The Screengrab : a clockwork orange

Trailer Review: In the Loop

Paul Clark — Fri, 29 May 2009 16:00:00 GMT

For my final Trailer Review here at Screengrab, I thought it would be nice to go out on an up note. So in lieu of the trailer for something I’m dying to see- what, still nothing from Avatar or Tree of Life out there?- I’m posting one of the best trailers I’ve seen lately, for Armando Iannucci’s political comedy In the Loop. Since the international trailer for this posted earlier this year, I’ve been getting a vibe similar to that of the original British Office, but to my eyes that’s a good thing. And I’m something of a sucker for trailers that don’t just stick to the usual trailer tricks- the style of this one is an homage to Kubrick’s original Clockwork Orange spots, down to the use of the Wendy Carlos sped-up electronic version of the “William Tell Overture.” But what I like most about this is that it doesn’t come right out and tell you everything you know about the premise of the movie, but it puts enough out there in one form or another that one can more or less figure out what’s going on if he’s paying attention. But then, what’s not to love about a trailer that includes a reference to Bugsy Malone- hardly the sort of allusion one generally finds in movies, much less the trailers for them.

Th-Th-That's All Folks! The Best & Worst Endings Of All Time (Part Eleven)

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 29 May 2009 01:30:00 GMT

The Worst:

A.I. (2001)

One of my day jobs is teaching various screenwriting courses, and I always use A.I. as a prime example of how NOT to end a movie. Of course, Steven Spielberg pretty much deserves his own wing in the terrible ending hall of fame: Minority Report, Saving Private Ryan, Munich, Schindler’s List and the tacky, tacked-on “Special Edition” ending of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which pretty much robbed the original ending of all its original mystery and wonder by not freakin’ knowing when to leave well enough alone. Of course, this unnatural, Brundlefly amalgam of the director’s flashy Hollywood huckster instincts and the Kubrickian darkness of the project’s original father (who died while the project was still mired in development hell) is pretty hapless throughout its running time, but it does manage a nice, poetic moment when David (Haley Joel Osment), a robot programmed to yearn for love from a mother who despises him, winds up trapped beneath the ocean, staring at a statue of the Blue Fairy, wishing endlessly for something he can never have. Hmm, I thought watching the movie for the first time, not a bad little dramatization of the human condition there, Spielberg...for don’t we all wish for things we’re programmed to want but can never achieve? Yet Spielberg, being the kind of guy who DOES get everything he wants, apparently has no use for the bittersweet frustrations of the great unwashed. Nope, Spielberg’s all about happy endings...and, apparently, mommy issues, because the movie doesn’t stop there: instead, it goes on and on and interminably on, getting sillier (and creepier) with each passing moment, as millennia pass and magical future robots allow little David to finally get what he always wanted...alone time in bed with a mother who LOVES him and ONLY him, dammit! C.G.I. + T.M.I. = ick. (AO)

CONTACT (1997)

Seriously, Robert Zemeckis and Carl Sagan? After all the mind-numbing science-vs.-faith arguments between Jody Foster’s astronomer and Matthew McConaughey’s minster, all you deliver is a silly-looking CG beach landscape – snow white sand! glowing blue water! – and the revelation that the much-discussed alien/God is Foster’s dearly departed daddy? It’s a figurative punch in the stomach from a film that’s already spent two hours slapping us in the face with faux-profound jibber-jabber and wannabe-2001 “trippy” sequences. (NS)

SCHOOL DAZE (1988)

So far, so good: by the time he reached the end of his second feature, School Daze, Spike Lee had opened up to new filmmaking techniques as well as expanding his political and emotional canvas to much wider and deeper topics than he’d attempted in She’s Gotta Have It. As the final moments of the two-hour film approached, Lee had introduced elements as far-ranging and controversial as class and race issues in the black community, date rape, divestiture, careerism and gentrification, and revolution vs. assimilation. It would be difficult to tie all those threads together, but Lee had matured so much as a filmmaker, viewers were confident he could pull it off. So what happens? Lawrence Fishburne lumbers all over campus, hollering “WAKE UP!” to audience and actors alike, all of whom seem surprised that he’s gone off script. Viewers wanted to wake up, all right – to a world in which Lee hadn’t pissed away all the goodwill of the rest of the movie on this obnoxious, go-nowhere student film ending. (LP)

JUICE (1992)

Whatever alien virus possessed Spike Lee to give School Daze such a flimsy cop-out of an ending, he apparently passed it on to his cinematographer. Four years later, when the talented but inconsistent Ernest Dickerson made his debut as a feature film director, it was with Juice, his own take on the gangsta epic that was then sweeping Hollywood; for most of its running time, it was a particularly compelling example of the genre, buoyed by solid performances in the lead roles by Omar Epps and Tupac Shakur. Then, in the movie’s climactic moments, bam! Spike Lee Disease strikes again: in a turn of events that is, to put it mildly, highly unlikely, Epps’ character tosses aside his piece and then pursues and disarms Shakur, who obligingly falls off of a building. A random partygoer tells Epps that now, he’s got the “juice”, which explains and/or resolves exactly nothing when it comes to everything that has gone before. All that talent on display, and not a script doctor in sight. (LP)

A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1971)

