The Screengrab : youtube

Watch It For Free: Eight Werner Herzog Movies

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 20:00:00 GMT

YouTube’s new partnership with big-name studios is already paying dividends for us cheap bastards who like to watch movies for free on our computrons. In association with Starzmedia, YouTube is now offering eight full-length Werner Herzog movies for your viewing pleasure, including Aguirre: The Wrath of God, Fitzcarraldo, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser and Even Dwarfs Started Small. Hit the jump for the linkage:

Here’s the Starzmedia page for the Herzog goodies, including Aguirre, which you can watch below.

(Hat tip to Film Studies for Free, which also offers links to a wealth of academic writing on Herzog available online.)

On-Line Viewing Tip: "No End in Sight"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 14:00:00 GMT

The HBO miniseries Generation Kill probably is the best movie yet made about the Iraq war, if "movie" is defined as something caught on camera and made available for viewing. But if you insist on calling it a TV show, then the best feature film about the Iraq war that's been released to movie theaters is probably Charles Ferguson's No End in Sight. The great virtue of Ferguson's film, which won the Special Jury Prize for documentary at last year's Sundance Film Festival, was nominated for an Academy Award, and is now available on DVD--is the lucidity it brings to a confusing subject. Ferguson assembles his material, which is mostly talking-heads interviews with people who were involved, and who became disgruntled, with the management of the war, so that you can see the string of bad decisions, made by people with a deeper committment to their ideological predispositions than to reality, and how they eventually added up to a fisaco of epic proportions. (The movie has a shortage of die-hard supporters of the war, but not because they weren't invited to share their views. One of the brave few who did agree to be interviewed was Walt Solcombe, a senior advisor to "reconstruction" admistrator L. Paul Bremer. Slocombe provides the movie with one of its rare shots of comedy when he's asked if it has ever been suggested to him that Bremer's decision to disband the Iraqi military, thus automatically rendering several thousand guys with guns who were well trained in blowing stuff up out of work, essentially created the insurgency. Slocombe makes a face as if he'd been asked if he's still fucking his sister and answers, "Not in those terms!")

Now, No End in Sight is being made available for free viewing on YouTube. So far as we can determine, this is the first time that a movie is been posted, without charge and with its filmmaker's blessing, on the site after a successful theatrical run, and those with iron butts would be advised to take advantage of it. The movie was posted on Monday of this week and will be pulled after November 4. In other words, it's there from the start of th Republican National Convention through the day of the presidential election. That's probably a hint.

Related Stories: Hollywood's Best Iraq Movie: Generation Kill

Video of the Day: Rusty's Learning to Listen Part 8

Paul Clark — Fri, 30 May 2008 19:30:00 GMT

You Elizabethtown fans out there may have noticed that in my review of the film earlier today that I failed to mention what may be the film’s best scene. This wasn’t an accident- I simply figured, why describe it when I could just as easily show it? That’s right, boys and girls. Here’s the full-length version of the educational video “Rusty’s Learning to Listen Part 8,” presented here through the magic of YouTube. Personally, I think it plays better in the context of the movie, but you can’t help but love how it more or less turns into the Cameron Crowe version of Zabriskie Point in the last minute. Enjoy!

Video of the Day: The Shock Doctrine

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 06 May 2008 16:30:00 GMT

Naomi Klein's trenchant, brilliant, and sometimes alarmist book about the use of 'shock and awe' tactics to push through free-market economic reforms during times of national trauma was released late last year, but it's just now seeing wide publication in paperback. At the time of its release, Klein released a short film via YouTube to serve as both a teaser for and audiovisual explication of the book.

The film is directed by Jonás Cuarón, and produced and co-written (with Klein) by his father, Alfonso Cuarón. The elder Cuarón met Klein when she was researching her first book on globalism, No Logo, and sought out his advice as a leading Mexican anti-globalism advocate. Although The Shock Doctrine was heavily downloaded at the time of its release, now seems like a good time to revisit it, both for its highly vital poltical message and its disturbing yet elegiaic cinematic qualities.

Who Wants To Be The Account Executive For A Fictional Millionaire Superhero?

