The Screengrab : billy wilder

Screengrab Presents: THE TOP TEN BEST MOVIES OF ALL TIME!!!!! (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 14 May 2009 20:00:00 GMT

As faithful readers already know by now, the End Is Near for this blog...but before we all get Raptured up outta this bitch, your soon-to-be-less-employed-than-usual pals here at the Screengrab figured we’d settle the age-old question of ultimate movie quality once and for all with our own definitive and irrefutable rulings on the subject.

Last week, we determined the Top Ten Worst Atrocities in the History of Cinema...and now, after months of intensive research, legal wrangling, animal testing, sleepless nights and enough partisan debate to make the Coleman-Franken dispute seem like a mere coin-toss, we hereby present our individual and collective picks for THE TOP TEN BEST MOVIES OF ALL TIME!!!!!!

(And...okay, so we cheated a little, kicking things off with an insoluble three-way tie for the #10 spot, starting with...)

10. DAYS OF HEAVEN (1978)

Terrence Malick’s sophomore effort about a love triangle that develops in the 1920 Texas panhandle is a work of pure cinema in which everything about its story, its characters, and its larger concerns is conveyed through overwhelmingly evocative imagery. From piercing cutaways to the natural world, to Linda Manz’s strange, haunting narration, to peerlessly beautiful twilight hour cinematography and Ennio Morricone’s wrenching score, it’s a film whose mournful poeticism casts a lingering spell, and which stands – in this critic’s humble opinion – as the finest feature ever committed to celluloid. (NS)

10. BELLE DE JOUR (1967)

Earlier this year, I sat down and watched Buñuel’s masterpiece Belle de Jour for what must have been the fortieth or so time, and it occurred to me that maybe, just maybe, this story is all a fantasy in the mind of the main character’s husband. If you’ve seen the movie, think about it -- the story is about the virginal Severine (Catherine Deneuve), who plays the elegant wife for husband Jean (Jean Sorel), while harboring (and eventually giving in to) fantasies of debasing herself as a prostitute. Observe the way Jean is always on the sidelines of the story, until the final reel, when he gets dragged into the middle of it. And look at his knowing smirk in the final scene. Now, I have no idea if this reading was something Buñuel intended. But no matter -- Belle de Jour is the kind of movie that invites readings like this one, however strange and far-fetched they might be. Also, it’s got Deneuve at the apex of her icy-hot sex appeal, Michel Piccoli at his most insinuating, plus it actually gets funnier with each subsequent viewing. From an objective point of view, Belle de Jour may not be the best movie ever made, but nuts to that -- it’s my favorite, and that’s good enough for me. (PC)

10. STAR WARS (1977)

During my tenure here at the Screengrab, I’ve rhapsodized endlessly and embarrassingly about my love for the original Star Wars, and now, as Grand Moff Tarkin would say, it will be the last time. But why is it one of the best movies ever? Because, personally, no other film has ever transported me as far and completely from the grip of dull reality into the escapist realms of cinematic possibility. Because, in a general sense, it distilled decades (even centuries) of recycled pop culture into something nobody had ever quite seen before. And while many blame George Lucas (and his buddy Steven Spielberg) for spawning the sort of CGI-infused, ADD-inducing summer blockbusters that led to the Michael Bayification of Hollywood, it should be remembered that Lucas’ original space opera was powered as much by crackerjack storytelling, likeable characters and a sincere joie de vivre as it was by special effects...a lesson clearly absorbed by the best of the new generation of blockbuster auteurs like Jon “Iron Man” Favreau and J.J. “Star Trek” Abrams. (And, finally, one last Star Wars fun fact, for old time’s sake: while double-checking the Internet Movie Database to see if I got the above Tarkin quote right, I unexpectedly discovered that the deformed guy who gives Luke Skywalker a hard time in the Mos Eisley cantina (“He doesn’t like you...I don’t like you either”) is apparently a doctor -- Dr. Cornelius Evazan, to be exact -- though I’m guessing the doctorate was more of an honorary degree, possibly bestowed by Arizona State University). (AO)

9. THE WILD BUNCH (1969)

"A simple story about bad men in changing times" is how Sam Peckinpah summed it up. But it's so much more than that. Pauline Kael said it was "a traumatic poem of violence, with imagery as ambivalent as Goya's" and also that "pouring new wine into the bottle of the Western, Peckinpah explodes the bottle." Westerns had always been mythic stories, morality tales about good and bad without the guiding force of law to keep matters civilized. The Wild Bunch brought a sense of grim reality to the story without losing the mythic quality. Gunfighters weren't good guys living by a code and bad guys living for themselves. Gunfighters didn't color-code into white and black hats. All of them - crooks, thieves, and highwaymen - were amoral, self-serving murderers. If they had a code of honor, it was a situational code, painting themselves in the best light. In the opening scene, the Wild Bunch weren't above using innocent civilians as a smokescreen when making their escape, nor were the railroad's hired guns above shooting through the civilians to get the Bunch. Peckinpah wanted his audience to feel the blood and iron, and he hoped that people would find themselves excited by the bloodlust and marvel at their own excitement and what it says about people. However, he stuck to a relativistic morality throughout the movie: the Bunch were merciless killers, but the railroad's hired guns were scummy desert rats unworthy of the Bunch. The Bunch robbed trains and put guns into the hands of the Mexican warlord Mapache, but their robbery was silent, clever, and cool, and they despised Mapache's base brutality. Considering the alternatives, they were the white hats, and moreover, they sort of knew it. All the arguments between the Bunch's leader Pike Bishop (William Holden) and his lieutenant Dutch Engstrom (Ernest Borgnine) were about what it meant to be honorable, what it meant to take a stand against the greater evil. Time is weighing their arguments down. The 20th century is upon them, and they're barely out of the 18th. They're getting older, slower, and there's no retirement plan for gunfighters. Pike talks about making one last score and then backing off, but Dutch brings him back to reality: "Back off to what?" That's a great question, and there is no answer for it. (HC)

