The Screengrab : cameron crowe

Screengrab's Favorite Movies About Music: Fiction Edition (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 22:00:00 GMT

HEAD (1968)

I think just about anyone who’s familiar with the Monkees’ sweet, goofy Peter Tork was bummed by the actor/musician’s recent diagnosis with head and neck cancer (although, apparently, the prognosis is currently good). And I think no matter how silly or cynically conceived hippies found the Pre-Fab Four back in the sixties, the songs the TV band had written for them (“I’m a Believer,” “Daydream Believer,” “Steppin’ Stone,” etc.) are a helluva lot better than most of the songs being written for today’s prefabricated music industry shills, most of whom don’t even have the self-awareness to be self-deprecating and more than a little embarrassed by their place in the pop culture firmament. To their credit, Tork and his bandmates Mickey Dolenz (the funny one), Davy Jones (the cute one) and Michael Nesmith (the smart one) tried their best to rebel against their corporate overlords with Head, a big-screen attempt at image-smashing phantasmagoria that plays like an LSD-inspired episode of the group’s small-screen show, i.e. a brainy, mostly well-behaved mind-fuck that’s actually a lot more entertaining and thought-provoking than some of the more “authentic” freak-outs of the era, what with the underwater imagery accompanying the haunting “Porpoise Song,” the burlesque meditations on fame and the peculiar cameos by the likes of Victor Mature, Annette Funicello and Frank Zappa with a cow.

HIGH FIDELITY (2000)

That High Fidelity is playfully self-conscious and yet not overly precious is a testament to both director Stephen Frears, here smoothly segueing between goofy comedy and sobering drama, as well as star (and co-writer) John Cusack, whose turn as romantically challenged record store owner Rob stands as one of his finest performances. Retaining the ragamuffin spirit of Nick Hornby’s source novel, Frears’ funny and incisive adaptation boasts two superb supporting players in Jack Black and Todd Louiso as Rob’s employees, as well as a script that refuses to sentimentalize the stunted-maturity failings of its protagonist. Rob is a man-child whose compulsive habit of concocting lists – about favorite songs and past break-ups – speaks to the vital role music plays in his romantic life, while also serving as his means of engaging in self-analysis through a safe, detached filter. A bit too much of Cusack’s narration and dialogue (taken verbatim from Hornby’s novel) lands with a writerly thud on screen, but the actor’s warts-and-all performance – unafraid to posit his protagonist as a navel-gazing prick, and still capable of making him endearing – is so energized that it overshadows any occasional missteps.

LAST DAYS (2005)

The high point of Gus Van Sant’s Béla Tarr-inspired “death trilogy” (following 2002’s Gerry and 2003’s Elephant), Last Days charts the final, pedestrian events in the life of a Kurt Cobain surrogate (Michael Pitt) in and around his Pacific Northwest estate. A ruminative, melancholy work with little interest in traditional narrative, Van Sant’s evocative gem aims mainly to situate viewers in a particular physical environment and headspace. In this case, that’s the remote residence and fuzzy mind of a shuffling, head-downturned, shaggy-haired rock star who wanders about his property like a ghost burdened by some ill-defined psychological and emotional misery. Rife with ambiguous religious overtones that contribute to an atmosphere of spiritual malaise, obliquely addressing the relationship between image and reality, and depicting its protagonist – constricted by claustrophobic full-frame compositions – as beset by hangers-on and record studio execs who take but don’t give, Last Days operates as a richly textured, arrestingly evocative avant-garde hypothesis about the forces that might have contributed to Cobain’s suicidal demise.

SINGLES (1992)

No one will mistake Singles for a great rom-com, but viewed as a snapshot of a very particular musical era, Cameron Crowe’s 1992 film holds up surprisingly well. The story has to do with two on-again, off-again couples (Campbell Scott and Kyra Sedgwick, Matt Dillon and Bridget Fonda) attempting to navigate choppy romantic waters. However, despite Crowe’s reasonably sturdy dramatization of twentysomethings in search of love and their post-collegiate identities – as well as his inconsistent (but far-from-disastrous) decision to have characters break the fourth wall to deliver commentary – the film’s lasting appeal has as much to do with timing as with storytelling. By setting the action in a Seattle grunge scene on the brink of exploding, Crowe hopelessly dated his film. Yet that turns out to be a good thing, since Singles, bolstered by cameos and performances by various members of the bands (Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains) that would temporarily make Seattle the epicenter of rock, while comfortably rooted in the damp, sleepy, basketball-loving atmosphere of his Pacific Northwest milieu, proves an engaging, enduring time capsule.

