The Screengrab : kenneth branagh

Trailer Review: Whatever Works

Paul Clark — Fri, 15 May 2009 16:00:00 GMT

Throughout my college years, I was a fairly rabid Woody Allen fan, watching his movies on video two or three in a row, much to the consternation of my roommates. Since then, his more inconsistent recent output has tempered my enthusiasm somewhat, but I still make sure to watch all of his new films in theatres, partly out of my long-established loyalty, partly out of hope that he’s got another masterpiece in him. Based on this trailer, Whatever Works probably won’t be that masterpiece, seeing as how it’s full of the sorts of easy potshots (particularly at Southern Christians) that mar most of his latter-day movies. Yet at the same time, it’s nice to see him back in New York after his years abroad- one hopes that his European sojourn has awakened a new creativity in him. And like a lot of people, I’m excited to see him working with Larry David, who is possessed of a similarly neurotic and cosmopolitan comic sensibility. If nothing else, David should be one of the better straight-up Allen surrogates to come around in ages. Miles better than Kenneth Branagh, that’s for sure.

A Screengrab Plea: Let Herbie Ride Again!

Phil Nugent — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 17:00:00 GMT

The superhero-movie trend wasn't going to die on the vine in the unlikely event that Watchmen-the-movie bombed, and the word on the street is that it didn't bomb, so if you fancy yourself a leading man, you'd better look good in spandex. New potential franchises have already been lining up on the tarmac; a while back, we reported that the job of directing a movie about the mighty Thor has been handed to Kenneth Branagh, who I'm sure will do every bit as well by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby as he did by Shakespeare, Mary Shelley, and Rita Rudner. I can't help but feel, though, that a golden opportunity is still sitting on the shelf there, continuing to be overlooked. I think we've pretty well established that Alan Moore makes for box office, and who has Alan Moore named as his own personal favorite superhero? Herbie, that's who! Herbie, Herbie Popnecker, Herbie the Fat Fury! The scarily bearded bard of Northampton is not alone in his idolatry. There has long been a teeming, steaming cult of Herbie brewing just below the demarcation line we call common sense. But where's our movie? Every so often, lo these past several years, word has gotten out that someone in Hollywood has given the greenlight to a Herbie movie. The pattern is always the same: dancing breaks out in the streets, the good champagne is uncorked, strangers hug each other in Times Square, babies are conceived. Then the morning after arrives and it turns out that the movie is about that damned Volkswagen again.

The creation of writer "Shane O'Shea" (a pseudonym for Richard E. Hughes, editor of the independent comics publisher ACG) and artist Ogden Whitney, Herbie first appeared in the December, 1958 issue of ACG's Forbidden Worlds. A product of that patch of suburbia that would later cast its siren song at David Lynch and John Waters, he was a round little boy with a bowl haircut and a pair of eyeglasses that were the liveliest thing on his poker face. A man of few words, Herbie seldom spoke up except to wave his trademark sucker at people and threateningly inquire, "You want I should bop you with this here lollipop?", a tag line that would later be tightened up and employed by TV's Kojak. Herbie's super powers--including a mighty punch, a menacing stare that could, and did, break the devil, the ability to communicate with animals, and a knack for time travel that helped him to become recognized as a hero and savior to many different civilizations throughout history--were firmly in place from the outset, while he was just waddling about in his Sansabelt slacks. Eventually, though, feeling that he had some responsibility, as the star of a comic book, to try to fit in with the superhero community, he did create for himself the alternate identity of the caped avenger the Fat Fury, flying through the skies barefoot with a toilet plunger on his head.

Like many a pulp hero, from Zorro and the Scarlet Pimpernel down to Superman, Herbie was in a way his own rival, scorned by a love object who admired the Fat Fury without ever guessing that he and the seemingly inadequate Herbie were one and the same. In the case of Herbie, the love object in question was no fair maiden but Herbie's gruff and clueless father, whose open loathing of his offspring seemed to cause Herbie little distress. At the same time, the legions of panting women who offered themselves to our hero, none of whom showed much conern about the fact that he was theoretically too young to be dating, had no effect on him either. As you might expect of a young man who was frequently seen to cut class to make a special meeting with Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, he had his mind on weightier matters. In a recurring development that has probably inspired more than one graduate thesis in the field of Cultural Studies, women who had been spurned by Herbie often ended up running off with the livestock, as if just knowing that Herbie was out there somewhere had ruined them for the human race.

Will there ever be a Herbie movie, ideally one directed a safe distance from Kenneth Branagh? Herbie fans have learned to be disappointed. ACG went under in 1967, three years after Herbie finally got his own book. In 1992, Dark Horse boldly announced that it was bringing out a 12-issue Herbie series consisting mostly of reprints from the long-gone ACG books; it crapped out after two issues were published, making it the Big Numbers of reprint series. Herbie later made a guest appearance in Bob Burden's Flaming Carrot comic, but this was after the magic had gone from both characters, and the results were sort of like those end-of-the-road appearances by the Three Stooges, where the spectacle of men in their late sixties poking each other in the eye seemed less like a cause for amusement than a desperate cry for help. The good news is that Dark Horse has finally done penance for having whiffed in 1992 by bringing out the complete ACG Herbie comics in three hardcover volumes, the last of which comes out next month. These handsome hardcover editions retail in the neighborhood of fifty dollars apiece and would cheer up anyone who needs to unwind after a long argument with the landlord about when the rent check will clear. Now that this material is readily available, maybe some Hollywood A-lister will finally see the potential that starring in a Herbie movie has to take his career to the next level. I don't mean any particular Hollywood A-lister, it could be any Hollywood A-lister, oh, any number of kaff kaff Philip Seymour Hoffman kaff Hollywood A-listers could have a triumph in the role.

