The Screengrab : gillian anderson

Take Five: Psychics

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 19:15:00 GMT

Death Defying Acts opens in limited release this weekend, and so far, it hasn't generated much advance buzz. It's hard to figure out why: It comes on the heels of other successful movies involving magicians, including The Prestige and The Illusionist; it's a romance-driven period piece (which should attract women), but it features a murder mystery, psychics, and famed escape artist Harry Houdini (for the fellas); it's got an all-star cast led by perennial heartthrobs Guy Pearce and Catherine Zeta-Jones; and it's directed by none other than girl-geek icon Gillian Anderson. Maybe people are confused by the premise: in Death Defying Acts features Zeta-Jones as a spiritualist out to run a con on the master magician. We haven't seen it yet, so we're not sure if Zeta-Jones' powers are portrayed as being authentic, but in real life, Houdini was a relentless skeptic who didn't believe in any aspect of the paranormal, and who, in fact, went out of his way to disprove all claims of the supernatural as buncombe. Regardless, Hollywood has always been a sucker for a good psychic yarn, which probably explains why goofy New Age religions tend to take root in southern California before hitting the rest of the country. For today's Take Five, we bring you a handful of fine films about psychics -- and not a single one starring Shirley MacLaine.

THE SHINING (1980)

Nobody does psychic powers like Stephen King, and nobody realizes those psychic powers on screen better than Stanley Kubrick does in this horror classic. One of the most effective ideas Kubrick had was to de-emphasize Danny's psychic abilities, to tone down the paranormal aspects of the story (such as the hedge topiary coming to life) in order to play up the much more compelling dramatic element of a family in isolation slowly falling apart. Not that the terrifying paranormal elements aren't there: few moments in contemporary horror are creepier than seeing Danny go into a drooling fit, or the bizarre images he sees in the abandoned rooms of the Outlook Hotel -- but by keeping them ambiguous, by allowing the suggestion that none of it is real, that it's all just possibly the byproduct of an epileptic vision or a mind damaged by loneliness and alcohol -- the whole thing is made more compelling and upsetting than if the paranormal elements were made explicit.

SCANNERS (1981)

There's nothing subtle or ambiguous, on the other hand, about David Cronenberg's early sci-fi terror masterpiece. Before his transition to an artist of the decay and dysfunction of the body in modern classics like The Fly, Cronenberg's obsession was the abuse and alteration of the mind -- and as he showed in movies like Altered States, The Brood and Videodrome, an unhinged mind could do a vast amount of damage. Nowhere is this given a sharper point than in his cult classic Scanners, which works pretty much like HIghlander except with exploding heads instead of sword decapitations. As shadowy corporations struggle to control the massive psionic powers of a handful of people, we witness the battle firsthand through the activities of a highly game cast which includes mopey Stephen Lack, sinister Michael Ironside, and hammy Patrick McGoohan. Scanners also features one of our favorite taglines ever: "There are four billion people on Earth. 237 are scanners. And they are winning." Choice!

THE FURY (1978)

After having wet his beak in the unhinged-psychic game with a now-legendary film adaptation of Stephen King's Carrie (see, there's king again), Brian De Palma warmed to the subject and cranked out a modest but highly energetic (and entertaining) teen-psychics-in-trouble picture called The Fury. Featuring Amy Irving and Andrew Stevens as the two fresh-faced kids who have to worry about blowing up a city block instead of needing to pick up some Clearasil, the plot revolves around their being sent to a government research lab where their overseers must walk a thin line between making sure their prize specimens don't get away and make them happy enough that they don't turn their considerable powers on their masters. Playing almost like a trial run of some of David Cronenberg's laer stuff, The Fury is bounding with energy (and not just of the psychic variety), and its B-movie plot is highly abetted by the top-notch cast, including a wildly overaheated Kirk Douglas as Stevens' father and a gravely understated John Cassavetes as one of the government flunkies.

AKIRA (1988)

As any teenager -- including the ones on this list -- can tell you, being young is no picnic. Your body starts to change, girls don't like you and you can't figure out why, you start feeling sick and alienated for no reason, and before you know it, you're hanging out with a bunch of nogoodniks in a biker gang. But if you start to develop horrific psychic powers, ones that can kill your friends, turn you into a grotesque monster, and even level the entire city of Toyko with the power of a nuclear bomb? Well, that, brother, as a very wise man once said, is when your heartaches really begin. Katsuhiro Otomo's groundbreaking animated feature, based on his own graphic novel series, featured stellar animation, top-shelf voice acting, creepy effects, a complex but not incomprehensible storyline (it turns out, to no one's real surprise, that a nefarious military intelligence project is behind poor Akira's transformation into a psionic monstrosity), and some great effects at the movie's unforgettable end all helped open up western markets to both anime and manga, transforming the world of comics and film forever.

INVINCIBLE (2001)

Anyone can make a movie about deranged psychics who threaten the lives of their loved ones. Leave it to Werner Herzog to up the ante by making a movie about a deranged psychic in the employ of the Nazi party who enlists a Jewish strongman to help him put on a carnival show about Siegfried, the legendary Aryan hero of myth. It's this kind of intensely focussed eccentricity, and reckless disregard for making sense, that seperates the men like Herzog from the boys. This was Herzog's first narrative feature after a prolonged stretch of making documentaries, and while it's not nearly in the same league as movies like Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre: The Wrath of God, it's still got his knack for breathtaking imagery and his gift for illustrating the mad inner lives of obsessives in spades. The psychic in question in Invincible is Erik Jan Hanussen, the doomed faux-Dane who, for a while, operated as Hitler's personal clairvoyant until falling out of favor with Der Fuhrer's inner circle and getting himself assassinated. His story is also told in the relatively straightforward biopic Hanussen (1988), but that movie can't compete with Tim Roth's giddy performance or Herzog's fiery direction.

Trailer Review: X-Files 2 Leaked Trailer Re-dux

John Constantine — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 17:01:00 GMT

For what is ostensibly a tent pole for Fox in the summer blockbuster season, there hasn’t been a whole lot of mainstream hype for the yet-to-be-officially-titled X-Files sequel. The film drops on July 25th and it’s only today that an official poster has been released (and it’s quite fetching, as you can see). Then again, there seems to be a method to the marketing madness behind Mulder and Scully’s resurrection. It works like this:

Step 1) Make brief trailer comprised purely of quick cuts, include one shot of beloved characters. Bring trailer to comics convention, allow nerds to spread good news.

Step 2) Make second trailer, include pensive dialogue between beloved characters, more quick cut action, add theme song and classic vague text alluding to “the truth” and it being somewhere. Bring to comic convention, allow nerds to spread good news.

Step 3) Profit without paying for televised marketing until summer.

That Chris Carter’s one smart cookie. Metaphorically speaking. Unless the truth that is out there is that Chris Carter is indeed a delicious, circular confection possibly containing chips of chocolate.

Trailer Review: X-Files 2 Wondercon Leak

John Constantine — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 20:09:00 GMT

About four years ago, shortly after I started working for Nerve and long before the illustrious Screengrab was born, I had one of my first bona fide celebrity sightings in New York. I was walking out of a music shop when I turned and saw David Duchovny briskly walking with a female companion on 4th street. We made eye contact and the look on Duchovny’s face will forever remain in my mind as one that screamed, “DEAR GOD, DON’T LET THE X-FILES FREAK TALK TO ME! NOT TODAY!” I held my tongue in a way that the audience watching this leaked teaser for the X-Files’ return to the silver screen would find impossible. There’s not much to it. A nice hint of mystery, a whole lot of my personal buddy Billy Connolly looking like the abominable snowman, and some quick shots of Mulder and Scully looking like Mulder and Scully. If you’re anything like these screaming fans though, that’s more than enough. This movie will have nothing to do with the show and first film’s ongoing mythology-aliens plotline and will be a standalone supernatural thriller. If this turns out to be as good as it looks at this point, I probably won’t be able to keep my mouth shut the next DD and I cross paths.

The Rep Report (February 20--27)

Phil Nugent — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 18:00:00 GMT

LOS ANGELES: The films of Sergei Paradjanov aren't like most of the films made in the Soviet Union in the sixties and seventies, and not really much like anything else, either: floating, visually poetic works full of charged symbolic imagery. Their meanings may not always be readily clear, but that wasn't enough to keep the government authorities from deciding that whatever they were supposed to mean, it pissed them off; the director, who died at the age of 66 in 1990, just when it was becoming possible for artists such as himself to get some breathing room in their home country, was subjected to official harassment during the most creatively fertile years of his career and spent four years in a labor camp. From February 22 to the 29th, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is showing six of Paradjanov's films, including his breakthrough Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors, the masterpiece The Color of Pomegranates, and the late works The Legend of Suram Fortress and Ashik Kerib, made in the 1980s after the filmmaker was obliged to take a fifteen-year layoff.

BERKELEY: The Pacific Film Archives pays tribute to one of the most highly regarded and least mass-audience-friendly of living British directors with "Closely Watched Films: Terence Davies" (February 20 - February 27). This ambitious retrospective is built around screenings of Davies' autobiographical works, the feature films The Long Day Closes and Distant Voices, Still Lives and the three shorts that comprise "The Terence Davies Trilogy", as well as his adaptation of John Kennedy Toole's The Neon Bible, with the director himself in attendance. On February 23, Davies will walk an audience through his breakthrough film in a discussion titled "Distant Voices, Still Lives: Shot-by-Shot." The theater will also screen his version of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth with Gillian Anderson. J. Hoberman captured what sets Davies apart, and what gives his work its fascintion, when he wrote of that one that “Davies’s sense of the material is closer to a Mizoguchi geisha drama than Masterpiece Theatre."

Morning Deal Report: Behind My Camel

Peter Smith — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 15:00:00 GMT

Spider-Man 4 lumbers gradually into production. Sony says this will include a mere two villains, instead of their originally planned 846. Whatever.

Gerard Butler has fled the Escape From New York remake, just after news that Brett Ratner had split for the outer boroughs himself.

The underused Gillian Anderson will star in The Smell of Apples, a drama set in '70s South Africa. Nice to see her again.

That George Romero just really likes zombies, apparently; Diary of the Dead's not even out yet and he's already planning a sequel.

Speaking as the "Andy Summers" in a Police cover band, I'm delighted to hear that the real Andy Summers' autobiography is becoming a documentary. That it's from the director of Tupac: Resurrection is a little less encouraging, but we'll see.

— Peter Smith