GRACE OF MY HEART (1996)

This movie is character actress Illeana Douglas's best role to date. As in Todd Haynes' Velvet Goldmine and I'm Not There, Grace of My Heart attempts to create a transcendent reality for the stories about Carole King, who some readers may need to be reminded was one of the Brill Building songwriters of the early '60s who later went on to have commercial success as a singer-songwriter with her album Tapestry. Perhaps you saw her on Stephen Colbert's show. In this movie, she is known as Denise Waverly. Denise comes to work in the Brill Building for a Phil Spector-alike played by John Turturro, writing songs for girl groups. She takes up with her co-songwriter, a Gerry Goffin-alike played by Eric Stolz (among the real-life Goffin-King compositions: "Will You Love Me Tomorrow," "The Loco-Motion," "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman"), but their marraige falls apart. Later, she moves to California and takes up with a Brian Wilson-alike played by Matt Dillon. Even though it's not as smart as the Haynes rock fictions, it's quite a lovely little movie with lots of nice touches to people familiar with the characters portrayed. I especially enjoy the faux-Wilson's mental breakdown while working on the movie's version of Smile, the real-life album that broke Brian Wilson's spirit for a time.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three & Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Nick Schager, Hayden Childs

Screengrab's Favorite Movies About Music: Fiction Edition (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 20:30:00 GMT

ALMOST FAMOUS (2000)

Some people knock Cameron Crowe's fictionalized cinematic memoir for viewing the '70s through rose-colored granny glasses...but, hey, it IS told from the point-of-view of a very, very happy 15-year-old kid who not only gets to write for Rolling Stone, but also loses his virginity to a trio of sexy groupies! For me, the hero's starry-eyed wonder was the whole point: it's a rare movie that can honestly make me remember how exciting, innocent and mysterious life (and, for that matter, show biz) seemed before I became such a cranky old man. And I've always gotta give props to any Hollywood movie made with such heartfelt emotion, humanity and attention to detail...PLUS it’s got Philip Seymour Hoffman as cool-nerd Jedi Master Lester Bangs, Fairuza Balk in a well-deserved good role for a change, Kate Hudson (in her ONLY good role to date) as the embodiment of the Great Unattainable and Zooey Deschanel in a cool-ass stewardess uniform. It’s all happening!

THE COMMITMENTS (2001)

Alan Parker's once-a-decade good movie -- and now that I mention it, Alan, you're almost twenty years overdue for another one -- has a solid grounding in one of Roddy Doyle's exuberant novels about Irish life. Because Parker was able to get the milieu down right, he and his screenwriters -- Dick Clement, Ian La Frenais, and Doyle -- were able to fiddle with the book's cast of characters in order to accommodate the cast they assembled from the extensive audition process (for instance, changing the book's lead singer from a young George Michael type to a beefy lout after meeting Andrew Strong, a heavyset 16-year-old with a powerful voice) without losing its flavor. The cast also included Glen Hansard, who took to turning down subsequent offers of acting jobs so as not to distract from his music career, which would eventually yield its greatest success when he returned to the movies for 1996's Once.

GREENDALE (2003)

Neil Young has been dabbling with filmmaking since at least 1974's Journey Through the Past, but this companion piece to his album of the same name is his best work as a director. Like many artists who basically play around at making movies when they're taking a break from their real work, Young's work in film is amateurish, but the amateurism here is playful and lively, and it expands on the story and ideas of the ten-song cycle of the album, which is perfectly achieved but also a little cut and dried. The story involves three generations of Greens: Grandpa, who sits on the porch all day thinking sadly about how the world has gone to hell; his used-up son Earl, who winds up in a jail cell; and young Sun Green, who preaches rebellion and freaks out the military-industrial complex armed with a megaphone and some killer tats. Even after all the changes Young has been through, the hippie dream dies hard.

