The Screengrab : disney

Wall Street's Concern: Can Pixar Keep Falling "Up"?

Phil Nugent — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 20:15:00 GMT

Pixar Animation Studios has sort of a funny relationship to its parent company, Disney: in terms of artistic and critical repute, its the company's prestige boutique line, yet it's also one of Disney's greatest cash cows. Last year's WALL-E was the fourth of Pixar's nine animated features to win the Academy Award, an achievement that is even more impressive when you consider that Pixar's first three features were made before the Academy bothered to create a category for Best Animated Feature. But last month, Richard Greenfield of Pali Research came up with an unusual way of celebrating the impending (May 29) release of the tenth Pixar feature, Up: he downgraded the company's stock. As Brooks Barnes reports in The New York Times, this was part of an overall expression of concern from "two important business camps — Wall Street and toy retailers" - about the commercial prospects of Up. The movie, which was directed by Pete Docter and Bob Peterson, and is to be released in 3-D, is about a 78-year-old man (voiced by Ed Asner) who, widowed and threatened with being moved to an assisted living facility, sets out for South America in a flying house powered by balloons, with an eight-year-old stowaway in tow. The naysayers fear that young audiences will find the aged protagonist and the lack of a prominent female character a turn-off. And the businessmen are expressing their lack of faith in the movie in a way that other moviemakers with strong critical reputations, such as Martin Scorsese, don't have to sit up nights worrying about: they're not lining up to produce lines of toys based on the film. "Thinkway Toys, which has churned out thousands of Pixar-related products since 1995’s Toy Story,” Barnes writes, "will not produce a single item."

This sort of talk pisses Pixar off, partly because they've heard it before. A lot of salarymen thought that they'd never heard of anything less commercial than Ratatouille, with its implicit message that the secret to good food is having more vermin in the kitchen - at least until they got a load of WALL-E with its long, dialogue-free opening sequence and apocalyptic take on environmental neglect. “The worries keep coming despite Pixar's track record," Doug Creutz of Cowen and Company says, "because each film it delivers seems to be less commercial than the last.” And in fact, even though Ratatouille and WALL-E were indeed huge hits, their ticket sales showed a marked drop-off from the likes of Finding Nemo. (Meanwhile, Pixar's biggest success in terms of generating toys and other side marketables was Cars, regarded by most observers as the studio's weakest feature in terms of quality.) Pixar has been building support in advance of the opening by showing it to bloggers and other friendly parties. So far, the response has been rapturous, with some fans comparing it to the work of Hayao Miyazaki. No doubt just hearing that makes Richard Greenfield want to take it all back.

Nobody seriously expects Up - which is scheduled to be shown on opening night at the Cannes Film Festival, an unprecedented honor for an animated film, or a 3-D film - to just tank. The real basis for the money men's complaints seem to be that Pixar, as they see it, perversely refuses to go at the target with both guns blazing. Instead of concentrating all their considerable energies on films that can be easily be spun into long-running franchises and tapped into for merchandising lines, they keep coming up with these odd, one-shot ideas and executing them impeccably. The movies are hits, but they could be making mega-super-colossal hits, which were in fact assembly lines for turning out more hits. (It's worth remembering that the one time Pixar tried to play the half-assed ancillary merchandise game, grinding out what was meant to be a direct-to-video sequel to their first film, Toy Story, Disney took one look at the resulting feature and realized that it was too good for the purpose for which it had been made; the studio was obliged to release it to theaters.) When the Pixar people aren't busy making films, they generate quotes for reporters, such as Pete Docter's “We make these films for ourselves. We’re kind of selfish that way,” or Pixar co-founder and Disney's head Imagineer John Lasseter's oft-repeated, "Quality is the best business plan.” Lines like that must strike the marketing guys as if they were intended as knives thrust into their skeevy black hearts. The bottom-line folks in Hollywood have always been good for reminding those in the creativity division that, while movies can be art, making them is also a business. The Pixar complainers may be representative of a mindset that isn't embarrassed to talk openly about how vexing it is to them that some of the people who generate good business have the audacity to also care about their art.

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Screengrab Review: “We Pedal Uphill”

Nick Schager — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 15:00:00 GMT

A collection of thirteen vignettes set around the country during George W. Bush’s presidency, We Pedal Uphill gauges the state of the union with less flash and blunt-force blather than your average Hollywood message picture, but nonetheless contains quite a bit of preachiness. Addressing various socio-political issues from the past eight years, writer/director Roland Tec certainly attempts a subtle touch, his script largely sidestepping declarative speeches and leaden exposition to make its points. His functional digital-video cinematography won’t win any awards, and his theater-trained cast’s unshowy turns are saddled with a stagey quality, but strictly in terms of aesthetics and performance, Tec’s film eschews – save for a few notable exceptions – ostentation and pomposity in favor of tonal and narrative modesty. Unfortunately, while he channels his anger, frustration and sadness about the nation’s health into short stories free of hysterics, his collage still all too frequently succumbs to moralistic clichés, and never coheres into a rousing, affecting whole.

We Pedal Uphill’s episodes often involve establishing a scenario that subsequently develops in an unexpected manner. Sensationalistic bombshells are mercifully nowhere to be found, yet Tec’s polite direction can’t overshadow the limpness of his arguments. In “The Mouse,” two men retire to a hotel room after meeting at a club, discover that they’re both Disney employees (one an exec, the other a parrot trainer), and then one offers the other monetary incentives to stay the night and get high, a supposed commentary on class tensions and economic disparity that comes off as half-baked. The same holds true for many of the film’s rough-sketch segments: prison management company employees discuss using every last inch of a cow for prisoners’ food before voraciously chowing down on a catered lunch; a Caucasian secretary brings to her African-American attorney boss’ attention a discrepancy regarding local voting machines, and is roundly criticized; a man goes to work, adorns his car with conservative bumper stickers (pro-life, pro-NRA, pro-Gitmo), enters his office and is revealed to be a liberal radio shock-jock. Mistaking insubstantiality for obliqueness, Tec’s stories only manage to brush up against their hot-button talking points before American-landscape transitional imagery shuffles us off to the next scene.

