The Screengrab : richard gere

DVD Digest for March 10, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 14:00:00 GMT

This week, a handful of the most acclaimed films of 2008, and an animated classic gets released from the Disney vaults again.

This week’s selection of recent releases coming to DVD includes some of 2008’s best-reviewed films, including Sean Penn giving an Oscar-winning performance in Gus Van Sant’s Milk (Universal, also Blu-Ray), Anne Hathaway in Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married (Sony, also Blu-Ray), Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York (Sony, also Blu-Ray) [the best film of the year, says I], Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky (Disney), and the Swedish vampire chiller Let the Right One In (Magnolia). Also this week, Jason Statham in Transporter 3 (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray), the real-life blues story Cadillac Records (Sony, also Blu-Ray), Paul Rudd and Seann William Scott in Role Models (Universal, also Blu-Ray), Charlize Theron in the WTO-centric ensemble piece Battle in Seattle (Universal, also Blu-Ray), and finally, one of the worst-received films of 2008, Mark Herman’s Holocaust-themed family movie The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (Disney).

The big news in classic releases this week is the 70th Anniversary “Platinum Edition” of one of Disney’s greatest animated classics, Pinocchio. Also coming to Blu-Ray, the new DVD includes new commentary from Leonard Maltin and others, some newly-unearthed deleted scenes and storyboards, and a bunch of new features for kids and animation buffs alike. Also this week: Richard Gere and Edward Norton in Primal Fear Special Edition (Paramount, also Blu-Ray), and perhaps the least likely “classic” I’ve spotlighted to date, Howard the Duck Special Edition (Universal).

In TV on DVD news, this week brings South Park Season 12 (Paramount, also Blu-Ray) and The Starter Wife Season 1 (Universal).

Finally, the biggest Blu-Ray only release this week is Batman: The Motion Picture Anthology 1989-1997 (Warner), which is great news if you don’t mind paying for two DVDs you’ll probably never watch just so you get DVDs of the Burton Batman movies. Also, where’s Mask of the Phantasm?

Up The Academy: Screengrab Salutes The All-Time Best & Worst Best Picture Winners (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 21:30:00 GMT

THE WORST:

CRASH (2004)

I didn’t actively hate Crash when I first saw it. Paul Haggis’ schematic, artificial examination of race relations in Los Angeles was a pleasant enough way to pass an evening: I enjoyed watching Sandra Bullock play against type as a sour yuppie, and the vignette with Michael Peña and his daughter was sweet (in a Six Feet Under subplot kind of way). But the whole storyline with Matt Dillon’s Racist Cop® was nothing more than Haggis the mainstream milquetoast trying way too hard to provoke, like a suburban teen buying a Slipknot hoodie at Hot Topic with his mom’s credit card and then wearing it to church. The really annoying thing about Crash, though, was the way it allowed Academy voters (after pretty much ignoring films like Hoop Dreams and Malcolm X) to pat themselves on the back for their willingness to confront “the race issue” by rewarding Haggis’ toothless paper tiger of a film while simultaneously snubbing the superior (and timely) “gay cowboy” movie that apparently made them feel icky and uncomfortable.

BEN-HUR (1959)

If David Lean is the best-case scenario for a filmmaker who can hit Oscar's Pavlovian reflexes with deadly aim and still produce something worthwhile, Ben-Hur is pretty much the silliest, most bloated example of "epic" filmmaking there is. As it happens, Ben-Hur is a "milestone" in "Oscar history" because it's one of only three movies to win 11 Oscars; the other two are Titanic and Lord Of The Rings: The Film That Never Ends, which pretty much proves that running way over three hours (and the usual budget) are non-negotiable prereqs. Have you watched all of Ben-Hur lately? It's leaden, endless gay camp (Gore Vidal did it on purpose, but it's still not very funny). The chariot race is great, only because William Wyler ceded directorial duties to Western cowboy-stunt specialist Yakima Canutt, who thankfully had zero interest in propriety or "good" directorial values. On the plus side, this makes Spartacus look faultless.

TOM JONES (1963)

With the tail-end exception of 1969's Midnight Cowboy and this film, the Academy did its darndest to ignore changing cinematic mores in the '60s. So: Tom Jones. Henry Fielding's comic genius is boiled down into a series of too-cute reflexive, winking gestures in a long, overcooked souffle. No surprise: Tom Jones was adapted by John Osborne — the angry young man par excellence, so humorless he was buried with a copy of Hamlet in his pocket, with everyone but Hamlet's lines crossed-out — and clunkily directed (per his usual "form") by Tony Richardson. Together, they water down Godardian gestures for farce, toying with every possible distancing device (it's a silent movie! It's an undercranked Keystone Kops moment!) without any real effect or exuberance. Rarely has jollity seemed this excruciating.

THE STING (1973)

Like Tom Jones, The Sting is another would-be light entertainment that's actually incredibly boring and way too long; the highlight is when Paul Newman says "crap." The best part is the old-school Universal logo at the start, and that's over in thirteen seconds, embedded above for your viewing pleasure. Seriously, why do people like this movie? You can listen to Scott Joplin on your own time and there are many much better Redford and Newman charm vehicles (separately, anyway). One side note: somehow, in 1973, Cries And Whispers was also nominated for Best Picture. Really?

CHICAGO (2002)

Chicago isn't the worst musical of the decade (Moulin Rouge! is hard to beat), but it is kind of magnificently dull. Hollywood always loves a good circle-jerk, and this thinly-veiled "condemnation" (read: winking celebration) of celebrity and the glamor of wrong-doing obliges. Criminal justice is like showbiz, because obviously everything is like showbiz, because everything is like Hollywood. The single most memorable moment in the entire movie isn't any of the murder/juicy stuff; it's Richard Gere dancing in his underwear. Rob Marshall's direction is impressively unimaginative — something most people finally caught onto with Memoirs of a Geisha — and let's not even get into what a disservice this does to the memory of the late, great Bob Fosse: he of the original choreography, he who didn't wait for someone to call him a bastard but interrogated himself for real with All That Jazz. Fosse played for keeps, for better or worse; Chicago plays for winks.

Click Here For Part One, Three, Four, Five, Six & Seven

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Vadim Rizov

Bloody Valentines: The Worst Relationships In Cinema History (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 22:00:00 GMT

OLIVER & BARBARA ROSE, THE WAR OF THE ROSES (1989)

Danny DeVito’s black-heart Valentine may not be a great movie, but it’s still a pretty good one, a neat little primer of stereotypes (and uncomfortable truths) of sexual politics in the late 20th century (as well as an emetic corrective to the Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan oeuvre of junk food Hollywood romance. In the midst of a contentious turf battle with his soon to be ex-wife, DeVito’s character warns his client, Oliver, that when it comes to divorce, “There is no winning! Only degrees of losing!” Naturally, Oliver doesn’t listen: not only is he arrogant and stubborn, but he’s also played by Michael Douglas, and so our sympathies at first are with his long-suffering spouse, Barbara (Kathleen Turner)...that is, until we realize Barbara is just as hateful in her cold, ruthless femininity as Oliver is in his chauvinist manhood. And so the couple’s mutual hostility escalates into an archetypal battle of the sexes where both sides are right and both sides are wrong: Barbara can’t stand her corporate asshole of a husband, yet feels entitled to the lavish house she transformed into a home with his corporate asshole money, prompting Oliver’s angry reminder, “It’s a lot easier to spend it than it is to make it, honeybun!” On the flip side of the gender equation, Oliver treats his wife like shit, yet naively expects her to keep providing love and validation (or, in Barbara’s words, “You expect me to keep reassuring you sexually even now when we disgust each other?”), leading to a grim moment of Pyrrhic victory in the movie’s final minutes that speaks volumes about the real balance of power in most American marriages.

BILL & ABBY & THE FARMER, DAYS OF HEAVEN (1978)

It’s a story as old as the Bible. Lovers on the run pretend to be siblings while in a land strange to them. She is beautiful, and the local patriarch is interested in her. She marries the guy -- what choice does she have? -- and here’s where the stories diverge. In one, her god is displeased and smites the land with a plague. In another, her god reveals the truth to her false husband in a dream, and he makes amends with extravagant gifts, even though he was the one deceived. In the last, her false husband catches her cavorting with her lover, and figures it all out. All three come to pass in Days of Heaven. Bill (Richard Gere) and Abby (Brooke Adams) are on the run after he’s killed his boss in a fight. They arrive in the extraordinarily lush and beautiful Texas fields (so lush, in fact, that they’re actually in Canada, not Texas) of The Farmer (Sam Shepard), where they pretend to be siblings so that no one will connect them with the murder back in Chicago. They put in a season’s worth of work, and the Farmer, smitten with Abby, asks her to stay. Bill encourages her to marry him because the Farmer is ill, and Bill can see salad days before them. She does indeed marry the Farmer, but not long after, the Farmer figures out the score between them. He gives Bill money to leave. While Bill’s gone, those plan falls apart: not only does the Farmer thrive, but Abby begins to love him. Abby is surprisingly passive throughout the movie. Maybe not too surprising, given that the story takes place in 1916, when Victorian morality still ran rampant through this country. But all she does is love. First Bill, then the Farmer. And from her innocent love will come only plague and death. After all, this isn't the Bible; it's Texas.

THE MONSTER & THE MONSTER’S MATE, BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935)

It’s said by some that the closest, most loving couples act like they were made for each other. James Whale’s early horror classic proves how awful that can be in practice – at least when it’s taken literally. Of course, it’s a pretty fine distinction whether or not a married couple is better off when only one partner is made out of the stitched-together and reanimated hunks of deceased criminals or just one of them is; on the one hand, it’s good for a long-term couple to share the same interests, but on the other hand, there is such a thing as spending too much time together. In the sequel to Frankenstein, the creature makes a shocking return, and doesn’t have to bend Dr. Frankenstein and the overeager Dr. Pretorius’ arms too hard to get them to head into the lab and create for him a mate, in the form of the breathtaking Elsa Lanchester. Unfortunately, the Bride doesn’t quite react as well to her post-corpse existence as does the Modern Prometheus, and she’s even less pleased at the matchmaking that’s taken place without her consent. Her eerie, spastic behavior makes it clear to the Monster that wedded bliss is a remote possibility, and since there’s no divorce court for inhuman monsters (at least ones not rich enough to hire Raoul Felder), he decides to return to the sweet embrace of death, muttering a line that anticipates Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?: “We belong dead.”

CHARLIE PARTANNA & IRENE WALKER, PRIZZI’S HONOR (1985)

“Do I ice her? Do I marry her? Which of these things?” Jack Nicholson’s mafia hitman, Charlie Partanna, asks a question most potential bridegrooms never get around to asking themselves in this underrated John Huston black comedy about the dangers of mixing business with pleasure. In Prizzi’s Honor, Nicholson plays a high-ranking mob killer who meets the lovely Irene Walker (played by Kathleen Turner, who, as one of the modern era’s great femmes fatale, has played the distaff side of many great bloody screen couples), and, upon pursuing her, discovers that they share an uncommon occupation. Naturally it’s good to have things in common, as the calculating Maerose Prizzi (played to perfection by Anjelica Huston) points out while encouraging Charlie to wed Irene, but the perils of a couple working together are well-known to relationship counselors, and it’s particularly exacerbated when the work they do involves murdering people for profit. It’s no surprise that the movie sets up an eventual, and fatal, confrontation between the two killers, but how it arrives at that inexorable conclusion is a surprise and a delight for most of its running time, especially as Nicholson’s sometimes-befuddled traditionalist and Turner’s gregarious maverick play off one another.

BART TARE & ANNIE LAURIE STARR, GUN CRAZY (1950)

It’s a cliché that a gun is a phallic stand-in for some people, but few movies make that association more explicit – especially given the cinematic restrictions of the time – than Joseph H. Lewis’ terrific overheated noir thriller Gun Crazy. Tightly-wound, desperately alone John Dall as Bart Tare has only ever loved one thing: shooting. That all changes when he runs into trick shooter Annie Laurie Starr (a gorgeously ruined Peggy Cummins) at a touring carnival; after a notoriously sexy scene that sublimates carnal desire into gun-love in ways that Wayne LaPierre could only dream of, they’re hooked into each other for life. But while Bart only wants the love of the only woman who could ever outgun him, Annie, one of noir’s slickest femmes fatale, wants the good life, and she isn’t going to let anything, not even Bart’s reluctance to commit crimes, stand in her way. She’s been beaten down bad by life, and the way she figures it, it’s about time for life to get a taste of its own medicine. All noir films are saturated with a sense of doom, but Gun Crazy’s is downright oppressive, as Bart reluctantly embarks on a life of crime knowing he’s helpless in the face of his love for Annie. But while his course is set, his eyes are wide open, and there’s a terrifically revelatory scene after their last big caper ends up bloodier than anticipated: “Two people dead,” he spits at her, “just so we can live without working!” It’s too late, though, always too late, and in the end, Bart and Laurie, who go together like guns and ammunition, end up the only way they could, like cold spent shells on the ground.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Four, Five, Six & Seven

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Hayden Childs, Leonard Pierce

DVD Digest for February 10, 2009

Paul Clark — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 15:00:00 GMT

With St. Valentine’s Day less than a week away, you’d think studios would start rolling out some of their romantic classics on DVD. But I’m seeing very little of that this week, unless of course your idea of romance is vastly different than mine…

DVDs of the Week: But then, for me, nothing says romance like a pair of movies from surrealist master Luis Bunuel. This week brings two of his favorites, The Exterminating Angel and Simon of the Desert, courtesy of the folks at Criterion. The Exterminating Angel is the known quantity for me, a wicked satire of bourgeois manners, in which a group of upper-crusters finds itself unable to leave following a dinner party, which brings them no end of trouble. Simon, Bunuel’s telling of the story of an ascetic who stood atop a remote pillar to prove his love for God, is one I’ve yet to see (do I smell a future Reviews By Request?), but its DVD release is no less noteworthy. The films, made during Bunuel’s sojourn in Mexico, have been given the deluxe Criterion treatment, with new transfers, documentaries, new interviews with actress Sylvia Pinal and others, and more.

Other noteworthy this week is Janus’ Essential Art House: Volume 2, which includes The 400 Blows, Black Orpheus, Pygmalion, La Strada, Ikiru, and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp in single-disc editions, also available separately. In addition, Lionsgate is releasing new editions of the Wallace and Gromit short films, A Close Shave, A Grand Day Out and The Wrong Trousers. Finally- and I can’t in good conscience call this a classic, though it’s not new- Universal’s got the “Extreme Edition” of the final film from the great Raul Julia, Street Fighter (also Blu-Ray). So if you enjoy things that suck, set aside money for that one.