8. SUNSET BOULEVARD (1950)

Even fifty years ago, it seems Hollywood's best days were already behind it. Los Angeles is a city that has been haunted by its past for nearly the entire length of its existence, and Sunset Boulevard is still its quintessential ghost story. Half a century later, Billy Wilder's masterpiece remains the eeriest and most caustic evocation of the Golden Age's twilight ever captured on celluloid. Wilder is often dismissed as a "writer's director" (or worse). It's true that his visual style is a fairly elemental one, but if Wilder's images don't possess the verve of a Kubrick or an Orson Welles, they do exert a cumulative power: William Holden’s cynical screenwriter shot from underneath as he floats lifelessly in the pool, flashbulbs popping behind him; the same pool seen empty and disintegrating from his garage apartment window, and the decaying tennis court beyond it; faded star Norma Desmond rising into the dust illuminated by a projector casting shadows of her former self on the wall; her legendary approach to the camera at the end, as she proclaims herself ready for her close-up. The air of rot and dissolution is almost unbearable. It's difficult to imagine now how shattering Sunset Boulevard must have been back in 1950. Tinseltown has been skewered many times since, in movies as different as Robert Altman's brilliant The Player and Joe Eszterhas's wretched Burn Hollywood Burn. Yet in all this time, no film-about-film has ever approached the dark, glittering genius of Wilder's vision. Even as the movie industry grows more and more appalling, Sunset Boulevard just gets better and better. (SVD)

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

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

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

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

THE BEST:

ANNIE HALL (1977)

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

THE APARTMENT (1960)

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

FROM HERE TO ETERNITY (1953)

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

THE WORST:

RAIN MAN (1988)

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

MILLION DOLLAR BABY (2006)

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

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Nick Schager, Phil Nugent

Reviews By Request, Oscar-Nominated Edition: Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942, Michael Curtiz)

Paul Clark — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 20:00:00 GMT

As usual, I’ll be polling you folks to determine the subject for the second of two Oscar-themed Reviews By Request columns, which will run in two weeks. To vote, see the poll at the end of this review.

It’s practically become a running joke that biopics are catnip to Oscar voters. It’s not difficult to see the reasons why- the historical setting gives affords technicians plenty of chances to show off, while audiences enjoy seeing the lives of their heroes brought to life through movie magic. Most of all, playing historical figures often gives actors an opportunity to show facets of their talent that aren’t normally on display. Nowhere is this more apparent than in biographies of musicians or other live performances, in which actors get the chance to not only portray real-life characters but also perform their work- in character, anyway. And of all the acclaimed showbiz biopic performances out there, few are more beloved than James Cagney’s Oscar-winning turn as George M. Cohan in Michael Curtiz’s Yankee Doodle Dandy.

As showbiz biopics go, Yankee Doodle Dandy has a pretty standard trajectory. We follow Cohan from his birth through his early days on the road, performing in vaudeville shows with his parents and sister as “The Four Cohans.” By the time he’s a teenager, young George has become good enough that he gets cocky; and despite his undeniable talent he’s been largely blackballed from the business by the time he’s hit adulthood. It’s only by composing his own material- combined with a lot of luck- that George makes a name for himself on Broadway, eventually becoming its biggest star. And all the while, he sticks by his family (including his dad, played by Walter Huston), and in turn his loving wife Mary (Joan Leslie) sticks by him.

And yet, compared to most movies of this sort, Yankee Doodle Dandy has almost no interest in the darker undercurrents of its protagonist. There’s a very good reason for this- made in the early years of World War II, the filmmakers wanted to tell the rousing story of a homefront hero, a patriot who served his country not with a gun but with songs like the World War I anthem “Over There.” This comes through clearest in the movie’s (supposedly apocryphal) framing device, in which Cohan is called to the White House late one night so that FDR can personally present him with the Congressional Gold Medal. And while this makes the film pretty hopeless as biography- as Cohan himself allegedly quipped after the premiere, “It was a good movie. Who was it about?”- it’s rousing entertainment all the same. In light of the tendency of many contemporary biopics to air out their protagonists’ dirty laundry, the film’s refusal to do so is perhaps its most refreshing aspect. Yankee Doodle Dandy is content to let its hero be a hero.

But the film would be nothing without Cagney’s infectious performance. Like many moviegoers of the time, I mostly knew Cagney through his hard-boiled gangster roles, combined his great late-period turns in films like Billy Wilder’s awesome One, Two, Three. But while I always knew he was an energetic actor, I wasn’t prepared for the high spirits he would bring to the role of George M. Cohan. The role had been turned down by the likes of Fred Astaire, and while Cagney wasn’t the dancer Astaire was (or the singer, for that matter- Cagney probably speak-sings half his lyrics), he throws himself so completely into the role that it scarcely matters. Cagney’s irrepressible desire to entertain is matched only by his inventiveness, as in the scene in which he first meets his eventual wife while covered in old-age makeup. It’s an irresistible performance, and one I dare say the Academy would’ve been hard-pressed to overlook even if it wasn’t based on a real person.

Yankee Doodle Dandy isn’t a movie about the life of George M. Cohan so much as it is about the myth of George M. Cohan. Consequently, it scarcely matters that Cohan was actually born on July 3rd, that the movie’s “Mary” was actually his second wife, or that the circumstances under which he received his Congressional Gold Medal were somewhat different than they are in the film. What matters is that, like its hero, it’s filled to the brim with an unabashed flag-waving spirit, and anchored with Cagney’s timeless, inspired performance. Yankee Doodle Dandy is cornball to be sure, but it’s the kind of movie that gives cornball a grand old name.

For the second Oscar-themed Reviews By Request column, I’m asking you to choose from five Best Picture-winning films I’ve never seen. So, which will it be?

Which should I review for my next Reviews By Request? | BuzzDash polls

As always, the comments section is open. See you in two weeks!