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 17:30:00 GMT

One of the niftiest features of Alan Moore's brilliant Watchmen comic was its fully realized fictional world: every aspect of the near-future alternate-reality America was fleshed out, from the names of the newspapers to the look of the pop fashion trends of the moment to the fast food joints and retail stores. Even the televisions were populated by cleverly thought-out commercials, many of them for products manufactured by Veidt Enterprises, the monolithic corporate giant run by ex-superhero Ozymandias.

Director Zack Snyder is determined to recreate this depth of field as much as possible, but he can't be bothered to actually make the commercials himself, since he is busy filming the movie and blogging endlessly about filming the movie. So he's making you do it! Or, more specifically, YouTube. Snyder is running a contest on the video-hosting site, inviting fans to create their own Veidt Enterprises commercials. If yours gets picked, you'll get thousands of dollars from the makers of this hugely expensive Hollywood blockbuster film!

Ha ha, no, just kidding. But you do have a chance to get your commercial featured in the movie -- for free! It's not exploitation if you enjoy it! Me, I'm picturing an ad for Veidt's "Nostalgia" cologne featuring an 80-year-old Wilford Brimley muttering, "You can smell like it's 1956 again."

As an aside, does anybody think that Zack Snyder looks absolutely terrible? I mean, I know he's under a lot of pressure, making a movie adaptation of a hugely well-respected property with geek cred aplenty, but the poor guy looks like he's aged a dozen and a half years since he wrapped 300.

An April Fool's Day Treat from YouTube

Paul Clark — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 16:00:00 GMT

With April Fool's Day now well underway, I'm sure many of you are busy pulling fun (and hopefully work-safe) pranks on your colleagues. We here at Screengrab couldn't resist the opportunity to get in on the fun by presenting one of the all-time great big-screen pranks, one that's as inspired in its simplicity as it is brilliant in its execution. Ladies and gentlemen, we give you, from jackass: number two, "The Valentine".

Also, should an oversize mechanical boxing glove propel itself out of your monitor to sock you in the noggin, know that it wasn't us who put it there. Or was it...?

The Second (or Third, or Fourth) Coming of the 1970s Movies

Phil Nugent — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Ross Douthat thinks that moviemakers have brought back the '70s, again. But when Tarantino and other filmmakers of a certain age set out to redeem the '70s as a cool decade after all, they fixated on the stylistic tics and mannerisms of gritty urban thrillers and genre hybrids such as blaxsploitation flicks, and what's been brought back now, in direct response to the Bush administration and its cheerleaders in the media, is the paranoid hopelessness of such Vietnam-and-Watergate-era pictures as The Parallax View, The Day of the Condor, and the vigilante genre epitomized by Charles Bronson in Death Wish. This is not how it was supposed to be. In the wake of 9/11, there were a lot of predictions, both inside the industry and in the press, that audiences would now reject cynicism and violent thrills and embrace the second coming of John Wayne, a simple man with a simple plan to solve all our problems, starting with wiping that smirk off your face, and do me some push-ups, smart boy! (Remember that "irony is dead" horseshit?) But the few overt attempts to play to this "new reality" — say, that remake of The Four Feathers that didn't do anybody any good, or that documentary about "good Americans" that was marketed as a bitch slap to Michael Moore — died a dog's death, and the more cunning of the filmmakers who might have once considered catering to it got with the program. As Douthat points out, after the failure of Tears of the Sun, a 2003 movie about some American special-ops guys in Nigeria who remember what they're really fighting for and who proceed to, well, really fight for it, its director, Antoine Fuqua, was back last year with Shooter, in which a special-ops guy who's back from the Middle East discovers that he's really fighting a conspiracy made up of sleazeball U.S. government guys — plutocrats who disregard the laws, sneer at the common people, and the depth of whose villainy can be accurately gauged according to the degree of their physical resemblance to Dick Cheney. Audience who ate it up may not have been conscious of responding to having their political prejudices stroked, but it was a much bigger hit than Tears of the Sun without being a much better movie. Also instructive: the career of Stephen Gaghan, who made a splash with his screenplay for Steven Soderbergh's (pre-9/11) Traffic, which summed up the war on drugs as a misguided, empty enterprise, but did also allow for the existence of a few good people working inside the system and scoring whatever little victories they could. Since then, Gaghan made his debut as a writer-director with Syriana, commonly referred to as "Traffic with oil instead of drugs," but which has a much more paranoid vibe, and which ends with its most intelligent, good-hearted, and plugged-in characters — its best hopes for positive change — literally blown off the road. It's the difference that makes Syriana feel like a product of the current zeitgeist.

