The Screengrab : paul thomas anderson

Phil's Film Faves, Part Two

Phil Nugent — Tue, 26 May 2009 19:00:00 GMT

STOP MAKING SENSE (1984) & SOMETHING WILD (1986)

Jonathan Demme's movies were essential to my having survived the 1980s. I had the closest thing I've ever had to a religious experience during the week when I saw Stop Making Sense five times; I've never seen another movie, including dance films and martial arts flicks, that conveyed to me so much of the pleasure of physicality, of moving your body, and there was something about seeing all those people joining their skills together and losing themselves in the shared experience of being simultaneously brainy, goofy, and hot that suggested everything I wanted to get, and never got, from college. The mixed-tape road trip of Something Wild, where the wild weekend gives way to a trial by fire that leaves the hero and heroine stronger, was everything I wanted out of the rest of life, including the handcuffs and the used-car-salesman cameo by John Waters.

RE-ANIMATOR (1985)

I've always loved horror movies, I've always loved comedy, and I've always loved the idea of comic horror midnight movies that go just far enough in the direction oftoo far. Maybe if more movies that light out in this direction got it right, it would matter less to me that Stuart Gordon got this one just right. But most of them don't.

DUCK SOUP (1933)

What I just said about midnight movies? It goes double for crackhouse-rat comedy.

SONGWRITER (1984)

This movie, starring Willie Nelson and Rip Torn, written by Bud Shrake, and directed by Alan Rudolph during those three weeks a decade when his meds are working, captures the spirit and flavor of Texas hipsterdom as it has always come across in the best of Nelson's music, Torn's acting, and Shrake's writing, and that's about as hip as things get in the South. I myself, a product of the Louisiana/Mississippi border, have spent about a month total in Texas my whole life, but am not above resorting to a contact high.

BEFORE SUNRISE (1995)

Can we talk? I don't get girls. Never have, never will. I miss signals, I misread situations, I don't know...I just don't get girls, okay? And if I may presume to speak for the losers of the world for a second, being one of those people who doesn't get anywhere with other people in that way can sometimes make it a sobering experience to sit in the dark watching a lot of movies in which couple effortlessly hook up. But if I ever saw a movie in which my own fantasy of the best way you could hook up with somebody, this is probably it. Two nice, smart people just run into each other, take a chance, and for as long as the movie is running, it pays off, only to end with a cliffhanger. The director, Richard Linklater, later resolved things with his sequel, Before Sunset, and I like it fine, but I think I may have enjoyed the nine intervening years of wondering even more.

I met Linklater once, not that he would remember. It was at a festival where he was showing his first movie, Slacker, and someone tried to introduce the two of us, and I actually, fairly elaborately snubbed him, because I'd heard about--hadn't seen--his movie and thought it sounded like a pile of shit. After snubbing him (and mortifying the person trying to make the introductions(, I walked away invisibly pinning a medal to my chest, and the last time I looked back at Linklater, he was smiling at me in a very nice way that I may only imagine seemed to say, "Gee, before I made a movie, this fellow would be one of the biggest jackasses I've ever met, but now, he wouldn't even make my personal top 500!" Maybe I don't deserve to get girls.

MAGNOLIA (1999)

I could get very personal here too, but I'll just say that I saw this movie at a moment when I very badly needed to see this movie. It is, of course, the movie that, of all P. T. Anderson's works, is the one most likely to get a shoe thrown at you if you sing its praises before a mixed audience. Both these facts probably have something to do with the fact that, while there are other movies of Anderson's that I think are better, his having made this one is the reason I'd be happy to take a bullet for him.

Great Beginnings: Screengrab's Favorite Opening Scenes Of All Time! (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 21:30:00 GMT

MULHOLLAND DRIVE (2001)

David Lynch has never been what you’d call a mainstream director -- his last feature film, if I recall correctly, began with him videotaping old Polish factories -- but despite his reputation as an artsy iconoclast, he’s also got a streak of razzle-dazzle showmanship and the ability to hook an audience like nobody’s business when he puts his transcendental mind to it. Perhaps owing to the relatively commercial nature of the film’s origin as a pilot for ABC (infamously ordered and then canceled by network muttonheads for being too “Lynchian”), Mulholland Drive kicks off with a psychedelic jitterbug scene that gets the adrenalin pumping like any good overture, then moves into an opening sequence freighted with intrigue, atmosphere and dramatic possibility like a master class in cinematic storytelling: a beautiful woman in a limousine at night...a man with a gun about to kill her...a doomed car full of hedonistic teenagers screaming towards them, and then...CRASH! The man with the gun is killed, the beautiful woman staggers off into the Los Angeles night, her memory obliterated...and I’m ready and willing to follow Lynch wherever he wants to go. (AO)

BOOGIE NIGHTS (1997)

As Magnolia and There Will Be Blood ably demonstrate, PT Anderson knows how to open a film. And in terms of audacious electricity, Anderson’s finest inaugural stanza can be found in his 1997 breakthrough Boogie Nights. A 3-minute single shot, it begins with the film’s title on a flashing movie marquee before the camera tilts left and then right (like an amusement park rollercoaster), then tracks a driving car to the entrance of a hopping nightclub, and then enters the club alongside Burt Reynolds, Julianne Moore and Luis Guzman, eventually moving around and onto the dance floor, to the surrounding tables and finally behind rollerskating Heather Graham. A bit of egotistical showmanship? Without question. Yet more than merely a superficial calling-card gesture, Anderson’s brash opening aesthetic stunt efficiently introduces many of the story’s key characters, as well as conveying the euphoric glitz and glamour of a California scene dominated by wannabes flirting with their celebrity dreams. (NS)

MANHATTAN (1979)

Most of the time, when a director proclaims that his setting is “practically another character”, it’s a bunch of hooey, an oft-repeated cliché spouted off by hacks who want to be congratulated for shooting on location. But for Woody Allen, it was different. For years, Allen’s films came to be synonymous with a way of life -- cultured, neurotic, more than a little wary, resolutely cosmopolitan -- that could only come from being steeped in the cultural mecca of the Western hemisphere. Film after Allen film paid homage to the city he loved, but none more so than the one named after his borough of choice. Yet true to form, even at the beginning of Manhattan, Allen grapples with his conflicting feelings on the city -- is it the world’s greatest city, or a symbol of everything that’s wrong with society? The fact that Allen can switch instantaneously from one viewpoint to the other suggests that in his mind, they’re merely two sides of the same coin. As Allen himself says in the film, the New York he knows exists in black and white and is accompanied by Gershwin, much like the film itself, which would imply that the town he loves belongs more to the past than to the present. Looking back at the film thirty years later, these directorial choices give the film a quality that’s both nostalgic and timeless, implying that even now, even with the World Trade Center and the House That Ruth Built gone (and Allen working mostly overseas), these are still part of the city, if only in our collective memory. (PC)

8 1/2 (1963) & WILD STRAWBERRIES (1957)

The dream sequence is an opportunity for a film to break out of the logic of its narrative and bare a character's fears for the audience -- unlike real dreams, which run a gamut of emotion, dream sequences in films tend to focus on anxiety. By breaking away from the internal logic of the film, the dream sequence can take a breath and develop an established character, and for this reason, very few films start with dream sequences. Fellini's 8 1/2 does, however, and Bergman's Wild Strawberries launches into one not long after the start. In the dream in 8 1/2, Fellini-substitute Anselmi dreams of being trapped in a traffic jam, all of the other drivers and passengers staring blindly at him (other than the old man pawing a starlet). He fights his way out of his car and flies away. Then he's flying over a beach, with a doppelganger holding a rope attached to his leg. An accountant rides up on a horse, cape flying behind him like the Knight at the beginning of Bergman's The Seventh Seal. His doppelganger insists that he come down, and he plummets into the ocean, waking up in terror. Pretty clear what that's about, right? Anselmi is first trapped in traffic, the great metaphor for go-nowhere-fast modern times, and when he escapes, he is dragged back down by his own ambitions and promises to moneymen. Anselmi starts the movie in a dream, spends much of it wallowing in memory, and finally ends the movie with dream-logic. His beginning dream is about his fear of being trapped, reeled in by his own accountants and his own professional persona, unable to fly and falling. In Wild Strawberries, Professor Borg dreams of faceless clocks and faceless people, time falling away while his own death stumbles before him. Although it's dream-logic, the meaning is written clearly and most of the action of the movie, in which Borg tries to fix the mess he's made of his life, follows. (HC)

Click Here For Part One, Three, Four & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Nick Schager, Paul Clark, Hayden Childs

Screengrab Presents: Cinema's Greatest Comebacks (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 22:00:00 GMT

RIP TORN in DEFENDING YOUR LIFE (1991)

A director I know who once worked with Rip Torn described him as a man filled with rage at all times, which may or may not be true. Yes, the actor famously smacked Norman Mailer on the noggin with a hammer in a bizarre fight somehow related to the production of the 1970 film Maidstone (an altercation that may or may not have been staged, but definitely seemed to draw actual blood). And, yes, there was that time he passed on the Jack Nicholson role in Easy Rider (specifically written for him by Terry Southern) after Dennis Hopper pulled a knife on him during a fight in a New York restaurant. So maybe he’s not the mellowest cat in the pet shop (and, sure, the man has been known to have a drink on occasion), but Torn nevertheless managed to maintain a fairly steady career, mostly as a character actor, from the time of his first screen appearance in the 1956 Baby Doll and his Broadway debut a few years later in the original cast of Tennessee Williams’ Sweet Bird of Youth through subsequent decades of TV and movie appearances. Yet, despite the occasional high class gig (like Alan Rudolph’s Songwriter in 1984 and a 1989 Nicolas Roeg adaptation of Sweet Bird starring Elizabeth Taylor), Torn’s later career had a distinct whiff of has-beenery (Jinxed, The Beastmaster)...until, that is, Albert Brooks cast him as the bombastic afterlife attorney Bob Diamond in Defending Your Life, thus unleashing the full, hitherto untapped comic brilliance of Torn (and, to a lesser extent, Meryl Streep), launching a late-period renaissance in the actor’s career as the go-to guy for directors and showrunners looking to capture that “Rip Torn” feeling, including Garry Shandling (who assured Torn’s place in comedy heaven by casting him as uber-producer Artie in The Larry Sanders Show), Barry Sonnenfeld (who assured mainstream theatrical heat via Men In Black) and, lately, America’s sweetheart Tina Fey and the gang over at 30 Rock. Who knew an angry guy could be so frickin’ lovable?