It’s not exactly Stanley Kubrick’s fault that the ending of A Clockwork Orange falls short. At the time he did his infamous adaptation of the Anthony Burgess novel, the actual end of the book, the 21st chapter, was not available in American versions. (Kubrick lived in England, but he’d first read an American edition of the novel.) So when the script was written, he had no idea that the chapter even existed. It features an older if not wiser Alex growing bored with his utra-violent lifestyle and contemplating going straight, getting a job, and raising his own family – a contemplation which, turning the book’s themes of moral panic on their ears, includes the vital possibility that his children might seem as nightmarish to him as he seems to be to his parents’ generation. Without this insight, Burgess considered the American version of the book to be deeply flawed; and without its subversive self-criticism, the movie Kubrick made of it seems morally and philosophically confused. Still, he’s not entirely blameless; when filming started, he got hold of an English edition with the complete 21st chapter, and decided not to change the script one bit. (LP)

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

Okay, the ending of this neo-pulp cult classic isn’t great. It’s one of those big cast mashups that were ubiquitous in the 1980s, with the whole cast walking purposefully together while music blared on the soundtrack and the camera jumped around showing the audience what it looked like when people walked from one place to another from different angles. But that isn’t what makes it one of the most disappointing endings of all time. It’s the very last thing we see before the movie fades to black: a title card promising that Buckaroo Banzai and His Hong Kong Cavaliers will be back, in Buckaroo Banzai Against the World Crime League. Twenty-five years later, it’s a promise that has yet to be fulfilled. Today, deals are inked to make multi-picture franchises long before they know whether the first movie will be a hit or a dud; even as we speak, a sequel to the nearly universally panned (and not nearly as popular as it was anticipated to be) Transformers movie is gearing up to hit theaters. So why, every time we watch this widely beloved cult hit, must we be reminded of a sequel that’s never going to come? (LP)

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Nick Schager, Leonard Pierce

Th-Th-That's All Folks! The Best & Worst Endings Of All Time! (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 28 May 2009 21:30:00 GMT

THE GRADUATE (1967)

As I noted in our list of the Top Ten Best Movies Of All Time, The Graduate is pretty close to perfect, right down to its classic finale. All by itself, the climactic rush to the altar made our list of great “race-against-time” scenes, and the sequence where Dustin Hoffman’s character pounds the church window and wields a crucifix against the older generation to rescue his lady love from bland suburban mediocrity still feels cathartic today. But the final moments truly seal the deal in one of the greatest ambiguous fade-outs of all time as Katharine Ross’ Elaine stares at the man she’s chosen, suddenly wondering what exactly comes after “happily ever after,” while Hoffman’s Ben stares straight ahead, the lost expression of the opening scenes returning to his face as he clearly wonders, “Now what?” Considering Charles Webb, the author of the source material, spent the next several decades in cash-strapped obscurity, tending a clinically-depressed lady with painted-on eyebrows named Fred while trying to get a Graduate sequel off the ground, maybe Ben and Elaine had reason to worry. (AO)

2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968)

The ending to Stanley Kubrick’s sci-fi masterpiece continues, forty years after its release, to baffle and intrigue, its post-light-show sights – a white room; Keir Dullea’s astronaut seeing himself, as an elderly man at a table and dying in bed; the monolith’s sudden reappearance – forming a tantalizing riddle. In its final, mesmerizing image of the star-child, 2001 does what no subsequent Kubrick film did, presenting a hopeful vision of the future, one in which man is finally free (at least until the forthcoming dystopia of A Clockwork Orange) of his base animalism. (NS)

A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1971)

Let me first make it clear that I’m very much aware that the Anthony Burgess novel A Clockwork Orange was originally published with a final chapter that never saw the light of day in the United States until Rolling Stone featured it in a 1987 issue. That’s when I first read it, and at that point I’d already seen the movie approximately 783 times. (Stanley Kubrick claimed he’d never seen the missing chapter before making his film, but he had – he just didn’t like it.) Burgess’ ending finds the cured Alex out for another night on the town with his new droogies. But he’s not really up for it – he’s getting too old for this shit, and entertaining thoughts of domestic bliss. I never felt like I needed to know this about him. “I was cured all right” strikes the right note for me – it doesn’t preclude the possibility of Burgess’ outcome, after all, but if we’re going to give this guy his free will back…well, we better be prepared for anything. It’s hard to imagine that final chapter fitting in cinematically with the world we’ve been immersed in for over two hours, and as Kubrick later demonstrated when working with Stephen King, he was never one to let the author’s intentions get in the way of his own worldview. (SVD)

STROSZEK (1977)

Werner Herzog has never been interested in sticking to convention, and nowhere is this more in evidence than in the strange and wonderful Stroszek. Beginning with a fairly formulaic setup -- a trio of misfits journey to America in search of a new life -- Herzog then proceeds to spin out his story in the most unexpected of ways. After hard times hit, the film courts cliché as the title character (played by Bruno S.) and his elderly pal Clemens Scheitz decide to hold up their bank, but when the bank is closed they rob the neighboring barber shop instead to the tune of a whopping $35 and use it to go shopping before Scheitz gets arrested. From there, it gets even odder. It’s the images that Herzog finds to conclude his tale that make this a classic, as we witness the sight of the stolen tow truck, now set ablaze, driving in circles around the parking lot with nobody at the wheel. So bizarre is the spectacle that it’s easy to miss Bruno climbing onto the ski lift with his shotgun, followed by the sound of the shotgun firing. Then, of course, there’s that dancing chicken, one of the most famous images in Herzog’s entire oeuvre. According to Herzog, the entire crew hated the damn chicken, but it so fascinated him that he felt the need to journey 600 miles from his principal filming location in order to shoot the final scene in the rest stop where the chicken danced. What does it all mean? Herzog, to his credit, leaves it to us to decide. (PC)

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (2007)

