The Screengrab : the departed

Up The Academy: Screengrab Salutes The All-Time Best & Worst Best Picture Winners (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 23:00:00 GMT

THE BEST:

CASABLANCA (1943)

For all the iconic Hollywood films from The Wizard of Oz to Star Wars that DIDN’T win Best Picture, it’s nice to know that Casablanca, at least, was properly enshrined. Whether you measure by cultural cachet, quotable lines, dorm room posters or AFI ranking, Humphrey Bogart’s finest hour is a classic among classics...and not in that “eat your broccoli” grad student dissertation way, either. The pace is crisp, the intrigue is intriguing, the writing is sharp and funny and the romance (not to mention the bromance) is swoony, even for cynics who’d normally gag on a sentiment like, “We’ll always have Paris.” In fact, Roger Ebert claims in his commentary on a special edition DVD of the film that he’s never heard a bad review of Casablanca, which he says is “probably on more lists of the greatest films of all time than any other single title, including Citizen Kane,” a masterpiece which may be “greater,” but nowhere near as beloved. Normally, such unquestioned, universal adoration would trigger my contrarian side (I’m lookin’ at you, Hanks!) – but that friggin' “La Marseillaise” scene gets me every goddamn time. (Now if you’ll excuse me, I seem to have a little something in my eye...)

ALL ABOUT EVE (1950)

This inside-show-business comic melodrama isn't the greatest movie ever to be garlanded with Oscars. It probably isn't even as great as Sunset Boulevard, another inside-show-business movie that happened to be nominated for Best Picture the very same year. But it's the choicest possible example of a certain kind of entertainment that looks especially fetching come awards season, the glittering self-hating bitch-fest, with actors jumping at the chance to show what overgrown, treacherous babies actors -- other actors -- really are behind the scenes, and also with the writer-director, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, preserving some of the pearls of wit that he'd been test-screening at all the best Hollywood dinner parties for the preceding couple of years. Mankiewicz was lucky to get to assign his dialogue to a couple of the greatest bitches ever to stalk a soundstage: Bette Davis, in her archetypal role as the actress and force of nature Margot Channing, and George Sanders, who picked up a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his purring critic, Addison DeWitt. The movie even opens with an awards ceremony, which Sanders can be heard snarking at in voiceover. With that opening, Mankiewicz was making it clear to the Academy that he was setting up a joke that only they could satisfyingly complete by giving his movie the prize, and the voters were happy to comply.

ON THE WATERFRONT (1954)

On its surface, this movie about labor racketeering on the New York docks could easily be mistaken for the kind of torn-from-the-headlines melodrama that Warner Bros. used to whip up into flavorful, punchy stories in the '30s and which by the 1950s was often served up in bloated and sanctimonious form. (Directed by Elia Kazan from an original script by Budd Schulberg, the movie is also widely taken as its creators' attempt to rationalize their friendly witness status before the House Un-American Activities Committee by showing the informer as a beleaguered hero.) But the actual New York locations, the strong work by such actors as Eva Marie Saint and Rod Steiger, and the best-observed moments in Schulberg's script transcend the movie's built-in limitations. And Brando himself embodies transcendence. Working quietly at first and slowly building to a full boil, he makes Terry Malloy into a real human being even as he's defining the image of the alienated '50s hero, a working-class outsider whose anger and confusion -- the instinctive, untutored emotions of a trapped animal -- make him seem more alive than the society he can't fit into, a society that no one guessed at the time was rotting from deep inside. In addition to marking the end of Brando's professional collaboration with Kazan, it also turned out to mark the end of Brando's first phase as a culture hero: his next movie, representing the start of a long stint in the wilderness, was Desirée, in which he played Napoleon. But it was enough to live on for awhile.

THE GODFATHER (1972) & THE GODFATHER, PART II (1974)

The early seventies were such a wild time for American movies that a bloody, historically sophisticated use of a criminal family as a metaphor for the capitalist system and the corruption of the American dream served as the era's answer to Gone with the Wind. Francis Ford Coppola's masterpiece, as intelligent and emotionally complicated as any epic ever to come out of Hollywood, would stand as a high point both in the history of film and the Academy's fluctuating record of shows of good sense all by itself. It's to the Academy's considerable credit that it did the right thing when it was presented with Part II, which was not the automatic commercial blockbuster that the first film had been. It must have been an especially sweet moment for Coppola, considering that the other Best Picture nominees included not only his own The Conversation but Chinatown, which was the first film independently produced by Robert Evans after Evans left Paramount Pictures, where he and Coppola had a difficult time working together on the first Godfather. Plus he beat The Towering Inferno!

