The Screengrab

Take Five: Bring On the Bad Guys

2008-07-18T20:00:00Z

As you may have heard unless you've just gotten back from an alternate dimension with no public relations industry, The Dark Knight opens this weekend, and even our resident skeptic Scott Von Doviak is hailing Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker as one of the pinnacles of big-screen malevolance. Batman is the perfect illustration of the principle that a hero is only as good as his villains; the Clown Prince of Crime is the outstanding member of an unforgettable rogue's gallery that throws the lonely heroism of Bruce Wayne into sharp relief by illustrating the other facets of his personality and demonstrating how terrible he might have been had he not taken the path of righteousness. Indeed, there are any number of genres, from true crime to film noir to serial thrillers to even Shakespearean tragedy, that prove that a story is only as strong as its most detestable character. Crime, as the man once said, is only a left-handed form of human endeavor, and for every enigmatic nihilist like the Joker who simply wants to watch the world burn, there's a figure whose vileness and evil are the result of a good man gone just a little bit bad. If your showing of The Dark Knight is sold out, here's five movies featuring some of our favorite big-screen villains to tide you over until you get to hear Ledger's deadly cackle for yourself.

THE STEPFATHER (1987)

These days, Terry O'Quinn is best known for his portrayal of John Locke, the mysteriously healed castaway from Lost who can be both hero and villain as he attempts to forge a mystical connection with the island. But 20 years ago, when the veteran stage actor first came to the attention of the moviegoing public, it was in this smart little thriller about a man so obsessed with having the perfect family that he was willing to kill to get it. His face an affable blank, O'Quinn goes about his father-knows-best routine with barely a harsh word for anything, until something goes wrong. That's when the devil inside him comes up, and he moves quickly from tearing up his tool room to butchering his whole family. O'Quinn's tightly controlled performance here is what makes the movie, and his quiet intensity is what makes it so devastatingly effective when he temporarily forgets the careful fiction he's made of his life and asks, with genuine confusion, "Who am I here?" -- before remembering, and delivering the news to his new wife in an especially brutal way.

THE MINUS MAN (1999)

Though a flawed movie, The Minus Man -- directed by Hampton Fancher, best known for penning the screenplay to Blade Runner -- is also a compelling one, thanks to the strong performance by Owen Wilson as the main character, Vann Siegert. Turning the usual serial killer narrative on its head, The Minus Man presents Siegert as a kind, handome, likable young man who wants to put down roots, to fit in, to be somebody -- but most of all, to help people. The problem is, he thinks that most people are so miserable that the best way to help them is to kill them (gently, of course, with a fast, painless poison). So decent is this mass murderer that his own conscience has to step in occasionally and remind him that what he's doing is wrong, in the person of two imaginary FBI agents who torment him. And so convincing is Wilson in making Vann a likable figure that more than once, the viewer finds himself wishing they would just go away and leave the poor boy alone.

THE ADVENTURES OF BUCKAROO BANZAI ACROSS THE 8TH DIMENSION (1984)

Great villains don't always have to be grim, sinister, humorless killing machines. Sometimes, as in this delightful neo-pulp sci-fi musical comedy, they can be goofy, pompous, overblown killing machines with the worst fake Italian accents since Chico Marx. Dr. Emilio Lizardo, the nefarious Red Lectroid living in the body of a long-dead rocket scientist, is played in the film by John Lithgow, who hams it up like there's no tomorrow. He sticks electrodes on his toungue, he tortures helpless women with honey, he gives plagiarized inspirational speeches to his handful of followers, and he deliberately mispronounces the names of his underlings -- and he has a hell of a time doing it. Dressed up in cobbled-together bits and pieces of a dozen pulp archetypes, Lithgow gets support from a colossal cast of veteran character actors, including Dan Hedeya, Christopher Lloyd and Vincent Schiavelli, but he outshines them all, investing each one of his often hilarious lines with hooty gravitas.

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (2007)

Some critics found the character of Anton Chigurh in the Coen Brothers' masterful adaptation of a Cormac McCarthy novel to be so over-the-top as to read like a cartoonish supervillain. Others, though, found the understated psychopath, played by a preternaturaly detached Javier Bardem in one of the big screen's most memorable haircuts, to carry surprising depth for someone described by another character in the film as "the ultimate bad-ass". The most compelling thing about Chigurh is that, while everyone else perceives him as totally insane, his madness has the impenetrable integrity of the lunatic. To himself, his actions make perfect sense, and the more time we spend around his insanity, the more we begin to understand it: in the chilling scene near the movie's end where he pays a visit to the tragedy-stricken Carla Jean, we know that he's playing his own deranged interpretation of fair with her, and the terror we feel as the tension mounts comes from the fact that we know and she doesn't.

ROCKY III (1982)

Made at the exact moment in time that the Rocky franchise was becoming a laughable self-parody, but Mr. T had yet to do the same, Rocky III, while more or less a disaster in its second half and filled with hokey, ridiculous moments, does manage to give us some of the most thrilling scenes in the series. Why? Because it also gives us the greatest villain in the series: the brutal, granite-hard, contemptous Clubber Lang, a street-fighting brawler who has nothing but loathing for the soft celebrity smooth-talker that Stallone's Rocky Balboa has become. Patterned partly after the young George Foreman, Clubber Lang is a monster in the ring who lives to destroy his opponents and has developed a line of trash-talk so electrifying that it sends the gregarious Rocky into a rage while providing the most quotable dialogue in the whole Rocky series. And though he never showed himself capable of doing more than he does here, Mr. T is stunning: his hostile, spitting hatred of everyone but himself is so exciting to watch that for the film's first hour, it's hard to take your eyes off him.

When Good Directors Go Bad: Ryan's Daughter (1970, David Lean)

2008-07-18T19:00:00Z

By the late 1960s, old-fashioned epics had fallen on hard times. With the counterculture movement in full swing, fewer young moviegoers were interested in large-scale entertainments, with sweeping vistas and larger-than-life filmmaking. However, Hollywood has always been a little slow to catch up with popular tastes, and this led to a string of big-budget flops, as the roadshow musicals and bloated period pictures failed to rope in audiences who went wild for The Graduate and Easy Rider. But if anyone could still make an old-school epic under these circumstances, it was David Lean, coming off the award-winning blockbusters Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago. Unfortunately, Ryan’s Daughter wasn’t remotely up to the standard of the director’s best work.

From the beginning, Ryan’s Daughter had problems. The filmmakers took a suspiciously long time to cast the film, with name actors like Marlon Brando and Peter O’Toole turning down the role of the British Maj. Doryan before up-and-comer Christopher Jones was cast. But things got far worse once production began. Lean was a notorious perfectionist, often taking hours to set up a single shot, which angered several of the film’s stars, with Leo McKern commenting, “I don’t like to be paid 500 pounds a week for sitting down and playing Scrabble.” And Jones’ acting talent- or, more appropriately, the lack thereof- caused friction between him and both Lean and leading lady Sarah Miles.

