The Screengrab : Sofia Coppola

Morning Deal Report: Sofia Coppola Goes “Somewhere”

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 20 May 2009 14:00:00 GMT

Sofia Coppola’s latest directorial effort Somewhere has secured the participation of a jackass. Chris Pontius of the Jackass crew “will play Sammy, best friend of the character played by Stephen Dorff, a decadent, bad-boy actor living at the Chateau Marmont in West Hollywood who begins to re-examine his life after a surprise visit from his 11-year-old daughter (Elle Fanning),” per The Hollywood Reporter.

That Dreamworks dream may be deferred. Yesterday we told you the studio had the blessing of the King family to proceed with their MLK biopic. Two of King’s children disagree. “Bernice King and Martin Luther King III have been embroiled in a legal battle with brother Dexter King, who is chairman-CEO of the King Estate, over who controls the personal papers of their late mother, Coretta Scott King,” Variety reports. “Bernice King told the Associated Press on Tuesday: ‘This is a deal that Mr. Spielberg and his people ... have entered into believing that they have the blessing of the King Estate. They don't have the blessings of Bernice and Martin King.’”

And we can all breathe a sigh of relief: the new Footloose has found its Bacon. You’ll recall that Zac Efron dropped out of the project, which had us all worried there for a while, but now Chace Crawford has stepped into his dancing shoes. “With a more mature, edgy version of Footloose than the original, Paramount will likely benefit from the fact that Crawford's Gossip Girl following skews a bit older than Efron's High School Musical audience.”

Coming Soon[er or Later]: The Marianne Faithfull Story

Phil Nugent — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 16:00:00 GMT

Marianne Faithfull has reportedly signed off on plans to make a film about her life, using her 1994 autobiography Faithfull as the basis for a screenplay. "It won't happen right away," Faithfull says, "but we have found a director who I trust who wants to make a film of the book." Faithfull herself claims to have no interest in participating in the process beyond hoping the check clears. "I'm not getting involved. I'll read the script, when it's ready, which isn't for a long time, and then I'll leave it to the director and the actress he chooses. I don't want to have much to do with it. I want to read the script and like the script and then I'm going to let go of it and let them do what they want. That's the way to do it." Faithfull, who has acted in several films herself--she starred in the 1968 head trip Girl on a Motorcycle and more recently appeared in Patrice Chéreau's Intimacy (2001) and Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette (2006), and was also typecast as God in a few episodes of the TV series Absolutely Fabulous--has expressed confidence that her life would make a good movie because it's "a great story." She is not wrong, and it's also easy to see why she's prefer to leave it to somebody else to live it again.

In the 1960s, Faithfull's glistening, youthful beauty and her intimidating connections--which included not just her scandal-sheet ties to the Rolling Stones but a family that included a mother who had danced for the Max Reinhardt Company and a great-great-uncle, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, who was credited with having lent his name to the term "masochism"--made her the face of Swinging London, healthy and happy and sexy on the surface but with the tantalizing suggestion of something unspeakable going on behind the palace gates. Faithfull had her own career as a pop musician, scoring hits that included the Jagger-Richards composition "As Tears Go By", and writing "Sister Morphine" for the Stones in return. In 1966, she began a very public affair with Mick Jagger, and would eventually serve as the cherry on top of an equally public drug bust at Keith Richards's place, where the cops burst in to find her draping her nude body in a fur rug. But the tabloid behavior that only enhanced the Stones' career-making images as their Satanic majesties was an anchor tied to her neck. "To be a male drug addict and to act like that is always enhancing and glamorising," Faithfull said years later. "A woman in that situation becomes a slut and a bad mother." Faithfull did in fact lose custody of her son, Nicholas--born in 1965, with her then-husband John Dunbar--in 1970, the same year she broke up with Jagger. By then, she was sinking deeper into drugs and well on her way to ending up as the subject of a where-are-they-now piece.

