The Screengrab : boogie nights

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 21:30:00 GMT

MULHOLLAND DRIVE (2001)

David Lynch has never been what you’d call a mainstream director -- his last feature film, if I recall correctly, began with him videotaping old Polish factories -- but despite his reputation as an artsy iconoclast, he’s also got a streak of razzle-dazzle showmanship and the ability to hook an audience like nobody’s business when he puts his transcendental mind to it. Perhaps owing to the relatively commercial nature of the film’s origin as a pilot for ABC (infamously ordered and then canceled by network muttonheads for being too “Lynchian”), Mulholland Drive kicks off with a psychedelic jitterbug scene that gets the adrenalin pumping like any good overture, then moves into an opening sequence freighted with intrigue, atmosphere and dramatic possibility like a master class in cinematic storytelling: a beautiful woman in a limousine at night...a man with a gun about to kill her...a doomed car full of hedonistic teenagers screaming towards them, and then...CRASH! The man with the gun is killed, the beautiful woman staggers off into the Los Angeles night, her memory obliterated...and I’m ready and willing to follow Lynch wherever he wants to go. (AO)

BOOGIE NIGHTS (1997)

As Magnolia and There Will Be Blood ably demonstrate, PT Anderson knows how to open a film. And in terms of audacious electricity, Anderson’s finest inaugural stanza can be found in his 1997 breakthrough Boogie Nights. A 3-minute single shot, it begins with the film’s title on a flashing movie marquee before the camera tilts left and then right (like an amusement park rollercoaster), then tracks a driving car to the entrance of a hopping nightclub, and then enters the club alongside Burt Reynolds, Julianne Moore and Luis Guzman, eventually moving around and onto the dance floor, to the surrounding tables and finally behind rollerskating Heather Graham. A bit of egotistical showmanship? Without question. Yet more than merely a superficial calling-card gesture, Anderson’s brash opening aesthetic stunt efficiently introduces many of the story’s key characters, as well as conveying the euphoric glitz and glamour of a California scene dominated by wannabes flirting with their celebrity dreams. (NS)

MANHATTAN (1979)

Most of the time, when a director proclaims that his setting is “practically another character”, it’s a bunch of hooey, an oft-repeated cliché spouted off by hacks who want to be congratulated for shooting on location. But for Woody Allen, it was different. For years, Allen’s films came to be synonymous with a way of life -- cultured, neurotic, more than a little wary, resolutely cosmopolitan -- that could only come from being steeped in the cultural mecca of the Western hemisphere. Film after Allen film paid homage to the city he loved, but none more so than the one named after his borough of choice. Yet true to form, even at the beginning of Manhattan, Allen grapples with his conflicting feelings on the city -- is it the world’s greatest city, or a symbol of everything that’s wrong with society? The fact that Allen can switch instantaneously from one viewpoint to the other suggests that in his mind, they’re merely two sides of the same coin. As Allen himself says in the film, the New York he knows exists in black and white and is accompanied by Gershwin, much like the film itself, which would imply that the town he loves belongs more to the past than to the present. Looking back at the film thirty years later, these directorial choices give the film a quality that’s both nostalgic and timeless, implying that even now, even with the World Trade Center and the House That Ruth Built gone (and Allen working mostly overseas), these are still part of the city, if only in our collective memory. (PC)

8 1/2 (1963) & WILD STRAWBERRIES (1957)

The dream sequence is an opportunity for a film to break out of the logic of its narrative and bare a character's fears for the audience -- unlike real dreams, which run a gamut of emotion, dream sequences in films tend to focus on anxiety. By breaking away from the internal logic of the film, the dream sequence can take a breath and develop an established character, and for this reason, very few films start with dream sequences. Fellini's 8 1/2 does, however, and Bergman's Wild Strawberries launches into one not long after the start. In the dream in 8 1/2, Fellini-substitute Anselmi dreams of being trapped in a traffic jam, all of the other drivers and passengers staring blindly at him (other than the old man pawing a starlet). He fights his way out of his car and flies away. Then he's flying over a beach, with a doppelganger holding a rope attached to his leg. An accountant rides up on a horse, cape flying behind him like the Knight at the beginning of Bergman's The Seventh Seal. His doppelganger insists that he come down, and he plummets into the ocean, waking up in terror. Pretty clear what that's about, right? Anselmi is first trapped in traffic, the great metaphor for go-nowhere-fast modern times, and when he escapes, he is dragged back down by his own ambitions and promises to moneymen. Anselmi starts the movie in a dream, spends much of it wallowing in memory, and finally ends the movie with dream-logic. His beginning dream is about his fear of being trapped, reeled in by his own accountants and his own professional persona, unable to fly and falling. In Wild Strawberries, Professor Borg dreams of faceless clocks and faceless people, time falling away while his own death stumbles before him. Although it's dream-logic, the meaning is written clearly and most of the action of the movie, in which Borg tries to fix the mess he's made of his life, follows. (HC)

