The Screengrab : sr.

Movie Review: "Ballast"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Ballast, which was made in rural Mississippi with a small cast of non-professional actors, most of them African-American, begins with Lawrence (Micheal J. Smith, Sr.), who is discovered sitting in his living room in shock, with the body of his twin brother, a suicide, lying in bed in the other room. For a while, the movie cuts back and forth between Lawrence's sad story and the troubles of twelve-year-old James (JimMyron Ross) and his indulgent single mother Marlee (Tarra Riggs), without at first making it clear how their lives are connected. Bored and lonely, James hooks up with an older group of drug dealers and begins making drops for them on his bike. He also acquires a gun and begins seriously acting out, at one point barging in on Lawrence in his home and robbing him, though Lawrence is so far lost in his depressive misery that it feels a little off applying so active a verb as "robbing" to anything that could be done to him; sticking a gat in his face is like yelling at a dead dog to heel. Eventually, things go very wrong with James and his new friends, and as the increasingly desperate Marlee begins to flail out looking for a way to keep herself and her son safe, the central trio collide with a bang.

Ballast won awards for its first-time director, Lance Hammer, and its cinematographer, Lol Crawley, when it played at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, and it has since gone on to become one of the best-reviewed movies of the year. I was eager to see it myself, partly because I grew up in rural Mississippi myself, and the world this movie touches on doesn't show up in movies that often. Crawley gives the back country landscape a blue-tinged loveliness that's very easy on the eyes but is also a little at odds with the uninflected, "natural" performances of most of the male cast members. The world of this movie doesn't bear much connection to the Mississippi I know, not because there's no visible resemblance between the two, but because the movie feels airless and stylized and as devoid of any sense of ongoing life as a diorama. Yet at the same time, Hammer, who invokes Robert Bresson in discussing his intentions, seems to mean for his nonprofessional cast to bring something to the screen that's more "real" than trained actors can. Though it may be blasphemous to say it, Bresson himself wasn't always able to get what he needed out of the supposedly pure, malleable untrained actors he came to favor, and Hammer hasn't yet had the experience that Bresson had wracked up before he started treating the casting of non-actors as an essential part of his "transcendental style." Here, Micheal J. Smith has a solid dignity that isn't always enough to hold the screen but does translate into a respectful admiration for his character. But young JimMyron Ross has no idea how to communicate whatever is supposed to be inside his troubled character, and Hammer has no idea how to guide him. If the viewer is pure-hearted and sympathetic enough to have no end of intrinsic sympathy for a lost, fatherless kid who likes to wave guns around, lies all the time, and stupidly stirs up trouble that puts the people who care for him in mortal danger, that might not be a problem, but for the flawed mere mortals among us, watching this little punk who has no depths of inner life that the camera can pick up on run amok creating plot complications can get old fast. Tarra Riggs, who has won roles in a few other pictures since making her movie debut here, gives the movie's most nuanced performance, but even her work suffers a little because of the writer-director's failure to really get a handle on the kid at the center. This woman is supposed to have a past history of substance abuse, and she's supposed to be hard-headed and self-sufficient enough to have gotten past that and made a living for herself and her boy by scrubbing urinals. But she never suspects that her acting-out little snot of a son might be involved with drugs, even after her starts turning up with bruises on his face. For the first half of the movie, she's so sweet and reasonable beyond the call of duty that she seems delusional, and there's so little preparation for her flaring up emotionally after things turn bad that she seems deranged.

It's nice to see a movie whose characters qualify as "the working poor" that actually seems to be set in the same economic world we live in: no Hollywood screenwriter would be constitutionally capable of writing the scenes in which James tells his mother that he needs twenty dollars for school or a hundred or so dollars to get right with the drug dealers, and she reacts as if she couldn't imagine earning that much extra cash in a single lifetime. But a lot of Ballast falls solidly in the "worthy" category. Pauline Kael once said that one of the few ironclad rules about movies is that the good ones never leave you feeling virtuous, and by the time that the catatonic Lawrence, whose dog was taken in by a neighbor after its grieving owner went off the deep end, goes to fetch the animal so that he can use it to bring James out of his shell, virtuousness is just what the film seems meant to embody. It's artful and well-meaning, but there may also be some condescension built into its joyless depiction of the tragic zombie lives of the underclass. The Delta setting may be a hint that Ballast is meant as the cinematic equivalent of a blues song, but if it is, it's the kind you get from the academic appreciators of the form who don't get that the term "the blues" describes the state that the music itself is supposed to lift you out of.