Screengrab Presents: The Worst Stage-To-Screen Adaptations Of All Time (Part Eight)

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 00:30:00 GMT

EVITA (1996)

The Andrew Lloyd Webber/Tim Rice pop-rock opera tells the story of a breathtakingly ambitious woman who sleeps her way to the top, then demands to be taken seriously (to the point of deification), yet no amount of money, power or adulation can ever satisfy her ravenous ego. For some reason, Madonna thought she’d be perfect for the part, and even learned to sing (fifteen years into her career as a singer) to hit the high notes of theater geek staples like “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina.” Unfortunately, the Material Girl’s participation in the project didn’t end with acting: while the Broadway production was about a flawed despot’s wife who embodies style-over-substance “truthiness" (imagining herself as a savior of the common people while really serving no one but herself), Madonna apparently insisted on scrubbing away her character’s flaws, transforming the story into a historically dissonant La Isla Bonita version of A Star Is Born, featuring a scrappy, sexy gal who uses her moxie to make it big (and wear a lot of swanky ‘40s fashion), robbing the musical of most of its thematic purpose and resonance and rendering Antonio Banderas’ role as Evita’s antagonist essentially pointless.

HAMLET (1969)

The movie versions of John Osborne's "angry young man" plays Look Back in Anger (starring Richard Burton) and The Entertainer (starring Laurence Olivier) -- plays that Richardson himself had staged in the theater -- are marred by clumsy film technique and the deadness one associates with inept efforts to "open out" stage plays, but they remain valuable records of great performances by legendary actors working with material that changed the face of theater. But Richardson's Hamlet, which wears its staginess on its sleeve and stars Nicol Williamson in the title role, is an embarrassing relic of its moment: a disastrous attempt to make Shakespeare relevant to the 1960s by pimping it out with sexual overtones (some of them supplied by Marianne Faithfull, who plays Ophelia, and who comes across as sweet, hard-working, and very confused) while emphasizing the generation gap angle (despite the casting, as Hamlet's stepfather and mother, of performers, Anthony Hopkins and Judy Parfitt, who were younger than Williamson). Williamson's performance itself is some kind of landmark in bad Shakespearean acting: too self-contained to connect with the other performers and wearing a fresh layer of varnish on his popping eyeballs, he gives a demonstration of how it's possible to use the lines to show off the speed of one's word rate and the showiness of one's delivery without using the words to express a thing. From several years' perspective, the whole thing may be best seen as an inside joke done in preparation for Williamson's performance, two decades later, as John Barrymore in Paul Rudnick's I Hate Hamlet. Which had its own problems.

KING LEAR (1971)

Peter Brooks' controversial, celebrated 1960s production was reportedly modeled on Samuel Beckett, with a resigned attitude towards the horrors that befall Lear and the other characters, and with the star, Paul Scofield, employing what Susan Sontag described as "arbitrary vocal mannerisms that deadened the full emotional power of his lines." "Deadened" is an accurate term for the production as it comes across in this black-and-white movie version, which seems to be an attempt to "modernize" the text by making it as far from moving as possible.

MACBETH (1948)

In his greatest Shakespeare movies, Chimes at Midnight and Othello, Orson Welles managed to draw inspiration for striking and powerful images from the desperation caused by his lack of funds, but he came a cropper here, working on too tight a budget and shooting schedule for Republic Pictures. In his cutting and reshaping of the text, Welles sometimes made dramatic logic subservient to his requisite Big Idea, that the witches and their cat's-paw, Macbeth, represented a barbaric, Druidic religion at war with the coming of Christianity. (He didn't do himself or the ears of his audience any favors with his other big idea, that the actors should attempt Scottish accents.) Other problems were beyond his control, such as the cheapo costumes that Republic supplied him with: the movie may be most notorious for its headgear, especially the sight of Welles in a "crown" that looks like a square box with three triangular points glued to the side, which Welles himself acknowledged made him look like he was playing the Statue of Liberty. It must be said that, as befits a play with a curse on it, Macbeth has probably inspired more rotten movie adaptations than any other great play, the most recent being a 2006 Australian movie, directed by Geofrey Wright, which was set among modern drug dealers in Melbourne, with leads who might have stepped out of a photo spread in Maxim; it plays like Miami Vice spoken in verse, with an Aussie accent. And that's not even taking into account all the movies that dump the bard's dialogue while, with a wink to the audience, using his plot. (These include the 1990 gangster movie Men of Respect, starring John Turturro and his wife Katherine Borowitz, and the godawful Scotland, Pa., in which James Le Gros and Maura Tierney attempt to rise in the fast-food industry by feeding their boss, Duncan, into the deep-fat fryer.)

LOVES LABOUR'S LOST (2000)

When Kenneth Branagh's Henry V opened months after the death of Laurence Olivier, critics rushed to embrace its young director-star as Olivier's heir apparent. But though Branagh has certainly had his moments since then, his directing career has been heavier on the Princess and the Showgirls than on the Hamlets. Bad as his attempts to experiment outside his Shakespeare roots (such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Peter's Friends) have been, he really found the worst of both worlds with the first-ever movie version of this Shakespeare comedy, staged as a musical and crammed with actors who lacked experience in both classical theater and singing and dancing. Miramax Studios took one look at the results and flushed its three-picture deal with Branagh down the toilet, thus establishing once and for all that Harvey Weinstein is a Friend of the Theater.

FIDDLER ON THE ROOF (1971)

Norman Jewison is a lousy director, and his thoroughly inept Fiddler On The Roof (source material I don't really care about one way or the other) did me a great service when I was a teenager by demonstrating (years before I'd seen Kevin Smith movies) exactly what inept mise-en-scene looks like. Early on, Topol is dancing in the barn. The frame is widescreen, and Jewison has so little idea of how to fill it that one half of the screen is Topol; the other half is a cow's ass. This is one of the crowning insults in the long history of rejected visual innovations on-screen. Why, if only I could find an amateur video of a Japanese stage production, even that would be an improvement. Oh wait, there it is!

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Vadim Rizov

Screengrab Presents: The Best Stage-To-Screen Adaptations Of All Time (Part Six)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 23:30:00 GMT

HENRY V (1989)

There’s been a lot of impressive speechifyin’ over the course of this past election year, and the Screengrab is currently accepting nominations for a Top Ten (or maybe even Twenty) of the greatest movie speeches of all time (to run in conjunction with Obama’s sure-to-be-classic inaugural oration)...yet, for my money, the tippy-top of any such list would have to include the classic St. Crispin’s Day pep talk from Shakespeare’s Henry V, wherein the titular monarch rallies the seemingly doomed, vastly outnumbered British army to give their lives gladly in the upcoming mother of all battles with France. Delivered by Kenneth Branagh (directing himself in a gripping action movie adaptation that makes you forget all about the pesky iambic pentameter stuff), the scene was so powerful on screen I wanted to rush right out and sack the concession stand. (And the rest of the movie ain't bad, neither.) Too bad the kind of talent (and ego) that allows a young firebrand like Branagh to helm and star in ambitious adaptations like Henry V and Hamlet tends to burn bright then quickly fade...at least, of late, from high-profile leading man movie roles (not to mention Emma Thompson’s heart).

