The Screengrab : ryan phillippe

Summerfest '08: "I Know What You Did Last Summer"

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Hey, remember Kevin WIlliamson? Sure you do! He was the highly paid screenwriter who was going to revolutionize the horror cinema for a new generation with his 'smart' thrillers, starting with Scream in 1996. Unfortunately, it turned out that by 'smart' he meant 'marginally rewarding for those who had spent as much time watching crappy horror movies as I did'. His moment quickly passed, and in the 2000s, torture porn and J-horror have become the new touchstones of Fangoria fans, while Williamson went on to a whole 'nother kind of showbiz glory as the creator of the slasher-deficient Dawson's Creek. Still, he meant well, and about ten years ago, his movies were about the only evidence that could be found that the genre had any life left in it at all. So why not give the guy a break and make one of his most famous films the subject of an entry in Summerfest '08, the weekly Screengrab feature where we review movies with the word 'summer' in the title to give you something to do for a couple of hours while you're waiting for the potato salad to cool? If nothing else, we can guarantee you that this week's installment is going to be a bit more fun than the gloomy 1950s psychodramas we've featured for the last couple of weeks.

So strap on your fisherman's slicker, polish up your favorite boat hook, and join us for a look at 1997's I Know What You Did Last Summer!

THE ACTION: Julie, Helen, Barry and Ray are a quartet of remarkably photogenic North Carolina teenagers who happily correspond to some of our very favorite big-screen stereotypes (respectively, the good girl, the wannabe starlet, the party boy, and the jock). On the Fourth of July weekend just after their graduation, they're cruising around one nigher after a fun trip to the beach, and wouldn't you know it, their car just happens to plow into a shambolic wino whom they are forced to leave for dead. Hey, it's happened to all of us, right? Let those who have not accidentally run over a wino cast the first stone, that's all I'm saying. A year later, they find themselves wracked with guilt and unable to fulfill any of their teenage dreams, except the dreams that involve staying drunk all the time. That's when they get a mysterious missive reading "I know what you did last summer", and a number of their friends start to turn up dead, the victims of sharpened implements wielded by a dead ringer for the Gorton's fisherman. Which one of them has turned on his or her friends? Or is it some phantom stranger who has it in for them? And which horror movie cliches will Kevin Williamson take pokes at while pretending he's above them in his own screenplay? Only time will tell, or looking at any number of movie spoiler websites.

THE PLAYERS: In aid of his how-much-can-I-get-this-dialogue-to-sound-like-Joss-Whedon-wrote-it script, Williamson (and forgotten director Jim Gillespie) recruited four of the hottest young talents in Hollywood, including Buffy the Vampire Slayer herself: our quartet of menaced teens aren't some backlot collection of nobodies, but Sarah Michelle Gellar, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Ryan Phillippe, and Freddie Prinze Jr. For the benefit of our younger readers, who are even now shrugging and saying "Who?", let us assure you that those four were the cream of the crop when it came to screamworthy teens ca. 1997. While none of them ended up as huge big-screen names, at the time, you'd have been hard pressed to find a more stellar group of young actors. So what if their careers didn't exactly pan out like they hoped they might? It's not as if, like their characters in the movie, their hopes and dreams for the future were dashed because of the massive guilt they felt at having performed an unspeakble act that left them...hey, wait a minute!

SUMMER FUN: There's all sorts of summer fun going on in this feel-good celebration of murder. We start out with a beach party -- probably the greatest kind of summer fun there is; we move on to some exciting teenage sex, which everybody loves even if you know the poor kids are gonna have to die for it; after that, there's a thrilling car wreck, which always gets your heart racing; and finally, there's a bloody killing spree, which is the way everyone wishes their July 4th weekend could end, even if it's a wish that only comes true for a selectr few people. The movie also features an appearance by a wan, unhinged Ann Heche as the sister of the hapless gent who gets run over early in the film, and you know whenever Ann Heche shows up, somebody's gonna be having a good time soon enough.

HAWAIIAN SHIRTS: Seeing as there are a lot of dudes in this movie, and dudes who, portrayed by latte-sipping left coast elitists as they are, are nonetheless supposed to be swaggering drunken teenagers from North Carolina, I am pleased to report that not only are there a few fleeting glimpses of Hawaiian shirts in I Know What You Did Last Summer, but there are even several incidences of the main male characters wearing shirts that, if they are not actually Hawaiian shirts, at least might as well be Hawaiian shirts. The point needs to be made in this film that several of its principles are good-time party guys, and if there is a better vector for delivery of this message than the Hawaiian shirt, I have yet to encounter it.

BIKINI PARTY TIME: Curiously enough for a movie that contains Sarah Michelle Gellar, Jennifer Love Hewitt, their breasts, and a beach, there is not really as much bikini action as one would perhaps anticipate, let alone desire. That said, the makers of this film are not idiots, and while they do extract from us the concession that we make do with half-sweaters, denim pimp hats, and whatever else the movie's wardrobe designer was into at the moment for much of the movie, it's not as if we are entirely denied our bikini party time. Which, given the fact that arguably the most important character in the movie spends an inordinate amound of time in a rain slicker, is probably a good thing.

