The Screengrab : The General

Not Readily Available on Legally Authorized Commercial DVD Release in the Continental United States: "I Went Down" (1997)

Phil Nugent — Tue, 26 May 2009 20:00:00 GMT

The snowballing reputation of the Irish playwright Conor McPherson reached a peak with The Seafarer, which he directed at the National Theatre in London in 2006; last year, the Broadway production won the actor Jim Norton a Tony Award, to go with the Olivier Award he'd won the year earlier for his performance. McPherson himself has directed three feature films, the latest of which, The Eclipse, was recently picked up for distribution after playing at the Tribeca Film Festival. McPherson's first produced screenplay was for I Went Down, an Irish gangland buddy comedy that was a huge indie hit in Ireland in 1997 but achieved only measly distribution here. At that time, McPherson was an unknown quantity here, and for the most part, so were the movie's stars, Peter McDonald and Brendan Gleeson. It was the John Boorman film The General, released here the same year as I Went Down, that helped raise Gleeson's profile as everybody's favorite Irish gangster, a position he shored up last year when he co-starred with Colin Farrell in the playwright Martin McDonagh's movie writing-directing debut, In Bruges. That movie actually has a striking family resemblance to I Went Down, though I Went Down is both lighter in tone and the better, more well-sustaned movie; unlike McDonagh's, it doesn't fall off a cliff overreaching for significance.

McDonald and Gleeson play Git and Bunny, a couple of layabouts who are ordered by a small-town gangster with a face like a bank overdraft notice (Tony Doyle) to run an errand for him, sending them out on the road to bring back an old associate (Peter Caffrey) who he claims is holding some money for him. You know that Git is a good lad because he got into trouble by assaulting a goon who was threatening a friend who hooked up with Git's fiancee while Git was serving an eight-month prison sentence. (It turns out he took the rap for his father, who, it turned out, was terminally ill and didn't survive to see the sentencing date.) You can also see that his run of bad luck has left him with a fatalistic attitude that he only begins to tentatively shake off when he and Bunny collect the gangster's old pal and begin to pick up signs that all may not be as they've been told. ""Did you ever make love to a gangster's wife?" Caffrey asks his new road partners, by way of conversation. "Jesus, you can't really enjoy yourself. It's like making love with the angel of fucking death on your shoulder"

As Bunny, Gleeson is decked out in the trappings of a fortyish rockabilly cat, with sideburns you could use as a can opener. Bunny, who helps set the tone for the slick job of gangstering that he and and Git will be performing off by stopping for gas in a stolen car whose fuel tank he can't get into, looks like nothing but a 200-pound handicap for the first leg od the trip, but he snaps to as he and Git warm to each other and he begins to have a stake in whether or not he makes it to the next day in one piece. (It turns out that he, too, in his own bearish way, is nursing a broken heart. Before setting out on the road, he stop by the house so that he can look through the glass and call out to the wife he's separated from, who's trying to hide in a corridor; he gently points out that he can see her clearly. He also phones in from the road, asking the little girl who answers if he can talk to an adult. "No," she says cheerily, as she hangs up. The director, Paddy Breathnach, keeps things simple, letting the actors develop their own weird rapport and make the most of McPherson's dialogue. (In the only other film of his that I've seen, te 2001 Blow Dry, the director went a little nuts, trying to cram brightly spotlit eccentricity down the audience's gagging throat.) I Went Down may be a small, distant stepping stone in McPherson's and Gleeson's careers, but it's a beautifully cut stone, more gem than pebble.

Screengrab Presents THE TOP TEN BEST FILMS EVER!!!! (Part Nine)

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 15 May 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Paul Clark's Top Ten Best Movies Ever!

1. BELLE DE JOUR (1967)
2. 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968)
3. THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC (1928)

The greatness of The Passion of Joan of Arc stems from the fact that director Carl Th. Dreyer knew what it was that made Joan’s story important- not that she believed that God had tasked her to save France, but that she was so steadfast in her faith that she thought it better do die than to deny it. Consequently, Dreyer’s version of Joan’s story has no battle sequences and no heavenly visions, merely a powerful retelling of Joan’s final days, her trial and execution. The world of this film is an unsparing- one might say godless- one, full of evil and underhanded men who are more than willing to sacrifice Joan for their own political gain. This serves to throw into sharp relief the power of Joan’s faith, by heightening the pain and suffering she endured up to the end for the God in whom she so resolutely believed. Falconetti’s performance, then as now, is a wonder, and it’s only fitting that she never appeared onscreen again- how could she have possibly lived up to it?

