The Screengrab : apocalypse now

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 28 May 2009 23:30:00 GMT

JAWS (1975)

Steven Spielberg comes in for his knocks on the "worst endings" part of this list: given all the resources in the film world, the poor guy just has trouble knowing when to stop. That makes it especially worth mentioning that, when he was young and desperate and trying to piece his first blockbuster together with spit and Scotch tape, he had the instincts and confidence and chops to tee up a daring high shot and make a hole in one. Peter Benchley, the author of the novel on which the movie was based, liked to recall the conversation he had in which he explained to Spielberg that the scene was physically impossible, and Spielberg replied that it didn't matter, saying that if he had the audience with him for the first couple of hours, he could sell them anything he wanted in the last five minutes, and as Benchley would admit, the kid was right. (PN)

MELVIN AND HOWARD (1976)

Jonathan Demme's version of the meeting of Howard Hughes (Jason Robards) and Melvin Dummar (Paul Le Mat) begins with a beauty of a long opening sequence, with Melvin giving the broken-down derelict Hughes a ride in his truck after picking him up in the desert in the middle of the night and gradually melting away his surly, defensive paranoia with the warmth of his cornball, middle American sincerity. The movie ends with a lovely little dream that finds the two of them back in the truck, with Howard taking the wheel from the exhausted, put-upon Melvin. Dennis Potter must have seen it and liked it, because he wrote a variation of it into the ending of his own 1985 film Dreamchild, with Lewis Carroll and the old woman who'd once served as the basis for his Alice standing in for Howard and Melvin, and it killed there, too. (PN)

APOCALYPSE NOW (1979)

When I first saw Apocalypse Now on VHS in the late '80s, the finale left me breathless. Willard terminated Kurtz with extreme prejudice, took Lance down to the boat, and then, after they crept away down the river, the promised airstrike fulfilled Kurtz's final instruction and exterminated them all. In the above clip, over the footage that floored the teenaged me, Francis Ford Coppola himself explains why this was not his intended interpretation. But what does he know? Coppola, who would later go on to direct such gems as The Godfather Part III and the Robin Williams vehicle Jack, thought that what the film really needed was another hour dealing with French imperialism in Southeast Asia. Although Saturday Night Live cut to the quick in their satire of the ending (Martin Sheen played a man hired by the studios to travel up river and shut down the production, and Coppola, out of ideas, blew everything up), the explosion of the set and murder of the people who worshipped Kurtz like a god is a better fit for the themes: the destructive clash of Western imperialism and other cultures, Willard becoming as hollow as Kurtz, and the fucking horror, the horror. The Coppola-approved ending is below (some of it has been translated to another language, but the visuals are what's important at the end), and while the juxtaposition of Willard's face and the statue is beautiful, luster is lacking compared to the deep reds, yellows, and whites of the airstrike. (HC)

THE BIRDS(1963)

End of the world. You expect it to come from someplace obvious, like a nuclear blast or a plague or a monster from the deep. But instead nature has turned on us, and nothing's ever going to be the same. The clip above discusses the ending that Evan Hunter intended in the script. His version had more gore, but the visual implication in the actual ending of the movie is much more unsettling, the birds covering every surface, the horrible sound of their cooing and calls, the sky dark and ominous as the car slowly starts to twist along the road. End of the world. (HC)

And, of course, we certainly couldn't forget...

GONE WITH THE WIND (1939)

CASABLANCA (1942)

SUNSET BOULEVARD (1950)

...but if we DID forget any of your favorites, then hopefully these two guys can pick up the slack...

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

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Hayden Childs

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

Great Beginnings: Screengrab's Favorite Opening Scenes Of All Time (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 22:30:00 GMT

DO THE RIGHT THING (1989)

Endings and (especially) middles are hard, but there’s something liberating about the instant rush and hit-the-ground momentum of beginnings, which is why so many great (and even not-so-great) directors are often inspired to make big, bold “HERE I AM!” statements in the first few minutes of films that frequently can’t compete with their own opening sequences. But Spike Lee, after two previous good-but-not-great at-bats with She’s Gotta Have It and School Daze, finally knocked one out of the park with Do The Right Thing, which exploded onto movie screens with the sex-and-violence one-two punch of Public Enemy’s “Fight The Power” and Rosie Perez’s fly-girl attack during the opening credits, then jolted audiences again with an alarm clock and the fast-talking “WAKE UP!” morning rap of Samuel L. Jackson’s dee-jay Mister Señor Love Daddy, who keeps the pace and sets the scene, letting us know in no uncertain terms that it’s HOT and about to get hotter as Lee takes us on a tour of his beloved Bed-Stuy neighborhood, introducing us in quick succession to most of the major players in a world as instantly distinctive as John Ford’s Monument Valley...or even Woody Allen’s Manhattan. (AO)

APOCALYPSE NOW (1979)

Rarely has a film’s initial moments set the forthcoming tone as immediately and evocatively as those of Apocalypse Now with its protracted shot of the Vietnamese jungle. From silence comes the sound of helicopter blades, then the airborne choppers themselves, and then the sparse electric guitar notes of The Doors’ “The End.” When Jim Morrison’s voice croons “This is the end” and bursts of napalm decimate the lush forest, the film fully enters into the realm of the hallucinatory, with Francis Ford Coppola’s pan through the smoke and fire soon integrating the superimposed image of Martin Sheen’s upside-down face, his head on a pillow facing a ceiling fan. Dream and reality coalesce in a woozy, hazy blend of longing, fear and self-inflicted violence (symbolized by a gun lying beside Sheen on the bed) that result, per the Lizard King, in “a wilderness of pain. And all the children are insane.” Table-setters don’t get much more exquisite than this. (NS)

BARBARELLA (1968)

This is more of an excuse for showing Jane Fonda naked than anything else, but the same could be said of the entire movie. An astronaut clad in a rather community theatre-looking metallic space suit floats weightlessly above a yellow shag carpet. Elevator muzak plays in the background and piece by piece, the suit comes off, revealing the astronaut to be a comely blonde, naked beneath the suit. Soon we have Barbarella floating around with her ass in the air to the tones of 1960s muzak. Cute and sexy for sure, but also disturbingly fetus-like. (SCS)

LA DOLCE VITA (1960)

La Dolce Vita has its fair share of famous scenes. The opening in which Jesus dangles from a helicopter flying low over Rome beats Anita Ekberg in the fountain by a mile. Fellini knows that any good opening needs to be odd and enjoyable besides hinting at what's to come. Here we have religion, sexy rich women, poor street boys, modern technology and ruins. And Paparazzo taking photos of it all while Marcello Mastroianni's character quietly eggs him on. (SCS)

THE SEARCHERS (1956)

Much is made of the final scene, where the movie's hero/anti-hero, the racist Ethan Edwards, cannot enter the embrace of the household, and the door slowly shuts on him. The opening scene is a mirror of the end, with Ethan's sister-in-law Martha opening the door and walking from the cool shade of the house into the harsh light of Monument Valley, relocated from Utah to Texas for the purposes of the film. Ethan is riding his horse in through the desert, still a ways off although closer than anything else in the huge landscape. The camera's journey from the dark interior to the brilliant and tremendous exterior emphasizes just how small the ranch is. Ethan's visit is his first in many years, and although the film doesn't say a word about it, it is clear that while his sleazy exploits are one reason he has stayed away for so long, his love for Martha is the primary cause. The whole of the plot revolves around that unspoken love. If you look for it, you can see it from the first moment Martha's face becomes visible, all of the concern and ambiguity that she cannot speak. Unspoken truths are at the heart of The Searchers, and in the gulf between what is said and what is meant is the real history of this country. (HC)

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Nick Schager, Sarah Clyne Sundberg, Hayden Childs

Independent Film Festival Boston Review: Winnebago Man

Andrew Osborne — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 16:05:00 GMT

My Screengrab colleague Scott Von Doviak and I tried to see Ben Steinbauer’s hot ticket documentary Winnebago Man three times during the 2009 South-By-Southwest festival in Austin, TX and were thwarted each time: once by sold-out crowds, once by SXSW traffic combined with sold-out crowds and once by a scheduling conflict.

Thus, I was happy to finally catch up with the movie at this year’s IFFB (which, curiously, stands for just “Independent Film Festival Boston,” rather than the presumably too mainstream-sounding “Independent Film Festival OF Boston”) -- and, I’m happy to report, the experience was nearly as rewarding and worth the wait as Steinbauer’s own three year pursuit of his elusive subject, Jack “Winnebago Man” Rebney, a.k.a. the Angriest R.V. Salesman in the World.

My wife had never seen the infamous YouTube clip that spawned Steinbauer’s project (a fact that, when spoken aloud at yesterday’s screening, brought astonished cries of disbelief from several audience members surrounding us at the Somerville Theater) -- so for those of you similarly unfamiliar, “Winnebago Man” was among the earliest generation of viral video superstars, back when “viral videos” were actually bootleg VHS tapes passed from one found footage enthusiast to another. Later, with the advent of YouTube’s paradigm-shifting time-suck technology, the montage of expletive-laden outtakes from some long-ago industrial film “blew up” (as the young people say), inspiring dozens of online parodies and spreading the Winnebago Man’s Daffy Duck-esque exasperation to millions around the world:

Austin documentarian Steinbauer, no stranger to on-set frustration and stress, became obsessed with the man in the clip (who’d inevitably become, among other things, a kind of patron saint to independent filmmakers everywhere) and set out to discover what the Winnebago Man himself thought of his new-fangled digital age fame (if, indeed, he was aware of it, or even still alive).

And so begins a funny and thought-provoking investigation into the nature of overnight on-line notoriety (featuring several hilarious and wince-inducing clips of comparable interweb superstars like the Star Wars kid and Aleksey “Impossible Is Nothing” Vayner), followed by a search for Rebney, the mysterious, reclusive Winnebago Man (whose Kurtz-like enigma is pieced together in the first reel of the film via intriguing clues like a telling string of P.O. boxes and off-the-grid identity erasure, the purple prose of a lone online classified ad attributed to Rebney and, eventually, first-hand accounts of actual encounters with the angriest RV salesman in the world).

Then one day, in a comically thrilling moment, the voice of the actual Winnebago Man finally issues from Steinbauer’s answering machine, luring the filmmaker on a journey that snakes through the rest of the film like a main circuit cable, plugged straight into Rebney. Since the filmmaker’s multi-faceted encounter with the real-life man behind the ranting is part of the fun and suspense of Winnebago Man, I won’t reveal more, except to say the results are funny, unpredictable and satisfying, resulting in a foul-mouthed, misanthropic (yet deeply human) examination of privacy and community in the internet age -- ideally suited for a double-feature screening with the somewhat sunnier, thematically-linked and equally enjoyable Best Worst Movie on your Netflix queue and/or at a savvy art-house near you.

