The Screengrab : 2012

Screengrab Death Watch: Day One

Andrew Osborne — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 11:49:00 GMT

And now, the end is near, and so we face the final curtain...

Yes, it’s true...as it turns out, the shitty economy, global warming, the death of print media and the looming Swine Flu pandemic are only the tips of the iceberg of sadness we’ll all have to deal with this year.

We learned yesterday that Nerve.com will be shuttering some of its culture blogs including...(sniff, sniff)...this one: sad to say, the Screengrab is not long for this dirty old world.

So enjoy our beloved, non-commercially viable coverage of the cinematic universe while you can...and stay tuned for plenty of clip-show nostalgia, maudlin eulogizing, a heart-tugging farewell song from Bette Midler and, in a last-ditch attempt to boost hits, 100% more gratuitous Tits & Ass...like, uh...that chick from The Hills showing her butt!

Taxing Time: A Screengrab Salute To Beat The Clock Cinema (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 20:00:00 GMT

When I was a younger man, summer vacations seemed to last 100 years and every day was at least 24 hours long.

Now, as an old geezer, I can’t help but notice how time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping into the future at an alarming rate. Summers, at best, tend to flash by in a matter of days -- and my days, like everything else, have apparently been downsized...

...or at least that’s how it feels here beneath the mountain of overdue assignments, unfinished projects and blown deadlines I find myself tunneling through of late, with less than a week remaining to file that damn “married filing jointly” 1040 form I haven’t even started yet...

...tick...tick...tick...

...but even as the clock ticks down to the April 15th tax deadline (not to mention the end of the Mayan calendar -- AND THE WORLD!!!!! -- in 2012), we here at the Screengrab figured we could spare a few seconds to salute THE BEST RACE AGAINST TIME FLICKS OF ALL...uh...TIME!

D.O.A. (1950)

This sweaty, 83-minute noir is pretty much all gimmick, but it's the ultimate in race-against-time gimmicks. Edmund O'Brien, who barks out his lines as if trying to reach the pork chop hanging around his neck, plays an accountant who hits San Francisco for a working vacation and discovers that he's been slipped a dose of a "luminous poison" for which there is no antidote. Given no more than a few days to live, O'Brien blows off the guided tour of Alcatraz and tears around the city, doing his unsubtle best to solve his own impending murder and wreak vengeance on his murderer before it's tag-on-the-toe time. The 1988 sequel, directed by Max Headroom creators Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton and starring Dennis Quaid, feels padded at 93 minutes, but it does have a couple of witty strokes in relocating the action to the world of academia -- Quaid plays a lapsed novelist and college professor whose motto of "publish or perish" is used against him by someone who has taken it a little too literally -- and setting it on a sweltering Texas college campus at Christmas time, thus giving Quaid an excuse to sweat even more profusely than Edmund O'Brien even with holiday decorations in the background. (PN)

HIGH NOON (1952)

Fred Zinnemann takes all the suspense out of the race against time; there’s no question of escaping the consequences, only of how they’re going to be dealt with. No one doubts that a gang of badmen are going to arrive in town at high noon, and that they’re going to call out Gary Cooper’s marshal, Will Kane, and seek revenge for him sending them up. Everyone knows what’s going to happen. So why is it one of the most tense Westerns ever made? That’s a testament to Zinnemann’s skill as a director: he manages to work endless amounts of tension, suspense and discomfort out of something we all know is going to happen. The only question is: will the townsfolk stand with Kane, who has protected them before, or will they abandon him in hopes of safety? That’s what makes the passage of time so excruciating in High Noon, and nowhere is it more explicit than in the famous scene where the clock ticks down, inexorably, in a stunning montage accompanied by Dmitri Tiomkin’s pitiless score, and the thing we all knew was going to happen finally happens. It’s one of the best examples in classic Hollywood of wrenching tension out of the inevitable. (LP)

THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962)