4. JEANNE DIELMAN (1975)

The sheer amount of focus that director Chantal Akerman and star Delphine Seyrig bring to this film is pretty breathtaking, showing us the everyday life of one woman over the course of 3 ½ hours. What’s more, Jeanne Dielman isn’t an especially noteworthy woman- she’s a single mother who turns the occasional trick to help pay the bills. But rather than lingering on Jeanne’s side job- which has no bearing on her life outside the confines of her bedroom- Akerman instead shows us the details of her everyday routine- preparing the meals, cleaning the flat, doing the shopping, and so on. Because of Akerman’s extensive use of real time, the film becomes about this routine, and consequently, when anything interrupts the routine, the film gains a surprising amount of impact, even from something as simple as Jeanne not getting her usual seat at the local café. As of now, Jeanne Dielman is unavailable in the United States in any home viewing format, so if the film ever makes it to your local rep house, you owe it to yourself to go.

5. ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (1968)

6. ORPHEUS (1949)

“A legend is entitled to be beyond time and place,” states director Jean Cocteau in his introduction to Orpheus. This unique approach to the original myth allows Cocteau to re-imagine it as one of the kinkiest love-quadrangles the big screen has ever seen, involving the titular poet, his wife Eurydice, Death herself, and her chauffeur Heurtebise. The movie’s key performance is from Maria Casares, who is not the larger-than-life Death that most audiences would expect, but so life-sized and lonely in the role that the love entanglements are allowed to be as poignant as they are. One of the most memorable touches Cocteau brought to the film was his knack for making the real world surreal, not merely through editing and camera trickery (film run backwards for eerie effect, characters suddenly disappearing into thin air), but also through strange locations (a bombed-out building used as the realm of the dead) and surreal plot points (chiefly among them the car radio on which Orpheus listens to the bizarre "poetry"). Cocteau was a true multi-talented artist, and Orpheus is on top of everything else one of the great films about the uneasy mix between art and life, in which life and art intrude onto each other, but in the end, if the art is truly enduring then not even death- or Death- can take it from the world.

7. CITIZEN KANE (1941)

8. PLAYTIME (1967)

I don’t think that any viewer who is paying attention can possibly deny what a singular directorial achievement Playtime is. With this film, a box-office disaster on its initial release, Tati re-created modern-day Paris on his own terms as a sterile maze of boxy skyscrapers, plate-glass windows, and beeping gadgetry. But while other filmmakers might be tempted to turn this setting (built entirely from scratch for the film) into an urban nightmare, Tati- true to the film’s title- concentrates on the funny little eccentricities that sneak their way in. This approach is ideal, as it turns out, as Tati’s impossibly intricate mise-en-scène (his skill at engineering visual moments is even keener than Keaton’s) would run the risk of becoming stifling if it wasn’t done with such offhand charm. To describe any of the priceless moments in the film wouldn’t spoil them so much as it would sell them short, as Tati pulls them off so perfectly, yet so unassumingly. And in the midst of it all is Tati’s signature character Hulot, a bastion of old-fashioned provincialism, who would exist at odds with his hyper-modern surroundings but for his singular brand of good-natured aloofness, which translates surprisingly well to his new environment. Playtime is bravura filmmaking of the gentlest kind, a film that demands to be revisited- and seen on the biggest screen possible- innumerable times to be appreciated, and is a sheer delight on each and every viewing.

9. THE GENERAL (1926)

If I was forced to choose a favorite filmmaker, my first choice would almost certainly be Buster Keaton. But for me, an even tougher choice is which of his films to choose. For the purpose of this list, I decided to disqualify Keaton’s short films, which sadly eliminated such classics as One Week, Neighbors, and The Scarecrow. In the end, while part of me was tempted to choose Sherlock Jr. or Seven Chances, I kept coming back to The General, which is both the greatest Civil War movie ever made and one of the greatest comedies in cinema. Rather than filling the film with wacky, distracting supporting characters, much of The General is comprised of scenes with Keaton alone on the train, and these scenes feature some of the most ingeniously realized gags ever put on film- the most legendary being the one in which Keaton finds a railroad tie atop the tracks in front of the train, so he carefully climbs down onto the train's cowcatcher and uses another railroad tie to knock the first one off the tracks. Like so many of the film's great moments (which are plentiful) this gag is less about gut-busting hilarity than engineering- we marvel at the simple ingenuity of it, with the added charge that Keaton did even the most dangerous stunts himself. There’s also a nonchalance about the film that's refreshing, a charm that takes its cue from its star's unassuming demeanor, that allows even the most intricate gag or potentially deadly stunt to feel like a throwaway, as though instead of a show-stopping moment it's all just another annoyance to this character's routine. Which, of course, only makes it funnier.

