The Screengrab : quentin tarantinol madeleine stowe

D. K. Holm Fundraiser at Portland's Cinema 21 This Sunday

Phil Nugent — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 15:30:00 GMT

We've reported on this before, so this is just a timely reminder: this Sunday, April 27, Cinema 21 in Portland (616 NW 21st Avenue, phone 503-223-4515) is holding a fundraiser for critic, author, and Screengrab contributor D. K. Holm. The website says that Holm, who has written books on Robert Crumb and Quentin Tarantino, "is suffering from a very treatable case of esophageal cancer. However, he is also, as he puts it, 'the American nightmare' -- uninsured and facing thousands of dollars in medical bills for chemotherapy and surgery." The event will include a silent auction and entertainment including a "compilation of D.K. Holm's many appearances in the films of James Westby" and "Portland luminaries reading some of D.K.’s most deliciously vitriolic reviews and hate mail." Those who may be able to unable--if say, you, like some of us, have the misfortune to not live in Portland--but would like to make your presence felt on the dance floor can send contributions directly to D. K. Holm at P.O. Box 4146, Portland, OR, 97208-4146.

Tribeca Film Festival review: "The Secret of the Grain"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Some twenty years ago, Matt Groening produced a parody of a typical film festival brochure that was full of such titles as "Land of Ice, Land of Sighs." The title The Secret of the Grain is almost as perfect in conjuring up exactly what people who don't see many foreign films dread they must be like. ("Grain! Why will you not grow so that I can feed my family!? What is your secret!?") It turns out that the movie isn't set on a barren plain ravaged by drought but in contemporary France, and the plot is something of a traditional family farce, though it's debatable whether the writer-director, Abdellatif Kechiche (Games of Love and Chance) understands just how traditional and just how farcical. His hero is Beiji (Habib Boufares), a sixty-year-old manual laborer with a sprawling Franco-Arab family of friends and kinfolk. When his already meager work opportunities go-getting stepdaughter, and when the screen is filled with people with resentments and competing agendas--as in the opening-night sequence that takes up most of the last hour, with Beiji's daughters from his first marriage hissing bitchy remarks about their mother's replacement behind her back-- things even spark a little, thought they never quite catch fire. At its best, it's a pretty fair example of what Quentin Tarantino calls a "hang-out movie." But its digressionary charms and lulling rhythms work against it both as a piece of storytelling and as a comedy. They don't always work to the performers' advantage, either. There are awful lot of scenes where the characters have one point to make, and they make it, and then the scene just keeps rolling along while they make it again and again in as many different words as Kechiche can think up. (And The Secret of the Grain runs two and a half hours.) There's a not untypical scene towards the end, where Beiji, who is in desperate trouble and looking for his son, barges in on his daughter-in-law, who is in tears over her husband's infidelities. She gets to deliver a very long (and very repetitive) monologue, with much sniffling and weeping in tight close-up, while Beiji, who is in the rush of his life, just stands there and listens to her. At least when this sort of thing happens in a Hollywood movie. you know why: the director is imagining hearing the title of his movie be read aloud and preceded by the words, "The award for Best Supporting Actress goes to..." But here, the director's Altmanesque belief in bestowing equal time on his minor characters has gone a little haywire.

Meanwhile, back at the restaurant, the pacing is still overdeliberate and "novelistic", but the action is being dredged up from classic episodes of Fawlty Towers. (But this movie by itself is almost half as long as the entire run of that series.) And whoever did the subtitles for the English language edition didn't have to work quite so hard. I don't speak French, but having seen a few movies in my time, I didn't really need the subtitles to know that, as things started going wrong, the extras were saying things like, "Two hours waiting for a cous-cous dish!" and "His new business is getting off to a bad start!" and "I'll never come here again, that's for sure!" and "Sock her blue! Never before have I been asked to accept so long a hiatus between meals while awaiting an albeit delicious fish delicacy! De Gaulle would not have stood for it, nor would Depardieu if he were peckish, I wager!" (Screengrab Quiz: I made one of those lines up. Guess which one and win a dream date with Leonard Pierce!) The movie ends with a final stroke that is intended as black comedy, playful slapstick, or a sudden leap in tragedy, but damned if I know for sure which, and I don't think that counts as deliberate artistic ambiguity.

The Top Ten Movies With Alternate Cuts, Part 2

Phil Nugent — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 15:00:00 GMT

MANHUNTER (1985, Michael Mann)

I've got four cuts of Manhunter on my shelf: the original theatrical version, a re-cut for broadcast on TCM, another cut allegedly for a preview, and then Mann's final definitive cut. Anything significantly different about these cuts? It's basically trimming down a few scenes and putting one or two back in, most of them documented on this excellent fan website. Mann has gone back to his movies before, re-cutting Last of the Mohicans (in the process removing a Clannad song that dated the flick), Ali, and even preparing a three-hour cut of Heat for a TV broadcast that never happened. Here, though, was an instance where a director's revisionist tinkering harmed the flick, removing dialogue from William Peterson that actually showed how much he empathised with the serial killer he was hunting. Though it might not be Mann's preferred cut, for me the original theatrical release is the definitive cut of the film so far.

