The Screengrab : untraceable

In Other Blogs: 2008 Halftime Reports

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Your favorite Screengrab writers have chimed in with their favorites (or least favorites, as the case may be) from the first half of 2008, but it may not completely shock you to learn that we are not the only bloggers to do so. Over at Cinematical, Jeffrey M. Anderson explains why. “Here's one of my dirty little secrets: I love lists and I keep track of my year's ten best movies all year long. Most other critics hastily assemble their lists at the last second, which is partly why so many December movies dominate; critics can't remember what they've seen earlier in the year. My list shows that 2008 has had a pretty poor first half, but I do have some contenders for listhood. Two movies are currently competing for the top spot, though I need to see them both again to be sure. Hou Hsiao-hsien's Flight of the Red Balloon (6 screens) is one; it has a lovely, laid-back, observant quality and feels less severe than some of Hou's other recent films. But I haven't yet decided if the film is a comedy or a tragedy.”

Also at Cinematical, Scott Weinberg presents a month-by-month breakdown of his year at the movies. As always, January is the cruelest month. “Not many choices, really, but I'm an enthusiastic supporter of both Cloverfield and Teeth. I also enjoyed Cassandra's Dream a bit more than most folks seem to, but it's hardly among Woody Allen's best movies. Beyond that, January was as lame as ever. (Thanks for nothing: One Missed Call, First Sunday, Mad Money, Rambo, Untraceable, and the execrable Meet the Spartans.)”

A site that’s new to us, Gone Elsewhere, weighs in with an overlooked choice. “The best new release I’ve seen thus far is Jeff Nichols’ Shotgun Stories. The film stars Michael Shannon as the oldest of three adult brothers whose father abandoned them years ago and began a new family, with four sons. The two sets of half-brothers grew up as bitter rivals, and emotions come to a head after the father dies. Shannon may be the most creepily intense actor in movies today; see William Friedkin’s Bug if you don’t believe me. Among the more interesting insights the film has to offer is that most of the characters seem to know full well that their actions are irrational and unproductive, but their hatred is self-sustaining and out of their control.”

At Scanners, Jim Emerson writes about the ever-changing crimson shades of cinematic blood. “Before the late '70s, blood was generally (and, remember, these are generalizations -- there are certainly exceptions) bright red and opaque, like nail polish or latex paint. It was often compared to ketchup, which in many cases it was. Since then, our taste for blood runs darker, anywhere from ruby red to almost black…My favorite movie-blood story belongs to Martin Scorsese. The way he tells it, the MPAA freaked when they saw the bloodbath in Taxi Driver (1976) and was ready to slap it with an X rating for violence. They suggested he tone it down -- as in, tone down the red -- in order to get an R. So, Scorsese put the scene through some kind of chem wash or something that made the blood more brownish. In his view, it made the scene more sickening and disturbing, but he got his R rating.”

And finally, our List-o-Mania selection this week comes from Spoutblog, which brings us 5 Actors Who Shouldn’t Be Famous. I’m not entirely certain Josh Hartnett even qualifies as famous, but the most controversial choice is Jon Voight. Granted, the included clip of Karate Dog is a powerful indictment.

Related:
2008: Second Quarter Wrap-Up
Half Measures: Leonard Pierce's Favorites of the First Half of '08
Half Measures: Paul Clark's Favorites of the First Half of '08

DVD Digest for May 13, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 13 May 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week: two new Criterion DVDs, the comeback effort of a master filmmaker, and the Chairman of the Board all compete for your DVD dollar. Who will win? Why, DVD buyers, of course!

DVD of the Week: For sheer comprehensiveness, nothing can touch Warner’s 22-film, 5-box-set tribute to the one and only Frank Sinatra. For all of Sinatra’s success as a recording artist, he was also a talented actor, given the right role, and this week sees the release of a number of his finest films. Among these are his Oscar-nominated performance in Otto Preminger’s The Man With the Golden Arm and Vincente Minnelli’s Some Came Running, both of which are included in the Frank Sinatra: The Golden Years box set. But if you prefer Sinatra the fresh-faced young crooner, check out Frank Sinatra: The Early Years, which includes such early-career titles as Step Lively, It Happened in Brooklyn, and The Kissing Bandit. Or see Sinatra match his pipes with Gene Kelly’s nimble feet in The Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly Collection, comprised of the classic musicals On the Town, Take Me Out to the Ballgame, and Anchors Aweigh. And if special features are your thing, there’s always The Rat Pack Ultimate Collector’s Edition, which finds the Chairman at his least inspired vehicles but leaves plenty of room for gawking at swingin’ celebrities of yore. Heck, Warner is even releasing 1993’s miniseries Sinatra on DVD this week, in case you want your Sinatra without all that Sinatra. All that’s missing is Sinatra’s two most acclaimed films, The Manchurian Candidate and From Here to Eternity. But I’m guessing you already own those, right?

As previously mentioned, this week also brings the release of two brand-spankin' new Criterions, Louis Malle’s The Lovers and The Fire Within. Also of note in classics on DVD: The Big Trail: Fox Grandeur Special Edition; the Godard double-feature of La Chinoise (Kino) and Le Gai Savoir; a new edition of Anthony Mann’s Man of the West (Fox); Saturday Night Live: The Complete Third Season (Universal); and the Fox Western Classics Collection, which includes the new-to-DVD titles Garden of Evil, Rawhide, and The Gunfighter. And in shameless cash-in news, this week brings new DVDs of all three Indiana Jones films, with a few added extra features so that buyers won’t feel completely ripped off.

In more recent films, today brings the release of Francis Ford Coppola’s Youth Without Youth (Sony, also Blu-Ray), his first official directorial effort in a decade. The film was generally regarded as a critical and popular disaster, but I found it fascinating- flawed to be sure, but intriguingly so- and I believe it’ll finally be appreciated for what it is on DVD. Also this week: Diane Lane in Untraceable (Sony, also Blu-Ray); Diane Keaton, Katie Holmes and Queen Latifah in Mad Money (Anchor Bay); and the French horror film Frontier(s) (Lionsgate). The other major new release this week is the DVD debut of The Animation Show 3 (Paramount), last year’s touring program of animated shorts presented by Mike Judge and Don Hertzfeldt. The DVD includes Hertzfeldt’s latest masterpiece Everything will be OK, as well as sixteen other shorts, some of which have been added especially for the DVD release.

This week’s Blu-Ray only releases are: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (Fox); Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (Fox); Mrs. Doubtfire (Fox); and just in time for this weekend’s new blockbuster, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Which brings me to this week’s Huddleston corner, in which we sigh over the lonely release of Warner’s One Missed Call on HD-DVD. I mean really, guys- you’re just kidding around now, right?

Caught in the Net: The Pitiful History of the Internet Thriller

Phil Nugent — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Steve Johnson contemplates the ongoing disappointment that is the Internet thriller. It's not as if Hollywood has ever trusted computers any farther than they could throw them. HAL 9000 tried to hog the spacecraft for himself in 2001: Space Odyssey; in Colossus: The Forbin Project, an electronic super-brain invented by the guy who plays Victor on my grandmother's beloved The Young and the Restless, was designed to serve as a perfect missile defense system but immediately started acting too big for its business; its descendant, the computer in WarGames almost started World War III in an excess of playfulness; and don't get me started on that weekend at Westworld. (Hell, I had more fun at Euro Disney.) But for the better part of a decade now, Hollywood has been specifically trying to tap into the supposedly vast, ominous potential of the Internet and hook into some of those cool cyberpunk dollars, with decidedly mixed results. "Like a virus shrugging off an outdated antibiotic," Johnson writes, "the Net has proved resistant to such attempts. You've seen evidence of the struggle. Over and over, Hollywood has shown us things happening on computer monitors in improbably large and cartoonish letters, as if all Web sites dealing with national security are designed by the folks at Webkinz. 'To eliminate Baltimore, click here,' that kind of thing."

You can see the thinking. Someone with mad hacking skills could spy on you, erase your identity, fill your Netflix queue with Ed Burns movies, make your life hell itself. That line of thinking helped produce such early cyberduds as The Net, in which hackers laid siege to Sandra Bullock while the audience just sat there wondering why she was so hard up for company that she was hanging out with Dennis Miller. Then there was Hackers starring Jonny Lee Miller and an alarmingly hot young Angelina Jolie (sporting an English accent and cobalt-blue nail polish) as the leaders of a team of master web surfers who run afoul of an evil computer genius called The Plague (Fisher Stevens), who single-handedly caused the cancellation of our plans to compose a list of the Ten Lamest Movie Super-Villains because the computer that writes our Top Ten lists kept insisting on assigning his name to all ten slots. (The most convincing hackers in movies are the team of government-run nerds in Enemy of the State--Jack Black is among them--who act like big swinging dicks when they're alone in a dark room with their computer screens in front of them and who fold faster than Superman on laundry day when pulled into the light and asked to account for what they've been doing--just following orders, natch.) More recently, as in Untraceable, movies have tried to go the Lee Siegel route of suggesting that there's just something about the 'Net that short circuits the frontal lobes and renders people incapable of fighting off their baser instincts. Here, the villain is a serial killer who yokes his victims to a webcam and urges people to check in at his site, "killwithme," having made it clear that "the more that watch, the faster he dies." Naturally, people watch in droves. (The set-up faintly recalls The Card Player, a 2002 Dario Argento horror in which the serial killer bets the victim's life on a video card game with the cops; if the killer wins, he executes his latest captive in front of a webcam while the police watch on helplessly.)

There are real anxieties and fears involving the Internet just waiting to be tapped for the movies, but there's a built-in problem identified by the writer Scott Rosenberg: "Movies are overwhelmingly a visual medium, and dealing with the Internet is the parallel problem to dealing with writing. In the old days it was a typewriter. There aren't a lot of great movies about someone sitting at a typewriter." The great Internet paranoia fantasy of the movies may still be the original The Matrix, which shot right past the realistic image of someone tapping away at a keyboard and conjured up an impressively imagined world of thrilling liberation and terrifying imprisonment. It understood that what's exciting, and scary, about the Internet is the sense it can give you that you're exploring strange new worlds at the same time that you are, in actual fact, sitting on your ass typing. The Matrix somehow found a way to show what that fantasy neverland located somewhere between the keyboard and the brain might look like, while other attempts to visualize the experience, such as Johnny Mnemonic, became too literal-minded and hit the earth with a splat. And having gotten it right that first time, the Wachowskis then spent a lot of time and money proving just how hard it is to do. As a wise man once said: "Whoa."