The Screengrab : francis ford coppola

Th-Th-That's All Folks! The Best & Worst Endings Of All Time! (Part Eight)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 28 May 2009 23:30:00 GMT

JAWS (1975)

Steven Spielberg comes in for his knocks on the "worst endings" part of this list: given all the resources in the film world, the poor guy just has trouble knowing when to stop. That makes it especially worth mentioning that, when he was young and desperate and trying to piece his first blockbuster together with spit and Scotch tape, he had the instincts and confidence and chops to tee up a daring high shot and make a hole in one. Peter Benchley, the author of the novel on which the movie was based, liked to recall the conversation he had in which he explained to Spielberg that the scene was physically impossible, and Spielberg replied that it didn't matter, saying that if he had the audience with him for the first couple of hours, he could sell them anything he wanted in the last five minutes, and as Benchley would admit, the kid was right. (PN)

MELVIN AND HOWARD (1976)

Jonathan Demme's version of the meeting of Howard Hughes (Jason Robards) and Melvin Dummar (Paul Le Mat) begins with a beauty of a long opening sequence, with Melvin giving the broken-down derelict Hughes a ride in his truck after picking him up in the desert in the middle of the night and gradually melting away his surly, defensive paranoia with the warmth of his cornball, middle American sincerity. The movie ends with a lovely little dream that finds the two of them back in the truck, with Howard taking the wheel from the exhausted, put-upon Melvin. Dennis Potter must have seen it and liked it, because he wrote a variation of it into the ending of his own 1985 film Dreamchild, with Lewis Carroll and the old woman who'd once served as the basis for his Alice standing in for Howard and Melvin, and it killed there, too. (PN)

APOCALYPSE NOW (1979)

When I first saw Apocalypse Now on VHS in the late '80s, the finale left me breathless. Willard terminated Kurtz with extreme prejudice, took Lance down to the boat, and then, after they crept away down the river, the promised airstrike fulfilled Kurtz's final instruction and exterminated them all. In the above clip, over the footage that floored the teenaged me, Francis Ford Coppola himself explains why this was not his intended interpretation. But what does he know? Coppola, who would later go on to direct such gems as The Godfather Part III and the Robin Williams vehicle Jack, thought that what the film really needed was another hour dealing with French imperialism in Southeast Asia. Although Saturday Night Live cut to the quick in their satire of the ending (Martin Sheen played a man hired by the studios to travel up river and shut down the production, and Coppola, out of ideas, blew everything up), the explosion of the set and murder of the people who worshipped Kurtz like a god is a better fit for the themes: the destructive clash of Western imperialism and other cultures, Willard becoming as hollow as Kurtz, and the fucking horror, the horror. The Coppola-approved ending is below (some of it has been translated to another language, but the visuals are what's important at the end), and while the juxtaposition of Willard's face and the statue is beautiful, luster is lacking compared to the deep reds, yellows, and whites of the airstrike. (HC)

THE BIRDS(1963)

End of the world. You expect it to come from someplace obvious, like a nuclear blast or a plague or a monster from the deep. But instead nature has turned on us, and nothing's ever going to be the same. The clip above discusses the ending that Evan Hunter intended in the script. His version had more gore, but the visual implication in the actual ending of the movie is much more unsettling, the birds covering every surface, the horrible sound of their cooing and calls, the sky dark and ominous as the car slowly starts to twist along the road. End of the world. (HC)

And, of course, we certainly couldn't forget...

GONE WITH THE WIND (1939)

CASABLANCA (1942)

SUNSET BOULEVARD (1950)

...but if we DID forget any of your favorites, then hopefully these two guys can pick up the slack...

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Nine, Ten, Eleven & Twelve

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Hayden Childs

Cannes Roundup: Day Two

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 15 May 2009 17:00:00 GMT

Francis Coppola takes another shot at a comeback with Tetro, but the response at Cannes was mixed at best. “The debut of a new Coppola stirred hope and foreboding; and both were warranted,” writes Richard Corliss in Time. “The great news is that this unquestioned giant of American cinema, who sired the Godfather films, The Conversation and Apocalypse Now in the '70s, is still making independent-minded movies three decades later. The bad news is that he made this one.” Eric Kohn of Indiewire chimes in: “Neither complete misfire nor triumphant return to form, Francis Ford Coppola’s Tetro works as a competent family drama right up until the messy final act.”

Jane Campion finds a champion for her comeback effort Bright Star in Allan Hunter at Screen Daily: “Bright Star deftly avoids the stilted, starchy quality often found in lesser period dramas. Characters appear comfortable in their clothes and settings, the dialogue flows easily from their lips and there is a quiet, everyday intimacy to the way events unfold.” The Telegraph is high on Fish Tank. “Shot with a terrific eye for pointillist detail and panorama, Arnold opens up the council estates of Essex, revealing the myriad ways in which they cramp but never entirely extinguish the spirit and imaginations of the people who live there.”

If your tastes run toward Korean vampire movies…well, the word is not so good on Park Chan-wook’s Thirst. “New settings and characters are introduced so willy-nilly, and consecutive scenes have so little formal or tonal consistency, that you’re generally floundering even as you’re gasping,” writes Mike D’Angelo in the AV Club. Variety calls it “an overlong stygian comedy that badly needs a transfusion of genuine inspiration.”

Screengrab Presents THE TOP TEN BEST MOVIES EVER!!!! (Part Ten)

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 15 May 2009 01:00:00 GMT

Scott Von Doviak's Top Ten Best Movies Ever!

1. THE GODFATHER PART II (1974)
2. SUNSET BLVD. (1950)
3. THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE (1948)
4. MCCABE AND MRS. MILLER (1971)
5. 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968)
6. TAXI DRIVER (1976)
7. JAWS (1975)

If mechanical shark effects and John Williams' relentless theme music were all it had going for it, Jaws still might have become the highest grossing movie in history at the time of its release. And it likely would still be lumped in with Star Wars as a progenitor of the modern summer blockbuster phenomenon. In truth, Jaws has always been much more than a mere creature feature or special effects extravaganza. From the moment the Universal Pictures logo appears onscreen, accompanied by otherworldly sonar pinging noises signaling unfathomable depths of mystery, to the mournful dinosaur roar that accompanies the shark's final descent back to the murky deep, we are firmly in the grip of a master filmmaker. And while Steven Spielberg's gifts would eventually sour, with sure-handed storytelling giving way to transparent manipulation, here his every instinct is sound and his attention to detail astonishing. His tonal control is absolute; the darkest of horrors coexist with lusty seafaring adventure and character-based comedy, and it is all of a piece. The biggest laughs lead into the most frightening shocks, and vice-versa. It's a balancing act enhanced by the finest score of John Williams' career. His dum-dum-dum-dum shark theme is instantly recognizable to anyone on the planet - hell, sharks probably swim around humming it - but it's a remarkably resilient piece of music, speeding up into bursts of nautical derring-do, slowing down to an ominous, guttural portent of doom. The shark itself, when it is finally seen, remains an impressive movie monster. Even if its artificiality is more apparent to today's effects-jaded movie audience, its appearances are still fleeting enough to startle and delight. Set Jaws beside any of the contemporary summer cash leviathans and the hollowness of modern-day Hollywood's vision of action-adventure entertainment is laid bare.

8. PSYCHO (1960)
9. ANNIE HALL (1977)
10. THE WILD BUNCH (1969)

Andrew Osborne's Top Ten Best Movies Ever!

1. STAR WARS (1977)
2. THE GODFATHER (1972)
3. THE GRADUATE (1967)

There are various movies that speak to me very personally -- and this one certainly qualifies, having spent most of my existence as an alienated, overeducated white dude -- but Mike Nichols’ tight, elemental collaboration with the dream team of Buck Henry, Dustin Hoffman, Anne Bancroft, Paul Simon & Art Garfunkle makes my list of Best Movies Ever because, like all the other movies in my Top Ten, it’s both an elemental, near-perfect example of -- and also rises above -- its genre to become a once-in-a-lifetime cinematic milestone. Plus, as a friend of my parents once said, it features the best use of a crucifix ever.

4. THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939)

When a movie penetrates as deeply into the culture and the collective unconscious as this adaptation of Frank L. Baum’s first Oz novel, the filmmakers must have done something right. The fact that it was considered a commercial disappointment upon its initial release but nevertheless went on to become a beloved American classic also says something. But the main reason I include it here is because it’s a fully realized work of art that fully utilizes all the possibilities of cinema, from the grim black and white cinematography that suddenly explodes into color and the infectious soundtrack to the special effects that brought flying monkeys to a grateful world. It’s easy to take The Wizard of Oz for granted in this cynical, ironic, post-modern world, but honestly: who in cinema history kicks more freakin’ ass than Margaret Hamilton as Miss Elmira Gulch and the mean green you-know-who? Answer: nobody.

5. APOCALYPSE NOW (1979)

As crazy-ass Dennis Hopper’s unhinged Kurtz acolyte would say, “I wish I had words...” Here are three -- epic, unsettling, iconic -- but they don’t even begin to capture the essence of the surrealistic war opera Francis Ford Coppola dragged into existence at the (temporary) cost of his own sanity four years after the Fall of Saigon. It’s difficult to separate the finished product from the legend of its infamously agonizing production history (see: Hearts of Darkness), and the generally terrible footage unearthed for the Redux version released in 2001 clearly demonstrates the razor thin line between genius and drek (and, seriously, what kind of zap did U.S.C. put on the heads of Coppola, Spielberg and Lucas that none of them can ever just leave friggin’ well enough alone)? Still, whenever people refer to the original 1979 theatrical version of Apocalypse Now as a flawed masterpiece, I always get confused, since the flaws (fat Brando, crazy Hopper, the slow descent into anarchy) are part of what makes it a masterpiece.

6. ANNIE HALL (1977)

7. SUNSET BOULEVARD (1950)

8. SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN (1952)

9. YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN (1974)

Many of the movies in our consensus and individual Top Tens are beautiful downers, primarily concerned with death, violence, heartbreak and/or the inescapable ennui of existence -- and, while it’s true that depressing themes and great films often go together, it’s important to remember that celluloid is also a great delivery system for adrenalin shots of pure joy like Young Frankenstein, a nearly perfect movie with a hilarious script and a dream ensemble that ranks 9th on my list instead of 8th because (“Puttin’ On The Ritz” notwithstanding) the even more nearly perfect Singin’ In The Rain has slightly better song and dance numbers.

10. THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS (2001)

You may have noticed by now that the vast majority of the Best Movies picked for these lists by the Screengrab brain trust were released prior to 1980, which does a great disservice to the Sundance generation of filmmakers like Jim Jarmusch, P.T. Anderson, the Coen Brothers, Spike Lee, Richard Linklater, Quentin Tarantino, etc. Maybe it’s just that films like Down By Law, Boogie Nights, Fargo, Do The Right Thing, Dazed and Confused or Pulp Fiction need to marinate for another decade before we’re ready to start comparing them head-to-head with the likes of Sunset Boulevard and Citizen Kane...but as far as I’m concerned, The Royal Tenenbaums already qualifies as one for the ages. By turns wistful, cynical, romantic, suicidally gloomy and insanely optimistic, Wes Anderson’s richly imagined masterpiece (about a burned-out family of geniuses in a dream-world New York) is everything I could possibly ask for in a movie: career-topping performances from everyone involved, whip-smart writing, gorgeous visuals, fearlessly eccentric style and Gwyneth Paltrow French-kissing a naked chick...top that, Orson!

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

Contributors: Scott Von Doviak, Andrew Osborne

Screengrab Presents THE TOP TEN BEST MOVIES EVER!!!! (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 14 May 2009 21:30:00 GMT

Phil Nugent's Top Ten(-ish) Best Movies Ever! (Part One)

1. Double feature: THE RULES OF THE GAME (1939) & GRANDE ILLUSION (1937)

2. THE EARRINGS OF MADAME DE...(1953)

The balance of visual beauty, depth of sophistication in terms of character psychology, high wit, and unsentimental yet warm humanity that Jean Renoir achieved in his greatest works would earn him the title of World's Greatest Filmmaker if it could be laid on anyone's shoulders without smirking. Max Ophuls' love tragedy is one of the few movies that can be mentioned in the same breath as Renoir's without embarrassing it. By an odd concidence, all these movies are, in varying degrees, about the death of the aristocratic class; all manage to satirize these people without cheap condescension or programmatic rage, and all manage to partake of the seductiveness of opulence without ever slipping into the Merchant-Ivory vice of seeming to have been made by snobs for tourists. We may never get another movie that looks on such people and their way of life with such clear eyes again; it's hard just to believe that these films were made in the same century that saw the birth of reality TV.

3. McCABE & MRS. MILLER (1971)
4. Double feature: THE GODFATHER (1972) & LAST TANGO IN PARIS (1973)

For people who were young when Marlon Brando first burst into movies, it must have really been something getting to watch him grow up. For those of us who were born when Brando was considered washed-up, with his impossible comeback still on the horizon, the older man is the Brando we first got to know--the broken-down, wise old monster of The Godfather and Paul, the middle-aged expatriate loser who might have been a success at something if he hadn't decided to instead be extraordinary. A case can be made that The Godfather, Part II is actually a greater film than its predecessor--I may have been known to make it myself a time or too--but even though Don Vito is present, in the singular and essential form of the young Robert De Niro, Brando is absent, all because he felt the need to throw his weight around (no jokes, please) and demand an exorbitant fee instead of doing a cameo as a favor to the director who'd made him relevant again. It was not entirely uncharacteristic and very petty of him, and they should have paid the son of a bitch whatever he asked for anyway.

5. HIS GIRL FRIDAY (1940)

Speed kills.

6. UMBERTO D. (1952)

Some goddamn way, Vittorio De Sica found a way to make direct contact with the human heart without any spillover into bathos, and he did it again and again. Eager to repeat this feat, and figuring that it would help if they could label it, some folks listed some of the methods the director seemed to favor, as if they were ingredients in a recipe, and called it "Neo-realism". Many people since then have since followed the recipe, with varying degrees of success. Some of them made pretty good movies, but nobody else has done quite what De Sica did.

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

Contributor: Phil Nugent

Screengrab Presents THE TOP TEN BEST MOVIES EVER!!!! (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 14 May 2009 21:00:00 GMT

3. 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968)

The year 2001 has long since come and gone, but the movie named for it seems to exist outside of time. There was nothing like it before and there’s been nothing quite like it since, although Stanley Kubrick’s space odyssey has influenced filmmakers as dissimilar as David Lynch and Paul Thomas Anderson. Ranging from the dawn of man to beyond the infinite, it’s larger than life and should be experienced that way, preferably on 70mm, as I once saw it at the Cinerama Dome in Los Angeles. (A screening at which it seemed self-evident that the intermission coming rather late in the game is timed perfectly for the audience to slip out to the parking lot and get into the proper headspace for the grand finale.) You could fit all of its dialogue on a greeting card, and little of it means anything at all. Kubrick’s epic is all about exploding the structure of narrative film, marrying big, bold imagery to minimalist plotting – it’s about a filmmaker reaching for the stars. Kubrick’s reach may have exceeded his grasp, but he took us on a hell of a ride along the way. (SVD)

To watch 2001 is to marvel at how big Stanley Kubrick’s ideas really were. Most movies, even the best ones, are content to confine themselves to the concerns of man, but the scope of 2001 stands astride human history, observing the beginning before leaping forward to behold the beginning of the end. He did this through bravura filmmaking to be sure, but also an uncanny ability to make his ideas visual rather than spelling them out in dialogue. Long portions of 2001 play without dialogue, and when the human characters speak, they have almost nothing of consequence to say. They go about their business as momentous events play around them, and even after they learn of an important extraterrestrial presence on the moon, they pass the time by prattling on about the sandwiches they’ve been given. Of course the effects are lovely, even today -- a feat that’s all the more impressive for the fact that Kubrick and his technicians had to invent many of them for the movie. But the technical wizardry doesn’t stand alone: rather, it's part of a directorial tour de force that was made with genuine care by one of the most gifted filmmakers ever to pick up a camera. (PC)

2. THE GODFATHER (1972)

There’s no real debate – maybe there hasn’t been for 35 years – about whether or not The Godfather and The Godfather Part II are masterpieces of Hollywood filmmaking. The only real debate is which of the two is superior. Many critics and viewers simply refuse to choose and lump the two together as a single film; it’s a decision I can fully understand and support. Most critics, though, when asked to pick just one, go for the second film, with its epic scope, its ramped-up internecine complexity, and its darker vision of violence and betrayal. When the wind is south-southwest, I agree with them; the two films are of such phenomenal merit that any given day, either one could be considered the greatest movie ever made. But if I had to carve in stone my favorite, it would be the first. It may have not had the engaging complexity of its sequel, and it left its ending far more ambiguous than the blood-soaked tragedy of Part II, but its cast was note-perfect in every single scene, anchored by the monumental presence of Marlon Brando, and its structure was untouchable, serving as a moving textbook of how to craft a great film. It built the towering edifice that its sequel would so brilliantly destroy, and it was one of those rare films that arrived in the world instantly recognizable as a thing of greatness. If Part II shocked the world by surpassing it, it’s because The Godfather was so great it seemed impossible to surpass. (LP)

I can’t recall if I ever posted this story before...but what the heck, I’m outta here soon anyway, so: I once had a girlfriend (now sadly and tragically departed, and way, way too young) who was obsessed with both parts of The Godfather. During our years together, we watched the whole epic dozens of times, and eventually came to know every scene and line by heart (especially Luca Brasi’s stated hope for “a masculine child” on the day of Connie’s wedding, a line delivered with absolutely believable nervousness by actor Lenny Montana, reportedly due to his own absolute nervousness on the day of filming). Very few movies stand up to so many repeat viewings...and then one night, a freshly-struck print of The Godfather screened at Mann’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood, and I was astonished to discover even more sumptuous visual detail packed into the frame than I’d ever noticed before, which only heightened my awareness of the nearly unparalleled genius of the film...as well as the staggering crappiness of The Godfather: Part III. (AO)

And now, the Screengrab's pick for the Number One Film Of All Time...

