The Screengrab : carrie

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 28 May 2009 20:00:00 GMT

So, in case you somehow missed the news, our beloved little blog will be ending at the end of the month, meaning THIS (sniff...sniff...) will be the very LAST of Screengrab’s Thursday lists.

Yet, in the classic words of Supersonic (heavy-rotationed into my very DNA by the good people of alternative radio), “every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end,” which means that while this blog will be pushing up daisies soon, you’ll still be able to get your fix of the Screengrab All-Stars at our new blog, Screengrab-In-Exile, featuring new (if somewhat less frequent) writing and links to writing from the usual gang of idiots...we may even pop up from time to time hereabouts writing for Nerve.com. Meanwhile, all your favorite Screengrab posts will be preserved in amber for future generations at www.thescreengrab.com (and stay tuned for the end of today’s list for links to all our individual websites).

Anyway, I have to say I’ll miss the ol’ place, and I’ve really enjoyed organizing and contributing to these lists. Heck, I’ll even miss getting called a douche by anonymous internet hecklers.

But all good things must come to an end, so once more for auld lang syne, let’s fade out together with THE BEST & WORST ENDINGS OF ALL TIME!!!!!!

DR. STRANGELOVE (1964)

Last week we saluted Slim Pickens’ whooping death trip aboard a nuclear bomb, but of course, that was only the beginning of the end of Dr. Strangelove. There’s no pie fight as Stanley Kubrick had originally planned, but we do get to see the great minds of the War Room contemplating the bright side of nuclear annihilation (10 women for every man!), the continuation of Cold War tension through the end of the world and beyond, and of course, the song we hope will be playing in your head as the Screengrab fades to black: We’ll meet again…don’t know where, don’t know when... (SVD)

THE PASSENGER (1975)

Michelangelo Antonioni’s ennui-drenched cinema reached something of an apex with The Passenger, the tale of a reporter (Jack Nicholson) who, while in Africa on assignment, assumes a dead stranger’s identity to escape the soul-crushing disaffection of his own life. It’s a beguiling pseudo-noir that culminates with one of cinema’s most awe-inspiring shots, a 7-minute single take – in which the camera magically passes through a room’s iron-barred window and then rotates 180-degrees – that expresses the film’s faith-and-philosophy-tinged portrait of the folly of dreaming about escape. (NS)

CARRIE (1976)

The shock ending of Brian De Palma's horror classic provides a hint as to how De Palma got the reputation in some quarters as a rip-off artist: it's a direct steal from the ending of John Boorman's Deliverance, from just four years earlier. But it's also a clear indicator of how De Palma, in the quarters that matter, earned the reputation of a master director: his execution smokes Boorman, whose scene was a bit of a botch. By contrast, De Palma's makes audiences jump as high as anyone has ever managed without installing ejector seats in the theater. (PN)

RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK (1981)

Just a quick word to acknowledge how clever Spielberg was to have the Ark of the Covenant, the holiest of holies, the subject of all of this strife and death, crated and boxed away in an anonymous government warehouse, presumably one of thousands of forgotten treasures. That's a wry sense of humor there. (HC)

CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON (2000)

The best movie endings are the ones that come at great cost, the ones that make us feel that we’ve lived with these characters and that their eventual fate, whatever it is, has been earned. The greatest recent example of this is Ang Lee’s wuxia masterpiece, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. After a truly epic sequence of events, changes of scenery and direction, life, death, moral redirection, and any number of other twists and turns, the young lovers Jen and Lo, hiding out at the Wudan temple, fondly recall their time together in the forbidding, barbaric deserts, where their love had first blossomed. “Make a wish, Lo,” says Jen, in one of the most perfect deliveries of a movie line in modern memory; “I wish that we’ll be in the desert together again,” he replies. Jen then silently hurls herself off the edge of the temple, into the clouds below, suspended first and then flying, calling back to a legend they’d discussed during their desert idyll as Tan Dun’s majestic, gorgeous music plays us to the credits. It’s one of the most romantic endings imaginable, and guaranteed to raise a lump in the throat of all but the coldest viewer – a scene that’s truly earned. (LP)

25TH HOUR (2002)

For most of Spike Lee’s 25th Hour, Monty Brogan (played by Edward Norton) is shown coming to grips with his upcoming incarceration -- saying goodbye to his loved ones, trying to determine who sold him up the river, even asking his best friends to beat the snot out of him so he won’t look like an easy target for prison rape. But just when Monty has more or less accepted his fate, the morning he’s scheduled to make the trip up to prison, his dad James (Brian Cox) meets him for the trip with an alternative -- to escape and start a new life. Over the next ten minutes, James paints a beautiful picture of this way out -- go West, find a little town in the desert, get a new identity, and so on -- and with Terence Blanchard’s elegiac score playing behind him, the plan is as tempting as it is far-fetched. But there’s a steep price for this escape, as Monty could never return to his old life. And so, the central theme of the movie snaps sharply into focus -- the choices we all must make in life. James is prepared for the possibility of never seeing his son again as long as he knows he’ll be okay, but is Monty ready to give up everything he knows for freedom? As we see him passing all those New Yorkers he once railed against, now smiling at him and seeing him off, we wonder if he can sacrifice his past to save his future. And just when he’s come to the end of his imagined life, all of a sudden he snaps back to his real one, back in the car on the road to destiny, and Lee’s camera lingers once again on Norton’s face. The choice is yours, Monty. (PC)

