The Screengrab : a girl cut in two

2008 in Review: Paul Clark's Favorite Movie Moments

Paul Clark — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Starting tomorrow, the writers of Screengrab will be unveiling their lists of the top 10 films of 2008. But before that begins, I’d like to post a different sort of list of highlights from the past year. For those of you who’ve only started reading recently, I used to write a bi-weekly column called “The Movie Moment,” in which I’d explore in depth some of my favorite scenes from movies both old and new. This past spring, I had to put the column on indefinite hiatus for various reasons, but I wanted to bring it back for this week only so I could celebrate some of my favorite Movie Moments of 2008. However, I had such a devil of time trying to narrow down my list that I’ve decided to simply list all of the moments that made me laugh out loud, cry like a baby, bite my nails uncontrollably, or which otherwise rocked my world this past year. This list is by no means meant to be taken as comprehensive, but merely were the moments which readily sprang to mind while I was writing the piece. So without further ado, I give you…

2008: The Year in Movie Moments:

(in no particular order)

The little boy’s confession notes- In Bruges

“No-no-no. I kill the bus driver.” - The Dark Knight

The security guard makes his rounds - Man on Wire

Sidney’s musical vows - Rachel Getting Married

The kiss that launched a thousand lens flares - Silent Light (only one of several transcendent moments in the film- the swimming-hole scene or the epic rainstorm might just as easily have qualified)

Mike’s late-night visit (or really, anytime Merle Haggard’s “Mama Tried” is played) - The Strangers

Peekaboo nudity - The Romance of Astrea and Celadon

Harry unveils the machine - Burn After Reading (honestly, who could possibly enjoy THAT?)

Madame Gaudens’ confession - A Girl Cut in Two

Incident at the race track - My Winnipeg

Most hilarious random line of the year: “When it comes to women, you’re Michael Jordan. I’m… Bill Laimbeer.” - Baghead

The new army suits up for battle - Role Models

Alex takes a shower - Paranoid Park

Brandi forgets her cell phone - Stuck

Black Kold Medina puts on a show - Trouble the Water

Runaway penguin - Encounters at the End of the World

Jung-rae Kim diagrams his neuroses - Woman on the Beach

Alex’s sex surprise, both inevitable and strangely erotic - XXY

The director’s big exit - Tropic Thunder

Most unlikely tearjerking moment of the year: Fred Knittle sings “Fix You”, Young@Heart

Three-way fist fight: Seth Rogen vs. James Franco vs. Danny McBride - Pineapple Express

The Richard McGuire segment - Fear(s) of the Dark

Ninjas! - In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale (yes, really)

And finally, my five favorite openings and finales of the year:

Perfect openings: “Put on Your Sunday Clothes”, WALL*E; Sunrise, Silent Light; The piano, The Silence Before Bach; The Jean-Claude Van Damme Stunt Spectacular, JCVD; The Legend of Po, Kung Fu Panda

Great final scenes (no spoilers): Synecdoche, New York, The Duchess of Langeais, Shine a Light, The Visitor, Burn After Reading

I would invite all of you to share some of your favorites in the comments section. After all, I’m surely missing at least a couple of really good ones.

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: August 9-15, 2008

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 21:00:00 GMT

You’ve had the dream. You find yourself in a classroom you’ve never seen before, sitting at a desk in your underwear. The professor is passing out the final exam. Your heart freezes, your fingers go numb as you suddenly realize – you forgot to read the Screengrab this week! Don’t let this happen to you. Catch up on all the highlights now, including:

The Top 20 Movies About Movies, Parts One, Deux, Three, Four and Five. These will definitely be on the test.

A moment of silence please for Bernie Mac, Bernie Brillstein, Isaac Hayes, and Elvis Presley and his crappy movies.

You know you’ll be asked about new movies, like Pineapple Express, Tropic Thunder, The Clone Wars and A Girl Cut in Two. But you should also be prepared for more obscure questions about Mad Dog Time, The Driver, The Last Sign and Summer Rental.

Remaking Rocky Horror: Bad idea or terrible idea?

Is Angelina Jolie playing Catwoman a more enticing proposition than Angelina Jolie playing Tom Cruise?

Woody Allen: Is he a better filmmaker or bronze figurine?

When is a documentary not a documentary?

Study hard or you may find yourself working for Troma.

In Other Blogs: Ernest Borgnine Masturbates a Lot

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 15:30:00 GMT

I trust we have your attention now? Or at least we’ll have it once you finish vomiting into your wastebasket. Here’s the set-up: 91-year-old Ernest Borgnine appeared on some repulsive Fox News talk show and was asked for the secret of his eternal youth – or if not his eternal youth, at least his continued not-dying. Borgnine leaned over and whispered (on-mike) in the host’s ear, “I masturbate a lot.” I think this is a pretty funny thing for a nonagenarian to say on TV, but Jeffrey Wells at Hollywood Elsewhere doesn’t seem to be amused. “This is a sad occasion for anyone who's ever savored Ernest Borgnine's performance as Fatso Judson in From Here to Eternity or Ragnar in The Vikings. With one remark, a respected actor has tainted his reputation for all eternity. I'll never be able to watch The Wild Bunch ever again with the same attitude I had before seeing this clip. I'm half-serious.”

Glenn Kenny at Some Came Running feels that “half-serious” is still way too serious. “I only wish I'd had the balls to have pulled something like that one of the handful of times I was compelled to interact with the sterling personalities on Fox and Friends…I spent a lot of time with Mr. Borgnine on the set of Baseketball a few years back. A real pistol, he was. Just think—he had been married to Ethel Freaking Merman. Which kinds of begs the question of just what it is he masturbates to. Jeffrey Wells seems to have taken this very hard. Or maybe I should say badly…Yeah, Borgnine's irrevocably tainted because he made a vulgar crack on a Fox News program. Okay, if you say so.”

Once you’ve finished scrubbing out your brain with bleach, cleanse your palate by heading over to Beyond the Multiplex for an interview with the lovely Ludivine Sagnier, now starring in A Girl Cut in Two, but forever memorable for “her oft-topless ingénue role opposite Charlotte Rampling in François Ozon's erotic thriller Swimming Pool.” Of her sadly nudity-free new film, Sagnier says, “When we were shooting it, Claude Chabrol would say, ‘It's my first porn movie.’ I would say, ‘Come on, Claude, don't say that. We don't have one scene of nudity.’ He'd say, ‘We don't need that,’ you know, with a smirk on his face. ‘The obscenity is in the head of the audience.’ That's what he liked about this story, to suggest everything.”

Spoutblog has an interview with Whit Stillman – not because he has anything new out, but because you can now watch Metropolitan at Hulu.com. Stillman does claim that those projects I told you about in Vanishing Act are imminent. “My feeling about the independent business is, for one thing, it’s cyclical. And we’re at the low end of the cycle, but I think it’ll go back up. And I think it’s actually very good to launch a project at the low end of the cycle, if you can launch it. And I think that, often, when things are bad, the way I like to look at it to make it seem better is that bad situations are just business opportunities. And there’s just a huge opportunity now to make good independent films and have them successfully released, ultimately, because there’s no easy money now, and everyone, I think, is going to be in a much tighter, more serious game. And I think that the person or the company that steps up to finance our film is going to do very well with it.” Pass the hat, people!

And in List-o-Mania this week, here’s a new blog to us, Topless Robot, with the 10 Most Blatant Star Wars Rip-offs. Oddly the list doesn’t include The Clone Wars, the biggest rip-off of all, but it does stir some nostalgia for crappy 70s and 80s sci-fi. “Galaxina seems to have had a decent budget for alien costumes and special effects, if not for its screenplay (the freighter spaceship is called the Infinity, the buffoonish captain is named Cornelius Butt, suspended animation jokes abound). But hell, no one came to see a flick starring a Playmate for political intrigue or a character study. Teenagers still stricken with their first Princess Leia boners came for Stratten’s come-hither innuendo, gratuitous cleavage shots, and maybe, just maybe, a bit of side-boob. If this trailer’s any indication, most of the male cast thankfully spent the duration of the flick on ice.”

Movie Review: "A Girl Cut in Two"

Phil Nugent — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 17:00:00 GMT

When the best scene in a movie involves a beautiful young woman looking up worshipfully at her much older lover while crawling towards him on her hands and knees with a peacock's tail attached to her ass, you're either watching a very strange movie or a work of genius. A Girl Cut in Two, the latest from French director Claude Chabrol, isn't a work of genius, but it is the second movie in a week to ride in with the news that hot young babes are putty in the hands of sixtyish grizzled-looking dudes with literary pedigrees. Like Elegy, A Girl Cut in Two has its own literary pedigree: it's an updated take on the Stanford White-Evelyn Nesbit-Harry K. Thaw triangle that blazed across the tabloids in the 1920s and got a second life when E. L. Doctorow used it as the cornerstone of his 1975 novel Ragtime. Here, the stand-in for White is a distinguished, graying novelist, Charles Saint-Denis (Francois Berleand), who is devotedly married but just can't seem to leave those young girls alone. (His agent, who packs a bathing suit when she comes to visit him and his wife in their big house in the country, where she practically camps out on his veranda, is played by the still-stunning Mathilda May, who some of us vulgar Americans will always remember best for her non-speaking, buck naked performance in the 1985 vampires-from-space movie Lifeforce.)

Charles's latest conquest is Gabrielle (Ludivine Sagnier), a fresh-faced blonde who delivers the weather reports on the TV news, where she's probably the best thing that's ever happened to the phrase "approaching gulf streams." When Charles spots her at his book signing, his eyes seem to pop out on springs, but in a tasteful and refined way, what with him being French and all. He soon secrets her away to his love nest in the city and then, overcome with emotion after she pulls that business with the peacock's tail ("You don't feel humiliated?" "Not even ridiculous."), he takes her to his special club, where classy people with subterranean sex drives get together to do things too shocking for Chabrol to do anything but hint at. He's said that the scenes at the club, where the actors kick back and trade knowing looks and the camera cuts away just when it looks as if we're going to get to see what they're all so smug about, "reflect my desire to explore the theme of perversion without ever showing it." I know that I'm not the one who's been making movies for fifty years, but I can't shake this feeling that giving your characters all kinds of interesting perversions and then not showing them amounts to failing to utilize one of the obvious advantages of making a movie about them in the first place.

I never believed a minute of A Girl Cut in Two, but it does have more of a sustained grip than Chabrol's recent movies, thanks in no small part to Sagnier's surprisingly vulnerable cupcake. Things take a turn for the goofy when the third side of this triangle heaves into sight: the spoiled rich rotter Paul Gaudens (Benoit Magimel), who professes love for Gabrielle while seething with hatred for Charles. (He blames him for having somehow inflicted shame on his family, but the exact details are either never made clear or were spelled out in subtitles that flashed on the screen while I was checking to make sure that my wristwatch still lights up when I press that little button on the side.) With his psychedelic Thurston Howell III wardrobe and his gelled blonde hair with a fistful of forelock strategically draped over one eye, Magimel looks like a French Owen Wilson fronting an '80s "new romantic" cover band, but the actual dialogue he has to speak has nothing on Spandau Ballet. A Girl Cut in Two begins coughing up blood as soon as it begins devoting whole scenes to his aristocratic crumb-bum family, presided over by a vicious snob of a mother (Caroline Silhol, who played Dietrich in last year's Edith Piaf biopic La Vie en Rose) who suggests an albino Morticia Addams. The last half hour or so, which wraps up with an ending that tops Chinatown in going out of it way to give literal meaning to a metaphorical title, dumps the confusion and chaos of adulterous passion in favor of one more demonstration that the cultured mask of the bourgeoisie masks a nest of serpents and is utterly disposable, though I did like the moment when a mercenary lawyer has a polite conversation with Mother Gaudens, exits the mansion, and as he heads for his car, goes, "Brrrrrrr!" The movie can best be appreciated as a one-hour-fifty-minute trailer for whatever Ludivine Sagnier does next. Whatever that is--Bond girl, female lead to Adam Sandler, Celebrity Detox Center: Paris Edition--I'm there.