The Screengrab : guy ritchie

Trailer Review: Sherlock Holmes

Paul Clark — Wed, 27 May 2009 16:00:00 GMT

As I’m sure many of you can guess, Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes isn’t exactly at the top of my must-see list for 2009. Really, this trailer is pretty much what I expected from this combination of material and director- wacky camera angles, bare-knuckle boxing matches, and lotsa stuff blowing up. What’s more, the oafish “lad” humor that’s shown up in all of Ritchie’s other films to date is also well in evidence here too, which the frat boys might enjoy but has never really done much for me. So any interest I have in this project comes from the cast, which is actually pretty intriguing to me. Being a Downey fan, I knew he would have fun as Holmes, but I wasn’t sure exactly how he’d take on the character, and it’s nice to see that he’s playing him not as a ninny (like Johnny Depp’s Ichabod Crane, funny as that was), but as a fairly capable if somewhat unorthodox crime-solver. And Jude Law should be entertaining as Watson- I generally like Law better when he’s not the protagonist, which lets him air out his inner character actor usually to good effect. Also, there’s Rachel McAdams in lingerie, which is nice to see- both the lingerie and McAdams in general. Plus I gotta admit- the hammer gag is pretty funny.

The Best & Worst Get Rich Quick Schemes In Cinema History! (Part Six)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 22:30:00 GMT

LOCK, STOCK & TWO SMOKING BARRELS (1998) & SNATCH (2000)

The Guy Ritchie formula seems deceptively easy: mix several colorfully bemonikered, slang-slinging con men, lowlifes, and petty criminals with a couple of scary sociopaths, a handful of intersecting scams and a hundred thousand bullets and beat to a pulp. And yet, as deeply uneven films like Smoking Aces (and Ritchie’s own Revolver) have demonstrated, good-natured ultra-violence can be just as tricky to pull off as the doomed get-rich-quick schemes favored by the sub-genre’s hapless anti-heroes. First, there needs to be a good Maguffin, like the antique shotguns in Lock, Stock or Snatch’s 86-carat diamond. Next comes a solid rooting interest (like the indispensable Jason Statham) and a credibly scary criminal kingpin like P.H. Moriarty’s murderous pornographer “Hatchet” Harry Lonsdale or Alan Ford’s psychopathic pig enthusiast, Brick Top. From there it’s all about delaying the inevitable showdown with as many undercard bouts as possible between interesting supporting characters like Vinnie Jones’ relatively nice bad men Big Chris and Bullet Tooth Tony and various allies, enemies and enemies-turned-allies (and vice-versa) played by the likes of Goldie, Benicio Del Toro, Dennis Farina and Brad Pitt's memorably mumbling pikey brawler, Mickey O'Neil. The real trick, though, is taking the material just seriously enough to maintain dramatic tension, while never quite taking it seriously enough to require tortured method acting from, say, Jeremy Piven. (AO)

THE STING (1973)

While The Grifters made the life of a con artist look bleak and despairing, as fit the work of a born cynic like Jim Thompson, The Sting – a smash hit when it first appeared in 1973 – made it look like quite a dreamy little profession, all natty outfits and colorful slang and snappy patter with your partner, accompanied by the rollicking ragtime strains of Scott Joplin. Of course, no one ever accused George Roy Hill of going for realism in The Sting; what he was trying to do was recapture the dynamite charisma his leads, Robert Redford and Paul Newman, had shared in their previous outing, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Amazingly, he captured lightning in a bottle twice, and even if audiences had a hard time following the big-payoff swindle that Redford and Newman had planned against the sting’s intended target, Robert Shaw, they didn’t seem to care. It all looked like such a lark, who cared about the details? (LP)

MIDNIGHT COWBOY (1969)

Explaining his reasons for lighting out from his dishwasher's job in Texas, Joe Buck (Jon Voight) says that there's "a lot of rich women back there beggin' for it -- payin' for it, too. And the men are mostly tooty fruities!" Not long after arriving in the big city, Joe beds Sylvia Miles, which settles any doubts you might have had about how hard he's willing to dedicate himself to his craft. However, he ends up paying her, a sure sign that he may lack the management skills necessary to be successfully self-employed. Luckily, Ratso (Dustin Hoffman), the slimy, crippled greaseball with the tubercular cough takes him into his apartment in a condemned building and offers to pimp him to the best of his abilities. The film doubles as a snapshot of the Times Square New York of the pre-Giuliani cleanup era; anyone who sees it and still professes feelings of nostalgia for the good old days is seriously ill. (PN)

BOB LE FLAMBEUR (1956)

Jean-Pierre Melville was the high priest of French noir, and Bob le Flambeur was one of his crowning achievements, a heist film so expertly orchestrated that, along with the preceding The Asphalt Jungle, it helped set a template still employed half a century later. The set-up involves aging, dapper gambler and thief Bob (Roger Deuchesne), who’s so well-liked that he’s friends with the chief of police, and who – after finding himself down on his luck – endeavors to change his fortunes by recruiting a crew for a lucrative casino score. Bob’s day-to-day existence revolves around taking chances, meaning that his eventual decision to pull off one last robbery is simply an example of a man recognizing his inherent nature. If Bob remains true to himself until the end, so too does Melville, whose expressionistic direction magnificently set the stage for the forthcoming French New Wave. Dark, sumptuous shadows, stunning iris shots, and on-location cinematography breathe melancholic life into this portrait of the romantic allure of a big score, and of the inescapable hand of fate. (NS)

CHRISTMAS IN JULY (1940)

By the standards of Preston Sturges's later, wilder films, the dreams on display here are rather modest, but they manage to inspire an impressive amount of damage anyway. Dick Powell, at his most ingratiatingly sappy, is the luckless young striver who wants to secure a solid enough place for himself that he can marry his girl, Ellen Drew. Dick decides that his best chance is to win the $25,000 top prize for the Maxford House Coffee Slogan, a shot in the dark that becomes a major point of his masculine pride when Ellen casts doubt on his submission: "If you can't sleep, it's not the coffee, it's the bunk!" (She persists in not liking it even after he's explained it to her, which he does at some length.) In perhaps the most straightforward plotline Sturges ever conceived, pranksters trick Dick into believing that he's won, Dick somehow gets his hands on the money and plays Mr. Big Spender, his boss forces a promotion on him in recognition of his previously unsuspected genius for concocting advertising slogans, the truth is revealed, Dick is chastened, and then of course it turns out that he really did win the contest because nobody sent in anything better. (PN)

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent, Nick Schager

Transported: The Jason Statham Think Piece

John Constantine — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 04:00:00 GMT

I had traveled half-way across the country to spend some quality time with my father. We were drinking Tomintoul scotch whiskey in his Colorado cabin. It was snowing outside and we were quiet, watching a movie, entranced. I turned to my dad and shared with him the undeniable truth I had gleaned from the film: "Transporting is the greatest job on earth." He sipped his drink, reflected on his years of wisdom, and nodded: "Yes. Yes it is."

If you're unfamiliar with Luc Besson's Transporter series — or wonder why a father and son would spend a portion of their few, precious hours together watching a movie about a guy and his car — its appeal can be summed up in two words: Jason Statham. The titular star doesn't make transporting look easy, of course. Adhering to a strict moral code while transporting goods for less-than-reputable businessmen is taxing. The guy has to make BMWs perform stunts that would confound a physicist. Cars just don't move like that, and if you're carting around a petite young woman in the trunk, as a transporter often does, you've got to factor in her continued survival as a goal. Plus, the job keeps you so busy — maintaining your pristine black suit and kicking the crap out of nameless thugs — that you don't get much of a chance to enjoy your secret seaside villa. (Incidentally, The Transporter has five named thugs in its credit list — Thugs 1 through 3, Little Thug, and Giant Thug — but Statham seems to brutalize quite a few poor, uncredited thugs, as well.) And getting your work finished in a timely manner is complicated by your nagging sense of honor. Human trafficking? Crap, you can't transport when you know that's going down. A wan model, wearing nothing but an unbuttoned nursing uniform and two uzis, kidnaps the rich toddler you're driving to school? Shit, doesn't look like you're punching out early today. And with all that going on, when does Statham find the time to sculpt his guns?

This is what you think about when you experience Jason Statham movies. You ask the big questions. The biggest of which is: why the hell can't I stop watching him?

Take 2006's Crank and its sequel, Crank: High Voltage, which opens this Friday. That a sequel to Crank even exists is a testament to Statham's rising star power: the original Crank ended with Statham's character falling umpteen-hundred feet from a helicopter, landing on a car, then bouncing onto the ground and dying. (Poster tagline for new film: "He was dead, but he got better.")