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Nick Schager, Phil Nugent, Hayden Childs, Paul Clark, Leonard Pierce

Screengrab Presents: The 25 Greatest Horror Films of All Time (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 21:00:00 GMT

15. THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT (1999)

Yes, I know you never actually see the witch. Yes, my wife and my father and countless other people got motion sickness from all the whip-pan video camera shots, and many others felt ripped off when the scariest thing in the much-hyped “new horror classic” was a bundle of sticks. And, true, the sequel was a jaw-dropping fiasco. And yet, I defend The Blair Witch Project on many levels. First, it did its job and creeped the bejesus outta me. Now, maybe that’s because I grew up (and later got stoned) in the dark woods of New England, where we used to actually burn witches, and so I’m the ideal audience for a flick about the paranoid possibilities of a forest at night. I also saw the movie on the big screen, after watching the brilliant small screen promotional faux-documentary Curse of the Blair Witch, so I was up-to-speed on all the Elly Kedward/Rustin Parr mythology and ready to be seduced by the film's tone of ominous forboding (rather than waiting to be impressed by gory special effects or whatever the haters didn’t find in the film). Plus, directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez turned a $22,000 budget into a $200 million dollar indie smash and then disappeared without a trace, kinda like the actors from the movie...so maybe there really is a curse.

14. CARRIE (1976)

Brian De Palma's purest and best horror movie is also the most potent of the horror genre's many essays on just how close high school is to hell on Earth. Sissy Spacek, at 26, turns in a phenomenal performance as the outcast who has to contend with mean girls at school and a mean mother of a Jesus freak (Piper Laurie) at home. Given the chance to shine for the first time in her life, she winds up onstage dripping with pig's blood in front of her jeering adolescent tormentors, who don't know that she's telekinetic and is about to stick the local tacky-jewelry manufacturer with a whole lot of unclaimed class ring. If you can watch the ensuing carnage without rooting for her, you must have been a cheerleader.

13. AUDITION (1999)

Ringu, a.k.a. The Ring, kicked off an American hunger for the weird eyes and dark, stringy hair of the ghosts of Japanese horror, but even more scary than a ghoul that crawls out of your TV set (a highly frightening but fairly uncommon occurrence) is an actual living woman who wants to do terrible, terrible things to you with needles. Sure, Sadako’s victims in The Ring may have a bad week and die, but the victims of shy, pretty, bat-shit crazy Asami Yamazaki (Eihi Shiina) wind up with no feet or tongue in a burlap sack for a much longer time. And then die. What makes the film even more disturbing is that it starts out like a carefree romantic comedy, until suddenly...not so much, kinda like Sleepless In Seattle with torture.

12. THE EVIL DEAD (1981)

Shot in the woods of Tennessee over the course of almost a year and half on a budget of less than $400,000, and slowly released to the public over an even longer span of time, Sam Raimi's gore-drenched take on the lost-out-here-in-the-middle-of-nowhere-with-weird-shit-going-on genre looks like the work of some enthusiastic kids who'd stayed up late watching junk like Equinox on TV and went a little crazy making their own home-movie version of it -- except that these kids had talent, as well as the rare determination to see their little art therapy project/get rich quick scheme through to the end. Some connoisseurs see this early, primitive effort as just a stepping-stone to the slapstick wonders of the openly parodic Evil Dead II, but the raw energy of this thing, which is often funny and just as often genuinely scary, is a testament to how well primitivism can work in the horror genre.

11. INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1978)

Jack Finney’s classic novel of (literal) social alienation was first brought to the screen in 1956, and since then it’s been officially remade three times (not counting rip-offs and “homages"). And, while the original Don Siegel adaptation has its rightful defenders, I’ve always been partial to the 1978 version starring Jeff Goldblum, Brooke Adams, Veronica Cartwright, Leonard Nimoy and, of course, the incomparable Donald Sutherland. Naturally, I’m biased: I saw this version on the big screen at an impressionable age, and it was the first movie I’d ever experienced where the good guys didn’t win...making me wonder if I could really trust the other people in the theater with me (or even my parents) and giving me an early taste of the existential angst I would become a lot more familiar with in my adolescent and adult life. Best of all, the movie inspired a game in my neighborhood where one pod person would go around infecting everyone else until there was only one “human” left. Trust me, you don’t know terror until you’re the last survivor on your street, waiting for the end as a dozen weirdly screaming pre-teen aliens slowly surround your hiding place.

