The Screengrab : last days

Screengrab's Favorite Movies About Music: Fiction Edition (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 22:00:00 GMT

HEAD (1968)

I think just about anyone who’s familiar with the Monkees’ sweet, goofy Peter Tork was bummed by the actor/musician’s recent diagnosis with head and neck cancer (although, apparently, the prognosis is currently good). And I think no matter how silly or cynically conceived hippies found the Pre-Fab Four back in the sixties, the songs the TV band had written for them (“I’m a Believer,” “Daydream Believer,” “Steppin’ Stone,” etc.) are a helluva lot better than most of the songs being written for today’s prefabricated music industry shills, most of whom don’t even have the self-awareness to be self-deprecating and more than a little embarrassed by their place in the pop culture firmament. To their credit, Tork and his bandmates Mickey Dolenz (the funny one), Davy Jones (the cute one) and Michael Nesmith (the smart one) tried their best to rebel against their corporate overlords with Head, a big-screen attempt at image-smashing phantasmagoria that plays like an LSD-inspired episode of the group’s small-screen show, i.e. a brainy, mostly well-behaved mind-fuck that’s actually a lot more entertaining and thought-provoking than some of the more “authentic” freak-outs of the era, what with the underwater imagery accompanying the haunting “Porpoise Song,” the burlesque meditations on fame and the peculiar cameos by the likes of Victor Mature, Annette Funicello and Frank Zappa with a cow.

HIGH FIDELITY (2000)

That High Fidelity is playfully self-conscious and yet not overly precious is a testament to both director Stephen Frears, here smoothly segueing between goofy comedy and sobering drama, as well as star (and co-writer) John Cusack, whose turn as romantically challenged record store owner Rob stands as one of his finest performances. Retaining the ragamuffin spirit of Nick Hornby’s source novel, Frears’ funny and incisive adaptation boasts two superb supporting players in Jack Black and Todd Louiso as Rob’s employees, as well as a script that refuses to sentimentalize the stunted-maturity failings of its protagonist. Rob is a man-child whose compulsive habit of concocting lists – about favorite songs and past break-ups – speaks to the vital role music plays in his romantic life, while also serving as his means of engaging in self-analysis through a safe, detached filter. A bit too much of Cusack’s narration and dialogue (taken verbatim from Hornby’s novel) lands with a writerly thud on screen, but the actor’s warts-and-all performance – unafraid to posit his protagonist as a navel-gazing prick, and still capable of making him endearing – is so energized that it overshadows any occasional missteps.

LAST DAYS (2005)

The high point of Gus Van Sant’s Béla Tarr-inspired “death trilogy” (following 2002’s Gerry and 2003’s Elephant), Last Days charts the final, pedestrian events in the life of a Kurt Cobain surrogate (Michael Pitt) in and around his Pacific Northwest estate. A ruminative, melancholy work with little interest in traditional narrative, Van Sant’s evocative gem aims mainly to situate viewers in a particular physical environment and headspace. In this case, that’s the remote residence and fuzzy mind of a shuffling, head-downturned, shaggy-haired rock star who wanders about his property like a ghost burdened by some ill-defined psychological and emotional misery. Rife with ambiguous religious overtones that contribute to an atmosphere of spiritual malaise, obliquely addressing the relationship between image and reality, and depicting its protagonist – constricted by claustrophobic full-frame compositions – as beset by hangers-on and record studio execs who take but don’t give, Last Days operates as a richly textured, arrestingly evocative avant-garde hypothesis about the forces that might have contributed to Cobain’s suicidal demise.

SINGLES (1992)

No one will mistake Singles for a great rom-com, but viewed as a snapshot of a very particular musical era, Cameron Crowe’s 1992 film holds up surprisingly well. The story has to do with two on-again, off-again couples (Campbell Scott and Kyra Sedgwick, Matt Dillon and Bridget Fonda) attempting to navigate choppy romantic waters. However, despite Crowe’s reasonably sturdy dramatization of twentysomethings in search of love and their post-collegiate identities – as well as his inconsistent (but far-from-disastrous) decision to have characters break the fourth wall to deliver commentary – the film’s lasting appeal has as much to do with timing as with storytelling. By setting the action in a Seattle grunge scene on the brink of exploding, Crowe hopelessly dated his film. Yet that turns out to be a good thing, since Singles, bolstered by cameos and performances by various members of the bands (Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains) that would temporarily make Seattle the epicenter of rock, while comfortably rooted in the damp, sleepy, basketball-loving atmosphere of his Pacific Northwest milieu, proves an engaging, enduring time capsule.