Of course, stories like this are nothing new in show business. Moreover, had the movie turned out well none of this would have mattered. Unfortunately, Ryan’s Daughter was a flop with critics and audiences, to the point that Lean didn’t direct another film for more than a decade. The film is a lumbering bore, without so much as an interesting character to hold the audience’s interest. Naturally, this being a Lean movie, Ryan’s Daughter is often gorgeous to look at, but that’s hardly enough to tide the audience over for upwards of three hours.

In fact, I’d say the visuals are part of the problem, or more accurately, that Lean cares more for the pictoral beauty of the film than he does for the people who inhabit it. Now, I realize that this criticism has also been levied at several films of another notorious perfectionist, Stanley Kubrick. The difference is that if you look at films such as 2001 and Barry Lyndon, you’ll see that Kubrick’s style demands a degree of distance from the characters, and the visuals are a large part of this. By contrast, Lean means to tell a human story in Ryan’s Daughter, and this distance only hinders his ability to do so.

Consider the early scene in which Rosy Ryan (played by Miles) sees her former teacher Charles Shaughnessy (Mitchum) after he comes home from a conference in Britain. As Rosy has long felt love for Charles- the man she will eventually marry, mind you- you’d think it might be good to see her reaction to his arrival. However, Lean’s staging of the event is so clumsy that he forgets to show us. One minute, Rosy is alone at the shoreline, then suddenly Lean cuts to an extreme long shot as Charles walks into the frame, so that they’re hardly more than specks on the beach moving toward each other. It’s only after they come together and begin talking that he cuts to their conversation. I wish I could say this was atypical of Lean’s style in Ryan’s Daughter, but this isn’t the case. Time and again, Lean’s characters are upstaged by the landscapes that surround them.

Then again, perhaps extreme long shots would’ve been the best way to deal with Christopher Jones, so that the audience couldn’t have seen how untalented and inexpressive an actor he was. Of course, this was hardly the first time a director was faced with the challenge of a difficult leading man, but Lean never figures out how to successfully work around this. Initially, the film gives most of Jones’ dialogue to a subordinate, but once he embarks on his affair with Rosy this becomes impossible, so Lean resorts to swelling music, longing glances from Miles, and cutaways to nature. But worst of all are the scenes in which Maj. Doryan flashes back to the battlefield- Jones screws up his face and flails around, but never convinces us that there’s anything underneath the surface. Jones’ performance is so inept that our antipathy toward him extends to the character itself, and by extension to Rosy, who by forsaking Robert Mitchum for this clown looks less like an impetuous youth than a horny little fool.

Speaking of fools, if Christopher Jones’ performance is inept, John Mills’ is downright embarrassing. Mills plays Michael, a local oaf who sadly has nobody to grapple with, in what surely has to be one of the most ignominious performances ever to net an Oscar. But even if Mills’ hammy turn isn’t completely Lean’s fault, the way the character is used has to be, as Michael functions as a comic mirror to the events of the story, eavesdropping on the lovers and following them around at pivotal moments. It’s a cheesy touch on the part of Lean and frequent screenwriter Robert Bolt, one that they should have known better than to include.

All of this isn’t to say that Ryan’s Daughter doesn’t have good points. For one thing, Miles’s and Mitchum’s performances would distinguish a film that told this story on a more intimate level (especially Mitchum’s). However, Lean’s style here is so unnecessarily grandiose that we lose sight of any reason why we should care about them or anything else we see onscreen. By the time the film actually justifies the magnitude of its scope, it’s far too late. There’s a spectacular sequence in which the townspeople aid a band of IRA fighters in bringing weapons ashore in the middle of a storm. But impressive though it is, all I could think of was how difficult it must have been to film. And that’s just about the last thing one should be thinking about during a scene like this.

Trailer Review: Hell Ride

2008-07-18T16:00:00Z

For the past week the blogosphere has been abuzz with the announcement of Quentin Tarantino’s upcoming project Inglorious Bastards. Which I suppose goes to show you that QT’s fanboy cachet is as strong as ever way. For more evidence of this, look no further than Hell Ride, the upcoming biker flick written and directed by and co-starring QT pal Larry Bishop. Quentin fans will no doubt recognize Bishop from his scene in Kill Bill: vol 2 as Larry the strip-club owner, but while Tarantino’s name is all over this trailer, Bishop’s isn’t mentioned until the very end. For good reason, too- Bishop’s last film, made a dozen years ago, was the godawful crime caper Mad Dog Time. Watching the grindhouse stylings of the Hell Ride trailer, it seems a shame that this is advertising a real movie, while Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving and Edgar Wright’s Don’t exist only in their creators’ imaginations.

"In Reality, It's Actually Worse": Defending 'Elite Squad'

2008-07-18T14:45:00Z

When José Padilha made Bus 174, he was praised by many critics as having created a documentary that treated the poverty, addiction, desperation and corruption in Brazil's favela slums with exceptional sensitivity and care. Now, a few years later, after his film Elite Squad (a narrative film that was originally meant to be a documentary) has become the most expensive -- and most profitable -- film in Brazilian cinema history, a lot of the same critics are calling him a quasi-fascist.

What happened?

In a revealing interview with the Guardian, Padilha -- alternating between defensive hostility and sincere pleading -- makes the case that whatever people think of Elite Squad, it does nothing but portray the everyday reality he set out to film. The story of Bope, a police special forces unit that goes after Brazilian drug dealers and street gangs with the same murderous brutality with which the gangs go after each other, is so naked and unrelenting in its portrayal of the deadliest police killers since Cobra that it's easy to imagine the director meant it as an ode to oppression. And his star, Wagner Moura, is so charismatic it's hard not to read his bloodthirsty, enthusiastically torturing Captain Nasciemento as a hero.

But that's too shallow a read, according to the filmmaker. He insists he set out to make nothing more than a documentary (though the relentless voice-overs don't do much to banish a partisan mood), and if people respond to the brutality of the film, they're responding to the brutality of a system they helped create. While some of his defenses ring a bit hollow (such as his Nixonian claim that critics who attack his film are dope-addled intellectuals unaware that they're part of the problem) and his omission of the fact that Bope has been implicated in the murder of impoverished favela residents not involved in the drug trade is rather damning, he does make good points about how Nasciemento's popularity is understandable in a country that has done little to make its citizens feel safe, and some of his depictions of institutional dysfunction echo those of The Wire, a show few would attack as fascist.

