The Screengrab : martin scorsese

Th-Th-That's All Folks! The Best & Worst Endings Of All Time! (Part Nine)

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 29 May 2009 00:00:00 GMT

And now, the worst...

THE BAD SEED (1956)

So, a few years back, my lovely Polish bride was in a production of the theatrical version of The Bad Seed, where bratty little hellspawn Rhoda Penmark (Patty McCormack) gets away with a whole lot of evil behavior, including (gasp!) matricide, simply because the gullible adults in the story (much like the gullible adults of today) are unwilling to see children -- especially cute little white children -- as anything but perfect little angels. But in the Hays Code ‘50s, villains simply HAD to be punished, at least in the movies, leading to one of the most ludicrous finales in cinematic history, whereby the bad seed gets her comeuppance Old Testament style with a good ol’ bolt from the blue courtesy of God (or possibly Zeus) Himself...followed by a dorky curtain call (complete with a comical “spanking” for McCormack) to reassure skittish audiences that, hey, folks! It’s just a movie! See? Everybody’s alive and well and no evil will ever befall you if you stay on the right side of the tracks with all the decent, well-dressed, respectable Christian people...honest! (AO)

THE QUIET AMERICAN (1958)

We could keep you up all night babbling about all the movies that softened and betrayed the endings of their source material (and even original screenplays, in some cases), denting otherwise excellent movies: Stella seeming to reject Stanley's blandishments in A Streetcar Names Desire, Mel Cooley squawking "Get me the FBI!" at the end of the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and on and on. Joseph L. Mankiewicz's adaptation of Graham Greene's novel about the dangers of well-intentioned American efforts in Indochina may take the prize, though -- partly because it has so much to recommend it (particularly Michael Redgrave's performance as the aging British reporter whose disapproval of the title character -- Audie Murphy -- is gummed up with the knowledge that the younger man is his romantic rival, and the sensuous, flowing atmosphere and camera work), which makes it all the more frustrating when Mankiewicz betrays Greene in the last scenes. The revelation that the American was the moral angel he believed himself to be, and the decision to have the woman the two men shared turn away from the surviving member of their triangle in disgust, was a significant enough alteration to lay waste to everything that had come before it. (The 2002 version, starring Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser, is in many ways a clunkier piece of filmmaking, but it holds up better just by being true to Greene.) (PN)

NO WAY OUT (1987)

This slick update of The Big Clock relocates the action from the world of magazine publishing to Washngton, D.C., where the Secretary of Defense (Gene Hackman) kills his mistress (Sean Young, so it's not as if a jury in the world would view him unsympathetically) and launches a search for the woman's other lover (Kevin Costner) while working the angle that she may have been the victim of a possibly apocryphal Soviet mole called "Yuri." Naturally, he puts Costner in charge of the investigation. In what appears to be the ending, Costner manages to slip away after exposing the bad guys; then, in the concluding scene, it is revealed that Costner, an actor who has trouble passing for anything but a lifelong resident of California, turns out to in fact be Yuri, the Russian mole. It's a twist ending, and to steal a line from David Edelstein, it's twisted, all right. (PN)

MINORITY REPORT (2002)

For the most part, Steven Spielberg's take on Philip K. Dick is one of the director's smartest and most accomplished entertainments in recent years, topped off with one of his most mind-melting bad endings; it's like seeing an Olympic athlete ace the first nine parts of the decathlon before fleeing the course to get fucked up on hillbilly heroin. The drop is so deep and so sudden that some enterprising geeks have an explanation for it: they'll tell you that everything that happens after Tom Cruise is sealed away in his frozen prison tube is actually a dream that his character has of being rescued and redeemed; despite what the movie shows you, as the credits roll, he's actually still locked away in there and the villain is triumphant. If some guys sitting at computer keyboards could come up with a nifty idea like that, how come Spielberg, with access to every writer in Hollywood and the millions to pay them, had to settle for the ending he wound up with? (PN)

HOLLYWOOD ENDING (2002)

This Woody Allen comedy stars our hero as a washed-up movie director who, given the chance to make his comeback film, suffers an attack of hysterical blindness and has to blunder through the entire production without being able to see what he's directing. Of all Allen's recent misfires, this one feels especially revealing because of the way that he fails to leap at the chance to score some sure laughs with the obvious joke that's waiting to be made: at no point do we get to see any of the footage that's been okayed by this poor bastard working in the dark. This, it turns out, is only the fair warning for the well-worn groaner awaiting us at the end, when the disgraced director receives the happy news that his blind man's movie has been declared a masterpiece by...the French! For a guy who's spent more and more time in the late stages of his career accepting plaudits from those same French critics and audiences, this counts as perhaps the laziest instance of biting the hand that feeds on record. (PN)

GANGS OF NEW YORK (2002)

Martin Scorsese's period epic was inspired by a 1928 book that was a garish collection of tall tales recounting the "real" hidden history of New York City. By the time Scorsese and his screenwriters got through embellishing it further and welding a plot to it, the result was practically a steampunk fantasy of barbaric city dwellers with a few Mad Max extras sprinkled in having knife fights all over the Five Points district. Which is fine; it definitely counts as something to see. However, the movie crashes as it strains to build to a proper climax. The main plot, involving a conflict between the local dictator Bill the Butcher (Daniel Day-Lewis) and his arch-nemesis (Leonardo DiCaprio) happens to climax just in time to collide with the 1863 Draft Riots, an actual historic event that, as Scorsese stages it, smashes into the storyline like a runaway truck tearing through the back of the theater and steamrollers the main characters. The most charitable interpretation is that Scorsese was trying to show how petty and, in historical terms, forgotten the people whose struggles he'd been involving us in for the preceding two and a half hours really were. But it feels as if The Lord of the Rings had ended with the news that the year was actually 1945 and Mordor was on the outskirts of Hiroshima, and that just as Frodo and Gollum were battling for the ring, they were all wiped out by the dropping of the atomic bomb. (PN)

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Ten, Eleven & Twelve

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

22 Years Ago in the Screengrab: Nailing "The Last Temptation of Christ"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 22 May 2009 18:00:00 GMT

MOROCCO, FALL, 1987: I arrived on the set of Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ a week into the filming. Andre Gregory, stripped to the waist, is standing knee-deep in water and ranting at the extras, who are writhing and wailing and flagellating themselves. I'm still adjusting to the heat and dust that the filmmaking team has already had a chance to acclimate itself to. The sun is doing strange things to my eyes. I thought I saw a goat with the head of Wallace Shawn run to the edge of the river to drink, but shrugged it off. A member of the crew picked up the goat, tucked it under his arm, and carried it back to the catering tent. The goat kept talking about how much it enjoyed sipping cold coffee in the morning and reading Charlton Heston's diaries until the sound of its voice was cut short by the sound of an axe connecting with its neck.

Scorsese himself wanders back from the line of portable toilets and looks at the screaming, bloody mess going on in the river. "Wow," he says to no one in particular, then flags down his cinematographer, Michael Ballhaus. "Listen," he says, "I don't want to get you in dutch with the union, but maybe you should cut your break short and film some of this, y'know? Maybe we could use it." Ballhaus nods and turns his camera toward the scene as Scorsese heads for the catering area.

The prospect of Scorsese telling a Biblical story is an exciting one. His Catholic background is felt in every frame of Mean Streets and Raging Bull. If one knows the devotion and passion that the director is likely to bring to religious themes, it makes it all the more frustrating to listen to the ridiculous complaints that have been coming from conservative religious groups who expect the movie to be an exercise in blasphemy. This is Scorsese's second try at getting this movie made. He was all set to go in 1983 with a cast that included Aidan Quinn in the title role, but Paramount got cold feet and pulled the plug at the last minute. This time, Scorsese is determined to get the movie finished no matter what. Word has it that he sought out a secret line of support as a safety net, just in case Universal tried to withdraw funding. If the stories are true, then he was right to hedge his bets. Sidney Sheinberg, the head of Universal, was reportedly on the verge of canceling the production shortly before he was hospitalized with mysterious stomach pains. (Doctors subsequently removed a nest of locusts that had somehow managed to make their home in his abdomen.)

I find Scorsese in the catering tent. A true hands-on director, he is helping prepare lunch, personally slaughtering the animals that have been smeared with lambs' blood and trussed up beneath a giant pentagram, a symbol the matches the crimson tattoo on Scorsese's bare chest. "O dark prince, accept my offering!" he screams as the knife in his hand comes down for the last time, opening the throat of a deer. The spray of blood hits Scorsese right in the face, but with the reflexes of a trained butcher, he barely winces. He wipes his hands and face with a wet toilet offered to him by his assistant, then whips off the antlers and animal skin that he has been using to protect his head and back from the ferocious sun. "Hi," he says as he shakes my hand, "I'm Marty, pleased ta meet'cha!" You can still see the shy, asthmatic little boy from Queens inside the powerful Hollywood player.

"I'm, I'm, I'm a, I'm like very excited about having the chance, having the chance to make this picture," he says, looking down at the mob at the river. "It's, it's a, it's just a very personal thing to me, and after awhile, you're prepared to do anything to get made. Anything." He turns to look at his crew sorting the carcasses to go on the grill, then grabs my face with both hands and looks deep into my eyes. "Aaaaanything!!" he stresses.

"You know, some people have been trying to depict this production as some kind of sacrilege, and that's kind of funny for those of us who do understand the project and what your intentions are. I know some people who think you must be angry about that, but I imagine that you must see it as sort of amusing."

"Yes, yes, sacrilege, blasphemy, that is, that is very funny, it amuses me, it makes me laugh, mwahh-hahh!! It hits me in the whadadya whadadya whadaya call it the funny bone, that it where it hits me. Where it makes me laugh. Hey, Randy, how's that venison coming?"

"This is some hard terrain you're shooting in," I say, watching as the chaos at the river accelerates and a man dressed incongruously, in a long black cloak and black hat, strolls along the bank, taking notes. "Have any of the actors had trouble working under these conditons?"

"It's been, it's, it's been, what you say, a very lively, most unconventional shooting environment. For sure, it has. And people have reacted to in any number of surprising ways. Willem Dafoe, when he's not working, he mostly hides in his trailer, weeping and curled in the fetal position. David Bowie spent his first half hour on the set wandering around muttering something about Berlin, then joined Dafoe in his trailer. Harry Dean Stanton is talking about buying a house here."

The man in the long black cloak turns to face the tent. "Oh, no," mutters Scorsese. "Please don't look at me. You can be here, you can leave notes, you can watch the dailies, but please, please don't ever look at me, not like that..."

Sensing that this might be a representative of Scorsese's secret investor, I ask, "Who is that guy. Would it be all right if I talked to him?"

"Nggggggghhhhh!!, replies Scorsese, "I, I do not think, I would not suggest that you, I think that would be a very bad idea, am unfortunate idea, one that I would in fact urge you not to pursue. Please don't. I urge you, don't. And whatever you do, don't sign anything he gives you. " He turns and holds me by both my arms and, looking me in the eyes again, silently mouths the word, "Don't." Then he turns and looks again at the man in black, and murmurs, "I passed him yesterday when he was talking to Barbara Hershey. Something about Botox..." He seemes to shudder.

The sky, which was clear and bright, suddenly turns black and the sound of distant thunder is heard. "Good set of ears on him, that's for sure," says Scorsese.

"You've worked as an independent filmmaker and from deep inside the industry," I say. "Even this far into your career, you've sort of gone back and forth. Do you think you'll ever work this way again?"

"No. No no no no no no no no no, I do not forsee that happening," says Scorsese. "I cannot anticipate the project on which I would want to repeat this particular experience, so no. It's just that this one means a lot to me, you know? I am...provisionally obligated to do another picture with my financer, a picture of his choosing, but based on the suggestions that he's got up his sleeve, I am fairly comfortable in my hopes that the actuality will not materialize. I'm pretty sure. I think. I hope." For the third time, Martin Scorsese looks me in the face, but now his expression is different, beseeching, hopeful yet frightened. "You don't happen to know," he asks, "if it's true that the remake rights to Cape Fear are up for grabs?"

Morning Deal Report: Scorsese Sings Sinatra

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

One Martin Scorsese picture that never made it out of development hell was an adaptation of Dino, Nick Tosches’ biography of Dean Martin, which was set to star Tom Hanks in the lead role. This was, of course, a terrible idea, and cooler heads eventually prevailed. Scorsese can’t let the Rat Pack go, however – he’s set to direct Sinatra, written by Field of Dreams screenwriter Phil Alden Robinson. “The deal comes after years of negotiations with Frank Sinatra Enterprises, a joint venture of the crooner's estate and Warner Music Group. Internal politics of the estate, where family members had to form a consensus as to how to tell the story and, more importantly, just how much of the story to tell -- was a hurdle that had to be overcome,” per The Hollywood Reporter. So…not exactly warts and all, then?

Lindsay Lohan is going to The Other Side. “Story centers on a grad student who must spend the summer working at a scientific institute on a remote island. She discovers an eccentric community of characters who are hiding a secret about a tragedy that took place many years before,” Variety reports.

Ozsploitation auteur Russell Mulcahy is back with Bait, a 3-D shark movie. “Upping the ante on peril, the film is set in a coastal town where a freak tsunami floods and traps shoppers in a supermarket with an armed maniac and a pack of hungry tiger sharks that have been washed into the building.” Jaws in a supermarket! I am so there!

The Hype Report: The X File on Winona Ryder

Phil Nugent — Fri, 08 May 2009 17:00:00 GMT

[Being the latest in an infrequent series devoted to movie-related puff pieces so over the top that they're a show all by themselves..]