1. McCABE & MRS. MILLER (1971)

Robert Altman's take on the Western is as upside-down as Sam Peckinpah's. Where The Wild Bunch is epic and bloody, McCabe and Mrs. Miller is about being small and transient in the great landscape of the West. As big as John McCabe's dreams are, they're only in his head. All the poetry in his soul doesn't mean anything in this tiny community grasping at civilization. His final stand, his big gun battle, is as unimportant to the town of Presbyterian Church as Icarus plunging into the sea in Pieter Brueghal's Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. W.H. Auden wrote of this painting in his poem "Musee des Beaux Arts":

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

In Presbyterian Church, the burning of the unfinished titular church takes precedence over McCabe's last stand. And there's always something else happening when humanity takes its last stand. Where Peckinpah mixed the myth with realism, Robert Altman always preferred the real. (HC)

You know what always gets me? When Mr. "I don't make deals!" says of McCabe, "That man never killed anybody," he sounds as if he were describing a character defect. The movies have always been populated by guys like this, and it's sobering to realize how many times the movies they were in didn't recoil from them in dismay; on more occasions than I think I want to know, these guys were the heroes! By the end of the movie, McCabe will have killed somebody, all right, before settling in to be covered over with snow as if he were a statue commemorating the town that he'd built. The town will go on, and the woman he loves may eventually notice that he's not around anymore, but at the moment of his death, she barely knows what planet she's on. (PN)

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

Contributors: Scott Von Doviak, Paul Clark, Leonard Pearce, Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

Screengrab Presents THE TOP TEN BEST MOVIES EVER!!!! (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 14 May 2009 20:30:00 GMT

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

I could go into (a little bit of) detail about how Leone simultaneously anticipates the "demythologized" Westerns of the 1970s and beyond and blows them all out of the water, but to do so would be pigeonholing the film's achievement. This film isn't just the greatest Western of all time -- it's one of the all-time great experiences one can have in a movie theatre. Sergio Leone's command of iconography is second to none, and his juxtaposition of pore-baring closeups and expansive landscapes is justifiably legendary. Many have called this film "operatic," and for good reason; this is an epic story told on a grand scale, with wonderfully archetypal characters who linger on and on in the mind. Much credit is due to the great Ennio Morricone, whose score defines the film's characters by their respective musical themes (love the way Henry Fonda's acid-guitar theme and Charles Bronson's guitar noodling mesh, suggesting their shared fate). One of the greatest pleasures for a filmgoer is finding a timeless scene -- a "Moment Out of Time," as it were. Once Upon a Time in the West is so assured and startling that it contains one Moment Out of Time after another, adding up to a peerless entertainment -- tense, moving, funny, artful, exciting as all hell, and above all the very cinematic definition of "iconic." (PC)

6. CITIZEN KANE (1941)

Yes, I know that including Citizen Kane on a “best movies ever” list is something of a cliché. But I’m not including it out of obligation -- I’m including it because it’s awesome. And while much of that has to do with the storytelling innovations of Orson Welles and screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz, the movie would feel like a cinematic bran muffin if not for the showman’s flair with which Welles infused every frame. Newly arrived in Hollywood after a stint as the wunderkind of stage and radio, Welles made the most of his shot at the big time, flush with the brashness of youth -- twenty-five years old, folks! -- while perhaps realizing he might never get a gig this sweet again (he didn’t, of course). So rather than playing it cool and keeping an eye on his long-term career, Welles poured every bit of inspiration he had into Kane, using every trick in the cinema’s arsenal, including some that were still in their infancy. But it’s Welles’ gusto -- and not incidentally, his genius -- that comes through most clearly, and even though his ideas have been co-opted and warmed over by thousands of films since, almost none has mustered up the same magic. (PC)

5. THE GODFATHER, PART II (1974)

Here’s the criteria I tried to abide by while picking the top ten best movies of all time: I wouldn’t list my ten favorite films, because I have a personal connection to some movies that I can’t possibly justify as all-time greats. And I didn’t want to go the "I've been told a thousand times that Grand Illusion is the best movie ever, so I better include it or I'll look like a schmuck" route, either. So I asked myself, “Self, gun to your head, no time to think, what is the greatest movie of all time?” The “gun to your head” part made it an easy choice – The Godfather, Part II. A bajillion gallons of ink have already been spilled praising its complex, large canvas storytelling, timeless themes, masterfully executed set pieces and brilliant performances, so I won’t pretend I have anything new to add. I’ll just mention a few images that come to mind: Robert De Niro running across a Depression-era New York rooftop, breaking a gun down into pieces and disposing of them as the sounds of a street festival waft up from below; Lee Strasberg dismissively passing a solid gold telephone around a table; Francis Coppola’s camera tracking through the Corleone compound as autumn leaves swirl around the yard. And if every masterpiece must have a flaw, well, we’ll always have Diane Keaton screaming “It was an ABORTION!” (Oh, and that first Godfather movie? That one’s pretty good, too.) (SVD)

4. THE RULES OF THE GAME (1939) & LA GRANDE ILLUSION (1937)

Two masterpieces in two years (with La Bête Humaine, a near masterpiece, in between). La Grande Illusion was the rarest of war movies, a film that never showed a battle but focused on the aftermath, a film that argued that war is inhuman in every sense of the word, which could devolve into a bumper sticker (such as the ubiquitous "war is bad for children and other living beings") but miraculously doesn't. Jean Renoir's humanism can never be underestimated. All of his characters are three-dimensional, and all -- even the sad, flawed German Captain von Rauffenstein (played by Erich Von Stroheim) -- are deserving of your sympathy. La Règle du jeu has the same commitment to the saving grace of underlying humanity, even as it explodes the Edwardian upstairs-downstairs upper-crust comedy of manners. (HC)

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

Contributors: Paul Clark, Scott Von Doviak, Hayden Childs

Trailer Review: Tetro

Paul Clark — Wed, 06 May 2009 16:00:00 GMT

The popular line on Francis Ford Coppola is that after directing four of the most important films of the seventies, his career hit the skids in the wake of his Zoetrope Studios failure, and he’s never quite recovered. But while it’s hard to deny that he’s never lived up to his seventies salad days, he’s still capable of crafting fascinating and beautiful work. Most of his best middle- and late-period films (One From the Heart and Tucker, to name two) are highly stylized films that hearken back to classical Hollywood traditions, and based on this trailer, I’d say that Tetro finds Coppola up to that same game. One thing I particularly love about this trailer is how is introduces the themes of the film while revealing little about the plot, aside from the two brothers (the older one played by Vincent Gallo) and the long shadow cast by their father. Plus, it looks bloody gorgeous. Yeah, it could turn out to be another Youth Without Youth, but I’d rather have the Coppola who made that ambitious mess than the one who made Jack, thank you very much.

Great Beginnings: Screengrab's Favorite Opening Scenes Of All Time (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 22:30:00 GMT

DO THE RIGHT THING (1989)

Endings and (especially) middles are hard, but there’s something liberating about the instant rush and hit-the-ground momentum of beginnings, which is why so many great (and even not-so-great) directors are often inspired to make big, bold “HERE I AM!” statements in the first few minutes of films that frequently can’t compete with their own opening sequences. But Spike Lee, after two previous good-but-not-great at-bats with She’s Gotta Have It and School Daze, finally knocked one out of the park with Do The Right Thing, which exploded onto movie screens with the sex-and-violence one-two punch of Public Enemy’s “Fight The Power” and Rosie Perez’s fly-girl attack during the opening credits, then jolted audiences again with an alarm clock and the fast-talking “WAKE UP!” morning rap of Samuel L. Jackson’s dee-jay Mister Señor Love Daddy, who keeps the pace and sets the scene, letting us know in no uncertain terms that it’s HOT and about to get hotter as Lee takes us on a tour of his beloved Bed-Stuy neighborhood, introducing us in quick succession to most of the major players in a world as instantly distinctive as John Ford’s Monument Valley...or even Woody Allen’s Manhattan. (AO)

APOCALYPSE NOW (1979)

Rarely has a film’s initial moments set the forthcoming tone as immediately and evocatively as those of Apocalypse Now with its protracted shot of the Vietnamese jungle. From silence comes the sound of helicopter blades, then the airborne choppers themselves, and then the sparse electric guitar notes of The Doors’ “The End.” When Jim Morrison’s voice croons “This is the end” and bursts of napalm decimate the lush forest, the film fully enters into the realm of the hallucinatory, with Francis Ford Coppola’s pan through the smoke and fire soon integrating the superimposed image of Martin Sheen’s upside-down face, his head on a pillow facing a ceiling fan. Dream and reality coalesce in a woozy, hazy blend of longing, fear and self-inflicted violence (symbolized by a gun lying beside Sheen on the bed) that result, per the Lizard King, in “a wilderness of pain. And all the children are insane.” Table-setters don’t get much more exquisite than this. (NS)

BARBARELLA (1968)

This is more of an excuse for showing Jane Fonda naked than anything else, but the same could be said of the entire movie. An astronaut clad in a rather community theatre-looking metallic space suit floats weightlessly above a yellow shag carpet. Elevator muzak plays in the background and piece by piece, the suit comes off, revealing the astronaut to be a comely blonde, naked beneath the suit. Soon we have Barbarella floating around with her ass in the air to the tones of 1960s muzak. Cute and sexy for sure, but also disturbingly fetus-like. (SCS)

LA DOLCE VITA (1960)

La Dolce Vita has its fair share of famous scenes. The opening in which Jesus dangles from a helicopter flying low over Rome beats Anita Ekberg in the fountain by a mile. Fellini knows that any good opening needs to be odd and enjoyable besides hinting at what's to come. Here we have religion, sexy rich women, poor street boys, modern technology and ruins. And Paparazzo taking photos of it all while Marcello Mastroianni's character quietly eggs him on. (SCS)

THE SEARCHERS (1956)

Much is made of the final scene, where the movie's hero/anti-hero, the racist Ethan Edwards, cannot enter the embrace of the household, and the door slowly shuts on him. The opening scene is a mirror of the end, with Ethan's sister-in-law Martha opening the door and walking from the cool shade of the house into the harsh light of Monument Valley, relocated from Utah to Texas for the purposes of the film. Ethan is riding his horse in through the desert, still a ways off although closer than anything else in the huge landscape. The camera's journey from the dark interior to the brilliant and tremendous exterior emphasizes just how small the ranch is. Ethan's visit is his first in many years, and although the film doesn't say a word about it, it is clear that while his sleazy exploits are one reason he has stayed away for so long, his love for Martha is the primary cause. The whole of the plot revolves around that unspoken love. If you look for it, you can see it from the first moment Martha's face becomes visible, all of the concern and ambiguity that she cannot speak. Unspoken truths are at the heart of The Searchers, and in the gulf between what is said and what is meant is the real history of this country. (HC)

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Nick Schager, Sarah Clyne Sundberg, Hayden Childs

He Died, but Then He Got Younger: The Prequel Perplex

Phil Nugent — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 19:00:00 GMT

Ryan Gilbey suggests that, now that it's barely even fun anymore to complain about sequels and remakes, we should shift gears and reserve our disgust for the concept of prequels. By some accounts, the term "prequel" was coined by George Lucas to describe the young-Don-Vito sections of Francis Ford Coppola's 1974 The Godfather, Part II. However, the first time the term was widely used in the press to label a feature film which had no other discernible reason for being may well have been in 1979, when Tom Berenger and William Katt starred in Richard Lester's Butch and Sundance: The Early Years.

This was not the first time that somebody had built a new work around a speculative history of what happened to the characters in an earlier work before they reached the point in their history where they made the audience's acquaintance in the first place. Even before The Godfather, Part II, this approach actually had a tony literary pedigree. Jean Rhys's 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea (filmed by John Duigan in 1993) filled in the pre-history to Jane Eyre, and the 1971 movie The Nightcomers, with Marlon Brando, attempted to lay the groundwork for Henry James's The Turn of the Screw. But Butch and Sundance established the basis for regarding prequels as a singularly uninspired and parasitic form. Apparently it was made because some genius noticed that the tenth anniversary of the money-making Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was approaching, and it seemed a shame to waste such a ripe excuse to try to cash in again. There was just one problem: the first movie ended, famously, with Butch and Sundance being turned into Swiss cheese by the Bolivian army. So a sequel was out of the question, but it might be possible to go backwards. And since there was this new actor in town whose major qualification for stardom seemed to be that he looked a lot like a young Robert Redford...

In the end, Butch and Sundance tanked, William Katt transitioned from starring in movies to appearing on TV each week in The Greatest American Hero and looking as if he was praying to take a bullet between line readings, and it looked as if prequels might turn out to be one of those momentary fancies of the movie industry, like disaster epics or Steven Seagal. A few more prequels did trickle out in later years, ranging from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom to Amityville II: The Possession. But the concept wasn't revived big time until, yes, George Lucas decided to jump-start his fantasy of actually making another Star Wars trilogy, beginning in 1999 with The Phantom Menace. Even now, though, prequels, which are much more commonly found in the ranks of the straight-to-video than among actual theatrical releases, tend to occur only when a franchise has been tapped to pitiful death (see Hannibal Rising) or when the producers are desperate for a gimmick that might help to compensate for the fact that the original stars want nothing to do with it (see Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd).

We might also want to define our terms a little. Gilbey, anticipating the day when movie prequels themselves become "respectable", cites Guillermo del Toro's forthcoming The Hobbit, as a prequel to Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies, but J. R. R. Tolkien wrote the book that del Toro is adapting before he wrote the Rings books; surely that matters more than the fact that the books have somehow managed to get themselves filmed in the wrong order. On the other hand, J. J. Abrams's Star Trek straddles the line between "reboot" and prequel: it means to reinvent the old franchise, but in the process of doing so, it introduces the audience to James T. Kirk and his merry band at an earlier stage of their development than Gene Roddenberry dared, or cared, to go. Ideally, this kind of thing might be done with a little humor, teasing the audience with the shared knowledge we have of what these characters are fated to become. At worst, it might give us the chance to see what it looks like when fan fiction is perpetrated with a $150 million budget.

Of the high-profile releases about to come barging through the door, Wolverine is closest to the dreaded prequel prototype. The signs are pretty much there, except in reverse: the X-Men franchise has been pronounced dead, or at least mothballed, but everybody's favorite moody mutant is indestructibly immortal, and Hugh Jackman is still at an age where he can pull off the role. So maybe the best way to try to squeeze a little more money out of the character, minus his familiar supporting cast, is to zap back to before most of them were born and fill in some of the bad boy's back story, which apparently goes back for fucking ever. Wolverine's director, Gavin Hood, who readily acknowledges that "Prequels are usually bad," adds that, since "most of the audience knows what's coming... the excitement should be not 'what?' but 'how?' It changes the emphasis. Usually a movie is about what will happen. Here it's 'How will what we know will happen, happen?'" That sounds about right. And it's true that even when you think you know exactly what's going to happen, the movies can still surprise you. For instance, I saw Gavin Hood's previous films, Tsotsi and Rendition, and now, people who may well have seen them too have hired him to direct a big-budget summer movie. Boy, am I surprised.

