The Screengrab : michelle pfeiffer

DVD Digest for May 12, 2009

Paul Clark — Tue, 12 May 2009 14:00:00 GMT

This week, a bunch of new tie-in DVDs for a little movie called Star Trek flood the market, as well as a new Criterion release from an old master.

But first, recent releases! For most moviegoers, this week’s big ticket title is the Euro-flavored kidnapping thriller Taken. Produced by Luc Besson and helmed by Pierre (District B13) Morel, Taken became the first action hit of 2009 by combining the high-octane grit of its action scenes with the unexpected gravitas brought to the story by star Liam Neeson. Not faring so well at the box office was Underworld: Rise of the Lycans (Sony, also Blu-Ray), the third in the seemingly deathless vampires-versus-werewolves saga. Also this week, Terence Davies’ Liverpool doc Of Time and the City (Strand) hits stores, along with a trio of high-profile direct-to-DVD releases: the Donnie Darko follow-up S. Darko (Fox, also Blu-Ray), Michelle Pfeiffer and Ashton “Twitter King” Kutcher in Personal Effects (Universal, also Blu-Ray), and The Grudge 3 (Sony), the not-particularly-anticipated third entry in the Grudge series.

In classics, the Trek love continues today with Paramount’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture Trilogy (also Blu-Ray), which thankfully doesn’t include the boring-ass first Star Trek movie, but instead encompasses films two through four. And if Trekkers are in need a few laughs and don’t feel like watching IV (or V, for that matter) again, they can pick up the Galaxy Quest Deluxe Edition (Paramount), which for my money is the best (unofficial) Trek movie since Kirk and Co. saved the whales. Or if you’re all Trekked out, the folks at Eclipse are releasing their latest box set, Eclipse Series 16: Alexander Korda’s Private Lives, which includes four high-spirited big-screen peeks into the lives of Henry VIII, Catherine the Great, Don Juan, and Rembrandt. And finally, Criterion’s releasing John Huston’s beloved “late” film Wise Blood (Criterion), one of the last “great” Huston films I still have yet to see. This of course would make it a key candidate for a Reviews by Request column except for oh wait.

This week’s TV on DVD slate is highlighted by the release of The Dana Carvey Show (Universal). Despite airing only eight episodes before getting the axe, this series has a cult following among TV fans. In fact, I’d be tempted to call Carvey a genius for surrounding himself with such promising talents as then up-and-comers Stephen Colbert, Steve Carell, Robert Smigel, and Charlie Kaufman, if not for the fact that he was also responsible for The Master of Disguise. Also this week, Seth Macfarlane’s Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy (Fox, also Blu-Ray).

In Blu-Ray only news, today brings the release of Star Trek: The Original Motion Picture Collection (Paramount), which collects all six of the original cast movies in one spiffed-up Blu-Ray Collection. And Paramount’s got plenty of comedy hitting stores as well, with Black Sheep (Paramount), Major League (Paramount), Wayne’s World (Paramount), Wayne’s World 2 (Paramount), and Without a Paddle (Paramount) on the way. Also this week: CSI Season 1 (Paramount), Force 10 from Navarone (Fox), and The Grudge (Sony).

Finally, our Synopsis of the Week takes us to the world of kiddie animation, with the four-part Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 25th Anniversary Edition, Season 7, available today in four parts from Lionsgate. Dig this crazy premise:

“Mutated into anthropomorphic fighting machines when they fall into the sewer at a young age, four turtles--Michelangelo, Leonardo, Donatello, and Raphael--have been trained in the martial arts by the sewer-dwelling Hamato Yoshi. Now, they fight crime in New York City, using their ninja skills as well as the aid of news reporter April O'Neil to counter the efforts of their enemy, Shredder. In this collection of the first six episodes from the 1987-96 animated series’ seventh season, the Turtles tangle with both natural and man-made elements while on adventures involving a massive tidal wave, melting glaciers, and the Eiffel Tower.”

Wow, who thinks of this stuff? And whoever thought it would play to kids?

