The Screengrab : new york times

Fish Stories

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 16:30:00 GMT

Somewhat lost in the shuffle of the endless top ten lists that appeared at the end of 2008 was this curiosity: Stanley Fish's list of the ten best American movies of all time. Fish, a legal scholar, literary theorist, philosopher, and author, is well known for his irascible opinions, unique antifundamentalist arguments, and ability to make friends -- and, just as easily, enemies -- on both sides of the ideological spectrum. He's also a somewhat legendary film books, and several of his many books are peppered with analogies from and references to his favorite movies.

Fish is definitely a product of his time and place (as he'd be the first to admit), and his list relies pretty heavily on films that would have made a big impression on an urban male of his particular age. The few modern movies that make his list range from the predictable (Raging Bull) to the surprising (Groundhog Day), but his commentary on all the films is worth reading, as he excercises his rare gift to cut to the heart of moral poses and contradictions -- as in his review of Sunset Blvd.: "When the movie begins, Gillis comes across as a nice guy, somewhat down on his luck, and Norma Desmond (Swanson) comes across as an egomaniacal monster who pressures him into becoming her boy-toy. But even before the final incredible scene of Desmond descending a staircase while the camera, empty of film, rolls, she has earned the sympathy we extend to the terribly needy, and he has revealed himself to be the true monster, a betrayer of Desmond, of the young girl (NancyOlson) who sees more in him than there is, and of himself."

The Wild Bunch doesn't make Fish's top ten (though he presents it as one of his uncommented-upon top twenty), which is too bad. The classic Sam Peckinpah western inspired him to write one of his most insightful illustrations of the problems of moral absolutism, in the early part of his book The Trouble with Principle: "While I was writing the chapters of this book, a scene from Sam Peckinpah's classic western The Wild Bunch was never far from my mind. The Wild Bunch is an outlaw gang led by two grizzled veterans played ot a career-performance turn by William Holden and Ernest Borgnine. One evening, the two are sitting around discussing an old comrade who has gone over to the other side and now rides at the head of the band of railroad detectives pursuing them. The Borgnine character is incensed and can't understand why their old friend doesn't abandon the pursuit and come home to where he really belongs. You have to remember, the Holden character says, he gave his world to the railroad. So what? is the response; it's not giving your word that's important, it's who you give your word to. I read the scene as a profound and concise analysis of the great divide in political theory. On the one side is the man of principle for whom a formal contract must be kept irrespective of the moral status of the other party; when you give your word, you give your word and that's it. On the other side is the man who varies his obligations according to the moral worth of the persons he encounters; some people have a call on your integrity, others don't, and the important thing is to determine at every moment which is which. There is, I think, nodoubt about which of these two visions is today the more generally approved. The Holden character speaks in the accents of Enlightenment liberalism; what he says is in accord with maxims many of us have long since internalized: 'A man's word is his bond.' 'Ours is a government of laws, not men.' 'You can't justify the means by the end.' 'Respect for your fellow man must be extended to all and not selectively.' Each of these maxims urges us to enter a perspective wider than that formed by our local affiliations and partisan goals; each gestures toward a morality more capacious than the morality of our tribe, our association, our profession or religion; each invites us to inhabity what the legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin calls 'the forum of principle', the forum in which our allegiances are not to persons or to wished-for outcomes but to abstract norms that neither respect nor disrespect particular persons and are indifferent to outcomes. Not that there has never been a strong argument on the other side. The Borgnine character is not alone in his sentiments, and among those who would support him in the exchange (though they would be an odd couple) is John Milton. Milton and his characters are always saying things like 'You are not worthy to be convinced' (the Lady to Comus in the masque of that name) or 'You don't owe any loyalty to a king who is not acting like one' (Milton to his countrymen in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates) or 'Everyone should be allowed to speak and publish, except of course Catholics' (Milton to the Parliament in The Areopagitica). When Satan describes himself to the angel Gabriel as a 'faithful leader' (Paradise Lost, IV, 933), the angel immediately replies, 'Faithful to who,? To thy rebellious crew? Army of fiends?' Like the Borgnine character, Gabriel refuses a notion of fidelity that is indifferent as to its object; some are deserving of your faith, some others are not, and to maintain loyalty merely because you once pledged it is to mistake an abstraction for an object of worship and to default on your responsibility first to determine what (or who) is good and true and then to follow it."

So Much For That "Never-Ending Story" Sequel, or, Guber Goes To College

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 15:30:00 GMT

You know, you spend the best years of your life arguing against the conservative notion that academia is full of navel-gazing, pointy-headed nudniks so out of touch with the real world that they suck up millions to pursue theses that anyone with an ounce of common sense could disprove in thirty seconds, and then something like this comes along.

In a story that smacks equally of grant-chasing and pure desperation, the Massachussets Institute of Technology -- providing dynamic proof of what happens when people trained in science attempt to apply objective standards to subjective fields of study -- has collaborated with a number of Hollywood big-shots to create something called the Center for Future Storytelling. The premise behind this colossal boondoggle is pure crankery: the movies, they say, are running out of stories. Despite record profits at the box office, we're apparently running dry of narrative (an argument their spokespeople bolster with such fist-shaking geezer logic as blaming text messaging, <i>Guitar Hero</I> and cell phones). It's basically an updated version of the argument advanced in the 1970s that thanks to the proliferation of rock 'n' roll music, we were rapidly running out of melody, and within thirty years there would be no such thing as a new song.

The whole thing is patently absurd. Narrative is a rhetorical device, not a natural resource; it can't be depleted like a coal mine. We'll no more run out of stories than we'll run out of metaphors. Even the act of defining different types of stories in order to prove that we're running out of them is a form of narrative. Do we see an increasing number of shitty movies based on old TV shows? Sure we do. But it's not because there aren't any original stories; it's because Hollywood keeps financing hackwork. And why does Hollywood keep financing hackwork? Because people pay to see it. Blaming some kind of imaginary depletion of the Narrative Zone on scriptwriters' inability to write decent endings ignores the fact that the whole thing is largely a business transaction, not a creative endeavor. And even if the ridiculous claim were true -- which it isn't -- it ignores the fact that there are other ways to tell innovative stories on film than narrative, and Hollywood has shown precious little interest in them, either.