Click Here For Part One, Three, Four & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Nick Schager, Paul Clark, Hayden Childs

Screengrab Presents: Cinema's Greatest Comebacks (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 22:00:00 GMT

RIP TORN in DEFENDING YOUR LIFE (1991)

A director I know who once worked with Rip Torn described him as a man filled with rage at all times, which may or may not be true. Yes, the actor famously smacked Norman Mailer on the noggin with a hammer in a bizarre fight somehow related to the production of the 1970 film Maidstone (an altercation that may or may not have been staged, but definitely seemed to draw actual blood). And, yes, there was that time he passed on the Jack Nicholson role in Easy Rider (specifically written for him by Terry Southern) after Dennis Hopper pulled a knife on him during a fight in a New York restaurant. So maybe he’s not the mellowest cat in the pet shop (and, sure, the man has been known to have a drink on occasion), but Torn nevertheless managed to maintain a fairly steady career, mostly as a character actor, from the time of his first screen appearance in the 1956 Baby Doll and his Broadway debut a few years later in the original cast of Tennessee Williams’ Sweet Bird of Youth through subsequent decades of TV and movie appearances. Yet, despite the occasional high class gig (like Alan Rudolph’s Songwriter in 1984 and a 1989 Nicolas Roeg adaptation of Sweet Bird starring Elizabeth Taylor), Torn’s later career had a distinct whiff of has-beenery (Jinxed, The Beastmaster)...until, that is, Albert Brooks cast him as the bombastic afterlife attorney Bob Diamond in Defending Your Life, thus unleashing the full, hitherto untapped comic brilliance of Torn (and, to a lesser extent, Meryl Streep), launching a late-period renaissance in the actor’s career as the go-to guy for directors and showrunners looking to capture that “Rip Torn” feeling, including Garry Shandling (who assured Torn’s place in comedy heaven by casting him as uber-producer Artie in The Larry Sanders Show), Barry Sonnenfeld (who assured mainstream theatrical heat via Men In Black) and, lately, America’s sweetheart Tina Fey and the gang over at 30 Rock. Who knew an angry guy could be so frickin’ lovable?

BURT REYNOLDS, BOOGIE NIGHTS (1997)

Burt Reynolds probably thought Rent-a-Cop would be his big comeback vehicle. Or Switching Channels. Or how about Cop and ½ ? That's why Boogie Nights almost has to be considered an accidental comeback; there's no evidence to suggest that Reynolds felt it had any more merit than, say, Striptease or Mad Dog Time – quite the opposite, in fact, as the one-time Bandit fired his agent after seeing the rough cut of Paul Thomas Anderson's opus. Hey, if you throw enough shit at the wall, something's bound to stick, and few have flung as much feces as our man Burt. Indeed, it is perhaps this very quality that makes Reynolds so convincing as porno patriarch Jack Horner, a kindred aging show-biz vet who mistakes his life's work for great art. Reynolds won a Golden Globe and was nominated for an Oscar for this performance, then parlayed the resulting goodwill into a string of firecracker roles that launched him back onto the Hollywood A-list. What, you missed Crazy Six, Waterproof, Pups, Grilled, Universal Soldier II and III and Uwe Boll's In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale? Your loss.

BILL MURRAY in RUSHMORE (1998)

Let's maintain a little perspective here. Chevy Chase would probably love a big, spangled comeback, though he turned down the Kevin Spacey role in American Beauty, apparently because he was concerned that it was dirty and would sully his image so that he would be less likely to be invited to do such family fare as Snow Day. Murray, who hasn't always seemed that interested in being a movie star, has never really gone as far away as Chase, who was all but driven from the A-list by a torch-carrying mob. But Murray spent most of the '90s veering between lightly promoted character roles (in such movies as Ed Wood and Wild Things) and star vehicles that he often seemed a little embarrassed about. (In the TV commercials for his 1997 The Man Who Knew Too Little, he offered to personally recompense any dissatisfied viewers for the price of their ticket, vowing, "I will put money in your hand with no anger in my heart.") If his melancholy, graying performance in this Wes Anderson picture feels like a breakthrough and a comeback, one that lifted him to a different level in movies, it may be because it never feels like a gag, or a stunt; you never pick him out in the frame and think, "Hey, there's Bill Murray!" Fourteen years after his weird attempt to stretch himself in The Razor's Edge, Murray, always good company in a movie, had quietly evolved into an actor.

