The Screengrab : errol morris

Set Your DVR!: May 27, 2009 - the foreseeable future

Hayden Childs — Wed, 27 May 2009 15:00:00 GMT

This is the last time I’ll write one of these columns (unless, of course, someone wants to hire me to do so), but I just wanted to mention how much fun it has been. I know that I haven’t been doing these as frequently as I should. My real job has been taking precedence, and now that I actually will have some time, there ain’t gonna be no Screengrab no more. So, since we are near the end, I wanted to write a super-deluxe column. Luckily, cable tv has made that easy by scheduling a ridiculous number of great movies in the near future!

Wednesday, May 27
On Wednesday, the best bet is Errol Morris's documentary Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, which is playing on IFC at 12:15 pm central/1:15 pm eastern (and sorry for the late notice!). Fast, Cheap and Out of Control is an impressive attempt to impose order into the chaos of the interviews, which is reflected in the subjects' chosen careers. Overnight, TCM is showing It Happened One Night at 1:30 am central/2:30 am eastern.

Thursday, May 28
Thursday has John Sayles's Lone Star on TCM at 9 pm central/10 pm eastern. That's one of the best Sayles movie, but I don't really need to tell you this, do I, dear Screengrab reader?

Friday, May 29
Starting at 5:30 am central/6:30 am eastern, Friday has six, count 'em, six, flicks worth a watch. First up is Amarcord, Fellini's last great movie, on IFC at the aforementioned time and again at 11:35 am central/12:35 pm eastern. Then TCM has The Blue Dahlia, the only movie based on a screenplay by Raymond Chandler, at 7:45 am central/8:45 am eastern. It's not the best film noir, but The Blue Dahlia has quite a lot going for it. In the afternoon, TCM is running Orson Welles's The Lady From Shanghai at 1 pm central/2 pm eastern. That's a great movie despite the ludicrous accent Welles sports throughout. In the evening, Ovation is running The Triplets of Belleville at 7 pm central/8 pm eastern and again at 10 pm central/11 pm eastern. Ovation keeps the aspect ratio of the films it runs, but it does cut for commercials frequently and sometimes bleeps adult language in racier movies. There's no adult language in The Triplets of Belleville, though. If something darker is more your style, IFC is showing Roman Polanski's Death and the Maiden at 7:15 pm central/8:15 pm eastern and again overnight at 12:30 am central/1:30 am eastern. Also overnight is the Jamaican crime flick that made Jimmy Cliff an international star, The Harder They Come, on TCM at 1:15 am central/2:15 am eastern.

Saturday, May 30
Saturday is always a good day for cable movies. The first one I want to mention is New World Order, as discussed by my esteemed colleague Mr. Scott Von Doviak, which is playing on IFC at 9 am central/10 am eastern. That's awfully early for conspiracy theories! I guess they have to get moving early on Saturday before the Military-Industrial-Fast Food-Big Oil-Computertronic-Cell Phone-Google-Movie Critic Complex gets its coffee. Unfortunately, IFC is also showing it at 3 pm central/4 pm eastern, which is all part of their plan, man! I also want to mention The Searchers on AMC at 11:30 am central/12:30 pm eastern. Don't watch good movies on AMC. They cut 'em down to 4:3 aspect, and then pan-&-scan them. It should be a crime to show The Searchers in anything other than widescreen. So skip it on AMC and get the DVD instead. Saturday afternoon is more promising. Ovation is showing Waking Life at 1 pm central/2 pm eastern. Not everyone loves or likes that movie, but I thought it was striving mightily towards something, and it deserves points for that. TCM is showing (in the correct widescreen aspect and uncut) The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly at 4 pm central/5 pm eastern. If you missed The Triplets of Belleville on Friday, Ovation is showing it again at 5 pm central/6 pm eastern and Waking Life again at 11 pm central/midnight eastern.

Sunday, May 31
Peter Weir's The Last Wave is one of those movies that I have a hard time rating. On one hand, it has a spooky ambience and haunting conceit that it doggedly maintains throughout. It features the only performance by Richard Chamberlain that could conceivably be called "acting" that anyone ever caught on film. On the other hand, the ending is profoundly silly, especially after all the dread leading up to it. With that caveat, I recommend that you take in a viewing if you haven't seen it. It's on IFC at 7 am central/8 am eastern and again at 1 pm central/2 pm eastern. Ovation is running The Triplets of Belleville again at 1 pm central/2 pm eastern and Waking Life again at 7 pm central/8 pm eastern. Ovation is also running Crumb at 9 pm central/10 pm eastern. Also recommended: since Sunday, May 31 is the ostensible last day of the Screengrab, spend your day perusing our archives!

Monday, June 1
There's funny and there's John Ford. The funny is Duck Soup on TCM at 1:30 pm central/2:30 pm eastern, then The Awful Truth on TCM at 5:15 pm central/6:15 pm eastern, and finally Young Frankenstein on Fox Movie Channel at 8:30 pm central/9:30 pm eastern. But TCM is running a John Ford film festival overnight starting at 7 pm central/8 pm eastern with Directed By John Ford, a documentary about the man as narrated by Orson Welles. Then there's Stagecoach (9 pm central/10 pm eastern), which is the movie Orson Welles watched to learn how to make movies, then The Horse Soldiers (10:45 pm central/11:45 pm eastern), The Quiet Man (1 am central/2 am eastern), and She Wore A Yellow Ribbon (3:15 am central/4:15 am eastern). That's a lot of horse opera (with an Irish interlude), but it's well worth it. Be sure to keep an eye on TCM this month, because they're running blocks of movies by great directors through all of June, sometimes two a day.

Tuesday, June 2
Ovation has the neorealist classic The Bicycle Thief (aka Bicycle Thieves) at 2 pm central/3 pm eastern and again at 5 pm central/6 pm eastern and overnight at 1 am central/2 am eastern. Thrill to the despair of a family man clinging to existence in post-war Rome! At 7 pm central/8 pm eastern, TCM is showing It Happened One Night, the first in a Frank Capra film festival running overnight. At the same time, Fox Movie Channel has Vanishing Point. But I recommend that you catch Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey on Ovation at that time (although it's playing again at 10 pm central/11 pm eastern). It's a fairly obscure documentary about the electronic musical instrument and its inventor that packs a surprising story and an emotional punch.

Wednesday, June 3
Nothing today, sorry (if he's your thing, TCM has a King Vidor film festival this evening, so check it out). Perhaps you could spend your day weeping for the lost Screengrab and cursing the cruel economy?

Thursday, June 4
TCM is running an Ingmar Bergman film fest starting at 7 pm central/8 pm eastern with an appearance by the director on the Dick Cavett Show from 1971. Then there's The Seventh Seal (8 pm central/9 pm eastern), Wild Strawberries (9:45 pm central/10:45 pm eastern), Persona (11:30 pm central/12:30 am eastern), Hour Of The Wolf (1 am central/2 am eastern), and The Passion of Anna (2:45 am central/3:45 am eastern). The first three in particular are necessary viewing for film geeks.

Friday, June 5
IFC has Before Sunrise at 4:15 pm central/5:15 pm eastern, but TCM is running Carol Reed movies all day and Steven Spielberg movies all night. Check out the schedule. Of course, I especially recommend The Third Man at 5 pm central/6 pm eastern.

And this is as far out as I'm going with specific recommendations. But watch TCM for Fritz Lang Day on June 8, Preston Sturges Night on June 10, John Huston and Akira Kurosawa on June 11, Jacques Tourneur on June 12, and... I should really cut this off here. It's been fun! Thanks for reading!

Screengrab Presents THE TOP TEN BEST FILMS EVER!!!! (Part Nine)

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 15 May 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Paul Clark's Top Ten Best Movies Ever!

1. BELLE DE JOUR (1967)
2. 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968)
3. THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC (1928)

The greatness of The Passion of Joan of Arc stems from the fact that director Carl Th. Dreyer knew what it was that made Joan’s story important- not that she believed that God had tasked her to save France, but that she was so steadfast in her faith that she thought it better do die than to deny it. Consequently, Dreyer’s version of Joan’s story has no battle sequences and no heavenly visions, merely a powerful retelling of Joan’s final days, her trial and execution. The world of this film is an unsparing- one might say godless- one, full of evil and underhanded men who are more than willing to sacrifice Joan for their own political gain. This serves to throw into sharp relief the power of Joan’s faith, by heightening the pain and suffering she endured up to the end for the God in whom she so resolutely believed. Falconetti’s performance, then as now, is a wonder, and it’s only fitting that she never appeared onscreen again- how could she have possibly lived up to it?