What's especially ridiculous about the article, though, isn't just its moronic premise, or the fact that a bunch of college professors with nothing better to do are going to spend the next ten years dicking around with it. It's the involvement of Hollywood big-shots, and their shockingly hypocritical statements about the whole affair. One of the Center for Future Storytelling's primary backers is Peter Guber, who teaches a class devoted to traditional narrative and shakes his wise old head, lamenting, "How do you compete with Transformers?" This, of course, is the same Peter Guber who brought us Flashdance, D.C. Cab and Tango & Cash. Also involved in the project is Bobby Farrelly, who blames low-brow audiences for the dearth of sophisticated writing and mourns the disappearance of masterful films like The Graduate. Mr. Farrelly, you may remember, brought you highbrow fare such as Dumb and Dumber, and is currently working on a movie about those masters of complex narrative, the Three Stooges.

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I'll Take Manhatta

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 20:15:00 GMT

You could be forgiven for never having heard of Manhatta. Filmed in 1920 on one of the most expensive movie cameras available at the time, it gained quite a reputation for its herky-jerky rhythms, Cubist sensibilities, and uniquely artistic view of the areas of Lower Manhattan it depicted; it was later described as the first American avante-garde film. But it soon fell out of print, and even dedicated cinephiles rarely saw it for decades. It became one of the many early films that it was far easier to talk about than to see.

A recent article by Dave Kehr in the New York Times about a new digital restoration of Manhatta is well worth a look, though, even if you aren't particultuar interested in the movie itself. It sheds a fascinating light on various aspects of film restoration, from the economics of the process to the social politics of why it becomes necessary. In the case of Manhatta, the main print of the film that was circulated for decades was horridly bleached out, poorly timed, and of awful quality (it can be seen on YouTube here, in a print described by Kehr as looking like "a fifth-generation photocopy that someone's dog had been sleeping on for several years"). Kehr notes that there it's unlikely that a photograph by Paul Strand or a painting by Charles Sheeler, the two men behind Manhatta, would be allowed to fall into such a state of disrepair. He quotes Josh Siegel, a curator at MoMA, as saying "There is a misconception about film that because it's a mass-produced medium, that all these films are easily accessible and easily reproduced. And of course, they're not."

The story of Manhatta's glorious restoration, using digital technologies that have only recently become available and are still extremely costly to museums and archivists without access to Hollywood money, is a compelling one. The technologies highlighted are often proprietary and expensive, and the movie's journey from a dusty, cracking print to what Kehr describe as a movie with "the grain and clarity of a platinum photographic print come to life" is an interesting one. In the story's crowning irony, Bruce Posner, the curator of the project, describes the thrill he got at seeing the movie digitally restored on a computer -- only to see, once it had been transfered back to film, a few telltale new specks of dirt on the print. It's a terrific look into an aspect of moviemaking that's rarely written about.

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B.R. Chopra, 1914-2008

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 19:15:00 GMT

Bollywood lost one of its most legendary directors today when B.R. Chopra, the commercially successful but often controversial filmmaker who managed to bring a tone of moral seriousness and ethical inquiry to an industry most often given over to frothy, lightweight musical entertainments, passed away at the age of 94. As reported in the New York Times and elsewhere, Chopra's death from natural causes was announced by his son, also a film producer and a member of what has grown to be a prominent family in the Indian film industry.

Originally trained as a journalist and setting out to support a large family with only his determination to succeed as a filmmaker, crag-faced Baldev Raj Chopra initially encountered failure in his film career, helming a few forgettable romantic comedies before scoring mild success with popular thrillers that showed the influence of Hitchcock. It was in the 1950s that Chopra's career truly blossomed, mirroring the success of the industry itself; and, as time went on, he proved himself capable of scoring popular successes with traditionally-minded audiences while still seeking to push the boundaries of what was allowed in Indian film of the day.

Chopra's best-known film was Naya Daur, a 1957 musical that played up the conflict between technocratic urbanism and rural agricultural life at a time when India's leadership was pushing for more urban development and a transition from old-style community values. Though he worked with many of the biggest Bollywood stars, he sometimes made a statement by eschewing big names, such as in the 1980 drama Insaf ka Tarazu (dealing with the often-taboo subject of rape); he likewise bucked the Bollywood trend of featuring songs in every film in movies like the popular courtroom drama Kanoon. Though he directed his last film in 1992, he continued to act as a producer for his won B.R. Films company until 2006, when he released another controversial film -- Baabul -- which challenged the treatment of women in traditional Indian society. His most well-known work in the west, oddly, was not a film, but a television series: in 1988, he produced a serialization of the Hindu epic Mahabharata, which found an audience in the U.S. thanks to being syndicated by PBS.

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Dreamworks SK...?

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 15:15:00 GMT

The studio system is long dead, but for over 30 years, David Geffen has been proving that the old-time movie mogul is still a going concern. One of the richest men in Hollywood history, Geffen is a true multimedia tycoon who's made money in film and music hand over fist and whose personal worth is estimated at close to $6 billion. Indisputably one of the biggest power players in the industry, he's had a huge impact on almost every studio you can name: Universal, Paramount, Disney, and the DreamWorks studio he founded with Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg. But, having hit 65 -- the age at which most people look forward to a respectable retirement -- is Geffen ready to walk away from it all?

Just weeks after engineering a break from Paramount -- which had recently purchased DreamWorks for over a billion and a half dollars -- Geffen continued to wheel and deal like a mogul of old. He formed a new company with Spielberg and Stacey Snider, backed by money from one of the biggest players in the emergent Bollywood system, and then -- shockingly -- seemed to indicate that he was backing off from production, and perhaps leaving the entertainment industry altogether. According to an article in the New York Times, even Spielberg is stunned at the possibility: "I cannot imagine not having David in my professional life. If that's true, I'm going to have to figure out what to do about it."

Of course, Geffen has made a career out of shocking people -- just ask Disney's stockholders if you don't believe it. So this could just be another ploy, another bargaining chip, another tactic in a still-full bag of tricks. But if he really is out of the game for good, it'll be, in many ways, the end of an era. As easy as Geffen was to hate -- he had a reputation as parsimonious, crude, and often manipulative -- he may be the last of the big-time moguls. And his retirement may echo the end of the studio system: we may not have much liked him when he was around, but we'll kinda miss him when he's gone.

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When Good Directors Go Bad: Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997, Clint Eastwood)

Paul Clark — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Forty years ago, the idea that Rowdy Yates from TV’s Rawhide would turn out to be a talented director would have seemed ridiculous. Yet it came to pass, with Clint Eastwood proving to be one of Hollywood’s most celebrated filmmakers. In addition, he’s also one of its most prolific, churning out an average of one film almost every year over the past decade. But in spite of making such well-regarded films as Unforgiven, Mystic River, and Million Dollar Baby, the truth is that when a filmmaker works at such a rate, there are bound to be some clunkers in the bunch. Surely enough, Eastwood had his share of mediocre or even subpar films throughout his career, even in the fertile period of the nineties. In the case of movies like True Crime and Blood Work, the middling quality of the films wasn’t too big a deal, as they were disposable adaptations of forgettable airport novels.

Then there was Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. A far cry from the likes of Absolute Power, Midnight was based on an honest-to-goodness acclaimed work of literature. John Berendt’s book, based on an actual Savannah, GA murder case, was a publishing phenomenon, residing on the New York Times bestseller list a full four years. For the first time since his Academy Award-winning Unforgiven, Eastwood was making an honest-to-goodness prestige project, and he devoted all his attention to directing the film, handing over the acting duties to the likes of Kevin Spacey and John Cusack. Anticipation was high, especially among fans of the novel who were curious to see how Eastwood would translate it to the screen.

Trouble is, like many really good books, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil doesn’t exactly lend itself to being adapted. While most good adaptations are inspired by books with strong, tight stories, much of the appeal of Berendt’s book is anecdotal, with plenty of fascinating characters orbiting around the story’s center, the trial of Jim Williams. Unfortunately, Eastwood is generally at his best when working with a relatively straightforward plot, and consequently, his attempts to mix the court case with the incidental dramas in Savannah just don’t quite work. It doesn’t help that Eastwood never really allows Savannah to become a natural element of the story like it ought to be. Watching his more successful adaptation of Mystic River, it’s hard to imagine the story taking place anywhere else, but I almost never got that vibe from Midnight, in which the city feels more like a backdrop than an actual setting.

Part of the problem is that Eastwood shies away from one of the book’s most important themes- the hypocrisy of Savannah’s upper-class when confronted by Williams’ homosexuality. Berendt’s novel addresses the almost tangible sense of abandonment that Williams felt when his “friends” refused to testify on his behalf once word of his sexual predilections came to light. But while it’s mentioned in passing in the film, Eastwood makes far too little of which should be a central issue. Without this undercurrent, the trial loses most of its energy, becoming little more than a mediocre courtroom drama with a few mild twists.

Also disappointing is the film’s treatment of the friendship between protagonist John Kelso, a Berendt surrogate played by John Cusack, and the story’s most famous supporting player, The Lady Chablis, who plays herself. In both the book and the film, the two characters- one a straitlaced northerner, the other a local transsexual- get to know each other as the story progresses, and while it’s pretty clear that nothing sexual ever transpires between them, there’s a tantalizing ambiguity about Chablis’ feelings toward Kelso. Sadly, Eastwood and screenwriter John Lee Hancock seem skittish about the possibility that audience members might think their hero is gay, so they concoct him a love interest who wasn't in the book, played by Eastwood’s daughter Alison. The romantic subplot is a complete waste of time, never advancing the story or working in any other way other than to reassure the audience that John Kelso is all about the ladies.

That said, both Cusack and The Lady Chablis are actually quite good in the movie. Cusack plays his usual charming, brainy type, but then, the story needs a levelheaded character in the middle of the eccentric locals. And The Lady Chablis is pretty priceless, especially when she’s playing off Cusack- I can’t imagine a more established actor playing the role even half as convincingly, no doubt because she’d already been playing the role for years even before the book, let alone the movie. And most of the rest of the cast is also fine- Spacey is courtly but subtly menacing in one of finest performances, and Jack Thompson has fun as Spacey’s defense attorney, a local hero (he’s the owner of the University of Georgia’s mascot “Uga”) who’s surprisingly neither a blowhard nor an over-the-top rube. The weak links are Alison Eastwood (who to her credit has almost nothing to do) and Jude Law as the murder victim, who when we see him in flashbacks is too mannered by half.

More than most filmmakers working today, Eastwood works in the classic tradition, allowing the film’s story to dictate his directorial decisions. Unfortunately, it never feels like he got a handle on the story. The courtroom scenes have no momentum, there’s too much gratuitous material involving Alison Eastwood’s character, and the local color just doesn’t work like it does on the page. After all, it’s one thing to imagine a guy walking a nonexistent dog or tethering flies to his clothing, and another entirely to actually see them. And late in the game, Eastwood abandons his low-key and realistic style to inject some magical realism into the film, but the moment doesn’t work because it feels so out of place with his style.

In the end, one gets the sense that Eastwood’s brand of filmmaking just didn’t mesh with Berendt’s story. Perhaps someone like Robert Altman could have pulled it off, given his gifts with ensemble casts and Southern settings, or even the documentarian Ross McElwee, chronicler of the Deep South in films like Sherman’s March and Bright Leaves. I might have suggested Errol Morris, considering his ability to portray eccentrics without condescending to them, but then, Morris' previous fiction feature didn’t turn out so well, did it?

It's Hard Out Here For a Singer/Songwriter

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 14:15:00 GMT

Where goeth Scarlett Johansson and Zooey Deschanel, so goeth Terrence Howard. Or so it would appear, as the Oscar-nominated star of Hustle & Flow prepares to release Shine Through It, his debut album on Columbia Records. And while it would seem unlikely that Johansson would record an album of Tom Waits covers, or that Deschanel would make a record that was actually worth listening to, so too would it seem improbable that the star whose rise to fame is inextricably linked with Three 6 Mafia would make an album of subtle, sensitive singer-songwriter tunes. And yet here we are.

In a profile in today's New York Times, Howard, whose screen reputation is largely built on playing street-smart hustlers, namechecks an unlikely set of performers as influential in the making of Shine Through It, including Paul Simon, Don McLean, and, yes, Barry Manilow. While he waxes rhapsodic about these artists, and explains why he didn't perform "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp" at the Oscars (problems with the language, says he), Howard makes it clear that he's no fan of rap music, and that while his peers listened to funk, he existed on the deeper level of artists like Harry Chapin and Dan Fogelberg. "I grew up in the projects, but Rick James wasn't my buddy," he sniffs. "I was more sensitive than that."

