The Screengrab : roman polanski

Th-Th-That's All Folks! The Best & Worst Endings Of All Time! (Part Seven)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 28 May 2009 23:00:00 GMT

SOME LIKE IT HOT (1959)

Sometimes, bringing a movie to a transcendent stop just comes down to the right sign-off line. Take it away, Joe E... (PN)

RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY (1962)

You might think we're double dipping here, since this same scene wound up on our list of great deaths scenes last week, but fuck it: Babe Ruth was a great hitter and a great pitcher. And when Joel McCrea, having taken what satisfaction he can from making the world a few louts shorter and knowing that his old pard (Randolph Scott) has had his trustworthiness restored to him, sinks to the bottom of the frame, and out of our world, it's a better than fitting end to both the character and the movie. Later Peckinpah films would end memorably and well, but never again would he get such a massive emotional effect so quietly. (PN)

YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN (1974)

The kind of unstructured crazy comedy that Mel Brooks (and, back then, Woody Allen) practiced in the '70s tended to collapse when time came to give the movies some kind of wrap-up. His collaboration with Gene Wilder is the best-sustained -- maybe the only sustained -- movie of Brooks' career, and part of what makes it satisfying is that he actually managed to provide a logical, happy ending that develops from the story instead of crashing through the rafters. You've got to be glad for these crazy kids. (PN)

CHINATOWN (1974)

Forget it, Jake. What did you do in Chinatown? As little as possible. One of cinema's best indictments of the corruption of power, Chinatown pulls no punches. No movie has better illustrated the brutal correlation between money and water rights in the arid climates of the Southwestern U.S., nor been quite so willing to show how the stewards of the public interest debase themselves acting as lackeys to the wealthy and powerful. This is exactly what American exceptionalism is trying to cover up, but the truth is that hiding something rotten only adds to the stench and decay. It takes a European eye, but not just any European eye, to see through the high gloss of rhetoric covering the post-War growth of the U.S. No, to get it right, you'd need a very particular European: one who had lived in the U.S. for a number of years, a person who lost his mother to Auschwitz and who himself spent his childhood surviving by wits alone while ducking Nazis and Nazi informers, a man who lost his wife, unborn child, and a bunch of his friends to the uniquely American Manson Family. That's the guy to look his audience in the eye and tell them that their cynical gumshoe is going to lose everything through his faith in the system, the monstrous Noah Cross is going to get away with rape, murder, and incest, and the femme fatale with the heart of gold is going to die for their sins. Forget it, he says, we're all in the dark, and no one knows if sticking their neck out makes things better or worse. I usually find nihilism appalling, but I'll be damned if Chinatown isn't a much-needed slap in the face. Where your run-of-the-mill misanthropes like Todd Solondz never got over being bullied in 7th grade, Polanski offers concrete reasons to assume the worst about people, especially when power and money are involved. It leaves you with a sour taste in the mouth and a queasy gut, but it leaves you wiser, too. (HC)

THE LONG GOODBYE (1973)

TERRY LENNOX: Nobody cares.

PHILIP MARLOWE: Nobody but me.

LENNOX: Yeah, well, that's you, Marlowe. And you're a born loser.

MARLOWE: Yeah; I even lost my cat.

[Reaches for his gun...]

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven & Twelve

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Hayden Childs

In Other Blogs: New Yorker State of Mind

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 16:00:00 GMT

As Phil Nugent reported here earlier this week, the venerable New Yorker Films “has ceased operations” and its catalogue of foreign and art house fare is set for auction. At Beyond the Multiplex, Andrew O’Hehir speculates about a potential landing spot for the treasure trove of classic films. “In a broader sense, New Yorker's long-term willingness to defy the marketplace realities of American film distribution never seemed like a sustainable business model. While the films listed above attracted at least some American viewers, New Yorker was worshiped in cinephile circles precisely because it often took on difficult and adventurous cinema that was destined to find almost no audience. Sometimes Talbot and Lopez seemed to be running an educational foundation under the guise of a for-profit business….New Yorker's library would have obvious appeal to "an online distributor, a TV network or a DVD company," Werner continues. Given that IFC is at least two and potentially all three of those things, and in recent years has assumed a commanding position in the distribution of foreign-language and American independent films, it might be the most logical potential bidder.”

At Some Came Running, Glen Kenny celebrates a new DVD release of Vanishing Point (which includes the UK version of the picture, containing an excised scene with Charlotte Rampling) by interviewing director Richard Sarafian. “At first I balked at Barry Newman being the star, ‘cause I had other possibilities and I felt…all I wanted was the adult male that looked like he belonged behind the wheel. And I had several major actors in mind that might have made a difference. It didn't turn out that way. It came back to me that either I use Barry Newman or Zanuck wasn't going to make the picture. I said, ‘Well, Mr. Zanuck, I'm going to make the car the star.’ And he said, ‘I knew you'd see it my way.’”

Spoutblog’s Karina Longworth revisits Eagle Pennell's The Whole Shootin’ Match. “It’s possible that this is just that time of year and I have SXSW on the brain, but when I watched The Whole Shootin’ Match a few days ago, more than seeing the film as a love/hate letter to the bottle, more than spotting its shared DNA with various films by Richard Linklater and Andrew Bujalski (and, to a lesser extent, Wes Anderson and Gus Van Sant), I saw it as a catalyst for a conversation about Austin’s evolving film cultural history…What interests me most about the ‘regional’ issue is that although Austin has become a place where independent filmmakers from all over the country — including LA and New York — come to show work, ironically, Austin’s past and present identity as a film town often gets lost in that process and excluded from the conversation.”

Roger Ebert hunts The Snark. “When Joaquin Phoenix appears on the Letterman program and behaves as a semi-catatonic weirdo, for example, he is instantly made the butt of imitators on the Indie Spirits and the Oscars, and the snarky presumption is that he is now a laughable buffoon. All memories of his splendid acting career are erased. He is past his sell-by date. The actor from Gladiator and Walk the Line, twice nominated for an Oscar, is now ridiculed on the Academy stage. Let's take him as a case study. When Phoenix was satirized on the Indie Spirits, I doubted anything on the Oscarcast was likely to equal it. The next day I wrote that the Oscar had proven me wrong. There was no hint that I objected to the portrayals. Those second thoughts arrived only belatedly, along with the reflection that if Phoenix really was ‘nutzoid,’ the segments were in poor taste. But nutzoid itself is snarkspeak, and I should have written ‘mentally ill,’ not to be Politically Correct, but simply to be decent.”

Finally, this week’s List-o-Mania comes from Den of Geek, which looks at the Top 50 Movie Special Effects Shots, including “the party crashers revealed” from The Fearless Vampire Killers. “Sometimes the oldest trick in the book is all you need. Thus reasoned Roman Polanski when his vampire-movie spoof required that the 'infiltrators' at a vampire ball be revealed as the only reflections in the ballroom mirror. Of course, the 'reflections' are out-of-focus doubles trying to 'mirror' principals Jack MacGowran, Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate, but once something works, anything more is pointless.”

