Weekly Top 1020: The Most Unforgettable Death Scenes of All Time, Part 4 (Spoiler Alert!)
5/24/2007 4:45:00 PM
Go here for Part One
Go here for Part Two
Go here for Part Three
Al Pacino, SCARFACE
“You wanna play rough? Okay. Say hello to my little friend.” Before every rapper, comedian and wannabe gangsta attempted his own pathetic impression, Tony Montana’s infamous lines kicked off one of the most incredible death scenes in movie history. As if singlehandedly avenging the deaths of Bonnie & Clyde, Sonny Corleone, and every other antihero who went down in a hail of gunfire, Al Pacino’s Scarface manages to slaughter a dozen or so men while, thanks to his coke-fueled rage, he himself takes machine gun fire as he taunts his would-be assassins that he’s still standing. It is only a shotgun blast from the back that finally sends him into a crucifixion pose, belly-flopping into the fountain pool below quickly turning the turquoise blue water blood red. Then that creepy music comes back in and the camera scans up to feed us the forced irony of a neon wrapped globe emblazoned with Tony’s mantra, “The World Is Yours,” all while director Brian De Palma’s elegant, symmetrical framing gives the scene a deeply ironic kick. There’s nothing subtle about the conclusion to De Palma’s three hour gangster epic, but then again there’s nothing subtle about anything in this movie — not the over-the-top plotting (courtesy of some whippersnapper named Oliver Stone), the acres of violence, or Pacino’s much celebrated performance. But would you believe us if we told you the film had some historical value? It’s actually not entirely inaccurate in its reflection of a strange, dark period of time in Miami when the amount of drugs, money and beautiful women concentrated in one area caused a crime wave the world has rarely seen. (Don’t believe us? Check out last year’s documentary Cocaine Cowboys, filled with amazing, first-hand accounts of Miami’s coke and crime heyday.)
Orson Welles, CITIZEN KANE
There are reasons why so many smart people think this is one of the greatest films ever made. This stunning opening scene is but one of them: As Welles dissolves creepily up towards Charles Foster Kane’s forbidding castle, you could swear that you’re watching a Universal monster movie. But then the movie goes experimental on us, as Welles cuts to a snowscape, followed by a jarring zoom back from a snow globe clenched desperately in a dying man’s hands, as a pair of lips cryptically whispers, “Rosebud.” (The movie will eventually turn into a documentary newsreel, then to a film noir, a marital drama, a screwball comedy, a musical, a thriller, and pretty much any other genre you can imagine.) What, exactly, is going on here? The beauty of Citizen Kane is that it manages to explore that question without ever really answering it: Narratively, we never find out the true meaning of Kane’s life. Stylistically, we go through the whole history of filmmaking up until 1941, even as the future of cinema is invented before our very eyes. And it would all have been nothing without that ominous, haunting death scene at the very beginning.
Samuel L. Jackson, DEEP BLUE SEA
Let’s face it: None of us were expecting much going into a movie about killer hyper-intelligent sharks directed by Renny Harlin and featuring an LL Cool J theme song about hyper-intelligent sharks. And Deep Blue Sea ultimately didn’t turn out to be much to write home about. But holy shit, its one stratospheric high-point is sure to live on in film history, long after people have forgotten who the hell Jean Renoir was. Just watch the clip.
Joel McCrea, RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY
In his later films, such as The Wild Bunch and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, the director Sam Peckinpah unleashed endless barrages of ammunition into his heroes in the last reel, as if nothing short of a minor war could bring them down for good. In this, his first great movie, the final shootout is comparatively modest in scale but no less lethal for that, as befits a hero — McCrea's aging hired gun, Steve Judd — who represents the best a man can be yet is still vulnerable to the rigors of aging, to betrayal, to simple feelings of disgust at the piddling insignificance of the no-account punks who can still take him out with a lucky shot. Peckinpah was lucky to have McCrea, an actor whose special, awesome ability to communicate total decency without ever seeming boring or sanctimonious had only deepened with age. At the end, having set things right, he sends the others in his party off to spare them the sight of his last moments and then, left alone and with the pain beginning to show in his face, he racefully slides out of the film frame, as if to spare the audience, too. A lot of other movies had coated the screen in gaseous emissions trying to make the Western hero's last stand seem mythic and emotionally moving, too; with one clean, simple gesture, Peckinpah and McCrea made their most revered competition, the Shanes and High Noons, look like the winners of booby prize day at Rodeo Clown College.
