The Screengrab : singin' in the rain

Screengrab Presents THE TOP TEN BEST MOVIES EVER!!!! (Part Ten)

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 15 May 2009 01:00:00 GMT

Scott Von Doviak's Top Ten Best Movies Ever!

1. THE GODFATHER PART II (1974)
2. SUNSET BLVD. (1950)
3. THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE (1948)
4. MCCABE AND MRS. MILLER (1971)
5. 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968)
6. TAXI DRIVER (1976)
7. JAWS (1975)

If mechanical shark effects and John Williams' relentless theme music were all it had going for it, Jaws still might have become the highest grossing movie in history at the time of its release. And it likely would still be lumped in with Star Wars as a progenitor of the modern summer blockbuster phenomenon. In truth, Jaws has always been much more than a mere creature feature or special effects extravaganza. From the moment the Universal Pictures logo appears onscreen, accompanied by otherworldly sonar pinging noises signaling unfathomable depths of mystery, to the mournful dinosaur roar that accompanies the shark's final descent back to the murky deep, we are firmly in the grip of a master filmmaker. And while Steven Spielberg's gifts would eventually sour, with sure-handed storytelling giving way to transparent manipulation, here his every instinct is sound and his attention to detail astonishing. His tonal control is absolute; the darkest of horrors coexist with lusty seafaring adventure and character-based comedy, and it is all of a piece. The biggest laughs lead into the most frightening shocks, and vice-versa. It's a balancing act enhanced by the finest score of John Williams' career. His dum-dum-dum-dum shark theme is instantly recognizable to anyone on the planet - hell, sharks probably swim around humming it - but it's a remarkably resilient piece of music, speeding up into bursts of nautical derring-do, slowing down to an ominous, guttural portent of doom. The shark itself, when it is finally seen, remains an impressive movie monster. Even if its artificiality is more apparent to today's effects-jaded movie audience, its appearances are still fleeting enough to startle and delight. Set Jaws beside any of the contemporary summer cash leviathans and the hollowness of modern-day Hollywood's vision of action-adventure entertainment is laid bare.

8. PSYCHO (1960)
9. ANNIE HALL (1977)
10. THE WILD BUNCH (1969)

Andrew Osborne's Top Ten Best Movies Ever!

1. STAR WARS (1977)
2. THE GODFATHER (1972)
3. THE GRADUATE (1967)

There are various movies that speak to me very personally -- and this one certainly qualifies, having spent most of my existence as an alienated, overeducated white dude -- but Mike Nichols’ tight, elemental collaboration with the dream team of Buck Henry, Dustin Hoffman, Anne Bancroft, Paul Simon & Art Garfunkle makes my list of Best Movies Ever because, like all the other movies in my Top Ten, it’s both an elemental, near-perfect example of -- and also rises above -- its genre to become a once-in-a-lifetime cinematic milestone. Plus, as a friend of my parents once said, it features the best use of a crucifix ever.

4. THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939)

When a movie penetrates as deeply into the culture and the collective unconscious as this adaptation of Frank L. Baum’s first Oz novel, the filmmakers must have done something right. The fact that it was considered a commercial disappointment upon its initial release but nevertheless went on to become a beloved American classic also says something. But the main reason I include it here is because it’s a fully realized work of art that fully utilizes all the possibilities of cinema, from the grim black and white cinematography that suddenly explodes into color and the infectious soundtrack to the special effects that brought flying monkeys to a grateful world. It’s easy to take The Wizard of Oz for granted in this cynical, ironic, post-modern world, but honestly: who in cinema history kicks more freakin’ ass than Margaret Hamilton as Miss Elmira Gulch and the mean green you-know-who? Answer: nobody.