The James Bond of the current era is Jason Bourne, the killing machine who, having lost his identity, starts out knowing nothing except that the world is out to get him. Over the course of three very busy pictures, he's yet to learn anything that might cheer him up. (The closest thing to good news in any of the Bourne pictures is that an amnesiac with a target on his back might still be able to hook up with Franka Potente — but he won't be able to keep her for long.) Even the Napoleon Solo of the current era, 24's Jack Bauer, though regarded by some as a right-wing hero standing almost alone in the liberal fantasyland that is topical-minded Hollywood, is at odds with the pasty-white, Nixonian government leaders who, more often than not, are at the bottom of the latest villainy he has to bust. (Jack's real "ideology" amounts to a bland willingness to do anything to anybody to get his way, in a universe where torture works. Like many a self-identified law-and-order type, he's not a real conservative so much as a barbarian with a cell phone and a muscle shirt.) But because the similarities between the '70s and today have more to do with a shared national mood of fatalistic helplessness than with the specifics giving rise to that mood, the "new '70s" atmosphere works best when the filmmakers skirt the issue of just what it is they're mooning about. So last year's slate of "Iraq war" movies had a beside-the-point feel to them, and even the vigilante-hero template doesn't have the same impact when transferred to contemporary New York — a place that certainly has its problems but that, compared to the city Travis Bickle called home, is relatively bloodless and well-scrubbed. (As Douthat points out, "Jodie Foster’s gun-toting avenger [in The Brave One] alone would have been responsible for more than one percent of the city’s annual killings." The anxieties of the '70s movies were part of something not just huge but pervasive, a societal rot that you couldn't miss — you couldn't leave home or turn on the news without being reminded of it. However bad things seem now, they don't seem out of control — if anything, just the opposite — and most people probably assign most of the blame squarely to one or two powerful people whose guts they hate. So the movies that try to take on society's ills head on feel as if they'd fit all too snugly onto YouTube.

Strange Bedfellows: Jack and Hillary

Paul Clark — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 20:00:00 GMT

This clip has been making the rounds for the past few days, so we figured we'd chime in. Normally, we don't go in for political or campaign-oriented discussion, but since Jack Nicholson is involved it's fair game. For most of the clip, this feels like a joke, like some bored YouTuber got it in his head to create a campaign spot using footage from old Jack movies. Even after the text starts popping up onscreen and it becomes clear that the creator of the spot is a Hillary supporter, it's still highly possible that we're dealing with that same semi-anonymous party. Then the final shot comes like a punchline — Jack himself, saying "I approved this message" directly to the camera — and it suddenly hits you that this is for real.

And that's what's so bizarre. I won't begrudge Jack his political opinions, especially since former President Clinton made a lot of big-shot Hollywood friends during his term in office. But what could have convinced him that this spot would work? What prevailed upon him to open with the Joker asking "who do ya trust?" Hate to break it to you buddy, but half of the clips you've included in your little love note to Hillary show you as a bad guy. Do you really think people will embrace a candidate because the Joker, Jack Torrance, and Colonel Jessup told them to?

Of course, it's entirely possible that Jack has another agenda entirely. By marshalling his crazy roles behind Hillary, perhaps he was doing his part to push the undecided toward Obama. It's the only possiblity that makes sense to me. But is this actually the case? Only your undertaker knows for sure.

Spotlight on Shorts: "gravida" and the Now Film Festival

Paul Clark — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 17:00:00 GMT

There was a time when short films were a part of practically everyone’s theatrical experience. In the days of double features, short films would be included in the program, sandwiched in somewhere between the serial and the newsreel. Sadly, those days are over. The small number of short films that do get projected tend to do so in a festival context, or as part of the occasional short-film program at your local arthouse.

The rest of them show online, on YouTube or MySpace, or any number of sites that specialize in short films. In the past decade, more websites have brought attention to young filmmakers by mounting online short film festivals, and the currently-in-progress Now Film Festival is no exception. Since October, the festivals review committee has been selecting one submitted movie per week to post on their site. Then the viewers give feedback on the films, and the best-received entries will progress to the final round of voting to be eligible win a new camera package.

There have been a number of worthy films to date, but the best of the lot thusfar is this week’s featured short, Lucas McNelly’s gravida. A far cry from the genre spoofery and juvenile humor many people have grown to expect from online shorts, gravida is a mature character study about a young pregnant woman trying to keep her loneliness at bay. From my original review of the film:

"gravida has much the same power as a good short story. It never overreaches for effect or tries to shoehorn too much into its relatively brief running time. It merely follows a situation to its logical end. We know just enough about its two characters to sympathize with where they’re coming from, and why they do what they do. . . Lucas McNelly has made a serenely confident short film, with which he shows a real facility as a director. He never tries to dazzle the audience with flashy technique or camera work, preferring his style to be dictated by his material. . . McNelly’s direction is subtle enough not to overwhelm the film, but strong enough to assure us that there’s a firm hand on the wheel. I’m eager to see what he does next."

Check out gravida and all of the selected shorts at the Now Film Festival web site, and don’t forget to vote for your favorites on MySpace's film page. The official gravida web site, which features links to other reviews of the film, can be found here.

Trajan Has Earned a Vacation

John Constantine — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 23:00:00 GMT

Despite being a flagrant Ze Frank imitator, YouTube user Kirby1’s got a point: the Trajan font could seriously use a break from Hollywood. If a font could actually be a whore, Trajan would indeed be the god-king of all whores. Hit the jump for Kirby1’s amusing thoughts on the matter.

YouTube Cabinet of Curiosities: Candy From Castro

Paul Clark — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 17:00:00 GMT

We here at Screengrab consider ourselves to be omnivorous in our moviegoing tastes. So, in an attempt to counter the rash of pieces about end-of-year lists and other prestige pictures, I'd like to tell you about a singularly strange film I caught up with recently, entitled If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? Released in 1971, Footmen was meant to be screened in churches throughout the South, but the film is no clean-scrubbed bit of Christian piety. It’s perhaps the most notorious example of a regional genre called the "soul winner," designed to (literally) scare the hell out of stray believers and send them running back into the bosom of the Lord.

Footmen was directed by down-home auteur Ron Ormond, who was spotlighted in the indispensable hixploitation book Hick Flicks: The Rise and Fall of Redneck Cinema, written by Screengrab’s own Scott Von Doviak. But the real dominant force behind the film was Mississippi preacher Rev. Estus Pirkle. Footmen was based on Pirkle’s book of the same title, and is a mindbending mix of fire-and-brimstone Christianity and anti-Communist propaganda. A sermon by Rev. Pirkle serves as narration for dramatized scenes of what would happen when the Communists took over America- based, according to Pirkle, on events that have already occurred in other Communist nations.

Footmen feels like a kind of Southern-fried Red-panic version of Scared Straight, containing one bizarre scene after another. The video above is from one of the film’s most infamous scenes, in which a state-sanctioned schoolteacher brainwashes children to turn away from Jesus. Believe it or not, the movie only gets weirder from here. Footmen is one of the damnedest films ever committed to celluloid, and one that ensured that Southland Tales was only the second most jaw-dropping movie I saw this past weekend.

YouTube Cabinet of Curiosities: Night on Bald Mountain (1933)

Paul Clark — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 17:00:00 GMT

We're all firming up our lists of the best new films of 2007- at least, I know I am. But I think it's also important to look back at the classics we finally caught up with this past year. I've seen some real corkers, but none has stuck with me quite like the 1933 animated short Night on Bald Mountain. Directed by husband-and-wife team Alexandre Alexeieff and Claire Parker, this short made excellent use of Modeste Mussorgsky's composition, beating Fantasia to the punch by seven years. While Alexeieff and Parker lacked Disney's resources, the film is nonetheless one of the most visually ravishing animated films I've ever seen.

But while one can appreciate Night on Bald Mountain without knowing anything about it, knowing about Alexeieff and Parker's animation technique makes the film feel like something of a miracle. The film was the first to utilize "pin screen animation", a technique pioneered by Alexeieff and Parker. Pin screen was a form of stop-motion animation that used a large screen filled with thousands of pins (hence the name). Images were created by moving the pins in and out as needed, as lights shining from the side of the screen would provide greater illumination to the pins that were pushed out than the ones that were pushed in. The filmmakers would then photograph a single frame, move the pins slightly, and start again.

Understandably, this was a painstaking process, and it took months and even years for Alexeieff and Parker to complete their short films. Because of this, the filmmakers only finished six pin screen shorts in their lifetimes. In addition, Orson Welles fans (and I'm assuming the great majority of you fall into this category) will recognize the technique from the prologue to Welles' 1962 adaptation of The Trial. Alexeieff and Parker demonstrated the technique for posterity in the film Pin Screen, which can be found on disc 7 of the DVD set Norman McLaren: The Master's Edition. Many of Alexeieff and Parker's other films can also be viewed on YouTube.

So what were some of the best classics you saw for the first time in 2007? Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments section.

Copy Cat Culture

Phil Nugent — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 16:30:00 GMT

In Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind, Jack Black and Mos Def play old-school video store clerks who, having accidentally erased their entire inventory of VHS tapes, "remake" their own versions of such rental-house perennials as RoboCop and Driving Miss Daisy with a Camcorder and the kind of props that an eight-year-old might use to construct his cardboard puppet theater. "They call this process "Sweding", for reasons that Gondry has already made his best attempt to explain to the Los Angeles Times' Chris Lee: "'I wanted a name that meant nothing,' Paris native Gondry said in Clouseau-esque Franglais about the invention of the verb. 'I had in mind, like, the suede shoes -- a fake velvet. A sort of ultra-suede? But I always get the word wrong because I'm French.'" Hey, they say that the first step is just admitting that you have a problem.

Aaron Sugarman, New Line Cinema's senior vice president for interactive marketing, thinks that the key to selling the movie may be turning people on to the great new world of Sweding, which shouldn't be hard; the way he sees it, the process is already well underway. "Everyone's taken by this idea of taking these great movies you love and remaking them into your own thing," he says. "It's what half the stuff on YouTube is." (Not to mention this fan favorite, whose makers might want to have a little chat with Gondry and Sugarman about their sources of inspiration.) The movie's own website extends the idea to the Internet, offering Sweded versions of such sites as IMDB and MySpace, and encouraging visitors to apply the Sweding process to their own lives, which had better have a lot of spare time set aside. The filmmakers plan to set up a "Sweding suite" at the Sundance Film Festival and offer workshop space to potential Sweders at SoHo's Deitch Projects gallery; Sweded fan films will shown at the gallery and on YouTube, though Gondry, to his credit, drew the line at a cross-promotion with Blockbuster, saying that turning what's meant as a celebration of independence and amateur creativity into a deal with a big corporation would amount to "contradicting ourselves." Meanwhile, New Line is reportedly "reaching out" to such directors as Robert Zemeckis and Ivan Reitman, whose works are Sweded in the movie, and inviting them to return to favor by producing their own Sweded versions of Be Kind Rewind. Ivan Reitman's version of a Michel Guidry film? Sounds like a sure-fire formula for turning gold into straw, but when it comes to surreal thinking, few filmmakers could have anything on a senior vice president in charge of interactive marketing.

YouTube Cabinet of Curiosities: Academy Award Winners Edition

Matthew Dessem — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 00:15:00 GMT

Via Neal Pollack, one of the strangest pieces of film you're likely to see this year. Morgan Freeman and Rita Moreno performing a Tom Lehrer song, from a time when children's television was noticeably more surreal. Not to mention more verbally acute and more alcoholic: when's the last time Dora the Explorer was offered manzanilla?

YouTube Cabinet of Curiosities: Sondheim on Film

Paul Clark — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 17:00:00 GMT

With the release of Tim Burton's version of Sweeney Todd this weekend, there’s sure to be a renewed interest among non-theatre buffs in the other works of Stephen Sondheim. To commemorate the occasion, I’m posting videos of two of Sondheim’s most iconic songs, as presented on film. First, here’s his old favorite “Send In the Clowns,” from A Little Night Music. It’s performed in the film version by Liz Taylor, whose voice isn’t exactly ideal for the song, but whose performance is a spectacle all the same. Check it out:

Another of Sondheim’s most enduring musicals is Company, which has yet to be adapted for the big screen. Company’s showstopping number “The Ladies Who Lunch” has been sung on various occasions by Carol Burnett (in the Sondheim revue Putting It Together), Barbara Walsh (in the 2006 Broadway revival), and then-17-year-old Anna Kendrick in the 2003 film Camp. But for sheer powerhouse charge, none can match Elaine Stritch’s take on the song on the original cast album. Here, in two segments, is Stritch performing take after take of the tune in D.A. Pennebaker’s 1970 documentary Original Cast Album: Company, a performance that’s even more impressive considering she’s singing it at 4:00 AM at the tail end of a nearly 18-hour cast recording session. Enjoy!

SWEENEY TODD opens nationwide this Friday. A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC and ORIGINAL CAST ALBUM: COMPANY are available on DVD.

YouTube Fight Club

Peter Smith — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 19:00:00 GMT

In late fall and winter, as the weather turns cold and the Oscar bait drives all the decent action movies out of the multiplex, a young man's thoughts to staying indoors, watching idiots beat each up on homemade fight videos posted on YouTube. Carlo Rotella has the definitive connoisseur's guide to and meditation on this emerging art form. Rotella breaks down the sub-genres, offers helpful advice to aspiring filmmakers and battlers, and makes a heartfelt plea for better color commentary from those in the crowd: "'Damn, he just hit you,' a voice from the crowd will say as the opponents tear into each other. 'He just hit you again. He's beating your ass!' To whom is this commentary directed? Who benefits from it? Not the fighters. They already know who hit whom." His essay, liberally illustrated with clips, is also a fount of lessons that it would have done me some good to have learned before adolescence, such as this: "These guys likewise commit the double error of messing with the wrong opponent and being unready for a fast start. As a general rule, if you pick a fight with someone who immediately assumes a relaxed but erect shuffle-stepping stance with his hands up and his chin tucked and a blandly businesslike expression on his face, you have probably just answered the question of the day wrong. . ." — Phil Nugent

YouTube Cabinet of Curiosities: Son of Dracula (1974)

Peter Smith — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 16:00:00 GMT

One of the best things about Columbus, Ohio’s The Incredible Two-Headed Marathon is the wide array of vintage trailers the hosts screen prior to the movies, trailers that run the gamut from classics to semi-forgotten junk. One of the most crowd-pleasing trailers to be shown this year advertised what was allegedly "The First Rock-and-Roll Dracula Movie," an Apple Films-produced horror spoof entitled Son of Dracula. The film, directed by the late, great cinematographer Freddie Francis, isn’t exactly good, but it’s certainly a must for connoisseurs of seventies-era kitsch. Fans of Harry Nilsson, who stars as the rockin’ count and performs about a dozen songs off his classic albums Nilsson Schmilsson and Son of Schmilsson, are also advised to check it out, as it’s one of only two big-screen roles by the great singer-songwriter. Besides, how can you resist a movie that features Ringo Starr as his mentor Merlin and Kind Hearts and Coronets' Dennis Price as Van Helsing, with special appearances by Peter Frampton, Keith Moon and John Bonham.

Instead of the trailer — which is unavailable online — I give you part one of the film itself, which some enterprising YouTuber dug out pop culture’s junk drawer and posted for your enjoyment and edification. Click the link for the other nine segments of the movie. . . if you DARE!

— Paul Clark