No Country For Old Men denies audiences the grand gesture and the blood. Strange to say about a film that features a killer who is less a man than a force of nature, but it's true. When Llewelyn first comes upon the scene of the drug shootout, the violence is over. When the bullets finally find Llewelyn, it happens offscreen. When Sheriff Ed Tom Bell stumbles into a potential conflict with Chigurh, the killer has melted away. Carla Jean even dies offscreen. It's a bloody movie, sure, but it studiously avoids giving audiences the easy conclusions that they may want. This is especially true at the end of the movie. Sheriff Bell has retired, giving his wife the peace of mind she wants, and he describes a couple of dreams he had to her. Both feature Bell's father, who he told us in the introduction was sheriff before him. In the first, he's lost money that his father gave him. In the second, his father silently passes him, carrying a fire, and Bell knows he will make a fire to protect and warm him. That's one of the beautiful things about this movie: even as it denies audiences their basest impulses, it gives them something unexpected. Here, the language is one of author Cormac McCarthy's major concerns, the existential quest for a moral code in a fallen world. The Coen brothers like to subvert expectations, and it's fair to say that this jolt of philosophy wasn't at all what audiences were expecting. But it was a far greater gift. (HC)

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven & Twelve

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Nick Schager, Scott Von Doviak, Paul Clark, Hayden Childs

Ozsploitation! “Dead End Drive-In” (1986)

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 20:30:00 GMT

Inspired by the terrific new documentary Not Quite Hollywood, the Screengrab is proud to present Ozsploitation!, our own survey of the golden age of Australian drive-in movies. Pop a tube, throw another shrimp on the barbie and try not to chunder.

Our Australian friends sure love their post-apocalypses. Maybe this is because so much of their country already looks like the apocalypse has come and gone. (I mean this in the most admiring way, of course.) Or maybe it’s just because Mad Max made a shitload of money, paving the way for on-the-cheap end of the world scenarios. Ozsploitation titan Brian Trenchard-Smith is certainly a fan of what he calls “What if?” stories, and here’s another one that’s worth a look, depending on your tolerance for the sights and sounds of the mid-80s.

A quickie opening crawl advises us of a near-future in the throes of global economic crisis. (I know – crazy!) Society is breaking down, roving gangs of “carboys” are making the streets unsafe for law-abiding citizens, and the government is resorting to desperate measures to keep the peace. Our hero Crabs (Ned Manning) learns just how desperate when he takes his girl Carmen (Natalie McCurry) out for a romantic evening at the drive-in. He makes the mistake of purchasing two “unemployed” tickets, which sounds like a bargain until you realize this is a signal to law enforcement that you are not to be allowed to leave the drive-in – ever.

While Crabs is getting it on with Carmen in the backseat of the ’56 Chevy convertible he borrowed from his brother, two of his tires are stolen. He reports the incident to the theater manager, who informs him there are no spare parts, no phones and no way to leave the theater without an operational vehicle, since pedestrians are illegal on the freeway. Furthermore, Crabs and Carmen are not alone in the drive-in; indeed, it’s a veritable concentration camp of disenfranchised youth, albeit one with a fully stocked concession stand. Crabs soon learns he is virtually alone in wanting to leave the drive-in and get back to real life, which is understandable. The drive-in seems like a pretty fun place to me, although I reckon I’d get sick of the ongoing Brian Trenchard-Smith film festival eventually. (Turkey Shoot is among the features that can be glimpsed on the drive-in screen.)

Still, Dead End would make for a fun night at the drive-in, especially if the theater owners were willing to spring for replicas of the movie’s paddy wagons to patrol the grounds as the flick unspools. Sure, it’s made up of spare parts from Mad Max, The Warriors, A Clockwork Orange and Repo Man, but that’s a testament to Trenchard-Smith’s good taste. A testament to his bad taste is the incredibly dated look of the film, a mosh pit of punk and new wave styles, junkyard production design – heavy on the neon – and admittedly bargain-basement Casiontone score. Then again, if you spent your formative years in this era like me, you’re probably a sucker for this stuff. Trenchard-Smith lays the social commentary on too thick in the waning moments as the youth of the drive-in revolt against the influx of Asian immigrants, but there’s a reasonably entertaining car chase to cleanse the palate. I’ll give it three Foster’s.

Previously on Ozsploitation!
Roadgames
Long Weekend

When Good Directors Go Bad: Waterloo (1970, Sergei Bondarchuk)

Paul Clark — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Of all the great cinematic epics, none is bigger than Sergei Bondarchuk's War and Peace. Simply put, everything about the film is massive- its budget (upwards of $100 million in 1960s dollars), its production schedule (nearly five years), its cast (tens of thousands of Red Army soldiers were used as extras in the battle sequences), even its running time of nearly eight hours. Yet War and Peace would merely be a footnote in movie history if its largesse was its only notable quality. Reviews of the day praised it not only for its epic scope and impeccable production values but also for its emotional sensitivity and human drama. Even today, War and Peace remains a masterpiece of its kind, and the rare adaptation of a great novel that does justice to its classic source material. For this not insignificant miracle, credit should be given not only to the Soviet film industry but also to Bondarchuk's sure-footed direction.

After the international acclaim for War and Peace, Bondarchuk decided to make a film about The Battle of Waterloo. For most filmmakers, this would have seemed a hugely ambitious project, but compared to War and Peace, a seemingly modest one for Bondarchuk. In order to bring the project to the screen, Bondarchuk received financial backing from Italian super-producer Dino De Laurentiis, and together they enlisted several well-known actors, led by Rod Steiger as Napoleon and Christopher Plummer as the Duke of Wellington. In addition, the film's $25 million budget afforded Bondarchuk the chance to re-create the battle on the same scale as the wartime sequences in War and Peace. But despite these factors, Waterloo was a disappointment both with critics and with audiences, garnering mostly middling reviews and making back less than one-fifth of its original budget, and sending its once-hot director back to the USSR for the rest of his career.