GRACE OF MY HEART (1996)

This movie is character actress Illeana Douglas's best role to date. As in Todd Haynes' Velvet Goldmine and I'm Not There, Grace of My Heart attempts to create a transcendent reality for the stories about Carole King, who some readers may need to be reminded was one of the Brill Building songwriters of the early '60s who later went on to have commercial success as a singer-songwriter with her album Tapestry. Perhaps you saw her on Stephen Colbert's show. In this movie, she is known as Denise Waverly. Denise comes to work in the Brill Building for a Phil Spector-alike played by John Turturro, writing songs for girl groups. She takes up with her co-songwriter, a Gerry Goffin-alike played by Eric Stolz (among the real-life Goffin-King compositions: "Will You Love Me Tomorrow," "The Loco-Motion," "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman"), but their marraige falls apart. Later, she moves to California and takes up with a Brian Wilson-alike played by Matt Dillon. Even though it's not as smart as the Haynes rock fictions, it's quite a lovely little movie with lots of nice touches to people familiar with the characters portrayed. I especially enjoy the faux-Wilson's mental breakdown while working on the movie's version of Smile, the real-life album that broke Brian Wilson's spirit for a time.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three & Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Nick Schager, Hayden Childs

Thursday Poll for December 11, 2008

Paul Clark — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Last week, the Thursday Poll took a look back at the recent films of Gus Van Sant to commemorate with the release of his latest film, Milk. In the process we made one unmistakable discovery- you folks like your Van Sant movie arty. To wit: of Van Sant’s last five movies, your favorite (and mine too) was 2002’s minimalist slackers-in-the-desert saga Gerry, which simultaneously won the week and conquered Thebes with a 44% showing. In our closest showing in a while, Van Sant’s Cannes prizewinner Elephant finished with a strong 38%, followed by Last Days with 13% and the sadly underrated Paranoid Park with 6%. And while awards-giving bodies will no doubt show plenty of love for Milk, its more mainstream style didn’t make much of an impact with our readers, garnering not a single vote. But hey, it’s better than Finding Forrester, right?

This week, in conjunction with the upcoming release of Frost/Nixon, the latest bit of middlebrow Oscar-bait from the guy who narrated Arrested Development (the best thing he ever did, by the way), we take a look at the varied cinematic portrayals of the Trickiest Dick to ever inhabit the White House. So, who’s your favorite big-screen Nixon?

Who's your favorite big-screen Nixon? | BuzzDash polls

As always, the comments section is open. We'll see you next week, provided nobody Gerries the rendezvous. Don't forget your shirt-basket!

Screengrab Salutes: The Top Biopics of All Time! (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 23:00:00 GMT

BLAISE PASCAL (1972)

Part of Rossellini's massive trove of biopics done for Italian TV in the last part of his career (and considered the best by J. Hoberman), Blaise Pascal respects the form but not spirit of biopics. Rossellini dutifully covers the 17th-century philosopher's life from infancy to death. There's no hint of a personal life though: it's 130 straight minutes of argumentation and disputation, with Pascal's greatest philosophical hits recited — conversationally, but barely — almost non-stop. Tension comes from an ominous, decidedly anachronistic synth score, whose constant hum reminds the viewer that death is coming for Pascal, and it does. Like Zodiac (albeit at a much lower intensity), Blaise Pascal gains power from tunneling deep into work and pointedly ignoring the outside world. Rossellini only stops to observe the uninflected past in non-dramatic moments: a silent sequence of a nobleman waking up, soaking his feet in water and being dressed by his servants tells us more about 17th-century class behavior than any dialogue could. No stories of how Pascal fell in love with a girl or had problems with his parents; the man's legacy, the film makes it quite clear, is solely an intellectual one, and that's all anyone should care about. It's oddly exhilarating: you're asked to simply step up and think hard for a while, without gratifying your emotions. In this (unsubtitled) clip, Pascal schools Descartes. Coming to DVD in January.

