The Screengrab : richard kelly

Screengrab Review: “S. Darko”

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 22 May 2009 17:00:00 GMT

The “latest features” sidebar over there in the right-hand column of your screen has been a running joke amongst us Screengrab staffers for almost exactly a year now…because it’s been that long since the latest features featured there have been updated. There’s no point in doing it now, of course; I merely point it out to draw attention to the “Donnie Darko Part Deux!?” headline, which manages to convey a mixture of horror and bafflement at the prospect of such an animal’s existence.

That animal is now here in the form of S. Darko, and Richard Kelly would presumably still want you to know that he had absolutely nothing to do with its existence. Instead, it’s the product of screenwriter Nathan Atkins (author of the TV-movie Point of Entry) and director Chris Fisher, the man behind several serial killer movies and a handful of Cold Case episodes. I’ve not seen any of their earlier work, so I won’t hold it against them. I have seen S. Darko, however, so that one is fair game.

The only returning cast member from the original Donnie Darko is Daveigh Chase, who you’ll remember as the littlest member of Sparkle Motion, Samantha Darko. As S. Darko opens (in 1995, though you’d never know it if not for the helpful title cards), Sam is all growed up into a confused 18-year-old. Still haunted by her brother’s bizarre death, Sam is driving cross-country with best friend Corey (Briana Evigan of Step Up 2: The Streets, and yes, daughter of BJ and the Bear star Greg Evigan); Sam is the angsty one, Corey the slutty one. When their car breaks down in a nowhere town and they hole up in a cheap motel, you could be watching Thelma and Louise: The Early Years.

That’s when the weird stuff starts happening. And by “weird stuff,” I mean secondhand effects cribbed from Kelly’s cult favorite: time loops, transparent, tentacle-like blobs, bunny-like apparitions and another end-of-the-world countdown. Characters die and come back to life, and it’s all part of the personal growth experience – figuring out who you are and your place in the world the hard way. The question that never gets answered: Why should we care about these people? Sam is a mopey downer, while Corey is simply one of the most abrasive, unlikable characters in recent memory.

Far more entertaining than the movie itself is the “making of” documentary included on the DVD. It’s hilarious to watch everyone from the screenwriter to the cast to the best boy try to justify their involvement in this pointless endeavor. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll sign on to write, direct or set up lawn chairs for Gomer Darko if there’s a decent paycheck in it, so I’m not moralizing here; it’s just that no one is honest enough to admit that’s their motivation. They all bend over backwards to emphasize that this is a “continuation,” not a sequel, and that it’s very respectful of Kelly’s vision and the rules of the world he set up. No one can adequately explain why this movie was made in the first place. After all, the original Darko was barely released in theaters and only acquired a cult following after its DVD release. Cult audiences don’t tend to respond well to this kind of cash-in attempt, as the makers of Shock Treatment can attest.

In Other Blogs: Jesus Wept

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 14:00:00 GMT

It’s Good Friday, so somebody out there must be writing about Jesus movies. Ah, here we go – it’s Joshua Land at Moving Image Source comparing The Passion of the Christ and The Last Temptation of Christ. “The single most hollow claim of those who picketed Last Temptation was the notion that Universal was exploiting Christianity in pursuit of the almighty dollar; like The Passion of the Christ, Scorsese’s film was an obviously uncommercial proposition from the get-go, and it remains remarkable that the studio ever pursued it at all, let alone held firm in the face of protests—particularly after Paramount had already dropped the project before it even went into production.”

David Lynch won’t do commentary tracks, so the folks at Shooting Down Pictures have taken it upon themselves to live-blog Inland Empire. “I don’t think it’s an informational kind of film. I don’t think it’s part of his vocabulary. That might be the trouble behind understanding the ‘genre’ of this film. Simply avant-garde play of light, affectations and moods. I think the first time I saw this, by this point I was thinking that it was explicitly about interpretation. And it’s setting up all these signs for you to interpret in any number of ways. But it is going to provide a network of significance, and there are several things that will keep popping up for you to pay attention to how and when. There’s an intuitive kind of architecture to the film. A lot of it is just the face - dreams, and faces. It’s all about cinema as a dream, dreams as cinema. It’s not even a syllogism, it’s all a bunch of links.”

