The Screengrab : david fincher

DVD Digest for May 5, 2009

Paul Clark — Tue, 05 May 2009 14:00:00 GMT

This week, the fifth and final Best Picture nominee from last year makes its DVD debut, and a whole lot of TV and Blu-Ray releases hit the market.

Recently, there was some uproar over the announcement that Criterion would be releasing David Fincher’s latest film, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, on DVD and Blu-Ray. Frankly, the naysayers sort of had a point- while Button is Fincher’s first stab at Oscar glory, it’s hardly the best-regarded film of his career, and it looked like Criterion was grabbing a big-ticket title in order to make some money to find its more esoteric efforts (such as last month’s Jean Painlevé box). But it turns out that we all underestimated Criterion- while the movie itself might be nothing special, the new 2-disc DVD is, boasting nearly three hours’ worth of documentaries on the making of the film, from on-the-set footage of Fincher at work to exhaustive features on the movie’s technical marvels. Paramount will also be releasing a film-only version as well, but if you really want to own this, the Criterion set is the way to go, and besides, if enough people buy the Criterion Button, maybe they’ll be persuaded to release some other Finchers as well. I for one long for a snazzy new version of The Game, but that’s just me…

Other recent releases coming to DVD this week include the Bollywood hit Chandni Chowk to China (Warner) and Azazel Jacobs’ priceless indie Momma’s Man (Kino).

The only notable classics release that’s on my radar this week is Mike Newell’s 1992 arthouse hit Enchanted April (Disney).

The week’s TV on DVD include: Spader and The Shat in Boston Legal Season 5 (Fox); the Daniel Defoe reworking Crusoe: The Complete Series (Universal); Gene Roddenberry’s Earth: The Final Conflict Season 1 (Paramount); the Candace Bushnell-penned Lipstick Jungle Season 2 (Universal); and the since-cancelled drama October Road Season 2 (Disney).

Finally, this week’s selection of Blu-Ray only releases has plenty of fun to help lead movie watchers into summer. We’ve got comedy- Big (Fox), There’s Something About Mary (Fox), Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (Paramount). We’ve got love stories- It Could Happen to You (Sony) and Roxanne (Sony). We’ve even got a double dose of dancing Travolta, with Grease (Paramount) and Saturday Night Fever (Paramount). Or if none of these does it for you, there’s always Michael C. Hall as everyone’s favorite serial-killer-hunting serial killer in Dexter Season 2 (Paramount).

In Other Blogs: Jesus Wept

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 14:00:00 GMT

It’s Good Friday, so somebody out there must be writing about Jesus movies. Ah, here we go – it’s Joshua Land at Moving Image Source comparing The Passion of the Christ and The Last Temptation of Christ. “The single most hollow claim of those who picketed Last Temptation was the notion that Universal was exploiting Christianity in pursuit of the almighty dollar; like The Passion of the Christ, Scorsese’s film was an obviously uncommercial proposition from the get-go, and it remains remarkable that the studio ever pursued it at all, let alone held firm in the face of protests—particularly after Paramount had already dropped the project before it even went into production.”

David Lynch won’t do commentary tracks, so the folks at Shooting Down Pictures have taken it upon themselves to live-blog Inland Empire. “I don’t think it’s an informational kind of film. I don’t think it’s part of his vocabulary. That might be the trouble behind understanding the ‘genre’ of this film. Simply avant-garde play of light, affectations and moods. I think the first time I saw this, by this point I was thinking that it was explicitly about interpretation. And it’s setting up all these signs for you to interpret in any number of ways. But it is going to provide a network of significance, and there are several things that will keep popping up for you to pay attention to how and when. There’s an intuitive kind of architecture to the film. A lot of it is just the face - dreams, and faces. It’s all about cinema as a dream, dreams as cinema. It’s not even a syllogism, it’s all a bunch of links.”

Director Richard Kelly (Southland Tales) blogs on his MySpace page about his new movie The Box. “The film was digitally photographed using the Panavision Genesis camera. In my audio commentary on Tony Scott's Domino, I mentioned that I would never shoot a 1970s period piece using a digital camera. My position on this changed when I saw David Fincher's extraordinary Zodiac. It can be done.”

This open letter to Bill O’Reilly has nothing to do with movies, but Roger Ebert wrote it and it’s too good to pass up: “I understand you believe one of the Sun-Times misdemeanors was dropping your syndicated column. My editor informs me that ‘very few’ readers complained about the disappearance of your column, adding, ‘many more complained about Nancy.’ I know I did. That was the famous Ernie Bushmiller comic strip in which Sluggo explained that ‘wow’ was ‘mom’ spelled upside-down.”

And in List-o-Mania this week…what the hell, let’s go with the 10 Greatest Mall-Set Action Scenes from Spoutblog, including Commando. “There’s nothing like seeing Arnold Schwarzenegger throw off about eight mall cops attempting a circular apprehension. There’s also nothing like seeing Arnold Schwarzenegger swing across the atrium of the Sherman Oaks Galleria using a plastic balloon-like decoration that couldn’t possibly have held him. Yes, there are a lot of over-the-top moments in this action scene, but there’s no denying it’s entertaining, at least to those of us who aren’t employed as mall security.”

Screengrab Predicts The Oscars: Winners (Part Six)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 23:30:00 GMT

BEST ACTOR

And the nominees are...

Richard Jenkins – The Visitor
Frank Langella – Frost/Nixon
Sean Penn – Milk
Brad Pitt – The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Mickey Rourke – The Wrestler

Paul Clark Predicts: Mickey Rourke

This might be more of a ballgame had Penn not won five years ago -- and if Milk had real Best Picture traction. As it stands, Rourke has the comeback story, the body transformation, the hype machine, and best of all, the awesome performance to carry him here.

Andrew Osborne Predicts: Sean Penn

Mickey Rouke got his Golden Globe, so his fairy tale comeback story had a nice happy ending, but Sean Penn won the SAG Award for Outstanding Performance in a Lead Role, so I think he’ll take the Oscar. Besides, for once, I actually want to hear Penn pontificate on a political subject...specifically, I want him to aim his famous humorless scowl at California’s clueless voters and ask them why they felt the need to make George Takei sad.

Leonard Pierce Predicts: Mickey Rourke

Frank Langella’s blowsy overacting is getting way too much attention, making him a risk to steal the thunder of much better performances. Brad Pitt’s Benjamin Button is showy but ultimately hollow, which should leave Sean Penn and Mickey Rourke to fight it out over Milk and The Wrestler. Given Penn’s history and AMPAS’ love of a comeback story, this one should by Rourke’s to lose.

Should Win: Mickey Rourke, The Wrestler
Will Win: Mickey Rourke, The Wrestler

Nick Schager Predicts: Mickey Rourke

Penn’s superb turn as the slain Harvey Milk is just as worthy, but the Academy loves underdog-comeback stories, and this year, that narrative belongs to The Wrestler’s Mickey Rourke.

Sarah Clyne Sundberg Predicts: Sean Penn

Scott Von Doviak Predicts: Mickey Rourke

SCREENGRAB CONSENSUS: MICKEY ROURKE

BEST DIRECTOR

And the nominees are...

Danny Boyle – Slumdog Millionaire
Stephen Daldry – The Reader
David Fincher – The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Ron Howard – Frost/Nixon
Gus Van Sant – Milk

Paul Clark Predicts: Danny Boyle

There are years when Oscar voters decide to spread the wealth by giving this award to a celebrated filmmaker whose film they liked just a shade less than the Best Picture winner. But this isn’t one of those years -- among the nominees no one’s particularly “due”, so they’ll fall back on their Best Picture pick.

Andrew Osborne Predicts: David Fincher

Just hedging my bets on this one, in the same way Academy voters may split their love in the absence of a slam-dunk Best Picture frontrunner.

Leonard Pierce Predicts: Ron Howard

This could be a curious case, insofar as there doesn’t appear to be any single movie poised to sweep the Oscars. I had originally predicted that neither David Fincher nor Gus Van Sant would receive a nomination due to the atypical films they made, but my colleague Scott Von Doviak, probably correctly, felt that this increases rather than lessens their chances. Stephen Daldry winning would be a worst-case scenario.

Should Win: Gus Van Sant, Milk
Will Win: Ron Howard, Frost/Nixon

Nick Schager Predicts: Danny Boyle

Of all the nominees, Boyle’s work is the flashiest, and his film has populist-landslide-winner written all over it. Given that he was also honored by the Director’s Guild of America, count on him taking home the gold.

Sarah Clyne Sundberg Predicts: Danny Boyle/Ron Howard

It's a toss-up between everyone's favorite — Slumdog Millionaire — and Frost/Nixon because Ron Howard is exactly the kind of "Hollywood insider taking his art seriously" that the Academy likes.

Scott Von Doviak Predicts: Danny Boyle

SCREENGRAB CONSENSUS: DANNY BOYLE

Stay tuned for our Best Picture predictions and your very own souvenir Academy Awards ballot as the Screengrab 2009 Oscar Special continues way past your bedtime and pre-empts the evening news!

Contributors: Paul Clark, Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Nick Schager, Sarah Clyne Sundberg, Scott Von Doviak

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 Predicts the Oscars: Nominations (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 22:45:00 GMT

BEST DIRECTOR

Scott Von Doviak Predicts:

NOMINEES
Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire)
David Fincher (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button)
Ron Howard (Frost/Nixon)
Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight)
Gus Van Sant (Milk)

David Fincher got respectable with Benjamin Button. Gus Van Sant did the same with Milk. Ron Howard is always an Academy favorite, so he should be there for Frost/Nixon. Danny Boyle put on a show in Slumdog Millionaire. The final slot is up for grabs, but I think Christopher Nolan has the best shot for The Dark Knight.

WINNER
Danny Boyle

Sarah Clyne Sundberg Predicts:

NOMINEES
Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire)
Ron Howard (Frost/Nixon)
Charlie Kaufmann (Synecdoche, NY)
Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight)
Gus Van Sant (Milk)

Charlie Kaufman will be nominated for Synecdoche, NY because it is a director's movie. However that will feel too forced of a winner, so Gus Van Sant will win for Milk. That is, unless the Academy goes with escapism in these trying times and Christopher Nolan wins for The Dark Knight. If the latter transpires, it will be one of those head-scratching moments when the reel of past winners rolls at future Awards shows. There is no way Danny Boyle will come in from left field and win for Slumdog Millionaire, but the Academy will want to show that they appreciate a good movie, so will nominate him anyway. Ron Howard will be thrown a nomination for engaging the Nixon presidency, a national trauma that we like to think seems timely.