PATTON (1970)

The rare movie equally beloved by hardcore cineastes and testosterone-addled football-loving guys who could care less about movies, Patton is best remembered for the surreal opening monologue (above), a real Patton speech delivered straight to the audience in front of a giant American flag. (Vincent Canby called the effect "almost Rauschenberg.") But Patton is the rare movie whose central ambivalence never seemed to bother the public. He's presented straight-up in the middle of combat scenes presented with elaborately gorgeous clarity; it's a question of perspective whether he's a loon or whether he has a point. It's also frequently hilarious, as in the scene where Patton arrives to take charge of a camp that's in a total state of disarray. He finds a man slumped over in a hallway. "What are you doing?" he barks. "Sleeping, sir" the man answers. "Well keep sleeping! You're the only one who knows what he's doing around here!"

LAST DAYS (2005)

In my experience, people who are die-hard Kurt Cobain/Nirvana fans tend to hate Gus Van Sant's impressionistic take on Cobain's mentally deranged final hours. On the one hand, Van Sant gets some major iconographic images right (Cobain's body in the gardener's shed); on the other hand, there's no Nirvana music and zero attempt to convey anything about Nirvana. If you find Van Sant's long-tracking-shots-and-lighting-experiments aesthetic annoying (and you love Cobain), it looks like total disrespect. It's just Michael Pitt (in a career playing largely the psychotic and the damaged, a stand-out still) stumbling around, mumbling, ineptly preparing Kraft Mac 'n Cheese and — only twice — making music. I love it because it's a gorgeous formal exercise, but there's also plenty of comic scenes in the opening (see above, where a real Yellow Pages salesman steadfastly attempts to sell "Blake" a spot in the book and Blake's too out of it to figure out what he's talking about or tell him he's got the wrong guy). As a biography, the most intriguing bits are hypothetical glosses on impossible but intriguing music geeks what-ifs: what if Rivers Cuomo (Lukas Haas, writing his own dialogue just like everyone else) whined about touring in Japan to Cobain and inadvertently began working out Pinkerton that way? (Does this make Weezer the heir apparent to Nirvana? Discuss.) What if Kim Gordon came to give him a stern talking to? In its own odd way, Last Days finally gets around to nailing some of the most frustrating aspects of how '90s indie-rock spiraled into a mini-parody of mainstream rock, with its very own drugged-out casualties and insular, petty rivalries.

SECRET HONOR (1984)

Some people think this is the best movie about Nixon ever made; pending further evidence, I'll concur. It's mostly a master class in direction: given an impossible source (a one-man stage play), Robert Altman somehow makes the whole thing non-stagy. Finding as many different angles and set-ups as Lumet did for 12 Angry Men, Secret Honor is as much a pleasure for its resourcefulness as for Philip Baker Hall's career high: short on impersonation, long on paranoia. Filmed before Nixon's '80s rehabilitation as an acceptable and even valued foreign policy commenter, Secret Honor is a fuck you to the man (just as the clip above is a fuck you from Nixon to everyone else; be warned, the multiple monitors do not mean this was directed by Altman in De Palma mode). As such, even though its climax is kind of disappointing — Nixon was paranoid, but not enough for the nightmarish caricature the film has him explaining himself through — it's as much a great performance as an index to early-'80s feelings about Nixon.

LAURENCE OF ARABIA (1962)

My most conventional pic for great biopic doesn't follow the rules as we've come to know them. The title's quite literal: this is everything to do with T.E. Lawrence in and around Arabia, and nothing more. No childhood, no steady decline (though Ralph Fiennes gave filling it out a shot with a TV movie, A Dangerous Man: Lawrence After Arabia). David Lean comes closer to making a '00s art film than anyone (including he, probably) would like to admit: with its long, contemplative shots of desert and tiny human specks against the sky, Lawrence unsubtly but effectively makes the exterior landscape a reflection of Lawrence's internal turmoil at all times.

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

Contributor: Vadim Rizov

Set Your DVR!: October 20 - October 28, 2008

Hayden Childs — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 15:00:00 GMT

What a great time of year for movies! If you're a fan of vintage horror, that is. Here's the DVR-worthy flicks on cable in the upcoming week.

Mon, Oct 20:

1:30/2:30 pm: The Haunting on TCM. Again, this is the 1963 Robert Wise version.

