The Screengrab

Reviews By Request: Camera Buff (1979, Krzystzof Kieslowski)

Paul Clark — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Thanks to reader Steven Carlson for requesting this week’s review. As always, for instructions on how to request the next review for this feature (to run in two weeks) see the bottom of this post.

When watching foreign-language films, it can be illustrative to look at their original titles. For example, the original title of Krzystzof Kieslowski’s early film Camera Buff is Amator, which roughly translates as Amateur. The difference between the two titles is telling. Whereas Camera Buff implies that the title character is a hobbyist or an enthusiast, the word “amateur” implies something more than that. The common definition of “amateur” is “non-professional”, but the root of the word is the Latin “amator”, or “lover.” In other words, someone who does something out of love.

Watching Camera Buff for the first time recently, I kept coming back to this idea, since for the film’s protagonist Filip Mosz (Jerzy Stuhr), making films is much more than a job. He first buys the camera to film his new baby girl, but soon gets the attention of his local party boss, who asks him to document the anniversary of his factory. Before he knows it, Filip has become a filmmaker- bankrolled by the party, traveling to film festivals, appearing on television, meeting major figures like Krzystzof Zanussi. All the while, Filip seems more than a little overwhelmed by the attention.

At one point in the film, Filip tells a coworker likens his filmmaking to stamp collecting. However, his behavior tells a different story. Once he picks up his camera at the beginning of the film, we rarely see Filip in a context that doesn’t involve filmmaking. When he’s at home, he’s usually reading a movie magazine or shooting footage out the window, much to the consternation of his wife, who finds herself attending to her newborn daughter alone. Meanwhile, the party boss becomes dismayed by the films Filip is making, as when he shoots a short film about a dwarf who works at the factory. The boss wonders if Filip might be holding his subject up to ridicule, but the look in his eyes says something different altogether. Could Filip be making a subversive work on the factory’s dime?

What gets Filip into trouble is that he can’t quite find a way to put the camera down for long enough to live his life. The very act of filming requires one to maintain a certain distance from the world around him. After all, how can everyone see what’s being shot unless the cameraman steps back to take it all in? However, this also distances Filip from his wife, who finds that she can no longer take his new vocation. When he leaves for his first film festival, she calls out from the train platform, “don’t win!” This isn’t because she doesn’t love him, but because she fears she’s losing him to his camera.

Early in the film, the boss quotes Lenin, who said, “cinema is the first art.” More than any other art form, movies connect deeply with people, and Filip’s work is no exception. His coworkers love him, the dwarf cries when the film about him is broadcast on television, and when a friend’s mother passes away, the first thing he asks Filip is to show him a film he shot of his mother when she was alive. Seeing the film, he remarks, “what you do is beautiful.”

But the party boss has a different point of view, seeing Filip’s work as potentially inflammatory. The film about the dwarf seems harmless enough, but it doesn’t necessarily put forth the image the Party wants. Even more troubling is Filip’s latest project, in which he peers behind the refurbished facades of the local buildings to reveal the crumbling structures behind them. In the film’s key scene, the boss takes Filip for a drive and talks to him not like a stern autocrat, but as someone who’s just pragmatic enough to know better than the rock the boat. “Public life cannot always withstand the light of day,” he says, before revealing that the local cultural minister- one of Filip’s friends and supporters- will be replaced because of Filip’s work.

Afterwards, he speaks with the fired minister, who assures him, “something good has awoken in you. Cultivate it.” But Filip isn’t strong enough to be responsible for his friend’s dismissal or for the resulting fallout from his construction exposé. So rather than facing this responsibility, he sabotages his own film and retreats, camera in hand, into his own life. Trouble is, most of it is gone, his wife and child having moved away. In the film’s final shot, Filip turns the camera on himself and remembers his wife and child- a touch that’s devastating both because of how much he’s lost and because of how pathetic it is that he still feels the need to cling to that camera.

Camera Buff lacks the ethereal quality that would distinguish most of Kieslowski’s later films, but given the oppressive regime under which he worked, perhaps that was for the best. Here, Kieslowski is largely concerned with telling one man’s story. One of the most interesting aspects of the story is how singleminded it is, charting the path taken by Filip as his love for filmmaking consumes his life. There’s almost nothing in the film that doesn’t have something to do with Filip’s vocation-turned-obsession, and more than once I was surprised by how elliptical the storytelling was, with months passing between some scenes. I was reminded of Hitchcock’s famous quote, “cinema is life with the boring bits cut out.” Unfortunately for Filip, those boring bits he missed were his life, passing him by.

So, what movie would you like me to review for the next installment of Reviews by Request? Let me know in the comments section below. To refresh your memory, here are the rules for requesting a movie to be reviewed: (1) it has to be a movie I haven’t seen, (2) it has to be available through Netflix, and (3) please only request one film. Other than that, anything is fair game. First to suggest a movie that qualifies gets their requested review. See you in two weeks!