Jailhouse Rock: The Greatest Prison Films of All Time (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 21:45:00 GMT

CHICAGO (2002)

Hot chicks behind bars? Check. A large, in-charge corrupt female warden? Check. Mean girl sparring between the new fish and the reigning cell block queen? Check. Nude lesbian shower orgies and bloody riot scenes? Sorry...Rob Marshall’s Oscar-winning adaptation of the toe-tappingly cynical 1975 Kander/Webb/Fosse musical adaptation of crime reporter Maurine Dallas Watkins’ 1926 play about celebrity criminals ain’t that kind of Women-In-Prison film. Helping to restore America’s faith in the potential entertainment value of movie musicals a year after Baz Luhrmann did his level best to destroy the genre with the Excedrin-headache known as Moulin Rouge, Chicago served up catchy tunes and light satire grounded by (relatively) gritty scenes of the “real-world” Murderess Row underpinning the fantasized production numbers. For all the literal and figurative song-and-dance surrounding the press and public’s fascination with lethal jazz babies Velma (Catherine Zeta-Jones) and Roxie (Reneé Zellweger), there’s also the other side of the coin: the grim fate of a Hungarian inmate who, unlike her media-savvy cellmates, is probably innocent but gets the noose rather than justice because she can’t speak English and doesn’t know how to game the system for her own benefit. But that’s about as serious as things get: those who prefer more harrowing musical depictions of doomed immigrant ladies destroyed by American xenophobia are welcome to seek out Dancer In The Dark, the entertainment equivalent of a swift hard kick in the crotch you’re not entirely sure you deserved. The rest of Chicago, meanwhile, is a feel-good romp about getting away with murder featuring Zeta-Jones at the top of her game, an unusually tolerable performances by Zellweger (in a role Divine would have really knocked out of the park) and a surprisingly unembarrassing performance by Richard Gere (although as fellow Screengrabber Scott Von Doviak correctly noted at the time, Christopher Walken in the razzle-dazzle role would have been godhead).

ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981)

Look, we’re not going lie to you: a lot of what’s awesome about John Carpenter’s Escape from New York is Snake Plissken. Kurt Russell’s one-eyed bank-robber antihero is badass enough to have earned the guy a generation of goodwill despite a subsequent decade filled with Captain Rons and Tango & Cashes. A lot more of what’s awesome about it is the dynamite supporting cast, which includes Lee Van Cleef, Harry Dean Stanton, a tasty Adrienne Barbeau, Donald Pleasance as a Fightin’ President, Screengrab fave/That Guy! emeritus Tom Atkins, and Isaac Hayes in a role so tough he almost out-bad-dudes Snake Plissken. But leaving all that aside, Escape from New York twists conventions all over the place: the bad boy reprobate is trying to break into prison, not get out of it, and New York, rather than being the destination everyone’s trying to reach and the place people only leave because they’re about to hit 40 and they can’t stand living with a roommate in Crown Heights anymore, is a maximum security prison where futuristic America dumps its biggest scumbags. (Insert predictable ‘Oh, the wacky world of science fiction, where New York is filled with criminal scum! Ha ha!’ joke here). Much as he did in Escape from Precinct 13, Carpenter takes genre conventions and flips them on their ears, with highly entertaining results.

STALAG 17 (1953)

Billy Wilder’s films are so essential and influential and beloved that it’s hard to pull back and talk about how weird and unsettling and even unpleasant they are. But they are indeed weird, unsettling, and often unpleasant. For one thing, there’s so much fakery that it’s up for grabs what Wilder was trying to elicit from his audience. In Billy Wilder’s eyes, life is about deception. Many -- if not most -- of his main characters are phonies. The cynics are all romantics. The romantics are all cynics. Sometimes they’re deluding themselves, sometimes the rest of the world. His movies also lather on a thick corn hash. That’s not too unusual for a Hollywood director of his era. John Ford and Howard Hawks were both certainly guilty of overcooking the corn. In Wilder’s movies, sometimes the corn is funny and sometimes it seems pointless. It’s all part of the artifice of his movies, the occasionally clumsy sleight-of-hand that he works with to try to distract you from the horror and mess his characters are making of their lives with all their deception. This artifice is occasionally too much for Wilder’s movies, and a few stories that should work (like Ace In The Hole, for instance, or The Apartment) try to hang too much suffering on a premise too phony and characters too empty. However, Stalag 17 goes the other way. It's a good Wilder movie. It did, however, open the door for Hogan’s Heroes, a bad tv show (don’t try to justify your nostalgia to me; it may be iconic but that doesn’t mean it’s good). It also laid the groundwork for the Roberto Benigni atrocity Life Is Beautiful, and a handful of other movies leaping to your mind about the goofy fun time people had in Nazi prison camps. Not that movies about Nazi prisons have to be grim, but c’mon, those flicks have no goddamn perspective. Anyway, the comic relief is far too broad for the movie, the story is pitched somewhere between too cynical and too maudlin, the characters are a little slow on the uptake, and damn if I know how it all works, but Stalag 17 somehow makes sense.

A MAN ESCAPED (1957)

The title suggests a conclusion foregone, but Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped is unconcerned with the conclusion. What’s important is the suffocating tight focus on Lt. Fontaine, our captured protagonist, his wide eyes full of twitchy wildness like cornered game, as he goes about the nuts-and-bolts of dismantling the prison about him. The movie opens with a close-up on his hand, testing a car door lever. In a minute, he will leap from the car and be immediately recaptured. But for the first couple of minutes, Bresson’s camera watches him as he holds his breath, waiting for just the right moment. Some men may give up when caught, but this one was built for escape. You will learn soon enough that he is a member of the French Resistance who is headed for detainment in a Nazi jail. He tells his story mostly in short, clipped voiceovers, as few people speak to him or give him a reason to speak during his confinement. But speech is unimportant. His mind is constantly at work planning his escape. Bresson’s taut and economical film lays bare the mechanics of a prison break, provided, of course, that the prison is built and staffed exactly like the one in the movie.

DEATH AND THE MAIDEN (1994)

The only prison in Roman Polanski’s film of Ariel Dorfman’s play Death and the Maiden is in the past. Sigourney Weaver plays Paulina, a former political prisoner scarred by her rape and torture while imprisoned. Her husband Gerardo (Stuart Wilson) owes her everything. One night -- the only night in this movie, really -- his car breaks down and he catches a ride from Dr. Miranda (Ben Kingsley), who leaves and later returns when he realizes that he accidentally kept Gerardo’s spare tire. The two men have a drink. Meanwhile, Paulina has apparently flipped. She steals Miranda’s car and destroys it, then returns home and begins to torture the man, claiming he did terrible things to her in the past. Her husband is understandably confused. Miranda seemed okay to him. And he knows that Paulina never saw her tormenter while in prison. How can she be sure? Three characters, one night, and a lifetime of human suffering.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Hayden Childs

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 21:30:00 GMT

2 DAYS IN PARIS (2007)

I've been an Adam Goldberg enthusiast since Dazed and Confused, but if you don't appreciate the actor's neurotic, hyperarticulate humor, then 2 Days In Paris may not be your cup of Pernod. On the other hand, even Hebrew Hammer haters may find themselves charmed by Julie Delpy's performance (in a movie she wrote and directed) as the distaff half of a bi-national couple facing relationship meltdown during the titular 48-hour period. After all the France-bashing during the (still not over yet!) Bush administration, it's interesting to see Delpy's warts-and-all depiction of The City of Lights, while her lived-in, heartfelt insights into love and family breathe fresh life into the ill-used romantic comedy genre. But Goldberg is the fish-out-of-water focus here, in a performance for anyone who’s ever been sick and disoriented on vacation while desperately wishing for the comforts of home.

