The Screengrab : the mist

Screengrab Review: “Infestation”

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 17:30:00 GMT

It’s a simple question we all have to ask ourselves sooner or later: Am I the sort of person who enjoys a good ol’ fashioned icky-fun movie about giant bugs? Go ahead and ask yourself. I’ll wait here.

Is the answer yes? Good, because that’s exactly what Infestation intends to be, and for the most part, it delivers. Chris Marquette (Fanboys) stars as Cooper, a fun-loving slacker who is about to be fired from his latest dead-end office job when…something happens. There is a flash of light and Cooper blacks out, only to wake up in the same office covered in a cocoon of webbing. No sooner has he managed to free himself than Cooper finds himself in a life-or-death struggle with a three foot long cockroach-looking creature. After defeating the gruesome beastie and freeing his co-workers from their own cocoons, Cooper and a small group of survivors set out on foot, hoping to find their way through a city infested with enormous creepy-crawlies to the sanctuary of a bomb shelter built by Cooper’s domineering father Ethan (Ray Wise).

Along the way, Cooper attempts to romance his boss’s daughter Sara (Brooke Nevin), fends off the advances of a distraught weathergirl (Kinsey Packard), and learns a few things about his insectoid tormenters. The bugs are blind and rely on sound to hone in on their prey. If they sting you on the small of the back, you’ll soon be sprouting multiple hairy legs of your own. Most importantly, they nest in a giant hive on the outskirts of town, the destruction of which may be the only hope for the survival of the human race.

Writer-director Kyle Rankin, who you may remember as one of the co-directors of The Battle of Shaker Heights from the second season of Project Greenlight, brings a welcome light touch to the proceedings, swerving from goofy to gross-out without missing a beat. Marquette makes for an engaging anti-action hero, and the special effects (supervised by Shaker Heights co-director Efram Potelle) compare favorably with those of the mega-budget bug movie The Mist (which could have benefited from the sense of fun displayed here).

It’s all good fun up until the abrupt, ambiguous ending, which may be an homage to The Sopranos or an awkward set-up for a sequel, but either way plays as too cutesy by half. If you can ignore that, you’ll find Infestation to be an ideal night at the drive-in, assuming you can still find one. As best I can tell, a release date is still up in the air, but in the meantime, here’s a short film from Rankin and Potelle that offers a glimpse of the big bug carnage to come:

Insex

Introducing the Screengrab 24-Hour Stephen King Marathon

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 19:30:00 GMT

As a special Halloween treat for Screengrab readers, I will be prying my eyelids open Clockwork Orange-style for a 24-hour marathon of movies based on the works of Stephen King. Because I have not completely lost my mind, these 24 hours will not necessarily be consecutive. I’ll be stringing them out all week, with each entry covering roughly six hours worth of possessed cars, killer dogs and corn-worshipping children. (However, once I’ve completed the task and reported my findings here, feel free to conduct your own 24-hour-straight experiment. I did this once before for my book Hick Flicks, watching 24 consecutive hours of hillbilly horror movies – including all four chapters of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre saga then in existence. About 18 hours into it, my dog was begging for mercy and I had to switch to the Golf Channel for a few minutes to decompress.)

I’ve set a few ground rules for this descent into the depths of cinematic terror. First of all, the roster must include only horror movies. No prison flicks or coming-of-age stories or whatever the hell Hearts in Atlantis is. This is a Halloween special, after all, so I need giant rats and werewolves and shit like that. Secondly, I eliminated any movie I’m very familiar with – The Shining, Carrie and Stand by Me, to cite the most obvious examples – as well as anything I’d seen in the past decade or so. That includes recent fare like The Mist, 1408 and Dreamcatcher, as well as the movies I watched for this High Hat piece on the state of Maine as depicted in King’s works. I didn’t want to be able to cheat and go by memory – although it’s not like any of you would really know if I did, anyway. Still, the integrity of the process must not be compromised, and since there are so many King movies out there, it wasn’t hard to limit myself to stuff I’ve either never seen or saw so long ago, I barely remember.

With all that being said, tune in tomorrow for Part One of the Screengrab 24-Hour Stephen King Marathon!