Tues, Oct 21:

11/12 am: Rio Grande on TCM. Classic John Wayne/John Ford Western.

8:45/9:45 pm: The Public Enemy on TCM. Buncha dirty rats doin' low-down dirty-rat bidness.

Wed Oct 22:

6:45/7:45 am: Batman on AMC. The 1966 version. Shark repellent, my friends. Need I say more?

8:20/9:20 am: George Washington on IFC (repeat at 2:35/3:35 pm). I'm not always going to repeat prior recommendations, but man, I like this movie.

3:30/4:30 pm: The Enchanted Cottage on TCM. I've never seen this, but it is apparently a much-loved, hard-to-see romance between an injured soldier and a lady who isn't much to look at. Unreleased on DVD.

6:15/7:15 pm: Last Days on IFC (repeat 10/23 at 2:00 am).

7/8 pm: The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) on TCM. This is the one with Charles Laughton.

Thur, Oct 23:

Start the day (or previous night) with a Val Lewton film festival on TCM!

12:45/1:45 am: Cat People on TCM. The first collaboration between director Jacques Tourneur and producer Val Lewton (the king of no-budget atmospheric eerieness). Not exactly horror, but not exactly anything else.

2/3 am: I Walked With A Zombie on TCM. Not just a killer Roky Erickson song, this is another Tourneur/Lewton collaboration.

3:15/4:15 am: Isle of the Dead on TCM. Val Lewton production starring Boris Karloff.

4:30/5:30 am: The Body Snatcher on TCM. Val Lewton production starring Boris Karloff AND Bela Lugosi, directed by Robert Wise, and based on a Robert Louis Stevenson short story, of all things.

5:45/6:45 am: Shattered Glass on IFC. Some people missed this 2003 film in which Hayden Christiansen plays a character who is - get this - supposed to be wooden. Based on the true events around the fantasist Stephen Glass's deception of The New Republic

7:35/8:35 am: Manderlay on IFC (repeat at 1:35/2:35 pm). Lars von Trier's follow-up to Dogville is about a Southern plantation in the 1930s that has never freed its slaves. Do you like von Trier? Then you'll probably like this.

2:15/3:15 pm: D.O.A. on TCM. Film noir classic.

UPDATE: 8 pm (not sure of the time zone): Red Sun on Retroplex (free on Comcast Digital). This is a Western starring Charles Bronson, Ursula Andress, Alain Delon, and Toshiro Mifune. Whoa! Thanks to Janet for the hat tip.

Fri, Oct 24:

4:15/5:15 am: Manderlay on IFC (repeat).

Sat, Oct 25:

2:45/3:45 am: 200 Motels on TCM. Frank Zappa's wacky movie. Are you a fan of Zappa? No? Then you'll hate it. Unreleased on DVD.

5:15/6:15 am: The Curse of Frankenstein on AMC. Classic Frankenstein movie starring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee.

7/8 am: Kiru on IFC (repeat at 1:50/2:50 pm). Samurai comedy! Yep.

8/9 am: Night of the Living Dead on SCIFI. Oh, you know this one already? You must have brains. Braaaaaaains.

11:30 pm/12:30 am: Catwoman on OXYGEN. Perhaps the scariest movie of the Halloween season. This movie has Halle Berry in the lead! (BWA-HA-HA!) And she’s trying to be sexy/sultry/non-robotic! (AAAAAAAH!) Actually, this is far too scary for anyone to view.

Sun, Oct 26:

12:45/1:45 am: The Honeymoon Killers on TCM. Brilliant and utterly repellent movie based on the true story of the Lonely Hearts Killers, who preyed on divorced women in the late 40s. Between this and Mad Men, you get the feeling that the mid-20th century wasn't such a great time to be an independent women.

7/8 am: The Ghost of Yotsuya on IFC. Ghosts! Samurais! Spurned Wives! Revenge!

10:00/11:00 am: The Flower of Evil on IFC. Directed by the Hitchcock-influenced Claude Chabrol. I haven't seen this one, but I run hot and cold on Chabrol movies.

1/2 pm: Kiss of Death on FMC. Fantastic film noir.

2:30/3:30 pm: An American Werewolf in London on AMC. This isn't a great movie, but it has a few great - I'd go as far as "iconic" - scenes, most notably David Naughton's transformation into the title monster. Does AMC cut for content? I often skip movies showing on AMC because I hate watching commercials during films. And I don't know if the movies are running uncut with commercials or cut down for size. Let me know in comments if you have a better idea about what AMC is doing.