Whatever one's read on the film's politics, it's extremely telling that, whie Padilha condems people who rail against the system while continuing to feed it, he admits that in order to facilitate filming in the favelas, he paid two sets of bribes: one to the neighborhood gangs not to attack him or his crew, and one to the neighborhood cops not to disrupt filming.

Fitting Farewells: The Top Ten Great Final Films (Part Three)

2008-07-17T21:00:00Z

Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe in THE MISFITS (1961)

The onscreen drama in John Huston’s film of Arthur Miller’s vehicle for wife Marilyn Monroe about horse wranglers and broken relationships in Reno, Nevada runs only a close second to the offscreen drama surrounding the film. Huston drank so much during the production he sometimes fell asleep on set, Monroe wound up in detox at one point during the shoot and died less than two years after delivering her final complete film performance as troubled divorcée, Roslyn Taber. The Misfits also marked the final performance of her equally iconic co-star, Clark Gable, who probably hastened his own death by a macho insistence on performing his own stunts, including (according to our old friend Wikipedia) “being dragged about 400 feet across [a] dry lakebed at more than 30 miles per hour” by a horse. Yet despite the tragedy surrounding the film, Gable and Monroe at least ended their careers (and too-short lives) with a worthy (and timeless) cinematic milestone.

Sergio Leone's ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA (1983)

After his first collaboration with Clint Eastwood, A Fistful of Dollars, made it possible for him to do what he liked as a director, Sergio Leone basically made nothing but epics, and they kept getting bigger and bigger. He had hoped to make a gangster movie back in the late 1960s but was persuaded to stick with the Italian Western form he had helped create for two more films, Once Upon a Time in the West (1969) and Duck, You Sucker! (1971), both of which were first released to the English-speaking markets in butchered cuts that helped to temporarily kill off his reputation in America. His Prohibition-set crime epic Once Upon a Time in America, which finally arrived in 1983, helped to inspire a re-evaluation of his passionate feel for action, story and romance, his large-scale compositional sense and the hallucinatory romanticism of every shot. Unfortunately, that was only after a 229-minute version of the movie began to get some play in theaters and on cable TV around 1985; originally, Warner Brothers, bowing to what had by then become tradition with Leone movies, sent it out to theaters in the summer of 1984 in an incoherent two-hour-twenty-minute cut that exposed Leone to ridicule and mockery on what should have been a triumphant occasion, which seems to have been a key part in this most movie-intoxicated of major director's decision that he had done enough for the art of film. He spent the rest of his life essentially retired. He died in 1989, by which point the good name of his last work had been pretty much restored.

Richard Farnsworth in THE STRAIGHT STORY (1999)

David Lynch's G-rated tribute to the diversity and rich unpredictability of the American heartland draws much of its strength from the man at its center: Richard Farnsworth as Alvin Straight, an actual World War II veteran who, at 73, drove a riding lawn mower 240 miles to reconcile with his dying older brother. (It was the only motor vehicle Straight was still fit to drive; the trip took him six weeks.) Farnsworth had gotten into movies as an extra and stuntman back in 1936. The movies in which he made uncredited nonspeaking appearances include Gone with the Wind, Gunga Din, Red River, The Ten Commandments, The Wild One, and Blazing Saddles. He began to get small speaking parts after three decades in the business, and then in 1978, he got an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role as an aging ranch hand in Comes a Horseman. His first big chance to carry a movie came with the 1982 Canadian Western The Grey Fox, in which, in his ealry sixties, he showed that he had learned how to present himself as a romantic, gentlemanly icon. He continued to play character parts through the 1980s and into the 1990s, but by the time David Lynch came calling, Farnsworth was pushing eighty and had been diagnosed with terminal bone cancer. Fearing that it might cost him the job, he kept that as his little secret and somehow managed to give the performance of his life, imbuing his now well-rehearsed iconic American character with a new vulnerability and humanity, while doing his best to conceal that he was in terrific physical pain most of the time. Farnsworth died in the fall of 2000, several months after his last performance won him another Academy Award nomination, this time for Best Actor.

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

Click here for Part One and Part Two

Fitting Farewells: The Top Ten Great Final Films (Part Two)

2008-07-17T20:30:00Z

Desmond Llewelyn, THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH (1999)

Despite a pretty decent theme song, The World Is Not Enough hardly qualifies as a great film (or even a particularly great Bond film), but it earns a spot on this list for one perfect scene. Desmond Llewelyn first appeared as the cranky go-to guy for state-of-the-art British spy paraphernalia in 1963’s From Russia With Love and returned in every subsequent 007 installment (except for 1973’s Live and Let Die) thereafter, outlasting Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore and Timothy Dalton before finally teaming with Pierce Brosnan for three late ‘90s adventures. In his final big screen appearance, the aging Q is seen schooling his protégé (and eventual replacement) R, played by John Cleese, before disappearing from view with the classic exit line, “Never let them see you bleed, and always have an escape plan.” Sadly, Llewelyn died shortly after the production wrapped, not of old age (he was 85), but in a car crash, on his way home to his beloved wife of 61 years after dinner with a friend...not, as my dad pointed out, the worst way to go, especially after spending your life as a beloved cinema icon (who once said he’d play his signature role “as long as the producers want me and the Almighty doesn't").

Robert Mitchum in DEAD MAN (1996)

Most of Robert Mitchum's contemporaries from the Golden Age made their onscreen farewells as frail shadows of their former selves (as we'll explore in-depth next week). Not Big Bad Bob. There could be no greater contrast between the classic Hollywood tough guys and the man-children of today's cinema than Mitchum's brief scene with Johnny Depp near the beginning of Dead Man. Even pushing 80, Mitchum looks like he could snap Depp in half like a breadstick. As John Dickinson, owner of a steelworks in the Old West town of Machine, Mitchum has a mane of white hair, an ever-present shotgun, and a life-sized self-portrait lurking behind him as if he is already in the process of passing into legend. When he hires a band of bounty hunters to track down Depp's William Blake, he can hardly bring himself to acknowledge their existence, instead addressing his initial remarks to the stuffed grizzly bear mounted in the corner of his office. It's as if he can only relate to the one other larger than life creature in the room.

THAT OBSCURE OBJECT OF DESIRE (1977)

Born in 1977, the legendary great director and provocateur Luis Bunuel cashed out with this minor classic, in which the rage and audience-baiting tricks of his early work seemed to have been replaced by a serene but sly playfulness. He gives the impression here that he's just enjoying the company of one of his favorite actors (Fernando Rey) and a couple of beautiful women (Carole Bouquet and Ángela Molina) as he uses them to jauntily illustrate his story about a gentleman who is driven half mad with frustration by a young woman who alternately invites and repels his advances. (The women is played by both of the lead actresses; a great deal of ink has been spent by critics speculating on what this device means, though it could have been something as simple as Bouquet having quit or been fired from the production and Bunuel deciding that he didn't feel like reshooting her scenes.) Having enjoyed one final round of good reviews and hossanahs, Bunuel settled in for a few years of drinking, studying insects, and working on his autobiography, My Last Sigh, which appeared not long before his death in 1983.

