The Screengrab : willem dafoe

22 Years Ago in the Screengrab: Nailing "The Last Temptation of Christ"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 22 May 2009 18:00:00 GMT

MOROCCO, FALL, 1987: I arrived on the set of Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ a week into the filming. Andre Gregory, stripped to the waist, is standing knee-deep in water and ranting at the extras, who are writhing and wailing and flagellating themselves. I'm still adjusting to the heat and dust that the filmmaking team has already had a chance to acclimate itself to. The sun is doing strange things to my eyes. I thought I saw a goat with the head of Wallace Shawn run to the edge of the river to drink, but shrugged it off. A member of the crew picked up the goat, tucked it under his arm, and carried it back to the catering tent. The goat kept talking about how much it enjoyed sipping cold coffee in the morning and reading Charlton Heston's diaries until the sound of its voice was cut short by the sound of an axe connecting with its neck.

Scorsese himself wanders back from the line of portable toilets and looks at the screaming, bloody mess going on in the river. "Wow," he says to no one in particular, then flags down his cinematographer, Michael Ballhaus. "Listen," he says, "I don't want to get you in dutch with the union, but maybe you should cut your break short and film some of this, y'know? Maybe we could use it." Ballhaus nods and turns his camera toward the scene as Scorsese heads for the catering area.

The prospect of Scorsese telling a Biblical story is an exciting one. His Catholic background is felt in every frame of Mean Streets and Raging Bull. If one knows the devotion and passion that the director is likely to bring to religious themes, it makes it all the more frustrating to listen to the ridiculous complaints that have been coming from conservative religious groups who expect the movie to be an exercise in blasphemy. This is Scorsese's second try at getting this movie made. He was all set to go in 1983 with a cast that included Aidan Quinn in the title role, but Paramount got cold feet and pulled the plug at the last minute. This time, Scorsese is determined to get the movie finished no matter what. Word has it that he sought out a secret line of support as a safety net, just in case Universal tried to withdraw funding. If the stories are true, then he was right to hedge his bets. Sidney Sheinberg, the head of Universal, was reportedly on the verge of canceling the production shortly before he was hospitalized with mysterious stomach pains. (Doctors subsequently removed a nest of locusts that had somehow managed to make their home in his abdomen.)

I find Scorsese in the catering tent. A true hands-on director, he is helping prepare lunch, personally slaughtering the animals that have been smeared with lambs' blood and trussed up beneath a giant pentagram, a symbol the matches the crimson tattoo on Scorsese's bare chest. "O dark prince, accept my offering!" he screams as the knife in his hand comes down for the last time, opening the throat of a deer. The spray of blood hits Scorsese right in the face, but with the reflexes of a trained butcher, he barely winces. He wipes his hands and face with a wet toilet offered to him by his assistant, then whips off the antlers and animal skin that he has been using to protect his head and back from the ferocious sun. "Hi," he says as he shakes my hand, "I'm Marty, pleased ta meet'cha!" You can still see the shy, asthmatic little boy from Queens inside the powerful Hollywood player.

"I'm, I'm, I'm a, I'm like very excited about having the chance, having the chance to make this picture," he says, looking down at the mob at the river. "It's, it's a, it's just a very personal thing to me, and after awhile, you're prepared to do anything to get made. Anything." He turns to look at his crew sorting the carcasses to go on the grill, then grabs my face with both hands and looks deep into my eyes. "Aaaaanything!!" he stresses.

"You know, some people have been trying to depict this production as some kind of sacrilege, and that's kind of funny for those of us who do understand the project and what your intentions are. I know some people who think you must be angry about that, but I imagine that you must see it as sort of amusing."

"Yes, yes, sacrilege, blasphemy, that is, that is very funny, it amuses me, it makes me laugh, mwahh-hahh!! It hits me in the whadadya whadadya whadaya call it the funny bone, that it where it hits me. Where it makes me laugh. Hey, Randy, how's that venison coming?"

"This is some hard terrain you're shooting in," I say, watching as the chaos at the river accelerates and a man dressed incongruously, in a long black cloak and black hat, strolls along the bank, taking notes. "Have any of the actors had trouble working under these conditons?"

"It's been, it's, it's been, what you say, a very lively, most unconventional shooting environment. For sure, it has. And people have reacted to in any number of surprising ways. Willem Dafoe, when he's not working, he mostly hides in his trailer, weeping and curled in the fetal position. David Bowie spent his first half hour on the set wandering around muttering something about Berlin, then joined Dafoe in his trailer. Harry Dean Stanton is talking about buying a house here."