Video of the Day: Coppola on “Tetro”

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 20:30:00 GMT

According to Screen Daily, American Zoetrope will self-release Francis Ford Coppola’s Tetro on June 11. Today Coppola launched a website for Tetro, which he not only directed but wrote; it’s his first original screenplay since The Conversation in 1974. “The story tells of two brothers, of family lost and found, and the conflicts and tragedies within a highly creative Argentine-Italian family. Vincent Gallo stars in the title role alongside Maribel Verdu, Klaus Maria Brandauer, Carmen Maura and newcomer Alden Ehrenreich.”

Content on the website is scarce so far, but Coppola did self-direct a video introduction, which offers a little insight on the film and a few unfortunate angles accentuating the maestro’s chins and nostrils. Enjoy!

Up The Academy: Screengrab Salutes The All-Time Best & Worst Best Picture Winners (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 23:00:00 GMT

THE BEST:

CASABLANCA (1943)

For all the iconic Hollywood films from The Wizard of Oz to Star Wars that DIDN’T win Best Picture, it’s nice to know that Casablanca, at least, was properly enshrined. Whether you measure by cultural cachet, quotable lines, dorm room posters or AFI ranking, Humphrey Bogart’s finest hour is a classic among classics...and not in that “eat your broccoli” grad student dissertation way, either. The pace is crisp, the intrigue is intriguing, the writing is sharp and funny and the romance (not to mention the bromance) is swoony, even for cynics who’d normally gag on a sentiment like, “We’ll always have Paris.” In fact, Roger Ebert claims in his commentary on a special edition DVD of the film that he’s never heard a bad review of Casablanca, which he says is “probably on more lists of the greatest films of all time than any other single title, including Citizen Kane,” a masterpiece which may be “greater,” but nowhere near as beloved. Normally, such unquestioned, universal adoration would trigger my contrarian side (I’m lookin’ at you, Hanks!) – but that friggin' “La Marseillaise” scene gets me every goddamn time. (Now if you’ll excuse me, I seem to have a little something in my eye...)

ALL ABOUT EVE (1950)

This inside-show-business comic melodrama isn't the greatest movie ever to be garlanded with Oscars. It probably isn't even as great as Sunset Boulevard, another inside-show-business movie that happened to be nominated for Best Picture the very same year. But it's the choicest possible example of a certain kind of entertainment that looks especially fetching come awards season, the glittering self-hating bitch-fest, with actors jumping at the chance to show what overgrown, treacherous babies actors -- other actors -- really are behind the scenes, and also with the writer-director, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, preserving some of the pearls of wit that he'd been test-screening at all the best Hollywood dinner parties for the preceding couple of years. Mankiewicz was lucky to get to assign his dialogue to a couple of the greatest bitches ever to stalk a soundstage: Bette Davis, in her archetypal role as the actress and force of nature Margot Channing, and George Sanders, who picked up a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his purring critic, Addison DeWitt. The movie even opens with an awards ceremony, which Sanders can be heard snarking at in voiceover. With that opening, Mankiewicz was making it clear to the Academy that he was setting up a joke that only they could satisfyingly complete by giving his movie the prize, and the voters were happy to comply.

ON THE WATERFRONT (1954)

On its surface, this movie about labor racketeering on the New York docks could easily be mistaken for the kind of torn-from-the-headlines melodrama that Warner Bros. used to whip up into flavorful, punchy stories in the '30s and which by the 1950s was often served up in bloated and sanctimonious form. (Directed by Elia Kazan from an original script by Budd Schulberg, the movie is also widely taken as its creators' attempt to rationalize their friendly witness status before the House Un-American Activities Committee by showing the informer as a beleaguered hero.) But the actual New York locations, the strong work by such actors as Eva Marie Saint and Rod Steiger, and the best-observed moments in Schulberg's script transcend the movie's built-in limitations. And Brando himself embodies transcendence. Working quietly at first and slowly building to a full boil, he makes Terry Malloy into a real human being even as he's defining the image of the alienated '50s hero, a working-class outsider whose anger and confusion -- the instinctive, untutored emotions of a trapped animal -- make him seem more alive than the society he can't fit into, a society that no one guessed at the time was rotting from deep inside. In addition to marking the end of Brando's professional collaboration with Kazan, it also turned out to mark the end of Brando's first phase as a culture hero: his next movie, representing the start of a long stint in the wilderness, was Desirée, in which he played Napoleon. But it was enough to live on for awhile.

THE GODFATHER (1972) & THE GODFATHER, PART II (1974)

The early seventies were such a wild time for American movies that a bloody, historically sophisticated use of a criminal family as a metaphor for the capitalist system and the corruption of the American dream served as the era's answer to Gone with the Wind. Francis Ford Coppola's masterpiece, as intelligent and emotionally complicated as any epic ever to come out of Hollywood, would stand as a high point both in the history of film and the Academy's fluctuating record of shows of good sense all by itself. It's to the Academy's considerable credit that it did the right thing when it was presented with Part II, which was not the automatic commercial blockbuster that the first film had been. It must have been an especially sweet moment for Coppola, considering that the other Best Picture nominees included not only his own The Conversation but Chinatown, which was the first film independently produced by Robert Evans after Evans left Paramount Pictures, where he and Coppola had a difficult time working together on the first Godfather. Plus he beat The Towering Inferno!

THE DEPARTED (2006)

Yes, we can all agree that it's a sham of a mockery of a travesty that Martin Scorsese never won an Oscar until 2007, and it makes no sense at all that The Departed is the only movie he directed to ever win Best Picture. Let's get past that, can we? Consider the competition this spectacularly entertaining Boston crime epic faced in the category: Babel, Letters from Iwo Jima, Little Miss Sunshine and The Queen. Not really a group with a lot of staying power. If I came across any of them while channel surfing tonight, I doubt I'd pause, but The Departed sucks me in every time. William Monahan's underrated script is an endlessly quotable encyclopedia of pungent tough-guy banter. Alec Baldwin and Mark Wahlberg in particular make the most of it, and although Jack Nicholson doesn't make the most convincing Boston mob boss, even he has his inspired moments. Scorsese isn't reinventing the wheel here, he's just showing all his imitators who have been trying to recreate Goodfellas for the past two decades how to really put on a show. There's an exhilarating pace and crackling energy to his relentless storytelling here, no matter that we've seen the story before (in Infernal Affairs, the Japanese thriller upon which The Departed is based) and that it may not actually make a lick of sense. I may be an apologist for late-period Scorsese (I think I love Gangs of New York even more), but even if you're not a Departed fan, who could begrudge one of our greatest living filmmakers (and one of the world's most enthusiastic movie fans) his moment in the Oscar spotlight?

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent & Scott Von Doviak

If It's Tueday, It Must Be Time for Another Post About "The Godfather"

Phil Nugent — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 18:00:00 GMT

Every time Carmine Caridi turns on the TV and sees James Caan kicking the shit out of his brother-in-law or getting gunned down at the toll booth in The Godfather, something inside him dies a little. In his account of the making of that movie in the new Vanity Fair, Mark Seal report that Caridi was cast, as in told that he had the role, as Sonny Corlone, and managed to hold onto it for a few days. "Caridi", Seal writes, "was a Sonny straight out of [Mario] Puzo’s book: a six-foot-four, black-haired Italian-American bull who came from a tough section of New York. Told that he had the part, Caridi quit the play he was appearing in and got fitted for wardrobe. When he walked down the block he had grown up on, people hanging out of windows screamed, 'One of the boys made it!' 'Women were coming up to me with their babies to kiss for good luck,' Caridi says. Caan recalls, 'He was running around with some friends of mine, celebrating. And I said, "Hey, don’t do this. They’re very shaky up there, and I know what Francis wants—no disgrace to you." … He was going to this club and that club,' meaning clubs frequented by the boys from Caan’s old neighborhood. 'They said, "What do you want to hang around us for?" And he says, "Well, I want to get the feeling." They said, "We’ll give you the feeling. We’ll throw you out of the fucking car at 90."'”

Caridi may have been the very image of Sonny Corleone down to his toes, but he didn't have the inside view of the casting process that Caan had by then. Caan was part of the core group of four--along with Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, and Robert Duvall--who Francis Coppola wanted from the very start. He met with active resistance to both Brando and Pacino from the studio, and though Caan seemed to have the best chance of all them of getting into the movie, the studio wanted Coppola to consider him for Michael, Pacino's part. "That was the last thing Francis wanted," Caan says now, "because he had it in his mind that Michael was the Sicilian-looking one and Sonny was the Americanized version." (It may be some kind of proof of the genius of this casting idea that, after the movie came out, Caan says that he "won Italian of the Year twice in New York, and I’m not Italian.") While Caridi was out spending his salary, Coppola made one last hard press for Pacino as Michael, a move that would practically demand that Caan, then officially cast as Michael, be shifted to the role of Sonny because of the difference in height between Pacino and Caridi. Finally, the Paramount chieftain Robert Evans--who looked much more like a classically tall-and-handsome Hollywood star than Pacino, and who thought that the role demanded a classically tall-and-handsome Hollywood star type because it was the role he'd have coveted if he were still an actor, relented. "“I don’t think I’ve gotten over it, still,” says Caridi, who at 74 is still a working actor. Coppola must have felt just godawful about all this, because he cast Caridi in small roles in both The Godfather, Part II and, many years later, The Godfather III. Caridi did strike other casting directors as sufficiently mobish that he got to play Frank Costello in Bugsy (1991) and Sam Giancana in Ruby (1992). Whatever happened to all those babies he kissed for luck has not yet been determined.

We've read a lot of articles about the making of The Godfather by now, and if you follow these links the way we tell you to, so have you. The special fascination of Seal's account is the emphasis it places in the actual (ahem) Mafia's role in almost preventing the movie from getting made, in its getting made, and the enthusiasm for it that overtook them once it was finished. Although neither Puzo nor Coppola ever met a real gangster--Coppola recalls that “Mario told me to never meet them, never agree to, because they respected that and would stay away from you if they knew you didn’t want contact.”--many people tried to get into the movie by boasting of their real-life organized crime bona fides. Alec Rocco, A.K.A. Moe Greene, wanted everyone to know that he had a past as a bookie and had the butt-ugly mugshot to prove it. Al Martino, the singer who played Johnny Fontaine, let it be known that he had the role coming to him because he was Johnny Fontaine, mob connections and all, which must have given Frank Sinatra, who reportedly wanted the production shut down because he thought everyone in the world thought that he was supposed to be Johnny Fontaine, mixed feelings. In the end, Martino got the role, despite Coppola's reported preference for Vic Damone, despite the fact that he was so inexperienced an actor that Brando had to resort to throwing an unscripted slap to the face into their big scene together in an effort to startle him enough to get him to come out and play. Bettye McCartt, assistant to producer Al Ruddy, broke her watch on the set one day and was approached by Lenny Montana, the mountainous former wrestler who played the Corleone family emforcer Luca Brasi. McCartt recalls that “He said, ‘What kind of watch would you like?,’ and I said, ‘I’d like an antique watch with diamonds on it, but I’ll get another $15 one.’ A week passes, and Lenny comes and he’s got a Kleenex in his hand wadded up, and he’s looking over his shoulder every step of the way.” He placed the wad of Kleenex on her desk. She opened it, and there was an antique diamond watch inside. “And he says, ‘The boys sent you this. But don’t wear it in Florida.’”

Meanwhile, Joe Colombo, the most "media-savvy" of the leaders of the Five Families, was battling the production through his "civil rights" organization, the Italian-American Civil Rights League, which had "a membership of 45,000 and a $1 million war chest." Looking to make peace, Al Ruddy invited Colombo to come to his office and examine the screenplay. “So next day Joe shows up with two other guys. Joe sits opposite me, one guy’s on the couch, and one guy’s sitting in the window.” Ruddy pulled out the 155-page script and gave it to the Mob boss. “He puts on his little Ben Franklin glasses, looks at it for about two minutes. ‘What does this mean—fade in?’ he asked. And I realized there was no way Joe was going to turn to page two.” Luckily, Colombo decided to cut to the chase: his only demand was that the word "Mafia" be deleted from the script and never appear in the movie. This, it turned out, was not the most difficult thing he could have asked for: the word appeared in the script exactly once, when the movie studio boss played by John Marley read Duvall's Tom Hagen the riot act, telling him in the most offensive way possible that he has no fear of Italian crime lords. Considering that Marley's diatribe also contained the words "dago", "wop", "greaseball", and "goombahs", the general feeling was that even with the "M"-word removed, the speech would still retain the necessary flavor. In the end, the movie would become a beloved totem among Italian Americans, law-abiding and otherwise, but Colombo himself would not live to see it. He was executed by a gunman, presumed to have been hired by rival gangster Joey Gallo, while appearing at an Italian-American Civil Rights League Unity Day celebration in New York in June 1971, at the same time that part the movie was being filmed a few blocks away. Al Ruddy had declined an offer to sit beside Colombo on the dais.

Screengrab Review: "Gomorrah"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 18:00:00 GMT

There's a popular nitwit theory that movies like The Godfather and TV series like The Sopranos "glamorize" Mafia life and make it look attractive. Again and again, the point may get made that Michael Corleone and Tony Soprano and the people in their orbit are ruthless moral idiots who actually grow less and less loyal to their closest associates the longer they have to endure the sight of them, but the idea seems to be that as long as they're treated as fascinating characters, people worthy of the audience's interest, somebody's going to look at their way of life and think, it doesn't look half bad. The new Italian movie Gomorrah may be less likely than any crime movie ever made to be accused of romanticizing gangsterism. The movie, which runs two hours and fifteen minutes, uses Robert Saviano's nonfiction book about the Neapolitan-based criminal organization known as "the Camorra" (which means, simply, the gang) as its jumping-off point. The book is fiercely angry about what the Camorra and its corrupting influence does to innocent people who are just trying to live their lives. The movie, which was directed by Matteo Garrone, provides grounds for anger, though its own emotional temperature is basically even and steady, even frigid. It cuts back and forth among several characters, most of them barely blips on the Camorra's radar screen: a bookkeeper who works distributing money to the families of clan members who are in prison; a mobbed-up tailor; a thirteen-year-old boy just beginning to get his bearings in the crooked world in which he'll be growing up; a couple of teenage meatheads who, unlike the professional big boys, see themselves as romantic outlaws and run around with guns causing so much aggravation that they'll eventually have to be put down. (To better make the point about what kind of movie this isn't, the knuckleheads shout lines from Brian De Palma's Scarface as they play cowboys and Indians.) There are also some guys who work in "toxic waste management", which translates into directing trucks full of poisonous materials to out-of-the-way sites where they can be dumped or buried. Thus the Camorra's influence extends to literally despoiling the land itself, adding one more thoughtful conceit to a movie already groaning with them.

Gomorrah has been highly praised for its stubbornly unexciting handling of this potentially shocking material, but for Matteo, that may be the choice of a director who doesn't have many other options. His previous movies, the dysfunctional love story Primo Amore (2004) and The Embalmer (2002), about a dwarfish taxidermist who is employed by the Camorra to hook up a corpse so that it can serve as a drug mule, also treated sensational material in a flat, affectless way that minimized the viewer's ability to connect with whatever was going on. He either doen't know how to involve the audience or consciously rejects involving them because he's aiming for something more challenging and cerebral. He mostly winds up with something flatter and deader. He's not above using violence and noise to get a rise out of you; the movie opens with a bloody mass execution carried out in a tanning salon, and Matteo makes a point of never making it clear who the victims were or why their were killed. Because the movie never invites you to care about its characters beyond the level of seeing them as faceless victims of a corrupt society, the frequent violent explosions serve the same purpose they do in the sleaziest kind of exploitation films: they nudge you awake between the lapses into total boredom.

Any movie that deals with power and crime that doesn't acknowledge the attractions of those things is as much a lie as a movie that makes a gangster's life seem noble. When Francis Ford Coppola made The Godfather, he didn't think he had to make the Corleones both colorless and unrelentingly disgusting to prevent viewers from thinking he was making a campaign commercial for the Mafia, because he assumed that most people have more sense than that. Gomorrah is being congratulated for assuming that people don't, and that a gangster movie's moral intelligence can best be judged by how hard it is to sit through it. The first step towards constructing a meaningful condemnation of organized crime might be to examine why people are drawn to it, but in Gomorrah, the reasons seem boiled down to: there's no resisting it. Nobody wants it, but if you try to stand up to it or even live apart from it, you'll get your head blown off. A lifeless depiction of a hopeless world, Gomorrah is an epic shrug of resignation.

