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Take Five: Van Sant

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 21:30:00 GMT

Gus Van Sant is certainly one of the most curious figures in contemporary American cinema. He pioneered a very specific breed of indie filmmaking before it even had a name, but his forays into mainstream cinema have alternated between clever successes and embarrassing failures. He gives some of the oddest interviews in Hollywood (compared to him, David Lynch is a downright pedestrian chit-chatter), and he's as dedicated to constant reinvention -- or at least refinement -- as anyone in the industry. And his career would seem downright schizophrenic if it weren't so marked by intensely personal qualities; he's done everything from big, Oscar-baiting biopics (such as Milk, his take on the rise and demise of openly gay San Francisco politician Harvey Milk) to small, artsy, improvised tales with almost no commercial potential. He's equally capable of having his characters spout unadulterated Shakespeare and having them say nothing at all for endless minutes of screen time, and make both choices seem perfectly natural. He has a curiously critical eye towards his own work -- that is to say, it's not curious that he is self-critical, but rather it's curious how much he talks like a film critic; many of his longer discussions with journalists have sounded more like a well-informed film critic discussing Gus Van Sant's work than it does a director talking about himself. His stabs at mainstream credibility have yielded decidedly mixed results; his successes have been noteworthy (see below), but his failures, especially flattened-out duds like Finding Forrester and Good Will Hunting, and an utterly pointless remake of Psycho, have been spectacular. Through it all, he's remained one of the film industry's hardest men to figure out, but it seems no one ever tires of watching what his next move will be. Here's five of our favorites by the Prince of Portland.

MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO (1991)

Mala Noche was the movie that made the underground sit up and take notice of Gus Van Sant's talent; Drugstore Cowboy won over the burgeoning indie world and made him a critic's darling. But the daring, explosively risky My Own Private Idaho was the movie that convinced me that I was seeing the work of an American genius in the making. The story of two sad, sincere male hustlers (played by River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves), it blended elements of Shakespearean drama, class warfare, transgressive queen cinema, and pure street poetry in a way that so clearly shouldn't have worked that it's downright amazing how well it did. Van Sant crammed the movie with real characters from his beloved Portland and made an intensely personal film that nonetheless hit everyone who saw it right where they lived.

TO DIE FOR (1995)

Gus Van Sant's first stab at commercial credibility was Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, which, despite a plethora of good intentions, was his first major dud. In fact, its ineptness in spite of itself might be noted as a pattern that the director would follow in much of his mainstream work, if it wasn't for the existence of his follow-up film, To Die For. Working from Buck Henry's sharpest, nastiest script in decades, Van Sant directs a movie that almost invisibly echoes some of the themes of his previous work, especially in those scenes featuring lovestruck, dimwitted local teen Joaquin Phoenix and his crew. Van Sant rarely overreaches, and manages to let the black comedic tone of the script do its work; his greatest accomplishment is to get a truly memorable performance out of Nicole Kidman, who's better here than she would be again for some time.

GERRY (2002)

In 2002, Van Sant was on the tail end of a bad time. Hollywood hadn't been good to him over the previous half-decade, but to be fair, he hadn't been very good to it, either, with Good Will Hunting, Psycho and Finding Forrester gunking up his resume. Returning to his strange interiors for another shot at indie filmmaking, he released the first of his "Death Trilogy", the underrated Gerry, and a lot of critics were ready to call it his fourth disaster in a row: it's static to the point of tedium, its improvised dialogue (by two actors not especially beloved by highbrow reviewers) was sometimes silly and sometimes impenetrable, and it had nothing resembling a plot. But Gerry was a quiet triumph, a movie that builds almost unnoticably and marks a return to greatness by a director who can do very much with very little.

ELEPHANT (2003)

Van Sant followed up the surprising and effective Gerry with the triumphant Elephant, the best film of 2003. The second of his death trilogy takes an almost transcendently naturalistic look at a small high school on the day of a Columbine-style murder spree; the dialogue, again largely improvised, and the endless, unintrusive tracking shots make Elephant a brilliant contradiction: a movie so banal that it's almost mystical. Through the whole event, from boring ordinariness to life-shattering violence, Van Sant's particular genius is to steadfastly refuse to lead the viewers to anything resembling an explanation for the horror. Forcing us to view everything from the eyes of those who don't understand why they have to die, Elephant reflects our own maddening desire to have random violence made explicable -- and the world's refusal to comply.