COMING TO AMERICA (1988)

Probably Eddie Murphy's finest moment. Also, one of those big box office-y 1980s comedies — like Back to the Future — that, while seemingly silly, get at the very heart of America. Hard to say how much of it is intentional but damn it, it works. Eddie Murphy doesn't just star as the pampered Prince Akeem of Zamunda ("The royal penis is clean your highness"). He also wrote the story. One imagines his train of thought went something like this: if the enslaved Africans brought to America were once kings and queens, then what would an African king seeking a wife in Queens think of America? Natch, hilarity ensues.

THE LAST MOVIE (1971)

The director-star Dennis Hopper's follow-up to Easy Rider (1969) begins with a Hollywood crew shooting a Western in Peru. Hopper plays Kansas, a stunt man who continues to hang around after the movie wraps. The film is insanely overedited, and Hopper the auteur got more than a little carried away with the possibilities of movies within movies and illusion versus reality games. To the degree that the movie has a plot, it seems to involve the Peruvians getting so excited from having watched the moviemakers at work that they build their own (non-functioning) cameras and other equipment out of bamboo and use them as an excuse to stage violent scenes, which in turn may be real. Hopper himself seems to have rendered the movie unintelligible because, out there on location, he got so into the heady atmosphere (and, it's said, some of the local mushrooms) that he couldn't stop tinkering with his baby, cutting and re-cutting it and throwing more and more monkey wrenches into its motor. His movie about the deranging effects of a clash of cultures thus also became an example of it. Luigi Pirandello would be proud. Jeff Spicoli might want to tip his hat, too.

THE THIRD MAN (1949)

Strangers in a strange land is something of a pet theme of Graham Greene, whether he's charting the course of the well-meaning but destructive title character of The Quiet American in Indochina or the crooked international financier of "Across the Bridge" who finds himself stranded in a dusty Mexican town. This classic may serve as his most enduring movie exploration of his mixed feelings about the good man -- in this case, American pulp Western writer Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) -- who thinks he's being a nobly stalwart hero when he's really just in way over his head. Martins arrives in Vienna after World War II, at a time when the city is divided into zones ruled over by representatives of four different countries and corruption runs rampant, only to be informed that the friend who summoned him there, Harry Lime (Orson Welles), was recently killed in a lorry accident. Naturally, Holly recognizes that something must be up and raises hell trying to find out what it is, until his friend, who faked his death to evade the consequences of his horrible crimes, comes out of the shadows and threatens his life. It would seem that Holly has been running himself ragged to avenge the death of a man he hadn't known at all. But the girls in Heavenly Creatures had his number.

PEPE LE MOKO (1937)

The strangers here are multiple: there's Pepe himself (Jean Gabin), a mythical French criminal hiding out in Algiers' Casbah, the police detectives sent over to track him down after his many successful years of hiding, the visiting woman Pepe seduces with a combination of his criminal allure and knowledge of an area off-limits to tourists, and — not least of all — director Julien Duvivier and his crew. Pepe Le Moko isn't entirely location-based, but there's very real exterior footage — especially in the opening sequence above — frequently from cameras far shakier and more obviously documentary and on-the-fly than most '30s narratives would allow themselves. Pepe is some kind of classic, at least in part because its relationship to its status as colonial filmmaking is constantly unsettled. "Algiers isn't Pigalle" announces a local cop before giving an overview of the area — including people "descended from barbarians, honest traditionalists but a mystery to us." Pepe's more at home with the natives than the French authorities pursuing him, and not in a way that's condescending or self-conscious either. Rough filmmaking at times, but containing more ideas than most movies know what to do with. Many of the same locations were used for The Battle of Algiers, if all that isn't weird enough for you; those traditionalists wouldn't remain a mystery for much longer.

ACE IN THE HOLE (1951)

Albuquerque. NM: into town comes a man so urbane he reads a newspaper while sitting in the car he's being towed in. The man is Chuck Tatum (Kirk Douglas), a veteran reporter already fired from 11 metropolitan dailies. Tatum's here to give the sleepy little town the shot in the arm it needs and thereby rebuild his disgraced career, but Albuquerque won't give him the material for the yellow journalism he practices. Tatum's an urban hustler in the land of rural innocents — until a man's trapped in a cave and Tatum brings him to the world stage. Deliberately endangering Leo Minosa (Richard Benedict) by needlessly delaying his rescue for a bigger story, Tatum transforms the area around the cave into the kind of oppportunistic carnival land of free-floating capitalistic enterprise and gaudy spectacle he's used to. Buried for years after its initial brutal reception, a recent restoration and release on Criterion have brought one of Billy Wilder's greatest films back into the spotlight it deserves.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Sarah Clyne Sundberg, Phil Nugent, Vadim Rizov

When Good Directors Go Bad: The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990, Brian De Palma)

Paul Clark — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Of all the prestige projects of the 1990 awards season, few had more potential than The Bonfire of the Vanities. To begin with, it was based on Tom Wolfe’s first fiction book, which had been widely read in serialized form in Rolling Stone before becoming a bestseller upon its publication as a novel. The director was Brian De Palma, who made his reputation with a series of kinky, Hitchcock-inspired thrillers during the seventies before branching out into more mainstream fare such as Scarface, The Untouchables and Casualties of War. With a wildly popular novel and an A-list director, Warner Bros. had visions of Oscars dancing in their heads, and they consequently filled the cast with big names, from recent Oscar nominees Tom Hanks, Melanie Griffith, and Morgan Freeman to newly anointed action superstar Bruce Willis, and backed them with plenty of first-rate character actors.

