The Screengrab : david lynch

Screengrab Presents THE TOP TEN BEST MOVIES EVER!!!! (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 14 May 2009 22:00:00 GMT

Phil Nugent's Top Ten(-ish) Best Movies Ever!

7. THE LADY EVE (1941)

Veronica Geng: "The American filmmaker Preston Sturges had a supreme gift for making people laugh without representing the world as better or worse than it is... In [his films], politics is rigged, poverty is immune to charity, bosses are petty dictators and workers live on dreams of jackpots, romantic love is either a luxury of the rich or a fabrication of the con artist, and small-town America's morality is the kind that ostracizes an unwed pregnant girl while embracing a bogus war hero. Yet these movies sent waves of euphoria rolling through the audience." That's one way of putting it. Here's another: Once upon a time, in a place called Hollywood, there lived a great man who one day decided that, if he had anything to say about it, the world would never forget William Demarest.

8. Double feature: JULES AND JIM (1962) & BAND OF OUTSIDERS (1964)

The intellectual wild men of the French New Wave, in revolt against their country's "tradition of quality" and taking sustenance from the grungier products of the Hollywood dream factory, took their cameras to the streets and proved that, so long as they were left alone to get their movies made as best they could, the improvisational high spirits and smarts and humor and excitement and heady romance of their finest work would remain ever fresh. Then, after a few masterpieces, one of these directors settled down and practically turned into a one-man Tradition of Quality, while the other dependably went him own way, albeit with a destination pass that was frequently stamped "CRAZYTOWN." The fact that it all somehow resulted in an American movie culture where a movie starring John Travolta and Bruce Willis made for eight and a half million dollars could count as a triumph for independent filmmaking is actually one of pop culture history's better jokes.

9. FIRES ON THE PLAIN (1959)

Apocalypse now, and then some.

10. STEAMBOAT BILL, JR. (1928)

By the time Buster Keaton hit Hollywood, he had been performing in vaudeville since he was three, the son of comics who incorporated him into their act. No man has, by his very example, provided a more stirring argument against the child labor laws. Keaton was a simple sort of man for a great artist: he just happened to be someone who, by the time he grew to adulthood, had mastered every skill that might be helpful to the creation of physical comedy and then, having taught himself the mechanics of filmmaking, turned out to have as strong an eye as anyone who's ever lived at staging physical comedy for maximum effectiveness on camera. It is dizzying to imagine what he might have achieved--on top of what he did achieve, which make no mistake about it, was a titanic body of work--if there had been no studio to get in his way.

11. Double feature: CITIZEN KANE (1941) & CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT (1967)

People call Citizen Kane, the debut film that Orson Welles directed when he was 25, a young man's movie, and it is, though in a way that not everybody may fully appreciate. It is an exercise in high-spirited flamboyance, but it is also, crucially, a movie made by a man who doesn't care about burning his bridges behind him, a self-styled "man of the theater" who, as a lark and a fund-raising expedition, decided to take a movie studio up on its offer of "creative control" and make one of those talking picture dealies, figuring that the worst that could happen would be that he'd generate a lot of publicity and a wad of cash that he could then plow into the stage career that he did care about. It is a movie made by a man who thought he'd be spending his life and doing his real work elsewhere, and so whose attitude towards the faded press baron whose face he was dunking in mud, and the scaredy-cat old studio heads who so dreaded what the press baron might still be able to do to them that they tried to pool their resources to buy and burn the film, was: Bring it on. Chimes at Midnight, made a little more than 25 years and many, many lifetimes later, is a movie made by a man who, in the course of burning those bridges, fell so completely in love with the medium that he would do anything to make another one, patching a film together with whatever spindly resources he could pull together. Strange as it may be that the cocky young bastard and the inspired old wizard were the same guy, we were lucky to have ever had either one.

12. Double feature: ERASERHEAD (1977) & BLUE VELVET (1986)

David Lynch arrived just as the American moviemaking renaissance of the 1970s was winding down, with a $20,000 movie that he'd been working on, off and on, over the course of some five years and that looked as if he'd been quietly reinventing moviemaking, starting with the period of silent experimental film and moving on from there, in blissful innocence of anything else going on in the world. Almost a decade later, everybody's favorite homegrown Surrealist achieved his apotheosis with a movie that was released at a time when indie filmmakers were asking to be congratulated on keeping things safely small and lo-fi and film geeks were catching up on what had come before through the miracle of VCRs hooked to small screens, and served notice that some dreams demand to be appreciated on the biggest screens available, with Dennis Hopper's heavy breathing tickling your ear in Dolby while the lushest nightmare on record unfolded before your eyes. Nowadays, David checks in from time to time via his website, and has responded to the digital information age with Inland Empire, which loses nothing when viewed as a YouTube video, and in fact practically demands to be seen that way. Time for somebody else to step up.

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

Contributor: Phil Nugent

Not Readily Available on Legally Authorized Commercial DVD Release in the Continental United States: "The Grey Fox" (1982)

Phil Nugent — Mon, 04 May 2009 17:00:00 GMT

[Note: When this feature premiered here some weeks back, it was under the title "Not on DVD". As several readers were thoughtful enough to point out, this was not technically accurate, because there isn't anything that you can't find in some version on DVD provided you have access to an all-region player, live at one of the far corners of the earth, and know a guy what knows a guy. Since then, researchers in the Screengrab test labs have labored to come up with a title for this feature that will be both honestly descriptive and pithy. As you can see, they failed. But you get the idea, right?]

The release of Wolverine has inspired a number of reviews and even studies of the Marvel Comics character written by people who could not resist the temptation to make light of the seemingly incongruous fact that this superheroic berserker figure is supposed to be Canadian, and therefore a product of what is widely, if unfairly, stereotyped as the dullest, most mild-mannered, phlegmatic society on Earth. It's true that Wolverine himself found life in the Great White North so unexciting that he ran off and got involved in the American Civil War. But at least one glamorous American antihero found the Canadian climate perfectly to his liking when he set about disproving F. Scott Fitzgerald's notorious line about there being no second acts in American lives. This was Bill Miner, the famously charming "gentleman bandit" who, in the course of making a name for himself as a stagecoach robber, is credited with having invented the pithy and hard-to-misconstrue phrase, "Hands up!" Miner is played by the 61-year-old Richard Farnsworth in The Grey Fox, which opens with our hero's release from prison. At first it appears that changing times have rendered him an honest man whether he likes it or not: the jail doors swing open to usher him into a post-stagecoach universe. For a time, he attempts to adjust to the practice of honest labor, with dispiriting results. Then he finds out about these neat things called trains.

It's the conceit of The Grey Fox, which was written by John Hunter and marked the feature directing debut of the twenty-seven-year-old Phillip Borsos, that Miner was inspired to start holding up trains after seeing a movie, the famous, early silent Western The Great Train Robbery (1903). (This is a fanciful bit of conjecture, and in fact, the botched Silverdale train robbery credited to him here is a matter of dispute among some historians; some don't think Miner was involved, and some disagree with the contention that it was Canada's first train robbery. That said, we don't cotton to spoilsports here at the Screengrab.) Shot by Frank Tidy, The Grey Fox has a beautiful look that ties in with its awareness of the movie past, and also with the West that was preserved in early photography. Most self-consciously arty Westerns of the past forty to fifty years--the period since the Western has been officially considered all but dead--are doomy, blood soaked affairs that look as if they were staged in the world's largest mud puddle and shot in natural light during a solar eclipse. The Grey Fox is steeped in a quality almost unknown to art Westerns: charm.

Farnsworth deserves much of the credit for this. He broke into movies in 1937 thanks to his skill with horses, and did stunt work and bit parts in scores of Westerns and other films (including Red River, Gunga Din, Gone with the Wind and Spartacus before he began to get speaking parts in the 1960s. He was still doing stunt work into the mid-1970s, before getting a major break as a past-his-prime cowpoke in Comes a Horseman (1978), for which he got an Academy Award nomination. That led to a run of steady work until his death in 2000, but The Grey Fox is your one chance to see the man having a fling at playing a romantic lead. His amused pleasure at the unlikeliness of it all is contagious, and he's perfectly believable both as a relic from an earlier time and a man so naturally courtly that you'd be hard put to remain sore at him for a little thing like robbing you at gunpoint. (Farnsworth's "natural" acting style--the manner of a man who picked it up over the course of forty-five years in front of the camera--sets him apart from the other trained actors in the cast in a way that passes for the self-contained oddness of a man who sat out the turn of the century in a four-by-five cell.) He even gets a girlfriend, in the form of Jackie Burroughs as a proto-feminist who herself is a practitioner of the new art of photography. There's a nicely underplayed in-joke when she admires the planes of his face and tells him that he'd photograph well.

The year before he died, Farnsworth had one other major starring role, in David Lynch's The Straight Story, for which the actor reeled in one more Oscar nomination. Phillip Borsos was not so lucky; though he burst out of the gate early, he was never able to follow up The Grey Fox with a comparable success. His eye stayed good, but his subsequent Hollywood films, The Mean Season and One Magic Christmas, were blighted by ill-conceived scripts and some questionable strokes of casting (such as Harry Dean Stanton as a guardian angel), and his Canadian biopic, Bethune: The Making of a Hero, was reportedly a fiasco. He died of leukemia, at the age of 41, in 1995, the same year as the release of his final film, Far from Home: The Adventures of Yellow Dog. Given the acclaim lavished on his first and best feature and the pleasure it's given people over the years, its absence from American DVD shelves doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense. Here's hoping that somebody busts it out of distribution limbo before the century turns again.

David Lynch's Interview Project

Phil Nugent — Mon, 04 May 2009 15:00:00 GMT

DAVID LYNCH PRESENTS INTERVIEW PROJECT from interview project on Vimeo.

What is David Lynch's "Interview Project"? In the video above, which is playing at his web site, Lynch gets right down to it: "What is Interview Project?" he asks, rhetorically. "Interview Project is, a, uhh...." That's our David--second takes are for pygmies.

It turns out that Interview Project is the fruit of "a 20,000-mile road trip over seventy days, across and back the United States." Over the course of this trip, "the team" conducted interviews with people they happened to meet along the way--enough of them to produce a promised 120 episodes. "It's so fascinating to look at and listen to people," Lynch says, hitting the word "people" with so much stress as to almost appear defensive, as if just before filming the spot, somebody had told him that what's really fascinating is to look at and listen to gila monsters. But no doubt anyone who David Lynch spots through his car window and feels a pressing need to interview can hold his own with the most charismatic member of any rival species. The episodes begin appearing online June 1; you can go to Lynch's site and register for an email reminder.

Great Beginnings: Screengrab's Favorite Opening Scenes Of All Time! (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 21:30:00 GMT

MULHOLLAND DRIVE (2001)

David Lynch has never been what you’d call a mainstream director -- his last feature film, if I recall correctly, began with him videotaping old Polish factories -- but despite his reputation as an artsy iconoclast, he’s also got a streak of razzle-dazzle showmanship and the ability to hook an audience like nobody’s business when he puts his transcendental mind to it. Perhaps owing to the relatively commercial nature of the film’s origin as a pilot for ABC (infamously ordered and then canceled by network muttonheads for being too “Lynchian”), Mulholland Drive kicks off with a psychedelic jitterbug scene that gets the adrenalin pumping like any good overture, then moves into an opening sequence freighted with intrigue, atmosphere and dramatic possibility like a master class in cinematic storytelling: a beautiful woman in a limousine at night...a man with a gun about to kill her...a doomed car full of hedonistic teenagers screaming towards them, and then...CRASH! The man with the gun is killed, the beautiful woman staggers off into the Los Angeles night, her memory obliterated...and I’m ready and willing to follow Lynch wherever he wants to go. (AO)

BOOGIE NIGHTS (1997)

As Magnolia and There Will Be Blood ably demonstrate, PT Anderson knows how to open a film. And in terms of audacious electricity, Anderson’s finest inaugural stanza can be found in his 1997 breakthrough Boogie Nights. A 3-minute single shot, it begins with the film’s title on a flashing movie marquee before the camera tilts left and then right (like an amusement park rollercoaster), then tracks a driving car to the entrance of a hopping nightclub, and then enters the club alongside Burt Reynolds, Julianne Moore and Luis Guzman, eventually moving around and onto the dance floor, to the surrounding tables and finally behind rollerskating Heather Graham. A bit of egotistical showmanship? Without question. Yet more than merely a superficial calling-card gesture, Anderson’s brash opening aesthetic stunt efficiently introduces many of the story’s key characters, as well as conveying the euphoric glitz and glamour of a California scene dominated by wannabes flirting with their celebrity dreams. (NS)

MANHATTAN (1979)

Most of the time, when a director proclaims that his setting is “practically another character”, it’s a bunch of hooey, an oft-repeated cliché spouted off by hacks who want to be congratulated for shooting on location. But for Woody Allen, it was different. For years, Allen’s films came to be synonymous with a way of life -- cultured, neurotic, more than a little wary, resolutely cosmopolitan -- that could only come from being steeped in the cultural mecca of the Western hemisphere. Film after Allen film paid homage to the city he loved, but none more so than the one named after his borough of choice. Yet true to form, even at the beginning of Manhattan, Allen grapples with his conflicting feelings on the city -- is it the world’s greatest city, or a symbol of everything that’s wrong with society? The fact that Allen can switch instantaneously from one viewpoint to the other suggests that in his mind, they’re merely two sides of the same coin. As Allen himself says in the film, the New York he knows exists in black and white and is accompanied by Gershwin, much like the film itself, which would imply that the town he loves belongs more to the past than to the present. Looking back at the film thirty years later, these directorial choices give the film a quality that’s both nostalgic and timeless, implying that even now, even with the World Trade Center and the House That Ruth Built gone (and Allen working mostly overseas), these are still part of the city, if only in our collective memory. (PC)

8 1/2 (1963) & WILD STRAWBERRIES (1957)

The dream sequence is an opportunity for a film to break out of the logic of its narrative and bare a character's fears for the audience -- unlike real dreams, which run a gamut of emotion, dream sequences in films tend to focus on anxiety. By breaking away from the internal logic of the film, the dream sequence can take a breath and develop an established character, and for this reason, very few films start with dream sequences. Fellini's 8 1/2 does, however, and Bergman's Wild Strawberries launches into one not long after the start. In the dream in 8 1/2, Fellini-substitute Anselmi dreams of being trapped in a traffic jam, all of the other drivers and passengers staring blindly at him (other than the old man pawing a starlet). He fights his way out of his car and flies away. Then he's flying over a beach, with a doppelganger holding a rope attached to his leg. An accountant rides up on a horse, cape flying behind him like the Knight at the beginning of Bergman's The Seventh Seal. His doppelganger insists that he come down, and he plummets into the ocean, waking up in terror. Pretty clear what that's about, right? Anselmi is first trapped in traffic, the great metaphor for go-nowhere-fast modern times, and when he escapes, he is dragged back down by his own ambitions and promises to moneymen. Anselmi starts the movie in a dream, spends much of it wallowing in memory, and finally ends the movie with dream-logic. His beginning dream is about his fear of being trapped, reeled in by his own accountants and his own professional persona, unable to fly and falling. In Wild Strawberries, Professor Borg dreams of faceless clocks and faceless people, time falling away while his own death stumbles before him. Although it's dream-logic, the meaning is written clearly and most of the action of the movie, in which Borg tries to fix the mess he's made of his life, follows. (HC)

Click Here For Part One, Three, Four & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Nick Schager, Paul Clark, Hayden Childs

Werner Herzog Remembers the Good Old Days in Peru, the Bad New Days in New Orleans

Phil Nugent — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Fitzcarraldo, the 1982 epic that Werner Herzog shot in the jungles of Peru, using a team of locals to pull a 320-ton steamboat up a mountain, may have been the most troubled production of the director's long and adventurous career, though the competition for that title is fierce. (Herzog had shot an estimated forty percent of the film when his star, Jason Robards, was sidelined by amoebic dysentery, after which his co-star, Mick Jagger, had to abandon the project to fulfill a commitment to tour with his day job, the Rolling Stones. Herzog wrote Jagger's role out of the script and replaced Robards with Klaus Kinski, the only known instance in movie history of someone bringing Klaus Kinksi in to stabilize a situation.) It's probably the most well-documented production in Herzog's career, though. The director Les Blank recorded it all in his won 1982 feature documentary Burden of Dreams, and now it's reported that, in June, Ecco Press is bringing out Herzog's journals written during the production, under the title Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo. For those of you who can't wait, The Paris Review has a selection in their Spring 2009 issue. ("These texts are not reports on the filming --of which little is said. Nor are they journals, except in a very general sense. They might be described instead as inner landscapes, born of the delirium of the jungle. But even that may not be entirely accurate--I am not sure." Coming from anyone else but Werner, this sort of thing would count as discouraging.) The excerpt isn't available online, but hey, it's a good magazine, so throw them twelve bucks if you're so inclined.