Director Richard Kelly (Southland Tales) blogs on his MySpace page about his new movie The Box. “The film was digitally photographed using the Panavision Genesis camera. In my audio commentary on Tony Scott's Domino, I mentioned that I would never shoot a 1970s period piece using a digital camera. My position on this changed when I saw David Fincher's extraordinary Zodiac. It can be done.”

This open letter to Bill O’Reilly has nothing to do with movies, but Roger Ebert wrote it and it’s too good to pass up: “I understand you believe one of the Sun-Times misdemeanors was dropping your syndicated column. My editor informs me that ‘very few’ readers complained about the disappearance of your column, adding, ‘many more complained about Nancy.’ I know I did. That was the famous Ernie Bushmiller comic strip in which Sluggo explained that ‘wow’ was ‘mom’ spelled upside-down.”

And in List-o-Mania this week…what the hell, let’s go with the 10 Greatest Mall-Set Action Scenes from Spoutblog, including Commando. “There’s nothing like seeing Arnold Schwarzenegger throw off about eight mall cops attempting a circular apprehension. There’s also nothing like seeing Arnold Schwarzenegger swing across the atrium of the Sherman Oaks Galleria using a plastic balloon-like decoration that couldn’t possibly have held him. Yes, there are a lot of over-the-top moments in this action scene, but there’s no denying it’s entertaining, at least to those of us who aren’t employed as mall security.”

Smells Like Indie Spirit: Our Favorite Sundance Films Of All Time (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 21:30:00 GMT

BUFFALO 66 (1998)

At some point in the recent past, we here at the Screengrab compiled a list of our guiltiest pleasures, and one of mine was The Brown Bunny, which I pretty much only wanted to see because of the notorious...uh...love scene between director/star Vincent Gallo and his co-star (and former paramour) Chloe Sevigny. Such a prurient interest is sad on two levels: first, that a grown, married man would rent a movie just to watch a quasi-famous actress get busy with an allegedly prosthetic schwanzstucker...but secondly that Gallo’s sophomore directorial effort would have so little else going for it after the flat-out brilliance of Buffalo 66. Starring as an ex-con loser who kidnaps a bored teen (Christina Ricci) in hopes of passing her off as his wife in a doomed effort to impress his hateful parents (Ben Gazzara and Anjelica Huston), Gallo's Billy Brown is all jittery desperation and hostile self-loathing...yet somehow, by the end of the movie, you’re rooting for both the character and the director, while the grim, hellish landscape of upstate New York in winter (a perfect reflection of the protagonist’s stunted isolation) has somehow blossomed with unexpected hope.

YOU CAN COUNT ON ME (2000)

Sundance, like most film festivals, has never lacked for sensitive dramatic films about dysfunctional families. This entry, which marked the film directing debut of playwright Kenneth Lonergan, stood out enough to count as a redemption of the genre. It also upped the profile of its star, Laura Linney, and all but launched the career, after some ten mostly uneventful years in movies, of Mark Ruffalo. The film won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2000 festival, and Lonergan (who himself picked up the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award) finally follows it up later this year when his second feature, Margaret, starring Anna Pacquin and Ruffalo, arrives in theaters.

AMERICAN PSYCHO (2001)

In the wake of The Blair Witch Project, Sundance slowly fell victim to that most dreaded of industry catchwords: “Buzz.” And as the fest’s spotty post-1999 reputation confirms, the most troublesome thing about encouraging and promoting buzz is that, when the buzzed-about don’t live up to their advanced billing, it’s the festival itself that suffers. Few films have ever arrived at Sundance with more early-bird hype than did Mary Harron’s American Psycho in 2001, given that, as an adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ infamous serial killer tome, its mixture of tongue-in-cheek ‘80s details and brutal violence, all wrapped up in a Kubrickian chill, seemed to make it, in the minds of many prognosticators, an “edgy” film with Fight Club-ish cult-fave potential. Such similarities, it turned out, were superficial at best. Still, American Psycho remains, eight years on, one of the few to match its lofty Sundance expectations, thanks to Christian Bale’s pitch-perfect personification of yuppiedom as a lethal mental affliction, Harron’s eerily composed, sterile direction, and a superlative murder scene set to the ominous sound of Huey Lewis and the News.

DONNIE DARKO (2001)

Every once in a blue moon, Sundance provides a platform for a truly exciting new voice, and in 2001, that was Richard Kelly, whose Donnie Darko received enthusiastic critical and audience response upon its premiere. Kelly hailed from a film-geek background but, with his debut, refused to simply indulge in name-check homages and cheesy nostalgia, instead creating an authentic sense of his ‘80s time period and suburban milieu (and the discomfort liberals felt during Michael Dukakis’ failed ’88 presidential bid), all while offering up one giant head-scratcher of a sci-fi saga involving time travel, Tears for Fears’ “Mad World,” and a menacing, knife-wielding giant rabbit who foretells news of the coming apocalypse to Donnie (Jake Gyllenhaal). As assured as it is beguiling, Donnie Darko, like Christopher Nolan’s Memento (which preceded it by a year), is a genre piece that rewards and, in certain respects, requires repeat viewings to unlock its twisted chronological mysteries, something that can’t, unfortunately, be said of Kelly’s follow-up Southland Tales. Me, I say come for the mystery, stay for the entrancing atmosphere of doomed-teen-romanticism.

SUPER TROOPERS (2001)

Broken Lizard, the comedy troupe behind Super Troopers, Club Dread (2004) and Beerfest (2006), is a decidedly hit-or-miss outfit, inspired one moment and flat the next. That description certainly applies to their debut about a group of misfit-slacker state troopers, which first screened at Sundance 2001 and amounts to a series of gags that range from the brilliant to the dreary. If the latter slightly outnumber the former, however, they don’t overshadow them, thanks in part to some inspired casting – how Broken Lizard convinced serious thesp Brian Cox to participate in such inanity remains baffling – that energizes the film’s humor. But moreover, Super Troopers thrives thanks to its pièce-de-résistance involving a couple of troopers pulling over a speeding car in which the backseat teenage passenger, in an effort to avoid arrest and prosecution, has engulfed a giant bag of marijuana. The bizarre incident that follows is dim-witted goofiness of a virtuosic variety, delivering a hilarious high so powerful that it carries one through quite a bit of ensuing patchiness.

Click Here For Part One, Three, Four & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Nick Schager

DVD Digest for November 18, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 15:00:00 GMT

This week, some of summer’s biggest hits arrive in stores in time for the holiday shopping season, along with a handful of choice classics.

DVD of the week: With all the care Pixar devotes to creating their theatrical releases, it’s amazing that they have any time left for their DVDs. However, Pixar’s DVD editions are almost invariably first-rate, and this week’s release of WALL-E would appear to be no exception. We begin, of course, with the razor-sharp transfer of the movie itself, which comes directly from the digital master, making it arguably crisper than could be found in the theatre. But that’s only the beginning, with two animated shorts (one seen in theatres, the other a DVD original), featurettes on the film’s sound design, visual design, music, character design, and more. Finally, there are a number of features on WALL-E that take viewers into the world of the film, including a documentary about the movie’s robotic cast, and short films about the nefarious “Buy N Large” corporation from its inception to their Earth Exit plan, and beyond. Needless to say, WALL-E is an ideal DVD for kids, but it’s also a must-have even if you don’t have a family to buy for this holiday season.

Other recent releases coming to DVD this week: Ben Stiller’s Hollywood action satire Tropic Thunder (Paramount, also Blu-Ray); America Ferrara, Amber Tamblyn and friends in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 (Warner, also Blu-Ray); and a quartet of acclaimed indie films- Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World (Image); the documentary Gonzo: The Life and Work of Hunter S. Thompson (Magnolia); Harmony Korine’s Mister Lonely (Genius); and Audrey Tautou in Priceless (First Look).

On the classics front, the big release this week is David Lynch: The Lime Green Box Set (Absurda), which includes the new-to-DVD Industrial Symphony No. 1, plus the remastered Eraserhead, a Lynch-approved 5.1-surround version of Blue Velvet, The Elephant Man, Wild at Heart, The Short Films of David Lynch, Dumbland, along with new extras for Elephant Man and Wild at Heart, the Eraserhead soundtrack, and a “Mystery Disc” full of exclusive Lynch goodies. Or if you’re looking for something a little more “classical”, pick up the new Criterion editions of Martin Ritt’s masterful adaptation of the John le Carre novel, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, or the French swashbuckler Fanfan la Tulipe. Also worth mentioning is the release of Fred Schepisi’s long-unavailable classic of Australian cinema, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (Ryko Distribution).