AMERICAN HOT WAX (1978)

When rock and roll was young and frisky, exploitation filmmakers threw together movies in which kids celebrated the new music with the help of actual music stars who stopped by to perform a number for a quick buck. This movie, directed by Floyd Mutrux, functions simultaneously as a parody of those movies and a fantasy of what it would have been like if someone had gotten one of them right. The terrific, late character actor Tim McIntire greased back his thinning hair and donned a succession of eye-abrasive sports coats to play the legendary disc jockey Alan Freed, who popularized rock and roll until he was destroyed in the payola scandal. (Freed himself was a mainstay of early rock movies, like Rock Around the Clock and Mr. Rock and Roll.) McIntire plays him as sweaty, medium-rung show business hustler who plays the role of Prometheus to the kids and comes to love it so much that he turns into a real hero in spite of himself. The cast also includes Laraine Newman as a character based on the young Carole King, the still-human Jay Leno and Fran Drescher, the child actor Moosie Drier as the head of the Buddy Holly Fan Club, and as themselves, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Screamin' Jay Hawkins, and Frankie Ford. The whole thing builds to the big rock show, where the forces of repression, horrified at the sight of interracial dancing in the aisles, orders the house lights turned on while Jerry Lee Lewis is onstage pumping out "Great Balls of Fire", inspiring the indignant Killer to complain, "Folks, it's mighty hard to do a rock and roll show with the lights on. Can't do it! Now, the police are over there doin' their job, Alan Freed's doin' his job, let Jerry Lee Lewis do his job and turn the damn lights off!" It is said that Abraham Lincoln sometimes reached comparable peaks of oratory, but there is no filmed record to confirm this.

PRIVILEGE (1967)

Filmmaker and media critic Peter Watkins trained his camera on rock'n'roll culture with the 1967 film Privilege, which examined the circus that sprung up around the (fictional) pop star Steven Shorter. Shorter is a worldwide musical phenomenon, and so rabid is his fan base that when Shorter stages a musical number in which he gets beaten and thrown into jail by police, an actual riot breaks out. In short, Steven's fans will follow him anywhere -- he endorses dozens of products Oprah-style, and when British farmers experience a surplus of apples, guess who they get for an advertising spot? As played by then-Manfred Mann lead singer Paul Jones (excellent in his big-screen debut), Shorter is a magnetic performer, but in the end, Watkins is more interested in him as a media commodity. The Steven Shorter we see in Privilege is less a three-dimensional person than a commodity, and indeed he seems to have little discernible personality when he's not onstage -- how ironic that Shorter's fans claim to love their idol "because he gives so freely of himself." In the end, Shorter is little more than a pure media image, as easily manipulated as any other, to the point where the establishment powers of the government and the Church of England can put Steven in front of a stadium full of fans and motivate them to chant "We will conform!" Privilege is the polar opposite of a rockin' good time -- it's a stark head trip in which even the most ruggedly individualistic of art forms can be co-opted and corrupted by the powers that be, and in which the populist media don't so much create stars as consume them and crap them back out when they're no longer needed.

Click Here For Part One, Three, Four & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Paul Clark

Screengrab’s Back-To-School Round-Up: The Top 18+ High School Films (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 20:00:00 GMT

There are two kinds of people in the world: the ones who despised high school and those who actually kinda liked it. Me, I was lucky...I was a geek, but nobody dumped pig’s blood on my head...I had zits but not a pizza face...I didn’t have many girlfriends, but as one of the straight guys in the drama club I did okay...and best of all, I grew up in a town where the rigid caste system of brains, jocks, preps, rebels and burnouts was loose enough for everyone to more or less party together, thanks to the magic of underage drinking and weed.

For some, of course, high school is a harrowing nightmare of alienation and rejection, a crucible that tests the soul (rather than simply a place of tests and The Crucible). But whether you experienced “Glory Days” or a “Teenage Wasteland” (or a little of both), the residue of adolescence is hard to shake: even retirement communities are rife with queen bees and wannabes, and the past three presidential elections (at least) have been structured as showdowns between smartypants teacher’s pets and “bad boys” promising awesome keggers while their parents are out of town.