King Kong, KING KONG
"I'll tell you straight out, a lot of people assume that with me, everything is part of some angle. I can't say I blame them, really. That's the price of being a showman. When you've made the choices I have and gone around the world, risking life and limb every step of the way, just to make sure that I stay the greatest showman around — well, okay, I have had to do some pretty fast talking in my day, just to keep my head attached to my neck. Mama Denham didn't raise any dummies. Part of the attraction of the whole Skull Island expedition was knowing that if I brought back anything that was half as wild as the stories I'd heard, I’d have a sensation that would lay this town on its ear. Well, we definitely got people's attention, though not in the way I was hoping. So then all of us who were in the street look up and see him falling towards us, and then a minute later while we're finding ourselves none the worse for the wear except a couple of us could probably use a change of underwear, and I hear somebody say something about the planes killing him, and I'll admit that I just couldn't resist. Not planes, I say — 'twas beauty killed the beast. Everybody sort of moans, but me, I think it's a snappy line myself. But then, while I'm congratulating myself on my gift of gab, I look down and I see his huge dead eye, staring right at me. And I start thinking about how it might have felt for him, being dragged over here on that leaky tub, and then about what that crowd of gawkers must have looked like to him while he was chained up on that stage. Naturally, that's when the photographers show up, just at that moment when I'm sliding to the ground next to his body. Big, tough Carl Denham cried that day? Cried over the monkey terrorist who tore the stuffing out of the Big Apple? You bet your ass I did. When the monkey died, everybody cried."
HONORABLE MENTION:
Wolfgang Kieling, TORN CURTAIN
Alfred Hitchcock had his way with quick, speedy death scenes, usually through stabbings, shootings, or being thrown off large American monuments. So in some senses, this remarkably disturbing scene in the middle of his flawed Cold War spy thriller Torn Curtain, was a way to make up for his history of quick dispatches. Perhaps also irked that the James Bond films were cramping his style, Hitch wanted to show that in real life, killing somebody wasn’t easy or quick at all. As Paul Newman and Carolyn Conwell try to do away with Newman’s nefarious East German bodyguard, the man just refuses to die. Stab him, punch him, strangle him, hit him on the head with a cast-iron pan, nothing seems to work. What does finally do it for this creepy German fellow? A gas oven. Even in one of his weaker films, Hitch’s sense of ice-cold irony never left him.
John Cusack, THE GRIFTERS
Few people could write down-and-out losers like Jim Thompson, and Roy Dillon was one of the biggest suckers Thompson ever wrote. As played by Cusack, Roy fancies himself a cool hustler, but in reality he’s strictly small time. He essentially becomes the prey for two vipers, his girlfriend (Annette Bening), and his mother Lily (Anjelica Huston). After eliminating Bening from the picture, Lily goes after her son’s money, first intimidating him and then attempting to seduce him. Finally, she grabs a suitcase and takes a swing at him. Unfortunately for Roy, this happens just as he’s taking a drink from a glass of water. The suitcase hits the glass and shatters it, a large shard embedding itself in Roy’s neck. As Lily scrambles around, sobbing, grabbing all the money she can, Roy bleeds to death. In our opinion, what makes this a great death scene isn’t simply the originality of the method. The key to its effectiveness is that it’s one of the most pathetic death scenes in all of cinema. Roy was a crook, but he wasn’t very good at it because he was too sensitive to succeed. There’s no place for emotion or sentimentality in Thompson’s world, and unfortunately for Roy it’s the only world he knew. It’s a stupid, senseless death, one that’s strangely fitting for a character like Roy, who only wanted love in a lifestyle that had none to give.
Bjork, DANCER IN THE DARK
If there’s one piece of advice we’re qualified to give, it’s this: Do not rent Dancer in the Dark to watch on someone’s birthday because you heard it featured Bjork and musical numbers and the ending was “really moving.” Of course, it may be memorable, as you and your friends wipe tears of utter desolation off your faces, but it might also end with someone throwing themselves off the third floor balcony. As the last of director Lars von Trier’s Golden Heart heroines, Bjork shines as a vision-impaired naif (Selma) determined to help her son. Selma is convicted for a murder equal parts self-defence and insanity — as she is encouraged by her attacker/landlord to kill him after she has wounded him while fighting him off. She is ultimately hanged, and no singing and dancing chorus emerges to save her. Dancer in the Dark won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, and the derision of many. The barren execution chamber, the hand-held camera “looking around” at the unofficial witnesses, and Bjork’s voice starkly ringing out the sweet melody of “this isn’t the last song”, sets the audience up to hope against hope. We wait in real time for the call, the instruction. And then, just as the lilting melody turns up, the floor drops out from under her, and we fall with her. Amidst all the gore and carnage served up on film and TV screens, Selma’s bloodless death is one you won’t likely forget.