ANIMAL CRACKERS (1930)

As a cinematic object, there’s not much to recommend Animal Crackers. Its staging is stiff as a rail, its romantic subplot just sits there and dies, its musical numbers aren’t much to write home about, and it’s hardly on the cutting edge of big-screen audiovisuals, even by the standards of eighty years ago. But it does do one thing that forever cements it in the upper echelons of stage-to-screen adaptations: it introduces the Marx Brothers to the world. Animal Crackers was one of the brothers’ most successful Broadway shows, running for almost 200 performances with the same cast, so Paramount took a chance that the comedy stylings of Groucho, Chico and Harpo would translate easily from play to film. In a certain sense, they were wrong: a number of Groucho’s more salacious lines, which were big hits with sophisticated New York audiences, were judged too risqué by the Hays Code bosses and cut out of the film version. But in most other respects, the Marx Brothers proved even more popular in the world of cinema than they did on the stage in Manhattan. Even the most cerebral elements of their mile-a-minute comedy, like the metahumor qualities evident in Groucho’s asides to the camera and Chico’s famously copping to not being Italian (the only movie in which he does so), proved to be as beloved by the heartland, and even foreign audiences, as they were to their Broadway fans.

DANGEROUS LIAISONS (1988)

Stephen Frears made a risky choice when he helmed the first English-language adaptation of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ oft-filmed 18th-century novel, Les Liaisons Dangereuses. While most stage plays are opened up on film – made to look as non-theatrical as possible – Frears deliberately played up the staginess of the production. Instead of shying away from its origins as a play, he soaked it in theatrical elegance, and intentionally called attention to its artificiality. He couldn’t have picked a better play on which to attempt this tactic: Dangerous Liaisons, written in a high-nasty style that evokes the sadistic game-playing and one-upmanship of the courtier class of its day, is all about lies, about artifice, about theatrical chicanery. That’s why Frears and his screenwriter Christopher Hampton (updating his theatrical adaptation of the original novel for the screen) made such a wise choice; the world in which Glenn Close’s Marquise de Merteuil and John Malkovich’s Vicomte de Valmont lived was as unreal as a play, and that sensibility rightly pervades the entire movie. It also further provides us all the evidence we need that Keanu Reeves cannot act, and that Uma Thurman can – and is might purty to boot.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce

Screengrab Presents: The Best Stage-To-Screen Adaptations Of All Time (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 21:00:00 GMT

THE GOOD FAIRY (1935)

Ferenc Molnar's prolific output (around 40 plays) was plundered (often in radically altered and/or watered-down form) by everyone: Rogers & Hammerstein got Carousel out of his Liliom, and Billy Wilder's fleetest farce, One, Two, Three updated (apparently unrecognizably) another play. Often forgotten is 1935's The Good Fairy, a triumph of clever dialogue and expert performances over William Wyler's typically ponderous, absurdly slow direction. In keeping with the good "production values" Wyler stolidly brought along for his whole career, things move way too slow. For no good reason, Preston Sturges' adaptation retains cumbersome faux-Hungarian street-name signs, presumably in the name of reminding audiences what cultivated terrain they've stumbled upon whenever an actor gets slowed down by a word. But Sturges keeps throwing away funny lines and faux-ponderous diction in every direction, and the movie's a blast despite all that. "Unhand me, varlet, lest I cleave thee to the brisket!" yells a drunk aristocrat. "I will scale yonder precipice alone!" And he's never heard from again.

HOBSON'S CHOICE (1954)

Harold Brighouse's 1916 comedy was a staple of Northern English comedy, which made everyone nervous when David Lean — "in every fibre a Southerner," notes Kevin Brownlow's biography — took it on. Fortunately, his cast — scenery-chewing Charles Laughton, John Mills (saving his career from impending disaster) and bitchy Brenda de Banzie — carry things nicely. Lean was never much good at comedy, but Hobson's Choice isn't much of a knee-slapper in the first place, so — unlike his awful, rhythmless Blithe Spirit, a mean-spirited, clunky travesty of Noel Coward's play (who responded "You've just fucked up the best thing I ever wrote") — it works. Lean's main contribution comes between dialogue, as in the clip above — continually grounding the mild, leisurely jokes in Manchester's real industrial sprawl. Co-writer Norman Spencer recalls Brighouse never really cared: "He was an old man who was a bit deaf and rather stunned by the whole thing. He said, 'I hope it'll be a nice film,' lost interest and went back up North again."

WILL SUCCESS SPOIL ROCK HUNTER? (1957)

It's nearly impossible to imagine Rock Hunter as a play — Frank Tashlin's movie is so aggressively cinematic, and its satirical points on celebrity's corrosive effects and so on kind of uninteresting. But it pops with Looney Tunes energy, mostly courtesy of Tony Randall: he's occasionally overrun with unexplained evil spirits that take over his body, lower his voice, and make him act as rudely as possible, an effect closer to the cartoons Tashlin started out in than any play. In the clip above (0:53 in), Randall interrupts the movie's action to address the audience directly while the screen loses its Cinemascope boundaries for all manner of TV-simulation; it's the cinematic equivalent of Todd Rundgren's sarcastic diatribe of in-house problems, "Sounds From The Studio," which showcased clipping, weird pitch-shifting and every other '70s analog problem in great detail. Here we get static, snow, and V-hold problems. It's the film's most exhilarating moment, and utterly irrelevant to theater.

THE HOMECOMING (1973)

"Didn't you hear what I said, dad?" sneers Ian Holm in the clip above. Pinter's clipped menace has translated to the screen better and more often than most, but The Homecoming is probably the best attempt to translate a play to screen with as little flash or changing as possible (including, at a mere 111 minutes, an intermission). Aside from one memorable handheld POV shot for the first act's climax — a nervous charge attempted by both character and camera — Peter Hall finds angles that sometimes find visual equivalents for what's being said, but mostly do the one thing that can't be accomplished in theater: have everything happen in a realistically crappy suburban house, without otherwise changing the tempo or performances one bit.