So it turns out that Winona Ryder is in the new Star Trek movie, where she plays the Vulcan ambassador Sarek's baby mama, and Vanessa Thorpe's profile of Ryder and the current state of her career has kind of science-fiction vibe to it itself. Did you know that Ryder was once "acclaimed as the most promising, most beautiful and most fashionable star of her generation - the generation, that is, that had become known as 'X'?" It's news to me, and I think I'm of the generation that had become known as 'X' myself, so long as we're all committed to writing in the style that has become known as "funny-looking'." Thorpe must have worried that we'd think it was just her, so she cites a back-up source: Ryder's father, who says that twenty or so years ago, his daughter and Johnny Depp were "the hottest couple in the United States." All together now--ewwwwww!! Is it possible that when all those folks at the red carpet premieres leaned across the police barricades and screamed, "You're the most promising, most beautiful, and most fashionable star of your generation," they were talking to Johnny? Thorpe herself undercuts her argument by describing Ryder's features as "elfin", a term I've always associated more with the likes of Michael J. Pollard or the guy on Two and a Half Men who isn't Charlie Sheen than anyone who might qualify as the most beautiful anything. It's possible that Cate Blanchett and Orlando Bloom in The Lord of the Rings have forever rewritten the rule book on this one, but not in my apartment.

The thing is, I've always thought that Ryder was beautiful, and that's why I never tortured myself a lot--a little, but not a lot--wondering why she had a career. It was easy for men, including men as smart and weird as Depp and Tim Burton, to have high hopes for her in her Beetlejuice days: she was, one more time, a very beautiful, very young girl who liked to tell interviewers that was reading Ian McEwan and do guest spots in Mojo Nixon videos. You could probably hear the puddles forming from all those geeks' hearts melting across the country. Thorpe seems to take it on faith that there's a general agreement that she was just dazzling in Scorsese's The Age of Innocence--where, to show her commitment to her craft, she allowed the makeup people to do her best to homely her up--and in the Gillian Armstrong production of Little Woman, which is indeed probably the best movie that has her close to its center. But it's also true that in both these movies, which we made when she was in her early twenties, she comes across as, emotionally, about twelve years old. When she was engaged in real life to Johnny Depp, who was eight years her senior, it was reported that no less an expert on grown-up behavior than Cher had warned her that she wasn't ready for such a leap. in the movies, seeing her married off to either Daniel Day Lewis or Gabriel Byrne was creepy, in ways the filmmakers could not have intended.

Ryder's last big-deal role was probably in 1999's Girl, Interrupted, a movie that wound up belonging her co-star, Angelina Jolie (who won an Oscar for it), and with good reason. Thorpe does her best to characterize Ryder's fallen star sound the result of some combination of a conspiracy and a perfect storm of "bad creative decisions, or perhaps just bad luck, which gradually began to edge Ryder deeper into a kind of Hollywood twilight." Yes, there was the shoplifting incident, which fed into other stories, like the one about her flaking out on the set of The Godfather III, gave her a reputation for being a troublesome fruitcake. But the fact is that Ryder's demons are small-time compared to those of Robert Downey, Jr., and there was always somebody willing to work with him while waiting for him to prove himself insurable again. Ryder was much in demand when she was barely an adult because she was beautiful and unusual and willing to work, and a number of people who got their foot in the door of the industry that way learned to act as they went along. Ryder never did. A lot of these people were discarded by the industry as their looks faded; what's most special about Ryder, who at 37 is still very easy on the eyes, is that her looks held up just fine and still Hollywood was eager to discard her, because she showed no sign of ever learning to act a lick. She and Downey were both in Richard Linklater's rotoscoped A Scanner Darkly, and the amazing thing was how much of him came through even as a cartoon, while her improved-upon screen image had the same hollow shell behind it that it always had.

Maybe Ryder will get her comeback: stranger things have happened, and if it does, good for her. But it's annoying to see writers present her career as a story of a major talent that's been neglected or gone to waste, because such talk amounts to a slight of other, genuine talents. So many really gifted actresses have to fight harder for parts as they grow older, and some of them never really win a round. Given that, how is it anything but simple justice that Ryder should have trouble getting good roles when the salient fact of her career has been her failure to seem to grow up? All she had to offer the camera was her face, and if the general feeling in Hollywood is that that's not enough to compensate for the trouble she's apt to cause, keep in mind that she's less trouble than a lot of people who manage to keep themselves in work. And then there's the wildy gifted people who don't stay in the race at all. "If Ryder's artistic rehabilitation works out over the summer," Thorpe writes breathlessly, "she will have re-emerged at the age of 37 as one of the most impressive veterans of a 1980s Hollywood bratpack scene that has seen many casualties. An emblem of troubled, talented youth, Ryder was a sort of female equivalent to River Phoenix, but unlike him she has survived." If I read this correctly, in the comparison between Phoenix, whose career included some indelible performances before it was cut short, and Ryder, whose career doesn't and wasn't, Ryder wins because, for reasons connected to a fluke of mortality and blind luck, she's the one who's still employable. Seriously, does anyone really want to go there?

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Whatever Happened to Kenneth Lonergan's "Margaret"?

Phil Nugent — Fri, 01 May 2009 17:30:00 GMT

When Kenneth Lonergan, already a successful playwright (This Is Our Youth) and screenwriter (Analyze This) made his directing debut with You Can Count on Me (2000), an acclaimed small film that did big things for the careers of its stars, Laura Linney and Mark Ruffalo, it seemed like the beginning of a promising career. Since then, Lonergan has had a script credit on Gangs of New York (directed by Martin Scorsese, who had an executive producer credit on You Can Count on Me); meanwhile, the years have gone by while his second film asa a director, Margaret has remained unreleased and possibly, depending on who you ask, unfinished. As John Horn reports, the movie, which was funded by Fox Searchlight Pictures and producer Gary Gilbert, was shot in 2005, and has now inspired a pair of lawsuits, one of which alleges that the movie remains unreleased because Lonergan, who has the power of final cut, has never been able to shape the material into a finished state that's to his satisfaction.

Margaret was never going to be an easy sell commercially. Based on a shooting script that ran more than 160 pages--a length that's liable to result in a two and a half hour movie--it was intended as a timely, post-9/11 parable about the nature of guilt and responsibility. Set in New York City, it stars Anna Paquin as a seventeen-year-old girl who witnesses a bus accident and becomes involved in a subsequent legal action against the driver, played by Mark Ruffalo. The cast also includes Matt Damon, as a teacher towards whom Paquin's character makes advances, and J. Smith-Cameron, who is married to Lonergan, as the girl's mother. (As if all this weren't involved enough, "Margaret" isn't the name of the Paquin character or anyone else in the movie: the title refers to a Gerald Manley Hopkins poem, “Spring and Fall: To a Young Child”, which comes up in the course of one of the classroom scenes. The list of high-powered prestige talents who worked on the movie include not one but two already-deceased producers, Anthony Minghella and Sydney Pollack, as well as cast members Alison Janney, Jean Reno, Kieran Culkin, Rosemarie DeWitt, Olivia Thirlby, and Matthew Broderick; Broderick, who also appeared in You Can Count on Me, is said to have loaned Lonergan a million dollars to help him complete the editing. (According to John Horn, "A Broderick spokesman said the loan was a private matter and disputed the dollar amount but did not provide another figure.") For his part, Scorsese is said to have sent in his "legendary editor" Thelma Schoonmaker to pitch in, but to no avail.

The lawsuits started flying last summer when Fox Seacrhlight "sued Gilbert and his production company, claiming he failed to pay the studio half of the film's production costs. Two months later, Gilbert's Camelot Pictures sued Fox Searchlight and Lonergan, alleging that the studio and Lonergan thwarted Gilbert's many attempts to finish the movie, forcing Camelot to pay for 'a clearly inferior and unmarketable film' that Lonergan, several people say, will not support." The $12 million that got spent on Margaret doesn't exactly make for a Heaven's Gate-style fiasco, but the situation is a source of embarrassment for all involved, not least the studio if it's true that they gave Lonergan carte blanche to make a movie that he couldn't make work--at least, not within the framework of certain conditions to which he'd agreed. (Lonergan's final-cut guarantee was contingent on his delivering a movie that was no longer than 150 minutes.) Whether Lonergan could only deliver an ambitious, sometimes brilliant failure, or if he simply turned obsessive perfectionist and couldn't let go of his baby, the studio seemed to have come to the conclusion that it was better for them to forget the movie existed rather than take it away from him and finish it for him, which would have been them look like crude buttinskys and alienated other "prestige" filmmakers they might have wanted to court in the future. Martin Scorsese reportedly declared that one version of Margaret that he saw back in 2006 was "brilliant, a materpiece." I hope he took notes.

Fat Actor Watch at New York Times: Paper of Record Alleges That When Russell Crowe Sits Around the House, He Really Sits Around the House

Phil Nugent — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 15:00:00 GMT

Always looking for a fresh angle on the really important movie news of the day, Michael Cieply uses his perch at Thew New York Times to ask" what's with all the male movie stars who are porkers? Who does he have in mind, exactly? Russell Crowe and Jeff Daniels, sharing a screen in State of Play ("Two men. One notebook. Four chins."); Denzel Washington, going "cheek-to-jowl with the bulky John Travolta" in the trailer for the remake of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three; Hugh Grant; and "Even Leonardo DiCaprio, the young heartthrob from Titanic"--Photos from the set of Shutter Island, a thriller on tap from Paramount Pictures and the director Martin Scorsese in October, show a little bit more to love." Oh, snap! Are they handing out chocolate bunnies to whoever can be the biggest bitch at the Times these days?

Cieply briefly notes that there's a gender-based double standard regarding the weight and age rules in Hollywood so far as leading players are concerned, but after dropping Kathleen Turner's name, he seems to feel that he's discharged his duty, as if the subject bored even him. He seems more taken with the idea that this is an utterly new phenomenon, but despite the historical examples he digs up, that may be a non-starter. "Photos of midcentury stars — Humphrey Bogart, James Stewart, Clark Gable and others — show them to have remained rather gaunt at an age when many of the current crop are anything but." Good thing those photos are handy, since it's not as if movie actors left behind filmed records of their performances so we'd be able to remind themselves what they looked like. That said, it seems a little callous to drag Bogart, one of the best-known victims of cancer sticks ever to go down coughing, into a discussion of how movie stars used to keep themselves svelte. (One well-circulated story has it that, when illness had left Bogie too weak to handle the stairs in his own home, he used to navigate from one floor to another by stuffing himself in the dumb waiter.) It's also worth remembering that Gable, who died of a massive heart attack after completing his last film, The Misfits, had lost 35 pounds on a crash diet to get his weight below 200 before shooting began. If there's any less of that sort of thing going on nowadays because more stars feel comfortable about appearing in public looking something other than whisper-thin, surely it's for the better.

It's also true that, as Cieply would have known if he'd put down the "photographs" and spent a couple of days watching Turner Classic Movies, there have always been counter-examples one could offer to his role call of manly waifs. Wallace Beery never looked as if he'd had trouble locating the desert cart, Spencer Tracey rolled into his onscreen middle age looking as if he'd swallowed a tether ball, James Cagney was getting pretty squared-off by the time of Yankee Doodle Dandy, Robert Mitchum often had an amorphous mass surrounding his midsection that he used to abruptly suck up into his chesticological region whenever he was required to take his shirt off, Gene Hackman's weight always flunctuated, sometimes wildly, depending on just how regular his latest "regular guy" character was supposed to be, and as for Jack Nicholson, in his mid-forties when he more or less officially entered his "middle-aged" period with Terms of Endearment--please. Of course, with movies as with everything else, memory can be a great deceiver. Lawrence Turman, "a veteran film producer who is chairman of the Peter Stark producing program at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts", told Cieply that "“John Wayne always looked a bit portly." I find it disturbing that the Peter Stark producing program at the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts can do no better for its chairman than a guy who's never seen Stagecoach. It may be a tribute to the lingering effect of the image that Wayne cast from around the mid-1950s until his death in 1979 that even some professionals think he always looked like that, but I would propose that, unlikely though it may seem, that if Wayne had looked in his youth like a guy who was fated to someday look the way he did in True Grit, he never would have gotten the chance to grow into that later incarnation--at least, not on movie screens.

This still leaves the question of whether some of these stars, heavier though they may undeniably be, are as hideous to behold as Cieply seems to be implying they are. I will confess that when I saw Travolta, say, in the trailer for Pelham, I did not catch myself thinking, "Here comes Wide Load." (I did catch myself thinking, "Get a load of Weird Hairline with his Fu Manchu mustache. Each of us has his issues.) One possibility worth considering is that such stars as Travolta, Washington, and Hanks, who came up in the 1980s, when a perfect storm of society-embraced body issues and new technology in the gym led to a new species of Americans who seemed to be armor-plated in their own skin and muscle, some of whom hastened to show off their new packaging on the covers of magazines, such as that infamous shot of Travolta on the cover of Rolling Stone to promote Stayin' Alive, looking as if his abs were about to jump out of his torso and his brains had already leaked out of his ears. Maybe, having fallen for that when you had the energy and free schedule to pursue it all the way, you have to let yourself go a little later on or else you'll explode. But then, in the interests of full disclosure, I should concede that I am from The South, where we deep fry our veggie plates and the lost causes that we love to get misty-eyed about include our own arteries in their pre-clotted state. Because of my own cultural conditioning, if I had my way, every other movie made since 1984 would have starred Joe Don Baker, and the others would have been divided between Randy Quaid and the late Dub Taylor, with the result that Michael Cieply would be even more confused.

Early April Fool’s Day? “Three Stooges” Casting Bombshell

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 21:00:00 GMT

As we posted here a while back, the Farrelly Brothers have a Three Stooges movie in the works. This is not a biopic of Moe and Curly Howard and Larry Fine, as we’ve previously seen with the 2000 TV movie starring Paul Ben-Victor, Michael Chiklis and Evan Handler, but rather a new comedy “built around the antics of the three characters that Moe Howard, Larry Fine and Howard played in the Columbia Pictures shorts.” Who will play the Stooges this time around? The answers may shock and astonish you!

According to Variety, MGM “has set Sean Penn to play Larry, and negotiations are underway with Jim Carrey to play Curly, with the actor already making plans to gain 40 pounds to approximate the physical dimensions of Jerome ‘Curly’ Howard. The studio is zeroing in on Benicio Del Toro to play Moe.”

