Video of the Day 2: Superman 2 – the Alternate Alternate Cut
3/23/2007 5:00:00 PM
Many people were dissatisfied with Richard Donner's “restored” cut of Superman 2 when it was finally released last year. True, the impressive Marlon Brando footage and the alternate scene of Lois Lane’s discovery of Clark Kent's identity were well-appreciated, but the editing of the cut discarded much of the stuff that made Richard Lester's 1981 version more... well, fun. Also, the ending of Donner's cut was a re-hash of the first film — though that was due to no fault of his own, and more due to the fact that he was kicked off the production before he could come up with something more satisfying. The result was a coherent, but flawed film.
With this in mind, an enterprising editor has come up with their own alternative edit of Superman 2, in some ways superior to both versions. And much, much more satisfying.
— Faisal Qureshi
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The Auteur Meets the Critic: My Trip to a Film Set
3/23/2007 4:20:00 PM
ScreenGrab writer DK Holm recently had the chance to play a small part in James Westby’s new film. Here, he relates his experiences.
On a cold morning recently, when the feeble snow rested like dirty pellets against the gray curb, I was summoned to a large warehouse in Portland, Oregon's industrial section by writer-director James Westby.
Westby was near the end of shooting The Auteur, film number two of what must be some kind of trilogy he is doing that meditates on the movie business itself, a trio that began with his award winning Film Geek. I had a very minor role in Film Geek, playing "myself" along with a few other local movie reviewers and pundits during the film's final fantasy segment. A mostly improvised sequence, it appeared to come off well, and I suggested to Westby (begged, really) that if he had a part in any upcoming films to please contact me.
Later that year he sent me the script to The Auteur. He had a part for me. A note attached told me to turn to page 86. There was my part — all of one line. I was to play an Ebert-esque TV show reviewer evaluating the title character's latest release. That was in August of last year. I immediately set about to memorize that one line, taking a hint from Lillian Ross's profile of Tommy Lee Jones in the New Yorker a decade ago, in which she followed him around his Texas ranch as he said the line, "I don't care" from The Fugitive 500 times a day in different tonalities and emphases.
Finally, half a year later, I got the call. The Auteur was enjoying its last day of shooting, and Westby had time to squeeze in one more scene, the TV review show. Westby's highly competent and engaging producer, Amber Geiger, directed a PA to come fetch me. The young lady was friendly at first, but as soon as she realized that I wasn't "important," conversation ceased with the abruptness of a brick wall.
Deposited at the door, I entered a vast, cold, dirty four-story building which Westby had practically taken over. Every floor hosted either a set or a production office. I was rushed to the wardrobe department where one of the shirt-sweater combos I brought was approved. After cursory "make up" (again, I wasn't deemed important), which was so cursory it had to be redone, I was ready to step under the lights next to the Roeper avatar, another of the film's producers named Byrd McDonald. Though I still had my line memorized, Westby enjoined us to improvise over a few select ideas, which we did with about 80 per cent efficiency.
The Auteur concerns the career of pornographic filmmaker Arturo Domingo (Melik Malkasian, of Film Geek). Like Boogie Nights, The Auteur had an earlier iteration as a short subject, but now Westby is expanding his text, with extended sequences that parody both recent hit films and their imaginary porno adaptations. Those worried about Scotty Pelk from Film Geek will be pleased to know that he has a cameo in The Auteur.
My scene done, I wandered around the set and tried to absorb the essence of cinema in action. The Auteur struck me as an unusually quiet set, which Westby ruled with distracted calm. "Acting" in a film is an unusual experience, to riot in obviousness. I was terribly nervous in front of the crew, which I assumed to be your classic "seen it all" veterans, though they all looked to be in their 20s. The nature of the work required that I maintain at equal levels of attention five threads all at once: what I was saying, my body, the camera, my "co-star," and Westby's instructions and modifications from the last take. It was exhausting.