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 23:00:00 GMT

HARVEY & JACK, MILK (2008)

Most every straight guy I know has tangled at some point with the Sexy Crazy Girl (y’know, the one that stole your wallet and set your bathroom on fire but looked so damn good in that little plaid miniskirt), and most straight girls have their horror stories about that Hot But Psycho Bad Boy all their friends warned them about, to no avail. From Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction and Leslie Mann in The 40 Year Old Virgin to Brad Pitt in Thelma & Louise and Mark Wahlberg in Fear, Sexy Crazy Girls and Hot But Psycho Bad Boys have been well-represented in mainstream cinema over the years. And while independent films (not to mention six seasons of The L Word) have provided numerous rainbow-flavored versions of the aforementioned archetypes, the gay characters depicted in most Hollywood films are usually too sexless and/or noble to fall into the sorts of messy romantic entanglements that pit brains and common sense against libido, heart and instinct. Gus Van Sant’s Milk, of course, was a recent and notable exception, dramatizing not only Harvey Milk’s heroic struggle for gay rights, but also the concrete realities of the complicated human relationships beneath all the abstract rhetoric. Like Hillary and Julia Goodridge, who recently got divorced after helping to pave the way for same-sex marriages in Massachusetts (yeah, MA!), Sean Penn’s Harvey Milk is only human as he fights for human rights. Like any number of hard-working professionals before and since, he has trouble balancing his personal and professional life, and falls into a mid-life crisis affair with Diego Luna’s clingy, troubled good-time-guy Jack Lira. For those who haven’t seen the movie, let’s just say that, in the tradition of countless real world and cinematic Crazy Girl/Bad Boy relationships, it doesn’t end well.

BOBBY & HELEN, THE PANIC IN NEEDLE PARK (1971)

Not giving your characters last names to make them more universal is always generally kind of a cheap trick, but Joan Didion co-wrote this, so I suppose we should just let it go. The Panic In Needle Park outdid Requiem For A Dream by nearly 30 years through a really simple expedient: just show people shooting up in needle close-ups. You don't need the anal dildo or hallucinations then. Bobby (Al Pacino) and Helen (Kitty Winn) don't use at first; he just deals, and she stares adoringly. Then he starts "chipping," she sneaks some while he's sleeping to see what it's all about, and much OD'ing, jail time and bad decision-making ensue. They're a couple who accelerate each others' downward spirals; thanks to one of Pacino's early galvanizing performances (before the ham set in) and Winn's essentially passive, worshipful gaze, it works.

MIMI & OSCAR, BITTER MOON (1992)

Oscar, an older American expat writer meets Mimi, a hot young French girl on a bus in Paris. After the initial meet-cute hot romance ensues. Years later we meet Oscar again, a broken man, as he tells his story to an awkward young Brit (Hugh Grant) on a Mediterreanean cruise. Don't let the presence of Hugh Grant fool you. This is a Polanski flick. The gist is that a man hasn't truly loved a woman unless there were animal masks and water sports invoved and he treated her like shit. Conversly, a lady never really loved a man unless she let him dismantle her self-confidence brick by brick and then took her revenge by putting him in a wheel chair and flaunting her magnificently muscled lover in front of him. Sounds like fun, no?

GEORGE & SHERRY PEARY, THE KILLING (1956)

There may be no film genre richer in sordid, back-stabbing, and generally unrewarding relationships than that of film noir, and they never got nastier than when Marie Windsor, star of Cat Women of the Moon, was in the room. With her heavy lids, bottle-blonde Wilma Flintstone 'do, a nose that she seemed to be looking down at men from even when they were taller than her, and a voice that could make any line sound withering, Windsor was born to nag, and in Stanley Kubrick's classic caper movie, she's partnered with an actor who was such a natural sucker that he first made crime movie history getting sold out by Sidney Greenstreet. Loitering around their apartment, Windsor casually reduces her short hubby to asking why she married him --"You used to love me. You said you did, anyway." -- to which she responds that he hasn't exactly delivered on those promises he made about hitting it big and setting her up in style, adding that she doesn't mind the lack of money so long as she has "a big, strong intelligent brute like you" to be down with. Even Homer Simpson would have trouble missing the sarcasm. The final proof that this marriage cannot be saved comes when she finds out that her husband George is involved in a million dollar racetrack robbery scheme; rather than just wait for him to pull off the heist and show up at home to wave the dough in her face, she just can't resist getting her boy toy -- Vince Edwards, all muscles and smirk -- to oil his own gun and go try to rip off the robbers. Poor George finds out that his lovey-dove has set him up for the last time when he hears Edwards break into the room, look around for him, and ask, "Hey, where's the jerk?"

STEVE BOLANDER & LAURIE HENDERSON, AMERICAN GRAFFITI (1973)

When American Graffiti begins, the plan is for Steve and his buddy (and Laurie's sister) Curt to go off to the East Coast and attend college; this means that his relationship with Laurie will be going long-distance, but not to worry -- Steve has thought about that and proposes to Laurie that they strenghten their bond to each other by seeing other people. This goes down about as well as you could expect. Bad as this is, those of us who actually know people who saw the momentous event of their high school graduation as a cue to marry their first serious dating partner will recognize that the real sign of horror to come arrives when Steve and Laurie take to the dance floor, and she clings to him with such fierce tenacity that his bare back must look as if he'd gone a couple of rounds with Lon Chaney, Jr. She then forces him to recognize the depth of his "true feelings" for her -- defined here as his acquisitive male jealousy -- by flouncing off and landing in Harrison Ford's lap. Come dawn and they're so solidly committed to each other that Steve isn't going away to college anymore, which means that in a few years, he'll have someone handy to blame for the fact that he's stuck in a shitty job in the same podunk town he grew up in, and she can't look at him without thinking about the twenty minutes when she was Indiana Jones' girl.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Vadim Rizov, Sarah Clyne Sundberg, Phil Nugent

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 22:30:00 GMT

BURT & LINDA PUGACH, CRAZY LOVE (2007)

If you never saw this documentary by Dan Klores and Fisher Stevens (or the talk show promotional tour by its subjects prior to its release), here’s the set-up: already-married New York City attorney Burt Pugach had an affair with a younger woman named Linda Riss, and when she broke it off, he contracted goons to blind her by throwing lye in her face. But wait, it gets even more romantic! After serving 14 years in prison for his crime, Pugach hooked up with Riss again, and eventually the two kooky lovebirds got married. Now here’s the depressing part: if you didn’t know their history, the kvetchy, passive-aggressive old couple portrayed in the film's contemporary interview segments could be ANY miserable old couple stuck in the comfortable rut of a relatively loveless marriage. So for all you dudes out there who think passion equals love and all you ladies with a thing for the bad boys, Crazy Love is a grimly humorous corrective.

MAE & JIMMY DOYLE, VIRTUE (1932)

Far from DVD but recently restored in a pristine new print by Sony (it's a start), Virtue is a stellar script by frequent Capra collaborator Robert Riskin with a premise that hasn't dated one bit: if a woman comes to a relationship with way more sexual experience than a man and it makes him insecure, paranoid and jealous, is there any way for him to get over that and save the relationship? Mae (Carole Lombard) is a former streetwalker who falls in love with cabdriver Jimmy Doyle (Pat O'Brien) while working behind the drivers' lunch-counter; Doyle's a tough-talking he-man woman-hater, but Mae wins him over. When they get back from their honeymoon day at Coney Island, the cops are there to arrest her for coming back to NYC after her last arrest; Jimmy vouches for her, but after the cops leave, the real test begins. Jimmy's ridiculously suspicious and obviously the walking wounded, his pride and suspicion a relationship toxin. Unfortunately, there's only so far a Pre-Code movie can go, and rather than having Jimmy and Mae work their problems out in open dialogue, Riskin has to resort to a tricksy but stupid melodramatic murder plot to clear the air. Still, Virtue is superior to, say, Chasing Amy, because being a former streetwalker is a much better metaphor for sexual inequality in a relationship than converting a freakin' lesbian. I mean c'mon. There's no clips online, so enjoy the creepy home footage above of Lombard and Clark Gable doing nothing much in particular.