HAMLET ('96 Branagh/'00 Almereyda)

Five years apart, Kenneth Branagh and Michael Almereyda offered near-definitive, completely opposed takes on Hamlet. Branagh has the whole text uncut; to get through everything in a relatively speedy four hours, whole monologues are delivered in breathless rushes. Out of either necessity or bravado (or both), Branagh overplays wildly at times, rendering his every intonation explicitly theatrical; it's a big help for the novice viewer though: arguably the most instantly comprehensible on-screen Hamlet, making everything clear. Updated to the 19th century, it seems, purely to enable lusher visual overkill, Hamlet is both intelligent Shakesperean interpretation and grand Hollywood entertainment. That Branagh stocks all the main parts with theatrically trained actors with basically no marquee value and all the minor parts with way out-of-their-depth Hollywood players (Billy Crystal! Jack Lemmon!) creates an inadvertant but fascinating form of tension and comic relief. Almereyda's version, on the other hand, goes fin de siecle, slashes the text remorselessly and spends a lot of time amusing itself with its updates (the ghost first appears in front of a vending machine on a security camera) and punnish ways to change things by implication without changing the words (Denmark is no longer a country but a corporation avoiding takeover). Within all the jokes, Ethan Hawke's slacker prince is convincingly callow, moody and self-absorbed, but Almereyda knows the text is strong enough to make even this young idiot's plight finally empathetically comprehensible.

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

Contributor: Vadim Rizov

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: Sept. 27-Oct. 3, 2008

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Look, we know lots of movie blogs out there on the webbing paid tribute to Paul Newman this week, and rightly so. But you’re never going to have closure until you’ve read Phil Nugent’s obituary, our Paul Newman Top 10 (Parts One, Two and Three) and Paul Clark’s look back at Exodus. That’s simply a fact. And while you’re at it, you might as well check out these other highlights from the week that was:

Reviews galore: Religulous, Ballast, Choke, Let the Right One In and Wild Man of the Navidad

Movies you may have missed: Getting to Know You, War of the Gargantuas, Jail Bait

People we love: Kat Dennings, The Angry Police Captain

People we can probably do without: Sharon Stone, David Spade, Lee Atwater

Worse idea: Kenneth Branagh’s Thor or Blade Runner 2?

Why, there’s so much good stuff here, I don’t know whether to shit or go blind.

Morning Deal Report: Kenneth Branagh Wields the Hammer of Thor

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 14:30:00 GMT

Eagle Eye gave the September box office a late bump, raking in $29 million in its first week. Yes, America, we have to start dealing with the fact that Shia LaBeouf is a movie star. The latest weepie adapted from the soggy Nicholas Sparks oeuvre, Nights in Rodanthe, landed at number two with $13.6 million, while last week’s champ, Lakeview Terrace, dropped to number three with $7 million. Somehow a Kirk Cameron movie called Fireproof finished fourth with $6.5 million. Perhaps this is the latest sign that the Rapture is nigh.

Of all the Marvel comics adaptations heading for the big screen, Thor is…well, it’s the latest one, anyway. And who better to bring this hammer-wielding blowhard to life than Mr. Shakespeare himself, Kenneth Branagh? As Variety puts it, “Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige's choice of Branagh is surprising, as Branagh hasn't really directed an action-heavy film since his debut on Henry V, a bloody telling of the British king's conquest of France.” Thor is due in 2010, so mark your calendar or your iPhone or whatever you kids are doing these days.

My friends, I recently started work on a screenplay for the first time in a few years, and now I am reminded why I gave up screenwriting in the first place: every time I come up with a new idea, I’m beaten to the punch. The latest example is The Old College Try by Brett Gursky and Scott Herbst, who I now hate. “The time-travel comedy centers on a thirtysomething commitment-phobic man who finds himself transported back to his college days at Syracuse University, where he can alter his romantic fate in what is described as a modern Peggy Sue Got Married,” says The Hollywood Reporter. It’s not exactly my idea, but it’s close enough for me too root for this project to crash and burn. That’s just how I roll.

Related:
Stan the Man and His A-Fan Plan
Screengrab Presents: The Top 25 War Films

Screengrab Presents: The Top 25 War Films (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 21:00:00 GMT

15. THE NIGHT OF THE SHOOTING STARS (1982)

This Italian film, directed by the brothers Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, is about the people who don't fight in war but who just do their best to keep their lives from being completely overrun when it comes to town. In this case, the people are Tuscan, and it's late in the summer of 1944, with World War II winding down and the local fascists preparing to blow up anything they can before the Americans arrive. The people of the village sneak out under dead of night and prepare to hit the road, hoping to stay alive until they encounter the Yanks; the movie is presented as the memories of a woman who was six years old then, and it's infused with a playful surrealism that colors the many incidents, making them seem touched by magic. Which, at this point, is entirely appropriate for a movie where the people can't wait to embrace the invading Americans.

14. PLATOON (1986)

Drawing on memories from his own experiences in combat, Oliver Stone won Best Director and Best Picture for his grunt’s-eye view of the Vietnam War, where (in the words of star Charlie Sheen, back when he was a serious actor rather than a smirky sitcom star), “We did not fight the enemy; we fought ourselves.” Earlier films (notably Apocalypse Now) had, of course, tackled the Southeast Asian “police action,” but the topic was generally as unpopular on the big screen as Iraq films are today. Platoon, premiering four years after the dedication of the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C., marked a cathartic cultural shift in America’s perception (and digestion) of the war: without Platoon’s critical and commercial success (and the flood of Vietnam movies, TV shows and video games that followed), a parody like 2008’s Tropic Thunder would have been unthinkable, not to mention sacrilegious. Yet, even though Vietnam era slang (being in “the shit”) and combat details (cigarette packs in helmet bands, etc.) are now war movie clichés, I’ll never forget seeing Platoon for the first time, when the wounds of America’s last great military misadventure were finally starting to heal, then watching shaken veterans around the theater hanging back after the lights came up, grouping together in pain and reminiscence.

