The Screengrab : luis bunuel

Screengrab Presents: THE TOP TEN BEST MOVIES OF ALL TIME!!!!! (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 14 May 2009 20:00:00 GMT

As faithful readers already know by now, the End Is Near for this blog...but before we all get Raptured up outta this bitch, your soon-to-be-less-employed-than-usual pals here at the Screengrab figured we’d settle the age-old question of ultimate movie quality once and for all with our own definitive and irrefutable rulings on the subject.

Last week, we determined the Top Ten Worst Atrocities in the History of Cinema...and now, after months of intensive research, legal wrangling, animal testing, sleepless nights and enough partisan debate to make the Coleman-Franken dispute seem like a mere coin-toss, we hereby present our individual and collective picks for THE TOP TEN BEST MOVIES OF ALL TIME!!!!!!

(And...okay, so we cheated a little, kicking things off with an insoluble three-way tie for the #10 spot, starting with...)

10. DAYS OF HEAVEN (1978)

Terrence Malick’s sophomore effort about a love triangle that develops in the 1920 Texas panhandle is a work of pure cinema in which everything about its story, its characters, and its larger concerns is conveyed through overwhelmingly evocative imagery. From piercing cutaways to the natural world, to Linda Manz’s strange, haunting narration, to peerlessly beautiful twilight hour cinematography and Ennio Morricone’s wrenching score, it’s a film whose mournful poeticism casts a lingering spell, and which stands – in this critic’s humble opinion – as the finest feature ever committed to celluloid. (NS)

10. BELLE DE JOUR (1967)

Earlier this year, I sat down and watched Buñuel’s masterpiece Belle de Jour for what must have been the fortieth or so time, and it occurred to me that maybe, just maybe, this story is all a fantasy in the mind of the main character’s husband. If you’ve seen the movie, think about it -- the story is about the virginal Severine (Catherine Deneuve), who plays the elegant wife for husband Jean (Jean Sorel), while harboring (and eventually giving in to) fantasies of debasing herself as a prostitute. Observe the way Jean is always on the sidelines of the story, until the final reel, when he gets dragged into the middle of it. And look at his knowing smirk in the final scene. Now, I have no idea if this reading was something Buñuel intended. But no matter -- Belle de Jour is the kind of movie that invites readings like this one, however strange and far-fetched they might be. Also, it’s got Deneuve at the apex of her icy-hot sex appeal, Michel Piccoli at his most insinuating, plus it actually gets funnier with each subsequent viewing. From an objective point of view, Belle de Jour may not be the best movie ever made, but nuts to that -- it’s my favorite, and that’s good enough for me. (PC)

10. STAR WARS (1977)

During my tenure here at the Screengrab, I’ve rhapsodized endlessly and embarrassingly about my love for the original Star Wars, and now, as Grand Moff Tarkin would say, it will be the last time. But why is it one of the best movies ever? Because, personally, no other film has ever transported me as far and completely from the grip of dull reality into the escapist realms of cinematic possibility. Because, in a general sense, it distilled decades (even centuries) of recycled pop culture into something nobody had ever quite seen before. And while many blame George Lucas (and his buddy Steven Spielberg) for spawning the sort of CGI-infused, ADD-inducing summer blockbusters that led to the Michael Bayification of Hollywood, it should be remembered that Lucas’ original space opera was powered as much by crackerjack storytelling, likeable characters and a sincere joie de vivre as it was by special effects...a lesson clearly absorbed by the best of the new generation of blockbuster auteurs like Jon “Iron Man” Favreau and J.J. “Star Trek” Abrams. (And, finally, one last Star Wars fun fact, for old time’s sake: while double-checking the Internet Movie Database to see if I got the above Tarkin quote right, I unexpectedly discovered that the deformed guy who gives Luke Skywalker a hard time in the Mos Eisley cantina (“He doesn’t like you...I don’t like you either”) is apparently a doctor -- Dr. Cornelius Evazan, to be exact -- though I’m guessing the doctorate was more of an honorary degree, possibly bestowed by Arizona State University). (AO)

