The Screengrab

Everybody loves the giddy thrill of convention season, but the beginning of one man's political career is the start of another man's lobbying campaign, and few sights in contemporary politics are less edifying than watching swarms of lobbyists descend like locusts on the Democratic and Republican National Conventions in hopes that whoever wins will be amenable enough to bribery to shower exemptions and special favors on their industry should they get elected.  And as far as this shameless behavior goes, it don't come much more shameless than that of the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America.

The RIAA and MPAA, two mobbed-up, indescribably crooked organizations whose entire histories consist of marginalizing the payments made to the artists who make them rich in order to maximize their own profits, are both sniffing around Denver -- and will afterwards drag their sorry, crooked carcasses to the Twin Cities -- in order to coke up interest in their latest scheme to unlawfully protect their own shoddy, dying industries and punish the average consumer for their own failures:  MPAA boss and former senator Dan Glickman, apparently unaware that the economy is tanking, the environment is polluted, and the country is fighting a war on two fronts, seeks the creation of a cabinet-level "copyright czar" to assist his organization in illegally fixing prices and suing retirees for copyright infringement. 

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Where goeth Scarlett Johansson and Zooey Deschanel, so goeth Terrence Howard.  Or so it would appear, as the Oscar-nominated star of Hustle & Flow prepares to release Shine Through It, his debut album on Columbia Records.  And while it would seem unlikely that Johansson would record an album of Tom Waits covers, or that Deschanel would make a record that was actually worth listening to, so too would it seem improbable that the star whose rise to fame is inextricably linked with Three 6 Mafia would make an album of subtle, sensitive singer-songwriter tunes.  And yet here we are.

In a profile in today's New York Times, Howard, whose screen reputation is largely built on playing street-smart hustlers, namechecks an unlikely set of performers as influential in the making of Shine Through It, including Paul Simon, Don McLean, and, yes, Barry Manilow.  While he waxes rhapsodic about these artists, and explains why he didn't perform "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp" at the Oscars (problems with the language, says he), Howard makes it clear that he's no fan of rap music, and that while his peers listened to funk, he existed on the deeper level of artists like Harry Chapin and Dan Fogelberg.  "I grew up in the projects, but Rick James wasn't my buddy," he sniffs.  "I was more sensitive than that."   

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It's been a long time since we've seen a new entry for That Guy!, the Screengrab's sporadic celebration of B-listers, character actors, and the working famous.  So who better to mark our return than one of the most enjoyable contemporary character actors?  Robert William Hoskins, the short, broad Cockney from Bury St. Edmonds, is one of England's most beloved actors -- quite unusual given that he's never had an acting lesson and his first role came purely by accident.  At the time, Hoskins was seeking a career as a writer, and supported himself, like most failed artists, by working odd jobs -- in this case, as a warehouse worker.  Showing up drunk and a theater to collect a friend who was auditioning for the lead, he was clowning around in the audience and, mistaken for one of the hopefuls by the casting director, he acquitted himself marvelously in the audition and got the part.  It cost him a friend, but it launched one of the richest careers in modern British cinema.  At 5'6", stout, and with an unmistakable working-class accent and demeanor, Hoskins is rarely the best-looking man in the room, even when he's alone; but he's parlayed his unusual appearance and forceful personality into some electrifying roles.  At first known for his ability to play intense and sometimes brutal criminals and assorted villains, he later convinced his agents that he was more diverse than his resume indicated and soon showed an exceptional gift for comedy as well, both verbal and physical.  His big break came in 1980, when, after a number of high-profile television appearances, he netted the lead role in The Long Good Friday (about which see below); it proved to be a turning point in his career, and he's worked steadily ever since, rarely in a lead role but always worth watching (well, maybe with the exception of Super Mario Brothers).  With both blockbuster films and small independent movies to his credit, Hoskins has proven his diversity, and even now, at age 65, he gets offers that men half his age would envy.  Curiously, he has played a number of political leaders from the 1940s and 1950s in his storied career:  Churchhill, Mussolini, Krushchev, and Soviet secret police killer Lavrent Beria.  Of this phenomenon, Hoskins has said, with typical self-deprecation, "Most dictators were short, fat, middle-aged and hairless.  Besides Danny DeVito, there's only me to play them."