Faithfull spent most of the 1970s, addicted to heroin and cocaine, suffering from anorexia nervosa, and undergoing extended periods of homelessness. She came back, totally unexpectedly and with a vengeance, in 1979, when she released the album Broken English, a scream of rage that mixed covers of John Lennon's "Working Class Hero" and Shel Silverstein's "The Ballad of Lucy Jordan" with new classics such as the title song and the seething ""Why D'Ya Do It", the song that Alanis Morissette's "You Oughta Know" wants to be when it grows up. She continued to reinvent herself on records and in live performance as a chilly but not unfriendly diva for the postpunk agem, the Marlene Dietrich of St. Ann's Warehouse. Now 62, Faithfull told an interviewer a couple of years ago that she'd just realized that she "had no safety net at all" and needed to start thinking about putting something away for her old age, so let's all hope she manages to make a nickel or two off this movie thing. In the meantime, her new album, Easy Come, Easy Go, which includes support from Marc Ribot, Rufus Wainwright, Chan Marshall, Nick Cave, Teddy Thompson, and whatsisname, Keith Richards, arrives in stores today.

Strangers In A Strange Land: Screengrab’s Favorite Fish-Out-Of-Water Stories (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 22:30:00 GMT

LOST IN TRANSLATION (2003)

A sad, funny ode to those fragile bubbles of joy, romance and deeper meaning in life's otherwise bitter cocktail of boredom, loneliness and disappointment, Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation captures a certain mood of isolated intimacy so well that I only wish I could've stumbled across it in a deserted movie theater and kept the experience all to myself. Then again, one of the points of the film is the importance of shared experience: disconnected from her goofus husband (Gionvanni Ribisi), familiar surroundings and a sense of forward momentum in her life, Scarlett Johansson's young American abroad drifts through Japan like a lonely camera, recording her isolated perceptions for no one until she herself is perceived by fellow traveler Bill Murray, kicking off a sweet "like" affair through the streets and karaoke bars of late-night Tokyo. "I'm looking for, like, an accomplice," Murray's Bob Harris says to Johansson's Charlotte during one of their early encounters...and sometimes that's all a stranger needs to make a strange land into a momentary home.

DEFENDING YOUR LIFE (1991)

At first, Daniel Miller (Albert Brooks) isn't clear that he's in a strange land at all. He's arrived in Judgment City, a place that "should seem pleasing and very familiar," assuming you spend a lot of time at golf course resorts in the Phoenix suburbs. The billboards, sterile hotel rooms and crappy stand-up comics do indeed seem familiar, if just a bit off-kilter. That's because Daniel has been killed in a car crash and is no longer on earth at all; rather, he is in a sort of way station between our world and the afterlife, waiting to be judged on his human existence. It's a potentially stressful situation, but there are some pleasant distractions: for instance, the food is delicious and you can eat all you want without gaining any weight. (The full-time residents of Judgment City, on the other hand, enjoy food that tastes a little like horseshit to "little brains" like us.) Indeed, Daniel finds life in Judgment City quite enjoyable once he meets Julia (Meryl Streep), the compatible soul mate he never managed to find in life. It's not so enjoyable once he's put on trial and forced to defend embarrassing episodes from his earthly existence – and Daniel should probably avoid unflattering visits to the Past Lives Pavilion – but no place is perfect.

MYSTERY TRAIN (1989)

We're talking about the first third of Mystery Train, to be more specific. The film follows a young Japanese couple riding a train into Memphis to visit the birthplace of rock & roll. The girl, Mitsuko, is obsessed with Elvis Presley. Her boyfriend Jun, dour and aloof, is a Carl Perkins man. They've come to visit Graceland and Sun Studios, but it's clear from the beginning that their ways -- hiking through the hot and empty streets with their suitcase suspended between them on a bamboo pole, giving their bellhop a plum, fetishizing their cigarette lighter -- are not the ways of Memphis or Americans. And yet, somehow by the end of their story, it's Memphis that seems alien. The sweetness underneath their oddity has normalized them, but the American South seems to be bursting with weirdness. Jarmusch, of course, has stacked the deck. His version of Memphis is filled with strangeness, and his cast includes Screaming Jay Hawkins as the desk clerk at their hotel and Rufus Thomas as a colorful local they meet. The Memphis I know is quite different.