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

Click here for Part One and Part Three

Fitting Farewells: The Top Ten Great Final Films (Part One)

2008-07-17T20:00:00Z

We recently asked YOU what Top Tens you’d like to see here on The Screengrab and, among the many fine suggestions, “Other Matt” proposed the Top Ten Ignominious Exits (i.e., “...films of an actor that are less than glorious and not [fitting] the last time we see them on celluloid”)... a list we’ll actually tackle NEXT week, since THIS week, in honor of Heath Ledger’s final completed performance (as the Joker in The Dark Knight), we've decided to examine the other side of the Two-Face coin: actors and directors who managed to fade to black with a fitting and/or memorable cinematic swan song.

Robert Altman's A PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION (2006)

When this project was first announced, it was a real head-scratcher for many: the sensibilities of Robert Altman and Garrison Keillor would seem to blend together about as well as bourbon and buttermilk. While no one in their right mind would ever equate A Prairie Home Companion with one of Altman's masterpieces, the result is a genial slice of faux-Americana that leaves you grinning from ear to ear. The wisp of a plot concerns the closing of the theater that has served as the long-time home of Keillor's homespun radio program, spurring the cast and crew to put on one last show for the folks at home. The specter of death hovers over the proceedings, but Companion is never morbid – how could it be when said specter is embodied by sweet-tempered Virginia Madsen? The backstage shenanigans and onstage farewells lend Companion the highly appropriate aura of a curtain call for a great American master – the icing on one of our culture's richest cakes.

John Wayne in THE SHOOTIST (1976)

After winning his Academy Award for the 1969 Western True Grit, a movie that gave him the chance to make fun of his anachronistic image and his physical decline yet still emerge heroic, John Wayne didn't seem to know what to do with himself. He spent most of the 1970s alternately starring in stale cowboy flicks (Rio Lobo, The Cowboys, Chisum) that tried to deny that he, or the movies, had changed, and embarrassing himself in imitations of the new bullying cop movies that had displaced the Western (McQ, Brannigan), like some combination of Clint Eastwood and a Tyrannosaurus Rex in a bad rug. He rallied, though, for his last film, in which he played a character specially tooled to provide a send-off for Wayne's screen image. He's J.B. Books, a legendary gunfighter who rides in from the plains to take a room in a small town and wait to die of cancer. The movie itself is sentimental and uneven, but Wayne, fitter-looking than in True Grit and dandified with a moustache, performs with more dignity and grace than he'd demonstrated onscreen in years. He must have suspected that this would be his last chance to tone up the tail end of his filmography, and he didn't let himself down. Although Wayne would live another three years, The Shootist was his last film, and 1977 would be the first year in which he didn't appear in a movie since his film debut in 1926.

Edward G. Robinson in SOYLENT GREEN (1973)

Soylent Green is a cheesy camp landmark of a dystopian sci-fi picture, but it has greatness in it, in the form of Edward G. Robinson. Robinson played the ancient researcher who is partner and roommate to Charlton Heston' tough-cop hero. As someone old enough to remember the planet before overpopulation, global warming, and the depletion of its natural resources turned it into a sweltering hellscape, Robinson's character is an emissary from another world, and so was Robinson, who began his career in movies before talkies and became a star in 1931 when he landed the title role in Little Caesar. He and Heston have an old-married-couple rapport that gives the movie its bit of heart; theirs is the only human relationship we see, maybe the last one left in a world that turns people into scavengers and victims. (Heston and Robinson had almost played together in the first of Heston's future shock films, Planet of the Apes, but after playing Dr. Zaius in a test scene, Robinson concluded that he wasn't hale enough to endure wearing the ape makeup for long stretches of time.) To its credit, Soylent Green gives him a beauty of a send-off, gazing wistfully at old nature footage while waiting for his lethal shot to kick in at a euthanasia clinic; it renders the famous "Soylent Green is made from people!" finale an anticlimax. Robinson died in January, 1973, four months before his last picture was released.

Andrei Tarkovsky’s THE SACRIFICE (1986)

Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice is a masterpiece by any yardstick, a beautiful, uncompromising meditation on the encroaching apocalypse and one man’s attempts to stop it in order to protect his family. Yet if one considers that Tarkovsky was suffering from lung cancer -- the disease that eventually claimed his life -- while making the film, it takes on a poignant new layer of significance. Once, in an interview, Tarkovsky stated “the only condition of fighting for the right to create is faith in your own vocation, readiness to serve, and refusal to compromise.” Having built up one of the most acclaimed bodies of work of any filmmaker of his generation, Tarkovsky might have been forgiven for retiring from filmmaking and living out the rest of his days in peace. But Tarkovsky, scarcely 53 years old at the time, wasn’t about to pass away without making one more offering to the gods of cinema. So when the film’s hero (played by Erland Josephson) lays down his life to spare those he loves, it’s impossible not to think of the filmmaker himself, making one final effort to better the art form he loved so passionately and uncompromisingly. Fittingly, The Sacrifice was one of Tarkovsky’s most celebrated films, not only as a tribute to a major work by a master filmmaker, but also as the final film from an artist who had, as always, raged against the dying of the light.

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent, Paul Clark

Click here for Part Two and Part Three

Famous Last Words: Round 2, Week 7

2008-07-17T19:00:00Z

I’ll say this for Jean-Luc Godard- he always manages to be divisive. Last week’s quote was taken from the ending of Godard’s 1965 lark Pierrot le Fou, and while some contestants had no trouble guessing the source of the quote- one player even went so far as to call it the easiest quiz yet- others had considerably more difficulty. Perhaps this is due to the film not being made in English- after all, it’s not like you can simply hear those lines in your head, right? Or maybe it was just hard to remember anything that followed Jean-Pierre Belmondo’s explosive final scene. Either way, congrats to those who guessed it.

Well, we’re halfway through the round now, and it’s still anyone’s game to win. Gift cards good for $25 from The Criterion Store await the top three finishers in this contest, and one could use these to purchase one of any number of fine DVDs, including Pierrot le Fou. From here on out, I’ll try to make them a little more challenging, although how much more remains to be seen. Here’s this week’s quote:

“From here on in, I rag on nobody.”

Submit your guesses to http://www.nerve.com/CS/controlpanel/blogs/”mailto:famouslastwords@nerve.com. Remember, all submissions must be received no later than 11:59 PM Eastern next Wednesday. Good luck!

