The Screengrab : in other blogs

In Other Blogs: Shoot Out the Lights

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 29 May 2009 14:30:00 GMT

I should probably use this final installment of In Other Blogs to suggest alternatives to the Screengrab for our fans about to go into withdrawal. (This is it folks, the last day, closing time, 50% off all posts, everything must go!) But let’s get real – there’s no replacing the Screengrab! Oh, if you must keep up with ongoing developments in the world of cinema, I suppose there are some alternatives (and I remind you to bookmark this page, which has a whole passel of ‘em). Instead, I’m going to take one last opportunity to pay tribute to…well, us.

At The Phil Nugent Experience, Phil Nugent takes aim at Kiefer Sutherland’s Jack Bauer. “Sutherland's performance, which has thoroughly redefined his image and career, shows just how irresistible the self-pitying enforcer act can seem when it's done to a crisp. In his first several years in movies, Sutherland was a weird-looking Brat Pack also-ran; as his youth started to slip away, his most striking roles, as a big bad wolf of a serial killer in Freeway and as the exposition merchant in the sci-fi fantasy Dark City, made it look as if he might be turning into the new Dwight Frye. His transformation into a TV action hero seemed a mighty unlikely development, but as soon as he turned into Jack Bauer, he developed a new, flinty authority that he'd never shown before. The few movies he's appeared in since 24 launched were in and out of theaters pretty quickly, and probably it helped that, as a TV star, he suddenly had smaller screens to fill, but it's possible to fail even at that: compare him to Christian Slater in My Own Worst Enemy if you want to know how thoroughly it's possible to belly flop in both media.”

At Silly Hats Only, Paul Clark announces his plans for what might qualify as the anti-Unwatchable. “For a long time, I’ve had a goal of watching every title represented by the Criterion Collection, and it occurred to me that if I didn’t set about to watch and write about every Criterion title I haven’t seen, I’ll never do it. And while it’s not the most original goal for a cinephile, I’d say it’s a worthy one all the same.”

At The AV Club, Leonard Pierce has the goods on The Goode Family. “I've always been precariously on the fence about Mike Judge. I thought Office Space was half of a brilliantly subversive satire that degenerated, in in its second half, into a predictable caper movie with a strangely reactionary message; Idiocracy, likewise, had some killer comic observations but couldn't seem to present them with much coherence in the end. So here we are with The Goode Family, Judge's new animated sitcom, and its promise to take a poke at political correctness. This all would have seemed very timely in, say, 1994, or even when King of the Hill debuted in '97.”

At From Here to Obscurity, Hayden Childs continues his alphabetical journey through his music collection. “The Cramps - Gravest Hits EP, Songs The Lord Taught Us, Psychedelic Jungle, and Bad Music For Bad People. Man! What can I possibly say about the Cramps that hasn't been said a million times already? People who enjoy the kind of music called rock & roll love the The Cramps. Some critics apparently consider Bad Music For Bad People to be a watered-down version of a better best-of that was released in England, but for me, well, that's the Cramps album that I first heard at 15 years old, and that's THE Cramps album for me. Besides all these other ones, I mean.”

At Slant, Nick Schager checks out Night in the Museum 2. “Commotion ensues, most of it functionally but unexcitingly executed, including an into-the-artwork sequence that pales in comparison to a similar bit from Loony Tunes: Back in Action.”

At The Ol’ Blog Shop, Andrew Osborne spends Memorial Day in America’s Heartland…Somerville, Mass. “But, really, for me it was all about the Shriners, or whoever those guys in the Aleppo fezzes were, and there were scores of them, possibly hundreds, taking up easily half the parade with their flags and weird Arab trumpet noodling and fake goatees and turbans and their candy-tossing...and forget about tiny little cars: the Somerville Shriners had tiny little 18-wheelers, not to mention tiny golf carts, tiny buggies, pop-wheelie clown cars, horses, horse cars, Segways and a trailer broadcasting a Shriner quartet as they sang “Yankee Doodle went to Baghdad riding in a Humvee” into dangling CB radio handsets.”

At Scott Von Doviak (someone please come up with a better blog name for me), I look at some recent movie Crime Scenes, including Gone Baby Gone. “Here are four words that inspire very little confidence when they appear on a movie screen: ‘Directed by Ben Affleck.’”

And remember, your one-stop shopping destination for keeping track of the ol’ Screengrab gang is Screengrab in Exile. Don’t stop believin’!

In Other Blogs: The Blogger Experience

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 22 May 2009 15:30:00 GMT

Some Came Running proprietor Glenn Kenny recounts his Girlfriend Experience at The Auteurs. Kenny has a role in the film that was pitched to him as “the Harry Knowles of internet escort reviewers.” Kenny was not immediately flattered. “Harry Knowles, if you don’t know, is famous for founding Aint It Cool News, a movie fan boy website of large popularity and no small industry influence. Knowles (and I hope he won't mind me saying this) is also, as Kyle on South Park would put it, a great big fat fuck. I am, hence, slightly put off.”

At Beyond the Multiplex, Andrew O’Hehir talks to Girlfriend Experience director Steven Soderbergh about his prolific, unpredictable career. “I'm always trying to be Howard Hawks, sure. I envy the opportunities that the studio directors got in the '30s and '40s. It was assumed that you would make more than one movie a year, and that that movie could be a western or a musical or a comedy or a drama. Very early on, before I made sex, lies, and videotape, I fantasized that I could have a career in which I could move around like that. It's not easy.”