— Pazit Cahlon, Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, DK Holm, Phil Nugent, Scott Renshaw, Vern, Bryan Whitefield
PREVIOUS WEEKLY TOP TENS:
- May 17, 2007: Cinema’s Greatest Offscreen Feuds
- May 10, 2007: The Worst Mothers in Movie History
- May 3, 2007: The Greatest Remakes
- April 26, 2007: Nude Scenes We Could Really Have Done Without
- April 19, 2007: The Most Historically Inaccurate Films Ever Made
- April 11, 2007: Cinema's Greatest No-Sex Sex Scenes
- April 4, 2007: Chicks with Guns
- March 29, 2007: The Most Important Nude Scenes of All Time
- March 22, 2007: The Worst Accents in Movie History
- March 14, 2007: The Kinkiest Films Ever Made
- March 7, 2007: The Most Dangerous Films of All Time
- February 27, 2007: The Best Nude Scenes of 2006
Permalink : http://www.nerve.com/nerveblog/screengrabblog.aspx?id=107e11715#11715 |
The Rep Report May 25-30, 2007
5/24/2007 4:00:00 PM
BERKELEY:
- In Shohei Imamura's The Insect Woman, a pimp trying to take sexual control of a young woman tells her, "You've only known the surface of happiness. I'll show you the true depths." Imamura had a special interest in the ways that people mistake the satisfaction of their basest desires for the pursuit of happiness and how low they're willing to dive to get there. It inspired in him a satirist's mixture of anger and amusement, but though he had his own unique flavor of black humor, he isn't thought of as primarily a comedian. Over the course of a career that spanned nearly 45 years, he built a multi-dimensional landscape of postwar Japan as seen from the vantage point of the alienated, the monomaniacal, characters so far outside polite society that some of them seem driven to virtually declare war on it. (He once made a documentary called A History of Postwar Japan as Told by a Bar Hostess, a title that might have gone on his tombstone.) On May 25, Pacific Film Archives begins its month-long Imamura retrospective, including films that have made their mark with Western audiences (including The Pornographers, Vengeance Is Mine, The Ballad of Narayama, and the superb late work The Eel) as well as such lesser-known films as The Profound Desire of the Gods and his 1957 debut Stolen Desire. For Imamua neophytes, it's an ideal chance to get acquainted, while old fans can have a great wallow. (Also, go here for the Nerve Film Lounge’s review of Criterion’s new Vengeance Is Mine DVD.)
- Starting May 27, PFA is also showing "Czech Modernism: 1926-1949. To Western movie lovers, mention of "Czech cinema" usually conjures memories of the films made during the Prague spring of the sixties and the wild, disturbing animation tradition of such artists as Jan Svankmajer (which comes to us filtered through the visions of disciples like the Quay brothers). This series attempts to unearth the roots of modern Czech film, work done between the wars "spurred on by a growing exposure to world cinema, by the freedom of the Jazz Age, and by a homegrown avant-garde (the Devetsil movement) that reveled in the promise of the moving image." Sounds like it should be quite an eye-opener.
- Also at PFA, and just in time for summer: "Meaningful Motion: The Early Films of Walter Hill." Five Wednesdays in a row, starting May 30, viewers nostalgic for the days when genre movies tried to excite you with their energy and grace instead of beating you into submission with their three-hour running times can check out the fine early work of a director whose belief in revealing character through action has always marked him as something of a man out of time, at least in Hollywood. (If he'd learned Chinese and moved to Hong Kong, the choreographic sense he's applied to his best violent set pieces might have made him a god.) The opening salvo is the 1975 Hard Times, easily the best of Charles Bronson's '70s starring vehicles and a special favorite among the mottled ranks of movies that sought to capitalize on the musky romantic atmosphere of old New Orleans.
NEW YORK:
- Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater is spending what amounts to a few days celebrating literate control freak directors of the 60s and 70s. On May 25 and 26, it's "Four by John Schlesinger", including two views of America (the Academy Award-winning Midnight Cowboy and the ambitious Nathaniel West adaptation The Day of the Locust) as well as the early Billy Liar and the superb Sunday Bloody Sunday. Then, from 27-30, the theater is running "a restored, previously unscreened 35mm internegative print" of Stanley Kubrick's period epic Barry Lyndon. Good news for Kubrick fans with hungry eyes and lead butts.
PORTLAND:
- The celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Janus Films — a celebration that seems to be entering its own second year — continues with a series of weekend screenings of the distribution house's venerable titles at the Northwest Film Center, kicking off on the 25th with a
double bill of Truffaut's The 400 Blows and Jules and Jim. The theater is inviting viewers to submit their requests for another round of screenings later this year.
