The Screengrab : dog day afternoon

Phil's Film Faves, Part One

Phil Nugent — Tue, 26 May 2009 18:00:00 GMT

A while back, we here at the Screengrab made our best stab at listing our picks for the greatest movies of all time. This is a classification that is distinctly different from naming our favorite movies, movies that, in many cases, happened to come into our lives at just the right moment, packing a style or a mindset that happened to hit us right in the soft spot, and that entered our bloodstream, affecting our judgements from that point on--though it not unheard of for favorite movies and greatest movies to overlap. A list of one's nominations for greatest movies tells one a lot about a person's ideas about art and history, about which breakthroughs matter to him in a way that, if they were not a part of what movies have come to be, he would care a lot less about them all. Our favorite movies tell us a lot about ourselves. Permit me to bore you with a little about me.

IT'S TOUGH TO BE A BIRD (1969)

DAD, CAN I BORROW THE CAR? (1970)

Both these short films were made by Ward Kimball, one of the "Nine Old Men" remembered as having been key to the development of the animation department at Walt Disney Studios. They were eventually shown on the TV anthology series The Wonderful World of Disney in the 1970s, which is were my barely formed retinas took them in. Bird is mostly animated, with some live action mixed in; Car is mostly live action, but with lots of animation effects. These range from quick gags to sequences that suggest the surreal, politically charged animation being done in Eastern Europe at the time, as well as Terry Gilliam's brand of animated cut-outs. Kimball, whose reputation is that of the wild man among the Disney old guard, had a simple, direct approach: pick a subject and garland it with as many visual gags as he could come up with. The wildness was all in how far afield his comic imagination could go, and how happy he seemed when he was slapping things together as fast as he could. I saw these films when I was so young that I subsequently forgot having seen them at all, but a few years ago I saw Bird again, and just a few months ago I found Car on a bootleg DVD, and as soon as I recognized what they were, I realized how much I'd loved them as an infant, so much so that I wanted more stuff like that to cram into my head. In a strange way, I think this desire planted the seeds for a lot of things I like, ranging from Svankmajer to Godard at his most discursive to Monty Python to Requiem for a Dream to the rambling monologues of This American Life. Discovering something that had a major impact on shaping your tastes when they were still at the developmental stages can weird you out a little.

JAWS (1975)

This was the first feature film that I loved unreasonably, and I think it's a good pick for a first love. The story is simple and uncomplicated and involving, and Spielberg brought it to life by lavishing upon it an amazing level of inventiveness at telling it visually, so much so that, in scenes such as the famous moment when the shark unexpectedly appears in the background of the shot while Roy Scheider has his head turned and is in the middle of spitting out a line in the other, he was able to give the viewer a jolt at the same time he got you laughing at his mastery of the conventions he was turning inside out and the audience expectations with which he was playing. It also has a subversive, satirical edge that connects it to the best of '70s pop culture: even someone who'd seen as few horror movies as I had by that time knew that it was unusual for the director to implicitly side with the hippie know-it-all scientist with the unsightly beard against the blustering macho man who thinks he's scored a goal in their ongoing war of personalities by glowering and flattening an empty beer can with his paw. (For years afterwards, I was trying to impress people by imitating Richard Dreyfuss's aplomb at squeezing a paper cup in response, not recognizing that it lost a lot of context.) Not long after I saw Jaws for the first of I hate to think how many times--not very long after at all, in fact, because I was too young to see it when it first came out but was allowed, after two years of screaming and crying over my cruel deprivation, to see it when it was re-released in 1977, thanks in no smart to my parents' very well-timed and much-enjoyed divorce, Star Wars came out. I used to try to reason with people who were raving about it at the playground. "Guys," I'd say in my reasoning-with-idiots voice, "there is no shark in this movie."

MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL (1975) & YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN (1974)

I know that she has many suitors, but for my part, let me just say, in all selfishness, that I will always be grateful for having seen Holy Grail at precisely the moment in my life when a movie that begins with the opening credits malfunctioning and ends with a police raid on the set would strike me as the greatest thing in the world. Frankenstein's appeal was less avant-garde. Let's just say that, for all of my childhood and well into my adolescence, I got most of my information about what was going on the movie theaters of our great land from the movie satires in Mad magazine, and it was a great thrill to see what was basically the greatest Mad magazine movie satire ever projected on a thirty-foot screen.

THE LONG GOODBYE (1973) & CALIFORNIA SPLIT (1974)

Elliot Gould's acting in these two Robert Altman's movies is the kind of thing that cults are meant for. It's as if he were living some kind of improvised coffeehouse monologue--too sweet to be by Lenny Bruce, but not requiring the kind of hepcat skeleton key that you might need to make sense of Lord Buckley. He's funny and seemingly detached but not above showing how much he really cares when he realizes that he's made a terrible mistake--a mistake that he invariably makes for the best of reasons, for refusing to sense the worst about a friend. And if he strikes a lot of people as flaky, that may be because he's his own man in a way that, even then, set him completely against the times, which more and more looks like the most genuinely heroic position for an American to take. I tried like hell to achieve this degree of loosness for a few years in my twenties, and I even thought I had it for a while, but in retrospect, I'm afraid that I was just unemployed.

DOG DAY AFTERNOON (1975)

My other big acting man-crush from that period is Al Pacino's performance here, and it couldn't be more different in its appeal, because I'd never seen anybody channel that much controlled energy before. The whole movie is a wonder of the New York actor's art, with people like John Cazale and Charles Durning and Sully Boyer and Chris Sarandon delicately matching their styles to Pacino's and providing the quiet contrast that makes his sustained liftoff possible. I once had a new roommate who had never seen this movie, and I was very eager to show it to her. I still remember the moment, about fifteen minutes into it, when she asked, "Umm...how much longer before they get out of the bank?" It's funny, those moments when you immediately know that it's not going to work.

TWO-LANE BLACKTOP (1971)

Excuse the appearance of cross-promotion, but I've already written about this one.

Blasphemy Isn't What It Used to Be: Ron Howard and "Angels & Demons"

Phil Nugent — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 15:30:00 GMT

Ron Howard's new movie, Angels & Demons, starring Tom Hanks as symbologist super sleuth Robert Langdon, is a follow-up to their 2006 piece-of-shit movie The Da Vinci Code, which was based on Dan Brown's bestselling 2003 pice-of-shit novel of the same name. (Angels & Demons is actually based on an earlier novel that Brown published in 2000, which marked the first appearance of the Langdon character.) I couldn't quite follow the thread of The Da Vinci Code, but I think it had something to do with clues hidden in the Mona Lisa that Amélie is Jesus Christ's great-great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter. (I think there was also something about how "the Holy Grail", legendary for being Jesus's favorite thing to drink from, was actually his pet name for Mary Magdalene, but that's so unbelievably filthy that I must have imagined it. We are, after all, talking about a movie made by Opie, starring Forrest Gump.) The new movie reportedly has to do with the return of the Illuminati, which (in Brown's conspiracy-fantasy mythology) was murderously wiped out by the Catholic church some three thousand years ago for being too scientific and artistic and progressive and all. As before, the new movie is being threatened with organized protests from Catholic groups who take offense at seeing their church portrayed as Murder, Inc. with funnier hats. Faced with these complaints, Howard has done what any serious religious history scholar would do: he's gone to the Huffington Post to deliver his Sermon on the Mount.

Howard's bete noire is William Donahue of the Catholic League, who, in Howard's words, "writes that I and the people who made this thriller 'do not hide their animus against all things Catholic.'" (Apparently all things Catholic include basic grammar.) "Let me be clear," writes the director of Frost/Nixon: "neither I nor Angels & Demons are anti-Catholic. And let me be a little controversial: I believe Catholics, including most in the hierarchy of the Church, will enjoy the movie for what it is: an exciting mystery, set in the awe-inspiring beauty of Rome. After all, in Angels & Demons, Professor Robert Langdon teams up with the Catholic Church to thwart a vicious attack against the Vatican. What, exactly, is anti-Catholic about that?" As to the details, "Mr. Donohue's booklet accuses us of lying when our movie trailer says the Catholic Church ordered a brutal massacre to silence the Illuminati centuries ago. It would be a lie if we had ever suggested our movie is anything other than a work of fiction (if it were a documentary, our talk of massacres would have referenced the Inquisition or the Crusades)...Mr. Donohue's op-ed [in the New York Daily News] and booklet also suggest that we paint the Church as 'anti-reason.' There is plenty of debate over what the Church did or didn't do with Galileo, but I for one do recognize that the Church did much throughout the ages to encourage and preserve education, the arts and the sciences." As Jesus used to say to Pontius Pilate, passive-aggressive much?

Unmollified by these and other valuable points made by Howard (ranging from "And if fictional movies could never take liberties with reality, then there would have been no Ben-Hur, no Barabbas, The Robe, Gone With The Wind, or Titanic. Not to mention Splash!" to "Even the current 'faith vs. science' debate over embryonic stem cells is briefly depicted in Angels & Demons in a balanced way."), Donahue has struck back in his latest press release: “Dan Brown says in his book that the Illuminati are ‘factual’ and that they were ‘hunted ruthlessly by the Catholic Church.’ In the film’s trailer, Tom Hanks, who plays the protagonist Robert Langdon, says ‘The Catholic Church ordered a brutal massacre to silence them forever.’ Howard concurs: ‘The Illuminati were formed in the 1600s. They were artists and scientists like Galileo and Bernini, whose progressive ideas threatened the Vatican.’ All of this is a lie. The Illuminati were founded in 1776 and were dissolved in 1787. It is obvious that Galileo and Bernini could not possibly have been members: Galileo died in 1647 and Bernini passed away in 1680. More important, the Catholic Church never hunted, much less killed, a single member of the Illuminati. But this hasn’t stopped Brown from asserting that ‘It is a historical fact that the Illuminati vowed vengeance against the Vatican in the 1600s.’" Perhaps sensing how many readers stepped out into the hallway for a smoke while he was rattling off dates, Brown adds, "Moreover, we know from a Canadian priest who hung out with Howard’s crew last summer in Rome (dressed in civilian clothes) just how much they hate Catholicism.” Personally, I have no plans to see Angels & Demons, but I would pay half my body weight in gold bullion to see a movie based on the true-life adventures of an undercover Catholic, dressed in a Canadian priest's idea of "civilian clothes"--I'm picturing Disco Stu with a cross around his neck--who hangs out with Opie and Forrest to listen to them express the true, hateful feelings they have about Catholics when they think all the Pope's children are in the bathroom. ("And the rhythm method--what's that all about!? You look at the size of some of these families, I guess maybe Mel Gibson's had a little trouble finding the backbeat, y'know what I'm saying? Cheese it, here comes Coppola!")

Now, we don't really have a dog in this race. And make no mistake about it, we here at the Screengrab are just crazy about blasphemy and try to encourage it whenever we can. What's discouraging, though, is Howard's good-natured, reasonable tone: yeah, we kind of dis your church's history and make your guys look like nut jobs and gangsters, but we don't mean anything by it! It's just necessary to the plot of a good thriller. What are you saying, that you don't like good thrillers? Go dig Hitchcock up and blow shit at him! Some real moviemakers like Bunuel risked their careers, their standing in the community, and maybe even their lives to make blasphemous movies, and somebody like Howard flirts with it, out of commercial necessity--somebody is going to make movies out of Dan Brown's bullshit--and expects everybody to understand that it doesn't really mean anything to him, so it shouldn't give offense to anyone. I myself am no fan of Oliver Stone's JFK, either as a movie or as an historical argument, but I'll give it this much: I'm willing to believe that the murder of John Kennedy is something that Stone is, or was, genuinely freaked out about. it's understandable that Howard would be baffled and even offended by William Donahue's assertion that he's actually a hater and propagandist against the Catholic church instead of a guy trying to make a buck with a pre-sold property, but if he would open his mind up a little, he might be able to see that, in his way, Donahue is paying him a compliment by suggesting that he's a serious enough man to believe in his own crap. As Al Pacino put it in Dog Day Afternoon, if somebody's going to blow my brains out, I hope it's somebody who does it because he hates my guts, not because it's his job.

Trailer Review: JCVD

Paul Clark — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 16:00:00 GMT

When it was announced that a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie was going to be playing at Toronto this year, it came as something of a surprise. Yet the reviews for JCVD were mostly positive, and I must say that this trailer is kind of a hoot. I suppose it was inevitable that the Muscles From Brussels would eventually make a movie that kids his image (what, doesn’t Double Team count?), but for something Van Damme would make this one looks pretty clever, a kind of Dog Day Afternoon meets Being John Malkovich, except, you know, with Van Damme. I suppose it helps that I watched all of JCVD’s “Classics” with my dad back in the day, so I’m pretty much the ideal audience member for this. But still, I’m actually looking forward to a Van Damme movie, for the first time in, well, ever.

That Guy! Special "Godfather" Edition, Part Three

Phil Nugent — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 16:00:00 GMT

This week, "The Godfather--The Coppola Restoration", a DVD and Blu-ray set consisting of newly remastered editions of the three "Godfather" films directed by Francis Ford Coppola, hits the stores. To honor the release of the home video set, That Guy!, the Screengrab's sporadic celebration of B-listers, character actors, and the working famous, is devoting itself this week to the backup chorus of these remarkable films.

LEE STRASBERG: Co-founder of the Group Theatre and a director of the Actors Studio, Strasberg was a legendary acting teacher and Method guru but had barely had an acting career of his own when his former studio Al Pacino suggested that, at 72, he might be the right man to incarnate Hyman Roth, the ancient Mafia rainmaker who is said to have earned Vito Corleone's respect but never his trust. There may have been a bit of sly mischief mixed in with Pacino's worship when he put the actor and the character together; Strasberg had inspired a fair amount of gossip over the years about his manipulation of those under his sway--particularly Marilyn Monroe, who left him the bulk of her estate in her will--and there are moments when it's easy to see in Roth an old actor who's used to playing up both his accumulated wisdom and his infirmities to get attention, and also to gull those around him into thinking that he's as harmless as he seems. Yet Strasberg, handed this unexpected opportunity to show what he could do with rich material after many years of talking the talk, really dove in and acted the hell out of the role. Given his reputation for stressing the importance of emotional groping in acting, one might be surprised at how technically accomplished his work is, especially in the scene where he talks about the grounds he has for harboring a grudge against Michael, begins to make a painful-sounding noise indicating that he's having trouble controlling his breathing, and just plows on ahead with his monologue, mastefully using the painful-sounding grunts as counterpoint to the lines. Strasberg won an Academy Award nomination for the performance but lost to another of his old students, Robert De Niro, for De Niro's performance in the same movie. It's no surprise that after this late-life fling, he was eager to do more film acting, though it's also no surprise that, at his age, there seemed to be no surplus of appropriate roles halfway worthy of him. He played Pacino's grandfather in the 1979 ...And Justice for All and co-starred with Ruth Gordon in Boardwalk and with Art Carney and George Burns in Going in Style that same year, and died in 1982.

DOMINIC CHIANESE: Chianese, who played Hyman Roth's right-hand man Johnny Ola, is unique in the annals of Godfather cast members in that he didn't really get much of a career boost from the movie but later became a celebrity thanks to his work in another organized-crime drama made twenty-five years later, which often used The Godfather itself as a handy reference point: The Sopranos. Chianese began his show business career as a musician with one foot in musical theater-- Gilbert and Sullivan, off-Broadway musicals, Oliver! He was working for the man, giving guitar lessons in a rehab center, when he landed the role of Johnny Ola and performed it with a skillfully applied veneer of polished smarm. (It was his second movie role, after a bit part in the 1972 Fuzz.) It did lead to fairly steady work in film and TV and a continuing association with Al Pacino: a year after The Godfather, Part II, he played Pacino's father in Dog Day Afternoon, and twenty years after that, Pacino invited him to participate in his documentary about acting Shakespeare, Looking for Richard. But none of that brought him anywhere near the attention he earned when David Chase stuck a pair of Mr. Magoo eyeglasses on him and dubbed him Uncle Junior. Since then, he has appeared in such movies as Unfaithful (2002) and When Will I Be Loved (2004) but has mostly used the boost he got from the TV show to re-energize his singing career, making personal appearances and releasing the CDs Hits and Ungrateful Heart.

ABE VIGODA: Vigoda was hired at an open casting call to play Tessio, the dignified and, to his ultimate misfortune, the tragically "smarter" of the Don's two oldest and most trusted close associates. At the time, he had done some stage work and a little TV, but had gained an embarrassingly slight toehold in the business for a working actor who'd recently entered his fifties. The shot of him at the Don's daughter's wedding, smiling while dancing with a little girl who's standing on his shoes, is as endearingly human as any image in the film; the later shot of him, lit like Boris Karloff at a black masque and laughing at the idea of the upstanding Michael carrying out an assassination, is scary enough to make you lose it in your pants. The movie automatically raised Vigoda's profile among casting directors. (Vigoda would tell interviewers that it also raised his profile among traffic cops, who took to stopping the shifty, baleful-looking man who they knew they'd seen someplace before...) Vigoda's big post-Godfather break was, of course, that of Fish, the senior citizen member of the detective squad on the TV comedy Barney Miller. That role made him semi-beloved, but after a couple of years, the network insisted on spinning him off onto his own goddamn sitcom with a bunch of goddamn kids, and after that was quickly canceled, Vigoda was stranded, overexposed, and badly typecast.

But he didn't turn into an official joke until the premature reports of his death started in 1982, with a false item in People magazine. It might have helped if Vigoda hadn't seemed so grateful for the attention. By now, late night talk shows, Conan O'Brien's in particular, have gotten a lot of mileage out of treating Vigoda as a punch line, the way comedians of an earlier generation used Sonny Tufts or The Horn Blows at Midnight. Sometimes the joke is that Vigoda, who turned 87 this year, is still alive; that may be an inevitable result of his having had his greatest success playing walking dead men before he himself was sixty. Sometimes, the joke seems to just be that there's this fellow named Abe Vigoda out there who was once in a great movie and whose name is still recognizable. It doesn't help that in Vigoda's few appearances in movies that have actually been released to theaters since 1974--such deathless classics as Joe Versus the Volcano and North--he seems to have been cast on the theory that it'll just tickle people to see Abe Vigoda turn up in a movie, as if he were an actor or something. Perhaps sensing this, Vigoda has generally seemed less alive and committed in these roles than he does when Conan or Dave has trotted him out to use as a sight gag. It's not altogether clear just what he's done to deserve this, but sometimes the world is just brutal on people who insist on continuing to exist after we've decided that that their fifteen minutes are up.

That Guy! Special "Godfather" Edition, Part One

Phil Nugent — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 16:00:00 GMT

This week, "The Godfather--The Coppola Restoration", a DVD and Blu-ray set consisting of newly remastered editions of the three "Godfather" films directed by Francis Ford Coppola, hits the stores. Not the least of the many glories of the first two "Godfather" movies is that they represent one of the greatest showcases of American acting ever caught on film, six hours that can stand as a master class demonstration of why American movie acting caught the imagination of the world and inspired generations of young English and European actors to try to do their own version of the Method shuffle. The first movie served as a meeting ground for Marlon Brando, the greatest of all postwar American stars, and several up-and-coming talents--Al Pacino, Robert Duvall, James Caan--who had grown up idolizing him and were about to join him at the Big Deal table; the second one served as a coronation for Robert De Niro, whose role as the young Don Corleone called on him to deliver a performance that could both stand on its own and match up with a viewer's fantasies about the old man Brando had already made indelible. But both films are also plastered with brilliant work by countless character actors and supporting players, some of whom never had a comparable moment in the sun, some of whom were just marking one more notch in the course of a long and busy career, but all of whom will probably be best remembered for their time spent in the Corleone's territory. To honor the release of the home video set, That Guy!, the Screengrab's sporadic celebration of B-listers, character actors, and the working famous, is devoting itself this week to the backup chorus of these remarkable films.

JOHN CAZALE: Probably no actor ever left behind a better batting average than Cazale. In part, this is because of his tragically short life: having made his film debut in The Godfather in 1972, when he was 36, he died six years later, of cancer, several months before the release of his final film, The Deer Hunter. Still, the record shows that he gave solid performances playing four different characters in five movies--the others were The Conversation (1974) and Dog Day Afternoon (1975)--each of which is regarded by trustworthy observers as a classic film from a classic period in American movies. Each also boasts a strong Godfather connection: Dog Day Afternoon paired him, again, with Pacino, The Deer Hunter finally gave him the chance to share scenes with De Niro, and The Conversation was written and directed by Coppola.

He was, bar none, the best screen partner that Pacino ever had. They had worked together in New York theater, most famously in Israel Horovitz's play The Indian Wants the Bronx. Both Pacino and Cazale were late breaking into movies, but where in Pacino's case that can be chalked up to his getting a late start becoming an actor, in Cazale's it may have had something to do with the reticent, shy, gentle nature to which everyone who knew him seems to testify. Onscreen, alongside such powerhouses as Pacino and James Caan, that gentle side could easily read as weakness, and each of Cazale's movie characters is a weakling of some kind. But it's a tribute to his deft brushwork and the nuances he could bring even to a thinly written part that each of these weaklings has his own emotional and intellectual range and distinctively wilted plumage, just as each has a different degree of acceptance regarding his own limitations. So the same man who, as Fredo, could inspire a mixture of pity, revulsion, and comic horror when he reveals that he actually thinks he might have made a credible leader of an organized crime family if he'd been given the chance can also, as Sal, the most poignantly incompetent bank robber in movie history in Dog Day Afternoon, turn your laughter to a choking sob as it begins to sink in that Sal had given himself up for dead long before the movie started and is only waiting to get the official word, in the form of a bullet between the eyes, from some reliable authority figure that it's okay for him to finally lie down and stop trying. In his last picture, The Deer Hunter, he had the chance to work with Meryl Streep, who he had met when they worked together in a Public Theater production of Measure for Measure in 1976, and to whom he was engaged at the time of his death.

ALEX ROCCO: Do you know who he is? He's Moe Green! The Jewish mobster who built Las Vegas was played by an actor with thick Boston Irish roots and, it's been reported, a distant "youthful indiscretion" connection to that city's Winter Hill criminal gang. Rocco is the kind of energetic, scene-stealing actor who can deliver some finely shaded detail work or convey some plot information in a conspiratorial whisper that makes you lean closer to the screen and then indulge in some hamming and scenery-nibbling in a way that's more likely to make you grin than turn your head away. As in his famous speech where he tells Michael Corleone off, he's able to make it seem as if it's the character he's playing who can't resist making a scene. Though he's played a vast range of characters over the course of his long career, he has a specialty that Moe Greene fits into snugly: that of the fast-talking showboat who's very smart but not quite as smart as he thinks he is--and it's that tiny difference between his egotistical self-image and cruel reality that, again and again-- as Moe Greene, or as a slick bank robber in The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973), or a racist police detective trying to adapt to changing times but unsure how in Detroit 9000, or a befuddled police chief in The Stunt Man (1980), or a talent agent in his Emmy-winning performance on the TV sitcom The Famous Teddy Z--causes him to get cut off at the knees. Notable among his other TV work, he supplied the voice of Roger Meyers, Jr., the vulgarian in charge of the Itchy & Scratchy cartoon empire on The Simpsons. And he recently appeared in a TV commercial for Audi that parodied the horse's head scene from The Godfather.

JOHN MARLEY: In that commercial, Rocco serves as a stand-in for John Marley, who played the rancid studio head Jack Woltz in The Godfather, and who died in 1984 at the age of 77. Before he refused to give Johnny Fontaine that part in his new war picture, Marley was probably best known for his work with John Cassavettes, who used him in the compromised Hollywood picture A Child Is Waiting and in the more purely Cassvettian agony-fest Faces, as well as for having played Ali MacGraw's father in Love Story. (Inexplicably, it was for that movie, and not The Godfather, that he ratcheted up his sole Academy Award nomination. He lost to John Mills for his work as a lovelorn hunchback in Ryan's Daughter, and for that, "inexplicable" can not begin to cut it.) Marley's most notable movie role after The Godfather may have been in Bob Clark's anti-Vietnam War horror movie Deathdream (1974), which in recent years has taken on cult classic status. (The screenwriter, Alan Ormsby, has said that the role--that of a jingoistic American father whose twisted values have contributed to the death of his son--was written with someone like John Wayne in mind, but that once Clark and Ormsby took a reality check and accepted that, of course, they were never going to get John Wayne or a star of comparable stature, they might as well go to the opposite end of the spectrum and get someone who looked like Marley--a short, wizened-looking old man whose unimpressive appearance served as an ironic counterpart to his overscaled bluster.) Towards the end of his life, Marley--a man whose stony glower and harsh rasp were clearly the mark of someone who was always up for a good chuckle--turned up on a very special episode of SCTV where he got to parody his Godfather role. There, playing Leonard Bernstein, he made the mistake of showing off his new horse while bragging that he would never give Johnny Pavarotti (John Candy) the part he wanted in his new war opera.

Movies Into Theater: "Dog Day Afternoon" Sweats It Out; "Spider-Man" Aims to Rock Out

Phil Nugent — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Anyone with half a slice of ham in his DNA who's watched Al Pacino tearing it up in the 1975 Dog Day Afternoon has to have thought to himself, Man, that looks exciting. I'd love to have done that! That probably accounts for the current reincarnation of Dog Day Afternoon as a stage play performed by New York's Barefoot Theater Company. The production was written and directed by its star, Francisco Solorzano, who takes on the role of Sonny, the desperate but not dishonorable man who, with his dull-witted sidekick Sal (John Cazale in the movie, Jeremy Brena here), walks into a bank in Brooklyn on a sweltering August day in 1972, looking to stage a robbery to raise the money for his male lover's sex change operation and winds up at the center of a hostage drama that involves platoons of cops and cheering, jeering crowds getting off on the chaos and energy. (At times, as when--in a scene not duplicated in the play--Pacino's Sonny marches in front of the bank, pumping his arm and screaming "Attica! Attica!" while the crowd, looking for any reason to knock the police, roars its approval, he was practically the event's emcee.) In a half-hearted attempt to turn this into a real play instead of a chance to live the dream of starring in a beloved classic, Solorzano tinkers with the time frame and assigning the characters monologues to fill in some of the back story. The result is both more heartfelt and a lot less ingenious than the last big restaging of a movie on a New York stage, the four-member-cast high-camp version of Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps. Dog Day Afternoon, which runs through August 15, is basically an actor's fantasy and a curiosity, but it may not be a bad way to kill a hot summer evening, especially for people who already have the movie well-memorized. But memories of Pacino, Cazle, Charles Durning, and Christopher Sarandon in the original continue to loom large.

In a glitzier section of the theater news department, auditions began this week for the Spider-Man musical that's planned for a fall 2009 opening. Nell Gluckman reports that the biggest news about the show so far is that it seems to be "attempting to bridge the gap between flashy musical theater and the firmly rooted New York rock scene. With music by Bono and The Edge of U2, the production's interest in a rock edge isn't a secret. But the producers and directors also seem to be cultivating a downtown vibe. Today's casting call is at the Knitting Factory, a venue with a history of performances of alternative music, booking bands such as Sonic Youth and Yo La Tengo in their early years." It sounds as if Spider-Man is looking to be the bridge between two emerging trends, the musical-based-on-a-movie (Legally Blonde) and the stage-musical-drawing-on-indie-rock--or at least, music that's closer to "real" rock than what you got with something like Hair--as typified by Spring Awakening and the Obie-Award-winning Passing Strange by the great, weird singer-songwriter Stew. One of the show's casting directors told Gluckman that, by making its presence felt at the Knitting Factory, the show hopes to attract some "people who haven't thought they should go out for a Broadway show." It remains to be seen whether their efforts will result in something that will attract people--as in, ticket buyers--who hadn't thought they'd be caught dead going out to a Broadway musical. But if there has to be a Spider-Man musical, it's sort of nice to know that the people mounting it have actually put some thought into anything besides getting the web-swinging effects to work.

Thursday Morning Poll for July 17, 2008

Paul Clark — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Last week, I beseeched our readers to consider the damn-near-perfect filmography of actor John Cazale, star of five classics of 70s Hollywood cinema. And the readers responded accordingly, declaring their favorite Cazale performance to be in The Godfather, Part II. Cazale’s second incarnation of Fredo garnered an impressive 54% of the vote, with second-place finisher (and my personal favorite) Dog Day Afternoon scoring 19%. I suppose there’s a lesson here- quality aside, you really can’t mess with a Godfather movie. But at least you folks picked the right one, rather than his relatively small role in the original film.

This week brings two potential blockbusters that appeal to very different audiences. But which holds more appeal for the Screengrab readership?

As always, the comments section is open. See you next week!

Pacino and De Niro Punch the Clock

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 16:00:00 GMT

We’ve all had a good time picking on Al Pacino for his shameless stroll through the critically reviled 88 Minutes, but the L.A. Times isn’t going to let his partner-in-crime Robert De Niro off the hook. Both Godfathers stand accused of making mockeries of their careers in pursuit of fat paychecks. (Disclaimer: I’m prepared to do the same. Somebody make me an offer.)

“The two icons of '70s New Hollywood, heroes to a generation of young actors and filmmakers, have become parodies of themselves,” writes Patrick Goldstein, “making payday movies and turning in performances that are hollow echoes of the electrically charged work they did in such films as Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Mean Streets and Taxi Driver.” As Goldstein notes, this isn’t exactly news to capo di tutti capi Francis Ford Coppola, who blew the whistle on his former golden boys in a GQ interview last year.

“I met Pacino and De Niro both when they were really on the come,” said Coppola. “They were really young and insecure. Now, Pacino is very rich, maybe because he never spends any money; he just puts it in his mattress. De Niro, kind of, was very inspired by Zoetrope and created an empire and is very wealthy and powerful….You know, even in those days, after The Godfather, I mean, I wanted—I didn't feel that those actors were ready to, ‘Let's do something else really ambitious.’ ” The director of Jack, ladies and gentlemen.

As we’ve mentioned, Pacino and De Niro are re-teaming later this year for the police thriller Righteous Kill. It will perhaps help you keep a lid on your expectations to know that the film is brought to you by the same producer and director as 88 Minutes, Avi Lerner and Jon Avnet. Lerner is described as a “colorful Israeli producer who has made hundreds of B movies over the last 20 years, having recently stepped up in budget class -- thanks to an influx of money from German film investment funds -- from direct-to-video thrillers with Jean Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal and horror fare like Shark Attack to star vehicles with Sly Stallone (Rambo) and Bruce Willis (16 Blocks).” It’s as if the golden age of Cannon Films is upon us again. Goldstein says it best: “With Avnet at the helm again, expectations for quality are low -- it has the get-out-your-checkbooks feel of the latest Eagles tour.”

New York Magazine Picks the New Yorkiest Movies Since 1968

Phil Nugent — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 15:00:00 GMT

To celebrate its fortieth anniversary, New York magazine has set its writers to assemble a "canon" of cultural works (books, music, TV, movies) from the last forty years that "capture something emblematic about New York." This, as David Edelstein's list of movies makes clear, isn't necessarily about selecting the best, nor is it limited to movies made by New Yorkers in New York: El Topo is here, for its role in creating that urban institution, the midnight movie. (By a felicitous quirk of timing, the first title on the list is Planet of the Apes with Charlton Heston, for its indelible closing image of the Statue of the Liberty after a wild weekend.) Also cited: Mean Streets, The Godfather, Part II, Taxi Driver, Dog Day Afternoon, Death Wish, The French Connection, Shaft, Deep Throat, Annie Hall, Saturday Night Fever, Tootsie, Wild Style, My Dinner with Andre, Stranger Than Paradise, and Wall Street.

Edelstein sort of half-apologizes for having picked so many movies from the 1970s, but how could it be otherwise? It was in the seventies that Hollywood declared studio lots passe and invaded the city with film crews, which were often manned by smart-ass native New Yorkers like Sidney Lumet, Paul Mazursky, and Brian De Palma, whose sensibilities came through so strongly that thet sometimes seemed to be making a "New York movie" even when they weren't. The American movie renaissance of the seventies is inextricably tied up with the breakdown of "the ungovernable city" in the same period; at the same time that the country at large was so attuned to the virtues associated with New York that Woody Allen could emerge as a sex symbol, the city went bankrupt and all but imploded, and the movies were here to record that. Movies as great as Scorsese's early features and as klutzy as Shaft all double as time capsules that tap into the urban chaos and make it look exciting, which is why there are people now who are nostalgic for the "good, old" (pre-Disneyfied) Times Square of hookers, three-card monte, and garbage-strewn streets. Movies don't feel as if they have that kind of combined impact anymore, though one movie that tried hard was Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, which both Edelstein and Lee credit with helping to drive Ed Koch from office. In an accompanying Q & A, Lee appears to also take credit for hooking up Barack and Michelle Obama, since "Barack told me the first date he took Michelle to was Do the Right Thing. I said, 'Thank God I made it.'" Timing is everything. If they'd met a year earlier or a year later, and he'd taken her to School Daze or Mo' Better Blues, she might have gone right home and changed her phone number.

The Rep Report (February 7--14)

Phil Nugent — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 18:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Over the course of a remarkably long career, Sidney Lumet has taken a crack at directing just about every kind of movie, while making a certain kind of film — the high-energy, acting-centered New York melodrama — his own. Last year he enjoyed a bit of a comeback with his 44th feature film, Before the Devil Know You're Dead, so the career retrospective at the Film Forum that kicks off this Friday with the 1976 Network couldn't be more timely. Highlights include Long Day's Journey into Night starring Katherine Hepburn, Ralph Richardson, Jason Robards, and Dean Stockwell, the greatest production of Eugene O'Neill ever caught on film and the high point of Lumet's sideline as a TV-trained specialist in filming plays; The Hill (1965), The Anderson Tapes, and The Offense, all of which feature powerfully charged performances by Sean Connery, an actor who Lumet was prescient in seeing as having the potential to be more than James Bond; and of course the two "based on a true story" films co-starring Al Pacino and the city of New York, Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon, which had such an impact that Lumet and his star could have practically taken out a copyright on Fun City in the seventies. Also, from 1939: One Percent of a Nation, a little-seen, independently produced New York film that includes the only record of the director's work as an actor. (He was fifteen at the time.) On Monday, February 11, the director will appear in person to discuss his career in "An Evening with Sidney Lumet", to be moderated by historian Foster Hirsch.

On the afternoon of Sunday, February 10, the Museum of the Moving Image will host "A Tribute to St. Clair Bourne", in honor of the documentary filmmaker, who died last December. The critic Armond White, film and literary scholar Clyde Taylor, Black Enterprise columnist George Alexander, and journalist and poet Esther Iverem will discuss the filmmaker's career and show clips of his work.

PORTLAND: The 31st Annual International Portland Film Festival opens Thursday, February 7 and runs through the 23rd, offering more than two weeks worth of jam-packed programming of feature films and shorts from around the world, in the city that Scott Favor and Bob Pigeon were proud to call home.

Whitefield at NYFF: Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead

Peter Smith — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 19:00:00 GMT

Let it not be said that I don’t respect Sidney Lumet. I read his book Making Movies and found it both practical and enlightening. I loved Dog Day Afternoon (who doesn’t?) and Running on Empty. But let’s face facts. Lumet is eighty-three. He made 12 Angry Men in 1957 — fifty years ago! When you receive a lifetime achievement award at the Oscars, you can probably read that as Hollywood’s polite way of saying, "It’s a wrap." Apparently Mr. Lumet is hard of hearing.

Though not nearly as bad as his last film, Find Me Guilty, Before The Devil Knows You're Dead turns out to be twice as frustrating, as it squanders an outstanding cast and a knockout script. Lumet chose to go the Tarantino/Babel route and skew the story’s narrative timeline, but by doing so he takes all the suspense out of what could have been huge dramatic windfalls by giving you three major (and I mean major) plot twists within the first fifteen minutes. As if that wasn’t crime enough, each time sequence change is signaled by the two frames locking into one another as opposing triangles in a square that click and spin into the next scene. This and the poor film quality make Before The Devil Knows You're Dead look like a made-for-tv movie circa 1991.

A dream cast of Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ethan Hawke, Albert Finney and a remarkably sexy Marisa Tomei do an admirable job of trying to prop this dog up on four legs, but in the end it’s just too much to ask. The film’s story spirals from tragic family drama of epic proportions into the realm of the absurd, with plot points that are increasingly unbelievable and distracting. The person I feel the worst for is first-time screenwriter Kelly Masterson, who probably thought her dream had come true when she heard Lumet would bring her script to life, only to find herself the victim of an outdated director. I can only imagine the kind of film someone like Rian Johnson (Brick) or Christopher Nolan would have made given the exact same elements. — Bryan Whitefield