WINNER
Gus Van Sant

Paul Clark Predicts:

NOMINEES
Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire)
David Fincher (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button)
Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight)
Andrew Stanton (WALL*E)
Gus Van Sant (Milk)

It’s rare for a Best Director shortlist to double the Best Picture nominees five-for-five, and of the Best Picture nominations I’m predicting, Frost/Nixon feels the least like a “director’s movie.” But who takes Ron Howard’s place? If The Wrestler catches on with the voters beyond a couple of acting nominations, Darren Aronofsky might place here -- likewise The Reader’s Stephen Daldry and Happy-Go-Lucky’s Mike Leigh, both two-time directing nominees. As always, one shouldn’t count out Clint Eastwood. But I’m going out on a limb here and predicting WALL*E director Andrew Stanton, as a nomination here would give Academy members a chance to recognize the film outside of its inevitable Best Animated Feature win, thereby making him the first director ever nominated for an animated film. As for the winner, bet on Fincher to win even if the film doesn’t, as the epic scope and classically-inflected style of Button should prove to be right up the voters’ collective alley.

WINNER
David Fincher

Andrew Osborne Predicts:

NOMINEES
Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire)
David Fincher (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button)
Ron Howard (Frost/Nixon)
Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight)
Gus Van Sant (Milk)

We made our Director predictions before the announcement of the DGA awards, so we’re all flying a little blind in this category. Ron Howard was Opie and Frost/Nixon was good, so he seems like an even-money bet. Christopher Nolan will surely ride The Dark Knight wave, and folks seem enamored of the creepy old man baby (and, I suppose, the swoony, melancholy romance) of Benjamin Button, so I reckon the powers-that-be might finally be ready to forgive David Fincher for Alien³. Whether or not his film receives a Best Picture nod, Danny Boyle will probably get nominated...because if directing means wrangling a zillion elements (including half the population of Mumbai) into a coherent, entertaining auteurial vision, then Boyle certainly directed the shit outta Slumdog Millionaire. And finally, I guess I have to go with Gus Van Sant for Milk, even though it means I just basically wound up parroting all the predictions in Entertainment Weekly. As for the actual winner...hmm. Though I think Dark Knight’s gonna win Best Picture, it’s still basically just an action film (no, really...it’s just an action film, people). Howard, Fincher and Boyle did fine work, but Van Sant has passion on his side and managed to get a labor of love to the finish line (after many failed attempts by previous players) so: him.

WINNER
Gus Van Sant

Leonard Pierce Predicts:

NOMINATIONS

Jonathan Demme (Rachel Getting Married)
Clint Eastwood (Changeling)
Ron Howard (Frost/Nixon)
Sam Mendes (Revolutionary Road)
John Patrick Shanley (Doubt)

Clint’s gonna get nominated for something, and please God don’t let it be for the damn-kids-get-off-my-lawn disaster Gran Torino. Demme gets the ‘year of the comeback’ nomination for Rachel Getting Married, and Shanley will pick up a nom since the Academy has a weakness for directors who aren’t really directors. It’ll come down to a slugfest between Mendes and Howard, who’s finally made a movie worth nominating, and I think, in a year that won’t see any big sweep winners, that Revolutionary Road will get Mr. Kate Winslet the big prize. BIGGEST SCREWJOB: Hollywood isn’t quite ready to welcome back Gus Van Sant, and Benjamin Button is the least David Fincherish movie David Fincher has ever directed, so they’ll get passed over.

WINNER
Sam Mendes

SCREENGRAB CONSENSUS: NOMINEES
DANNY BOYLE, DAVID FINCHER, RON HOWARD, CHRISTOPHER NOLAN, GUS VAN SANT

SCREENGRAB CONSENSUS: WINNER
GUS VAN SANT

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four & Six

Contributors: Paul Clark, Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Sarah Clyne Sundberg, Scott Von Doviak

F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood/ Hollywood in F. Scott Fitzgerald

Phil Nugent — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 19:30:00 GMT

As Susan King points out in the Los Angeles Times, David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which is based on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald that first appeared in Collier's magazine in 1922, represents the latest development in an intense, dysfunctional love affair between Hollywood and Fitzgerald that goes right back to the days when the author was alive and the hottest thing in publishing. King quotes Matthew J. Bruccoli, editor of Fitzgerald's published notebooks and correspondence, as saying that Fitzgerald, who claimed to have come up with the idea of a man born old and growing younger through the years based on a remark by Mark Twain, was "probably attracted to this [fantasy] form by its tension between romanticism and realism, for the challenge of fantasy is to make events convincing." But maybe he was just looking for a fresh spin on the way that youth slips away, which was one of the writer's obsessions for all his short life. Fitzgerald, who from the evidence of those notebooks and letters, had begun complaining that his best years were past him as early as his twenties, was once so great a literary celebrity that he and his wife, Zelda, were given screen tests and offered the chance to star in a silent version of his novel This Side of Paradise. They turned the offer down; Gore Vidal has written that "like so many romantics, then and now, the Fitzgeralds did not want to go through the grim boring business of becoming movie stars. Rather they wanted to live as if they were inside a movie... Each lived long enough and suffered enough to realize that movies of that sort are to be made or seen, not lived. But by then she was in a sanitarium full-time and he was a movie hack."

When Fitzerald returned to Hollywood in the '30s to work as a screenwriter, he was a has-been in need of money; his private life was a mess and his career had begun to slide downward with the commercial failure of his greatest book, The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald was genuinely interested in doing good work for the movies--unlike, say, William Faulkner, who made no bones about just being there for the money and who, coincidentally or not, wound up getting credit for having worked on some pretty good movies. Fitzgerald's only screen credit was as co-writer of Three Comrades, a 1938 adaptation of an Erich Maria Remarque novel, directed by Frank Borzage. Two years later, he died, following his second heart attack, at 44. According to Vidal, Fitzgerald may have run afoul of his boss, "the boy genius Irving Thalberg, whose "tasteful" films (The Barretts of Wimpole Street) were much admired in those days. On one occasion (recorded in the story 'Crazy Sunday') Fitzgerald held riveted a party at the Thalbergs with a drunken comedy number. Movie stars do not like to be upstaged by mere writers, especially drunk writers. But next day, the hostess, the ever-gracious Norma Shearer, wired Fitzgerald (no doubt after an apologetic mea culpa that has not survived), "I thought you were one of the most agreeable persons at our tea." In Hollywood that means you're fired; he was fired.

When Hollywood at the actual, still-living Fitzgerald nestled in its bosom, it may not have been able to overcome its natural aversion to the aura he then had as a washed-up failure--an aversion that Fitzgerald shared, and that may have contributed to his physical deterioration as much as the fast living and his alcoholism. But it still loved his stories about scandal and blighted romance among the rich and the beautiful: it rushed to turn them into movies when they were hot off the presses and then, after his death, was quick to reconceive them as nostalgic odes to a vanished time. Leading the league in film adaptations is Fitzgerald's masterpiece The Great Gatsby, which Baz Luhrmann is currently threatening to film. It's a little hard to gauge Hollywood's track record with this book, because the first, silent adaptation, made in 1926 with Warner Baxter in the title role, has been lost, and the first sound version, made in 1949 with Alan Ladd in the lead and Elliott Nugent (no relation) directing, was pulled from distribution when the 1974 Robert Redford Gatsby was released and has been little seen since. The Redford movie, which was much-hyped at the time, was so long on expensive period detail and production values and so short on emotion, depth, and poetic feeling that it was as if it had been written by the Fitzgerald of The Beautiful and the Damned, a tyro whose greatest gift was for snappy titles. The second most popular Fitzgerald novel among would-be film adapters is probably Tender Is the Night, which was made into a bad movie in 1962 and a somewhat better TV miniseries in 1985, with a script by Dennis Potter. In a lighter key, in 1977 Joan Micklin Silver made an hour-long TV film for PBS based on the short story Bernice Bobs Her Hair; it contains tickling performances by Shelley Duvall as a country mouse cousin and Veronica Carthwright as the citified relation driven to jealousy by her toothy charms.

There's also a whole subgenre of attempt to capture some of what Fitzgerald had to say, in the writing he did in his last years, about Hollywood while he was there, in the process of being ground up in the gears of the machine itself. It's not his best work, but Hollywood is always suitably impressed with a genuine great writer deems Hollywood a fit subject for him to grapple with. The great white whale is The Last Tycoon, Fitzgerald's unfinished attemtpt at a Hollywood novel, with a Thalberg-like studio chief as its hero. It's one of the ironies of both men's careers that Fitzgerald had it in him to buy the hype surrounding Thalberg as the most culturally sophisticated of the studio bosses and to try to turn him into a tragic hero, even while Thalberg was shafting him, just as he'd shafted his other betters, from Erich von Stroheim to the Marx Brothers. The 1976 movie version, adapted by Harold Pinter and starring Robert De Niro, was the last movie directed by Elia Kazan; it's a stiff, largely because the filmmakers were too reverential towards the material to dare to flesh out Fitzgerald's incomplete novel and turn it into a story. (A 1959 TV version was directed by Ted Kotcheff and starred John Ireland.) And Christopher Lloyd played Pat Hobby, the hack-screenwriter antihero of a series of stories--attempted comedies that Fitzgerald must have ground out in a grumpy, self-lacerating mood--in a 1987 film shown on PBS as part of its Tales from the Hollywood Hills anthology series.

But as Vidal wrote, some people would rather live the movies than make them, and some would rather bypass the art in favor of gossipy dreams about the artist. That's the idea behind F. Scott Fitzgerald and "The Last of the Belles", a 1974 TV movie that fuses an adaptation of the title story with Richard Chamberlain playing the young Scott as he romances Blythe Danner's Zelda, and another TV film, 1976's F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood, which dispenses with the fictional adaptations and just dives right in to scenes of the dissipated Scott (played by Jason Miller, with Tuesday Weld as Zelda and Julia Foster as his Hollywood mistress, Sheila Graham) reeling around Hollywood in a half-potted stupor. Neither film is very good, but the casting directors can congratulate themselves on hiring two very different actors, neither of whom looked a thing like Fitzgerald, to represent the two popular fantasies of how he was at either end of his famous life: chipper and civilized as young Dr. Kildaire when starting out and as gaunt and pathetic as a bad playwright turned John Garfield imitator at the end. It probably says something about the mysteries of creation that, even when Fitzgerald adaptations are good, none of them really convey as much of his style and feeling as the work he himself did for the script of Three Comrades, just as it probably says something about the frustrating nature of writing for movies that, even with Fitzgerald's fingerprints on it, Three Comrades is still mostly a terrible movie.

The Rep Report (December 26-January 4)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 19:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: "Essential Sturges" at Film Forum crams a week's worth of the good stuff into what's left of the year, with a day after another of the funniest double bills ever offered to a city full of people in full need of a sanctuary from all the sorry weather. Also booked through January 1, but showing only at early-afternoon matinees: the 1941 Hoppity Goes to Town, the 84-minute animated feature that marked the end of the Fleischer Brothers' challenge to the Disney monopoly. It's an unusual movie that saw the Fleischers toning down the trademark anarchy and injecting more of the Disney cuteness into their mix in what now looks like a desperate attempt to stave off the collapse of their company. The attempt failed: pushed back from its original release date so as to avoid direct competition with Disney's Dumbo, the movie wound up being released two days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, an event that did little to whet America's appetite for the tuneful tale of a lovelorn grasshopper's attempts to save his community from human onslaught. The movie's failure led to the end of Fleischer Studios, leaving it behind as a little-seen relic from a remarkable time in the history of American animated films.