APOCALYPSE NOW (1979)

It's hard to tell which is the stranger country in Apocalypse Now: the Vietnam that Willard barely sees, the military that tries to pretend that the situation is normal (rather than all fucked up), or the Kingdom of Death in Col. Kurtz's heart of darkness. Martin Sheen's Willard has not just fallen off the turnip truck; indeed, when the movie opens, he's drunk and bitter about being stuck again in Saigon. But the drunken ennui of Saigon seems more like the height of civilization as he travels further upriver after Kurtz. Even the Apocalypse Now Redux, which adds an odd layover at a French plantation, only increases Willard's alienation from his surroundings. The world is mad. It is madness to make war on people for their own good. It is madness to attempt to carve a jungle into a Western utopia. It is madness to pretend that there is any return when you have raised the ghosts of primordial horror.

THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING (1975)

An important reminder for the would-be Kurtzes and (in the case of this movie) Danny Dravots of this world: gods don't bleed and die. If you ever try to pass yourself off as a god, be sure not to bleed or be ritually assassinated. A better policy is to avoid attempts at passing as a god altogether. The Man Who Would Be King is a deliberately old-fashioned story in which director John Huston demonstrates the lie at the heart of original author Rudyard Kipling's overt imperialist attitudes towards Asia. Two British adventurers (played by Sean Connery and Michael Caine, both at the top of their games), set out for an unknown area of Afghanistan to pursue unknown riches. Upon arriving, the locals decide that Danny (that's Connery's character) is a god when an arrow that has become lodged in his clothing fails to kill him. Danny, sadly, comes to believe his own press. I hope I am spoiling little when I reveal that hubris is an unforgiving mistress.

LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (1962)

This may be the consummate British colonialist fantasy of knowing a strange land so well that the natives respect you as one of their own. You spend years studying the language and culture at Oxford, only to go overboard completely and become a barefoot, djellabia-wearing, stallion-riding master of the desert. David Lean's film is based on T. E. Lawrence's memoirs, Seven Pillars of Wisdom. In a nutshell it's the story of Lawrence mounting an Arab revolt against the Ottomans, surreptitiously helping the British as their Empire crumbles all around. Real events aside, this is also a fantastic film in and of itself. It is one of those brilliant character studies of a half-mad, half-genius hero, obsessed with an impossible goal. Serpico, The French Connection, and Vanishing Point come to mind. Instead of the inner workings of a nineteen-seventies cop, we get the psyche of Lawrence and the stoic facial expressions of Peter O’Toole galloping up and down the Hejaz. Never mind that Lawrence’s vision — and promise to King Faisal — of a large pan-Arab state based on tribal patterns (including present-day Iraq) went down the toilet in ways we are still experiencing right at this very moment.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Five & Six

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Hayden Childs, Sarah Clyne Sundberg

OST: "Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai"

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 20:00:00 GMT

If you've been following the "OST" feature here at the Screengrab for a while, or even if you're just familiar with the kind of chicanery that goes on in the music business under the guise of protecting intellectual property, you'll know that an astonishingly large number of movie soundtracks present you with a product that's wildly -- even borderline fraudulently -- different from what you encountered in the movie. The difficulty and cost of obtaining clearance rights to music, especially for small, cash-poor independent films, and the greed and short-sightedness of record companies (or just their willingness to butt heads with equally greedy movie companies over the size of their slice of the pie) has sunk many a soundtrack. Jim Jarmusch's inventive, compelling Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai ran afoul of this very problem, but with a curious endgame: there are, in fact, two available records affiliated with the movie -- one best described as a soundtrack, and the other a score. Both are extremely worthwhile, but neither is completely successful on its own; both are very different in character, although they were written by the same person; and both feature material from the film as well as material that never appeared in it, though only one is available in the United States.