If newer movies are more your speed, this week’s recent releases coming to DVD include: Courtney Hunt’s double Oscar nominee Frozen River (Sony, also Blu-Ray); Kevin Smith’s Zack and Miri Make a Porno (Genius Products; Samuel L. Jackson and the late Bernie Mac in Soul Men (Genius Products); Richard Gere and Diane Lane in Nights in Rodanthe (Warner, also Blu-Ray); and a pair of very different showbiz satires, Barry Levinson’s What Just Happened? (Magnolia), and Bruce Campbell directing Bruce Campbell in My Name Is Bruce (Image, also Blu-Ray). Also this week, a quartet of curious films from fascinating filmmakers: Oliver Stone’s W. (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray); Spike Lee’s WW2 drama Miracle at St. Anna (Buena Vista, also Blu-Ray); Fernando Meirelles’ Blindness (Buena Vista); and Eric Rohmer’s The Romance of Astrea and Celadon (E1 Entertainment Distribution), allegedly the master’s final film. Oddly enough, the Rohmer looks to be the most romantic movie in this week’s column. Don’t know if your Dirty Dancing-loving special lady would go for it though…

Finally, a pretty action-packed and bloody lineup of Blu-Ray only releases this week: Martin Scorsese’s classic Raging Bull (MGM); David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence (Warner); a pair of John Grisham adaptations, A Time to Kill and The Pelican Brief (both Warner); a double feature starring The Rock, Doom (Universal) and The Rundown (Universal); and two of Onion AV Club critic Scott Tobias’ New Cult Canon picks, Donnie Darko (Fox) and The Boondock Saints (Fox). Also, Milos Forman’s Amadeus: The Director’s Cut (Warner) and the table-tennis comedy Ping Pong Playa (Image).

Oh, and Pretty Woman (Disney).

Jailhouse Rock: The Greatest Prison Films of All Time (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 21:45:00 GMT

CHICAGO (2002)

Hot chicks behind bars? Check. A large, in-charge corrupt female warden? Check. Mean girl sparring between the new fish and the reigning cell block queen? Check. Nude lesbian shower orgies and bloody riot scenes? Sorry...Rob Marshall’s Oscar-winning adaptation of the toe-tappingly cynical 1975 Kander/Webb/Fosse musical adaptation of crime reporter Maurine Dallas Watkins’ 1926 play about celebrity criminals ain’t that kind of Women-In-Prison film. Helping to restore America’s faith in the potential entertainment value of movie musicals a year after Baz Luhrmann did his level best to destroy the genre with the Excedrin-headache known as Moulin Rouge, Chicago served up catchy tunes and light satire grounded by (relatively) gritty scenes of the “real-world” Murderess Row underpinning the fantasized production numbers. For all the literal and figurative song-and-dance surrounding the press and public’s fascination with lethal jazz babies Velma (Catherine Zeta-Jones) and Roxie (Reneé Zellweger), there’s also the other side of the coin: the grim fate of a Hungarian inmate who, unlike her media-savvy cellmates, is probably innocent but gets the noose rather than justice because she can’t speak English and doesn’t know how to game the system for her own benefit. But that’s about as serious as things get: those who prefer more harrowing musical depictions of doomed immigrant ladies destroyed by American xenophobia are welcome to seek out Dancer In The Dark, the entertainment equivalent of a swift hard kick in the crotch you’re not entirely sure you deserved. The rest of Chicago, meanwhile, is a feel-good romp about getting away with murder featuring Zeta-Jones at the top of her game, an unusually tolerable performances by Zellweger (in a role Divine would have really knocked out of the park) and a surprisingly unembarrassing performance by Richard Gere (although as fellow Screengrabber Scott Von Doviak correctly noted at the time, Christopher Walken in the razzle-dazzle role would have been godhead).

ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981)

Look, we’re not going lie to you: a lot of what’s awesome about John Carpenter’s Escape from New York is Snake Plissken. Kurt Russell’s one-eyed bank-robber antihero is badass enough to have earned the guy a generation of goodwill despite a subsequent decade filled with Captain Rons and Tango & Cashes. A lot more of what’s awesome about it is the dynamite supporting cast, which includes Lee Van Cleef, Harry Dean Stanton, a tasty Adrienne Barbeau, Donald Pleasance as a Fightin’ President, Screengrab fave/That Guy! emeritus Tom Atkins, and Isaac Hayes in a role so tough he almost out-bad-dudes Snake Plissken. But leaving all that aside, Escape from New York twists conventions all over the place: the bad boy reprobate is trying to break into prison, not get out of it, and New York, rather than being the destination everyone’s trying to reach and the place people only leave because they’re about to hit 40 and they can’t stand living with a roommate in Crown Heights anymore, is a maximum security prison where futuristic America dumps its biggest scumbags. (Insert predictable ‘Oh, the wacky world of science fiction, where New York is filled with criminal scum! Ha ha!’ joke here). Much as he did in Escape from Precinct 13, Carpenter takes genre conventions and flips them on their ears, with highly entertaining results.

STALAG 17 (1953)

Billy Wilder’s films are so essential and influential and beloved that it’s hard to pull back and talk about how weird and unsettling and even unpleasant they are. But they are indeed weird, unsettling, and often unpleasant. For one thing, there’s so much fakery that it’s up for grabs what Wilder was trying to elicit from his audience. In Billy Wilder’s eyes, life is about deception. Many -- if not most -- of his main characters are phonies. The cynics are all romantics. The romantics are all cynics. Sometimes they’re deluding themselves, sometimes the rest of the world. His movies also lather on a thick corn hash. That’s not too unusual for a Hollywood director of his era. John Ford and Howard Hawks were both certainly guilty of overcooking the corn. In Wilder’s movies, sometimes the corn is funny and sometimes it seems pointless. It’s all part of the artifice of his movies, the occasionally clumsy sleight-of-hand that he works with to try to distract you from the horror and mess his characters are making of their lives with all their deception. This artifice is occasionally too much for Wilder’s movies, and a few stories that should work (like Ace In The Hole, for instance, or The Apartment) try to hang too much suffering on a premise too phony and characters too empty. However, Stalag 17 goes the other way. It's a good Wilder movie. It did, however, open the door for Hogan’s Heroes, a bad tv show (don’t try to justify your nostalgia to me; it may be iconic but that doesn’t mean it’s good). It also laid the groundwork for the Roberto Benigni atrocity Life Is Beautiful, and a handful of other movies leaping to your mind about the goofy fun time people had in Nazi prison camps. Not that movies about Nazi prisons have to be grim, but c’mon, those flicks have no goddamn perspective. Anyway, the comic relief is far too broad for the movie, the story is pitched somewhere between too cynical and too maudlin, the characters are a little slow on the uptake, and damn if I know how it all works, but Stalag 17 somehow makes sense.

A MAN ESCAPED (1957)

The title suggests a conclusion foregone, but Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped is unconcerned with the conclusion. What’s important is the suffocating tight focus on Lt. Fontaine, our captured protagonist, his wide eyes full of twitchy wildness like cornered game, as he goes about the nuts-and-bolts of dismantling the prison about him. The movie opens with a close-up on his hand, testing a car door lever. In a minute, he will leap from the car and be immediately recaptured. But for the first couple of minutes, Bresson’s camera watches him as he holds his breath, waiting for just the right moment. Some men may give up when caught, but this one was built for escape. You will learn soon enough that he is a member of the French Resistance who is headed for detainment in a Nazi jail. He tells his story mostly in short, clipped voiceovers, as few people speak to him or give him a reason to speak during his confinement. But speech is unimportant. His mind is constantly at work planning his escape. Bresson’s taut and economical film lays bare the mechanics of a prison break, provided, of course, that the prison is built and staffed exactly like the one in the movie.

