The Screengrab : stephen dorff

Morning Deal Report: Sofia Coppola Goes “Somewhere”

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 20 May 2009 14:00:00 GMT

Sofia Coppola’s latest directorial effort Somewhere has secured the participation of a jackass. Chris Pontius of the Jackass crew “will play Sammy, best friend of the character played by Stephen Dorff, a decadent, bad-boy actor living at the Chateau Marmont in West Hollywood who begins to re-examine his life after a surprise visit from his 11-year-old daughter (Elle Fanning),” per The Hollywood Reporter.

That Dreamworks dream may be deferred. Yesterday we told you the studio had the blessing of the King family to proceed with their MLK biopic. Two of King’s children disagree. “Bernice King and Martin Luther King III have been embroiled in a legal battle with brother Dexter King, who is chairman-CEO of the King Estate, over who controls the personal papers of their late mother, Coretta Scott King,” Variety reports. “Bernice King told the Associated Press on Tuesday: ‘This is a deal that Mr. Spielberg and his people ... have entered into believing that they have the blessing of the King Estate. They don't have the blessings of Bernice and Martin King.’”

And we can all breathe a sigh of relief: the new Footloose has found its Bacon. You’ll recall that Zac Efron dropped out of the project, which had us all worried there for a while, but now Chace Crawford has stepped into his dancing shoes. “With a more mature, edgy version of Footloose than the original, Paramount will likely benefit from the fact that Crawford's Gossip Girl following skews a bit older than Efron's High School Musical audience.”

Screengrab's Guilty Pleasures (Part Six)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 23:30:00 GMT

SARAH CLYNE SUNDBERG'S GUILTY PLEASURES:

PRÊT-À-PORTER (1994)

Let me draw your attention to a film that perhaps isn't so much embarrassing as severely underappreciated. In my mid-teens my mind was similar to cheap sausage; pretty much anything went in. This included a gem unique to the early '90s — Elle Topmodel. I could not get enough of the comings and doings of Christy Turlington, Linda Evangelista and Kate Moss (those were supermodels, lest you did not know). Meanwhile I had my angry-girl Doc Martens and parka-wearing indie cred to protect. I kept my obsession with fashion and models under wraps. Happily, there appeared a film that was art house enough so that I could see it without shame: Prêt-à-Porter. This was Robert Altman's send-up of the Paris fashion week and the fashion industry at large. At the time, I thought it was all fiction (though thrilling) and laughed my ass off at the prissy TV anchor, the egomaniac fashion designers, and the three scary-looking fashion editors, shriveled in their severe brown bobs. And last but not least, the two journalists who holed up in their hotel room, reporting the shows off the TV while screwing and getting trashed off the booze in the mini bar. That was before I knew the world well enough to realize that some things don't need to be made up. The movie also reads like a best-of '60s Euro movies with Sophia Loren, Anouk Aimée and Marcello Mastroianni knocking about on screen. I find that unlike Elle Topmodel, Prêt-à-Porter has only improved with age.

BACKBEAT (1994)

Backbeat tells the the tale of The Beatles in the post-Liverpool, pre-Beatlemania years. It's one of those films that is barely middle-brow and not quite tacky enough to be kitsch. But I love this movie, goddammit. Even though I never really cared much for The Beatles. Stuart Sutcliffe, the "fifth Beatle" and main protagonist here, tags along with John, Paul, George and Ringo on their first minor break: A tour in Hamburg, Germany. There Stuart finds his true calling is not to be a good-looking stage prop to his friend, John. Rather, he has been put on this earth to pal around with black-clad German philosophy majors, get high at art school parties, and sleep with the beautiful pixie-haired German photographer who gave the band their first "look." Love triangles! Friendship put to the test! Fame! Sex! Untimely death! This movie has it all, packaged in attractive, early '60s costume. Stephen Dorff may have played Stuart, the ostensible main character. But Ian Hart steals the show as John Lennon in his pompadour-wearing rocker days, spouting easily digestible quotes, "I'm not angry, I'm fucking desperate!" and "What if you met the girl of your dreams, like Brigitte Bardot, but with better manners, and she fell in love with your best friend?"

Click Here For More Guilt From Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Leonard Pierce, Hayden Childs & Vadim Rizov

Contributor: Sarah Clyne Sundberg

Unwatchable #63: “Alone in the Dark”

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

Of the many fine and noble reasons to take on this Unwatchable project (a paycheck, an outlet for repressed hostility, an excuse to put off watching Berlin Alexanderplatz), the chance to familiarize myself with the oeuvre of Uwe Boll certainly ranks…somewhere. We pick on him a lot here, so it seems only fair that I ensure it’s justified. The first Boll work we encountered was BloodRayne 2: Deliverance back at #77, and this was my conclusion: “I have to assume this is not close to Uwe Boll’s worst work, because it’s pretty much indistinguishable from any other straight-to-video genre junk.”

Alone in the Dark is probably a step closer to Boll’s worst work. Like BloodRayne 2 and most of the Boll filmography, its origins lie in the ancient Japanese art of the “videogame.” The movie begins with the longest expository crawl I have ever encountered. You could combine all the opening crawls from every episode of Star Wars, including the ones about galactic trade routes, and they wouldn’t add up to the length of this thing. So much back story, so little need for it. It has something to do with an ancient advanced race of Indians called the Abnaki, who opened the portal to the world of darkness and let all the booga-boogas out.