Michelle Pfeiffer, "Dangerous Liasons" Director Reteam for Colette's "Cheri"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 18:00:00 GMT

Michelle Pfeiffer turned 50 last year, and though the years haven't been that bad on her, her screen image has definitely cooled a bit. Her last couple of movies went straight to DVD, and her few other screen performances since 2001 have been in supporting performances (White Oleander, Hairspray, Stardust). Now she's starring as an aging French courtesan in Cheri, directed by Stephen Frears and adapted from the Colette novel. The movie is having its premiere at the Berlin Film Festival, and Mick Brown's timely profile of Pfeiffer will do until somebody publishes her biography. The title character of Cheri is the son (Rupert Friend) of a colleague (Kathy Bates) who Pfeiffer's character, Léa de Lonval, agrees to educate in the ways of sex and love, with predictably bittersweet results. "Being in that stage of life wasn't something I really had to do a lot of research for,' Pfeiffer told Brown, "because I'm already there. Although in some ways it's a little bit harder to really understand and articulate to yourself, because you're right in the middle of it. Probably 10 years from now I'll be able to look at this phase of my life and be able to understand her journey more. But I think for a lot of women 50 is a very particular age. I'm not one that's ever really thought about birthdays, but this was a big one and I was not looking forward to it. But surprisingly it has left me feeling liberated in a strange kind of way. Sort of, the pressure's off."

For Pfeiffer, Cheri marks a return to the literary period-picture world of Dangerous Liasons and The Age of Innocence. Pfeiffer speculates that she fits into these movies about the social manners of an earlier time because "I'm good at disguising my feelings." Frears, who directed her twenty years ago in Liasons, says she was first on his list of actresses for the role, and "It's quite a short list… She is exactly the right age, and just by being beautiful herself, that struggle has been a large part of her. And she wears it very gracefully. She puts jeans and a cap on and she looks about 16. I remember saying to her when I met her, I think we're going to have trouble making you look old.' But she was just very good about it. She wasn't saying, 'Oh, go on, make me look younger,' like you might imagine Hollywood actresses do. She wasn't asking to conceal anything. The main problem was this great, great cameraman [Darius Khondji] who had been trained to make beautiful women look even more beautiful, and who was completely soppy – he kept saying, 'I can only make her look beautiful.' She was much more straightforward about it. I took my hat off to her."

As to her recent career slowdown, Pfeiffer claims to be okay with it ("Everyone slows down when they get to my age, but that's fine."), adding, "But there are fewer roles for all of us in the movie industry. They're making a fraction of the movies they used to make; and so many of them are either animation or these franchise films that you see more and more A-list actors doing. The middle-range financed film hardly exists any more." She lives outside Los Angeles, raises her kids, and checks in with her analyst. "I remember I had an acting coach, Milton Katselas, who I studied with when I was first starting out, and he would ask us, 'OK, how do you think this character would behave in this scene?' And you'd give your little explanation – 'Well, I think…' And then he'd say, 'OK, now how would you really behave in this scene?' And the first answer was almost always bullshit. But we don't even realise it."

The Letdowns: Tequila Sunrise (1988)

Nick Schager — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 18:30:00 GMT

In this recurring column, we revisit (and reconsider) eagerly anticipated films that didn’t seem to fulfill their pre-release promise.

Having cemented his place in the screenwriting pantheon with 1974’s Academy Award-winning Chinatown, Robert Towne embarked on a directorial career with 1982’s reasonably well-received lesbian track-and-field saga Personal Best. For his second behind-the-camera outing, however, the writer/director returned to the terrain that had nabbed him Oscar gold, as 1988’s Tequila Sunrise was, like Chinatown, a knotty, star-studded L.A. noir full of shifting allegiances and difficult-to-decipher truths. Or, at least, that was the heritage responsible for the rather considerable hype that preceded Towne’s sophomore effort. Unfortunately, such comparisons now seem by and large superficial, given that the film – despite some sleek cinematography by Conrad L. Hall, a comfortable familiarity with its City of Angels cops-and-crooks milieu, and the participation of Mel Gibson, Kurt Russell, Michelle Pfeiffer, and the late, great J.T. Walsh and Raul Julia – turned out to be a striking example of a project with the ingredients for greatness that nonetheless came out half-baked.

