The Screengrab : george a. romero

Final Farewells: The Best & Worst Death Scenes In Cinema (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 21 May 2009 20:30:00 GMT

Albert Finney in BIG FISH (2003)

How powerful is Albert Finney’s death scene in Tim Burton’s tall tale of a man with larger-than-life recollections of his own personal history? Well, let’s put it this way: according to New York magazine, “The last his family saw of [monologist Spalding Gray] was Saturday, January 10, [2004] when he took the kids to see Big Fish, the story of a dying father’s relationship with his son, at the Loews Village on Third Avenue and 11th Street. After the movie, Gray wept.” And then, 24 hours later, he tossed himself off the Staten Island ferry into the East River. Perhaps the special power of the movie for Gray (and creative types in general, myself included) is best captured in the final line, after Finney (as Edward Bloom, a character played in flashbacks by Ewan McGregor) inspires his son (Billy Crudup) to mitigate the tragedy of death through art and fantasy: “A man tells a story over and over so many times he becomes the story. In that way, he is immortal.” And, frankly, isn’t reimagining the world and hoping for some existence beyond it (in Heaven and/or in films, novels, scientific discoveries, progeny, blog entries, etc.) more or less the heart of human existence? For me, the greatest terror is thinking my consciousness and memories (not to mention the existence of my friends, relatives...even acquaintances and pets) will be erased forever at death. In particular, I dread the eventual demise of my parents and cling to hopes and fantasies that somehow there’s more than an empty void at the end of our road after all the fun and struggle of life...and so Burton’s film (about a father’s death transformed by flights of fancy) hit me like a 2x4, unleashing an unexpected, uncontrollable torrent of emotion unlike anything I’ve ever experienced at the movies (or maybe it was just the cameo by Miley Cyrus, in her feature film debut, back when she was known as “Destiny"). (AO)

Rutger Hauer in BLADE RUNNER (1982)

Hauer’s Roy Batty is one of the screen’s most nuanced villains; while he’s a ruthless killer who’s not above playing with his victims the way a cat does a gutted rat, he’s also got a higher purpose. Roy is a replicant – an artificial life-form programmed to live only a short time so his intellect and emotions won’t develop to a human level – but in his case, it’s too late: he reaches a near-total self-awareness before his time is up. At the end of this science-fiction masterpiece, Roy toys with Detective Rick Deckard, who has wiped out most of his friends; he brutalizes him while taunting his own moral superiority: “Aren’t you the good man?” But nothing can be done; Roy knows he’s on the way out, and his last act isn’t to kill, but to save Deckard’s life. As he fades out into nonexistence, he drives home the film’s central question of what it means to be human, reminding Deckard that when he dies, his unique mind and irreplaceable memories will be gone forever, “like tears in the rain.” It’s a philosophically deep and emotionally powerful ending in a genre that rarely sees the two combined. (LP)

Duane Jones in NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968)

The zombie movie has reached its oversaturation point and is now just kind of annoying, but the movie that started it all, George Romero’s low-budget classic Night of the Living Dead, still holds the power to chill, and its final scene – extremely massive spoiler alert, for those of you who have somehow missed out on seeing this over the last forty years – is a real gut-punch. Level-headed, competent Ben (played by Duane Jones in what was at the time a controversial casting decision, placing an African-American actor in the lead against a group of whites) has managed to fend off seemingly endless onslaughts of flesh-hungry zombies, conquering threats from without and within, over the course of a nightmarish day when his life was constantly in danger. Finally securing a measure of peace, he beds down in the abandoned farmhouse for the night, plotting how he will make his escape the following morning; when he awakens, without foreshadowing and without fanfare, he is fatally shot by a passing sheriff’s posse who mistake him for one of the living dead he’s spent the entire rest of the movie fighting. It’s an inspired, if exceptionally cruel, ending, and it gives us the first glimpse of the nasty social commentary that would feature in Romero’s later work. (LP)

Faye Dunaway & Warren Beatty in BONNIE AND CLYDE (1967)

The demise of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker at the end of Arthur Penn’s paradigm-busting gangster epic shouldn’t have come as any kind of surprise; after all, anyone who knew the history of the two criminals knew how they met their end, and had probably seen the photos of their car, pierced with hundreds of bullet holes. What Penn’s unforgettable death scene accomplishes, then, isn’t shock because of what happens, but rather how it’s depicted; refusing to take the easy way out, Penn forces us to watch Bonnie and Clyde (with whom we’ve spend the entire movie being forced into a bizarre sympathy) die the way they likely did in real life: in a horrible, convulsing, twitching, gory, pitiful mass of blood and gore. Different people took the ending in different ways, from the straights who saw it as a long-overdue comeuppance to the heads who felt it was another example of rebel heroes dying at the hands of the Man; but no one who saw it forgot it easily, and it substantially upped the ante for violence in Hollywood. From then on, no death would be simple and bloodless and abstracted; over the next two decades, the town would be drowned in gore from movies that picked up the gauntlet that Bonnie and Clyde threw down. (LP)

