The Screengrab : metropolitan

Dear Santa: Cinematic Comebacks We'd Most Like To See (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 16:00:00 GMT

WHIT STILLMAN (& CHRIS EIGEMAN)

Like caviar or triple-malt scotch, the films of Whit Stillman are rarified, WASPy treats best savored while the rest of the world noshes on Big Macs and beer. Around the time Richard Linklater was eavesdropping on his beloved Austin eccentrics in Slacker and Kevin Smith was chronicling the lives of hyper-articulate, dirty-minded New Jersey wage slaves in Clerks, Stillman’s indie debut, Metropolitan, focused on yet another chatty, self-contained subculture: the privileged debutantes and awkward urban haute bourgeoisie of the Upper East Side twentysomething social circuit. Dry, sardonic Chris Eigeman and nervous, schleppy Taylor Nichols were Metropolitan’s standouts, and Stillman wisely paired the sweet-and-sour comic duo as brothers in his follow-up, Barcelona, a witty, extremely low-concept picaresque about boorish Americans abroad in 1980s Spain. Eigeman also starred in The Last Days of Disco, the final installment of the director’s overeducated white people trilogy (and also his last film to date). For reasons I’ve never entirely understood, given its thematic and tonal similarity to its predecessors, Disco (which also features Chloe Sevigny, Kate Beckinsale and Robert Sean Leonard) was considered a disappointment by most fans and critics (if not by Stillman himself, who enjoyed the tale of bed and club-hopping yuppies enough to retell the story again a few years later as a fake roman-a-clef in the voice of one of the film’s characters). Sadly, Stillman’s vision was too wordy, insular and quirky even for art house audiences, making it impossible in recent years for him to finance subsequent projects, the worst result of which (to my way of thinking) is the resultant lack of good roles for the hilarious (and criminally underused) Eigeman. Yet the Internet Movie Database says that Stillman is currently adapting Christopher Buckley’s novel Little Green Men, and though no cast is listed yet, with luck maybe it’s a good sign that Eigeman (recently Spirit Award-nominated for his directorial debut, Turn the River) will someday appear in front of the camera again and not just behind it.

BROOKE ADAMS

In the late '70s and early '80s, Adams' dark-haired beauty, sense of fun, and tantalizing hint of neurosis (in such films as Days of Heaven, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Tell Me a Riddle, The Dead Zone, and Almost You) made her the thinking horndog's indie movie star of choice, but then she drifted out of sight. She only turned up in movies a couple of times during the '90s, most notably in Alison Anders's 1992 Gas Food Lodging. That same year, she married Tony Shalhoub, with whom she had a daughter the next year. In 2002, she had her only big movie role of recent years in Made-Up, a charming but barely seen comedy that Shalhoub co-starred in and directed, from a script by her sister, Lynne Adams. About the only other way to have gazed on her in recent years would be to monitor Shalhoub's TV series; she's made guest appearances on both Wings and Monk. So long as they're happy, I'm happy. I miss her, though.

MARE WINNINGHAM

In 1985, Winningham co-starred in the prototypical Brat Pack movie St. Elmo's Fire, when she was 26. Dramatically, she was at a disadvantage for being cast as the least emotional, mildest mannered of the seven lead characters, though she also had an edge in that she was the only one of the movie's stars, besides Ally Sheedy, who could act a lick. (At the time, anyway: Rob Lowe had his moments fifteen years later on The West Wing.) Winningham has the kind of virtues that can easily be cast as negatives, but she's such a capable, talented actress that her honesty and decency can seem radiant and illuminating rather than starchy and prim; to fully appreciate her, check out the 1995 Georgia, where her superb performance as a hard-working, mess-cleaning musician can be viewed aside Jennifer Jason Leigh's gruesomely self-immolating, exhibitionistic display as her self-immolating sister. The worst thing that could ever be said of Winningham is that her honorable acting style has sometimes failed to make the dull, underwritten roles she's been stuck with seem livelier than they are, but anyone who saw her as the unconventional love of Anthony Edwards' life in Miracle Mile (1989) or the blubbering girlfriend who's quick to dump the jobless Timothy Hutton in Made in Heaven (1987) knows that her gifts include a wild streak. As she enters her middle years -- she turns fifty next year -- it sure would be something to get to see the nice girl be given the chance to cut the hell loose.

PAMELA REED

It's easy to imagine aspiring directors in Hollywood being sent forth into the valley armed with one basic, flawless piece of no-brainer advice: if you have a scene that you want the audience to stay awake for, stick Pamela Reed onscreen. Since 1980, her first year in movies, inviting David Carradine and Sonny Landham to have a knife fight for her honor (Carradine: "What does the winner get?" Reed: "Nothin' you ain't both already had.") in The Long Riders and presenting Paul La Mat with a marriage proposal that should have come with a free toaster in Melvin and Howard, she's been practically storming off the screen and slapping the cell phones out of people's hands. Why has this woman never been offered the chance to carry a movie? Is it thought that a woman with her energy and internal strength would alienate audiences if they had to put up with her for more than a few scenes at a time? Sure, that makes sense: it's not as if Bette Davis had a career. But I don't mean to suggest that we shouldn't be grateful for what we get of her, especially given that she's spent most of the past decade hanging around TV sets. This did give her the chance to revive one of her greatest roles, the fully caffeinated political campaign manager T. J. Cavanaugh of Robert Alman's Tanner '88 and its 2004 sequel Tanner on Tanner. On the other hand, that Jericho thing didn't do anybody any good. She belongs on the big screen, where she can take on dragons big enough to make it seem like a fair fight (as does her co-star from Tanner and The Right Stuff, Veronica Cartwright, and Amy Madigan, another actress who doesn't need to chug kerosene before she arrives on the set to breathe fire).

PIPER PERABO

Can it really be called a comeback if a star never quite hit it big in the first place? Consider the sad case of Piper Perabo. In 2000, she was being called Hollywood's It Girl, with two high-profile projects on the horizon. Unfortunately for her, those projects were The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Coyote Ugly. The former was a notorious stinker in which Perabo's performance got lost amid the second-rate animation and hammy turns from Robert DeNiro and Rene Russo. The latter was a modest success, but one that had less to do with its nominal lead than audiences flocking to see scantily-clad dancing female bartenders. Having gained no momentum whatsoever from her alleged star-making vehicles, Perabo's career quickly hit the skids, with the actress appearing in a string of lame-brained thrillers and forgettable comedies, with the occasional supporting role in the Steve Martin-headed Cheaper By the Dozen franchise. Eight years after being declared the Next Big Thing, Perabo was last seen playing second banana to a cast of talking Chihuahuas. Frankly, that's a shame, because despite the disappointing trajectory of her career, Perabo remains a vibrant, fetching actress with an infectious smile and a surprisingly soulful side. Just look at her brief appearance in Christopher Nolan's The Prestige -- as Hugh Jackman's ill-fated lover, Perabo brings more genuine spark and feeling to her role than her more tabloid-friendly costar Scarlett Johansson could hope to muster. Even better is 2001's Lost and Delirious, a mostly forgotten Canadian film about teenage sexuality in an ivy-covered boarding school. Perabo steals the show as Paulie, a rebellious young woman nursing a hopeless love for her reluctant classmate. It's a performance that's so white-hot with intensity and charged with eroticism that she eventually becomes more than the film can really take. So why exactly was she last seen in a movie that called for her to bark into a telephone? Your guess is as good as ours.

Click Here For Part One, Three & Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Paul Clark

In Other Blogs: Ernest Borgnine Masturbates a Lot

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

I trust we have your attention now? Or at least we’ll have it once you finish vomiting into your wastebasket. Here’s the set-up: 91-year-old Ernest Borgnine appeared on some repulsive Fox News talk show and was asked for the secret of his eternal youth – or if not his eternal youth, at least his continued not-dying. Borgnine leaned over and whispered (on-mike) in the host’s ear, “I masturbate a lot.” I think this is a pretty funny thing for a nonagenarian to say on TV, but Jeffrey Wells at Hollywood Elsewhere doesn’t seem to be amused. “This is a sad occasion for anyone who's ever savored Ernest Borgnine's performance as Fatso Judson in From Here to Eternity or Ragnar in The Vikings. With one remark, a respected actor has tainted his reputation for all eternity. I'll never be able to watch The Wild Bunch ever again with the same attitude I had before seeing this clip. I'm half-serious.”

Glenn Kenny at Some Came Running feels that “half-serious” is still way too serious. “I only wish I'd had the balls to have pulled something like that one of the handful of times I was compelled to interact with the sterling personalities on Fox and Friends…I spent a lot of time with Mr. Borgnine on the set of Baseketball a few years back. A real pistol, he was. Just think—he had been married to Ethel Freaking Merman. Which kinds of begs the question of just what it is he masturbates to. Jeffrey Wells seems to have taken this very hard. Or maybe I should say badly…Yeah, Borgnine's irrevocably tainted because he made a vulgar crack on a Fox News program. Okay, if you say so.”

Once you’ve finished scrubbing out your brain with bleach, cleanse your palate by heading over to Beyond the Multiplex for an interview with the lovely Ludivine Sagnier, now starring in A Girl Cut in Two, but forever memorable for “her oft-topless ingénue role opposite Charlotte Rampling in François Ozon's erotic thriller Swimming Pool.” Of her sadly nudity-free new film, Sagnier says, “When we were shooting it, Claude Chabrol would say, ‘It's my first porn movie.’ I would say, ‘Come on, Claude, don't say that. We don't have one scene of nudity.’ He'd say, ‘We don't need that,’ you know, with a smirk on his face. ‘The obscenity is in the head of the audience.’ That's what he liked about this story, to suggest everything.”

Spoutblog has an interview with Whit Stillman – not because he has anything new out, but because you can now watch Metropolitan at Hulu.com. Stillman does claim that those projects I told you about in Vanishing Act are imminent. “My feeling about the independent business is, for one thing, it’s cyclical. And we’re at the low end of the cycle, but I think it’ll go back up. And I think it’s actually very good to launch a project at the low end of the cycle, if you can launch it. And I think that, often, when things are bad, the way I like to look at it to make it seem better is that bad situations are just business opportunities. And there’s just a huge opportunity now to make good independent films and have them successfully released, ultimately, because there’s no easy money now, and everyone, I think, is going to be in a much tighter, more serious game. And I think that the person or the company that steps up to finance our film is going to do very well with it.” Pass the hat, people!

And in List-o-Mania this week, here’s a new blog to us, Topless Robot, with the 10 Most Blatant Star Wars Rip-offs. Oddly the list doesn’t include The Clone Wars, the biggest rip-off of all, but it does stir some nostalgia for crappy 70s and 80s sci-fi. “Galaxina seems to have had a decent budget for alien costumes and special effects, if not for its screenplay (the freighter spaceship is called the Infinity, the buffoonish captain is named Cornelius Butt, suspended animation jokes abound). But hell, no one came to see a flick starring a Playmate for political intrigue or a character study. Teenagers still stricken with their first Princess Leia boners came for Stratten’s come-hither innuendo, gratuitous cleavage shots, and maybe, just maybe, a bit of side-boob. If this trailer’s any indication, most of the male cast thankfully spent the duration of the flick on ice.”

Independent Film Festival of Boston Review: Turn the River

Andrew Osborne — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Gambling movies, like submarine movies, generally don’t have too many variables. At some point in just about every sub movie, the submarine gets torpedoed and/or sinks to “crush depth,” and the captain and crew either get killed or, more often, survive. Likewise, in cards and billiards movies (not to mention sports films in general, of which gambling flicks are a boozier subset), the plot typically comes down to: in the big, climactic competition, does your rooting interest win or lose? And in most stories, the outcome, while faux suspenseful, is usually pretty easy to predict.

So it’s one of the strengths of indie staple Chris Eigeman’s writing and directing debut Turn the River, about Famke Janssen’s desperate, homeless, pool-hustling card sharp, that not only is the outcome of her particular “big game,” when it comes, anything but a foregone conclusion, but also that her ultimate success or failure in the contest is only one element in a suspenseful skein of fateful plot developments.

