The Screengrab : jodie foster

Taxing Time: A Screengrab Salute To Beat The Clock Cinema (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 21:00:00 GMT

CELLULAR (2004)

Despite flying under many moviegoers’ radars in 2004, David R. Ellis’ Cellular is a crackerjack thriller that overcomes its somewhat preposterous central conceit via unflagging breakneck energy. Co-written by B-movie master Larry Cohen, the story hinges on a kidnapped woman (Kim Basinger) using a smashed telephone to make a random call to the cell phone of a stranger (Chris Evans). Basinger successfully convinces Evans to help her escape her predicament, though complications arise at every turn, from dying cell phone batteries, to the cops’ unwillingness to lend a hand, to a bit of signal-crossing that forces Evans to steal someone else’s cell phone and car. Bolstered by a strong cast that also includes Jessica Biel as Evans’ ex-girlfriend, Jason Statham as Basinger’s kidnapper, and William H. Macy as a police officer, and enlivened by director Ellis’ no-nonsense, pulse-pounding orchestration of his various high-wire set pieces, Cellular remains the type of efficient, no-frills genre flick that Hollywood has – save for the rare exception – mostly given up on in favor of high-concept, big-budget spectaculars. (NS)

THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (1991)

Jonathan Demme’s 1991 serial-killer fantasia has been so celebrated (after winning a shocking number of Oscars and turning Dr. Hannibal Lecter into a household name) and its performances so justifiably celebrated that it’s easy to forget: at its heart beats a good old-fashioned thriller, cleverly conceived and exquisitely realized. A huge amount of the tension in a movie crammed full of it derives from the fact that Anthony Hopkins’ Dr. Lecter knows exactly what the murderous Buffalo Bill is up to, but he doesn’t care. As he notes, he has all the time in the world, but as for Bill’s latest victim – “Tick tock”, he says with casual menace. Even after it’s become clear that Lecter is doling out information as part of an overarching plan to free himself, the movie never stops screwing with the bloody deadline it’s set; when Buffalo Bill’s house is finally raided, it’s a masterful fake-out that only increases the tension. Demme and his screenwriter, Ted Tally, deserve tons of credit for adding psychological depth and character to what is, at heart, a terrifically paced old-school murder mystery. (LP)

THE ABOMINABLE DR. PHIBES (1971)

This camp horror classic stars Vincent Price as a brilliant madman outfitted with a voice box, a Moe Howard haircut, and the red-rimmed eyes of a lifetime High Times subscriber. Peeved at the medical team he blames for the death of his beloved wife -- and if you looked like this and managed to find a beautiful woman who wanted to marry you, you'd take the loss of her hard, too -- Price sets about dispatching them by means of a series of murder plots inspired by the plagues that God, under Charlton Heston's supervision, once inflicted on Egypt. The climactic zinger is a terrifically tense draining-hourglass sequence that is Price's version of the curse that claimed the country's first born sons. Instead of killing the chief surgeon (Joseph Cotten), he kidnaps and drugs the man's son, implants a key inside the boy's chest near his heart, and leaves him lying on a surgical table beneath an acid-filled container. Doc Cotten has six minutes to perform the delicate surgery necessary to retrieve the key so he can free the boy and move him out of the way before the acid eats its way through and destroys his face. In the end, Cotten pulls it off, and the acid falls on Price's mysterious woman assistant, who thus forfeited the chance to appear in the sequel. (PN)

MURDER BY CONTRACT (1958)

This little-seen but influential 81-minute noir, directed by Irving Lerner on a low budget, stars Vince Edwards as a businesslike hit man who hits Los Angeles and hooks up with a couple of mooks who are to support him in his efforts to kill a government witness who is being kept under heavy guard while waiting to give testimony against Mr. Big. Despite its brief running time, the movie is to most race-against-time films what O. J. Simpson's televised 2004 tour of California was to Vanishing Point. To his assistants' consternation, the brainy Vince chooses to while away his first few days in the city before turning to his work, only to explode when he discovers that the target is a woman -- not because he has any philosophical or sentimental objections to killing a woman, but because he regards women as more "unpredictable" than men, which makes them more likely to veer from the routines on which he bases his elaborate murder plans. After a re-negotiation of his fee, Vince sets to work, but damned if there doesn't seem to be something to his gender-based theory. After bombing out a couple of times. and with the clock ticking down, Vince breaks character and makes a last, desperate, hands-on stab at dispatching his target, finally coming to grief in the end. It's an unusually zen thriller. (PN)

Cut the red wire, the green wire...or Click Here For Part One, Two, Four, Five & Six!!!!

Contributors: Nick Schager, Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent

Jailhouse Rock: The Greatest Prison Films of All Time (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 21:15:00 GMT

TITICUT FOLLIES (1967)

Before I got my driver’s license, the only way to get to Boston from my hometown of Middleboro, Massachusetts (besides a ride from Mom & Dad) was a local bus that stopped at a prison in the neighboring town of Bridgewater to pick up the newly released ex-cons and ship ‘em home (or the nearest equivalent). Years later, I discovered the prison was actually the notorious state hospital for alcoholics, sex offenders and the criminally insane profiled in Frederick Wiseman’s controversial documentary Titicut Follies, a movie even more disturbing than all those long-ago bus rides. In stark black and white, Wiseman shows the subhuman conditions of the 1960s version of the facility and the desperation of the inmates (including one poor bastard I still remember vividly, years after the first and only time I watched the film, who keeps explaining, over and over again, that he’s perfectly sane and would really, really, really like to leave the premises). As an avid psychedelic drug enthusiast in my younger days, winding up in a mental hospital (mistakenly or not) has always been high on my list of worst-case scenarios, but Titicut Follies (named for the grimly surreal inmate “talent show” depicted in the film) is worst-case by way of 18th century Bedlam: “We see men needlessly stripped bare, insulted, herded about callously, mocked, taunted,” Robert Coles wrote of the film in The New Republic. “We see them ignored or locked interminably in cells. We hear the craziness in the air...” Massachusetts was so embarrassed by the film they tried not only to ban it, but also to have all copies destroyed (!) on the grounds that somehow the documentary violated the patients’ dignity more than, say, being held indefinitely in cell blocks without toilets and periodically hosed down. Wiseman asserted repeatedly that he’d received permission from all the patients who appeared in the film (or their guardians), yet (according to Wikipedia, at least) the film wasn’t legally cleared for general public release until 1991, at which point the Massachusetts State Supreme Court also stipulated the film would need to include a “brief explanation...that changes and improvements have taken place at Massachusetts' Correctional Institution in Bridgewater since 1966.” One would hope.

THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (1991)

In this year of Rachel Getting Married, it’s not at all hard to see why Jonathan Demme once made a movie that swept the Oscars. What’s surprising is that he won it for The Silence of the Lambs, a movie that in lesser hands, with a lesser cast, would have been little more than a clever genre exercise. But Demme’s capable direction, a masterful sense of mood and tone, and some stunning performances carried it into the realms of greatness, with Anthony Hopkins’ brutally mannered performance proving what a great villain can do for a movie. Some prison films are all about the experience of being on the inside, but others derive their tension and power from the time-honored tradition of the jailbreak. While Dr. Hannibal Lecter’s escape from his dismal subterranean dungeon (where he’s kept from touching anything solid, even a pen cap) is inevitable, it differs from most escape yarns in that the criminal’s liberation is something that fills us with dread instead of excitement. Lecter’s cruel psychological manipulation leads him out from the underground, and his brutal violence unleashes him on the world again after a decade of imprisonment. The movie’s final scenes are less a triumph than a threat: Satan unleashed upon the world again.

ANIMAL FACTORY (2000)

Steve Buscemi does an admirable job, in his second full-length directorial effort, of conveying the casual brutality and bizarre social cycles of prison life. By refusing both glamorization and utter degradation, he keeps his storytelling solid and balanced, allowing the powerful action on screen to work itself out in more subtle ways. Edward Furlong’s young convict finds himself totally unprepared for prison life, and even after he’s taken under the wing of ex-gang boss Willem Dafoe, he finds himself given over to fear that shapes his reactions to the prison world as much as any real violence or sexual assault. Buscemi’s simple, un-flashy approach is perfect for the material, and he wisely keeps himself off camera and lets his actors and situations tell the story. Of course, he’s aided and abetted, so to speak, by a worthy bunch of co-conspirators: the screenplay to Animal Factory was written by Eddie Bunker – best known as Mr. Blue in Reservoir Dogs, but also an established writer, actor, and career criminal whose own stints in prison inspired the script. Bunker’s friend Danny Trejo – a man he spent time with in prison and who, like him, was redeemed through his art – also has a leading role in the film, which is one of the reasons it reeks of authenticity.

I AM A FUGITIVE FROM A CHAIN GANG (1932)

The melodramatic tone of most ‘30s films leads to an inevitable graying, and Mervyn LeRoy’s then-controversial I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang hasn’t aged like a fine wine. But it’s still an extremely worthwhile movie, with a harrowing escape scene and the nervous, twitchy shoulders of Oscar-nominated Paul Muni as a World War I vet who fled the intolerably brutal justice of the Georgia prison system. Based on a true story – in fact, Robert Burns, the man on whom Muni’s character was based, served as a technical adviser on the film while still a fugitive until he was forced to hit the road again – Chain Gang fudged the facts a bit. It’s no secret that the movie’s particulars were a bit glossed over in order to make Muni more appealing to audiences hard-hit by the Depression. But it certainly doesn’t make him a noble figure by any means; his downward spiral and lowlife ways only make it more shocking when we see how he’s systematically dehumanized by the chain gang system, which was little more than state-sponsored slavery. Even 75 years later, the movie’s final scene packs a punch, as Muni answers the question of how he manages to live with a simple, harsh response: “I steal.”

DOWN BY LAW (1986)

You don’t often hear the phrase “quirky prison comedy”, but if anyone can carry off that particular genre blend, it’s Jim Jarmusch. Assembling a unique cast – John Lurie as a big-talking pimp, Tom Waits as a laconic disc jockey, and Roberto Begnini (in his first English-speaking role, if you can call it that) as a bewildered Italian tourist – he deftly mixes together screwball comedy, existential drama, and the kind of quiet indie strangeness that would become his hallmark over the years to come. Compelled to escape from prison more or less because they can’t stand being stuck in the same cell with one another anymore (their scenes in jail are probably the funniest prison scenes this side of the end of The Producers), the three break out and trudge through the gorgeously photographed Louisiana bayou; they escape imprisonment, but they can’t escape each other, and freedom seems to have precious little to distinguish itself from jail for them. A perfect companion piece to Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise, Down By Law is perhaps the greatest of Jarmusch’s "beautiful losers" movies, and the whole thing should be experienced like your last night before heading off to jail: through a cloud of smoke and a fog of booze, with a good-looking and dangerous girl by your side.

Click Here For Part One, Three, Four & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce

Screengrab Salutes: The Top 25 Leading Ladies of All Time (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 20:30:00 GMT

20. LILLIAN GISH (1893-1993)

One should resist the temptation to guess that Gish's name is better-remembered than most of the actresses who did their most noteworthy work during the silent era because she was such a favorite of D. W. Griffith, a director who has received (and deserved) so much of the credit for the development of the movies as an art form. In her performances for Griffith -- the titles include Intolerance, Broken Blossoms, Way Down East, Orphans of the Storm, and, of course, The Birth of a Nation -- she embodied fragile, beautiful girlhood, and had to carry out all the cliches of Victorian melodrama that make so many dramatic silent movies look ridiculous today. Yet she did it with an unearthly technique that poeticized the material and made her eternally threatened characters seem not so much frail and dainty but rather not of this world; it's as if they'd become their own ghosts without taking the customary step of first abandoning their bodies. She also made two great silents with director Victor Sjostrom, The Scarlet Letter and The Wind; the latter was a box-office failure that led to the cancellation of her MGM contract. Although she was never to enjoy anywhere near the same degree of success in talkies, she had a few notable roles spread far apart over the course of her remarkably long life and career, the most impressive being the stern, Christian spinster who holds her own against the devil, in the form of Robert Mitchum, in The Night of the Hunter. Her last film appearance was in 1987's The Whales of August. She reacted to news that people were appalled she didn't get an Oscar nomination for it by saying that she really didn't mind not being put in the position of losing to Cher.