10. GATES OF HEAVEN (1978)

Roger Ebert may sometimes be prone to going overboard with praise, but when he’s right, he’s right, and he’s 100% right about Gates of Heaven, a movie he’s been stumping for for more than three decades. Fans of Errol Morris know what I’m talking about, but for the rest of you- yes, it really is that good. Morris may use pet cemeteries as his starting point, but ultimately it's about the ways in which we deal with the death of those we love, and by extension with our own mortality. Morris has always been one of the most patient of documentarians, and one of the chief pleasures of Gates of Heaven is in the distinctive and colorful ways the various interviewees talk, from the bone-weary resignation of failed cemetery owner Floyd McClure to the regurgitated management philosophies of Philip Harberts to (especially) ornery old Florence Rasmussen. And as Morris interviews various owners of dead animals, they reflect on how important these pets were in their lives as a source of companionship and unconditional love- sure, these people sound a little crazy for projecting these feelings onto animals, but simply by presenting these people the film asks us how many people can offer the same kind of loyalty these pet owners felt from their pets? In the end, this film offers no small amount of plain-spoken philosophy, as when one pet owner states, "there's your pet, your pet's dead. But what happened to the thing that made it move?" No film I've seen is this profound about the ways in which people seek meaning not in art or centuries-old wisdom, but in the lives (and deaths) of others.

SPECIAL MENTION: DECALOGUE (1989)

This being a “best movies” list, it’s debatable whether Krzystzof Kieslowski’s The Decalogue really qualifies, since while it has played theatrically all over the world, it was originally intended as a ten-part miniseries for Polish television (call this “special mention” a compromise). What’s undeniable, however, is that this is one of the major works of the twentieth century. Decalogue was inspired by The Ten Commandments, but one of its great achievements is that it views the Commandments less as religious doctrine than key moral tenets that govern most modern-day societies. So rather than trafficking in pious, preachy parables, Kieslowski and co-writer Krzystzof Piesiewicz examine the ways in which people in the modern world struggle with these age-old decrees, not always successfully. In one of the episodes, a girl who has grown close to her widower father must decide how to deal with her feelings after she discovers that he isn't her biological father after all; in another, the unfaithful wife of a gravely ill man finds out that she is pregnant by her lover, and tells her husband's doctor that the unborn child's fate will be decided by whether or not he believes her husband will die. And in the series’ most beloved episode, a teenage voyeur falls in love with a woman he spies on, and decides to become part of her life. The way this film plays out defies all expectation, yet in retrospect the events seem almost inevitable. The Decalogue may or may not be an according-to-Hoyle movie, but I’m guessing that when the history of moving-image-thingies is written, The Decalogue will occupy a place of honor.

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

Contributor: Paul Clark

Set Your DVR!: October 6 - October 12, 2008

Hayden Childs — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Hi, Screengrab readers! For my first post, I thought I’d kick off a series in which I suggest various movies worth recording off of cable TV in the upcoming week. See, I know that since you read the Screengrab, you have a fairly solid grasp on the movies and movie history, but there’s always some that slip through the cracks. The movies I’ll mention here will give you a chance to catch up on those that you might have overlooked. If I miss something, please post it in the comments!

Here’s the skinny: I’m assuming, of course, that you’ve gone to the trouble of getting a DVR (or have a VCR you know how to set, at the very least) to go along with the cable you pay for month after month, but you don’t always keep an eye on upcoming movies. Since you’re reading the Screengrab, I’m not going to recommend movies that everyone recommends, such as Singin’ In The Rain (which, incidentally, I record just about every time it’s on, because I always have time to watch one of the dance numbers). I’m not going to be too esoteric, either. I’ll use an in-law test: I’ll stick with movies that I doubt my mother-in-law has seen, and that way will try to catch some of the great movies that are more likely to slip through the cracks. One more thing: no premium channels, mainly because I can’t afford them.