The Rep Report (September 12--19)

Phil Nugent — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 15:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: If you've ever wondered why Robert Downey, Jr. keeps that "junior" in his name, it's because, once upon a time, when Downey was starting out in the mid-1980s, it still seemed prudent to make it easier for casting directors to figure out that he was not his own father, a man who until recently did not have to be advertised as "Robert Downey, Sr." In the 1960s, Downey the Elder made a string of low-budget satirical comedies, notably Babo 73 (1964), which starred underground cinema mainstay Taylor Mead and 1965's Chafed Elbows, arguably the first "underground" to receive a significant measure of commercial and critical success. Though he had an almost-mainstream hit with 1969's Putney Swope, he pretty much dropped off the radar after 1972's Greaser's Palace. (In between, he made the 1970 Pound, which is set in one, and which features Robert Downey the Younger's film debut. He played a puppy.) But while most of his later feature-film work made it to home video in the 1980s--even Up the Academy, the infamous (and disowned) attempt to start a Mad magazine movie franchise to compete with the National Lampoon--those early-'60s films just dropped off the face of the Earth, and were generally assumed to have been lost.. Now Anthology Film Archives is bringing them back for a week's run. Bruce Bennett at New York Sun has the story of how Martin Scorsese's Film Foundation got on board with the project of restoring Downey's early work. It is reported that Downey, upon learning that Martin Scorsese agreed that it was worth putting up the "small fortune" necessary to restore these films because of their cultural significance, had a quick answer: "Has he seen them?"

Film Forum, in association with the BFI, commences a two-week tribute to David Lean on Friday. Yeah, Lawrence of Arabia and the other late epics are made for the big screen, but for some of us, the really choice news here is that many of Lean's finely crafted, early entertainments are brought together, many in handsome new prints. The program kicks off perfectly with the Dickens-adaptation double feature: Great Expectations, a rousing entertainment that famously inaugurated Lean's lifelong partnership with Alec Guinness (seen here in the role of Herbert Pocket), and Oliver Twist, in which Guinness actually caused the movie some problem with Jewish groups for his alarmingly faithful embodiment of Dickens's Fagin. There's also the chance to see Charles Laughton tear it up with a splendidly undomesticated performance in the domestic comedy Hobson's Choice, Noel Coward perfect the stiff upper lip in the wartime propaganda film In Which We Serve, and Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard take out a patent on the masochistic romantic agony of shared self-denial in Brief Encounter. A word to the wise: if it's epic you're after, take a pass on the latest drive to "re-evaluate" Lean's misbegotten 1970 waste of time Ryan's Daughter and, instead, check out his last film, the sumptuous, brilliantly acted 1984 version of E. M. Forster's A Passage to India.

LOS ANGELES: The 12th Annual Latino International Film Festival, one of the pre-eminent opportunities for Latino filmmakers to show their work to audiences in the U.S., runs September 12 through the 19th. The 132-film program ranges from the popular and timely Colombian drama Paraiso Travel to music documentary profiles of Celia Cruz and Israel "Cachao" Lopez.

Happy (Almost) Birthday, MAD! (a tribute by Andumb Osboring)

Andrew Osborne — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 18:00:00 GMT

According to the recent 286 glossy-page “green” issue of Vanity Fair, E.C. Comics was founded 60 years ago by William M. Gaines, kicking up an important early skirmish in the ongoing American Culture Wars by publishing influential, controversial horror, action, science fiction and fantasy titles like Tales From The Crypt, Two-Fisted Tales and Weird Science.

But Mad magazine, which premiered in 1952, would prove to be the company’s most iconic, longest-surviving contribution. Much has been written about the generations-deep influence of Alfred E. Neuman and “the usual gang of idiots” on American satire and popular culture in general...but, this being the Screengrab, I wanted to pay special tribute to six decades of Mad’s sometimes brilliant, sometimes sophomoric movie parodies.

According to our old friend Wikipedia, the first film spoof featured in Mad was 1953’s Ping Pong (get it?), followed shortly thereafter by Noon!, Sane!, From Eternity Back To Here!, Wild 1 (correction) Wild ½, Stalag 18 and approximately a zillion others over the subsequent decades, up to and including contemporary jabs like The Da Vinci Coma, Spider-Sham 3 and Harry Plodder & The Torture of the Fan Base.