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

Contributors: Andrew Unborn; The Vengeful Ghost of Phil Nugent

Introducing the Screengrab 24-Hour Stephen King Marathon

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 19:30:00 GMT

As a special Halloween treat for Screengrab readers, I will be prying my eyelids open Clockwork Orange-style for a 24-hour marathon of movies based on the works of Stephen King. Because I have not completely lost my mind, these 24 hours will not necessarily be consecutive. I’ll be stringing them out all week, with each entry covering roughly six hours worth of possessed cars, killer dogs and corn-worshipping children. (However, once I’ve completed the task and reported my findings here, feel free to conduct your own 24-hour-straight experiment. I did this once before for my book Hick Flicks, watching 24 consecutive hours of hillbilly horror movies – including all four chapters of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre saga then in existence. About 18 hours into it, my dog was begging for mercy and I had to switch to the Golf Channel for a few minutes to decompress.)

I’ve set a few ground rules for this descent into the depths of cinematic terror. First of all, the roster must include only horror movies. No prison flicks or coming-of-age stories or whatever the hell Hearts in Atlantis is. This is a Halloween special, after all, so I need giant rats and werewolves and shit like that. Secondly, I eliminated any movie I’m very familiar with – The Shining, Carrie and Stand by Me, to cite the most obvious examples – as well as anything I’d seen in the past decade or so. That includes recent fare like The Mist, 1408 and Dreamcatcher, as well as the movies I watched for this High Hat piece on the state of Maine as depicted in King’s works. I didn’t want to be able to cheat and go by memory – although it’s not like any of you would really know if I did, anyway. Still, the integrity of the process must not be compromised, and since there are so many King movies out there, it wasn’t hard to limit myself to stuff I’ve either never seen or saw so long ago, I barely remember.

With all that being said, tune in tomorrow for Part One of the Screengrab 24-Hour Stephen King Marathon!

DVD Digest for October 7, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 14:00:00 GMT

It’s a massive week for classic films, and a surprisingly good one for new releases too, once you get past the big Hollywood titles…

DVD of the Week: There was no small amount of competition for this spot, not merely because of the jaw-dropping number of classic titles being release but also due to one of TV’s best sitcoms seeing its most recent season bow on DVD store shelves. But with all the great stuff that’s hitting stores this week, to my eyes there was only one logical choice- Universal’s Touch of Evil 50th Anniversary Edition. It would be one thing if this DVD was simply a cash-in, a new pressing of the previously released 1998 cut of the film. But joining the “restored” version of the film are both the original theatrical cut and an additional “preview version”, both of which are being released on DVD for the first time. In addition, there are plenty of extras both old and new, including commentary tracks to correspond with each of the three available versions of the movie. What more could a Touch of Evil fan ask for? How about a reproduction of the legendary Orson Welles memo that led to the 1998 restoration? Yep, that’s in here too. I don’t normally double-dip my DVDs, but I’m definitely going to make the upgrade this time.

But wait, there’s more! Disney is releasing a 2-disc “Platinum Edition” of their 1959 classic Sleeping Beauty, packed with plenty of extras for both family audiences and animation buffs. Criterion is releasing two more films from the French master of crime dramas, Jean-Pierre Melville- Le Doulos (starring Jean-Paul Belmondo) and Le Deuxieme Souffle (with Lino Ventura). There are new 2-disc special editions of three of Hitchcock’s most iconic classics- Psycho, Rear Window, and Vertigo (all Universal). And Ray Harryhausen is representin’ here too, with a new DVD of The 7th Voyage of Sinbad 50th Anniversary Edition (Sony, also Blu-Ray), plus the Ray Harryhausen Giftset (Sony, also Blu-Ray), which includes previously-released editions of 20 Million Miles to Earth, It Came From Beneath the Sea, and Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, plus collectible Ymir figurine.

Also, like musicals? Then pick up Fox’s The Alice Faye Collection Volume 2, which contains Hollywood Cavalcade, The Great American Broadcast, Four Jills in a Jeep, Rose of Washington Square, and Hello, Frisco, Hello (also available separately). And with the winter months coming sooner than you’d think, you can start traveling in the comfort of your own home with The Michael Palin Collection (Warner), which collects the amiable Python’s adventures Around the World in 80 Days, Pole to Pole, Full Circle, Hemingway Adventure, Great Railways Journeys, Sahara and Himalaya into one handy box set. Finally, Warner is releasing two very different classic titles, The Picture of Dorian Gray and the Watership Down Deluxe Edition. So yeah, something for everyone.

But wait, there’s more! Two of my favorite films from the first half of 2008 are hitting the streets today- Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park (Genius Productions) and Stuart Gordon’s Stuck (Image Entertainment). And two other acclaimed indies are getting released as well, The Visitor (Anchor Bay, also Blu-Ray) starring Screengrab fave Richard Jenkins, and Boy A (Genius Productions). And, oh yeah… The Happening (Fox, also Blu-Ray) and You Don’t Mess With the Zohan (Sony, also Blu-Ray). Although I’m not sure I want to know anybody who’d buy these instead of any of the aforementioned classics.

This week’s TV on DVD release is 30 Rock Season 2 (Universal), which finds Liz, Jack, Tracy, Kenneth the Page, and the rest of the TGS gang taking a trip to MILF Island, among other misadventures. Also this week: Brotherhood Season 2 (Paramount), How I Met Your Mother Season 3 (Fox), and The Simpsons Season 11 (Fox).

Finally, this week’s Halloween-heavy Blu-Ray only releases include: The Amityville Horror (MGM), Beetlejuice 20th Anniversary Deluxe Edition (Warner), Body Heat (Warner), Young Frankenstein (Fox), Carrie (MGM), and Otis (Warner). No word on whether Carré Otis is somehow involved.

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

OST: "Psycho"

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 20:30:00 GMT

Bernard Herrmann was one of the most legendary film composers of all time. One of his first major compositions was the score to The Devil and Daniel Webster, in which he showed both his innovative approach and his playfully subversive nature by by double-tracking a violin to play a jaw-droppingly complex rendition of "Pop Goes the Weasel", and then claiming the solo was the work of a teenaged violin prodigy he'd discovered. He composed a number of memorable movie scores over the years, from the towering, epic sweep of Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (his very first project) to the moody, dark tension of Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (his very last). But it is with Alfred Hitchcock's name that Herrmann's will be foreever linked.

Hitchcock knew he was playing with dynamite when he made Psycho. The movie that buried noir and ushered in the age of the maniacal slasher was a risky venture for him on many levels: with its shocking violence, infamous mid-film twist, and horror plot, it was a massive deviation from the big-budget hit mysteries that had made so much money for his studio bosses in the late 1950s. Fearing disaster, Hitch -- who was nothing if not determined -- tried as much as possible to make the film on the cheap, and he wasn't afraid to capitalize on personal relationships to do so. Some stories have it that he strong-armed Herrmann, who had turned in incredibly monumental work for him before on such movies as The Man Who Knew Too Much, North by Northwest, and Vertigo; but Herrmann wasn't one to be cowed so easily. He agreed to work on the soundtrack for Psycho at less than his normal pay, but Herrmann -- a rarity amongst film composers insofar as he retained near-total creative control over the final product of his labors -- made it clear he was going to do things his way. Most famously, he ignored Hitchcock's foremost prerogative when writing the score: the director insisted that, for maximum shock value, there be total silence on the soundtrack during the murders, most especially the infamous shower scene.

Luckily for generations of moviegoers, Bernard Herrmann chose to completely disregard this directive, and, when Hitchcock raised a stink, Herrmann insisted that he view the scene with the music he'd written intact. If Hitchcock didn't agree that the music improved the scene instead of distracting from it, then he'd relent. Hitchcock agreed, and, as has been every one of the tens of millions who have seen Psycho since then, he was blown away by how perfect was the juxtaposition of music and visuals. Since then, it's become one of the true classics in the history of movie scoring; Herrmann's brilliant decision to use only the string section of his orchestra for the music, with the only low-end being provided by bass and cello, was inspired and set the standard for high-pitched, shrieking instrumentation as the default for horror films. It also spawned hosts of imitators and 'tributes' over the years (and none proved more determined than Brian De Palma, who, mirroring his own obsession with Hitchcock, used subtle variants of the music in both Carrie and Dressed to Kill). Very few soundtracks in motion picture history so reflect the personality of their creator than does Bernard Herrmann's work -- unnerving, brilliant, raw, and determined -- than does Psycho.

BEST TRACKS: It's impossible to even discuss Psycho -- the movie or the soundtrack -- without discussing the music from the notorious shower scene. (It's called "The Murder", by the way.) As other critics have mentioned, it's almost unfair to call it a piece of music; it's just the sound made by every string section in every orchestra in the world as they warm up. And yet by placing it in context, Herrmann transforms this ordinary sound into one of the most chilling pieces of music in history, and sets the tone for hundreds, maybe thousands, of future citematic murders. Not bad for a piece of music that's barely a minute long; and it's even more astonishing when you consider that, on an album of dozens of short pieces, it virtually defines the score's less-is-more aesthetic by being one of the longer pieces on the album! Still, this wouldn't be one of the greatest film scores of all time if it was simply one minute-long piece of genius; there's much more to love here, including the memorable title track ("Prelude", in which eerie swirls of strings leap and tangle with one another over the unforgettable Saul Bass title sequence), which is so well-loved that Stuart Gordon lifted it wholesale for the opening to Re-Animator. Other strong tracks include the tragic, melancholy "The Body"; the creepy, tense "Cabin 10", and the wailing, cacaphonous avant-gardeism of "The Cellar". A must-have score from a movie where almost all participants were at the tops of their games.

Take Five: Psychics

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 19:15:00 GMT

Death Defying Acts opens in limited release this weekend, and so far, it hasn't generated much advance buzz. It's hard to figure out why: It comes on the heels of other successful movies involving magicians, including The Prestige and The Illusionist; it's a romance-driven period piece (which should attract women), but it features a murder mystery, psychics, and famed escape artist Harry Houdini (for the fellas); it's got an all-star cast led by perennial heartthrobs Guy Pearce and Catherine Zeta-Jones; and it's directed by none other than girl-geek icon Gillian Anderson. Maybe people are confused by the premise: in Death Defying Acts features Zeta-Jones as a spiritualist out to run a con on the master magician. We haven't seen it yet, so we're not sure if Zeta-Jones' powers are portrayed as being authentic, but in real life, Houdini was a relentless skeptic who didn't believe in any aspect of the paranormal, and who, in fact, went out of his way to disprove all claims of the supernatural as buncombe. Regardless, Hollywood has always been a sucker for a good psychic yarn, which probably explains why goofy New Age religions tend to take root in southern California before hitting the rest of the country. For today's Take Five, we bring you a handful of fine films about psychics -- and not a single one starring Shirley MacLaine.

THE SHINING (1980)

Nobody does psychic powers like Stephen King, and nobody realizes those psychic powers on screen better than Stanley Kubrick does in this horror classic. One of the most effective ideas Kubrick had was to de-emphasize Danny's psychic abilities, to tone down the paranormal aspects of the story (such as the hedge topiary coming to life) in order to play up the much more compelling dramatic element of a family in isolation slowly falling apart. Not that the terrifying paranormal elements aren't there: few moments in contemporary horror are creepier than seeing Danny go into a drooling fit, or the bizarre images he sees in the abandoned rooms of the Outlook Hotel -- but by keeping them ambiguous, by allowing the suggestion that none of it is real, that it's all just possibly the byproduct of an epileptic vision or a mind damaged by loneliness and alcohol -- the whole thing is made more compelling and upsetting than if the paranormal elements were made explicit.

SCANNERS (1981)

There's nothing subtle or ambiguous, on the other hand, about David Cronenberg's early sci-fi terror masterpiece. Before his transition to an artist of the decay and dysfunction of the body in modern classics like The Fly, Cronenberg's obsession was the abuse and alteration of the mind -- and as he showed in movies like Altered States, The Brood and Videodrome, an unhinged mind could do a vast amount of damage. Nowhere is this given a sharper point than in his cult classic Scanners, which works pretty much like HIghlander except with exploding heads instead of sword decapitations. As shadowy corporations struggle to control the massive psionic powers of a handful of people, we witness the battle firsthand through the activities of a highly game cast which includes mopey Stephen Lack, sinister Michael Ironside, and hammy Patrick McGoohan. Scanners also features one of our favorite taglines ever: "There are four billion people on Earth. 237 are scanners. And they are winning." Choice!

THE FURY (1978)

After having wet his beak in the unhinged-psychic game with a now-legendary film adaptation of Stephen King's Carrie (see, there's king again), Brian De Palma warmed to the subject and cranked out a modest but highly energetic (and entertaining) teen-psychics-in-trouble picture called The Fury. Featuring Amy Irving and Andrew Stevens as the two fresh-faced kids who have to worry about blowing up a city block instead of needing to pick up some Clearasil, the plot revolves around their being sent to a government research lab where their overseers must walk a thin line between making sure their prize specimens don't get away and make them happy enough that they don't turn their considerable powers on their masters. Playing almost like a trial run of some of David Cronenberg's laer stuff, The Fury is bounding with energy (and not just of the psychic variety), and its B-movie plot is highly abetted by the top-notch cast, including a wildly overaheated Kirk Douglas as Stevens' father and a gravely understated John Cassavetes as one of the government flunkies.

AKIRA (1988)

As any teenager -- including the ones on this list -- can tell you, being young is no picnic. Your body starts to change, girls don't like you and you can't figure out why, you start feeling sick and alienated for no reason, and before you know it, you're hanging out with a bunch of nogoodniks in a biker gang. But if you start to develop horrific psychic powers, ones that can kill your friends, turn you into a grotesque monster, and even level the entire city of Toyko with the power of a nuclear bomb? Well, that, brother, as a very wise man once said, is when your heartaches really begin. Katsuhiro Otomo's groundbreaking animated feature, based on his own graphic novel series, featured stellar animation, top-shelf voice acting, creepy effects, a complex but not incomprehensible storyline (it turns out, to no one's real surprise, that a nefarious military intelligence project is behind poor Akira's transformation into a psionic monstrosity), and some great effects at the movie's unforgettable end all helped open up western markets to both anime and manga, transforming the world of comics and film forever.

INVINCIBLE (2001)

Anyone can make a movie about deranged psychics who threaten the lives of their loved ones. Leave it to Werner Herzog to up the ante by making a movie about a deranged psychic in the employ of the Nazi party who enlists a Jewish strongman to help him put on a carnival show about Siegfried, the legendary Aryan hero of myth. It's this kind of intensely focussed eccentricity, and reckless disregard for making sense, that seperates the men like Herzog from the boys. This was Herzog's first narrative feature after a prolonged stretch of making documentaries, and while it's not nearly in the same league as movies like Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre: The Wrath of God, it's still got his knack for breathtaking imagery and his gift for illustrating the mad inner lives of obsessives in spades. The psychic in question in Invincible is Erik Jan Hanussen, the doomed faux-Dane who, for a while, operated as Hitler's personal clairvoyant until falling out of favor with Der Fuhrer's inner circle and getting himself assassinated. His story is also told in the relatively straightforward biopic Hanussen (1988), but that movie can't compete with Tim Roth's giddy performance or Herzog's fiery direction.

Diablo Cody Unwraps “Jennifer’s Body”

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 21 May 2008 15:30:00 GMT

If you listen closely, you can hear the sound of knives sharpening in anticipation of Diablo Cody’s screenwriting follow-up to Juno, the horror comedy Jennifer’s Body. A backlash is inevitable – really, it started almost simultaneously with the initial Juno hype, but it’s usually the sophomore effort that really takes it in the shins. If Cody is concerned, there’s not much evidence of it in the recent interviews she’s done to promote the film, which just wrapped shooting in Vancouver.

“I guess I was trying to think of something that was legitimately scary to me as opposed to a marketable horror idea,” Cody told The Province, which describes Jennifer’s Body as “another story about verbal teens -- bookish Needy (Amanda Seyfried) is horrified when a satanic rite turns best pal Jennifer (Megan Fox) into a ravenous man-killer.” Hey, we’ve already had a mumblecore horror movie, so why not one full of snappy, smart-alecky banter?

“All I could think of was girls -- teenaged women are terrifying,” says Cody. “They can be really frightening, really ruthless and irrational -- and evil. So I thought maybe I could literally make a teenaged girl a bogeyman in the classic sense.” Sounds a little Carrie to us, and indeed Cody makes that comparison herself in another interview with Fearnet, also citing The Virgin Suicides, Suspiria and Just One of the Guys, among others. “This is a horror movie--not to sound like a complete pretentious douche bag--but it is a horror movie made by filmmakers and made by people who genuinely care about film. [Director] Karyn [Kusama] was a total horror geek. I’m a horror geek. The producers are into this stuff. This was not a mercenary effort to make something that seemed like it was kind of profile. We wanted to make a horror movie, and we are extremely respectful of the great films that came before us. I think that people will see that in the finished product.”

Jennifer’s Body isn’t scheduled for release until next year. That should give us plenty of time to get these knives nice and sharp.

Screengrab Bets the Oscars: Phil's Picks

Phil Nugent — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Let's make sure we're on the same page on this: if you bet money, household chores, or bragging rights on anything you're about to read in this post, you are out of your mind, and while I pity you, I will not admit in a court of law to ever having met you. I got off the Oscar train when I was eight years old and Sissy Spacek didn't win for Carrie; to have continued our relationship beyond that point would have been madness, madness! I claim no inside knowledge or deep understanding of how they decide these things, and the only thing I could tell you about the winners of recent years is that Jennifer Hudson won last year for Dreamgirls. (How do I know this? I was talking to someone on the phone when it was announced, and the woman I was talking to happened to have her TV set on. When Hudson's name was called out, the woman screamed. It turned out that it was a joyous scream, but until she calmed down enough to tell me what the hell was going on, my best guess was that she had just noticed that her couch was on fire.) Anyway, the only thing more completely charmless than the Oscars may be the ugly spectacle of a writer bragging about how little he cares about what he's paid to weigh in on, so now that we've just established that my opinion in this area counts for about as much as hair styling tips from Paul Wolfowitz, here goes:

BEST SCREENPLAY:

Diablo Cody takes Best Original for Juno because the voters have actually heard her name — it's not like, having come across it once, you can get it out of your head without laser surgery — and Paul Thomas Anderson takes it for Best Adaptation for There Will Be Blood, because that's what you get when you make a great movie but you aren't going to get Best Picture and the Best Director prize already taken.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS:

Apparently this is going to go to Cate Blanchett for I'm Not There, partly because Blanchett is also nominated for a Best Actress award that she is not getting to get and nominating her twice in one year without giving her anything would just seem silly. A good and sound bit of reasoning, and so I will of course reject it. And not only because I don't get the universally accepted logic by which this is agreed to be a "supporting" performance. Who the hell is she supposed to be supporting? The term ought to mean something other than "Big name actor in a role that is frequently off-screen." She's definitely the unquestioned star of her section of the movie, and while I didn't put a stop watch on it, I'll bet that she has as much screen time as any of the other Dylans. And if it turns out that Richard Gere, say, has a little more actual screen time, I'm not sure that the editor did him a favor by it. Until persuaded otherwise, I shall remain convinced that Blanchett's placement in this category is part of some conspiracy to screw over Amy Ryan, who wouldn't win anyway, because you only win an Oscar for playing a character as skanky as her Gone Baby Gone character if the Academy has already seen you in a bunch of glamour-puss roles and so knew for sure that you were acting. It's a moot point anyway, because I boldly predict that the winner will be Ruby Dee, because she has had a long and distinguished career, because she is 83 years old, because her late husband, Ossie Davis, is much missed, and because even though she didn't have much of a role in American Gangster, she did get to slap Denzel Washington, and he needed slapping.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR:

