The Screengrab : waking life

Set Your DVR!: May 27, 2009 - the foreseeable future

Hayden Childs — Wed, 27 May 2009 15:00:00 GMT

This is the last time I’ll write one of these columns (unless, of course, someone wants to hire me to do so), but I just wanted to mention how much fun it has been. I know that I haven’t been doing these as frequently as I should. My real job has been taking precedence, and now that I actually will have some time, there ain’t gonna be no Screengrab no more. So, since we are near the end, I wanted to write a super-deluxe column. Luckily, cable tv has made that easy by scheduling a ridiculous number of great movies in the near future!

Wednesday, May 27
On Wednesday, the best bet is Errol Morris's documentary Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, which is playing on IFC at 12:15 pm central/1:15 pm eastern (and sorry for the late notice!). Fast, Cheap and Out of Control is an impressive attempt to impose order into the chaos of the interviews, which is reflected in the subjects' chosen careers. Overnight, TCM is showing It Happened One Night at 1:30 am central/2:30 am eastern.

Thursday, May 28
Thursday has John Sayles's Lone Star on TCM at 9 pm central/10 pm eastern. That's one of the best Sayles movie, but I don't really need to tell you this, do I, dear Screengrab reader?

Friday, May 29
Starting at 5:30 am central/6:30 am eastern, Friday has six, count 'em, six, flicks worth a watch. First up is Amarcord, Fellini's last great movie, on IFC at the aforementioned time and again at 11:35 am central/12:35 pm eastern. Then TCM has The Blue Dahlia, the only movie based on a screenplay by Raymond Chandler, at 7:45 am central/8:45 am eastern. It's not the best film noir, but The Blue Dahlia has quite a lot going for it. In the afternoon, TCM is running Orson Welles's The Lady From Shanghai at 1 pm central/2 pm eastern. That's a great movie despite the ludicrous accent Welles sports throughout. In the evening, Ovation is running The Triplets of Belleville at 7 pm central/8 pm eastern and again at 10 pm central/11 pm eastern. Ovation keeps the aspect ratio of the films it runs, but it does cut for commercials frequently and sometimes bleeps adult language in racier movies. There's no adult language in The Triplets of Belleville, though. If something darker is more your style, IFC is showing Roman Polanski's Death and the Maiden at 7:15 pm central/8:15 pm eastern and again overnight at 12:30 am central/1:30 am eastern. Also overnight is the Jamaican crime flick that made Jimmy Cliff an international star, The Harder They Come, on TCM at 1:15 am central/2:15 am eastern.

Saturday, May 30
Saturday is always a good day for cable movies. The first one I want to mention is New World Order, as discussed by my esteemed colleague Mr. Scott Von Doviak, which is playing on IFC at 9 am central/10 am eastern. That's awfully early for conspiracy theories! I guess they have to get moving early on Saturday before the Military-Industrial-Fast Food-Big Oil-Computertronic-Cell Phone-Google-Movie Critic Complex gets its coffee. Unfortunately, IFC is also showing it at 3 pm central/4 pm eastern, which is all part of their plan, man! I also want to mention The Searchers on AMC at 11:30 am central/12:30 pm eastern. Don't watch good movies on AMC. They cut 'em down to 4:3 aspect, and then pan-&-scan them. It should be a crime to show The Searchers in anything other than widescreen. So skip it on AMC and get the DVD instead. Saturday afternoon is more promising. Ovation is showing Waking Life at 1 pm central/2 pm eastern. Not everyone loves or likes that movie, but I thought it was striving mightily towards something, and it deserves points for that. TCM is showing (in the correct widescreen aspect and uncut) The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly at 4 pm central/5 pm eastern. If you missed The Triplets of Belleville on Friday, Ovation is showing it again at 5 pm central/6 pm eastern and Waking Life again at 11 pm central/midnight eastern.