BURT REYNOLDS, BOOGIE NIGHTS (1997)

Burt Reynolds probably thought Rent-a-Cop would be his big comeback vehicle. Or Switching Channels. Or how about Cop and ½ ? That's why Boogie Nights almost has to be considered an accidental comeback; there's no evidence to suggest that Reynolds felt it had any more merit than, say, Striptease or Mad Dog Time – quite the opposite, in fact, as the one-time Bandit fired his agent after seeing the rough cut of Paul Thomas Anderson's opus. Hey, if you throw enough shit at the wall, something's bound to stick, and few have flung as much feces as our man Burt. Indeed, it is perhaps this very quality that makes Reynolds so convincing as porno patriarch Jack Horner, a kindred aging show-biz vet who mistakes his life's work for great art. Reynolds won a Golden Globe and was nominated for an Oscar for this performance, then parlayed the resulting goodwill into a string of firecracker roles that launched him back onto the Hollywood A-list. What, you missed Crazy Six, Waterproof, Pups, Grilled, Universal Soldier II and III and Uwe Boll's In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale? Your loss.

BILL MURRAY in RUSHMORE (1998)

Let's maintain a little perspective here. Chevy Chase would probably love a big, spangled comeback, though he turned down the Kevin Spacey role in American Beauty, apparently because he was concerned that it was dirty and would sully his image so that he would be less likely to be invited to do such family fare as Snow Day. Murray, who hasn't always seemed that interested in being a movie star, has never really gone as far away as Chase, who was all but driven from the A-list by a torch-carrying mob. But Murray spent most of the '90s veering between lightly promoted character roles (in such movies as Ed Wood and Wild Things) and star vehicles that he often seemed a little embarrassed about. (In the TV commercials for his 1997 The Man Who Knew Too Little, he offered to personally recompense any dissatisfied viewers for the price of their ticket, vowing, "I will put money in your hand with no anger in my heart.") If his melancholy, graying performance in this Wes Anderson picture feels like a breakthrough and a comeback, one that lifted him to a different level in movies, it may be because it never feels like a gag, or a stunt; you never pick him out in the frame and think, "Hey, there's Bill Murray!" Fourteen years after his weird attempt to stretch himself in The Razor's Edge, Murray, always good company in a movie, had quietly evolved into an actor.

FRANK SINATRA in FROM HERE TO ETERNITY (1953)

Some revisionists (such as David Thomson) have questioned just how desperately Sinatra needed the role of Maggio to salvage his career, or even how badly the career needed salvaging; it's true that the singer was under fire from newspaper columnists and self-righteous "morals" groups for his divorce and his (then liberal) politics, but it's not as if it were dog-food-for-dinner time. But everyone who was there agrees that Sinatra felt as if his world had collapsed; he may still have been rich and famous, but he didn't feel like Frank Sinatra anymore, which is to say that it had been a while since a mob of screaming teenage girls had threatened to lick his clothes off. And anyway, of all the great movie-star comebacks, this may be the only one to have inspired a major subplot in a great movie, and to be based on a rumor so widely circulated that the people who saw The Godfather were assumed to know damn well who "Johnny Fontaine" was and the title of the "new war picture" that he so badly wanted to be in. Though it does seem to be untrue that the Mafia got Frank the job. If it were some piddly-ass thing, Sinatra might have turned to his shadier friends, but for this, he felt he needed to use his big guns. So Ava Gardner got him the job.

MARLON BRANDO in THE GODFATHER & LAST TANGO IN PARIS (1972)

In last year's TCM documentary Brando, Michael Winner, who directed Brando in the 1971 film The Nightcomers, described how he was able to sell the American rights to Universal Pictures as part of the studio's scheme to get rid of its connection to the star. Universal had a multi-picture deal with Brando, and the bosses jumped at the chance to use Winner's film to burn off its contract with the actor whose recent track record -- Morituri, The Appaloosa, Candy, The Night of the Following Day, et al -- seemed to be that of a spent force. Francis Ford Coppola famously had to fight the Paramount brass just to get permission to have Brando do a screen test, even though demanding a screen test of Brando was considered such an insult that many expected that once the request had been made, Paramount would have the relief of never hearing from him again. By all accounts, Brando was always helpful and considerate during the filming, though he later made it clear that he felt that he'd been screwed financially on the deal. The movie was still chugging along happily at the box office when Tango, the adults-only character drama that Brando had done for Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci, was shown at that year's New York Film Festival and set off the first shock waves caused by both the power and sexual directness of Brando's performance. As an actor, he would never dive as deep again, and as a co-worker, he would never be so well-behaved again -- certainly not for Coppola, who he tortured for every perceived Godfather-related slight he'd shrugged off, first by refusing to do a cameo in The Godfather, Part II, then by keeping one eye firmly on the clock while making Apocalypse Now. But the one-two punch of these two masterpieces left him with a mystique that he would carry to the end of his days, and though his post-1972 resume is strange and spotty, no one doubts that he was doing whatever it was he wanted to do.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Four & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

Trailer Review: Bedtime Stories

Paul Clark — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 16:00:00 GMT

When I first heard about Adam Sandler’s new effects-driven family comedy, I found myself dreading it. But although the combination holds somewhat less promise than “Sandler meets PT Anderson”, I’ve got to admit this looks slightly less toxic than I’d originally feared. The idea that the kids are inadvertently wishing harm upon Uncle Skeeter through their outlandish bedtime-story twists is a promising one that’s sure to leaven some of the inevitable mawkishness of the genre. Yet alas, there’s not a laugh to be found in this trailer. Maybe it’s because I only find Sandler funny when he’s got a little edge, but seeing him soften his trademark character for the kiddies just doesn’t do it for me. After all, if there’s one comedian who shouldn’t be given a reason to dumb down even further, it’s… OK, it’s actually Dane Cook, but if there are two then the second would surely be Adam Sandler. But still, I’m not cringing at the idea of this movie anymore, so that’s a step in the right direction, right?

DVD Digest for September 16, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week is a busy one for lovers of classic cinema- to say nothing of the folks at Warner Home Video.

DVD(s) of the Week: Continuing their ongoing commitment to spotlight film history’s greatest filmmakers, the good folks at Criterion fill a glaring hole in the DVD market with this week’s release of three classics by Max Ophüls- La Ronde, Le Plaisir, and The Earrings of Madame De…. These three films, all made at Ophüls’ artistic and commercial peak, make a lovely introduction to the man’s work, with all the continental sophistication, exquisitely-wrought melodrama, and lavish production values that made his reputation. And stars? You bet- between the three films, you’ll find Jean Gabin, Simone Signoret, Anton Walbrook, Charles Boyer, Danielle Darrieux, and Simone Simon. If you can only shell out for one disc, go with Earrings, whose DVD features not only scholarly commentary and a number of featurettes (including an interview with Paul Thomas Anderson, whose complex camera movements were clearly inspired by Ophüls’ work), but also a new printing of the source novel, Louise de Vilmorin’s Madame De…. But really, they’re all worth your money. Now all we need is a Region 1 DVD of Letter From an Unknown Woman…

In addition, this week is a banner occasion for musical fans, led by a double dose of Oscar-winning Vincente Minnelli titles, An American in Paris and Gigi (both Warner), each presented in snazzy new Two-Disc Special Editions. There’s also Warner’s The Busby Berkeley Collection Volume 2, which includes Gold Diggers of 1937, Gold Diggers in Paris, Hollywood Hotel and Variety Show. Other classics coming to DVD this week include: Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice 20th Anniversary Deluxe Edition (Warner); young Tom Cruise and his Ray-Bans in Risky Business 25th Anniversary Deluxe Edition (Warner, also Blu-Ray); Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains (Ryko Distribution), which was spotlighted last week by our very own Phil Nugent; Glenn Close in the live-action 101 Dalmatians and 102 Dalmatians (Disney); and The Charlie Chan Collection Volume 5 (Fox).

This week’s roster of recent releases on DVD is headed up by The Wachowski Brothers’ financial and critical bomb Speed Racer (Warner, also Blu-Ray), which I believe is still the most underappreciated movie so far this year. Other recent titles coming to DVD include: Patrick Dempsey in Made of Honor (Sony, also Blu-Ray); Al Pacino in 88 Minutes (Sony, also Blu-Ray); Mike Myers making an ass of himself again in The Love Guru (Universal, also Blu-Ray); the surprisingly affecting Young@Heart (Fox); David Gordon Green’s Snow Angels (Warner); the acclaimed documentary Constantine’s Sword (First Run); and two direct-to-DVD titles, 101 Dalmatians II: Patch’s London Adventure (Disney) and Another Cinderella Story (Warner, also Blu-Ray).

This week’s new TV on DVD titles include: Chuck Season 1 (Warner); Criminal Minds Season 3 (Paramount); Dirty Sexy Money Season 1 (Disney); My Name Is Earl Season 3 (Fox); Private Practice Season 1 (Disney); and Pushing Daisies Season 1 (Warner, also Blu-Ray).

Finally, in Blu-Ray only titles, this week brings 1408 (Weinstein), Hulk (Universal), Madagascar (Paramount), The Mist (Weinstein), and Shrek the Third (Paramount).

OST: "There Will Be Blood"

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 20 May 2008 19:00:00 GMT

The recent direction in which Radiohead has turned causes much split opinion, as might be expected from one of the biggest bands in the world. Some feel that the more avant-garde turn their music has taken is a sign of growth, development, and change for the better, a step away from the simple but distinctive pop craftsmanship that marked their early days and towards an entirely new sensibility, more attuned to the voice of modern minimalist composers than to the pop or even indie-rock tradition. Others think it's been a disaster, a pretentious and overwrought plunge into the alienatingly highbrow at the cost of the band's credibility, relatability and listenability. Whatever one's opinion (and I'm certainly in the former camp), a lot of tears have been shed over the fate of the band's guitarist, Jonny Greenwood. Though he's been vocally supportive of Radiohead's direction and has adapted his playing admirably well to the demands of the more stripped-down, electronic-influenced work, many have wondered -- especially given the sound of lead singer Thom Yorke's solo work -- if he was fully behind the shift in tone. But after the release of the stunning soundtrack to Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, no one should worry, least of all Greenwood himself. It's a masterful album, perfectly suited to the material onscreen, that shows how fully possessed he is by moody minimalism and dissonant, striking tones.

