The Screengrab : michael almereyda

Oddball Summer Movies 2009

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 05 May 2009 19:30:00 GMT

“Summer movie” is one of those phrases like “beach novel” or “toilet wine” that causes an immediate, involuntary adjustment of our expectations. (I was going to say “lowering of expectations,” but we make some mighty tasty toilet wine here at Screengrab headquarters.) When we hear “summer movie,” we think of explosions or aliens or exploding aliens, even though by Hollywood’s calendar, there is no time of year that isn’t appropriate for movies about exploding aliens. But by that same token, there are summer movies that feature hardly any exploding aliens at all. To kick off the season, the New York Times asked several motion picture luminaries to ruminate on their favorite summer movies, with surprising results.

Paradise director Michael Almereyda’s selection isn’t that far off the beaten path, aside from the fact that it was actually released in March. “A summery, in-between-jobs listlessness floated me into a weekday matinee of The Matrix 10 years ago. I wasn’t expecting much… There’s no way to summarize the plot without acknowledging its silliness or without then giving the writers/directors — the Wachowski brothers — their due for the precision and seductive power of every image, every scene, every gravity-defying action sequence. But the movie gathers true conviction and soul, I think, from the underrated performances of Mr. Reeves and his sorrowful, symmetrically hard-edged co-star, Carrie-Anne Moss.”

Lynn Shelton, director of the excellent indie Humpday, makes a more idiosyncratic choice. “How I yearned, during the summers I lived in New York, to just get out of that overheated, overanxious city every once in a while, to meander aimlessly along an esplanade in some quiet seaside spot, the gentle breeze ruffling the hair at the back of my neck. Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories provides the quintessential backdrop for a New Yorker’s escapist fantasies: a sleepy little film festival at the shore, where the besieged filmmaker Sandy Bates has been invited to attend a retrospective of his work. Although the soothing qualities of the place are not immediately accessible to our hero, once he does manage to give his swarming, rabid fans the slip, you can practically taste the salt in the air and hear the lapping of the waves in the middle distance.”

For more picks, including summer faves from Catherine O’Hara and Atom Egoyan, check out the Times feature here.

Dear Santa: Cinematic Comebacks We’d Most Like To See (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 16:30:00 GMT

SHERYL LEE

Lee was originally cast as the face (and corpse) of bewitching, self-destructive prom queen Laura Palmer on the equally bewitching and self-destructive TV classic Twin Peaks, yet David Lynch was so captivated by the actress that he created a recurring role for her on the show (as Laura’s doomed cousin Maddie), then later placed her at the center of the feature-length Peaks prequel, Fire Walk With Me, a critically-scorned movie that made Lee (and her iconic character) seem, to many, like a guest who’d overstayed her welcome. And yet, even if you’re one of the haters who viewed the film as an unnecessary, self-indulgent folly (rather than an undervalued masterpiece), take another look at Lee’s performance: yes, she gobbles like a turkey at one point (a moment frequently and too easily mocked), but she also commits herself to the role of an abuse victim on the brink of madness with the kind of frightening, vulnerable intensity that would have earned praise and awards buzz if not for the small screen (and Log Lady) associations. Since her fifteen minutes of fame (and undeserved ridicule), Lee has largely flown beneath the radar in projects more interested in her capacity for physical (rather than emotional) nakedness onscreen, but even so there have been some diamonds in the rough: the innocent in This World, Then The Fireworks, the innocent turned deadly in John Carpenter’s Vampires and, most notably (if least interestingly), in her almost comeback roll as the German girlfriend in Backbeat. Lately, Lee’s found a home back on television (most recently on Dirty Sexy Money...remind me to set my Tivo!), but I’d be fascinated to see what she’d bring to a meaty film role now that she’s been seasoned with all these extra years of rejection, experience and wisdom.

MICHAEL ALMEREYDA

After years of a steadily increasing profile on the arthouse circuit, Michael Almereyda made his best film yet, 2002's Happy Here And Now. After some festival showings, it promptly disappeared, only to be cynically resurrected by IFC after Katrina rendered its New Orleans setting suddenly marketable. The truth is that Almereyda's abstract feature doodles are even less marketable than those of his patron David Lynch, but — if you're on the right wavelength — they can also be totally ethereal and enveloping. Since Happy, he's made two documentaries (one of which I've seen — This So-Called Disaster, which lives down to its title), and which decidedly aren't his element. 2006's Tonight At Noon remains in some kind of post-production hell, and this year's New Orleans, Mon Amour didn't even get the token post-Katrina bounce after dropping at SXSW. What gives?

