The Screengrab : buck henry

Taxing Time: A Screengrab Salute To Beat The Clock Cinema (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 22:00:00 GMT

BEFORE SUNSET (2004)

He only has 90 minutes before he has to catch that plane, and boom!, the love of his life shows up. Last time they met, they had only one night together. Now that they're older, time is even more precious, and they are even more uncertain how to proceed. The last time, the story could look away, passing time through ellipses, but this time, everything has to unfold in real time. Because love doesn't care about your schedule, and it comes and goes as it pleases. In 1995, when Before Sunrise came out, I was 23 and I didn't know how to appreciate the tender little moments life has to offer. I didn't know how hard it is to make a connection with someone, and I let friends and potential loves slip out of my grasp. In short, I understood the characters in Before Sunrise. I could see a little of myself in Jesse, and let this be the only time I admit kinship with Ethan Hawke. I never gave up anything as precious as Jesse and Celine (and, Julie Delpy, how many people my age are in love with you?) in Before Sunrise, but I could easily see how something like that could happen. When its sequel came out in 2004, I was 32, happily married, and I had learned a little more about how the world worked. And Before Sunset just tore my heart out, heedless. How do you deal with the person who makes you remember the person you were, let alone the torrent of old emotions and regrets? The structure of the movie insists that neither has time to dwell on regrets and anger, but they have to address it. Their connection isn't the superficial kind. Richard Linklater has had his ups and downs as a filmmaker, but he's never been finer than he was with this movie. Some people may like their car chases, but the pursuit of the most dangerous game draws more blood and quickens the breath like nothing else. (HC)

BACK TO THE FUTURE (1985)

Back to the Future (yes, that's part one, you fools, what kind of philistine do you take me for?) has plenty of scenes that still make me cringe and/or hold my breath like they did when I first saw them back when I was a wee one. In that department, the Johnny B. Goode scene is rivaled only by the end scene, which is literally a race against time. Young Marty McFly needs to be sent back to the future using 1950s technology and natural sources of electricity. The kid's literally starting to disappear, for crying out loud — that with almost seducing his own mother, and other murky psychological goop. Sure, the 1950s may have looked good to your average Reagan-voting suburbanite, but it was not just fun and games. There was segregation, and more importantly, no rock 'n' roll for white people. Imagine getting stuck back there forever. The horror! So back in 1954, Doc does his best to remedy the disorder he set about thirty years later, dangling from the town hall clock while Marty does his best in the DeLorean. Now if the franchise had only ended there. (SCS)

THE GRADUATE (1967)

Maybe I'm just partial to The Graduate. Could be. But there is something delicious about the penultimate part of the movie, where Dustin Hoffman's Ben is skidding around dusty California roads in his little red Alfa Romeo, desperately trying to find the chapel where Elaine is going to be wed to her hunky purebred husband. Part of what makes this so great is that it breaks two (or perhaps three) of the cardinal rules of cinematic races against time: first, there is a feeling of horrible slowness to Ben's car ride and search for the chapel. This is less fast and furious and more like one of those dreams where you need to run and run fast, but somehow it's all in slow motion no matter how much you power on. Second, Ben loses his race against time; he gets to the church too late...second-and-a-half being too late doesn't matter. (SCS)

THE TESTAMENT OF DR. MABUSE (1933)

Fritz Lang's masterpiece of German Expressionism is part horror film, part crime syndicate saga, part procedural, and all about the force of obsession. The last third is given over to a race against the clock, as veil upon veil slips away to reveal Mabuse's ambitious plan, the unlimited reign of crime. The trailer above is in German, but it conveys just how stunningly creepy and exciting the movie is: the superimposition of images, the whispering voice, the car chase, the real sense of danger pervading every scene. Joseph Goebbels, no fool, saw it as a condemnation of Nazism and banned it from Germany under the Third Reich. It's up for debate whether Lang was intentionally condemning Nazis, but even if Lang wasn't sure what his message was, one cannot doubt his skill as a filmmaker. The visual power of the film, the unsettling use of sound, the wheels-within-wheels of the plot: all reach across the gap of time and still hold sway over modern viewers. Even as one easily discounts the psychology of the film, its coherent view of a world spiralling out of control cannot be denied. (HC)

Click Here Immediately For Part One, Two, Three, Four & Six

Contributors: Hayden Childs, Sarah Clyne Sundberg

Screengrab Review: "American Swing"

Phil Nugent — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 16:00:00 GMT

The great thing about Mathew Kaufman and Jon Hart's documentary American Swing, about the New York "swingers' club" Plato's Retreat and its owner and public face, Larry Levenson, is that it puts a warm, human face on a time and a subculture that, seen from today's not-so-distant perspective, could easily be treated as a visit to the Bizarro World. The time is the late 1970s and pre-AIDS 1980s, when the values of the counterculture and the sexual revolution that began in the 1960s had trickled down to more conservative and apolitical members of the middle class--people who saw themselves as basically stable members of traditional society but who saw other people casting off such societal constraints as pre-marital abstinence and post-marital monogamy and felt that they'd been missing out. They wanted a little hedonism in their lives. Originally located on Manhattan's Upper West Side, in the basement of the Ansonia Hotel--the same location that had previously housed the Continental Baths, the gay bathhouse that achieved its measure of immortality when it was decreed that every article ever written about Bette Midler would mention that she got her start there--the members-only club had a sauna, a jacuzzi, a swimming pool, a buffet, and a dance floor with a live DJ. Because it was conceived as a "straight" equivalent to the bathhouses and other places in the city where gay men were hooking up, its policy prohibited sex between men, though women were cordially invited to go nuts.

What makes this scene seem liberating, in the movie's telling, is how friendly it all was, and how nonjudgemental everyone seems to have been in their attitudes towards their fellow swingers. Plato's, one witness says, revived the concept of the orgy and made it a reality for "the man on the street." Imperfect bodies were tolerated, even embraced, while men paraded around nude but for their socks and shoes, achieving what someone calls "that stag film look." The movie includes first-hand reminiscences from several Plato's regulars, including a few celebrities, including Buck Henry (who says that he went more often than he would have if friends weren't constantly flying in from the West Coast who demanded that he take them there, presumably because they'd already seen the Statue of Liberty) and Melvin Van Peebles, who fondly remembers the warm reception accorded to an overweight couple who took to the dance floor nude and who were so heavy that they made the DJ's turntable bounce. Professor Irwin Corey, looking like Renfield at ninety, claims to have never seen any ugly people at Plato's, which is clearly a judgement call. It would be easy to make fun of some of the people seen here talking about how they let their hair down at Plato's, but the movie treats them very tenderly. They certainly come across better than such defenders of civilization as Phil Donahue, David Susskind, and Stanley Siegel, who are shown in vintage TV clips, doing their best to grill Larry Levenson and get him to break down and admit that he was sent here by the devil to tarnish our precious Judeo-Christian nation and all it stands for. Levenson's affable candor and eagerness to be understood--listening to these shrill folks denounce him, he looks a little hurt when he doesn't look bewildered, as if he were wondering if they know that tbe target of their vitriol is right there in the room with them--just makes the TV hosts look borderline insane. They'd have gotten more traction grilling Barney Fife about his role in the assassination of JFK.