After Waterloo flopped big-time at the box office, De Laurentiis chalked its failure up to the lack of big-money stars in the cast. But while it's tempting to wonder what sort of Napoleon could be played by De Laurentiis' first choice Richard Burton, I'd say that Steiger did just fine with the role. This is especially true in the character's more grandiose moments- Steiger was always a magnificent ham, and Napoleon gave him a chance to cut loose in some entertaining ways that livened up the film. And for his part, Plummer did a capable job as the arrogant upper-class general Wellington.

Likewise, I'd say the battle sequences are as spectacular as advertised. As in War and Peace, the sight of thousands upon thousands of actual humans on the battlefield is still impressive, and still impossible to duplicate with CGI. In order for the sheer magnitude to achieve its intended effect, Bondarchuk films most of the battle in long shots, the better to comprehend the narrative of the battle itself. I also liked Bondarchuk's use of "God's eye" shots at several times in the battle, especially when the English Army forms itself into tight squares to fight off the advancing French cavalry. Had Bondarchuk tried to make a tactics-heavy recreation of the battle a la Cy Endfield's Zulu, Waterloo might have been a classic.

As it stands, the film is a missed opportunity, primarily because he and screenwriter H.A.L. Craig simply can't find a way to successfully integrate his principal characters into the battle. One of the triumphs of War and Peace was that Bondarchuk made us care about the people who were fighting the battle. But rather than exploring the lives of some of the soldiers in any kind of depth, Bondarchuk concentrates his narrative on Wellington and Napoleon and the differences in their approaches to war. This contrast is fairly interesting early on, but once the battle begins the tactic stops working. After all, it's hard to care about two men who essentially stand back and watch as thousands of men march to their deaths.

Today, any notoriety Waterloo may have comes mostly from the rumor that its disappointing box office performance led to production being shut down on Stanley Kubrick's Napoleon. But whether or not this is the case, the bile this idea summons up in some cinephiles is somewhat unfair. After all, hugely expensive epics were on their way out, and besides, Kubrick made A Clockwork Orange instead, so it's not like his career took much of a hit. Taken on its own terms, Waterloo ultimately doesn't work, but there are dazzling sequences that demonstrate what a gifted filmmaker Bondarchuk was, and it's a shame that more of his work isn't available in the U.S. I guess seeing him “go bad” on such a grand scale has made me want to see him make good again.

The Screengrab Holiday Special: Movies We're Thankful For (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 15:30:00 GMT

SCOTT VON DOVIAK IS THANKFUL FOR:

JAWS (1975)

It's the summer of 1975 and I have successfully completed the second grade. I am living on a Navy base in Puerto Rico, and I've got the run of the place: swimming pool, ball field, bowling alley, snack bar all within easy biking distance…and of course, the movie theater. We're a few months behind the states, which means every time a kid comes back from a week's vacation stateside, I hear about it all over again: Jaws. By summer's end, I have entire scenes memorized and I haven't even seen the damn thing yet. Every week I check the base newsletter (El Tiburon – meaning, of course, "the shark," and did I mention that our little league team was also called the Sharks?) for the upcoming movie listings. Finally it appears on the schedule. When the big night arrives, I pedal to the theater, ditch my bike and get in line. While trying to catch my breath, I overhear bits of conversation. They're not talking about sharks – they're talking about pinball wizards and deaf, dumb and blind kids. I get to the ticket window. "Sorry, there was a misprint. The movie tonight is Tommy." I pedal home in tears. I rage to my parents about the unfairness of it all. My dad gets on the horn and raises a stink. Apparently he's not the only one. The next night, I finally get my shark movie. I close my eyes when the head pops out from under the boat – I knew it was coming – but other than that, I'm good. I've seen it a few times since then.

A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1971)

A few years later I'm in high school in Maine. My friends Nick and Rodney and I are the A/V department, which somehow entitles us – again – to the run of the place. We've got keys to everything, including the teacher's lounge, where we sometimes hang out long after hours, watching the rough footage of our day's production. (Our primary function is shooting the basketball games and school plays, but we often commandeer the equipment to make our own sketch comedy show, a sublime blend of the Monty Python and Bert and I sensibilities, God willing now lost to the ages.) One day someone brings in a rented copy of A Clockwork Orange, a movie I'd tried to watch once before. I wasn't ready for it then; I was ready for it now. There can't possibly be a more awesome, mind-blowing movie when you're sixteen years old – especially if you're watching it in the teacher's lounge. Up until now I'd always been baffled and a little perturbed that the director got so much more credit than the screenwriter. So the director decides where to put the camera and maybe works with the actors a little? So what? A Clockwork Orange clarified the matter for me, more so than any Filmmaking 101 course ever could. When I got to college and caught up on Pauline Kael and company, I learned that not everyone was quite so enamored with it. I even grudgingly conceded they might have a point or two, but the impact of that long-ago viewing still lingers.

APOCALYPSE BOP (1996)

Every cineaste should get a chance to play movie star once in their lives, and I got that opportunity when fellow Screengrabber Andrew Osborne cast me in the lead role of Zeke in his indie feature Apocalypse Bop. (What can I say, my price was right.) I was working as an office drone at Warner Bros. in Los Angeles when word came through that the financing was in place (i.e., Andrew had maxed out his credit cards – where is his government bailout, I ask you?) and shooting was scheduled to commence in Boston and Middleboro, Mass. Although fully prepared to quit my job, I was given a leave of absence by an understanding boss and jetted east for the month-long shoot. As the perpetually harried writer-director-producer, I'm sure Andrew has a very different perspective (and maybe he'll tell you all about it someday), but we cast members had an absolute blast – that is, until the final days when my immune system finally shut down under the strain of 12-hour shooting days and late-night partying. The movie itself – a surreal Gen-X comedy about a party at the end of the world – didn't become the next Clerks, but it had a respectable festival run and I happen to think it's pretty groovy – and you can order your own copy for cheap in the fancy new VHS format if you're curious! Later I would go on to co-write and co-star in the Austin-shot indie What I Like About You, but it wasn't quite the same experience as my summer vacation as a movie star.

DELIVERANCE (1972)

On a whim during the summer of 2001, I decided to partake in a combination canoe trip, BBQ and outdoor screening of Deliverance sponsored by the Alamo Drafthouse (see below). I thought it might make for a fun Film Threat article, but I ended up getting a lot more out of it than that. The complete tale of my harrowing voyage is told in the preface to my book Hick Flicks – which was inspired by this very same event. Before the feature presentation began, trailers from '70s drive-in pictures like Gator, Grizzly and Smokey and the Bandit were shown, and I had a flash of inspiration that led to nearly three years worth of research, writing and – most time-consuming of all – watching hundreds of (mostly terrible) movies about moonshine, fast cars, redneck sheriffs and killer hillbillies. Eventually, however, I got a book out of it, and that will live on into eternity – or at least until all the copies decompose.

ALAMO DRAFTHOUSE

I've been a working film critic for nearly a decade now, and I must confess that the thrill of going to the movies is…I won't say gone, but somewhat diminished. Very often I'm assigned to review movies I wouldn't see on a dare otherwise. The screenings are free, but not always convenient, and many of them are promo events sponsored by radio stations with loudmouth hosts shooting t-shirts into the audience…the whole production has very little resemblance to what I used to love about going to the movies. (Has my pity party started yet?) So it is that on this day of turkey, stuffing, football and giant floating Underdogs, I give thanks to the Alamo Drafthouse, which has made moviegoing fun again. How have they done this? Well, they've added beer to the proceedings, which is always a plus in my book. But they also have tasty food, unusual programming and a keen sense of showmanship. You always want to get there early for the custom-tailored pre-show. And, of course, for the beer.

And thank you, Screengrab reader, for putting up with my little walk down memory lane. My list may have seemed somewhat random, but I'm very thankful for all of the above and I'm glad it's all on the record. Now go get you some more pie.

Click Here For More Thanks From Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Paul Clark, Leonard Pierce & Sarah Clyne Sundberg

Contributor: Scott Von Doviak

Introducing the Screengrab 24-Hour Stephen King Marathon

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 19:30:00 GMT

As a special Halloween treat for Screengrab readers, I will be prying my eyelids open Clockwork Orange-style for a 24-hour marathon of movies based on the works of Stephen King. Because I have not completely lost my mind, these 24 hours will not necessarily be consecutive. I’ll be stringing them out all week, with each entry covering roughly six hours worth of possessed cars, killer dogs and corn-worshipping children. (However, once I’ve completed the task and reported my findings here, feel free to conduct your own 24-hour-straight experiment. I did this once before for my book Hick Flicks, watching 24 consecutive hours of hillbilly horror movies – including all four chapters of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre saga then in existence. About 18 hours into it, my dog was begging for mercy and I had to switch to the Golf Channel for a few minutes to decompress.)

I’ve set a few ground rules for this descent into the depths of cinematic terror. First of all, the roster must include only horror movies. No prison flicks or coming-of-age stories or whatever the hell Hearts in Atlantis is. This is a Halloween special, after all, so I need giant rats and werewolves and shit like that. Secondly, I eliminated any movie I’m very familiar with – The Shining, Carrie and Stand by Me, to cite the most obvious examples – as well as anything I’d seen in the past decade or so. That includes recent fare like The Mist, 1408 and Dreamcatcher, as well as the movies I watched for this High Hat piece on the state of Maine as depicted in King’s works. I didn’t want to be able to cheat and go by memory – although it’s not like any of you would really know if I did, anyway. Still, the integrity of the process must not be compromised, and since there are so many King movies out there, it wasn’t hard to limit myself to stuff I’ve either never seen or saw so long ago, I barely remember.

With all that being said, tune in tomorrow for Part One of the Screengrab 24-Hour Stephen King Marathon!

Screengrab Pub Crawl: The Top 15 Bars of Cinema (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 29 May 2008 21:00:00 GMT

“PETER BOYLE’S BAR,” THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE (1973)

Peter Boyle's Boston Irish bar in The Friends of Eddie Coyle is a low-key, specialized place, a dimly lit oasis where the community's down-and-out, aging petty criminals, such as Eddie Coyle (Robert Mitchum), can seek refuge, wet their whistles, and bitch and moan a little about the cruel hand dealt to them by the fates. Mind you, we don't mean to imply anything by referring to it as "Peter Boyle's bar." Boyle, who definitely works there managing the counter, does slip once in conversation with the federal agent (Richard Jordan) he deals information to and calls it his bar, and Jordan has to correct him: "You mean you work for a man who has a liquor license, right? You're a convicted felon." "Like I said," replies Boyle without missing a beat, "I work for a man who has a liquor license. I forget sometimes." Boyle must have some wicked student loans to pay off, because even with the gig at the bar and whatever he gets from Jordan, he still has to hold down a second job as a hit man. When Boyle sells out Alex Rocco and his crew of bank robbers to Jordan and the big boys think that Mitchum might have been the rat, Boyle ties everything up neat as a pin by agreeing to whack Mitchum for his treachery, and even makes sure the job will be easy to perform by plying Mitchum with free booze until he's practically ready to be poured into his coffin. Somehow we feel certain that the man who has the liquor license will understand.