OWEN WILSON

This has nothing to do with Owen Wilson's personal life, which is frankly none of my business. But should he — after finishing what appears to be a contractually-mandated stint in A Night At The Museum 2 — still have any kind of relish for acting or film in general, it would be nice to see not the return of the Wilson who made lazy craptastic vehicles like Drillbit Taylor or You, Me & Dupree, but the thoughtful co-writer of Bottle Rocket and Rushmore and/or the brilliantly limited slacker comedian who single-handedly rewrote and saved films like Shanghai Noon and (yes, I'm serious) The Big Bounce. Hell, he can even make another The Minus Man if that's what it takes.

TOM GREEN

This one's purely personal. I think Freddy Got Fingered is a very funny movie (which is generally not even true for fans of The Tom Green Show). I even think Freddy Got Fingered is a surprisingly emotional and deeply felt examination of poisonous father-son bonds, a deeply felt apologia from Green to his dad for being so awful to him on the show, fueled by a totally sincere desire for reconciliation. You, on the other hand, may be with the majority of the planet, which finds it to be an abomination. Whatever the case, it's time to rescue Green from whatever web-interview-show purgatory he's fallen into. If nothing else, he can keep reminding dudes of the importance of testicular self-exams.

DAVE CHAPPELLE

This one's utterly universal; is there anyone who wasn't amused by Chappelle? Chappelle hasn't disappeared completely; he's known to show up in comedy clubs with little more than 24 hours' advance notice, and he interviewed James Lipton in November for Inside The Actor's Studio's 200th episode. That's all we get? No one can blame Chappelle for the entirely understandable qualms that led him to shut down his show, and it's totally fair if he wants to retreat to the "Fuck Hollywood" ranch. But Dave Chappelle's Block Party wasn't just a joyous neighborhood tribute (and Michel Gondry's best film); it showed a way out for Chappelle, a post-comic persona that allowed him to drop irony and prove a surprisingly affable host to 21st-century race relations. Whether as a comic or simply as a good guy to spend time with on-screen, we could use him back.

Click Here For Part One, Two & Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Vadim Rizov

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Ho! And also, ho-ho! Happy Festivus from all of us here at The Screengrab!

Last week, we shared some of our favorite cinematic comebacks of all time, but today the gifts we're really hoping to get are the following COMEBACKS WE'D MOST LIKE TO SEE IN 2009, starting with...

MARISA TOMEI

Is it generally accepted that Tomei is as good as she is? She won an Academy Award for her supporting performance in 1992's My Cousin Vinny, but, as also happened with Mira Sorvino (who was ridiculed for having won an Oscar for Mighty Aphrodite) and Jennifer Tilly (who was teased just for having been nominated for Bullets Over Broadway), that achievement inspired some snickering from people who don't understand why you'd waste an award on someone in a comedy. Never mind that Tomei's performance in that movie, which gave audiences as much sheer pleasure as anything run through a projector that year, couldn't have been easy to pull off, or that it summed up as well as anything else she's done what a remarkable combination of brains and adorability she has as an actress. Devoted to working in the theater, and not averse to doing TV when the role is right, she takes long breaks between movie jobs, though she keeps her hand in enough that nobody refers to The Wrestler as her comeback picture. But only for a brief time, in the wake of her Oscar win, did she inspire filmmakers to place her at the center of a few starring vehicles (Untamed Heart, Only You, The Family Perez). From Vinny to In the Bedroom to last year's Before the Devil Knows You're Dead to The Wrestler, the bulk of her most striking movie work has consisted of supporting roles in which her character was defined by her relationship to a man who had more lines and more screen time. And almost any time when Tomei is in a movie but not onscreen counts as wasted time.