4. JEANNE DIELMAN (1975)

The sheer amount of focus that director Chantal Akerman and star Delphine Seyrig bring to this film is pretty breathtaking, showing us the everyday life of one woman over the course of 3 ½ hours. What’s more, Jeanne Dielman isn’t an especially noteworthy woman- she’s a single mother who turns the occasional trick to help pay the bills. But rather than lingering on Jeanne’s side job- which has no bearing on her life outside the confines of her bedroom- Akerman instead shows us the details of her everyday routine- preparing the meals, cleaning the flat, doing the shopping, and so on. Because of Akerman’s extensive use of real time, the film becomes about this routine, and consequently, when anything interrupts the routine, the film gains a surprising amount of impact, even from something as simple as Jeanne not getting her usual seat at the local café. As of now, Jeanne Dielman is unavailable in the United States in any home viewing format, so if the film ever makes it to your local rep house, you owe it to yourself to go.

5. ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (1968)

6. ORPHEUS (1949)

“A legend is entitled to be beyond time and place,” states director Jean Cocteau in his introduction to Orpheus. This unique approach to the original myth allows Cocteau to re-imagine it as one of the kinkiest love-quadrangles the big screen has ever seen, involving the titular poet, his wife Eurydice, Death herself, and her chauffeur Heurtebise. The movie’s key performance is from Maria Casares, who is not the larger-than-life Death that most audiences would expect, but so life-sized and lonely in the role that the love entanglements are allowed to be as poignant as they are. One of the most memorable touches Cocteau brought to the film was his knack for making the real world surreal, not merely through editing and camera trickery (film run backwards for eerie effect, characters suddenly disappearing into thin air), but also through strange locations (a bombed-out building used as the realm of the dead) and surreal plot points (chiefly among them the car radio on which Orpheus listens to the bizarre "poetry"). Cocteau was a true multi-talented artist, and Orpheus is on top of everything else one of the great films about the uneasy mix between art and life, in which life and art intrude onto each other, but in the end, if the art is truly enduring then not even death- or Death- can take it from the world.

7. CITIZEN KANE (1941)

8. PLAYTIME (1967)

I don’t think that any viewer who is paying attention can possibly deny what a singular directorial achievement Playtime is. With this film, a box-office disaster on its initial release, Tati re-created modern-day Paris on his own terms as a sterile maze of boxy skyscrapers, plate-glass windows, and beeping gadgetry. But while other filmmakers might be tempted to turn this setting (built entirely from scratch for the film) into an urban nightmare, Tati- true to the film’s title- concentrates on the funny little eccentricities that sneak their way in. This approach is ideal, as it turns out, as Tati’s impossibly intricate mise-en-scène (his skill at engineering visual moments is even keener than Keaton’s) would run the risk of becoming stifling if it wasn’t done with such offhand charm. To describe any of the priceless moments in the film wouldn’t spoil them so much as it would sell them short, as Tati pulls them off so perfectly, yet so unassumingly. And in the midst of it all is Tati’s signature character Hulot, a bastion of old-fashioned provincialism, who would exist at odds with his hyper-modern surroundings but for his singular brand of good-natured aloofness, which translates surprisingly well to his new environment. Playtime is bravura filmmaking of the gentlest kind, a film that demands to be revisited- and seen on the biggest screen possible- innumerable times to be appreciated, and is a sheer delight on each and every viewing.

9. THE GENERAL (1926)

If I was forced to choose a favorite filmmaker, my first choice would almost certainly be Buster Keaton. But for me, an even tougher choice is which of his films to choose. For the purpose of this list, I decided to disqualify Keaton’s short films, which sadly eliminated such classics as One Week, Neighbors, and The Scarecrow. In the end, while part of me was tempted to choose Sherlock Jr. or Seven Chances, I kept coming back to The General, which is both the greatest Civil War movie ever made and one of the greatest comedies in cinema. Rather than filling the film with wacky, distracting supporting characters, much of The General is comprised of scenes with Keaton alone on the train, and these scenes feature some of the most ingeniously realized gags ever put on film- the most legendary being the one in which Keaton finds a railroad tie atop the tracks in front of the train, so he carefully climbs down onto the train's cowcatcher and uses another railroad tie to knock the first one off the tracks. Like so many of the film's great moments (which are plentiful) this gag is less about gut-busting hilarity than engineering- we marvel at the simple ingenuity of it, with the added charge that Keaton did even the most dangerous stunts himself. There’s also a nonchalance about the film that's refreshing, a charm that takes its cue from its star's unassuming demeanor, that allows even the most intricate gag or potentially deadly stunt to feel like a throwaway, as though instead of a show-stopping moment it's all just another annoyance to this character's routine. Which, of course, only makes it funnier.

10. GATES OF HEAVEN (1978)

Roger Ebert may sometimes be prone to going overboard with praise, but when he’s right, he’s right, and he’s 100% right about Gates of Heaven, a movie he’s been stumping for for more than three decades. Fans of Errol Morris know what I’m talking about, but for the rest of you- yes, it really is that good. Morris may use pet cemeteries as his starting point, but ultimately it's about the ways in which we deal with the death of those we love, and by extension with our own mortality. Morris has always been one of the most patient of documentarians, and one of the chief pleasures of Gates of Heaven is in the distinctive and colorful ways the various interviewees talk, from the bone-weary resignation of failed cemetery owner Floyd McClure to the regurgitated management philosophies of Philip Harberts to (especially) ornery old Florence Rasmussen. And as Morris interviews various owners of dead animals, they reflect on how important these pets were in their lives as a source of companionship and unconditional love- sure, these people sound a little crazy for projecting these feelings onto animals, but simply by presenting these people the film asks us how many people can offer the same kind of loyalty these pet owners felt from their pets? In the end, this film offers no small amount of plain-spoken philosophy, as when one pet owner states, "there's your pet, your pet's dead. But what happened to the thing that made it move?" No film I've seen is this profound about the ways in which people seek meaning not in art or centuries-old wisdom, but in the lives (and deaths) of others.

SPECIAL MENTION: DECALOGUE (1989)

This being a “best movies” list, it’s debatable whether Krzystzof Kieslowski’s The Decalogue really qualifies, since while it has played theatrically all over the world, it was originally intended as a ten-part miniseries for Polish television (call this “special mention” a compromise). What’s undeniable, however, is that this is one of the major works of the twentieth century. Decalogue was inspired by The Ten Commandments, but one of its great achievements is that it views the Commandments less as religious doctrine than key moral tenets that govern most modern-day societies. So rather than trafficking in pious, preachy parables, Kieslowski and co-writer Krzystzof Piesiewicz examine the ways in which people in the modern world struggle with these age-old decrees, not always successfully. In one of the episodes, a girl who has grown close to her widower father must decide how to deal with her feelings after she discovers that he isn't her biological father after all; in another, the unfaithful wife of a gravely ill man finds out that she is pregnant by her lover, and tells her husband's doctor that the unborn child's fate will be decided by whether or not he believes her husband will die. And in the series’ most beloved episode, a teenage voyeur falls in love with a woman he spies on, and decides to become part of her life. The way this film plays out defies all expectation, yet in retrospect the events seem almost inevitable. The Decalogue may or may not be an according-to-Hoyle movie, but I’m guessing that when the history of moving-image-thingies is written, The Decalogue will occupy a place of honor.

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

Contributor: Paul Clark

Morning Deal Report: Megan Fox Crosses the Border

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 14:00:00 GMT

Megan Fox will star in the “border thriller” The Crossing. “Byron Willinger and Philip de Blasi penned the pic, in which a couple returning from a Mexican vacation is carjacked and the husband kidnapped. The wife (Fox) must smuggle heroin across the border in order to spring him,” per The Hollywood Reporter. A spokesman for the film claims that Fox is “ideal for the role of a woman who must be both victim and hero,” which I think is his way of saying she’s hot.

Eighteen years after the ill-fated The Dark Wind, Errol Morris is taking another shot at directing a narrative film. Currently known as Untitled Cryonics Project, it’s the true of Robert F. Nelson, “a TV repairman who in the 1960s joined a group of enthusiasts who believed they could cheat death with a new technology: cryonics. But freezing dead people so scientists could reanimate them in the future turned out to be harder than Nelson thought,” Variety reports. It’s described as a dark comedy, and Ira Glass is among the producers.