Summer of Silents

2008-07-17T16:30:00Z

One of the nice things about living in a big city is that there's always a lot of big corporations with money to throw around. If you're an aspiring filmmaker, they might just throw some at you! Such is the case with the Silent Film Festival, which, despite the name, is actually a competition.

Here's how it works: You make a film (silent, but it can be accompanied by live music) under three minutes long. It revolves around one of these themes:

- What is New York?

- What's your favorite emotion?

- What emotion is New York?

- Your favorite ghost story

No explicity nudity or violence; otherwise, go nuts. Submit your work on a DVD in .mpeg or QuickTime format by August 11th, along with your full name, phone number, e-mail, mailing address, and a description of your fim, category, and inspiration to:

ATTN: Silent Film Festival

60 E. 42nd Street Ste. #659; NY, NY 10165

The ten best films will be displayed in a prominent place in the city by the competition's sponsor, a major Manhattan real estate developer. In addition to the free publicity, the sponsors will also pay your way into two major film festivals (your choice) you'd like to submit the film to. You can contact the festival with any questions.

Meanwhile, if you're more in the mood to watch silent films than make them, the Silent Film Society of Chicago kicks off their 2008 festival season this Friday with a series of Harold Lloyd shorts. The festival continues at the Portage Theatre for six more weeks, with live organ accompaniment and films starring Clara Bow, Buster Keaton and Gloria Swanson, among others. Ah, the sound of silents...

Thursday Morning Poll for July 17, 2008

2008-07-17T14:00:00Z

Last week, I beseeched our readers to consider the damn-near-perfect filmography of actor John Cazale, star of five classics of 70s Hollywood cinema. And the readers responded accordingly, declaring their favorite Cazale performance to be in The Godfather, Part II. Cazale’s second incarnation of Fredo garnered an impressive 54% of the vote, with second-place finisher (and my personal favorite) Dog Day Afternoon scoring 19%. I suppose there’s a lesson here- quality aside, you really can’t mess with a Godfather movie. But at least you folks picked the right one, rather than his relatively small role in the original film.

This week brings two potential blockbusters that appeal to very different audiences. But which holds more appeal for the Screengrab readership?

As always, the comments section is open. See you next week!

Screengrab Review: “The Dark Knight”

2008-07-17T12:00:00Z

Christopher Nolan’s 2005 franchise re-launch Batman Begins ended with a tantalizing tease (lifted from Frank Miller’s comic book reboot Year One) that all but guaranteed a sequel: Lt. James Gordon (Gary Oldman) revealing the calling card of the new freak in town – a Joker, of course – and implying that by his presence, Batman has raised the stakes for theatricality and large-scale actions among the criminal element in Gotham City. To mostly satisfying results, the highly anticipated and insanely hyped follow-up, The Dark Knight, takes that idea and runs with it. The only problem is, it runs a marathon when a 10K would have sufficed.

As The Dark Knight opens, a new day has dawned on Gotham, with fresh-faced District Attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) leading the charge. Along with his assistant and girlfriend Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal replacing Katie Holmes, an upgrade in every conceivable way), he has put mob boss Sal Maroni (Eric Roberts) on trial and is closing in on the underworld’s money laundering operation. But he requires a little clandestine help from the city’s resident masked vigilante, who he doesn’t realize is, of course, Rachel’s “psycho ex-boyfriend” Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale).

Crashing the party is a much more dangerous psycho, his scarred face smeared with greasy clown makeup. He cuts a deal with the mob to rid them of the Batman in exchange for half their assets, and the wiseguys are forced to take this Joker seriously once he starts eliminating high-profile targets, including the current police commissioner. It soon becomes clear that the Joker isn’t in it for the money; he’s an unpredictable agent of pure anarchy, looking to reshape Gotham City in his own twisted image.

The Joker, you may have read, is played by the late Heath Ledger in his final full performance. Last week I wrote this cranky post about the somewhat unseemly hype surrounding Ledger’s Oscar chances. I’m still not crazy about all that, but there’s no denying that Ledger delivers the goods. He’s a mesmeric force burning through The Dark Knight like a shooting star – you literally can’t take your eyes off him, and when he’s not onscreen the movie misses him terribly. His Joker isn’t Nicholson’s baggy-pants comedian or Cesar Romero’s hooting harlequin; he has no name, no past, no future, no rules and no reductive “mommy never loved me” back story (or rather, he has a bunch of them, and they all contradict each other). He’s pure, unfettered chaos, and in Ledger’s portrayal, the comic book icon finally becomes one of the great screen villains.

Through its first ninety minutes or so, The Dark Knight is a worthy showcase for him. Nolan manages to keep a lot of plates spinning at once, using the insistent, earworming score by Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard to make action in disparate locations seem like it’s all part of the same epic sweep. But he has the same problem here as he did in Batman Begins; he’s really good at getting all the parts of the engine tuned up and revving at full force, but he has a much harder time shutting it all down. In its protracted final act, The Dark Knight blunders down some blind alleys and runs through a series of false climaxes en route to the finish line. There’s the matter of introducing another supervillain late in the game, a temptation the Batman series has rarely been able to resist. Here it’s the coin-flipping Two-Face, who has been given short shrift twice now, although admittedly he fares better here than when Joel Schumacher turned him into Jim Carrey’s cackling sidekick in Batman Forever. He does have an arc, but honestly, we don’t care about it as much as we should – which leads to the other big flaw Knight shares with its predecessor.

Nolan and his co-screenwriter (and brother) Jonathan Nolan want to make sure we’re aware that what we’re watching is a cut above the usual summer superhero fare – that it has layers of psychological depth that set it apart from your Hulks and Iron Men. To that end, they have a bad habit of explicating their themes in the dialogue, so that every character becomes an armchair psychologist or amateur sociologist at one time or another. This results in some ponderous musings on morality, madness, fate and the nature of heroism, all of which weigh down the movie in the home stretch. The filmmakers would like to think The Dark Knight is about the battle for Harvey Dent’s soul, and by extension, that of Gotham City, but we know better. It’s all about the Joker, and every minute he’s not on the screen is a minute we’ve been robbed. Heath Ledger left us wanting more, but the same can’t quite be said of The Dark Knight.

Related:
Batman: The Lost Years
The Joker's Viral Marketing: Threat or Menace?

Summerfest '08: "I Know What You Did Last Summer"

2008-07-16T20:00:00Z

Hey, remember Kevin WIlliamson? Sure you do! He was the highly paid screenwriter who was going to revolutionize the horror cinema for a new generation with his 'smart' thrillers, starting with Scream in 1996. Unfortunately, it turned out that by 'smart' he meant 'marginally rewarding for those who had spent as much time watching crappy horror movies as I did'. His moment quickly passed, and in the 2000s, torture porn and J-horror have become the new touchstones of Fangoria fans, while Williamson went on to a whole 'nother kind of showbiz glory as the creator of the slasher-deficient Dawson's Creek. Still, he meant well, and about ten years ago, his movies were about the only evidence that could be found that the genre had any life left in it at all. So why not give the guy a break and make one of his most famous films the subject of an entry in Summerfest '08, the weekly Screengrab feature where we review movies with the word 'summer' in the title to give you something to do for a couple of hours while you're waiting for the potato salad to cool? If nothing else, we can guarantee you that this week's installment is going to be a bit more fun than the gloomy 1950s psychodramas we've featured for the last couple of weeks.

