The Screengrab : filth and wisdom

In Other Blogs: Hangover Edition

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 14:30:00 GMT

You’ll have to excuse my disheveled appearance and fogginess of mind this morning, but the Red Sox made me drink a lot last night. Was that an amazing comeback or what? Am I right? Huh? Oh, right. Movies. Let us segue through this Beyond the Multiplex post on Madonna’s directorial debut, Filth and Wisdom, as Andrew O’Hehir ponders his love for Madge and the obstacle in his way. “Does A-Rod possess the spiritual and/or aesthetic wealth that Madonna and I share? I say nay. He may not, for instance, recognize the precise odor of hipster familiarity surrounding Filth and Wisdom, which seems like a movie Jim Jarmusch might have started in 1991 and then abandoned because it wasn't going anywhere. Filth and Wisdom isn't laughable or embarrassing; instead it's rather sweet and 100 percent recycled, which might not be a bad way of describing its creator at this vulnerable time in her personal and professional life. It's a little bit Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, a little bit John Waters, a little bit Darren Aronofsky, a little bit (God help us) Desperately Seeking Susan. It's dumb. I sort of liked it.”

At his new blog Hollywood & Fine, Marshall Fine disagrees. “The phrase ‘Madonna’s directorial debut’ does not so much trip off the tongue as sound like a punchline, which is appropriate in this case. Based on Filth and Wisdom, she hasn’t lost her knack for creating unwatchable cinema. Filth and Wisdom is a silly stew of phony profundity that will have you checking your watch almost as soon as the movie starts. Like Hiro on Heroes, Madonna has mastered the ability to make time stop – or, at least, crawl. Are we there yet? No, sorry, better settle in for a long slog.”

Did you know that the Screengrab’s own Phil Nugent has a blog called, oddly enough, The Phil Nugent Experience? Not only is it the finest source of hilarious and insightful political coverage in all the Bronx, but occasionally Phil even writes about movies. What can I say – the man loves his job so much, he does it in his spare time. Here Phil defends the unloved Intolerable Cruelty. “For me, the Coens' fun machines tend to turn cold without a strong, magnetic performance at their center. The warming star power at this movie's core is generated by Clooney, who parodies his own image by magnifying his golden boy attractiveness to such a degree that the gap between it and the Miles's myopic, self-enthralled fatuousness becomes an amazing thing to behold. (It's much more entertaining than seeing him send up his image in Burn After Reading by having the other characters react to him as if he were the irresistable George Clooney even though he seems to be imitating Warren Oates.)”

It’s never too early for Halloween at Arbogast on Film, now in the midst of a month-long 31 Screams celebration. Today he looks at the original 1958 version of The Fly. “I'm not sure what to make of the flyman. As most of the dead scientist's intelligence was retained within his manfly brain, there obviously isn't much left for that of the flyman... who screams pitiably as he meets his doom. His voice is high-pitched - just within the range of human hearing - but his pleas are unmistakeable. ‘Help me,’ he cries out. ‘Help me.’ And as the spider draws closer, it sounds as if he is yelling ‘Go away... go away’ to the spider in childish desperation. And that's just it-- this scene horrifies, it cuts to the bone because it's like watching a child being murdered right in front of you.”

And finally, with W. arriving in theaters today, our good friends at Spill have reimagined Oliver Stone’s film as a Sarah Palin biopic:

Find more videos like this on The Spill.com Movie Community<

Insufficiently Forgotten Films: "Swept Away" (2002)

Phil Nugent — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Here at the Screengrab, we have an irregularly scheduled feature known as "Forgotten Films", which we use to discuss beloved, or at least interesting, movies that seem to have fallen through the cracks of moviegoers' memories. But what about those films that, while deservedly forgotten, will never be forgotten enough for some people's liking? Films that, in addition to sucking like a Hoover and a half, can only serve to represent the sore spots that their makers would much, much rather they'd never booked into theaters and charged admission? To inaugurate what we suspect will be an even more irregularly scheduled feature devoted to these very special films, today we exhume Guy Ritchie's Swept Away.

