The Screengrab : twister

MIchael Crichton, 1942-2008

Phil Nugent — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Michael Crichton, who died of throat cancer Tuesday at the age of 66, started out as a prodigy and developed into something like a smoothly functioning assembly line of marketable concepts. Crichton, who graduated from Harvard in 1964 and obtained an M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1969, published his first novels under the name "John Lange", starting with Odds On in 1966; he also published the thriller A Case of Need (which would be filmed, in 1972, by Blake Edwards under the title The Carey Treatment) in 1968 under the psuedonym "Jeffrey Hudson" and co-wrote the countercultural action comedy Dealing (1970) with his brother Douglas, which they published under the name "Michael Douglas." (It too was made into a movie in 1972.) Under his own name, Crichton published Five Patients (1970), a nonfiction account of his medical experiences, as well as the sci-fi thrillers The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man, both of which were also quickly snapped up by Hollywood. Not surprisingly, Crichton, by all reports a bit of a control freak and no shrinking violet, soon decided to get more involved, in a hands on way, with what the movies were doing to his books, and he launched his own directing career with Pursuit, a 1972 TV-movie based on a John Lange novel. A year later, he made his feature directing debut with Westworld, an ingenious sci-fi movie about a futuristic amusement park where average joes can pay to inhabit robot-infested, pasteboard versions of the wild west, medieval times, and ancient Rome and live out their sleaziest, movie-inspired daydreams. The movie, which featured Yul Brynner as a sinister robot version of his own character from The Magnificent Seven, demonstrated just how far Crichton could go in powering a movie with his own cleverness. It also dropped an early hint that he might not have the most flattering opinion of the mass audience he'd decided to pitch his work at.

Crichton would also direct the medical thriller Coma with Genevieve Bujold in 1978 and, in 1979, adapt an elegantly staged version of his 1975 novel The Great Train Robbery, starring Sean Connery as a Victorian super-thief. In the 1980s, his pace slowed considerably. He Between 1980 and 1989 he published only two novels, Congo and Sphere, that were not well received, as well as a couple of non-fiction books, including a follow-up to Five Patients and an introductory guide to computers. He also wrote and directed a couple more sci-fi movies, Looker (1981) and Runaway (1984), and directed a forgotten-on-impact Burt Reynolds movie, Physical Evidence (1989), which would remain his last credit as a director. (He reportedly came out of retirement to do some uncredited reshoots on John McTiernan's 1999 The Thirteenth Warrior, which was based on his 1976 novel Eaters of the Dead.) But his 1990 novel Jurassic Park relaunched Crichton as an idea man, a master of high concept with a knack for latching onto hot-button issues and molding them into audience-friendly gimmicks ranging from rampaging, resurrected dinosaurs to his illustrating the issue of sexual harassment by having, in the movie made from his novel Disclosure, Demi Moore terrifying Michael Douglas (the real one this time) with her mechanical-career-woman sexual avidity. (To some degree, Crichton never really stopped writing for robots.) Crichton's genius reputation in Hollywood was solidified by his work as creator-writer on the TV series ER, which made George Clooney a star and provided work for every other English-speaking actor within reach of a SAG card, proving to be a lot harder to kill than dinosaurs. Out of deference to the newsmagazine-cover-worthy success of his second act, Hollywood once again fast-tracked everything by Crichton they could get their hands on, including not only his Jurassic Park sequel The Lost World, Timeline and Rising Sun (which enlivened his chilly technocrat image by lending it an arresting undercurrent of deranged, crackpot xenophobia) but earlier, dodgier novels that had been lying dormant for years. (He also produced and co-wrote the 1996 Twister.) His last work to appear in his lifetime was his 2006 novel Next. It generated headlines when it appeared that Crichton had avenged himself on a journalist who had attacked a previous Crichton novel, State of Fear, for its dismissive attitude towards global warming by giving the man's name to a fictional character who was a child molester.

Coming Soon: A Screengrab Salute To Movie Trailers (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 20:00:00 GMT

We were going to continue our Back To School salute with this week’s Top Ten list, but thought we should pause for a moment to pay tribute to Don LaFontaine, the king of movie trailer voiceover talent (who died on September 1) with a list of some of our favorite coming attractions.

This is a strange subject, perhaps, for a Top Ten(-ish) List, since many people regard previews as nothing more than glorified commercials that give away all the good parts, annoying time wasters before the movie you really wanted to see (or, at best, a last minute chance to rush out and get popcorn without missing anything important).

As for me, I sometimes go to movies I’m not even all that excited about just to get myself a good dose of coming attraction action. Trailers are like a perfect little ADD film festival: four or five upcoming releases boiled down to their purest essence in high velocity speedballs of action, music and memorable sound bites designed to goose my anticipation of movies I’m looking forward to or draw my attention to unheralded films I might otherwise have missed.

Most of the time, though, previews allow me to vicariously enjoy all the best moments of flicks like Death Race and Disaster Movie without requiring me to actually sit through them, thus expanding my cinematic horizons while saving wear and tear on both my ass and my wallet.

So here’s a quick Screengrab preview of coming attractions: next week, The Top College Movies of All Time!

And now...on with our feature presentation.

DON LAFONTAINE: THE VOICE

The man...the myth...the trailers. Hard to choose just one LaFontaine original to write about, so this seemed appropriate. But as far as individual coming attraction previews go, there’s no better place to start than with...

The trailer for THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK (1980)

In a previous Screengrab list, I wrote: “After the pure, cinematic orgasm of Star Wars blew my pre-pubescent mind beyond any hope of repair, even The Empire Strikes Back was something of a let-down (although watching the teaser trailer for the sequel during one of the theatrical re-releases of the original may stand as the most exciting two minutes of my entire movie-going life).” Allow me to elaborate, for those who were NOT 12-year-old boys in 1979: I had Star Wars sheets, a Star Wars poster above my bed and roughly 1200 plastic Star Wars figures, vehicles, playsets and little tiny guns in my toy chest. I’d seen Star Wars theatrically at least a dozen times, and I’d already read the screenplay, the novelization AND the Marvel Comics adaptation. I knew every frame of film, line of dialogue and Ben Burtt sound effect by heart. And then, in the Year of Our Lord 1979, they re-released THE BEST FILM EVER once again into theaters...only THIS time with the promise of a trailer at the end for the long and desperately awaited sequel, The Empire Strikes Back. And so I paid my parents’ money yet again, and watched Luke blow up the Death Star yet again, and then...at last...the music surged, a brand NEW logo in that funky Star Wars font drifted into view...and...well, the rest was such an undiluted rush of adrenalized oxytocin bliss I essentially disappeared into a barely cognizant state of pure sensation usually reserved for ketamine addicts and William Hurt’s character in Altered States. I only began to process the experience on the second or third viewing of the trailer (following my 14th or 15th viewings of Star Wars)...but, in a nutshell, seeing Luke, Leia, Han Solo and the rest busting free of scenes I knew like Catholic liturgy to suddenly act out BRAND NEW scenes, in BRAND NEW vests and hairdos was equivalent to waking up and discovering the sky was suddenly green and ice cream was a breakfast food. Reminiscing on the embarrassing geekiness of my pre-pubescent obsession (and, uh, this entire blog entry), I can fully empathize with the new generation of kids who waited up ‘til midnight in full Harry Potter drag to snag their Deathly Hallows hardcovers the second they went on sale...and I even (almost) forgive George Lucas for Jar-Jar Binks and (ugh) Stinky the Hutt and all the future disappointments that eventually followed that one glorious trailer.

The trailers for INDEPENDENCE DAY (1996), TWISTER (1996) & THE PERFECT STORM (2000)

And then, of course après Star Wars, le deluge. It may not be fair to blame George Lucas (and/or Steven Spielberg) for double-handedly ending the glorious era of ‘70s filmmaking, but the Midas-fingered directors certainly helped to usher in the current era of commerce driven “event” movies. But unlike the aforementioned Empire Strikes Back trailer, which enthralled my pre-pubescent soul while promoting an actual movie worth seeing, many of today’s “event” trailers have become stand-alone short subjects far superior to the films they ostensibly advertise. Independence Day may not have been a great movie, but the trailer (with its exploding White House, embattled New York and stirring call to arms by a faux-macho American president) was certainly a grabber (and, in retrospect, an eerie pre-post-9/11 propaganda film). The same CGI highlight-reel approach, featuring at least one big compelling “gotcha!” moment -- like the glimpse of that giant wave in The Perfect Storm preview or the truck (or is it a tractor?) flying right at the audience in the final seconds of the Twister trailer -- has become an art form unto itself in recent years, not unlike a carnival barker spiel far more entertaining than whatever the unwary are likely to find if they actually buy a ticket and step inside the tent.

The trailer for ROBOT MONSTER (1953) and this freaky-ass trailer for VIDEODROME (1983)

But, of course, mainstream blockbusters aren’t the only productions that generate trailers as good or better than the films they promote. With no stars or Burger King tie-in promotions to aid them, B-movies and indies have always lived or died by their posters and trailers. The 1950s was a golden age of schlock movie previews (like this one for Robot Monster), with all the wooden acting and dull exposition stripped down to just the juicy monster money shots. Meanwhile, indies prefer to entice with their critical raves, film fest appearances, and/or (in the case of this Videodrome teaser) a freaky, inexplicable smörgåsbord of sight and sound compelling enough to lure audiences into uncharted waters if only to find out what the hell is going on...even when said imagery bears little relation to actual scenes from the movie.

The trailer for BUBBLE (2005)

If you were a big-name director who’d just made a low-budget film with no stars in a town most people couldn’t locate on a map, how would you sell it? If you’re Steven Soderbergh, you’d break pretty much every rule of trailer-making. This brilliant spot for Bubble contains exactly none of the following: voiceover, shots of the actors, plot summary, or critical or festival notices. Heck, there’s barely even a human presence at all, aside from the “Another Steven Soderbergh Experience” credit at the very end. Instead, Soderbergh gives us a montage taken from the inside of a doll factory (the film’s primary setting), with isolated doll parts progressively taking the final shape of the dolls. All this set to a jaunty yet creepy orchestral piece (anybody know where it’s from?), giving the proceedings an eerie feel. In the context of the story, the montage has an air of hopelessness -- are we merely dolls slapped together by an uncaring hand? -- but taken on its own merits, it’s a brilliant bit of salesmanship, a distinctive trailer for a movie that otherwise might fall quickly under the radar.

The trailer, website, etc. for THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT (1999)

It figures that The Blair Witch Project would have made good use of the fleeting-glimpse concept that has been at the heart of so many great trailers; after all, it was at the heart of the movie, too. The trailer's real innovation was to combine a tried-and-true gimmick that linked it to such films as Psycho, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and even Fargo -- the deliberate confusion as to whether this was a "true" story and what was then still a new idea, the use of a promotional web site -- and really work that sucker in a way that no one ever had before. By using the trailer to whet the viewer's curiosity and then flashing the site's URL with its implicit promise to provide more information at the click of a mouse, Blair Witch really fuzzed the line between hype and hoax, and in the process served up an all-encompassing promotional campaign that may have been more fun than the movie itself.

The trailer for THE BIRDS (1963)

This sinister mini-movie – a twisted take on the educational short film – may be the most clever theatrical trailer ever produced. Alfred's macabre sense of humor is on full display here, and he draws out the gag just a little too long, making the audience comfortable before -- gaa! scary birds! The Birds never explains why all the world's winged creatures suddenly revolt, which only adds to the horror. This trailer's answer? They were just tired of being made into chicken dinners and fancy hats.

Click Here for Part 2!

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Paul Clark, Phil Nugent, Gwynne Watkins

DVD Digest for May 6, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 06 May 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week: One of the most acclaimed films of 2007 arrives to do battle with some of the most reviled releases so far in 2008. Who will prevail? Read on…

DVD of the Week: No one does musical biography like Todd Haynes. This should have been clear from his previous films Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story and Velvet Goldmine, and his latest film, I’m Not There, lays any remaining doubts to rest. But then, when one is making a movie about Bob Dylan, how could it possibly fit into a neat little package? The Weinstein Company’s two-disc DVD of the film contains a wide variety of features, including a commentary track with Haynes, two deleted scenes, some audition tapes, a handful of documentaries, and a tribute to Heath Ledger. But most of all, there’s the film itself- I’m Not There is sometimes wondrous, sometimes frustrating, but always worthy of its subject, and this DVD should find a place in the collections of cinephiles and Dylan fans alike.

Alas, the other new arrivals on DVD aren’t nearly that noteworthy, sometimes aggressively counteracting the awesomeness of I’m Not There with their wholesale suckitude. More typical of this week’s crop is the universally detested The Hottie and the Nottie (Genius Products- how’s that for irony?), the latest attempt by its star- who I refuse to name here- to achieve total media domination. Also this week: Ice Cube and Tracy Jordan Morgan in First Sunday (Sony, also Blu-Ray); Hilary Swank in P.S. I Love You (Warner, also Blu-Ray); the long-awaited Eva Longoria Parker vehicle Over Her Dead Body (New Line); and 2006 TIFF Audience Award Winner Bella (Lions Gate). Also, this week brings the release of the heartwarming family-themed vagina dentata comedy Teeth, as well as Sony’s first step into the Bollywood market, Saawariya (also Blu-Ray). But while a few of these are worth seeing, I’d have to say this was probably the easiest week to pick a DVD of the Week in quite a while.

A few new editions of some already-on-DVD titles will be hitting stores this week as well, including: The Bridges of Madison County Deluxe Edition (Warner); Serial Mom Collector’s Edition (Focus); and a two-disc special edition of Twister (Warner, also Blu-Ray). Finally, this week’s sole Blu-Ray only release is the 2004 remake of Shall We Dance?

Sorry folks, that’s all I’ve got. Next week promises to bring more DVD goodness. Not a moment too soon, I say.