The Screengrab : louis malle

That Gal! Amy Madigan

Phil Nugent — Wed, 27 May 2009 19:00:00 GMT

Amy Madigan has been one of my favorite actresses for twenty-five years now. She's maintained her place in the rotation even though I've managed to see less and less of her as the years go by. A quick peek at IMDB confirms that she's never stopped working for very long, but it became clear pretty fast in the 1980s that she wasn't going to become a movie star, partly because she's never done "kittenish", and she's spent an awful lot of the past ten years working in movies that nobody saw and in TV shows about doctors that I didn't see. (I'm a hypochondriac. The last thing I need is to spend my down time learning about new symptoms.) Her last good role in a movie worthy of her time was in Gone Baby Gone, and it's probably not a coincidence that the picture also featured Ed Harris--her husband, who she met on the set of Places in the Heart and with whom she also co-starred in Louis Malle's Alamo Bay, Winter Passing, the TV film Riders of the Purple Sage, and Harris's own directorial debut, Pollack. One interesting aspect of her having been married to Harris for most of both their film careers may be that Madigan always has an easy reminder of how much easier it is for men to slide back and forth between a (relatively) great variety supporting and ensemble roles and character leads than it is for a woman.

Madigan has always had such strength and power onscreen that it must have cost her some roles--big roles that were being cast by people who find such power in a woman intimidating (and who extrapolate from that that folks in the audience will have trouble "relating" to her) and also small roles where the worry is that she'll stand out too much, as if it's supposed to be a bad thing when an actress is cursed with having such an effect on audiences that they can't take their eyes off her. This may be something that Madigan can't do much about, since she doesn't seem to be one of those performers who disappear into the woodwork when they're not acting. At the 2001 Academy Awards, when Elia Kazan tottered out to collect his Lifetime Achievement Oscar, the camera picked her out, sitting in the audience, next to her husband, not clapping. I mean, she was not clapping up a goddamn storm, and glowering silently at the spectacle onstage. I remember the sight of her better than I remember most of the movies that were nominated that year. (I also remember looking at Harris and thinking, My God, son, if you know what's good for you, you'd better not clap!)

Where to see Amy Madigan at her best:

LOVE CHILD (1982):

This "true" story about a woman who entered prison at 19, had an affair with a guard, got pregnant, and fought for the right to hold onto her baby while in prison was directed by the infamous Larry Peerce, and in most respects, it's a like a Lifetime movie on hillbilly heroin. (Mackenzie Phillips failed to stage a comeback through her role as the prison's ducktailed head bull dyke.) But it was Madigan's first starring role, and those of us who saw it when it came out--on HBO, I mean, nobody saw this thing when it was in theaters--really knew we were seeing something. Madigan carries the movie to the movie on her back. She was in her early thirties but looked much younger, and uses her fireplug quality--the short frame seemingly on the verge of exploding from its own surplus of energy--very effectively to convey the David-and-Goliath side of the story, but without a trace of parthos; she's not a David you'd bet against. A year later, she got to give birth after a nuclear holocaust in the TV film The Day After, raising fears that she might be on the verge of being typecast as pregnant women carrying to term symbolic tokens of a second chance.

LOVE LETTERS (1983): This quiet, searching, imperfect yet emotionally rich film was written and directed by Amy Jones, and at the time it came out, it inspired some loose talk that it might be part of a new run of films looking at sex and love from a woman's perspective. (It wasn't, at least not from Amy Jones, whose subsequent films as writer and/or director amount to a steaming pile of junk, from Indecent Proposal and the Halle Berry vehicle The Rich Man's Wife to the Beethoven films. Earlier, she directed The Slumber Party Massacre from an original script by the novelist Rita Mae Browne. That one has a cult rep among people who want to believe that it must be intended as some kind of parody. People will always be kind...) The movie stars Jamie Lee Curtis as a single woman who, having found a cache of old letters written to her late mother by a man not her father, is compelled to jump into an affair with a married photographer (James Keach). Curtis is brilliant, and her scenes with Keach are fine, but it's the scenes she has with Madigan, playing her best friend, that set a new standard for capturing the distinctive rhythm of two intelligent women who care a lot about each other talking around the fact that one of them is doing something very, very stupid.

STREETS OF FIRE (1984)

Madigan has spent so much time playing rural and country women of good peasant stock that it's a real kick getting to see her as an urban action warrior. In Walter Hill's deranged "rock & roll fable", she plays McCoy, a two-fisted, pistol-packing super-mechanic with a tough-gal catch phrase: "Are we gonna talk about it, or are we gonna do it?" If Hill has employed her to hang around him when he was working on his scripts and bark that line out whenever his mind started to wander, he might have had more of a career since Ronald Reagan's first term. The movie stars Michael Pare, once a highly touted star of tomorrow who might as well have had "Where Are They Now?" scrawled across his birth certificate, as a pretty-boy bad-ass who's on a rescue mission to save his ex-girlfriend (Diane Lane) from the clutches of Willem Dafoe and his band of toughs. (They're so bad, they force the Blasters to perform for Jennifer Beals's body double in Flashdance.) When Pare and Madigan join forces, the movie seems to think that now she's his sidekick. It's so cute! Legend has it that Hill originally asked Madigan to read for the part of Pare's sister, and that after she'd done so, she pointed out to him that McCoy (who was originally written as a man) was the only part in the script worth a damn and, you know, what have done for me lately, Walter? Maybe if she's tried that line on her husband, she would have gotten to play Jackson Pollack.

CARNIVALE (2003--2005)

This HBO series would probably be finishing up its run right about now if the network had committed to the six-year plan that the producers intended. Instead, they cut it off after two seasons--and few who saw the second-season finale walked away thinking they had reason to complain, because the show seemed already to be doing a thorough job of swallowing its own tail. The show, about occult hocus-pocus set against the backdrop of the Great Depression, was a murky stab at an instant Twin Peaks-style cult hit, but it did provide you with a way to check in on Madigan week after week. She played the formidable sister of the scary preacher man played by Clancy "voice of Lex Luthor" Brown, and she always improved the show's focus, even when she couldn't even pretend that her character has a better idea than you did of what the hell was supposed to be going on.

The Screengrab Library of Unproduced Screenplays: John Belushi's "Noble Rot"

Phil Nugent — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 17:00:00 GMT

It was twenty-seven years ago last month that John Belushi died, at the age of 33. At the time, Belushi's movie career was approaching a crossroads. At the end of 1981, he had released two films, Continental Divide, and Neighbors, that had an important place in the trajectory of his career--they were the first features he'd done in which he played a clearly defined starring role, rather than as a standout member of an ensemble cast (as in National Lampoon's Animal House and 1941), in a movie that (unlike The Blues Brothers) wasn't a pretested spin-off of something he'd done on Saturday Night Live. Taken individually, Continental Divide was a tepid comedy for which Belushi tried to stretch himself to play a romantic lead, and a flop, whereas Neighbors was a misplayed, sloppy travesty of Thomas Berger's darkly comic novel, which Belushi came to hate, and which actually made some money. Neither film capitalized on what Belushi might have been able to bring to movies, but between them, they seemed to sum up what Belushi (perhaps ill-advisedly) wanted to do, and what the studios, to his horror, thought he was good for.

That tug-of-war was going on as Belushi spent his last days mulling his choice of projects: a comedy based on (or at least yoked to the title of) The Joy of Sex that was being pushed on by the studio, and Moon Over Miami, which the director Louis Malle and the playwright John Guare, fresh from their upscale success with Atlantic City, wanted to tailor to Belushi and Akroyd's talents. (It would have starred Belushi as a small-time con artist employed to help Akroyd, as an uptight FBI agent, cook up an Abscam-like sting operation.) This time, though, Belushi had his own pet idea, a script called Noble Rot that he and Don Novello were adapting from a screenplay by Jay Sandrich called Sweet Deception. If Belushi was disgusted by what the bosses were offering him but nervous about jumping into the art-movie deep end with Malle and Guare, it must have made sense to him to try and work with Novello, a colleague from the SNL days (where Novello, a staff writer, used to pop up in the guise of Father Guido Sarducci), to shape something specifically to what he saw as the true nature of his gifts. Of course, it must have also seemed like a good idea one night to check into the Chateau Marmont hotel and send out for speedballs.

Noble Rot is about Johnny Glorioso, the 30-year-old son of a Northern California winemaker whose wastrel tendencies have made him the despair of his family, though even the cops who hand him over to his father in the opening scenes can't do enough to stress how well-liked he is by everyone and what a lovable rapscallion he is. (They pay tribute to the fighting prowess that made it necessary for four cops to bring him down.) Dad has his own problems. The big wine contest is coming up, and his other son, the responsible one, can't board the plane because he's had an allergic reaction to some seafood. "I can't believe it," he laments. "I got on son who can't eat lobster, and one son that can't drink." He sits Johnny down and tells him that he has to take his brother's place, explaining the importance of the occasion in a speech that also serves as an explanation for the script's less-than-selling title. It seems that every once in a great while, a special grey fungus known as Botrytis cinerea infects grapes which, if they are picked at just the right point, can in turn yield a spectacular wine. Just to make sure we get it, the old man tells Johnny, the black sheep, that he has undying faith in him because he is "my noble rot--my blessing in disguise."