Herzog also just checked in with John Patterson, giving him a quick rundown of the current busy state of his movie career at his Laurel Canyon home, because he still considers himself to be a filmmaker and all this "man of letters" business is making him nervous. Herzog, who credits his global viewpoint to the fact that he "had seen much of the world before I was 20, and I had experienced it in a very fundamental way - being on foot, in Africa, in danger," actually had to take his age into account--he's now 66--when deciding not to imperil his life by shooting some icy underwater footage himself on his Antarctica documentary Encounters at the End of the World. However, he braved New Orleans, Nicolas Cage, and the wrath of Abel Ferrara on the movie he recently finished, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. Werner insists that, previous reports to the contrary, this is not a remake or a reboot of or a sequel to Ferrara's 1992 scuzzball classic, which came complete with rape on a church altar, visions of Jesus, and full-frontal Keitel. It seems that producer Ed Pressman owns the rights to the title and just wanted to use it on a new project. "I was assured," says Herzog, "that this was not related to another film of a similar name. I told them, 'If you swear on the heads of your children.' I also had hints from Nicolas Cage that he wouldn't sign unless he knew I was directing, which is a good way to start a film." Herzog was keen to shoot in New Orleans "because, after Katrina, you were in a situation where civil life came to a breakdown. Not merely because the hurricane caused a lot of material destruction, but it also created a collapse of civility - looting and, by the way, the police were heavily involved in that, too." And the producers were hot to shoot there too, because of "the tax incentives."

Herzog is "also in the process of wrapping up another film, My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, produced by David Lynch and loosely based on a gruesome matricide in San Diego in the 1980s, starring Michael Shannon...This being a Herzog movie, the suburban footage is interspersed with scenes - visions, perhaps - captured in Central Asia and Peru. He calls it 'sort of a horror movie'." This all amounts to the most time Herzog has spent working with actors and scripts for quite some time, now; most of his filmography for the last several years has been devoted to nonfiction filmmaking. (The biggest and most recent exception, 1996's Rescue Dawn with Christian Bale, was based on the same story that Herzog had already used a decade earlier for his documentary, Little Dieter Needs to Fly.) Not that he sees much difference, of course; this is a guy who, in 1991's Lessons of Darkness, presented footage of the smoking, apocalyptic aftermath of the Gulf War as a science fiction film, and who later, in 2005's The Wild Blue Yonder, intercut NASA footage with film of the actor Brad Dourif improvising a monologue recounting his life as an extraterrestrial immgirant. "The distinction between fiction and documentary," says Herzog, "is the last thing I would spend a sleepless night over."

Related stories: Werner Herzog's Very Bad Idea

Strangers in a Strange Land: Special All-Herzog Edition

Video of the Day: David Lynch’s “Shot in the Back of the Head”

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 15:30:00 GMT

David Lynch has directed the video for “Shot in the Back of the Head,” a song by his new bestest friend Moby from his upcoming album Wait for Me. In a capitalization-challenged press release, Moby writes, “the creative impetus behind the record was hearing a david lynch speech at bafta, in the uk. david was talking about creativity, and to paraphrase, about how creativity in and of itself, and without market pressures, is fine and good… the first single(if you can call an instrumental with no vocals that we're giving away for free a 'single')is called 'shot in the back of the head', and i'm happy to announce that david lynch has done the video for it. i sent him the music and said, 'please do whatever you want'. so he sat down and drew some animation that is very dark and beautiful. david lynch is my favorite film director, and i'm really happy to have him as the first video director on 'wait for me'.”

Fans of Lynch’s Internet series Dumbland will immediately recognize the animation style, although the mood is decidedly darker. Hit the jump to take a look (and a listen):

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.”

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: March 28-April 3, 2009

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 21:00:00 GMT

Hey, gang. It’s your ol’ pal, the Cost-Dawg. Some friends of mine told me about this very amusing “Waterworld II” prank y’all pulled on April Fool’s Day. I got a good chuckle out of it. Truth is, I’d never make a sequel to Waterworld, a movie for which I drank my own pee. (Real pee? That’s a Hollywood secret, kids.) However, I thought this would be a good opportunity to let you know I am hard at work on a follow-up to The Postman. I want to call it The Postman Always Rings Twice, but some hardasses at the studio are giving me grief over that title for some reason.

While I was checking out your site, I happened to read your list April Fools: The 35 Funniest Movie Characters of All Time (Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven and Eight). I dunno, folks, I think you might have forgotten somebody. If you need a hint, I got two words for you: swing and vote. Get me? Bet you feel pretty silly now.

As for the rest of your stuff, most of it made me feel like I’d rather be back on the set of Waterworld guzzling my own whiz, but I guess these were okay:

Reviews: Sugar, Alien Trespass, The Song of Sparrows, Gigantic, Adventureland

The Screengrab Library of Unproduced Screenplays: David Lynch and Mark Frost's "One Saliva Bubble"

White Elephant Blogathon: Flesh Gordon

Ozsploitation! “Mad Dog Morgan” (1976)

Forgotten Films: "Strange Invaders" (1983)

Unwatchable #39: “The Invisible Maniac”

Video of the Day: “How to Make a Good Movie” with David Lynch

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 19:45:00 GMT

Maybe this is how we’ll finally get to see Ronnie Rocket. The online TV channel David Lynch Foundation Television launched last week, and although it’s ostensibly dedicated to Lynch’s beloved Transcendental Meditation (Lynch’s foundation is “dedicated to providing students with the opportunity to learn how to meditate”), it looks there are plenty of goodies in store for those of us more interested in movies than meditation. What better way to start your day than with the “Daily David,” an exclusive interview series “where David speaks candidly about anything and everything ranging from filmmaking to consciousness”? A recent installment, in which Lynch explains how to make a good movie (hint: props are important), follows the jump:

The Screengrab Library of Unproduced Screenplays: David Lynch and Mark Frost's "One Saliva Bubble"

Phil Nugent — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 18:00:00 GMT

Few movie artists who've emerged in the last thirty or so years excite so much curiosity about what they're working on--and about what they've worked on in the past and been forced to abandon--as David Lynch. And none are more vocal about their mixed feelings, or worse, about that kind of curiosity. Lynch, who famously abhors the inclusion of directors' commentaries and even chapter stops on DVDs, wants his work to be experienced only in its final, polished form, and he doesn't appreciate having cultists root around in the tangle of his false starts and wrong turns. When someone in the audience of a live Q & A asked Lynch about an early version of the script for Blue Velvet that he'd come across, which ended with Dorothy Vallens jumping off a roof, Lynch curtly responded that the question showed why all the copies of all the early drafts of anything ought to be burned. The true Lynch fanatic is likely to end up feeling a little like Max Brod wrestling with Kafka's instructions to him to destroy his letters and other unpublished writings, torn between wanting to respect the great man's wishes and the desire to know and share as much as possible about what been up to. Because Lynch is principally a movie director, that includes whatever traces we have of what he might have done if he'd had not just more time but all the funding opportunities in the world.

For Lynch freaks, the great white whale of unproduced Lynch projects is Ronnie Rocket, a script that goes back to the late 1970s. Described by Lynch as being "about a three-foot tall guy with red hair and physical problems, and about 60-cycle alternating current electricity", the project was originally intended as Lynch's follow-up to Eraserhead. When that didn't work out, it was going to be his follow-up to The Elephant Man, and then his follow-up to Blue Velvet. After Twin Peaks, he began to talk about it as a starring vehicle for Michael Anderson, the dwarf actor who played The Man from Another Place in that series and later appeared in Mulholland Drive. Lynch has rewritten and rewritten the script, and at that same Q & A, he told Elvis Mitchell that after every project he completes, he tries to get Ronnie Rocket a green light. Some people, though, think that the movie will never get made because Lynch is past the point of being able to make it. It might be one of those long-deferred dream projects that directors sometimes fuss over and fantasize about until it takes up permanent residence in some remote corner of their minds, from which it can never be successful dislodged. And some of us who used to anticipate what the director of Eraserhead and Blue Velvet's ultimate dream project might look like are less excited about the prospect of seeing it made now by the director of Inland Empire, the man who, in interviews, seems less interested in pushing the boundaries of the audio-visual possibilities of film than in embracing new technology that mainly offers him the pleasures of greater convenience.

Ronnie Rocket is Lynch at his most intensely personal. One Saliva Bubble, which was written in 1987, around the same time that Lynch was reportedly close to making Ronnie with a cast that would have included Dean Stockwell, Dennis Hopper, Brad Dourif, and Jack Nance--the Blue Velvet All-Stars--is a relic of a very different phase in Lynch's career, a period when he teamed up with Mark Frost, a writer best known for his work on Hill Street Blues and the 1987 horror movie The Believers, and tried to meet the mainstream halfway. Based on the results, the idea behind the partnership must have been something like this: the two of them would work bring their weird conceits to the table and decide on which ones they both liked, after which Frost would press them into some commercially viable form that might get the green light from a studio or network, after which Lynch would wrap them in Style. Before hitting pay dirt with Twin Peaks, Frost and Lynch worked on The Lemurians, a projected TV series with roots in a variant of the Atlantis myth that figured in the cosmos of Madame Blavatsky, and Goddess, a movie spun from the notion that Robert Kennedy had Marilyn Monroe rubbed out, but only One Saliva Bubble is known to have made it to the completed screenplay stage. At the point where it seemed likeliest that it might get beyond that, it had Steve Martin and Martin Short attached for the leads.

The script begins in "a top-secret, experimental, offensive/defensive military installation hidden away in the countryside outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania." In the first scene, some scientists are exposing the innards of a computer system while a trio of security guards "who appear to be refugees from the Neolithic period" stand off to the side, exchanging crude jokes. The title refers to Frost and Lynch's version of the butterfly effect: one of the guards blows a raspberry, and in the process "jettisons a perfect saliva bubble" which floats "past the unknowing, refined, well-groomed Scientists and down into the microscopic copper wires, creating a tiny, seemingly insignificant electrical short circuit," which in turn causes some kind of satellite missile-defense system to emit a beam that strikes the small town of Newtonville, Kansas. The effect of the beam is to cause several citizens to trade bodies, or merge their personalities, or something like that with other citizens. A gang of rowdy, out-of-shape Texans swap places with a troupe of Chinese acrobats; a Britishy matron takes over the body of a black blues musician. And the hero, Wally, "a forty year old milquetoast salesman", trades places with Horton, a ferocious hit man. This is '80s high concept, Lynch style.

Part of what makes it Lynchian is that everybody in Newtonville, and outside it too, seems buggy and warped even before the transformation takes place. It's also marked by a strange mixture of sweetness and darkness. When Wally is trundling around in Horton's menacing form, his love life and overall place in the scheme if things improves, but--and this is probably the most winning idea in the whole script--the bloodthirsty Horton steps into Wally's life and discovers that he loves being a family man, especially since his wife and son love the new, scary version of their family provider. The warmest, and just about the wordiest, passage in the script comes when Horton has to deal with a bully who's been messing with junior. "I know what a hard life you've lived," he tells the kid, "what with your folks divorce and your father's alcoholism. It wasn't so long ago that I didn't know the meaning of a family either. Victor, I know about the loneliness, lying awake at night, feeling like no one in the world cares for you. I know what this can do to you; the rage and frustration. And I just want you to understand you've got a friend here and his name is Wally Newton. By the time he's finished, there isn't a dry eye in the schoolroom. Meanwhile, the military is discussing whether to cover the whole mess up by going with a plan to "reduce Newtonville to a smoking pile of ash, litter the area with sheep with their eyes sewn shut and blame it on UFO's."

One Saliva Bubble reads as if it must have been fun to write. It has an antic, anything-goes tone, "anything" including comical Chinese who say things like,"Herro, Gentremen, how may I herp you?", animated-cartoon tricks involving dogs freezing in the air in mid-pounce and doors that fling themselves open at the sight of the fearsome Horton, cute comic gangsters, broadly drawn cariactures of blustery generals that would strike Buck Turgidsen as a tad much, and an ending that is unintentionally summed up by the stage direction: "The crowd is totally bewildered." Humor has always been a major element in Lynch's work; certainly it had a lot to do with the success of Twin Peaks, especially in the first season, when it was easier to separate the intentionally funny from the other kind. There, the funny moments arose naturally out the characters and situations. But, trying to write a comedy, he seems less interested in story or character than in piling silliness upon silliness. And because Lynch can't seem to help himself from minting a strange, idiosyncratic world even when he populates it with silly accents and fart jokes, there's an abstract, weirdly cerebral feel to the whole thing, like seeing a star MIT student's experimental design for the world's greatest homemade beer bong. Although the film was never made, there may be a clue as to what it would have looked like in Lynch and Frost's follow-up TV series, the short-lived behind-the-scenes radio sitcom On the Air, where the farcical plot turns and slapstick pratfalls were so unfunny they were borderline creepy. The show played like charades night at the Black Lodge. (In turn, Saliva Bubble may provide hints of what might have been in store for us if Lynch had realized another of his ideas for a comedy: Dream of the Bovine, which would have starred Harry Dean Stanton as one of three cows who are reincarnated as people but still think of themselves as cattle.)

With the early, phenomenal success of Twin Peaks, Lynch and Frost proved that there was a mass audience for a crowd-pleasing serial entertainment served up with the kind of craft, visual imagination, and double-edged with that Lynch brought to the project. But they also wound up demonstrating the corrupting influence of mass success, a corruption that in their case was self-defeating. If they had fulfilled the expectations they'd set up and solved the mystery of Laura Palmer's murder in that first season, they might have been unable to lure their audience back for whatever they did next, but they could have gone out in glory; instead, by trying to extend the plotline beyond the breaking point, they wore out their welcome with the audience and betrayed their implicit pledge to keep Twin Peaks from turning into just another TV show, playing by the same nothing-ever-really-changes rules. After On the Air and the Twin Peaks movie Fire Walk with Me (on which Frost had an executive producer credit but no input on the script), they went their separate ways, and it would take Lynch a while to regain his bearings. In his collaborations with Frost and also in Wild at Heart, the movie that was released between the first and second seasons of Twin Peaks, he had begun showing the strain of trying to match up to the way the industry seemed to see him: not as a major artist trying to capture his own way of seeing on film, but as some guy standing by the side of the road holding up a hand-lettered sign reading, "WILL WRITE WEIRD SHIT FOR FOOD."