FRANK SINATRA in FROM HERE TO ETERNITY (1953)

Some revisionists (such as David Thomson) have questioned just how desperately Sinatra needed the role of Maggio to salvage his career, or even how badly the career needed salvaging; it's true that the singer was under fire from newspaper columnists and self-righteous "morals" groups for his divorce and his (then liberal) politics, but it's not as if it were dog-food-for-dinner time. But everyone who was there agrees that Sinatra felt as if his world had collapsed; he may still have been rich and famous, but he didn't feel like Frank Sinatra anymore, which is to say that it had been a while since a mob of screaming teenage girls had threatened to lick his clothes off. And anyway, of all the great movie-star comebacks, this may be the only one to have inspired a major subplot in a great movie, and to be based on a rumor so widely circulated that the people who saw The Godfather were assumed to know damn well who "Johnny Fontaine" was and the title of the "new war picture" that he so badly wanted to be in. Though it does seem to be untrue that the Mafia got Frank the job. If it were some piddly-ass thing, Sinatra might have turned to his shadier friends, but for this, he felt he needed to use his big guns. So Ava Gardner got him the job.

MARLON BRANDO in THE GODFATHER & LAST TANGO IN PARIS (1972)

In last year's TCM documentary Brando, Michael Winner, who directed Brando in the 1971 film The Nightcomers, described how he was able to sell the American rights to Universal Pictures as part of the studio's scheme to get rid of its connection to the star. Universal had a multi-picture deal with Brando, and the bosses jumped at the chance to use Winner's film to burn off its contract with the actor whose recent track record -- Morituri, The Appaloosa, Candy, The Night of the Following Day, et al -- seemed to be that of a spent force. Francis Ford Coppola famously had to fight the Paramount brass just to get permission to have Brando do a screen test, even though demanding a screen test of Brando was considered such an insult that many expected that once the request had been made, Paramount would have the relief of never hearing from him again. By all accounts, Brando was always helpful and considerate during the filming, though he later made it clear that he felt that he'd been screwed financially on the deal. The movie was still chugging along happily at the box office when Tango, the adults-only character drama that Brando had done for Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci, was shown at that year's New York Film Festival and set off the first shock waves caused by both the power and sexual directness of Brando's performance. As an actor, he would never dive as deep again, and as a co-worker, he would never be so well-behaved again -- certainly not for Coppola, who he tortured for every perceived Godfather-related slight he'd shrugged off, first by refusing to do a cameo in The Godfather, Part II, then by keeping one eye firmly on the clock while making Apocalypse Now. But the one-two punch of these two masterpieces left him with a mystique that he would carry to the end of his days, and though his post-1972 resume is strange and spotty, no one doubts that he was doing whatever it was he wanted to do.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Four & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

In Other Blogs: The Top 25 L.A. Movies

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 17:00:00 GMT

The L.A. Times recently published their list of the 25 Best L.A. Films of the Past 25 Years. Naturally, some of the choices proved controversial (a lot of folks have trouble with the selection of Jackie Brown over Pulp Fiction, for instance), but Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule thinks it’s a decent list. “There were only eight, perhaps nine instances where I felt like the choices could have been replaced, by another film in the director’s filmography, or by another similarly themed film, or just by another movie to replace one that just shouldn't be there at all. For example, I can certainly understand why Boogie Nights is on the list, but it’s ultimately too diffuse and far more conventional than its electric style would suggest. I much prefer P.T. Anderson’s Magnolia (1999), a high-wire act in which Anderson gets more directly in touch with his inner Altman and dashes all concerns over whether anyone’s having a good time or not, planting Old Testament visual clues that subliminally lay the groundwork for that shocking rain of frogs. (And speaking of Altman, while I'm not the biggest fan of The Player, I was far happier to see it representing the great director here rather than the dour and sour Short Cuts.)”

The Toronto International Film Festival kicked off yesterday, and Spoutblog has the scoop on the film Paris Hilton doesn’t want you to see. “Paris Hilton and her team have successfully pressured the Toronto International Film Festival into canceling all but one screening of Adria Petty’s Paris, Not France, a documentary about the celebrity heiress which ‘attempts to explore the Paris phenomenon and how it defines this moment in culture’ and is also ‘modeled after the 1960s it-girl film Darling.’ Though the film’s TIFF info page still lists three public screenings, TIFF documentary programmer Thom Powers confirmed to me that Paris will screen only once at the festival. ‘From my standpoint, of course, I wish we could do additional screenings,’ Powers told me in an email. ‘But this is certainly a better option than not showing the film at all.’… As Steven Zeitchik joked when he first blogged about this, ‘the mind dances at what kind of footage can be seen so newly shameful to Paris Hilton, the enfant teribles whose entire reputation is based on shamelesness.’”

Cinematical is also on the scene in Toronto, and they’ve had a look at The Brothers Bloom. “Long awaited in the wake of his 2005 debut Brick, Rian Johnson's The Brothers Bloom is a magic trick of a film; the second it's over, you want to see it again so you can try to catch how you were tricked, but you also want to see it again so you can return to the joy and wonder of being wrapped up in the nimble, deck-shuffling hands of a born showman. Watching it at first, some of The Brothers Bloom's creative and thematic elements seem like they're on loan from Paul Thomas Anderson (opening narration by Ricky Jay, pop-whiz-bang camera work, the troubled-but-tender relationship between the two brothers) while others feel as if they've been cribbed from Wes Anderson (deadpan confessions, whimsical set design, a parallel-universe setting where people still travel to Europe by steamship). The truth is, as much as The Brothers Bloom may feel like it's cribbing from other films at first, this is Rian Johnson's movie, and even if my more dreary and discerning critical faculties told me the final act goes on, perhaps, a beat too long, my inner moviegoer was sitting bolt upright, smiling, bright-eyed and carried away.”

At Some Came Running, Glenn Kenny makes an interesting connection between Road House and a David Lynch movie. No, not that Road House. “The terrifying physical contrast between the behemoth and a very delicate woman brought to mind a scene from David Lynch's under-appreciated (to my mind, at least) 1992 Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. This scene, too, is set in a roadhouse of sorts—the back room of the Bang Bang Bar, which actually, if one line of dialogue is to be believed, is located on the Canadian side of the Canada/U.S. border the structure sits on. As it happens, the road house of Negulsco's film is located near the Canadian border; this turns into a significant plot point once Lily and Pete are trying to escape from the psychotic Jefty, played by Richard Widmark with his then-trademark tetchy intensity… I wonder if Lynch had ever seen Negulsco's film. Some shards of it, it seems, lodged their way into the world of Twin Peaks. The road house as portrayed in the '48 picture is a piece of bygone mid-century Americana that I've always found fascinating—it looks way fun. It's got a bar, a restaurant, a sporting-goods store, and a bowling alley!”

And in List-o-Mania this week, Geekdad weighs in with 10 Movies Needing a Muppet Remake. This guy has put way too much thought into this. “Casablanca - The initial temptation is to cast Kermit as Rick, but I think Kermit is better as the utterly noble Victor Laszlo, with Miss Piggy as Ilsa by his side. Gonzo is much better as Rick, with his internal, and external, conflict between love, revenge, and the right thing to do. Rowlf is Sam, for who else could be? Captain Renault is a tough part to play, but I think Fozzie has the right cavalier attitude for the role.”

Thursday Morning Poll for April 17, 2008

Paul Clark — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 14:00:00 GMT

You know what they say- timing is everything. So perhaps it was unfair of me to wonder after your favorite Paul Thomas Anderson a scant two days after the DVD release of There Will Be Blood. In the end, the film walked away with a victory in last week's poll, racking up an impressive 44% percent of the vote. Running neck and neck for the runner-up spot were Boogie Nights and Magnolia. The comparatively modest Punch-Drunk Love and Hard Eight- awesome though they are- just couldn't keep up.

This week, in advance this weekend's release of The Forbidden Kingdom, we settle the age-old question that the film itself attempts to answer: who would win?

If you want to be more specific about your answer- say, "Jet circa Black Mask" or "Jackie in his Project A/Police Story days" feel free. You know what to do.

After Forty Years, the End of the New Line

Phil Nugent — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 16:30:00 GMT

It's been announced that New Line Cinema is being folded into Warner Bros. Entertainment. (Both studios are subsidiaries of Time Warner. New Line's connection to Time Warner goes back to 1996, when the corporation picked up New Line's parent company, Turner Broadcasting. As Forbes reports, "The decision to merge the two film divisions didn't come as a surprise. Time Warner Chief Executive Jeff Bewkes said during a Feb. 6 conference call that 'there is an obvious question about whether it still makes sense for us to have two completely separate studio infrastructures at Warner and New Line.' In a statement Thursday, Time Warner said that New Line will keep its own development, production, marketing, distribution and business affairs operations, but will coordinate them with Warner Bros. 'to maximize film performance and operating efficiencies, achieve significant cost savings and improve margins.' " It't not yet clear how many jobs will be lost in the downsizing process, but Robert Shaye and Michael Lynne, who co-founded the company forty years ago, and who had been sharing the titles of chairman and chief executive, are both already out the door.

The latest development marked the end to a long, strange trip to the top for a funky little company that had its first big successes in the early 1970s marketing John Waters's 1972 Pink Flamingos and the camp revival of the 1936 drug-hysteria picture Reefer Madness. New Line hit a new level of mainstream commercial success with the 1984 A Nightmare on Elm Street, which the company built into a powerhouse franchise. By the end of the eighties, New Line had one foot in the art house and one in exploitation/genre movies, a formula that it made work with a lively mix of films such as The Evil Dead, Sid and Nancy, The Hidden, House Party, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Player, Glengarry Glen Ross, Menace II Society, The Mask, Dumb and Dumber, Se7en, Boogie Nights, and Magnolia, as well as Austin Powers, Friday, Blade, and Final Destination and the franchises that grew out of them. The studio's biggest gamble, and biggest success, was probably the Lord of the Rings trilogy, a high-stakes commitment that left the company CEOs looking brilliant--at least, until they proceeded to alienate the director Peter Jackson so badly that he become but one of a long line of litigants who filed lawsuits that grew out of controversy about the company's accounting practices and charges that they failed to honor various pledges and legal committments to everyone from bit players in the movies to the heirs of J. R. R. Tolkien. New Line had recently updated its corporate logo to celebrate its fortieth birthday last October 5.

New Horizons in Online Criticism: The Burt-Reynolds-a-Thon

Paul Clark — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 17:00:00 GMT

One of the most interesting aspects of online criticism is the diversity of films being spotlighted. Sure, there are plenty of good web-based critics who remain devoted primarily to the old masters and the classics of world cinema, but more and more people are breaking with that mold and giving serious consideration to corners of film history that in the past were passed over by the critical establishment.

For an example of this, look no further than the blog Welcome to L.A. Proprietor Larry Aydlette formerly known by his noms de 'net That Little Round-Headed Boy and The Shamus — has devoted the entire month of February to mounting the mammoth one-man Burt-Reynolds-a-Thon. Every day this month, Aydlette will be spotlighting another aspect of Reynolds' long career, from his seventies-era salad days to his Oscar-nominated comeback in Boogie Nights, as well as all the somewhat leaner years both between and since. So far, Aydlette has taken on a Super Bowl weekend double feature of Burt's football-playing roles in Semi-Tough and The Longest Yard, as well as writing a reassessment of his only Oscar-nominated performance to date, Boogie Nights' porn paterfamilias Jack Horner.

While I wouldn't necessarily consider myself a Reynolds fan, there's no denying his status as a pop-culture icon, something people have a tendency to forget given his current ubiquity and presence in more than his share of regrettable roles. Bear in mind that in the era of Pacino, Nicholson, Hoffman and Beatty, it was Reynolds who was Hollywood's biggest moneymaker. Even today, we all know his name and his face. In Aydlette's words, "Some thirty years after his peak of stardom, you never have to ask: Burt Who? How many of today's stars will be able to say that thirty years from now?" For this reason alone, Reynolds' career deserves to be taken seriously, and I'm glad that Aydlette is putting forth the effort.

P.T.A. Report

Phil Nugent — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 18:00:00 GMT

For those who've been handicapping the race for supremacy among the American filmmakers who achieved big-deal status during the 1990s, here's how things stand as this year winds down: with Quentin Tarantino providing the half of a double feature that followed the half that much of the audience walked out on, Richard Linklater taking a well-deserved breather, David O. Russell becoming a reality star on YouTube, Alexander Payne ducking through corners in a Groucho mask to avoid explaining his screenwriting credit on I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, and Kevin Smith unable to make a long-term thing out of his job directing the pilot for the TV show about an underachieving minimum-wage ape with a secret life battling dark forces that isn't Chuck. We extend wishes of good luck and productivity in the year to come to all of them, except maybe for Kevin Smith. In the meantime, with less than a week of 2007 left to go, Paul Thomas Anderson has vaulted into first place with his first movie in five years, There Will Be Blood. Opening today, Anderson's period epic, starring Daniel Day Lewis as an obsessive, misanthropic prospector, is making a scramble for becoming the best-reviewed movie of the year.

This was not an altogether predictable development. In a thoughtful piece on where Anderson has been so far and where he's at now, Dennis Lim describes Anderson as a thirty-seven-year-old "enfant terrible" who "incites strong, divided opinions." "Strong, divided opinions" may seem to be a soft way of putting it for anyone who went through the great Magnolia wars of 1999. In that high-pitched, three-hour film, which had the feel of an attempted career summation despite its only being the director's third movie, Anderson delivered a titanic audience-divider, just in time for the end of the millennium. Since it came out, the movie has gradually acquired more and more supporters who tend to regard it not just admiringly but downright protectively, but at the time of its release, the roars of derision were deafening. To a great degree, Magnolia was not criticized as a disappointment or an honest failure but as some sort of violation of aesthetic law whose creator ought to be stripped of his epaulets and driven into the Forbidden Zone. For a self-taught filmmaker who wasn't yet thirty, dealing with that must have been an interesting experience. The bonus-features disc on the Magnolia DVD includes a little home movie in which Anderson's then-girlfriend, Fiona Apple, apparently playing the movie, performs an interpretive dance while Anderson hisses, "Boogie Nights made money! You want to be the only one that doesn't...It's too fucking long, there's too many blow-ups--it's all just too fucking too!"

As Lim points out, Anderson is indeed "a size freak", but he also "invites emotional responses because he's an emotional filmmaker, and this, too, distinguishes him from most of his cohorts. The signature trait of the '90s indie school is detachment, whether in the form of self-conscious cleverness or numb ennui, but there's nothing detached about Anderson's films...Given the dominant American pop idioms of snark and quirk, Anderson's sensibility can be confounding. He's satirical, but also achingly sincere. His characters often speak with a declarative directness that is both breathtaking and a little ridiculous." Those viewers not swept up in Magnolia's emotional flow seem to have responded to its steady stream of heartfelt monologues by desperately unhappy people desperate to connect (to the people onscreen and to the people in the audience) as proof that they were at the mercy of a high-school amateur. In his follow-up to Magnolia, the Adam Sandler movie Punch-Drunk Love, Anderson sensibly scaled down and tightened the focus on a single character, but the picture was still huge in the audacity of its approach. Anderson is as much a cerebral movie geek as any of his contemporaries, but he's probably the only one of them who might have taken a look at Adam Sandler's screen image and actually thought about it on an emotional level, dissecting it and exploring what it might be like to live at such an unstable level of passive-aggressiveness. The movie was still direct in its emotional current but more atylized, with a central character nowhere near as articulate as those in Magnolia. (The movie was much better received critically than Magnolia but it didn't do much business; the publicity department failed to rise to the challenge of somehow alerting people that this was an Adam Sandler movie for people who can't stand Adam Sandler.)

With his fifth film, Anderson may have found a story that enables him to indulge his taste for spectacle and vast canvasses while presenting a conventional enough surface to appease the likes of The New Yorker's David Denby, who dismissed both Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love as "whimsical". (Denby likes There Will Be Blood, except for the conclusion, which he figures proves that "some part of him must have rebelled against canonization." I must have been dozing when we all agreed to put Jughead in charge of the canon.) For the moment, for some of us, the price of Anderson's surprise success may be having to listen to some people use his new movie as a club to beat on his earlier work. But we'll settle so long as he doesn't get in the habit of making us wait five years between movies.

Take Five: Smut

Peter Smith — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 21:00:00 GMT

The Amateurs opens in limited release this Friday. We have absolutely no intention whatsoever of seeing it, because there is the possibility, however remote, that it will contain a nude scene featuring Joe Pantoliano. But it does give us a chance to talk about pornography. Not actual pornography, mind you — as open-minded as this site is, we're pretty sure the bosses aren't going to let us post stills of our favorite scenes from the oeuvre of the Dark Brothers. No, what we're talking about here is movies about pornography. There's been smut on film since there was film, but while Hollywood has always been officially disdainful of its little brother in the Valley, it's also been a bit fascinated as well. Recently, European filmmakers have actually included real sex in their movies and made it work as part of a respectable narrative, but in the U.S., the NC-17 rating is still the kiss of death and violence will likely always be more palatable to the censors than sex. But even in those arty Euro-flicks, the sex is in service of the story and not the other way around; will a genuine porn movie ever be made with a great script, top-notch direction and production, and big Hollywood stars? Probably not. But there will still be movies about pornography; here are five of the best.

BLUE MOVIE (1970)

Okay, technically, this isn't a real movie. It is, instead, a novel about the making of a movie. The novel is by Terry Southern, and the movie (Faces of Love) is one that Southern and his good friend, the director Stanley Kubrick, had sometimes talked of making together. It would be a big-budget Hollywood picture, with as many of the big stars of the day as they could afford and a multi-million-dollar budget — and it would contain hardcore pornography. Kubrick knew the movie could never be made in his lifetime and never pursued it, but the subversive Southern couldn't let go of the idea and fictionalized the making of the film in a hilariously filthy novel. Now, thirty-seven years later, Southern and Kubrick are both dead — and their movie has still never been made.

HARDCORE (1979)

Paul Schrader's sometimes hokey and sometimes harrowing follow-up to Blue Collar dealt with every father's recurring nightmare: seeing his missing daughter in a porno flick. Inspired partly by Schrader's own obsession with pornography (which he referenced in Taxi Driver as well), the film doesn't always manage to carry off its mix of religious fury and sleazy L.A. grit, and its central conceit (the father goes undercover as a porn producer to find his daughter) is pretty flimsy, but Hardcore is carried on the strength of a furious, consuming lead performance by George C. Scott and some terrific cameo roles by Peter Boyle, Hal Williams and Dick "Darrin" Sargent.

BODY DOUBLE (1984)

Somehow, Alfred Hitchcock never got around to making a movie set in the rented houses and storefront offices of the San Fernando Valley pornography industry. So Brian De Palma did it for him. Best described as an bizarre combination of Vertigo and Rear Window with smut and power drills thrown in for an extra bit of a kick, Body Double is, like many of De Palma's Hitchcock-homage films, a movie that's a lot smarter and better than it appears on the surface, and it rewards multiple viewings. It also features one of the filthiest — and funniest — line readings ever from a big Hollywood star: Melanie Griffith, as porn star Holly Body, explaining painstakingly to Craig Wasson's hapless character exactly what she will and will not do.

BOOGIE NIGHTS (1997)

Like most of his films, Paul Thomas Anderson's porn-industry epic Boogie Nights has its problems. It's sprawling in the worst way, its script badly needed a ruthless application of the blue pencil, and Anderson often mistakes putting people through the wringer for character development. But it's not for nothing that he's considered a major American director, and even leaving aside the tremendous cast he assembled here, he achieves many moments of genuine emotional power and perfectly captures a certain southern California milieu from the late 1970s and early 1980s.

WONDERLAND (2003)

The story of Johnny "Wadd" Holmes — one of the biggest stars in the history of porn, as well as one of its most pathetic figures — is a fascinating one, combining as it does so many juicy elements. Money, sex, death, degradation, disease and murder all played a part in Holmes' life, and every element came together in the notorious Wonderland Murders. The story of the murders was told in an abstracted way in Boogie Nights and literally in the little-seen documentary Wadd: The Life & Time of John C. Holmes, but they receive a much more direct screen treatment in Wonderland. While Val Kilmer turns in a surprisingly strong performance as Holmes, but the movie itself it chaotic, confused and shambolic — but then, as the life story of Johnny Wadd, how could it be anything but?

— Leonard Pierce

The Ten Greatest Prosthetics in Movie History, Part 1

Peter Smith — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 20:00:00 GMT

We recently did a list of real bodily transformations in film, so it's only fair that now we look on the flipside and consider those bodily transformations that had nothing to do with an actor's ability to stay on or off carbs but rather tested their patience in the makeup chair. Of course, some had it easier than others: Goldie Hawn probably sat in makeup for hours for her fat scenes in Death Becomes Her and practically nobody noticed. On the other hand, Marlon Brando stuck something in his mouth and became an icon. (There's a joke waiting to be made here, but we won't be the ones to make it.) And some just got to walk around pretending they had a big schlong. You'll find them here, in our list of The Ten Greatest Prosthetics in Movie History.

Marlon Brando's Cheeks in THE GODFATHER (1972)

One of the most famous prosthetics in the history of film can't actually be seen on screen: it's stuffed inside Marlon Brando's mouth. No, not a Big Mac. It's a dental prosthetic designed especially for the actor, and which he uses throughout the film to facilitate both a vocal and physical transformation into Don Vito Corleone. Conceiving of the character as resembling a bulldog, Brando showed up for his screen test with cotton wool crammed between his teeth and the inside of his cheeks to give him a jowly, determined look; once he was cast, it soon became apparent that, however Method it might have been, this was an untenable choice, since the cotton dried out his mouth and left him unable to deliver his lines. Coppola, who was just beginning a long and agonizing decade of catering to Brando's ever-eccentric behavior, stepped in and had the dental prosthetic constructed. After he started using it, the actor discovered another happy accident: the way it shaped his cheeks and mouth helped him to lower his voice to the scratchy whisper that Brando was going for with the character, which he patterned after real-life mobster Frank Costello's raspy intonation. Though it's never actually seen (and it's left completely unexplained why Robert DeNiro, playing the young Vito Corleone in flashbacks in the film's sequel, has an entirely different facial structure), the plastic doohickey helped create one of the most memorable of all film icons, and boosted sales of cotton balls as a generation of bad impressionists found an easy way out.

Steve Martin's Nose in ROXANNE (1987)

This modern version of Cyrano de Bergerac is a comedy, so Martin's "C.D." doesn't have to die at the end or fail to get the girl. But he does have to go through the whole movie with a nose like a foot-long breadstick jutting out from the center of his face. As befits the non-tragic tone of the movie, the nose is too openly silly-looking to make Martin look ugly, though it does look unwieldy, especially in a shot where a bird perches on it and in a scene where Darryl Hannah slaps his face. (Instead of reacting to the slap by touching his cheek, his places his fingers on the bridge of his nose, as if afraid that it might come flying off.) The nose also adds an unacknowledged layer of comedy to the happy ending: so this Cyrano gets his Roxanne, but how is he going to kiss her?

Alec Guinness's Teeth in THE LADYKILLERS (1955)

Leading a gang of blackguards who rent a room from a sweet old lady so they can use it as a gathering place to work on plans for their armored car heist, Guinness needs a physical quality to set him apart and clearly define him as team leader. He finds it in his enormous choppers, which serve as an unspoken reminder to the younger and stronger men in the room that if they give him any guff, he can always bite their heads off. Trying to follow in Guinness's footsteps in the 2004 remake, Tom Hanks affected a Colonel Sanders-from-Hell look, an oil-slick hairdo, and a laugh that seemed to be coming out of his ears, none of which served him half as well as Guinness's malignant bear-trap grin.

Mark Wahlberg's Penis, in BOOGIE NIGHTS (1997)

Paul Thomas Anderson's porn-industry saga Boogie Nights is many things to many people: an epic, a comedy, a drama, a tragedy, a period piece. But for a good part of its running time, we were a bit worried that the film was also going to be a Beckett-ian exercise in dislocation: Waiting for Godot, except this time Godot is a giant dong. Luckily, director Anderson knew the delicate balance he was striking here: a movie in which we constantly saw rising porn star Dirk Diggler's allegedly massive dick would have been exploitative and unreleasable; but to not show it would feel exploitative in a wholly different way. So, understanding the value of a good money shot, Anderson waited until the last moment of the film to reveal its ostensible protagonist. The result was dramatically sound, curiously poetic, and also broke new ground in male onscreen nudity. Of course, it was also a fake. A damn good fake. There are still people out there who think that grand revelation was Marky Mark's actual member. Some of them are probably hanging out in his rec room as we speak.

Orson Welles's Face in TOUCH OF EVIL (1958)

Had he played the role of the brilliant but hopelessly corrupt border cop Hank Quinlan ten years later, Orson Welles wouldn't have needed any help from his makeup department. In 1958, though, the director still had yet to be completely ruined by rich food and high living, so he relied on padded clothing and tricky camera angles to make him look fat and shambolic, and layers and layers of prosthetics to give his face the appearance of an aging, gin-blossomed alcoholic. Quinlan's addiction to dandy candy and quicker liquor accounts for his puffy cheeks, bloated nose, and crooked teeth, and he looks like such a fright that even a long-in-the-tooth Marlene Dietrich is shocked at his appearance. Accompanied by a memorable fat-man gait, an out-of-breath voice and a tremendously ravaged performance, the prosthetics turned the director into a hulking parody of the man he would later become. Welles himself told this story: since filming often ran quite late (he did much of the principal photography at night to avoid the prying eyes of studio spies dispatched to keep him in line), one evening he found himself on the way to a dinner party while still wearing the bulbous nose and flappy cheeks of Hank Quinlan. Arriving home to greet his guests, one actress sized him up — having not seen him for several months — and said, through a terribly forced grin, "Oh, Orson! You look wonderful!"

— Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Vadim Rizov