I became familiar with the older parodies through repackaged, full-color mini-comic inserts in the Mad Super Special editions, but it’s the mid-‘70s Mort Drucker era that I remember most fondly, with its takedowns of movies I knew and loved (Star Roars, The Spy Who Glubbed Me), “grown-up” movies I experienced in Mad long before viewing the actual objects of ridicule (The Ecchorcist, A Crock o’ (Blip!) Now) and countless flicks I never bothered to see (The Eyes of Lurid Mess, The Calamityville Horror) figuring they’d never be as entertaining as the Mad versions.

Was I annoyed when, halfway through reading the gazillion-page Lord of the Rings trilogy Mad blew the ending of the epic for me with 1979’s The Ring and I, a parody of 1978’s animated Lord of the Rings (which only went as far as the Battle of Helm’s Deep)? Yes. Very annoyed.

But I had to give credit to the magazine for brutally savaging its own 1980 celluloid fiasco, Up The Academy (directed, curiously enough, by Robert Downey, Sr.). And, in addition to the laughs, attitude and cinematic sensibility it offered, Mad also provided my pubescent, pre-internet libido with any number of smokin' hot pen-and-ink fantasy girls to ogle (Undressed To Kill’s semi-clad Nancy Allen caricature, in particular) as fondly remembered now as any Playboy centerfold.

Eventually, of course, like an elder sibling cast out of Narnia, I drifted away from Mad in later years, never to return...but as long as there’s Bleccch in my Kaputnik, the usual gang of idiots will live forever in my Portzebie.

Rep Report Addendum: 90 Years' Worth of United Artists at Film Forum

Phil Nugent — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 20:00:00 GMT

United Artists may have been the first major American film studio to be set up, back in 1919, in some kind of spirit of. . . if not utopianism, then at least something other than outright hostile opposition to the people on the creative end. It was the people on the creative end who set it up — four of them, to be precise — D. W. Griffith, Charles Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., and Mary Pickford — with an eye towards distributing their own movies, and accounts of its founding that sought out the opinion of their rival studio heads tended to be long of images of asylums taken over by the inmates, that sort of thing. Originally each member of the original triumvirate was supposed to help the studio make its nut by turning out four films a year, which might not have been such a crackpot idea at one point, but Griffith and Chaplin and Fairbanks were beginning to think bigger and bigger on projects that they fussed over for longer and longer periods, and none of them were getting any younger, and it wasn't long before other filmmakers were being invited to make films for UA. In the 1950s, producers Arthur Krim and Robert Benjamin took it over, with Chaplin and Pickford's blessings. (Fairbanks and Griffith had died by then.) As Dave Kehr notes, "Because United Artists did not feel constrained by the moral strictures of the Production Code, it was able to move quickly as social mores changed in the 1960s." In the fifties, working with a succession of independent producers, the studio had greenlit movies that defied censorship codes and conventional attitudes such as The Manchurian Candidate, Sweet Smell of Success, and Kiss Me Deadly. In the 1960s, they produced Midnight Cowboy, the first movie to win the Academy Award for Best Picture after having been given an X rating by the MPAA. (They also developed a lucrative sideline in English-speaking imports, such as the British films Tom Jones — another Oscar winner for Best Picture — A Hard Day's Night, and Sunday, Bloody Sunday, as well as the dubbed versions of Sergio Leone's Italian Westerns starring Clint Eastwood.

In the 1970s, UA's faith in risk-taking filmmakers made possible such Renaissance-era classics as Last Tango in Paris, Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye and Thieves Like Us, and Annie Hall, but this approach, led them grief: at a precarious time in the company's fortune, around the time that Krim, Benjamin, and CEO Eric Pleskow noisily broke away to form their own company, Orion, Michael Cimino showed up at UA's door with a script called Heaven's Gate and a request for enough rope, and the confused, inexperienced new UA bosses gave him enough to hang half the directors in Los Angeles. Cimino's baby, which premiered in the same season that produced the studio's last proud moment, Raging Bull, sank United Artists, which wound up being picked up by MGM, which coveted its distribution apparatus. For much of the time since then, UA has amounted to a handful of franchise rights (mainly to the Pink Panther and James Bond) in search of a studio, but last year it became a play toy for Tom Cruise and his producing partner Paula Wagner. Starting today and running through May 1, Film Forum honors the good old days with a mammoth retrospective that includes all the films listed above — well, except for Heaven's Gate; I mean, would you invite the guy who killed your kids to your wedding anniversary? — including other delights, including key films by the original big four: Griffith's Orphans of the Storm, Way Down East, and Broken Blossoms; Chaplin's City Lights and Modern Times; Fairbanks's The Thief of Bagdad, The Mask of Zorro, and Robin Hood; and Mary Pickford's Sparrows and My Best Girl.