From December 26 through the 31st, Film Society of Lincoln Center offers "Scorsese Classics", a full plate of films by the city's favorite son that includes the early Who's That Knocking at My Door?, the breakthrough masterpieces Mean Streets and Taxi Driver and more recent fare such as GoodFellas and Casino and the exhilarating Bob Dylan doc No Direction Home. Of special interest: the double bill of two short documentaries from the mid-70s that remain unavailable on DVD, the Scorsese family portrait Italianamerican and the jaw-dropping biography-by-monologue American Boy, starring Stephen Prince, who sold Travis Bickle his boom stick in Taxi Driver. Then starting on January 1, Lincoln Center passes the baton for "Under the Sign of Fincher", three days of David Fincher movies double billed with movies Fincher has selected as important to his development as a filmmaker, followed, on January 4, by a screening of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and, for separate admission, a Q & A about its making between the director and critic Kent Jones. If nothing else, this is probably your only chance in this lifetime to see Se7en paired with Mary Poppins.

Ever-Mysterious National Board of Review's Year-End Awards

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Before any of the critics’ associations weigh in with their year-end awards, the National Board of Review releases its annual awards announcement and Top 10 list. While this organization certainly has an official-sounding name, questions remain about the legitimacy of the group, which was actually founded as a censorship board in 1909. In response to a reader question, Roger Ebert once wrote, “I have never met anyone who has met a member of the National Board of Review. The director John Boormann recently told me that he attended one of their award banquets at the Tavern on the Green in Central Park, and met several other award winners. There was a celebrity host to hand out the prizes. ‘After I got back home,’ he mused, ‘I realized that I had not met a single person claiming to be a member of the National Board of Review.’”

Be that as it may, the NBR’s list is taken seriously each year as a bellwether of the upcoming critics’ prizes and other awards, so we hereby dutifully present their top honors:

BEST PICTURE: Slumdog Millionaire
BEST DIRECTOR: David Fincher, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
BEST ACTOR: Clint Eastwood, Gran Torino
BEST ACTRESS: Anne Hathaway, Rachel Getting Married
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: Josh Brolin, Milk
BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Penelope Cruz, Vicky Cristina Barcelona

TOP TEN FILMS:

Burn after Reading
Changeling
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Dark Knight
Defiance
Frost/Nixon
Gran Torino
Milk
WALL•E
The Wrestler

Trailer Review: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button Trailer #2

Paul Clark — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Last month, I declared David Fincher’s film version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story to be my most-anticipated movie of the fall. This trailer only made me more breathless in my anticipation. For one thing, the trailer affords me a more in-depth look than ever before at the breadth of Brad Pitt’s performance- sure, there’s plenty of CGI and makeup effects involved, yet Pitt (a perpetually underrated actor) nonetheless has plenty of responsibility in bringing the character to life. In addition, the story is shown a little more in-depth, including supporting characters played by Cate Blanchett, Tilda Swinton, and Taraji P. Henson. There’s been some bad buzz coming out of early screenings that the film is “too long”, but to hell with that. I could be happy luxuriating in Fincher’s world for hours on end.

Screengrab Fall Preview: Paul Clark's Picks

Paul Clark — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 17:30:00 GMT

Yesterday, my colleague Scott Von Doviak dared all of his fellow Screengrab staffers to weigh in on our most anticipated movies of the fall. Given my lifelong inability to resist a dare (which resulted in my eating far too many unspeakable things in my younger days) I’ve decided to answer the call. Craving an additional challenge- and hoping to spotlight the wide array of good and bad releases coming soon to a theatre near me- I’ve decided to eliminate all contenders that appeared in Scott’s preview. Here goes:

3 UP

1. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – for years, David Fincher has been one of Hollywood’s most gifted filmmakers, with last year’s Zodiac his best film yet. With Button, Fincher turns his camera on an honest-to-goodness work of literature (an F. Scott Fitzgerald story, fer chrissakes), but don’t expect a workmanlike Tradition of Quality-style adaptation. Button re-teams Fincher with Brad Pitt, who continues to improve as an actor by seeking out adventurous material, and this story gives him his biggest challenge yet, not only playing a character from childhood through old age, but playing him while aging in reverse. It’s the kind of story that requires a visionary to pull off, and I can think of few better candidates for the job than Fincher. Every year, there’s at least one high-profile movie that I actively root for to be great, and this year, it’s Benjamin Button.

2. A Christmas Tale – Unlike Benjamin Button, the latest film by the great French filmmaker Arnaud Desplechin is something of a known quantity, premiering at Cannes to almost universal acclaim. But even if it hadn’t already screened, my hopes for this one would be through the roof. In the past few years, Desplechin has become one of my favorite filmmakers, and he’s coming off his finest work yet, 2004’s Kings and Queen. Factor in that Christmas Tale re-unites four of that film’s stars- Matthieu Amalric, Catherine Deneuve, Emmanuelle Devos, and Hippolyte Girardot- and I’m sold. That the film’s IMDb recommends the Steve Martin remake of Cheaper By the Dozen shouldn’t be held against it.

3. The Brothers Bloom – as I stated in my Trailer Review earlier this week, I’m in the pro-Brick camp, so naturally I’m excited for Rian Johnson’s follow-up project. But he’s also assembled an irresistible cast (I love Brody and Ruffalo as brothers, and Rachel Weisz is always best when she plays daffy), so I’m extra-stoked for this one. Could we be witnessing the rise of a major American filmmaker? Here’s hoping.

3 DOWN

1. Defiance – tell me if you’ve heard this one before: Ed Zwick directs a film about an outsider who aids a group of minorities in fighting about those who oppress them. That the minorities are Jews and the time period is during World War II only makes Defiance’s Oscar-grubbing even more blatant. Thanks, but no thanks.

2. RockNRolla – you know, I was under the impression that the abject failure of Revolver coupled with the divorce from Madonna meant that the moviegoing public would get a break from Guy Ritchie. Alas, that beautiful dream wasn’t to be. It was nice while it lasted though…

3. Bedtime Stories – Adam Sandler’s comic persona might be juvenile, but he’s always been at his best at unleashing his rage onscreen in decidedly un-kid-friendly ways. Less successful are his attempts to warm the heart, which makes the idea of a Sandler family comedy all the more misguided. The presence of Adam (The Pacifier) Shankman in the director’s chair doesn’t inspire much confidence either.

WILD CARD

It’s not as odd as Scott’s choice of Oliver Stone’s W. (what could be?), but I’m pretty conflicted about Quantum of Solace. What made Casino Royale so damn good is that it combined a kickass James Bond thrill ride with a legitimately compelling story. But although hiring director Marc Forster hints that the producers might be trying for that same balance of action and drama, I have my doubts that lightning will strike twice. Add to this Forster’s lack of experience in the action genre, plus the fact that unlike Casino this one doesn’t have an Ian Fleming novel to provide a solid narrative foundation, and Quantum has a lot to live up to. Sure, it might be diverting, but after Casino Royale, that just doesn’t cut the mustard anymore. However, I’d love nothing more than to be wrong about this.

Taking "The Midnight Meat Train"

Paul Clark — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Last fall, I wrote up a Trailer Review for a movie called The Midnight Meat Train, based on a short story by horror maestro Clive Barker. At the time, I had some misgivings about the movie- largely due to director Ryuhei Kitamura- I was intrigued enough by the premise and the Barker name that I filed it away in my mind as one to watch for. Now, nearly nine months later, the movie has arrived in a limited number of theatres, courtesy of its distributor, Lionsgate. According to the horror site Shock Till You Drop, the movie was caught in the middle of a regime change at the studio, with new chief Joe Drake dumping the remaining projects left behind by his predecessor, Peter Block, aside from sure things like the unkillable Saw franchise. Due to the niceties of studio politics, the movie has been quietly opened in roughly 100 theatres, mostly of the discount variety, in order to fulfill a contractual obligation with production company Lakeshore Entertainment. The movie was scheduled to play for a week on its way to a fall DVD release.

With the marketing and distribution costs at an all-time high, and DVD and on-demand supplanting theatrical viewing as the moviegoing experience of choice for the majority of Americans, it’s becoming more and more common to see movies getting this treatment. It can happen for a number of reasons: the films might be difficult to market, there might be the aforementioned studio infighting, or maybe one of the executives simply doesn’t like the movie. Sometimes, the movie just isn’t very good. These factors and others can come into play when it comes to which movies get the shaft from studios.

But how’s the movie, you ask? Is it the horror equivalent of Idiocracy- a cult-y oddball that didn’t get the studio love it deserved? Or was Lionsgate right in dumping The Midnight Meat Train into mostly-empty theatres to be quickly forgotten? Actually, it’s somewhere between these two extremes. Neither a genre masterpiece nor a travesty, it’s a fairly effective, hard-R horror movie. If it’s guts and gore you want, The Midnight Meat Train should satisfy your cravings.

One aspect I liked about the movie was that it belongs less to the tradition of slasher movies than it does to the old-school “meat movie” and, as such, feels less beholden to formula and cliché. Unlike slasher movies- which devote an inordinate amount of attention to the killing and mutilation of women- Kitamura and Barker are pretty equal-opportunity in portraying their victims, which I appreciated. In addition, the movie plays in parts like the straight-horror flipside to David Fincher’s Se7en, as our protagonist (played by Bradley Cooper) finds himself unable to look away from the violent heart of the city. It’s not until he’s spurred on to really probe this hear that he finds much more darkness and horror than he could have imagined. I haven’t read the Barker story upon which it’s based, but I would imagine that this theme is present there as well.

Unfortunately, the movie doesn’t work as well as it could, due in large part to director Ryuhei Kitamura. Kitamura is a favorite of Asian cinema fans, but I found his previous films consistently underwhelming. Versus’ zombies-versus-yakuza premise cemented the movie’s rep in the hearts of fanboys, but it was too slipshod and unevenly paced to work for me. Likewise, Godzilla: Final Wars succeeded in the giant-monster scenes but failed when the director tried to inject human storylines into the mix. But most of all, Kitamura’s tendency toward show-offy camera work and needless CGI have been consistently problematic, and it’s these same issues that keep The Midnight Meat Train from being as good as it could’ve been. During the most potentially frightening scenes, Kitamura’s use of computer generated gore and camera trickery took me right out of the movie, making me think of how he pulled off the shot rather than being scared.

Yet I would still recommend The Midnight Meat Train to anyone who’s into horror. Bradley Cooper makes a sympathetic protagonist in his early scenes, and is convincingly crazy later on. I also liked Vinnie Jones as the silent killer, his imposing frame used to good effect here. And in spite of Kitamura’s look-at-me! direction, the movie contains a number of effective sequences, including a final-reel revelation that left me quite pleasantly surprised. So if you like horror, give The Midnight Meat Train a look when it comes to DVD. After all, it’s not like Lionsgate is giving you many other options.