DEATH AND THE MAIDEN (1994)

The only prison in Roman Polanski’s film of Ariel Dorfman’s play Death and the Maiden is in the past. Sigourney Weaver plays Paulina, a former political prisoner scarred by her rape and torture while imprisoned. Her husband Gerardo (Stuart Wilson) owes her everything. One night -- the only night in this movie, really -- his car breaks down and he catches a ride from Dr. Miranda (Ben Kingsley), who leaves and later returns when he realizes that he accidentally kept Gerardo’s spare tire. The two men have a drink. Meanwhile, Paulina has apparently flipped. She steals Miranda’s car and destroys it, then returns home and begins to torture the man, claiming he did terrible things to her in the past. Her husband is understandably confused. Miranda seemed okay to him. And he knows that Paulina never saw her tormenter while in prison. How can she be sure? Three characters, one night, and a lifetime of human suffering.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Hayden Childs

DVD Digest for January 20, 2009

Paul Clark — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 15:00:00 GMT

With the recent deep freeze that has stricken much of the country, now’s the perfect time to curl up in front of the television and watch a DVD. And don’t think the studios don’t know it.

DVD of the Week: The cream of this week’s DVD releases looks to be the snazzy new Criterion edition of Gregory Nava’s breakthrough film El Norte. This lovely mini-epic about a pair of Guatemalan refugees venturing north to America, Nava’s film told a too-common story that hadn’t been successfully dramatized in movies before. Shooting the film largely on the fly, Nava and his wife/collaborator Anna Thomas helped to kick-start the American independent film movement by redefining the sorts of movies could be made with limited means. Both the standard edition and the Blu-Ray edition include a new commentary track by Nava, interviews with Nava, Thomas, and the film’s principal actors, Nava’s 1972 student film The Journal of Diego Rodriguez Silva, and more. At a time when “Sundance movies” have practically become a formula unto themselves, El Norte is a reminder that independent film can be more than just a cliché.

Also this week in classics is Criterion’s standard-format edition of Douglas Sirk’s Magnificent Obsession, which also includes a remastered version of the 1935 John M. Stahl original. Or if you like your weepies more contemporary, there’s always The Notebook Limited Edition Gift Set (Warner, also Blu-Ray).

This week’s slate of recent releases coming to DVD is headlined Saw V (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray), the latest entry in a series that will surely continue as long as there are people willing to come up with convoluted ways to kill off characters. Also this week: Mark Wahlberg in the video game adaptation Max Payne (Fox, also Blu-Ray), the story of Heisman winner Ernie Davis in The Express (Universal, also Blu-Ray), the family films Igor (MGM, also Blu-Ray) and City of Ember (Fox), Jonathan Rhys-Meyers in the “a white man shall free them” drama The Children of Huang Shi (Sony), the cult-ready musical gorefest Repo!: The Genetic Opera (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray), and the direct-to-DVD horror movie Amusement (Warner, also Blu-Ray).

In TV on DVD, this week brings The Rockford Files Season 6 (Universal), Emergency! Season 5 (Universal), and Moonlight: The Complete Series (Warner).

Finally, this week’s Blu-Ray only titles is highlighted by the enduring classic This Is Spinal Tap (MGM), in an edition that boasts all of the extras from MGM’s standard-format edition. Also this week: Jennifer Garner in 13 Going on 30 (Sony), Denzel Washington’s Antwone Fisher (Fox), Tony Scott’s Domino (Warner) (for my money, the most underappreciated movie of the decade so far), Alexander Payne’s Election (Paramount), Steve Martin making an ass of himself in The Pink Panther (Sony), and Richard Gere and Diane Lane in Unfaithful (Fox).

Sundance Roundup: Day Three

Scott Von Doviak — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 19:15:00 GMT

Spike Lee makes his first trip to Sundance this year with Passing Strange, his filmed record of the Broadway hit. But we don't care about that. Today it's all about the hat. This tragic, tragic hat. Where to start? The white-on-white Yankees logo? The ring of white fur that doesn't appear to have any actual warming value? Come on, Spike, even A-Rod wouldn't be caught dead in that thing. "“I’m not taking a poll,” he told the New York Times. “I’m just trying to stay warm.” Try harder.

The first major deal of the festival has been sealed. "Antoine Fuqua’s Brooklyn’s Finest closed a deal on Saturday night at the Sundance Film Festival, with North American rights going to Senator Distribution, Inc," Indiewire reports. "Buzz began building around the film after Friday night’s world premiere at the Eccles Theater in Park City. The story of 'cops and crooks' (ala Training Day), Finest stars Richard Gere, Don Cheadle, Ethan Hawke, Wesley Snipes and Ellen Barkin." Movie City News expresses some surprise at the deal, " given the reportedly hostile reception it received at the film’s premiere, especially to an ending that shocked and angered many." Not to worry, though! The distributor assures us the ending will be cut.

Last week I picked Spread, the Ashton Kutcher gigolo movie, as one of five movies to skip, but if Salon's Andrew O'Hehir is to be believed, I am no Nostradamus. "This guilty pleasure premiered to a packed house on Saturday night and was pretty much a smash...Kutcher turns out to have terrific acting chops well beyond the doofus self-mockery of his TV-host and pitchman personas." Well, I'll say this for Kutcher: I don't think even he would be caught dead in Spike Lee's hat.

Trailer Review: Nights in Rodanthe

Paul Clark — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Sometimes in my capacity as Screengrab’s resident trailer watcher, I’m faced with movies that just weren’t made for me, like chintzy-looking family movies or the latest installment in the deathless High School Musical franchise. And while I’m often game for a really good romantic melodrama, film adaptations of the novels of Nicholas Sparks just aren’t my thing. And I’ve got to say, Nights in Rodanthe looks like more of the same- picturesque locations, an idealized courtship between two attractive stars, and plenty of greeting-card-worthy sentiment. But while I have no interest in the movie, I nonetheless have to find a way to sit through a 2 ½-minute trailer without nodding off. So I glom onto the re-teaming of Diane Lane and Richard Gere and imagine Nights in Rodanthe as a prequel to Unfaithful, in which we witness the wellspring of the marriage that would end up with Lane cheating on Gere with super-hunky French bookseller Olivier Martinez. I highly doubt this was the intention of the filmmakers, but if you’re one of the people who isn’t on this movie’s wavelength, thinking about it this way will certainly make the trailer more interesting. It certainly did for me.

The Top Ten Great Scenes From Not So Great Movies (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 20:30:00 GMT

The watch scene from THE COTTON CLUB (1984)

Francis Coppola spent the first half of the 1980s despoiling his reputation and laying waste to his bank account by turning out a string of movies that concentrated on technological wizardy and hollow flash to such a degree that involving the audience in what was supposed to be going on became a moot point. Reduced to working as a gun for hire, he signed on to direct this elephantine period musical about the legendary Harlem night spot, and made all the same mistakes that he'd made with his own labor-of-love fiascoes. He and his screenwriting partner, William Kennedy, were not helped by their producers, who signed Richard Gere to star in the movie, and accepted his demand that he get to play a cornet player, before a script had been written. (This meant that Coppola and Kennedy had to vamp their asses off to come up with a story that would be set at a jazz club which only employed black musicians yet had a white musician at its center.) The best scene in the movie is a throwaway moment between the Cotton Club's gangster owner, Owney Madden, and his baleful partner, Frenchy Demange, played by Bob Hoskins and Fred Gwynne, who were not considered to be among the most glittering members of the movie's crowded cast. (At the time, Hoskins was largely unknown in America, and Gwynne, at 58, was just beginning to crawl out from under the shadow of Herman Munster, a role that had left him badly typecast for twenty years.) Frenchy has just been released from the clutches of a sociopathic thug (Nicolas Cage) who kidnapped him for ransom; Owney is reluctant to let Frenchy know how worried he's been for him, and Frenchy is pissed off because he's heard, falsely, thay Owney tried to bargain down the price of the ransom. Reunited, they use the ostensible subject of a busted watch as an excuse to dance around and finally reveal how much their friendship means to them. It's the only fully human scene in the movie, and not only does it not involve the leads, but Coppola and Kennedy didn't write it. Hoskins and Gwynne came up with it while hanging out together on the set, waiting for something to do.

The pie-eating scene from STAND BY ME (1986)

I know that a great many people have tender feelings for this gentle look at the bond between little boys -- or, to put it the way the grown narrator (Richard Dreyfuss) puts it at the very end, "I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?" I guess that's sort of true: later on, I was never so hard up for someone to hang out with that I was willing to tolerate having friends who ate worms. The fact is that some of us would rather not even have to think about the possibility that Stephen King has a soft, sensitive side (and that goes triple for Meathead). However, there is one scene that fully lives up to what some of us might have hoped for in a collaboration between the author of Carrie and the director of This Is Spinal Tap. It's the scene where the kid who likes to tell stories (and who's going to grow up to be Richard Dreyfuss, i.e. Stephen King) gathers his mates together and enthralls them with the tale of Lardass, the fat kid who rewards the people of his town for their years of abuse with a little plan involving a pie-eating contest and a dose of castor oil. I never heard any gross-out stories that could top the ones invented by twelve-year-old boys who were secretly a lot less sensitive than they wanted to believe. Jesus, does anybody?

Darth Maul, Sebulba & The Pod Race from THE PHANTOM MENACE (1999)

After the pure, cinematic orgasm of Star Wars blew my pre-pubescent mind beyond any hope of repair, even The Empire Strikes Back was something of a let-down (although watching the teaser trailer for the sequel during one of the theatrical re-releases of the original may stand as the most exciting two minutes of my entire movie-going life). In retrospect, it was pretty obvious that seeing The Phantom Menace as a grown-ass man (especially after HOURS in line waiting for a seat at the Mann’s Chinese screening in Hollywood on opening night) would never come anywhere close to replicating the experience of watching the original trilogy at more or less exactly the right age. But from the dense trade federation blather and Sesame Street robots of the film's opening minutes through all the disheartening talk of mitochlorians and CGI miasma of its overlong running time, Phantom Menace barely even achieved the all-important Star Wars “feel” until Darth Maul unfurled that wicked pissa double-sided light saber and Sebulba hopped into his souped-up muscle car for the big Pod Race midway through the movie. Here, at last, were some worthy additions to that far, far away galaxy I'd known and loved, swaggering, mysterious and truly alien figures who (like Jango and Li’l Boba Fett in Attack of the Clones, General Grievous in Revenge of the Sith and Ian McDiarmid’s series-spanning, scenery-chewing evil Emperor) were far more compelling than whatever nonsense was going on with Jar-Jar Binks and the rest of the so-called “main” characters over in the boring “A” story. And the Ben-Hur pod-race sequence (despite the hokey, sub-Spaceballs intrusion of those “wacky” sports announcers and the fact that Sebulba wuz robbed) was such a breathless, seemingly effortless mini-masterpiece of lucid storytelling and high tech filmmaking that it gave me the smallest flicker of hope that Lucas wouldn’t blow the rest of the new trilogy as badly as he'd blown Episode One.

Click here for Part One & Part Three

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Andrew Osborne

Girl DisemPowering: Nine Films That Didn't Do Feminism Any Favors (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 20:30:00 GMT

And now that we’re all feeling nice and empowered from our Top Ten List of films with strong female characters and themes, here’s the other side of the coin: nine movies we’re guessing you won’t find on Gloria Steinem’s Netflix queue (unless she’s researching a new book on movies that didn’t exactly do wonders for the feminist movement).

(Oh, and while we're on the subject, a special P.S. to Katherine Heigl: Really? Knocked Up is more sexist than 27 Dresses? That's a fascinating theory. Please, tell me more!)

PRETTY WOMAN (1990)

Although she later improved her girl power street credit with her Academy Award-winning turn as an indomitable single mother in Erin Brockovich, Julia Roberts’ breakthrough role was about as healthy (and irresistible) as a deep fried bacon Twinkie for the mobs of women (and men) who made it a blockbuster hit. I mean, I’m a dude and I certainly have my issues with some of the more strident tenets of feminism, but even I was offended by the film’s basic premise about the whore-with-the-heart-of-gold who charms a rich Prince Charming with her sparkling personality (and fellatio skills) to the point where he decides to keep her for himself, making her dreams come true by paying for all the overpriced jewels and fashion she could possibly want. Oh, and he goes down on her on a Steinway...the movie’s one true nod to progressive gender relations. This movie is offensive on so many levels, it’s hard to know where to begin. The blatant portrayal of women as whores who only get what they want by attracting successful men? The offensiveness of Jason Alexander’s loathsome chauvinist pig character, a personification of the film’s equal opportunity anti-male stereotyping (unattractive men are icky slobs and probably rapists, whereas good looking men are more trustworthy and morally superior)? The ridiculous depiction of prostitution as an Outward Bound-style empowerment program (complete with Laura San Giacomo’s mother hen prostitute telling a fledgling whore at the end of the movie that she expects big things from her, y'know, on par with Roberts’ home run of man-bagging)? Oh, sure...it’s just a movie, and an insidiously charming one at that, and maybe I’m reading too much into it and getting all het up for no reason...yet, at the same time, it’s also worth noting that many of the girls who grew up watching Pretty Woman (not to mention the film’s original audience) now enjoy (and sometimes embody) the film’s sex-for-crass-materialism ethos in pervasive cultural incarnations from Paris Hilton and The Real World to just about every show on the E! network.

FATAL ATTRACTION (1987)

One of the most polarizing blockbuster hits of the '80s, Fatal Attraction presents us with Glenn Close as the image of the sexy, successful unmarried career woman and turns her into what the movie confidently assumes is every man's nightmare: the one night stand who won't go away. Seen alone in her apartment at night, she's not really confident at all: she's a lonely neurotic wreck -- this is what being without a family, or at least a man, presumably does to a woman, what all career women are really like underneath. Then, after the married guy (Michael Douglas) who thought they were both just having a little fling stops putting up with her, she turns into an avenging harpy, and in the process she says all the things that women who are sick of being badly used and treated as objects have said. They don't apply to the situation, and you may think the fact that she thinks they do shows how sick she is, but given that this is the era of Reagan, AIDS, the "new chastity" and the anti-feminist backlash, a lot of people in the audience thought the fact this fruitcake was saying them proved what she was saying must be crazy in any instance. The movie isn't exactly misogynist; its real cunning is the way it uses the recently politicized concept of "family" to justify its turning Close into a she-devil while advocating the use of violence or whatever else it takes to ward off attacks by outsiders who try to damage the holy unit of family. As everyone knows, the movie originally ended with Close committing suicide and framing Douglas for her murder, an ending that was actually more plausible in keeping with the character's psychology, and one that pissed off test audiences who were denied the revenge-killing catharsis they'd been made to expect. The movie was probably always fated to end with Close getting it, but the stroke of genius was in putting the gun in the hand of Douglas's wife (Anne Archer) and making it a battle between the good wife and the hussy, a choice that made some women in the audience cheer louder than the men. The family that slays together...

LEGAL EAGLES (1986)

Everything about this slapped-together, thoughtlessly conceived comedy-thriller, starring Robert Redford and Debra Winger as dueling lawyers and Darryl Hannah as a pair of frosted lips sitting atop mile-high legs, is a testament to the hackish instincts of the director, Ivan Reitman, and the screenwriting team, Jim Cash and Jack Epps, Jr. (whose other collaborations include Top Gun, The Secret of My Success, and Anaconda). It's the kind of movie that seems to have been made by people who were in a rush to get the shoot completed because they couldn't wait to show up at the red carpet premiere, the kind of movie where less important things like telling a story or entertaining an audience never crossed anyone's mind. About the only thing of note about it is the example it provides of just how much damage simple hackishness can do, because Legal Eagles also wasted the time and bent the brain of one of the white-hot talents of the '80s, Debra Winger, at just the point in her career where she was lined up on the runway and poised for full takeoff. Her role here -- a foil to Redford and, ultimately, a damsel in distress -- is so stupidly written that it's an insult, and she's the only person in the large, talented cast who still hadn't had the idealism beaten out of her to such a degree that she knew enough to just go through the motions and collect her check. You can see her trying to bring some kind of truth to what she's doing, and you can see how unhappy she is that she isn't succeeding, and her unhappiness is contagious. The movie is said to have done Winger extended career damage, partly because it soured her on the movie business but also because the industry was appalled that she was so impolite as to complain about the director in interviews. Anywhere but in Hollywood, expressing confidence in Ivan Reitman as a director would be grounds for having a judge take away your power of attorney.

FLASHDANCE (1983)

This MTV-styled sleazefest was bad for women, sweatshirts, steelworkers, strip clubs, movies, lobster dinners, pit bulls, warehouse lofts, Top 40 radio, and Jennifer Beals' dance double. (It was also a little rough on Maureen Marder, the real-life stripper-welder who "inspired" the screenplay outline, and who was persuaded to sign away the movie rights to her life story for a flat payment of $2300. After the movie grossed in excess of $150 million, Paramount, in an industry that routinely writes checks to squelch nuisance suits, actually let Marder drag them in front of a judge after she came around begging for more money, secure in the knowledge that the agreement would hold up in court. Then, in an amazing act of chutzpah, the movie studio actually sued over a Jennifer Lopez video that was painstakingly designed as a tribute to the movie. Not that people shouldn't be penalized somehow for paying tribute to Flashdance.) It makes all the horrible sense in the world that, for this "inspirational" story of a girl who doesn't give up her dream to dance, the director Adrian Lyne cast an unknown who couldn't dance (but who had the "look") and then tried to suppress the information that her dancing was performed by a double, Marine Jahan, whom he subsequently threatened to punish for daring to publicly take credit for her own work in the movie. (He may have been successful in this: Jahan only appeared in one other movie, 1984's Streets of Fire.) Given the flashy fast-cut style that Lyne developed (with his work in TV commercials before transposing it to movies), this could just as well have been the story of a carefully lit can of peas that never gave up its dream to be a zucchini. Not trying to give you any ideas, Adrian.

MONA LISA SMILE (2003)

The thing that makes Mona Lisa Smile – the story of a bohemian art history teacher who comes to shake things up at the hyper-conservative cartoon of an East Coast university in the stodgy 1950s – so incredibly frustrating, and qualifies it for inclusion in our list of movies that are particularly disempowering to women, is that it actually thinks it’s a feminist movie. Set at a version of Wellesley University so reactionary that the board of chancellors might as well have Snidely Whiplash mustaches, the movie asks us to believe that Julia Roberts’ character has come to show young women the possibility of more than just a perfunctory education to put some polish on their cocktail party chatter before settling down into marriage, but it subverts itself at every turn, to such a degree that it actually comes across as more sexist that the milieu it rails against. Roberts shows her students the liberation possible through art – but never manages to mention any female artists. Roberts teaches her young charges that there’s more to life than being someone’s wife – but all of the characters are essentially defined by their relationship to men. Roberts encourages her students not to let themselves be limited by the expectations of others – but Maggie Gyllenhaal’s character is clearly condemned in the movie for her loose sexual morals, and in one of the movie’s ugliest scenes, Julia Stiles’ character excoriates an ashamed Roberts for expecting her to choose a career over marriage. When it comes to defining women by their power and potential, Mona Lisa Smile is a path to hell that’s paved with good intentions.

Click here for Part Two of Girl DisemPowering

Click here for Part One and Part Two of Chick Hits: The Girl Power Top Ten

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

A Brief History of “Milk”

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 14:30:00 GMT

There have been some awkward moments lately for Craig Zadan and Neil Meron, who spent 16 years trying to bring an adaptation of Randy Shilts’ 1982 Harvey Milk biography The Mayor of Castro Street to the screen. There is indeed a Milk biopic set to hit theaters this fall, and Zadon and Meron “have fielded all sorts of congratulatory calls in recent months from people excited to hear that after years of struggle,” that film has finally been made.

But the problem is that film, directed by Gus Van Sant and starring Sean Penn, isn’t their film. According to the L.A. Times, “Zadan and Meron's project is dead in the water, beaten into production by the Van Sant film, which is due for release this fall from Focus Features. To add salt to the wound, several key people involved with Milk, including Van Sant, were once involved with Zadan and Meron's film.”

We’ve seen Hollywood release two near-simultaneous volcano movies and even two Truman Capote biopics within a few months of each other, but don’t count on history repeating in this case. Still, as Times writer Patrick Goldstein notes, “The movie may be dead, but it leaves a colorful corpse behind. During the project's odyssey, Zadan and Meron worked with an impressive set of filmmakers, including Bryan Singer, Van Sant and Oliver Stone, the last having spent a memorable evening with the producers visiting a string of gay bars in the Castro district. Over the years, a host of actors had shown interest in the project, including Robin Williams, Kevin Spacey, Daniel Day-Lewis, Kevin Kline, James Woods, Richard Gere and Steve Carell.”

It’s too bad the Stone version didn’t get made, if only because we’d love to see a DVD extra documenting his Castro tour. This happened before Stone completed JFK, a movie that didn’t exactly endear him to the gay community, “which was infuriated by the film's portrayal of several key assassination conspirators as debauched homosexuals. Never one to back away from a fight, Stone gave an incendiary interview to the gay and lesbian newsmagazine the Advocate, in which he compared Queer Nation to a Nazi group, saying ‘they work through intimidation and fear.’ ” Whoops! Stone then suggested that hey, maybe Gus Van Sant might be a better man for the job, and even though it worked out that way, Zadan and Meron were left behind.

Screengrab’s “I’m Not There” Study Guide

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 06 May 2008 19:30:00 GMT

As you have already been informed, I’m Not There arrives on DVD today. For those of you in the “I’m sort of interested, but not really a big Dylan fan” camp, here are a few supplemental materials that may or may not enhance your appreciation of Todd Haynes’ unconventional biopic. Put away your notebooks, there will not be a test.

As you may have gleaned, I’m Not There is a cavalcade, a kaleidoscope, a veritable cinematic smoothie blending many eras and images from Dylan’s career. Mmm…smoothie. I’m sorry, where was I? Oh, yes. Throughout the film Haynes quotes, tweaks and otherwise references a number of original sources very familiar to Dylan fans but perhaps not to neophytes. Such as:

DYLAN GOES ELECTRIC (1965)

In one of the seminal moments of Dylan’s career, the one-time pride of the Greenwich Village folk scene plugged in his guitar at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, alienating the purists in the audience and prompting Pete Seeger to announce he’d cut the power with an axe if he had one. (Haynes has some fun with this moment.) Dylan’s evolution from earnest folkie to hipster rocker can be seen in the recent documentary The Other Side of the Mirror, which collects his Newport performances from 1963 through 1965.

EAT THE DOCUMENT (1972)

Once intended as a straightforward follow-up to D.A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back (which forms the basis of much of the Cate Blanchett segment of I’m Not There), this fragmented look at Dylan’s 1966 tour has no official release, but has been heavily bootlegged (and now, of course, YouTubed). Those seeking straightforward live concert footage are bound to be disappointed (though extended versions of many of the performances are available on the DVD of Martin Scorsese’s Dylan doc No Direction Home), but the film has its fascinations, notably footage of John Lennon sharing a car ride with a severely fucked-up Bobby D.

PAT GARRETT AND BILLY THE KID (1973)

This elegiac Sam Peckinpah western contains Dylan’s “acting” debut (as the mysterious outlaw Alias), but more importantly, his soundtrack composing debut, including the timeless “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” which should always conjure images of Slim Pickens clutching his bloodied midsection. In the Richard Gere section of I’m Not There, Haynes creates a landscape of the Old Weird America that is equal parts Pat Garrett, The Basement Tapes and Dylan’s 1976 tour, the Rolling Thunder Revue. (For more on Pat Garrett, check out Tom Block’s definitive appraisal at The High Hat.)

RENALDO AND CLARA (1978)

This one is for the completists only. In fact, I thought I was a completist and I’ve never completed it. Nearly 30 years before Haynes, Dylan himself did an impressionistic take on his own legend, with the assistance of Sam Shepherd. The nearly four hour result has long been regarded as a complete debacle, but here’s your chance to get on the ground floor of the re-evaluation. The whole thing is on YouTube if you have the stamina.

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.

Take Five: Cryptozoology

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Hollywood loves a good monster movie. The recent success of the risky Cloverfield is proof of the fact that audiences, too, will flock to a good creature feature even if the monster's main purpose is to ruin the first-date memories of outer-borough hipsters. Strangely enough, though, movie studios and filmgoers alike are a tad more diffident when it comes to monsters that have a slight possiblilty of being real. Vampires, zombies, wolfmen, and whatever the hell Gamera was supposed to be? Sure, we'll take whatever you got. But when was the last time you saw a bunch of lithe, promiscuous teenagers menaced by a bunyip? What was the last movie that featured a small town in the middle of nowhere being attacked by a rampaging Cornish Owl-Man? Paramount is hoping, with the Friday release of Fred Wolf's shaggy Sasquatch story Strange Wilderness, that audiences will evince an interest in Bigfoot unseen since the glory days of the Six Million Dollar Man. But as we'll see, the history of movies based on so-called "cryptids" — creatures or animals widely thought to be legends, but believed by some researchers to be real — is dismal enough that the studio has as much chance of actually uncovering the Loch Ness Monster than turning a profit off of this dud-in-the-offing.

NIGHT OF THE DEMON (1980)

An almost-forgotten, and rightfully so, horror cheapie from the dawn of the slasher era, Night of the Demon does for Bigfoot what Jason Voorhees did for big-screen murderers, or at least tries to. Big-screen Bigfeet are usually portrayed as either gentle giants or, at worst, misunderstood animals, but in this null-budget exploitation number, he's more like a bloodthirsty devil on a rampage, Freddy Kreuger without the stylish hat and sweater combo. The movie's Sasquatch romps all over the Pacific Northwest, terrorizing anthropology students, yanking the junk off of an unfortunate hillbilly, and having his wicked way with local farmer's daughters. The high, or low, point of the flick comes in a flashback sequence: the innocent young lady who found herself at the receiving end of unwelcome advances from Bigfoot decides, for some reason, to bear its offspring (birthing the child of a monstrous rape apparently being less shameful than an abortion), until her overbearing dad decides to force her to kill the Bigfoot baby! A hallucinatorily bad movie sure to be the final word in, as the poster copy put it, "cross-breedin' Bigfoot".

TWILIGHT ZONE: THE MOVIE (1983)

Despite the fact that multiple reports of gremlins, wing-monsters and foo fighters by American flyers in WWII were all almost certainly the result of ordinary mechanical failure, combat fatigue, or smuggling a bottle of Old Crow into the cockpit, the Army took them seriously enough to launch a legitimate investigation, and by the 1960s, the beasties were entrenched enough in popular culture to inspire a memorable episode of The Twilight Zone. When a movie adaptation rolled around some twenty years later, a remake of this episode was arguably its high point, thanks largely to a wildly over-the-top, and yet somehow perfectly suitable, lead performance by John Lithgow. (Amusingly enough, almost twenty years after that, William Shatner — who'd played the gremlin's victim in the original TV version — was paired up with Lithgow on his own show, 3rd Rock from the Sun, and the two baked hams overacted like there was no tomorrow in a sly inside gag about their shared past.) Nowadays, the movie is remembered largely for the disastrous accident that took the lives of several crew members, and given John Landis' rather contemptible behavior at a subsequent trial for negligence, it's surprising he didn't try to blame the helicopter crash on an invisible monster only he could see.

SPLASH (1984)

Yes, folks, there are those in the cryptozoological community — and apparently there is one — who believe that mermaids are really real, and not just the product of a dugong and a very lonely, very drunk sailor coming into contact with one another. It is to them and to you that we recommend a fresh viewing of this charming '80s comedy. It's long been an almost invisible part of the cultural landscape; few people even think about it these days. But Splash is in fact a very fine comedy of its day, not boisterous or insulting like the majority of Eighties comedies that reached its level of success. And it also functions quite well as a time capsule: it brings us a pre-iconic Tom Hanks, a pre-crazy-recluse Darryl Hannah, a pre-self-important Ron Howard, and a pre-death John Candy in one of his most appealing roles — all wrapped up in a genuinely funny, if slight, Bruce Jay Friedman screenplay. There's only five dugongs in captivity, but DVDs of Splash can be found anywhere.

ANACONDA (1997)

Despite an incredibly dismal record of investigations into various Nessies, Jersey Devils and Bigfeet, the cryptozoologists have been right exactly once: the giant squid. Long considered a myth, a dead Architeuthis washed up in New Zealand in the 1870s, and in 2004, scientists finally captured living speciments on film. Many believe that if the fringe biology crowd is going to score another stopped-clock victory, it will be with the discovery of gigantic specimens of the already huge constrictor snakes known as anaconda, and when that day comes, perhaps this movie will be viewed as eerily prophetic instead of an embarrassingly hokey, campy creature feature with a mind-blowingly unrealistic rubber snake as its villain. Anaconda isn't entirely unsalvageable; Jon Voight hams it up deliciously as a great white hunter, Ice Cube is entertaining in full-on Private Hudson mode as a doomed photographer, and there are many fine shots of Jennifer Lopez' structurally pleasing hiney. However, the script is an utter dud, the special effects look like they were done by a dull fifteen-year-old, and the plot makes The Mothman Prophecies look brilliant by comparison.

THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES (2002)

When the history of Richard Gere's movie career is written, it's unlikely that this will be one of its most glorious moments. It's hard to imagine a worse title than The Mothman Prophecies, and if the movie isn't quite as terrible as the title promises, it sure as hell ain't great, either. Supposedly based on true events, the flick is about as good as you might expect from a movie prefaced by such a claim; back in the 1970s, they used to make thousands of flicks like this loopy would-be chiller about a West Virginia town haunted by mysterious visions of the future and visitations by a rubbery, bug-winged extraterrestrial something-or-other, and they were all pretty bad, albeit in a different way. The Mothman Prophecies is plenty expensive as opposed to a cheap filmed-in-a-weekend exploitation flick, and it tries for a post-modern moody ambience instead of pure shock, but it's still pretty dire. There's a big, garish steel statue of the Mothman in the actual West Virginia town where the events of the movie allegedly took place; it's a safe bet that Gere's performance — alternately bored and confused — will ever be similarly immortalized.

Top Ten of 2007: Paul Clark

Paul Clark — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Note: Like Leonard, I don’t live in one of what Hollywood would consider a major cinematic market, so I have yet to see some of the year’s best-reviewed films, such as There Will Be Blood and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. But I think it’s better to post this now rather than waiting until I’ve seen all the major movies, which for all I know won’t happen for months.