And what goes together better than booze and violence, you may ask? Why, milk and ultra-violence, as we jet overseas for a little in-out, in-out with the gang at the...

KOROVA MILK BAR, A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1971)

It's no accident that Stanley Kubrick's still-controversial odyssey into a violent near-future begins in its most stylized locale. We know we've entered a strange new world from the moment Kubrick's camera pulls back from Alex the droog's demonic stare to reveal the Korova milk bar. It's a quintessentially Kubrickian venue: symmetrical, heavenly lit and made up of a few bold strokes of décor. There's the lettering on the walls, words unknown to us until our humble narrator explains that "moloko plus vellocet or synthamesc or drencrom" means milk spiked with drugs, the drink of choice at the Korova, served straight from the nipple spigots of ceramic nudies. (Talk about objectifying the female form – the tables in the place are also made up of these gleaming white statuettes.) The ambient music tends toward droning synths, but during the breaks you may hear a snatch of Beethoven, as if some great bird has flown into the bar. It's a setting so iconic it has served as the model for several real-life cocktail lounges, including this one in White Plains, New York. It's sure to be a stop on the Screengrab staff's next cross-country pub crawl.

But, in the meantime, we’ll continue our cinematic bar golf with some tasty blue goo at the wretched hive of scum and villainy that got us all hooked in the first place...

THE MOS EISLEY CANTINA, STAR WARS (1977)

We ask you, what else is there to say about the Star Wars cantina sequence? So much ink has already been spilled over its daring expose of discriminatory serving practices towards droids, the startling revelation that Werner Herzog has a death sentence in twelve system, humorous and amusing observations on the many similarities between the bar's clientele and one's graduating class or family reunion, Luke Skywalker's hands-on method of getting the bartender's attention (we'd love to see him try that sometime at Coyote Ugly) and the unnerving news that things have gotten so bad that Satan has nothing to do all afternoon but hang out at a corner table, softly chuckling to himself. Suffice to say this scene was experienced by enough people not yet old enough to drink that it may have had a strong impact on a generation's expectations of what a night out would be like, and that it turned out to be a lot closer to reality for some of us than for others.

RICK'S CAFÉ AMÉRICAIN, CASABLANCA (1942)

And finally, what cinematic pub crawl would be complete without (arguably) the most famous movie bar of them all? After a long night of drinking, there’s no better place to unwind: no garish colors to contend with, indoor smoking(!), and if you’re lucky, Rick himself may keep the place open late, sharing a bottle and stories of the good ol’ days in Paris. There’s no loud rock and roll on the jukebox, just Sam on piano, a talented jazz band and occasional national anthem sing-offs between visiting groups of tourists. The dress code is casual but stylish, and you can even get a bite to eat or some coffee if you need a little something to settle your stomach. Just remember to keep your passport handy, be sure you tip the waitstaff (and the local constabulary), pay attention to the local curfews, don’t drive drunk and use protection if you begin any beautiful friendships before last call...

...speaking of which, that pretty much wraps it up for The First Annual Screengrab Pub Crawl, so gather up your jackets and move it to the exits, ‘cuz you don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here (although you’re more than welcome to go back and enjoy Part One of this list!

Here’s lookin’ at you, kids.

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Scott Von Doviak, Andrew Osborne

OST: "A Clockwork Orange"

Leonard Pierce — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 18:15:00 GMT

It’s no surprise that the soundtrack to Stanley Kubrick’s highly controversial adaptation of Anthony Burgess’ sci-fi masterpiece A Clockwork Orange would prove to be almost as great a firestarter as the movie itself. After all, music plays a huge – and hugely divisive – role in the movie: music is all that the nihilistic, savage street thug Alex DeLarge truly loves; music is what makes one of his most vicious attacks so unbearable, as he brutally attacks an innocent while crooning the main theme from the classic musical Singin’ in the Rain; and music is what makes his brainwashing ‘treatment’ at the hands of the government so objectionable, as the Ludovico Technique not only robs him of his ability to do violence, but fills him with nausea when he hears the gorgeous strains of Beethoven’s 9th.

What was a bit surprising is the reason that the soundtrack to A Clockwork Orange was so controversial. Despite the intense public reaction, the real stumbling block in the release of the album was due to a number of legal impediments and a not-insignificant amount of money it took to secure the rights to Gene Kelly’s rendition of “Singin’ in the Rain”. But that isn’t what set many critics off. Instead, it was the classical score by composer Wendy (formerly Walter, a fact that had already, er, engendered some controversy) Carlos that put up many critics’ hackles: she arranged and performed a number of significant pieces of classical music, including Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” and others, using a then-new electronic organ known as the Moog synthesizer. A number of traditionalists attacked Carlos for bastardizing the classics, and for using what was referred to in one review as “circus music” to interpret the divine odes of Purcell and Rossini. It wasn’t a controversy that was new to Carlos, who had, for some time, issued her Switched-On series under her pre-sexual-reassignment-surgery name of Walter Carlos because the classical establishment was uncomfortable with female composers, let alone ones who had once been men. But even leaving those dated and debased criticisms aside, critics were cheating themselves and listeners out of some terrific music by decrying the Clockwork Orange OST: in addition to Carlos’ “Timesteps” (an extended piece based on the original Burgess novel that she’d begun work on even before she knew there was a movie in the works), there are very worthwhile tracks on the album by other early pioneers of avant-garde and electronic music, including Terry Riley and Tangerine Dream.

BEST TRACKS: Wendy Carlos’ contemplative, clever “Timesteps”, released on the original soundtrack album in a grievously abbreviated four-minute version but restored in 1998 on the Complete Original Score reissue in its full 14-minute glory; the eerie Moog rendition of the Second Movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, retitled here the “Suicide Scherzo” to reflect events in the plot; and the jarring yet utterly charming ditty “I Want to Marry a Lighthouse Keeper” by Erika Eigen.

Vanishing Act: John Hughes

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 19:00:00 GMT

You learn some funny things when researching a column dedicated to filmmakers who have mysteriously vacated the multiplex. As surprised as I was last week to find out that Michael Cimino was originally slated to direct Footloose, I am doubly stunned this week to discover that there are no less than five Beethoven movies. I’m not talking about the deaf composer idolized by Alex in A Clockwork Orange; I’m talking about the freakin’ St. Bernard of that name. And do you know what that fifth Beethoven movie is titled? That’s right, it’s Beethoven’s 5th! And why am I telling you this?

It’s because the first Beethoven movie was co-written by John Hughes, under the nom de garbage Edmond Dantès. Dantès, you may recall, was the Count of Monte Cristo, but it’s also the name Hughes has used on several occasions to disguise his involvement in films such as Maid in Manhattan. Looking over his body of work, you have to wonder if he wishes he’d started using the name earlier.

Hughes had a pretty good thing going for a while there, as almost anyone who was a teenager in the 1980s will tell you. Together, Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Weird Science, Pretty in Pink and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off pretty much comprise the definitive portrait of teen angst in the Reagan era. But after a brief foray into the grown-up realm with She’s Having a Baby, Hughes regressed like Charlie in Flowers for Algernon, churning out increasingly lame kiddie fare, from the Home Alone series to Curly Sue to (shudder) Baby’s Day Out. At some point, perhaps he realized his name was becoming shorthand for “prolific purveyor of puerile pap,” and made an abrupt course correction. Now he’s almost reclusive enough to consider changing his name to Howard.

The most recent project Hughes graced with his own name was the barely-released Reach the Rock, an uncharacteristically downbeat small-town dramedy he scripted in 1998. Around that time he gave one of last known interviews, conducted by High Hat co-founder and Screengrab confidant William Ham. In it, he does sound like a man who’s ready for an extended sabbatical. “The only sequels I was involved in were under duress,” he says. “I didn't even know about Vegas Vacation until I read about it in the trades!... I tried to talk them out of doing Ferris Bueller as a series…That's why I've stayed in Chicago, 'cause I never quite fit into L.A. It's easier to maintain a degree of innocence here, you're not playing the herd so much.”

It’s a little hard to buy the notion of John Hughes as anti-Hollywood renegade, especially since his alter ego Edmond Dantès is back at work. Did you catch the Drillbit Taylor trailer earlier today on the Screengrab? Well, Dantès is credited with the story on this latest export from the Judd Apatow conglomerate. Indeed, the increasingly overexposed and overextended Apatow could do worse that to regard his latest collaborator as a cautionary tale…before he ends up making his own Curly Sue.

No, But I've Read The Movie: A CLOCKWORK ORANGE

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 16:45:00 GMT

It's hard to think of a movie more divisive — both at the time it was filmed and today — than Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Anthony Burgess' dystopian social satire A Clockwork Orange. The novel was already controversial enough (the film, as brutal as it seemed upon its release in 1971, actually toned down much of the book's violence, and substituted a consensual sex scene for Alex's rape, in the novel, of two preadolescent girls), and while the film did what it could to make a savage treatment of youth violence palatable to censors, it still earned an X rating in the United States and raised such objections in the UK that Kubrick voluntarily withdrew it from release, and stipulated that it not be shown there again until after his death.

Even beyond that, both book and movie are plagued with inconsistencies, misinterpretations, and resentment: the novel was released in the United States without its critical final chapter (it was finally restored in 1986), which entirely changes the reader's perceptions of what had gone before. Kubrick himself had only a minimal interest in remaining faithful to his source material (which had been given to him as a gift by his friend and favorite writer, Terry Southern), while Burgess — paid only a pittance for the film rights — had his own misgivings about a movie version of his then-notorious book. "I feared that the cutting to the narrative bone which harmed the filmed Lolita," he said, "would turn the filmed A Clockwork Orange into a complementary pornograph — the seduction of a minor for the one, for the other brutal mayhem.

The writer's aim in both books had been to put language, not sex or violence, into the foreground; a film, on the other hand, was not made out of words." A Clockwork Orange was, indeed, made not out of words, but out of images, and it was those images — often of vicious sociopathic behavior to which the viewer is made an uncomfortable witness and even accomplice — that defines the movie just as the elegant (and deliberately deceptive) use of language defines the book.

WHAT IT HAD: A truly visionary director — one of the greatest of all time — who could not have been more perfectly suited to bring to the screen the bleak, cold, stylized dystopian London of Burgess' novel. A script that, while it may have lacked the writerly approach to language and truth that permeated Burgess' source material, at least remained surprisingly faithful to its story and made a largely successful attempt to bring the 'Nadsat' slang used by the droogs in the novel to the big screen. A hypnotically compelling lead performance by a young and terrifyingly believable Malcolm McDowell. A brilliant soundtrack by Wendy Carlos that matched the mood and tone of the film to an uncanny degree. A handful of some of the most memorable scenes ever put to celluloid in a science fiction film.

WHAT IT LACKED: A man at the helm who possessed the same deep and abiding sense of linguistic play as the author of the book. A director whose ability to write a script was as sure-handed as his ability to frame a shot. A strong secondary cast. A sense of political commitment and philosophical heft as deep as its source material. An ability to easily distinguish between violence presented to shock and violence presented to titillate, and a willingness to make the viewer care about the difference. A true satirist's moral center, and a true storyteller's ability to put ambiguity in service of the truth. A reluctance to go out on a sour note that felt exploitative. The final chapter, which did so much to make sense of the book, but which, when left out, leaves behind a somewhat incoherent film.

DID IT SUCCEED?: It succeeded hugely on its own terms, but what terms were those? Kubrick's specialty was subtlety of emotion, not subtlety of intent; he was a visual filmmaker, not a philosophical one, and a story as deeply philosophical as A Clockwork Orange was done something of a disservice by being placed in his hands, no matter how stunning the film is to look at and how long its best-known setpieces stay with you. Kubrick's determination to provoke provides them movie with some of its finest moments and some of its worst; and while the movie is not without its ambiguity, it sacrifices profundity for power, which is not always an acceptable tradeoff. However, it does what it sets out to do so spectacularly that it's almost churlish to note that Burgess' fears about the filmed version of his novel came very precisely true.

Take Five: Revolution!

Peter Smith — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 21:00:00 GMT

Monday was Guy Fawkes Day. What the hell is Guy Fawkes Day, you may be asking if you are not British, or the product of an inferior educational system? The Fifth of November is what it is, the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot by one Mr. Fawkes to blow up Parliament. Americans, comic book fans, and people who were hung over in their Survey of European History classes may remember it best from V for Vendetta, where the eponymous terrorist V decides Guy Fawkes Day is the perfect time to throw his own fireworks display at the Houses of Parliament, touching off a popular revolt against the tyrannical government of a future England (not entirely without similarity to modern America). Hollywood films have always had a bit of a, shall we say, delicate constitution about films that portray violent revolution, which, despite the circumstances of our own founding, seems to smack a bit of pink. Other countries haven’t been so squeamish; here’s some good films to watch when you’re ready to stick it to the Man.

BRONENOSETS POTYOMKIN [THE BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN] (1925)

A classic in every sense of the word, Sergei Eisenstein’s phenomenal silent movie about an uprising of sailors against the czarist regime virtually invented the modern art of montage, gave us the endlessly influential “Odessa Steps” sequence, and stood as a towering achievement of Soviet cinema, even outlasting its censors and detractors in Russia itself. But one of the most astonishing things about it is that it was made less than eight years after the Russian Revolution, arguably the most important upheaval of the 20th century. The notion that such gorgeous and powerful art could be put the service of the purest propaganda would haunt writers and critics for decades – and would be put to the test again when Leni Riefenstahl began work on her Triumph of the Will.

METROPOLIS (1927)

Science fiction, with its potential for infinite variety, would seem to be a natural for political storytelling, but much popular sci-fi is either painfully apolitical or downright reactionary. Writers such as Samuel Delany and Ursula LeGuin, who approach issues of revolution and anarchy, are still few and far between in the genre. In the 1920s, though, when Fritz Lang made his silent sci-fi masterpiece, everyone in the audience knew exactly what he was talking about. The highly charged atmosphere of Germany between the wars featured socialists, communists and nationalists constantly at each other’s throats, and Metropolis’ depiction of a mistreated underclass of despised laborers working for the enrichment of a wealth, privileged industrial elite made it quite clear where the director’s sympathy lay. Only a few years later, the Nazis would come to power, and Lang fled the country, deciding that it wasn’t his kind of revolution.

ZÉRO DE CONDUITE [ZERO FOR CONDUCT] (1933)

French boarding schools have contained an element of seediness and menace in more than one great film (see also Clouzot’s Diabolique), but nowhere do they seem as oppressive and intolerable as they do in Jean Vigo’s masterful, anarchic Zero for Conduct. Surreal, creepy, innovate, funny, touching and occasionally terrifying, the film also does more than anything before or since to convey the pure, joyous spirit of youthful rebellion that life eventually beats out of you. Less than an hour long but filled with unforgettable moments, Zero for Conduct is a masterpiece about the giddy charge of revolution.

WEEK END (1967)

It takes so little to transform that word into something threatening: simply split it, as do the French, and place a heavy emphasis on “end”, and you have the implication, carried in every frame of this astonishing film, that it’s not just the work week that’s coming to an end, but cinema and perhaps civilization itself. It’s hard to appreciate today exactly how great an impact Jean-Luc Godard’s revolutionary consciousness had on French society of its day; he wasn’t the most successful director in the country, but he was a major figure in the arts, and his stars were famous television actors with huge amounts of mainstream credibility. When his characters turned to the camera and discussed, in plain terms, the high and low of Marxist revolution, it wasn’t satire or the dabbling of a dilettante: it was someone who was dead serious, and whose final stab for some time at narrative filmmaking would eerily presage the eruption of Paris less than a year later.

IF… (1968)

Nowadays, young people know Malcolm McDowell as that kindly old man from Heroes who wants to blow up New York to prove a point about something or other. But forty years ago, between appearing as Alex in A Clockwork Orange and starring in this Lindsay Anderson classic about a rebellious youth who graduates from sassing back and carrying on with girls to turning a machinegun on the headmasters at his school, he must have seemed like the film industry’s own Antichrist. 1968 was a tumultuous year, and students in France, Italy, Japan and Germany, among other places, were only a hair away from actually lining up their teachers in front of a firing squad; the film seems a bit heavy-handed and dated these days (especially given the spectacular flameout of its director), but at the time, it was a savage and sobering piece of filmmaking.

— Leonard Pierce