Bloody Valentines: The Worst Relationships in Cinema History (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 21:00:00 GMT

To paraphrase Edwin Starr: Valentine’s Day! Huh! What is it good for?

Well...depends who you ask: it certainly didn’t work out too well for the poor Roman priest who got himself beaten, stoned, beheaded (and later canonized) for nuptializing Christian couples out of season, nor for any of the other Catholic martyrs named Valentine whose various grisly fates somehow led to the annual tradition of grown-ass men dropping seventy bucks a pop to have teddy bears in boxer shorts with hearts on them delivered to grown-ass women in the middle of winter.

Scholars blame Geoffrey Chaucer for ruining February 14th by linking a bunch of obscure Roman Catholic feast days with the aggravating concept of courtly love, thus stressing out singles and couples alike for centuries to come with unrealistic, unattainable expectations about all the perfect moments of romance we’re all supposed to be having (instead of weeping lonely tears into our popcorn at solo matinees of He’s Just Not That Into You or forgetting to buy a frickin’ card for our significant others and never hearing the goddamn frickin’ end of it).

It should, of course, be remembered that St. Valentine’s ol’ pagan buddy Cupid is the son of both a goddess of love AND a god of war, and thus not all the couples the little bastard shoots with his arrows wind up living happily ever after. Therefore, as a cheery reminder that things could always be worse in this infernal season of l’amour, your friends-with-benefits here at the Screengrab are proud to present BLOODY VALENTINES: THE WORST RELATIONSHIPS IN CINEMA HISTORY!

PROF. IMMANUEL RATH & LOLA LOLA, THE BLUE ANGEL (1930)

A sort of preemptive riposte to the 20th century's literary canon of professors effectively leveraging their intellectual heft for the purpose of seducing their students, The Blue Angel has stuffy Rath (Emil Jannings) falling for cabaret singer Lola Lola (Marlene Dietrich) when he goes down to waggle his finger in her face and tell her to stop distracting his students. Instead, she captivates and reduces him to a pathetic spectacle, as pathetic in the public's eyes as he is in hers. If Rath had at least a little touch of submissiveness in him, maybe he'd enjoy being constantly humiliated in a sub-dom 24/7 way; as it is, Lola reduces him to a man with no free will. Dietrich's star was made in this first collaboration with Josef von Sternberg; meanwhile, Jannings' performance is frequently looked down upon as an anachronistic acting style from another age. Which actually makes perfect sense for the character he's playing. As a depiction of a May-December, intellectual-emptyheaded, pompous-earthy, and every other kind of mismatch possible relationship, The Blue Angel isn't painful only because it's more conducive to distanced contemplation and sarcastic laughter than visceral empathy. Should you have extra time at work (should you still be employed, in fact), some kind soul has uploaded the whole German version to YouTube, but the embedding has been disabled, so enjoy the trailer above, then click here to watch the whole thing.

GEORGE & MARTHA, WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? (1966)

There may be bloodier couples in the history of cinema, but there are none whose hatred burned brighter. George and Martha – a small-time failure of a college professor and his crude harpy of a wife, played by real-life couple Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor – may not want to kill each other, but it’s only because dead they would be past inflicting pain, which is all that keeps them going. Considering that Martha speaks of their marriage in terms of total warfare, and George’s idea of whimsical banter is to point a rifle at his wife’s head during a cocktail party, it’s no surprise that this movie has become shorthand for violently feuding couples. This is a couple that’s beyond mere feuding, but whose initial passion has never soured: it’s been transformed into something just as fiery, a loathing built on complete knowledge of, and complete dependence upon, one another. The film shocks us right out of the box by presenting us with a couple whose fury and loathing for each other is deeper than the love in an any big-screen romance; it then shocks us even further by showing how deeply, albeit bizarrely, they care for each other, and how much more profound their relationship is than the seemingly happy couple that contrasts them.

MICHAEL & KAY CORLEONE, THE GODFATHER (1972) and THE GODFATHER, PART II (1974)

There's a lesson here that a lot of you girls would do well to heed: when your boyfriend runs off to Sicily without a word, gets married to a perfect stranger he met over there about ten minutes after he got off the boat, and then, after somebody sticks dynamite under the hood of the car and blows her sky high, he shows up where you work, again without a word, and announces that, lucky you, he's looking to fill the position of second wife and he's prepared to consider your qualifications -- honey, take a breath. If you feel swayed by his liquid brown eyes and passionate words, try and think about how you're going to feel waking up next to him in a few years, when the face is set off by a toupee like an earth-tone fireworks display and that insinuating voice keeps erupting "HOO-hah!" Then you tell Casanova that as much as you appreciate the offer, you feel that you might be overqualified on account of your ability to count above ten without taking off your shoes. Unless you've got some kind of fetish for having doors slammed in your face.

JACK & WENDY TORRANCE, THE SHINING (1980)

If you've seen The Shining as many times as I have – and there's very little chance of that – you've probably spent some time speculating about the marriage of Jack and Wendy Torrance. How did they meet? What was the attraction? When did they decide to get married, and didn't they have any friends or family to talk them out of it? Some would point to the obvious incompatibility of the brooding, hot-tempered Jack (Jack Nicholson) and the frail, skittish Wendy (Shelly Duvall) as a flaw in the movie, but to those people I would pose this query: Do you know any married people? Because if you do, surely you are aware that for every couple that seems inevitable and perfect for each other, there are at least three that make no sense whatsoever on any rational level. It's easy to blame Jack for the eventual dissolution of the relationship. He is the guy who starts talking to ghosts and running around with an axe, after all. But let's not let Wendy entirely off the hook. She did go along with a plan that entailed living in total isolation with a man who has a history of alcohol abuse and domestic violence (no matter how much she may have tried to downplay it), and she brought her young son Danny into it. At the very least, she's guilty of poor judgment, but at least it all works out in the end.

FRANK BOOTH & DOROTHY VALLENS, BLUE VELVET (1986)

Frank Booth and Dorothy Vallens, the two emblems of maniacal deviance and defiled virtue (respectively) in David Lynch’s surrealistic neo-noir Blue Velvet, may share things...but love isn’t one of them. Dorothy (Isabella Rossellini) is a nightclub singer with a daughter and an air of mystery, which – as Kyle MacLachlan’s amateur sleuth Jeffrey peeps after being shoved, post-blowjob, into a closet – is due to her association with Frank (Dennis Hopper). Frank is a sociopath holding Dorothy’s husband hostage so she might sexually gratify him, and the twisted sadomasochistic tryst (replete with helium inhalations and erotic asphyxiation) that Jeffrey witnesses while hiding in that closet may stand as some of the most disturbingly unsettling material ever shot by the peerlessly out-there Lynch. The couple’s relationship ultimately ends when Jeffrey shoots Frank dead, but this being Lynch, the ensuing happy ending is laced with perversion, due in part to the earlier suggestion that Dorothy, conditioned to Frank’s beatings, has been warped into associating pleasure with pain.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Vadim Rizov, Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent, Scott Von Doviak & Nick Schager

Strangers In A Strange Land: Screengrab’s Favorite Fish-Out-Of-Water Stories (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 22:30:00 GMT

LOST IN TRANSLATION (2003)

A sad, funny ode to those fragile bubbles of joy, romance and deeper meaning in life's otherwise bitter cocktail of boredom, loneliness and disappointment, Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation captures a certain mood of isolated intimacy so well that I only wish I could've stumbled across it in a deserted movie theater and kept the experience all to myself. Then again, one of the points of the film is the importance of shared experience: disconnected from her goofus husband (Gionvanni Ribisi), familiar surroundings and a sense of forward momentum in her life, Scarlett Johansson's young American abroad drifts through Japan like a lonely camera, recording her isolated perceptions for no one until she herself is perceived by fellow traveler Bill Murray, kicking off a sweet "like" affair through the streets and karaoke bars of late-night Tokyo. "I'm looking for, like, an accomplice," Murray's Bob Harris says to Johansson's Charlotte during one of their early encounters...and sometimes that's all a stranger needs to make a strange land into a momentary home.

DEFENDING YOUR LIFE (1991)

At first, Daniel Miller (Albert Brooks) isn't clear that he's in a strange land at all. He's arrived in Judgment City, a place that "should seem pleasing and very familiar," assuming you spend a lot of time at golf course resorts in the Phoenix suburbs. The billboards, sterile hotel rooms and crappy stand-up comics do indeed seem familiar, if just a bit off-kilter. That's because Daniel has been killed in a car crash and is no longer on earth at all; rather, he is in a sort of way station between our world and the afterlife, waiting to be judged on his human existence. It's a potentially stressful situation, but there are some pleasant distractions: for instance, the food is delicious and you can eat all you want without gaining any weight. (The full-time residents of Judgment City, on the other hand, enjoy food that tastes a little like horseshit to "little brains" like us.) Indeed, Daniel finds life in Judgment City quite enjoyable once he meets Julia (Meryl Streep), the compatible soul mate he never managed to find in life. It's not so enjoyable once he's put on trial and forced to defend embarrassing episodes from his earthly existence – and Daniel should probably avoid unflattering visits to the Past Lives Pavilion – but no place is perfect.

MYSTERY TRAIN (1989)

We're talking about the first third of Mystery Train, to be more specific. The film follows a young Japanese couple riding a train into Memphis to visit the birthplace of rock & roll. The girl, Mitsuko, is obsessed with Elvis Presley. Her boyfriend Jun, dour and aloof, is a Carl Perkins man. They've come to visit Graceland and Sun Studios, but it's clear from the beginning that their ways -- hiking through the hot and empty streets with their suitcase suspended between them on a bamboo pole, giving their bellhop a plum, fetishizing their cigarette lighter -- are not the ways of Memphis or Americans. And yet, somehow by the end of their story, it's Memphis that seems alien. The sweetness underneath their oddity has normalized them, but the American South seems to be bursting with weirdness. Jarmusch, of course, has stacked the deck. His version of Memphis is filled with strangeness, and his cast includes Screaming Jay Hawkins as the desk clerk at their hotel and Rufus Thomas as a colorful local they meet. The Memphis I know is quite different.

APOCALYPSE NOW (1979)

It's hard to tell which is the stranger country in Apocalypse Now: the Vietnam that Willard barely sees, the military that tries to pretend that the situation is normal (rather than all fucked up), or the Kingdom of Death in Col. Kurtz's heart of darkness. Martin Sheen's Willard has not just fallen off the turnip truck; indeed, when the movie opens, he's drunk and bitter about being stuck again in Saigon. But the drunken ennui of Saigon seems more like the height of civilization as he travels further upriver after Kurtz. Even the Apocalypse Now Redux, which adds an odd layover at a French plantation, only increases Willard's alienation from his surroundings. The world is mad. It is madness to make war on people for their own good. It is madness to attempt to carve a jungle into a Western utopia. It is madness to pretend that there is any return when you have raised the ghosts of primordial horror.

THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING (1975)

An important reminder for the would-be Kurtzes and (in the case of this movie) Danny Dravots of this world: gods don't bleed and die. If you ever try to pass yourself off as a god, be sure not to bleed or be ritually assassinated. A better policy is to avoid attempts at passing as a god altogether. The Man Who Would Be King is a deliberately old-fashioned story in which director John Huston demonstrates the lie at the heart of original author Rudyard Kipling's overt imperialist attitudes towards Asia. Two British adventurers (played by Sean Connery and Michael Caine, both at the top of their games), set out for an unknown area of Afghanistan to pursue unknown riches. Upon arriving, the locals decide that Danny (that's Connery's character) is a god when an arrow that has become lodged in his clothing fails to kill him. Danny, sadly, comes to believe his own press. I hope I am spoiling little when I reveal that hubris is an unforgiving mistress.

LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (1962)

This may be the consummate British colonialist fantasy of knowing a strange land so well that the natives respect you as one of their own. You spend years studying the language and culture at Oxford, only to go overboard completely and become a barefoot, djellabia-wearing, stallion-riding master of the desert. David Lean's film is based on T. E. Lawrence's memoirs, Seven Pillars of Wisdom. In a nutshell it's the story of Lawrence mounting an Arab revolt against the Ottomans, surreptitiously helping the British as their Empire crumbles all around. Real events aside, this is also a fantastic film in and of itself. It is one of those brilliant character studies of a half-mad, half-genius hero, obsessed with an impossible goal. Serpico, The French Connection, and Vanishing Point come to mind. Instead of the inner workings of a nineteen-seventies cop, we get the psyche of Lawrence and the stoic facial expressions of Peter O’Toole galloping up and down the Hejaz. Never mind that Lawrence’s vision — and promise to King Faisal — of a large pan-Arab state based on tribal patterns (including present-day Iraq) went down the toilet in ways we are still experiencing right at this very moment.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Five & Six

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Hayden Childs, Sarah Clyne Sundberg

Screengrab Presents: Cinema’s Greatest Comebacks (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 21:30:00 GMT

PAM GRIER in JACKIE BROWN (1997)

I suppose this one doesn’t entirely count as a comeback, since the former blaxploitation star of urban classics like Coffy and Foxy Brown has yet to land another starring role as meaty as Jackie Brown, the drug-mule stewardess who outsmarts both her murderous boss (Samuel Jackson) and the feds on her tail before riding off into the sunset with a suitcase of cash in Quentin Tarantino’s underrated adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s Rum Punch. Then again, hardly any actresses (especially those of, ahem, a certain age) get to star in major motion pictures as realistically smart, complex, vulnerable women like Jackie, who succeed not with machine guns or sex (although there’s plenty of that simmering just under the surface in Grier’s palpable chemistry with Robert Forster, as bail bondsman Max Cherry, Jackie’s reluctant partner in crime -- one of the great screen couples of all time), but rather through believably human ingenuity and courage. Yet, at the very least, Grier finally earned some overdue respect as an actress from those who’d previously looked down on her B-movie roots, and though she didn’t win an Oscar for her Oscar-worthy career best performance, she at least caught a second wind in her career as a character actress, with relatively high-profile gigs like Jane Campion's Holy Smoke and The L Word...though, come to think of it, maybe it's time for yet another Pam Grier comeback so those of us without Showtime can maybe see her a little more often.

ROBERT ALTMAN, THE PLAYER (1992)

The rise and fall and rise of Robert Altman is well-known to movie geeks, but no list of great cinematic comebacks would be complete without a nod to the director who rose to prominence during the anything goes, lunatics-running-the-asylum ‘70s era of American filmmaking, when Uncle Bob churned out a head-spinning number of modern day classics like M*A*S*H and Nashville before biting the Hollywood hand that fed him one too many times and getting banished to the wilderness, only to raise his career from the dead once again by chomping down even harder on that very same Hollywood hand. After foolishly viewing film as a creative means of expression (rather than the branding mechanism and product placement delivery system we now know it to be), Altman was kicked to the curb by the powers-that-be once the Suits reasserted corporate control of the studios in the early eighties. Not only was Altman an idealistic pothead who wouldn’t know a high-concept Eddie Murphy vehicle if it bit him in the ass, but he was OLD, a condition the New Hollywood power elite feared might be contagious. Yet even in exile, Altman found a way to keep on keepin' on: he was an early adapter of cheap, indie video technology, which he used to keep his director-fu sharp with adaptations of stage plays like Secret Honor and prescient experiments like the political fictumentary Tanner ’88, all of which helped him to eventually reboot his career thanks to an independent film about Hollywood full of cameos by old friends and (at least according to Wikipedia) unpaid stars who just happened to show up at the L.A. locations where Altman was shooting and agreed to improvise some lines. The Player, a critical and financial success, was nominated for an “all-is-forgiven” Oscar that gave Altman the clout to work fairly steadily for the remainder of his life, generating both hits (Short Cuts, Gosford Park) and misses (Prêt-à-Porter, Kansas City)...any one of which remains far more interesting and unique today than all the Transformers in Toy Town.

DANIEL DAY-LEWIS in GANGS OF NEW YORK (2002)

In the late eighties and throughout the nineties, Daniel Day-Lewis developed a reputation as one of the world's finest and most versatile actors, due in no small part to the exhaustive amount of work he put into his characterizations. Eventually, the work began to take its toll, and following 1997's The Boxer, Day-Lewis took an extended sabbatical from acting. After five years pursuing various interests (like spending time with his family, not to mention those strange rumors about an apprenticeship with an Italian cobbler) Day-Lewis was finally lured back into the business by his onetime collaborator, Martin Scorsese. Once on board, Day-Lewis threw himself completely into the role of Bill "The Butcher" Cutting as he had with his other great performances, going so far as to speak in the character's voice even when he wasn't on the set. The result was a Day-Lewis performance completely unlike any he'd given before, making Bill a ferocious villain who rules the city by virtue of being the most ruthless monster to prowl the streets. Yet what makes the performance truly scary is his unpredictability, whether he's menacing his former lover with a set of throwing knives ("whoopsie-daisy!"), tap-tap-tapping a dagger against his glass eye, or standing over the body of a man he's just killed with a look-at-what-I-just-did smirk on his face. Day-Lewis has often spoken about how each performance makes him feel uneasy about whether he'll ever act again, and with such single-minded devotion to his craft it's little wonder that he feels that way. Yet it's also this devotion, coupled with Day-Lewis' genius, that makes each of his performances feel like a gift, and we undoubtedly have Scorsese to thank for making his subsequent performances -- including his towering turn as Daniel "Draaaaaaaaaaaaaaainage!" Plainview- possible. And you say his next movie is a musical? We can't wait.

ALEC BALDWIN in THE COOLER (2003)

When Alec Baldwin turned up in a supporting role in the 2003 Mike Myers vehicle The Cat in the Hat, reviewer David Edelstein wrote that, "The movie's grim subtext is the wreck of Baldwin's career — how puffy he looks, and how he never manages to rise above his material." One week later, The Cooler opened, and Baldwin was on his way to Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations for his smooth, multilayered performance as a Las Vegas casino operator who, to his surprise and despair, discovers that he does actually have a heart. Baldwin had always been something of an odd man out among Hollywood A-listers, a classic example of a character actor in a leading man's body: he seemed a little dull trying to play the action hero (The Hunt for Red October, The Shadow) or lover boy (Prelude to a Kiss) but seemed happily liberated whenever he got a crack at playing psychos (Miami Blues, The Juror) or scumbags (State and Main). His role in The Cooler was a personal breakthrough because it gave him the chance to play a scumbag (with psycho tendencies) who had the depth to find himself conflicted, and also to show off both his comic and dramatic chops to a new degree, leading indirectly to his full-blown career renaissance on TV's 30 Rock.

MARTIN LANDAU in TUCKER: THE MAN AND HIS DREAM (1988)

Landau, whose attention-getting performance as the assistant baddie in North by Northwest was followed by several seasons as the master of disguise on TV's Mission: Impossible, never flew as high in his early movie career as some of the names on this list, but he managed to fall farther than just about any of the others anyway. After leaving Mission: Impossible in a contract dispute and taking his wife and co-star Barbara Bain with him, Landau spent fifteen or so years adrift in horror and sci-fi pictures barely worthy of the name, as well as such august TV productions as The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan's Island and The Return of the Six Million Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman. Somehow, Coppola decided to throw him a lifeline when he was casting his long-deferred dream project about the car designer Preston Tucker, and Landau's performance -- a shaft of cranky warmth cutting like a light saber through a hollow movie, coming from an actor with a semi-familiar name but with a face so changed since the last time most viewers had seen him that he was all but unrecognizable -- is the only thing fondly remembered from that picture. Landau got an Oscar nomination and a leading role in Woody Allen's 1989 Crimes and Misdemeanors. He eventually did win an Oscar, for playing the washed-up, half-crazed Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood (1994). Speaking about that performance later, he was quick to give credit to his own years in the show business wilderness; they'd given him a pretty good idea of what Lugosi had gone through.

Click Here For Part One, Three, Four & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Paul Clark, Phil Nugent

21 Stars We Hate (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 20:30:00 GMT

TOM HANKS

I know, I know...this list is called “Stars We Hate,” and it’s hard to work up any real vitriol against Mr. Hanks: after all, he seems like a peach of a guy, he’s turned into a pretty good producer and he established an eternal place for himself in the cinematic canon as the voice of Woody in Toy Story 1 & 2. But let me ask you something: do you consider Tim “Buzz Lightyear” Allen a truly iconic movie star? The Cary Grant of his generation? No? Why not? Like Hanks, Allen also rose to fame as a likeable lug in a dumb sitcom, then made the leap to movies with a series of mostly terrible high concept comedies, give or take one undeniable classic apiece (Galaxy Quest for Allen, Big or Splash for Hanks, depending who you ask). And, like Hanks, you totally wouldn’t believe Allen as a dangerous tough guy mobster in Road To Perdition...although, wait, actually, I take that back: considering Tim Allen was busted with a pound of cocaine back in 1978, ratted out 21 drug dealers to avoid a life sentence and spent more than two years in prison, I’m guessing he’s got more than a little bit of a dark side, which makes him an interesting performer even though, for some reason, he’s mostly chosen to squander his talent on crap over the years. Hanks, on the other hand, is more ambitious and, in the “serious” half of his career, has generally chosen better material (three movies with Meg Ryan notwithstanding)...but the problem is there’s no there there: he’s just not that great an actor, no matter how many Best Actor awards he wins. Sure, he pulled the “lose a lot of weight” gimmick for Castaway, which puts him on par (at best) with Ethan Hawke and Christian Bale, who pulled the same trick for Alive and The Machinist, respectively (though neither of them won an Oscar for their efforts). Playing gay was just another award-winning acting gimmick for Hanks in Philadelphia: I never believed his performance for a second, just as I failed to believe his grizzled tough guy act in Perdition or Saving Private Ryan. At his best, in light comedy or light drama like Apollo 13, Hanks is akin to the guy who got all the starring roles in your high school drama club...appealingly bland in productions the audience is predisposed to like. But a modern-day Jimmy Stewart (as people who should know better insist on calling him)? Hardly. For one thing, Jimmy Stewart would never have subjected us to Bachelor Party or Forrest Gump.

DIANE KEATON

In certain quarters here at Nerve’s opulent Screengrab HQ, Diane Keaton is held not only to be not a bad actress, but in fact a rather good one. You will recall, because I know you read everything we post here every day, that she even appeared in the Honorable Mention section of our list of the Top 25 Leading Ladies of All Time. A gentlemanly raising prevents me from mentioning the name of the Screengrab contributor who placed Ms. Keaton into nomination; but I beg of you -- since I assume you all agree with me that Diane Keaton could not act her way out of a paper bag, or act her way into a paper bag, or even act in the general vicinity of a paper bag -- do not e-mail jibes and rotten fruit at this individual. He is a fine man, an insightful film writer, and an intelligent human being, but once, when we were shooting the back nine at Burning Tree, he caught a stray Ben Hogan right in the temple, and ever since then, he has been unable to recognize Diane Keaton’s fretfully obvious limitations as an actress. Starting out strong by playing Woody Allen’s most appealing muse in Annie Hall, she soon discovered that a career as a professional actress would require her to display emotions other than whimsy and peevishness, a task to which she was sadly unequal. Witness, for example, her performance in The Little Drummer Boy, a woefully overrated film in which she proves that as an actress, she is unable to convincingly portray an actress. Even in her biggest break, playing the insufferably Kay in the first two Godfather movies, her greatest accomplishment is to leave you feeling baffled as to what Michael Corleone – or, for that matter, Francis Ford Coppola – ever saw in her to begin with. Happily, since she has descended into middle age, she has been relegated to the kind of roles Hollywood tends to offer middle-aged women, which greatly reduces the odds that I will ever have to see her in anything ever again.

ANDIE MACDOWELL

Joe Queenan, one of film criticism’s greatest haters, once said of the enervating Penelope Ann Miller that “if she is still alive, Penelope Ann Miller is the worst actress alive. And if she is dead, good.” While I can’t say that I actively wish for Andie MacDowell’s death, I will say that if she were suddenly stricken with some horrible disease that prevented her from ever appearing in front of a camera again, I would send a hundred dollars to any charity vowing to prevent the disease from being cured. While I certainly can’t argue that Penelope Ann Miller is a horrendously bad actress, I will say that, unlike Andie MacDowell, she did not seem to have a knack for convincing talented directors to put her in good movies. While MacDowell's career started out poorly – in her debut role in Greystoke, she was out-acted by both a chimpanzee and Christopher Lambert, and she went on to be only the third most annoying thing about St. Elmo’s Fire – she somehow got herself cast as the lead in the otherwise excellent sex, lies and videotape, where she first showed her ability to flounder around helplessly while being outacted by every sentient creature in the vicinity. She went on to appear in Groundhog Day, where she was unable to convince me that Bill Murray would bother crossing the street for her, let alone turning back time. But her crowning crappiness was in Robert Altman’s wonderful Short Cuts, a movie whose greatness is evident in the fact that it survived being completely ground to a halt by her reading of a line -- in what was meant to be the movie’s most intensely emotional scene -- with all the passion of a piece of cardboard. I haven’t seen her in anything since she conned Wim Wenders into putting her in The End of Violence, but IMDB tells me that she’s spent the last 12 years making movies, just as if she weren’t the very worst actress in the world.

ROBERT REDFORD

If you look at some of Redford's early supporting performances in movies such as Inside Daisy Clover and The Chase, or even his earlier guest shots on such TV shows as The Twilight Zone and Route 66, you see a self-aware guy with a sly wit and the ability to sketch out a character in a few quick strokes. What happened? He turned into a politician, focusing public attention on his support for good causes ranging from the environment to independent filmmaking and taking longer and longer breaks from the screen. It's good to have interests, but the thing is, the breaks from the screen eventually seemed to be continuing even when he was on screen. From the moment that he (belatedly) became a big star on the back of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Redford's acting became more and more minimalistic, until you began to suspect that he put out so little for fear of expressing something that might alienate or cool off a single member of his target demographic. At the same time, what looked like simple vanity was eating into and damaging his movies in big ways (such as his inability to connect with Mia Farrow in The Great Gatsby) and small (such as his refusal to allow his character to receive a jailhouse haircut when he's undercover in a barbaric Southern prison in Brubaker.) Redford made his name at the moment when Hollywood was suddenly deluged with new "ethnic" stars such as Pacino, De Niro, and Dustin Hoffman, as well as stars who fell far outside the pretty-boy category, such as Gene Hackman, and for decades Redford got first pick of the glamorous, man of few words golden boy romantic lead roles in old-fashioned films such as Out of Africa and the benighted Havana because he was thought to be the closest thing left to a star in that mold. Which is fine, but it's surprising that so smart a guy would have wanted those roles, especially given that he didn't devote much time to doing anything else. (Maybe all that shampoo ate into his brain.) Whether as an actor (The Last Castle, Up Close and Personal, Spy Game), a director (The Legend of Bagger Vance), or both (The Horse Whisperer, Lions for Lambs), his films of the last several years couldn't be more beside the point. He faces the end of his career in the very odd position of being a hero to young independent filmmakers at the film festival his Sundance Institute sponsors rather than for any movies he's actually worked on.

BRAD PITT

Pitt became America's sweetheart through his role as the one night stand of Geena Davis' dreams in Thelma and Louise, but the thing about one night stands is you're never supposed to have to see them again. It didn't take too many leading roles to reveal that Pitt couldn't act a lick, but it was easy to sympathize with all the people who didn't mind so long as they got to rest their eyes on him for a couple of hours. However, two factors made Pitt's superstardom more grating than the success of most fabulously good-looking untalented people: first, a lot of people, some of them movie critics, liked looking at him so much that they actually started talking as if he were in fact one hell of an actor, and not just a skillful master of his craft, but rather some kind of high-flying hip icon, earning him the respect of people who wouldn't cross the street to piss on, say, Keanu Reeves; and, second, for a while he seemed to think that he had something to prove, so after being content to flash his teeth and his six-pack in Thelma and Louise, A River Runs Through It, and Legends of the Fall, he actually started taking on challenging roles in creatively ambitious projects, and in the course of time showed that he had it in him to be a real menace. To see Pitt trying to break new acting ground in 12 Monkeys, Se7en and Interview with the Vampire (where he mostly succeeded in making his co-star, Tom Cruise, look better than he ever had before, albeit by comparison) is to experience the same kind of flush of emotions one might feel watching a drunken monkey juggle plastic explosives. When he has no idea what to do, as in most of Vampire, he pouts as if the director just hit him with a yardstick and bruised his winkie. When, God help us, he's fully confident and going for broke, as in 12 Monkeys, his uncontrolled spasm of a performance makes you fear for his co-workers. During the late '90s, in such films as Seven Days in Tibet and Meet Joe Black, he did seem to find his true niche, getting paid kajillions of dollars to star in unbelievably long, misconceived movies that nobody would see. And he gave what will likely stand as his best-remembered performance in Fight Club, in which he was well-cast as a violent lunatic's vainest projection of his imaginary self-image. Time, money, and acclaim seem to have mellowed him, and the on-screen company of George Clooney and Angelina Jolie has been good for him; in the Danny Ocean pictures and Mr. and Mrs. Smith, he's been content to hang around on screen like a handsome lump, allowing the filmmakers to tap into his proven box office appeal while leaving the heavy lifting to his more gifted co-stars. But on those occasions where he's attempted to re-affirm his acting stature by impersonating Achilles or Jess James -- well, he still pouts real good.

Click Here For Part One, Part Three & Part Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent

Take Five: Stoned

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Oliver Stone's hastily assembled, curiously timed film biography of George W. Bush, W., opens everywhere today. "Why?" is a question for the ages; Bush is not only still alive, he's still President of the United States, and the movie was completed before one of the major events of his administration actually happened. Couldn't Stone have waited a few years? After all, Jim Morrison had been in the ground for two decades before Stone got around to making a crappy movie about him. Our own Scott Von Doviak has already done the heavy lifting of actually seeing W., and his review suggests that it's another non-triumph for Ollie; but in this case, as much as we may find the guy off-putting, Take Five comes to praise Stone, not to bury him. As we do every time he comes out with a new movie, we float our favorite theory about the man: that he's actually a very good writer who failed upwards and became a very mediocre director, a living example of the Peter Principle. With the sole (and bewildering) exception of Evita, Oliver Stone hasn't written a movie he didn't also direct in over twenty years; but lest we forget, in his early years, Stone was considered a top-notch screenwriter who was expert at plucking the key themes out of someone else's vision -- making them lean, mean, and, perhaps most memorably, violent in an incredibly compelling way. So today, we're going to look at five movies which Stone didn't direct, but whose screenplays he fully or partly wrote -- almost all of which we like more than most of the films where he was behind the camera.

MIDNIGHT EXPRESS (1978)

Directed by the erratic Alan Parker, the infamous, controversial Midnight Express was a 32-year-old Oliver Stone's first major motion picture as a screenwriter. It went on to become a huge box office success, as well as spurring a major moral panic over drug smuggling and making the words "Turkish prison" as paralyzing as an ice cube down the back of the shirt. Unsurprisingly, in later years, it became clear that Stone's screenplay was a wildly over-the-top exaggeration full of fabrications, distortions and outright nonsense, despite its claim of being based on a true story; even the real-life Billy Hayes repudiated it. But that was, and to some extent still is, the genius of Oliver Stone: he could extrapolate the juciest meat of a story and sizzle it up into an absurd paranoid fantasy you couldn't help but devour.

CONAN THE BARBARIAN (1982)

Still, in our opinion, the greatest thing that Oliver Stone has ever done, the hugely underrated Conan the Barbarian found him paired in the screenwriting duties with director John Milius. Milius, an unabashed right-wing war hawk and suspected crypto-fascist, had a habit of butting heads with '60s liberals like Stone, with the conflict bringing out the best in both of them; he'd previously worked with Francis Ford Coppola, even more of a lefty than Stone, on Apocalypse Now, and their diametrically opposed viewpoints about the Vietnam War resulted in a crazed masterpiece. Conan is no less so; Stone's cynical pro-civilization standpoint and Milius' joyously pro-barbarian views resulted in a movie that is uncannily faithful to Robert E. Howard's violent, amoral books.

SCARFACE (1983)

Even to Brian DePalma's most vociferous defenders -- a dwindling number in which we count ourselves members in good standing -- there is a general recognition that Scarface, his updating of the 1930s gangster classic to the Miami drug trade days, isn't actually a very good movie. But it is a very important movie, insofar as it influenced dozens of later thug-life pictures both better and worse than it was; and, what's more, for its many, many failings, it's a compulsively watchable movie. Even if you know about its overblown performances, its ridiculous ending, and its general sense of aimlessness and enervation, you hardly ever want to turn it off. And a lot of that is down to screenwriter Oliver Stone, who crammed it full of so many hilariously quotable lines that it became the biggest influence on hip-hop since James Brown.