My first thought after reading this and cleaning up the Coke Zero I spit out all over my computer monitor was that this has to be a mistake. The mistake being that someone at the Variety.com office hit a switch about a week too soon, and that this article was meant to go up on April 1st. It’s too close to such brilliant pranks as Scorsese to Direct Final Harry Potter Film to be real, right? I’m sure we can expect a retraction any minute now.

Either that, or…this is real? Sean Penn did almost display a detectable sense of humor in his Oscar acceptance speech, even if ever so briefly. So maybe…nah. Gotta be a mistake.

Yesterday's Hits: Rain Man (1988, Barry Levinson)

Paul Clark — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 19:00:00 GMT

Here’s the pitch: a young man, reeling from the death of his father, drives across country with the brother he never knew who, as it happens, is autistic. Cast one of Hollywood’s most respected actors as the autistic brother and its hottest leading man as the younger brother, and even today the pitch sounds like something straight out of high-concept hell. Yet despite its premise, which jazzed up the bankable but disreputable formula of the road movie with a mental-illness twist, Rain Man was not only the most popular movie of 1988 but also one of the most acclaimed Hollywood releases of the year, winning both the Oscar for Best Picture and the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, the only film ever to win both of these prestigious awards.

Today, Rain Man is largely remembered for its awards, for Hoffman’s performance, and the memorable lines he contributed to popular culture, including such favorites as “I’m an excellent driver.” But like many surprise hits, Rain Man was initially seen as a somewhat risky project by Hollywood. Several directors and a number of studios passed on the film before Barry Levinson and United Artists ended up making it. And while the film was in production, both of its stars had doubts about its potential. The film’s opening weekend receipts were disappointing, but soon it began to generate ecstatic word of mouth among moviegoers, eventually raking in over $170 million domestically to become the highest-grossing movie of the year.

So what was the secret to Rain Man’s success? Well, the stars didn’t hurt. By and large, major Hollywood projects were more star-driven in the eighties than they are nowadays, and Rain Man followed the popular Hollywood formula of pairing a respected veteran actor with a hot young star. And in 1988, there was no young star hotter than Tom Cruise. Still riding high from the success of Top Gun, Cruise had earlier in the year turned the cheesy bartending drama Cocktail into a sizable hit. Yet even in his younger days, he had a tendency to seek out established talent. He had followed Top Gun with The Color of Money, which paired him off with Paul Newman under the direction of Martin Scorsese, and Rain Man gave him a similar opportunity to work with Hoffman.

But while Hoffman was the one who got most of the accolades, I think that the film hinges just as much on Cruise’s performance. Don’t get me wrong- Hoffman’s certainly impressive. But due to the nature of Raymond Babbitt’s autism, Hoffman doesn’t have much of a character arc to play- he doesn’t change so much as cycle, again and again, through his daily routine. Levinson and screenwriters Ron Bass and Barry Morrow wisely avoided the temptation to soft-pedal Raymond’s autism by miraculously having him “recover”, and they’re to be commended for this. However, a movie solely about Raymond would have quickly become repetitive (think Jeanne Dielman, which actually sounds awesome so never mind), and certainly would not have been made by a Hollywood studio.

Because of this, it falls to Charlie (Cruise) to drive the story, and Cruise was more than up to the task. Charlie is a complicated character who’s often selfish and unsympathetic. Consider how greedy he can be, especially when it comes to Raymond- he steals Raymond from an institution in an attempt to procure more money from his late father’s estate, and once he discovers Raymond’s prodigious memory and gift for quickly counting large numbers of objects, Charlie decides to take Raymond to Las Vegas to score money by cheating a casino. But Cruise’s refusal to make Charlie a saint makes him all the more relatable. Sure, he can be a self-centered prick, but we also feel his pain whenever we see him dealing with Raymond. After all, keeping one’s life together (especially when the bank is breathing down your neck) is difficult enough without having to plan one’s days around someone like Raymond, for whom the need to eat one’s meals on time, watch The People’s Court, or wear the correct pair of underwear supersedes all else.

Because we see Charlie struggling with Raymond, it becomes all the more heartwarming when he finally learns to love and appreciate his older brother. In many ways, Rain Man may contain Cruise’s most undervalued performance, since not only is he upstaged by Hoffman’s showier work, but he also plays the sort of role that was often associated with him, the yuppie hotshot with an overabundance of alpha-male charm. However, to call Charlie Babbitt a stereotypical “Tom Cruise role” seems reductive, since it overlooks the nuances of the character. Then as now, Cruise was a fine actor, and one who was often doomed to being underappreciated.

Rain Man isn’t a perfect movie. Occasionally, it gets a little too plot-driven, as when Charlie and Raymond make their stop in Vegas. But at its best, it’s as good now as it ever was, due to the performances of Hoffman and Cruise and the rhythm and chemistry between them. Cruise might have joked that it was “two schmucks in a car,” but I think that’s what works about the movie- it gives these two fine actors sufficient time and space to work together without pinning them down to too much plot. And while Raymond doesn’t get better in the end, at least now he has a brother to visit him in the institution.

For better or worse, in the two decades since its release Rain Man has become the dominant pop culture image most people associate with autism. A few years ago, the Onion A.V. Club critic Noel Murray- himself the father of an autistic child- posted his thoughts on the film, filtered through his own experience. In this post (which you can read in full here), he states that although the film gets many of the details of autism right, it suffers because Raymond feels less like a character than a plot device through which Charlie can find redemption, and that the subject of autism would be better served by a movie that followed him and found drama in his routines. It’s a perfectly reasonable opinion of the film considering his circumstances, and I don’t disagree with him. As a movie about autism, Rain Man doesn’t quite cut it. But taken on its own terms, I’d say it still works pretty darn well.

The Rep Report (March 20 - March 26)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 18:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: BAM starts up its second posthumous tribute to Paul Newman that kicks off with The Long Hot Summer, the project beloved by Newman fans as the one where he and Joanne hooked up, before concentrating on the late-middle end of the actor's long career. Included: Slap Shot (1977), which features the best of his many performances for director George Roy Hill; his Oscar-winning return to the role of Fast Eddie Felsen in Martin Scorsese's The Color of Money (1986); and two films he directed, Rachel, Rachel (1968) starring Joanne Woodward, and the 1971 Ken Kesey adaptation Sometimes a Great Notion, starring Newman and Henry Fonda.

BOSTON: The Boston Underground Film Festival opened last night and runs through the 23rd. The schedule includes Bad Behavior, the latest from professional midnight-slot provocateur Frank Henenlotter (Basket Case, Frankenhooker, Brain Damage), the controversial Deadgirl, and the Von Doviak-approved The Rock-afire Explosion, and a gratifying overflow of shorts.

Screengrab's Favorite Movies About Music: Non-Fiction Edition (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 20:30:00 GMT

Nick Schager's Favorites:

NEIL YOUNG: HEART OF GOLD (2006)

Conventional wisdom be damned, Jonathan Demme’s Neil Young: Heart of Gold is superior to his celebrated Stop Making Sense, its marriage of style and substance so subtle and affecting that it stands as a pinnacle of the concert-doc form. The focus is an August 2005 Young show at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium in support of Prairie Wind, an album written while the musician was anticipating brain aneurysm surgery, and a haunting, lingering sense of mortality hangs over the proceedings, which features a setlist divided pretty evenly between old and new material. Young is in superb shape here, whether performing on stage alone or accompanied by others (a choir, Emmylou Harris). It’s Demme’s direction, however, that elevates the endeavor to borderline-greatness, his alternation between intimate close-ups and expansive shots of the stage and theater (all beautifully handled by cinematographer Ellen Kuras) reflecting a balance between pessimistic loneliness and heartening, communal optimism that’s echoed in Young’s songs, which range from selections typical (“Old Man,” the titular track) to lesser-known (“It’s a Dream”). Refusing to chop up his footage with unnecessary edits, Demme lets the man play, to the film’s – and our – immense benefit.

THE LAST WALTZ (1978)

An elegiac lament for the end of a band and a musical era, The Last Waltz has a melancholy derived from both its subject matter and from its director, Martin Scorsese, who shot this superb concert doc during the difficult production of 1977’s New York, New York. Part funeral, part celebration, Scorsese’s depiction of The Band’s 1976 farewell show at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom is an all-star affair, as the Canadian outfit – led by charismatic frontman Robbie Robertson, and delivering a wide range of selections from their catalog of Americana tunes – is joined on stage by a who’s-who of titans, including Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Neil Young, Neil Diamond, Joni Mitchell, Eric Clapton and Muddy Waters. Thanks to meticulous pre-planning, Scorsese’s live footage is aesthetically dazzling, though The Last Waltz also takes detours to studio-shot musical numbers and interviews with members of The Band, who by the time of the show had begun to drift apart thanks to a combination of road weariness and drugs, and whose worn-out commentary further suggests that the film is a snapshot of a moment in time slipping away, if not already lost forever.

METALLICA: SOME KIND OF MONSTER (2004)

Depicting Metallica as a divided, dysfunctional family, Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, about the turbulent events surrounding the writing and recording of 2003’s St. Anger, exudes real, unvarnished honesty in its portrait of a mega-band coming apart at the seams. There’s plenty of drama to fill out the 139-minute runtime, from the extracurricular artistic activities of drummer Lars Ullrich, to the alcohol-related issues of singer James Hetfield, to the group’s meetings with a therapist after bassist Jason Newsted ditches the group and the remaining three members are left to figure out what’s next – which, as it turns out, is a long, messy hiatus caused by Hetfield’s sudden decision to enter rehab. Berlinger and Sinofsky strike a suitable balance between respect for their subjects and dedication to warts-and-all authenticity, and if their doc is more rock (soap) opera than speed metal, it’s still a fascinating backstage glimpse of a supergroup attempting to manage professional success and expectations, personal demons, and interpersonal relationships strained by 20+ years of constant contact.

THE FILTH AND THE FURY (2000)

Julien Temple’s The Filth and the Fury is more than just a non-fiction biography of The Sex Pistols; it’s a striking sociological record of late-‘70s England. Temple’s aesthetic is to cut-and-paste archival footage at a breakneck pace, a strategy that’s in tune with the band’s unpolished, anarchic music and attitude as well as the era’s socio-political tumultuousness. Rarely has a documentary collage been so fierce and formally shrewd, recounting the band’s 26-month history with a dynamism that, aided by new interviews with band members (all seen in silhouettes), makes the action feel current, urgent, vital. Ostensibly Temple’s rejoinder to his own 1980 doc The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle, which told the Sex Pistols’ story from the perspective of manager Malcolm McLaren, The Filth and the Fury assumes lead provocateur Johnny Rotten’s viewpoint. It’s just as slanted a POV, to be sure, but the scruffy, skuzzy, electric energy of Temple’s direction, amplified by his sharply funny and insightful editorial juxtapositions, results in a blisteringly honest portrait.

THE DEVIL AND DANIEL JOHNSTON (2005)

The Devil and Daniel Johnston, Jeff Feurzig’s film about the troubled West Virginia singer-songwriter whose music is colored (and complicated) by mental illness, has a form modeled after that of Tarnation, its multimedia biography crafted through a combination of archival audio, video and still-photographs. The director’s clear fondness for his subject somewhat hampers his ability to fully investigate the many issues raised by Johnston’s life, most notably the question of whether Johnston’s music would be quite as celebrated were it not for the fact that Johnston is a seriously unstable individual. Still, if The Devil and Daniel Johnston doesn’t raise this relevant possibility, instead proving content to just respectfully document the man’s life and career, it benefits from having a remarkable story to tell, as Johnston’s up-and-down saga includes brushes with stardom, psychotic breakdowns, stints in psychiatric facilities, and professional conflicts. Not to mention that the musician – funny, charming, erratic, disturbed – comes across as a case study in the fine line between, if not outright intersection of, inspiration and madness.

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

Contributor: Nick Schager

Screengrab's Favorite Movies About Music: Non-Fiction Edition (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 20:00:00 GMT

A few weeks back, I claimed the period from New Year's to Oscar Night was the most wonderful time of the year for movie geeks, what with all the Best-Of Lists and awards season festivities...but for movie AND music geeks (not to mention the small but powerful barbecue geek lobby), there is no better place or time than mid-March in sunny Austin, when the South-By-Southwest Festival unleashes 1,800 bands from around the world on the capital of Texas, along with several zillion filmmakers, wannabes, hucksters, tourists, web designers, Industry sleazeballs and bloggers (including yours truly, my esteemed colleagues Scott Von Doviak, Hayden Childs, Leonard Pierce and, heck, maybe half the Nerve.com staff for all I know...see you at the Yard Dog, guys)!

Thus, in celebration of SXSW’s yearly combo of films & fretboards, your pals here at the Screengrab are launching a two-week tribute to OUR ALL-TIME FAVORITE MOVIES ABOUT MUSIC!

Andrew Osborne’s Favorites:

IMAGINE (1988)

As far as I can remember, the first pop song I ever knew by heart was “Yellow Submarine” -- well, the chorus, anyway, which my brother and me would sing endlessly to the delight (and eventually, I’m sure, to the ear-piercing annoyance of) my parents on numerous long car trips throughout the early ‘70s. So I guess that would make the Beatles my first favorite band...and brilliant, heroic, sarcastic, acerbic, mean, funny, shit-stirring, peace-loving John was always my favorite Beatle (even if he didn’t lend his voice to his cartoon incarnation in the film version of Submarine...a deeply disillusioning trivia fact I’ve been trying to erase from my brain through strategic drinking ever since I learned it). My hipster college roommate cried conspicuously on the fifth anniversary of Lennon’s death (and possibly every year since), whereas I save my tears over the Smart One’s tragically premature and sinfully meaningless demise for periodic viewings of Andrew Solt’s warts-and-all (but ultimately loving) tribute, Imagine (allegedly released in part to counteract the warts-and-nothing-else Lennon biography published by icky toad Albert Goldman the same year). Narrated by Lennon himself, the film chronicles the life and times (and music and feuds and love affairs and political activism) of its subject while evoking the spirit of the 1960s and 1970s far more effectively than a certain reverse-aging button enthusiast I could mention...I only wish Solt's documentary had a better ending.