The man in the long black cloak turns to face the tent. "Oh, no," mutters Scorsese. "Please don't look at me. You can be here, you can leave notes, you can watch the dailies, but please, please don't ever look at me, not like that..."

Sensing that this might be a representative of Scorsese's secret investor, I ask, "Who is that guy. Would it be all right if I talked to him?"

"Nggggggghhhhh!!, replies Scorsese, "I, I do not think, I would not suggest that you, I think that would be a very bad idea, am unfortunate idea, one that I would in fact urge you not to pursue. Please don't. I urge you, don't. And whatever you do, don't sign anything he gives you. " He turns and holds me by both my arms and, looking me in the eyes again, silently mouths the word, "Don't." Then he turns and looks again at the man in black, and murmurs, "I passed him yesterday when he was talking to Barbara Hershey. Something about Botox..." He seemes to shudder.

The sky, which was clear and bright, suddenly turns black and the sound of distant thunder is heard. "Good set of ears on him, that's for sure," says Scorsese.

"You've worked as an independent filmmaker and from deep inside the industry," I say. "Even this far into your career, you've sort of gone back and forth. Do you think you'll ever work this way again?"

"No. No no no no no no no no no, I do not forsee that happening," says Scorsese. "I cannot anticipate the project on which I would want to repeat this particular experience, so no. It's just that this one means a lot to me, you know? I am...provisionally obligated to do another picture with my financer, a picture of his choosing, but based on the suggestions that he's got up his sleeve, I am fairly comfortable in my hopes that the actuality will not materialize. I'm pretty sure. I think. I hope." For the third time, Martin Scorsese looks me in the face, but now his expression is different, beseeching, hopeful yet frightened. "You don't happen to know," he asks, "if it's true that the remake rights to Cape Fear are up for grabs?"

Cannes Roundup: Day Seven

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 20 May 2009 19:00:00 GMT

Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds has finally been unveiled, and now it’s time for all of us to put our expectations in check. Mike D’Angelo at the AV Club calls it “a shambling mass of contradictions that’s likely to divide QT partisans like nothing since Jackie Brown. Conceptually, this is easily the strangest film he’s ever made, as well as the least commercially viable.” J. Hoberman of the Village Voice is a bit more enthused: “Perhaps one should call Inglourious Basterds--a sort of World War II spaghetti western, even more drenched in film references than blood--quintessential Tarantino. A little long, a bit too pleased with itself, it's a movie of enthusiastic performances, terrific dialogue, amoral, surprisingly crude, mayhem, and mind-boggling juvenile fantasy.” Eric Kohn of Indiewire is not: “Basterds lacks the crackly excitement of Tarantino’s other efforts, mainly because he can’t seem to tie the whole package together.”

We’ll all get our chance to experience the..er…wonders of Lars von Trier’s Antichrist for ourselves, courtesy of IFC Films. Per Entertainment Weekly, “IFC will release the same controversial cut of the film that recently screened at the Cannes Film Festival. In the movie, Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg play a couple who retreat to a wooded cabin to overcome the grief of losing their only child.” At the other end of the spectrum, IFC has also acquired Ken Loach’s soccer comedy Looking for Eric.

Alan Resnais is not retired. “Declaring himself 'too lazy' to spice up his famously cerebral films with blood and thunder, the 86-year-old director, who brought Hiroshima mon Amour to the Cannes film festival 50 years ago, nonetheless said he always hoped to win audiences,” per Reuters. “‘If I knew that by putting the camera a bit more to the right or a bit more to the left, moving it about or fixing it in place, there would be more people watching it, I would do it straight away,’ he said after a press screening of his film Les herbes folles (Wild Grass) at the Cannes festival. ‘But it's completely unpredictable.’”

Jailhouse Rock: The Greatest Prison Films of All Time (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 21:15:00 GMT

TITICUT FOLLIES (1967)