Johnny heads out for the East Coast and finds himself sitting next to Christine on the plane. She is a looker, but when she fails to be dazzled by his line of patter--she asks the flight attendant to find him another seat while he's sneaking a joint in the can--the viewer is clearly supposed to think, "What's her problem?" instead of, "Jesus, if the attendant hadn't found another corner to shove him into, I'd have jumped out in mid-air and taken my chances." Right away, one may pick up on a certain disconnect between how charming Belushi thinks his alter ego would have come across and what's on the page, because Johnny's supposedly funny, seductive conversation peaks with his testimonial in praise of the scintillating quality of the in-flight magazine (he's disappointed to learn that he has to catch a plane whenever he wants to check out the latest issue) and then levels out when he discovers that the movie they're showing is The Deer Hunter. (He's seen it before and thought there'd be more deer hunting in it.)

It turns out that Christine is involved in a diamond smuggling operation. (Her boss is one of those guys whose lines--"I won't involve your young friend anymore. He's served his purposes."--that you can't read without hearing the "MWAAHAHA!" at the end.) She involves Johnny in an elaborate push-pull relationship that is designed to throw off the people on her trail but also seems to speak volumes about the star and co-writer's woman issues. It's also around this point that you begin to notice that, for what's largely a con-game comedy with a character who's supposed to be a wild man in the role of the fall guy, Noble Rot is very short on narrative invention; not a hell of a lot actually happens. Christine keeps pulling Johnny close to her to keep his distracting presence in the game, then pushing him away and vanishing only to reappear, while he stands around with a big question mark over his head. Belushi must have thought that he was making Jay Sandrich's material "his" and making it edgier by making his character cruddier and ruder, and maybe he also sensed that Novello, with his gentle satiric wit, was the right person to reign him back from the going too far over the top and lending the movie some charm. But neither Novello (who would go on to publish the Laszlo Letters series, write and produce for SCTV, and lend his affable presence to many film, TV, and radio roles, but never did get a real screenplay credit or publish anything else with a real plot) nor he had the story sense to replace the scaffolding they were tearing down with a workable replacement.

In place of a story developing, there are several moments where Belushi would have gotten to assert what a wild and crazy guy he was (such as a throwaway moment in which he shows off his idea of a promotional gimmick for his long-suffering dad's winery: T-shirts with the words "GLORIOSO VINEYARDS" surrounded by a skull and lightning bolts). And how hip he is: Christine may be smart and sexy and better able to function smoothly in society than this coarse brute, but she says things like, "This is the 1980s--all you need is money," and she needs reminding who Keith Richards is. ("Yes, of course. Of the music group?") Considering that the Rolling Stones once hosted SNL, and that Robert De Niro, the star of The Deer Hunter, was a friend of Belushi's on the L.A. party scene--he dropped by Belushi's hotel room the night he died--some of the cultural references come across as bits of name-dropping trying to pass for inside jokes. (There are also scripted appearances by Orson Welles and Marvin Hamlisch, who gets to tickle the ivories in a party scene while some lucky bit player tells another, "He wrote The Sting, you know.") As in much of The Blues Brothers, Belushi seemed to be trying to fit into the '80s by claiming to be keeping the spirit of the '60s alive while making something that felt a little as if he and his buddies were trying to become the new Rat Pack.

Noble Rot ends with a final twist that leaves Johnny on top and Christine out in the cold. It's a looking-out-for-number-one conclusion that betrays audience expectations that Johnny will either get something real going with the girl (or any girl) or that he'll come through and win his family's wine the recognition that it deserves, and the fact that Belushi apparently saw it as a crowd-pleasing happy ending shows that he actually fit into the "all you need is money" 1980s better than he wanted to admit to himself. In the whole picture, there's one climactic scene where he gets to really Belushi it up: at the wine-testing, where a French judge overrules the impressed reactions of his fellow judges and bad mouths the Glorioso wine. ("Perhaps 'skunky' isn't the right word. Actually, it tastes more like the fur of a wet dog.") Johnny, of course, goes nuts--you can bet that a glass of wine gets emptied over somebody's head--and delivering a detailed condemnation of the judge that does not neglect to mention France's outstanding war debt. This rhymes with an earlier scene in which Johnny delivers a lengthy monologue describing the horrors of a visit he once made to France, where wandered into an eatery in hopes of getting a hamburger and was grossed out with an offer of head cheese. I don't know what would have happened with John Belushi's movie career if he'd lived longer, but if he'd made Noble Rot, I'm pretty sure that he never would have won a Légion d'honneur medal to clink against Jerry Lewis's.

Set Your DVR!: February 23 - 27, 2009

Hayden Childs — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 18:00:00 GMT

I'm having to break my pledge to stick to a handful of movies per week. Because this week is just so freakin' chock-full of goodness! It's so movie-riffic that it would be absurd for me to try to cut it down to three or four. I don't remember being made the Mayor Of Television, but since there's no other reasonable explanation, I expect to be cutting a bunch of ribbons until my corrupt administration is thrown in jail. Enjoy it while it lasts!

Only two movies to mention on Monday, February 23. At 7 pm central/8 pm eastern and again at 10 pm central/11 pm eastern, OVATION is showing Spalding Gray's Swimming To Cambodia, a monologue that highlights what a fun and nimble mind Gray had. It's directed by Jonathan Demme and scored by Laurie Anderson, both of which add extra layers of cool. Then overnight, TCM is showing Jean Renoir's The Southerner at 1:15 am central/2:15 am eastern (2/24). I'll be honest: The Southerner can be a tough movie. Renoir at his best was perhaps the most sympathetic and humanist director of the 20th century. But he was quite out of his depth with this movie. It's not terrible, but it's not his first tier. Still quite worthwhile for fans of Renoir or star Zachary Scott.

On Tuesday, February 24, TCM is out of control with awesomeness. First, at 11:15 am central/12:15 pm eastern, TCM is showing Jacques Tati's Mr. Hulot's Holiday, which is a funny and charming, if not uproarious, movie about the habits of the French middle-class during the 50s. Afterwards, TCM is showing François Truffaut's The 400 Blows at 12:45 pm central/1:45 pm eastern. It's not just one of the earliest classics of the French New Wave, but also a powerful semi-autobiographical story about institutional mistreatment of juvenile delinquents. The misbegotten memories of mistreatment of French youth continues at 2:45 pm central/3:45 pm eastern with Louis Malle's Au Revoir, Les Enfants, which is a semi-autobiographical work about a boarding school that hides a few young Jews during the Second World War. Afterwards is René Clément's Gervaise at 4:45 pm central/5:45 pm eastern. I have not seen this movie, but I don't believe that it has been released on DVD.

TCM leaves France for Japan in the evening with four stone classics of Japanese cinema: The Burmese Harp at 7 pm central/8 pm eastern, then Rashomon at 9 pm central/10 pm eastern, followed by The Seven Samurai at 10:30 pm central/11:30 pm eastern, and finally Kwaidan at 2 am central/3 am eastern (2/25). The Burmese Harp is an anti-war story, Rashomon is (of course) about the shifting nature of narrative and observations (or so I recall), The Seven Samurai is the greatest film the world has ever known (although I don't mean to overpraise it - and, well, I'm not) and Kwaidan is a collection of ghost stories.

Also of note on Tuesday night is The Order of Myths, appearing on the show Independent Lens, which most PBS channels run at 10 pm central/11 pm eastern on Tuesdays. The Order of Myths is one of the best documentaries of 2008, which was an unusually strong year for documentaries. The movie deals with the racially divided Mardi Gras of Mobile, Alabama with a deft touch that makes villains of none while carefully examining the history of racism and power that created the situation. It's stunningly great, and I don't just say this because I grew up in Mobile and am intimately familiar with the sticky racial and familial issues that filmmaker Margaret Brown bravely tackles. If you miss this because of your dedication to the Kurosawa movies on TCM, check your listings. My PBS channel is showing it again overnight on Wednesday night/Thursday morning at 3 am central time.

TCM is showing three excellent movies on Thursday, February 26, as well. In the morning is Charlie Chaplin's The Gold Rush at 5 am central/6 am eastern. In the evening, there's Bogey and Hepburn in The African Queen at 7 pm central/8 pm eastern and later Roman Polanski's masterpiece Chinatown at 11:15 pm central/12:15 am eastern.

Set Your DVR! December 22 - 29, 2008

Hayden Childs — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 16:00:00 GMT

I don't know if your Christmas week is anything like mine (if you even have a Christmas week, that is), but every year, I spend an inordinate amount of time on the couch. It's a good way to be with family without having to, y'know, talk with anyone. I usually lay there, using my mind only to ponder how full my belly is and wondering how long it will take me to digest enough to make room for another slice of pecan pie. But this year, instead of mindless entertainment, I intend to engage with some movies! Maybe that will take my mind off of food. For a little while, at least. Here's what's good this week, in the central/eastern format. I'm also moving overnight movies to the prior day write-up, which is my policy from here forward.

Monday, December 22:

Monday offers two flicks about evil and naivety! What could be better than considering evil during the final weeks of the year? Au Revoir, Les Enfants is Louis Malle's examination of life in a French boarding school during the Vichy occupation. Our young protagonist seems to be going through normal kid issues, but his innocence is threatened by the War and his growing suspicion that a schoolmate might be a hidden Jew. The Quiet American is based on Graham Greene's novel about a not-so-well meaning journalist encountering a CIA agent in 1950s Vietnam. Strangely enough, the CIA agent may be the more naive of the two.