So strap on your fisherman's slicker, polish up your favorite boat hook, and join us for a look at 1997's I Know What You Did Last Summer!

THE ACTION: Julie, Helen, Barry and Ray are a quartet of remarkably photogenic North Carolina teenagers who happily correspond to some of our very favorite big-screen stereotypes (respectively, the good girl, the wannabe starlet, the party boy, and the jock). On the Fourth of July weekend just after their graduation, they're cruising around one nigher after a fun trip to the beach, and wouldn't you know it, their car just happens to plow into a shambolic wino whom they are forced to leave for dead. Hey, it's happened to all of us, right? Let those who have not accidentally run over a wino cast the first stone, that's all I'm saying. A year later, they find themselves wracked with guilt and unable to fulfill any of their teenage dreams, except the dreams that involve staying drunk all the time. That's when they get a mysterious missive reading "I know what you did last summer", and a number of their friends start to turn up dead, the victims of sharpened implements wielded by a dead ringer for the Gorton's fisherman. Which one of them has turned on his or her friends? Or is it some phantom stranger who has it in for them? And which horror movie cliches will Kevin Williamson take pokes at while pretending he's above them in his own screenplay? Only time will tell, or looking at any number of movie spoiler websites.

THE PLAYERS: In aid of his how-much-can-I-get-this-dialogue-to-sound-like-Joss-Whedon-wrote-it script, Williamson (and forgotten director Jim Gillespie) recruited four of the hottest young talents in Hollywood, including Buffy the Vampire Slayer herself: our quartet of menaced teens aren't some backlot collection of nobodies, but Sarah Michelle Gellar, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Ryan Phillippe, and Freddie Prinze Jr. For the benefit of our younger readers, who are even now shrugging and saying "Who?", let us assure you that those four were the cream of the crop when it came to screamworthy teens ca. 1997. While none of them ended up as huge big-screen names, at the time, you'd have been hard pressed to find a more stellar group of young actors. So what if their careers didn't exactly pan out like they hoped they might? It's not as if, like their characters in the movie, their hopes and dreams for the future were dashed because of the massive guilt they felt at having performed an unspeakble act that left them...hey, wait a minute!

SUMMER FUN: There's all sorts of summer fun going on in this feel-good celebration of murder. We start out with a beach party -- probably the greatest kind of summer fun there is; we move on to some exciting teenage sex, which everybody loves even if you know the poor kids are gonna have to die for it; after that, there's a thrilling car wreck, which always gets your heart racing; and finally, there's a bloody killing spree, which is the way everyone wishes their July 4th weekend could end, even if it's a wish that only comes true for a selectr few people. The movie also features an appearance by a wan, unhinged Ann Heche as the sister of the hapless gent who gets run over early in the film, and you know whenever Ann Heche shows up, somebody's gonna be having a good time soon enough.

HAWAIIAN SHIRTS: Seeing as there are a lot of dudes in this movie, and dudes who, portrayed by latte-sipping left coast elitists as they are, are nonetheless supposed to be swaggering drunken teenagers from North Carolina, I am pleased to report that not only are there a few fleeting glimpses of Hawaiian shirts in I Know What You Did Last Summer, but there are even several incidences of the main male characters wearing shirts that, if they are not actually Hawaiian shirts, at least might as well be Hawaiian shirts. The point needs to be made in this film that several of its principles are good-time party guys, and if there is a better vector for delivery of this message than the Hawaiian shirt, I have yet to encounter it.

BIKINI PARTY TIME: Curiously enough for a movie that contains Sarah Michelle Gellar, Jennifer Love Hewitt, their breasts, and a beach, there is not really as much bikini action as one would perhaps anticipate, let alone desire. That said, the makers of this film are not idiots, and while they do extract from us the concession that we make do with half-sweaters, denim pimp hats, and whatever else the movie's wardrobe designer was into at the moment for much of the movie, it's not as if we are entirely denied our bikini party time. Which, given the fact that arguably the most important character in the movie spends an inordinate amound of time in a rain slicker, is probably a good thing.

Charles H. Joffe, 1929-2008

2008-07-16T17:30:00Z

Charles H. Joffe, a talent agent, business manager, and producer best known to casual filmgoers as the producer of a number of Woody Allen's best films, has died in his home town of Los Angeles at the age of 78.

Felled by a persistent lung ailment, Joffe had been ill for some time, but since the 1950s, he had been a powerhouse wheeler and dealer in Hollywood and New York. His Rollins Joffee talent agency, founded with partner Jack Rollins, was the first to book Lenny Bruce, and later handled the careers of some of the biggest names in comedy, including David Letterman, Dick Cavett, Robin Williams, Martin Short, Billy Crystal, Robert Klein, and the team of Mike Nichols & Elaine May. He had a reputation as a tough, old-school, cigar-chewing negotiator whose gift for big-money contracts often saw his clients turning over huge profits within a short time of signing with him.

Joffe's first film as a producer with Woody Allen was Take the Money and Run, the success of which he was able to leverage into a then-unprecedented degree of artistic control over his films for the director. He is listed either as producer, co-producer or executive producer on all of Allen's films up to and including the yet-to-be-released Vicki Cristina Barcelona, and when Annie Hall won the Best Picture Oscar in 1977, it was Joffe who picked up the prize in Woody Allen's stead. According to the New York Times, he was a stern and frank figure in the careers of his proteges, and offered up the following advice to a young Allen, frustrated at the dues-paying period he spent making films like Casino Royale: "You're trying to get into the film business. It's going to be a big picture, and you're in it with a lot of stars. You're having a nice time in London, playing poker every night and visiting all the museums. Just shut up."

Unwatchable #77: “BloodRayne 2: Deliverance”

2008-07-16T17:00:00Z

Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

Here’s a nice change of pace. In our last installment, we looked at the zombie western The Quick and the Undead. This time it’s the vampire western BloodRayne 2: Deliverance. If there are any mummy westerns awaiting further up the list, well, I’d just as soon be surprised.

BloodRayne 2 is the first Uwe Boll movie we’ve encountered on our journey up the Bottom 100 chart, but I’m confident it won’t be the last. Boll is, of course, the renowned videogame-to-movie schlockmeister and favored punching bag of internet movie geeks. And true to form, BloodRayne 2 is a videogame adaptation, although I must confess to being familiar neither with the game nor the first BloodRayne movie. Because I care, I did a little research before settling down to enjoy the film. Here are my findings: Rayne is a half-human, half-vampire hybrid known as a dhampir. Her father was the king of the vampires and was played by Ben Kingsley, and this sort of makes me wish I was watching the original rather than the sequel. Alas, there is no Kingsley (nor any other known actors) in BloodRayne 2, which was released directly to video.

I also gather that the first BloodRayne was set in 18th century Romania, whereas BloodRayne 2 is set in the Old West town of Deliverance. (Confusingly enough, the BloodRayne videogame was set during World War II, but we’ve got enough to worry about without getting into that.) Deliverance is a quiet little place that’s just now getting the railroad, and reporter Newton Pyles (Chris Coppola), who has been dispatched from the east coast to collect true tales of the wild, wild west, is having trouble finding anything wild to write about. That is, until a pack of vampires descends on the town to feed on the children of Deliverance. Their leader: Billy the Kid! Billy the Kid with a Romanian accent! Just like in all the stories.

Who can stop these fiends? Only the dhampir Rayne (Natassia Malthe, #53 on Maxim’s 100 Sexiest Women list). Sure, in her leather cowgirl outfit she looks like she should be pouring Jager shots and dancing on the bar at Coyote Ugly, but she’s handy with swords and guns that fire silver bullets rubbed in garlic and blessed with holy water. Her showdown with Billy the Kid is one for the ages, assuming the ages were between 9 and 9:30 last night.

I have to assume this is not close to Uwe Boll’s worst work, because it’s pretty much indistinguishable from any other straight-to-video genre junk. Boll rips off musical cues from Once Upon a Time in the West and Deadwood, so at least he steals from the good stuff. There is one scene that, while not particularly well executed, at least caught my attention. It involves a trap Billy the Kid sets, with the town’s children rigged up with nooses around their necks and Rayne struggling to balance a weight that will keep them from being hanged. But now that I think of it, Boll probably ripped that off from a better movie, too.

Previously on Unwatchable:
78. The Quick and the Undead
79. Anus Magillicutty
80. The Smokers
81. Soccer Dog: The Movie
82. American Soldiers

Trailer Review: Max Payne

2008-07-16T16:00:00Z

A few years ago, Roger Ebert set off an outcry in the gaming community when he questioned in print whether video games could, indeed, be art. While I’m a non-gamer myself, I remain optimistic of the artistic potential of the medium. However, whether Hollywood will manage to figure out how to make the proverbial good video game adaptation is somewhat more in doubt. I couldn’t say for sure, but I’m guessing that there are plenty of games out there that create interesting worlds and compelling narratives. So why does almost every big-screen video game adaptation look like a third-rate ripoff of The Matrix? Perhaps all it’ll take is for a genuine gifted filmmaker to take on a video game. Then again, maybe what makes video games really interesting- the actual, you know, playing of them- will always make the big-screen adaptations of them feel a lot like watching your buddies play Super Mario Bros. all afternoon without allowing you to take the controls for a while. Not that I’m bitter or anything…

Video of the Day: Sharon Tate's Screen Test

2008-07-16T14:45:00Z

Yes, kids, once upon a time, Sharon Tate was a real live actress, and not just Charlie Manson's most famous victim, or Roman Polanski's second-biggest reason to be bummed out.

Here's proof, in the form of her screen test for the utterly deranged Valley of the Dolls -- a movie so nuts that Roger Ebert wrote a parody sequel to it that was actually less crazy than the original. Dig her reading of that last line...

Morning Deal Report: The Unholy Steven Spielberg/Diablo Cody Alliance

2008-07-16T14:00:00Z

Readers of the Morning Deal Report (or any of my other nonsense), take note: vacation beckons me, so I will be posting sporadically over the next two weeks or so. Please, for the sake of the children, keep your grieving to a minimum. Now on with your regularly scheduled briefing.

As you may know, Steven Spielberg and Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody are collaborating on a Showtime series, The United States of Tara. Now, Variety reports that Cody is scripting an untitled comedy for Dreamworks that, like Tara, is based on an idea by Spielberg. No details are available, but I do have to wonder how Spielberg came to the conclusion that Diablo Cody is the vessel through which all his wondrous notions shall be realized. There seems to be a distinct difference in sensibilities here, but maybe it’s just me.

Meanwhile, you knew it wouldn’t be long before Iron Man 2 started revving up, especially once Jon Favreau started whining on his MySpace page that he hadn’t been hired to direct it yet. (This has since been rectified.) Now the super-sequel has a screenwriter. According to the Hollywood Reporter, Justin Theroux has been tapped to pen the follow-up due in April 2010. If the name sounds familiar, it’s probably because Theroux is best known as an actor. David Lynch fans will recall him from Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire, but Theroux also has a screenwriting credit on the upcoming Tropic Thunder.

Finally I have to tell you about the Billy Joel documentary Last Play at Shea, which will capture the piano man’s upcoming concert at the soon-to-be-demolished Shea Stadium. Why do I have to tell you about this? Only because of this great Variety quote from producer Steve Cohen: “We wanted to approach this like a Ken Burns documentary, looking at Billy and Shea Stadium’s place in the pantheon of New York.” Yep, the Civil War, baseball, jazz…and Billy Joel. That, my friends, is America.

Related:
Diablo Cody Unwraps "Jennifer's Body"
Adams v. Marvel: Iron Man Turns to Crime?

Screengrab Q&A: Uschi Obermaier

2008-07-15T23:00:00Z

If anyone epitomizes a "wild thing," it's bohemian femme fatale Uschi Obermaier, sexual icon and successful model in 1960s Germany. She was the it girl, hippie rebel and rock-star player of the time (boasting affairs with Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Jimi Hendrix). With her signature pout, big hair and fearless attitude, Obermaier's free and passionate spirit made her one of the most desired women of the times.

She first earned her rebellious reputation as girlfriend of Rainer Langhans, leader of Germany's leftist party Kommune 1, but found their ideals conflicted with the freedom she desired. Her lust for ultimate liberty was fulfilled when she won the heart of adventurer Dieter Bockhorn, with whom she traveled around the world in a bus he custom-made for her.

Obermaier's story of freedom amidst the sexual revolution is documented in director Achim Bornhak's recently released Eight Miles High, which adapts her biography High Times. Actress Natalia Avelon takes us through Obermaier's short-lived life of glamour from teenage runaway to nomadic model and fought-over Stones groupie. The movie is a whirlwind tour of her life, capturing the restlessness of the time and costs of free love. Talking to Obermaier on the phone, I found that at sixty years old, she's an even more potent figure of femininity and sexuality than the film portrays. — Bianca Merbaum

So life in the '60s really was one wild party, with lots of sex, drugs and rock and roll?
It really was like that with all the ups and downs. At that time everything — the music, the fashion, the politics — everything was really new. Germany at the time was really suffocating and you were supposed to do what your parents wanted to. I just did not want it. Other people around me didn't want to put up with it either. So we tried everything, and sometimes it was good and sometimes we made mistakes. When we were so young we wanted to try out everything. And also our hormones were raging. Right away you fall in love and you think sex is a beautiful language and you want to speak it, you want to try it.

In the movie, 'free love' is a struggle, with a lot of jealousy and pain. Do you think free love can really exist?
That idea of 'free love' was kind of put on by the Kommune 1. That you don't own the other person. I never felt it. The saying 'jealousy doesn't exist' is just in the mind. I never understood it. If I love someone, I'm jealous like hell. When someone slept with someone else it hurt me. I'm just like a normal person too.

The movie doesn't show your life after Dieter Bockhorn's death. This whole period of your life ended when his life ended.
Up to the time when Bockhorn died, life was very glamorous and I had everything thrown into my lap. After Bockhorn's death I really hit the bottom. I was too old for modeling, I was in America, I didn't want to go back to Germany like my parents hoped after Bockhorn died. They hoped that I would come back home like a dog with his tail between his legs. But I said no, I'm not going to do that. It was very hard times for me. I didn't know how to exist, but I always followed my heart and nowadays, being sixty, I'm exactly where I always wanted and wished for.

Where's that?
My place in Los Angeles is in the mountains. I have a lot of space and freedom, I have a beautiful house and I just do what I want. I'm into making jewelry, and that seems to take off. I'm really, very happy with my life.

Let's gossip a little bit about your affairs with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Were they good lovers?
Were they good lovers? Of course. Otherwise I wouldn't have been with them. But people always ask me, "Who was the best lover?" and I have to tell you, the best lover is always the man I'm with, right now.

And who's that?
[Laughs] I'm not telling that!

There is a brief part in the movie about your exchange with Jimi Hendrix, but did you have anything intimate with him?
Unfortunately that's not in the movie. We were only together for a short time but in my mind he was just the sweetest person. He was just — I can't really explain it in words — but there was something really really special about him, not just because he was "Jimi Hendrix." He had something that really hit my nerve. He was a wonderful person, wonderful. Very shy!

Did he play you songs?
Um... no, not really, because we were busy [laughs].

Do you think Natalia Avelon's sexy performance is an accurate depiction of you?
Yeah. Well, I would say I was even better [laughs]. I think she did a good job. What really disturbed me — just little things — is she had too much makeup on. Like the red lipstick. You would have never caught me in red — you would have caught me in purple. Then she tried to make my pout, which didn't come naturally, so I kind of cringed. But really, I don't want to put anything down because she really did a great job. She picked up on a lot of my habits and attitude. The whole cast was really good, especially the guy who plays Bockhorn. At times, sometimes, my heart stopped — I thought it was old footage. But Bockhorn had this incredible smile, and he couldn't bring that.

OST: "This is Spinal Tap"

2008-07-15T21:00:00Z

Song parodies are tricky business. Done well, they're delightful, working on their own terms musically, delivering on the joke, and rewarding the listener for spotting the various musical and comedic references. Done poorly, they're about the lowest form of music there is. One of the reasons that the ouevre of Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer works so well (and here we include This is Spinal Tap, which, although directed by Rob Reiner, was written by the three performers in much the same way that the later, Guest-directed films like Best in Show and A Mighty Wind would be) is that they have some degree of genuine affection for the medium they're skewering. If Guest and company simply despised heavy metal, their parody would fall flat -- their unfamiliarity with or contempt for the music would result in unconvincing musical numbers, and their lack of feeling for the characters and the milieu would come across as patronizing rather than funny. It's an undying tribute to how successful their parody truly was -- and how deeply it comes across as both affectionate and mocking -- that amongst actual heavy metal musicians, This is Spinal Tap is treated with the kind of reverence normally saved for people who play it completely straight. The movie gets it just right, and real metal musicians know it.

One shouldn't minimize Reiner's contribution to the film -- he's a much more technically sure-handed director than Guest, and he did provide some of the funnier lyrics to the fictional group's songs -- but it's never hard to figure out, from the delightfully offhand, improvised quality of much of the dialogue to the fact that Guest, McKean and Shearer not only wrote all the music, but performed it themselves without the aid of the usual ringers, who's responsible for Spinal Tap's success. In a bizarre testament to the power of successful comedy, the soundtrack to This is Spinal Tap -- which, after all, is a movie about a comically incompetent heavy metal band -- became a huge success. Many of those who bought the soundtrack album no doubt did so as a goof, merely to remember the mocking songs of this groundbreakingly awful British hard rock outfit with the constantly rotating drummers. But many more bought it because, intended as a joke or no, these were damn good songs, written by damn good performers, who may have meant them to be insulting, but didn't do so from a position of ignorance. How good were they? So good that punk legend Mark E. Smith of the Fall lifted the riff from "Tonight I'm Gonna Rock You Tonight" in its entirety for his own "Athlete Cured". So good that, when you take into account official releases and fan-created bootlegs, the fictional Spinal Tap has more records available than a lot of really good heavy metal bands that actually exist. So good that the aforementioned "Tonight I'm Gonna Rock You Tonight" is something of a heavy metal classic despite its jokey genesis, and even appears in the video game Guitar Hero II alongside such genuinely legendary songs as "Freebird", "War Pigs" and "Billion Dollar Babies". And so good that the soundtrack itself, almost unique among movies in the musical spoof genre, is strong enough to stand on its own detached from the movie: if you have any affinity at all for the classic heavy metal sound, these are songs you're going to sing along to on your iPod even if you know, deep in your hard-rockin' heart, that they're really jokes at your expense.

BEST TRACKS: Aside from the indispensible "Tonight I'm Gonna Rock You Tonight", with its merciless bassline and barely legal teen-queen lyrics, there's at least half a dozen stone classics on this soundtrack, even if they contain the seeds of their own destruction: "Big Bottom", the classic ode to fat fannies, has parazlyzingly funny lyrics to go along with its monster hook; "Hell Hole" is a tremendously catchy screamer with New Wave of British Heavy Metal influences so strong you can easily see Rob Halford belting it out instead of McKean's David St. Hubbins; and the Motorheady "Heavy Duty" is crushingly appropriate from a band that sometimes takes to the stage with three bass players. And if for some reason you don't like metal -- like, say, you don't enjoy things that are fun -- there's also the ludicrous hippie anthem "(Listen to the) Flower People" and the dead-on early Beatles parody, "Gimme Some Money". Go, Nigel, go!