Hal Holbrook has had a long and distinguished career and is now the same age as Ruby Dee, so if she doesn't win in her category, his chances automatically go up by 50%. But I really don't see it happening. Philip Seymour Hoffman gives the best performance in this category — he's a stone hoot in Charlie Wilson's War, which marks a rare example of an actor giving the Academy three different performances to select for nomination and the Academy choosing the right one. I'd think he had a real chance if it weren't for the fact that he already won not too long ago for Best Actor for Capote, which makes Javier Bardem the needier candidate. Bardem's trigger-happy, unstoppable psycho in a much-discussed hairstyle gave audiences all the fun of watching a Batman villain ply his trade, but it's in an officially certified, critically approved serious film with a literary pedigree, and for this he will be the recipient of much gratitude from voters whose wives dragged them to Atonement. He's already won more than a few awards for this performance, and he'll be throwing one more on the pile.

BEST ACTRESS:

Julie Christie in a lock. Next?

BEST ACTOR:

The conventional wisdom seems to be that this one belongs to Daniel Day-Lewis for There Will Be Blood. I think that George Clooney has a shot for Michael Clayton, which is the kind of hard-hitting, tough-minded, yet still glamorous-looking movie that Hollywood wishes and expects America to take to its bosom. (Clooney looks worn-down and dissipated in it, and a gorgeous-looking man looking as much like hell as he can is the most glamorous thing in the world.) Some would argue that Clooney himself gave the award to Day-Lewis at a recent Newsweek-sponsored gathering where he serenaded his shy British colleague by saying that all actors "bow low to this motherfucker." Indeed, the whole of the media has been going wild these last couple of months about Day-Lewis's position as the great screen actor of our time. I do not disagree. But I happen to be one of those suspicious types who, when I hear conservative pundits on Fox News go on and on about how fearsome a candidate Barack Obama would be against a Republican challenger in November, and how they think that any Republican would just chew Hillary Clinton up and spit her out, I can't help thinking, Okay, would they say that out loud if they really believed it? Hasn't anyone ever heard the one about wanting to be thrown in the brier patch? So, on this baseless idiot notion, I have just decided the media have been building Day-Lewis up in preparation for the shocking upset to come when Clooney takes the prize. Remember, you read it here first! Unless I'm wrong, in which case you can just forget that I said anything.

BEST DIRECTOR:

The Coens, for No Country for Old Men, in a bigger lock than Julie Christie.

BEST PICTURE:

The big pictures here are obviously No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood, and I think they're going to cancel each other out. Both are impressive, violent movies that actually alienate as many potential voters as they attract. For the same reasons that I think George Clooney is an attractive candidate for Best Actor, his movie, Michael Clayton, has the smell of a loser to it. So the contrarian, can't-we-all-just-get-alone vote will go to putting either Juno or Atonement over the top. After it won at the Golden Globes, I thought that Atonement, with its period romance and literary prestige, was a shoo-in, but since then I have shifted over to favoring Juno, partly because I got bored with my previous position, partly because Juno is this year's Little Miss Sunshine, and Little Miss Sunshine lost last year. That means that the partisans of indie-flavored whimsy will be harder-driving this year. Also, it came out later in the year than Little Miss Sunshine, and is lucky in its timing: I calculate that the backlash against the backlash against Juno is now on a rising wave and will crest in time for the awards Sunday. It will flatten out the next morning and the papers will be full of "What were we thinking" pieces for the next two weeks.

Oprah's Favorite Things Include Watching Road House

Peter Smith — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 18:00:00 GMT

We're not so into this trend of giant DVD box sets; they tend to be padded with lots of half-baked featurettes, useless production stills, and other things you'd never pay money for if they weren't all packaged together in a pretty box with a movie you really like. But United Artists just took it to the next level with its 90th Anniversary Prestige Collection — a massive 110-disc set that features ninety films from seven decades. Oprah just named it one of her Favorite Things, which means it will sell like hotcakes. $870 hotcakes to be exact. But let's look at exactly which ninety movies are featured, shall we?

First off, the box set starts with the '40s, leaving out the opportunity to include earlier United Artist benchmarks like Broken Blossoms (1919), The Gold Rush (1925) and Stagecoach (1939).

The '40s/'50s selection, including Marty, Night of the Hunter and Some Like It Hot, is fairly solid — although Rebecca and The African Queen are among the missing.

The '60s brings a bunch of Bond films and some second-tier Billy Wilder. Good picks: The Apartment, In the Heat of the Night, Satyricon, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, Midnight Cowboy. Questionable: It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, The Thomas Crown Affair, The Battle of Britain, I Could Go On Singing. Notable omission: The Graduate.

The '70s has some interesting stuff: Rocky, Annie Hall, The Last Waltz, Carrie, Manhattan, Last Tango in Paris and Lenny would make for a quality weekend of film-watching. But The Pink Panther Strikes Again? Equus? And how much James Bond do we really need? Missing in action: Network and Being There.

By the '80s, things are getting a bit random. Enjoy a triple feature of Heaven's Gate, WarGames and Child's Play! Or alternately, Baby Boom, Raging Bull and Road House! Top it off with the most unnecessary Bond film of them all, the Timothy Dalton vehicle The Living Daylights. No big omissions here, unless you want to count I'm Gonna Git You Sucka.

Finally we reach the '90s-'00s, a short selection featuring Bowling for Columbine, the little-seen Pieces of April, The Birdcage, Hotel Rwanda, Leaving Las Vegas, and five others. What, no Showgirls?

Overall, the set feels like a stranger's DVD collection: a few classics, a few childhood favorites, a few questionable selections they probably got for $5 at the drugstore. But it doesn't feel like the collection of a movie buff, nor does it have any particular coherence beyond the name of the studio. If an alien landed on Earth and asked me how to quickly amass an American film collection, I might advise him to get this box set. However, if you live on this planet, you can probably find a better use for your $900. Like, for example, buying forty-five copies of Network. — Gwynne Watkins

(Belated) Take Five: Stephen King

Peter Smith — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 21:00:00 GMT

So, have you heard of this Stephen King fellow? Apparently he’s pretty widely read. Hs popularity as a novelist is matched only by his profligacy — he’s written over thirty novels and hundreds of short stories on his way to becoming one of the best-selling authors of all time. This level of popularity is like heroin to Hollywood producers, and adaptations of his books and stories — as well as original screenplays by King himself, an inveterate movie nerd — have led to an astonishing 100+ films and television shows. Like their source material, though, they’re a decidedly mixed bag: for every Shawshank Redemption, there’s a Children of the Corn 666: Isaac’s Return. And just as King enjoys a decidedly muddled critical reception, films made from his works, while occasionally made by talented filmmakers who find in the material the bones of something great, tend towards third-rate exploitation horror. Still, with The Mist having opened last week, it’s good to remember that a number of genuinely worthwhile projects have made the translation from the mind of King to the big screen. Here are five of the best.

CARRIE (1976)

The first hint that Stephen King’s novels might be the stuff of memorable movies came in 1976, when Brian DePalma got hold of his tale of a shy, stunted teenage girl who happened to have vast telekinetic powers. As the rest of this list will make clear, it’s no secret that King’s books tended to make good films only in the hands of a competent director, but DePalma in particular blew the doors off of this one, picking out the meaty insides and discarding the extraneous baggage. Ratcheting up the tension of King’s patented adolescent-angst narrative and turning the end into something beyond gore and well into Grand Guignol territory, DePalma also delivers one of the best jump-out-of-your-seat shocks in horror movie history near the end of Carrie.

SALEM'S LOT (1979)

The story of a small town infested by vampires was one of King’s first big successes as a novelist, and this TV movie adaptation — helmed by horror maven and Texas Chainsaw Massacre director Tobe Hooper — does a terrific job conveying its sense of paranoia and night terror without resorting to gore or cheap thrills. Indeed, working within the restrictions of television seemed to suit Hooper and screenwriter Paul Monash, who paced and teased the moments of shock out quite effectively. They’re also aided greatly by a cast crammed full of top-shelf character actors, including Elisha Cook Jr., Fred Willard, James Mason, Ed Flanders and George Dzundza.

THE SHINING (1980)

Not a lot of genuinely great directors have taken on the works of Stephen King, but Stanley Kubrick was unquestionably the greatest. Made only three years after the publication of the novel, The Shining is a work of genuine genius, containing one of Jack Nicholson’s greatest screen performances, some absolutely tremendous camerawork, and a sense of creeping horror that’s absent in many of the plodding, obvious shock films made from King's work. (Amazingly, the best-ever movie adaptation of a Stephen King novel was one of King’s least favorites; he later helped a far-inferior TV movie reworking into existence.)

CREEPSHOW (1982)

In a perfectly wonderful and appropriate twist of fate, one of Stephen King’s best friends is zombie auteur George Romero, and while Creepshow, their only true collaboration (King wrote the screenplay and Romero directed) isn’t the best movie based on the horror writer’s works, it’s easily the most enjoyable. The two sought to recreate the goofy, gory tone of the EC horror comics they had both enjoyed in their youth, and they succeeded to an admirable degree — and if the overall feel of the movie, as well as a hysterically nutty performance by King himself, are any indication, they had a hell of a time doing it.

THE DEAD ZONE (1983)

The story of a man who can see the future, and whether or not he has the chance to alter it, is a pretty whoozy old trope in science fiction, and to be honest, it doesn’t fare all that much better even in the hands of a man who, like Stephen King, can lend a patina of respectability to even the hoariest stock plots. David Cronenberg does what he can with the material he has, but it’s not the script or the direction that makes The Dead Zone worth watching: it’s the lead performances, most especially Christopher Walken (sublimely nutty as usual) in the role of the seer and Martin Sheen (hamming it up like nobody’s business) as a politician he suspects may someday trigger a nuclear war.

— Leonard Pierce