9. THE WILD BUNCH (1969)

"A simple story about bad men in changing times" is how Sam Peckinpah summed it up. But it's so much more than that. Pauline Kael said it was "a traumatic poem of violence, with imagery as ambivalent as Goya's" and also that "pouring new wine into the bottle of the Western, Peckinpah explodes the bottle." Westerns had always been mythic stories, morality tales about good and bad without the guiding force of law to keep matters civilized. The Wild Bunch brought a sense of grim reality to the story without losing the mythic quality. Gunfighters weren't good guys living by a code and bad guys living for themselves. Gunfighters didn't color-code into white and black hats. All of them - crooks, thieves, and highwaymen - were amoral, self-serving murderers. If they had a code of honor, it was a situational code, painting themselves in the best light. In the opening scene, the Wild Bunch weren't above using innocent civilians as a smokescreen when making their escape, nor were the railroad's hired guns above shooting through the civilians to get the Bunch. Peckinpah wanted his audience to feel the blood and iron, and he hoped that people would find themselves excited by the bloodlust and marvel at their own excitement and what it says about people. However, he stuck to a relativistic morality throughout the movie: the Bunch were merciless killers, but the railroad's hired guns were scummy desert rats unworthy of the Bunch. The Bunch robbed trains and put guns into the hands of the Mexican warlord Mapache, but their robbery was silent, clever, and cool, and they despised Mapache's base brutality. Considering the alternatives, they were the white hats, and moreover, they sort of knew it. All the arguments between the Bunch's leader Pike Bishop (William Holden) and his lieutenant Dutch Engstrom (Ernest Borgnine) were about what it meant to be honorable, what it meant to take a stand against the greater evil. Time is weighing their arguments down. The 20th century is upon them, and they're barely out of the 18th. They're getting older, slower, and there's no retirement plan for gunfighters. Pike talks about making one last score and then backing off, but Dutch brings him back to reality: "Back off to what?" That's a great question, and there is no answer for it. (HC)

8. SUNSET BOULEVARD (1950)

Even fifty years ago, it seems Hollywood's best days were already behind it. Los Angeles is a city that has been haunted by its past for nearly the entire length of its existence, and Sunset Boulevard is still its quintessential ghost story. Half a century later, Billy Wilder's masterpiece remains the eeriest and most caustic evocation of the Golden Age's twilight ever captured on celluloid. Wilder is often dismissed as a "writer's director" (or worse). It's true that his visual style is a fairly elemental one, but if Wilder's images don't possess the verve of a Kubrick or an Orson Welles, they do exert a cumulative power: William Holden’s cynical screenwriter shot from underneath as he floats lifelessly in the pool, flashbulbs popping behind him; the same pool seen empty and disintegrating from his garage apartment window, and the decaying tennis court beyond it; faded star Norma Desmond rising into the dust illuminated by a projector casting shadows of her former self on the wall; her legendary approach to the camera at the end, as she proclaims herself ready for her close-up. The air of rot and dissolution is almost unbearable. It's difficult to imagine now how shattering Sunset Boulevard must have been back in 1950. Tinseltown has been skewered many times since, in movies as different as Robert Altman's brilliant The Player and Joe Eszterhas's wretched Burn Hollywood Burn. Yet in all this time, no film-about-film has ever approached the dark, glittering genius of Wilder's vision. Even as the movie industry grows more and more appalling, Sunset Boulevard just gets better and better. (SVD)

Click Here For Part Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine & Ten

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Nick Schager, Paul Clark, Hayden Childs, Scott Von Doviak

Reviews By Request: Juliet of the Spirits (1965, Federico Fellini)

Paul Clark — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 19:00:00 GMT

As always, voting for my next Reviews By Request column can be found at the end of this review.

The “late period” films of Federico Fellini are one of the major blind spots in my moviewatching history. I’ve seen nearly all of his earlier works, up to and including the “transitional” work 8 ½, which remains my favorite of his films. However, the only Fellini films I’ve seen after this are Amarcord (which I love) and Satyricon (which I don’t), but I was certainly familiar with these films’ critical reputations, which tend to echo the sentiments expressed by the loudmouthed intellectual in the movie line in Annie Hall.