THE DEPARTED (2006)

Yes, we can all agree that it's a sham of a mockery of a travesty that Martin Scorsese never won an Oscar until 2007, and it makes no sense at all that The Departed is the only movie he directed to ever win Best Picture. Let's get past that, can we? Consider the competition this spectacularly entertaining Boston crime epic faced in the category: Babel, Letters from Iwo Jima, Little Miss Sunshine and The Queen. Not really a group with a lot of staying power. If I came across any of them while channel surfing tonight, I doubt I'd pause, but The Departed sucks me in every time. William Monahan's underrated script is an endlessly quotable encyclopedia of pungent tough-guy banter. Alec Baldwin and Mark Wahlberg in particular make the most of it, and although Jack Nicholson doesn't make the most convincing Boston mob boss, even he has his inspired moments. Scorsese isn't reinventing the wheel here, he's just showing all his imitators who have been trying to recreate Goodfellas for the past two decades how to really put on a show. There's an exhilarating pace and crackling energy to his relentless storytelling here, no matter that we've seen the story before (in Infernal Affairs, the Japanese thriller upon which The Departed is based) and that it may not actually make a lick of sense. I may be an apologist for late-period Scorsese (I think I love Gangs of New York even more), but even if you're not a Departed fan, who could begrudge one of our greatest living filmmakers (and one of the world's most enthusiastic movie fans) his moment in the Oscar spotlight?

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent & Scott Von Doviak

Morning Deal Report: Pride and Predator

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 15:30:00 GMT

How many times have you been watching a frilly Jane Austen adaptation when the thought occurs to you: “You know what would really improve this movie? An alien attack!” Well, your dreams have come true. Variety reports that “Will Clark is set to direct Pride and Predator, which veers from the traditional period costume drama when an alien crash lands and begins to butcher the mannered protags, who suddenly have more than marriage and inheritance to worry about.”

My favorite Halle Berry movie is the one where she plays the jewel thief. Actually, that one hasn’t been made yet – but be patient! Berry is “attached to star in Who Is Doris Payne, a Eunetta Boone-scripted fact-based film about an international jewel thief whose career spanned five decades.

William Monahan is a busy man. The Departed writer, last seen adapting The Art of the Heist, is also set to turn the John Grisham legal thriller (as opposed to the John Grisham whaling adventure, I guess) The Associate into a screenplay. Shia LaBeouf stars as “a Yale Law School student with a sordid secret that leaves him vulnerable to blackmail.”

Related:
Morning Deal Report: The Squeakquel
Halle Berry Loses Her Mind

Morning Deal Report: The Squeakquel

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 15:00:00 GMT

I wish I could tell you there won’t be an Alvin and the Chipmunks sequel. Furthermore, I wish I could tell you it won’t be titled Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel. But I cannot tell you these things. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Betty Thomas will direct the squeakquel, in which “Zachary Levi, star of the NBC action comedy series Chuck, has been cast opposite the computer-generated singing rodents.”

Woody Allen is going back to London. After a brief return to his New York stomping grounds for the upcoming Whatever Works starring Larry David and Evan Rachel Wood, Allen will shoot his latest project across the pond with Josh Brolin and Anthony Hopkins. “As usual, Allen is keeping title and plot under wraps,” Variety reports.

The Departed screenwriter William Monahan has another crime up his sleeve. Monahan will direct an adaptation of “The Art of the Heist: Confessions of a Master Thief, Rock-and-Roller and Prodigal Son, the forthcoming memoirs of career criminal Myles Connor. Connor became an art connoisseur and a rock musician whose band, Myles and the Wild Ones, backed Roy Orbison. He was also an accomplished art and antiques thief who was involved in a series of museum robberies that grabbed headlines in Boston in the 1970s and 1980s,” per Variety.

Morning Deal Report: Jim Sheridan’s “Black Mass”

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

Now here’s a project I’m genuinely excited about: Irish director Jim Sheridan (In the Name of the Father, The Boxer and, er, the 50 Cent movie Get Rich or Die Tryin’) is set to adapt the true crime tale Black Mass: The True Story of an Unholy Alliance Between the FBI and the Irish Mob. It’s the story of Boston mob boss Whitey Bulger and corrupt federal agent John Connolly, who aided and abetted his criminal empire for decades. (If this sounds familiar, it’s probably because The Departed drew heavily on the Bulger legend.) "This is a story of a corrupt system and about how an angry guy became the second most wanted man after Bin Laden," Sheridan told Variety.