Crank is one of the worst movies I've ever seen in my life, a brutishly stupid set-piece pileup that finds Statham getting maimed by an army of racial stereotypes. Statham's character, hit-man Chev Chelios, has been injected with the poisonous "Beijing Cocktail" and therefore needs to maintain a constant stream of adrenaline running through his system or he'll die. The plot, in Statham's own words, is: "Run, run, fucking run. I do not stop." It features a sex scene between Statham's and Amy Smart's characters that's (I think) supposed to be funny: when Chelios feels himself flagging at a bus stop, his only choice is to have street-sex with Smart, on a mailbox in front of a gaggle of picture-taking Japanese tourists. It's about as titillating as a porta-john. I couldn't look at mailboxes for a week, I was that embarrassed for them. But now, when I see trailers for Crank: High Voltage, which actually manages to look stupider in two minutes than Crank does in eighty, I think, "Hmm. Yes. I cannot wait to see it. I needed plans for Friday night and thankfully they have presented themselves. Thank you, Mr. Statham."

Perhaps it helps that Statham appears to feel much like I would, if forced to stimulate sex with Amy Smart in front of a large group of strangers: slightly disgusted, but willing to get the job done. Speaking about a public-sex scene in the Crank sequel (we can only imagine), Statham said, "Trying to do an aggressive sex scene is quite difficult, especially in a public place with a crowd of screaming extras with their little camera phones going click-click, taking pictures of your pasty white ass." Statham is the action-star who isn't afraid to tell it like it is, or insult his own ass cheeks.

But where the hell did this sort of self-denigrating hero come from? The twenty-first century rebirthed the marquee action star, but today's dominant, male-fantasy models are a far cry from their Reagan-era forebears. The big-muscle, low-vocabulary Schwarzeneggers and Stallones have given way to the sad, silent, and speedy Matt Damons and Daniel Craigs, intelligent action peddlers who — off-screen — deplore the violence they peddle. Statham doesn't play in their league, though; he's a C-lister. In some ways, he's closer to the Clinton-era, thick-skulled, martial-artist-as-actor tradition of Seagal and Van Damme, but that lineage doesn't quite fit him either; though Statham's acting has never won an Oscar, and his American accent has been derided, he looks like Orson Welles next to the Muscles from Brussels.

Jason Statham's early life seems as oddball and awesome as some of his roles. The son of a lounge singer and a dancer, he was on Britain's National Diving squad for twelve years, which led work modeling for the French Connection. To bankroll his scuba-diving hobby, he hustled perfume and jewelry on London street corners. This, plus his modeling and his martial-arts training, led him to his acting debut in Guy Ritchie's hipster-faves Lock, Stock, & Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch at the turn of the century. He played one-named roles, guys called Bacon and Turkish, swarthy Cockney con men who spent their onscreen time doing everything to avoid violence, not dole it out. But how did he go from skinny, balding Brit spouting witticisms to becoming the Transporter? And why do I like him so much as the Transporter?

Let's be honest. Statham's never as cool as Craig, but no one can be. No man has that many smooth things to say and, even if they did, no random woman on a beach is going to respond when you say them. He's never as collected as Damon, but Jason Bourne is a government-made super-spy. Chev Chelios doesn't jump off a bridge because it's the strategic maneuver he's been trained to take. He jumps off a bridge because, well, that's about the only choice he has. He's hassled and busy, annoyed by the demands of survival, but will do whatever it takes to survive.

Maybe it's that hint of everyman exasperation that makes Statham so irresistible, that, counterintuitively, makes his most outsized exploits (flipping luxury sedans onto moving trains, etc.) seem plausible. When Statham's interrupted while transporting, or he's given a drug that's going to make his heart explode, he responds with a begrudging sigh. A rolling of the eyes. God, why did it have to be today? I have things to do! That hint of reality establishes that for all his toughness, Jason Statham is One Of Us. If I gave up carbs and worked out eighteen hours a day, he suggests, I, too, could live his golden life. And if I did, I would feel about life the way his characters feel. (There are differences, I suppose. I, for one, would gently caress Ms. Smart in the comfort and safety of the mail truck.)

I was wrong. Transporting isn't the greatest job on earth. Being Jason Statham is.

A Solitary Man: "Bronson"

Phil Nugent — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 20:45:00 GMT

The new British film Bronson is about a man named Charles Bronson, but it's not a biopic about the star of Death Wish; it's about a 56-year-old former bareknuckle boxer and convicted armed robber (born Michael Gordon Peterson, before he is said to have been renamed by a boxing promoter) who has spent some thirty-four years in prison, thirty of which he's spent in solitary confinement. (Since 1974, he's spent a total of four months out of prison.) Part of what sets Bronson apart from other celebrity criminals is that his fearsome reputation is based not on any reign of terror he conducted in society at large but on his behavior as a prisoner; his relatively brief stretch of time behind bars and outside solitary confinement was a three-ring circus of violent protests, hostage takings, and physical attacks on guards and fellow prisoners. (In the movie, which was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at this year's Sundance Film Festival, he is played by Tom Hardy, who appeared in Guy Ritchie's recent film RocknRolla)An inside view is provided by Erwin James, who writes in the Guardian, "During my own 20-year prison journey I crossed paths with Bronson on a number of occasions, though we never met face to face. His time was spent mostly in punishment blocks, segregation units, close supervision centres - or in the back of prison vans on the way from one prison to another, always accompanied by at least six prison officers in riot gear. The closest we came to meeting was when I was moved to Long Lartin high-security prison, near Evesham in Worcestershire. Some days before I landed, Bronson had run amok on one of the landings. Naked, blacked-up, wearing only a bandana around his head and wielding a spear, he had single-handedly taken control of most of the wing... The carnage he had caused was in evidence all around. They put me in his old cell; it was surprisingly clean. To be honest, I was glad he had been moved. Doing serious time, trying to make sense of the system, the culture of aggression, and acceptance of failure is hard enough without having to cope with demented and unpredictable neighbours going berserk. A prison officer once said to me, regarding one high-security prison: 'It would be great here if it wasn't for the cons.' He wasn't making a joke."

Bronson is a notorious figure in England, and the BBC reports that the movie has come under protests by prison officials and others as a glorification of a violent menace. "We should not be glorifying this type of behaviour," say Colin Moses, national chairman of the Prison Officers' Association. "This man has spent the best part of his life behind bars for causing harm to people. He has caused trauma to hard-working, law-abiding people who will never work again. Bronson is not a victim, he is the perpetrator." As it happens, the movie is due to be released on March 13, which means that its ad campaign overlaps with Bronson's next appearance before the parole board, on March 11. No doubt the timing will do him a hell of a favor.

DVD Digest for January 27, 2009

Paul Clark — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 15:00:00 GMT

This week, a whole bunch of late-summer/early-fall releases are coming on DVD to help soothe the midwinter moviegoing blues.

Of this week’s bumper crop of recent theatrical releases coming to DVD, the most noteworthy is Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona (Genius Products, also Blu-Ray), which became the Woodman’s biggest hit in years due in no small part to the promise of hot Penelope Cruz-on-Scarlett Johansson action. That it was also a welcome change of scenery for the filmmaker- shooting for the first time in Spain- helped matters somewhat as well. It’s definitely worth a look if you haven’t seen it yet- come for the sexy stuff, stay for the memorable performances by Oscar nominee Cruz, Javier Bardem playing a character 180 degrees removed from his Anton Chigurh, and the ever-dependable Rebecca Hall.

Also this week, Warner unleashes the cops’n’robbers trifecta of Edward Norton and Colin Farrell in Pride and Glory (also Blu-Ray), Neil LaBute’s Lakeview Terrace (also Blu-Ray), and Guy Ritchie’s Rocknrolla (also Blu-Ray). Other releases include: Rainn Wilson in The Rocker (Fox, also Blu-Ray); Kirk Cameron’s inspirational melodrama Fireproof (Sony), the Iraq War drama The Lucky Ones (Lionsgate); Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired (Image), a docuymentary about the filmmaker’s controversial court case; the French thriller Tell No One (MPI); the babes-and-binge-drinking comedy College (Fox); and a pair of direct-to-DVD animated releases, Hulk Vs. (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray) and Open Season 2 (Sony, also Blu-Ray).

This week’s selection of classics coming to DVD is highlighted by MGM’s The Pink Panther Film Collection (MGM), which includes all of the films including a new pressing of the original, also available in separately as The Pink Panther (1963) Collector’s Edition (MGM, also Blu-Ray). There’s also The Pink Panther Classic Cartoon Collection (MGM), a nine-disc set of the televised Pink Panther shorts. All of this Pink Panther news might be happier if it didn’t portend the release of the second crappy remake starring Steve Martin, but what can you do. Also this week: Mary Poppins 45th Anniversary Edition (Disney).

Finally, the big Blu-Ray only news this week is the release of Universal’s The Bourne Collection, which includes all three theatrical features (sorry, no Richard Chamberlain TV movie), along with a raft of extras. Also this week: Oliver Stone’s Any Given Sunday Director’s Cut (Warner), the college band drama Drumline Special Edition (Fox), and the annual release of Groundhog Day (Sony).

Screengrab 2009 Preview: Paul Clark's Picks

Paul Clark — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 20:00:00 GMT

It’s a little risky looking forward at an entire upcoming year’s worth of releases and cherry-picking the promising-looking ones. It’s not just that many of the movies that are currently slated to come out within the next 12 months might get pushed back or shuttered altogether. It’s also the fact that as good as some movies might look on paper with their high-profile casts and extravagant budgets, they could very well end up awful. Just ask the makers of Town and Country.