If a tragic hero can also be a sweet schlub from the outer boroughs, then American Swing makes a pretty good case for Levenson as a tragic hero. The "king of swing" was a big, beefy guy with a toothy smile and the air of someone who might at any minute ask you to tell him about the rabbits again. Plato's homey air seems to have been a direct emanation of Larry's personality. He comes across as a completely uncynical, even romantic guy who had a roving dick and no capacity for hypocrisy. (Someone says that Larry would fall in love with every woman he had sex with even if he had sex with ten women in one night, and he was perfectly capable of having sex with ten women in one night.) Fred J. Lincoln, a porn film entrepreneur who played Weasel in the original, Wes Craven Last House on the Left, and who took charge of the club as it turned, he says, from a grocery store to a supermarket, breaks up as he recalls "that horrible food" at Plato's and shakes his head as he thinks of Larry: "He was so proud of his buffet." Larry's home touch is evident in the hilarious commercials that were made to air on local TV. In one, Larry and a blonde stare at an off-screen cue card that must have attached to the side of a giant tortoise and race through their lines like zombies on speed. Another boasts the official Plato's Retreat jingle, which has lyrics about how "the pleasure and fun/ will keep you feeling young", which are suitable for a McDonald's. It's with no small degree of evident pride that one club member recalls that when the club changed locations in 1980, it was directly across from a McDonald's.

Things had to go bad, and they did in pretty much all the ways you'd expect, starting with Larry's relationship with Mary, his steady woman friend in the early days of the club. In the time-honored tradition of people trying to keep a doomed relationship alive until it turns into what they'd prefer it to be, Mary did her best to play the queen to Mary's king of Plato's, even though she, unlike Larry, had no special quarters to which to retreat; when she'd hook up with some guy or guys, Larry would wander around, muttering that she was "upset" about something. Larry, meanwhile, was going on talk shows and explaining that although he loved her and considered himself to be faithful to her so long as he only had sex with other women while inside the club, there was no way that one woman could give him everything he needed, while Mary sometimes sat beside him, her face cracking. (This is probably Larry's real low moment, though his blindness to Mary's unhappiness seems to be a product more of lack of imagination than of cruelty.) Things went into a tailspin when Mary had an affair with her chauffeur, lighting a fuse that ended with Larry in the hospital after a mysterious physical assault and Mary on the road to a sanitarium. Some time after that, the IRS came calling, and when their agents asked to see the books, the bookkeeper promptly forked them over. She says now that she didn't know that the nice visitors were IRS agents, implying that she was just being neighborly and would have shown the books to anyone who wandered in and asked politely. When she finally did figure out what was going on, she reacted by blurting out, in front of the agents, "We're dead!", indicating that she'd be a lot of fun to play poker with. While the IRS prepared its brief against Larry, the bookkeeper and her husband disappeared. Larry's bodyguard says that he assumed that they were on the run and in fear for their lives, then tears up laughing as he recalls that he turned on the TV one say and saw them competing on the game show Card Sharks.

Larry wound up doing a stint in the pen and returned to his throne at Plato's, but the magic was dying out, with "dying" being the operative word. The swingers' philosophy seemed increasingly out of step with the coming age of Reagan, but it was the AIDS virus that really tolled the bell for Plato's. As Dian Hanson, the porn magazine editor who appeared in Terry Zwigoff's Crumb puts it, it got to the point where "the people who cared about their lives stopped going to sex clubs." Those who kept going tended to be the hard-core, scary, and desperate to a nihilistic degree. Meanwhile, without the stabilizing influence of a steady girlfriend, Larry was falling prey to, in Al Goldstein's words, "All the women who wanted him for the money he didn't have and the drugs that he did have." He was also going on TV and assuring people that Plato's was a healthy environment, at one point playing Mr. Science and insisting that "because of the smell of chlorine in the air at Plato's Retreat, the AIDS virus doesn't have a chance." In the footage from this era, Larry shows the desperation of a man on the verge of losing the identity that's given his life meaning. On New Year's Eve, just as 1986 was about to arrive, Mayor Ed Koch's health department shut down Plato's, partly, says someone, so that the crackdowns on the gay bathhouses wouldn't appear discriminatory. Stripped of his king of swing crown, Larry seemed unable to move on while retaining his happy memories, like his former members who appear in the movie. Instead, he gained weight, started driving a cab, and expired of a heart attack in 1999, when he was 62. He might have been the only person to have ever stepped onto the premises at Plato's who thought that it could go on forever. "I think Plato's kind of died a natural death," says Annie Sprinkle, with a shrug. "Maybe it had a little help."

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

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

As part of Screengrab’s year-end List-a-palooza, we asked you, our imaginary internet friends, what topics you’d like to see featured in our weekly Top Twenty.

Janet immediately stepped up to the plate with the following suggestion: “Last week, Walker finally made it to the top of my Netflix queue, in my current reconsideration of all things Alex Cox. As I watched it, I kept thinking about My Best Fiend, which I had watched about a month ago. I realized that there were at least three films I could name that revolved around a White man traveling to Latin America and going crazy, and I started wondering if there were more. I'm not even sure if there are enough for a Take Five, but I count on your broader knowledge on the subject. So, if you would be so kind, I would love a list of White Man Goes to Latin America and Goes Insane movies.”

And so, in honor of Janet, this week’s list features plenty o’ white dudes livin’ la vida loca south of the border...but we also broadened our mandate to include all manner of fish-out-of-water stories -- from aliens in New York to city slickers in the Great Beyond -- as Screengrab travels the world (and the time/space continuum) to celebrate our favorite cinematic tales of STRANGERS IN A STRANGE LAND!

WALKER (1987)

And speaking of strange, it’s hard to get stranger than the 19th century American soldier of fortune William Walker or the eponymous cinematic tale of his misadventures conjured by the determinedly peculiar British cult director Alex Cox a century or so later. The real-life Walker invaded Mexico and Nicaragua more or less on his own and was eventually executed by officials in Honduras for being such a colossal pain in the ass. Cox was inspired to make his film (starring Ed Harris in full, spooky glower) “in the middle of the US-sponsored terrorist war against the Nicaraguan people...with the intention of spending as many American dollars as possible in Nicaragua, in solidarity with the Nicaraguans against the yanks' outrageous aggression against a sovereign nation.” Although ostensibly a period piece, Cox filled his film with anachronistic elements like tanks and helicopters to show how “nothing had changed in the 140 odd years between Walker's genocidal campaign and that of Oliver North and his goons.” Reaction, as they say, was mixed. Liberals were offended by Cox’s bizarre, slapstick take on the material (prompting Robert Redford to consider making his own preachy, ponderous version...a project that mercifully never materialized). Most everyone else was merely baffled by the quasi-biopic, and Universal essentially buried the six million dollar production, which barely grossed a quarter million dollars domestically...although, according to Cox, the movie was “extremely popular in certain places. It was the second biggest film hit ever in Nicaragua, after The Sound of Music,” thus making Cox's Latin American adventure about a zillion times more worthwhile than those of either Walker or North.

LOCAL HERO (1983)

Fish-out-of-water stories basically come in two variants: nightmares about characters who fall down a rabbit hole and land in Hell, or happier fantasies about some lucky bastard who happens upon Shangri-La. Bill Forsyth's beautiful little comedy, one of the few movies that might be called achingly charming, falls into the latter camp, but with a cruelly bittersweet twist. The setting is a seaside village on the coast of Scotland; the hero, Mac (Peter Reigert), is a young Houston oil company executive who is sent there to buy up the residents' homes so that the area can be despoiled. The residents are eager to get their checks so that the company can get on with the despoiling, but Mac, who in his native environment is so robotically detached that he has no trouble conducting a phone conversation with a co-worker who he can see to wave to through the other side of his glass office wall, falls so deeply in love with the place that when his boss, Happer (Burt Lancaster), flies out to connect with him, Happer doesn't recognize him. Happer himself is an amateur astronomer who looks deeply miserable sitting behind his desk in his lair atop his own personal skyscaper; he's outgrown his identity as a staid CEO, just as Lancaster had finally, fully outgrown his movie star identity as a grinning action hunk. Even in his suit and with his private helicopter, it's clear that he belongs in this magical landscape with its wide-open possibilities, just as it's clear that Mac, even with his new casual style and unshaven face, doesn't; much as he wants to, he still has his face pressed against the glass. The last scene, after Happer has blithely ordered Mac back to Houston so that the party can continue without him hovering at its edges, cuts deep.

THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH (1976)

The British cinematographer-turned-director Nicolas Roeg, who for a while made a specialty of eroticizing alienation, made his solo directing debut with Walkabout, a ghostly 1971 strangers/strange-land story about a proper white teeenage girl and her little brother who are stranded in the Australian outback. In this science-fiction film, Roeg extended his vision to cast the whole planet Earth -- or at least America, which to an Englishman trying to make a career in moviemaking in the 1970s must have seemed like pretty much the same thing --- as the strange land into which he drops his hero, an alien visitor (David Bowie) on a mission to save his dying planet from drought. On one level, the movie is a straight-faced joke on the idea that some of our most celebrated world-shakers, such as Howard Hughes, have scarcely seemed human at times. (Bowie's mission requires him to become titanically rich by bringing, and copyrighting, his civilization's advanced technologies.) But it's also a Christ story that happens to be set in a time so debased, and with such a short attention span, that the martyred hero, though he's able to have his purity corrupted through a developing lust for drink and television, can't manage to hold the villains' interest long enough for them to bother completing his crucifixion.

WEST OF ZANZIBAR (1926)

Lon Chaney and his favorite director, Tod Browning, made this silent version of the 1926 play Kongo, which is mostly set in what used to be called "darkest Africa." Chaney plays a married stage magician who loses the use of his legs after brawling with his wife's lover, played by Lionel Barrymore. Chaney, now known affectionately as "Dead-Legs," to his associates, relocates to Africa and sets himself up as the leader of a tribe of natives, who take his magic tricks for the mark of a peerless and dangerous witch doctor. When Chaney learns that his wife died in childbirth, he assumes that Barrymore was the father and sends for the now orphaned girl. He then proceeds to mistreat and debase her as cruelly as possible, with the intention of turning her into a broken animal; his plan is to present this ruined creature to Barrymore and then treat himself to the sight of Barrymore being treated to the sight of the natives burning the girl alive. You get one guess what the big surprise twist turns out to be. Kongo itself was later filmed as a talkie with Walter Huston; it, like Zanzibar and other films such as the weirdly stagebound White Cargo, belonged to a long-dead genre of films about white men in the jungle lording their superiority over the natives, unless they (like the juvenile character in White Cargo) are driven mad by the sultry, seductive powers of the helplessly sexy natives. Zanzibar is powered by the sheer, chugging hatefulness of which both Browning and Chaney were macabre masters, which is probably why it feels fresher now than those other films. The racial component, while never front and center, is more palatable today when it's presented as part of a horror fantasy, with the white antihero as twisted as anyone he's going to meet out there in the Congo.

IN THE CITY OF SYLVIA (2007)

There's been a lot of ink spilled on Sylvia in the list-making blur we've all just emerged out of. Suffice it to say Sylvia is the rare movie not to capture the experience of traveling in a specific city or country, but just the essence of what it means to stay in one part of an urban European city for a few days and slowly begin to see the same strangers and places over and over again, acclimating slowly to the local rhythms. The fact that it's seen through the eyes of a young, self-consciously arty idiot doesn't matter one whit; with him out of the frame for maybe 1/3 of the film, it's as much a film about the weird pan-European charms of Strasbourg as anything.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Vadim Rizov

Take Five: Van Sant

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 21:30:00 GMT

Gus Van Sant is certainly one of the most curious figures in contemporary American cinema. He pioneered a very specific breed of indie filmmaking before it even had a name, but his forays into mainstream cinema have alternated between clever successes and embarrassing failures. He gives some of the oddest interviews in Hollywood (compared to him, David Lynch is a downright pedestrian chit-chatter), and he's as dedicated to constant reinvention -- or at least refinement -- as anyone in the industry. And his career would seem downright schizophrenic if it weren't so marked by intensely personal qualities; he's done everything from big, Oscar-baiting biopics (such as Milk, his take on the rise and demise of openly gay San Francisco politician Harvey Milk) to small, artsy, improvised tales with almost no commercial potential. He's equally capable of having his characters spout unadulterated Shakespeare and having them say nothing at all for endless minutes of screen time, and make both choices seem perfectly natural. He has a curiously critical eye towards his own work -- that is to say, it's not curious that he is self-critical, but rather it's curious how much he talks like a film critic; many of his longer discussions with journalists have sounded more like a well-informed film critic discussing Gus Van Sant's work than it does a director talking about himself. His stabs at mainstream credibility have yielded decidedly mixed results; his successes have been noteworthy (see below), but his failures, especially flattened-out duds like Finding Forrester and Good Will Hunting, and an utterly pointless remake of Psycho, have been spectacular. Through it all, he's remained one of the film industry's hardest men to figure out, but it seems no one ever tires of watching what his next move will be. Here's five of our favorites by the Prince of Portland.

MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO (1991)

Mala Noche was the movie that made the underground sit up and take notice of Gus Van Sant's talent; Drugstore Cowboy won over the burgeoning indie world and made him a critic's darling. But the daring, explosively risky My Own Private Idaho was the movie that convinced me that I was seeing the work of an American genius in the making. The story of two sad, sincere male hustlers (played by River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves), it blended elements of Shakespearean drama, class warfare, transgressive queen cinema, and pure street poetry in a way that so clearly shouldn't have worked that it's downright amazing how well it did. Van Sant crammed the movie with real characters from his beloved Portland and made an intensely personal film that nonetheless hit everyone who saw it right where they lived.

TO DIE FOR (1995)

Gus Van Sant's first stab at commercial credibility was Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, which, despite a plethora of good intentions, was his first major dud. In fact, its ineptness in spite of itself might be noted as a pattern that the director would follow in much of his mainstream work, if it wasn't for the existence of his follow-up film, To Die For. Working from Buck Henry's sharpest, nastiest script in decades, Van Sant directs a movie that almost invisibly echoes some of the themes of his previous work, especially in those scenes featuring lovestruck, dimwitted local teen Joaquin Phoenix and his crew. Van Sant rarely overreaches, and manages to let the black comedic tone of the script do its work; his greatest accomplishment is to get a truly memorable performance out of Nicole Kidman, who's better here than she would be again for some time.

GERRY (2002)

In 2002, Van Sant was on the tail end of a bad time. Hollywood hadn't been good to him over the previous half-decade, but to be fair, he hadn't been very good to it, either, with Good Will Hunting, Psycho and Finding Forrester gunking up his resume. Returning to his strange interiors for another shot at indie filmmaking, he released the first of his "Death Trilogy", the underrated Gerry, and a lot of critics were ready to call it his fourth disaster in a row: it's static to the point of tedium, its improvised dialogue (by two actors not especially beloved by highbrow reviewers) was sometimes silly and sometimes impenetrable, and it had nothing resembling a plot. But Gerry was a quiet triumph, a movie that builds almost unnoticably and marks a return to greatness by a director who can do very much with very little.

ELEPHANT (2003)

Van Sant followed up the surprising and effective Gerry with the triumphant Elephant, the best film of 2003. The second of his death trilogy takes an almost transcendently naturalistic look at a small high school on the day of a Columbine-style murder spree; the dialogue, again largely improvised, and the endless, unintrusive tracking shots make Elephant a brilliant contradiction: a movie so banal that it's almost mystical. Through the whole event, from boring ordinariness to life-shattering violence, Van Sant's particular genius is to steadfastly refuse to lead the viewers to anything resembling an explanation for the horror. Forcing us to view everything from the eyes of those who don't understand why they have to die, Elephant reflects our own maddening desire to have random violence made explicable -- and the world's refusal to comply.

PARANOID PARK (2007)

A strangely stirring and deeply affecting film, 2007's Paranoid Park -- based largely on a successful young adult novel -- finds Gus Van Sant returning to Portland and making a key transition from the relentlessly bleak indie sensibilities of the Death Trilogy to the artsy mainstream appeal of Milk. Once again trusting an amateur cast (many of whom were recruited off of MySpace) and a good deal of improvised dialogue to carry the tone of the film, Van Sant also lays in a heavy, dark directorial touch that nails the mood of the story perfectly. He's greatly aided in this attempt by the gorgeous cinematography by Wong Kar-Wai's cameraman, Christopher Doyle, and the Zoo-York-clad Gabe Nevins as the affectless skateboarding protagonist. Paranoid Park is a perfect bridge between To Die For and Elephant.

Related Posts:

Screengrab Review: Milk

Gus Van Sant and Paranoid Park: 'It's the End of a Certain Way I Was Making Films'

Screengrab's Back To School Round-Up: The Top 15 College Movies (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 20:30:00 GMT

THE FRESHMAN (1990)

For the recent high school graduate, going to college can feel like entering a strange new world, so it makes perfect metaphorical sense that this comedy, written and directed by the prankish Andrew Bergman, is about a film student (Matthew Broderick) who goes to a different school, in a different city, and finds himself entering a different movie: his new employer and mentor, played by Marlon Brando, is a heavyset, gray-haired Italian gentleman who talks in a gravelly near-whisper and is highly reminiscent of a certain classic American movie from the early 1970s in which a business negotiation involved a decapitated horse. No such atrocities occur here, but you do get to see longtime Miss America pageant host Bert Parks serenade a Komodo dragon.

THE GRADUATE (1967)

Watching Animal House in high school may have given me a somewhat warped idea about what to expect from my undergraduate years, but The Graduate turned out to be an unnervingly accurate depiction of the terrifying unstructured malaise waiting to devour the unwary in those first uncertain years after college graduation. True, my parents didn’t have a sunny Southern California pool for me to float around in while I tried to figure out my life, but their friends and they offered plenty of well-meaning but fantastically unhelpful advice of the “Plastics” variety, while embodying exactly the type of suburban sameness I was so desperate to avoid. And, no, I didn’t have an older Mrs. Robinson to school me in sex and cynicism, but Simon & Garfunkle soothed my weary, alienated soul on numerous occasions. Career highlight efforts by stars Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft, director Mike Nichols, writer/cameo artiste Buck Henry and even wax effigy Katharine Ross make this film a best-of-show masterpiece of any genre, and the movie’s final shot of young lovers Ben & Elaine riding off into an unknowable future on a crosstown bus is an image of hope and terror for the ages...specifically, the ages 21-25.

GOOD NEWS (1947)

This candy-colored MGM musical is probably the best example of a lost genre, that of the collegiate musical that centers on football and builds to the big game. It had been enough of a mainstay of American entertainment for the Marx Brothers to have parodied it fifteen years earlier in Horse Feathers; in fact, this movie has its roots in a 1927 stage musical that was first filmed in 1930. By the time this remake was hatched, both the stage original and the first movie version were regarded as too dirty, by post-World War II standards, for Production Code-era Hollywood. So the script was laundered, and the most sexless, blandest leads in movie history, Peter Lawford and June Allyson, were brought into play as, respectively, the gridiron hero (no, seriously, that was Peter Lawford's role) and the brainy librarian who has to tutor him so that he doesn't do so badly in his courses that he's not allowed to remain on the football team. (Truly the American musical is a pure fantasy realm.) Part of what makes this bowdlerized production charming is that it represents nostalgia for the 1920s as seen from the vantage point of the late 1940s, which seen today gives it an odd, unearthly appeal. It also helps that the people hired to plug the holes left by the editing actually added some good songs and found people livelier than Lawford and Allyson to perform them. The movie's real star is the vivacious and weird Joan McCracken, a Broadway dancer-singer who died young without ever having built much of a movie career: she triumphs in the movie's opening and in her showcase number, the possibly-insulting-to-Native-Americans novelty piece "Pass That Peace Pipe."