Before I got my driver’s license, the only way to get to Boston from my hometown of Middleboro, Massachusetts (besides a ride from Mom & Dad) was a local bus that stopped at a prison in the neighboring town of Bridgewater to pick up the newly released ex-cons and ship ‘em home (or the nearest equivalent). Years later, I discovered the prison was actually the notorious state hospital for alcoholics, sex offenders and the criminally insane profiled in Frederick Wiseman’s controversial documentary Titicut Follies, a movie even more disturbing than all those long-ago bus rides. In stark black and white, Wiseman shows the subhuman conditions of the 1960s version of the facility and the desperation of the inmates (including one poor bastard I still remember vividly, years after the first and only time I watched the film, who keeps explaining, over and over again, that he’s perfectly sane and would really, really, really like to leave the premises). As an avid psychedelic drug enthusiast in my younger days, winding up in a mental hospital (mistakenly or not) has always been high on my list of worst-case scenarios, but Titicut Follies (named for the grimly surreal inmate “talent show” depicted in the film) is worst-case by way of 18th century Bedlam: “We see men needlessly stripped bare, insulted, herded about callously, mocked, taunted,” Robert Coles wrote of the film in The New Republic. “We see them ignored or locked interminably in cells. We hear the craziness in the air...” Massachusetts was so embarrassed by the film they tried not only to ban it, but also to have all copies destroyed (!) on the grounds that somehow the documentary violated the patients’ dignity more than, say, being held indefinitely in cell blocks without toilets and periodically hosed down. Wiseman asserted repeatedly that he’d received permission from all the patients who appeared in the film (or their guardians), yet (according to Wikipedia, at least) the film wasn’t legally cleared for general public release until 1991, at which point the Massachusetts State Supreme Court also stipulated the film would need to include a “brief explanation...that changes and improvements have taken place at Massachusetts' Correctional Institution in Bridgewater since 1966.” One would hope.

THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (1991)

In this year of Rachel Getting Married, it’s not at all hard to see why Jonathan Demme once made a movie that swept the Oscars. What’s surprising is that he won it for The Silence of the Lambs, a movie that in lesser hands, with a lesser cast, would have been little more than a clever genre exercise. But Demme’s capable direction, a masterful sense of mood and tone, and some stunning performances carried it into the realms of greatness, with Anthony Hopkins’ brutally mannered performance proving what a great villain can do for a movie. Some prison films are all about the experience of being on the inside, but others derive their tension and power from the time-honored tradition of the jailbreak. While Dr. Hannibal Lecter’s escape from his dismal subterranean dungeon (where he’s kept from touching anything solid, even a pen cap) is inevitable, it differs from most escape yarns in that the criminal’s liberation is something that fills us with dread instead of excitement. Lecter’s cruel psychological manipulation leads him out from the underground, and his brutal violence unleashes him on the world again after a decade of imprisonment. The movie’s final scenes are less a triumph than a threat: Satan unleashed upon the world again.

ANIMAL FACTORY (2000)

Steve Buscemi does an admirable job, in his second full-length directorial effort, of conveying the casual brutality and bizarre social cycles of prison life. By refusing both glamorization and utter degradation, he keeps his storytelling solid and balanced, allowing the powerful action on screen to work itself out in more subtle ways. Edward Furlong’s young convict finds himself totally unprepared for prison life, and even after he’s taken under the wing of ex-gang boss Willem Dafoe, he finds himself given over to fear that shapes his reactions to the prison world as much as any real violence or sexual assault. Buscemi’s simple, un-flashy approach is perfect for the material, and he wisely keeps himself off camera and lets his actors and situations tell the story. Of course, he’s aided and abetted, so to speak, by a worthy bunch of co-conspirators: the screenplay to Animal Factory was written by Eddie Bunker – best known as Mr. Blue in Reservoir Dogs, but also an established writer, actor, and career criminal whose own stints in prison inspired the script. Bunker’s friend Danny Trejo – a man he spent time with in prison and who, like him, was redeemed through his art – also has a leading role in the film, which is one of the reasons it reeks of authenticity.

I AM A FUGITIVE FROM A CHAIN GANG (1932)

The melodramatic tone of most ‘30s films leads to an inevitable graying, and Mervyn LeRoy’s then-controversial I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang hasn’t aged like a fine wine. But it’s still an extremely worthwhile movie, with a harrowing escape scene and the nervous, twitchy shoulders of Oscar-nominated Paul Muni as a World War I vet who fled the intolerably brutal justice of the Georgia prison system. Based on a true story – in fact, Robert Burns, the man on whom Muni’s character was based, served as a technical adviser on the film while still a fugitive until he was forced to hit the road again – Chain Gang fudged the facts a bit. It’s no secret that the movie’s particulars were a bit glossed over in order to make Muni more appealing to audiences hard-hit by the Depression. But it certainly doesn’t make him a noble figure by any means; his downward spiral and lowlife ways only make it more shocking when we see how he’s systematically dehumanized by the chain gang system, which was little more than state-sponsored slavery. Even 75 years later, the movie’s final scene packs a punch, as Muni answers the question of how he manages to live with a simple, harsh response: “I steal.”

DOWN BY LAW (1986)

You don’t often hear the phrase “quirky prison comedy”, but if anyone can carry off that particular genre blend, it’s Jim Jarmusch. Assembling a unique cast – John Lurie as a big-talking pimp, Tom Waits as a laconic disc jockey, and Roberto Begnini (in his first English-speaking role, if you can call it that) as a bewildered Italian tourist – he deftly mixes together screwball comedy, existential drama, and the kind of quiet indie strangeness that would become his hallmark over the years to come. Compelled to escape from prison more or less because they can’t stand being stuck in the same cell with one another anymore (their scenes in jail are probably the funniest prison scenes this side of the end of The Producers), the three break out and trudge through the gorgeously photographed Louisiana bayou; they escape imprisonment, but they can’t escape each other, and freedom seems to have precious little to distinguish itself from jail for them. A perfect companion piece to Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise, Down By Law is perhaps the greatest of Jarmusch’s "beautiful losers" movies, and the whole thing should be experienced like your last night before heading off to jail: through a cloud of smoke and a fog of booze, with a good-looking and dangerous girl by your side.

Click Here For Part One, Three, Four & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce

Madonna On Film: Screengrab Celebrates Her Top Ten "Best" and Worst Performances (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 19:00:00 GMT

And now...the stinkers.

6. Marie in Shadows and Fog (1992), Elspeth in Four Rooms (1995)

As noted in Part One, Madonna works best in movies when used as spice in a cameo...except, of course, when the cameo is lousy. Yet, though these two performances are, in fact, terrible, it’s hard to judge Ms. Ciccone too harshly for either of them, given the fact that Lily Tomlin, Jodie Foster and Kathy Bates hardly fare much better in Woody Allen’s limp, pretentious Shadows and Fog, and nobody but the lucky actors in Robert Rodriguez’s section of the misbegotten omnibus film Four Rooms bothered to give a coherent performance, either.

7. Abbie Reynolds, The Next Best Thing (2000)

The only movie in Madonna’s filmography where she attempts to play a completely “normal,” contemporary human being (as opposed to a 1940s ballplayer, an S&M obsessed murder suspect, a tightrope walker, an elfin princess, a witch, an Argentine dictator, a kooky East Village free spirit, etc.), Ms. Ciccone earns low points here if only for somehow finding a way to make the song “American Pie” even more annoying than it already was. To be fair, I never saw this movie either, but my lovely Polish bride informs me that Madonna's performance here as a straight woman in a custody battle with her gay baby daddy features exactly one funny sight gag involving the Material Boobs, but otherwise earns its #7 spot fair and square, given Madge's complete lack of chemistry with friend and co-star Rupert Everett and the fact that she seems "like an automaton” throughout “like she always is.”

8. Eva Peron in Evita (1996)

While Ms. Ciccone may have worked harder on this role than any other in her cinematic career (even finally learning to sing after more than a decade as a successful recording artist) it is, in many ways, her most annoying performance, partly because she’s clearly so impressed with herself, partly because so many critics played along with the charade (even going so far as to award her efforts with a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Comedy or Musical), but mostly because she transformed an ironic cautionary tale of the rise and fall of a dictator’s wife into a triumphant love story about the rise and rise of a plucky, ambitious gal (not unlike – hey! – Madonna herself!), all the while downplaying the nastier side of Peron’s (and her own) egomaniacal megalomania and its often toxic effect on the peasants who love her...thus deliberately undercutting the plot and theme of her own movie (not to mention Antonio Banderas’ role as spokesman for the downtrodden and future t-shirt model Che Guevara who, with no antagonist to play against, merely comes across like a whiny little bitch).

9. Rebecca Carlson in Body of Evidence (1993)

For all her onstage masturbation, conical Gauliter bras and nude photo shoots, Madonna has never really had a handle on sex. For her, the beast with two backs has nothing to do with joy, love, pleasure or fun, which makes this so-called “erotic” thriller such a complete slog as she fucks Willem Dafoe on shards of broken glass (hot!!!), spits out Razzie-winning lines like “Have you ever seen animals make love, Frank?” and reminds us that, apparently, being Sharon Stone isn’t quite as easy as it looks.

10. Gloria Tatlock, Shanghai Surprise (1986), Amber Leighton, Swept Away (2002)

For some reason, both of Madonna’s husbands (co-star Sean Penn and director Guy Ritchie) managed to distill all of Ms. Ciccone’s worst cinematic instincts into a pair of monumentally shrill, annoying, wooden performances in two of the worst movies ever made. Penn at least had the excuse of being drunk throughout production of Shanghai Surprise (though, sadly, I wasn’t drunk or stoned or, even better, unconscious while sitting through it), and I’m not sure what Guy Ritchie’s excuse was for making Swept Away, unless (as with his short BMW promotional film “Star”) he simply couldn’t resist the opportunity to publicly humiliate his beloved spouse. Given her total lack of chemistry with nearly every co-star in her career (except Rosie O'Donnell and, of course, her own reflection), it’s no surprise Ms. Ciccone fares no better with Penn in Shanghai or Adriano Giannini in Swept Away, which my wife summed up with a quote that could apply to any number of Madonna’s past and future cinematic blunders: “Painfully unfunny...another joyless performance.”

Click here for Part One

Morning Deal Report: George Clooney’s Challenge

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 14:30:00 GMT

The Cloon is getting political again. According to Variety, George Clooney “has bought the rights to Jonathan Mahler's legal thriller The Challenge, about the long campaign waged by U.S. Navy lawyer Charles Swift and Georgetown law professor Neal Katyal to ensure a fair trial for Salim Hamdan, the bodyguard and driver of Osama bin Laden.” Presumably Clooney will play the lawyer and not the driver.

Conan (the Barbarian, not the O’Brien) dons his loincloth again for Lionsgate. Dirk Blackman and Howard McCain, who have written an Amazon warrior vehicle for Scarlett Johansson, will pen the return of Robert E. Howard’s creation. (Presumably the governor of California is unavailable to reprise his role.) The Hollywood Reporter quotes producer Fredrik Malmberg as saying “We all want this movie to go into production as soon as possible,” so you know quality is priority number one.

Willem Dafoe is a versatile fellow, isn’t he? He played Jesus in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, and now he’s set to star in Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist. It doesn’t sound like he’s necessarily taking on the title role, however. Variety describes it as a “psychological thriller that evolves into a horror film,” in which “Dafoe and [Charlotte] Gainsbourg will play a couple who retreat to an isolated cabin in the woods following the death of their child.” That Von Trier, he’s a million laughs.

Related:
George Clooney Leans In and Other Insights
Face/Off: "Breaking the Waves"

Trailer Review: Anamorph

John Constantine — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 22:43:00 GMT

Sometimes certain movies can ruin actors for you. They can be the finest performer in the world, but they end up bound to a very specific performance in your mind. My brain refuses to see Willem Dafoe as anything but FBI Agent Paul Smecker from Boondock Saints, which has proven problematic in enjoying his films. Anamorph, as you can see from this trailer, seems like a decent, stylish piece of Fincher-esque crime fiction with a good serial killer hook. But all I see is Dafoe showing up at a mobster’s mansion in drag while a morbidly obese Italian man refers to him as “primo box”. You can see how this would ruin the tension. I plan on soldiering through my disturbing fixations when this comes out on April 18th though. Writer/director Henry Miller might just have something special here.

The Top Ten Uncompleted Movies, Part 2

Phil Nugent — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 20:30:00 GMT

APT PUPIL

Bryan Singer's adaptation was not the first version of this Stephen King novella. In 1987, British Director Alan Bridges had Nicol Williamson and Ricky Schroder in the leads of this story concerning a teenager discovering his elderly neighbor's Nazi past. Unfortunately, the film ran over budget and with ten days of filming left, the financing ran out and the film shut down. Accounts vary of just how much was left to shoot. Stephen King had reportedly seen a 3/4 rough cut and commented it was "really good" while the writers, Ken and Jim Wheat, reported seeing an assemblage of forty minutes' worth of footage. By the time financing was found to complete the shoot a year later, Schroder had grown too too old to continue in his role and there was no way to finish the film short of a full re-shoot. To date, the footage has never been shown to the public, though if there's ever a special edition of Bryan Singer's version, one hopes that the director would be able to snag the rights to include Alan Bridge's version as a bonus feature.

IN GOD'S HANDS

It is a tragic fact that many early feature films have been lost forever due to negligence and poor preservation. What's horrifying is to find out that even in the 21st Century, an entire feature film can be lost due to an accident, especially when its not the new Eddie Murphy comedy but it comes from someone like filmmaker Lodge Kerrigan. In God's Hands was produced by Stephen Soderbergh's Section Eight outfit and starred Peter Sarsgaard and Maggie Gyllenhaal as a couple who've lost their child. Unfortunately, the entire camera negative of the film was damaged, causing it to be lost. I'm still stunned that someone on the film didn't realize something was wrong after the first few days of shooting just by checking the rushes, but the damage had been done. Kerrigan, who bounced back with Keane, has expressed no interest in trying to re-shoot In God's Hands. This is one of those cases that could be used as a backhanded argument for abandoning film to shoot digital.

THE THIEF AND THE COBBLER

This British animation has the distinction of having had the longest production phase ever. Renowned animator Richard Williams started the project in 1965, animating it part time and financing the project through the odd commercial jobs and work on other films, such as Murder on the Orient Express, The Charge of the Light Brigade, and the credit sequences on some of the "Pink Panther" films. After endearing himself to the powers that be by serving as animation director on Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Williams was finally able to get financing to complete the film, but a variety of factors resulted in its being taken away from him by Mirimax and handed over to television animator Fred Calvert. Despite numerous promises from various parties to try and complete the film according to Williams's original design, this probably won't be happening anytime soon. The original workprint of the film can be found on YouTube. The "completed" bastardisation edition can be bought from your local Blockbuster Bargain bucket, hidden under a couple hundred copies of Norbit.

MY BEST FRIEND'S BIRTHDAY

Unofficially considered by those in the know as Quentin Tarentino's directorial debut, this is a far cry from Reservoir Dogs. Shot on Super 16mm over a few years, the completed 70-minute cut was lost in a fire, and so what survives is about 30-40 minutes of rough footage. Is it watchable? It has certainly has had a cult following grow around it, and despite its technical issues, it is in, IMHO, a far more enjoyable time waster than Death Proof.

ARRIVE ALIVE

Jeremiah Chechik is one unlucky man. His second film was supposed to be a comedy featuring Willem Dafoe as a hotel manager who falls for Joan Cusack as one of the guests. It was co-written by National Lampoon and Saturday Night Live veteran and self-styled "dangerous comedian" Michael O'Donoghue and produced by Art Linson. Unfortunately after two weeks of shooting, Linson pulled the plug and wrote off a couple of million dollars. Why? Apparently, it was due to Dafoe's performance, an attempt to bring "edge" to a romantic-comedy leading-man part that Linson, in his book A Pound of Flesh, described as "terrifying". Chechik managed to bounce back with Benny & Joon before his career was nearly destroyed with The Avengers, one of those productions where 50% of the production ended up on the cutting room floor.

QUE VIVA MEXICO

This was to be Sergei Eisenstein's first film made outside Russia, co-produced by renowned American novelist, Upton Sinclair. Unfortunately, after cost-overruns and other problems, Eisenstein was summoned back to the Soviet Union by Stalin (who can refuse an invitation like that?) leaving behind over 200,000 feet of unedited footage. Despite promises to send the footage to the USSR for the director to edit, this never came to pass, and instead several different edited versions of the film have appeared under different titles over the years, most of them falling into obscurity. None of the versions come close to what Eisenstein may have wanted but the film is still inspiring people to take a shot at it. (This YouTube clip is a trailer to promote the latest attempt at a restoration from Lutz Becker).

--Phil Nugent; Faisal A. Qureshi

Click here for Part 1.

Vanishing Act: Troy Duffy

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 20:30:00 GMT

In our last Vanishing Act, we got you caught up on Mark Borchardt, the aspiring filmmaker whose attempts at bringing his first film to the screen were documented in American Movie. As a special St. Paddy’s Day treat, we thought we’d do the same for another aspiring filmmaker whose attempts at bringing his first film to the screen were documented in 2003’s somewhat less uplifting Overnight.

The subject of that documentary is Troy Duffy, a foulmouthed, chain-smoking, overall-clad boy from Boston who went to Hollywood and made his dream come true. At least, that’s the direction things seemed to be going when Duffy made a too-good-to-be-true deal with Miramax based on his buzzed-about script The Boondock Saints. The Weinstein brothers agreed to finance the film with Duffy as director, hire his band to do the music for the movie, and even buy the bar where Duffy works (J. Sloane’s) on the premise that they’ll own it together.

If you’ve seen Overnight, you know what happens next. The tagline “There’s more than one way to shoot yourself” neatly sums up Duffy’s association with Miramax, as the brash, confrontational and increasingly obnoxious and deluded would-be filmmaker goes on to decimate his relationship with the Weinsteins and sandbag Boondocks in the process. Eventually he did make the movie with Franchise Films for a much smaller budget than originally planned. Boondocks opened in a handful – make that a thimbleful – of theaters for a week in 2000, earning less than $100,000 at the box office. If this happened to Mark Borchardt we’d find it depressing, but Duffy comes off as such an unlikable blowhard throughout the documentary, there’s not a wet eye in the house. Hubris had taken down another victim, or so it seemed.

For some reason, however, Boondock Saints developed a rabid cult following once it was released on video exclusively to Blockbuster. The story of two Boston Irishmen who take on the Russian mob, the film is virtually indistinguishable from any number of Tarantino or Guy Ritchie knockoffs, save for Willem Dafoe’s deranged performance as an FBI agent. Still, facts are facts: the DVD sold like crazy, and no matter how many bridges Duffy burned in Hollywood, money still talks.

In this case, the talk was about a sequel, to be called All Saints Day. That talk continues to this day, and generally involves veiled references to rights issues and litigation standing in the way of the “Boondock flock” getting their hearts’ desires. Periodically Duffy issues video messages via his website and YouTube, such as the one below, detailing his plans for the sequel as well as another project-in-waiting, a black comedy called The Good King. He doesn’t really sound like a guy who’s been humbled (he claims never to have seen Overnight), but who knows? If you’re feeling charitable today, why not raise a glass of green beer in a toast to him and all the others who have been chewed up and spit out by the Hollywood machine – even the ones who had it coming.

The Ten Greatest Prosthetics in Movie History, Part 2

Peter Smith — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 21:00:00 GMT

Nicole Kidman's Nose in THE HOURS (2002)

Can a fake nose win an Oscar? Some might say it already did, when Nicole Kidman's turn as Virginia Woolf in The Hours was awarded the golden statue for Best Actress. We've got nothing against Kidman's performance in that film, but judging by the reams of press that her lightly reoriented schnozz got at the time, you'd think that it was the nose that was wearing Kidman, instead of the other way around. Of course, this was yet another award in a long series of Best Actress Oscars that went to Beautiful Women Doing Unglamorous Things — whether it was playing a tarted-up legal secretary (Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich), having sex with Billy Bob Thornton (Halle Berry in Monster's Ball) or looking like a burn victim (Charlize Theron in Monster). Which is, really, the only way we can explain Kidman's decision to use such a subtle prosthetic in the first place; it's not like the American moviegoing public had any idea what Virginia Woolf looked like in the first place.

Jeff Goldblum's Jaw, Cheeks, Eyes, His Very Fucking Being, in THE FLY (1986)

Some of us were prohibited from watching more than two hours of TV a week as children. Luckily, some of us were also latch-key kids, so naturally, whenever no one was home, we gorged, often on both food and shlocky afternoon TV movies. And those of us who were unlucky enough to see The Fly at this time didn't quite grasp the extent of our mistake until it was too late. There you are, happily eating your delivery pizza, and in the middle of a big, meaty bite, you're confronted by the spectacle of one of Brundlefly's eyes falling off, like an egg yolk dripping into batter. You assume that's the most disgusting scene they're gonna throw at you. Again, big mistake. Jeff Goldblum's Brundlefly is possibly the single most hideous, repugnant creature ever seen on film — worse than the Alien mother, worse than any other close competitor. Every negative trait of Jeff Goldblum's physiognomy is brought into stark relief onto an insect face; when it decays, we dare you to keep eating. We certainly didn't.

Penelope Cruz's Ass, VOLVER (2006)

Since her Hollywood debut, Cruz has been the poster child for foreign-born performers who aren't half as compelling in English as they are in their native tongue. Which is why her reunion with Pedro Almodovar was a cause for celebration — not only would she be working in Spanish again, but she was collaborating with a filmmaker who always brought out the best in her. But strangely enough, much of the buzz around Penelope's role in 2006's Volver focused less on the performance than around the generous fake derrière she strapped on for the role. According to Almodovar, the padded rump was necessary for the character, an earthy, hard-working mother in the Anna Magnani tradition, and this makes sense, since Penelope Cruz is lovely, but talk about bun cakes — she ain't got 'em. But then a funny thing happened. Instead of drawing undue attention to Penelope's prodigious prosthetic posterior, the hype allowed moviegoers to grow accustomed to the sight of the suddenly callipygian Cruz, much in the same way Alejandro Amenabar leaked stills of a heavily made-up Javier Bardem to the Spanish press so the public would get used to his appearance in The Sea Inside. The gimmick paid off in the end, as Cruz's full-bodied (sorry) performance made the rockin' world go 'round, garnering her unprecedented critical praise and a rare (for a foreign-language performer) Best Actress Oscar nomination. In fact, after the success of Volver, the only question that remains for Penelope Cruz's career is: how can she leave this behind?

Vincent Gallo's Penis in THE BROWN BUNNY (2003)

When people actually got around to seeing Vincent Gallo's The Brown Bunny rather than just making fun of it (which isn't to say that they stopped making fun of it afterwards, or that many people actually got around to seeing it), the scene that generated the most buzz was what is delicately referred to as "the blowjob", where Gallo's lodge pole is climbed by Chloe Sevigny, for whom one has never felt more pity. The scene's verite qualities and (literally) naked emotional power are what most people talked about, although we think they were just grateful that something was actually happening in the movie after endless shots of Gallo driving aimlessly across country. Gallo, who tends to be pretty sensitive about things like this, has always claimed that the hog in question belongs to him; French director Claire Denis, on the contrary, claims that it is an artificial wang, and that, worse yet, it isn't even Vince's artificial wang — she says he stole it off the set of her 2001 film Trouble Every Day, in which he had a large part, but not that large part. In the absence of, er, concrete evidence from Gallo, we're going to go with Claire Denis' version of events; we figure that since she's not on record as hoping Roger Ebert gets cancer for giving one of her films a bad review, she's got the moral high ground.

Gwyneth Paltrow's Body in SHALLOW HAL (2001)

Hollywood's relationship with the overweight isn't exactly a history of sensitivity and kindness. Particularly where women are concerned, the mere suggestion of being a few pounds beyond anorexic means you're virtually unemployable; and in a city where people like Christina Ricci, Drew Barrymore and Britney Spears can be attacked in the press for being fat, roles for actual human women, let alone fat women, are few and far between. When the Farrelly brothers decided to make a movie about a shallow womanizer who falls in love with a 300-pound woman to prove that he can see 'inner beauty,' they had a casting decision to make: hire two people to play Rosemary Shanahan — one a beautiful, thin Hollywood blonde, to portray Hal's perception of her, and one a genuine 300-pound actress to portray the 'real' character — or just stick Gwyneth Paltrow in a fat suit? (It didn't help the whole unpleasant aftertaste of the movie that its male lead was Jack Black, an actor who gets romantic leads despite his own flabby physique; no actress with a body like Black's would ever nail down a leading-lady part.) Perhaps it's too much to expect anything like insight from filmmakers whose reputation is built on the gross-out comedy, but the fat suit is already a ethical minefield (representing, as it does, a sort of physical proof of Hollywood's allergy to hiring anyone genuinely overweight to appear in a prominent role) without filling it with an actress who probably weighed 110 pounds soaking wet when she was filming the role.

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

Willem Dafoe's Teeth in WILD AT HEART (1990)

The whole world seems to be rotting in David Lynch's nightmare road movie, and nowhere is this clearer than in the misbegotten mouth of white-trash villain Bobby Peru, played by Willem Dafoe in full-moon mode. Unholy, irredeemable, and defiantly unflossed, Bobby Peru is meant to be the ultimate dark void awaiting the young lovers at the end of their road to nowhere, and no Satanic movie character ever displayed a less welcoming smile. Perverse to the end, the still-smiling Bobby finally slides a shotgun beneath his chin and blows his own head off, after which the part of his body above the gum line must have felt a certain amount of relief.

Goldie Hawn's Fat in DEATH BECOMES HER (1992)

In this special-effects comedy, Goldie Hawn and Meryl Streep play lifelong rivals who achieve "undead" immortality and spend the rest of the movie blowing holes in each other, twisting each other's necks into pretzels, knocking their heads into their chest cavities, and generally behaving as if Chuck Jones were their stunt coordinator. But the most effective physical mutation in the picture may come when Hawn slips into an old-fashioned fat suit and layers of latex makeup to depict her character's depressive obesity after Streep has waltzed off with her fiancee. Nothing in the movie is funnier than Hawn's expression of malicious satisfaction, with her features sunk deep in the mass of her cream puff head, as she imagines raining destruction down on her gal pal. At the time, Hawn was forty-six years old and had spent a quarter of a century doing her damndest to hang onto the body and mannerisms of a teenage girl. Maybe she felt wickedly giddy at even pretending to have let herself go.

Dennis Hopper's False Leg in RIVER'S EDGE (1987)

Dennis Hopper, fresh from his comeback in Blue Velvet, lays claim to the being the counterculture's answer to Walter Brennan in this generation-gap study of alienated youth. John Heard made a good grab for the position in Cutter's Way, where he staggered around pretending to be one-legged and wore an eye patch to boot, but that was nothing compared to what you get when you equip Hopper with an artificial leg, an inflatable sex doll, and the name "Feck", and sit back to watch him rock. When Hopper, who deals dope to the local teenagers, sits down to remove his false leg, it symbolizes the loss of his own youthful innocence and the disconnect between the older characters and the young people, which is fed by their use of his own product. Or something like that. And did we mention that his character's name is Feck!?

— Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Vadim Rizov