Hollywood Conservatives Face "New McCarthyism", Goblins, Unicorns

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 18:30:00 GMT

One of the favorite activities of the modern movement conservative is to claim that, since not every single aspect of the culture panders to him, he is being discriminated against. Having never actually experienced any actual discrimination -- unlike, say, black people -- the right-winger seems to believe that it is an oppression too heavy to be borne that he is sometimes made aware of things that he does not personally enjoy. Liberal arts classes in college taught by liberals? Discrimination against conservatives! Some people don't adhere to the tenents of the Southern Baptist Convention? Discrimination against conservatives! Young people listening to the rappity-hop music? Discrimination against conservatives!

This week has seen a big push in one of the favorite such complaints of the movement conservative: that, because of the preponderance of liberals in Hollywood, conservatives are being discriminated against in Hollywood. Jason Appuzzo, founder of the late, unlamented Libertas Film Festival, was one of the biggest purveyors of this ridiculous myth; Brent Bozell is another. But in the last ten days, we've seen an op-ed by Jon Voight in the right-wing Washington Times in which he blamed American liberals for the murder of millions by the Cambodian dictator Pol Pot, and claimed that "if, God forbid, we live to see Obama president, we will live through a socialist era that America has not seen before, and our country will be weakened in every way". The editorial was widely scoffed at, and conservative gadflies, who mistake being made fun of for being blackballed and having your entire career destroyed, immediately came crawling up from the cellar to complain about "establishment entertainment journalists expertly wielding the tools of the New McCarthyism". So says Andrew Breitbart (who, earlier this year, I heard peddle the absurd notion that Hollywood celebrities are afraid to say they support our troops in Iraq, lest they face censure at the hands of the liberal bosses). While conservatives almost universally react to liberal opinions on the part of entertainers with some variant of "shut up and sing" (witness the widespread hostility the Dixie Chicks faced a few years ago), let one of their own get laughed at for mouthing of some ill-conceived right-wing talking point, and we're witnessing the vile fascism of "a town that doesn't embrace free speech anymore". Breitbart's commenters are even worse, claiming that "the old McCarthyism was harmless compared to the new". (Those who wish to compare and contrast may note that Mr. Voight currently has three films in production, and starred in one of the most successful films of 2007, as opposed to, say, Dalton Trumbo, who spent a year in prison because of the blacklist, or Hanns Eisler, who was more or less forced to leave the country and ended up in the hands of the Soviet East Germans, or Alvah Bessie, who never worked in her chosen profession again, or Canada Lee, Bartley Crum and John Garfield, who all died because of the horrible after-effects of coming under McCarthyite scrutiny.)

Meanwhile, the Weekly Standard featured a cover story entitled "Hollywood Takes on the Left", in which David Zucker outlines his difficulties and frustrations in making An American Carol, his long-promised conservative comedy. Zucker, too, complains of a "new McCarthyism" in Hollywood, designed to keep Republicans out, and frets that "conservative films are almost illegal in Hollywood". Even if one ignores the fact that movie studios are owned and run by capitalist multimillionaires who are hardly hostile to the core principles of conservativism, this absurd sense of pseudo-oppression fails for one simple reason: audiences tend to like or dislike movies based on whether or not they're entertaining, not based on their ideological bias. (After all, as conservatives love to remind us, liberal anti-Iraq War films have been duds at the box office.) If Zucker's film fails, it won't be because of some mythical Hollywood liberal mafia; it will be because the movie is preachy instead of funny, and audiences don't like preachy.

Luckily, because of the freedom of speech people like them denied victims of the blacklist in the 1950s, Zucker, Breitbart, Voight, and their ilk are welcome to complain all they like about how terribly oppressed they are; that they actually do so is all the evidence you need of the moral bankruptcy of the modern conservative movement.

Unwatchable #76: “Kickboxer 3: The Art of War”

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 17:00:00 GMT

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.

The Internet Movie Database is a powerful engine that can be used for both good and evil, and those of us who have ceded a portion of our lives to its control can find ourselves victims of some capricious whims indeed. In the early days of the Unwatchable project, long before I’d been beaten down by the likes of It’s Pat and Anus Magillicutty, I first encountered the Kickboxer series in the form of episode four, The Aggressor. Now, more than two months later, I find myself face-to-face with Kickboxer 3: The Art of War.