— Phil Nugent
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Cannes Report: D’Angelo Reviews Roy Andersson's You the Living
5/24/2007 3:15:00 PM
Asked to name the most singular, sui generis movie of the last decade or so, I'd probably plump for Roy Andersson's Songs from the Second Floor, a series of apocalyptic tableaux shot on massive, forced-perspective studio sets. The winner of a Special Jury Prize at Cannes in 2000, it was Andersson's first feature in 25 years, and so complete in its unique aesthetic that it was hard to imagine what he could possibly do for an encore. A: More of the same, only with a jauntier, less overtly despairing tone. Indeed, You the Living, a late addition to the Un Certain Regard section, sometimes feels like a lost silent comedy, with magnificently constructed sight gags (the best of which adds a pointed new twist to the old "yank the tablecloth from beneath the china" routine) and a recurring Dixieland-jazz score, heavy on the tuba. Songs from the Second Floor grew more and more impressive and haunting over repeat viewings (I've now seen it six times); You the Living seems unlikely to expand in the same way, mostly because it lacks the nightmare-world throughline that made Second Floor feel like more than just a bunch of blackout sketches. But Andersson remains the only filmmaker in the world whose artistry is concentrated almost exclusively in set construction, and while there's nothing here to rival the massive airport sequence from the last film, the scene in which a newly married couple's apartment barrels through the countryside and eventually stops at a railway station (the set was apparently constructed on an actual train!) comes mighty close. There's also a lone musical number, which is enjoyable enough to suggest that a full-fledged Roy Andersson musical could be awesome indeed. Pity his next film won't likely surface until around 2015.
— Mike D’Angelo
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The Movie Moment: FREAKS (dir. Tod Browning, 1932)
5/24/2007 2:30:29 PM
What is exploitation? In terms of entertainment, the term tends to infer a purely base appeal, with lurid content that’s meant to give viewers a voyeuristic charge. Whether it’s a demolition derby or a peepshow, exploitation more often than not is looked upon as “low-culture,” lacking in socially-redeeming value. Perhaps the most basic form of exploitation is the circus freakshow, which for centuries exhibited people who suffered from all varieties of genetic malformations for the amusement of able-bodied ticket buyers.
In the broad outlines, Tod Browning’s Freaks would seem to qualify as an exploitation movie, perhaps the most famous ever made. Certainly the film’s climactic scene, in which the sideshow attractions take violent revenge on the “big people” who have wronged them, would lead one to believe this is the case. However, I don’t think that it’s quite so simple. Up until the film’s final ten minutes, most of its running time is spent observing the characters going about their backstage lives. The film doesn’t want us to simply gawk at their deformities, but instead takes time to observe their behavior.
Given the film’s subject matter, the cast of Freaks was chosen largely because of their abnormal conditions. Back in 1932, no amount of available effects could have created the film’s microcephalic (pinhead) characters, for example. But Browning, a former circus performer himself, likes and respects these characters, and it shows. Most of them turn out to be engaging personalities. In addition, they aren’t ashamed of their conditions, but have found ways to live “normal” lives the best they can. Johnny Eck, born with no legs, puts on a pair of gloves and walks around on his hands. Likewise, we see a woman with no arms hold a knife and fork between her toes to eat a meal.
Or consider the cast member with the most “unfortunate” condition of all, Prince Randian. Sometimes referred to as “The Human Torso,” Prince Randian was a lifelong circus performer who was born without arms and legs. While in real life he was sometimes carried by an assistant, in the film he is mostly seen moving around under his own power by rocking on his stomach.
In my favorite scene in Freaks, Randian is having a conversation with another circus performer, Rollo. As Rollo starts to talk about the crowd’s reaction to his new act, we see Randian use his mouth to pull a cigarette out of a pack. Then, still holding the cigarette in his mouth, he takes a box of matches, nudges it open, pulls out a match, closes the box, then lights the match. Finally, he carefully sets the match on top of the box, lights the cigarette, and blows out the match.
For a non-disabled person, this is a routine act, but it’s sort of miraculous to see a man with no arms or legs do it. Part of the intrinsic interest of Freaks is this documentary aspect, the prospect of seeing people with disabilities work around their difficulties to do things others do. Yet what separates Freaks from a garden-variety exploitation movie is that Randian does it without breaking a sweat, like it’s as normal for him as for anyone else. It’s clear that he’s been lighting his own cigarettes for most of his life, and after using his ingenuity to formulate a routine in order to do so, lighting a cigarette is no big deal for him.
