Vincent Gallo vs. The New York Post
9/14/2007 6:00:00 PM
The New York Post has never been renowned for its fact checking department, and apparently ScreenGrab hero (I mean how can we not love a guy who gives us material like this?) Vincent Gallo has taken issue with the Post's claim that he may have used a prosthetic in his infamous blowjob scene with Chloe Sevigny from The Brown Bunny. (The Post, also not known for objectivity, doesn't hesitate to characterize Gallo's film as "the 2003 movie bomb.") They're not actually the first to make this claim, as a young man came along some time ago demanding money from Gallo for performing as his stunt cock. Gallo brushed that claim aside, and directed a similar rant at Post writer Frank Scheck: "Tell that hack to convince his mother, sister or wife to let me give it to her. . . and then she can report back to little Frank if she thought [it was fake]."
Gallo also encourages reporters to go straight to the actress' mouth for confirmation or consider the expense a prosthetic would have added to his minimal budget. We're not exactly who's right or wrong here, only that Gallo is a quote machine, but if you ask the all-knowing Wikipedia, you'll find this in the movie's entry: "In Richard Schickel's documentary Welcome to Cannes, aired on Turner Classic Movies, there is mention of a rumor launched during the Cannes Film Festival by French filmmaker Claire Denis, who directed Trouble Every Day, a movie featuring Vincent Gallo. According to Denis, the penis appearing on the infamous fellatio scene is a prosthetic stolen from the set of Trouble Every Day."
And the mystery of the copy cock continues. . . — Bryan Whitefield
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Toronto Day 3 Addendum: Les Amours d'Astrée et de Céladon
9/14/2007 5:00:00 PM
In Arthur Penn's film Night Moves, protagonist Harry Moseby famously likened seeing an Eric Rohmer film to "watching paint dry." I wonder what ol' Harry would have made of Rohmer's latest film, Les Amours d'Astrée et de Céladon. This is a profoundly strange film, one that could only have been made by a long-standing master of cinema, one in full control of his art and long past worrying about squeezing his stories into convenient little holes. If it's not my favorite film of Toronto so far, it's the one I've thought about the most since I first saw it, and the one I've discussed and argued about most with other festival-goers.
Rohmer's story is set in a bucolic sheep-herding community in fifth century France, but Amours is hardly an ossified period piece. Instead of delving into the period visually, Rohmer uses his setting to explore the mentality of an bygone time and place, one in which Catholicism had yet to become the predominant moral code. At various points in the film, characters engage in quintessentially Rohmer-esque discussions, once on the comparative virtues of monogamy and oat-sowing, another time on the nature of different religious beliefs. But in Amours, Rohmer is not simply drawing on history but in classical theatre, with its blatantly artificial setups and plot contrivances.
Consider the direction the story takes in its third act, when Céladon (Andy Gillet) attempts to win back his lady love Astrée (Stéphanie de Crayencoeur). Because of a colossal misunderstanding, Astrée has forbidden Céladon to see her, so Céladon dresses up as a woman see her without her knowing. This has been the setup for many a lowbrow comedy — my friend Steve Carlson, who hated the film, called this "Rohmer's version of Sorority Boys" — but rather than ducking the ridiculousness of these scenes, he exploits them as much as possible. The film has so many contrivances and near-misses, and Astrée is so oblivious, that it becomes absurd. This would sink a film by a less assured filmmaker, but Rohmer keeps a strong hand at the controls, turning a potentially frustrating story into an immensely entertaining one.
In addition, Amours is the sexiest film Rohmer has made in years. Despite receiving a PG rating in Canada, there is a fair amount of nudity on display, all the more potent for how nonchalant and almost modest it is. In particular, there's a scene near the end of the film that involves what can only be called "peekaboo nudity" on the part of the lovely Astrée that is intensely erotic. I certainly didn't expect it in a Rohmer film, but I'm not complaining.