Mon, Oct 27 (ze spillover from Sunday):

1:30/2:30 am: Vampyr: Der Traum des Allan Grey on TCM. Now this is a great movie, Dreyer’s 1932 vampire epic. One of the greatest vampire movies ever made, in fact, up there with Nosferatu. I don't know how it will look in this cut, but I believe that time and neglect have left all existing prints somewhat faded.

3/4 am: Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte on AMC. Horror film starring Bette Davis, Olivia de Havilland, Joseph Cotten, and Agnes Moorehead. Sounds like a recipe for overheated Southern goth to me, but it's pretty highly rated, so what do I know?

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

Gus Van Sant and "Paranoid Park": "It's the End of a Certain Way I Was Making Films"

Phil Nugent — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Sam Adams writes in The Los Angeles Times that Gus Van Sant sees his new film, Paranoid Park, as "a transitional film, moving him once again toward the mainstream." The first thing to say about this is that, compared to the so-called "Death Trilogy" of films that Van Sant has made since 2002 (Gerry, Elephant, and Last Days) while under the influence of director Bela Tarr, he may be right. The second thing is that Van Sant's notion of the mainstream and Michael Bay's may barely be on speaking terms. It's not clear that it has all that much in common with the Van Sant of Good Will Hunting or Finding Forrester, either. The new movie differs from his other recent work in that it had an honest-to-goodness script (based on Blake Nelson's young adult novel). But as Mike D'Angelo noted here recently, it has many of the trademarks of Van Sant's forays into experimental filmmaking: nonlinear storytelling, long, long takes, even oddball music choices. The teenage skateboarder hero, who is carrying a secret that's killing him inside, strolls down a high school corridor on his way to a sit-down meeting with a police detective as Billy Swan's lovably woozy "I Can Help" ("It would sure do me good/ To do you good") wobbles on the soundtrack.

Back in the late 1980s, Mala Noche and Drugstore Cowboy made Van Sant the great hope of the indie movement before the movement itself really had a star system and an identity. After the ambitious My Own Private Idaho, his adaptation of Tom Robbins's Even Cowgirls Get the Blues turned out to be the kind of disastrous conflagration that can turn a filmmaker's reputation to ash in one puff. Even those who thought the director needed to re-invent himself were surprised at how thoroughly he dug in as a Hollywood pro, first with the commercial-indie black comedy To Die For and then with Good Will Hunting and Finding Forrester. If Van Sant sees these kinds of films as marking distinct stages in his career — he has said that with the Death Trilogy and Paranoid Park he has reached "the end of a certain way I was making films" — he's always worked hard at doing the best job he can and is fluid in his notions of what collaborators belong on which projects. Harris Savides, his cinematographer on Gerry, Elephant, and Last Days, first teamed up with him on Finding Forrester. Now they're working together on his next movie, Milk, starring Sean Penn as the martyred, openly gay San Francisco politician Harvey Milk, a large-scale period drama that will give the director the chance to recreate San Francisco in the 1970s, in the first full glow of gay liberation — what Van Sant himself describes as "the creation of a gay class of people, from nothing, or from a subclass that was below the surface." The new project, the realization of a long term dream of Van Sant's, returns him to the general subject of Elephant, et al. — death in the public sphere — with a "more conventional" storytelling approach, but for Van Sant, conventionality remains something with which he has to make his uneasy peace. "You can never really get there," he says of such concepts as "the real" Harvey Milk, "So you might as well have an analogy rather than a biographical depiction."

Morning Deal Report: Teenage Angst Has Paid Off Well

Peter Smith — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 15:00:00 GMT

In the wake of Gus Van Sant's Last Days and A.J. Schnack's documentary Kurt Cobain: About a Son comes the announcement that Universal will adapt Charles Cross's Cobain biography Heavier Than Heaven. What took 'em so long?

Bruce Dern is directing for the first time, and better yet, Hart's Location will star him and his wife and daughter, Diane Ladd and Laura Dern. That is an all-star family right there. We're psyched.

Naomi Watts will star in the remake of The Birds from Casino Royale director Martin Campbell.

— Peter Smith