If some of these tales would benefit from ten additional minutes, others convey their meaning so bluntly that they seem unsalvageable. In “Wrong Turn,” an African-American man visits a suburban Louisiana community full of staring-from-their-lawns residents in order to thank the Caucasian man who saved him and his family during Katrina, a sequence about the squandered opportunity for post-flood racial harmony that – despite two solid performances – trades in painfully obvious juxtapositions. We Pedal Uphill’s clunkiness, however, is most strongly felt in “Treason,” a drearily one-note comedy bit concerning a New Mexico tour guide’s severely lopsided history lesson about the Rosenbergs to bored listeners. And the film’s fondness for indulging in already-hoary stereotypes is epitomized by the penultimate lecture “What Happened to Rita?”, in which a librarian returns to work after three years as a dazed semi-amnesiac, her condition the consequence (as nicely integrated flashbacks reveal) of a testy late-night encounter with Homeland Security agents who want the take-out records of an Arab man, and whose villainous menacing makes them come across like crude Big Brother cartoons.

The Rep Report (December 26-January 4)

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

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

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

The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: "The Nightmare Before Christmas"

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 17:20:00 GMT

If you are anything like me -- and why wouldn't you be? -- you're a sucker for Christmas. The arbitrary yet somehow natural-seeming traditions; the carols which somehow only sound right when you've got just enough bourbon-fortified eggnog in you; the extra days off from work; the fact that people give you free stuff wrapped in shiny paper; the way everyone pretends to be nice to each other for a change: what's not to like? It's also one of those Western cultural touchstones so universal (suck it, Judaism!) that pretty much everybody gets into the act; despite the bogus claims from pouty conservatives about a "war on Christmas", the birth of Baby Jesus is still commemorated on almost every TV show on the air, and Yuletide is second only to summer as a Hollywood high holy day.

So, in the spirit of this year's Summerfest series -- where I lazily Netflixed a dozen or so movies with "summer" in the title and reviewed them so you'd know what to watch while the pool guy skimmed the drowned crow out of your Jacuzzi -- I present the Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon, where I get drunk and watch some of the finest Christmas movies that Hollywood has crammed down our throats, and ask: will this movie fill you with holiday cheer or seasonal depression?

First up is 1993's The Nightmare Before Christmas, also known as Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas and Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas in Disney Digital 3-D, although a more accurate name for it would be Not Actually Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas or even Hi Everybody We're Henry Selick and Caroline Thompson and We Directed and Wrote This Movie Respectively And What Do We Have To Do To Get a Little Credit For That?'s The Nightmare Before Christmas. While Burton created the lead characters and wrote a poem that served as the movie's inspiration, he had very little to do with making the film itself, and the fact that he's generally given all the kudos for it is a shame, because if nothing else, it proves how other people are capable of taking his quirky, creepy aesthetic and running with it.

Made using a daring, innovating, and highly striking form of 3-D animation, The Nightmare Before Christmas uses the clever (and somewhat underexplored) notion that all holidays are represented geographically in an otherworldly tableau to tell the story of Halloween bigwig Jack Skellington -- voiced by Chris Sarandon, with song vocals by the film's composer, Burton stalwart Danny Elfman. Jack happens upon the existence of Christmastown, and, meaning well but flummoxed -- and slightly jealous -- of the universal love showered on its big shot, one "Sandy Claws", resolves to cut in on his action. Hilarity ensues, lessons are learned, and all that standard Christmassy crap, but filtered through a truly weird visual sensibility.

One thing that director Selick and screenwriter Thompson share with Tim Burton is a sort of whimsical disregard for the conventions of storytelling. Setpieces ramble one to the other, and the story rolls gregariously along without ever making a lot of sense -- you get the idea that the filmmakers were as impatient as some of their younger audience to get on to the next bit of cool stuff. That said, the movie is breathtakingly gorgeous, with incredibly clever and intricate visuals that took as much time and effort as the story didn't. (There's currently an exhibit of some of the models used in the film on display at an art museum here in San Antonio, where I live, and seeing them up close, you get an unexpected sense of how elaborate and careful the building of them was; it's clearly no accident the movie looks as good as it does.) Kids old enough not to be freaked out by some of the jarring elements of the movie will adore its highly successful visual style, which blends cute and creepy in a way rarely seen outside of Japanese animation, and adults will be engaged by the swell performances and the overall intricacy of the movie's design.

Despite the Halloweeny themes and the often shocking visual play, there's really nothing gloomy or depressing about The Nightmare Before Christmas; it's an old-fashioned entertaining all-ages romp like rarely gets made any more, and the songs, while not exactly unforgettable, are loads of fun while you're experiencing them, especially "The Oogie Boogie Song", a monster's rollicking threat towards a kidnapped Santa Claus. In contrast to Burton's own weepy-assed Christmas effort, Edward Scissorhands, the only bummer to be found is that some of the great talents on display in the voice cast -- including Paul Reubens, Catherine O'Hara, and Glenn Shadix -- don't get nearly as much work as their talent deserves.

12 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS RATING: A solid 8 Maids a-Milking. The story and the script won't stay with you past Christmas morning, but it's a pure good time you can sing along to after you've gotten deep in the punch bowl Christmas Eve -- and you won't even have to chase the kids out of the living room.

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Dreamworks SK...?

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 15:15:00 GMT

The studio system is long dead, but for over 30 years, David Geffen has been proving that the old-time movie mogul is still a going concern. One of the richest men in Hollywood history, Geffen is a true multimedia tycoon who's made money in film and music hand over fist and whose personal worth is estimated at close to $6 billion. Indisputably one of the biggest power players in the industry, he's had a huge impact on almost every studio you can name: Universal, Paramount, Disney, and the DreamWorks studio he founded with Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg. But, having hit 65 -- the age at which most people look forward to a respectable retirement -- is Geffen ready to walk away from it all?

Just weeks after engineering a break from Paramount -- which had recently purchased DreamWorks for over a billion and a half dollars -- Geffen continued to wheel and deal like a mogul of old. He formed a new company with Spielberg and Stacey Snider, backed by money from one of the biggest players in the emergent Bollywood system, and then -- shockingly -- seemed to indicate that he was backing off from production, and perhaps leaving the entertainment industry altogether. According to an article in the New York Times, even Spielberg is stunned at the possibility: "I cannot imagine not having David in my professional life. If that's true, I'm going to have to figure out what to do about it."

Of course, Geffen has made a career out of shocking people -- just ask Disney's stockholders if you don't believe it. So this could just be another ploy, another bargaining chip, another tactic in a still-full bag of tricks. But if he really is out of the game for good, it'll be, in many ways, the end of an era. As easy as Geffen was to hate -- he had a reputation as parsimonious, crude, and often manipulative -- he may be the last of the big-time moguls. And his retirement may echo the end of the studio system: we may not have much liked him when he was around, but we'll kinda miss him when he's gone.

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Screengrab Review: "An American Carol"

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 15:45:00 GMT

This week, as the election nears, I decided to treat myself to two movies that I ordinarily wouldn't see under any circumstance. Not just because they looked terrible -- although they did -- but also because they were movies that, in a very literal sense, were not made for me. These movies are less artistic endeavors than they are salvos in the culture war, and if they were aimed at me, it was not as a consumer, but as a target.

But hey, so what? I go see a lot of movies that aren't really meant for me. I've reviewed Tyler Perry movies, which aren't meant for me. I've reviewed Disney animated movies, which aren't meant for me. I'm a big fan of Stan Brakhage, and his movies weren't really made for anyone. I'm a professional, damn it, and as a professional, I can take whatever to the other side in the culture wars dish out. The first tasty bowl of arsenic: David Zucker's An American Carol.

The film, as you may know from Phil Nugent's earlier piece on it, is a high-dudgeoned but low-minded spoof in which a stand-in for Michael Moore (portrayed by a stand-in for Chris Farley) is interrupted in his quest to ban the Fourth of July by a visitation by three ghosts, who attempt to dissuade him from his wicked anti-American ways. Why wasn't his movie released at Christmastime? Why would anyone want to ban a calendar day? Why would you send John F. Kennedy to attack a prominent liberal? I figured if I started asking myself questions like that, I would just go insane. Instead, I focused on whether or not the movie was actually funny. I hope I will be believe when I say that, all ideological considerations aside, it wasn't. It's not that you can't be funny from a specific political point of view; in fact, satire (which, really, An American Carol is too dumb to qualify as, but still) depends on a moral standing ground from which to attack. It's that these jokes lack any kind of universality, humanity or relatability: the only way you can think it's funny is if you agree with where it's coming from. Or, to put it another way: the new, right-wing David Zucker believes it's funny to have Michael Moore slapped around by Bill O'Reilly. If you happen to agree, you might be modestly amused; if you don't, the joke will fall even flatter than it actually does. The old, non-political David Zucker knew better: he just thought it was funny when people get slapped.

Above and beyond the question of its partisan demands, though, is the fact that An American Carol just isn't very funny, even if you're a conservative. Its jokes are lazy, obvious, and predictable even by the subzero standards of modern farce, and while moviegoing audiences have proven time and time again that they'll go to a movie that critics don't like because they genuinely enjoy it themselves, there's very few people who will go to a movie out of spite, which is really the only reason to see An American Carol. This is evidenced by the fact that with half the country or more still self-identifying as conservative, the movie completely tanked at the box office; as Phil reported, though, Zucker and a few of his far-right pals are claiming that its disastrous performance is due to some kind of liberal conspiracy. If I can be allowed one moment of ideology, that's the great strength of the paranoid right: if you succeed, it's because America loves your values; if you fail, it's because liberals sabotaged you. All I can say is, they did a hell of a screw job on this one.

Hollywood Conservatives Face 'New McCarthyism', Goblins, Unicorns

Trailer Review: The Princess and the Frog

Paul Clark — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 16:00:00 GMT

How can you keep Disney sincere after they’ve seen Shrek? Judging by this trailer, you can’t. Despite being an old-school 2D animation release- directed by longtime Mouse stalwarts Ron Clements and Jerome Musker- this trailer reeks of the kind of ironic self-awareness that’s been inflicted on children by the Dreamworks animation wing for the past decade. Yes, I realize that kissing a frog is icky, but is it really necessary for the princess in the trailer to know the fairy tale that she’s starring in, and to question the necessity of actually kissing the frog on the lips? I don’t think so. But why bother asking these questions when we can get up in arms about the “offensiveness” of the Cajun firefly at the end? Zzzzzzzzzzzz...

Trailer Review: Up

Paul Clark — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Disney week continues at Trailer Review with the new Pixar teaser. If you like Pixar- and I honestly can’t imagine why you wouldn’t- give this a look. This is somewhat shorter than their average teaser job, but I for one am curious to what an Ed Asner-voiced senior citizen is doing with hundreds of helium balloons tied to his chimney. So yeah, mission accomplished.

Yesterday's Hits: The Jazz Singer (1927, Alan Crosland)

Paul Clark — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 19:00:00 GMT

What made The Jazz Singer a hit?: The talking, of course. For more than three decades, moviegoers could travel to the other side of the world or even back in time, but they couldn’t hear the people onscreen actually talking. But in the late 1920s, various studios began to experiment with synchronized sound. While several short films, including Disney’s Steamboat Willie, had been already released with spoken dialogue, The Jazz Singer was the first widely-seen sound feature. Because of the sound equipment, the cost of the film was roughly twice that of a normal Hollywood production, but the movie proved so popular that its success demonstrated the commercial viability of “talkies.” According to Oscar legend, Hollywood’s executives were so bowled over by the success of The Jazz Singer that it was declared ineligible for the first-ever Best Picture Oscar, so afraid were they that it would run away with the award.

What happened?: When The Jazz Singer was first released, audiences couldn’t get enough of “a movie that talked.” But within a few years, talkies became fairly commonplace, to the point where the majority of big-budget releases had spoken dialogue throughout. As a result, the occasional sound scenes in The Jazz Singer no longer held any magic. Unfortunately for The Jazz Singer, this gave viewers ample opportunity to pore over the more rudimentary aspects of the film- the acting, the directing, the storytelling, and so on. And in these respects, The Jazz Singer was even less sophisticated than it was technologically.

Al Jolson, the star of The Jazz Singer remained a popular singer and performer in the decades that followed, and the film itself experienced a resurgence in popularity with the release of the twin biopics The Jolson Story and Jolson Sings Again in the late 1940s. But with the increasing consciousness of race in the United States, the scenes in which Jolson performs in blackface caused the film to fall out of favor with audiences and critics, turning it into little more than a footnote in the history of cinema.

Does The Jazz Singer still work?: Nope, and not just for the obvious reason. I hadn’t seen The Jazz Singer prior to watching it for this review, and its reputation led me to expect a movie that was chock full of minstrelsy. Actually, it contains roughly ten minutes of blackface- two musical numbers and a dramatic scene. But even those scenes left a bad taste in my mouth, less for their offensiveness than for their sheer ridiculousness. While I realize that blackface was considered a legitimate form of entertainment in the 1920s- instead of a reason to be kicked offstage at a Friars’ Club roast- it doesn’t make it any less laughable today.

What’s more, it feels completely gratuitous to the story that the film is telling. Jack Robin (Jolson) works his way to the top as a straight jazz singer, and once he hits Broadway he suddenly begins blacking up for performances, and the film treats this sudden change like it’s perfectly natural. What’s more, in the backstage scene involving Jack and his mother, the presence of blackface subverts the dramatic intent of the scene. When Jack’s mother cries out that her son has to come home to be reconciled with his dying dad, it’s supposed to be heartbreaking, but all I could pay attention to was Jolson’s blackened face and curly wig. Surely that couldn’t have been the film’s intention, could it?

But even out of blackface, Jolson’s performance hasn’t aged well at all. Jolson was primarily a theatrical performer, which is reflected by his overly emphatic acting style- an arsenal of broad facial expressions, shoulder shrugs, eye rolls, and head tilts. But while these gestures might play well on the stage, they’re unsuited to the cinematic medium, and even in intimate moments it feels like Jolson is playing to the cheap seats. What also becomes apparent in close-ups is the strange glint in Jolson’s eyes, which is interpreted by the other characters as pep but looked more to my eyes like mischief, almost malevolence. This gives The Jazz Singer a creepy vibe that couldn’t have been the filmmakers’ intention.

Rare and special is the film that actually holds up to eight decades’ worth of hindsight, and The Jazz Singer isn’t remotely that rare or special. Setting aside its technological advances, it was the kind of broad, simplistic melodrama of the sort that gives silent movies a bad name among non-cinephiles. That it was made at a time when silents were reaching their artistic apex just demonstrates how forgettable it really is. If not for its status as Hollywood’s first sound feature and the subsequent uproar over its racial insensitivity, it’s pretty safe to say The Jazz Singer would have been pretty much forgotten by cinema history, like so many other films of the period.

But hey, it’s still better than the Neil Diamond version, right?

When Is A Documentary Not A Documentary?

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 14:30:00 GMT

That's the question that William Goss is asking at Cinematical. Documentaries, long thought to be boring slogs that were designed to educate first and entertain fifth, have recently started making big money and attracting media attention. With that, they've also started to become entertaining first and informative last; and now, catering to an audience no longer consisting only of the fringe elements who liked documentaries for their own sake, their only previous requirement -- that they be true -- has come under increasing scrutiny.

"At what point did we begin to craft documentary filmmaking specifically to the masses," asks Goss, referring specifically to the Breakast Club-esque, heavily choreographed American Teen, "and then what happens when the masses just don't show?" And more than that, what happens when, in service to those massess, documentaries absolve themselves of their most sacred trust -- to reflect reality -- and start become something entirely different?

Obviously, this isn't the first time documentaries have blurred those particular lines in hopes of finding an audience. Going as far back as Nanook of the North, we find scenes that are staged, reshot, or otherwise tinkered with. Recreations have been a hot issue since the debut of Errol Morris' work; old Disney nature documentaries frequently blurred or even fabricated the truth about their subjects; and ideological bias has been an issue in documentary film since long before there was a Michael Moore. But in recent years, it's become a more important question than ever, with such popular films as March of the Penguins, which used manipulated footage on its way to becoming one of the biggest documentary successes of all time, the similar Arctic Tale, and the upcoming Morning Light, an alleged real-life documentary about sailing in which the cast is selected no differently than that of a sitcom.

Goss isn't entirely convinced this is a bad thing. He cites, in particular, cites Man On Wire (with its many reenactments) and Operation Filmmaker (whose protagonist abandons the 'role' crafted for him) as being excellent films depite the blurring of reality and fiction. But it does leave open copious questions. "The challenge remains for documentaries to double as entertainments," he says; but how much compromise can be made in service of that worthwhile goal?

Richard Roeper to Grant Wishes of Millions of Cinephiles

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 18:45:00 GMT

In how-can-we-miss-you-if-you-won'-go-away news, At the Movies co-host Richard Roeper has announced that this month will be his last on the popular movie review program. Unfortunately for those who have been wishing he would stop reviewing movies since he first started doing it in 2000, he will not be quitting film criticism altogether, but rather starting his own show as parent company Disney turns At the Movies into a new magazine-format entertainment-based talk show. "Over the last two seasons," Roeper said, "as (co-host) Roger (Ebert) has bravely coped with his medical issues, I've continued the show with a number of guest co-hosts, such as Jay Leno, Harold Ramis and John Mellencamp," all of whom share with Roeper the fact that they are not actually movie critics.

Although it's a classy way to go out -- giving his legendary senior partner props and making it look like he just wants to stay true to his calling rather than that Disney just wouldn't give him the money he thought he was worth -- Roeper's departure only highlights his widely criticized role in the ever-crumbling world of film criticism. Brought in to replace the beloved critic Gene Siskel after his death, the lean, jocular Roeper -- who owes his entire career as a movie writer to the fact that he happened to sit near Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times offices -- has often been excoriated for his hard-to-defend choices, aversion to anything but standard Hollywood fare, and genuine lack of knowledge about the movie industry in general, which could generously be interpreted as populism but which often came across as plain old ignorance. While there's many reasons to defend him -- he's genuinely enthusiastic about his job, he's an able and engaging political and cultural critic, and best of all, he's a White Sox fan -- as a movie critic, he's entirely too wrapped up in the polite and popular, and his reign on At the Movies has coincided with a general decline in the business of film criticism. He may just be a symbol of what's wrong with the vocation, but as symbols go, he'll do until the real thing gets here.

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Separated at Birth: "Wall-E" and "Silent Running"

Phil Nugent — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 14:30:00 GMT

The new Pixar film Wall-E might be considered the real blockbuster of the summer movie season so far, if only because most of the other obvious lollapaloozas--Iron Man, Sex and the City, that Harrison Ford thing--opened a month or so before summer officially started a little more than a week ago. A very funny, beautifully designed, unexpectedly affecting (I cried, okay? The walking trash compactor with the googly eyes fell in love and I cried. And I'd do it again.) animated fable, Wall-E deserves all the riches it will earn for its makers, which will probably only pile up faster and faster as people look for something to take the kids to see even as the remaining summer sure-shots, such as the new Batman and Hellboy films, turn weirder and darker. Because the movie carries a pretty explicit satirical message indicting the human race--or Americans, not that there's that much difference--of having selfishly abandoned their stewardship of their own ruined planet, it will also set off a publicity-getting barrage attacks by conservative commentators denouncing it as tree-hugging propaganda, which I'm sure will do it at least as much harm as those attacks on Mr. Incredible and his family for being elitists.

In the meantime, some canny repertory theater programmers would be well advised to cash in on the movie's success by pulling Silent Running out of mothballs, toot sweet. Although Wall-E pays comic homage to 2001 and includes an in-joke for Alien fans by employing Sigourney Weaver as the Mothering voice of a spaceship's computer, its strongest debt, both visually and spiritually, is to the 1972 hippie sci-fi film that marked the directing debut of Douglas Trumball, still best known for his work as a special effects wizard on such films as 2001, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Blade Runner. Both Wall-E and Silent Running posit a time when mankind has completely squandered the natural resources of its home planet, though Silent Running never gives you a look at what Earth itself has come to. Set entirely in space, it stars Bruce Dern as Freeman Lowell, a crew member aboard the Valley Forge, a vessel that has been tending the last surviving gardens in an orbiting greenhouse dome. After Dick Cheney ascends to the presidency, orders come in to blow up the domes and return to Earth. Lowell is the only person who seems troubled by this, and in the end he takes command of the ship and sets off into deep space so that he can tend his garden without being hassled by the man. He has to kill his three fellow human crew members (Ron Rifkin, Cliff Potts, and Jess Vint) in order to pull it off, a detail that the movie doesn't linger on but that gives it a tough edge that makes it genuinely provocative and perhaps saves it from squishiness. Like Edward Abbey's cult novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, it can be taken as an implicit endorsement of eco-terrorism. (It should be noted that Trumball devised an out for himself with the movie's soundtrack, which raises the possibility that Dern's character has been driven insane from having to listen to Joan Baez trilling in his ears.)

Of course, there's always been a glass ceiling on the number of people in the audience who were prepared to root for Bruce Dern even when he's on his best behavior. The real heroes of Silent Running are Lowell's helpers, the drones--pint-sized, waddling robots that he whimsically renames Huey, Dewey, and Louie. The drones seem to grow their own eccentric personalities after Lowell has liberated them from their lives of anonymous drudgery and programmed them to concentrate on tending the garden, and when one of them "dies", it seems to matter much more than the deaths of Lowell's mostly cretinous human companions. To realize his concept for the drones, Trumball actually went low-tech: the robots are suits (weighing some twenty pounds each) that were inhabited by double-amputees. The character of Wall-E, in turn, is unmistakably a drone as re-imagined by Chuck Jones and liberated from live-action gravity. (Although Pixar is still technically an arm of Disney--maybe the only arm that works with any reliability--Wall-E and the accompanying short film Presto, about a stage magician with a hungry rabbit, makes it more clear than ever that if the company's contract is with Uncle Walt, its artists' hearts and souls belong to classic Warner Brothers' Termite Terrace.)

Silent Running isn't the solid knockout entertainment that Wall-E is. Originally produced for Universal's doomed early-seventies "youth division", it is a searching and sometimes fumbling film, but one whose weaknesses are redeemed both by its sweetness and the incongruously razor-blade-chewing presence of its leading man. It is in some ways a movie made for the sake of a central image, and that image--the leafy green forest in the glass dome floating silently in space, carefully preserved and safe where no man can see it, or despoil it--can still give you shivers. (Unfortunately, so can Joan Baez.) It's an oddball personal movie, but Wall-E isn't the first mainstream picture to take inspiration from it: the drones had a strong effect on the look and behavior of Star Wars's R2-D2. In turn, Pixar hired Ben Burtt, the sound designer best known as the "voice" of R2-D2, to provide the same for Wall-E. Whatever else they don't have in common, these movies could all be said to share a core language--a language of clicks and beeps.

Screengrab Predicts: The Top 5 Hits of Summer 2008

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 01 May 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Studio executives, like TV weathermen, can be wrong half the time and still make a pretty fine living. One major difference, of course, is “The Suits” in Hollywood spend zillions on publicity and advertising campaigns to attempt to make their forecasts come true...and even then, they’re only right about half the time when it comes to cinematic hits and misses.

We here at the Screengrab will take that action. With the 2008 Blockbuster Season bearing down on us LIKE A RADIOACTIVE SPACE BUS THAT TRANSFORMS INTO A GIANT ROBOT LOADED WITH EXPLOSIVES, we hereby offer our predictions for the summer’s Top 5 Hits and Misses, in hopes of scoring ourselves sweet development deals based on our uncanny pop culture pulse-fingering prognostication abilities.

For the purposes of this experiment, “HIT” and “MISS” will refer not to the critical reception or cinematic quality of the films in question (because, really, who cares about that stuff?). Instead, we’ll calculate the accuracy of our predictions based on each film’s domestic box office gross in relation to its marketing/production budget and the hype/expectation surrounding it.

Want to play along at home? Let us know your Top 5 picks for upcoming Summer Hits, and compare them to our collective and individual predictions. Whoever scores the most correct answers WINS A BRAND NEW IMAGINARY CAR!

And now, our picks for the Top 5 HITS of Summer 2008:

5. KUNG FU PANDA

This one's pretty easy to explain: (1) Kung fu. (2) Pandas. It's got something for everyone! (LP)

Plurality Opinion: Dreamworks' annual summer animated movie doesn't have the built-in audience of the Shrek franchise, but it should still do good family business for the three weeks before Wall*E hits screens. (PC)

Memorandum Opinion: I haven’t seen that Panda on any big plastic soda cups yet, but maybe I haven’t been hanging out in the right fast food restaurants or convenience stores. This movie just squeaked onto our list as a result of numerous split votes elsewhere...but who knows? Maybe panda is the new penguin! (AO)

4. IRON MAN

Another gamble here, but one worth betting on due to it being the first high-profile summer release. Iron Man isn't an icon like Batman or Spider-Man, but Paramount has done a bang-up job promoting the film, and the re-emergence of Robert Downey Jr. as a high-profile leading man is the kind of story that can do wonders for a movie's public awareness. (PC)

3. INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL

Come on, like it could possibly be anything else. Indiana Jones is one of the iconic characters in cinema. Who's not looking forward to this? Add to that the fact that the film's got next to no competition for the month or so after it's released and this is the one to beat. Here's hoping it's actually good. (PC)

Memorandum Opinion: I'm going to call this as a slight box office disappointment that nevertheless cracks the top five. Indy's heyday was a long time ago, and even Lucas and Spielberg seem to be trying to downplay expectations. (SV)

Dissenting Opinion: First of all, that title is just way too long. Titles more than 20 letters long are for artsy foreign movies. Second, is there really that big an audience for this outside of hardcore geek circles? The key demographic for summer action flicks wasn't even born when the LAST Indiana Jones movie came out. (LP)

2. THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA: PRINCE CASPIAN

Advance word is that the second in the Narnia series outdoes the first in terms of pacing, script, and special effects, but my guess is that it'll succeed because conservatives bitched so much about the previous movie not getting enough attention that America will guiltily drag themselves to see it just to shut them up. (LP)

Dissenting Opinion: The last installment in the Narnia franchise was a blockbuster, but that was released in December. In a more competitive summer season, it should have a solid opening weekend before getting trounced by Indiana Jones. (PC)

1. THE DARK KNIGHT

There's pretty much no way this thing will bomb. Even if it had a bad director, a crummy script, an unpopular main character, and a poorly-designed set, geeks would flock to it in droves. But it doesn't have any of those things, AND one of its stars died mysteriously during filming! That's money in the bank, people. (LP)

Let's see: blockbuster sequel, over a solid year's worth of hype, extensive viral marketing campaign, hugely popular hero and villain, and to top it off, a much-buzzed final complete performance by Heath Ledger. Even non-Batfans are going to want to get a load of his Joker, which should push The Dark Knight to the top of the heap. (SV)

Batman is back in the public's good graces after the awesomeness of Batman Begins, and this one's got the most popular of Bat-villains, The Joker. And sad to say, but the hype around the late Mr. Ledger's performance will only help the movie's chances at the box office. (PC)

HONORABLE MENTION:

HANCOCK:

Will Smith. July 4. Action, comedy, superheroes, you name it. It's got practically everything one could ask for from a midsummer release. (PC)

WALL*E

Here's where things get a little less certain. Sure, WALL-E is a Disney/Pixar release, with all the family cachet that implies. However, it may not be as cuddly as some of the family favorites Pixar has made in the past. Still, this is the highest-profile family-friendly release of the summer, so this is the one to beat. Besides, if Pixar can strike box-office gold with rats in a kitchen... (PC)

TROPIC THUNDER

Historically, August is the time when comedy re-emerges as box-office gold. After months of blockbuster bloat, audiences will want to laugh again, and this movie- starring Ben Stiller and newly-hot Robert Downey Jr.- looks to have the most potential for success. (PC)

AMERICAN TEEN

An instant America’s sweetheart cuddly “rebel” poster girl and a trailer that’s so John Hughes accessible that megaplex audiences may not realize it’s a documentary until it’s too late to get their money back may turn this Sundance fave into an indie hit (at the very least) and maybe even a real live mainstream smash. (AO)

PINEAPPLE EXPRESS

If the rabid anticipation of this flick by the teenage dudes at my last family gathering bears any relation to the feelings of teenage dudes across the nation, this could be a sleeper hit. Plus: Apatow. (AO)

WHAT HAPPENS IN VEGAS

With a combination of everyone's favorite annoying jackass, Ashton Kutcher, and a title drawn from an ad campaign predicated on date rape, fatal drug overdoses, and dead hookers, how can it miss? (LP)

***

The above list reflects the combined, weighted picks of four of our resident Screengrab know-it-alls. Below, our original ballots:

Leonard Pierce

1. The Dark Knight

2. Kung Fu Panda

3. Speed Racer

4. The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian

5. What Happens In Vegas

Scott Von Doviak

1. The Dark Knight

2. Iron Man

3. Hancock

4. Prince Caspian

5. Indiana Jones

Paul Clark

1. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

2. Hancock

3. The Dark Knight

4. Wall*E

5. Iron Man

Andrew Osborne

1. Indiana Jones

2. The Dark Knight

3. Prince Caspian

4. The Pineapple Express

5. American Teen

-- Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Paul Clark, Scott Von Doviak, Leonard Pierce

P.S. Your Deer Is Dead

Leonard Pierce — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Disney, as Disney is fond of reminding us, is not just a movie company or an entertainment conglomerate: it's a kingdom, a lifestyle, almost a religion. And if that's true, its position on the major issues of the day are more than just fodder for the back pages of their annual stockholder report: they're front page news, or even the subject of scholarly tomes.

Such, as the New York Times reports, is the case with Disney's environmental record. Throughout its history, Disney has played both sides of the ecological fence: it recently announced the formation of a new film unit exclusively dedicated to creating nature documentaries, while its theme parks are denounced by environmentalists as resource-draining, pollution-spewing nightmares; its previous science films have sparked the interest of children in wildlife and conservation, while attracting charges of exaggeration or outright fakery; and its beloved animated children's classics have cemented a protective attitude towards nature in the minds of entire generations, while both hunters and animal rights activists claim that they present a distorted and dangerous view of animal life.

Two new books have recently appeared on the market, reflecting the Disney dichotomy as regards the world of nature. David Whitley of Cambridge University has penned The Idea of Nature in Disney Animation, a prolix pro-Disney statement of purpise in which he argues that Disney has done perhaps more than any other institution to promote environmentalism: "These films", he says of Disney's animated canon, "have taught us variously about having a fundamental respect for nature. Some of them, such as Bambi, inspired conservation awareness and laid the emotional groundwork for environmental activism." Ralph Lutts of Oxford, however, takes issue with that notion in his The Nature Fakers: Wildlife, Science, & Sentiment, taking the films to task for their "Sunday School vision of nature as a place without stress, conflict, or death."

The debate looks to intensify with the foundation of Disneynature, and author Patricia Cohen notes that even internally, the message isn't always clear-cut, as the John Muir unspoiled-wilderness environmentalism of early Disney films like Bambi is giving way to a Nature Conservatory view in movies like Finding Nemo, where humans and animals find a happy medium of coexistence. One problem, though: what of Pixar? What message are we sending our children about the issue of safe spaces for robots, living toys, and talking cars?

Ollie Johnston, 1912--2008

Phil Nugent — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 15:00:00 GMT

The death of animator Ollie Johnston, at 95, marks the end of our first-hand access to an era: Johnston, who worked at Disney from 1935 until his retirement in 1978, was the last member of the core group of the studio's animators who were known collevtively as "the nine old men." (Most of them were in their twenties when they were given that label.) Johnston worked in various major capacities on such features as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Fantasia, Pinocchio, and Bambi; among other accomplishments, he was famous, or notorious, for having animated the death of Bambi's mother, thus making him responsible for several generations of childhood traumas. A real company man, he married a co-worker, a Disney pen-and-ink artist named Marie. (The marriage lasted for 63 years, until his wife's death in 2005.)

Among animation geeks, his name came to be closely associated with a fellow member of the nine old men, Frank Thomas, who he knew at Stanford University and who retired from Disney the same year he did. The two were popular attractions on the lecture circuit and co-authored a number of books aimed at recording and preserving the story of how the Disney classics came to be made, including Bambi: The Story and the Film, The Disney Villains, and Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life. Their own story was the subject of a 1995 documentary feature, Frank and Ollie, which was made by Frank's son Theodore Thomas. Their shared website is here. Frank Thomas died in 2004.

Fine and Zandi

Phil Nugent — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 17:00:00 GMT

You may not have heard of David Zandi. If so, from the sound of it, you don't know what you're missing. The twenty-nine-year-old, Iranian-born Zandi, says that he's one of the last surviving male members of the Persian royal family. His IMDB page, which lists two acting credits--Marci C, in which he played "Musician", and Men in Black II, in which he stretched for the role of "Alien"--is full of other intriguing personal information, including the news that he's "a champion equestrian", "loves going skiing in the winter", "Turned down the offer to be a model for Gucci and Calvin Klein to stay in acting school", and that he "Coached his girlfriend with her acting and speech in 2001 so she could work on his project." (Is that what the kids are calling it these days?) This stuff goes over pretty well with the people who hang out at IMDB message boards: one post there is headed, "MARRY ME!" The page also features quotes from Zandi, including this beaut: "Even as Talent, I see it as my sole duty to do that which is in the best interest of the Studio, regardless of my own personal desires." Right now, Zandi is trying to serve the best interests of Disney by offering himself to star in the forthcoming movie version of the video game Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. Zandi isn't exactly lobbying for the role: he just wants the studio to recognize that logic is on his side. "I'm very logical for this part," he explains, "because of the way that I was raised as a child, his personality, his mannerisms. It's something I could easily pull off. It would be like playing myself. It would be an opportunity to play myself because of my ancestry."

But though he's above begging, he "will accept the role from Jerry Bruckheimer when he decides to meet the demands of the fans. I just want to give the fans what they want." Zandi knows what the fans want because of "an official-looking poll obtained by movie news service IESB.net" that shows him leading the field s voters' top choice for the role, ahead of such notables as Orlando Bloom, Zac Efron, and James McAvoy. IESB says only that they received news of the poll from an anonymous source who asked that his identity be kept confidential, a Disney spokesperson said only the official spokesperson equivalent of, "Pull the other one," and Zandi disclaims any connection to the poll but does say that he thinks it would be an awful thing for his family and everyone involved if his ancestor wound up being played by Orlando Bloom. (We hear him on that one.) Will Jerry Bruckheimer come to his sense and hire Zandi? Right now, things don't look that good, but maybe if things don't work out, maybe Zandi can maintain his poise by repeating this mantra, from his IMDB quotes section:"In this world, there are many forms of deception, but perhaps the greatest of them all, is self-deception."

Oscar Shorts, Part 2: Best Animated Short Film

Paul Clark — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 20:00:00 GMT

More often than not, the winner of the Best Animated Short Film category seems like a foregone conclusion. With such major Hollywood players as Pixar, Disney, and Blue Sky in the mix, it can be hard for the up-and-coming animator to compete for the prize. But this year is different. There’s no big animation studio in the mix, which should make for an interesting Oscar race. In addition, there are a number of worthy nominees in the race, so one hopes quality will be the primary factor in voters’ decisions.

At a time when Hollywood animated features all seem to boast a similar visual aesthetic — largely a modified CGI take on the classic Disney style — it’s good to see diversity in this year’s crop of Oscar-nominated shorts. Consider the Russian entry, My Love, animated in a painterly style with plenty of swirling brushstrokes. This style is a good match for its classically-bound story, set in czarist Russia and inspired by Turgenev. My Love, directed by Alexander Petrov, is a poignant evocation of first love, and a rich and rewarding film.

The film with the broadest mainstream appeal is Josh Raskin’s I Met the Walrus, which also boasts the best backstory of the five nominees. In 1969, fourteen-year-old Jerry Levitan snuck into John Lennon’s hotel room and persuaded him to do a short interview, and almost four decades later Levitan and Raskin have turned that interview into a film. If only the film itself were so interesting — Raskin’s style is shallow and uninspired, literalizing Lennon’s remarks by matching them with sub-Gilliam visual equivalents. As far as films like this go, it pales in comparison with Chris Landreth’s 2004 Oscar-winner Ryan, which was similarly inspired by an interview but made for compelling cinema with its expressive style and bittersweet tone. By comparison, I Met the Walrus is a stunt.

Also taking its cue from a dearly departed musical master is Suzie Templeton and Hugh Welchman’s Peter and the Wolf, a new take on Prokofiev’s classic. One of three stop-motion films in competition this year, the film follows Peter and his animal friends into the forest where of course they meet a wolf. The story is nothing new, but the animation is impressive. I especially liked the backgrounds, full of gnarly trees and dark corners, but the characters were fun as well, my favorite being a fat, mean cat who looked suspiciously like Orson Welles as Falstaff.

I was somewhat more mixed on the French stop-motion nominee, Même les Pigeons Vont Au Paradis (Even Pigeons Go to Heaven). Samuel Tourneux and Simon Vanesse’s short tells the story of a priest who tries to convince an old miser to buy a machine that will guarantee him entry into heaven. The animation is good-looking, but the filmmaking isn’t particularly inspired, and the pacing feels rushed. In the end, Pigeons is more or less a one-joke movie, not up to the high standard set by some of the other nominees.

Finally, the third stop-motion entry and the best of this year’s nominees is Madame Tutli-Putli, which follows the titular mousy heroine as she experiences a number of strange events on a bizarre night train. Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski’s film is light on story, but overflowing with style. In addition, Madame Tutli-Putli is a masterpiece of tone, perfectly capturing the forlorn feel of an overcrowded train car, as well as moments of humor, suspense, and visual poetry. Madame Tutli-Putli is perhaps too obscure for the Academy voters — pessimist that I am, I anticipate that they might go for I Met the Walrus or Even Pigeons Go to Heaven. But it’s a wonder, and I expect that it’ll still be watched long after the other films have been forgotten.

Trailer Review: WALL*E

John Constantine — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 22:15:00 GMT

As buzz has had it for over a decade now, Pixar really is the true successor to the Disney animated feature dynasty. They’re fast approaching their silver anniversary as the most critically and commercially adored animation studio in the Western world. With the exception of A Bug’s Life — which is pretty standard kiddie-picture fluff despite being beautiful — their reputation is flawless. From the look of this trailer for WALL*E, Andrew Stanton’s directorial follow-up to Finding Nemo, it looks like Pixar’s poised to make their most exciting work yet. It isn’t that their quirky subjects du jour are mechanical, that territory having already been covered by Cars. It’s that it looks like the movie is going to be largely devoid of dialogue. The studio’s no stranger to silent animation but this would be their first full length feature to forego an imminently quotable script voiced by recognizable celebs. Ballsy stuff. Color us excited.

You can check out Empire’s exclusive trailer here.

When Good Directors Go Bad: The Brothers Grimm (2005, Terry Gilliam)

Paul Clark — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Terry Gilliam is as widely known for his production troubles as he is for the quality of his films. Gilliam has had to contend with studio interference on nearly all his recent films, and has weathered such troubles as litigation over screenplay credit on Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a literal pain-in-the-ass star who shut down production on The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, and the death of leading man Heath Ledger while shooting his latest project, The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus. It’s gotten to the point where it’s a shock when a Gilliam project runs smoothly.

After finally abandoning Don Quixote, Gilliam needed a new project, and around the same time, Bob and Harvey Weinstein of Miramax were looking for a fantasy franchise to cash in on the recent success of Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. Of course, the eternal troublemaker Gilliam and the famously meddling Weinsteins were hardly an ideal match, but I’d guess that Gilliam was so frustrated with not making films that he took The Brothers Grimm so that he could keep working.

However, from the beginning there were problems. Both Gilliam and leading man Matt Damon wanted Oscar nominee Samantha Morton for the film’s female lead, but the Weinsteins vetoed her, allegedly because she wasn’t deemed attractive enough. Let me repeat that: she wasn’t good-looking enough for these guys. Another point of contention was a prosthetic nose that Gilliam wanted Damon to wear in the film, but which was nixed by the studio. And the troubles continued throughout production (regular Gilliam cinematographer Nicola Pecorini was fired mid-filming) and even post-production (the film’s most expensive effects sequence was cut from the film after the effects were nearly finished). Gilliam and the studio differed so greatly over the film’s final cut — surprising, I realize — that Gilliam placed the editing on hold for six months and shot his subsequent film, Tideland, in the interim.

But though The Brothers Grimm clearly suffered from studio meddling, Gilliam is hardly blameless. The screenplay is mediocre at best, cribbing the main storyline of The Frighteners — a charlatan exploiting people’s superstitions for personal gain suddenly comes up against a genuine supernatural threat. Into this formula, Gilliam, screenwriting collaborator Tony Grisoni, and Miramax house scribe Ehren Kruger shoehorn as many references to Grimm fairy tales as they can, most of which practically club you over the head with their obviousness.

Perhaps sensing how thin the material was, Gilliam tries to compensate with his direction, which is brimful with such familiar Gilliam tropes as swooping camera shots, wide-angle lenses, and all manner of extreme tilts. Likewise, he directs his supporting players to go wayyyyyyyyy over the top instead of giving them three-dimensional characters. Most embarrassing is Peter Stormare as the bumbling Cavaldi, giving less a performance than a failed parody of commedia dell’arte-style acting. At one point, Cavaldi says of the German tongue, “every word is like an execution,” but the line would more aptly be applied to his performance.

Amidst the chaos, there are elements of The Brothers Grimm that work. Chiefly among them is the performance by Heath Ledger as the nebbishy Jakob Grimm, who actually believes in the stories that he and his brother are exploiting. Ledger makes the most of what he’s given to create a funny, surprisingly touching character who gives the film what little heart it contains. In 2005, Ledger was beginning to really demonstrate his range, and based on the evidence here we might have expected some richly comic performances in his future. Damon is solid as well in a more conventional role, but it’s Ledger who steals the show.

There are also a handful of magical moments in which Gilliam transcends the screenplay and lets his imagination run wild. Most effective is a scene in which a puddle of mud takes a human form to abduct a child, and it’s such a creepy image that not even a line pointing out that the mud-man is meant to be the Gingerbread Man can ruin it. I also like a macabre moment in which a girl is swallowed whole by a possessed horse, which Gilliam shows almost completely in shadow. And there’s a priceless bit involving a kitten, one of the few times in the film when Gilliam’s twisted sense of humor shines through.

After sticking it on the shelf for months, the Weinsteins released The Brothers Grimm in late summer 2005, as one of roughly a dozen films they dumped in theatres just prior to relinquishing Miramax to Disney. Leading up to the film’s release, the Weinsteins allegedly placed a gag order on Gilliam forbidding him to say anything against the film for fear that he’d try to sabotage its box-office chances. But Gilliam had mostly moved on, as Tideland would make its world premiere less than a month later. Tideland received many negative reviews, but love it or hate it, it’s unmistakably a Gilliam film, which is more than I can say about The Brothers Grimm.

"Toy Story" Trilogy in 3-D

Phil Nugent — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 18:00:00 GMT

In recent years, Disney has become notorious for tinkering with the cherished contents of its vaults; you could kill a year or so by just comparing all the various "restoration" versions of Fantasia. But Pixar, the computer-animation division that has been responsible for many of the company's biggest hits and most of its critically revered creative muscle since the mid-1990s, has seemed to be too busy moving forward to spend its time and money fretting over its back catalog. Now it's been announced that the 1995 Toy Story, Pixar's first feature film and first release through Disney, and its fine sequel, the 1999 Toy Story 2, will be "remade" in 3-D, in anticipation of the eventual release of Toy Story 3, scheduled to be made in 3-D. John Lasseter, the Pixar co-founder and current chief creative officer at Disney Animation Studios who directed both films, says that "We thought it would be great to let audiences experience the first two films all over again and in a brand new way. . . 3D offers lots of great new possibilities for the art of animation and we will continue to use this new technology to tell our stories in the best possible way." It certainly represents an upgrade for Toy Story 2 in particular — that project was originally supposed to be one of the "direct-to-video" sequels that Disney routinely puts out after it's had a hit, but the movie was repositioned for a proper theatrical release after it turned out that Pixar was unable to sink to the usual Disney level. The 3-D Toy Story will be released in the fall of 2009, with Toy Story 2 coming out early in 2010 and the all-new TS3 scheduled to appear in summer of that year. The situation is slightly reminiscent of the re-release of the gussied-up versions of the first three Star Wars movies in 1997, in anticipation of the 1999 appearance of The Phantom Menace. Except that, you know, we have faith in John Lasseter.