DVD Digest for September 16, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week is a busy one for lovers of classic cinema- to say nothing of the folks at Warner Home Video.

DVD(s) of the Week: Continuing their ongoing commitment to spotlight film history’s greatest filmmakers, the good folks at Criterion fill a glaring hole in the DVD market with this week’s release of three classics by Max Ophüls- La Ronde, Le Plaisir, and The Earrings of Madame De…. These three films, all made at Ophüls’ artistic and commercial peak, make a lovely introduction to the man’s work, with all the continental sophistication, exquisitely-wrought melodrama, and lavish production values that made his reputation. And stars? You bet- between the three films, you’ll find Jean Gabin, Simone Signoret, Anton Walbrook, Charles Boyer, Danielle Darrieux, and Simone Simon. If you can only shell out for one disc, go with Earrings, whose DVD features not only scholarly commentary and a number of featurettes (including an interview with Paul Thomas Anderson, whose complex camera movements were clearly inspired by Ophüls’ work), but also a new printing of the source novel, Louise de Vilmorin’s Madame De…. But really, they’re all worth your money. Now all we need is a Region 1 DVD of Letter From an Unknown Woman…

In addition, this week is a banner occasion for musical fans, led by a double dose of Oscar-winning Vincente Minnelli titles, An American in Paris and Gigi (both Warner), each presented in snazzy new Two-Disc Special Editions. There’s also Warner’s The Busby Berkeley Collection Volume 2, which includes Gold Diggers of 1937, Gold Diggers in Paris, Hollywood Hotel and Variety Show. Other classics coming to DVD this week include: Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice 20th Anniversary Deluxe Edition (Warner); young Tom Cruise and his Ray-Bans in Risky Business 25th Anniversary Deluxe Edition (Warner, also Blu-Ray); Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains (Ryko Distribution), which was spotlighted last week by our very own Phil Nugent; Glenn Close in the live-action 101 Dalmatians and 102 Dalmatians (Disney); and The Charlie Chan Collection Volume 5 (Fox).

This week’s roster of recent releases on DVD is headed up by The Wachowski Brothers’ financial and critical bomb Speed Racer (Warner, also Blu-Ray), which I believe is still the most underappreciated movie so far this year. Other recent titles coming to DVD include: Patrick Dempsey in Made of Honor (Sony, also Blu-Ray); Al Pacino in 88 Minutes (Sony, also Blu-Ray); Mike Myers making an ass of himself again in The Love Guru (Universal, also Blu-Ray); the surprisingly affecting Young@Heart (Fox); David Gordon Green’s Snow Angels (Warner); the acclaimed documentary Constantine’s Sword (First Run); and two direct-to-DVD titles, 101 Dalmatians II: Patch’s London Adventure (Disney) and Another Cinderella Story (Warner, also Blu-Ray).

This week’s new TV on DVD titles include: Chuck Season 1 (Warner); Criminal Minds Season 3 (Paramount); Dirty Sexy Money Season 1 (Disney); My Name Is Earl Season 3 (Fox); Private Practice Season 1 (Disney); and Pushing Daisies Season 1 (Warner, also Blu-Ray).

Finally, in Blu-Ray only titles, this week brings 1408 (Weinstein), Hulk (Universal), Madagascar (Paramount), The Mist (Weinstein), and Shrek the Third (Paramount).

Shreveport, La.: Your Family-Friendly One-Stop Film Location

Phil Nugent — Tue, 20 May 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Shreveport. Louisiana, the third-largest city in the Pelican State and the center of the "Ark-La-Tex" nexus, is a real nice place to raise your kids up. It was once a swaggering power center of the oil business. But then the Lousiana branch of the Standard Oil Company, which was located in Shreveport back when Huey Long used to like to talk trash about the company's Board of Directors and their mamas, got absorbed by the New Jersey branch, and in the 1980s the city was hit hard by an economic downturn. Today the city is enjoying a major resurgence, thanks to an unlikely embrace by the film industry. Oliver Stone's W. is just one of a number of productions shooting there now, following the trail blazed by Factory Girl, The Mist, and Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay. Now, David Carr reports, "Major film-industry companies like Paskal Lighting, Cinelease and Panavision all have permanent presences here. And last month Nu Image/Millennium Films, a producer and distributor of independent films like Mad Money and My Mom’s New Boyfriend, announced the construction of a 6.7-acre production campus with a planned expansion to a 20-acre full-service studio that will have three sound stages, production offices, a mill and a prop house."

Lousiana had been angling to attract film business for some twenty years now, in reaction to the loss of oil revenue that affected the whole state. This was in the period when New Orleans, in particular, redefined itself as dependent on the tourist dollar and started playing up its image as an exotic locale, sort of like a Disneyland where you could get a lap dance. Towards this end, Carr notes, "The state offers a 25 percent tax credit for in-state spending, which bumps to 35 percent when the money goes to Louisiana production crews." Once upon a time, the immediate result of this was a whole spate of movies (Tightrope, The Big Easy, Blaze, etc.) full of crooked politicians in white suits and cops in ill-fitting clothes wiping the sweat off their foreheads with hankies while trudging through the French Quarter during Mardi Gras to see if Madame LeCree the hoodoo priestess could throw the monkey bones and tell them where that serial killer might be hiding. But then Hurricane Katrina killed off whatever appeal N'Orleans still might have had for big production companies that hadn't already been wiped out by overreaching local grafters. After Katrina forced "many productions working with state tax credits in New Orleans had to scramble for both higher ground and a place to finish their films", they landed in Shreveport, and in the process noticed that the economic bust had left behind a city "with a substantial infrastructure, with varied architecture and numerous highways, nice characteristics if you’re making a movie." While New Orleans tended to star as in itself in any movie made there, Shreveport can easily pass for Anywhere, U.S.A., sort of like Toronto with humidity. " And," writes Carr, "though there are no direct flights to Shreveport from Los Angeles and New York, city officials try to overcome what would seem to be a deal-breaker by doubling down on the hospitality." Oliver Stone, for one, has no complaints. “I made four movies in Dallas. And where we are right now,” he says of Shreveport, "is Bush country, so it feels right.” The gap-toothed wonder added, “You get something working with extras from here. Look, these people are gamblers and roughnecks. They know all about boom and bust. This is a second-chance town. I just read that there may be a huge reserve of gas right under the city that was not discovered until very recently.” Of course, it could be said that any town that Oliver Stone rolls into automatically acquires a previously undetected huge reserve of gas...

YouTube Film Critics: Spill and the Reel Geezers

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Newspapers have been shedding personnel at an alarming rate in recent months, and those of us who earn our beer money writing about movies are no exception. As the Hollywood Reporter notes in a piece about small independent films being overlooked by major newspapers, “Critics have recently been laid off, bought out of their contracts or left and were not replaced at the Los Angeles Times, the Village Voice, New York Newsday and more than 15 papers around the country.”

This presents a problem for you, the film consumer. Where to go for a diverse array of informed opinion on the motion pictures of the day? Well, once you’ve read all the latest news and reviews at the Screengrab, you might want to click on over to YouTube, where the time-honored Siskel & Ebert format lives on in two very different web series.

Spill.com is the latest permutation of Korey Coleman’s long-running Austin cable access show The Reel Deal. Coleman, his friend Martin Thomas, and a rotating cast of co-hosts conducted a loose, funny and very low budget roundtable discussion of the current cinema for over a decade before relocating to the internet. A cartoonist and filmmaker (his indie film 2 A.M. played SXSW in 2006), Coleman decided to take on a new creative challenge and animate webisodes of The Reel Deal (podcasts of this version of the show can be found here). The show proved so popular, it was bought out by a New York company and reemerged as Spill.com. Aside from Korey, the rest of the Reel Deal crew took on new personas for the revamped version, but the irreverent humor and down-to-earth vibe remain intact, as you can see in this review of The Mist:

At the other end of the spectrum, we have the Reel Geezers. If you ever wanted to recreate the experience of listening to your grandparents bicker about movies, this is the show for you. Lorenzo Semple Jr. (screenwriter of Papillon, The Parallax View and 16 Batman episodes) and Marcia Nasatir (a former agent and producer of The Big Chill and Ironweed) give the octogenarian viewpoint on the latest releases, which is particularly helpful when it comes to a movie like Superbad:

Let's Twist Again

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 17:30:00 GMT

At this most retrospective time of the year, let us look back at the thrillers of 2007 and the mind-bending twists that made them so thrilling. By “mind-bending,” of course, I mean ludicrous or predictable or – ever so rarely – actually clever enough to make the attached movie almost worth sitting through. Which twists missed, which got us pissed, and which made the list with The Mist?

It goes without saying that there are spoilers galore after the jump, so tread lightly…

I KNOW WHO KILLED ME

The Plot: Student Aubrey Fleming (Lindsay Lohan) is abducted by a Saw-like fiend who dismembers her and leaves her for dead. When she awakes in the hospital, she insists she is actually a stripper named Dakota Moss.

The Twist: Aubrey Fleming and Dakota Moss are twins, separated at birth!

Verdict: Lohan may have pulled off the twin routine in The Parent Trap, but in her current state it’s asking a bit much for her to pull off one character, let alone two.

THE REAPING

The Plot: Hilary Swank is a former missionary who has lost her faith and now travels the country debunking miracles. She has her hands full when a series of biblical plagues descends on a small Southern town and the townspeople blame a young girl they believe to be possessed by a demon.

The Twist: The young girl is not possessed by a demon. Swank has been impregnated by the local cult leader, and she is carrying the devil spawn.

Verdict: This twist manages to turn a perfectly awful Exorcist knockoff into a genuinely terrible Rosemary’s Baby rip-off in the blink of an eye. No small feat!

THE NUMBER 23

The Plot: Dog catcher Walter Sparrow (Jim Carrey) finds intriguing parallels to his own life in a strange book written by the mysterious Topsy Kretts. The book, The Number 23, concerns a detective who murders his lover.

The Twist: Sparrow wrote the book himself as a confession to the murder of his college girlfriend. Topsy Kretts = Top Secrets!

Verdict: It takes director Joel Schumacher nearly fifteen minutes to explain the twist, which should have been his first clue that it wasn’t a very good one.

PREMONITION

The Plot: The morning after her husband Jim is killed in a car accident, Linda Hanson (Sandra Bullock) wakes up to find he is still alive. The next day, Jim is dead again, and Linda realizes she is living the week of his death out of order.

The Twist: Linda figures this out in time to prevent the car crash that would have killed Jim. But he is killed almost immediately anyway when a fuel truck skids out of control and slams into him.

Verdict: No explanation is ever given for Linda’s scrambled chronology, and she doesn’t even seem all that curious about it – so why should we?

THE MIST

The Plot: The residents of a small Maine town are trapped in a supermarket when a mist full of fearsome critters rolls in. Bloodshed and insanity ensue before David Drayton (Thomas Jane) and a handful of survivors attempt their escape by car.

The Twist: The survivors run out of gas in the mist. Convinced there is no escaping a lingering, painful death via critter, Drayton mercy kills the others, including his own son. Minutes later, the mist clears as the military arrives to wipe out the critters.

Verdict: So mean, sadistic, and cruelly satisfying, even Stephen King didn’t come up with it – it was Frank Darabont’s idea, and who knew he had it in him?

(Belated) Take Five: Stephen King

Peter Smith — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 21:00:00 GMT

So, have you heard of this Stephen King fellow? Apparently he’s pretty widely read. Hs popularity as a novelist is matched only by his profligacy — he’s written over thirty novels and hundreds of short stories on his way to becoming one of the best-selling authors of all time. This level of popularity is like heroin to Hollywood producers, and adaptations of his books and stories — as well as original screenplays by King himself, an inveterate movie nerd — have led to an astonishing 100+ films and television shows. Like their source material, though, they’re a decidedly mixed bag: for every Shawshank Redemption, there’s a Children of the Corn 666: Isaac’s Return. And just as King enjoys a decidedly muddled critical reception, films made from his works, while occasionally made by talented filmmakers who find in the material the bones of something great, tend towards third-rate exploitation horror. Still, with The Mist having opened last week, it’s good to remember that a number of genuinely worthwhile projects have made the translation from the mind of King to the big screen. Here are five of the best.

CARRIE (1976)

The first hint that Stephen King’s novels might be the stuff of memorable movies came in 1976, when Brian DePalma got hold of his tale of a shy, stunted teenage girl who happened to have vast telekinetic powers. As the rest of this list will make clear, it’s no secret that King’s books tended to make good films only in the hands of a competent director, but DePalma in particular blew the doors off of this one, picking out the meaty insides and discarding the extraneous baggage. Ratcheting up the tension of King’s patented adolescent-angst narrative and turning the end into something beyond gore and well into Grand Guignol territory, DePalma also delivers one of the best jump-out-of-your-seat shocks in horror movie history near the end of Carrie.

SALEM'S LOT (1979)

The story of a small town infested by vampires was one of King’s first big successes as a novelist, and this TV movie adaptation — helmed by horror maven and Texas Chainsaw Massacre director Tobe Hooper — does a terrific job conveying its sense of paranoia and night terror without resorting to gore or cheap thrills. Indeed, working within the restrictions of television seemed to suit Hooper and screenwriter Paul Monash, who paced and teased the moments of shock out quite effectively. They’re also aided greatly by a cast crammed full of top-shelf character actors, including Elisha Cook Jr., Fred Willard, James Mason, Ed Flanders and George Dzundza.

THE SHINING (1980)

Not a lot of genuinely great directors have taken on the works of Stephen King, but Stanley Kubrick was unquestionably the greatest. Made only three years after the publication of the novel, The Shining is a work of genuine genius, containing one of Jack Nicholson’s greatest screen performances, some absolutely tremendous camerawork, and a sense of creeping horror that’s absent in many of the plodding, obvious shock films made from King's work. (Amazingly, the best-ever movie adaptation of a Stephen King novel was one of King’s least favorites; he later helped a far-inferior TV movie reworking into existence.)

CREEPSHOW (1982)

In a perfectly wonderful and appropriate twist of fate, one of Stephen King’s best friends is zombie auteur George Romero, and while Creepshow, their only true collaboration (King wrote the screenplay and Romero directed) isn’t the best movie based on the horror writer’s works, it’s easily the most enjoyable. The two sought to recreate the goofy, gory tone of the EC horror comics they had both enjoyed in their youth, and they succeeded to an admirable degree — and if the overall feel of the movie, as well as a hysterically nutty performance by King himself, are any indication, they had a hell of a time doing it.

THE DEAD ZONE (1983)

The story of a man who can see the future, and whether or not he has the chance to alter it, is a pretty whoozy old trope in science fiction, and to be honest, it doesn’t fare all that much better even in the hands of a man who, like Stephen King, can lend a patina of respectability to even the hoariest stock plots. David Cronenberg does what he can with the material he has, but it’s not the script or the direction that makes The Dead Zone worth watching: it’s the lead performances, most especially Christopher Walken (sublimely nutty as usual) in the role of the seer and Martin Sheen (hamming it up like nobody’s business) as a politician he suspects may someday trigger a nuclear war.

— Leonard Pierce

Today in the Nerve Film Lounge: I'm Not There, Hitman, The Mist, August Rush, Feed, Lili Taylor

Peter Smith — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 17:00:00 GMT

I'm Not There: "The screen would be a poorer, smaller place without such ambition."

Hitman: "I am a lover of trashy, violent movies, and Hitman is an insult to violent trash."

The Mist: "Frank Darabont loves Rod Serling. I mean really loves him."

August Rush: "Even if you're not the musical type, you might suspend your disbelief long enough to be stirred."

Feed: "Despite a handful of choice moments (Jerry Brown snorting nose spray), there's not enough here to justify a seventy-six-minute run time."

Q&A: Lili Taylor: "These days, there's not a lot of stuff actors can use to protect themselves from the roles, and protect themselves from the audience's projections."

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! We'll be back on Monday.