The Screengrab : elvis presley

Screengrab Review: "Goodbye Solo"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 15:00:00 GMT

Goodbye Solo, the third feature from Ramin Bahrani, the 34-year-old, American-born writer-director of Iranian extraction who was recently inducted by A. O. Scott into the "neo-neo-realism" hall of fame, represents a major leap forward for a filmmaker who wasn't in a bad place to begin with. Shot in Bahrani's home town of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, it's one of those rare movies that is hard to discuss, in terms of the story and characters, without making it sound simpler--and more pat--than it is. The title character, Solo (played by Souléymane Sy Savané) is a Sengalese immigrant who's driving a cab while working at fulfilling his dream to become a flight attendant; optimistic and high-spirited, he meets his match in the form of William (Red West), a sturdy-looking old man and the demeanor and expression of someone who once loaned Death twenty bucks and has decided to go ask for his money back. William regularly employs Solo to drive him to the movies, a pilgrimage he seems to be making so he'll have an excuse to talk to the kid who mans the ticket station; one night, he tells Solo that he'd like to schedule an appointment at some future date for Solo to chauffeur him out to a nearby nature spot--a mountain called Blowing Rock, where the wind blows up towards heaven--and leave him there. There's a good tip in it for him.

Part of what sets Bahrani-- who co-wrote Goodbye Solo and his previous film, Chop Shop, with Bahareh Azimi--apart from the run of Hollywood directors is how resistant he is to reducing his characters to pieces in a machine that runs on formula. Having gotten Solo's attention, William finds himself unable to get rid of him. The cabbie, who already has a full plate studying for his flight attendant exam while juggling the demands of a lover (Carmen Leyva) who'd rather he stay grounded and close at hand and the woman's tiny daughter, Alex (Diana Franco Galindo), stays in William's face, calling him "big dog" and trying to show him a good enough time that he'll snap out of his suicidal fixation. He also makes a stab at getting to the bottom of whatever has turned William against life, which is a dry run: Solo does learn a bit more about his favorite passenger, but if Goodbye Solo is packing anything that be given so banal a lable as a "point", it's simply that the forces that drive people can't be summed up in the space of a ninety-minute movie, and that someone who's made up his mind to recede and withdraw, and who has his own damn reasons for it, can't be easily persuaded to change course by all the free beers and childlike smiles in the world.

What sets Bahrani apart from some of the other directors in Scott's neo-neo-realist pantheon, such as Lance Hammer (Ballast) and Kelly Reichardt (Wendy and Lucy, Old Joy), is that he can put miserable people on the screen and generate something from their presence that's richer and more complicated than mere pathos or the warm feeling some moviegoers get from feeling sorry for poor people. And as he demonstrated with his nonprofessional leads in both Man Push Cart and Chop Shop, he's also different from some of his alleged peers in that he knows how to get non-actors to behave expressively and to hold the screen, instead of filling a movie with nonprofessionals and inviting the audience to admire how authentically uninteresting they are. In an interview with the director at SpoutBlog, Noralli Ryan Fores described a moment during filming when Galindo pulled Bahrani aside "to ask why it was that [Solo's] character at this moment seemed so sad. 'I don’t know; why do you think he is so sad?' Bahrani asked." That kind of intelligent openness to the mystery of what people are about suffuses the picture. You can taste it even in Michael Simmonds's cinematography, which makes Winston-Salem seem like a place so alive that it seems likely that every bit player would have a story worth telling.

The movie's web site describes Souléymane Sy Savané as a "former flight attendant, high-fashion runway model and African televison star." I don't know what he got up to on African TV, but Savané's performance in this, his first movie, is altogether remarkable. It's earned comparisons to Sally Hawkins's work in Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky, and it's a similar kind of high-wire feat, in that you may be aware of how easily Solo's cheerful determination to insert himself into other people's lives, whether they want him to or not, because he thinks he can get them to share his affable worldview (and then everything will be all right) could easily make him one irritating son of a bitch. Solo doesn't have as secure a support network or financial status as Happy-Go-Lucky's Poppy, and there are moments when life wipes the smile off Solo's face and leaves him winded. Even then, he never senses what's clear to the audience, which is that his indefatigable good cheer and expansive nature are every bit as mysterious as William's determination to pull defeat out of the jaws of acceptance and possibility--or, as William might see it, to go out on his own terms.

