The Screengrab : w.

Roger Ebert Knows What’s Worth “Knowing”

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 16:30:00 GMT

The fact that Roger Ebert gave the latest Nicolas Cage vehicle Knowing a four-star review is not all that surprising. It’s not like he’s ever held his top rating in reserve for the Chinatowns and Godfathers of cinema; recent four-star reviews include Watchmen, Lakewood Terrace and Oliver Stone’s W. In addition, Ebert has always been a big fan of a previous effort from Knowing director Alex Proyas, Dark City. What’s a little more surprising and unusual is Ebert’s follow-up, published two days after his initial review, in which he expresses astonishment at the overwhelmingly negative critical reception the movie has received.

“Knowing is among the best science-fiction films I've seen -- frightening, suspenseful, intelligent and, when it needs to be, rather awesome.” That’s the first sentence of Ebert’s review. Those of us who have not been overly impressed by Nicolas Cage’s career choices of the past decade or so already have reason to be skeptical. “With expert and confident storytelling, Proyas strings together events that keep tension at a high pitch all through the film,” Ebert continues. “Even a few quiet, human moments have something coiling beneath. Pluck this movie, and it vibrates. Even something we've seen countless times, like a car pursuit, works here because of the meaning of the pursuit, and the high stakes.”

It didn’t take long for Ebert to discover that his enthusiasm was not universally shared amongst his critical brethren. “Either I'm wrong or most of the movie critics in America are mistaken,” Ebert writes in his follow-up article. “This is astonishing. Let's suppose I was completely wrong. Even if I was how bad could the possibly movie be? Half as good as the slasher film Shuttle? A third as good as Last House on the Left?” Ebert does understand how many of us feel about Cage these days. “Some readers said they avoid his movies on principle. Many found him guilty of over-acting. A critic was quoted who referred to his ‘fright wig,’ which is just mean-spirited snark.”

Ebert also says critics had problems with the Biblical parallels in this end-of-the-world thriller. I have to confess I haven’t found the time in my schedule to squeeze in a viewing of Knowing myself, but let’s see what a few of our leading luminaries had to say. Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly calls the movie “so inept that you may wish you were watching an M. Night Shyamalan version of the very same premise.” A.O. Scott of the New York Times notes: “If your intention is to make a brooding, hauntingly allegorical terror-thriller, it’s probably not a good sign when spectacles of mass death and intimations of planetary destruction are met with hoots and giggles.” Says Ty Burr of the Boston Globe, “It's a Nicolas Cage movie, so, admit it, you're expecting crazy. You have no idea.”

Ebert isn’t completely alone, though. Todd McCarthy of Variety calls Knowing a “not-bad supernatural-tinged sci-fier that has more on its mind than the run-of-the-mill effects-driven extravaganza.” What say you, Screengrab readers? The movie topped the box office this weekend, so surely somebody has seen it. Let us know what you thought in the comments.

Related:
Roger Ebert Gives Himself Thumbs Down
Abel Ferrera Would Like Werner Herzog and Nicolas Cage to Please Die in a Fire

DVD Digest for February 10, 2009

Paul Clark — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 15:00:00 GMT

With St. Valentine’s Day less than a week away, you’d think studios would start rolling out some of their romantic classics on DVD. But I’m seeing very little of that this week, unless of course your idea of romance is vastly different than mine…

DVDs of the Week: But then, for me, nothing says romance like a pair of movies from surrealist master Luis Bunuel. This week brings two of his favorites, The Exterminating Angel and Simon of the Desert, courtesy of the folks at Criterion. The Exterminating Angel is the known quantity for me, a wicked satire of bourgeois manners, in which a group of upper-crusters finds itself unable to leave following a dinner party, which brings them no end of trouble. Simon, Bunuel’s telling of the story of an ascetic who stood atop a remote pillar to prove his love for God, is one I’ve yet to see (do I smell a future Reviews By Request?), but its DVD release is no less noteworthy. The films, made during Bunuel’s sojourn in Mexico, have been given the deluxe Criterion treatment, with new transfers, documentaries, new interviews with actress Sylvia Pinal and others, and more.

Other noteworthy this week is Janus’ Essential Art House: Volume 2, which includes The 400 Blows, Black Orpheus, Pygmalion, La Strada, Ikiru, and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp in single-disc editions, also available separately. In addition, Lionsgate is releasing new editions of the Wallace and Gromit short films, A Close Shave, A Grand Day Out and The Wrong Trousers. Finally- and I can’t in good conscience call this a classic, though it’s not new- Universal’s got the “Extreme Edition” of the final film from the great Raul Julia, Street Fighter (also Blu-Ray). So if you enjoy things that suck, set aside money for that one.