THE LORD OF THE RINGS TRILOGY (2001-2003, Peter Jackson)

Peter Jackson had made it clear during pre-production of his adaptation of Tolkien's trilogy that an extended cut would be coming out, and so it did, and the fans lapped it up, thus putting even more cash into New Line's coffers. But were these cuts any good? It depends on what you're looking for. I always thought the theatrical releases were pretty rushed and the extended versions did have a more relaxed pace about them, but did Tolkien fans really want to see hobbits getting tall from Ent juice or a bit of extended battle butchery? Apparently so. I thought these were a mixed bag. (I mean, do you really want to see an extended ending for Return of the King? Wasn't it long enough anyway?) All credit for Jackson for giving consumers the options, but was it really that much of an improvement?

THE STAR WARS TRILOGY (1977-1982, George Lucas, Irvin Kersher, Richard Marquand)

Han fired first. Among all the extra tidbits that were included in the trilogy, the one that angers the fans most is George Lucas changing the infamous Han vs Greedo confrontation from this:

To this:

And its downhill from there. Yes the special editions made a bundle when re-released. Yes, most people probably have them on their DVD shelf, but if you just give audiences one option, that's what they have to go with. It was only last year that Lucas relented and finally released the original, unaltered films on DVD and even then, they were non-anamorphic transfers. Does the additional material add to the films? Nope.

THE NEW WORLD (2005, Terrence Malick)

Terrence Malick is notorious for taking a long time with the editing of his movies, so it wasn't a surprise to hear that his last film, The New World, wasn't going to make its original November 2005 release date. A month later though, a 150-min cut was screened for critics with hopes that it would qualify for a few Academy Awards. In 2006, the film went into general release with a shortened cut, which Malick considered his best version; a log of the changes can be found here. The only place to get a copy of the first cut is if you have a copy of the Academy screeners or you get the special edition Italian DVD. Never fear though, as according to producer Sarah Greene, Malick has started work on another cut of The New World. Though considerable work had been done on it, its still up in the air when it may come out, though I suspect this may be due to the director mulling over what HD format he should release it on. After this, one hopes he can get back to finally finishing his alternate cut of The Thin Red Line, which is rumored to be a completely new film altogether. But then, even a re-edited Malick film is better than no Malick.

THE LAST EMPEROR (1987, Bernardo Bertolucci)

The Last Emperor is one of those old-style epics that needs to be seen on the big screen. No amount of CGI could have the power to surprise and astonish like this scene:

It was the original 160-minute cut that picked up the Academy Awards, but Bertolucci preferred his director's cut and until recently, you could only get a decent copy of both cuts from the U.K. But when Criterion recently announced its special edition containing both cuts, it quietly noted that the cinematographer, Storraro again, once again applied his Univisium concept by re-formatting the film to now be shown at 2:1 aspect ratio. It's unimaginable to see a film like this in a compromised halfway-house aspect ratio, but in this case, fans of The Last Emperor at least have a choice.

RUNNERS UP:

REVENGE (1989, Tony Scott)

Most alternate cuts have stuff being put into the film, Tony Scott went one better by chucking stuff out of Revenge. He waited eighteen years to remove twenty-four minutes out of Tarantino's favourite flick. Do we get to see more Madeleine Stowe in her prime? Disappointingly, not really, but we do get a much tighter and meaner story of two men who are righteously pissed off with one another because of a bitch in heat.

LEGEND (1984, Ridley Scott)

There are about four cuts of this flick flying around the world. Do any of them improve Scott's flawed fairy tale? They try. Until the 2003 DVD release, U.S. viewers were only familiar with a Tangerine Dream-scored cut of the film. The film's devoted fan base resulted in the release of a director's cut that revealed that even with the director at full control, the film may have had little chance at the box office but now was held together by the late Jerry Goldsmith's more sumptious score. Tim Curry as Darkness steals the show from everyone.

ALIEN 3 (1993, David Fincher)

David Fincher's debut nearly killed off the director's career, and until the release of the special edition, the only other version of the film was a leaked three-hour bootleg. The new cut is a revelation, even though it was done without Fincher's collaboration. A completely new version that makes you re-assess an otherwise neglected and flawed contribution to the Alien franchise. And if you disagree with that, I got two words to say to you: Alien: Resurrection.

TERMINATOR 2 (1992, James Cameron)

Cameron first got alternate cut success with the release of Aliens: Special Edition. T2 got a bunch more footage thrown in, most of it of the type that filmmakers refer to as "character development". To his credit, Cameron's DVD producers were the first ones who used "branching" DVD software, where extended footage would be seamlessly intergrated within the original cut.

SUPERMAN 2 (1992, Richard Lester, Richard Donner)

An alternate ending to Superman 2.:

Watching Donner's cut of Superman II is painful. The additional Marlon Brando footage really adds to the film, as do his conceptions of the scenes, but unfortunately, Richard Donner was kicked off the film after only two-thirds of it had been completed. The rest of it was re-shot by Richard Lester. Donner's insistence on using as little of Lester's footage as possible creates a curious discontinuity, but it's the repeat ending that really lets it down. If Donner had been allowed to finish the sequel, he may have come up with something that didn't rehash the first film, but in this case the Lester film is more complete.

— Faisal A. Qureshi

Click here for Part 1.