THE MOVIE: The British writer-director's third feature is a remake of Lina Wertmuller's 1974 cocktail-chatter classic (whose full title is Swept Away...by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August), with Ritchie's wife, Madonna, and the Italian actor Adriano Giannini taking over the roles originated by the luscious comedienne Mariangelo Melato and Wertmuller's favorite leading man (and Adriano's father) Giancarlo Giannini. Madonna is an obnoxious, motor-mouthed rich bitch--excuse the sexist characteriation, but in both the original film and the remake, that's very much the idea--whose rich tycoon husband (Bruce Greenwood) has plunked her down on a yacht touring the Mediterranean. The ship's fisherman (Giannini) takes exception to her non-stop prattling, her hateful attitude, and her politics, and when, through an outrageously contrived quirk of circumstance, they wind up stranded together on a deserted island, where her money counts for nothing and she is dependent on his manly survivor skills, he takes full advantage of the tables having been turned. Their new relationship begins with him whacking her repeatedly in the face and quickly blossoms into a heated love affair. But then they are rescued, and the movie dares to ask: can the crazed-rutting-weasels romance between a rich dame and a working-class stud survive the artificial pressures that society will thrown up against it?

WHY IT DESERVES TO BE FORGOTTEN: Swept Away would have looked pretty strange even to a visitor from Mars, but to understand it at all, one has to have seen Lina Wertmuller's version, so that at least one can understand how the elements worked in the original conception and how they've been watered-down in this "reimagining." This is not meant as an actual endorsement of Wertmuller's movie, which is shrill and simplistic and rather badly made. But she enjoyed a brief, intense vogue in the mid-70s because she was prepared to play with fire onscreen, politically, emotionally, and sexually. Even though it was made by a woman, the original Swept Away... is a rape fantasy, with a veneer of political commentary. Giancarlo Giannini's character, a self-declared Communist who more than kept up with his capitalist debating partner in the gasbag department, didn't just belt Melato around, he commenced their "affair" by taking her by force. She in turn, was so grateful to him for using his superior physical strength to make a real woman of her that when he woke up, he found that she had gathered wild flowers and used them to decorate his genitals. Wertmuller was able to sell this to a chic, intellectual film audience by first establishing that Melato's character represented the bourgeoisie and Giannini was the embodiment of the poor laboring class on whose throat she had her foot. So their time on the island can be "interpreted" not as a man enslaving a woman, who discovers that she loves being submissive to him, but as the working class punishing the moneyed classes, who are forced to admit that they had it coming to them. (In one interview, Wertmuller went so far as to respond to the charge of misogyny by insisting that Melato's character was "really a man." I know all there is to know about the crying game, and this is ridiculous.) As to the question of whether the affair can survive outside the island, Wertmuller answered that one with a resounding "No." Once the two are rescued and return to Italy, the spell is broken and the woman cannot resist returning to the life of privilege that excludes the honest working stiff with a copy of Das Kapital in his back pocket and a necklace of posies on his prick.

As you might expect, Ritchie was a lot less interested in seeing how long he could keep his audience glued to their seats with an action-packed debate about the role of the masses in capitalist society. And in 2002, the pro-Communist blather would have had people staring blankly at the screen, wondering if they had a brain tumor that had just suddenly kicked in. (Even Wertmuller, with her mean joker's temperament, wasn't sure how to treat this stuff in the original, appearing sympathetic to the Giannini character's views but treating the man himself as a coarse boob.) There is a token effort made to engage the issues of class warfare, but it's kept pretty much on the level of Madonna mewling, "If you ask me, [capitalism]'s a lot better than Communism." One side effect of this is that the scenes in which the bitch takes evident pleasure in humiliating and insulting the thug, which in the original were meant to be sexually charged demonstrations of Marx in action, look more like outtakes from Body of Evidence, the S & M courtroom thriller in which Madonna's black widow-dominatrix character tried to fuck Frank Langella to death and applied hot wax to the cadaverous chest of Willem Dafoe. Although Ritchie's name is on the picture, Madonna's influence seems strong, and as with everything else she's ever done, the message seems to be that the best way to address anything--the class system, gender warfare, surviving on a desert island--is to dig a hole in the sand and settle in for a good screw. Neither she nor Giannini gives any evidence here of being able to act a lick--although she's uncharacteristically convincing when she gets to express gratitude to him for dominating her, a T.M.I. moment that just makes the viewer uncomfortable. (Let's not even get started on the fact that her character, "Amber Leighton", is reportedly named for Ritchie's mum.) Much of the film just looks a lot like every music video in which Madonna has justified her love to some surly-looking, unshaven hunk with tight abs and no personality. The relationship is all about sex now, and it's less nasty than in the original--their first sex in the remake is consensual--but that only serves to make it all seem that much more insipid. So does the ending, where the big factor keeping the two of them apart in civilization is her husband, not her feelings.

WHY IT COULDN'T POSSIBLY EVER BE FORGOTTEN ENOUGH: In case you haven't heard--hey, seriously, presidential election, Wall Street bailout, season finale of Project Runway, there's been a lot going on--Madonna and Guy Ritchie's divorce plans hit the wires yesterday. They were married for eight years, during which time her career remained basically stable and his sank from the weight of four failed follow-ups to his 1999 debut feature Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels. (I am, perhaps a bit presumptively, including his latest, RocknRolla, which premiered last week to muffled cries of, "Jesus, this fast-cutting British gangster shit again!?" Madonna's directorial debut, which bears the disarmingly on-the-nose title Filth and Wisdom, joins it in theaters this weekend.) Swept Away, their major collaboration not counting their son Rocco, is the most obvious cultural by-product of their union, and for vultures looking for clues as to the nature of their marriage and the reasons for its failure to endure, it is a gold mine. It's tempting to guess from what's on the screen that Madonna was the big instigator in the decision to remake a "controversial", once-hot property that she probably remembered reading about when she was a youngster already dreaming about making scandalous entertainment for the big city sophisticates, and that Ritchie got dragged along for the ride without ever finding a way to tie it in with what he's good at as a filmmaker: he's a one-trick pony, but he's not an untalented pony. Madonna, on the other hand, is a self-styled multimedia player whose instincts regarding movies haven't played her right since Desperately Seeking Susan. If what she really did want in a husband was a powerful dominating figure who could go toe to toe with her as an equal, it was an early sign that the marriage was doomed as soon as Ritchie signed on to direct her in a project that he never would have picked out for himself and whose likely failure was compounded by the fact that she didn't really understand it herself. On the other hand, she provides the movie's liveliest moment when, backed up by an on-screen mambo orchestra, she dances in the sand while wearing a canary-yellow dress and lip-synching to Rosemary Clooney singing, "Come on-a My House." It's a "fantasy" sequence, which here as in 99 out of a hundred other similar cases is code for, "This doesn't fit but we just wanted to do it." It doesn't belong in the movie it's a part of, but then, that movie has no other reason for existing.

Screengrab Fall Preview: Andrew Osborne's Picks

Andrew Osborne — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 05:05:00 GMT

So, last week, Scott Von Doviak picked a trifecta of movies he’s most looking forward to (and three he’s most definitely avoiding) in the Fall/Winter 2008 Oscar Bait/Xmas Blockbuster Season, and challenged his fellow Screengrabbers to do the same.

Paul Clark was the next to weigh in, and now I’ll give it a shot...although I have to admit, with so many interesting and terrible-looking movies on deck, it’s hard to pick just three of each, so I’ll automatically disqualify Burn After Reading and Synechdoche, New York from my Top 3 and Bedtime Stories and The Women from my Bottom 3, since they’ve already been cited on the previous two Fall Preview lists.

Which brings us to MY lists...

3 UP

1. Frost/Nixon – I’m a big fan of what I call “Guys In Suits” movies, featuring the behind-the-scenes machinations of top-level professionals tackling complex problems and/or competing in high-stakes political/diplomatic jousting matches. The Queen was a fine example of the genre (even though Helen Mirren’s Elizabeth II wore pantsuits and was certainly no guy), and this tale of the 1977 cat-and-mouse tango between Tricky Dick and the TV interviewer attempting to coax a smoking gun mea culpa from the disgraced ex-president shares a screenwriter (Peter Morgan) and co-star (the always great Michael Sheen) with that earlier film, while adding a Broadway-honed performance by Frank Langella...plus I heard the stage version was outstanding.

2. W. – So, originally, I had Harry Potter & The Half-Blood Prince here, until Noel Murray reminded me (in the comments section below) that the very same Scott Von Doviak who started this whole "Fall Preview" mania recently posted about Warner Bros.'s decision to bump the next Hogwarts episode to summer '09. And that self-same Von Doviak, in the Wild Card section of his Fall Preview, said of W., "This can’t possibly be any good, can it?" Well, sir, my answer to that question would have to be...maybe? I mean, sure Ollie more or less accused LBJ of murder in JFK...but the historical whodunnit was still compelling and fascinating (as was Nixon) despite (and maybe because of) all the director's usual batshit crazy excess. George W. Bush is a far less tortured protagonist than Richard Milhouse or Jim Garrison, but his unlikely rise to power, his rogue's gallery of blueblood, secret society and redneck cronies and the duality of his goofy antics vs. his creepy daddy issues, addictions, arrogance and ruthless ambition (combined with Stone's usual kitchen-sink sturm und drang) make this one a must-see, thumbs up, down, or sideways.

3. Zack and Miri Make A Porno – For my third pick, it was a toss-up between Doubt, another Guys In Suits (or, in this case, Nuns In Habits) movie adapted from a Broadway play, Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist, which has a charming trailer and Michael Cera (who’s developed into a pretty good indicator of quality in his short career) or this goofy new Kevin Smith joint, which could very well be terrible. But I’m not sick of star Seth Rogen yet and I have many pleasant memories of past visits to Mr. Smith's View Askewniverse, so I gotta give the nod to Silent Bob.

3 DOWN

1. Marley & Me – The Chariots of Fire theme plays while a cute widdle dog runs along a beach pursued by the ever-more-icky Jennifer Aniston and a newly soulful, poignant, life-affirming, ix-nay on the uicide-say Owen Wilson. The tag line is “Heel the Love.” Based on the coming attractions trailer, let’s just say I am very much not the target demographic for this movie and we'll leave it at that.

2. Filth and Wisdom – Sure, Madonna’s an easy target when it comes to cinematic misadventures, and maybe it’s banal and predictable to assume her directorial debut about quirky London flatmates with big dreams will be as pretentious and self-important as its title...but my friend Heidi caught a screening at the Provincetown Film Festival and said it sucked, and I'm more than willing to believe her.

3. Saw V – Really? Even still yet more torture porn? Dude, the shit was old when Troma released Bloodsucking Freaks back in 1976. Enough already.

WILD CARD

The Road - I'm fascinated, but jeez, this post-apocalyptic road movie sounds like the entertainment equivalent of my father's recent painful nose surgery or, y'know, Dancer in the Dark.

Filthy Madonna

Leonard Pierce — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 15:45:00 GMT

After time served as pop star, actress, model, cheesecake auteur, teenage pregnancy debate flashpoint, capitalist, professional celebrity, marketing guru, dancer, trophy wife, bogus accent advocate, Kaballist, children's book author, and for all we know astronaut, Madonna can finally add "feature film director" to her ridiculously rambunctious résumé.

The Material Girl is in Berlin this week for their International Film Festival, screening her first movie behind the camera: the light romantic comedy Filth and Wisdom. It's attracting a decent audience at festival screenings — albeit largely for its star-studded soundtrack, featuring performers like Ludacris, Britney Spears, and Gogol Bordello (whose Eugene Hütz narrates the film and plays one of the lead roles), as well as Madonna herself. Regardless of how well the film itself is received, it'll be an improvement on the last visit to BIFF — according to the Hollywood Reporter, she was virtually in hiding the entire time, avoiding the press attention that came from being half of the world's most reviled couple with then-husband Sean Penn.

Uh. . . so how is the movie, anyway? Going by the Reporter's review, it's "all over the place but oddly appealing", not a bad description of the director's entire life as a whole, now that we think about it. . . but the fact that the reviewer uses the word "dire" twice in one review doesn't bode well for Filth and Wisdom's future as anything but a novelty.