Gore Verbinski has gone to the Black List for his next project. Said list is “an unofficial Hollywood tally of promising unmade scripts,” and Verbinski has plucked one formerly titled Black Hole from the pile. Michael Gilio’s script “focuses on a retired rancher who responds to a phone solicitation swindle that wipes out his savings,” Variety reports. You’re picturing Tommy Lee Jones too, aren’t you?

“Focus Features is developing a biopic about Fela Kuti, the Nigerian musician and political maverick,” per The Hollywood Reporter. “Kuti, whose full name is Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, garnered fame in the U.S. for his fusion style of music known as Afrobeat. He often was imprisoned on what human-rights groups called trumped-up charges when he went back to his native country and spoke out against its government and policies. He died in 1997.”

Related:
Turned Stick-Up Kid, But Look What You Done Did
Watch It (But Not For Free): "The Friends of Eddie Coyle"

Oscar Launch: The Silly Season Commences

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 17:00:00 GMT

As the days of 2008 dwindle down to a precious few, the year-end think-pieces, Oscar prognostications and meta “we’re not really prognosticating, but rather ironically commenting on the ridiculous awards process” articles proliferate at an alarming rate. How to keep up? How to ensure that you’re familiar with not only the consensus Academy Award front-runners, but also the reasons they have been anointed, while more worthy efforts have been snubbed? Now more than ever you need to the Screengrab, where we consume and digest this information, then regurgitate the salient points in tasty bite-size increments.

We begin with The New York Times, where David Carr calls himself The Carpetbagger, an alias that lends him the aura of being above it all while he’s actually wallowing in it. “Against the backdrop of a historic presidential election and a vortex of economic dysfunction, the burgeoning Oscar season seems even sillier than usual,” Carr harrumphs. “After all, who really cares about the throwdown for best supporting actor at a time when the citizenry seems poised for a run on its own banks?” With that out of the way, he proceeds to handicap the horse race thusly: “This year, by the Bagger’s count, seven or eight films have a shot at best picture. The consensus, in no particular order — well, O.K., in a little bit of a hierarchy — includes The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Slumdog Millionaire, Frost/Nixon, Revolutionary Road, Milk, Doubt and The Reader. And a surprise may be waiting in the wings: Clint Eastwood, a durable crush object of the Academy, has a habit of swinging out of the trees late in the game, as he did two years ago with Letters From Iwo Jima, so keep an eye on Gran Torino.” This all seems commonsensical enough, although to my eyes The Changeling looks more Oscar-y than the “get off my lawn” movie. I guess Gran Torino has the advantage of not having already flopped, however.

The Hollywood Reporter’s Steven Zeitchik wonders if indie film awards have become redundant. “The indie film movement sprang up as a reaction to mainstream Hollywood, so its awards should do the same. It's also good. The awards business may be awash in star and industry back-scratching, but in the Spirits and Gothams, a category of writers, directors and producers have trophy shows to call their own. But there's one thing these awards didn't count on as they forged their contrarian mission: They'd become too successful. Indie movies are now such a part of the awards mainstream that they regularly trump studio movies… the downside is that the shows now no longer seem like a necessary antidote to the Academy Awards; they seem like the Academy Awards lite.” Zeitchik suggest setting a ceiling of a $10 million budget and making previous Oscar winners ineligible for consideration for “indie” awards. Methinks the horse is already out of that particular barn; adopting these stringent guidelines is the best way to make these awards disappear entirely.

Dan Zak of The Washington Post would like the Oscars to lighten up. “In February, the Oscar for Best Picture went to No Country for Old Men, a highbrow slasher movie, the bleakest contender to take the top prize since -- well, since the year before, when The Departed won. Further cementing the notion that bleak movies get made in order to strike gold, three out of four acting Oscars were given to people who played villains: Daniel Day-Lewis as the monstrous oilman in the nihilistic There Will Be Blood; Tilda Swinton as the sniveling attorney in Michael Clayton, a movie in which every person has mortgaged his soul; and Javier Bardem as the dead-eyed killer Anton Chigurh, who cattle-gunned the entire cast of No Country save for Tommy Lee Jones, whose character ended the movie on a note of despair, not death. This year, that might count as a happy ending. Big movies have tent-poled 2008 with a tarp of cruelty. No resolution, no absolution. Just the raw misery of the human condition. Buh-leak. We expect this of fringe foreign films, the confounding subgenre of torture porn, and most documentaries, but not the biggest hits and highest-praised movies of the year.” How to cure this case of the bleaks? Why, the recession might just be the ticket! Expect an onslaught of inoffensive feel-good movies, which is good news for everyone except those of us who find the likes of Beverly Hills Chihuahua infinitely more depressing than any Cormac McCarthy adaptation.