So join us now as we skip fifth period gym class to bring you a very special tribute to readin’, writin’ and Ritalin: Screengrab + the Greatest High School Movies 4-eva!

REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE (1955)

Almost indisputably the ur-document of teenage cinema, Nicholas Ray's explosive Rebel without a Cause did it all: it made a huge star out of Natalie Wood, and turned James Dean into something even huger than that – an icon. It proved eerily predictive in its on-screen depiction of poor doomed Sal Mineo. It was made at the exact moment in American history when teenagers were making the transformation from an age category to a demographic, and it became the blueprint for a million movies about how parents just don't understand. It became such an essential part of the culture that it falls under that rare category of movies that you know back to front even if you haven’t seen them. Oh, and incidentally, it's a great movie, with electrifying performances by all three leads, and an often-neglected directing job by the masterful Nicholas Ray. Dean's Jim Stark is the archetype of angry, alienated teenagers, and so perfectly does he inhabit the role that it could fairly be said that pretty much every alienated teenager in film history – in fact, every alienated teenager in reality – is just a copy of him. Most of all, Rebel Without a Cause does something quite magical: while never breaking the tensely emotional shell in which it surrounds its characters, while making their emotions as real and weighty as our own, it manages to give the sensation and perspective utterly lacking from their lives, and the lives of every teenager who would ever watch them: that this too would pass, and that the problems that seemed like – and, indeed, were – matters of life and death during high school would seem weightless as a cloud from the perspective of adulthood.

CARRIE (1976)

There are those who think Brian De Palma is a genius and those who find his "operatic" style overwrought and often downright silly, and 99 times out of 100 you can put me in the latter camp. Yet there was at least one occasion when De Palma's hyper-melodramatic emotionalism perfectly matched the source material: Stephen King's seminal "revenge of the nerd" tale Carrie. In high school, after all, every little slight, snub, or misunderstanding feels like a matter of life and death, and our most embarrassing moments seem to go on for hours – at least for those of us who weren't born to be the quarterback or the prom queen. De Palma conveys that hormones-gone-mad sensibility as if he's undergone some kind of regression therapy, particularly in the movie's two most famous set-pieces. The opening, set in the girls' locker room, transitions from woozy wet dreamland to literal bloody terror without missing a beat, while the pigs-blood prom sequence holds every agonizing note of a symphony of mortification before giving way to Carrie's deadly (but undeniably cathartic) retribution. It's the ultimate high-school-as-horror movie – because when you're 16 or so, it's hard to think of six more terrifying words than "They're all gonna laugh at you."

FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH (1982)

This late-summer teen comedy was released into the teeth of critics who regarded it as a mall-filler and promotional device for the soundtrack album, a judgment that was probably shared by the studio that released it. It quickly rode to cult status on the strength of its genuine affection for its young characters and the gentle but incisive touch of director Amy Heckerling and her screenwriter, Cameron Crowe, as well as a sprawling, talented ensemble cast. At the time, it was seen as the movie that made Sean Penn a star, and his Jeff Spicoli -- Shaggy with a surfboard instead of a crime-solving dog and a Volkswagen Microbus with a well-toasted aroma -- remains a classic comic stoner archetype. Now, though, the movie looks like one of those pictures that in one sweep introduced a generation's worth of new faces, including Forest Whitaker (as the token black football player who one kid assumes they just chauffeur in for the games), Jennifer Jason Leigh, Phoebe Cates, Judge Reinhold, Eric Stoltz, Anthony Edwards, and, in a teensy feature debut, an actor with a long face and good family connections who for the first and only time in his career was billed "Nicolas Coppola." Heavy rotation on HBO proceeded to practically burn it into the DNA of '80s kids, who used their new VCRs to make a close study of Reinhold's masturbation fantasy of a topless Phoebe Cates emerging from the swimming pool, a sequence that made budding cineastes of many an appreciative young male.