12:30/1:30 pm: Au Revoir, Les Enfants on IFC.
2:30/3:30 pm The Quiet American on IFC.
2:30/3:30 am: Enemy Mine on AMC.
5:05/6:05 am: Au Revoir, Les Enfants on IFC.

Tuesday, December 23:

Tuesday's full of anti-war sci-fi in the AM! Maybe it's not great sci-fi, but it's (probably) worth a viewing, especially with impressionable young minds around you. Enemy Mine, one of my favorite movies when I was 13, is about setting asides differences in the face of a hostile universe. I haven't seen it since I was a kid, but I recall that it had a strong anti-war and pro-cooperation message. A far better movie (with far less latex and, well, mostly the same message) is the original The Day The Earth Stood Still, an untouchable classic that only a fool would attempt to remake. Finally, The Day After is a good way to wrap up the morning with some schlock that originally aired on TV when I was exactly the right age for a nascent political awakening (that would be 1983, when I was 11). In light of the dramatic depiction of the harshness of life after a nuclear attack on the US, I remember my shock and disbelief when I overheard President Granddaddy Ronald Reagan on TV pushing for more nuclear weapons. He lost my vote that day.

In the afternoon, there's John Ford's 3 Godfathers, which is like a Western version of Three Men And A Baby, only with death and despair. Awesome! Then Roman Polanski's The Pianist offers a little more death and despair. And finally, as a salve to all of this suffering, Lubitsch's The Shop Around The Corner is the sweetest and bestest romantic comedy that ever graced celluloid. (Note: the overnight movie discussed here rather than on the prior day for thematic purposes.)

2:30/3:30 am: Enemy Mine on AMC.
7/8 am: The Day The Earth Stood Still on AMC.
9/10 am: The Day After on SCIFI.
3/4 pm: 3 Godfathers on TCM.
4:30/5:30 pm: The Pianist on IFC.
5/6 pm: The Shop Around The Corner on TCM.
2/3 am: The Shop Around The Corner on TCM.

Wednesday, December 24:

Christmas Eve brings more despair! I recommend that you choose wisely and then go volunteer in a soup kitchen. Nobody Knows is a 2004 Japanese film based on a true story about children who were horribly neglected by an unfit mother and then abandoned to survive on their wits alone. Guaranteed to make the hardest heart break down and openly weep. Brother's Keeper is the uplifting documentary about a rural community that rallies around a near-feral farming family when one brother is accused of murdering another. The Delicate Art of the Rifle is a microbudget indie about a sniper on a college campus. Death and the Maiden is Roman Polanski's film (of the Ariel Dorfman play) in which a woman (Sigourney Weaver, who has never been better) is convinced that the man who gave her husband a ride home was the man who tortured and raped her while she was a prisoner of the previous brutal regime. It is stunningly good and sadly underappreciated. Finally, Bad Santa is the salve for all that ails us.

6/7 am: Nobody Knows on IFC.
8:30/9:30 am: Brother’s Keeper on IFC.
10:30/11:30 am: The Delicate Art of the Rifle on IFC.
12:05/1:05 pm: Nobody Knows on IFC.
2:45/3:45 pm: Brother’s Keeper on IFC.
4:35/5:35 pm: The Delicate Art of the Rifle on IFC.
6:15/7:15 pm: Death and the Maiden on IFC.
10/11 pm: Bad Santa on Comedy Central.

Thursday, December 25:

Tidings of comfort and joy for all: TCM has a film fest of Bogie's most iconic movies on Christmas Day. That'll deck your halls with boughs of something. Note that it runs all night.

7/8 am: 3 Godfathers on TCM.
2/3 pm: Bad Santa on Comedy Central.
7/8 pm: Casablanca on TCM.
9/10 pm: The Big Sleep on TCM.
11 pm/12 am: The Maltese Falcon on TCM.
1/2 am: The African Queen on TCM.
3/4 am: High Sierra on TCM.

Friday, December 26:

Back to our regularly scheduled holiday sadness! George Washington is a must-see film about youths who can't see a future for themselves in their quiet North Carolina town. Elephant is about youths whose future is brutally taken away for reasons unknown. And The Honeymoon Killers is about hideous sociopaths who love each other and brutalize the world. Happy fucking Boxing Day!

9/10 am: George Washington on IFC.
10:35/11:35 am: Elephant on IFC.
2:05/3:05 pm: George Washington on IFC.
3:35/4:35 pm: Elephant on IFC.
5/6 pm: The Honeymoon Killers on IFC.
3:35/4:35 am The Honeymoon Killers on IFC.
5:25/6:25 am: George Washington on IFC.

Saturday, December 27:

Saturday is about Japan. First up is The Greatest Story Ever Told, aka The Seven Samurai. I believe I recently wrote here that The Wild Bunch was the best film ever. That's only half-true, because The Seven Samurai is its equal. Damn, this movie is good. Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon isn't even close to the same league, but it's pretty great on its own. Finally, Hayao Miyazaki's Howl's Moving Castle is not the best Miyazaki movie, but it's wonderful and highly, highly recommended.

7/8 am: The Seven Samurai on IFC.
10:30/11:30 am: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon on IFC.
2:30/3:30 pm: Howl’s Moving Castle on IFC.
4:30/5:30 pm: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon on IFC.

Sunday, December 28:

Wait, Sunday is about Japan. Rashomon, another film by Akira Kurosawa, is iconic and a must-see for fans of cinema, although it isn't quite as great as his best movies. The Bad Sleep Well is Kurosawa's corporate office take on Hamlet. Of his three Shakespeare adaptations (the other two are Throne of Blood/MacBeth and Ran/King Lear), it is the least, but it's full of his distinct sensibilities and very enjoyable. Finally, Malick's The Thin Red Line is half-war movie and half-nature documentary and all about the human soul. Overnight, there's Tati's utterly delightful Mr. Hulot's Holiday, which is full of wit and pratfalls.

7/8 am: Rashomon on IFC.
8:30/9:30 am: The Bad Sleep Well on IFC.
8/9 pm: The Thin Red Line on IFC.
2/3 am: Mr. Hulot’s Holiday on TCM.
2:30/3:30 am: The Thin Red Line on IFC

Monday, December 29:

Dreary Monday! Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is a film based on a play that delights in its own postmodernity. If you watched The Bad Sleep Well, definitely follow it up with this. And then put off whatever it is that you're supposed to be doing. Kiss of Death is one of the great film noirs. The Sweet Hereafter, Atom Egoyan's film based on Russell Banks's devastating novel, will ruin you in a good way. And The Player is Robert Altman's great tribute/kiss-off to Hollywood.

6:50/7:50 am: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead on IFC.
9/10 am: Kiss of Death on FMC.
1:30/2:30 pm: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead on IFC.
9/10 pm: The Sweet Hereafter on IFC.
11 pm/12 am: The Player on IFC.

Set Your DVR!: December 15 - 22, 2008

Hayden Childs — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 16:00:00 GMT

What a great week for movies on cable! Here’s what’s coming up that’s worth your time. In the spirit of the holidays, I’ve even gotten a little expansive. But this week brings another embarrassment of riches.

The times are, as always, in Central/Eastern format. Also, as always, please let me know in comments if you see something coming up that I’ve missed. I’ll try to add it to the regular column if I can, but my time will be tight in the next few weeks, so please don’t be too disappointed if I don’t get to your recommendation.

Monday, December 15:
2:45/3:45 pm: Mystery Train on IFC. Jim Jarmusch’s triptych about the strange charms of Memphis, TN.
6:25/7:25 pm: George Washington on IFC.

Tuesday, December 16:
3:25/4:25 am: Mystery Train on IFC.
6:50/7:50 am: George Washington on IFC.
7/8 am: Decision at Sundown on TCM. A Randolph Scott & Budd Boetticher Western, and that means good.
7:30/8:30 am: Batman on AMC. This is the 1966 Batman, the very definition of campy.
10:25/11:25 am: Howl’s Moving Castle on IFC. Miyazaki’s great animated film about war and magic and love and identity, presented here in the original Japanese with subtitles.
12:30/1:30 pm: George Washington on IFC.
4:05/5:05 pm: The Thin Red LIne on IFC. Malick’s unconventional anti-war drama is a force of nature.
5/6 pm: The Cincinnati Kid on TCM. What could be more exciting than Steve McQueen playing high-stakes poker?
7/8 pm: Shadow of a Doubt on TCM. Great little second-tier Hitchcock film that ought to be in the first tier.
11 pm/12 am: The Third Man on TCM. If you like movies and haven’t seen this, you MUST rectify your oversight immediately.

Wednesday, December 17:
8:30/9:30 pm: Death on the Nile on TCM. A Hercule Poirot mystery that was a favorite of mine when I was a kid. The nonstop excitement practically screams “heavyset Belgian detective!”
8/9 pm: The Thin Red Line on IFC.
11 pm/12 am: The New World on IFC. That's a lot of Malick for one sitting!

Thursday, December 18:
1:30/2:30 am: The Thin Red Line on IFC.
4:25/5:25 am: The New World on IFC.
9:15/10:15 am: The Naked City on TCM. One of the greatest film noirs.
10:30/11:30 pm: Blade Runner on SCIFI. Always worth a viewing.
11 pm/12 am: Vanishing Point on FMC. As the Zen koan says, -There is no why. There is only Kowalski driving through the desert.