Ali Arikan breaks from the Trek pack at The House Next Door. “Which is all by way of saying there is absolutely no nuance in J.J. Abrams’s film, not even a soupçon of subtlety, no genuine humour. It’s all piff-paff, whack-bang, etc, packed with heaps of post-modernist “irony” or whatever it is they call this bollocks. Nudge nudge, wink wink ahoy. We are all wallowing in a never-ending adolescence these days. So, instead of making us laugh, J.J. Abrams just wants to make us feel clever, and the whole thing becomes a big ego-massage”

Bright Lights After Dark considers the geography of 3 Women. “It's a point that many viewers miss, though it's difficult to blame them: Robert Altman's 3 Women is really "about" California, and quite distinctly so -- it doesn't belong to its contentual municipality in the sense that, say, Nashville does. And it's not about the psycho-sprawl urban California of Los Angeles or the spittle, cardboard and tinsel California of Hollywood or the plugged culture retro-future sophistry California of San Francisco. It's about the other California, by which one means the smattering of middle-of-nowhere cities always on the brink of suburbia these days, and always reminding us of somewhere else. The dusty, mid-western-like cock-and-bull towns that flank the interstate 5 with ranches and groves. The shattered-shell-and-hanging-kayak-wind-chime Mediterranean beach villas that dot the coastal region from Monterey to Santa Barbara. And, of course, the boilingly barren, frenziedly phallic desert settlements that circle the parched Mojave and Joshua Tree territories.”

And finally in List-o-Mania, Topless Robot offers the 10 Most Blatant Terminator Ripoffs, including Cyborg Cop. “A renegade cop (is there any other kind in these movies?) goes to the tropics to find his long lost brother, who has been transformed into a cybernetic killing machine by a mad scientist in this '93 movie. As the scientist, John Rhys-Davies seems to be under the impression he's filming an episode of Gilligan's Island as his performance has to be seen to be believed.”

In Other Blogs Goes to Hawaii

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:30:00 GMT

Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule previews the summer movie schedule. “But even with the proof, in Star Trek, that my expectations could be so fundamentally off-base, it’s still hard for me to get excited, as Entertainment Weekly insists I should, about this summer’s big-ass slate of films. I thumbed through that 'Summer Movie Preview' issue with 'all the buzz on over 80 new films' and was bored stiff by the time I turned the page into the month of July. Really, am I supposed to care that Stephen Sommers, perpetrator of Van Helsing, has a new action blockbuster based on a toy I was bored with in 1967? Am I supposed to get all squirmy with excitement at seeing shots of a sweaty Megan Fox intercut with heavy-metal images from Michael Bay’s new movie about toys I was at least 15 years too old for when they were first popular? And despite my fondness for McG and the first Charlie’s Angels feature (about as zesty and giddily exciting as any pre-fab confection could be), that new Terminator movie just looks so goddamn glum and desperate, and overly familiar.”

GreenCine Daily’s DVD of the Week is Wise Blood. “Otherworldly in its characterizations (did I forget to mention the naïve, hyperactive 18-year-old obsessed with both a shrunken mummy and some guy in a bear suit?) but too sad or realistically perverse—even during a violent act late in the film—to be written off as a grotesque carnival, Wise Blood is not the tale of redemption or maybe accidental martyrdom that the final scenes superficially symbolize. It's about the powerlessness of existence, which is both as terrifying and absurd as that sounds.”

Beyond the Multiplex argues the importance of the original Star Trek. “For me, Star Trek and the Rolling Stones, as much as they might appear to be polar opposites -- one supremely American and the other English, one Apollonian and optimistic, the other Dionysian and pessimistic -- were the cultural phenomena that made the pre-punk-rock early '70s tolerable. A person interested in those things was, prima facie, not interested in Donny Osmond or Happy Days, had conceivably read a book not required by teachers and furthermore could plausibly have access to decent weed.”

At Scanners, Jim Emerson ponders whether one bad shot can ruin a movie. “I'm not among those who think the final shot of Hal Ashby's Being There takes a marvelously sustained balancing act and kicks it to the ground. But I can understand how somebody might feel that way. But how can just one bad decision -- maybe on screen for just a second or two -- deflate a full-length motion picture? Well, roughly the same way a pinprick in a balloon can, I guess. It can puncture the thin membrane that's sustaining the thing. Without shape and purpose, there's nothing to keep it aloft any longer.”

Finally in List-o-Mania, Spoutblog offers 10 Lost Theories Inspired by the Movies. Back to the Future Part III, anyone? “When that bright flash of light ended the episode, the Losties trapped in 1977 were returned to the present time. Or, that’s what a number of the show’s fans are predicting today. But if anyone’s been paying close attention, they’ll know that Lost has taken some cues from the Back to the Future franchise this season. So, logically, by looking at that trilogy, we know that Lost must have its denouement in the 1800s, just as the BTTF series does with Part III.”

In Other Blogs: Roger Ebert Contemplates Eternity

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 08 May 2009 14:30:00 GMT

The weekend is almost here, so let’s turn to our old pal Roger Ebert for some cheery TGIF thoughts. “I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear. I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. What I am grateful for is the gift of intelligence, and for life, love, wonder, and laughter. You can't say it wasn't interesting. My lifetime's memories are what I have brought home from the trip. I will require them for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I brought home from Paris. I don't expect to die anytime soon. But it could happen this moment, while I am writing…I hope not. I have plans.”