Orson Welles in CITIZEN KANE (1941)

Orson Welles was already a restless, experimental genius at the astonishingly young age of 26 when he brought Citizen Kane to the screen. It’s widely considered one of the greatest films of all time for good reasons, many of which stem from Welles’ desire to rewrite the rules of filmmaking and start fresh from the ground up; and he doesn’t waste any time, putting the central character’s dramatic death scene at the beginning of the movie and working back from there to solve the mystery. At the top of the film, we see Charles Foster Kane as a bedridden old man, and before we even know who this man surrounded by opulent treasures is, he expires, letting a snow globe crash to the floor, and with his last breath, hissing the word ‘Rosebud’ – the key to the rest of the story. Welles later expressed dissatisfaction with this scene, saying he never quite felt right about it and writing off ‘Rosebud’ as a cheap Freudian gimmick, but its power has remained: it’s still counted as one of the most remembered death scenes in cinema, ‘Rosebud’ is at the top of the list of cinematic famous last words, and the whole sequence has been parodied thousands of times in dozens of media. (LP)

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce

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

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

CLIFFHANGER (1993)

Let’s be clear...Cliffhanger is not a good film. Sylvester Stallone is...well, he’s Sylvester Stallone, and John Lithgow only works as a villain when he’s playing a snotty elitist or Dr. Lizardo and not somebody who’s actually meant to scare me. But the primal suspense of the opening sequence above haunts me far more than any number of scenes from much, much better films. Here’s the set-up: Stallone plays Gabe, some kind of extreme mountain ranger who (along with helicopter ace Janine Turner) attempt what should be the routine rescue of their colleague Hal (Michael Rooker) and his cute-as-a-bug girlfriend, Sarah (Michelle Joyner), who’ve managed to get trapped while hiking in the Rocky Mountains -- but then things go horribly awry, and suddenly Gabe and Sarah are stuck hanging from a thin line between two peaks over a vertigo-inducing abyss...and then the line starts to give way...and then Sarah slips and winds up dangling from Gabe’s meaty fingers...and it’s all very suspenseful and routinely pulse-pounding until -- holy shit! -- sweet, innocent Sarah actually falls to her death, screaming all the way...the kind of unexpected gut-punch one rarely encounters in the typical theme-park safety net of most summer thrill rides. The incident is so demoralizing, in fact, that it hangs like a pall over the characters and audience for the rest of the film's running time, adding untenable weight to a ludicrous Die Hard knock-off that can’t support it -- but director Renny Harlin deserves at least some credit for creating such a terrifying, memorable stand-alone reminder of the visceral power of cinema. (AO)

WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES (2000)

It’s fairly common in the films of Bela Tarr to find scenes that take place in barrooms. But there’s no scene in Tarr’s filmography -- or anyone else’s, for that matter -- that’s quite like the opening of his 2000 film Werckmeister Harmonies. At the end of another long night, the barkeep kicks out all of his customers, but not before Valuska (Lars Rudolph) demonstrates to the others the way a solar eclipse works by using three of the drunks to portray the sun, the Earth, and the moon. At first, it’s a hilarious bit of imagery, with the sun waving his arms, the Earth lurching around the sun, and the moon circling the Earth at a dizzying pace. However, before long Valuska has a surprise in store for the others, as he stops the moon between the sun and the Earth and proceeds to describe in haunting language what happens when the sun’s rays have been blocked out -- the strange behavior of the animals, the moment of dread felt by the people who witness it, and so on. Of course, Valuska explains, the moment is over as soon as it began, but it’s this moment, and the thoughts of apocalypse it inspires, that sets the tone for the rest of the film. Soon enough, a real brush with the reckoning arrives in town (in the form of a traveling circus and its mysterious whale), causing all hope to disappear, however briefly, from the townspeople. And so, what begins as a strange and hypnotic opening comes to encapsulate the entire film -- practically the definition of a great and important opening scene. (PC)

DAWN OF THE DEAD (2004)

Zack Snyder’s loose remake of George A. Romero’s 1978 zombie classic gets progressively less interesting as it goes along, though there’s almost no way his film could have maintained the level of blistering, manic terror delivered by its opening sequence. After finishing her shift at the local hospital, Sarah Polley’s nurse returns to her suburban home and loving husband. Their peaceful domesticity is shattered the following morning, however, when the neighbor’s little girl appears at their bedroom door looking decidedly fleet and hungry. A ferocious attack ensues, followed by Polly’s husband transforming into a crazed cannibal, sparking further mayhem that propels her outside and – as a gorgeously wrought panoramic shot reveals – into mass chaos, her street overrun by zombies and their fleeing, panicking would-be victims. Hopping into her car, she zigzags through the madness, Snyder’s camera situated directly behind her car (or attached to its hood) to heighten the crazed immediacy of the action, which culminates in a thudding car crash that proves an ideal segue into Snyder’s Johnny Cash-scored credit sequence and subsequent mall-set zombiepocalypse saga. (NS)

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (2007)