I know many will disagree with me, but I enjoyed Les Amours d'Astree et de Céladon more than anything I've seen in a long time. I relished Rohmer's airy, effortless command of potentially problematic material, but I also simply had a great time. Let me put it this way — I laughed more at Amours than at anything I've seen all year, including Superbad. And that's nothing to sneeze at, folks. — Paul Clark
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Take Five: Little Wars
9/14/2007 4:00:00 PM
The movie business has always loved war. But, having lived through the twentieth century, it's also learned that some wars are better than others — there were dozens, if not hundreds, of films made about WWII while it was still raging, while, famously, Hollywood only produced one film about the Vietnam conflict while combat was still taking place, and that was the jingoistic, simple-minded John Wayne vehicle The Green Berets. After a period of initial reluctance, moviemakers have come out with plenty of pictures about the Iraq war and its nebulous counterpart, the Global War on Terror; but in between the American Revolution and the Elmer Fudd-like pursuit of that wascally wabbit Osama bin Laden, a lot of countries have fought a lot of wars, not all of them as crammed with shock and awe as that sexy, sexy Second World War. The Hunting Party, opening wide today, features the intriguing team-up of Richard Gere and Terrence Howard as a pair of journalists immersed in intrigue during the Bosnian conflict; here's some other movies set during a choice selection of lovely little wars.
THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962)
The best film about the Korean War hardly shows the conflict at all. (We're disqualifying M*A*S*H here because it was really about Vietnam.) Aside from a few memorable flashbacks starring the unlovable Raymond Shaw and his colorful company, the conflict in Korea is really just a backdrop for rampant post-war paranoia in a film that expertly blends the Red Scare with a healthy dose of distrust for the likes of Joseph McCarthy. Regardless of how deeply it immerses you in the Korean War, it's one of the finest films of its day, working on half-a-dozen levels — as Oedipal drama, espionage thriller, actor's showpiece, beat-the-clock action picture, bleak black comedy, and doomed romance alike — before its unforgettable conclusion.
THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS (1966)
Gillo Pontecorvo's insurrectionist masterpiece has undergone a curious political history: made a scant four years after the end of the French occupation of Algeria, The Battle of Algiers was championed as a triumph of realism and damned as a vile piece of Marxist propaganda during its time. Even stranger, in the post-September 11th world, it has undergone a similarly divisive revival, with some conservatives calling it little more than a terrorist training film and no less an institution than the Pentagon using it as an educational tool on how to fight an insurgency — and how not to. Whatever the case, it's a masterful film both as a drama and a document of one of the most hard-fought episodes of urban warfare this century.
BREAKER MORANT (1979)
Though they can rightfully be said to have changed the course of empire, most people today know little to nothing about the Boer Wars. While they generated more moviemaking interest overseas than in America, good movies about the conflicts between the British and the Dutch colonists of the Orange Free State are hard to come by, and none are better than Bruce Beresford's tremendous story of that gray area where warfare and justice collide. Through the talents of an incredibly solid cast, including Edward Woodward and Bryan Brown, he tells one of the most gripping tales of courts-martial on film; Breaker Morant is long, long overdue for a DVD release.
SALVADOR (1986)
Like most of Oliver Stone's films, Salvador has a lot of problems — a somewhat incoherent script, an inability to figure out exactly what it wants to say, a healthy dose of misogyny, and two of the least likeable lead performances (by Jameses Woods and Belushi, two of the least likeable lead actors) in Hollywood history. As is often the case, Stone wants to make a political statement but also wants to tell a human drama, and he's seemingly unsure from moment to moment which he's doing. But it still deserves some credit for a few amazing set pieces, a handful of genuinely powerful emotional moments, and the courage, during the Red Dawn era, to tackle the highly controversial U.S. involvement in Central American brushfire wars at a time when it was still going on.
BELLE EPOQUE (1992)
A winner of a Best Foreign Film Oscar in the year of its release, Belle Epoque isn't the best film about the Spanish Civil War; that title belongs to one of several outstanding documentaries about the highly charged conflict, including 1984's The Good Fight and 1963's To Die in Madrid. But it's a warm, beautiful film that is unfairly attacked for its dreamy, romantic framework — innumerable American films (including Casablanca, for goodness' sake) have taken the same approach to WWII without lessening the seriousness of the times. Besides, the bloody, surreal opening scenes show that director Fernando Trueba isn't entirely immune to the chaotic lunacy of the days leading up to the war.
— Leonard Pierce
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Babelgum Online Film Festival
9/14/2007 3:00:00 PM
Spike Lee is participating with a video-streaming outfit called Babelgum to launch an international online film festival. The Babelgum Online Film Festival "will have six categories: short films under twenty minutes, documentary, animation, advertising, social and environmental films, and best emerging talent," with applicants "limited to films that have already been screened at other festivals from January 2007 through February 2008." People can begin posting their films, which must be no longer than 45 minutes, on the site on September 15; after that, on-line voting will begin the process of winnowing down the films in each category, with the final winners to be selected by Lee himself next April. The often prickly Lee seems admirably psyched about the possibilities the web offers to new filmakers. "There's this misconstrued thinking," he says, "that all talent is in Los Angeles or New York. Where you live is no longer a hindrance. . . Talent isn't a problem. There's an abundance of talent. This is an opportunity to showcase your talent." — Phil Nugent
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Top 16: Cinema’s Worst Musical Misfires, Part 2
9/14/2007 2:00:00 PM
LOST HORIZON (1973)
A musical retelling of the legend of Shangri-La, with lavish, expensive sets, a big-name producer (Ross Hunter) with a solid track record of making successful musicals behind the scenes. A cast with established big-name stars like Peter Finch and Michael York, and hot newcomers like Olivia Hussey. And best of all, songs by Burt Bacharach, one of America's greatest tunesmiths, who was a proven hitmaker. So convinced were the Columbia Pictures execs who greenlighted Lost Horizon that it would be a hit that, even after sinking $12 million into the picture itself, they spent millions more on marketing — including a men's fashion line, a cologne, a furniture brand, and innumerable other tie-ins. What could possibly go wrong? Well, the movie could stink like a week-old fish, for one thing. Audiences were less impressed by the lead performances than they were by the spectacularly crummy supporting roles of George Kennedy and Bobby Van; and whatever songwriting magic Burt Bacharach possessed, he left it in his other pants when he penned the tunes for Lost Horizon, which range from merely boring to horrible. The movie was a complete box-office disaster, failing to make back even a fourth of its budget (let alone all the money they sunk into the fashion line). Director Charles Jarrott was banished to TV; writer Larry Kramer never worked in Hollywood again; and Lost Horizon would be Ross Hunter's last big-screen production. So notoriously awful is the movie that, almost alone among big-budget movies of the 1970s, it has never been released on VHS or DVD; the clips to be found on YouTube give only a hint of what an embarrassing slog the whole thing is.
YENTL (1983)
If we here at Screengrab ever get to be big hotshots blogging it up from yacht decks in St. Tropez, we will ask our (fit, attractive) assistants only one thing: to remind us never to begin complete potentially embarrassing vanity projects (hi, Madonna!). Despite her talent and success, Barbra Streisand had no one around to dissuade her from making Yentl. It took her fifteen years to mangle the Isaac Bashevis Singer story to the screen, choosing to direct, co-write, star, and of course, sing. What possessed her to take a short story by a modern master and warp it into a schmaltzy musical, we will never know. But Singer's tale of a woman seeking knowledge — driven to study Talmud at a time when society wouldn't permit her — becomes something awkward and cloying, interspersed with over-wrought musical soliloquies. In Singer's story, Yentl disguises herself as a man in order to study — and continues to live as a man for the rest of her life. In Streisand's "fable" (as she calls it), Yentl messes up in the shtetl and high-tails it for the Freedom of America. You think we're being hard on Babs? Well, Shakespeare can't comment on the adaptation of Twelfth Night at your local theatre, but Singer could and did comment on the film version of his story in the New York Times: "My story. . . was in no way material for a musical, certainly not the kind Miss Streisand has given us," he wrote in 1984. "Let me say: one cannot cover up with songs the shortcomings of the direction and acting." Hey, there's a reason why this man has a Nobel.
ON A CLEAR DAY YOU CAN SEE FOREVER (1970)
A collaborative effort by several talented people who maybe should never have even had lunch together. It was directed by Vincente Minnelli, then near the end of his career, and stars Barbra Streisand, during that period when Hollywood was struggling to find tested musical properties that might be right for her. The script is based on a wispy stage musical by Alan Jay Lerner and Burton Lane, which was expanded and rewritten until it achieved a head-splitting level of charmless contrivance. It has something to do with reincarnation and issues carried over from past lives; Yves Montand plays the psychiatrist who hypnotizes Streisand (with whom he must have set some kind of world record for negative chemistry) and taps into her earlier life a couple of centuries ago, when she was costumed by Cecil Beaton but her songs stank anyway. Seen now, the most notable and oddest thing about the movie may be the fleeting presence of Jack Nicholson as Babs's stepbrother and confidante. This was the first job Nicholson got after Easy Rider made him a star; in fact, it was just about the first role he'd ever had in a big studio movie, after a dozen years working in TV and on the fringes of Hollywood, and while the movie was being made, he told interviewers how excited he was to have the chance to co-star with Streisand and to sing in a musical. But he's barely in the finished product, and he doesn't get to sing a note. (Those who've seen his singing cameo role in Tommy can guess at the reason.) All in all, Paramount carved some fifty minutes out of Minnelli's cut before turning what was left of the film out, alone and unloved, into the cold, cruel world.
THE WIZ (1978)
In 1975, eighteen-year-old Stephanie Mills originated the role of Dorothy in the successful Broadway musical that gave The Wizard of Oz an all-black spin; two years later, 33-year-old Diana Ross lobbied hard over the objections of her Motown mentor Berry Gordy and landed the part of the sweet, innocent girl in the movie version. That casting disaster became only the most memorably head-scratching decision in a whole parade of them: Sidney Lumet to direct? Joel Schumacher to adapt the book? Adding back a song cut from the show's test run ("You Can't Win") just to give Michael Jackson as the Scarecrow something to sing? Costumes that made the 1939 film look state-of-the-art by comparison? Utterly lifeless in its screen incarnation, The Wiz eased into theaters and eased on down the road having earned back little more than half of its production cost.
A CHORUS LINE (1985)
If you're looking for a case study in how to royally screw up a beloved Broadway production, look no further than A Chorus Line. The producers' first mistake was hiring Richard Attenborough to direct, fresh off his Oscar-winning Gandhi, exactly the kind of stodgy, self-important epic that made his reputation. Attenborough then decided against using the musical's original cast in favor of fresh-faced kids, despite the fact that the majority of the characters in the stage version were actors who'd struggled for years in search of their big break. A number of songs were cut from the original show, and a mostly hinted-at relationship between auditioning actress Cassie and director Zach was greatly expanded, complete with lush flashback scenes that mostly serve to subject the audience to Michael Douglas croaking out "What I Did For Love." We'd continue, but you get the picture. Despite all their efforts to reconfigure A Chorus Line for the screen, nothing helped, and for good reason: because A Chorus Line is uniquely suited to the theatre. The brilliance of the stage show, which consists largely of a series of auditions, is the way the actor/characters appeal directly to the audience, and to turn this into cinema is to lose that magic. The filmed version of A Chorus Line isn't without its merits, but everything good about it is taken from the stage version, and all the faults are its own. Today, the film endures mostly as a footnote to one of the most storied productions in Broadway history, and if any good has come from the filmed version, it's that Hollywood has learned to occasionally leave well enough alone. Which would explain why they haven't tackled Cats — at least, not yet.
I'LL DO ANYTHING (1994)
James L. Brooks wrote and directed this inside-Hollywood musical comedy, starring Nick Nolte as a frustrated actor and featuring Albert Brooks as a neurotic producer. The movie, which boasted songs by Prince, Carole King, and Sinead O'Connor and dance numbers choreographed by Twyla Tharp, meant to satirize the compromises and general confusion that make it so difficult for anyone in Hollywood to ever do anything good or even different. Then the movie was shown to preview audiences, who reacted to it so derisively that the decision was made to cut out all the songs and dances. Oh, irony! Much rewriting, reshooting, and recutting later, a no-longer-musical version of the aptly titled I'll Do Anything was released to an indifferent public and bemused critical response. By then, so much time had been spent tinkering on it that a throwaway joke about the movie included in an episode of The Simpsons (where Brooks serves as one of the producers) actually got broadcast a year before the picture was released.
NEWSIES (1992)
It's hard to imagine how this movie ever got made. Based on a true story (about a newsboys' strike at the end of the nineteenth century) and originally conceived as a serious drama, it turned into something no one in their right mind would want to watch. American audiences have never particularly cared much for the ugly class issues that come with movies about the labor movement, and anyone who'd enjoy such a thing would have been instantly turned away by the degree to which those same labor issues were whitewashed in deference to making the kind of corny, artificial, sunshiney musical no one has really cared about since, oh, the late 1940s. Instead of realistic characters, the movie gives us a bunch of shopworn caricatures who were retreads back when this movie would have been categorized as a current-events picture; instead of genuine conflict, it gives us Robert Duvall, in a rare lousy performance, playing Joseph Pulitzer as if he were Snidely Whiplash. It fails as a drama, it fails as a comedy, and it even fails as a musical — there's some snazzy if anachronistic choreography by High School Musical's Kenny Ortega, but there's not a single memorable song in the movie, and the cast is led by a young Christian Bale, who's charismatic enough, but is supported by a whole raft of young actors who. . . well, who aren't Christian Bale. Calculated to please everybody, Newsies is exactly the sort of movie that pleases nobody. Curiously enough, though, it's developed something of a cult following; there's nothing in the merits of the film itself, which is pretty much a wash, to merit praise, but the pull of Disney combined with shucks-spouting kids in period costumes seems to exert a powerful influence on a certain type of person.
THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (2004)
The temptation is there, when discussing the interminable snorefest that is the big-screen adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber's unexplainably popular stage production, to attack the source material. Personally, we find the original Phantom pretty much intolerable, but some folks like chocolate, and some like vanilla, and that's really all you can say about that. The screen version, though, is so profoundly misbegotten that even if you have some affection for the original, it is quickly dashed against the rocks that come with putting Joel Schumacher in charge of anything. The number of mistaken assumptions that went into this film is staggering: the belief that the problem with Webber's music was the hokey instrumentation instead of the fact that it just wasn't very good in the first place, and that it would improve if played by a sweeping, grandiose Hollywood orchestra? Wrong. The belief that the vocals sound best coming out of "rock" (that is to say, untrained) vocalists? Wrong. The belief that the story suffered from a lack of exposition, and would benefit from extra backstory that made the whole thing even longer? Wrong. The belief that Emmy Rossum can act? Very, very wrong. The only people who come off well in this musical disaster movie are Minnie Driver and Miranda Richardson, who, realizing what they are up against, decide to amuse themselves throughout the entire movie by putting on some of the most ridiculous accents this side of Marlon Brando.
— Pazit Cahlon, Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Scott Renshaw
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Top 16: Cinema’s Worst Musical Misfires, Part 1
9/14/2007 1:00:00 PM
Julie Taymor's much-anticipateddreaded romantic Beatles musical epic Across the Universe opens this week. To be fair, we haven't seen it yet. And it's still possible that this troubled production, which was reportedly the subject of much editing room in-fighting, could be good. But let's face it: if it turns out to be a disaster, this won't be the first time a crack-headed, ambitious musical idea resulted in a less-than-stellar work of cinema. As a pro once said, "You can't be really great unless you're willing to be really bad." And some of the garish, bloated, insane musicals Hollywood has treated us to over the years have nobly borne out that theory. These are movies that truly, desperately wanted to be awesome (how else to justify those huge costs, those lavish productions, those A-list actors?), but oh boy, they weren't. Here are our favorites from the Worst Musical Misfires in Cinema History.
SGT. PEPPER'S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND (1978)
The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was a landmark achievement in the history of rock and roll recordings, so naturally it would be treated with care and respect in a musical that paired the Bee Gees with George Burns. This freaky fantasia made a Drab Four out of Peter Frampton and the brothers Gibb in a thinly-plotted excuse to put Beatles songs in the mouths of 1970s musical stars like Alice Cooper, Aerosmith and. . . Steve Martin? From the forced use of song-title character names (the ingénue was Strawberry Fields, fergawdsake) to the jaw-droppingly weird musical numbers, it was about the worst execution imaginable of what was a terrible idea to begin with. For his involvement as Sgt. Pepper himself, Billy Preston deserved to have his "fifth Beatle" designation stripped for all time.
XANADU (1980)
If you've ever wondered what turned Robert Greenwald into the lefty issue-doc auteur behind Iraq for Sale, Outfoxed and Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, it was probably witnessing first-hand the devastation that corporate thinking could wreak. Yes, he was behind the camera for this tale of an artist (Michael Beck), his actual-from-Greek-mythology Muse (Olivia Newton-John) and a dream to build the awesomest roller-disco, like, ever. On the one hand, you've almost got to admire the perversity of pairing The Tubes with Olivia in 1940s Andrew Sisters-mode for a duet; on the other, it provided one of film history's sadder moments: watching Gene Kelly try to look anything other than depressed while cruising around on skates to Electric Light Orchestra tunes. A current Broadway incarnation tries to redeem its legacy through campy self-awareness, but Greenwald will need to do plenty more public-service cinema to even the karma score.
UNDER THE CHERRY MOON (1986)
Prince directed himself in this follow-up to Purple Rain, and no one who saw both movies would ever again refer to the first as a vanity project. Originally Mary Lambert was set to direct, but she and Prince parted ways because she found his ideas for the movie to be insubstantial and artsy. (Let it be noted that having lodged these objections, she then traipsed off to make Siesta.) A true eye-popping, brain-dead folly, it was shot in the French seaside resort town of Nice by the great cinematographer Michael Ballhaus, and seems to be set in some timeless, weightless, fashion layout era that encompasses everything, from Art Deco to drum solos, that Prince regards as looking or sounding cool. (This is the kind of movie that drives desperate publicists to invoke the phrase "pure style.") The cast includes Jerome Benton of the Time as Prince's sidekick, Tricky; young thing Kristin Scott Thomas, learning to keep a straight face no matter what (a talent that would pay off big for her ten years later in The English Patient); and the movies' leading racist thug of the period, Steven Berkoff, as Scott Thomas's father, who has a predictable reaction to finding his daughter the object of our hero's lustful attentions. The best thing about the whole mess, the music (which includes "Kiss" and which served as the basis for the album Parade), is underplayed and all but thrown away, as if the auteur didn't want it to distract us from what he was getting up to onscreen.
STAR! (1968)
The Sound of Music (1965), which was the all-time box office champ until The Godfather and which helped get the whole nightmare cycle of charmless, elephantine "family" musicals rolling, made Julie Andrews into a major movie star, but her brand of fresh-scrubbed cheerfulness was almost instantly out of date. In fact, she went into this epic dud fresh from another big musical bomb, Thoroughly Modern Millie. Star! which reunited her with the director of The Sound of Music, Robert Wise, represented an attempt to toughen up her image a little. It's supposed to be a biopic about the English musical-comedy diva Gertrude Lawrence, and it has an expose aspect, revealing its heroine as something of a bitch. But Andrews doesn't have the style or sophistication or exciting presence needed to play a compelling theatrical monster, and though the theatrical biopic form means that Star! is one of the few musicals of its kind that features real songs — songs, by Cole Porter and Noel Coward and Kurt Weill and George and Ira Gershwin, that were part of the actual Gertrude Lawrence's repertoire — the way Andrews performs them, they might as well be "Can You Feel the Love Tonight?" Now almost totally forgotten, Star! was a legendary commercial disaster in its day; it cost $14 million dollars, which was a lot of money to throw down the toilet in those days. So few people went to see this expensive, heavily promoted movie that 20th Century Fox tried to get some of its money back by cutting it down by almost an hour and re-releasing it under a different title, Those Were the Happy Times.
PAINT YOUR WAGON (1969)
It seemed like a good idea at the time. Well, actually. . . no, it didn't. But at a time when the musical genre — a symbol of everything that was bloated and stodgy about the decaying studio system — was struggling a bit, thinking out of the box was probably the right thing to do. But there's a reason why that box exists. That box exists so that people don't do batshit crazy things like cast Clint Eastwood, Lee Marvin, and Jean Seberg in musical Westerns. That box exists so that people don't get Paddy Chayefsky to adapt Lerner & Lowe musicals. And that box certainly exists so that they don't spend the gross national product of a small Latin American country making the thing. That said, one good came of this Joshua Logan-helmed mess: it reportedly strengthened Eastwood's resolve to become a director. We'd like to imagine he was still thinking of this movie when he savagely wiped out half that town at the end of Unforgiven.
DARLING LILI (1970)
Julie Andrews again, still trying to remake her image into something saleable. This time her co-pilot was her husband, director Blake Edwards, who took it upon himself to turn Little Miss Sunshine into a sexy femme fatale. She plays a British music hall star who, during World War I, leads a secret life as a Mata Hari-style spy and seductress. She even has a striptease number, all on the way to using her sizzling wiles to bewitch a benumbed-looking Rock Hudson. Spending two hours listening to Blake Edwards brag about what hot stuff his wife is turns out to be kind of like listening to George Herbert Walker Bush telling you how smart his son is, though at least George W. could probably be trusted to keep his clothes on. The picture basically finished Andrews as an A-list player in Hollywood. Over the course of the next fifteen years, she would appear in seven movies, six of which were directed by the stubbornly adoring Edwards. One of them, the 1981 S.O.B., is acknowledged to be Edwards's response to the damage that Darling Lili did to both their careers. It's built around a scene in which sweet Julie bares her breasts for the camera. Some ideas die hard.
CAN'T STOP THE MUSIC (1980)
If a musical is good, it can be transcendently good. If a musical is bad — and musicals, sadly, are very often bad — it can be forgettably bad, or, like this perennial candidate for the worst of the worst, it can be resplendently, triumphantly, spectacularly horrible. Predicated on a number of horrible miscalculations, the greatest of which was that the Village People were going to be the hot band of the 1980s, Can't Stop the Music — or, as it was instantly dubbed by almost everyone who saw it, Can't Stand the Music — is a disaster at every possible level of filmmaking: terrible acting, terrible music, ridiculous (and ridiculously expensive) set pieces that can't even be salvaged by their grade-Z campiness, incompetent direction, and a script that really, really thinks it's funny, and really, really isn't. Olivia Newton-John was originally picked to star in this and dropped out to make Xanadu instead; it's a testament to how mind-blowingly awful Can't Stop the Music truly is that we can honestly say she made the right decision. As if all this weren't enough, you can measure the depths of crappiness inherent in this cinematic bologna burp by the number of careers it killed: it was TV character actress Nancy Walker's first film as a director, and also her last. It was Olympic athlete Bruce Jenner's first part on the big screen, and also his last. It was the first movie featuring original music by the Village People, and also the last. It was producer Alan Carr's first original screenplay, and also his last. Inexplicably, however, the one career it didn't smother a-borning was that of leading man Steve Guttenberg in his first, but sadly not his last, starring role.
GUYS AND DOLLS (1955)
This heavy version of the Broadway show derived from Damon Runyan's fables about cute hoodlums was directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who from the looks of it must have spent a lot of time on the set trying to work up the courage to peek through his fingers while holding his head in his hands. You can hardly blame him. As the romantic lead, Sky Masterston, Marlon Brando can't really sing and dances less well than he would, many years and pounds later, on the ice rink in The Freshman. At least he seems game, unlike his partner, Jean Simmons, who looks very beautiful and very, very, very embarrassed. Frank Sinatra co-stars as the comical Jewish gambler Nathan Detroit. Reportedly, he was offered his choice of the two male leads, picked Nathan, then decided that Sky was the better part and proceeded to stalk through the filming in a steaming jealous rage. The best thing about the movie may be that it inspired Brando to say of Sinatra, "Frank is the kind of guy who, when he dies, he's going to go to Heaven and give God a hard time for making him bald."
— Pazit Cahlon, Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Scott Renshaw
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Today in the Nerve Film Lounge
9/14/2007 12:00:00 PM
Top Ten (actually, sixteen) is on it's way — we're running a little late over here. In the meantime:
Eastern Promises: "Cronenberg delivers his most lifeless movie to date, an unrepentant hack-job that can neither satisfy on a narrative level or disturb on a stylistic level."
Darkon: "There's a line between presenting a subculture fairly and buying wholly into its underlying premises."
Great World of Sound: "Bleak as it is, Great World of Sound is also weirdly uplifting; written and acted with admirable subtlety, it shows without telling."
Permalink : http://www.nerve.com/nerveblog/screengrabblog.aspx?id=107e14339#14339 |
Morning Deal Report: Calling JB
9/14/2007 11:00:00 AM
 | | Terry "Tito" Zwigoff |
Terry Zwigoff will direct The $40,000 Man, a Six Million Dollar Man parody about "a legendary astronaut and true American hero who finds himself horribly injured in a car accident and rebuilt by the government to be a bionic man, but on a budget of $40,000 — which makes him not all that bionic." Great concept — let's hope it's better than Art School Confidential.
Jackie Chan is searching for an heir to his throne. He's behind a Chinese reality show called Jackie Chan's Disciples, seeking out an amateur ass-whomper to whom he can pass on all his crazy Jedi knowledge.
This child-kidnapping case in England has delayed the U.K. release of Ben Affleck's directorial debut, Gone Baby Gone, which focuses on a similar story. If only someone had been blinded by toxic waste before Affleck could foist Daredevil on us all.
— Peter Smith
Permalink : http://www.nerve.com/nerveblog/screengrabblog.aspx?id=107e14336#14336 |
The Funny Pages
9/13/2007 4:00:00 PM
 | | Magnetto and his gang of chumpsters |
The comic book movie news never ends around here, and until I get a girlfriend or win the lottery, I will never stop passing it on to you, the loyal Screengrab reader. In an interview with Wizard, comic-book-movie überhack David S. Goyer gives us a sneak preview of Magneto, the movie that destroyed our beautiful dream that the X-Men franchise was dead after the disastrous third installment. Invisible Girl/blabbermouth Jessica Alba spills the beans to MTV that Rose McGowan has landed the lead in the Barbarella remake, ensuring that it will be a success on at least, er, two levels. And, in indie comics news, the Sci-Fi Channel sports this interview with 30 Days of Night star Josh Hartnett and producer Sam Raimi, who, surprisingly, actually appear to have read the comic. — Leonard Pierce
Permalink : http://www.nerve.com/nerveblog/screengrabblog.aspx?id=107e14311#14311 |
Video of the Day: Peeping Tom Post-Mortem
9/13/2007 3:00:00 PM
Thelma Schoonmaker is best known to American audiences as the longtime editor of Martin Scorsese's films, but she's also the widow of British director Michael Powell, directing partner of Emil Pressburger. Here, she discusses the brilliant, controversial Peeping Tom, the film that essentially killed her husband's career — and why the critics might have responded to it the way they did. — Leonard Pierce
Permalink : http://www.nerve.com/nerveblog/screengrabblog.aspx?id=107e14309#14309 |
