The Screengrab : val kilmer

Morning Deal Report: Katie Holmes in the Dark

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 07 May 2009 14:30:00 GMT

Guillermo del Toro and Matthew Robbins have scripted the thriller Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, a thriller that will star Katie Holmes. The movie “is based on a 1973 ABC telepic about a young girl who moves in with her father and his girlfriend and discovers they are sharing the house with devilish creatures,” Variety reports.

The Irishmen are coming! “Ray Stevenson, Christopher Walken and Val Kilmer will play the leads in The Irishman, a crime story that Jonathan Hensleigh will direct,” per The Hollywood Reporter. Stevenson will play Danny Greene, “a violent Irish-American gangster who competed with the Italian mob in 1970s Cleveland and ended up provoking a countrywide turf war that crippled the mafia. Walken will play the loan shark and nightclub owner Shondor Birns, and Kilmer is a Cleveland police detective who befriends Greene.”

Robert De Niro and Edward Norton will reunite for the psychological thriller Stone. “Story centers on a correctional officer (De Niro) who is seduced by the wife of a convicted arsonist (Norton) up for parole.” De Niro and Norton previously appeared together in The Score.

Screengrab's Favorite Movies About Music: Fiction Edition (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Last week, as part of our ongoing coverage of the South-By-Southwest Film, Music & Interactive Festival, we decided to get our collective groove on with a list of our favorite movies about real-live musicians.

But who says musicians have to be real to be memorable? Sure, Mitch & Mickey may be fictional characters portrayed by Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara in Christopher Guest’s faux-folkumentary, A Mighty Wind...yet despite the fact the duo never really existed, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house when my lovely Polish bride and I danced at our wedding reception to that non-existent classic hit of sweet, sweet romance, “A Kiss At The End Of The Rainbow." And, sure, the real Sid Vicious was nice and all...but I have equally fond memories of Gary Oldman’s fictional version in Alex Cox’s Sid & Nancy.

To blur the lines of fiction and reality even further, this week’s list also includes movies about make-believe people affected by real musicians and real musicians transforming themselves into make-believe people as your pals at the Screengrab salute OUR FAVORITE MOVIES ABOUT MUSIC: FICTION EDITION!

THIS IS SPINAL TAP (1984)

Yes, we all know it's hilarious. But This Is Spinal Tap is a classic for more reasons than simple hilarity. This was one of the first major films to be classified a "mockumentary", and in order for the style to work at all, director Rob Reiner and stars Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer had to get all the details down cold. This meant concocting an elaborate backstory involving multiple group names, format changes, and a parade of dozens of drummers who met their respective ends under bizarre circumstances. But beyond the more obvious references, Spinal Tap had to walk, talk, and play like a real aging rock band, from the principles writing and performing their own songs before actual crowds to the shorthand that the band members have with each other, as when Nigel (Guest) calls out "GSM" during rehearsal to signal that he wants to practice the song "Gimme Some Money." The gambit worked -- numerous moviegoers at the time were convinced that Spinal Tap was a real touring act, and the movie quickly became a favorite of legitimate rock acts, who identified with such scenes as the group getting lost on their way to the stage. Soon enough, life imitated farce, and Guest, McKean, and Shearer began touring as Spinal Tap, even releasing a second album in 1992 entitled Break Like the Wind. Even today, Spinal Tap endures, both in its cinematic form and its real-life incarnation, with a tour coming later this spring.

24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE (2002)

Steve Coogan has a motor-mouthed smart-guy comedian's dream role as Tony Wilson, TV reporter, pop theorist, and the man behind Factory Records, which brought the sound of Manchester to a postpunk world. Directed by Michael Winterbottom, the movie, which also provides plum roles for Shirley Henderson (as Wilson's first wife), Paddy Considine (as his sidekick Rob Gretton), Andy Serkis (as the deranged genius producer Martin Hannett), and Sean Hayes (as Ian Curtis), covers the first public performance by the Sex Pistols, the rise and end of Joy Division, the band's resurrection as New Order, the slaphappy career of the Happy Mondays and the coming of rave culture, and Factory's death throes, with Coogan's Wilson walking through it explaining himself and the culture he's part of, always talking a mile a minute. Coming from the cerebral Winterbottom, the movie itself could be called a sustained work of rock criticism, except that rock crit hasn't been this funny since Lester Bangs swigged his last bottle of Romilar.

HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH (2001)

John Cameron Mitchell energetically transposed his hit off-Broadway show to celluloid with 2001’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch, the story of a transsexual punk rock goddess named Hedwig (Mitchell) who narrates her life story while travelling across the country playing second-rate venues, her shot at stardom stymied by a former lover and disciple (Michael Pitt) who became a music sensation by stealing her songs. Hedwig’s is a lunatic odyssey which begins in East Berlin where, as a young boy, she undergoes a sex change operation in order to marry her U.S. army lover and escape the Iron Curtain, and which is partially conveyed via a bevy of musical numbers and animated sequences that are striking in both their ingenuity and power. Bolstered by rollicking, blistering tunes that are as well suited for arenas as they are for the stage and screen, Mitchell’s film is rowdy, bombastic, idiosyncratic and heartfelt, a combination to which only a select few movie musicals can legitimately lay claim.

THE DOORS (1991)

A close friend once derided The Doors’ music as “bad poetry with keyboards,” and while I’m generally inclined to concur with his assessment, there’s nonetheless something transfixing about Oliver Stone’s 1991 biopic, which has the type of on-the-edge, trippy-druggy dynamism that typified the director’s creatively fertile early-‘90s period. Stone’s anything-goes aesthetic showmanship is an ideal approach for a portrait of the L.A. band and, in particular, lead singer Jim Morrison, whose larger-than-life persona – drunken fool, callous bastard, earnest poet, sex god – naturally appealed to a filmmaker fascinated with mythologizing socio-political icons. The Doors oozes reverence without alienating those who might think the film’s subjects and their classic-rock canon fall somewhat short of greatness, due in part to uniformly superb performances led by Val Kilmer’s pitch-perfect embodiment of the lizard king, but mostly thanks to Stone’s lack of inhibition, his madman stylistic excesses (and yes, I’m including the Indian in the desert), supremely well-attuned to the careening rollercoaster energy of The Doors.

VELVET GOLDMINE (1998) and I'M NOT THERE (2007)

With these two films, Todd Haynes has produced the finest examples of fictional rock movies that I can imagine. Both have taken the lives of real rock musicians -- Bowie & Iggy in the former, Dylan in the latter -- and played up the mythic qualities to create a transcendent hyper-reality. No, Bowie and Iggy and Dylan didn't really live like this. But speaking from the point of view of poetry and mythology and literature, these are more true than mere reality can manage. That's what myths and stories are about: heightening everyday reality into a more universal truth. Most people's lives aren't up to the examples set by Ulysses or Hercules or even Ishmael or Natty Bumppo. But I think few would deny that there's a universal recognition of the truth in the lives of these wandering heroes. Celebrities sometimes play the role of real-life analog to idealized heroes. That's why so many urban myths leap up about the lives of celebrities; people need to believe in the extraordinariness of others. Rock musicians in particular often play the debauched Dionysian role of the glorious artistic mess, the pleasure-seeker who indulges in sex and drugs to feed his or her creative output. With these movies, Haynes pushes past the mere facts to feed the stories, and the results are fascinating, part narrative and part critique. In Velvet Goldmine, Christian Bale plays a journalist in an Orwellian Britain of the late '80s. A series of events causes him to investigate -- and recall -- the heyday of glam rock and its figurehead Brian Slade, who is basically the Platonic ideal of David Bowie (with elements of Brian Eno thrown in for good measure) as played by Jonathan Rhys Meyer. Slade's closest associate is Curt Wild (Ewan McGregor), who is mostly Iggy with a little Lou Reed thrown in. The two are lovers, and Slade gleefully expresses his fluid sense of sexuality. So there's three layers right there: Orwellian future, permissive past, rockers as trangressors. But there's more. Haynes dares to suggest that the bisexual/creative impulse was a gift from aliens (or angels) to Oscar Wilde in the Victorian era, and has passed down through the ages to the instigators of glam. That's, well, audacious as all hell. Haynes specifically compares Slade to both Wilde and his horrendous creation Dorian Gray. So, that's at least two more layers, maybe more. So, yes: gay theory, rock theory, lit theory, treatises on repression and freedom combined with the cults of youth and beauty. There's a lot going on in this movie. And it rocks like hell.

In I'm Not There, Haynes similarly adopts all of the myths about Bob Dylan into a narrative that's both fractured and more meaningful than a straightforward film could convey. There are six Dylans in this film, which is fewer Dylans than real life has given us. But these six Dylans represent the greatest periods of his life. Marcus Carl Franklin, an 11-year-old African-American boy, represents the youngest Dylan myth, the farmboy who rides the rails calling himself Woody Guthrie, learning America's traditional folk and blues music along the way. Ben Whishaw plays the interior Dylan, the playful interviewee who calls himself Arthur Rimbaud and comments cryptically on the rest of Dylan's life. Christian Bale plays the young and sincere New York folksinger Dylan, the socially active songwriter who calls himself Jack Rollins and travels to the South to sing to Civil Rights workers in a field. Rollins will later morph into Pastor John, the born-again Christian Dylan of the late '70s and early '80s. Heath Ledger plays the actor Dylan, the one who is horrible to his beautiful wife and torn in two by their divorce. His name is Robbie Clark and his wife, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, is Claire, and their story evokes the mid-'70s Dylan of Renaldo and Clara and Blood On The Tracks. Cate Blanchett plays Jude Quinn, the rock star Dylan of the mid-'60s and Don't Look Back. Quinn is explicitly shown as dead from a motorcycle accident at the beginning of the movie, which references Dylan's 1966 motorcycle accident which effectively killed off his Don't Look Back-era persona. Richard Gere plays Billy the Kid, who is the Dylan of The Basement Tapes, John Wesley Harding, and Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid. Gere's Billy lives in Riddle County, where the carnivalesque/Old West/Old Testament world of the Basement Tapes springs to life. So, that's the shallowest overview I could provide, and it more or less ate up all my space. Layers and layers in these films. Watch 'em again. And again.

Click Here For Part Two, Three, Four & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Paul Clark, Phil Nugent, Nick Schager, Hayden Childs

Morning Deal Report: Brett Ratner Drinks "Youngblood"

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 15:00:00 GMT

America was way too into He’s Just Not That Into You, rewarding the rom-com with the top box office spot and a $27.5 take. Last week’s big winner Taken slipped to the second spot, followed by Coraline and The Pink Panther 2, which was mercifully perceived as a disappointment. Steve Martin, this is your chance to retire to a quiet life of banjo recordings.

Brett Ratner is set to direct an adaptation of Rob Liefeld’s “iconic” graphic novel Youngblood. (Iconic is Variety’s word, not mine.) Is he doing this because it’s a project near and dear his heart? “Most of the great graphic novels are gone, and Youngblood is one of the few comic books left with tentpole potential,” said Ratner. Is he trying to sound like a jackass or does that just come naturally?

Finally, some political news from The Hollywood Reporter: “Holy hornet's nest, Batman! The New Mexico governor's mansion? Fresh from the inauguration, Val Kilmer is pondering running for governor in 2010, when two-term Democrat Bill Richardson will be forced from office by term limits.” Really, Hollywood Reporter? “Holy hornet’s nest, Batman”? Is that all you got?

Related:
Helming the Heroes
Car Talk with Val Kilmer

Meryl Streep Don't Take Nun of Your Crap in "Doubt"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 18:00:00 GMT

John Patrick Shanley's Doubt is one of the most unusual pieces of Oscar bait laid out before the public this holiday season. Based on Shanley's play of the same name, which is set in a Catholic school in the Bronx in 1964, and which the playwright-filmmaker has managed to transpose to the screen with every bit as much style and as full a grasp of the movie medium as one expects from the director of Joe vs. the Volcano. Superficially, at first glance, it appears to be a simply a filmed version of the play. The text is the blueprint for a naturalistic acting contest in which the four main characters dance around each other, trying to determine what, if anything, Father Flynn did with little Donald Miller in the rectory with the communion wine. However, in an audacious choice, the movie subtly shifts into a science fiction fantasy, about how a stable-seeming institution is driven insane by the presence in it midst of an alien intruder. This major change is entirely the work of one of the principal performers, Meryl Streep, who plays the unforgivingly snoopy old nun who has Father Flynn's backside in her rifle scope, and who makes it clear from her entrance, trailing alongside the benches stuffed with children attending a service and leaving a path of popping eyes and frightened mugging in her wake, that the character is...not of our world. Just as the movie seeks to keep viewers in...doubt!!--as to whether or not Father Flynn has been a dirty, dirty boy, it never spells out just what universe Sister Aloysius Beauvier may have come from, or to what species she might belong. (Her name is a grim indication of the flailing effort she has made at self-invention since coming to live among the humans; presumably, having entered our world from God knows what unguarded cosmic border, she adopted the name of the dead president's widow.)

Is she an extraterrestrial? Or is she a distant cousin of the Wicked Witch of the West, having fled Oz steps ahead of the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman's Republican Guard? While that possibility might be a stretch, Streep's ever increasing resemblance to Margaret Hamilton automatically brings it to mind. It's only a physical resemblance, because Margaret Hamilton was a much subtler performer. But the mysterious dialect that sometimes slips through when Sister Aloysius can't think of a word in what she would call "Earth language" to convey what she means might be Oz-speech, or it could just as easily be something spoken on the Moons of Tralfamadore. In one key scene, Sister Aloysius goes on a desk-raiding expedition while her helpless Earth slave--played by Amy Adams, her fair face a trembling mask of horror--stands by. Pulling a bag out of the desk, Streep cries triumphantly, "Khye! Yandi!" Adams, taking her life in her hands, fearfully points out that the bag only contains cough drops. "Khye! Yandi!..by another name!" Streep retorts. The audience thus learns that in Sister Aloysius's home world, "Khye! Yandi!" is a ritual exclanation made whenever someone detects the presence of something sweet, or what we Earthlings call "candy". The movie, which never shows Sister Aloysius greeting a spaceship to take her home or chugging live frogs or doing whatever it is that those of her kind do to take nourishment, is almost grudging in the slivers of information it offers about Sister Aloysius, so much so that, if you watched it after being up for forty-eight hours straight while messed up on cough syrup and with a hat pulled low over your eyes and listening to the ball game on the radio with headphones, you might just think that it was about the weirdest nun in the world and not fully grasp that there's no way in hell that a serious, trained professional like Streep could have ever intended the good sister to be taken for a member of the human race. The movie's reticence on the point of Streep's inhuman freakishness ultimately makes it a much more disturbing experience than if she has ever actually pulled off a rubber mask to reveal the lizard face beneath.

Having consulted David Thomson, I am forced to conclude that there is no term for a performance that single-handedly upends a movie by completely changing the context of the movie lucky enough to contain it, and any discussion of Christopher Walken's career is surely poorer for that. But Streep's performance in Doubt is not wholly without precedent. Perhaps the most famous example in recent years was Tim Robbins's Night Gallery-style performance in Clint Eastwood's Mystic River. Playing a character who was abducted as a child, Robbins, pop-eyed and trembling throughout, created suspense by transforming the key mystery of the film into just what had been returned to his family in place of the boy who had been taken away. Did the two even share the same body? It might have been less horrifying to speculate that what had grown into Robbins was cobbled together from scratch by his kidnappers before they returned to their mold-encrusted tomb or faraway planet. The movie provided only the most nightmare-inducing, tantalizing hint of what it could be like to live with this thing, in the person of his nerve-racked wife, played by Marcia Gay Hardin, who looked ready to jump out of her skin at the slightest sound and spoke as she supported herself dubbing lines for Tweety Bird. Frustratingly, the film kept waving the mystery of Robbins's zoological classification--was he vampire, zombie, local chief organizer for Nader in 2004--while actually focusing on the far less intriguing question of whether he not he had killed Sean Penn's daughter in the course of his ghoulish nightly rounds. Several years earlier, Eastwood had directed, and starred himself in, White Hunter, Black Heart, playing a role modeled on John Huston. This central piece of casting transformed what should have been a movie about a charming scared monster of a worldy movie director into a movie about the fleeting wish of a guy who became rich and world famous for the casual ease with which he dropped extras into their coffins to appear dashing and debonair, and also to talk as if cacti were blooming in his larynx. He couldn't bring off the former, but the latter as come to him quite naturally in the years since.

William Hurt's ninth-inning appearance in A History of Violence did a nice job of turning a mostly sober-sided movie into The Three Stooges Meet John Gotti. John Turturro's comic relief performance in Transformers, complete with whimsically deployed underwear, occupies its own realm with natural laws all its own. Then there is the matter of late Brando. Actually, many of the movies in which late Brando was permitted to run amok had so little identity without him that it would be silly to make too much of the way that his presence turned, say, The Missouri Breaks into Late Brando Kills Cowboys. Then there's the 1996 version of The Island of Dr. Moreau. Here the chief mischief maker is actually Val Kilmer, playing the dope-addled chief assistant to the title character, played by Brando in the fey, epicene manner that he had deployed more than thirty years earlier in the remake of Mutiny on the Bounty, complete with sorta-English accent. In Moreau, after Brando's character is killed, Kilmer tries to mollify the doctor's murderous, ravening creations by dressing up as the Doc and imitating him over the loudspeaker system. However, Kilmer doesn't imitate Brando's character in the movie but instead does his best after-hours impersonation of the Brando of Stanley Kowalksi, Terry Malloy, etc. What sense the critters onscreen could be expected to make of this we cannot know, but for the people in the theater, it turns the movie into a Val Kilmer production entitled Late Brando, Early Brando, and Whichever Brando Cut Ahead of Me at the Catering Table Can All Kiss My Ass.

For me, the all-time king of these kinds of performances will always be, not Brando or Kilmer or Streep or even Walken, but Wings Hauser, the high-spirite musician and soap opera veteran who menaced half the hookers in L.A. in Vice Squad, turned Richard Pryor onto cocaine in Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling, and abused his position as the police chief of Provincetown more than one might have thought possible in the Norman Mailer-directed spree Tough Guys Don't Dance. Unless handled carefully, say with large animal tranquilizers, Hauser always approaches his roles as if he had been employed to engage in hand-to-hand combat with Godzilla while the people of Tokyo gaze on amazement. His profile in movies has receded in recent years, and the film scene is saner but poorer for that.

Screengrab's Back To School Round-Up: The Top 15 College Movies (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 21:00:00 GMT

REAL GENIUS (1985)

If there’s one thing America hates, it’s smart people. Brainy elitists like Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Barack Obama and that pencil-neck geek we used to beat up in gym class make us nervous, inspiring vague feelings of inadequacy that can usually be doused by voting for down-to-earth “real” people like George W. Bush and Sarah Palin, who don’t know how to pronounce “nuclear” (and really couldn’t give a shit). But Martha Coolidge’s ensemble comedy about fledgling scientists at a fictionalized CalTech depicts a world where mental, not physical, strength is prized and knowledge (in the form of Val Kilmer’s fast-talking, wisecracking Chris Knight and Michelle Meyrink’s official Screengrab Sexy Nerd Jordan) is hot. The story’s teen prodigy protagonist Mitch Taylor (Gabriel Jarrett...largely MIA in recent years but reappearing soon in Frost/Nixon) and aging burnout Laslo (Jon Gries) embody the double-edged sword of intellectual aptitude, where intimate knowledge of chemical laser technology is no guarantee of success, happiness or intimacy with actual humans, while the surprisingly charming Kilmer offers a hopeful balance of “real” and “genius,” with the wherewithal to understand that light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation can also be used to blow off steam by pointing the way to the occasional pool party blow-out.

SCHOOL DAZE (1988)

Oh, college...where politics, drinking and date rape are never more than a quad away. This Spike Lee joint takes us to the Mission College campus, a historically black alma mater back in the "divest from South Africa, support ANC" days. It stars Giancarlo Esposito as a fascistoid fraternity leader, Laurence Fishburne as Dap, a righteous, wet-behind-the ears campus radical and Spike Lee as his vertically challenged cousin Half-Pint. Half-Pint is not so much into the politics, being more given to Greek life. The movie follows Dap's quest to get the college to divest and Half-Pint's quest to pledge with the Gamma-Phi-Gammas and get laid. Like any self-respecting college movie, School Daze, takes us through pledge week, a homecoming parade and a dance scene in which half-naked coeds get down to a band. All that plus musical numbers and parachute pants.

KICKING AND SCREAMING (1995)

I don't know about you folks, but my college experience was not a nonstop bacchanal of toga parties and panty raids (although that description accurately applies to the typical day at Screengrab headquarters), so the average college movie doesn't really speak to me. My memories of those days mostly involve bantering about matters great and small over a pitcher of beer with good friends, neurotic fretting about dysfunctional relationships and, towards the end, a sort of heart-freezing paralysis at the prospect of "life" awaiting me. That's probably why I've always loved Noah Baumbach's debut Kicking and Screaming, one of the few "Gen X" movies (along with Linklater's Slacker) that didn't make me want to set fire to the movie theater. (Let us not even speak of Reality Bites.) Baumbach's film covers the final day of college and the aimless months that follow for a group of friends finding it hard to move on from their routine of trivia contests, verbal jousting and picking up undergrads at the local pub. The ensemble includes Chris Eigeman, Parker Posey, Josh Hamilton and the scene-stealing Carlos Jacott, all of whom clearly relish Baumbach's literate, martini-dry dialogue, as well as Eric Stolz in one of his best roles, a sort of intellectual doppelganger of Wooderson from Dazed and Confused ("Why would I ever leave? I am a student and that's what I chose.") Have fun with those slobs at Delta House – I'll be over here thinking up eight movies where monkeys play key roles.

NIGHT OF THE CREEPS (1986)

Innumerable horror movies have taken place on college campuses or featured college students as the protagonists, but more often than not, this is just so the producers can film the movie on the cheap and have an excuse to put nubile twenty-somethings in front of the camera. The highly enjoyable 1986 cult classic Night of the Creeps, on the other hand, not only makes full use of its campus setting (having the alien menace begin its rampage in a menacing corner of the biology lab), but with its campy tone, hilariously quotable dialogue, nerdy outcast protagonists, delightfully lo-fi approach, and innumerable film student in-jokes, it actually plays like a movie that was made by college students. Writer/director Fred Dekker wasn’t exactly that when he made Night of the Creeps, but he wasn’t far from it; he was only 26, and, having been rejected by both UCLA and USC’s film schools, he had something to prove. His later efforts didn’t exactly set the world on fire, but his debut remains one of the most enjoyable horror flicks of the 1980s – a movie that plays more like an admiring postmodern salute to the old B-movie fare of yesteryear than the grim misogynist slasher flicks that dominated the decade. (For those who are, ahem, of a certain age, the movie’s fashions and music will also bring back memories of college that may not be altogether pleasant.) The whole movie is sustained with its terrific sense of humor, much of which is dryly delivered by inimitable character actor Tom Atkins.

SPIDER-MAN 2 (2004)

Sam Raimi’s second installment of the Spider-Man franchise isn’t just one of the best super-hero movies ever made; it’s a good solid college movie as well, that speaks to any busy student with or without radioactive arachnid powers. Think about it: Marvel Comics has always prided itself on mixing real-world angst with its crimefighting action; that’s the factor that made the Spider-Man comic such a success in the first place. And that kind of storytelling is very much on display here: Peter Parker, fresh out of high school and entering his first semester at Empire State (an institution of higher learning that, as a child, I was determined I would one day attend until I found out it wasn’t real), and the turmoil that so thoroughly futzes with his state of mind both in and out of costume all throughout Spider-Man 2 are familiar ones to anyone who’s ever been in college. He’s on a full ride, but his family’s not doing so well; he’s got to work a low-paying, demeaning job to help out, and that cuts into his study time. His girlfriend has eschewed college to pursue a successful career, and he’s not only barely got time to see her, but he’s even a little jealous. He’s drifting away from his only high school friend. His precocious genius isn’t as impressive to his college professors as it was to his high school teachers. And his educational mentor undergoes a horrible accident and rampages all over New York with the robotic limbs fused to his torso. Okay, maybe that last one’s a stretch, but still – you get the idea.

Click Here for Part One & Part Two

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Sarah Sundberg, Scott Von Doviak, Leonard Pierce

Morning Deal Report: Johnny Depp, Household Pet

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 14:30:00 GMT

Don’t tell the newly pious Joe Eszterhas, but his old partner in crime Paul Verhoeven is in talks to direct another erotic thriller. Variety says the untitled script by Wendy Miller “centers on a college intern who finds himself trapped in a dangerous affair with the boss’s wife. Project is described as Risky Business meets Fatal Attraction.” So…Fatal Business? Risky Attraction?

What is the terrifying secret of The Steam Experiment? I certainly can’t wait to find out, as Val Kilmer, Armand Assante and Eric Roberts team up for the indie suspense thriller. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the plot concerns “six people trapped and terrorized in an urban Turkish bathhouse.” Just imagine being trapped in a bathhouse with Val Kilmer, Armand Assante and Eric Roberts and you can already smell the suspense.

Johnny Depp reunites with Gore Verbinski (Pirates of the Caribbean) for the animated feature Rango. Per Variety, “Depp will voice the lead character, a household pet that goes on an adventure to discover its true self.” Really, that’s what it says – a household pet. As if revealing whether he’s a dog or cat or gerbil would be giving too much away.

Related:
Saint Joe: "Showgirls" Writer Finds Jesus
Depp vs. Murray: Dueling Gonzos

DVD Digest for August 12, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 14:00:00 GMT

After last week’s thin selection of new DVDs, this week brings a number of high-quality releases.

DVDs of the Week: DVDs couldn’t be much different than this week’s two most notable new releases, the Criterion release of Guy Maddin’s Brand Upon the Brain! and the final season of The Wire (HBO). But in its own way, each is pretty indispensible. Maddin’s film is, like his entire body of work, indescribable to anyone who hasn’t already seen it, but for those who are on his wavelength, it’s magical. That Criterion has finally embraced this most movie-drunk of filmmakers is exciting enough. But they’ve also gathered half a dozen different narration tracks for the sake of variety, including narration by Isabella Rossellini, Laurie Anderson, Eli Wallach, and Maddin himself. In addition, there’s a new documentary on the director, plus two new short films by Maddin, made especially for this release. So yeah, good news.

But if anything, the release of Season 5 of The Wire is even more of a cause for celebration. The groundbreaking, critically-acclaimed HBO series has been praised to the heavens in venues both classier and more authoritative than this one, so I’ll refrain from heaping still more effusive praise on a series that hardly needs it. All I can say is, if you haven’t experienced The Wire yet, you’ve got some great times ahead of you. And if you have, you don’t need me to convince you to buy the final season on DVD.

This week’s recent releases coming to DVD include: Dennis Quaid and Ellen Page in Smart People (Disney, also Blu-Ray); Stephen Chow’s cockeyed kids’ movie CJ7 (Sony, also Blu-Ray); and Val Kilmer and Stephen Dorff in Felon (Sony, also Blu-Ray). Also, three DVDs by Lech Majewski: The Garden of Earthly Delights, Glass Lips, and The Gospel According to Harry (all Kino), the last of which features a young Viggo Mortensen.

In TV on DVD, this week brings South Park Season 11 (Paramount), Prison Break Season 3 (Fox, also Blu-Ray), and Caroline in the City Season 1 (Paramount).

Finally, in Blu-Ray only news, the week’s big release almost certainly has to be Sony’s “Action” Box Set, which includes Jean Claude Van Damme in Maximum Risk, Steven Seagal in Half Past Dead, Wesley Snipes in 7 Seconds, and Ice Cube in xXx: State of the Union. I mean, come on- Van Damme, Seagal, and Snipes all in one box set? The 1993 version of me is stoked. Also this week: The Doors (Lionsgate) and Belly (Lionsgate), in case you were wondering.

Yesterday's Hits: Top Gun (1986, Tony Scott)

Paul Clark — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Readers, I have a little confession to make: up until last week, I’d never watched Tony Scott’s Top Gun from beginning to end. Yes, I’d seen parts of the film here and there on television, but I’d never actually sat down for the purpose of actually watching Top Gun in its entirety. However, I was familiar enough with the film by reputation and through hearing others talk about it that I was fairly sure I wasn’t missing much. Yet the film was so popular in its day that it was almost inevitable that I would be writing it up for a column sooner or later. So in writing this week’s column, I wouldn’t be simply reviewing Top Gun on its own merits, but viewing it through the prism of its pop-cultural impact- not normally the way to review a movie, but more or less the modus operandi here at Yesterday’s Hits. So get ready to take a ride on the highway to... the danger zone!

Why was Top Gun a hit?: In the days of Old Hollywood, the big splashy entertainments were usually distinguished by their sheer magnitude, with towering sets, far-flung locations, and the proverbial “cast of thousands”. But all of this changed in the 1970s, when directors like Spielberg and Lucas made hugely popular blockbusters that were distinguished less by their largesse than for their momentum. By the time 1986 rolled around, audiences were feeling the need for speed, and Top Gun delivered. Top Gun boasted eye-popping aerial photography and combat sequences that rivaled almost anything that had been shown onscreen up to that point, and allowed the U.S. Navy to show off some of their most state-of-the-art fighter planes.

But if audiences came for the jets, they stuck around to witness the birth of a new superstar, Tom Cruise. Cruise had made a big impression three years prior in Risky Business, but it was Top Gun that propelled his career into the stratosphere. Lt. Pete “Maverick” Mitchell isn’t a great role, but it was tailor made to Cruise’s onscreen persona- boyish, driven, confident, almost impossibly handsome. Maverick such was a quintessential eighties hero (his goal: to be “the best of the best”) and so successfully did Cruise fit the role that he represented the kind of man who women wanted to be with and men wanted to be like. Top Gun became the runaway hit of 1986, taking in $176 million in the United States alone. In addition, the film became an invaluable recruiting tool for the Navy, which stationed recruiters outside of many theatres, resulting in an almost unprecedented number of applications.

What happened?: After its theatrical release, Top Gun became a sizable hit on home video and maintained most of its popularity through the end of the decade. However, by the time the nineties rolled around, the alpha-male lifestyle and master-of-the-universe mindset of the eighties had fallen out of fashion, and movies like Top Gun became more interesting for their kitsch value than as entertainment.

Consider the whole Tarantino issue. In the 1994 indie Sleep With Me, Tarantino expounded upon a theory that posited Top Gun as a movie about Maverick struggling with his homosexuality. How well the theory holds up when watching the film is almost immaterial- although scenes like the infamous volleyball game, in which Cruise, Val Kilmer and Rick Rossovich all play shirtless and covered in sweat as Kenny Loggins sings “Playing With the Boys” on the soundtrack certainly don’t discourage this interpretation. But what’s important is how alien the un-ironic brand of manliness in the film translated to the more self-aware age, and how cheesy it all feels in retrospect. Even now, when we can’t look back at the eighties without a certain snickering nostalgia, Top Gun isn’t remotely the manly-man classic it set out to be.

Does Top Gun still work?: Not really. For such a mammoth box office hit, there really isn’t much to Top Gun. The movie’s storyline, such as it is, is just a framework on which to hang a series of flight sequences, interspersed with love scenes and bits of strutting-peacock machismo. From a visual standpoint, the movie’s still fairly exciting when the planes are in the air, but considering that most of these scenes are actually simulated missions rather than actual combat, there’s not a lot of tension to them. As the aviators battle to determine who will be Top Gun, the movie comes off a lot like a baseball movie in which most of the story is devoted to players in spring training duking it out for a spot on the roster. The real combat sequence at the end is considerably more exciting, but it’s too little, too late, once one realizes that the entire preceding ninety minutes have all essentially been the setup.

If the story is thin, the characters are even thinner. From Maverick on down, the people who populate the film are defined by one or two basic motivations. Maverick wants to be the best and discover what happened to his father. Charlie (Kelly McGillis) wants a big promotion in Washington, and to get closer to Maverick for various reasons. Iceman (Kilmer, clearly bored) wants to beat Maverick. The film’s only interesting character is Maverick’s “rear man” (heh heh) Goose, played by Anthony Edwards. Goose is best friends with Maverick and would follow him anywhere, but feels conflicted about risking his life in combat because he has a wife and kids. Naturally, Goose is doomed, but because we actually care about him as a person instead of just an action figure, his death is one of the few parts of the movie that makes an impression.

As a whole, Top Gun is curiously soulless. Looking back at the classics of the past that have truly endured, it’s clear that all of them were lovingly crafted, with the filmmakers taking a real emotional stake in the films they made. This isn’t the case with Top Gun, a movie in which every element is calculated and focus-grouped to appeal to the widest possible audience. For example, there’s the film’s love scene. Cruise and McGillis exhibit almost no chemistry or sexual tension throughout the film, yet test audiences complained about the lack of a love scene, so Scott shot one months after principal shooting was completed. The scene is so perfunctory that it doesn’t work except to satisfy an obligation to a formula, and much of the rest of the film feels the same way. No wonder the theory Tarantino voiced caught on- at least it gives audiences something to entertain themselves while the movie itself is on autopilot.

Oh, and in case you still haven’t seen it for yourself, here’s a clip of Tarantino from Sleep With Me sharing the Top Gun theory, coming to us through the magic of YouTube.

Yeah, Quentin gets the line wrong, but still- it's tough not to watch the film now without thinking "Swordfight! Swordfight!" at least once.

Car Talk with Val Kilmer

Phil Nugent — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 19:45:00 GMT

What with the WGA strike, there isn't a lot of TV series news out there right now, but as Spencer Tracy used to say, what's there is cherce. It's been reported that Val Kilmer will be serving as the voice of KITT, the talking car, in the "rebooted" new pilot version of Knight Rider being readied by executive producer Doug Liman, with an eye towards possibly launching a new series. Originally, Will Arnett (Arrested Development, Blades of Glory), the new reigning Mr. Smarmy, was set to play KITT, a bright idea that might have resulted in something that felt closer to Heat Vision and Jack: The Next Generation. In a surreal development, Arnett had to be replaced because the pilot's sponsor, Ford, objected to his casting because he had done voice work in commercials for General Motors, thus denying him the chance to provide the voice of a car because he was already "the voice of GMC Trucks." In a world where nobody seems to understand what constitutes a conflict of interest anymore, it's always good to see somebody deciding where to draw a line in the sand. Anyway, this is sort of movie news because Kilmer is still a movie star. Sort of. (Heck, for that matter, when I saw Wristcutters last year, the revelation that Arnett was playing the movie's mysterious cult leader was greeted by the audience with a reaction comparable to what you might get if Jesus walked out onstage and announced that he was here to introduce the Beatles reunion.) Not that we mean to tease Kilmer about this. Sure, there was a time when we'd have been happy to oblige, but in the last several years the kissy-lipped devil has ripened into one entertaining side of ham, making the most of his flashy roles in such films as Spartan and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and the recent TV miniseries Comanche Moon, and giving such co-stars as Robert Downey, Jr. and Steve Zahn — men who do not live dull lives — something to write home to mother about. ("Yeah, then he started hopping, hopping around in place, and he said he thought he was a flea. Oh, it's in the movie. If you look close, you can see his nose twitch at one point. That's where the director shit his pants.") The Knight Rider pilot is slated to air sometime later this month on NBC.

Take Five: Smut

Peter Smith — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 21:00:00 GMT

The Amateurs opens in limited release this Friday. We have absolutely no intention whatsoever of seeing it, because there is the possibility, however remote, that it will contain a nude scene featuring Joe Pantoliano. But it does give us a chance to talk about pornography. Not actual pornography, mind you — as open-minded as this site is, we're pretty sure the bosses aren't going to let us post stills of our favorite scenes from the oeuvre of the Dark Brothers. No, what we're talking about here is movies about pornography. There's been smut on film since there was film, but while Hollywood has always been officially disdainful of its little brother in the Valley, it's also been a bit fascinated as well. Recently, European filmmakers have actually included real sex in their movies and made it work as part of a respectable narrative, but in the U.S., the NC-17 rating is still the kiss of death and violence will likely always be more palatable to the censors than sex. But even in those arty Euro-flicks, the sex is in service of the story and not the other way around; will a genuine porn movie ever be made with a great script, top-notch direction and production, and big Hollywood stars? Probably not. But there will still be movies about pornography; here are five of the best.

BLUE MOVIE (1970)

Okay, technically, this isn't a real movie. It is, instead, a novel about the making of a movie. The novel is by Terry Southern, and the movie (Faces of Love) is one that Southern and his good friend, the director Stanley Kubrick, had sometimes talked of making together. It would be a big-budget Hollywood picture, with as many of the big stars of the day as they could afford and a multi-million-dollar budget — and it would contain hardcore pornography. Kubrick knew the movie could never be made in his lifetime and never pursued it, but the subversive Southern couldn't let go of the idea and fictionalized the making of the film in a hilariously filthy novel. Now, thirty-seven years later, Southern and Kubrick are both dead — and their movie has still never been made.

HARDCORE (1979)

Paul Schrader's sometimes hokey and sometimes harrowing follow-up to Blue Collar dealt with every father's recurring nightmare: seeing his missing daughter in a porno flick. Inspired partly by Schrader's own obsession with pornography (which he referenced in Taxi Driver as well), the film doesn't always manage to carry off its mix of religious fury and sleazy L.A. grit, and its central conceit (the father goes undercover as a porn producer to find his daughter) is pretty flimsy, but Hardcore is carried on the strength of a furious, consuming lead performance by George C. Scott and some terrific cameo roles by Peter Boyle, Hal Williams and Dick "Darrin" Sargent.

BODY DOUBLE (1984)

Somehow, Alfred Hitchcock never got around to making a movie set in the rented houses and storefront offices of the San Fernando Valley pornography industry. So Brian De Palma did it for him. Best described as an bizarre combination of Vertigo and Rear Window with smut and power drills thrown in for an extra bit of a kick, Body Double is, like many of De Palma's Hitchcock-homage films, a movie that's a lot smarter and better than it appears on the surface, and it rewards multiple viewings. It also features one of the filthiest — and funniest — line readings ever from a big Hollywood star: Melanie Griffith, as porn star Holly Body, explaining painstakingly to Craig Wasson's hapless character exactly what she will and will not do.

BOOGIE NIGHTS (1997)

Like most of his films, Paul Thomas Anderson's porn-industry epic Boogie Nights has its problems. It's sprawling in the worst way, its script badly needed a ruthless application of the blue pencil, and Anderson often mistakes putting people through the wringer for character development. But it's not for nothing that he's considered a major American director, and even leaving aside the tremendous cast he assembled here, he achieves many moments of genuine emotional power and perfectly captures a certain southern California milieu from the late 1970s and early 1980s.

WONDERLAND (2003)

The story of Johnny "Wadd" Holmes — one of the biggest stars in the history of porn, as well as one of its most pathetic figures — is a fascinating one, combining as it does so many juicy elements. Money, sex, death, degradation, disease and murder all played a part in Holmes' life, and every element came together in the notorious Wonderland Murders. The story of the murders was told in an abstracted way in Boogie Nights and literally in the little-seen documentary Wadd: The Life & Time of John C. Holmes, but they receive a much more direct screen treatment in Wonderland. While Val Kilmer turns in a surprisingly strong performance as Holmes, but the movie itself it chaotic, confused and shambolic — but then, as the life story of Johnny Wadd, how could it be anything but?

— Leonard Pierce

Forgotten Films: Masked and Anonymous (2003)

Peter Smith — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 18:00:00 GMT

Bob Dylan re-wrote the rules about what was allowed of a famous singer, songwriter, and public figure, but it turned out that he did have one normal thing about him: he liked the idea of being a movie star. Dylan was a movie star whenever he got to be himself in caught footage, as in D. A. Pennebaker's 1967 documentary Don't Look Back, but his first several attempts to pass for an actor, or to capture his magnificence himself, tended to be kind of, well, disastrous. The music he produced for the soundtrack of Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973) yielded a triumph in "Knockin' on Heaven's Door," but Peckinpah's attempt to incorporate Dylan into the cast, as a mysterious, knife-throwing hombre known as "Alias", only resulted in a smirking blank space on the screen. Dylan's own 1978 Renaldo & Clara, a four-hour mixture of fantasy and documentary sequences threaded through with performance footage from the 1975-76 Rolling Thunder Revue, inspired print seminars, in places like the Village Voice, on the theme, "Dylan: What Happened?"; long unavailable in its complete form, the movie will probably be seen again around the time that Jerry Lewis's The Day the Clown Cried is released as part of the Criterion Collection. Then there's Hearts of Fire, a misguided 1987 rock-'n-roll love story with Dylan as the sage old music legend who plays smitten mentor to the uni-named cupcake Fiona. The barely-released film was the last work by its director, Richard Marquand (Eye of the Needle, Return of the Jedi), who had a fatal stroke before signing off on the final cut.

After a long lay-off from movies, Dylan re-emerged in 2003 as the star of Masked and Anonymous, directed by Larry Charles. (It was the first movie directed by Charles, who was then best known for his TV work, as a writer on Seinfeld and a director on Curb Your Enthusiasm. His second movie would be Borat.) Dylan and Charles co-wrote the script, under the pseudonyms "Sergei Petrov" and "Rene Fonatine." It was made fast — principal photography was reportedly completed in twenty days — and relatively cheap; a lot of well-known people agreed to be paid scale on it because, like the various celebrities who appeared in Renaldo & Clara, they just wanted to work with Dylan. The cast includes Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, Jessica Lange, Ed Harris, Val Kilmer, Mickey Rourke, Angela Bassett, Penelope Cruz, Giovanni Ribisi, Luke Wilson, Fred Ward, Bruce Dern, Cheech Marin, Tracey Walter, Robert Wisdom, Chris Penn, Christian Slater and Susan Tyrrell, as well as Dylan's longtime touring band (including guitarist Charlie Sexton and bassist Tony Garnier) and a little girl named Tinashe Kachingwe, who brings down the house with her a-cappella version of "The Times They Are A-Changin'." The reward they get for their participation is that they all get to be characters in a new Dylan song — one of the really long ones, like "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again," full of imagery and puns and symbols and throwaway jokes. That's how the movie is conceived.

The setting is America as a junta-led dictatorship, with government-controlled media and street executions, and with Dylan as a legendary troubadour named "Jack Fate" who's spent the last several years locked away in prison. An Albert Grossman-like manager figure — Uncle Sweetheart, played by John Goodman — gets him sprung so he can perform at a big televised benefit concert, and he tours the back country on his way to the performance site, serving as witness to the perversion of the country's ideals, and playing straight man to a succession of ranters and weirdos. The movie has its dead spots and its puzzlements, and it rambles, as you might expect. But it's not just some vanity project. There's real pain and a lot of humor in it, and its vision of an entertainment-sated America in lockdown is politically sophisticated in a way that was guaranteed to go over like a lead balloon when it was released during the summer of "Mission Accomplished!" Part of the movie's strength, and part of what may cause many to regard it as dismissible, is that it pictures this nightmare of where we may be headed but doesn't have any ideas of how to slay the dragon once it plops its ass down in the seat of power. Dylan doesn't dismiss the power and value of music, but he knows damn well that it doesn't stop jackbooted thugs in their tracks.

The one message that does come through loud and clear is that the sixties have been over a long time, they aren't ever coming back, and they may not have been everything that nostalgic boomers and post-boomer dreamers want to think they were in the first place. In one of the movie's funniest and most pointed scenes, Goodman reads a long list of songs that the government would like Jack Fate to perform for the national television audience: it's a string of rebellious sixties classics ("Street Fighting Man", "Masters of War"), now toothless but still good for making the listener imagine that he must be a part of something daring. (Dylan's deadpan response: "I dunno, Sweetheart. It seems like a whole lot of songs.") And the movie's villain is a self-hating blowhard of a rock journalist (Jeff Bridges) who "interviews" the Dylan character by suggesting that he's a has-been and a sell-out while reeling off the names of rock heroes such as Hendrix who had the decency to die young. Dylan seems to hate this asshole more than the dying, dictatorial "president" (Richard C. Sarina) or his replacement — Mickey Rourke, who caresses the screen with his sweetest pussycat smile while promising, "We will empty the prisons, and fill the football stadiums!" Masked and Anonymous was part of a general comeback for Dylan that began with his 1997 album Time Out of Mind; since then, his autumnal renaissance has included a couple more albums (Love and Theft, Modern Times) and his memoir Chronicles, Volume One, as well as the belated official release Live 1966 and the Martin Scorsese documentary No Direction Home. (He also won an Academy Award for the song "Things Have Changed" from Wonder Boys.) In this unexpected surge of critically garlanded work, Masked and Anonymous (which also yielded a superb soundtrack album) may have gotten lost in the shuffle, but in its own eccentric way, it's as intriguing a statement about Dylan and his myth as any yet caught on film. At least, until the imminent release of Todd Haynes I'm Not There, which addresses the problem of summing up Dylan by dividing the part among six different actors. You can bet that Dylan is kicking himself for not having thought of that before.

— Phil Nugent