The Screengrab : the ice storm

Screengrab’s Five to Watch at Cannes

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 13 May 2009 17:00:00 GMT

Greetings from the Croisette on the beautiful French Riviera! The entire Screengrab gang has convened over croissants and café au lait at Le Grande Bleu, and we’re hashing over our picks to click for the fabulous festival kicking off with tonight’s screening of the opening night film, Up. Wait until the crew back at Nerve headquarters gets a look at these expense reports!

OK, so we’re not actually in France. But why should a little technicality like that prevent us from bringing you the best in Cannes coverage? Or at least linking to the best in Cannes coverage, which we’ll do when we launch our daily Cannes Roundup tomorrow. For now, here’s a look at five movies I’d be sure to check out if I actually were on the Riviera instead of sitting at my desk in my underwear.

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS

Maybe Death Proof wasn’t all you dreamed it would be, and Brad Pitt’s cracker accent may not fill you with all the confidence in the world, and it’s just possible I’m describing myself here. Still, I have enough good will stored up for Quentin Tarantino as a filmmaker (if not as a personality) that I can’t help but be excited for his World War II epic, bad spelling and all.

TAKING WOODSTOCK

“It’s 1969, and Elliot Tiber, a down-on-his-luck interior designer in Greenwich Village, New York, has to move back upstate to help his parents run their dilapidated Catskills motel, the El Monaco…When Elliot hears that a neighbouring town has pulled the permit on a hippie music festival, he calls the producers, thinking he could drum up some much needed business for the motel.” Ang Lee’s take on the ‘70s (The Ice Storm) worked out pretty well, so let’s see what he can do with the ‘60s.

THE IMAGINARIUM OF DOCTOR PARNASSUS

Granted, Terry Gilliam’s track record of late has not been stellar. He couldn’t get Don Quixote off the ground, The Brothers Grimm was underwhelming, and I already regret leaving Tideland off my top ten list of the worst movies ever. But judging from the brief clips above, Imaginarium has more of an early Gilliam feel, and the curiosity factor of Heath Ledger’s last ever (partial) performance is definitely a draw. Plus: Tom Waits as the Devil!

PANIQUE AU VILLAGE (A TOWN CALLED PANIC)

I’d never heard of this Belgian film before this morning, but the description certainly intrigues. “Animated plastic toys like Cowboy, Indian and Horse have problems, too. Cowboy and Indian's plan to surprise Horse with a homemade birthday gift backfires when they destroy his house instead. Surreal adventures take over as the trio travel to the center of the earth, trek across frozen tundra and discover a parallel underwater universe where pointy-headed (and dishonest!) creatures live. Each speedy character is voiced -- and animated -- as if their very air contains both amphetamines and laughing gas.”

ANTICHRIST

“A grieving couple retreat to ’Eden’, their isolated cabin in the woods, where they hope to repair their broken hearts and troubled marriage. But nature takes its course and things go from bad to worse...” Hey, I’m always up for a good ol’ scary cabin-in-the-woods movie, and with Lars Von Trier at the helm, this one is sure to either terrify or infuriate – or more likely, both.

Screengrab Review: "Lymelife"

Nick Schager — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 17:00:00 GMT

In case you haven’t been listening to what prestige and art-house films have been blaring, the suburbs aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. The carefree contentment projected by all those white-picket-fence homes, and the smiling cheer of all those good-looking people in their nice clothes and fancy cars? It’s all lies, joyful facades that mask serious social dysfunction. Despite seeming like the place where happily-ever-afters come true, the suburbs are in reality hotbeds of familial discord, of tumultuous adolescent anger and misery, and of deception, greed, selfishness and alienation. If you thought that moving there from the vile, corrupting city was smart, think again. Relocating to a comfy home, and mingling with your undoubtedly Yuppie neighbors, will only warp you into a desolate conformist zombie like those seen in American Beauty, The Ice Storm and countless other likeminded dramas. And desperately running through the streets like Leonardo DiCaprio’s wretched Revolutionary Road hubby, or performing fatal makeshift abortions on yourself like Kate Winslet’s hopeless wife, are your only avenues of escape!

