The Screengrab : mpaa

The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: "It's a Wonderful Life"

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 20:30:00 GMT

Eight films into our little holiday movie marathon, we finally arrive at the one that most of our readers who haven't spent the last sixty years in the Witness Protection Program in a cave on Mars have probably already seen a dozen times or so: Frank Capra's legendary 1946 Christmas movie, It's a Wonderful Life. While there's been dozens and dozens of adaptations of A Christmas Carol, there's only one It's a Wonderful Life: despite decades of references, parodys, homages and metacommentaries, the big-screen adaptation of the Phillip Van Doren short story "The Greatest Gift" remains one of a kind. Thanks to an inexplicable chain of events that led to its falling into the public domain for a number of years, it was shown on pretty much every television station at Christmas for decades; finding someone in the U.S. who hasn't seen it is next to impossible.

The challenge when discussing It's a Wonderful Life, then, isn't to explain its plot or detail the great things about it: these are things most people know intimately from repeated first-hand experience. The challege is to think of something new to say about a movie that almost everyone of a certain age has seen, probably more than once. Frank Capra's surehanded direction, the solid script (primarily by Capra and Frances Goodrich), and iconic performances by screen legend Jimmy Stewart (whose interpretation of George Bailey is more responsible than anything for the cultural shorthand we now have for him), future television star Donna Reed, and Hollywood patriarch Lionel Barrymore are the building blocks for a film that defines the word "Capraesque", but what makes it resonate so? It it simple repetition that makes this the Christmas classic above all others?

Entire books have been written about It's a Wonderful Life, and we'll be breaking no new ground in discussing the film in our limited space. But one thing worth mentioning is that how terrifically effective the entire cast is: at a time when the star system was in full swing, Capra and his collaborators (which included script doctors in the uncredited form of Clifford Odets and Dalton Trumbo) populated Bedford Falls with an entire star system of great actors and actresses, many of them character types who gave the performances of their careers in the film. The entire cast seems to take their acting cues from the oversized yet surprisingly natural performance of Jimmy Stewart, who had to be talked into playing the role -- his first since returning from a traumatic tour of duty in WWII.

One thing that's finally getting a due amount of attention after years of being glossed over in critical overviews, at a time when "Capraesque" was misguided jargon for simple-minded patriotic feel-good movies, is how deeply dark and sometimes subversive It's a Wonderful Life can be. Mixed in with all the appropriately heartwarming stuff about family, neighborliness and the power of choosing life is some undeniably cynical, nasty commentary on life as we live it. Capra lets his social-realist background bubble surpringly to the fore considering this is a movie with a bumbling trainee angel named Clarence in it, and for a movie most parents feel totally at ease showing to their children, there are many dark hints of suicide, prostitution, economic ruin, and anti-capitalism so pronounced that the FBI was said to consider the entire film merely an elevated form of Red propaganda designed to soften up our citizens to commie anti-banker rhetoric.

J. Edgar Hoover's boys weren't exactly off by a mile. Frank Capra meant for It's a Wonderful Life to be inspirational as well as confrontational, to show an American spirit challenged and often miserable if always ultimately triumphant. This was the only major motion picture to be produced by Capra's Liberty Studio, a venture designed to showcase serious issue-driven films about what it means to be an American; but even if it were the only major motion picture Capra ever made, it would be enough. In a way, it's fortunate that RKO's operators made the foolish mistake of not renewing the film's copyright at a critical time: when It's a Wonderful Life slid into the public domain, it ensured that it would be viewable at least once a year by audiences who might not have otherwise gotten a chance to see it, and fully take in its hidden depths.

12 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS RATING: An unparallelled 12 drummers drumming out a message of hope and redemption. Simply one of the greatest Christmas stories ever told, as well as one of the finest movies of its era (even if it did get screwed by the Motion Picture Academy. If you have the chance, I'd also recommend a viewing of Hirokazu Koreeda's masterful After Life (Japanese title: Wandafuru Raifu), a brilliant, unforgettable film that isn't a holiday movie but purely and beatifully distills the esence of It's a Wonderful Life -- its primary influence -- in an astonishing way.

The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: The Nighmare Before Christmas

May God Bless And Keep The Czar...Far Away From Us!

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 15:45:00 GMT

Everybody loves the giddy thrill of convention season, but the beginning of one man's political career is the start of another man's lobbying campaign, and few sights in contemporary politics are less edifying than watching swarms of lobbyists descend like locusts on the Democratic and Republican National Conventions in hopes that whoever wins will be amenable enough to bribery to shower exemptions and special favors on their industry should they get elected. And as far as this shameless behavior goes, it don't come much more shameless than that of the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America.

The RIAA and MPAA, two mobbed-up, indescribably crooked organizations whose entire histories consist of marginalizing the payments made to the artists who make them rich in order to maximize their own profits, are both sniffing around Denver -- and will afterwards drag their sorry, crooked carcasses to the Twin Cities -- in order to coke up interest in their latest scheme to unlawfully protect their own shoddy, dying industries and punish the average consumer for their own failures: MPAA boss and former senator Dan Glickman, apparently unaware that the economy is tanking, the environment is polluted, and the country is fighting a war on two fronts, seeks the creation of a cabinet-level "copyright czar" to assist his organization in illegally fixing prices and suing retirees for copyright infringement.

If the effort succeeds, we here at the Screengrab will salute Glickman and his cronies for not only having created the single most pointless, self-serving cabinet post in the history of democracy, but for setting the precedent for the Loansharking Czars, Extortion Czars, and Pimping Czars that will no doubt follow in its wake. Thanks, MPAA!

The Gay Pride Top Twenty (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 20:30:00 GMT

DESERT HEARTS (1985)

Unlike the much-heralded 1982 Olympic-athletes-in-love drama Personal Best, 1985’s lower-profile lesbian romance Desert Hearts (based on a novel by Jane Rule) was (A) actually directed by a woman (Donna Deitch) and (B) depicted a love story where neither participant ultimately winds up going back to a man after a tentative Sapphic fling. Like Marilyn Monroe’s character years before in The Misfits, Helen Shaver’s restrained English professor Vivian Bell finds herself in Reno, Nevada, sweating out the state’s six-week residency requirement in order to obtain a quick divorce from her husband. While killing time in a no-boys-allowed guest house (run by Jack Tripper’s old landlady, Audra Lindley), Vivian meets a free spirit named Cay (Patricia Charbonneau) and, much to her own surprise, discovers an intense spiritual and sexual connection she never experienced with the XY chromosome set. Given the don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t even acknowledge that homosexuality exists mindset of the story’s 1959 setting, Vivian isn’t even entirely aware that she’s been living in a closet, but once she’s out, her feelings trump her fears of a life less ordinary, and she invites Cay to follow her back to New York, and Cay admits that Vivian “reached in and put a string of lights” around her heart, one of the great swoony lines in the annals of romantic cinema.

THIS FILM IS NOT YET RATED (2006)

A funny, real-life detective yarn, a brief history of film and a timely exposé of American cultural hypocrisy...all that AND a compendium of notorious, uncensored sex scenes? What's not to like? This Film Is Not Yet Rated is a gotcha! documentary in the Super Size Me tradition, where the filmmaker explores a larger topic by subjecting himself to a series of misadventures. In this case, the subject is the shadowy, puritanical Motion Picture Association of America, an unelected, unimpeachable board which subtly shapes our national cultural agenda by determining which films (and values) are "family-friendly" and which are marginalized by means of the current G-PG-PG13-R-NC17 ratings system. Combining movie clips and filmmaker interviews, director Kirby Dick demonstrates how the MPAA habitually demonizes sex in movies (particularly the homo- variety) while letting violence slide...but the real fun of the movie is watching the ironically-named Dick track down the secretive MPAA board members together with a spunky private detective (who, coincidentally but with obvious thematic irony, also happens to be a lesbian mother) before submitting the very film you're watching to the very group it's about for a rating in a great meta moment of "Fuck You" brio.

REFLECTIONS IN A GOLDEN EYE (1967)

Long before the "Don't ask, don't tell" era, a Southern army post was probably the least healthy environment for a deeply closeted homosexual imaginable. That's certainly the case in John Huston's adaptation of the Carson McCullers novel Reflections in a Golden Eye, in which pretty much every character has a psychosexual hang-up of some sort. Marlon Brando is Major Weldon Penderton, whose pride is entirely tied up in being something he's not: a portrait of courage, a leader of men. Elizabeth Taylor is his wife Leonora, one of the all-time ballbusters, and she's definitely got his number. "Firebird is a horse," he grumbles one morning, annoyed at his wife's devotion to the animal. "Firebird is a stallion," she hisses, and though it may have taken the 1967 audience a while to catch on (the words "gay" or "homosexual" are never mentioned – probably couldn't be mentioned), Penderton could hardly feel more emasculated if she horsewhipped him across the face in front of his colleagues – which she later does. A pent-up bottle of rage and self-loathing (he rides a horse like he's got the post's flagpole up his ass), Penderton finally pops his cork when he catches the object of his obsession, a hunky but dim young soldier played by Robert Forster in his movie debut, in his wife's bedroom sniffing through her undies. The movie's ending is a bit overheated, but Brando is brilliantly bizarre as a gay man who is definitely in the wrong place at the wrong time.

FOX AND HIS FRIENDS (1975)

He certainly wasn’t the first gay filmmaker, but a legitimate argument can be made that the brilliant German director Rainier Werner Fassbinder was the first gay filmmaker of importance. Fassbinder himself was openly gay, and homosexuality often played a part in his films, whether obviously or subtly, but Fox and His Friends was the first movie he made where a homosexual romance was the centerpiece of the plot. More importantly, though, as the director stressed in interviews, the gayness of the characters is not “a problem, or a comic term”. Fassbinder wanted nothing more – and nothing less – than to bring us a moving, tragic soap opera romance in which the main characters were not heterosexual. To accomplish this, he had to make the movie extremely personal (he filmed many of its scenes in the gay Berlin demimonde he frequented in his private life, and he chose to play the character of naïve working-class lottery winner Fox Biberkopf himself), but he also had to ensure that the movie would neither humiliate nor glorify its gay characters. In order for it to work, he had to show that gays were just as noble, as innocent, and as decent as other people, but he also had to show that they were just as base, as manipulative and as cruel as other people. The result is a masterpiece that contains everything that is great about Fassbinder as a director, and one of the most sad and human stories in the history of film drama: what Fox gives up for love, and the way his need for acceptance and affection leads him to ruin, resonates universally. That’s what good movies – be they ‘gay’ or ‘straight’ – are supposed to do.

BEN-HUR (1959)

One of the most iconic gay performances in cinema history came from a man who not only wasn’t gay, but apparently had no idea he was supposed to be playing a gay character, and when he found out, vehemently denied it for decades. The story goes that director William Wyler and screenwriter Gore Vidal found the notion that Messala and Judah Ben-Hur would have been so close, only to come to a position of extreme hatred over a fairly arcane dispute over politics, a tad hard to believe. Vidal, whose reputation as a bit of a troublemaker has never been a secret, came up with the notion that the two men had been lovers when they were young, and their split was not over politics, but over Ben-Hur’s eventual rejection of Messala. Wyler thought it was worth a shot, and while the two men discussed it with Stephen Boyd, who played Messala, they dared not bring the subject up with Heston, who was none too fond of gays. Naturally, the script never directly mentioned the situation either, but given the way Heston’s adult Ben-Hur interacts with Messala (the result, according to both Vidal and Boyd, of precise wording in the script and careful direction from Wyler), it’s a bit hard to believe that Heston couldn’t figure out that something was going on. Still, for reasons of his own, Heston spent the next forty years as the sole representative of the “I did not play a homo in Ben-Hur” position, going so far as to deny Gore Vidal had anything to do with the finished script of the film – a claim Vidal handily disproved, using, among other things, passages in Heston’s own autobiography as a source.

Click here to read Part One, Part Three and Part Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Andrew Osborne

Watch it for Free: This Film is Not Yet Rated

Gwynne Watkins — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Ever wondered who those people in the MPAA are, and what kind of criteria they're using to distinguish between a PG-13 and an R? Well guess what -- nobody knows. That's because the MPAA is, quite literally, a secret organization, whose members are anonymous and whose voting methods are entirely arbitrary. But if you want to know more, Kirby Dick has uncovered as much as humanly possible in his anti-censorship documentary This Film is Not Yet Rated.

Dick's film combines director interviews, MPAA-censored clips and private investigator footage, all with the goal of showing how the MPAA is stifling the filmmaking industry. The film would have been stronger if Dick had scored more face time with big-name directors; their first-hand stories of ratings warfare are just unbelievable. (What the MPAA deemed obscene in Boys Don't Cry -- not the violence, but the close-up of Chloe Sevigny's face during an orgasm -- is extremely telling.) Equally effective is the montage that juxtaposes identically shot sex scenes, one gay and one straight, while contrasting the films' ratings. Although the private eye scenes are less compelling, the PI's eventual discoveries about MPAA members' identities are sobering; in short, everything the MPAA has said about its members is a lie, and their appeals board seems jury-rigged against edgy and independent filmmakers.

Stream or download the whole film here.

Woody Allen is Smokin'!

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 17:15:00 GMT

At least, that's what the New York Times says about his latest, Cassandra's Dream — and, more to the point, the MPAA isn't doing anything about it.

Although Brooks Barnes claims that the characters in Cassandra's Dream smoke so heavily that "some patrons have exited theaters feeling like they just paid $12 to sit in the ashtray of an 18-wheeler", the film netted a Kool Ultra-Mild of a rating at PG-13 — this despite the Motion Picture Association of America's claim less than a year ago that they'd be cracking down hard on portrayals of heavy smoking on film, with "pervasive" use of the coffin nail a virtual guarantee of a more restrictive rating.

So far, we haven't heard of a single film sporting a "rated M for Marlboro" rating. If smoking is less prevalent in movies than it used to be, it's probably due to general healthier lifestyles and the growing social taboo on smoking indoors being reflected on film. But even if it weren't Woody at the helm, it's difficult to believe the MPAA was doing more than. . . well, blowing smoke last May when they announced the anti-tobacco crackdown in film. It's served its purpose in placating public pressure groups, and it's not hard to imagine that enforcement of the standard will be much of a priority, particularly since its target isn't illegal and doesn't carry much weight with the religious right the way that sex, bad language and drug use do.

Still, Weinstein Company boss Harvey Weinstein says that when the film hits DVD, it will carry the same anti-smoking PSAs that other recent Weinstein releases have featured. An ex-smoker, he believes he has a moral responsibility to educate the young about the dangers of smoking. Then again, Harv also believes that he could end movie piracy overnight if he could just get Shia LaBeouf to convince kids that it's not cool, so take his advice with a grain of salt.

Morning Deal Report: Bollocks.

Peter Smith — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 16:00:00 GMT

Oh, the good ol', progressive ol' MPAA: they've rejected the poster (visible at right) for Alex Gibney's documentary Taxi to the Dark Side, about the U.S. military's torture of foreign detainees. No blood, no gore, what's the problem? Well, it might upset children. And remember, all American political discourse must be pitched (gently, underhand) to the comfort level of an eight-year-old.

After the Fight-Club-reunion hype around State of Play, with Brad Pitt and Edward Norton sharing a screen once more, Pitt fled the coop. Now Norton has done the same, and Ben Affleck will replace him.

Jerry Bruckheimer gets into video games. This probably won't be a very difficult transition.

From the Nerve Film Issue: Censory Perception

Peter Smith — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 20:00:00 GMT

Today in Nerve's Film Issue: Gwynne Watkins tests your ability to identify a film by its objectionable content, with the help of ScreenIt.com's comprehensive lists of film no-nos ("Some characters have bad attitudes for wanting to conquer all others by invading and killing them.") What MPAA rating best describes you? Find out here.