The Screengrab : rachel mcadams

Trailer Review: Sherlock Holmes

Paul Clark — Wed, 27 May 2009 16:00:00 GMT

As I’m sure many of you can guess, Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes isn’t exactly at the top of my must-see list for 2009. Really, this trailer is pretty much what I expected from this combination of material and director- wacky camera angles, bare-knuckle boxing matches, and lotsa stuff blowing up. What’s more, the oafish “lad” humor that’s shown up in all of Ritchie’s other films to date is also well in evidence here too, which the frat boys might enjoy but has never really done much for me. So any interest I have in this project comes from the cast, which is actually pretty intriguing to me. Being a Downey fan, I knew he would have fun as Holmes, but I wasn’t sure exactly how he’d take on the character, and it’s nice to see that he’s playing him not as a ninny (like Johnny Depp’s Ichabod Crane, funny as that was), but as a fairly capable if somewhat unorthodox crime-solver. And Jude Law should be entertaining as Watson- I generally like Law better when he’s not the protagonist, which lets him air out his inner character actor usually to good effect. Also, there’s Rachel McAdams in lingerie, which is nice to see- both the lingerie and McAdams in general. Plus I gotta admit- the hammer gag is pretty funny.

The Authenticity Police on the Set of "State of Play"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 15:00:00 GMT

Washington Post writer R. B. Brenner describes his thrilling adventures serving as a technical consultant on State of Play. The movie which stars Russell Crowe as bearish investigative reporter employed by "the Washington Globe, a down-on-its-luck 'second buy' in town, recently taken over by a media conglomerate," where he has Helen Mirren for a boss and Rachel McAdams as a blog-savvy novice to goggle with admiration over his death-defying journaistic feats and to tsk-tsk over his ethical lapses. Once upon a time, this was a 2003 British miniseries of the same title, which "portrays a Fleet Street world of newspapering that, though rollicking fun, is an ethical nightmare by American standards. Its ace reporter pays sources for information (an absolute no-no in the United States), surreptitiously videotapes a source in a hotel room (a firing offense, and a felony in several states) and generally behaves like a walking conflict of interest (and in a bedroom scene with the politician's wife, he does more than walk)." Brenner saw it as his job to guide the filmmaking team, which included Scottish director Kevin Macdonald (Touching the Void, The Last King of Scotland), in adapting the specifics to the American journalism milieu without costing the story any juice.

Towards this end, Brenner set about trying to make sure that Crowe's character was a respectable beacon of his profession, even though part of the character's scruffy charm is clearly meant to be that he's one of those rule-bending, amoral dudes whose first responsibility is to the story and who, compared to the people Brenner probably views as being at the height of the profession--i.e., the ones who get invited to appear on the Sunday morning talk shows and, well, get hired as technical consultants on major Hollywood productions--aren't completely respectable. Brenner objected to the fact that Crowe's character repeatedly pays informants for information, which Brenner says could never happen here, by which he presumably means that if a real reporter got caught doing it, there would be howls of outrage and affronted op-ed pieces for a week and then the reporter would either be suspended or get fired and go to work for Fox News. "Twice, the director agreed to work-arounds. The third time? The good news is, Crowe's reporter never pays a dime, which Macdonald sees as accommodating me. The bad news is, one brief scene could lead the audience to think otherwise."

This was not the only occasion when "my crusade for authenticity bumped into unyielding walls at times. When I repeatedly objected to the illicit-videotaping scene, Macdonald politely made clear that in the end, plot rules. He was trying to tell a dramatic story, a political whodunit, and didn't want the audience bogged down in a journalism ethics lesson. I kept arguing that if he aspired to elevate the film above mere thriller, then accurately portraying my profession's code of conduct should matter more." On the other hand, he describes a scene during filming when Mirren's editor asked Crowe if he could be "objective" about a story in which he had a personal stake and Crowe ad-libbed, "Absolutely not." "Those words," writes Brenner, "didn't make it into the film, much to my relief." Too bad; it's not only a funny line, but it reveals the reporter as an honest man.