MICHAEL KEATON

Does Keaton have issues? As an actor, he's come an incredibly long way from his screen debut in Night Shift, where he was still basically doing stand-up comedy in character -- but ever since hanging up his Bat cape and apparently losing Tim Burton's contact information, he's bounced from role to role, seldom betraying any sign that he cares about sustaining a viable career. He did reportedly beg for his role in Jackie Brown, though he left less impact on the finished film than he did when, as a gag, he reprised the character for a surprise cameo in Out of Sight. He gave a startling performance as a genius-level sociopathic criminal in Desperate Measures, but the downside is that he gave it in Desperate Measures. He may just be a man with more talent than taste, but given his background, it is suprising that he doesn't attempt more comedies; maybe he felt stung after the commercial failure of the 1996 Multiplicity, an underrated film in which he played multiple roles and worked like a saint to keep all the movie's balls in the air. Still,everything you'd guess about him from his acting seems designed to make you wonder why he'd want to appear in Herbie: Fully Loaded or be reincarnated as a snowman in Jack Frost: how hard up can he be for ways to impress his kids? Some of his recent films went all but unreleased (including The Merry Gentlemen, which he directed), but he gave one of his best performances last year on TV, in the cable miniseries The Company, where his legendary CIA brainmaster James Jesus Angleton gave you the feeling that decades of American history were decided by the icy paranoia of a few quietly deranged men in dark rooms. He also famously dropped out of the TV series Lost after learning that the producers had changed their minds about killing off his character in the pilot episode. The one thing that's plain and clear about Keaton is that he's a restless man whose reluctant to settle for the obvious, even if he'd rather star in White Noise than be idle while waiting for his next chance to shake up the Richter scale in a meaningful way. Some young hotshot director who's looking to make waves should plug himself into Keaton's aura and see what happens.

KELLY LYNCH

Lynch is regally beautiful enough, and capable of summoning up enough style and attitude, that you might be tempted to describe her as the sane equivalent of Sharon Stone, if that didn't undervalue her acting range: though she ought to be a movie star, Lynch is also actress enough to pass for a normal human being. For all practical purposes, her movie career really begin with Drugstore Cowboy, where as Diane, the drug-fiend housewife, she burned holes in the screen with her level gaze until exiting the picture with her vulnerabilities finally exposed, a thoroughbred on shaky legs. So far as good movies go, that was pretty much the end of her career, too, though she's continued to give solidly crafted, emotionally rich performances in all manner of dreck, from the "ooh, edgy!" 1993 romantic comedy Three of Hearts, in which she yearned for fellow M.I.A. Sherilyn Fenn, to the 2005 head trip The Jacket, where she gave Adrien Brody more reason than usual to have the shivers. Her chops are formidable and she clearly loves a challenge, and trying to keep her dignity and earn her paycheck in Mr. Magoo clearly counts as a challenge. But she probably deserves better. I know those of us who are her fans do.

SUZY AMIS

Amis has a face that, at least when it's filtered through the lenses of the cameras that love her unconditionally, could make you forget about everything else in the world if your hair was on fire. As an actress, she invariably communicates warmth and sweetness, but she can dredge up subterranean feelings of anger and pain when she needs to. Rolling Stone gave her its vote as the Next Big Thing actress back in the late 1980s, and in little seen indie fare such as Rocket Gibralter, Watch It, and Michael Almereyada's Twister and Nadja, as well as bigger-budget but well-hidden films such as John Boorman's Where the Heart Is and Bruce Beresford's Rich in Love, she delivered everything a movie "It girl" could deliver but the box office success. One of her rare starring vehicles, The Ballad of Little Jo, developed a small cult following after it was smuggled onto cable TV, though perhaps the most stunning evidence of how much she could give a movie came with the 1993 two-character filmed play Two Small Bodies, a weird take on the Alice Crimmins case kept on life support by Amis and her co-star Fred Ward, who probably deserves his own entry on this list. She finally got to be in a hit in 1995 when she was tapped to supply the token amount of estrogen to the cast of The Usual Suspects, a movie where the late-arriving news that her character has been murdered off-screen hits the viewer like a lead weight hitting one's foot. But then she took on a nothing role in James Cameron's Titanic, and she and Cameron (who at the time was married to his fourth wife and Terminator leading lady, Linda Hamilton) had an affair -- then the next thing you know, Cameron's divorce was final and the two of them were getting married, and she hasn't worked since, just as Hamilton was out of circulation while she and Cameron were married. I look forward to the day that James Cameron meets his future sixth wife the way some people look forward to getting their hands on their 401k.