13. SHAME (1968)

It’s probably no coincidence that most of Ingmar Bergman’s starkest films were made at the height of the Vietnam War, a time when the horrifying images of battle were being broadcast on television sets all over the world on a nightly basis. Bergman’s most explicit take on the horror and senselessness of war, Shame, begins in quintessential Bergman fashion, focusing on a pair of married musicians (played by Liv Ullmann and Max Von Sydow, of course) who have retreated from their old lives onto a remote Swedish island. Their marriage could hardly be called happy, but it’s comfortable and secure, far removed from the rest of world, including a war that’s been raging in the distance. Suddenly and without warning, the war comes to their doorstep. But despite the handful of battle sequences, Shame has nothing to do with combat, and everything to do with the poisonous effect of war on everyone it touches. Ullmann, who is concerned only with the well-being of herself and her husband, finds herself accused of treason. Their home is destroyed. Ullmann sleeps with a local bureaucrat, perhaps out of self-preservation, but perhaps for other reasons. And Von Sydow reveals himself to be either a coward or a vindictive scumbag, depending on one’s perspective. Bergman refuses to pin the story to a single war -- it’s certainly not Vietnam, in spite of when he made it. Instead, Shame is a condemnation of the very idea of war and the effect it has on humanity -- not merely the literal death and destruction, but also the psychic fallout it leaves in its wake, which can linger long after any memory of why the war was fought in the first place.

12. HENRY V (1944) & (1988)

Shakespeare's play, which came in so handy for pundits looking for a point of comparison for George W. Bush's transformation into a great war leader after 9/11, was a propaganda piece celebrating the great victory of the outnumbered English by the overburdened French at the Battle of Agincourt. But because Shakespeare knew the value of ambiguity and multiple meanings, the work is open to various interpretations and can be staged in different ways to emphasize different possible themes. Laurence Olivier had a personal triumph as both director and star with the 1944 version, which, being made during World War II, not surprisingly treated the material as the occasion for a rousing, jingoistic hard sell for patriotic warfare. Forty-five years later, Kenneth Branagh, making his movie debut as a director and also starring in the title role, had no war to promote and so saw fit to stage the work as a big, baroque spectacle with ironic attitudes towards the expressions of patriotic fervor, film noir lighting, and what Pauline Kael called a "deranged Darth Vader entrance" for himself. As it is, both movies are huge, happy wallows in showy stagecraft and the best acting the British can always offer at the snap of a finger. (Branagh's, in particular, is the kind of movie where Paul Scofield has a walk-on.)

11. BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN (1925)

Sergei Eisenstein, master of the montage and one of the greatest pioneers of early cinema, made two classic war films, both very different from one another. His first, Battleship Potemkin, is often cited as one of the greatest movies of all time, and that’s not just hype: aside from the legendary Odessa Steps sequence, it contains some of the earliest uses of montage, and generally establishes itself as a movie using visual language light-years beyond what anyone else was doing at the time. But as a war film, it is unquestionably subversive: it was designed as a piece of pure propaganda in which the oppressed sailors of the battleship rise up in righteous anger against their cruel Czarist overlords. At no point do we have anything but sympathy for the heroic mutineers, and no less a personage than Josef Goebbels declared that anyone might become a Bolshevik after viewing the movie. Alexander Nevsky, on the other hand, is as much a celebration of patriotism and loyalty as Potemkin was of rebellion and revolution. It didn’t reach its peak of popularity until a few years after it was made, when Russia and Germany were at each other’s throats, but its ability to induce a patriotic fervor, as audiences cheered at the Russian peasant army driving out the Teutonic Knights, was unmistakable. And while it wasn’t the artistic success that Battleship Potemkin was, it did feature an unforgettable score and one scene that rivals the Odessa Steps sequence: the famous battle on the ice of Lake Peipus, which stands as one of the most thrilling battle sequences ever staged for film.

Click Here for Part One, Part Two, Part Four, Part Five, Part Six & Part Seven

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

Charlton Heston (1924-2008)

Paul Clark — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 06:39:00 GMT

Charlton Heston, one of only a handful of honest-to-goodness stars remaining from Hollywood's Golden Age, has passed away at his home in Beverly Hills. He was 84 years old. He is survived by Lydia, his wife of 64 years, and his two children and three grandchildren. Details about Heston's death are still sketchy at this point, but he had suffered from symptoms similar to Alzheimer's Disease for years.

Heston began his acting career on the stage, with his first movie role coming from a filmed theatre performance of Ibsen's Peer Gynt, recorded when Heston was all of 17. But the film that brought him into the public eye was Cecil B. DeMille's Oscar-winner The Greatest Show on Earth, in which he played Ben Braden, the manager of the circus and held his own opposite James Stewart and Betty Hutton, among others. In the next few years, Heston split his time between film and television, one of the few actors who managed to work steadily in both media.

However, his stardom skyrocketed when DeMille came calling again, casting Heston as Moses in his final film, 1956's The Ten Commandments. The role required a truly commanding presence, not just to be convincing as the man who led the Israelites out of Egypt, but also to hold his own against the then-awe inspiring special effects, but Heston pulled it off. From there Heston specialized in similarly larger-than-life heroes, often in period adventures such as The Big Country, El Cid, and Ben-Hur, for which he won the Oscar for Best Actor.

In the 1960s, Heston's stardom continued even as his career choices became more inconsistent- for every Major Dundee, there was a The Agony and the Ecstasy in which he was severely miscast in the role of Michelangelo (yes, that one). But he once again found his groove at the end of the decade with Planet of the Apes, now considered a science fiction classic. It was the first in a series of futuristic dramas for Heston, who went on to appear in the film's sequel, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, before starring in The Omega Man and Soylent Green.

During the 1970s, even as young filmmakers and new actors were gaining clout in Hollywood, Heston stuck to his guns and continued playing the sorts of heroes that made him a star. His presence was right at home in square blockbusters like Earthquake and Airport '75, as well as 1976's bloated war epic Midway. Shortly thereafter, Heston began to turn again to television, starring in a number of TV movies, as well as making a guest appearance on Dynasty as Jason Colby, who was later given his own series, The Colbys.

In the 1990s, Heston's leading-man opportunities had mostly dried up, and after that he worked regularly as a dependable character actor, lending an old-Hollywood authority to films like Tombstone, In the Mouth of Madness, and Any Given Sunday, as well as putting in a cameo in Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes remake. In addition, he also did a good amount of voiceover work, his commanding baritone gracing films as diverse as Armageddon and Disney's Hercules. He also showed a surprising ability to kid his square-jawed image. After two hosting stints on Saturday Night Live, he had arguably the best scene in the otherwise disposable Wayne's World 2, playing "The Better Actor." He also appeared in True Lies as Arnold Schwarzenegger's CIA boss, a role that allowed him to pass the torch to Arnold as Hollywood's biggest right-leaning star.

In recent years, Heston's politics have increasingly overshadowed his acting. Heston, a longtime supporter of the National Rifle Association, served as its president in 1998, a position he served in until his diagnosis with Alzheimer's. But rather than remembering Heston for his politics- or his final major big-screen appearance in Michael Moore's Bowing For Columbine- I prefer to remember the good times. Of his storied career, I treasure most two performances he gave nearly two decades apart.

The first, of course, is Touch of Evil. Hollywood legend has it that Orson Welles was only supposed to act in the film, and that Heston (who had only taken the role to be directed by Welles) was largely responsible for Welles directing the film. At first glance, Heston's brand of straightforward heroism seems at odds with Welles' morally twisty vision. However, Heston is exactly what the film needs, an uncomplicated but compelling protagonist to contrast with the rest of the proceedings, in particular Welles' corrupt, seedy Hank Quinlan. It all works perfectly, and Heston deserves much of the credit for this, despite the fact that he may just have made film history's least convincing Mexican.

At the other end of his career, in the middle of his elder-statesman period, Heston gave what may have been his best performance in Kenneth Branagh's epic production of Hamlet. Ever since his early work, Branagh has had a love for stunt casting, often to disastrous ends. But Heston's performance is no stunt. In the small but important role of The Player King, he shows a real aptitude for Shakespeare's language, as well as a sensitivity to the nuances of the material. The first time I saw his performance, I couldn't help but think that I'd underestimated Heston all these years. More than just a presence, Heston was an actor, and one who will be greatly missed.

Roger Ebert is All Thumbs, No Voice

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 15:30:00 GMT

The balcony is open once again for Roger Ebert, who will return to his reviewing duties this month at the Chicago Sun-Times. This means, among other things, that at least one film critic will continue to be employed by a major metropolitan newspaper, which is nice. As David Carr reported in the New York Times, “critics at more than a dozen daily newspapers (including those in Denver, Tampa and Fort Lauderdale) and several alternative weeklies who have been laid off, reassigned or bought out in the past few years, deemed expendable at a time when revenues at print publications are declining, under pressure from Web alternatives and a growing recession in media spending.” (Carr also notes that “movie blogs are strewn about the Web like popcorn on a theater floor.” Hey! We resemble that remark!)

In any case, Ebert is returning to his word processor, but presumably not to his TV gig. In a letter published on the Sun-Times site, the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic writes, “Are you as bored with my health as I am? I underwent a third surgery in January, this one in Houston, and once again there were complications. I am sorry to say that my ability to speak was not restored. That would require another surgery.”

Ebert has understandably had just about enough of surgery. He first went under the knife in 2002 in order to have a malignant tumor on his thyroid gland removed; surgery on his salivary gland followed, resulting in the startling change in his appearance. “I ain’t a pretty boy no more,” Ebert writes, quoting Raging Bull. “I am still cancer-free, and not ready to think about more surgery at this time. I should be content with the abundance I have.”

Included in that abundance is Ebert’s annual film festival, which will open at the University of Illinois on April 23. According to the Hollywood Reporter, “This year's festival will kick off with Kenneth Branagh's 70mm Hamlet from 1996, the only uncut, full-length film of Shakespeare's masterpiece. As with past editions, Ebert will select 12-14 films representing a cross section of genres and styles. There is no submission process, but they are films Ebert has screened in the course of his reviewing.” Naturally, the festival concludes with the presentation of the Golden Thumb.

Paul Scofield, 1922 - 2008

Phil Nugent — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 18:30:00 GMT

Paul Scofield has died, at the age of 86. He had been suffering from leukemia. Widely regarded as one of the greatest Shakespearean actors of his generation, Scofield had a richer career in the theater than in the movies, where his recessive, slightly chilly presence as much as his devotion to the stage may have prevented him from ever becoming a major star. Yet he won an Academy Award for Best Actor for his fourth film and second Hollywood-funded production, playing Sir Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons (1966), director Fred Zinnemann Oscar-garlanded film version of Robert Bolt's play. (Scofield had earlier played the Nazi villain in John Frankenheimer's The Train, starring Burt Lancaster. Maybe he and Lancaster got on well, because one of his few other adventures in Hollywood hackwork came in the 1973 Lancaster vehicle Scorpio.) Scofield already had a Tony for the Broadway production of the play, in which he had made his American debut. Even after winning the Oscar, Scofield was mostly seen in movie theaters in filmed versions of plays, such as the movie of Peter Brooks's famously icy production of King Lear with Scofield in the title role, and Edward Albee's A Delicate Balance, made in 1973 as part of Ely Landau's American Film Theater subscription series. In 1989, he appeared briefly as the King of France in Kenneth Branagh's Henry V, and a year later he played Hamlet' father's ghost in Franco Zeffirelli's ill-advised film of the play with Mel Gibson in the lead. He also played the historian Mark Van Doren in Quiz Show (1994) and the witchfinding judge in the 1996 The Crucible. His final film role was as the voice of the horse, Boxer, in an ambitious 1999 TV movie version of Orwell's Animal Farm.

DVD Digest for March 11, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week finds the recently-anointed Best Picture Oscar winner coming to DVD, as well as some long-overlooked genre offerings, adrift of sea of junk both old and new. In other words, sort of like every week here at DVD Digest.

DVD of the week: What else could it be but No Country for Old Men (Buena Vista, also Blu-Ray)? The film's DVD contains some interesting-looking featurette, including a making-of with the Coens, but the primary reason I'm including it here is because when a legitimately great film is honored with the Best Picture Oscar, it's a cause for celebration. Say what you will about the falling fortunes of the Academy Awards, but the Oscar name still means something to people, and the award should bring No Country a bigger home-viewing audience than it would have had otherwise. Yes, I realize there will almost certainly be a super-deluxe edition of the film in six months or so, one which will hopefully include an Easter egg of Henry Kissinger: Man on the Go. But especially in a relatively slow week for DVD (no major box sets, no Criterions), I'd say the arrival of No Country in home-viewing form constitutes an event.