In a slow week for TV on DVD, the most noteworthy title is Bones Season 3 (Fox).

Finally, this week presents the most definitive argument that Blu-Ray has really arrived, with a plethora of mostly crappy Blu-Ray only releases. The exceptions are Curtis Hanson’s pretty-good Eminem vehicle 8 Mile (Universal) and the Neil Gaiman-scripted Mirrormask (Sony). But other than that, it’s looking pretty dire, with the Martin Lawrence double feature of Blue Streak (Sony) and National Security (Sony), Guy Ritchie’s Revolver (Sony), and Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales (Sony), which if nothing else remains the most definitive cinematic statement about the ongoing war over teen horniness. I’m for decriminalization, by the way.

Sequel to "Donnie Darko" Is on the Way, Much to the Dismay of the Creator of "Donnie Darko"

Phil Nugent — Mon, 12 May 2008 21:30:00 GMT

Donnie Darko (2001), the long-gestating cult hit from writer-director Richard Kelly, is about to get an ugly little brother. Or maybe a stepbrother, or just somebody who got ahold of its credit card number and is charging pizzas to its account. The planned sequel, S. Darko, begins shooting next week and is going to be shopped around at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival. The film's title refers to the character of Samantha Darko, who was Donnie's sister in the original film and was played by Daviegh Chase. The plot will involve a road trip the now- eighteen-year-old Samantha takes with a friend, a trip that becomes complicated when they begin to experience "bizarre visions." (Spoiler alert: Donnie himself, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, did not survive the conclusion of the first film.) Daveigh Chase will reprise her role in the new film, and that's as close as it has to an actual, breathing connection to the original Donnie Darko. The $10-million production will be directed by Chris Fisher, who directed and co-wrote Dirty, a crooked-cop drama starring Cuba Cooding, Jr., and horror flicks about real-life murderers Richard ("Night Stalker") Ramirez and the Hillside Strangler. Fisher says that "I am a great admirer of Richard Kelly's film and hope to create a similar world of blurred fantasy and reality." Simon Crowe, of the production company Velvet Octopus, chimes in: "I think there is a new generation of cinema-goers who will be very excited to see this film."

Whatever generation he has in mind, it does not appear that Richard Kelly is among their number. Cinemascope reports on Kelly's official reaction: "Over the last couple of days, a few people have asked me what’s up with 'this Donnie Darko sequel.' So to set the record straight, here’s a few facts I’d like to share with you all - I haven’t read this script. I have absolutely no involvement with this production, nor will I ever be involved. I have no control over the rights from our original film, and neither I nor my producing partner Sean McKittrick stand to make any money from this film." Reaction from fans has been swift, too: there's already a petition on-line devoted to shutting the damn thing down. (Quick, somebody call Sprite Gum!) It's not exactly the first time that some hack has threatened to grind out a string of sausage movies "based" on an original that deserves to be treated with more respect. (Can you say The Stepfather II: Father's Day?) But it's definitely a cheeky move to try this sort of thing with such a beloved art-cult object, especially given how long it took for Richard Kelly himself to start reaping some benefits from Donnie Darko itself. Or, as Cinemascope's Peter Sciretta puts in, in a line worthy of Dr. Van Helsing: "damn the buyers that will pour money [into] what seems on the outset as a blasphemous and disrespectful project".

New Easter Classics: "Night of the Lepus" (1972)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Like Christmas movies, Easter movies have only so many iconic touchstones to wave to declare their allegiance to the holiday, but it seems as if Christmas gets more mileage out of its storehouse than Easter does out of its two major devotional images: the resurrection of the Christian Messiah, and cute fluffy bunnies. A glance at the TV listings shows that movies that feature crucifixions clearly predominate on the weekend schedule, even as they tend to shut out movies made by Martin Scorsese or Robert Downey, Sr. But a few minutes of most Biblical movies, especially when compared to the work of Chuck Jones, may leave you wondering if the rabbit movies don't really have the inside track. Night of the Lepus may be the perfect Easter movie just because it makes an effort to meet both camps halfway: it depicts the human race buying itself a second chance at life by crucifying (okay, electrocuting) several acres' worth of giant, rampaging bunny rabbits. Inexplicably, TV programmers have yet to seize on it as a holiday perennial, and the chances that this might be the year that changes got even smaller when Turner Classic Movies ran it last weekend as part of its "TCM Underground" series, thus indicating that the network not only has a real counter-instinct for innovative holiday programming, but that somebody over there detects an unsuspected outlaw-cinema vibe in Stuart Whitman.