Indeed, if Howard is a tad fuzzy about who, exactly, the audience is for Shine Through It, he makes no bones about who the audience isn't: black people. "My own people, black people, they've become accustomed to this hip-hop sound," he says. "If it doesn't have a driving beat, I don't know if they'll hear it right away. I think I have to go to a different crowd." NPR, here he comes!

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Screengrab Writer Was Nowhere Near New York At The Time

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 07 May 2008 16:30:00 GMT

No one likes a celebrity stalker story, but speaking personally, I am particularly outraged by the unfolding story of 37-year-old Jack Jordan, who is currently on trial for harrassing Uma Thurman by sending her bizarre letter and menacing doodles, breaking into her trailer, and generally acting all creepy around the Kill Bill star. Hey, pal, not only is stalking Uma Thurman evil and wrong, it's supposed to be my job. I haven't invested 20 years of my life on this celebrity crush just to have some punk like you steal my thunder.

The Jack Jordan story is filled with icky little details, such as the Henry Darger-esque clippings he left in Thurman's trailer during the filming of My Super Ex-Girlfriend (Uma Thurman stalker tip: a better thing to leave in her trailer would be a note imploring her to pick better scripts), the stick-figure drawings of himself giggling and leaping off a razor blade into a grave (Uma Thurman stalker tip: hire a professional illustrator), and the midguidedly tender notes reading "If you think you love me, then how sad that your kids and you and me would have to spend another holiday apart. Now it's the end of September and I live in my car." (Uma Thurman stalker tip: it's never a good opening gambit, with any woman, to mention that you live in your car.)

Perhaps the most depressing aspect of this whole situation, however: as the Defamer points out, the New York Times article about Jordan's trial seems to take pains to mention that Thurman, who says she feared for her children's lives when the stalker was on the loose, was "haggard" with carelessly done hair, a dowdy old gray shawl, and no makeup while she testified against him. Good grief, woman, it's only a crazy man who sent you pictures of bloody razor blades! Would it kill you to get gussied up a bit?

P.S. Your Deer Is Dead

Leonard Pierce — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Disney, as Disney is fond of reminding us, is not just a movie company or an entertainment conglomerate: it's a kingdom, a lifestyle, almost a religion. And if that's true, its position on the major issues of the day are more than just fodder for the back pages of their annual stockholder report: they're front page news, or even the subject of scholarly tomes.

Such, as the New York Times reports, is the case with Disney's environmental record. Throughout its history, Disney has played both sides of the ecological fence: it recently announced the formation of a new film unit exclusively dedicated to creating nature documentaries, while its theme parks are denounced by environmentalists as resource-draining, pollution-spewing nightmares; its previous science films have sparked the interest of children in wildlife and conservation, while attracting charges of exaggeration or outright fakery; and its beloved animated children's classics have cemented a protective attitude towards nature in the minds of entire generations, while both hunters and animal rights activists claim that they present a distorted and dangerous view of animal life.

Two new books have recently appeared on the market, reflecting the Disney dichotomy as regards the world of nature. David Whitley of Cambridge University has penned The Idea of Nature in Disney Animation, a prolix pro-Disney statement of purpise in which he argues that Disney has done perhaps more than any other institution to promote environmentalism: "These films", he says of Disney's animated canon, "have taught us variously about having a fundamental respect for nature. Some of them, such as Bambi, inspired conservation awareness and laid the emotional groundwork for environmental activism." Ralph Lutts of Oxford, however, takes issue with that notion in his The Nature Fakers: Wildlife, Science, & Sentiment, taking the films to task for their "Sunday School vision of nature as a place without stress, conflict, or death."

The debate looks to intensify with the foundation of Disneynature, and author Patricia Cohen notes that even internally, the message isn't always clear-cut, as the John Muir unspoiled-wilderness environmentalism of early Disney films like Bambi is giving way to a Nature Conservatory view in movies like Finding Nemo, where humans and animals find a happy medium of coexistence. One problem, though: what of Pixar? What message are we sending our children about the issue of safe spaces for robots, living toys, and talking cars?

Soldier of Orangeburg

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Two years from now, America will mark the anniversary of the shooting of students at Kent State by National Guardsmen. It was a pivotal moment in the anti-war movement, and it marked, for many, the exact point at which it was no longer possible to pretend what kind of country they lived in. There will be a lot of nostalgia, a lot of hand-wringing, and if we're lucky, a certain degree of self-examination. What probably won't be discussed quite as much, if at all, is the fact that it wasn't the first killing of students on campus by members of the armed forces.

That dubious distinction belongs to the so-called "Orangeburg Massacre", where, in 1968, National Guard soldiers opened fire on a crowd of 100 students at South Carolina State College. Three of the students were killed, and dozens were wounded; today, two separate films -- one, Orangeburg, by a pair of independent documentarians, set to debut on PBS this fall, and the other, Black Magic, by a more mainstream filmmaker, airing on ESPN of all places -- ask why America's memory of this outrage doesn't echo the way Kent State did. There are plenty of good reasons, of course: the SC State shooting wasn't as well documented (only a few photographs were taken at the time, and most were destroyed in a fire); it fell during an off news cycle and wasn't picked up by the major newspapers until it had largely died down; initial reports of the massacre falsely described it as an exchange of gunfire, rather than the shooting of unarmed students by soldiers; and it happened at night, when no television crews were available to cover the event.

But the biggest reason of all is that the victims were all black. The shooting was triggered by protests in reaction to white citizens who objected to the desegregation of a local bowling alley, and instead of being a response to the Vietnam War, the Orangeburg Massacre was part of the ongoing struggle for civil rights.

In the New York Times, the fascinating story of how these films came to be made is laid out in some detail (director Dan Klores explains that he essentially used the fact that one of the victims of Orangeburg was a star basketball player in high school to convince ESPN to fund his movie), and the ongoing injustice of the story (the only person who served jail time for the killings was one of the victims, who was charged with incidement to riot) is addressed by both filmmakers, who hope that, if nothing else, the new attention the case is getting will force the government of South Carolina to reopen the case. The Times also provides links to its own contemporary coverage of the case, and some compelling commentary from the people who have been pursuing justice in the case for decades. Bestor Cram, the co-producer of Orangeburg, explains his difficulties in securing finance for the documentary: "We were up against two problems. People actually wondered why they hadn't heard of (the massacre). Number two, everyone thinks the civil rights story has been told."