Glenn Kenny brings reason to rejoice at Some Came Running: The Friends of Eddie Coyle is finally due out on DVD – in a Criterion edition, no less. “‘Young film fans raised in the multiplex era might look back and lament the fact that no one is making movies like The Friends of Eddie Coyle anymore,’ Kent Jones writes in his exemplary (as usual) essay on the 1973 film, included in the new Criterion DVD of it. ‘The truth is that they never did. There's only this one.’ Robert Mitchum's performance as Eddie, the hangdog, hard-luck crook whose quiet desperation—in this story, he's due to start serving some time in a couple of weeks, and he's just not going to be able to hack it—compels his every move, is a huge part of the film's uniqueness. He underplays like nobody's business, and never announces himself. Not only does the trademark Mitchum smirk never once cross his face—looking at his work here, you'd never believe he had it in the first place.”

At PopMatters, Kit MacFarlane reconsiders Mickey Rourke in Homeboy. “A glum and downbeat boxing film, Homeboy not only anticipates many of the key concerns of the highly-celebrated The Wrestler, but also, by now-obvious extension, the real life trajectory of Rourke himself. But the film fell into the ‘too depressing’ pit on its release, and the presence of standard genre cliches saw it treated dismissively by those who didn’t look close enough to see those same cliches being quietly, but firmly, derailed. Despite the presence of actors like Christopher Walken and Jon Polito, a delicate score by Eric Clapton, and even a fawning reference in Bob Dylan’s Chronicles ("The movie traveled to the moon every time [Rourke] came onto the screen. Nobody could hold a candle to him."), it is rarely mentioned today at all…Too depressing in 1988, Homeboy‘s aura of sorrow now seems too delicate, too nuanced and poetic, next to the sensationalized sledgehammer misery pioneered by today’s hip angst-peddlers like Aronofsky, Todd Solondz, Larry Clark, and Christopher Nolan.”

SmartMoney lists 10 Things Movie Critics Won't Tell You. We’re fond of #7: You probably don’t want to hear this, but you need me. “Want to stir people up? Ask them what they think of movie critics. Jen Davis of Louisville, Ky., is put off by what she sees as a superiority syndrome in the profession. ‘My opinion is just as valid, dammit!’ she says. Tammy Ras of Pascoag, R.I., is more militant: ‘If they say, “Don’t see it, it sucks,” that means, “Go see it, it’s great.”’ Sounds harsh, but the truth is, filmgoers need reviewers. As Salon.com’s Zacharek puts it, ‘Critics are the only thing standing between consumers and advertising.’ With hundreds of films released in theaters each year, ‘Critics are more important now than they ever were,’ she says. ‘There are just so many movies, so much aggressive hype.’”

Finally, it’s not exactly a blog, but The Worst Show on the Web is Blog Talk Radio, and more importantly, the most recent episode features your Screengrabbin’ pals Andrew Osborne and yours truly discussing some films screening at the San Francisco International Film Festival, most notably (and contentiously) My Suicide. Give it a listen here.

In Other Blogs: Where No Blog Has Gone Before

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 01 May 2009 14:00:00 GMT

At The House Next Door, Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard get their Trek on, running down the first six films in the series. “There's something ephemeral about these films, something insubstantial, like they'll all just melt away once I stop thinking about them. Maybe it's because they're so thoroughly rooted in this weird nostalgia for the original series, a nostalgic feeling that I can't say I really share. Each of the films has an extended montage, some of them longer and more insufferable than others, in which the camera caresses the glistening surface of the starship Enterprise with fetishistic glee, like a horny dude ogling a naked centerfold or a mid-life crisis case polishing the chrome on his sports car. In the first film, it feels like it takes 20 minutes for everyone to stop just gawking at the damn ship in disbelief. It's a strange experience to watch these films with all these obvious nostalgic cues—the crew reassembling for each new mission, the familiar faces being highlighted, the bombastic music whenever the ship first appears, the obscure nods to episodes of the TV series—and to realize that I'm not in on the reminiscences of the intended audience.”

Our erstwhile colleague Vern weighs in on twittering at the movies. “I don’t think I’m gonna start catching up with all the 21st century technologies, for example I still don’t have a cellular phone device or those shoes with the wheels in them. But everywhere I go I hear about this “twitter” they got now. Moriarty writes in his column about how Harry Twittered him something or other, Harry writes in his column about what he was Twittering during the movie because it was so scary, Devin Feraci on Chud is mad because some other douchebag used his twittering during Crank 2 and also he had to cancel his tweeter for Even Rachel Wood because he was disappointed in the quality of her twitterings, or whatever.”

Beyond the Multiplex features more Jarmusch chat. “For me, film is very related to music, in that it flows before you in its own time signature. And my own musicality is on the slower side. Maybe it's like the way I talk. Maybe I think slowly. Then there's the aspect that, I don't know why ... I'm attracted to the moments that are somewhat -- maybe completely -- devoid of something dramatic. My films are built around those things. Coffee and Cigarettes is just little moments out of a day that are not considered important. Or I made Night on Earth, in which the whole film is made up of cab rides that, in a dramatic narrative, would be the part you would leave out.”

David Poland of The Hot Blog has an interesting take on that viral version of Wolverine. “Personally, I think Fox should include the now-infamous leaked version in the eventually DVD package for this film. Own the situation. And if you are a film lover, the footage of unfinished effects is kind of interesting when you see the final version. It’s the kind of stuff that studios put in DVD extras in order to illustrate the process of building effects.”

And in List-o-Mania this week, Spoutblog offers the very timely How to Survive a Plague - 10 Lessons From the Movies. For instance, Don’t Bomb the Plague. “The original hushed-up outbreak in Outbreak is thought to be eradicated with a bomb, and in The Crazies the military wants to destroy an infected town with nuclear weapons. But as we see in the former, such means aren’t guaranteed to make the plague go away. In The Andromeda Strain, it’s even learned that the threatening bacteria will be strengthened by an atomic bomb, which is unfortunate since the underground facility in which the alien organism is being studied is equipped with a self-destruction mechanism employing such weaponry. Fortunately the lab also has a way to disarm that bomb, but it’s best to just not have such “safety” measures in the first place.”

In Other Blogs: Revenge of the '80s

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 14:30:00 GMT

At Hollywood and Fine, Marshall Fine dubs the plethora of recent ’80s-set films the revenge of Gen-X. “What does it mean to set a movie in the ’80s? We know what movies set in the ’50s mean: innocence and ignorance, a time of conformity and repression. It was the Eisenhower era, the Cold War, McCarthyism, the rise of suburbia and mass media. Set a movie in the ’60s and it means something else entirely: turmoil, upheaval, awakening. The rise of youth culture, civil rights, Vietnam, counterculture…What I see in movies about the ’80s, written and directed by people who were kids and teens during that period, is a certain disapproval of how their parents’ generation – the baby boom that lit the fuse on the ’60s – squandered their opportunity. Rather than build on the ideas of the civil rights and anti-war movements, they focused on themselves: on getting that great car, that great house, those designer clothes, that outrageous windfall profit.”

Bret Easton Ellis reviews the films made from his books at the AV Club. “Less Than Zero is obviously bad, and we don’t need to talk about why that didn’t work. And American Psycho—that is, I think, an impossible book to adapt. But whatever, it was the greatest hits from the book, more or less. Mary did a very good job of keeping that movie together, as did Christian Bale, and I think Roger did a terrific job. And with The Informers, I think there is really an outstanding movie floating out there somewhere, and I hope one day people might be able to see it. But it’s very interesting. I am not comparing The Informers to The Godfather on any level, but there’s that famous story where Paramount asked Coppola to cut like an hour out of the movie, because they didn’t want to release a three-hour movie. And Coppola did, and showed it to the executive, and it was terrible. It moved very slowly at two hours. And then when he put the other hour back in, it moved very quickly. And that’s all I want to say about The Informers.”

Beyond the Multiplex previews the Tribeca Film Festival, including Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench. “You start watching Damien Chazelle's directing debut and you say, OK, it's a low-budget indie in black-and-white. Then you realize it's a low-budget indie musical in black-and-white. And finally you grasp that it's a low-budget indie jazz musical in black-and-white, with original songs written in the spirit of 1940s pop, swing and bebop. And tap dancing. So Chazelle gets an A-plus for concept and effort, and the question of whether the wistful, mumblecore-style love story lives up to its framing device maybe isn't so important.”

Slate’s Mark Harris takes a look at the Warner Archive Collection. “For movie lovers, this is heaven. Anybody can adequately take the measure of a century of film by leapfrogging across decades, countries, and genres from one masterpiece to another, and this is pretty much how we all do it, Netflixing our way through the Criterion Collection (great, but not for American movies) or checking off Oscar nominees from decades past (great, but only as a barometer of what people thought was great at the time). But movie history is also written in what happened between the great movies—in the ambitious and the mundane, the half-hearted and the forgotten, the unjustly overlooked and the justly dismissed.”

Current Movies celebrated Earth Day with their four favorite green films, including…Godzilla vs. Hedorah. “Directed by Yoshimitsu Banno, the film is a hodge podge of hippie-dom when Godzilla (everyone’s favorite foil for nuclear holocaust) must step up to battle the alien Hedorah who feeds off pollution and gives off all sorts of bad things. This somehow damages everyone’s favorite nuclear monster, but the Big Green Guy wins in the end.”

In Other Blogs: Date Rape and the Full Douchiness

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 14:30:00 GMT

The great date rape debate over Observe and Report rages on. Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule weighs in. “As I have stated here more than often, the subject of rape is one that I don’t take particularly lightly, so I stands to reason that if the scene were something on the order of revolting exploitation in simple service of pushing the comedy envelope, my moral compass not yet having been totally demagnetized, it would not be a scene which would naturally cause me to leap to its defense. The scene is, in fact, a twisted riff on DeNiro’s delusional date with Cybill Shepherd, in which he takes her to a porn movie and she runs out on him, disgusted. The difference is, of course, that Faris’ character not only doesn’t run out, but actively encourages this oafish psychosexual time bomb in his increasingly dangerous delusions largely because her own moral compass, aided by drink and drugs, is carelessly spinning out of control. Jody Hill’s satiric portrait of the deadened denizens of mall culture, of which Faris’ Brandi and Rogen’s Ronnie are but two extreme examples, have been called heartless exaggerations, but to this hayseed they looked pretty familiar.”

Spoutblog has the scoop on the relaunched Movieline. “The switch was flipped on the Movieline.com moments ago. The relaunch of the Hollywood magazine of the 90s, the once eminently readable forerunner of the bloggy listicle most notable in recent years for its spectacular decline into toothless aspirational lifestyle mag Hollywood Life, immediately caught blogosphere attention when three editors from the recently shuttered Defamer were hired to steer the reincarnation effort…The verdict as of Hour One? So far, they don’t *exactly* seem to be reinventing the movie website wheel but, you know … it’s not like I am.”

At The Projectionist, David Edelstein accuses Robert Downey, Jr. of The Full Douchiness. “Downey won an Oscar nomination thanks to his delivery of that ‘Full Retard’ speech — which wasn’t just funny but also fundamentally accurate in its assessment of actors' obsessions and the Academy's taste. Even given his sympathy for the subject of The Soloist and his co-star Jamie Foxx, Downey could have handled this with more grace: “Yeah, I knew that would come back to haunt me … that was that character's opinion. But Jamie got to know this guy and really wanted to do him justice and blah blah blah blah … ” Or something. Instead, he took umbrage; he was offended that a journalist would dare to bring up something he had uttered in a movie released less than a year ago. Downey is a great actor and deserves all kinds of respect for keeping his demons at bay, but there ought to be a rehab center for celebrity self-righteousness.” (Edelstein has since backed off a bit. The Partial Douchiness, perhaps?)

Buzz Buzz has developed a special feature that will aid my weekly efforts to assemble this here column. “A few years ago I put together a Google custom search engine called Film Blogs, Etc. that I remain quite pleased with, and that I use all the time. It includes a good mix of high-quality web-based publications that approach film from a variety of angles. A number of these sites cover new movies, often in the form of festival dispatches, making this a good resource for finding information about films that haven’t yet garnered enough reviews to appear on sites like Metacritic or Rotten Tomatoes, and the online film journals and blogs by Film Studies academics that it includes make it a nice complement to scholarly databases like the FIAF International Index to Film Periodicals and the Film Literature Index Online.” Nice job, but AHEM we don’t see the Screengrab on your list of searched blogs. Please rectify this injustice post-haste.

Finally, postmodernbarney.com offers some Uncomfortable Plot Summaries. “BATMAN: Wealthy man assaults the mentally ill…FERRIS BUELLER’S DAY OFF: Amoral narcissist makes world dance for his amusement…STAR TREK IV: Interplanetary fugitives poach wildlife from a past age to cover up an act of genocide.”

In Other Blogs: Jesus Wept

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 14:00:00 GMT

It’s Good Friday, so somebody out there must be writing about Jesus movies. Ah, here we go – it’s Joshua Land at Moving Image Source comparing The Passion of the Christ and The Last Temptation of Christ. “The single most hollow claim of those who picketed Last Temptation was the notion that Universal was exploiting Christianity in pursuit of the almighty dollar; like The Passion of the Christ, Scorsese’s film was an obviously uncommercial proposition from the get-go, and it remains remarkable that the studio ever pursued it at all, let alone held firm in the face of protests—particularly after Paramount had already dropped the project before it even went into production.”

David Lynch won’t do commentary tracks, so the folks at Shooting Down Pictures have taken it upon themselves to live-blog Inland Empire. “I don’t think it’s an informational kind of film. I don’t think it’s part of his vocabulary. That might be the trouble behind understanding the ‘genre’ of this film. Simply avant-garde play of light, affectations and moods. I think the first time I saw this, by this point I was thinking that it was explicitly about interpretation. And it’s setting up all these signs for you to interpret in any number of ways. But it is going to provide a network of significance, and there are several things that will keep popping up for you to pay attention to how and when. There’s an intuitive kind of architecture to the film. A lot of it is just the face - dreams, and faces. It’s all about cinema as a dream, dreams as cinema. It’s not even a syllogism, it’s all a bunch of links.”

Director Richard Kelly (Southland Tales) blogs on his MySpace page about his new movie The Box. “The film was digitally photographed using the Panavision Genesis camera. In my audio commentary on Tony Scott's Domino, I mentioned that I would never shoot a 1970s period piece using a digital camera. My position on this changed when I saw David Fincher's extraordinary Zodiac. It can be done.”

This open letter to Bill O’Reilly has nothing to do with movies, but Roger Ebert wrote it and it’s too good to pass up: “I understand you believe one of the Sun-Times misdemeanors was dropping your syndicated column. My editor informs me that ‘very few’ readers complained about the disappearance of your column, adding, ‘many more complained about Nancy.’ I know I did. That was the famous Ernie Bushmiller comic strip in which Sluggo explained that ‘wow’ was ‘mom’ spelled upside-down.”

And in List-o-Mania this week…what the hell, let’s go with the 10 Greatest Mall-Set Action Scenes from Spoutblog, including Commando. “There’s nothing like seeing Arnold Schwarzenegger throw off about eight mall cops attempting a circular apprehension. There’s also nothing like seeing Arnold Schwarzenegger swing across the atrium of the Sherman Oaks Galleria using a plastic balloon-like decoration that couldn’t possibly have held him. Yes, there are a lot of over-the-top moments in this action scene, but there’s no denying it’s entertaining, at least to those of us who aren’t employed as mall security.”

In Other Blogs: Swing and a Drive

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 14:30:00 GMT

As I write this, we’re 72 hours from Opening Day and I can practically taste the peanuts and Cracker Jack. OK, that’s because I had a bowl of peanuts and Cracker Jack for breakfast, but you don’t want to hear about that. You want to hear about the Beyond the Multiplex interview with Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, directors of what Andrew O’Hehir calls the best baseball movie ever, Sugar. “One of the things that drew us to this story was this really staggering statistic,” says Fleck. “If you look at the '80s, the percentage of African-American players in baseball was around 22 percent. That has gone down to somewhere around 8 or 9 percent now, while the Dominican population in baseball has risen dramatically….Major League Baseball has taken money out of the inner cities, partly because baseball is an expensive sport to play. It's not like basketball, where all you need is a ball and a hoop. You need lots of equipment, and you've got fields you have to take care of. They've taken money out of the cities and flipped it into the Dominican Republic, where they can sign players much cheaper.”

At Scanners, Jim Emerson wonders whether Blu-ray has gone too far. “The announcement of a pristine, digitally enhanced Blu-ray release of Edgar G. Uhlmer's grimy 1945 noir Detour got me thinking in granular terms... It would be a mistake to 'clean up' the noise of some kinds of music, just as it would be counter to the spirit of, say, John Cassavettes (or Ed Wood) to create digitally pristine copies of their grittier work for Blu-ray release. A movie that was shot in 16 mm or on grainy stock for low-light conditions looks that way because... that's the way it was made. It's part of the work itself, integral to the experience the filmmakers created. Is it a good idea to ‘restore’ (‘remodel’ is more apt) a movie to look brighter, sharper, clearer than it ever was before?” Good questions, but as Emerson eventually points out, that “digitally pristine” edition of Detour was an April Fool’s Day joke.

Via GreenCine Daily, a look at a most unusual Craigslist posting. “Just this afternoon, I stumbled upon this hilariously pathetic, 'negotiable' pitch under the quite-clickable heading Attention Film Critics (Los Angeles): ‘Hi. We just finished a film and need to buy a one sentence quote from someone who calls himself a film critic. Thanks.’…I half-worry that an unscrupulous somebody might just take that person up on the offer. On the other hand, perhaps it's a positive sign for critics, that our opinions still hold a monetary value.” This is truly disgusting, repulsive and contrary to every ethical impulse in my body. And dammit, it looks like they’ve already found someone else to do it.

If you enjoyed Paul Clark’s entry in the White Elephant Blogathon, you can check out the rest of the entries here. I’m particularly thrilled that She Blogged by Night was forced to sit through the recent Unwatchable entry 3 Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain. “Speaking of rejuvenated manhood, at one point Medusa -- in her skin tight black leather S&M gear -- practically straddles Dave Dragon while telling him she'll make him her boytoy. Frankly, and I say this with all the maturity and dignity I can muster, I would have much rather seen the movie that would have led to.”

And if you didn’t get enough April Fool action on Wednesday, CinemaBlend has a roundup of some of the best film site pranks (although not our own, harrumph), including Seth Rogen In Talks for Galactica Film, Johnny Depp Is Freddy Krueger and Daniel Craig Quits Bond.

In Other Blogs: Knowing Me, Knowing You

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 14:00:00 GMT

At Scanners, Jim Emerson weighs in on Roger Ebert’s Knowing bafflement. “It's one thing to be the voice in the crowd pointing out that the Emperor has no clothes. It's very different to feel like you're the only one who's cheering an Emp you feel is magnificently attired…But critical opinion isn't an electoral contest where winners and losers are determined by some (largely illusory) consensus. Not many years ago, the general public would not have had any idea of what many critics outside their own town had said about a film -- nor would they have known how each and every movie performed at the box office weekend after weekend.”

David Frank of Rope of Silicon puts his trust in Ebert. “In trendy sushi bars across the country a quiet buzz hums among kids wearing black-rimmed glasses and Alamo Drafthouse T-shirts. They wonder if Mr. E ate some magical Freaky Friday fortune cookie with Ben Lyons — not than any of these curious folk would admit to seeing any version of Freaky Friday. Has the man given up? Is he losing it?...I haven’t seen Knowing. Which means I can’t say whether I agree with Ebert or not. Regardless of whether I think Knowing is junk or treasure, I do know the man has not lost it. He has not gone Earl Dittman on us. He really does believe Knowing is a great science-fiction film despite whatever you, your mom and your favorite hipper-than-thou Internet curmudgeon thinks. And that’s why I love Roger Ebert. He’s his own man.”

Beyond the Multiplex looks at “a completely miscellaneous grab bag of indie openings,” including the intriguing Severed Ways. “Impressive and also absolutely ludicrous, this is the movie you need to recommend to that suburban metalhead cousin in desperate need of having his mind blown. Purportedly based on an episode from the Vinland Sagas, in which two 11th-century Norsemen are left on their own to fend for themselves in unknown North America, writer-director-actor Tony Stone's Severed Ways is something like a DIY combination of black-metal video, Italian horror film, The Blair Witch Project and some really slow, nature-obsessed art movie like Old Joy.”

At The House Next Door, Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard converse about two “unfortunately overlooked and/or unfairly maligned” films, David Gordon Green’s Undertow and Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris. Says Harris: “I wanted to talk about Undertow largely because it's been forgotten: you're right that almost no one brings it up these days in talking about Green, who's mostly known for his first two films and now the Judd Apatow collaboration Pineapple Express. Ebert's rave aside, I believe Undertow got decidedly mixed reviews upon release, including its fair share of very negative ones, but on the whole I wouldn't say it's maligned so much as simply overlooked. That's unfortunate, because in my opinion it is Green's best film thus far, the film that comes closest to fulfilling the tremendous promise he's displayed in all his features. It's not a perfect film by any means, not a masterpiece, but in its own strange way it is ‘great,’ a baroque fable about the loss of childhood innocence and the totemic power of family.”

Let’s wrap it up with this week’s installment of List-o-Mania courtesy of Spoutblog: 10 Films That Saved Their Franchises. Like, uh…Attack of the Clones? “It made the least amount of money of the three Star Wars prequels, but Attack of the Clones was the trilogy’s saving grace, because after the ‘George Lucas ruined my childhood!’ disappointments of The Phantom Menace, this second (or fifth?) installment of the franchise got the old fans excited again by alluding to (and leading in the direction of) more characters and events of the original movies, while overall featuring a better plot and more satisfying action.” I’m fainting with damned praise.

In Other Blogs: 100% Watchmen-Free Edition

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 16:30:00 GMT

It’s enough already! I blame myself for piling on, but surely we can find some intriguing blog entries out there on subjects other than the movie that rhymes with Blotchmen. For instance, Arbogast on Film is looking back at an apocalyptic fantasy from the olden days. “Maybe the world did come to an end in 1988. I don't want to be glib but I'm hard pressed to think of anything that has surfaced in the interim that really is something to tap dance about. There was an electricity back then, a crackle in the air that's missing now, the void filled by buzz, which isn't the same thing. None of us knew the backstory of MIRACLE MILE (1988) at the time of its release; we didn't know that the property had been kicked around Hollywood for the better part of a decade or that its author, Steve DeJarnatt, had written the script for Warners but had bound himself to the project as a director, which queered the deal. We didn't know DeJarnatt (well, we didn't know DeJarnatt) had bought the script back from the studio for $25,000 and that Hemdale stepped in with an offer to produce for just under $4 million, which got the ball rolling. Nope. All of this happened while we were sleeping, and when we woke up MIRACLE MILE had happened.”

At Hollywood Elsewhere, Jeffrey Wells speculates on rumors that Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life will feature…dinosaurs? “Some 18 years ago I over-wrote a very long piece about Malick, a where-is-he? thing called Malick Aforethought…I remember researching and describing an ambitious film that Malick wanted to film in the wake of the 1978 release of Days of Heaven, called Q. (A title later appropriated by Larry Cohen when he made Q, The Winged Serpent.) And I remember a passage about a dinosaur sleeping and dreaming in a sea of magma -- I remember that much. The story spanned millenia. We all know there's a 20th Century portion in which Pitt (I think) plays Penn's dad in flashbacks. I realize this all sounds a little vague.”

If you’re attending SXSW without a film badge, Slackerwood offers some tips. “Movies shot in Austin or with Austin ties may fill up quickly. Sometimes cast and crew members and their families are invited and a number of seats are reserved. On the other hand, these are the movies that often draw more ticketholders than badgeholders, because the audience is full of locals wanting to see their neighbor or coworker's movie. So if you get there early, you might be okay.”

At The House Next Door, Jeremiah Kipp talks to Daniel Bird about Central European New Wave Cinema. “In Poland I am a cultural outsider. I try to read films in cultural context, but my response is, ultimately, personal. I am English, after all. But I have been living in Warsaw on and off since 2002. Yes, there are culturally specific aspects to many of the films I write about. Sometimes an understanding helps the appreciation of these films, but not always. Zulawski's Diabel makes a lot more sense if you know something about the Warsaw student riots in March 1968. But what attracts me to a particular film is its bizarre quality. I guess you could say such films seem bizarre to a cultural outsider. But then I think the only person in the world who finds Diabel 'normal' is Zulawski himself.”

Finally in List-o-Mania, the AV Club offers 24 graphic novels besides, uh, you-know-what that they’d like to see made into movies. Like all right-thinking people, they’d love to see David Lynch adapt Daniel Clowes’ A Velvet Glove Cast in Iron. “Seeing the two work together on this eerie, unhinged story, which blends elements of Twin Peaks and the Manson family’s worst nightmares, would be a rare treat—or a total disaster. Luckily, Clowes has already anticipated the latter possibility; in the pages of Eightball, where Velvet Glove first appeared, he wrote a hilarious what-if story of its Hollywood adaptation, complete with happy ending, product placement, and cheesy classic-rock soundtrack.”

In Other Blogs: New Yorker State of Mind

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 16:00:00 GMT

As Phil Nugent reported here earlier this week, the venerable New Yorker Films “has ceased operations” and its catalogue of foreign and art house fare is set for auction. At Beyond the Multiplex, Andrew O’Hehir speculates about a potential landing spot for the treasure trove of classic films. “In a broader sense, New Yorker's long-term willingness to defy the marketplace realities of American film distribution never seemed like a sustainable business model. While the films listed above attracted at least some American viewers, New Yorker was worshiped in cinephile circles precisely because it often took on difficult and adventurous cinema that was destined to find almost no audience. Sometimes Talbot and Lopez seemed to be running an educational foundation under the guise of a for-profit business….New Yorker's library would have obvious appeal to "an online distributor, a TV network or a DVD company," Werner continues. Given that IFC is at least two and potentially all three of those things, and in recent years has assumed a commanding position in the distribution of foreign-language and American independent films, it might be the most logical potential bidder.”

At Some Came Running, Glen Kenny celebrates a new DVD release of Vanishing Point (which includes the UK version of the picture, containing an excised scene with Charlotte Rampling) by interviewing director Richard Sarafian. “At first I balked at Barry Newman being the star, ‘cause I had other possibilities and I felt…all I wanted was the adult male that looked like he belonged behind the wheel. And I had several major actors in mind that might have made a difference. It didn't turn out that way. It came back to me that either I use Barry Newman or Zanuck wasn't going to make the picture. I said, ‘Well, Mr. Zanuck, I'm going to make the car the star.’ And he said, ‘I knew you'd see it my way.’”

Spoutblog’s Karina Longworth revisits Eagle Pennell's The Whole Shootin’ Match. “It’s possible that this is just that time of year and I have SXSW on the brain, but when I watched The Whole Shootin’ Match a few days ago, more than seeing the film as a love/hate letter to the bottle, more than spotting its shared DNA with various films by Richard Linklater and Andrew Bujalski (and, to a lesser extent, Wes Anderson and Gus Van Sant), I saw it as a catalyst for a conversation about Austin’s evolving film cultural history…What interests me most about the ‘regional’ issue is that although Austin has become a place where independent filmmakers from all over the country — including LA and New York — come to show work, ironically, Austin’s past and present identity as a film town often gets lost in that process and excluded from the conversation.”

Roger Ebert hunts The Snark. “When Joaquin Phoenix appears on the Letterman program and behaves as a semi-catatonic weirdo, for example, he is instantly made the butt of imitators on the Indie Spirits and the Oscars, and the snarky presumption is that he is now a laughable buffoon. All memories of his splendid acting career are erased. He is past his sell-by date. The actor from Gladiator and Walk the Line, twice nominated for an Oscar, is now ridiculed on the Academy stage. Let's take him as a case study. When Phoenix was satirized on the Indie Spirits, I doubted anything on the Oscarcast was likely to equal it. The next day I wrote that the Oscar had proven me wrong. There was no hint that I objected to the portrayals. Those second thoughts arrived only belatedly, along with the reflection that if Phoenix really was ‘nutzoid,’ the segments were in poor taste. But nutzoid itself is snarkspeak, and I should have written ‘mentally ill,’ not to be Politically Correct, but simply to be decent.”

Finally, this week’s List-o-Mania comes from Den of Geek, which looks at the Top 50 Movie Special Effects Shots, including “the party crashers revealed” from The Fearless Vampire Killers. “Sometimes the oldest trick in the book is all you need. Thus reasoned Roman Polanski when his vampire-movie spoof required that the 'infiltrators' at a vampire ball be revealed as the only reflections in the ballroom mirror. Of course, the 'reflections' are out-of-focus doubles trying to 'mirror' principals Jack MacGowran, Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate, but once something works, anything more is pointless.”

In Other Blogs: Oscar Overload

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 15:00:00 GMT

Oscar night is almost here and the blogs are a-buzzin’. Once you’ve made your way through our definitive look at the All-Time Best and Worst Best Picture Winners, head over to Future of Classic to compare notes with Flashback Five - The Worst Best Pictures in Oscar History. Here’s a hint on the number one choice: This “shaggy-dog story about a lovable dimwit was technically accomplished, cloyingly sentimental, and politically suspect.”

At Beyond the Multiplex, Andrew O’Hehir checks out the Foreign Film nominees. “Instead of trying to write a bunch of new jokes about the lameness of the Academy's foreign-language film nominations, I wonder if anyone would notice if I just republished a few greatest hits from my last three years' worth of bitching and moaning?... It should go without saying that the foreign-language Oscar bears no relationship to whether given movies are, y'know, actually any good, or to whether any paying audiences, American or otherwise, want to see them. In fact, it's difficult to say what the furrin-film Oscar measures, other than providing readings from an especially eccentric focus group: What kinds of movies with subtitles would a bunch of cranky, seniorish film-industry professionals in Los Angeles County like to watch, if they actually liked to watch movies with subtitles?”

Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule makes the Best Actress case for someone who isn’t even nominated. “In a perfect world, one in which the academy supposedly devoted to excellence in motion pictures, but which routinely ignores genius-level comic performances or finds a way to ghettoize them in supporting role categories, actually acknowledged the age-old dictum that comedy is hard, Angelina or Melissa would have been kicked to the curb to make room for Anna Faris's hilarious sunburst performance in The House Bunny…she makes every scene she’s in feel like it’s something brand-new through a combination of brilliant timing, vocal mannerisms, physical grace (and its opposite, cannily choreographed clumsiness) and pure movie star charm.”

At Some Came Running, Glen Kenny takes a look at the unusual Blu-ray release of a previous Oscar winner. “One supposes that it was inevitable—that someday, some extremely conscious men of vision would use the most advanced, sophisticated, versatile digital imaging technology extant for the purpose of making a given film look like an immaculate, scratch-free print of a '70s eight-millimeter porno loop. Do I exaggerate? A little. Maybe. I'm still not sure. I looked at the new Blu-ray of William Friedkin's 1971 The French Connection last night and have to say I'm still of several minds about it. Rather than use digital technology to make obvious, you know, fixes—like really nail down whether that Santa Claus bust scene at the beginning takes place at night or during the day—Friedkin and his tech cohort performed a radical overhaul of the film's look, stripping away any traces of studio-process sheen and going for a very detailed brand of grit.”

Finally, get an edge on the rest of your Oscar viewing party guests with Defamer’s “In Memorium” Oscar Montage Pool. Will Mr. Blackwell make the montage? Will Charlton Heston end it? And who will get the montage’s first sound clip? (I’m betting it all on Harvey Korman.)