Mon, Oct. 6:
Nothing here. Good thing, too, since I’m not posting this until Tuesday Morning

Tues, Oct. 7:
9:00 am: Ace In The Hole on TCM. I don’t think this is a very good movie. But plenty of reviewers disagree with me, so I’m going to mention it. Actually, by the time this goes live, it'll probably be too late.

8:00 pm: Don’t Look Back on VH1CL (repeating at 11:30 pm). Maybe you’ve seen this, and maybe not. But it’s one of the great rock documentaries and, if you watch it, you’ll enjoy I’m Not There that much more.

Wed, Oct. 8:
11:45 pm: The Gay Divorcee on TCM. I mentioned I like dancing, right? This is Fred and Ginger at their best.

Th, Oct. 9:
1:45 am: Top Hat on TCM. I take those last comments back. This one is Fred and Ginger at their best.

7:00 pm: Four Jacques Tati films (Jour de Fete, Mr. Hulot’s Holiday, Mon Oncle, and Play Time) on TCM. Ah, the whimsy! Can you stand it? Honestly, I’ve only seen the last of these, and I wasn’t much taken with it at the time. But attitudes change. I intend to record ‘em all.

Fri, Oct. 10:
12:15 am: Play Time on TCM. Already mentioned this.

2:30 am: The General on TCM. Yeah, yeah, I know. Everyone should have seen this by now. But not everyone has, so I hereby recommend that you record and watch it if you fall into that camp.

3:45 am: The Navigator on TCM. Same deal as above.

5:00 am: Macbeth on TCM. This is Orson Welles’ 1948 version where everyone affects a crappy Scottish accent, even the actual Scots in the film. Welles’ accent in particular is so horrid and depressing that it may cause you to think less of Citizen Kane. However! This is one of those movies that has enough greatness and interest elsewhere - in this case, in the visual language of the film and the minor plot changes - that it’s worth a viewing despite its deficiencies.

7:00 am: Gerry on IFC. I love the hell out of Van Sant’s death trilogy (is that a spoiler? I’m not sure). Some viewers find them long and pointless, but I think all three have a transcendent beauty to them that gives meaning to the pointless death in each and begs the question: what’s the point of anyone’s death? In this one, two guys get lost in the desert. There’s a ten-minute tracking shot near the end where they walk from the dark into the morning sun without changing their positions to each other that I think is one of the prettiest scenes in all cinema. It’s almost Abstract Expressionism. Don’t watch it if you don’t like Rothko, but if you do, snap this one up.

8:00 pm: Dick on Oxygen (again at 10:00 pm). This movie looked stupid and fluffy in the previews, and I didn’t watch it until a friend forced it on me. It’s hilarious. Best as the second half of a double feature with All The President’s Men.

Sat, Oct. 11:
6:30 am: Journey Into Fear on TCM. Entertaining little spy thriller with Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten.

7:00 am: Samurai 2 on IFC. The second part of the epic trilogy. Even if you haven’t seen the first part, the plot is fairly self-explanatory and thoroughly enjoyable.

10:15 am: Primer on IFC (repeat at 3:00 pm). Smart, smart no-budget sci-fi thriller. I had to watch it a couple of times (and finally consult a website) to untangle the central mystery, but that’s part of the fun.

11:00 am: After The Thin Man on TCM. The second Thin Man movie. That’s all I need to say, right?

3:00 pm: The Haunting on TCM. This is the 1963 Robert Wise movie, not the awful remake. I recommended it to a friend last Halloween, and she told me it was the worst movie she’d ever seen. I think she’s very, very wrong. It still creeps me the hell out.

Sun, Oct. 12:
5:00 am: 24 hours of Paul Newman movies (The Rack, Until They Sail, Torn Curtain, Exodus, Sweet Bird Of Youth, Hud, Somebody Up There Likes Me, Cool Hand Luke, Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, Rachel, Rachel, and The Outrage) on TCM. Have you seen all of these? I haven’t. Go on, catch up on the guy’s work.

7:00 am: Cleo From 5 to 7 on IFC. Many classics of the French New Wave spend so much time and effort trying to unlock the mysterious, riddle-like conundrum of the enigmatic, baffling desires of oh-so-fickle womanhood that no one will forget they were made by men. This one was actually made by a women, and you can tell.

6:45 pm: Last Days on IFC (showing again Monday at 3:35 am). The third in Van Sant’s death trilogy. I suspect it plays much better if you don’t really care about Kurt Cobain. I don’t, and I loved it.