HEATHERS (1989)

"Dear Diary," writes Ronnie Sawyer in her journal, in the goth-comedy that launched a thousand imitators, "my teen angst has a body count." That's as good a way as any to describe Heathers, the surprisingly subversive – and even more surprisingly successful – teen comedy that made a huge star of Winona Ryder (and threatened to do the same for Christian Slater, until he had the good taste to appear in several more movies so we could all see how ridiculous it was for him to go around claiming to be an actor). Ryder's character just wants to fit in with her high school's elite (the titular Heathers), but she's got a nasty independent streak and a Bud Cortish hobby of faking suicide, so it looks like she might be caught between her own desires and the intractable social demands of high school forever – until the dreamy Jason Dean shows up, determined to cut the Gordian knot of teen angst, no matter how many people he has to kill to do it. Heathers has plenty of problems, from its highly improbable plot to its pat ending to, well, basically everything involving Christian Slater; but the reason it grabbed us then is the reason it holds up now. It's an unsparing look at the ludicrously overblown and arbitrary pressures of high school social life, wrapped up in an extremely funny package courtesy of screenwriter Daniel Waters. It may not be as deep as it thinks it is, but it's got a nasty attitude and it's got tons of great lines, and once you're actually out of high school, and you realize life doesn't really depend on being cool, that's enough.

Click Here for Part Two, Part Three & Part Four

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

Video of the Day: Rusty's Learning to Listen Part 8

Paul Clark — Fri, 30 May 2008 19:30:00 GMT

You Elizabethtown fans out there may have noticed that in my review of the film earlier today that I failed to mention what may be the film’s best scene. This wasn’t an accident- I simply figured, why describe it when I could just as easily show it? That’s right, boys and girls. Here’s the full-length version of the educational video “Rusty’s Learning to Listen Part 8,” presented here through the magic of YouTube. Personally, I think it plays better in the context of the movie, but you can’t help but love how it more or less turns into the Cameron Crowe version of Zabriskie Point in the last minute. Enjoy!

When Good Directors Go Bad?: Elizabethtown (2005, Cameron Crowe)

Paul Clark — Fri, 30 May 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Note: For various reasons too boring to get into here, I was unable to secure a playable copy of the DVD for this week’s Reviews by Request in time to write a post. I’ll be running Jason Alley’s requested review of The New Kids next Friday at the regularly scheduled time. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Of all the paths to success taken by Hollywood’s major filmmakers, Cameron Crowe’s is one of the most interesting. Crowe’s 2000 film Almost Famous recounts the story of the teenage Crowe’s stint as a reporter for Rolling Stone, and after his time with the magazine he went undercover as a high school student in order to pen the screenplay for Fast Times at Ridgemont High. As a writer-director, he carved out a niche for his warm, humanistic films, which tend to make liberal use of impeccably-chosen rock’n’roll soundtracks. After the success of Almost Famous, Crowe decided to try something new, making the mindbending thriller Vanilla Sky. However, many critics and audience members were unamused, and although the film did well at the box office (largely due to the presence of Tom Cruise), it’s currently remembered as an interesting failure. After this strange trip outside his comfort zone, Elizabethtown was supposed to be a return for Crowe to the kind of movie he made better than anyone.

But then, a funny thing happened- the return to glory never happened. At its premiere in Toronto, Elizabethtown received buzz that was middling at best, hostile at worst. Crowe’s film- which made the festival circuit in a rough cut- was later shorn of twenty minutes, with the film’s original ending jettisoned completely. But the damage had already been done, as Elizabethtown, no matter what form it’s in, still hasn’t recovered from that initial drubbing. If Vanilla Sky was a strange experiment on Crowe’s part to branch out to a new format, Elizabethtown was treated as one too many trips to the same creative well. Suddenly, the style that had audiences had loved in Say Anything, Jerry Maguire, and Almost Famous wasn’t working anymore.

Yet I’m here not to bury Elizabethtown but to praise it. The film is far from perfect, but it’s hard to hate a movie that’s as unabashedly sincere as this one. Elizabethtown is a big shaggy dog of a movie, one that stumbles around and makes too much noise but which it’s not impossible not to love at least a little. It’s not remotely one of Crowe’s better films, but it’s much better than its reputation would suggest.

Admittedly, it took me more than one viewing of the film to come around to this realization. After one viewing of Elizabethtown, I wrote that the film displayed “all of Crowe’s worst tendencies as a writer-director- up-with-people soliloquies, an overreliance on classic rock to bear the story’s emotional load- with almost none of his previous works’ better qualities.” Yet while I still see the elements I objected to the first time around, I don’t object to them nearly as much now. Is it a case of lowered expectations? Perhaps. I wanted another film of the caliber of Almost Famous, and Elizabethtown didn’t deliver in that respect. But I think there's more to it than that.