Having just seen Juliet of the Spirits for the first time, I can’t argue with the opinion that it’s an “indulgent” film, but I’m not sure that’s a bad thing, since it reveals aspects of their maker that his more disciplined films could not. Supposedly, Fellini intended Juliet of the Spirits to be a tribute to his wife and frequent leading lady, Giulietta Masina. If this is the case, it’s a funny sort of tribute. Yes, Juliet (played by Masina) sticks to her principles when her husband cheats on her, and eventually finds escape from their marriage. But for most of the film, she is portrayed as a hapless victim, carried along by the whims of the film- and those of her husband.

Consider the way that she is portrayed visually. Juliet never seems to fit in no matter where she is. From the beginning of the film, when her husband (played by Mario Pisu) hosts an impromptu dinner party, the guests are garishly dressed and glamorous, while Juliet wears a simple dress and a matronly brown wig. This will be a trend throughout the film, as Juliet clashes with her more decadent surroundings. Likewise, throughout the film Fellini accentuates the Masina’s petiteness, often showing her amidst people (even her own mother) who tower over her. In other hands, Juliet’s inability to fit into the film’s world would be a defiant statement, but Fellini’s feelings about it seem to be more complicated than that. One can see that he feels affection for his wife, but he can’t resist being drawn toward the decadence that had become such an integral element of both his life and his work.

And what is one supposed to make of the way Juliet is treated by the film after discovering her husband’s infidelity? A more conventional film might have taken the husband to task for his cheating, but not Fellini, who kept mistresses throughout much of his adult life. Instead, one character after another tells Juliet that in order to win her husband back, she needs to embrace her sexual side- to be more like, say, her buxom, sexually liberated neighbor Suzy, played by Sandra Milo, who by her own admission put in time as one of Fellini’s mistresses. Needless to say, Juliet has some trouble with this advice, especially as it relates to her own Roman Catholic upbringing.

The worldview we see in Juliet of the Spirits is a decidedly pre-feminist one, and one that’s a little hard to stomach. But at the same time, one needs not agree with what a film is saying to appreciate the film itself, and Fellini uses the framework of this story to lay bare his own ideas about marriage, sexuality, and the female gender in general. Because these ideas run so contrary to more “enlightened” points of view that have found their way into most contemporary works of art, Juliet of the Spirits is more thought-provoking than a more politically correct film might have been.

And even if you’re not down with Fellini’s worldview in Juliet of the Spirits, it’s hard to argue with the sheer visual splendor of the film, Fellini’s first in color. Many of world cinema’s greatest filmmakers first made the transition to color during the 1960s- Bergman and Antonioni had already made the switch, with Buñuel and Kurosawa still to come. What these filmmakers had in common is that they didn’t simply make the change for commercial reasons, but treated color as another filmmaking tool to be used wisely. In Juliet of the Spirits, Fellini uses color to create images that would not have had the same impact in black and white, as when he painted the walls red to create unease during a scene in which Juliet visits a mysterious healer. Also striking is the full spectrum of colors found in Suzy’s cavernous home (reminiscent of a fantasy version of a brothel), which contrasts with Juliet’s memories of her Catholic upbringing, which are full of solid shades of red and grey, with innocent white on the children and the almost impossibly dark violet (not black) of the nuns’ robes. Juliet of the Spirits is a feast for the eyes- and, with Nino Rota’s mindbending score, for the ears as well.

In doing research for this review- which must no doubt seem as rambling as the film itself- I came across the following quote from Fellini:

“We don't really know who woman is. She remains in that precise place within man where darkness begins. Talking about women means talking about the darkest part of ourselves, the undeveloped part, the true mystery within… [The] problem for man is to reunite himself with the other half of his being, to find the woman who is right for him-right be she is simply a projection, a mirror of himself. A man can't become whole or free until he has set woman free-his woman. It's his responsibility, not hers. He can't be complete, truly alive until he makes her his sexual companion, and not a slave of libidinous acts or a saint with a halo.”

Perhaps this quotation is the key to what Fellini was attempting with Juliet of the Spirits- not simply translating these ideas into cinematic form, but also struggling to reconcile them with his own weaknesses and deeply-ingrained ideas of what women meant to him in his life. Of course, it’s hard to say what Masina really thought of all this, but that’s part of what makes the movie so darn fascinating, isn’t it?

When coming up with a theme for the next Reviews By Request selection, I kept thinking back to this week's DVD release of The Wrestler and reflected on the fact that I've seen only a handful of movies from the eighties salad days of Wrestler comeback kid Mickey Rourke. So the next Reviews By Request will attempt to remedy this. Some of the titles I've listed below have solid reputations, others not so much, but I haven't seen any of them. That I've seen not only 9 1/2 Weeks but also Wild Orchid (not to mention Double Team) says a lot about me as a moviegoer, but that's a topic for another time. Anyway, which of these should I review next?

Online Surveys & Market Research

Due to a software snafu involving the new polling software, the above poll may be displaying too small to be easily readable, so here are the options in chronological order: Rumble Fish, The Pope of Greenwich Village, Year of the Dragon, Angel Heart, and Johnny Handsome. Hope that helps. And ss always, feel free to sound off in the comments section below. See you in two weeks!

The Rep Report (April 22 -- April 29)

Phil Nugent — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 18:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: An unnamed but prominent runner-up in our recent list of notably unexpected movie reunions, Luis Bunuel's Viridiana (1961) marked the director's homecoming to the country of his birth, Spain, from which he had exiled himself before beginning his movie career rather than live under the fascist dictatorship of Francisco Franco. Bunuel was invited to return and launch his first production made on Spanish soil at a time when Franco, or somebody, was apparently feeling sore about the Generalissimo's international reputation as a stifler of creativity who presided over a country that his regime had sucked dry of all life and spirit. The Spanish Film Board duly okayed the script and sent the finished product off to the Cannes Film Festival, cheerfully oblivious not just to its sacrilegious content but also to the possibility that there just might be a hint of a rebuke to Franco in such details as the title heroine's line, "The weeds have taken over the past 20 years... And beyond the second floor, the house is overrun with spiders."

The movie won the Palm d'Or at Cannes that year, but it was also denounced by the Vatican as an affront to the church. In response, Bunuel shrugged, "I didn’t deliberately set out to be blasphemous, but then Pope John XXIII is a better judge of such things than I am." Franco dismissed all the members of his Film Board and burned every print of the movie that he could get his hands on, and Bunuel had to get along as best he could, making his movies somewhere else on the planet, for the rest of his career. Viridiana wasn't shown again in Spain until 1977, two years after Franco's death, and if you'd been living there, you too would have wanted to give it a while to make sure that the silver bullets really worked. I saw it several years ago in New Orleans, in a theater that was full of Jesuit priests, and all the way through it, those guys laughed their heads off at stuff that I'm guessing I didn't have a thorough enough religious education to appreciate. Then the movie ended and the lights came on, and they scuttled out of there as if were afraid of being caught by their mothers at a porno flick. Starting this Friday, Film Forum brings Viridiana back for one week to see if it still has the power to spook the pious. Buneul's last word on the subject was to declare, famously, that he was "still an atheist, thank God"; Franco, his total life achievements accurately summed up in the words of Chevy Chase, is still dead.

For five days starting tonight, Anthology Film Archives hosts a retrospective of the work of Shirley Clarke, a maverick independent filmmaker whose work dates back to that moment when "independent cinema" in America seemed to be an offshoot of the Beat movement. Clarke's first film, the 1961 The Connection, was based on the Living Theater's production of Jack Gelber's New York play about junk and jazz, with a cast that includes Warren Finnerty, Carl Lee, Roscoe Lee Browne, and Garry Goodrow, as well as an onscreen musical combo that includes Jackie McLean. Clarke followed that up with the j.d. drama The Cool World (1964), doubly valuable today as a time capsule of Harlem, and the verite monologue documentary Portrait of Jason (1967). Anthology is showing them all, as well as some of her lesser-known work, including her final film, a 1985 portrait of Ornette Coleman.

