Video of the Day 2: Pictures of Assholes
3/30/2007 5:45:00 PM
It seems like we're all Joseph Gordon-Levitt all the time over here at Nerve these days, but we had to include this one. It's a short JGL made (which he posted on his own website), featuring some paparazzi. He discusses it further in his Film Lounge interview.
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Take Five: What's That Strange Music I Hear?
3/30/2007 4:59:39 PM
Now playing across the country, The Hills Have Eyes 2 — the Wes Craven-written sequel to the remake of the Wes Craven-directed original — doesn't interest me on its merits as a film. Once you've seen one company of National Guardsman eaten by a horde of radioactive zombies, you've seen 'em all. What interested me was the trailer; more specifically, the use, in the trailer, of the creepy, intricate "Insect Eyes" — a track off mutant folkie Devendra Banhart's debut album, “Rejoicing in the Hands.” To say it's one of the all-time strangest marriages of image and sound I've ever experienced is an understatement, and it got me to thinking of other bizarre combinations of film narrative and pop music that have remained in my memory long after the lights have gone up and the tune has faded from my memory. Sure, any old genius can, like Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino, come up with a perfect blend of sight and sound; but it takes a special kind of filmmaker to do something this nuts.
A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1971) – "Singin' in the Rain" Gene Kelly.
There are few movies as polarizing as Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, and few scenes as divisive as its vicious hero Alex's rape and assault during a home invasion as he cheerily sings the title number from Hollywood's greatest musical. Kubrick knew exactly what he was doing here, pitting one movie, one meaning, one method of filmmaking directly against one another and forcing the viewer to make an impossible choice. (Though one must give credit to actor Malcolm McDowell for being the one who improvised the song while goofing around on set — Kubrick reportedly was so immediately taken with the idea he rushed out to make sure he could get the rights to the song, then rushed back to set and told McDowell to go with it.) Having seen the movie, and having heard the song in this particular context, even if you hate A Clockwork Orange, it's all but impossible to hear it again without making the association, just as Kubrick and McDowell intended.
DAWN OF THE DEAD (1978) – "The Gonk" by the Noveltones.
One of the reasons George Romero's undead epic works so well is that it's a masterful satire on capitalism as well as a balls-out monster movie. Its narrative of American consumer zombies turned into literal zombies — and thus drawn instinctively to their natural habitat, the shopping mall — gets almost every detail, from the survivor fantasy of ransacking a fully stocked department store to the zombies gaping at the mannequins in the store windows, exactly right. Nowhere is this more evident than in the hilarious final sequence, where the zombies take over the mall to the strains of this perfectly realized goof on limp, non-intrusive Muzak.
REPO MAN (1984) – "The Shit Hits the Fan" by the Circle Jerks.
Take it from someone who was there: no movie, not even Penelope Spheeris' straight-up documentary The Decline of Western Civilization, captures the tone of the L.A. punk scene of the 1980s as well as Alex Cox's Repo Man. The music, naturally, is pitch-perfect, with lots of great moments accompanied by Black Flag, Iggy Pop and Los Plugz — but none is more perfect than when Otto and his friends visit Agent Rogersz at a swanky nightclub. As a barely competent, ingratiating pop combo bleats in the background, your brain teases you: what is that song? It's so familiar, yet so out of place. Then it hits you: it's hardcore legends the Circle Jerks, done up in lounge-singer drag, doing a sleazy-smooth cover of their own mosh-pit classic "When the Shit Hits the Fan".
THE BIG LEBOWSKI (1998) – "Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)" by the First Edition.
For all the talk of how the Coen Brothers' bewildering brilliant The Big Lebowski is a postmodern pastiche of a Raymond Chandler noir, it hardly gets any credit for being a hell of a messed-up musical. There aren't a lot of directors who would even think of setting a big combo dream sequence/Busby Berkeley production number, featuring Saddam Hussein and a bowling alley, to the tune of this woozy piece of cobwebbed psychedelia (the kind of number where the songwriter seems to measure how, like, totally heavy he is by the recurrence of the word "mind"), let alone be able to pull it off, but the use of the First Edition quasi-classic is one of the movie's many high points. (Special bonus crazy points for the realization that the singer and songwriter behind this unlikely piece of drugged-out pop silliness is none other than a young Kenny Rogers.)