As William, Red West has the most well-worn face, in terms of its exposure to the camera, of anyone who's been in a Bahrani movie to date. The 72-year-old West is best known as a member of the Memphis Mafia, the group of old pals and bodyguards that settled around Elvis Presley. You can catch glimpses of him in Elvis on Tour and Elvis: That's the Way It Is, but long before that, he had broken into movies and TV as a stunt man, with help from actor and Friend of Elvis Nick Adams, who hired West to work on his TV series The Rebel. That eventually led to scads of acting jobs, mostly in small roles, in such movies as Walking Tall and Framed and a shitload of TV. More recently, he appeared in Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers, Francis Ford Coppola's The Rainmaker, Robert Altman's Cookie's Fortune, and Ira Sachs's 40 Shades of Blue, though his most prominent role in a film may have been in the 1989 bad-laugh classic Road House. He's a hard-working pro, and in Goodbye Solo, he looks like an inexplicably magnetic old man who Bahrani lured over from standing in line at the DMV. Nothing in West's catalog of eighty-something movie and TV appearances would give you much reason to think that he could pull off what's asked of him here. William turns out to have a greater tolerance for Solo's company than you might have guessed, and he also turns out to be capable of going from ornery to scary when he feels that Solo's crossed the line. Then the moment passes, and you can see that William has one more trespass to regret, and that it'll be bothering him long after Solo has shrugged it off, which happens pretty much instantaneously. West never overplays his hand, and you can't take your eyes off him. The next time he runs into Elvis, who famously fired him and banished him from his sight a year before the King's death, West can delight his old pard with the news that, of the two of them, he was the one who wound up getting the breakthrough movie role.

Morning Deal Report: Horton Hears a Hex

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 15:30:00 GMT

Horton Hears a Who director Jimmy Hayward has lined up his next gig: he’ll be bringing DC comics gunslinger Jonah Hex to the screen. “The character of Hex, known for having the right side of his face disfigured and wearing a Confederate army uniform, was a rough-and-tumble gunslinger and part-time bounty hunter whose adventures always ended in blood,” notes The Hollywood Reporter. Josh Brolin is attached to star as Hex.

The Painted Veil director John Curran will direct Keira Knightley in The Beautiful and the Damned. “Hanna Weg script concerns the turbulent marriage of alcoholic writer F. Scott Fitzgerald and his mercurial wife Zelda Sayre, who was schizophrenic. The tempestuous relationship, which unfolded in the high society of the Roaring '20s, inspired some of the novelist's works,” Variety reports.

Fresh from inflicting Bedtime Stories upon us, Adam Shankman will direct a remake of Bye Bye Birdie for Columbia. “A stage favorite for the past half-century, Birdie centers on Conrad Birdie, a popular singer whose character is based loosely on Elvis Presley. He's about to be shipped off to the army, but as part of a publicity stunt, he agrees to one last encounter with a fan before he goes to war.” Ah yes, it’s truly a timeless tale, but without Dick Van Dyke, we’re not interested.

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Keira Knightley's Last Night
The Butler Did It

OST: "Jailhouse Rock"

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 21:30:00 GMT

Lest we forget, Elvis Presley was once a movie star. In fact, as malicious movie writer Joe Queenan put it, Elvis -- in his spare time from being the biggest rock and roll star in the history of the world -- also made dozens of the world movies of all time. Elvis' movie work was noteworthy not only for its poor quality as film (honestly, folks, he turned out one stinkeroo after another; he made thirty-one movies as an actor, and maybe three of them are even remotely worth watching), but for their poor quality as soundtracks. Considering that almost all of his movies were musicals -- because, believe me, nobody was hiring the guy for his acting chops -- they produced very few good songs. Elvis had tons of great singles, but hardly any of them came from his movies. Jailhouse Rock was a notable exception.

Made in 1957 with workmanlike pro Richard Thorpe at the helm, Jailhouse Rock was Elvis' third movie as a leading man, and one of his only tolerable ones. He plays Vince Everett, a sneering yet charming hillbilly who serves a stint in the joint for involuntary manslaughter. While there, he writes the title song, invents a hot dance craze to go along with it, and gets out of jail just in time to romance snooty society dame Judy Tyler. It's pretty standard fare, and plenty hokey at that, but it's at least snappy and enjoyable instead of a joyless slog like most of his movies. (It also had a tragic dimension -- Elvis' co-star Tyler died in a car wreck only three days after the film wrapped, and he refused to see it out of respect for her, thus ensuring he never got to see one of his only decent big-screen appearances.) As Queenan has astutely noted, it's not as if we were particularly robbed of a bunch of great performances by the rotten scripts Colonel Tom Parker foisted on Elvis, but in the early days at least, he was occasionally cast in roles that played to his strengths as a rockabilly performer and allowed him to have fun with his roles. Elvis also choreographed the dance number, basing it not on the formal dance routine called for in the script but his own hip-swinging moves of the day. Citizen Kane it ain't, but if you insist on seeing an Elvis movie, you could do worse. Boy, could you do worse.

But the soundtrack is the real strength here. There are lots of reasons why; first of all, it was written by Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller, the two premier hitmakers of the day, who holed up in a hotel room for a week to crank out the tunes on time. Second, rather than releasing the soundtrack as a full-length album -- thus making it susceptible to the kind of bloat that characterized the albums made from his later films -- RCA put it out as a lean, mean five-song EP that left no room for duds. And perhaps most importantly, Jailhouse Rock is one of the only films in which Elvis is backed by the razor-sharp musicians (guitarist Scotty Moore, bassist Bill Black, and drummer D.J. Fontana, with Stoller providing the piano licks) that played for him live, instead of a group of passionless studio hacks. That element alone makes it sound like a real record instead of a collection of cash-ins.

BEST TRACKS: As noted, with only five songs on the EP, there isn't a bad song to be found on the Jailhouse Rock soundtrack. (Beware later versions, which add as many as 20 more songs and are typically bloated and tired.) Of course, the title track is a monster, one of Elvis' greatest hits ever, with a killer vocal performance that played to his ripping rockabilly snarl and featured some great performances by Fontana and Moore; and "I Want to Be Free" was a minor hit with a memorable riff from Stoller's piano. But the two tracks not written by the Lieber/Stoller team -- "Young and Beautiful" and "Don't Leave Me Now", both by Aaron Schroeder -- are fine songs, with the latter becoming a regular in Elvis' live repertoire, and the last song on the album is the hugely enjoyable "(You're So Square) Baby, I Don't Care", which was a hit not only for Elvis, but for Buddy Holly, Cliff Richard, and -- decades later -- Brian Setzer as well. The EP doesn't contain another song from the movie that proved to be a big hit ("Treat Me Nice"), but it's still an essential piece of the Elvis experience.

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Jerry Reed, 1937--2008

Phil Nugent — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Jerry Reed has died of complications from emphysema at the age of 71. Reed, who was born in Atlanta in 1937, spent two years in the military before moving to Nashville in the early 1960s to pursue a career in the country music industry. A guitar picker with a unique style, he quickly earned a place in the fraternity of working, sought-after studio musicians while honing his songwriting on the side. His rise to solo stardom was abetted by two legendary figures: Chet Atkins, who produced one of Reed's early singles in the mid-'60s and later teamed up with him for a pair of award-winning albums in the early 1970s, and Elvis Presley, who recorded a couple of Reed compositions, "Guitar Man" and "U.S. Male", while plotting his own late-'60s comeback. (Legend has it that Elvis, who decided to do "Guitar Man" after hearing Reed's own recorded version, decreed that Reed was to be brought in to play on the sessions after finding that nobody else could recreate the self-taught guitarist's "weird tunings.") Reed's own biggest hit, the 1971 Grammy-winning "When You're Hot, You're Hot", established him as an unexpected master of the demented redneck comedy routine set to music, a field that he also plowed in the Elvis tribute "Tupelo Mississippi Flash" and the great, rabid Cajun epic "Amos Moses." During this period, he was becoming a familiar face on TV, thanks to recurring appearances on musical-variety programs hosted by Glen Campbell and Dean Martin. (Reed had his own short-lived series--The Jerry Reed When You're Hot You're Hot Hour--in 1972.) He also slipped into animated (as in cartoon) form to appear on an episode of The New Scooby-Doo Movies, calling in Shaggy, Scooby, and the other personnel of the Mystery Machine to help him find his lost guitar.