That said, here (using the ever-popular “3 Up, 3 Down” format) are a handful of my most anticipated movies of 2009, along with three I’m dreading, and one wild card:

3 Up:

The Tree of Life

Marking the filmmaker’s quickest turnaround to date, Terrence Malick latest film comes a scant four years after his 2005 masterpiece The New World. That Malick has apparently decided to keep making movies is worth celebrating by itself, but that he’s finally getting around to his supposed “dream project” (which he’s allegedly been tinkering with for three decades now) is the stuff of Malick-fanboy fantasies.

Inglourious Basterds

Speaking of fanboy fantasies, it looks like Quentin Tarantino’s long-discussed World War II actioner is for real. Word from those who’ve read the script is that Basterds (Tarantino’s spelling) is all kinds of wanky, but don’t forget that people said the same about Kill Bill and Thunder Bolt Death Proof, and those turned out just fine. Not even Eli Roth’s acting could scare me away from this.

Avatar

I toyed with several choices in this spot- including Pixar’s Up and Von Trier’s Antichrist- but in the end, I kept coming back to Jim Cameron’s state-of-the-arts space opera. It’s been twelve years since Cameron made his last fiction feature (nothing you’d have heard of), and I’m plenty curious to see the project that convinced him to come back. Say what you will about his movies- there’s no denying Cameron’s technical mastery and knack for cinematic grandeur, and I’m eager to see how he pushes the envelope again this time around.

3 Down:

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra

Two summers ago, I hated Michael Bay’s Transformers, the movie that disproved my seemingly ironclad hypothesis that no movie that contains giant robot fights could ever be boring. After that movie’s massive box-office success, Hollywood has responded with a wave of big-screen toy/cartoon adaptations pitched to adults who really ought to know better (coming in 2012: The Jonas Brothers are Voltron!). Is there any chance this will actually be good? Don’t bet on it.

G-Force

You folks already know how I feel about this one. The only way this could’ve possibly been good would be if Robert Smigel or Trey Parker and Matt Stone were behind it, making it as bizarre as possible, but that’s not going to happen. Sorry, G-Force, but my flesh’n’fur cavies could take you all on without breaking a squeak, sassy celebrity voices or no.

Paul Blart: Mall Cop

Yet another sub-Sandler product from the Happy Madison crap factory. Normally, I wouldn’t bother, except that the title character’s name is too close to mine to ignore. I’m hoping this falls out of the public consciousness quickly so that I don’t have to worry about "Mall Cop" jokes for the next few years. Why couldn’t the character be “Paul Blart: Nuclear Physicist” or “Paul Blart: Vascular Surgeon?” How about “Paul Blart: World’s Greatest Film Critic?” Okay, maybe that’s pure fantasy, but I can dream, right?

Wild Card:

Sherlock Holmes

I was a fan of the Holmes series in my youth, so part of me is excited for this, not only for the cast (Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law are inspired choices to play the newfangled Holmes and Watson), but also because the filmmakers are using the classic A Scandal in Bohemia story as their inspiration. So why isn’t this one of my most anticipated movies of 2009? Two words, folks- Guy Ritchie. Maybe he’ll be able to keep his tendencies toward visual noise and narrative incoherence in check this time, but if Ritchie screws the pooch on this seemingly foolproof project, I’m going to be seriously pissed.

Andrew Osborne's Top Ten Movies of 2008 (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 22:46:00 GMT

6. THE WACKNESS

Thoughtful, well-made coming-of-age stories are usually popular, and weed has been making a cinematic comeback lately, so I’m not exactly sure why The Wackness in general and Josh Peck’s charming turn as wistful pot dealer Luke Shapiro didn’t make more of a splash in 2008. Writer/director Jonathan Levine’s evocation of Manhattan circa 1994 feels as specific and lived-in as Ben Braddock’s Pasadena or Lloyd Dobler’s Washington suburb, and it’s hard to think of a better first-love interest than Olivia Thirlby. I posted a full review of the movie back in June when it first charmed me at the Provincetown Film Festival, so rather than repeat all that praise, I’ll just paraphrase Thirlby’s character and say the film wound up on my Top Ten because, in a difficult year, it reminded me to look at the dopeness and not just the wackness.

7. FULL BATTLE RATTLE

Full Battle Rattle is a documentary by Jesse Moss and Tony Gerber about a simulated Iraqi province in California’s Mojave desert, populated by Iraqi-American citizens and U.S. Army “insurgents” in a full-immersion training scenario where soldiers practice both their combat and diplomacy skills before heading off to the real war in Iraq. At first, it’s funny to watch battles interrupted by visits from the ice cream man as the military combines role-playing and stagecraft to create what seems like a strange, gorey theme park or game show (complete with graphically wounded mannequin “casualties,” designed to prepare fledgling medics for the realities of war). But it’s those harsh realities waiting for the participants beyond all the play-acting that provide the film with its emotional core, as we come to know the various players, including an Iraqi immigrant terrified of being deported and an American combat vet who admits, tellingly, that after returning from a tour of duty, it takes him several days to start viewing his Iraqi colleagues as people again (as opposed to potential enemies). By the time the simulation ends and the soldiers we’ve come to know say goodbye to their families and ship out to an uncertain future, the lady next to me in the movie theater was openly weeping, and there seemed to be something in my eye as well.

8. IRON MAN

I’ve gone on record about my utter bafflement over the messianic fervor surrounding The Dark Knight, a good but occasionally clunky superhero movie featuring an entertaining performance by a talented actor who died far too young. But I still don’t see why Heath Ledger’s Brad Dourif-ian performance as The Joker is considered groundbreaking or revelatory: compare its evocation of evil to Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet and then get back to me. And I’m still not really sure why Batman’s deliberations over civil liberties vs. public safety are especially more profound than Iron Man’s growing awareness of the consequences of war profiteering, except that Jon Favreau’s comic book adaptation takes itself far less seriously while delivering its tightly paced (but not over-written) action payload. Robert Downey Jr.’s performance is nowhere near as flashy or iconic as Ledger’s, of course – a typical downside of playing the good guy – but it’s miles ahead of Christian Bale’s stiff-in-a-suit Caped Crusader. Downey is fun and fascinating to watch, infusing a potentially one-dimensional role with the gravity and humanity of hard-won experience, as well as the humility of a man all too aware he could very easily have shared Ledger’s fate.

9. IN BRUGES

Who is this incredibly engaging, charismatic actor named Colin Farrell, and why haven’t I seen him on the big screen before now? Oh, sure, I’m familiar with his doppelganger: that brooding, constipated Irish guy with the same name who kept threatening to be the next big thing for several years, but never quite arrived thanks to performances in a succession of mezzo-mezzo movies that never quite connected with audiences. But the Farrell who plays the guilt-ridden hit man Ray in Martin McDonagh’s funny, suspenseful crime drama In Bruges is a true movie star, well-paired with Brendan Gleeson as the soulful mentor waiting for the other shoe to drop in the titular Belgian town after a botched assignment brings down the wrath of crime boss Ralph Fiennes (who likewise has never been quite so compelling on screen). The beautiful but claustrophobic confines of the distinctive setting and the pervasive undertow of regret gives Bruges a richer flavor than, say, a fun but ultimately disposable Guy Ritchie offering like RockNRolla, even if McDonagh’s film isn’t ultimately all that much more than the sum of its high quality parts.

10. VICKY CRISTINA BARCELONA

Until three seconds ago, I was planning to include Slumdog Millionaire in the final slot of this list, if only for the energy and scope of Danny Boyle’s storytelling mojo. But as I started to think and write about it, I realized the film as a whole simply left me cold. On the other hand, there was no lack of heat in Woody Allen’s latest comeback film, which is possibly why I have warmer memories of it. Penelope Cruz's performance as the hot-blooded trois in the ménage between Scarlett Johansson’s feckless American tourist and Javier Bardem’s Spanish art stud is probably better than the movie itself, but Allen still has some interesting things to say about the chimerical nature of love, the conflicting desires of the brain, heart and libido and the way smart people consistently outsmart themselves by refusing to acknowledge what they really want, even when they somehow manage to find it. (And, of course, the fact the movie unfolds against a backdrop of gorgeous Spanish locations doesn’t hurt, either.)

Honorable Mention: Wellness, Goliath, Turn the River, American Teen, Pineapple Express, Tropic Thunder, Tell No One, Ghost Town, Burn After Reading, The Bank Job, RockNRolla, Role Models, Quantum of Solace, Slumdog Millionaire, Doubt

Worst Movies I Actually Saw:
Patti Smith: Dream of Life, Indiana Jones & The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, What Just Happened?

