The Screengrab : laura linney

Whatever Happened to Kenneth Lonergan's "Margaret"?

Phil Nugent — Fri, 01 May 2009 17:30:00 GMT

When Kenneth Lonergan, already a successful playwright (This Is Our Youth) and screenwriter (Analyze This) made his directing debut with You Can Count on Me (2000), an acclaimed small film that did big things for the careers of its stars, Laura Linney and Mark Ruffalo, it seemed like the beginning of a promising career. Since then, Lonergan has had a script credit on Gangs of New York (directed by Martin Scorsese, who had an executive producer credit on You Can Count on Me); meanwhile, the years have gone by while his second film asa a director, Margaret has remained unreleased and possibly, depending on who you ask, unfinished. As John Horn reports, the movie, which was funded by Fox Searchlight Pictures and producer Gary Gilbert, was shot in 2005, and has now inspired a pair of lawsuits, one of which alleges that the movie remains unreleased because Lonergan, who has the power of final cut, has never been able to shape the material into a finished state that's to his satisfaction.

Margaret was never going to be an easy sell commercially. Based on a shooting script that ran more than 160 pages--a length that's liable to result in a two and a half hour movie--it was intended as a timely, post-9/11 parable about the nature of guilt and responsibility. Set in New York City, it stars Anna Paquin as a seventeen-year-old girl who witnesses a bus accident and becomes involved in a subsequent legal action against the driver, played by Mark Ruffalo. The cast also includes Matt Damon, as a teacher towards whom Paquin's character makes advances, and J. Smith-Cameron, who is married to Lonergan, as the girl's mother. (As if all this weren't involved enough, "Margaret" isn't the name of the Paquin character or anyone else in the movie: the title refers to a Gerald Manley Hopkins poem, “Spring and Fall: To a Young Child”, which comes up in the course of one of the classroom scenes. The list of high-powered prestige talents who worked on the movie include not one but two already-deceased producers, Anthony Minghella and Sydney Pollack, as well as cast members Alison Janney, Jean Reno, Kieran Culkin, Rosemarie DeWitt, Olivia Thirlby, and Matthew Broderick; Broderick, who also appeared in You Can Count on Me, is said to have loaned Lonergan a million dollars to help him complete the editing. (According to John Horn, "A Broderick spokesman said the loan was a private matter and disputed the dollar amount but did not provide another figure.") For his part, Scorsese is said to have sent in his "legendary editor" Thelma Schoonmaker to pitch in, but to no avail.

The lawsuits started flying last summer when Fox Seacrhlight "sued Gilbert and his production company, claiming he failed to pay the studio half of the film's production costs. Two months later, Gilbert's Camelot Pictures sued Fox Searchlight and Lonergan, alleging that the studio and Lonergan thwarted Gilbert's many attempts to finish the movie, forcing Camelot to pay for 'a clearly inferior and unmarketable film' that Lonergan, several people say, will not support." The $12 million that got spent on Margaret doesn't exactly make for a Heaven's Gate-style fiasco, but the situation is a source of embarrassment for all involved, not least the studio if it's true that they gave Lonergan carte blanche to make a movie that he couldn't make work--at least, not within the framework of certain conditions to which he'd agreed. (Lonergan's final-cut guarantee was contingent on his delivering a movie that was no longer than 150 minutes.) Whether Lonergan could only deliver an ambitious, sometimes brilliant failure, or if he simply turned obsessive perfectionist and couldn't let go of his baby, the studio seemed to have come to the conclusion that it was better for them to forget the movie existed rather than take it away from him and finish it for him, which would have been them look like crude buttinskys and alienated other "prestige" filmmakers they might have wanted to court in the future. Martin Scorsese reportedly declared that one version of Margaret that he saw back in 2006 was "brilliant, a materpiece." I hope he took notes.

"The Haunting in Connecticut" and the Evolution of the Bullshit "True" Horror Movie

Phil Nugent — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 18:00:00 GMT

The Haunting in Connecticut, a horror movie that opens this weekend, is being promoted with a poster and TV ads built around an image of a boy who appears to have tobacco leaves three times the size of his lead sprouting from his mouth. My first impression of this image was that the movie must have been made as part of a tax write-off scheme and that the publicity department, knowing that the film was meant to fail and understanding that they weren't expected to attract people to the theater, were having a little fun, but it turns out that a lot of people think that it's one selling ad. The intended reaction is, what the hell is supposed to be going on there!? Or, more precisely, because Haunting is touted as being "based on true events", what the hell is supposed to have been really going on there!?

It seems clear that a significant percentage of the audience for scary entertainment gets a charge out of hearing that whatever's freezing their marrow is "true"--or, at least, "based on a true story", or in the case of the just shamelessly fraudulent, "inspired by actual events." Last year, Brian Bertino's The Strangers was promoted with the "inspired" line; in interviews, Bertino revealed that the inspiration in question came from his having read Helter Skelter, Vincent Bugliosi's book about the Manson murders, when he was a kid, and also that someone who may have been a burgler once knocked on his door. So The Strangers was inspired by true events in the sense that it's true that, in a very different era, in circumstances very different from those in Bertino's movie, people very different from the people in his film were knifed in their home by people with very different motivations than those assigned to Bertino's masked creeps. And that if you've been reading Helter Skelter and know that there are some crazy sumbitches with knives running around out there somewhere, hearing a knock on the door can really freak you out. But the existence of psychos with knives is a well-established fact. Movies about supernatural events that claim to be somehow rooted in actual events are another kettle of fish, right?

As with so much else, your standards of veracity here may depend on how much you want to believe--or, if you're a filmmaker, how much you stand to gain in box-office revenue and media attention if you have a weird story that you can peddle as true. The Haunting in Connecticut purports to tell the story of the Snedeker family (called the Campbells in the movie), who in 1986 moved into a house in Southington, Connecticut to be close to a hospital at Yale University, where one of the two sons was receiving treatment for cancer. The boys moved into the basement, which had previously been used as a mortuary, and became witness to all manner of ghostly visitors--presumably, ghosts who either had complaints about their embalming or had enjoyed the process so much that they were reluctant to leave. The story was turned into a book, In a Dark Place, by horror novelist Ray Garton, who worked in concert with the Snedekers and Ed and Lorraine Warren, a married team of paranormal investigators who had looked into the case and vouched for its authenticity--which is reason enough to set off the screaming red light on the bullshit detector.

The Warrens, you see, had a hand in the granddaddy of bullshit "true" paranormal stories, that of "the Amityville Horror." That particular load began in November 1974, when 23-year-old Ronald DeFeo, Jr. murdered his parents and four siblings in the Long Island home where they had lived since 1965. DeFeo, who was known to use heroin and LSD, first tried to convince the police that his family had been wiped out by a Mafia contract killer before confessing to the murders himself; he was sentenced to six consecutive terms of 25 years to life, despite his lawyer's plea of insanity. A year later, George and Kathy Lutz and their family moved into the DeFeos' house. They lived there about a year, which turned out to be just enough time to gather the "experiences" that, embellished and augmented by the author's imagination, were plowed by Jay Anson into the 1977 bestseller The Amityville Horror. Reviewing the 1979 movie, which shocked the shit out of everyone involved in it by becoming one of the biggest hits of the year, Veronica Geng wrote that the filmmakers "had to add the horror" and that the book, which tries to make your skin crawl by recalling how the Lutzes were tormented by flies in the house in winter and the haunting sounds of a "German marching band tuning up", "should have been called The Amityville Nuisance.

For the Lutzes, the real Amityville nuisance turned out to be Ronald DeFeo's lawyer, William Weber, who published an article claiming that he and the Lutzes had jointly come up with the idea of concocting a haunting hoax and worked out the outline of what became Anson's book "over many bottles of wine." The idea was to provide a pretext for Weber to appeal DeFeo's case while giving the Lutzes a chance to break away from a house they now realized they couldn't afford, a make a bundle in the process. When the Lutzes sued Weber, the judge threw out the case, saying, "Based on what I have heard, it appears to me that to a large extent the book is a work of fiction, relying in a large part upon the suggestions of Mr. Weber." Kathy Lutz died in 2004, and George died in 2006. He continued to maintain that the book was "mostly true", although he remained vague about the not-mostly part that wasn't and declined to give details about just what happened the night the family claimed to have fled the house for good, saying that it was all "too frightening". (It would have to be better than the 1979 movie, which climaxes with everybody piling into the car and starting to drive away in a heavy rainstorm, only to have George go back on foot to collect the dog and falling through a hole in the floor into a pool of evil-looking black goop.) In 2003, George's stepson Christopher told somebody that the story was "mostly" fiction, and damned if George didn't sue him, too. Meanwhile, the house on Long Island is still there, and in the thirty-three years since the Lutzes got the hell out of Dodge, many occupants have come and gone. None of them has reported having "experienced" shit. That hasn't put a dent in the Amityville Horror industry, which now totals nine films, including direct-to-video specials, the 2005 remake of the 1979 original, and Amityville 3-D.

Compared to the story behind the more recent The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005), the sheepish hucksterism of George Lutz and company seem downright adorable. Scott Derrickson's "based on a true story" film is framed as a courtroom drama starring Laura Linney as a lawyer who defends a priest (Tom Wilkinson) who performed an exorcism on a young girl who, the movie shows Linney slowing realizing, really was possessed by demons. The "true story" that this thing is based on is that of Anneliese Michel, a German woman who suffered from clinical depression and epilepsy, the symptoms of which her parents and local church authorities diagnosed as demonic possession. After almost a year at the hands of self-styled exorcists, Michel died of malnutrition and dehydration; both her parents and a pair of dipshit priests were tried and convicted of manslaughter. (This was in 1976; one thing this case and that of The Amityville Horror have in common is that neither might have happened if it hadn't been for The Exorcist.) The 2006 German film Requiem, directed by Hans-Christian Schmid and starring the talented Sandra Hüller, gives a truthful (as opposed to "based on a true story") account of the case. The on-line edition of National Review recently named Emily Rose as one of the 25 best "conservative" movies. Since I didn't vote for it, I trust that I won't take any flak for interpreting this as NR's way of saying that it's intrinsically conservative to starve your daughter to death and tell the judge that you thought it was what God would have wanted.

As for The Haunting in Connecticut, I haven't seen it yet, but Ray Garton has gotten the jump on the inevitable debunking claims, distancing himself from his own book and saying that it took considerable professional skill on his part to just craft a semi-coherent narrative from his discussions with the Snedekers because none of them could “keep their stories straight.” He also implied that drug and alcohol abuse might have been responsible for some of the "unusual" behavior, and has even implied that he's not sure the Snedekers' son was really being treated for cancer. (Meanwhile, used copies of the paperback edition of the out of print book are going for upwards of $160 on Amazon.) For her part, Lorraine Warren has complained that the movie distorts what happened to the Snedekers and that what "really" happened is actually "much scarier" that the movie. (Ed Warren died in 2006). How much you care about all this may depend on how bored you are by the real world, or maybe by whether or not you live in the house that the Snedekers vacated. No one but them has detected any paranormal activity going on, but the current inhabitants are now having to put up with what might be called the Southington Nuisance--rubberneckers who, turned on by the publicity campaign for the movie, have started invading the vicinity in hopes of seeing Bloody Mary waving at them from the attic window. The current homeowner, Susan Trotta-Smith, told a reporter that "Most people are respectful. They stay on the road. They might take a picture. But we have had a few problems with people kind of rudely coming up to the door and scaring our kids, telling them the house is haunted." Now all she has to do is slip her kids copies of Helter Skelter, and they'll be on their way to their own Hollywood careers.

Smells Like Indie Spirit: Our Favorite Sundance Films Of All Time (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 21:30:00 GMT

BUFFALO 66 (1998)

At some point in the recent past, we here at the Screengrab compiled a list of our guiltiest pleasures, and one of mine was The Brown Bunny, which I pretty much only wanted to see because of the notorious...uh...love scene between director/star Vincent Gallo and his co-star (and former paramour) Chloe Sevigny. Such a prurient interest is sad on two levels: first, that a grown, married man would rent a movie just to watch a quasi-famous actress get busy with an allegedly prosthetic schwanzstucker...but secondly that Gallo’s sophomore directorial effort would have so little else going for it after the flat-out brilliance of Buffalo 66. Starring as an ex-con loser who kidnaps a bored teen (Christina Ricci) in hopes of passing her off as his wife in a doomed effort to impress his hateful parents (Ben Gazzara and Anjelica Huston), Gallo's Billy Brown is all jittery desperation and hostile self-loathing...yet somehow, by the end of the movie, you’re rooting for both the character and the director, while the grim, hellish landscape of upstate New York in winter (a perfect reflection of the protagonist’s stunted isolation) has somehow blossomed with unexpected hope.

YOU CAN COUNT ON ME (2000)

Sundance, like most film festivals, has never lacked for sensitive dramatic films about dysfunctional families. This entry, which marked the film directing debut of playwright Kenneth Lonergan, stood out enough to count as a redemption of the genre. It also upped the profile of its star, Laura Linney, and all but launched the career, after some ten mostly uneventful years in movies, of Mark Ruffalo. The film won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2000 festival, and Lonergan (who himself picked up the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award) finally follows it up later this year when his second feature, Margaret, starring Anna Pacquin and Ruffalo, arrives in theaters.

AMERICAN PSYCHO (2001)

In the wake of The Blair Witch Project, Sundance slowly fell victim to that most dreaded of industry catchwords: “Buzz.” And as the fest’s spotty post-1999 reputation confirms, the most troublesome thing about encouraging and promoting buzz is that, when the buzzed-about don’t live up to their advanced billing, it’s the festival itself that suffers. Few films have ever arrived at Sundance with more early-bird hype than did Mary Harron’s American Psycho in 2001, given that, as an adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ infamous serial killer tome, its mixture of tongue-in-cheek ‘80s details and brutal violence, all wrapped up in a Kubrickian chill, seemed to make it, in the minds of many prognosticators, an “edgy” film with Fight Club-ish cult-fave potential. Such similarities, it turned out, were superficial at best. Still, American Psycho remains, eight years on, one of the few to match its lofty Sundance expectations, thanks to Christian Bale’s pitch-perfect personification of yuppiedom as a lethal mental affliction, Harron’s eerily composed, sterile direction, and a superlative murder scene set to the ominous sound of Huey Lewis and the News.

DONNIE DARKO (2001)

Every once in a blue moon, Sundance provides a platform for a truly exciting new voice, and in 2001, that was Richard Kelly, whose Donnie Darko received enthusiastic critical and audience response upon its premiere. Kelly hailed from a film-geek background but, with his debut, refused to simply indulge in name-check homages and cheesy nostalgia, instead creating an authentic sense of his ‘80s time period and suburban milieu (and the discomfort liberals felt during Michael Dukakis’ failed ’88 presidential bid), all while offering up one giant head-scratcher of a sci-fi saga involving time travel, Tears for Fears’ “Mad World,” and a menacing, knife-wielding giant rabbit who foretells news of the coming apocalypse to Donnie (Jake Gyllenhaal). As assured as it is beguiling, Donnie Darko, like Christopher Nolan’s Memento (which preceded it by a year), is a genre piece that rewards and, in certain respects, requires repeat viewings to unlock its twisted chronological mysteries, something that can’t, unfortunately, be said of Kelly’s follow-up Southland Tales. Me, I say come for the mystery, stay for the entrancing atmosphere of doomed-teen-romanticism.

SUPER TROOPERS (2001)

Broken Lizard, the comedy troupe behind Super Troopers, Club Dread (2004) and Beerfest (2006), is a decidedly hit-or-miss outfit, inspired one moment and flat the next. That description certainly applies to their debut about a group of misfit-slacker state troopers, which first screened at Sundance 2001 and amounts to a series of gags that range from the brilliant to the dreary. If the latter slightly outnumber the former, however, they don’t overshadow them, thanks in part to some inspired casting – how Broken Lizard convinced serious thesp Brian Cox to participate in such inanity remains baffling – that energizes the film’s humor. But moreover, Super Troopers thrives thanks to its pièce-de-résistance involving a couple of troopers pulling over a speeding car in which the backseat teenage passenger, in an effort to avoid arrest and prosecution, has engulfed a giant bag of marijuana. The bizarre incident that follows is dim-witted goofiness of a virtuosic variety, delivering a hilarious high so powerful that it carries one through quite a bit of ensuing patchiness.

Click Here For Part One, Three, Four & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Nick Schager

DVD Digest for June 10, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 14:00:00 GMT

The run-up to Father’s Day continues with more dad-friendly DVDs, including a handful of the most acclaimed films of 2008 to date.

DVD of the Week: After last week’s wide selection of testosterone-heavy actioners, this week finally brings a DVD for the thinking dad- HBO’s critically-feted seven-part miniseries John Adams. Based on the book by David McCullough and starring Oscar nominees Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney, John Adams is a prestige project through and through. But the big surprise is how exhaustive and complex a portrait of the man and his time this really is. Some highly unpleasant events take place on the way to revolution, and the film doesn’t shy away from this reality. Likewise, in addition to Giamatti and Linney’s accomplished turns as John and Abigail, the film also boasts some note-perfect supporting work from the likes of David Morse as George Washington and Tom Wilkinson as Ben Franklin. As far as founding fathers go, Adams has long taken a backseat in popularity to these two men as well as Thomas Jefferson, but if nothing else, John Adams is invaluable in helping to pin down his importance in the history of this nation.

Other new releases this week include: Doug Liman’s Jumper (Fox, also Blu-Ray); Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman in Meathead’s The Bucket List (Warner, also Blu-Ray); 2007’s Funny Games (Warner), the film so nice Michael Haneke made it twice; Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson in the historical bodice-ripper The Other Boleyn Girl (Sony, also Blu-Ray); Cristian Mungiu’s Palme d’Or winner 4 Months 3 Weeks & 2 Days (IFC Films); the Exquisite Corpse-styled indie thriller The Signal (Magnolia); and of course, the best-reviewed theatrical release of 2008, Larry the Cable Guy in Witless Protection (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray).

In classics on DVD, this week’s big news is Lionsgate’s High Noon Two-Disc Ultimate Collector’s Edition, which brings the guy-movie favorite back to DVD with a number of new features. Included among these are a number of documentaries and featurettes, along with a video of Tex Ritter performing his Oscar-winning song from the film. But if dad’s tastes run more to looking at babelicious European actresses of yore, Lionsgate’s got that covered too, with the Catherine Deneuve 5-Film Collection (including Le Sauvage, Hôtel des Amériques, Manon 70, Le Choc and Fort Saganne) and the Sophia Loren 4-Film Collection (which includes I Girasoli, Carosello Napoletano, Attila, and Madame Sans-Gene).

Finally, being released this week exclusively in Blu-Ray: Broken Trail (Sony), Natural Born Killers (Warner), and The Professionals (Sony).

DVD Digest for April 22, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week, a cinematic master gets the Eclipse treatment, and a viral-marketing-phenom makes its DVD debut.

DVD of the Week: In the past few years, a number of Yasujiro Ozu films have made their way to DVD, but he was so prolific that there are still many films missing, especially from his earlier work. For this reason alone, the arrival Eclipse Series 10: Silent Ozu- Three Family Comedies is cause for celebration. Comprised of three films made between 1931 and 1933, the Silent Ozu box has no extras to speak of (Eclipse doesn't really do extras), but each film features a brand-new score by silent-film composer Donald Sosin, as well as the high-quality transfers we've come to expect from the Criterion family. To date, I've only seen the box's centerpiece film, I Was Born, But..., but that film and the other Ozus I've seen have been so delightful that I have no reservations about recommending the other films- 1933's Passing Fancy and 1931's Tokyo Chorus- as well. Here's hoping that Eclipse continues to do right by Ozu in the years to come. He's certainly worth it.

Releasing today from Criterion itself is Spanish filmmaker Juan Antonio Bardem's seminal, long-overlooked melodrama Death of a Cyclist. The class-oriented of a respected professor whose life goes into freefall when after a hit-and-run accident, the film is at times heavyhanded but always striking and beautifully shot. In addition, the film should provide a fitting introduction for many moviegoers to the charms of leading lady Lucia Bosé. An Italian stunner with screen presence to burn, Bosé was a mainstay of the early films of Michelangelo Antonioni, as well as appearing in work by Buñuel, Fellini, and Marguerite Duras. The DVD also includes a featurette on the life and work of Bardem, but the real story is the film which, like its female lead, is ripe for rediscovery.

Also of note on the classics front is the release of four comedies from Universal's Cinema Classics series. The four films are: the Mae West/Cary Grant vehicle She Done Him Wrong; Billy Wilder's early film The Major and the Minor starring Ginger Rogers and Ray Milland; and two films from director Mitchell Leisen, 1939's Midnight starring Claudette Colbert, and 1937's Easy Living with Jean Arthur. Each film is a gem, but of particular note is Easy Living, perhaps the greatest film written by Preston Sturges before he reigned over Hollywood comedy in the 1940s. And if it's sexy action you want, check out Image's new DVD of the Shaw Brothers cult classic Intimate Confessions of a chinese Courtesan, a movie I'm pretty sure I dreamed one night.

Compared to this week's selection of classics, the new titles can't help but look a little paltry. The big-ticket DVD this week is of course Cloverfield (Paramount), the Matthew Reeves/JJ Abrams rampaging-monster movie. For me, the film was never so much fun as when I first saw the trailer before Transformers, but the DVD should give people a chance to approach the film separated from all the hype. This week also brings a Philip Seymour Hoffman double feature, with Hoffman hitting DVD shelves with Tamara Jenkins' The Savages (Fox)- in which he appears opposite Laura Linney- and his caustic, Oscar-nominated performance in Mike Nichols' Charlie Wilson's War (Universal), which also features mediocre turns by Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts, and a pretty hot scene in which Emily Blunt slinks down the stairs wearing only a man's dress shirt.

In addition, there's a trifecta of indie releases hitting the market today: Andrew Wagner's Starting Out in the Evening (Lionsgate), which garnered awards buzz for the ever-dependable Frank Langella; Paul Schrader's The Walker (ThinkFilm), featuring Woody Harrelson as a too-helpful escort for society women; and Joe Swanberg's Hannah Takes the Stairs (Genius Productions), starring "mumblecore" darling Greta Gerwig. Also worth mentioning are the second season of Friday Night Lights (Universal), J.A. Bayona's supernatural chiller The Orphanage (New Line, also Blu-Ray), and the mostly-ignored Hollywood remake of One Missed Call (Warner, also Blu-Ray). Mind you, the latter is only worth mentioning for the sake of completism, but there you go.

Finally, David Huddleston would like the announce that there are no HD-DVDs hitting the market today. Frankly, he couldn't be happier.

Gary Busey Apologizes to Jennifer Garner, Throws Seacrest Under the Bus

Phil Nugent — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 22:45:00 GMT

High-spirited actor and gonzo icon Gary Busey has apologized for what some regarded as an overenthusiastic introduction to actress Jennifer Garner at last month's Academy Awards, an event that we personally will never be able to link to enough times. Busey, who was himself nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor for the 1978 The Buddy Holly Story (and who, more recently, won the Best Supporting Actor prize at the 2003 DVD Premiere Awards for his work in Slap Shot 2: Breaking the Ice, repeatedly interrupted Ryan Seacrest while Seacrest was conducting interviews on the red carpet for the E! channel, then compounded the offense by giving Laura Linney a peck on the cheek and attempting to climb Garner so that he could nap in her coiffure. In an e-mail released by his clean-up crew, Busey said that he "meant no disrespect to Ms. Jennifer Garner when I met her at the Oscars and apologize if I made her uncomfortable." He added that he hadn't realized at first that there was an interview going on and that he then started to withdraw but, "suddenly Ryan introduced her to me." For the record, we love Gary Busey and heartily endorse his tactic of shifting blame to Ryan Seacrest, so much so that we plan to use it the next time we fall behind in our student loan payments or forget not to look directly at the bank's security camera. But he should always remember: if you're going to hug Jennifer Garner, wear a helmet!

Gary Busey Attempts To Make Out With Jennifer Garner In Public

Peter Smith — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 20:05:00 GMT

Because we here at the Screengrab respect the inestimable refinement of our readership, we normally wouldn't stoop to lowbrow material like this (cough). But the above is the kind of headline we film writers dream of, and we'll be damned if we're going to let it get by. Hit the jump for what's possibly the most awkward red-carpet moment of the year. (Special props to the cameramen for catching Seth Rogen and Jonah Hill gawking in the background.)

Paste Magazine's Art House 100

Phil Nugent — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Paste magazine has published its "Art House Powerhouse 100", devoted to listing "the people behind the movies we love." The feature is self-consciously designed to serve as an alternative to the other "power lists" that such magazines as Vanity Fair and Entertainment Weekly get such a thrill out of assembling, with Paste's list striving to determine, "Who are the power players in the world of quality cinema? What individuals and organizations make intelligent, well-crafted movies and have the profile, financial resources and/or critical esteem to attract discerning audiences? In short, we looked for those at the intersection of art and commerce who make independent film the viable and sustainable industry that we’ve come to enjoy." After that buildup, the magazine proceeds to serve up a list of names that for the most part will not be unfamiliar to many people with a passing interest in high-profile moviemaking a little further off the beaten track than say. Transformers. But if few of them have been starving for media attention, most of them are certainly deserving of a pat on the back. The lists of directors (which includes Martin Scorsese, the Coen brothers, Paul Thomas Anderson, David Lynch, David Cronenberg, Todd Haynes, Tim Burton, Guillermo del Toro, Michael Winterbottom, Stephen Frears, and comeback kid Sidney Lumet) and actors (among them Naomi Watts, Viggo Mortensen, Laura Linney, Forest Whitaker, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Cate Blanchett, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Don Cheadle, Daniel Day-Lewis, Cillian Murphy, Ryan Gosling, Johnny Depp, and Javier Bardem), can be found at the website. The hard copy, available at your local newstand, also tots up noteworthy cinematographers (such as Roger Deakins, the hard-working D.P. on No Country for Old Men, In the Valley of Elah, and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford) and producers, as well as listing the magazine's favorite film festivals.

You Can Count on Her

Phil Nugent — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 19:00:00 GMT

When Laura Linney first began appearing in movies and on TV, she had what the Guardian's Barbara Ellen calls a "patrician quality" often found in stage-trained actresses of a WASPy mien and a "deceptively bare--classically beautiful" face, which seemed fused to a "nice girl" vibe: she played a lot of schoolteachers. Her movie parts started getting bigger with 1994's Congo, in which she wielded a big gun against a marauding horde of albino gorillas while the movie's alleged leading man stood there looking shell shocked, which really wasn't the most unreasonable reaction to the script. Somehow, Linney's career survived the drying up of the brief vogue for killer-gorilla jungle movies, but it may not have been until 2000's You Can Count on Me, where she got to have a cackle fit upon hearing her suddenly seamy love life reflected in a country song on the radio, where she really started to get the chance to stretch out onscreen.

Now, writes Ellen, she has somewhat cornered the market in tense, textured blondes - seemingly unglamorous, delicate as china, but with eyes that spit fire, ice and everything in between. In her current film, The Savages, Linney has probably her best role since You Can Count on Me. Coincidentally or not, both films are brother-and-sister stories, and in the new one, she clearly relishes the chance to lock horns professionally with the hard-rocking Philip Seymour Hoffman. "We're both theatre people," she says of the pairing, "we both grew up in New York, and we're both story-first people. We had a lot of fun." Fun isn't something that you often hear actresses past forty talking about having in Hollywood, where too many actresses spend too many of what might be their prime creative years waiting for a chance to have a role where they get to do something besides say, "Have fun catching the terrorists, dear" to Harrison Ford's departing back and wait to see if maybe they'll be taken hostage so they can have another scene. Linney claims not to let it get her down. " It's really about being realistic. No one is going to be an A-list movie star and make millions of dollars forever; you're just not. But it's also about the fact that I think we're lucky we got to be 40."