If newer movies are more your speed, this week’s recent releases coming to DVD include: Courtney Hunt’s double Oscar nominee Frozen River (Sony, also Blu-Ray); Kevin Smith’s Zack and Miri Make a Porno (Genius Products; Samuel L. Jackson and the late Bernie Mac in Soul Men (Genius Products); Richard Gere and Diane Lane in Nights in Rodanthe (Warner, also Blu-Ray); and a pair of very different showbiz satires, Barry Levinson’s What Just Happened? (Magnolia), and Bruce Campbell directing Bruce Campbell in My Name Is Bruce (Image, also Blu-Ray). Also this week, a quartet of curious films from fascinating filmmakers: Oliver Stone’s W. (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray); Spike Lee’s WW2 drama Miracle at St. Anna (Buena Vista, also Blu-Ray); Fernando Meirelles’ Blindness (Buena Vista); and Eric Rohmer’s The Romance of Astrea and Celadon (E1 Entertainment Distribution), allegedly the master’s final film. Oddly enough, the Rohmer looks to be the most romantic movie in this week’s column. Don’t know if your Dirty Dancing-loving special lady would go for it though…

Finally, a pretty action-packed and bloody lineup of Blu-Ray only releases this week: Martin Scorsese’s classic Raging Bull (MGM); David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence (Warner); a pair of John Grisham adaptations, A Time to Kill and The Pelican Brief (both Warner); a double feature starring The Rock, Doom (Universal) and The Rundown (Universal); and two of Onion AV Club critic Scott Tobias’ New Cult Canon picks, Donnie Darko (Fox) and The Boondock Saints (Fox). Also, Milos Forman’s Amadeus: The Director’s Cut (Warner) and the table-tennis comedy Ping Pong Playa (Image).

Oh, and Pretty Woman (Disney).

Two Severed Fingers Way, Way Up, and Other Tales from the Hollywood Marketing Division

Phil Nugent — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 18:00:00 GMT

“If we weren’t making decisions based on marketability, John Malkovich would be in every movie.” Tad Friend's New Yorker article about modern movie marketing is full of great quotes like that. (It's attributed to a nameless "movie marketeer.") Friend writes, "It is often said in Hollywood that no one sets out to make a bad movie, but the truth is that people cheerfully set out to make bad movies all the time. It is more accurate to say that no one sets out to make a movie without having a particular audience in mind." Here's the way it breaks down: "The collective wisdom [among marketers] is that young males like explosions, blood, cars flying through the air, pratfalls, poop jokes, 'you’re so gay' banter, and sex—-but not romance. Young women like friendship, pop music, fashion, sarcasm, sensitive boys who think with their hearts, and romance—-but not sex (though they like to hear the naughty girl telling her friends about it)...Older women like feel-good films and Nicholas Sparks-style weepies: they are the core audience for stories of doomed love and triumphs of the human spirit. They enjoy seeing an older woman having her pick of men; they hate seeing a child in danger. Particularly once they reach thirty, these women are the most 'review-sensitive': a chorus of critical praise for a movie aimed at older women can increase the opening weekend’s gross by five million dollars. In other words, older women are discriminating, which is why so few films are made for them." On the other hand, a marketing consultant named Terry Press told Friend that “Guys [i.e., "older men"] only get off their couches twice a year, to go to Wild Hogs or 3:10 to Yuma. If all you have [in your movie's target demographic] is older males, it’s time to take a pill.”

Although marketing divisions may be the enemy of the art of movies, there is an art to devising a successful marketing campaign. Friend spends much of his time profiling Tim Palen, a 47-year-old who has designed campaigns for Lionsgate films ranging from Crash and W. to Rambo and the Saw franchise. It was he who came up with the weird mix of gross-out provocation and graphic elegance that was the poster image for Saw II: a pair of severed fingers laid out to look like a "II." (The ad was designed to do its work before the movie was released; Palen had to rejigger it so that the fingers' stubs weren't seen before the movie could get an R rating from the MPAA.) Palen's campaigns sometimes have a touch-every-base quality; with W., he had to make the director, Oliver Stone, feel that his even-handed treatment of George W. Bush was being handled with the respect it deserved, while keeping in mind that telling the world how fair and even-handed the movie was would not likely cause panic at the box offices. (Palen was disappointed when W. failed to become the second-biggest weekend grosser because he had an ad set to go that showed a picture of the movie's star, Josh Brolin, sitting on the toilet with the words, "W. Is Number Two!"

Friend happened to be shadowing Palen while he was starting work on a campaign for a new Renee Zellweger comedy, which was originally called Chilled in Miami but is now called New in Town. Palen calls it "The Devil Wears Patagonia." (“Did you see Baby Boom?" he asks Friend. "It’s that. It’s that without the baby.”) Palen worked on devising a trailer for the film with David Schneiderman, who reports on Palen's reaction to the first try: "‘Where’s the Mary Tyler Moore?’ He said, ‘This girl goes to this little town in Minnesota and she’s a cold person, and they warm her up, right? More warmth, more style, more Devil Wears Prada. ’ And I said, ‘I don’t know where that is in the movie.’ And he said, ‘Create it.’ ” You might think that people whose job it is to sell movies to the public would find it helpful to at least put up a front of thinking the movies in question are, well, not garbage, and if you do think that, you may find it sobering to discover just how very wrong you are. Palen worked on a Jessica Alba comedy called Good Luck Chuck that was so bad that Palen can only say that he "got the film open, which was kind of a feat. America likes cheese.”

Thursday Poll for October 30, 2008

Paul Clark — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 23:00:00 GMT

And It’s George W. Bush by a landslide! Inspired by the recent release of W., we asked our readers to compare the onscreen presidency of Josh Brolin with his father’s performance as Ronald Reagan on the controversial miniseries The Reagans. In the end, it wasn’t even close, with every single vote going the younger Brolin’s way. Of course, there were only a handful of votes registered by our state-of-the-art polling instruments, which either means that only a few of you have seen either or both of the films, or there was some massive voter disenfranchisement going on. Of course, neither would possibly stand a chance against Terry Crews' spot-on portrayal of President Camacho, but that's a poll for another time.

This week’s poll comes just in time for Halloween. This afternoon, we ranked our all-time favorite horror movies, and now it’s your turn. I’ve listed the five most popular films among our writing staff, and now it’s your turn. Which of the Screengrab’s all-time favorite horror movies is your favorite?

Which of Screengrab's top 5 horror classics is your favorite? | BuzzDash polls

Ooooooooh, scary! Leave your comments below, and when you’re out trick-or-treating, remember to check your candy before you eat it. See you in November!

“W.”: The Footnotes

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Oliver Stone still hasn’t gotten over all the criticism he faced from Kennedy assassination scholars after the release of JFK. Once it was made clear that the film was based more on wild conspiracy theories than factual evidence, Stone was quoted as saying, “"I believe the Warren Commission Report is a great myth. And in order to fight a myth, maybe you have to create another one, a counter-myth.” This always sounded just a tad defensive (and, of course, convenient), especially when the release of Nixon was accompanied by a published screenplay annotated with hundreds of footnotes citing sources. There’s your “facts,” buddy! He’s done the same with W., his new George W. Bush bio, but there’s no need to purchase the screenplay to get the footnotes. They’re available online!

Here’s an index to the 83 footnotes, each corresponding to a scene from the movie. For example, footnote #20 is titled Bush-Pretzel Incident. “On January 14, 2002, U.S. President George W. Bush emerged in front of a press conference with a very prominent broken blood vessel welt on his cheek, and said that he had choked on a pretzel while watching television the day before. Bush had reportedly been sitting on his couch, 90 minutes into watching an NFL football Miami vs. Baltimore play-off game on television, when he choked on the pretzel, falling to the ground, injuring himself, and briefly losing consciousness before awakening to see his dogs Barney and Spot showing alarm at his state. Laura Bush was reportedly in the adjoining room at the time, and Bush was alone watching the football game.” The source cited for this information is…well, it’s Wikipedia. But I’m sure the Wikipedia page cites someone reliable. (Really, how alarmed was Spot? Was he interviewed?)

The film also depicts W. as being behind the infamous “Willie Horton” ads during his father’s 1988 campaign – and Karl Rove being behind W. Footnote 33 provides some documentation supporting the involvement of “Junior,” but Rove is not mentioned – probably because Rove was actually running Supreme Court campaigns in Texas at the time. Let’s just call that one creative license; it doesn’t quite rise to the level of “counter-myth.” And as for the scenes in which Bush swills O’Doul’s non-alcoholic beer? Total fiction. According to Footnote #60, Bush’s brand is Buckler.

Related:
Screengrab Review: "W."
Take Five: Stoned

Morning Deal Report: A Brad Pitt Odyssey

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 14:30:00 GMT

No need for a recount: Max Payne has defeated George W. Bush at the box office polls. The Mark Wahlberg shoot-em-up took in $18 million over the weekend to claim the top spot. Finishing second was that pesky Beverly Hills Chihuahua, just edging out The Secret Life of Bees. Oliver Stone’s W. was fourth with $10.6 million.

After dumping Darren Aronofsky from his dance card, Brad Pitt is preparing for a space Odyssey. “After turning Homer's epic poem The Iliad into the 2004 film Troy, Warner Bros. and Brad Pitt are teaming with George Miller to adapt the Greek poet's other masterwork, The Odyssey,” Variety reports. “Their intention is to transfer the tale to a futuristic setting in outer space.”

Miramax is “developing Daily Show head writer Ben Karlin and Stu Zicherman's satirical comedy A.C.O.D. (Adult Children of Divorce), the story of a grown man still caught in the crossfire of his parents' 15-year-old divorce,” per The Hollywood Reporter. “‘We're very glad to get the validation from Miramax, especially since we've been working on the script longer than any of our parents were married,’ Karlin and Zicherman said.”

Related:
Brad Pitt Jilts Aronofsky Again
Screengrab Review: "W."

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: Oct. 11-17, 2008

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 21:30:00 GMT

Hey there, Screengrab readers. Joe the Plumber here. You don’t want to know the details, believe me, but there’s been an unusual toilet incident here at Screengrab headquarters and I’ve been called in to take care of the situation. It’s cool, I don’t mind helping these guys out because they pay cash under the table. No taxes! But they did ask if I wouldn’t mind handling the Highlight Reel while I’m here. I’ll admit, I don’t usually read the Screengrab – I’m more of a Modern Materialist guy – but they slipped me a few extra bucks, so what the hell. Here’s the best stuff I saw this week:

They did a decent job with the Top 25 Leading Ladies of All Time (Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven and Eight), although I personally would have included Raquel Welch. Always had a thing for her. And this list of the Top 007 James Bond Theme Songs (Parts One and Two) is all right, but where’s For Your Eyes Only? That Sheena Easton had some pipes – and I know from pipes!

I don’t get out to the pictures much, so I probably won’t see W. and What Just Happened, but I am looking forward to that new Star Trek. Does anyone know if it has tribbles in it? I never saw Cockfighter, My Neighbor Totoro, Swept Away or Boiler Room – but I’ve seen my share of boiler rooms, let me tell you!

Aw, jeez, this toilet is bad news. What is that green stuff? Anyway, I gotta wrap this up, but if you’re interested in Tony Curtis’s book, Oliver Stone movies, the Saw amusement park ride or Jabba the portly Irish gent, go read about ‘em.

Oh, and this isn’t funny. These are tools, not weapons.

Take Five: Stoned

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Oliver Stone's hastily assembled, curiously timed film biography of George W. Bush, W., opens everywhere today. "Why?" is a question for the ages; Bush is not only still alive, he's still President of the United States, and the movie was completed before one of the major events of his administration actually happened. Couldn't Stone have waited a few years? After all, Jim Morrison had been in the ground for two decades before Stone got around to making a crappy movie about him. Our own Scott Von Doviak has already done the heavy lifting of actually seeing W., and his review suggests that it's another non-triumph for Ollie; but in this case, as much as we may find the guy off-putting, Take Five comes to praise Stone, not to bury him. As we do every time he comes out with a new movie, we float our favorite theory about the man: that he's actually a very good writer who failed upwards and became a very mediocre director, a living example of the Peter Principle. With the sole (and bewildering) exception of Evita, Oliver Stone hasn't written a movie he didn't also direct in over twenty years; but lest we forget, in his early years, Stone was considered a top-notch screenwriter who was expert at plucking the key themes out of someone else's vision -- making them lean, mean, and, perhaps most memorably, violent in an incredibly compelling way. So today, we're going to look at five movies which Stone didn't direct, but whose screenplays he fully or partly wrote -- almost all of which we like more than most of the films where he was behind the camera.

MIDNIGHT EXPRESS (1978)

Directed by the erratic Alan Parker, the infamous, controversial Midnight Express was a 32-year-old Oliver Stone's first major motion picture as a screenwriter. It went on to become a huge box office success, as well as spurring a major moral panic over drug smuggling and making the words "Turkish prison" as paralyzing as an ice cube down the back of the shirt. Unsurprisingly, in later years, it became clear that Stone's screenplay was a wildly over-the-top exaggeration full of fabrications, distortions and outright nonsense, despite its claim of being based on a true story; even the real-life Billy Hayes repudiated it. But that was, and to some extent still is, the genius of Oliver Stone: he could extrapolate the juciest meat of a story and sizzle it up into an absurd paranoid fantasy you couldn't help but devour.

CONAN THE BARBARIAN (1982)

Still, in our opinion, the greatest thing that Oliver Stone has ever done, the hugely underrated Conan the Barbarian found him paired in the screenwriting duties with director John Milius. Milius, an unabashed right-wing war hawk and suspected crypto-fascist, had a habit of butting heads with '60s liberals like Stone, with the conflict bringing out the best in both of them; he'd previously worked with Francis Ford Coppola, even more of a lefty than Stone, on Apocalypse Now, and their diametrically opposed viewpoints about the Vietnam War resulted in a crazed masterpiece. Conan is no less so; Stone's cynical pro-civilization standpoint and Milius' joyously pro-barbarian views resulted in a movie that is uncannily faithful to Robert E. Howard's violent, amoral books.

SCARFACE (1983)

Even to Brian DePalma's most vociferous defenders -- a dwindling number in which we count ourselves members in good standing -- there is a general recognition that Scarface, his updating of the 1930s gangster classic to the Miami drug trade days, isn't actually a very good movie. But it is a very important movie, insofar as it influenced dozens of later thug-life pictures both better and worse than it was; and, what's more, for its many, many failings, it's a compulsively watchable movie. Even if you know about its overblown performances, its ridiculous ending, and its general sense of aimlessness and enervation, you hardly ever want to turn it off. And a lot of that is down to screenwriter Oliver Stone, who crammed it full of so many hilariously quotable lines that it became the biggest influence on hip-hop since James Brown.

YEAR OF THE DRAGON (1985)

Michael Cimino and Oliver Stone have been tied together by fate since early on. They share similar styles and similar obsessions, and both were rumored for many years as wanting to do a remake of the woozy film version of Ayn Rand's ridiculous novel, The Fountainhead. The one time they worked together was on 1985's Year of the Dragon, a film in which all of their strengths and weaknesses were apparent. Just before giving full voice to his Vietnam experiences in Platoon, Stone hints at them here, constantly and darkly; his dialogue is often flat and creaky, as opposed to the gloriously lurid bombshells of Scarface, but his characters and scenarios compliment Cimino's hyperactive sense of busy detail and rhetorical bombast, and he plays on themes of male bonding and sudden violence as a social actor that he'd later explore as a director.

8 MILLION WAYS TO DIE (1986)

The last movie Stone would write for a director other than himself (aside from the aforementioned Evita, to which his contributions were minimal) was Hal Ashby's 8 Million Ways to Die, a movie reviled by many but regarded by others as a miniature masterpiece that doesn't get nearly the attention it deserves. Whatever the case, its favors -- which, for its defenders, include some gorgeously lurid violence and dialogue so scuzzy it borders on the beautiful, as well as a nice lead performance by Jeff Bridges -- are hard to discern under lots of muddle. Did Ashby really direct, or did Stone take over when he was fired? Did Stone really write, or is Robert Towne responsible for the script Stone could no longer handle when he ended up behind the camera? We may never know; and a lot of people simply don't care.

Related Posts:

Dissecting/Debating W.

Stone vs. Iran, Round 2

In Other Blogs: Hangover Edition

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 14:30:00 GMT

You’ll have to excuse my disheveled appearance and fogginess of mind this morning, but the Red Sox made me drink a lot last night. Was that an amazing comeback or what? Am I right? Huh? Oh, right. Movies. Let us segue through this Beyond the Multiplex post on Madonna’s directorial debut, Filth and Wisdom, as Andrew O’Hehir ponders his love for Madge and the obstacle in his way. “Does A-Rod possess the spiritual and/or aesthetic wealth that Madonna and I share? I say nay. He may not, for instance, recognize the precise odor of hipster familiarity surrounding Filth and Wisdom, which seems like a movie Jim Jarmusch might have started in 1991 and then abandoned because it wasn't going anywhere. Filth and Wisdom isn't laughable or embarrassing; instead it's rather sweet and 100 percent recycled, which might not be a bad way of describing its creator at this vulnerable time in her personal and professional life. It's a little bit Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, a little bit John Waters, a little bit Darren Aronofsky, a little bit (God help us) Desperately Seeking Susan. It's dumb. I sort of liked it.”

At his new blog Hollywood & Fine, Marshall Fine disagrees. “The phrase ‘Madonna’s directorial debut’ does not so much trip off the tongue as sound like a punchline, which is appropriate in this case. Based on Filth and Wisdom, she hasn’t lost her knack for creating unwatchable cinema. Filth and Wisdom is a silly stew of phony profundity that will have you checking your watch almost as soon as the movie starts. Like Hiro on Heroes, Madonna has mastered the ability to make time stop – or, at least, crawl. Are we there yet? No, sorry, better settle in for a long slog.”

Did you know that the Screengrab’s own Phil Nugent has a blog called, oddly enough, The Phil Nugent Experience? Not only is it the finest source of hilarious and insightful political coverage in all the Bronx, but occasionally Phil even writes about movies. What can I say – the man loves his job so much, he does it in his spare time. Here Phil defends the unloved Intolerable Cruelty. “For me, the Coens' fun machines tend to turn cold without a strong, magnetic performance at their center. The warming star power at this movie's core is generated by Clooney, who parodies his own image by magnifying his golden boy attractiveness to such a degree that the gap between it and the Miles's myopic, self-enthralled fatuousness becomes an amazing thing to behold. (It's much more entertaining than seeing him send up his image in Burn After Reading by having the other characters react to him as if he were the irresistable George Clooney even though he seems to be imitating Warren Oates.)”

It’s never too early for Halloween at Arbogast on Film, now in the midst of a month-long 31 Screams celebration. Today he looks at the original 1958 version of The Fly. “I'm not sure what to make of the flyman. As most of the dead scientist's intelligence was retained within his manfly brain, there obviously isn't much left for that of the flyman... who screams pitiably as he meets his doom. His voice is high-pitched - just within the range of human hearing - but his pleas are unmistakeable. ‘Help me,’ he cries out. ‘Help me.’ And as the spider draws closer, it sounds as if he is yelling ‘Go away... go away’ to the spider in childish desperation. And that's just it-- this scene horrifies, it cuts to the bone because it's like watching a child being murdered right in front of you.”

And finally, with W. arriving in theaters today, our good friends at Spill have reimagined Oliver Stone’s film as a Sarah Palin biopic:

Find more videos like this on The Spill.com Movie Community<

Screengrab Review: "W."

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 16:00:00 GMT

It's not for me to offer unsolicited advice to a famous and successful filmmaker like Oliver Stone, especially when it's too late for said advice to be taken anyway – but what the hell, while I'm here I might as well tell you my idea for the movie Stone should have made instead of W. As you may have read here in the Screengrab or elsewhere in the liberal elite media, W. is a biopic of our current president, George W. Bush, who is not up for re-election and is leaving office in January no matter who wins. (Unless he barricades himself inside the Oval Office with a shotgun and a bottle of whiskey, which might have made for a good scene in W…but I'm getting ahead of myself.) As such, W. is unlikely to have a substantial effect on the upcoming election.

What if, instead, Stone had made a movie about the administration of President John McCain? Stone and his screenwriter Stanley Weiser could have cooked up a juicy, paranoid fantasia of a potential McCain Era in American history, supplemented by flashbacks from McCain's actual colorful past. It would be a similar movie in many ways; as Tom Dickinson writes in the fascinating Rolling Stone cover story "Make-Believe Maverick," McCain and Bush were both youthful fuck-ups with daddy issues, the major difference being that "George W. Bush was a much better pilot."

Our 43rd president's career as a pilot isn't covered in W. but Stone's film samples most of the greatest hits from Bush's misspent youth. We see his hazing as a Yale fraternity pledge, his inability to hold down a job for long (whether it be on a Texas oil rig or on Wall Street), his fondness for the demon alcohol, his courtship of librarian and future wife Laura (Elizabeth Banks), his baseball dreams, his sobriety and salvation, and finally his entry into "the family business." And although we don't see much of brother Jeb in the movie, it's clear that (in Stone's view, anyway) patriarch George Herbert Walker Bush (James Cromwell) sees the boy he calls "junior" as the Fredo of the family.

These blasts from the past are scattered throughout W., which primarily concerns itself with the Bush administration’s ramp-up to the war in Iraq. The film opens months after the 9/11 terror attacks, as the president and his cabinet brainstorm a catchphrase that will resonate with the American people. “Axis of hatred” falls short, but…ahhh, “Axis of Evil! I like that!” This scene plays exactly like the moment in Stone’s The Doors when Ray Manzarek dreams up the keyboard intro to “Light My Fire.” Sometimes it seems there is only one biopic in the world.

Stone’s unique brew of absurdity, paranoia and psychobabble is at its most potent in these Strangelovian war room scenes. The cast alone makes for compelling viewing, if only for the wide variety of acting approaches. As Condoleezza Rice, Thandie Newton is such a near-perfect replicant, she doesn’t come close to resembling an actual human being – she’s like something Disney shipped in from the Hall of Presidents. Jeffrey Wright is doing a voice as Colin Powell, but to the best of my recollection, it’s nothing like Powell’s actual voice. Others barely attempt any imitation at all; as the man Bush calls “Vice,” Richard Dreyfuss only once hints at Cheney’s Penguin grin, but he’s got the prince of darkness vibe down pat. When Cheney explains what the real plan is for Iraq – that is, the establishment of a new American Empire in the Middle East and Asia, with delicious black oil flowing from every pipe – W. is at its most giddily satirical and subversive.

It’s a shame the rest of it is so pedestrian. It all flows together and moves along at a brisk pace – it doesn’t feel like a movie that was shot, edited and released within the span of a baseball season – but the script is far too reductive and simple-minded. (Yes, you could argue that’s appropriate to the central character, but then you still have to sit through it.) Stone likes to be able to claim he’s depicting both sides of the story, so he appears to treat key points like W’s religious conversion and romance with Laura seriously. Then he turns around and gives us one of those classic Bushisms (“Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?”) and jars us right out of the movie.

As Phil Nugent posted earlier this week, Stone had originally planned to include more black comedy and surreal elements, and I do think that might have been the more fruitful approach. To the extent that W. does work, give credit to Josh Brolin – he’s the one member of the cast who gives both a pitch-perfect impression and a genuine performance. It’s hard to play dumb and spoiled and, y’know, carelessly destructive of an entire country, and still maintain a modicum of likeability – but Bush did pull it off for a while and Brolin pulls it off here. Poor Elizabeth Banks is saddled with a conception of Laura Bush that doesn’t extend much beyond “enabling airhead,” and James Cromwell projects too much gruff gravitas to pass for the patrician elder Bush.

It all comes down to “Poppy didn’t love me best, so I’ll show him,” and even if that’s true in reality, it’s a boring cliché on the screen. And since we’re dealing with Oliver Stone, a point worth making once is worth making a hundred times, in 100-point boldface type, until not even the dimmest bulb in the audience can possibly miss it. I’m reminded of a scene in Barcelona, where a character explains that he understands subtext to mean a “hidden message or import of some kind,” but wonders what you call “the message or meaning that's right there on the surface, completely open and obvious?” That is, of course, the text – and Stone’s movies are all text all the time, right there on the surface, completely open and obvious.

Watch It For Free: Crawford

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Oliver Stone’s W. is due in theaters a week from Friday, and those of you who want to do a little homework ahead of time have a golden opportunity today. The documentary Crawford, which I reviewed during SXSW this year (and Andrew Osborne also chimed in on) is streaming for free online for your cubicle-viewing pleasure. It’s the story of George W. Bush’s hometown – but not really of course, because he just moved there before the 2000 election to secure his Texas good ol’ boy image. For everyone crossing days off the calendar until the end of the Bush era, it’s a must-see. Hit the jump for the linkage.

Hulu has your free Crawford today.

Red Suspension of Disbelief: Gordon Gekko's Speechwriter Would Like to Clarify

Phil Nugent — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Stanley Weiser, Oliver Stone's co-writer on the 1987 Wall Street, has just published his apologia for his part in the creation of the popular image of the morally shifty, massive-balled financial insider as American hero. (Weiser also wrote Stone's forthcoming W. as well as other politically crusading movies and TV films such as Murder in Mississippi, Freedom Song, Rudy: The Rudy Guiliani Story, and 1987's Project X, in which Matthew Broderick fearlessly rescued monkeys from The Man.) Wall Street, which starred Michael Douglas as maverick financier Gordon Gekko and Charlie Sheen, who had already done time as Stone's youthful fantasy alter ego in Platoon, as his corruptible protege. Douglas, playing a role designed to click with moviegoers' memories of the kind of charismatic heel role that his father had all but taken out a copyright on decades earlier, had his star heightened by the movie, for which he won an Academy Award. (As for Sheen, he can now be seen rotting before the viewer's very eyes on the TV sitcom Two and a Half Men. The other representatives of the show's title are played by Jon Cryer and some kid. I think somebody's math is off.) Meanwhile, Gekko's showboat moment, the "'Greed is good' speech", has become not just a one-scene highlight reel of Douglas's career but a signpost moment in 1980s culture, a phenomenon that's been challenging the 60's status as The Decade That Refused to Leave. (Oliver Stone, of course, has a foot solidly in both.) A recent critics' symposium on the possible effects of the Wall Street crash pointed to that speech as a choice example of satire that was adopted by people who steadfastly refused to get the joke.

With the current financial meltdown, Gekko's name has been coming up a lot lately, always with the understanding that to cite the character by name is to use a form of shorthand to conjure up images of predatory jackals in power suspenders. What isn't always apparent is that the people citing Wall Street as some kind of dire prophecy remember that the movie started out as stale news and then had the great good fortune to become an unplanned comment on breaking news, circa 1987. Stone had decided to do a movie about Wall Street around the time that the hammer started coming down on insider traders, including Ivan Boesky, who was arrested and started selling out his fellow street rats in 1986, the same year that he had delivered a "greed-is-good"-type speech ("I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself") at the University of California. (Weiser says that Gekko was partly based on Boesky and partly based on other high rollers. He was also partly based on Stone; Weisner writes that the director's "rants" and "unpublishable barbs proved to be the precise varnish with which I needed to coat Gekko.") The movie was treated as a big deal leading up to its release--Stone had won the Oscar for Platoon earlier in the year--but there was also a feeling reported in the trade press that nobody really had huge box office hopes for what amounted to "two hours of people talking about money." Then the 1987 Wall Street crash hit, and audiences who knew that something important was happening but were having trouble figuring out just what it was from reading the business section crowded into theaters to see if they could better make sense of the big news story of the day if it had Darryl Hannah in it. At the time, the 1987 Wall Street freak-out was widely reported as the death knell of the go-go-80s/Reagan era, but it turned out that greed had been, if not necessarily good, then sorely misunderestimated.

According to Weisner, Stone conceived of the idea of "a movie about Wall Street" pretty much on the spot, veering away from the idea of a movie that he had ordered Weisner to research about the 1950's quiz show scandals, and casting it in ambitious literary terms before either he or his collaborator had any idea of what it might entail in terms of a story or characters. "Read Crime and Punishment over the weekend," he told Weisner, "and we'll talk Monday." Weisner, to his credit, admits to having made do with the Cliff's Notes. When he reported back that he didn't see anything in there that they could apply to Wall Street, Stone, who may very well not have been clear about anything about Crime and Punishment except that he liked the title, told him to go read The Great Gatsby instead. (Weisner rented the movie.) After this unpromising beginning, things went on to work out okay, but Weisner marvels at the fact that in the last twenty years he's "run into quite a number of younger people, who upon discovering that I co-wrote the film, wax rhapsodic about it . . . but often for the wrong reasons...A typical example would be a business executive or a younger studio development person spouting something that goes like this: 'The movie changed my life. Once I saw it I knew that I wanted to get into such and such business. I wanted to be like Gordon Gekko.'" If he had it all to do over again, he says, he would rewrite Gekko's big line to read: "Greed is Good. But I've never seen a Brinks truck pull up to a cemetery." This would certainly have had a different effect on audiences, assuming that, like me, they would have had no earthly idea just what it's supposed to mean.

Trailer Review: W. Trailer #2

Paul Clark — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Ah, there’s the Oliver Stone we all know. When it was announced that Stone was making a movie about George W. Bush to be released on the eve of the Presidential election, many people scratched their heads. How would he take on our most prickly and controversial Commander in Chief since Nixon? But the more I see of W., the more interested I get. Sure, Stone and screenwriter Stanley Weiser could very well make mincemeat of the historical record, but hell- that’s par for the course with Stone. Yet I like the chutzpah he shows here, using a strange cocktail of fact, conjecture and outright fabrication to attempt to figure out what makes Bush tick. Moreover, he’s actually done it in a context that looks like a rollicking entertainment instead of a muckraking screed. More and more, it’s looking like I’ll be there opening weekend.

Screengrab Fall Preview: Paul Clark's Picks

Paul Clark — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 17:30:00 GMT

Yesterday, my colleague Scott Von Doviak dared all of his fellow Screengrab staffers to weigh in on our most anticipated movies of the fall. Given my lifelong inability to resist a dare (which resulted in my eating far too many unspeakable things in my younger days) I’ve decided to answer the call. Craving an additional challenge- and hoping to spotlight the wide array of good and bad releases coming soon to a theatre near me- I’ve decided to eliminate all contenders that appeared in Scott’s preview. Here goes:

3 UP

1. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – for years, David Fincher has been one of Hollywood’s most gifted filmmakers, with last year’s Zodiac his best film yet. With Button, Fincher turns his camera on an honest-to-goodness work of literature (an F. Scott Fitzgerald story, fer chrissakes), but don’t expect a workmanlike Tradition of Quality-style adaptation. Button re-teams Fincher with Brad Pitt, who continues to improve as an actor by seeking out adventurous material, and this story gives him his biggest challenge yet, not only playing a character from childhood through old age, but playing him while aging in reverse. It’s the kind of story that requires a visionary to pull off, and I can think of few better candidates for the job than Fincher. Every year, there’s at least one high-profile movie that I actively root for to be great, and this year, it’s Benjamin Button.

2. A Christmas Tale – Unlike Benjamin Button, the latest film by the great French filmmaker Arnaud Desplechin is something of a known quantity, premiering at Cannes to almost universal acclaim. But even if it hadn’t already screened, my hopes for this one would be through the roof. In the past few years, Desplechin has become one of my favorite filmmakers, and he’s coming off his finest work yet, 2004’s Kings and Queen. Factor in that Christmas Tale re-unites four of that film’s stars- Matthieu Amalric, Catherine Deneuve, Emmanuelle Devos, and Hippolyte Girardot- and I’m sold. That the film’s IMDb recommends the Steve Martin remake of Cheaper By the Dozen shouldn’t be held against it.

3. The Brothers Bloom – as I stated in my Trailer Review earlier this week, I’m in the pro-Brick camp, so naturally I’m excited for Rian Johnson’s follow-up project. But he’s also assembled an irresistible cast (I love Brody and Ruffalo as brothers, and Rachel Weisz is always best when she plays daffy), so I’m extra-stoked for this one. Could we be witnessing the rise of a major American filmmaker? Here’s hoping.

3 DOWN

1. Defiance – tell me if you’ve heard this one before: Ed Zwick directs a film about an outsider who aids a group of minorities in fighting about those who oppress them. That the minorities are Jews and the time period is during World War II only makes Defiance’s Oscar-grubbing even more blatant. Thanks, but no thanks.

2. RockNRolla – you know, I was under the impression that the abject failure of Revolver coupled with the divorce from Madonna meant that the moviegoing public would get a break from Guy Ritchie. Alas, that beautiful dream wasn’t to be. It was nice while it lasted though…

3. Bedtime Stories – Adam Sandler’s comic persona might be juvenile, but he’s always been at his best at unleashing his rage onscreen in decidedly un-kid-friendly ways. Less successful are his attempts to warm the heart, which makes the idea of a Sandler family comedy all the more misguided. The presence of Adam (The Pacifier) Shankman in the director’s chair doesn’t inspire much confidence either.

WILD CARD

It’s not as odd as Scott’s choice of Oliver Stone’s W. (what could be?), but I’m pretty conflicted about Quantum of Solace. What made Casino Royale so damn good is that it combined a kickass James Bond thrill ride with a legitimately compelling story. But although hiring director Marc Forster hints that the producers might be trying for that same balance of action and drama, I have my doubts that lightning will strike twice. Add to this Forster’s lack of experience in the action genre, plus the fact that unlike Casino this one doesn’t have an Ian Fleming novel to provide a solid narrative foundation, and Quantum has a lot to live up to. Sure, it might be diverting, but after Casino Royale, that just doesn’t cut the mustard anymore. However, I’d love nothing more than to be wrong about this.

Trailer Review: W.

Paul Clark — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Once again, Oliver Stone finds himself faced with the same questions that accompanied his previous film, World Trade Center- is it too soon to make a movie that dramatizes an American tragedy? Okay, settle down folks, I'm just kidding. And so, it seems, is Stone, making a movie about a boozing, tomcatting son of privilege who somehow rose to the highest office in the land. More than ever, the film feels like something of a put-on, what with George H.W. Bush threatening his son with an ass-whuppin’. But at the same time, I’m intrigued as to what the hell Stone is going to do with this. At the very least, it should prove to be a million miles removed from the stately apologia that was Nixon, to say nothing of his pious WTC.

Shreveport, La.: Your Family-Friendly One-Stop Film Location

Phil Nugent — Tue, 20 May 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Shreveport. Louisiana, the third-largest city in the Pelican State and the center of the "Ark-La-Tex" nexus, is a real nice place to raise your kids up. It was once a swaggering power center of the oil business. But then the Lousiana branch of the Standard Oil Company, which was located in Shreveport back when Huey Long used to like to talk trash about the company's Board of Directors and their mamas, got absorbed by the New Jersey branch, and in the 1980s the city was hit hard by an economic downturn. Today the city is enjoying a major resurgence, thanks to an unlikely embrace by the film industry. Oliver Stone's W. is just one of a number of productions shooting there now, following the trail blazed by Factory Girl, The Mist, and Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay. Now, David Carr reports, "Major film-industry companies like Paskal Lighting, Cinelease and Panavision all have permanent presences here. And last month Nu Image/Millennium Films, a producer and distributor of independent films like Mad Money and My Mom’s New Boyfriend, announced the construction of a 6.7-acre production campus with a planned expansion to a 20-acre full-service studio that will have three sound stages, production offices, a mill and a prop house."

Lousiana had been angling to attract film business for some twenty years now, in reaction to the loss of oil revenue that affected the whole state. This was in the period when New Orleans, in particular, redefined itself as dependent on the tourist dollar and started playing up its image as an exotic locale, sort of like a Disneyland where you could get a lap dance. Towards this end, Carr notes, "The state offers a 25 percent tax credit for in-state spending, which bumps to 35 percent when the money goes to Louisiana production crews." Once upon a time, the immediate result of this was a whole spate of movies (Tightrope, The Big Easy, Blaze, etc.) full of crooked politicians in white suits and cops in ill-fitting clothes wiping the sweat off their foreheads with hankies while trudging through the French Quarter during Mardi Gras to see if Madame LeCree the hoodoo priestess could throw the monkey bones and tell them where that serial killer might be hiding. But then Hurricane Katrina killed off whatever appeal N'Orleans still might have had for big production companies that hadn't already been wiped out by overreaching local grafters. After Katrina forced "many productions working with state tax credits in New Orleans had to scramble for both higher ground and a place to finish their films", they landed in Shreveport, and in the process noticed that the economic bust had left behind a city "with a substantial infrastructure, with varied architecture and numerous highways, nice characteristics if you’re making a movie." While New Orleans tended to star as in itself in any movie made there, Shreveport can easily pass for Anywhere, U.S.A., sort of like Toronto with humidity. " And," writes Carr, "though there are no direct flights to Shreveport from Los Angeles and New York, city officials try to overcome what would seem to be a deal-breaker by doubling down on the hospitality." Oliver Stone, for one, has no complaints. “I made four movies in Dallas. And where we are right now,” he says of Shreveport, "is Bush country, so it feels right.” The gap-toothed wonder added, “You get something working with extras from here. Look, these people are gamblers and roughnecks. They know all about boom and bust. This is a second-chance town. I just read that there may be a huge reserve of gas right under the city that was not discovered until very recently.” Of course, it could be said that any town that Oliver Stone rolls into automatically acquires a previously undetected huge reserve of gas...