Where to see Bob Hoskins at his best:

THE LONG GOOD FRIDAY (1980)

Hoskins' breakout film role came in this gripping, suspenseful gangster movie, which he earned by a stellar performance in Dennis Potter's fantastic television mini-series Pennies from Heaven.  Playing Harold Shand, a short-tempered and violent British gangster, Hoskins is endlessly fascinating to watch:  his character, used to being in complete control, is a textbook case of slow, angry boil as his world begins to completely unravel on what should be the occasion of his greatest triumph.  Watching Shand fall to pieces as he thrashes about helplessly, trying to find out who is out to destroy him and why, is one the greatest treats the gangster genre has to offer.

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It's been a busy week for screenings; imagine my surprise when a DVD of the new (well, newish; it opens in limited release here in the States this Friday, but it was actually made in 2007) movie by Takashi "The Filmmaker of Love" Miike showed up in my mailbox.  Miike, the mind behind such twisted cinematic fare as Audition, Ichi the Killer and Visitor Q, has a reputation for extreme weirdness, and his new one is no exception.  It may bewilder, confuse and infuriate, but it certainly isn't going to bore.

Set in some nebulous time zone between the Battle of Dannoura in the 12th century and the wild and wooly days of the Wild West (or, in this case, the Wild East), Sukiyaki Western Django essentially does to A Fistful of Dollars what Dollars did to Yojimbo:  lifts its plot wholesale and plops it into a western setting.  But, since it's Miike behind the lens, you know you won't see the story of warring clans bloodily competing for gold done up in any kind of pedestrian fashion.  Taking his cues from Sergio Leone, he sets the movie's action in "Nebada", a section of the old west that's about as authentic as the remote deserts of Tuscany.  He also instructs his actors -- almost all of whom are Japanese, though see below -- to speak in an extremely bizarre form of phoenetic English, which proves to be extremely distracting, if sporadically amusing.  And in one of the movie's most ridiculous divergences, Quentin Tarantino plays a freakish admixture of the Man With No Name and the cowboy narrator in The Big Lebowski.  Tarantino, who cannot act in his native language, also cannot act in Japanese, but Miike simply has him imitate the other actors, who are speaking cod English with thick Japanese accents, and the result is...well, you really just have to see it for yourself.

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The comics racket is a tough one -- or, as Variety puts it in a bizarre moment of Coen-channeling when discussing Virgin's entry into the field a few years back, it is "a rocky place where their seeds could find no purchase".  (Comics2Film adds the unwelcome phrasing that the company was "inseminated with funds from Richard Branson's media empire".  Those guys really need to get out more.)  After several largely fruitless years of attempting to steal market share away from the bigwigs at Marvel and DC -- and signing a deal with ex-Marvel boss Stan Lee to develop a line of properties for them that went nowhere -- Virgin Comics has finally realized what everyone else in the business already knows:  that the real money in comics doesn't come from the books themselves, but from farming out their characters as properties to be used in Hollywood blockbusters.  In aid of this, they're shuttering their New York office and moving the whole operation to L.A.

Branson insists that the comics wing isn't shutting down, it's simply reorganizing as a development company; but that's just typical business boilderplate.  What should truly concern us here are the various bits of trivia concealed deep within the article, where the author clearly hoped we would not notice them:  the fact that Virgin's "Hollywood development deals" for their characters are almost all slotted for release on the Sci-Fi Channel as opposed to an actual movie theatre, and feature such blockbuster properties as "Guy Ritchie's The Gamekeeper" and "Ed Burns' Dock Walloper"; the fact that, despite deals being inked all over town, not a single Virgin Comics film or TV production has actually been made; and the boffo news that Branson's partner in the venture is Deepak Chopra's son Gotham -- as in Gotham City, home of the Batman -- which likely explains the commonly cited reason for the comics line's failure, that it focuses on stories involving relatively obscure Indian mythology. 

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Well, folks, it's the end of the line.  This weekend marks the Labor Day holiday, traditionally the last big weekend of the summer.  School's back in session, long vacations are a thing of the past, and sunshine and beach barbeques give way to gray skies and long commutes.  It's no different in the movie business:  giant blockbuster blow-'em-ups give way to small, quiet pictures whose goal is to make your girlfriend cry.  And just as the summer blockbuster season must end, so too must Summerfest 2008, the Screengrab's hot-weather feature where we analyze one movie a week with "summer" in the title, with the goal of giving you something to do for two hours while your silently dreading having to go back to the office.  But we're not going to just leave you hanging with some cheap piece of junk we happened to notice while scrolling through the IMDB listings; oh, no.  We're going to see Summerfest '08 out with a blast by bringing you a movie we've been excited about since we began this project, a true throwback to the summer flicks of yore where you could sit in a theater with a rapidly melting Slurpee and have a few laughs without feeling guilty about it.  Summer may be over -- and it may be a long four months until we bring you "The Screengrab's Twelve Days of Christmas Movies" -- but  we're going to wave goodbye to it with one of the funniest, most good-natured satires in recent years.  Whether or not you came of age in the 1980s, this is a movie that will make you feel what it was like, and crack your shit up while doing so.  

It's been great spending summer with you kids, but the time has come to pack up your duffel bags and head home to your parents.  But before you do, put on your tightest pair of gym shorts, and join us for 2001's Wet Hot American Summer!

THE ACTION:  Late August, Camp Firewood.  It's the last day of camp, just like it's the last day of the Screengrab, and kids and counselors alike are stricken with a hormone-crazed mix of excitement and regret:  camp is just about to end, but there's still so much to do!  Will the head counselor find love with the unassuming astronomer who lives across the way?  Will our slightly nerdish hero finally draw the attention of his dream girl away from her thoughtless, philandering boyfriend?  Will the lithe, athletic, tennis-playing chap ever get laid?  Will the camp's baseball team ever defeat that snooty bunch from the rich kid's camp the next lake over?  Will the cook overcome his Viet Nam-era post-traumatic stress disorder with the aid of a talking can of mixed vegetables?  And will the fat kid who runs the camp radio station ever take a bath, already?  These questions and more will be answered, sort of, in what turns out to be not only a vivacious comedy in its own right, but an absolutely pitch-perfect evocation of the party-as-a-verb days of the early 1980s and the innumerable shameless sex comedies they brought us.  Ultimately more a collection of moments than an actual movie, Wet Hot American Summer is so riotous and well-meaning, you can't hold its shambolic nature against it.

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Admittedly, it ain't Christopher Nolan.  But in a cleverly conceived -- and surprisingly watchable -- example of what YouTube is capable of delivering, filmmaker Andre Perkowski brings us Silent Shadow of the Bat-Man, a detourned collage film made up up of found footage and scenes snipped from some of the same old silent movies that influenced Batman's creators, Bill Finger and Bob Kane, in designing the character, including The Bat, The Man Who Laughs and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

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So,my fellow Screengrabbers have thrown down the gauntlet, and once again, I gotta clean it up. What movies am I really looking forward to this fall? Burn After Reading, The Road and Synedoche, New York, among others. But thanks to the quirky rules we set up just to get on each other's nerves, we're trying not to repeat ourselves, so I've chosen to focus on a few films that have gone unmentioned by my beloved associates.

Of course, there's plenty to look forward to in theaters this fall above what's on my top three list below. The indie film about an Arab-American teenager's crisis of conscience, Towelhead; the wide release of the clever Assassination of a High School President; the American big-screen debut of Wong Kar-Weii's breathtaking Ashes of Time; and the mainstream debut of the sparkling Lily Rabe in the otherwise uninteresting What Just Happened are all enough to put your butt in a padded theater chair if you're a film fan. But beyond that, there's the movies I'm most -- and least -- looking forward to, beneath the cut.

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Bernard Herrmann was one of the most legendary film composers of all time.  One of his first major compositions was the score to The Devil and Daniel Webster, in which he showed both his innovative approach and his playfully subversive nature by by double-tracking a violin to play a jaw-droppingly complex rendition of "Pop Goes the Weasel", and then claiming the solo was the work of a teenaged violin prodigy he'd discovered.  He composed a number of memorable movie scores over the years, from the towering, epic sweep of Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (his very first project) to the moody, dark tension of Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (his very last).  But it is with Alfred Hitchcock's name that Herrmann's will be foreever linked.

Hitchcock knew he was playing with dynamite when he made Psycho.  The movie that buried noir and ushered in the age of the maniacal slasher was a risky venture for him on many levels:  with its shocking violence, infamous mid-film twist, and horror plot, it was a massive deviation from the big-budget hit mysteries that had made so much money for his studio bosses in the late 1950s.  Fearing disaster, Hitch -- who was nothing if not determined -- tried as much as possible to make the film on the cheap, and he wasn't afraid to capitalize on personal relationships to do so.  Some stories have it that he strong-armed Herrmann, who had turned in incredibly monumental work for him before on such movies as The Man Who Knew Too Much, North by Northwest, and Vertigo; but Herrmann wasn't one to be cowed so easily.  He agreed to work on the soundtrack for Psycho at less than his normal pay, but Herrmann -- a rarity amongst film composers insofar as he retained near-total creative control over the final product of his labors -- made it clear he was going to do things his way.  Most famously, he ignored Hitchcock's foremost prerogative when writing the score:  the director insisted that, for maximum shock value, there be total silence on the soundtrack during the murders, most especially the infamous shower scene.

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Filmed in 1957, just a few years after his outstanding USC student documentary Bunker Hill was released and taking place in the same run-down neighborhood in Los Angeles (even some of the establishing shots, at a busy supermarket and on a steep trolley car going up and down the hill known as "Angel's Flight"), Kent MacKenzie's The Exiles follows a day in the life of a small group of unemployed American Indians living more or less hand to mouth.  The men spend their days sleeping and their nights drinking themselves into oblivion, while the women tend to their families or choose someone to spend the night with before the inevitable fighting breaks out.  It wasn't released until 1961, and MacKenzie would only make one more movie before his death in 1980; but what he leaves behind in The Exiles is a fascinating film that blends a documentary subject with a narrative approach, traditional framing techniques with French New Wave camerawork, and neo-realist situations and dialogue with contemplative internal monologues.

Shown on a double bill at the Armand Hammer Museum's Billy Wilder Theater in Los Angeles recently, The Exiles follows the surly, overweight Homer Nish; his trusting, pregnant common-law wife Yvonne Williams; and the drunken, womanizing smoothie Tommy Reynolds through a typical day.  Unsparing in its treatment of their character, but never failing to show the social and economic conditions that affect them, the film shows both the nobility and baseness of its subjects, and along the way creates one of the most fully realized portraits of the American Indian in film history.  A brief interlude on the Arizona reservation that is home to Nish's parents provides a much-needed break in the action, contrasting what the 'exiles' left behind with their daily reality and segueing smoothly back into the contemporary action.   

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As we've discussed previously at the Screengrab, the documentary film is perhaps the most controversial and dynamic genre in contemporary motion pictures.  While with most critics, there seems to be a consensus that we are in a sort of golden age of documentary filmmaking, with documentarians suddenly reaching the same level of fame as mainstream movie directors, and a few documentaries making a killing at the box office, others express doubts about what kinds of documentaries are being made, while some insiders are concerned about new techniques in documentary filmmaking that blur the line between fact and fiction.

One of the hot topics in the British documentary field -- and one that's sure to make it to our shores sooner rather than later -- is the fact that many documentarians, unable to secure funding from the usual Hollywood moneymen for their sometimes-controversial movies, are turning to what the Guardian  calls "the third sector"; that is to say, charities, non-profit organizations, and advocacy groups.  Actor/filmmaker Gael Garcia Bernal, for example, has sought the aid of a number of NGOs, media outlets, and other not-for-profits for his new documentary, Resist.  In addition to traditional sources like federal arts funding, documentary filmmakers are seeking the aid of such groups to help them bypass the traiditional Hollywood financing and distribution schemes.  "The involvement of charities means that not only will the film inspire people to act, but we can also give them a way to put this inspiration to use afterwards," sayds Bernal.

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Hello? Oh...Mr. Rooney...what? Uh, no...Scott's not here. This is Andrew...Andrew Osborne...yes, sir, I'm another one of the writers here at The Screengrab. You may have read my ongoing autobiographical posts about the summer I spent working for Troma ...no? Well, maybe you read my special 50th birthday salute to the films of Madonna or my review of Vicky Cristina Barcelona? No? Oh, well...

...uh, what's that, sir? Scott Von Doviak? You mean the author of "Tom Cruise Still Creepy, Still Not Funny," "Anna Faris, Honorary Bunny" and "Unwatchable #74: You Got Served"? Oh, well, he's not here right now, but...

...excuse me? You've heard rumors that Scott is singing "Twist and Shout" in the streets of Chicago with his colleague Leonard Pierce, author of "Video of the Day: Sharon Stone Bares All For Paul Verhoeven," "Summerfest '08: Corvette Summer" and that cool story about the state of DC Comics film adaptations? And that Sarah Sundberg, one of the hardworking contributors to "Screengrab Salutes The Top 20 Animated Feature Films" was riding around with them in a bright red Ferrari convertible?

Oh, no, sir, I'm afraid you must be mistaken...

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To be honest, Urusei Yatsura 2:  Beautiful Dreamer probably isn’t one of the greatest animated features of all time.  It probably isn’t even one of the best Japanese animations of all time.  What it is, though, is a surprisingly good and unexpectedly deep installment of a beloved anime series that came out of left field, surprising – and, to be honest, disappointing – many dedicated fans (and the show’s creator), but finding an audience beyond the normal ‘Japanimation’ devotees who appreciated its daring, its ambition, and its beautiful eeriness. 

Directed by Mamoru Oshii (who would later become famous for Ghost in the Shell and his “Kerberos” saga), Beautiful Dreamer, released in Japan in 1984, was the second big-screen adaptation of the wildly popular Urusei Yatsura anime series.  Like much of creator Rumiko Takahashi’s work, Urusei Yatsura was gentle, good-humored, slightly subversive situation comedy – in this case, it focused on the flighty, jealous Lum, an alien who begins attending a Japanese high school and constantly disrupts classes with her protective attitude towards her dimwitted boyfriend, Ataru.  However, this sort of story – along with the attendant physical comedy that marked the show – no longer interested Oshii, and he decided to take things in a decidedly different – and much darker and deeper – direction.

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PERSEPOLIS (2007)



In the same way graphic novels like Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis have expanded the thematic possibilities of pen and ink comics beyond run-of-the-mill superhero adventures and the romantic entanglements of the gang at Riverdale High, so too does this pristine cinematic adaptation demonstrate the ability of animation to lend a necessary artistic distance to depictions of events that would simply be too grim or painful to watch otherwise.  Satrapi’s autobiographical tale (which she co-scripted and co-directed with her graphic novel collaborator Vincent Paronnaud) tackles big subjects like the Iranian Revolution, Islamic fundamentalism and the agony of adolescence with visual flair and heartfelt humanity, while the voice performances (by an effervescent Danielle Darrieux, Catherine Deneuve and her daughter, Chiara Mastroianni (as Satrapi) are far more three-dimensional than many of 2007’s live action female roles.

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SOUTH PARK: BIGGER, LONGER AND UNCUT (1999)



Oh, sure, The Simpsons Movie was funny...but it wasn't South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut funny. It wasn't even "Marge vs. the Monorail"-era Simpsons funny. After ten years of writing, The Simpsons Movie seemed no better or worse than an above-average episode of the show drawn out to feature length. (And, aside from the "Spider-Pig" theme, where were the musical numbers?!?!)  By way of comparison, when Trey Parker and Matt Stone got a chance to bring their consistently hilarious and subversive Comedy Central cartoon to the big screen, they pulled out all the stops: a full, Broadway/Guitar Hero-quality, Oscar-nominated musical score by future Tony-winner Marc Shaiman and Metallica frontman James Hetfield (!!!), a typically topical, economy-size blockbuster of a plot, some unobtrusively awesome voice cameos, impressively stepped-up animation and, most importantly, the swearing...oh, the wonderful, wonderful swearing, some of the most (literally) musical cursing in cinema history...and “Uncle Fucker” wasn’t even the funniest part.  Or the most shocking: that came later, when I actually felt a rare burst of affection for Robin Williams during his good-natured, who’d-a-thunk-it performance of “Blame Canada” at the 72 Annual Academy Awards ceremony.

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So, according to our very own Scott Von Doviak, Star Wars: The Clone Wars may not exactly be on the short list for this year’s Best Animated Feature Film Oscar, although, to paraphrase Warner Bros. head of distribution Dan Fellman, awards, critical praise and boffo box office were never really the point, since the movie, essentially, "was targeted to a specific audience for specific reasons [i.e., to promote the upcoming Cartoon Network series of the same name]. We accomplished that mission, and it will continue in another medium."

That crazy dreamer! Just goes to show that, when it comes to animation, even studio execs can get swept up in the magic that happens when pencils, paint, pixels, Plasticine modeling clay or paper cut-outs meet persistence of vision and insane amounts of patience.

According to our old friend, Wikipedia, “The earliest form of animation is a 5,200 year old earthen bowl found in Iran in Shahr-i Sokhta which has five images painted along the sides. When the bowl is spun, it shows a goat leaping up to a tree to take a pear.”  (And, ironically, scientists have since determined the bowl actually received better reviews and a higher per-screen average than The Clone Wars...but I digress.) 

Anyway, the aforementioned bowl may or may not be included in NEXT week’s list of The Screengrab’s all-time favorite animated shorts, but in-between then and now (get it?  get it?  I’m here all week!  Try the veal!) please join us for a very special Screengrab salute to the greatest animated features of all time!

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Regular Screengrab readers know that I am not one to go for cheap nostalgia.  I don't view the world through rose-colored glasses, and I usuallly think that any line of reasoning that ends with 'things where better when I was a kid' come not from any real aesthetic position, but from an unwillingness to admit that one has gotten older and that the culture has moved along since we were teenagers.  I'm especially not nostalgic about the 1970s; I spent most of that decade being pretty easy to please.  If it came with a cape or a mask, and I could enjoy it while eating a bowl of Apple Jacks, it was okay with me.  However, every once in a while, there's a piece of cultural driftwood that floats past that grips me with a strange sense of longing for the good old days, and today's Summerfest 2008 entry is one of them.  Maybe I'm just becoming a softie because this is the penultimate installment of Summerfest '08 -- a feature in which I profile a movie with the word "summer" in the title that you can use to kill an hour and a half while you're waiting for your car to get detailed -- or maybe there's something deeper at work.  It's hard to say:  the big draws of this week's movie, Corvette Summer, are vintage cars and Mark Hammill, and I'm neither a gearhead nor a Star Wars fan.  Maybe it's just my longtime crush on Annie Potts.  But whatever the case, we're going to plunge head-first, for the second-to-the-last installment of Summerfest 2008, into a movie which represented the very last moment Mark Hamill was given any on-screen presence in anything but a Star Wars movie, and the very last moment Danny Bonaduce was even remotely taken seriously.  

Summer's ending, as all things must.  But with only two more Summerfest screenings to go, we're going to see it out with a bang!  Join me for a look at 1978's Corvette Summer!

THE ACTION:  It's 1978, and like every high school kid in 1978, Kenneth W. Dantley Jr. is obsessed with two things:  hot girls and fast cars.  Being an out-of-it chunkhead, he can't do much about obtaining the former, but in pursuit of the latter, he takes a shop class, and as his final project, instead of building a bird feeder or an ashtray, he comes up wih a custom-designed 1973 Chevrolet Corvette Stingray.  Unfortunately, Kenny is in the habit of befriending ill-meaning douchebags like the weaselly Kootz, under whose care the tricked-out 'Vette is stolen.  Kenny, anxious to get back the car which got him his first-ever A grade, heads off on an epic trip from Los Angeles to Las Vegas; along the way, he runs into mobsters, lowlifes, ne'er-do-wells, and Vanessa, who describes herself as a "prostitute-in-training" headed to Vegas to hit the major leagues of whoring.  We're apparently meant to find this flattering.  Once he actually arrives in Sin City, he falls in with a bunch of other head-in-the-clouds gearheads and the tone of the movie shifts and becomes less an outrageous teen comedy and more a deadly-dull weekend with the kind of fanatic auto enthusiasts that you find at car shows embarrassing their wives.  It's a testament to the quality of the movie that the star who's lasted the longest is the car itself, which is still shown at classic auto shows all over the country.

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There's a great moment early on in Frank Zappa's engaging autobiography, The Real Frank Zappa Book, where a teenaged Zappa becomes obsessed with some long-forgotten doo-wop single.  Having recently started taking band classes, he marched to his music teacher, put on the record, and demanded to know:  "Why do I like this song so much?"  The teacher gave it a listen and responded, simply, "Diminished fifths".  This one moment began Zappa's lifelong affair with music theory, and the idea that there was more to why we responded positively to one song over another than simply matters of taste.  
 
The internet has been a real double-edged sword in terms of film criticsism; on the one hand, it's opened up the field to non-professionals in a really positive way, allowing those outside the traditional academic and journalistic worlds to take a shot at the discipline, often with a fresh perspective, a new approach, or an eye towards non-mainstream films and genres.  On the other hand, it's also subject to the same flattening effect on criticism that darkens the entire world wide web:  it seems enough to merely have an opinion, and no one has he right to tell you it's wrong.  Merely thinking something is enough, and the idea of defending your opinion intelligently -- let alone actually knowing what you're talking about -- is too often considered qualnt Web 1.0 thinking.  That's why we're grateful to sites like the Broadview Blog.

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Okay, well, maybe not all -- she'd save that for the actual movie.  But this is Stone's initial screen test for her most notorious role, as ice-cold killer Catherine Trammell in 1992's  Basic Instinct.  At the time this footage was shot, Sharon Stone was still considered one of Hollywood's hottest bombshells instead of one of Hollywood's biggest kooks, and Paul Verhoeven, still three years away from Showgirls, was still a subversive genius.  

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Sergio Leone had to be talked into making Once Upon a Time in the West.  He'd moved on; he wanted to make movies in America, and he'd already begun pre-production on a gangster epic he hoped would do to the golden age of crime pictures what he'd been doing to the golden age of westerns for a decade.  But a lot of producers had made a lot of money off of his so-called 'spaghetti westerns', and they wanted to make more.  So they dangled such a big paycheck in front of him that, in 1968, he agreed to go back to the well one more time.  He was going to finally fulfill his threat to totally dismantle the western and rebuild it from the ground up; and he wasn't going to do it without Ennio Morricone.

Though he scored a number of Leone's best films and came to be associated with the 'sound of spaghetti', Morricone is largely still known to American audiences as the author of the memorable main theme to The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.  And while that's a pretty strange piece of music in terms of traditional film scores, it doesn't even begin to give you an idea of what a truly wierd musician Morricone really is.  Capable at any given moment of unleashing nearly cacaphonous serial music, floods of distorted, ultra-loud guitars, haunting minimalist refrains, bizarre and atonal free-jazz sounds, shrieking electronic tones, or simple and elegant variations on traditional folk music.  Such wide and varied sounds are in ample evidence in the composer's vast catalogue; many of his best (and strangest) pieces of music were composed as soundtrack music for long-forgotten Italian movies, but put all together in one pot, a service performed by American avant-garde aficionado and punk vocalist Mike Patton on his indispensable Crime and Dissonance series, they represent one of the most restless imaginations of any contemporary musician.  With Ennio Morricone, you knew you'd be getting something of quality, but you might not have any idea whatsoever what it was going to be.  Such was the case with Once Upon a Time in the West.

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Despite the fact that The Dark Knight has made roughly eighty-five kerjillion dollars on its way to breaking nearly every box office record since the dawn of motion photography, DC Comics -- and, by extention, their parent company Warner Brothers -- is widely perceived as the big loser in the battle of superhero movies.  Much as Marvel Comics did in the early '60s, Marvel Films -- the people responsible for Iron Man, Spider-Man and the X-Men franchise -- has largely trounced what it used to call its "Distinguished Competition".  Although both companies have turned their franchise characters into successful movies, Marvel's have generally been seen as more successful, more entertaining, more true to their comic book origins, and most of all, easier to get made.  While DC continues to farm its characters out to various studios, Marvel has consolidated its filmmaking power into its studio arm, ensuring a production continuity that provides another curious parallel to the '60s, when the more coherent continuity of Marvel's comics appealed to readers. 

This is a situation that Warner Brothers, who's been making movies even longer than DC has been making comics, is eager to change.  In an article in the latest Variety, Warner execs and DC bigwigs alike discuss what's being done to avoid the sort of missteps that have led to their being thought of as the second-tier player in superhero films.  From greenlighting unprofitable tripe like Catwoman to dragging its feet on potential blockbusters like Wonder Woman and Justice League, DC's film development players have made a number of high-profile mistakes (let's not even speak of the botch-job that was the making and marketing of Superman Returns) that have led them to be seen as failures despite having put out the biggest blockbuster in four decades.  

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Every couple of months, someone in the press gets wind of the notion that independent film -- which, to our knowledge, has never been a field people have entered with an eye towards getting rich -- is on its last legs.  Lamentations ensue, and then someone pulls out the box office receipts for