Vanishing Act: Christopher McQuarrie

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 18:30:00 GMT

It’s rare that the screenwriter for a splashy indie film will get as much or more attention than the director, but that was the case when The Usual Suspects hit it big in 1995. Boyhood friends Bryan Singer and Christopher McQuarrie first collaborated on 1993’s Public Access, which went nowhere despite winning the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. Their second effort become a modern crime classic, and there was no ignoring the fact that McQuarrie’s twisty narrative and twisted characters contributed greatly to the success of Suspects. In fact, when the Academy Awards were held the following year, it was McQuarrie who walked away with the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.

It was Singer, however, who used Suspects as a launching pad to a blockbuster career. After the Stephen King misfire Apt Pupil, Singer bounced back with the first two X-Men movies and the semi-successful Superman Returns. McQuarrie went his own way, hoping to realize his dream project: bringing Alexander the Great to the screen. This turned into a long, frustrating odyssey that ended when Oliver Stone made his own much-mocked version with Colin Farrell. McQuarrie’s sole effort as a writer-director, The Way of the Gun, was released in 2000, but it was something of a disappointment, getting lost in the post-Tarantino crime wave. Since then, McQuarrie has worked as a script doctor (doing uncredited rewrites on the first X-Men, among others) and has been involved in a number of aborted projects, including a Bryan Singer remake of Logan’s Run, but he has a grand total of zero screen credits since 2000.

That’s finally about to change. Today McQuarrie’s name popped up in this AP story about yet another controversy surrounding the upcoming Tom Cruise film Valkyrie. It seems Slate has had to retract a claim that the film’s producers altered photographs of German officer Claus von Stauffenberg in order to make them more closely resemble Cruise. This claim turned out to be false, and commenting on the situation was one of Valkyrie’s producers – Christopher McQuarrie. Per the AP: “‘The picture United Artists used of Colonel Stauffenberg can be found all over the Internet,’ said Valkyrie co-writer and producer Chris McQuarrie in a written statement released by a United Artists spokeswoman Tuesday. McQuarrie, who won a screenplay Oscar in 1995 for The Usual Suspects, added that it would have been easier to ‘alter Tom Cruise’ than to doctor ‘every available picture of Claus von Stauffenberg.’”

Valkyrie is the first full-fledged reunion of Singer and McQuarrie since The Usual Suspects. The duo was also set to re-team for the Harvey Milk biopic The Mayor of Castro Street, but that was before Gus Van Sant went forward with Milk. McQuarrie’s next announced project as a writer-director is The Stanford Prison Experiment, based on the actual psychological study gone awry in 1971. Rumored cast members include Ryan Phillippe and Paul Dano, but given the bumps in the road McQuarrie has already hit, it’s best to take such information with a grain of salt.

Related:
Tom Cruise Career Downward Spiral Update
A Brief History of Milk

"Stop-Loss"; Kimberly Peirce on the Back-Door Draft

Phil Nugent — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Kimberly Peirce's first feature, the 1999 Boys Don't Cry, starred Hilary swank as Brandon Teena, the cross-dressing woman who was murdered by a couple of male associates who had met her when she was presenting herself as a man. It was one of the biggest indie success stories of the period and made a star of Swank (who won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance), who had previously been best known for The Next Karate Kid. Of all the up-and-coming filmmakers who managed to get their bids in just before the millennium turned, Peirce has been perhaps the most conspicuously missing in action since. Now, nine years later, she's back with her new film, Stop-Loss. The title refers to the "loophole" in American soldiers' contracts permitting for "involuntary extensions" of their tours, as "national security" is deemed to require it. Peirce learned about the so-called "back door draft", which the military has been relying on in the face of a drop-off in recruiting numbers during the Iraq war, from her half-brother, who enlisted after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Peirce herself had responded to 9/11 by "traveling the country in 2003, interviewing military men and women and recording homecoming parades for a potential documentary about soldiers from sign-up to return." Then she started tinkering with a script for a fictional film called "AWOL." It wasn't until she'd listened to her brother's stories, and watched his cache of videos made by soldiers overseas, that her ideas began to focus around the idea of a patriotic soldier (played in Stop-Loss by Ryan Phillippe) who wanted to serve his country and has done his time but now wants to be allowed to move on and live his life. The army has other ideas.

Peirce hasn't just been kicking back for much of the nine years since Boys Don't Cry. Even before she began grappling with this new subject matter, she'd flirted with making movies based on Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Arthur Golden's novel Memoir of a Geisha, and the notorious inside-Hollywood murder of William Desmond Taylor. She also considered adapting The Ice at the Bottom of the World, a novel by Mark Richard, before instead inviting Richard to collaborate with her on the script of what became Stop-Loss. A self-described "Southern conservative," Richard may have counterbalanced Peirce's politics and helped prevent the script from turning into a screed. But if Stop-Loss is one more Iraq movie, it also has core similarities to Boys Don't Cry. “When I talked to a wounded soldier who lost his limbs and still wants to go back," says Peirce, "he told me, ‘It’s not the war, it’s the men." As in Boys Don't Cry, Peirce has caught hold of a story of small town kids who risk their lives out of a need for a certain kind of camaraderie. The heroes who feel that they've fulfilled their duty and now expect to be dealt with honorably have only their tiny support network to rely on. “There was a sense of deep, deep longing before Stop-Loss," says Peirce. "Boys set the bar very high artistically for me. I wanted to be that much in love with my next character. I wanted to feel it was taking over my whole life. I was lonely when I wasn’t able to work on a movie at that level again."