In 1975, Reed made his movie acting debut in the redneck classic W. W. and the Dixie Dancekings, starring Burt Reynolds. His movie career, which would displace his music career for several years, became inextricably tied to that of Reynolds's, with whom he co-starred in Gator (which Reynolds directed), Smokey and the Bandit and its first sequel, and Stroker Ace, where his brief appearance was uncredited, a hint that Reynolds probably wishes he'd picked up on. Reed also turned up on Reynolds's TV series B. L. Stryker and Evening Shade; acted in the comedy Hot Stuff, which was directed by its star, fellow Reynolds sidekick Dom DeLuise; and displaced ol' Burt in the 1983 Smokey and the Bandit Part 3, which Reynolds couldn't be bothered with. He also co-starred with Peter Fonda in High-Ballin', part of the trucker-as-modern-American-hero drive-in movie cycle that the Smokey and the Bandit movies (and Reed's own contribution to its soundtrack, "East Bound and Down") helped midwife, went head to head with Robin Williams and Walter Matthau in the 1983 comedy The Survivors, and played an officer in the Gene Hackman-Danny Glover Vietnam drama Bat 21 (1988), on which he was also the executive producer. After contributing redneck authenticity to the Adam Sandler vehicle The Waterboy in 1998, Reed officially abandoned movies to spend the rest of his life concentrating on his music. At that time, he expressed something close to disdain for his acting ability ("When people ask me what my motivation is, I have a simple answer: Money."), but in fact he was an easy, natural presence on-screen, and brought energy and likability to many roles that might have defeated a better-trained but stiffer performer. If the secret to his success in movies was partly that he recognized his own limitations and never strayed to far outside his comfortable range, that at least makes him smarter than say, Kris Kristofferson. Reed is survived by his wife Priscilla, with whom he would have celebrated a fiftieth wedding anniversary next year.

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: August 9-15, 2008

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 21:00:00 GMT

You’ve had the dream. You find yourself in a classroom you’ve never seen before, sitting at a desk in your underwear. The professor is passing out the final exam. Your heart freezes, your fingers go numb as you suddenly realize – you forgot to read the Screengrab this week! Don’t let this happen to you. Catch up on all the highlights now, including:

The Top 20 Movies About Movies, Parts One, Deux, Three, Four and Five. These will definitely be on the test.

A moment of silence please for Bernie Mac, Bernie Brillstein, Isaac Hayes, and Elvis Presley and his crappy movies.

You know you’ll be asked about new movies, like Pineapple Express, Tropic Thunder, The Clone Wars and A Girl Cut in Two. But you should also be prepared for more obscure questions about Mad Dog Time, The Driver, The Last Sign and Summer Rental.

Remaking Rocky Horror: Bad idea or terrible idea?

Is Angelina Jolie playing Catwoman a more enticing proposition than Angelina Jolie playing Tom Cruise?

Woody Allen: Is he a better filmmaker or bronze figurine?

When is a documentary not a documentary?

Study hard or you may find yourself working for Troma.

Clambake: Remembering Elvis Through His Terrible Movies

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 20:30:00 GMT

Believe it or not, another Elvis anniversary is just around the corner. The King died on his throne on August 16, 1977, so we can at least be thankful it’s not an anniversary with a round number. Nevertheless, some folks will no doubt commemorate the occasion with a trip to Graceland or a nice dinner of peanut butter and banana sammiches. And then there’s Mark Hinson of the Tallahassee Democrat, who remembers the King thusly: “R.I.P., Elvis, but, man, you made some lousy movies.”

Now, I’ve been known to enjoy the occasional Presley picture – who among us can resist the charms of Viva Las Vegas? – and I’ve even known an Elvis movie connoisseur or two in my day. But it’s hard to deny the truth in Hinson’s claim, particularly when he’s willing to back it up in a fashion near and dear to my heart. Namely, sitting through a pile of crappy movies. “Because this year is an odd-number anniversary — and a gallon of gas costs more than a necklace made of unicorn horns — I'm not driving to Memphis this week to stand around in the August heat with my fellow weirdos,” Hinson writes. “Instead, I rented a stack of Elvis movies last weekend and paid tribute to the King with a full day of electrifying Elvis cinema.”

