The Screengrab : david cronenberg

DVD Digest for May 26, 2009

Paul Clark — Tue, 26 May 2009 14:00:00 GMT

In advance of the upcoming shuttering of The Screengrab- just four more days, folks!- the DVD departments of Disney, Paramount, and Fox have graciously decided not to put out any recent releases this week in protest. Thanks for the support, guys!

Unfortunately, this boycott leaves us with precious little to report in regards to recent movies. Put it another way- when your highest-profile recent release coming to DVD is the forgotten Renee Zellweger/Harry Connick Jr. rom-com New in Town (Lionsgate), the phrase “slow week” doesn’t quite cover it. If you’re looking for Asian fare, this week also brings Mamoru Oshii’s animated The Sky Crawlers (Sony, also Blu-Ray), as well as two Wayne Wang indies, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (Magnolia) and Princess of Nebraska (Magnolia). And let’s not overlook the much-anticipated How to Give Pleasure to a Woman by a Woman (Pacific Media).

Thankfully, there’s a little more of interest in the classics department, although that’s kind of a good news/bad news situation. The good news is that Warner is releasing titles from Michelangelo Antonioni, David Cronenberg, John Boorman, Hal Ashby, and Hugh Hudson. The bad news is that this week’s releases include some of these estimable auteurs’ worst films. Now, I’m aware that Zabriskie Point and M. Butterfly have their defenders. However, I’m not sure people were exactly clamoring for a DVD of Beyond Rangoon or director’s cuts of Revolution and Lookin’ to Get Out, no matter how excited Jon Voight is about the latter. At least they’re not in a box set, so you Zabriskie fans can finally watch stuff blow up real good at the end without having to buy a DVD of Al Pacino fighting the Redcoats as well. Also this week: Falling Down Deluxe Edition (Warner).

Now that Hollywood has seen fit to make Land of the Lost into an expensive summer movie, it was inevitable that Land of the Lost: The Complete Series (Universal) would be hitting stores in advance of that. Or if you’re more into the whole cop-show thing, this week also sees the release of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: The Ninth Year (Universal) and The Closer: Season 4 (Warner).

Finally, this week’s Blu-Ray only slate includes perhaps the “man”-liest triple feature around, with new Blu-Rays of Children of Men (Universal), Cinderella Man (Universal), and Inside Man (Universal) hitting stores today. Also this week: Field of Dreams (Universal), Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves Extended Cut (Warner), Seabiscuit (Universal), Spy Game (Universal), and True Romance Unrated Cut (Warner).

In the words of Annette Hanshaw, “that’s all.”

Final Farewells: The Best & Worst Death Scenes In Cinema (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 21 May 2009 20:00:00 GMT

A lot of my friends have been going through break-ups and divorces lately, which means they’ve probably also been hearing that old familiar friends/family/Facebook folk wisdom about how the end of a relationship is like a death, which must be properly mourned.

And, given that we're down to our next-to-last Thursday list before getting dumped for some younger, sexier blogs by Nerve, your pals here at the Screengrab, having moved beyond denial, anger and bargaining, figured we oughta tackle grief -- well, grief and “holy shit, did you see that guy’s head explode? How frickin' cool was that?” -- with THE SCREENGRAB’S FAVORITE DEATH SCENES OF ALL TIME, including...

The Guy With The Exploding Head, SCANNERS (1981)

Holy shit! How frickin' cool was that? I remember first seeing the aforementioned Exploding Head Guy during one of the montage sequences of the 1984 theatrical clip show Terror in the Aisles (a horror film comprised entirely of classic moments from other horror films, kind of like the Scary Movie franchise without the dick jokes). Later, I saw David Cronenberg’s Scanners in its entirety, although the only thing I really remember about it now is the scene above, where renegade telepath Darryl Revok (B-Movie Hall of Fame villain extraordinaire Michael Ironside) totally blows that bald dude’s skull apart -- with his mind! -- in one of the most memorable death scenes in cinematic history...second only, I suppose, to John Hurt’s demise in Alien (below) for its shock value imagery. In a way, then, it’s sad to realize that, in the wake of Saving Private Ryan and the recent wave of torture porn cinema, the image of a bloody cranium bursting like a ripe watermelon is now considered tame enough to show as a sight gag on The Daily Show. (AO)

John Hurt in ALIEN (1979)

Executive Officer Kane (John Hurt) goes to investigate an abandoned spaceship. He finds a chamber full of eggs. One of the eggs hatches, releasing a creature that latches onto his face, knocking him unconscious. His fellow crew members take him back to their ship, where they watch over him until the creature lets go and he awakens, seemingly okay. Then, during a meal, Kane gets violently ill, and a screeching, phallic monster bursts out of his chest cavity...in the process terrifying a generation, immediately elevating Alien above the majority of its contemporary peers, and providing one of the most horrific birth-rape images in the annals of cinema. (NS)

John Cassavettes in THE FURY (1978)

Some men just make you want to get to the point, big-time. Cassavettes is of course legendary as the man who, some say, created the independent American film movement -- but he earned his rent as an actor in other people's movies, and as an actor, he made his strongest impact in man-you-love-to-hate roles. The one that everyone probably remembers best is Guy, the hungry New York actor who pimped his wife out to Satan, a gesture that his character here -- Childress, a top-secret government operative with a dead arm and deader eyes -- would sniff at as the move of a rank amateur. Childress lays waste to most of the cast of Brian De Palma's visually lush horror thriller, only to meet his match in a telekinetic teenager who must share her director's movie-geek interests and black sense of humor, since what she has planned for him is actually a choice parody of the ending of Michelangelo Antonioni's Zabriskie Point. (PN)

Robert Shaw in JAWS (1975) & Samuel L. Jackson in DEEP BLUE SEA (1999)

Hitchcock used to talk about the difference between suspense and surprise in terms of a bomb under the kitchen table. If it suddenly goes off in the midst of a breakfast conversation, you have a moment of surprise. But if you keep cutting to the bomb ticking away while your characters sip their coffee and chomp their bacon…well, now you have suspense. Hitchcock’s thesis can also be applied to movies in which characters are eaten by sharks. (Hitch didn’t mention farce, although that’s a third option.) In Jaws, we have Quint, the old man of the sea, a man seemingly destined to be eaten by sharks ever since he escaped that fate after the sinking of the USS Indianapolis at the end of World War II. He goes kicking and screaming, sliding down the deck, reaching for a hand that can pull him to safety…suspense! In Deep Blue Sea, we have Samuel L. Jackson giving one of those action movie “rouse the troops” speeches. Just at the moment we’re sure he’s going to lead his team to victory over the shark menace…surprise! (SVD)

JAMES CAGNEY IN WHITE HEAT (1949)

From the first time you get a look at Jimmy Cagney’s unhinged, short-tempered gangster Cody Jarrett, you know he’s not going to end well. Cody is ruthless, bloodthirsty and marginally sane, and like Hamlet, he likes his mother…a lot. When Ma Jarrett (who’s just as crooked and crazy as her boy Cody) finally catches a bullet in the back, he goes completely off the rails and turns from a colorful, hot-headed gangster to one of the most murderous psychotics in the history of crime dramas. Finally betrayed by an undercover cop posing as a trusted member of his gang, Cody’s end comes when he desperately scrambles up the side of a gas storage tank. Fighting it out through a hail of bullets and a cloud of tear gas, he spits death at the cops below, refusing to go out without a fight, but the end seems near when the police snitch catches him with a couple of sniper shots. Even then, he’s got a bloody-minded determination to go out on his own terms: he recklessly fires his pistol into the gas tank, and just before it goes up in a huge, fiery explosion, he screams a defiant echo of the toast he used to raise to his late mother: “Top of the world!” (LP)

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

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

Morning Deal Report: Failure of Imagination Threat Level Orange

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 14:30:00 GMT

Universal is remaking Drop Dead Fred. Let me repeat that. Universal is remaking Drop Dead Fred. Perhaps you vaguely recall the 1991 original, which “starred Phoebe Cates as a wallflower who loses her job and husband during the course of a lunch hour. Forced to live back home, she's reunited with her childhood imaginary friend (Brit actor Rik Mayall), who promises to help but causes more havoc.” The new version will star Russell Brand as the imaginary friend and will be written by “Dennis McNicholas, one of the writers of Universal's upcoming Land of the Lost,” per The Hollywood Reporter. Of course it will.

The Universal remake train isn’t stopping there, however. They’re also planning a new version of Videodrome. “The new picture will modernize the concept, infuse it with the possibilities of nano-technology and blow it up into a large-scale sci-fi action thriller.” And you might be surprised to learn that David Cronenberg “has no role in the film as yet.” Or you might not.

If that doesn’t do it for you, how about a spiffy new screen version of Humpty Dumpty. “The 3-D sci-fi horror pic is about a half-human, half-alien creature who embarks on a murderous rampage after his alien mother is abused by two rednecks in the Deep South,” Variety reports. Oh…that Humpty Dumpty?

Related:
Brand X: Sexy Beast Russell Brand Storms America
The Cruise/Cronenberg Circle

“You Cannot Have Sex”: Sasha Grey’s Girlfriend Experience

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 19:00:00 GMT

In his obituary for Marilyn Chambers yesterday, our own Phil Nugent noted that “Chambers became perhaps the only established hardcore star to play the leading role in a ‘mainstream’ film by a major North American director (at least, until Steven Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience opens) when David Cronenberg cast her in his second feature, Rabid.” The star of the Soderbergh film is Sasha Grey, until now best known for her work in such mature adult fare as Squirt Gangbang, Blow Me Sandwich 11 and Cum Fart Cocktails 5.

You’d expect Grey’s first mainstream role to be something of a change of pace, but the actress herself wasn’t so sure about that. “When I had the first meeting I assumed I would be naked and do a sex scene,” Grey tells New York magazine. “Did I think I would do five, like in my adult work? No, but even up to the point where we were shooting, I thought there was going to be at least one sex scene.”

Despite the fact that she’s playing a high-priced call girl, Grey learned no coitus would be required. “The contract did say that I would be nude. But one of the clauses was [laughing] “You cannot have [real] sex.” To me, that was a pretty funny legality… But it was great not to have sex—that would have been too easy. If you want to see me having sex, you can do that! Not doing it shifts the focus, because a lot of clients are there for more than the sex.”

Anyone holding out hope for a Cum Fart Cocktails 6 may be out of luck. “I’ve got to diversify myself. Do I want to be 35, having sex on-camera? No. I want to be sitting on a fucking porch at my beach house with my own successful company.” A fucking porch? I’m sure she didn’t mean it the way I read it.

Related:
Screengrab at Sundance: Review of The Girlfriend Experience
Steven Soderbergh's Girlfriend Experience

Clippy Strikes Back: The Scariest Technology In Cinema History (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 21:30:00 GMT

THE MATRIX (1999)

Spoiler alert! The Matrix is people! Just kidding...but really, if you haven’t seen it by now, allow me to ruin the surprise for you: according to Laurence Fishburne’s Morpheus, the Matrix is a computer-generated dream world built to keep us under control in order to change human beings into the copper-top batteries fueling our cybernetic overlords. And yet, when Keanu “Whoa!” Reeves’ messianic Neo finally “wakes up” in his real world goo pod prison, the all-knowing cybernetic overlords just...uh...flush him down a drain so he can be enlisted by Morpheus and his band of human rebels in their fight to overthrow the Matrix. Huh? Wha? That logical inconsistency blew a gaping hole in my willing suspension of disbelief the first time I saw the Wachowski Brothers' cyberpunk classic, yet later I realized I’d worried my pretty little head over nothing...NOT because the disappointing sequels kinda sorta explained away the seeming plot contrivance (since Neo was really the sixth integral anomaly and thus was supposed to find his way to the Architect and blah, blah, blah...), but rather because the original Matrix was so fresh and visually exciting, with a paranoid, unified-field conspiracy theory of a plot that captured the unease (and exhilaration) of life in the digital age better than any movie since...well...Tron. (AO)

THE TERMINATOR (1984) & T2: JUDGMENT DAY (1991)

A perfect killing machine sent from the future to slay the mother of mankind’s eventual savior, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator was, from 1984 to 1991, the baddest assassin around. But James Cameron’s wildly popular sequel to The Terminator, T2: Judgment Day, further upped the ante, introducing a shape-shifting liquid-metal version of the techno-phobic series’ cyborg destroyers, the T-1000 (Robert Patrick), that stands as one of action cinema’s most daunting evildoers. If both the original and T-1000 Terminators are preeminent examples of malevolent machinery, however, it’s Skynet – the government-sanctioned computer program that goes sentient, instigates a nuclear holocaust, and manufactures an army of robots – that proves the franchise’s true villain. Shrewdly foreshadowing our increasing global inter-connectivity, and postulating that condition as ripe for tragedy, Cameron’s series offers us an apocalypse created by the very devices we rely on for our protection, and then – as further evidenced by T3, TV’s Sarah Connor Chronicles, and presumably the forthcoming Terminator: Salvation – also posits those machines as our sole means of achieving post-doomsday deliverance. (NS)

PULSE (2001)

Many J-horror imports exploit fears of technology, but none do so as effectively – and as thoughtfully – as Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s 2001 masterpiece Pulse. From online computers to cell phones, technology is ubiquitous throughout Kurosawa’s film, and slowly reveals itself to be the cause of a strange, growing phenomenon whereby Tokyo’s citizens begin to mysteriously disappear, often leaving behind only a residual black stain on the wall (shades of the marks found throughout post-atom-bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki). It soon becomes clear that ghosts are attempting to enter the physical world through our gadgets, and Kurosawa’s portrait of a technology-fostered apocalypse is chilling not simply for its raft of indelibly unsettling imagery (a plane hurtling to the ground, shuffling specters spied on a computer monitor), but from its story’s underlying commentary about the alienation and loneliness fostered by our mounting reliance on machines. Modernity’s technological progress leads to communication breakdown, which in turn results in societal disintegration, a set of circumstances Kurosawa chillingly depicts as both unavoidable and irreversible. (NS)

VIDEODROME (1983)

The purifying/corrupting relationship between technology and the human body has long fascinated (and been fetishized by) David Cronenberg, a topic which he superbly addressed in 1983’s Videodrome. In this mind-bending story, the president of a low-rent television station, Max Renn (James Woods), stumbles upon transmissions of the titular S&M horror show – in which rape, torture and mutilation occur in a single orange room – and subsequently begins suffering from horrific hallucinations. From there, the line between real and unreal blurs, though regardless of whether or not the ensuing madness is all in Max’s head, the sight of him inserting organic videotapes into a stomach gash, which in turn produces a gun that melds with his hand, affords a twisted, terrifying view of man’s increasingly fundamental bond with his inanimate creations. “Long Live the New Flesh!” serves as both a rallying cry for the film’s “villains” and the mournful final words of Renn, with Cronenberg ambiguously treating our connection to television as something at once liberating and destructive. (NS)

SECONDS (1966)

John Frankenheimer's nightmare movie, shot by cinematographer James Wong Howe, begins with the chubby, perpetually middle-aged character actor John Randolph (Jack Nicholson's father in Prizzi's Honor) as a married banker who barely recognizes that his life has gone stale until someone is kind enough to point it out. He is recruited as a client by a mysterious, secret organization that arranges for people to be given second chances at life: first their bodies are remade through plastic surgery and an exercise regimen, then they are dropped into a new routine that has been planned for them by a computer program. Of course, they're still the same old dissatisfied dullards they were before they went under the knife, especially if, like Randolph, they're being played by Rock Hudson after the bandages come off. Most techno-phobic sci-fi films are about the dangers of technology that we don't yet have; this one is about what people could have been doing with technology that they already had when the movie came out, if only they were stupid and shameless enough. Which may be why it feels more accurately prophetic now than 2001. (PN)

Click Here For Part One, Two & Three

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Nick Schager, Phil Nugent

Clippy Strikes Back: The Scariest Technology In Cinema History (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 21:00:00 GMT

TRON (1982)

Older brothers usually get to be know-it-alls (and, of course, we’re usually right), but my Big Bro credibility took a huge hit in the ‘80s when I told my kid brother in no uncertain terms that he was absolutely, completely wrong in his crazy belief that Roger Ebert once gave this Disney science-fiction oddity a four-star review. But, though it pained me then (and now) to admit, my brother was absolutely right: Ebert raved about Tron, calling it a “dazzling...technological sound-and-light show that is sensational and brainy, stylish, and fun” in its anthropomorphized depiction of the inner workings of computer technology, starring Jeff Bridges as a programmer trapped in a trippy day-glo software universe Jeff “the Dude” Lebowski would surely appreciate. At the time, of course, director Steven Lisberger’s tale of a Master Control Program bent on domination was fairly unique; that and the film’s visual palette were groundbreaking enough to explain why Ebert (and my brother) could forgive the fairly colorless acting and writing...but it was the cool Disneyland theme park attraction and the super-cool video game that finally won me over to the wonders of Tron. Nowadays, of course, it’s the other way around as the Master Control Program that runs Hollywood routinely morphs video games and theme park attractions into run-of-the-mill movies, computers are ubiquitous and CGI long ago lost its new car smell...but, hey, at least good ol’ Roger Ebert still knows how to flummox me with an occasional WTF? 4-star review! (AO)

SHIVERS (1975)

For his first feature, David Cronenberg came up with an idea that so completely sums up the recurring concepts of his early work -- the horror at the body and mutations, the hang-ups about sexual repression and sexual release -- that it's kind of remarkable that he ever revved himself up again to make another. Set mostly inside a high-tech luxury apartment complex outside Montreal, it begins with a scene that suggests an old-school porno film that's gone off its trolley: a burly, bearded old man assaults a young woman in what looks like a Catholic schoolgirl outfit and, after stripping himself to the waist, sets about vivisecting her. It turns out that he's a scientist who has developed a parasite that, once introduced into the human body, frees the host from anything remotely resembling inhibitions. The girl is his test subject, who has been entirely too efficient at spreading the parasite around to various neighbors, so that by the end of the movie, the whole complex has turned into one enormous writhing, drooling, mindless orgy on the move. This concept is especially disturbing to those viewers shallow enough to notice that the casting department has not done its job with an eye towards assembling the ideal orgy of a Skinemax audience's dreams. Don't let anybody tell you that Montreal in the mid-70s was suffering from a shortage of unsightly people. (PN)

DARK STAR (1974)

Made while he and screenwriter Dan O’Bannon were completing their USC film school postgraduate work, John Carpenter’s debut feature Dark Star paid amusing homage to Kubrick’s seminal 2001 in its portrait of machinery gone awry. Aboard a spaceship whose astronauts have been tasked with eliminating unstable stars in order to pave the way for future colonization, the computer motherboard goes straight-up crazy and a rogue bomb goes even crazier, attempting to detonate in the ship’s loading bay despite the crew’s best efforts to prevent such a catastrophe. Unlike 2001 or O’Bannon’s later screenwriting hit Alien (which borrowed liberally from this film’s premise), Carpenter’s maiden directorial outing is played for tongue-in-cheek laughs rather than chills, and rather ramshackle ones at that. Yet despite an upfront lack of seriousness, this space saga’s conception of technology remains decidedly pessimistic, its story’s faulty equipment conveying an underlying fear of the potential calamity that awaits those foolish enough to count on CPUs for their safety. (NS)

COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT (1970)

This sci-fi film can be watched in its entirety on YouTube, and it doesn't lose much there. Directed by the erratic Joseph Sargent, whose other credits include Jaws: The Revenge but also The Taking of Pelham One Two Three and the 1989 TV film Day One (a good docudrama about the ultimate evil technology story, the Manhattan Project), it's not a visually distinguished movie, but its treatment of the ever-popular computers-are-our-masters theme, specifically geared to the nuclear age, is impressively spiky. Dr. Forbin, played by The Young and the Restless mainstay Eric Braeden, has perfected the ultimate missile-defense system, a supercomputer called Colossus that will have absolute control over America's nuclear arsenal and is impervious to attack. As soon as it's switched on, Colossus announces that it senses the existence of its own doppelganger -- Guardian, a Soviet supercomputer with the same function and capabilities. Furthermore, Colossus and Guardian make contact with each other and decide that they should join forces to protect the planet, shutting out the middle man -- i.e., us. Various attempts are made, under Dr. Forbin's direction, to override, penetrate, and otherwise shut down the computers, with results that only raise the question, "What part of 'impervious to attack' do you not understand?" In the end, Colossus, after detonating a couple of missiles just to remind us that it means business, assures the human population that it wants only the best for the world over which it now holds complete control, always a reassuring sentiment whether you hear it from a supercomputer with nuclear capability or Billy Mays. (PN)

Click Here For Part One, Two & Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Nick Schager

The Rep Report (February 20 - 26)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 18:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: The Film Society of Lincoln Center's annual Film Comment Selects series (February 20 - March 5) offers the chance to catch up with a wide variety of movies, old and new, that have been judged as neglected by the country's leading serious movie magazine. This year, the recent stuff includes Michael Almereyda's latest dispatch from New Orleans, Paradise, Jean-Claude Brisseau's controversial A l’aventure, Paul Schrader's Holocaust-survivor story Adam Resurrected with Jeff Goldblum and Willem Dafoe, the South Korean thriller The Chaser (Chugyeogja), John Boorman's The Tiger's Tail, a doppelganger story starring Brendan Gleeson, and Lake Tahoe, Mexican director Fernando Eimbcke's follow-up to his small-scale charmer Duck Season. The older selections include some real buried gems, including two documentaries by Joel DeMott and Jeff Kreines: the notorious Demon Lover Diary, which is about the making of a zero-budget mid-1970s horror movie that ends with the documentary makers fleeing the scene in apparent fear for their lives from their subjects, one of whom mangled his hand so that he could use the insurance money to finance his movie and somehow arranged with Ted Nugent to use ol' Wango Tango's house for a location; and Seventeen, a look at teen culture in Muncie, Indiana that was made in 1983 for public television but deemed too raw for broadcast. There are also rare screenings of films by Situationist International founder Guy Debord and Robert Aldrich's seldom seen The Killing of Sister George.

Each weekend between now and the first week of April, starting tonight, the IFC Center will be having midnight screenings of a different film by David Cronenberg, including his first really big mainstream hit, 1986's The Fly (on March 6 and 7), but also with some out-of-the-way stuff. On February 27 and 28, IFC shows Spider, an adaptation of a Patrick McGrath novel starring Ralph Fiennes and a magnificent, jaw-dropping Miranda Richardson, that may be his best film of the decade and is almost certainly his most underappreciated.

Back in the days of studio musicals, Marni Nixon was the best-known off-screen singing voice in musicals. Nixon provided the high notes of Marilyn Monroe's version of "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and dubbed the singing voices of Margaret O'Brien in The Secret Garden, Deborah Kerr in The King and I and An Affair to Remember, Natalie Wood in West Side Story, and Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady. It was after that last film was released that Nixon, who received no on-screen credit for this work, became a celebrity and inspired a minor scandal when word leaked out of her contributions to the performances of non-singing stars in singing roles. She subsequently appeared on-screen as a singing nun in The Sound of Music; more recently, she supplied a voice for the Disney animated feature Mulan. On Monday, February 23, Nixon, who at 78 is still performing on-stage, will appear live at the Film Forum to promote her new autobiography, I Could Have Sung All Night. She'll be interviewed on-stage by the Film Forum's Bruce Goldstein and her co-writer, Stephen Cole.

DURHAM, NORTH CAROLINA: The tenth annual Nevermore Film Festival, a three-day celebration of "horror, gothic, & fantasy", starts today and runs through the weekend. A treat for genre fans, it's a chance to kick back and sample what the up-and-coming mad scientists have been brewing in theire labs, where horror junkies with low budgets and fevered brains try to bring something new and personal to the field even as the big studios are content to run off the thousandth xerox copy of a franchise that had worn out its welcome before the returns on its original installment were cold. (Yes, we're looking at you, Jason Voorhees.) This year's highlights include the trapped-in-a-supermarket thriller Alien Raiders and the moody, urban British ghost story The Disappeared. There are also old school screenings of such family friendly classics as James Whale's Frankenstein and The Creature from the Black Lagoon.

BERKELEY: The Human Rights Watch International Film Festival runs at the Pacific Film Archives from February 25 -27. The festival aims to be "the leading showcase for committed and courageous films that open our eyes to a range of human rights issues around the globe", and this year's program includes some sharp and poetic treatments of those issues, among them Up the Yangtze, The Sari Soldiers, about women who participated in the Nepalese civil war; the Argentinean lament Our Disappeared; and the paranoia-inducing Secrecy.

Morning Deal Report: The Cruise/Cronenberg Circle

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 15:30:00 GMT

David Cronenberg’s adaptation of the Robert Ludlum novel The Matarese Circle is attracting some big names. Denzel Washington is already on board, and now Tom “Eyepatch” Cruise is in talks to join him. “Cruise will go mano a mano with Washington as two bitter enemy spies who, after spending two decades trying to kill each other, grudgingly team up against the Matarese, a powerful group at the root of a conspiracy,” Variety reports.

Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan has set up his latest bat-free project at Warner Bros. His original script Inception is described as a sci-fi action film, but as The Hollywood Reporter notes, “one would suppose a treatment based on some poems he wrote in his fifth-grade journal would have gotten the green light.”

John Malkovich has signed on to play the bad guy in Jonah Hex. “Malkovich will play Turnbull, a wealthy Southern plantation owner whose son is killed by Union soldiers during the Civil War. He blames Hex, a former confederate soldier-turned-hardened bounty hunter and gunslinger,” per Variety.

Related:
Tom Cruise, at Midlife, with a Freaking Eyepatch
Horton Hears a Hex

DVD Digest for February 10, 2009

Paul Clark — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 15:00:00 GMT

With St. Valentine’s Day less than a week away, you’d think studios would start rolling out some of their romantic classics on DVD. But I’m seeing very little of that this week, unless of course your idea of romance is vastly different than mine…

DVDs of the Week: But then, for me, nothing says romance like a pair of movies from surrealist master Luis Bunuel. This week brings two of his favorites, The Exterminating Angel and Simon of the Desert, courtesy of the folks at Criterion. The Exterminating Angel is the known quantity for me, a wicked satire of bourgeois manners, in which a group of upper-crusters finds itself unable to leave following a dinner party, which brings them no end of trouble. Simon, Bunuel’s telling of the story of an ascetic who stood atop a remote pillar to prove his love for God, is one I’ve yet to see (do I smell a future Reviews By Request?), but its DVD release is no less noteworthy. The films, made during Bunuel’s sojourn in Mexico, have been given the deluxe Criterion treatment, with new transfers, documentaries, new interviews with actress Sylvia Pinal and others, and more.

Other noteworthy this week is Janus’ Essential Art House: Volume 2, which includes The 400 Blows, Black Orpheus, Pygmalion, La Strada, Ikiru, and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp in single-disc editions, also available separately. In addition, Lionsgate is releasing new editions of the Wallace and Gromit short films, A Close Shave, A Grand Day Out and The Wrong Trousers. Finally- and I can’t in good conscience call this a classic, though it’s not new- Universal’s got the “Extreme Edition” of the final film from the great Raul Julia, Street Fighter (also Blu-Ray). So if you enjoy things that suck, set aside money for that one.

If newer movies are more your speed, this week’s recent releases coming to DVD include: Courtney Hunt’s double Oscar nominee Frozen River (Sony, also Blu-Ray); Kevin Smith’s Zack and Miri Make a Porno (Genius Products; Samuel L. Jackson and the late Bernie Mac in Soul Men (Genius Products); Richard Gere and Diane Lane in Nights in Rodanthe (Warner, also Blu-Ray); and a pair of very different showbiz satires, Barry Levinson’s What Just Happened? (Magnolia), and Bruce Campbell directing Bruce Campbell in My Name Is Bruce (Image, also Blu-Ray). Also this week, a quartet of curious films from fascinating filmmakers: Oliver Stone’s W. (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray); Spike Lee’s WW2 drama Miracle at St. Anna (Buena Vista, also Blu-Ray); Fernando Meirelles’ Blindness (Buena Vista); and Eric Rohmer’s The Romance of Astrea and Celadon (E1 Entertainment Distribution), allegedly the master’s final film. Oddly enough, the Rohmer looks to be the most romantic movie in this week’s column. Don’t know if your Dirty Dancing-loving special lady would go for it though…

Finally, a pretty action-packed and bloody lineup of Blu-Ray only releases this week: Martin Scorsese’s classic Raging Bull (MGM); David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence (Warner); a pair of John Grisham adaptations, A Time to Kill and The Pelican Brief (both Warner); a double feature starring The Rock, Doom (Universal) and The Rundown (Universal); and two of Onion AV Club critic Scott Tobias’ New Cult Canon picks, Donnie Darko (Fox) and The Boondock Saints (Fox). Also, Milos Forman’s Amadeus: The Director’s Cut (Warner) and the table-tennis comedy Ping Pong Playa (Image).

Oh, and Pretty Woman (Disney).

Nine-Point Plans

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 18:15:00 GMT

It ain't Thanksgiving, but everyone wants a slice of the turkey. Most people have already made their New Year's resolutions (some of us have already broken them, for that matter), but up north, in Edmonton's Vue Weekly newspaper, critic Brian Gibson is asking not what he can do for Hollywood, but what Hollywood can do for him.

Shocked into a wishful reverie by a chance viewing of Clint Eastwood's embarrassing end-of-life project Gran Torino, Gibson delivers a nine-item wish list for what he hopes the movies will deliver in 2009. On his checklist are more realistic films about class and race, big comebacks from fading Hollywood actresses (including Screengrab favorite Debra Winger), more films by female directors, and "a damn good Canadian movie from a director other than Cronenberg, Egoyan or Maddin".

Never ones to miss out on the chance to jump someone else's train, we'd like to echo several of Gibson's wishes -- especially his desire to see serious film criticism make a comeback, and a better distribution system that ensures that people in locations like, oh, say Edmonton and San Antonio get a chance to see something other than blockbusters on the big screen a couple of times a year. And, to round out his list to an even dozen, here's three more things we'd like to see from the film world in 2009:

1. The emergence of a new and exciting national cinema. The last several years have seen the emergence of exciting and vibrant film scenes in places like South Korea, Spain, Thailand, and even Iran. But how about a new national cinema taking center stage? Enough great films have come out of Africa in the last few years to suggest they're due for a major renaissance; Arab cinema might finally bloom in the unlikely event that a prolonged period of politcal and economic stability settles in the Gulf; and Italian cinema has been in the doldrums for a number of decades.

2. Directors breaking out of their boxes. While there's something to be said for finding what you're good at and sticking with it, the emergence of several major talents in recent years who have confined themselves to the dreary and limited world of torture-porn horror movies gives one pause. Rob Zombie's movies are made by a man with a careful and crafty eye for visuals and a keen grasp of mood, and the first half The Strangers proved that young Bryan Bertino is a master of timing and a guy who knows how to wring tension out of a dramatic scene or a simple framing shot. We'd like to stop imaging what it would be like if these guys turned their obvious skills towards something a little bit more mature, and actually see it.

3. Watchmen being worth watching. It doesn't seem like so goddamn much to ask.

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The Curious Case of Benjamin Button's Undeserved Oscar Buzz

Andrew Osborne — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 15:00:00 GMT

So, I suppose I should first concede that I’m not exactly the target audience for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. I only saw it because my wife likes Cate Blanchett and Tilda Swinton, and she wound up enjoying the movie (somewhat) more than me as well.

And it’s not like there aren’t good moments: every scene with the aforementioned Ms. Swinton, for instance. And Jared Harris is a hoot as a rollicking sea captain...in fact, in the midst of the film's long, long, ever-so-long 166 minute running time, the half hour-ish section with the intertwining Swinton/Harris subplots is certainly worthy of Oscar consideration, featuring as it does a vivid romance and a breathtaking World War II battle scene between a tugboat and a Nazi sub, illuminated by the flaming wreckage of a torpedoed battleship. Good stuff, as Johnny Carson used to say.

But Benjamin Button isn’t generating Oscar buzz as a short subject. Somehow, people think the whole thing should be considered for a Best Picture statuette, complete with nominations (and maybe even awards!) for Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Taraji P. Henson, director David Fincher and screenwriter Eric Roth. Which strikes me a bit odd, considering how bad the movie is.

Now, I don’t want to come down too hard on Ms. Henson: I know from Hustle & Flow (and even Smoking Aces) that she’s a good and interesting actress, and she does the best she can here with a one-dimensional "supportive mother" gig...but why this rote, uneventful role is considered more Oscar-worthy than Debra Winger’s barnburner performance in Rachel Getting Married is bizarre to the point of incomprehensibility.

Fincher, meanwhile, gives good mise en scène throughout, making fine use of CGI and production design to create some pretty (though bloodless) depictions of New Orleans in the ‘20s, Russia in the ‘40s, New York in the ‘50s, etc. And he kicks in some nice set pieces, like the Swinton/Harris bits and a running gag about lightning. But a director is also supposed to have what we in the business call a “take” on his material, even if he’s saddled with a gimmicky, unfocused screenplay full of vague, generic insights like “You never know what's comin' for ya.” Fincher is also responsible for some flat-out bad decisions like the unnecessary and distracting frame story, in which a dull, constipated Julia Ormond reads (and reads and reads) Benjamin Button’s diary to mumbly old Cate Blanchett while Hurricane Katrina bears down on them for no particular reason.

Indeed, the casting of Blanchett turns out to be another of Fincher’s missteps. While the actress has been good and sometimes even great in other roles, her alien beauty (and strangely unyielding red ponytail, present in just about every era of the story) more or less defeats the best efforts of the make-up and CGI teams assigned to convince us her character is aging while Button grows younger. Not counting the heavy prosthetics of her deathbed scenes, Blanchett’s "Daisy" always looks pretty much like the thirtysomething actress playing her, from her teens through her seventies, and not knowing how old the character's supposed to be at any given time gets awfully confusing in a movie about asynchronous timelines, especially when Daisy and Benjamin Button are trying to figure out the logistics of their relationship...although the near total lack of chemistry between Blanchett and Pitt is a much bigger problem in that department.

Blanchett’s character was semi-conscious through most of Babel, making it difficult to gauge her chemistry with Pitt in their previous go-round, but here the alleged lifelong soulmates seem to have nothing in common (apart from their ridiculous beauty). I’d blame Pitt, but he manages to generate plenty of believable heat with Swinton, so either Swinton’s so good she raises Pitt’s game in their scenes together (a distinct possibility) or else Blanchett's usual vibrance is simply weighed down by her distractingly gooey Naawwwwlins accent, underwritten character and dead weight co-star and there's not a hell of a lot she can do about it. (Or both.)

And Pitt really does nothing interesting with his role (in the same way Roth and Fincher do nothing interesting with a premise David Lynch or David Cronenberg would've knocked right the fuck out of the park). Sure, it's funny to see Pitt running around as a tiny little geezer, and in his romantic hunk scenes he certainly looks like a movie star...but his character is more or less completely passive throughout the story, and I never believed him as a young old man or an old young man: he’s basically just Brad Pitt in a series of wigs.

So, aside from Swinton and the art department, why exactly is Benjamin Button considered so dang award-worthy? Well, David Wildman of The Weekly Dig thinks it’s because “Pitt as an old fart looks shockingly similar to the way Robert Redford looks now. My theory is that Hollywood’s elite are feeling their mortality, as the boomers head off toward the sunset, and it isn’t pretty. When the WWII generation was getting to this point back around the ‘60s, they stoically denied it, pretending they could swing just like the kids. John Wayne played the same character until he keeled over, and codgers like Dean Martin posed as sexy secret agents. Pitt is still relatively young and handsome, but he can’t help gazing at his navel like a pussy and neurotically obsessing about that inevitable light at the end of the tunnel.”

Of course, in this case, the light may very well be glinting off an undeserved Oscar.

Related Stories:
Screengrab Predicts the Oscars: Nominations
Trailer Review: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

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

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

10. THE FLY (1986)

Horror movies, contrary to the claims of highfalutin critics like us, don’t necessarily have to be about anything. If they’re scary and well-made and don’t insult your intelligence, just being a good horror movie is enough. But when they are about something, especially in the hands of a storyteller of the depth and intelligence of David Cronenberg, they transcend genre and become something truly special. Cronenberg took a popular pulp story by George Langelaan, which had been filmed once before as a pretty straightforward monster movie in the 1950s, and remade it as a terrific modern-day horror flick, complete with terrifically suspenseful moments and plenty of nauseating fluids for the grindhouse crowd – but he also infused it with a powerful undercurrent of extremely personal terror. The Fly, carried on the hair-sprouting, wing-bearing back of Jeff Goldblum’s greatest performance, is one of the finest movies ever made about the betrayal of the body: in the story of a scientist who is transformed into an insect-like creature, Cronenberg manages to isolate not only the horror, but also the loneliness, the helplessness, and the frustration of the sick and the dying. When Brundlefly is finally dispatched at the movie’s end, the pervasive feeling isn’t one of revenge, or relief – it’s one of terrible sadness.

9. CARNIVAL OF SOULS (1962)

Half a dozen years before George A. Romero went to work re-creating the movie zombie for all time, this film, directed on a shoestring budget by Herk Harvey (with members of a filmmaking team that the Lawrence, Kansas-based Harvey used in his principal business making educational and industrial films) just about invented the modern concept of the independent horror movie, as well as doing its bit to fuzz the line between art film and amateur hour. The first and just about the last film to feature its star, Candace Hilligoss, with Harvey as the most notable of the ghouls who begin to haunt her, it has a dreamy, disconnected quality that may not have been entirely planned but that is especially well-suited to a story that may or may not be happening, about a heroine who may or may not have survived the car accident that opens the film. In fact, parts of Carnival of Souls come as close as any pre-'70s film to anticipating the world of David Lynch -- which makes you wonder if it's a coincidence that Hilligoss' character's name, Mary Henry, contains the names of the central male and female characters of Eraserhead.

8. BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935)

The 1931 Frankenstein wasn't the first film inspired by Mary Shelley's novel, and it sure wasn't the last, but its imagery was so perfect and powerful -- the shambling monster with the squared-off head, the boxy flat-top and the jacket with the sleeves too short -- that it imprinted itself on the imaginations of generations of viewers, so much so that no later version of the monster ever really looks quite right. This sequel was put together by the same key personnel who worked on the first film -- the director, James Whale, Boris Karloff as the monster and the high-strung Colin Clive as the mad scientist -- but Whale, a campy, stylish wit who would later be played by Ian McKellan in the 1998 Gods and Monsters, really let his dark sense of humor off the leash in this one, resulting in a film that sympathizes with the monster to such a degree that the creature's rallying cry, "I love dead! Hate living!" and his final kiss-off line, after his rejection at the hands of the title figure (Elsa Lanchester), "We belong dead," take on the quality of anthems. Underneath the film's knowing silliness is a genuine, tender regard for those who cannot find love or acceptance in this world, and what greater horror could there be?

7. THE EXORCIST (1973)

William Friedkin’s adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s best-selling novel isn’t the best movie on this list. The Shining is a greater artistic accomplishment; Psycho is a more important film; The Fly is more meaningful. But for my money, there’s no movie on this list that’s scarier, and isn’t that the whole point of a horror movie? The movie that utterly terrified me as an adolescent still has the potential to give me nightmares as an adult; Friedkin makes judicious use of timing and tone to keep you just interested enough to be alert when the real horror starts, and once it does, he keeps up a mood of sustained menace, ranging from the suggestive to the utterly brutal, that never lets up. In less competent hands, The Exorcist could have degenerated into a boring morass of overblown theatrics and incomprehensible theology – which is exactly what happened in the sequels – but here, with everything firing on all cylinders, the movie instills an almost religious sense of dread even in those who have never sat through a Catholic sermon on the horrors of hell. An extremely formidable cast, anchored by an intense Ellen Burstyn, an ironclad Max Von Sydow, a neurotically brilliant Jason Miller, and a killer one-two punch from Linda Blair and Mercedes McCambridge, helps fix your attention throughout the film, but it’s the handful of truly terrifying moments that keep this a classic. (The restored “Version You’ve Never Seen” only amplifies the constant sense of stress and unease, and if anything, is even more frightening than the original.) Small wonder that Billy Graham claimed that the movie was literally possessed by the Devil.

6. ALIEN (1979)

My parents took my brother and me to see Alien when we were 12 and 10, respectively. To the best of my recollection, my brother bailed for the safety of the lobby sometime around the time the baby “chest-burster” burst from John Hurt’s chest in the film’s iconic and notorious horror film moment, leading to Veronica Cartwright’s stunned and horrified, “Oh, God...” (because, really, what else does one say in such a situation)? I remember feeling very big brother smug about staying bravely in my seat as the ever smaller crew of the freighter Nostromo hunted H.R. Giger’s phallic dentata extraterrestrial through the claustrophobic cabins and corridors of their vessel...until, that is, the moment when sole survivor Ripley (and her cat) abandoned ship...AND THE ALIEN WAS IN THE ESCAPE POD WITH HER! Fuck this, I thought...I wasn’t gonna risk a pre-pubescent heart attack just because my folks thought it would be funny to scare the piss out of their children. Rushing out to join my brother in the lobby, I watched the rest of the movie through a window in the door of the theater, then probably went home and had a few hundred nightmares. In my adult life, I’m more a fan of James Cameron’s 1986 thrill-ride sequel than Ridley Scott’s relatively artsy, slow-moving original...but respect must be paid to any film with the power to induce actual childhood trauma.

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

Contributors: Pierced Leonard, Philled With Evil Nugent, Android Osborne

Morning Deal Report: Cronenberg Does Ludlum

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 14:15:00 GMT

Back in the early days of the interwebs, I used to butt heads with a contrarian boob who insisted that Tony Danza was our greatest comic resource and that Robert Ludlum was a modern-day Dickens, among other dubious claims. While Danza remains sadly under-appreciated (although he did appear on a 2005 All My Children episode as Erica Kane’s wedding planner, so there’s that), Ludlum has been the recipient of a posthumous reputation bump thanks to the Bourne movies. Now creepmaster David Cronenberg is getting in on the action, as he negotiates to direct The Matarese Circle, a thriller based on a Ludlum novel. Denzel Washington is attached to star in the movie in which “two rival intelligence agents -- one American, one Soviet -- find themselves working together to ferret out and vanquish members of a mysterious group of criminals called the Matarese that has infiltrated the highest levels of American government,” per The Hollywood Reporter. No word yet on whether or not there’s a part for Tony Danza.

Forest Whitaker’s first leading role 20 years ago was Charlie Parker in Clint Eastwood’s jazz biopic Bird. Now Whitaker takes on another jazz legend as the director and star of What a Wonderful World, the first Louis Armstrong biopic authorized by Satchmo’s estate. Ron Bass will write the script that “will kick off during the musician’s impoverished early years in New Orleans and primarily chronicle his career as a trumpet virtuoso and improvisational singer,” Variety reports.

Its producer compares it to Soylent Green, but it sounds more like Quintet to me: it’s Fortuna, starring Dominic Monaghan and Freddy Rodriguez. “Set in 2100, Fortuna envisions an Earth where a collapsed economy and climate crises have eliminated the middle class, leaving a few very wealthy and the teeming masses in severe poverty. To give hope and avoid revolt, the elite create Fortuna, a mysterious game where one in a thousand wins a big payday and joins the upper classes. But their hidden goal to ‘reduce poverty’ by 30% over 50 years comes with a deadly price tag,” says THR. I dunno – collapsed economy? Climate crisis? Sounds like crazy way-out science fiction to me!

Related:
No, But I've Read the Movie: NAKED LUNCH
Popular Mechanics Makes List of Most Prescient Sci-Fi Flicks

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.

Apocalypse Now and Then: Ten Great End-of-the-World Movie Scenarios, Part 1

Phil Nugent — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 20:30:00 GMT

Neil Marshall's new sci-fi action thriller Doomsday, starring the very hard-to-mind-looking-at Rhona Mitra, opens tomorrow. It is but the latest in a long and hallowed tradition of using the controlled, expensive technology of motion pictures to imagine how things will look as our planet, spinning out of control with its resources depleted, chews through its last nerve and prepares to breathe its last. We don't know for sure how the world will really end of course, but one thing's for sure; if the last person who's there to see it has seen the right movies, he's certain to spend his last minutes experiencing a powerful sensation of deja vu.

THE ROAD WARRIOR (1981)

This is actually the second of the three films directed by George Miller and starring Mel Gibson as Mad Max — hence its title outside the United States, Mad Max 2 — but even though it's the one in the middle, it's the one that gets the apocalyptic element just about right. Things are pretty crazy in the original Mad Max, but society hasn't completely flatlined yet. And in Beyond Thunderdome, known to serious film scholars as "the one with Tina Turner", damned if the people don't seem to be having too good a time. (It makes the end of the world look like something that Vince McMahon is staging for a Pay-Per-View.) The Road Warrior gets a real doomsday vibe going by boiling the cutting-edge action movie, circa 1980, down to its essentials: loud motor vehicles, lots of space in which to drive them at high speeds, and plenty of attitude exhibited by people with punk haircuts and Dirty Harry jawlines. It is a hard world where men are men, except for the ones who are more like warthogs who've been hitting the Nautilus machines, and the screenwriter, if he knows what's good for him, isn't getting paid by the spoken word. George Miller has since proven himself to be a director whose talent is varied and many-sided, but he may have had trouble fully shaking this vision off: in his most recent film, Happy Feet, he managed to slip an end-of-days vibe into a story of dancing penguins.

GLEN AND RANDA (1971)

The end of the world as brought to you by hippies. Shaggy-haired Glen (Steve Curry) and Randa (Shelley Plimpton, Martha's mother) are a young couple who have never known civilization; among the last surviving human inhabitants of a world devastated by nuclear war, they have no memory of a pre-apocalyptic world and no knowledge of what has been lost outside of the images Glen sees in some comic books he's scavenged. Childlike and close to nonverbal, they spend their days frisking naked in the grass and among the trees, much as they would if they were rich California trust fund kids before the apocalypse and their parents were out of town for the weekend. They don't even seem to have the instinctive ability to figure out about sex and procreation on their own; after Randa is impregnated by a half-mad old man (Garry Goodrow), Glen, who has led them out on a search to find the wonders he has beheld in his Wonder Woman comic, turns pouty and takes to kicking her in her growing tummy. In the end, Randa dies in childbirth, and Glen sets out to sea in a tiny boat, taking the newborn baby along in case he needs a snack. Glen and Randa had trouble getting released at all, perhaps in part because of its stars' reluctance to put some clothes on, and like some other films by the director Jim McBride, seems to have subsequently vanished from the face of the earth.

BLACK MOON (1975)

The end of the world as brought to you by arty French hippies. Actually, this film was directed by the great Louis Malle, but he was clearly trying to access the counterculture zeitgeist and getting in touch with his inner goofball. Cathryn Harrison, the fifteen-year-old granddaughter of Rex Harrison, is wandering through what's left of the world; she is first seen posing as a man, because, maybe because the women heard about what happened to poor Randa, relations between the sexes have degenerated into a shooting war. She ends up taking refuge in a huge house occupied by Therese Giehse (German), Alexandra Stewart (French Canadian), and Joe Dallesandro (the jury's still out). None of the people talk much, maybe because, given the language barriers, they'd have trouble understanding each other if they did. The cast also includes a rat and a unicorn (which appears to have a glandular condition), both of which do talk; there are also flowers that, when stepped on, whine about it. Shot by Sven Nykvist, Black Moon looks great, thus confirming any suspicions you may have had that the human race will still be able to take pretty pictures even after we've used up our last collective brain cell.

BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES (1970)

Charlton Heston's astronaut character Taylor was already a rather nihilistic fellow in the original Planet of the Apes, but in the first sequel of the series he proves he's not just all talk. First he vanishes for about an hour, shortly after the discovery of the Statue of Liberty that ended the first movie, leaving the main action to a mini-Heston, James Franciscus. (Franciscus's meaningful contributions to the series are few, but we'll always have his incredulous reading of the line "My God — it's a city of apes!") Late in the movie, Franciscus discovers that Taylor is being held captive by a band of underground mutants who worship a doomsday bomb that will, if detonated, destroy the entire planet. The gorilla army descends on the mutant lair and all hell breaks loose, in the course of which poor Franciscus takes a bullet to the head. Having had quite enough of talking apes and telepathic mole-people, Heston unleashes a mighty cry of "You bloody bastards!" and plunges onto the detonator with his dying breath. And you can pry it from his cold, dead hands, if you can find them, which you can't because, indeed, the planet explodes. Or as the abrupt final line of narration has it: "In one of the countless billions of galaxies in the universe, lies a medium-sized star, and one of its satellites, a green and insignificant planet, is now dead." Hey, thanks for coming to the show, ladies and gentlemen! Drive home safely! It's an ending that provokes laughter in your modern sophisticated audience, much to the bafflement of a gentleman who was sitting behind me at a revival house screening some years ago. "I dunno what everyone's laughing at," he muttered. "It's gonna happen."

LAST NIGHT (1999)

Most movies about apocalypse tie themselves in knots to imagine the unimaginable. They spend millions of dollars on effects and art direction to stage elaborate scenarios of how the world will end, as the filmmakers work out of the question of why. Standing in contrast to films of this kind is Don McKellar's Last Night, a movie with a strictly ground-level approach to an impending apocalypse. In McKellar's world, the end is imminent, and the characters are powerless to stop it, so rather than focusing on the extremes of human behavior, the film attempts to deal more realistically with how characters would spend their final hours on Earth. The tone is set early on when a woman (Sandra Oh) stops at an abandoned grocery store for a bottle of wine, sees two on the shelf, and instead of simply taking both and leaving she carefully chooses one and politely leaves the other for someone else to take. This small gesture says it all — there is looting and rioting in Last Night, but in the face of the unspeakable many people would prefer to end their lives by maintaining all the order and dignity they can. Consider the gas company executive (played by David Cronenberg) who calls all of the company's customers to assure them that the power will stay on until the end. Other people take the end of the world as an opportunity to fulfill their lifelong wishes, from the aspiring pianist who finally gets a gig a hour before the world is scheduled to end to the man who uses it as an excuse to sleep with one of his former teachers. Last Night lacks the visceral thrills of most films about apocalypse, but instead it focuses on the very different reactions people would inevitably have with the end of the world only hours, minutes, even seconds away.

— Paul Clark, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak

Click here for Part 2.

The Rep Report (March 7-14)

Phil Nugent — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 23:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: An inspiration to late bloomers everywhere, the Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira (born in December, 1908) made his first film in 1938 and managed to make a dozen more pictures over the course of the next forty years, but he started to buckle down in 1979, when he made his breakthrough with Doomed Love. He's made more than thirty works since then, and has churned out a movie a year since 1990. "The Talking Pictures of Manoel de Oliveira" (March 7-30) at the Brooklyn Academy of Music is an ambitious retrospective salute to the remarkable career and little-seen work of this distinctive and filmmaker as he apprroaches his centennial.

BAM is also paying tribute this month to J. Hoberman, the brainy and idiosyncratic film writer, on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of his settling in at his regular perch at The Village Voice. Running from March 10 through April 3, the schedule begins with Eraserhead, the subject of Hoberman's first review for the Voice, and includes such "personal favorites" of the critic as King of Comedy, David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch, Ernie Gehr's Side/Walk/Shuffle, Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, and John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13. (Pleased as punch, the Voice has posted Hoberman's 1992 review of Naked Lunch, a stellar example of the kind of fireworks that Hoberman can set off even when writing about a movie that many sane people wouldn't watch again if blindfolded.)

Sarah Polley Bottles a Genie

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 19:00:00 GMT

We thought the awards season was finally over, but as so often happens here at the Screengrab, we forgot all about our fine neighbors to the north. Yes, there are Canadian movie awards, too. They’re called the Genies, and they were handed out last night in Toronto. The big winners were Away From Her and Eastern Promises, each snagging seven Genies.

Sarah Polley’s directorial debut captured the top prizes: Away From Her won for best picture, director, actress (Julie Christie), actor (Gordon Pinsent), supporting actress (Kristen Thomson) and adapted screenplay (Polley again). According to the Globe and Mail, Pinsent had high praise for both Polley and Christie. “Julie also left me with a gift of some sort. We had this way too short canoodling love story, and before leaving the bed, she'd tap me on the shoulder and say, 'Well done, Gordon.' Well, that's on the resume.”

David Cronenberg’s latest cleaned up in many of the remaining categories, including original screenplay, supporting actor (Armin Mueller-Stahl) and original score (Howard Shore), among others. Eastern Promises executive producer Robert Lantos took the opportunity to comment on a pending amendment to the Canadian Income Tax Act that could limit government funding of controversial material, saying “this screenplay is chockfull of powerful, frank, honest, original scenes. Just the kind that, if some barbarians have their way, are no longer going to be permissible in Canadian cinema.”

On a lighter note, host Sandra Oh confirmed what we’ve long suspected: that everyone in Canada knows each other. “David Cronenberg, I played your wife in the movie Last Night. And Molly Parker, I dated your brother-in-law for three years. Totally true.”

Parcheesi: The Movie

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 22:00:00 GMT

The search is on to find the Uwe Boll of board games. Universal has signed a deal with Hasbro to develop movies based on the classics: Monopoly, Battleship, Ouija and Candy Land. Because that 1985 Clue movie worked out so well, it only took 23 years to get to this point. Apparently everyone who was in charge of Hollywood then has now moved on.

This development dovetails nicely with last summer’s rumor that Ridley Scott has interest in bringing Monopoly to the big screen. According to the scuttlebutt at the time, Scott has already offered roles in the film to Scarlett Johansson and Kirsten Dunst. (We’re guessing Dunst plays the shoe, with Johansson taking on the part of the top hat.) The plan is apparently to turn the hallowed game of Atlantic City real estate into “a racy comedy thriller… in an attempt to win over teenagers who regard board games as a last resort on a wet afternoon.” Hey, if chess can be made into a musical, I guess anything’s possible. (And don’t tell me I’m the only one who remembers “One Night in Bangkok.”)

Admittedly, Battleship makes a little more sense as a cinematic concept, and Ouija pretty much writes itself, but frankly we’d prefer David Cronenberg's Ants in the Pants or Martin Scorsese's Don’t Spill the Beans to Candy Land: The Movie. If you think Universal couldn’t set their sights any lower (their official announcement is rife with nauseating buzzwords like “global brand awareness” and “slate strategy”), be warned that they aren’t stopping at board games. Variety reports that other Hasbro products, like goop-filled marvel-man Stretch Armstrong and poker-for-geeks Magic the Gathering, are also in the mix.

Famous Last Words: Round 1, Week 6

Paul Clark — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 20:00:00 GMT

The vast majority of respondents were quick to (correctly) point out that last week's quote was taken not from Paul Haggis' Best Picture thief winner Crash, but from the 1996 David Cronenberg film of the same title. Of course, we laugh, but I can only imagine the people stopping at their local DVD rental emporium to pick up the latest Oscar-anointed "classic" only to come home with Cronenberg's car-loving, scar-fucking extravaganza. Sadly, this probably didn't happen nearly as often as I wish it did, but a fella can dream, can't he?

This week, we're back to a single line of dialogue. Try this one on for size:

“This world is so full of crap, a man’s gonna get into it sooner or later whether he’s careful or not.”

Cheerful, eh? As always, submit your guesses to famouslastwords@nerve.com. For the rules, click right here. And remember, all guesses must be received by 11:59 PM Eastern next Wednesday. Good luck!

The Buzz on "The Fly" at L. A. Opera

Phil Nugent — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Always eager to explore strange new worlds, David Cronenberg is revisiting his 1986 classic of love gone very bad, The Fly, but stretching it to fir a new canvas. Cronenberg will direct an opera based on the movie for the L.A. Opera. It marks the first time working in opera for both Cronenberg and his set designer Dante Ferretti. Also on board: librettist David Henry Hwang (the playwright whose M. Butterfly was filmed by Cronenberg in 1993) and composer Howard Shore, a longtime Cronenberg collaborator who also did the music for the movie. Conducting will be Placido Domingo, who no doubt has been having a great time sitting in front of the DVD player, familiarizing himself with the work of his new friends. ("Is that a. . . did she just. . . ROOWWWWFFF!!") The role of Seth Brundle, teleporting gene-spliced scientist and gentle stud muffin, will be taken over by Daniel Okulitch, a Canadian bass-baritone who is no stranger to opera-movie mash-ups: he starred in Baz Luhrmann's Broadway production of La Boheme and the opera based on the Death Row lament Dead Man Walking. The Fly will open this September.

In news that's sort of related, it's been announced that a live musical based on Shrek will open at the Broadway Theatre on December 14, with Sutton Foster (Thoroughly Modern Millie, The Drowsy Chaperone, Young Frankenstein) as Princess Fiona and Christopher Sieber as the villain, Lord Farquaad — you remember, right? The little midgety guy voiced by John Lithgow who was supposed to be Michael Eisner? We are talking three movies and a Christmas special ago. The roles of the title character and his donkey sidekick have not yet been cast. Assuming the show only covers the action of the first movie, one problem it may face is getting people to come see it instead of waiting for the sequel, which is when Puss in Boots shows up. That cat rocks!

Roy Scheider, 1932-2008

Phil Nugent — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Roy Scheider has died in Little Rock, Arkansas, at the age of 75. He had battled cancer in recent years; the cause of death has been reported as complications from a staph infection. Scheider made his film debut in a 1962 horror movie called The Curse of the Living Corpse and throughout the 1960s worked on the stage and on such TV soaps as The Edge of Night, Love of Life, and The Secret Storm. He began to get small movie roles in the late '60s, and had a breakout year in 1971, when, as a thirty-nine-year-old juvenile, he played Jane Fonda's pimp in Klute and Gene Hackman's police partner in The French Connection. (In interviews, and ultimately in a commentary track on The French Connection DVD, Scheider liked to tell a story about how he won the part after someone saw him blow a stage audition and was impressed with the brio with which off the director.) Scheider got an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for the role, which would ultimately lead to his getting his first leading role in The Seven-Ups, a 1973 cop thriller directed by the French Connection producer Philip D'Antoni. But it was of course the 1975 Jaws that was Scheider's biggest hit and the movie that made him a familiar face to the public at large, and beloved to a generation of pop-eyed movie freaks. As the land-locked seaside Sheriff Brody, Scheider was the tentpole of a central triumverate that also included Richard Dreyfuss (wisecracking, brainy, Method) and Robert Shaw (macho, demented, classically theatrical). It was Scheider's job to anchor what would become the most successful movie ever made by serving as the likable audience identification figure, he pulled it off with a smooth, pro's grace.

Scheider starred in a number of other movies (including William Friedkin's Sorcerer, Last Embrace, Still of the Night, and Blue Thunder) but never again found himself at the center of anything near as big a blockbuster. He was also forced, by contractual committment, to appear in Jaws 2, which cost him the chance to star in Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter. He did get an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor for serving as the director Bob Fosse's alter ego in the 1979 All That Jazz; he didn't want, but his work in that picture will be remembered as among the best performances of his career. However, by the mid-1980s he was only getting big parts in smaller-budgeted pictures (such as 52 Pick-Up, made for Cannon Films) and indie productions (such as 1997's The Myth of Fingerprints) and appearing in smaller parts in such films as Fred Schepisi's The Russia House, David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch, and Francis Ford Coppola's The Rainmaker. He also starred in the first season of the TV series SeaQuest DSV and played studio chief George Schaefer in RKO 281, an HBO film about the making of Citizen Kane. He kept working at a furious rate, and in one of his last appearances, as a serial killer on Death Row last year in an episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent, he showed that he was still capable of doing memorable work when the material he was given managed to meet him halfway.

The Ten Worst Medical Breakthroughs in Movie History, Part 2

Phil Nugent — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 15:00:00 GMT

THE TERMINAL MAN (1974)

The title character, played by George Segal, is a brilliant computer programmer who suffers from epileptic seizures and Acute Disinhibitory Lesion (ADL) syndrome. He has begun experiencing blackouts, and he's gotten in trouble with the law because of violent beatings he's inflicted on people while his cerebral cortex was out to lunch. Looking to help the poor guy out, doctors implant electrodes in his brain and hook them up to a miniature computer implanted in his neck. All this is meant to control his seizures and help prevent him from behaving violently, but Segal goes off his meds, the computer malfunctions, and the next thing you know, he's a misfiring killing machine, lurching about the city laying waste to people and waterbeds, and driven even crazier by his "delusion" that computers are taking over the world and waging war on the human race, a species of paranoia for which he himself could now serve as Exhibit A. After The Terminal Man was released, its message about the dangers of computers was taken to heart by everyone who saw it, the U.S. government banned any further development of computer technology, and Steve Jobs became a street musician. You are reading this on one of those new-fangled text-messaging abacuses.

SSSSSSS (1973)

Back in the early 1970s, when concern about global climate change was such an obscure topic that Al Gore was still jacking up the air conditioner to "frosty" and demanding to know "When the hell does it warm up around here?", Dr. Carl Stoner was on the case. Doc Stoner, played by the much-loved and deeply untrustworthy character actor Strother Martin, suspects that a new Ice Age might be coming, and he has his own radical plan for helping the human race to adjust to changing circumstances: he's working on a serum that will turn us all into king cobras. Unfortunately, the good doctor leaves himself open to charges that he lets his personal feelings guide his scientific process: he selects as his first test subject Dirk Benedict (later known as Face on The A-Team), who just happens to have been sniffing around the doctor's young daughter, played by Heather Menzies, who's beautiful when she takes off her glasses. (This being an early-70s exploitation movie, she ends up taking off a lot more than her glasses.) Soon Benedict is stumbling around the lab with a greenish complexion, scaly flaking skin, and his hair falling out, which in my experience would be enough to ensure that Heather Menzies would cut him off even if he didn't wind up turning into a snake.

MYRA BRECKINRIDGE (1970)

Generally speaking, sexually transformative surgery has gotten a bad rap in the movies; Ed Wood did very little to glamorize the field with his 1953 first feature, Glen or Glenda (A.K.A. I Changed My Sex), where the whole point seemed to be to transform a repressive society to make it acceptable for men with pencil-line moustaches to indulge their passion for Angora sweaters. Things hadn't gotten much better by the early seventies, when the writer-director Michael Sarne (compared by one of his colleagues to "a wolf with rabies") committed this blasphemous version of Gore Vidal's classic Pop novel. In Sarne's telling, Myron, played by film writer and Gong Show staple Rex Reed, goes under the knife and comes out as Myra, played by Raquel Welch. It would take a special commission composed of cooler heads than my own to decide whether, for the patient, that amounts to a step forward, a step back, or a lateral move. Incidentally, the surgeon is played by the venerable John Carradine, who must have felt comfortable in the role, because two years later, he played the medical sex researcher in Woody Allen's Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, who was engaged in such nefarious pursuits as "taking the brain from the head of a lesbian and putting it in the body of a man who works for the telephone company."

RABID (1977)

No list of movie medical mishaps would be complete without a bow to the work of David Cronenberg. In his debut feature, the 1975 Shivers (A.K.A. They Came from Within), a doctor working with parasitic transplants that he hopes will liberate an overly straitlaced society succeeds so well that he turns a Montreal apartment complex into a mindless rolling orgy that sets out, at the end of the movie, to infect the larger world. In his 1979 The Brood, a maverick psychotherapist (Oliver Reed) coaches his prize pupil into channeling her unresolved anger until she begins literally giving birth to murderous creatures who are pure products of her rage. Rabid is sort of the worst of both worlds, plus maybe a few more worlds you never would have thought of without David's kind help. Porn actress Marilyn Chambers plays an accident victim who winds up in the hands of a plastic surgeon looking to try out an experimental skin grafting technique. It somehow causes her to grow a phallus-like organ beneath her armpit, which she uses to impale people and feed, vampire-like, on their blood. Her victims in turn become frothing, murderous lunatics, who run amok like the infected people in Shivers, except not as friendly. If there's a common theme running through Cronenberg's early work, it may be the message, "Even if you don't like his movies, you can at least take heart that, thank God, he didn't become a doctor!"

SPECIAL BONUS BEST-- BEST PROGRAM OF MEDICAL REFORM:

THE HOSPITAL (1971)

This black comedy, written by Paddy Chayefsky, is set in a beleaguered Manhattan teaching hospital that's going to the dogs. The Chief of Medicine, Dr. Herbert Beck (George C. Scott), has to deal not only with the "radiant" bungling of his staff (exemplified by a pompous, strutting quack named Welbeck) but with a mysterious string of deaths among his staff members, whose bodies keep turning up in hospital beds and sprawled across chairs in the emergency waiting room. It's all right, though: it turns out that the staff members are being picked off by a saintly madman (Bernard Hughes) who, having suffered as a patient in the hospital, has been sort-of-murdering the doctors by putting them in situations where they'd be all right if they were subjected to timely care and basic competence, which he recognizes as supremely unlikely. Learning the truth, Dr. Beck points this reformer in the direction of Dr. Welbeck and wishes him godspeed.

Click here for Part 1.

Look Back in Analog: VHS Nostalgia

Phil Nugent — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 18:00:00 GMT

VHS cassettes are clunky, fragile, easily damaged and easy to accidentally tape over. When VHS was still new, and later, when it was a staple of everyday life, moviemakers tended to use it as a symbol of lonely alienation, as in sex, lies, and videotape or David Cronenberg's Videodrome (where the cable-TV huckster played by James Woods, his mind twisted into Silly Putty shapes by exposure to sinister cathode rays, is controlled by his minders via fleshy cassettes that are inserted into a slit he grows in his stomach), or as a chilly modern form of trespass, as in David Lynch's Lost Highway, where someone leaves tapes on Bill Pullman and Patricia Arquette's doorstep, recording ever-closer invasions of their privacy. Introduced in 1976, VHS would somehow defeat Beta in the marketplace and have no trouble dominating laser disc, even though those rival forms offered superior picture quality, but when DVD appeared, offering superior quality and various bells and whistles in a durable, easily portable format, it was as if home video had suddenly caught up with compact disc technology, except that nobody has ever made the claims for VHS that many audiophiles still make for vinyl records as a "warmer", superior recording medium. The last movie released on VHS was A History of Violence in 2005, which means that VHS's commercial life stopped just short of twenty years. But, as 8-track enthusiasts have demonstrated, it's possible to feel nostalgic for anything, and Dennis Lim sees a growing wave of nostalgia for VHS represented in such forthcoming films as Be Kind Rewind and Son of Rambow, as well as such cult objects as the song "Videotape" on the new Radiohead album and "the deliberately lo-fi video" look of the Snoop Dogg video "Sensual Seduction".

Lim points out that "The generation that came of age in the ’80s, as the VCR was becoming a staple, is especially prone to VHS nostalgia," and this really isn't surprising. For those who grew up during the first stages of the home entertainment revolution, VHS will always be like the first car you ever drove. It was the means by which consumers redefined their relationship to movies; suddenly, we were no longer at the mercy of theater and TV programmers, but could dig through film history or take the latest blockbuster home in a little box and watch and re-watch it until we were barking sick of the damn thing. It's hard not to feel some lingering affection for a liberating force like that even after you've been made all too aware of its flaws, and I suspect that I'm not the only movie geek in the world who doesn't continue to hoard a little collection of VHS editions of movies and random oddities that haven't been released on DVD. Lim also reports on a "rarer and geekier phenomenon of VCR nostalgia" represented by Andy Hain, "a software engineer in Brighton, England, [who] maintains the Web site and 'virtual museum' Total Rewind, which scrupulously charts the evolution of VCRs from prehistory to obsolescence. Pride of place is given to the 70-plus vintage video players and cameras in the collection that Mr. Hain has been building since 1993. 'It was mainly the technology that appealed to me,' he wrote in an e-mail message. 'The more I discovered, the more strange and unlikely machines I came across, and I wanted to get hold of them and tinker with them. I also liked the design aspect. The early machines were very expensive and would have been proudly displayed in living rooms. They were styled like top-end hi-fi components, or in some cases like the bridge of the starship Enterprise.'” As for the director of Be Kind Rewind, Michel Gondry, he probably speaks for many in describing one of the natural impulses that makes it harder to let go and ride the wave: “Today new product comes so fast that sometimes the human brain doesn’t have the capacity to adapt.”

Afternoon Deal Report: A Fitting Tribute to Hasbro's Tradition of Quality

Peter Smith — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 17:20:00 GMT

Dennis Quaid and Channing Tatum have joined the cast of G.I. Joe. This seems apt, given Tatum's startlingly realistic face.

Julianne Moore will star in the supernatural thriller Shelter.

After (ahem) a monstrous opening, Cloverfield has dropped 68% at the box office. Course, when you're up against an aesthetic triumph like Meet the Spartans, which made $18 million last weekend. . .

Crash is becoming a series on Starz. That's the ensemble drama Crash, not the Cronenberg flick about car-fucking, unfortunately.

Luc Besson's next project will be a three-film adaptation of Aventures, a beloved French comic about a novelist in World War I-era Paris.

No, But I've Read The Movie: NAKED LUNCH

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 16:30:00 GMT

Today, the Screengrab introduces a new semi-regular feature, in which we look at movie adaptations of high-profile novels. Movies based on books are a dime a dozen -- or at least they were before around 1998, when every single movie became based on a television show that originally aired between 1971 and 1983. But movies based on good books are still rare enough to warrant a closer look, possibly because the qualities that make a good book are rarely the same qualities that make a good movie. Great novels tend to focus on philosophy, psychology, and internal narrative, while great movies often emphasize action, movement and dialogue. All too often, the word "unfilmable" is applied to truly ambitious and complex fiction, as if the very idea of encapsulating on screen what so impresses us on the page is laughable on its face, and nowhere is this more obvious than in 1991's Naked Lunch. David Cronenberg, with his literary pretensions, obsession with mutated human bodies, and appetite for the grotesque would seem to make him a natural for making a movie version of William S. Burrough's infamous Beat-influenced black comedy; but even with a like-minded director, filming Naked Lunch would be an uphill battle. It's not a narrative novel in the traditional sense -- or any sense, really; it's more a series of vignettes, impressions, monologues and riffs, more like a heroin-soaked jazz fugue than a story. Even if Cronenberg could find a way to make Burroughs' masterpiece palatable to an audience without getting an X rating (Burroughs was rather fond of notions like talking assholes and rectal mucous), could he make any narrative sense out of a non-narrative novel?

WHAT IT HAD: A director who had read, enjoyed, and understood the novel, and who was writing the script himself to avoid any conflict of vision. A decent budget for an indie film. A studio willing to indulge the often-disturbing creative vision of its author. A built-in cult audience. A game cast, including a terrifically deadpan performance by Peter Weller as Burroughs' alter-ego, Big Bill Lee; a juicy, sympathetic turn by Judy Davis as Burroughs' wife and muse, Joan; and a hilariously fiendish, toothy ham-job by Roy Scheider as the nefarious Dr. Benway. A determination to make the most of its vision and to find clever work-arounds for the book's sometimes incoherent narrative structure. Moments of brilliance in the soundtrack by free jazz giant Ornette Coleman. And most importantly, a nastily sympathetic sense of humor.

WHAT IT LACKED: A mainstream audience that would make the whole thing worthwhile. A group of fans who would forgive any variance from their beloved source material. A willingness to turn over the reins entirely to Coleman, resulting in some plodding, ham-handed incidental music from Howard Shore. A budget big enough to keep some of the special effects from seeming hokey and cheap. A tight focus on how to involve all of the book's best moments, resulting in a somewhat fuzzy sense of direction at times. The will to completely overthrow narrative entirely and bring to the film a permeating experimental quality such as is found throughout the book. A critical audience who had any interest in seeing such a bizarre novel get made into a movie in the first place.

DID IT SUCCEED?: Mostly, yes -- and in a very unusal way. Cronenberg figured out early on that if he was going to make a movie out of Naked Lunch at all, he was going to have to make it something entirely different than the book, which, as trite as it is to say, is almost entirely unfilmable. So, after hammering out a script that he was happy with and securing a lead actor both capable and sympathetic to his vision, he proceeded not to make a film adaptation of the novel, but a clever and inventive metaphor for the circumstances of the writing of the novel. The result is less a literary adaptation than it is an extremely deceptive, but in no sense unsuccessful, biopic; if it fails to give us a faithful sense of Burroughs' work, it at least gives us a faithful sense of Burroughs, and that's quite a kick in itself.

Top Ten of 2007: Leonard Pierce

Leonard Pierce — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Unlike many of my fellow bloggers here at the Screengrab, who live in urbane, sophisticated metropoli, I make my home in San Antonio, Texas. We have a ratio of approximately one movie theatre for every million people here, and "art house" is just what the locals call a museum. I hear if we play our cards right, we might be getting a one-week screening next year of that movie The Graduate all the cool kids are talking about, but until then, it's pretty much Transformers on nineteen of the twenty-four screens down at Huebner Oaks. So you'll forgive me if my list leans pretty heavily on stuff that's already available on Netflix; at least half the movies on my list were ones that I had to drive an hour up to Austin to even have a chance of seeing before their DVD release, and there's more than a few movies that likely would have a chance of appearing here (I think specifically of There Will Be Blood and Syndromes and a Century) that there was simply no way for me to see before the year was up. Still, I'll be happy to go along with the prevailing wisdom that 2007 was an especially rich year for film; there was plenty to see, even if you had to go out of your way to see it.

#10: THE LIVES OF OTHERS (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, dir.)

Although it was released in 2006, this masterful film from Germany didn't receive an American audience outside of the Telluride Film Festival until February. It was well worth the wait. Far too many movies that pick up Best Foreign Film Oscars are the international doppelgangers of Best Picture winners -- overblown, overpraised, middlebrow 'prestige' pictures lacking in resonance, depth and any particular qualities that will result in their being remembered far down the line. But The Lives of Others -- best thought of as a brilliant reworking of The Conversation against the dreadful backdrop of Soviet East Germany -- deserved every bit of praise heaped on it by critics both here and abroad. It's a stunning, terrifying film, brilliantly illustrating Hannah Arendt's 'banality of evil' in the person of the astonishing Ulrich Mühe.

#9: SWEENEY TODD, THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET (Tim Burton, dir.)

One of the few of a year-end spate of high-profile films that I actually got a chance to see, Sweeney Todd is Tim Burton's adaptation of the notoriously blood-soaked and difficult Stephen Sondheim musical. I've never been especially fond of Tim Burton as a director, but the qualities of his filmmaking that usually work against him -- the broad emotional strokes, the barely-held-together plots, the characters as caricatures, and the meticulous set design at the expense of believability -- are turned into such strengths that it's hard to believe no one ever had the idea of having him do a musical before this. The result is certainly the best film he's ever done and likely the best film he'll ever do, an absolutely gorgeous thing to look at, and with some surprisingly fine performances. One of the best musicals I've ever seen.

#8: EASTERN PROMISES (David Cronenberg, dir.)

Conversely, I've long been a staunch defender of David Cronenberg's, even with films like Crash and Spider, which met with widespread revulsion from a lot of my fellow critics. Unfortunately, I found his most celebrated film -- 2005's A History of Violence -- sadly lacking, a formulaic and uninspiring drama that bore so little of his unique imprint as a filmmaker that it could have been directed by almost anyone. If the Russian mob drama Eastern Promises isn't strong enough to stand alongside his greatest works, though, it's at least a return to form and a revisiting of some of the themes -- muddled self-identity, the grace and brutality of violence, and a simultaneous revulsion at and fascination with the human body -- that have made him one of the signature talents of the day. Plus, naked Viggo Mortensen, ladies!

#7: BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU'RE DEAD (Sidney Lumet, dir.)

If you'd have told me last year -- hell, if you'd told me twenty years ago -- that one of the best film of 2007 would be by ancient journeyman Sidney Lumet, I'd likely have scoffed. But damned if the old trooper doesn't turn in a remarkably swift and sure-handed job behind the helm here, presenting a neo-noir thriller about a simple caper gone disastrously wrong that wouldn't be entirely out of place in the early 1960s and yet never loses a fresh sense of modernity. Before the Devil Knows You're Dead isn't a groundbreaking piece of cinema art; it's simply an assured, highly professional piece of moviemaking of the sort we rarely see anymore, and which Lumet is eminently qualified to give us. It's further bolstered by a dynamite performance from Philip Seymour Hoffman, who has simply owned 2007 on screen.

#6: LUST, CAUTION (Ang Lee, dir.)

Ang Lee continues to be the most versatile moviemaker in the business with his best work since Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; if he is absolute master of no genre, he at least never ceases to amaze with his ability to dive confidently into all genres. Bouyed by astonishing performances so tightly controlled and confidently directed that they seem drawn from lost Wong Kar-Wei footage, Lust, Caution maintains a killing pace throughout and doesn't fail to deliver on its near-constant sense of tension and frustration. The much-discussed sex scenes are indeed intense and scarily erotic, but they also accomplish something that's so rarely done that it's become an industry joke: they're not arbitrary, but essential, not only to the plot, but also to the slow but inexorable revelation of the nature of the characters.

#5: THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY (Julian Schnabel, dir.)

I was never fond of Julian Schnabel, the visual artist, and while I thought that his debut film, Basquiat, showed promise, I tended to agree with the New York art critic Robert Hughes, who called it a movie about the worst painter of the 1980s made by the second worst. I'm not sure what Hughes has to say about The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, but I think it's an amazing film by a director who's finally come into full posession of the tools of his craft. Schnabel has said that he still considers himself an artist first and a director second, but this visually rewarding, complex and beautiful movie is better than anything he ever put to canvas, and even without the tremendous lead performance by Mathieu Amalric, it would be a film worth watching for its mastery of internal landscapes far richer than Schabel's art ever suggested.

#4: MANUFACTURED LANDSCAPES (Jennifer Baichwal, dir.)

In what is widely regarded as a banner year for documentaries, the finest one I saw had nothing to do with the war in Iraq, the peccadilloes of the president, or the politics of personality. Instead, it was a little-seen film about a little-known photographer named Edward Burtynsky. His photographs -- and the like-minded film by Jennifer Baichwal -- document the vastness and power of man-made constructs, and convey the awe and the terror one feels at observing objects, from China's Three Gorges Dam to American junkyards, that are made by the hand of humans but can dwarf or even overwhelm the natural surroundings in which they appear. A slow-paced, deliberate, and provocative film made as a collaboration between two artists who understand each other in an perfectly asynchronous way.

#3: ZODIAC (David Fincher, dir.)

Much has been made of the fact that David Fincher, best known for his visual pyrotechnics, allegedly made his most successful film without them. That's not entirely true; among other scenes, the opening drive-by tracking shot, the first murders, and the construction montage of the San Francisco skyline can stand next to some of the most stylish set-pieces in his other films. But it's undeniable that his best film to date, and one of the best films of the year, is at its best when he simply stands back and lets the audience become spellbound with the absorbing interplay of his characters. A fascinating treatment of the nature of obsession and a subtle treatise on the way we become ensnared in the grotesque and the perverse, Zodiac is revelatory in the way it defies expectations of what a serial-killer drama should be.

#2: BRAND UPON THE BRAIN! (Guy Maddin, dir.)

Guy Maddin has been quietly establishing himself as one of the finest, most idiosyncratic directors in the world for several years now, and Brand Upon the Brain! is both his most autobiographical film to date (the lead character in the film is, well, Guy Maddin, ably and amusingly played by young Sullivan Brown) and his best. There was some fear amongst critics who had a chance to see it in its 'touring edition' -- a live extravaganza featuring on-site music, celebrity voice-overs and sound effects composed right there in the theater -- that the film wouldn't hold up without all the show-stopping theatrical gimmicks, but they needn't have worried: this is the purest distilliation of Maddin's unique sensibilities as a filmmaker: sexual obsession, throwback surrealism, fantastic dreamscapes, and madness as part of the everyday.

#1: NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (Joel & Ethan Coen, dirs.)

There are plenty of filmmakers who would trade their favorite limb for a track record like Joel and Ethan Coen -- from 1984 to 2001, they didn't make a bad film, and the 9 features they put in the can over those 17 years add up to the most robust corpus by any living American filmmaker you can name. Things started to go awry with Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers; many placed the blame on the fact that, for the first time, the Coens were filming material they didn't write. That's not a problem with No Country for Old Men, a triumphant masterpiece of genre filmmaking based on a minor Cormac McCarthy novel that once again places the brothers (credited, for the first time ever, as co-directors) where they belong: at the very pinnacle of American moviemaking. An astonishing comeback that will be discussed for decades.

The Ten Greatest Prosthetics in Movie History, Part 2

Peter Smith — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 21:00:00 GMT

Nicole Kidman's Nose in THE HOURS (2002)

Can a fake nose win an Oscar? Some might say it already did, when Nicole Kidman's turn as Virginia Woolf in The Hours was awarded the golden statue for Best Actress. We've got nothing against Kidman's performance in that film, but judging by the reams of press that her lightly reoriented schnozz got at the time, you'd think that it was the nose that was wearing Kidman, instead of the other way around. Of course, this was yet another award in a long series of Best Actress Oscars that went to Beautiful Women Doing Unglamorous Things — whether it was playing a tarted-up legal secretary (Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich), having sex with Billy Bob Thornton (Halle Berry in Monster's Ball) or looking like a burn victim (Charlize Theron in Monster). Which is, really, the only way we can explain Kidman's decision to use such a subtle prosthetic in the first place; it's not like the American moviegoing public had any idea what Virginia Woolf looked like in the first place.

Jeff Goldblum's Jaw, Cheeks, Eyes, His Very Fucking Being, in THE FLY (1986)

Some of us were prohibited from watching more than two hours of TV a week as children. Luckily, some of us were also latch-key kids, so naturally, whenever no one was home, we gorged, often on both food and shlocky afternoon TV movies. And those of us who were unlucky enough to see The Fly at this time didn't quite grasp the extent of our mistake until it was too late. There you are, happily eating your delivery pizza, and in the middle of a big, meaty bite, you're confronted by the spectacle of one of Brundlefly's eyes falling off, like an egg yolk dripping into batter. You assume that's the most disgusting scene they're gonna throw at you. Again, big mistake. Jeff Goldblum's Brundlefly is possibly the single most hideous, repugnant creature ever seen on film — worse than the Alien mother, worse than any other close competitor. Every negative trait of Jeff Goldblum's physiognomy is brought into stark relief onto an insect face; when it decays, we dare you to keep eating. We certainly didn't.

Penelope Cruz's Ass, VOLVER (2006)

Since her Hollywood debut, Cruz has been the poster child for foreign-born performers who aren't half as compelling in English as they are in their native tongue. Which is why her reunion with Pedro Almodovar was a cause for celebration — not only would she be working in Spanish again, but she was collaborating with a filmmaker who always brought out the best in her. But strangely enough, much of the buzz around Penelope's role in 2006's Volver focused less on the performance than around the generous fake derrière she strapped on for the role. According to Almodovar, the padded rump was necessary for the character, an earthy, hard-working mother in the Anna Magnani tradition, and this makes sense, since Penelope Cruz is lovely, but talk about bun cakes — she ain't got 'em. But then a funny thing happened. Instead of drawing undue attention to Penelope's prodigious prosthetic posterior, the hype allowed moviegoers to grow accustomed to the sight of the suddenly callipygian Cruz, much in the same way Alejandro Amenabar leaked stills of a heavily made-up Javier Bardem to the Spanish press so the public would get used to his appearance in The Sea Inside. The gimmick paid off in the end, as Cruz's full-bodied (sorry) performance made the rockin' world go 'round, garnering her unprecedented critical praise and a rare (for a foreign-language performer) Best Actress Oscar nomination. In fact, after the success of Volver, the only question that remains for Penelope Cruz's career is: how can she leave this behind?

Vincent Gallo's Penis in THE BROWN BUNNY (2003)

When people actually got around to seeing Vincent Gallo's The Brown Bunny rather than just making fun of it (which isn't to say that they stopped making fun of it afterwards, or that many people actually got around to seeing it), the scene that generated the most buzz was what is delicately referred to as "the blowjob", where Gallo's lodge pole is climbed by Chloe Sevigny, for whom one has never felt more pity. The scene's verite qualities and (literally) naked emotional power are what most people talked about, although we think they were just grateful that something was actually happening in the movie after endless shots of Gallo driving aimlessly across country. Gallo, who tends to be pretty sensitive about things like this, has always claimed that the hog in question belongs to him; French director Claire Denis, on the contrary, claims that it is an artificial wang, and that, worse yet, it isn't even Vince's artificial wang — she says he stole it off the set of her 2001 film Trouble Every Day, in which he had a large part, but not that large part. In the absence of, er, concrete evidence from Gallo, we're going to go with Claire Denis' version of events; we figure that since she's not on record as hoping Roger Ebert gets cancer for giving one of her films a bad review, she's got the moral high ground.

Gwyneth Paltrow's Body in SHALLOW HAL (2001)

Hollywood's relationship with the overweight isn't exactly a history of sensitivity and kindness. Particularly where women are concerned, the mere suggestion of being a few pounds beyond anorexic means you're virtually unemployable; and in a city where people like Christina Ricci, Drew Barrymore and Britney Spears can be attacked in the press for being fat, roles for actual human women, let alone fat women, are few and far between. When the Farrelly brothers decided to make a movie about a shallow womanizer who falls in love with a 300-pound woman to prove that he can see 'inner beauty,' they had a casting decision to make: hire two people to play Rosemary Shanahan — one a beautiful, thin Hollywood blonde, to portray Hal's perception of her, and one a genuine 300-pound actress to portray the 'real' character — or just stick Gwyneth Paltrow in a fat suit? (It didn't help the whole unpleasant aftertaste of the movie that its male lead was Jack Black, an actor who gets romantic leads despite his own flabby physique; no actress with a body like Black's would ever nail down a leading-lady part.) Perhaps it's too much to expect anything like insight from filmmakers whose reputation is built on the gross-out comedy, but the fat suit is already a ethical minefield (representing, as it does, a sort of physical proof of Hollywood's allergy to hiring anyone genuinely overweight to appear in a prominent role) without filling it with an actress who probably weighed 110 pounds soaking wet when she was filming the role.

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

Willem Dafoe's Teeth in WILD AT HEART (1990)

The whole world seems to be rotting in David Lynch's nightmare road movie, and nowhere is this clearer than in the misbegotten mouth of white-trash villain Bobby Peru, played by Willem Dafoe in full-moon mode. Unholy, irredeemable, and defiantly unflossed, Bobby Peru is meant to be the ultimate dark void awaiting the young lovers at the end of their road to nowhere, and no Satanic movie character ever displayed a less welcoming smile. Perverse to the end, the still-smiling Bobby finally slides a shotgun beneath his chin and blows his own head off, after which the part of his body above the gum line must have felt a certain amount of relief.

Goldie Hawn's Fat in DEATH BECOMES HER (1992)

In this special-effects comedy, Goldie Hawn and Meryl Streep play lifelong rivals who achieve "undead" immortality and spend the rest of the movie blowing holes in each other, twisting each other's necks into pretzels, knocking their heads into their chest cavities, and generally behaving as if Chuck Jones were their stunt coordinator. But the most effective physical mutation in the picture may come when Hawn slips into an old-fashioned fat suit and layers of latex makeup to depict her character's depressive obesity after Streep has waltzed off with her fiancee. Nothing in the movie is funnier than Hawn's expression of malicious satisfaction, with her features sunk deep in the mass of her cream puff head, as she imagines raining destruction down on her gal pal. At the time, Hawn was forty-six years old and had spent a quarter of a century doing her damndest to hang onto the body and mannerisms of a teenage girl. Maybe she felt wickedly giddy at even pretending to have let herself go.

Dennis Hopper's False Leg in RIVER'S EDGE (1987)

Dennis Hopper, fresh from his comeback in Blue Velvet, lays claim to the being the counterculture's answer to Walter Brennan in this generation-gap study of alienated youth. John Heard made a good grab for the position in Cutter's Way, where he staggered around pretending to be one-legged and wore an eye patch to boot, but that was nothing compared to what you get when you equip Hopper with an artificial leg, an inflatable sex doll, and the name "Feck", and sit back to watch him rock. When Hopper, who deals dope to the local teenagers, sits down to remove his false leg, it symbolizes the loss of his own youthful innocence and the disconnect between the older characters and the young people, which is fed by their use of his own product. Or something like that. And did we mention that his character's name is Feck!?

— Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Vadim Rizov

Take Five: The Betrayal of the Body

Peter Smith — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 21:00:00 GMT

Julian Schnabel, who's proved to be a much more interesting film director than he was a painter, has caused quite a stir in France with his latest, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Opening in limited release this weekend, the film deals with a French fashion magazine editor who suffers a paralyzing stroke and is forced to communicate with the world — telling tales not only of his internal imprisonment, but also of his rich interior life — the only way he can: by blinking out the words with his left eyelid, the sole part of his body he can still control. The idea that the human body is as much a prison as a vehicle is as old as Shakespeare, and it's likewise yielded a number of fine films, particularly from directors who've had their own bodies betray them, or those of their loved ones. When the mind is still sharp but seems to exist solely as a captive of a body, without which it cannot survive, but to which it is frustratingly bound, some outstanding, if terribly depressing, dramatic situations can ensue. Here are five films dealing with the ways in which the mind can become a prisoner of the body — and the ways in which those minds seek escape.

JOHNNY GOT HIS GUN (1971)

For many decades, a number of prominent directors had sought permission to make a film of Dalton Trumbo's stunningly powerful anti-war novel. Trumbo (a longtime victim of Hollywood's anti-Communist blacklist) always refused, saying that only he could properly translate the novel — which deals with a WWI veteran who loses his arms, legs and face to an exploding shell and desperately seeks a way to communicate his rage at the futility of the loss to the world — to film. When he finally did, it was an odd effort, to say the least, but it featured many of the book's most essential themes and powerful scenes. (A remake, based on a recent stage adaptation, is currently in the works.)

THE FLY (1986)

David Cronenberg's films have a number of common threads, but if one attitude hovers above them all, it's the simultaneous attraction to and revulsion at the human body — its vitality as well as its decay. Although the theme is present in almost all of his movies, nowhere is it more purely realized than in his remake of The Fly, where scientist Seth Brundle's slow disintegration and dehumanization as he transforms into a monster is both subtly and explicitly compared to the progress of those suffering from deadly diseases like cancer and AIDS. In a number of the movie's most telling and memorable pieces of dialogue, the director's fascination with the body's potential and the horror at its easy disintegration are obvious.

MY LEFT FOOT (1989)

Christy Brown's childhood could have — should have — been a brief, sad nightmare. Born with crippling cerebral palsy, he was barely expected to live, let alone thrive. But his fiercely determined mother refused to believe that there wasn't a lively mind inside that shattered body, and kept at the young Irishman to grow and to think, until he eventually learned to read, to write, and to paint with the left foot of the title, his only working limb. Borne to lofty heights largely on the strength of a terrific performance as Brown by Daniel Day-Lewis, My Left Foot was the directorial debut of Jim Sheridan, who went on to make other well-received, Oscar-nominated films such as The Field, In the Name of the Father and In America before somehow landing at the helm of 50 Cent's vanity project, Get Rich or Die Tryin', after which he presumably died of shame.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME (1991)

Master documentarian Errol Morris wisely assumed that audiences wouldn't be entirely enthralled by a straightforward discussion of the heavy-duty astrophysics contained in scientist Stephen Hawking's book of the same name. So he wisely chose to focus as much on Hawking himself as on his theories; Hawking is an endlessly compelling figure; despite having developed Lou Gehrig's disease in his early twenties, which has confined him to a wheelchair and made him incapable of speech or all but the tiniest movements, he is widely considered a scientific genius on the level of Albert Einstein. Morris presents some of Hawking's theories and, like the book that gives his film its name, attempts to make them accessible to the causal viewer, but likewise presents the enigma of the man who made them and asks us to consider the power of a the mind that occupies that nearly useless body.

FRIDA (2002)

Julie Taymor's biopic of the notorious Mexican painter Frida Kahlo is plagued with problems — spotty performances, a suspect script and more hoary clichés than you can shake a paintbrush at. But it's visually inventive, well-framed, and as good a cinematic look as we're likely ever going to get at the singular Ms. Kahlo. The brilliant, temperamental Frida was involved, at a young age, in a horrific accident that left her scarred for life and in constant pain, and while she became a celebrity, a heroine, and a towering figure in the arts of her homeland, she was never able to escape the wounds, both physical and psychic, left to her by the trauma.

— Leonard Pierce

(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

"I'm One of the Sanest People I Know"

Peter Smith — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 17:00:00 GMT

That's a statement that's always cause for either relief or alarm. Coming from David Cronenberg, it's probably the former, but we're not betting our paychecks against it. The London Independent brings us an interesting interview with the Canadian maverick director, in which he makes the startling claim that he almost helmed Basic Instinct 2 but his script was rejected for being "too interesting," and discusses how the titles of his films have affected their box office (women didn't see A History of Violence because it had the word 'violence' in the title, he says, while they were drawn to Eastern Promises because it "sounds like a cheap perfume." Well, that and full frontal Viggo, David.) — Leonard Pierce