7:00 pm: Dave Chappelle’s Block Party on MTV2 (repeat on Monday at 5:00 pm). Aw yeah! Somehow Michel Gondry and Dave Chappelle combined forces to make a concert film that is good-natured, loose-limbed, and funny in ways that most concert films could not even conceive.

Mon, Oct. 13:
In case I’m late getting the next installment up on Monday, I just want to mention the following:

11:00 am: George Washington on IFC (repeat at 4:15 pm). Slow and thoughtful take on African-American youths in a go-nowhere Southern town directed by the guy who made Pineapple Express. Obvious influences: Terrence Malick and Charles Burnett.

2:00 pm: Vanishing Point on FMC. The lesser of the two great existential car movies of 1971 (Two-Lane Blacktop is the other). This one’s still a pop culture point-of-reference, especially for Tarantino movies. Definitely worth a viewing.

Screengrab Presents: The Top 25 War Films (Part Seven)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 23:30:00 GMT

HONORABLE MENTION

300 (2007)

Even relatively anti-war films like Platoon acknowledge the fierce camaraderie and euphoric adrenalin rush of warriors in combat, but this surrealistic adaptation of Frank Miller’s graphic novel about a legendary phalanx of Spartans taking on a zillion enemy warriors is all bloodlust, all the time. Yet, while historically suspect (since modern researchers are pretty sure the power-mad Persian king Xerxes didn’t really command a legion of trolls, orcs and giants from the darkest reaches of Middle Earth), and hardly on par with more serious evocations of combat (like, say, Apocalypse Now or Full Metal Jacket), 300 is notable, like many of the best war films, as a reflection of its time. Some critics detected jingoistic echoes of George W. Bush’s “bring ‘em on” foreign policy in the refusal of Spartan badass King Leonidas (Gerard Butler) to negotiate with foreign powers, going it alone with his own Coalition of the Willing when other nations (and a cowardly Congress...er, Spartan Council) refuse to authorize war against an imminent Persian threat to democracy and freedom. Just as Nixon reportedly watched Patton over and over again before sending troops into Cambodia, it’s easy to imagine Bush viewing 300 to make himself feel better about sending American troops into combat without sufficient body armor: after all, Leonidas and his 299 BFFs take down half Xerxes’ army bare-chested! Framed as a tale of indeterminate tallness relayed by a warrior to inspire his fellow troops on the verge of combat, the fetishized fairy tale unreality of 300’s violence, tone and (xenophobic) politics, its conflicted homophobic/homoerotic ideal of manliness, its complete surrender to (and celebration of) CGI fakery and its wild popularity and seductive guilty pleasure craftsmanship all combine into a fascinating time capsule of an age when troops compare combat to video games and the line between fact and fiction, has never seemed quite so blurry.

JOHNNY GOT HIS GUN (1971)

Some antiwar films spin their message with subtlety, some with humor, some with grace and some with a quiet sense of loss. Not Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun: it cuffs you to your chair and spends the next two hours beating you over the head with its message that war is nothing more than a huge grinding machine designed to destroy bodies and minds. Based on his own novel – which had the misfortune to appear on the eve of the Second World War, thus assuring its brutal message would be completely drowned out – Johnny Got His Gun was directed and written by Trumbo himself, following a thirty-year quest to bring the story to the screen. It’s not a particularly accomplished movie; Trumbo was a first-time director, and it shows. But the sheer horror it conveys through the portrayal of young Joe Bonham, a WWI veteran who has been rendered more or less a human paperweight by an enemy shell, and the sheer contempt it shows for a social order in which hundreds of thousands of lives are destroyed as if that were an acceptable way to solve problems, makes for a devastating viewing experience, and one which found a much more receptive audience at the height of the Vietnam War. (Many viewers later became familiar with Johnny Got His Gun due to its being heavily excerpted in Metallica’s video for “One”; the band had encountered so many difficulties in licensing individual scenes that they eventually just bought the entire move outright.)

THE GENERAL (1927)

Buster Keaton's Civil War comedy starring a train is probably the greatest war comedy of the silent era, unless you want to count The Birth of a Nation as history's little joke on D. W. Griffith's reputation. In the big battle scene, the Union army was played by five hundred members of the Oregon National Guard, and the Confederates were played by the same five hundred members of the Oregon National Guard, after a quick costume change. Apparently Keaton had some doubts about the acting ability of the guy playing the Northern general who sees the train tumbling into a river as the bridge it's crossing is dynamited, since legend has it that he didn't tell the fellow that the bridge he was facing was about to be blown up while the train was crossing it; certainly the man's expression of surprise is Oscar-worthy. After the location shooting was done, Keaton and his crew went back to Hollywood without bothering to clean up after themselves, and the wreckage of the train remained where it had fallen. The locals turned it into a tourist attraction until the scrap metal was needed during World War II.