5. APOCALYPSE NOW (1979)

As crazy-ass Dennis Hopper’s unhinged Kurtz acolyte would say, “I wish I had words...” Here are three -- epic, unsettling, iconic -- but they don’t even begin to capture the essence of the surrealistic war opera Francis Ford Coppola dragged into existence at the (temporary) cost of his own sanity four years after the Fall of Saigon. It’s difficult to separate the finished product from the legend of its infamously agonizing production history (see: Hearts of Darkness), and the generally terrible footage unearthed for the Redux version released in 2001 clearly demonstrates the razor thin line between genius and drek (and, seriously, what kind of zap did U.S.C. put on the heads of Coppola, Spielberg and Lucas that none of them can ever just leave friggin’ well enough alone)? Still, whenever people refer to the original 1979 theatrical version of Apocalypse Now as a flawed masterpiece, I always get confused, since the flaws (fat Brando, crazy Hopper, the slow descent into anarchy) are part of what makes it a masterpiece.

6. ANNIE HALL (1977)

7. SUNSET BOULEVARD (1950)

8. SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN (1952)

9. YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN (1974)

Many of the movies in our consensus and individual Top Tens are beautiful downers, primarily concerned with death, violence, heartbreak and/or the inescapable ennui of existence -- and, while it’s true that depressing themes and great films often go together, it’s important to remember that celluloid is also a great delivery system for adrenalin shots of pure joy like Young Frankenstein, a nearly perfect movie with a hilarious script and a dream ensemble that ranks 9th on my list instead of 8th because (“Puttin’ On The Ritz” notwithstanding) the even more nearly perfect Singin’ In The Rain has slightly better song and dance numbers.

10. THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS (2001)

You may have noticed by now that the vast majority of the Best Movies picked for these lists by the Screengrab brain trust were released prior to 1980, which does a great disservice to the Sundance generation of filmmakers like Jim Jarmusch, P.T. Anderson, the Coen Brothers, Spike Lee, Richard Linklater, Quentin Tarantino, etc. Maybe it’s just that films like Down By Law, Boogie Nights, Fargo, Do The Right Thing, Dazed and Confused or Pulp Fiction need to marinate for another decade before we’re ready to start comparing them head-to-head with the likes of Sunset Boulevard and Citizen Kane...but as far as I’m concerned, The Royal Tenenbaums already qualifies as one for the ages. By turns wistful, cynical, romantic, suicidally gloomy and insanely optimistic, Wes Anderson’s richly imagined masterpiece (about a burned-out family of geniuses in a dream-world New York) is everything I could possibly ask for in a movie: career-topping performances from everyone involved, whip-smart writing, gorgeous visuals, fearlessly eccentric style and Gwyneth Paltrow French-kissing a naked chick...top that, Orson!

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

Contributors: Scott Von Doviak, Andrew Osborne

Screengrab Presents THE TOP TEN BEST MOVIES EVER!!!! (Part Seven)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 14 May 2009 23:00:00 GMT

Hayden Childs's Top Ten Best Movies Ever!

1. THE WILD BUNCH (1969)
2. THE SEVEN SAMURAI (1954)

Although I listed The Wild Bunch in the first spot, this one is equally deserving. Perhaps more. The story is simple: poor peasant villagers, beset by marauding bandits, hire a group of down-on-their-luck samurai to defend them. But this is storytelling at its finest: lyrical, universal, and profound. Akira Kurosawa was a great fan of John Ford, and the epic sweep of Ford's Westerns added to the majesty of The Seven Samurai. Look, I can hardly talk about this movie. It's just too much.

3. McCABE & MRS. MILLER (1971)

4. BADLANDS (1973) & DAYS OF HEAVEN (1978)

Terrence Malick's first two films are wondrous. I mean this in the sense that they contain wonders to behold and that they are themselves wonders. For one thing, they shouldn't work. Both movies are narrated by girls on the cusp of becoming young women, and both often suppress dialogue to emphasize through voiceover the inner lives of their narrators. Badlands recasts the story of serial killer Charles Starkweather into an insular fairy tale, a Brothers Grimm story about murderous innocence. Days Of Heaven is like an Andrew Wyeth painting given life, and like that other famous artwork that springs to life, Pinnochio, it's a much darker story with breathtaking beauty and sudden horror. (HC)

