The Screengrab

How the Garcia Girls Spent Their Summer gets its limited-release debut this Friday, after two years of lingering on the festival circuit without a distributor.  Although some critics have praised its good-natured look at sexuality and overall sunny demeanor, it's likely that the real reason Georgina Riedel's feature-length debut is finally seeing the light of day is the newfound TV stardom of its lead actress, America Ferrara.  Still, the reason I want to see it is simple:  it's set in Arizona.  I was born and raised in Phoenix, at a time when everyone from there was from somewhere else, and while I don't really miss the place, I still have that hokey boosterism that makes me raise an eyebrow whenever I hear a movie or television show is set there or filming there.  During the early days of Hollywood, the movie business was obsessed with the 48th state -- largely because it had only recently become a state.  It was the last of the frontier, the final remnant of the proud plains and deserts of the New West, and while the vast majority of the western shoot-'em-ups set in Arizona were really made on a back lot five blocks from La Cienega Boulevard, there's still plenty of movies out there claiming Arizonan provenance.  As the state has morphed into Southern California's bedroom annex, with all the strip malls and chain stores that implies, there's continued to be a few standout films that use the Grand Canyon State as their setting; here's five of them.

IN OLD ARIZONA (1929)

The filming of this early classic western didn't get within 300 miles of Arizona, but like a lot of early cowboy pictures, it's set there.  In Old Arizona has a lot of the corny qualities that modern audiences associate with this era of filmmaking, but it's worth seeing -- and historically significant -- for a number of reasons.  The first full-length talkie ever released by 20th Century Fox, it was also the first talking picture to be filmed outdoors.  Director Raoul Walsh was set to play the lead himself, but a car accident robbed him of the chance, and cost him an eye, leading to the eyepatch that became his tradmark in later years; his replacement was Warner Baxter, who won only the second Best Actor Oscar in history for his performance as the Cisco Kid.  Finally, the movie has a memorable twist ending that sets it apart -- courtesy of the original story, by O. Henry.

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The Coen Brothers may have just enjoyed the greatest commercial, critical and Oscar success of their career with No Country for Old Men, but it will never be their most beloved movie. That would be the decidedly offbeat comedy released to general box office indifference ten years ago this month: The Big Lebowski.

As one of seven Americans to not only see Lebowski during its original theatrical run but to love it immediately, I’ve always been both baffled and delighted by the movie’s ascension to the top of the “most quoted” heap, let alone its Star Trek-like success in the realm of fan conventions.

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It’s that time of the year when Screengrab readers in certain parts of the country can pretty much count on an unexpected day off or two thanks to Mother Nature’s fury. In my part of the country (Austin, TX), said fury usually comes in the form of about a half-inch of freezing drizzle, but having grown up in the Northeast, I am certainly well acquainted with the concept of the Snow Day. And what could be better on a day when you can’t leave the house than a pile of movies featuring a veritable blizzard’s worth of snow?

Herewith, then, the Screengrab’s list of the ten snowiest movies. Please note that we have not included the Chevy Chase/Chris Elliott movie Snow Day. We wouldn’t do that to you.

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The Library of Congress has announced its annual list of new additions to the National Film Registry.. Every year since 1989, the Registry has named 25 films--everything from Casablanca to the Zapruder home movie of President Kennedy's assassination--to be permanently preserved owing to their being deemed to possess cultural, historical, or aesthetic significance. Among the inclusions this time: Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Grand Hotel, Days of Heaven, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, 12 Angry Men, In a Lonely Place, Wuthering Heights, Bullitt the Disney cartoon Three Little Pigs, the Robert Benchley comic short The Sex Life of the Polyp, the Oscar-winning Sinatra-does-tolerance short The House I Live In, and Dances with Wolves. (We have no idea whether that last one is supposed to be culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant, but maybe somebody at the Registry just doesn't think that Native Americans have suffered enough.) The most recent of the new additions to the Registry, which now tops out at a total of 525 titles, are the Kevin Costner thing and Back to the Future (1985), which has the enduring distinction of being the only time-travel teen comedy ever directly referenced by name in a presidential State of the Union address. (Ah, the eighties!) For the record, the newest movie listed in the Registry overall is still 1996's Fargo, the subject of a recent "Face/Off" column at this site by the Corsican brothers of on-line film writing, Leonard Pierce and myself. The Registry declined comment on rumors that plans are underway to commemorate this event by constructing a life-size bronze statue in front of the building showing a couple of geeks having a shovel fight.

LEONARD PIERCE: Unlike our last Face/Off, when we discussed Children of Men (a film which you will be marrying next summer in a small private ceremony at the Film Forum, whereas I view it simply as the most overrated movie by one of the Three Amigos prior to the release of Pan's Labyrinth), today, we're going to talk about a movie we both really liked, albeit possibly for different reasons — Fargo by the Coen Brothers.

Specifically, we're going to talk about how the movie feels about Marge Gunderson, its main character and moral center. One of the most common critiques of the Coen Brothers as filmmakers is that, while they're technically gifted and skilled synthesists, they lack heart, soul and feeling — the humanistic qualities of the directors they choose to ape. I don't believe this is true, necessarily; while I don't think the Coens will ever be accused of Capraesque oversincerity, I think they believe, more or less, in the message as well as the medium. But I do think that the Coens are very cynical filmmakers, not calculating or phony, but with a pretty jaundiced view of humanity. I don't, in short, think they really like their characters very much.

I won't go as far as to say they hate Marge Gunderson; she is clearly a decent human being for the most part, and they don't reserve for her the contempt with which they treat Jerry Lundegaard, who doesn't even have the courage to be a bad man, or Wade Gustafson, who treats the kidnapping of his daughter like a business deal only he is competent enough to close on. But I think Marge is meant to be yet another manifestation of the dull, unimaginative "Minnesota nice" of their childhood, which they sought to exorcise in Fargo just as surely as Todd Haynes did the wealthy Southern California of his youth in Safe.

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Korean-American actor Steve Park doesn't have the robust résumé that some of the people we've featured in this column can claim. Whose fault that is makes for a fascinating question — one that Park has had the courage to ask, which may in itself constitute the answer. Park is a gifted and emotionally open actor who's likewise a talented comedian; he was a series regular on In Living Color, where he met and married his wife, actress Kelly Coffield, and while the show didn't serve as a springboard to huge fame the way it did his fellow cast member Jim Carrey, he likewise didn't become synonymous with shrill, joke-free comedies, and got to ply his trade in a number of TV sitcoms without half the country cringing at the mere mention of his name. In 1996, coming off of his greatest screen performance, he was accorded the rare opportunity to become a guest star on Friends — at the time the highest-rated show on television, and one which, by no means coincidentally, was coming under some criticism for its portrayal of contemporary New York as a lily-white yuppie enclave no more ethnically robust than Omaha, Nebraska. While filming his episodes, Park witnessed an ugly racial incident involving the crew, and detected a certain callousness and arrogance in his fellow actors; and, rather than do what 99% of Hollywood would do in that situation — keep his mouth shut and collect his paycheck — he chose instead to pen a deeply felt and brutally honest article called "Struggling for Dignity," in which he attacked the industry for its retrograde views of Asian-Americans and its highest-paid stars for ignoring the often brutal and inhumane treatment of their lesser-known fellows.

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The setup: After making a name for themselves with a series of unique and relatively small-scale crime stories (Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, and Miller's Crossing), Joel Coen and his producer-cowriter brother Ethan won the Palme d'Or at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival with their Hollywood-themed comedy Barton Fink. Their next film saw them collaborating with super-producer Joel Silver and working with a budget of upwards of $25 million back when that still meant something in Hollywood.

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