Related Articles:
SXSW: The Final Round-Up
SXSW Review: Best Worst Movie

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: April 11-17, 2009

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 21:00:00 GMT

It’s not funny, you know. Sure, Woody Harrelson Launches Method Assault on Undead Photographer makes for a cute headline. But if you knew anything about the craft, you’d know that this sort of thing goes on all time when we actors get so deeply involved with our characters. Do you know how many natives Brando beheaded with a machete on the set of Apocalypse Now? Sure, Paramount covered it all up, but when you’re in Hollywood’s circle of trust, you hear about these things.

It’s been a bad week for Woodies all around, as you know if you read Woody Allen, Larry David and the Blackness of Eternity and How Much Is Woody Allen’s Good Name Worth? Let me ask you this: When is Woody Allen gonna make a zombie movie? About time, I’d say.

Anyway, that paparazzo is thinking of suing me, so I’m gonna go consult The Best & Worst Get Rich Quick Schemes in Cinema History (Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five and Six). And then maybe I’ll get around to the rest of these:

Reviews: Lemon Tree, Sleep Dealer, State of Play, Grey Gardens, The Hemingway Night

The Screengrab Holiday Special , Parts One, Two, Intermission & Three

The Legend of "Him", the Lost Dirty Jesus Movie

Transported: The Jason Statham Think Piece

Yesterday's Hits: There's Something About Mary (1998, Peter and Bobby Farrelly)

Unwatchable #37: Bad Girls from Valley High

SXSW Review: "My Suicide"

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 19:00:00 GMT

Imagine all the worst case scenarios you might associate with the term "indie film," and you'll find most of them on display in David Lee Miller's intolerable feature My Suicide. Overbearing, in-your-face mixed media visuals? Check. Facile approach to "edgy" subject matter? Check. Record label-approved hipster band soundtrack slathered over every scene? Check. Photogenic young cast sure to meet the approval of The Hills demographic? Check. Any sort of heart or insight or recognizable human behavior? Nowhere to be found.

Archie Williams (Gabriel Sunday) is a 17-year-old high school student living in a media-saturated world of his own making. A video camera seemingly permanently affixed to his hand, an array of movie references his most reliable form of communication, Archie is pretty much insufferable from the very beginning of My Suicide. So when we learn he's planning to kill himself on camera for a media class project, it's not the most upsetting news.

Understandably, Archie's teacher is not on board with his concept, although his classmates are intrigued, particularly beautiful Sierra (Brooke Nevin), the poor little rich girl Archie has always had a crush on. Sierra lost her brother in a car accident, and her parents are unfeeling, overmedicated plastic people who give her everything she wants. Naturally, she's suicidal as well. Oh, the pain of the privileged!

Archie and Sierra turn out to be kindred spirits, at least temporarily, and they set about checking items off their bucket list together, which works out great for Archie as Sierra takes his virginity. Just as we begin to suspect they'll decide there might be something to this "life" thing after all, a tragedy hits that sets them both back into a tailspin. Only the gaseous wisdom of special guest star David Carradine can set Archie back on the path to righteousness.

Director Miller gives this Afterschool Special material the full Requiem for a Dream/Natural Born Killers migraine treatment, emptying his box of ProTools to engineer a rapid-fire mix of film, video, animation and computer graphics that some will undoubtedly call "dazzling." All of this only serves to conceal how hollow the story is at the core and how little we care about the characters. Sunday is a skilled mimic, as we learn when Archie does trite re-enactments from The Deer Hunter, The Matrix, Apocalypse Now and Taxi Driver (yes, he actually does the "You talkin' to me" scene, which we all needed to see recreated for the twelve millionth time),but Archie's big emotional moments never ring true. Nothing does in My Suicide, including the tossed-off suggestion that helping others is the cure-all for depression. It would be depressing to think this is what passes for visionary indie filmmaking these days, but fortunately SXSW provides enough counter-examples to ensure that's not the case.

Related:
SXSW Review: American Prince
SXSW Review: New World Order

Better Late Than Never: Phil Nugent's Oscar Predictions

Phil Nugent — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 16:00:00 GMT

Here at the Screengrab, we happily embrace our responsibility, as movie bloggers, to approach the massive, steaming mountain of Oscar speculation coverage and, having considered it, to grab a shovel and do our part. I personally missed the recent group "Oscar predictions" feature, because I hadn't had the chance to see most of the movies nominated for the major awards. Now that time has passed, I still haven't seen them, but a wino who hangs out by the mall near Columbus Circle briefed me on what he'd heard people saying about them as they were filing out of the Loew's multiplex across from Lincoln Center and running their mouths while he was trying to sleep, and now I think I'm all up to speed. Let's do this thing.

BEST PICTURE: Last year, just as our country was collapsing into economic meltdown and post-imperial despair, one movie stood out for its ability to bring a smile to faces whose owners thought that they would never smile again, to fill the air with the laughter of children, to defy the iron laws of miserable reality and nature itself. That film was, of course, Beverly Hills Chihuahua. It's a lead pipe cinch to win Best Picture this year--or would be, if it were nominated. It isn't, due to a terrible blunder. Because most of the rich and powerful industry figures who select the nominees have very busy schedules, what with all the time they spend entertaining the troops overseas and home schooling their children, they entrust the actual selection process to their servants, asking them to fill out and submit their ballots for them. This year, most of them naturally advised the help to vote for the movie about the rich dogs who visit the slums, and something got lost in the translation, much to the benefit of Danny Boyle's movie, which is apparently about some folks in India. Once the voters recognize this slip-up, Slumdog's chances are sure to plummet.

The Weinstein Company has put a lot of muscle behind The Reader, but the film, which turns on the act of reading, and even announces as much in its title, will not be forgiven by the representatives of the movie business for so brazenly calling attention to, and perhaps seeming to encourage, an alternative method of entertainment. If the company wanted to antagonize the entire industry, why didn't they just make a movie called The Video Pirate Who Cost That Poor Studio Janitor in the Short Film You Just Saw His Daughter's College Fund? One film that might stand to profit from these movies' obvious missteps is Frost Nixon, Ron Howard's fact-based follow-up to Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill. (The movie stars Michael Sheen, the most talented and British of the countless actor sons, some legitimate and officialy recognized, some not, of Apocalypse Now star Martin Sheen, as Skid Roper, an itinerant washboard musician who wreaks bloody revenge on his former parter, Mojo Nixon, after Nixon dissolves their partnership and abandons him for solo stardom just as poor Skid was beginning to enjoy the earthly pleasures known only to novelty artists making it big on the collegr radio circuit.) But I predict that the Best Picture award will go the The Dark Knight. Since it's not nominated, its win would constitute a shocking and unexpected twist at the end of the evening, and that's just how Batman rolls!

BEST ACTOR: Everyone agrees that this will be a pitched battle between the two leading candidates: Frank Langella, who plays Mojo Nixon in Frost Nixon, and Brad Pitt for his performance as an eighty-year-old baby in the twenty minutes of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button that some people saw before they fell asleep or went out for a smoke and forgot to return to the theater. In both cases, it will very likely come down to the two bravura musical numbers performed by the stars. Langella's pitched rendition of "Burn Down the Malls" has become a cult sensation, especially since the Gap built their holiday TV commercials around it, but Pitt set the screen on fire with the spectacular production number in which he dances around his New Orlean orphanage, performing Benjamin Button's Oscar-nominated theme song:

Alakazam and whoa, hot damn!

I'm an eighty-year-old baby!

The devil must have sent me here to freak y'all out,

And no, I don't mean maybe.

Oh, I go in my pants like a baby do

But that's what the old folks do too, woo!

Prayin' every night, God, kill me, please!

I'm an eighty-year-old baby!

The rule of thumb with actors nominated for their performances in singing parts is that their odds greatly improve if they did their own singing. When Jamie Foxx was nominated for Ray a few years ago, the general consensus was that he was badly miscast as Johnny Ray, but Foxx was assured of a win as soon as voters heard his own wrenching performance of "The Little White Cloud That Cried". And while Langella did his own singing, not only was Pitt's singing voice dubbed, but his face was CGI-generated, and his dancing was performed by that old guy who used to appear in the Six Flags commercials. Normally, this would give Langella an edge. But we're probably going to have to give Pitt one of these things eventually, and there may never be another time when a Brad Pitt performance has so little Brad Pitt in it. And since the less Pitt contributes to a Brad Pitt performance the better it's likely to be, I think the Academy will do the right thing and strike now while the iron is hot.

BEST ACTRESS: Anne Hathaway is nominated for her performance in Rachel Getting Married, but as I understand, she doesn't play Rachel. Getting nominated for a movie that has a character's name in the title when you didn't play that character is just confusing. It makes Academy voters' heads swim, and trust me, these people don't need that. Kate Winslet is nominated for The Reader, and we've already discussed what's the matter with that title, and I hear that Winslet actually plays the person who the reader reads to, which...well, see above. Sometimes I don't think people even take these things seriously. Melissa Leo is nominated for Frozen River, which is a peerless example of the kind of performance and movie that wins at the Independent Spirit Awards exactly one day before the same names are read aloud at the Oscars ceremony and a murmur passes through the crowd that goes something like, "I dunno, I think maybe she's from Canada." Meryl Streep is nominated for playing a nun in a film based on an acclaimed Broadway play, and that sure sounds like an Oscar sure shot, as I was saying just the other day to President Ronald Reagan and MTV VJ Martha Quinn as we were playing Ms. Pac-Man and eating Frusen Glädjé washed down with New Coke while wearing our "Frankie Say" T-shirts and waiting to go over and stand in line for the opening of Epcot Center...oh, really? That was all that long ago, huh? Okay, then I guess it'll have to go to Angelina Jolie for The Changeling. It should have hit me immediately that they'll need to do that to make it up to Clint for not nominating him for having had jack shit to do with Gran Torino, especially since watching that movie amounted to spending two hours seeing Eastwood screaming at the voters, "Look at these wrinkles! Listen to this raspy croak of a voice! Y'see this kisser? I'm not gonna be here forever, for God's sakes, don't you get it!?" The nice thing is that now Brad and Angelina will both carry one home, on the same night. It'll probably extend the life of the marriage by a good two years.

BEST DIRECTOR: Danny Boyle for Slumdog Millionaire. Just the voters' way of saying that they understand that the mix-up about nominating him instead of whoever directed Beverly Hills Chihuahua wasn't his fault and everybody feels bad about any possible embarrassment this whole mess has cost him

THE JEAN HERSHOLT HUMANITARIAN AWARD: This guy.

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

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

LOST IN TRANSLATION (2003)

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

DEFENDING YOUR LIFE (1991)

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

MYSTERY TRAIN (1989)

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

APOCALYPSE NOW (1979)

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

THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING (1975)

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

LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (1962)

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

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

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

Take Five: Stoned

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Oliver Stone's hastily assembled, curiously timed film biography of George W. Bush, W., opens everywhere today. "Why?" is a question for the ages; Bush is not only still alive, he's still President of the United States, and the movie was completed before one of the major events of his administration actually happened. Couldn't Stone have waited a few years? After all, Jim Morrison had been in the ground for two decades before Stone got around to making a crappy movie about him. Our own Scott Von Doviak has already done the heavy lifting of actually seeing W., and his review suggests that it's another non-triumph for Ollie; but in this case, as much as we may find the guy off-putting, Take Five comes to praise Stone, not to bury him. As we do every time he comes out with a new movie, we float our favorite theory about the man: that he's actually a very good writer who failed upwards and became a very mediocre director, a living example of the Peter Principle. With the sole (and bewildering) exception of Evita, Oliver Stone hasn't written a movie he didn't also direct in over twenty years; but lest we forget, in his early years, Stone was considered a top-notch screenwriter who was expert at plucking the key themes out of someone else's vision -- making them lean, mean, and, perhaps most memorably, violent in an incredibly compelling way. So today, we're going to look at five movies which Stone didn't direct, but whose screenplays he fully or partly wrote -- almost all of which we like more than most of the films where he was behind the camera.

MIDNIGHT EXPRESS (1978)

Directed by the erratic Alan Parker, the infamous, controversial Midnight Express was a 32-year-old Oliver Stone's first major motion picture as a screenwriter. It went on to become a huge box office success, as well as spurring a major moral panic over drug smuggling and making the words "Turkish prison" as paralyzing as an ice cube down the back of the shirt. Unsurprisingly, in later years, it became clear that Stone's screenplay was a wildly over-the-top exaggeration full of fabrications, distortions and outright nonsense, despite its claim of being based on a true story; even the real-life Billy Hayes repudiated it. But that was, and to some extent still is, the genius of Oliver Stone: he could extrapolate the juciest meat of a story and sizzle it up into an absurd paranoid fantasy you couldn't help but devour.

CONAN THE BARBARIAN (1982)

Still, in our opinion, the greatest thing that Oliver Stone has ever done, the hugely underrated Conan the Barbarian found him paired in the screenwriting duties with director John Milius. Milius, an unabashed right-wing war hawk and suspected crypto-fascist, had a habit of butting heads with '60s liberals like Stone, with the conflict bringing out the best in both of them; he'd previously worked with Francis Ford Coppola, even more of a lefty than Stone, on Apocalypse Now, and their diametrically opposed viewpoints about the Vietnam War resulted in a crazed masterpiece. Conan is no less so; Stone's cynical pro-civilization standpoint and Milius' joyously pro-barbarian views resulted in a movie that is uncannily faithful to Robert E. Howard's violent, amoral books.

SCARFACE (1983)

Even to Brian DePalma's most vociferous defenders -- a dwindling number in which we count ourselves members in good standing -- there is a general recognition that Scarface, his updating of the 1930s gangster classic to the Miami drug trade days, isn't actually a very good movie. But it is a very important movie, insofar as it influenced dozens of later thug-life pictures both better and worse than it was; and, what's more, for its many, many failings, it's a compulsively watchable movie. Even if you know about its overblown performances, its ridiculous ending, and its general sense of aimlessness and enervation, you hardly ever want to turn it off. And a lot of that is down to screenwriter Oliver Stone, who crammed it full of so many hilariously quotable lines that it became the biggest influence on hip-hop since James Brown.

YEAR OF THE DRAGON (1985)

Michael Cimino and Oliver Stone have been tied together by fate since early on. They share similar styles and similar obsessions, and both were rumored for many years as wanting to do a remake of the woozy film version of Ayn Rand's ridiculous novel, The Fountainhead. The one time they worked together was on 1985's Year of the Dragon, a film in which all of their strengths and weaknesses were apparent. Just before giving full voice to his Vietnam experiences in Platoon, Stone hints at them here, constantly and darkly; his dialogue is often flat and creaky, as opposed to the gloriously lurid bombshells of Scarface, but his characters and scenarios compliment Cimino's hyperactive sense of busy detail and rhetorical bombast, and he plays on themes of male bonding and sudden violence as a social actor that he'd later explore as a director.

8 MILLION WAYS TO DIE (1986)

The last movie Stone would write for a director other than himself (aside from the aforementioned Evita, to which his contributions were minimal) was Hal Ashby's 8 Million Ways to Die, a movie reviled by many but regarded by others as a miniature masterpiece that doesn't get nearly the attention it deserves. Whatever the case, its favors -- which, for its defenders, include some gorgeously lurid violence and dialogue so scuzzy it borders on the beautiful, as well as a nice lead performance by Jeff Bridges -- are hard to discern under lots of muddle. Did Ashby really direct, or did Stone take over when he was fired? Did Stone really write, or is Robert Towne responsible for the script Stone could no longer handle when he ended up behind the camera? We may never know; and a lot of people simply don't care.

Related Posts:

Dissecting/Debating W.

Stone vs. Iran, Round 2

Thursday Morning Poll for October 2, 2008

Paul Clark — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Last week, Screengrab’s intrepid writing staff unveiled its list of the greatest war movies ever made, and topping our list was Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion. But when we asked the readers to pick their favorite, they settled upon something a little more American. So cue up the Wagner and break out your surfboard, because according to our readership, the greatest war movie of all is none other than Francis Ford Coppola’s incendiary Apocalypse Now, which outpaced Renoir’s film 33% to 25%. Tying for #3 were Robert Altman’s MASH and Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory with 17% apiece, and bringing up the rear was Casablanca, a fine movie but undoubtedly the least war movie-ish of the bunch.

This week, we remember the late Paul Newman. Earlier today, we ran our picks of Newman’s greatest performances, and now we’ll let you choose your favorites from our top five choices. Which of these films represented Newman’s finest hours?

Favorite Paul Newman performance? | BuzzDash polls

As always, the comments section is open. See you next week!

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 22:00:00 GMT

5. PATHS OF GLORY (1957)

One of Stanley Kubrick’s earlier films, Paths of Glory stands as both a link to his later style and a curious anomaly. While it contains many of the technical hallmarks of his later work, often in embryonic form, it also bears – at least partly thanks to notorious pulp novelist Jim Thompson, who Kubrick recruited to whip the screenplay into shape – an incredibly powerful emotional resonance that belies his later reputation as a cool, bloodless artisan. Paths of Glory is set during the grimmest stretches of the First World War, at a time when the French army was said to practice a variant of decimation in order to prevent desertion and insubordination as the troops increasingly perceived the war to be a pointless and horrid waste of lives. Colonel Dax, played with uncharacteristic depth by Kirk Douglas, is ordered to lead his men on a charge that goes disastrously awry; following a battle scene legendary for its grim, ugly, almost sightless realism, his commanding officer, to save face, orders a quartet of men – chosen for no other reason than that they are largely friendless and undesirable – executed for cowardice. More than Kubrick’s first great film, Paths of Glory also marks a turning point in the way modern cinema treats war, and the movie’s unforgettable final scene provides an emotionally troubling catharsis, as doomed men are serenaded by a captured German woman (played by an actress, Susanne Christian, whom Kubrick would later marry), that is one of the most devastating punches in war cinema.

4. M*A*S*H (1970)

Ask someone – ask anyone – to name the greatest film about the Korean War, and they’ll tell you it’s Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H. The only problem is, M*A*S*H isn’t about Korea at all. Robert Altman clearly intended it to refer, in all its blackly funny glory, to the then-raging war in Vietnam. However, 20th Century Fox, already nervous about how the film would be received, understandably panicked at the thought that this hilariously subversive treatment of the madness of war and the use of near-nihilistic dark comedy as the only reasonable response to it. Altman, who by his own lights “had practice working for people who don’t care about quality, and I learned to sneak it in”, had utterly failed to mention Korea at all, so the studio stuck in a title card in post-production and added some clumsy radio announcements that made it clear to Mr. & Mrs. America that no, this was a different Asian anti-communist crusade. Their minds eased, Mr. & Mrs. A took the movie to heart – or at least didn’t demand the public immolation of its director; the next thing you know, the movie was turned into a beloved ‘70s sitcom that maintained the formal structure of the movie, if none of its deeply antisocial content. If M*A*S*H has been superseded as an anti-war film, or as even an uplifted middle finger to authority, it’s still the funniest war movie ever made.

3. CASABLANCA (1942)

If Casablanca is no longer the consensus pick as the greatest movie of all time – and there are plenty of people who will make a damn convincing case that it is – it’s at least one of the very few films that almost everyone agrees is great. And that’s especially surprising, because it’s not only a war film, but one made during wartime – hardly an environment conducive to greatness. But while it’s never particularly subtle (even people who have never seen it know within the first hour that the self-centered Rick is eventually going to stick his neck out and do what’s right), it’s simply so jam-packed with greatness that its power cannot be denied. Skillfully directed, beautifully filmed, and crammed with so many iconic performances that it’s practically a primer on what good acting looked like in the Golden Age of Hollywood, Casablanca is also, amazingly, a fiercely patriotic picture that manages, through sheer force of its goodwill and beauty, to not come across as jingoistic. Roger Ebert once wrote, in his review of Paths of Glory, that the folk song performed by the German woman at that film’s end was the ultimate condemnation of patriotism, just as the triumphant singing of “Le Marseillaise” at Rick’s Café is the ultimate celebration of it. Unlike many of the greatest war films, Casablanca never makes you wonder if it’s all worth it or which side you should be on; but unlike many of the worst war films, it also doesn’t make you feel dirty for cheering on the good guys, or cheat you into a false sense of smugness. It’s the purest expression of the notion of a good war, and sometimes, that’s not so bad.