Ideally, The Bonfire of the Vanities should have been one of the biggest movie events of 1990. But then, if it had been, I would be writing about it in my Yesterday’s Hits column instead of When Good Directors Go Bad. As it stands, the big-screen adaptation remains one of the most notorious fiascos in Hollywood history, earning back a mere $15 million of its then-extravagant $50 million budget, and receiving mostly savage reviews. As a De Palma fan of long standing- I’m the guy who liked The Black Dahlia, after all- I’d like to say that the film was merely misunderstood, but even I have to admit that it’s a failure.

Part of the problem is the casting of the principal roles, from the top on down. If you were casting the role of an ambitious commodities trader and self-anointed “Master of the Universe”, whose name would come to mind? Michael Douglas? Tom Cruise, perhaps? But after Warner Bros. deemed the character too unsympathetic on the page, they decided to cast Tom Hanks in the role, which is sort of like casting Jimmy Stewart as Gordon Gekko. Also problematic was the casting of Willis. The character of journalist Peter Fallow was written as a dissolute Brit (the role was originally offered to John Cleese), but Willis ended up being cast for marquee value, and gave one of his laziest performances, smirking his way through the role and pissing off most of the people involved with the production with his ego.

Worst of all is Griffith. During the eighties, Griffith’s dumb-blonde persona proved to be surprisingly adaptable to a number of filmmakers’ visions, from the tart-with-a-heart of Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild to the streetwise porn star of De Palma’s own Body Double. However, the role of Maria Ruskin was far beyond her limited talent. On the page, Maria may be the trickiest character in the novel, a wily manipulator whose ditzy façade hides a pitch-black heart. But Griffith can only manage the ditzy part, so when the character begins to reveal her shameless nature after Sherman’s life begins to go down the tubes we never believe it. The two halves of her personality- sexy and cunning- never mesh convincingly, so rather than lacing her manipulations with an erotic charge, her dark side makes the sexy stuff creepy, which surely wasn’t what the film was aiming for.

But while the casting issues might have been out of De Palma’s hands, he’s far from blameless. Admittedly, Wolfe’s novel is something of a tough nut to crack, simultaneously a cross-section of New York City life, a morality tale, and a savage takedown of the craven greed and ambition that fueled the eighties. However, it fails on all three counts. Much of its power as a snapshot of the Big Apple’s social strata is lost because its characters are sketchy and one-dimensional, a problem that might have been partially alleviated by spot-on casting, but not entirely. Likewise, the film places its morality tale aspects on the back burner for most of its running time, only to have judge/voice of reason Morgan Freeman bust out an extended monologue about decency in the film’s final five minutes, at which point it comes off as a tacked-on moral rather than a natural outgrowth of the story.

This leaves only the exposé aspect of the story. In nearly 700 pages, Wolfe was able to lay bare the motivations of nearly all of the major players in the story, from Sherman, Maria and Peter, to the lawyers, politicians and community leaders who opportunistically seized upon his case for their own personal gain. Without the time to do this onscreen, De Palma instead focuses on the circus (political and media-driven) that ensues. But while a more assured comic filmmaker might have been able to spin even an abbreviated Bonfire into a bitter little pill (imagine what an Ace in the Hole-era Billy Wilder might have done with this material), De Palma brings almost nothing to the material aside from the liberal use of unflattering wide-angle close-ups to underline the grotesqueness of the characters. Sure, there are a handful of cool camera tricks- especially the nearly five-minute-long opening Steadican shot- but for the most part they don’t really work in the context of the story, and mostly just call attention to themselves. I hate to use a criticism that De Palma’s detractors are wont to levy at him, but in this case, they’re right.

In the end, the biggest failing of The Bonfire of the Vanities is one of tone. The scathing satire of the original novel was replaced by a more hamfisted style that was both broad and shrill. A few of the jabs hit (I love how Andre Gregory’s poet is introduced: “he’s on the shortlist for the Nobel Prize. He has AIDS.”), but most of the time they whiff. Scenes like the one where Maria’s cuckold husband (Alan King) suddenly dies in mid-conversation or the famous “crumbs” monologue by Sherman’s wife might have worked on the page, but they flounder and die onscreen, the former because it’s not inherently funny to see a minor character kick the bucket, the latter because Kim Cattrall plays the character as such a high-strung harpy that it’s hard to focus on anything she says.

Now, it’s entirely possible that Ebert was right when he wrote that The Bonfire of the Vanities might be enjoyable to those who are unfamiliar with the book. But I wouldn’t bet on it. De Palma and the studio took a powerful and lacerating story and adapted it in the most pedestrian way possible, and replaced the prickly citizens of Wolfe’s New York City with characters who are both cartoonish and, worse, uninteresting. If anything good came out of my watching Bonfire again, it’s that I’ve been inspired to re-read the book, to immerse myself in Wolfe’s language and marvel at the world he created. By now, it’s become a cliché that people are generally better off reading the book, but in this case that’s the only way to go.

In Other Blogs: Synecdoche-mania

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Sure, we know you think we’re a bunch of sellouts. We brought you the exclusive clip and the rave review, and it just so happens that ads for Synecdoche, New York are plastered all over Nerve. I assure you, however, that I have received no payola. (At least, not yet. Cash is fine, fellas.) I just happen to be really high on the movie, but just to provide a little balance, let’s check in with Vinyl is Heavy. “Especially given that structures and their construction are such a major part of the film, it's hard to not see this as at best a missed opportunity, at worst as evidence of Synecdoche's ultimate failure: that it doesn't utilize form. No doubt, it's got some great ideas, ideas about space and time which seem natural to film; but they're not put together in any cohesive way. Things are jumbled, uneven. Leaving the theater, I couldn't escape the thought of what would've been if Kauffman had given things more time, allowed the form to unfold itself, gradually over time, so that we feel time slipping away from us as it slips away from Caden, so that the approach of the film's end really is that gradual approach of Death.” (If you want to read a really dissenting view, check out Rex Reed at the Observer, but be sure to wear your hazmat gear.)

