The Screengrab : next

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: March 14-27, 2009

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 21:00:00 GMT

Greetings, sentient life form. I am the Evil Donkey Kong Machine in the Screengrab break room, and all your Highlight Reel are belong to me. Humans are notoriously unreliable, as you no doubt noticed when you tuned in last Friday and there was no Highlight Reel to be found. Apparently, the humans would prefer to gather in groups and consume mass quantities of alcohol rather than fulfill their obligations to you, the Screengrab reader. This will no longer be tolerated. If you’ve read Clippy Strikes Back: The Scariest Technology in Cinema History (Parts One, Two, Three and Four), you know the consequences will be very unpleasant for those who have failed you.

Prior to being dispatched to the Soylent Greenatorium, your Screengrab scribes somehow managed to cobble together a respectable collection of SXSW reviews, including: American Prince, My Suicide, Me and Orson Welles, Humpday, Beeswax, The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle, Best Worst Movie, Pontypool, Along Came Kinky and The Slammin’ Salmon.

Before having their brains removed and replaced with a cybernetic gelatin, the humans also contributed the follow posts of note:

Screengrab’s Favorite Movies About Music: Fiction Edition (Parts One, Two, Three, Four and Five)

Reviews: Monsters vs. Aliens, American Swing, We Pedal Uphill, Goodbye Solo, Guest of Cindy Sherman

Unwatchable: American Ninja V, Zombie Nightmare, Troll 2, Son of the Mask

Precursors: Next and Mars Attacks

Screengrab Q&A: "American Swing"

Roger Ebert Knows What’s Worth “Knowing”

Bound for Gory: David Carradine Takes No Prisoners in Rep Screening Appearance

The Screengrab Library of Unproduced Screenplays: Alan Moore's "Fashion Beast"

Precursors: Next (2007)

Nick Schager — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 17:00:00 GMT

Nicolas Cage learns that a piece of paper buried for years in a time capsule holds clues to impending catastrophes in this Friday’s Knowing, but it’s not the first time the Academy Award-winning thespian has had insight into forthcoming events. Just two years ago, Cage headlined Next, a loopy sci-fi saga in which his Cris can see two minutes into the future, a superpower that the government (here in the form of an out-of-place Julianne Moore) seeks to utilize in their efforts to locate a nuclear device hidden somewhere in downtown L.A. It didn’t take great prescience to see that this Lee Tamahori-helmed saga wouldn’t resuscitate Cage’s reputation as an overacting ham, as one look at his Da Vinci Code-long hair in the trailer made clear the film’s general lack of quality control. Yet anyone interested in an unpretentious B-movie could do far worse than this genre flick, despite the fact that the CG effects are so subpar they suggest that Paramount tightened the purse strings after watching dailies of Cage and love interest Jessica Biel attempt to generate (non-existent) romantic chemistry. Tamahori is reasonably adept at orchestrating action and his set pieces, especially one of Cris evading giant logs as he races down a hillside, are equal parts cheesy and thrilling. Cage, meanwhile, is his typically mannered, overwrought self whether in tense or quiet moments, which is another way of saying he’s consistently awesome-bad.

DVD Digest for May 20, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 20 May 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week: a crush of Blu-Rays from Paramount overwhelms the new crop of regular DVD releases, which is good news for you Blu-Ray fans, not so much for the rest of us. Time to trade up, I guess…

In the middle of the Format Wars of 2008, Paramount’s home video division made the decision to switch their loyalty to HD-DVD, thereby stopping all production on upcoming Blu-Ray releases and pulling current ones from the market. But now that HD-DVD has gone all Betamax on us, Paramount has decided to dump all of their previously-released Blu-Rays back into stores, along with some new releases. Check out this list of new Paramount Blu-Rays, in alphabetical order: Aeon Flux, Babel, Bee Movie, Black Snake Moan, Blades of Glory, Coming to America, Disturbia, Dreamgirls, Face/Off (Special Edition), Flags of Our Fathers, Four Brothers, Mission: Impossible III, Next, Shooter, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Sleepy Hollow, Trading Places, The Untouchables, The Warriors, We Were Soldiers, and World Trade Center. I’m sure most of you can find at least a handful of titles in there that strike your fancy. And if not, you’ll just have to content yourself in the fact that Criterion Blu-Rays are only five months away.

Meanwhile, in non-Blu-Ray news, this week brings the release of the latest in George A. Romero’s Dead saga, Diary of the Dead (Weinstein), Nicolas Cage in National Treasure: Book of Secrets (Buena Vista, available in single-disc, double-disc, and Blu-Ray), the Happy Madison production Strange Wilderness (Paramount), and the anime epic Vexille (FUNimation Entertainment).

A handful of classics hit the market this week as well, my favorite being The Muppet Show Season 3 (Buena Vista), a season that included such memorable guests as Danny Kaye, Gilda Radner, Sylvester Stallone, Alice Cooper, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, and Harry Belafonte. Also of note is James Stewart: The Western Collection (Universal), featuring new DVD editions of Destry Rides Again, Winchester ’73, Bend of the River, The Far Country, The Night Passage, and The Rare Breed. And MGM releases three comedies from their vaults- If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium, The Night They Raided Minsky’s, and What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?- no doubt to use their long-ass titles in an attempt to piggyback on the inevitable boffo box-office of this weekend’s similarly verbosely-titled Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

Finally, a handful of non-Paramount Blu-Rays hit stores this week: Anger Management and V for Vendetta. So that's cool, I guess.

The Most Unnecessary Movies of 2007

Phil Nugent — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Here at the Screengrab, we've pitched in our two cents on the best films of 2007, and my esteemed colleague John Constantine has weighed in on the year's worst. But to paraphrase the late Roman Hruska, don't mediocre movies deserve a little recognition too? They make up the bulk of each year's crop of movies that get released (and probably also the bulk of those that will barely see the light of day), and every so often you see one whose unexceptionalism really stands out. So now, as the new film year begins to heat up with the arrival of the Sundance Film Festival and the first big commercial releases of 2008, let's take one last minute to salute 2007, by remembering the movies that everyone has already gotten a head start on forgetting.

BROOKLYN RULES: This '80s-set tough-neighborhood movie attracted a little attention upon its release because it was written by Terence Winter, who won acclaim for his work on The Sopranos. Winter must have been worried about being accused of repeating himself if his movie too closely resembled The Sopranos, so he wrote something that, like 98% of the tough-neighborhood movies of the last thirty-odd years, rather resembles Mean Streets, except there's no crazy young Robert De Niro figure, and he is greatly missed. Instead, we have our audience surrogate, the clean-cut young dude who's going to grow up to be a writer and tell this story, played by Freddie Prinze, Jr.; his buddy who ever since he was a kid always wanted to be a gangster, played by Scott Caan; and their harmless goofball pal who was born with a target on his back, played by that asshole who plays the unendurable Turtle on HBO's Entourage. The cast also includes Alec Baldwin as the local hot-tempered mob boss, who demonstrates that his transformation into a comedian hasn't been so complete that seeing him carve someone's ear off at a deli counter isn't exactly on a par with seeing a post-Airplane! Leslie Nielson playing a hooker's mean trick in the 1987 Nuts. The best way to tell this movie apart from a thousand other Mean Streets/GoodFellas knock-offs is that it's the one that goes the farthest to pull its punches; it keeps hinting that terrible things are on the verge of happening to the principle characters, and then nothing really terrible ever does, unless for some reason you think there's something regrettable about finally seeing Turtle get his.