PARANOID PARK (2007)

A strangely stirring and deeply affecting film, 2007's Paranoid Park -- based largely on a successful young adult novel -- finds Gus Van Sant returning to Portland and making a key transition from the relentlessly bleak indie sensibilities of the Death Trilogy to the artsy mainstream appeal of Milk. Once again trusting an amateur cast (many of whom were recruited off of MySpace) and a good deal of improvised dialogue to carry the tone of the film, Van Sant also lays in a heavy, dark directorial touch that nails the mood of the story perfectly. He's greatly aided in this attempt by the gorgeous cinematography by Wong Kar-Wai's cameraman, Christopher Doyle, and the Zoo-York-clad Gabe Nevins as the affectless skateboarding protagonist. Paranoid Park is a perfect bridge between To Die For and Elephant.

Related Posts:

Screengrab Review: Milk

Gus Van Sant and Paranoid Park: 'It's the End of a Certain Way I Was Making Films'

The Gay Pride Top Twenty (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 20:00:00 GMT

It’s Gay Pride Month, the 10th Annual Provincetown Film Festival kicks off this weekend and George “Mr. Sulu” Takei and Ellen DeGeneres are getting married (though not to each other, of course) in California (hooray California! And what’s taking you so long, New York and Vermont and Washington and Hawaii and Illinois and...y’know, all the rest of the country?)...

...so, anyway, to help celebrate, we here at the Screengrab thought it would be a good time to salute some of the highpoints in gay (and lesbian and bisexual and transgender) cinema with our very own rainbow collection of Queer Nation classics (not that there’s anything wrong with that)!

ANGELS IN AMERICA (2003)

"Hey, wait just a cotton-pickin' minute!" the purists among you may cry. “I thought this was a list of Gay Pride films, not TV shows!” Well, for starters, Mike Nichols’ all-star, six-hour, multiple Emmy and Golden Globe winning adaptation of Tony Kushner’s Tony and Pulitzer Prize winning rumination on homosexuality, homophobia and the better angels of human nature wasn’t TV...it was HBO. But more importantly, in a media landscape of generally low ambitions, lowered expectations and lowest common denominator multiplex landfill, it’s hard to ignore a six-hour celluloid phantasmagoria of staggering audacity, master class filmmaking, sharp dialogue, potent visuals, timely thematic resonance and knockout performances (including a multi-tasking Meryl Streep, future Weeds costars Justin Kirk and Mary-Louise Parker, Jeffrey Wright, Patrick Wilson, Emma Thompson, James Cromwell, Ben Shenkman and Al Pacino, using his late-career bluster to good effect as prototypical self-hating conservative closet case Roy Cohn). Sure, it gets a little silly sometimes, but who would've thought a movie about the AIDS pandemic (as depicted through intertwining tales of two infected men haunted by ghosts and other celestial messengers) would find time for so much humor, imagination and hope...and, as opposed to, say, a certain lengthy, operatic, sometimes silly (but Oscar-winning) big-screen multi-part epic about heroic bravery in the face of faceless evil, lethal apathy and looming death, the cultural and political battles depicted in Angels in America are no fantasy, and continue to rage on and on and on...

HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH (2001)

The most original film musical of the decade began as a drag act at Squeezebox!, a weekly gay performance event in mid-90s New York City. Performer and creator John Cameron Mitchell based his iconic character Hedwig on details from his own life: his childhood in East Berlin, his idenitification with queer rock stars, his struggles with being the gay son of a military general. The crux of Hedwig's character is both a fiction and a metaphorical truth: she is the victim of a botched sex change operation, leaving her a little bit male and a little bit female. Fueled by the anti-showtunes of Stephen Trask and Mitchell's gender-bending charisma, the film Hedwig and the Angry Inch is a glam-rock spirit quest: Hedwig begins as a self-loathing wannabe rock star looking to complete herself through sex, and by the end of the story, she is walking naked into the world, stripped of makeup and bitterness, finally learning to love herself. If that's not pride, then what is?