In other new releases, this week brings Paramount's tiresomely overhyped Bee Movie; Steve Carell and Juliette Binoche in Dan in Real Life (Buena Vista, also Blu-Ray); the John Woo-wannabe Hitman (Fox, also Blu-Ray); August Rush (Warner, also Blu-Ray); the misbegotten Caine/Law/Branagh remake of Sleuth; last summer's largely forgotten updating of Nancy Drew (Warner); and the anime DVD Appleseed Ex Machina (Warner, also Blu-Ray).

On the classics front, the week's big news is the three new titles in Fox's ever-growing selection of film noir on DVD: Ginger Rogers in Black Widow, Jeanne Crain in Dangerous Passage, and Joan Crawford and Henry Fonda in Otto Preminger's Daisy Kenyon. Daisy Kenyon in particular has enjoyed a critical resurgence during the past year, and I'm eager to check it out now that it's finally available again. Other titles of note include the Al Pacino double feature of ...And Justice For All and Bobby Deerfield (both Sony), and a new special edition of Gattaca (Sony, also Blu-Ray). The week's Blu-Ray-only releases include Dogma (Sony), I, Robot (Fox), and Independence Day (Fox).

Finally, David Huddleston offers his condolences to the following HD-DVD releases:

Bee Movie (Paramount)
In the Valley of Elah (Warner)
Michael Clayton (Warner)
Fletch (Universal)

I don't know about you, but $20 seems a lot to pay for what will likely be used as a Fletch drink coaster in a few months' time. Although if you use it to hold your Bloody Mary while you eat a steak sandwich and a steak sandwich, perhaps it'll be worth it to you.

DVD Digest for February 12, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 15:00:00 GMT

This week, one of 2007's best films comes to DVD, and a master's musicals get the box-set treatment.

DVD of the Week: Most of the most beloved films of Ernst Lubitsch's career come from its final years, when the Lubitsch touch had already become well-established. But it's easy to forget that the master had already had a fruitful career long before Ninotchka, The Shop Around the Corner, and To Be or Not to Be. With the films included in this box set, Lubitsch was one of the first filmmakers to integrate song and narrative after the advent of talkies. But this would mean little today if the films themselves didn't hold up, and they do, with all of Lubitsch's trademark charm and Pre-Code sophistication. Eclipse has given their typical treatment (no extras, but lovely transfers) to the films The Love Parade, Monte Carlo, One Hour With You, and The Smiling Lieutenant, which boast some of the era's quintessential stars — Maurice Chevalier, Claudette Colbert, and Jeannette MacDonald. As always, Eclipse and parent company Criterion succeed in filling in another hole in cinema history.

Incidentally, today is my birthday, so if anyone out there is looking for a suitable gift, you could do a whole lot worse than this.

A bumper crop of more recent films being released on DVD this week, including: Ben Affleck's surprisingly great Gone Baby Gone (Buena Vista, also Blu-Ray); James Gray's searing crime drama We Own the Night; Becoming Jane (Buena Vista, also Blu-Ray), the second Austen-themed dramedy in as many weeks; John Cusack in The Martian Child (New Line); No Reservations (Warner, also Blu-Ray), the Catherine Zeta-Jones-starring remake of 2001's Mostly Martha; Tyler Perry's latest hit, Why Did I Get Married? (Lionsgate); the Apollo-mission documentary In the Shadow of the Moon (ThinkFilm); and John Turturro's polarizing star-studded quasi-musical, Romance and Cigarettes (Sony). In addition, this week finally sees the DVD release of Amy Heckerling's long-delayed I Could Never Be Your Woman (Genius Entertainment), starring Michelle Pfeiffer, Paul Rudd, and Atonement Oscar nominee Saoirse Ronan. If nothing else, now we can see what all the fuss was about.

Back to classics, this week also brings Sony's The Stanley Kramer Film Collection, a collection of five films Kramer directed and/or produced. The centerpiece of the set is a new 40th Anniversary Edition of Kramer's once-controversial interracial-marriage drama Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. Also in the set is the Kramer-directed Ship of Fools, as well as The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T, A Member of the Wedding, and The Wild One, all of which he produced.

Other older films coming to DVD include: The Joan Crawford Collection Volume 2 (Warner), which includes Sadie McKee, Strange Cargo, A Woman's Face, Flamingo Road, and Torch Song; Fox's Charlie Chan Collection Volume 4; and Kenneth Branagh's 1991 dramedy Peter's Friends (MGM), boasting an enviable cast, including Branagh, then-wife Emma Thompson, Hugh Laurie, Stephen Fry, and Imelda Staunton. For some reason, MGM has seen fit to package the film in a box set alongside the misguided Elmore Leonard/Paul Schrader satire Touch, the 1988 Patrick Dempsey-Jennifer Connelly vehicle Some Girls, and Scott Baio and Willie Aames in Zapped! Strange bedfellows indeed.

Finally, if you're jonesing for TV on DVD, this week sees the release of season 1 of The Equalizer (Universal), as well as the Vern-approved Blade: the Series (New Line). But fear not — only one more week until the release of Walker, Texas Ranger: The Complete Fourth Season, the rare DVD that can be enjoyed by both Chuck Norris fans and Conan O'Brien watchers.

Famous Last Words: Round 1, Week 4

Paul Clark — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 20:00:00 GMT

With Kenneth Branagh's disastrous re-imagining still fresh (if that's the word) in the minds of the few who bothered to see it, I suppose now is as good a time as any to remember when the title Sleuth wasn't synonymous with suckitude. Branagh's film shares with Joseph L. Mankiewicz's awesome 1972 original — the source of last week's quote — little more than a star (Michael Caine) and the basic plot as laid down by author Anthony Shaffer. The surrounding junk is all Branagh's and screenwriter Harold Pinter's. At least we can comfort ourselves with the idea that, ten years from now, if movie-watchers want to check out Caine in Sleuth, they'll mostly likely be seeing him opposite Sir Lawrence Olivier, in perhaps his most entertaining performance. Congrats to those who guessed correctly.

This week's quote contains multiple lines of dialogue, but don't let that throw you:

"What’s your name?"
"Davis."
"Mine’s McCardle. . . well, so long."
"So long."

Submit your guesses to famouslastwords@nerve.com. For a list of rules, click right here. And remember, all guesses for this week's quiz are due in by next Wednesday at 11:59 PM Eastern. Good luck!

The Thirteen Greatest Long-Ass Movies of All Time, Part 1

Peter Smith — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 18:00:00 GMT

There are long movies, and there are really long movies. But there's also that notorious third category: The Long-Ass Movie. You know them. Usually they have to be split into two or three parts. Sometimes they have to be released as mini-series, with abbreviated versions put out in theaters. Occasionally they're hacked to pieces by studios and distributors, and become founts of controversy. More often that not, they're made by Germans. (We're not kidding. Check the list.) And most of the time, though sadly not always, they're great — ambitious, sprawling, uncompromising, and riveting. There's something really special about a long-ass movie, which, for our purposes, we're classifying as a film over four hours long. You never forget the experience of sitting through it. We certainly didn't. Here's our list of the Greatest Long-Ass Movies of All Time.

HAMLET (1996) Running time: 242 mins.

It's highly unlikely that anyone in Shakespeare's time actually saw Hamlet in full. As many critics and biographers have noted, the full text of The Bard's masterpiece would run over four hours if performed — a prohibitive length even today, despite such modern conveniences as lighting, electricity, and weekends. Clocking in at a limber four hours and two minutes, Kenneth Branagh's full-text version of the play struck a remarkable balance: an uncompromised performance that was also relentlessly cinematic. Some called Branagh's camera tricks show-offy, but he was simply following in the footsteps of one of the great linguistic show-offs of all time. The film's baroque visual style complemented the verbal gymnastics of Shakespeare's sweet tongue, and the result is not only the most faithful adaptation of Shakespeare ever filmed, but also, for our money, one of the absolute best.

UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD (1991) Running time: 280 mins.

Don't laugh. The two-hour, thirty-eight-minute U.S. theatrical release version of Wim Wenders's insanely ambitious sci-fi epic romance was a messy, albeit fascinating, journey through an ultra-globalized millennial world, with William Hurt and Solveig Dommartin bouncing around the planet recording with a revolutionary camera designed to help blind people see, accompanied to snippets of songs from the director's favorite rock acts (Nick Cave, R.E.M., U2, etc. — the soundtrack CD for this thing was a mainstay in many a contemporaneous college dorm room). The full, nearly-five-hour version, it turns out, wasn't nearly so messy. Rather, it was a sober, compelling, and visionary lament for the ways in which the oncoming technological transformation of society would transform human contact; Wenders's portrait of a hyper-connected world predated the Internet revolution. More importantly, it had even more of that awesome music.

1900 (1976) Running time: 315 mins.

Unjustly tarred on its initial release as a disaster, Bernardo Bertolucci's epic, a highly personal film despite its five-hour running time, has withstood the test of time far better than anyone would have expected. Its big-name cast, surprisingly, doesn't hold up particularly well — thanks to a sometimes shaky script and a not insignificant language barrier. But as an epic of great scope and a continuation of Bertolucci's tremendous visual-storytelling techniques, it's a raging success. Five hours fly by in the presence of such gorgeous filmmaking, thanks to the sensual, earthy tone of the film, the solid pacing, and the director's extreme care. Bertolucci apparently envisioned 1900 as his own response to the success of The Godfather — he would tell the modern history of Italy, just as Francis Ford Coppola had told the modern history of Italian-Americans, with a similar sense of range and scope and sweep. At the time of its release, no one would have credited Bertolucci's film as successful on that level, but if he'd had the foresight to do as Coppola did and release it as two separate films telling a single story, it's easy to imagine that 1900 would have enjoyed a much better critical reception.

NAPOLEON (1927) Running time: 330 mins.

Abel Gance was one of the towering French directors of the silent era, one of those pop-eyed geniuses whose only reservation about the movie medium was that it would be a shame if it turned out to have any boundaries at all. The massive epic that is now Gance's best-known work was originally intended to be only the first chapter in a multi-part historical epic consisting of six enormous features. You get a taste of what Gance hoped to achieve at the end of this picture, when three different projectors are used to show contrasting images on three screens, achieving something like a split screen image to the nth degree. Unfortunately, this silent landmark was completed the same year as The Jazz Singer, and Napoleon was released in America in a savagely truncated version that didn't even attempt to preserve the triple-projection imagery. Gance would continue to work, but most of his wildest ambitions would go unfunded and unfulfilled. He didn't become fully appreciated until the film historian Kevin Brownlow assembled a restored version that, with live musical accompaniment, played to ecstatic responses in packed theaters in 1980 and 1981. (Thankfully, Gance lived to see it — he died late in 1981.) That initial restoration ran five minutes short of four hours, but Brownlow kept going back, and by 2000 he had extended the film by another thirty-five minutes. It remains a thrilling mixture of audacious filmmaking, charming corn, and some very strange politics: Napoleon is so thrilled by the French Revolution that he sets out to bring democracy to other countries by invading them — evidence that the French, of all people, created the Bush Doctrine.

LA COMMUNE (PARIS, 1871) (2000) Running time: 345 mins.

As huge fans of Peter Watkins, we found that the number of Watkins-related items on Screengrab has been shockingly low of late, so we'll take any opportunity we can to plug his work. La Commune, his epic film about the Paris Commune of 1871, which in its full form runs five hours and forty-five minutes, is in many ways a summing-up of Watkins's career that tests the methods and techniques he'd developed over the course of more than thirty years. The Commune was a group of intellectuals, students and workers who took over a section of Paris in 1871 and formed an experimental government. True to form, Watkins took over an abandoned factory and staged the rise and fall of the "Commune" as covered and reported on by modern TV crews, who take turns interviewing the non-actors who represent the political leaders, the common people, the military forces working to smash the Commune, et al. He even tosses in a dandyish news anchor who spreads anti-Commune sentiment on a competing network, "Versailles TV." Ever the iconoclast, Watkins refuses to consign the fervor of Communards to the distant past, and by doing so he celebrates the revolutionary spirit both past and present, as when a discussion between the characters gives way to a contemporary debate about globalization. It may be the crowning achievement of one of the strangest film artists of his time — a man who sees himself as trying to bring history alive in order to educate the masses, but who has no apparent ability to make films in a way that might entice the masses to want to see them.

— Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce