The Screengrab : annie hall

That Guy! John Glover

Phil Nugent — Thu, 21 May 2009 16:30:00 GMT

In the late 1970s, in a string of films of wildly varying quality and interest (including Annie Hall, Julia, the Farrah Fawcett vehicle Somebody Killed Her Husband, and Jonathan Demme's Last Embrace and Melvin and Howard), John Glover established himself as a real one-scene wonder, an eccentric, highly skilled actor who was able to take a very brief amount of screen time and use it to make as strong an impression as anyone else in the movie. He was much in demand in the 1980s and into the '90s, doing a lot of work in a lot of different shades and flavors, ranging from a man trying to show the sick hero (Aidan Quinn) of the 1985 TV movie An Early Frost who to die, of AIDS, with dignity, to a doctor who sues his hospital to firing him for having a disfiguring disease on an episode of L.A. Law to the pitchman for a lethal car-protection device in a parody commercial that opened Robocop 2. Yet his combination of brazen smarts and the energy level of an electrified fence seemed to make him especially prone to being cast in villain roles, culminating in his playing the devil himself in the short-lived cult TV series Brimstone. By then, he had also given ample evidence of having the most versatile hair in the history of acting.

In recent years, Glover has been of a presence in TV and on stage than in movies; he may actually be best known to young'uns as Lex Luthor's father on Smallville, a role he played for seven seasons before the character kicked off. Since then, he's been seen as Ron Rifkin's boyfriend on Brothers and Sisters and as Zachary Qunito's father on Heroes. He's currently on Broadway, playing Lucky in a highly praised production of Waiting for Godot alongside Nathan Lane, Bill Irwin, and, as Pozzo, John Goodman--Those Guys! of much repute, all.

Where to see John Glover at his best:

52 PICK-UP (1986): This Elmore Leonard adaptation, directed by John Frankenheimer, suffers from an equilibrium problem: the villains are so much more entertaining than the people they're tormenting that it keeps throwing the picture off balance. But of all the performances that inspired one critic to proclaim Glover "the prime rotter of the '80s"--including his scheming stepdaddy in Masquerade (1988) and a smiling hatchet man out for Bill Murray's job in Scrooged (1988)--this is the most flamboyantly show-stopping. His slimy mastermind and amateur filmmaker Alan Raimy is a trained bookkeeper who "found better ways of making money; these include blackmailing Roy Scheider for having slept with a lissome young thing, and then, when that doesn't pan out, blackmailing him after framing him for the lissome young thing's murder. (It goes without saying that he had filmed both the sex and violence, for maximum persuasiveness.) One reason this performance stands out in the Glover rogue's gallery is that he has a first-rate partner in another That Guy!, Clarence Williams III. While Glover, lean and gaunt, dances in place while working his motor mouth, Williams, huge and near-mute, looms menacingly over those he's trying to impress while they wonder if the color of his eyes exists in nature. In his own prize scene, Williams tortures his girlfriend (Vanity) to find out if she's sold them out to Schedier, and, after she squeals that she would never dream of doing such a thing, sits up, murmurs, "I believe you," and then, after pausing and gazing into the nether distance, laments his great character failing: "But I believe everybody!"

GREMLINS 2: THE NEW BATCH (1990): Joe Dante's sequel to the 1984 "E.T. Goes Nutzoid"-genetic freak of a summer movie came out right about the time that Glover started confessing to interviewers that he'd like a crack at parts that were less villainous and funnier. He plays Daniel Clamp, a cartoon of Donald Trump, back in the days when Trump was a high-end cheeseball celebrity (Page Six, Spy magazine, Doonesbury) and not just a low-end cheeseball who plays a tycoon on reality TV. The role is still kind of villainous, but it's mostly a comic opportunity, and Glover delivers a sophisticated-sophomoric performance that meshes will with the general outlines of a film that's conceived as a feature-length, (mostly) live-action salute to master Looney Tunes animator Chuck Jones. This was especially impressive at the time, when Glover could also be seen starring in a production of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People that Jack O'Brien directed for public television, which really ought to be available on DVD.

LOVE! VALOR! COMPASSION! (1997): Terrence McNally's highly acclaimed 1994 play, which follows the lives of a group of gay male friends over the course of three holiday-weekend getaways, lost something in the transition to this stiff movie version, but at least it gave Glover, a member of the original Broadway cast, a chance to preserve his dual performance. He plays a pair of English twin brothers: John Jeckyll, a sour, dyspeptic put-down artist, and James, who is beloved by all for his sweet disposition and generous nature. (Dr. Jeckyll and ... get it?) Glover shows his stature here partly by the traps he evades: he plays both brothers (the nicer of whom is dying of AIDS) as individuals and not as conceits made flesh, and does it so well that, by the end, it may be John, the acidic brother who knows that no one will ever love him as easily as everyone loves his twin, to whom your heart goes out.

Woody Allen, American Apparel Come to Terms

Phil Nugent — Tue, 19 May 2009 15:30:00 GMT

When we last checked in, Woody Allen was suing American Apparel for $10 million in response to the company's use of an image taken from Annie Hall in its advertisements--an act that Allen was concerned might give people the impression that he was willing to sink to working as a pitchman in his native country--and American Apparel's lawyers were, in turn, threatening to start some shit! Company mouthpiece Stuart Slotnick declared that "our belief is that after the various sex scandals that Woody Allen has been associated with, corporate America’s desire to have Woody Allen endorse their product is not what he may believe it is,” and reports appeared in the papers indicating that American Apparel planned to call Allen's wife and family members to the stand as it made its case that the director of Zelig is so widely despised that the company was practically taking its life in its hands by daring to put his face, without his permission, on its billboards. Maybe that was a bluff, or maybe the company president received a late-night legal consultation with his old business partner Jacob Marley. In any case, the company agreed yesterday to pay a $5 million settlement to the fillmaker.

"Threats and press leaks by American Apparel designed to smear me did not work," Allen said afterwards, "and a scheme to call a long list of witnesses who had nothing to do with the case was disallowed by the court. I hope this very large settlement will discourage American Apparel and others from doing this type of thing to myself or others in the future." American Apparel CEO Dov Charney, who stressed that the decision to settle was made by his company's insurance handler, made it sound as if the whole mess had grown out of a subtle attempt on his part to reach out to Allen and show him that they should probably be co-starring in a wacky sitcom together. The billboard, Charney said, was "an attempt to at least make a joke about" his own past history on the receiving end of sexual harassment lawsuits: "Today, two years later, all the claims in the lawsuits have been completely disproven and yet at the time, some writers characterized me as a rapist and abuser of women, others asserted that I was a bad Jew, and some even stated that I was not fit to run my company." It was, Charney added, "ironic that I have to explain this to Woody Allen when he has expressed similar frustrations in the past."

Screengrab Presents THE TOP TEN BEST MOVIES EVER!!!! (Part Ten)

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 15 May 2009 01:00:00 GMT

Scott Von Doviak's Top Ten Best Movies Ever!

1. THE GODFATHER PART II (1974)
2. SUNSET BLVD. (1950)
3. THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE (1948)
4. MCCABE AND MRS. MILLER (1971)
5. 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968)
6. TAXI DRIVER (1976)
7. JAWS (1975)

If mechanical shark effects and John Williams' relentless theme music were all it had going for it, Jaws still might have become the highest grossing movie in history at the time of its release. And it likely would still be lumped in with Star Wars as a progenitor of the modern summer blockbuster phenomenon. In truth, Jaws has always been much more than a mere creature feature or special effects extravaganza. From the moment the Universal Pictures logo appears onscreen, accompanied by otherworldly sonar pinging noises signaling unfathomable depths of mystery, to the mournful dinosaur roar that accompanies the shark's final descent back to the murky deep, we are firmly in the grip of a master filmmaker. And while Steven Spielberg's gifts would eventually sour, with sure-handed storytelling giving way to transparent manipulation, here his every instinct is sound and his attention to detail astonishing. His tonal control is absolute; the darkest of horrors coexist with lusty seafaring adventure and character-based comedy, and it is all of a piece. The biggest laughs lead into the most frightening shocks, and vice-versa. It's a balancing act enhanced by the finest score of John Williams' career. His dum-dum-dum-dum shark theme is instantly recognizable to anyone on the planet - hell, sharks probably swim around humming it - but it's a remarkably resilient piece of music, speeding up into bursts of nautical derring-do, slowing down to an ominous, guttural portent of doom. The shark itself, when it is finally seen, remains an impressive movie monster. Even if its artificiality is more apparent to today's effects-jaded movie audience, its appearances are still fleeting enough to startle and delight. Set Jaws beside any of the contemporary summer cash leviathans and the hollowness of modern-day Hollywood's vision of action-adventure entertainment is laid bare.

8. PSYCHO (1960)
9. ANNIE HALL (1977)
10. THE WILD BUNCH (1969)

Andrew Osborne's Top Ten Best Movies Ever!

1. STAR WARS (1977)
2. THE GODFATHER (1972)
3. THE GRADUATE (1967)

There are various movies that speak to me very personally -- and this one certainly qualifies, having spent most of my existence as an alienated, overeducated white dude -- but Mike Nichols’ tight, elemental collaboration with the dream team of Buck Henry, Dustin Hoffman, Anne Bancroft, Paul Simon & Art Garfunkle makes my list of Best Movies Ever because, like all the other movies in my Top Ten, it’s both an elemental, near-perfect example of -- and also rises above -- its genre to become a once-in-a-lifetime cinematic milestone. Plus, as a friend of my parents once said, it features the best use of a crucifix ever.

4. THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939)

When a movie penetrates as deeply into the culture and the collective unconscious as this adaptation of Frank L. Baum’s first Oz novel, the filmmakers must have done something right. The fact that it was considered a commercial disappointment upon its initial release but nevertheless went on to become a beloved American classic also says something. But the main reason I include it here is because it’s a fully realized work of art that fully utilizes all the possibilities of cinema, from the grim black and white cinematography that suddenly explodes into color and the infectious soundtrack to the special effects that brought flying monkeys to a grateful world. It’s easy to take The Wizard of Oz for granted in this cynical, ironic, post-modern world, but honestly: who in cinema history kicks more freakin’ ass than Margaret Hamilton as Miss Elmira Gulch and the mean green you-know-who? Answer: nobody.

5. APOCALYPSE NOW (1979)

As crazy-ass Dennis Hopper’s unhinged Kurtz acolyte would say, “I wish I had words...” Here are three -- epic, unsettling, iconic -- but they don’t even begin to capture the essence of the surrealistic war opera Francis Ford Coppola dragged into existence at the (temporary) cost of his own sanity four years after the Fall of Saigon. It’s difficult to separate the finished product from the legend of its infamously agonizing production history (see: Hearts of Darkness), and the generally terrible footage unearthed for the Redux version released in 2001 clearly demonstrates the razor thin line between genius and drek (and, seriously, what kind of zap did U.S.C. put on the heads of Coppola, Spielberg and Lucas that none of them can ever just leave friggin’ well enough alone)? Still, whenever people refer to the original 1979 theatrical version of Apocalypse Now as a flawed masterpiece, I always get confused, since the flaws (fat Brando, crazy Hopper, the slow descent into anarchy) are part of what makes it a masterpiece.

6. ANNIE HALL (1977)

7. SUNSET BOULEVARD (1950)

8. SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN (1952)

9. YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN (1974)

Many of the movies in our consensus and individual Top Tens are beautiful downers, primarily concerned with death, violence, heartbreak and/or the inescapable ennui of existence -- and, while it’s true that depressing themes and great films often go together, it’s important to remember that celluloid is also a great delivery system for adrenalin shots of pure joy like Young Frankenstein, a nearly perfect movie with a hilarious script and a dream ensemble that ranks 9th on my list instead of 8th because (“Puttin’ On The Ritz” notwithstanding) the even more nearly perfect Singin’ In The Rain has slightly better song and dance numbers.

10. THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS (2001)

You may have noticed by now that the vast majority of the Best Movies picked for these lists by the Screengrab brain trust were released prior to 1980, which does a great disservice to the Sundance generation of filmmakers like Jim Jarmusch, P.T. Anderson, the Coen Brothers, Spike Lee, Richard Linklater, Quentin Tarantino, etc. Maybe it’s just that films like Down By Law, Boogie Nights, Fargo, Do The Right Thing, Dazed and Confused or Pulp Fiction need to marinate for another decade before we’re ready to start comparing them head-to-head with the likes of Sunset Boulevard and Citizen Kane...but as far as I’m concerned, The Royal Tenenbaums already qualifies as one for the ages. By turns wistful, cynical, romantic, suicidally gloomy and insanely optimistic, Wes Anderson’s richly imagined masterpiece (about a burned-out family of geniuses in a dream-world New York) is everything I could possibly ask for in a movie: career-topping performances from everyone involved, whip-smart writing, gorgeous visuals, fearlessly eccentric style and Gwyneth Paltrow French-kissing a naked chick...top that, Orson!

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

Contributors: Scott Von Doviak, Andrew Osborne

Reviews By Request: Juliet of the Spirits (1965, Federico Fellini)

Paul Clark — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 19:00:00 GMT

As always, voting for my next Reviews By Request column can be found at the end of this review.

The “late period” films of Federico Fellini are one of the major blind spots in my moviewatching history. I’ve seen nearly all of his earlier works, up to and including the “transitional” work 8 ½, which remains my favorite of his films. However, the only Fellini films I’ve seen after this are Amarcord (which I love) and Satyricon (which I don’t), but I was certainly familiar with these films’ critical reputations, which tend to echo the sentiments expressed by the loudmouthed intellectual in the movie line in Annie Hall.

Having just seen Juliet of the Spirits for the first time, I can’t argue with the opinion that it’s an “indulgent” film, but I’m not sure that’s a bad thing, since it reveals aspects of their maker that his more disciplined films could not. Supposedly, Fellini intended Juliet of the Spirits to be a tribute to his wife and frequent leading lady, Giulietta Masina. If this is the case, it’s a funny sort of tribute. Yes, Juliet (played by Masina) sticks to her principles when her husband cheats on her, and eventually finds escape from their marriage. But for most of the film, she is portrayed as a hapless victim, carried along by the whims of the film- and those of her husband.

Consider the way that she is portrayed visually. Juliet never seems to fit in no matter where she is. From the beginning of the film, when her husband (played by Mario Pisu) hosts an impromptu dinner party, the guests are garishly dressed and glamorous, while Juliet wears a simple dress and a matronly brown wig. This will be a trend throughout the film, as Juliet clashes with her more decadent surroundings. Likewise, throughout the film Fellini accentuates the Masina’s petiteness, often showing her amidst people (even her own mother) who tower over her. In other hands, Juliet’s inability to fit into the film’s world would be a defiant statement, but Fellini’s feelings about it seem to be more complicated than that. One can see that he feels affection for his wife, but he can’t resist being drawn toward the decadence that had become such an integral element of both his life and his work.

And what is one supposed to make of the way Juliet is treated by the film after discovering her husband’s infidelity? A more conventional film might have taken the husband to task for his cheating, but not Fellini, who kept mistresses throughout much of his adult life. Instead, one character after another tells Juliet that in order to win her husband back, she needs to embrace her sexual side- to be more like, say, her buxom, sexually liberated neighbor Suzy, played by Sandra Milo, who by her own admission put in time as one of Fellini’s mistresses. Needless to say, Juliet has some trouble with this advice, especially as it relates to her own Roman Catholic upbringing.

The worldview we see in Juliet of the Spirits is a decidedly pre-feminist one, and one that’s a little hard to stomach. But at the same time, one needs not agree with what a film is saying to appreciate the film itself, and Fellini uses the framework of this story to lay bare his own ideas about marriage, sexuality, and the female gender in general. Because these ideas run so contrary to more “enlightened” points of view that have found their way into most contemporary works of art, Juliet of the Spirits is more thought-provoking than a more politically correct film might have been.

And even if you’re not down with Fellini’s worldview in Juliet of the Spirits, it’s hard to argue with the sheer visual splendor of the film, Fellini’s first in color. Many of world cinema’s greatest filmmakers first made the transition to color during the 1960s- Bergman and Antonioni had already made the switch, with Buñuel and Kurosawa still to come. What these filmmakers had in common is that they didn’t simply make the change for commercial reasons, but treated color as another filmmaking tool to be used wisely. In Juliet of the Spirits, Fellini uses color to create images that would not have had the same impact in black and white, as when he painted the walls red to create unease during a scene in which Juliet visits a mysterious healer. Also striking is the full spectrum of colors found in Suzy’s cavernous home (reminiscent of a fantasy version of a brothel), which contrasts with Juliet’s memories of her Catholic upbringing, which are full of solid shades of red and grey, with innocent white on the children and the almost impossibly dark violet (not black) of the nuns’ robes. Juliet of the Spirits is a feast for the eyes- and, with Nino Rota’s mindbending score, for the ears as well.

In doing research for this review- which must no doubt seem as rambling as the film itself- I came across the following quote from Fellini:

“We don't really know who woman is. She remains in that precise place within man where darkness begins. Talking about women means talking about the darkest part of ourselves, the undeveloped part, the true mystery within… [The] problem for man is to reunite himself with the other half of his being, to find the woman who is right for him-right be she is simply a projection, a mirror of himself. A man can't become whole or free until he has set woman free-his woman. It's his responsibility, not hers. He can't be complete, truly alive until he makes her his sexual companion, and not a slave of libidinous acts or a saint with a halo.”

Perhaps this quotation is the key to what Fellini was attempting with Juliet of the Spirits- not simply translating these ideas into cinematic form, but also struggling to reconcile them with his own weaknesses and deeply-ingrained ideas of what women meant to him in his life. Of course, it’s hard to say what Masina really thought of all this, but that’s part of what makes the movie so darn fascinating, isn’t it?

When coming up with a theme for the next Reviews By Request selection, I kept thinking back to this week's DVD release of The Wrestler and reflected on the fact that I've seen only a handful of movies from the eighties salad days of Wrestler comeback kid Mickey Rourke. So the next Reviews By Request will attempt to remedy this. Some of the titles I've listed below have solid reputations, others not so much, but I haven't seen any of them. That I've seen not only 9 1/2 Weeks but also Wild Orchid (not to mention Double Team) says a lot about me as a moviegoer, but that's a topic for another time. Anyway, which of these should I review next?

Online Surveys & Market Research

Due to a software snafu involving the new polling software, the above poll may be displaying too small to be easily readable, so here are the options in chronological order: Rumble Fish, The Pope of Greenwich Village, Year of the Dragon, Angel Heart, and Johnny Handsome. Hope that helps. And ss always, feel free to sound off in the comments section below. See you in two weeks!

Woody Allen, Larry David, and the Blackness of Eternity

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 20:00:00 GMT

I think we’re all in agreement that the casting of Larry David in the lead of Woody Allen’s latest film Whatever Works is pure gold, Jerry. Well, maybe everyone aside from Larry David. “I’d always been a fan. … I asked him to do it, and he said, ‘But I can’t act! I can only do what I do, I’m not an actor, you’ll be disappointed,’” Allen told Sara Vilkomerson of the New York Observer. “You know, those are the ones who can always do it. The ones that tell you how great they are can never do it. Larry is all, ‘I can’t do it. I can’t do it,’ but when it came time to do it, right out of the box, he did it.”

It’s not that David leapt at the chance. “I gave him every opportunity to get someone else. I was kind of uncomfortable. I was out of my comfort zone,” he said. Then he laughed. “Of course, the comfort zone is not very big! I take one step to the right and I’m out of my comfort zone.”

As Vilkomerson notes in her lengthy but thoroughly entertaining piece The Unshine Boys, Allen and David are responsible for two of the most indelibly neurotic portraits of New York City in pop culture history – Allen through dozens of movies over the past few decades, most notably Annie Hall and Manhattan, and David through the classic sitcom of the ‘90s he co-created, Seinfeld. (Unlike Allen, who has always loathed the place, David has moved on to skewering Los Angeles in his current HBO series Curb Your Enthusiasm.) The similarities between the two aren’t hard to spot, but David reluctantly admits he may have a slightly less bleak view of the world. “I think [Woody’s] probably more of a pessimist about the big picture,” Mr. David said. “The hopelessness, meaninglessness of it all—the blackness of eternity—those questions. Whereas I suspect I’m probably more pessimistic about the smaller things: The relationship won’t work out, Obama will lose, the Yankees will lose, the movie will bomb—things like that. People won’t watch ball games with me because I’m so pessimistic. I’m no fun to be around.”

As for Allen, he insists he’s not “cynical and misanthropic and nihilistic,” just realistic. And there’s not much chance he’ll be seeing this post anytime soon. “It’s gone past me,” he said, of the Internet age. “I don’t have a computer, I don’t have a word processor or any of that stuff… I know I’m missing something. I know when friends Google instant information or things”—he keeps a Webster’s dictionary close by—“it just seems so futuristic to me! I’m still plodding and doing it the other way. I don’t say that proudly, or like it’s a good thing. I don’t think it’s a good thing. I’ve just never been able to make the transition.” Hey, whatever works.

Related:
Take Five: Woody
Woody Allen Doesn't Care What YouThink

Up The Academy: Screengrab Salutes The All-Time Best & Worst Best Picture Winners (Part Six)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 23:30:00 GMT

THE BEST:

ANNIE HALL (1977)

I was downright horrified when Woody Allen’s brainy romantic comedy swiped the Best Picture Oscar away from Star Wars on the night of the Academy Awards’ golden anniversary edition. And considering the innovation and impact of George “the Neck” Lucas’ classic blockbuster (and the fact that a far inferior popcorn flick like Return of the King was considered worthy of the top prize nearly three decades later), I still have issues with the snub. But the choice is more comprehensible now in my reflective middle age dotage than it was in the midst of my pre-pubescent geekery: America in the ‘70s was far more interested in grit and neuroses than fanboy fantasy, and the wookies and Jedi philosophy must have seemed especially goofy compared to the grim realities of then-recent Best Picture winners like The French Connection, The Godfather and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. And if somebody had to shoot down Luke Skywalker, then I’m glad it was Annie Hall. For one thing, it was a fair fight, since the Academy tends to hold comedy and science fiction in the same low regard. More importantly, though, for all the great jokes about dead sharks and Kafka, Annie Hall is a touching, highly relatable masterpiece of character and storytelling, in service of a romantic pairing as iconic as Bogie & Bacall: to this day, whenever the film comes on TV, my parents (a small town Yankee version of Alvy & Annie who somehow stayed together) inevitably wind up holding hands and misting up...which is just about as cute as prickly, overeducated white people get. Plus, with its twisty storytelling, animated sequences and meta sight gags, Annie Hall is far more visually and structurally interesting than most Best Picture winners in any genre. And besides, if a romantic comedy had to beat Star Wars in 1977, at least it wasn’t The Goodbye Girl.

THE APARTMENT (1960)

Billy Wilder’s knack for crafting affecting, humane comedy was close to unparalleled, and few of his films showcased that gift better than 1960’s The Apartment, an effervescent rollercoaster spiked with grown-up melancholy. Jack Lemmon spends his days as one of corporate America’s nondescript suits, and his nights loaning out his apartment to superiors so they can have a place to covertly screw their mistresses. Lemmon’s everyman pines for Shirley MacLaine’s elevator girl, who’s involved with Lemmon’s boss (Fred MacMurray), a thorny love triangle laced with workplace pecking-order tensions, and one given verve by Wilder’s deft satirical hand. Yet for all its bubbly wit, The Apartment’s lasting relevance is partially due to the muted sorrow that lurks around the busy frame’s corners – a nagging sadness wrought from its protagonists’ stubborn willingness to define themselves via their vocations, and which consequently makes Lemmon and MacLaine’s ultimate leap into love feel not fairy-tale preordained, but hard-earned.

FROM HERE TO ETERNITY (1953)

If Brando's dockworker Terry Malloy represented one definitive take on the '50s prole rebel hero, Montgomery Clift's Pvt. Robert E. Lee Pruitt is the alienated '50s hero who thinks he's found a place for himself in the ultimate conformist culture, the army. Clift was on his way to being Brando's equal as a great new kind of movie actor when the car accident that shattered his face also crushed his confidence and derailed his career, and here he's as gentle and sure of the path he should be on as Brando's heroes tended to be instinctively assertive yet lost. But as much as he loves the army and welcomes the chance to be given rules to follow, some part of him can't help bucking when he's given orders that he knows are wrong. He won't box for the company because he's afraid of killing somebody in the ring, and then he kills somebody in retaliation for the murder of his best friend because he knows that the system will simply absorb the injustice. In the end, the system he turned to for a home kills him off, almost as an afterthought. If the Best Picture winners are anything to go by, the 1950s must have been an especially schizoid time in American culture: the list swings back and forth between movies like this one and On the Waterfront, which seemed to be bursting with news and awareness about the state of the country, and such spectacles as The Greatest Show on Earth, Around the World in 80 Days, and Ben-Hur, which seemed like kaleidoscopes imported from a different solar system.

THE WORST:

RAIN MAN (1988)

It's a well-established Hollywood joke that actors can court Oscar by playing someone with a mental or physical disability, but most of these roles still require the actor to try to fit into some kind of narrative context and connect to the other performers while replicating some carefully studied tics or mannerisms. Dustin Hoffman fought for years to get the script of Rain Man filmed, and it's easy to see why: the role of the autistic Raymond gives him an excuse to shut himself off from everything and everyone going on around him, and to be praised for how thoroughly he could ignore everything while concentrating on his little acting exercises. He must have thought that all his Christmases were coming at once. As for his co-star, Tom Cruise, Rain Man dates from the beginning of that unfortunate period where, his box-office appeal being a given, he was concentrating on proving he could "act" by denying the audience his gleaming smile and acting like an obnoxious ass. (Oh, he was "acting." We're certain of it.) The movie itself is nothing but a tear-stained pedestal for two movie stars stuck in self-parody mode.

MILLION DOLLAR BABY (2006)

This rigged, underlit, depressive wallow marks the nadir of Clint Eastwood's serious, craggy old thing period. The quality of the performances, especially Morgan Freeman's and Hilary Swank's, can't disguise the thinness of the stock characters that populate Paul Haggis's screenplay; in particular, Swank's grasping white-trash relations would be judged as vile, condescending stereotypes by a Jerry Springer audience. The best thing about the movie is that it inspired a hilarious public outcry among disability rights groups and assorted loons who thought that by having Swank's character opt to die rather than live out her life as a quadriplegic, it would start a trend and that impressionable disabled people would start offing themselves in droves. But even that was compromised when Eastwood, trying to address the controversy, announced that "I've gone around in movies blowing people away with a .44 magnum. But that doesn't mean I think that's a proper thing to do." He doesn't? Dude, you've earned the right to keep making boring movies for the rest of your life, but you don't have to disillusion us too.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Nick Schager, Phil Nugent

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 23:30:00 GMT

THE BROTHER FROM ANOTHER PLANET (1984)

Like many new arrivals to New York City, Joe Morton’s character in John Sayles’ indie comedy is hoping for a fresh start in the strange, scary but not entirely hostile metropolis. The big difference, of course, is that Morton’s innocent mute is a three-toed extraterrestrial, an escaped slave from "another planet" being pursued by two vaguely feline (and white) Men In Black (who, ironically, are far more concerned with the number of toes on their quarry’s feet than the color of his skin). Sayles’ gentle parable of multicultural integration features a magic trick (in the scene above) that hinges on a still-timely sociological sight gag about urban race relations. Yet it’s interesting to ponder what the eponymous Brother would think if he made a return visit to our planet today: with the Disney-fication of Times Square and the ongoing gentrification of Harlem (not to mention the upcoming Obama inauguration), even the human characters from Sayles’ early ‘80s world might feel a bit disoriented in the strange land of 2008 Manhattan.

UNDER THE VOLCANO (1984)

Malcolm Lowry's novel of self-destruction is a force of nature. John Huston's film of the novel is, sadly, not. Sure, it contains moments of beauty and tragedy, but when things go wrong, they go wrong with a dogged determinism. Albert Finney plays the drunken Geoffrey Firmin, ex-consul of the British Empire in Mexico, with a grace rarely afforded cinematic alcoholics. The other actors are, sadly, not up to his standards (Huston's adaptation of Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood has the same problem, as leading man Brad Dourif's talents far outshine all other actors onscreen, save Harry Dean Stanton.) As Firmin stumbles further out of the relative safety of his regular haunts, Mexico becomes less like an exotic extension of his home and more like a seedy extension of the jungle, where Firmin's haughty imperialism will lead to a swift downfall.

BORAT: CULTURAL LEARNINGS OF AMERICA FOR MAKE BENEFIT GLORIOUS NATION OF KAZAKHSTAN (2006)

Sacha Baron Cohen’s most notorious creation, Borat Sagdiyev, isn’t really a stranger at all. He’s more of an infiltrator. And his America isn’t a strange land, either; in fact, it’s one the British comedian smugly believes he knows like the back of his hand. Whether you loved or hated Borat is largely dependent on how much tolerance you have for Baron Cohen’s assumption that he can easily get to the ugly creamed filling under the sweet exterior of America just by biting it in the right spot; there are those who find his style of humor hysterical and telling, and others who find it manipulative and condescending. But no one can doubt, after seeing it in action, how skillfully he wields it, not to inform, but to eviscerate. Borat is a butcher, not a surgeon, and we’re his meat. His Kazakhstan is funny because he correctly assumes that it’s distant enough from our daily lives that we’ll laugh at his fantastic portrayal of it; and his America is funny because he correctly assumes that we’re so far inside of it that we won’t even realize how he’s making it look until it’s far too late. The archetype of the man trapped in a world not of his own making usually derives its humor from the fact that he’s a holy fool, innocently reflecting our reality in his ignorance; Borat shows how dangerous it can be when the holy fool is really an unholy genius who knows exactly how to take advantage of the fact that people are likely to do anything if they think they’re in the presence of someone who doesn’t know any better.

THE NEW WORLD (2005)

It’s no surprise that Terrence Malick’s name would show up on a list of great movies about culture clashes. Since the beginning of his career, he’s specialized in showing us the beauty and violence that grow out of peoples’ encounters with the strange, whether that strangeness is expressed as the dreary middle of the U.S., the uncontrollable vastness of the new west, or the tempting primitivism of the South Pacific in wartime. What’s shocking about The New World is that he manages to pull the same trick twice in one movie – and both times with spectacular results. Filming in modern-day Virginia, his conjuration of the lands that greeted John Smith’s men is so perfect, so unspoiled, so bountiful that it’s almost terrifying. His men were promised heaven, and to see it in this life fills them with an almost religious dread. But this quickly fades: if heaven is on earth, what need have they for law? The settlement soon devolves into a stunted, filthy savagery that stands in marked contrast to the gorgeous plenty of the New World. It’s all done with some of the most breathtaking camera work ever seen, but then the movie takes an astonishing shift – one that, in the hands of a lesser filmmaker, would have shattered the tone of the film. We see England through Pocahontas’ eyes as no less strange and unreal a place than was America in John Smith’s eyes, a place of man without nature, of infinite variations of gray and wet, and it has no less devastating an effect on her life.

MOSCOW ON THE HUDSON (1984)

Made at pretty much the exact last moment that Robin Williams was capable of doing anything likable, Paul Mazursky’s charming Moscow on the Hudson now seems like a relic of an ancient age, but it should be remembered that it came out at a time when the only cinematic method of interacting with the Soviet Union was with hails of gunfire and exploding rocket-bombs. Mazursky’s story of a simple and kind Russian musician who decides to defect during a state visit to New York had its bittersweet moments, as Williams’ Vladimir Ivanoff discovered that life in America is not all smiles and sunshine even for those who have the rare opportunity to have sex with Maria Conchita Alonso. But it also managed to convey the belief, greatly underrepresented in theaters at the time, that Russians were actual human beings who might not deserve to be shot in the face; and it also suggested the possibility – which, as it happened, turned out to be disturbingly correct – that the best way to get the Commies on our good side was just to let them take a gander at a well-cut pair of blue jeans and a fully stocked shelf at the supermarket. Many of Moscow on the Hudson’s land-of-plenty/land-of-want scenes are cliché by this point, but at the time, they seemed fresh and earnest enough to work.

WOODY ALLEN IN GENERAL: PARTICULARLY SLEEPER (1973), BANANAS (1971) & ZELIG (1983)

I used to think of Woody Allen as an explorer of the well-known. He endlessly treads around his own expensively analyzed psyche to tell new truths about self-absorbed Manhattan professionals. Strange then, to realize that much of his early work deals with outsiders who are unable to cope with their surroundings, then suddenly find themselves in even more alien circumstances. In Sleeper he is cryogenically frozen, then thawed in a strangely familiar future where pot-smoking has been replaced by fondling an orb and sex by the Orgasmatron machine. In Bananas he's a hapless doofus who has no particular luck with the ladies. That is, not until he finds himself at the center of guerilla action in a small Central American country in a permanent state of coups and revolutions: an innocent abroad if there ever was one. Then there's Broadway Danny Rose, where Allen stars as a man who lives his entire life somewhat out of his element. (His buddies at the Carnegie Deli suggest a Danny Rose sandwich would be a bagel with Marinara sauce). In Annie Hall he is Alvy Singer, who is perpetually on guard against his familiar New York surroundings turning strange on him. Whenever he ventures outside of New York his suspicion that he is an alien in his own country are confirmed. He cannot function in L.A. and when he visits Annie's family in Wisconsin, he finds himself transformed to a Hassidic Jew. Finally, of course, there is Zelig, the story of the eternal chameleon, never at home, and always adaptable.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Hayden Childs, Leonard Pierce, Sarah Clyne Sundberg

Take Five: Woody

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 20:30:00 GMT

Boy, what's up with all the Woody Allen posts this week? I mean, sure, he's got a new movie opening today (Vicki Cristina Barcelona), and sure, a lot of critics are claiming it's his best work in a decade. But someone says that every decade, and have been doing so for approximately four decades. So who is this jerk who's so obsessed with the Wood-man, that he keeps forcing Screengrab readers to share his mania? Oh, right -- it's me. It may surprise you to learn that, given my fascination with the former Mssr. Konigsberg, I am not especially a huge fan of his work, and I'm certainly not one of his more vociferous defenders. I think he's mistaken about being a Serious Artist, which gets in the way of his being one of the funniest men of his generation; he's got a major Mary Sue complex; he's somewhat technically limited as a director and receives a lot of credit for work that is properly given to his cinematographers; and I agree with Joe Queenan that his work is literally sophomoric -- the intellectual, moral and emotional themes in his movies rarely get past the level of someone who, like Woody himself, dropped out of college his sophomore year. But in Annie Hall and Manhattan, he made two of the best movies of the 1970s; he's one of the finest comic minds on the planet; and he's managed to make a career for himself so robust that he's made an average of a movie a year for 30 years, which, no matter how similar the themes in said movies, is something like a miracle. So, after you've watched Penelope Cruz and Scarlett Johansson make out in the Wood-man's latest masterpiece, why not rent five more of my favorites, and make it a festival?

WHAT'S UP, TIGER LILY? (1966)

The fact that the directorial debut of a man many people consider the greatest moviemaker of his generation was little more than a cheap Chinese action-thriler with jokey dialogue dubbed in over it is shocking to some people. It's as if someone told you that thumbocentric auteur/Kung Pow! Enter the Fist director Steve Oedekerk grew up to be Jean-Luc Godard. But it's true: for his very first film in 1966, Woody Allen got the rights to a junk chop-socky called Key of Keys from American International Pictures, who had judged its plot too elaborate. Woody and his cast simply chucked the damn plot out the window and turned the entire thing into a goofball James Bond parody, which the studio padded out with some extraneous nonsense and a couple of pop songs by the Lovin' Spoonful (the biggest brush that Woody would ever again have with modern popular culture), released, and went on to make a fortune off of. What's even more surprising than the fact that What's Up, Tiger Lily? was Woody Allen's first movie as a 'director' is that it works so well -- it's tightly paced, contains tons of funny gags (many of which seemed a lot fresher than when bad comedians and internet wags recycled them 40 years later on the internet and in movie theatres). A fun, funny piece of detournment , no matter how you view Allen's later career.

ZELIG (1983)

Woody Allen's 12th feature film as director may be his most daring, in terms of visual style, formalist invention, and pure idea. Although technology, and the application of the basic notion in other, lesser films, has somewhat blunted Zelig's impact, at the time of its release, it couldn't have seemed more daring: an experimental psychologist is brought in to study the case of one Leonard Zelig, an insecure nebbish who has made his way through life -- and even entered the orbits of some of the 20th century's most famous and infamous figures -- without having a personality of his own. So much of a non-entity is Zelig that he takes on the characteristics -- psychological, moral, intellectual, and even physical -- of the people around him. It's an interesting treatise, in its own way, of the nature of celebrity and the way some peoples' whole lives are malleable thanks to their eagerness to please. But one of the problems with Allen's movies is that it's easy to get carried away with that kind of talk, and forget about whata funny, detailed, and sophisticated movie it is; and, beyond that, Woody did a good bit of stretching (uncharacteristic for him) in order to carry off the film's technical requirements and insert his nebbishy nuance in all of modern history. An outstanding film, one of his best.

HANNAH AND HER SISTERS (1986)

I've never been much of a fan of Woody Allen's 'serious' work. While I appreciate the effort to stretch, and the desire of a talented man to be thought of as something more than a clown, they've always come across as somewhat joyless and flat to me. To abandon what you're best at in favor of something a dozen people do better is an odd thing for an artist to do, and until Allen becomes a much better technical director and stops writing dialogue that means to sound impressive and instead sounds pretentious, I'll continue to be one of those cranky jerks who prefers his funny stuff, thank you very much. That said, Hannah and Her Sisters is a pretty terrific film, if for no other reason than the astonishingly good performances he coaxes out of his cast. It's not without typical Woody Allen drama flaws: the characters are generally unlikable, the dialogue veers into hootiness more than once, and it's yet another example of why the Wood-man shouldn't ever be allowed to comment on any American popular culture after 1965 or so. But it's got a strong script, a more steady than normal technical sensibility, great music, a handful of genuinely powerful emotional scenes, and some of the most stunning performances he's ever gotten out of his cast, especially from Michael Caine and Dianne Wiest.

RADIO DAYS (1987)

Right in between the excellent but heavy Hannah and Her Sisters and the rambling, disappointing bummer of September, Woody Allen decided to give us moviegoers a big, delicious, tasty candy treat in the form of Radio Days, an absolutely delightful little movie that doesn't get nearly the credit it deserves as one of his best films. A combination childhood memoir and loving tribute to the Golden Age of radio, it's one of his sweetest and most good-natured films, and possibly the funniest one he's done in the last 20 years. While his focus, as always, is on interpersonal dynamics, he doesn't get lost in it, as is his unfortunate tendency to do; instead, he opens up the stage just enough to let us see his neighbors, his teachers, and most importantly, the cast and crew of the radio shows that helped shape him, who come across as alternately admirable, chummy, and utterly absurd. Best of all, these winning characters are played by one of the best ensemble casts Allen ever assembled, and, for the first time, he gets out of the way and lets the script and the story do the heavy lifting. Radio Days is simply a charming, utterly likable movie, a gem in Woody Allen's catalog -- it's a genuine feel-good movie, not because it's full of sentimental treacle, but because you feel good after watching it, and when you aren't, you wish you were.

DECONSTRUCTING HARRY (1997)

It was the late 1990s when Woody Allen's reputation as a filmmaker started to take a lot of serious hits, and there aren't many critics -- myself included -- who are willing to step up and defend many of the films he's made in the last ten years. Sometimes he went to the same well a bit too often; other times, he accepted less-than-stellar performances out of his cast, or stretched a little further than his talent was willing to let him go. Other times, he just seemed tired and cranky and unsure of what he wanted to do. While Deconstructing Harry was guilty of all of these to a greater or lesser degree, for some reason, it resonated with me a lot more than did most of his work from the last decade. Perhaps it's the unexpectedly nasty edge to the film that suggests that Allen could be one of the great cynics if he wasn't already one of the great neurotics; perhaps it's the gleeful piss-take at his own public persona, which, although he ultimately lets himself off the hook, shows that he's a lot more self-aware than he might let on in his latter-day work; or maybe it's just that, while they don't always succeed, the metafictional conceits, surrealistic elements and extremely un-Allenish use of camera effects, quick-cut editing and other film trickery illustrate that he isn't entirely moribund. Whatever the case, while it's by no means a great film, Deconstructing Harry at least shows the old pro's still got some life in him.

Charles H. Joffe, 1929-2008

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 17:30:00 GMT

Charles H. Joffe, a talent agent, business manager, and producer best known to casual filmgoers as the producer of a number of Woody Allen's best films, has died in his home town of Los Angeles at the age of 78.

Felled by a persistent lung ailment, Joffe had been ill for some time, but since the 1950s, he had been a powerhouse wheeler and dealer in Hollywood and New York. His Rollins Joffee talent agency, founded with partner Jack Rollins, was the first to book Lenny Bruce, and later handled the careers of some of the biggest names in comedy, including David Letterman, Dick Cavett, Robin Williams, Martin Short, Billy Crystal, Robert Klein, and the team of Mike Nichols & Elaine May. He had a reputation as a tough, old-school, cigar-chewing negotiator whose gift for big-money contracts often saw his clients turning over huge profits within a short time of signing with him.

Joffe's first film as a producer with Woody Allen was Take the Money and Run, the success of which he was able to leverage into a then-unprecedented degree of artistic control over his films for the director. He is listed either as producer, co-producer or executive producer on all of Allen's films up to and including the yet-to-be-released Vicki Cristina Barcelona, and when Annie Hall won the Best Picture Oscar in 1977, it was Joffe who picked up the prize in Woody Allen's stead. According to the New York Times, he was a stern and frank figure in the careers of his proteges, and offered up the following advice to a young Allen, frustrated at the dues-paying period he spent making films like Casino Royale: "You're trying to get into the film business. It's going to be a big picture, and you're in it with a lot of stars. You're having a nice time in London, playing poker every night and visiting all the museums. Just shut up."

Screengrab Q&A: Joachim Trier, Director of Reprise

Peter Smith — Fri, 16 May 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Joachim Trier's debut film Reprise centers on a pair of twentysomething best friends who drop their debut novels into the same mailbox to varied results. It's taken the writer/director on a very interesting journey. The film won Trier a Discovery Award at the 2006 Toronto Film Festival; it debuted in the States at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, and was later the featured film in the 2007 New Directors/New Films series, where Manohla Dargis of the New York Times declared it "one of the most passionately and intellectually uninhibited works from a young director I've seen in ages." It also went on to win Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Film at the Amanda Awards in Norway (the equivalent of an Oscar) in 2007. But only after support from superproducer Scott Rudin and Miramax will the film get a general release in American theaters today. Reprise is vibrant, inventive and original in both its ideas and its form, and is sure to be at the top of my own year-end list. — Bryan Whitefield

Foreign-language films typically have a hard time in America, and I remember someone at the MoMA screening asking if you had considered writing an English language version of Reprise. . .
[laughs] I've had offers, actually. But to me Reprise is perfect as it is now in its cultural setting. I'm interested in detail, and not because I'm trying to hone in on one particular part of the audience. You try to see things as they are — these are people who are living like that and have shoes like that and listen to music like this and this is the world where they live. You work to create it and you don't ask questions. To recreate that somewhere else would be absurd. But at the same time, some people were telling me, "This film reminds me so much of people I know on the Lower East Side." I get this even in Turkey. There were people there that were coming up to me to say, "We have boys like that in Istanbul that listen to Joy Division and everything."

You use some interesting formal devices in the film, like skewing timelines or having scenes play where the dialogue track doesn't match the action. How much of that was in the script and how much was done afterwards?
The screenplay is a lot like the film as a finished piece, but along the way you have to create something else and then come back to it. We would write a very intertwined, intercut scene to give the financiers an idea of how it would look. But then I would re-write it, with my co-writer, as a long linear scene that we would then cut up and go back to the initial idea. Dirty formalism, I usually call it. It needs to be alive and chaotic, yet it's also quite particularly planned.

The film plays very loose, but at the same time feels very focused.
I think those are the kind of contrasts we are always looking for when we do movies. I think it's the same for the actors. They go on set and they learn their lines and practice and run them again and again, and then they go on set and kind of lose them.

You're also dealing with the contrast between light and dark; the film balances very serious scenes with very funny ones.
It's kind of like music. In order to [fit in both tones], you need almost musical transitions.

That is how people actually deal with unhappy experiences. If you're going to pick your best friend up out of the mental hospital, you make a joke to deal with it.
Otherwise you won't survive. Compensational dynamics in people are more interesting. When the two boys are closest to each other, they can throw a lot of shit and say bad things to each other, but when they drift apart, they don't have that glue anymore. They end up trying to be polite; they're just not sure what to say anymore.

You cast mostly non-professional actors.
We looked at musicians or friends of friends or stand-up comedians, all sorts of people. In fairness, some of them are trained actors, but the lead parts are all people who have done other things. Like the guy that plays Phillip is a doctor. He worked with young teenage schizophrenics as part of his education as a doctor, so he had great experience, and he knew that madness isn't always excessive and screamy. It can sometimes be very drawn in.

