The Screengrab : moscow on the hudson

Strangers In A Strange Land: Screengrab’s Favorite Fish-Out-Of-Water Stories (Part Six)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 23:30:00 GMT

THE BROTHER FROM ANOTHER PLANET (1984)

Like many new arrivals to New York City, Joe Morton’s character in John Sayles’ indie comedy is hoping for a fresh start in the strange, scary but not entirely hostile metropolis. The big difference, of course, is that Morton’s innocent mute is a three-toed extraterrestrial, an escaped slave from "another planet" being pursued by two vaguely feline (and white) Men In Black (who, ironically, are far more concerned with the number of toes on their quarry’s feet than the color of his skin). Sayles’ gentle parable of multicultural integration features a magic trick (in the scene above) that hinges on a still-timely sociological sight gag about urban race relations. Yet it’s interesting to ponder what the eponymous Brother would think if he made a return visit to our planet today: with the Disney-fication of Times Square and the ongoing gentrification of Harlem (not to mention the upcoming Obama inauguration), even the human characters from Sayles’ early ‘80s world might feel a bit disoriented in the strange land of 2008 Manhattan.

UNDER THE VOLCANO (1984)

Malcolm Lowry's novel of self-destruction is a force of nature. John Huston's film of the novel is, sadly, not. Sure, it contains moments of beauty and tragedy, but when things go wrong, they go wrong with a dogged determinism. Albert Finney plays the drunken Geoffrey Firmin, ex-consul of the British Empire in Mexico, with a grace rarely afforded cinematic alcoholics. The other actors are, sadly, not up to his standards (Huston's adaptation of Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood has the same problem, as leading man Brad Dourif's talents far outshine all other actors onscreen, save Harry Dean Stanton.) As Firmin stumbles further out of the relative safety of his regular haunts, Mexico becomes less like an exotic extension of his home and more like a seedy extension of the jungle, where Firmin's haughty imperialism will lead to a swift downfall.

BORAT: CULTURAL LEARNINGS OF AMERICA FOR MAKE BENEFIT GLORIOUS NATION OF KAZAKHSTAN (2006)

Sacha Baron Cohen’s most notorious creation, Borat Sagdiyev, isn’t really a stranger at all. He’s more of an infiltrator. And his America isn’t a strange land, either; in fact, it’s one the British comedian smugly believes he knows like the back of his hand. Whether you loved or hated Borat is largely dependent on how much tolerance you have for Baron Cohen’s assumption that he can easily get to the ugly creamed filling under the sweet exterior of America just by biting it in the right spot; there are those who find his style of humor hysterical and telling, and others who find it manipulative and condescending. But no one can doubt, after seeing it in action, how skillfully he wields it, not to inform, but to eviscerate. Borat is a butcher, not a surgeon, and we’re his meat. His Kazakhstan is funny because he correctly assumes that it’s distant enough from our daily lives that we’ll laugh at his fantastic portrayal of it; and his America is funny because he correctly assumes that we’re so far inside of it that we won’t even realize how he’s making it look until it’s far too late. The archetype of the man trapped in a world not of his own making usually derives its humor from the fact that he’s a holy fool, innocently reflecting our reality in his ignorance; Borat shows how dangerous it can be when the holy fool is really an unholy genius who knows exactly how to take advantage of the fact that people are likely to do anything if they think they’re in the presence of someone who doesn’t know any better.

THE NEW WORLD (2005)

It’s no surprise that Terrence Malick’s name would show up on a list of great movies about culture clashes. Since the beginning of his career, he’s specialized in showing us the beauty and violence that grow out of peoples’ encounters with the strange, whether that strangeness is expressed as the dreary middle of the U.S., the uncontrollable vastness of the new west, or the tempting primitivism of the South Pacific in wartime. What’s shocking about The New World is that he manages to pull the same trick twice in one movie – and both times with spectacular results. Filming in modern-day Virginia, his conjuration of the lands that greeted John Smith’s men is so perfect, so unspoiled, so bountiful that it’s almost terrifying. His men were promised heaven, and to see it in this life fills them with an almost religious dread. But this quickly fades: if heaven is on earth, what need have they for law? The settlement soon devolves into a stunted, filthy savagery that stands in marked contrast to the gorgeous plenty of the New World. It’s all done with some of the most breathtaking camera work ever seen, but then the movie takes an astonishing shift – one that, in the hands of a lesser filmmaker, would have shattered the tone of the film. We see England through Pocahontas’ eyes as no less strange and unreal a place than was America in John Smith’s eyes, a place of man without nature, of infinite variations of gray and wet, and it has no less devastating an effect on her life.

MOSCOW ON THE HUDSON (1984)

Made at pretty much the exact last moment that Robin Williams was capable of doing anything likable, Paul Mazursky’s charming Moscow on the Hudson now seems like a relic of an ancient age, but it should be remembered that it came out at a time when the only cinematic method of interacting with the Soviet Union was with hails of gunfire and exploding rocket-bombs. Mazursky’s story of a simple and kind Russian musician who decides to defect during a state visit to New York had its bittersweet moments, as Williams’ Vladimir Ivanoff discovered that life in America is not all smiles and sunshine even for those who have the rare opportunity to have sex with Maria Conchita Alonso. But it also managed to convey the belief, greatly underrepresented in theaters at the time, that Russians were actual human beings who might not deserve to be shot in the face; and it also suggested the possibility – which, as it happened, turned out to be disturbingly correct – that the best way to get the Commies on our good side was just to let them take a gander at a well-cut pair of blue jeans and a fully stocked shelf at the supermarket. Many of Moscow on the Hudson’s land-of-plenty/land-of-want scenes are cliché by this point, but at the time, they seemed fresh and earnest enough to work.

WOODY ALLEN IN GENERAL: PARTICULARLY SLEEPER (1973), BANANAS (1971) & ZELIG (1983)

I used to think of Woody Allen as an explorer of the well-known. He endlessly treads around his own expensively analyzed psyche to tell new truths about self-absorbed Manhattan professionals. Strange then, to realize that much of his early work deals with outsiders who are unable to cope with their surroundings, then suddenly find themselves in even more alien circumstances. In Sleeper he is cryogenically frozen, then thawed in a strangely familiar future where pot-smoking has been replaced by fondling an orb and sex by the Orgasmatron machine. In Bananas he's a hapless doofus who has no particular luck with the ladies. That is, not until he finds himself at the center of guerilla action in a small Central American country in a permanent state of coups and revolutions: an innocent abroad if there ever was one. Then there's Broadway Danny Rose, where Allen stars as a man who lives his entire life somewhat out of his element. (His buddies at the Carnegie Deli suggest a Danny Rose sandwich would be a bagel with Marinara sauce). In Annie Hall he is Alvy Singer, who is perpetually on guard against his familiar New York surroundings turning strange on him. Whenever he ventures outside of New York his suspicion that he is an alien in his own country are confirmed. He cannot function in L.A. and when he visits Annie's family in Wisconsin, he finds himself transformed to a Hassidic Jew. Finally, of course, there is Zelig, the story of the eternal chameleon, never at home, and always adaptable.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Hayden Childs, Leonard Pierce, Sarah Clyne Sundberg

America the Beautiful: 15 Movies That Show What's Right With U.S. (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 21:00:00 GMT

YOUNG MR. LINCOLN (1939)

One of the most famous lines from any John Ford movie is, "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." Not great advice for a reporter, but Ford got away with in this picture, which isn't a straight biopic but a romantic fantasy about the pre-fame Abraham Lincoln (Henry Fonda) as we'd like to imagine it. The movie's script does have a basis in history: the story is built around a murder trial that young Abe took on as a fledgling lawyer. The movie uses this set-up to provide Fonda with the chance to show Lincoln demonstrating his folksy sagacity, his humor, his basic decency and the canniness that would make him a successful politician, but in embryonic form, as a young leading man learning the ropes on his way to becoming a legend. He may not know, as we know, that he's the great Abraham Lincoln. But as we see him figuring out that he has that in him, the movie elevates patriotic corn to the level of folk poetry.

MOSCOW ON THE HUDSON (1984)

Yes, Virginia, Robin Williams used to be good for something. In this melancholy comedy from director Paul Mazursky, Williams slips easily and deeply into the role of a Russian musician who surprises himself by defecting during a trip to New York. It's easy to differentiate this movie from the run of hard-sell, Commie-bashing Cold War movies that Hollywood churned out in the Reagan '80s, and not just because Williams never picks up a machine gun or steps into a boxing ring to beat some patriotic respect into a Russkie villain who's built like a moose. The movie respects the pain of self-exile and the dislocation that comes from the struggle to adjust to a new culture, whether its hero is cursing America after he's been mugged or passing out in a grocery store after suffering a cerebral overload from trying to choose among too many varieties of coffee. Because it sees the craziness in a chauvinistic country composed of immigrants from all over, its tribute to the reasons for taking pleasure and pride in America go down easy, without dishonesty or embarrassment.

JAZZ ON A SUMMER'S DAY (1960)

Bert Stern's record of the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival (featuring performances by Thelonious Monk, Louis Armstrong, Mahalia Jackson, Jack Teagarden, Anita O'Day, Dinah Washington, Chuck Berry, Gerry Mulligan, and others who did more for our nation's good name than anybody whose name you've ever seen on a ballet) preserves, without embalming, the sensation of spending a day blissed out in the sunshine sampling the wide range of everybody's favorite indigenous American art form. With cute kids, chilled babes, pretty boats, and no sunburn.

DAVE CHAPPELLE'S BLOCK PARTY (2005)

Top 5 reasons why I love America: (1) freedom of speech, (2) freedom of assembly, (3) our rich, diverse culture, itself a mix-and-match patchwork of multiple overlapping cultures, (4) the ability of all those overlapping cultures to co-exist and mingle while maintaining their own distinct perspectives and points of view and (5) our greatest export, entertainment. All of these elements are in full effect in Dave’s Chappelle’s Block Party, a rollicking concert documentary that manages (like Woodstock and Stop Making Sense before it) to capture a very specific moment in our national timeline. It’s not just a movie, it’s an event...and I don't mean simply the titular block party, an all-day, all-inclusive jam for the residents of one hardscrabble Brooklyn neighborhood (and one lucky Midwestern marching band) featuring undervalued performers like Erykah Badu, the Roots and Jill Scott and socially conscious rappers like Kanye West and Talib Kwelli. Among other things, the film was a fantastically classy, big-hearted, easy-going comeback for Dave Chappelle after his 2005 "meltdown" (actually a shockingly rare example of celebrity integrity). But, more importantly, in this post-9/11, post-Katrina, post-optimistic, pre-apocalyptic era, director Michel Gondry captures a joyfully defiant moment of celebration, hope and community sorely needed but sorely missing from our recent media landscape.

NASHVILLE (1976)

Everyone wants to write the Great American Novel, but very few people even come close. The same thing goes for films, but if any one qualifies for the title of Great American Movie, it's Robert Altman's masterpiece about the events of a single weekend in the country music capitol. Altman was not then and would never be a jingo: Nashville shows us the very worst that people are capable of throughout its running time and right up until its dramatic conclusion. But while it's a movie about America's flaws and deceptions, it's also a movie about America's grace and possibilities, about how little moments of decency and humanity can shine through even at the worst of times. With its sprawling cast and complex characters, we are shown cynicism, deceit, selfishness, callowness, stupidity and cruelty, but we're also shown beauty, honesty, kindness, determination, charity and insight – often from the same people at different times. Like the best and most ambitious art, Nashville attempts to put the world and everything in it within a limited setting and a restricted narrative, and it succeeds not cleanly, but messily, which is the only way it could have succeeded. Made at a crucial time in American history, where the pride many felt at the upcoming national bicentennial conflicted with recent events, including war, economic uncertainty, and political scandal. It couldn't have been more timely, and in its two hours and forty minutes, it does what a great American work of art must do: illustrate what is dreadful about our nation, in order to throw what is glorious about it into sharp relief.

Click here for Part One & Part Two

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce