The Screengrab : kirk douglas

Clippy Strikes Back: The Scariest Technology In Cinema History (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 20:30:00 GMT

SATURN 3 (1980)

To be honest, the scariest thing about Stanley Donen’s Cheez-Whiz science fiction chamber piece isn’t the giant “Demi-God” robot Hector (not even after the human-brained cyborg is reprogrammed with the horny, homicidal impulses of Harvey Keitel’s Abby-Normal cerebellum). Nor is it the terrible acting by Farrah Fawcett or the sight of Kirk Douglas’ naked rump in action. No, for me, the scariest thing about Saturn 3 is the inexplicable streak of Puritan fundamentalism it elicited when I saw it on the big screen many moons ago, prompting me to sit down and fire off an angry letter to Starlog magazine about all the unnecessary sexual content Donen had slipped into a genre (science fiction) that was usually a non-threatening, safely asexual haven for pubescent, maladjusted geeks like my then (barely) 13-year-old self. The fact that Keitel stared at the private parts of (scantily-clad) Fawcett’s dog, Sally, then later wrestled with a nude Douglas filled me with moral outrage (masking hormonal unease) that was later replaced by massive embarrassment when the aforementioned letter was actually published and, worse, discovered (and mercilessly mocked) by my friends. And now, thanks to the wonders of modern bloggage, I can share my Saturn 3 embarrassment with the whole wide world, all at the touch of a button...thanks a bunch, technology! (AO)

WARGAMES (1983)

In WarGames, Matthew Broderick is the first kid in America with the Internet, but unfortunately, he doesn’t seem to know how to use it to download porn. He does know how to hack into his high school’s system and change his grades, which is useful, but not as useful as changing his cute classmate Jennifer’s (Ally Sheedy) grades. He also tries to break new ground in the field of cyber-piracy by downloading a cool new game from the manufacturer before it’s even released, but instead inadvertently hacks into the NORAD supercomputer known as WOPR (War Operation Plan Response) and launches a potentially apocalyptic game of Global Thermonuclear War. From a modern standpoint, WarGames plays like a goofy shotgun marriage of John Hughes-ian ‘80s teen comedy and dated technothriller, but I’ll give the movie credit for anticipating the potential for cyber-terrorism long before any of us knew what that meant and also for tapping into Reagan-era anxiety about nuclear war, accidental and otherwise. It’s harder to forgive the simplistic, preachy “tic-tac-toe” ending (seen above), but maybe they can fix that in the inevitable remake. (SVD)

MINORITY REPORT (2002)

Steven Spielberg turned a Philip K. Dick story into an action vehicle for Tom Cruise, with results that actually trash the ideas in the original material less thoroughly than a lot of other moves based on Dick's work. The ideas can't said to be far from timely, either. Cruise is the head of the Washington, D.C. "Precrime" force, which uses psychics and a vast electronic surveillance network to pick out people who are contemplating committing crimes and arrest them before the crimes actually occur. Cruise, as twittishly self-satisfied as ever, sees nothing troubling about this way of doing things until he himself is identified as a potential evildoer, at which point he suddenly detects certain flaws in the system. A good movie up until the last fifteen minutes or so; not even Dick ever imagined a drug that could make the ending go down easily. (PN)

SERENITY (2005)

Most of Joss Whedon's space-cowboys fantasy (spun off from his criminally short-lived TV series Firefly) revels in futuristic technology, treating it as a blast, but it has a sting in its tail: the revelation of what terrible secret the government is sitting on. In one of his novels, William S. Burroughs once invented a drug called Bor Bor, which was "held in horror" by Burroughs' heroes and "only used as a weapon against our enemies"; its effect "is to lull the user into a state of fuzzy well-being and benevolence, a warm good feeling that everything will come out all right for America." The crew of Serenity discover the remains of a city that consists of functioning, automated buildings filled with dusty corpses; they are all that is left of a population that was fed on an experimental drug that was designed to produce a more tranquil, non-violent people less inclined to object to or protest anything, and who became so satisfied with the state of things that they stopped moving altogether and quietly starved to death. That's one version of Morning in America. (PN)

Click Here For Part One, Three & Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

Strangers In A Strange Land: Screengrab’s Favorite Fish-Out-Of-Water Stories (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 21:30:00 GMT

2 DAYS IN PARIS (2007)

I've been an Adam Goldberg enthusiast since Dazed and Confused, but if you don't appreciate the actor's neurotic, hyperarticulate humor, then 2 Days In Paris may not be your cup of Pernod. On the other hand, even Hebrew Hammer haters may find themselves charmed by Julie Delpy's performance (in a movie she wrote and directed) as the distaff half of a bi-national couple facing relationship meltdown during the titular 48-hour period. After all the France-bashing during the (still not over yet!) Bush administration, it's interesting to see Delpy's warts-and-all depiction of The City of Lights, while her lived-in, heartfelt insights into love and family breathe fresh life into the ill-used romantic comedy genre. But Goldberg is the fish-out-of-water focus here, in a performance for anyone who’s ever been sick and disoriented on vacation while desperately wishing for the comforts of home.

COMING TO AMERICA (1988)

Probably Eddie Murphy's finest moment. Also, one of those big box office-y 1980s comedies — like Back to the Future — that, while seemingly silly, get at the very heart of America. Hard to say how much of it is intentional but damn it, it works. Eddie Murphy doesn't just star as the pampered Prince Akeem of Zamunda ("The royal penis is clean your highness"). He also wrote the story. One imagines his train of thought went something like this: if the enslaved Africans brought to America were once kings and queens, then what would an African king seeking a wife in Queens think of America? Natch, hilarity ensues.

THE LAST MOVIE (1971)

The director-star Dennis Hopper's follow-up to Easy Rider (1969) begins with a Hollywood crew shooting a Western in Peru. Hopper plays Kansas, a stunt man who continues to hang around after the movie wraps. The film is insanely overedited, and Hopper the auteur got more than a little carried away with the possibilities of movies within movies and illusion versus reality games. To the degree that the movie has a plot, it seems to involve the Peruvians getting so excited from having watched the moviemakers at work that they build their own (non-functioning) cameras and other equipment out of bamboo and use them as an excuse to stage violent scenes, which in turn may be real. Hopper himself seems to have rendered the movie unintelligible because, out there on location, he got so into the heady atmosphere (and, it's said, some of the local mushrooms) that he couldn't stop tinkering with his baby, cutting and re-cutting it and throwing more and more monkey wrenches into its motor. His movie about the deranging effects of a clash of cultures thus also became an example of it. Luigi Pirandello would be proud. Jeff Spicoli might want to tip his hat, too.

THE THIRD MAN (1949)

Strangers in a strange land is something of a pet theme of Graham Greene, whether he's charting the course of the well-meaning but destructive title character of The Quiet American in Indochina or the crooked international financier of "Across the Bridge" who finds himself stranded in a dusty Mexican town. This classic may serve as his most enduring movie exploration of his mixed feelings about the good man -- in this case, American pulp Western writer Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) -- who thinks he's being a nobly stalwart hero when he's really just in way over his head. Martins arrives in Vienna after World War II, at a time when the city is divided into zones ruled over by representatives of four different countries and corruption runs rampant, only to be informed that the friend who summoned him there, Harry Lime (Orson Welles), was recently killed in a lorry accident. Naturally, Holly recognizes that something must be up and raises hell trying to find out what it is, until his friend, who faked his death to evade the consequences of his horrible crimes, comes out of the shadows and threatens his life. It would seem that Holly has been running himself ragged to avenge the death of a man he hadn't known at all. But the girls in Heavenly Creatures had his number.

PEPE LE MOKO (1937)

The strangers here are multiple: there's Pepe himself (Jean Gabin), a mythical French criminal hiding out in Algiers' Casbah, the police detectives sent over to track him down after his many successful years of hiding, the visiting woman Pepe seduces with a combination of his criminal allure and knowledge of an area off-limits to tourists, and — not least of all — director Julien Duvivier and his crew. Pepe Le Moko isn't entirely location-based, but there's very real exterior footage — especially in the opening sequence above — frequently from cameras far shakier and more obviously documentary and on-the-fly than most '30s narratives would allow themselves. Pepe is some kind of classic, at least in part because its relationship to its status as colonial filmmaking is constantly unsettled. "Algiers isn't Pigalle" announces a local cop before giving an overview of the area — including people "descended from barbarians, honest traditionalists but a mystery to us." Pepe's more at home with the natives than the French authorities pursuing him, and not in a way that's condescending or self-conscious either. Rough filmmaking at times, but containing more ideas than most movies know what to do with. Many of the same locations were used for The Battle of Algiers, if all that isn't weird enough for you; those traditionalists wouldn't remain a mystery for much longer.

ACE IN THE HOLE (1951)

Albuquerque. NM: into town comes a man so urbane he reads a newspaper while sitting in the car he's being towed in. The man is Chuck Tatum (Kirk Douglas), a veteran reporter already fired from 11 metropolitan dailies. Tatum's here to give the sleepy little town the shot in the arm it needs and thereby rebuild his disgraced career, but Albuquerque won't give him the material for the yellow journalism he practices. Tatum's an urban hustler in the land of rural innocents — until a man's trapped in a cave and Tatum brings him to the world stage. Deliberately endangering Leo Minosa (Richard Benedict) by needlessly delaying his rescue for a bigger story, Tatum transforms the area around the cave into the kind of oppportunistic carnival land of free-floating capitalistic enterprise and gaudy spectacle he's used to. Buried for years after its initial brutal reception, a recent restoration and release on Criterion have brought one of Billy Wilder's greatest films back into the spotlight it deserves.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Sarah Clyne Sundberg, Phil Nugent, Vadim Rizov

"I Am Atrios!": Kirk Douglas, MySpace Celebrity

Phil Nugent — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 17:00:00 GMT

MySpace has honored its "oldest celebrity blogger" who, it turns out, is Kirk Douglas. Guy Adams reports Douglas "began blogging last year, as part of a temporary initiative to promote his memoir Let's Face It, but decided to continue after seeing the level of interest his comments sparked. In one entry, he writes that he now receives too many messages to answer them personally, his goal at the start. 'But I want you to know that I appreciate each comment that I receive – positive or negative. And I enjoy the opportunity to talk to so many people much younger than I am.' " (Kirk, man, we love you, but you're 92 years old. Odds are pretty solid that you have the opportunity to talk to someone younger than you are whenever someone calls to ask if you're satisfied with your long distance carrier.)

According to his MySpace page, Kirk is white/caucasian, Jewish, married, straight, and a Sagittarian. (Hey, high five, my fellow archer.) At the time of this writing he has 695 friends, though that number is likely to go up as word spreads that this "Kirk Douglas" on MySpace is, whoa, Kirk Douglas. (There are other "Kirk Douglases" and even a Spartacus or three on MySpace, but they are other people.) His favorite movies are Champion starring Lola Albright, Spartacus starring Tony Curtis, Paths of Glory starring Timothy Carey, and Lonely Are the Brave starring Walter Matthau. Dude! No love for The Fury!? It's nice to see that, five years after he formally retired from acting, the man who broke the Hollywood blacklist by hiring Dalton Trumbo to work on the script for Spartacus and telling him he didn't have to use the kitchen entrance is still in touch and keeping up with politics: he's so pleased with the election of Barack Obama that he could plotz. "I express my opinion, and I tell them that they don't have to agree with me because it's a free country," he has said, by way of explaining his blogging philosophy. "And their answers are very, very interesting. I take it seriously. Otherwise I wouldn't do it. I don't have to do it, I don't make money. It's something that gives me personal satisfaction."

Screengrab Salutes: The Top Biopics Of All Time! (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 21:30:00 GMT

GANDHI (1982)

After watching this 188-minute biographical epic (possibly the only first-run film I ever saw in a theater that featured an intermission), it was years before I was able to see Ben Kingsley without thinking of his most iconic role. Now, almost three decades later, I’m so familiar with Kingsley’s onscreen persona (thanks to films like Bugsy, Sexy Beast and The Wackness) that it’s amazing to look back on Gandhi and consider how deeply the British-Indian actor submerged himself into the role of this lawyer-turned-freedom fighter, spiritual leader and all-around Great Soul. Richard Attenborough’s production was an old school event, featuring 300,000 extras (a Guiness World Record!) and racking up eight Academy Awards (including the trifecta of Best Picture, Best Actor and Best Director) for its depiction of the life of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi from 1893 to 1948, through his early days as an activist for Indian rights in South Africa and his leadership in the struggle for Indian independence from England to his ultimate martyrdom at the hands of a radical Hindu assassin. This kind of large canvas storytelling frequently collapses under the weight of pretension, slack pacing and scattered focus (see: Australia), but Attenborough pulled off this cinematic monument with a clear-eyed discipline worthy of his extraordinary subject.

THE PRIVATE LIFE OF HENRY VIII (1933) & REMBRANDT (1936)

Here's why Charles Laughton was a movie star. (You could be excused for not always being clear on that.) With Henry VIII, a real warhorse of a classic early talkie, Laughton did as much as anyone to create the modern image of that much-married royal as a tantrummy spoiled child who did nothing but indulge his whims and send his clothes back to the tailor to be let out again, and he did it at such a generous comic pitch that he made the fellow seem lovable, even cuddly, like an Ewok with a weakness for having his ex-girlfriends beheaded. For a full taste of the big boy's range, it ought to be sampled alongside the much quieter Rembrandt, a surprisingly sensitive and engaging portrait of the Dutch master. For that cozy family feeling, both films feature charming appearances by the off-screen Mrs. Laughton, Elsa Lanchester, who was also the on-screen Bride of Frankenstein.

SWEET DREAMS (1985)

Patsy Cline died too young, but nobody can say that the movies haven't done all right by her. Beverly D'Angelo walked off with the second act of Coal Miner's Daughter as the pampered, saucy Patsy who taught poor little country girl Loretta Lynn how to be a star, and this full-length treatment, centering on the married-folks love story between Jessica Lange's Patsy and Ed Harris as Charlie Dick (one of those guys who was born to bathe in the light of a more exciting personality generous enough to decree him worthy), is like great country music in motion. For girl talk, Lange has Ann Wedgeworth, supporting actress extraordinaire, as her mama.

LUMUMBA (2001)

Raoul Peck's film stars Eriq Ebouaney, in one of the most towering unheralded great performances of the past decade, as Patrice Lumumba, first Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Lumumba was driven from office and assassinated two months into his term; when the movie was made, some forty years after the events it documents, the region was still such a political powder keg that locations had to be scouted far afield, and even after the film was released to theaters, a former American government advisor who felt that he'd been accused of being implicated in Lumumba's death got HBO to bleep the mention of his name from the soundtrack before the movie was broadcast on cable TV.

LUST FOR LIFE (1956) & VINCENT & THEO (1990)

In his tragically short life, Vincent Van Gogh was underappreciated, starved, mistreated, thought mad, and forced to go without his share of love and satisfaction, but he did get two pretty good movies made about him, and one of them inspired the title of an Iggy Pop song that somehow found its way into the ad campaign of Carnival Cruise Lines, so I guess it evens out. Directed by Vincente Minnelli and starring Kirk Douglas, with James Donald as Brother Theo and Anthony Quinn as Gauguin, Lust For Life is in the dramatic MGM style and played to the hilt; a huge success in its day, it is clearly enough a product of its time that it may be a bit underrated today, but it remains a very moving experience crafted by intelligent, talented people at the height of their game. The latter film, which stars Tim Roth as a Van Gogh so ferociously in love with life and so passionately aware of how much of it he's missing out on that he can seem open-hearted and embittered at the same moment, was directed by Robert Altman, and is very clearly the product of his sensibility alone. It is barely rated at all, because so few people have seen it.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

Set Your DVR!: October 27 - November 3, 2008

Hayden Childs — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Halloween week means more vintage horror! TCM in particular is even exceeding their own high standards this week, shoehorning in a night of Billy Wilder on Tuesday (nothing is recommended because everything is fairly well-known) and a few film noir classics on Wednesday before cranking up the scary on Thursday. As always, let me know in comments if you see something I shouldn’t have missed!

Mon, Oct 27:

11 am/12 pm: An American Werewolf in London on AMC. As I said last week, it’s not a great movie, but it has a few iconic scenes.

Tues, Oct 28:

5/6 am: The Invisible Man on AMC. Based on Ralph Ellison’s classic novel of race in America... whoops, that’s not right. No one’s ever made that movie. This is James Whale’s classic horror film starring Claude Rains.

6:45/7:45 am: Bride of Frankenstein on AMC. And this is James Whale’s frankenlady movie.

7/8 am: The Desperate Hours on TCM. Neat little thriller about convicts on the lam starring Humphrey Bogart.

11 pm/12 am: An American Werewolf in London on AMC. Repeat.

Wed, Oct 29:

1/2 pm: An American Werewolf in London on AMC. Repeat. Last time I’m going to mention it, in fact.

7/8 pm: Murder, My Sweet on TCM. Killer adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely.

10:45/11:45 pm: Out of the Past on TCM. Film noir classic with Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas. Directed by Jacques Tourneur, who also made three of the Val Lewton-produced no-budget horror films we’re recommending this week.

Thurs, Oct 30:

12:30/1:30 am: They Live By Night on TCM. Earlier movie based on the same source material as Robert Altman’s Thieves Like Us, which is one of his most underappreciated movies.

3/4 am: House of Wax on CHILLER. Vincent Price’s classic. Note: You will not see Paris Hilton in this movie.

3:45/4:45 am: The Thing From Another World on TCM. Howard Hawks directing an early sci-fi/horror movie. The John Carpenter movie The Thing was a remake.

6:30/7:30 am: The Beast with Five Fingers on TCM. FIVE WHOLE FINGERS! YAAAAAARGH!

7:30/8:30 am: 8 Women on LOGO. Francois Ozon assembles every major French actress of our time for a half-musical/half-murder mystery.

8/9 am: I Walked With A Zombie on TCM. Jacques Tourneur doing horror on a Val Lewton production.

9:15/10:15 am: Curse of the Demon on TCM. Recut version of the horror film Night of the Demon. Directed by Jacques Tourneur applying what he has learned from doing horror on Val Lewton productions.

10:45/11:45 am: Gerry on IFC (repeat at 4/5 pm and on 11/31 at 4:10/5:10 am). I just keep recommending it!

5:30/6:30 pm: House of Usher on TCM. Roger Corman! Vincent Price! Edgar Allan Poe! You might be surprised to learn that this is a tender romantic comedy.

7/8 pm: Dead of Night on TCM. Creepy little horror anthology from Ealing Studios. And no Sir Alec Guinness to be found!

Fri, Oct 31:

A quick note: TCM owns Halloween programming. You can’t go wrong with anything they’re showing all day.

1/2 am: Kwaidan on TCM. A beloved Japanese horror anthology.

3:45/4:45: Spirits of the Dead on TCM. A triptych of short films from Roger Vadim, Louis Malle, and Federico Fellini (which of these names is not like the others?). I’ve never seen it, but the cast of Jane Fonda, Brigitte Bardot, Terence Stamp, and Alain Delon sounds promising.

6:30/7:30 am: Cat People on TCM. More Lewton & Tourneur!

7/8 am: The Honeymoon Killers on IFC. Still brilliant, still vile.

8/9 am: Freaks on TCM.

8:30/9:30 am: Halloween on AMC. Halloween? Hasn’t everyone seen this? I suspect that some people have forgotten how effective it is with almost no budget and no special effects.

9:15/10:15 am: The Devil Doll on TCM. How many ways can I say “creepy”? This one’s directed by the creator of Freaks, Tod Browning.

2:30/3:30 pm: The Body Snatcher on TCM. More Val Lewton! With Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi!

4/5 pm: Bedlam on TCM. And even more Val Lewton! This one’s with just Karloff.

7/8 pm: The Host on G4. Korean horror movie with great special effects and a cruel sense of humor.

Sat, Nov 1:

1/2 am: The Host on G4 (repeats at 11/12 am).

1:30/2:30 am: Blood Feast on TCM. Things start getting ugly overnight at TCM. This is a challenger to Plan 9 From Outer Space for the coveted Worst Movie Ever award. Highly recommended! Directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis, whom you can read more about in our very own Scott Von Doviak’s excellent book Hick Flicks, which is a perfect stocking-stuffer for the film geek in your family.

2:45/3:45 am: 2,000 Maniacs on TCM. A follow-up to Blood Feast. I understand that the name is misleading, as Lewis only had to budget for 1,986 maniacs.

3/4 am: The Blob on CHILLER (Repeat at 6:00 am/7:00 am). Steve McQueen in the no-budget flick that might just be a parable about the insidious effects of CREEPING COMMUNISM! BOOGA BOOGA! Starring Barack Obama’s tax policies as The Blob and Sarah Palin as the small-town mayor who knows how to stop it. If only the people will listen!

5:15/6:15 am: Forbidden Planet on TCM. Ah, the horror is starting to subside. What better way to recover than a movie that puts Shakespeare’s The Tempest in space?

7/8 am: My Darling Clementine on AMC. One of the finest classic Westerns of all time. Starring Henry Fonda and directed by John Ford.

7/8 am: Sanshiro Sugata on IFC. Akira Kurosawa’s first film, this is a standard issue wuxia film in terms of plot and progression, but with Kurosawa’s unerring eye behind the lens, there’s moments of stunning beauty to be found. Unreleased on DVD, and a must for Kurosawa fanatics.

9:30/10:30 am: The Last Wave on IFC (repeat at 2:45/3:45 pm). Richard Chamberlain’s most shocking role (in which discernible acting can be detected!) about apocalyptic aboriginal weirdness in Australia. Directed by Peter Weir.

Sun, Nov 2:

Happy birthday to my mom and my brother-in-law Jeff!

7/8 am: Solaris on IFC. This is the Tarkovsky original, not the Soderbergh remake. A deeply sad, meditative movie about love and self and Otherness. I’m being purposely vague, but this review is only two sentences, and this movie deserves much more than that.

8:30/9:30 am: Macbeth on TCM. Orson Welles’s Macbeth with the bad accents and great filmmaking.

5:35/6:35 pm: The New World on IFC. Terrence Malick’s film about how struggle defines all human relationships, despite the transcendental indifference of nature. Did I just write that? This is easily one of the best films of the last decade, so just watch it.

8/9 pm: The Proposition on IFC (repeat on 11/3 at 1:15/2:15 am). John Hillcoat’s Aussie Western written by Nick Cave. It wants to be a Peckinpah movie, but it’s not even a Boetticher. That’s not to say it’s worthless, but it bites off more than it can chew. Hillcoat’s the director of the upcoming adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which I hope is better than this.

9:45/10:45 pm: The Year of Living Dangerously on TCM. Remember when Mel Gibson could act? Good times. Oh, ok. This is most definitely not a good time. Directed by Peter Weir.

11 pm/12 am (11/3): True Stories on VH1CL (repeat on 11/3 at 7/8 pm). It’s not a good movie, but it’s fun. This is David Byrne’s labor of love, a deliberately quirky look at America from one of its deliberately quirky pop culture figures. The Talking Heads songs aren’t their best, but they’re pretty good, and pretty good looks good from here.

Mon, Nov 3:

3/4 am: Isle of the Dead on CHILLER. Another Val Lewton production! Why is it on after Halloween? Apparently CHILLER has started the Halloween 2009 season early.

5:05/6:05 am: Tom Dowd & the Language of Music on IFC (repeat at 12:30/1:30 pm). Delightful documentary about the man with the golden ear who flawlessly recorded some of the greats of 20th century music.

10:05/11:05 am: The New World on IFC. Repeat.

10:30/11:30 am: The Man From Laramie on TCM. Anthony Mann Western with James Stewart. Not the best Mann Western, but it’ll do.

8/9 pm: Me and You and Everyone We Know on IFC (repeat 11/4 at 12/1 am). Miranda July is cute and a little alienating. John Hawkes learned from Deadwood the fine art of saying everything he has to say with his eyebrows. Somehow, despite the nearly lethal levels of quirk, July has made a movie with an enormous amount of heart.

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 22:00:00 GMT

5. PATHS OF GLORY (1957)

One of Stanley Kubrick’s earlier films, Paths of Glory stands as both a link to his later style and a curious anomaly. While it contains many of the technical hallmarks of his later work, often in embryonic form, it also bears – at least partly thanks to notorious pulp novelist Jim Thompson, who Kubrick recruited to whip the screenplay into shape – an incredibly powerful emotional resonance that belies his later reputation as a cool, bloodless artisan. Paths of Glory is set during the grimmest stretches of the First World War, at a time when the French army was said to practice a variant of decimation in order to prevent desertion and insubordination as the troops increasingly perceived the war to be a pointless and horrid waste of lives. Colonel Dax, played with uncharacteristic depth by Kirk Douglas, is ordered to lead his men on a charge that goes disastrously awry; following a battle scene legendary for its grim, ugly, almost sightless realism, his commanding officer, to save face, orders a quartet of men – chosen for no other reason than that they are largely friendless and undesirable – executed for cowardice. More than Kubrick’s first great film, Paths of Glory also marks a turning point in the way modern cinema treats war, and the movie’s unforgettable final scene provides an emotionally troubling catharsis, as doomed men are serenaded by a captured German woman (played by an actress, Susanne Christian, whom Kubrick would later marry), that is one of the most devastating punches in war cinema.

4. M*A*S*H (1970)

Ask someone – ask anyone – to name the greatest film about the Korean War, and they’ll tell you it’s Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H. The only problem is, M*A*S*H isn’t about Korea at all. Robert Altman clearly intended it to refer, in all its blackly funny glory, to the then-raging war in Vietnam. However, 20th Century Fox, already nervous about how the film would be received, understandably panicked at the thought that this hilariously subversive treatment of the madness of war and the use of near-nihilistic dark comedy as the only reasonable response to it. Altman, who by his own lights “had practice working for people who don’t care about quality, and I learned to sneak it in”, had utterly failed to mention Korea at all, so the studio stuck in a title card in post-production and added some clumsy radio announcements that made it clear to Mr. & Mrs. America that no, this was a different Asian anti-communist crusade. Their minds eased, Mr. & Mrs. A took the movie to heart – or at least didn’t demand the public immolation of its director; the next thing you know, the movie was turned into a beloved ‘70s sitcom that maintained the formal structure of the movie, if none of its deeply antisocial content. If M*A*S*H has been superseded as an anti-war film, or as even an uplifted middle finger to authority, it’s still the funniest war movie ever made.

3. CASABLANCA (1942)

If Casablanca is no longer the consensus pick as the greatest movie of all time – and there are plenty of people who will make a damn convincing case that it is – it’s at least one of the very few films that almost everyone agrees is great. And that’s especially surprising, because it’s not only a war film, but one made during wartime – hardly an environment conducive to greatness. But while it’s never particularly subtle (even people who have never seen it know within the first hour that the self-centered Rick is eventually going to stick his neck out and do what’s right), it’s simply so jam-packed with greatness that its power cannot be denied. Skillfully directed, beautifully filmed, and crammed with so many iconic performances that it’s practically a primer on what good acting looked like in the Golden Age of Hollywood, Casablanca is also, amazingly, a fiercely patriotic picture that manages, through sheer force of its goodwill and beauty, to not come across as jingoistic. Roger Ebert once wrote, in his review of Paths of Glory, that the folk song performed by the German woman at that film’s end was the ultimate condemnation of patriotism, just as the triumphant singing of “Le Marseillaise” at Rick’s Café is the ultimate celebration of it. Unlike many of the greatest war films, Casablanca never makes you wonder if it’s all worth it or which side you should be on; but unlike many of the worst war films, it also doesn’t make you feel dirty for cheering on the good guys, or cheat you into a false sense of smugness. It’s the purest expression of the notion of a good war, and sometimes, that’s not so bad.

2. APOCALYPSE NOW (1979)

"My film is not a movie. My film is not about Vietnam. My film is Vietnam." That sounds like a crazy person talking, and it must have been a crazy person who made Apocalypse Now, surely the greatest "war as acid trip" movie ever made. Who among us is not intimately familiar with all the Stations of the Cross by now, from "Saigon. Shit." to "Charlie don't surf" to "I love the smell of napalm in the morning" and finally, "The horror. The horror"? There's no point trying to defend Coppola's greatest folly in terms of coherent narrative or classical Hollywood structure -- you're either aboard for the ride with Willard, Chief, Clean and the rest, or you're reaching for your new set of Godfather DVDs. Even among those of us for whom Apocalypse was a formative experience in mind-expanding cinema, it's clear that the finished product teeters on the brink between genius and nonsense, and you need only spend an evening with the misguided Apocalypse Now Redux to see how thin the line between the two actually is. But the ambition, spectacle, weirdness, and pure guts of the original version is more than enough to secure it a place of honor on my list of desert island discs.

1. GRAND ILLUSION (1937)

Jean Renoir's masterpiece uses a pair of actors with grand theatrical styles, Erich von Stroheim and Pierre Fresnay, and France's leading exponent of the unadorned, working-class style, Jean Gabin, and by putting them together in a prison camp during World War I, means to convey a powerful anti-war message of universal brotherhood. In this it was so successful that the Nazis ordered all the prints be seized after they marched into France. For years the film was thought to be lost, and Renoir, who really had hoped to have some detrimental impact on the coming of World War II, felt that he had as much solid proof that he had failed as any filmmaker had ever had. Instead of bringing us world peace, he had to settle for having made one of the four of five greatest movies in history, the poor sap.

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

Contributors: Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

Take Five: Psychics

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

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

THE SHINING (1980)

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

SCANNERS (1981)

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

THE FURY (1978)

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

AKIRA (1988)

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

INVINCIBLE (2001)

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

In(dy) Other Blogs

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 23 May 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Because the release of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull has been so criminally overlooked by the mainstream media, it’s been up to the blogosphere to pick up the slack. As Paul Clark tipped you in his revisitation of the Temple of Doom, Cerebral Mastication is the hub of Indy blogdom, so a tip of the well-worn fedora to Ali Arikan for the centralized linkage.

The House Next Door offers a three-fer, looking back at all three previous Indiana Jones movies. Matt Zoller Seitz emerges from semi-retirement to offer his own thoughts on Temple of Doom, which he says “has the series' simplest plot, most annoying love interest, most casually racist and imperialist attitudes and most grotesque imagery (Doom and its summer-of-'84 blockbuster cousin, the Spielberg-produced Gremlins, sparked the creation of a new MPAA rating, PG-13). At the same time, though, it's the most viscerally intense entry in the series and the most wide-ranging in its moods, spotlighting the imaginations of Spielberg and his co-producer, George Lucas, at their most freewheeling. It's a blast from the id—like Close Encounters, 1941, E.T. and A.I, a rare instance of the director appearing to construct images and situations for his own private reasons, rather than keeping his eyes and ears attuned for signs of viewer discontent.”

At Edward Copeland on Film, David Gaffen has narrowed his focus to a single scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark – the one “where Indiana Jones, realizing that the Ark of the Covenant is to be placed on a plane and flown out of Egypt, sets out to sabotage the plane.” Gaffen proceeds shot-by-shot to dissect the workings of a signature action sequence. “The escalation here is deliberate – slowly ratchet up the tension within a scene that is already filled with active movement, derivative of Hitchcock in its cleverness even if Spielberg still names the 1950s serials as his original inspiration. The elements added in are small, careful ones – a shot of the wing grazing a nearby fuel truck, which spills gasoline. Just as the large German was introduced as a potential opponent this is presented as a problem, the proverbial gun in Act I that has to be fired in Act II.”

At Cinema Styles, Jonathan Lapper is trying to get excited about this whole thing. “A lot can change in 27 years. That's how long it's been since the original Raiders of the Lost Ark and it's been nearly two decades since the last one, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Look at it this way: Two of the biggest adventure hits of 1954 were 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and The Naked Jungle. Now imagine Kirk Douglas and Charlton Heston making sequels to those movies in 1981, 27 years later. By 1981 the movie landscape was decidedly different than it was in 1954 and 2008 is decidedly different than 1981. Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't sense the excitement about a new Indiana Jones film like I did in the eighties. When the other two sequels were released they, like the Star Wars sequels The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, were the summer movies to see. Now Indiana Jones is practically lost in the shuffle.”

Cinematical has a week’s worth of Indy stuff on offer. They’ve got us covered for List-o-Mania this week with Seven Indiana Jones Knock-Offs. Number one is Tomb Raider: “It's like all the initial three Indiana Jones films wrapped up in one, with added sex appeal in casting Angelina Jolie in the Harrison Ford role. Yet Jolie as Croft is too serious to be the female counterpart to Ford's Indy. Also, while the Indiana Jones films deal with some level of magically religious fantasy, they're at least grounded by ‘real’ or familiar artifacts such as the Holy Grail and the Ark of the Covenant. And they tend to remain just realistic enough to avoid things like giant six-armed statues that come to life.”

Remember those kids who made the shot-for-shot remake of Raiders back in the 80s? Well, they’ve hit the big time – sort of. According to Underwire, “On May 14, eight days before the release of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, now-grown filmmakers Chris Strompolos, Eric Zala and Jayson Lamb will showcase their movie at the landmark Mann's Chinese Theater. But the guys who made it won't see a dime. ‘Due to copyright issues, revenue from the screenings of our film must go to a nonprofit organization,’ said Strompolos…While Adaptation can't be screened for profit, the DIY back story has turned into a moneymaker for Strompolos, Zala and Lamb. Big-shot movie producer Scott Rudin (There Will Be Blood) purchased rights to their real-life filmmaking adventures and hired Daniel Clowes (Ghost World) to write the script for Paramount Pictures.”