A tale of best friends on opposite sides of the law who wind up at personal and professional odds, Tequila Sunrise charts the friction between high school buds Mac (Gibson) and Nick (Russell), the former a big shot drug dealer trying to ditch the business (for barely explicated reasons), and the latter an LAPD lieutenant who wants to keep Mac from prison but still feels compelled to nail him to the wall. Towne suitably sets up these tense dynamics, yet the central love triangle the two blood brothers eventually form with restaurant hostess Jo Ann (Pfeiffer) never gets off the ground, mainly because Towne, rather than fleshing out Jo Anne, simply reduces her to a lazy narrative pawn dressed up like an ‘80s department store mannequin. This doesn’t make her appear any less silly than Russell’s Nick, whose slicked-back hair was Towne’s deliberate nod to the coiffure of then-L.A. Lakers coach Pat Riley (whom, astonishingly, he even thought about casting). But unlike his co-stars, Russell at least has a character with clear, identifiable personality traits.

Matching Pfeiffer’s blandness, Gibson, in one of the least charismatic performances of his career, seems totally unsure of who Mac actually is, a situation caused in part by Towne’s preposterous conception of the character as a family-first average Joe without a dastardly bone in his body. The result is that Gibson mutes his every line, action and reaction to the point that Mac’s behavior seems solely spurred by the logistical plot demands of Towne’s talk-heavy, energy-deficient script. An occasional bit of sharp dialogue helps balance out the more groan-worthy hardboiled utterances about loyalty and friendship, just as Russell’s morally dubious Nick provides sporadic life to the lethargically paced proceedings. Yet whenever Tequila Sunrise seems poised to hit a vigorous noir groove, the writer/director shoots himself in the foot, whether it’s his clumsily self-conscious expressionistic imagery (such as a shot of Mac and Nick silhouetted against the sunset while sitting on a beach swing set) or, worst of all, a blaring saxophone-scored sex scene between Gibson and Pfeifer that’s literally, embarrassingly “steamy.”

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 23:30:00 GMT

HENRY V (1989)

There’s been a lot of impressive speechifyin’ over the course of this past election year, and the Screengrab is currently accepting nominations for a Top Ten (or maybe even Twenty) of the greatest movie speeches of all time (to run in conjunction with Obama’s sure-to-be-classic inaugural oration)...yet, for my money, the tippy-top of any such list would have to include the classic St. Crispin’s Day pep talk from Shakespeare’s Henry V, wherein the titular monarch rallies the seemingly doomed, vastly outnumbered British army to give their lives gladly in the upcoming mother of all battles with France. Delivered by Kenneth Branagh (directing himself in a gripping action movie adaptation that makes you forget all about the pesky iambic pentameter stuff), the scene was so powerful on screen I wanted to rush right out and sack the concession stand. (And the rest of the movie ain't bad, neither.) Too bad the kind of talent (and ego) that allows a young firebrand like Branagh to helm and star in ambitious adaptations like Henry V and Hamlet tends to burn bright then quickly fade...at least, of late, from high-profile leading man movie roles (not to mention Emma Thompson’s heart).

ANIMAL CRACKERS (1930)

As a cinematic object, there’s not much to recommend Animal Crackers. Its staging is stiff as a rail, its romantic subplot just sits there and dies, its musical numbers aren’t much to write home about, and it’s hardly on the cutting edge of big-screen audiovisuals, even by the standards of eighty years ago. But it does do one thing that forever cements it in the upper echelons of stage-to-screen adaptations: it introduces the Marx Brothers to the world. Animal Crackers was one of the brothers’ most successful Broadway shows, running for almost 200 performances with the same cast, so Paramount took a chance that the comedy stylings of Groucho, Chico and Harpo would translate easily from play to film. In a certain sense, they were wrong: a number of Groucho’s more salacious lines, which were big hits with sophisticated New York audiences, were judged too risqué by the Hays Code bosses and cut out of the film version. But in most other respects, the Marx Brothers proved even more popular in the world of cinema than they did on the stage in Manhattan. Even the most cerebral elements of their mile-a-minute comedy, like the metahumor qualities evident in Groucho’s asides to the camera and Chico’s famously copping to not being Italian (the only movie in which he does so), proved to be as beloved by the heartland, and even foreign audiences, as they were to their Broadway fans.

DANGEROUS LIAISONS (1988)

Stephen Frears made a risky choice when he helmed the first English-language adaptation of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ oft-filmed 18th-century novel, Les Liaisons Dangereuses. While most stage plays are opened up on film – made to look as non-theatrical as possible – Frears deliberately played up the staginess of the production. Instead of shying away from its origins as a play, he soaked it in theatrical elegance, and intentionally called attention to its artificiality. He couldn’t have picked a better play on which to attempt this tactic: Dangerous Liaisons, written in a high-nasty style that evokes the sadistic game-playing and one-upmanship of the courtier class of its day, is all about lies, about artifice, about theatrical chicanery. That’s why Frears and his screenwriter Christopher Hampton (updating his theatrical adaptation of the original novel for the screen) made such a wise choice; the world in which Glenn Close’s Marquise de Merteuil and John Malkovich’s Vicomte de Valmont lived was as unreal as a play, and that sensibility rightly pervades the entire movie. It also further provides us all the evidence we need that Keanu Reeves cannot act, and that Uma Thurman can – and is might purty to boot.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce

Honorable Mention: The Top Leading Ladies of All Time (Part Six)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 22:30:00 GMT

PAM GRIER (1949 - )

She was the undisputed queen of black '70s cinema. In tight pants, high heels and with razor blades in her Afro, Pam Grier burned up the screen in movies like Foxy Brown and Coffy. Independent black cinema fell on hard times by the end of that decade and she did not make the leap over to the Hollywood mainstream. For years she worked smaller film roles and TV here and there. That is, until Quentin Tarantino cast her in what might have been his — and her — best film ever, Jackie Brown. There Pam plays a middle-aged woman, a struggling air-hostess, slightly frayed at the edges but tough as nails...and what a sight to see.

SOPHIA LOREN (1934 - )

In pure feminine power and deliciousness, few can rival Sophia Loren in her glory years. It is hard to believe now, but the first lady of Italian film actually made her way onto the screen after fellow Italian bombshell Gina Lollobrigida. In fact she was discovered by (and subsequently married, then split with) Carlo Ponti, who also launched Lollobrigida's carreer. While works of Talmudic length could be written on Loren's looks, she's no mean actress. Get thee to a video store for Two Women or El Cid to appreciate her in the fullest.

ANNE BANCROFT (1931-2005)

Born Anna Maria Italiano in the Bronx, she followed that age-old tradition of taking a more WASPy sounding stage name. Anne Bancroft will, however, always be Mrs. Robinson to us. There are more prolific actresses out there, but you can't deny the power of her performance as a beautiful, sad, alcoholic older woman to Dustin Hoffman's younger man in The Graduate. Now that we are sniffing thirty ourselves we realize that (A) Mrs. Robinson wasn't supposed to be particularly old in the movie and (B) at 36, Anne Bancroft was only a few years older than Hoffman. In any case, leopard print never looked so good. And never did a lady lead with so much out-of-control control. It isn't easy to top one of the best movies of all time and nothing Bancroft did after that (no, not even being the voice of the Queen in Antz) made the same splash. Mel Brooks married her, though, so you know she was special.