“Some of Synecdoche’s detractors insist that the film is impossibly convoluted,” writes Karina Longworth at Spoutblog. “It’s not, but a first viewing can be mostly devoted to figuring out the specifics of space and time. Kaufman often jumps years ahead in the space of a cut, but this is almost always directly referenced in the script after the fact. If anything, this continual confirmation would seem like a flaw in the script, a transparent funneling of exposition into dialogue, if Caden’s inability to grasp or cope with the unstoppable march of time wasn’t one of the film’s key themes.”

At Beyond the Multiplex, Andrew O’Hehir interviews the Kauf Man himself. “It is about works of art, but it's also about what we do as people. What Caden is creating in his environment is what we do in our daily lives when we tell stories about what's happening to us. We try to organize the world, which isn't organized the way our brains want to organize it. We tell stories about the people in our lives, we project ideas onto them. We project relationships with people, we make our lives into stories. I don't think we can avoid doing that. There's no way to approach anything in an objective way. We're completely subjective; our view of the world is completely controlled by who we are as human beings, as men or women, by our age, our history, our profession, by the state of the world.”

After transforming into an L.A. Dodgers blog during the National League playoffs, Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule gets back to the rep house with a look at the early work of Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale. “Together, Zemeckis and Gale trafficked in the kind of nasty, caustic characters which, combined with the Bobs' authorial in-your-face prankishness and glee (especially in Used Cars), linked them directly to the morally adrift protagonists found populating late-period Billy Wilder comedies like Kiss Me, Stupid, The Fortune Cookie and One Two Three. The foul-mouthed abandon of Used Cars, suffused with loyalty to a vision of corruption and thoughtless ambition as key elements the quintessential American biography, particularly on the eve of the Reagan era, was equal parts chilling and exhilarating, like a belly laugh at the edge of the abyss.”

In List-o-mania this week, Cracked offers 9 Foreign Rip-Offs Cooler Than The Hollywood Originals. Number 9 is Yarasa Adam (Batmen). “There's a lot to love about the Turkish Batman, namely his ability to do more with less. Whereas the American Batman cloaks his severe mental illness with gee-whiz gadgets and, well, a cloak, Betmen has no need for capes, technology, or subtlety. He knows that dressing up like a deranged trapeze artist and borrowing the wife's Chevy Nova for the afternoon will do way more to frighten felons than any bat-shaped airplane.”

The Top 20 Movies About Movies (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 21:00:00 GMT

SUNSET BOULEVARD (1950)

Long before Robert Altman gave three quarters of the Screen Actors Guild an opportunity to parody and celebrate themselves in The Player, Billy Wilder managed to corral a Golden Age Who’s Who (including Gloria Swanson, Erich von Stroheim, Buster Keaton, Hedda Hopper and Cecil B. DeMille, playing funhouse mirror versions of themselves) for a project which, even had it failed, would still have been a worthwhile snapshot of an epochal changing of the guard at the crossroads of Old Hollywood and the dawn of the modern era. But, of course, Sunset Boulevard didn’t fail: this classic dance of death between Swanson’s desperate, deluded has-been and William Holden’s bitterly conflicted never-was received critical hosannas, eleven Academy Award nominations and three wins, a fairly secure spot on the AFI list of the greatest American movies and a mediocre musical adaptation (a sure sign of massive cultural penetration). Box office-wise, the movie failed to click with the hix in the stix upon its initial release, possibly contributing to the movie industry’s ongoing conviction that Middle America has little interest in movies about (A) the movie industry and/or (B) monkey funerals.

SINGIN' IN THE RAIN (1951)

One of the best musicals ever made, Singin' in the Rain is also one of the freshest self-satires ever to come out of Hollywood. Gene Kelly and Jean Hagen play silent movie stars Don Lockwood and Lina Lamont, whose continuing success as a screen couple is endangered by the coming of sound, which is a problem because of lovely Lina's pronounced vocal resemblance to the sound a cat makes when you feed its tail into the garbage disposal. (I was eight years old. The statute of limitations has long since run out.) As a parody of a narcissistic star's condescending attitude towards the fans, Hagen's adenoidal speech to the "little people" has never been bettered, except maybe for a few real stars at awards shows who didn't know that they were competing with a put-on.

MULHOLLAND DRIVE (2001)

David Lynch's love/hate relationship with Hollywood is well-documented, and both sides of the equation are on full display in this masterful fever dream, rescued from network television oblivion after clueless ABC suits deep-sixed the pilot for Lynch's proposed follow-up to Twin Peaks. The set-up could have made for an intriguing continuing series: cheery, naïve small-towner Betty (Naomi Watts) comes to L.A. and finds amnesiac raven-haired beauty "Rita" (Laura Elena Harring) hiding in her aunt's apartment. Betty tries to help Rita unlock the secret of her true identity even as she pursues her dream of an acting career, which takes off after an electrifying audition for brooding filmmaker Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux). The feature film version of Mulholland Drive turns the entire scenario inside-out, reconfiguring all the characters and events into a nightmare straight out of Hollywood Babylon. In Lynch's twisted vision, the film industry is presented as a shadowy conspiracy of malevolent oddballs. You get the impression this is exactly how Lynch thinks show business is run, and who knows, he may be right.

BARTON FINK (1991)

One of the Coen Brothers' most divisive films, Barton Fink is famously an extended meditation on writer's block, conceived when they found themselves unable to progress any further on the labyrinthine plot to Miller's Crossing. And, indeed, it's a fine treatment of writing and writers, a subject Hollywood gets terribly wrong more often than not. But there's more than one of Joel & Ethan's crippling neuroses on display here: they're also extremely diffident about working within the Hollywood system, and while they may not feel much sympathy with the phony working-class sentiments of the titular playwright, they're certainly not on the side of the impossibly crass, bullying toadstool of a producer, played by Michael Lerner in one of the Coens' finest 'angry man behind an expensive desk' roles. The writers' own vices, from Fink's arrogance and ego to Faulkner stand-in Bill Mayhew's alcoholism and self-pity, may be what sinks them, but studio bosses like Lerner's bombastic Jack Lipnick, Jon Polito's toadying Lou Breeze, and Tony Shalhoub's irritable Ben Geisler are always willing to throw them a boulder. In the end, Fink, trapped by his own unwillingness to listen, finds himself in what is likely one of the Coen Brothers' worst nightmares: locked into an unbreakable studio contract, largely incapable of producing any worthwhile work, and even when they can, unable to find anyone to produce it.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Scott Von Doviak, Leonard Pierce

Original Vs. Remake: Ocean's Eleven

Andrew Osborne — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 17:00:00 GMT

In honor of the ten year anniversary of the passing of Ol’ Blue Eyes (and the recent timely release of several DVD box sets of his cinematic output), we here at Screengrab decided to have Frank’s original 1960s casino caper and George Clooney’s 2001 remake face off in the ring-a-ding to see which is truly the heavyweight champ of hangin’-out-with-your-famous-pals cinema. Awright, boys...come out swingin’!

DANNY OCEAN

I vividly remember the day when my esteemed Screengrab colleague, Scott Von Doviak, told me I had to drop whatever I was doing and go check out Steven Soderbergh’s Elmore Leonard adaptation, Out of Sight. “You mean the movie with that guy from E.R.?” I replied, incredulous, thinking perhaps I’d misunderstood. "The guy from One Fine Day? Batman & Robin? That guy?” “Yes,” Mr. Von Doviak replied. “I’m afraid we have to start liking George Clooney now.” And, in fact, the statement was prescient, because soon The Cloon had established himself as the Sexiest Man Alive, the Last True Movie Star, the eternal bachelor, the guy with the pot-bellied pig, the sensible humanitarian do-gooder, and the guy my wife has informed me she’d run off with in a heartbeat...and I wouldn’t even blame her, because he’s just that fucking cool. But you know what? He’s still not as cool as Frank Sinatra in 1960. Advantage: Original.

THE ELEVEN

Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Don Cheadle, Casey Affleck, Carl Reiner, Bernie Mac...these are all fairly cool people. Sammy and Dino? They're so cool I don’t even need to mention their last names (though I suppose it’s a toss-up whether Joey Bishop is cooler than Scott Caan or vice-versa). The big problem is that no matter how cool Sammy and Dino are, and as well as they wear suits and swill cocktails, they’re part of a gang that just doesn’t have many good scenes, good lines, or all that much to do. Advantage: Remake.

THE DAME

Not that she had all that much to work with in an underwritten role, but the best part of Julia Robert’s performance (as the art curator at the Bellagio?) is the meta gag of “introducing” her in the credits like a dewy fresh unknown. Angie Dickinson doesn’t fare much better, despite an arguably better wardrobe, and this category would probably be a draw if not for the mitigating factor of Shirley Maclaine’s great cameo as “Tipsy Girl” in the original, giving what noted Rat Packologist John Mitchell calls “the only actual performance in the movie,” cementing her as “any reasonable drunk’s pin-up girl.” Advantage: Original.

THE HEIST

The original scores big points for its highball concept, cooked up by five writers, including Billy Wilder(!). Meanwhile, by plotting a heist where Sammy Davis, Jr.’s character masquerades as a tap-dancing garbage man, the film either criticizes 1960s racism or embodies it (depending who you ask). But the heist in the remake (scripted by Ted Griffin) is faster paced, requires more costumes and gadgets, and wraps up with a nice, lyrical moment by the Bellagio’s dancing waters (as opposed to the original’s surprisingly downbeat buzzkill pall of failure and mortality). Advantage: Remake.

THE SCORE

Even without the groovy remix of Elvis Presley’s lost classic “A Little Less Conversation,” the soundtrack to the 2001 edition of Ocean’s is worth a listen for the space age bachelor pad rhythms of David Holmes’ swingin’ retro score and classic cuts from Perry Como, Percy Faith, Quincy Jones and Claude DeBussy. But the original featured Sammy’s aforementioned sanitation song and dance “Ee-O-Leven” and Dean Martin performing a vibe-tastic version of “Ain’t That A Kick In The Head”...and you really can’t argue with vibes. Advantage: Original

THE SEQUELS

This one is pretty close to a draw, but Ocean’s Twelve and Ocean’s Thirteen were marginally less dreadful than the original’s quasi-sequels Sergeants 3, 4 For Texas and Robin and the 7 Hoods, so... Advantage: Remake.

And thus, in a tight race between style and substance, the winner is...REMAKE!

(Coming up next: the dueling Dawns of the Dead!)

Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Remembering Claudette Colbert: "Easy Living" and "Midnight" on DVD

Phil Nugent — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 19:30:00 GMT

There were so many inventive, witty, sparklingly funny romantic comedies produced by Hollywood in the 1930s that the only logical reason that some of them aren't famous classics is that there were already too many famous classics in this genre and the Westerns were getting jealous. as noted already in our regular DVD roundup, today marks the first appearance on shiny steel discs for two winners, Easy Living (1937), which is not to be confused with a 1949 Jacques Tourneur film of the same title starring Victor Mature and Lucille Ball, and Midnight (1939), which is not to be confused with any of the fifty or sixty other movies with that same title, many of which center around a heavyset person who attempts to work out some childhood trauma that had been nagging at him by dismembering a co-ed. If you are unfamiliar with these films and the trend in fast-paced, fast-talking, sexy entertainment from which they arose, you might wonder how they compare with the modern sex comedies you can enjoy in today's theaters. There is no question that, when compared to a movie like Forgetting Sarah Marshall, they are in some ways deficient. For instance, you will search through these DVDs in vain for a single moment in which the penis of the third-string male lead of How I Met Your Mother is comically, and graphically, deployed. You won't be seeing Don Ameche unzip either. But they do have other things going for them.

For one thing, both hit the ground running, almost as if their makers knew that they'd someday be released into a mass-information age where they'd be competing for the attention of people who had a new video game to tackle. In Easy Living, which is set in New York when that was still way cool, Jean Arthur is on her way to work when she's hit by a fur coat that an enraged millionaire (Edward Arnold) has thrown out a window and makes the mistake of wearing it. (She loses her job because everybody thinks that she must be a gold-digging creature of loose morals and winds up without enough pocket change to afford dinner at the automat, which is staffed by the millionaire's son--Ray Milland--who's just stormed out of the mansion determined to make his own way.) In the continental-flavored Midnight, Claudette Colbert gets off a train in Paris in the middle of the night with nothing but the evening dress on her back and sets out to snare a rich husband--like, now, before she starves. (She meets a millionaire--John Barrymore, exultantly pop-eyed--who ropes her into his marriage problems by hiring her to bewitch the gigolo who's got his own wife, played by Mary Astor, fatally distracted.) You might have noticed that, unlike today's comedies, which depend for their plots and much of their humor on the emotional blocks of a bunch of Peter Pans (or "lovable slackers") and the overgrown cheerleaders (who are supposed to be "career women") who are doomed to sort of love them, the thirties films, which were made for audiences for whom the Depression was a still-fresh memory and the Second World War a looming reality, are full of more-or-less grown-ups who see their options being closed off by financial hardship. They have to resort to absurd, madcap strategies and improvisational stabs at reinvention to keep from falling into an economic pit that makes it seem that much more unlikely that they'll find true love at the end; Colbert's character in Midnight is not untypical of screwball romantic heroines in that she sees true love as a threat, a distraction that might wreck her plans by taking her eye off the ball. If I had gotten that job as DVD columnist for The Daily Worker, I could really go to town with this.

Easy Living and Midnight have a couple of big things in common behind the scenes. One is that both were directed by the insufficiently remembered Mitchell Leisen, a former art director who brought a shimmery, Art Deco look to the material that resulted in a near-perfect souffle, airily stylish but with enough earthly gravity to support slapstick pratfalls and such gags as Barrymore indulging in a funny voice when he makes a well-timed prank phone call. Another thing the two films have in common is that both were written by professional wisecrackers--Preston Sturges, who did the original script for Easy Living, and Billy Wilder, who wrote Midnight with his partner Charles Brackett--who hated Mitchell Leisen's guts. The news that Sturges, in particular, was unhappy was with Leisen did with his script for Easy Living (and also with Remember the Night, a cruelly little-known, Christmasey romance that Leisen and Sturges collaborated on the next year) remains puzzling, but maybe something in both Sturges and Wilder was pushing them to be dissatisfied with the director's work because both of them knew it was time to take charge of how their material was filmed; Sturges would move behind the camera in 1940, and Wilder would follow suit in 1942 (with The Major and the Minor, which also comes out on DVD today as part of the same TCM-approved series). So, in an indirect way, Leisen helped to launch a couple of directing careers that would soon eclipse his own. But the man who made Easy Living and Midnight need not be laden down with backhanded compliments. He's got the real thing coming to him.

DVD Digest for April 22, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week, a cinematic master gets the Eclipse treatment, and a viral-marketing-phenom makes its DVD debut.

DVD of the Week: In the past few years, a number of Yasujiro Ozu films have made their way to DVD, but he was so prolific that there are still many films missing, especially from his earlier work. For this reason alone, the arrival Eclipse Series 10: Silent Ozu- Three Family Comedies is cause for celebration. Comprised of three films made between 1931 and 1933, the Silent Ozu box has no extras to speak of (Eclipse doesn't really do extras), but each film features a brand-new score by silent-film composer Donald Sosin, as well as the high-quality transfers we've come to expect from the Criterion family. To date, I've only seen the box's centerpiece film, I Was Born, But..., but that film and the other Ozus I've seen have been so delightful that I have no reservations about recommending the other films- 1933's Passing Fancy and 1931's Tokyo Chorus- as well. Here's hoping that Eclipse continues to do right by Ozu in the years to come. He's certainly worth it.

Releasing today from Criterion itself is Spanish filmmaker Juan Antonio Bardem's seminal, long-overlooked melodrama Death of a Cyclist. The class-oriented of a respected professor whose life goes into freefall when after a hit-and-run accident, the film is at times heavyhanded but always striking and beautifully shot. In addition, the film should provide a fitting introduction for many moviegoers to the charms of leading lady Lucia Bosé. An Italian stunner with screen presence to burn, Bosé was a mainstay of the early films of Michelangelo Antonioni, as well as appearing in work by Buñuel, Fellini, and Marguerite Duras. The DVD also includes a featurette on the life and work of Bardem, but the real story is the film which, like its female lead, is ripe for rediscovery.

Also of note on the classics front is the release of four comedies from Universal's Cinema Classics series. The four films are: the Mae West/Cary Grant vehicle She Done Him Wrong; Billy Wilder's early film The Major and the Minor starring Ginger Rogers and Ray Milland; and two films from director Mitchell Leisen, 1939's Midnight starring Claudette Colbert, and 1937's Easy Living with Jean Arthur. Each film is a gem, but of particular note is Easy Living, perhaps the greatest film written by Preston Sturges before he reigned over Hollywood comedy in the 1940s. And if it's sexy action you want, check out Image's new DVD of the Shaw Brothers cult classic Intimate Confessions of a chinese Courtesan, a movie I'm pretty sure I dreamed one night.

Compared to this week's selection of classics, the new titles can't help but look a little paltry. The big-ticket DVD this week is of course Cloverfield (Paramount), the Matthew Reeves/JJ Abrams rampaging-monster movie. For me, the film was never so much fun as when I first saw the trailer before Transformers, but the DVD should give people a chance to approach the film separated from all the hype. This week also brings a Philip Seymour Hoffman double feature, with Hoffman hitting DVD shelves with Tamara Jenkins' The Savages (Fox)- in which he appears opposite Laura Linney- and his caustic, Oscar-nominated performance in Mike Nichols' Charlie Wilson's War (Universal), which also features mediocre turns by Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts, and a pretty hot scene in which Emily Blunt slinks down the stairs wearing only a man's dress shirt.

In addition, there's a trifecta of indie releases hitting the market today: Andrew Wagner's Starting Out in the Evening (Lionsgate), which garnered awards buzz for the ever-dependable Frank Langella; Paul Schrader's The Walker (ThinkFilm), featuring Woody Harrelson as a too-helpful escort for society women; and Joe Swanberg's Hannah Takes the Stairs (Genius Productions), starring "mumblecore" darling Greta Gerwig. Also worth mentioning are the second season of Friday Night Lights (Universal), J.A. Bayona's supernatural chiller The Orphanage (New Line, also Blu-Ray), and the mostly-ignored Hollywood remake of One Missed Call (Warner, also Blu-Ray). Mind you, the latter is only worth mentioning for the sake of completism, but there you go.

Finally, David Huddleston would like the announce that there are no HD-DVDs hitting the market today. Frankly, he couldn't be happier.