5. GRAND ILLUSION (1937) & THE RULES OF THE GAME (1939)

6. THE SEARCHERS (1956)

The Searchers is such a strange film, veering wildly between the unholy obsession, the blanket condemnation of racism, the anti-hero who might well be the hero, the cornpone humor, the score that screams of American exceptionalism even as the movie shows itself deeply ambivalent about America's past. This multifaceted approach is offputting at first, but utterly compelling over multiple viewings. John Ford and John Wayne made a hell of a lot of Westerns together, but this is the greatest. (HC)

7. THE GODFATHER PART II (1974)

8. UNFAITHFULLY YOURS (1948) & THE LADY EVE (1941)

9. VERTIGO (1958) & LA JETEE (1962)

Vertigo is Alfred Hitchcock's finest film, an echo chamber of fetishistic obsession with an almost indescribably weird plot. La Jetee is Chris Marker's most accessible movie, a short film captured almost entirely in still shots with a voiceover explaining key plot points. The plot revolves around an obsessive remembrance of an event from the protagonist's youth. One of the major scenes echoes a scene in Vertigo. In his film Sans Soliel, which almost made this list, Marker explains how obsessed he became with Vertigo, wanting to copy it as a means of understanding and possessing it. The embedded video below contains all 26 minutes of La Jetee in its totality. (HC)

10. COCKFIGHTER (1974)

Monte Hellman made some heady no-budget movies in his heyday, but this one, in which Warren Oates plays a cockfighter who has taken a vow of silence, is the headiest (sorry, Two-Lane Blacktop, but you're second in my heart). Let me be clear: cockfighting is one of the ugliest, most vulgar and inhumane sports known to man, and I find it reprehensible. Hellman looks at it without flinching and finds the beauty within. Oates is one of my favorite actors, and never is he better than here, a movie in which he has maybe five lines of dialogue, although he is in every scene. (HC)

11. TOUCH OF EVIL (1958) & YOJIMBO (1961)

Both of these movies make art out of sheer pulp. By almost any standard, Touch Of Evil should be unbelievably bad, but it's astonishingly great, better, I dare say, than Citizen Kane. It's a police procedural where the killing and killer are completely irrelevant to the plot. It's a movie about a corrupt cop who is always right about his suspect even when he plants evidence (and unlike, say, 24, the film doesn't condone police corruption). It's a movie with an unhealthy amount of cheese and ham - Charlton Heston as a Mexican cop!, a biker gang all addled on weed who abduct Janet Leigh!, Marlene Dietrich as a gypsy fortune teller! Orson Welles in a fat suit (or should that be an even fatter suit?)! - that somehow turns it all into the finest cinematic cuisine. Yojimbo also starts with a pulp premise, in this case a samurai version of Dashiell Hammett's The Glass Key and Red Harvest, and finds a way to frame it all into a stunning battle royale. (HC)

12. SINGIN' IN THE RAIN (1952)

What the first thing an actor learns? The show must go on!

Here's several other movies that ought to be on this list, and would have been if I'd figured out a way to stretch the idea of Top Ten any further:

Aguirre, Wrath of God (Herzog, 1972)
The Battle of Algiers (Pontecorvo, 1965)
Chinatown (Polanski, 1974)
Ikiru (Kurosawa, 1952)
Killer of Sheep (Burnett, 1977)
Miller's Crossing (Coen, 1990)
Night of the Hunter (Laughton, 1955)
Playtime (Tati, 1967)
Ride The High Country (Peckinpah, 1962)
Rio Bravo (Hawks, 1959)
Week End (Godard, 1967)

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

Contributor: Hayden Childs

The Top 20 Movies About Movies (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 21:00:00 GMT

SUNSET BOULEVARD (1950)

Long before Robert Altman gave three quarters of the Screen Actors Guild an opportunity to parody and celebrate themselves in The Player, Billy Wilder managed to corral a Golden Age Who’s Who (including Gloria Swanson, Erich von Stroheim, Buster Keaton, Hedda Hopper and Cecil B. DeMille, playing funhouse mirror versions of themselves) for a project which, even had it failed, would still have been a worthwhile snapshot of an epochal changing of the guard at the crossroads of Old Hollywood and the dawn of the modern era. But, of course, Sunset Boulevard didn’t fail: this classic dance of death between Swanson’s desperate, deluded has-been and William Holden’s bitterly conflicted never-was received critical hosannas, eleven Academy Award nominations and three wins, a fairly secure spot on the AFI list of the greatest American movies and a mediocre musical adaptation (a sure sign of massive cultural penetration). Box office-wise, the movie failed to click with the hix in the stix upon its initial release, possibly contributing to the movie industry’s ongoing conviction that Middle America has little interest in movies about (A) the movie industry and/or (B) monkey funerals.

SINGIN' IN THE RAIN (1951)

One of the best musicals ever made, Singin' in the Rain is also one of the freshest self-satires ever to come out of Hollywood. Gene Kelly and Jean Hagen play silent movie stars Don Lockwood and Lina Lamont, whose continuing success as a screen couple is endangered by the coming of sound, which is a problem because of lovely Lina's pronounced vocal resemblance to the sound a cat makes when you feed its tail into the garbage disposal. (I was eight years old. The statute of limitations has long since run out.) As a parody of a narcissistic star's condescending attitude towards the fans, Hagen's adenoidal speech to the "little people" has never been bettered, except maybe for a few real stars at awards shows who didn't know that they were competing with a put-on.

MULHOLLAND DRIVE (2001)

David Lynch's love/hate relationship with Hollywood is well-documented, and both sides of the equation are on full display in this masterful fever dream, rescued from network television oblivion after clueless ABC suits deep-sixed the pilot for Lynch's proposed follow-up to Twin Peaks. The set-up could have made for an intriguing continuing series: cheery, naïve small-towner Betty (Naomi Watts) comes to L.A. and finds amnesiac raven-haired beauty "Rita" (Laura Elena Harring) hiding in her aunt's apartment. Betty tries to help Rita unlock the secret of her true identity even as she pursues her dream of an acting career, which takes off after an electrifying audition for brooding filmmaker Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux). The feature film version of Mulholland Drive turns the entire scenario inside-out, reconfiguring all the characters and events into a nightmare straight out of Hollywood Babylon. In Lynch's twisted vision, the film industry is presented as a shadowy conspiracy of malevolent oddballs. You get the impression this is exactly how Lynch thinks show business is run, and who knows, he may be right.

BARTON FINK (1991)

One of the Coen Brothers' most divisive films, Barton Fink is famously an extended meditation on writer's block, conceived when they found themselves unable to progress any further on the labyrinthine plot to Miller's Crossing. And, indeed, it's a fine treatment of writing and writers, a subject Hollywood gets terribly wrong more often than not. But there's more than one of Joel & Ethan's crippling neuroses on display here: they're also extremely diffident about working within the Hollywood system, and while they may not feel much sympathy with the phony working-class sentiments of the titular playwright, they're certainly not on the side of the impossibly crass, bullying toadstool of a producer, played by Michael Lerner in one of the Coens' finest 'angry man behind an expensive desk' roles. The writers' own vices, from Fink's arrogance and ego to Faulkner stand-in Bill Mayhew's alcoholism and self-pity, may be what sinks them, but studio bosses like Lerner's bombastic Jack Lipnick, Jon Polito's toadying Lou Breeze, and Tony Shalhoub's irritable Ben Geisler are always willing to throw them a boulder. In the end, Fink, trapped by his own unwillingness to listen, finds himself in what is likely one of the Coen Brothers' worst nightmares: locked into an unbreakable studio contract, largely incapable of producing any worthwhile work, and even when they can, unable to find anyone to produce it.

Click Here for Part One, Part Two, Part Four & Part Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Scott Von Doviak, Leonard Pierce

OST: "A Clockwork Orange"

Leonard Pierce — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 18:15:00 GMT

It’s no surprise that the soundtrack to Stanley Kubrick’s highly controversial adaptation of Anthony Burgess’ sci-fi masterpiece A Clockwork Orange would prove to be almost as great a firestarter as the movie itself. After all, music plays a huge – and hugely divisive – role in the movie: music is all that the nihilistic, savage street thug Alex DeLarge truly loves; music is what makes one of his most vicious attacks so unbearable, as he brutally attacks an innocent while crooning the main theme from the classic musical Singin’ in the Rain; and music is what makes his brainwashing ‘treatment’ at the hands of the government so objectionable, as the Ludovico Technique not only robs him of his ability to do violence, but fills him with nausea when he hears the gorgeous strains of Beethoven’s 9th.

What was a bit surprising is the reason that the soundtrack to A Clockwork Orange was so controversial. Despite the intense public reaction, the real stumbling block in the release of the album was due to a number of legal impediments and a not-insignificant amount of money it took to secure the rights to Gene Kelly’s rendition of “Singin’ in the Rain”. But that isn’t what set many critics off. Instead, it was the classical score by composer Wendy (formerly Walter, a fact that had already, er, engendered some controversy) Carlos that put up many critics’ hackles: she arranged and performed a number of significant pieces of classical music, including Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” and others, using a then-new electronic organ known as the Moog synthesizer. A number of traditionalists attacked Carlos for bastardizing the classics, and for using what was referred to in one review as “circus music” to interpret the divine odes of Purcell and Rossini. It wasn’t a controversy that was new to Carlos, who had, for some time, issued her Switched-On series under her pre-sexual-reassignment-surgery name of Walter Carlos because the classical establishment was uncomfortable with female composers, let alone ones who had once been men. But even leaving those dated and debased criticisms aside, critics were cheating themselves and listeners out of some terrific music by decrying the Clockwork Orange OST: in addition to Carlos’ “Timesteps” (an extended piece based on the original Burgess novel that she’d begun work on even before she knew there was a movie in the works), there are very worthwhile tracks on the album by other early pioneers of avant-garde and electronic music, including Terry Riley and Tangerine Dream.

BEST TRACKS: Wendy Carlos’ contemplative, clever “Timesteps”, released on the original soundtrack album in a grievously abbreviated four-minute version but restored in 1998 on the Complete Original Score reissue in its full 14-minute glory; the eerie Moog rendition of the Second Movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, retitled here the “Suicide Scherzo” to reflect events in the plot; and the jarring yet utterly charming ditty “I Want to Marry a Lighthouse Keeper” by Erika Eigen.

The Rep Report (November 16 - December 2)

Peter Smith — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 19:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Early in his foreshortened career as a film director, Albert Lamorisse made two of the most enduringly beautiful "children's movies" in the pantheon: the 1956 Oscar-winning, thirty-two-minute The Red Balloon, co-starring the title character and the director's six-year-old son Pascal, and the 1952, forty-minute White Mane. Film Forum is showing both as a single program for ten days from November 16-25. Lamorisse, who was born in Paris in 1922 and who was killed in a 1970 helicopter crash while shooting footage for a documentary, had developed a fine eye working as a photographer before making his first moving pictures. (He is fondly remembered in another department of geekdom as the creator of the board game "La Conquette Du Monde", which Parker Brothers would eventually market in the United States under the name "Risk".) His eye for beauty and fanciful poetic imagination proved to be perfectly scaled to these short works, which in their bittersweet way are basically perfect. Seen back-to-back, they're almost as ideal a start to the holiday season as getting crushed to death by a stampede of customers when the mall doors open the day after Thanksgiving.

There may also be an eye-popping children-of-all-ages feel to some of the pictures stocked in the Museum of the Moving Image program, Glorious Technicolor! (November 17 - December 2). The schedule includes a restored print of the gob-smackingly great-looking outdoor melodrama Trail of the Lonesome Pine, as well as The Adventues of Robin Hood with Errol Flynn strutting his stuff in leafy-green tights and classic musicals as Singin' in the Rain, The Wizard of Oz, The Band Wagon, and one of Busby Berkeley's all-time "can you get me some of what the choreographer's been smoking?" eye-poppers, The Gang's All Here. Plus a little something called Gone with the Wind and, on December 2, that yuletide perennial Apocalypse Now Redux.

Before there was such a thing as "independent film", there was the mildly condescendingly named "regional-film movement," a system by which people who lacked the wherewithal or the desire to relocate to New York or Los Angeles made movies wherever they were whenever they could scrape the money together, tried to get them shown at festivals, sometimes succeeded, and then, as often as not, were never heard from again. The Texas-based writer-director Eagle Pennell had his moment right on the cusp of the new dawn of independent-film distribution. In fact, he's partly, if indirectly responsible for it, since it's been reported that it was Pennell's first feature, the 1978 The Whole Shootin' Match, that inspired Robert Redford to found the Sundance Film Festival, just to see if maybe there was anything else like that being made in the wide open spaces between the two coasts. Pennell's second feature, Last Night at the Alamo attracted even more attention in 1984, but by the time Sundance was turning "independent" directors into cult superstars on their way to being industry players, Pennell was yesterday's news, as well as an increasingly hopeless alcoholic on his way to being homeless. (He died in 2002, eight days before what would have been his fiftieth birthday.) From November 16-21, the Film Society of Lincoln Center is bringing back The Whole Shootin' Match in a restored print. It's a chance to pay tribute to a lost pioneer and also to see what the part of America that's outside Hollywood — specifically, the highly distinctive part that was Austin, Texas — looked like thirty years ago.

CHICAGO: From November 17 through December 4, the Gene Siskel Film Center pays tribute to the neo-Bresson stylings of Portuguese director Pedro Costa, an avant-garde narrative minimalist renowned for the painterly beauty of his compositional sense. The program begins with his early 1989 feature The Blood (O Sangue) and includes his recent, highly acclaimed Colossal Youth.

BOSTON: Now that Ben Affleck, of all people, seems to have gotten Boston better than half-right in the firmly rooted thriller Gone Baby Gone, it's as good a time as any to look back on how Hollywood has done by Beantown. Boston Filmed (November 16-22) at the Brattle devotes a week to such diverse on-location entertainments as the original The Thomas Crown Affair and Love Story, up to the more recent Mystic River and The Departed, as well as two indies from director Brad Anderson, the romantic comedy and ode-to-postponed-gratification Next Stop, Wonderland and the minimalist mind-fuck horror story Session 9. Buried deep in the mix, towards the middle of next week, are some obscure, modest, not-available-on-DVD gems: the 1977 Between the Lines, Joyce Micklin Silver's likable little comedy about the death of the counterculture as seen from the offices of an underground newspaper, and the 1973 crime drama The Friends of Eddie Coyle ,with a cast that includes Robert Mitchum, Peter Boyle, Richard Jordan, Alex Rocco and Steven Keats all having the time of their lives rolling George V. Higgins's dialogue around on their tongues.

SAN FRANCISCO: This weekend, the Castro proudly presents a bunch of movies I've never heard of as part of the Fifth Annual Third I Film Festival, promoting South Asian cinema "art-house classics to experimental visions to next-level Bollywood." I'm going to be honest here. With everything else that's going on in the world, even just the world of film, it's not going to be possible for even an authority so utterly devoid of a life as The Rep Report to be up on all of it until my cloning experiments bear fruit, and though I never made anything like a conscious decision about it, it seems that experimental South Asian movies and next-level Bollywood are my major field of personal ignorance. If you're in the San Francisco area and don't have a wedding to attend, I encourage you to sneer at my boring provincialism and check this program out.

— Phil Nugent