The Screengrab : under the volcano

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 23:30:00 GMT

THE BROTHER FROM ANOTHER PLANET (1984)

Like many new arrivals to New York City, Joe Morton’s character in John Sayles’ indie comedy is hoping for a fresh start in the strange, scary but not entirely hostile metropolis. The big difference, of course, is that Morton’s innocent mute is a three-toed extraterrestrial, an escaped slave from "another planet" being pursued by two vaguely feline (and white) Men In Black (who, ironically, are far more concerned with the number of toes on their quarry’s feet than the color of his skin). Sayles’ gentle parable of multicultural integration features a magic trick (in the scene above) that hinges on a still-timely sociological sight gag about urban race relations. Yet it’s interesting to ponder what the eponymous Brother would think if he made a return visit to our planet today: with the Disney-fication of Times Square and the ongoing gentrification of Harlem (not to mention the upcoming Obama inauguration), even the human characters from Sayles’ early ‘80s world might feel a bit disoriented in the strange land of 2008 Manhattan.

UNDER THE VOLCANO (1984)

Malcolm Lowry's novel of self-destruction is a force of nature. John Huston's film of the novel is, sadly, not. Sure, it contains moments of beauty and tragedy, but when things go wrong, they go wrong with a dogged determinism. Albert Finney plays the drunken Geoffrey Firmin, ex-consul of the British Empire in Mexico, with a grace rarely afforded cinematic alcoholics. The other actors are, sadly, not up to his standards (Huston's adaptation of Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood has the same problem, as leading man Brad Dourif's talents far outshine all other actors onscreen, save Harry Dean Stanton.) As Firmin stumbles further out of the relative safety of his regular haunts, Mexico becomes less like an exotic extension of his home and more like a seedy extension of the jungle, where Firmin's haughty imperialism will lead to a swift downfall.

BORAT: CULTURAL LEARNINGS OF AMERICA FOR MAKE BENEFIT GLORIOUS NATION OF KAZAKHSTAN (2006)

Sacha Baron Cohen’s most notorious creation, Borat Sagdiyev, isn’t really a stranger at all. He’s more of an infiltrator. And his America isn’t a strange land, either; in fact, it’s one the British comedian smugly believes he knows like the back of his hand. Whether you loved or hated Borat is largely dependent on how much tolerance you have for Baron Cohen’s assumption that he can easily get to the ugly creamed filling under the sweet exterior of America just by biting it in the right spot; there are those who find his style of humor hysterical and telling, and others who find it manipulative and condescending. But no one can doubt, after seeing it in action, how skillfully he wields it, not to inform, but to eviscerate. Borat is a butcher, not a surgeon, and we’re his meat. His Kazakhstan is funny because he correctly assumes that it’s distant enough from our daily lives that we’ll laugh at his fantastic portrayal of it; and his America is funny because he correctly assumes that we’re so far inside of it that we won’t even realize how he’s making it look until it’s far too late. The archetype of the man trapped in a world not of his own making usually derives its humor from the fact that he’s a holy fool, innocently reflecting our reality in his ignorance; Borat shows how dangerous it can be when the holy fool is really an unholy genius who knows exactly how to take advantage of the fact that people are likely to do anything if they think they’re in the presence of someone who doesn’t know any better.

THE NEW WORLD (2005)

It’s no surprise that Terrence Malick’s name would show up on a list of great movies about culture clashes. Since the beginning of his career, he’s specialized in showing us the beauty and violence that grow out of peoples’ encounters with the strange, whether that strangeness is expressed as the dreary middle of the U.S., the uncontrollable vastness of the new west, or the tempting primitivism of the South Pacific in wartime. What’s shocking about The New World is that he manages to pull the same trick twice in one movie – and both times with spectacular results. Filming in modern-day Virginia, his conjuration of the lands that greeted John Smith’s men is so perfect, so unspoiled, so bountiful that it’s almost terrifying. His men were promised heaven, and to see it in this life fills them with an almost religious dread. But this quickly fades: if heaven is on earth, what need have they for law? The settlement soon devolves into a stunted, filthy savagery that stands in marked contrast to the gorgeous plenty of the New World. It’s all done with some of the most breathtaking camera work ever seen, but then the movie takes an astonishing shift – one that, in the hands of a lesser filmmaker, would have shattered the tone of the film. We see England through Pocahontas’ eyes as no less strange and unreal a place than was America in John Smith’s eyes, a place of man without nature, of infinite variations of gray and wet, and it has no less devastating an effect on her life.

MOSCOW ON THE HUDSON (1984)

Made at pretty much the exact last moment that Robin Williams was capable of doing anything likable, Paul Mazursky’s charming Moscow on the Hudson now seems like a relic of an ancient age, but it should be remembered that it came out at a time when the only cinematic method of interacting with the Soviet Union was with hails of gunfire and exploding rocket-bombs. Mazursky’s story of a simple and kind Russian musician who decides to defect during a state visit to New York had its bittersweet moments, as Williams’ Vladimir Ivanoff discovered that life in America is not all smiles and sunshine even for those who have the rare opportunity to have sex with Maria Conchita Alonso. But it also managed to convey the belief, greatly underrepresented in theaters at the time, that Russians were actual human beings who might not deserve to be shot in the face; and it also suggested the possibility – which, as it happened, turned out to be disturbingly correct – that the best way to get the Commies on our good side was just to let them take a gander at a well-cut pair of blue jeans and a fully stocked shelf at the supermarket. Many of Moscow on the Hudson’s land-of-plenty/land-of-want scenes are cliché by this point, but at the time, they seemed fresh and earnest enough to work.

WOODY ALLEN IN GENERAL: PARTICULARLY SLEEPER (1973), BANANAS (1971) & ZELIG (1983)

I used to think of Woody Allen as an explorer of the well-known. He endlessly treads around his own expensively analyzed psyche to tell new truths about self-absorbed Manhattan professionals. Strange then, to realize that much of his early work deals with outsiders who are unable to cope with their surroundings, then suddenly find themselves in even more alien circumstances. In Sleeper he is cryogenically frozen, then thawed in a strangely familiar future where pot-smoking has been replaced by fondling an orb and sex by the Orgasmatron machine. In Bananas he's a hapless doofus who has no particular luck with the ladies. That is, not until he finds himself at the center of guerilla action in a small Central American country in a permanent state of coups and revolutions: an innocent abroad if there ever was one. Then there's Broadway Danny Rose, where Allen stars as a man who lives his entire life somewhat out of his element. (His buddies at the Carnegie Deli suggest a Danny Rose sandwich would be a bagel with Marinara sauce). In Annie Hall he is Alvy Singer, who is perpetually on guard against his familiar New York surroundings turning strange on him. Whenever he ventures outside of New York his suspicion that he is an alien in his own country are confirmed. He cannot function in L.A. and when he visits Annie's family in Wisconsin, he finds himself transformed to a Hassidic Jew. Finally, of course, there is Zelig, the story of the eternal chameleon, never at home, and always adaptable.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Hayden Childs, Leonard Pierce, Sarah Clyne Sundberg

Screengrab Presents: Cinema’s Greatest Comebacks (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 22:30:00 GMT

JACKIE EARLE HALEY in LITTLE CHILDREN (2006)

Some people on this list needed comebacks after destroying their own careers through bad choices or behavior, but the triumphant, Oscar-nominated comeback of Jackie Earle Haley in 2006’s Little Children was extra sweet because it was such a Cinderella story...and, as they say, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. After memorable breakthrough roles as the punk turned Little League champ in The Bad News Bears (1976) and the Cutter with the heart of gold in Breaking Away (1979), Haley suffered the child star curse and saw his career nosedive into obscurity during the ‘80s, ‘90s and most of the oughts. According to Haley (as quoted on the Internet Movie Database), “I'd always avoided stuff like 'Where are they now?' or 'Whatever happened to?'...You tell me, have you ever seen a 'Whatever happened to' where they seemed anything but pathetic? I could do that or just disappear.” And so, like so many creative types before him who’d ridden their dreams as far as they could, Haley rejoined the everyday rat race where most of us live, delivering pizzas, refinishing furniture, working variously as a security guard, a limousine driver and such, until A-list director Steven Zaillian, in the kind of wet dream moment that (usually) never comes true, just happened to remember the actor’s earlier work and cast him, more or less out of the blue, in the 2006 Sean Penn adaptation of All The President’s Men, which in turn led to Haley’s true comeback via his harrowing, heartbreaking performance later that year as the neighborhood pedophile in Todd Field’s Little Children...which in turn led to a part in Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island and the plum role of Rorschach in Zack Snyder’s 800-pound gorilla, Watchmen. So who knows? Maybe there’s hope.

STERLING HAYDEN in DR. STRANGELOVE: OR, HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1964)

Tall, striking Sterling Hayden developed into one of the biggest stars of the 1950s thanks to his unique looks, cruelly laconic performances and ability to bring mysterious depths to even noir lowlifes. But his heart had never really been in acting, which he found to be a frivolous and often unengaging profession. He had an extremely standoffish relationship with capitalism, and his ability to land roles in high-grossing films was, to him, merely a means to an end: i.e., his habit of sailing, which got him away from an American consumer culture he often reviled. In 1958, he was involved in a nasty divorce and decided to leave it all behind once and for all; defying a court order, he took his kids, packed up a sailboat for the long haul, and headed off to Tahiti, where he would remain for almost six years. Aside from one brief television appearance, the only thing he did during that time that had anything to do with the entertainment industry was to write a hugely entertaining and profoundly thoughtful autobiography called Wanderer, in which he essentially repudiated his life as a movie star. Still, a nautical life is expensive, and in the 1960s, he enjoyed a protracted comeback which began in the best possible way: with an unforgettably loony performance as the unhinged General Jack D. Ripper in Stanley Kubrick’s pitch-black Cold War comedy Dr. Strangelove.

JOHN HUSTON, UNDER THE VOLCANO (1984)

John Huston couldn’t possibly have had a more charmed career. He was practically born into Hollywood royalty; his father, Walter Huston, preceded him in a career as a double-threat director and actor. John himself added more to the package: he was a terrific writer, an intellectual, a keen spotter of talent. His very first movie as a director, The Maltese Falcon, is one of the greatest Hollywood movies of all time, and he followed it up with classics like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Key Largo, The Asphalt Jungle, The African Queen and Beat the Devil. Things started to go awry for him in the mid-‘50s, though, after an ambitious but failed adaptation of Moby Dick, and by the 1960s, he was directing second-tier work like The List of Adrian Messenger and the disastrous Reflections in a Golden Eye. In the 1970s, he launched some work that contained sparks of genius, but nothing that coalesced into coherence: there were moments of greatness in The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, The Man Who Would Be King, and Wise Blood, but all of them fell apart under the weight of their flaws. By the 1980s, he was producing pure schlock like Victory and Annie. Forty years as a director is far longer than anyone has a right to be successful, and people were willing to forgive his sad descent because of the greatness of his earlier work: but Huston, a career rebel, wasn’t about to go out without a fight. In 1984, he directed a stunning Albert Finney in an imperfect but still highly impressive adaptation of the great Malcolm Lowry novel Under the Volcano; it signaled a genuine late-career comeback for Huston, who went on to direct the enjoyable Prizzi’s Honor and the astonishing movie version of James Joyce’s The Dead before finally dying himself in 1987.

TERENCE STAMP in THE LIMEY (1999)

While most of the people on this list have rejuvenated their careers once or twice, the outstanding British actor Terence Stamp has had more comebacks than most people have had hot dinners. He rose to fame alongside his old flatmate Michael Caine and went on to become one of the most celebrated actors of the 1960s, as well as a sort of living symbol of the Carnaby Street crowd of London’s swinging sixties; it was at the end of that decade, after a highly public breakup with girlfriend Jeannie Shrimpton, that he had his first downturn, decamping for an Indian ashram and taking much of the 1970s off. He followed that with his first major comeback, in the juicily hammy role of General Zod in Superman II, and enjoyed a brief resurgence in the ‘80s that faded just as quickly in the waning part of that decade. 1994 found him mounting another big comeback through the simple act of donning a dress in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, but he floundered a bit after that, until 1999, when screenwriter Lem Dobbs and director Steven Soderbergh came through with a role crafted especially for him. Revisiting (and updating) Stamp’s nasty, edgy, working-class persona, and even going so far as to use recycled footage from one of his old films as “archival footage” of the character he was playing, the two created, in the vengeful ex-hoodlum Wilson, the role he’d been working towards his whole career. Stamp’s performance was universally celebrated and allowed him to stage yet another comeback – which has now faded enough that he’s about due for one more.

BEN AFFLECK, GONE BABY GONE (2007)

Ben Affleck never deserved to be a walking punchline for the following reasons: 1) Good Will Hunting was weak and should never had made anyone famous; 2) the kind of callow, narcissistic performances Affleck gave in movies like Paycheck perfectly reflected and commented upon the material 3) "Bennifer" doesn't mean anything. Nonetheless, having become an all-too-easy punchline, Affleck retreated behind the camera and demonstrated a knack for drawing perfectly judged performances and local color. If Gone Baby Gone seems to be under the delusion that the camera exists solely to record said elements, Affleck has a scarily grounded feel for his Boston hometown. The best decision he ever made was figuring out that the SAG-mandated extras should remain out of sight at all times and he should instead train his camera upon incidental alcoholics and degenrates without flinching. This remains the most pungent film of 2007.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Vadim Rizov

Cinema’s Greatest Comebacks & Comebacks We’d Like To See (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 10:30:00 GMT

JACKIE EARLE HALEY in LITTLE CHILDREN (2006)

Some people on this list needed comebacks after destroying their own careers through bad choices or behavior, but the triumphant, Oscar-nominated comeback of Jackie Earle Haley in 2006’s Little Children was extra sweet because it was such a Cinderella story...and, as they say, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. After memorable breakthrough roles as the punk turned Little League champ in The Bad News Bears (1976) and the Cutter with the heart of gold in Breaking Away (1979), Haley suffered the child star curse and saw his career nosedive into obscurity during the ‘80s, ‘90s and most of the oughts. According to Haley (as quoted on the Internet Movie Database), “I'd always avoided stuff like 'Where are they now?' or 'Whatever happened to?'...You tell me, have you ever seen a 'Whatever happened to' where they seemed anything but pathetic? I could do that or just disappear.” And so, like so many creative types before him who’d ridden their dreams as far as they could, Haley rejoined the everyday rat race where most of us live, delivering pizzas, refinishing furniture, working variously as a security guard, a limousine driver and such, until (in the kind of wet dream moment that never really happens) A-list director Steven Zaillian just happened to remember the actor’s earlier work and cast him, more or less out of the blue, in the 2006 Sean Penn adaptation of All The President’s Men, which in turn led to Haley’s true comeback via his harrowing, heartbreaking performance later that year as the neighborhood pedophile in Todd Field’s Little Children...which in turn led to a part in Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island and, of course, the plum role of Rorschach in Zack Snyder’s 800-pound gorilla, Watchmen. So who knows? Maybe there’s hope.

STERLING HAYDEN in DR. STRANGELOVE: OR, HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1964)

Tall, striking Sterling Hayden developed into one of the biggest stars of the 1950s thanks to his unique looks, cruelly laconic performances and ability to bring mysterious depths to even noir lowlifes. But his heart had never really been in acting, which he found to be a frivolous and often unengaging profession. He had an extremely standoffish relationship with capitalism, and his ability to land roles in high-grossing films was, to him, merely a means to an end: i.e., his habit of sailing, which got him away from an American consumer culture he often reviled. In 1958, he was involved in a nasty divorce and decided to leave it all behind once and for all; defying a court order, he took his kids, packed up a sailboat for the long haul, and headed off to Tahiti, where he would remain for almost six years. Aside from one brief television appearance, the only thing he did during that time that had anything to do with the entertainment industry was to write a hugely entertaining and profoundly thoughtful autobiography called Wanderer, in which he essentially repudiated his life as a movie star. Still, a nautical life is expensive, and in the 1960s, he enjoyed a protracted comeback which began in the best possible way: with an unforgettably loony performance as the unhinged General Jack D. Ripper in Stanley Kubrick’s pitch-black Cold War comedy Dr. Strangelove.

JOHN HUSTON, UNDER THE VOLCANO (1984)

John Huston couldn’t possibly have had a more charmed career. He was practically born into Hollywood royalty; his father, Walter Huston, preceded him in a career as a double-threat director and actor. John himself added more to the package: he was a terrific writer, an intellectual, a keen spotter of talent. His very first movie as a director, The Maltese Falcon, is one of the greatest Hollywood movies of all time, and he followed it up with classics like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Key Largo, The Asphalt Jungle, The African Queen and Beat the Devil. Things started to go awry for him in the mid-‘50s, though, after an ambitious but failed adaptation of Moby Dick, and by the 1960s, he was directing second-tier work like The List of Adrian Messenger and the disastrous Reflections in a Golden Eye. In the 1970s, he launched some work that contained sparks of genius, but nothing that coalesced into coherence: there were moments of greatness in The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, The Man Who Would Be King, and Wise Blood, but all of them fell apart under the weight of their flaws. By the 1980s, Huston was producing pure schlock like Victory and Annie. Forty years as a director is far longer than anyone has a right to be successful, and people were willing to forgive his sad descent because of the greatness of his earlier work: but Huston, a career rebel, wasn’t about to go out without a fight. In 1984, he directed a stunning Albert Finney in an imperfect but still highly impressive adaptation of the great Malcolm Lowry novel Under the Volcano; it signaled a genuine late-career comeback for Huston, who went on to direct the enjoyable Prizzi’s Honor and the astonishing movie version of James Joyce’s The Dead before finally dying in 1987.

TERENCE STAMP in THE LIMEY (1999)

While most of the people on this list have rejuvenated their careers once or twice, the outstanding British actor Terence Stamp has had more comebacks than most people have had hot dinners. He rose to fame alongside his old flatmate Michael Caine and went on to become one of the most celebrated actors of the 1960s, as well as a sort of living symbol of the Carnaby Street crowd of London’s swinging sixties; it was at the end of that decade, after a highly public breakup with girlfriend Jeannie Shrimpton, that he had his first downturn, decamping for an Indian ashram and taking much of the 1970s off. He followed that with his first major comeback, in the juicily hammy role of General Zod in Superman II, and enjoyed a brief resurgence in the ‘80s that faded just as quickly in the waning part of that decade. 1994 found him mounting another big comeback through the simple act of donning a dress in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, but he floundered a bit after that, until 1999, when screenwriter Lem Dobbs and director Steven Soderbergh came through with a role crafted especially for him. Revisiting (and updating) Stamp’s nasty, edgy, working-class persona, and even going so far as to use recycled footage from one of his old films as “archival footage” of the character he was playing, the two created, in the vengeful ex-hoodlum Wilson, the role he’d been working towards his whole career. Stamp’s performance was universally celebrated and allowed him to stage yet another comeback – which has now faded enough that he’s about due for one more.

BEN AFFLECK, GONE BABY GONE (2007)

Ben Affleck never deserved to be a walking punchline for the following reasons: 1) Good Will Hunting was weak and should never had made anyone famous; 2) the kind of callow, narcissistic performances Affleck gave in movies like Paycheck perfectly reflected and commented upon the material 3) "Bennifer" doesn't mean anything. Nonetheless, having become an all-too-easy punchline, Affleck retreated behind the camera and demonstrated a knack for drawing perfectly judged performances and local color. If Gone Baby Gone seems to be under the delusion that the camera exists solely to record said elements, Affleck has a scarily grounded feel for his Boston hometown. The best decision he ever made was figuring out that the SAG-mandated extras should remain out of sight at all times and train his camera upon incidental alcoholics and degenrates without flinching. This remains the most pungent film of 2007.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Five, Six & Seven

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Vadim Rizov