FAR FROM HEAVEN (2002)

Though he’d established himself since Poison, his first major feature, as the most talented director to come out of the so-called ‘New Queer Cinema’ movement of the 1990s, it wasn’t until Far From Heaven that Todd Haynes' talents were recognized by the mainstream media. His previous films had been too controversial, too oblique, too postmodern; but with this 1950s period piece, Haynes finally gained widespread acceptance and, with it, four Oscar nominations. Ironically for one of the most original filmmakers in Hollywood, the movie that gained him this recognition was a pure throwback. With its high melodrama, ginger treatment of interracial relations, and gorgeous color palette, it was unmistakably reminiscent of the films of the melodrama king of the fifties, Douglas Sirk; and with its highly stylized acting, uncomfortable emotional weight and unapologetic addressing of gay sexual desire, it likewise conjured the films of Sirk’s most famous devotee, Ranier Werner Fassbinder. In a way that blends the fantastic, romantic sensibilities of Sirk and the gritty, rich realism of Fassbinder – and with a freedom to frankly address issues of racism and homosexuality that were denied to them both – Haynes manages to make a film that’s both moving and incredibly frustrating. Always able to coax winning performances out of his actors, he also gets Dennis Quaid to deliver an exceptionally sensitive performance in a role where both understatement and overreaching could have been a disaster.

MY BEAUTIFUL LAUNDRETTE (1985)

For obvious reasons, European cinema was several decades ahead of the curve when it came to addressing homosexuality (or, for that matter, any sexuality) on screen. It’s impossible to even conceive of an American film in 1985 – let alone one with the relative high profile of Stephen Frears’ My Beautiful Laundrette – being as frank, and as frankly erotic, about a gay couple. Like Far From Heaven, it succeeded largely by not making its focus too narrow; the story of young Pakistani Omar and his white lover, a former skinhead played with verve by a young Daniel Day Lewis, is made especially lively and vital by placing it within the context of a broader story of the British immigrant experience at the peak of Thatcherism. Deftly blending issues of race, class, culture and economics with a star-crossed romance, My Beautiful Laundrette owes much to a top-shelf script by Hanif Kureishi; but what shouldn’t be overlooked is its intensely erotic scenes, which were among the first in mainstream film to illustrate that gay sex on the big screen could pack as much power as its heterosexual counterpart. Gordon Warnecke as Omar is a real find in his big screen debut, and Daniel Day Lewis, in only his third film, already shows signs of being the titanic actor he would eventually become.

MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO (1991)

Gus van Sant has always specialized, at least in his personal films (that he finances with tripe like the Psycho remake and Good Will Hunting), in convincingly portraying the sad, proud lives of lowlifes, drifters and people with no real home to go to, whether by choice or by circumstance. He also has a particular talent for showing us characters who desperately need the love of someone, but who are none too wise in selecting who that someone should be. Those two themes come together with audacity and depth in My Own Private Idaho, the story of two hustlers – the poverty-stricken, vulnerable, narcoleptic Mike Waters (played by the late River Phoenix) and the slumming, proud, arrogant Scott Favor (played by Keanu Reeves who, God bless him, at least seems to be trying). For a movie so charged with homosexual love, it’s strangely lacking in sex, and not in the self-denying, passionless way that’s required from most gay characters on the big screen: rather, sex for the two of them is a largely joyless professional operation reserved for the making of money or the killing of time. This doesn’t mean they don’t need love, though, and therein lies the movie’s great tragedy: Mike wants the love of only Steve, and Steve wants the love of only his estranged, wealthy father. All of this plays out with an aesthetic derived not from Warhol’s cool surface gayness, or Fassbinder’s melodramatic near-camp: it’s given a thick sheen of the classics, drawing directly from Shakespeare. This can be both its damnation (several of the openly Shakespearian scenes come across as contrived and hokey) and its salvation (framing the entire struggle in the trappings of real tragedy gives it dramatic depth and resonance it might otherwise lack), but it’s a movie that certainly can’t be faulted for its ambition, and whatever its flaws, it’s a worthy step forward in the mainstreaming of gay characters in American cinema.

Click here for Part Two, Part Three and Part Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Gwynne Watkins, Leonard Pierce

The Top Ten Uncompleted Movies, Part 1

Phil Nugent — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 20:00:00 GMT

The sad death of Heath Ledger caused speculation that the film he had been shooting, Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, might be in jeopardy. This isn't the first time that the loss of a principle cast member has threatened to shut down a movie. Witness the battle Doug Trumbull had to fight to keep Brainstorm from being written off when Natalie Wood died. Of course, there are various movies that had not been finished for one reason or another, some through accidents and others to a simple lack of interest. What follows is a list of 10 of the more promising or at least potentially interesting films that were not released in their intended form for one reason or another.

--Faisal A. Qureshi

DARK BLOOD

River Phoenix's death in October 1993 led to the complete shutdown of George Sluzier's film. Already a troubled production, with reports of tension between Judy Davis and Phoenix, the film only had 11 days of shooting left before tragedy struck. The British company Palace Pictures, which was funding the production, decided that the film couldn't be salvaged. Even though Jim Barton's script received a postive reception when it was given a read through by the Script Factory, there have been no takers for trying to re-shoot or complete the picture.

THE MAN WHO SHOT DON QUIXOTE

Terry Gilliam's first experience of getting a film written off was luckily recorded in a documentary, Lost in La Mancha, shot by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe. After one week of shooting, Jean Rochefort, injured himself while getting on a horse, flew back to France and received doctor's orders to never ride again. There are rumours that Jeremy Thomas would take over the project and re-start production with Johnny Depp still attached, but until then all we have are rushes of Depp berating a fish.

I, CLAUDIUS

The 1976 BBC Adaptation of Robert Graves I, Claudius has been hailed as one of the greatest works of British TV drama. Forty years earlier, however, Alexander Korda tried producing a feature adaptation of the book starring Charles Laughton as Claudius and Merle Oberon as the nymphomaical Messalina, with Josef Von Sternberg directing. Unfortunately, Merle Oberon suffered an accident that resulted in the abandoning of filming. Luckily, the footage that had been completed survived and was later the center piece of the excellent BBC Documentary, The Epic That Never Was, which was itself released to film theaters.

ORSON WELLES'S DON QUIXOTE

Orson Welles had worked on Don Quixote for years, going through various scripts and cast changes, and shooting in Mexico and Spain. Financed out of his own pocket, Welles started shooting in 1955 just after he was kicked off the editing of Touch of Evil, and carried on until the death of his Sancho Panza, Akim Tamiroff. Strangely enough, the job of assembling the surviving footage into something coherent was given to Spanish exploitation filmmaker Jesus Franco, who had been Welles's first assistant director during some of the shooting. Reviled when it premiered in Cannes, it leaves one hoping that someday there will be another attempt to "complete" the job by someone with more artistry and closer to Welles's own wavelength than a second-rate horror hack.

SOMETHING'S GOT TO GIVE

Marilyn Monroe's final film, which was shelved after her death. On paper it looked great, with George Cukor directing and a cast that included Phil Silvers and Dean Martin. The story, a remake of the 1940 My Favorite Wife (which was itself derived from Tennyson's "Enoch Arden") involved a husband who has his wife declared dead after she's been missing for five years, only for her to turn up when he's getting re-married. Unfortunately Monroe's inability to come in to shoot her scenes (she was apparently off 17 days out of 30 of the duration of the production) and with Fox hemorraging money from the even more expensive, Cleopatra, decided to sack the actress and re-organise the production. Unfortunately, Monroe's death killed the project altogether, and it wasn't until 1999 that Fox allowed the release of 39 minutes of footage shot for the film to celebrate Monroe's 75th birthday. (My Favorite Wife was ultimately remade as Move Over, Darling, with Doris Day and James Garner.)

--Phil Nugent, Faisal A. Qureshi

Click here for Part 2.

Our 11 Favorite Romantic Moments in the Movies, Part 1

Phil Nugent — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 21:30:00 GMT

First things first: before you all start sending in your complaints, take a look at the headline there. It's not "The Best Romantic Moments" or "The Most Classic Romantic Moments", and the American Film Institute was not consulted in the making of this list. These are our favorite romantic moments, chosen by us, the good people of the Screengrab. Romance is a very big part of what makes movies so central to our imaginative lives, and what strikes a person as deeply romantic is about as personal as responses get. Here are a few moments that got to us. Happy Valentine's Day.

OUT OF SIGHT (1998)

You have to figure that this movie would have a special place in the heart of any movie geek: the hero and heroine first detect a spark between them while talking about movies. The fact that they're having that conversation while holed up in the trunk of a car after one of them has taken the other hostage in the course of a prison break...well, let's call that the "meet cute", an essential part of any story that you look forward to telling the grandchildren someday. That scene lights the fuse that spreads out into a smooth hot glow in this scene, the one where George Clooney officially became a movie star and the repository of our best fantasy hopes on the big screen. As for Jennifer Lopez, well, let's just say that if she had retired from the screen to enter a nunnery or marry the Prince of Monaco immediately after shooting this movie, we'd still be driving ourselves crazy wondering what we'd all missed out on.

BLUE VELVET (1986)

Some believe that David Lynch's greatest movie is so deeply encased in something called "irony" that it is devoid of true feeling and honest emotion. These worthies must have been on an extended jujubee break in the lobby during the dance scene, with Kyle MacLachlan and Laura Dern trancing out to the unearthly sound of Julee Cruise performing the Lynch-Angelo Badalamenti song "Mysteries of Love." If anything, Lynch's Pop distancing makes it possible for the viewer to appreciate how ridiculous romantic love can seem to the observer, and also to recognize how little that matters in relation to the way it make you feel. Or as that great romantic poet Jerry Lee Lewis once put it, "I laughed at love 'cause I thought it was funny. You came along and you moved me, honey..."

TRULY, MADLY, DEEPLY (1991)

Juliet Stevenson was happy before the movie started, because she was with Alan Rickman, but then he went and died on her, and she became just miserable. It got so bad that Alan Rickman had to come back to comfort her, and she was happy again for a while, but then she got confused because she met another guy who, though perhaps not measuring up to Alan Rickman in many respects, did have the clear home-field advantage of still being alive, and so Alan Rickman, who is sensitive about these things, finally told her that he thought he'd better leave, because he was prepared to put what was best for her first, and it would probably be better for her to get back to having close relationships with living people. All in all, you should maybe just watch the clip: they explain it a lot better than we do.

MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO (1991)

Mike (River Phoenix) is a no-account hustler. He's a narcoleptic, unable even to control whether he stays conscious. He's got nobody, no home, and in all likelihood, not much future beyond the point at which the movie stops. But he is a romantic hero, because he loves unconditionally, asking only that the undeserving object of his love treat him with a little respect when he has to ask him a direct question: "What am I to you?"

McCABE & MRS. MILLER (1971)

Love does a job on people. Consider the case of John McCabe (Warren Beatty), frontier enterpeneur in partnership with the whore and brothel keeper Mrs. Miller (Julie Christie), who has the misfortune to be in love with a woman who he brought to the territory in order to profit from her selling herself to any client ambitious enough to get into bed with her. Believing that "If a man is fool enough to get into business with a woman, she ain't going to think much of him" and lamenting that all his association with Mrs. Miller has "cost me so far is money and pain," McCabe retreats to his room and, alone, rages at the woman he feels doesn't see him: “I got poetry in me. I do! I got poetry in me. But I ain’t gonna put it down on paper. I ain’t no educated man. I got sense enough not to try.” Delivered by one of the sexiest male movie stars of his generation, the speech may in fact be one of the most poetic of all depictions in movies of the ability of romantic frustration to make any of us feel pathetically inarticulate.

LA JETÉE (1962)

It is often said of people in love that the world only seems to exist, that things only seem to come to life, when they are with the people they love. In experimental filmmaker Chris Marker’s brilliant, haunting narrative masterpiece La Jetée, that notion is made visually explicit, in one of the most memorable sequences in all of film history. It’s a moment of delicate beauty that manages to be not only an iconic piece of filmmaking but a moment of breathtaking tenderness and romance, as well. The film (upon which Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys was based) is in fact a series of still photographs, telling the story of a world devastated by nuclear warfare, and the attempt of a group of survivors to travel back in time searching for an answer, any answer, to their dire predicament. The man that is chosen as the time traveler, played by Davos Hanich, is haunted by a vague visual memory that will assume grave importance when he arrives in the present day, but through it all, the story is told only through a compelling voice-over narration and Marker’s exquisitely paced still photographs. Except for one moment. In the latter half of the film, Hanich gazes down at the face of the woman he loves (played by the beautiful Hélène Chatelain) and, almost imperceptibly at first, and then clearly like breaking through water, her face begins to move, and she blinks, in the movie’s only filmed sequence. It’s not only a tremendously effective piece of direction, but one of the most moving, romantic moments in cinema.

— Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

Click here for Part 2.

That Guy!: Udo Kier

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 20:15:00 GMT

After months of doing this feature, we started to wonder: are we being Europhobic? Are our America-centric viewing habits getting the best of us? Are countless Frenchmen, Germans, and Italians snubbing our film blog because of our unwillingness to feature beloved character actors from the Continent in That Guy!? Well, that ends today. For today we feature, as the lead singer of Korn gracefully put it, "the man with the fucked-up eyes": Mr. Udo Kier. Wherever he goes, Udo (as is befitting a man named Udo) is a candidate for the strangest man in the country. He has played a vampire or a zombie at least a dozen times, and he is likely the only actor in the history of the world to have appeared in films by Gus van Sant, Ranier Werner Fassbinder, Lars von Trier, Andy Warhol, and Rob Zombie. Resembling nothing so much as a Helmut Newton photograph come to some semblance of three-dimensional life, Udo Kier -- who was born in Germany and almost died hours later when Allied bombers pulverized the hospital in which he was born -- cannot rightly be called a character actor so much as he can a cult actor. Whether he's going to be a leader or a member of that cult depends on the role. Truth be told, Udo isn't even one of the finer actors we've featured in this space; his presence in a film isn't so much a promise of a gripping performance to come as it is a dire warning that something very, very fucked up is about to happen. He's appeared in a staggering number of films -- as many as 150 at last count -- and it is putting it extremely mildly to say that they range greatly in quality. He was in Berlin Alexanderplatz; he was also in Spermula, a movie that we assure you we are not making up. He was in Dogville; he was also in Barb Wire. He has worked with some of the most talented American and European directors of the last half-century; he also put on a spanking costume and posed in Madonna's "Sex" book, and smeared fresh animal offal over his face at the behest of Paul Morrisey. What will he do next? Believe us when we say that a man who has been directed by both Quentin Tarantino and Uwe Boll within the last year is capable of anything.

Where to see Udo Kier at his best:

ANDY WARHOL'S DRACULA (1974)

Nowadays, Udo's reputation as an actor hinges largely on showing up on set and, when someone points a camera at him, very quietly acting like a creepy weirdo who manages to freak you out just by standing there. Back in his early days, though, it hinged on getting in front of the camera and acting like a complete and utter lunatic, as he does in this campy, ridiculous, so-bad-it's-horrible Paul Morrissey production (the only thing Andy Warhol did for the movie was write a check). Listen to him intone "The blood of these whores is killing me!" and you'll begin to understand why Udo Kier, in the first of his many vampire roles, is a very odd person.

MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO (1991)

As he often does when left to his own devices, Udo, like some sort of exotic species of spider crawling across your dinner plate, practically steals the show out from under such powerhouse hitters as River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves by doing little more than showing up. In Gus van Sant's daring modern-day quasi-Shakespearean drama of narcoleptic hustlers, Udo turns up essentially playing himself, a Euro-trash hustler who tools around town with his eyes bugging out and making bizarre things happen. Udo doesn't even really have to act here: he just appears on screen and the whole audience starts having a spasm.

SHADOW OF THE VAMPIRE (2000)

Udo Kier, as previously mentioned, has spent an awful lot of time portraying vampires, for reasons known only to himself and probably best kept that way. In Elias Merhige's inventive retelling of the filming of F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu, Kier goes against type and actually plays off of the undead rather than playing them. Seeming to conjure up a bizarre mix of Renfield and Gollum with a hefty dose of nitrous poppers thrown in for an extra frisson, Udo actually manages in a minor role to throw in some acting chops the likes of which we hadn't seen since Europa, just to prove he could do it.

Take Five: Movies With Lyrics

Peter Smith — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 19:00:00 GMT

Danish director Susanne Bier’s new film, Things We Lost in the Fire, is already generating a tremendous amount of indie hype. If the buzz manages to survive this opening weekend, it may result in the words "Oscar" and "Halle Berry" being mentioned without the words "fluke" or "Catwoman" appearing in the same sentence. The quiet family drama’s name may seem pretty arcane to people who aren’t as into indie rock as they are indie film – the title is drawn from an outstanding 2001 album by Duluth slowcore band Low. As more and more directors who grew up on a diet of punk, alternative and indie rock start making films, we’re likely to see more such abstractions; but while we wait for a generation raised on post-hardcore to grow up, here’s a few films from the past with musical names.

SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL (1968)

Filmed simultaneously with the Rolling Stones' recording of the song of the same name – indeed, footage of the Stones putting down tracks for the single are featured in the film – this was one of the first movies to use a rock song as its title. Jean-Luc Godard’s documentary/agitprop/drama/black comedy/whatever is a typically brilliant, typically frustrating film, very much in keeping with his work of the era. And, like the song, the film seems to be nothing so much as an admission that the end of the Sixties were a chaotic, turbulent vortex that owed as much to the hand of Satan as they did the peace-and-love generation.

MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO (1991)

Gus Van Sant’s disorienting, dazzling, neo-Shakespearian drama about the lives of two gay hustlers (Keanu Reeves and the late River Phoenix) was a major step forward in the director’s postmodernist sensibility. Crammed with classical allusions, stunt casting, surrealism and shattered (or at least badly bruised) fourth walls, its determination to blend the sophisticated and the trashy was an appropriate tribute to the junk-culture leanings of the B-52s. "Private Idaho", a track off their 1980 sophomore effort Wild Planet, lent the movie its name more than a decade later. It’s a pretty good match, too – try dancing to the song’s frenetic rhythms during some of the movie’s more depressing moments.

THINGS TO DO IN DENVER WHEN YOU’RE DEAD (1995)

Unfairly slammed as a third-rate Tarantino knockoff for no better reason than its unfortunately timed release date, this intricate, too-clever-for-its-own-good heist thriller from director Gary Fleder is really more of a second-rate film noir that somehow got made fifty years too late. Still, maybe it deserved some of the bad reputation that got it lost among a raft of hip, violent thrillers – while it drew its name from an evocative, hilarious song off of the late Warren Zevon’s 1991 album Learning to Flinch, the filmmakers (no doubt aware that you can’t copyright a title, even one as distinctive as this) neither sought not received Zevon’s permission in using the name.

BOYS DON’T CRY (1999)

The movie that put Hilary Swank (and, to a lesser degree, Chloe Sevigny) on the map was also the first major Hollywood release to treat transgender people as anything but a punch line. The story of Brandon Teena, who lived most of his life as a male before being beaten to death by friends after they discovered he was biologically female, set the tone for a spate of indie films about homosexuality and gender issues. Its deeply ironic name was drawn from a 1980 single by the Cure, taken from their debut album of the same name, but the version featured in the movie itself is a far inferior cover. Seek out the original, one of the strongest the band put out before becoming a self-caricature.

MAN ON THE MOON (1999)

It’s no coincidence that Milos Forman’s biopic of experimental comedian Andy Kaufman drew its name from the 1992 R.E.M. song of the same name (from their Automatic for the People album). The song is itself a worshipful tribute to the comic, featuring references to his most famous routines and a chorus where singer Michael Stipe imitates Kaufman imitating Elvis. What’s more interesting is that this may be one of the few times where the video for the original song is far superior to the movie the song inspired – the inventive Peter Care-directed video is much more memorable than the somewhat stodgy and predictable film by Forman.

— Leonard Pierce