The Screengrab : new line cinema

Precursors: Friday the 13th VII-X

Nick Schager — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 16:00:00 GMT

After six grisly films, Jason Voorhees’ modus operandi had become so ludicrously predictable – crush a guy’s head, throw a body through a window, stab a sexpot through a bed mattress, etc. – that the only way to keep the franchise alive was through pure, unadulterated outrageousness. And as this week’s third and final recap reveals, there was plenty of ridiculousness to go around in Friday the 13th’s last four chapters.

Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988)

Following Part VI’s no-seriousness-allowed lead, The New Blood concentrates on a psychically powered teen who, as a kid, accidentally used her abilities to drown abusive boozehound dad in Crystal Lake. Years later, she tries to resurrect him with her mind but (oops!) winds up reanimating chained-underwater Jason instead. It’s a hilarious Freudian-infused set-up, but the paint-by-numbers script rarely exploits its paternal-hang-ups premise for sufficient laughs or scares. Rather than an inventively kooky battle-of-the-paranormal-titans, what the visually well-framed film mainly offers up is scene after scene of dimwits getting perfunctorily slaughtered (usually pre-, during or post- sex) either in a cabin or while running around the forest at night. Kudos, however, to an ending that seems to relish its own amusing preposterousness, and to the filmmakers for recognizing that, if they could no longer make Jason frightening, they could at least force his victims – namely, Susan Blu as the psychic girl’s mother – to sport some truly terrifying ‘80s hair.

Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989)

Is Part VIII’s decision to predominantly set its action on a boat rather than in NYC meant to upend expectations in a way Jason’s killings don’t? It would be nice to think so, though Rob Hedden’s film is so uniformly chintzy that the real reason for the story’s delayed arrival in Manhattan is likely due to an apparent $67 production budget. After an eternity spent watching electricity-resurrected Jason dispatch party cruiser passengers, a girl who once escaped little Jason’s underwater clutches and a boy with daddy issues make their way to the Big Apple (via rowboat!), which – full of leather-jacketed hoods doing drugs, mugging people, and then tossing their empty wallets into rat-infested trash cans – looks like something out of Street Smart. That a junkie injects the film’s heroine with heroin is a humorous touch. Less sensible, however, is giving Jason the power of teleportation (how else to explain his movement from one shot to another?), or the idea that coating the serial killer in shit – in a fitting finale, Jason is drowned in sewage – might somehow magically turn him back into a little boy.

Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993)

The first Friday the 13th not made by Paramount, Jason Goes to Hell has the distinctive feel of (as well as a gloved-hand cameo from) New Line’s trademark horror franchise, Nightmare on Elm St. Ignoring the fact that, when last we saw him, Jason had morphed into a nude child, this “final” Friday commences with Jason getting blown up and then magically possessing a number of host bodies in order to reach Crystal Lake and be resurrected through his last living relatives: sister Diana (Erin Grey), niece Jessica (Kari Keegan), or Jessica’s baby. The notion that Jason can only be born again through, or killed by, his kin is explained by a bounty hunter (21 Jump Street’s Steven Williams) who’s randomly well-informed about this suddenly made-up mythological guideline. A mortician chowing down on Jason’s beating heart expertly kick-starts the gore, but far too much body-jumping, unmasked zombie villains, and shots of spirit-energy flying into or out of Jason make this the series’ second worst installment after Part V.

Jason X (2002)

Unlike his prior two outings, in which Jason barely visits Manhattan and never kicks ass in Hell (respectively), the supernatural fiend spends most of Jason X where advertised: in space! After being cryogenically frozen, Jason is thawed out 450 years later aboard a spaceship and immediately commences his usual slicing and dicing of young adults. Continuity gaps the size of a small planet regularly crop up, yet prove no more distracting than the intergalactic crew’s penchant for spouting 2002-era colloquialisms (“Know what I’m sayin’?”). A fembot eventually blasts Jason to smithereens, mainly so the filmmakers can have him rise again as a cyborg, a sci-fi turn of events that pushes the series about as far as possible from its modest kids-murdered-in-the-woods origins. Still, upon closer inspection, Jason’s transformation into a literal killing machine actually makes perfect sense, given that the Friday the 13th franchise’s defining characteristic always was its mechanical approach to hack-and-slash horror.

Click Here For Parts One & Two

Take Five: HBO

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 30 May 2008 18:45:00 GMT

Sex and the City: The Movie opens everywhere that Cosmopolitans are sold today, and the odds are pretty good that it will make enough money to keep Sarah Jessica Parker in sundresses for the rest of her life. There is little doubt as to whether or not the movie -- based on the inescapable HBO original series -- will be successful; the real question is whether or not it's going to be any good. One thing is for sure: it will at least make more money than the other films that have been made out of HBO's original television programming. They're a pretty dismal set of money-losers and critic-displeasers, ranging from the not good (Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny) to the very bad (the Mr. Show movie, Run Ronnie Run) to the completely awful (the Tales from the Crypt spin-off Bordello of Blood). If the long-rumored Deadwood movie ever gets made, or if the Sopranos movie doesn't turn out to be a disappointment, this may change things, but in the meantime, HBO's television shows have yet to produce a movie worth watching. Less known, however, is that HBO has a production arm that has put out a number of worthwhile films, many of which had theatrical releases prior to their run on the pay cable network; some of them, in fact, were released exclusively for theatrical release through HBO Films or their sister company, Picturehouse FIlms. With their overseeing company, New Line Cinema, dead, the future of HBO Films is uncertain, but given the quality of their past releases, they're sure to find a new home somewhere with parent company Time/Warner. Here's five fine films that were released under the HBO Film distribution banner.

AMERICAN SPLENDOR (2003)

The first, and arguably the best, of a rash of terrific film releases by HBO Films in the mid-2000s, Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini's inventive (and sometimes elusive) documentary about underground comics writer Harvey Pekar stands alongside the remarkable Crumb as a compelling, if sometimes troubling, look at an American original. The comparison is by no means coincidental: legendary cartoonist Robert Crumb is a longtime friend of Pekar's, and the man he first recruited to illustrate his stories of the struggles, victories, humiliations and triumphs of everyday life. If it's a little disengenuous to claim that Pekar is the indestructably normal person he claims to be (and it is -- normal people, after all, do not compulsively and sometimes brilliantly catalog the minutia of their lives in autobiographical comics), there's nothing at all phony about Pekar, his everyday heroism, the skewed attitude and refusal to surrender to the diificultues of an ordinary life, or his irascible and cynical -- if never openly cruel -- sense of humor.

ELEPHANT (2003)

The first of a series of collaborations between HBO Films and director Gus Van Sant, Elephant is the best of the lot -- and may in fact be one of the finest films of the decade. Inspired by the horrific mass murder at Columbine High School, the fragmented, almost dreamlike story of a pair of alienated high school students who go on a shooting rampage is a meditation on violence unlike any other in recent cinematic history. Elephant is a quiet, open, almost meditative film, breaking off to follow one character after another in order to present the day of the shooting as resolutely normal; but its greatest trick is to constantly dangle in front of us tantalizing 'clues' to the motivation of the killers, only to have every one of them lead to an unproductive, uncomfortable dead end. After the final bloodbath, we have an almost tangible need to know the whys and wherefores of the senseless killing, but the movie is wise enough to deny us an easy solution to an impossibly difficult question, and is brave enough to believe in its director's vision and leave us hanging without a quick fi or an easy scapegoat.

DEATH IN GAZA (2004)

One of the least partisan -- and most tragically unbearable -- documentaries about the Israeli-Palestine conflict was the 2004 film Death in Gaza, which concentrated largely on the impact the war had on children in the area. Focusing on a quartet of Palestinian kids, all in their early teens or younger, who take up arms against their occupiers, Death in Gaza neither exculpates the bad behavior of the kids (their anti-Semitism is extremely uncomfortable, especially from children so young) or glosses over why they might be so driven to militancy and violence (we are constantly exposed to the insufferable living conditions into which they are born and raised, and every one of them has a jaw-dropping horror story about the death of a friend or relative). What makes the move especially harrowing is that its 34-year-old British director, James Miller, was himself killed by the Israeli Defense Forces while filming in Gaza at night, a typically stupid, futile, and enraging event that is captured on film and shown matter-of-factly during the course of the documentary. Powerful and sad.

MARIA FULL OF GRACE (2004)

Joshua Marston's feature about a young Colombian teenager who becomes a drug mule in order to raise money for her impoverished family is filmed in such an effective, simple neorealist style -- and manages to so effectively encapsulate one of the most degrading yet banal aspects of the dehumanizing aspects of capitalism -- that it's hard to avoid comparisons to De Sica's The Bicycle Thief. And while it's not even remotely in that film's league, it's still very much a movie worth watching, updating De Sica's themes for a post-socialist age, and it does at least have one advantage over its spiritual forebear: the presense of the heartbreaking, compelling, fascinating lead actress, Catalino Sandino Moreno. The then-17-year-old Moreno turns in one of the most watchable yet tragic performances in recent memory as a headstrong, intelligent girl who has nonetheless begun to move in circles who will shape her into something she cannot control; it's almost impossible to take your eyes off her from the beginning of the movie to the end.

THE NOTORIOUS BETTIE PAGE (2005)

The Notorious Bettie Page, a serviceable if never stunning biography of the legendary 1950s pin-up queen, was brought to us by the writer/director team of Guinevere Turner and Mary Harron. The duo also was responsible for the highly problematic American Psycho, and Harron also directed the truly discomfiting I Shot Andy Warhol. While its problems are different (a lack of depth and a somewhat flat visual style, neither of which were the difficulties with Harron's other movies), it does reflect the curate's egg nature of all three films. Clearly, it wasn't a movie made to do nothing more than titillate, but by the same token, we walk out of the theater knowing precious little more about the notorious Bettie Page than we did when we came in. That said, it shares with the other films a great deal of energy and feeling, and is supported by the sort of tremendous central performance Harron seems to coax so easily out of her stars -- Gretchen Mol is easily the equal of Christian Bale or Lili Taylor, and it's her charm and control in the role that makes this a movie worth watching.

New Line Projects Enter Development Limbo

Phil Nugent — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Being a Hollywood screenwriter is an unpredictable rollercoaster of a career even when the studio you've finally worked out a deal with hasn't just basically disappeared. But that's the case with those writers who had projects pending with New Line Cinema, the idiosyncratic company whose recent financial woes ended with the decision to fold it into Warner Bros. (the better to "streamline" its slate of films) and the departure of Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne, the CEOs who founded New Line forty years ago. A lot of people who thought their next projects had been safely sheparded past Development Hell have found themselves right back in purgatory while the "transition team" scours the wreckage with a mind to defining just what the new New Line is supposed to be all about. Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Jay Fernandez identifies the types of projects that are probably safe, mainly sequels and remakes tied to New Line's licensed properties such as Freddy Krueger and the Nightmare on Elm Street series, and "low-budget comedies like The Grackle, The $40,000 Man and All You Can Eat." Imperilled: "higher-budget or prestige dramas and thrillers, such as writer-director Edward Norton's adaptation of Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn, Brett Ratner's production of Mr. S: My Life With Frank Sinatra and producers Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci's Red Cell." (Some lucky winners may be bumped up the chain to become Warner Bros. productions.) On the plus side, some projects that had become snared in New Line's corporate tentacles and weren't looking to get made may revert to their creators, who'll have another shot at placing them with another studio. Right now, there isn't much anyone can do besides wait and see.

The Lawyering of the "Rings"

Phil Nugent — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 21:00:00 GMT

New Line Cinema only recently settled a lawsuit filed by Peter Jackson, director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, that was supposed to clear things up between the studio and the filmmaker and open the way to production on Jackson's version of The Hobbit. Now the studio has been hit by a suit by heirs of J. R. R. Tolkien and a group of publishers who are looking to tap the studio for millions. Also waiting for their day in court: the Saul Zaentz Company, which once upon a time owned the film rights to Tolkien's work--they sold them to Miramax, which in turn sold them to New Line, and which has already had its own complicated round of legal action with New Line — and "sixteen New Zealand actors who appear in supporting parts in the films, who last year charged New Line with bilking them of a share in an estimated $100 million profit from the sale of video games, caps and other film-related merchandise." As The New York Times reports, "the trilogy may be turning into the first true cinematic 'franchise' for local legal representatives. The lawsuits, to some extent, have fed one another, and are providing a feast for those who bill by the hour."

Much of the — let's be generous and call it "miscommunication" — between all these warring parties may come down to New Line's status as an "independent studio", albeit one owned by Time Warner, which has its own manner of accounting for international revenue that differs from that of the major, worldwide studios. That's cold comfort for New Line when it considers the full ramifications of the Tolkien family suit, which "has the earmarks of a public relations nightmare." The studio stands accused of shafting the heirs of a beloved author, including a charitable trust whose revenues go to various very good causes, by ignoring a long-standing agreement regarding the money they were to receive from any film adaptations of the Rings books. Bonnie Eskenazi one of the lawyers for the Tolkien forces, has said that her clients waited so many years before filing suit because they were innocent enough to think that the greedy movie hustlers could be dealt with on a reasonable level, without bringing lawyers into it: "They do things politely, in a certain manner," she said, a statement that for all the sense it will make to most lawyers in the greater Los Angeles area might as well have been issued in Esperantu. Certainly it seems a long, long time ago that the Rings movie project smacked anyone of a risky financial venture. It'll be the ultimate sick joke about Hollywood accounting if the comparatively modest follow-up project The Hobbit never gets off the ground because New Line can't get everyone paid to the courts' satisfaction.

Copy Cat Culture

Phil Nugent — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 16:30:00 GMT

In Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind, Jack Black and Mos Def play old-school video store clerks who, having accidentally erased their entire inventory of VHS tapes, "remake" their own versions of such rental-house perennials as RoboCop and Driving Miss Daisy with a Camcorder and the kind of props that an eight-year-old might use to construct his cardboard puppet theater. "They call this process "Sweding", for reasons that Gondry has already made his best attempt to explain to the Los Angeles Times' Chris Lee: "'I wanted a name that meant nothing,' Paris native Gondry said in Clouseau-esque Franglais about the invention of the verb. 'I had in mind, like, the suede shoes -- a fake velvet. A sort of ultra-suede? But I always get the word wrong because I'm French.'" Hey, they say that the first step is just admitting that you have a problem.

Aaron Sugarman, New Line Cinema's senior vice president for interactive marketing, thinks that the key to selling the movie may be turning people on to the great new world of Sweding, which shouldn't be hard; the way he sees it, the process is already well underway. "Everyone's taken by this idea of taking these great movies you love and remaking them into your own thing," he says. "It's what half the stuff on YouTube is." (Not to mention this fan favorite, whose makers might want to have a little chat with Gondry and Sugarman about their sources of inspiration.) The movie's own website extends the idea to the Internet, offering Sweded versions of such sites as IMDB and MySpace, and encouraging visitors to apply the Sweding process to their own lives, which had better have a lot of spare time set aside. The filmmakers plan to set up a "Sweding suite" at the Sundance Film Festival and offer workshop space to potential Sweders at SoHo's Deitch Projects gallery; Sweded fan films will shown at the gallery and on YouTube, though Gondry, to his credit, drew the line at a cross-promotion with Blockbuster, saying that turning what's meant as a celebration of independence and amateur creativity into a deal with a big corporation would amount to "contradicting ourselves." Meanwhile, New Line is reportedly "reaching out" to such directors as Robert Zemeckis and Ivan Reitman, whose works are Sweded in the movie, and inviting them to return to favor by producing their own Sweded versions of Be Kind Rewind. Ivan Reitman's version of a Michel Guidry film? Sounds like a sure-fire formula for turning gold into straw, but when it comes to surreal thinking, few filmmakers could have anything on a senior vice president in charge of interactive marketing.