It should come as no surprise that Jarmusch's 1999 pseudo-remake of Jean-Pierre Melville's fantastic Le Samourai features a terrific soundtrack. As befits his image as a New York hipster filmmaker, Jim Jarmusch's movies have always placed music in a prominent position; from the haunting, unnerving guitar wails of Neil Young that formed the basis of the soundtrack to Dead Man to the exotic, emotionally powerful jazz-funk of Ethiopian composer Mulatu Astaque that was featured in Broken Flowers, Jarmusch is one of a handful of directors -- others include Quentin Tarantino, Wes Anderson, and Sofia Coppola -- who can be counted on to take as much care with the soundtrack as they do with the film itself. After reading that Italian-American mafiosi were fond of gangsta rap, and consulting with his star Forest Whitaker, Jarmusch decided to bring in the RZA, producer and mastermind behind the hugely influential Wu-Tang Clan, to write both the score and the soundtrack to Ghost Dog. This began a collaboration between the two that became deeper and more profound than either had anticipated; the RZA ended up consulting with Jarmusch on some of the language of the street hustlers in the film, helped out with the design and costuming, and even appears briefly in the film (as do Timbo King and a handful of the Wu-Tang Killa Bees auxiliary). The movie and the music are gorgeously integrated on every level, reflecting a realness that couldn't have come about if any other director and any other musician had been behind it: scenes are perfectly broken up by the intrusion of killer hip-hop tracks (all of which the RZA wrote, produced, or both); the scenes themselves feature gorgeous nighttime driving shots of Whitaker's lethal but loyal assassin, accompanied by evocative, skeletal beats also made by the RZA.

Unfortunately, things went awry, as things often do. Epic, which then had a stranglehold of a contract on the RZA's work, saw the release of the film -- which they couldn't have cared less about -- as nothing more than an opportunity to release new RZA-penned singles to the hip-hop market. They saw no value whatsoever in the instrumental score he'd worked so hard on, and which so perfectly complemented the film. As a result, when the licensing deal was penned with Razor Sharp, the company that released the soundtrack, Epic gave them permission only to use the hip-hop songs the RZA produced, and none of the instrumental score. Eventually, an alternate version of the soundtrack -- this time featuring a number of excellent selections from the score -- was released, but only in Japan. The result is the unsatisfying split alluded to above: here in America, the only version of the soundtrack you're likely to find is the one featuring the rap songs -- which, make no mistake, are almost uniformly excellent, but suffer from a lack of completeness. If you're lucky enough to live in Japan, or shell out extra money to import the version available there, you'll get parts of the score -- at the cost of the great rap singles. So, in the end, the Ghost Dog soundtracks remain two imperfect halves of an incredible whole, and are likely to remain so as long as greed gets in the way. Or, to put it another way, forever.

BEST TRACKS: Assuming you're either unable or unwilling to get hold of the Japanese version of the soundtrack to Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, we'll assume that you're listening to the American version, illustrated above. (The score segments are replaced by rather useless "samurai code quotes" from the movie.) Don't despair, though; while you aren't hearing the whole picture, you're still getting some amazing RZA-penned hip-hop. Some of the best tracks here include the Wu-Tang's featured track, "Fast Shadow", a raw-sounding, desperate slice of urban paranoia; "Strange Eyes", a groovy, expressive effort by the Wu spinoff group Sunz of Man; and, especially, "Don't Test/Wu Stallion", an evocative, insinuating dub groove by underrated Jamaican toaster Suga Bang Bang, which slithers from one pole to another over a killer minimalist beat by the RZA, which suggests the score that you're missing.

Related Posts:

OST: Krush Groove

OST: He Got Game

Face/Off: "The Godfather Part III"

Phil Nugent — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 18:00:00 GMT

["Face/Off" is a recurring feature in which two Screengrab regulars who on their friendliest day couldn't agree on whether or not the sun is hot trade reactions to a movie. This week, in tribute to the release of "The Godfather: The Coppola Restoration" on DVD and Blu-Ray, Sarah Clyne Sundberg and Phil Nugent attempt to set each other straight on "The Godfather Part III."]

SARAH CLYNE SUNDBERG:OK Phil, here she goes:

I think The Godfather: Part III is a great movie. There, I said it. It has always been a bit of a mystery to me why it is so maligned by just about anyone who thinks they know anything about movies.