There were legitimate worries when Greenwood was announced as the composer to the score to There Will Be Blood. A number of people, myself included, questioned the prominent role assigned to Aimee Mann's music in Magnolia; boosters found it fitting, a natural extension of the movie's story. Others found it extremely inclusive, smacking of the cart driving the horse. It turns out they have nothing to worry about: Greenwood's score in There Will Be Blood is as subtle and insinuating as Mann's songs in Magnolia were obvious and intrusive. From the first squalling, snakeline chords the the last smothering cluster of strings, it's a tightly controlled, sinister, and utterly appropriate score, a musical realization of the struggles and excesses in Daniel Plainview's soul. While the movie itself is epic, the score is minute and precise, coming from a stripped-down version of a full orchestra and delivering a terrible sense of struggle from its very first notes. At times, Greenwood almost seems to be fighting a horrible battle to make the dissonant blasts and squalling notes force meaning and emotion from the barren landscapes of the film's oil-town settings: there is pain and effort in this music as real and as clear as Plainview's horribly willful efforts to drag himself out of a hole in the ground with a wooden leg. Some notes sound relentlessly, again and again, with a furious insistence worthy of Ligeti; other notes creep loosely around the edges of perception, bringing the entire thing an almost ambient quality like Brian Eno's instrumental efforts. It's an astonishing piece of work on every level, instantly marking Greenwood as a force to be reckoned with as a film composer. (Unfortunately, the presence of a slight three-minute quote from his own "Popcorn Superhet Receiver", an avant-garde piece influenced by the Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki, disqualified the widely praised score from Oscar contention.)

BEST TRACKS: the stirring, magnificent (and ironically claustrophobic) "Open Spaces", which opens the album; the angry, jerking, ,almost psychotic "Eat Him By His Own Light"; and the lonely, dismal, haunting "Daniel Plainview" are standouts here, but give the entire album a listen, all the way through, divorced from the context of the film: it's a testament to how well it's done that, as perfectly as it works onscreen, it holds up amazingly well on its own.

Thursday Morning Poll for May 15, 2008

Paul Clark — Thu, 15 May 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Last week, we attempted to decide once and for all the ongoing battle between the fans of Paul Thomas Anderson and the Wes Anderson lovers of the world. The resultant poll yielded victory for P.T. (who benefited at least in part from his most recent film being better-received than Wes’), who got 55% of the vote to Wes’ 36%. Finishing a distant third was Sweden’s Roy Andersson, not a bad figure under the circumstances, especially considering he’s one of the few world-class directors who’s actually made fewer films than either PT or Wes. As expected, our attempts to turn Brad and Paul W.S. into the Ralph Nader and Lyndon LaRouche of the Anderson poll bore no fruit.

With Prince Caspian coming out this weekend, I took some time to think of other “Prince”-titled movies in film history, and I came to the conclusion that there really aren’t that many good ones. I suppose that makes a certain amount of sense- most movies are made by men, most men would rather be a king than a prince, “prince” sounds kind of childish and wussy, and so on. However, there have been at least a handful of memorable ones, some due to quality, others for simply being so damned ubiquitous on their original release that we couldn’t possibly forget them. So for this week’s pool- from this admittedly limited selection of “Prince”-ly movies, select your favorite.

As always, if you feel like we’ve left out something important (and I’m sure we have) or you just want to share your love for American Boy: A Profile of Steven Prince or The Prince & Me, the comments are open.

Thursday Morning Poll for April 17, 2008

Paul Clark — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 14:00:00 GMT

You know what they say- timing is everything. So perhaps it was unfair of me to wonder after your favorite Paul Thomas Anderson a scant two days after the DVD release of There Will Be Blood. In the end, the film walked away with a victory in last week's poll, racking up an impressive 44% percent of the vote. Running neck and neck for the runner-up spot were Boogie Nights and Magnolia. The comparatively modest Punch-Drunk Love and Hard Eight- awesome though they are- just couldn't keep up.

This week, in advance this weekend's release of The Forbidden Kingdom, we settle the age-old question that the film itself attempts to answer: who would win?

If you want to be more specific about your answer- say, "Jet circa Black Mask" or "Jackie in his Project A/Police Story days" feel free. You know what to do.

Thursday Morning Poll for April 10, 2008

Paul Clark — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Well, that fairly well. In the first week of our new Thursday Morning Poll, our loyal Screengrab readers overwhelmingly selected The Dark Knight as their most-anticipated comic book movie of this summer. Coming in a distant second was the similarly awesome-looking Iron Man, with Hellboy II and The Incredible Hulk in a virtual tie at #3. Wanted proved to be singularly undeserving of its title, receiving no votes whatsoever.

To switch gears a bit, this week's poll was inspired by Tuesday's DVD release of Paul Thomas Anderson's latest magnum opus, There Will Be Blood.

And remember, sound off in the comments about your favorites.

DVD Digest for April 8, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week, a cracked fantasy favorite finally gets the DVD it deserves, and DVD lovers can finally order their milkshakes to go.

For most moviegoers, the big news this week is the arrival of Paul Thomas Anderson's latest masterpiece There Will Be Blood in DVD. But while that's cause for celebration, be warned- as with Sweeney Todd last week, Paramount is releasing the film in two separate versions, a bare-bones single-disc release and a two-disc set featuring some deleted scenes and a number of featurettes about the making of, and history behind, the film. Normally, I'd be skeptical about the relatively slim pickings even on the two-disc set, but Anderson's recent DVD releases haven't contained too much in the way of commentaries and the like, so this was to be expected from him. Besides, it's not like you're NOT going to buy There Will Be Blood- it's awesome enough to stand on its own merits without all the snazzy bells and whistles.

But no less noteworthy is the release of a new version of Terry Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (Sony, also Blu-Ray). Munchausen, a notorious flop in its day, has since become something of a cult favorite, and it's good to see Sony finally giving it a good DVD treatment. Naturally, there's a Terry Gilliam commentary track, which should be reason enough to buy the DVD, considering that Gilliam's commentaries are never better than when he's talking about films that were mishandled by their distributors. The two-disc set also includes the three-part documentary "The Madness and Misadventures of Munchausen," as well as storyboard sequences that supposedly feature "all-new vocal performances by Terry Gilliam and Chris McKeown." Dare I hope Gilliam drew the storyboards in Pythonimation style?

In other classics coming to DVD news, Fox is continuing the celebration of Bette Davis with a six-disc Bette Davis Centenary Celebration Collection that includes a new two-disc version of All About Eve along with bare-bones discs of The Nanny, The Virgin Queen, Phone Call From a Stranger, and the gothic-horror classic Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte. Other than that, not much to write about in the classics department, unless of course the Blu-Ray release of Arnold Schwarzenegger in The 6th Day blows your hair back. In which case don't let me stop you.

More recent titles being released on DVD this week include John C. Reilly in the musical biopic spoof Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (Sony, also Blu-Ray), the family fantasy The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep (Sony, also Blu-Ray), Robert Redford's star-studded Iraq War dud Lions For Lambs (MGM), and the Leonardo DiCaprio-produced and -narrated tree-hugger documentary The 11th Hour (Warner).

Finally, David Huddleston's checking in again this week, this time to offer his condolences to Warner's HD-DVD release of I Am Legend. You know, Huddleston's condolences might make me feel bad for Will Smith's character in the film, except I'm guessing he'd be grateful for the company.

Screengrab Bets the Oscars: Phil's Picks

Phil Nugent — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Let's make sure we're on the same page on this: if you bet money, household chores, or bragging rights on anything you're about to read in this post, you are out of your mind, and while I pity you, I will not admit in a court of law to ever having met you. I got off the Oscar train when I was eight years old and Sissy Spacek didn't win for Carrie; to have continued our relationship beyond that point would have been madness, madness! I claim no inside knowledge or deep understanding of how they decide these things, and the only thing I could tell you about the winners of recent years is that Jennifer Hudson won last year for Dreamgirls. (How do I know this? I was talking to someone on the phone when it was announced, and the woman I was talking to happened to have her TV set on. When Hudson's name was called out, the woman screamed. It turned out that it was a joyous scream, but until she calmed down enough to tell me what the hell was going on, my best guess was that she had just noticed that her couch was on fire.) Anyway, the only thing more completely charmless than the Oscars may be the ugly spectacle of a writer bragging about how little he cares about what he's paid to weigh in on, so now that we've just established that my opinion in this area counts for about as much as hair styling tips from Paul Wolfowitz, here goes:

BEST SCREENPLAY:

Diablo Cody takes Best Original for Juno because the voters have actually heard her name — it's not like, having come across it once, you can get it out of your head without laser surgery — and Paul Thomas Anderson takes it for Best Adaptation for There Will Be Blood, because that's what you get when you make a great movie but you aren't going to get Best Picture and the Best Director prize already taken.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS:

Apparently this is going to go to Cate Blanchett for I'm Not There, partly because Blanchett is also nominated for a Best Actress award that she is not getting to get and nominating her twice in one year without giving her anything would just seem silly. A good and sound bit of reasoning, and so I will of course reject it. And not only because I don't get the universally accepted logic by which this is agreed to be a "supporting" performance. Who the hell is she supposed to be supporting? The term ought to mean something other than "Big name actor in a role that is frequently off-screen." She's definitely the unquestioned star of her section of the movie, and while I didn't put a stop watch on it, I'll bet that she has as much screen time as any of the other Dylans. And if it turns out that Richard Gere, say, has a little more actual screen time, I'm not sure that the editor did him a favor by it. Until persuaded otherwise, I shall remain convinced that Blanchett's placement in this category is part of some conspiracy to screw over Amy Ryan, who wouldn't win anyway, because you only win an Oscar for playing a character as skanky as her Gone Baby Gone character if the Academy has already seen you in a bunch of glamour-puss roles and so knew for sure that you were acting. It's a moot point anyway, because I boldly predict that the winner will be Ruby Dee, because she has had a long and distinguished career, because she is 83 years old, because her late husband, Ossie Davis, is much missed, and because even though she didn't have much of a role in American Gangster, she did get to slap Denzel Washington, and he needed slapping.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR:

Hal Holbrook has had a long and distinguished career and is now the same age as Ruby Dee, so if she doesn't win in her category, his chances automatically go up by 50%. But I really don't see it happening. Philip Seymour Hoffman gives the best performance in this category — he's a stone hoot in Charlie Wilson's War, which marks a rare example of an actor giving the Academy three different performances to select for nomination and the Academy choosing the right one. I'd think he had a real chance if it weren't for the fact that he already won not too long ago for Best Actor for Capote, which makes Javier Bardem the needier candidate. Bardem's trigger-happy, unstoppable psycho in a much-discussed hairstyle gave audiences all the fun of watching a Batman villain ply his trade, but it's in an officially certified, critically approved serious film with a literary pedigree, and for this he will be the recipient of much gratitude from voters whose wives dragged them to Atonement. He's already won more than a few awards for this performance, and he'll be throwing one more on the pile.