OFFICE SPACE (1999) – "Still" by the Geto Boys.
Like most of Mike Judge's work, Office Space is terribly inconsistent. It abandons its most appealing premise about halfway into the movie, and turns what could be a truly subversive statement about the alienation of work into a fairly tame, straightforward heist comedy. But along the way, it serves up tons of laughs, and none of them are more potent than one of the all-time killer visual jokes: to the strains of one of the most powerful, nihilistic slabs of gangsta rap in hip-hop history, three timid, tie-wearing suburban cubicle drones dismantle a photocopier with all the bloodthirsty gusto of a vicious inner-city set-trip.
— Leonard Pierce
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Further Notes on American Cinema: Lucky McKee [The Near Side of Paradise]
3/30/2007 4:20:00 PM
As a fan and disciple of American Cinema, Andrew Sarris's standard anatomization of Hollywood directors, I return to it again and again for insight and succor. Unfortunately, the book has a cut off date of 1968, consequently containing no rankings and summaries for Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone, Terrence Malick, and scores and scores of other directors who emerged since Sarris's book came out. Modestly, I hope to rectify that situation. Over the next many months, I propose to issue forth brand spanking new director summaries and evaluations, geared for adaptability into Sarris's template. With a slight refiguring of Sarris's categories, these new director filmographies and summaries should slip easily into Sarris's book, physically, though perhaps not aesthetically. As with Sarris's book, titles will be in plain text, with key films of a director's oeuvre in italics. My slightly refined categories will be, in ranking order, Pantheon, The Near Side of Paradise, Working Stiffs, Lightly Likable, Cable Ready, Send in the Clowns, Flashes in the Pan, Foreign Entanglements, Producers as Auteurs, Less Than Meets the Eye, and finally, Subjects for Further Research. Rankings are tentative, for the most part, because these are living directors whose full careers may eventually modify their final rankings. Fellow fans of American Cinema are encouraged to print out these dispatches and paste them into a scrapbook that can sit on the shelf next to Sarris's book, looking like its long-lost patchwork cousin. — DKH
 | | Lucky McKee |
All Cheerleaders Die (2001, also writer); May (2002, also writer, music supervisor); Sick Girl (episode of Masters of Horror, 2006); The Woods (2006); Roman (2006, writer-producer-actor only); Red (2007)
In a different generation, Lucky McKee might have been a Douglas Sirk or a George Cukor. His focus and areas of sympathy lie wholly with women, their loneliness, and their suffering, especially those with an inability to fit in. He also has a fascination with Lesbians, whom he incorporates into his films on an equal footing with his other characters. The times being what they are, McKee dwells in the realm of relatively low budget horror. But though he may have a visual affinity for the genre (and his movies are almost always visually polished despite their budgets), essentially McKee uses the flexibility of the horror film to explore the facets of women and their sociology.
 | | May |
His signature film remains May, an unrelenting profile of female oddity that tests even the viewer's inherent sympathy. It could easily have been a Takashi Miike tale as it follows a woman (Angela Bettis) deeper into strangeness. McKee wittily includes in the narrative a horror film buff (Jeremy Sisio) who gets much more than he bargained for, who is confronted with real horror. Though posters on the wall of the horror buff's house suggest that Dario Argento is a premiere influence on McKee, his films actually link back more closely to '60s and '70s "closed house" horror films such as Whatever Happened to Baby Jane and The Mother.