Whitman plays a do-gooder scientist who, trying to keep rancher Rory Calhoun from spreading poison to rid his fields of rabbits, creates a serum that he hopes will disrupt the bunnies' breeding patterns. Instead, it turns them into jumbo-size monster bunnies that leave burrow holes the size of craters and maul a guy named Jud for implictly mocking their lifestyle by picking the lettuce out of his sandwich. (After Whitman's wife and partner, Janet Leigh, chases Jud's attacker off with a shotgun, she wipes what appears to be ketchup off his face and tries to quiet his whimpering by assuring him, "It's okay, Jud, it's okay. The rabbit's gone.") Night of the Lepus, which also stars Star Trek's DeForrest Kelley in a notably unflattering mustache, is not a good movie — snippets of it appear on a TV set in Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers, and the footage is much stranger and more disturbing when seen for bare seconds at a time, out of context. But it does have its instructive side, especially in the sense that it can be very educational to see how not to do something. To view a sequence in which shots of rabbits hopping through the desert are intercut with scenes of cattle stampeding, and then to realize that you're supposed to get the idea that the cattle are stampeding because giant rabbits are coming their way, is to grasp with special force that there is much more to the editor's art than one is likely to master from a correspondence course and a lot of blind self-confidence. The film is also overly devoted to what I've always thought of as "The Six Million Dollar Man fallacy", a common delusion among editors and production people in the 1970s, probably inspired by desperation, that anything can be made more awesome by running it in slow motion. After the big mass-electrocution scene, the film winds up with a lingering shot of a couple of bunnies eyeballing the camera and spectacularly failing to seem ominous. Most of the movie's attempted thrills were achieved through trick photography, if one can use that term even when the trick doesn't take, though a large stuffed bunny seems to be employed in Jud's big scene, and there is one classic shot, of the kind that could not be fully appreciated until the invention of the freeze-frame button, of a guy in a rabbit suit getting whacked in the face. Whatever he got paid, it wasn't enough. (Of course, if the producers had had enough money to do the movie right, they would have paid somebody to forcibly shave DeForrest Kelley.) It could be that the advent of CGI could now make a truly thrilling Night of the Lepus remake a reality. Are you listening, Richard Kelly?

Bottom Five of 2007

John Constantine — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 18:25:00 GMT

With The Screengrab’s overall Top Ten of 2007 going up today, it is high time we let you, the reader, know which movies we thought sucked the most in good ‘ol ’07. Here are five movies that run the gamut from so-bad-you-have-to-see-it down to my-life-is-emptier-after-that-shit. It should be noted that one of these movies actually caused the writer to scream in public for about twenty minutes about how bad it was, embarrassing editor Peter Smith while he tried to order a slice of pizza. Try to guess which one. We think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

#5: HITMAN (Xavier Gens, dir.)

Big and dumb are words often used to extol an action movie’s virtues. Not so with Hitman, a video game adaptation that, as far as I can tell, isn’t even about anything. It’s shocking that a movie with both a nude Olga Kurylenko and Timothy Olyphant could be this bad.

#4: TRANSFORMERS (Michael Bay, dir.)

Bravo, Michael Bay. Only you could make a movie based on a cartoon - itself little more than a half hour toy commercial - that is actually shallower than its source material. Bravo.

#3: DAN IN REAL LIFE (Peter Hedges, dir.)

Am I really supposed to feel sorry for this asshole? He lies to his motherless children, acts like a petulant child, and makes out with his brother’s girlfriend when he barely knows her. Look not to Evan Almighty for the worst Steve Carell movie of the year. It is before you.

#2: HALLOWEEN (Rob Zombie, dir.)

I checked my watch approximately sixteen times while watching Zombie’s remake of Halloween, desperate for it to be over. Whenever I pass by one of the numerous posters throughout New York City advertising the recently released Halloween: Unrated DVD, I puke a little in my mouth.

#1: SOUTHLAND TALES (Richard Kelly, dir.)

Wow. Just, wow, man. Jesus.

Understanding "Southland Tales", and Other Impossible Dreams

Phil Nugent — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 13:05:00 GMT

It used to be that if you wanted your movie to be perceived as so cool and mind-blowing that it had a shot at outsider-midnight movie status, you had to somehow shock the bejesus out of people. But now that, as John Waters says, what was once shocking has been fully co-opted by Hollywood, so that everything from Hostel to South Park is mainstream entertainment, the best way to go about it seems to be to confuse people. A few years ago, Salon, in its function as a daily manual for the intelligent cool-hunter, was so impressed by the head-scratching qualities exhibited by David Lynch's Mulholland Drive and Richard Kelly's Donnie Darko that it provided handy skeleton keys to help guide the baffled viewer through both movies. Now, writer Thomas Rogers has whipped up an explanatory gloss on Kelly's new film, Southland Tales. (It should perhaps be noted that, in keeping with the insular nature of the pursuit of the coolest movie in the world, Southland Tales explicitly references Mulholland Drive, along with Kiss Me Deadly, Philip K. Dick, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, and God knows what else.)

As a large-scale directorial achievement, Southland Tales is impressive, and I can honestly say that, watching it, I was never bored. I also felt like I had less of a grasp on what it was supposed to mean when the closing credits rolled than I did when I walked into the theater. What's remarkable about Rogers's article is that now that I've read it, I feel more confused than ever. Besides the fact that some key scenes are filmed and edited in a way that makes them really difficult to follow, there's a phenomenal amount of complex back story to the characters, their world, and the events they're caught up in that the audience simply isn't made privy to in the course of watching the picture. Kelly, who extensively re-edited the picture after its premiere at Cannes, losing an entire subplot involving Janeane Garofalo and adding voice-over narration intended to meet the viewer halfway, has also written three so-called "graphic novels" (in my apartment, we read "comic books" and are proud of it) that have been collected as Southland Tales: The Prequel Saga; it seems that anyone who hopes to understand the movie better would be well advised to read them and, you know, I might just do that one of these days. Rogers makes it clear that anyone looking to better understand the movie would also be well advised to grab a copy of the New Testament and make a deep study of the Book of Revelations and, okay, I probably wouldn't do that even if it was guaranteed to help me better understand my ex-girlfriends. It comes down to the individual to decide whether just getting Kelly's alternate-universe apocalyptic fantasies is worth this much work. Kelly may be one of the first filmmakers of the Information Age, building mixed-media collages that can't be fully appreciated on their own until you've read the comic book, seen the director's cut on DVD, diagrammed the interviews, checked out the YouTube ephemera, etc. He might also just be a talented but undisciplined guy making a mess. The possibility that he's a bit of both is enough to ensure that he remains interesting at least for a while.

The Ten Best Deleted Scenes of All Time, Part 2

Peter Smith — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 18:00:00 GMT

THE CHIP REMOVAL SCENE, TERMINATOR 2

The premise of Terminator 2 is that Arnold Schwarzenegger's character, a cyborg who spent the whole first film trying to assassinate future revolutionary Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), has now been reprogrammed to protect her family. In other words, he's the same soulless killing machine, but on a humane mission instead of a lethal one. So how does he acquire emotions, attachments and embarrassing slang words over the course of the film? That mystery is explained in this deleted scene, in which Sarah removes an inhibitor chip from the Terminator's head. (Fun fact: given the limits of special effects in 1991, the mirror effect was achieved by having Linda Hamilton perform surgery on a dummy head, while Hamilton's twin sister — seriously — stood on the other side of the mirror with actual Arnold.) The scene also includes a confrontation between Connor and her son which fundamentally changes the dynamic of their relationship, allowing him to take over as leader. (In the director's commentary, Cameron says he "agonized" over cutting this scene.)

"THIS BULGING RIVER", WAITING FOR GUFFMAN

We'd kill to spend a day sifting through Christopher Guest's cutting room floor. Guest films hours and hours of documentary-style footage for his improvised comedies, only a fraction of which end up in the final film. The DVD versions of This is Spinal Tap (which he co-wrote but didn't direct), Best in Show and A Mighty Wind are loaded with hilarious (and sometimes shockingly dark) deleted scenes. But our favorite is this giddy extended climax from Waiting for Guffman. Guffman follows a small-town community theater troupe as they cast, rehearse and perform an original musical, all the while increasingly convinced that they're heading to Broadway. This deleted musical number is an ingenious musical theater parody — with production values that are comparable to actual Broadway.