Hinson begins with the “sunny 1964 incest musical” Kissin’ Cousins, in which Elvis tests the limits of his acting chops in a dual role. “The dark-haired Elvis stars as an Air Force officer named Josh who's ordered to smooth talk his opossum-eating Tennessee cousins out of their property because the military wants to use it as a base for nuclear missiles. Elvis also plays Josh's mountain-dwelling cousin, Jodie, a blond-haired lug with a waxy complexion who may be a hillbilly golem… Let's just say it's not as convincing as Jeremy Irons playing identical twins in Dead Ringers.”

The marathon continues with such milestones of cinema as Harum Scarum, Tickle Me, and A Change of Habit, featuring Mary Tyler Moore as an undercover nun, but Hinson saves his highest praise for Clambake, which he dubs a “dung grenade.” I do think he’s a little hard on “Do the Clam” from Girl Happy, however. Judge for yourself:

Related:
Forgotten Films: "Eat the Peach" (1986)
Original Vs. Remake: Ocean's Eleven

Forgotten Films: "The Fastest Guitar Alive" (1967)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 16 May 2008 17:00:00 GMT

"You better stick to singing," Sammy Jackson, one of the two male leads of The Fastest Guitar Alive tells his partner. "I don't think you've got much future as a spy." It turned out that hardly anybody connected with this movie had much of a future except for Jackson's sidekick--Roy Orbison, who, as it turned out, did stick to singing. The movie, which coincided with the start of a long career slump for the most beautifully masochistic of white rock crooners, was Roy's one fling at movie acting. In this Civil War-era Western, he plays the performing half of a team of snake oil salesman and saloon entertainers who ride from town to town hauling a wagon full of dancing girls. Sammy pitches his miracle elixir and serves as manager to Roy, who hits the stage at the local watering hole and sings the songs written specially for the movie, such as the Marty Robbins knockoff "Pistolero", the Ren-and-Stimpyesque "Happy Party Time" ("Have a good time party,dance the night away/ Have a good time party,it's time to laugh and play") , and "Snuggle Huggle" (" I want to be as snuggle as a buggle in a ruggle/ When my sweety does the snuggle huggle with me"), which was deemed to hot for inclusion on the soundtrack album. This serves as their cover while they go about trying to break into the U.S. mint to steal gold to help fund the Confederate state. The title itself refers to Roy's special guitar, which is also a secret weapon; when he plucks a particular string, a long, thin gun barrell slowly emerges from the side--an image whose unintentionally hilarious phallic overtones are not helped by the funny sound effect that accompanies it. Shooting an interloper's hat off just to get his attention, Roy warns him, "If you're interested, I could kill you with this, and play your funeral march at the same time."

Roy doesn't actually kill anyone; we're repeatedly informed that, despite the fair amount of fancy shooting he does, he somehow "couldn't" use his fast guitar for to lay anyone out permanently. The movie also features a tribe of Borsht-Belt-style Indians (including Iron Eyes Cody, the Italian-American actor who specialized in pretending to be Native American, and who starred in the iconic public service announcement whose message was, "People start pollution--people can stop it!") who might have been run off the set of F Troop. When they get wind that Roy and company are passing through, they ready to attack, though just before they mount up we hear Cody say, "We'll just give 'em a good scare, not hurt 'em, huh Chief?" Maybe because it took its cues from Orbison's innate gentleness--he must have radiated less natural rebelliousness than anyone else who ever stopped for a cup of coffee at Sun Studios--Fastest Guitar keeps declaring how undangerous it is. Even the fact that the heroes are spying for the Rebels during the Civil War-- a choice that may have been dictated by the thickness of Orbison's country-fried accent--is treated as just one of those fluky things; they never talk about the pros or cons of either side in the conflict, but they're overjoyed at the end when they learn that the South has surrendered, just so they can stop running around and settle down.

Fastest Guitar was directed by Michael D. Moore--no connection to that Fahrenheit 9/11 fellow--who had just started his nothing-much directing career a year earlier with the Elvis Presley picture Paradise, Hawaiian Style. As little as he (and most other movie directors) got out of Elvis, he didn't get much more out of Orbison; resplendent in a gleaming black pompadour and with more costume changes than La Streisand on a good night, Roy walks through in a good-natured way, as if he had no idea what these movie people wanted of him but didn't have the heart to tell them to leave him alone after they were nice enough to come looking for him and offer him the role. (Sometimes he absently looked to his left and right in between saying his lines, as if he'd just registered that the camera was on and wanted to see what they were filming.) His presence gives this tacky, motorless musical Western a trace of sweetness that it wouldn't otherwise have, but he's so out of his element that it's pretty funny that it would turn out to be a movie--Blue Velvet, with its instant-classic scene of Dean Stockwell lip-synching "In Dreams"--that would unexpectedly revive his career twenty years later. The Fastest Guitar Alive was eventually released on VHS, and the soundtrack has been issued on CD, but both are now out of print, and no DVD release is in sight (though it turns up about once every couple of years on Turner Classic Movies). Which is fine, really. It's the kind of theoretical-cult movie that's a straight drag to actually watch but can be a blast to see immortalized on the Internet.

Forgotten Films: "Eat the Peach" (1986)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 17:00:00 GMT

The 1986 comedy Eat the Peach has the kind of modest, unpredictable charm associated with the early films of the Scottish writer-director Bill Forsythe. Its unforced affection for its working class characters' oddball notions and offbeat tendencies also recalls such Jonathan Demme films as Melvin and Howard, which may have something to do with Demme's decision to lend his name as "presenter" of the finished film. It's set in a rural patch of Ireland so desolate and hungry that you wouldn't be surprised to notice Mad Max fighting punk bikers on the horizon. The hero, Vinnie (Stephen Brennan) and his affable sidekick and brother-in-law Arthur (Eamon Morrissey) are themselves motorcycle enthusiasts, but they don't have any great enemies to battle, and after the local computer factory shuts down and the boss, having delivered a drunken tribute to the excellence of this beautiful land, returns to Japan, they don't even have day jobs. They repair to the bar, where they watch an Elvis Presley movie called Roustabout, in which the king rides his own hog around and around in a circular ramp called the Wall of Death. And soon the two men are busy slapping together a wooden version of the Wall of Death in Vinnie's backyard, while his small daughter looks in wonder and his wife Nora (Catherine Byrne) looks on in a kind of resigned despair. Soon they're taking on minor smuggling jobs to help subsidize the building of the wall; they tell themselves that when it's finished, there'll be a line of paying customers from all over, waiting to watch them ride it.

Peter Ormrod, who directed Eat the Peach, from a script that co-wrote with his producer, John Kelleher, based it on a true story that he just stumbled across; he was driving out in the middle of nowhere and damned if he didn't spot a Wall of Death out there. Having had the idea for the movie drop in his lap, he ran with it, and populated it with such characters as Boots (Niall Toibin), a big-talking promoter in J. R. Ewing regalia who tries to give the impression that he's been to America and learned the secrets of gasbag capitalism. But the movie, though whimsical, doesn't settle for being cute; it has something real to say about what it's like to be a man with leadership abilities and imagination who's trapped in an unwelcoming environment and has responsibilities he can barely meet. The movie's low-budget beauty and warm but aching humor give it links to contemporary Irish folklore. Ormrod himself had been working in television before making this movie, and after making it, he seems to have dropped off the face of the earth; it's the last thing on his IMDB page, where the "biography" section reads, in its entirety, "Used to be a pilot for now defunct Belgian airline Sabena where he served as captain before they shut down," though it doesn't say whether he did that before or after his fling as an auteur. Somebody should find out what the hell happened to the guy. Maybe there's a movie in it.

Mike D'Angelo at Sundance: Part 7

Peter Smith — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 17:30:00 GMT

Mike D'Angelo reports from the Sundance Film Festival:

The hottest ticket at Sundance 2007 — for the increasingly desperate press, if not for the general public — was Hounddog, in which Dakota Fanning played a barefoot farm girl so desperate for tickets to see Elvis Presley that she was willing to strip naked and gyrate around à la The King, only to get brutally raped for her trouble. Many fewer journalists flocked to see this year's less sensationalistic Phoebe in Wonderland, starring Dakota's equally precocious younger sister Elle — which is a shame, since it's a much more interesting film, albeit somewhat muddled. Phoebe's dangerous obsession isn't Elvis but Alice: Her mother (Felicity Huffman) has been working for years on a Lewis Carroll dissertation, and Phoebe desperately wants the lead role in her grade school's production of Alice in Wonderland, to be directed — sort of — by a singularly bizarre new drama teacher (Patricia Clarkson). So badly does Phoebe want the part, in fact, that she devises an elaborate system of games and rituals designed to secure it for her. She paces the school hallway for hours, carefully avoiding any cracks in the floor. She hops up the stairs at her house, then hops down twice, backwards, then up again, then a half-turn, clapping, then repeat. She washes her hands again and again and again, until they bleed.

Writer-director Daniel Barnz plays a rather pointless game of keep-away with Phoebe's condition, which isn't named until the movie's final moments, but I'll respect his wishes. (I'm pretty sure it's two comorbid conditions, actually, though the script doesn't specify; if I tell you that she also shrugs her shoulders a lot and occasionally repeats other people's sentences, that should clinch it for the neuro-heads.) Barnz's goal here — quite an admirable one, in an after-school special kind of way — is to suggest that such conditions are only the extreme end of a continuum upon which we all reside. But he also wants to make a more general plea for tolerance, so we get a subplot about an effeminate little boy in Phoebe's class who wants to play the Red Queen in drag and is immediately labeled queer. And he also wants Clarkson's drama teacher to be one of those Dead Poets Society educational martyrs who encourage kids to chuck all rules and regs before being marched to the guillotine by some humorless authority figure (here, inexplicably, Campbell Scott, who can't do humorless with a gun to his head). And he also wants to beguile us with Gilliamesque fantasy sequences, at which he sucks, quite frankly. The main reason to see Phoebe in Wonderland is for yet another astonishing Fanning performance. How these little girls are able to summon such powerful reserves of fear and anguish and terror, I have no idea. I'm not really sure I want to know, to be honest.

Say Good Night to the Bad Girl: Vampira, R.I.P.

Phil Nugent — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Maila Nurmi has died, at the age of 86. A Finnish-born model — she worked for Man Ray and the pin-up artist Alberto Vargas — and sometime actress, Nurmi was best-known as her alter ago, Vampira, the "beatnik ghoul-girl" with the long black tresses and long talon-like fingernails who began hosting movies on late night television in 1954. The Vampira character, whose look was reportedly inspired by the cartoon drawing that would eventually be christened Morticia Addams, first appeared on Los Angeles's KABC-TV. The station discontinued the show a year later, but Nurmi held onto the rights to the character and was able to revive Vampira on a different channel. Kinescopes of her TV work are now rare, much-valued ephemera on the collectors' market, but Vampira will remain undead forever in Nurmi's best-known movie role, in Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space, where she appeared made up as the character and was billed under the character's name.

Nurmi's other movie credits include The Beat Generation, Sex Kittens Go to College, and The Magic Sword. Her last film appearance was in the oddball cult project I Woke Up Early the Day I Died, made in 1998 from an unproduced script credited to Ed Wood; she herself was portrayed by Lisa Marie in Tim Burton's 1994 Ed Wood biopic. She was also a footnote Hollywood celebrity of the 1950s, fabled for her friendships with the likes of James Dean, Elvis Presley, and Orson Welles. (In her later years, she ran an antiques store, Vampira's Attic, on Melrose Avenue.) But her real place in pop culture history is as the first of the TV "horror hosts"; her success as Vampira led to a wave of wisecracking, ghoulish hustlers doing wraparound segments for TV showings of scary movies, most of whom never attained anything like her degree of national recognizability. Probably the best known of the latter day hosts, Cassandra Peterson's Elvira, was in fact the product of a failed attempt, by KHJ-TV, to revive the Vampira character with Nurmi's blessing. (Nurmi withdrew her consent for the use of the Vampira name and makeup after the station rejected her choice, Lola Falana.) She died peacefully in her sleep on January 10.