2. APOCALYPSE NOW (1979)

"My film is not a movie. My film is not about Vietnam. My film is Vietnam." That sounds like a crazy person talking, and it must have been a crazy person who made Apocalypse Now, surely the greatest "war as acid trip" movie ever made. Who among us is not intimately familiar with all the Stations of the Cross by now, from "Saigon. Shit." to "Charlie don't surf" to "I love the smell of napalm in the morning" and finally, "The horror. The horror"? There's no point trying to defend Coppola's greatest folly in terms of coherent narrative or classical Hollywood structure -- you're either aboard for the ride with Willard, Chief, Clean and the rest, or you're reaching for your new set of Godfather DVDs. Even among those of us for whom Apocalypse was a formative experience in mind-expanding cinema, it's clear that the finished product teeters on the brink between genius and nonsense, and you need only spend an evening with the misguided Apocalypse Now Redux to see how thin the line between the two actually is. But the ambition, spectacle, weirdness, and pure guts of the original version is more than enough to secure it a place of honor on my list of desert island discs.

1. GRAND ILLUSION (1937)

Jean Renoir's masterpiece uses a pair of actors with grand theatrical styles, Erich von Stroheim and Pierre Fresnay, and France's leading exponent of the unadorned, working-class style, Jean Gabin, and by putting them together in a prison camp during World War I, means to convey a powerful anti-war message of universal brotherhood. In this it was so successful that the Nazis ordered all the prints be seized after they marched into France. For years the film was thought to be lost, and Renoir, who really had hoped to have some detrimental impact on the coming of World War II, felt that he had as much solid proof that he had failed as any filmmaker had ever had. Instead of bringing us world peace, he had to settle for having made one of the four of five greatest movies in history, the poor sap.

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

Contributors: Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

Coppola’s Apocalypse Forever

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 17:00:00 GMT

As you know, spiffy new restored versions of the Godfather movies are playing in selected theaters and just out on DVD. Meanwhile in England, the latest special edition of Apocalypse Now (released domestically as “The Complete Dossier” and containing both the original and Redux cuts of the movie) is making its way to home video. It must be kind of a drag for Francis Ford Coppola that the only movies anyone wants to talk to him about were made in the ‘70s, but to his credit, he’s still a good sport about it.

“The thing with cinema is that you always feel as if you’re just beginning to understand it, and that makes each day very fresh and exciting,” Coppola said recently in an interview with The Times of London. “When I was younger, I decided I would make each film as an experiment, trying to do something that was appropriate to its theme, so Apocalypse Now was quite different from The Godfather or The Conversation. So I made it in a style I felt appropriate to the war itself: high amperage, big production, almost out of control.”

The logistical challenges of making Apocalypse are well-documented (notably in the terrific Hearts of Darkness), but one that often gets overlooked is that of Marlon Brando’s girth. “He admitted we had a problem in that this ‘Green Beret colonel’ would not be as overweight as he was, which presented issues of what sort of costume should he wear, as there wouldn’t be uniforms in his size. He didn’t want to be depicted as a man who had let his appetites and passions go wild, which was the other solution. Marlon, like all fat people, was shy and embarrased by his weight, which of course I understood, having something of the same problem, as did Orson Welles. I decided to dress him in black and portray his fatness as great size, meaning that you usually see just his shoulders and arms. So his large scale could be interpreted as that of a giant man. I used a very tall, husky double for the scenes where you see all of him.”

When asked whether he’d prefer to remembered for the Godfather movies or for Apocalypse, Coppola responds, “I’d actually like to be remembered for my present film Tetro, which is the most personal film I’ve made…I don’t want to be remembered for a film, but for the fact that I loved so much and was enchanted by little children.” Er...okay. Good luck with that.

Related:
Eleanor Coppola: Still "Notes" Worthy
Francis Ford Coppola's Sex Change Operation

Yesterday's Hits: Kramer vs. Kramer

Paul Clark — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 19:00:00 GMT

What made Kramer vs. Kramer a hit?: In the 1970s, divorce rates were higher than they’d ever been. A downturn in the economy meant that working people had to work harder to make ends meet, while the women’s liberation movement opened up the eyes of women nationwide to opportunities that existed for them outside the home. But while a number of films had dealt with the subject of divorce, Kramer vs. Kramer was one of the first high-profile Hollywood releases on the subject. Due to its subject matter and the prestigious nature of the project, the film received a great deal of attention from the media, which aided the public’s awareness of it immensely.

Also, the presence of Dustin Hoffman in the lead role was intriguing to moviegoers. At the time, Hoffman was best known for putting his Method acting skills to work at playing quirky outsiders. By contrast, the character of Ted Kramer was very much a “regular guy”- an ad man working his way up the ranks of his company until his wife leaves him, forcing him to raise their child more or less alone. Whereas a more conventional star might have been less than convincing as a struggling father, Hoffman made the character vulnerable and down-to-Earth, which in turn made him sympathetic even when he gets frustrated with his son and the hand that life has dealt him. Combined, these two factors helped to make Kramer vs. Kramer not only the toast of the 1979 Academy Awards, but also the year’s biggest box-office draw.

What happened?: Coming at the tail end of the 1970s- the “last hurrah” of the heyday of Hollywood’s maverick filmmakers- the relatively modest Kramer vs. Kramer hasn’t sustained its initial critical love when compared to more ambitious and director-driven films of the era like Apocalypse Now and All That Jazz. That Kramer vs. Kramer bested those films for the Best Picture Oscar only added to the sentiment that the end of the seventies brought a golden age of Hollywood filmmaking to a screeching halt.

But Kramer vs. Kramer hasn’t fallen from grace so much as it’s lost much of its visibility. When a movie’s success is predicated on the hot-button issues it raises, it can often look dated once those issues have become commonplace. So it was with Kramer vs. Kramer, especially when it came to its single-father storyline. At the time of the film’s release, the idea of a man who puts his career on the back burner to raise a child on his own was new territory for Hollywood. But whereas the philosophy behind Ted Kramer’s lifestyle change once came off as a bold statement on parenthood, it now seems like only the proper thing to do under the circumstances. Good, but hardly groundbreaking.

Does Kramer vs. Kramer still work?: Yes, although not always in the ways director Robert Benton and novelist Avery Corman originally intended. The title of the film refers to the custody proceedings between Ted and his ex-wife Joanna (Meryl Streep) that comprise much of the film’s final third. Unfortunately, the case and the fallout from the decision is perhaps the least interesting aspect of the movie, mostly because it’s the most bound to plot conventions. This extends to the film’s final scenes, which set up a bittersweet ending until the need for a happy ending rears its ugly head. When Joanna shows up at Ted’s on the date she was scheduled to take her son Billy (Justin Henry) home with her only to announce that she thinks he should stay with his dad, it feels more like plot contrivance than a decision made by the character.

However, the film works nicely as a time capsule of the way gender roles were shifting in the late 1970s. As a college-educated woman who came of age during the counterculture movement of the late 1960s, Joanna holds no small amount of resentment for being relegated to the role of housewife while Ted furthers his career. It’s telling that once she’s returned to New York to be a mother again, she explains herself primarily in the language of self-help and psychoanalysis that was gaining traction in popular culture at the time. Meanwhile, Ted’s metamorphosis into a capable single parent prefigures the more gender-neutral parenting roles that have become the norm today.

However, Kramer vs. Kramer is at its best when it’s deals in a straightforward manner with its central relationship, between Ted and Billy. Ted is hardly a saint- he has something of a temper, which causes him to lose his patience. But Benton takes the time to show him making a new life for himself and his son. Much of the credit should go to Hoffman, who not only gives one of his least mannered performances, but also is able to create a completely believable relationship with then-seven-year-old Justin Henry. It’s because we buy the two of them as father and son that we care when it looks like the two may be separated. There’s a lovely moment that comes when Billy sees his mother for the first time when over a year. In his excitement, he sprints toward Joanna and doesn’t look back. Rather than showing a closeup of Hoffman’s reaction, Benton holds camera on him in long shot, and the surroundings dwarf Ted in a way that mirrors the insignificance he’s feeling.

Whereas in 1979 the big story of Kramer vs. Kramer was its portrayal of a man raising a child alone, today it’s more noteworthy as a cinematic portrayal of what it means to be a single parent, regardless of gender. From my experience dating a single mother, I’ve learned rearing a child by oneself requires a lot of sacrifice, and the scenes in which Ted’s work performance suffers as a result of his parental demands rang absolutely true for me. But I also appreciated the more low-key moments in which we see Ted and Billy forging a loving father-son relationship. I especially liked two scenes that involve Ted making French toast for Billy- the first taking place the day after Joanna has left, the second on the morning Billy’s scheduled to leave with her. The difference between these two scenes- one frantic, the other routine- says it all about how far they’ve come together.

Unwatchable #75: “The Last Sign”

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

We are now one-quarter of the way through our mind-and-butt-numbing journey up the IMDb’s Bottom 100 list, a quest every bit as fraught with peril as the one Martin Sheen endured in Apocalypse Now. (It remains to be seen whether Marlon Brando is waiting at the end.) According to my rough calculations, this means we still have three quarters of the list to get through – a prospect that would bring many a cinephile to his knees, sobbing and begging for mercy. As always, I must simply remind myself that this is a marathon, not a sprint, and I can only play the game on the schedule in front of me. In this case, that game is The Last Sign, a 2005 supernatural thriller starring Andie MacDowell.

I’m immediately suspicious of any movie that opens with a shitload of logos for companies I’ve never heard of. This makes me think what I’m about to watch is more of a tax shelter than a motion picture. The Last Sign is evidently some sort of international co-production; in any case, there are a bunch of guys named Claude in the opening credits. Perhaps it’s irrational to develop a bad impression on such flimsy evidence, but there are no rules to Unwatchable. For instance, I could also point out that the title The Last Sign is as meaningless as it is forgettable. Or I could mention that Andie MacDowell plays some sort of scientist in this film, a scenario that requires more suspension of disbelief than I am usually willing to suspend. Still, a good movie could overcome these objections. This one does not.

MacDowell is Kathy Macfarlane, a widow and single parent struggling to remain financially solvent after the death of her abusive husband Jeremy (Tim Roth), a doctor who developed a drinking problem while on a mission in Africa. To that end, she reluctantly takes in a guest house tenant, ze zhexy Frenchman Marc (Samuel Le Bihan). But is there more to this boarder than his wooden personality and tendency to walk around shirtless? MacDowell is receiving mysterious phone calls every night at 12:15 a.m. At first she suspects Marc, but then she encounters a former patient of Jeremy’s who insists that her late husband is trying to get in touch with her. A creepy co-worker of McDowell’s, Endora (an expertly cast Margot Kidder), agrees. And when MacDowell starts seeing ghostly visions of Jeremy all around town, it appears we’re in for an M. Night Shyamalan knockoff – particular given the stilted dialogue and delivery that has become as much a Night signature as the big plot twist. (It’s not clear whether director Douglas Law has instructed his actors to speak in a lobotomized monotone for a purpose, or if it’s just because English isn’t his first language.)