Eigeman, best known for mordant, fast-talking characters in films like Kicking & Screaming, Mr. Jealousy, the short-lived West Coast Seinfeld knock-off It’s Like, You Know and the Whit Stillman trilogy (Metropolitan, Barcelona & The Last Days of Disco), does a good job capturing both the quiet hostility of upper class dysfunction and the bare-knuckle grit of back-room cash games in this tightly-controlled, low-budget indie about a mother (Janssen) struggling to raise the money necessary to kidnap her son (Jaymie Dornan) over the border to Canada, away from his abusive yuppie father (Matt Ross, the scary polygamist Alby on Big Love).

Janssen goes “all in” (get it?) with her portrayal of the mother, Kailey, an older, sadder variant of the shady poker pro she portrayed in Rounders. Despite stringy hair and a drab wardrobe, the actress’ supermodel looks clash a bit with River's seedy milieu, but the character’s she-wolf intensity is nevertheless compelling.

According to Eigman, his star went to billiards boot camp before shooting began, and managed to nail one crucial, difficult bank shot in the movie on her very first try (scoring a nice payday for some lucky P.A. in the on-set betting pool who correctly predicted she’d manage the feat in one take). Janssen’s unfaked ease with a cue stick lends credence to the storyline, as does her palpable chemistry with Dornan, utterly believable as a smart, resourceful kid with none of the usual cloying Hollywood precociousness.

The rest of the supporting cast is equally fine: Ross is a hissable but multi-faceted villain, Lois Smith is a hoot as a bitch-on-wheels matriarch, John Juback is a formidable pool-hall adversary and Terry Kinney steals his scenes as a sweet, street-smart black marketeer. And for those disheartened by Rip Torn’s recent frail, half-speed performances on 30 Rock, his turn here as Janssen’s grizzly mentor, Quinn, is a gruff, vigorous return to form.

Vanishing Act: Whit Stillman

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Whit Stillman was never what you’d call a prolific filmmaker, but this is getting ridiculous. Stillman was something of a late bloomer in the first place; he started work on the Barcelona screenplay in the early 80s while working as a foreign sales agent in Spain, then set it aside when he returned to New York to run an illustration agency. He then spent four years working on the script for Metropolitan, which eventually became his debut feature in 1990, when Stillman was 38 years old. He received an Oscar nomination for the screenplay and was able to secure studio funding for Barcelona, which reached screens four years later.

Another four years passed before The Last Days of Disco was released in 1998, but Stillman couldn’t keep up the breakneck pace. It has now been a decade with no new Stillman, at least as far as the movies are concerned. Not that he’s been totally idle in the meantime; you may recall his peculiar decision to write a sort of post-modern novelization of The Last Days of Disco, which was published in 2000. (The book was written from the point of view of one the movie’s characters, who has been hired by Castle Rock Entertainment to adapt the film based on his own experiences.)

Two years ago, Stillman wrote an essay for The Guardian called “Confessions of a Serial Drifter,” in which he attempts to explain his protracted vanishing act. His first attempt at following up Last Days involved the Jamaican music he fell in love with while making that movie, but he put that aside when “a producer friend called to apologise for having claimed I was ‘attached’ to a project he was trying to get a studio to buy, which turned out to be Anchee Min's memoir of the Chinese cultural revolution, Red Azalea.” Stillman read Min’s book and decided he actually would like to be attached to the project. “I was a bit worried - I had liked the idea of doing the small, difficult Jamaican production before the enormous, frightening Chinese one, but the option on the Red Azalea book rights was ticking.”

That ticking sound turned out to be a time bomb. “Someone with a special interest in the subject returned to Los Angeles and interested a far more important director in the book, who then started a long behind-the-scenes campaign to get it for himself - or so rumour has it…Our project for Red Azalea came apart in early 2002. I still had the beloved Jamaican project to return to, and was lucky soon to find backers for that script.”

While that may be the case, the project has yet to surface. But Stillman’s name has since been attached to another novel adaptation. In May of 2006, Variety reported that Stillman had signed on to direct Little Green Men, based on the book by Christopher Buckley. All the project lacked was a leading man. “Whenever Mr. Comedy Star wants to do it, that's when we will," said the helmer. “If he wants, we can do it in his backyard, and there's even a part for his girlfriend.” Apparently Mr. Comedy Star has yet to find a hole in his schedule, because we’re still waiting.