THE HOTEL CONFESSION SCENE, SUPERMAN II

Director Richard Donner had filmed more than half of Superman II when the producers removed him from the project, replacing him with Richard Lester. The theatrical version of the film is a hybrid of Lester and Donner scenes, and for years after its release, rumors swirled that a better film — the Donner cut — was buried in the Warner Brothers vaults. When the Donner cut finally came to DVD in 2006, it was a mixed blessing: on one hand, it's very clearly an unfinished film. On the other hand, it contains some marked improvements over the theatrical release. This scene, in which Lois cleverly forces Clark to reveal his identity as Superman, is one of those improvements. It packs far more of a dramatic wallop than the "oops-i-dropped-my-glasses-in-the-fire" reveal from the Lester version. Perhaps the ultimate deleted scene, this one was never actually filmed; it was edited together from Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder's separate screen tests.

DAVID DUNN AND THE PRIEST, UNBREAKABLE

Unbreakable, M. Night Shyamalan's hushed, atmospheric follow-up to The Sixth Sense, tells the story of David Dunn (Bruce Willis), a stressed-out family man who survives a horrific train crash. When David realizes that he was the only survivor — and no one can offer him an adequate explanation — he begins to explore the possibility that he may be something other than an ordinary human being. It's a clever premise, and Unbreakable is an underrated film, but there are some serious gaps in logic — i.e., how has David passed his fortieth birthday without ever realizing he's invulnerable? This deleted scene offers some much-needed insight. It also toys nicely with the stock character of the cinematic priest; we expect him to talk about fate and God's plan, which he does, but not in the way you're thinking.

THE PUMPKIN CARVING SCENE, DONNIE DARKO

The Donnie Darko DVD contains miles of deleted footage, much of which made it into Donnie Darko: The Director's Cut — and most of which, frankly, makes the film overly complicated and heavy-handed. The original theatrical release has a pervasive sense of mystery, and the film's unanswered questions are part of its appeal. That said, every new scene between Donnie and his family deepens the impact of the film's time-twisting climax. This one is our favorite. It's an ordinary moment between Donnie (Jake Gyllenhaal) and his sister Elizabeth (real-life sibling Maggie Gyllenhaal), that reveals the affection in their relationship yet hints of ominous things to come.

— Gwynne Watkins

Today in the Nerve Film Lounge: No Country for Old Men, It Is Fine, Pixar Collection, Richard Kelly

Peter Smith — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 17:00:00 GMT

No Country for Old Men: "You know the Coen Brothers are back on top of their game when they somehow derive maximum tension from the banal image of a candy wrapper slowly uncrinkling on a dusty countertop."

It Is Fine! Everything Is Fine: "A remarkable next step for Crispin Glover."

Pixar Short Films Collection: "An important collection that contains the past and future of cinema in equal amounts."

Q&A: Richard Kelly: "It's the darkest of dark subject matter, but I wanted it to be like a party."

Southland Toons

Peter Smith — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 18:00:00 GMT

Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales, opening in two weeks after innumerable delays and controversies, has gone from being one of the most anticipated films of recent years to one of the most dreaded. But however it’s ultimately received upon its national debut, there’s still a whole lot of people who can’t wait to see it, either to praise or damn it. In an unusual bit of marketing, Kelly has scripted a series of graphic novels (drawn by Brett Weldee) that will serve as a prequel to the story the film will allegedly finish, and released them in bits and pieces, scavenger-hunt style, to fifteen different websites. The first collection, Southland Tales I: Two Roads Diverge, is now available, in order, at JoBlo.com, MTV, UGO.com, Comics2Film and IGN. — Leonard Pierce

Morning Deal Report: Beam Me Up

Peter Smith — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 15:00:00 GMT

More Trek news: Simon Pegg — Shaun of the Dead himself — to play Scotty. Awesome.

Zack Snyder will direct The Last Photograph, an Afghanistan-set drama "based on an original idea by Snyder." (Snyder has original ideas?)

Frank Langella joins Cameron Diaz in The Box, Richard Kelly's intended follow-up to Southland Tales — assuming anyone lets the guy direct after that thing comes out.

— Peter Smith