ELIZABETH PENA

In the mid-1980s, in such movies as Down and Out in Beverly Hills, La Bamba, and Jacob's Ladder, Pena established herself as a pouty, steamy cuddlebug, but one whose pout concealed teeth that could bite: her expression of disgust when looking at the macho moron she married in La Bamba leaves a stronger visual memory than the happy romantic scenes of Lou Diamond Phillips' Richie Valens courting his unruffled blonde kewpie doll Donna. As a post-ingenue actress, Pena had her highest-profile role in John Sayles' Lone Star, sitting on a car hood with Chris Cooper, trying to process the information that their love was not meant to be, big time. She can currently be seen in the ensemble cast of the family comedy Nothing Like the Holidays, physically a little puffier-looking but with banked fires still smoldering behind her eyes. Someone needs to provide her with a canvass broad enough to let those fires flame out.

Click Here For Part Two, Three & Four

Contributor: Phil Nugent

Screengrab Presents: The Best Stage-To-Screen Adaptations Of All Time (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 21:00:00 GMT

THE GOOD FAIRY (1935)

Ferenc Molnar's prolific output (around 40 plays) was plundered (often in radically altered and/or watered-down form) by everyone: Rogers & Hammerstein got Carousel out of his Liliom, and Billy Wilder's fleetest farce, One, Two, Three updated (apparently unrecognizably) another play. Often forgotten is 1935's The Good Fairy, a triumph of clever dialogue and expert performances over William Wyler's typically ponderous, absurdly slow direction. In keeping with the good "production values" Wyler stolidly brought along for his whole career, things move way too slow. For no good reason, Preston Sturges' adaptation retains cumbersome faux-Hungarian street-name signs, presumably in the name of reminding audiences what cultivated terrain they've stumbled upon whenever an actor gets slowed down by a word. But Sturges keeps throwing away funny lines and faux-ponderous diction in every direction, and the movie's a blast despite all that. "Unhand me, varlet, lest I cleave thee to the brisket!" yells a drunk aristocrat. "I will scale yonder precipice alone!" And he's never heard from again.

HOBSON'S CHOICE (1954)

Harold Brighouse's 1916 comedy was a staple of Northern English comedy, which made everyone nervous when David Lean — "in every fibre a Southerner," notes Kevin Brownlow's biography — took it on. Fortunately, his cast — scenery-chewing Charles Laughton, John Mills (saving his career from impending disaster) and bitchy Brenda de Banzie — carry things nicely. Lean was never much good at comedy, but Hobson's Choice isn't much of a knee-slapper in the first place, so — unlike his awful, rhythmless Blithe Spirit, a mean-spirited, clunky travesty of Noel Coward's play (who responded "You've just fucked up the best thing I ever wrote") — it works. Lean's main contribution comes between dialogue, as in the clip above — continually grounding the mild, leisurely jokes in Manchester's real industrial sprawl. Co-writer Norman Spencer recalls Brighouse never really cared: "He was an old man who was a bit deaf and rather stunned by the whole thing. He said, 'I hope it'll be a nice film,' lost interest and went back up North again."

WILL SUCCESS SPOIL ROCK HUNTER? (1957)

It's nearly impossible to imagine Rock Hunter as a play — Frank Tashlin's movie is so aggressively cinematic, and its satirical points on celebrity's corrosive effects and so on kind of uninteresting. But it pops with Looney Tunes energy, mostly courtesy of Tony Randall: he's occasionally overrun with unexplained evil spirits that take over his body, lower his voice, and make him act as rudely as possible, an effect closer to the cartoons Tashlin started out in than any play. In the clip above (0:53 in), Randall interrupts the movie's action to address the audience directly while the screen loses its Cinemascope boundaries for all manner of TV-simulation; it's the cinematic equivalent of Todd Rundgren's sarcastic diatribe of in-house problems, "Sounds From The Studio," which showcased clipping, weird pitch-shifting and every other '70s analog problem in great detail. Here we get static, snow, and V-hold problems. It's the film's most exhilarating moment, and utterly irrelevant to theater.