Catherine Keener has joined Pierce Brosnan and Uma Thurman for Percy Jackson, a Christopher Columbus adaptation of a fantasy series by Rick Riordan. “The books, which put Greek gods in modern times, involve Poseidon's half-human son, Percy, who is on a quest in modern America to prevent a war among the gods.”

Related:
Megan Fox Goes Deep
When Good Directors Go Bad: The Dark Wind

2008 Highlight Reel: The Top Twelve Screengrab Posts of the Year

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Compiling the weekly highlight reels here at the Screengrab is not such an arduous task, but putting together a year's worth of the finest in film bloggery was a considerably more formidable undertaking. Using a complicated points system akin to the BCS in college football, I have surveyed my fellow Screengrabbers, weighted the page views and reader comments, and come up with the following dirty dozen: the best of the year in Screengrab.

Top Ten Reasons The Dark Knight Isn't As Good As You Think It Is

Love it or hate, it's hard to deny The Dark Knight was the pop culture event of the year. Our man Osborne has some qualms.

Why So Serious? The Dark Knight in the Political World

Of course, as with any pop culture phenomenon in an election year, The Dark Knight was used to score political points, few of which made any sense to me.

Forgotten Films: The Oscar

Phil neatly dissects one of the all-time great so-bad-it’s-good movies, and apparently gets legendary author (and The Oscar screenwriter) Harlan Ellison to comment. (L.P.)

The Screengrab Presents: The Five Kinds of Twist Endings

Gwynne knows that, just as there are only seven kinds of stories, there are only five ways to make the endings of those stories totally blow your mind. (L.P.)

Classless Man in Voiceless Brawl

Leonard brings us the heartwarming tale of film critics engaging in a stimulating exchange of ideas.

When Good Directors Go Bad: The Dark Wind (1991, Errol Morris)

Paul focuses on the single fiction film made by one of the cinema’s all-time greatest documentarians – a movie so bad I wasn’t even aware that it existed. (L.P.)

The View through the View-Master: The Iron Giant

Hayden - or as we call him around Screengrab headquarters, "the breeder" - looks at the Brad Bird classic through the eyes of both child and Childs.

CGI Must Die: 5 Reasons Why

Andrew asks the musical question, "Why so much digital crap, Hollywood?"

Take Five: Crime and Pyunishment

Leonard evaluates the oeuvre of one of our most underrated schlockmeisters, Albert Pyun.

Five Reasons We Want Mad Max Back

Enough with Indy, Rocky and Rambo. It's time for our favorite road warrior to make a comeback.

Tom Cruise, at Midlife, with a Freaking Eyepatch

Phil prefers the later, loonier Cruise. Find out why.

Unwatchable: It's Pat

I had to include an Unwatchable on this list, and this one seemed to be a favorite.

(Special thanks to Leonard Pierce for an assist on the comments and to Phil Nugent for diligent research.)

Reviews By Request: Bigger, Stronger, Faster* (2008, Chris Bell)

Paul Clark — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 20:00:00 GMT

As always, I’ll be polling you folks to determine my next Reviews By Request column. To vote, see the poll at the end of this review.

Watching Chris Bell’s Bigger, Stronger, Faster* (*The Side Effects of Being American), the first thing that I noticed was that Bell didn’t look like the typical documentarian. Of course, there really isn’t a mold for what a nonfiction filmmaker ought to look like, but normally documentary filmmakers tend to look either like intellectuals (Errol Morris, Frederick Wiseman) or self-styled man-of-the-people types (Michael Moore, Morgan Spurlock). By contrast, Bell is a good-looking thirtysomething, broad-shouldered and well-muscled, in keeping with his life as a former bodybuilder. But in making this, his first feature, Bell obeyed the first rule of writing- when in doubt, write what you know. Or in Bell’s case, film it.

On one level, Bigger, Stronger, Faster is about steroids. However, considering Bell’s experiences in the world of competitive lifting and bodybuilding, the movie is hardly an anti-steroid screed. Bell knows this world too well to come out against chemical enhancement. For one thing, while he’s against taking steroids himself, his brothers Mike (aka “Mad Dog”) and Mark (“Smelly”) have no such qualms. Mad Dog still harbors his childhood dreams of pro wrestling stardom, while Smelly continues to compete in power-lifting competitions, at one point bench pressing more than 700 pounds. Meanwhile, Chris is working at Gold’s Gym selling gym memberships, and is smaller than both his older and younger brother. Did the drugs make the difference?

For years, health experts have warned athletes about the dangers that steroids can wreak on one’s body. But Bigger, Stronger, Faster presents a dissenting opinion, calmly and surprisingly convincingly. According to the scientists and doctors Bell interviews for the film, the health risks that come from taking steroids are relatively minor, and are generally temporary. But while another director might have taken these findings as evidence in favor of steroid use, Bell is up to something altogether different. He’s dispelling the overblown health-related myths of steroids in order to approach the issue on ethical and sociological grounds.

In Bell’s mind, the use of steroids among athletes is symptomatic of a deep-seated desire not only to succeed, but to come out on top. From a young age, Bell remembers idolizing men (Arnold Schwarzenegger, Hulk Hogan) whose success came, according to them, as the result both of their muscular physiques and their hard work. Children are taught that if they dream big and follow their dreams, they can be anything they want to be and escape their humdrum lives. And if it takes chemical enhancement to get the edge one needs to prevail, so be it (this doesn't end with muscle mass either- why would I keep getting e-Mail spam advertising penis enlargment unless someone was buying?). Besides, asks the film, if fighter pilots are required to take amphetamines, and teenagers are prescribed Adderall to get the edge at school, why shouldn’t athletes be allowed to use steroids?

Bigger, Stronger, Faster isn’t an especially distinguished documentary- it’s fairly nuts and bolts from a directing standpoint, and Bell is occasionally prone to digressions that don’t really go anywhere. He occasionally includes a surprising scene such as the one where he interviews Donald Hooten, who famously spoke out against steroids after his steroid-using son killed himself. But he also includes such unnecessary sequences as the one where he decides to make his own energy supplement, hiring a couple of migrant workers to help him prepare the supplement and even staging an ad campaign. More often than not, however, Bell’s points hit home.

One of the key points he addresses is the paradox of modern professional sports- that on one hand we demand our athletes win, while on the other we need them to play fair. During the film, Bell remembers the incident when the hated wrestler The Iron Sheik was arrested for doing drugs with fellow wrestler Hacksaw Jim Duggan, and Bell recalls being shocked less by their actions as he was by the idea that the two were supposed to be mortal enemies. Perhaps this explains much of the outrage stirred up by the Congressional hearings on steroid use in Major League Baseball- that deep down, we still want to believe in our sports heroes as we did when we were young. In a world that’s complicated and difficult to figure out, we need a place where success is easily measured, everything is governed by rules, and there are clear-cut winners and losers. Above all, we need to believe that our dreams are attainable. In one of the last scenes of Bigger, Stronger, Faster, we see Mad Dog, now thirty-six years old and married, putting on a unitard and making an audition video for the WWE. Of course, his chances of making it in professional wrestling are long gone, but he forges on. After all, it’s easier and more comforting than reality.

What’s next for Reviews By Request? I’m still catching up on some 2008 releases, and this week’s choices include a low-budget comedy starring one of the year’s most dependable scene stealers, a spring horror release that received decidedly mixed reviews, two very different documentaries, and finally, the latest film from the Troma team. So, what’ll it be?

What movie should I review next? | BuzzDash polls

Voting closes on Monday night. Remember, the comments section is open for you to talk up your favorites or recommend other titles for future installments. See you in two weeks!

When Good Directors Go Bad: Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997, Clint Eastwood)

Paul Clark — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Forty years ago, the idea that Rowdy Yates from TV’s Rawhide would turn out to be a talented director would have seemed ridiculous. Yet it came to pass, with Clint Eastwood proving to be one of Hollywood’s most celebrated filmmakers. In addition, he’s also one of its most prolific, churning out an average of one film almost every year over the past decade. But in spite of making such well-regarded films as Unforgiven, Mystic River, and Million Dollar Baby, the truth is that when a filmmaker works at such a rate, there are bound to be some clunkers in the bunch. Surely enough, Eastwood had his share of mediocre or even subpar films throughout his career, even in the fertile period of the nineties. In the case of movies like True Crime and Blood Work, the middling quality of the films wasn’t too big a deal, as they were disposable adaptations of forgettable airport novels.

