The Screengrab : the greatest

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: Jan. 17-23, 2009

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 22:00:00 GMT

You may have been thrilled when the Screengrab announced it would be running enough Sundance coverage to choke a horse. I wasn’t thrilled. I’m the horse. And let me tell you, they weren’t just kidding around. Screengrab editor emeritus Bilge Ebiri was on the scene in Park City filing reviews of all the buzz movies: An Education, Bronson, The Cove, Tyson, The Greatest, Moon, Don’t Let Me Drown, Amreeka, In the Loop and The Girlfriend Experience.

Not only that, but Scott Von Doviak was in the home office, rounding up all the Sundance headlines from Day One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven and Eight.

After I finally managed to choke all that down, I had a look at some of the other stuff posted on the Screengrab this week:

Jailhouse Rock: The Greatest Prison Films of All Time (Parts One, Two, Three, Four and Five)

Unwatchable #56: Araf (aka The Abortion)

Screengrab Self-Promotion Theater #2: Shoe

Reviews By Request: Reprise and Son of Rambow

Sundance Roundup: Day Six

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 18:00:00 GMT

More wheeling and dealing, via The Hollywood Reporter: Fox Searchlight snapped up the rights to the New York romance Adam, which it “hopes to turn it into the next Once, which it acquired here in 2007.” Sony Pictures Classics won the bidding war for An Education, “for a price in the $3 million-$4 million range for North American and select Latin American rights.” Lionsgate picked up “The Winning Season, James Strouse's tale of a high-school girls' basketball team starring Sam Rockwell.”

This year’s Sundance It Girl has been coronated. Per Entertainment Weekly, it’s 23-year-old British actress Carey Mulligan. “The star of Lone Scherfig's An Education and the bright spot in Shana Feste's melodrama The Greatest, Mulligan is transfixing audiences with her angelic looks and broad acting range.” You can also catch her in Michael Mann’s upcoming Dillinger epic Public Enemies, with Johnny Depp and Christian Bale.

E! Online is on the celebrity swag watch. Any truth to the rumors that Paris Hilton walked off with 30 goodie bags? Apparently so, but not all Sundance stars are so greedy. Screengrab sweetheart Zooey Deschanel refused all handouts, saying it “it takes away from the festival.” Awwww.

Previously:
Sundance Roundup: Day Five
Sundance Roundup: Day Four

Screengrab at Sundance: Review of The Greatest

bilge — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 16:00:00 GMT

Screengrab editor emeritus Bilge Ebiri reports from the frontlines of Park City.

Shana Feste’s The Greatest came to Sundance trailing a cloud of buzz, in part because of fest director Geoffrey Gilmore’s gushing descrip ti o n of the film in the festival guide. So imagine my surprise when the film turned out to be a variation on Ordinary People, only significantly less stylistically assured. (Fuck you. Redford’s film is stylistically assured.) Here, Susan Sarandon and Pierce Brosnan play the parents of an 18-year-old boy killed in a horrific car accident during the film’s opening scene. When his girlfriend turns out to be pregnant and with nowhere to go, they bring her in to their family. Wackiness most certainly does not ensue.

To be fair, grief is always a hard subject to tackle onscreen, always carrying with it the slight whiff of exploitation, and Feste’s story appears to come from an honest place. The tone varies sharply, perhaps by design – the main conflict in the film is a strange war of attrition between Brosnan and Sarandon’s characters. She wants to indulge her pain to the fullest, wanting to know as much about her son’s final moments as possible. In her quest to do so, she finds the man who crashed into the car (Michael Shannon), who himself is comatose, and begins to nurture and read to him. (In what appears to be an awkward narrative oversight, the film never explains how Shannon’s character went from being fully conscious and active following the accident, even going so far as to walk over to the boy, give him his coat and – we later learn – talk to him, only to somehow wind up in a months-long coma.)

In truth, though, Sarandon has done the grieving mother role before – many, many times – and it’s hard not to think of films like Lorenzo’s Oil or Moonlight Mile or Safe Passage while watching her. That sense of familiarity with her performance works against the film’s attempts to convey the upheaval in its characters’ lives. No, it’s actually Brosnan who makes the film, and without him in it, I’m not sure I would have been able to take it at all seriously. As a math professor who finds obsessive comfort in numbers, the actor turns his preternatural cool into a weapon; his aloofness here comes not from confidence but from a deep, unsettling awkwardness. When he does finally break down, it’s painful and clumsy, and we want him to go back to holding it all in. But that seems to be partly the point. His presence here takes what might have been an agonizingly obvious drama of grief and threatens to turn it into something altogether more surprising.

Vanishing Act: Monte Hellman

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Hellman! His is one of the great “What if?” stories in American cinema. As in, “What if someone had given the poor guy some money to make a few movies over the past 40 years or so?” The beginning of Hellman’s career bears a close resemblance to that of many heavy-hitters from his generation, including Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese and Jonathan Demme. That is, he got his filmmaking education on the cheap from Roger Corman, churning out quickies like Beast from Haunted Cave and Flight to Fury. Once Hellman had put in enough hours in the basement, Corman teamed him with fellow stalwart Jack Nicholson for a pair of offbeat westerns, The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind. Hellman’s breakthrough and downfall arrived simultaneously with 1971’s Two-Lane Blacktop, declared “The Movie of the Year” by Esquire and then released to general indifference.

Had the movie caught on with the youth culture in the same way Easy Rider did, Hellman’s subsequent filmography might have been a treasure trove, but instead it’s more of a trivia quiz. There’s Shatter, a 1974 Hong Kong action picture Hellman departed after three weeks of shooting; China 9, Liberty 37, a Spaghetti western in which Warren Oates and Sam Peckinpah appear in support of the immortal Fabio Testi; The Greatest and Avalanche Express, both of which Hellman took over after the original directors died; Iguana, a seafaring tale of a disfigured sailor that never received a theatrical release; and Cockfighter, the only one of the bunch that lives up to the promise of the early westerns and Blacktop – and even that one had its original theatrical release sabotaged when Corman recut it to add more action.

By 1989, it was as if Hellman had come full circle to his disreputable early days with Corman, as he helmed the horror sequel Silent Night, Deadly Night III: Better Watch Out! His best shot at a comeback arrived in the form of Quentin Tarantino, who approached Hellman to direct his script Reservoir Dogs. Of course, Tarantino eventually decided to direct it himself, leaving Hellman with only an Executive Producer credit. That led to pretty much nothing.

So where is Hellman now? He’s got a teaching gig at CalArts, helping to educate future filmmakers who may someday hire him and then decide to direct themselves, leaving him only with an Executive Producer credit. He was heavily involved with Criterion’s superb 2-disc DVD release of Two-Lane Blacktop, which includes commentary tracks, a documentary field trip to some of the film’s locations as well as an uneasy conversation between Hellman and Blacktop star James Taylor, who has never seen the film. And after seventeen years, he finally returned to the director’s chair for a segment of the horror anthology Trapped Ashes.

Having recently watched Ashes, just out on DVD, I can attest that Hellman’s segment, “Stanley’s Girlfriend,” is worth a look. Although it’s never explicitly stated, the Stanley of the title is clearly Kubrick, and Hellman has fun with what we know of the legend, weaving the 2001 filmmaker’s love of photography and chess into a supernatural explanation for his permanent exile from the United States. “Stanley’s Girlfriend” isn’t much more than a doodle, but it’s easily the standout in a movie that includes a cautionary plastic surgery tale about vampiric breast implants. See for yourself:

Previously on Vanishing Act:
Christopher McQuarrie
Savage Steve Holland