Reviewing a 1974 film version of The Front Page, Pauline Kael captured the enduring appeal of the play's view of Chicago journalism circa the early twentieth century by quoting a reporter named Sherman Reilly Duffy: "Socially a journalist fits in somewhere between a whore and a bartender, but spiritually he stands beside Galileo. He knows the world is round." By his own account, Brennan is a representative of the current state of big-time journalism, which is willing to consider the possibility that the world is round if that's what the experts say, but mostly knows where its next meal is coming from. The Hollywood State of Play is itself a throwback to the 1970s, when movies like All the President's Men and The Parallax View (and TV shows like Lou Grant and The Night Stalker, in which Darren McGavin got to the bottom of this whole zombie problem plaguing Chicago) portrayed investigative reporters as the new hard-boiled detective heroes and our last defense against some all-enveloping conspiracy whose jaws where always just about to snap shut. It's a romantic idea that may still have some fantasy appeal, but it doesn't seem very timely, considering that most of the journalistic scandals of the last twenty years have been the result not of overreaching by unshaven, hard-drinking reporters fighting to get to the truth but by well-manicured establishment reporters meekly taking dictation from whatever powerful figure deigned to use them as a P.R. service. (When The New York Times's Judith Miller was criticized for shoveling anything she was told by Ahmad Chalabi into the paper, she indignantly replied that her critics clearly didn't understand what her job was, the implication being that if Chalabi had passed his press kit along to some reporter who'd bothered to check to see whether any of what he'd been told was true or even remotely plausible, that reporter would not have been doing his job right.)

The idea that what's really killing American journalism is the closeness between journalists, who aspire to becoming TV bloviators and beltway celebrities, with the celebrities they cover, is not one that Brennan was likely to push the State of Play crew towards; by his own telling, he was too star-struck from being around real celebrities that he had to summon up all his courage to tell the movie star Crowe that if his character had real reason to believe that somebody was likely to get killed, he would probably go to the cops. The movie may do a little better by the other thing that is killing the newspaper business, which is new technology and the threat of obsolescence. Crowe's old-school ink-stained wretch vents his resentment of McAdams's flavor of the month by sneering, "I've been here 15 years, I've got a 16-year-old computer. She's been here 15 minutes and she's got enough gear to launch a fucking satellite." Another good line. Turns out that it, too, was ad-libbed, on-camera, by Crowe. Maybe, instead of bothering to write scripts, they should just hand Crowe a character and have him live in full costume for a few months, following him around and recording his movements until he gets off enough zingers to add up to a movie.

Screengrab Review: "State of Play"

Nick Schager — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 15:00:00 GMT

A 2003 BBC miniseries condensed from six hours to two for its big-screen Hollywood adaptation, State of Play is so bursting with characters, plots, and hot-button subject matter that some unavoidably receive short shrift. Though its English TV heritage and multifaceted current events-laden narrative both recall Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic, Kevin Macdonald’s (The Last King of Scotland) film nonetheless largely eschews Big Statement grandstanding in favor of murder-mystery tension. It’s a tack that can occasionally be vexing, as some of the issues this tale nominally addresses would surely benefit from further investigation, whether it’s the increasingly edgy relationship between traditional and new media, the role of corporate interests on news reporting, and – in an echo of this season’s 24 storyline – the rise of profit-first private military contractors in international affairs and homeland security. Yet Macdonald’s decision to use these topics primarily as flavoring for a tale of nothing-is-what-it-seems espionage and investigative journalism is, ultimately, a shrewd (if disappointing) one that keeps the focus on suspense and prevents the taut, knotty proceedings from overreaching.

In the nation’s capital, a thief and pizza delivery man are shot dead by a skilled killer, while at the same time, the aide (Maria Thayer) to married congressman Stephen Collins (Ben Affleck), whom she was both screwing and working for as the lead investigator of a Senate committee hearing into Blackwater-esque private military contractor PointCorp, is mysteriously killed by a subway train. Washington Globe reporter Cal McAffrey (a scruffy, long-haired Russell Crowe) is assigned to cover the first deaths but – given that Collins is his former college roommate, as well as married to a woman (Robin Wright Penn) whom he once slept with – inevitably begins looking into the latter case. What he unearths is a tangled web of duplicity, corruption and murder fit for a Raymond Chandler yarn, and one he’s tasked with figuring out while contending with an editor-in-chief (Helen Mirren) under pressure from the paper’s bottom line-driven new owners and a staff blogger named Della Frye (Rachel McAdams) eager to work the story alongside her renowned peer. Double crosses, assassinations, and treachery soon engulf the plucky reporters, and as they breathlessly sift through facts, rumors and revelations, Macdonald’s film achieves suitably swift momentum, the twists and turns coming fast enough to keep one distracted from the obvious, telegraphed denouement lying in wait.

Jeff Daniels, Viola Davis and Jason Bateman round out a sturdy all-star cast that’s asked mainly to embody familiar archetypes, and if Crowe’s hero is less compromised than the script would like us to believe – his severe conflicts of interest never truly putting his noble motivations in serious doubt – the actor’s driven performance nonetheless anchors the vigorous action. That, underneath its flurry of characters and incidents, State of Play adheres to a familiar All the President's Men-style whodunit template is for its first two-thirds inconsequential, since Macdonald keeps the shadowy proceedings brisk and thorny enough to mildly intrigue. Unfortunately, all the commotion is primarily in service of a seen-from-miles-away bombshell that renders the plot – and its half-baked but unpretentious portrait of the insidious influence of private entities in what should be public services (government and media) – far more shallow than it initially appeared. Although, even if the film proves nothing more than a clever, diverting bit of smoke and mirrors, its end-credits depiction of the start-to-finish process of newspapers’ daily creation serves as a poignant coda for the vital yet dying art of old-school, courageous, truth-telling reportage.

Morning Deal Report: Harrison Ford and Rachel McAdams Wake to “Morning Glory”

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Harrison Ford will play a “grizzled old-school anchor in the Ted Koppel mold who quits in disgust with the gossip-heavy direction of the evening newscast” in Morning Glory, per The Hollywood Reporter. “He is then recruited by a hot up-and-coming producer (Rachel McAdams) to help revive a morning talk show, only to be paired with his rival.” J.J. Abrams is producing under his Bad Robot banner.

Gore Verbinski is developing a project based on a 2007 Wall Street Journal article “about the online fantasy role-playing world and its detrimental impact on the real lives of players,” Variety reports. “The article by Alexandra Alter focuses on a married man who spends as many as 20 hours a day on a computer, existing through an avatar who is a thriving, musclebound entrepreneur. In reality, he is a diabetic, chain-smoking 53-year-old.” Verbinski needs a title. How about Second Skin?

Cheech and Chong aren’t ready to put down the bong anytime soon. In addition to the live concert movie already announced, the duo will join forces for Cheech and Chong's Smokin' Animated Movie, based on their library of classic comedy routines. “"It's great to be doing a movie where Cheech and I never have to get out of bed or be on camera," Chong said.

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Take Five: Road Trip

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 20:15:00 GMT

Opening this Friday, Neil Burger's The Lucky Ones is a bit of a gamble as a follow-up to The Illusionist. Following the plight of three soldiers recently returned from Iraq (played by Tim Robbins, Michael Pena and Rachel McAdams), it quickly turns into a sort of social statement-cum-sign o' the times story as they find themselves on a road trip together across the country. It's hard to predict how The Lucky Ones will be received; Iraq movies are always a crapshoot, and the movie's curious blend of comedy and drama may not fit in with the subject matter. But it's always fun to see a new road movie, especially this late in the year when the possibility taking real-world road trips becomes more and more daunting. Road pictures have a long and storied history in Hollywood, and filmmakers have managed to fold everything from bone-chilling noir to high-concept comedy to existential drama into the format. America is especially adept at making road pictures, not only because of the grand canvas that is the national geography, but because of our total immersion in car culture. Here's five of our favorites.

DETOUR (1945)

Film noir, despite its association with the urban environment, was never afraid to take its show on the road as long as there was a nice juicy crime at the center of the story, and Detour serves up a doozy. A grade-z Poverty Row picture made for the cost of Clark Gable's lunch, Detour nonetheless proved to be one of the most effective noir films of its day, thanks to its relentless, grubby energy. Tom Neal, who starts the picture looking like he's had his insides scooped out and just gets worse from there, plays a sad-sack piano player who just wants to get to the west coast so he can be united with his former flame. But along the way he gets framed for murder after running afoul of Ann Savage in one of the most terrifying femme fatale roles of all time. A terrific, unsparingly bleak little film that proves a little can go a long way.

ROAD TO UTOPIA (1946)

The term "road picture" was more or less invented to describe the handful of movies made in the 1940s to showcase the comedic talents of the Bob Hope/Bing Crosby team. The movies, which always featured the boys making an arduous comic trek to some picaresque location, were of varied quality, but were alway huge moneymakers. The last of these was the best; it featured Hope and Crosby (accompanied, as always, by Dorothy Lamour) as turn-of-the-century con artists heading to Alaska to strike gold. That was just the set-up, though, for one of the most anarchic comedies of the decade; scanning more like a Marx Brothers movie, Road to Utopia featured in-jokes, metahumor, wordplay, surreal gags, and even some inexplicable albeit hilarious voice-overs by master humorist Robert Benchley.

TWO LANE BLACKTOP (1971)

A beloved film among your loyal Screengrab scribes, Monte Hellman's throat-clutching existential race movie Two Lane Blacktop opened to great praise and almost as quickly faded out of existence. It's not hard to see why: for all its greatness, it's a remarkably strange little flick, curiously aimless despite its implacable velocity, with characters who are little more than cyphers, as much as they intrigue us. Two of its 'stars', James Taylor and Dennis Wilson, basically never acted again, and Warren Oates turns in a performance -- as the impenetrable, self-inventing G.T.O., named after his car -- that's bizarre even weighed against his filmography. Still, it's probably the pinnacle of the road movie as metaphor for existence, and once seen, it's never forgotten. A real underground classic that's finally gotten its due.

NATIONAL LAMPOON'S VACATION (1983)

Nowadays, the presence of the National Lampoon imprint is practically a guarantee that a movie is going to be a colossal pile of shit. There are those of us old enough to remember how lucky we were back in the days when only the next installment of the venerable National Lampoon's Vacation franchise was going to be a piece of shit, but even for us old cranks, it does us good to remember that the original was actually a pretty solid ensemble comedy. Directed by a still-fresh Harold Ramis, written by John Hughes (who adapted his own story, with surprisingly few changes, from the old NatLamp magazine), and starring Chevy Chase when "starring Chevy Chase" was a preferable alternative to suicide, Vacation has held up surprisingly well, both on its own merits and as, essentially, the blueprint for every road comedy since.

BROKEN FLOWERS (2005)

Even for fans of Jim Jarmusch -- a group of which I am a proud member -- there was a lot not to like about Broken Flowers. Though the music, by Ethiopian jazzman Mulatu Astaque, was fantastic, it felt like it was driving the aimless plot, and the hip-music-plays-as-America-flashes-on-the-windshield device was getting a bit tired. Bill Murray's aging sad sack character was becoming less of a revelation and more of a routine. The incomprehensible ethnic as source of boundless wisdom device was wearing thin. All in all, parts of Broken Flowers played like a pardoy of Jarmusch rather than the real thing. But the parts that worked, including some stunning acting by the movie's female leads and the whole road-trip-to-nowhere angle which Jarmusch has done so well before, remind you why you put up with the parts that don't.

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