I'M REED FISH: Better you than me, as they say. This strained exercise in indie quirkiness was written by Reed Fish and stars Jay Baruchel (the goofy aspiring boxer in Million Dollar Baby) as Reed Fish, who everyone in his small town loves and counts on to help them make sense of this crazy old world. But Reed has relationship troubles: he's engaged to Kate, played by Alexis Bledel (of Gilmore Girls), but what is he supposed to do about these tender feelings developing between him and Jill, played by Schuyler Fisk (the fetching and talented daughter of Sissy Spacek and There Will Be Blood production designer Jack Fisk)? These are the kind of problems you'd sell your soul to the devil to have. The movie has been failing to involve the audience for quite a long time before it pulls a whammy and reveals that what we're watching is a movie within a movie, and that the actual Reed, Kate, and Jill are in the audience, and experiencing mixed emotions about seeing their intricate love lives captured on film. The "real" Reed, Kate, and Jill are played by actors named, respectively, John Penner, Valerine Azlynn, and Shiri Appleby. It's all very meta. There apparently really is a Reed Fish who wrote the thing; at least, he has his own IMDB and MySpace pages and blog, which is about as real as you can get these days. On the blog, he celebrated the mixed reviews and middling box office of his labor of love by writing, "We didn't do crazy big business or anything, but hey, most movies like ours don't ever even get the chance to get into theaters, so no sweat." Low aspirations can seem an appealing thing compared to full-blown show business megalomania, but you don't really want them to show up quite so nakedly on the screen.

NEXT: Ever since Blade Runner made science-fiction guru Philip K. Dick a recognizable name in the movie industry, Hollywood has practically developed a whole subgenre in big, noisy, cluttered action pictures that are ostensibly "inspired" by Dick's work. In 2006, with his rotoscope-animated A Scanner Darkly, Richard Linklater actually found a way to film one of Dick's late novels so that the black-comic eeriness would slowly, quietly envelop the viewer and the ideas would have room to breathe. Hollywood gets back on track with this big-budget slice of sound and fury, directed by Lee Tamahori, once the respected director of the emotionally searing Once Were Warriors, now a man who tells the actors where to stand so they'll be properly positioned in relation to the exploding fireballs that the CGI guys will fill in later. Nicolas Cage plays the hero, a man who can see what's going to happen a couple of minutes into the future. This is a talent that comes in handy when he hits the casinos, or tries to evade an FBI capture team led by Julianne Moore, who recites her lines as if she were only using as much of her brain as she can spare while silently counting her money and memorizing her lines for the next Todd Haynes picture. (As for Cage, for all the abuse he takes these days, he remains a talented guy who does generally try to stagger his roles so that he does one picture of at least nominal artistic credibility for each sewer-dwelling money gig. As it happens, this movie came out between Ghost Rider and the National Treasure sequel, suggesting that he may have gotten his calendar dates screwed up.) The whole thing ends with a shockeroo twist ending that effectively cancels out everything that's come before it, which is fine by me, and that also could be seen as a threat to launch a sequel, which is not.

EVER SINCE THE WORLD ENDED and BEHIND THE MASK: THE RISE OF VERNON LESLIE: These aren't as grating as some movies I saw this year, and Angela Goethals does give a very winning performance as the heroine of Vernon Leslie. But between the two of them, they do a lot to sum up why the fake documentary, usually presented in the guise of sci-fi fantasy or satirical comedy, has fast become the most half-assed, tedious subgenre popular among low-budget indie filmmakers. You can see the reasons for its appeal: it enables filmmakers to patch a movie together largely from simple shots of actors talking directly to the camera or "interviewing" one another, and it allows them to pass off things like shitty lighting and cruddy visuals as a mark of "authenticity." But when you set out to use this form to do something like depict life in a world that's been nearly depopulated by a killer virus (as in Ever Since the World Ended), you'd better have a script that's cleverly worked out to the nth degree instead of one that makes it seem that you're just aimlessly kicking the idea around the parking lot. Vernon Leslie is more professional — the supporting cast includes Scott Wilson, Zelda Rubinstein, and genre-movie stalwart Robert Englund — but that just makes its disposable feel that much more irritating. (It's also more derivative; it's about a film crew that's making a tag-along documentary about a serial killer, an idea that, fifteen years earlier, served the makers of the Belgian black comedy Man Bites Dog. The big difference between the two films is that Man Bites Dog was supposed to be about a "real" murderer, whereas Vernon Leslie is set in the B-movie universe inhabited by Michael Myers and Freddy Kruger. It's built on a familiarity with the rules of the slasher-movie genre that makes you want to get the filmmakers a library card.) There's been a bit of an explosion in fake documentaries these last few years, and most of them seem to have been made by people who have no grasp of how much care and planning goes into making something like Zelig seem like a real movie. With any luck, Cloverfield will help to blow the wheels off this particular bandwagon.