DRUMLINE (2002)

This go-for-it movie, starring Nick Cannon as an unpolished bullet of raw talent who upsets the equilibrium of the marching band at a prestigious all-black university, has the kind of silly plot mechanics one expects from the genre, but it also has a lot of freshness and energy and a surprisingly impressive performance by Orlando Jones as the upright professor in charge of the band. As staged by director Charles Stone III, the precisely choreographed final battle of the bands at the big championship competition is a winner-take-all moment undreamt of in Sylvester Stallone's philosophy.

WONDER BOYS (2000)

Michael Douglas gives one of his most winning performances in this adaptation of Michael Chabon's terrific novel about Grady Tripp, a stalled novelist and aging pothead whose gig teaching creative writing at a Pittsburgh university has turned into a not unpleasant form of limbo. This is one of the few movies that features a halfway believable facsimile of some form of the writer's life, a virtue that extends to Tobey Maguire's amazing turn as the most talented and mercurial of Tripp's students, and also for a characteristically high-wire performance by Robert Downey, Jr. as the great man's literary agent. The studio had enough faith in the movie's entertainment value that, after it bombed in its initial run, they rolled it out again a few months later with a new ad campaign, whereupon it bombed all over again. It still hasn't developed the cult following on DVD that one might have hoped for, and Tobey Maguire remains much better known as Peter Parker than as James Leek, but the movie did win Bob Dylan an Academy Award for his original theme song, "Things Have Changed."

Click Here for Part One & Part Three

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Andrew Osborne

America The Critical: 15 Movies That Show What's Wrong With U.S. (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 20:30:00 GMT

THE GODFATHER (1972)

Perhaps you've heard of it? The epic (and epically popular) metaphorical study of how the American dream was corrupted begins with the words "I believe in America" and then spends six hours and fifteen minutes (counting Part II) making it clear just what that belief entails. Sweet dreams, Papa.

IDIOCRACY (2006)

After skewering the soul-deadening effect of modern cubicle culture in 1999’s Office Space, Beavis & Butthead and King of the Hill creator Mike Judge created a comedic future dystopia (mirroring that of Cyril M. Kornbluth’s classic 1951 short story, “The Marching Morons”) where idiots have inherited the Earth (because all you overeducated hipsters out there either didn’t spawn or tried to prevent unsustainable overpopulation by limiting yourselves to one or two kids while the irresponsible, short-sighted and just plain dumb were breeding like rabbits). Idiocracy featured eminently bankable heartthrob Luke Wilson (as well as plenty of good ol’ lowest-common-denominator fart jokes) and received largely positive reviews...yet, mysteriously, the film was withheld from critics and vanished without a trace, receiving virtually zero publicity from its distributor (20th Century Fox) during its shockingly miniscule 125-screen theatrical run, whereupon the film was dumped unceremoniously onto DVD. So what happened? Well, I’ve never heard an official explanation, but I suspect the Suits either didn’t get Judge’s film or its depiction of our nation’s ever-lowering standards of taste, intelligence and acceptable civilized behavior hit a little too close to home, given the media’s complicity in the closing of the American mind. In Judge’s film (set in 2505, but clearly, even shockingly evocative of the trashiest parts of our modern-day landscape), nothing matters but sex and money, nobody is responsible for their own behavior, everything (including the population’s disposable clothing) is branded with corporate logos and anyone who dares to appear smart, competent, cultured, self-aware or sensitive (y’know, elite) is branded a “fag” and viewed with hostility and suspicion, even if (like Wilson’s time-traveling 20th century everyman) they’re trying to prevent global catastrophe. Judge somehow got product placement from real companies (whose representatives apparently never read the script: one scene, for instance, features an H&R Block that offers tax returns with “happy endings”), and biting the hands of his corporate masters so viciously may be the real reason the Suits buried the film, although (like Office Space) Idiocracy has managed to attract a small cult following (which this entry will hopefully increase), bringing some overdue attention to an unfairly neglected satiric gem of smart dumb comedy.

THE MAGIC CHRISTIAN (1969)

Terry Southern was the foremost satirist of American culture of his generation, and The Magic Christian is a jab at American money-lust unrivalled by anything this side of William Gaddis' JR. And while director Joseph McGrath (abetted by two Monty Python's Flying Circus alums, Graham Chapman and John Cleese) transplanted the action to his native England when he adapted the book for the big screen, transforming billionaire prankster Guy Grand from an old line Northeasterner to (im)proper British banker along the way, there was still no mistaking what country the author had in mind when he penned the tale of a man whose sole purpose in life was to prove that everyone has their price. A few of the scenes play nicely into the new but not exactly improved British sensibility of the film, but most of the bizarre schemes Grand comes up with to test the limits of his countrymen's greed – from a ludicrously overpriced luxury car roughly the size of a city block to a championship boxing match calculated to enrage by having the fighters kiss at a vital moment – could only resonate the way they do in America. The change of scenery does give the movie a bit of a schizophrenic feel (as does the addition of a rather purposeless Ringo Starr as Grand's son), but really, if someone tells you he's made a satire of a cash-hungry nation full of venal hacks who will sell out their every principle for money, you know what country he's talking about even if everyone in the movie talks like Alastair Cooke.

THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH (1976)

Suppose an alien, a blank slate with no preconceptions about our country, found himself in America. To him it is neither the land of opportunity nor the Great Satan, so with no frame of reference or historical context, what elements of our culture make the greatest impression upon him? Rampant consumerism? Unchecked capitalism? The duplicity of governments and corporations? That's one way of looking at Nicolas Roeg's trippy sci-fi flick (adapted from a novel by Walter Tevis), but like much of Roeg's '70s output, The Man Who Fell to Earth resists easy interpretation. David Bowie, already the man who sold the world, takes on the title role, one Thomas Jerome Newton. A visitor from another planet suffering from extreme drought, Newton has come to our world on a rescue mission. Using alien technology, he secures a number of patents (including one for ultra-futuristic self-developing film) and amasses a fortune, with which he plans to finance a return trip home (presumably with plenty of water, although like everything else, this is never really explained). But Newton loses focus, corrupted by wealth, drink, television and the only people he trusts. By the time he falls into the clutches of a government agency that has discovered his true nature, he has flamed out, never to return to the stars. Roeg keeps us as disoriented as his protagonist with his slippery acid trip visuals and elastic interpretation of time and space, but there's no mistaking the intent behind such images as Bowie stirring his gin with the barrel of a six-shooter, and it ain't God Bless America.

POINT OF ORDER (1964)

Emile de Antonio, the early, smarter, non-self-promoting version of Michael Moore, didn't pretend to be an investigative journalist. In his first film, which is about the Army-McCarthy hearings, he didn't even make any pretense to topicality: Point of Order was released ten years after the hearings themselves, and seven years after Joseph McCarthy's death. De Antonio's eye was on the big picture. He had the insight that, by boiling the 187 televised hours of hearing down to a tight 97 minutes of political vaudeville -- Joseph McCarthy and Joseph Welch's greatest hits -- and doing without voice-over narration or any other kind of explanatory devices, he could skirt charges of bias by seeming to let the HUAC all-stars hang themselves by their own words and actions. At the same time, by selecting just the right material and emphasizing the ridiculous to such a degree that the movie was immediately praised as a work of nonfiction satire, he seriously affected how the Red-hunters in Congress would be seen for generations. De Antonio would use the same political scrapbook technique in such later films as the Vietnam War doc In the Year of the Pig and the Nixon biography Millhouse: A White Comedy, movies that attracted less mainstream attention in part because their targets hadn't been off the front pages for a decade at the time they were released.

Click here for Part One and Part Three

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

Take Five: Gotta Get A Guru

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 19:55:00 GMT

Mike Myers' not-so-glorious return to the big screen, The Love Guru -- also known as Austin Powers IV and Verne Troyer's Pleading E-Mails Finally Pay Off -- opens everywhere today, and critics couldn't be more disappointed. Not only is it reported to be low on laughs, it's also being criticized as being high on stereotypes; despite his alleged friend and idol Deepak Chopra coming to his aid, Myers has been attacked for his stereotyping of Asian Indians and his portrayal of a cartoonish, caricatured guru. But let's face it: Hollywood has always loved its gurus, spiritual masters, and wise old mystics from the subcontinent. Hardly had the Beatles falled under the influence of the Maharishi than Hollywood followed suit; here's a look at some of the more memorable wise men of the East that the movie business has given us.

THE LOVED ONE (1965)

One of the few countercultural satires from the 1960s to hold up in the modern era, Tony Richardson's The Loved One holds up for two reasons: first, it was based on an Evelyn Waugh novel from nearly two decades prior and isn't quite as tarred, as a result, by the hippie-dippie vibe of its time; and second, it's got an impeccable crew behind the camera, from Richardson to cinematographer Haskell Wexler to skilled, hip screenwriters Christopher Isherwood and Terry Southern. This satire of capitalism run amok in the funereal industry crams so many jokes into its two-hour running time that it's almost impossible to keep up with them all, but make sure you don't miss gravel-throated character actor Lionel Stander as the Guru Brahmin, one of the first-ever big-screen gurus -- and one of the first to be portrayed as a bumbling fraud.

CANDY (1968)

This big-screen adaptation of the Mason Hoffenberg novel (actually the infamous Terry Southern writing under a pseudonym) is generally regarded as a major failure. It's not that there weren't talented people involved -- besides Southern himself, and his co-writer Buck Henry, the cast is crammed with fine actors -- but the entire film seems to go off the rails from the very start. That doesn't mean, though, that there aren't plenty of bizarre treats for those with the energy to sit through it. This updating of Voltaire's Candide is purely Southern in the sense that authority figures are always portrayed as phony, venal, and couching some grotesque habits or appetites. In this instance, we're treated to the the sight of the monstrour Grindl -- a sex-crazed Hindu guru played by an overheated Marlon Brando -- putting the poor, put-upon Candy in yet another compromising position.

THE PARTY (1968)

All right, so technically, Peter Sellers' Hrundi V. Bakshi ("That is what my name is called") in the Blake Edwards farce The Party isn't a guru. (That title more rightly belongs to Chauncey Gardiner, the character played by Sellers in 1979's Being There.) But he is Indian, sort of, and he does speak in Hindi platitudes that those around him mistake for pearls of inscrutable eastern wisdom. For example, when asked who he thinks he is, he responds, "In India, we do not think who we are. We know who we are." Whoa, heavy. The rest of the movie is pretty much straight-up Blake Edwards comic fare, and it falls flat on the stereotypes at times, but a few scenes are still paralytically funny forty years later, especially when a stoned Bakshi comes across a parakeet cage and solemnly intones the name of the birdseed: "Birdy Num Num."

THE HOLY MOUNTAIN (1973)

In this stunning, surreal, and nearly incomprehensible masterpiece by ultimate provocatuer Alejandro Jodorowsky, the guru is Horacio Salinas, a Christlike thief who is half savior and half mountebank. Under the tutelage of the Alchemist, a mysterious figure played by Jodorowsky himself, he and his gang of mystical banditos -- each named for a different celestial body -- plan nothing less than an assault on Heaven, where they will depose the reigning gods and take their places. Visually, this is exactly the sort of film people talk about when they talk about crazy European art films: it's bewildering, deliberately offensive, totally impenetrable, and weird for the sake of being weird. It's also absolutely brilliant, and Jodorowsky -- who's the real guru here -- shows us what it might be like inside the mind of the truly enlightened -- and it alternately makes us gasp at its beauty and scares the hell out of us.

HOLY SMOKE (1999)

Jane Campion's weirdest movie -- which, if you think about it, is really saying something -- features the always-engaging Kate Winslet in the role of a young woman who decides to embark on a quest for spiritual self-discovery in the Indian subcontinent. Along the way, she encounters the guru Chiddaatman Baba (played by Dhritiman Chatterjee) and falls under his sway -- and that's just where the movie begins. From there, she is confronted by Harvey Keitel as a deprogrammer -- sorry, "cult exiter" -- hired by her family to get her back, and discovers that he's not without his own guru-like tendencies. A battle of wills, intellects and bodies ensue over the terrain of feminism, spirituality and sexuality, and the movie degenerates into a bit of a chaotic mess, but it's at least a glorious mess with two terrific actors like Keitel and Winslet at the fore.

Screengrab Predicts: The Top 5 Bombs of Summer 2008

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 01 May 2008 20:30:00 GMT

And now, The Screengrab’s predictions for the Top 5 box office disappointments and/or outright disastrous flops of Summer 2008!

(Want to play along at home? Let us know your Top 5 picks for upcoming Summer Bombs, and compare them to our collective and individual predictions. Whoever scores the most correct answers WINS AN IMAGINARY FANTASY DATE WITH MIKE MYERS AND/OR SARAH JESSICA PARKER!)

5. SEX AND THE CITY

I guess I shouldn't exactly say that I'm confident this movie will be a huge failure. More like I'm praying to any god that will listen that it will be. (LP)

What kind of sick, twisted, topsy-turvy world do we live in where the promised Deadwood TV movies have never materialized, yet Sex and the City gets the full-fledged big screen treatment? No sort of world for me, I know that much. As hard as it is for me to believe that anyone on the planet still cares about the sex lives of Sarah Jessica Parker and her pals, I'm sure there are a few fans left out there. But they'll all see this on the first weekend and then it will sink like a stone. (SV)

Yes, the show has a built-in fan base, but will it be enough? The fact is, this is opening the week after Indiana Jones, and there are many more women who will buy a ticket for Indy than there are men who'll pay to see Carrie and Company on the big screen. Perhaps an early-fall release would have been a better idea? (PC)

4. SPEED RACER

Who was this movie made for? Everyone's heard of the show, but who remembers it all that well? Looks too kiddish for most adults, and too hyperkinetic for the family audience. Factor in the film's release date- the second week in May, historically a bum weekend- and the outlook here isn't promising. (PC)

Dissenting Opinion: Intersecting that demographic sweet spot where NASCAR fans, nostalgic hipsters, Japanese animation buffs, and people with nothing better to do on a hot afternoon meet, this cartoon revival will score big, and drive up sales of Steve Albini records and pet monkeys. (LP)

3. THE HAPPENING

It's not happening anymore for M. Night Shyamalan, who has seen his stock drop from Hitchcock heir to 21st century Ed Wood with each successive release. (SV)

Five years ago, the M. Night Shyamalan name would have been enough to guarantee box office. However, after The Village and Lady In the Water, the studio is going to have to step up their game to recoup their investment here. And without a Bruce Willis in the lead role, it's going to be that much harder. (PC)

DISSENTING OPINION: While I am on record as a LeBeouf hater, I’m an ardent Shyamalan apologist. For me, even his stinkers are interesting (or at least amusing), and I’m apparently the only guy in America who actually enjoyed Lady In The Water enough to put it on my year-end Top Ten List. Oh, sure, it SEEMS like it’s going to bomb...but the SHOCKING TWIST ENDING is that, y’know, it might not be a TOTAL fiasco. (AO)

2. THE LOVE GURU

Is there anyone out there who doesn't think this looks like total shit? Mike Myers appears onscreen for the first time in five years, but let's not forget that his last leading-man role was- UGH- THE CAT IN THE HAT. (PC)

Coroners examining the bomb crater will have trouble separating the remains of The Love Guru from the remains of Heather Graham’s The Guru in an adjacent crater, and will thus bury them together in the Tomb of the Unseen Faux-Indian Musical Comedy. (AO)

1. THE INCREDIBLE HULK

Taking a movie, based on a very hard-sell Marvel character (whose entire existence is predicated on violence and stupidity), which was one of the few recent superhero movies to totally bomb and remaking it only a few years later with a much worse director? Now that's a formula for success! (LP)

Marvel Studios has gone out of their way to sell this film as a completely different creature than the last movie. But will people get the message? I think they underestimate how much people disliked the last Hulk, and it's going to take a lot of good press to make audiences believe they won't get fooled again. (PC)

By the way...does anyone else think a giant green ‘roid-ragin’ CGI depiction of Ed Norton is inherently hilarious? What’s next, Sean Penn as Martian Manhunter? (AO)

Memorandum Opinion: I don't want to say I'm rooting against The Incredible Hulk exactly, but as one of the few defenders of Ang Lee's version, I would feel some satisfaction if the presumably louder, faster, dumber sequel/remake/whatever-it-is met with an even worse box office fate. (SV)

DISHONORABLE MENTION:

HANCOCK

Recent presidential elections have shown us time and again that America has no tolerance for poor moral values, like this movie with 'cock' in the title and which features Will Smith, and yet does not have a single occurrence of the phrase "Aw hell naw". (LP)

GET SMART

The appeal of the old TV show -- a number of episodes of which were written by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry -- wasn't its spy satire; it was its smart, character-driven comedy. The movie looks to go for cheap retro thrills and ultra-broad laughs, and America's love affair with Steve Carrell may have peaked. (LP)

People like Steve Carell on TV, but after last summer's Evan Almighty, his box-office clout is pretty questionable. This uninspired-looking TV spinoff probably won't counter that. (PC)

THE MUMMY: TOMB OF THE DRAGON EMPEROR

Does anyone still actually care? (PC)

WANTED/HELLBOY II: THE GOLDEN ARMY

2008 is the summer of comic book movies, but there's such a thing as overkill. Without the name recognition of Batman or the marketing push of Iron Man, these will probably be lost in the shuffle. (PC)

**************

The above list reflects the combined, weighted picks of four of our resident Screengrab know-it-alls. Below, our original ballots:

Leonard Pierce

1. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

2. The Incredible Hulk

3. Hancock

4. Get Smart

5. Sex and the City

Scott Von Doviak

1. The Happening

2. Sex and the City

3. You Don’t Mess With the Zohan

4. The Love Guru

5. The Incredible Hulk

Paul Clark

1. Speed Racer

2. The Incredible Hulk

3. The Love Guru

4. Get Smart

5. Wanted/Hellboy II: The Golden Army

Andrew Osborne

1. The Love Guru

2. The Incredible Hulk

3. Speed Racer

4. Wall*E

5. Hancock

-- Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Paul Clark, Scott Von Doviak, Leonard Pierce

The Spirit of '67

Phil Nugent — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Pictures at a Revolution, a new book by Entertainment Weekly staffer Mark Harris, zeroes in on a signal moment in popular culture — 1967, a time when the old Hollywood studios were losing their grip on mass taste and hip young American filmmakers were beginning to be influenced by the European New Wave directors — by examining the making of each of the five films nominated for that year's Academy Award for Best Picture. The list consists of In the Heat of the Night, the eventual winner, and the four also-rans, Bonnie & Clyde, The Graduate, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, and Dr. Dolittle. The films themselves go a long way towards making Harris's point that Hollywood was cracking apart at the time from confusion, internal conflict, and dry rot; it's hard to believe that they were all made in the same year, let alone that an industry would have chosen all of them to point to with pride as the best of which they were capable.

The ones that seem most clearly of their time are Bonnie & Clyde and The Graduate. The latter was a crowd-pleasing zeitgeist movie, a time-stamped movie of the moment, but Bonnie & Clyde was a genuinely revolutionary film at the time — the writers, Robert Benton and David Newman, had originally hoped to attract Francois Truffaut to direct — and a certified classic. It was also a movie that, had it won the Oscar, would have set off a chain of massive coronaries through three-quarters of the executive suites in Hollywood. As for In the Heat of the Night, it was recently re-issued on a new DVD, which set off a fresh round of condescending notices pointing up its flaws. It is in fact an entertaining little murder melodrama with a number of strong virtues — notably the dazzling cinematographer by Haskell Wexler and Rod Steiger's Oscar-winning performance — but it is the kind of movie that was overrated in its day and is now fated to be underrated, as punishment for being a good movie that won an award that should have gone to a great movie. It looks even better if compared to the other big racial-tolerance message movie, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, which is where most of the dry rot settled.

In its general outlines, this will be familiar territory to many readers of film books; the Bonnie & Clyde story has been especially thoroughly covered already, but even the ringer, the expensive and unwatchable Dr. Dolittle, has already been dealt with at some length in a well-known book: John Gregory Dunne's 1969 The Studio, a first-hand journalistic account of how thoroughly that movie's tortured production bollixed Twentieth-Century Fox at the time. But Harris is a good writer and has managed to wring fresh material from such interview subjects as Mike Nichols, Arthur Penn, Warren Beatty, Dustin Hoffman, Robert Towne, and Buck Henry, while plugging the gaps with well-chosen insights drawn from such sources as Sidney Poitier's memoirs. Overblown title and all, Harris's book is a fascinating, five-sided snapshot of a remarkable moment in movie history.

Le Bon Temps Roule!

Phil Nugent — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 16:00:00 GMT

It's Fat Tuesday, which marks the noisy, beer-stained conclusion to Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Sadly, most of you who visit this site are trapped at your jobs or classrooms right now, and while we could address ourselves exclusively to those now celebrating in the Pelican State, most of them are probably too drunk to read. We'll just settle for mentally sending them some love rays and hope those in the French Quarter remember that as soon as the clock turns to twelve tonight, those nice policemen on horseback whose job it is to clear the streets will start unsheathing their billy clubs. For the rest of you, we'll just remind you that there have been a number of motion pictures that tried to tap into the mysterious beauty and happy vibe of the city that care forgot. Most of these movies stank like week-old gumbo, but here's a few that might make for an enjoyable carnival day rental:

PANIC IN THE STREETS (1950)

This thriller starts out on the New Orleans docks, where a tough named Blackie (played by a hulking, gaunt-featured newcomer to movies billed as "Walter Jack Palance") murders a guy who's fresh off the boat who looks as if he's only got about five minutes to live anyway. When the coroner confirms that the dead man was suffering from pneumonic plague, Richard Widmark (as a U.S. Public Health officer) and a cop played by Paul Douglas have to track down Palance, his whimpering sidekick Zero Mostel, and anyone else who may have been in contact with him, while keeping things quiet so as to prevent a panic. The director, Elia Kazan, who a year later would make one of the great movies set in New Orleans when he transferred Tennesee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire to film, shot this movie in actual New Orleans locations, which means that, in addition to its virtues as a crackerjack entertainment — which are considerable — it also has the fascination of serving as a semi-documentary record of the city as it was more than half a century ago. Fun fact: shortly after directing Mostel in this picture, Kazan testified against him in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee, thus helping to get the actor blacklisted.

HARD TIMES (1975)

This period piece, set during the Depression, was the first film directed by its screenwriter, Walter Hill. It's a vehicle for Charles Bronson, in what is almost certainly the best movie and probably the best performance of his '70s period as a top-billed international star; he plays a soft-spoken drifter who falls in with a gambler (James Coburn) and begins competing in bare-knuckle fistfights that are thrown together to give the locals something to bet on. You get a sense of what the leisurely pace of life does to you in New Orleans from this film: for an action movie, it has a unusually slow tempo, as if Hill were a little drunk on the atmosphere and needed to take care to remember to keep putting his next foot in front of the other in the right order. But it's so flavorful and lovingly crafted that it's never boring. Strother Martin, who wears a white suit and a moustache that make him look more than ever like Tennessee Williams's Mini-Me, plays Coburn's sidekick, who tends Bronson's wounds; he explains his unlicensed medical status by saying that "in the fourth year of my studies, a small black cloud appeared on the campus. I departed under it." (The young Becky Allen, a mainstay of New Orleans theater for many years, has a small, good appearance as his dinner date.)

Eighteen years later, another talented action director, John Woo, would come to New Orleans to shoot his first American film, Hard Target, starring Jean-Claude Damme (as "Chance Boudreaux"), who stumbles across an operation, led by Lance Henriksen, to organize The Most Dangerous Game-style hunts of displaced homeless men on the streets of the city. At one point, Henriksen tells someone that "it's no accident we're in New Orleans... There's always some unhappy corner of the globe where we can ply our trade." So I guess the filmmakers deserve some kind of credit for not sucking up to the local Tourist Board. Oddly enough, this was not the first movie that tried to account for Van Damme's Belgian accent by insisting that his character was supposed to be a Cajun.

THE BIG EASY (1986)

This fast-talking crime movie is one that New Orleans itself has always had a love-hate relationship with. It's a cartoon of the city's image, complete with crooked cops, weird accents (the hero, a detective played by Dennis Quaid, is meant to be Cajun-Irish), and such lines as, "Who do I look like, the Grand Marshall of the Mardi Gras?" But on its own endearingly unambitious terms, it's often a fun cartoon, with a memorable little turn-on of a bedroom scene between Quaid and Ellen Barkin (who, when Quaid sticks his hand up her skirt, unrolls her smile as if she'd been wondering all her life what was in there), and funny turns by Lisa Jane Persky, Grace Zabriskie, and local icon John Goodman. There's even a brief appearance (as an inexplicably surly magnet salesman) by Peter Gabb, who starred in a Tulane University production of John Guare's The House of Blue Leaves in which this writer played a nun, a performance hailed by one critic as having been "worth trying, I guess." This movie is especially worth seeing for Charles Ludlam's appearance as Quaid's lawyer, identified at one point as "da man dat got da governor acquitted." Ludlam, the founder of New York's Ridiculous Theatrical Company, was a god in his own specialized field of high-camp, Pop Art theatrical farce, but he didn't leave behind much on film, and by the time The Big Easy opened, he had died of AIDS. Though Ludlam was a Yankee, his joyously broad, eye-rolling cameo specifically captures the kind of fun that blossoms in New Orleans like few things I've ever seen.

TUNE IN TOMORROW... (1990)

This one's really freaky, and definitely a matter of taste. Fans of hardcore silliness will find a lot in it to like. Even its bloodlines are surreal: the screenplay, by the British novelist William Boyd (An Ice Cream War; A Good Man in Africa), is based on Mario Vargas Llosa's Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, which was set in Lima, Peru in the 1950s, but with the action shifted to New Orleans in the same period. It was directed by Jon Amiel, a British TV and movie director who was then fairly hot after coming off the Dennis Potter-scripted miniseries The Singing Detective, and who was on his way, after this film came out, to never being fairly hot again. It stars Peter Falk as "Pedro Carmichael", a radio soap-opera writer who takes a creatorly interest in the forbidden romance developing between hot-blooded man-child Keanu Reeves and the ripe, womanly Barbara Hershey. The movie, which really takes off in the sections where Pedro's radio show fantasies are acted out by a group of actors that includes Peter Gallagher, Elizabeth McGovern, Dan Hedaya (in an eyepatch), Hope Lange, Buck Henry, and local embarrassment John Larroquette, also features a terrific original score by Wynton Marsalis, who can be seen performing with his band in a nightclub sequence. If you ever get the chance, give it a shot: it sure won't remind you of much else that you've seen before.