Excuse the sarcasm, but seriously – does anyone still find this gibberish relevant? Pulling the curtains back on picture-perfect suburbia is such a stale, clichéd modus operandi that it’s long ceased to be of any use. And one suspects that the reason so many recent films address this topic from the detached confines of an earlier era (anywhere from the ‘50s to ‘80s) is because only in the past would characters actually view as revelatory the fact that non-city-living isn’t a surefire blissful existence. Which brings us around to Lymelife, a late-‘70s-set tale about screwed-up Long Island high-schooler Scott Bartlett (Rory Culkin), whose crumbling family includes cold, philandering real-estate developer dad Mickey (Alec Baldwin), military brother Jimmy (Kieran Culkin), and gloomy, quietly suffering mom Brenda (Jill Hennessy). His life a checklist of movie clichés about adolescence, Scott is picked on by the local bully, loves Star Wars, and pines for his pretty older neighbor Adrianna (Emma Roberts), who flirts with and teases him. Also in the mix are Adrianna’s crazy parents: mom Melissa (Cynthia Nixon) is an adulteress sleeping with Mickey, and her dad Charlie (Timothy Hutton) is a mess of a man who, instead of looking for work, smokes pot in his basement, his deterioration ostensibly instigated by a case of lime disease.

I say ostensibly because Charlie – like everyone else in Derick Martini’s film (co-written with brother Steven) – is really suffering from suburbanitis, that stultifying malady in which moving to the ‘burbs not only doesn’t solve, but in fact amplifies, barely suppressed problems. Lymelife shows directorial restraint in depicting Scott’s confused headspace, and its performances are universally solid, with both Rory Culkin and Hennessey conveying a tempered soulfulness that helps prevent their characters from succumbing to cartoonishness. Yet the narrative they’re assigned to breathe life into is irrevocably moldy, a portrait of father-son and husband-wife strife, as well as of budding teenage sexuality and maturity, that’s defined by groaningly bittersweet, paradise-is-an-illusion shots of middle-class homes spied out of school bus windows. Apparently semi-autobiographical, Lymelife sporadically nails sharp (if familiar) details, for example a shirtless Scott rehearsing how to be cool and macho while staring into his mirror, or Scott and Adrianna’s awkward maiden sexual experiences. Too bad, then, that such authenticity is drowned out by an overarching don’t-judge-a-book-by-its-cover message that long ago lost its luster.

Trailer Review: Taking Woodstock

Paul Clark — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 16:00:00 GMT

After a decade that has taken him from martial arts masters and green behemoths to gay cowboys and resistance fighters, Ang Lee is taking on the widely-acknowledged high water mark of the Flower Power era, Woodstock. Yet for his genre-hopping, I nonetheless sense some pet Lee themes coming through in this story, especially in its story of middle-of-the-road types uneasily dipping their toes into the changing cultural seas that surround them, seen most explicitly in The Ice Storm. Yes, you respond, but how does the movie look? Pretty darn good, I think. Never having seen his television appearances, this is my first exposure to Dimitri Martin, but he looks like a capable center for this story, and Lee surrounds him with an impressive supporting cast, including Imelda Staunton, Emile Hirsch, and the ever-underrated Liev Schreiber. Another thing that intrigues me about this trailer- and the movie itself, of course- is that Lee doesn’t seem to be over-romanticizing the late 1960s the way many American filmmakers do, which is refreshing. And Eugene Levy as Max Yasgur seems strangely right to me.

When Good Directors Go Bad: Hulk (2003, Ang Lee)

Paul Clark — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 19:00:00 GMT

In recent years, as “sequel” and “remake” have become dirty words in the minds of moviegoers, Hollywood studios have scrambled to come up with new, less offensive alternatives. How many blockbusters based on previously-adapted properties have been tagged with descriptions like “re-invention”? Yet even by these standards, the efforts made by Universal and Marvel Studios to distance their new, more “crowd-pleasing” version of The Incredible Hulk (“You’re going to like him when he’s angry!”) from Ang Lee’s 2003 film Hulk have been particularly aggressive. And for good reason, as Lee’s take on the classic comic left most viewers disappointed or even pissed off. Does Hulk deserve its reputation? Not really. But just because it’s not that bad doesn’t mean it’s all that good either.

In the early part of his career, Ang Lee was known primarily for his modestly-budgeted films which deftly mixed domestic drama with light comedy. Titles like Eat Drink Man Woman and The Wedding Banquet helped to make the NYU grad’s reputation in the States even before he began making movies here, and Sense and Sensibility and The Ice Storm only served to further this reputation. But while 1999’s Ride With the Devil was widely considered Lee’s first disappointment, he quickly recovered by returning to the Far East to make Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the critically-acclaimed martial arts epic that brought Lee the best reviews of his career to date and his first Oscar, as well as record-breaking U.S. box-office for an Asian film. It was Crouching Tiger that caught the attention of Universal Studios, who were looking for a fresh voice to bring Hulk to the screen.

But while Lee was an inspired choice for a comic book movie, I really don’t think he was the right one for Hulk. Lee is a gifted filmmaker, but he’s never had a strong, easily recognizable visual style, instead preferring to let his story determine the look of his films. But although other Lee films have benefited from this versatility- the chilly, sterile images of The Ice Storm bear little resemblance to the sweeping vistas of Crouching Tiger, but both are ideal for their respective films- Lee never finds the right look for Hulk. Although it’s not for lack of trying- attempting to accentuate the story’s comic book origins, Lee subjects the audience to a barrage of split-screens and snazzy wipes. Unfortunately, instead of creating any sort of kinetic excitement, the tricked-up style is merely distracting and, in the end, tiresome.

As for the individual shots themselves, Lee’s framing is rarely dynamic enough to make the images pop the way they should. All too often, shots are murky when they should be crisp. This is especially true of the film’s night scenes, which look dank and under-lit. Even worse, Lee insisted on shooting many of the film’s big action sequences at night. But whether this was an artistic decision on Lee’s part or a trick by the effects team to cover for some occasionally dodgy CGI, these sequences are often incomprehensible. This is especially true of the final battle between Hulk and his father- in a scene that serves not only as the action climax of the film but also the resolution of the lifelong conflict between father and son, the last thing you want is for the audience to wonder what the hell is going on.

In addition to the film’s stylistic shortcomings, the storytelling in Hulk leaves something to be desired. Part of the problem is that as far as comic book heroes go, Hulk is a strange case. Rather than being a hero who uses his powers for positive ends, Hulk is unleashed aggression personified- a man who has been cursed by fate and the sins of his father to expand and beat the crap out of anything in his way whenever he gets angry. The premise plays closer to tragedy than traditional comic book action, and to his credit, Lee takes the dramatic stuff seriously, rather than treating it simply as exposition and padding between the action scenes. However, the film’s broad-strokes-only storytelling and one-dimensional characters are less than compelling. Too much time and energy are expended on unlocking the mysteries of Bruce Banner’s past, a torturous bit of “dollar-book Freud” (thank you, Orson Welles) that stops the film dead in its tracks and makes the film less tragic than dour. Not helping matters is Eric Bana’s colorless performance as Banner. Bana came to the attention of Hollywood with his live-wire performance in Chopper, but he displays none of that volatility here. Shouldn’t someone as deeply troubled as Bruce Banner show some evidence of inner life?

Hulk is a strange creature, a film that attempted to be a stylish, kickass summer movie with a solid dramatic foundation but ended up satisfying almost no one. I admire certain aspects of the movie, like the way Lee counterpoints the restrained work by his leads with the unhinged mugshot-era performance by Nick Nolte, or Lee’s occasional use of quietness (a rare quality among most comic-book movies). But at the end of the day, the movie just doesn’t work. Yet I appreciate Lee’s efforts to make an honest-to-goodness art film out of a superhero movie. Hulk isn’t a success, but it’s more thought-provoking than most of the forgettable fare that has characterized the genre for years. It’s no Spider-Man, but I’ll take it over the likes of Fantastic Four- or The Incredible Hulk, for that matter.

DVD Digest for March 18, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week, a memorable trio of new Criterions shares a release date with three of the most critically lambasted films of 2007. Who will prevail?

DVD of the Week: In the past decade, the suburban-dysfunction genre has had a lot to answer for, not least the seemingly endless string of glib American Beauty clones full of easy laughs and cheap stabs at profundity. But The Ice Storm shouldn't be held accountable for this- an uncommonly sensitive take on similar material, Ang Lee's adaptation of Rick Moody's novel ventures into uncomfortable corners of the bourgeois lifestyle without softening them with irony. Lee's film also boasted a cast that if anything is more impressive now than it was then, given the subsequent careers of then-newcomers Tobey Maguire and Katie Holmes, as well as former child stars Elijah Wood and Christina Ricci. Criterion's new two-disc set features commentary from Lee and writer/producer James Schamus, interviews with Moody and many of the film's stars, and much more, plus it promises to make Frederick Elmes' cold, wet cinematography look particularly gorgeous. It's the perfect opportunity to revisit a film that warrants a second look.

Also this week, Criterion brings us two films that are new to DVD, Alberto Lattuada's Mafioso and Hiroshi Teshigahara's documentary Antonio Gaudi. Not having seen either of these films I can't pass judgment on them, but I'm glad Criterion has seen fit to give them the best treatment possible, particularly Teshigahara's film, the latest effort on their part to celebrate his often-overlooked career.

Recent releases coming to DVD include: Joe Wright's Oscar-nominated Atonement (Universal), the kid-friendly princess comedy Enchanted (Disney, also Blu-Ray), the surprisingly good I Am Legend (Warner, also Blu-Ray), Fox's failed attempt at a Potter-like franchise The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising, and the aforementioned trio of critically-drubbed films, Love in the Time of Cholera (New Line), Revolver (Sony), and Southland Tales.

New TV on DVD includes Volume 1 of the 2007 reboot of The Bionic Woman (Universal) and Season 8 of Married... with Children (Sony). That's a strange juxtaposition of flashy action and soundstage-bound low comedy, but then when it comes to television, you can't have one without the other.

Also of note is MGM's trio of new DVD editions of baseball-themed movies to get viewers geared up for Opening Day: Bull Durham, Eight Men Out, and Pride of the Yankees. Indeed, these new editions appear to be geared more toward baseball fans than movie lovers, as they're chock full of baseball-themed extras, particularly the Curt Schilling-heavy Pride of the Yankees platter.

Finally, we bring you yet another edition of the ever popular Huddleston Corner. This week, we're offering shout-outs to two new HD-DVD releases, Atonement (Universal) and Justice League: The New Frontier (Warner). However, Mr. Huddleston would like to inform you that he doesn't know how many more condolences he has left in him, and he hopes that the bums companies who are still stuck on HD-DVD will get their acts together soon.

Trailer Review: The Incredible Hulk

John Constantine — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 22:52:00 GMT

Yeah, yeah, Ang Lee makes beautiful movies. Oh, Brokeback Mountain is a romantic masterpiece! Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is a ballet of sound and emotion! The Ice Storm is tense, suburban tragedy at its finest! Fuck all that. Ang Lee made Hulk. He is the director who thought giant CGI dogs and Nick Nolte were a good combination. Marvel Pictures is banking on the whole world to have shoved that atrocity out of their minds as The Incredible Hulk is a reboot for the franchise and from the looks of this trailer, it’s a fine upgrade. We’ve gone from Eric Bana to Ed Norton (awesome), giant CGI dogs to giant CGI Tim Roth (double awesome), and sloppy introspection to big, dumb action (not necessarily awesome but wise). There are some downgrades (Jennifer Connelly to Liv Tyler is not awesome) but things are looking good. Ed Norton is pitch-perfect as Bruce Banner in these scenes, a perfect mix of frightened and exhausted. It’s nice to see Tim Roth back in a blockbuster as well. I was beginning to think that Planet of the Apes had done scared him off for good!