Some confusion results. Kickboxer 4 opened with a lengthy montage, presumably made up of clips from the previous installments, designed to bring us up to speed on the story. So I assumed I had already seen a miniaturized version of Kickboxer 3…but now that I’ve actually seen the movie, I can’t see how it connects to its follow-up. It seems to take place outside the carefully established continuity of the Kickboxer series; the villainous Tong Po goes unseen and unmentioned, and our hero David Sloane (Sasha Mitchell) has a Miyagi-esque mentor who appears in none of the other films. I notice that both Kickboxer 2 and 4 are directed by chronic offender Albert Pyun, whereas Kickboxer 3 is directed by Rick King (Prayer of the Rollerboys). I can only assume that King’s work did not fit into Pyun’s vision for the series, and he chose to ignore it entirely. I’d research this matter further if I thought anyone gave a crap.

Anywhat, The Art of War finds Sloane and his wise old Asian mentor Xian (Dennis Chan) traveling to Rio for a big match. Shortly after they arrive, street urchin Marcos steals their camera and Sloane is forced to chase and put the beat-down on the lad. This is the beginning of a beautiful friendship, and Sloane takes both Marcos and his jailbait sister Isabella under his wing. Lane (Richard Comar), the slimy manager of Sloane’s slated kickboxing opponent, is a slave-pimp in his off-hours, and he kidnaps Isabella with plans to sell her off to the highest bidder. Lane has his fortune riding on his own fighter, so it’s imperative that Sloane lose the upcoming match. To that end, he makes Sloane a deal: he will let Isabella go if Sloane complies with a special training regimen he’s cooked up. (He’s already asked Sloane to throw the fight and been turned down, but that was before Isabella was kidnapped. Presumably Sloane would be more willing to go along with the plan now that a child’s life is at stake, but then we wouldn’t get to enjoy the scenes of Sloane running up a hill with a backpack full of rocks and getting dragged behind a boat.)

The high point of Kickboxer 3 arrives with a montage of wise Xian’s efforts to heal Sloane in time for the fight. He collects various roots and mouse tails and the venom from a snake to prepare a healing elixir, then smears Sloane’s body with some sort of fungal poultice. Hey, it works! Sloane kicks ass and takes names and everyone lives happily ever after until Kickboxer 4. The question I’m left to wrestle with is whether or not Kickboxer 3 is really 22 bad movies worse than Kickboxer 4. On this score, I suppose it is: Kickboxer 4 features a lot more people getting kicked in the face.

Previously on Unwatchable:
77. BloodRayne 2: Deliverance
78. The Quick and the Undead
79. Anus Magillicutty
80. The Smokers
81. Soccer Dog: The Movie

Trailer Review: Marley & Me

Paul Clark — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Today we conclude Memoir Week here at Trailer Review with the trailer for the adaptation of John Grogan’s Marley & Me. Not having read the book, I’m ill-prepared to pass pre-emptive judgment on the movie version, which stars Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston. But this teaser doesn’t give me a whole lot of hope. Now, I realize that making a teaser is a tricky business, having to give audiences a taste of the movie without much footage to work with. But this one just feels lazy- thirty seconds of a cute little dog, a glimpse of Wilson and Aniston chasing him, then the title. On top of that, there’s the head-slappingly obvious use of Vangelis’ Chariots of Fire theme, which despite its overuse for the past quarter century has become Hollywood’s music of choice to accompany a running scene, no matter what life form it might be. The only other thing I know is that the movie was directed by David Frankel, who with this and The Devil Wears Prada is quickly becoming Hollywood’s go-to guy for bringing memoirs to the big screen. I wasn’t a big fan of the earlier film, so I’ll probably pass on this one.

In Other Blogs: Faster, Britney...Kill! Kill!

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 15:00:00 GMT

At Some Came Running, Glenn Kenny is skeptical about a rumored remake. “A couple of my esteemed colleagues have expressed slightly guarded enthusiasm over the extremely shaky prospect that Quentin Tarantino will direct Britney Spears in a remake of Russ Meyer's 1965 exploitation classic Faster Pussycat...Kill! Kill!, but I can't say it pushes any of my buttons, personal or otherwise. Of course the argument that, for what it's worth, Pussycat got made but good the first time isn't gonna cut any ice if in fact a remake is in the cards. But really...Britney Spears. Who cares. Her cultural currency—which is entirely distinct, as I'm sure you know, from tabloid currency—is as low as it's ever been…Having Tarantino hand-hold her through a turn as a loudmouth psycho drag-racing lesbian stripper will do exactly what for her at this point?” I don’t think this one’s worth worrying about. It’s taken how many years to get Inglorious Bastards going? Cooler heads will prevail.