It's the nature of the world that everything you think you understand should be challenged. That no matter how long you live and what sort of times you have seen, the world will always seem stranger and more frightening as you age. You expect wisdom with your years, but time tends to make you complacent instead. No Country For Old Men is a little too insubstantial to qualify for Cormac McCarthy's top shelf, but that doesn't mean that it's devoid of his signature insight into darkness and weakness. The movie hews tightly to the book, but movies are more immersive than books, and it's harder to take a step back from a seemingly wise narrator to ask whether one is actually hearing wisdom or whether it is complacency. When Sheriff Ed Tom Bell tells us from the beginning that he can't understand the way that crime has changed, that he can't be a part of the world because it would put his soul at hazard, the sweep of the movie leads some or even most of the audience to believe that they are supposed to agree with him. And given a choice between Sheriff Bell and the amoral killing machine Anton Chigurh, well, Bell would be the safer choice for your sympathy. Bell is wrong, though, which will be brought to his attention late in the movie. But now we're at the beginning, just Sheriff Bell talking about how time has passed him while the camera lingers over those gorgeous shots of West Texas, so serene they look like still images until the wind blows. And then we're in the police station watching a man calmly murder another, leaving scuff marks on the floor as random and beautiful as the desert grass we just saw. And we're reminded that the desert, like the world around it, is always as full of danger as it is of beauty. That's nothing new. (HC)

Click Here For Part One, Two, Four & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Paul Clark, Nick Schager, Hayden Childs

Thursday Poll for November 6, 2008

Paul Clark — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 15:00:00 GMT

This year’s Presidential election might have resulted in a decisive win, but not all elections lately have been so clear-cut. Take last week’s poll, in which we polled you folks about your favorite of our top 5 horror movies of all time. With nearly all precincts reporting, it’s a dead heat between the top contenders, Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead. Making this deadlock all the more surprising is the fact that, just a few weeks ago, these first two installments in George A. Romero’s Dead franchise didn’t finish nearly so closely in that particular poll. At any rate, it’s looking like we’re going to have to send this one to the House of Representatives, who ought to be able to settle this thing, although the possibility of a corrupt bargain is a very real one.

This week, we look ahead to the upcoming awards season. If recent history is any indication, most of the Oscar nominees will come from films that have yet to be released in theatres. But odds are that at least the moviegoing public has already seen a few of the nominees who will wake up happy on the morning on January 22, 2009. So who stands the best chance of getting nominated from the first ten months of the year? Setting aside the most obvious choice (the late Heath Ledger, of course), I’ve listed five of the most likely contenders, taken from films that have been widely released or are currently available on DVD. Will it be Anne Hathaway’s revelatory work in Jonathan Demme’s family dramedy? Angelina Jolie in her first collaboration with perennial Oscar favorite Clint Eastwood? The scene-stealing Penelope Cruz in Woody Allen’s latest? The Jenkins, knocking one out of the park in his long-awaited leading man breakthrough? Or will the Academy decide to recognize the controversial, attention-getting comedic work by Robert Downey Jr., the big-star story of the year so far? The choice is yours:

Who's most likely to be Oscar-nominated? | BuzzDash polls

As always, feel free to sound off in the comments section. See you next week!

Thursday Morning Poll for October 23, 2008

Paul Clark — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Reader Steve C. accused me of being a sadist due to last week’s poll, in which I asked readers which of George A. Romero’s Dead movies was their favorite. But (somewhat spurious) charges of sadism notwithstanding, the Romero poll saw perhaps the most decisive win of any Thursday Morning Poll to date. A full two-thirds of Screengrab readers selected 1978’s gorefest/consumerism satire Dawn of the Dead as their favorite of the franchise, followed by Night and Day. The more recent entries in the series, Land and Diary, received no love whatsoever, but while neither of them is up to the high standard set by the original trilogy, I have a soft spot for Land, which almost feels like the best John Carpenter movie that Carpenter never made. If nothing else, it’s the best Carpenter movie in the last two decades (since They Live, of course).

In conjunction with both the upcoming Presidential election and the recent release of Oliver Stone’s W., I thought a Presidential quiz was in order for this week. But while I struggled to come up with a suitable topic, it dawned on me that Josh Brolin wasn’t the first member of his family to portray an actual President. A few years ago Josh’s dear old dad, James “Paging Mr. Herman” Brolin, essayed the role of Ronald Reagan in a much-ballyhooed and controversial miniseries, The Reagans. In light of this realization, I decided this was the only logical question for this week’s quiz. So, I ask you- which Brolin do you think was more Presidential?

Which Brolin was more Presidential? | BuzzDash polls

As always, the comments section is open. So exercise your right to vote, and we’ll see you next week!

Reviews By Request: Knightriders (1981, George A. Romero)

Paul Clark — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Note: Beginning this week, I’ve decided to make a change to my normal posting schedule, switching the posting dates of my big features. So from today onward, Reviews by Request and When Good Directors Go Bad will post on alternate Tuesdays, while Yesterday’s Hits will run every Friday.

Thanks to reader Jason Alley for requesting this week’s review. As always, for instructions on how to request the next review for this feature (to run in two weeks), see the bottom of this post.

In the opening scene of George A. Romero’s Knightriders, we see a blackbird flying through a forest at daybreak. The bird awakens a man, sleeping on the forest floor, next to a woman. We next see the man, stripped naked, in the river, flagellating himself with a stick. Then the man and woman don their clothes- the man, a suit of armor; the woman, a cloak and a crown. As they prepare to leave the woods, the camera finally reveals their trusty steed- a shiny new motorcycle, gleaming in the morning sun.

Make no mistake about it- Knightriders is a strange creature, from its premise on down. As the film continues, the man and woman soon join up with their companions, a traveling Renaissance Faire-esque troupe whose specialty is staging medieval tournaments using motorcycles instead of horses. It’s an odd juxtaposition and something of a bizarre spectacle around which to make a movie. But somehow, against all odds, Romero pulls it off.

From the beginning, Romero acknowledges the strangeness of pairing these two extremely dissimilar concepts. For most people, chivalry carries such associations as tradition, discipline, and a code of honor, while motorcyclists have a stigma of being hell-raisers and outlaws. Part of the reason the movie works is because it doesn’t so much try to reconcile the two ideas as let them play off each other.

On one side, there’s Morgan (Tom Savini), a mustached biker who joined the troupe to rider and fight, and started calling himself Morgan Le Fay until he was informed that the character was a woman. Morgan has set his sights on being the troupe’s King, until he gets another offer from a sleazeball agent to start his own show. Not for Morgan is the chivalric code, not when there’s money to be made and women to be bedded.

On the other side is Bill Davis (Ed Harris), the man we met in the forest at the beginning. Bill formed the troupe and became the King, and honestly believes that he’s carrying on the old ways. To him, the bikes are a necessary evil- they’re certainly not horses, but under the circumstances, they’ll do. But he’s not happy about it. When a young fan asks him to autograph a motorcycle magazine with his photograph inside, Bill refuses on principle. He treats the knight’s code of honor with deadly seriousness, and even when his actions seem foolish to others, he’s acting with the honor in mind.

In terms of the material, Knightriders would seem to be an odd choice for Romero, best known as director of horror movies like the Dead franchise, Martin, and The Crazies. But thematically, the films are more similar than they initially seem. Like all of his best-known work, Knightriders deals with the gulf between the lives of an insular, marginalized minority and the outside world.

The Dead films portray this idea at its most basic- a band of survivors barricading itself against outside threats. Here, the outsiders are those who aren’t part of the troupe- the “suckerheaded American driftwood” (Billy’s words) who come to see destruction and mayhem with no care for the meaning of it all. A pivotal tournament scene happens just as the troupe looks like it’s about to disband, but all the spectators care about is the motorcycles and the violence, even complaining when the musical accompaniment gets shut off.

But no less important to the story is the internal conflict of the group, between those who want to pander to the crowds and make big money, and those who want to stay true to the ideals upon which the group was founded. What’s sort of amazing is how successfully Romero integrates it into his story, instead of simply paying it lip service. As a filmmaker, the conflict between commerce and idealism no doubt held a great deal of interest for Romero, who must have had numerous temptations to make “safer” and more respectable films following the success of Dawn of the Dead.

I sometimes wonder if Romero doesn’t get his due as a filmmaker because he usually made movies in “disreputable” genres. Does the fact that action and horror movies are designed to provoke an emotional response first and foremost make the best ones unimaginable as art? Romero’s typically unobtrusive direction of Knightriders ranks among his best, effective in both its larger moments (the tournament scenes) and the smaller ones. One indelible moment in the film, almost incidental to the story, finds a middle-aged woman with a black eye standing alone in her kitchen just after her daughter has left with one of the troupe members. Romero’s camera watches her from a distance through a doorway, as she turns on the faucet just before she starts to cry. It’s a perfect little touch, one that tells us everything we need to know about her, and I’m glad Romero decided to keep it in the film.

Knightriders is divided into three main sections, centered around three tournaments. In the first two tournaments, the troupe is putting on a show for the paying audience, knocking each other off their bikes to get the spectators to whoop and cheer. But for the third, there’s no one watching but the rest of the troupe. The ideological conflict between Bill and Morgan has become real, and the battle could decide the fate of the group. True, no money will be made from this battle, but no matter- the participants finally have something to fight for.

So, what movie would you like me to review for the next installment of Reviews by Request? Let me know in the comments section below. To refresh your memory, here are the rules for requesting a movie to be reviewed: (1) it has to be a movie I haven’t seen, (2) it has to be available through Netflix, and (3) please only request one film. Other than that, anything is fair game. First to suggest a movie that qualifies gets their requested review. See you in two weeks!