I also love the two previous Godfathers, but what would the cycle be without Part III? Part II suffers from the common mid-trilogy malaise of the confused and incomplete story arc. Part III, like the first Godfather movie, is a stand-alone.

The Godfather: Part III is a movie by a middle-aged man about people past their prime looking, back on their regrets. We see the extent of Michael Corleone's fall from young idealistic college boy. We get inside his head and see his disgust at his own corruption and at that of humanity in general. The Vatican is utterly unholy, as are the highest reaches of the "legitimate" business world to which he once aspired. His American dream has turned to shit. The dream house on lake Tahoe is in ruins.

Michael's curse is surviving. He will die among the tomatoes and the olives in Sicily. Utterly alone. Unlike his father, there are no grandchildren to make orange-peel false teeth for.

It isn't subtle but who watches The Godfather for subtlety? Who can't relate to Michael's pain at the way things turned out? Who doesn't feel a tug at the heartstrings when Michael and Kay talk about how it all went wrong?

One common complaint is Sofia Coppola's acting. Yeah, her delivery could be better. But she is playing a rich and vapid teenage girl. She isn't supposed to come off as heartfelt and deep. How about that scene where Andy Garcia's character asks, "Who's your father?" and she bats her big heavy eyelids and goes, "I'll give you a hint, he's Italian." Can't mess with that. Moreover, she's so amazingly beautiful to look at that everything else is beside the point. The movie as a whole is easy on the eyes. Take that scene on the steps of the opera house in Palermo: Loved ones shot down, the Anglo ex-wife howling like a Sicilian widow. What other way could one possibly wrap up a story like this?

PHIL NUGENT: Sarah,

There are a lot of niggling little problems with The Godfather Part III that I could niggle over, but the movie was released almost twenty years ago, to a movie press that did have its knives out, and most of those nits have been well picked already. So I'll jump right ahead to what looks to be our core disagreement: the idea that the story that Coppola had already lavished so much time on needed completing. I think that The Godfather Part II is about as great as movies get, and I don't think it left anything unresolved that needed resolving. You can leave the theater or switch off the DVD wondering what Michael Corleone did with himself to kill whatever time he had left to him, but he's a hollow shell and a lost soul, beyond redemption. Wherever you pinpoint the moment at which his soul turned to ash--whether it was when he shot up that restaurant or saw his first wife blown up or cast his second wife out of his life or ordered a hit on his own harmless dope of a surviving brother--he's sunk deep into the life that he was determined to forswear at the start of the first film, and he ain't coming back. It's the logical conclusion to his story and the point at which his life can yield no further meaning.

For some of us, the truly awful thing about The Godfather, Part III is that it betrays what Coppola and Pacino achieved in the first two movies. They didn't get around to making it until they'd both had the chance to discover that the career apotheosis they'd enjoyed between 1972 and 1974 is not the natural order of things, and they allowed their nostalgia for their own better days to get to them and took it as a license to go soft on the character of Michael Corleone. Now he's a loving old booger with a Gertrude Stein haircut who keeps Kay (Diane Keaton), the outsider he ran out of his house on a rail, standing around in the hallway oozing tolerant acceptance. It's not clear what exactly he's been up to in the twenty years left unaccounted for since the end of the second picture and the beginning of this one, though he does have the overscaled self-righteous self-pity of a man who gave filmmaking a try and doesn't understand why his visually ambitious adaptations of S. E. Hinton movels weren't better received. But even if he was busy building hospitals for Mother Teresa in the off-season, the movie shows an unseemly eagerness to let him off the hook. With no transitional explanation, he's gone from being a monster to a man whose worst failing is that, with all the millions of dollars at his disposal and all those button men to order around, he was unable to defeat his powerful enemies from murdering the Pope.

There are some good things in this movie that don't get talked about enough. Talia Shire's Connie's transformation into the widowed Lady Macbeth of the Upper East Side is the one piece of characterization that represents a strong, believable, and compelling line from the first movie to the last, and the cold fire in her eyes could make the Cloverfield monster remember that he has urgent business in another hemisphere. And though Sofia Coppola's performance isn't nearly as strong, it's nice to see someone sticking up for. When GF III opened, Sofia Coppola took the brunt of the harsh criticism like a beachhead taking a tsunami. Sofia was pushed into appearing in the movie after Winona Ryder dropped out, and having a bunch of assholes in the press and on TV sneer at you and accuse you of not having done as good a job as Winona freaking Ryder would have done is a hell of a punishment for having tried to humor Daddy. I don't think she's very good in the movie--would it have killed Daddy to have at least sprung for a vocal coach?-- but she's a great camera subject and has a touching presence, and she's very winnable in those little moments like the one where, all yearning uncertainty, she tells Andy Garcia, "I love you, cuz." She did not have a great acting career ahead of her, but I take some satisfaction in the fact that, eighteen years later, her place in contemporary film history seems a lot more secure than Winona Ryder's.

SARAH CLYNE SUNDBERG: First of all, stopping at The Godfather: Part II would be ludicrous. Everybody knows that the important things in life come in threes: The golden era Supremes, the patriarchs, the Three Stooges.

It looks like our fundamental disagreement is over whether or not there is a worthwhile story left to tell at the end of Part II.

The way I see it is as follows: Beside the blood and the gore and the cannoli, the Godfather is a fairly universal story about life.

Most of the times our lives don't turn out the way we wanted. Like Michael Corleone everyone with half a heart is an idealist when they are young. Like Michael Corleone everybody with half a brain learns that they are no less corrupt and compromised than other people and certainly not than their parents. Life then, like The Godfather is about learning to face yourself and the world despite the inherent disappointment and imperfection. This is why Part III is vital.

You are right. It isn't clear exactly what Michael Corleone has been up to since we last saw him. But it is fair to assume he hasn't been building hospitals for Mother Teresa. His medal of honor from the Vatican is meant to indicate the corruption of the Catholic Church, rather than the goodness of Michael Corleone's business activities.

Perhaps he is in some sense a monster. An aged monster. But also just a petty little man. He goes to confession for the first time in years. He knows and we know and the priest knows there is no absolution for what he has done. Still, he's got to go on living, he's got to get a long with his family.

Analogy: The holocaust happened, we still have to live in the world. I can sit in Berlin in 2008 and enjoy a beer and a beautiful sunset. These to concepts don't exclude each other. Dealing with the contradictions is what being human is all about. The Godfather: Part III is a movie about two middle-aged men, by two middle aged men, about how to keep living in the face of overwhelming evidence that most things turn to shit.

This is what makes The Godfather: Part III a story worth telling. A life that ends at thirty or forty is but half a life, after all.

PHIL NUGENT: Half a life? I'm aiming to live to a hundred sixty myself. For one thing, I'm looking forward to seeing a new home video release of The Godfather movies, with each successive release being hailed as the first one that does the movies justice and makes all its predecessors look like dogshit, every seven or eight years. I figure that by 2140, they'll have it tweaked to the point that I can reach out and give Apollonia a shoulder massage. But my own longevity aside, I tend to think that most stories reach a logical stopping point long before everybody, or even just the main character, dies. I think The Godfather Part III itself does that: I wish to God they'd faded to black on the scene with Pacino and Sofia on the steps and not shoved in that unnecessary last shot of Pacino toppling off the bench. (Couldn't they at least have hired Ruth Buzzi to come in to sit next to him and occasion the toppling by hitting him with her handbag?)

I'll say this, though: it's definitely a tribute to the power of these movies that it's understandable that people could come out of the sixth hour in the company of these characters and feel that they hadn't gotten enough. (And with the flashbacks in Part II, Coppola managed to make the telling of the lead-in to the story as compelling as spinning it out further. Though he couldn't have known it at the time, this meant that he got to trump George Lucas, who did okay with the Star Wars sequels, but with the prequels, not so much.) It's not as if he's spent the last twenty-five years fighting off demands from the studios that he let them pay him to make Rumble Fish II. And I have to respect Coppola's insistence on treating the third one as if it were part of the family, keeping it included in the box sets. (He could easily weasel his way out of doing that by saying that the point of the re-issues is the restoration of the originals, and that Part III, which was made more recently with pretty current technology, is already available in an acceptable format and doesn't require the same herculean restoration labors as the older films, which were made with a since discontinued color process.) Coppola has done everything short of piss mercury to expand on his cinematic legacy since 1974, and while many of the movies he's made since then have their supporters, none of them have gone very far in denting the impression that he was basically put on Earth to make movies about the Corleones. I guess he ought to have some say in deciding how many of these movies there are.