BEST ACTRESS:

Julie Christie in a lock. Next?

BEST ACTOR:

The conventional wisdom seems to be that this one belongs to Daniel Day-Lewis for There Will Be Blood. I think that George Clooney has a shot for Michael Clayton, which is the kind of hard-hitting, tough-minded, yet still glamorous-looking movie that Hollywood wishes and expects America to take to its bosom. (Clooney looks worn-down and dissipated in it, and a gorgeous-looking man looking as much like hell as he can is the most glamorous thing in the world.) Some would argue that Clooney himself gave the award to Day-Lewis at a recent Newsweek-sponsored gathering where he serenaded his shy British colleague by saying that all actors "bow low to this motherfucker." Indeed, the whole of the media has been going wild these last couple of months about Day-Lewis's position as the great screen actor of our time. I do not disagree. But I happen to be one of those suspicious types who, when I hear conservative pundits on Fox News go on and on about how fearsome a candidate Barack Obama would be against a Republican challenger in November, and how they think that any Republican would just chew Hillary Clinton up and spit her out, I can't help thinking, Okay, would they say that out loud if they really believed it? Hasn't anyone ever heard the one about wanting to be thrown in the brier patch? So, on this baseless idiot notion, I have just decided the media have been building Day-Lewis up in preparation for the shocking upset to come when Clooney takes the prize. Remember, you read it here first! Unless I'm wrong, in which case you can just forget that I said anything.

BEST DIRECTOR:

The Coens, for No Country for Old Men, in a bigger lock than Julie Christie.

BEST PICTURE:

The big pictures here are obviously No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood, and I think they're going to cancel each other out. Both are impressive, violent movies that actually alienate as many potential voters as they attract. For the same reasons that I think George Clooney is an attractive candidate for Best Actor, his movie, Michael Clayton, has the smell of a loser to it. So the contrarian, can't-we-all-just-get-alone vote will go to putting either Juno or Atonement over the top. After it won at the Golden Globes, I thought that Atonement, with its period romance and literary prestige, was a shoo-in, but since then I have shifted over to favoring Juno, partly because I got bored with my previous position, partly because Juno is this year's Little Miss Sunshine, and Little Miss Sunshine lost last year. That means that the partisans of indie-flavored whimsy will be harder-driving this year. Also, it came out later in the year than Little Miss Sunshine, and is lucky in its timing: I calculate that the backlash against the backlash against Juno is now on a rising wave and will crest in time for the awards Sunday. It will flatten out the next morning and the papers will be full of "What were we thinking" pieces for the next two weeks.

Indie Box-Office Roundup: Weekend of February 15-17, 2008

Paul Clark — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 00:17:00 GMT

Continuing its strong appeal to arthouse audiences, Eran Kolirin's The Band's Visit has moved up to #1 atop this week's Indie Box-Office Roundup. The Israeli comedy, released in the US by Sony Pictures Classics, managed an impressive per-screen average of $11,267, up from $9,642 last week. At a time when the big Hollywood releases are opening big and falling fast, it's good to see a movie that really catches on with audiences like this. A movie like The Band's Visit may never pull in Cloverfield grosses, but in its limited release it should have more staying power than most would-be blockbusters.

Also maintaining a strong showing over President's Day Weekend was last week's chart-topper, Focus Features' In Bruges, now at #2 with a $10,420 per-screen average in its second week of release. Martin McDonough's film is still expanding its release, so expect the averages to dip somewhat in the following weeks.

The weekend's top premiere was George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead, the inaugural release from Weinstein Company offshoot Third Rail Releasing. Romero's film, his fifth Dead movie to date, garnered a solid $6,549 per screen, and will expand to 10 more markets for the weekend of February 29.

Rounding out the top 5 were Cao Hamburger's The Year My Parents Went on Vacation (City Lights) and the self-distributed David and Layla. Also of note was Magnolia's program of 2007 Oscar-nominated Short Films, which finished #9 on the list. However, I find their figures more than a bit dubious, considering I had to pay separate admissions for the Animated and Live-Action programs.

Finally, Juno-watch! The movie that Roger Ebert called "his true love" finished just outside the top 10 this week, raking in $2,993 per screen, finishing ahead of last week's top wide-ish release, There Will Be Blood. Next week could see a bump in a number of current limited releases, depending on how the Oscars pan out. So hopefully we'll get a nice surge for PT Anderson, not so much for Diablo Cody and Ivan Reitman's kid.

Top 10, Weekend of February 15-17:
1. The Band's Visit [Sony Pictures Classics] ($11,267 per screen)
2. In Bruges [Focus Features] ($10,420 per screen)
3. George A. Romero's Diary Of The Dead [Third Rail Releasing] ($6,549 per screen)
4. The Year My Parents Went On Vacation [City Lights Pictures Releasing] ($5,430 per screen)
5. David & Layla [David & Layla, LLC] ($5,007 per screen)
6. 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days [IFC First Take] ($4,808 per screen)
7. How To Cook Your Life [Roadside Attractions] ($3,704 per screen)
8. The Business of Being Born [International Film Circuit] ($3,608 per screen)
9. 2007 Academy Award Nominated Short Films [Magnolia Pictures] ($3,605 per screen)
10. Caramel [Roadside Attractions] ($3,360 per screen)

Source: IndieWire.

Video of the Day: PTA vs. Mike Figgis

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 18:45:00 GMT

When Mike Figgis sat down with him for a lengthy BBC interview back in 1998, Paul Thomas Anderson wasn't yet the conquering hero of There Will Be Blood. He was still a young maverick filmmaker with only two movies under his belt and a hell of a lot to prove.

But even though Magnolia, Punch-Drunk Love and his masterwork with Daniel Day-Lewis were still to come, the man gave great interview. With hands flailing, eyes flashing, mouth full of snacks, and the air around him turning blue, he spends quite some time trading barbs, laughs and film theories with Figgis in a three-part chat as part of the "Hollywood Conversations" series on Film Four. (The equally enjoyable second and third installments are here and here.) The consensus is that TWBB has cemented Anderson's rep as a great filmmaker, but even those who disagree will allow that he's a fun guy to listen to.

Scandal, Awards at Berlinale

Paul Clark — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 15:00:00 GMT

The jury prizes for the recently-concluded Berlin Film Festival have been announced, and this year's Golden Bear Winner is unpopular, to say the least. The jury's choice for best film, José Padilha's Tropa de Elite (Elite Squad), deemed by critic Dennis Lim "a violent, cop's-eye view of Rio's favela drug wars that registers more as glorification of the fighting than as critique," has become the center of a wave of controversy. The film is the fiction debut of Bus 174 director Padilha, and much of the controversy has stemmed not from the film itself, but from its being awarded the top prize over more popular titles such as Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky and P.T. Anderson's There Will Be Blood. Filmbrain has even gone so far as to suggest that the Golden Bear was bought by the film's distributor, Harvey Weinstein. It's true Elite was one of the worst-reviewed films in competition — many critics have called it "fascist," making it a strange film for a Costa-Gavras-led jury to get behind, no? However, the idea that it was paid for seems a little far-fetched to me. But what do I know? I wasn't there.

Other prizes from the Berlinale:
Jury Grand Prix- Standard Operating Procedure (Errol Morris)
Silver Bear, Best Director- Paul Thomas Anderson, There Will Be Blood
Silver Bear, Best Actress- Sally Hawkins, Happy-Go-Lucky
Silver Bear, Best Actor- Reza Najie, The Song of Sparrows
Silver Bear, Best Script- In Love We Trust (Wang Xiaoshuai)
Alfred Bauer Prize- Lake Tahoe (Fernando Eimbcke)
10th Panorama Audience Award- Lemon Tree (Eran Riklis)

Source: GreenCine Daily.

Screengrab Bets The Oscars: Leonard's Picks

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 15:30:00 GMT

With the 80th annual Academy Awards less than two weeks away, and with the WGA strike apparently near its end (assuring that there actually will be an Oscar ceremony, and not just a handful of star-struck entertainment journalists trying to figure out who the TelePrompTer works), it's time for us here at the Screengrab to suck it up. It's time for us to do what every other film writer in the world, self-respecting or otherwise, is doing, and lay down our picks for the big to-do. Since I've always had a knack for making a jackass out of myself on the internet, I'll be the first: under the cut, you'll find my picks for who deserves to take home a statuette come Oscar night in eigh different categories, and who's going to walk away with the gold, regardless of merit. Over the next thirteen days, I'm hoping my Screengrab colleagues will join me in this endeavor, and then, come March, at least one of us can strut around talking about how smart we are.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS:

There's a fine crowd of candidates this time around, and it's hard to pick a winner — there's no obvious failings just as there's no obvious standouts. All told, Cate Blanchett should win for her turn as Dylan in I'm Not There, but I'm predicting it will actually end up in the hands of Amy Ryan for the surprising Gone Baby Gone.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR:

If, as I'm predicting, the Coen Brothers are shut out again this year, that means even more that Javier Bardem should win for his performance as Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men. However, given his spate of terrific roles towards the end of the year, I'm predicting it will go to Philip Seymour Hoffman for Charlie Wilson's War.

BEST ACTRESS:

Ellen Page surely deserves recognition for the breakout performance she delivered in Juno, and there's a slight possibility she'll get it. However, I think the Academy will go the other direction — since Hal Holbrook won't be getting an old-timer's award, Julie Christie will take home the gold for the little-seen Away from Her.

BEST ACTOR:

Although there's an off chance that George Clooney will take home the gold, I'm picking Daniel Day-Lewis' colossal performance in There Will Be Blood as both my should-win and will-win. Past performance and academy voting patterns be damned: it's a towering, masterful job of acting that carries the entire movie.