Then there was Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. A far cry from the likes of Absolute Power, Midnight was based on an honest-to-goodness acclaimed work of literature. John Berendt’s book, based on an actual Savannah, GA murder case, was a publishing phenomenon, residing on the New York Times bestseller list a full four years. For the first time since his Academy Award-winning Unforgiven, Eastwood was making an honest-to-goodness prestige project, and he devoted all his attention to directing the film, handing over the acting duties to the likes of Kevin Spacey and John Cusack. Anticipation was high, especially among fans of the novel who were curious to see how Eastwood would translate it to the screen.

Trouble is, like many really good books, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil doesn’t exactly lend itself to being adapted. While most good adaptations are inspired by books with strong, tight stories, much of the appeal of Berendt’s book is anecdotal, with plenty of fascinating characters orbiting around the story’s center, the trial of Jim Williams. Unfortunately, Eastwood is generally at his best when working with a relatively straightforward plot, and consequently, his attempts to mix the court case with the incidental dramas in Savannah just don’t quite work. It doesn’t help that Eastwood never really allows Savannah to become a natural element of the story like it ought to be. Watching his more successful adaptation of Mystic River, it’s hard to imagine the story taking place anywhere else, but I almost never got that vibe from Midnight, in which the city feels more like a backdrop than an actual setting.

Part of the problem is that Eastwood shies away from one of the book’s most important themes- the hypocrisy of Savannah’s upper-class when confronted by Williams’ homosexuality. Berendt’s novel addresses the almost tangible sense of abandonment that Williams felt when his “friends” refused to testify on his behalf once word of his sexual predilections came to light. But while it’s mentioned in passing in the film, Eastwood makes far too little of which should be a central issue. Without this undercurrent, the trial loses most of its energy, becoming little more than a mediocre courtroom drama with a few mild twists.

Also disappointing is the film’s treatment of the friendship between protagonist John Kelso, a Berendt surrogate played by John Cusack, and the story’s most famous supporting player, The Lady Chablis, who plays herself. In both the book and the film, the two characters- one a straitlaced northerner, the other a local transsexual- get to know each other as the story progresses, and while it’s pretty clear that nothing sexual ever transpires between them, there’s a tantalizing ambiguity about Chablis’ feelings toward Kelso. Sadly, Eastwood and screenwriter John Lee Hancock seem skittish about the possibility that audience members might think their hero is gay, so they concoct him a love interest who wasn't in the book, played by Eastwood’s daughter Alison. The romantic subplot is a complete waste of time, never advancing the story or working in any other way other than to reassure the audience that John Kelso is all about the ladies.

That said, both Cusack and The Lady Chablis are actually quite good in the movie. Cusack plays his usual charming, brainy type, but then, the story needs a levelheaded character in the middle of the eccentric locals. And The Lady Chablis is pretty priceless, especially when she’s playing off Cusack- I can’t imagine a more established actor playing the role even half as convincingly, no doubt because she’d already been playing the role for years even before the book, let alone the movie. And most of the rest of the cast is also fine- Spacey is courtly but subtly menacing in one of finest performances, and Jack Thompson has fun as Spacey’s defense attorney, a local hero (he’s the owner of the University of Georgia’s mascot “Uga”) who’s surprisingly neither a blowhard nor an over-the-top rube. The weak links are Alison Eastwood (who to her credit has almost nothing to do) and Jude Law as the murder victim, who when we see him in flashbacks is too mannered by half.

More than most filmmakers working today, Eastwood works in the classic tradition, allowing the film’s story to dictate his directorial decisions. Unfortunately, it never feels like he got a handle on the story. The courtroom scenes have no momentum, there’s too much gratuitous material involving Alison Eastwood’s character, and the local color just doesn’t work like it does on the page. After all, it’s one thing to imagine a guy walking a nonexistent dog or tethering flies to his clothing, and another entirely to actually see them. And late in the game, Eastwood abandons his low-key and realistic style to inject some magical realism into the film, but the moment doesn’t work because it feels so out of place with his style.

In the end, one gets the sense that Eastwood’s brand of filmmaking just didn’t mesh with Berendt’s story. Perhaps someone like Robert Altman could have pulled it off, given his gifts with ensemble casts and Southern settings, or even the documentarian Ross McElwee, chronicler of the Deep South in films like Sherman’s March and Bright Leaves. I might have suggested Errol Morris, considering his ability to portray eccentrics without condescending to them, but then, Morris' previous fiction feature didn’t turn out so well, did it?

DVD Digest for October 14, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week brings plenty of thrills on Blu-Ray and some interesting arthouse releases coming to DVD. Oh, and some guy with a whip.

Conundrum of the Week: Terrence Malick’s The New World is one of my favorite movies of all time. So why am I not more excited about this week’s release of the “Extended Cut” of the film? You’d think that I would welcome the opportunity to see even more of the film, to luxuriate in its irresistible Malick-ness. Yet I find myself torn. On the one hand, I’m encouraged by the fact that Malick re-cut the film himself, which leads me to believe that maybe he just needed more time to get his vision fine-tuned to his exact specifications (I still yearn, in vain I fear, for his 6-hour cut of The Thin Red Line). But it was the theatrical cut that I fell in love with in the first place. So why can’t the boys at Warner just do what Universal did last week and release all three existing cuts of The New World in one handy box set? Now, there would be an occasion worth celebrating. I know, I know- I’m thinking about it too much. But that’s what they pay me for, after all…

Also notable this week is MGM’s Alfred Hitchcock Premiere Collection, which contains eight Hitchcock titles from their library and features many new commentary tracks and archival material including Hitchcock being interviewed by Peter Bogdanovich and Francois Truffaut. The big titles in the set are Rebecca, Spellbound, and Notorious, each of which went out of print on Criterion DVD a few years ago, and which are now available separately as well as in the set. Other titles in the set are The Paradine Case, Sabotage, Young and Innocent, Lifeboat, and The Lodger. Other classics coming to DVD include: a new release of Robert Altman’s Short Cuts (Criterion), Kon Ichikawa’s An Actor’s Revenge (Koch), Capricorn One (Lionsgate), and the 15th Anniversary of Chaplin (Lionsgate), which features what’s still Robert Downey Jr.’s sole Oscar nomination to date.

The week’s biggest recent release on DVD is, of course, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (Paramount, also Blu-Ray), a movie which I enjoyed but which disappointed a number of fans including Trey Parker and Matt Stone. But if you’re one of the Indy naysayers, check out one or more of this week’s crop of new indies: Errol Morris’ Standard Operating Procedure (Sony, also Blu-Ray), the Genghis Kahn origin story Mongol (Warner, also Blu-Ray), the Cannes-anointed The Edge of Heaven (Strand Releasing), and this year’s Golden Bear-winner at Berlin, Elite Squad (Genius Productions). Or if you’ve got a little too much cash jangling around in your pockets, you can always either buy The Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything: A VeggieTales Movie (Universal) or drive by your local Best Buy and throw $20 out of your car window, both of which produce about the same effect.

This week’s TV on DVD releases include: CSI Season 8 (Paramount), Back to You Season 1 (Universal), Nash Bridges Season 1 (Paramount), and The Unit Season 3 (Fox).

Finally, this week’s releases are a fairly action-packed bunch, including thrills of all sorts. For true-crime thrills, try Eastern Promises (Universal), American Gangster (Universal), or Casino (Universal). If you’ve got a taste for blood, give Interview With the Vampire (Warner) a spin. For adventure and romance, there’s always the double feature of Romancing the Stone (Fox) and Jewel of the Nile (Fox). If you like your action spiced liberally with cyberpunk, you probably don’t need me to tell you about this week’s release of The Ultimate Matrix Collection (Warner). For some Halloween chills, check out Poltergeist (Warner). And if you don’t really care for good movies, Constantine (Warner) should satisfy your movie-watching urges just fine.

Screengrab Review: “Surfer, Dude”

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 15:00:00 GMT

It’s not always a pretty sight when documentary filmmakers make the leap to fictional features. See – or rather, do whatever you can to avoid seeing – Michael Moore’s Canadian Bacon and Errol Morris’s The Dark Wind. As I implied in this post yesterday, I’m a big fan of S.R. Bindler’s documentary Hands on a Hard Body. Even so, I wasn’t exactly stoked to learn his follow-up (nearly a decade later) would be a surfing movie starring The Shirtless One, Matthew McConaughey. I dunno, maybe it’s just because I watched the entire goofy-ass David Milch series John From Cincinnati, but there’s something about the whole mystical-spiritual aura surrounding surfing that makes otherwise talented people a little loopy.

Surfer, Dude definitely qualifies as loopy – even that comma in the title is a little too self-consciously quirky. McConaughey, a friend of Bindler’s since high school, produced the film through his production company j.k. livin and brought his essential dudeness aboard in the lead role of Steve Addington, a free-spirited “soul surfer” who lives for the waves. Upon returning to Malibu from his latest world tour, Addington is informed by his manager (Woody Harrelson) that his board and shorts sponsorship contracts have been sold to Eddie Zarno, a former surfer turned multimedia mogul. Zarno has big plans for Addington, including a role in a beach house reality series and a virtual reality videogame bearing his image.

Addington’s “not feelin’ it.” He’s an all-natural dude and all he needs is his friends, his weed and his waves. “I’m not some assclown in a green room. I’m a surfer, dude!” Despite his manager’s warnings that cash is in short supply, Addington wants nothing to do with the digital world. His spiritual crisis arrives when the waves disappear. As the days pass with no surf to ride, he goes on a fast (including the ganja), but can he remain true to himself and resist selling out to the Man? Duuuuude.

Surfer, Dude has a green theme in more ways than one – in addition to McConaughey and Harrelson, Willie Nelson is on hand as a goat farmer to complete the trinity of Texas stoner icons. But the movie is so lightweight, it’s hard to invest too heavily in Addington’s existential dilemma. It’s a vanity project to the core, an ode to its producer-star in all his toned-and-tanned golden glory. With his lazy honeydew drawl, allergy to shirts and “awright awright awright” party-guy vibe in full effect, McConaughey isn’t playing a character so much as his US magazine persona come to life. His wink and nod towards his lovable rogue image recalls the Burt Reynolds of the late 70s, and that’s one way of looking at this movie: it’s Smokey and the Bandit with surfboards.

Related:
Woody Harrelson Eats Your Brains
Trailer Review: Fool's Gold

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?

The World of Lists: Documentaries Get Their Due

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 14:30:00 GMT

Though we love movie-related lists as much as anybody -- indeed, as we love movie-related lists even more than anybody -- we've noticed a somewhat disturbing trend in the recent flood-tide of best-ofs: the documentary often gets the short shrift. Stuck somewhere between a feature film and an educational short, even with the new wave of populist docs that actually make money at the box office, doumentaries are rarely considered part of the mainstream corpus which gets shuffled around for various critics' Top Whatever lists, and thus, leave the average fan with no idea where to start when it comes to the medium.

That's something that Jonathan Kahana, a professor of cinema studies at NYU (and author of the recently released Intelligence Work: The Politics of American Documentary) aims to change with this list.

Originally created as a feature for an in-flight magazine and later severely truncated (a process all to familiar to those of us who have tilled that particular soil), Kahana's list contains a dozen of the finest documentaries in history from the 1920s to the present, available on DVD and otherwise. Compiled by the author to "pay it forward" to an upcoming generations of documentary fans, the list is a solid one -- we'll present it below in chronological order, but please do check out the link for Kahana's insightful commentary on each choice.

1. Manhatta (Charles Sheeler & Paul Strand, 1921) & Rain (Joris Ivens, 1929)
2. Nanook of the North (Robert Flaherty, 1922)
3. The Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929)
4. Night and Fog (Alain Resnais, 1955)
5. Salesman (Alfred & David Maysles, 1969)
6. Harlan County U.S.A. & American Dream (Barbara Kopple, 1975 & 1991)
7. Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1982)
8. The Thin Blue Line (Errol Morris, 1989)
9. Little Dieter Wants to Fly (Werner Herzog, 1998)
10. The Gleaners and I (Agnes Varda, 2000)
11. The Corporation (Jennifer Abbott & Mark Achbar, 2003)
12. Bright Leaves (Ross McElwee, 2004)

What do you think, Screengrab readers? What did Kahana include that you'd have left off, and what did he omit that you'd make sure got in? What are your 12 favorite documentaries?

Related Posts:

Doc Around the Clock

Bin-Laden 2, Documentary Filmmakers 0

Indie Box-Office Roundup: Weekend of April 25-27, 2008

Paul Clark — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Even at the indie box office, it seems that Iraq War movies can't catch a break. The weekend's highest-profile documentary, Errol Morris' Standard Operating Procedure (Sony Pictures Classics), couldn't keep up with the relatively unheralded Up the Yangtze (Zeitgeist). Up the Yangtze, the debut feature from Yung Chang and the latest in a recent wave of films dealing with the impact of the massive China's Three Gorges Dam project, brought in $15,851 on its one screen, the highest per-screen take by a documentary so far this year.

Finishing in second place was the child-prostitution drama Holly (Priority Films), which took advantage of strong advance group sales to take in $15,687 on its single screen of release, less than $200 behind this week's winner. Coming in a strong third was the debut of Claude Lelouch's latest, Roman de Gare (IDP/Samuel Goldwyn), starring Fanny Ardant and Dominique Pinon.

Rounding out the top five were Then She Found Me (ThinkFilm), the directorial debut of Oscar-winner Helen Hunt, and Standard Operating Procedure. Which just goes to show you that even at the indie box-office, an acting Oscar trumps a best documentary Oscar every time.

Finally, we feel compelled to mention that two-week champion The Visitor fell to sixth place after expanding its release to 76 screens. Don't worry, Richard Jenkins- we still love you, and we'll let you keep your crown.

Top 10: Weekend of April 25-27:
1. Up the Yangtze [Zeitgeist] ($15,851 per screen)
2. Holly [Priority Films] ($15,687)
3. Roman De Gare [IDP/Samuel Goldwyn Films] ($12,742)
4. Then She Found Me [ThinkFilm] ($8,066)
5. Standard Operating Procedure [Sony Pictures Classics] ($7,054)
6. The Visitor [Overture Films] ($6,285)
7. Tuya's Marriage [Music Box Pictures] ($4,675)
8. Glass: A Portrait Of Philip In 12 Parts [Koch Lorber Films] ($4,356)
9. The Singing Revolution [Abramorama Entertainment] ($4,281)
10. Without The King [First Run] ($4,237)

Source: IndieWire.

Screengrab Review: Standard Operating Procedure

Peter Smith — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 18:45:00 GMT

By Mike D'Angelo

In one sense, Standard Operating Procedure is anything but. Errol Morris has few rivals among documentary filmmakers, but he isn't renowned for tackling hot-button issues torn from yesterday's headlines; most of the folks who've sat down before his patented Interrotron camera have been either fascinating eccentrics (Gates of Heaven; Fast, Cheap & out of Control) or aging provocateurs willing to discuss controversies from decades past (Mr. Death, The Fog of War). For all its lurid notoriety, Abu Ghraib seems almost too ordinary a subject for someone as outlandishly gifted as Morris, and while he's done his usual formally sophisticated and journalistically thorough job, S.O.P. is the first movie he's ever made that gives off a faint but unmistakable whiff of déjà vu.

You know the players; you know the photos. Morris has secured interviews with five of the seven MPs who were indicted, including media scapegoat Lynndie England, and coaxed from them a disarmingly candid assessment of their behavior. Anybody who's read Philip Zimbardo's excellent The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil will be familiar with the film's unstated thesis, which blames the persecution and degradation at Abu Ghraib not on the moral lapse of a few "bad apples" but on a poisonous atmosphere created and condoned by those much higher up the military food chain. Still, words on a page can't provide the odd amalgam of shame and defiance that permeates these interviews, nor the dispassionate intimacy of the Interrotron itself.

What gets short shrift, surprisingly, are the photographs themselves. Some have been critical of Morris' decision to commission flashy animated sequences from graphics whiz Kyle Cooper, finding the juxtaposition of the sordid and the high-tech to be somehow unseemly. Those people should chill. But what I really wanted from S.O.P. — especially given the terrific essays Morris has been writing on the nature of photography for the New York Times — was an in-depth exploration of the bizarre disjunction between what the disgraced MPs (persuasively) claim they were feeling and their demeanor in the pictures. Sabrina Harman, for example, wrote letters to her lover at the time that powerfully recount her disgust at what was going on — so why do we see her grinning like a lunatic and giving a big party-hearty thumbs-up beside an Iraqi corpse? Morris asks the question, but he doesn't really delve, being too busy indicting the U.S. military as a whole. Thing is, we don't need Errol Morris to do that. We rely on him to look past the patently obvious.

Truth or Dare: Paul Arthur on Errol Morris's "Standard Operating Procedure"

Phil Nugent — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 21:30:00 GMT

Paul Arthur, an influential film scholar and critic (and author of A Line Of Sight: American Avant-Garde Film Since 1965) died recently; one if his last pieces has now appeared in Artforum, in which he examines the techniques of "nonfiction filmmaker" Errol Morris, whose forthcoming Standard Operating Procedure is about the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. Arthur finds Morris guilty of choosing "to substitute metaphor for analysis"; he compares Morris's approach to that of Alex Gibney's in Taxi to the Dark Side--whose "gritty reenactments, lush landscape shots, interviews lit like Dutch portraiture, and ... ominous music track replete with vaguely religious wailing suggestive of cries of another sort... never supersede or distract from Gibney’s inflamed political indictment"--and find Morris's approach wanting.

Morris himself has called his film "a nonfiction horror movie;” Arthur, taking note of the contributions of the cinematographer Robert Richardson and composer Danny Elfman, and describing Morris's penchant for interrupting interview testimony with creepy imagery, writes, "These visual aperçus, which Morris refers to rather sophistically as 'impressions' rather than reenactments, are undeniably gorgeous. Their style, however, belongs to a film genre that provides titillation through horror. To employ this rhetoric in a documentary about actual horror is obscene, yielding familiar aesthetic thrills as a substitute for specificity of meaning. We aren’t prompted to contemplate the Iraq occupation’s signature scandal as the product of a mercenary chain of executive decisions, cultural attitudes, venalities, and personal pathologies; we are, as it were, let off the hook. It’s only a movie." The article, which will inflame Morris's most devoted fans--and he has lots of them--is provocative and spiky enough to remind those who knew Arthur's work what a valuable man he was in an argument, whether he was on your side or not. With any luck, it might also inspire some who are unfamiliar with his writing to try to find out more about what they've beeb missing.

When Good Directors Go Bad: Year of the Horse (1997, Jim Jarmusch)

Paul Clark — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 19:00:00 GMT

For almost three decades now, Jim Jarmusch has been one of the heroes of American independent cinema. The deadpan humor and multicultural vibe of his best works have influenced directors worldwide, and his maverick sensibility has practically defined the term “independent filmmaker.” While this sensibility hasn’t endeared him to the Hollywood bigwigs (his insistence that he retain the rights to the negatives of all his films would be a dealbreaker for most studios) it’s made him something of a hero to followers of indie-film, because he’s a director who gets away with making whatever he damn pleases.

Jarmusch’s 1995 masterpiece Dead Man marked his first collaboration with legendary rocker Neil Young, of whom Jarmusch was a longtime fan. Young’s mindbending score was divisive- Roger Ebert famously likened the sound to Young dropping his guitar over and over- but the film cemented a friendship between the two artists. So for his next film Jarmusch decided to go on the road with Neil Young and Crazy Horse, with the goal of making the concert film Year of the Horse. It was Jarmusch’s first documentary.

A few weeks ago I spotlighted in this column The Dark Wind, the sole fiction feature from master documentarian Errol Morris. For Jarmusch, Year of the Horse is no less misbegotten. Now, I don’t begrudge filmmakers- least of all gifted, independent-minded ones like Jarmusch- their attempts to break out of their filmmaking comfort zones. However, with Year of the Horse, Jarmusch shows almost no affinity for the documentary form.

In its opening credits, Year of the Horse proclaims that it was “proudly made in Super-8,” and the film is suffused with a lo-fi aesthetic that’s similar to most of Young’s best work. However, in such films as Stranger Than Paradise, Down by Law, and Dead Man, Jarmusch’s style is tight and deliberate, with little room for the kinds of accidents that one normally finds in a documentary of this sort. As a result, the film feels less like a charmingly hardscrabble Young work than a sloppy, amateurish mess.

Part of the problem is the music in the film. While I prefer Young’s rootsy albums like Harvest to his Crazy Horse work, the songs in the film are pretty solid. However, their concert performances have a tendency to drag on (and on and on), with lots of onstage improvisation between Young and his bandmates. While jamming can make for a great concert experience, it’s tough to make it interesting to those who aren’t actually in attendance, and Jarmusch never figures out how to make it work. Rather than focusing on the audience’s reaction to the music or really zeroing in on the musical chemistry between the band, Jarmusch too often cuts away from the concert to often random and usually uncompelling images.

Some of these images are merely distracting, as when Jarmusch intercuts footage of clouds or a passing train into the songs. But others are downright puzzling, as when the film cuts away from an onstage performance of “Fuckin’ Up” to show some decades-old footage of Crazy Horse bassist Billy Talbot shoplifting and getting arrested, a hamfisted attempt on Jarmusch’s part to turn the song into a music video, another form he isn’t particularly good at. Either way, the cutaways don’t help. Whereas Jarmusch seems to intend them to add interest to the stage performance, they merely serve to remind us of how the song is dragging on well past its logical end (one number finishes with the band playing the same chord nearly two dozen times). The only time the cutaways actually serve their intended purpose is when Jarmusch juxtaposes the 1996 concert performance of “Like a Hurricane” with footage of the same song taken from their 1986 tour. In this footage, in which Young already looks haggard, Jarmusch comes closest to illustrating the idea of how long Neil Young and Crazy Horse have been in the game.

At several times during the (mostly superfluous) band interviews in Year of the Horse, Crazy Horse guitarist Frank “Pancho” Sampedro remarks that Jarmusch will never be able to compress three decades of Crazy Horse history into a documentary. However, based on the evidence on display in the film, two hours seems far too long. I’m sure there were plenty of vivid experiences in the history of the band, but few of them appear to have been “proudly filmed on Super-8.” Seeing as how the most memorable thing that happens offstage in Year of the Horse is a floral centerpiece catching on fire, perhaps Jarmusch would have been better off sticking to the music itself.

But as I said, he’s always marched to his own drummer, and fortunately for his fans his next film was 1999’s fascinating Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, that wonderful one-of-a-kind combination of aging wiseguys and Hagakure-reading lone gunmen. In other words, definitely a step in the right direction. Jarmusch’s next film, The Limits of Control, is currently on track for a 2009 premiere.

Screengrab Review: "Writ Writer"

Leonard Pierce — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 19:30:00 GMT

To some people, Alfredo "Fred" Cruz was one of the greatest civil rights activists in all of Texas, and one of the few unsung heroes in American history (he doesn't even have a Wikipedia entry, a sure sign you're being slept on). To others, he was "the most dangerous man in the Texas prison system". The documentary Writ Writer makes director Susanne Mason's views on the subject crystal clear -- and aims to correct the fact that, some 30 years after his groundbreaking and difficult work was completed, Cruz remains largely unknown even in Texas, let alone the United State, although hundreds of thousands of people in every state in the union have benefited from his toil and sacrifice.

Born poor on the bad side of San Antonio, Alfredo Cruz got hooked on heroin at a young age (several members of his family were dealers) and, after accidentally killing his best friend in a shooting accident, went into a downward spiral that eventually led to his conviction for robbery. Handed a ridiculously long sentence, Cruz -- who always maintained his innocence -- could find no one willing to defend a wild youth with no money and dark skin, so he had no choice but to take up his own cause, teaching himself law and filing appeals on his own behalf. It wasn't an easy task; at the time, it was frowned upon for anyone to read law, and Cruz, who rapidly developed a reputation as a troublemaker for daring to take an interest in his own affairs, was often defeated in court when prison officials would confiscate his books, papers and legal briefs, leaving him unable to mount a convincing defense. Not content to take up his own cause, Cruz also became a "writ writer", or jailhouse lawyer, filing appeals on behalf of other prisoners -- an activity that was, astonishingly, illegal under Texas law at the time. Subjected to brutality and endlessly cruel punishment by prison officials, Cruz nonetheless managed to overturn the law, making it possible for prisoners all over the country to gain valuable civil rights; he also secured his own release after a successful challenge to his conviction, and in a high point to his ultimately tragic life, ended up marrying the New York attorney who had helped him win his case -- a woman twice his own age.

Despite its compelling narrative and the fascinating excerpts from Cruz's memoirs that appear throughout the film, how well you'll respond to Writ Writer depends entirely on how interested you are in Cruz's story. Mason is not a visually gifted director, and the documentary almost never strays from talking head mode. It's also got zero chance of a theatrical release, but you will get a chance to see it this summer just the same: it's being featured as part of PBS' "Independent Lens" series. Many years in the making, Writ Writer is definitely worth seeing for its powerful subject matter and its illumination of how our modern penal system was formed. Susanne Mason won't displace Errol Morris as anyone's favorite documentarian, but this is a story interesting enough to spare an hour on.

Trailer Review: Standard Operating Procedure

Paul Clark — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Errol Morris may not have had much luck in the realm of fiction filmmaking, but he remains one of the most gifted documentarians currently working. Here he trains his Interrotron on the problem of torture by our military, in particular the incidents at Abu Ghraib. It's a subject that has been tackled by a number of films already, but if anyone can find a fresh perspective on the issue it's Morris. If nothing else, the trailer one again demonstrates that Morris' visual style is much more sophisticated than that of his comtemporaries, although it remains to be seen whether that's a good thing when you're dealing with an issue as morally thorny as torture. All the same, Morris is a filmmaker whose work demands to be seen, and Standard Operating Procedure is no exception.

When Good Directors Go Bad: The Dark Wind (1991, Errol Morris)

Paul Clark — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 19:00:00 GMT

If there's one thing I've discovered while writing this column, it's that When Good Directors Go Bad™, they usually do so in ways that are strangely compelling. While some of the films they make are merely small missteps and others are unmitigated disasters, generally the films will show enough of the director's style to be of interest as part of the filmmaker's oeuvre as a whole. Yet occasionally, a great director will make a film that just sort of recedes into the background of his career, insignificant even as a footnote to an important career. The Dark Wind, Errol Morris' sole fiction feature to date, is such a film.

The Dark Wind, based on a novel by Tony Hillerman, tells the story of Officer Jim Chee (Lou Diamond Phillips), a young Navajo working as a policeman on his reservation. Most of the time, he's assigned to relatively small duties, like staking out a road that's sometimes traveled by bootleggers, or keeping watch over a disputed well. But when Chee witnesses a mysterious plane crash while keeping watch one night, he stumbles onto the biggest case of his young career, involving murder, drug trafficking, dirty feds, and longstanding tribal disputes between the Navajo and Hopi. With help from Hopi deputy "Cowboy" Dashee (Gary Farmer), Chee tries to get to the bottom of the mystery.

The film's storyline is a pretty basic murder mystery, which aside from the Native American elements could describe thousands of movies. So what drew Morris to Hillerman's novel? When he was asked this question by an interviewer, Morris replied, "I did this for the same reason that everybody does everything in Hollywood: vanity and greed." Morris had had no small amount of difficulty in making his previous films — it supposedly took over two years for him to round up all of the relevant interview subjects to appear in The Thin Blue Line, for example — and no doubt an easy money project looked mighty appealing to him after that.

Trouble is, nobody involved with the film seems to be trying very hard, least of all the director. Morris, who has created some of the most visually arresting documentaries ever made, shows little facility at shooting a fiction film. The Dark Wind is flat and affectless, not in a rigorous way like a Robert Bresson film, but in a way that feels lazy and slapdash. The result is a movie with no style, no momentum, and above all no suspense. Strange, that the director who had turned a real-life case into an honest-to-goodness suspense documentary with The Thin Blue Line can't do the same with a fictional murder mystery.

The listlessness extends to the film's performances. At the time, Lou Diamond Phillips was at the tale end of his brief flirtation with Hollywood leading man status, and he gives such a recessive and uncharismatic performance in The Dark Wind it's easy to see why he didn't become a big star. Most of the supporting performances are forgettable, ranging from mediocre, like Fred Ward as the Lieutenant in charge of Chee, to the downright awful, notably Guy Boyd as sleazy federal agent Johnson. The one exception is the ever-watchable Gary Farmer, who plays his role with a casual charm that's sorely missing from the proceedings.

Of course, some of the blame for the film's failure should be laid at the feet of executive producer Robert Redford. Supposedly Morris had such a difficult time working with Redford that he left the project before it was completed. Some of the film's flaws can probably be chalked up to Redford's involvement, such as its ambling pacing. Other problems were mostly likely an attempt on Redford's part to salvage the project. I hope for Morris' sake that the awful voiceover was Redford's idea.

Yet I'm afraid the lion's share of blame must be given to Morris, who was simply never a good fit for the material. There are occasional touches that feel of a piece with the rest of his work — for example, a former carny who seems to be there for local color purposes until the Law of Economy of Characters kicks in. Mostly though, The Dark Wind comes off as a for-hire job, not unlike Morris' commercials for Miller High Life, but with less of a personal stamp. As Frank Zappa once said, Morris was "only in it for the money," and after a while even that ceased to be enough.

Fortunately, Morris soon made a return to the documentaries that have always been his forte. The next year, he collaborated with none other than Stephen Hawking on the film version of A Brief History of Time. This kicked off a fruitful period for Morris, in which he made his celebrated documentaries Fast, Cheap and out of Control (1997), Mr. Death (1999), and the Oscar-winning The Fog of War. His latest film, Standard Operating Procedure, premiered to Morris' usual enthusiastic reviews at this year's Berlinale.

"The Pervert's Guide to the Cinema" in The Believer

Phil Nugent — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Slavoj Zizek may not exactly be overexposed in movies, but he's come closer to it than any other Slovenian film theorist, Lacanian philosopher, and sometime presidential candidate I can think of. (The Guardian once called him "the Elvis of philosophy", ignoring Elvis's famous statement that he thought that Lacan was "about as funny as a turd in a punchbowl.") A couple of fall festival seasons back, the bearded, bearish Zizek could be seen pontificating about such subjects as Hitchcock and David Lynch, The Exorcist and The Matrix, in Sophie Fiennes's two-and-a-half-hour The Pervert's Guide to the Cinema, which was at least the third film documentary built around his gruff-accented rumblings, and which was widely acclaimed as his definitive star turn. The movie has yet to be distributed here in theaters or on DVD, but you can watch a fifty-minute chunk of it on a DVD that comes with "The 2008 Film Issue" of The Believer. In a brief accompanying tribute, Jason McBride describes Zizek's approach in this film essay as "dialectical materialism for the multiplex." I don't know what that means, but it sure is catchy.

Earlier film directors (including Alfonso Cuaron, who included Zizek among the list of all-star bigbrains who appeared in The Possibility of Hope, the documentary short that was included as a bonus on the Children of Men DVD, which also included a Zizek commentary track) have been content to stick a camera in front of Zizek and watch him spout. Finnes, trying to supply some cinematic fireworks to match the stream of words pouring out of her star, provides him with settings drawn from the film clips that are intercut with his monologue; we see him sitting in a chair in Norman Bates's basement, sitting across from Laurence Fishburne's Morpheus and demanding, "I vant a third pill!", steering the boat taking Tippi Hedren to Rod Taylor's island home in The Birds (the title of which Zizek pronounces as "The Burks"), and in Dorothy Vallens's apartment in Blue Velvet, passively observing her mating ritual with Frank Booth. (Disappointingly, he and Frank don't pass the inhaler back and forth.) At first it seems like a cute gimmick, but it begins to feel like the logical next step in Zizek's approach. He loves movies, but he also has mixed feelings about their hold on them, the way they invade and impose themselves on his dream life. Spinning theories about where these images come from and how they work is his way of fighting back and reclaiming some territory within his own inner space; Fiennes makes it possible for him to escape the lecture room and take the fight to his subject's home turf. In addition to the DVD (and the already-notorious Werner Herzog-Errol Morris conversation), there are a few other things in the magazine that aim to get at the movies' assaults on our dreams, and our conscious minds' efforts to stand their ground, that might do Zizek proud. Notable among them are the tribute to the late Leonard Schrader's vast collection of lobby cards,, and Devin McKinney's persuasive argument, which bows to neither purists nor James Stewart partisans, that Henry Fonda should have played Scottie in Vertigo.

Gravedigging with Werner Herzog and Errol Morris

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 18:30:00 GMT

The 2008 Film Issue of The Believer features the transcript of a conversation between filmmakers Werner Herzog and Errol Morris, which took place at Brandeis University last fall. As you know if you've seen Les Blank's short film Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, Herzog played a significant role in getting Morris's career started by betting the budding documentarian that he would indeed consume his footwear if Morris ever completed his first film Gates of Heaven. Herzog survived the meal and their friendship survived the bet.

Even before the shoe-eating incident, Herzog and Morris got up to some odd adventures together. "When Werner and I first met each other, we took a trip to visit this serial killer [Edmund Emil Kemper III] in prison in Northern California," says Morris. If you're not familiar with Kemper's resume, suffice it to say he got started torturing animals and killing his grandparents, moved on to murdering female hitchhikers, and ended his storied career by bludgeoning his mother to death with a hammer, using her head for a dartboard and raping her headless corpse. "Kemper was, in a way, a very sensitive person," says Herzog. "When you looked at his hands, like the hands of a violin player, in a way. I remember he looked like an elephant with a Mozart soul."

Herzog and Morris later had a falling out over another serial killer, the notorious Ed Gein. As Herzog explains, "Errol wanted to know more about the grave robberies, because Ed Gein had not only murdered people. He also excavated freshly buried corpses at the cemetery. And I do remember: he dug up graves in a pretty perfect circle. And in the very center of this circle was the grave of his mother. And Errol kept wondering, did he excavate his mother and use her flesh and skin for some sculptures in things at his home?... So the only way to find out is, I proposed, let's go to Plainfield, grab a shovel, and dig at night."

It turns out that Morris had some qualms about this plan; you can read the rest of this fascinating story here.

Doc Around The Clock

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Michael Moore has to stretch pretty far to surprise people these days, but he pulled it off after the Oscars last week when he announced his intention of forming a new distribution consortium with the stated aim of getting more documentary films into more theatres. Speaking at an event sponsored by the International Documentary Association, Moore pushed the idea of moving away from a model where one documentary tends to dominate the market, and noted that the only way his plan would be appealing to studios and movie theatres is if he is "going to go and ask, not for charity, but to show them a way where they can make more money than what they are making on that 15th screen or on that shitty night of the week when nobody's in there". The plan also involves creating a cultural shift with filmgoers towards what he calls "Doc Night in America".

Meanwhile, Errol Morris, one of the few documentarians along with Moore who doesn't have much trouble securing distributions for his films, has been working on Standard Operating Procedure, his new film about the abuses at Abu Ghraib, and after its premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival, he sat down with Germany's Der Spiegel for a lengthy interview about how and why he made it. Although he admits that "there's a lot of people in the administration I'd like to see indicted", he notes that the movie isn't about them but rather what the incidents at the notorious Iraqi prison tell us about ourselves. He also talks about the difficult, sometime days-long interviews with his subjects (he managed to secure interviews with almost all the participants in the abuses, including Lynndie England and Charles Graner), and his views on the nature of the documentary: "I think there's this crazy idea, which is simply wrong, that you can only talk about the real world in one way, that journalism has to be conducted according to a certain set of styles," he says. "There's only one style here, and that is the pursuit of truth, the underlying reality of what happened, and anything which is in service of that is fair game."

Scandal, Awards at Berlinale

Paul Clark — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 15:00:00 GMT

The jury prizes for the recently-concluded Berlin Film Festival have been announced, and this year's Golden Bear Winner is unpopular, to say the least. The jury's choice for best film, José Padilha's Tropa de Elite (Elite Squad), deemed by critic Dennis Lim "a violent, cop's-eye view of Rio's favela drug wars that registers more as glorification of the fighting than as critique," has become the center of a wave of controversy. The film is the fiction debut of Bus 174 director Padilha, and much of the controversy has stemmed not from the film itself, but from its being awarded the top prize over more popular titles such as Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky and P.T. Anderson's There Will Be Blood. Filmbrain has even gone so far as to suggest that the Golden Bear was bought by the film's distributor, Harvey Weinstein. It's true Elite was one of the worst-reviewed films in competition — many critics have called it "fascist," making it a strange film for a Costa-Gavras-led jury to get behind, no? However, the idea that it was paid for seems a little far-fetched to me. But what do I know? I wasn't there.

Other prizes from the Berlinale:
Jury Grand Prix- Standard Operating Procedure (Errol Morris)
Silver Bear, Best Director- Paul Thomas Anderson, There Will Be Blood
Silver Bear, Best Actress- Sally Hawkins, Happy-Go-Lucky
Silver Bear, Best Actor- Reza Najie, The Song of Sparrows
Silver Bear, Best Script- In Love We Trust (Wang Xiaoshuai)
Alfred Bauer Prize- Lake Tahoe (Fernando Eimbcke)
10th Panorama Audience Award- Lemon Tree (Eran Riklis)

Source: GreenCine Daily.

Take Five: The Betrayal of the Body

Peter Smith — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 21:00:00 GMT

Julian Schnabel, who's proved to be a much more interesting film director than he was a painter, has caused quite a stir in France with his latest, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Opening in limited release this weekend, the film deals with a French fashion magazine editor who suffers a paralyzing stroke and is forced to communicate with the world — telling tales not only of his internal imprisonment, but also of his rich interior life — the only way he can: by blinking out the words with his left eyelid, the sole part of his body he can still control. The idea that the human body is as much a prison as a vehicle is as old as Shakespeare, and it's likewise yielded a number of fine films, particularly from directors who've had their own bodies betray them, or those of their loved ones. When the mind is still sharp but seems to exist solely as a captive of a body, without which it cannot survive, but to which it is frustratingly bound, some outstanding, if terribly depressing, dramatic situations can ensue. Here are five films dealing with the ways in which the mind can become a prisoner of the body — and the ways in which those minds seek escape.

JOHNNY GOT HIS GUN (1971)

For many decades, a number of prominent directors had sought permission to make a film of Dalton Trumbo's stunningly powerful anti-war novel. Trumbo (a longtime victim of Hollywood's anti-Communist blacklist) always refused, saying that only he could properly translate the novel — which deals with a WWI veteran who loses his arms, legs and face to an exploding shell and desperately seeks a way to communicate his rage at the futility of the loss to the world — to film. When he finally did, it was an odd effort, to say the least, but it featured many of the book's most essential themes and powerful scenes. (A remake, based on a recent stage adaptation, is currently in the works.)

THE FLY (1986)

David Cronenberg's films have a number of common threads, but if one attitude hovers above them all, it's the simultaneous attraction to and revulsion at the human body — its vitality as well as its decay. Although the theme is present in almost all of his movies, nowhere is it more purely realized than in his remake of The Fly, where scientist Seth Brundle's slow disintegration and dehumanization as he transforms into a monster is both subtly and explicitly compared to the progress of those suffering from deadly diseases like cancer and AIDS. In a number of the movie's most telling and memorable pieces of dialogue, the director's fascination with the body's potential and the horror at its easy disintegration are obvious.

MY LEFT FOOT (1989)

Christy Brown's childhood could have — should have — been a brief, sad nightmare. Born with crippling cerebral palsy, he was barely expected to live, let alone thrive. But his fiercely determined mother refused to believe that there wasn't a lively mind inside that shattered body, and kept at the young Irishman to grow and to think, until he eventually learned to read, to write, and to paint with the left foot of the title, his only working limb. Borne to lofty heights largely on the strength of a terrific performance as Brown by Daniel Day-Lewis, My Left Foot was the directorial debut of Jim Sheridan, who went on to make other well-received, Oscar-nominated films such as The Field, In the Name of the Father and In America before somehow landing at the helm of 50 Cent's vanity project, Get Rich or Die Tryin', after which he presumably died of shame.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME (1991)

Master documentarian Errol Morris wisely assumed that audiences wouldn't be entirely enthralled by a straightforward discussion of the heavy-duty astrophysics contained in scientist Stephen Hawking's book of the same name. So he wisely chose to focus as much on Hawking himself as on his theories; Hawking is an endlessly compelling figure; despite having developed Lou Gehrig's disease in his early twenties, which has confined him to a wheelchair and made him incapable of speech or all but the tiniest movements, he is widely considered a scientific genius on the level of Albert Einstein. Morris presents some of Hawking's theories and, like the book that gives his film its name, attempts to make them accessible to the causal viewer, but likewise presents the enigma of the man who made them and asks us to consider the power of a the mind that occupies that nearly useless body.

FRIDA (2002)

Julie Taymor's biopic of the notorious Mexican painter Frida Kahlo is plagued with problems — spotty performances, a suspect script and more hoary clichés than you can shake a paintbrush at. But it's visually inventive, well-framed, and as good a cinematic look as we're likely ever going to get at the singular Ms. Kahlo. The brilliant, temperamental Frida was involved, at a young age, in a horrific accident that left her scarred for life and in constant pain, and while she became a celebrity, a heroine, and a towering figure in the arts of her homeland, she was never able to escape the wounds, both physical and psychic, left to her by the trauma.

— Leonard Pierce