On the other hand, it lasted but an hour, and then I was able to wander the set. Westby took me back into a small chamber hidden behind the set where the film's editor was assembling the magnificent digital imagery into a movie on a laptop. He showed me a scene that parodied Fight Club and featured local phenomenon Viva Las Vegas: writer, editor, actress, rock musician muse, and exotic dancer. While wandering around the set I noticed that Westby had turned many of the digital images into storyboards, with cartoon stage directions and word balloons. When no one was looking, I liberated a couple of the pages as a memento (after all, I was not otherwise getting paid). Then it was time to go, and I was transported from the world of teeming, amusing sexual fantasy to the messy streets of reality in silence.
— DK Holm
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Worst Accents Addendum: John Malkovich in Johnny English
3/23/2007 3:45:00 PM
While working on our Worst Accents of All Time list earlier this week, we had a bit of back and forth over which of John Malkovich’s outrageous accents to feature on our list — his goofily inappropriate Russian brogue in Rounders, or his unbearably goofy French accent in the Rowan Atkinson spy spoof Johnny English. We decided on Rounders, for the simple fact that a hilarious scene like that right at the supposed narrative high point of a drama was just wildly misguided, and because Johnny English, being an intentionally silly flick, only benefited from Malkovich’s ridiculous Fwwench accent.
Still, we just had to share this clip. It truly is something to behold. Enjoy.
— Bilge Ebiri
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Scenes from the Life of Orson Welles: A Tragedy in Three Clips
3/23/2007 3:00:00 PM
Anyone who reads Joseph McBride's new biography Whatever Happed to Orson Welles? will walk away from it convinced, more than ever, that Orson Welles was a pioneer. McBride’s work goes into great details on what happened to Welles’s unfinished films, including the legendary The Other Side of the Wind. Some of the footage from the film, which has made its way onto the internets, was already featured as a ScreenGrab Video of the Day months ago; still, there’s no harm in checking it out again:
But many people forget that Welles was also a pioneer of the theatre before getting into films. And one of his most controversial and successful productions was an all-black staging of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the design of which was an influence on his under-rated film adaptation of 1948. A newsreel company shot a few clips to share with cinema audiences. Here they are:
And now comes the sad part. While he continued to work on some of his greatest films, Welles was also often reduced near the end of his life to appearing in crappy Paul Masson wine commercials. At least he had the good sense to sample the product before reporting in for work.
— Faisal Qureshi
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Vlad the Impaler: Close-Up
3/23/2007 2:15:00 PM
Taking down filmdom’s most beloved classics, one sacred cow at a time…
I normally like to impale stuff I've seen before — partial re-viewing seems to yield deeper grounds for complaint — but MoMA's excellent recent Abbas Kiarostami retro not only allowed to me see some rare gems (The Wedding Suit is as essential as any of the accepted classics in my opinion) but to finally catch up with Close-Up: a movie that routinely makes top 100 lists, that Kiarostami himself considers his best film, a quintessential examination of the porous boundary between film "reality" and "fiction," and a great excuse to use all kinds of potentially destabilizing scare quotes.
Yeah. And?
In a letter published in February's issue of Sight & Sound, one Giovanni Fazio writes in to complain (re: Cache) that this genre — the "half-baked 'meditation' on filming and the image" — is "something critics seem to swoon for." It's not a problem exclusive to film geeks — anyone who's spent any significant amount of time studying English in college will recall watching their TAs' and professors' eyes glaze over in excitement whenever discussing passages wherein the protagonists read — but there's something about self-reflexive filmmaking that seems to induce automatic critical orgasms. To his everlasting credit, Kiarostami will have none of these interpretations: "Close-Up is not a film about cinema," he has stated. But aforementioned students of English will also remember that authorial intention should never be allowed to interfere with a film's interpretation. So…
Simply, Close-Up is a semi-documentary about Hossein Sabzian, who was arrested in 1989 for impersonating Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf and thereby ingratiating himself with a family, promising them to shoot "his" next movie in their house and borrowing 1,900 toman (about 10 pounds at the time), the latter detail constituting the main charge against him in the subsequent trial. Kiarostami read about the bizarre affair in the magazine Sorush, rushed to film the trial, and then subsequently convinced nearly all of the main players to participate in an ersatz-verite re-creation.
The film's fundamental adherence to the basic facts of the case is never in doubt; the scene-to-scene veracity, as with so much of Kiarostami's work, is what's at stake. In his other films, Kiarostami frequently has his characters interrupt scenes to point out their falsehood, or himself warps the narrative to point out its falsehood (cf. Taste of Cherry's ending for the most famous example). Thing is, it's always an interruption or twist in the narrative, not the whole movie. Which is a good thing: Kiarostami is a master of visuals, layering intriguing soundscapes and teasing out great performances from amateurs, but he's not exactly one of cinema's great thinkers in a themed, This Is What The Movie Means kind of way. The glory of Taste of Cherry — as with much of Kiarostami's work — doesn't rest in its theme (which can basically reduced to an '80s t-shirt that says — in big, Frankie Goes To Hollywood letters — "Choose Life"), but in its consideration of landscapes, driving, use of repetition and recording of the moments of "nothingness" that make up the most tangible elements of Kiarostami's work.
 | | Abbas Kiarostami |
Close-Up ditches pretty much all of these assets in favor of endless close-ups of people talking (the title's no lie) and...that's about it. As thought fodder for cinema studies grad students, Close-Up suggests a lot about the "boundary" between truth and fiction, yet not in a particularly artful way: Sabzian is an impoverished sadsack who relates to the impoverished sadsacks of Makhmalbaf's work, and that's about it. You could, I suppose, write an endless disquisition on the tangled relation between fact and fiction. Or you could simply pick-up Alberto Elena's invaluable if awkwardly translated The Cinema of Abbas Kiarostami, learn which sequences are which, and then respect authorial intention.
The Impaler apologizes. The movie itself is kind of visually dull, endlessly talky, and not particularly rewarding, with Kiarostami ignoring his own strengths. But it's the fans he really hates.
— Vadim Rizov
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Video of the Day 1: Clint Eastwood in Lady Godiva of Coventry
3/23/2007 1:30:00 PM
The popularity of YouTube has given rise to many types of user-created phenomena, from mash-up trailers to fan re-edits to those goofy things where people take scenes from 300 and set them to Evanescence songs. But one of our favorites is the whole idea of creating a video by editing together all the scenes featuring an actor in a small supporting part — at their best, these things have a certain comic energy and rhythm that we find hard to resist. See if you agree: here, one enterprising YouTuber took all the scenes featuring one young, then-unknown named Clint Eastwood from the film Lady Godiva of Coventry and turned it into something worthy of Tom Stoppard.
— Bilge Ebiri
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Take Five: Both Sides of the Camera
3/23/2007 12:30:00 PM
This week sees the national release of Brian W. Cook's Color Me Kubrick: A True…ish Story (Go here for Nerve’s review, and go here for an interview with its writer), the highly implausible tale of an ordinary man (Alan Conway, played here by a game John Malkovich) who poses as Stanley Kubrick, despite looking nothing like him and knowing next to nothing about his films. Even more implausibly, Conway is a real person and many of the events in Color Me Kubrick really did take place. And while this may be the first film where an actor plays a non-actor playing a director, there's a long — and often just as implausible, and just as true — history of famous directors ending up on the wrong end of the lens, whether playing themselves or being played by others.
WERNER HERZOG EATS HIS SHOE (1980)
Documentary filmmaker Les Blank is best known for his lively, inviting films about cuisine, including Garlic is as Good as Ten Mothers and Yum, Yum, Yum!, a study of the origins of Cajun and Creole cooking. Perhaps his most noteworthy film, though, involves a meal that no one would want to eat, especially the man who ended up eating it: just as the title indicates, the dementedly brilliant German director Werner Herzog eats a shoe after having lost a bet that then-unknown director Errol Morris would never complete his first movie. In between bites of the boiled boot, Herzog expounds, as Herzog will, on the nature of filmmaking.
REAL LIFE (1979)
Albert Brooks isn't really a shameless, insensitive showbiz creep; he just plays one in his movies. Brooks' greatest comic creation is "Albert Brooks", a neurotic, self-deluding Hollywood jackoff, and that character is nowhere more fully realized than in his first feature, where he portrays, well, Albert Brooks — a comedian who courts respectability by spearheading an attempt to film a "real" family for an entire year. The project goes swimmingly for about, oh, five minutes or so until Brooks decides reality is too boring and spices it up with songs, clown acts, and an attempt to seduce his leading man's wife. A funny, prescient film that's too little seen.
ED WOOD (1994)
You can definitely make a convincing argument that the best way to experience Ed Wood in front of the camera is to see the movies Ed Wood made behind the camera: the awful auteur delivers the performance of a lifetime as the titular transvestite in Glen or Glenda, and it's a performance that at least rivals that of the rest of the rank amateurs in his movies. Still, as an actor, Ed was no Tor Johnson, and it fell to Johnny Depp to humanize and redeem Hollywood's most notorious idiot-savant. It probably says something about the man that Ed Wood was worse at being Ed Wood than a guy who never met Ed Wood…but what?
CONTEMPT (1963)
In the history of film, there has probably never been a bigger extended middle finger — towards critics, audiences, and the film's own producers — than Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt. Saddled with bloated financing, a demanding producer and stars he neither needed nor wanted, Godard was assigned to make a blockbuster, and hated every minute of it. Rather than throw up his hands, he made Contempt, one of the most accurately-named films this side of, well, Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe; casting a nobody named Michel Piccoli as an anguished screenwriter clearly meant to represent himself, Godard created a bitter masterpiece of recrimination.
THE POSTMAN (1997)
Hollywood loves it when actors direct, which is how people like Robert Redford take home Oscars in years where the competition is Raging Bull. Me? I like it when actors make big, huge fools out of themselves, which is why this moronic, overpriced piece of crap is a fave. Essentially monstrously undeserving Best Director winner Kevin Costner's love letter to monstrously undeserving Best Actor nominee Kevin Costner, The Postman glistens with the sweet, sticky sheen of self-love, from the ludicrous speech leading lady Olivia Williams gives the title character to the appearance of not one but two cameos by Costner's offspring. The kind of monuments to out-of-control egos that rarely get made anymore these days — but then again, there's always Mel Gibson.
— Leonard Pierce
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When Starf*cking Goes Wrong: A Grazergate Update
3/23/2007 11:45:00 AM
I should’ve been covering Grazergate a bit earlier, but since the shit has hit the fan in such an extraordinary way in the last day or two, now’s as good a time as any, I guess.
Those paying attention may already be familiar with the basics: The Los Angeles Times, in all its ass-kissing wisdom, decided it was going to hire Imagine honcho (and real-life Chia Pet) Brian Grazer to guest-edit the opinion section of this Sunday's edition of the paper.
There was some public outcry over such a silly decision, but the paper was ready to go forward with the whole thing — until it was revealed that editorial page editor Andres Martinez’s girlfriend was Imagine’s publicist. So, at the last minute, they pulled the section, which was slated to appear on Sunday. Martinez resigned, in a huff.
“Although Martinez insists the selection was not influenced by his relationship, and publisher David Hiller said he also believed that to be true, the publisher decided the appearance of conflict of interest was too dicey for the Current section to be published as planned in Sunday's paper. ‘
What’s amazing is that the Times saw the appearance of conflict of interest in the fact that one of its editors had a relationship with one of the publicists…but it refused to see any conflict of interest in the idea of Los Angeles’ main daily’s opinion section being guest edited by one of the city’s most powerful producers. Imagine the Washington Post guest edited by George W. Bush, or Hillary Clinton.
— Bilge Ebiri
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At the Film Lounge: Sandler Agonistes. Plus, Cross-dressing Iranians, Cross-dressing Malkovich
3/23/2007 11:01:46 AM
There are a whole bunch of new reviews up at the Nerve Film Lounge today, to assist you in your all-important movie-going decisions. Here’s a sampling.
Shooter - “Nobody deserves a B-movie franchise more than the former Marky Mark, and at least on paper, Antoine Fuqua's Shooter sounds like an admirable attempt at delivering the goods…Unfortunately, [it] doesn't steady its aim between convincing conspiracy thriller and balls-out B-movie, and ends up hitting neither target.”
Offside - An Iranian film about the lowly status of women in that country that “isn’t a solemn, well-intentioned drag — though it does involve drag.” We’re there.
Reign Over Me - Our reviewer finds it “soppy, sentimental” and can’t quite get over the fact that “[Adam] Sandler still speaks in the same voice from his comedies, the cracking mumble of a child asking for just one more bowl of soup, please.”
TMNT - It can’t decide whether it wants to appeal to “the Yu-Gi-Oh! set” or “thirty-year-old nostalgia hounds.” Believe it or not, those two demographics have not yet merged.
Color Me Kubrick - John Malkovich at his scenery-chewing best in this light-hearted, sort of fact-based comedy about a man who impersonated Stanley Kubrick in the 90s. Bonus for Kubrick fans: the film is full of allusions to the director’s films, and was made by his former assistants.
I Think I Love My Wife - “Feels like a bad mash-up of [Chris Rock’s] stage one-liners (he even has one incidental character recycle his "black people like rims" bit) pushed into a Lifetime midlife-crisis movie,” although it does have “an amazing last scene.”
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Movies Get Failing Grade from Historians When It Comes to the Facts
3/23/2007 10:30:00 AM
The adaptation of Frank Miller's graphic novel 300 is out today in the
UK. To tie-in with this and the recent controversy surrounding the film and its lack of historical accuracy (which by all accounts is more to blame in the graphic novel), the BBC has a great article up about historical accuracy in film, featuring interviews with film historian Kevin Brownlow (The Parade’s Gone By…) and others concerning popular cinema’s complicated relationship with facts. (Money quote: “Just imagine the fuss that is going to be caused when they make a film about Margaret Thatcher.")
— Faisal Qureshi
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Morning Deal Report: Kate & Leo Reunite, Sony Gets Another Coppola, Grindhouse Gets a Rating
3/23/2007 10:03:38 AM
- Titanic stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet are reuniting to star in American Beauty director Sam Mendes’s adaptation of Richard Yates’s beloved 1961 novel Revolutionary Road, about “a suburban 1950s couple tragically caught between their true desires and the pressure to conform.”
- Sony Pictures Classics has taken the distribution rights for Francis Ford Coppola’s newest film, Youth Without Youth.
- Grindhouse finally has a rating — duh, it’s an R — and a running time — over three hours.
- Rumors are buzzing that the villain in the fourth Spider-Man movie (that would be the one they’re going to make after they’re done with the next one) will be Morlun, “a vampiric being who has walked the earth for centuries.” Of course, they may have to figure out who the hell will be playing Spider-Man first.
- Lily Tomlin reacts to those leaked videos of her and David O. Russell going at each other's throats — and she’s simultaneously mortified and curiously Zen about the whole thing: “Adults have fights and go through stuff…I know some people are more dignified in the world, that if you transgress against that kind of professionalism, that it’s some kind of great sin, but I don’t see it that way.”
- Jeanne Tripplehorn and Embeth Davidtz have joined the cast of Rowan Woods’s Winged Creatures, which already includes Kate Beckinsale, Forrest Whitaker, Dakota Fanning, Guy Pearce and Jackie Earle Haley. “The story follows the witnesses to a brutal murder suicide in a fast food restaurant as they cope with the aftermath of the incident and how they affect the people who help them along the way.” It’s like Fearless with Big Macs.
- Warner Bros. Pictures has bought the film rights to For the Sake of Liberty: America's First Spy, M. William Phelps' upcoming biography of American Revolutionary hero Nathan Hale, who was executed by the British in 1776 after being caught working for the Americans on the British-occupied island of Manhattan.
— Bilge Ebiri
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