ANN DARROW & KONG, KING KONG (1933)

When Peter Jackson remade Kong, he beefed up the sympathetic vibes between ape and woman, even including an Edward Scissorhands-ish ice-rink moment at the end; it wasn't beauty killed the beast, but society. Not the case in the original, where a shrieking Fay Wray doesn't realize (as someone once pointed out, and I can't remember how) that Kong is, all things considered, far from the worst thing that could happen to her: he keeps her safe on the island and would never, ever drop her from the Empire State Building. But no: she shrills and is generally totally ungrateful. Naomi Watts and Kong are actually kind of a cute couple; Wray and Kong, forget about it. Someone thought the archaic and perfectly-preserved, unreconstructed attitudes of the original weren't enlightening enough and edited a really bad "modern trailer" for it; it's above.

ALGY LONGWORTH & GWEN, BULLDOG DRUMMOND STRIKES BACK (1934)

An immensely amusing movie 20th Century Fox apparently never bought the permanent rights to the source material for — hence insanely hard to see — Bulldog Drummond is embodied for an encore by Ronald Colman, who'd already embodied H.C. 'Sapper' McNeile's emblem of British charm and resourcefulness in 1929. But his companion Algy was being played by Charles Butterworth for the first time. As the movie opens, it's Algy's wedding day to Gwen (Una Merkel), but their honeymoon night keeps getting interrupted by Bulldog's murder investigations and tanglings with generic sinister Oriental Prince Achmed (Warner Oland). Bulldog seems like a man of the world (because he's been out of Britain), but everyone else is asexual and stiff-upper-lip; Algy seems either fatalistically resigned to his wedding night being interrupted or actively looking for excuses to get out of it. (His bride is American, hence presumably experienced, which implicitly adds to the panic.) His final line at the film's final interruption — the relationship is never so much as close to consummation — is astonishing: "Perhaps you and I will be happy in our Platonic little way." They're the most sexually trapped married couple ever.

ED & LOU AVERY, BIGGER THAN LIFE (1956)

The mismatch between Ed (James Mason) and Lou Avery (Barbara Rush) is a geographical one set up in casting: even if you don't know that Mason's British (and not terribly good at concealing his accent) and Rush is a corn-fed Coloradan, you can sense a mismatch from the opening moments, when Ed announces everyone they had over for their suburban party was "dull" and failed to say anything witty, surprising or interesting. When Ed starts binging on cortisone and turns into a raving psychotic with delusions of grandeur, it merely confirms that there's no way he should be in the same suburban house as the rest of America. He needs to get back to where he belongs. Nicholas Ray's movie was a flop when it came out, and now it's a kind of overrated cult classic, but it's still compellingly sardonic stuff.

DAVE HIRSH & GINNIE MOOREHEAD, SOME CAME RUNNING (1958)

When Dave Hirsh (Frank Sinatra) wakes up on a bus back in his hometown, he's got a wicked hangover and a girl he doesn't remember having picked up, Ginnie Moorehead (Shirley MacLaine). He sends her packing, but she keeps hanging around, and eventually they're a couple, out of intertia as much as anything: Hirsh wants to do the Right Thing, and Ginnie is so pathologically needy she's hurt by the slightest rejection. What Dave doesn't realize is that doing the right thing is the wrong thing for both of them; [MAJOR SPOILER] Ginnie ends up dead, and Dave ends up with more guilt than he knows what to do with. Ironically, in reality Sinatra made sure MacLaine would get her big death scene so she could have her big star breakthrough ("Look, I want the kid to get killed, she'll get an Oscar nomination," he reportedly said. "I don't care about my role."), and she got it. But on-screen, they're a couple trapped together by both of their faults: her needs, his unwillingness to be a bastard when it has to be done. Short-term kindness is long-term cruelty.

ROSEMARY & GUY WOODHOUSE, ROSEMARY'S BABY (1968)

This one's a literal from-hell: what could be worse than having a husband who'll trade you in to a Satanic coven in exchange for a boost for his acting career? I've long maintained Rosemary's Baby is actually a black comedy — it has more nervous laughs than most real comedies — but there's no denying that anyone married to John Cassavetes is in for the long haul in general. Mia Farrow just gets an especially bad break.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Vadim Rizov

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

Morning Deal Report: Polanski and Belushi, Together at Last

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 15:30:00 GMT

Apparently some sort of awards nominations were announced this morning. I think you can find the details elsewhere at the Screengrab.

Scorsese and De Niro. Hitchcock and Stewart. Polanski and…Belushi? JIM Belushi? Yes, it’s true, according to The Hollywood Reporter: "Tom Wilkinson and Jim Belushi have joined the cast of Roman Polanski's The Ghost, which begins filming in Berlin on Feb. 4. The movie stars Pierce Brosnan as a former British prime minister and Ewan McGregor as his ghostwriter.”

Marc Webb (500 Days of Summer) will direct “The Spectacular Now, a coming-of-age dramedy based on Tim Tharp's book,” per Variety. "It's somewhere between Sideways, Catcher in the Rye and Ferris Bueller's Day Off," said producer Tom McNulty. Well, that narrows it down.

Mark Ruffalo’s directorial debut, Sympathy for Delicious, is back on track following the shooting death of Ruffalo’s brother. “The story, written by Christopher Thornton, follows a paralyzed DJ, struggling to survive on the streets of L.A., who turns to faith healing and mysteriously develops the ability to cure the sick -- although not himself. The DJ then decides to cash in on his gift in exchange for his rock 'n' roll dreams,” per THR.

Related:
Roman Polanski Sees a Ghost
Movies We Missed: My Life Without Me (2003)

Breaking News in Roman Polanski Case

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 21:00:00 GMT

Roman Polanski didn’t make the top five in our Screengrab Person of the Year awards for 2008, but it’s a safe bet he was in the top ten. We’ve been covering each new development in his quest to end his exile from the United States stemming from his 1977 arrest on charges of drugging and raping a thirteen-year-old girl, and now there is breaking news that may bring the 75-year-old director a step closer to returning to our shores.

According to CNN, “The alleged victim in a 1977 sexual assault case against director Roman Polanski has filed court papers seeking dismissal of the charges against him. The woman's declaration seeking dismissal was filed Monday in Los Angeles, California, in connection with Polanski's efforts to have the 31-year-old case dismissed.”

It was last year’s documentary Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired (due later this month on DVD) that re-opened the debate about the case. The alleged victim, Samantha Geimer, would prefer to close down the discussion once and for all. “I am no longer a 13-year-old child. I have dealt with the difficulties of being a victim, have surmounted and surpassed them with one exception. Every time this case is brought to the attention of the Court, great focus is made of me, my family, my mother and others. That attention is not pleasant to experience and is not worth maintaining over some irrelevant legal nicety, the continuation of the case.”

Polanski’s lawyers filed a motion to dismiss the charges in December. A hearing is scheduled for January 21st. Tune in here for further developments.

