The Screengrab : cybill shepherd

In Other Blogs: Date Rape and the Full Douchiness

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 14:30:00 GMT

The great date rape debate over Observe and Report rages on. Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule weighs in. “As I have stated here more than often, the subject of rape is one that I don’t take particularly lightly, so I stands to reason that if the scene were something on the order of revolting exploitation in simple service of pushing the comedy envelope, my moral compass not yet having been totally demagnetized, it would not be a scene which would naturally cause me to leap to its defense. The scene is, in fact, a twisted riff on DeNiro’s delusional date with Cybill Shepherd, in which he takes her to a porn movie and she runs out on him, disgusted. The difference is, of course, that Faris’ character not only doesn’t run out, but actively encourages this oafish psychosexual time bomb in his increasingly dangerous delusions largely because her own moral compass, aided by drink and drugs, is carelessly spinning out of control. Jody Hill’s satiric portrait of the deadened denizens of mall culture, of which Faris’ Brandi and Rogen’s Ronnie are but two extreme examples, have been called heartless exaggerations, but to this hayseed they looked pretty familiar.”

Spoutblog has the scoop on the relaunched Movieline. “The switch was flipped on the Movieline.com moments ago. The relaunch of the Hollywood magazine of the 90s, the once eminently readable forerunner of the bloggy listicle most notable in recent years for its spectacular decline into toothless aspirational lifestyle mag Hollywood Life, immediately caught blogosphere attention when three editors from the recently shuttered Defamer were hired to steer the reincarnation effort…The verdict as of Hour One? So far, they don’t *exactly* seem to be reinventing the movie website wheel but, you know … it’s not like I am.”

At The Projectionist, David Edelstein accuses Robert Downey, Jr. of The Full Douchiness. “Downey won an Oscar nomination thanks to his delivery of that ‘Full Retard’ speech — which wasn’t just funny but also fundamentally accurate in its assessment of actors' obsessions and the Academy's taste. Even given his sympathy for the subject of The Soloist and his co-star Jamie Foxx, Downey could have handled this with more grace: “Yeah, I knew that would come back to haunt me … that was that character's opinion. But Jamie got to know this guy and really wanted to do him justice and blah blah blah blah … ” Or something. Instead, he took umbrage; he was offended that a journalist would dare to bring up something he had uttered in a movie released less than a year ago. Downey is a great actor and deserves all kinds of respect for keeping his demons at bay, but there ought to be a rehab center for celebrity self-righteousness.” (Edelstein has since backed off a bit. The Partial Douchiness, perhaps?)

Buzz Buzz has developed a special feature that will aid my weekly efforts to assemble this here column. “A few years ago I put together a Google custom search engine called Film Blogs, Etc. that I remain quite pleased with, and that I use all the time. It includes a good mix of high-quality web-based publications that approach film from a variety of angles. A number of these sites cover new movies, often in the form of festival dispatches, making this a good resource for finding information about films that haven’t yet garnered enough reviews to appear on sites like Metacritic or Rotten Tomatoes, and the online film journals and blogs by Film Studies academics that it includes make it a nice complement to scholarly databases like the FIAF International Index to Film Periodicals and the Film Literature Index Online.” Nice job, but AHEM we don’t see the Screengrab on your list of searched blogs. Please rectify this injustice post-haste.

Finally, postmodernbarney.com offers some Uncomfortable Plot Summaries. “BATMAN: Wealthy man assaults the mentally ill…FERRIS BUELLER’S DAY OFF: Amoral narcissist makes world dance for his amusement…STAR TREK IV: Interplanetary fugitives poach wildlife from a past age to cover up an act of genocide.”

The Movie Moment: Taxi Driver (1976, Martin Scorsese)

Paul Clark — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Of all the great films I’ve written Movie Moment pieces about thusfar, Taxi Driver is almost certainly the most celebrated. In fact, it’s been a canonical classic for so long that it’s hard to imagine what it’s like to see it fresh, to say nothing of trying to describe what exactly makes it great to those who haven’t seen it. As with all the great masterpieces of cinema, there’s a temptation to shrug and say that it exists on its own terms, but that would be selling the film, and director Martin Scorsese, short. Taxi Driver is made from many of the same components as a number of films from the period, but what distinguishes it from more routine violent dramas of its time is that it’s primarily a character study. Paul Schrader's screenplay and Scorsese’s direction follows Travis Bickle (played by Robert DeNiro) almost every step of the way so that we feel like we’ve walked in his shoes.

Scorsese uses a number of techniques, both subtle and obvious, to convey this feeling. At various points in the film, we hear Travis in voiceover, reading his letters or discussing his plans with no one in particular. Scorsese also uses numerous shots taken from Travis’ point of view, as he silently stares at suspicious characters. But Scorsese finds a way to return to Travis even in the scenes that aren’t necessarily focused on him. There’s an early scene in which we meet Cybill Shepherd and Albert Brooks in a campaign headquarters. The two of them talk, joke around, and obviously enjoy each other’s company. But eventually the conversation turns, as Shepherd notices a strange man parked in a taxi outside the building. Of course, it’s Travis, who’s been watching them the entire time.

Just as interesting is the way Scorsese shoots the conversations in which Travis is actually involved. On first viewing, it appears that Scorsese uses a lot of shot-reverse shot setups to shoot these dialogue exchanges, no different than most other Hollywood movies. But look again at the way these shots are framed- while the shots of the other people talking are invariably positioned over Travis’ shoulder, the inverse is rarely true. Travis is almost never absent from the frame, and although the space he’s given by Scorsese is usually entirely his own, he also intrudes on the spaces of the other characters.

It's because of this that a late scene between the 12 ½ year-old prostitute Iris (Jodie Foster) and her pimp Sport (Harvey Keitel) comes as such a surprise. Prior to this scene, we’ve only seen Iris and Sport through Travis’ eyes, and our experience with them echoes his. We see Iris merely as a poor young girl stuck in a miserable life and yearning to be rescued, as when she runs into Travis’ cab one night and demands to be taken away. Similarly, we only see Sport as an irredeemable monster who handles her roughly and sells her underage body to the johns with a filthy salespitch.

And then the scene begins. Sport and Iris are alone in Iris’ room, shortly after Iris has had breakfast with Travis. She begins to express doubts about her life, and talks about maybe wanting to get out. Rather than flying into a rage as one might expect from a street corner pimp, Sport instead tries to comfort her. He tells her, “I don’t want you to like what you’re doing. If you like what you’re doing, you wouldn’t be my woman.” He then puts on some music and holds her close to him, softly whispering in her ear.

It’s a pretty good scene, but what really makes it work is the point where the viewer begins to wonder, “where’s Travis?” And for good reason- this is the first and last scene in the movie in which Travis is not present. So what’s going on? It’s hard to believe this is all in his imagination- Travis is the sort of person who sees himself as a white knight, and no white knight would think to imagine his target as a gentle comforter and protector of young girls.

If anything, this may be the closest the film comes to feeling objectively “real”- that is, unfiltered through Travis’ mind. In Travis’ simplistic worldview, there are women crying out for him to save them, and men who stand in his way. This exchange between Iris and Sport stands in sharp contrast to his worldview. Granted, this is probably as good as it gets between them, but their relationship isn’t nearly so simple as Travis imagines them to be. When talking to Iris over breakfast, Travis insists that Sport is a scumbag and a killer, whereas Iris seems amused when she talks about Sport, like he’s a big brother to her. But Travis refuses to believe any differently than he already does, and it’s fitting that the tender moment between the two comes to an abrupt halt when Scorsese cuts to Travis firing his gun directly toward the camera.

The climax of Taxi Driver has a sad inevitability, as Travis decides to “save” Iris by brutally killing Sport and his associates. In the middle of the carnage, all Iris can do is recoil and scream out for him to stop, but Travis can’t see the horror in her eyes, merely the mission he feels he has to carry out. How does she feel about what happens? The film never says. But I think it’s telling that once she’s been returned to her parents, it’s her father who thanks Travis for what he’s done, and not Iris herself.

When Good Directors Go Bad: Texasville (1990, Peter Bogdanovich)

Paul Clark — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 20:00:00 GMT

There's a general rule of thumb that any sequel worth making is generally made within four or five years of the original film. Naturally, there are exceptions to this rule, but they're few and far between. Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles, anyone? It's best for sequel makers to strike while the iron is hot, not merely from a business point of view, but also to build on the goodwill of the original. Yet the cinematic landscape is littered with sequels that arrived well past their franchise's expiration date. For every Before Sunset, there's a dozen Oliver's Storys, standing on the dusty highway of cinema history, angrily shaking a tire iron at the pop-culture bus as it passes them by.

1990 brought us three notable examples of this phenomenon, all follow-ups to canonical classics of 1970s Hollywood cinema. The most famous of the bunch was, of course, The Godfather, Part III, an admittedly unnecessary film that's still mostly better than its rep. Then there's The Two Jakes, the Jack Nicholson-directed sequel to Chinatown that's a mess but boasts a fine Harvey Keitel performance. The worst of the lot is easily Peter Bogdanovich's Texasville.

Some of you might not remember this, but Peter Bogdanovich was once known primarily as a fine filmmaker, rather than for playing Dr. Melfi's shrink on The Sopranos or as the boring dude who keeps turning up on DVD commentaries. But in his salad days as a filmmaker, he made a number of excellent films, with his 1971 film The Last Picture Show enduring as a honest-to-goodness masterpiece. But after his career cooled off — a cooling due in no small part to 1975's disastrous At Long Last Love — Bogdanovich had much more trouble getting films made, so he finally decided to make a Last Picture Show sequel, adapting the second Anarene novel by Larry McMurtry and reuniting the lion's share of the original cast.

Some sequels exist to build on and deepen the story of the originals, while others are more about catching up with characters we've gotten to know and love some years down the line. In theory, Texasville should fall into the latter category, but this can be a tricky thing to pull off, especially in a setting like Anarene where everyone knows each other and not a whole lot changes over the years. So instead of exploring how many of these old relationships have played out since the last film, Bogdanovich tightens his focus to Duane Jackson (played in both films by Jeff Bridges), the former football captain who now primarily exists to be picked on by his wife, children, and life in general.

Part of the problem with Texasville, and a major reason why it can't even come within spitting distance of The Last Picture Show, is because Bogdanovich is no longer the young tyro he was in the seventies. That's apparent from the film's opening shot, where we see the Texas landscape in lifelike color, whereas Last Picture Show was in beautiful black and white. But the new color scheme is the least of Texasville's issues. The original film was a realistic fifties-era slice of life about a town so small that there was little to do but go to the movies and fool around as each day brought you a little closer to death. It was a world so desolate that the movie theatre ended up closing.

Texasville is also founded upon the same conception of the town, but it's hard to reconcile the two worlds. The original film's roads and houses were almost always empty, but the more modern version of Anarene is a flurry of activity. Yes, the characters still screw around, but it's played almost as a joke rather than the sad reality we saw in the original film. It's as though Bogdanovich no longer had the nerve to play the story as tragedy anymore, so he settled instead on farce.

Making Duane the central character in the film was probably a mistake as well, although I suppose it's as much McMurtry's fault as anyone's. But regardless of who's to blame, Duane wasn't a character we especially cared about in The Last Picture Show, and while Bridges is a fine actor, even he can't distract us from the fact that we're too busy wondering what happened to the more interesting folks. Honestly, did McMurtry and Bogdanovich really think audiences had waited nineteen years to find out what would happen if Jacy (Cybill Shepherd) came back into his life? Or that he now has a son who can't keep it in his pants, just like his daddy was back in high school?

Texasville is almost perverse in the way it avoids rekindling the old feelings that were originally summoned up by The Last Picture Show. Consider the original film's protagonist Sonny (Timothy Bottoms), who's now relegated to a supporting part in the story. Aside from the dearly departed Sam the Lion (played in the original by Ben Johnson), the heart of The Last Picture Show was Sonny's relationship with Ruth Popper, played in both films by Cloris Leachman.

Yet Texasville gives the two almost no screen time together. The film practically forgets Sonny altogether at several points, returning to him every so often to show him getting steadily crazier, as when he visits the abandoned (after thirty years!) Royal Theatre to "watch movies in the sky.” Even when Sonny moves in with Ruth after a nervous breakdown, we never see them together as we did in the first film. Does Bogdanovich even care? Surely he could have found some tender moments between Sonny and Ruth had he not devoted so much time to, say, an awful scene in which Sonny's troublemaking twins spearhead a mass egging of the town's centennial festivities.

While Texasville isn't the all-time worst sequel to a great film, it may be the most disheartening. To see Bogdanovich so colossally misjudge what made The Last Picture Show so great makes me wonder whether he ever knew in the first place. In a way, the fate of the Royal Theatre sums up the difference between these two movies. In the original film, it played a central role in the town, and brought joy and goodwill into the lives of its residents. In Texasville, it's a ruin, an eyesore, a pale shadow of what it once was, and you pretty much have to be crazy to go there.