Many years and many outbreaks of paranoia later, John Frankenheimer's satirical yet stirring Cold War thriller is still the gold standard for political-assassination fantasies. Among its other virtues, it remains one of the most blackly funny movies ever to come out of Hollywood, but the laughter dies as the noose tightens and Frank Sinatra, losing faith that things will work out, races through the traffic-clogged streets to arrive at the convention hall, just in time to see Laurence Harvey finally earn his Medal of Honor. (PN)

RUN LOLA RUN (1999)

Run Lola Run, about Lola’s (Franka Potente) efforts to save her boyfriend (Moritz Bleibtreu) from death by procuring 100,000 deutschmarks in 20 minutes, is a tour de force of blistering kineticism that predictably achieved cult canon status the moment it hit theaters in 1999. Yet what elevates Tom Tykwer’s debut above so many other beat-the-clock sagas is its aesthetic flair and inventiveness, its storytelling and visual intricacy, and its deft use of its unique style in the service of a subtly thoughtful meditation on time and fate. Segmented into three sections, each of which finds Lola attempting to achieve her goal, Run Lola Run’s race-against-time narrative presents a free will-vs.-determinism debate in the guise of a frenzied videogame, one in which Lola must use her allotted three lives to figure out how to complete her mission. Playfully philosophical without being pretentious, and excessively flashy without being shallow, Tykwer’s film delivers edge-of-your-seat rollercoaster thrills as well as enough sly substance to warrant coming back for a return ride. (NS)

Hurry!!!! Click Here For Part Two, Three, Four, Five & Six!!!!

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Nick Schager

Screengrab's Favorite Movies About Music: Non-Fiction Edition (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 20:00:00 GMT

A few weeks back, I claimed the period from New Year's to Oscar Night was the most wonderful time of the year for movie geeks, what with all the Best-Of Lists and awards season festivities...but for movie AND music geeks (not to mention the small but powerful barbecue geek lobby), there is no better place or time than mid-March in sunny Austin, when the South-By-Southwest Festival unleashes 1,800 bands from around the world on the capital of Texas, along with several zillion filmmakers, wannabes, hucksters, tourists, web designers, Industry sleazeballs and bloggers (including yours truly, my esteemed colleagues Scott Von Doviak, Hayden Childs, Leonard Pierce and, heck, maybe half the Nerve.com staff for all I know...see you at the Yard Dog, guys)!

Thus, in celebration of SXSW’s yearly combo of films & fretboards, your pals here at the Screengrab are launching a two-week tribute to OUR ALL-TIME FAVORITE MOVIES ABOUT MUSIC!

Andrew Osborne’s Favorites:

IMAGINE (1988)

As far as I can remember, the first pop song I ever knew by heart was “Yellow Submarine” -- well, the chorus, anyway, which my brother and me would sing endlessly to the delight (and eventually, I’m sure, to the ear-piercing annoyance of) my parents on numerous long car trips throughout the early ‘70s. So I guess that would make the Beatles my first favorite band...and brilliant, heroic, sarcastic, acerbic, mean, funny, shit-stirring, peace-loving John was always my favorite Beatle (even if he didn’t lend his voice to his cartoon incarnation in the film version of Submarine...a deeply disillusioning trivia fact I’ve been trying to erase from my brain through strategic drinking ever since I learned it). My hipster college roommate cried conspicuously on the fifth anniversary of Lennon’s death (and possibly every year since), whereas I save my tears over the Smart One’s tragically premature and sinfully meaningless demise for periodic viewings of Andrew Solt’s warts-and-all (but ultimately loving) tribute, Imagine (allegedly released in part to counteract the warts-and-nothing-else Lennon biography published by icky toad Albert Goldman the same year). Narrated by Lennon himself, the film chronicles the life and times (and music and feuds and love affairs and political activism) of its subject while evoking the spirit of the 1960s and 1970s far more effectively than a certain reverse-aging button enthusiast I could mention...I only wish Solt's documentary had a better ending.

BIG TIME (1988)

I may have started off loving the Beatles, but after that my tastes wandered from the pop and rock aisles to the musical theater section. Thankfully, my cooler friends were kind enough to broaden my horizons just in time for adolescence with an endless series of mix-tapes, bringing me up to speed on punk, New Wave and, eventually, the one-man genre known as Tom Waits. As it happened, I became a fan smack dab in the midst of Waits' Island years, when he was recording the game-changing trilogy of albums (Swordfishtrombones, Rain Dogs & Frank’s Wild Years) considered by many to be the high-water mark of the singer/songwriter/Conundrummer’s more or less consistently brilliant career...and so I was in exactly the right place at exactly the right moment to catch the Boston stop of the tour captured (or, more specifically, reimagined) in Chris Blum’s barking, bantering concert film Big Time, which depicts Waits both onstage and wandering the periphery as Frank, the mysterious, muttering song character who infamously doused his house in gasoline and torched it, then got on the Hollywood Freeway headed North (and some time later, apparently, wound up working as an usher in a creepy old vaudeville house). Unfortunately, I had to leave that long-ago Boston concert halfway through to get to a stupid play rehearsal (...stupid! ...stupid! ...stupid!), little knowing I wouldn’t get to see Waits in the flesh again for 20+ years (and counting): in the ‘90s, I kept leaving cities just before Waits’ tour arrived in them, and here in the oughts, his infrequent tour stops always seem to be far, far away. So until I finally manage to track the man down again, Big Time will have to do.

STOP MAKING SENSE (1984)

The first time Talking Heads entered my consciousness was on the soundtrack of Risky Business, growling the dirty stomp of “Swamp” over scenes of teen sex in Tom Cruise’s suburban bordello. Shortly thereafter but around the same period, I put a face to the distinctive voice...specifically David Byrne’s weird moony face projected on the side of a house and the dotted white line of a highway in the wicked pissa video for “Burning Down The House” (back when videos were wicked pissa and MTV wasn’t a 24/7 suck-fest). Then, a year later, Jonathan Demme's Stop Making Sense finally gave me a full dose of Talking Heads (thus hooking me on the band for a lot longer than the band stayed hooked on each other). I never got a chance to see David, Tina, Chris & Jerry play live -- not all at the same time, anyway -- but dancing in the aisles with dozens of fellow Head-heads during the classic concert film’s theatrical run was the next best thing...kinda like Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience without the special glasses and shitty music. Indeed, Demme makes his subjects pop off the screen without 3D technology, pyrotechnics or any of the usual rock-doc clichés: all he needed was a lamp, a big suit, a good shot list and one of the best rock bands of all time.

WOODSTOCK (1970)

In the 1971 film The Omega Man, not-quite-last-man-alive Charlton Heston spends his lonely days in a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles watching Michael Wadleigh’s super-size documentary of the mother of all concerts again and again...and, frankly, if I wind up being the sole survivor when the world ends in 2012, I’d be pretty psyched to find Woodstock in the projector of my local movie house. For one thing, it’s 184 minutes long (or roughly one hour for each of the three days of peace and music it chronicles)...and the special director’s cut released in 1994 contains an additional 40 minutes of still yet more peace, music and damn, dirty hippies. But what makes Woodstock perfect for repeat viewings is how much Wadleigh and his editors (including Martin Scorsese and BFF Thelma Schoonmaker) pack into the running time, using split-screen sensory overload to capture every conceivable angle of the epochal event, from the iconic onstage performances by Jimi, Joan, Joe, Country Joe, Richie, Arlo and the surprisingly awesome Sha Na Na (among many, many others) to the brown acid, Porta-Potty maintenance and holy-shit meltdowns of the poor bastards trying to keep the whole event from spiraling into the sort of madness and catastrophe captured by the Maysles Brothers and Charlotte Zwerin in 1970’s other notable concert documentary, Gimme Shelter, the yang to Woodstock’s yin and definitely not the sort of movie likely to cheer you up in an empty theater surrounded by killer mutants.