Flickhead checks out some obscure DVD releases from restoration house Legend Films. “Set in the trendy inner sanctum of late 1970s encounter groups where narcissism overtakes self awareness, Bill Persky’s Serial (1980) is as safe as an episode of Love, American Style peppered with four-letter words, Sally Kellerman’s boobs and Lalo Shifrin’s quaint muzak score. (With some embarrassment, I confess the theme, ‘A Changing World,’ rattled around in my head for days after.) It’s a quietly amusing time capsule of Marin County after the fall of The Sixties, where middle age and middle class values are perpetually analyzed by quack psychologists and individuals fearful of commitment. An intriguing companion piece to Phil Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1979), this slice of Left Coast lunacy includes Tuesday Weld, Martin Mull, Bill Macy, a coked-out therapist played by Peter Bonerz, the woefully undervalued Barbara Rhodes, and Christopher Lee — Christopher Lee! — as a gay biker named ‘Skull.’”

At the House Next Door, Andrew Johnston revisits Risky Business. “As much as I loved them, teen sex comedies didn’t exactly make me feel good about being the kind of kid I was in 1983, the year I turned 15. They all took place in a world where smart and sexually inexperienced kids (i.e., guys like me) were always laughably pathetic, and rich ones (me again) were universally evil and arrogant. Here, finally, was a movie that didn’t pass judgment on those qualities. In the opening scene, our hero Joel Goodson recounts a dream in which he’s riding his bike home through his affluent neighborhood and winds up inside a neighbor’s house where a nubile girl invites him to join her in the shower, a dream that turns into a nightmare when the shower stall turns into a classroom full of his peers taking the SAT, for which he’s three hours late. How could I not identify with the guy?”

At Scanners, Jim Emerson becomes the last film blogger on earth to see The Dark Knight. “When we were in college, a music critic friend of mine who delighted in making "best ever / worst ever" statements proudly (and sincerely) proclaimed that Bob Dylan's Blood On the Tracks was the single greatest artistic achievement in the history of mankind. We teased him about the hyperbole, but I admit I liked him all the more for saying it. Unguarded, unbounded enthusiasm is a wonderful thing to behold, to feel, and to share…I waited a couple weeks to see The Dark Knight and I even though I felt lukewarm about the movie, I couldn't wait to talk about it.”

And in List-o-Mania this week, in honor of the Tom Cruise cameo in Tropic Thunder, Spoutblog presents the 10 Best Small Roles for Big Stars. Some are fairly obvious (no such list would be complete without Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glenn Ross), but I admittedly had forgotten all about Arnold Schwarzenegger as “Prince Hapi” in Around the World in 80 Days. “Schwarzenegger’s hilarious appearance as a lecherous Turkish prince — one of his last roles filmed before becoming Governor of California — is one of the few highlights, if not the sole highlight (personally, I enjoy Jackie Chan in anything, and I liked more of this movie than most people did). The role is especially funny and creepy if you’ve ever seen that old footage of Schwarzenegger being sleazy at Carnival in Rio.”

Poster-Modernism

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 14:30:00 GMT

The great thing about movie writing is that there's so much to love. Since film is the most intensely collaborative of media, a good move can be appreciated on any number of levels, and even a bad movie might have something to recommend it. That's because a movie isn't one thing, it's dozens: it's a screenplay, a collection of performances by actors, a moving picture, a trailer, a logo, a soundtrack, a trailer, and a dozen other artistic endeavors all assembled into a single production. As you can tell from other Screengrab features like our "OST" soundtrack reviews and Paul Clark's trailer reviews, we love the process of looking at a film not only as a whole, but as the discrete elements that make up that whole. Which is why we're very enthusiastic about "Poster Service", a new feature on the Guardian's film blog.

Enlisting the aid of Paul Rennie, the head of the graphic design department at St. Martins College, the "Poster Service" series takes a look at some famous (their first installment was Gone with the Wind) and not-so-famous (this week features Pink String and Sealing Wax, an Ealing comedy that was a hit in Britain but little-known elsewhere) in an attempt to discern, from a designer's perspective, why some movie posters work and some don't. Referring to the Selznick classic, Rennie observes that "the title of Gone with the Wind immediately communicates an association with the genteel sophistication of the southern U.S. Against a backdrop of the Civil War, the associations of [its] typography alluded to a more luxurious and sensual environment than that of the WASPish north. It's just right for a particular kind of passion romance." Of Pink String and Sealing Wax, he notes, "the Ealing film posters are remarkable on two points. Firstly, and against all the odds, they are recognisable works of art by artists whose work extends beyond the usual concerns of graphic design, cinema and fine art. Secondly, they embrace and give passion to the political dimension of satire and social-realism -- especially rare in cinema."

We're pretty excited to see where Rennie goes from here -- and frankly, we're just as interested, if not more so, in what he judges to be bad poster art than we are the good stuff. What about you, Screengrab readers? What are your favorite, and least favorite, movie posters?

Related Posts:

Screengrab Movie Poster Preview

Back to the Drawing Board

Olympic Games Past: Rifling Through the Archives

Sarah Clyne Sundberg — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 12:08:00 GMT

Olympia

Leni Riefenstahl's epic documentary of the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. Your viewing pleasure may be somewhat tainted by the appearance of Adolf Hitler. He hosted the games and commissioned the film. The insanely long opening sequence shows nude and loin-clothed athletes, Greek ruins and German forests. Next, the camera pans over a map of Europe. Names of countries, Hungary, Austria, Czechoslovakia pop up. It reads like a roadmap for coming invasions. Then on to the stadium full of heiling masses. Jesse Owens' series of wins in the sprint races, an athletic bird-flip to Nazism, are a definite highlight. Gives some perspective on Olympic Games and politics, no?

Tokyo Olympiad

Set at the Tokyo Olympic Games of 1964, Kon Ichikawa's film opens with a wrecking ball on old fire-bombed buildings, then cuts to a brand new jet age Olympic stadium. Think of this as a post war bookends to Olympia. Out with the old in with the new. Children cheer the torch relay by the Atomic Bomb Dome in Hiroshima. It's the '60s. Peace love and sportsmanship. The team from newly independent Ghana marches in Afros, Kente cloth and sunglasses. Post-revolutionary Cubans wave flags. Ridiculously huge teams from the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. compete for world domination. This is sort of an anti-thesis to Leni Riefenstahl's totalitarian perfection. Ichikawa's camera finds weirdness in the details. A shot-putters round belly; the jaunty swing of race-walking butts; a sprinter from Ceylon lost on the field.

Chariots of Fire

Lanky Cambridge men in stylish white underwear run like the wind to win for Britain at the 8th Olympic Games in Paris in 1924. The country is still suffering the aftershocks of World War I. The Olympic Games are on the cusp of becoming the realm of professional athletes rather than gentleman amateurs. Two young lads, one Jewish, one an evangelical Scotsman, must overcome petty prejudice and personal obstacles on their way to the games. Like any self-respecting Olympic flick this one is based on a true story. Upper-crust period costumes abound. As an added bonus you get to see a foppish British nobleman jump hurdles on which he has balanced brimming glasses of champagne.

Munich

Low on sports, high on 1970s terrorist chic. At the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, Black September, a terrorist group, broke into the quarters of the Israeli Olympic team, took them hostage, and killed them. Spielbergs movie is based on the events and the vendetta with the Israeli secret service that followed. Flashes from the pivotal bloodbath are replayed throughout. Most notably when Eric Bana's character makes love to his wife; one of the more uncomfortable sex scenes in history. Steven Spielberg doing what he does best. You know he's driving your emotional roller coaster, but who cares when it feels this good?

Personal Best

Set at the try-outs for the 1976 Olympic track trials. No terror drama here. Just a lot of lesbian tension with Mariel Hemingway — of Manhattan — fame and Patrice Donnelly in the lead roles. skimpy mid-70s shorts. 'Nuff said.

15 Films That (Almost) Could’ve Been Directed By Somebody Else (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 21:30:00 GMT

SCENES FROM A MALL (1991) & 2 DAYS IN PARIS (2007), Not Directed by Woody Allen

While not as legion as Hitchcock (or even Tarantino) imitators, there have certainly been a fair number of pretenders to the Woodman’s throne over the years (including, in the recent period, Mr. Konigsberg himself), but Scenes From a Mall (which, if it were actually part of the Allen oeuvre, would rank well north of Hollywood Ending and somewhere south of Sweet and Lowdown) deserves special mention if only for the Allen-esque stammer of the dialogue delivered by none other than Woody Allen himself, charmingly paired with Bette Midler as a slick, successful, L.A.-loving Bizarro World version of his usual New York schlub persona (yet still kvetching endlessly about the difficulties of getting the whole love and happiness thing to work out). Meanwhile, after numerous attempts at regenerating his aforementioned trademark schlub persona, Dr. Who-style, into the form of younger actors ranging from John Cusack and Will Ferrell to Jason Biggs and Scarlett Johansson, it’s astonishing that Allen has never, to my knowledge, thought to cast the wry, world-class neurotic über-Jew Adam Goldberg in one of his films. Fortunately, writer/director/actress (and former Goldberg paramour) Julie Delpy corrected the obvious cinematic oversight with 2 Days In Paris, the type of hot-blooded, fast-talking, quick-witted meditation on life, romance, family, morality and mortality that used to be Allen's default setting before a string of duds forced his own recent decampment to Europe in search of inspiration.