Related:
Roman Polanski: Wanted in Los Angeles, Desired in Turin
Polanski Sexual Assault Victim Gives Thumbs Up to "Polanski: The Movie"

Set Your DVR! December 22 - 29, 2008

Hayden Childs — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 16:00:00 GMT

I don't know if your Christmas week is anything like mine (if you even have a Christmas week, that is), but every year, I spend an inordinate amount of time on the couch. It's a good way to be with family without having to, y'know, talk with anyone. I usually lay there, using my mind only to ponder how full my belly is and wondering how long it will take me to digest enough to make room for another slice of pecan pie. But this year, instead of mindless entertainment, I intend to engage with some movies! Maybe that will take my mind off of food. For a little while, at least. Here's what's good this week, in the central/eastern format. I'm also moving overnight movies to the prior day write-up, which is my policy from here forward.

Monday, December 22:

Monday offers two flicks about evil and naivety! What could be better than considering evil during the final weeks of the year? Au Revoir, Les Enfants is Louis Malle's examination of life in a French boarding school during the Vichy occupation. Our young protagonist seems to be going through normal kid issues, but his innocence is threatened by the War and his growing suspicion that a schoolmate might be a hidden Jew. The Quiet American is based on Graham Greene's novel about a not-so-well meaning journalist encountering a CIA agent in 1950s Vietnam. Strangely enough, the CIA agent may be the more naive of the two.

12:30/1:30 pm: Au Revoir, Les Enfants on IFC.
2:30/3:30 pm The Quiet American on IFC.
2:30/3:30 am: Enemy Mine on AMC.
5:05/6:05 am: Au Revoir, Les Enfants on IFC.

Tuesday, December 23:

Tuesday's full of anti-war sci-fi in the AM! Maybe it's not great sci-fi, but it's (probably) worth a viewing, especially with impressionable young minds around you. Enemy Mine, one of my favorite movies when I was 13, is about setting asides differences in the face of a hostile universe. I haven't seen it since I was a kid, but I recall that it had a strong anti-war and pro-cooperation message. A far better movie (with far less latex and, well, mostly the same message) is the original The Day The Earth Stood Still, an untouchable classic that only a fool would attempt to remake. Finally, The Day After is a good way to wrap up the morning with some schlock that originally aired on TV when I was exactly the right age for a nascent political awakening (that would be 1983, when I was 11). In light of the dramatic depiction of the harshness of life after a nuclear attack on the US, I remember my shock and disbelief when I overheard President Granddaddy Ronald Reagan on TV pushing for more nuclear weapons. He lost my vote that day.

In the afternoon, there's John Ford's 3 Godfathers, which is like a Western version of Three Men And A Baby, only with death and despair. Awesome! Then Roman Polanski's The Pianist offers a little more death and despair. And finally, as a salve to all of this suffering, Lubitsch's The Shop Around The Corner is the sweetest and bestest romantic comedy that ever graced celluloid. (Note: the overnight movie discussed here rather than on the prior day for thematic purposes.)

2:30/3:30 am: Enemy Mine on AMC.
7/8 am: The Day The Earth Stood Still on AMC.
9/10 am: The Day After on SCIFI.
3/4 pm: 3 Godfathers on TCM.
4:30/5:30 pm: The Pianist on IFC.
5/6 pm: The Shop Around The Corner on TCM.
2/3 am: The Shop Around The Corner on TCM.

Wednesday, December 24:

Christmas Eve brings more despair! I recommend that you choose wisely and then go volunteer in a soup kitchen. Nobody Knows is a 2004 Japanese film based on a true story about children who were horribly neglected by an unfit mother and then abandoned to survive on their wits alone. Guaranteed to make the hardest heart break down and openly weep. Brother's Keeper is the uplifting documentary about a rural community that rallies around a near-feral farming family when one brother is accused of murdering another. The Delicate Art of the Rifle is a microbudget indie about a sniper on a college campus. Death and the Maiden is Roman Polanski's film (of the Ariel Dorfman play) in which a woman (Sigourney Weaver, who has never been better) is convinced that the man who gave her husband a ride home was the man who tortured and raped her while she was a prisoner of the previous brutal regime. It is stunningly good and sadly underappreciated. Finally, Bad Santa is the salve for all that ails us.

6/7 am: Nobody Knows on IFC.
8:30/9:30 am: Brother’s Keeper on IFC.
10:30/11:30 am: The Delicate Art of the Rifle on IFC.
12:05/1:05 pm: Nobody Knows on IFC.
2:45/3:45 pm: Brother’s Keeper on IFC.
4:35/5:35 pm: The Delicate Art of the Rifle on IFC.
6:15/7:15 pm: Death and the Maiden on IFC.
10/11 pm: Bad Santa on Comedy Central.

Thursday, December 25:

Tidings of comfort and joy for all: TCM has a film fest of Bogie's most iconic movies on Christmas Day. That'll deck your halls with boughs of something. Note that it runs all night.

7/8 am: 3 Godfathers on TCM.
2/3 pm: Bad Santa on Comedy Central.
7/8 pm: Casablanca on TCM.
9/10 pm: The Big Sleep on TCM.
11 pm/12 am: The Maltese Falcon on TCM.
1/2 am: The African Queen on TCM.
3/4 am: High Sierra on TCM.

Friday, December 26:

Back to our regularly scheduled holiday sadness! George Washington is a must-see film about youths who can't see a future for themselves in their quiet North Carolina town. Elephant is about youths whose future is brutally taken away for reasons unknown. And The Honeymoon Killers is about hideous sociopaths who love each other and brutalize the world. Happy fucking Boxing Day!

9/10 am: George Washington on IFC.
10:35/11:35 am: Elephant on IFC.
2:05/3:05 pm: George Washington on IFC.
3:35/4:35 pm: Elephant on IFC.
5/6 pm: The Honeymoon Killers on IFC.
3:35/4:35 am The Honeymoon Killers on IFC.
5:25/6:25 am: George Washington on IFC.

Saturday, December 27:

Saturday is about Japan. First up is The Greatest Story Ever Told, aka The Seven Samurai. I believe I recently wrote here that The Wild Bunch was the best film ever. That's only half-true, because The Seven Samurai is its equal. Damn, this movie is good. Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon isn't even close to the same league, but it's pretty great on its own. Finally, Hayao Miyazaki's Howl's Moving Castle is not the best Miyazaki movie, but it's wonderful and highly, highly recommended.

7/8 am: The Seven Samurai on IFC.
10:30/11:30 am: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon on IFC.
2:30/3:30 pm: Howl’s Moving Castle on IFC.
4:30/5:30 pm: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon on IFC.

Sunday, December 28:

Wait, Sunday is about Japan. Rashomon, another film by Akira Kurosawa, is iconic and a must-see for fans of cinema, although it isn't quite as great as his best movies. The Bad Sleep Well is Kurosawa's corporate office take on Hamlet. Of his three Shakespeare adaptations (the other two are Throne of Blood/MacBeth and Ran/King Lear), it is the least, but it's full of his distinct sensibilities and very enjoyable. Finally, Malick's The Thin Red Line is half-war movie and half-nature documentary and all about the human soul. Overnight, there's Tati's utterly delightful Mr. Hulot's Holiday, which is full of wit and pratfalls.

