The Screengrab : the parallax view

The Authenticity Police on the Set of "State of Play"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 15:00:00 GMT

Washington Post writer R. B. Brenner describes his thrilling adventures serving as a technical consultant on State of Play. The movie which stars Russell Crowe as bearish investigative reporter employed by "the Washington Globe, a down-on-its-luck 'second buy' in town, recently taken over by a media conglomerate," where he has Helen Mirren for a boss and Rachel McAdams as a blog-savvy novice to goggle with admiration over his death-defying journaistic feats and to tsk-tsk over his ethical lapses. Once upon a time, this was a 2003 British miniseries of the same title, which "portrays a Fleet Street world of newspapering that, though rollicking fun, is an ethical nightmare by American standards. Its ace reporter pays sources for information (an absolute no-no in the United States), surreptitiously videotapes a source in a hotel room (a firing offense, and a felony in several states) and generally behaves like a walking conflict of interest (and in a bedroom scene with the politician's wife, he does more than walk)." Brenner saw it as his job to guide the filmmaking team, which included Scottish director Kevin Macdonald (Touching the Void, The Last King of Scotland), in adapting the specifics to the American journalism milieu without costing the story any juice.

Towards this end, Brenner set about trying to make sure that Crowe's character was a respectable beacon of his profession, even though part of the character's scruffy charm is clearly meant to be that he's one of those rule-bending, amoral dudes whose first responsibility is to the story and who, compared to the people Brenner probably views as being at the height of the profession--i.e., the ones who get invited to appear on the Sunday morning talk shows and, well, get hired as technical consultants on major Hollywood productions--aren't completely respectable. Brenner objected to the fact that Crowe's character repeatedly pays informants for information, which Brenner says could never happen here, by which he presumably means that if a real reporter got caught doing it, there would be howls of outrage and affronted op-ed pieces for a week and then the reporter would either be suspended or get fired and go to work for Fox News. "Twice, the director agreed to work-arounds. The third time? The good news is, Crowe's reporter never pays a dime, which Macdonald sees as accommodating me. The bad news is, one brief scene could lead the audience to think otherwise."

This was not the only occasion when "my crusade for authenticity bumped into unyielding walls at times. When I repeatedly objected to the illicit-videotaping scene, Macdonald politely made clear that in the end, plot rules. He was trying to tell a dramatic story, a political whodunit, and didn't want the audience bogged down in a journalism ethics lesson. I kept arguing that if he aspired to elevate the film above mere thriller, then accurately portraying my profession's code of conduct should matter more." On the other hand, he describes a scene during filming when Mirren's editor asked Crowe if he could be "objective" about a story in which he had a personal stake and Crowe ad-libbed, "Absolutely not." "Those words," writes Brenner, "didn't make it into the film, much to my relief." Too bad; it's not only a funny line, but it reveals the reporter as an honest man.

Reviewing a 1974 film version of The Front Page, Pauline Kael captured the enduring appeal of the play's view of Chicago journalism circa the early twentieth century by quoting a reporter named Sherman Reilly Duffy: "Socially a journalist fits in somewhere between a whore and a bartender, but spiritually he stands beside Galileo. He knows the world is round." By his own account, Brennan is a representative of the current state of big-time journalism, which is willing to consider the possibility that the world is round if that's what the experts say, but mostly knows where its next meal is coming from. The Hollywood State of Play is itself a throwback to the 1970s, when movies like All the President's Men and The Parallax View (and TV shows like Lou Grant and The Night Stalker, in which Darren McGavin got to the bottom of this whole zombie problem plaguing Chicago) portrayed investigative reporters as the new hard-boiled detective heroes and our last defense against some all-enveloping conspiracy whose jaws where always just about to snap shut. It's a romantic idea that may still have some fantasy appeal, but it doesn't seem very timely, considering that most of the journalistic scandals of the last twenty years have been the result not of overreaching by unshaven, hard-drinking reporters fighting to get to the truth but by well-manicured establishment reporters meekly taking dictation from whatever powerful figure deigned to use them as a P.R. service. (When The New York Times's Judith Miller was criticized for shoveling anything she was told by Ahmad Chalabi into the paper, she indignantly replied that her critics clearly didn't understand what her job was, the implication being that if Chalabi had passed his press kit along to some reporter who'd bothered to check to see whether any of what he'd been told was true or even remotely plausible, that reporter would not have been doing his job right.)

The idea that what's really killing American journalism is the closeness between journalists, who aspire to becoming TV bloviators and beltway celebrities, with the celebrities they cover, is not one that Brennan was likely to push the State of Play crew towards; by his own telling, he was too star-struck from being around real celebrities that he had to summon up all his courage to tell the movie star Crowe that if his character had real reason to believe that somebody was likely to get killed, he would probably go to the cops. The movie may do a little better by the other thing that is killing the newspaper business, which is new technology and the threat of obsolescence. Crowe's old-school ink-stained wretch vents his resentment of McAdams's flavor of the month by sneering, "I've been here 15 years, I've got a 16-year-old computer. She's been here 15 minutes and she's got enough gear to launch a fucking satellite." Another good line. Turns out that it, too, was ad-libbed, on-camera, by Crowe. Maybe, instead of bothering to write scripts, they should just hand Crowe a character and have him live in full costume for a few months, following him around and recording his movements until he gets off enough zingers to add up to a movie.

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:

The Second (or Third, or Fourth) Coming of the 1970s Movies

Phil Nugent — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Ross Douthat thinks that moviemakers have brought back the '70s, again. But when Tarantino and other filmmakers of a certain age set out to redeem the '70s as a cool decade after all, they fixated on the stylistic tics and mannerisms of gritty urban thrillers and genre hybrids such as blaxsploitation flicks, and what's been brought back now, in direct response to the Bush administration and its cheerleaders in the media, is the paranoid hopelessness of such Vietnam-and-Watergate-era pictures as The Parallax View, The Day of the Condor, and the vigilante genre epitomized by Charles Bronson in Death Wish. This is not how it was supposed to be. In the wake of 9/11, there were a lot of predictions, both inside the industry and in the press, that audiences would now reject cynicism and violent thrills and embrace the second coming of John Wayne, a simple man with a simple plan to solve all our problems, starting with wiping that smirk off your face, and do me some push-ups, smart boy! (Remember that "irony is dead" horseshit?) But the few overt attempts to play to this "new reality" — say, that remake of The Four Feathers that didn't do anybody any good, or that documentary about "good Americans" that was marketed as a bitch slap to Michael Moore — died a dog's death, and the more cunning of the filmmakers who might have once considered catering to it got with the program. As Douthat points out, after the failure of Tears of the Sun, a 2003 movie about some American special-ops guys in Nigeria who remember what they're really fighting for and who proceed to, well, really fight for it, its director, Antoine Fuqua, was back last year with Shooter, in which a special-ops guy who's back from the Middle East discovers that he's really fighting a conspiracy made up of sleazeball U.S. government guys — plutocrats who disregard the laws, sneer at the common people, and the depth of whose villainy can be accurately gauged according to the degree of their physical resemblance to Dick Cheney. Audience who ate it up may not have been conscious of responding to having their political prejudices stroked, but it was a much bigger hit than Tears of the Sun without being a much better movie. Also instructive: the career of Stephen Gaghan, who made a splash with his screenplay for Steven Soderbergh's (pre-9/11) Traffic, which summed up the war on drugs as a misguided, empty enterprise, but did also allow for the existence of a few good people working inside the system and scoring whatever little victories they could. Since then, Gaghan made his debut as a writer-director with Syriana, commonly referred to as "Traffic with oil instead of drugs," but which has a much more paranoid vibe, and which ends with its most intelligent, good-hearted, and plugged-in characters — its best hopes for positive change — literally blown off the road. It's the difference that makes Syriana feel like a product of the current zeitgeist.

The James Bond of the current era is Jason Bourne, the killing machine who, having lost his identity, starts out knowing nothing except that the world is out to get him. Over the course of three very busy pictures, he's yet to learn anything that might cheer him up. (The closest thing to good news in any of the Bourne pictures is that an amnesiac with a target on his back might still be able to hook up with Franka Potente — but he won't be able to keep her for long.) Even the Napoleon Solo of the current era, 24's Jack Bauer, though regarded by some as a right-wing hero standing almost alone in the liberal fantasyland that is topical-minded Hollywood, is at odds with the pasty-white, Nixonian government leaders who, more often than not, are at the bottom of the latest villainy he has to bust. (Jack's real "ideology" amounts to a bland willingness to do anything to anybody to get his way, in a universe where torture works. Like many a self-identified law-and-order type, he's not a real conservative so much as a barbarian with a cell phone and a muscle shirt.) But because the similarities between the '70s and today have more to do with a shared national mood of fatalistic helplessness than with the specifics giving rise to that mood, the "new '70s" atmosphere works best when the filmmakers skirt the issue of just what it is they're mooning about. So last year's slate of "Iraq war" movies had a beside-the-point feel to them, and even the vigilante-hero template doesn't have the same impact when transferred to contemporary New York — a place that certainly has its problems but that, compared to the city Travis Bickle called home, is relatively bloodless and well-scrubbed. (As Douthat points out, "Jodie Foster’s gun-toting avenger [in The Brave One] alone would have been responsible for more than one percent of the city’s annual killings." The anxieties of the '70s movies were part of something not just huge but pervasive, a societal rot that you couldn't miss — you couldn't leave home or turn on the news without being reminded of it. However bad things seem now, they don't seem out of control — if anything, just the opposite — and most people probably assign most of the blame squarely to one or two powerful people whose guts they hate. So the movies that try to take on society's ills head on feel as if they'd fit all too snugly onto YouTube.

Enter the Moviedrome

Peter Smith — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 18:45:00 GMT

British cineastes love Alex Cox for his BBC series Moviedrome, which highlighted cult films. Until its demise in 1994, it was required viewing on a Sunday night, when Cox would pop up and introduce a couple of short films that he felt were neglected, interesting or screwed-up. This was when "cult" didn't have that sniffy sense of intellectual superiority. A lot of filmmakers cite Cox's excellent Moviedrome introductions as kicking off their interest in cinema. Unseen since their original broadcast, they've now popped up on YouTube. The very first Moviedrome introduction, above, for The Wicker Man, also features Cox's definition of cult. Others have included Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Halloween, a film he's reluctant to praise. Hopefully his more enthusiastic intros to Mishima, The Parallax View and Django will make it onto the net soon. — Faisal A. Qureshi

Conglomerated Baddies: The 22 Most Evil Corporations in Movie History, Part 1

Peter Smith — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 21:00:00 GMT

So everybody’s all a-twitter about the new Clooney flick Michael Clayton and how realistic and original it is. "Realistic" is a relative term, sure, but we’d like to note humbly that Clayton fits into a long line of movies about characters crusading against Evil Movie Corporations, some real, many fictional. The fact is, the Faceless Corporation is one of cinema’s easiest targets — cooking the books, offing all detractors, bribing officials, and usually killing its consumers. But maybe it’s about time we paid tribute to these parasitic, conglomerated baddies. They may not sneer like Lee Marvin, and they may not cackle like Gert Frobe, but without them, the annals of movie villainy would be a far more impoverished place. So here they are, The 22 Most Evil Corporations in Movie History.

The Soylent Corporation, SOYLENT GREEN (1973)

Charlton Heston went through some shit in the late 1960s and 1970s. He had to deal with earthquakes, runaway airplanes, post-apocalyptic albinos, and a planet full of damned dirty apes. He didn't always make it to the end of the movie in one piece, but give or take a hissy fit in front of the ruins of the Statue of Liberty, he usually managed to hang onto his stoic composure. The one time he cracked and had to be carried offstage screaming and frothing at the mouth, it came from a good look at the inner workings of the Soylent Corporation. In 2022, the teeming refuge of an overpopulated and underresourced planet depend on SoyCorp for their meager diet: synthetic crackers and buns that go by the names Soylent Red, Soylent Yellow, and the ever-popular Soylent Green, which is said to be made from plankton and which has a tangy zest with just a hint of Edward G. Robinson. For the benefit of extremely slow viewers, the terrible secret of Soylent Green is spelled out in Chuck's exit line, which has entered the camp lexicon and is beloved even, or maybe especially, by those who've never seen the movie.

The Parallax Corporation, THE PARALLAX VIEW (1974)

In Taxi Driver, arguably the greatest of all the seventies assassination movies, Travis Bickle, like Lee Harvey Oswald and Arthur Bremer before him, plans to kill one target and then shifts to another when things don't work out. What Travis lacks is a stabilizing figure to help him stay focused and channel his energies — just what the Parallax Corporation offers to the maladjusted social reject searching for the right career path. In this paranoid fantasy, both the "lone gunmen" accused of picking off the potential saviors of our nation, and the real assassins for whose crimes those patsies are framed, are the carefully sculpted products of a company that arranges the hits and shapes the way they're perceived by a gullible public. They're so good at it that reporter Joe Frady (Warren Beatty), the movie's hero, whom we expect to expose the conspiracy, instead winds up as the latest patsy. In the movie's most memorable sequence, Beatty and the audience are subjected to a lengthy film montage that's a regular part of the Parallax training process, a scene apparently based on the not-implausible notion that watching short student films could turn someone homicidal.

The Weyland-Yutani Corporation, ALIEN Saga

Most of our readership will surely have two thoughts when reading the above byline, the first being, "wait, Alien AGAIN???" and the second being, "Wait, the Company has a name?" Well, yes, they do, although we’d understand if you hadn’t noticed it. In Ridley Scott’s original film, Weyland-Yutani ran the show, but their presence in the film was almost subliminal — on computer monitors, on a beer bottle, and so forth. But as the series continued, their logo became more visible, especially in Aliens, where it appeared at several points emblazoned on the walls of the mostly-deserted colony where the film is set. But the Company’s ubiquity pales in comparison to its insidious presence in the Alien universe. From the time it tricked the Nostromo into embarking on an alternate, crew-expendable mission resulting in the death of all but one crew member, Weyland-Yutani consistently sent people into the path of the Alien, all in the name of bringing back a specimen for weapons research. Ash’s sentiments about the Alien — "a perfect organism. . . unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality" — could just as easily be applied to Weyland-Yutani. But as the saying goes, there’s always a bigger fish. In a scene deleted from Alien: Resurrection, it was announced that Weyland-Yutani had somewhere along the line been bought out by Wal-Mart. Not even a money-grubbing intergalactic juggernaut stood a chance against the Sam Walton empire.

Pacific Gas and Electric, ERIN BROCKOVICH (2000)

If you want a generic corporate name, "Pacific Gas and Electric" will do. And if you want a particularly evil-sounding chemical name, what’s better than hexavalent chromium? It’s got HEX in it and it sounds shiny. . . like the Terminator. And then if you really wanna rile people up, have the faceless corporation dump evil chemicals into something harmless and life-sustaining. . . like groundwater. Watch as PG & E (Profits! Greed! Eeeevil!) seems to snicker while the good townspeople get sicker and sicker from an act so innocent — simply drinking the water. If you made it up, they’d slap cliché (or Ibsen) on the script coverage. But if it happened to be a True Story with a 333 million dollar settlement at the end of a class-action lawsuit, then you’d have an Oscar-winning hit movie.

"The Company", SECONDS (1966)

John Frankenheimer's profoundly depressing horror movie deals with the machinations of a deep-pocketed organization that arranges for people unhappy with their lives — from the looks of things here, that would be everybody over the age of fourteen — to be "reborn" via plastic surgery and forged identities. Veteran character actor John Randolph plays the poor schlub who gets roped in and, because the Company uses entrapment and blackmail to make it "easier" for their clients to give up their old lives, is forced to become Rock Hudson. No one will be surprised to learn that this does not prove to be the automatic gateway to an exciting, more rewarding new existence. Unable to cope, Randolph/Rock finally demands that the Company give him a new new life, and soon discovers how they acquire the corpses they need to fake the deaths of new clients. The tough minded will say he brought it all on himself by not ducking out the nearest fire exit when he learned that the head of the Company was Will Geer, TV's Grandpa Walton. As any hardened moviegoer could have told him, anybody that folksy (see also "Brimley, Wilford" in The Firm) in a position of power has got to be up to no good.

— Paul Clark, Pazit Cahlon, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Vadim Rizov, Bryan Whitefield