Just as I was preparing myself for a dopey twist, it became apparent that The Last Sign had more in common with a Lifetime movie of the week than The Sixth Sense. It seems that Jeremy is only seeking forgiveness for his drunken crapulence from beyond the grave, and once he’s received that, McDowell is free to boff the hunky Frenchman in the guest house. At this point, I realized I was actually disappointed that The Last Sign had deprived me of the preposterous and insulting twist ending that would have propelled it into the ranks of the truly rank. The movie certainly earns its status as forgettable straight-to-video fodder, but it falls well short of a deserving spot on the Bottom 100.

Previously on Unwatchable:
76. Kickboxer 3: The Art of War
77. BloodRayne 2: Deliverance
78. The Quick and the Undead
79. Anus Magillicutty
80. The Smokers

America The Dissonant: Seven Movies That Send Mixed Messages About U.S.

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 20:15:00 GMT

Last week, because it was the 4th of July and because we’re such red-blooded, flag-lapel-pin-wearing patriots, we here at the Screengrab celebrated some of our all-time favorite Pro-America movies. And the week before that, because we’re also dirty rotten elitist commie pinkos, we focused on movies that dared to criticize the American Empire. And now, to complete our nationalist trifecta, we examine a third type of film: movies that are designed to make the U.S. look kick-ass, but actually wind up making us look kinda lame-ass.

THE PATRIOT (2000)

That great American Roland Emmerich first treated us to his overblown brand of Fourth of July fireworks in Independence Day, but that little-seen arthouse curiosity is covered later in the list. In The Patriot, Emmerich jumps back in time a couple hundred years to show us the true meaning of Independence Day. Which is, of course, the kicking of major British ass. Mel Gibson plays a wealthy southern landowner with no slaves who goes all Mad Max 1776 when the redcoats burn down his house and kill various members of his family. Arming his two youngest boys with rifles and himself with as many guns, knives and hatchets as he can carry, Gibson sets out to liberate his oldest son from the Brits who have seized him. The ensuing slaughter is shockingly savage for a summer popcorn flick, and for a moment you think the movie might actually be interested in exploring some areas of moral ambiguity. The moment passes. Emmerich isn't interested in any of the actual root causes of the Revolution; this world-changing event serves as mere window-dressing for a routine revenge thriller – an excuse for some flag-waving rah-rah to jack up the stakes and make The Patriot seem like it's about something.

COBRA (1986)

A perennial plank in every political campaign is law & order; no matter how low the statistics actually get, voters rank crime as one of their top concerns in every public opinion poll. Unfortunately, the law & order platform usually has an ugly side, and this movie couldn’t have been a more jaw-dropping cautionary tale about the dangers of a brutally empowered police force if it was actually trying to be. In 1986, post-Rambo and at the peak of his popularity, Sylvester Stallone starred in and wrote the screenplay to Cobra, in which he played the black-clad, submachinegun-toting police officer Marion Cobretti, opposing a shadowy outfit called the New Order, who you might think wanted to play gloomy, depressing post-punk songs at everyone in America, but in fact were even worse: they wanted to overthrow democracy and institute the rule of the strong over the weak. Deciding to beat them at their own game, Cobretti simply cruises around Los Angeles, dressed like a gay Nazi biker and, dispensing with democratic fripperies like due process and prohibitions against cruelty, simply massacres every criminal unlucky enough to wander into his sights. Torturing, burning, gutting, and gunning down dozens of people throughout the course of the movie, Stallone managed to alienate even some of his die-hard fans: while the movie made decent money and temporarily knocked Top Gun out of the #1 slot, a decent number of filmgoers as well as critics found its vision of law & order America as a place where the cops acted as little more than roving death squads pretty repugnant.

APOCALYPSE NOW (1979)

Francis Ford Coppola, debuting Apocalypse Now at the Cannes Film Festival, famously said, “My film is not about Vietnam; it is Vietnam.” And like Vietnam, it is something too sprawling, too massive, too chaotic and complicated to be assessed in a few simple sentences. At turns it seems heartily pro-war and virulently anti-war; it conveys the insanity of the entire interventionist approach while still seeming to lay the blame on soft, coddled grunts and incompetent civilians. This inherent contradiction isn’t just circumstantial: it arises from the fundamental clash of worldviews between the director and the screenwriter. John Milius, the writer of the original script, meant it to be simultaneously a rebuke to what he perceived as the weakness and unrealistic expectations of anti-war protestors and a celebration of the virtues of the warrior spirit. Much of this approach survives in the finished film, especially in the diffident portrayal of Colonel Kurtz, who at times seems more heroic than insane. Meanwhile, director Francis Ford Coppola meant for Apocalypse Now to be a straightforward adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”, with American anti-Communism taking the place of Belgian colonialism and Kurtz portrayed as a murderous madman. In the end, the movie, meant by one of its creators to be a celebration of the American intervention in Vietnam and another to be a condemnation of same, attains a terrifyingly uneasy balance between the two. After the torturous production of the movie had finished, Coppola said, “We had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane.” Much the same could be said about America in Vietnam.

RED DAWN (1984)

And speaking of John Milius...the aforementioned screenwriter directed this Reagan-era blood-wet dream (based on a story co-written with Kevin Reynolds) about a Russian invasion of Middle America (or, as many conservatives prefer to think of it, America), complete with terrifying imagery of the Golden Arches obscured by Soviet paratroopers...oh, the humanity! How evil are Milius’ commies? So evil that, shortly after landing in a field outside a high school in Calumet, Colorado, their very first order of business is to machine-gun an unarmed black teacher (nice touch, John) who wanders outside to see what’s going on. Because, y’know, that’s how commies roll: no algebra for you, capitalist pig-dogs! Forget attacking military bases or other strategic targets: this U.S.S.R. knows the best way to cripple Yankee morale is to cut off our access to fast food and varsity sports! Fortunately, the popular jocks of Calumet High know where to find guns and ammo in bulk, and before you can say “Second Amendment,” their one-time football team, the Wolverines, has transformed into a crack guerilla group of...um...insurgents, willing to engage in extreme acts of ultra-violence to drive the foreign superpower from their land. Probably best not to think too deeply about how the story would be different if the town under siege were, say, Tikrit, or if the Colorado teenagers with easy access to automatic weapons were nerds instead of jocks and the high school was in neighboring Columbine. In Milius’ world, the good guys are joyless, soulless killing machines, the bad guys are joyless, soulless killing machines in different uniforms (and, thus, bad) and violence is the only answer. WOLVERINES!!!!!!

THE CAINE MUTINY (1954)

The film adaptation of Herman Wouk’s wildly popular 1951 novel The Caine Mutiny was a mess. Wouk had been contracted to write the screenplay himself, but was fired after turning in a script that was over four hours long; difficulties in casting plagued the production, which also went highly overbudget; and director Edward Dmytryk felt that Columbia Pictures kept too tight a rein on him and didn’t let him make the movie he wanted to make. In addition, there was a great deal of political pressure on the production; in order to secure the Navy’s cooperation in making the picture, the studio had given all sorts of assurances that no one would be made to look bad, and with anti-Communist fever sweeping Hollywood and the American public much less certain about the Korean War than it had been about WWII, everyone was walking on glass to make sure the story, about a mutiny aboard a minesweeping ship commanded by the unstable, paranoid Captain Queeg, didn’t come across as too anti-military. All of these factors and more contributed to the uncomfortable ending of the film: after the mutineers are acquitted by a court-martial tribunal following a dramatic meltdown on the stand by Queeg himself, their defense attorney turns on them, calling them goldbrickers, cowards and gutless wonders. He saves most of his rancor for the cynical intellectual Lt. Keefer, who he accuses of having masterminded the entire situation just because he thought he was smarter than everyone else. The whole thing ends up ringing rather hollow, both dramatically and philosophically, and defuses the rest of the movie’s far more interesting conflict (one’s duty in wartime balanced against the malfeasance of one’s commanding officer) for a simple-minded pasty, sneaky egghead vs. upstanding macho man one. For a movie that sets itself the task of questioning the meaning of honor and duty to end up claiming it’s better to follow a deranged lunatic into battle than listen to some smart-ass college boy does no service to the military tradition it goes to such lengths to protect.

INDEPENDENCE DAY (1996)

Appropriately enough, I first saw this movie on July 4th weekend, in Atlanta, Georgia, where I was killing time waiting for the Olympic Village to be finished. There wasn't much to do, so to get out of the heat until the Braves game started, I ducked into a theater that was screening this Roland Emmerich atrocity. What stuck with me over the years isn't so much its incompetence or its bombast – it's really no worse than any number of other alien-invasion flicks, and it's been outdone dozens of times since then in sheer alienating volume – but its coldhearted determination to ruthlessly exploit every noxious Hollywood stereotype in existence. In a movie which purports to be patriotic, from its name right down to its 'fightin' president' character, it instead turns out to be jingoistic, as the nations of the world are helpless to do a thing against marauding extraterrestrials until the good-hearted Yanks do what they've done since the Great War: pull their foreign fat out of the fire. Aside from the horrendous stereotypes embodied in the main cast (including Will Smith as a wisecracking fighter pilot, Randy Quaid as a crazy kook no one believes, Vivica Fox as a hooker with a heart of gold, Margaret Colin as a bitchy career woman, Brent Spiner as a misguided intellectual, Harvey Fierstein as a mincing queen, and Judd Hirsch as a Jewish caricature so odiferous its only competition comes from Julius Streicher cartoons), there's also the astonishing montages that occur when the alien motherships are disabled: African tribesmen hoot and holler, waving spears (!) around and looking as if they accidentally left home without the bones in their noses, and gibberish-spouting, kaffiyeh-clad Arabs ululating mindlessly, unable to even make themselves understood until a helpful white man gets on the blower to explain the situation to his American brethren. What purports to be a feel-good action blockbuster, more than ten years later, now plays like a cartoon of the invincible ignorance of American foreign policy.

FORREST GUMP (1994)

In the Year of Our Lord 1994, there was no middle ground in America: you were either Pro-Gump or Pulp-ist. You either looked at life as a box of chocolates or as an overpriced Martin & Lewis milkshake. And if you were the kind of gal who dressed as Mrs. Mia Wallace with a hypo full of adrenalin sticking out of your breastplate or the kind of guy who dressed like Jules or Vincent in a skinny tie and black suit jacket that year for Halloween, then you probably weren’t all that surprised when the groundbreaking instant classic Pulp Fiction lost the Best Picture Oscar to the revisionist history of the sixties and seventies where all the peace-loving hippies were fools and dupes who never accomplished anything but their own self-destruction and the good-natured dimwit who accepts the status quo at face value is rewarded with happiness and, of course, obscene wealth. Unlike Being There, which used Peter Sellers’ blank-slate gardener, Chance, to satirize the willful, self-reflexive gullibility of the American people, Robert Zemeckis’ insidiously reactionary comedy pretends to celebrate simple American values while actually championing the type of anti-intellectual, head-in-the-sand, cross-your-fingers-and-hope-you-win-the-lottery malaise that led to eight years of the recent Voldemort administration and (egad) the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company.