19. JODIE FOSTER (1962 - )

I’m pretty sure there’s only one actress on this list I’ve had a crush on since first grade, a crush even more doomed than my usual movie star fantasies (if all the rumors about Foster’s famously off-limits private life are true). Starting with her appearance as Becky Thatcher in the 1973 screen version of Tom Sawyer (though her career actually started at seven with a 1969 cameo on The Doris Day Show), Foster always seemed like the smart, cute, preternaturally mature older girl next door who clued you in to the grown-up world and made you feel cooler just for knowing her. Then one day, as cool, older girls tend to do, Foster leapfrogged straight from child’s play to adulthood with her amazing Oscar-nominated role as the not-as-smart-as-she-thinks-she-is jailbait streetwalker in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), inspiring the insane, obsessive infatuation of would-be presidential assassin John Hinckley, Jr. Most child and teen stars fade away with far less provocation, but after putting the Hinckley incident behind her with a stint at Yale and transitional roles in a string of box office disappointments (including the cult classic, Foxes), Foster’s adult career finally caught fire with a pair of Best Actress Oscars for The Accused (1988) and The Silence of the Lambs (1991). Since then, Foster’s had the clout to largely follow the whims of her own smarty-pants muse, like a real-life version of Gwyneth Paltrow’s aging prodigy in The Royal Tennenbaums, flitting from brainy mainstream fare like her driven SETI researcher in Contact (1997) and offbeat fandangos like Nell (1994) to interesting supporting roles, most notably her fantastically amoral fixer in Spike Lee’s Inside Man. Thanks to her evident mental toughness (and probably the collective unconscious memory of her signature role as the serial killer- slaying Clarice Starling), Foster has also become an unlikely action star in movies like Panic Room and The Brave One...and while some of her paycheck jobs (like the terrible, terrible Flightplan) are miles beneath her, they can also be seen as forgivable means to her directorial ends, financing humble passion projects like Flora Plum and Little Man Tate. Given the range and breadth of her career, the usual rules and restrictions of female stardom in Hollywood just never seem to apply to Foster, and hopefully they never will: smart people rule!!!

18. GONG LI (1965 - )

First off, just look at that face. Gong Li was blessed with a timeless beauty, coupled with a regal movie-star bearing. However, the road to big-screen immortality is littered with the nipped and tucked bodies of gorgeous women. Luckily for Gong, then, that she got her start as an actress during China’s fabled Fifth Generation of filmmakers, an era that had little use for empty glamour. As the muse of leading Fifth Generation directors Chen Kaige and longtime lover Zhang Yimou, Gong quickly began to specialize in playing women who were systematically ground down by the oppressive forces of Chinese patriarchy. In movies like Raise the Red Lantern, Ju Dou, and Farewell My Concubine, Gong suited the filmmaking style perfectly, her soulfulness grounding the often-tragic stories while her beauty complemented the eye-popping imagery. Yet there was more to her than suffering and anguish, as evidenced by her tenacious turn in The Story of Qiu Ju and the bitchy moll she portrayed in Shanghai Triad. Around the turn of the millennium, Gong’s roles became increasingly ornamental for a time -- honestly, there’s no compelling reason to see Zhou Yu’s Train other than to stare at her -- but in recent years she’s finally begun working outside of her native land on a regular basis. And although her Hollywood roles have been inconsistent at best -- thumbs up for Miami Vice, thumbs down for Memoirs of a Geisha and (ugh) Young Hannibal -- she gave one her best performances yet in Wong Kar-wai’s 2046. As the female equivalent of Tony Leung’s seedy writer Mr. Chow, Gong excels at the kind of morally compromised character that can only be played convincingly by an actress who’s grown into the role. It’s a tantalizing hint of the treasures that should be in store for us as Gong approaches middle age, and frankly, we can’t wait.

17. SHELLEY DUVALL (1949 - )

She’s gawky and weird, with stringy hair and an awkward way about her. And she’s mesmerizing. And beautiful. And one of the most amazing actresses of her generation. It took an eye like Robert Altman’s to see the gorgeous leading lady behind her not-so-Hollywood looks. She’s at her best in Altman’s Thieves Like Us, where a love scene transforms her from a funny-looking teenager into a Modigliani beauty. But she’s great in all of the Altman films she made, even Popeye. She popped up in Annie Hall, Time Bandits, and Underneath, but the general public probably knows her best as Wendy from The Shining. Let’s look at that list of directors again: Altman, Woody Allen, Terry Gilliam, Stanley Kubrick, and Stephen Soderbergh. And yet, what has she done worth watching since 1995? In fact, she’s been mostly MIA since 1980. What gives?

16. MARLENE DIETRICH (1901-1992)

Josef von Sternberg brought her from Germany to the US and made her the ur-femme fatale before WWII. Later she became Hollywood’s go-to girl when they needed a faded flower of decadent old-world Europe. The Nazis tried to lure her back to Germany, but she hated Nazis. And she loved Orson Welles. After she broke with von Sternberg, she made some okay westerns (and one with Fritz Lang that sounds extraordinary, but has not been released on DVD), a second-tier Hitchcock film, a couple of Billy Wilder movies, and Touch Of Evil, one of the greatest movies ever made. She was some kind of a woman. What does it matter what you say about people?

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

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Andrew Osborne, Paul Clark, Hayden Childs

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

DVD Digest for August 5, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Yeesh, talk about feast to famine- after last week’s bumper crop of good releases, this week’s release chart’s looking like pretty slim pickings.

In fact, there’s so little good stuff out this week that I’ve decided to forego the DVD of the Week feature altogether. Instead, I’ll move on directly to the new releases. This week: the Abigail Breslin/Jodie Foster family adventure Nim’s Island (Fox, also Blu-Ray); the Best Foreign Language Film-winning Holocaust epic (kind of redundant, no?) The Counterfeiters (Sony, also Blu-Ray); and two acclaimed documentaries about two very different artists, Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis (Arts Alliance America) and Pete Seeger: The Power of Song (Genius Productions/The Miriam Collection). Also, a new Spanish-language take on Carmen (Lionsgate), which I’m only including here as an excuse to post a picture of the lovely Paz Vega. You’re welcome.

In “classics”, this week brings two box sets: Universal’s High School Flashback Collection, which includes Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, and Weird Science, also available separately; and the Starship Troopers Trilogy Box Set (Sony, also Blu-Ray), which includes the new direct-to-DVD sequel Starship Troopers 3: Marauder, as well as the new-to-Blu-Ray original film and its first sequel Starship Troopers 2: Hero of the Federation. On a side note, I’m consistently amazed by how much Sony has flogged the Starship Troopers name brand, considering how big a flop the original film was back in the day.

Finally, in tie-in news, this week brings the DVD premiere of the 1984 miniseries The First Olympics Athens 1896 (Sony), just in case around-the-clock coverage over the next two weeks isn’t to cool down your Olympic fever.

Will Barack Obama Be America's Next Great Black President?

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 14:30:00 GMT

You know how there’s usually nothing good on TV, and then finally there are TWO shows you want to watch and they’re both on at the same time? That’s what this election has been like for me. After a a lifetime of troubled Democratic administrations and doomed Democratic candidates from McGovern to Kerry (and don’t even get me started on the disastrous Gore/Lieberman campaign, Nader haters), we finally get two really strong contenders...IN THE SAME FREAKIN’ ELECTION YEAR. And they just spent the past few months beating the shit out of each other.

But that's all behind us now: according to media scuttlebutt, Hillary will officially concede the Democratic nomination on Saturday and become America’s #1 Obama Girl, while Barack moves one step closer to becoming our nation’s first real black president, after many years of fake black presidents on TV and the big screen.

And so, in honor of Senator Barack Obama’s historic achievement, Screengrab decided to look back at some of the African Americans who occupied the Oval Office in fiction before reality finally caught up:

Morgan Freeman as President Tom Beck in Deep Impact (1998)

After playing God in Bruce & Evan Almighty, President of the United States was actually a step down for Morgan Freeman...but America was lucky to have his wisdom, authority and soothing, inspirational baritone during a crisis involving a potential Extinction Level Event, a.k.a. a giant comet on a collision course with Earth. Rather than farming out the whole thing to Haliburton, President Beck freezes wages and prices to prevent an economic disaster and dispatches Robert Duvall’s Capt. Spurgeon "Fish" Tanner and a multinational crew of astronauts, who sacrifice themselves to destroy the big rock, thus saving (most of) humanity. Heckuva job, Fishie.

Dennis Haysbert as President David Palmer on 24 (2002-2004)

After surviving assassins in a truly harrowing California primary, Haysbert’s resilient, basso profundo commander-in-chief is faced with nuclear and biological terrorism, as well as attempts by corrupt American businessmen to manufacture war in the Middle East in order to drive up oil prices and...uh...hey, isn’t this a Fox show with a big conservative fan base? Must be all the torture...so much torture, in fact, that West Point Academy worried cadets were starting to view such behavior as acceptable interrogation procedure, and I’ve personally heard talk radio guys condone extreme neo-con interrogation policies because, heck, they always work for Jack Bauer. Yet isn’t it also possible, given the show’s impact, that Haysbert’s performance as the indomitable President Palmer in some way helped Middle America get used to the idea of a handsome young African American Democrat in the White House?

Bill Clinton as President Bill Clinton in Contact (1998)

While not technically African American, Bill Clinton received an honorary designation as the nation’s first black president (until the real thing comes along) from a plurality of U.S. comedians. And while not technically a cast member of Robert Zemeckis’ adaptation of Carl Sagan’s tale of Earth’s first contact with extraterrestrial life, Clinton nevertheless received more screen time than Rob Lowe or Angela Bassett thanks to a presidential speech about rocks found on Mars that was repurposed (controversially) as a fictional proclamation about alien transmissions received by astronomer Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster). Ironically, the only reason Clinton got to portray the president in the movie was because Sidney Poitier passed on the role.

Terry Crews as President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho in Idiocracy (2006)

Of course, some presidents are better than others, though given the average IQ of the dumbed-down populace of Mike Judge’s little-seen, depressingly spot-on social satire, Idiocracy, Crews’ President Camacho doesn’t really do that bad a job. Sure, he almost executes the smartest man in the world (Luke Wilson’s cryogenically-preserved average Joe, whose 21st century common sense reads as genius in 2505 America). But he does have leadership skills, and when Joe’s brilliant plan to water crops with, y’know, water instead of corporate sports beverages helps to end a crippling food shortage, Camacho has the wisdom to actually listen to expert opinion rather than (ahem) stubbornly staying the course.

Tommy “Tiny” Lister as President Lindberg in The Fifth Element (1997)

Forget the Axis of Evil...Lister’s science-fictional administration has to deal with The Great Evil, a sentient flaming asteroid intent on, yes, wiping out all life on Earth. While Bruce Willis’ cab driver and Milla Jovovich’s supernatural supermodel do most of the heavy lifting in the fight against Evil (and its chief henchman Zorg, played by Gary Oldman in a peculiar plastic hat), President Lindberg nevertheless doesn’t ask and Chris Tucker’s Ruby Rhod doesn’t tell when his ultra-flamboyant radio host joins the mission, and the intergalactic commander-in-chief even supports his troops by preventing a naggy mother from cock-blocking Willis’ eventual clone chamber tryst with Jovovich...talk about advocating stem cell research!

Jailbait Cinema: 16 Films That Make Us Nervous (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 22 May 2008 20:00:00 GMT

If we all hit puberty overnight on our 21st birthdays, American life would be a helluva lot less complicated. But, as the recent Miley Cyrus “back-gate” scandal revealed, teenage sexuality is a topic that America doesn’t want to think about, even as it just can't seem to stop thinking about it.

On the one hand, most of us had (or at least thought about) sex in high school...on the other hand, once we’re adults, we’re all supposed to conveniently forget our memories and fantasies of adolescent lust. On the one hand, sex education is viewed as promoting underage promiscuity...but on the other hand, abstinence-only education tends to lead to a lot of unwanted pregnancy, since teenagers somehow figure out how to have sex even without classroom lectures about condoms. On the one hand, innocent teachers, day care workers, 19-year-olds with 17-year-old girlfriends and that 6-year-old boy who smacked a female classmate on the butt have all been branded for life as sexual offenders based on false or flimsy charges in hysterical witch hunts to “protect the children” at all costs...on the other hand, research indicates 20-25% of girls and 5-15% of boys in the U.S. experience some form of molestation at the hands of adults, the Catholic Church ignored its own institutional abuse scandals and the international sex trade in young flesh is thriving.

Clearly, we’re a little conflicted about the whole sex thing. Sure, we’re all shocked and disgusted by those creeps on To Catch A Predator...but somebody out there is watching Gossip Girl, sneaking peeks at Barely Legal magazine, lusting after Zac Efron and buying sexy cheerleader outfits from the Frederick's of Hollywood catalogue...and it’s not all just teens and predators. In fact, if we here at the Screengrab didn’t know better, we’d almost think Americans fetishize taboos instead of just being honest about them, leading to some pretty screwy behavior...AND the following list of films that reside in that dangerous grey area between sexual initiation and exploitation.

LOLITA (1962 & 1997)

Of course, no list of jailbait cinema would be complete without the grandmother of them all, or this previous Screengrab post on the screen adaptations of Nabokov's novel.

TAXI DRIVER (1976)

The best joke in Martin Scorsese’s masterful meditation on violence and alienation is when Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle is turned into a hero for ‘rescuing’ Jodie Foster’s teenage prostitute by gunning down her pimps and johns; the best joke outside Taxi Driver is that a lot of critics actually believed Scorsese was being sincere in his depiction of the event. More than one film writer, including a few who should have know better, saw in the movie’s chaotic ending an endorsement of vigilantism, a baffling interpretation that came back to haunt Scorsese – who clearly couldn’t have been more taken aback by this turn of events – when realities like the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan and the saga of subway shooter Bernard Goetz impinged on the fantasy of his film. The notion that Bickle is any kind of a hero is subverted at every turn: his diary is filled with racism and paranoia, his targeting of lowlifes and criminals only happens when he’s frustrated in his attempt to assassinate a politician; ordinary people can’t spend more than a few minutes in his presence without thinking he’s crazy; and even his targeting of Iris’ pimp (as with his targeting of presidential candidate Charles Palatine) is motivated as much by sexual jealousy as it is any kind of desire for justice. Travis is rightly appalled by the menu of sexual acts Iris will perform when read to him by the pimp Sport, and he does seem to have some genuine concern for her well-being, but he’s as oblivious to his own sexual desire for her as he is the impropriety of taking a date to a porno theater. Iris herself treats Bickle like he’s from another planet, and the film’s crowning irony comes at the end, when Travis, a marginalized psychotic only saved from suicide by a redemptive bloodbath and only saved from being a spree killer by his fortuitous choice of victim, receives a letter from Iris’ parents, filled with gratitude for having saved their daughter. It’s certain that if Travis ever took up the Steensmas’ invitation to visit them on their farm, they’d peg him for a maniac within seconds, but it’s the intricate chain of happenstance that turns a maniac into a hero which forms part of the genius of Taxi Driver – and totally upends Travis and Iris’ ‘relationship’ in a way no other jailbait movie has managed.

MANHATTAN (1979)

Woody Allen’s lovely, funny Manhattan is to movies about jailbait-chasing creeps what Citizen Kane is to, er, movies not about jailbait-chasing creeps. Mariel Hemingway earned an Oscar nomination for her performance as Tracy, the high school paramour of Woody’s Isaac Davis, and the Wood-Man himself got a nod from the Academy for his light, adept screenplay. So successful was Manhattan as a breezy, skillful romantic comedy that hardly anyone got creeped out by the fact that Woody’s character was technically committing statutory rape; when he explained “She's 17. I'm 42 and she's 17. I'm older than her father; can you believe that? I'm dating a girl wherein I can beat up her father”, he wasn’t being grammatical, but he was at least being really funny and self-deprecating. Those were the qualities that let us overcome our moral compunctions about what was really happening in the movie, and ignore the fact that, when Isaac tries to convince Tracy not to go away for six months to act with a theater group, he’s actually trying to talk her out of leaving him just long enough to be legal when she comes back. It was all very amusing, and even redeeming when he makes the ‘mature’ decision to start seeing Diane Keaton’s Mary Wilkie instead. Of course, all good things must come to an end, and the plot of Manhattan, one of the few times a Hollywood movie allowed us to not be utterly skeezed out by a middle-aged man jumping into the sack with a 17-year-old, took on a whole different dimension when the Soon-Yi Previn scandal broke. The prospect of a real-life Woody, then in his mid-50s, carrying on an illicit affair with a girl barely in her 20s was, somehow, much less appealing and light than a fictional Woody carrying on with a teenage girl, and all the worse that he was still married and the girl was his adopted daughter. For moviegoers, the worst thing about the scandal is that it’s made Manhattan almost impossible to watch without feeling an edge of ickiness it hadn’t previously possessed.

GHOST WORLD (2001)

Jailbait all-star Thora Birch’s performance as Enid Coleslaw in Ghost World is well-played on a number of levels: as we showed in our Girl Geeks list a few weeks back, she appealed to audiences (especially the, uh, male members thereof) because of her intelligence, hipness, cynicism and what seemed to be a wisdom beyond her years. But the other edge of the blade was the fact that for all her toughness and sophistication, she was still a high school girl. She was vulnerable and emotionally fragile and bound to get herself into situations she couldn’t handle. When she first encounters Steve Buscemi’s sad-sack loser Seymour, she toys with him the way she does her bewildered peer Josh; but when she gets to know him, she discovers that he’s as bitter, resentful, and out of step with the mainstream world as she is. They begin to develop a deep friendship based on the things they mutually hate (hey, there are worse things on which to base a relationship), but the astonishing thing about the way things develop between Enid and Seymour is that it’s an almost total inversion of the normal jailbait romance. Almost from the beginning, we sense that somehow, the two are going to end up in bed together, but unlike in most such movies, where no matter how much the writers try to pretty it up with the language of love, it’s still a predatorial relationship where the man has all the power, in Ghost World, we feel just as sorry for Seymour as we do for Enid. They’re both out of their depth, and as much as we like them both and are glad they’ve found each other, we know it can only end in disaster and we almost beg them not to hook up. When they do, we can tell it’s the beginning of the end for Seymour – and sure enough, he disappears from the film soon after, leaving Enid more vulnerable than she’s ever been. Because of this sense of sadness and loss, it’s one of the truest portrayals of such relationships ever put on film.

INNOCENCE (2004)

One of the principal allures of cinema has always been the way it affords its audience a chance to peek in on activities that would normally go unseen. However, this sort of voyeurism can occasionally feel like a curse when it confronts people with images they aren’t comfortable seeing. So it is with Innocence, a strange yet somehow magical film about a remote boarding school for young girls. Sequestered from the world, the girls are free to live and play without a single male gaze being cast upon them, which makes for the movie’s most fascinating conundrum- by showing us this hidden world founded upon the girls not being seen, director Lucile Hadzihalilovic forces us to deal with the question of why we’re so uncomfortable seeing them this way. Hadzihalilovic (wife of Irreversible director Gaspar Noé) doesn’t shy away from some potentially controversial images- a group of prepubescent girls swimming, a bathing teenager staring at her still-developing nude body in the mirror- which played a large part in the film being dismissed by many critics as fodder for the raincoat crowd. Yet Hadzihalilovic knows exactly what she’s doing, and this becomes obvious in the film’s final reel when we discover that the girls’ dance lessons are designed to train them for nightly performances the school puts on for shadowy male benefactors. That this revelation coincides with the beginning of the girls’ sexual development is deliberate, as Hadzihalilovic suddenly re-introduces men back into the lives of the girls just at the time they would begin paying them serious attention. With this final twist of the knife, Innocence asks whether the loss of the girls’ innocence is merely part of nature, or if others force it upon them, and Hadzihalilovic wisely leaves it for us to decide.

THE PROFESSIONAL (1994)

Luc Besson's violent fantasy about a hit man (Jean Reno) who takes in an orphaned twelve-year-old (Natalie Portman) and tutors her in the art of murder may go farther than any other commercial Hollywood movie in blatantly eroticizing a preteen girl. Other actresses not much older than Portman was here have played girls who aroused inappropriate feelings in older men; Portman, with her perfect little features set off by a Louise Brooks haircut and something around her neck that makes her look gift-wrapped, is treated as an object, or a pet, who first begs to be taken in by Leon the professional, and then (in a scene that was first cut from the American prints) begs him to make love to her. How did Besson get away with this? Partly by casting Jean Reno, who's a whiz at holding the camera while signaling that his pilot light has long since gone out, so you can feel confident that he'll stoically decline her entreaties. (Before she showed up, his best friend was a plant.) And partly by the black humor scenes of Leon teaching his little soul mate to become a killer, so that if you object to the film on moral grounds, you're liable to become dizzy from not being able to decide where to begin. It seems a little odd to complain about the unrequited, consensual pedophilia if you have no problems with the violence, but complaining about the violence just makes you feel like a square. The Professional is a truly outrageous movie, but it's extremely (and self-protectively) calculated in its outrageousness.

For more jailbait: Part Two, Part Three

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Paul Clark, Phil Nugent

Supply Side Film Criticism: How Travis Bickle Saved the Reagan Revolution

Phil Nugent — Wed, 21 May 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver has long been seen as a controversial masterpiece, a searing time capsule of New York City scraping bottom, and a high point in the fashion history of Mohawk haircuts. Now it turns out that on top of all those things, it's also a stealth fighter in the battle to unleash the forces of free market capitalism. This comes from Columbia University economist and Nobel laureate Robert Mundell, who has revealed to the world a theory that might be called wildly speculative and more than a little tasteless--in a word, Screengrabian. It has to do with the infamous effects of the film on John Hinckley, who developed an obsession with Jodie Foster based on her performance in the movie and watched it over and over, immersing himself in the sight of Robert De Niro's Travis Bickle preparing to assassinate a presidential candidate before switching gears and turning his guns on the Foster character's exploiters. Eventually, in the spring of 1981, Hinckley himself shot Ronald Reagan, then less than two months into his presidency.

Here's where it gets good. Although many remember Reagan as having been supernaturally unstoppable during the early years of his presidency, he was already facing major opposition, both in Congress and from the public at large, to parts of his economic plan. But then Hinckley showed up. "According to Mundell," writes the Financial Times of London, "the wave of sympathy for Reagan that was engendered by the assassination attempt deterred Democrats in Congress from voting against his proposed tax cuts. Because of this accident of history, the US administered a big fiscal stimulus at the same time that Paul Volcker at the Federal Reserve was administering tight money. This, for Mundell, was vital in creating the era of prosperity that followed." On the basis of this development, Mindell doesn't think that the movie's historical economic importance can be overstated. "Taxi Driver is the most important movie ever made from the standpoint of creating GDP," he's said. "It's the movie that made the Reagan revolution possible. That movie was indirectly responsible for adding between $5trn and $15trn of output to the US economy." At least we think it was indirect. Stay tuned for our next chapter, in which Oliver Stone arrives waving photos of Milton Friedman and Martin Scorsese performing script doctoring chores while crouching in the grassy knoll.

Screengrab Movie Vacations #1: The Very Large Array

Andrew Osborne — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 14:00:00 GMT

So, do you like really big, impressive hunks of technology in the middle of nowhere? Do you like being places where Jodie Foster and/or James Woods and/or even Tom Skerritt have been? Did you totally dig (or at least mildly enjoy) the 1997 Robert Zemeckis adaptation of the contemplative, pointy-headed Carl Sagan novel Contact?

Well, sir or madame, if you answered yes to any of the above, have I got a nifty Screengrab Movie Vacation™ for you!

Next time you're in Soccoro, New Mexico (about an hour south of Albuquerque and two hours north of Las Cruces), turn west on U.S. 60 and drive 50 miles through tiny towns and scenic, empty plains until you suddenly crest a ridge and find yourself gaping in nerdish wonder at the startling sight of 27 gigantic radio telescopes all scanning the known universe from the middle of a cow pasture.

At this point, the directions on the National Radio Astronomy Observatory website will say, “Turn South on NM 52, then West on the VLA access road, which is well marked. Signs will point you to the Visitor Center.”

What the directions WON’T tell you is that NM 52 is NOT particularly well-marked and VERY easy to miss. A word to the wise: if you find yourself driving west past the Very Large Array, you’ve probably missed NM 52 and may soon take an ill-advised left turn down a farm road into the middle of a very surly herd of cattle. (Trust me on this one.)

But once you manage to find NM 52, the rest of the journey is quick, painless, and totally worth it. The first stop when you reach the VLA site is the tiny Visitor’s Center, filled with images of truly freaky space phenomena way cooler than similar science museum images of said phenomena you may have encountered, if only because you’re right there where the scientists are discovering all that freaky stuff! (And be sure to check out the gift shop and the Whisper Gallery, too...you’ll be glad you did!)

Then it’s out to the Very Large Array itself, a vast, technological space age Stonehenge which you (and maybe even your wife, who’s never seen Contact and would really rather be shopping for Navajo jewelry in Santa Fe, but is kindly humoring you) may very well find awe-inspiring because: (A) the Very Large Array is, in fact, very large, and it’s always awe-inspiring to be dwarfed by things much larger than yourself, (B) all the telescopes are pointing up into the beautiful blue New Mexico sky and the infinite universe beyond, scanning for radio signals from millions and billions of light years away, which is very trippy and cool when you’re standing right there at the origin point of it all, (C) it’s way off the beaten path, meaning not that many people in the world will ever get to stand where you’re standing, and finally (D), without many other visitors around, it’s very easy to pretend you’re actually IN Contact, helping Jodie Foster’s character, Ellie Arroway, in her search for extraterrestrials...while fifty yards away, actual scientists are actually searching for actual extraterrestrials!

Okay, I know.

I know what you’re thinking, and it’s true: I have a very patient wife. But even she got swept up in the sheer presence of the place...and chances are that you will, too...but if the Very Large Array doesn’t sound like your particular cup of fur, then stay tuned for our next Screengrab Movie Vacation™ Destination: The Apocalypse Now River Ride of Doom!

The Second (or Third, or Fourth) Coming of the 1970s Movies

Phil Nugent — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Ross Douthat thinks that moviemakers have brought back the '70s, again. But when Tarantino and other filmmakers of a certain age set out to redeem the '70s as a cool decade after all, they fixated on the stylistic tics and mannerisms of gritty urban thrillers and genre hybrids such as blaxsploitation flicks, and what's been brought back now, in direct response to the Bush administration and its cheerleaders in the media, is the paranoid hopelessness of such Vietnam-and-Watergate-era pictures as The Parallax View, The Day of the Condor, and the vigilante genre epitomized by Charles Bronson in Death Wish. This is not how it was supposed to be. In the wake of 9/11, there were a lot of predictions, both inside the industry and in the press, that audiences would now reject cynicism and violent thrills and embrace the second coming of John Wayne, a simple man with a simple plan to solve all our problems, starting with wiping that smirk off your face, and do me some push-ups, smart boy! (Remember that "irony is dead" horseshit?) But the few overt attempts to play to this "new reality" — say, that remake of The Four Feathers that didn't do anybody any good, or that documentary about "good Americans" that was marketed as a bitch slap to Michael Moore — died a dog's death, and the more cunning of the filmmakers who might have once considered catering to it got with the program. As Douthat points out, after the failure of Tears of the Sun, a 2003 movie about some American special-ops guys in Nigeria who remember what they're really fighting for and who proceed to, well, really fight for it, its director, Antoine Fuqua, was back last year with Shooter, in which a special-ops guy who's back from the Middle East discovers that he's really fighting a conspiracy made up of sleazeball U.S. government guys — plutocrats who disregard the laws, sneer at the common people, and the depth of whose villainy can be accurately gauged according to the degree of their physical resemblance to Dick Cheney. Audience who ate it up may not have been conscious of responding to having their political prejudices stroked, but it was a much bigger hit than Tears of the Sun without being a much better movie. Also instructive: the career of Stephen Gaghan, who made a splash with his screenplay for Steven Soderbergh's (pre-9/11) Traffic, which summed up the war on drugs as a misguided, empty enterprise, but did also allow for the existence of a few good people working inside the system and scoring whatever little victories they could. Since then, Gaghan made his debut as a writer-director with Syriana, commonly referred to as "Traffic with oil instead of drugs," but which has a much more paranoid vibe, and which ends with its most intelligent, good-hearted, and plugged-in characters — its best hopes for positive change — literally blown off the road. It's the difference that makes Syriana feel like a product of the current zeitgeist.

The James Bond of the current era is Jason Bourne, the killing machine who, having lost his identity, starts out knowing nothing except that the world is out to get him. Over the course of three very busy pictures, he's yet to learn anything that might cheer him up. (The closest thing to good news in any of the Bourne pictures is that an amnesiac with a target on his back might still be able to hook up with Franka Potente — but he won't be able to keep her for long.) Even the Napoleon Solo of the current era, 24's Jack Bauer, though regarded by some as a right-wing hero standing almost alone in the liberal fantasyland that is topical-minded Hollywood, is at odds with the pasty-white, Nixonian government leaders who, more often than not, are at the bottom of the latest villainy he has to bust. (Jack's real "ideology" amounts to a bland willingness to do anything to anybody to get his way, in a universe where torture works. Like many a self-identified law-and-order type, he's not a real conservative so much as a barbarian with a cell phone and a muscle shirt.) But because the similarities between the '70s and today have more to do with a shared national mood of fatalistic helplessness than with the specifics giving rise to that mood, the "new '70s" atmosphere works best when the filmmakers skirt the issue of just what it is they're mooning about. So last year's slate of "Iraq war" movies had a beside-the-point feel to them, and even the vigilante-hero template doesn't have the same impact when transferred to contemporary New York — a place that certainly has its problems but that, compared to the city Travis Bickle called home, is relatively bloodless and well-scrubbed. (As Douthat points out, "Jodie Foster’s gun-toting avenger [in The Brave One] alone would have been responsible for more than one percent of the city’s annual killings." The anxieties of the '70s movies were part of something not just huge but pervasive, a societal rot that you couldn't miss — you couldn't leave home or turn on the news without being reminded of it. However bad things seem now, they don't seem out of control — if anything, just the opposite — and most people probably assign most of the blame squarely to one or two powerful people whose guts they hate. So the movies that try to take on society's ills head on feel as if they'd fit all too snugly onto YouTube.

The Movie Moment: Taxi Driver (1976, Martin Scorsese)

Paul Clark — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Of all the great films I’ve written Movie Moment pieces about thusfar, Taxi Driver is almost certainly the most celebrated. In fact, it’s been a canonical classic for so long that it’s hard to imagine what it’s like to see it fresh, to say nothing of trying to describe what exactly makes it great to those who haven’t seen it. As with all the great masterpieces of cinema, there’s a temptation to shrug and say that it exists on its own terms, but that would be selling the film, and director Martin Scorsese, short. Taxi Driver is made from many of the same components as a number of films from the period, but what distinguishes it from more routine violent dramas of its time is that it’s primarily a character study. Paul Schrader's screenplay and Scorsese’s direction follows Travis Bickle (played by Robert DeNiro) almost every step of the way so that we feel like we’ve walked in his shoes.

Scorsese uses a number of techniques, both subtle and obvious, to convey this feeling. At various points in the film, we hear Travis in voiceover, reading his letters or discussing his plans with no one in particular. Scorsese also uses numerous shots taken from Travis’ point of view, as he silently stares at suspicious characters. But Scorsese finds a way to return to Travis even in the scenes that aren’t necessarily focused on him. There’s an early scene in which we meet Cybill Shepherd and Albert Brooks in a campaign headquarters. The two of them talk, joke around, and obviously enjoy each other’s company. But eventually the conversation turns, as Shepherd notices a strange man parked in a taxi outside the building. Of course, it’s Travis, who’s been watching them the entire time.

Just as interesting is the way Scorsese shoots the conversations in which Travis is actually involved. On first viewing, it appears that Scorsese uses a lot of shot-reverse shot setups to shoot these dialogue exchanges, no different than most other Hollywood movies. But look again at the way these shots are framed- while the shots of the other people talking are invariably positioned over Travis’ shoulder, the inverse is rarely true. Travis is almost never absent from the frame, and although the space he’s given by Scorsese is usually entirely his own, he also intrudes on the spaces of the other characters.

It's because of this that a late scene between the 12 ½ year-old prostitute Iris (Jodie Foster) and her pimp Sport (Harvey Keitel) comes as such a surprise. Prior to this scene, we’ve only seen Iris and Sport through Travis’ eyes, and our experience with them echoes his. We see Iris merely as a poor young girl stuck in a miserable life and yearning to be rescued, as when she runs into Travis’ cab one night and demands to be taken away. Similarly, we only see Sport as an irredeemable monster who handles her roughly and sells her underage body to the johns with a filthy salespitch.

And then the scene begins. Sport and Iris are alone in Iris’ room, shortly after Iris has had breakfast with Travis. She begins to express doubts about her life, and talks about maybe wanting to get out. Rather than flying into a rage as one might expect from a street corner pimp, Sport instead tries to comfort her. He tells her, “I don’t want you to like what you’re doing. If you like what you’re doing, you wouldn’t be my woman.” He then puts on some music and holds her close to him, softly whispering in her ear.

It’s a pretty good scene, but what really makes it work is the point where the viewer begins to wonder, “where’s Travis?” And for good reason- this is the first and last scene in the movie in which Travis is not present. So what’s going on? It’s hard to believe this is all in his imagination- Travis is the sort of person who sees himself as a white knight, and no white knight would think to imagine his target as a gentle comforter and protector of young girls.

If anything, this may be the closest the film comes to feeling objectively “real”- that is, unfiltered through Travis’ mind. In Travis’ simplistic worldview, there are women crying out for him to save them, and men who stand in his way. This exchange between Iris and Sport stands in sharp contrast to his worldview. Granted, this is probably as good as it gets between them, but their relationship isn’t nearly so simple as Travis imagines them to be. When talking to Iris over breakfast, Travis insists that Sport is a scumbag and a killer, whereas Iris seems amused when she talks about Sport, like he’s a big brother to her. But Travis refuses to believe any differently than he already does, and it’s fitting that the tender moment between the two comes to an abrupt halt when Scorsese cuts to Travis firing his gun directly toward the camera.

The climax of Taxi Driver has a sad inevitability, as Travis decides to “save” Iris by brutally killing Sport and his associates. In the middle of the carnage, all Iris can do is recoil and scream out for him to stop, but Travis can’t see the horror in her eyes, merely the mission he feels he has to carry out. How does she feel about what happens? The film never says. But I think it’s telling that once she’s been returned to her parents, it’s her father who thanks Travis for what he’s done, and not Iris herself.

DVD Digest for February 5, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 15:00:00 GMT

This week: some recent favorites premiere on DVD, numerous classic films arrive in new editions, and I double back to cover a new release we overlooked last week.

DVD Ripoff of the Week: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford was one of the best-reviewed films of 2007 and garnered Oscar nominations for Casey Affleck and cinematographer Roger Deakins. However, the film performed well below expectations at the box office, due in no small part to Warner Brothers completely bumbling its theatrical rollout. Due to its low gross and artsy rep, the brainiacs at Warner Home Video will release the film this week in a bare-bones edition. How bare-bones are we talking? Try these features on for size: widescreen, subtitle and language options, and 5.1 audio. And that's all, folks.

Not.

Even.

A.

Trailer.

You know, seems to me the DVD companies have it all backwards. It's mainly the hits that get splashy, extras-packed special editions, when it's the ambitious flops that could really benefit from them. Honestly, does a movie like Pirates of the Caribbean really need a boatload of bonus features to sell more DVDs? I don't think so. But The Assassination of Jesse James might attract more buyers if the DVD had commentary, some interesting featurettes, and so forth. At least the Blu-Ray edition has a documentary. How hard would it have been to put that on the regular DVD as well?

Of course, we know what this release really means: Warner is trying to make some quick bucks from opening-week impulse buyers, with the possibility of a super-sweet edition later on, possibly with Andrew Dominik's cut of the film included as well. Really, it's like they're not even trying to disguise it anymore. It's as though we're back in VHS days, when the studios would release tapes at higher prices to be sold primarily for rental, then lower the prices later on for buyers. The difference is that DVD is much more of a buyers' medium, thus collectors would piss and moan if they had to spend $100 on a new DVD. It's a money-grubbing ploy, but it must be working or else the studios wouldn't keep doing it, right?

Other new releases coming to DVD include: Jodie Foster in Neil Jordan's The Brave One (Warner, also Blu-Ray), Julie Taymor's Beatles-scored folly Across the Universe (Sony, also Blu-Ray), the Cate Blanchett-starring disaster Elizabeth: The Golden Age (Universal, also HD-DVD [!]), the Julie Delpy-directed 2 Days in Paris (Fox), Robert Benton's Feast of Love (MGM), and The Jane Austen Book Club (Sony, also Blu-Ray). Because when I think of the folks who own Blu-Ray players, I think Jane Austen.

No noteworthy classic films coming to DVD for the first time this week, but quite a few new editions of previously released films, including: Midnight Express: 30th Anniversary Edition (Sony), The Apartment Collector's Edition (Universal), The Aristocats Special Edition (Disney), The Wiz: 30th Anniversary Edition (Universal), Tootsie: 25th Anniversary Edition (Sony), and You've Got Mail: The Deluxe Edition (Warner). Fox is also releasing a two-disc set featuring both versions of Imitations of Life, for those of you who crave a Stahl vs. Sirk showdown. In addition, this week sees Blu-Ray only releases of Crimson Tide (Buena Vista), Me, Myself & Irene and Wall Street (both Fox).

Finally, I can't believe I neglected to mention in last week's column the second DVD release from our friends at Benten Films, Quiet City and Dance Party USA: Two Films By Aaron Katz. Founded last year, Benten is a decidedly small operation specializing in non-mainstream fare. Katz's work is a good match for the Benten label- a DIY filmmaker, Katz has been acclaimed by many as the most talented of the director comprising the movement that's usually labeled "mumblecore." With DVD mastering becoming cheaper and more widespread, there are many mom'n'pop DVD operations that have popped up on the scene, but Benten feels special to me, not least because founders Andrew Grant and Aaron Hillis are online cinephiles of long standing. Here's hoping for many successful years for the Benten team.