MYSTERY MEN (1999), Not Directed By Tim Burton

This loudly hyped, much derided, and in fact somewhat underappreciated superhero parody (based on characters created by Flaming Carrot writer-artist Bob Burden) boasts elaborate set design, a smashing pop-Gothic look mixed with improvisational comedy riffs, satirical homages to various geekish interests, and Paul Reubens, all of which helped remind viewers of Tim Burton. In fact, the unusal-sounding name of the film's first-time director, Kinka Usher, actually helped inspire a rumor that the movie was, in fact, directed by Burton under an obviously contrived alias, even though Burton was busy at the time trying to bring his own Sleepy Hollow to market. Other evidence that Burton had nothing to do with it include the fact that the action scenes are fairly coherent, along with the movie's role in making Smash Mouth's "All Star" the hardest-to-avoid pop song in America for a good two or three years. (If the devoutly contrarian Burton had had a hand in that, he'd have probably joined the French Foreign Legion to atone.) Based on available evidence, there is in fact a Kinka Usher, but after the disappointing reception to this movie, his film career seems to have folded up its tent.

CITY OF LOST CHILDREN (1995), Not Directed by Terry Gilliam

Thanks to the fluke of his having broken in with Monty Python's Flying Circus and what that seems to have done to his sense of humor, the Minnesota-born Terry Gilliam has been fated to spend most of his life striking many people as sort of English. Oddly enough, the most successful Gilliam movie of the last fifteen or so years may have been cooked up by a couple of Frenchmen. Like Gilliam, Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet began their work as collaborators working in animation; with their first feature, Delicatessen, they announced their intent to make live-action films with the same degree of frenzied visual imagination (and the same sort of sick humor) usually found only in cartoons. But with Lost Children, they dove head-first into Gilliam's territory, with a sophisticated take on childlike fantasy that boasted a complicated plot, a look that was half fairy tale and half cyberpunk, and a villain out to steal the dreams of children. If Gilliam had made it himself after Time Bandits and Brazil, it would have made a far more fitting end to his "imagination trilogy" than the film he did make, The Adventures of Baron Muchausen. Instead, Gilliam did at least recognize the filmmakers as kindred spirits, and was quick to issue a blurb that they could use in the trailer.

And finally...

CHARADE (1963), Not Directed By Alfred Hitchcock

To tell the truth, we here at The Screengrab think that the tendency to compare just about any attempt at a stylish thriller to the work of Alfred Hitchcock has been overblown. Hitchcock didn't invent the concept of screen thrills, any more than (say) John Ford invented men on horseback or Stanley Donen, the director of Charade, invented singing and dancing. They all just happened to be really good at their specialties. What makes Charade, with its Parisian setting and alternately jokey and spooky murders, so much of a special case is its use of its star, Cary Grant, and the way it links this charmingly light romantic-mystery-comedy to North by Northwest and To Catch A Thief, the films that Hitchcock built around Grant after the strain of Hollywood comedy that made Grant a star had dried up or curdled. (Hitchcock also directed Grant in one of his best movies from the 1940s, Notorious, but that was in a darker, more hard-boiled style of tortured romance.) In all these movies, the filmmakers take Grant's star image into account in a slightly ironic way that makes it all the more glamorous and irresistable. (This is the movie where Audrey Hepburn, the damsel in distress, asks Grant, "Do you know what's wrong with you?" and then answers her own question: "Nothing.") They all hold up a lot better than the other movies that Grant made during the last twenty years or so of his career, and in fact, Charade, which he made just before he turned sixty, is for all practical purposes the last real "Cary Grant" movie. He did star in two more pictures, Father Goose and Walk, Don't Run (a remake of The More the Merrier), but they were half-hearted stabs at seeing if Grant could delight the public as, respectively, a boozy, unshaven old grump or a lovable match-making old busybody. Neither was a success, and Grant, sensing that his fans had no interest in seeing him evolve into anything besides Cary Grant, graciously retired from the screen. (Trivia note: in 2002. Jonathan Demme remade Charade as The Truth About Charlie, a movie whose Big Idea was, as Demme explained it, to see what Charade would look like if it had been directed in the flyblown experimental style of a French New Wave director working in 1964. It turned out that if the movie had been made that way, it would have kind of sucked.)

Click Here For Part One, Part Two & Part Three

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

15 Films That (Almost) Could've Been Directed By Somebody Else (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 21:00:00 GMT

3 WOMEN (1977), Not Directed By David Lynch

Like any number of David Lynch films, 3 Women starts in one genre, telling one story about a certain group of characters, then at some point the acid kicks in, reality shifts, and if you went out to get popcorn or go to the bathroom, you’d be forgiven for coming back in and thinking you’d wandered into the wrong theater (or living room) given the batshit craziness that’s replaced whatever movie you'd previously been watching. In this Altman phantasmagoria, inspired, like many if not all of Lynch’s films, by a dream, Shelley Duvall plays a chirpy sanitarium worker who makes the mistake of taking in spooky, Carrie-era co-worker Sissy Spacek as a roommate, only to see her previously unexamined life unravel as she and Spacek swap personalities with each other (and maybe even a few other people, possibly including the third of the 3 Women, a mysterious desert mural artist played by Janice Rule). Things get trippier in the final twenty minutes than Quintet and Popeye combined (or, for that matter, any other Altman film I can think of), and if none of it seems to make a lick of sense, well, Altman didn’t entirely understand the ending either, though apparently he had a “theory,” possibly involving all the film's recurring twins and triplets, the red lampshade, the Cowboy, the homeless man behind the Winkie’s, the family of rabbits, the creepy, white-faced specter of Robert Blake and...wait...what was I talking about? Oh no...it...is...happening...again...

CHOOSE ME (1984), Not Directed By Robert Altman

After a beginner's period in the early 1970s directing low-budget horror pictures with titles such as Barn of the Screaming Dead, Alan Rudolph was born again working as assistant director to Robert Altman on The Long Goodbye, California Split, and Nashville. After working on the screenplay for Altman's Buffalo Bill and the Indians, Rudolph resumed his career as a writer-director with 1977's Welcome to L.A., a movie made very much in the shadow of Altman. (The script was spun off from a "suite" of rock songs by Richard Baskin, who worked on the songs in Nashville and had a small role in that movie.) Since then, Rudolph has worked prettily steadily, sometimes writing his own material and sometimes not, often proudly displaying his Altman influence and not infrequently tripped up by it. This sex comedy, which uses Teddy Pendergrass (a big, big improvement on Richard Baskin) on the soundtrack and joins the visual lyricism of 3 Women to a fairly bouncy romantic-entanglement plot, is most likely his proudest achievement -- except for the less Altmanesque Songwriter, a beautifully directed movie which had the advantage of being written by somebody else. Both films were completed and shown in certain parts of the country in 1984, but didn't branch out distribution-wise until 1985...which means that 1985 was definitely Rudolph's year, especially considering that the Altman movie made by Altman himself that year was O. C. and Stiggs.

CRIMEWAVE (1985), Not Directed by The Coen Brothers

A pair of marginally competent criminals. A minor crime that balloons into a bloody, out-of-control mess. Cartoonish, overblown physical gags balanced by cerebral filmmaking and hilarious, quotable dialogue. Loopy, incongruous accents. Characters named Helene Trend, Arthur Coddish and Renaldo the Heel. The presence of cult and character actors like Paul Smith, Brion James, Edward Pressman, Antonio Fargas and – of course – Bruce Campbell. This has to be a Coen Brothers movie, right? Well, yes and no. Made in 1985, just after Joel and Ethan Coen wrapped Blood Simple and just before they started working on Raising Arizona, the underrated and hard-to-find Crimewave was actually directed by their good friend, frequent collaborator and college buddy Sam Raimi. The Coens wrote the screenplay, but despite the presence of some highly explosive camerawork (by Robert Primes) and the presence in the cast of a number of future Coen Brothers regulars (including Frances McDormand and Ted Raimi, Sam's brother), the direction is all Sam Raimi, who at one point seemed like an anarchic offshoot of the Coen sensibility more than the middle-of-the-road blockbuster director he later became. If nothing else, the movie stands as a unique curiosity: the only movie written by the Coen Brothers that they didn't also direct.

FAR FROM HEAVEN (2002), Not Directed by Douglas Sirk or Ranier Werner Fassbinder

Douglas Sirk was born to direct Far from Heaven. Its combination of lush, stylish visuals, soap-opera-style emotional fireworks, and ever-present societal pressure was right in his wheelhouse – it was the sort of movie he'd built his reputation upon making. Unfortunately for the movie's producers, Sirk was unavailable to make the movie, having unfortunately died fifteen years prior. The next logical step would be to hire a fellow German director who was, in many ways, Sirk's inheritor, both in terms of high drama, visual flair, and expertise at making tangible the invisible pressures exerted by society. In a further bit of bad luck, it turned out that Ranier Werner Fassbinder was also dead, having perished some twenty years before. In the end, they had to go with the guy who had written the movie in the first place: the pioneering queercore director Todd Haynes, who, even since his first student films, had seemed like an exceptionally talented amalgam of both Sirk and Fassbinder. For years, he had talked about how the two German filmmakers had influenced him, from their elegant visual styles to their focus on the taboo, but it wasn't until he did the positively retro Far from Heaven (which was dedicated to the memory of Douglas Sirk) that the influence turned into an outright homage. Setting its story of repressed homosexuality and interracial love smack dab in the middle of Sirk's 1950s, and infusing Sirk's forbidden romantic obsessions with Fassbinder's much more explicit treatments of racism and homophobia, Todd Haynes managed to create something that comes across as exactly the movie Sirk or Fassbinder would have made, were they able to escape death and the tenor of their times.