Roman flips the paradigm. Though it is written by and stars McKee in the lead role, it is directed (on digital video) by Angela Bettis, his otherwise cinematic muse, and the film privileges a lonely male with a dull job and a hopeless crush on a neighbor (the always great Kristin Bell). Roman has the feel of an early script resurrected; it doesn't have enough story for its 92 minutes.
 | | Roman |
"The Sick Girl" blends the arch humor of the whole Masters of Horror series with the agony of modern dating (in this case a Lesbian first date). If May was a veterinarian with strange fantasies, then "Sick Girl"'s Ida Teeter (Bettis again) is an oddball etymologist with an odd Jane Hathaway demeanor who at least enjoys a short period of happiness, at least until her new girlfriend (Erin Brown) is taken over by an "aggressive" insect that Ida receives in the mail.
The Woods expands McKee's palette while remaining consistent with his fixation on lonely troubled women. Like the recent The Covenant, The Woods is an "old dark school" tale in which a young woman Heather (Agnes Bruckner) is farmed out to an exclusive yet mysterious school where she is dropped among her mirror images. As a pyro, Heather of course also has red hair, which earns her the sobriquet "firecrotch" from the school's "mean girl," Samantha (Rachel Nichols).
The Woods takes place in a vaguely 1960s world, with Bruce Campbell as the dad and lush romantic '60s tunes on the car radio. Though less visually exhaustive than his previous films, The Woods broadens the context out of which his women emerge (Heather's mother is a vain harridan) and through which they must arise (a closed matriarchal society). As in May, Heather manages to attract a sole friend, Marcie Turner (Lauren Birkell) who is really the May equivalent; Heather is too much the independent rebel and smart mouth.
 | | The Sick Girl |
Eventually the school is shown to have huge secrets of its own, and its narrative resolves itself down a path that links it to Neil LaBute's take on The Wicker Man and its secret society of outsider women. Fine as it is, The Woods's narrative eventually seems to get out of hand, and it's possible that McKee is more successful with a smaller tableau.
Few directors have imposed on themselves such a constricted vein to mine, yet on the surface McKee's films don't feel obsessive or narrow. Perhaps that is because thus far MeKee has managed to maintain his integrity as a writer-director. His second tier obsessions — watching and voyeurism from within the cocoon of imposed societal isolation — make McKee eminently worthy of obsession on the part of film fans themselves, who should be able to relate to his sensitivity to that emotional state. At some point, McKee will make a more mainstream hit, and his name will cease to be an oddity among horror directors.
— DK Holm
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Tank Girl: The Alternate Version
3/30/2007 3:45:00 PM
How many of you remember Tank Girl? A barely memorable adaptation of Alan Martin and Jamie Hewlett's comic book, the film was directed by Rachel Talalay and starred Lori Petty (who replaced Emily Lloyd, who dropped out when told she had to shave her head for the role). The story followed Tank Girl battling Malcolm McDowell and the evil Water & Power corporation. There are various sidekicks she picks on the way, the most notable being a mutant half-kangaroo/half human character, TG, whom she gets off with.
Given that the last attempt at off-screen bestiality was in the G-rated bomb, Howard the Duck, it was no wonder the studio got jittery with the film. The film was severely re-cut before release and flopped at the box office.
Rachel Talalay has carved a very respectable career as a director for TV on both sides of the Atlantic. Not only has she done episodes of The Dead Zone and Ally McBeal but she also helmed the UK series Bands of Gold and an adaptation of Wind in the Willows. Her feature career, though, has faltered — until recently, she was attached to direct an adaptation of Garth Ennis' Preacher comic strip.
Now, Rachel has put all the scenes that the studio forced her to cut on the web; you can check them out at her official website or on YouTube. The film might not be a classic, but it did introduce this bizarre comic book to a wider audience.
— Faisal Qureshi
 | | Lori Petty in Tank Girl |
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“Those Who Can’t Do” and Other Myths from the Writer-Maker Divide
3/30/2007 3:00:00 PM
A couple of weeks ago in this space, I lamented the almost complete absence of movies about college basketball. Apparently, I wasn’t the only hoops junkie who noticed. Onetime ESPN.com contributor and sports blogger Dan Shanoff announced this week that he has optioned a screenplay — an underdog-sports comedy about a college intramural team that makes it to the NCAA tournament.
Several prefaces are in order here. First of all, I’ve read Shanoff’s sportswriting work for years, and he’s a clever and savvy guy who may very well be able to transfer that cleverness and savvy to cinematic storytelling. Second, I clearly haven’t read the screenplay in question, so I have no clue as to its possible merits as a film. And third, we all should know that “optioned screenplay” is only a half-step up from “screenplay sitting collecting dust in my desk drawer” in terms of the likelihood of ever seeing a theater screen.
But while I should simply be thinking, “Good for him,” there’s a part of me that feels a twinge of annoyance at a deal like this. And maybe that’s because I’ve spent more than a decade as a professional critic listening to people assume that behind all of my writing about movies is a guy who really, deep down, must want to write movies.
This could easily seem like a backhanded swipe at other contributors to this site, many of whom either have made movies or have a long-term interest in making movies. Seriously, follow your blisses, dudes and dudettes. It’s just that for every professional analyst who makes the career jump to creative art, there’s a reinforcement of the tired old saw that those who can’t do, teach. Sportswriters are all just frustrated would-be jocks, and film critics are all just frustrated would-be filmmakers. And now, apparently, even sportswriters are frustrated would-be filmmakers.
Critics keep feeling the need to defend what they do in the face of public attacks by filmmakers and “think-pieces” — oh, how loosely I use that term — about whether critics “matter” any more when we look at box office results. But it’s hard to take critics seriously about their value when so many of them behave as though criticism is just a stepping-stone to something they really want to do — or, more pragmatically, something at which they can make more money.
We are a culture that, in general, sneers at thoughtful analysis as the realm of pussies. A historian is not just some guy who didn’t have the balls to get out there and start his own war; he’s someone who can provide insight and context that allows deeper understanding. Analysis matters, whether it’s analysis of current events, sports or movies. I write about film because I love this unique art, not because I’m hoping to establish name recognition or make contacts for that killer pitch I’m just waiting to sell. But if analysts themselves keep behaving as though it’s something to graduate from as soon as possible, why should anyone else believe that?
I really do hope Shanoff has written a great college basketball movie. If it is, I’ll probably also kind of wish that someone else had written it.
— Scott Renshaw
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In Memoriam: John P. Ryan, Character Actor Extraordinaire
3/30/2007 2:30:00 PM
You've probably had friends like this. Likable guys whose ambition doesn't quite match their skills. Someone who just doesn't have much of a clue about how they come across, who are unaware of a physical or postural defect, or a manner of speaking that gives them a hint of the buffoon. You like them; but you always see them with a glass ceiling hovering over their head.
That's the way I felt about John P. Ryan, who died on March 20th at the age of 70. The barrel-chested, Dick Tracy-chinned actor had a bombastic way of delivering his lines. He always struck me like a hobbyist taking a whirl at movies, as if he were another George Kennedy whose presence in the movies is comforting but also rather curious. Yet the fierceness with which he sought out the role of Sonny Corleone belies any passivity. That he didn't get it (how could he, in the face of James Caan's more natural approach?) must have been a blow, but he was a good sport about it, later appearing in Coppola's Cotton Club.
Ryan probably first came to national attention as Spicer, the weird male nurse in Five Easy Pieces (there is a beautiful dissolve over his walking up to Lois Smith and talking, but without us being able to hear what he says, something you don't see in movies much anymore), but his claim to fame is as the dad, Frank Davies, in Larry Cohen's It's Alive. He showed a range, toiling under the strictures of a low budget, but wasn't able to capitalize on it, instead returning to broad, secondary roles.
But they were built into him. With his large chest and jutting jaw he could not overcome the tyranny of the physical that rules Hollywood casting. Yet his filmography is one that most any actor would be proud to flourish, including Hoffa, White Sands, Class of 1999, Three O'Clock High, Runaway Train (a film in which he was encouraged to redefine over the top), The Right Stuff, Breathless, The Escape Artist, The Postman Always Rings Twice, and The Missouri Breaks. He worked up until 1996, appearing in Bound as a gangster. What a way to go.
— DK Holm
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Brett Ratner Boxes Brett Carr, Winds Up In Hospital
3/30/2007 2:00:00 PM
Part of us is wondering if this is a hoax, but that does indeed appear to be Rush Hour Brett Ratner boxing with Bret Carr, his old friend and the director of the ultra low-budget RevoLOUtion. Not sure what started the feud, but damn. Ratner could probably raise the money for his next action opus just from selling people the right to punch him.
— Faisal Qureshi.
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Video of the Day 1: Best/Worst Fight Scene of All Time
3/30/2007 1:20:00 PM
Over a million people have already viewed this video, so we're probably a bit late to the party. But this thing just has to be shared. It has to be.
(Hat tip: Panayides Optical House)
— Bilge Ebiri
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In Praise of Thelma
3/30/2007 12:45:00 PM
As a working film editor, I know they rarely get recognized for their contributions. It wasn’t until recently that most moviegoers even knew what an editor did. And even then...who wants to write about editors anyway? They're not sexy, and no one wants them to pose in front of a Steenbeck on the cover of Vanity Fair.
One exception to this is Thelma Schoonmaker, who’s been Martin Scorsese's exclusive editor from Raging Bull onwards. The Independent did a pretty good interview with her recently, covering her early career, her trouble with the Unions when Scorsese tried to get her to cut his first couple of pictures, and her relationship (and later marriage) to the British director, Michael Powell.
— Faisal Qureshi
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Lounging Around...
3/30/2007 12:01:00 PM
Don’t forget to check out The Nerve Film Lounge today. We got all sorts of good stuff, including reviews of:
- The Lookout: Joseph Gordon-Levitt “adds nuance and intelligence to a role that would have cornered a lesser actor into caricature," while “the movie falls short of breaking out of the archetypal heist plot, but it does lend the old tricks an unexpected humanity.”
- Killer of Sheep: Charles Burnett’s much-praised, tragically unseen lost masterpiece is “anti-hyperbolic in its every understated gesture. Burnett's filmmaking is unassuming to the nth degree, and his belated cinematic debut is an affectionate, elliptical encounter with the small-scale pleasures and tragedies of the everyday world.”
- Blades of Glory: “[B]ecomes little more than a factory trying to churn out as many one-liners as possible, in the hopes that Ferrell's quotable gems will be snapped up by the same frat boys who endlessly aped Borat.”
- Also, check out Matt Prigge’s great interview with The Lookout’s Joseph Gordon-Levitt, in which the actor confesses he’s “deeply proud” of 3rd Rock from the Sun.
And stay tuned throughout the day for more reviews at the Film Lounge…
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Questions That Need No Answers…
3/30/2007 11:30:00 AM
Slate's Josh Levin has assembled a video slide show presentation to answer the question, "Why is Will Ferrell funny?" (If only this technology had been available when Chris Farley was alive!) In his introductory remarks, Levin writes that "compared with someone like Vince Vaughn, a talented comedian who infuses every role with manic shtick, Ferrell's versatility is a wonder to behold." Well, I knew that Vaughn's performance in Dodgeball was infused with something...
— Phil Nugent
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"Lookout" Is Right: Chaos at a Screening
3/30/2007 10:45:00 AM
The Lookout was screened for the critics earlier this week, on Monday night at the Lloyd Cinemas in Portland, Oregon. But this is not a review of the film, The Lookout (read Nerve's review here). This is a review of the experience of seeing The Lookout at a critic's screening, of seeing any movie at a critics screening.
There are three ways a reviewer can officially see a movie. They can go to a daytime screening held solely for them. They can attend a night screening that is usually a promotional event linked to a radio station or other local business. Or they can pay to see it after it opens. Increasingly, the third option is the most viable.
In the last year, there have been no less than four fistfights breaking out during radio tie in night screenings of movies for the critics. And always there is noise and chatter and vocal food consumption. Of late, the audience has taken to razzing and heckling the critics as they enter the theater. Who are these people and why is this happening?
Oh, I suppose one could argue that the world is becoming a violent place, so why should the movie auditorium, which after all traffics in dreams of violence, be exempt. But there is a specific reason for this increased unruliness.
They are called Screening Rats, Passholes, and a litany of other names. They are a group of freeloaders who chase all over town for movie passes and then arrive en masse.
Other cities have them, I have heard. Chicago. Los Angeles. But none of them match the dedication and the virulence of the Screening Rats in Portland. There are literally 200 of them. They all know each other, and sit in large blocks. They act as if the screening is their private party and one of the main Passholes, is often given to walking up and down the aisles, where his subjects kiss his ring in thanks for the passes he has given them, as if he ran the screening and not Paramount, Warner, or Sony.
This would be fine if it stopped there, and in fact that is the way it's been since 1979, when Passholism first got its start in Portland. Only the studios and their publicists would suffer, for the Passholes only communicate among each other, thus defeating the purpose of the word-of-mouth screening. You wouldn't want them talking about your movie anyway, as anyone who has eavesdropped on their post movie chatter knows that they essentially hate movies. They are only there for bragging rights and the free t-shirts. Often, they leave early, further disrupting the screenings.
But in the last year or two, the complexion of the Passholes has changed. There is more rage, more hostility, more violence. During the Blood Diamond screening, a fight broke out between two drunken Passholes, disrupting the screening for 20 minutes as the lights came on and Security tried to tear them apart. At an earlier screening in the same theater, two Rats got mad at each other and rolled out of the theater, fists flying. A critic I know left Seraphim Falls before it even began because of a fight that broke out right next to her, in the aisle. Finally, attendees reported to me that last Monday night a fistfight broke out in the middle of the auditorium right in the middle of the film. It was particularly embarrassing for Miramax-Disney, because writer-director Scott Frank's sister happened to be in the theater and was sitting right in front of the disputants.
I attend few of the night screenings any more because of these fights. In addition, I am jeered and yelled at by the Rats as I walk into the theater (reviewers are let in early). I know it is fun to hate critics. It's a pastime I too have engaged in. But do the studios really want this to be the environment in which the reviewers see their films? Isn't it easier to mentally compose prose for a prospective review when you are not in fear for your life? I don't think that the opinions of reviewers are affected by the hostile environment. However, I do know that critics are attending fewer and fewer of the night screenings. If the studios are intentionally attempting to minimize the reviews their films receive, it's working.
— DK Holm
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Morning Deal Report: Clooney Denies, Wahlberg Signs, Tarantino Recuts
3/30/2007 10:02:33 AM
- Despite rumors to the contrary, longtime David O. Russell nemesis (and onetime David O. Russell employee) George Clooney claims he had nothing to do with the leak of those Lily Tomlin videos to the Internet.
- Awww. Hollywood’s newest starlet is 97 years old. And she hasn’t even had an upskirt paparazzi shot yet. (Hat tip: Movie City News.)
- We reported on the rumor earlier, but now it’s official: Mark Wahlberg will star in M. Night Shyamalan’s eco-thriller The Happening.
- Quentin Tarantino is reportedly planning to screen a longer cut of Death Proof at Cannes. Where they really understand grindhouse cinema.
- Lots of hip bands to be featured on the Spider-Man 3 soundtrack, including The Killers, Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs, and The Flaming Lips. Presumably to inoculate the film against the whining of jaded alt-rock hipsters. (Hat tip: Pop candy.)
— Bilge Ebiri
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