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY:

Traditionally, the screenplay categories are the thanks-for-playing awards for the year's best movies, but which for whatever reason aren't going to get one of the big awards. As such, it's a dead heat between No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood, and my money's on Paul Thomas Anderson this year.

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY:

If ever there are a sold-gold, lead-pipe lock in the history of solid-gold, lead-pipe locks, it's Diablo Cody winning Oscar gold this year for Juno. Bet the farm on it.

BEST DIRECTOR:

For filmmakers as talented and distinctive as the Coen Brothers never to have won an Oscar is a crime, but this isn't their Departed year. They'll be shut out again, though, leaving open the question of who gets it. P.T. Anderson seems obvious, but I'm gonna say this is a divisive year and Tony Gilroy takes it for Michael Clayton.

BEST PICTURE:

If Juno wins, the very balance of nature will be forever thrown askew. No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood are the most deserving, but are perceived as overly nihilistic and grim. Michael Clayton could be the winner by default, but I think it'll go to Atonement, the very definition of an Academy prestige picture.

Paste Magazine's Art House 100

Phil Nugent — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Paste magazine has published its "Art House Powerhouse 100", devoted to listing "the people behind the movies we love." The feature is self-consciously designed to serve as an alternative to the other "power lists" that such magazines as Vanity Fair and Entertainment Weekly get such a thrill out of assembling, with Paste's list striving to determine, "Who are the power players in the world of quality cinema? What individuals and organizations make intelligent, well-crafted movies and have the profile, financial resources and/or critical esteem to attract discerning audiences? In short, we looked for those at the intersection of art and commerce who make independent film the viable and sustainable industry that we’ve come to enjoy." After that buildup, the magazine proceeds to serve up a list of names that for the most part will not be unfamiliar to many people with a passing interest in high-profile moviemaking a little further off the beaten track than say. Transformers. But if few of them have been starving for media attention, most of them are certainly deserving of a pat on the back. The lists of directors (which includes Martin Scorsese, the Coen brothers, Paul Thomas Anderson, David Lynch, David Cronenberg, Todd Haynes, Tim Burton, Guillermo del Toro, Michael Winterbottom, Stephen Frears, and comeback kid Sidney Lumet) and actors (among them Naomi Watts, Viggo Mortensen, Laura Linney, Forest Whitaker, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Cate Blanchett, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Don Cheadle, Daniel Day-Lewis, Cillian Murphy, Ryan Gosling, Johnny Depp, and Javier Bardem), can be found at the website. The hard copy, available at your local newstand, also tots up noteworthy cinematographers (such as Roger Deakins, the hard-working D.P. on No Country for Old Men, In the Valley of Elah, and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford) and producers, as well as listing the magazine's favorite film festivals.

Paul Clark Predicts the Oscar Nominees

Paul Clark — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 19:00:00 GMT

"Nobody knows anything." Screenwriter William Goldman immortalized that phrase a few decades ago, and it's as true this Oscar season as it's always been. Perhaps even more so — not only are many Oscar races still wide-open, but the status of the ceremony itself is up in the air. But for now the show is still happening, which means the nominations are set to be announced tomorrow morning. Here are my hasty, shot-in-the-dark predictions in the top six categories:

Best Picture:
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Into the Wild
Juno
Michael Clayton
No Country for Old Men

I think we can all agree that No Country is in, right? Beyond that, it's something of a crap shoot. Michael Clayton is the kind of classy star vehicle the Academy usually responds to, and audience favorite Juno has become too big a word of mouth phenomenon to ignore. At one point, Atonement was looking like a front-runner for the win, but its Oscar buzz has subsided. On the other side of the coin, There Will Be Blood may be too bleak for the voters to embrace — it would have a better chance were it the year's undisputed critical champ, but with No Country in the mix, PTA's masterpiece could be shut out here. Instead, I'm predicting The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, an acclaimed true-life story that's only gaining momentum, and Into the Wild, the year's most Oscar-baity film directed by a respected actor, which is something that tends to go over well with the actor-filled Academy membership.

Best Actor:
George Clooney, Michael Clayton
Daniel Day-Lewis, There Will Be Blood
Johnny Depp, Sweeney Todd
Emile Hirsch, Into the Wild
Viggo Mortensen, Eastern Promises

Even if the Academy decides to overlook There Will Be Blood, they won't be able to deny the awesomeness of Day-Lewis' blazing performance as Plainview. Likewise, Clooney and Depp have recently become Academy favorites, and I dare say that had Sweeney Todd done more business Depp would've been the one to beat here. Hirsch is a bit iffier here given his age, but he carries Into the Wild on his capable shoulders, and if the film gets nominated I'm guessing he will be too. With the recent groundswell for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, I think Matthieu Amalric should be seen as a contender here, although not nearly as much as if he was an American star. Instead, I'm going with Mortensen — Eastern Promises didn't exactly set the world on fire, but his performance was the highlight, and I think voters will take the opportunity to honor him not only for this role but also for his overlooked turns in A History of Violence and the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Best Actress:
Amy Adams, Enchanted
Julie Christie, Away From Her
Marion Cotillard, La Vie en Rose
Angelina Jolie, A Mighty Heart
Ellen Page, Juno

Throughout this awards season, three names kept popping up in this rare — Christie, Cotillard, and Page. So it's pretty safe to assume they'll make it in. That leaves us two spots in a relatively weak year for buzzed-about performances (sadly, Black Book's Carice Van Houten has no traction whatsoever). With very little competition, Jolie should make the cut — the film didn't make much of a dent, but her stardom has kept her in the race. The final spot is anyone's guess. High-profile star turns (Jodie Foster in The Brave One, Cate Blanchett in Elizabeth: The Golden Age) have flopped at the box office, while respected performers in independent films (notably Laura Linney in The Savages) have been lost in the year-end shuffle. That leaves Amy Adams in Enchanted, a star-making performance by a previous nominee in a hit movie that's still fresh in people's minds.

Best Director:
Paul Thomas Anderson, There Will Be Blood
Joel and Ethan Coen, No Country for Old Men
Tony Gilroy, Michael Clayton
Sean Penn, Into the Wild
Julian Schnabel, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

At this point, Best Director is the Coens' to lose. Even if someone else takes home Best Picture, I think it's still their year in this category. I also think the Directors Branch will be impressed by Sean Penn's metamorphosis into serious filmmaker, as well as Schnabel's unconventional, inspired filmmaking choices in Diving Bell. For this year's semi-obligatory non-Best Picture-nominated director, I'm predicting Anderson, a respected maverick whose filmmaking chops in There Will Be Blood are undeniable even if the film itself is too much for some audiences. Of the two remaining Best Picture nominees, I think Gilroy has the edge over Juno's Jason Reitman for two reasons: (1) crowd-pleasing comedies tend to get shut out of this category, and (2) Gilroy is a veteran screenwriter makes an impressive directorial debut. But don't be surprised if another "lone director" — say, Sidney Lumet for Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, or Tim Burton for Sweeney Todd — gets the nod instead.

Best Supporting Actor:
Javier Bardem, No Country for Old Men
Philip Seymour Hoffman, Charlie Wilson's War
Hal Holbrook, Into the Wild
Tommy Lee Jones, No Country for Old Men
Tom Wilkinson, Michael Clayton

In a year without Bardem, this race might have come down to Grand Old Actor Holbrook vs. veteran character actor Wilkinson. But Bardem casts a long shadow over this category, with Chigurh the creepiest villain in an Oscar-feted film since Hannibal Lecter. Charlie Wilson's War wasn't the Oscar juggernaut that it was predicted to be, but I still think Hoffman's scene-stealing turn will make it in. I think this year's biggest surprise will be the absence of Casey Affleck's performance in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Affleck's the only serious competition Bardem has had among the precursor awards, but Jesse James was a box-office flop and Affleck's performance could give voters the willies. Max Von Sydow's affecting turn in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly might have had a chance here — as a means of honoring one of the world's most esteemed actors and, by extension, his recently-departed longtime collaborator Ingmar Bergman — except that he might not have enough screentime to be a contender. Instead, I'm giving the edge to Jones, an Academy favorite who came roaring back this year to give two acclaimed performances after a decade's worth of commercial crap.

Best Supporting Actress:
Cate Blanchett, I'm Not There
Catherine Keener, Into the Wild
Kelly MacDonald, No Country for Old Men
Amy Ryan, Gone Baby Gone
Tilda Swinton, Michael Clayton

Once again, three names keep popping up in this category: Blanchett, Ryan, and Swinton. I think they'll all get nominated, though who will win remains to be seen (early shot-in-the-dark prediction: a Swinton upset). The other two spots are less certain. But consider that, more than any other category, the Best Supporting Actress nominees are largely composed of performers who starred opposite other Oscar nominees. In this respect, I think contenders such as Ruby Dee in American Gangster, Marisa Tomei in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, and especially Saoirse Ronan in Atonement, are at a disadvantage here. Instead, I'm predicting the fourth spot to go to Catherine Keener, getting her third nomination in this category for her moving turn in Into the Wild. The final slot comes down to Jennifer Garner in Juno and Kelly MacDonald in No Country for Old Men. Despite Garner's greater name recognition, I'm giving the edge to MacDonald, both for No Country's frontrunner status and for playing one of Oscar's favorite characters, the supportive, long-suffering wife. But honestly, it could go either way.

Watch for the Oscar nominations tomorrow, January 22. And remember, nobody knows anything.

Daniel Day-Lewis Speaks

Phil Nugent — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 18:04:00 GMT

"Actors should never give interviews. Once you know what colour socks they wear, you'll remember it next time you see them performing, and it will get in the way. It is not in anyone's interest." That's how Daniel Day-Lewis begins an interview, so I guess that Peter Stanford, who conducted this one for the London Telegraph, deserves credit for not shaking his hand and heading off to the library to cobble together quotes from back issues of People. (Stanford: "Can I ask you about your method?" Day-Lewis: "God help you.") Still, for a guy who clearly regards the work of promoting a movie as a regrettable necessity, Day-Lewis sure does seem like an open guy, especially where his work process is concerned. One surprise is that he regards his fine performance in Philip Kaufman's The Unbearable Lightness of Being as "a mistake": "If I'd really shut out the din and looked at that script, I'd have known that I wasn't ready for that. I felt I was short-changing them somehow because I was missing the centre of it. It was sliding away from me. . . And apart from anything else, the exploration of sexuality in the film was just — well, I was in no way prepared for how that would feel."

