The Screengrab : crispin glover

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: Feb. 21-27, 2009

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 22:00:00 GMT

It’s a beautiful day for a Screengrab post, a beautiful day in the Screengrab!

Hello, boys are girls! How are you today? I am fine! Today we’re going to visit the marvelous land of make-believe! First we’re going to explore the Screengrab’s Ultimate Exploitation Films (Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five and Six)! You younger boys and girls will need a note from your parents.

Next we’ll enjoy a magical Unwatchable Recap (Parts One, Two, Three, Four and Five)! All of you boys and girls will need a note from your psychiatric counselors.

Are you still with me, boys and girls? Hold on tight!

Screengrab Review: The Trouble with Romance

Alan Moore’s Stealth Watchmen Campaign

Screengrab Flashback, 1987: Crispin Glover, Kicking Against the Prick

Precursors: Street Fighter

CineKink Film Festival: The Auteur

Where Are You Filming the Rest of Your Life?

Screengrab Flashback, 1987: Crispin Glover, Kicking Against the Prick

Phil Nugent — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 22:00:00 GMT

As our heroic Oscar show live-bloggers pointed out, the Academy Awards broadcast did clear up one pressing question: more than a week after Joaquin Phoenix's bizarre, bearded appearance on the David Letterman show, it's still open season on the actor turned rapper. This is kind of s shame, if only because James Wolcott seems to have been proven right in his speculation that all the slack-jawed fascination Phoenix inspired in his few minutes on Dave's couch has come at the price of a lack of serious attention and box office for the movie he was ostensibly promoting, Two Lovers, his latest collaboration with writer-director James Gray. Still unanswered, though, is the question of whether Phoenix is genuinely flaking out publicly (or worse), or if, as has been suggested, he's engaged in some Andy Kaufman-style prank or long-term Borat-type project. Though for some of us watching, the appearance summoned up not thoughts of either Sacha Baron Cohen or Latka's creator but Crispin Glover. If that's the role model that Phoenix meant to invoke, he's a rare bird indeed.

Glover's turn in the spotlight came in the summer of 1987, when he was supposed to be promoting Tim Hunter's River's Edge, the tragic-teen melodrama in which he had his biggest movie role to date. (Up to that time, he was best known for having played Michael J. Fox's father in Back to the Future.) Glover's freakish, hand-waving performance in River's Edge garnered mixed reviews at best, and it helped create a climate in which the still relatively little-known actor was widely perceived as something of an oddball. Even so, his Letterman appearance exceeded even the most baroque expectations. Acting as if he were about to keel over from anthrax, Glover boogied out onstage in thrift-shop clothing, platform shoes, and a fright wig, and began to frantically stammer about how the jackals in the media were writing about him as if he were some kind of weirdo. Apparently incited to demonstrate what a normal fellow he was by some girls in the audience who called out, "Nice shoes!", Glover made a muscle, invited his host to arm wrestle, then leaped up to demonstrate his ability to kick as high as the seated Letterman's head. He did in fact, kick very close to Letterman's head, which seemed to be the cue Dave was looking for to announce that their revels now were ended.

In those pre-Internet days, word of what had gone down spread rapidly across college campuses, in some cases with VCR-recorded evidence that was disseminated with what we used to call "tape trees." (And I wore an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time.) Word was slow to get out that Glover was playing a character, Rubin, who would eventually be the focus of a barely seen feature film, 1991's Rubin and Ed, co-starring Howard Hessman and directed by Trent Harris (The Beaver Trilogy). This explanation fails to explain how Glover thought anyone not privy to this information could have been expected to watch him unravel with anything other than open-mouthed bewilderment, or why he thought that the notoriously crankly control freak Letterman would be delighted to watch him melt down on his time and feel the draft from his oversized clodhoppers tickle the side of his face.

Coupled with his work in River's Edge, the Letterman show appearance cemented the direction of Glover's acting career, which is to say that it officially redefined him as an unvarying token of sheer weirdness. (His subsequent failure to appear in the sequel to Back to the Future, which he followed up by suing the filmmakers for violating his "image" by having the actor who replaced him made up to resemble him, also earned him the reputation of a weirdo who was hard to deal with.) By the time of his cameo in Wild at Heart, Glover was seen as the sort of person David Lynch shoehorns into a movie if he's afraid that it might not be strange enough. Although Glover's few opportunities to play a relatively normal person, in mostly small roles in such films as John Boorman's Where the Heart Is and What's Eating Gilbert Grape? have shown him to be a capable actor with a surprisingly sweet screen presence, his biggest roles and ripest paydays have been for flaunting his geek-show side in such films as Charlie's Angels, Bartleby, and Willard. (More recently, he reunited with the director of Back to the Future, Robert Zemeckis, to incarnate the title role in Beowulf.) A well-established young actor with a string of successes to his credit, Phoenix will not be so easily pigeonholed. At this point, most people would be relieved to hear that he's having a laugh, even if he did throw a labor of love movie under the bus in the procession, and after a shave, the industry would welcome him back with welcome if wary arms. But is he kidding? It's a dubious sort of joke that serves to turn you into a punchline for Ben Stiller's use. Stay tuned.

Precursors: Friday the 13th IV-VI

Nick Schager — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 16:00:00 GMT

Jason may have suffered a seemingly fatal axe to the head at the end of Part III, but as The Screengrab’s continuing Friday the 13th recap confirms, it takes much more than that to permanently vanquish Camp Crystal Lake’s most infamous attendee.

Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984)

Regardless of this fourth entry’s title, the series was just getting started with The Final Chapter, a lazy, formulaic tale of – you guessed it! – horndogs being terrorized in the woods around Crystal Lake. Though now an expert in the art of murder, Jason’s stabby slayings are particularly uninventive here. Fortunately, picking up the slack are Crispin Glover as a spastically dancing nerd taunted by his friend for being a “dead fuck” (aka a “lousy lay”), a hunky hitchhiker whom the film embarrassingly attempts to suggest might in fact be Jason (despite his non-deformed face), and a young Corey Feldman as a kid named Thomas who knows how to fix car engines, excitedly peeps at a next-door couple having sex, makes professional-grade monster masks like a mini-Stan Winston, and develops a strange bond with his hockey-masked pursuer.

Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning (1985)

Building upon The Final Chapter’s last-shot implication, A New Beginning spends most of its excruciatingly dull runtime insinuating that Feldman’s Thomas – now a twentysomething committed to a mental hospital near Crystal Lake – is the individual behind a recent string of Jason-style killings. In an out-of-left-field twist, however, the film’s conclusion [spoiler alert, for those who might care] fingers not Thomas but some random EMT who had previously appeared in a grand total of two scenes. Then, once again aiming to pull the rug out from under its audience, director Danny Steinmann subsequently does depict Thomas aspiring to become Jason’s heir, a bit of make-up-your-mind! indecision that’s indicative of this, the series’ lamest episode, notable only for its adherence to certain genre tenets – the prime one being: anyone who has sex or is a minority must die – as well as for featuring Diff’rent Strokes’ Dudley (Shavar Ross) in a key role.

Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI (1986)

Simultaneously trying to maintain continuity with, and break free from the idiocy of, Part V, Jason Lives kicks off with a now-sane Thomas venturing to Jason’s grave in order to once and for all destroy the brute’s buried corpse. To do this, he stabs the body with a metal pole, which is then struck by lightening, which in turn immediately reanimates Jason into a lumbering zombie destroyer. It’s hokum with a more overtly supernatural bent, which fits nicely with the filmmakers’ decision to wholeheartedly embrace wink-wink campiness in both dialogue (“Some folks have a strange idea of entertainment,” being one of the self-reflexive standouts) and characterizations (the archetypal victims include a jock, bad girl, barking-mad sheriff, mentally handicapped fat kid who loves candy bars, and assortment of hot-to-trot disposable teens). Jason Lives campily blends humor and nastiness, and if that combo was eventually mimicked by a glut of genre-degrading imitators, it nonetheless in this case oh-so-slightly reinvigorates Jason’s routine mayhem.

Click Here For Parts One & Three

Screengrab Scream-Off: Beowulf’s Grendel vs. Pumpkinhead 2’s Wild Boy

Andrew Osborne — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 15:00:00 GMT

So, the wife and I just got around to watching Robert Zemeckis’ 2007 adaptation of Beowulf last night, and in addition to the film’s soulless video game versions of a vagina-less Angelina Jolie, a buff Ray Winstone and a naked Anthony Hopkins, one of the creepiest parts of the movie was Crispin Hellion Glover’s scarily believable crazy person screaming as the mushy-headed monster, Grendel.

Yet, even as Glover’s weirdly accented ululations scared the piss out of our cat Zuzu, I found myself harkening back to my OWN sadly neglected turn as the screaming voice of doomed wild boy Tommy (and his demonic doppelganger) in the 1994 Soleil Moon Frye horror classic Pumpkinhead 2: Blood Wings.

True, the roles of Tommy the Wild Boy and Mr. Head were officially played by J.P. Manoux and Mark McCracken, respectively, but for reasons I can’t quite remember now (and probably having to do with the fact I just happened to be at the post-production facility at the time), I was nevertheless called upon to sweeten the dying/rage-filled screams of the aforementioned two characters in the P2 sound mix with my own shrieky talents.

So who’s the better screamer in a side-by-side comparison?

YOU decide!

Screamer #1: Crispin Hellion Glover, Beowulf

Screamer #2: Andrew Hellion Osborne, Pumpkinhead 2

Related Stories:
Crispin Glover: Modern-Day Vaudevillian
Stan Winston, 1946--2008

Morning Deal Report: Jim Carrey Believes – Or Not

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 14:30:00 GMT

Sequels ruled the weekend box office, with High School Musical 3: Senior Year opening to a “Holy shit, America, first the Chihuahua and now this?” $42 million. And moviegoers still can’t get enough of that lovable mass murderer Jigsaw, as Saw V took in $30.5 million, good for second place. Pride and Glory performed about as well as you’d expect from a movie that’s been sitting on the shelf since there were only three Saw movies, mopping up $6.3 million. And it should come as no surprise that W. dropped precipitously in the polls, with a weekend take of $5.3 million.

Believe it or not, Jim Carrey is set to play Robert Ripley for director Chris Columbus. The Ripley’s Believe It or Not project has been floundering in development hell for a while (Tim Burton was formerly attached), but Paramount has given Columbus the go-ahead. “Once Columbus’ deal is closed, the studio will hire a writer to draft the project, which remains a Par priority: The studio is aiming for a 2011 release and is hoping the pic spawns a franchise,” Variety obviouslies.

Speaking of Burton, the inevitable has happened: Crispin Glover has joined the cast of Alice in Wonderland. The Mad Hatter role is already taken, so Glover will appear as the Knave of Hearts, who is “put on trial for stealing the Queen of Hearts' tarts and is defended by Alice,” per The Hollywood Reporter.

Related:
Crispin Glover Requires Cash, Sushi
Anne Hathaway in Wonderland

Unwatchable #70: “Epic Movie”

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

How could you do this to me, IMDb Bottom 100 list? After all we’ve been through together, how could you make me sit through two Friedberg-Seltzer spoof movies in a single week? It was only last Friday that I took on #72 Meet the Spartans, and now you present me with the diarrhea duo’s previous exercise in pop culture regurgitation, Epic Movie. Look, I was patient and understanding when you made me watch two Kickboxer sequels. At least you gave me a few weeks to recover between them. But now you’ve crossed a line, IMDb Bottom 100 list. We’ll continue to do business together, but we’re no longer speaking.

The only good news is that, much like Spartans, Epic Movie barely crosses the 60 minute mark before the extended credits, complete with dance sequences and hee-larious outtakes, begin. Also, the word apparently had yet to reach the top Hollywood agencies that they would serve their clients best by destroying all query letters from Friedberg-Seltzer Industries; there are actual recognizable faces on display here in addition to the usual sort-of-look-and-sound-alikes. Kal Penn, Jennifer Coolidge, David Carradine, Crispin Glover (!) and perhaps most dishearteningly, Fred Willard, all show up and do their best to survive with their dignity intact.

The best I can say about Epic Movie is that it’s not quite as slapdash as Meet the Spartans. (I’ll dismiss the fact that it’s actually ranked higher on the list as a statistical quirk.) There’s a sort of plot, at least for a while, involving four orphans, each of whom secures a golden ticket entitling them to a tour of Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. (Wonka is played by Glover, doing a twitchy but uninspired take on Johnny Depp’s version.) Wonka takes the orphans prisoner in order to use their organs as the secret ingredient in his candy, but they escape through the wardrobe into Gnarnia. (The ‘G’ is what makes it a parody, right up there with those Cracked issues of the mid-70s featuring “The Fonze.”) There they battle The White Bitch (Coolidge), enlist the aid of Captain Jack Swallows, and get Punk’d by an Ashton Kutcher-alike in a trucker hat.

There are fleeting indications in Epic Movie that Friedberg and Seltzer have some dim awareness that making a pop culture joke involves putting some sort of twist on that which is familiar. For instance, turning the Mutant Academy into a high school where the X-Men are the cool kids is an amusing notion. Turning the Da Vinci Code phrase “So dark the con of man” into “So lame the hair of Tom” as a poke at the follicular follies of Tom Hanks in that particular movie – that’s moderately chuckle-worthy. Having the characters break into hip-hop musical numbers every ten minutes, however, is not funny. It’s not funny the first time, it’s not funny the fourth time, and it only calls attention to the fact that you’re desperate to pump up the running time.

There are indications that the game is up for our friends Iceberg and Salsa. (See what I did there? I spoofed ‘em! I spoofed ‘em good!) Their latest atrocity Disaster Movie did not approach the box office success of its predecessors, and it became the first movie ever to score a perfect 0% on Rotten Tomatoes. Now that’s funny.

Previously on Unwatchable:
71. Gigli
72. Meet the Spartans
73. Fascination
74. You Got Serve d
75. The Last Sign

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: June 21-27, 2008

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 21:00:00 GMT

We’ve had some fun with the Entertainment Weekly list of new classics, but let it be known that we here at the Screengrab have some new classics of our own! Personally I get all choked up thinking about the time we maybe confirmed a rumor about Gael Garcia Bernal, but for others, the seminal moment was the story about how Crispin Glover requires cash and sushi. Reaching all the way back to Monday, here are the rest of the posts we’ve deemed absolutely timeless, to be treasured for generations to come.

America the Critical: 15 Movies That Show What’s Wrong With U.S. (Parts One, Two and Three)

The week in lawsuits: Gibney vs. ThinkFilm and Adams vs. Marvel

The films of yesteryear: Top Gun, Smiles of a Summer Night and Heaven Can Wait

The films of today: The Wackness and Garden Party

The films of never, please: American Soldiers and Soccer Dog: The Movie

The filmmakers of some repute: Roman Polanski, Pedro Almodovar and Peter Jackson

The lovely ladies: Ellen Page, Hilary Duff and The Women

The one that got away: George Carlin

Crispin Glover Requires Cash, Sushi

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 20:00:00 GMT

A few months ago I was a bit startled to emerge from a movie at the world famous Alamo Drafthouse in downtown Austin to find Crispin Glover chatting in seemingly amiable fashion with a few folks in the lobby. It took me a second to remember that the Alamo was hosting a screening of Glover’s latest opus, What Is It? It occurred to me that it must sometimes be a little awkward for whoever is assigned to tend to the needs of a, shall we say, unusual guest like Mr. Glover, but for at least that passing moment, he didn’t seem particularly inclined to kick anyone in the face.

I was reminded of that night when reading about Glover’s recent appearance at Chandler Cinemas in Phoenix. "For $18, it's a very long night," midnight movie hostess Andrea Beesley-Brown told Stephen Lemons of the Phoenix New Times. "You get your money's worth of Crispin. You get to meet him and get your freaky photo with him. He'll sign stuff. It's a good value for the patron." That’s swell for Glover fans, but not so swell for Beesley-Brown and the theater. “The lion's share of the take went to Glover — $14 out of the $18 ticket price, and Glover's food, in-town travel, and sundry expenses were covered by the event's promoters. Glover required a regular diet of sushi, and had the promoters man his merchandise booth and police the crowd for possible bootleggers filming his surreal, Luis Buñuel-esque film with smuggled-in camcorders. There is but one 35mm print of the film, as Glover has opted not to release it on DVD. So piracy issues are a constant concern to the bizarre star.”

That doesn’t sound so unusual considering the outrageous demands we’ve seen in contract riders posted on the Smoking Gun over the years, but it gets worse. Glover demanded to be paid in cash, despite the fact “that many of the tickets had been sold online through a service that paid the promoters only after the fact… ‘He wanted it in all the nice, new bills because he takes his money to the Czech Republic, where he has land or a castle or something,’ Beesley-Brown claimed he told her. ‘Apparently, he has to take all the nice bills over there because the Czechs won't take ripped bills.’”

Glover also claimed the theater damaged his print and demanded restitution. When contacted, the actor responded with his own version of the story. A series of emails documenting the whole chain of events from both sides can be found here, for those with an in-depth interest in peculiar quasi-celebrity behavior.

Related:
Portrait of the Artist as a McFly
What It Is: The Mind of Crispin Glover

Take Five: Friday the 13th

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 20:15:00 GMT

Normally, the Friday Take Five feature is built around some new release. But this is a very special day for bottom-drawer cinephiles the world over: today is Friday the 13th, the day commemorated in a series of eleven of the rootin'-est, tootin'-est, sexually-active-teenager-beheadin'-east movies of all time. While there isn't a new Friday the 13th movie coming out -- unfortunately, or thankfully depending on your perspective, we'll have to wait until 2009 for the proposed remake of the first movie -- there's no reason we can't take a look back at what is, despite the universal revulsion of critics, one of the most successful franchises in motion picture history. It's hard to believe it's been 28 years since the first Friday the 13th movie, but the mass-murderous adventures of the scrappy, plucky Jason Voorhees (and what's with all the big-screen serial killers having such WASPy names, from Voorhees to Krueger to Meyers? Aren't there any unstoppable, inhuman psychopathic butchers named Breitkowicz or Morelli?) have manage to last longer than most marriages. With little more than a machete, a hockey mask, and a can-do attitude, Jason has become a cultural icon, almost single-handedly birthing the lamentable teen-slasher genre so popular in the 1980s and managing to set a standard for improbable resurrections that not even superhero comics can rival. I'm not going to say that the movies below represent the best of the Friday the 13th movies; to be perfectly honest, "best" just isn't a word than any of these flicks can aspire to. But at the very least, these are the five that represent, in some way, a hallmark acheivement for everyone's favorite reason to avoid summer camp.

FRIDAY THE 13th (1980)

It's usually claimed that the first of the venerable hack-'n'slash franchise is the best, and we can't argue with that claim. However, while John Carpenter's Halloween was a genuinely good low-budget horror movie that spawned a ton of far inferior sequels, Sean Cunningham's Friday the 13th was pretty much a crappy exploitation movie that produced a bunch of sequels that were marginally worse. The francise didn't have far to fall, but at the very least, if you were of a certain age in the 1980s, seeing the original Friday the 13th was something like a rite of passage. Of mild canonical interest due to the fact that Jason Voorhees isn't the killer and doesn't even appear in the film in his familiar form, this would still just be a long-forgotten curio along the lines of Silent Night Deadly Night if it hadn't happened to catch an inexplicable fire and turn into one of the biggest indie movie hits of all time. The sequels that it birthed are all much, much worse, don't get us wrong -- but don't go into this expecting any kind of a diamond in the rough. It's just the least objectionable turd in a very big punchbowl.

FRIDAY THE 13th PART 3 (1982)

Although the franchise was already a runaway hit, it wasn't until the third installment that the Friday the 13th movies finally took the shape with which we're most familiar today. The third visit to woebegotten Camp Crystal Lake was marketed as a gimmick movie thanks to having been filmed in 3-D ("A new dimension in terror!", screamed the posters and newspaper ads), but what really makes Friday the 13th Part 3 so memorable in the series is that it's the first time the immortal and ill-tempered Jason Voorhees first dons his iconic hockey mask. He also picks up a few attributes that would be reiterated, if never actually explained in any way, in all subsequent Friday the 13th movies: his tremendous, almost superhuman strength, and his abilty to come back from almost any injury, however fatal. Hockey goalies are the members of the team least likely to get into a fistfight on the ice, but starting with this movie, Jason Voorhees manages to make them seem like the most bad-ass guys in professional sports.

FRIDAY THE 13th: THE FINAL CHAPTER (1984)

The fourth installment of the franchise promised it would be the last, and some people -- including special effects wizard Tom Savini, who believed this would be Jason Voorhees' last ride, and actor Ted White, who played the killer but was so upset with the script and the poor treatment of the actors that he asked for his name to be removed from the credits -- seemed to believe it. No such luck, though: The Final Chapter made $32 million, which pretty much guaranteed that there would be more to come. In most ways a typical example of the series (Jason goes bananas on a bunch of teens with a variety of sharpened implements), The Final Chapter is noteworthy largely for its cast: a young Corey Feldman plays the male lead in a sure sign that you're watching a movie that was made in the mid-1980s. Additionally, Crispin Glover's fans and detractors alike will be interested to know that in this movie, the always-controversial actor's hand gets nailed to a countertop with a corkscrew. And then Jason whacks him in the face with a meat cleaver.

JASON X (2002)

It's the tenth movie! Get it? If that doesn't strike you as particularly clever, too bad, because believe us, it doesn't get any better from there. By this point in the two decades of the Friday the 13th franchise, the character of Jason Voorhees has already become a sort of cultural punchline for improbable resurrections; in addition, he's already slipped the surly bonds of Camp Crystal Lake and visited, amongst other places, Manhattan, Hell, and the depths of Corey Feldman's soul -- each worse than the one before. So what was left for the venerable franchise to do but send him to an even more absurd location (a spaceship orbiting a post-apocalyptic future Earth) and give him an even more ridiculous method of resurrection (infiltrated by a hi-tech nanobot virus and transformed into a cybernetic superman)? The writers were also clever enough to use the movie's future setting as a way to give the finger to the innumerable continuity nerds who had started swarming around the francise.

FREDDY VS. JASON (2003)

Well, why not? Pitting the two slasher icons against one another was an idea that had been kicking around for a decade, but by the time it finally got made, anyone who expected Hong Kong veteran Ronny Yu to bring the same sly, campy sense of humor to Freddy vs. Jason that he did to Bride of Chucky was in for a pretty big disappointment. The plot to this thing is pretty incomprehensible, even by the convoluted standards of Friday the 13th movies, but it's all just prelude to the big showdown between the two bloodthirsty ne'er-do-wells that makes up the second half of the movie. After a great deal of hurled cutlery, Jason seems to emerge victorious, trudging sloppily out of Crystal Lake with the severed head of Freddy Krueger -- which then proceeds to give us a wink, a laugh, and the terrifying prospect of yet another sequel. Luckily, that's the last we've seen of Freddy or Jason for a good long while, but the remake is less than a year away...

Harmony Korine Settles Down

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 18:30:00 GMT

There comes a time when all of us have to put our skateboarding, glue-sniffing, bum-fighting, Meryl Streep-pushing, smoking-in-bed-and-burning-down-the-house days behind us, and if the New York Times is to be believed, that time has come for Harmony Korine. Perhaps the only man on earth who counts Werner Herzog and magician David Blaine among his close friends, Korine no longer wanders the mean streets of New York asking strangers to punch him in the face. He’s now married and living in Nashville, and as Dennis Lim reports, “this onetime fixture of the downtown party circuit did not seem nostalgic for the old days.”

The old days were interesting, though – some would say more interesting than the movies he made then. (After Janet Maslin declared his 1997 white-trashterpiece Gummo the worst movie of the year, Korine recalls, “I got a call from Herzog, who was like, ‘This movie is now destined to live forever.’ ”) He managed to burn down not one house, but two. (“The first one I don’t know what happened,” he said. “The second one was my fault. I fell asleep smoking.”) He made a series of Crispin Glover-esque appearances on the David Letterman show, and embarked on a video project called Fight Harm, perhaps the single stupidest movie ever attempted by a name director. This is how Korine explained it at the time: “I go around provoking passers-by, trying to start a fight while the video camera follows me and films everything. It's very brutal -- I've already broken a collar bone and been arrested. The punches and kicks are all real, it's one of the most disgusting things you'll ever see.”

After trips to the hospital and jail, the project was abandoned. “I thought I was making the greatest comedy,” he said. “At the time I really felt like that’s what I was on earth to do — get beaten up.” Some of his critics agree, but Lim cites Mister Lonely as “apparent evidence of a kinder, gentler Harmony Korine.” We trust this means Korine won’t be going the Uwe Boll route and challenging his critics to meet him in the ring.

Tribeca Film Festival Review: "Seven Days Sunday"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 20:00:00 GMT

The German film Seven Days Sunday marks the feature directing debut of Niels Laupert, a 33-year-old director of TV commercials and music videos. Laupert seizes on the true story of a couple of sixteen-year-old boys whose alienation and general confusion turns them into thrill killers for a night. One thing you can't accuse Laupert of is glamorizing psychopathic violent behavior. The way he tells this story, the two anti-heroes Adam, (Ludwig Trepte, who looks like Seth Cohen from The O.C. after a personality transplant with a woodchuck) and Tommek (played by Martin Kiefer as a scrawny-legged sweeb with a John Hinckley haircut, a tattoo on the side of his neck, and a pathetic smirk that seems intended to come across as threatening), are driven to kill out of sheer boredom, and to really hammer than point home, Laupert overloads the movie with some of the deadliest, most overextended scenes of just sitting the fuck around ever captured on film. (Seven Days Sunday runs eighty minutes and feels at least twice as long.) Martin Kiefer's performance has to be seen to fully appreciate just how unconvincing an actor playing a supposedly charismatic, dangerous adlescent tempter figure can be. He makes Crispin Glover in River's Edge look like Dr. Mabuse.

Crispin Glover: Modern-Day Vaudevillian

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 18:30:00 GMT

The Guardian investigates the age-old question, “Is Crispin Glover really a big ol’ weirdo, or what?” On the one hand, you have his recent appearance as Grendel in the big-budget CGI epic Beowulf, which might lead you to believe Glover is settling into the role of eccentric character actor in mainstream Hollywood fare. How strange could a guy be if he’s appeared in both Back to the Future and Charlie’s Angels?

On the other hand, you have Glover’s latest directorial effort, It Is Fine! Everything Is Fine, “a psychosexual drama written by and starring Steven C Stewart, who died soon after the film was completed. Stewart, a cerebral palsy sufferer, plays a man suffering from murderous satyriasis, and can be seen in some truly graphic scenes in the film with a number of women, which seems at odds with Glover's description of the screenplay as ‘beautiful and naïve’.” It’s a follow-up to 2005’s What Is It?, which Guardian writer Andrea Hubert describes as, well, “virtually indescribable without at least mentioning a cast comprised entirely of Down's syndrome actors, swastika imagery, blackface minstrels, naked women in monkey masks, with race hate musician Johnny Rebel warbling in the background as snails die gruesome deaths by salt and razor blades.”

It may come as a shock to learn that studios aren’t lining up to finance such projects – at least not directly. There is a method to Glover’s madness: “I get to fund and promote my films off the back of theirs.” Give him credit for putting his money where his mouth is; a lot of actors claim their mainstream work is merely a means of sustaining their commitment to art (coughNicolasCagecough), but Glover is actually using his corporate paychecks for subversive purposes. “What Is It? is a reaction to corporate restraints in the film market whereby anything that can make an audience member unhappy will be excised. And by unhappy, I mean truly uncomfortable, so they're looking at a film and asking, 'Is this right? Is it wrong? Should I be here? Should they have done this? What is it?' Why has taboo been corporately excised from our view? At every step along the conveyor belt of the corporately funded film, someone will say, 'You really wouldn't want to say that.' And what ends up happening is that nothing is said.”

As to the question at the beginning of this post…well, for those of us who caught this infamous Letterman appearance the first time around, it’s never really been in doubt:

The Ten Best Murderous Duos in Movies, Part 2

Phil Nugent — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 21:30:00 GMT

Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson) & Vincent Vega (John Travolta), PULP FICTION (1994)

For all the talk about the brilliance of Quentin Tarantino’s filmmaking, his resurrection and reanimation of ‘70s pop culture, and the way he redefined the crime drama for a postmodern generation, there’s a profound misunderstanding of why his two most famous creations – the black-suited hitmen Jules Winnfield and Vincent Vega – are so enjoyable to watch. It’s not the hip pseudo-philosophical dialogue; it’s not the bad-ass speechifying; it’s not even the rapport between Samuel L. Jackson and born-again-hard John Travolta that makes Jules & Vincent so downright charming. No, what really makes them work is that Tarantino manages to do what no one else had ever done: he transformed the story of two murderous assassins into an engaging workplace comedy. When you get right down to it, Jules & Vincent are just two working stiffs whose job happens to be a tad idiosyncratic. When they’re not filling some rip-off artist full of hot lead, they’re just like any two likeable jerks at the office or factory of your choice: they swap vacation stories, they get annoyed at each other’s long-established social tics, they blame each other for workplace fuckups, they laugh at each others’ jokes, they eat junk food together at break time, and they drive around aimlessly between jobs trying to think of something to do, whether it’s fall in love with the wrong girl or have a profound religious awakening. For all the goofy trappings, from the automatic weapons to the mysteriously glowing box to the wallet that says BAD MOTHERFUCKER, we relate so strongly to Jules & Vincent because, despite their bloody way of making a living, we recognize in them the comfortable familiarity of workplace ritual. If anyone tells me that their scenes with Harvey Keitel’s Mr. Wolfe are anything but extremely well-done sitcom detritus, we'll call them a liar to their face.

Ray (Billy Bob Thornton) & Pluto (Michael Beach), ONE FALSE MOVE (1992)

One of the scariest of the many scary moments in Carl Franklin's modern backwoods noir (which Thornton co-wrote) comes when the intelligent and more calculating member of the duo, Pluto, instructs the more volatile Ray not to flip out when they're stopped by a highway cop: "We don't want to kill him if we don't have to." Ray takes Pluto's advice on this one because he understands that Pluto is smarter than he is; it's not as if the idea that there might be reasons not to simply kill someone who poses an inconvenience to him is something he understands on any deeper emotional level. Both men are prepared to do whatever it takes to keep them free and on the move, and to pick up a little scratch on the side as they go, and both are useful to the other, though it's Pluto's genius for sizing up a situation and deciding that it's time to wipe somebody out that keeps them free and on the move for as long as they are. The fact that they're a biracial team adds sauce to the mix, even as the redneck live wire (with the black girlfriend from the South) and his cucumber-cool partner resist the urge to ever acknowledge it.

Sappensly (Robert Webber) & Quill (Gig Young), BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA (1974)

If Fante and Mingo had lived to middle age, smartened up their wardrobes, and gone freelance, they might have ended up like these guys. Alfredo Garcia, a bizarre modern Western with white men in suits, equipped with planes, cars, and machine guns, tearing around Mexico in search of a guy's rotting melon that has a million dollar bounty on it, is the director Sam Peckinpah's scurviest film, a response to Hollywood's refusal to let him make the kind of movies he wanted to make, and Sappensly and Quill are probably meant as his fuck-you note to the studio executives he regarded as no better than manicured hyenas, gutless wonders, amoral killers. Peckinpah always had conflicted feelings about his characters and everything else he put on screen, and there's an unexpected, and unexpectedly affecting moment, when Quill is killed; Sappinsly looks at his body, utters his name in a voice cracking with grief, and then turns his gun on the movie's hero (Warren Oates) in what may be a desperate need to lash out at a world in which he's suddenly found himself alone or what may be a gunman's (successful) bid for suicide, forcing Oates to put him out of his misery. It's the closest thing to a moment of warm feeling in the movie.

Mr. Wint (Bruce Glover) & Mr. Kidd (Putter Smith), DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER (1971)

Neither of these guys looks like much of a threat; in fact one of them looks like the love child of David Crosby and Gallagher. (Putter Smith, who made his film debut as Mr. Kidd, made only a couple of other films and is actually best known as a jazz bassist. Bruce Glover played one of Jack Nicholson's "associates" in Chinatown but may now be best known as Crispin Glover's father.) Yet they manage to achieve memorability just on the basis of their archness, and for serving as the James Bond series' concession to the value of teamwork. Oddjob or Jaws would probably beat the shit out of either of them if one tried to sit at next to him in the villains' commissary, but so long as they stick together, respect must be paid: you never know what one of them might be up to behind your back while you're throttling the other. As for the homoerotic element alluded to elsewhere in this feature, it's there for sure, but it's best to not dwell on it, and not just because nobody wants to picture these guys kissing. (And make no mistake about it, we don't just mean that nobody wants to picture them kissing each other.) For all its charms, the Bond series has seldom been out front in terms of images of social progress, and the close-up of Mr. Wint appearing to leer pleasurably as Sean Connery literally shoves a bomb up his ass is not 007's proudest moment.

Eric (Eric Deulen) & Alex (Alex Frost), ELEPHANT (2003)

Standing in marked contrast to most of the murderous duos on this list are the teenage killers in Gus Van Sant’s impenetrable, elegiac evocation of the Columbine massacre, Elephant. Though one of them shares a name with the real-life Colorado school shooters, it’s not by design; like most of the characters in the film, actor Eric Deulen lends his name to his creation. Alex (played by the revoltingly compelling Alex Frost) is the dominant member of the twosome, plotting the massacre during class and delivering its terrifying final lines, but unlike most big-screen killer combos, there’s nothing flashy, clever or even wickedly likable about Eric & Alex. Though their actions are, in the end, far more costly in human lives than other big-screen killers, they are meant to be neither nightmarish horror-film bad-asses or appealing anti-heroes. In keeping with the tone of this wonderful, frightening film, they are ciphers: we know little more about them when the movie ends than we did when it began, and it’s easy to see that Van Sant made the movie not to explicate Columbine, but to mock our pretense that Columbine was explicable. A number of viewers detected an element of homophobia in the scene where the two kiss in a shared shower, but Van Sant no more suggests that repressed homosexuality is to blame for the boys’ rampage than video games, social isolation, or any one of a dozen red herrings he throws out. We greedily devour every one, so hungry are we for some hint, any hint that such a horrid, pointless waste of human life must have an explanation, any explanation. But in the end, we are left only with a lot of bodies and a pair of enigmas. That’s murder for you.

— Paul Clark; Phil Nugent; Leonard Pierce

Click here for Part 1.

The Rep Report (February 14-21)

Phil Nugent — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 18:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: A dependable annual treat, the "Film Comment Selects" series at the Film Society of Lincoln Center (February 14-28) gives the writers and editors of that magazine a chance to decorate the screen of the Walter Reade Theater with a wide-ranging selection of films, new and old, that they love a lot more than the U.S. distribution business does. There are new films by George A. Romero (the opening night selection, Diary of the Dead), Jacques Rivette (The Duchess of Langeais, to be shown with the actress Jeanne Balibar in attendance), Ramin Bahrani (Chop Shop), Olivier Assayas (Boarding Gate), Lukas Moodyson (Container), and Alex Cox (The Searchers 2.0). The weird revivals include Cox's 1987 Walker, Crispin Glover's 1992 Rubin and Ed, and a couple of Richard Fleischer movies, the 1971 English true crime story 10 Rillington Place starring Richard Attenborough, and the mind-boggling 1975 Southern slave-owners' potboiler Mandingo.

"Milos Forman: A Retrospective" (February 14-28) at the Museum of Modern Art covers the expatriate director's career from his early, attention-getting work (Loves of a Blonde, The Firemen's Ball), traces his American work from the 1971 Taking Off to his finding a groove as a respected Hollywood pro (from the Academy Award-winning smash One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest to Amadeus and The People vs. Larry Flynt); it also includes some items from off the beaten tracks, such as his contributions to the omnibus films Visions of 8 and I Miss Sonja Henie.

CHICAGO: For one week starting February 15, the Gene Siskel Film Center is showing a new print of Jean-Luc Godard's exploration of youth culture, revolutionary leftist politics, and bright, shiny primary colors, La Chinoise (1967). This is an important film in the career of a major director and a unique experience on its own terms, and it's never been available on home video in this country, and it doesn't get out to play very often, so I'd advise the curious to brave whatever disaster-movie weather you have to brave to make it to the theater.

What It Is: The Mind of Crispin Glover

Peter Smith — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 17:00:00 GMT

Crispin Glover is crazy. If there’s one thing everyone knows about him, it’s that: he’s the guy who made an album of unlistenable noise, who tried to kick David Letterman in the head, who makes intensely non-commercial films like What Is It? and It Is Fine! Everything Is Fine. But I’ve met Crispin Glover and. . . well, he doesn’t seem crazy. He seems extraordinary thoughtful, intelligent and almost deferentially respectful to his coworkers. That’s the way he comes across in this interview with IFC’s Aaron Hillis, who, like me, saw a rough cut of What Is It? over a decade ago. Again, Glover comes across as a man who knows exactly what the practical and psychological costs of his extremely unusual films are, and who is generally at peace with the reputation he knows he’s developed. The oddest thing he does in the interview is forget his age, but he says (with a laugh) "I started in film when I was eighteen, so that's a long time to have been around. I've now published four books, I've had a record out, and I've produced, directed and edited two different films that I'm proud of. It's like, at a certain point, how genuinely insane can someone who's done all that be?" — Leonard Pierce

Portrait of the Artist as a McFly

Peter Smith — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 21:00:00 GMT

A few weeks back, I went to the Magno screening room in midtown Manhattan to catch a screening of Crispin Glover's new picture It Is Fine! Everything is Fine. Excitement abounded. I'd failed to catch any of the screenings of Glover's What Is It? when it premiered late last year and was still feeling pangs of regret. I'd developed an acute obsession with the man after finding his website in 2005. Yes, it's common knowledge that George McFly is a big weirdo, but I didn't really appreciate just how weird at the time. The trailer for What Is It? scared the shit out of me. The notion of a mad character actor creating humor through Dadaist films starring a cast of spastics was as entrancing as it was revolting. You see, I thought he was being ironic. It's not my fault though. "Clowny Clown Clown" leaves an impression.

So I was excited to finally see one of the man's movies in full, excited to be shocked, excited to see just how weird it could get. I arrived a touch on the early side, and there was no one at the theater aside from a confused woman in her late sixties, waiting to see a picture called The Unknown Woman, and a couple of disgruntled projectionists, type of dudes who you see with cigarettes dangling from their mouths even when they aren't smoking. Fearing small talk with the elderly and suffering from a coffee-filled bladder, I asked the projectionists where the gentleman's room was and went off to kill some time. Then, refreshed, I headed back out to the waiting room, prepared to talk about the weather or feign being busy. I also considered faking a cell-phone call. That's when I almost tripped on Crispin Glover. He was unpacking the reels for It Is Fine and handing them off to the projectionists. I knew it was a possibility that he'd be there. What Is It? was only screened by Glover himself on tour. But here he was sans publicists, handlers, anyone. Just Glover sporting a Prince Valiant bob and a black suit. I rushed to the benches and the relative safety of the old woman but the projectionists called out and let her know that The Unknown Woman was just about to start, and I was alone. Glover walked down the hall and sat down to my right.

Fuck.

"Are you here to see the film?" That tremor in his voice isn't put on. Guy sounds like that.

"Yeah. Yes. I'm excited. Looking forward to it."

"Excellent. Good. Good. It's an excellent film."

He pulled out a laptop and I wondered if he was suffering from the same chat phobia I'd been feeling a few minutes ago. But for the next twenty minutes this back and forth went on. We talked about how What Is It? was received critically, and about aberrant sexuality in widely released movies. It was plain that this quiet man was very serious about his work, and this was more unsettling than had he been a jabbering psychotic. It meant he wasn't being ironic. Finally the publicist arrived along with a handful of other people and things got underway.

Glover opened with a truncated version of "The Big Slideshow", a surrealist spoken-word piece accompanied by slides of pages and art torn from old books that he'd mangled and scrawled over. He apologized for not having a spotlight, but the flickering screen he stood in front of gave a better effect. It was like sitting in a David Lynch scene. As Glover yelled, ranted about zoos and slaves and mollusks while pointing at broken images in the dark room, it was settled. He was definitely not being ironic. By the time It Is Fine! (which you can read about here) had finished, I was exhausted. My brain felt overheated, like I'd tried to think about too many things at once and it had made me stupid.

The afternoon had turned out weird in the end, but not in the way I'd expected, and the only thing that was shocking was the earnestness in the work and the artist who was presenting it. I learned a couple of lessons. The first is that going to the bathroom is not an effective way of killing time to avoid awkward situations. It only leads to things getting stranger on you. The second is that it isn't wise to assume that every piece of media is aloof and the people making them are at a distance smirking. Irony may be an abused commodity these days, but that doesn't mean it will stay that way. Sometimes the artist is going to pop up in your face, make you look at something, and ask you how it feels.

— John Constantine

[I had my own memorable chat with Glover last year, available here for the curious. — ed.]

Today in the Nerve Film Lounge: No Country for Old Men, It Is Fine, Pixar Collection, Richard Kelly

Peter Smith — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 17:00:00 GMT

No Country for Old Men: "You know the Coen Brothers are back on top of their game when they somehow derive maximum tension from the banal image of a candy wrapper slowly uncrinkling on a dusty countertop."

It Is Fine! Everything Is Fine: "A remarkable next step for Crispin Glover."

Pixar Short Films Collection: "An important collection that contains the past and future of cinema in equal amounts."

Q&A: Richard Kelly: "It's the darkest of dark subject matter, but I wanted it to be like a party."