10. The Hunting Party

It’s been said before, but I’ll say it again- 2007 was a damn fine year to be a movie lover. Because of this, there were probably a dozen films competing for the final spot on this list, but in the end I had to go with a sentimental favorite, one that deserves much more love than it’s gotten so far. Richard Shepard's darkly comic tale of three journalists (Richard Gere, Terrence Howard, Jesse Eisenberg) searching for a Bosnian warlord succeeds not so much because of its story as for its salty, unironic portrait of male friendship. As in Shepard’s last film The Matador, The Hunting Party is a story about men drawn to violence who booze and bond in outposts far off the beaten path. At a time when Brokeback Mountain is still a punchline, it takes real chutzpah to write a scene in which one man tells another, “that’s why I love you,” without going for a laugh.

9. Time

Korea’s prolific and controversial director Kim Ki-duk has become something of a whipping boy for the cinematic cognoscenti, but there’s no denying that the guy’s got skills. Time, his best film to date, appears on the surface to be a response to Korea’s plastic-surgery craze, but at its heart it’s a story of amour fou, like Seconds played for tragedy rather than thrills. In Kim’s hands, plastic surgery becomes a metaphor for how self-conscious we’ve become, so insecure in our skin that we’re no longer able to simply give ourselves over to others, not even those we love. Also, Kim’s gift for astonishing imagery is as keen as ever, especially in his use of a seaside sculpture park.

8. I’m Not There

The premise- six actors playing six different versions of Bob Dylan- sounds like an academic exercise only a semiotics major could love. But each onscreen Dylan is only a pawn in the game of director Todd Haynes, a piece of the puzzle that has become the Dylan mythos. With his ingenious structure, Haynes highlights the contradictions, tall tales, and outright fabrications of Dylan’s legend, revealing him to be less a self-conscious chameleon reinventing his image for the public as a lifelong searcher who cared little whether we wanted to follow. The wonder is that I'm Not There is so much fun- sometimes electrifying, sometimes goofy, but always fascinating.

7. Offside

The idea that Iranian women aren’t allowed to attend soccer games would seem to be the setup for a dour polemic, but director Jafar Panahi has other plans for their story. In Panahi’s eyes, the law isn’t so much an injustice as a colossal pain for all involved, and by highlighting the absurdity of the situation, Offside becomes the stuff of high comedy. And a rousing crowd-pleaser to boot- Panahi shot much of the film in the bowels of the stadium during an actual World Cup qualifying match, and even at a distance from the field, the energy is palpable. In the end, football is a uniter, not a divider, and once the detained women escape their captors to mingle with their celebrating countrymen, they’re able to share in the victory that their laws had tried to deny them.

6. Joshua

In a year that saw Rob Zombie’s Michael-heavy remake of Halloween, one might be excused for wondering what an evil-kid thriller was doing on my list. But George Ratliff’s Joshua is another breed altogether- a genre movie in the abstract, but a particularly chilly and thematically-rich one. Moreover, Joshua is very much an of-the-moment bad seed, not some pint-sized supernatural boogeyman but the product of ineffectual and indulgent parenting. Jacob Kogan is creepy in the title role, but the real revelation is Sam Rockwell, giving the performance of the year as his father, a man whose parenting skills are limited at best, and who is ill-equipped to deal with a son whose behavior goes so sharply against his own. When he finally realizes what he’s up against it’s too late to stop it, and thanks to Ratliff and Rockwell, this realization hits with the power of a gut punch.

5. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

In Assassination, director Andrew Dominik plays a tricky game- to make a Western that doesn’t so much de-mythologize the genre as re-mythologize it by making explicit the undercurrent of mythmaking that was always a part of the West. It could have been a disaster, but somehow it works beautifully, thanks not only to the beauty of the filmmaker but also the performances. Brad Pitt is fine as a Jesse James who is all too mindful of the larger-than-life figure he cut in the West, but the film belongs to Casey Affleck as Ford, the youngster whose boyish hero worship festered into violent obsession. Ford was foolish enough to believe that he could create his own legend, but all he did was to be swallowed up by Jesse’s, and because of Affleck’s performance this reviled figure becomes downright tragic.

4. The Host

The best giant monster to attack theatres this past year didn’t stomp Tokyo, but Seoul, in the superior Korean creature feature The Host. With a flair for showmanship and populist storytelling that nearly equal those of Spielberg in his Jaws days, director Bong Joon-ho has made a monster movie to stand alongside the greats in the genre. Part of the credit should go to the effects wizard who created the disgusting yet somehow lovable monster, but I dare say the movie wouldn’t work so well if not for the endearingly flawed family at the movie’s center. Even on a list this full of darkness and despair, there’s always a place for pure, unadulterated entertainment, and The Host gave me more sheer moviegoing pleasure than any film of 2007.

3. Gone Baby Gone

Most of the praise for Gone Baby Gone has centered on the film’s performances- especially the much-feted Amy Ryan- and the surprising amount of thematic resonance to be found in the film. But I think director Ben Affleck deserves a great deal more credit for how powerful this film is than he’s been getting. Most obviously, Affleck has a real feel for his setting- a working-class South Boston neighborhood- and the people who inhabit it. But while this location seems at first like backdrop to a mystery involving a kidnapped child, it eventually takes center stage in the story, which turns into an breathlessly compelling study in the consequences of tribalism. “Guys take pride in where they’re from, like it was something they did,” states protagonist Patrick Kenzie (Casey Affleck- again!) in the film’s opening voiceover. The tragedy is that Kenzie- thinks himself above it all- buys into this idea as much as anybody.

2. No Country for Old Men

For most of its running time, No Country for Old Men works primarily as an uncommonly exciting chase thriller, in which the overmatched Lewellyn Moss struggles to stay ahead of stone-cold killer Chigurh (Javier Bardem). But while first two acts of the film are enough to mark it as the Coen brothers’ best work in years, it’s the final act, which avoids the expected confrontation between Chigurh and Lewellyn in favor of something more philosophical, that the film to another level of greatness altogether. An observer for most of the story, Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) suddenly comes face to face with the idea that even if you run from the evil that you fear may be hiding behind one door, there’s no guarantee that it won’t be waiting for you behind another. “You can’t stop what’s coming,” indeed.

1. Zodiac

From the beginning, David Fincher’s evocation of the still-unsolved case of the Zodiac killer has been something of an anomaly. It’s a serial-killer movie that practically never goes for cheap thrills, and a three-hour fact-based period piece that’s almost bereft of epic sweep. In short, it’s tough to put my finger on what exactly makes Zodiac such a masterpiece. For me, the most awe-inspiring aspect of the film is its near-obsessive attention to detail, one that’s downright fanatical even by the standards of the true-crime genre. But using the thousands of tiny clues and incidental pieces of business that surrounded the Zodiac case, Fincher immerses us fully in the world of the case, one in which the crime-solving technology and interdepartmental procedures of the day were always several steps behind the schemes of the killer.

Also worth mentioning: Everything Will Be OK (sorry, no trailer)

When I was making this list, I decided to restrict myself to feature-length films. However, taking into account all new movies I saw this past year, none hit me quite as hard as Don Hertzfeldt’s thrilling new animated short, Everything Will Be OK. In little more than fifteen minutes, Hertzfeldt tells the story of a man who is doomed to die. His doctors give up on him, his mother moves in to help, and the man himself goes off the deep end. And then, without warning, he suddenly gets better, much to everyone's annoyance. Everything Will Be OK has the feel of an especially good Raymond Carver story, both in its sense of irony and its reliance on small but significant detail, but the twisted sense of humor and unique animation style is all Hertzfeldt. Call it number zero in my top 10.