Since then, Day-Lewis has been selective enough about his roles that it was a calculated gamble for Paul Thomas Anderson to write There Will Be Blood with him in mind for the lead — a part that requires Day-Lewis to be onscreen for damn near the movie's entire, long running time — but the gamble paid off. "I'd loved his films," Day-Lewis says of Anderson. "And the idea had occurred to me that we might enjoy getting up to the same kind of mischief, but when this script came it really took me quite by surprise in the most wonderful way. The bag was packed once I'd read it." As for the idea that the movie is meant to be taken as a comment on contemporary events, "Paul's not unaware of what is going on in the world but our focus had to be a much narrower and more selfish one. If you enter into the realm of trying to create a parable or cautionary tale, you've already strayed so far off course that you might as well stay in bed. So no, it was utterly and specifically that man in that story in that place at that time in America's social history." As the actor sees it, the screenwriter "honestly told unblinkingly the story of one man's life from the first scene to this outrageous conclusion. I couldn't begin to imagine where some of that had come from because it didn't always appear to have a logic, and yet it appeared to me to have its own innate logic."

PTA's Milkshake: Damn Right, It's Better Than Yours

Paul Clark — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 20:00:00 GMT

As Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood still awaits its full-on nationwide release, the buzz for the film has become practically deafening. It's appeared on a raft of critics' top 10 lists, and has raked in heaps of awards for Anderson, star Daniel Day-Lewis, and the score by Jonny Greenwood. But while critical accolades have a definite appeal to a certain portion of the moviegoing audience, it's going to take more than that for the film to break through to the general populace.

That's where the blogosphere comes in. Numerous web sites have seized upon the movie as a kind of cult object, in particular Daniel Day-Lewis' line "I drink your milkshake!", which he bellows near the end of the film. One enterprising webmaster is offering free idrinkyourmilkshake.com e-Mail accounts for a limited time through his web site. In addition, Hollywood Elsewhere's Jeff Wells has proclaimed the line to be "the golden ticket that will sell this thing to people who are too lazy to read reviews and don't care that much about awards." He goes on to suggest that Paramount spearhead the Milkshake campaign by printing up t-shirts, buttons, bumper stickers, and the like.

Me, I'm of two minds about this. On one hand, part of me cringes at the idea of the public awareness for P.T. Anderson's first film in five years being reduced to a catch-phrase that really doesn't make much sense outside the context of the movie. But having seen the film, I realize that a film with such an dark and unsparing view of human nature- even a great one like There Will Be Blood- is going to be a tough sell with the public. Though whether the Milkshake campaign would have much effect on box office remains to be seen, I think every possible effort should be made to put butts in seats. Besides, it could give us a welcome reprieve from Anchorman-inspired t-shirts.

Oh, and Paramount: want another suggestion on how to make the movie appeal to a wider audience? Give it a wider release already. I gladly drove three hours to catch it, but most people (even many movie lovers) wouldn't, so why deny them the chance to see There Will Be Blood?

The Rep Report (January 2-17)

Phil Nugent — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 20:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: From January 2 through the 17th, Film Forum hosts a retrospective of the films of the once-ever-present, still-controversial Otto Preminger. Things kick off, fittingly, with the classic noir Laura (double -billed with the Joan Crawford vehicle Daisy Kenyan), followed by a new restored print of the courtroom drama Anatomy of a Murder and a matched double bill of thrillers capturing Preminger at his seamiest: Angel Face, with the aristocratic Jean Simmons eager to sully herself with a bemused Robert Mitchum, and Fallen Angel, with Dana Andrews itching for Linda Darnell. (The theater will not be following Preminger into the depths of the last fifteen years of his career, but anyone curious to see just how unmoored he had become by 1968 might want to supplement the program with some homework in the form of a rare TV screening of the hippie head trip Skidoo, airing at 2 AM (EST) Friday night/a> as part of Turner Classic Movies' "Underground" series.)

Film Society at Lincoln Center's Dance on Camera Festival (January 2–6, 11 and 18–19) includes a wide range of dance films from around the world, including works by Pina Bausch and Jacques Tati.

Those who've just gotten their first taste of the world as seen through the eyes of maverick filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson via There Will Be Blood can find out where he's been all their lives with the Museum of the Moving Image's weekend screening of Anderson's first four films, from Hard Eight (or Sydney, as he'd much rather you'd call it) to Punch Drunk Love. We can't guarantee that they'll emerge feeling certain that you know just what he's been doing all their lives, but we hope they'll enjoy the ride anyway.

LOS ANGELES: "The Films of Lee Chang-dong" (January 3 - 5) at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art gives local audiences a chance to get acquainted with a South Korean director whose four films have, with the exception of 2002's Oasis, received no real distribution in the U.S. (However, his most recent film, Secret Sunshine, is South Korea's submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Picture and recently came in first in IndieWIRE's critics' poll devoted to undistributed films.) Lee will be in attendance at the screenings.

CHICAGO: The Gene Siskel Film Center devotes two months, from January 5 to March 4, to the taboo-busting Japanese director Shohei Imamura, showing eighteen of his features, "many in specially imported prints from Japan." The schedule includes such classics as Vengeance Is Mine, Black Rain, The Ballad of Narayama and The Insect Woman, but it is especially notable for being crammed with many titles that remain seldom screened and little known in the U.S.

Trailer Roundup End of Year Special- Best Trailer of 2007

Paul Clark — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 17:00:00 GMT

There Will Be Blood

Given how exacting his direction has become, one could forgive Paul Thomas Anderson for handing responsibilities for cutting his trailers off to someone else. But ever since Magnolia Anderson has opted to assemble his own trailers, and I'm grateful that he has. Magnolia's initial teaser was a marvel of summing up the film perfectly while saying nothing, and Punch Drunk Love's trailer perfectly captured the screw-loose sense of un-pretty comedy at play in the film. Every trailer for There Will Be Blood has been a must-see, but the final version is the true classic of the bunch, emphasizing the film's macabre style and violent emotions. In addition, Anderson wisely recognizes his trump card, the great Daniel Day-Lewis, and he plays him early and often. 2007 has had its share of memorable trailers, but none will quickens the pulse like this one.

Anderson, Par Vantage Conspire to Make Smaller Cities Feel Inferior

Paul Clark — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 15:00:00 GMT

For those of you who are chomping at the bit to see P.T. Anderson's by-all-accounts-awesome new film There Will Be Blood, your wait may soon be over. If you live in one of fourteen selected cities, that is. As the above video states, exclusive midnight sneak preview screenings are scheduled to be held on December 29 in the following cities: Austin, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Miami, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Portland, Sacramento, San Diego, Seattle, Toronto, and Washington, D.C. So if you're lucky enough to live in one of those cities- or New York or Los Angeles, where the film opened yesterday- you'll be able to bask in the greatness. Meanwhile, if you live anywhere else in North America, you'll have to drive for hours through the snow or bemoan the fate that landed you in, say, Columbus, Ohio.

P.T.A. Report

Phil Nugent — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 18:00:00 GMT

For those who've been handicapping the race for supremacy among the American filmmakers who achieved big-deal status during the 1990s, here's how things stand as this year winds down: with Quentin Tarantino providing the half of a double feature that followed the half that much of the audience walked out on, Richard Linklater taking a well-deserved breather, David O. Russell becoming a reality star on YouTube, Alexander Payne ducking through corners in a Groucho mask to avoid explaining his screenwriting credit on I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, and Kevin Smith unable to make a long-term thing out of his job directing the pilot for the TV show about an underachieving minimum-wage ape with a secret life battling dark forces that isn't Chuck. We extend wishes of good luck and productivity in the year to come to all of them, except maybe for Kevin Smith. In the meantime, with less than a week of 2007 left to go, Paul Thomas Anderson has vaulted into first place with his first movie in five years, There Will Be Blood. Opening today, Anderson's period epic, starring Daniel Day Lewis as an obsessive, misanthropic prospector, is making a scramble for becoming the best-reviewed movie of the year.

This was not an altogether predictable development. In a thoughtful piece on where Anderson has been so far and where he's at now, Dennis Lim describes Anderson as a thirty-seven-year-old "enfant terrible" who "incites strong, divided opinions." "Strong, divided opinions" may seem to be a soft way of putting it for anyone who went through the great Magnolia wars of 1999. In that high-pitched, three-hour film, which had the feel of an attempted career summation despite its only being the director's third movie, Anderson delivered a titanic audience-divider, just in time for the end of the millennium. Since it came out, the movie has gradually acquired more and more supporters who tend to regard it not just admiringly but downright protectively, but at the time of its release, the roars of derision were deafening. To a great degree, Magnolia was not criticized as a disappointment or an honest failure but as some sort of violation of aesthetic law whose creator ought to be stripped of his epaulets and driven into the Forbidden Zone. For a self-taught filmmaker who wasn't yet thirty, dealing with that must have been an interesting experience. The bonus-features disc on the Magnolia DVD includes a little home movie in which Anderson's then-girlfriend, Fiona Apple, apparently playing the movie, performs an interpretive dance while Anderson hisses, "Boogie Nights made money! You want to be the only one that doesn't...It's too fucking long, there's too many blow-ups--it's all just too fucking too!"

As Lim points out, Anderson is indeed "a size freak", but he also "invites emotional responses because he's an emotional filmmaker, and this, too, distinguishes him from most of his cohorts. The signature trait of the '90s indie school is detachment, whether in the form of self-conscious cleverness or numb ennui, but there's nothing detached about Anderson's films...Given the dominant American pop idioms of snark and quirk, Anderson's sensibility can be confounding. He's satirical, but also achingly sincere. His characters often speak with a declarative directness that is both breathtaking and a little ridiculous." Those viewers not swept up in Magnolia's emotional flow seem to have responded to its steady stream of heartfelt monologues by desperately unhappy people desperate to connect (to the people onscreen and to the people in the audience) as proof that they were at the mercy of a high-school amateur. In his follow-up to Magnolia, the Adam Sandler movie Punch-Drunk Love, Anderson sensibly scaled down and tightened the focus on a single character, but the picture was still huge in the audacity of its approach. Anderson is as much a cerebral movie geek as any of his contemporaries, but he's probably the only one of them who might have taken a look at Adam Sandler's screen image and actually thought about it on an emotional level, dissecting it and exploring what it might be like to live at such an unstable level of passive-aggressiveness. The movie was still direct in its emotional current but more atylized, with a central character nowhere near as articulate as those in Magnolia. (The movie was much better received critically than Magnolia but it didn't do much business; the publicity department failed to rise to the challenge of somehow alerting people that this was an Adam Sandler movie for people who can't stand Adam Sandler.)