MEN IN WAR (1957)

This diamond-hard Korean War drama was directed by Anthony Mann, a once-neglected action master who's now best remembered for his Westerns with James Stewart. Though little known, this movie is up there with the best of those. The superb cast is headed by Robert Ryan as a lieutenant in charge of a platoon lost behind enemy lines. As they inch their way along in search of safe ground, they're joined by a couple of strays: blunt, bullying Aldo Ray and Robert Keith -- gaunt and aged-looking, with huge hands and haunted eyes -- as a mute, shell-shocked Colonel who Ray treats as protectively as an especially mean seeing eye watching out for its master. The flat simplicity of the movie's title summons up echoes of early Hemingway, and its best scenes would do Papa proud.

Click Here for Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five & Part Six

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent

CGI Must Die: 5 Reasons Why

Andrew Osborne — Mon, 12 May 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Plastic surgery is a good metaphor for CGI (a.k.a. "computer-generated imagery"): it works best when you’re least aware of it, adding value without calling attention to its glaring, unnatural fakery. A little and you’re marveling at the natural, age-appropriate sexiness of Susan Sarandon, Helen Mirren or Meryl Streep, wondering “did she or didn’t she?” with regard to nips, tucks and nose jobs. Too much, and you’re recoiling in horror at that freakish Cat Lady lady, gasping in shock over missing noses and airbag lips, or wondering why Nicole Kidman keeps wearing that creepy Nicole Kidman mask.

Hollywood has developed an unhealthy addiction to both plastic surgery and CGI, preferring the obviously fake to the convincingly real, whether in the form of grotesquely disproportionate rock-hard breasticles or pixilated atrocities like Speed Racer, the cinematic equivalent of watching other people's birthday brats play video games at Chuck E. Cheese for an endless 135 minutes.

Did Jar-Jar Binks teach us nothing? Call me old-fashioned, but I still prefer a little special in my special effects: cinematic images that make me go, “Oh my God, how’d they do that?” rather than, “Dude, that reminds me of this awesome World of Warcraft battle I just posted on YouTube!”

If you’re one of the CGI addicted who think all non-pixelated movie effects are inherently “cheesy,” consider the following clips an intervention as we here at the Screengrab present five examples of amazing movie moments that had (almost) nothing to do with computer-generated imagery.

Just about any Buster Keaton movie

See that car falling apart while Buster Keaton is driving it? See the front of that house falling and nearly crushing him? See that bridge collapsing with the train on it? All that shit actually happened in real life, not in post-production!

The Road Warrior

Why are high speed car chases with actual cars (and trucks and motorcycles and gyrocopters) better than computerized car action? Gee, I don’t know...maybe the same reason sex with an actual human being is better than internet porn?

The Thing (1982)

Sure, the shape-shifting alien action in John Carpenter’s The Thing may look as fake and unbelievable as CGI...but the viscous, tactile ooze has an icky, organic quality that's very hard to duplicate in the shiny world of greenscreen ones and zeroes.

Altered States

CGI scenes all tend to have a similar look, not unlike the legions of aging Hollywood starlets sporting “trout pout” and Spitting Image puppet faces after one too many visits to the neighborhood Botox dispensary. Directors and special effects coordinators forced to get a little more creative, however, may come up with distinctive, fucked-up and memorable images like those found in this one-of-a-kind Ken Russell phantasmagoria.

Star Wars

And speaking of tactile...one word: models. The star destroyer in the opening scene of Star Wars (along with all the nooks and crannies of all the ships in 2001, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Alien) were and remain more iconic and dramatic than all the CGI pod-racers, Naboo royal cruisers or Trade Federation frigates the computers at Skywalker Ranch have ever rendered.

Don’t get me wrong. CGI has achieved some amazing things: the bullet-time sequences in The Matrix, Gollum and that buck naked Angelina Jolie in Beowulf. But enough is enough, people. It’s time for Hollywood to go cold turkey.

For the betterment of all humanity...CGI Must Die.