Nathan Lee Loses His Voice

Phil Nugent — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 15:00:00 GMT

When film critic Nathan Lee signed on at The Village Voice in October 2006, he said, in reaction to the staff cuts and other problems then plaguing the paper (even as it was patting itself on the back on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary): "I came into this at a point where the Voice had been bought," he said. "The change was done; it had happened. I'm coming into it afterwards and my sense is, 'What is still valuable here; what can we still do? How can the Voice continue to have a strong, lively, influential and really smart sense of film coverage?' That's what I'm really invested in at this point." The paper turned out to be invested in other things, and now, eighteen months after claiming his first-ever regular staff position ("I've never had health benefits in my entire adult life"), Lee has been let go, from the Voice. Lee's own announcement of the unhappy news reads as follows: "In great Village Voice tradition, I was abruptly laid off today for 'economic reasons.' My employment at the paper ends immediately: someone else, alas, will be tasked with specifying the precise shade of periwinkle frosting atop the cupcakes in My Blueberry Nights. And so I am, as they say, 'looking for work,' though presumably not as a staff film critic as such jobs no longer appear to exist."

Lee, a gifted writer with his own idiosyncratic taste and a brawler's verve, who earned attention for his work in the New York Sun and The New York Times, will surely land on his feet. It's not so clear how much of the Voice's reputation as a vital force in film coverage will be left standing by this latest development. The paper that served as a home base for such writers as Andrew Sarris, Manohla Dargis, and David Edelstein (now keeping house at, respectively, the New York Observer, the New York Times, and New York magazine respectively), still has a living landmark in J. Hoberman (whose thirty-year-career at the Voice is currently serving as the basis for a tribute at the Brooklyn Academy of Music), but the paper had barely recovered from the firing of section editor Dennis Lim and writer Michael Atkinson around the same time as Lee's hiring. Lee's firing may revive talk that the head office (which, make no mistake about it, has also done its best to decimate the other Voice arts sections) has been urging the paper to do more to hype big films and cut back on the more cerebral writing about avant-garde and offbeat fare. As S. T. VanAiresdale has noted, "New York newspapers have now lost four full-time film critics in the last month." If Lee's departure really stings, it may be partly because he's a hot property and also partly because there was a time when you expected better from the Voice.

Critics, Scientists Agree: "Jumper" Not Very Good

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 20:00:00 GMT

It's not often that the subjective, opinionated world of cultural criticism and the objective, fact-based world of hard science come together, let alone form a common consensus. But in January of 2008, one of those rare moments occurred: a special screening of the Hayden Christensen vehicle Jumper, about a young man who discovers he has the power to teleport through space, was arranged for physics professors and their students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. These brilliant men and women, heirs to the tradition of Newton, Bohr and Einstein, agreed with movie critics the world over: Jumper has got a lot of problems.

According to the Times, the screening was arranged by publicist Warren Betts, who apparently got a little overexcited when he heard about the feasibility of (quantum) teleportation, and was attended by Christensen and the film's director, Doug Liman. (Liman claims to have been a physics prodigy in high school, but to have taken no classes at the collegiate level because "being good at it made it a little boring". This no doubt accounts for why so many star athletes don't bother to pursue sports in college.) After the screening, two professors predictably burst the bubble of anyone left thinking the movie's science was anything but pseudo-, to the cheers of their nerdy students; one of them, a Dr. Edward Farhi, chose instead to concentrate on the acting and the characters, apparently not having been informed that the movie stars Hayden Christensen and Rachel Bilson.

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.

Madea Goes To Jail: Tyler Perry in Steroid Bust

Leonard Pierce — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 18:30:00 GMT

An ongoing investigation into the traffic in steroids and HGH (human growth hormone) has yielded some unexpected names, according to reports in the New York Times and elsewhere. Rather than the usual litany of fair-to-middling baseball players, the most frequently cited figures in the latest probe are entertainers — specifically, rappers like 50 Cent, Timbaland, and (inexplicably) Mary J. Blige. We're not the only ones to be a bit stymied at why a musician would need to take 'roids; while, admittedly, they're cheaper than a personal trainer if you want to hulk out the way Timbo has of late, a personal trainer can only symbolically shrivel your generative organs while shouting motivational slogans at you, rather than literally causing them to curl up and wither on the vine the way steroids can.

If there was one name above all others that was a shocker in this witch hunt ongoing investigation, it was alleged funnyman and beloved chitlin-circuit institution Tyler Perry, the writer/director/star of many a boffo slapstick hit on the urban theater scene and the creator of Madea, the most widely beloved overweight transvestite since Dame Edna Everidge. Tyler isn't noticably buff, his schtick, physical as it is, doesn't seem any more physically demanding than any other theatrical or television work, and he certainly doesn't rely on power-blasted shirtless photos to sell his product. Maybe the fat suit just isn't doing it for him anymore? At any rate, it'll be curious to see how his many fans react to the news; they're a tremendously devoted lot, but on the other hand, unlike any number of bad-boy rappers one could name, Perry's act depends quite heavily on his image as a devout Christian, and his Madea plays as well as his other films and theatrical presentations rely strongly on a traditionalist morality.

Of course, he might be able to rely on the fact that HGH isn't illegal to own or sell. Which brings us to that all-too-often begged question here at the height of anti-steroid mania: if HGH is legal, and if there was no rule (as there wasn''t) against taking steroids at the time most of the players named in the Mitchell Report were implicated, why keep naming names? If no one is likely to face jail time (and no one is, with the exception of baseball's designated scapegoat Barry Bonds), what's the big deal?

Close To The Edge

Leonard Pierce — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 15:30:00 GMT

In the Village Voice film section, Michelle Orange reviews the inelegantly titled Chuck Close: An Elegant Portrait of the Art World's Leading Portraitist. Set for limited release the year after Manufactured Landscapes signalled a great leap forward for documentaries about visual artists, its director (and friend of the subject) Marion Cajori won't be around to enjoy any success her film might encounter; having worked on the film for over fifteen years, died in 2006 after completing work on the film. Cajori's previous work as a documentarian also focused on the art world; her best-known films were Joan Mitchell: Portrait of an Abstract Painter and Louise Bourgeois: Art is Sanity, and a previous iteration of the Chuck Close documentary, in a shortened form broadcast on PBS and entitled Chuck Close: A Portrait in Progress, was nominated for an Emmy in 1998. The completed film focuses on Close, best known for his gargantuan, photorealistic self-portraits, as well as other artists and creators such as Robert Rauschenberg and Philip Glass who received the same treatment (Gerhard Richter is a curious omission). The focus of the film, however, is Close's artistic process, and not his often-irascable personality -- Close was partially paralyzed in the 1980s and since then, has used a self-designed system of leverl, pulleys, ladders and other Rube Goldberg devices to allow him to finish his massive paintings. Cajori's film, Orange says, alleviates the usual arts-doc talking head boredom as she "regularly slows the gorgeously crisp, high-def film down to the brush-stroke" and notes that "Close's piecemeal, coherent style is wonderfully, almost winkingly well suited to Cajori's". Matt Zoller-Seitz, reviewing the film for the Times, likewise calls the film "splendid" and notes that it "truly excels is in its depiction of the physical process of making art." Close is a major figure in the world of art, and has deep ties to the Pacific Northwest and Chicago as well as claims to international fame as a painter; we're hoping that Cajori's documentary gets wider release than just the New York arts scene of which she was a part.

State of Play in Hollywood

Peter Smith — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 20:00:00 GMT

David M. Halbfinger reports that the uncertain state of the political thriller State of Play may offer some insight into how the game is being played this minute in a movie industry driven half-nuts by labor difficulties. Brad Pitt, who was locked in to star in the movie, pulled his Hamlet act and waltzed away from the project last week, just as it was about to go into production. Like many high-level productions, State of Play was all set to go so as to complete shooting by next June, when Hollywood may face an actors' strike. Now Universal, if it decides to proceed on schedule, will have to re-cast the lead quickly before other fully-booked-up actors in the cast start dropping out to make their other pre-June committments. On the plus side, they can consider any number of leading men, such as Tom Hanks and Johnny Depp, who are suddenly available because the projects they were about to start work on have been put on hold until after the writers' strike ends, because it's been decided that the scripts still need work.

Don't feel too bad for the studio bosses, though; in a business where sincerity is regarded as a first sign of the onset of dementia, the various strikes are in some ways a gold mine for the people in charge of spin. United Artists is currently backing out of Pinkville, Oliver Stone's planned movie on the My Lai massacre, and the official story is that it's because of, yes, script problems that can't be dealt with due to the strike. But anonymous sources claim, not implausibly, that UA was looking for a way to get out because, after the commercial failure of all the Iraq War movies this fall (including UA's own megaflop Lions for Lambs), the last thing anybody wants to do is fund another big-budget expedition back to Vietnam. — Phil Nugent

Preminger Biographed

Peter Smith — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 21:00:00 GMT

At the peak of his fame, Otto Preminger was one of the few directors of his day whose name was familiar to American moviegoers. Though he had made a couple of decent pictures in his day and even one enduring classic (the 1944 Laura), this had a lot less to do with the quality of his big, expensive, titillating epics (Exodus, Advise and Consent, The Cardinal, In Harm's Way) than it did his gift for self-publicity. Preminger, who played the commandant of a German P.O.W. camp in Billy Wilder's Stalag 17, wasn't above using his Austrian accent, bald head, and commanding personality to remind people of Erich von Stroheim, and he kept the public reminded of his existence by such stunts as getting himself cast as Mr. Freeze for a special guest villain gig on Batman. Foster Hirsch's new biography The Man Who Would Be King is intended sympathetically, but by now Preminger's name has been kept alive largely by all the stories about what a red-faced screaming pain he was to work with, and it may end up selling largely on the basis of its gossip about "Otto the Ogre"'s vile tirades and abuse of his casts and crews. Reviewing the book for the New York Times, Richard Schickel notes that "Someone once asked a much less famous director, Alexander Mackendrick, how to get an actor to do what you need him to do. 'You don't,' Mackendrick said. 'What you do is try to get the actor to want what you need.' This is the sort of seductiveness Preminger never managed." Of course, Mackendrick, who just wanted to make movies, not court gossip columnists, and who, as the director of Whisky Galore, The Man in the White Suit, and The Ladykillers, was pretty much lost adrift when Ealing Studios ceased production, still managed to direct the classic Sweet Smell of Success before giving it all up in disgust and spending his last years teaching at Cal Arts. So where's his biography? — Phil Nugent

Allen and Martin in Print

Peter Smith — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 17:00:00 GMT

Two of the major film comedians of recent decades have started launching multiple assaults onto bookstore shelves. Woody Allen, of course, stop being a "mere" comedian a long time ago; he also started hemorrhaging audience shares a long time ago, and Conversations with Woody Allen: His Films, the Movies, and Movie-making, a redundantly subtitled collection of interviews conducted with his biographer Eric Lax, is designed to serve as a reminder that he is a major filmmaker, in case any of the people who've stopped seeing his movies have forgotten it. Much of what he has to say about the path he's taken as a director and his on-again, off-again relationship with his fans will be very familiar to anyone who's had moments of being interested lo these many years. Allen likes to affect a mandarin pose; the official story is that he stopped reading his reviews after Annie Hall, a film whose "classic" status apparently strikes him as inexplicable. But the 1980 Stardust Memories, a self-victimization orgy (and a work that Allen regards as among his very favorites) that includes a fantasy scene of extraterrestrials telling Allen that they prefer his "earlier, funnier" films, sure does look like it was made by someone who'd made a close study of the reviews of Interiors. Lax may be too deferential for the job; the book would be a livelier read if some of it had been done with an interlocutor who might have reacted to Allen's wondering aloud why Hollywood Ending "was not thought of as a first-rate, extraordinary comedy" by explaining, "Because it sucked donkeys, my liege." Blessedly, as a sop to those who like him funny, Allen has also authorized the release of Mere Anarchy, a new book of his recent "casuals" from The New Yorker, as well as The Insanity Defense: The Complete Prose, which vacuums up the contents of the three earlier collections that Allen published from around 1970 to 1980. The new collection, which brings together the pieces Allen started publishing again in the 1990s after a long time away from the typewriter, are sometimes a little creaky, but they have their moments. The thicker book, however, is a dandy flashback to that period when Allen's pores seemed to spontaneously produce off-kilter sophomoric wisecracks. You can see him losing interest in the form towards the end of the book, but that's when he rallies and produces his best effort at staying gut-bustingly funny while telling a real, honest-to-God story: "The Gleams Episode", about an ill-fated love affair between Emma Bovary and a frustrated CCNY professor who has the ability to literally escape into the pages of literary classics.

Playing the mandarin may actually come a lot more naturally to Steve Martin, who seems to have put an inhuman amount of cool, thoughtful contemplation into a career that began with him marketing himself as a spastic ass. Martin describes Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life, a memoir that takes him from the start of his performing career to the point in 1981 when he retired from stand-up to concentrate on movies, as "not an autobiography but a biography, because I am writing about someone I used to know." (Martin has also written a new alphabet book, with illustrations by Roz Chast.) Like Allen, Martin has gradually moved away from his earlier, spirited film work, but with a difference. He was once eager to star in the chance-taking Pennies from Heaven and to explore his bittersweet side in his scripts for Roxanne and L.A. Story, but at some point he got fed up with putting his heart and blood into projects that were perceived as commercial disappointments, and for more than ten years now, he's plainly seen movies as something you do for the money and pitch straight down the center of the road. His more ambitious work has been done elsewhere (as in his play Picasso at the Lapin Agile and his novella Shopgirl, which inspired a 2005 film in which he co-starred with Clare Danes) or at least in movies that were somebody else's baby (such as David Manet's The Spanish Prisoner, where he had a chilling role as a con man). The excerpts from his memoir that have appeared already are graceful, affecting, and leave the reader wanting more. In the meantime, he's about to start a new movie, based on his idea of what movie audiences want: it's an unnecessary sequel to his unnecessary remake of The Pink Panther. — Phil Nugent

Strike Three

Peter Smith — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 20:00:00 GMT

Continuing news from the front lines of the WGA strike: commenting in the Guardian, indie screenwriter William Boyd lays out the facts of the case for a British audience and notes that in the digital age, there's much more to his outfit than Jack Warner's notorious "schmucks with Underwoods." Cinematical reports on a new study (details of which appeared in Sunday's New York Times) that suggests studios are losing money thanks to back-end-loaded participation deals, where big-name stars, directors and producers eat up such a large percentage of a film's total revenue that only the biggest movies turn a profit. Monika Bartyzels argues that the writers are only a scapegoat for studios looking to blame someone else for their own short-sightedness. And in Wired, John Scott Lewinski speculates that the strike might be just what the studios are after to use legal wrangling to get out of top-dollar contracts and high-end development deals. — Leonard Pierce

Auto-Baumbach-graphies

Peter Smith — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 20:00:00 GMT

After years spent working his way back after the box office failure of his second feature, the underappreciated 1997 comedy Mr. Jealousy, the writer-director Noah Baumbach struck gold with 2005's The Squid and the Whale, about the emotional fallout from the divorce of a culturally ambitious Park Slope family. Because Baumbach's own parents divorced when he was a teenager, and because his father, Jonathan Baumbach, is, like the hero's father in his movie, a novelist — his mother is Georgia Brown, who used to be a film critic for the Village Voice — part of the buzz around the movie was always based on assumptions that it was autobiographical. Baumbach tells Dennis Lim that while he was doing promotion for the film, "Someone would ask me if something was true, and I’d say no, and then they’d ask me a follow-up question under the assumption that it was true. I’d get tripped up answering a question about my real father based on something in the movie that wasn’t real." Baumbach's new follow-up, Margot at the Wedding, is another emotionally charged comedy about marriage and family, and it too draws on Baumbach's life, which now includes the experience of having people ask you presumptuous questions about your life based on what they assume they know about you and your family from your work. The new picture's title character is a writer (Nicole Kidman) who has to contend with readers hell-bent on seeing her fiction as a blueprint of her life and the lives of her family, including her sister, whose busted first marriage served as the basis for one of Margot's stories. (The movie is a family project in another way: Margot's sister is played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, who is married to Baumbach.) So, now that the director can get his projects funded again, does he have any other pipe dreams about the future? "My hope is that I will make enough movies that they can’t all conceivably be autobiographical." — Phil Nugent

Hair Today, Coen Tomorrow

Peter Smith — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 19:00:00 GMT

After largely triumphant tour of the festival circuit — it premiered at Cannes last spring and recently played at the New York Film Festival — the Coen brothers' No Country for Old Men has now started trickling into commercial theaters. With a cast headed by Tommy Lee Jones and Javier Bardem, adapted from a Cormac McCarthy novel, and widely hailed as a "return to form" for the Coens after a couple of poorly received comedies (the doomed remake of The Ladykillers and the sharp, cruelly underappreciated Intolerable Cruelty) the picture does not lack for talent, cultural cachet, and the news hook. Yet from the very first reports from Cannes, one detail has tended to dominate the coverage: the hair helmet that Bardem sports in his role as the borderlands Terminator, Anton Chigurh. The first notices the movie received simply described it as a "pageboy haircut", which is accurate enough but fails the convey the full, shocking impact of the sight of the thing.

But the people who've been waiting these past months for the movie to open so they could weigh in on it have no intention of being left out. Paste magazine calls the character "splendidly coiffed", but that's either sarcasm or the minority opinion weighing in. More typically, Dana Stevens of Slate calls him "a bob-haired golem," while Jan Stuart of Newsday refers to his "forklift mop of hair." Stephen Hunter of the Washington Post, Keith Phipps of the Onion AV Club, and David Edelstein of New York magazine have all invoked Prince Valiant, but Salon's Andrew O'Hehir thought Bardem looked more like Ringo Starr. In the Village Voice, Scott Foundas invoked Cousin Itt. (New York Times reviewer A. O. Scott, a man with a literary background who understands the value of understatement, simply described Chigurh as "a deadpan sociopath with a funny haircut.")

This is hardly the first time that a Coen brothers movie has attracted attention of a tonsorial nature. The corny-surreal tone of Raising Arizona was quickly established by Nicolas Cage's haircut, which suggested an attempted imitation of Kevin Bacon's tastefully spiky 'do as executed by an epileptic barber with the blind staggers. As the title character of Barton Fink, a leftist playwright who seemed to be a cartoon of Clifford Odets, John Turturro wore a pop-top hairdo that actually made him look more like George S. Kauffman by way of Eraserhead. We may never know for sure whether this was a deliberate attempt to make the Odets-like character seem more "universal" or if the hairdresser on the picture was working from a miscaptioned photograph. In The Big Lebowski, all the political and cultural battles of the 1960s seemed to have come down, decades later, to an uneasy truce between Jeff Bridges' hippie-burnout look and the squared-off cropping of Walter, the reactionary Vietnam vet played by John Goodman [and inspired by John Milius! — ed.], who looks like a cinder block wearing tinted shades. "I'm a hair actor and proud of it!" George Clooney once insisted, and maybe the Coens wish there were more performers out there willing to define their characters somewhere above their eyebrows. After all, it was the Coens who, in O Brother Where Art Thou?, established that George Clooney isn't just a fine actor, a major star, and the unashamed voice of show business liberalism: he's a Dapper Dan man! — Phil Nugent

Rock Around the Crock

Peter Smith — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 19:00:00 GMT

David Carr's story in the New York Times — posted yesterday — is a typical trend piece. Entertainment journalism (and, hence, people like me, admittedly) couldn't survive without the occasional story that identifies three or more roughly similar things happening at roughly the same time and concludes that it means something important; still, Carr's piece struck me as particularly off the mark. He concludes that we're in for a renaissance of movies about rock music: he cites documentaries on Tom Petty, plus features like Across The Universe (The Beatles), I'm Not There (Bob Dylan) and break-out hit Once.

What Carr seems to be getting out, without being really aware of it, is how the rock biopic has displaced any other kind of biopic, with VH1's Behind The Music cited as the prototype for every rise-and-fall arc peddled. "We all know these stories from VH1’s Behind the Music, and even though we know what to expect, we still love watching them," weighs in Judd Apatow, apropos of his upcoming spoof Walk Hard. (We do?) The real question is, why are biopics nowadays seemingly all about musicians just old enough to be canonized — where are the artists (it's been years since Pollock), politicians and writers? When Richard Attenborough stopped churning out stuff like Gandhi and Shadowlands, did the genre die? If so, why?

The cynical, probably correct answer, is "because these movies suck." Still, it's a question worth thinking about; boomers are getting older and more secure about canonizing previously disreputable idols. Notice how Carr doesn't cite Musician (a recent documentary about jazz avant-gardist Ken Vandermark), Dig! (the indie-music bible featuring The Brian Jonestown Massacre and The Dandy Warhols), or Metallica: Some Kind Of Monster. It's not a rock renaissance, it's another smug round of cultural gentrification. I smell another think piece coming on; hire me, New York Times! — Vadim Rizov

Bollywood Bonanza: Shah Rukh Khan Breaks Big

Peter Smith — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 16:00:00 GMT

In the New York Times Book Review, Charles Taylor celebrates Anupama Chopra's new biography of Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan, both for its own virtues and for what its existence may say about the spread of interest in popular Indian cinema to the English-speaking audience. "The larger significance of the book," he writes, "is that a major American publishing house is bringing out a biography of a major foreign star, largely unknown in the United States. And that is remarkable at a time when newspaper and magazine editors and film distributors are increasingly reluctant to offer readers and viewers what they haven’t already heard about." With more and more movies fighter for fewer and fewer screens in America, and with the international distribution system an erratic mess, it may seem a stretch to suggest that Bollywood is about to take the country by storm. "But in a global economy in which India stands poised to play a bigger part, when the Internet and DVD’s are creating film audiences not bound by borders or by the caprices of film distribution, when some American multiplexes are giving over screens to Bollywood releases in order to lure America’s growing Indian population and when the stagnation of Hollywood sometimes makes the survival of movies as a popular art form seem an iffy proposition, Americans can’t afford to ignore Bollywood much longer." At forty-one, Shah Rukh Khan could well be an important tool in breaking into the Western market; two of his recent movies, Veer-Zaara and Chak! de India (which comes out on DVD next month) are among the rare Bollywood movies that have actually played theaters in the States. Taylor describes him as "part leading man, larger part buoyant goofball" who "represents the confident, successful Indian yuppie, the citizen of the world who is nonetheless recognizably Indian." He definitely has crossover potential. But can he do it in pictures as exotically strange to American tastes as his Bollywood hits? The obvious alternative would be Hollywood-style versions of Bollywood movies, similar to the imitation-Hong Kong action knockoffs that Chow Yun Fat got shoved into when he came to America. The very idea may give migraines to Bollywood-lovers and -haters alike. — Phil Nugent

Mockbusters

Peter Smith — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 19:00:00 GMT

Asylum is a small Hollywood production company with a niche. Its recent titles include The Da Vinci Treasure, Snakes on a Train, and Transmorphers. As Rolf Potts explains, that last one might be mistaken, ideally by someone on a late-night raid at Blockbusters, for Transformers, except that the Asylum product "has no recognizable actors, no merchandising tie-ins and a garbled sound mix. Also unlike Transformers, it has cheap special effects and a subplot involving lesbians." Potts calls films like these, which are designed to be viewed by people with another, better-known movie on their minds, as "mockbusters." David Michael Latt, the company's co-founder, calls them "tie-ins", though that term has traditionally been used by people who were actually working together on a mass-marketed product and not by people who were, in effect, letting the big studios unknowingly do their marketing for them. Latt explains that Anchor, which has been around since 1997, just kind of tripped into this; they had made their own cheapo adaptation of H. G. Wells's War of the Worlds, starring C. Thomas Howell, and they noticed that, when Steven Spielberg's own big-time movie of that same name and provenance hit DVD racks, it didn't hurt their sales. Soon, Asylum was making King of the Lost World, starring Bruce Boxleitner and Steve Railsback and featuring a DVD cover with a picture of a big-ass gorilla, which was timed to appear at the same time as Peter Jackson's King Kong. "I’m not trying to dupe anybody," Latt tells Potts. "I’m just trying to get my films watched." And the only way he can do that is by duping people. But at least he's keeping Steve Railsback off the streets. — Phil Nugent