Morning Deal Report: David Fincher Gets Goony

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Hancock soared above the competition for the holiday weekend box office dollar. It took in an estimated $66 million from Friday through Sunday, bringing its total since its Tuesday night release to $107.3 million. As those of you who participated in last week’s poll have figured out, that makes Hancock Will Smith’s fifth Fourth of July weekend at number one, following Independence Day, the two Men in Black movies and the immortal Wild, Wild West. Wall-E dropped to the number two slot in its second week of release with $33.4 million, bringing its total to a respectable $128.1 million, while Wanted took a predictable 60% dive, still good for third place.

With Hancock’s success, you can bet the graphic novel adaptations will keep rolling out. David Fincher is looking to bring the Dark Horse title The Goon to the screen as a CG animated feature, it says here in the Hollywood Reporter. Perhaps you are unfamiliar with The Goon? “Created by Eric Powell in 1999, the comic follows the adventures of a muscle-bound brawler who claims to be the primary enforcer for a feared mobster. The stories have a paranormal and comedic edge to them and concern ghosts, zombies, mad scientists and ‘skunk apes.’” You had me at “skunk apes.”

Variety reports that the multi-tasking Spike Lee, already committed to a Michael Jordan documentary, an Inside Man sequel and an adaptation of The Time Traveler, will be filming performances of the Broadway musical Passing Strange. “Plot centers on young black artist from L.A. who flees his middle-class upbringing and heads to Amsterdam and Berlin in an attempt to find himself.” Lee will shoot three performances of the piece, with the current plan being to debut the filmed version on cable.

Related:
Morning Deal Report: Time Traveling with Spike Lee
Fincher's Musical, The Canon of Thor, and Justice on the Rocks

Trailer Review: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Paul Clark — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Although the Spanish-language trailer for David Fincher’s latest film appeared online a few weeks ago, I decided to wait to weigh in until it showed up in English. Well, here it is, folks, and if I wasn’t already excited about it before, I certainly would be now. Some people have complained that the trailer gives the entire plot away, but I don’t think that’s the case. While it certainly shows its hero aging in reverse, the circumstances of his life are only hinted at here. Which of course is just as it should be- make the movie’s premise clear, but don’t delve too deeply into the details. And it goes without saying that the movie looks bloody gorgeous. The makeup job for Benjamin is particularly impressive, and the visual style of the movie is of the caliber we’ve grown to expect from Fincher. And Pitt continues to impress, not just with his range, but also in his willingness to shy away from his pretty boy image. All in all, a tantalizing taste of one of my most anticipated upcoming movie, and a hint that maybe this could prove a critics’ favorite and major player at year’s end. Far-fetched? Now that the Coens are Oscar-winners, I should say not.

Chick Hits: The Girl Power Top Ten (Part 2)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 20:15:00 GMT

ERIN BROCKOVICH (2000)

Julia Roberts’ breakthrough film, Pretty Woman (about the magical romantic possibilities of being a whore) was a monster hit, if not exactly a high water mark in the history of feminism (be sure to look for it on our upcoming Girl Dis-Empowering Top Ten). Erin Brockovich, meanwhile, was the flipside of the equation: a realistically desperate woman who succeeds in spite of, rather than because of her prominent cleavage...and in this quasi-true story, the prize at the end of the fairy tale isn’t a rich millionaire, but a million dollars the single-mother-turned-investigative-paralegal earns for herself (as a bonus from Albert Finney's lawyer/mentor Ed Masry) through brains and tenacity during the course a battle royale with an evil...uh, utility company. And talk about empowering: Roberts went on to win an Oscar for Best Actress, she and director Steven Soderbergh got to hang out with George Clooney and screenwriter Susannah Grant went on to write and direct...Catch and Release with Jennifer Garner and Kevin Smith. Which must have been nice for her.

ALIENS (1986)

There were kick-ass female action heroes before Sigourney Weaver in Aliens, of course. Sigourney Weaver in the original Alien comes to mind, for instance, as does Linda Hamilton in the original Terminator, Karen Allen in Raiders of the Lost Ark and so on and so forth, all the way back to real life ass-kickers like Elizabeth I, Joan of Arc and Cleopatra. But the Ripley of James Cameron’s Aliens really redefined the female action star for the modern age. For one thing, she’s the star of the movie, and she’s tough all the way through, taking command of a doomed rescue mission to an alien infested colony when the indecisive (male) space marine commander in charge of the mission literally falls down on the job, then later rescuing her man-sel in distress potential love interest, Michael Biehn’s Corporal Dwayne Hicks. But Weaver’s heroine isn’t just a muscled, monosyllabic Rambo with tits: she’s a deeply human character who draws superhuman strength not from extra testosterone or the bite of a radioactive spider, but from the sweet maternal bond she forms with an orphaned girl in the midst of all the gunplay and explosions of the masculine world...at least, that is, until David Fincher went and fucked everything up in Alien 3...but I’ll save that rant until our Top Ten list of great movies with incredibly aggravating unnecessary sequels.

MEAN GIRLS (2004)

Mean Girls began with a book by Rosalind Wiseman, Queen Bees and Wannabes, about high school social hierarchies and how they shape the lives of those who pass before them. It is a serious journalistic-sociological study, which apparently came as a bit of a surprise to Tina Fey after she agreed to take on the job of adapting it into a movie. Fey, who appears in the movie as the math teacher Ms. Norbury, came up with a story about Cady (Lindsay Lohan), who moves to Chicago and enters her first American public school at 16 after being home-schooled in Africa by parents who emphasize the value of learning, and so has to endure the culture shock of discovering that "education" in the States is all about bureaucratic rules on one side and social anxiety and status on the other. Out of a mixture of anthropological fascination and a half-conscious but real desire to fit in, Cady "infiltrates" the top clique of pretty girls -- a process that involves her pretending to be dumber than she is in order to snare a boy she likes -- and begins to maneuver her way to the lead position by outbitching them in ways that suggest a Machiavellian Heather. The movie's official mouthpiece is Fey's Ms. Norbury, who ultimately gets Cady to embrace her better side by forcibly inducting her into the school's "Mathletes" team. She also has a strange but deeply felt scene where she hustles all the girls together in the gym and lectures them about why they behave the way they do and why it's not good, though the whole point of Cady's character would seem to be that it's possible to know all that and still find the seductive pull of the status sirens impossible to resist. A mere four years since its release, the most poignant thing about Mean Girls now may be that it serves as a reminder of a more innocent time when it was possible to cast Lindsay Lohan as a sensitive brainiac who, after a brief slumming phase, manages to get herself under control.

WAITING TO EXHALE (1995)

This episodic drama about the rocky-but-hopeful romantic lives of four black women in Phoenix (get it, Greek mythology buffs?) shocked the shit out of the industry by becoming one of the major sleeper hits of the '90s. It also surprised movie critics, who tended to notice that it kind of sucks. It's also arguable whether it merits inclusion in any discussion of movies with positive female role models: all of the members of its central quartet come across as a little brain-damaged, and not just because of how eager they are to define themselves as failures or successes depending on whether they've managed to land a man. (The director, Forest Whitaker, managed to wangle some money from HBO after the premiere of Sex and the City, claiming that the network had ripped him off, and it's true that the movie shares most of what's objectionable about the TV show.) But the public embrace of the movie, and the way it cowed professional opinion makers, marks some kind of landmark moment in empowering the audience, especially if you define empowerment as doing the hucksters' jobs for them. Viewers who loved the movie, especially black women, hit back at criticism of it so hard that newspapers and magazines actually started publishing editorials and what amounted to counter-reviews denouncing the people who had been so insensitive to the entertainment needs of those who wanted overplayed, demented soap operas geared to their own demographic group. The movie helped get a number of movies starring black women greenlit, but its real lasting influence can best be seen in the critical reaction to a movie like Dreamgirls, which inspired many mumbly, mealy-mouthed reviews by writers who clearly thought that it stank but also thought that it was going to be another phenomenon and were afraid of being seen as coming down too hard on the wrong side of it. For an example of what this looks like in practice, compare the Dreamgirls review that Slate critic Dana Stevens wrote when the movie was released , and her review of Hairspray, where she led off by revealing what she really thought of Dreamgirls -- six months later, when she thought no one was looking. Waiting to exhale can take many forms.

PERSEPOLIS (2007)

It’s one thing to talk about how women are empowered by watching the adventures of a fictional female space marine, lady cop, or teenage devil-slayer. But it’s quite another to consider the triumph over sexism and oppression represented in the animated big-screen adaptation of Marjane Satrapi’s beautiful, powerful graphic novel, Persepolis. Satrapi was born in Iran, not too long before the Islamic revolution against the corrupt and brutal Shah by the fundamentalist Ayatollahs. Her father was a respected civil engineer and her mother was an international journalist – living symbols of the new, modernized Iran that hoped to take its place among the elite nations. This aspiration was crushed with the Islamic revolution and the subsequent war with Iran, both of which Satrapi lived through as she and the women of her family (liberated all, three generations back) struggled to adjust to a new reality where they could be imprisoned for letting too much of their faces show in public. She managed to escape to Europe, but it was never home to her, and she eventually returned, hoping to balance her need to be in the country that was her true home with her need to be respected and taken seriously as a woman. Satrapi has always made it a point to illustrate the fact that there is more to Iran than the caricature of out-of-control religious fundamentalists, and in the scene where Satrapi, as a college art student, stands up to a panel of men who insist that her education take a back seat to their sexist dogma, it gives a stirring picture of a country that bristles at its every restriction.

Click here for Part One!

Related Posts: Girl DisemPowering: Nine Films That Didn't Do Feminism Any Favors (Part One & Part Two)

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

Trailer Review: Choke

Paul Clark — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Sam Rockwell has been working steadily in movies for almost twenty years now in both comedy and drama, but in since the beginning of the decade he’s really come into his own. But while character work as diverse as Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The Assassination of Jesse James, and Joshua (my favorite performance of 2007, case you’re wondering), has made him one of the most fascinating actors currently working, he still hasn’t managed to find a true star-making role. If its trailer is any indication, Choke could change that. Based on a novel by Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk, Choke’s Victor Mancini is a perfect fit with the smart-assed, sleepy-eyed underachiever types that Rockwell as always excelled at playing. But what distinguishes this film is that Victor is the protagonist, as we follow his misadventures as a con man and sex addict trying to care for his terminally-ill mother and finding a way to be not completely irredeemable as a person. But while director Clark Gregg’s style appears to be a far cry from David Fincher’s attention-grabbing Fight Club visuals, he’s at least had the good sense to surround Rockwell with a worthy cast of costars, especially Anjelica Huston as his mother and Kelly MacDonald (*drool*) as the tentative object of his affection. I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on this one.

OST: "Fight Club"

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 09 May 2008 16:30:00 GMT

The soundtrack portion of David Fincher's 1999 cult-favorite adapatation of the pseudo-subversive Chuck Palahniuk novel Fight Club receives its fair share of praise, and justifiably so. It features great songs like Tom Waits' "Goin' Out West", terrific vocals courtesy Persian electronica songstress Azam Ali in Vas' "Svarga", a brilliant detournment of Andre Previn's main theme from Valley of the Dolls, and, of course, the stunning post-credits blast at the end of the Pixies' "Where is My Mind?". Unfortunately, you won't find any of those songs on the movie's official soundtrack release; fortunately, what you will find there -- the movie's score, perfectly realized by the Dust Brothers, is even better.

The Dust Brothers -- known to their moms as Mike Simpson and John King -- started out as Los Angeles-based DJs with a keen sampling sensibility and a knack for deftly combining the best qualities of hip-hop and rock. It was this quality that followed them throughout their successful careers producing huge hits for everyone from Tone-Loc to Hanson to Young MC to the Rolling Stones, and nowhere was it better realized than on their innovative and memorable production of the second Beastie Boys album, Paul's Boutique. But the Fight Club soundtrack -- their first full-length solo effort -- was a different animal altogether. Sounding much more like their rivals (and onetime namesakes), the Chemical Brothers, it was much more saturated in techno and electronica than most of their previous work, and given that it was meant to set the mood for one of the blackest, bleakest comedies of the 1990s, they couldn't rely on the sunny, open feel they usually brought to the hits they produced for other artists. Faced with the biggest challenge of their careers, the Dust Brothers came through like champions, putting together an insanely tense, claustrophobic record of unstoppable beats barely hemmed in by dark, sinister synthesizer buzzings and clangings, and schizophrenic ambient noises that perfectly suited the movie's nasty, crooked-grin postmodernism. In many ways, it was literally the peak of their career -- they never put out another solo record, concentrating instead on production, and possibly admitting to themselves that nothing they'd ever do could possibly top the creeping death of the Fight Club score's innovative blend of dance, ambient, trip-hop and drum 'n' bass mayhem.

BEST TRACKS: The third track on the album ("What is Fight Club?", often referred to as the "Fight Club Theme") is the standout of an excellent album, with a simple, relentless beat pushing forward unsparingly as a wobbling, unnerving synth line drops in and out of view around it -- in its own way, the track is as perfectly representative of the film as can be imagined. The epic album opener, "Who is Tyler Durden?", is almost as iconic, with a slashing dance drum line being undercut, interrupted and cruelly undermined by a titanic use of samples; the two tracks together (even though they're seperated in sequence by the less impressive "Homework") are a killer one-two punch. Later in the record, keep an ear open for the massive, crushing "Medulla Oblongata" and the deadly tandem of "Stealing Fat" and "Chemical Burn".

Trailer Review: The Fall

Paul Clark — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 16:00:00 GMT

I wasn't the biggest fan of Tarsem's first feature The Cell, but his visual sense was undeniable, and in the years since its release I've been curious about what his follow-up would be. The Fall premiered to mixed reviews at the 2006 Toronto Film Festival, but if this trailer is any indication the images are as powerful here as in The Cell, if not more so. Parts of the trailer reminded me of the color films of Alejandro Jodorowsky, albeit less cheeky, but the nature of the visuals belies Tarsem's subcontinental origins. But what's particularly impressive is that the film appears to have been made on a relatively low budget, with no big name actors (the closest thing to a star here is a pre-Pushing Daisies Lee Pace) and an independent budget. Yet the trailer is ravishing, and the imprimatur of fellow filmmakers David Fincher and Spike Jonze is a good sign. I couldn't say how widely Roadside Attractions plans to open the film, but I hope that I get a chance to see it on the big screen, which will make it easier to savor the images and overlook any potential narrative hiccups.

Attack of the ’80s Sci-Fi Remakes: “Dune” & “Heavy Metal” Reborn

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Recent weeks have seen rumors circulating that a sequel to The Last Starfighter is in the works, and a fourth installment of the Mad Max series (entitled Fury Road) has been an on-again-off-again proposition for years. Now, in two separate reports, Variety brings the latest news confirming that – for whatever inexplicable reason – the sci-fi of the ’80s is Hollywood’s new favorite vintage.

Sure, if you want to get technical about it, neither of the two features in the works is a remake so much as another whack at source material that first became fodder for the movies in the 1980s. David Fincher, a busy fellow of late (he recently wrapped The Curious Case of Benjamin Button with Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett), is leading the charge to bring another animated adaptation of Heavy Metal to the screen. The new version “will be stamped by the erotic and violent storylines and images that remain the trademark of a magazine that debuted in the U.S. in 1977.” In other words, boobies and blood, which is what made the 1981 version of Heavy Metal a must-see back when the notion of R-rated cartoons was more of a novelty. The new version will consist of eight or nine segments, with Fincher helming one, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles creator Kevin Eastman tackling another, and many of the others up for grabs. Here’s hoping it at least boasts an edgier soundtrack than the original, which featured such futuristic artists as Sammy Hagar, Journey and Grand Funk Railroad.

Meanwhile, Peter Berg (Friday Night Lights, The Kingdom) has signed on to direct the latest adaptation of Dune. This is at least the third attempt at launching a franchise from Frank Herbert’s turgid but enduring series (the fourth if you count the aborted Jodorowsky version). The Sci Fi channel tried to get it going earlier this decade, but it’s the 1984 David Lynch messterpiece that sets the gold standard for ill-conceived efforts at launching a blockbuster series. As for the new version, the filmmakers “consider its theme of finite ecological resources particularly timely,” while “Paramount envisions the project as a tentpole film.” Good luck, guys, but that’s been envisioned before.

The Twelve Greatest Opening Credits in Movie History, Part 2

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 22:00:00 GMT

THE HAWKS AND THE SPARROWS (1966)

The great Ennio Morricone has contributed to some of the greatest opening credit sequences of all time, but the opening to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1966 masterpiece The Hawks and the Sparrows holds a special place in the hearts of anyone who has seen and heard it. Here, in tune with Pasolini’s conception of the film as “a comic opera,” the credits are actually sung, in a boisterous vocal performance (courtesy of the great Domenico Modugno) that ranges from cackling laughter to pronounced wail to gentle whisper. Reminiscent of both the rhythmic Spaghetti Western scores Morricone was becoming famous for and the more wacked-out electronic experimentation he was beginning to dabble in, it also displays a weirdo playfulness that is pure Pasolini. Indeed, try to imagine what’s going through the head of this fellow, as he performs this strangest of compositions in concert with Morricone, decades later.

RAGING BULL (1980)

With Martin Scorsese directing and Michael Chapman doing the cinematography, it’s no surprise that the Jake LaMotta biopic has opening credits that are a treat for the eyes (and they’re tremendously aided by the simple choice of making the title of the film show up in red against the black and white of the rest of the sequence, another little touch that makes the whole so incredibly memorable). The ears are also given their due, with the selection of the intermezzo from Pietro Mascagani’s Cavalleria Rusticana providing a mournful, rising sound against which the slow-motion camerawork and the silently exploding flash bulbs play like a dream. But the truly astonishing thing about the opening credit sequence of Raging Bull is how perfectly and precisely it echoes the thematic content of the film: the ring seems impossibly huge, almost as if it’s an open field, but to Jake LaMotta – a snarling, raging animal even before the fight starts, bounding about and throwing phantom punches, champing at the bit for the violence to start – it’s a cage that stifles him, that can barely contain him. Fighting is as close as he gets to Heaven, yet smoke encircles the arena and transforms it into Hell; and while he is at his greatest, his most legendary, in the ring, he seems somehow tiny against its permanence, and he grows as he dances, faceless, towards the camera, only to shrink again into anonymity and nothingness as he once again drifts away. It’s as if the entire film and everything it has to say is contained in these two and a half minutes.

DO THE RIGHT THING (1989)

Even the stinkiest of Spike Lee joints generally boast memorable opening credits; think of the kids playing street games like hopscotch and double-dutch in the otherwise problematic Crooklyn, or the unlikely slice of Americana – a lyrical slo-mo basketball montage scored to Aaron Copland’s “John Henry” – that opens He Got Game. So it’s no surprise that Lee’s finest film features one of the most vivid, arresting main title sequences of the past 20 years. Lee obviously knew he had created an incendiary piece of work, and determined to grab the audience by the throat right from the beginning as the pulsating, near-apocalyptic beat of Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” kicks in on the soundtrack, accompanied by a take-no-prisoners one-woman dance-off. Alternately clad in colorful, curve-hugging tights and boxing apparel, Rosie Perez embodies the tale of tensions boiling over on a hot summer day with her aggressive, near-violent gyrations. This was Perez’s first screen appearance; it’s hard to imagine a more mesmerizing introduction.

SE7EN (1995)

It’s hard to believe how long ago Se7en was. It was not only pre-Brangelina, it was pre-Brad&Jen – it was, in fact, circa Brad and Gwyneth. It was before the gruesome goresploitation of all the Saw flicks and before the mind-f@#$ing of Memento. And the opening credits alerted you right away: you were watching something different. Someone was going to great detail to set a tone, and the tone made you uneasy. The jittery stop-motion, the yellowed pages, hand-scratched letters, red darkroom light, and the Nine Inch Nails “Closer to God” remix, it was all indicative of some serious sociopathology. Like the Tom Waits song, “What’s he doing in there?”, you were privy to someone obsessively doing something. And you just knew all that snipping, scrawling photo-developing, photocopying, and bandaged-fingers hand-sewing would amount to no good. Se7en’s opening credits not only caught you up in the horror of the film before the film started, it also launched director Kyle Cooper’s career. It set the bar pretty high for all the horror flick opening credits that came later. For all we know, it may even be responsible for launching a different creepy trend: the scrap-booking craze.

LOST HIGHWAY (1997)

A great title sequence does not guarantee a great movie, of course; sometimes the opening credits promise more than the filmmaker is able to deliver. The hypnotic opening of David Lynch’s Lost Highway is a prime example. Designed by Jay Johnson, the sequence is deceptively simple: a driver’s seat point-of-view of an endless road stretching out ahead into pitch blackness. Our progress is swift, but unsteady – we’re weaving all over the broken yellow line in the middle as credits swoop out of darkness ahead, pause briefly, then shatter against the windshield. David Bowie is no comfort on the radio, singing “I’m Deranged.” Wherever we’re going, something terrible is going to happen when we get there. Well, the movie that follows isn’t terrible; it has its moments, although on the whole it’s ponderous and half-baked, nowhere near the dangerous thrill ride promised by the opening. With its themes of identity confusion, it’s almost a rough draft of the much more successful Mulholland Drive; you almost wish Lynch could keep the title and the credits and take another crack at the rest of it.

PANIC ROOM (2002)

David Fincher, one of the most visually inventive directors working today, usually pulls out the stops when creating his title sequences (see Se7en, elsewhere on this list, as well as Fight Club and Zodiac). Panic Room, though a neat little thriller, isn’t his finest film, but it’s another fantastic accomplishment in terms of setting the table for what’s to come. Its very simple setup belies how incredibly effective it is: we see a number of exterior shots of Manhattan, as the names of the cast and crew appear in stylized photography throughout the sequence. But this bare-bones description in no way communicates the unsettling nature of the actual credits: the names appear as if they were floating in mid-air, part of the physical landscape of New York, carved into nothingness by the hand of God himself like the writing on the walls at Nebuchadnezzar’s palace as a quietly ominous score by the usually overwrought Howard Shore plays on the soundtrack. There’s a disturbing air to the entire sequence, even though nothing menacing actually happens (other than an almost subliminal glimpse of the film’s tagline – “FACE YOUR FEARS” – that appears on a Telex screen). A collaboration between Fincher, design company Picture Mill and special effects outfit Computer Café, the credits took almost a full year to finish, and the fruits of their labors are extremely rewarding, full of subtle menace and nameless dread.

- Bilge Ebiri, Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak, Pazit Cahlon

Read Part 1 of this feature

The Top Ten Movies With Alternate Cuts, Part 2

Phil Nugent — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 15:00:00 GMT

MANHUNTER (1985, Michael Mann)

I've got four cuts of Manhunter on my shelf: the original theatrical version, a re-cut for broadcast on TCM, another cut allegedly for a preview, and then Mann's final definitive cut. Anything significantly different about these cuts? It's basically trimming down a few scenes and putting one or two back in, most of them documented on this excellent fan website. Mann has gone back to his movies before, re-cutting Last of the Mohicans (in the process removing a Clannad song that dated the flick), Ali, and even preparing a three-hour cut of Heat for a TV broadcast that never happened. Here, though, was an instance where a director's revisionist tinkering harmed the flick, removing dialogue from William Peterson that actually showed how much he empathised with the serial killer he was hunting. Though it might not be Mann's preferred cut, for me the original theatrical release is the definitive cut of the film so far.

THE LORD OF THE RINGS TRILOGY (2001-2003, Peter Jackson)

Peter Jackson had made it clear during pre-production of his adaptation of Tolkien's trilogy that an extended cut would be coming out, and so it did, and the fans lapped it up, thus putting even more cash into New Line's coffers. But were these cuts any good? It depends on what you're looking for. I always thought the theatrical releases were pretty rushed and the extended versions did have a more relaxed pace about them, but did Tolkien fans really want to see hobbits getting tall from Ent juice or a bit of extended battle butchery? Apparently so. I thought these were a mixed bag. (I mean, do you really want to see an extended ending for Return of the King? Wasn't it long enough anyway?) All credit for Jackson for giving consumers the options, but was it really that much of an improvement?

THE STAR WARS TRILOGY (1977-1982, George Lucas, Irvin Kersher, Richard Marquand)

Han fired first. Among all the extra tidbits that were included in the trilogy, the one that angers the fans most is George Lucas changing the infamous Han vs Greedo confrontation from this:

To this:

And its downhill from there. Yes the special editions made a bundle when re-released. Yes, most people probably have them on their DVD shelf, but if you just give audiences one option, that's what they have to go with. It was only last year that Lucas relented and finally released the original, unaltered films on DVD and even then, they were non-anamorphic transfers. Does the additional material add to the films? Nope.

THE NEW WORLD (2005, Terrence Malick)

Terrence Malick is notorious for taking a long time with the editing of his movies, so it wasn't a surprise to hear that his last film, The New World, wasn't going to make its original November 2005 release date. A month later though, a 150-min cut was screened for critics with hopes that it would qualify for a few Academy Awards. In 2006, the film went into general release with a shortened cut, which Malick considered his best version; a log of the changes can be found here. The only place to get a copy of the first cut is if you have a copy of the Academy screeners or you get the special edition Italian DVD. Never fear though, as according to producer Sarah Greene, Malick has started work on another cut of The New World. Though considerable work had been done on it, its still up in the air when it may come out, though I suspect this may be due to the director mulling over what HD format he should release it on. After this, one hopes he can get back to finally finishing his alternate cut of The Thin Red Line, which is rumored to be a completely new film altogether. But then, even a re-edited Malick film is better than no Malick.

THE LAST EMPEROR (1987, Bernardo Bertolucci)

The Last Emperor is one of those old-style epics that needs to be seen on the big screen. No amount of CGI could have the power to surprise and astonish like this scene:

It was the original 160-minute cut that picked up the Academy Awards, but Bertolucci preferred his director's cut and until recently, you could only get a decent copy of both cuts from the U.K. But when Criterion recently announced its special edition containing both cuts, it quietly noted that the cinematographer, Storraro again, once again applied his Univisium concept by re-formatting the film to now be shown at 2:1 aspect ratio. It's unimaginable to see a film like this in a compromised halfway-house aspect ratio, but in this case, fans of The Last Emperor at least have a choice.

RUNNERS UP:

REVENGE (1989, Tony Scott)

Most alternate cuts have stuff being put into the film, Tony Scott went one better by chucking stuff out of Revenge. He waited eighteen years to remove twenty-four minutes out of Tarantino's favourite flick. Do we get to see more Madeleine Stowe in her prime? Disappointingly, not really, but we do get a much tighter and meaner story of two men who are righteously pissed off with one another because of a bitch in heat.

LEGEND (1984, Ridley Scott)

There are about four cuts of this flick flying around the world. Do any of them improve Scott's flawed fairy tale? They try. Until the 2003 DVD release, U.S. viewers were only familiar with a Tangerine Dream-scored cut of the film. The film's devoted fan base resulted in the release of a director's cut that revealed that even with the director at full control, the film may have had little chance at the box office but now was held together by the late Jerry Goldsmith's more sumptious score. Tim Curry as Darkness steals the show from everyone.

ALIEN 3 (1993, David Fincher)

David Fincher's debut nearly killed off the director's career, and until the release of the special edition, the only other version of the film was a leaked three-hour bootleg. The new cut is a revelation, even though it was done without Fincher's collaboration. A completely new version that makes you re-assess an otherwise neglected and flawed contribution to the Alien franchise. And if you disagree with that, I got two words to say to you: Alien: Resurrection.

TERMINATOR 2 (1992, James Cameron)

Cameron first got alternate cut success with the release of Aliens: Special Edition. T2 got a bunch more footage thrown in, most of it of the type that filmmakers refer to as "character development". To his credit, Cameron's DVD producers were the first ones who used "branching" DVD software, where extended footage would be seamlessly intergrated within the original cut.

SUPERMAN 2 (1992, Richard Lester, Richard Donner)

An alternate ending to Superman 2.:

Watching Donner's cut of Superman II is painful. The additional Marlon Brando footage really adds to the film, as do his conceptions of the scenes, but unfortunately, Richard Donner was kicked off the film after only two-thirds of it had been completed. The rest of it was re-shot by Richard Lester. Donner's insistence on using as little of Lester's footage as possible creates a curious discontinuity, but it's the repeat ending that really lets it down. If Donner had been allowed to finish the sequel, he may have come up with something that didn't rehash the first film, but in this case the Lester film is more complete.

— Faisal A. Qureshi

Click here for Part 1.

No, But I've Read the Movie: THE BLACK DAHLIA

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 21:30:00 GMT

Although much more commercially successful, the "L.A. Quartet" novels by the disturbed but fascinating noir novelist James Ellroy — consisting of The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential and White Jazz — didn't represent the great artistic leap forward that his "Underworld U.S.A." trilogy (American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand and the upcoming Blood's a Rover) did. The latter books were the ones that really lifted Ellroy from skilled genre specialist to ambitious and near-brilliant American novelist, representing both his own development as a writer and his desire to see the noir novel shed its genre restrictions and take its place amongst great literature. Even if one argues that White Jazz is the real transition — and many people have, convincingly — The Black Dahlia is a rough piece of work, somewhat formless and definitely formulaic in a way that his later books would avoid. While it features many of the same themes of sexual obsession and moral ambiguity that would mark his later work, it remained somewhat inextricably bound in the bad parts of pulp and the tendency to police-prodedural tropes. That said, the "L.A. Quartet" books are far more straightforward narratives, with less emphasis on the black depths of psychology and more to carry the narrative than chopped-up internal monologues. No one has yet attempted to film any of the "Underworld U.S.A.", but if it ever happens, the results will likely be a less successful film than L.A. Confidential; the qualities that make it a lesser novel — overemphasis on plot, weaker internal monologue, and a grounding in the archetypical qualities of film noir — are the same ones that made it a better film. The Black Dahlia, for all its faults, is an eminently more filmable book than The Cold Six Thousand. Or so you might have thought until Brian De Palma showed up in 2006 and proved you wrong, wrong, wrong by burping out this mishandled disaster of an adaptation. WHAT IT HAD: Good intentions, and not much else. It's not as if De Palma doesn't know how to handle film noir — he's proven on many occasions that he's adept at the genre, and had illustrated his affinity as recently as his previous movie (2002's underrated Femme Fatale). Even though he wasn't able to hold his post-modernist trickster tendencies in check, The Black Dahlia could have worked as simultaneous tribute to and subversion of classic noir, the only possible way to read the way it came out that makes any sense, if he'd assembled a better cast, better script, and. . . well, different director. Mark Isham provides some nice, moody music for the soundtrack, and, as one might expect from the man who brought you The Untouchables, it's a gorgeous-looking film with some great Vilmos Szigmond cinematography.

WHAT IT LACKED: Where to begin? A coherent vision, a decent script, a solid creative interpretation of the source material, a consistent point of view, and most of all, a cast worthy of the material. Screenwriter Josh Friedman had worked on the script for years, but it's still a mess, and clearly not to his strengths, which lie mostly in sci-fi genre work. It had originally been optioned to David Fincher, who, given De Palma's clear boredom and frustration with the project, may have been a much better choice to tackle the project. And the cast is pretty much an absolute disaster: Josh Hartnett completely lacks either charisma or weight, Scarlett Johansson is in way over her head, Aaron Eckhart is a non-entity, Hilary Swank looks like she should be in a completely different movie, and Mia Kirshner isn't even remotely up to the task of playing the title role, especially given that it's much expanded from the novel.

DID IT SUCCEED?: No way. Brian De Palma is already one of the most divisive directors around, with legions of haters for every dozen fans he's picked up over the years, but even his staunchest defenders — I'm one — couldn't get behind The Black Dahlia. The critical consensus on the release of the long-awaited film was that it was a megaton bomb, and for once, the accepted wisdom is pretty much right on the money. A good movie could have been made from James Ellroy's novel, but this sure as hell isn't it. The novel is a formative effort from Ellroy, and while L.A. Confidential is still superior to the movie, so too is The Black Dahlia for entirely different reasons. With White Jazz slated to hit the big screen next year directed by Joe Carnahan — who most recently brought us the abysmal Smokin' Aces — Ellroy's luck with film adaptations of his work will likely continue circling the drain.

Academy Awards Also-Rans

Phil Nugent — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Now that the Academy Award nominations have been announced, we can all buckle up and wait to find out who the lucky non-winners are. Don't get us wrong: an Oscar win has a lot to recommend it. It bestows upon the recipient not just bragging rights but a new, higher pay ceiling and, if he doesn't screw it up the way Kevin Spacey did, a privileged glow and a long-term shot at juicier roles. But as anyone who's spent ten minutes reading about Cary Grant or Alfred Hitchcock knows, there's nothing that sets a major Hollywood figure apart like never having won an Oscar — that is, a real Oscar, and none of that special lifetime career achievement bullshit. Then, every time someone writes a profile of you, they can set aside a moment to tear their hair out over the fact that you never got the big prize — and everyone, including the people who'd never given it a second's thought before, will automatically do you the honor of agreeing that, yes, it is a shocking thing now that you mention it. In recent years, the sudden realization that Paul Newman and Martin Scorsese, to name two examples, had never won Oscars set off palpitations in the entertainment media, and cries went out urging the Academy to do the right thing, to make sure that they did not go to their graves un-Oscared, even if it meant honoring, by association, such lesser works as The Color of Money and The Departed. It's hard not to feel that, by finally joining what sometimes seems to be the majority, these men lost a little something that had previously set them apart from the likes of Red Buttons, Cliff Robertson, Roberto Begnini. One would think that Scorsese, with his ravenous enthusiasm for obscure and neglected filmmakers whose posthumous reputations glow with the luster one associates with misunderstood genius, would get this as much as anyone, but the lure of the little gold statuette is a powerful one. Let's take a moment to honor some of the people who will have to content themselves with asking Marty how it feels to hold one.

BEST ACTOR: Except for Johnny Depp and Viggo Mortensen, all the nominees here are already lost souls, with Oscars already stashed in the broom closet. Still, George Clooney and Tommy Lee Jones have only won for Best Supporting Actor in the past, so I'm sure it would feel a little special if they were able to corral one for being top banana. (Jones's nomination is also notable for being the only direct evidence included in the list of nominations that there was something this past year called "movies about the Iraq war.") Notable among the missing: Mark Ruffalo and Robert Downey, Jr. of Zodiac, two very fine performances that could just as easily have been shoehorned into the Supporting Actor category, but which had the misfortune to have been included in a movie that really took it on the chin for having been released early in the year. (The Academy has traditionally favored movies that were released late in the year and so were fresh in the minds of voters, a tradition that the development of home video has done surprisingly little to reverse.) The Academy did reach back to movies released in the first half of 2007 in order to bestow a Best Actress nomination on Julie Christie for her work in Away from Her, but Gordon Pinsent, who had to carry that picture, and whose performance was equally fine, was slighted, which may have something to do with the fact that no Academy voters have fond memories of having used a picture of him torn from the pages of Vogue to help them get through puberty thirty years ago. Similarly, Will Smith's performance in I Am Legend, a movie that he was obliged to keep alive single-handedly for long stretches, was in its way every bit as impressive a feat of movie-star acting as Clooney's glamorously world-weary turn in Michael Clayton, but he was in a movie about fighting rabid vampires, whereas Clooney was in one about reaching deep down into the pit of one's soul and learning to say no to the forces of evil, represented by a bunch of lawyers who could easily be taken for rabid vampires if you squint.

BEST ACTRESS: It's really no surprise that one of the most remarkable performances seen this year, that of Molly Shannon in Year of the Dog, isn't here: the movie was, again, released a very long time ago, it wasn't a hit, and in the ranks of people remembered for having been on Saturday Night Live, Shannon is probably closer to Chris Farley's side of the scale than Bill Murray's in the public mind. That could change if she gives many more performances like this one, but God knows where she's going to find the roles. It's a bit more surprising that Angelina Jolie's A Mighty Heart has sunk without a trace; it's not the best performance of the year, nor is it Jolie's best performance, but in a year that, as usual, was not overflowing with instances of women being given the chance to strut their stuff in big, juicy parts, you might think that Jolie's lending whatever muscle she has a movie star to telling the story of Daniel Pearl's widow would get her a token nod. Maybe all the factors that it had going against it — released in the summer, box-office failure, heavy subject matter, plus the mixed feelings that so many people seem to have about Jolie (is she a star, or a tabloid freak?) created a kind of perfect storm. Ashley Judd's wild-eyed, insane sexy mama in the off-Broadway sort-of-horror picture Bug was something to see. I don't know if the studio even bothered to send out screener copies to Academy voters, though if they were on the fence about it, I'd have chipped in for the cost of the postage, just so I could fantasize about how many of them would end up calling in priests to exorcise their DVD players.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: Chris Cooper punted two good shots the Academy's way, first with his creepy performance as treasonous spook Robert Hanssen in Breach, then with an excellent demonstration of the character actor functioning as secret star in the big action flick The Kingdom, but the Academy passed on both. Steve Zahn was amazing and heartbreaking as a doomed P.O.W. in Werner Herzog's Rescue Dawn; he didn't get nominated either, but just last week he was amazing again, effortlessly channeling Robert Duvall as the young Gus McCrae in the Lonesome Dove prequel, so maybe the Emmys will make it up to him later. Jeff Daniels' straight-talking blind man in The Lookout deserved more attention than it got, and Clarence Williams III made a solid meal of about two (uncredited) scenes as Bumpy Johnson in American Gangster. (Ruby Dee did get nominated for Best Supporting Actress for playing Denzel Washington's mother in that movie. Her performance isn't nearly as rich as Williams', but she's certainly due for a little attention, and maybe the Academy figured, regarding her and Williams, that it was either one or the other.) The funny thing is that the category is padded out with people — Casey Affleck, Javier Bardem — who got enough screen time in their movies to qualify as lead actors. Bardem's Supporting Actor status feels like it's rigged to make it easier for him to claim the award, though I'd look for a late surge to form behind Hal Holbrook after people realize that he's not only nominated but actually still alive and capable of being cheered by a win.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: I don't get the universal consensus that Cate Blanchett was a supporting actress in I'm Not There. I guess that, again, it comes down to amount of screen time, but nobody else in that movie had any more screen time than she did; certainly nobody else put theirs to as good a use. I probably wouldn't mind so much except that, by shoving her into this category for her phenomenal performance, it feels as if the Academy is shafting Amy Ryan, nominated for a hair-raisingly skanky performance as a bad mother for the ages in Gone Baby Gone, and Tilda Swinton, whose completely reprehensible and yet completely understandable corporate villain gave Michael Clayton a surprising amount of its soul. A little tinkering might have left room for Marisa Tomei, who in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead made Philip Seymour Hoffman's faithless wife convincingly empty and slow-witted and shallow in her dissatisfaction with her existence, yet still made her seem very much worth screwing up your life over. This would have also been the place to honor little Nina Kervel-Bey, who made one of the year's most remarkable debuts in the French film Blame It on Fidel. She's actually the star of the movie, but from Tatum O'Neal to Abigail Breslin, the Academy has traditionally shoved little girls into the Best Supporting Actress category, as if "supporting" were synonymous with "short." Appearances to the contrary, Ellen Page turns twenty-one next month, so her nomination in the Best Actress category (for Juno) does not break this trend. It would have been nice, though, if Page's co-star Jennifer Garner could have been sandwiched in here. In The Kingdom, Garner is still trying to prove herself as an action heroine, with mixed results, but she gave the performance of her career so far in Juno — a carefully nuanced performance and a brave one, one that depended for its (and the movie's) full effectiveness on the actress's willingness to slowly open up to the audience and reveal what's on the inside of a woman who has the shell of a frosty yuppie robot.

BEST DIRECTOR: The fun in this category has usually been in thinking about how it feels to be the one director who wasn't nominated even though his movie was nominated as Best Picture. However he may laugh it off in public, you know that the message he thinks he's getting is, "And last but not least, nominated for Best Picture in spite of having been directed by..." This year it is the director of Atonement, the esteemed young filmmaker what's-his-name, who has to wonder if everybody thinks the actors built the sets while he was in the bathroom and came up with their blocking while he was at lunch. Suffice to say that Julian Schnabel, the director of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, fills out the category just fine, though it might be even finer if, say, Jason Reitman had somehow been overlooked in favor of Zodiac's David Fincher. Another surprisingly plausible contender might have been Ben Affleck, who sure did a hell of a lot better job behind the camera on Gone Baby Gone than he's ever done in front of it. Affleck may not have the face of a director — that's a compliment, Ben — but I'm in favor of anything that encourages him to stay back there.

Where Have All The Heroes Gone?

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 17:30:00 GMT

Since we here at the Screengrab are determined to absolutely flood you with news about big-screen superhero comic adaptations until you get so annoyed that you personally come to our offices and spill Diet Coke all over our mint-condition issue of X-Men #137, we feel it's our duty to bring you the bad news as well as the good. No, we're not talking about the bad news that most of these movies are going to kind of suck; that you can take as a given. We're talking about the bad news that as shocking as it may seem, Hollywood may be running out of superheroes.

As reported in Variety, the big studios have already strip-mined almost every first- and second-tier superhero title that Marvel, DC and the independents have to offer (and some third-tier ones as well — we're lookin' at you, Ghost Rider). This fact, combined with less than stellar box office reception for a handful of recent superhero movies (we are, once again, lookin' right at you, Ghost Rider) and the surprising popular and critical reception given to non-mainstream comic book adaptations of non-superhero material, may mean that producers will start increasingly looking for the next Sin City, American Splendor or A History of Violence.

An adaptation of Greg Rucka's unconventional police procedural, Whiteout, is already in the works, and Brian Michael Bendis' deconstruction of the Eliot Ness, Torso, may be David Fincher's next project (Bendis himself is writing the screenplay to a movie version of his spy thriller, Jinx). But there's still a pile of terrific graphic novels — not a one of them featuring men in tights — that could made a terrific movie: Kyle Baker's Why I Hate Saturn and The Cowboy Wally Show are both smart, well-crafted comedies; James Sturm's The Golem's Mighty Swing is both a visually stunning piece of storytelling and a powerful period piece about race and religion; Dan Clowes' Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron is a natural for a surrealist in the David Lynch mode (even if Clowes has already joked about what a catastrophe a filmed version of the book would be, he proved himself wrong once already with Ghost World); and someday, someone's got to do something with Paul Chadwick's Concrete, which takes what could be a hackneyed sci-fi narrative and turns it into a surprisingly deep and emotional character study. Maybe it's time for Hollywood to look past not only the cape, but the companies behind them, and give indie publishers as much of a chance as they give indie film.

Fincher's Musical, The Canon of Thor, and Justice on the Rocks

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 21:10:00 GMT

Oh, comic book movie news. Will we ever get enough of you? No, apparently we will not.

In an interview with MTV's Movie News, Zodiac director and Oscar hopeful David Fincher teases us with a few comic-related projects he's tinkering with: he's attached to helm the film adaptation of inexhaustible comic book scribe Brian Michael Bendis' graphic novel Torso, he's kicking around the idea of doing an adaptation of another graphic novel called The Killer, and he's allegedly in talks to produce another animated film based on the artsy/smutty fantasy comics rag Heavy Metal, because we all remember how well it worked out the last time someone did that. The most intriguing bit of info that Fincher drops, though, is that he wants to do a Broadway musical based on Fight Club: "I always saw it as a comedy," he says. "Then everybody would look at me like a leper."

Chicago's Daily Herald, in a talk with South Side native and I am Legend screenwriter Mark Protosevich, reveals the unsurprising news that comic books and junk culture made him the man he is today. Protosevich's next big project, after he gets back from his strike-imposed inadvertent vacation, will be the silver screen debut of Marvel Comics' The Mighty Thor, who he somewhat confusedly describes in Biblical terms: "It's the story of an Old Testament god who becomes a New Testament God", he says. I'm the first to admit that my mind would wander a bit in Sunday School (blame it on comic books), but I'm pretty sure Thor doesn't appear in the version of the Bible they had us reading.

Finally, comic geeks and movie nerds alike were excited some months ago at the announcement that Babe/Mad Max director George Miller would be the man behind the camera for an upcoming big-screen version of the Justice League of America comic. The JLA is a universally beloved superhero team, and the news that a movie based on their exploits would be directed by someone who possesses actual filmmaking talent was welcomed across the board. Unfortunately, as IESB reports, the project is beginning to look as if it will never see the light of day. A combination of factors -- competing franchises, the writer's strike, Miller's commitment (against the studio's wishes) to use a cast of unknowns, a mushy script, and the usual budgetary issues — may lead to the whole thing being scrapped. Which may or may not be a bad thing: when the buzzword surrounding your project is "mediocre", sometimes not even Superman can save the day.

Top Ten of 2007: Paul Clark

Paul Clark — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Note: Like Leonard, I don’t live in one of what Hollywood would consider a major cinematic market, so I have yet to see some of the year’s best-reviewed films, such as There Will Be Blood and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. But I think it’s better to post this now rather than waiting until I’ve seen all the major movies, which for all I know won’t happen for months.

10. The Hunting Party

It’s been said before, but I’ll say it again- 2007 was a damn fine year to be a movie lover. Because of this, there were probably a dozen films competing for the final spot on this list, but in the end I had to go with a sentimental favorite, one that deserves much more love than it’s gotten so far. Richard Shepard's darkly comic tale of three journalists (Richard Gere, Terrence Howard, Jesse Eisenberg) searching for a Bosnian warlord succeeds not so much because of its story as for its salty, unironic portrait of male friendship. As in Shepard’s last film The Matador, The Hunting Party is a story about men drawn to violence who booze and bond in outposts far off the beaten path. At a time when Brokeback Mountain is still a punchline, it takes real chutzpah to write a scene in which one man tells another, “that’s why I love you,” without going for a laugh.

9. Time

Korea’s prolific and controversial director Kim Ki-duk has become something of a whipping boy for the cinematic cognoscenti, but there’s no denying that the guy’s got skills. Time, his best film to date, appears on the surface to be a response to Korea’s plastic-surgery craze, but at its heart it’s a story of amour fou, like Seconds played for tragedy rather than thrills. In Kim’s hands, plastic surgery becomes a metaphor for how self-conscious we’ve become, so insecure in our skin that we’re no longer able to simply give ourselves over to others, not even those we love. Also, Kim’s gift for astonishing imagery is as keen as ever, especially in his use of a seaside sculpture park.

8. I’m Not There

The premise- six actors playing six different versions of Bob Dylan- sounds like an academic exercise only a semiotics major could love. But each onscreen Dylan is only a pawn in the game of director Todd Haynes, a piece of the puzzle that has become the Dylan mythos. With his ingenious structure, Haynes highlights the contradictions, tall tales, and outright fabrications of Dylan’s legend, revealing him to be less a self-conscious chameleon reinventing his image for the public as a lifelong searcher who cared little whether we wanted to follow. The wonder is that I'm Not There is so much fun- sometimes electrifying, sometimes goofy, but always fascinating.

7. Offside

The idea that Iranian women aren’t allowed to attend soccer games would seem to be the setup for a dour polemic, but director Jafar Panahi has other plans for their story. In Panahi’s eyes, the law isn’t so much an injustice as a colossal pain for all involved, and by highlighting the absurdity of the situation, Offside becomes the stuff of high comedy. And a rousing crowd-pleaser to boot- Panahi shot much of the film in the bowels of the stadium during an actual World Cup qualifying match, and even at a distance from the field, the energy is palpable. In the end, football is a uniter, not a divider, and once the detained women escape their captors to mingle with their celebrating countrymen, they’re able to share in the victory that their laws had tried to deny them.

6. Joshua

In a year that saw Rob Zombie’s Michael-heavy remake of Halloween, one might be excused for wondering what an evil-kid thriller was doing on my list. But George Ratliff’s Joshua is another breed altogether- a genre movie in the abstract, but a particularly chilly and thematically-rich one. Moreover, Joshua is very much an of-the-moment bad seed, not some pint-sized supernatural boogeyman but the product of ineffectual and indulgent parenting. Jacob Kogan is creepy in the title role, but the real revelation is Sam Rockwell, giving the performance of the year as his father, a man whose parenting skills are limited at best, and who is ill-equipped to deal with a son whose behavior goes so sharply against his own. When he finally realizes what he’s up against it’s too late to stop it, and thanks to Ratliff and Rockwell, this realization hits with the power of a gut punch.

5. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

In Assassination, director Andrew Dominik plays a tricky game- to make a Western that doesn’t so much de-mythologize the genre as re-mythologize it by making explicit the undercurrent of mythmaking that was always a part of the West. It could have been a disaster, but somehow it works beautifully, thanks not only to the beauty of the filmmaker but also the performances. Brad Pitt is fine as a Jesse James who is all too mindful of the larger-than-life figure he cut in the West, but the film belongs to Casey Affleck as Ford, the youngster whose boyish hero worship festered into violent obsession. Ford was foolish enough to believe that he could create his own legend, but all he did was to be swallowed up by Jesse’s, and because of Affleck’s performance this reviled figure becomes downright tragic.

4. The Host

The best giant monster to attack theatres this past year didn’t stomp Tokyo, but Seoul, in the superior Korean creature feature The Host. With a flair for showmanship and populist storytelling that nearly equal those of Spielberg in his Jaws days, director Bong Joon-ho has made a monster movie to stand alongside the greats in the genre. Part of the credit should go to the effects wizard who created the disgusting yet somehow lovable monster, but I dare say the movie wouldn’t work so well if not for the endearingly flawed family at the movie’s center. Even on a list this full of darkness and despair, there’s always a place for pure, unadulterated entertainment, and The Host gave me more sheer moviegoing pleasure than any film of 2007.

3. Gone Baby Gone

Most of the praise for Gone Baby Gone has centered on the film’s performances- especially the much-feted Amy Ryan- and the surprising amount of thematic resonance to be found in the film. But I think director Ben Affleck deserves a great deal more credit for how powerful this film is than he’s been getting. Most obviously, Affleck has a real feel for his setting- a working-class South Boston neighborhood- and the people who inhabit it. But while this location seems at first like backdrop to a mystery involving a kidnapped child, it eventually takes center stage in the story, which turns into an breathlessly compelling study in the consequences of tribalism. “Guys take pride in where they’re from, like it was something they did,” states protagonist Patrick Kenzie (Casey Affleck- again!) in the film’s opening voiceover. The tragedy is that Kenzie- thinks himself above it all- buys into this idea as much as anybody.

2. No Country for Old Men

For most of its running time, No Country for Old Men works primarily as an uncommonly exciting chase thriller, in which the overmatched Lewellyn Moss struggles to stay ahead of stone-cold killer Chigurh (Javier Bardem). But while first two acts of the film are enough to mark it as the Coen brothers’ best work in years, it’s the final act, which avoids the expected confrontation between Chigurh and Lewellyn in favor of something more philosophical, that the film to another level of greatness altogether. An observer for most of the story, Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) suddenly comes face to face with the idea that even if you run from the evil that you fear may be hiding behind one door, there’s no guarantee that it won’t be waiting for you behind another. “You can’t stop what’s coming,” indeed.

1. Zodiac

From the beginning, David Fincher’s evocation of the still-unsolved case of the Zodiac killer has been something of an anomaly. It’s a serial-killer movie that practically never goes for cheap thrills, and a three-hour fact-based period piece that’s almost bereft of epic sweep. In short, it’s tough to put my finger on what exactly makes Zodiac such a masterpiece. For me, the most awe-inspiring aspect of the film is its near-obsessive attention to detail, one that’s downright fanatical even by the standards of the true-crime genre. But using the thousands of tiny clues and incidental pieces of business that surrounded the Zodiac case, Fincher immerses us fully in the world of the case, one in which the crime-solving technology and interdepartmental procedures of the day were always several steps behind the schemes of the killer.

Also worth mentioning: Everything Will Be OK (sorry, no trailer)

When I was making this list, I decided to restrict myself to feature-length films. However, taking into account all new movies I saw this past year, none hit me quite as hard as Don Hertzfeldt’s thrilling new animated short, Everything Will Be OK. In little more than fifteen minutes, Hertzfeldt tells the story of a man who is doomed to die. His doctors give up on him, his mother moves in to help, and the man himself goes off the deep end. And then, without warning, he suddenly gets better, much to everyone's annoyance. Everything Will Be OK has the feel of an especially good Raymond Carver story, both in its sense of irony and its reliance on small but significant detail, but the twisted sense of humor and unique animation style is all Hertzfeldt. Call it number zero in my top 10.

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.

David Fincher: Alien 3 Made Me a Belligerent Asshole

John Constantine — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 17:19:00 GMT

So many filmmakers have aped David Fincher’s true-grit style since Se7en came out that it’s hard to believe that movie was released a mere twelve years ago. It certainly feels like a lot longer. I haven’t seen it yet but from what I’ve heard Zodiac is on par with Fincher’s best work. His fascination with the story of the Zodiac killer is infectious in this interview with Ain’t It Cool. It’s a good read on the whole too. Fincher talks about the painful learning experience that was making Alien 3 — “Alien 3 probably made me more of a belligerent asshole than I otherwise would have been.” — and discusses his upcoming adaptations of Brian Bendis’ graphic novel Torso and Arthur C. Clark’s Rendezvous With Rama. Shame he isn’t doing Childhood’s End. I was just thinking about how awesome a movie of that would be last week.

What did you think of Zodiac, Screengrab readers?

Morning Deal Report: Objectif Ecran

Peter Smith — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 16:00:00 GMT

Andy Serkis has joined the cast of the Spielberg/Jackson Tintin. Looks like this thing is really happening. As a Tintin diehard from days past, I have mixed feelings about that, but we'll just have to see.

The Golden Compass is performing a lot better in those godless "other countries" you've heard so much about; go figure.

Paramount is charging extra for theaters to run Sweeney Todd, and at least one chain is boycotting in protest. Folks, I've seen Sweeney Todd, and it has way too much arterial spray to capture that precious family-holiday mammon. Woe to the family that walks in there by accident.

Morgan Freeman draws nearer to his long-standing goal of adapting Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama. That's a very oblique, mysterious book, without a huge amount of action. The only director I can imagine honoring it is (well, duh) Stanley Kubrick. The rumored director — David Fincher — not so much.

— Peter Smith

Morning Deal Report: There is Power in a Union

Peter Smith — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 15:00:00 GMT

Looks like this Writers' Guild strike could actually happen. Now, the top-grossing films so far this year are Pirates of the Caribbean 3, Harry Potter 5, Spider-Man 3, Shrek 3, and Transformers. Who needs writers?

While Peter Jackson waits on his next big-budget sci-fi action flick (Halo), he's planning a more personal project: a big-budget sci-fi action flick called District 9.

Speaking of departures, David Fincher will adapt a graphic novel about a detective chasing a killer.

— Peter Smith