Movie Magic: Making Pittsburgh Ugly Enough for Cormac McCarthy's "The Road"

Phil Nugent — Wed, 28 May 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Charles McGrath drops in on the set of The Road, based on Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel and directed by the Australian John Hillcoat, who seems to have a thing for arid nightmare landscapes and writers with a Biblical tinge to their prose. (His previous film was the outback period Western The Proposition, from an original script by Nick Cave. In the novel, McGrath notes, "because of some unexplained catastrophe...the sky is gray, the rivers are black, and color is just a memory. The landscape is covered in ash, with soot falling perpetually from the air. The cities are blasted and abandoned. The roads are littered with corpses either charred or melted, their dreams, Mr. McCarthy writes, 'ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts.'” In order to get the right atmosphere for such a tale, the film crew has been shooting in Pittsburgh--best known to film historians as the launching pad for George A. Romero's zombie chronicles--New Orleans, and Mount St. Helens. But even there, sometimes things just look too good for the end of the world. When McGrath arrived to observe the filming, "The sky was blue, the sun so bright that crew members were smearing on sunscreen. A breeze was carrying away the fog pumping feebly from a smoke machine. Even worse, green grass was sprouting everywhere, and there were buds on the trees." "Today is a bad day," lamented special effects director Mark Forker.

Eventually, the picnic weather will be CGI'ed out of existence. For now, Hillcoat is concentrating on his actors and what McGrath refers to as the locations' "pleasing array of post-apocalyptic scenery: deserted coalfields, run-down parts of Pittsburgh, windswept dunes" and "a burned-down amusement park in Lake Conneaut and an eight-mile stretch of abandoned freeway, complete with tunnel." The film stars Viggo Mortenson and an eleven-year-old Australian boy, Kodi Smith-McPhee as the nameless father and son at the center, with brief appearances by Robert Duvall, Michael K. Williams, Garret Dillahunt, Guy Pearce (who starred in The Proposition) and Charlize Theron, in flashbacks, as the dead wife and mother of the principals. Mortensen describes the material as "a love story that’s also an endurance contest. I mean that in a positive way. They’re on this difficult journey, and the father is basically learning from the son. So if the father-son thing doesn’t work, then the movie doesn’t work. The rest of it wouldn’t matter. It would never be more than a pretty good movie. But with Kodi in it, it has a chance to be an extremely good movie, maybe even a great one.” For now, much of the buzz around the movie is about Kdoi Smith-McPhee, "privately referred to [on the set]... as the Alien because of the uncanny, almost freakish way that on a moment’s notice he switched accents and turned himself from a child into a movie star." "I don’t even think of him as a kid," says Mortenson. There are things he’s done on this movie that I’ve never seen anybody do before. And there are many adult actors who never have a moment like he has every day."

"Barringer82"'s YouTube Movie Montages

Phil Nugent — Mon, 05 May 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Steve Bryant at Reel Pop drew our attention to these beautifully assembled little montages by YouTube user "barringer82", who ought to be working for the Academy Awards people. They're like eating peanuts. "The Films of the 1970s" makes a case for that era as a time when actors who knew what the hell to do with a long, unbroken silent take, in particular Jack Nicholson and Al Pacino, ruled the world, and it feels so perfectly assembled, as if flows from one clip to the next in synch with the music and Peter Finch's big speech from Network, that we couldn't care less that Blow Out was actually released in 1981. (It also made us realize, for the first time ever, that one reason that Finch works so brilliantly in that part is his vocal resemblance to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Before he actually appeared on screen, I thought the clip of him talking was from a fireside chat that FDR must have given after snacking on hash brownies.) "The Films of the 1980s" is remarkable for the way it captures what 75% of the population found delightful about that decade, with sneaking hints about why the rest of us experienced as a George A. Romero movie in 3-D Technicolor. (It goes on too long, but then so did the 1980s.) And "The Films of the 1990s" makes the second-best argument I know of for Magnolia as the key, unifying film of that decade. (The best argument for that has been made by myself, and I'm not sure I could ever get enough drinks in me again to repeat it.)

Barringer25 has also assembled video seminars on such directors as Stanley Kubrick, David Lynch, Quentin Tarantino, the Coen brothers, P. T. Anderson, Michael Mann (parts one and two), and Martin Scorsese (parts one and two.)

New Grindhouse Classics: "Mulberry Street"

Phil Nugent — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 17:00:00 GMT

The holy grail of a certain kind of movie geek is the low-budget genre picture--crime, sci-fi, or maybe, especially, horror--made by no-name filmmakers who, forced to compensate for their lack of resources with whatever they can come up with in terms of ingenuity and febrile, crackpot ideas, achieves what Manny Farber called "termite art," a strange and living vision that charges down alleys that Jerry Bruckheimer wouldn't venture into if there were strippers in there. Mulberry Street, which played theaters for an instant last year tucked in alongside seven other scare pictures as part of the 2007 "After Dark Horrorfest" and which recently came out on DVD, is a rare example of a movie that gets close enough to achieving grail status for viewers to catch scent of the wine. It's an apocalyptic horror movie that suggestively touches on post-9/11 anxieties without resorting to the kind of explicit speechifying that one encounters in the films of such specialists in ambitious schlock as Larry Cohen. It's also a movie that solves the problem of how to capture the edgy, grungy vibe of the classic New York movies from the seventies and make it seem relevant to the city we know today.

Mulberry Street is set among the people who can barely afford a ticket to the theaters in the more photogenic parts of New York now, who are being crowded out of a place that increasingly seems to have no place for anyone who has to keep up on the price of groceries. The main setting is an apartment building whose tenants are on the brink of being evicted by a development company looking to upgrade the area; the company's billboards are plastered with the message, "The neighborhood is changing" and a picture of the Trump-like company head, gazing down over his latest acquisition like a Yuppie Big Brother. The construction process has apparently set off reverberations that are reaching down beneath the subway lines and bringing to the surface an especially nasty breed of rats, who, biting anyone they come across, turn their human victims into rabid, murderous were-rats. Silly as this sounds, in the movie it plays with a metaphoric logic that's hard to shake off. It's as if gentrification has finally driven what's left of the city's natural essence insane and forced it to fight back. Of course, in fighting back, it mainly strikes the people who are already its fellow sufferers--the people who, as in Katrina, can't afford to get out of nature's way. When all hell is broken loose and Manhattan has been quarantined, a TV news announcers informs us that the mayor will soon be making a speech, "from the Bahamas."

Directed by Jim Mickle from a script he co-wrote with Nick Damici, who plays the hero, an ex-boxer named Clutch, it's a monster movie whose fast-cut editing (by the director) and blurry, often weirdly lovely cinematography (by Ryan Samul) are so effective that it's hard to mind much that they probably developed as a way to conceal the limitations of the special effects/make-up budget. The first rat people we see are bum-like creatures with loose, matted hair that strategically conceals their features, though once things are going good, there's a quick glimpse of a bald, pointy-haired sucker who looks rather like the title character of F. W. Muneau's Nosferatu. (The ending, which features guys running around in protective suits, plays as a double homage to George Romero's Night of the Living Dead and his lesser-known 1973 film The Crazies.) Most of the characters are hard-scrabble members of the working poor and self-styled tough New Yorkers; when a young family hustles to get the hell out of the building before the plague engulf them, one urban warrior yells after them contemptuously, "Go back to Connecticut!" (There's also a memorable scene of a heavyset bar owner matter-of-factly chasing a monster out of his place by repeatedly whacking it upside the head with a skillet while hollaring, "And stay out!")

The biggest flaw in the movie is that the casualness-in-the-face-of-chaos tone can get underdone. There are a couple of moments where characters seem bizarrely unmoved by the loss of people they had reason to feel close to, and Clutch, who's expecting his grown daughter's return home after a stint in Iraq and a spell in a military hospital, never betrays the concern you might expect a loving father to expect upon his realization that his kid is out there somewhere in a zombie minefield; he never even comments on it. (The daughter is played by Kim Blair, whose beauty is somehow made only more affecting by her character's facial scars. The standout member of the cast is Ron Brice, who plays Clutch's gay roommate; he knows how to communicate fear and confusion while retaining his character's dignity.) But even when it seems to have a couple of circuits misfiring, Mulberry Street has a look and feel that set it apart from the run of blood-squib operas cluttering up the direct-to-video shelves. Hardcore horror geeks and people nostalgic for the old Times Square should give it a look. Some sane people might want to give it a look, too.

Indie Box-Office Roundup: Weekend of February 15-17, 2008

Paul Clark — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 00:17:00 GMT

Continuing its strong appeal to arthouse audiences, Eran Kolirin's The Band's Visit has moved up to #1 atop this week's Indie Box-Office Roundup. The Israeli comedy, released in the US by Sony Pictures Classics, managed an impressive per-screen average of $11,267, up from $9,642 last week. At a time when the big Hollywood releases are opening big and falling fast, it's good to see a movie that really catches on with audiences like this. A movie like The Band's Visit may never pull in Cloverfield grosses, but in its limited release it should have more staying power than most would-be blockbusters.

Also maintaining a strong showing over President's Day Weekend was last week's chart-topper, Focus Features' In Bruges, now at #2 with a $10,420 per-screen average in its second week of release. Martin McDonough's film is still expanding its release, so expect the averages to dip somewhat in the following weeks.

The weekend's top premiere was George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead, the inaugural release from Weinstein Company offshoot Third Rail Releasing. Romero's film, his fifth Dead movie to date, garnered a solid $6,549 per screen, and will expand to 10 more markets for the weekend of February 29.

Rounding out the top 5 were Cao Hamburger's The Year My Parents Went on Vacation (City Lights) and the self-distributed David and Layla. Also of note was Magnolia's program of 2007 Oscar-nominated Short Films, which finished #9 on the list. However, I find their figures more than a bit dubious, considering I had to pay separate admissions for the Animated and Live-Action programs.

Finally, Juno-watch! The movie that Roger Ebert called "his true love" finished just outside the top 10 this week, raking in $2,993 per screen, finishing ahead of last week's top wide-ish release, There Will Be Blood. Next week could see a bump in a number of current limited releases, depending on how the Oscars pan out. So hopefully we'll get a nice surge for PT Anderson, not so much for Diablo Cody and Ivan Reitman's kid.

Top 10, Weekend of February 15-17:
1. The Band's Visit [Sony Pictures Classics] ($11,267 per screen)
2. In Bruges [Focus Features] ($10,420 per screen)
3. George A. Romero's Diary Of The Dead [Third Rail Releasing] ($6,549 per screen)
4. The Year My Parents Went On Vacation [City Lights Pictures Releasing] ($5,430 per screen)
5. David & Layla [David & Layla, LLC] ($5,007 per screen)
6. 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days [IFC First Take] ($4,808 per screen)
7. How To Cook Your Life [Roadside Attractions] ($3,704 per screen)
8. The Business of Being Born [International Film Circuit] ($3,608 per screen)
9. 2007 Academy Award Nominated Short Films [Magnolia Pictures] ($3,605 per screen)
10. Caramel [Roadside Attractions] ($3,360 per screen)

Source: IndieWire.

Review: Diary of the Dead

Peter Smith — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 18:07:00 GMT

Diary of the Dead is the latest in George Romero's now forty-year-old "[Noun] of the Dead" franchise. It's back-to-basics in tone and production, after 2005's massive Land of the Dead. It would be easy to accuse Romero of trend-hopping, based on the film's "found footage" presentation and release in proximity to Cloverfield and Brian De Palma's Redacted. But the film parts from the recent surge of Blair Witch-ian diegesis by opening with narration: a character explaining that she's edited and produced the film you're about to watch with the intent not just to record but to frighten. Instead of coming off as pretentiously meta, this contextualizing helps you suspend your disbelief. Romero makes the most of that suspension, and the result is a strange movie that succeeds far more often than it fails.

Foregoing the established continuity of the previous Dead films, Diary begins on day one of the zombie apocalypse. A group of film students are shooting a horror movie in the woods when they hear on the radio that the dead are rising from the grave. It's a simple set-up, colored by Romero's trademark winking humor, but it works thanks to the reactions of the cast. There's no panic, just a dumbstruck acceptance. Protagonist Jason continues to film as the group begins their journey to his girlfriend's home. Where Cloverfield and Blair Witch used a camera-wielding character to emphasize how technology acts as a buffer between humanity and disaster, Jason's compulsion to keep documenting the end of the world is actually the core conflict in Diary of the Dead. The camera, the character it's tied to, and its angry, incredulous subjects emphasize conflicting human impulses during disaster: do I document or do I help. As one puts it, "I want to help them, but I can't, cause I'm fucking plugged in," and to Romero, that about says it all. — John Constantine

Take Five: Romero Alive!

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 21:30:00 GMT

George Romero's Diary of the Dead opens this Friday, and it's the fifth in his legendary zombie film series. We thought about dedicating this week's Take Five to an overview of each installment, but not only could we not swing a screening of Diary (dammit!), but we figured, what better time to look at some of Romero's other films? Yes, it's true: the man who invented the modern conception of the zombie, who's responsible for one of the most durable and appealing of the Famous Monsters of Filmland, has actually made a couple of movies that do not feature the living dead! We're the first to admit that we're suckers for the low-budget, foul-mouthed, expatriate Pittsburgher, though, and while he seems to save his best stuff for the zombie pictures, that's not all there is to the man. True, he sticks with bloodshed and horror — we aren't expecting a Shakespeare adaptation or a minor-key family drama from him anytime soon — but at least a few of his non-zombie pictures are worth checking out for various reasons. So if you're in one of the many cities where Diary of the Dead won't open for a while, head to your local grindhouse video emporium or fire up your rent-by-mail queue and have a Romero-fest in which the dead don't walk: they just die.

THE CRAZIES (1973)

Romero's fourth film overall, and his best to immediately follow the original Night of the Living Dead, this is similar to his original zombie masterpiece in many ways: the Pittsburgh-area filming locations, the largely amateur cast and the ultra-low budget, and the dreadful atmosphere of paranoia and nameless fear. It concerns the government's attempt to control a bizarre outbreak of a strange virus that causes instant, violent insanity in all who contract it; but the government, as it often is, isn't telling all that it knows, and the faceless federal agents in stark white biochemical hazard suits quickly become as menacing as the maddened townsfolk. A fascinating, underseen movie that creates a terrific mood of terror and insanity, with some of Romero's pointed social commentary; he's currently working on a big-budget remake.

MARTIN (1977)

Perhaps George Romero's most underrated film is this suspenseful, character-driven horror film made just before the release of Dawn of the Dead (and financed by Romero's direction of a TV movie about O.J. Simpson called Juice on the Loose, which would only take on horrific dimensions much later on). Martin Madahas — played compellingly by the young unknown John Amplas — is a drifter of Eastern European descent who has come to believe that he's a vampire, and for everyone who's determined to talk him out of it before he wields the straight razors that compensate for his lack of fangs, there's someone else who's trying to convince him he's right. The ambiguity over Martin's true nature, and his own feelings towards the urges he can't deny, are what make this such an interesting movie. Definitely worthwhile.

CREEPSHOW (1982)

We've discussed this one before, in our Stephen King Take Five, but it's a longtime favorite of ours and one of the gems of Romero's catalogue — not to mention the only time he really seems to relax and have fun. It's his first truly big-budget picture, and while the effects and film quality are much improved, the most he gets out of the money he's given to play with is populating the cast of this campy good time with tons of appealing character actors, from Fritz Weaver and Ed Harris to Leslie Nielsen and E.G. Marshall to King himself and an uncredited Tom Atkins. This isn't high art by any means, but it perfectly captures the atmosphere of giddy vileness in the old EC Comics it emulates, and it's a highly enjoyable romp if, like King and Romero, you surrender completely to the pulp tone of the thing.

MONKEY SHINES (1988)

Monkeys share one thing in common with zombies: they are awesome. As single-word punchlines, only robots can rival them. But with Monkey Shines, a film about a homicidal helper chimpanzee, Romero manages to prove that monkeys are only as successful as the stars of horror movies if they are a hundred feet tall. Monkey Shines isn't nearly as bad as its reputation or its horrible name (it's hootily subtitled An Experiment in Fear); it has a compelling psychological angle, an interesting undertone of moral ambiguity, and a light touch with the social satire. Then again, it ain't all that good, either, and it's largely sunk by dud after dud in the supporting cast, from charmless Jason Beghe in the lead to completely baffled pros like Stanley Tucci and Janine Turner. Still, it's got a monkey, plus Stephen Root, so you'll laugh at least once.

BRUISER (2000)

We were quite excited when we heard about the impending release of Bruiser back around the turn of the century: not only was Romero back, but he appeared to be directing a movie that was more psychological thriller than gorefest. Unfortunately, despite tight direction and some swell performances (especially by Peter Stormare), the story of a repressed, simpering executive who explodes into rage and revenge gives the game away too soon and drifts aimlessly in its latter half into a fog of serial-killer cliches. This is a movie that could have benefited hugely from dwelling on the psychological state of its lead character and leaving open a degree of ambiguity and uncertainty about his actions, the way Martin did, but instead, it's a statement of the kind of potential Romero always has but doesn't always deliver on.

The Rep Report (February 14-21)

Phil Nugent — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 18:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: A dependable annual treat, the "Film Comment Selects" series at the Film Society of Lincoln Center (February 14-28) gives the writers and editors of that magazine a chance to decorate the screen of the Walter Reade Theater with a wide-ranging selection of films, new and old, that they love a lot more than the U.S. distribution business does. There are new films by George A. Romero (the opening night selection, Diary of the Dead), Jacques Rivette (The Duchess of Langeais, to be shown with the actress Jeanne Balibar in attendance), Ramin Bahrani (Chop Shop), Olivier Assayas (Boarding Gate), Lukas Moodyson (Container), and Alex Cox (The Searchers 2.0). The weird revivals include Cox's 1987 Walker, Crispin Glover's 1992 Rubin and Ed, and a couple of Richard Fleischer movies, the 1971 English true crime story 10 Rillington Place starring Richard Attenborough, and the mind-boggling 1975 Southern slave-owners' potboiler Mandingo.

"Milos Forman: A Retrospective" (February 14-28) at the Museum of Modern Art covers the expatriate director's career from his early, attention-getting work (Loves of a Blonde, The Firemen's Ball), traces his American work from the 1971 Taking Off to his finding a groove as a respected Hollywood pro (from the Academy Award-winning smash One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest to Amadeus and The People vs. Larry Flynt); it also includes some items from off the beaten tracks, such as his contributions to the omnibus films Visions of 8 and I Miss Sonja Henie.

CHICAGO: For one week starting February 15, the Gene Siskel Film Center is showing a new print of Jean-Luc Godard's exploration of youth culture, revolutionary leftist politics, and bright, shiny primary colors, La Chinoise (1967). This is an important film in the career of a major director and a unique experience on its own terms, and it's never been available on home video in this country, and it doesn't get out to play very often, so I'd advise the curious to brave whatever disaster-movie weather you have to brave to make it to the theater.

Trailer Review: George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead

Paul Clark — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 17:00:00 GMT

I actually saw this in Toronto at the world-premiere Midnight Madness screening, and while I was lukewarm on it the first time around, I'm curious to catch it again. For one thing, having recently seen Cloverfield, which uses a similar first-person shooting style, I'd like to be able to watch this again for comparison's sake — to contrast the stylistic gambit in the hands of a genre master with the director of the David Schwimmer vehicle The Pallbearer. Diary of the Dead may prove to be the most love-it-or-hate-it of any Romero zombie movie yet — it's got both the gore and the sociopolitical messages one has grown to expect from a Romero zombie movie, although how well he does by the latter is up for debate. But regardless of how you feel about it, a new Romero zombie is still something of an event.