Were there filmmakers or artists in general who inspired you?
Alain Resnais and Chris Marker are people who have meant a lot to me, because they made films that deal with almost the ground substance of cinema — memory, representation, identity — things that I think give themselves as themes to films particularly. Also Woody Allen, with Annie Hall. A lot of that stuff is seen as comedy but it's actually really good drama. But there are millions of references — a lot of music actually. The guy that did the score has a band called The White Birch, and we were listening to that all the time when we were writing. It was great when he said he would do the score for us since he'd never done feature film scores before.

Was he a friend of yours?
Not at the time, but we had some common friends.You know, it's a little ironic since Reprise is kind of about people who fall apart as friends, but I've made a lot of new friends through this process.

[SEMI-SPOILER ALERT] I thought it was refreshing to have an, in a sense, uplifting, almost happy ending.
Not everybody has interpreted it like that.

I kept waiting for something really dark to happen and I thought the way you tied things up was very nice. Did you struggle with that decision?
People interpret the ending differently. Some people see it as quite bleak and others see it as optimistic. I was always, in my mind, cheering for the characters; I just hope that people are open to an open ending.

One of the hallmarks of American indies seems to be that if you have a happy ending, you secretly wanted to make a commercial film.
I remember hearing acquisitions people talking about the films at Sundance: "Was it hopeful? Was it uplifting?" Those were the two words I kept hearing, and it struck me as so odd. . . I mean, what the fuck is hopeful? It makes me hopeful sometimes if a filmmaker can make a film that's truly sad and makes me feel less alone. But this idea of hopefulness I found very funny.

A “Beverly Hills Chihuahua” By Any Other Name

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 13 May 2008 16:00:00 GMT

In Jack Mathews’ book The Battle of Brazil, which recounts Terry Gilliam’s struggle to get his director’s cut of Brazil released by Universal Pictures, the author reprints a list of alternative titles the Universal suits presented to Gilliam. Apparently they felt Brazil was confusing or misleading – after all, the movie didn’t take place in Brazil, and they certainly didn’t want to give audiences the wrong impression. And you can certainly see how these titles would have proved clearer and more appealing to the masses: If Osmosis, Who Are You?, Explanada Fortunata Is Not My Real Name, The Girl in the House on the Truck That's on Fire, and my all-time favorite, Gnu Yak, Gnu Yak and Other Bestial Places.

The point is, choosing the title of a movie can be a multi-million dollar decision, as Josh Friedman reports in the L.A. Times. It’s so important, there’s even a consulting firm called TitleDoctors, started by marketing consultants Seth Lockhart and Jamil Barrie. Imagine, this is a job you can have – meeting with movie executives and presenting them with a list of old song titles you think would be a perfect fit for their new romantic comedy or crime drama.

“Getting studios to agree on a name change is never easy (none of the titles for the 13 films Lockhart and Barrie consulted on during their first year in business has been adopted),” Friedman writes. “Filmmakers and production executives can become enamored of a movie's ‘working’ title. And studios may have already invested millions in marketing a project under a particular name, making it financially costly to alter.”

Some title changes are for the best; it’s hard to imagine Annie Hall achieving classic status under its original moniker Anhedonia, after all, and if you’re making a comedy about a pampered pocket dog from the 90210, you might as well call it Beverly Hills Chihuahua. But as Friedman points out, audiences are likely to flock to Hancock as much as they would the proposed alternate titles Heroes Never Die and Less Than Hero. And it’s probably for the best that the original title, Tonight, He Comes was jettisoned. As star Will Smith told Entertainment Weekly, ““You don’t want your movie to already have the porno title.”

New York Magazine Picks the New Yorkiest Movies Since 1968

Phil Nugent — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 15:00:00 GMT

To celebrate its fortieth anniversary, New York magazine has set its writers to assemble a "canon" of cultural works (books, music, TV, movies) from the last forty years that "capture something emblematic about New York." This, as David Edelstein's list of movies makes clear, isn't necessarily about selecting the best, nor is it limited to movies made by New Yorkers in New York: El Topo is here, for its role in creating that urban institution, the midnight movie. (By a felicitous quirk of timing, the first title on the list is Planet of the Apes with Charlton Heston, for its indelible closing image of the Statue of the Liberty after a wild weekend.) Also cited: Mean Streets, The Godfather, Part II, Taxi Driver, Dog Day Afternoon, Death Wish, The French Connection, Shaft, Deep Throat, Annie Hall, Saturday Night Fever, Tootsie, Wild Style, My Dinner with Andre, Stranger Than Paradise, and Wall Street.

Edelstein sort of half-apologizes for having picked so many movies from the 1970s, but how could it be otherwise? It was in the seventies that Hollywood declared studio lots passe and invaded the city with film crews, which were often manned by smart-ass native New Yorkers like Sidney Lumet, Paul Mazursky, and Brian De Palma, whose sensibilities came through so strongly that thet sometimes seemed to be making a "New York movie" even when they weren't. The American movie renaissance of the seventies is inextricably tied up with the breakdown of "the ungovernable city" in the same period; at the same time that the country at large was so attuned to the virtues associated with New York that Woody Allen could emerge as a sex symbol, the city went bankrupt and all but imploded, and the movies were here to record that. Movies as great as Scorsese's early features and as klutzy as Shaft all double as time capsules that tap into the urban chaos and make it look exciting, which is why there are people now who are nostalgic for the "good, old" (pre-Disneyfied) Times Square of hookers, three-card monte, and garbage-strewn streets. Movies don't feel as if they have that kind of combined impact anymore, though one movie that tried hard was Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, which both Edelstein and Lee credit with helping to drive Ed Koch from office. In an accompanying Q & A, Lee appears to also take credit for hooking up Barack and Michelle Obama, since "Barack told me the first date he took Michelle to was Do the Right Thing. I said, 'Thank God I made it.'" Timing is everything. If they'd met a year earlier or a year later, and he'd taken her to School Daze or Mo' Better Blues, she might have gone right home and changed her phone number.

Rep Report Addendum: 90 Years' Worth of United Artists at Film Forum

Phil Nugent — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 20:00:00 GMT

United Artists may have been the first major American film studio to be set up, back in 1919, in some kind of spirit of. . . if not utopianism, then at least something other than outright hostile opposition to the people on the creative end. It was the people on the creative end who set it up — four of them, to be precise — D. W. Griffith, Charles Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., and Mary Pickford — with an eye towards distributing their own movies, and accounts of its founding that sought out the opinion of their rival studio heads tended to be long of images of asylums taken over by the inmates, that sort of thing. Originally each member of the original triumvirate was supposed to help the studio make its nut by turning out four films a year, which might not have been such a crackpot idea at one point, but Griffith and Chaplin and Fairbanks were beginning to think bigger and bigger on projects that they fussed over for longer and longer periods, and none of them were getting any younger, and it wasn't long before other filmmakers were being invited to make films for UA. In the 1950s, producers Arthur Krim and Robert Benjamin took it over, with Chaplin and Pickford's blessings. (Fairbanks and Griffith had died by then.) As Dave Kehr notes, "Because United Artists did not feel constrained by the moral strictures of the Production Code, it was able to move quickly as social mores changed in the 1960s." In the fifties, working with a succession of independent producers, the studio had greenlit movies that defied censorship codes and conventional attitudes such as The Manchurian Candidate, Sweet Smell of Success, and Kiss Me Deadly. In the 1960s, they produced Midnight Cowboy, the first movie to win the Academy Award for Best Picture after having been given an X rating by the MPAA. (They also developed a lucrative sideline in English-speaking imports, such as the British films Tom Jones — another Oscar winner for Best Picture — A Hard Day's Night, and Sunday, Bloody Sunday, as well as the dubbed versions of Sergio Leone's Italian Westerns starring Clint Eastwood.