Worst Movie I Didn’t See:
An American Carol

Most Overrated:
The Dark Knight (see above)

Most Overcriticized:
The Happening

Respected More Than Liked:
Synechdoche

TOP TV:
The Wire
Mad Men
The Amazing Race
The Daily Show & The Colbert Report
Survivor: Micronesia & Gabon
Breaking Bad
The Soup
Everybody Hates Chris
Recount
Generation Kill
Project Runway
True Blood

2008 SOUNDTRACK
“No One” – Alicia Keyes
“Pretty Blue” – Moonflower
“Paper Planes” – M.I.A.
“Wichita Lineman” – Glen Campbell
“Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)” – Beyonce
“Sex Changes” – The Dresden Dolls
“Shoot the Runner” – Kasabian
“Still Alive” – GLaDOS
“Sax Rohmer, Pt. 1” – The Mountain Goats
“M79” – Vampire Weekend
“I Am Commando” – The NorthAtom
“I’m Good. I’m Gone” – Lykke Li
“Belleville Rendezvous” – The Triplets of Belleville (Soundtrack)
“Happy Days Are Here Again” – Barbara Streisand

Click Here For Part One

DVD Digest for November 18, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 15:00:00 GMT

This week, some of summer’s biggest hits arrive in stores in time for the holiday shopping season, along with a handful of choice classics.

DVD of the week: With all the care Pixar devotes to creating their theatrical releases, it’s amazing that they have any time left for their DVDs. However, Pixar’s DVD editions are almost invariably first-rate, and this week’s release of WALL-E would appear to be no exception. We begin, of course, with the razor-sharp transfer of the movie itself, which comes directly from the digital master, making it arguably crisper than could be found in the theatre. But that’s only the beginning, with two animated shorts (one seen in theatres, the other a DVD original), featurettes on the film’s sound design, visual design, music, character design, and more. Finally, there are a number of features on WALL-E that take viewers into the world of the film, including a documentary about the movie’s robotic cast, and short films about the nefarious “Buy N Large” corporation from its inception to their Earth Exit plan, and beyond. Needless to say, WALL-E is an ideal DVD for kids, but it’s also a must-have even if you don’t have a family to buy for this holiday season.

Other recent releases coming to DVD this week: Ben Stiller’s Hollywood action satire Tropic Thunder (Paramount, also Blu-Ray); America Ferrara, Amber Tamblyn and friends in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 (Warner, also Blu-Ray); and a quartet of acclaimed indie films- Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World (Image); the documentary Gonzo: The Life and Work of Hunter S. Thompson (Magnolia); Harmony Korine’s Mister Lonely (Genius); and Audrey Tautou in Priceless (First Look).

On the classics front, the big release this week is David Lynch: The Lime Green Box Set (Absurda), which includes the new-to-DVD Industrial Symphony No. 1, plus the remastered Eraserhead, a Lynch-approved 5.1-surround version of Blue Velvet, The Elephant Man, Wild at Heart, The Short Films of David Lynch, Dumbland, along with new extras for Elephant Man and Wild at Heart, the Eraserhead soundtrack, and a “Mystery Disc” full of exclusive Lynch goodies. Or if you’re looking for something a little more “classical”, pick up the new Criterion editions of Martin Ritt’s masterful adaptation of the John le Carre novel, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, or the French swashbuckler Fanfan la Tulipe. Also worth mentioning is the release of Fred Schepisi’s long-unavailable classic of Australian cinema, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (Ryko Distribution).

In a slow week for TV on DVD, the most noteworthy title is Bones Season 3 (Fox).

Finally, this week presents the most definitive argument that Blu-Ray has really arrived, with a plethora of mostly crappy Blu-Ray only releases. The exceptions are Curtis Hanson’s pretty-good Eminem vehicle 8 Mile (Universal) and the Neil Gaiman-scripted Mirrormask (Sony). But other than that, it’s looking pretty dire, with the Martin Lawrence double feature of Blue Streak (Sony) and National Security (Sony), Guy Ritchie’s Revolver (Sony), and Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales (Sony), which if nothing else remains the most definitive cinematic statement about the ongoing war over teen horniness. I’m for decriminalization, by the way.

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: Nov. 1-7, 2008

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 22:00:00 GMT

Change has come to America. The campaign was long and hard-fought, like that of Billy Jack. While we all enjoyed the Election Day Online Viewing Guide, that time is behind us. Forgotten are the days of Gabriel Over the White House. No longer must we ponder Visions of Change: Utopias and Worst-Case Scenarios (Parts One, Two, Three and Four). The Barack Obama Film Festival has begun. As such, I have chosen the Screengrab to outline my agenda for the next four years.

Highlights include:

Stopping the Three Stooges Revival

Exalting Kate Winslet’s Real Ass

Expunging Alone in the Dark, Great Expectations and Angels Brigade from the Library of Congress

Mourning Michael Crichton

Turning Guy Ritchie Gay

Guy Ritchie Goes Gay (Not That There's Anything Wrong With That)

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 16:00:00 GMT

So, as cool as Obama’s victory was, California’s decision to enshrine anti-gay discrimination in its freakin’ constitution was a definite buzzkill for progressives (not to mention George Takei)...

...but the gay community (and the breeders who love them) can take heart that at least one former homophobe is doing his best to become a card-carrying Friend of Dorothy.

I speak, of course, of fake badass Guy Ritchie, a man whose “pride in his own heterosexuality swells noticeably when he’s in the presence of a gay man” like Christopher Ciccone, who noted the director’s off-putting fondness for “poofter” jokes in his tell-all dish-ography Life With My Sister Madonna.

And yet, after years of sex with the mannish, muscular Material Girl (which he famously described as “cuddling up to a piece of gristle”), Ritchie seems to have developed a bit more sympathy for the gay (and, perhaps, transgendered) community...so much so that he actually included a sympathetic homosexual character (in addition to the usual subconscious homoerotic subtext) in his latest film, RockNRolla, wherein small-time hoodlum Handsome Bob (Tom Hardy) comes out of the closet and his mate One Two (Gerard Butler) gets all weird about it ‘til he discovers his other mates already know and don’t really give a shit.

“I think it’s just an issue that I’m trying to get over,” Richie admitted in a recent interview, adding that he’s “coming to grips with his sexuality” now that it looks like he may finally get to have enjoyable sex again with new girlfriend Kelly Reilly, star of his upcoming film Sherlock Holmes.

So that’s one British homophobe down, 5,387,939 ignorant California voters to go!

Related Stories:
Trailer Review: RockNRolla
Embattled Guy Ritchie “Caught Up in the Zeitgeist of Slaggery”

Morning Deal Report: Joaquin Phoenix Bids Adieu

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 15:00:00 GMT

With Halloween falling on a Friday this year, you’d think those savvy Hollywood moguls would have lined up the scary movies in order to capitalize. But unless your idea of terror is Seth Rogen humping Elizabeth Banks (and it may well be), that didn’t happen. Consquently, High School Musical 3: Senior Year retained its hold on the top spot, adding $15 million to its total haul of $61.8 million. This means we can look forward to either College Musical or High School Musical 4: We All Flunked! Zack and Miri Make a Porno took second place with $10.7 million, while the one horror holdover from last week, Saw V, finished third with $10.1 million. Guy Ritchie’s RocknRolla failed to rock, taking in a dismal $1.8 million in its first weekend of wide release.

We doubted it would ever happen, but shooting has started on the sequel to Boondock Saints in Toronto. “Sean Patrick Flanery and Norman Reedus are reprising their roles as the crusading fraternal twins Connor and Murphy MacManus, who seek revenge on the tough Boston underworld. Billy Connolly is also returning as Poppa M,” per The Hollywood Reporter. And yes, enfant really, really terrible Troy Duffy is back in the director’s chair. Overnight II, anyone?

And from the “get that man a urine test” file, Joaquin Phoenix has announced his retirement from acting. Per Variety, “The words ‘Good Bye’ were penned on the actor's knuckles at a premiere Saturday night for his latest film, Two Lovers, and Phoenix confirmed a surprise announcement he made last week: He's giving up movies.” Phoenix will now concentrate on his music career. I’ve got summer 2011 in the Screengrab comeback pool.

Related:
Screengrab Review: "Zack and Miri Make a Porno"
Vanishing Act: Troy Duffy

Insufficiently Forgotten Films: "Swept Away" (2002)

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: August 24-30, 2008

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 21:00:00 GMT

My fellow Americans, I am here to humbly accept your nomination of Recapper of the Week in Screengrab! I think we all know it is time for a change. No longer can we sit by, complacent, while the screenwriter of Showgirls turns to Jesus. No longer can we allow Robert Downey Jr. to badmouth The Dark Knight. No longer can we stand by while good men like Phil Nugent and Andrew Osborne face-off over Judd Apatow and Pineapple Express!

No, my friends, this is a time for unity. A time for us to gather together and marvel at the World’s Greatest Animated Shorts – Parts One, Two, Three, Four and Five! We must respect the Screengrab Fall Preview Picks of Andrew Osborne and Leonard Pierce, as different as they may be, as equal planks in our broad platform.

Some will tell you Guy Ritchie is caught up in the zeitgeist of slaggery. Some will insist that Fascination and Meet the Spartans are actually watchable movies. Some will wonder when Robert Zemeckis went bad, or why Terrence Howard would record an album, or under what circumstances David Lynch met Devo.

We don’t have all the answers! But we do know that That Guy is Bob Hoskins! We do know that Sukiyaki Western Django is some fucked-up shit! We do know that An American Carol is coming out whether we like it or not! And if we all stick together we can survive anything, even RocknRolla or a sequel to The Strangers !

God bless the Screengrab, and let’s make it a Wet Hot American Summer!

Trailer Review: RocknRolla

Paul Clark — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Last week I declared Guy Ritchie’s latest film to be one of my most-dreaded titles for this upcoming fall, and this trailer is a big reason why. Normally, with such an insistently-cut trailer, I’d wonder if it might just be trying to punch up a somewhat less aggressive movie. However, seeing as how every movie Ritchie has made that wasn’t Swept Away looks exactly like this- convoluted gangland proceedings, gonzo violence, a laddish sense of humor, in-your-face onscreen text, show-offy camera tricks out the wazoo- I don’t think that’s the case here. One would think that the disastrous reception to Ritchie’s Revolver would relegate this to a direct-to-DVD release. But since it stars 300’s newly-anointed star Gerard Butler, this is practically guaranteed to receive a nationwide booking. And I suppose that’s fine- far be it from me to begrudge a filmmaker the chance to get his work seen. But that doesn’t mean I have to buy a ticket.

Hollywood Welcomes Virgin

Leonard Pierce — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 14:30:00 GMT

The comics racket is a tough one -- or, as Variety puts it in a bizarre moment of Coen-channeling when discussing Virgin's entry into the field a few years back, it is "a rocky place where their seeds could find no purchase". (Comics2Film adds the unwelcome phrasing that the company was "inseminated with funds from Richard Branson's media empire". Those guys really need to get out more.) After several largely fruitless years of attempting to steal market share away from the bigwigs at Marvel and DC -- and signing a deal with ex-Marvel boss Stan Lee to develop a line of properties for them that went nowhere -- Virgin Comics has finally realized what everyone else in the business already knows: that the real money in comics doesn't come from the books themselves, but from farming out their characters as properties to be used in Hollywood blockbusters. In aid of this, they're shuttering their New York office and moving the whole operation to L.A.

Branson insists that the comics wing isn't shutting down, it's simply reorganizing as a development company; but that's just typical business boilderplate. What should truly concern us here are the various bits of trivia concealed deep within the article, where the author clearly hoped we would not notice them: the fact that Virgin's "Hollywood development deals" for their characters are almost all slotted for release on the Sci-Fi Channel as opposed to an actual movie theatre, and feature such blockbuster properties as "Guy Ritchie's The Gamekeeper" and "Ed Burns' Dock Walloper"; the fact that, despite deals being inked all over town, not a single Virgin Comics film or TV production has actually been made; and the boffo news that Branson's partner in the venture is Deepak Chopra's son Gotham -- as in Gotham City, home of the Batman -- which likely explains the commonly cited reason for the comics line's failure, that it focuses on stories involving relatively obscure Indian mythology.

Still, the company has some real talent signed, from well-liked comics writer Mike Carey to porn star Jenna Jameson to Stan the Man himself. Time will tell if Virgin Comics can develop any of those signings into decent movies and/or TV shows, but this morning, Branson has to be wishing the entire venture didn't sound so much like a bad nepotistic joke in an inside-Hollywood parody.

Embattled Guy Ritchie “Caught Up in the Zeitgeist of Slaggery”

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Sure, it seems like it would be easy enough to be Guy Ritchie, making your London gangster movies, naming your characters after Dick Tracy villains and generally building a career out of fast-paced, violent Tarantino knockoffs. But Ritchie has hit a rough patch of late. Warner Bros. is said to be down on the American box office prospects of his latest effort, RocknRolla, and the sordid details of his wife Madonna’s alleged dalliance with Yankees slugger Alex Rodriguez were splashed across the New York tabloids for weeks.

Ritchie recently talked to Craig McLean of The Guardian about the former matter, even as he did his best to evade the latter. About Warner Bros. president Alan Horn’s concerns about RocknRolla, Ritchie is diplomatic. “'Well, first of all I like Warner Brothers very much. They've been very good to me,' he replies. He's about to begin shooting his next film, a Sherlock Holmes story with Robert Downey Jr. in the title role, and that's a Warner Brothers project. 'And I like and respect Alan very much. I mean, they're still talking about an 800-screen release [in the US]. If it's on 800 screens that's bigger than what I would do anyway - I would go smaller. So there's not much I can say.'”

Ritchie gets a little more prickly when the subject of Revolver, his underperforming and critically panned previous film, arises. “'I was disappointed in the respect that...I'm not sure if the film was being slagged off as much as...We got caught up in the zeitgeist of slaggery, so it was clearly at some point not about the film. And I just don't accept it's a bad film. I know how to make a film. So to say it's a bad film, to say it's constructed badly or anything - it's just not.”

Ritchie turns politic again when the topic of his wife’s acting in his remake of Swept Away is raised. For that and more, check out the full interview here.

Related:
Madonna on Film: Screengrab Celebrates Her Top Ten "Best" and Worst Performances
No Shit, Sherlock: Guy Ritchie Reimagines Holmes

Screengrab Fall Preview: Paul Clark's Picks

Paul Clark — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 17:30:00 GMT

Yesterday, my colleague Scott Von Doviak dared all of his fellow Screengrab staffers to weigh in on our most anticipated movies of the fall. Given my lifelong inability to resist a dare (which resulted in my eating far too many unspeakable things in my younger days) I’ve decided to answer the call. Craving an additional challenge- and hoping to spotlight the wide array of good and bad releases coming soon to a theatre near me- I’ve decided to eliminate all contenders that appeared in Scott’s preview. Here goes:

3 UP

1. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – for years, David Fincher has been one of Hollywood’s most gifted filmmakers, with last year’s Zodiac his best film yet. With Button, Fincher turns his camera on an honest-to-goodness work of literature (an F. Scott Fitzgerald story, fer chrissakes), but don’t expect a workmanlike Tradition of Quality-style adaptation. Button re-teams Fincher with Brad Pitt, who continues to improve as an actor by seeking out adventurous material, and this story gives him his biggest challenge yet, not only playing a character from childhood through old age, but playing him while aging in reverse. It’s the kind of story that requires a visionary to pull off, and I can think of few better candidates for the job than Fincher. Every year, there’s at least one high-profile movie that I actively root for to be great, and this year, it’s Benjamin Button.

2. A Christmas Tale – Unlike Benjamin Button, the latest film by the great French filmmaker Arnaud Desplechin is something of a known quantity, premiering at Cannes to almost universal acclaim. But even if it hadn’t already screened, my hopes for this one would be through the roof. In the past few years, Desplechin has become one of my favorite filmmakers, and he’s coming off his finest work yet, 2004’s Kings and Queen. Factor in that Christmas Tale re-unites four of that film’s stars- Matthieu Amalric, Catherine Deneuve, Emmanuelle Devos, and Hippolyte Girardot- and I’m sold. That the film’s IMDb recommends the Steve Martin remake of Cheaper By the Dozen shouldn’t be held against it.

3. The Brothers Bloom – as I stated in my Trailer Review earlier this week, I’m in the pro-Brick camp, so naturally I’m excited for Rian Johnson’s follow-up project. But he’s also assembled an irresistible cast (I love Brody and Ruffalo as brothers, and Rachel Weisz is always best when she plays daffy), so I’m extra-stoked for this one. Could we be witnessing the rise of a major American filmmaker? Here’s hoping.

3 DOWN

1. Defiance – tell me if you’ve heard this one before: Ed Zwick directs a film about an outsider who aids a group of minorities in fighting about those who oppress them. That the minorities are Jews and the time period is during World War II only makes Defiance’s Oscar-grubbing even more blatant. Thanks, but no thanks.

2. RockNRolla – you know, I was under the impression that the abject failure of Revolver coupled with the divorce from Madonna meant that the moviegoing public would get a break from Guy Ritchie. Alas, that beautiful dream wasn’t to be. It was nice while it lasted though…

3. Bedtime Stories – Adam Sandler’s comic persona might be juvenile, but he’s always been at his best at unleashing his rage onscreen in decidedly un-kid-friendly ways. Less successful are his attempts to warm the heart, which makes the idea of a Sandler family comedy all the more misguided. The presence of Adam (The Pacifier) Shankman in the director’s chair doesn’t inspire much confidence either.

WILD CARD

It’s not as odd as Scott’s choice of Oliver Stone’s W. (what could be?), but I’m pretty conflicted about Quantum of Solace. What made Casino Royale so damn good is that it combined a kickass James Bond thrill ride with a legitimately compelling story. But although hiring director Marc Forster hints that the producers might be trying for that same balance of action and drama, I have my doubts that lightning will strike twice. Add to this Forster’s lack of experience in the action genre, plus the fact that unlike Casino this one doesn’t have an Ian Fleming novel to provide a solid narrative foundation, and Quantum has a lot to live up to. Sure, it might be diverting, but after Casino Royale, that just doesn’t cut the mustard anymore. However, I’d love nothing more than to be wrong about this.

Madonna On Film: Screengrab Celebrates Her Top Ten "Best" and Worst Performances (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 19:00:00 GMT

And now...the stinkers.

6. Marie in Shadows and Fog (1992), Elspeth in Four Rooms (1995)

As noted in Part One, Madonna works best in movies when used as spice in a cameo...except, of course, when the cameo is lousy. Yet, though these two performances are, in fact, terrible, it’s hard to judge Ms. Ciccone too harshly for either of them, given the fact that Lily Tomlin, Jodie Foster and Kathy Bates hardly fare much better in Woody Allen’s limp, pretentious Shadows and Fog, and nobody but the lucky actors in Robert Rodriguez’s section of the misbegotten omnibus film Four Rooms bothered to give a coherent performance, either.

7. Abbie Reynolds, The Next Best Thing (2000)

The only movie in Madonna’s filmography where she attempts to play a completely “normal,” contemporary human being (as opposed to a 1940s ballplayer, an S&M obsessed murder suspect, a tightrope walker, an elfin princess, a witch, an Argentine dictator, a kooky East Village free spirit, etc.), Ms. Ciccone earns low points here if only for somehow finding a way to make the song “American Pie” even more annoying than it already was. To be fair, I never saw this movie either, but my lovely Polish bride informs me that Madonna's performance here as a straight woman in a custody battle with her gay baby daddy features exactly one funny sight gag involving the Material Boobs, but otherwise earns its #7 spot fair and square, given Madge's complete lack of chemistry with friend and co-star Rupert Everett and the fact that she seems "like an automaton” throughout “like she always is.”

8. Eva Peron in Evita (1996)

While Ms. Ciccone may have worked harder on this role than any other in her cinematic career (even finally learning to sing after more than a decade as a successful recording artist) it is, in many ways, her most annoying performance, partly because she’s clearly so impressed with herself, partly because so many critics played along with the charade (even going so far as to award her efforts with a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Comedy or Musical), but mostly because she transformed an ironic cautionary tale of the rise and fall of a dictator’s wife into a triumphant love story about the rise and rise of a plucky, ambitious gal (not unlike – hey! – Madonna herself!), all the while downplaying the nastier side of Peron’s (and her own) egomaniacal megalomania and its often toxic effect on the peasants who love her...thus deliberately undercutting the plot and theme of her own movie (not to mention Antonio Banderas’ role as spokesman for the downtrodden and future t-shirt model Che Guevara who, with no antagonist to play against, merely comes across like a whiny little bitch).

9. Rebecca Carlson in Body of Evidence (1993)

For all her onstage masturbation, conical Gauliter bras and nude photo shoots, Madonna has never really had a handle on sex. For her, the beast with two backs has nothing to do with joy, love, pleasure or fun, which makes this so-called “erotic” thriller such a complete slog as she fucks Willem Dafoe on shards of broken glass (hot!!!), spits out Razzie-winning lines like “Have you ever seen animals make love, Frank?” and reminds us that, apparently, being Sharon Stone isn’t quite as easy as it looks.

10. Gloria Tatlock, Shanghai Surprise (1986), Amber Leighton, Swept Away (2002)

For some reason, both of Madonna’s husbands (co-star Sean Penn and director Guy Ritchie) managed to distill all of Ms. Ciccone’s worst cinematic instincts into a pair of monumentally shrill, annoying, wooden performances in two of the worst movies ever made. Penn at least had the excuse of being drunk throughout production of Shanghai Surprise (though, sadly, I wasn’t drunk or stoned or, even better, unconscious while sitting through it), and I’m not sure what Guy Ritchie’s excuse was for making Swept Away, unless (as with his short BMW promotional film “Star”) he simply couldn’t resist the opportunity to publicly humiliate his beloved spouse. Given her total lack of chemistry with nearly every co-star in her career (except Rosie O'Donnell and, of course, her own reflection), it’s no surprise Ms. Ciccone fares no better with Penn in Shanghai or Adriano Giannini in Swept Away, which my wife summed up with a quote that could apply to any number of Madonna’s past and future cinematic blunders: “Painfully unfunny...another joyless performance.”

Click here for Part One

15 Films That (Almost) Could've Been Directed By Somebody Else (Part Two - Special QT Edition)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 20:30:00 GMT

SMOKIN’ ACES (2006), Not Directed By Guy Ritchie (or Quentin Tarantino)

Now that Madonna keeps Guy Ritchie's cajones in a vault at the Bank of London (although here's knockin' wood for RockNRola) and Quentin Tarantino's gasbaggery has flared-up to chronic levels (I mean, good Lord, Death Proof would have been about ten minutes long if some brave editor had dared to cut every scrap of verbal diarrhea...but fingers crossed for Inglorious Bastards), there aren't too many directors cranking out simple gun-slingin' all-star demolition derbies like Smokin' Aces anymore. The formula is relatively simple: combine a dozen or so intersecting/doublecrossing thieves/assassins/lawmen/etc. with a simple Maguffin and a zillion rounds of ammunition and overheat, then sit back and see who survives. Like KFC chicken, it's not good for you and you'll probably regret it later (especially if you stick around for Aces' terrible one-twist-too-many ending), but Joe Carnahan’s loving and/or shameless transfer of Lock, Dogs & Two Smokin’ Snatches to a Lake Tahoe casino serves as a more-or-less satisfying delivery system for a whole bunch of tasty, testosterone-flavored empty calories with better-than-necessary performances from a cast including Ray Liotta, Matthew Fox, Ryan Reynolds, Ben Affleck, Andy Garcia, Nestor Carbonell, Common, a luminescent Alicia Keys and about a hundred other people, including a way-too-serious performance by Jeremy Piven as the sleazy informant everybody else in the movie wants to save and/or kill.

THE LIMEY (1999), Also Not Directed by Quentin Tarantino

One of the strengths – and weaknesses – of Steven Soderbergh as a director is that he's extremely competent, and at times even brilliant, without having anything that approaches a distinctive style. A jack-of-all-genres and master of none, he produces one good movie after another, none of which seem to have any isolatable quality at which you can point and say "ah, there we have it – the Soderbergh trademark". Even when his films are visually distinctive and structurally inventive, they seem not so much expressions of Soderbergh's own filmmaking style as they do intense evocations of the work of other directors. It's not that Soderbergh is a chameleon, or worse yet, a copy-cat; no one, especially me, would accuse his films of being derivative. It's just that he often seems like he's inadvertently channeling someone else when he creates his very engaging films. Case in point: this terrific, energetic neo-noir is one of Soderbergh's best films, and one of the best crime movies of its era. But The Limey bears many of the hallmarks of another very successful filmmaker. The clever chronology, the complex structure of the storytelling, the brilliant use of two-shots, the mastery of integrating popular music with on-screen action, and the resuscitation of '70s icons like Terence Stamp, Lesley Ann Warren and Peter Fonda to deliver powerhouse performances are all indicative of the work of Quentin Tarantino (who, at the time, had been idle for several years, lending credence to the notion that The Limey could be a project of his). The film's use of period objects (including footage from 1960s Terence Stamp movies to represent younger versions of his character here), pop-cultural obsessions (Luis Guzman's t-shirts bearing the images of controversial political figures), and even the characters (most especially Nicky Katt as a foul-mouthed, junk-obsessed hitman) all collude to make this seem like a lost Tarantino flick – but it's all Soderbergh, all the time, if for no other reason than in the The Limey, unlike a typical Tarantino movie, the director is master of his gimmicks and not the other way around.

RESERVOIR DOGS (1992), Not Directed by Ringo Lam

It's a fine, fine line between 'homage' and 'rip-off'. That line is trod to a greater or lesser degree by a lot of the movies on this list, and whenever someone remakes or adapts a film by another director, no matter how careful they are to pay tribute to their inspiration, someone's not going to get the message. (For a prime example of this, consider how much heat Martin Scorsese took for The Departed, even though he not only openly acknowledged the influence of Infernal Affairs, but credited its writer on screen.) The line gets a little more smudged when the director is an inveterate film buff who makes no secret of sampling bits and pieces of his favorite flicks in everything he does, and whose notion of a tribute is very similar to many people's notion of a wholesale theft, and nowhere is this more apparent than in Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs. So similar is the film to Ringo Lam's 1987 Hong Kong gangster exercise City On Fire – they share a major plot point, similar styles and costumes, bits of dialogue, and even two scenes in their entirety – that it pretty much completely eradicates that line between tribute and remake. For Tarantino's part, he cites City On Fire as a favorite, but denies that his first major success as a director rips it off; at least one vocal opponent, filmmaker Mike White, did an entire short called Who Do You Think You're Fooling? comparing the two movies frame for frame and excoriating Tarantino for not giving Lam proper credit. To many, Reservoir Dogs is one of the best and most original independent films ever made, a movie that literally changed the face of moviemaking in its time; to others, it's just the best movie that Ringo Lam already made.

Click Here For Part One, Part Three & Part Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce

Morning Deal Report: Borat vs. Iron Man

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 14:30:00 GMT

While his wife Madonna continues to dominate the tabloid covers, Guy Ritchie is keeping busy preparing for his Sherlock showdown. As we told you last week, Ritchie’s reboot of Sherlock Holmes is getting some competition from a rival production that will star Sacha Baron Cohen as the great detective and Will Ferrell as the elementary Watson. Now Ritchie has landed his Sherlock: Robert Downey, Jr. As Variety reports, “Downey emerged as an action star with Iron Man and Sherlock Holmes also will take advantage of his physical skills as the character displays brawn as well as brains. The basis for the film is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's classic tales, but also the comicbook Sherlock Holmes.” The “comicbook” Variety refers to is an upcoming take by Lionel Wigram, not the classic DC version pictured here. Sorry, nerds.

Speaking of comics (and nerds): fans of the Elfquest series by Wendy and Richard Pini, commence sharpening your knives. Or swords. Or whatever it is elves carry. Dodgeball writer/director Rawson Thurber will bring your beloved Wolfriders to the big screen for Warner Bros., per the Hollywood Reporter. “The series -- which at certain points in its history was published by both Marvel and DC Comics -- attracted a more mature audience as it went along, with scenes of battles and sexuality that were intense for that time. Hollywood has long tried to adapt the series, and several attempts at an animated series or feature have been made over the years.” Hey, what could go wrong?

Who says print is dead? It’s not only comic books that are coming to the screen in droves. Remember the New York Times article 'Mystery on Fifth Avenue' that was recently optioned by J.J. Abrams? Well, according to Variety, “Miramax Films has closed a deal to develop a movie from ‘This Strange Thing Called Prom,’ a Brooke Hauser article published in the June 22 edition of the New York Times. The article follows the prom adventures of high school seniors who came to Brooklyn from locales like Senegal, Venezuela, Tibet, Haiti, Poland and Gabon (one was a nomadic yak herder until age 12).” You may laugh, but don’t you think yak herding skills would have come in handy at your prom?

Related:
No Shit, Sherlock: Guy Ritchie Reimagines Holmes
The Summer of Downey

Morning Deal Report: Dueling Sherlocks

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 15:00:00 GMT

As if Guy Ritchie didn’t have enough problems, what with the gossip sheets running wild with rumors that A-Rod is shtupping his wife. Now it turns out that his Sherlock Holmes feature will face competition from Borat himself. Per Variety, Columbia Pictures has announced “an untitled comedy that will star Sacha Baron Cohen as master detective Sherlock Holmes and Will Ferrell as Watson, his crime-solving partner.” According to Columbia president Matt Tolmach, this re-teaming of the Talladega Nights stars is a sure-fire knee-slapper. "Just the idea of Sacha and Will as Sherlock Holmes and Watson makes us laugh…having them take on these two iconic characters is frankly hilarious." Thank you for speaking frankly, Mr. Tolmach. Of course, this is not the first time rival productions involving the same iconic character have gone head-to-head, as we recall from the great Robin Hood war of the '90s. But then, that was a war nobody won.

The cast of Roland Emmerich’s latest rendition of the end of the world is coming together. Triple threat Thomas McCarthy, who most recently wrote and directed The Visitor, will join John Cusack, Amanda Peet and Danny Glover in Emmerich’s 2012. “As an actor, I've never worked on anything with this scale before, and I always go see these movies,” McCarthy tells the Hollywood Reporter. “This does have a big budget and I do make more money, which is nice, but I know if you take a job like this just for the money, you'll be miserable.” Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tell it to Nicolas Cage.

Meanwhile, the French hit Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis (Welcome to the Sticks) is being remade not only in America (Will Smith will star for Warner Bros.) but in Italy. Variety describes it as a “heart-warmer about a postal worker forced to relocate to a small town in the north where he can't understand the patois, the food or the many quirks.” We’ll wait for the Portuguese version.

Related:

No Shit, Sherlock: Guy Ritchie Reimagines Holmes
1949 vs. 2012: John Woo/Roland Emmerich Deathmatch!

No Shit, Sherlock: Guy Ritchie Reimagines Holmes

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Here at the Screengrab, we’re not philosophically opposed to a “re-imagining” of Sherlock Holmes. After all, the ace detective has been through a lot in his century-long career on the silver screen. He’s been played by Peter Cook, Peter Cushing, Peter Lawford and Peter O’Toole. He’s even been portrayed by actors not named Peter, including Christopher Lee, Christopher Plummer, John Cleese, Michael Caine and someone named Hugo Flink. But we’re pretty sure even the great Basil Rathbone would turn in his pipe and deerstalker hat at the news out of Hollywood this morning.

Guy Ritchie, the man behind such meticulously crafted mysteries as Snatch and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, will spearhead the Holmes revival. According to the Hollywood Reporter, “Ritchie has signed on to write and direct a reimagining of super sleuth Sherlock Holmes for Warner Bros. Lionel Wigram and Dan Lin are producing the movie, which takes its cues from a forthcoming comic that Wigram wrote as a selling tool for a new take on the classic Sir Arthur Conan Doyle character. The concept sees the character be more adventuresome and less stuffy than previous screen incarnations and mines on more obscure character traits.”

The phrases “selling tool” and “less stuffy” certainly have me salivating at the prospect of a hip new Sherlock for the 21st century, how about you? Can I get an “Elementary, my dear Watson”? No?

Related:
Madonna Ruins Casablanca
Take Five: True Crime

Madonna Ruins Casablanca

John Constantine — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 22:44:00 GMT

It’s just a rumor right now but, according to the Daily Mail, Madonna is trying to get together a remake of Casablanca. A remake of Casablanca set in Iraq in which she plays Ilsa Lund. Go ahead, find something disposable to vomit in. You back? Now think of all her scenes in Dick Tracy. Bet you don’t remember eating those carrots. Now think of Guy Ritchie’s Swept Away remake. Alright, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make you cry.

Thankfully, there’s no script or anything remotely tangible to confirm this horror yet but if anyone can get funding to make something terrible, it’s Madonna.

I apologize for earlier. Click on this. It’ll make you feel better.

Props to Buzz Sugar for warning us.

Vanishing Act: Troy Duffy

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 20:30:00 GMT

In our last Vanishing Act, we got you caught up on Mark Borchardt, the aspiring filmmaker whose attempts at bringing his first film to the screen were documented in American Movie. As a special St. Paddy’s Day treat, we thought we’d do the same for another aspiring filmmaker whose attempts at bringing his first film to the screen were documented in 2003’s somewhat less uplifting Overnight.

The subject of that documentary is Troy Duffy, a foulmouthed, chain-smoking, overall-clad boy from Boston who went to Hollywood and made his dream come true. At least, that’s the direction things seemed to be going when Duffy made a too-good-to-be-true deal with Miramax based on his buzzed-about script The Boondock Saints. The Weinstein brothers agreed to finance the film with Duffy as director, hire his band to do the music for the movie, and even buy the bar where Duffy works (J. Sloane’s) on the premise that they’ll own it together.

If you’ve seen Overnight, you know what happens next. The tagline “There’s more than one way to shoot yourself” neatly sums up Duffy’s association with Miramax, as the brash, confrontational and increasingly obnoxious and deluded would-be filmmaker goes on to decimate his relationship with the Weinsteins and sandbag Boondocks in the process. Eventually he did make the movie with Franchise Films for a much smaller budget than originally planned. Boondocks opened in a handful – make that a thimbleful – of theaters for a week in 2000, earning less than $100,000 at the box office. If this happened to Mark Borchardt we’d find it depressing, but Duffy comes off as such an unlikable blowhard throughout the documentary, there’s not a wet eye in the house. Hubris had taken down another victim, or so it seemed.

For some reason, however, Boondock Saints developed a rabid cult following once it was released on video exclusively to Blockbuster. The story of two Boston Irishmen who take on the Russian mob, the film is virtually indistinguishable from any number of Tarantino or Guy Ritchie knockoffs, save for Willem Dafoe’s deranged performance as an FBI agent. Still, facts are facts: the DVD sold like crazy, and no matter how many bridges Duffy burned in Hollywood, money still talks.

In this case, the talk was about a sequel, to be called All Saints Day. That talk continues to this day, and generally involves veiled references to rights issues and litigation standing in the way of the “Boondock flock” getting their hearts’ desires. Periodically Duffy issues video messages via his website and YouTube, such as the one below, detailing his plans for the sequel as well as another project-in-waiting, a black comedy called The Good King. He doesn’t really sound like a guy who’s been humbled (he claims never to have seen Overnight), but who knows? If you’re feeling charitable today, why not raise a glass of green beer in a toast to him and all the others who have been chewed up and spit out by the Hollywood machine – even the ones who had it coming.

Take Five: True Crime

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 21:30:00 GMT

Getting wide release this weekend is Roger Donaldson's The Bank Job, also known as the movie that seems like it should be directed by Guy Ritchie but isn't. It is, however, based on an infamous 1971 vault heist which has gained recent noteriety not so much for the unsolved crime — although it was one of the biggest bank jobs in British history at the time — but the circumstances of its aftermath: what seemed to be an incredibly newsworthy story was hardly written about in the days following thanks to a "D notice" that served to gag the press. Speculation as to why this would be the case has raged for thirty-five years, and now, Donaldson's film (informed by a newly popular conspiracy theory involving a royal sex scandal) attempts to answer the question definitively, if fictionally. Nothing makes for an exciting movie like crime, and nothing makes a crime movie have that little extra edge than the slightest elements of truth. True crime movies have been a fixture of the silver screen almost since their inception; there's so many to choose from that we don't even begin to pretend this list is definitive. It's just a few of our favorites, each for a different reason. Line them all up on a cold night, watch them in a row, and thank your lucky stars this never happened to you...

THE PHENIX CITY STORY (1955)

A little-seen and underrated noir thriller from the genre's waning days, Phil Karlson's The Phenix City Story eschews the highly stylized approach of many of its contemporaries and goes for an understated, gritty style that allows it to function almost like a documentary. The story is built around the then-infamous case of Phenix City, Alabama, which at the time was so thoroughly controlled by mobsters (who became fat from prostitution and gambling fed by nearby military bases) that they operated with near-complete impunity. When Alabama's attorney general was assassinated there, it became the first city since the Civil War to have martial law declared without the occurence of a natural disaster. Raw, exciting, and remarkably violent for its time, The Phenix City Story is a forgotten classic of its time.

BONNIE AND CLYDE (1967)

Sometimes, what makes a true crime masterpiece so powerful isn't its proximity to the truth, but its distance from it. Arthur Penn's brilliant crime drama, which made a handful of careers and set the tone for the highly personal studio filmmaking of the 1970s, was based on the real story of outlaws Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, but only insofar as it gave him pegs on which to hang his story. In real life, Bonnie and Clyde were considerably less attractive than Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, and even more morally unappealing; they were, in fact, vicious and contemptible heels, little more than brutal murderers, whose legend grew out of a nation obsessed with pulp fiction and crime as escapism. It's a testament to the magic of storytelling that they came to the big screen so completely altered.

THE KRAYS (1990)

For nearly a decade during London's Swinging Sixties, the undisputed overlords of the organized crime underworld were the brothers Ronald and Reginald Kray. Before their own penchant for bloody mayhem brought them down, they were the most feared individuals in the criminial demimonde, ruling their empire through torture and intimidation. Peter Medak's colorful, engaging biopic about the brothers is bouyed by its enjoyable evocation of London in the '60s as well as a remarkable performance as the twins by real-life brothers Gary and Martin Kemp — like the Krays, fraternal twins, but unlike them, best known to the world as the leaders of the 1980s New Romantic pop band Spandau Ballet! It's the first major role for both Kemps, and they tackle it with such gusto and skill it's surprising they never became major stars, though both stuck with the acting game.

DAHMER (2002)

Serial killers are a staple food of horror and thriller directors, and in the late 1990s and early 2000s, there was a spate of low-budget psychological chillers all based on the real-life exploits of actual mass murderers. Most of them were little more than slightly pretentious splatter flicks, but Dahmer — written and directed by David Jacobson — stood out as the class of the bunch. Resting on a smart script, a genuinely stark and chilling mood, and a fantastic lead performance by Jeremy Renner as the infamous Milwaukee cannibal, Dahmer is a compulsively watchable and truly terrifying movie. Its power comes not from gore or mayhem, but from the simplicity of its vision and the way in which it involves us emotionally with Dahmer while all the time creeping us ever closer to a full revelation of the depths of his madness.

CRAZY LOVE (2007)

One of the most bizarre true-crime documentaries ever made, this astonishing film from last year relies for its watchability on the fact that it's a story so unbelievable, it could only be true. It traces the improbable relationship of influential New York attorney Burt Pugach, who carried on an affair with a lovely young woman named Linda Riss. In 1959, Riss broke off the affair with the married Pugach, after which, enraged and terrified that she would start seeing someone else, he hired thugs to throw lye in her face, blinding and permanently scarring her. This hideous act would be the end of many true-crime movies, but here, it's only the beginning: sentenced to fourteen years in prison, Pugach went on to write Riss constantly while he served his time — and eventually, when he was released, the two were married!

Screengrab Review: The Bank Job

John Constantine — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 21:17:00 GMT

The Bank Job says it's based on a true story, proudly proclaiming on its striking retro posters, "The true story of a heist gone wrong. . . in all the right ways." Unlike some movies that make similar claims, like the upcoming 21, The Bank Job doesn’t take too many gross liberties with its foundational truths, such as they are. This much is fact: in 1971, Lloyds Bank on London’s Baker Street was robbed. During the burglary, the criminals’ walkie-talkie communications were overheard by a ham-radio enthusiast. It was the biggest story in town for about a week, until a government-issued D-notice, or gag order, was put in effect and that was the end of it. (The U.K. government denies a D-notice was ever issued.) The bad guys got away with it, and no one ever found out why. Bank Job writers Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, along with director Roger Donaldson, take these events and spin them into a decent story about amateur crooks, thuggish pornographers, pervy politicians and evil Black Panthers.

Clement and La Franais’ version of events revolve around Terry, played by Jason Statham in patented tough-guy mode, and his gang being unwittingly hired by MI5 to retrieve pornographic photos of a British royal stored in black activist/extortionist pimp Michael X’s safe-deposit box. Statham’s become a regular face in the trashy action genre, but The Bank Job finds him returning to his Guy Ritchie roots as a small-time player in London’s seamy underworld. Statham and his crew make up the best parts of the film, their canned heist-movie dialogue ("The one score that will change everything") delivered with enough charm to keep the tedium of cliché at bay. The rest of the players don’t pull their weight. Peter De Jersey’s Michael X isn’t very threatening, David Suchet’s Lew Vogel comes off as less imposing and more ready for an episode of PBS’ Mystery, and the film’s numerous cops and G-men are just set dressing. Taken as a whole, The Bank Job is decent fluff. The only real knock against it is Roger Donaldson’s failure to pursue the '70s-exploitation trappings so prevalent in the movie’s marketing and first half. It’s more Joe Carnahan than it is Peter Collinson. When the movie focuses on the titular job, it’s great stuff, satisfyingly seedy and exciting. Everything else goes a little wrong and, no, not in all the right ways.

Trailer Roundup: Speed Racer, The Great Debaters, In Bruges

Peter Smith — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 18:00:00 GMT

Speed Racer

I never really watched the old Speed Racer cartoons, so I can't say how faithful this is. But I find the cartoonishness of the trailer to be pretty charming. With something as stylized as the original, it would be a mistake to try for realism, so the Wachowskis are aiming for a more animated style in the lighting and the CGI, and this has extended to the performances. What clinched it for me was Emile Hirsch's vigorous nodding when he asks the little kid, "oh no?" toward the end of the trailer — this is about as un-naturalistic an acting decision as one can make, and it fits in perfectly. Whether this movie will please the fans is a question I can't hope to answer here. I only know that this looks like a lot of fun.

The Great Debaters

If someone told me there was a movie coming out about a group of African-American college students in the 1930s starting a debate team, I would be able to predict with relative certainty how the trailer would play, and in this case I would be more or less correct. From the time I saw Denzel Washington standing on top of a table while the words "based on a true story" appeared onscreen, I knew I was in the presence of a movie with almost nothing new to say. Frankly, outside the presence of Oscar winners Washington and Forest Whitaker, this feels more like a TV movie, down to the presence of Oprah Winfrey as producer. Also, debate isn't that interesting, folks. Sure, it allows actors to give impassioned speeches that rile up an audience one way or another, but that doesn't exactly make for great cinema. At least this year's Rocket Science, which portrayed the world of contemporary policy debate, had novelty going for it.

In Bruges

Maybe it's the Irish I inherited from my mother's side of the family, but this trailer makes me giggle uncontrollably. The cast is clearly having a great time — Colin Farrell flexing his Irish accent for a change, plus the great Brendan Gleeson, and Ralph Fiennes, who's so much more fun now that he's stopped playing so serious all the time. When I heard the plot synopsis for this, I was afraid it would come off like a Guy Ritchie gangster movie, but there's enough blarney on display in the trailer to put those thoughts to rest. I'm partial to the scene where Farrell and Fiennes negotiate their way through a shootout, but why choose? In Bruges might not break the bank at the box office, but I for one will be in line to buy a ticket.

— Paul Clark

Morning Deal Report: Angels & Demons Fasttracked

Peter Smith — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 15:00:00 GMT

Ron Howard rushes through a dark corridor, clutching his side. He seeks a final script for the Da Vinci Code sequel adaptation — but will he find it before the Writers' Guild strike?! OH THE SUSPENSE!

Michael Mann will direct Robert De Niro in the mob story Frankie Machine. Scorsese was looking at the script too, but bowed out.

Guy Ritchie is remaking The Dirty Dozen.

— Peter Smith