Sunday, May 31
Peter Weir's The Last Wave is one of those movies that I have a hard time rating. On one hand, it has a spooky ambience and haunting conceit that it doggedly maintains throughout. It features the only performance by Richard Chamberlain that could conceivably be called "acting" that anyone ever caught on film. On the other hand, the ending is profoundly silly, especially after all the dread leading up to it. With that caveat, I recommend that you take in a viewing if you haven't seen it. It's on IFC at 7 am central/8 am eastern and again at 1 pm central/2 pm eastern. Ovation is running The Triplets of Belleville again at 1 pm central/2 pm eastern and Waking Life again at 7 pm central/8 pm eastern. Ovation is also running Crumb at 9 pm central/10 pm eastern. Also recommended: since Sunday, May 31 is the ostensible last day of the Screengrab, spend your day perusing our archives!

Monday, June 1
There's funny and there's John Ford. The funny is Duck Soup on TCM at 1:30 pm central/2:30 pm eastern, then The Awful Truth on TCM at 5:15 pm central/6:15 pm eastern, and finally Young Frankenstein on Fox Movie Channel at 8:30 pm central/9:30 pm eastern. But TCM is running a John Ford film festival overnight starting at 7 pm central/8 pm eastern with Directed By John Ford, a documentary about the man as narrated by Orson Welles. Then there's Stagecoach (9 pm central/10 pm eastern), which is the movie Orson Welles watched to learn how to make movies, then The Horse Soldiers (10:45 pm central/11:45 pm eastern), The Quiet Man (1 am central/2 am eastern), and She Wore A Yellow Ribbon (3:15 am central/4:15 am eastern). That's a lot of horse opera (with an Irish interlude), but it's well worth it. Be sure to keep an eye on TCM this month, because they're running blocks of movies by great directors through all of June, sometimes two a day.

Tuesday, June 2
Ovation has the neorealist classic The Bicycle Thief (aka Bicycle Thieves) at 2 pm central/3 pm eastern and again at 5 pm central/6 pm eastern and overnight at 1 am central/2 am eastern. Thrill to the despair of a family man clinging to existence in post-war Rome! At 7 pm central/8 pm eastern, TCM is showing It Happened One Night, the first in a Frank Capra film festival running overnight. At the same time, Fox Movie Channel has Vanishing Point. But I recommend that you catch Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey on Ovation at that time (although it's playing again at 10 pm central/11 pm eastern). It's a fairly obscure documentary about the electronic musical instrument and its inventor that packs a surprising story and an emotional punch.

Wednesday, June 3
Nothing today, sorry (if he's your thing, TCM has a King Vidor film festival this evening, so check it out). Perhaps you could spend your day weeping for the lost Screengrab and cursing the cruel economy?

Thursday, June 4
TCM is running an Ingmar Bergman film fest starting at 7 pm central/8 pm eastern with an appearance by the director on the Dick Cavett Show from 1971. Then there's The Seventh Seal (8 pm central/9 pm eastern), Wild Strawberries (9:45 pm central/10:45 pm eastern), Persona (11:30 pm central/12:30 am eastern), Hour Of The Wolf (1 am central/2 am eastern), and The Passion of Anna (2:45 am central/3:45 am eastern). The first three in particular are necessary viewing for film geeks.

Friday, June 5
IFC has Before Sunrise at 4:15 pm central/5:15 pm eastern, but TCM is running Carol Reed movies all day and Steven Spielberg movies all night. Check out the schedule. Of course, I especially recommend The Third Man at 5 pm central/6 pm eastern.

And this is as far out as I'm going with specific recommendations. But watch TCM for Fritz Lang Day on June 8, Preston Sturges Night on June 10, John Huston and Akira Kurosawa on June 11, Jacques Tourneur on June 12, and... I should really cut this off here. It's been fun! Thanks for reading!

SXSW Review: American Prince

Hayden Childs — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 15:00:00 GMT

In 1977, Martin Scorsese made a short film about his friend Steven Prince. American Boy is a remarkably simple movie. There’s a scene of Scorsese and Prince goofing around in a hot tub at the very beginning of the film. There’s a few home movies of Prince as a little boy that are interspersed throughout the film. There’s a sudden and inexplicable brawl between the diminutive Prince and portly character actor George Memmoli because Scorsese loves nothing better than pandering to the ladies. But for most of the film’s 55 minutes, Prince just hangs out in a living room full of friends (including Scorsese) and tells his wildly entertaining stories. American Boy was not easy to find in the days before the Internet, but now, of course, the whole thing is available on YouTube.

American Prince is a sequel of sorts. Most of this movie consists of Prince sitting in someone’s living room, telling stories about his life. At one point near the end of the movie, Prince establishes that they’ve been filming for about five hours, and it’s clear that the bulk of the movie was taken from that same interview. In American Prince, Steven Prince reveals why he walked away from the movie business (a close call with a famous Hollywood murder), what he’s doing now (contractor and co-owner of a medical marijuana clinic in California), and how much he enjoyed sharing a house with Scorsese and Robbie Robertson of The Band in the late 70s (that would be lots and lots and lots). He talks about how two of the stories from American Boy have cropped up in other films. He himself retold one story in Richard Linklater’s Waking Life (and American Prince’s director Tommy Pallotta was a producer of that movie). Another story, in which he had to resuscitate a woman who had overdosed by sticking a needle full of adrenalin straight into her heart, appeared mostly untouched in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. You remember it, I’m sure. It’s hard to forget the image of Uma Thurman with a needle sticking out of her chest.

Steven Prince is a fun guy to spend time with. His stories, and the way he tells them, are fascinating and funny and full of truth. It’s easy to see why both Scorsese and Pallotta thought that a feature film could be made of what is essentially one man’s monologue. The downside of Pallotta’s movie, though, is the camerawork. Scorsese is smart enough to keep his camera at a steady middle distance from Prince so that the viewer can get the full experience of his expressive body language. For some unknown reason, Pallotta frames his picture in close to Prince, way too close, and then he can’t stay still for a second. The camera is jittery, jumping around Prince face, in tight on his mouth, leaping over to a shoulder, sometimes partially obscured by someone in front of it. For a short, couple-minute interview, it would be okay, a little intimate and woozy maybe, but leaving the viewer with the feeling of being there. For nearly an hour, however (the film runs 52 minutes), it’s a dizzingly bad choice. I like Prince, but being that close to him gave me vertigo. In the hot tub scene at the beginning of American Boy, Scorsese sends Prince back over to his own side when he encroaches too much on Marty’s space. Pallotta should have taken note; it’s easier to feel close to someone if you aren't smothered.

The camerawork aside (actually, one more comment, just to make sure that I’m being clear: it’s not bad camerawork, but it’s not right for this picture), American Prince has a lot going for it. It’s entertaining, smart material, and by all rights, it should bring Steven Prince to a new audience.

In Other Blogs: Festivus!

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 15:30:00 GMT

At Beyond the Multiplex, Andrew O’Hehir previews the New York Film Festival. “Like any institution closely identified with New York City -- the Yankees, the Times, the Metropolitan Museum, the scum-sucking financial establishment that has ruined all of our lives and our children's as well -- the New York Film Festival makes a pretty easy target for crusading anti-elitists of all stripes…What's far more interesting about the NYFF after all this time is that it remains remarkably successful at its self-assigned mission, anachronistic and undemocratic as that may appear. In programming relatively few features (28 this year) -- most of them drawn from the major European festivals in Berlin, Cannes and Venice -- and in insisting on a pre-pop-culture vision of cinema as an art form, festival director Richard Peña and his staff have, perversely enough, proven to be shrewd table-setters for the fall film marketplace.”

Erstwhile Screengrabber Mike D’Angelo already has a page of NYFF reviews up, and it sounds like you can scratch Tony Manero off your list. “For those not temperamentally inclined to celebrate uncompromising cine-machismo for its own sake, however, this is pretty thin gruel, deeply unpleasant without ever coming within spitting distance of enlightening. Once you've been startled by Raúl assisting an old woman home and then unexpectedly pummeling her to death for her TV set, and then seen him pawn the TV in order to fund a replica of the multicolored Saturday Night Fever dance floor, you're good to go, literally -- everything that follows is more of the same. American Psycho didn't really work as a movie, but at least Bret Easton Ellis had a coherent idea, in that you can readily see the connection between '80s materialism, Bateman's sadistic violence and the transformation of Genesis into a Phil Collins solo act. How exactly does living under Pinochet translate to disco fever? Why are we watching Tony Manero and not, say, Roy Neary or Luke Skywalker?”

Also weighing in on NYFF is Vadim Rizov at The House Next Door, who finds Gomorrah comes up wanting when compared to our favorite TV show. “The problem with Gomorrah is that it could start and end anywhere. The Wire runs full arcs, tying social problems to well-developed characters; the war never ends, but the characters move on. Gomorrah is representative types running through a loop: today's Scarface-emulating young sociopaths are tomorrow's dead meat, but there'll always be someone to replace them. All five stories in Gomorrah's hydra-headed monster have rough conclusions, but anyone expecting a movie about mob life to end in any kind of upbeat fashion a) needs to watch more movies b) needs, indeed, to read up a bit more. Gomorrah is exactly what I thought it would be, which means there's no surprises.”

Dazed and Confused and Waking Life star Wiley Wiggins was a regular fixture around Fantastic Fest, and as this entry at his blog It’s Not For Everyone shows, he’s down with the Ozsploitation. “Brian Trenchard-Smith, fresh from his appearance in Not Quite Hollywood, introduced and answered questions about one of his very early films, The Man From Hong Kong. As one might expect from an Australian Kung Fu movie, the driving sequences are better than the fight sequences, and the main car chase in the. Movie is actually one of the most impressive filmed, mainly for the demolition-derby ferocity with which the cars slam into one another and a sureness in the photography and editing during the chase. The acting and plotting are the most memorable when they flirt with self parody. The movie was a lot of fun, but pales in comparison to some of Trenchard-Smith's crazier films.”

And in List-o-Mania this week, Filmbrain features Lost in the Sixties and Seventies: A Dozen I'd Kill to See. At number four is the 1971 obscurity You've Got to Walk It Like You Talk It or You'll Lose That Beat. “Easily the holiest of grails on the list, this is a film I originally heard about back in the early 80s, but only recently confirmed that it does indeed truly exist. Dig this: an anarchic anti-establishment comedy that skewers then-contemporary mores that stars Zalman King (yes, that one) as a young man trying to find his way in New York City. Add to that a cast that includes Allen Garfield, Richard Pryor, and Roz Kelly (Happy Days' Pinky Tuscadero), and features music by Steely Dan's Walter Becker and Donald Fagen. Oh yes, Wes Craven worked on the film as well. I have never met a single soul who can honestly claim to have seen this film, so if you have, please do speak up!”

Screengrab Salutes: The Top 20 Animated Features Films (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 20:30:00 GMT

SOUTH PARK: BIGGER, LONGER AND UNCUT (1999)

Oh, sure, The Simpsons Movie was funny...but it wasn't South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut funny. It wasn't even "Marge vs. the Monorail"-era Simpsons funny. After ten years of writing, The Simpsons Movie seemed no better or worse than an above-average episode of the show drawn out to feature length. (And, aside from the "Spider-Pig" theme, where were the musical numbers?!?!) By way of comparison, when Trey Parker and Matt Stone got a chance to bring their consistently hilarious and subversive Comedy Central cartoon to the big screen, they pulled out all the stops: a full, Broadway/Guitar Hero-quality, Oscar-nominated musical score by future Tony-winner Marc Shaiman and Metallica frontman James Hetfield (!!!), a typically topical, economy-size blockbuster of a plot, some unobtrusively awesome voice cameos, impressively stepped-up animation and, most importantly, the swearing...oh, the wonderful, wonderful swearing, some of the most (literally) musical cursing in cinema history...and “Uncle Fucker” wasn’t even the funniest part. Or the most shocking: that came later, when I actually felt a rare burst of affection for Robin Williams during his good-natured, who’d-a-thunk-it performance of “Blame Canada” at the 72 Annual Academy Awards ceremony.

WAKING LIFE (2001)

In some ways, Richard Linklater's sixth feature played like a sequel to his first, Slacker. Like that seminal low-budget indie, Waking Life is largely plotless as it prowls the streets of Austin, Texas, encountering one talkative oddball or dime-store philosopher after another. It sure doesn't look anything like Slacker, though; while the former film aimed for street-level realism, Waking Life takes place in a dream state realized through an animation process developed by Bob Sabiston (and ripped off many times since). Using computer software, animators were able to draw on top of edited video footage. With each new scene, a different artist takes the reigns, resulting in a fluid, continually evolving picture. The images ebb and flow like ocean waves, which may be problematic for viewers susceptible to sea sickness, but will prove entrancing to those on Linklater's wavelength. (Honorable mention goes to Linklater's second foray into animation, A Scanner Darkly, which uses a similar process to very different effect in its depiction of a paranoid world just on the edge of our own reality.)

THE IRON GIANT (1999)

For a film that seems so completely seamless on screen, The Iron Giant has one of the most Frankensteinian origin stories of any of the movies on this list. It’s based on a children’s story by Ted Hughes, the widower of Sylvia Plath, former poet laureate of England, and author of some of the most bloody, visceral poems of the 20th century. When it was first optioned as a film, it was meant to be a live-action musical, with music by no less than the Who’s Pete Townshend; although that never worked out, Townshend did produce a soundtrack for a stage show based on the story. Disney Studios engaged Warner Bros. in a bidding war, with Warner, on the winning side, finally handing the project off to Brad Bird – who, just a few years later, would be working with Disney anyway, on Pixar’s The Incredibles. On top of all that, it was originally envisioned as a completely traditional cel animation project, then reconceived as a film done in 3D computer animation – only to eventually arrive on screen as an amalgam of both, with the bulk of the film done in standard animation and the main character – a colossal alien machine who befriends a young boy while being sought by a paranoid government – done in CGI. The Iron Giant took years to make, and went through innumerable reconceptions, personnel changes, and battles between the filmmakers and the studio – which makes it all the more remarkable that it’s such a terrific piece of work. Charming, funny, and moving by turns, and featuring all of what would become known as director Brad Bird’s hallmarks, it’s a movie that couldn’t have been any better if it had come out of Pixar – which we mean as the highest possible compliment.
FANTASIA (1940)

With all the praise that’s been heaped on it over the last six decades, it’s easy to forget that Disney’s Fantasia could have been a disaster. Indeed, many critics predicted such a fate for it, and a few (including the notorious Irish author Flann O’Brien) held that opinion even after it was released and began piling up the accolades. Animation, then as now, was taken less than seriously as a film medium, and when Walt Disney announced that he would be releasing a film combining his studio’s unique, whimsical style of animation with some of the greatest works in the Western classical music canon, trepidation was widespread: those who loved the music feared it would be bastardized by the presence of cartoon characters, and those who loved the cartoons feared that Disney was overreaching by putting his work in the service of such highbrow affairs. And, to be truthful, the movie isn’t pure perfection; at times, it does come across as pretentious, and at other times, hopelessly middlebrow. But when it works – and the great wonder of Fantasia is that it works more than it doesn’t – it’s because the music is so perfectly matched with the material. The “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” segment is simply the finest Mickey Mouse cartoon ever made, and Leopold Stokowski’s interpretation of the musical accompaniment does it its proper service. The “Rite of Spring” passage is simply an inspiration, a clever conceit carried off without a single hitch, and the “Night on Bald Mountain” segment, which could have become an overblown gasbag of a passage, instead plays perfectly well. Coming down to earth with playful humor whenever it threatens to become too self-impressed, Fantasia overcomes the culture clash at its heart to become one of the finest animated features of all time.

Click Here for Part One, Part Three, Part Four & Part Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Leonard Pierce