THE HOMECOMING (1973)

"Didn't you hear what I said, dad?" sneers Ian Holm in the clip above. Pinter's clipped menace has translated to the screen better and more often than most, but The Homecoming is probably the best attempt to translate a play to screen with as little flash or changing as possible (including, at a mere 111 minutes, an intermission). Aside from one memorable handheld POV shot for the first act's climax — a nervous charge attempted by both character and camera — Peter Hall finds angles that sometimes find visual equivalents for what's being said, but mostly do the one thing that can't be accomplished in theater: have everything happen in a realistically crappy suburban house, without otherwise changing the tempo or performances one bit.

HAMLET ('96 Branagh/'00 Almereyda)

Five years apart, Kenneth Branagh and Michael Almereyda offered near-definitive, completely opposed takes on Hamlet. Branagh has the whole text uncut; to get through everything in a relatively speedy four hours, whole monologues are delivered in breathless rushes. Out of either necessity or bravado (or both), Branagh overplays wildly at times, rendering his every intonation explicitly theatrical; it's a big help for the novice viewer though: arguably the most instantly comprehensible on-screen Hamlet, making everything clear. Updated to the 19th century, it seems, purely to enable lusher visual overkill, Hamlet is both intelligent Shakesperean interpretation and grand Hollywood entertainment. That Branagh stocks all the main parts with theatrically trained actors with basically no marquee value and all the minor parts with way out-of-their-depth Hollywood players (Billy Crystal! Jack Lemmon!) creates an inadvertant but fascinating form of tension and comic relief. Almereyda's version, on the other hand, goes fin de siecle, slashes the text remorselessly and spends a lot of time amusing itself with its updates (the ghost first appears in front of a vending machine on a security camera) and punnish ways to change things by implication without changing the words (Denmark is no longer a country but a corporation avoiding takeover). Within all the jokes, Ethan Hawke's slacker prince is convincingly callow, moody and self-absorbed, but Almereyda knows the text is strong enough to make even this young idiot's plight finally empathetically comprehensible.

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

Contributor: Vadim Rizov

The Five Most Intriguing SXSW Trailers: Narrative Films

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 20:30:00 GMT

Yesterday we took a look at the most notable documentaries playing at this year’s SXSW Film Festival, which kicks off a week from today in Austin, TX. Today let’s check out the narrative films. Unfortunately, some of the movies we’re most excited about don’t have trailers available online, but here’s the best of the rest.

21

Truthfully, we’re torn about this one. It’s based on the terrific nonfiction thriller Bringing Down the House, about a team of MIT students who become blackjack experts in Las Vegas, and it may actually contain the first bearable Kevin Spacey performance in years. But the casting of bland Jim Sturgess and Kate Bosworth has us wincing, particularly since the real MIT Blackjack Team was made up primarily of Asian-Americans.

Mister Lonely

A Michael Jackson impersonator falls for a Marilyn Monroe lookalike. "Meanwhile, a miracle is happening somewhere in a Latin American jungle." It could be unbearably precious, but it is Harmony Korine's first movie since Julien Donkey-Boy, so we can’t help but be curious.

New Orleans Mon Amour

Director Michael Almereyda made the little-seen but weirdly compelling Happy Here and Now (which played SXSW in 2003) in pre-Katrina New Orleans. After the flood, Almereyda returns to the Crescent City tell the story of a surgeon trying to get his life back together as the city tries to do the same.

Goliath

Austin’s own Zellner Brothers may not be following the Coens to the Oscar podium anytime soon, but they do have their own special brand of comedic deadpan. Their latest feature Goliath, about a man searching for his lost cat, got a mixed reaction when it premiered at Sundance, but the hometown crowd is sure to be on their side.

Baghead

Greta Gerwig is the undisputed queen of mumblecore, starring in no less than three such films at this year’s SXSW festival. One of them is the Duplass Brothers’ Baghead, the mumblecore horror-comedy about four friends spending a weekend at a woodsy cabin, where they are menaced by a man with a paper bag over his head. Even if you can’t stand these sort of inarticulate twentysomething characters, you can at least hold out hope that Baghead will do something terrible to them.

As a bonus, here’s a short film that will be playing this year’s festival. It’s called "I Slammed My Dick in the Drawer." We think it’s self-explanatory.