Edward Carnby (Christian Slater), a former agent for Bureau 713, the government agency of paranormal investigations (Your tax dollars at work under the Bush administration!), is haunted by these whatsihoosies, both in his dreams and in his real life, where they have taken over the bodies of people who grew up in the same orphanage as he did. Along with his girlfriend, the brilliant anthropologist and museum curator Aline Cedrac (Tara Reid), and the forces of Bureau 713, headed up by hothead Burke (Stephen Dorff), he must defeat these computer generated beasties before they do all the terrible, terrible things.

It’s basically a cross between a zombie movie and an Aliens ripoff, with a little dash of Indiana Jones, but it would all be instantly forgettable if not for the deranged casting. Much has been made of poor Tara Reid in her thick glasses and hair-in-a-bun, trying to act all smart and stuff. And it’s true, one does have difficulty maintaining a straight face when she talks about “decoding the pictograms” or mispronounces “New-FOUND-land.” It’s like watching a Sarah Palin interview, which is not an experience I’ve been anxious to relive quite yet. But let’s not be sexist here. Can we not agree that Slater makes an equally implausible genius investigator, and that Dorff is perhaps a little out of his depth as a leader of men? It’s as if the bus carrying the entire drama club plunged over an embankment, and the drama coach was forced to recast the school play with the head cheerleader, the backup quarterback and the guy who makes bongs in wood shop.

All things considered, though, Alone in the Dark is a mighty tedious cacaphony of automatic gunfire and bad special effects. I'm still waiting for Dr. Boll to impress me with some Ed Wood-grade lunacy. Don't let me down.

Previously on Unwatchable:
64. Angels’ Brigade
65. Meet the Browns
66. Jail Bait
67. Nine Lives
68. Kazaam

DVD Digest for August 12, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 14:00:00 GMT

After last week’s thin selection of new DVDs, this week brings a number of high-quality releases.

DVDs of the Week: DVDs couldn’t be much different than this week’s two most notable new releases, the Criterion release of Guy Maddin’s Brand Upon the Brain! and the final season of The Wire (HBO). But in its own way, each is pretty indispensible. Maddin’s film is, like his entire body of work, indescribable to anyone who hasn’t already seen it, but for those who are on his wavelength, it’s magical. That Criterion has finally embraced this most movie-drunk of filmmakers is exciting enough. But they’ve also gathered half a dozen different narration tracks for the sake of variety, including narration by Isabella Rossellini, Laurie Anderson, Eli Wallach, and Maddin himself. In addition, there’s a new documentary on the director, plus two new short films by Maddin, made especially for this release. So yeah, good news.

But if anything, the release of Season 5 of The Wire is even more of a cause for celebration. The groundbreaking, critically-acclaimed HBO series has been praised to the heavens in venues both classier and more authoritative than this one, so I’ll refrain from heaping still more effusive praise on a series that hardly needs it. All I can say is, if you haven’t experienced The Wire yet, you’ve got some great times ahead of you. And if you have, you don’t need me to convince you to buy the final season on DVD.

This week’s recent releases coming to DVD include: Dennis Quaid and Ellen Page in Smart People (Disney, also Blu-Ray); Stephen Chow’s cockeyed kids’ movie CJ7 (Sony, also Blu-Ray); and Val Kilmer and Stephen Dorff in Felon (Sony, also Blu-Ray). Also, three DVDs by Lech Majewski: The Garden of Earthly Delights, Glass Lips, and The Gospel According to Harry (all Kino), the last of which features a young Viggo Mortensen.

In TV on DVD, this week brings South Park Season 11 (Paramount), Prison Break Season 3 (Fox, also Blu-Ray), and Caroline in the City Season 1 (Paramount).

Finally, in Blu-Ray only news, the week’s big release almost certainly has to be Sony’s “Action” Box Set, which includes Jean Claude Van Damme in Maximum Risk, Steven Seagal in Half Past Dead, Wesley Snipes in 7 Seconds, and Ice Cube in xXx: State of the Union. I mean, come on- Van Damme, Seagal, and Snipes all in one box set? The 1993 version of me is stoked. Also this week: The Doors (Lionsgate) and Belly (Lionsgate), in case you were wondering.

From Skeet to Scarlett: Vanity Fair's Hollywood Issue

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 21:30:00 GMT

As you read here earlier today, Vanity Fair has cancelled their Oscar party, but there’s no stopping their annual movie issue. Somewhere amid the hundreds of glossy ads and smelly cologne strips, you’ll find articles on the films of Norman Mailer, the glitzy life of producer Jerry Weintraub and “A Guy’s Guide to Chick Flicks” by the ever-vigilant James Wolcott. The web site offers none of these, but it does feature a slideshow of all the Hollywood Issue covers photographed by Annie Liebovitz. It’s fun to flip back through the years and have a good chuckle at some of Vanity Fair’s picks to click from days gone by (after first pausing briefly to once again admire Scarlett Johannson’s rear flank in the March 2006 edition). For instance, without peeking at the caption, how many of the stars on the 2000 cover can you identify on sight? The “hot new wave” (their words, not ours) of 1998 seems to have panned out for the most part, but are there any pangs of regret for including both Stephen Dorff and Skeet Ulrich in 1996’s "Boy’s Town" lineup?

Probably not. After all, Vanity Fair isn’t in the talent evaluation business; they’ve got a product to move, and apparently putting attractive people on their cover is a time-tested way of doing it. The Hollywood Issue is probably a more accurate barometer of which publicists have the most juice than anything else, so if anything we should be impressed by their batting average over the years. So take heart, Ginnifer Goodwin, Alice Braga, Elizabeth Banks and the rest of you 2008 “Fresh Faces”: all is not necessarily lost.