YEAR OF THE DRAGON (1985)

Michael Cimino and Oliver Stone have been tied together by fate since early on. They share similar styles and similar obsessions, and both were rumored for many years as wanting to do a remake of the woozy film version of Ayn Rand's ridiculous novel, The Fountainhead. The one time they worked together was on 1985's Year of the Dragon, a film in which all of their strengths and weaknesses were apparent. Just before giving full voice to his Vietnam experiences in Platoon, Stone hints at them here, constantly and darkly; his dialogue is often flat and creaky, as opposed to the gloriously lurid bombshells of Scarface, but his characters and scenarios compliment Cimino's hyperactive sense of busy detail and rhetorical bombast, and he plays on themes of male bonding and sudden violence as a social actor that he'd later explore as a director.

8 MILLION WAYS TO DIE (1986)

The last movie Stone would write for a director other than himself (aside from the aforementioned Evita, to which his contributions were minimal) was Hal Ashby's 8 Million Ways to Die, a movie reviled by many but regarded by others as a miniature masterpiece that doesn't get nearly the attention it deserves. Whatever the case, its favors -- which, for its defenders, include some gorgeously lurid violence and dialogue so scuzzy it borders on the beautiful, as well as a nice lead performance by Jeff Bridges -- are hard to discern under lots of muddle. Did Ashby really direct, or did Stone take over when he was fired? Did Stone really write, or is Robert Towne responsible for the script Stone could no longer handle when he ended up behind the camera? We may never know; and a lot of people simply don't care.

Related Posts:

Dissecting/Debating W.

Stone vs. Iran, Round 2

Thursday Morning Poll for October 2, 2008

Paul Clark — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Last week, Screengrab’s intrepid writing staff unveiled its list of the greatest war movies ever made, and topping our list was Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion. But when we asked the readers to pick their favorite, they settled upon something a little more American. So cue up the Wagner and break out your surfboard, because according to our readership, the greatest war movie of all is none other than Francis Ford Coppola’s incendiary Apocalypse Now, which outpaced Renoir’s film 33% to 25%. Tying for #3 were Robert Altman’s MASH and Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory with 17% apiece, and bringing up the rear was Casablanca, a fine movie but undoubtedly the least war movie-ish of the bunch.

This week, we remember the late Paul Newman. Earlier today, we ran our picks of Newman’s greatest performances, and now we’ll let you choose your favorites from our top five choices. Which of these films represented Newman’s finest hours?

Favorite Paul Newman performance? | BuzzDash polls

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

That Guy! Special "Godfather" Edition, Part Five

Phil Nugent — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 16:00:00 GMT

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

TALIA SHIRE: The world of the Corleones is one that shuts out its women. Their job is to produce and raise the children, and they are basically treated as children, to remain innocent and untainted by knowledge of what their family's prosperity is based on--as if they could really not know, or as if there could be absolution in ignorance. The big exception is Michael's sister Connie, played by Francis Ford Coppola's sister, Talia Shire. (One advantage of this side of the casting is that Coppola instinctively understood how to get guys to act like brothers to a little sister. James Caan says that Coppola would engineer situations on the set, asking Caan to shoo away some bastard who was "bothering" Talia; it was only later that Caan realized that Coppola was psyching him up for the big scene where Caan's Sonny, after seeing bruises on his sister's face, performs a little marriage counseling by tracking down his brother-in-law and stomping a mudhole in his ass.) Maybe because he didn't want to seem to be playing favorites, Coppola treated Shire's character a little negligently in the first film; she doesn't really threaten to rise above the level of a victim and a plot function until her big explosion at the end, screaming that Michael has had her husband killed. But in Part II, she enters the movie like a house on fire, a fabulously turned out slightly-older woman who's going to do whatever it takes to embarrass the family she blames for wrecking her life, even if that means she has to hang out with Troy Donahue. Eventually she wears herself out with her own acting out and returns to the nest, and by the time of Part III, she's more active plotter than Michael. She has her ideas about how things ought to be done and takes full advantage of all the perks she figures she has coming to her as blood relation. And nobody is going to take her out in a rowboat and put one in her head while it's bowed in prayer.

The Godfather is one of two big movie franchises that dominate Shire's filmography. The other is the Rocky series, where she played Adrian, the ugly duckling who became the hero's loyal wife, hanging in there from the 1976 original through to Rocky V in 1990. (Her absence from the 2006 Rocky Balboa is explained by her character's death from, in the tasteful words of her widower, "da woman cancer.") Although she was perfectly charming in the first Rocky movie, the role called for her to return to the likable-mouse range of the first Godfather movie, and in invited audiences to like her for being so drably unimaginative and for being faithfully devoted to America's Lug. The success of Rocky did lead to her having, for a few months from 1979 to early 1980, a brief fling as a leading lady, but the movies she starred in--the uneven and off-putting Old Boyfriends and the terrible horror pictures Prophecy and Windows (which is the only film directed by Godfather cinematographer Gordon Willis, and which cast Shire as the target of a dangerous lesbian stalker played Elizabeth Ashley)--were such bombs that they left Shire open to public ridicule. The whole experience may have let her a little gun-shy; for the next ten years or so, she didn't stray far from Rocky's apron strings, and though she has continued working pretty steadily in recent years, she seems to have a pretty good sense for picking scripts whose finished films will scarcely see the light of day. I suspect that Shire may still have some surprises in her, but it remains to be seen whether anyone will arrange for them to be turned loose.

G. D. SPRADLIN: A big believer in the value of a varied CV, the Oklahoma-born Spradlin was an attorney, an independent oil man, and a politician before turning professional actor in his mid-forties. He had already built up an impressive roll call of intimidating but not always trustworthy authority figures--cops, doctors, politicians, military officers--before Coppola brought him on board to play Senator Pat Geary, a man who the Senate doorkeeper can't introduce with the words "the honorable..." without dissolving in giggles. Having earned his place in movie history, Spradlin continued to play admirals, sports coaches (including, in the 1979 North Dallas Forty, a character said to be modeled on Tom Landry), and even, in his last job before his official retirement in 1999, Ben Bradlee in the cross-eyed Watergate spoof Dick. All of these roles now seem informed by the fact that the man onscreen once set his nastiest sneer in place to go head to head with Michael Corleone, and that it took a bloody bed full of dead girl to make him blink, and shudder. Especially worthy of mention is his other job for Coppola, in Apocalypse Now, where he plays the general who gives Martin Sheen his assignment up river, and where his sad, weary face--the face of a man who by God will do the job he signed on to do, but at the time he signed on he sure didn't know he was going to be doing this shit--is like a red flag to the star, and maybe to the audience. Whatever happens next, you can't look into those eyes and say that you weren't given fair warning.

LENNY MONTANA: Six feet six inches tall and not whisper-thin, Montana (nee' Lenny Passofaro) worked as a bouncer and is rumored to have had some kind of mob connections before he entered show business as a professional wrestler, where he worked under the names Lenny the Bull, Zebra Man, and Chief Chickawicki. Lenny was 45 when he made his movie debut in The Godfather playing Luca Brasi, the old family enforcer who didn't expect to be invited to his boss's daughter's wedding. If the scene in which Luca thanks Don Corleone for having been so honored had been played and shot as written, it might have been less memorable. As it turned out, Lenny the Bull was so starstruck by Marlon Brando that he couldn't be in Brando's presence for two seconds without looking as if he were going to shit his pants and maybe bleed from the eyes a little, so after all attempts to calm him down failed, Coppola reconceived the scene: in the finished product, Luca is so overwhelmed by the Don's willingness to let him enter his home through the front door in broad daylight, and so unused to social interaction that doesn't involve threatening to leave someone with fewer body parts than he had when he showered that morning, that he has laboriously prepared a written speech for the occasion, which he has trouble getting out even in the sealed labratory conditions of the Don's office. In Lenny's other big scene, he gets to have a drink with some fellows who pin his hand to the bar with a knife and then garrote him, and Lenny played it as if getting throttled with piano wire came much more naturally to him than wedding-day small talk. Given the massive international success of The Godfather and Lenny's easily recognizable face and physique, is it any wonder that his acting debut did lead to other offers? He appeared in James Toback's Fingers, a TV film starring Frank Sinatra called Contract on Cherry Street, the Jackie Chan vehicle The Big Brawl, the Steve Martin hit The Jerk, and Robert Aldrich's ...All the Marbles, as well as in such trivia as the Italian spoof The Funny Face of the Godfather. He even took a co-writing credit on one of his last films, Blood Song, a horror flick that co-starred Richard Jaeckel and Frankie Avalon. His artistic vision more or less fulfilled, Lenny retired from the screen that year and died in Italy in 1992.

Screengrab Presents: The Top 25 War Films (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 22:00:00 GMT

5. PATHS OF GLORY (1957)

One of Stanley Kubrick’s earlier films, Paths of Glory stands as both a link to his later style and a curious anomaly. While it contains many of the technical hallmarks of his later work, often in embryonic form, it also bears – at least partly thanks to notorious pulp novelist Jim Thompson, who Kubrick recruited to whip the screenplay into shape – an incredibly powerful emotional resonance that belies his later reputation as a cool, bloodless artisan. Paths of Glory is set during the grimmest stretches of the First World War, at a time when the French army was said to practice a variant of decimation in order to prevent desertion and insubordination as the troops increasingly perceived the war to be a pointless and horrid waste of lives. Colonel Dax, played with uncharacteristic depth by Kirk Douglas, is ordered to lead his men on a charge that goes disastrously awry; following a battle scene legendary for its grim, ugly, almost sightless realism, his commanding officer, to save face, orders a quartet of men – chosen for no other reason than that they are largely friendless and undesirable – executed for cowardice. More than Kubrick’s first great film, Paths of Glory also marks a turning point in the way modern cinema treats war, and the movie’s unforgettable final scene provides an emotionally troubling catharsis, as doomed men are serenaded by a captured German woman (played by an actress, Susanne Christian, whom Kubrick would later marry), that is one of the most devastating punches in war cinema.

4. M*A*S*H (1970)

Ask someone – ask anyone – to name the greatest film about the Korean War, and they’ll tell you it’s Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H. The only problem is, M*A*S*H isn’t about Korea at all. Robert Altman clearly intended it to refer, in all its blackly funny glory, to the then-raging war in Vietnam. However, 20th Century Fox, already nervous about how the film would be received, understandably panicked at the thought that this hilariously subversive treatment of the madness of war and the use of near-nihilistic dark comedy as the only reasonable response to it. Altman, who by his own lights “had practice working for people who don’t care about quality, and I learned to sneak it in”, had utterly failed to mention Korea at all, so the studio stuck in a title card in post-production and added some clumsy radio announcements that made it clear to Mr. & Mrs. America that no, this was a different Asian anti-communist crusade. Their minds eased, Mr. & Mrs. A took the movie to heart – or at least didn’t demand the public immolation of its director; the next thing you know, the movie was turned into a beloved ‘70s sitcom that maintained the formal structure of the movie, if none of its deeply antisocial content. If M*A*S*H has been superseded as an anti-war film, or as even an uplifted middle finger to authority, it’s still the funniest war movie ever made.

3. CASABLANCA (1942)

If Casablanca is no longer the consensus pick as the greatest movie of all time – and there are plenty of people who will make a damn convincing case that it is – it’s at least one of the very few films that almost everyone agrees is great. And that’s especially surprising, because it’s not only a war film, but one made during wartime – hardly an environment conducive to greatness. But while it’s never particularly subtle (even people who have never seen it know within the first hour that the self-centered Rick is eventually going to stick his neck out and do what’s right), it’s simply so jam-packed with greatness that its power cannot be denied. Skillfully directed, beautifully filmed, and crammed with so many iconic performances that it’s practically a primer on what good acting looked like in the Golden Age of Hollywood, Casablanca is also, amazingly, a fiercely patriotic picture that manages, through sheer force of its goodwill and beauty, to not come across as jingoistic. Roger Ebert once wrote, in his review of Paths of Glory, that the folk song performed by the German woman at that film’s end was the ultimate condemnation of patriotism, just as the triumphant singing of “Le Marseillaise” at Rick’s Café is the ultimate celebration of it. Unlike many of the greatest war films, Casablanca never makes you wonder if it’s all worth it or which side you should be on; but unlike many of the worst war films, it also doesn’t make you feel dirty for cheering on the good guys, or cheat you into a false sense of smugness. It’s the purest expression of the notion of a good war, and sometimes, that’s not so bad.

2. APOCALYPSE NOW (1979)

"My film is not a movie. My film is not about Vietnam. My film is Vietnam." That sounds like a crazy person talking, and it must have been a crazy person who made Apocalypse Now, surely the greatest "war as acid trip" movie ever made. Who among us is not intimately familiar with all the Stations of the Cross by now, from "Saigon. Shit." to "Charlie don't surf" to "I love the smell of napalm in the morning" and finally, "The horror. The horror"? There's no point trying to defend Coppola's greatest folly in terms of coherent narrative or classical Hollywood structure -- you're either aboard for the ride with Willard, Chief, Clean and the rest, or you're reaching for your new set of Godfather DVDs. Even among those of us for whom Apocalypse was a formative experience in mind-expanding cinema, it's clear that the finished product teeters on the brink between genius and nonsense, and you need only spend an evening with the misguided Apocalypse Now Redux to see how thin the line between the two actually is. But the ambition, spectacle, weirdness, and pure guts of the original version is more than enough to secure it a place of honor on my list of desert island discs.

1. GRAND ILLUSION (1937)

Jean Renoir's masterpiece uses a pair of actors with grand theatrical styles, Erich von Stroheim and Pierre Fresnay, and France's leading exponent of the unadorned, working-class style, Jean Gabin, and by putting them together in a prison camp during World War I, means to convey a powerful anti-war message of universal brotherhood. In this it was so successful that the Nazis ordered all the prints be seized after they marched into France. For years the film was thought to be lost, and Renoir, who really had hoped to have some detrimental impact on the coming of World War II, felt that he had as much solid proof that he had failed as any filmmaker had ever had. Instead of bringing us world peace, he had to settle for having made one of the four of five greatest movies in history, the poor sap.

Click Here for Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Six & Part Seven

Contributors: Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

Mickey Rourke Gets Up Off the Canvas

Phil Nugent — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 15:00:00 GMT

As the opening of the New York Film Festival draws near and with it, the American premiere of Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler, Scott Foundas checks in with the movie's star, Mickey Rourke. Given the reception to Aronofsky's last movie, The Fountain, his new one (which won the Best Film prize at the recent Venice Film Festival) would qualify as a back-from-the-dead comeback even if it starred Michael Phelps, but the fact that it's a Mickey Rourke movie--the first time that Rourke has claimed the starring role in a full-length, non-multiple-story movie in many a moon--makes it even bigger news. Looking back to his early days, when he moved from Miami to New York with an itch to act, Rourke recalls, ""I wanted to be like Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Chris Walken, and Harvey Keitel. I wanted to be a really great actor. And if I worked really, really fucking hard, maybe one day I could do that. And I worked really, really hard. I had no social life. I lived like a monk. For weeks on end, I slept on the couch at the Actors Studio, working on scenes nonstop." And when he followed up his scene-stealing small role as an arsonist named Teddy in Body Heat with his performance as the overgrown tomcat Boogie in the ensemble picture Diner, a lot of people were very impressed with his charisma, his seductiveness, his "look into my eyes" audience rapport, and his ability to overcome playing characters with really dopey names. Thinking back on what happened next, Rourke says, "I look at these guys like Matt Damon, George Clooney, Sean Penn—they're all very bright, educated guys who understand that it's a business and there's politics involved. I wasn't educated or aware enough. I thought I was so good I didn't have to play the game. And I was terribly wrong."

Here, as in his other post-crash interviews, Rourke is admirable in his insistence on blaming himself for screwing up his career. Still, talk of office politics can scarcely convey how weirdly Rourke began to handle himself, and to style himself, as soon as he began to get a little control over his movie roles. In such horndog entertainments as 9 1/2 Weeks and Wild Orchid, he seemed to be trying to prove that, given the right wardrobe, leading ladies, and exotic locales, even a Miami boy could qualify as Eurotrash. In Angel Heart and Barfly, he continued to bang away at his female co-stars like a screen door during a typhoon, while also demonstrating his "authenticity" as a manly Method actor by reporting to work looking as if he'd been tied to the back bumper of a jeep and dragged through a swamp. All this time, he was living far beyond his means and turning down roles in movies that might have made his status in Hollywood a lot sturdier. Meanwhile, stories about his unmanageable behavior on the set and the storm surrounding his on-again, off-again marriage to his Wild Orchid co-star Carre' Otis (who accused, and then non-accused him, of spousal abuse) were helping to turn him into a joke. Rourke dates the point of no return to his decision to co-star with Don Johnson in the 1991 Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man. The movie was a critically derided bomb, and for once Rourke, who had done it because he desperately needed the money, couldn't claim to have had any grand artistic hopes for the finished product. "They paid me a lot of money, and I went fuckin' bonkers because I sold out and I hated myself for it. Some kind of anger kicked off, about the fact that I'd put myself in a position to have to do that movie. The demons took over." Rourke's sense of shame over having done the kind of movie that most stars routinely laugh off drove him to abandon acting for several years and take up professional boxing, a sport he had practiced as an amateur back in the early seventies. (Although Rourke remains vague about his age, he must have been around forty when he climbed back into the ring.) Eventually he started shopping around for movie roles again, having concluded a physical testing that one hopes did more good for his soul than it did for his face. He was very funny as a self-pampering, sleazeball lawyer in Francis Ford Coppola's adaptation of the John Grisham thriller The Rainmaker. He worked a long time filming a good-sized role in Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line, but sadly, his whole performance was edited out of the movie. He played the villain in the Tsui Hark film Double Team, which co-starred Jean Claude Van Damme and Dennis Rodman, but sadly, his performance stayed in the movie.

Rourke's real salvation came from fellow actors who, when they took their own turns directing movies, reached out to him as a worthy brother in need. In small roles as a bookie in Vincent Gallo's Buffalo 66, as a prison drag queen in Steve Buscemi's Animal Factory, and as a man who can't get past his daughter's murder in Sean Penn's The Pledge, Rourke was given the chance to demonstrate both his range and, especially in the Penn film, his daring willingness to go very deep emotionally while remaining handsomely in control of his effects as an actor. In 1994, Rourke had been too occupied with boxing to say yes when Quentin Tarantino invited him to play the Bruce Willis part in Pulp Fiction. Now, Tarntino's sidekick Robert Rodriguez cast him in a small role in Once Upon a Time in Mexico and then in a biggerm, showier (and CGI-augmented) one in Sin City, a movie whose most awesome special effect was Rourke's ability to make his presence felt through all that latex and computer trickery. But in the eyes of the suits, he was still unbankable and probably insurable.

But Aronofsky and his screenwriter, Robert D. Siegel, had planned The Wrestler with Rourke in mind, and when Rourke agreed to meet the director, Aronofsky gave him what sounds like one hell of a pep talk. As Rourke describes it, "He sits down, and for the first five minutes, he tells me how I fucked up my whole career for 15 years behaving like this, and I'm agreeing with everything. Yes, I did. That's why I haven't worked for 15 years, and I've been working real hard not to make those mistakes... He goes: 'You have to listen to everything I say. You have to do everything I tell you. You can never disrespect me. And you can't be hanging out at the clubs all night long. And I can't pay you.' And I'm thinking: 'This fucker must be talented, because he's got a lot of nerve to say that.' " But Aronofsky discovered that he couldn't get the movie funded without a big star, and when Rourke was told that he was going to be out of the picture, part of him was relieved, ""because I knew that Darren wanted me to revisit these dark places, these painful places." Then suddenly, he was back in again. If Rourke had any complaints about the resulting collaboration, he's keeping them to himself. "He knew how to push my buttons," he says of Aronofsky. "I do a take, and I nail it. I look over at Darren and I think: 'OK, we're moving on.' And he walks over to me and says: 'Do it better.' And you know what surprised me? I did it again, and I did it better. He knew that if he challenged me, that's what I wanted. A lot of people don't like that; me, I need it."

Face/Off: "The Godfather Part III"

Phil Nugent — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 18:00:00 GMT

["Face/Off" is a recurring feature in which two Screengrab regulars who on their friendliest day couldn't agree on whether or not the sun is hot trade reactions to a movie. This week, in tribute to the release of "The Godfather: The Coppola Restoration" on DVD and Blu-Ray, Sarah Clyne Sundberg and Phil Nugent attempt to set each other straight on "The Godfather Part III."]

SARAH CLYNE SUNDBERG:OK Phil, here she goes:

I think The Godfather: Part III is a great movie. There, I said it. It has always been a bit of a mystery to me why it is so maligned by just about anyone who thinks they know anything about movies.

I also love the two previous Godfathers, but what would the cycle be without Part III? Part II suffers from the common mid-trilogy malaise of the confused and incomplete story arc. Part III, like the first Godfather movie, is a stand-alone.

The Godfather: Part III is a movie by a middle-aged man about people past their prime looking, back on their regrets. We see the extent of Michael Corleone's fall from young idealistic college boy. We get inside his head and see his disgust at his own corruption and at that of humanity in general. The Vatican is utterly unholy, as are the highest reaches of the "legitimate" business world to which he once aspired. His American dream has turned to shit. The dream house on lake Tahoe is in ruins.

Michael's curse is surviving. He will die among the tomatoes and the olives in Sicily. Utterly alone. Unlike his father, there are no grandchildren to make orange-peel false teeth for.

It isn't subtle but who watches The Godfather for subtlety? Who can't relate to Michael's pain at the way things turned out? Who doesn't feel a tug at the heartstrings when Michael and Kay talk about how it all went wrong?

One common complaint is Sofia Coppola's acting. Yeah, her delivery could be better. But she is playing a rich and vapid teenage girl. She isn't supposed to come off as heartfelt and deep. How about that scene where Andy Garcia's character asks, "Who's your father?" and she bats her big heavy eyelids and goes, "I'll give you a hint, he's Italian." Can't mess with that. Moreover, she's so amazingly beautiful to look at that everything else is beside the point. The movie as a whole is easy on the eyes. Take that scene on the steps of the opera house in Palermo: Loved ones shot down, the Anglo ex-wife howling like a Sicilian widow. What other way could one possibly wrap up a story like this?

PHIL NUGENT: Sarah,

There are a lot of niggling little problems with The Godfather Part III that I could niggle over, but the movie was released almost twenty years ago, to a movie press that did have its knives out, and most of those nits have been well picked already. So I'll jump right ahead to what looks to be our core disagreement: the idea that the story that Coppola had already lavished so much time on needed completing. I think that The Godfather Part II is about as great as movies get, and I don't think it left anything unresolved that needed resolving. You can leave the theater or switch off the DVD wondering what Michael Corleone did with himself to kill whatever time he had left to him, but he's a hollow shell and a lost soul, beyond redemption. Wherever you pinpoint the moment at which his soul turned to ash--whether it was when he shot up that restaurant or saw his first wife blown up or cast his second wife out of his life or ordered a hit on his own harmless dope of a surviving brother--he's sunk deep into the life that he was determined to forswear at the start of the first film, and he ain't coming back. It's the logical conclusion to his story and the point at which his life can yield no further meaning.

For some of us, the truly awful thing about The Godfather, Part III is that it betrays what Coppola and Pacino achieved in the first two movies. They didn't get around to making it until they'd both had the chance to discover that the career apotheosis they'd enjoyed between 1972 and 1974 is not the natural order of things, and they allowed their nostalgia for their own better days to get to them and took it as a license to go soft on the character of Michael Corleone. Now he's a loving old booger with a Gertrude Stein haircut who keeps Kay (Diane Keaton), the outsider he ran out of his house on a rail, standing around in the hallway oozing tolerant acceptance. It's not clear what exactly he's been up to in the twenty years left unaccounted for since the end of the second picture and the beginning of this one, though he does have the overscaled self-righteous self-pity of a man who gave filmmaking a try and doesn't understand why his visually ambitious adaptations of S. E. Hinton movels weren't better received. But even if he was busy building hospitals for Mother Teresa in the off-season, the movie shows an unseemly eagerness to let him off the hook. With no transitional explanation, he's gone from being a monster to a man whose worst failing is that, with all the millions of dollars at his disposal and all those button men to order around, he was unable to defeat his powerful enemies from murdering the Pope.

There are some good things in this movie that don't get talked about enough. Talia Shire's Connie's transformation into the widowed Lady Macbeth of the Upper East Side is the one piece of characterization that represents a strong, believable, and compelling line from the first movie to the last, and the cold fire in her eyes could make the Cloverfield monster remember that he has urgent business in another hemisphere. And though Sofia Coppola's performance isn't nearly as strong, it's nice to see someone sticking up for. When GF III opened, Sofia Coppola took the brunt of the harsh criticism like a beachhead taking a tsunami. Sofia was pushed into appearing in the movie after Winona Ryder dropped out, and having a bunch of assholes in the press and on TV sneer at you and accuse you of not having done as good a job as Winona freaking Ryder would have done is a hell of a punishment for having tried to humor Daddy. I don't think she's very good in the movie--would it have killed Daddy to have at least sprung for a vocal coach?-- but she's a great camera subject and has a touching presence, and she's very winnable in those little moments like the one where, all yearning uncertainty, she tells Andy Garcia, "I love you, cuz." She did not have a great acting career ahead of her, but I take some satisfaction in the fact that, eighteen years later, her place in contemporary film history seems a lot more secure than Winona Ryder's.

SARAH CLYNE SUNDBERG: First of all, stopping at The Godfather: Part II would be ludicrous. Everybody knows that the important things in life come in threes: The golden era Supremes, the patriarchs, the Three Stooges.

It looks like our fundamental disagreement is over whether or not there is a worthwhile story left to tell at the end of Part II.

The way I see it is as follows: Beside the blood and the gore and the cannoli, the Godfather is a fairly universal story about life.

Most of the times our lives don't turn out the way we wanted. Like Michael Corleone everyone with half a heart is an idealist when they are young. Like Michael Corleone everybody with half a brain learns that they are no less corrupt and compromised than other people and certainly not than their parents. Life then, like The Godfather is about learning to face yourself and the world despite the inherent disappointment and imperfection. This is why Part III is vital.

You are right. It isn't clear exactly what Michael Corleone has been up to since we last saw him. But it is fair to assume he hasn't been building hospitals for Mother Teresa. His medal of honor from the Vatican is meant to indicate the corruption of the Catholic Church, rather than the goodness of Michael Corleone's business activities.

Perhaps he is in some sense a monster. An aged monster. But also just a petty little man. He goes to confession for the first time in years. He knows and we know and the priest knows there is no absolution for what he has done. Still, he's got to go on living, he's got to get a long with his family.

Analogy: The holocaust happened, we still have to live in the world. I can sit in Berlin in 2008 and enjoy a beer and a beautiful sunset. These to concepts don't exclude each other. Dealing with the contradictions is what being human is all about. The Godfather: Part III is a movie about two middle-aged men, by two middle aged men, about how to keep living in the face of overwhelming evidence that most things turn to shit.

This is what makes The Godfather: Part III a story worth telling. A life that ends at thirty or forty is but half a life, after all.

PHIL NUGENT: Half a life? I'm aiming to live to a hundred sixty myself. For one thing, I'm looking forward to seeing a new home video release of The Godfather movies, with each successive release being hailed as the first one that does the movies justice and makes all its predecessors look like dogshit, every seven or eight years. I figure that by 2140, they'll have it tweaked to the point that I can reach out and give Apollonia a shoulder massage. But my own longevity aside, I tend to think that most stories reach a logical stopping point long before everybody, or even just the main character, dies. I think The Godfather Part III itself does that: I wish to God they'd faded to black on the scene with Pacino and Sofia on the steps and not shoved in that unnecessary last shot of Pacino toppling off the bench. (Couldn't they at least have hired Ruth Buzzi to come in to sit next to him and occasion the toppling by hitting him with her handbag?)

I'll say this, though: it's definitely a tribute to the power of these movies that it's understandable that people could come out of the sixth hour in the company of these characters and feel that they hadn't gotten enough. (And with the flashbacks in Part II, Coppola managed to make the telling of the lead-in to the story as compelling as spinning it out further. Though he couldn't have known it at the time, this meant that he got to trump George Lucas, who did okay with the Star Wars sequels, but with the prequels, not so much.) It's not as if he's spent the last twenty-five years fighting off demands from the studios that he let them pay him to make Rumble Fish II. And I have to respect Coppola's insistence on treating the third one as if it were part of the family, keeping it included in the box sets. (He could easily weasel his way out of doing that by saying that the point of the re-issues is the restoration of the originals, and that Part III, which was made more recently with pretty current technology, is already available in an acceptable format and doesn't require the same herculean restoration labors as the older films, which were made with a since discontinued color process.) Coppola has done everything short of piss mercury to expand on his cinematic legacy since 1974, and while many of the movies he's made since then have their supporters, none of them have gone very far in denting the impression that he was basically put on Earth to make movies about the Corleones. I guess he ought to have some say in deciding how many of these movies there are.

That Guy! Special "Godfather" Edition, Part Two

Phil Nugent — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 16:00:00 GMT

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

RICHARD CASTELLANO: Squat, fat, and fleshy, Castellano casts a broad shadow as the loyal Corleone lieutenant Clemenza. Castellano, who is said to have ad-libbed his best-remembered line--the sage advice, "Leave the gun, take the cannoli."-- makes such a strong impression in The Godfather, and is so memorable because of his work in it, that it's kind of dumbfounding to realize how little else he left behind on film. After almost a decade or so of small parts in movies, TV, and the theater, his big break came with a role in the Joseph Bologna-Renee Taylor play Lovers and Others Strangers; he was nominated for a Tony Award for it, then won an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor when he recreated his performance for the movie version in 1970. His breakout success as Clemenza led to a string of starring roles in failed TV sitcoms (The Super, Joe and Sons) and supporting roles in Godfather knockoffs, such as the TV movies Incident on a Dark Street and Honor Thy Father (based on Gay Talese's nonfiction bestseller) and the short-lived dramatic series The Gangster Chronicles. Castellano maneuvered himself out of what should have been his one sure shot at a triumphant follow-up, in The Godfather, Part II: Francis Ford Coppola wrote him out of the screenplay after being confronted with what he felt were unreasonable demands involving salary, script approval, and other perks. It's easy to understand how Castellano, after slogging away in the business for so long, would find it hard not to pass up a chance to demand a little star treatment when he felt he could get away with it; it's just as easy to understand how Coppola, who already had his plate full with the million other details to the enormous production that demanded his production, would feel inclined to tell this ego-tripping fat load to take a walk. Castellano made his last film appearance in 1982 and died six years later.

MICHAEL V. GAZZO: In The Godfather, Part II, Michael Corleone has a moment where he tells the aging gangster Frankie "Five Angels" Pentageli how glad he is that his old family house "never went to strangers. First Clemenza took it over, and then you." Thus with one speck of throwaway dialogue did Francis Ford Coppola make his one gesture to filling in whatever happened to Clemenza after Michael's ascension to the throne. After things didn't work out with Richard Castellano, Coppola was obliged to create a new character and assign to him the function in the sequel that he had planned for Clemenza: that of the leftover representative of the old ways turned alienated betrayer. It put Gazzo, the man brought in to play the part, in a tough situation: he couldn't very well do an impression of Castellano, but he had to build from scratch someone who the audience could respond to with the same kind of affection that they would someone they remembered fondly from the first movie. Gazzo, with his walrus mustache, friendly gravelly croak, and effusive but elegaic manner, actually managed to pull this off, helped by a wonderful entrance scene where he begs for a drink of water from a garden hose and then reveals that he's not too big a man to put up with Fredo's company for a few minutes. Although Gazzo, a graduate of the Actors Studio who went on to form a West Coast theater workshop in his own name, had done some acting going back to the 1950s--he's an uncredited bit player in On the Waterfront-- before he played Pentageli, he was best known for writing the "I-was-a-Method-dope fiend" play A Hatful of Rain. (He would eventually get to adapt that text for the movies, and also worked on the script for the Elvis Presley vehicle King Creole.) Godfather II effectively made him America's favorite aging goombah; it left him all but guaranteed of steady work, especially on TV, where he usually played characters whose last name ended in a vowel and who could be counted on to at some point deliver a variation on the line, "I want this Kojak/Baretta/B.J. and the Bear problem taken care of!" His second most notable movie role was in James Toback's 1978 directorial debut, Fingers, where he was funny and poignant as a whipped, washed-up loan shark who is treated protectively by his violently unhinged son, played by Harvey Keitel. He died in 1995.

BRUNO KIRBY: The son of the actor Bruce Kirby, Bruno Kirby was the epitome of the potato-faced, fast-talking, New York-honking character guy whose specialty was amusing audiences while appearing to drive everybody who has to share a screen with him right up the wall. At his most high-profile, he was the kind of actor who gets to play sidekick to the kind of actor--such as Billy Crystal in City Slickers or Albert Brooks in Modern Romance--who had to produce or direct the movie in order to star in it. Perhaps his best, most weirdly typical role was in "The Gas Man", an episode of the TV series Homicide, in which he played an embittered ex-con who was twisted and ambitious enough to plot a baroque plan for the detective (Andre Braugher) who'd put him away but not quite mad enough to carry through on it when he had the chance. In The Godfather, Part II, the most handsome item on his resume, he's thoroughly un-typical: cast as the young Clemenza, and billed as "B. Kirby, Jr.", he's not immediately recognizable in his padded suits and with his Italian accent, which inhibits him from doing his customary high-pitched jabbering. But many years later, he'd get to bring his customary type into the Corleone's world through the side door when he was cast as helpmate to Marlon Brando in his mock-Don Vito role in the 1990 comedy The Freshman. Kirby died from complications from leukemia in 2006.

DVD Digest for September 23, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week, a number of classic crime stories hit DVD, plus the big summer movie whose blockbuster gross surprised almost everyone with a Y chromosome.

DVD of the Week: Okay, so maybe there are more high-profile titles in the mix this week, movies that are both more popular and more critically acclaimed (see the next paragraph). But to my eyes, the big DVD news this week is the arrival of Eclipse Series 12: Aki Kaurismaki’s Proletariat Trilogy. For years, Kaurismaki’s work has been woefully underrepresented on Region 1 DVD, with only his recent films The Man Without a Past and Lights in the Dusk currently in print. So Eclipse’s release of three of his best early works is cause for celebration among his fans, in whose company I count myself. In evidence in each of the set’s three films- Shadows in Paradise, Ariel and The Match Factory Girl- is Kaurismaki’s patented deadpan humor, although in Match Factory Girl, the best of the three, the comedy can be a little difficult to spot at times amid the pathos generated by the film’s title character. If you already know Kaurismaki’s work, you’ve already reserved a copy of this, no doubt hoping that Eclipse will continue their commitment to Kaurismaki with eventual releases of Drifting Clouds and Take Care of Your Scarf, Tatjana. But if you’re looking to get into Kaurismaki, this is as good a place as any to start.

Additionally, as most of you know this week also brings the release of Paramount’s The Godfather: Coppola Restoration Collection (also Blu-Ray), which includes newly remastered versions of the first two films, commentary tracks by the director, and special features both old and new. There’s also the L.A. Confidential Two-Disc Special Edition (Warner, also Blu-Ray) that includes a new commentary track featuring the cast and crew, plenty of new special features, and even the music-only feature that was a highlight of the original pressing. Finally, two new collections of note: Sony’s new line of “Martini Movies” (whatever that means), which includes Dollars, The Garment Jungle, Affair in Trinidad, The Anderson Tapes, and The New Centurions; and the Warner Brothers Pictures Gangsters Collection Vol. 4- includes The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse, The Little Giant, Larceny, Inc., Invisible Stripes, and Kid Galahad.

This week’s new releases coming to DVD include: Sex and the City: The Movie (Warner, also Blu-Ray); George Clooney’s Leatherheads (Universal, also Blu-Ray); Ewan McGregor and Hugh Jackman in the Skinemax-ready Deception (Fox, also Blu-Ray); Dario Argento’s final installment in the “Three Mothers” trilogy The Mother of Tears (Dimension); the Flatliners-style thriller Pathology (MGM); and Simon Pegg in Run Fatboy Run (Warner).

This week has plenty to offer in TV on DVD, including: Boston Legal Season 4 (Fox); Brothers and Sisters Season 2 (Disney); Cashmere Mafia: The Complete Series (Sony); CSI: New York Season 4 (Paramount); Friday the 13th The Series: The First Season (Paramount); and Samantha Who? Season 1 (Disney).

Finally, this week’s relatively small slate of Blu-Ray only releases includes: Blow (Warner), and Cirque de Soleil: Corteo (Sony).

That Guy! Special "Godfather" Edition, Part One

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

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

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

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

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

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

Take Five: Bad Cops

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 20:15:00 GMT

Neil LaBute's new movie, Lakeview Terrace, opens this Friday. Critical opinion is still split, but critical opinion will have its say soon enough about whether the director is returning to the promising form he showed in In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors, or whether he's just cranking out a cheap thriller because he wants to buy a new boat. Lakeview Terrace finds Samuel L. Jackson, Hollywood's default angry black man, in the role of a mean-tempered, menacing L.A. cop who takes offense to an interracial couple (played by Patrick Wilson and Kerry Washington) who move in next door to him. The idea of crooked cops has always been an appealing one to people who write thrillers; the idea of the very people charged with protecting the innocent being the ones who might hurt them has powerful appeal, and plenty of filmmakers -- Alfred Hitchcock comes immediately to mind -- have put their ambivalent feelings about the police front and center in their movies. By the same token, however, due to the strict content restrictions of post-Code Hollywood, it was a taboo subject for decades; with very few exceptions, a crooked or evil cop was one of the very few things it was absolutely verboten to show on screen. When the code era passed, almost as if to make up for lost time, dozens of scriptwriters and directors began to explore the idea of the cop who betrayed the ideals he was sworn to uphold, and the bad cop genre was born. Here's five of the best.

THE ASPHALT JUNGLE (1950)

John Huston's masterful ensemble picture about a daring, carefully calculated jewel theft gone awry is one of the greatest noir films ever made, with an incredible cast (headed by Sterling Hayden as the iron-willed thug Dix Handley and Sam Jaffe as the brilliant crook Doc Riedenschneider) and a taut, fatalistic atmosphere that keeps you glued to the screen. But it's also a fine example of how movies had to creep around the concept of the bad cop at the height of the Hays Code: although it's made clear that Barry Kelley's Lt. Ditrich is on the make, and that his accepting bribes from hoods helps crime flourish, the idea of a crooked policeman being so plainly presented ran afoul of the Code. So a scene was filmed in which his incorruptible chief set him on the straight an narrow, and the end coda assures the viewer that such crooked cops are an aberration that will always be found out and punished, rather than the norm.

THE GODFATHER (1972)

The Hays Code had been more or less dead in the water for a dozen years by the time Francis Ford Copolla started filming his epic American gangster movie, and those dozen years had seen a lot of wearing away of the notion of the policemen as a friendly, helpful, vigilant and unimpeachable protector of the innocent. But a few taboos still remained on screen, and The Godfather did its not insubstantial bit to overcome them. In the course of the Corleone family's conflict with the slimy drug dealer Virgil Solozzo, Tom Hagen warns that "The Turk" cannot be gotten to because he enjoys the protection of New York police captain McCluskey (played by Sterling Hayden, acting the flip side of his Asphalt Jungle character) -- and that it is simply not done to kill a cop. When young Michael Corleone, who had previously been the victim of McCluskey's bullying, argues "Where does it say you can't kill a cop?", and points out that Hayden is a dirty cop on the make with his fingers in the drug racket, he's not just talking to the family -- he's talking to the audience.

MANIAC COP (1988)

William Lustig's bizarre little thriller, combining traditional police thriller elements with a sadistic slice of slasher-era horror, was the last movie you'd expect to start a franchise. But so it did, and in the the process launched the career of the hulking, iron-jawed Robert Z'dar. The sequels are generally not worth watching, but the original Maniac Cop -- in which a serial killer dressed as an NYPD patrol officer starts preying on innocent victims -- it a remarkably tight and rather exciting (if extremely lurid) piece of cinema that more than justifies its cult reputation. As a director, Lustig doesn't waste time or film, and the movie carries on at a deadly, involving clip; it's abetted by tons of fine performances from respectable character actors like Sheree North, Bruce Campbell, and original That Guy!/friend of the Screengrab Tom Atkins.

BAD LIEUTENANT (1992)

Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant was, at the time of its release, what it still is today: an atom bomb of bad-cop movies. Harvey Keitel, at the peak of his "I must appear naked in every movie I make" phase, plays a nameless New York police detective who is far and away the worst portrayal of a policeman in cinematic history: a brutal, violent drunk, a drug addict, a crook, a thief, a gambling addict, and a whoremonger. But this isn't just shock cinema: Keitel's Lieutenant is not just the worst big-screen cop imaginable, he's also, in many ways, the most complex. Ferrara throws Keitel into a deep, dark hole because he wants to show him the way out of it. Bad Lieutenant is a terrific film, which is why the as-yet-unconfirmed rumors that Werner Herzog is going to remake it with Nicolas Cage in the title role are so bewildering.

TRAINING DAY (2001)

Antoine Fuqua's nasty 2001 Los Angeles gang story hasn't held up spectacularly well in the years since it was made. Co-star Ethan Hawke seems out of place; the plot doesn't hold up particularly strongly, the tone wanders all over the place, and though it's quite well made, it's never spectacular. What does hold up, however, is Denzel Washington's electrifying performance as Alonzo, a narcotics officer so deep on the take that he barely recognizes -- or cares -- what side he's on. In the annals of crooked cop movies, it stands alongside Harvey Keitel's Bad Lieutenant, and skillfully illustrates the way that a bad man can justify his evil by thinking that he's doing good. The role earned Washington his second acting Oscar and his first Best Actor; though he'd deserved it for Malcolm X, this was no mere compensatory gesture, but a well-earned recognition of a stunning performance.

Related Posts:

Take Five: Ride Hard

Take Five: Bring On the Bad Guys

Coppola’s Apocalypse Forever

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 17:00:00 GMT

As you know, spiffy new restored versions of the Godfather movies are playing in selected theaters and just out on DVD. Meanwhile in England, the latest special edition of Apocalypse Now (released domestically as “The Complete Dossier” and containing both the original and Redux cuts of the movie) is making its way to home video. It must be kind of a drag for Francis Ford Coppola that the only movies anyone wants to talk to him about were made in the ‘70s, but to his credit, he’s still a good sport about it.

“The thing with cinema is that you always feel as if you’re just beginning to understand it, and that makes each day very fresh and exciting,” Coppola said recently in an interview with The Times of London. “When I was younger, I decided I would make each film as an experiment, trying to do something that was appropriate to its theme, so Apocalypse Now was quite different from The Godfather or The Conversation. So I made it in a style I felt appropriate to the war itself: high amperage, big production, almost out of control.”

The logistical challenges of making Apocalypse are well-documented (notably in the terrific Hearts of Darkness), but one that often gets overlooked is that of Marlon Brando’s girth. “He admitted we had a problem in that this ‘Green Beret colonel’ would not be as overweight as he was, which presented issues of what sort of costume should he wear, as there wouldn’t be uniforms in his size. He didn’t want to be depicted as a man who had let his appetites and passions go wild, which was the other solution. Marlon, like all fat people, was shy and embarrased by his weight, which of course I understood, having something of the same problem, as did Orson Welles. I decided to dress him in black and portray his fatness as great size, meaning that you usually see just his shoulders and arms. So his large scale could be interpreted as that of a giant man. I used a very tall, husky double for the scenes where you see all of him.”

When asked whether he’d prefer to remembered for the Godfather movies or for Apocalypse, Coppola responds, “I’d actually like to be remembered for my present film Tetro, which is the most personal film I’ve made…I don’t want to be remembered for a film, but for the fact that I loved so much and was enchanted by little children.” Er...okay. Good luck with that.

Related:
Eleanor Coppola: Still "Notes" Worthy
Francis Ford Coppola's Sex Change Operation

DVD Digest/Rep Report Addendum: Corleone Family Muscles Its Way onto Blu-Ray and Houston Street

Phil Nugent — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 15:00:00 GMT

There have been a lot of good movies made since 1972, sure 'nuff. But in the twenty-six years since Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather was released, to be followed two years later by The Godfather, Part II, no other movie that combined such seriousness of purpose and richness of entertainment value to deliver so essential a vision of American life has come close to monopolizing the box office, shaping the national conversation, and setting up a permanent residence in people's imaginations as that picture did. No brag, just fact. The movies--the original, the sequel, and also, um, that Part III thing where Pacino was made up as if to star in The Alice B. Toklas Story--make their latest appearance on DVD on September 23, which will also mark their first time on Blu-Ray HD. Since Coppola had no pressing offers to make Youth Without Youth, Part II, he had plenty of time to donate to the project, the fruits of which bear the official title The Coppola Restoration. The set includes a disc's worth of supplementary material, and it turns out that there are interesting observations to made even about the making of, um, that Part III thing.

Meanwhile, New York audiences should be pleased to know that the Film Forum is using the movies this year to ease the transition into fall, in newly restored prints that have received the personal Coppola seal of approval. Nice as it is to have the family installed in your home, nothing really compares to the experience of settling in a large dark room with a bunch of other lucky people, immersing yourself in the story of the Corleones, and then trooping back out onto the streets some hours later to discover that, you know, time has passed. Starting today, they're running the original for a week, after which Part II will play from September 19-25. Then, for marathon viewers, there will be the chance to roll in and see both movies (separate admissions, let's get real here) from September 26 to October 2. These are long damn movies, which cuts down on how many times they can be run in a single work day, which in turn cuts into the business at the concession stand, so Film Forum deserves an even heartier tip of the hat for this that they do most days for just being there, the Manhattan film freak's equivalent of an amber field of grain. Sadly, various factors such as common sense have dictated that the Forum will not be showing Part III as part of this gala event, but word on the street is that if you slip the popcorn girl a ten-spot (six dollars for members), she'll act it out for you if the line's not too long. I always tear up at her re-enactment of the scene where the meeting of the heads of the organized crime families is strafed by Joey Zaza's helicopter assassin squad.

Vanishing Act: Monte Hellman

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Hellman! His is one of the great “What if?” stories in American cinema. As in, “What if someone had given the poor guy some money to make a few movies over the past 40 years or so?” The beginning of Hellman’s career bears a close resemblance to that of many heavy-hitters from his generation, including Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese and Jonathan Demme. That is, he got his filmmaking education on the cheap from Roger Corman, churning out quickies like Beast from Haunted Cave and Flight to Fury. Once Hellman had put in enough hours in the basement, Corman teamed him with fellow stalwart Jack Nicholson for a pair of offbeat westerns, The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind. Hellman’s breakthrough and downfall arrived simultaneously with 1971’s Two-Lane Blacktop, declared “The Movie of the Year” by Esquire and then released to general indifference.

Had the movie caught on with the youth culture in the same way Easy Rider did, Hellman’s subsequent filmography might have been a treasure trove, but instead it’s more of a trivia quiz. There’s Shatter, a 1974 Hong Kong action picture Hellman departed after three weeks of shooting; China 9, Liberty 37, a Spaghetti western in which Warren Oates and Sam Peckinpah appear in support of the immortal Fabio Testi; The Greatest and Avalanche Express, both of which Hellman took over after the original directors died; Iguana, a seafaring tale of a disfigured sailor that never received a theatrical release; and Cockfighter, the only one of the bunch that lives up to the promise of the early westerns and Blacktop – and even that one had its original theatrical release sabotaged when Corman recut it to add more action.

By 1989, it was as if Hellman had come full circle to his disreputable early days with Corman, as he helmed the horror sequel Silent Night, Deadly Night III: Better Watch Out! His best shot at a comeback arrived in the form of Quentin Tarantino, who approached Hellman to direct his script Reservoir Dogs. Of course, Tarantino eventually decided to direct it himself, leaving Hellman with only an Executive Producer credit. That led to pretty much nothing.

So where is Hellman now? He’s got a teaching gig at CalArts, helping to educate future filmmakers who may someday hire him and then decide to direct themselves, leaving him only with an Executive Producer credit. He was heavily involved with Criterion’s superb 2-disc DVD release of Two-Lane Blacktop, which includes commentary tracks, a documentary field trip to some of the film’s locations as well as an uneasy conversation between Hellman and Blacktop star James Taylor, who has never seen the film. And after seventeen years, he finally returned to the director’s chair for a segment of the horror anthology Trapped Ashes.

Having recently watched Ashes, just out on DVD, I can attest that Hellman’s segment, “Stanley’s Girlfriend,” is worth a look. Although it’s never explicitly stated, the Stanley of the title is clearly Kubrick, and Hellman has fun with what we know of the legend, weaving the 2001 filmmaker’s love of photography and chess into a supernatural explanation for his permanent exile from the United States. “Stanley’s Girlfriend” isn’t much more than a doodle, but it’s easily the standout in a movie that includes a cautionary plastic surgery tale about vampiric breast implants. See for yourself:

Previously on Vanishing Act:
Christopher McQuarrie
Savage Steve Holland