Click Here For Part Two, Three, Four, Five, Six & Seven

Contributor: Andrew Osborne

Morning Deal Report: Joss Whedon in the Woods

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 15:15:00 GMT

Joss Whedon is producing The Cabin the Woods, to be written and directed by Cloverfield screenwriter Drew Goddard, and two actors are aboard for the trip. “"It's really just your basic typecasting: When you need two actors to run through the woods in low-cut nighties, you immediately think of Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford,” Goddard tells The Hollywood Reporter. Little is known about the story, except that it “provides a new twist on a classic scenario -- in this case the young-people-stranded-in-the-woods horror trope.” The new twist: the young people are OLD!

Michael Imperioli’s directorial debut opens the Rotterdam Film Festival today – and no, it’s not Cleaver. The Hungry Ghosts “recounts the crossed destinies of a group of isolated New Yorkers, all in search of happiness,” Variety reports. Imperioli’s Sopranos co-stars Steve Schirippa and Sharon Angela are in the cast and expected to be on hand in Rotterdam.

2012 has been delayed. The movie, not the year – we’re pretty sure 2012 will still immediately follow 2011 if all goes well. Sony is pushing back Roland Emmerich’s latest apocalypse from July 10 to November 13, “the same date the studio used to launch the previous two James Bond pics.”

Related:
1949 vs. 2012: John Woo/Roland Emmerich Deathmatch!
Video of the Day: Wonder Woman '67

The Year in Trailer Review: Paul Clark's Favorite Trailers of 2008, Part 2

Paul Clark — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Like last year’s trailer for Cloverfield or even the teaser for The Matrix, the first spot for Eagle Eye was a brilliant bit of teasing, tantalizing audiences by saying just enough about the plot to reel them in without spoiling any of the movie’s secrets. The Eagle Eye teaser does little more than establish the characters and set up the film’s premise, but that’s enough. Reviews for the film convinced me to stay away, but really, how could it possibly live up to this?

How do you boil down a four and a half hour movie about Che Guevara into a 2-minute trailer? If you’re Steven Soderbergh, you start by appealing to the Che mythos through some interview footage, intercut with scenes of him triumphing in battle and making his philosophies on revolution clear at the United Nations. Then, without warning, you switch gears into Che’s fateful final years, in which his success began to dry up, and even change aspect ratios accordingly. The Che teaser is nothing flashy, but it gets the job done extremely well, boiling down the film’s trajectory while leaving interesting moviegoers wanting more.

Roland Emmerich has become Hollywood’s reigning master of disaster largely by inventing increasingly bizarre ways to besiege the people of Earth. With his latest he imagines that the titular date, the year in which the Mayan calendar has foretold the world to end, as the time of many and varied apocalyptic disasters. But for anyone who thinks Emmerich doesn’t realize how absurd his stories are, I give you this trailer, in which he visualizes a Tibetan monastery being washed away by a massive tidal wave. For that final touch, he sets it to Wendy Carlos’ music from The Shining, just to show you he knows what he’s doing. 2012 could very well suck, but you know I’ll be there opening weekend.

Finally, I probably watched the red-band trailer for Pineapple Express more times than any other trailer this year. What can I say? It’s a blast, even if it does spoil many of the best laughs in the movie.

Trailer Review: 2012 (Teaser)

Paul Clark — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Say what you will about his movies, but Roland Emmerich’s work has always made for awesome teasers. Remember the image of the White House getting zapped in Independence Day, the museum bit in the Godzilla teaser, or the frozen-over New York skyline of Day After Tomorrow? Quite frankly, I thought this teaser for Emmerich’s latest disaster epic 2012 was his best yet. Of course, much of this has to do with it being a cheeky homage to one of Screengrab’s all-time favorites, the classic teaser for Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. I knew I was in for a treat when I heard Wendy Carlos’ music from the teaser, accompanying the giant wave that crashes over the mountains (!). But when the monastery floats away just like the couch in the Shining teaser, I had to chuckle- I was the only one in the theatre doing so, but what the hell. Had I contributed to this week's list, I would have declared Emmerich’s disaster movies to be some of my guilty pleasures, and I’m primed for 2012 to be one as well.

Morning Deal Report: Dueling Sherlocks

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 15:00:00 GMT

As if Guy Ritchie didn’t have enough problems, what with the gossip sheets running wild with rumors that A-Rod is shtupping his wife. Now it turns out that his Sherlock Holmes feature will face competition from Borat himself. Per Variety, Columbia Pictures has announced “an untitled comedy that will star Sacha Baron Cohen as master detective Sherlock Holmes and Will Ferrell as Watson, his crime-solving partner.” According to Columbia president Matt Tolmach, this re-teaming of the Talladega Nights stars is a sure-fire knee-slapper. "Just the idea of Sacha and Will as Sherlock Holmes and Watson makes us laugh…having them take on these two iconic characters is frankly hilarious." Thank you for speaking frankly, Mr. Tolmach. Of course, this is not the first time rival productions involving the same iconic character have gone head-to-head, as we recall from the great Robin Hood war of the '90s. But then, that was a war nobody won.

The cast of Roland Emmerich’s latest rendition of the end of the world is coming together. Triple threat Thomas McCarthy, who most recently wrote and directed The Visitor, will join John Cusack, Amanda Peet and Danny Glover in Emmerich’s 2012. “As an actor, I've never worked on anything with this scale before, and I always go see these movies,” McCarthy tells the Hollywood Reporter. “This does have a big budget and I do make more money, which is nice, but I know if you take a job like this just for the money, you'll be miserable.” Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tell it to Nicolas Cage.

Meanwhile, the French hit Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis (Welcome to the Sticks) is being remade not only in America (Will Smith will star for Warner Bros.) but in Italy. Variety describes it as a “heart-warmer about a postal worker forced to relocate to a small town in the north where he can't understand the patois, the food or the many quirks.” We’ll wait for the Portuguese version.

Related:

No Shit, Sherlock: Guy Ritchie Reimagines Holmes
1949 vs. 2012: John Woo/Roland Emmerich Deathmatch!

1949 vs. 2012: John Woo/Roland Emmerich Deathmatch!

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 20 May 2008 17:30:00 GMT

It’s deal-making time on the Croisette in Cannes, and while some deals are more ill-advised than others, we’ve rounded up a few notables worthy of mention.

John Woo is set to direct 1949, which we are assured is not a sequel to Steven Spielberg’s 1941. Variety reports it is a “big budget romancer that will crank up as soon as he has finished his epic Red Cliff.” A Chinese-language epic “based on true events at the end of WWII and the final years of the Chinese Civil War, pic will star Chang Chen and Korea's Song Hye-kyo.”

Leap ahead 63 years and you’ll find Roland Emmerich’s 2012. Once again, Variety is on the case, reporting that John Cusack and Redbelt’s Chiwetel Ejiofor will star in the apocalyptic thriller, “whose title refers to the end days of human civilization as foretold by the ancient Mayan calendar. Story kicks off with a global cataclysm, which brings an end to the world as we know it, and chronicles the heroic struggle of the survivors.” Emmerich has already ended the world once, of course, with The Day After Tomorrow. We’re beginning to think he has issues.

And what the hell, since we’re already plundering Variety for this post, we might as well pass on the news that Steve Buscemi is joining the cast of Youth in Revolt, playing the father of Michael Cera in the film based on a novel by C.D. Payne. “Cera plays teenager Nick Twisp, who meets the girl of his dreams on a family vacation and destroys the trip trying to be with her.”