In the 1970s, UA's faith in risk-taking filmmakers made possible such Renaissance-era classics as Last Tango in Paris, Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye and Thieves Like Us, and Annie Hall, but this approach, led them grief: at a precarious time in the company's fortune, around the time that Krim, Benjamin, and CEO Eric Pleskow noisily broke away to form their own company, Orion, Michael Cimino showed up at UA's door with a script called Heaven's Gate and a request for enough rope, and the confused, inexperienced new UA bosses gave him enough to hang half the directors in Los Angeles. Cimino's baby, which premiered in the same season that produced the studio's last proud moment, Raging Bull, sank United Artists, which wound up being picked up by MGM, which coveted its distribution apparatus. For much of the time since then, UA has amounted to a handful of franchise rights (mainly to the Pink Panther and James Bond) in search of a studio, but last year it became a play toy for Tom Cruise and his producing partner Paula Wagner. Starting today and running through May 1, Film Forum honors the good old days with a mammoth retrospective that includes all the films listed above — well, except for Heaven's Gate; I mean, would you invite the guy who killed your kids to your wedding anniversary? — including other delights, including key films by the original big four: Griffith's Orphans of the Storm, Way Down East, and Broken Blossoms; Chaplin's City Lights and Modern Times; Fairbanks's The Thief of Bagdad, The Mask of Zorro, and Robin Hood; and Mary Pickford's Sparrows and My Best Girl.

Oprah's Favorite Things Include Watching Road House

Peter Smith — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 18:00:00 GMT

We're not so into this trend of giant DVD box sets; they tend to be padded with lots of half-baked featurettes, useless production stills, and other things you'd never pay money for if they weren't all packaged together in a pretty box with a movie you really like. But United Artists just took it to the next level with its 90th Anniversary Prestige Collection — a massive 110-disc set that features ninety films from seven decades. Oprah just named it one of her Favorite Things, which means it will sell like hotcakes. $870 hotcakes to be exact. But let's look at exactly which ninety movies are featured, shall we?

First off, the box set starts with the '40s, leaving out the opportunity to include earlier United Artist benchmarks like Broken Blossoms (1919), The Gold Rush (1925) and Stagecoach (1939).

The '40s/'50s selection, including Marty, Night of the Hunter and Some Like It Hot, is fairly solid — although Rebecca and The African Queen are among the missing.

The '60s brings a bunch of Bond films and some second-tier Billy Wilder. Good picks: The Apartment, In the Heat of the Night, Satyricon, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, Midnight Cowboy. Questionable: It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, The Thomas Crown Affair, The Battle of Britain, I Could Go On Singing. Notable omission: The Graduate.

The '70s has some interesting stuff: Rocky, Annie Hall, The Last Waltz, Carrie, Manhattan, Last Tango in Paris and Lenny would make for a quality weekend of film-watching. But The Pink Panther Strikes Again? Equus? And how much James Bond do we really need? Missing in action: Network and Being There.

By the '80s, things are getting a bit random. Enjoy a triple feature of Heaven's Gate, WarGames and Child's Play! Or alternately, Baby Boom, Raging Bull and Road House! Top it off with the most unnecessary Bond film of them all, the Timothy Dalton vehicle The Living Daylights. No big omissions here, unless you want to count I'm Gonna Git You Sucka.

Finally we reach the '90s-'00s, a short selection featuring Bowling for Columbine, the little-seen Pieces of April, The Birdcage, Hotel Rwanda, Leaving Las Vegas, and five others. What, no Showgirls?

Overall, the set feels like a stranger's DVD collection: a few classics, a few childhood favorites, a few questionable selections they probably got for $5 at the drugstore. But it doesn't feel like the collection of a movie buff, nor does it have any particular coherence beyond the name of the studio. If an alien landed on Earth and asked me how to quickly amass an American film collection, I might advise him to get this box set. However, if you live on this planet, you can probably find a better use for your $900. Like, for example, buying forty-five copies of Network. — Gwynne Watkins

Allen and Martin in Print

Peter Smith — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 17:00:00 GMT

Two of the major film comedians of recent decades have started launching multiple assaults onto bookstore shelves. Woody Allen, of course, stop being a "mere" comedian a long time ago; he also started hemorrhaging audience shares a long time ago, and Conversations with Woody Allen: His Films, the Movies, and Movie-making, a redundantly subtitled collection of interviews conducted with his biographer Eric Lax, is designed to serve as a reminder that he is a major filmmaker, in case any of the people who've stopped seeing his movies have forgotten it. Much of what he has to say about the path he's taken as a director and his on-again, off-again relationship with his fans will be very familiar to anyone who's had moments of being interested lo these many years. Allen likes to affect a mandarin pose; the official story is that he stopped reading his reviews after Annie Hall, a film whose "classic" status apparently strikes him as inexplicable. But the 1980 Stardust Memories, a self-victimization orgy (and a work that Allen regards as among his very favorites) that includes a fantasy scene of extraterrestrials telling Allen that they prefer his "earlier, funnier" films, sure does look like it was made by someone who'd made a close study of the reviews of Interiors. Lax may be too deferential for the job; the book would be a livelier read if some of it had been done with an interlocutor who might have reacted to Allen's wondering aloud why Hollywood Ending "was not thought of as a first-rate, extraordinary comedy" by explaining, "Because it sucked donkeys, my liege." Blessedly, as a sop to those who like him funny, Allen has also authorized the release of Mere Anarchy, a new book of his recent "casuals" from The New Yorker, as well as The Insanity Defense: The Complete Prose, which vacuums up the contents of the three earlier collections that Allen published from around 1970 to 1980. The new collection, which brings together the pieces Allen started publishing again in the 1990s after a long time away from the typewriter, are sometimes a little creaky, but they have their moments. The thicker book, however, is a dandy flashback to that period when Allen's pores seemed to spontaneously produce off-kilter sophomoric wisecracks. You can see him losing interest in the form towards the end of the book, but that's when he rallies and produces his best effort at staying gut-bustingly funny while telling a real, honest-to-God story: "The Gleams Episode", about an ill-fated love affair between Emma Bovary and a frustrated CCNY professor who has the ability to literally escape into the pages of literary classics.

Playing the mandarin may actually come a lot more naturally to Steve Martin, who seems to have put an inhuman amount of cool, thoughtful contemplation into a career that began with him marketing himself as a spastic ass. Martin describes Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life, a memoir that takes him from the start of his performing career to the point in 1981 when he retired from stand-up to concentrate on movies, as "not an autobiography but a biography, because I am writing about someone I used to know." (Martin has also written a new alphabet book, with illustrations by Roz Chast.) Like Allen, Martin has gradually moved away from his earlier, spirited film work, but with a difference. He was once eager to star in the chance-taking Pennies from Heaven and to explore his bittersweet side in his scripts for Roxanne and L.A. Story, but at some point he got fed up with putting his heart and blood into projects that were perceived as commercial disappointments, and for more than ten years now, he's plainly seen movies as something you do for the money and pitch straight down the center of the road. His more ambitious work has been done elsewhere (as in his play Picasso at the Lapin Agile and his novella Shopgirl, which inspired a 2005 film in which he co-starred with Clare Danes) or at least in movies that were somebody else's baby (such as David Manet's The Spanish Prisoner, where he had a chilling role as a con man). The excerpts from his memoir that have appeared already are graceful, affecting, and leave the reader wanting more. In the meantime, he's about to start a new movie, based on his idea of what movie audiences want: it's an unnecessary sequel to his unnecessary remake of The Pink Panther. — Phil Nugent