Click Here For Part One, Part Two & Part Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

15 Films That (Almost) Could've Been Directed By Somebody Else (Part Two - Special QT Edition)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 20:30:00 GMT

SMOKIN’ ACES (2006), Not Directed By Guy Ritchie (or Quentin Tarantino)

Now that Madonna keeps Guy Ritchie's cajones in a vault at the Bank of London (although here's knockin' wood for RockNRola) and Quentin Tarantino's gasbaggery has flared-up to chronic levels (I mean, good Lord, Death Proof would have been about ten minutes long if some brave editor had dared to cut every scrap of verbal diarrhea...but fingers crossed for Inglorious Bastards), there aren't too many directors cranking out simple gun-slingin' all-star demolition derbies like Smokin' Aces anymore. The formula is relatively simple: combine a dozen or so intersecting/doublecrossing thieves/assassins/lawmen/etc. with a simple Maguffin and a zillion rounds of ammunition and overheat, then sit back and see who survives. Like KFC chicken, it's not good for you and you'll probably regret it later (especially if you stick around for Aces' terrible one-twist-too-many ending), but Joe Carnahan’s loving and/or shameless transfer of Lock, Dogs & Two Smokin’ Snatches to a Lake Tahoe casino serves as a more-or-less satisfying delivery system for a whole bunch of tasty, testosterone-flavored empty calories with better-than-necessary performances from a cast including Ray Liotta, Matthew Fox, Ryan Reynolds, Ben Affleck, Andy Garcia, Nestor Carbonell, Common, a luminescent Alicia Keys and about a hundred other people, including a way-too-serious performance by Jeremy Piven as the sleazy informant everybody else in the movie wants to save and/or kill.

THE LIMEY (1999), Also Not Directed by Quentin Tarantino

One of the strengths – and weaknesses – of Steven Soderbergh as a director is that he's extremely competent, and at times even brilliant, without having anything that approaches a distinctive style. A jack-of-all-genres and master of none, he produces one good movie after another, none of which seem to have any isolatable quality at which you can point and say "ah, there we have it – the Soderbergh trademark". Even when his films are visually distinctive and structurally inventive, they seem not so much expressions of Soderbergh's own filmmaking style as they do intense evocations of the work of other directors. It's not that Soderbergh is a chameleon, or worse yet, a copy-cat; no one, especially me, would accuse his films of being derivative. It's just that he often seems like he's inadvertently channeling someone else when he creates his very engaging films. Case in point: this terrific, energetic neo-noir is one of Soderbergh's best films, and one of the best crime movies of its era. But The Limey bears many of the hallmarks of another very successful filmmaker. The clever chronology, the complex structure of the storytelling, the brilliant use of two-shots, the mastery of integrating popular music with on-screen action, and the resuscitation of '70s icons like Terence Stamp, Lesley Ann Warren and Peter Fonda to deliver powerhouse performances are all indicative of the work of Quentin Tarantino (who, at the time, had been idle for several years, lending credence to the notion that The Limey could be a project of his). The film's use of period objects (including footage from 1960s Terence Stamp movies to represent younger versions of his character here), pop-cultural obsessions (Luis Guzman's t-shirts bearing the images of controversial political figures), and even the characters (most especially Nicky Katt as a foul-mouthed, junk-obsessed hitman) all collude to make this seem like a lost Tarantino flick – but it's all Soderbergh, all the time, if for no other reason than in the The Limey, unlike a typical Tarantino movie, the director is master of his gimmicks and not the other way around.

RESERVOIR DOGS (1992), Not Directed by Ringo Lam

It's a fine, fine line between 'homage' and 'rip-off'. That line is trod to a greater or lesser degree by a lot of the movies on this list, and whenever someone remakes or adapts a film by another director, no matter how careful they are to pay tribute to their inspiration, someone's not going to get the message. (For a prime example of this, consider how much heat Martin Scorsese took for The Departed, even though he not only openly acknowledged the influence of Infernal Affairs, but credited its writer on screen.) The line gets a little more smudged when the director is an inveterate film buff who makes no secret of sampling bits and pieces of his favorite flicks in everything he does, and whose notion of a tribute is very similar to many people's notion of a wholesale theft, and nowhere is this more apparent than in Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs. So similar is the film to Ringo Lam's 1987 Hong Kong gangster exercise City On Fire – they share a major plot point, similar styles and costumes, bits of dialogue, and even two scenes in their entirety – that it pretty much completely eradicates that line between tribute and remake. For Tarantino's part, he cites City On Fire as a favorite, but denies that his first major success as a director rips it off; at least one vocal opponent, filmmaker Mike White, did an entire short called Who Do You Think You're Fooling? comparing the two movies frame for frame and excoriating Tarantino for not giving Lam proper credit. To many, Reservoir Dogs is one of the best and most original independent films ever made, a movie that literally changed the face of moviemaking in its time; to others, it's just the best movie that Ringo Lam already made.

Click Here For Part One, Part Three & Part Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce