The Screengrab : the man who fell to earth

Strangers In A Strange Land: Screengrab's Favorite Fish-Out-Of-Water Stories (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 21:00:00 GMT

As part of Screengrab’s year-end List-a-palooza, we asked you, our imaginary internet friends, what topics you’d like to see featured in our weekly Top Twenty.

Janet immediately stepped up to the plate with the following suggestion: “Last week, Walker finally made it to the top of my Netflix queue, in my current reconsideration of all things Alex Cox. As I watched it, I kept thinking about My Best Fiend, which I had watched about a month ago. I realized that there were at least three films I could name that revolved around a White man traveling to Latin America and going crazy, and I started wondering if there were more. I'm not even sure if there are enough for a Take Five, but I count on your broader knowledge on the subject. So, if you would be so kind, I would love a list of White Man Goes to Latin America and Goes Insane movies.”

And so, in honor of Janet, this week’s list features plenty o’ white dudes livin’ la vida loca south of the border...but we also broadened our mandate to include all manner of fish-out-of-water stories -- from aliens in New York to city slickers in the Great Beyond -- as Screengrab travels the world (and the time/space continuum) to celebrate our favorite cinematic tales of STRANGERS IN A STRANGE LAND!

WALKER (1987)

And speaking of strange, it’s hard to get stranger than the 19th century American soldier of fortune William Walker or the eponymous cinematic tale of his misadventures conjured by the determinedly peculiar British cult director Alex Cox a century or so later. The real-life Walker invaded Mexico and Nicaragua more or less on his own and was eventually executed by officials in Honduras for being such a colossal pain in the ass. Cox was inspired to make his film (starring Ed Harris in full, spooky glower) “in the middle of the US-sponsored terrorist war against the Nicaraguan people...with the intention of spending as many American dollars as possible in Nicaragua, in solidarity with the Nicaraguans against the yanks' outrageous aggression against a sovereign nation.” Although ostensibly a period piece, Cox filled his film with anachronistic elements like tanks and helicopters to show how “nothing had changed in the 140 odd years between Walker's genocidal campaign and that of Oliver North and his goons.” Reaction, as they say, was mixed. Liberals were offended by Cox’s bizarre, slapstick take on the material (prompting Robert Redford to consider making his own preachy, ponderous version...a project that mercifully never materialized). Most everyone else was merely baffled by the quasi-biopic, and Universal essentially buried the six million dollar production, which barely grossed a quarter million dollars domestically...although, according to Cox, the movie was “extremely popular in certain places. It was the second biggest film hit ever in Nicaragua, after The Sound of Music,” thus making Cox's Latin American adventure about a zillion times more worthwhile than those of either Walker or North.

LOCAL HERO (1983)

Fish-out-of-water stories basically come in two variants: nightmares about characters who fall down a rabbit hole and land in Hell, or happier fantasies about some lucky bastard who happens upon Shangri-La. Bill Forsyth's beautiful little comedy, one of the few movies that might be called achingly charming, falls into the latter camp, but with a cruelly bittersweet twist. The setting is a seaside village on the coast of Scotland; the hero, Mac (Peter Reigert), is a young Houston oil company executive who is sent there to buy up the residents' homes so that the area can be despoiled. The residents are eager to get their checks so that the company can get on with the despoiling, but Mac, who in his native environment is so robotically detached that he has no trouble conducting a phone conversation with a co-worker who he can see to wave to through the other side of his glass office wall, falls so deeply in love with the place that when his boss, Happer (Burt Lancaster), flies out to connect with him, Happer doesn't recognize him. Happer himself is an amateur astronomer who looks deeply miserable sitting behind his desk in his lair atop his own personal skyscaper; he's outgrown his identity as a staid CEO, just as Lancaster had finally, fully outgrown his movie star identity as a grinning action hunk. Even in his suit and with his private helicopter, it's clear that he belongs in this magical landscape with its wide-open possibilities, just as it's clear that Mac, even with his new casual style and unshaven face, doesn't; much as he wants to, he still has his face pressed against the glass. The last scene, after Happer has blithely ordered Mac back to Houston so that the party can continue without him hovering at its edges, cuts deep.

THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH (1976)

The British cinematographer-turned-director Nicolas Roeg, who for a while made a specialty of eroticizing alienation, made his solo directing debut with Walkabout, a ghostly 1971 strangers/strange-land story about a proper white teeenage girl and her little brother who are stranded in the Australian outback. In this science-fiction film, Roeg extended his vision to cast the whole planet Earth -- or at least America, which to an Englishman trying to make a career in moviemaking in the 1970s must have seemed like pretty much the same thing --- as the strange land into which he drops his hero, an alien visitor (David Bowie) on a mission to save his dying planet from drought. On one level, the movie is a straight-faced joke on the idea that some of our most celebrated world-shakers, such as Howard Hughes, have scarcely seemed human at times. (Bowie's mission requires him to become titanically rich by bringing, and copyrighting, his civilization's advanced technologies.) But it's also a Christ story that happens to be set in a time so debased, and with such a short attention span, that the martyred hero, though he's able to have his purity corrupted through a developing lust for drink and television, can't manage to hold the villains' interest long enough for them to bother completing his crucifixion.

WEST OF ZANZIBAR (1926)

Lon Chaney and his favorite director, Tod Browning, made this silent version of the 1926 play Kongo, which is mostly set in what used to be called "darkest Africa." Chaney plays a married stage magician who loses the use of his legs after brawling with his wife's lover, played by Lionel Barrymore. Chaney, now known affectionately as "Dead-Legs," to his associates, relocates to Africa and sets himself up as the leader of a tribe of natives, who take his magic tricks for the mark of a peerless and dangerous witch doctor. When Chaney learns that his wife died in childbirth, he assumes that Barrymore was the father and sends for the now orphaned girl. He then proceeds to mistreat and debase her as cruelly as possible, with the intention of turning her into a broken animal; his plan is to present this ruined creature to Barrymore and then treat himself to the sight of Barrymore being treated to the sight of the natives burning the girl alive. You get one guess what the big surprise twist turns out to be. Kongo itself was later filmed as a talkie with Walter Huston; it, like Zanzibar and other films such as the weirdly stagebound White Cargo, belonged to a long-dead genre of films about white men in the jungle lording their superiority over the natives, unless they (like the juvenile character in White Cargo) are driven mad by the sultry, seductive powers of the helplessly sexy natives. Zanzibar is powered by the sheer, chugging hatefulness of which both Browning and Chaney were macabre masters, which is probably why it feels fresher now than those other films. The racial component, while never front and center, is more palatable today when it's presented as part of a horror fantasy, with the white antihero as twisted as anyone he's going to meet out there in the Congo.

IN THE CITY OF SYLVIA (2007)

There's been a lot of ink spilled on Sylvia in the list-making blur we've all just emerged out of. Suffice it to say Sylvia is the rare movie not to capture the experience of traveling in a specific city or country, but just the essence of what it means to stay in one part of an urban European city for a few days and slowly begin to see the same strangers and places over and over again, acclimating slowly to the local rhythms. The fact that it's seen through the eyes of a young, self-consciously arty idiot doesn't matter one whit; with him out of the frame for maybe 1/3 of the film, it's as much a film about the weird pan-European charms of Strasbourg as anything.

Click Here For Part Two, Three, Four, Five & Six

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Vadim Rizov

DVD Digest for December 16, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 15:00:00 GMT

One of this holiday season’s most in-demand gifts is sure to be a shiny new Blu-Ray player to go along with the mess of HDTVs that have flooded the market (what economic crisis?). Consequently, this week’s DVD Digest is heavy on Blu-Ray DVDs in titles both old and new, to serve as last-minute impulse buys for movie lovers of all stripes.

DVD of the Week: With all the new Blu-Rays that have hit stores lately, it seems only fitting that this week’s DVD of the Week be the first wave of Blu-Ray releases from everyone’s favorite DVD company, The Criterion Collection. Earlier this year, Criterion announced just over a dozen upcoming Blu-Ray titles, and today will bring four of them. Two are will be Blu-Ray editions of titles that were recently released by Criterion on standard DVD- Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express and Wes Anderson’s debut feature Bottle Rocket. But no less notable are the Blu-Ray releases of two old favorites from the Criterion vault, Carol Reed’s immortal The Third Man and Nicolas Roeg’s SF classic The Man Who Fell to Earth. As is the case with virtually all Criterion releases, the new Blu-Rays contain many special features, and the increased definition and sharpness that’s possible with Blu-Ray will undoubtedly make the films themselves look better than ever (Third Man and Chungking should be particularly eye-popping). If you own a Blu-Ray player and you don’t plan to buy at least a couple of these, you don’t have much business calling yourself a movie lover…

… In which case, you’ll probably be more inclined to purchase one of the other Blu-Rays that are hitting stores today. Paramount is releasing a quartet of their comedies- Hot Rod, Old School, The Heartbreak Kid, and the ever popular “Holy Schnike!” edition of Tommy Boy- along with the strange double feature of Coach Carter and Into the Wild, all in Blu-Ray only. And Fox is answering Paramount’s challenge rather feebly, releasing only Uwe Boll’s In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale in response. Gonna have to try harder than that, guys.

This week’s recent releases on DVD are highlighted by two late-summer hits that scratch some very different itches. On the one hand, you could watch the Golden Globe-nominated ABBA musical Mamma Mia! (Universal, also Blu-Ray). On the other, you could take a gander at The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (Universal, also Blu-Ray), the latest in Universal’s effects-heavy franchise.

Heck, practically the only new DVD release not to be coming out in Blu-Ray this week is the acclaimed series Generation Kill (HBO). And while I won’t hold the lack of a Blu-Ray edition against the show, it nonetheless feels like the DVD-release version of bringing a knife to a gunfight. Unless, of course, you don’t have a Blu-Ray player in the first place, in which case the point is moot.

America The Critical: 15 Movies That Show What's Wrong With U.S. (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 20:30:00 GMT

THE GODFATHER (1972)

Perhaps you've heard of it? The epic (and epically popular) metaphorical study of how the American dream was corrupted begins with the words "I believe in America" and then spends six hours and fifteen minutes (counting Part II) making it clear just what that belief entails. Sweet dreams, Papa.

IDIOCRACY (2006)

After skewering the soul-deadening effect of modern cubicle culture in 1999’s Office Space, Beavis & Butthead and King of the Hill creator Mike Judge created a comedic future dystopia (mirroring that of Cyril M. Kornbluth’s classic 1951 short story, “The Marching Morons”) where idiots have inherited the Earth (because all you overeducated hipsters out there either didn’t spawn or tried to prevent unsustainable overpopulation by limiting yourselves to one or two kids while the irresponsible, short-sighted and just plain dumb were breeding like rabbits). Idiocracy featured eminently bankable heartthrob Luke Wilson (as well as plenty of good ol’ lowest-common-denominator fart jokes) and received largely positive reviews...yet, mysteriously, the film was withheld from critics and vanished without a trace, receiving virtually zero publicity from its distributor (20th Century Fox) during its shockingly miniscule 125-screen theatrical run, whereupon the film was dumped unceremoniously onto DVD. So what happened? Well, I’ve never heard an official explanation, but I suspect the Suits either didn’t get Judge’s film or its depiction of our nation’s ever-lowering standards of taste, intelligence and acceptable civilized behavior hit a little too close to home, given the media’s complicity in the closing of the American mind. In Judge’s film (set in 2505, but clearly, even shockingly evocative of the trashiest parts of our modern-day landscape), nothing matters but sex and money, nobody is responsible for their own behavior, everything (including the population’s disposable clothing) is branded with corporate logos and anyone who dares to appear smart, competent, cultured, self-aware or sensitive (y’know, elite) is branded a “fag” and viewed with hostility and suspicion, even if (like Wilson’s time-traveling 20th century everyman) they’re trying to prevent global catastrophe. Judge somehow got product placement from real companies (whose representatives apparently never read the script: one scene, for instance, features an H&R Block that offers tax returns with “happy endings”), and biting the hands of his corporate masters so viciously may be the real reason the Suits buried the film, although (like Office Space) Idiocracy has managed to attract a small cult following (which this entry will hopefully increase), bringing some overdue attention to an unfairly neglected satiric gem of smart dumb comedy.

THE MAGIC CHRISTIAN (1969)

Terry Southern was the foremost satirist of American culture of his generation, and The Magic Christian is a jab at American money-lust unrivalled by anything this side of William Gaddis' JR. And while director Joseph McGrath (abetted by two Monty Python's Flying Circus alums, Graham Chapman and John Cleese) transplanted the action to his native England when he adapted the book for the big screen, transforming billionaire prankster Guy Grand from an old line Northeasterner to (im)proper British banker along the way, there was still no mistaking what country the author had in mind when he penned the tale of a man whose sole purpose in life was to prove that everyone has their price. A few of the scenes play nicely into the new but not exactly improved British sensibility of the film, but most of the bizarre schemes Grand comes up with to test the limits of his countrymen's greed – from a ludicrously overpriced luxury car roughly the size of a city block to a championship boxing match calculated to enrage by having the fighters kiss at a vital moment – could only resonate the way they do in America. The change of scenery does give the movie a bit of a schizophrenic feel (as does the addition of a rather purposeless Ringo Starr as Grand's son), but really, if someone tells you he's made a satire of a cash-hungry nation full of venal hacks who will sell out their every principle for money, you know what country he's talking about even if everyone in the movie talks like Alastair Cooke.

THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH (1976)

Suppose an alien, a blank slate with no preconceptions about our country, found himself in America. To him it is neither the land of opportunity nor the Great Satan, so with no frame of reference or historical context, what elements of our culture make the greatest impression upon him? Rampant consumerism? Unchecked capitalism? The duplicity of governments and corporations? That's one way of looking at Nicolas Roeg's trippy sci-fi flick (adapted from a novel by Walter Tevis), but like much of Roeg's '70s output, The Man Who Fell to Earth resists easy interpretation. David Bowie, already the man who sold the world, takes on the title role, one Thomas Jerome Newton. A visitor from another planet suffering from extreme drought, Newton has come to our world on a rescue mission. Using alien technology, he secures a number of patents (including one for ultra-futuristic self-developing film) and amasses a fortune, with which he plans to finance a return trip home (presumably with plenty of water, although like everything else, this is never really explained). But Newton loses focus, corrupted by wealth, drink, television and the only people he trusts. By the time he falls into the clutches of a government agency that has discovered his true nature, he has flamed out, never to return to the stars. Roeg keeps us as disoriented as his protagonist with his slippery acid trip visuals and elastic interpretation of time and space, but there's no mistaking the intent behind such images as Bowie stirring his gin with the barrel of a six-shooter, and it ain't God Bless America.

POINT OF ORDER (1964)

Emile de Antonio, the early, smarter, non-self-promoting version of Michael Moore, didn't pretend to be an investigative journalist. In his first film, which is about the Army-McCarthy hearings, he didn't even make any pretense to topicality: Point of Order was released ten years after the hearings themselves, and seven years after Joseph McCarthy's death. De Antonio's eye was on the big picture. He had the insight that, by boiling the 187 televised hours of hearing down to a tight 97 minutes of political vaudeville -- Joseph McCarthy and Joseph Welch's greatest hits -- and doing without voice-over narration or any other kind of explanatory devices, he could skirt charges of bias by seeming to let the HUAC all-stars hang themselves by their own words and actions. At the same time, by selecting just the right material and emphasizing the ridiculous to such a degree that the movie was immediately praised as a work of nonfiction satire, he seriously affected how the Red-hunters in Congress would be seen for generations. De Antonio would use the same political scrapbook technique in such later films as the Vietnam War doc In the Year of the Pig and the Nixon biography Millhouse: A White Comedy, movies that attracted less mainstream attention in part because their targets hadn't been off the front pages for a decade at the time they were released.

Click here for Part One and Part Three

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak

David Bowie Sings "Bullshit!" on Stage Musical Version of "The Man Who Fell to Earth"; Has No Modern Love for the Director

Phil Nugent — Tue, 20 May 2008 13:30:00 GMT

Somebody is trying to put together a stage musical version of The Man Who Fell to Earth, Nicolas Roeg's 1976 science fiction classic, and park it on Broadway, and it has been reported in the British press that David Bowie, who starred in the movie, is working on the project with director Peter Schaufuss, with an eye towards lending him the rights to some of his songs. Now David Bowie has announced that it's news to him. An official notice posted on Bowie's website quotes a "spokesman" as saying, "We have licensed absolutely no material written by Mr. Bowie to Schaufuss. We have never been requested to and we do not intend to," adding, "We are close to the Walter Tevis Estate and we have and have first hand knowledge that they have not licensed the musical rights to The Man Who Fell To Earth to Schaufuss either." (Tevis wrote the novel on which Roeg's movie was based. He's one of those lucky writers whose names have been kept alive thanks mostly to the movies' versions of his work: he also wrote the novel The Hustler and its sequel, The Color of Money, which lent its title, but not much else, to the screenplay that Richard Price eventually wrote for the sequel to the movie version of The Hustler.)

The Bowie website also claims that "the advertising for this production appears to be utilising an unauthorised name and likeness of Mr. Bowie and we will seek injunctions, if necessary, to stop their use." Bowie himself characterized reports of his participation as "absolute toss"--when Bowie denied rumors that he was going to appear in an episode of Doctor Who, he called them, "absolute tish and tosh"; this didn't even merit the extra noun--and added, "I have no idea who Peter Schaufuss is either." (Anyone who's followed Bowie's career at all will recognize that for him to say he's never heard of someone is no small thing.) It goes without saying that anyone trying to hatch a spin-off of The Man Who Fell to Earth would want very much to at least give the impression of having Bowie's blessing, at the very least. The film, which launched Bowie as a movie actor, cast him as an extraterrestrial on a mission to Earth to save his distant, dying planet; for this purpose, he takes out patents on various advanced alien technologies and assumes the persona of an eccentric genius gazillionaire. When the movie first came out, one reviewer wrote that it was as likely an explanation of Howard Hughes as any other.) It was a role that Bowie had unknowingly been auditioning for in some of his early seventies records and stage shows, and though he contributed no songs to the film either, he subsequently used stills from it as cover art for two of his albums. (Incidentally, the BBC claims that it's not clear that the production touted in the link above and the one that Schaufuss is working on are one and the same, but we'd hate to think that two people had this same idea.)

See Bardot's Ass, Bowie's Junk in Blu-Ray

Paul Clark — Wed, 07 May 2008 23:27:00 GMT

Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later, but for all of you movie lovers longing for the day when you’d be able to take some honest-to-goodness classics (by which we don’t mean The Sixth Day) for a spin in your shiny new Blu-Ray player, your wait will soon be over. In an e-Mail sent to members of the Criterion Collection mailing list, the Criterion powers that be have announced the release of thirteen titles from the Criterion Collection beginning in October, encompassing classics and newer films, foreign and English-language. Here’s the complete list:

The Third Man
Bottle Rocket
Chungking Express
The Man Who Fell to Earth
The Last Emperor
El Norte
The 400 Blows
Gimme Shelter
The Complete Monterey Pop
Contempt
Walkabout
For All Mankind
The Wages of Fear

According to the e-Mail, “these new editions will feature glorious high-definition picture and sound, all the supplemental content of the DVD releases, and they will be priced to match our standard-def editions.” Criterion also plans on rereleasing the standard DVD of Walkabout featuring a new transfer and features, for those so inclined. But just as exciting is that it looks like Criterion has new DVD editions of Bottle Rocket, Chungking Express, and El Norte in the pipeline, which is cool even for those of us still rockin' old-school players.

Meanwhile, Facets has announced that they plan to continue their plans to move ahead with a new line of HD-DVDs. David Huddleston was not amused.

Take Five: Resident Aliens

Peter Smith — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 20:00:00 GMT

The ever-busy John Cusack stars in Martian Child, opening wide this weekend. Based on an award-winning novel by legendary sci-fi author and Star Trek scribe David Gerrold (who also executive-produced the film and had final approval on the script, ensuring that, if nothing else, it’ll be loyal to its source), the film focuses on an older man — Cusack, essentially playing a straight version of Gerrold himself — who, battling his own personal demons, adopts a disturbed young boy who thinks he’s from Mars. It’s not your typical science-fiction scenario, but it’s one that echoes a number of other films in the genre that play on the ambiguity, or at least strangeness and charm, of the idea of an alien among us. As with many other types of genre films, science fiction is often at its most successful when it eschews the gimmicks, special effects, and labyrinthine plots and focuses instead on drama, revelation and humanity, even if the human is very possibly an alien. Here’s a fiver of films to get you in the mood for Martian Child.

THE BOY WITH GREEN HAIR (1948)

Directed by film-industry trouper Joseph Losey, The Boy with Green Hair gives us the spectacle of, well, a boy with green hair. Not technically an alien-among-us sci-fi story, it nonetheless functions in that same sort of parable mode, bringing us what is now a terribly dated and hokey message of tolerance. At the time, though, it probably seemed a lot more subversive; it was made even before the Hollywood blacklist was in full swing. Its post-war setting and refugee metaphors also must have scored some points about Jews and blacks that weren’t likely to be made explicit at the time. And despite how archaic it may seem today, it’s worth seeing for one reason: the ten-year-old protagonist is played by a young Dean Stockwell.

QUATERMASS AND THE PIT (1967)

The Quatermass series was something of a predecessor to Dr. Who, with many of the same themes and concerns, but the good doctor has never come close to cranking out a story this unexpected and unsettling. In it, a scientist discovers a Martian spacecraft, millions of years old, buried beneath the London underground, and as soon as it’s unearthed, it bequeaths the aliens’ final legacy to us: violence, madness and directionless hatred. Quatermass eventually discovers that it was these ancient astronauts who shaped us into the dominant species on Earth, by carefully guiding our predilection for mayhem; in this underseen and underrated sci-fi thriller, we have met the alien, and he is us.

THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH (1976)

In a role originally intended for Peter O’Toole, David Bowie — who was simultaneously, in his music career, playing at being an alien — puts in one of the finest, creepiest performances of his career. In this supremely weird, often affecting Nic Roeg vehicle, Bowie plays an urbane visitor to Earth who’s come here in search of water, establishing himself as a multimillionaire (using high-tech gadgets entirely familiar to the modern viewer) in order to do so. Admirable support is turned in by Rip Torn and others, but it’s Bowie’s ultra-frosty, near-reptilian performance, shot through with transcendent humanity at just the right moments, that will have you wondering if the guy really was an alien after all.

THE BROTHER FROM ANOTHER PLANET (1984)

John Sayles made this movie to raise a few bucks and bide the time while making Matewan, but it’s quite an accomplishment on its own. The story of a stranded alien who arrives in Manhattan wearing a black man’s skin — in which he is surprised to discover he merits different treatment — The Brother from Another Planet manages to rise above its exploitation origins (and often goofy genre conventions, such as grade-Z special effects and bizarre superhero subplot) and deliver some fine acting and interesting insights into matters of race and class. Taken on its own, it’s worth seeing, but it especially works in the greater context of Sayles’ work.

STARSHIP TROOPERS (1997)

Forget Showgirls — director Paul Verhoeven’s most misunderstood film is this adaptation (and subversion) of the classic Robert Heinlein novel about total war in space. Verhoeven, in typical black-comic style, takes the creepy, quasi-fascist tone of the Heinlein book and completely upends it, making one of the most damning statements on film about the futility and stupidity of war. It also functions, in its treatment of the utterly inhuman and thus utterly disposable buglike aliens, as a presciently barbed statement about our human tendency to dehumanize the enemy in times of war.

— Leonard Pierce