One of my biggest objections the first time around was to what I termed Crowe’s “relentless humanism”- his need to inject joy and life-affirming sentiment into practically every corner of the story. On top of that, little details kept eating at me- the fact that a major American company wouldn’t have a contingency plan that would prevent them from taking a bath on a billion-dollar campaign, or that a woman with a job and a life would somehow find time to map out a days-long journey (complete with annotated maps and corresponding mix CDs) for a man she’d met only days before. Actually, the entire character of Claire (played by Kirsten Dunst) seemed pretty far-fetched to me, a Crowe fantasy girl much like Almost Famous’ Penny Lane, only bearing next to no relation to the real world.

Yet after further review it’s pretty clear that Crowe wasn’t striving for realism with Elizabethtown. True, there are no mythical beasties or far-flung settings to clue the audience in to the fact that liberal suspension of disbelief will be required, but I believe Crowe intends the film not as a naturalistic representation of the world, but as an emotional odyssey through his own sensibility. Crowe leads his protagonist Drew Baylor (Orlando Bloom) on a journey from the brink of death back into life, spurred on by the memory of his father and the dogged persistence of Claire. And if Claire isn’t particularly convincing as a fleshed-out character, she’s such an effective catalyst that she works in the context of this story.

And along the journey, Crowe supplies a number of lovely scenes that make the occasional rough patch that much easier to take. Listen to the human cacophony that buzzes around the home of Drew’s Aunt Dora (played by the Food Network’s Paula Deen)- a flurry of activity that stands in sharp rebuke to Drew’s solitary lifestyle. Observe the perfect little scene that takes place between Drew and his slacker cousin Jessie (Paul Schneider, giving the film’s best supporting performance), culminating in the line, “yeah, I don’t know my dad very well either.” And even Crowe’s omnipresent soundtrack works surprisingly well, especially during Drew’s climactic road trip. If some of the music choices feel too on-the-nose, that’s pretty much the point, and if you don’t like Elton John’s “My Father’s Gun,” then there’s really no hope left for you.

As I said before, Elizabethtown has a number of problems. For example, Bloom’s performance is inconsistent- though he does have some nice moments- and Crowe really should have toned down some of the voiceover narration and dialogue (“the deep beautiful melancholy of everything that’s happened”- I mean, really?). Yet the more cynical films I see, the more I’m inclined to forgive a filmmaker like Crowe who clearly pours his heart into a film. In Elizabethtown’s final voiceover, Drew quotes a slogan of the British Air Force: “those who risk, win.” Crowe takes some big chances in Elizabethtown, and even if they don’t all pay off, the film has won me over. In two tries, yes, but better late than never.

The Ten Greatest Mentors in Movie History, Part 2

Phil Nugent — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 20:30:00 GMT

Lester Bangs (Philip Seymour Hoffman), ALMOST FAMOUS (2000)

Cameron Crowe's semi-autobiographical film sticks made-up names on the teenage rock journalist at its center (i.e., Crowe's stand-in) and the rock band he has his big Life-Changing Experience while covering, but Crowe puts Bangs, the legendary editor of Creem, on-screen under his own name, and Hoffman incarnates every loving thing ever written or said about Bangs and makes it look easy. Part of the fascination of Almost Famous is that Crowe presents Bangs as the voice of hard-earned wisdom, and has him share that wisdom with his surrogate out of a spirit of pure generosity, yet the kid violates every rule that Bangs lays down for him, and the way the movie sees it, this all works out great for him. At the time, it must have seemed that this had worked out pretty great for Crowe; as a reporter, he really did cozy up to the rock stars he covered and wrote flatteringly about them (out of what seemed to be real awe for his subjects, rather than opportunism), and the connections he forged couldn't have done him any harm on his path to becoming a big Hollywood writer-director. But resisting Bangs's advice that he learn to temper his sweet enthusiasm with some distance and skepticism--to care more about his art than about others' feelings--he may have done some harm to his ability to extend his range as a filmmaker. In fact, after Crowe's last couple of movies, and the last couple of anthologies with Bangs's material in them, Bangs's career is probably the healthier one now, and he's been dead since 1982.

Howard (Walter Huston), THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE (1948)

Howard, the ancient prospector (and proto-ecologist--witness his speech about leaving the Earth "the way we found it"), suggests Yoda crossed with Gabby Hayes, and may be the platonic ideal of the figure of the Western codger who sometimes seems half-mad but has great stores of wiliness and gumption. Drafted by a couple of tenderfeet to bring his experience to a gold-mining venture, he makes his pupils rich, while adhering to the rule that defines so many movie mentor figures: namely, his sage advice does him more good than the people to whom he offers it. When last seen, the old man is preparing to return to the Indian village where he can live out his golden years receiving the royal treatment in exchange for serving as the locals' "medicine man." Bogart's Fred C. Dobbs, the malcontent who scorns fair treatment for his mentor, makes his fortune but gets his lead lopped off before he can haul it back to civilization, while Tim Holt, who treats Howard with the respect that is his due, stays alive but loses his riches and has no recourse but to go back to being Tim Holt.

"Subway Ghost" (Vincent Schiavelli), GHOST (1990(

Lanky at six feet four, with a thick shock of untamed dark hair surrounding a bald pate and a long face like melted ice cream, Schiavelli (who died in 2005) was often cast for the shock effect of his appearance, whether he was playing an asylum inmate in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest or a high school teacher in Fast Times at Ridgemont High (where the news that he has a hot-looking wife is good for a laugh). His role as a nameless and very touching spectre in Ghost gave him the chance to play an uncharacteristically direct and fiery character, and he rose to the occasion so fully that, for a few scenes, he actually brought something wholly unearthly to a movie that's mostly about comforting the audience by showing it that death is just another stage of life. Schiavelli seems to know different: being stranded among the living has turned him into the most alienated figure imaginable, and after he's consented to help the hero master his abilities, he abruptly takes his leave, as if he'd just remembered that the movie he's in is meant for those who are sweeter-natured than he has any interest in being.

John (Bruce Dern), THE TRIP (1967)

Never slow to jump on a trend, Roger Corman was first out of the gate when the LSD craze hit in the late 60s, casting Peter Fonda as TV commercial director Paul Groves, a straight-arrow type who decides to take an acid trip as a means of dealing with his pending divorce. Even for a novice like Groves, certain ground rules should be self-evident, the primary one being: when tripping for the first time, you do not want Bruce Dern to be your guide. This is like buying the parenting manual by Lynne "mother of Britney and Jamie Lynn" Spears. Nonetheless, Groves agrees to take the drug under the supervision of Dern's unnerving weird-beard character John, and off we go into the lava lamp school of druggy filmmaking — pretty colors and shapes, strobe lights and colored gels. At this point, your more responsible LSD guide would put on some trippy tunes and maybe show you some groovy album covers, but John just sort of snivels and grins and makes Groves feel even more nervous and paranoid with his "hey, it's just a normal ol' chair, buddy" routine. It's even possible that Corman meant John to be a comforting presence, but happened to be out shooting second unit footage for The Navy vs. the Night Monsters the day the casting director learned Dern was willing to work for a sleeping bag and a couple of tuna fish sandwiches. Anyway, Groves' trip takes a turn for the worse when he convinces himself he's killed his creepy guide and, panicked, races out into the Hollywood night. Then he proves to be an even worse judge of character than we'd previously suspected when, at the height of his freaked-out paranoia, he turns to Dennis Hopper for solace. Just say no, kids.

Bud (Harry Dean Stanton), REPO MAN (1984)

"Not many people got a code to live by anymore," says Bud, the veteran repo man embodied in all his shambling, world-weary glory by Harry Dean Stanton, who schools our young anti-hero Otto in the tricks of the trade. Bud does have a code, though, and in a movie that ranks among the most quotable of the last three decades, he is a veritable font of direct and concise street-level wisdom. In other words, fuck Yoda. Here are the five elements of the Repo Code we've chosen to live by, and we learned them all from Bud.

5. I don't want no commies in my car. No Christians either.

4. It helps if you dress like a detective. Detectives dress kinda square. If you look like a detective people are gonna think you're packing something.

3. Look at 'em – ordinary fucking people, I hate 'em. An ordinary person spends his life avoiding tense situations. A repo man spends his life getting into tense situations.

2. Only an asshole gets killed for a car.

1. Repo man's got all night, every night.

--Phil Nugent; Scott Von Doviak

Click here for Part 1.

The Ten Best Deleted Scenes of All Time, Part 1

Peter Smith — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 21:00:00 GMT

"STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN," ALMOST FAMOUS

Depending on your feelings about Cameron Crowe, this is either the ballsiest or the most pretentious deleted scene ever released on DVD. Either way, Almost Famous would have been ten minutes and eleven seconds longer if Crowe had secured the rights to "Stairway to Heaven," which plays over this scene in its entirety. Here's the set-up: it's the early '70s, and high-school music critic William Miller (Patrick Fugit) has been offered the opportunity to accompany his favorite rock band on tour, but his mother (Frances McDormand) believes that rock n' roll is the devil's music. In order to convince her otherwise, William sits his family down and makes them listen to "Stairway." And they listen. And we listen. And we watch them listen. For eight minutes. The most amazing thing about this scene is that it works : it's a battle between William's youthful enthusiasm and his mother's skepticism, played out in facial expressions and body language. When McDormand's character reaches her decision, it's perfectly clear how she got there.

THE SPIDERWALK, THE EXORCIST

For all its grotesque make-up, bodily fluids and levitation effects, The Exorcist gets the most scare mileage from scenes in which possessed adolescent Regan (Linda Blair) does something that almost seems human — but is, in fact, frightening and impossible. The scene in which her head turns completely around is a bone-chilling example. This infamous deleted scene, achieved with the aid of a contortionist body double and suspension wires, is another. Director William Friedkin cut the spider walk from the theatrical release of The Exorcist, believing that it showed "too much" too soon. It later became the most talked-about inclusion in the director's cut, and it ranks among the film's most notable scenes for sheer creepiness.

THE RECORD-SELLING SCENE, HIGH FIDELITY

For record store clerk/owner Rob Gordon (John Cusack), romantic passion and musical passion are completely intertwined. If he were to lose faith in either one, life would not be worth living. That sentiment is perfectly encapsulated in this deleted scene from High Fidelity, in which a jilted wife (Beverly D'Angelo) attempts to sell Rob her husband's priceless record collection at an obscene discount. Most collectors would pounce on the deal, but Rob is thrown into a moral quandary — almost as if he's afraid of hurting the records' feelings. In addition to its endearing portrait of Rob's unique personal ethics, this scene forshadows his pivotal realization later in the film: that he actually kind of loves the job he spends his life bitching about.

THE PHONE CALL HOME, BIG

The '80s were a decade of body-switching comedies, but Penny Marshall's Big was a cut above the rest. Twenty years later, it's still fresh, believable and funny, mostly because Marshall eschews bloated gags and focuses on the small, day-to-day difficulties of being a child in a middle-aged world. There's a dark edge to the film's best moments, which inevitably emerge from Josh's fear, bewilderment and naiveté. This deleted scene takes place after Josh (Hanks) has received his first adult paycheck ("One hundred and twenty dollars!" he exclaims, having never seen that much money before) and spent it gorging on junk food. Up all night with a stomachache, the only thing Josh can think to do is call his mother — who, of course, doesn't recognize his post-puberty voice. The newly released extended version of Big includes this scene, and it's a moving counterpoint to the giddy junk-food-and-silly-string orgy that precedes it.

"MERCY" (THE LAIR SCENE), ALIEN

This gut-wrenching scene, cut from the theatrical release of Alien, contains a startling revelation: with the exception of John Hurt's character (whose chest was memorably split open), none of the alien's victims are dead. Instead, Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) discovers the half-alive bodies of her friends being devoured, slowly and painfully, by the alien's offspring. In addition to being a great scene for Weaver — you can see her humanity leaking away as she aims that flamethrower — it's one of the more horrifying visuals that the filmmakers created, and it contains a stunning H. R. Giger set piece that didn't make it into the theatrical version.

— Gwynne Watkins

Check back tomorrow for Part 2!