Related:
Top Five Oscar Moments
Jokers Wild About Heath Ledger's Oscar Chances

Screengrab Review: "Pride and Glory"

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 19:45:00 GMT

Gavin O'Connor's new film, Pride and Glory, has a plan: it's mapped out all the things it wants to remind you of. It clearly wants to echo the moral ambiguity of The Wire, the multigenerational sweep of The Godfather, the close-knit web of loyalty and betrayal of The Departed. But since it's O'Connor at the helm instead of the talented folks who brought you those stories, it conjures them in tone only, never in quality, and leaves you asking: haven't I seen this movie before -- like, a hundred times?.

If O'Connor started out with a script that wasn't particularly going anywhere, and if he wasn't especially going to bring anything to the table as the director, he at least gave us some actors with juice to play his family of often-shady New York police officers. Edward Norton, who isn't the world's most consistent performer but is occasionally capable of greatness, plays Ray Tierney, a conflicted hard-ass who is divided between fidelity to his insular cop clan and a desire to do the right thing no matter what. This sort of agonized moralist is a specialty of Nortons, but here he just seems sort of bored. Jon Voight, on the other hand, seems to be having a ball as the family's drunken father figure, and even though the vast majority of his dialogue are windy cliches, he livens up the flick every moment he's on screen. No such luck with Colin Farrell, toothy at the best of times and absolutely ludicrous here: as bad-boy brother-in-law Jimmy Egan, he might as well be twirling a Snidley Whiplash mustache and tying his wife (named, no kidding, Megan Egan) to a railroad track.

Pride and Glory tries for the kind of intensity conjured by movies like Serpico, Donnie Brasco, and Goodfellas, which is probably why all its highfalutin talk about honor and loyalty and devotion sound so familiar. But it's not a comfortable familiarity; it's a boring one. The movie never really picks up, even in its most action-packed scenes, because it has an unwarranted confidence in the dramatic potential of its plot, and an unjustified trust in the ability of its lead actors to deliver it. Farrell's goofy performance aside, there's not that much about it to actively dislike; but there's certainly not much to like, either. It's the cinematic equivalent of a Big Mac: overstuffed, not very good for you, and you've already tried it so many times that you don't even really taste it anymore.

Screengrab Review: W.

Trailer Review: Body of Lies

Paul Clark — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Does anyone out there actually buy Leonardo DiCaprio in tough-guy roles? Don’t get me wrong- I think he’s a talented actor, and given the right part he can knock it out of the park. But I didn’t find him convincing in Gangs of New York and Blood Diamond, and I’m certainly not convinced here. If you look at Leo’s best recent roles- Frank Abagnale, Howard Hughes, even Billy Costigan in The Departed- they all make use of his innate boyishness and knack for playing psychologically damaged characters. But there’s just something about him (the reedy voice, the scraggly facial hair) that doesn’t work when he’s supposed to be tough and street-smart. Just like he was in Gangs, he looks hopelessly overmatched here by his more experienced costar- Russell Crowe this time around- and it’s going to require a lot of work from director Ridley Scott and screenwriter William Monahan to convince me that Leo’s character can hold his own opposite Crowe’s. Also, it seems sort of sinful that the gorgeous Carice Van Houten (playing Leo’s wife) is nowhere to be found in the trailer, but maybe that’s just me.

Watch It (But Not For Free): “The Friends of Eddie Coyle”

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 20:30:00 GMT

Even if you think Amy Ryan’s wicked pissah performance in Gone Baby Gone wuz robbed on Oscar night, there’s no denying we’re living in the golden age of Boston crime movies. Mystic River kicked it off, The Departed won the Oscar for Best Picture last year, and now Martin Scorsese is set to direct an adaptation of Dennis Lehane’s Shutter Island starring (who else?) Leonardo DiCaprio. But the granddaddy of all these films remains criminally unknown, rarely screened and never released on home video: The Friends of Eddie Coyle.

Adapted from the novel by Boston crime writer George V. Higgins, the precursor to Lehane and Spenser creator Robert Parker, Coyle is the story of a small-time gun dealer who turns informant when he learns he’s facing a stretch in prison. Directed by Peter Yates and starring Robert Mitchum as Coyle, the film isn’t big on plot twists or even much violence; its power comes from Higgins’ pungent dialogue, gritty locations and one of Mitchum’s finest performances. It has a devoted cult following, and the leader of that cult has to be Hollywood Elsewhere columnist Jeffrey Wells, who has been pursuing Coyle’s DVD release like Ahab pursued the white whale.

It began with this column from 2001, back when Wells still wrote for Reel.com. “Coyle was originally distributed by Paramount Pictures, which still owns the rights,” he wrote. “However, there are no current plans by Paramount to put it out on DVD, according to PHV spokesperson Martin Blythe. ‘But you're the second person to ask recently, so I'll mention it,’ he said earlier this week. ‘Sometimes this is how things start.’” Sometimes, perhaps, but not in this case. Wells has restated his demands periodically through the years, right up until earlier this month. Despite rumors that Criterion plans to release it (the same rumors surround virtually every rare or unreleased movie you can imagine), Coyle remains unavailable on DVD.

However, you can watch The Friends of Eddie Coyle any time you’d like, either on your computer or your TiVo, if you have such a thing. It is available as a digital download through Amazon’s Unbox service, and you can either rent it for $3.99 or buy it for $9.99. I have no information about the quality of the video – actually, I’m hoping one of our devoted readers will serve as the guinea pig and report back here. Here’s the trailer; if it interests you, why not take the plunge?

Screengrab Bets The Oscars: Leonard's Picks

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 15:30:00 GMT

With the 80th annual Academy Awards less than two weeks away, and with the WGA strike apparently near its end (assuring that there actually will be an Oscar ceremony, and not just a handful of star-struck entertainment journalists trying to figure out who the TelePrompTer works), it's time for us here at the Screengrab to suck it up. It's time for us to do what every other film writer in the world, self-respecting or otherwise, is doing, and lay down our picks for the big to-do. Since I've always had a knack for making a jackass out of myself on the internet, I'll be the first: under the cut, you'll find my picks for who deserves to take home a statuette come Oscar night in eigh different categories, and who's going to walk away with the gold, regardless of merit. Over the next thirteen days, I'm hoping my Screengrab colleagues will join me in this endeavor, and then, come March, at least one of us can strut around talking about how smart we are.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS:

There's a fine crowd of candidates this time around, and it's hard to pick a winner — there's no obvious failings just as there's no obvious standouts. All told, Cate Blanchett should win for her turn as Dylan in I'm Not There, but I'm predicting it will actually end up in the hands of Amy Ryan for the surprising Gone Baby Gone.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR:

If, as I'm predicting, the Coen Brothers are shut out again this year, that means even more that Javier Bardem should win for his performance as Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men. However, given his spate of terrific roles towards the end of the year, I'm predicting it will go to Philip Seymour Hoffman for Charlie Wilson's War.

BEST ACTRESS:

Ellen Page surely deserves recognition for the breakout performance she delivered in Juno, and there's a slight possibility she'll get it. However, I think the Academy will go the other direction — since Hal Holbrook won't be getting an old-timer's award, Julie Christie will take home the gold for the little-seen Away from Her.

BEST ACTOR:

Although there's an off chance that George Clooney will take home the gold, I'm picking Daniel Day-Lewis' colossal performance in There Will Be Blood as both my should-win and will-win. Past performance and academy voting patterns be damned: it's a towering, masterful job of acting that carries the entire movie.

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY:

Traditionally, the screenplay categories are the thanks-for-playing awards for the year's best movies, but which for whatever reason aren't going to get one of the big awards. As such, it's a dead heat between No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood, and my money's on Paul Thomas Anderson this year.

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY:

If ever there are a sold-gold, lead-pipe lock in the history of solid-gold, lead-pipe locks, it's Diablo Cody winning Oscar gold this year for Juno. Bet the farm on it.

BEST DIRECTOR:

For filmmakers as talented and distinctive as the Coen Brothers never to have won an Oscar is a crime, but this isn't their Departed year. They'll be shut out again, though, leaving open the question of who gets it. P.T. Anderson seems obvious, but I'm gonna say this is a divisive year and Tony Gilroy takes it for Michael Clayton.

BEST PICTURE:

If Juno wins, the very balance of nature will be forever thrown askew. No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood are the most deserving, but are perceived as overly nihilistic and grim. Michael Clayton could be the winner by default, but I think it'll go to Atonement, the very definition of an Academy prestige picture.

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

The Rep Report (October 17 - November 1)

Peter Smith — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 19:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Now, here's what I'm talking about: the Film Society of Lincoln Center celebrates the successful completion of the New York Film Festival by firing its guns in the air with 10 Years and Running: Recent Hong Kong Cinema (October 17 - 25). The program ranges from Wong Kar Wai's Happy Together and 2046 to a very welcome helping of action master Johnnie To, whose steady refining of his technique and stubborn reluctance to bolt for Hollywood give his recent work a last-man-standing quality. (He is represented here by the The Mission, the 1999 brothers-in-arms shoot-em-up that was of no small help to its star, Anthony Wong, in his quest to be crowned World's Coolest Actor, and the more recent Election and its companion piece, Triad Election.) The newer offerings include Triangle, a caper flick co-directed by the three Hong Kong amigos, Tsui Hark, Ringo Lam and Johnnie To, and films by the team of Andrew Lau and Alan Mak, whose Infernal Affairs is perhaps (if unjustly) best known in the U.S. as the original version of Scorsese's The Departed.

The Brooklyn Academy of Music presents its sixth annual selection of highlights from the Pordenone Silent Film Festival (October 18 - 21). The program, which plunders the vaults of the Danish studio Nordisk, includes documentary footage of the German front lines during World War I, as well as fanciful adventures involving trips to Mars, runaway meteors and the ever-present fight against the white slave trade. Film preservationist Serge Bromberg will also be on hand with yet another of his personal selections of precious silent rarities. Most screenings will feature live musical accompaniment by Donald Sosin.

Sergei Bondarchuk's adaptation of War and Peace, which is playing the Film Forum in a seven-hour cut (shown in two parts, with a separate admission for each) from October 19 through November 1, is somewhere between a great lost film and a towering curiosity. As much an example of technological competition between the Cold War powers as the space race, it was in production for seven years and cost $100,000,000 in 1968, which makes it still the most expensive movie ever made. Yet it's not just an historical oddity. Bondarchuk, who first gained celebrity as an actor (he plays Pierre in the film), was a greatly gifted director clearly drunk on the possibilities of filmmaking. There are many stunning moments and a striking, dynamic use of the camera that take the film out of the Masterpiece Theater/Merchant-Ivory category of embalmed classics; despite the impossibility of fully capturing the novel on film, it's not a negligible achievement. This was only Bondarchuk's second movie, and he never got to follow it up; after it won him an international acclaim and an Academy Award, he blew his reputation on the 1970 English-language bomb Waterloo, starring Rod Steiger as Napoleon, then came crawling back to Mother Russia, only to spend the rest of his career snarled up in the compromises and political confusion of the post-Khrushchev, pre-glasnost era. He died in 1994. To now see the one film that forms the bulk of his career is to marvel at what driven and talented people are capable of putting on the screen, and what the strain of doing it, and the desire to do it again, can sometimes do to their lives.

BOSTON: When Martin Scorsese's great concert film The Last Waltz came out in 1978, one of the most talked about moments in it was the single, unbroken shot for most of Muddy Waters' performance of "Mannish Boy." On the DVD commentary, we learned it's a wonder that Muddy got into the movie at all. Scorsese had gotten his song list mixed up and given the camera crew a break, and then when the blues legend strolled out onstage, the director, thinking that no one was recording the moment, had a fit collosal even by his standards. The reason that one sustained shot exists is that one of the star cinematographers working on the project, Laszlo Kovacs, didn't know that he was supposed to be on a break; he had taken his headset off because he had somehow grown weary of the sweet music of Martin Scorsese screaming in his ear. Kovacs died last July, and the Brattle pays tribute to the work he did in his career prime with Seventies Shooter: A Tribute To Laszlo Kovacs, running through the 25th. And since the series begins with such films as Five Easy Pieces and Easy Rider and then winds down with one of the earliest requiems for the 1960s, Shampoo, and the rough-housing, "un-P.C." cop comedy Freebie and the Bean, it doubles as a rare chance to see the counterculture rise and fall in the space of a week's worth of films.

— Phil Nugent