Also important here is Rollo’s reaction to Randian. Or, more precisely, his non-reaction — just as Randian’s been lighting cigarettes for years, so Rollo would have seen him doing it many times. Freaks almost never leaves the world of the circus performers, which allows the audience to learn their way of life from the inside out. Because of this, once the climactic act of revenge comes, the audience is able to experience it through the prism of the performers’ code of ethics — as the film says, “if you offend one, you offend them all.”
— Paul Clark
Previous Movie Moment columns:
- May 17, 2007 -- The Elephant Man
- May 10, 2007 -- Gilles’ Wife
- May 3, 2007 -- Babe: Pig in the City
- April 26, 2007 -- La Belle Noiseuse
- April 20, 2007 -- Phantom of the Paradise
- April 12, 2007 – Lolita
- April 5, 2007 -- Bus 174
- March 29, 2007 -- Belle de Jour
- March 22, 2007 –- Nashville
- March 15, 2007 -- A Fish Called Wanda
- March 8, 2007 -- 8 Women
- February 22, 2007 -- The Girl Can’t Help It
- March 1, 2007 -- Tree of Wooden Clogs
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Weekly Top 1020: The Most Unforgettable Death Scenes of All Time, Part 3 (Spoiler Alert!)
5/24/2007 1:05:33 PM
Go here for Part 1, and here for Part 2.
Janet Leigh, PSYCHO
It’s been ripped off, homaged, spoofed, referenced, and over-analyzed to death, but can anything still compare to the sheer bravura terror of this, the pivotal scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s most notorious film, the one that codified the concept of the spoiler (by the way, sorry), introduced the mid-movie twist, quite possibly kick-started the slasher film genre, and kept star Janet Leigh from ever taking a shower again in real life?
Rutger Hauer, BLADE RUNNER
“I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time… like tears in rain. Time to die.” A number of people who had worked on 2001 also worked on Blade Runner, and, watching replicant baddie Roy Batty’s (Rutger Hauer) haunting final moments, it’s hard not to be reminded of HAL’s onscreen death fourteen years earlier. Of course, by all accounts, the greatest science-fiction film of the 1980s should have been a hit. But back then, audiences were too busy drunkenly swerving between the sight of Sly Stallone blowing away commies and suburban kids staring open-mouthed at the skies in wonder at whatever Uncle Spielberg was gonna give them next. Let’s face it: Anyone who tried to put subtlety into a sci-fi movie in the Reagan years was just asking for it.
Marvin, PULP FICTION
“Mah-vin, what do you think a all this?” His 1994 masterpiece was already popping with all sorts of crazy twists, and by the time the third act rolled around, Quentin Tarantino had already had his audience eating out of the palm of his hands for a good hour and a half, at least. (Naysayers should try to close their eyes and remember those hazy days when we weren’t all jaded by the writer-director’s grating ubiquity.) But he was yet to unleash his most insane narrative surprise on us, taking a conversation between two hit-men about miracles and God’s unexpected grace into a sharp left turn of shock, desperation, gore, and breathless, mile-a-minute hilarity — as if Preston Sturges had stumbled onto the set of a Sam Peckinpah movie. The dude was here to stay. (The actor’s name, by the way, was Phil LaMarr…but he’ll always be Marvin to us.)
David Morley, BARRY LYNDON
Make no mistake about it: Stanley Kubrick had a way with a death scene. We could have made this entire list out of scenes from his films (and we almost did): The heartbreaking executions in Paths of Glory, Scatman Crothers’s gory sacrifice in The Shining, Humanity’s atomic comeuppance in Dr. Strangelove, and the aforementioned dispatch of a particularly nasty series of 1’s and 0’s in 2001. But perhaps the most powerful scene in Kubrick’s oeuvre came in the third act of his overlooked-at-the-time masterpiece, Barry Lyndon, in which we watch the title character lose both his son and his chance at the noble line he so desperately covets, framed by Michael Hordern’s grimly fatalistic narration, accompanied by Leonard Rosenman’s haunting adaptation of Handel’s Sarabande. (Oh, and has anyone ever looked so good looking so miserable as Marisa Berenson does in this scene?) It’s one of the most emotionally devastating moments ever filmed in the history of cinema; and a shocking, welcome rebuke to the cranks who accuse Kubrick’s films of being “cold.”
Basil Wallace (aka Screwface), MARKED FOR DEATH
In Steven Seagal's third film, Marked For Death, he kills his adversary a record number of times. Screwface is a scenery-chewing Jamaican gang leader with satanic eyes and a penchant for voodoo, who says things like “Stop thee blood clot cryin’. Everybody must dead. It’s yer turn." He's the type of crime boss who will one moment be playing a game of dominoes with his henchmen, then suddenly knock over the table, break off a leg and beat a guy with it. Not a nice guy or a sportsman. So we definitely side with Seagal's character Hatcher when he faces Screwface in a sword fight, splits his crotch and beheads him. Which would've been a good double-death for most movie villains, but Seagal has a lot more where that came from. While Seagal and his accomplices are carrying the severed head around as a visual aid to prove that the witch is dead, Screwface resurfaces — it turns out that twin brothers were actually ruling the gang in order to appear to be everywhere at once.
Screwface #2's death involves:
1. a skull grab/thumb through the eyes combo
2. being rammed through a cement wall
3. having his spine snapped over Seagal's knee
4. being thrown down an elevator shaft, which would've killed him even if he weren't…
5. impaled on a protruding metal pole at the bottom
So by our count that's seven different death blows for Screwface. A very high quality screen death.
— Pazit Cahlon, Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, DK Holm, Phil Nugent, Scott Renshaw, Vern, Bryan Whitefield
Part 4 will appear later today.
PREVIOUS WEEKLY TOP TENS:
- May 17, 2007: Cinema’s Greatest Offscreen Feuds
- May 10, 2007: The Worst Mothers in Movie History
- May 3, 2007: The Greatest Remakes
- April 26, 2007: Nude Scenes We Could Really Have Done Without
- April 19, 2007: The Most Historically Inaccurate Films Ever Made
- April 11, 2007: Cinema's Greatest No-Sex Sex Scenes
- April 4, 2007: Chicks with Guns
- March 29, 2007: The Most Important Nude Scenes of All Time
- March 22, 2007: The Worst Accents in Movie History
- March 14, 2007: The Kinkiest Films Ever Made
- March 7, 2007: The Most Dangerous Films of All Time
- February 27, 2007: The Best Nude Scenes of 2006
Permalink : http://www.nerve.com/nerveblog/screengrabblog.aspx?id=107e11705#11705 |
Video of the Day: Sicko Trailer
5/24/2007 12:21:18 PM
No doubt you've read something already about Michael Moore's latest, Sicko. (Mike was kind of underwhelmed, but others seemed to dig it quite a bit.) Either way, this trailer is sure to get some folks riled up right good.
— Bilge Ebiri
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Tyro Tyke Auteur Wins Lawsuit Against His Producers
5/24/2007 11:30:00 AM
 | | Yeah, he looks adorable...until he starts channeling Erich von Stroheim. |
11-year-old Dominic Scott Kay has won an out-of-court settlement in his lawsuit “for control of editing and exploitation of the short film Saving Angelo,” which he wrote, directed, and co-starred in (alongside Kevin Bacon!). The film “centers on a young boy who rescues an injured dog and finds a home for it at a fire station.” The suit was filed in January in Los Angeles, against some of his financiers and producers, who had tried to wrest control of the film away from him.
Okay, what’s more disturbing: That people would do this to an 11-year-old, or that they would be investing tens of thousands of dollars into this kid’s film in the first place? Also, given Hollywood’s toxic fondness for all things young, is this the beginning of an even more dangerous trend: Pre-teen auteurs?
— Bilge Ebiri
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Magazine Beat: New Issue of Script
5/24/2007 10:45:00 AM
Do screenwriting magazines really want you to become a screenwriter?
They are an interesting niche phenomenon. The descendants of The Writer , Writer's Digest , and Poets and Writers , screenwriter magazines are geared at once both to aspiring screenwriters and already established scribes. Written By , for example, is the official publication of the Writer's Guild of America West, but sold to anyone who can enter a Borders. Creative Screenwriting is an independent journal that offers screenwriter interviews (I once conducted one for the magazine on Mike Rich) and biz oriented advice columns (the magazine began as a digest sized publication with an emphasis on script structure). CS also does a terrific series of podcast interviews with screenwriters for which one is ever hopeful that someday they will finally get the sound right.
Kristin Thompson, in her masterly book Storytelling in the New Hollywood , points out that the publication of script writing manuals and guides (of which these magazines are a sub-genre) tends to coincide with periods of uncommon solicitation from Hollywood to outsiders for material. The 1920s saw an upswing in script manuals, and the 1990s saw another phase, one that coincided with the "threat" from independent filmmaking. But is it really all that easy to break into the movie business via script writing? Aren't these magazines luring on and teasing their readers?
Yes, I suppose that such magazines might be of some meager help to actual aspiring screenwriters. They provide minor tips about formatting and content that might be of service in "cleaning up" an otherwise messy script. But Mike Rich, to take one example, only got into the script writing biz, wherein he is now enormously successful, because he won a contest. What are the odds of that? Who would have guessed that the messy, "unformatted" script that he sent to the Nicholl Fellowship contest would have touched the hearts of those judges? Talent. Luck. It's a fucking crapshoot. But let's face it, these screenwriter magazines prey on the eternal, internal optimism of even the most lowly, destitute aspirants.
Script: Celebrating the Writer is a new one on me. Published by Final Draft, its current issue is Volume 13, No. 3, which suggests that it's been around awhile. It turns out that the magazine began publication in 1989 as a four page newsletter; now it is a 112 page glossy.
Like the mirror-imaged Moviemaker and Filmmaker , Script looks like it covers much the same beat as its competitors. The current issue features Randall Wallace on the cover in an expensive Bob Guccione-type suit and a kung fu pose. He's there to discuss adapting Ayn Rand's two-bit philosophy doorstop Atlas Shrugged. Inside, there is an interview with Bruce Evans and Raynold Gideon about their movie Mr. Brooks , a discussion between Michael Cunningham and Susan Minot about their collaboration on an adaptation of Minot’s novel Evening , a preview of "Summer Blockbusters," and some DVD reviews in the back written by Robert Piluso which are actually pretty good (most DVD reviews in the other screenwriter mags and their companion sites tend to be boosterish and barely even mention screenwriting lessons to be learned in conjunction with the discs).
The site offers only one "sample" article online, in this case a profile of Judd Apatow, but I found the most interesting piece in the issue was Eli Roth’s very educational account of writing Hostel: Part II and the various strategies he employed to solves some of the problems attendant in writing sequels. " Hostel had a very deliberate tonal shift halfway trough the film. I used comedy tin the first half to make people feel safe, so they'd drop their guard, which ultimately made the tonal shift much more powerful. I wanted people to forget they were in a horror film, so by the time the horror came, they were genuinely shocked and horrified. With Hostel: Part II , I took a different tack. I approached every scene through the eyes of the audience instead of through the eyes of the characters. In Hostel , we're with the guys having fun — the film is shot with lots of bright colors, wide lenses, 'safe' camera moves. But with Hostel: Part II , when we see the girls, I shot the scene with a sense of dread. It was a very dark, ominous tone right from the beginning."
— D. K. Holm
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Morning Deal Report: Von Trier Fine, Borat Writes, Costner Dons His Stetson
5/24/2007 10:00:00 AM
 | | Von Trier gives the thumbs up for Filmmaker Magazine |
- Lars Von Trier would like everyone to know that reports of his crippling depression have been greatly exaggerated.
- Borat will be authoring two new books: Borat: Touristic Guidings To Minor Nation of US and A and Borat: Touristic Guidings To Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.
- After a brief jaunt through the realm of independent music and a leisurely stroll through the world of tabloid headlines, Kevin Costner is back where he belongs: Making Westerns.
- The Weinstein Company has launched three new DVD labels: “Dimension Extreme, a label for horror, comedy, thriller and sci-fi titles…the Miriam Collection for restorations, prestige and foreign pics and Kaleidoscope TWC for family fare.” Not sure where those Asian movies it’s buying are going to wind up — if anywhere.
- Disney has bought a pitch for a film called Monday Monday, about “a neurotic teen who has to relive his disastrous first day at a new high school until he gets it right.”
- A documentary about the murdered Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko has been added at the last minute to the Cannes lineup.
— Bilge Ebiri
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Weekly Top 1020: The Most Unforgettable Death Scenes of All Time, Part 2 (Spoiler Alert!)
5/23/2007 5:00:00 PM
Bambi’s Mother, BAMBI
Do you remember it? The shock of Bambi’s mother shot. Her body slumped at the edge of the meadow, half-buried in snow? Her blood turning the snow around her red? No? You’re right, it didn’t happen like that. That was the version in our heads; we were impressionable kids. Bambi, released in 1942, contained the first death scene in a Disney film, coming on the heels of Snow White. In fact, you never see Bambi’s mother shot. You only hear it happen, and then you watch Bambi stumble around in a blizzard, calling for her. One of the DVD’s special features is an audio re-enactment of Bambi story meeting transcripts from 1936-1942. When Walt decides the audience doesn’t need to see Bambi’s mother fall, much less actually die in the snow, he says memorably, “It’ll tear their hearts out — when the guy comes back yelling ‘Mother!’” And he was right. It does.
Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, BONNIE & CLYDE
Arthur Penn's belated response to the French New Wave redefined violence in American movies — what it looked like, the range of emotions and meanings it communicated, even the ways in which it could throw an audience off balance. Slapstick routines end with blood spilled; a man is killed and, in the same instant, turned into a pop homage to an image from an Eisenstein film; and the heartiest, most affable character on the screen, Gene Hackman's Buck Barrow, is reduced to a bewildered, dying animal spending its last moments on Earth on all fours in a field, surrounded by a posse of hick toreadors. Along the way, Penn & co. pretty much defined the term “hail of gunfire”: The movie's concluding moments, with the innocently destructive lovers caught in a blizzard of bullets that shreds their jerking, tumbling bodies, obliterates all that's come before it. Then the movie's over. Nothing more to say. Move along. Nothing to see here.
Dominique Sanda, THE CONFORMIST
Anticipating Adriana (Drea de Matteo) and her hopeless run through the woods years later in The Sopranos, the death of Anna Quadri (Dominique Sanda) in Bernardo Bertolucci's masterpiece The Conformist (1970) is an excruciating blend of political necessity and interpersonal betrayal. The set up is extravagantly set up in the film's script. Newlywed Marcello Clerici (Jean Louis Trintignant) has traveled to Paris on his honeymoon with a double mission, to contact and help expose Professor Quadri, an Italian intellectual in exile, an anti-fascist who needs silencing. Clerici hopes to get into the good graces of his admired Fascist masters, but his flirtation (and his wife's) with the intellectual's companion, Anna, dilutes his mission. Clerici and his confederates follow Anna on a trip into the country, where they will be ambushed (this brief summary can only hint at the sequences cumulative complexities). There is no fiercer indictment of cowardice, of sexual repression, and of personal betrayal, in all of Bertolucci's films, or indeed of all films, than in the shot of Clerici sitting frozen in his car seat as Anna pounds on his window, screaming, before she runs with decreasing energy and hope through the snow-covered woods.
Jon Voight, THE CHAMP
The generally accepted, ethical way to make a film is that when you have a big, overly emotional scene, you want to pull back a little. A well-placed cut can do wonders, as can moving the camera away from a character in the midst of wrenching agony. In other words, understatement is your friend. Unless you’re Italian. In which case, please, by all means, rub our faces in it: When the operatically inclined Franco Zeffirelli took on a Hollywood remake of the tear-jerking boxing classic The Champ, he evidently decided that the sight of a young boy watching his desperate boxer dad die wasn’t gut-wrenching enough, and that what this scene really needed was the camera right on the kid’s face, watching him plead with everyone around him, for an excruciating length of time. To his credit, young Ricky Schroeder (yes, that Ricky Schroeder) did a marvelous job. And Voight was always good at these sorts of melodramatic parts. (He was on the receiving end of one at the end of Midnight Cowboy.) It’s one of the most excruciating death scenes ever, enough to give any kid nightmares for eternity. And Zeffirelli. Shamelessly. Milks. Every. Single. Minute. Of. It.
Brad Pitt, MEET JOE BLACK
Before Martin Brest brought us the national punchline that was Gigli, he directed this lovingly photographed three-hour narcotic disguised as a remake of Death Takes a Holiday. But maybe his molasses-drip pacing contributed to the sucker-punch effectiveness of the scene in which Brad Pitt’s character dies, allowing him to become the shell body for Death’s earthly excursion. After a meet-cute with Claire Forlani, the cheery Pitt wanders into traffic — where he is promptly blasted by an oncoming car, tossed into the air like a sea lion by a killer whale, and plowed again by another oncoming car. Cinema’s best guy-hit-by-a-car moment ever was almost enough of an adrenaline jolt to keep a viewer awake through the rest of the movie — almost.
— Pazit Cahlon, Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, DK Holm, Phil Nugent, Scott Renshaw, Vern, Bryan Whitefield
Parts 3 & 4 will appear tomorrow.
PREVIOUS WEEKLY TOP TENS:
- May 17, 2007: Cinema’s Greatest Offscreen Feuds
- May 10, 2007: The Worst Mothers in Movie History
- May 3, 2007: The Greatest Remakes
- April 26, 2007: Nude Scenes We Could Really Have Done Without
- April 19, 2007: The Most Historically Inaccurate Films Ever Made
- April 11, 2007: Cinema's Greatest No-Sex Sex Scenes
- April 4, 2007: Chicks with Guns
- March 29, 2007: The Most Important Nude Scenes of All Time
- March 22, 2007: The Worst Accents in Movie History
- March 14, 2007: The Kinkiest Films Ever Made
- March 7, 2007: The Most Dangerous Films of All Time
- February 27, 2007: The Best Nude Scenes of 2006
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