SHIRLEY MACLAINE (1934 - )

My first Shirley MacLaine memory: sitting in front of my parents' stereo (approximately the size of the desk I'm sitting at now), playing my mother's copy of the Sweet Charity soundtrack and staring intently at the redhead on the album cover. I may have only been six or seven years old, but I had good taste. I lost track of Shirley after that, until she resurfaced as the kook on Larry King talking about her past lives in Atlantis and her UFO frequent-flier miles, just another Hollywood punchline. What a cad I was, forgetting what a beautiful thing we had there in front of the stereo all those years ago. But it all came back to me when I finally got around to seeing the work that made her famous in the first place. In her trademark roles – The Apartment, Irma la Douce, Sweet Charity and especially Some Came Running, she's pixie-cute, charming, funny, sometimes annoying and ultimately heartbreaking. She was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress five times, finally winning for Terms of Endearment. In 1993, I saw her open for Frank Sinatra at the Worcester Centrum; her show-stopper was, of course, "If My Friends Could See Me Now." I'd be lying if I said she looked like she'd stepped right off that long-ago album cover, but I will tell you she still had the gams.

CLAUDIA JENNINGS (1949-1979)

If such redneck romps as Gator Bait, Truck Stop Women and Moonshine County Express aren't part of your cinematic education, you may not have even heard of Claudia Jennings, but in the mid-1970s she was the queen of the drive-in, the ultimate hick chick. Born Mary Eileen Chesterson in St. Paul, Minnesota, Jennings studied dramatic arts as a child and performed with the Hull House theater company in Chicago after graduating high school. She took a day job as a receptionist for Playboy magazine, where her knockout looks did not go unnoticed. She posed for the magazine in 1969 and again in 1970, when she was named Playmate of the Year. Moving to Los Angeles to pursue acting, she landed a supporting role in the 1972 roller derby flick Unholy Rollers. Her role in 1974's Truck Stop Woman, in which she hijacked trucks using sex as her primary weapon, became the model for the rest of Jennings' leading roles: drop-dead gorgeous, sexually uninhibited and tough enough to take on the big boys. Long before Thelma and Louise hit the road, Jennings and Jocelyn Jones played a sexy pair of bank-robbing outlaws in The Great Texas Dynamite Chase. In Gator Bait, Jennings is a bayou woman turned Death Wish-style vigilante after her little sister is murdered by depraved hillbillies. A decade before Sigourney Weaver's supposedly groundbreaking turn in Aliens, Jennings was already kicking ass and taking names – and doing it in the tightest, tiniest pair of Daisy Dukes possible. Her final performance came in David Cronenberg's little-seen 1979 racing picture, Fast Company – ironic, in that Jennings was killed in an auto accident on the Pacific Coast Highway that year, a couple of months shy of her thirtieth birthday. Her cinematic legacy may be a minor one, but in the realm of the hick flick, Claudia Jennings still reigns.

MICHELLE PFEIFFER (1958 - )

Although it wasn't her first movie, most filmgoers got their first good gawk at Pfeiffer in the 1983 Scarface. Although opinions were mixed (and would remain so for a while) about whether she could act, the camera loved her, and the way she embraced the role of the world's surliest cokehead gangster's moll established that she wasn't persnickety about wanting to be liked. Any doubts about her acting had been pretty much cleared up by the time of Dangerous Liasons, in which she was excellent in one of the film's major roles that was probably the least fun to play. That movie and her other 1988 releases, Married to the Mob and Tequila Sunrise, made it clear that likability itself was comfortably within her range. Her singing sexpot in The Fabulous Baker Boys was pure starshine, her alienated early '60s runaway housewife in Love Field a terrific stretch, and with all due respect to Julie Newmar, her Catwoman gave the most insouciant reading of the line "Meow!" on record. Her movies have gotten worse, and her last one, I Could Never Be Your Man. ended up going straight to DVD. But she remains a welcome presence on-screen.

ANNA MAGNANI (1908-1973)

If Sophia Loren could have taken out a patent on the movie image of the Italian woman as lusty, ripe, and sensual, Magnani embodied the idea of the Italian as a woman who might have stepped off an opera stage, made of common clay but transcendently beautiful in a way that represents what people used to call "a force of nature." She had been acting in movies (and also singing and performing in cabaret and nightclubs) since the earliest days of sound pictures, but it was Roberto Rossellini's 1945 Open City, and in particular her death scene, that made her an international star. She continued to work in Europe with such directors as Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti (Bellissima), and Jean Renoir, who after using her in The Golden Coach proclaimed her the greatest actress he'd ever worked with. Hollywood never quite knew just what to do with her, but she did find something of a patron in Tennessee Williams, and she won an Oscar for the film version of The Rose Tattoo. Magnani once said that "Women like me can only submit to men capable of dominating them, and I have never found anyone capable of dominating me," and in that movie you can see what she meant: she looks at her co-star, Burt Lancaster, as if he were Arnold Stang. (She was apparently perceived as a bit much even by her co-star in The Fugitive Kind -- the ill-fated screen version of Williams' Orpheus Descending -- a shy, retiring fellow named Marlon Brando. "Every time I play a scene with her," Brando is supposed to have said, "I'm gonna have a rock in each hand.") Her death in Rome, at the age of 65 from pancreatic cancer, occasioned a public funeral ceremony rumored to have made the Pope jealous.

Click Here for Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Seven & Eight

Contributors: Sarah Sundberg, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

DVD Digest for February 12, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 15:00:00 GMT

This week, one of 2007's best films comes to DVD, and a master's musicals get the box-set treatment.

DVD of the Week: Most of the most beloved films of Ernst Lubitsch's career come from its final years, when the Lubitsch touch had already become well-established. But it's easy to forget that the master had already had a fruitful career long before Ninotchka, The Shop Around the Corner, and To Be or Not to Be. With the films included in this box set, Lubitsch was one of the first filmmakers to integrate song and narrative after the advent of talkies. But this would mean little today if the films themselves didn't hold up, and they do, with all of Lubitsch's trademark charm and Pre-Code sophistication. Eclipse has given their typical treatment (no extras, but lovely transfers) to the films The Love Parade, Monte Carlo, One Hour With You, and The Smiling Lieutenant, which boast some of the era's quintessential stars — Maurice Chevalier, Claudette Colbert, and Jeannette MacDonald. As always, Eclipse and parent company Criterion succeed in filling in another hole in cinema history.

Incidentally, today is my birthday, so if anyone out there is looking for a suitable gift, you could do a whole lot worse than this.

A bumper crop of more recent films being released on DVD this week, including: Ben Affleck's surprisingly great Gone Baby Gone (Buena Vista, also Blu-Ray); James Gray's searing crime drama We Own the Night; Becoming Jane (Buena Vista, also Blu-Ray), the second Austen-themed dramedy in as many weeks; John Cusack in The Martian Child (New Line); No Reservations (Warner, also Blu-Ray), the Catherine Zeta-Jones-starring remake of 2001's Mostly Martha; Tyler Perry's latest hit, Why Did I Get Married? (Lionsgate); the Apollo-mission documentary In the Shadow of the Moon (ThinkFilm); and John Turturro's polarizing star-studded quasi-musical, Romance and Cigarettes (Sony). In addition, this week finally sees the DVD release of Amy Heckerling's long-delayed I Could Never Be Your Woman (Genius Entertainment), starring Michelle Pfeiffer, Paul Rudd, and Atonement Oscar nominee Saoirse Ronan. If nothing else, now we can see what all the fuss was about.

Back to classics, this week also brings Sony's The Stanley Kramer Film Collection, a collection of five films Kramer directed and/or produced. The centerpiece of the set is a new 40th Anniversary Edition of Kramer's once-controversial interracial-marriage drama Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. Also in the set is the Kramer-directed Ship of Fools, as well as The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T, A Member of the Wedding, and The Wild One, all of which he produced.

Other older films coming to DVD include: The Joan Crawford Collection Volume 2 (Warner), which includes Sadie McKee, Strange Cargo, A Woman's Face, Flamingo Road, and Torch Song; Fox's Charlie Chan Collection Volume 4; and Kenneth Branagh's 1991 dramedy Peter's Friends (MGM), boasting an enviable cast, including Branagh, then-wife Emma Thompson, Hugh Laurie, Stephen Fry, and Imelda Staunton. For some reason, MGM has seen fit to package the film in a box set alongside the misguided Elmore Leonard/Paul Schrader satire Touch, the 1988 Patrick Dempsey-Jennifer Connelly vehicle Some Girls, and Scott Baio and Willie Aames in Zapped! Strange bedfellows indeed.

Finally, if you're jonesing for TV on DVD, this week sees the release of season 1 of The Equalizer (Universal), as well as the Vern-approved Blade: the Series (New Line). But fear not — only one more week until the release of Walker, Texas Ranger: The Complete Fourth Season, the rare DVD that can be enjoyed by both Chuck Norris fans and Conan O'Brien watchers.

Morning Deal Report: To Hell With Ellen Page

Peter Smith — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 16:15:00 GMT

It girl Ellen Page will star in Sam Raimi's Drag Me to Hell. Drag Me to Hell sounds kind of cool — it's said to be Raimi's return to his budget-horror roots after a decade of blockbuster work.

Stephen Frears's next film is Cheri, an adaptation of the French novel. It'll star Michelle Pfeiffer, reteaming Frears with his Dangerous Liaisons star.

The writers' strike could end Wednesday, depending how its members vote on a possible settlement tomorrow night. No settlement probably means no Oscars at this point — a possibility that has a certain appeal. But let's hope it's over, for the sake of the writers and their coworkers.

Amy Heckerling: Fast Times in a Clueless Hollywood

Phil Nugent — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 19:00:00 GMT

In a better movie world, filmmakers like Amy Heckering would constitute the backbone of the industry. Heckerling doesn't have a colossal artistic reputation or rack up Academy Award nominations. She's a mainstream, commercial director, and some of her hits, such as Look Who's Talking and its sequel and National Lampoon's European Vacation, are pure, unapologetic hackwork. But she's intelligent and talented, with a special, sensitive feeling for the comedy of adolescent romantic confusion, and at least twice, in Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Clueless, she's plowed those qualities into modest-seeming projects that have taken on the status of modern classics. But Clueless came out more than a dozen years ago, and since then, Heckerling has only managed to get one new movie into theaters, the sweet but underbaked Loser (2000). Heckerling has spent much of the time since then working on a comedy called I Could Never Be Your Woman. Heckerling wrote the script back in 1999, drawing on what she knows herself about the difficulties that women — especially women who aren't as young as they used to be — face in Hollywood. The movie stars Michelle Pfeiffer as a fortysomething TV producer with career problems, single-mother problems, and a confusing, budding romance with a younger man — Paul Rudd, who got his big break playing Alicia Silverstone's love interest in Clueless. (For Woman, Heckerling cast the then-unknown young actress Saoirse Ronan as Pfeiffer's daughter; Ronan has since won an Oscar nomination for her work in Atonement.) After years of delays, the movie is finally being released on DVD on February 12. In a story in Entertainment Weekly (not available on-line), Missy Schwartz writes that the movie's path to direct DVD release comes only "after coming this close to a theatrical release more times than Heckerling can remember" and terms the situation "something of a sub-cultural curio. It's a modestly budgeted indie that, while far from perfect, never got the chance it deserved, hitting every speed bump and knocking over every traffic cone along the way."

Initially Heckerling was going to make the movie for Paramount, but the project never got off the ground there, something that Heckerling believes had at least something to do with "concern about doing a movie with an older female protagonist — not anybody's favorite demographic." Heckerling then secured financing from Philippe Martinez, a controversial figure who, in 2005, set up Bauer Martinez Entertainment, which he promised to turn into the biggest indie film studio in the U.S. Martinez did allow Heckerling to get the movie made, though not without some odd compromises: for financial reasons, she was obliged to shoot the film in London and try to pass it off as Los Angeles. And by the time the film was completed, Martinez had decided that, contrary to his original plans, his company wasn't up to distributing its own movies. A distribution deal with MGM fell through, and other interested parties backed off after discovering that the DVD and non-pay-TV rights had already been signed away to The Weinstein Company, a move that Heckerling likens to saying, "Here, but my baby. I've cut its legs off, but it's still cute." Is Heckerling at least happy that her baby will be available to be seen now? She doesn't seem unhappy. Well, she doesn't seem miserable about it. But, at fifty-three, she isn't even promising that she'll direct again. "I don't want to work for the hell of it," she says.