A Screengrab Plea: Let Herbie Ride Again!

Phil Nugent — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 17:00:00 GMT

The superhero-movie trend wasn't going to die on the vine in the unlikely event that Watchmen-the-movie bombed, and the word on the street is that it didn't bomb, so if you fancy yourself a leading man, you'd better look good in spandex. New potential franchises have already been lining up on the tarmac; a while back, we reported that the job of directing a movie about the mighty Thor has been handed to Kenneth Branagh, who I'm sure will do every bit as well by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby as he did by Shakespeare, Mary Shelley, and Rita Rudner. I can't help but feel, though, that a golden opportunity is still sitting on the shelf there, continuing to be overlooked. I think we've pretty well established that Alan Moore makes for box office, and who has Alan Moore named as his own personal favorite superhero? Herbie, that's who! Herbie, Herbie Popnecker, Herbie the Fat Fury! The scarily bearded bard of Northampton is not alone in his idolatry. There has long been a teeming, steaming cult of Herbie brewing just below the demarcation line we call common sense. But where's our movie? Every so often, lo these past several years, word has gotten out that someone in Hollywood has given the greenlight to a Herbie movie. The pattern is always the same: dancing breaks out in the streets, the good champagne is uncorked, strangers hug each other in Times Square, babies are conceived. Then the morning after arrives and it turns out that the movie is about that damned Volkswagen again.

The creation of writer "Shane O'Shea" (a pseudonym for Richard E. Hughes, editor of the independent comics publisher ACG) and artist Ogden Whitney, Herbie first appeared in the December, 1958 issue of ACG's Forbidden Worlds. A product of that patch of suburbia that would later cast its siren song at David Lynch and John Waters, he was a round little boy with a bowl haircut and a pair of eyeglasses that were the liveliest thing on his poker face. A man of few words, Herbie seldom spoke up except to wave his trademark sucker at people and threateningly inquire, "You want I should bop you with this here lollipop?", a tag line that would later be tightened up and employed by TV's Kojak. Herbie's super powers--including a mighty punch, a menacing stare that could, and did, break the devil, the ability to communicate with animals, and a knack for time travel that helped him to become recognized as a hero and savior to many different civilizations throughout history--were firmly in place from the outset, while he was just waddling about in his Sansabelt slacks. Eventually, though, feeling that he had some responsibility, as the star of a comic book, to try to fit in with the superhero community, he did create for himself the alternate identity of the caped avenger the Fat Fury, flying through the skies barefoot with a toilet plunger on his head.

Like many a pulp hero, from Zorro and the Scarlet Pimpernel down to Superman, Herbie was in a way his own rival, scorned by a love object who admired the Fat Fury without ever guessing that he and the seemingly inadequate Herbie were one and the same. In the case of Herbie, the love object in question was no fair maiden but Herbie's gruff and clueless father, whose open loathing of his offspring seemed to cause Herbie little distress. At the same time, the legions of panting women who offered themselves to our hero, none of whom showed much conern about the fact that he was theoretically too young to be dating, had no effect on him either. As you might expect of a young man who was frequently seen to cut class to make a special meeting with Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, he had his mind on weightier matters. In a recurring development that has probably inspired more than one graduate thesis in the field of Cultural Studies, women who had been spurned by Herbie often ended up running off with the livestock, as if just knowing that Herbie was out there somewhere had ruined them for the human race.

Will there ever be a Herbie movie, ideally one directed a safe distance from Kenneth Branagh? Herbie fans have learned to be disappointed. ACG went under in 1967, three years after Herbie finally got his own book. In 1992, Dark Horse boldly announced that it was bringing out a 12-issue Herbie series consisting mostly of reprints from the long-gone ACG books; it crapped out after two issues were published, making it the Big Numbers of reprint series. Herbie later made a guest appearance in Bob Burden's Flaming Carrot comic, but this was after the magic had gone from both characters, and the results were sort of like those end-of-the-road appearances by the Three Stooges, where the spectacle of men in their late sixties poking each other in the eye seemed less like a cause for amusement than a desperate cry for help. The good news is that Dark Horse has finally done penance for having whiffed in 1992 by bringing out the complete ACG Herbie comics in three hardcover volumes, the last of which comes out next month. These handsome hardcover editions retail in the neighborhood of fifty dollars apiece and would cheer up anyone who needs to unwind after a long argument with the landlord about when the rent check will clear. Now that this material is readily available, maybe some Hollywood A-lister will finally see the potential that starring in a Herbie movie has to take his career to the next level. I don't mean any particular Hollywood A-lister, it could be any Hollywood A-lister, oh, any number of kaff kaff Philip Seymour Hoffman kaff Hollywood A-listers could have a triumph in the role.

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: Feb. 28-March 6, 2009

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 22:00:00 GMT

Look, I get it. I do have a sense of humor, you know. If I got to choose my own superpower, it wouldn’t be freakin’ gills, that’s for sure. And I understand that there isn’t a whole hell of a lot of crime going on underwater – although did you ever stop to ask yourself why? My stats don’t lie. Besides, you wait until those polar ice caps start to melt and you’re wading hip-deep down Fifth Avenue. You’ll be wishing you had ol’ Aquaman on speed-dial then.

So, yeah, I knew I wasn’t going to see my name on Screengrab Salutes the Best & Worst Comic Book Movies of All Time (Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five and Six). And I knew I was gonna get sick of all the Watchmen hype: the Screengrab Review, the Other Screengrab Review, The Final Countdown, Saturday Morning Watchmen, Dave Gibbons on Watchmen, The Science of Watchmen and on and on it goes. But I sure as hell wasn’t expecting this. I mean, come on! Who do I have to blowfish to get a movie deal already?

While I have your attention, I’d like to point out that my underwater internet connection is spotty at times. I almost missed out on Unwatchable week, featuring Lawnmower Man 2, Laserblast, Cool as Ice, Creepshow 3, and 3 Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain. And I almost missed this stuff, too:

Screengrab Reviews: Sherman’s Way, Tokyo!, Everlasting Moments and Reunion

Catching Up with the Lynches, David and Jennifer

Screengrab Q&A: Mark Webber, director of Explicit Ills

Watch It For Free: Sita Sings the Blues (2008, Nina Paley)

The Continuing Political Life of Election's Tracey Flick

Faking Farts with Olivia Thirlby

In Other Blogs: 100% Watchmen-Free Edition

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 16:30:00 GMT

It’s enough already! I blame myself for piling on, but surely we can find some intriguing blog entries out there on subjects other than the movie that rhymes with Blotchmen. For instance, Arbogast on Film is looking back at an apocalyptic fantasy from the olden days. “Maybe the world did come to an end in 1988. I don't want to be glib but I'm hard pressed to think of anything that has surfaced in the interim that really is something to tap dance about. There was an electricity back then, a crackle in the air that's missing now, the void filled by buzz, which isn't the same thing. None of us knew the backstory of MIRACLE MILE (1988) at the time of its release; we didn't know that the property had been kicked around Hollywood for the better part of a decade or that its author, Steve DeJarnatt, had written the script for Warners but had bound himself to the project as a director, which queered the deal. We didn't know DeJarnatt (well, we didn't know DeJarnatt) had bought the script back from the studio for $25,000 and that Hemdale stepped in with an offer to produce for just under $4 million, which got the ball rolling. Nope. All of this happened while we were sleeping, and when we woke up MIRACLE MILE had happened.”

At Hollywood Elsewhere, Jeffrey Wells speculates on rumors that Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life will feature…dinosaurs? “Some 18 years ago I over-wrote a very long piece about Malick, a where-is-he? thing called Malick Aforethought…I remember researching and describing an ambitious film that Malick wanted to film in the wake of the 1978 release of Days of Heaven, called Q. (A title later appropriated by Larry Cohen when he made Q, The Winged Serpent.) And I remember a passage about a dinosaur sleeping and dreaming in a sea of magma -- I remember that much. The story spanned millenia. We all know there's a 20th Century portion in which Pitt (I think) plays Penn's dad in flashbacks. I realize this all sounds a little vague.”

If you’re attending SXSW without a film badge, Slackerwood offers some tips. “Movies shot in Austin or with Austin ties may fill up quickly. Sometimes cast and crew members and their families are invited and a number of seats are reserved. On the other hand, these are the movies that often draw more ticketholders than badgeholders, because the audience is full of locals wanting to see their neighbor or coworker's movie. So if you get there early, you might be okay.”

At The House Next Door, Jeremiah Kipp talks to Daniel Bird about Central European New Wave Cinema. “In Poland I am a cultural outsider. I try to read films in cultural context, but my response is, ultimately, personal. I am English, after all. But I have been living in Warsaw on and off since 2002. Yes, there are culturally specific aspects to many of the films I write about. Sometimes an understanding helps the appreciation of these films, but not always. Zulawski's Diabel makes a lot more sense if you know something about the Warsaw student riots in March 1968. But what attracts me to a particular film is its bizarre quality. I guess you could say such films seem bizarre to a cultural outsider. But then I think the only person in the world who finds Diabel 'normal' is Zulawski himself.”

Finally in List-o-Mania, the AV Club offers 24 graphic novels besides, uh, you-know-what that they’d like to see made into movies. Like all right-thinking people, they’d love to see David Lynch adapt Daniel Clowes’ A Velvet Glove Cast in Iron. “Seeing the two work together on this eerie, unhinged story, which blends elements of Twin Peaks and the Manson family’s worst nightmares, would be a rare treat—or a total disaster. Luckily, Clowes has already anticipated the latter possibility; in the pages of Eightball, where Velvet Glove first appeared, he wrote a hilarious what-if story of its Hollywood adaptation, complete with happy ending, product placement, and cheesy classic-rock soundtrack.”

Catching Up with the Lynches, David and Jennifer

Phil Nugent — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 19:00:00 GMT

The Guardian recently sent two writers on different expeditions to track down David Lynch, currently camping out as Gaby Wood discovered, in "a steep, strange, snake of a street and sheer, straight steps is a set of concrete buildings clinging onto the side of the Hollywood Hills", and his daughter Jennifer, who's been busy clearing the ground for the U.K. release of her own second feature as a director, Surveillance. Wood's own feature is short on terrific new quotes from the great man, which probably reflects less on her journalistic abilities than on where Lynch's head is at these days: he's still deep in that "Film and me are quits!" space he's been promoting ever since he discovered digital video and made Inland Empire. Wood describes that work, accurately, as "a three-hour ode to impenetrability.") " 'I just love this camera,' Lynch says, in his nasal, deliberate, almost robotically enthusiastic voice. We are looking at a large chiaroscuro nude, which has been printed in two parts and hung on the wall, and Lynch is telling me about his Hasselblad digital. Unbelievable. Thirty-nine million pixels. The camera remembers something like 4,000 pieces of information per photograph. It is machine. It's a machine.' A look of delight passes across his face. 'It's just a glorious world,' he says.

It's nice to know that he's happy. Those who saw the documentary Lynch know that the director now spends a lot of time in his own "bunker", which includes offices and studios and recording equipment, piling up cigarette ashes while waiting for inspiration to hit. Word has apparently reached Lynch that he has nothing left to prove, and his attitude towards his future movie career seems to be that if he has a reason to make another film, he supposes he will. "Sometimes I get an idea for cinema. And when you get an idea that you fall in love with, this is a glorious day. That idea may just be 1a fragment, but it holds something. It might be a scene, or a part of a scene, or a character, or a way the character talks, a light or a feel ... You write that idea down. And thinking about that idea will bring other ideas in – there's a hook to it. And things start to emerge. And then you see, one day, a script. A script is just words to remind you of the ideas. And you follow that, but always staying on guard, in case other ideas come in, because a thing isn't finished till it's finished. And one day, it's finished." But if he never gets the money to make another movie, "I don't care. See, a painting is much cheaper than making a film. And photography is, you know, way cheap. So if I get an idea for a film, there are many ways to get it together and go realize that film. There's really nothing to be afraid of." In the meantime, he's returned to his first love, painting, and he also makes two-dimensional art works, and shoots photographs. He has a special fondness for nudes in factories--decaying factories, "factories [that] are defunct, celebrated for their decay and decomposition in a way that renders them organic," like the pencil factory in Eraserhead if it had spent a few decades under water.

Wood writes that "In the course of our interview Lynch had made (I felt) a series of didactic yet meaningless speeches of varying length, none of which lent itself to illustrating any particular point. But afterwards I found myself laughing, because I realised he was not so much unforthcoming as bordering on the Delphic. He is – unbudgingly, impenetrably, but nevertheless magnificently – a character of his own making. In his movies the characters who talk like this – a sort of scattershot guru-speak, in which sayings are either wise or total rubbish, depending on what sticks – are fortune-tellers, random ciphers or mysterious orchestrators of strange plots (the dancing dwarf in Twin Peaks, the Cowboy in Mulholland Drive, the witchy neighbour in Inland Empire). In other words, the most unnatural among the dramatis personae. But when you listen to Lynch you realise they are (in their delivery at least) the most natural, the most like him." It turns out that the Oracle of Missoula, Montana recently got married, for the fourth time. The new Missus Lynch is Emily Stofle, a 26-year-old actress who was in Inland Empire. (Before that, she played one of the victims of the title character in 2002's Ted Bundy.) Says Wood, "I'm not the first to wonder how someone who is so evangelically "blissed out" can live through the un-bliss of three divorces (he has a child from each marriage) and a well-publicised break up with Isabella Rossellini. To this Lynch will only say: 'We live in the field of relativity. Things change.' "

Visiting Jennifer Lynch, who's now 40, John Patterson failed to ask what she thinks of her new mommy. When Jennifer Lynch was 24, she was busy being raked over the coals for her ill-fated debut film, Boxing Helena. Bad as that movie was, it seems likely that the reaction to it would have been considerably less intense had its auteur's name been Ratskywatsky or something. "It had no chance to be seen through unbiased eyes. Did I know what I was doing? I knew what I was trying to do. And I think it's OK to fail at things. But it was the astonishing rage and, in particular, the suggestion that as a human being I didn't deserve to be loved ever again - something the National Organisation of Women actually said about me. Like, are you fucking kidding me? C'mon, even Hitler deserved to be loved - in fact a little love might have made him a way better guy. I had to retreat and wonder why the reaction to a movie could be so violent and so vitriolic. And there was hostility all over the world - there was no safe place. Whatever I got, I got in a personal way, directed right at me. I would have welcomed a serious discussion of the flaws and intentions of that film, but not a debate about whether I deserved to be alive."

Fortunately, Lynch--who Patterson describes as "rowdy, bawdy, sick-in-the-head funny and very fast with a quip"--was able to use the connection to her father to her benefit this time. "My father called me after he read the script a couple of years ago and he said, 'You're the sickest bitch I know!'" Thanks, Pop! But after Jennifer was unable to get funding for Surveillance, "he called ages later and said, 'What's happening with your movie?' and I said 'Zilch.' I told him I don't know if it's the material, if it's the 15 years raising a kid, if it's Boxing Helena, but nobody's interested. And he said, 'What if I put my name on it?' I'm like, 'C'mon Dad, you know how I feel about it.' Because, believe me, it's a big issue for me. But that day I typed: 'Executive producer: David Lynch', and within 48 hours I had more offers than I knew what to do with. I swear, any screenwriter wanting a little attention should just write 'Steven Spielberg' on their script. Who's checking?" The movie stars two veterans of her father's films, Bill Pullman and Julia Ormond, as investigators on the trail of a serial killer, and involves the viewpoint of an eight-year-old girl who picks up on things that the adults around her miss. "I wanted to play with the wisdom and clarity of a child's perception," says Lynch. "And also I like the idea of the serial killer movie in a way that's not just 'cut 'em up, kill all the sluts'. Although, God knows, I did some of that too. But I wanted terror in broad daylight, in a place that outwardly seems so safe...The second you start being brave about something that terrifies you and start really digging into it, confronting it head on, that's great; it's the cowards who say, 'Nah, not a problem.' And that's a real way in which - as bumper-stickerish as it sounds - art can save your fucking life. You need a place to put all that stuff."

Eddie Murphy, "Dreamgirls" Director to Collaborate on Richard Pryor Biopic

Phil Nugent — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 20:30:00 GMT

It's been reported that Eddie Murphy is prepared to waive his usual fee for the chance to play Richard Pryor in Is It Something I Said?, a biopic of the late comic that's being planned by Bill Condon; Condon's last movie, Dreamgirls, earned Murphy the first Oscar nomination of his 25-year-old movie career. It's not the first time that Pryor and Murphy's names have been uttered in the same breath. In the early 1980s, when both men were at the height of their box office appeal, the freshly hatched Murphy was featured on the cover of People magazine alongside Pryor and often described as his comedic heir, and in 1989, the two co-starred in Harlem Nights, the only movie that Murphy has ever directed. Pryor himself took directing credits on two features: his final stand-up performance feature, the 1983 Here and Now, and the autobiographical Jo Jo Dancer...Your Life Is Calling, in which Pryor played a comedian who rises from being the son of a Peoria, Illinois prostitute to a rich and beloved celebrity entertainer who can't manage his love life or his taste for addictive substances. A shapeless mess that restages, to diminishing returns, many scenes from Pryor's life that he had already turned into comic gold in his stand-up act, the movie is perhaps most notable for portraying the calamitous 1980 event when Pryor suffered life-threatening over more than half his body, as a suicide attempt, with Pryor's character lighting himself on fire after dousing his clothes with rum. Pryor's injuries had been officially reported as having been the result of a freebasing accident, but some ten years after Jo Jo came out, Pryor, in a book and in interviews, would describe it in much the same way it was shown in the movie. By that time, the comic had been physically waylaid by multiple sclerosis.

The idea that Eddie Murphy is the best possible fit for the role of Richard Pryor may be one of those ideas that seems so obvious that the first thing that should be done with it is to re-examine it. Even back when the two of them were sharing magazine covers, it was clear that they had little enough in common in terms of presence, image, shared experiences and preferred subject matter that the talk of Murphy as being "the new Richard Pryor" seemed redolent of a bygone era when it was thought that America could only handle one black superstar in any particular medium at a time. Whatever was going on in his personal life, there was always something childlike about Richard Pryor, whereas Murphy could credit his fast rise to the fact that, even when he was barely out of his teens, there seemed to be a forty-year veteran of the Vegas club circuit inside him. In the age of Reagan and Rambo, he had his biggest success in what were essentially action pictures (48 Hrs., Beverly Hills Cop and its sequel) in which he functioned as both the gun-waving hero and the wisecracking comic relief; he may have been willing to double as a thief (in 48 Hrs.) or dress down (in the Beverly Hills Cop movies) if it would help audiences relate to him as an "underdog", but he was still an authority figure at heart, compared to Pryor's eternal outsiders. In this week's "Random Roles" feature in The Onion, Margot Kidder says that the key to the much-married Pryor's great appeal was partly his "vulnerability"; that's not a quality that ever turned up much in Murphy's character descriptions.

Pryor himself had a long-cherished, off-and-on plan to star in a bipic about Charlie Parker, who would eventually be portrayed by Forest Whitaker in Clint Eastwood's Bird, which came out in 1988, around the same time that Pryor's movie career wa winding down. (Pryor's last starring role was in the 1991 Another You. He later contributed cameo roles to two movies, Larry Bishop's 1996 Mad Dog Time and David Lynch's 1997 Lost Highway, made after M.S. had him firmly in its grip, which might not have been the greatest idea in show business history.) We'll never know whether Pryor, under ideal laboratory conditions, would have been able to get far enough outside his own very powerful persona to convincingly play Charlie Parker, though another lacerating stand-up comedian, Dick Gregory, gave a performance, as a character based on Parker in the 1967 Sweet Love, Bitter, that compares quite favorably to the one Whitaker gave in Bird. One thing that Pryor, Gregory, and Parker had in common was that they had all spent their young adulthood struggling to make it in a tough business; it's no insult to Murphy's talent or imagination as an actor that, having achieved superstardom at twenty on Saturday Night Live, he may not be able to really imagine what drove someone like Pryor, who worked him way up from performing in strip clubs and neighborhood bars to mainstream success in Vegas and on TV, only to dynamite and rebuild his career from scratch because he felt that his early success was a betrayal of what he really knew. There's also the fact that, at 47, Murphy is already much closer to being the age where Pryor's career began rolling itself up than the point at which he was firing on all cylinders and shooting off sparks. I'll keep my fingers crossed, but I'd be more interested in seeing him played by someone like Dave Chappelle--someone who's not just funny and talented, but whose concept of show business success has traps and demons in it.

Morning Deal Report: Big Screen "Galactica"

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 15:00:00 GMT

As you may have read somewhere around here, the 81st Annual Academy Awards took place last night – actually, I think they just handed out the last award about 15 minutes ago – and Slumdog Millionaire was the big winner. Meanwhile at the box office, it was a whole other story as Madea Goes to Jail took the top honors with an astounding $41.1 million haul. I think Tyler Perry gets to keep pretty much all of that, doesn’t he? Taken and Coraline held strong at second and third, but Friday the 13th plummeted 81%, taking in only $7.8 million.

Battlestar Galactica may be coming to the big screen, but fans of the current SciFi Channel incarnation shouldn’t get too excited. “Universal has quietly entered into negotiations with Glen A. Larson to write and produce a big-screen version of the property he created,” per The Hollywood Reporter. “The movie effort would have no connection to the series and would relaunch the story in a new medium. However, staples such as the characters Adama, Starbuck, and Baltar will remain.” Here’s hoping they bring back the adorable robot dog Muffit.

The good news is: David Lynch has a new project. The bad news is: it’s Twittering. Yes, you can follow the real David Lynch here for such scintillating daily insight as “You can’t fight City Hall” and “Let a smile be your umbrella.” Lynch confirms his tweeting (or whatever the kids today are calling it) in the video below:

Bloody Valentines: The Worst Relationships in Cinema History (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 21:00:00 GMT

To paraphrase Edwin Starr: Valentine’s Day! Huh! What is it good for?

Well...depends who you ask: it certainly didn’t work out too well for the poor Roman priest who got himself beaten, stoned, beheaded (and later canonized) for nuptializing Christian couples out of season, nor for any of the other Catholic martyrs named Valentine whose various grisly fates somehow led to the annual tradition of grown-ass men dropping seventy bucks a pop to have teddy bears in boxer shorts with hearts on them delivered to grown-ass women in the middle of winter.

Scholars blame Geoffrey Chaucer for ruining February 14th by linking a bunch of obscure Roman Catholic feast days with the aggravating concept of courtly love, thus stressing out singles and couples alike for centuries to come with unrealistic, unattainable expectations about all the perfect moments of romance we’re all supposed to be having (instead of weeping lonely tears into our popcorn at solo matinees of He’s Just Not That Into You or forgetting to buy a frickin’ card for our significant others and never hearing the goddamn frickin’ end of it).

It should, of course, be remembered that St. Valentine’s ol’ pagan buddy Cupid is the son of both a goddess of love AND a god of war, and thus not all the couples the little bastard shoots with his arrows wind up living happily ever after. Therefore, as a cheery reminder that things could always be worse in this infernal season of l’amour, your friends-with-benefits here at the Screengrab are proud to present BLOODY VALENTINES: THE WORST RELATIONSHIPS IN CINEMA HISTORY!

PROF. IMMANUEL RATH & LOLA LOLA, THE BLUE ANGEL (1930)

A sort of preemptive riposte to the 20th century's literary canon of professors effectively leveraging their intellectual heft for the purpose of seducing their students, The Blue Angel has stuffy Rath (Emil Jannings) falling for cabaret singer Lola Lola (Marlene Dietrich) when he goes down to waggle his finger in her face and tell her to stop distracting his students. Instead, she captivates and reduces him to a pathetic spectacle, as pathetic in the public's eyes as he is in hers. If Rath had at least a little touch of submissiveness in him, maybe he'd enjoy being constantly humiliated in a sub-dom 24/7 way; as it is, Lola reduces him to a man with no free will. Dietrich's star was made in this first collaboration with Josef von Sternberg; meanwhile, Jannings' performance is frequently looked down upon as an anachronistic acting style from another age. Which actually makes perfect sense for the character he's playing. As a depiction of a May-December, intellectual-emptyheaded, pompous-earthy, and every other kind of mismatch possible relationship, The Blue Angel isn't painful only because it's more conducive to distanced contemplation and sarcastic laughter than visceral empathy. Should you have extra time at work (should you still be employed, in fact), some kind soul has uploaded the whole German version to YouTube, but the embedding has been disabled, so enjoy the trailer above, then click here to watch the whole thing.

GEORGE & MARTHA, WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? (1966)

There may be bloodier couples in the history of cinema, but there are none whose hatred burned brighter. George and Martha – a small-time failure of a college professor and his crude harpy of a wife, played by real-life couple Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor – may not want to kill each other, but it’s only because dead they would be past inflicting pain, which is all that keeps them going. Considering that Martha speaks of their marriage in terms of total warfare, and George’s idea of whimsical banter is to point a rifle at his wife’s head during a cocktail party, it’s no surprise that this movie has become shorthand for violently feuding couples. This is a couple that’s beyond mere feuding, but whose initial passion has never soured: it’s been transformed into something just as fiery, a loathing built on complete knowledge of, and complete dependence upon, one another. The film shocks us right out of the box by presenting us with a couple whose fury and loathing for each other is deeper than the love in an any big-screen romance; it then shocks us even further by showing how deeply, albeit bizarrely, they care for each other, and how much more profound their relationship is than the seemingly happy couple that contrasts them.

MICHAEL & KAY CORLEONE, THE GODFATHER (1972) and THE GODFATHER, PART II (1974)

There's a lesson here that a lot of you girls would do well to heed: when your boyfriend runs off to Sicily without a word, gets married to a perfect stranger he met over there about ten minutes after he got off the boat, and then, after somebody sticks dynamite under the hood of the car and blows her sky high, he shows up where you work, again without a word, and announces that, lucky you, he's looking to fill the position of second wife and he's prepared to consider your qualifications -- honey, take a breath. If you feel swayed by his liquid brown eyes and passionate words, try and think about how you're going to feel waking up next to him in a few years, when the face is set off by a toupee like an earth-tone fireworks display and that insinuating voice keeps erupting "HOO-hah!" Then you tell Casanova that as much as you appreciate the offer, you feel that you might be overqualified on account of your ability to count above ten without taking off your shoes. Unless you've got some kind of fetish for having doors slammed in your face.

JACK & WENDY TORRANCE, THE SHINING (1980)

If you've seen The Shining as many times as I have – and there's very little chance of that – you've probably spent some time speculating about the marriage of Jack and Wendy Torrance. How did they meet? What was the attraction? When did they decide to get married, and didn't they have any friends or family to talk them out of it? Some would point to the obvious incompatibility of the brooding, hot-tempered Jack (Jack Nicholson) and the frail, skittish Wendy (Shelly Duvall) as a flaw in the movie, but to those people I would pose this query: Do you know any married people? Because if you do, surely you are aware that for every couple that seems inevitable and perfect for each other, there are at least three that make no sense whatsoever on any rational level. It's easy to blame Jack for the eventual dissolution of the relationship. He is the guy who starts talking to ghosts and running around with an axe, after all. But let's not let Wendy entirely off the hook. She did go along with a plan that entailed living in total isolation with a man who has a history of alcohol abuse and domestic violence (no matter how much she may have tried to downplay it), and she brought her young son Danny into it. At the very least, she's guilty of poor judgment, but at least it all works out in the end.

FRANK BOOTH & DOROTHY VALLENS, BLUE VELVET (1986)

Frank Booth and Dorothy Vallens, the two emblems of maniacal deviance and defiled virtue (respectively) in David Lynch’s surrealistic neo-noir Blue Velvet, may share things...but love isn’t one of them. Dorothy (Isabella Rossellini) is a nightclub singer with a daughter and an air of mystery, which – as Kyle MacLachlan’s amateur sleuth Jeffrey peeps after being shoved, post-blowjob, into a closet – is due to her association with Frank (Dennis Hopper). Frank is a sociopath holding Dorothy’s husband hostage so she might sexually gratify him, and the twisted sadomasochistic tryst (replete with helium inhalations and erotic asphyxiation) that Jeffrey witnesses while hiding in that closet may stand as some of the most disturbingly unsettling material ever shot by the peerlessly out-there Lynch. The couple’s relationship ultimately ends when Jeffrey shoots Frank dead, but this being Lynch, the ensuing happy ending is laced with perversion, due in part to the earlier suggestion that Dorothy, conditioned to Frank’s beatings, has been warped into associating pleasure with pain.

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

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

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: Jan. 24-30, 2009

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 22:00:00 GMT

Hey, movie lovers. Screengrab’s newest intern here, bringing you the highlight reel for the week that was. And what a week, am I right? Personally I could have done without it, but what are you gonna do? By the way, does anyone out there want to take over the Morning Deal Report? I’m not saying the position is necessarily open…but hit me up at my PayPal account and I’ll see what I can do.

The hottest thing going this week is Smells Like Indie Spirit: Our Favorite Sundance Films of All Time (Parts One, Two, Three, Four and Five), but there’s some other great stuff as well. Let’s give a warm welcome to the newest Screengrabber, Nick Schager, who makes his debut this week reviewing Medicine for Melancholy and Serbis. We’ve also got the two latest Unwatchables, A*P*E and Meatballs 4. And I’m just getting warmed up! Be sure to check out:

Sundance Do-Overs: When the Buzz Turns to Fizzle

Science! Solving the Italian Job Cliffhanger

Screengrab Review: The Shark Is Still Working

David Lynch Will Teach Your Children to Fly

The View Through The View-Master: Peter And The Wolf

David Lynch Will Teach Your Children to Fly

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 21:00:00 GMT

Those who have read his book Catching the Big Fish or caught any of his lectures or interviews in the past few years know that David Lynch is a strong proponent of transcendental meditation. Now the Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive director is putting together “a ‘global benefit concert’ in New York, featuring Paul McCartney, Moby, Sheryl Crow, Eddie Vedder and Donovan, to raise funds to teach meditative techniques to schoolchildren.”

The overall goal of the benefit is, of course, world peace. “If a further 1% can be persuaded to take up yogic flying in groups, world peace would follow, according to the Transcendental Meditation Movement, of which Lynch is the public face,” The Guardian reports. Admittedly, I’ve never been a Maharishi follower, but I have seen Lynch’s lectures and I don’t think I’ve ever heard him mention “yogic flying.” So I did a little YouTube excavation and came up with this National Geographic clip:

Whoa! Are you telling me David Lynch can do that? I mean, I’ve seen him cook quinoa on the Inland Empire DVD, and that was quite a feat, but this is something else. I think he should do this in his next movie. And maybe he will: “For Lynch fans, the wait for his next creative work could end in disappointment: his next project is a ‘road movie’ about touring TM around the globe.”

Related:
David Lynch Enjoys Damn Fine Egg Salad Sandwich
In Heaven: When David Lynch Met Devo

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 Live Blogs The Golden Globes

Andrew Osborne — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 00:39:00 GMT

(All times TiVo approximate)

7:33 - Nice silly bow tie, Brad.

7:35 - Way to step on your annoying daughter’s dress, Billy Ray.

7:38 - Good Lord! Marisa Tomei is wearing the puffy shirt! Is her next movie The Pirates of Penzance?

7:41 - Brangelina blow off Ryan Seacrest...heh-heh-heh...

7:46 - My lovely Polish bride Amy acquaints me with the Golden Globes dinner menu:

APPETIZERS
California organic field green salad with white asparagus
Crisp apricot dill goat cheese in phylo and poached pear
Maple syrup apple cider vinaigrette

ENTREES
Grilled prime tenderloin of beef with green tea pearl and sautéed aromatic Asian spice marinated sea bass
Sherry wine yuzu pepper sauce
Grilled king oyster mushroom
Jicama, Romanesco and potato onion croquette

DESSERT
Golden chocolate Globe with organic yogurt pistachio mousse

7:49 - The E! Channel breaks out their "Star Tracker" technology, wherein video arrows point out the stars to us in wide shots of the red carpet. Note to E! - Just because you CAN do it doesn't mean you SHOULD do it.

7:50 - Jeremy Piven appears on the red carpet. Apparently his mercury levels have returned to normal. Thank you, baby Jesus!

7:53 - Amy is sick of all the sand colored couture. Her favorite gowns of the evening: Drew Barrymore and Christina Applegate. Me, I could eat me some Anne Hathaway with a spoon.

8:02 - Amy thinks J. Lo is wearing one of Cher's Bob Mackie gowns from a 1970s time machine.

8:04 - Okay, I haven't seen The Reader and I love Kate Winslet, but...really? Best Supporting Actress? She must give really good Nazi.

8:06 - Damn, that Kate Winslet is adorable. Meanwhile...um...is Sting in that production of Pirates of Penzance with Marisa Tomei?

8:10 - BROOOOOOOOOOCCCEE!!!!!

8:11 - I'm trying to figure out who or what Darren Aronofsky looks like in his funny weaselly moustache. A villain in a Preston Sturges film? The Guy Fawkes mask in V for Vendetta? Meanwhile, Amy thinks Rumer Willis (in the background as a Golden Globes girl) may have had her chin shaved, since her big square potato head is no longer quite as prominent and she actually looks kinda cute. From a distance.

8:13 - Robert Downey Jr. apparently stuck his toe in the same electrical outlet as Drew Barrymore.

8:18 - Tom Wilkinson has apparently been drinking since noon.

8:20 - Hooray for Laura Dern! Amy's happy she kept her original nose, and I'm happy David Lynch used his mysterious powers of transcendental meditation to help her win.

8:25 - What happened to Don Cheadle's hair?

8:27 - Amy does not care about Eva Mendes. Even if she is a proud Cuban-American. (But we both love whoever that guy was she introduced...I missed what he said because I was Googling Eva Mendes and found this great shot of her plumber's crack while Amy drools over Hamm, John Hamm:

8:31 - Both my mother and Amy's mother call to express outrage over Hamm getting robbed. Amy dubs it Hammgate.

8:36 - Ricky Gervais = hilarious. Tells Kate Winslet, "See? I told you...do a Holocaust movie and you'll win awards!"

8:39 - The hobbits from the Fellowship of the Ring...sorry, I mean, the Jonas Brothers, present the award for Best Foregone Conclusion...I mean, uh, Best Animated Feature. Amy says the middle Jonas Brother looks like the guy she lost her virginity to (although I saw the guy recently and he no longer has that silky Jonas hair...or any hair, really).

8:41 - Amy wants Johnny Depp, meanwhile, to simply wash his hair.

8:43 - Sally Hawkins wins Best Actress for Comedy! I couldn't be happier! Amy is also happy for Sally, but wants to feed her skinny ass some brie.

8:45 - Sally Hawkins is full of love. And, possibly, nitrous oxide.

8:54 - Cheadle: good bald. Ralph Fiennes: not so much. (Amy, meanwhile, loves loves loves Drew Barrymore's dress.)

8:58 - Ledger wins. Universal sadness.

9:03 - Meanwhile, over on CNN, they're interviewing Priscilla Presley, who apparently got some cut-rate plastic surgery that left her looking like a Dick Tracy villain.

9:07 - Colin Farrell has that weird Aronofsky moustache, too! Trend alert!

9:10 - Waltz With Bashir guy: best acceptance speech of the evening.

9:11 - Maggie Gyllenhaal wears my aunt's drapes. Shirley Maclaine is either stoned or just got hit in the face with a frying pan.

9:13 - Paul Giamatti, for some reason, decided to come dressed as Judah Friedlander.

9:18 - Mmm! Look at that sexy Seth Rogen! Amy prefers fat Seth. Either way, Mickey Rourke is probably gonna kick his ass for that coke-snorting joke.

9:21 - What did David Duchovny mouth to the camera while blowing a kiss? Amy's guess: "I love hookers."

9:23 - Alec Baldwin thanks his vile pig of a daughter. Awwww.

9:31 - Giamatti!

9:36 - I don't have any little snarky comment to make, but I must just pause here to acknowledge the comic brilliance of Tracy Morgan, edging past the Waltz With Bashir guy for best speech. (Lorny Mikes!)

9:41 - Didn't mention it at the time, but controversy breaks out here in Somerville over Glenn Close's outfit. Amy says age-appropriate. Her mother, phoning in from New Hampshire, says early '80s Boca Raton.

9:43 - "Mmm...Pierce Brosnan," quoth Amy. "Nothin' wrong with that." She also likes him because he has a fat wife.

9:46 - P. Diddy and Kate Beckinsale step down off a wedding cake to present a nice Indian man with the award for Best Soundtrack (for Slumdog Millionaire).

9:48 - Nice boobs, Tina Fey!

9:54 - Scorcese!

9:58 - Much whispering about the awe-inspiring wonder of Steven Spielberg and his gift to the art of cinema. Bathroom break!

10:06 - All right, snark aside: (A) Spielberg throws some love to Scorcese, which is nice, but (B) that montage of Spielberg movies reminds you...damn, Steven Spielberg sure made a bunch of good-ass movies. (And, y'know, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull). This speech sure is going on, though.

10:09 - Spielberg: still talking.

10:13 - Is it more that Emma Thompson's really big or that Dustin Hoffman's really small?

10:15 - Danny Boyle wins Best Director. Again, the toe-in-electric-outlet hair. Trend alert!

10:19 - Amy says Colin Farrell looks less like a pubic hair with his hair cut short. And I'm happy to see the Bruges love: rent it now! (By the way, I didn't realize when I put In Bruges on my 2008 Top Ten list that the movie's writer/director, Martin McDonagh, is also the playwright responsible for The Lieutenant of Inishmore, the bloodiest play (and one of the most entertaining) I've ever seen on stage. If you get a chance, be sure to check it out!) I have plenty of time to write about all this, incidentally, because Colin Farrell will apparently never stop talking. "You're not Steven Spielberg!" says Amy, who hates him. Me, I thought his speech was kinda sweet.

10:29 - Hayek, Johansson and Cruz all enter my consciousness at once. Amy breaks out the smelling salts.

10:31 - Borat!

10:32 - Really? The Golden Globe audience boos a Madonna joke? Hmm. While I ponder this strange development, Vicky Cristina Barcelona wins best comedy/musical, which makes me think of Salma, Scarlett and Penelope again...mmm...

10:36 - Oh, wait...add Freida Pinto to that fantasy...mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm...

10:39 - Kate Winslet momentarily forgets that Angelina Jolie was also nominated for Best Actress. Angelina Jolie: not happy. Mark Wahlberg says hi to my mother for me.

10:45 - Mad Men? Rules.

10:49 - All the people who wouldn't return Mickey Rourke's calls last year are now very happy for Mickey Rourke.

10:50 - Mickey Rourke thanks David Unger for his balls.

10:52 - Darren Aronofsky flips the bird on national television. "Nice, real nice," says Amy's mother, phoning in from New Hampshire. "John Ford would never do that."

10:54 - Mickey Rourke thanks Scott Franklin for breaking his balls. Somehow Axl Rose was also involved with The Wrestler, making it the New Jersey-est movie of all time. Finally Rourke thanks his dogs. "That's the kinda shit you wait up all night for," says Amy.

10:58 - And...Slumdog! The guy accepting the award jumps the Aronofsky train with a verbal finger flip...trend alert!

Anyway, thanks for playing along at home! And now, to recap...the complete list of winners:

Best Motion Picture - Drama

Winner: Slumdog Millionaire (2008)

Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Drama

Winner: Mickey Rourke for The Wrestler (2008)

Best Television Series - Drama

Winner: "Mad Men" (2007)

Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture - Drama

Winner: Kate Winslet for Revolutionary Road (2008)

Best Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy

Winner: Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008)

Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy

Winner: Colin Farrell for In Bruges (2008)

Best Director - Motion Picture

Winner: Danny Boyle for Slumdog Millionaire (2008)

Best Performance by an Actress in a Television Series - Musical or Comedy

Winner: Tina Fey for "30 Rock" (2006)

Best Original Score - Motion Picture

Winner: Slumdog Millionaire (2008) - A.R. Rahman

Best Television Series - Musical or Comedy

Winner: "30 Rock" (2006)

Best Performance by an Actor in a Mini-Series or a Motion Picture Made for Television

Winner: Paul Giamatti for "John Adams" (2008)

Best Performance by an Actor in a Television Series - Musical or Comedy

Winner: Alec Baldwin for "30 Rock" (2006)

Best Screenplay - Motion Picture

Winner: Slumdog Millionaire (2008) - Simon Beaufoy

Best Performance by an Actress in a Mini-Series or a Motion Picture Made for Television

Winner: Laura Linney for "John Adams" (2008)

Best Foreign Language Film

Winner: Vals Im Bashir (2008)

Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture

Winner: Heath Ledger for The Dark Knight (2008)

Best Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for Television

Winner: "John Adams" (2008)

Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy

Winner: Sally Hawkins for Happy-Go-Lucky (2008)

Best Animated Film

Winner: WALL·E (2008)

Best Performance by an Actress in a Television Series - Drama

Winner: Anna Paquin for "True Blood" (2007)

Best Performance by an Actor in a Television Series - Drama

Winner: Gabriel Byrne for "In Treatment" (2008)

Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Series, Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for Television

Winner: Laura Dern for Recount (2008) (TV)

Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Series, Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for Television

Winner: Tom Wilkinson for "John Adams" (2008)

Best Original Song - Motion Picture

Winner: The Wrestler (2008)("The Wrestler")

Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture

Winner: Kate Winslet for The Reader (2008)

Screengrab's 2008 Person of the Year

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Next to People's Sexiest Man Alive, there is no more coveted honor in Hollywood than Screengrab's Person of the Year. At least, that's what we're hoping; we've never actually done it before. After combing the archives over the past year, I have determined the five individuals who recieved the most coverage - for good or for ill - here at our humble blog. Can you guess Screengrab's Person of the Year? The top five, after the jump:

5. Zooey Deschanel

Described by our Phil Nugent as "the unofficial muse of the Screengrab," Ms. Deschanel has an open invitation to our New Year's Eve party. We celebrated her SXSW performance, her survival of the Shyamalan bomb The Happening, her role in the surprisingly influential All the Real Girls, and her "Sweet Ballad" in Yes Man. Call us, Zooey!

4. Werner Herzog

The year in Werner news began with the director reminiscing over his gravedigging days with Errol Morris. Later, Herzog expounded on his many unmellow moods. More shocking developments arrived with the Cannes Film Festival, at which it was announced that Herzog would remake The Bad Lieutenant, a very bad idea indeed. Abel Ferrara agreed, and a celebrity feud was born. Next, Werner signed a cocktail napkin deal to collaborate with fellow weirdo David Lynch. In the end, Herzog redeemed himself with the acclaimed (here, anyway) Encounters at the End of the World.

3. Heath Ledger

Dying at the beginning of the year is perhaps not the most satisfying path toward Screengrab Person of the Year. We ran the breaking news of his death, the initial coroner's report, the Esquire diaries, the fate of Terry Gilliam's Doctor Parnassus and the somewhat unseemly buzz on Ledger's Oscar chances. We'd prefer he was only on this list for his performance as the Joker, but that's life (and death).

2. Uwe Boll

We're a little hurt that our favorite crapmeister hasn't been in touch to thank us for all the publicity. We've covered everything from the petition urging him to retire to his many feuds to the efforts of a gum company to end his career. We've reviewed his Unwatchables Alone in the Dark and BloodRayne 2: Deliverance, and watched as theaters shunned Postal. Heck, Paul Clark even defended the man! Come on, Uwe. Take out an ad in Variety to thank us already.

1. Scarlett Johansson

Oh Scarlett, what would we do without you? I think you can tell the Screengrab is sharply divided over you. Phil Nugent, for one, has little use for you, as you can probably tell from posts like Scarlett Johansson, Yellow Journalism, Grammys Snub Scarlett, Toast Tia, Scarlett Johansson and Ryan Reynolds: 2 B 2-Gether 4-Ever and Scarlett Johansson Sings! Sings Tom Waits Songs!! Others of us - like me - are more enamored of your attributes, as you might glean from such posts as Scarlett Johansson, Cover Girl, Your Scarlett Johansson Music Video Has Arrived, and the all-time favorite, And Now Scarlett Johansson Making Out with Penelope Cruz. Either way, there's no denying it: Scarlett Johansson, you are Screengrab's 2008 Person of the Year!

Set Your DVR! December 29, 2008 - January 5, 2009

Hayden Childs — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Ugh. The post-Xmas blues are coming on strong. Hell, let's drink to baby new year 2009 and get it over with! Here's the DVR-worthy scoop for the coming week. Times are Central/Eastern and overnight movies go with the previous day.

Monday, December 29:

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is all wacky postmodernism, while The Sweet Hereafter is quite the opposite. The Player is somewhere in-between, but a lot funnier.

1:30/2:30 pm: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead on IFC.
9/10 pm: The Sweet Hereafter on IFC.
11 pm/12 am: The Player on IFC.
3:05/4:05 am: The Sweet Hereafter on IFC.

Tuesday, December 30:

The penultimate day of 2008 is all about the past and the future! Ang Lee's Ride With The Devil is a topsy-turvy Civil War film, while Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch is not just the greatest Western, but the greatest film that this country has ever produced. CQ is about a lost young screenwriter in swinging Europe during the 60s making a Barbarella-like retro-future flick. Soylent Green is, uh, people. Heaven's Gate is an amazing, dull something.

4:30/5:30 pm: Ride With the Devil on AMC.
7/8 pm: The Wild Bunch on AMC.
7:30/8:30 pm: CQ on IFC.
9/10 pm: Soylent Green on TCM.
1/2 am: Heaven’s Gate on TCM.

Wednesday, December 31:

It's the last day of the year, spend the sober part of it with America's (fictionalized) history. Stagecoach, the film that Orson Welles studied to learn how to direct movies, is surprisingly claustrophobic, given that it was shot in Monument Valley, and one of the most influential films ever made. And of course you've seen the two Sergio Leone movies before, but there's never a bad reason to watch one of the Man With No Name films.

5/6 am: Stagecoach on TCM.
9/10 am: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly on AMC.
1/2 pm: A Fistful of Dollars on AMC.

Thursday, January 1:

If you find yourself up early (or late), The Coen Brother's gangster film Miller's Crossing is the best movie they've made. TCM has a Cary Grant film festival running during the day, with the screwball classics Bringing Up Baby, The Awful Truth, and It Happened One Night (there's others, too, but these are the best). In prime time, TCM is running the original King Kong, which is an awe-inspiring movie. And Reservoir Dogs is, of course, the movie that launched Madonna's career.

8:15/9:15 am: Miller’s Crossing on IFC.
10/11 am: Bringing Up Baby on TCM.
2:30/3:30 pm: Miller’s Crossing on IFC.
3:15/4:15 pm: The Awful Truth on TCM.
5/6 pm: It Happened One Night on TCM.
7/8 pm: King Kong (1933) on TCM.
9:15/10:15 pm: Reservoir Dogs on IFC.
2:35/3:35 am: Reservoir Dogs on IFC.

Friday, January 2:

While IFC has the weirdness of Blue Velvet, TCM is running a Randolph Scott film festival. The first two were directed by Budd Boetticher and are great, sometimes dark, versions of the classic Western style. I don't know anything about The Cariboo Trail. Western Union was directed by Fritz Lang. Excuse me, I mean Fritz "Kick Ass" Lang.

6:25/7:25 pm: Blue Velvet on IFC.
7/8 pm: The Tall T on TCM.
8:30/9:30 pm: Ride Lonesome on TCM.
10/11 pm: The Cariboo Trail on TCM.
11:30 pm/12:30 am: Western Union on TCM.
2:15/3:15 am: Blue Velvet on IFC.

Saturday, January 3:

Saturday doesn't have much. The 47 Ronin is the first part of an epic samurai tale. I'm guessing the second half will run the following Saturday. And Modern Times is the classic Chaplin film.

7/8 am: The 47 Ronin, Part I on IFC.
7/8 pm: Modern Times on TCM.

Sunday, January 4:

Burden of Dreams is the documentary about the ambitious dreamer Werner Herzog slowly going insane while trying to film Fitzcarraldo, a movie about an ambitious dreamer who slowly goes insane. Harlan County, USA is a documentary about a mining strike in Kentucky in the 70s. After watching this movie, you may join the IWW. And Paranoid Park is Gus Van Sant's 2008 film about skateboarders and murder. It's in the vein of his Death Trilogy rather than his more conventional style, and it's topping many Best Of 2008 lists.

7/8 am: Burden of Dreams on IFC.
8:45/9:45 am Harlan County, USA on IFC.
12:05/1:05 pm: Burden of Dreams on IFC.
5:30/6:30 pm: Paranoid Park on IFC.

Monday, January 5:

Back to the grindstone again! In this case, the grindstone will be played by Andrei Tarkovsky's experimental film Solaris and Michael Winterbottom's trippy history of Tony Wilson and the Manchester scene, 24 Hour Party People.

1:35/2:35 pm: Solaris on IFC.
4:30/5:30 pm: 24 Hour Party People on IFC.

Dear Santa: Cinematic Comebacks We’d Most Like To See (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 16:30:00 GMT

SHERYL LEE

Lee was originally cast as the face (and corpse) of bewitching, self-destructive prom queen Laura Palmer on the equally bewitching and self-destructive TV classic Twin Peaks, yet David Lynch was so captivated by the actress that he created a recurring role for her on the show (as Laura’s doomed cousin Maddie), then later placed her at the center of the feature-length Peaks prequel, Fire Walk With Me, a critically-scorned movie that made Lee (and her iconic character) seem, to many, like a guest who’d overstayed her welcome. And yet, even if you’re one of the haters who viewed the film as an unnecessary, self-indulgent folly (rather than an undervalued masterpiece), take another look at Lee’s performance: yes, she gobbles like a turkey at one point (a moment frequently and too easily mocked), but she also commits herself to the role of an abuse victim on the brink of madness with the kind of frightening, vulnerable intensity that would have earned praise and awards buzz if not for the small screen (and Log Lady) associations. Since her fifteen minutes of fame (and undeserved ridicule), Lee has largely flown beneath the radar in projects more interested in her capacity for physical (rather than emotional) nakedness onscreen, but even so there have been some diamonds in the rough: the innocent in This World, Then The Fireworks, the innocent turned deadly in John Carpenter’s Vampires and, most notably (if least interestingly), in her almost comeback roll as the German girlfriend in Backbeat. Lately, Lee’s found a home back on television (most recently on Dirty Sexy Money...remind me to set my Tivo!), but I’d be fascinated to see what she’d bring to a meaty film role now that she’s been seasoned with all these extra years of rejection, experience and wisdom.

MICHAEL ALMEREYDA

After years of a steadily increasing profile on the arthouse circuit, Michael Almereyda made his best film yet, 2002's Happy Here And Now. After some festival showings, it promptly disappeared, only to be cynically resurrected by IFC after Katrina rendered its New Orleans setting suddenly marketable. The truth is that Almereyda's abstract feature doodles are even less marketable than those of his patron David Lynch, but — if you're on the right wavelength — they can also be totally ethereal and enveloping. Since Happy, he's made two documentaries (one of which I've seen — This So-Called Disaster, which lives down to its title), and which decidedly aren't his element. 2006's Tonight At Noon remains in some kind of post-production hell, and this year's New Orleans, Mon Amour didn't even get the token post-Katrina bounce after dropping at SXSW. What gives?

OWEN WILSON

This has nothing to do with Owen Wilson's personal life, which is frankly none of my business. But should he — after finishing what appears to be a contractually-mandated stint in A Night At The Museum 2 — still have any kind of relish for acting or film in general, it would be nice to see not the return of the Wilson who made lazy craptastic vehicles like Drillbit Taylor or You, Me & Dupree, but the thoughtful co-writer of Bottle Rocket and Rushmore and/or the brilliantly limited slacker comedian who single-handedly rewrote and saved films like Shanghai Noon and (yes, I'm serious) The Big Bounce. Hell, he can even make another The Minus Man if that's what it takes.

TOM GREEN

This one's purely personal. I think Freddy Got Fingered is a very funny movie (which is generally not even true for fans of The Tom Green Show). I even think Freddy Got Fingered is a surprisingly emotional and deeply felt examination of poisonous father-son bonds, a deeply felt apologia from Green to his dad for being so awful to him on the show, fueled by a totally sincere desire for reconciliation. You, on the other hand, may be with the majority of the planet, which finds it to be an abomination. Whatever the case, it's time to rescue Green from whatever web-interview-show purgatory he's fallen into. If nothing else, he can keep reminding dudes of the importance of testicular self-exams.

DAVE CHAPPELLE

This one's utterly universal; is there anyone who wasn't amused by Chappelle? Chappelle hasn't disappeared completely; he's known to show up in comedy clubs with little more than 24 hours' advance notice, and he interviewed James Lipton in November for Inside The Actor's Studio's 200th episode. That's all we get? No one can blame Chappelle for the entirely understandable qualms that led him to shut down his show, and it's totally fair if he wants to retreat to the "Fuck Hollywood" ranch. But Dave Chappelle's Block Party wasn't just a joyous neighborhood tribute (and Michel Gondry's best film); it showed a way out for Chappelle, a post-comic persona that allowed him to drop irony and prove a surprisingly affable host to 21st-century race relations. Whether as a comic or simply as a good guy to spend time with on-screen, we could use him back.

Click Here For Part One, Two & Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Vadim Rizov

Set Your DVR!: December 15 - 22, 2008

Hayden Childs — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 16:00:00 GMT

What a great week for movies on cable! Here’s what’s coming up that’s worth your time. In the spirit of the holidays, I’ve even gotten a little expansive. But this week brings another embarrassment of riches.

The times are, as always, in Central/Eastern format. Also, as always, please let me know in comments if you see something coming up that I’ve missed. I’ll try to add it to the regular column if I can, but my time will be tight in the next few weeks, so please don’t be too disappointed if I don’t get to your recommendation.

Monday, December 15:
2:45/3:45 pm: Mystery Train on IFC. Jim Jarmusch’s triptych about the strange charms of Memphis, TN.
6:25/7:25 pm: George Washington on IFC.

Tuesday, December 16:
3:25/4:25 am: Mystery Train on IFC.
6:50/7:50 am: George Washington on IFC.
7/8 am: Decision at Sundown on TCM. A Randolph Scott & Budd Boetticher Western, and that means good.
7:30/8:30 am: Batman on AMC. This is the 1966 Batman, the very definition of campy.
10:25/11:25 am: Howl’s Moving Castle on IFC. Miyazaki’s great animated film about war and magic and love and identity, presented here in the original Japanese with subtitles.
12:30/1:30 pm: George Washington on IFC.
4:05/5:05 pm: The Thin Red LIne on IFC. Malick’s unconventional anti-war drama is a force of nature.
5/6 pm: The Cincinnati Kid on TCM. What could be more exciting than Steve McQueen playing high-stakes poker?
7/8 pm: Shadow of a Doubt on TCM. Great little second-tier Hitchcock film that ought to be in the first tier.
11 pm/12 am: The Third Man on TCM. If you like movies and haven’t seen this, you MUST rectify your oversight immediately.

Wednesday, December 17:
8:30/9:30 pm: Death on the Nile on TCM. A Hercule Poirot mystery that was a favorite of mine when I was a kid. The nonstop excitement practically screams “heavyset Belgian detective!”
8/9 pm: The Thin Red Line on IFC.
11 pm/12 am: The New World on IFC. That's a lot of Malick for one sitting!

Thursday, December 18:
1:30/2:30 am: The Thin Red Line on IFC.
4:25/5:25 am: The New World on IFC.
9:15/10:15 am: The Naked City on TCM. One of the greatest film noirs.
10:30/11:30 pm: Blade Runner on SCIFI. Always worth a viewing.
11 pm/12 am: Vanishing Point on FMC. As the Zen koan says, -There is no why. There is only Kowalski driving through the desert.

Friday, December 19:
12/1 am: Before Sunset on WE. I try not to mention movies that will be broken by commercials, but this one, a sequel to 1995’s Before Sunrise, has a certain charm in its older, wiser take on young love.
1:30/2:30 am: Elephant on IFC. Dreamy Van Sant flick about high school snipers.
3/4 am: Vanishing Point on FMC.
8:45/9:45 am: Paths of Glory on TCM.
5:30/6:30 pm: The Others on OXYGEN. Pleasantly creepy ghost story starring Nicole Kidman.
6:15/7:15 pm: The Player on IFC. Altman’s tour de force “conventional Hollywood” film, which starts with an extended homage to Touch of Evil and proceeds to tear down the walls of Old Hollywood.
8:30/9:30 pm: The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou on IFC. Many Wes Anderson fans felt that this was the moment when his whimsy and prop fetish finally overwhelmed his ability to tell a story. I think there’s a beating heart in this story, but The Darjeeling Limited was an unpleasant stillborn mess.
11 pm/12 am: The Face of Another on IFC. Brilliant and creepy Japanese horror film about the slippery nature of identity.

Saturday, December 20:
2/3 am: The Face of Another on IFC.
5:30/6:30 am: The Ox-Bow Incident on AMC.
7/8 am: The Hidden Fortress on IFC. Akira Kurosawa’s tale of a princess in peril, swept away by war, protected by her loyal general, and kept constantly on the verge of trouble by a couple of bumbling peasants. Reportedly one of the major inspirations for Star Wars.
7/8 am: The Others on OXYGEN.
7:15/8:15 am: My Darling Clementine on AMC. Iconic John Ford Western about the shootout at the OK Corral.
2:30/3:30 pm: 8 Women on LOGO.
5:35/6:35 pm: Gosford Park on IFC. Robert Altman’s brilliant upstairs/downstairs Edwardian murder mystery.
8:30/9:30 pm: Mulholland Dr. on LOGO. One of David Lynch’s best films, propelled by dream-logic and horror.

Sunday, December 21:
8:45/9:45 am: Kiss of Death on FMC. Top-notch film noir. Unfortunately, it’s playing at the same time as...
8:45/9:45 am: The Testament of Dr. Mabuse on IFC. Fritz Lang’s 1933 thriller that didn’t just invent the procedural, but built it on a parable about a crime boss able to mesmerize his subordinates with his words and imagery. Lang fled the Nazis for America almost immediately after its release. The ability of many of the scenes to retain their shock value today is a testament to this movie's sheer brilliance.
12:15/1:15 pm: Gosford Park on IFC.

Monday, December 22:
2:45/3:45 am: The 400 Blows on TCM. Francois Truffaut’s incredibly powerful ode to child neglect and juvenile delinquency.
7/8 am: Au Revoir, Les Enfants on IFC. Fantastic Louis Malle flick about a boarding school in France during the Nazi occupation that’s hiding a young Jew.
11 am/12 pm: Bringing Up Baby on TCM. A screwball comedy classic that everyone should see at least once in this all-too-short life.
12:30/1:30 pm: Au Revoir, Les Enfants on IFC.

In Other Blogs: The Movie Killer

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Film critics may be disappearing from the pages of daily newspapers by the dozen, but it’s still not happening fast enough for some in Hollywood. Specifically, as Patrick Goldstein writes in The Big Picture, New York Times critic Manohla Dargis is feared and loathed by studio brass. “It's an open secret in indie Hollywood that no one wants Manohla Dargis to review their movie, fearing that the outspoken critic will tear their film limb from limb. It's the ultimate backhanded compliment, since what they really fear is Manohla's persuasiveness -- that she'll write a review whose combination of vitriolic snarkiness and intellectual heft will actually persuade high-brow moviegoers to drop the film from their must-see list. (To be fair, she can be equally passionate about films she loves; for example, Synecdoche, New York, or anything by David Lynch.)… No one blinks an eye when a critic eviscerates a dumb summer comedy -- that's a fair target. It's the filmmakers who've aimed high and been brought to their knees by a Dargis pan who feel as if they've been gored for sport. You might say Manohla occupies a unique perch: She's the critic you love to read, just as long as you're not reading about your movie.”

Karina Longworth takes issue with Goldstein at Spoutblog. “It’s almost as if Goldstein is advocating for a kind of affirmative action for art (or, at least, artsy) films: all pictures may be on a level playing field in Manohla’s eyes, but a certain type of picture should be given special consideration for at least trying to be art, even if it fails… I guess it’s not that surprising that Goldstein’s attack on Manohla would resemble the faux-populist, ‘Let’s see you do better’ line of the over-protective commenter class. But if he’s actually suggesting that critics should allow “empathy” for the architects of blatant awards bait to temper their judgements, then this might be his harshest anti-criticism statement yet.”

At Beyond the Multiplex, Andrew O’Hehir chats with Steven Soderbergh about Che. ‘It was still, for a long time, one script. And it was becoming really unwieldy. And worse than that, because it was so long, we were still trying to make it into one film, or one normal-length film. The themes were really, really short, and you really couldn't go into any detail about anything and it started to feel like a two-hour trailer for a four-hour movie. And that's when I suggested busting it in half…My attitude was like, "Look, in nature, when a cell gets too big, it divides in order to survive. That's what we've got here. That's what we have to do." And I think, in retrospect, it was the right thing to do. Now I look at it and wish we'd just gone to HBO and done 10 hours.”

Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule pays tribute to Forrest J. Ackerman with a video presentation: My Visit to the Ackermansion. “In 1998 my wife and I made a pilgrimage to the Ackermansion and, some 20 or so years after my obsession with Famous Monsters had been tabled, I finally got to meet the man who had meant so much to me in the formative years of my film education. I brought along a video camera and taped the entire affair, a glimpse inside the halls of the most famous movie mansion of them all…if you never got a chance to take the trip yourself, spend some time with the Ackermonster and enjoy him doing what he enjoyed most—interacting with fans and reliving a life well spent chronicling his beloved history of horror.”

Year-end lists are trickling in. Marshall Fine’s top ten at Hollywood and Fine is topped by Revolutionary Road. “Director Sam Mendes returns to suburbia circa 1956 and reteams Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet in this film version of Richard Yates’ novel. The acting is terrific – nuanced yet passionate – and Mendes captures the novel’s era-defining feeling of seekers putting their dreams on hold to chase conventional success.” Nathan Lee has five underrated films that deserve your love, including Mother of Tears. “Dario Argento’s deranged b-movie extravaganza about the uncorking of a witch from an ancient urn that ushers in the second Fall of Rome is the most fun I’ve had at the movies…ever?” Hello, Netflix!

Take Five: Van Sant

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 21:30:00 GMT

Gus Van Sant is certainly one of the most curious figures in contemporary American cinema. He pioneered a very specific breed of indie filmmaking before it even had a name, but his forays into mainstream cinema have alternated between clever successes and embarrassing failures. He gives some of the oddest interviews in Hollywood (compared to him, David Lynch is a downright pedestrian chit-chatter), and he's as dedicated to constant reinvention -- or at least refinement -- as anyone in the industry. And his career would seem downright schizophrenic if it weren't so marked by intensely personal qualities; he's done everything from big, Oscar-baiting biopics (such as Milk, his take on the rise and demise of openly gay San Francisco politician Harvey Milk) to small, artsy, improvised tales with almost no commercial potential. He's equally capable of having his characters spout unadulterated Shakespeare and having them say nothing at all for endless minutes of screen time, and make both choices seem perfectly natural. He has a curiously critical eye towards his own work -- that is to say, it's not curious that he is self-critical, but rather it's curious how much he talks like a film critic; many of his longer discussions with journalists have sounded more like a well-informed film critic discussing Gus Van Sant's work than it does a director talking about himself. His stabs at mainstream credibility have yielded decidedly mixed results; his successes have been noteworthy (see below), but his failures, especially flattened-out duds like Finding Forrester and Good Will Hunting, and an utterly pointless remake of Psycho, have been spectacular. Through it all, he's remained one of the film industry's hardest men to figure out, but it seems no one ever tires of watching what his next move will be. Here's five of our favorites by the Prince of Portland.

MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO (1991)

Mala Noche was the movie that made the underground sit up and take notice of Gus Van Sant's talent; Drugstore Cowboy won over the burgeoning indie world and made him a critic's darling. But the daring, explosively risky My Own Private Idaho was the movie that convinced me that I was seeing the work of an American genius in the making. The story of two sad, sincere male hustlers (played by River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves), it blended elements of Shakespearean drama, class warfare, transgressive queen cinema, and pure street poetry in a way that so clearly shouldn't have worked that it's downright amazing how well it did. Van Sant crammed the movie with real characters from his beloved Portland and made an intensely personal film that nonetheless hit everyone who saw it right where they lived.

TO DIE FOR (1995)

Gus Van Sant's first stab at commercial credibility was Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, which, despite a plethora of good intentions, was his first major dud. In fact, its ineptness in spite of itself might be noted as a pattern that the director would follow in much of his mainstream work, if it wasn't for the existence of his follow-up film, To Die For. Working from Buck Henry's sharpest, nastiest script in decades, Van Sant directs a movie that almost invisibly echoes some of the themes of his previous work, especially in those scenes featuring lovestruck, dimwitted local teen Joaquin Phoenix and his crew. Van Sant rarely overreaches, and manages to let the black comedic tone of the script do its work; his greatest accomplishment is to get a truly memorable performance out of Nicole Kidman, who's better here than she would be again for some time.

GERRY (2002)

In 2002, Van Sant was on the tail end of a bad time. Hollywood hadn't been good to him over the previous half-decade, but to be fair, he hadn't been very good to it, either, with Good Will Hunting, Psycho and Finding Forrester gunking up his resume. Returning to his strange interiors for another shot at indie filmmaking, he released the first of his "Death Trilogy", the underrated Gerry, and a lot of critics were ready to call it his fourth disaster in a row: it's static to the point of tedium, its improvised dialogue (by two actors not especially beloved by highbrow reviewers) was sometimes silly and sometimes impenetrable, and it had nothing resembling a plot. But Gerry was a quiet triumph, a movie that builds almost unnoticably and marks a return to greatness by a director who can do very much with very little.

ELEPHANT (2003)

Van Sant followed up the surprising and effective Gerry with the triumphant Elephant, the best film of 2003. The second of his death trilogy takes an almost transcendently naturalistic look at a small high school on the day of a Columbine-style murder spree; the dialogue, again largely improvised, and the endless, unintrusive tracking shots make Elephant a brilliant contradiction: a movie so banal that it's almost mystical. Through the whole event, from boring ordinariness to life-shattering violence, Van Sant's particular genius is to steadfastly refuse to lead the viewers to anything resembling an explanation for the horror. Forcing us to view everything from the eyes of those who don't understand why they have to die, Elephant reflects our own maddening desire to have random violence made explicable -- and the world's refusal to comply.

PARANOID PARK (2007)

A strangely stirring and deeply affecting film, 2007's Paranoid Park -- based largely on a successful young adult novel -- finds Gus Van Sant returning to Portland and making a key transition from the relentlessly bleak indie sensibilities of the Death Trilogy to the artsy mainstream appeal of Milk. Once again trusting an amateur cast (many of whom were recruited off of MySpace) and a good deal of improvised dialogue to carry the tone of the film, Van Sant also lays in a heavy, dark directorial touch that nails the mood of the story perfectly. He's greatly aided in this attempt by the gorgeous cinematography by Wong Kar-Wai's cameraman, Christopher Doyle, and the Zoo-York-clad Gabe Nevins as the affectless skateboarding protagonist. Paranoid Park is a perfect bridge between To Die For and Elephant.

Related Posts:

Screengrab Review: Milk

Gus Van Sant and Paranoid Park: 'It's the End of a Certain Way I Was Making Films'

Screengrab Salutes: The Top Biopics of All Time! (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 22:00:00 GMT

FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS (1998)

Biopics have always blurred the line between fact and legend, a stylistic practice that both fueled and destroyed the career of Hunter S. Thompson, who (at his best) went beyond the bounds of traditional journalism by injecting himself into the stories he covered, amplifying the reality of his subject matter through wild exaggeration. But, as a certain lame duck American president can certainly attest, “truthiness” is a slippery slope, and Thompson eventually began to confuse himself with his journalistic doppleganger, Raoul Duke, the drug-addled party monster at the heart of Terry Gilliam’s psychedelic adaptation of the college dorm room staple once considered unfilmable. While a “straight” biopic of the actual events of Thompson’s life would be fascinating (as long as Art Linson, director of the tedious Bill Murray fiasco Where the Buffalo Roam, had nothing to do with it), Gilliam instead captured the legend of Thompson/Duke and his infamous 1971 road trip to Sin City with his “attorney,” Dr. Gonzo (a funhouse mirror fictionalization of the Mexican-American political activist Oscar Zeta Acosta). Critics loathed the over-the-top depiction of Thompson’s hallucinated wonderland, yet despite an excess of shrieking in Benicio del Toro’s headache-inducing performance as Gonzo, Johnny Depp admirably captures both the real Thompson and his alter ego in an underrated performance. Plus, the movie’s a flat-out hoot: after howling through a near empty screening with fellow Screengrabber Scott Von Doviak, another audience member who’d ignored all the scathing reviews approached us to hazard the minority opinion, “Yeah! It was funny...right?”

RAGING BULL (1980)

Directors who specialized in noir – drawn as they were to doomed heroes and disorienting levels of moral ambiguity – loved to make films about boxers. Carnal, visceral creatures, they seemed particularly drawn to the sort of manipulative femme fatales the genre celebrated, and they played to the notion of destiny’s brute: they were men, after all, whose primary form of human communication was savage physical violence. Martin Scorsese, who brought the dynamic emotional energy of the ’70s and the gorgeous visual iconography and crushing sense of guilt and shame of Catholicism to the noir framework, clearly felt the same way, so it’s no coincidence that one of his greatest films is a breathtaking refinement of the old-school pug-centered crime drama. What makes Raging Bull such a shocker, then, is that it’s a true story: Jake LaMotta’s meteoric rise, brutal determination, mercurial mood swings, and destructive relationships with his wife, his family, and his God seem like the stuff of lurid, overblown pulp drama. Given the material they had to work with, it’s no wonder Scorsese and his collaborators created such a stunning, immediate film. While much is made of the admittedly astonishing physical transformation made by Robert DeNiro as his LaMotta slid from lean, hungry contender to fat, washed-up ex-champ, his emotional and psychological transformation is just as incredible, as the cocky, unstoppable self-confidence of the young man inexorably decays into the pitiful, indulgent self-loathing of age.

MISHIMA: A LIFE IN FOUR CHAPTERS (1985)

Paul Schrader wrote the screenplay to Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull, which may have served as a sort of apprenticeship for his directing, four years later, the moving screen biography of Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima. Not only did he borrow heavily from Scorsese’s visual handiwork (notice the overhead camera angles, and the visual tonality that mixes elegiac near-silences with scenes of fiery violence), but he chose as his subject a public figure who shared more in common with Jake LaMotta than either of them would have cared to admit. Like LaMotta, Mishima’s story was so bizarre as to seem like the stuff of fiction: a weak young man who transformed himself through sheer willpower into a physically perfect bodybuilder; a barely closeted homosexual with poetic inclinations who married one of his country’s most famous female beauties and preached a gospel of rabid militarism; and a famous celebrity, considered the greatest writer of his generation, who ended his life in the most base possible manner, staging a would-be fascist revolution that ended with him clumsily committing suicide as the soldiers he hoped to inspire laughed at his grand ideals. Deftly blending intense psychological moments from Mishima’s life with gorgeous evocations of some of the most famous scenes in his fiction, Schrader creates a biopic that shows how much he learned from Scorsese – and how much he brought to the table himself.

THE ELEPHANT MAN (1980)

There were a million ways The Elephant Man could have gone wrong. (It’s easy to see how, in the innumerable one-joke parodies of it that sprang up in its wake.) A film about John Merrick, the terribly deformed Victorian-era man whose intelligence and perception transformed the lives of many who met him, could have been overly mawkish if taken too far in one direction, or grotesque and exploitative if taken too far in the other. Mel Brooks, who financed the film, knew this, and his first and best decision was to keep his name out of the production, realizing that audiences and critics would expect the film to be a joke if they thought it was coming from him. He took a major risk in hiring David Lynch to helm The Elephant Man, especially given Lynch’s penchant for unnerving surrealism, but Lynch was the best possible choice, and hit the necessary tone just right: he let Merrick’s appearance speak for itself, trusting John Hurt to communicate the agony of his mere existence as well as the man’s essential dignity. Lynch made the right decision to transfer his sense of the absurd and the bizarre onto Merrick’s surroundings, presenting us with a view of Victorian London as unsettling and alien as that of the world of Eraserhead, while putting Merrick in the position not of a monster, but of a man who did his best to be human in a world that would not allow him that role. The collaboration was so successful it’s a shame that the project Brooks next intended to do with Lynch – a surreal nightmare biography of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels set entirely inside the subject’s head - never got off the ground.

SAMURAI I: MUSASHI MIYAMOTO (1954)

When the historical figure you’re portraying in your biopic is less a human being than a character straight out of legend, you’ve got a lot of leeway in how you can portray him. There have been dozens of films in which legendary swordsman and duelist Miyamoto Musashi is the central figure, but the best of them all is director Hiroshi Inagaki’s Samurai trilogy. Though they’re best viewed as a whole, the first of the three movies is probably the strongest installment, telling the story of the epic figure from his humble beginnings to his utter transformation in the crucible of an unimaginably bloody battle. What Inagaki does right, and what distinguishes Musashi Miyamoto from the innumerable other films about the characters, is to strike a powerfully clear balance between historical storytelling and epic filmmaking; he is able, through solid storytelling and some highly inventive composition, to convey the sense that he is allowing us a glimpse of a real human figure who came from a particular time and place and ended up the way he did for discernable reasons, but he never lets go of the sweep and tension that remind us we’re watching a movie about a hero who is as much demigod as man. Of course, much of the credit must go to Toshirô Mifune, who gives the first of many towering performances in the lead role, yet Inagaki – rarely thought of as one of the first-rank Japanese directors of his day – does a fine job of sustaining the mood, tone, pace and look (abetted by some terrific EastmanColor cinematography by Jun Yasumoto) that distinguishes the whole trilogy. It’s as close to a definitive biopic as one can hope for when dealing with a legend.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce

The Screengrab Holiday Special: Movies We're Thankful For (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 16:00:00 GMT

PHIL NUGENT GIVES THANKS FOR:

BLUE VELVET (1986)

I'm not sure that it's possible to fully appreciate how thankful some of us are for Blue Velvet, the greatest American movie of the 1980s, without having suffered the indignity of being a movie freak in the 1980s, when this picture arrived like cool water to a man stranded in the desert. The biggest surprise may not have been that David Lynch, who by that time had Eraserhead and The Elephant Man to his credit, had this inside him, but that he was allowed to get it out of his system with the financial assistance of Dino De Laurentiis, who bought the property out of development hell and gave Lynch carte blanche to express his vision, asking only that the sucker come in at no longer than two hours. This was apparently De Laurentiis' way of thanking Lynch for all the unhappy work the director had put in cranking out Dune, another De Laurentiis production. Given that Dune failed to result in the intended franchise hit, nobody in Hollywood would have been surprised, let alone appalled, if Dino had told the boy from Missoula to take a hike, and take his leading man (Kyle MacLachlan, who made his film debut in Dune, and who had signed to appear in a string of sequels that were never going to happen) with him. Instead, De Laurentiis succumbed to an unusually well-timed bout of honor, and given the results, only the churlish would whisper that it's too bad that it didn't last long enough for Lynch to cut a deal with him to make Ronnie Rocket. Because of this, anyone who's thinking of talking some shit about Dino De Laurentiis -- the man whose other credits in 1986 alone included Tai-Pan, King Kong Lives, and Maximum Overdrive -- had better check with me first to make sure you've got the right. Unless you've paid for a movie masterpiece and been married to Silvano Magnano, you probably haven't.

MOUSEHOLES (1999)

Helen Hill, who died in 2007, and who earlier this week was awarded a Leo Award by the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, was a friend of mine. Helen was an independent filmmaker, though given the way that term is bandied about these days, it doesn't begin to capture just how independent she was; she never had an agent or a distributor, but finished her short animated films when she could and trucked them around to festivals with a reel tucked under her arm. Her masterpiece, Mouseholes, is a tribute to her dead grandfather that draws on home movies, Helen's own childlike animation, and tape-recorded conversations to make something sublime out of one of the most remarkable things about movies, and one of the key ways in which they have forever changed our world: their ability to enable us to hold onto a few invaluable pieces of the people we've lost, like ghosts trapped in bottles. For Helen, the film was about hanging onto part of her grandfather; now, for those of us left behind, the film has become about holding onto part of the woman who made it.

HIS GIRL FRIDAY (1940)

Let's be clear about this: the reason that one of the best, funniest comedies in the history of movies exists is that its producer-director, Howard Hawks, had the balls and the taste to be corrupt in just the right way. A lot of people with as much talent as Hawks would never have thought of taking The Front Page, which then had a pretty good claim to being the greatest American play yet written and is nothing to sneeze at now, and turning it into a romantic comedy by giving the lead role a sex change and turning the other male lead into her ex-husband, who's waiting to make his next move. And while Hollywood was, and always will be, full of crass jackals who'd think nothing of trying something like that, hardly any of them would have been able to pull it off. (A 1988 remake of Hawks' rip-off, set in the world of TV news and starring Burt Reynolds and Kathleen Turner called Switching Channels was apparently made just to demonstrate this very point.) By now, His Girl Friday is so solidly (and deservedly) entrenched in its super-plus classic status that most people are barely aware of what a cold-blooded commercial calculation it's based on, or even that it has a title that ought to make you barf. I bring all this up now not because it takes anything away from the wonderfulness of the movie, because it doesn't: if I'm ever exiled to a desert island, this son of a bitch is coming with me. But it's worth keeping in mind, so that in a movie culture increasingly open to conventional wisdom and partisan warfare, everyone keeps in mind the final word on how greatness is achieved: you just never know.

TOKYO OLYMPIAD (1065)

Kon Ichikawa's 170-minute documentary record of the 1964 Olympic Games was commissioned by the Japanese government as part of their effort to use the games as their announcement that the country had transformed itself since World War II and was eager to be regarded as a smoothly functioning, hospitable member of the world of nations. Originally, the Japanese telegraphed both the ambition of the project, and their willingness to meet the rest of the world halfway, by hiring Akira Kurosawa, who at that time had no serious challengers for the title of the Japanese director who was best-known and most revered outside Japan. Luckily, somebody had a reality check and realized that Ichikawa, who was known for his ability to improvise in the face of changing conditions, was better suited temperamentally to this mission that the proud old samurai and control freak Kurosawa. Besides, the world already had one great Olympics documentary showing what the games looked like through the eyes of a director accustomed to bending reality to her will: Leni Riefenstahl's Olympiad, legendary for the way it transforms the musclular bodies on display into black-and-white film poetry. Ichikawa's brightly colored film captures the atmosphere, the flavor, the summer fun aspect of the whole spectacle, as well as the awesome mixture of the personalities involved. And though it's a measure of Ichikawa's mastery that it all looks effortless -- a few thousand people got together and had some contests, and all he did was point a camera at it and boil the results down to the good stuff -- the sense it gives you of the scale of the enterprise is explanation enough as to why there weren't more Olympics movies like this prior to the mid-1960s. Of course, there'll never be anything like it ever again; none of the people who might put up the money would see the point, because now we get to watch it all while it's happening, on TV. Whoopy-dink.

THE FILMS OF W.C. FIELDS

Pauline Kael: "From their titles, it's hard to tell the W.C. Fields movies apart; as John Mosher observed, 'Fields is Fields, a rose is a rose.' " Wilfrid Sheed:"...we demand more of Fields than even comic genius. We have to believe he meant it. We want certification that such a one existed: a mean, child-hating con man who was so funny about it that he made these things all right." Although there were other great screen comedians who were funnier in a greater number of ways, such as the Marx Brothers, and others who were more gifted visually as moviemakers, such as Buster Keaton, Fields' scraggly, underfunded, rattily uneven body of work retains the special fascination of representing one mean-spirited bastard's judgement on, and self-defense strategy against, the world. Fields has turned out to be one of those movie figures, like Bogart, who never goes out of style or fully loses connection with the modern world, yet it doesn't get any easier, as the years go by, to believe that the movies themselves got made on the level. The Fatal Glass of Beer, Million Dollar Legs, Mississippi, It's a Gift, The Man on the Flying Trapeze, My Little Chickadee, The Bank Dick, Never Give a Sucker an Even Break -- they all look as if they made late at night when the studio bosses had gone home and the security guards had passed out drunk, using money that whimsically crooked bookkeepers had skimmed from the budgets of Rin Tin Tin pictures. Although there are people working today who are probably as talented as Fields, and maybe even as idiosyncratic, there are no parallels for his career; as soon as Bill Murray, probably the closest living point of comparison, showed that he could make people laugh in a thrown-together movie like Stripes, he was thrown into big-budget special effects exravaganzas like Ghostbusters and eventually forced to turn character actor, which might have been his strategy for self-defense. To find anything close to Fields' vehicles today, you'd probably be best off searching the schedule of the Animal Planet channel.

RICHARD PRYOR LIVE IN CONCERT (1979)

Hard to believe now, but there was a time in our culture when stand-up comedians didn't get to leave behind every inflection of their act, cusswords included, perfectly preserved on cable TV specials. Lenny Bruce, who more or less invented the modern conception of the nightclub comic as satirical firebrand and verbal cartoonist, left behind only a posthumously released film record of one of his last performances, caught after his legal and drug problems had snuffed out his energy and wit and reduced him to a wry, paranoid figure snuffling in front of a bare brick wall. (Earlier clips of Bruce doing a TV-friendly version of his act on the Steve Allen show give you some idea of how much of his act was physical, and so is missing from the performances that were released on records.) Bruce's greatest disciple, Richard Pryor, was much luckier: this full-feature performance film caught him in full flight at the height of his powers, at a time when he was using everything he'd learned about working a crowd and applying it to a young lifetime's worth of experiences and observations. The film was released a year before Pryor, in a guilt-stricken, coke-baser's frenzy of despair, lit himself on fire; its sequels, starting with the 1982 Richard Pryor Live on the Sunset Strip, record his partially successful attempt to relaunch himself after that traumatic meltdown, and his subsequent discovery that both his health and his inspiration were all but shot. But at least future generations won't be in any danger of thinking that this man was just the guy in The Toy.

McCABE & MRS. MILLER; THE LONG GOODBYE; THIEVES LIKE US; CALIFORNIA SPLIT; NASHVILLE (1970s)

In 1970, Robert Altman, then 45, directed the first hit film of his career, M*A*S*H. Ten years later, on a wavering leash from producer Robert Evans and a fluctuating budget, he directed Popeye, which was to be his second hit, even though it turned out to be the kind of commercial success whose star, Robin Williams, would still be apologizing for it twenty years later. In between those two hits, Altman would be able to make thirteen feature films, make them his way, for good or ill, and get them distributed by major studios whose bosses were still reeling in confusion from the collapse of the old system and cowed by Altman's many prizes and adulatory reviews. The five listed above are my favorites from that amazing body of work, which is as alive and unconventional as any large-scale attempt to understand America that any artist has ever embarked on. You might prefer five others; I'm generally up to taking another look at any of them, except maybe for Quintet and A Perfect Couple, because I find that revisiting even the ones that I think stink on ice feels less like looking at dead, bad old movies than like revisiting distant, weird members of the family who I haven't seen since the last time they got out of rehab. The fact that any of them exist at all is conclusive proof that desperate bewilderment at the top is not the worst thing you could have in the movie business. You might think that the same guys who were prepared to sponsor Altman to such a degree on the basis of one hit would have handed him the keys to the kingdom after he'd had a second one, but by 1980, the corporate heads had decided they knew what they were doing again, and the next year, Altman gave up on Hollywood and spent the rest of the decade working in theater and cable TV and making filmed plays on shoestring budgets, with only one small return to actual feature filmmaking, the barely released O. C. and Stiggs. He restarted his movie career right on schedule, in 1990, beginning with Vincent and Theo, a Van Gogh biopic that is as great as anything he ever made, and as unprofitable.

THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962)

The greatest fusion of commercial thriller and political satire ever to come out of Hollywood -- and, as directed by John Frankenheimer, a still-stunning mixture of old-studio technique and new-style TV-age hipness -- is fairly high on the list of movies that nobody should have been able to get made at all. The novel, by Richard Condon, was a great success but also widely taken for being unadaptable. In fact, George Axelrod, who did the masterful screenplay, has said that he was stymied with a concrete case of writer's block until the film's star, Frank Sinatra, cured him by calling up and saying that it had been a while and he would like to see some pages. (Axelrod was the film's co-producer, alongside Frankenheimer, so technically, he was Sinatra's boss, but let's get real: having Frank Sinatra call you up and tell you that he sure would like to see you flap your arms and fly over the Chrysler Building might turn out to be the cure for gravity.) It wouldn't be until the late 1970s that the mercurial Sinatra would gain control of the picture himself and pull it from theatrical distribution or TV broadcast until 1988. The reasons for this, mostly financial in nature, aren't altogether clear, but contrary to popular urban myth, it doesn't seem to have anything to do with guilty feelings related to the possibility that the movie anticipated the Kennedy assasination. (By then, Richard Condon had written a novel, Winter Kills, that was directly based on JFK assassination conspiracy lore, and that book was made into a movie, written and directed by William Richart and starring Jeff Bridges, the blighted production and distribution history of which would spur rumors and allegations related to the organized-crime connections of some of its financiers and the disinclination of Embassy Pictures to alienate its own connections in the defense industry.) But I can say that I remember finally seeing The Manchurian Candidate for the first time -- actually, the first three times -- in the spring of 1988 at the Prytania Theater in New Orleans, and that of all my experiences with movies that have been re-introduced to the public after a spell in the vault, none has been as far from disappointing as my experience with this one.

CHILDREN OF PARADISE (1945)

Marcel Carne's three-hour-plus romantic celebration of the life of the theater, as rich and satisfying as any epic-scale film entertainment in history, was made during the Nazi occupation of France, a time when the Vichy government imposed rationing and other restrictions on materials and did not permit the production of any movie intended to be longer than 90 minutes. (Carne got approval to proceed with his script only by pretending that the finished product would be released in two parts.) The production provided employment, and gave cover, to many Resistance members, who worked as extras alongside Nazi loyalists who had been assigned to the project by Vichy, smiling and nodding in polite conversation with those scumbags while memorizing their faces and imagining how they were going to look with nooses draped around their necks. (Legend has it that Carne dragged out the production towards the end in anticipation of the arrival of the Allies so that the movie could wrap in a free France.) This kind of big moviemaking is commonly associated with decadence now, but Carne's commitment to his elegant conception and vast canvas was strong enough that he plowed ahead, creating the illusion that he had much greater material resources than he had. Some contemporary "independent" filmmakers who think they're demonstrating their own artistic integrity when they can't bother to focus the camera properly ought to be made to sit through this movie and then handed ritual seppeku blades, in trust that they'll do the right thing.

JAWS (1975)

I was eight years old. She was two: this was 1977, the first year she was "officially" re-released after her debut in 1975, to compete with this slutty new number on the block named Star Wars. A lot of the kids I knew were all excited about the new girl, and couldn't understand why I was so excited about the chance that I might get to see some old hag who everybody had been talking about for a couple of years, but I had done some asking around, and everything I discovered seemed to confirm that the new girl didn't have a shark. And I had been fascinated by the thought of Jaws for, it seemed, my whole life; it seemed that, for as long as I could remember, I'd heard people talking about her in vague, soft whispers. I knew that I was supposed to be too young for her, because I'd spent so many hours -- yes, hours -- lying on my belly looking at the newspaper ads, and gazing at that special box that read, "May Be Too Intense for Younger Children." (As the Mad magazine parody pointed out, putting that line in the ads as a means of keeping kids out of the theaters was like trying to keep ants away from a picnic by pouring sugar on the ground.) Ultimately, I got to see it because the Disney cartoon The Rescuers was also playing at McComb, Mississipp's only two-screen theater -- McComb, Mississippi's only movie theater -- and because my mom decided that she'd rather be getting her hair done and shooting shit with the girls for those two hours than sitting next to me watching Bob Newhart and Eva Gabor lend their voices to the characters of a couple of mice. After I got home -- following a very awkward car ride during which I, still in a state of shock, deflected my mom's questions about the movie she thought I'd seen with a series of "Hah?"s -- I would go through many stacks of white typing paper trying to adapt the movie to comic-strip form, in much the way that Hunter Thompson, I would read later, had spent his youth copying pages of Hemingway and Fitzgerald longhand, so that he could feel their prose rhythms coursing through his fingers. It was the closest I had come at that time to writing a movie a love letter. In retrospect, she probably thought I was kind of goofy, if she thought of me at all. I was just one of millions of boys staring at her with my eyes and mouth wide open, I know that. And in the years since -- Christ, in the decades since -- I've known a lot of movies that were smarter, sweeter, more generous, more mature, more beautiful, and had more to teach me about the world. But you never forget the first one. This year she turned thirty-three, and it would be an understatement to say that she still looks good for her age. I expect that, if I'm still around when she's sixty-six, I'll still want to drink her bath water.

Click Here For More Thanks From Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Paul Clark, Leonard Pierce & Sarah Clyne Sundberg

Contributor: Phil Nugent

DVD Digest for November 18, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 15:00:00 GMT

This week, some of summer’s biggest hits arrive in stores in time for the holiday shopping season, along with a handful of choice classics.

DVD of the week: With all the care Pixar devotes to creating their theatrical releases, it’s amazing that they have any time left for their DVDs. However, Pixar’s DVD editions are almost invariably first-rate, and this week’s release of WALL-E would appear to be no exception. We begin, of course, with the razor-sharp transfer of the movie itself, which comes directly from the digital master, making it arguably crisper than could be found in the theatre. But that’s only the beginning, with two animated shorts (one seen in theatres, the other a DVD original), featurettes on the film’s sound design, visual design, music, character design, and more. Finally, there are a number of features on WALL-E that take viewers into the world of the film, including a documentary about the movie’s robotic cast, and short films about the nefarious “Buy N Large” corporation from its inception to their Earth Exit plan, and beyond. Needless to say, WALL-E is an ideal DVD for kids, but it’s also a must-have even if you don’t have a family to buy for this holiday season.

Other recent releases coming to DVD this week: Ben Stiller’s Hollywood action satire Tropic Thunder (Paramount, also Blu-Ray); America Ferrara, Amber Tamblyn and friends in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 (Warner, also Blu-Ray); and a quartet of acclaimed indie films- Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World (Image); the documentary Gonzo: The Life and Work of Hunter S. Thompson (Magnolia); Harmony Korine’s Mister Lonely (Genius); and Audrey Tautou in Priceless (First Look).

On the classics front, the big release this week is David Lynch: The Lime Green Box Set (Absurda), which includes the new-to-DVD Industrial Symphony No. 1, plus the remastered Eraserhead, a Lynch-approved 5.1-surround version of Blue Velvet, The Elephant Man, Wild at Heart, The Short Films of David Lynch, Dumbland, along with new extras for Elephant Man and Wild at Heart, the Eraserhead soundtrack, and a “Mystery Disc” full of exclusive Lynch goodies. Or if you’re looking for something a little more “classical”, pick up the new Criterion editions of Martin Ritt’s masterful adaptation of the John le Carre novel, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, or the French swashbuckler Fanfan la Tulipe. Also worth mentioning is the release of Fred Schepisi’s long-unavailable classic of Australian cinema, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (Ryko Distribution).

In a slow week for TV on DVD, the most noteworthy title is Bones Season 3 (Fox).

Finally, this week presents the most definitive argument that Blu-Ray has really arrived, with a plethora of mostly crappy Blu-Ray only releases. The exceptions are Curtis Hanson’s pretty-good Eminem vehicle 8 Mile (Universal) and the Neil Gaiman-scripted Mirrormask (Sony). But other than that, it’s looking pretty dire, with the Martin Lawrence double feature of Blue Streak (Sony) and National Security (Sony), Guy Ritchie’s Revolver (Sony), and Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales (Sony), which if nothing else remains the most definitive cinematic statement about the ongoing war over teen horniness. I’m for decriminalization, by the way.