BIG TIME (1988)

I may have started off loving the Beatles, but after that my tastes wandered from the pop and rock aisles to the musical theater section. Thankfully, my cooler friends were kind enough to broaden my horizons just in time for adolescence with an endless series of mix-tapes, bringing me up to speed on punk, New Wave and, eventually, the one-man genre known as Tom Waits. As it happened, I became a fan smack dab in the midst of Waits' Island years, when he was recording the game-changing trilogy of albums (Swordfishtrombones, Rain Dogs & Frank’s Wild Years) considered by many to be the high-water mark of the singer/songwriter/Conundrummer’s more or less consistently brilliant career...and so I was in exactly the right place at exactly the right moment to catch the Boston stop of the tour captured (or, more specifically, reimagined) in Chris Blum’s barking, bantering concert film Big Time, which depicts Waits both onstage and wandering the periphery as Frank, the mysterious, muttering song character who infamously doused his house in gasoline and torched it, then got on the Hollywood Freeway headed North (and some time later, apparently, wound up working as an usher in a creepy old vaudeville house). Unfortunately, I had to leave that long-ago Boston concert halfway through to get to a stupid play rehearsal (...stupid! ...stupid! ...stupid!), little knowing I wouldn’t get to see Waits in the flesh again for 20+ years (and counting): in the ‘90s, I kept leaving cities just before Waits’ tour arrived in them, and here in the oughts, his infrequent tour stops always seem to be far, far away. So until I finally manage to track the man down again, Big Time will have to do.

STOP MAKING SENSE (1984)

The first time Talking Heads entered my consciousness was on the soundtrack of Risky Business, growling the dirty stomp of “Swamp” over scenes of teen sex in Tom Cruise’s suburban bordello. Shortly thereafter but around the same period, I put a face to the distinctive voice...specifically David Byrne’s weird moony face projected on the side of a house and the dotted white line of a highway in the wicked pissa video for “Burning Down The House” (back when videos were wicked pissa and MTV wasn’t a 24/7 suck-fest). Then, a year later, Jonathan Demme's Stop Making Sense finally gave me a full dose of Talking Heads (thus hooking me on the band for a lot longer than the band stayed hooked on each other). I never got a chance to see David, Tina, Chris & Jerry play live -- not all at the same time, anyway -- but dancing in the aisles with dozens of fellow Head-heads during the classic concert film’s theatrical run was the next best thing...kinda like Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience without the special glasses and shitty music. Indeed, Demme makes his subjects pop off the screen without 3D technology, pyrotechnics or any of the usual rock-doc clichés: all he needed was a lamp, a big suit, a good shot list and one of the best rock bands of all time.

WOODSTOCK (1970)

In the 1971 film The Omega Man, not-quite-last-man-alive Charlton Heston spends his lonely days in a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles watching Michael Wadleigh’s super-size documentary of the mother of all concerts again and again...and, frankly, if I wind up being the sole survivor when the world ends in 2012, I’d be pretty psyched to find Woodstock in the projector of my local movie house. For one thing, it’s 184 minutes long (or roughly one hour for each of the three days of peace and music it chronicles)...and the special director’s cut released in 1994 contains an additional 40 minutes of still yet more peace, music and damn, dirty hippies. But what makes Woodstock perfect for repeat viewings is how much Wadleigh and his editors (including Martin Scorsese and BFF Thelma Schoonmaker) pack into the running time, using split-screen sensory overload to capture every conceivable angle of the epochal event, from the iconic onstage performances by Jimi, Joan, Joe, Country Joe, Richie, Arlo and the surprisingly awesome Sha Na Na (among many, many others) to the brown acid, Porta-Potty maintenance and holy-shit meltdowns of the poor bastards trying to keep the whole event from spiraling into the sort of madness and catastrophe captured by the Maysles Brothers and Charlotte Zwerin in 1970’s other notable concert documentary, Gimme Shelter, the yang to Woodstock’s yin and definitely not the sort of movie likely to cheer you up in an empty theater surrounded by killer mutants.

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

Contributor: Andrew Osborne

SXSW Preview: Ten Must-See Documentaries (Part One)

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 19:00:00 GMT

The 2009 SXSW Film Festival kicks off on Friday, so what do you say we spend the week previewing some can’t-miss attractions? We’ll start with the documentaries – five today and five tomorrow – then move on to the narrative features.

ALONG CAME KINKY…TEXAS JEWBOY FOR GOVERNOR

From singing Jewish cowboy (“Asshole from El Paso,” “Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in the Bed”) to mystery writer (A Case of Lone Star, Road Kill) to gubernatorial candidate, Kinky Friedman has done it all. Along Came Kinky chronicles Fridman’s 2006 unsuccessful run for the governorship of Texas.

(Screens March 19th at 7:30 pm, Paramount Theater)

AMERICAN PRINCE

The great lost Martin Scorsese film (note: not so lost) is American Boy, a profile of Steven Prince, who memorably played the gun salesman in Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. Thirty years later, director Tommy Pallotta catches up with Prince, now living in Austin and still graced with the gift of gab.

(Screens March 14th at 7:30 pm, March 17th at 11 am, Alamo South)

BEST WORST MOVIE

I had no idea there was any such thing as a cult of Troll 2 until a few months ago, when the Alamo Drafthouse hosted a Rolling Roadshow screening of the movie in Morgan, Utah. Who would go all the way to Utah to see Troll 2? Find out in Best Worst Movie, the behind the scenes story of what some consider to be the worst movie ever made (but which is actually #41 in our Unwatchable countdown – perfect timing!).

(Screens March 14th at 9:30 pm, Alamo South, March 16th at 4 pm, Paramount Theater, March 20th at 9:30 pm, Convention Center)

DRUNKEN ANGEL: THE LEGEND OF BLAZE FOLEY

SXSW has a long, proud tradition of musical documentaries, particularly ones about eccentric or troubled musicians (The Devil and Daniel Johnston, You’re Gonna Miss Me), and here’s the latest. “Born in a tree house, killed in a friend's living room, 86'ed from his own funeral, Blaze Foley is now a bona fide country music legend.” He’s also the subject of the Lucinda Williams song that gives this documentary its title.

(Screens March 18th at 7 pm, Convention Center)

FOR THE LOVE OF MOVIES: THE STORY OF AMERICAN FILM CRITICISM

How’s this for self-indulgence? A film critic previewing a movie about film critics made by a film critic. Gerald Peary talks to many well-known film critics, including some who are still employed, about their love of movies and the history of film criticism. Participants include Roger Ebert, Elvis Mitchell, Andrew Sarris and, for some reason, Harry Knowles.

(Screens March 16th at 8 pm, March 18th at noon, Alamo Ritz, March 21st at 4 pm, Alamo South)

Up The Academy: Screengrab Salutes The All-Time Best & Worst Best Picture Winners (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 23:00:00 GMT

THE BEST:

CASABLANCA (1943)

For all the iconic Hollywood films from The Wizard of Oz to Star Wars that DIDN’T win Best Picture, it’s nice to know that Casablanca, at least, was properly enshrined. Whether you measure by cultural cachet, quotable lines, dorm room posters or AFI ranking, Humphrey Bogart’s finest hour is a classic among classics...and not in that “eat your broccoli” grad student dissertation way, either. The pace is crisp, the intrigue is intriguing, the writing is sharp and funny and the romance (not to mention the bromance) is swoony, even for cynics who’d normally gag on a sentiment like, “We’ll always have Paris.” In fact, Roger Ebert claims in his commentary on a special edition DVD of the film that he’s never heard a bad review of Casablanca, which he says is “probably on more lists of the greatest films of all time than any other single title, including Citizen Kane,” a masterpiece which may be “greater,” but nowhere near as beloved. Normally, such unquestioned, universal adoration would trigger my contrarian side (I’m lookin’ at you, Hanks!) – but that friggin' “La Marseillaise” scene gets me every goddamn time. (Now if you’ll excuse me, I seem to have a little something in my eye...)

ALL ABOUT EVE (1950)

This inside-show-business comic melodrama isn't the greatest movie ever to be garlanded with Oscars. It probably isn't even as great as Sunset Boulevard, another inside-show-business movie that happened to be nominated for Best Picture the very same year. But it's the choicest possible example of a certain kind of entertainment that looks especially fetching come awards season, the glittering self-hating bitch-fest, with actors jumping at the chance to show what overgrown, treacherous babies actors -- other actors -- really are behind the scenes, and also with the writer-director, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, preserving some of the pearls of wit that he'd been test-screening at all the best Hollywood dinner parties for the preceding couple of years. Mankiewicz was lucky to get to assign his dialogue to a couple of the greatest bitches ever to stalk a soundstage: Bette Davis, in her archetypal role as the actress and force of nature Margot Channing, and George Sanders, who picked up a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his purring critic, Addison DeWitt. The movie even opens with an awards ceremony, which Sanders can be heard snarking at in voiceover. With that opening, Mankiewicz was making it clear to the Academy that he was setting up a joke that only they could satisfyingly complete by giving his movie the prize, and the voters were happy to comply.

ON THE WATERFRONT (1954)

On its surface, this movie about labor racketeering on the New York docks could easily be mistaken for the kind of torn-from-the-headlines melodrama that Warner Bros. used to whip up into flavorful, punchy stories in the '30s and which by the 1950s was often served up in bloated and sanctimonious form. (Directed by Elia Kazan from an original script by Budd Schulberg, the movie is also widely taken as its creators' attempt to rationalize their friendly witness status before the House Un-American Activities Committee by showing the informer as a beleaguered hero.) But the actual New York locations, the strong work by such actors as Eva Marie Saint and Rod Steiger, and the best-observed moments in Schulberg's script transcend the movie's built-in limitations. And Brando himself embodies transcendence. Working quietly at first and slowly building to a full boil, he makes Terry Malloy into a real human being even as he's defining the image of the alienated '50s hero, a working-class outsider whose anger and confusion -- the instinctive, untutored emotions of a trapped animal -- make him seem more alive than the society he can't fit into, a society that no one guessed at the time was rotting from deep inside. In addition to marking the end of Brando's professional collaboration with Kazan, it also turned out to mark the end of Brando's first phase as a culture hero: his next movie, representing the start of a long stint in the wilderness, was Desirée, in which he played Napoleon. But it was enough to live on for awhile.

THE GODFATHER (1972) & THE GODFATHER, PART II (1974)

The early seventies were such a wild time for American movies that a bloody, historically sophisticated use of a criminal family as a metaphor for the capitalist system and the corruption of the American dream served as the era's answer to Gone with the Wind. Francis Ford Coppola's masterpiece, as intelligent and emotionally complicated as any epic ever to come out of Hollywood, would stand as a high point both in the history of film and the Academy's fluctuating record of shows of good sense all by itself. It's to the Academy's considerable credit that it did the right thing when it was presented with Part II, which was not the automatic commercial blockbuster that the first film had been. It must have been an especially sweet moment for Coppola, considering that the other Best Picture nominees included not only his own The Conversation but Chinatown, which was the first film independently produced by Robert Evans after Evans left Paramount Pictures, where he and Coppola had a difficult time working together on the first Godfather. Plus he beat The Towering Inferno!

THE DEPARTED (2006)

Yes, we can all agree that it's a sham of a mockery of a travesty that Martin Scorsese never won an Oscar until 2007, and it makes no sense at all that The Departed is the only movie he directed to ever win Best Picture. Let's get past that, can we? Consider the competition this spectacularly entertaining Boston crime epic faced in the category: Babel, Letters from Iwo Jima, Little Miss Sunshine and The Queen. Not really a group with a lot of staying power. If I came across any of them while channel surfing tonight, I doubt I'd pause, but The Departed sucks me in every time. William Monahan's underrated script is an endlessly quotable encyclopedia of pungent tough-guy banter. Alec Baldwin and Mark Wahlberg in particular make the most of it, and although Jack Nicholson doesn't make the most convincing Boston mob boss, even he has his inspired moments. Scorsese isn't reinventing the wheel here, he's just showing all his imitators who have been trying to recreate Goodfellas for the past two decades how to really put on a show. There's an exhilarating pace and crackling energy to his relentless storytelling here, no matter that we've seen the story before (in Infernal Affairs, the Japanese thriller upon which The Departed is based) and that it may not actually make a lick of sense. I may be an apologist for late-period Scorsese (I think I love Gangs of New York even more), but even if you're not a Departed fan, who could begrudge one of our greatest living filmmakers (and one of the world's most enthusiastic movie fans) his moment in the Oscar spotlight?

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent & Scott Von Doviak

SXSW Lineup Announced

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 19:45:00 GMT

I don’t know if the groundhog saw his shadow or not, but either way it’s six weeks until the happiest time of the year, SXSW. The full film festival lineup has been announced, and highlights include:

American Prince – Remember Martin Scorsese’s documentary American Boy? No? Well, surely you remember the guy who sells Travis Bickle his guns in Taxi Driver. That’s Steven Prince, who director Tommy Pallotta catches up with in this new documentary. (I must admit, this is a brilliant way to ensure Martin Scorsese watches your movie. I’d follow up on his other documentary subjects, Charles and Catherine Scorsese, but sadly they’re no longer with us.)

Best Worst Movie – “When an Italian filmmaker, an Alabama dentist and fledgling Utah actors filmed the low-budget horror movie, Troll 2, they'd no idea that twenty years later they would be celebrated for making the worst movie ever made.” Troll 2 is coming soon to Unwatchable, so I’ll be the judge of that.

Beeswax – Last year’s Baghead was the first mumblecore horror movie, and this appears to be the first mumblecore legal thriller. Andrew Bujalski (Funny Ha Ha) writes and directs.

Winnebago Man – A movie about this guy:

For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism – A documentary about film critics? Brilliant! I predict this will get no bad reviews.

Check out the full roster here.

Morning Deal Report: Scorsese and Day-Lewis Reunite

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 16:20:00 GMT

Blart has fallen. The Liam Neeson thriller Taken topped the box office with $24.6 million, knocking everyone’s favorite mall cop to the runner-up spot with $14 million. The Uninvited debuted in third place with $10.5 million, with Hotel for Dogs and Gran Torino rounding out the top five.

Martin Scorsese is lining up his third collaboration with Daniel Day-Lewis. Based on a novel by Shusaku Endo, Silence “is set in the 17th century as two Jesuit priests face violence and persecution when they travel to Japan to locate their mentor and to spread the gospel of Christianity,” Variety reports. Benicio Del Toro and Gael Garcia Bernal are also in negotiations to co-star.

Mickey Rouke, who seems determined never to be out of work again, is in talks to star in the gangster movie Broken Horses for Indian writer-director Vidhu Vinod Chopra. “Co-produced by Mumbai-based Reliance Big Pictures, Horses, which plans to shoot in New Mexico and New York, is part of a multipicture deal between Chopra and the Indian studio,” per The Hollywood Reporter.

Related:
Scorsese and De Niro Heard You Paint Houses
Mickey Rourke's Whiplash

Morning Deal Report: Polanski and Belushi, Together at Last

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 15:30:00 GMT

Apparently some sort of awards nominations were announced this morning. I think you can find the details elsewhere at the Screengrab.

Scorsese and De Niro. Hitchcock and Stewart. Polanski and…Belushi? JIM Belushi? Yes, it’s true, according to The Hollywood Reporter: "Tom Wilkinson and Jim Belushi have joined the cast of Roman Polanski's The Ghost, which begins filming in Berlin on Feb. 4. The movie stars Pierce Brosnan as a former British prime minister and Ewan McGregor as his ghostwriter.”

Marc Webb (500 Days of Summer) will direct “The Spectacular Now, a coming-of-age dramedy based on Tim Tharp's book,” per Variety. "It's somewhere between Sideways, Catcher in the Rye and Ferris Bueller's Day Off," said producer Tom McNulty. Well, that narrows it down.

Mark Ruffalo’s directorial debut, Sympathy for Delicious, is back on track following the shooting death of Ruffalo’s brother. “The story, written by Christopher Thornton, follows a paralyzed DJ, struggling to survive on the streets of L.A., who turns to faith healing and mysteriously develops the ability to cure the sick -- although not himself. The DJ then decides to cash in on his gift in exchange for his rock 'n' roll dreams,” per THR.

Related:
Roman Polanski Sees a Ghost
Movies We Missed: My Life Without Me (2003)

Screengrab Presents: Cinema’s Greatest Comebacks (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 21:30:00 GMT

PAM GRIER in JACKIE BROWN (1997)

I suppose this one doesn’t entirely count as a comeback, since the former blaxploitation star of urban classics like Coffy and Foxy Brown has yet to land another starring role as meaty as Jackie Brown, the drug-mule stewardess who outsmarts both her murderous boss (Samuel Jackson) and the feds on her tail before riding off into the sunset with a suitcase of cash in Quentin Tarantino’s underrated adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s Rum Punch. Then again, hardly any actresses (especially those of, ahem, a certain age) get to star in major motion pictures as realistically smart, complex, vulnerable women like Jackie, who succeed not with machine guns or sex (although there’s plenty of that simmering just under the surface in Grier’s palpable chemistry with Robert Forster, as bail bondsman Max Cherry, Jackie’s reluctant partner in crime -- one of the great screen couples of all time), but rather through believably human ingenuity and courage. Yet, at the very least, Grier finally earned some overdue respect as an actress from those who’d previously looked down on her B-movie roots, and though she didn’t win an Oscar for her Oscar-worthy career best performance, she at least caught a second wind in her career as a character actress, with relatively high-profile gigs like Jane Campion's Holy Smoke and The L Word...though, come to think of it, maybe it's time for yet another Pam Grier comeback so those of us without Showtime can maybe see her a little more often.

ROBERT ALTMAN, THE PLAYER (1992)

The rise and fall and rise of Robert Altman is well-known to movie geeks, but no list of great cinematic comebacks would be complete without a nod to the director who rose to prominence during the anything goes, lunatics-running-the-asylum ‘70s era of American filmmaking, when Uncle Bob churned out a head-spinning number of modern day classics like M*A*S*H and Nashville before biting the Hollywood hand that fed him one too many times and getting banished to the wilderness, only to raise his career from the dead once again by chomping down even harder on that very same Hollywood hand. After foolishly viewing film as a creative means of expression (rather than the branding mechanism and product placement delivery system we now know it to be), Altman was kicked to the curb by the powers-that-be once the Suits reasserted corporate control of the studios in the early eighties. Not only was Altman an idealistic pothead who wouldn’t know a high-concept Eddie Murphy vehicle if it bit him in the ass, but he was OLD, a condition the New Hollywood power elite feared might be contagious. Yet even in exile, Altman found a way to keep on keepin' on: he was an early adapter of cheap, indie video technology, which he used to keep his director-fu sharp with adaptations of stage plays like Secret Honor and prescient experiments like the political fictumentary Tanner ’88, all of which helped him to eventually reboot his career thanks to an independent film about Hollywood full of cameos by old friends and (at least according to Wikipedia) unpaid stars who just happened to show up at the L.A. locations where Altman was shooting and agreed to improvise some lines. The Player, a critical and financial success, was nominated for an “all-is-forgiven” Oscar that gave Altman the clout to work fairly steadily for the remainder of his life, generating both hits (Short Cuts, Gosford Park) and misses (Prêt-à-Porter, Kansas City)...any one of which remains far more interesting and unique today than all the Transformers in Toy Town.

DANIEL DAY-LEWIS in GANGS OF NEW YORK (2002)

In the late eighties and throughout the nineties, Daniel Day-Lewis developed a reputation as one of the world's finest and most versatile actors, due in no small part to the exhaustive amount of work he put into his characterizations. Eventually, the work began to take its toll, and following 1997's The Boxer, Day-Lewis took an extended sabbatical from acting. After five years pursuing various interests (like spending time with his family, not to mention those strange rumors about an apprenticeship with an Italian cobbler) Day-Lewis was finally lured back into the business by his onetime collaborator, Martin Scorsese. Once on board, Day-Lewis threw himself completely into the role of Bill "The Butcher" Cutting as he had with his other great performances, going so far as to speak in the character's voice even when he wasn't on the set. The result was a Day-Lewis performance completely unlike any he'd given before, making Bill a ferocious villain who rules the city by virtue of being the most ruthless monster to prowl the streets. Yet what makes the performance truly scary is his unpredictability, whether he's menacing his former lover with a set of throwing knives ("whoopsie-daisy!"), tap-tap-tapping a dagger against his glass eye, or standing over the body of a man he's just killed with a look-at-what-I-just-did smirk on his face. Day-Lewis has often spoken about how each performance makes him feel uneasy about whether he'll ever act again, and with such single-minded devotion to his craft it's little wonder that he feels that way. Yet it's also this devotion, coupled with Day-Lewis' genius, that makes each of his performances feel like a gift, and we undoubtedly have Scorsese to thank for making his subsequent performances -- including his towering turn as Daniel "Draaaaaaaaaaaaaaainage!" Plainview- possible. And you say his next movie is a musical? We can't wait.

ALEC BALDWIN in THE COOLER (2003)

When Alec Baldwin turned up in a supporting role in the 2003 Mike Myers vehicle The Cat in the Hat, reviewer David Edelstein wrote that, "The movie's grim subtext is the wreck of Baldwin's career — how puffy he looks, and how he never manages to rise above his material." One week later, The Cooler opened, and Baldwin was on his way to Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations for his smooth, multilayered performance as a Las Vegas casino operator who, to his surprise and despair, discovers that he does actually have a heart. Baldwin had always been something of an odd man out among Hollywood A-listers, a classic example of a character actor in a leading man's body: he seemed a little dull trying to play the action hero (The Hunt for Red October, The Shadow) or lover boy (Prelude to a Kiss) but seemed happily liberated whenever he got a crack at playing psychos (Miami Blues, The Juror) or scumbags (State and Main). His role in The Cooler was a personal breakthrough because it gave him the chance to play a scumbag (with psycho tendencies) who had the depth to find himself conflicted, and also to show off both his comic and dramatic chops to a new degree, leading indirectly to his full-blown career renaissance on TV's 30 Rock.

MARTIN LANDAU in TUCKER: THE MAN AND HIS DREAM (1988)

Landau, whose attention-getting performance as the assistant baddie in North by Northwest was followed by several seasons as the master of disguise on TV's Mission: Impossible, never flew as high in his early movie career as some of the names on this list, but he managed to fall farther than just about any of the others anyway. After leaving Mission: Impossible in a contract dispute and taking his wife and co-star Barbara Bain with him, Landau spent fifteen or so years adrift in horror and sci-fi pictures barely worthy of the name, as well as such august TV productions as The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan's Island and The Return of the Six Million Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman. Somehow, Coppola decided to throw him a lifeline when he was casting his long-deferred dream project about the car designer Preston Tucker, and Landau's performance -- a shaft of cranky warmth cutting like a light saber through a hollow movie, coming from an actor with a semi-familiar name but with a face so changed since the last time most viewers had seen him that he was all but unrecognizable -- is the only thing fondly remembered from that picture. Landau got an Oscar nomination and a leading role in Woody Allen's 1989 Crimes and Misdemeanors. He eventually did win an Oscar, for playing the washed-up, half-crazed Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood (1994). Speaking about that performance later, he was quick to give credit to his own years in the show business wilderness; they'd given him a pretty good idea of what Lugosi had gone through.

Click Here For Part One, Three, Four & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Paul Clark, Phil Nugent

Screengrab Salutes: The Top Biopics of All Time! (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 22:00:00 GMT

FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS (1998)

Biopics have always blurred the line between fact and legend, a stylistic practice that both fueled and destroyed the career of Hunter S. Thompson, who (at his best) went beyond the bounds of traditional journalism by injecting himself into the stories he covered, amplifying the reality of his subject matter through wild exaggeration. But, as a certain lame duck American president can certainly attest, “truthiness” is a slippery slope, and Thompson eventually began to confuse himself with his journalistic doppleganger, Raoul Duke, the drug-addled party monster at the heart of Terry Gilliam’s psychedelic adaptation of the college dorm room staple once considered unfilmable. While a “straight” biopic of the actual events of Thompson’s life would be fascinating (as long as Art Linson, director of the tedious Bill Murray fiasco Where the Buffalo Roam, had nothing to do with it), Gilliam instead captured the legend of Thompson/Duke and his infamous 1971 road trip to Sin City with his “attorney,” Dr. Gonzo (a funhouse mirror fictionalization of the Mexican-American political activist Oscar Zeta Acosta). Critics loathed the over-the-top depiction of Thompson’s hallucinated wonderland, yet despite an excess of shrieking in Benicio del Toro’s headache-inducing performance as Gonzo, Johnny Depp admirably captures both the real Thompson and his alter ego in an underrated performance. Plus, the movie’s a flat-out hoot: after howling through a near empty screening with fellow Screengrabber Scott Von Doviak, another audience member who’d ignored all the scathing reviews approached us to hazard the minority opinion, “Yeah! It was funny...right?”

RAGING BULL (1980)

Directors who specialized in noir – drawn as they were to doomed heroes and disorienting levels of moral ambiguity – loved to make films about boxers. Carnal, visceral creatures, they seemed particularly drawn to the sort of manipulative femme fatales the genre celebrated, and they played to the notion of destiny’s brute: they were men, after all, whose primary form of human communication was savage physical violence. Martin Scorsese, who brought the dynamic emotional energy of the ’70s and the gorgeous visual iconography and crushing sense of guilt and shame of Catholicism to the noir framework, clearly felt the same way, so it’s no coincidence that one of his greatest films is a breathtaking refinement of the old-school pug-centered crime drama. What makes Raging Bull such a shocker, then, is that it’s a true story: Jake LaMotta’s meteoric rise, brutal determination, mercurial mood swings, and destructive relationships with his wife, his family, and his God seem like the stuff of lurid, overblown pulp drama. Given the material they had to work with, it’s no wonder Scorsese and his collaborators created such a stunning, immediate film. While much is made of the admittedly astonishing physical transformation made by Robert DeNiro as his LaMotta slid from lean, hungry contender to fat, washed-up ex-champ, his emotional and psychological transformation is just as incredible, as the cocky, unstoppable self-confidence of the young man inexorably decays into the pitiful, indulgent self-loathing of age.

MISHIMA: A LIFE IN FOUR CHAPTERS (1985)

Paul Schrader wrote the screenplay to Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull, which may have served as a sort of apprenticeship for his directing, four years later, the moving screen biography of Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima. Not only did he borrow heavily from Scorsese’s visual handiwork (notice the overhead camera angles, and the visual tonality that mixes elegiac near-silences with scenes of fiery violence), but he chose as his subject a public figure who shared more in common with Jake LaMotta than either of them would have cared to admit. Like LaMotta, Mishima’s story was so bizarre as to seem like the stuff of fiction: a weak young man who transformed himself through sheer willpower into a physically perfect bodybuilder; a barely closeted homosexual with poetic inclinations who married one of his country’s most famous female beauties and preached a gospel of rabid militarism; and a famous celebrity, considered the greatest writer of his generation, who ended his life in the most base possible manner, staging a would-be fascist revolution that ended with him clumsily committing suicide as the soldiers he hoped to inspire laughed at his grand ideals. Deftly blending intense psychological moments from Mishima’s life with gorgeous evocations of some of the most famous scenes in his fiction, Schrader creates a biopic that shows how much he learned from Scorsese – and how much he brought to the table himself.

THE ELEPHANT MAN (1980)

There were a million ways The Elephant Man could have gone wrong. (It’s easy to see how, in the innumerable one-joke parodies of it that sprang up in its wake.) A film about John Merrick, the terribly deformed Victorian-era man whose intelligence and perception transformed the lives of many who met him, could have been overly mawkish if taken too far in one direction, or grotesque and exploitative if taken too far in the other. Mel Brooks, who financed the film, knew this, and his first and best decision was to keep his name out of the production, realizing that audiences and critics would expect the film to be a joke if they thought it was coming from him. He took a major risk in hiring David Lynch to helm The Elephant Man, especially given Lynch’s penchant for unnerving surrealism, but Lynch was the best possible choice, and hit the necessary tone just right: he let Merrick’s appearance speak for itself, trusting John Hurt to communicate the agony of his mere existence as well as the man’s essential dignity. Lynch made the right decision to transfer his sense of the absurd and the bizarre onto Merrick’s surroundings, presenting us with a view of Victorian London as unsettling and alien as that of the world of Eraserhead, while putting Merrick in the position not of a monster, but of a man who did his best to be human in a world that would not allow him that role. The collaboration was so successful it’s a shame that the project Brooks next intended to do with Lynch – a surreal nightmare biography of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels set entirely inside the subject’s head - never got off the ground.

SAMURAI I: MUSASHI MIYAMOTO (1954)

When the historical figure you’re portraying in your biopic is less a human being than a character straight out of legend, you’ve got a lot of leeway in how you can portray him. There have been dozens of films in which legendary swordsman and duelist Miyamoto Musashi is the central figure, but the best of them all is director Hiroshi Inagaki’s Samurai trilogy. Though they’re best viewed as a whole, the first of the three movies is probably the strongest installment, telling the story of the epic figure from his humble beginnings to his utter transformation in the crucible of an unimaginably bloody battle. What Inagaki does right, and what distinguishes Musashi Miyamoto from the innumerable other films about the characters, is to strike a powerfully clear balance between historical storytelling and epic filmmaking; he is able, through solid storytelling and some highly inventive composition, to convey the sense that he is allowing us a glimpse of a real human figure who came from a particular time and place and ended up the way he did for discernable reasons, but he never lets go of the sweep and tension that remind us we’re watching a movie about a hero who is as much demigod as man. Of course, much of the credit must go to Toshirô Mifune, who gives the first of many towering performances in the lead role, yet Inagaki – rarely thought of as one of the first-rank Japanese directors of his day – does a fine job of sustaining the mood, tone, pace and look (abetted by some terrific EastmanColor cinematography by Jun Yasumoto) that distinguishes the whole trilogy. It’s as close to a definitive biopic as one can hope for when dealing with a legend.

Click Here For Part One, Part Two, Part Four, Part Five & Part Six

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce

OST: "Stop Making Sense"

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 22:30:00 GMT

There's one great problem with making a concert film: if the audience doesn't respond positively to the music, no amount of great filmmaking is going to save it. Documentaries about bands are one thing; if there's a good story to tell, an audience might just forgive the band in the spotlight for making music they dont' particularly care for. But in a concert film, with very little to contemplate but the action on stage, if the moviegoers aren't compelled by the music that's being made, that's pretty much all she wrote. With some concert films, such as Woodstock, there's enough historical portent to the whole affair that it gets carried along; that film also had the benefit of multiple bands to take the pressure off. With other films, such as the Maysles Brothers' Gimme Shelter, there's the power of a compelling story to alleviate the fact that you might not especially dig the Rolling Stones at their stage in their career: what was going on all around them was more than enough to compensate for any distaste you might have for the music coming out of the speakers. With Jonathan Demme's beautiful, moving, nearly perfect 1984 concert film Stop Making Sense, though, Demme was taking a huge risk: he presented no story, no history, no audience, no variance, no nothing: just the pure experience of watching the Talking Heads play.

It could have been a disaster. Although they were one of the most successful of the bands to come out of the New York punk scene (they even raised the money to shoot the film themselves), Talking Heads were, then as now, not to everyone's taste. Their nervy, edgy blend of no wave, funk, and ice-cold electronic pop turned off a lot of people, as did lead singer David Byrne's otherworldly geekiness, which made him come across as even more alien than David Bowie, but with none of Bowie's cool. And although the band, touring behind their then-new album Speaking in Tongues, went on to have a number of high-profile hits, at the time it was a big risk, both for them and for their record label, to sink so much money and time into a full-length concert documentary with no guaranteed audience. But it wasn't a disaster: Stop Making Sense was, and is, quite simply the greatest concert film ever made, the purest and simplest evocation imaginable of the sheer joy of watching a band at the top of their game play an amazing show in a live setting. It's that rare exception to the rule: even those who weren't particular fans of the Talking Heads found themselves instantly swept away by the sheer charisma and intensity of the performers. The movie that Jonathan Demme made at such risk became the gold standard to which all concert films are held.

How did he do it? Partly through redefining the rules of concert films, and partly through sheer technical innovation. The movie is structually brilliant, most notably in the device of having David Byrne come out alone for the first track and having him joined on each subsequent number by another band member until the whole outfit is powerfully lockstepped on stage. Demme also uses an all-digital soundtrack -- unheard of at the time -- and a number of innovative lighting techniques to showcase the band and fulfill Byrne's request that the standard array of colored lights not be used. Finally, he wisely chooses to show the audience as little as possible and reduce the crowd noise on the skillfully mixed soundtrack; this replicates to an uncanny degree the experience of actually being at a show, and the movie's choice of long shots over quick takes emulates the visual experience of live music for most people. But, of course, he couldn't have done it without the cooperation of a band at the peak of their powers; Byrne worked with him all the way, and Talking Heads were at their creative peak and their chops had been honed by constant touring. They even tossed in a few ringers -- especially Parliament/Funkadelic sidement Bernie Worrell and Steve Scales -- to fill out the sound. Byrne provided the movie with its visual hook by donning a Joseph-Beuys-influenced white suit about five sizes too big, and the band plays as if there's nothing in the whole wide world they'd rather be doing. It all adds up to a singularly transcendent experience, almost entirely without peer in the history of musical cinema.

BEST TRACKS: There simply isn't a bad track here, and whether you pick up the original or the expanded version of the soundtrack to Stop Making Sense, you're going to get an album full of winners. Even divorced from the wonderful visuals, this is one of the finest live music documents you can buy, and it's crammed with great songs from beginning to end. To name three favorites, though, I'd mention the opening rendition of "Psycho Killer" with Byrne, alone on an acoustic guitar, accompanied by an off-state Roland 808 synthesizer which he cleverly disguises as a battery-operated boom box; an edgy, high-energy rendition of "Girlfriend is Better" which lends the film its name; and the glorious version of "Once in a Lifetime" which may be the single greatest bit of concert footage ever recorded on film.

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OST: "Rushmore"

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 21:45:00 GMT

Wes Anderson, whatever his other faults as a filmmaker -- and I, for one, would argue that they're plentiful -- has developed a justified reputation as a consummate crafter of motion picture soundtracks. Unlike other directors who simply leave it to the judgment of whoever's writing the score to make sure sound and vision are properly attuned, with a complementary mood and tone, Anderson personally supervises the selection of the music that goes into his films, painstakingly matching existing songs and original scoring to make sure every scene is perfectly matched, that viewers not only see what he wants them to see, but hears what he wants them to hear. This gift of blending original music, extant pop music artifacts, and film is one that he shares with a handful of other directors of a distinctly post-modernist bent: Jim Jarmusch, Quentin Tarantino, and the grandaddy of them all, Martin Scorsese. All four men have a positive passion for blending rock, pop and other musical forms into a lively mix and then folding them delicately into their movies. Tarantino, the consummate pastiche artist, may be the most adept at this form of cinematic mix-tape, but Wes Anderson may be the most inspired, and both musically and cinematically, Rushmore is his masterpiece.

For a movie as distinctly modern as Rushmore is, it has a curiously archaic quality. The music borrowed from other sources is intensely retro; the finished product sounds like a mix CD put together by a quirkily aggressive friend who's obsessed with the music of the British invasion. And while that might seem pretty odd for a movie about a kid who came of age in the late 1990s, it's less odd than it might seem once you've seen Rushmore: Max Fisher is undoubtedly one of those insufferable kids who's utterly scornful of any band containing people close to him in age, and ostentatiously listens only to music that was composed before the invention of the cassette tape. In the album's liner notes, Anderson claims that he originally wanted the soundtrack to contain nothing more than Kinks songs, but a combination of legal issues and the pleading of his collaborators made him change his mind. It's probably for the best -- such an extravagant gesture would be too relentlessly outre, more in keeping with Anderson's later, crazily idiosyncratic work than Rushmore, a movie that keeps a relatable and recognizable human heart beating beneath its ironic hipster exterior. And while Quentin Tarantino might have cast Bill Murray as some sort of flamboyant bit of revivalism, Anderson, here, does it because Murray is the only actor who can deliver the blend of sly, wicked humor and melacholy that is reflected in the soundtrack.

Of course, Wes Anderson did more in putting the music of Rushmore together than comb through a couple of late-'60s Britpop anthologies. The music he selects ranges from smash hits to rarities obscure enough to stun newcomers and surprise experts. Beyond that, he does break up the monotony of endless pop snippets by allowing the wise presence of a score -- and a score composed by another '70s throwback element, Devo frontman Mark Mothersbaugh. There are bits and pieces of Mothersbaugh's original music -- mostly burbling, optimistic electronic pieces of the sort that used to show up on bachelor-pad hi-fi samplers in the sixties -- on the Rushmore soundtrack, and they're both brief enough to not be intrusive and skillful enough to not be superfluous. An entire album of them would be pretty intolerable, but used like this -- as leavening for the pop gems that surround them -- they show that Anderson still has confidence in traditional film-music usages, but is clever enough to give them ann interesting twist. Since the making of Rushmore, Anderson's films have gotten more abstract, more arcane, more personal in a way that is almost inaccessible and alienating, and while they still feature some gems (like Seu Jorge's terrific Bowie covers in The Life Aquatic), he's never topped the cinematic and musical magic he displays here.

BEST TRACKS: Aside from a flat track or two and some inessential incidental music from Mark Mothersbaugh, there's hardly a dud in this whole stack. "Making Time" is an absolutely crushing track from the forgotten Creation, a Who knockoff so skillful it could have slipped onto The Who Sell Out without anyone noticing; and the Who themselves are well-represented by one of the slicker, cleaner versions in existence of their charming mini-rock opera, "A Quick One (While He's Away)". Although only one Kinks song remains on the soundtrack, it's an absolute killer -- the quiet, sweetly sinister "Nothin' in the World Can Stop Me Worryin' 'Bout That Girl" -- and two of Cat Stevens' best tunes, "Here Comes My Baby" and "The Wind", make an appearance before the whole thing winds down with the Faces' flawless "Ooh La La".

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Morning Deal Report: Scorsese and De Niro Heard You Paint Houses

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 15:15:00 GMT

Now that we’ve all finally recovered from the awesome reunion between Robert De Niro and Al Pacino in Righteous Kill (“He squints! He yells! Together they solve crimes!”), word comes down that De Niro and Martin Scorsese are teaming up for – are you sitting down? – a mob movie! Steve Zaillian will adapt I Heard You Paint Houses, the story of hitman Frank "the Irishman" Sheeran. “Pic’s title refers to mob slang for contract killings, and the resulting blood splatter on walls and floors,” Variety helpfully clarifies. “Book was written by Charles Brandt, who befriended Sheeran shortly before the latter’s death in 2003. Among the crimes Sheeran confessed to Brandt, according to the 2004 book, was the killing and dismemberment of Hoffa, carried out on orders from mob boss Russell Bufalino.” Yes, that would be Jimmy Hoffa. Call me a sucker, but I actually have some hope for this one.

What is the complete opposite of a Scorsese/De Niro mob movie? It’s a hard question to answer scientifically, but I’m going to have to go with a Yogi Bear and Boo Boo feature film. Yes, “Warner Bros. is taking a trip to Jellystone Park,” according to The Hollywood Reporter. Surf’s Up director Ash Brannon is attached, and the movie will combine live-action with CG animation. I was always more of a Huckleberry Hound man myself.

Elsewhere in animation – or stop-motion claymation, to be specific – Philip Seymour Hoffman will lend his pipes to Mary and Max. “Pic looks at the unlikely pen-pal friendship between Mary, a chubby lonely 8-year-old girl in Melbourne, Australia, and Max, a 44-year-old, severely obese, Jewish man with Asperger's Syndrome living in New York,” per Variety. There is no truth to the rumors that Hoffman has gained 200 pounds for the role.

Related:
Pacino and De Niro Punch the Clock
Scorsese to Direct Final Harry Potter Film

The Rep Report (September 12--19)

Phil Nugent — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 15:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: If you've ever wondered why Robert Downey, Jr. keeps that "junior" in his name, it's because, once upon a time, when Downey was starting out in the mid-1980s, it still seemed prudent to make it easier for casting directors to figure out that he was not his own father, a man who until recently did not have to be advertised as "Robert Downey, Sr." In the 1960s, Downey the Elder made a string of low-budget satirical comedies, notably Babo 73 (1964), which starred underground cinema mainstay Taylor Mead and 1965's Chafed Elbows, arguably the first "underground" to receive a significant measure of commercial and critical success. Though he had an almost-mainstream hit with 1969's Putney Swope, he pretty much dropped off the radar after 1972's Greaser's Palace. (In between, he made the 1970 Pound, which is set in one, and which features Robert Downey the Younger's film debut. He played a puppy.) But while most of his later feature-film work made it to home video in the 1980s--even Up the Academy, the infamous (and disowned) attempt to start a Mad magazine movie franchise to compete with the National Lampoon--those early-'60s films just dropped off the face of the Earth, and were generally assumed to have been lost.. Now Anthology Film Archives is bringing them back for a week's run. Bruce Bennett at New York Sun has the story of how Martin Scorsese's Film Foundation got on board with the project of restoring Downey's early work. It is reported that Downey, upon learning that Martin Scorsese agreed that it was worth putting up the "small fortune" necessary to restore these films because of their cultural significance, had a quick answer: "Has he seen them?"

Film Forum, in association with the BFI, commences a two-week tribute to David Lean on Friday. Yeah, Lawrence of Arabia and the other late epics are made for the big screen, but for some of us, the really choice news here is that many of Lean's finely crafted, early entertainments are brought together, many in handsome new prints. The program kicks off perfectly with the Dickens-adaptation double feature: Great Expectations, a rousing entertainment that famously inaugurated Lean's lifelong partnership with Alec Guinness (seen here in the role of Herbert Pocket), and Oliver Twist, in which Guinness actually caused the movie some problem with Jewish groups for his alarmingly faithful embodiment of Dickens's Fagin. There's also the chance to see Charles Laughton tear it up with a splendidly undomesticated performance in the domestic comedy Hobson's Choice, Noel Coward perfect the stiff upper lip in the wartime propaganda film In Which We Serve, and Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard take out a patent on the masochistic romantic agony of shared self-denial in Brief Encounter. A word to the wise: if it's epic you're after, take a pass on the latest drive to "re-evaluate" Lean's misbegotten 1970 waste of time Ryan's Daughter and, instead, check out his last film, the sumptuous, brilliantly acted 1984 version of E. M. Forster's A Passage to India.

LOS ANGELES: The 12th Annual Latino International Film Festival, one of the pre-eminent opportunities for Latino filmmakers to show their work to audiences in the U.S., runs September 12 through the 19th. The 132-film program ranges from the popular and timely Colombian drama Paraiso Travel to music documentary profiles of Celia Cruz and Israel "Cachao" Lopez.

OST: "Psycho"

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 20:30:00 GMT

Bernard Herrmann was one of the most legendary film composers of all time. One of his first major compositions was the score to The Devil and Daniel Webster, in which he showed both his innovative approach and his playfully subversive nature by by double-tracking a violin to play a jaw-droppingly complex rendition of "Pop Goes the Weasel", and then claiming the solo was the work of a teenaged violin prodigy he'd discovered. He composed a number of memorable movie scores over the years, from the towering, epic sweep of Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (his very first project) to the moody, dark tension of Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (his very last). But it is with Alfred Hitchcock's name that Herrmann's will be foreever linked.

Hitchcock knew he was playing with dynamite when he made Psycho. The movie that buried noir and ushered in the age of the maniacal slasher was a risky venture for him on many levels: with its shocking violence, infamous mid-film twist, and horror plot, it was a massive deviation from the big-budget hit mysteries that had made so much money for his studio bosses in the late 1950s. Fearing disaster, Hitch -- who was nothing if not determined -- tried as much as possible to make the film on the cheap, and he wasn't afraid to capitalize on personal relationships to do so. Some stories have it that he strong-armed Herrmann, who had turned in incredibly monumental work for him before on such movies as The Man Who Knew Too Much, North by Northwest, and Vertigo; but Herrmann wasn't one to be cowed so easily. He agreed to work on the soundtrack for Psycho at less than his normal pay, but Herrmann -- a rarity amongst film composers insofar as he retained near-total creative control over the final product of his labors -- made it clear he was going to do things his way. Most famously, he ignored Hitchcock's foremost prerogative when writing the score: the director insisted that, for maximum shock value, there be total silence on the soundtrack during the murders, most especially the infamous shower scene.

Luckily for generations of moviegoers, Bernard Herrmann chose to completely disregard this directive, and, when Hitchcock raised a stink, Herrmann insisted that he view the scene with the music he'd written intact. If Hitchcock didn't agree that the music improved the scene instead of distracting from it, then he'd relent. Hitchcock agreed, and, as has been every one of the tens of millions who have seen Psycho since then, he was blown away by how perfect was the juxtaposition of music and visuals. Since then, it's become one of the true classics in the history of movie scoring; Herrmann's brilliant decision to use only the string section of his orchestra for the music, with the only low-end being provided by bass and cello, was inspired and set the standard for high-pitched, shrieking instrumentation as the default for horror films. It also spawned hosts of imitators and 'tributes' over the years (and none proved more determined than Brian De Palma, who, mirroring his own obsession with Hitchcock, used subtle variants of the music in both Carrie and Dressed to Kill). Very few soundtracks in motion picture history so reflect the personality of their creator than does Bernard Herrmann's work -- unnerving, brilliant, raw, and determined -- than does Psycho.

BEST TRACKS: It's impossible to even discuss Psycho -- the movie or the soundtrack -- without discussing the music from the notorious shower scene. (It's called "The Murder", by the way.) As other critics have mentioned, it's almost unfair to call it a piece of music; it's just the sound made by every string section in every orchestra in the world as they warm up. And yet by placing it in context, Herrmann transforms this ordinary sound into one of the most chilling pieces of music in history, and sets the tone for hundreds, maybe thousands, of future citematic murders. Not bad for a piece of music that's barely a minute long; and it's even more astonishing when you consider that, on an album of dozens of short pieces, it virtually defines the score's less-is-more aesthetic by being one of the longer pieces on the album! Still, this wouldn't be one of the greatest film scores of all time if it was simply one minute-long piece of genius; there's much more to love here, including the memorable title track ("Prelude", in which eerie swirls of strings leap and tangle with one another over the unforgettable Saul Bass title sequence), which is so well-loved that Stuart Gordon lifted it wholesale for the opening to Re-Animator. Other strong tracks include the tragic, melancholy "The Body"; the creepy, tense "Cabin 10", and the wailing, cacaphonous avant-gardeism of "The Cellar". A must-have score from a movie where almost all participants were at the tops of their games.

Vanishing Act: Monte Hellman

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Hellman! His is one of the great “What if?” stories in American cinema. As in, “What if someone had given the poor guy some money to make a few movies over the past 40 years or so?” The beginning of Hellman’s career bears a close resemblance to that of many heavy-hitters from his generation, including Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese and Jonathan Demme. That is, he got his filmmaking education on the cheap from Roger Corman, churning out quickies like Beast from Haunted Cave and Flight to Fury. Once Hellman had put in enough hours in the basement, Corman teamed him with fellow stalwart Jack Nicholson for a pair of offbeat westerns, The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind. Hellman’s breakthrough and downfall arrived simultaneously with 1971’s Two-Lane Blacktop, declared “The Movie of the Year” by Esquire and then released to general indifference.

Had the movie caught on with the youth culture in the same way Easy Rider did, Hellman’s subsequent filmography might have been a treasure trove, but instead it’s more of a trivia quiz. There’s Shatter, a 1974 Hong Kong action picture Hellman departed after three weeks of shooting; China 9, Liberty 37, a Spaghetti western in which Warren Oates and Sam Peckinpah appear in support of the immortal Fabio Testi; The Greatest and Avalanche Express, both of which Hellman took over after the original directors died; Iguana, a seafaring tale of a disfigured sailor that never received a theatrical release; and Cockfighter, the only one of the bunch that lives up to the promise of the early westerns and Blacktop – and even that one had its original theatrical release sabotaged when Corman recut it to add more action.

By 1989, it was as if Hellman had come full circle to his disreputable early days with Corman, as he helmed the horror sequel Silent Night, Deadly Night III: Better Watch Out! His best shot at a comeback arrived in the form of Quentin Tarantino, who approached Hellman to direct his script Reservoir Dogs. Of course, Tarantino eventually decided to direct it himself, leaving Hellman with only an Executive Producer credit. That led to pretty much nothing.

So where is Hellman now? He’s got a teaching gig at CalArts, helping to educate future filmmakers who may someday hire him and then decide to direct themselves, leaving him only with an Executive Producer credit. He was heavily involved with Criterion’s superb 2-disc DVD release of Two-Lane Blacktop, which includes commentary tracks, a documentary field trip to some of the film’s locations as well as an uneasy conversation between Hellman and Blacktop star James Taylor, who has never seen the film. And after seventeen years, he finally returned to the director’s chair for a segment of the horror anthology Trapped Ashes.

Having recently watched Ashes, just out on DVD, I can attest that Hellman’s segment, “Stanley’s Girlfriend,” is worth a look. Although it’s never explicitly stated, the Stanley of the title is clearly Kubrick, and Hellman has fun with what we know of the legend, weaving the 2001 filmmaker’s love of photography and chess into a supernatural explanation for his permanent exile from the United States. “Stanley’s Girlfriend” isn’t much more than a doodle, but it’s easily the standout in a movie that includes a cautionary plastic surgery tale about vampiric breast implants. See for yourself:

Previously on Vanishing Act:
Christopher McQuarrie
Savage Steve Holland

Morning Deal Report: George Clooney’s Challenge

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 14:30:00 GMT

The Cloon is getting political again. According to Variety, George Clooney “has bought the rights to Jonathan Mahler's legal thriller The Challenge, about the long campaign waged by U.S. Navy lawyer Charles Swift and Georgetown law professor Neal Katyal to ensure a fair trial for Salim Hamdan, the bodyguard and driver of Osama bin Laden.” Presumably Clooney will play the lawyer and not the driver.

Conan (the Barbarian, not the O’Brien) dons his loincloth again for Lionsgate. Dirk Blackman and Howard McCain, who have written an Amazon warrior vehicle for Scarlett Johansson, will pen the return of Robert E. Howard’s creation. (Presumably the governor of California is unavailable to reprise his role.) The Hollywood Reporter quotes producer Fredrik Malmberg as saying “We all want this movie to go into production as soon as possible,” so you know quality is priority number one.

Willem Dafoe is a versatile fellow, isn’t he? He played Jesus in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, and now he’s set to star in Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist. It doesn’t sound like he’s necessarily taking on the title role, however. Variety describes it as a “psychological thriller that evolves into a horror film,” in which “Dafoe and [Charlotte] Gainsbourg will play a couple who retreat to an isolated cabin in the woods following the death of their child.” That Von Trier, he’s a million laughs.

Related:
George Clooney Leans In and Other Insights
Face/Off: "Breaking the Waves"

Dennis Lim Hammers Out the Evolution of the Fight Scene

Phil Nugent — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Set off in part by the arguments over The Dark Knight's action scenes--widely held to be "visually incoherent" even by many of the film's admirers--Dennis Lim has assembled a thoughtful and compelling "slide show" charting the evolution of the movie fight scene. Classic action directors such as Don Siegel and Samuel Fuller used action and space to give their fights a kinetic punch that made audiences sit up and forget to blink, but in recent years directors have come to rely more and more on technological pizzazz to put the viewer in the position of someone right in the action (as in Scorsese's Raging Bull) or to violate the laws of gravity, more purposefully in The Matrix. At their peak, the Wachowskis were able to use stage violent ballets and dissect them even as they unfolded, but more hackish and hollow-headed directors have helped rob movie action of its soul by making scenes that feel so unreal that there's nothing at stake even when they're readable. Still, you do occasionally see something like what Lim calls the "show-stopping corridor fight in Korean director Park Chanwook's Oldboy," adding, "to watch this after trying to figure out what's happening between Batman and the Joker is something like going back to Astaire and Rogers after watching Renee Zellwegger and Richard Gere in Chicago. Fight scenes play on the spectator's dual need for illusion and authenticity. And precisely for that reason, great fight scenes, like Park's one-take wonder, tend to be at once believable and beyond belief. The choreography is intricate and meticulous enough to be convincing, but the scene also calls attention to its artificiality, with sly allusions to the side-scrolling vantage of beat-'em-up video games and the blatant proscenium framing. (To shoot from this "impossible" angle literally required the demolition of the fourth wall.)"

DVD Digest for July 29, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 14:00:00 GMT

As we get ready to tear into the dog days of summer, this week brings a number of great new DVDs to help you beat the heat.

DVDs of the Week: In a banner week for culty fare, I would like to spotlight two especially noteworthy new DVD releases. First is the long-awaited release of Alex Proyas’ director’s cut of Dark City (Warner, also Blu-Ray). A flop on its original release, Dark City has in the intervening years become something of a cult film, its critical reputation salvaged in part by the ongoing support of Roger Ebert, who memorably chose it as his #1 film of 1998. With this director’s cut, Proyas has added more than ten minutes of footage to an already compelling original, in addition to making other noticeable changes (not least, dropping the introductory voiceover that was present in the theatrical cut). In addition to the original disc’s commentaries by the filmmakers and Ebert, the new edition includes two new featurettes, a review of the film by Neil Gaiman, and a number of other features. Most double-dips and “director’s cuts” are largely marketing department bluster, but Dark City should prove to be worth the upgrade.

My other pick this week is Peter Watkins’ Privilege (New Yorker), a movie which as some of you might recall I loved so much I kind of want to marry it. At the time I originally saw the film, I had no inkling that it would be released on DVD, as for years it had been unavailable in any home-viewing format, and was only available to theatrical venues in a single print. So if you’ve been waiting eagerly to see Privilege- and Lord knows you should have been- your day has finally arrived. New Yorker’s DVD is light on special features, but you know what? It doesn’t matter. That it’s available is cause enough for celebration, and should lead to the film becoming the cult classic it so richly deserves to be.

Other classics coming this week to DVD include the Tyrone Power Matinee Idol Collection (Fox, includes 10 feature films) and WarGames: 25th Anniversary Edition (MGM).

As for recent releases, you know it’s a good week when the release of a Martin Scorsese film on DVD isn’t the biggest story. Nevertheless, it’s still nice to have Scorsese’s Stones doc Shine a Light (Paramount, also Blu-Ray) available, even if it can’t match the spectacle of seeing the film in IMAX. Other recent releases coming to DVD include: the stoner sequel Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay (New Line, also Blu-Ray); Owen Wilson in Drillbit Taylor (Universal, also Blu-Ray); the famously Oscar-snubbed Israeli crowdpleaser The Band’s Visit (Sony); Doug Pray’s documentary Surfwise (Magnolia); the year’s non-Mamet MMA drama Never Back Down (Summit); the postapocalyptic actioner Doomsday (Universal, also Blu-Ray). Also, three direct-to-DVD sequels: Lost Boys: The Tribe (Warner, also Blu-Ray), WarGames: The Dead Code (MGM), and Stargate: Continuum (MGM, also Blu-Ray).

This week’s TV on DVD releases include: Centennial: The Complete Series (Universal); Law & Order: Special Victims Unit Season 7 (Universal); and Witchblade: The Complete Series (Warner). This week also brings the release of Masters of Horror Season 2 (Anchor Bay), and while many of the installments are of dubious quality, at least the box set can boast this week’s coolest packaging.

Finally, Blu-Ray only releases this week include the Paramount’s Jack Ryan tetralogy of The Hunt for Red October, Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger, and The Sum of All Fears. Also of note: Beowulf: The Director’s Cut (Paramount); Top Gun (Paramount); The Lost Boys (Warner); and Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle (New Line).

In Other Blogs: 2008 Halftime Reports

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Your favorite Screengrab writers have chimed in with their favorites (or least favorites, as the case may be) from the first half of 2008, but it may not completely shock you to learn that we are not the only bloggers to do so. Over at Cinematical, Jeffrey M. Anderson explains why. “Here's one of my dirty little secrets: I love lists and I keep track of my year's ten best movies all year long. Most other critics hastily assemble their lists at the last second, which is partly why so many December movies dominate; critics can't remember what they've seen earlier in the year. My list shows that 2008 has had a pretty poor first half, but I do have some contenders for listhood. Two movies are currently competing for the top spot, though I need to see them both again to be sure. Hou Hsiao-hsien's Flight of the Red Balloon (6 screens) is one; it has a lovely, laid-back, observant quality and feels less severe than some of Hou's other recent films. But I haven't yet decided if the film is a comedy or a tragedy.”

Also at Cinematical, Scott Weinberg presents a month-by-month breakdown of his year at the movies. As always, January is the cruelest month. “Not many choices, really, but I'm an enthusiastic supporter of both Cloverfield and Teeth. I also enjoyed Cassandra's Dream a bit more than most folks seem to, but it's hardly among Woody Allen's best movies. Beyond that, January was as lame as ever. (Thanks for nothing: One Missed Call, First Sunday, Mad Money, Rambo, Untraceable, and the execrable Meet the Spartans.)”

A site that’s new to us, Gone Elsewhere, weighs in with an overlooked choice. “The best new release I’ve seen thus far is Jeff Nichols’ Shotgun Stories. The film stars Michael Shannon as the oldest of three adult brothers whose father abandoned them years ago and began a new family, with four sons. The two sets of half-brothers grew up as bitter rivals, and emotions come to a head after the father dies. Shannon may be the most creepily intense actor in movies today; see William Friedkin’s Bug if you don’t believe me. Among the more interesting insights the film has to offer is that most of the characters seem to know full well that their actions are irrational and unproductive, but their hatred is self-sustaining and out of their control.”

At Scanners, Jim Emerson writes about the ever-changing crimson shades of cinematic blood. “Before the late '70s, blood was generally (and, remember, these are generalizations -- there are certainly exceptions) bright red and opaque, like nail polish or latex paint. It was often compared to ketchup, which in many cases it was. Since then, our taste for blood runs darker, anywhere from ruby red to almost black…My favorite movie-blood story belongs to Martin Scorsese. The way he tells it, the MPAA freaked when they saw the bloodbath in Taxi Driver (1976) and was ready to slap it with an X rating for violence. They suggested he tone it down -- as in, tone down the red -- in order to get an R. So, Scorsese put the scene through some kind of chem wash or something that made the blood more brownish. In his view, it made the scene more sickening and disturbing, but he got his R rating.”

And finally, our List-o-Mania selection this week comes from Spoutblog, which brings us 5 Actors Who Shouldn’t Be Famous. I’m not entirely certain Josh Hartnett even qualifies as famous, but the most controversial choice is Jon Voight. Granted, the included clip of Karate Dog is a powerful indictment.

Related:
2008: Second Quarter Wrap-Up
Half Measures: Leonard Pierce's Favorites of the First Half of '08
Half Measures: Paul Clark's Favorites of the First Half of '08

Half Measures: Leonard Pierce's Favorites of the First Half of '08

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Hey, all the cool kids are doing it. With Andrew Osborne posting his favorite films of the first six months of 2008 last week, and Paul Clark doing the same only yesterday, who am I to drop the ball? This list, already heavily revised just since last week thanks to some illuminating July 4th viewing, will no doubt undergo serious revision before anything on it makes it to a Best of 2008 list; living in a city where first-run movies are hard to come by unless they're American and released by a mainstream production company, I've come to reply quite heavly on home video releases, film festivals, and other avenues of distribution that make assessments of this sort quite difficult so early in the year. That said, here's what's flicked my switches so far in a year that follows one of the best in recent memory.

My top five:

1. WALL*E - They say that the studio system is dead, and that the releasing company no longer tells you anything about the quality of the film. That's true to an extent, but Pixar is a glorious exception to the rule. The computer animation studio has hardly released a single film during its entire existence, and their latest, concerning a robot whose job is to clean up the detritus of a dead world, has raised the wrath of conservatives while managing to be perhaps the greatest movie Pixar has yet made. Especially daring because it largely abandons the clever dialogue of previous releases, it instead gives the eyes a feast like they've never seen before throughout its long periods of silence. An astonishingly successful film with heart, spirit and intelligence, proving that great art can be commercial. Or vice versa.

2. Shine A Light - Is it a testament to Martin Scorsese's skill as a filmmaker, or the Rolling Stones' skill as musicians and personalities, that his documentary about them has proven to be one of my favorite movies of the year, despite the fact that I long ago lost interest in them as a band, and wouldn't go see them in concert if you paid me? Perhaps that's not so surprising -- Scorsese, after all, has been following and filming the band for decades, and much of the appeal of Shine a Light comes from the effortless way he edits together his own footage of the Stones and old archival material taken by himself and others. To top it all off, he blends this compelling historical material with a contemporary performance so overwhelming that it almost convinces a skeptic like me that the Rolling Stones are still a band that matters.

3. Iron Man - As a lifetime comic book nerd, I had to sit through decades of neglect, followed by decades of failure, for Hollywood to start getting superhero movies right. While I've always been partial to DC comics, Marvel was the first to get it right, with the two initial X-Men movies; then, with the first two Spider-Man films, I was able to relax and say, finally, somebody gets it. With this year's release of Iron Man, Marvel -- now producing their own product with the Marvel Films studio -- continues to get it right: it's a near-perfect superhero film by a director (Jon Favreau) who clearly adores his source material but knows what to jettison to make it work on screen. Add tons of humor, exhilarating action scenes, and an incredibly charismatic lead performance by Robert Downey Jr., and you have one of the best movies of the year.

4. Assassination of a High School President - Yes, one of my favorite movies of 2008 has Mischa Barton in it. Believe me, I'm as surprised as you are. Not yet in wide release, this clever satire, disguised as a teen comedy, Brett Simon's clever, twisting neo-noir travels some of the same paths as obvious predecessors like Brick, Election and Rushmore, but does so with an intricate and well-carried-out plot and an overall thematic twist that's a lot more cutting than it appears to be on the surface. Not a perfect film by any means, Assassination's reach exceeds its grasp, and it has some clunky tonal problems throughout. But a game cast, some terrific dialogue, and a funny, confident presentation does a lot to compensate for its flaws, making it one of the better festival finds of 2008.

5. Bigger, Stronger, Faster*- I've probably seen more documentaries this year than I have narrative feature films, and one of the standouts, both in terms of subject and execution, is Chris Bell's Bigger, Stronger, Faster* (asterisk in the original). Bell, a former steroid user himself and one of a family of three brothers, all of whom are juicers, has made a movie where the real villain isn't the concrete thing of steroids (which, in fact, are shown, if not as beneficial, at least as not nearly as harmful as TV 'experts' and their drummed-up hysteria would have us believe), but the abstraction of a country that will forgive anything if it ends in victory. Filled with images both inspiring and grotesque, it does what good documentaries do: presents us with the situation and lets us decide what it means and what to make of it.

RUNNER-UP: The surprisingly great first two-thirds of The Strangers.

MADE IN 2007, BUT NOW PLAYING: My Winnipeg; The Band's Visit; and, especially, Paranoid Park.

EW Makes Great-Movies List; Screengrab Points, Laughs

Paul Clark — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 19:00:00 GMT

With last week blessedly free of celebrities getting knocked up and/or being caught without underwear, Entertainment Weekly has seized upon this fallow period in entertainment news to unveil yet another list for your perusal. In this week’s double issue, EW’s writing staff unveiled their lists of “The New Classics” in a number of media, including their top 100 movies of the last quarter century. There were a few pleasant surprises- like #4 pick Blue Velvet making its second prominent appearance on a high-profile list in less than a week (after the latest AFI special)- and you can't really argue with Pulp Fiction at #1, but many of the choices left something to be desired. Put it another way- if you know both jack and shit about cinema, EW’s list is bound to feel pretty unsatisfactory, with a whopping six foreign-language films and two documentaries out of 100.

Of course, the makers of such lists are always prone to stating that their goal is to “stir up debate.” So in the proud Screengrab tradition of speaking truth (or at least strongly-worded fibs) to power, I’d like to go on record to state that a number of masterpieces of the past 25 years were ignominiously robbed in order to make way for the likes of Pretty Woman. On top of that, a few of the movies that made the list were so unceremoniously- and undeservingly- buried near the bottom that their inclusion is arguably even more of a disgrace when you consider the titles that outrank them. In keeping with EW’s format, I’ve kept the artsy-fartsy to a minimum- no shorts, no avant-garde, no mentions of Peter Watkins. Instead I’ve selected five pretty accessible movies (including a foreign-language pick) and one classic that deserved far better than EW wanted to give it.

But first, a note to EW’s webmaster: your online feature on the 26 greatest movie posters doesn’t want to scroll over to the poster for The Limey. Please fix this immediately. Thank you.

Now, my alternate selections, in no particular order:

The New World- to my eyes, the finest American film of the last 25 years. Should have qualified just by being one of the most beautiful films ever made, but there’s more to Terence Malick’s masterpiece than gorgeous cinematography and panoramic shots of nature. Malick’s re-creation of the founding of Virginia and the resulting “settlement” of the land is always completely convincing, transporting the viewer into the lifestyle (and mindsets) of the time in a way few period pieces can manage. But it’s also a heartrending love story of a particularly mature kind, as Pocahontas (the glowing Q’Orianka Kilcher) must learn to let go of her childish love in order to find sustainable happiness with another. The New World is a marvel, and I expect that we’ll be seeing it on plenty of lists in the decades to come.

Naked- Now, I can kind of understand leaving Malick off your list, since the guy’s only made two movies during the eligible period. But what’s your excuse when it comes to Mike Leigh? Even the Academy has caught on to Leigh’s greatness- witness the bevy of nominations for Secrets and Lies, Topsy-Turvy and Vera Drake- but for my money his best work to date is still Naked. Of course, it’s something of a bitter pill to swallow, with an almost painfully bleak view of human nature. And in the middle of it all is David Thewlis, giving one of the all-time great performances, as the compulsively verbal misanthrope Johnny, the kind of bastard whose sole redeeming virtue is that he knows exactly how much of a bastard he is. Thewlis owns the film, creating from the ground up a character so fascinating that we can’t help but watch him, mouth often agape, up through the film’s magnificent final shot.

Heavenly Creatures- Hey EW, you know that Peter Jackson guy? The one whose most famous films you’ve placed prominently at #2? Well, he did make movies before Lord of the Rings, and in its way Heavenly Creatures is just as good if not better. Beginning with a true-crime story that would in other hands have lent itself to sensationalism- teenage lesbian murderers!- Jackson instead crafted in alternately invigorating and harrowing movies about the seductiveness, and the dangers, of fantasy. As Pauline and Juliet (Melanie Lynskey and Kate Winslet, in their breakthrough roles) grow ever more attached to their King-Arthur-meets-Ayn-Rand fairy tale land, they increasingly feel compelled to defend it against the encroachment of the everyday world, until the story commences in a sudden, shocking act of violence that sends these killer angels crashing back to Earth forever.

Once Upon a Time in America- Once again, Sergio Leone’s final masterwork is the odd man out among gangster dramas, with the EW writers forwarding the unfortunate notion that the genre began with The Godfather and ended with GoodFellas, with a brief stopover in Scarface Land. Leone’s film may not have the iconic status of Coppola, the seductiveness of Scorsese, or the gangsta cachet of DePalma, but as a cinematic achievement, it deserves respect, at least in its 227-minute long version. As a minor-key elegy for a crime culture that has long since passed, Once Upon a Time in America mops the floor with The Godfather, Part III, with as many classic moments as any film in Leone’s oeuvre. You’ll never look at a garbage truck the same way again.

Three Colors Trilogy- I debated including Decalogue on this list but decided against it because it premiered on television. But I had no such problem with Kieslowski’s trilogy, a wholly unique- yet entirely approachable- grand work in three parts. In telling three intimate stories, Kieslowski manages to capture a specific end-of-the-millennium worldview, as well as some surprising insights into human nature in general. But the film’s true power comes from their simplicity- Kieslowski tells us everything we need to know about these people and their lives, if only we know where (and how) to look. Beyond that, they’re just ravishing cinema, with the scores of Zbigniew Preisner ranking among the greatest ever written for the screen.

And finally…

Back to the Future- #91? Really? Working from perhaps the tightest and cleverest screenplay ever made into a Hollywood blockbuster, Robert Zemeckis and company turned what was essentially a comedic take on Americana into a genuine piece of Americana itself. How many movies of the past quarter century are this widely seen, or so beloved by all sectors of the moviegoing audience? Back to the Future is a textbook case of all the pieces lining up just so, as well as a testament to how wonderful a big-budget movie when the filmmakers trust their assembled elements enough to stay out of their own damn way. But hey, if you guys really think Shrek, Gladiator, Speed, Fatal Attraction, Scream, Beverly Hills Cop, Dirty Dancing (?!?!?), Out of Africa, and Napoleon Dynamite are all better than Back to the Future, I guess I don’t have anything left to say to you.