The Screengrab : ricky jay

In Other Blogs: The Top 25 L.A. Movies

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 17:00:00 GMT

The L.A. Times recently published their list of the 25 Best L.A. Films of the Past 25 Years. Naturally, some of the choices proved controversial (a lot of folks have trouble with the selection of Jackie Brown over Pulp Fiction, for instance), but Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule thinks it’s a decent list. “There were only eight, perhaps nine instances where I felt like the choices could have been replaced, by another film in the director’s filmography, or by another similarly themed film, or just by another movie to replace one that just shouldn't be there at all. For example, I can certainly understand why Boogie Nights is on the list, but it’s ultimately too diffuse and far more conventional than its electric style would suggest. I much prefer P.T. Anderson’s Magnolia (1999), a high-wire act in which Anderson gets more directly in touch with his inner Altman and dashes all concerns over whether anyone’s having a good time or not, planting Old Testament visual clues that subliminally lay the groundwork for that shocking rain of frogs. (And speaking of Altman, while I'm not the biggest fan of The Player, I was far happier to see it representing the great director here rather than the dour and sour Short Cuts.)”

The Toronto International Film Festival kicked off yesterday, and Spoutblog has the scoop on the film Paris Hilton doesn’t want you to see. “Paris Hilton and her team have successfully pressured the Toronto International Film Festival into canceling all but one screening of Adria Petty’s Paris, Not France, a documentary about the celebrity heiress which ‘attempts to explore the Paris phenomenon and how it defines this moment in culture’ and is also ‘modeled after the 1960s it-girl film Darling.’ Though the film’s TIFF info page still lists three public screenings, TIFF documentary programmer Thom Powers confirmed to me that Paris will screen only once at the festival. ‘From my standpoint, of course, I wish we could do additional screenings,’ Powers told me in an email. ‘But this is certainly a better option than not showing the film at all.’… As Steven Zeitchik joked when he first blogged about this, ‘the mind dances at what kind of footage can be seen so newly shameful to Paris Hilton, the enfant teribles whose entire reputation is based on shamelesness.’”

Cinematical is also on the scene in Toronto, and they’ve had a look at The Brothers Bloom. “Long awaited in the wake of his 2005 debut Brick, Rian Johnson's The Brothers Bloom is a magic trick of a film; the second it's over, you want to see it again so you can try to catch how you were tricked, but you also want to see it again so you can return to the joy and wonder of being wrapped up in the nimble, deck-shuffling hands of a born showman. Watching it at first, some of The Brothers Bloom's creative and thematic elements seem like they're on loan from Paul Thomas Anderson (opening narration by Ricky Jay, pop-whiz-bang camera work, the troubled-but-tender relationship between the two brothers) while others feel as if they've been cribbed from Wes Anderson (deadpan confessions, whimsical set design, a parallel-universe setting where people still travel to Europe by steamship). The truth is, as much as The Brothers Bloom may feel like it's cribbing from other films at first, this is Rian Johnson's movie, and even if my more dreary and discerning critical faculties told me the final act goes on, perhaps, a beat too long, my inner moviegoer was sitting bolt upright, smiling, bright-eyed and carried away.”

At Some Came Running, Glenn Kenny makes an interesting connection between Road House and a David Lynch movie. No, not that Road House. “The terrifying physical contrast between the behemoth and a very delicate woman brought to mind a scene from David Lynch's under-appreciated (to my mind, at least) 1992 Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. This scene, too, is set in a roadhouse of sorts—the back room of the Bang Bang Bar, which actually, if one line of dialogue is to be believed, is located on the Canadian side of the Canada/U.S. border the structure sits on. As it happens, the road house of Negulsco's film is located near the Canadian border; this turns into a significant plot point once Lily and Pete are trying to escape from the psychotic Jefty, played by Richard Widmark with his then-trademark tetchy intensity… I wonder if Lynch had ever seen Negulsco's film. Some shards of it, it seems, lodged their way into the world of Twin Peaks. The road house as portrayed in the '48 picture is a piece of bygone mid-century Americana that I've always found fascinating—it looks way fun. It's got a bar, a restaurant, a sporting-goods store, and a bowling alley!”

And in List-o-Mania this week, Geekdad weighs in with 10 Movies Needing a Muppet Remake. This guy has put way too much thought into this. “Casablanca - The initial temptation is to cast Kermit as Rick, but I think Kermit is better as the utterly noble Victor Laszlo, with Miss Piggy as Ilsa by his side. Gonzo is much better as Rick, with his internal, and external, conflict between love, revenge, and the right thing to do. Rowlf is Sam, for who else could be? Captain Renault is a tough part to play, but I think Fozzie has the right cavalier attitude for the role.”

Tribeca Film Festival Review: "Redbelt"

Phil Nugent — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 15:00:00 GMT

In his recent, attention-getting Village Voice article proclaiming himself to no longer be a "brain-dead liberal", David Mamet chided those who fail to appreciate how great it is here in the land of the free and who sit around trying to think up reasons to be dissatisfied with democratic capitalism, just so they can have something to be sore about. In Redbelt, Smiley Mamet's latest stab at writing and directing a movie, the hero, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, is a hard-working, incorruptable black man who's trying his damndest to make an honest living running a martial-arts academy that does its bit for society by training police officers in methods of self defense. But when we meet him, he's already in danger of going out of business, and then evil Hollywood types steal his technique of pitting combatants against each other after selecting one to be "handicapped" for the bout. Robbed of the only thing he has that may have monetary value so that these sharks can cheapen it by using it in circus-like arena ring competitions, he's ultimately reduced to agreeing to compete in one of the bouts in hopes of at least winning some prize money, and then he discovers that the contests are fixed. ("Whenever two guys are fighting for money," mewls the crooked promoter played by Ricky Jay, "the fight is never fair.") Does Mamet ever see any of the plays and movies he signs his name to, or is he so committed to the capitalist system that he has a bunch of cranks hired off park benches staffing a sweatshop where they grind this stuff out by the yard?

Chiwetal Ejifor brings his role a strong presence and the ability to convey complex thought and emotional storms going on beneath a placid surface. He deserves a lot of credit for not appearing ridiculous when his character pounds away at the jujitsu formula that appears to be his all-purpose mantra for life: "There is no situation you can't escape from. There is no situation you can't turn to your advantage." The movie only leaves him completely out to dry once, when Mamet, letting his hand (and his woman problem) show all too nakedly, has him bestow these wise words on a woman (Emily Mortimer) who's been raped, while demonstrating that with more skill and determination, she could have fought off her attacker. Although Mortimer is required to make a full-blown crazy-broad entrance, twitchy and paranoid and all but frothing at the mouth, it turns out that she's the movie's Good Woman; after Ejifor starts telling her what to do, she shuts her yap and gratefully concentrates on supporting him, while Ejifor's wife (Alice Braga), a "Brazilian princess" who worries about her business and dares to have doubts about whether her husband's noble principles will be enough to keep the lights turned on, throws in her lot with the rotten show business people who are conspiring against him. They include Tim Allen, insanely cast as a tough-guy movie star with a bad haircut, and Joe Mantegna, all too perfectly cast as the movie star's slimeball manager, who gives you the feeling that he could produce a line of male body oils from his pores and market it under the brand name "Dishonestee'." Having used these guys to establish that the world is totally rigged and everything's phony, Mamet then turns around and flatters the audience by insisting that the ticket-buying rubes the world over will still notice and appreciate true quality when they see it; when Ejifor and a bad guy get into a tussel in the corridor leading to the stage of the big fight, every head in the place ignores the glitz they've paid to get in to see and swivels to pay attention to the true jujitsu master in action. Mamet himself is the show-business equivalent of one of those politicians who've spent twenty-five years in Congress screaming about how you need to keep re-electing him in order to send a message to those out-of-touch Washington insiders.

Trailer Review: Redbelt

Paul Clark — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 17:00:00 GMT

When I first heard about this, I wasn't sure how it would work — I mean, David Mamet taking on the world of mixed martial arts? And now, seeing the trailer, I still don't know what to think. On the one hand, there's that patented Mamet dialogue, here delivered both by Mamet regulars Ricky Jay and Joe Mantegna and by newcomers like Chiwetel Ejiofor and Emily Mortimer. But how will it mesh with the mixed martial arts scenes? And it remains to be seen how well Mamet will direct the fights themselves — early word is that they're the movie's most glaring flaw. Also, there's the whole Tim Allen thing. Still, it's Mamet, so I'll give it a chance, especially considering how much better Spartan was than it had any right to be.