With his fifth film, Anderson may have found a story that enables him to indulge his taste for spectacle and vast canvasses while presenting a conventional enough surface to appease the likes of The New Yorker's David Denby, who dismissed both Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love as "whimsical". (Denby likes There Will Be Blood, except for the conclusion, which he figures proves that "some part of him must have rebelled against canonization." I must have been dozing when we all agreed to put Jughead in charge of the canon.) For the moment, for some of us, the price of Anderson's surprise success may be having to listen to some people use his new movie as a club to beat on his earlier work. But we'll settle so long as he doesn't get in the habit of making us wait five years between movies.

Austin Goes for "Blood"

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 18:30:00 GMT

Did you know there’s an Austin Film Critics Association? I live in Austin and this is news to me. Nonetheless, the AFCA has weighed in on the year in movies and handed its major awards to a film that won’t reach area screens until 2008. According to Variety, There Will Be Blood takes the honors for Best Film, Director (Paul Thomas Anderson), Actor (Daniel Day-Lewis), Cinematography (Robert Elswit) and Original Score (Johnny Greenwood). Ellen Page and Allison Janney collect acting kudos for their work in Juno, while Javier Bardem continues his rampage through the awards season with yet another Best Supporting Actor nod. It’s good to see The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters get some richly deserved recognition in the Documentary category, but couldn’t the Austin Film Award bestowed upon Grindhouse be put to better use? Sure, that carpetbagger Tarantino made effective use of local landmarks like Guero’s Taco Bar and the Texas Chili Parlor, but Robert Rodriguez has been coasting on his favorite son status for too long. Consider this a belated vote for the homegrown Hell on Wheels, Bob Ray’s surprisingly compelling documentary on the contentious Austin roller derby scene. It’s wheeling its way through the film festival circuit, so keep your eyes peeled.

English Storyteller, American Stories

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 21:00:00 GMT

The hook in this interview in London's Telegraph magazine is Daniel Day-Lewis' meticulous, detail-oriented approach to acting, and indeed, there's plenty of that for those looking for such a thing. He talks at length of his immersive, Method-based approach (he built a tent of skins, paddled a canoe, and learned to handle a flintlock rifle while filming The Last of the Mohicans), compares his art to the craft of woodworking, and dismisses the many obvious tics of his characters -- being in jail or paralyzed in a wheelchair -- as surface fripperies, with the real heart of the character coming from making the lives of someone utterly different from them seem immediate and real. But much more interesting is the fact that the London-born actor, currently starring in P.T. Anderson's There Will Be Blood, spends much of the interview (which is, after all, with a British newspaper) trashing the opportunities of British cinema. From an early age, he says, "I wanted to tell American stories." He articulates his near-contempt for the strict class structure of his homeland, and thinks of the tradition of honing your craft in theatrical classics as little more than an obstacle. "My love of American movies was like a secret that I carried around with me," he says, and admits that if it hadn't been Martin Scorsese who approached him about playing Newland Archer in The Age of Innocence, he would have turned it down as "too English".

Take Five: Smut

Peter Smith — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 21:00:00 GMT

The Amateurs opens in limited release this Friday. We have absolutely no intention whatsoever of seeing it, because there is the possibility, however remote, that it will contain a nude scene featuring Joe Pantoliano. But it does give us a chance to talk about pornography. Not actual pornography, mind you — as open-minded as this site is, we're pretty sure the bosses aren't going to let us post stills of our favorite scenes from the oeuvre of the Dark Brothers. No, what we're talking about here is movies about pornography. There's been smut on film since there was film, but while Hollywood has always been officially disdainful of its little brother in the Valley, it's also been a bit fascinated as well. Recently, European filmmakers have actually included real sex in their movies and made it work as part of a respectable narrative, but in the U.S., the NC-17 rating is still the kiss of death and violence will likely always be more palatable to the censors than sex. But even in those arty Euro-flicks, the sex is in service of the story and not the other way around; will a genuine porn movie ever be made with a great script, top-notch direction and production, and big Hollywood stars? Probably not. But there will still be movies about pornography; here are five of the best.

BLUE MOVIE (1970)

Okay, technically, this isn't a real movie. It is, instead, a novel about the making of a movie. The novel is by Terry Southern, and the movie (Faces of Love) is one that Southern and his good friend, the director Stanley Kubrick, had sometimes talked of making together. It would be a big-budget Hollywood picture, with as many of the big stars of the day as they could afford and a multi-million-dollar budget — and it would contain hardcore pornography. Kubrick knew the movie could never be made in his lifetime and never pursued it, but the subversive Southern couldn't let go of the idea and fictionalized the making of the film in a hilariously filthy novel. Now, thirty-seven years later, Southern and Kubrick are both dead — and their movie has still never been made.

HARDCORE (1979)

Paul Schrader's sometimes hokey and sometimes harrowing follow-up to Blue Collar dealt with every father's recurring nightmare: seeing his missing daughter in a porno flick. Inspired partly by Schrader's own obsession with pornography (which he referenced in Taxi Driver as well), the film doesn't always manage to carry off its mix of religious fury and sleazy L.A. grit, and its central conceit (the father goes undercover as a porn producer to find his daughter) is pretty flimsy, but Hardcore is carried on the strength of a furious, consuming lead performance by George C. Scott and some terrific cameo roles by Peter Boyle, Hal Williams and Dick "Darrin" Sargent.

BODY DOUBLE (1984)

Somehow, Alfred Hitchcock never got around to making a movie set in the rented houses and storefront offices of the San Fernando Valley pornography industry. So Brian De Palma did it for him. Best described as an bizarre combination of Vertigo and Rear Window with smut and power drills thrown in for an extra bit of a kick, Body Double is, like many of De Palma's Hitchcock-homage films, a movie that's a lot smarter and better than it appears on the surface, and it rewards multiple viewings. It also features one of the filthiest — and funniest — line readings ever from a big Hollywood star: Melanie Griffith, as porn star Holly Body, explaining painstakingly to Craig Wasson's hapless character exactly what she will and will not do.

BOOGIE NIGHTS (1997)

Like most of his films, Paul Thomas Anderson's porn-industry epic Boogie Nights has its problems. It's sprawling in the worst way, its script badly needed a ruthless application of the blue pencil, and Anderson often mistakes putting people through the wringer for character development. But it's not for nothing that he's considered a major American director, and even leaving aside the tremendous cast he assembled here, he achieves many moments of genuine emotional power and perfectly captures a certain southern California milieu from the late 1970s and early 1980s.

WONDERLAND (2003)

The story of Johnny "Wadd" Holmes — one of the biggest stars in the history of porn, as well as one of its most pathetic figures — is a fascinating one, combining as it does so many juicy elements. Money, sex, death, degradation, disease and murder all played a part in Holmes' life, and every element came together in the notorious Wonderland Murders. The story of the murders was told in an abstracted way in Boogie Nights and literally in the little-seen documentary Wadd: The Life & Time of John C. Holmes, but they receive a much more direct screen treatment in Wonderland. While Val Kilmer turns in a surprisingly strong performance as Holmes, but the movie itself it chaotic, confused and shambolic — but then, as the life story of Johnny Wadd, how could it be anything but?

— Leonard Pierce

The Ten Greatest Prosthetics in Movie History, Part 1

Peter Smith — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 20:00:00 GMT

We recently did a list of real bodily transformations in film, so it's only fair that now we look on the flipside and consider those bodily transformations that had nothing to do with an actor's ability to stay on or off carbs but rather tested their patience in the makeup chair. Of course, some had it easier than others: Goldie Hawn probably sat in makeup for hours for her fat scenes in Death Becomes Her and practically nobody noticed. On the other hand, Marlon Brando stuck something in his mouth and became an icon. (There's a joke waiting to be made here, but we won't be the ones to make it.) And some just got to walk around pretending they had a big schlong. You'll find them here, in our list of The Ten Greatest Prosthetics in Movie History.

Marlon Brando's Cheeks in THE GODFATHER (1972)

One of the most famous prosthetics in the history of film can't actually be seen on screen: it's stuffed inside Marlon Brando's mouth. No, not a Big Mac. It's a dental prosthetic designed especially for the actor, and which he uses throughout the film to facilitate both a vocal and physical transformation into Don Vito Corleone. Conceiving of the character as resembling a bulldog, Brando showed up for his screen test with cotton wool crammed between his teeth and the inside of his cheeks to give him a jowly, determined look; once he was cast, it soon became apparent that, however Method it might have been, this was an untenable choice, since the cotton dried out his mouth and left him unable to deliver his lines. Coppola, who was just beginning a long and agonizing decade of catering to Brando's ever-eccentric behavior, stepped in and had the dental prosthetic constructed. After he started using it, the actor discovered another happy accident: the way it shaped his cheeks and mouth helped him to lower his voice to the scratchy whisper that Brando was going for with the character, which he patterned after real-life mobster Frank Costello's raspy intonation. Though it's never actually seen (and it's left completely unexplained why Robert DeNiro, playing the young Vito Corleone in flashbacks in the film's sequel, has an entirely different facial structure), the plastic doohickey helped create one of the most memorable of all film icons, and boosted sales of cotton balls as a generation of bad impressionists found an easy way out.

Steve Martin's Nose in ROXANNE (1987)

This modern version of Cyrano de Bergerac is a comedy, so Martin's "C.D." doesn't have to die at the end or fail to get the girl. But he does have to go through the whole movie with a nose like a foot-long breadstick jutting out from the center of his face. As befits the non-tragic tone of the movie, the nose is too openly silly-looking to make Martin look ugly, though it does look unwieldy, especially in a shot where a bird perches on it and in a scene where Darryl Hannah slaps his face. (Instead of reacting to the slap by touching his cheek, his places his fingers on the bridge of his nose, as if afraid that it might come flying off.) The nose also adds an unacknowledged layer of comedy to the happy ending: so this Cyrano gets his Roxanne, but how is he going to kiss her?

Alec Guinness's Teeth in THE LADYKILLERS (1955)

Leading a gang of blackguards who rent a room from a sweet old lady so they can use it as a gathering place to work on plans for their armored car heist, Guinness needs a physical quality to set him apart and clearly define him as team leader. He finds it in his enormous choppers, which serve as an unspoken reminder to the younger and stronger men in the room that if they give him any guff, he can always bite their heads off. Trying to follow in Guinness's footsteps in the 2004 remake, Tom Hanks affected a Colonel Sanders-from-Hell look, an oil-slick hairdo, and a laugh that seemed to be coming out of his ears, none of which served him half as well as Guinness's malignant bear-trap grin.

Mark Wahlberg's Penis, in BOOGIE NIGHTS (1997)

Paul Thomas Anderson's porn-industry saga Boogie Nights is many things to many people: an epic, a comedy, a drama, a tragedy, a period piece. But for a good part of its running time, we were a bit worried that the film was also going to be a Beckett-ian exercise in dislocation: Waiting for Godot, except this time Godot is a giant dong. Luckily, director Anderson knew the delicate balance he was striking here: a movie in which we constantly saw rising porn star Dirk Diggler's allegedly massive dick would have been exploitative and unreleasable; but to not show it would feel exploitative in a wholly different way. So, understanding the value of a good money shot, Anderson waited until the last moment of the film to reveal its ostensible protagonist. The result was dramatically sound, curiously poetic, and also broke new ground in male onscreen nudity. Of course, it was also a fake. A damn good fake. There are still people out there who think that grand revelation was Marky Mark's actual member. Some of them are probably hanging out in his rec room as we speak.

Orson Welles's Face in TOUCH OF EVIL (1958)

Had he played the role of the brilliant but hopelessly corrupt border cop Hank Quinlan ten years later, Orson Welles wouldn't have needed any help from his makeup department. In 1958, though, the director still had yet to be completely ruined by rich food and high living, so he relied on padded clothing and tricky camera angles to make him look fat and shambolic, and layers and layers of prosthetics to give his face the appearance of an aging, gin-blossomed alcoholic. Quinlan's addiction to dandy candy and quicker liquor accounts for his puffy cheeks, bloated nose, and crooked teeth, and he looks like such a fright that even a long-in-the-tooth Marlene Dietrich is shocked at his appearance. Accompanied by a memorable fat-man gait, an out-of-breath voice and a tremendously ravaged performance, the prosthetics turned the director into a hulking parody of the man he would later become. Welles himself told this story: since filming often ran quite late (he did much of the principal photography at night to avoid the prying eyes of studio spies dispatched to keep him in line), one evening he found himself on the way to a dinner party while still wearing the bulbous nose and flappy cheeks of Hank Quinlan. Arriving home to greet his guests, one actress sized him up — having not seen him for several months — and said, through a terribly forced grin, "Oh, Orson! You look wonderful!"

— Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Vadim Rizov

That Guy!: Philip Baker Hall

Peter Smith — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 19:00:00 GMT

It's no secret that the selection of a That Guy! is a highly personal thing. I play favorites in this space, and make no apologies. There's nothing objective about why I'll pick a Tom Atkins but eschew a Burt Young — it's as simple as one appealing to me on a certain level and the other leaving me as cold as a glass of raw eggs. Everyone has their preferences when it comes to character actors, and finding agreement on the subject is harder than getting a group of a dozen movie critics to agree on a Coen Brothers film. Of course, every rule has its exceptions, and if there's ever been anyone with a bad word to say about Philip Baker Hall, I've never met them (and they better hope I don't, particularly in a dark alley, and with a couple of boxes of Sno-Caps in me). It's astonishing to consider that Hall is seventy-six years old — not because he doesn't look it, with his worn, lined face, perpetually plastered-down hair and eyes that droop with a combination of sadness and intelligence — but because he's looked that way for at least twenty years. The common perception that he sprung into the world fully formed, like Athena, from the imagination of Paul Thomas Anderson, ignores a film career that goes back almost five decades — not that it wasn't largely worth ignoring before he crossed paths with Robert Altman, who gave him a role that would forever grant him one of the all-time great film performances in history even if he'd never made another movie. But until Anderson made him the patriarch of his own personal stock company of actors, the bleary, wise Ohioan's bread and butter was in television. Putting in competent, bill-paying performances in everything from M*A*S*H and The Jeffersons to Family Ties to L.A. Law, he reached his greatest heights on the small screen as the absurdly overblown Lt. Bookman on Seinfeld, a library cop ripped from the pages of Mike Hammer and put to work in service of chasing down delinquent fines. It showed off Hall's considerable comic — indeed, self-parodic — skills, but he's still at his best as a tragic figure who has seen just a little too much of the world and is always waiting for a final moment of grace that may never come.

Where to see Philip Baker Hall at his best:

SECRET HONOR (1984)

One of the towering performances not just in his career but in all of American cinema, Hall's turn as a fictionalized Richard Milhaus Nixon is gripping enough to carry the entire film — and it does: he's the only person on screen during the entire hour-and-a-half runtime. Director Robert Altman, who knew Hall from television work, had seen him perform as Nixon in the stage version of Secret Honor, and trusted that he was enough of an actor to carry it over to film; the gamble paid off in spades, as the audience is held spellbound during the entire stunning performance.

HARD EIGHT (1996)

Sixty-five is the age at which you're supposed to retire, not the age at which you have your first real breakout performance. But Paul Thomas Anderson, who'd selected Hall based largely on the strength of his work in Secret Honor, chose him to play the tormented professional gambler Sydney in his full-length directorial debut. Watching the aging Hall play off of promising young character actor (and friend of this program) John C. Reilly is like watching an aging gunslinger trade shots with an up-and-comer, a dynamic which perfectly plays into their respective characters.

DOGVILLE (2003)

Philip Baker Hall's performance as Tom Edison Sr. in Lars Von Trier's controversial and daring story of degradation and evil served not only to record another terrific performance in his portfolio, but to put the critical establishment on notice that he wasn't a wholly owned subsidiary of Paul Thomas Anderson, Inc. Hall brings entirely new dimensions and depths to his performance as Dogville's patriarch, while never sacrificing his greatest asset: the ability to convey the weight of a man whose eyes have seen more than they should.

— Leonard Pierce

Daniel Day-Lewis Cultivates Unibrow

Peter Smith — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 18:00:00 GMT

The new special "film issue" of the New York Times Magazine centers on the Western. The cover story is a typically insightful profile by Lynn Hirschberg, this time of Daniel Day-Lewis, who stars in P. T. Anderson's forthcoming Sinclair Lewis adaptation, There Will Be Blood. (Those who've seen the trailer for the movie have been startled to learn that Day-Lewis has somehow obtained legal custody of John Huston's voice.) There's also a piece on road movies by the gifted cinematographer Walter Salles, and A. O. Scott's latest meditation on the history and meaning of the Western, which includes this shocker from film historian Rick Altman: turns out that the 1903 The Great Train Robbery, which I've spent my whole life hearing described as the first movie Western, was actually, in Altman's opinion, more of "a combination of travel and crime genres." (So what was the first Western? Scott must have been as surprised as I was, because he forgot to ask.) Also: the thrilling story of how an enterprising hustler-publisher named Scott Mitchell Rosenberg, managed to get DreamWorks and Universal studios interested in making a movie based on a comic book series called Cowboys & Aliens. If you haven't heard of the comic before, that might have something to do with the fact that Rosenberg, who refers to his business model as "full-circle commercialization," didn't bother to print any copies until late last year, because he didn't want to go to the trouble until he was positive that he was going to have a movie to cross-promote them with. Actually, my favorite thing about this article, which was written by Ben Ehrenreich, may be its first sentence: "It has been a while since Hollywood discovered comics." I've been seeing articles about how grown people now read comic books and big companies profit from it for some twenty-two years or so now, and this may be the first time one of them didn't lead off with some variant of, "Holy market share, Batman! Did you know that comics aren't just for kids anymore!?! The shocking news you are about to read will knock the green off your Kryptonite!!!" — Phil Nugent

Trailer Roundup: Sweeney Todd, There Will Be Blood, August Rush

Peter Smith — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 16:00:00 GMT

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

When it was announced that Hollywood was finally going to adapt Steven Sondheim’s hit musical, it seemed a no-brainer for Tim Burton to be tapped to direct. Yet judging by the trailer, I’m not sure he was the right choice. Sure, Burton has become the go-to guy for dark-yet-commercial, but Sweeney Todd is unpleasant stuff, and Burton’s tendency towards cartoonish style and scary-yet-sensitive man-children may lead him to soft-pedal the story’s less savory aspects. Too bad, because Sweeney Todd could be a hell of a movie if made right. Jury’s still out on the singing voices of the actors — Sweeney’s a demanding role vocally, and Depp mostly speak-sings his one song in the trailer. But let’s not forget that (a) a really strong voice isn’t altogether necessary when you’ve got multiple takes and post-production facilities at your disposal, and (b) for whatever reason Hollywood studios are still reluctant to give musicals an all-out singing-and-dancing push. Perhaps they’ve realized that the core audience for musicals is both older and more female than the demographic of teenage boys they court so aggressively?

There Will Be Blood

Oh man, I’m so pumped (sorry) for this. Every P.T. Anderson film is an event for a certain strain of filmgoer, but this could be even more than that. Blood appears to be as much of a departure as Punch-Drunk Love was. Unlike many filmmakers of his generation, he’s impossible to pigeonhole. And that he’s got Daniel Day-Lewis on board this time only makes this even more promising. Here’s a director who got startling performances from Burt Reynolds and Adam Sandler, neither a particularly acclaimed thespian, and so a collaboration with the most uncompromising talent among recognizable "name" actors is pretty irresistible. Based on ecstatic early word coming out of Austin’s Fantastic Film Fest, my high hopes seem to be justified. Also, just to clear something up: There Will Be Blood is the new Paul Thomas Anderson movie. It is not the new Saw movie. Get it? Got it. Good.

August Rush

Let’s see: cute kids, music, an orphan trying to find his parents. If this weren’t in English it’d be a shoo-in for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. But as it is it’s a big-studio release, so it’s got to stand on its own merits. I’ve got nothing against anything this movie is about, but August Rush looks like it’s been calculated for maximum tear-extracting shamelessness. And just when you don’t think it could look any more dire, Robin Williams shows up in full twinkling-eccentric mode as a inspirational street-corner guitarist in a cowboy hat. At least Terrence Howard is around to deliver the trailer’s one good moment, when he asks the long-lost mom played by Keri Russell the question on everyone’s mind — "Why’s it so important that you want him now?"

— Paul Clark