Taverns On The Screen: The Top Ten Barroom Scenes of Cinema (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 20:00:00 GMT

So, last week (as those of you who didn't black out may recall) we here at The Screengrab took you on a very special Pub Crawl through some of the most distinctive gin joints of celluoid.

This week, it’s hair of the dog time as we return to the world of booze (although we can stop anytime we feel like it...really!) for a survey of movies where the dives themselves may be forgettable, but not so the people (and, occasionally, vampires) who inhabit them.

So belly up to the bars and join us for another round of the finest alcoholic action, drunken destruction, boozy balladeering and sudsy seduction in cinema!

LOST IN TRANSLATION (2003)

Sofia Coppola’s fantasia about a depressed movie star and a directionless young woman stranded in a Tokyo luxury hotel is short on plot but long on atmosphere and the pleasures of indolence...and it’s hard to think of two better people to kill time with than Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson (in what, hopefully, won’t turn out to be her career zenith). The fizzy high point of Lost In Translation takes place during a haphazard bar hop (involving strange Japanese...spud guns? Anyone?) that ends (as all the finest bar hops do) in a private Plexiglas karaoke pod high above the city, where Murray’s Bob Harris surprises Johansson’s Charlotte (and, possibly, himself) with the naked romantic yearning in his rendition of Roxy Music’s “More Than This,” leading to lots of platonic foreplay and climaxing in one of the greatest smooches in all of celluloid. (And if you think your warm, fuzzy memories of the movie would be ruined forever if you ever discovered just what, exactly, Bill Murray whispered into ScarJo's ear following that famous kiss, then for God’s sake, don’t CLICK HERE!)

AFTER HOURS (1985)

Our own Phil Nugent recently covered the convoluted history of Martin Scorsese’s After Hours and the question of its true authorship. Whoever really wrote it and whoever deserves credit for it, though, it’s a deftly made and smartly directed little comedy, and plays up Scorsese’s rarely credited ability to handle comedy. Despite taking place in the wards and dungeons of Manhattan, After Hours focuses on only a few locations; but the one it gets the most use out of is the punk club Berlin, where the tortured soul Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne), already punished beyond reason for the high crime of trying to get into Rosanna Arquette’s pants, must visit in an attempt to do the only thing in the world he wants to do: go home. Just getting in to Berlin is hard enough: he must confront a side-of-beef bouncer (Clarence Felder) who quotes Kafka at him. When he finally gets in the door, he finds that the price of entry is being forcibly corralled by the staff and given a Mohawk as a filmmaker (a cameo by Scorsese himself) shines a spotlight in his face and Bad Brains’ “Pay to Cum” blares on the the P.A. system. And even that isn’t the end: when, later in the wee hours, Paul is forced to return to Berlin to avoid the fury of a mob who think he’s a housebreaker, he finds it nearly deserted save for an avant-garde artist (Verna Bloom) who ‘saves’ him by encasing him bodily in a shell of shellac and old newspapers. For this he paid a five-dollar cover charge?