7/8 am: Rashomon on IFC.
8:30/9:30 am: The Bad Sleep Well on IFC.
8/9 pm: The Thin Red Line on IFC.
2/3 am: Mr. Hulot’s Holiday on TCM.
2:30/3:30 am: The Thin Red Line on IFC

Monday, December 29:

Dreary Monday! Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is a film based on a play that delights in its own postmodernity. If you watched The Bad Sleep Well, definitely follow it up with this. And then put off whatever it is that you're supposed to be doing. Kiss of Death is one of the great film noirs. The Sweet Hereafter, Atom Egoyan's film based on Russell Banks's devastating novel, will ruin you in a good way. And The Player is Robert Altman's great tribute/kiss-off to Hollywood.

6:50/7:50 am: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead on IFC.
9/10 am: Kiss of Death on FMC.
1:30/2:30 pm: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead on IFC.
9/10 pm: The Sweet Hereafter on IFC.
11 pm/12 am: The Player on IFC.

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: Nov. 22- Dec. 5, 2008

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 22:00:00 GMT

Because I was busy digesting turkey, stuffing and pie while forming a deep groove in my couch, I neglected to post a highlight reel last week. That means you’re in for a treat – it’s the very first Supersized Highlight Reel! That’s right, we’ve got two weeks worth of leftovers for you. That means not only our Holiday Special: Movies We’re Thankful For (Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five and Six) but our list of the Top Biopics of All Time (Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five and Six).

But we’re just getting warmed up. We’ve also got reviews of not only Gus Van Sant’s new biopic Milk, but the documentary The Times of Harvey Milk. And we’ve got more William Friedkin posts than at any time since 1974 (when the Screengrab was only available via short-wave radio): William Friedkin Has No Sense of Social Obligation, The French Connection Influenced Everything and The Screengrab: Your One-Stop Site for All Things William Friedkin.

You want more reviews? How about The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer, Thomas Kinkade's Christmas Cottage, Waterloo, Mister Lonely, Frost/Nixon and the Stop Making Sense soundtrack? How about the first installment of Leonard Pierce’s 12 Days of Christmas, The Nightmare Before Christmas? How about the latest in Ozsploitation, Roadgames?

Still not enough? Check out these other headlines from the fortnight past:

Roman Polanski: Wanted in Los Angeles, Desired in Turin

Roger Ebert: The Death of the Film Critic is the Death of Society

Oscar Launch: The Silly Season Commences

All The Real Girls Is One of the Most Influential Movies of the Decade

Site of the Day: A John Waters Christmas

Video of the Day: "Mia and Roman"

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Inspired by our commenter "TB" (we know who you are, sir) on Phil Nugent's earlier Roman Polanski post, here is Mia and Roman for your viewing pleasure. Said esteemed commenter describes this treasure as a "must-see, unintentionally hilarious and often repellent short film...a studio puff-piece intended as a tribute to the friendship between two free-spirited artists and rebels who color outside the lines, etc., but its main effect is to show Mia up as a blue-ribbon narcissist and dilettante." Judge for yourself!

Roman Polanski: Wanted in Los Angeles, Desired in Turin

Phil Nugent — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 16:00:00 GMT

For almost a year now, Marina Zenovich's documentary Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, which deals with the Los Angeles criminal case that turned the director of Chinatown and Rosemary's Baby into a fugitive from American justice, has been kicking up dust in both film and legal circles. In 1977, Polanski was arrested on six felony counts arising from charges that he had drugged and raped a thirteen-year-old girl at a private photo shoot he had arranged at his friend Jack Nicholson's house. In a plea bargain, Polanski, who had been staring down a possible life sentence if convicted on all counts, pled guilty to a single count of "unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor", and expected to receive probation, a sentence that would have been in keeping with recommendations made by psychiatrists advising the court. In the end, Polanski fled the country, though only after spending 42 days locked up in a maximum-security prison where he was to receive a "psychological evaluation." What the documentary, which draws on interviews with both defense and prosecution attorneys involved in the case, makes clear is that Polanski skipped out only after deciding that he couldn't trust the judge, Lawrence J. Rittenband, a starstruck jackass whose delight at being at the center of a high-profile case had turned to distress over the bad publicity he was getting from Hollywood reporters chastising him for going easy on a rich pervert filmmaker with a "Children of the night!" foreign accent. (The subtitle of Zenovich's film is a sly reference to the different ways that Polanski was regarded in America and in Europe.) On two occasions, Rittenband demanded that the lawyers play-act scenes with him for the benefit of the reporters, and reneged on deals he'd made when he didn't like his press clippings. (Rittenband has since died, but in the movie, retired Deputy District Attorney Roger Gunson, who speaks about Polanski as if he were something he'd found sticking to his shoe, recalls warning Polanski's lawyer about Rittenband and says that if he'd found himself at the legal mercy of a freak like Rittenband, he probably would have been on the next plane himself.) Now lawyers for Polanski have filed a request the dismiss the outstanding warrant against him, citing the evidence of "a pattern of misconduct and improper communications" revealed in the film. If the charges are dropped--a move that Polanski's alleged victim calls for in the film--the 75-year-old winner of the 2002 Academy Award for Best Director (for The Pianist) will finally be able to visit the U.S. for the first time in thirty years. A spokeswoman for the District Attorney's office told reporters that she couldn't comment on the new developments because the D.A. was s till waiting to be served with the motion. She knew all about it, though. Saw it on the TV news.

While he waits for the results of the Los Angeles Superior Court hearing scheduled in January, Polanksi is maintaining his regular schedule of getting his feet kissed in Europe. He recently showed up at the Turin Film Festival, site of an enormous career retrospective thrown in his honor. Neil Harris reports that "At the nearby Museo Nazionale del Cinema, the gantry that snakes around its spectacular five-storey exhibition hall is decorated with blown-up photographs from the director's own collection. Viewed together, they offer fascinating insights into the making of such iconic masterworks as Repulsion, Chinatown and Rosemary's Baby. A snap from the latter's set sees its star Mia Farrow visibly delighted by a chart breaking down her performance into separate components. Polanski, whose directing style has not always inspired descriptions of his actors as being "visibly delighted", rolled into town to co-star in a Q & A session with director Nanni Moretti (The Son's Room), the festival's artistic director. Describing the challenges he's placed in front of himself on some projects, Polanski said that "Telling stories is not enough. I need something more difficult to achieve." He also admitted to the odd failure or two. The most spectacular of these on his resume is Pirates, the $40 million bellyflop that Polanski had actually been working on before his arrest and that was finally released in 1986, only to serve as a reminder to the world that if you're working on an expensive project that you've conceived for Jack Nicholson to star in and find yourself making it with Walter Matthau in the lead, something has gone terribly wrong. "It was a nightmare from beginning to end. Every day something new would go wrong," Polanski recalled of the shoot, adding, "I should have got a special award just for finishing it." Or maybe, as Chico Marx might put it, he should have been offered a really special award in exchange for agreeing not to finish it.

Screengrab Presents: The 25 Greatest Horror Films of All Time (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 20:30:00 GMT

20. RE-ANIMATOR (1985)

This 1985 instant-midnight-movie classic just about killed off the concept of the underground-horror-cult-item by being too perfect; a beautifully executed, straight-faced H.P. Lovecraft update with farce timing and gory slapstick, it hit its marks with such stunning aplomb that it's hard to think of a similar film that wouldn't be embarrassed to be compared to it. That includes pretty much every subsequent attempt by the first time filmmaker Stuart Gordon, previously known as founding director of Chicago's Organic Theater Company, to follow it up, though its star, Jeffrey Combs, has managed to keep the spirit of Herbert West alive through his performances in other movies -- especially Peter Jackson's The Frighteners, where his deranged, ghostbusting FBI agent is a scene-stealing fusion of Dr. West, Fox Mulder, and Hazel Motes.

19. EYES WITHOUT A FACE (1959)

Georges Franju's nightmare classic was first released in the U.S. in 1962 in a re-edited, English-language version called The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus. In a time when foreign films really had to fight for American distribution, this was a peculiar kind of triumph that demonstrated that it was possible for certain special films to bridge the audiences that responded to the critical theories of Andre Bazin and those who were more at home with Joe Bob Briggs. The restored version that has since become the standard text even here makes it clearer that the movie (about a mad doctor's attempts to restore the once-beautiful, then damaged and now slate-blank face of his daughter) is an attack on unthinking scientific experimentation that draws on the deliberate tapping-into-the-irrational of the Surrealists and such films as Cocteau's Orpheus -- but it's still a movie about a guy whose hobby is stripping the kissers off kidnapped women until he gets eaten by his own attack dogs.

18. MARTIN (1977)

After many failed attempts to successfully follow up on Night of the Living Dead, and two years before returning to the zombie well with Dawn of the Dead, George Romero made this riff on the vampire genre in his beloved Pittsburgh. The title character, played by twenty-six-year-old John Amplas, is a forlorn, alienated young man who appears to be a serial killer and wishes he were a vampire. In its own odd way, Martin, more than any other film of its time, anticipates the Goth subculture of Anne Rice and the post-punk concept of vampires as creatures of morbid romantic fantasy, though it's an ironic comment on that kind of attraction, not a celebration of it: at key moments, Romero shows us Martin's fantasies of himself as a suave, literal lady killer with seductive powers, before staging his murders as the unpleasant messes they actually are. Romero himself turns up in a cameo as a priest who, sought for guidance by an Old World relative of Martin's, turns out to be less interested in hearing the man out than in raving about The Exorcist.

17. ROSEMARY’S BABY (1968)

If Charles Grodin doesn’t exactly spring to mind when you think of the great stars of horror, then you’ve never seen Rosemary’s Baby. Kicking off the 1970s devil movie craze two years before the start of that morally ambiguous decade (and one year before director Roman Polanski’s wife Sharon Tate was murdered by the minions of real life demon Charles Manson), Mia Farrow dramatized the worst-case-scenario fears of young mothers everywhere as the title character in a defiantly downbeat movie where motherhood is perverted, the fetus is the villain, the bad guys win and we get to see Ruth Gordon naked for the first (but, thanks to Bud Cort and Hal Ashby, certainly not the last) time in her distinguished career.

16. THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE (1974)

These days Leatherface is just another lovable lunk in the horror franchise Hall of Fame, right up there with Jason and Freddy Krueger, but despite all the sequels and remakes, the impact of his 1974 debut is undiminished. There's nothing complicated about the plot: five young people traveling across Texas in a van happen upon a seemingly deserted farmhouse where they make the sudden and violent acquaintance of the hulking butcher and cross-dresser Leatherface and the rest of the demented Sawyer clan. Tobe Hooper's film derives much of its power from its grimy, snuff-film authenticity; it looks as though it may have been discovered moldering in the attic of the decaying Sawyer farmhouse. When Leatherface revs his chainsaw while closing in on a victim in the deep, dark woods, you can only think, yep, that would certainly scare the living shit out of me. Leatherface's final dance of death in the early morning rays of the sun is perhaps the seminal image of hillbilly horror. Much has been made of the movie as metaphor for any number of things – Vietnam, Watergate, feminism, the collapse of the counterculture, the dissolution of the nuclear family and possibly the 1973 World Series for all I know – but as flat-out unrelenting exploitation of the modern suburbanite's fear of backwoods people, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre has few peers.

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

Contributors: Phil BOOOOO!-gent, Andrew OsBurning-in-Hell, Baron Scott Von Frankendoviak

How Not to Interview Faye Dunaway: Latest in a Series

Phil Nugent — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 17:00:00 GMT

At the Guardian, Xan Brooks has a diverting account of how he came to get ejected from Faye Dunaway's presence while conducting her "first British press interview in nearly 20 years ". Dunaway is across the pond for the Raindance Film Festival showing of her latest film, Flick, a horror movie directed by David Howard. Brooks opens his account by describing how Howard listed for him all "the things I am absolutely not to ask her. Firstly, there must be no mention of Mommie Dearest, the Joan Crawford biopic credited with destroying Dunaway's career. Nor must I ask her about Andrew Lloyd Webber, who bumped her from the Los Angeles production of Sunset Boulevard in 1994; or about her adult son, who may or may not be adopted; or about the cosmetic surgery that she may or may not have undergone. Is that it? 'Yes,' says Howard. 'I think that's the lot.' He turns out to be wrong." Brooks veered into a minefield when he chose to ask her about Roman Polanski's Chinatown and how much reports of tensions on its set might have damaged her career. ("Oh," Dunaway says, "The Roman thing.") When our intrepid correspondent asks the ladylike Dunaway if it's true that she once threw a cup of urine at her pint-sized director, the interview wraps itself up in short order.

Before the meltdown, Dunaway gives what sounds like an amusing performance, half elegant and half dippy, as an aging star who may only be a faded name to younger moviegoers and who seems surprisingly intent on being judged a creature of regal dignity. In Flick, she plays "a one-armed Memphis cop on the trail of a zombie Teddy boy." Brooks marches right out onto thin ice at the start, mentioning that Howard has said that in casting her, "he was taking his lead from Roger Corman, the B-movie producer who made a habit of hiring older Hollywood legends such as Ray Milland to appear in his movies" Dunaway's response: "I think he was going for - not old Hollywood, let's not say that. But maybe a little of the old-style glamour." Despite the dragon-lady demeanor that made Dunaway stand out in the '60s and '70s and that made her a neat fit for both the role of Joan Crawford and the nostalgic setting of Chinatown, Dunaway describes her breakout role as Bonnie Parker as the one "that's closest to me. I was a southern girl and so was Bonnie. We share the frustrations of living in that small, limited environment - dying to get out and move forward in the world. That was part of my makeup as a girl." Cut short though it was, the conversation does give you a feeling that you might have glimpsed something about Dunaway, and why she hasn't done better at staying afloat in the last couple of decades: women have to fight to stay alive in Hollywood, and Dunaway, who clearly has the resources to be a fighter, doesn't want to be seen that way: it conflicts with her surprising desire to be seen as a lady. She doesn't seem to grasp that Brooks is trying to help her out, not trap her, when he suggests that the nasty stories told against her for having been difficult might "come down to a case of Hollywood sexism, I ask her. After all, nobody ever complained about her former co-stars Jack Nicholson, Steve McQueen or Marlon Brando being a little bit wild or rebellious. But Dunaway doesn't bite: she can't think what I mean."

Video of the Day: Sharon Tate's Screen Test

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 14:45:00 GMT

Yes, kids, once upon a time, Sharon Tate was a real live actress, and not just Charlie Manson's most famous victim, or Roman Polanski's second-biggest reason to be bummed out.

Here's proof, in the form of her screen test for the utterly deranged Valley of the Dolls -- a movie so nuts that Roger Ebert wrote a parody sequel to it that was actually less crazy than the original. Dig her reading of that last line...

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: June 21-27, 2008

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 21:00:00 GMT

We’ve had some fun with the Entertainment Weekly list of new classics, but let it be known that we here at the Screengrab have some new classics of our own! Personally I get all choked up thinking about the time we maybe confirmed a rumor about Gael Garcia Bernal, but for others, the seminal moment was the story about how Crispin Glover requires cash and sushi. Reaching all the way back to Monday, here are the rest of the posts we’ve deemed absolutely timeless, to be treasured for generations to come.

America the Critical: 15 Movies That Show What’s Wrong With U.S. (Parts One, Two and Three)

The week in lawsuits: Gibney vs. ThinkFilm and Adams vs. Marvel

The films of yesteryear: Top Gun, Smiles of a Summer Night and Heaven Can Wait

The films of today: The Wackness and Garden Party

The films of never, please: American Soldiers and Soccer Dog: The Movie

The filmmakers of some repute: Roman Polanski, Pedro Almodovar and Peter Jackson

The lovely ladies: Ellen Page, Hilary Duff and The Women

The one that got away: George Carlin

Morning Deal Report: Roman Polanski Sees a Ghost

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 14:30:00 GMT

The controversies of his past are back in the headlines thanks to a recent HBO documentary, so what better time for Roman Polanski to get back to work? Polanski will adapt the Robert Harris political thriller The Ghost, with Nicolas Cage, Tilda Swinton and Pierce Brosnan, Variety reports. “Cage will play a ghostwriter hired abruptly to finish the memoirs of an ex-British prime minister after the first scribe turned up dead. The ghostwriter's research leads him to uncover skeletons in the pol's closet that put the writer's life in danger.” Alas, this doesn’t mean Cage’s Bad Lieutenant remake has fallen through; Ghost will shoot after he completes his work with Werner Herzog this summer.

William Hurt and Zach Gilford will be fishing in The River Why, adapted from the novel by David James Duncan. Per the Hollywood Reporter, this “coming-of-age tale centers on a young man named Gus Orviston (Gilford) and his quest for an elusive rainbow trout, which is a metaphor for the man's internal search for self-knowledge.” Or maybe he’s just hungry.

Finally, that sequel to The Host you’ve been waiting for is on the way. According to Variety, Chinese director Ning Hao will helm the follow-up to the Korean horror film. The sequel “will have to tread carefully to avoid criticizing the Chinese government. Story will concern a calamity caused when people ignore a monster due to their desire for money.” Sounds like another one of those metaphor thingies.

Related:
The Roman Exile: 30 Years and Counting
Werner Herzog's Very Bad Idea

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: June 14-20, 2008

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 21:00:00 GMT

It’s time to hit the ol’ fishin’ hole (wink-wink), but before we go, let’s bask in the glory that was the week in Screengrab.

We’ve outdone ourselves with this week’s Top Ten list. To be specific, we’ve outdone ourselves by ten with the Gay Pride Top Twenty.

We may go back to Summer School, but First Sunday will be our last.

Don’t mess with the Norton. He’ll Hulk you! He’ll Hulk the shit out of you!

So was that Shyamalan guy ever any good? A look back at The Sixth Sense.

Stan Winston and Cyd Charisse are still dead.

We’re about ready to let Roman Polanski back in the country, how about you?

If you’re offended by the South Park soundtrack, we suggest you blame Canada.

Hey, Mike Myers! People sure don’t like your new movie much – aside from Deepak Chopra, of course. Perhaps you should have read Take Five: Gotta Get a Guru first.

We didn’t read the alleged Frank Darabont draft of Indiana Jones, but we posted about it anyway.

And finally, those two words that strike fear into the hearts of all right-thinking Americans: It’s Pat.

The Roman Exile: 30 Years and Counting

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 14:40:00 GMT

After a very brief theatrical run, Marina Zenovich's documentary on the infamous Roman Polanski statutory rape case, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired -- which resulted in his 30-year exile from the United States -- makes its cable debut this week, and far from simply rehashing the facts of the past, it has cast severe doubt on what most people think they know. It's even brought up a fresh new wrinkle in the case, which is already causing a war of words between people on all sides of the event.

Cinematical covers the new twist (in an article with the yawn-inducing headline "Roman Polanski Doc Still in Dispute"). When Wanted and Desired tipped Monday night on HBO, it wasn't the same version that filmgoers in New York and Los Angeles saw during its limited big-screen run; the film's producers, under pressure from the Los Angeles County Superior Court, deleted a portion of the documentary in which it is claimed that in 1997, a judge newly assigned to the case offered to drop the charges against Polanski and allow him to return to the U.S., on the condition that the hearing be televised. Polanski refused, and spent ten more years in exile.

What's most astonishing about the claim isn't that court officials denied it and pushed the filmmakers into dropping the scene; it's that attorneys on both sides of the case -- both the defense and the prosecution -- say the documentary is correct and that L.A. County is lying. In a joint statement -- the first issued in the history of the case by both defense and prosecuting attorneys -- they claim that "Monday's false and reprehensible statement by the Los Angeles Superior Court continues their inappropriate handling of the Polanski case."

In the Washington Post, William Booth interviews Zenovich and examines the film in some depth, finding that the director attempts to show how celebrity and greed conspired to botch and misdeal the case against Polanski while never exculpating the director or forgetting the victim. Whatever the ultimate outcome of a situation in which no one emerges looking particularly good, Polanski himself maintains the same distance he always has: he refused to attend a screening of Wanted and Desired, and, given a DVD of the documentary, asked only what Zenovich's next film project might be.

Jailbait Cinema, Part 3

Polanski Sexual Assault Victim Gives Thumb's Up to "Polanski: The Movie"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 09 May 2008 13:30:00 GMT

When Roman Polanski won the Academy Award for Best Director for The Pianist, he became the first filmmaker to win that Oscar while a fugitive from U. S. justice. In 1977, Polanski was arrested and charged with rape and drugging a minor after Samantha Geimer (or Samantha Gailey, as she was then known), a thirteen-year-old girl who he wanted to photograph for French Vogue, claimed that he had plied her with champagne and quaaludes and then assaulted her at the private shoot he had arranged at Jack Nicholson's house. Polanksi, who has always maintained that he was set up as part of a scheme by the girl's mother to blackmail him, arranged a deal to plea to a lesser charge, only to flee the country after being advised that the judge intended to set aside the plea bargain and throw the book at him. (He faced a possible prison term of fifty-years.) He hasn't been back to the States since, though Samantha Geimer, interviewed in the wake of The Pianist's release, said that as far as she was concerned, "Straight up, what he did to me was wrong. But I wish he would return to America so the whole ordeal can be put to rest for both of us."

All this and more is covered in the eagerly awaited HBO documentary Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, which had its premiere showing in New York this week. Jada Yuan of New York magazine's "Vulture" blog reports that one party of three that showed up for the event were: Samantha Geimer, accompanied by her mother and husband. Geimer, who lives in Hawaii, has three kids and works for a real estate developer, agreed to let the filmmakers interview about what happened thirty years ago because, ""Generally for me, it's just easier that if people want to talk to me, I talk to them. That way they don't sit out in front of my house and wait for me." Still, you might think that she wouldn't have been up to flying in from the big island to see it all gone over again onscreen. On the contrary, "We thought this would be really fun. We don't get many chances to come to New York, so I was really happy to come and see the city and do all this fabulous stuff. Got to be back to work on Friday or the boss will fire me." As for the movie, she endorses it heartily, and maybe, a bit, to her surprise: "I didn't think somebody could make it that interesting."

Mike D'Angelo at Sundance: Part 1

Peter Smith — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 19:50:00 GMT

Mike D'Angelo reports from the Sundance Film Festival:

Sundance is playing things close to the vest this year, for some reason. Upon my arrival late Thursday night — too late, alas, to catch the opening-night attraction, In Bruges, which everyone who did see it seems to think is ill-served by its hyperactive trailer — I picked up a copy of the Salt Lake City Weekly, expecting to find my friend Scott Renshaw's capsule reviews of perhaps two dozen films that had been screened for local press before the festival proper even began. Instead, there only was a page of wild guesswork, advance screenings having apparently been scuttled. Nor were Friday's press screenings particularly appetizing, as most of the morning and afternoon was devoted to soporific-sounding selections from the World Documentary section. Did I really want or need to learn anything further about Mumia Abu-Jamal? (In Prison My Whole Life.) Would Up the Yangtze, about China's Three Gorges Dam project, be any more illuminating than Jia Zhang-ke's 2006 Venice prizewinner Still Life, just now opening in limited U.S. release? Hoping the homegrown docs might be more energizing, I stuck my head into Traces of the Trade, a personal-essay film in which the director and nine relatives tour the locations where their ancestors purchased slave labor with rum and molasses, but fled after forty minutes of unbearably self-indulgent white-liberal guilt.

As I write this, most of the potentially heavy hitters are still to come. Today, however, people are buzzing, with good reason, about yet another documentary, Marina Zenovich's Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired. (Full disclosure: I roomed with Marina at Cannes a few years ago, though we barely spoke since I tend to fall asleep at festivals within fifty-two seconds of hitting my room.) As the title suggests, the film focuses on Polanski's 1977 arrest for "unlawful sexual intercourse" (plea-bargained down from rape) with a thirteen-year-old girl and his subsequent flight from justice just hours before he was due to be sentenced, resulting in what may well be lifelong exile in France. Even for those familiar with the general details of the case, though, Wanted and Desired will likely prove revelatory. Zenovich dutifully provides basic psychological context for Polanski's odious conduct — mom murdered by Nazis, pregnant wife slaughtered by Manson Family — and wittily illustrates various points with well-chosen clips from Rosemary's Baby, Chinatown, The Tenant, and other favorites. Ultimately, however, she's less interested in Polanski's crime than she is in the outlandish farce of judicial corruption that the banal crime somehow inspired. If you've ever run into a celebrity and found yourself instantly transformed into a babbling cretin, this fascinating film will provide some solace: At least the celeb's life and freedom weren't in your shaking hands.

Sundance Roundup: Day 3

Scott Von Doviak — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 20:30:00 GMT

Today’s Sundance buzz is all about Sir Ben Kingsley making out with one of the Olsen twins in a phone booth. No, it’s not the aftermath of a particularly out-of-control Park City bash – just a scene from The Wackness, in which Kingsley plays a psychiatrist who trades his services for weed and hooks up with another of his dealer’s clients, played by Mary-Kate Olsen. Per the Associated Press, Olsen “said she'd been worried about pulling off Kingsley's hairpiece during filming but pronounced the make-out session ‘fun.’” Good to know.

Unknown director Amy Redford was on hand for the premiere of her film The Guitar yesterday. Her father, a fellow named Robert, said all the right things to the Salt Lake Tribune. “She will probably have a rougher time than anybody…She did it on her own.”

We told you yesterday’s hot ticket would be Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, and sure enough, the Weinstein Company has swooped in and purchased the international rights to the documentary. Domestic rights remain available if you’re interested.

Or maybe you just want to look at the pretty people. Entertainment Weekly’s photo gallery includes Mary-Kate snuggling with Colin Farrell. Sorry, Sir Ben.

Sundance Roundup: Day 2

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 20:30:00 GMT

Robert Redford addressed the troops last night as the Sundance Film Festival kicked into gear. He hailed the filmmakers as “agents of change” and warned those desperately seeking buzz to expect the unexpected, the Salt Lake Tribune reports. He might have a point, as this L.A. Times look at last year’s highly touted Sundance crop portends.

The buzz-seekers went on to ignore Redford’s advice anyway. With the WGA strike dragging on, studios are eager to find readymade product to fill holes in their release schedules. The first big deal has already been made, with HBO snapping up the rights to The Black List: Volume One, a documentary collaboration between photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders and former New York Times film critic Elvis Mitchell. For a handy cheat sheet of the rest of this year’s buzz flicks, head over to Defamer.

If you’re looking for something to see in Park City tonight, the highlight looks to be Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired at the Holiday Village at 6:15 pm. Co-writer/director Marina Zenovich writes about her experiences making the documentary for Filmmaker. If midnight movies are more your speed, George Romero’s Diary of the Dead screens later tonight.

Schnabel Speaks

Peter Smith — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 19:00:00 GMT

After Julian Schnabel made his directorial debut with the 1996 biopic Basquiat, the art critic Robert Hughes called it a movie about the worst painter of the 1980s, made by the second worst. (Because Schnabel cast it from the ranks of all his fashionable New York character actor friends, he also made it possible for The New Yorker's Anthony Lane to describe it as the kind of movie in which "Christopher Walken passes for normal.") Rather surprisingly, Schnabel has kept at it, and now, seven years after his remarkable second film Before Night Falls, he's back with The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, based on the acclaimed memoir by Jean-Dominique Bauby.

The movie, like the book, recounts Bauby's struggle with near-total physical paralysis after he had suffered a massive stroke. Bauby wrote the book by "dictating" it, one letter at a time, by blinking his left eye. He died, at forty-five, days after the book was published. In the movie, he is played by Mathieu Amalric, of Munich and Kings and Queen, widely known among U.S. audiences as "that guy who looks like Roman Polanski's nicer brother."

This Times article tells the story: the producer Kathleen Kennedy had originally bought the rights to the book and was set to make it with Johnny Depp in the lead, and Depp, another celebrity friend of Schnabel's, brought him in to direct it before being forced to abandon it himself, due to his commitment to what Schabel calls "that pirate thing." Kennedy stuck with Schnabel, though, even after he insisted on making the film with a mostly French cast, and in French, which the studio probably thought was a hell of a consolation prize for not getting to make it with Johnny Depp. It all seems to have turned out all right; Schnabel won the best director prize at Cannes, and the movie's glittery trailer looks beautiful and even, in a strange way, kind of joyful. The only problem is that Schnabel, who is stubbornly atached to his identity a painter, is now becoming known to some, much to his dismay, as a movie maker. The good news is that he tries not to hold it against them. "I don’t think that people know too much about painting. I don’t think that they really understand what it is. I mean, I don’t want to put anybody down. I just think more people understand the language of movies than of paintings." Sadly, the question of whether he thinks Robert Hughes might be one of those people either never comes up in his interviews or has yet to yield a printable response. — Phil Nugent

Morning Deal Report: Adapt or Die

Peter Smith — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 16:00:00 GMT

Guillermo Del Toro will adapt The Champions, a late-'60s BBC series too goofy to summarize here.

Roman Polanski will adapt Robert Harris's thriller The Ghost.

Mike Newell will adapt Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, from the legendary videogame series. If he were adapting my experience with Prince of Persia, it'd have to be ten hours of the Prince getting killed over and over again, possibly with a twelve-year-old screaming curses in the background. That game ruled.

— Peter Smith