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Leonard Pierce

Related Stories: America The Critical: 15 Movies That Show What's Wrong With U.S., America the Beautiful: 15 Movies That Show What's Right With U.S.

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: May 3-9, 2008

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 09 May 2008 21:30:00 GMT

This was the week that was at the Screengrab:

We offered free career advice to the 21st century Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw, Scarlett Johansson and Ryan Reynolds.

We watched Nicolas Cage, Michael J. Fox and Bruce Willis debase themselves in the Five Most Embarrassing Celebrity Commercials.

We compared two versions of The Thomas Crown Affair, two versions of Lolita, and the two faces of Aaron Eckhart.

We climbed The Towering Inferno and floated down the Apocalypse Now river.

We saw a naked Bo Derek drenched in honey and milk in Bolero, the latest entry in the Unwatchable series of 100 worst movies ever.

We expressed concern for Christina Ricci, hailed Jonathan Pryce and looked forward to seeing Bardot’s ass in high definition.

We told you about the 12 Greatest Movies Based on TV Shows and you told us we forgot about Serenity. Sorry about that.

And finally, we got sweet, sweet revenge.

What a week, no?

Screengrab Movie Vacations #2: Pagsanjan, Philippines

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 09 May 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Back in 1994, I spent five weeks in the Philippines working on a video game adaptation of a pretty bad D-list Michael Dudikoff action movie called Soldier Boyz (along with future directors Darren Aronofsky and Jed Weintrob).

At one point during my sojourn, the cast and crew of the game and movie lodged at the Pagsanjan Rapids Hotel, where (I was excited to learn) Marlon Brando, Dennis Hopper and Francis Ford Coppola had all stayed during some of the endless production phase of Apocalypse Now. Later, of course, I learned that just about every hotel in the Philippines claims Brando, Hopper and Coppola slept there, but there’s no doubt the Pagsanjan River was one of the key locations in the film, and a darn fine destination for the cinematically-inclined adventure travelers amongst you.

If you wind up taking this particular Screengrab Movie Vacation, you could do worse than the Pagsanjan Rapids Hotel. The open air lobby features a bar stocked with San Miguel beer and looks out on a majestic, exotic tableau like the opening scene of Apocalypse Now, just before the napalm explosions: palm trees, a raging river, water buffalo grazing in the distance and, if you’re lucky, a rainbow.

You can book a boat ride on the Pagsanjan River and leave straight from the hotel, drifting downstream like Martin Sheen’s Captain Willard past dramatic, vegetation-choked steps (the only remains of Colonel Kurtz’s Temple of Doom), surrounded on all sides at all times by hucksters in canoes trying to sell you trinkets (like the carved tiki-head ashtray I purchased that blows smoke out its mouth when there’s a cigarette in the dish).

The river ride ends at Pagsanjan Falls, where your friendly, hard-working boatmen will probably expect you to buy them lunch...and trust me, several miles downriver from your hotel in a foreign country isn't the best time to suddenly turn cheapskate...then its back upriver for garlic adobo rice (mmm!!!!) and more San Miguels. For more information on Pagsanjan, check out backpackingphilippines.com, and stay tuned for our next exciting Screengrab Movie Vacation destination: Devil’s Tower, Wyoming!

Screengrab Movie Vacations #1: The Very Large Array

Andrew Osborne — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 14:00:00 GMT

So, do you like really big, impressive hunks of technology in the middle of nowhere? Do you like being places where Jodie Foster and/or James Woods and/or even Tom Skerritt have been? Did you totally dig (or at least mildly enjoy) the 1997 Robert Zemeckis adaptation of the contemplative, pointy-headed Carl Sagan novel Contact?

Well, sir or madame, if you answered yes to any of the above, have I got a nifty Screengrab Movie Vacation™ for you!

Next time you're in Soccoro, New Mexico (about an hour south of Albuquerque and two hours north of Las Cruces), turn west on U.S. 60 and drive 50 miles through tiny towns and scenic, empty plains until you suddenly crest a ridge and find yourself gaping in nerdish wonder at the startling sight of 27 gigantic radio telescopes all scanning the known universe from the middle of a cow pasture.

At this point, the directions on the National Radio Astronomy Observatory website will say, “Turn South on NM 52, then West on the VLA access road, which is well marked. Signs will point you to the Visitor Center.”

What the directions WON’T tell you is that NM 52 is NOT particularly well-marked and VERY easy to miss. A word to the wise: if you find yourself driving west past the Very Large Array, you’ve probably missed NM 52 and may soon take an ill-advised left turn down a farm road into the middle of a very surly herd of cattle. (Trust me on this one.)

But once you manage to find NM 52, the rest of the journey is quick, painless, and totally worth it. The first stop when you reach the VLA site is the tiny Visitor’s Center, filled with images of truly freaky space phenomena way cooler than similar science museum images of said phenomena you may have encountered, if only because you’re right there where the scientists are discovering all that freaky stuff! (And be sure to check out the gift shop and the Whisper Gallery, too...you’ll be glad you did!)

Then it’s out to the Very Large Array itself, a vast, technological space age Stonehenge which you (and maybe even your wife, who’s never seen Contact and would really rather be shopping for Navajo jewelry in Santa Fe, but is kindly humoring you) may very well find awe-inspiring because: (A) the Very Large Array is, in fact, very large, and it’s always awe-inspiring to be dwarfed by things much larger than yourself, (B) all the telescopes are pointing up into the beautiful blue New Mexico sky and the infinite universe beyond, scanning for radio signals from millions and billions of light years away, which is very trippy and cool when you’re standing right there at the origin point of it all, (C) it’s way off the beaten path, meaning not that many people in the world will ever get to stand where you’re standing, and finally (D), without many other visitors around, it’s very easy to pretend you’re actually IN Contact, helping Jodie Foster’s character, Ellie Arroway, in her search for extraterrestrials...while fifty yards away, actual scientists are actually searching for actual extraterrestrials!

Okay, I know.

I know what you’re thinking, and it’s true: I have a very patient wife. But even she got swept up in the sheer presence of the place...and chances are that you will, too...but if the Very Large Array doesn’t sound like your particular cup of fur, then stay tuned for our next Screengrab Movie Vacation™ Destination: The Apocalypse Now River Ride of Doom!

The Top Ten Movies With Alternate Cuts, Part 1

Phil Nugent — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 22:00:00 GMT

What is it about alternate cuts? A cynical marketing tool to sell an old movie or the chance for the filmmakers to finally unveil their true vision of the film? In the old days, studios wouldn't bother with keeping trims and outtakes; better to dump them in the sea and save the space for something more worthwhile. Most of the great filmmakers suffered from this. Orson Welles couldn't reconstruct his version of The Magnificent Ambersons, and even more recently, William Friedkin couldn't find the footage to finally unleash his preferred cut of Cruising. In the old days, if you wanted to see the alternate cut of a movie, you had to go to another country. Graham Greene didn't dig the shortened version of Once Upon A Time In The West, so he told his readers to go to Paris to see the uncut version. Friedkin went apeshit when he found out that Sorcerer, his beloved remake of The Wages of Fear, had been completely re-cut by the European distributors, so that the opening character prologues instead appeared as flashbacks, usually whenever a character was just about to blow up. Here, though, is a list of ten alternate cuts that are well worth your time. — Faisal A. Qureshi

BLADE RUNNER (1982, Ridley Scott)

How many different versions of this film are there? Warner Brothers did everyone except eBay bootleggers a favor when they put all five on one platter. First there was the U.S. voice-over cut, then the international cut (for a few frames of ultra-violence that those decadent Europeans dig) and then the authorized director's cut. Hold on a minute though, Ridley Scott kept saying that actually wasn't his final cut, so he went back to the editing room and came out with his definitive final cut (and let's not forget the 70mm Workprint that kicked the whole thing off). Basically, film lovers wouldn't have alternate cuts of movies if it wasn't for Blade Runner. It was the film that showed that ten years after the first release and proved you could still make cash from your old films. Which version is the best though? Well, that's up to you. I thought changing Rutger Hauer's "I want more life, fucker" to "father" kind of sucked and spoiled an otherwise decent flick, but WB did the decent thing and actually made sure all of them are there for your perusal. Heck, maybe I should go into the editing room and cut my own personally approved cut of Blade Runner. I mean, they do give you everything in this package.

THE SHINING (1980, Stanley Kubrick)

How can a filmmaker allow two different cuts of a film in release? If you're Stanley Kubrick, you can do everything. Whilst US audiences had the pleasure of a 147-minute cut of the Stephen King adaptation, the rest of the world just had the pleasure of a two-hour cut of the film, both approved by the director. Sure, Eyes Wide Shut had CGI figures covering some naughty bits, and he trimmed twenty minutes from 2001 after its world premiere, but this is different: Kubrick allowed both cuts to co-exist. What's the difference between them? Well, it's mostly scene shortening and dialogue trims, including bits where Scatman Crothers' character is going back to the Overlook Hotel to see what the heck is going on there. At one point you could get both versions on DVD, but with the recent re-release of the longer cut of The Shining, expect to see the shorter cut to disappear from existence. And did you know that there's a third version that had an alternate ending that was trimmed from all prints a week after its US release?

APOCALYPSE NOW (1979, Francis Ford Coppola)

As far as I'm aware, there are four versions of this film lying around, the longest being a five hour workprint that you can probably bit torrent now from bad VHS dupes. But Coppola re-released the original theatrical and the Redux edition together. Which one's better? For my money, I prefer the theatrical release, as Sheen just comes out as a mean brooding muthafucka. Redux is good to have, but for me, that music in the French plantation scene just spoiled the entire mood of the flick and the film never recovered completely from that moment on. Currently available on DVD but without the excellent Hearts of Darkness documentary included, what really spoils the film is cinematographer Vittorio Storraro's insistence that the film be transferred at his preferred retrospective Univisium 2:1 aspect ratio instead of 2.35:1 of its original release. If you want to see it properly, best to record a HD broadcast straight onto your hard drive, cause Storraro ain't having you watch it any other way.

EXORCIST 4 (2005, Renny Harlin, Paul Schrader)

Orson Welles had his ending for The Magnificent Ambersons re-shot by a studio hack, but enough of the film survived to be eventually regarded as a butchered classic. When Paul Schrader was kicked off the Exorcist prequel by Morgan Creek, rumors started circulating of his cut being some horror classic that had been 99% re-shot by studio hack Renny Harlin. A vocal internet campaign and the disastrous reception of the Harlin version resulted in Schrader's film being released to re-coup some of Morgan Creek's investment in the film, but the response was indifferent. Harlin's cut is goofy fun, with OTT sequences that make no sense but do crank up some foley effect on the soundtrack. Schrader's is Bergmanesque in comparison, interesting to watch and with a great performance by French pop star Billy Crawford as the possessed boy in need of exorcism. Both prequels are interesting to see a study in rhythm: Harlin has the actors play it fast and cuts every couple of seconds, whilsts Schrader meditates on his scenes, trying to build the tension up slowly.

TOUCH OF EVIL (1958, Orson Welles)

Orson Welles' sleazy cop thriller was first known only in a ninety-minute version, then in an extended 108-min cut that was found and re-released in 1976, but cineastes had to wait until 1998, when Rick Schmidlin and Walter Murch did a re-cut of the film based on a fifty-eight-page memo that Welles had sent the studio. (Needless to say, the studio ignored him completely.) After the restoration was released, the 1976 cut was retired to the vault, and what a pity that was. I'm not a fan of the restored edition; the limitations of the picture restoration can be seen in the opening sequence, when the picture softens at each point where a title had originally appeared. But the worse aspect is the removal of the excellent Henry Mancini score. Universal has no plans to re-release both cuts on DVD so until then, compare both openings and see what you'd like.

Click here for Part 2!

That Guy!: Laurence Fishburne

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 22:30:00 GMT

February is Black History Month, and since we enjoyed combing through the stacks in preparation for last week's featured That Guy!, Yaphet Kotto, we figured we'd continue on in that vein and take a look at some of Hollywood's finest African-American character actors. We've discussed before how it's much harder for a woman to make a reputation playing character roles; actresses tend to be valued more for their looks than their acting skills, and women who aren't traditionally beautiful have far fewer opportunities to build a career based on their chops and personalities than do men who aren't conventionally handsome. Similarly, it may actually be easier for African-Americans to become character actors, for no other reason than for a very long time, leading man roles were generally denied to them. With his commanding demeanor, strong and handsome face and forceful personality, there's no reason that Larry Fishburne shouldn't have become one of Hollywood's biggest stars, and for a brief period in the early 1990s, it seemed like he would be — but for various reasons, it became clear that even at that late date, the movie business had only one opening for Serious Black Superstar, and it was already being filled by Denzel Washington. (It still is, for that matter.) So Fishburne — a rare black child star who became an even rarer black actor who never fell into stereotypical action or comedy roles — had to settle for nabbing some of the highest-profile second-banana roles available. Fishburne has always been a remarkably gifted actor, even as a child, and despite often being cast as a militant, a prophet, or some other variety of visionary, he's willing to take the piss on occasion (witness his almost satirically self-important voicing of the Silver Surfer in the recent Fantastic Four sequel), and is actually a lot more fun in light comic roles than anyone gives him credit for, as he showed when he played Cowboy Curtis on Pee Wee's Playhouse. Still not yet fifty years old, Fishburne has a lot of good roles ahead of him, if he doesn't give up acting altogether and move into writing, directing or producing — all areas at which he's shown talent. And if he never became America's next black superstar, he did get to marry the luscious Gina Torres, and that ain't bad as a second prize.

Where to see Laurence Fishburne at his best:

APOCALYPSE NOW (1979)

It wasn't his first movie — the former child star had already impressed audiences with his teenage turn in Cornbread, Earl and Me — but Francis Ford Coppola's Vietnam nightmare was certainly the film that put young Laurence Fishburne on the map. As Mr. Clean, he gives the purest and most human performance in the movie, and his death is the most touching and tragic. It's all the more astonishing that Larry (as he called himself at the time) was only fourteen years old when filming began, having fudged his age to get the part. Of course, the filming of Apocalypse Now took so long, he was approximately thirty-eight years old when it wrapped.

BOYZ N THE HOOD (1991)

This was the movie that seemed to predict superstardom for Fishburne; so successful and influential was it at the time of its release that it's also the film that inspired him to start going by Laurence instead of Larry. John Singleton's directorial debut, Boyz N the Hood is one of the first, and undoubtedly the best, of a mini-wave of ghetto-realist gangsta films, and despite heavy competition from pre-living-joke-status Cuba Gooding and Ice Cube (and Angela Bassett, with whom he would later shine as Ike Turner in What's Love Got to Do With It?), Fishburne anchors the cast as the morally complex, conflicted Furious Styles.

THE MATRIX (1999)

The Wachowski Brothers' high-toned blend of wire-fu, gunplay and slapdash philosophy holds up less well with each year that passes by. But at the time of its release, it perfectly synthesized a number of elements of the zeitgeist into an action movie that, if it wasn't as smart as it thought it was, at least wasn't dumb. Fishburne landed the role of a lifetime as the mystical hacker Morpheus, and it's a testament to his acting skills and more or less permanent sense of gravitas that he managed to avoid magical Negritude in a role that pretty much defines the magical Negro. It probably also managed to buy him a pretty nice house, so who's complaining?

The Rep Report (November 16 - December 2)

Peter Smith — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 19:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Early in his foreshortened career as a film director, Albert Lamorisse made two of the most enduringly beautiful "children's movies" in the pantheon: the 1956 Oscar-winning, thirty-two-minute The Red Balloon, co-starring the title character and the director's six-year-old son Pascal, and the 1952, forty-minute White Mane. Film Forum is showing both as a single program for ten days from November 16-25. Lamorisse, who was born in Paris in 1922 and who was killed in a 1970 helicopter crash while shooting footage for a documentary, had developed a fine eye working as a photographer before making his first moving pictures. (He is fondly remembered in another department of geekdom as the creator of the board game "La Conquette Du Monde", which Parker Brothers would eventually market in the United States under the name "Risk".) His eye for beauty and fanciful poetic imagination proved to be perfectly scaled to these short works, which in their bittersweet way are basically perfect. Seen back-to-back, they're almost as ideal a start to the holiday season as getting crushed to death by a stampede of customers when the mall doors open the day after Thanksgiving.

There may also be an eye-popping children-of-all-ages feel to some of the pictures stocked in the Museum of the Moving Image program, Glorious Technicolor! (November 17 - December 2). The schedule includes a restored print of the gob-smackingly great-looking outdoor melodrama Trail of the Lonesome Pine, as well as The Adventues of Robin Hood with Errol Flynn strutting his stuff in leafy-green tights and classic musicals as Singin' in the Rain, The Wizard of Oz, The Band Wagon, and one of Busby Berkeley's all-time "can you get me some of what the choreographer's been smoking?" eye-poppers, The Gang's All Here. Plus a little something called Gone with the Wind and, on December 2, that yuletide perennial Apocalypse Now Redux.

Before there was such a thing as "independent film", there was the mildly condescendingly named "regional-film movement," a system by which people who lacked the wherewithal or the desire to relocate to New York or Los Angeles made movies wherever they were whenever they could scrape the money together, tried to get them shown at festivals, sometimes succeeded, and then, as often as not, were never heard from again. The Texas-based writer-director Eagle Pennell had his moment right on the cusp of the new dawn of independent-film distribution. In fact, he's partly, if indirectly responsible for it, since it's been reported that it was Pennell's first feature, the 1978 The Whole Shootin' Match, that inspired Robert Redford to found the Sundance Film Festival, just to see if maybe there was anything else like that being made in the wide open spaces between the two coasts. Pennell's second feature, Last Night at the Alamo attracted even more attention in 1984, but by the time Sundance was turning "independent" directors into cult superstars on their way to being industry players, Pennell was yesterday's news, as well as an increasingly hopeless alcoholic on his way to being homeless. (He died in 2002, eight days before what would have been his fiftieth birthday.) From November 16-21, the Film Society of Lincoln Center is bringing back The Whole Shootin' Match in a restored print. It's a chance to pay tribute to a lost pioneer and also to see what the part of America that's outside Hollywood — specifically, the highly distinctive part that was Austin, Texas — looked like thirty years ago.

CHICAGO: From November 17 through December 4, the Gene Siskel Film Center pays tribute to the neo-Bresson stylings of Portuguese director Pedro Costa, an avant-garde narrative minimalist renowned for the painterly beauty of his compositional sense. The program begins with his early 1989 feature The Blood (O Sangue) and includes his recent, highly acclaimed Colossal Youth.

BOSTON: Now that Ben Affleck, of all people, seems to have gotten Boston better than half-right in the firmly rooted thriller Gone Baby Gone, it's as good a time as any to look back on how Hollywood has done by Beantown. Boston Filmed (November 16-22) at the Brattle devotes a week to such diverse on-location entertainments as the original The Thomas Crown Affair and Love Story, up to the more recent Mystic River and The Departed, as well as two indies from director Brad Anderson, the romantic comedy and ode-to-postponed-gratification Next Stop, Wonderland and the minimalist mind-fuck horror story Session 9. Buried deep in the mix, towards the middle of next week, are some obscure, modest, not-available-on-DVD gems: the 1977 Between the Lines, Joyce Micklin Silver's likable little comedy about the death of the counterculture as seen from the offices of an underground newspaper, and the 1973 crime drama The Friends of Eddie Coyle ,with a cast that includes Robert Mitchum, Peter Boyle, Richard Jordan, Alex Rocco and Steven Keats all having the time of their lives rolling George V. Higgins's dialogue around on their tongues.

SAN FRANCISCO: This weekend, the Castro proudly presents a bunch of movies I've never heard of as part of the Fifth Annual Third I Film Festival, promoting South Asian cinema "art-house classics to experimental visions to next-level Bollywood." I'm going to be honest here. With everything else that's going on in the world, even just the world of film, it's not going to be possible for even an authority so utterly devoid of a life as The Rep Report to be up on all of it until my cloning experiments bear fruit, and though I never made anything like a conscious decision about it, it seems that experimental South Asian movies and next-level Bollywood are my major field of personal ignorance. If you're in the San Francisco area and don't have a wedding to attend, I encourage you to sneer at my boring provincialism and check this program out.

— Phil Nugent

Long Live the New Flesh!: Top 12 Real Bodily Transformations on Film, Part 2

Peter Smith — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 22:00:00 GMT

RENEE ZELLWEGER in BRIDGET JONES'S DIARY (2001) and BRIDGET JONES: EDGE OF REASON (2004)

Was it 20 pounds she gained? Was it 30? Sure, it's one thing when a guy decides to pack on some extra weight for a role, but when Zellweger decided to beef up to play the title role as Helen Fielding's zaftig, romantically-challenged heroine — on two separate occasions, no less — you'd have though from the reaction that her sacrifice was the cinematic equivalent of Ronnie Lott cutting off the tip of a finger to play in a football game. Her rounder figure — along with a surprisingly decent British accent — helped make Zellweger more convincing in the role, but here's the depressing reality: even at somewhere between 140 and 150 pounds, she wasn't exactly outside the normal, healthy body weight for a woman of her size and frame. No wonder the character is so screwed up.

KEANU REEVES in LITTLE BUDDHA (1993)

Don't laugh. Seriously. The idea of Keanu playing Siddhartha in Bernardo Bertolucci's epic about the life of the Buddha has fueled many a one-liner (though let it be noted that since then the actor has played a rather surprising number of Chosen Ones, so obviously Bertolucci was on to something). Perhaps it was in anticipation of such skepticism that Reeves went all-out for the role, actually choosing to not eat for a lengthy period of time to better recreate the image of Siddhartha after his momentous fast. Indeed, if more people had seen the movie, they might have garnered more respect for the young actor. You thought this dude was thin before? Check him out here.

SYLVESTER STALLONE in COP LAND (1996)

When an actor feels pressured to live up to his own image (forty-eight vials of human growth hormone, anyone?), is it surprising that the public was so resistant to seeing him at less the perfect physical condition? With his legacy as Rocky and Rambo firmly (get it, firmly) established, movie goers expected "Sylvester Stallone" + "cop" to equal "muscles" + "action." Stallone gained forty pounds (mmm, IHOP…) and accepted SAG minimum to play the role of the shy, gentle, hearing-impaired cop Freddy, but the public just wouldn't embrace him that way. Even a cast rounded out by De Niro, Keitel, and Liotta — and pumped up by a Miramax hype machine which had just recently become fully operational — couldn't force the film into viewer's hearts. It was a risk Stallone needed to take as an actor, but with five kids, a wife, and a magazine launch to support, he ultimately returned to his free weights and the franchises that made his fame and fortune.

PETER O'TOOLE in LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (1962)

In Nicolas Wapshott's snippy biography of the legendary Peter O'Toole, the author claims that producer Sam Spiegel and director David Lean pressured the actor into getting a rhinoplasty to narrow his nose, in order to more closely resemble his character in Lawrence of Arabia. While it's indisputable from photographic evidence that O'Toole did indeed get some work done on his booze-reddened honker around this time, it was likely his own decision — even leaving aside the fact that it's an awful lot to ask of someone to get elective surgery to play a single role, how dedicated to verisimilitude could Lean and Spiegel have possibly been? After all, O'Toole, at nearly 6'3", was a full ten inches taller than the diminutive T.E Lawrence, but it's not very likely that David Lean asked his leading man to get his shins lopped off for the role. Still, as physical transformations go, it might not have been the most dramatic, but its occurrence in such a big movie with such a big star is noteworthy, coming only a few years after Charlton Heston was being sponged down with bodypaint to play a Mexican in Touch of Evil. Goodness knows what they would have asked of Marlon Brando if he'd gotten the part; Anthony Perkins, who was also considered, probably would have required a full Adam's apple transplant.

GEORGE CLOONEY in SYRIANA (2004)

New York Times reviewer Manohla Dargis once wrote that, by roping Brad Pitt into the Danny Ocean movies, George Clooney relieved himself of "of the burden of being the most beautiful man in the room." It is a burden that Clooney has happily relieved himself of whenever possible. In the ensemble-cast political drama Syriana, which he co-produced, Clooney plays one of those intelligence experts who knows more than anybody else about what's going on in the Middle East but cannot get any of the higher-ups to listen to him because his gruff manner and realistic views harsh their buzz. To play the part, he let his beard grow out and gained just enough weight to take himself out of the "Hell-lo, gorgeous!" league. The change gives him an air of authentic-seeming physical discomfort, which pays off brilliantly in the scene where he fluffs a job interview and the in the image of him, shirtless and barefoot, regaining consciousness on a bathroom floor after torture: he looks painfully vulnerable but too pathetic to bother killing off. The experience seems to have served him well; in the current Michael Clayton, in which he plays a big law firm's unloved, overmortgaged fixer, he shows that he can now play the overqualified loser role without the physical baggage.

MARLON BRANDO in THE TEAHOUSE OF THE AUGUST MOON (1956) and APOCALYPSE NOW (1979)

In his blazing youth, Marlon Brando sometimes made very odd decisions in his choice of roles, but even when all the odds were stacked against him, he always brought total commitment to the train-wreck site. When John Patrick's once-loved, painfully whimsical play was brought to the screen, Brando insisted on playing the Japanese interpreter Sakini, a narrator figure who keeps talking to the audience and dispensing cutesy aphorisms in a mincing fake-Asian dialect. Brando's seriousness of purpose is evident in his starved appearance: he went on a crash diet and whittled himself down alarmingly for the part so that Glenn Ford and the others playing American military men could loom over him appropriately. He doesn't give a terrible performance—he does a number of clever things, and he keeps his energy level amazingly high, considering that he must have felt like passing out every time he walked past the catering area — but after the viewer recovers from the initial shock, he may wonder why Brando thought this material was worth the sacrifice. Twenty years later, Brando had reason to feel that he had nothing left to prove, and to prove that, he used the set of Apocalypse Now to unveil the mountainous physical condition that we know think of as Late Brando. The actor would later go on to do some remarkable things in that condition, but he was still self-conscious about his weight gain and hadn't yet mastered his new body as an actor. Having single-handedly scuttled Francis Ford Coppola's original conception of Colonel Kurtz as a man so divorced from physical pleasure that he was a gaunt, haggard, living ghost, he balked at the director's attempt to reconceive the role as a bloated, belching voluptuary. In the end, all Coppola could do with him was let him babble whatever came into his head while shooting him concealed in shadows and hope for the best. We will long argue about the lessons of Marlon Brando's career, but this much seems clear enough: whether he was giving it his all or just watching the clock while waiting for his paycheck to clear, he didn't get to be Marlon Brando by doing anything half-way.

CHRISTIAN BALE in THE MACHINIST (2004)

Brad Anderson's psychological thriller aims for a surreal, nightmarish feel in its story about an insomniac repressing a terrible secret, but nothing in Anderson's bag of visual tricks is as disturbing as the appearance of its star: to convey the effects of stress and sleeplessness on his character, Bale lost more than sixty pounds over the course of four months, taking his weight down to 120 pounds. Reportedly he wanted to go down to a neat one-hundred pounds, but Anderson talked him out of it. Thank God he did; with his facial features sunken and gnarled, the skin tightly fitted around his skeletal structure, Bale looks like something you could cut your hand on. If the way he looks were the product of some special make-up technique, it might be awe-inspiring, but knowing that it's really his body both makes and undermines the movie. He's the creepiest thing in it, yet you're too worried that he could keel over at any minute to concentrate on the story.

HONORABLE MENTION:

MELANIE GRIFFITH in THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES (1990)

Some physical transformations have proven worth it; some, not so much. Some have been valuable investments of time on the parts of the actors, who have used a change in their bodies as part of their creative process; some have verged on neurotic acts of self-mutilation. But Melanie Griffith's attempt to go above and beyond the call of duty on The Bonfire of the Vanities is in a category all its own: it's mainly notable for the way the actress, who at the time was a fifteen-year veteran of Hollywood moviemaking at age thirty-three, seems to have gotten her personal and professional calendars mixed up. Playing a gazillionaire's tarty mistress, a role that required her to appear in a succession of low-cut gowns, Griffith decided that it would be a good idea to get breast enhancement surgery during a break from shooting, when half her scenes were in the can and she still had more to shoot. According to Julie Salomon's indispensable book The Devil's Candy, the movie's director, Brian De Palma, was notified of the big change in his leading lady when she returned to the set and sat in his lap; she beamed at him and waited for a compliment on her new chassis while the crew goggled and he tried to smile while wondering how he was going to match shots. Oddly, Griffith continues to show a disatisfaction with what God and Tippi Hedren gave her that some might say borders on rank ingratitude; she recently did her part to get the TV series Viva Laughlin pulled off the air by scaring the viewers with her new lips, which look as if they were drawn by Max Fleischer.

– Pazit Cahlon, Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Scott Renshaw

Apocalypse Now Redux Redux

Peter Smith — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 17:00:00 GMT

When the specs for the special edition of Apocalypse Now Redux were unveiled, there was widespread disappointment that the documentary, Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse, was not part of the set. DVD Talk reviewer Preston Jones spoke for many critics and fans in his review:

This set is being touted as The Complete Dossier, [suggesting] that everything anyone who's a fan of the film could want is included. . . but until a DVD set is released either incorporating Hearts of Darkness or creating an entirely new production documentary using Eleanor [Coppola]'s footage (some of which is glimpsed in a few featurettes), Apocalypse Now remains a film not fully, completely and rightly recognized for the difficult achievement it is on DVD.

So it was a surprise to find that Hearts of Darkness was finally coming out on DVD in a special edition. It caught a lot of people unaware, including the co-director, George Hickenlooper, who wasn't very happy about the way he's been treated over the DVD. Posting on the Hollywood Elsewhere message board, Hickenlooper gave a comprehensive report of his own attempts to get the film out:

Uhm, guys, I only found out about this the same way Jeff did. Last night while surfing the net. I haven't talked to Fax [Bahr, co-director], but I am really surprised by this development. The only thing I know is that it is coming out on Paramount. I am also frankly bummed that I wasn't asked to do a commentary. . . It also saddens me that I spent many hours of time and energy talking to the folks at Criterion who are dying to put it out. I even flew myself to Denver to have lunch with Francis to talk him into it. That was three years ago. He said he'd get back to me but I guess he's been too busy. So here we are. I found out about it last night and it's coming out on Paramount DVD.

But then later he posts:

Having just viewed the packaging of my film, I have to say I am really pissed off. And I am not pissed off at Paramount. I spoke to Home Video guy Michael Harkin today and he told me Paramount had nothing to do with the packaging or mastering of the DVD. It was ALL delivered by Zoetrope. So this is all Francis' doing and he never even bothered to return my emails or phone calls. The last one in May reminding him about the Criterion offer.

Talk about hearts of darkness, eh?

— Faisal A. Qureshi