Friday, December 19:
12/1 am: Before Sunset on WE. I try not to mention movies that will be broken by commercials, but this one, a sequel to 1995’s Before Sunrise, has a certain charm in its older, wiser take on young love.
1:30/2:30 am: Elephant on IFC. Dreamy Van Sant flick about high school snipers.
3/4 am: Vanishing Point on FMC.
8:45/9:45 am: Paths of Glory on TCM.
5:30/6:30 pm: The Others on OXYGEN. Pleasantly creepy ghost story starring Nicole Kidman.
6:15/7:15 pm: The Player on IFC. Altman’s tour de force “conventional Hollywood” film, which starts with an extended homage to Touch of Evil and proceeds to tear down the walls of Old Hollywood.
8:30/9:30 pm: The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou on IFC. Many Wes Anderson fans felt that this was the moment when his whimsy and prop fetish finally overwhelmed his ability to tell a story. I think there’s a beating heart in this story, but The Darjeeling Limited was an unpleasant stillborn mess.
11 pm/12 am: The Face of Another on IFC. Brilliant and creepy Japanese horror film about the slippery nature of identity.

Saturday, December 20:
2/3 am: The Face of Another on IFC.
5:30/6:30 am: The Ox-Bow Incident on AMC.
7/8 am: The Hidden Fortress on IFC. Akira Kurosawa’s tale of a princess in peril, swept away by war, protected by her loyal general, and kept constantly on the verge of trouble by a couple of bumbling peasants. Reportedly one of the major inspirations for Star Wars.
7/8 am: The Others on OXYGEN.
7:15/8:15 am: My Darling Clementine on AMC. Iconic John Ford Western about the shootout at the OK Corral.
2:30/3:30 pm: 8 Women on LOGO.
5:35/6:35 pm: Gosford Park on IFC. Robert Altman’s brilliant upstairs/downstairs Edwardian murder mystery.
8:30/9:30 pm: Mulholland Dr. on LOGO. One of David Lynch’s best films, propelled by dream-logic and horror.

Sunday, December 21:
8:45/9:45 am: Kiss of Death on FMC. Top-notch film noir. Unfortunately, it’s playing at the same time as...
8:45/9:45 am: The Testament of Dr. Mabuse on IFC. Fritz Lang’s 1933 thriller that didn’t just invent the procedural, but built it on a parable about a crime boss able to mesmerize his subordinates with his words and imagery. Lang fled the Nazis for America almost immediately after its release. The ability of many of the scenes to retain their shock value today is a testament to this movie's sheer brilliance.
12:15/1:15 pm: Gosford Park on IFC.

Monday, December 22:
2:45/3:45 am: The 400 Blows on TCM. Francois Truffaut’s incredibly powerful ode to child neglect and juvenile delinquency.
7/8 am: Au Revoir, Les Enfants on IFC. Fantastic Louis Malle flick about a boarding school in France during the Nazi occupation that’s hiding a young Jew.
11 am/12 pm: Bringing Up Baby on TCM. A screwball comedy classic that everyone should see at least once in this all-too-short life.
12:30/1:30 pm: Au Revoir, Les Enfants on IFC.

Set Your DVR!: October 27 - November 3, 2008

Hayden Childs — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Halloween week means more vintage horror! TCM in particular is even exceeding their own high standards this week, shoehorning in a night of Billy Wilder on Tuesday (nothing is recommended because everything is fairly well-known) and a few film noir classics on Wednesday before cranking up the scary on Thursday. As always, let me know in comments if you see something I shouldn’t have missed!

Mon, Oct 27:

11 am/12 pm: An American Werewolf in London on AMC. As I said last week, it’s not a great movie, but it has a few iconic scenes.

Tues, Oct 28:

5/6 am: The Invisible Man on AMC. Based on Ralph Ellison’s classic novel of race in America... whoops, that’s not right. No one’s ever made that movie. This is James Whale’s classic horror film starring Claude Rains.

6:45/7:45 am: Bride of Frankenstein on AMC. And this is James Whale’s frankenlady movie.

7/8 am: The Desperate Hours on TCM. Neat little thriller about convicts on the lam starring Humphrey Bogart.

11 pm/12 am: An American Werewolf in London on AMC. Repeat.

Wed, Oct 29:

1/2 pm: An American Werewolf in London on AMC. Repeat. Last time I’m going to mention it, in fact.

7/8 pm: Murder, My Sweet on TCM. Killer adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely.

10:45/11:45 pm: Out of the Past on TCM. Film noir classic with Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas. Directed by Jacques Tourneur, who also made three of the Val Lewton-produced no-budget horror films we’re recommending this week.

Thurs, Oct 30:

12:30/1:30 am: They Live By Night on TCM. Earlier movie based on the same source material as Robert Altman’s Thieves Like Us, which is one of his most underappreciated movies.

3/4 am: House of Wax on CHILLER. Vincent Price’s classic. Note: You will not see Paris Hilton in this movie.

3:45/4:45 am: The Thing From Another World on TCM. Howard Hawks directing an early sci-fi/horror movie. The John Carpenter movie The Thing was a remake.

6:30/7:30 am: The Beast with Five Fingers on TCM. FIVE WHOLE FINGERS! YAAAAAARGH!

7:30/8:30 am: 8 Women on LOGO. Francois Ozon assembles every major French actress of our time for a half-musical/half-murder mystery.

8/9 am: I Walked With A Zombie on TCM. Jacques Tourneur doing horror on a Val Lewton production.

9:15/10:15 am: Curse of the Demon on TCM. Recut version of the horror film Night of the Demon. Directed by Jacques Tourneur applying what he has learned from doing horror on Val Lewton productions.

10:45/11:45 am: Gerry on IFC (repeat at 4/5 pm and on 11/31 at 4:10/5:10 am). I just keep recommending it!

5:30/6:30 pm: House of Usher on TCM. Roger Corman! Vincent Price! Edgar Allan Poe! You might be surprised to learn that this is a tender romantic comedy.

7/8 pm: Dead of Night on TCM. Creepy little horror anthology from Ealing Studios. And no Sir Alec Guinness to be found!

Fri, Oct 31:

A quick note: TCM owns Halloween programming. You can’t go wrong with anything they’re showing all day.

1/2 am: Kwaidan on TCM. A beloved Japanese horror anthology.

3:45/4:45: Spirits of the Dead on TCM. A triptych of short films from Roger Vadim, Louis Malle, and Federico Fellini (which of these names is not like the others?). I’ve never seen it, but the cast of Jane Fonda, Brigitte Bardot, Terence Stamp, and Alain Delon sounds promising.

6:30/7:30 am: Cat People on TCM. More Lewton & Tourneur!

7/8 am: The Honeymoon Killers on IFC. Still brilliant, still vile.

8/9 am: Freaks on TCM.

8:30/9:30 am: Halloween on AMC. Halloween? Hasn’t everyone seen this? I suspect that some people have forgotten how effective it is with almost no budget and no special effects.

9:15/10:15 am: The Devil Doll on TCM. How many ways can I say “creepy”? This one’s directed by the creator of Freaks, Tod Browning.

2:30/3:30 pm: The Body Snatcher on TCM. More Val Lewton! With Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi!

4/5 pm: Bedlam on TCM. And even more Val Lewton! This one’s with just Karloff.

7/8 pm: The Host on G4. Korean horror movie with great special effects and a cruel sense of humor.

Sat, Nov 1:

1/2 am: The Host on G4 (repeats at 11/12 am).

1:30/2:30 am: Blood Feast on TCM. Things start getting ugly overnight at TCM. This is a challenger to Plan 9 From Outer Space for the coveted Worst Movie Ever award. Highly recommended! Directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis, whom you can read more about in our very own Scott Von Doviak’s excellent book Hick Flicks, which is a perfect stocking-stuffer for the film geek in your family.

2:45/3:45 am: 2,000 Maniacs on TCM. A follow-up to Blood Feast. I understand that the name is misleading, as Lewis only had to budget for 1,986 maniacs.

3/4 am: The Blob on CHILLER (Repeat at 6:00 am/7:00 am). Steve McQueen in the no-budget flick that might just be a parable about the insidious effects of CREEPING COMMUNISM! BOOGA BOOGA! Starring Barack Obama’s tax policies as The Blob and Sarah Palin as the small-town mayor who knows how to stop it. If only the people will listen!

5:15/6:15 am: Forbidden Planet on TCM. Ah, the horror is starting to subside. What better way to recover than a movie that puts Shakespeare’s The Tempest in space?

7/8 am: My Darling Clementine on AMC. One of the finest classic Westerns of all time. Starring Henry Fonda and directed by John Ford.

7/8 am: Sanshiro Sugata on IFC. Akira Kurosawa’s first film, this is a standard issue wuxia film in terms of plot and progression, but with Kurosawa’s unerring eye behind the lens, there’s moments of stunning beauty to be found. Unreleased on DVD, and a must for Kurosawa fanatics.

9:30/10:30 am: The Last Wave on IFC (repeat at 2:45/3:45 pm). Richard Chamberlain’s most shocking role (in which discernible acting can be detected!) about apocalyptic aboriginal weirdness in Australia. Directed by Peter Weir.

Sun, Nov 2:

Happy birthday to my mom and my brother-in-law Jeff!

7/8 am: Solaris on IFC. This is the Tarkovsky original, not the Soderbergh remake. A deeply sad, meditative movie about love and self and Otherness. I’m being purposely vague, but this review is only two sentences, and this movie deserves much more than that.

8:30/9:30 am: Macbeth on TCM. Orson Welles’s Macbeth with the bad accents and great filmmaking.

5:35/6:35 pm: The New World on IFC. Terrence Malick’s film about how struggle defines all human relationships, despite the transcendental indifference of nature. Did I just write that? This is easily one of the best films of the last decade, so just watch it.

8/9 pm: The Proposition on IFC (repeat on 11/3 at 1:15/2:15 am). John Hillcoat’s Aussie Western written by Nick Cave. It wants to be a Peckinpah movie, but it’s not even a Boetticher. That’s not to say it’s worthless, but it bites off more than it can chew. Hillcoat’s the director of the upcoming adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which I hope is better than this.

9:45/10:45 pm: The Year of Living Dangerously on TCM. Remember when Mel Gibson could act? Good times. Oh, ok. This is most definitely not a good time. Directed by Peter Weir.

11 pm/12 am (11/3): True Stories on VH1CL (repeat on 11/3 at 7/8 pm). It’s not a good movie, but it’s fun. This is David Byrne’s labor of love, a deliberately quirky look at America from one of its deliberately quirky pop culture figures. The Talking Heads songs aren’t their best, but they’re pretty good, and pretty good looks good from here.

Mon, Nov 3:

3/4 am: Isle of the Dead on CHILLER. Another Val Lewton production! Why is it on after Halloween? Apparently CHILLER has started the Halloween 2009 season early.

5:05/6:05 am: Tom Dowd & the Language of Music on IFC (repeat at 12:30/1:30 pm). Delightful documentary about the man with the golden ear who flawlessly recorded some of the greats of 20th century music.

10:05/11:05 am: The New World on IFC. Repeat.

10:30/11:30 am: The Man From Laramie on TCM. Anthony Mann Western with James Stewart. Not the best Mann Western, but it’ll do.

8/9 pm: Me and You and Everyone We Know on IFC (repeat 11/4 at 12/1 am). Miranda July is cute and a little alienating. John Hawkes learned from Deadwood the fine art of saying everything he has to say with his eyebrows. Somehow, despite the nearly lethal levels of quirk, July has made a movie with an enormous amount of heart.

The Jailbait Sweet 16 (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 22 May 2008 21:00:00 GMT

PRETTY BABY (1978) & THE BLUE LAGOON (1980)

Europe is a very different place than America, and the seventies were a very different time. From Socrates to Roman Polanski, Europeans have always had a much more, uh, relaxed attitude when it comes to May/December (or even early April/December) relationships. Whether said social mores indicate healthy, sex-positive liberation or sick, twisted perversion, the fact remains: them foreigners sure do make a lot of movies about sexed-up youngsters. In 1971, Louis Malle directed Murmur of the Heart, about a 15-year-old boy who gets hit on by priests and has sex with his mother. A few years later, Malle hit the controversy jackpot with Pretty Baby, the lurid yet turgid tale of a young girl raised by prostitutes whose virginity is auctioned off prior to her marriage to an older man. Brooke Shields, rouged and naked throughout, became the (literal) poster girl for commodified, sexualized “innocence” and a precursor to the sexualization of even younger girls in those creepy JonBenét Ramsey-esque pre-pubescent beauty pageants that Little Miss Sunshine mocked so brilliantly. Two years after Pretty Baby, Brooke Shields lost her virginity again in The Blue Lagoon, this time to a barely legal Christopher Atkins (who would later shake his groove thing for cougar Lesley Ann Warren as a male stripper in the 1983 cheese-whiz classic A Night In Heaven). That Lagoon was such a smash hit in the U.S. had everything to do with the movie’s lush cinematography and wholesome depiction of pure, innocent love and nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that its hot teenage stars were (tastefully!) naked half the time...because, of course, we Americans have superior morals.

PALE RIDER (1985)

In this inflated imitation of his own High Plains Drifter, the director-star Clint Eastwood plays a mystical, supernatural gunslinger who materializes after a 14-year-old girl (Sydney Penny) has prayed for a hero to come and deal with the meanies making things hard for her gold-mining community. Once he's arrived, though, Penny isn't content with having him shoot all the bad guys; she also puts the moves on him, only to have him turn her down, maybe because he's got something going on with her mother (Carrie Snodgress). In a snit, Penny has the bright idea of trying to make him jealous by riding off to where the bad guys are holed up so that Eastwood has to come and collect her before a drooling Richard Kiel can club her and drag her off to his cave. Pale Rider is just one of several films in the Eastwood oeuvre that can make you wonder if, back in the early seventies, Clint left some part of his brain unclaimed on the set of The Beguiled.

THE KID (1921)

The title character in this Charlie Chaplin silent is played by the seven-year-old Jackie Coogan, but the movie features a dream sequence set in Heaven, and in that sequence, Chaplin contrived an attention-getting bit for Lita Grey, an untested young actress who, decades before Nabokov wrote his novel, was sometimes known as "Lolita." In the movie, Gray, looking very cute, and playing a character known as "Flirtatious Angel", traipses out wearing big wings and starts cuddling up to Chaplin like a friendly kitten. She encourages him to chase after her by skipping away and flashing what she would later describe as "a very skinny leg", and he obligingly goes literally flying after her. Chaplin used her again in The Idle Rich and planned to cast her as the female lead in The Gold Rush, but she wound up playing a small role in movie history and a considerably larger one in Chaplin's scandal-plagued personal life; he had to recast her role, and marry her, when he got her pregnant at age 16. (Chaplin was 35.) Their marriage, which produced two children and ended in an ugly public divorce, lasted only three years, and her professional and intimate personal life with Chaplin was over by the time she was twenty.

BULLY (2001)

Larry Clark gets accused of a lot of things by critics. I mean, a lot. In the view of some film writers, he’s second only to Lars von Trier as the filmmaker most likely to be Nosferatu reincarnated. But the most common charge is that he’s some kind of dirty old man – a guy who makes movies for no better reason than to look at attractive young people cavorting in front of his camera lens so he can yell “AROO-GA!”. This charge is not only a tad conspiratorial (Clark lives in New York, a city where it’s pretty easy to get a gander at naked teenagers, and making expensive, highly controversial films would seem to be an awfully roundabout way of doing it), but also pretty fatuous when directed specifically at Clark. I mean, can you name a major Hollywood movie of the last 30 years that didn’t feature an attractive, overly sexualized young man or woman in a leading role? Most critics were pretty indulgent of the alleged Chester-the-Molester qualities of Clark’s 1999 debut feature, Kids, because they bought into its sense of impending moral panic; but by 2001, when the world had decided it had bigger problems than that of 17-year-olds having sex, a lot of people decided that Bully, his loose adaptation of a real Florida murder case, was nothing but a justification for Clark to see pretty young things in their altogether. But then, as now, this charge was ignorant of history and tone-deaf to reality. Clark has always been obsessed with beautiful young people who obliviously hurtle into self-destruction, including himself: he’s a brilliant photographer whose first book, Tulsa, featured his speed-freak friends shooting themselves into early graves, and like his films – Bully in particular – the grim realities of death and insanity gave a distinctively un-erotic charge to even the most beautiful bodies in his photographs. It was also released when he was 27 years old (and many of the photos were taken when he was much younger), exempting him from the charge of simply being a horny old coot. Later photographic works would focus on his own drug addiction, the tragic lives of handsome but damaged Times Square hustlers, and, tellingly, the way that media images of young people shape – and warp – youth culture. Far from being a dirty old man, the artist who made Bully was simply following a path he had been on for over 30 years. There’s no denying it’s a film crammed with prurient interest, but that serves only to solidify Clark’s central obsession: that the ignorant self-destruction of youth is all the more tragic because they are so vibrant and beautiful.

FREEWAY II: CONFESSIONS OF A TRICKBABY (1999)

Society’s moral strictures being what they are, film directors, when they bring to us a movie featuring a bunch of hot young things romping around in their birthday suits, must think of some way to convince us that we’re not watching for the obvious reason. There are many ways to do this: dramatic tension, outright deception, or the pretense of imparting some sort of grand moral lesson. Matthew Bright, the deranged auteur behind the Freeway movies, has discovered a method that’s, as far as we know, unique to him: he wedges his nymphomaniacal teenagers in between a bizarre framework of re-imagined postmodernist fairy tales tinged with a truly surreal sense of humor. The second movie in a proposed trilogy, Freeway II is, believe it or not, a retelling of “Hansel and Gretel”, only with lesbian shower scenes, cannibalistic transvestite nuns, and David Alan Grier. Absent the deranged trappings, it’s unlikely that this movie would ever have gotten made; Natasha Lyonne was of age in the female lead, but she’s meant to be playing an 18-year-old juvenile delinquent, and her partner in crime, the demented serial killer La Ciclona (played by the riveting Maria Celedonio), is explicity, and we mean explicitly, portrayed as being sixteen years old. Were this a mainstream movie aimed at a mainstream audience, it probably would have generated a Senate investigation when Lyonne and Celedonio get it on in a beer-fueled makeout session in a hotel bathroom; but Bright had already set the scene for this sort of nonsense by presenting us with a mass prison vomiting scene (choreographed like a Busby Berkley musical, with the bulimic prisoners as chorines) and a striptease involving a girl with a prosthetic leg. He continues in this vein, ultimately asking us to cope with the image of Vincent Gallo in nun drag trying to bake the hapless Ms. Lyonne into a pie. In the face of all that, there’s simply no room for self-incrimination for ogling teen girls; you just have to sit back and go where the ride takes you.

For more jailbait: Part One, Part Two

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

Will Elder, 1921--2008

Phil Nugent — Mon, 19 May 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Will Elder has died at the age of 87, after a battle with Parkinson's. A commercial artist and cartoonist, he spent much of his life all but joined at the hip to the great Harvey Kurtzman, who created Mad for EC Comics in 1952. Elder, who had been a classmate and collaborator of Kurtzman's from years before, became the defining artistic voice of Mad in its comic book period; he and Kurtzman had similar senses of humor, and when Elder illustrated Kurtzman's scripts eviscerating such cultural touchstones as Mickey Mouse, Sherlock Holmes, and Archie and Jughead. After Kurtzman left Mad in 1957, Elder followed him loyally through a string of short-lived humor magazines: Trump (a Garden of Eden for print humor of the period, and one that lasted all of two issues), Humbug (which is set to be republished in its entirety later this year by Fantagraphics), and Help! Though it was the most uneven of all these publications, it was for Help! that Kurtzman and Elder created the doomed all-American careerist boy Goodman Beaver, star of their masterpiece, "Goodman Goes Playboy," featuring characters from their earlier "Archie" parody. That story was kept out of circulation by years due to threat of legal action from the publishers of "Archie" comics, who were unamused to learn that their red-headed cash cow was throwing orgies in his vast hipster crash pad after selling his soul to the devil. Which is ironic, since everyone who participated in suppressing the story has, of course, gone to Hell for it.

After Help! went bust, Kurtzman (who died in 1993) and Elder mainly kept their hand in with irregular installments of the Playboy feature "Little Annie Fanny", which boasted eye-popping, gorgeous painted artwork by Elder. In his later years, Elder busied himself by jovially witnessing his belated transformation into a living legend, a process helped along by the publication (in two volumes) of all the "Little Annie Fanny" stories as well as the gratifyingly thick tribute volumes Will Elder: The Mad Playboy of Art and Chicken Fat. Although he never actually worked for the movies, to a great degree, movie comedy of the second half of the twentieth century is unimaginable without Elder's influence. His propensity for packing gags upon gags is there in the work of such directors as Richard Lester and the Louis Malle of Zazie dans le Metro, not to mention Airplane!, and the self-conscious analysis of pop culture that he and Kurtzman developed in their work planted the seeds for much of what sprouted in movies in the 1960s and 1970s, from the use of old gangster and private eyes movies as the basis for something new and self-critical in Bonnie & Clyde and The Long Goodbye to George Lucas reviving old Saturday matinee serials with a more or less straight face. Portzebie, and out.

DVD Digest for May 13, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 13 May 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week: two new Criterion DVDs, the comeback effort of a master filmmaker, and the Chairman of the Board all compete for your DVD dollar. Who will win? Why, DVD buyers, of course!

DVD of the Week: For sheer comprehensiveness, nothing can touch Warner’s 22-film, 5-box-set tribute to the one and only Frank Sinatra. For all of Sinatra’s success as a recording artist, he was also a talented actor, given the right role, and this week sees the release of a number of his finest films. Among these are his Oscar-nominated performance in Otto Preminger’s The Man With the Golden Arm and Vincente Minnelli’s Some Came Running, both of which are included in the Frank Sinatra: The Golden Years box set. But if you prefer Sinatra the fresh-faced young crooner, check out Frank Sinatra: The Early Years, which includes such early-career titles as Step Lively, It Happened in Brooklyn, and The Kissing Bandit. Or see Sinatra match his pipes with Gene Kelly’s nimble feet in The Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly Collection, comprised of the classic musicals On the Town, Take Me Out to the Ballgame, and Anchors Aweigh. And if special features are your thing, there’s always The Rat Pack Ultimate Collector’s Edition, which finds the Chairman at his least inspired vehicles but leaves plenty of room for gawking at swingin’ celebrities of yore. Heck, Warner is even releasing 1993’s miniseries Sinatra on DVD this week, in case you want your Sinatra without all that Sinatra. All that’s missing is Sinatra’s two most acclaimed films, The Manchurian Candidate and From Here to Eternity. But I’m guessing you already own those, right?

As previously mentioned, this week also brings the release of two brand-spankin' new Criterions, Louis Malle’s The Lovers and The Fire Within. Also of note in classics on DVD: The Big Trail: Fox Grandeur Special Edition; the Godard double-feature of La Chinoise (Kino) and Le Gai Savoir; a new edition of Anthony Mann’s Man of the West (Fox); Saturday Night Live: The Complete Third Season (Universal); and the Fox Western Classics Collection, which includes the new-to-DVD titles Garden of Evil, Rawhide, and The Gunfighter. And in shameless cash-in news, this week brings new DVDs of all three Indiana Jones films, with a few added extra features so that buyers won’t feel completely ripped off.

In more recent films, today brings the release of Francis Ford Coppola’s Youth Without Youth (Sony, also Blu-Ray), his first official directorial effort in a decade. The film was generally regarded as a critical and popular disaster, but I found it fascinating- flawed to be sure, but intriguingly so- and I believe it’ll finally be appreciated for what it is on DVD. Also this week: Diane Lane in Untraceable (Sony, also Blu-Ray); Diane Keaton, Katie Holmes and Queen Latifah in Mad Money (Anchor Bay); and the French horror film Frontier(s) (Lionsgate). The other major new release this week is the DVD debut of The Animation Show 3 (Paramount), last year’s touring program of animated shorts presented by Mike Judge and Don Hertzfeldt. The DVD includes Hertzfeldt’s latest masterpiece Everything will be OK, as well as sixteen other shorts, some of which have been added especially for the DVD release.

This week’s Blu-Ray only releases are: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (Fox); Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (Fox); Mrs. Doubtfire (Fox); and just in time for this weekend’s new blockbuster, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Which brings me to this week’s Huddleston corner, in which we sigh over the lonely release of Warner’s One Missed Call on HD-DVD. I mean really, guys- you’re just kidding around now, right?

The Rep Report (April 15--21)

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

NEW YORK: The coolest noise in town this spring and summer may be at the Museum of Modern Art's "Jazz Score" series (April 17--September 15), which offers "a gallery installation, live concerts, and a panel discussion," as well as a series of features and shorts powered by original jazz soundtracks. Whether by design or just the luck of the draw, the selection makes it clear that the use of an original jazz score, whether composed by Duke Ellington (Anatomy of a Murder) or Elmer Bernstein (The Man with the Golden Arm), reveals a certain level of artistic aspiration, often coupled with a lust for the lower things in life. At the simplest level, music by Miles Davis or by John Lewis and the Modern Jazz Quartet can do wonders for a thriller such as Louis Malle's Elevator to the Gallows or Robert Wise's Odds Against Tomorrow, with Robert Ryan as a racist crook and Harry Belafonte as his unhappy partner in crime. At the other extreme, there's Arthur Penn's Mickey One, a fascinating, incoherent, art-damaged movie that seems to be trying to take its cues from Stan Getz's saxophone improvisations on the soundtrack--bad as the movie is, it's fun to watch just for the visions it gives you of the studio executive's heads melting when they first saw it--and such artifacts as Robert Frank's Pull My Daisy, with music by Ornette Coleman, and Shirley Clarke's off-Broadway verite films The Cool World and The Connection, reminders that the American independent film movement once seemed to be an offshoot of the Beats' world. There are also some international obscurities that sound better than intriguing, notable Dilemma, a 1962 film made in apartheid-era Johannesburg by the Danish director Henning Carlsen (Hunger), starring Zakes Mokae and with music by Max Roach.

LOS ANGELES: Tonight, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ "John Huston Lecture on Documentary Film" at the Linwood Dunn Theater will include screenings of the two great military documentaries that Huston made during World War II, The Battle of San Pietro and Let There Be Light. Although made with the cooperation of the U. S. military and officially intended as part of the war effort, San Pietro--which is both a strikingly clear and cogent account of a battle and a nonfiction war poem composed on film--met with some grumblings from the higher-ups, and Light, a harrowing visit to a medical ward full of soldiers suffering from the psychological effects of war, was actually kept from public view until the early 1980s. Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Susan King makes the point that Huston had to deal with much more interference than some of the people now making documentaries about the Iraq war, but many of those current filmmakers could still learn a lot from his work. She also reminds us that Huston had a ready answer for the jarheads who clucked that his movies seemed "anti-war': ""Whenever I make a film that's for war, you can take me out and shoot me." The screening will be introduced by Huston's son Tony and followed by a panel discussion including Dr. Charles Wolfe, Dr. Betsy McLane, and Richard E. Robbins, the producer-director of the Oscar-nominated doceumentary Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience.

Apocalypse Now and Then: Ten Great End-of-the-World Movie Scenarios, Part 1

Phil Nugent — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 20:30:00 GMT

Neil Marshall's new sci-fi action thriller Doomsday, starring the very hard-to-mind-looking-at Rhona Mitra, opens tomorrow. It is but the latest in a long and hallowed tradition of using the controlled, expensive technology of motion pictures to imagine how things will look as our planet, spinning out of control with its resources depleted, chews through its last nerve and prepares to breathe its last. We don't know for sure how the world will really end of course, but one thing's for sure; if the last person who's there to see it has seen the right movies, he's certain to spend his last minutes experiencing a powerful sensation of deja vu.

THE ROAD WARRIOR (1981)

This is actually the second of the three films directed by George Miller and starring Mel Gibson as Mad Max — hence its title outside the United States, Mad Max 2 — but even though it's the one in the middle, it's the one that gets the apocalyptic element just about right. Things are pretty crazy in the original Mad Max, but society hasn't completely flatlined yet. And in Beyond Thunderdome, known to serious film scholars as "the one with Tina Turner", damned if the people don't seem to be having too good a time. (It makes the end of the world look like something that Vince McMahon is staging for a Pay-Per-View.) The Road Warrior gets a real doomsday vibe going by boiling the cutting-edge action movie, circa 1980, down to its essentials: loud motor vehicles, lots of space in which to drive them at high speeds, and plenty of attitude exhibited by people with punk haircuts and Dirty Harry jawlines. It is a hard world where men are men, except for the ones who are more like warthogs who've been hitting the Nautilus machines, and the screenwriter, if he knows what's good for him, isn't getting paid by the spoken word. George Miller has since proven himself to be a director whose talent is varied and many-sided, but he may have had trouble fully shaking this vision off: in his most recent film, Happy Feet, he managed to slip an end-of-days vibe into a story of dancing penguins.

GLEN AND RANDA (1971)

The end of the world as brought to you by hippies. Shaggy-haired Glen (Steve Curry) and Randa (Shelley Plimpton, Martha's mother) are a young couple who have never known civilization; among the last surviving human inhabitants of a world devastated by nuclear war, they have no memory of a pre-apocalyptic world and no knowledge of what has been lost outside of the images Glen sees in some comic books he's scavenged. Childlike and close to nonverbal, they spend their days frisking naked in the grass and among the trees, much as they would if they were rich California trust fund kids before the apocalypse and their parents were out of town for the weekend. They don't even seem to have the instinctive ability to figure out about sex and procreation on their own; after Randa is impregnated by a half-mad old man (Garry Goodrow), Glen, who has led them out on a search to find the wonders he has beheld in his Wonder Woman comic, turns pouty and takes to kicking her in her growing tummy. In the end, Randa dies in childbirth, and Glen sets out to sea in a tiny boat, taking the newborn baby along in case he needs a snack. Glen and Randa had trouble getting released at all, perhaps in part because of its stars' reluctance to put some clothes on, and like some other films by the director Jim McBride, seems to have subsequently vanished from the face of the earth.

BLACK MOON (1975)

The end of the world as brought to you by arty French hippies. Actually, this film was directed by the great Louis Malle, but he was clearly trying to access the counterculture zeitgeist and getting in touch with his inner goofball. Cathryn Harrison, the fifteen-year-old granddaughter of Rex Harrison, is wandering through what's left of the world; she is first seen posing as a man, because, maybe because the women heard about what happened to poor Randa, relations between the sexes have degenerated into a shooting war. She ends up taking refuge in a huge house occupied by Therese Giehse (German), Alexandra Stewart (French Canadian), and Joe Dallesandro (the jury's still out). None of the people talk much, maybe because, given the language barriers, they'd have trouble understanding each other if they did. The cast also includes a rat and a unicorn (which appears to have a glandular condition), both of which do talk; there are also flowers that, when stepped on, whine about it. Shot by Sven Nykvist, Black Moon looks great, thus confirming any suspicions you may have had that the human race will still be able to take pretty pictures even after we've used up our last collective brain cell.

BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES (1970)

Charlton Heston's astronaut character Taylor was already a rather nihilistic fellow in the original Planet of the Apes, but in the first sequel of the series he proves he's not just all talk. First he vanishes for about an hour, shortly after the discovery of the Statue of Liberty that ended the first movie, leaving the main action to a mini-Heston, James Franciscus. (Franciscus's meaningful contributions to the series are few, but we'll always have his incredulous reading of the line "My God — it's a city of apes!") Late in the movie, Franciscus discovers that Taylor is being held captive by a band of underground mutants who worship a doomsday bomb that will, if detonated, destroy the entire planet. The gorilla army descends on the mutant lair and all hell breaks loose, in the course of which poor Franciscus takes a bullet to the head. Having had quite enough of talking apes and telepathic mole-people, Heston unleashes a mighty cry of "You bloody bastards!" and plunges onto the detonator with his dying breath. And you can pry it from his cold, dead hands, if you can find them, which you can't because, indeed, the planet explodes. Or as the abrupt final line of narration has it: "In one of the countless billions of galaxies in the universe, lies a medium-sized star, and one of its satellites, a green and insignificant planet, is now dead." Hey, thanks for coming to the show, ladies and gentlemen! Drive home safely! It's an ending that provokes laughter in your modern sophisticated audience, much to the bafflement of a gentleman who was sitting behind me at a revival house screening some years ago. "I dunno what everyone's laughing at," he muttered. "It's gonna happen."

LAST NIGHT (1999)

Most movies about apocalypse tie themselves in knots to imagine the unimaginable. They spend millions of dollars on effects and art direction to stage elaborate scenarios of how the world will end, as the filmmakers work out of the question of why. Standing in contrast to films of this kind is Don McKellar's Last Night, a movie with a strictly ground-level approach to an impending apocalypse. In McKellar's world, the end is imminent, and the characters are powerless to stop it, so rather than focusing on the extremes of human behavior, the film attempts to deal more realistically with how characters would spend their final hours on Earth. The tone is set early on when a woman (Sandra Oh) stops at an abandoned grocery store for a bottle of wine, sees two on the shelf, and instead of simply taking both and leaving she carefully chooses one and politely leaves the other for someone else to take. This small gesture says it all — there is looting and rioting in Last Night, but in the face of the unspeakable many people would prefer to end their lives by maintaining all the order and dignity they can. Consider the gas company executive (played by David Cronenberg) who calls all of the company's customers to assure them that the power will stay on until the end. Other people take the end of the world as an opportunity to fulfill their lifelong wishes, from the aspiring pianist who finally gets a gig a hour before the world is scheduled to end to the man who uses it as an excuse to sleep with one of his former teachers. Last Night lacks the visceral thrills of most films about apocalypse, but instead it focuses on the very different reactions people would inevitably have with the end of the world only hours, minutes, even seconds away.

— Paul Clark, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak

Click here for Part 2.

Home Video Is Where the Heart Is

Phil Nugent — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 19:00:00 GMT

2007 was a pretty good year for moviegoing, but it may have been an even better one for DVDs. Even the acrimonious racket over the format battles couldn't obscure the almost steady flood of eye-catching product issued on shiny steel discs. For starters, a number of the most exciting new movies of the last twelve months were released in especially fine, often two-disc editions, including Pan's Labyrinth, Children of Men, The Host, and Knocked Up in its "unrated, expanded" form. But there's also been a treasure trove of oldies and oddities of every kind, sure to be of interest to anyone who was lucky enough to score a gift certificate or two over the holidays.

CAREER RETROSPECTIVES: While boxes devoted to stars have become a popular scam designed to lump together various heapings scooped from the bottom of the barrel (the "Marlon Brando Collection" is a five-disc set dominated by such least-loved Brando films Teahouse of the August Moon, The Formula, and the 1962 Mutiny on the Bounty), a number of director-themed boxes make it possible to have an affordable, one-stop film festival at home. The smartly chosen Viva Pedro--The Almodovar Collection skips past the auteur's tickling juvenelia to the full-blown operatic dementia of his most accomplished '80s work (Matador, Law of Desire, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown), then bypasses his confused mid-career slump to rejoin him at the mature pitch represented by Live Flesh and All About My Mother. The Documentaries of Louis Malle, a six-disc set released by Criterion through its Eclipse division, is an invaluable compilation of nonfiction films, including his multi-part Phantom India series, by a great director whose reputation may be imperilled by his confounding versatility. In theatrical releases, 2007 was the year that Charles Burnett's legendary Killer of Sheep finally breathed pure air, and New Yorker Video/ Milestone is to be congratulated for rising to the occasion and constructing an instant and invaluable box by combining Sheep with Burnett's short films and second feature, My Brother's Wedding, to create Killer of Sheep: The Charles Burnett Collection. The second volume of The Films of Kenneth Anger captures the cream of Anger's trend-setting experimental shorts, from the 1964 Scorpio Rising to 1981'a Lucifer Rising. For those who crave that kind of transgressive trippiness unpolluted by talent or taste, The Films of Alejandro Jodorowsky is definitely one of the archeological finds of the year, finally making El Topo and its runtier cousins safe for home viewing. Personally, I kind of think that Jodorowsky was always a con man who hogged the magic mushrooms at the buffet table, but maybe that's why nobody ever invited me to do the midnight programming at the Elgin.

ANIMATION: Is there any pleasure more sublimely twenty-first geeky than trancing out in front of the home entertainment system watching classic 'toons? This year saw the release of a much appreciated fifth volume of Looney Tunes--Golden Collection, but the real shocker may be Popeye the Sailor, 1933-1938: Vol. 1, which rescued a trove of the Fleischer brothers' best from years of rights problems and cheapo videotapes. Then there's Tex Avery's Droopy--The Complete Theatrical Collection, which if anything may be a bit too complete; it contains seven cartoons that Avery purists will shun because they were made by other hands, but they all star the dog who, from the looks of it, spent his screen career stoically suffering for his art. Animated Soviet Propaganda: From the October Revolution to Perestroika is a four-disc set that will make a perfect May Day present for your old Socialist friend from college who still hasn't gotten over it. Last but not least, there's The Three Stooges Collection, Vol. One: 1934-1936. Technically, the Three Stooges weren't really cartoon characters, but the films are a lot easier to watch if you pretend that they were.

TELEVISION: Yes, you can still watch TV on your TV, and thanks to a few hardy corporations you can even pay for the privilege. Twin Peaks: The Definitive Gold Box Edition performs a notable feat by finally getting the first season (AKA "the good one"), including the feature-length pilot, and the second season (AKA "the not-so-much one") season of David Lynch and Mark Frost's prime time phenom in print and available at the same point in history. Clare Danes fans will be almost as grateful for My So-Called Life: The Complete Series, though some of us would trade all its extras for one bonus scene of the heroine seeing through that smarmy little nimrod Jordan Catalano and leaving him carless in the park stripped to his underwear. That wouldn't have come as any more of a shock than the timely arrival in stores of Saturday Night Live--The Second Season, AKA "Bill Murray: The Pre-Wes Anderson Years, Volume 1." Yes, Virginia, they do still make new TV shows, and of the current series now on DVD, 30 Rock--Season 1 seems particularly well shaped to reward repeat viewings. As show biz self-satire goes, it's not as great as The Larry Sanders Show, but as a DVD it may be less infuriating an artifact than Not Just the Best of the Larry Sanders Show. Here's a series that fully deserves the every-episode-plus-ephemera Twin Peaks treatment, but instead, what do we get? Four discs, consisting of 23 episodes, some of which are already available on the first-season DVD that was first issued back in 2001 and is still in print, plus eight hours of extras that are sort of interesting the first time you watch them and then automatically turn into space that could have been taken up by close to thirty additional episodes. Garry Shandling, if you're reading this, or David Duchovny, if you're reading this and you still have Garry's naumber and can give him a message: It's not right, man. It's just not right. Do you really care this much less about your career legacy than Popeye does!?

SMORGASBORD: Many companies have taken to vaccuuming up odds and ends of film history and boxing them according to genre and sub-genre and even attitude, with results that are fun to contemplate even if you'd rather not shell out something in the high two figures to have them on the shelf. Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film, 1900-1934, the latest, four-disc set in the series compiled from the American Archives, is a remarkable collection of topical studies, including Cecil B. DeMille's 1928 feature The Godless Girl. Now on its fourth box set, the Film Noir Classic Collection has gone from showcasing movies you'd seen already to movies you'd read about to movies you dimly remember not bothering to stay up to watch after you read about them in the late-night TV listings. As such, it is a veritable overstuffed closet of discoveries waiting to be made, a place to see such actors as Robert Ryan, Edward G. Robinson, Sterling Hayden, and Ricardo Montalban strut their stuff, and to listen to the commentary tracks and give such cool-headed enthusiasts as James Ellroy, Eddie Muller, and Richard Schickel a chance to convince you why you should be watching this stuff. The Cult Camp Classics series slaps together everything from early Sergio Leone (The Colossus of Rhodes) and very late Joan Crawford (Trog), complete with mostly excellent commentary tracks, across four multi-disc boxes divided into such categories as "Women in Peril" and "Terrorized Travelers." The Welcome to the Grindhouse series of double-bill single discs are the most attractive of several packaging jobs that use the supposedly magical word "grindhouse" to offer an excuse to watch movies that Trog crosses the street to avoid be seen with in public.

CRITERION: Still the bestest with the mostest. This year they graced the shelves with dreamy new editions of Breathless, Mala Noche, Two-Lane Blacktop, Days of Heaven, and Berlin Alexanderplatz.

DRAGON DYNASTY: Specialists, and the new kid on the block. For years, Harvey Weinstein stormed the festivals, greedily buying up rights to Asian action films, and then lost them in the back of the freezer. This new label, started by the Weinstein Company in association with Genius Products, looks to make amends by issuing such pictures as Jackie Chan's Police Story films, John Woo's Hard-Boiled, the Infernal Affairs trilogy, and other action classics including the beyond-canonical 36th Chamber of Shaolin on DVD in deluxe packages far superior to any treatment they've received in the West before now. Indeed, the DVDs are so beautiful that only a churl could think to point out that it's about damn time. It's about damn time.

That Guy!: Wallace Shawn

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

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

Where to see Wallace Shawn at his best:

MY DINNER WITH ANDRE (1981)

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

THE PRINCESS BRIDE (1987)

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

VANYA ON 42nd STREET (1994)

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

— Leonard Pierce

The Rep Report (November 2 - 20)

Peter Smith — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 17:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: From November 2 through the 20th, Film Forum brings back Jean-Jacques Beinex's 1981 romantic comedy-thriller Diva, in a new 35 mm. print. As visually graceful as it is inventive, playfully witty, with actual if improbable characters pushing the plot forward, it remains an especially flavorful example of what used to be called "an exercise in pure style" from back before easy access to computer imagery and MTV syntax resulted in an explosion of would-be prodigies turning out movies that really are exercises in pure style. The new print is reported to also boast some new, improved subtitles. (The first time I saw the movie, on cable TV on my fifteenth birthday — I rode my brontosaurus to the house of my friend who had HBO — a single half-assed glitch in the subtitles served to completely screw up the plot.) If you haven't seen it before, nothing else you have seen can fully prepare you for it; Beinex himself has spent the last quarter century failing to follow it up.

October 30 would have been Louis Malle's seventy-fifth birthday, which makes this a good time to check out what may be his happiest masterpiece, the autobiographical 1971 comedy Murmur of the Heart. (I do not mean to suggest that there might ever be a bad time to check it out.) The Film Society of Lincoln Center will be showing it on November 1 as part of their "Young Friends of Film" program. Andre Gregory, who worked with Malle on two of his finest American films, My Dinner with Andre and Vanya on 42nd Street, will be on hand to introduce the film.

BERKELEY: Romanian cinema, believe it or not, is hot right now and getting hotter, so Pacific Film Archives is offering a handy primer in the form of Revolutions in Romanian Cinema (November 3 - December 9). The country produces fewer feature films than any other European country — half a dozen a year — but as Spencer Tracy used to say, what's there is choice. The schedule includes The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, the Cannes festival winner that really got the West paying attention, as well as the sardonic 12:08 East of Bucharest and the powerful recent New York Film Festival entry 4 Months 3 Weeks 2 Days. Plus five other feature films and a program of shorts.

The Pacific Film Archive also hosts The Passion of Pasolini (November 1 - December 7), dedicated to the work of the still-controversial Italian novelist, poet, and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini. The series, which includes his adaptations of The Decameron, Arabian Nights, The Canterbury Tales and The Gospel According to St. Matthew opens with his 1961 debut feature Accattone; it closes with his scandalous last film, the 1975 Salo. Just keep telling yourself: it's only chocolate, it's only chocolate. . .

WASHINGTON, D.C.: The twentieth annual 2007 European Union Film Showcase opens November 1 and runs through November 20th at the AFI Silver Theater, showcasing a wide selection of new and recent films from across the continent. The opening night selection is Christopher Columbus: The Enigma, the latest by the startlingly prolific Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira. The director, who will be in attendance, turns ninety-nine on December 12. I just thought I'd put that out there in case you want to show up and give him his birthday card a little early.

— Phil Nugent

Robert Goulet, 1933 - 2007

Peter Smith — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 17:00:00 GMT

Robert Goulet has died, after a sudden illness, while waiting for a lung transplant. He was seventy-three. Goulet struck gold in 1960 when he was cast as Lancelot in the original Broadway production of the musical Camelot. That triumph led to a successful recording career and a string of TV appearances, notably as a favorite guest of daytime talk-show host Mike Douglas. He also returned to the Broadway stage, most recently in a revival of La Cage aux Folles.

But to movie audiences, Goulet had his own special niche: he was one of the pioneers of the straight-faced, ironic cameo appearance by the celebrity who may or may not be in on the joke. Goulet, who appeared in several "straight" dramatic roles on such TV series as Police Woman and Fantasy Island, never developed much skill as an actor, but whether playing the villain in a Naked Gun movie or getting shot through the roof in Beetlejuice or parodying himself by name in Scrooged or a memorable episode of The Simpsons, he seemed like a nice guy and a good sport. He may have been a sacred object to many a fan of Broadway ballads, but to a generation of movie lovers, he came to be fondly regarded as the Chuck Norris who sings. The two halves of his career came seamlessly together in the high point of his movie career, the great moment in Louis Malle's 1981 Atlantic City where, again playing a clueless version of himself, he presides over a publicity event in a casino lobby and attempts to serenade a woman (Susan Sarandon) who has just been informed that her husband's been murdered. — Phil Nugent