THE HUDSUCKER PROXY (1994)

Look, we’ve all found ourselves in the same situation as Tim Robbins’ Norville Barnes once in a while. Broke, hopeless, down on your luck; everyone thinks you’re crazy, your best girl thinks you’re a heel, and your former elevator operator is stealing your ideas. (Well, okay, maybe not that last one.) And, to make things worse, it’s New Year’s Eve, and you don’t even have a date. So the least you can do is to stumble into the nearest bar and kill the pain with a slow, steady supply of martinis. But when Norville hits Ann’s 440 – the beatnik bar favored by his gal Friday, the fast-talking Amy Archer (Jennifer Jason Leigh) – even that doesn’t help: Ann’s, as the exasperated bartender played by Steve Buscemi in the Coen Brothers’ screwball homage The Hudsucker Proxy explains time and time again, doesn’t serve “al-key-hool”. It’s a juice bar, with coffee drinks for the extra-adventurous, and no matter how many times Norville asks for a martini (and he asks a lot), he can’t get one, and is forced to live on the ten or twelve he’s already got percolating in his bloodstream. Finally, Amy arrives and tries to talk him down to earth – even favoring him with a rendition of the Muncie High fight song – but it’s no good; Norville flees the bar and before the night is up, he’ll end up on a ledge. Frankly, we can’t blame him; Ann’s 440 looks cool enough, but as Norville drunkenly asks, what kind of bar is it if you can’t get a martini?

FAT CITY (1972)

John Huston's comeback film is set in Stockton, California and stars Stacy Keach as Tully, an alcoholic boxer who's managed to become a has-been without ever having been much of anything in the first place, and Jeff Bridges as Ernie, a younger man who Tully takes a shine to. Tully encourages the kid to take up boxing, as if encouraging anyone to follow in his own career path counted as a favor. The movie has its fair share of scenes in rowdy, darkly lit bars full of people with nowhere else to go in the middle of the day, but its most haunting moment comes at the end, in an unnaturally bright-looking cafe bar that seems to be a hangout for dry drunks. Tully has pulled Ernie there after the kid, spurning his offer that they go out together for a drink, has agreed to grab a cup of coffee. After an exchange of ideas on the subject of the ancient looking bar man ("How you like to be him?" "Maybe he's happy." "Maybe we're all happy."), Tully looks around the place, and Huston freezes the frames to pinpoint the moment of horrified sobriety. Ernie starts to leave, only to agree to Tully's desperate plea that he stick around and "talk some," but the two men have nothing to say to each other, and the credits roll over the image of them sitting together not talking. The actors move just enough to remind you that this time the frame isn't frozen. Maybe they're happy.

PENNIES FROM HEAVEN (1981)

Christopher Walken earned his hoofer's stripes in this phantasmagorical Depression musical, in which he appears as Tom, a politely soulless pimp who meets his latest employee, Bernadette Peters, when she's sitting in a bar trying to recover from being fired from her job as a schoolteacher for being pregnant by a married man who she hasn't heard from lately. In the movie, the characters use music-inspired fantasies to help them get through what their lives have turned into; here, Peters, who can't think of any way to support herself besides turning tricks, is doing her limited best to deal with the awful fact that she's actually met someone who can teach her how, and Walken, who can dance like a son of a bitch, has no problem making you believe that you're seeing something that a person could only pull off in a daydream. After the number is over, Tom rudely snaps her back to reality by warning her that if he discovers she's a tease who's wasting his time, "I'll cut your face." Walken doesn't have any problem with that part, either.

NEAR DARK (1987)

"Just how old are you, Jesse?" someone asks Lance Henriksen, and Henriksen, smiling like a redneck crocodile, replies, "Let me put it this way, son: I fought for the South." Henriksen's Jesse is the father figure in a brood of vampires who look like a white trash family and travel around in a van with the windows blacked out. In the movie's money scene, they wander into a roadside bar that Bill Paxton -- the "big brother" -- declares to be "Shitkicker Heaven" and proceed to use it as their own personal buffet table. A young Adrian Pasdar plays the hero, an innocent young dude who's been inducted into the family by the bite of a winsome, lonely blonde bloodsucker (Jenny Wright) and is still learning the ropes. Once the bodies start dropping, the bartender pulls out a shotgun and blasts Pasdar in the torso. Reflexively, Pasdar reacts as if he were dying and then stops and stands there with a hole in his chest, registering his surprise that he isn't. "It's a trip, ain't it?" says Paxton. There have been a shitload of reworkings of the vampire genre in the last twenty or so years, but in few of them does the blood flow so red and thickly potent as in this scene.

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Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent