The Screengrab : peter fonda

The Rep Report (May 1 -- 6)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 01 May 2009 15:30:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Those of you who've been meaning to catch up with your Stalin-era Russian light entertainments won't want to miss "Red Diva: Lyubov Orlova: First Lady of the Soviet Screen" at the Film Society of Lincoln Center (May 1-4). A celebrated stage performer who would eventually marry the director Grigori Aleksandrov, who, with Eisenstein, worked on the script of Strike, acted in Potemkin and assisted with the direction on October, Orlova was the sweetheart of the Soviet Union in such pictures as The Circus (1936), Jolly Fellows (1934), and Volga Volga. She died in 1975, but not before a small planet discovered by a Soviet astronomer had been named after her. Top that, Ginger Rogers!

If that's not enough to satisfy your pinko tastes, you can ride your hog over to Film Forum and stick it to the man by checking out the new restored 35-mm. print of Easy Rider. The critic David Thomson once ranked the blockbuster commercial success of Dennis Hopper's hippie dream among the greatest tragedies ever to befall the movies, and God knows that, from Peter Fonda's stoic Mr. Cool performance as Captain America to what may be the most overwrought trip sequence in the history of cinematic psychedelia (filmed in a New Orleans graveyard, where dead people were trying to sleep), it does not lack for sources of embarrassment for those who made it and anyone trying to watch it with their eyes uncrossed. Yet, as our own Sarah Clyne Sundberg noted here recently, it remains an excellent source of prime-period Jack Nicholson. And when Saint Nich's not onscreen, you can just close your eyes and listen to the best collection of counterculture-era rock that K-Tel never produced.

The Museum of Modern Art's Julien Duvivier retrospective begins today and runs though May 25. Duvivier may be best remembered here for the 1937 Pépé le Moko, starring Jean Gabin (and remade by Hollywood as Algiers, with Charles Boyer), and for good reason: it's a masterpiece of the genre that it helped to create, the poetic French melodrama. But the opening night selection, Poil de carotte (1932), is an unusual, beautiful childhood reverie that very different in some ways from most of the director's later work.

TORONTO: Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, opened last night and runs through May 10. The filma generating buzz include the boxing film Big John, Ashes of American Flags starring the band Wilco, the behind-the-scenes Asian stunt work film Action Boys, Winnebago Man, and Best Worst Movie, which nobody in Austin has been able to shut up about since last month's SXSW Festival.

PORTLAND: The Portland Documentary & eXperimental Film Festival, or "PDX Fest" for short, runs May 6 through the 10th. It kicks off with a loving memorial tribute to the late Bruce Connor.

Not Readily Available on Legally Authorized Commercial DVD Release in the Continental United States: Jack Nicholson's "Drive, He Said"

Phil Nugent — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 15:00:00 GMT

[Note: When this feature premiered here some weeks back, it was under the title "Not on DVD". As several readers were thoughtful enough to point out, this was not technically accurate, because there isn't anything that you can't find in some version on DVD provided you have access to an all-region player, live at one of the far corners of the earth, and know a guy what knows a guy. Since then, researchers in the Screengrab test labs have labored to come up with a title for this feature that will be both honestly descriptive and pithy. As you can see, they failed. But you get the idea, right?]

Today marks the 72nd birthday of Mr. Jack Nicholson. In 1958, Nicholson made his movie debut in the title role of the 70-minute Roger Corman production Cry Baby Killer, which would lead to more than a decade's worth of solid employment in low-paying jobs in low-budget indie films, many of them for Corman, most of them exploitation and drive-in fare, though a few of them (such as Irving Lerner's 1960 Studs Lonigan and the pair of "existential" Westerns, The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind, that Monte Hellman directed back to back on Corman's nickel in the mid-'60s. (Nicholson also wrote the script for Whirlwind and had writing credits on a few other '60s films, including Hellman's 1964 Flight to Fury, The Trip, and the Monkees vehicle Head, with whose director, Bob Rafelson, he later made Five Easy Pieces, The King of Marvin Gardens, The Postman Always Rings Twice, and Blood and Wine.) The movie that made Nicholson a star, Easy Rider, was basically an art-house version of the biker movies that Corman had made, starting with The Wild Angels, which starred Easy Rider's Peter Fonda. Nicholson had come on board Easy Rider as an afterthought, when Rip Torn, who was set to play the good-hearted good ol' boy George Hanson, got into a bitch-slapping contest with Dennis Hopper and got his invitation to join the production rescinded. In fact, at the time, Nicholson thought that his acting career was over. He was tired of bashing his head against walls trying to break into the industry and had arranged to make his directing debut with an adaptation of Jeremy Larner's 1964 campus novel, Drive, He Said. It was only when he saw Easy Rider with an audience and picked up on the crowd's reaction to his performance that Nicholson realized that his career as a movie star had just begun.

Like Richard Farina's 1966 Been Down So Long, It Looks Like Up to Me, Larner's novel (which takes its title from a Robert Creeley poem) was published early enough in the 1960s to later seem prescient about campus unrest in the Vietnam era, and both books were turned into movies that were released in 1971, by which time the campus protest movement had peaked in the wake of Kent State. Nicholson's movie was filmed in Eugene, Oregon on and around the state university. William Tepper, who looks here like a stork-legged cross between Abbie Hoffman and the Robert De Niro of Mean Streets, made his movie debut as Hector Bloom, a star basketball player who is called out by his coach (Bruce Dern) for having an attitude problem. Hector, who could have any girl on the campus he wanted, has pulled the genius move of having an affair with Olive (Karen Black), who is married to a professor played by Robert Towne, who had also labored in the Corman factory as a screenwriter (The Last Woman on Earth, The Tomb of Ligeia) before writing a couple of movies that gave Nicholson two of his most memorable roles, The Last Detail and Chinatown. (Towne took the name of his Chinatown hero, J. J. Gittes, from Harry Gittes, a friend of Nicholson's who co-produced Drive, He Said. Though the script for this movie is credited to Larner and Nicholson, both Towne and Terrence Malick are said to have taken an uncredited crack at it.) Things turn out badly, but not necessarily in the way you might expect. It turns out that Olive's husband is an overly cerebral, phlegmatic type who knows perfectly well that Hector is balling his wife--it's not easy to miss--but wants to impress everyone with how well he's taking it; a part of him is sort of proud that the great athlete deems him worthy of cuckolding. Olive eventually pushes both of them away, telling them that they're "both big babies" who "deserve each other."

The surprising crosscurrents between the actors caught in this triangle, and also between Tepper and Dern (whose tightly focused performance as the hard-ass coach is some of the very best work he's ever done) capture what's best about Drive, He Said and suggest what Nicholson might have been able to bring to movies if he'd stuck with it as a director. Tepper himself gives an extraordinary performance as an inarticulate but deeply troubled man with the manner of a put-on artist and a romantic soul. (After Drive, He Said bombed, Tepper did some TV but disappeared from movies for a decade. In the early 1980s, he turned up in Miss Right, a comedy that reunited him with his co-star Karen Black, and he had supporting roles in the 1983 remake of Breathless and the 1984 Tom Hanks-Adrian Zmed comedy Bachelor Party, and hasn't been seen on-screen since.) Nicholson shows a free but sure hand with the cast, which also includes Michael Warren (of the TV series Hill Street Blues) and, in smaller roles, David Ogden Stiers (lean and hirsute and recognizable only by his voice, even though he's attempting a cracker accent), Cindy Williams, and June Fairchild, beloved to many for her role as the woman who snorts Ajax in the Cheech and Chong movie Up in Smoke.

For all that's brilliant (or at least brilliantly promising) about Drive, He Said, it's easy to see why it tanked in 1971. Nicholson doesn't seem to have any idea how to shape the material into a cohesive hold, so it feels like a succession of sequences rather than a movie, and the audience is left to get its bearings on its own. Probably a lot of people sat through as much of it as they could stand without ever getting them. There's also the subplot involving Michael Margotta as Gabriel, Hector's roommate, whose character must have struck some people as embarrassingly dated even in 1971. Nicholson fails to establish any basis for a relationship or even any kind of emotional bond between Hector and Gabriel, but what does come through is that, while Hector resists bending to the demands of The Establishment, Gabriel can't even consider it, and the pressure is driving him crazy, at a time when it was fashionable to view going crazy as a noble quest. Gabriel never has a quiet moment in the movie; he's always attacking the M.P.s during his draft induction physical, taking a sword to a TV set after screaming, "They staged the moon landing in Phoenix, Arizona!", throwing commodes out of second story windows, etc. At the climax, he tries to rape Olive, during an assault on her house (and body) that he (maybe with a little prodding from the director) stages as if it were a night of bad experimental theater, and after that doesn't work out, he walks naked into the campus biology lab and sets free the various critters caged there. It must be said, though, that even here Nicholson keeps a tight enough rein on Margotta's performance that only intermittently does this stuff play as foolishly as it sounds. (And in the scene in the lab, there is one glorious caught shot of one of the freed mice appearing to try to make out with one of the frogs, which spurns its advances and hops away.)

Nicholson didn't direct another movie until 1978's barnyard comedy Goin' South, in which he also starred, and that wasn't until after he'd added The Last Detail, Chinatown, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor) to his resume. After he won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Terms of Endearment, Nicholson began telling interviewers that his ultimate dream was to take home one more Academy Award, for Best Director. He pretty much stopped saying that after his third and, to date, last film as director, The Two Jakes, slithered out from under a rock in 1990. An attempted sequel to Chinatown from a fresh Robert Towne script that Towne had tried and failed to make himself five years earlier, it was the kind of movie that absolutely had to have propulsion and a clear plot line, and once again, Nicholson didn't know how to put it together so that the sum would amount to more than a pile of scenes strung together. Maybe it's not that surprising that, with so little practice sitting in the director's chair, Nicholson had gotten no better at what he had been hopeless at twenty years earlier, but he had also lost his touch at guiding his fellow actors: he couldn't even get a decent performance out of himself.

You'd have to be crazy to suggest that Nicholson took the wrong road after savoring that explosion of applause for his performance in Easy Rider. Chances are that Drive, He Said (which played at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival) wouldn't even have gotten as much attention as it did if its director hadn't been a movie star, and if Nicholson hadn't worked as hard as he did at his acting career in the early 1970s, he might not have stayed a movie star for long. (Peter Fonda, the real star of Easy Rider, sure didn't.) As it is, he became the biggest, most durable star of his generation. But he did have something special when he directed Drive, He Said, and it's a shame that, when he reached for it again, it had dissipated.

Screengrab's Ultimate Exploitation Films!!!!!!! (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 21:30:00 GMT

GLEN OR GLENDA? (1953)

By high school, I’d seen plenty of artsy foreign films and indies (not to mention a decade's worth of Saturday morning creature double features on UHF), but I’m pretty sure Glen or Glenda? was the first real exploitation flick I ever saw (at least on the big screen), followed by a half dozen more during a day-long marathon at the late-lamented Off The Wall Cinema in Central Square, Cambridge. Edward D. Wood, Jr.’s impassioned fauxcumentary -- about a man (Wood himself) who can work better, think better, even play better, and be more of a credit to his community and his government, in satin undies, a dress and a sweater of finest angora -- was unlike anything I’d ever seen, less a work of art than a Rorschach snapshot of a fringe perspective far beyond mainstream standards of taste, commerciality and talent (in...uh...the traditional sense). Before long, I knew everything about Ed Wood, Jr. and his merry band of misfits, but few cinematic experiences in my life, before or since, have been so bizarrely disorienting as my baffled first encounter with the spectacle of stampeding buffalo superimposed over Bela Lugosi’s impassioned command to “PULL THE STRING!” Wood may have only been exploiting himself (and, I suppose, Lugosi), but respectable Hollywood movies are rarely this fascinating, sincere or unique.

THE TRIP (1967)

Roger Corman was never slow to jump on a trend, so it’s no surprise that he was first out of the gate when the LSD craze hit in the 1960s. Ever the consummate professional, Corman sampled the drug while camping at Big Sur and by his own account, had a mighty fine time doing so. Nevertheless, in the course of his diligent research he had come across some mentions of what the hippies termed “bad trips,” and felt compelled to present a more balanced picture of the hallucinogen’s effects than his own experience had provided. Peter Fonda stars as TV commercial director Paul Groves, a straight-arrow type who decides to take an acid trip as a means of dealing with his pending divorce. Even for a novice like Groves, certain ground rules should be self-evident, the primary one being: when tripping for the first time, you do not want Bruce Dern to be your guide. The man is not possessed of a soothing bedside manner, to say the least. All seems to be going well for Groves at first; he stares at his hands and entertains deep thoughts about the significance of the phrase “living room,” and experiences vivid hallucinations in which he runs around the sets from Corman’s old Poe movies. (Even while experimenting, it seems, Corman never took his eye off the bottom line.) Groves’ trip takes a turn for the worse when he convinces himself he’s killed his creepy guide and, panicked, races out into the Hollywood night. He proves to be an even worse judge of character than we’d previously suspected when, at the height of his freaked-out paranoia, he turns to Dennis Hopper for solace. He also has a proto-Robert Downey Jr. moment when he wanders into a Hollywood Hills mansion and watches TV with a little girl until he is chased away. None of this strikes me as a ringing endorsement of the drug, but apparently it was still too ambiguous for distributor AIP, which added a “shattered mirror” effect to the film’s final shot of Fonda, against Corman’s wishes.

THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT (1972)

Wes Craven’s later successes made him a genre icon, but it’s the director’s early, bare-bones efforts that delivered his canon’s most inspired chills. That’s certainly true of his skuzzy, deranged calling card The Last House on the Left, which commingled camp, dirt-under-fingernails brutality and one stunner of a twist. Spitting in the face of the peace-and-love generation’s idealism about humanity’s goodness (and rife with hoary urban panic), Craven’s debut mimics Bergman’s The Virgin Spring save for that film’s happy ending, its initially goofy amateurishness – full of ham-fisted cross-cutting, silly songs, and a group of fiends who seem better fit for a sitcom – soon giving way to stark, vicious brutality. After two girls are slaughtered for trying to procure some pot, their murderers coincidentally show up at the house of one of the victims’ parents, who quickly deduce who the strangers are and what they’ve done, and decide to do something very, very violent about it. Cheap, graceless and often shocking, Craven’s film is in many ways quite inept, but it’s the memorable carnage that’s truly, intentionally awful.

IT'S ALIVE (1974)

Ever want to have a baby? If so, make sure to avoid Larry Cohen’s It’s Alive, which trumps Rosemary’s Baby as the ‘70s horror gem most likely to turn couples permanently sour on the notion of procreation. Though the director’s first mainstream success, few scary movies have been as underrated as Cohen’s masterpiece, an undeserved fate one can only assume has something to do with the corniness of its creature’s rubbery appearance and two sequels that did little to enhance its reputation. With a no-frills, slightly surrealistic approach that heightens his tale’s emotional immediacy, Cohen blisteringly exploits the myriad anxieties that accompany the impending birth of a child, which in this case proves to be a mutant monster begat by a middle class couple. A physical expression of its parents' neuroses (as well as ecological ruin), the creature’s rampage is stoked for typical genre scares, but Cohen doggedly keeps the focus first and foremost on the inner conflict of the creature’s father (John P. Ryan), torn between an instinct to care for, and a burning desire to kill, his unholy progeny.

MS. 45 (1981)

Few exploitation cinema auteurs are as skilled as Abel Ferrara, and few exploitation films are as grimly proficient as Ms. 45, the director’s nasty, nimble tale of a female avenger taking her fury out on NYC’s chauvinistic male population. Ferrara’s down-and-dirty aesthetic lends some high-voltage seediness to his story about a mute seamstress (Zoë Lund) who’s raped by two different men in one afternoon and responds by going Charles Bronson on any guy unfortunate enough to cross her path. Her feminist fury unleashed, Thana becomes a simultaneously sexy and scary angel of death, singlehandedly embarking on a campaign of terror that ultimately leads to a mesmerizing finale in which she carries out her bloody work in a nun’s costume. Far from merely an exploitation hack, Ferrara arranges his frame with a master’s eye, conveying his story’s central gender conflict in a raft of expertly orchestrated compositions, all while addressing his own Catholic hang-ups and – as implied by his cameo as her maiden, masked attacker – taking a decidedly ambiguous stance towards his anti-heroine’s rampage.

Click Here For Part One, Three, Four, Five & Six...insurance policies are available in the lobby!

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Nick Schager

Take Five: Ride Hard

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Larry Bishop's Hell Ride opens in limited release this week. Advance buzz about the retroriffic biker exploitation flick isn't great, despite the fact that the movie features one of the most mindlessly entertaining trailers of recent years. Still, it's good to see the biker movie, a cultural leftover from the 1960s that has remained with us despite the transition of Harley culture from last refuge of dangerous lowlifes to weekend amusement of the upper middle class, survive in some form or another. For over 40 years, the lone, leather-clad biker on a flipped-back hog or amped-up chopper has been one of Hollywood's most enduring archetypes, used for everything fom a means to instill mindless terror to cheap comedy relief to, all too often, both. If Hell Ride does nothing more than give Michael Madsen a chance to play an all-new variant on his standard violent lowlife character, it will at least keep this archetype alive. Though, given that plenty of aging Tinseltown stars, writers and producers are themselves motorcycle enthusiasts, it's probably not in any immediate danger anyway. While you're waiting for Hell Ride to come to your local theater -- or, more likely, given its dismal advance hype, while you're waiting for it to show up at your local video rental bargain bin -- here's five more biker movies to help you unleash your inner scuzzball.

THE WILD ONE (1953)

Laslo Benedik's teen-menace movie started it all, in more ways than one. Not only was it the first major motion picture to deal with the alleged menace of out-of-countrol outlaw biker gangs (which, a little over ten years later, would developed into a full-blown moral panic, as exquisitely detailed in Hunter S. Thompson's Hell's Angels), but it was one of the first movies to present us with the raw sexual charisma and magnetic, brooding talents of young Marlon Brando; it almost single-handedly started the 1950s craze among teen boys for leather jackets; and each gang in the film lent a name to a rock band (Brando's Black Rebel Motorcycle Club and Lee Marvin's Beatles). The events of the film -- which is still highly entertaining today, despite literally decades of imitators -- involve the takeover of a small California town by rival gangs of outlaw bikers; based on a story in Harper's (which was itself based on a real-life incident in Hollister, CA in 1947), it also starts a less pleasign tradition: that of ridiculously overstating the biker menace to appeal to your audience. Not only were the events in Hollister terribly mild compared to the dramatization in The Wild One (there was no real violence, and very little vandalism or criminal behavior), but the bikers involved were invited back a number of times over the years until it became something of a local tradition.

EASY RIDER (1969)

By 1969, the myth of the outlaw biker had transmogrified from simple post-WWII recreational activity to mysterious urban legend to full-blown moral panic, and finally, as evidenced in this notorious countercultural masterpiece, a counter-symbol of true freedom and the flight from small-mindedness and oppression in the face of stultifying all-American values. By the time Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson strapped on the helmets and hopped aboard their custom Captain America choppers, they were engaged in full-fledged reverse myth-making, transforming the rebel biker from the sort of dangerous threat to small-town America that Hopper had played a number of times in other, lesser exploitation movies to a vision of the divine fool, the holy innocent who, while he might consume barrels full of psilocybin and acres worth of grass, was in fact all that was good and decent about this country. And then, wouldn't you know it? Some greaseball redneck goes and blows his head off, just to be a dick. While there's certainly qualities to Easy Rider that make it a treat to watch (most especially Nicholson's performance, Laszlo Kovacs' cinematography, and bits of Terry Southern's screenplay), it's very much a product of its time; you may be glad it exists, but you're likely to spend a lot of time wondering exactly what happened back then.

GIMME SHELTER (1970)

Since Hunter Thompson didn't have a film crew with him when he was writing his Hell's Angels book, the Maysles Brothers' masterful documentary about the Rolling Stones' notorious concert at Altamont is likely to remain the definitive treatment of the most infamous of all outlaw biker groups on film. Unsurprisingly, it shows them at their worst but doesn't entirely play fair: while everyone knows the story of how the security at the concert was disastrously handed over to a lot of drunken, rowdy Angels who worked cheap and didn't care whose head they bashed in, and while there's no doubt that their killing of black concertgoer Meredith Hunter was an overreaction (and the racial slurs they deployed against him didn't help their cause one bit), it was only later made clear that the bikers had been right about Hunter: he was, as they'd said, been carry a gun, waving it around recklessly, and behaving in a very suspicious manner. Filmed evidence of this was why Hell's Angel Allen Passaro, who was primarily responsible for Hunter's death, was acquitted of murder. But as with most stories involving outlaw bikers, the truth got muddled and the legend got exaggerated: Altamont became widely known as the exact time and place that the Sixties died, and the Hell's Angels' reputation as lawless maniacs grew deeper and darker.

THE ROAD WARRIOR (1981)

After decades of imitators, parodies, and its own decreasing dividends in terms of sequels, it's hard to remember exactly how exciting the Mad Max movies were when they first came out. Hard, that is, until you sit down and watch one all the way through. Made at a time when Mel Gibson was still an electrifying performer and not a living self-parody, and directed by a George Miller light-years removed from feel-good movies about talking pigs, they still hold up a gold standard for smart, anarchic, terrifyingly high-velocity action movies, and Mad Max 2 -- more commonly known in the U.S. as The Road Warrior -- is the best of them. It's one of the best action movies of all time, and unlike most movies featuring car crashes, postapocalyptic wastelands, and murderous bandits who look like they were once members of Charged G.B.H., it doesn't sacrifice a shred of intelligence while bringing us its heart-stopping thrills. With oil recently clearing $300 a barrel, gas hitting over $4 a gallon, and many people -- both serious economic thinkers and paranoid tool-shed ranters -- considering what a "post-peak oil" world might look like, now is a good time to contemplate a future without gasoline, where deranged biker gangs run amok, and say: actually, that looks kinda cool.

BEYOND THE LAW (1992)

While public interest in outlaw biker gangs started to die out in the 1970s and had almost totally faded by the 1980s, the biker gangs themselves never went away, and even today, a fringe element of the culture is responsible for some fairly heinous drug dealing and the sort of violent turf wars that go with them. In 1982, an Arizona undercover cop infiltrated one such gang in order to bring them down after a particularly brutal drug killing, and Playboy magazine carried his compelling story. Over 10 years later, HBO produced this dramatic action thriller based on Dan Saxon's story, and while it didn't attract a great deal of attention at the time, it has gone on to become a bargain-bin cult classic, thanks largely to its highly realistic depiction of undercover procedures and its unusually literate storytelling. Okay, admittedly, some of the dialogue is a bit hokey, and Charlie Sheen looks absolutley ridiculous in a biker beard and leather vest, but it's a tightly constructed, nasty little thriller that's a lot better than it has any right to be. And hey, who's that playing a violent lowlife? You guessed it: Michael Madsen! How far we've come...

The Ten Greatest Mentors in Movie History, Part 2

Phil Nugent — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 20:30:00 GMT

Lester Bangs (Philip Seymour Hoffman), ALMOST FAMOUS (2000)

Cameron Crowe's semi-autobiographical film sticks made-up names on the teenage rock journalist at its center (i.e., Crowe's stand-in) and the rock band he has his big Life-Changing Experience while covering, but Crowe puts Bangs, the legendary editor of Creem, on-screen under his own name, and Hoffman incarnates every loving thing ever written or said about Bangs and makes it look easy. Part of the fascination of Almost Famous is that Crowe presents Bangs as the voice of hard-earned wisdom, and has him share that wisdom with his surrogate out of a spirit of pure generosity, yet the kid violates every rule that Bangs lays down for him, and the way the movie sees it, this all works out great for him. At the time, it must have seemed that this had worked out pretty great for Crowe; as a reporter, he really did cozy up to the rock stars he covered and wrote flatteringly about them (out of what seemed to be real awe for his subjects, rather than opportunism), and the connections he forged couldn't have done him any harm on his path to becoming a big Hollywood writer-director. But resisting Bangs's advice that he learn to temper his sweet enthusiasm with some distance and skepticism--to care more about his art than about others' feelings--he may have done some harm to his ability to extend his range as a filmmaker. In fact, after Crowe's last couple of movies, and the last couple of anthologies with Bangs's material in them, Bangs's career is probably the healthier one now, and he's been dead since 1982.

Howard (Walter Huston), THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE (1948)

Howard, the ancient prospector (and proto-ecologist--witness his speech about leaving the Earth "the way we found it"), suggests Yoda crossed with Gabby Hayes, and may be the platonic ideal of the figure of the Western codger who sometimes seems half-mad but has great stores of wiliness and gumption. Drafted by a couple of tenderfeet to bring his experience to a gold-mining venture, he makes his pupils rich, while adhering to the rule that defines so many movie mentor figures: namely, his sage advice does him more good than the people to whom he offers it. When last seen, the old man is preparing to return to the Indian village where he can live out his golden years receiving the royal treatment in exchange for serving as the locals' "medicine man." Bogart's Fred C. Dobbs, the malcontent who scorns fair treatment for his mentor, makes his fortune but gets his lead lopped off before he can haul it back to civilization, while Tim Holt, who treats Howard with the respect that is his due, stays alive but loses his riches and has no recourse but to go back to being Tim Holt.

"Subway Ghost" (Vincent Schiavelli), GHOST (1990(

Lanky at six feet four, with a thick shock of untamed dark hair surrounding a bald pate and a long face like melted ice cream, Schiavelli (who died in 2005) was often cast for the shock effect of his appearance, whether he was playing an asylum inmate in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest or a high school teacher in Fast Times at Ridgemont High (where the news that he has a hot-looking wife is good for a laugh). His role as a nameless and very touching spectre in Ghost gave him the chance to play an uncharacteristically direct and fiery character, and he rose to the occasion so fully that, for a few scenes, he actually brought something wholly unearthly to a movie that's mostly about comforting the audience by showing it that death is just another stage of life. Schiavelli seems to know different: being stranded among the living has turned him into the most alienated figure imaginable, and after he's consented to help the hero master his abilities, he abruptly takes his leave, as if he'd just remembered that the movie he's in is meant for those who are sweeter-natured than he has any interest in being.

John (Bruce Dern), THE TRIP (1967)

Never slow to jump on a trend, Roger Corman was first out of the gate when the LSD craze hit in the late 60s, casting Peter Fonda as TV commercial director Paul Groves, a straight-arrow type who decides to take an acid trip as a means of dealing with his pending divorce. Even for a novice like Groves, certain ground rules should be self-evident, the primary one being: when tripping for the first time, you do not want Bruce Dern to be your guide. This is like buying the parenting manual by Lynne "mother of Britney and Jamie Lynn" Spears. Nonetheless, Groves agrees to take the drug under the supervision of Dern's unnerving weird-beard character John, and off we go into the lava lamp school of druggy filmmaking — pretty colors and shapes, strobe lights and colored gels. At this point, your more responsible LSD guide would put on some trippy tunes and maybe show you some groovy album covers, but John just sort of snivels and grins and makes Groves feel even more nervous and paranoid with his "hey, it's just a normal ol' chair, buddy" routine. It's even possible that Corman meant John to be a comforting presence, but happened to be out shooting second unit footage for The Navy vs. the Night Monsters the day the casting director learned Dern was willing to work for a sleeping bag and a couple of tuna fish sandwiches. Anyway, Groves' trip takes a turn for the worse when he convinces himself he's killed his creepy guide and, panicked, races out into the Hollywood night. Then he proves to be an even worse judge of character than we'd previously suspected when, at the height of his freaked-out paranoia, he turns to Dennis Hopper for solace. Just say no, kids.

Bud (Harry Dean Stanton), REPO MAN (1984)

"Not many people got a code to live by anymore," says Bud, the veteran repo man embodied in all his shambling, world-weary glory by Harry Dean Stanton, who schools our young anti-hero Otto in the tricks of the trade. Bud does have a code, though, and in a movie that ranks among the most quotable of the last three decades, he is a veritable font of direct and concise street-level wisdom. In other words, fuck Yoda. Here are the five elements of the Repo Code we've chosen to live by, and we learned them all from Bud.

5. I don't want no commies in my car. No Christians either.

4. It helps if you dress like a detective. Detectives dress kinda square. If you look like a detective people are gonna think you're packing something.

3. Look at 'em – ordinary fucking people, I hate 'em. An ordinary person spends his life avoiding tense situations. A repo man spends his life getting into tense situations.

2. Only an asshole gets killed for a car.

1. Repo man's got all night, every night.

--Phil Nugent; Scott Von Doviak

Click here for Part 1.

And the ReOscar Goes to…Peter Fonda?

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 17:00:00 GMT

While we’ve been busy with our spreadsheets and slide rules, trying to figure who the big winners will be come Sunday night, Time’s Richard Corliss is just getting around to giving his picks for the 1998 Oscars. No, Corliss hasn’t slipped through some sort of wormhole in the space-time continuum. Instead he’s presenting Time’s First Annual Re-Oscars.

The premise is that the Academy may have occasionally made a mistake or two over the years, a controversial notion we’re nonetheless prepared to embrace. "What we're offering is a second chance at the Academy Awards handed out on March 23, 1998," Corliss writes. "To a lot of people, the record eleven Oscars that James Cameron's Titanic lapped up that night were suitable acknowledgment of a much-loved movie that quickly became the top box-office attraction in film history. We're asking how Titanic, which was named the Best Picture of 1997, and the performances that won in the four actor categories have stood the test of time. And we're answering: Eh, not so well."

If your memory of the films that challenged Titanic for Best Picture that year is a little shaky, we don’t blame you. Somehow we’d forgotten those timeless classics As Good as It Gets and The Full Monty were nominated as well, although with guns to our heads we probably could have guessed Good Will Hunting made the final five. Given those choices, we’ll go along with Corliss’s selection of L.A. Confidential as the first Re-Oscar winner, although his reasoning is a little shaky: “A guilty secret of film criticism is that reviewers often lavish their fondness on modern versions of the kinds of genres they don't make any more. Thus The English Patient, a film in the David Lean epic tradition, was my choice for best film of 1996. L.A. Confidential is a time trip back to the period in which it's set, the early '50s, when film noir (as the French called Hollywood's crime dramas) argued that postwar optimism was a lie — that brutality and betrayal lurked around the every city street corner, where the cop on the beat might also be on the take.”

Corliss also reminds us of one of the laziest Academy decisions in recent memory: Jack Nicholson winning his third Oscar for his Jack Nicholson-esque performance in As Good as It Gets. "Nicholson had lost an Oscar a few times when he deserved one: in Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces and especially Chinatown, a great performance that lost to Art Carney's turn as a lonely older guy with health problems in Harry and Tonto. . . Chalk up Nicholson's third Oscar as an early Life Achievement Award." Instead, Corliss chooses to recognize Peter Fonda’s nearly forgotten turn in the all-around understated Ulee’s Gold. Hey, we’re happy for him. For the rest of the ReOscar roster, click here.

The Rep Report (January 11-15)

Phil Nugent — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 21:00:00 GMT

BERKELEY: Pacific Film Archives launches a wide-ranging new retrospective, "The Medieval Remake" (January 11 - February 16), devoted to the many different flavors of medieval fantasy on film. (The series "was inspired by The Contagious Middle Ages in Post-Communist East Central Europe, an exhibition on view at the Townsend Center for the Humanities on the UC Berkeley campus through January.") We're not talking Robert Taylor and George Sanders jousting in tin costumes here; the whole program is strictly high end, with Takovsky's Andrei Rublev, Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky, both Dreyer's and Bresson's takes on the story of Joan of Arc in the dock, a pair of Ingmar Bergman's flashbacks to the Dark Ages (The Seventh Seal and Virgin Spring), and Fritz Lang's two enormous, silent Nibelungen, baroque visual extravangas so large-scaled that Wagner himself might have wondered if maybe the director were laying it on a little thick. It's striking to be reminded of how many great directors of wildly varying ranges and styles have been drawn to this period and these stories, and it promises to be an amazing series. But you might want to stick Ivanhoe or Excalibur in your Netflix queue just to help you lighten up afterwards.

Hepcats, zoot suiters, and beboppers can usher in the new year at PFA with "Cool World: Jazz and the Movies" (January 12 - February 6), a series that mixes well-known films with jazzy scores and settings (such as The Man with the Golden Arm, featuring Frank Sinatra's great performance as a junkie poker dealer) and relative obscurities. Notable among the latter category are Sweet Love, Bitter, a low-budget 1967 drama that features a strong performance by the comedian-activist Dick Gregory as a character modeled on Charlie Parker, and All Night Long, a 1962, modern version of Othello set in London, that features Charles Mingus in an acting role as himself. (A clip from it appears in the documentary Mingus.)

NEW YORK: "John Ford at Fox" (January 12-February 2) spotlights the glory period that was the director's time at "the Hollywood studio closest to being Ford’s base." (It's the same body of work honored in the new DVD box set Ford at Fox.) There are films here, such as The Iron Horse, Young Mr. Lincoln, and My Darling Clementine, where the director defined the popular version of key chapters of American history; others, such as the folk comedies Steamboat 'Round the Bend and Judge Priest, which preserve the performance style of Will Rogers, now are American history. The series begins with the new documentary Becoming John Ford, featuring interviews with Ford biographer Joseph McBride and Peter Fonda.

Forgotten Films: Halloween Hangover Edition

Peter Smith — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 18:00:00 GMT

Most low-budget, independently produced horror movies are cheesy gross-outs designed for the straight-to-video market, and that can make it even harder for a real movie maker who's decided to dip a toe into the scare genre; his work may end up tainted by association. When the writer-director Michael Almeda decided to make Nadja (1994), his oddly poetic comedy about a vampire princess in Brooklyn, he had an additional problem in that the children of the night were becoming so goddamn overexposed; Almeda, who has since become best known for his amazing 2000 Hamlet and his documentaries about the creative process (This So-Called Disaster, William Eggleston in the Real World), was competing for attention with Anne Rice and Francis Ford Coppola, with Jess Weldon and lesser pretenders coming up fast. Seen today, Nadja is a flawed but strikingly inventive, great-looking, and sometimes very funny riff on the mythology of the undead. It's also very evocative of a specific time and place, and I don't mean Transylvania. Almeda cast it with what you might call the Mid-Nineties Indie Film All-Stars: The stunning Elina Löwensohn in the title role, Martin Donovan, Suzy Amis, Jared Harris, Karl Geary and, on the comeback trail, Peter Fonda as the vampire killer Van Helsing. (Fonda, who's just arrived in town after finally dispatching Dracula, is especially funny explaining that staking the old Count was no great challenge: "He was like Elvis at the end. . . The magic was gone, and he knew it.") There's also a cameo by David Lynch, who was one of the movie's producers, as a security guard at the morgue. One line in particular also time-stamps the picture, when Jared Harris, as Nadja's brother, describes an ESP message from his sister as "a psychic fax." If the picture had been made twenty minutes later, he would have said "e-mail."

The 1988 ghost story Lady in White was made in Wayne County, New York, on a budget of less than five million dollars, by the writer-director Frank LaLoggia. Unlike Nadja, it has no special pretensions to artistry; LaLoggia, who had earlier made a horror movie called Fear No Evil that he felt had been mangled by the releasing studio, simply wanted to make a good, commercial movie that was true to his conception and wasn't subject to meddling from a bunch of suits. He succeeded: it's an entertaining, stylish little spook story, with a terrific lead performance by the eleven-year-old Lukas Haas. Ironically, though, the movie ended up getting good reviews and considerable attention as an indie-filmmaking success story but failed to achieve much distribution; just because you make your film your way without interference from the suits doesn't mean the suits have to show it. (LaLoggia didn't get to make another movie for more than twenty years, and that film, The Haunted Heart, hasn't received theatrical distribution.) Luckily, both Nadja and Lady in White have been preserved on DVD to entertain and scare audiences that never knew they existed during their brief tour of our nation's movie theaters. — Phil Nugent