The 8th annual Tribeca Film Festival runs from tonight through May 3. In its earliest years, Tribeca was a sprawling mix of international and indie films and big, glossy Hollywood fare that commanded a lot of attention but seemed in no immediate danger of developing its own coherent identity. Last year they scaled way back and were rewarded for it with a minor breakthrough: the top prize winner, Let the Right One In, emerged as a cult hit and counts as the closest that Tribeca has come to putting its stamp on a emerging success, which is seen by many as the mark of a major festival. This year Tribeca has scaled back even further, which people are hoping will result in a tighter focus. The opening night selection is Woody Allen's Whatever Works.

SAN FRANCICSO: The The San Francisco International Film Festival runs from April 23 to May 7.

Blasphemy Isn't What It Used to Be: Ron Howard and "Angels & Demons"

Phil Nugent — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 15:30:00 GMT

Ron Howard's new movie, Angels & Demons, starring Tom Hanks as symbologist super sleuth Robert Langdon, is a follow-up to their 2006 piece-of-shit movie The Da Vinci Code, which was based on Dan Brown's bestselling 2003 pice-of-shit novel of the same name. (Angels & Demons is actually based on an earlier novel that Brown published in 2000, which marked the first appearance of the Langdon character.) I couldn't quite follow the thread of The Da Vinci Code, but I think it had something to do with clues hidden in the Mona Lisa that Amélie is Jesus Christ's great-great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter. (I think there was also something about how "the Holy Grail", legendary for being Jesus's favorite thing to drink from, was actually his pet name for Mary Magdalene, but that's so unbelievably filthy that I must have imagined it. We are, after all, talking about a movie made by Opie, starring Forrest Gump.) The new movie reportedly has to do with the return of the Illuminati, which (in Brown's conspiracy-fantasy mythology) was murderously wiped out by the Catholic church some three thousand years ago for being too scientific and artistic and progressive and all. As before, the new movie is being threatened with organized protests from Catholic groups who take offense at seeing their church portrayed as Murder, Inc. with funnier hats. Faced with these complaints, Howard has done what any serious religious history scholar would do: he's gone to the Huffington Post to deliver his Sermon on the Mount.

Howard's bete noire is William Donahue of the Catholic League, who, in Howard's words, "writes that I and the people who made this thriller 'do not hide their animus against all things Catholic.'" (Apparently all things Catholic include basic grammar.) "Let me be clear," writes the director of Frost/Nixon: "neither I nor Angels & Demons are anti-Catholic. And let me be a little controversial: I believe Catholics, including most in the hierarchy of the Church, will enjoy the movie for what it is: an exciting mystery, set in the awe-inspiring beauty of Rome. After all, in Angels & Demons, Professor Robert Langdon teams up with the Catholic Church to thwart a vicious attack against the Vatican. What, exactly, is anti-Catholic about that?" As to the details, "Mr. Donohue's booklet accuses us of lying when our movie trailer says the Catholic Church ordered a brutal massacre to silence the Illuminati centuries ago. It would be a lie if we had ever suggested our movie is anything other than a work of fiction (if it were a documentary, our talk of massacres would have referenced the Inquisition or the Crusades)...Mr. Donohue's op-ed [in the New York Daily News] and booklet also suggest that we paint the Church as 'anti-reason.' There is plenty of debate over what the Church did or didn't do with Galileo, but I for one do recognize that the Church did much throughout the ages to encourage and preserve education, the arts and the sciences." As Jesus used to say to Pontius Pilate, passive-aggressive much?

Unmollified by these and other valuable points made by Howard (ranging from "And if fictional movies could never take liberties with reality, then there would have been no Ben-Hur, no Barabbas, The Robe, Gone With The Wind, or Titanic. Not to mention Splash!" to "Even the current 'faith vs. science' debate over embryonic stem cells is briefly depicted in Angels & Demons in a balanced way."), Donahue has struck back in his latest press release: “Dan Brown says in his book that the Illuminati are ‘factual’ and that they were ‘hunted ruthlessly by the Catholic Church.’ In the film’s trailer, Tom Hanks, who plays the protagonist Robert Langdon, says ‘The Catholic Church ordered a brutal massacre to silence them forever.’ Howard concurs: ‘The Illuminati were formed in the 1600s. They were artists and scientists like Galileo and Bernini, whose progressive ideas threatened the Vatican.’ All of this is a lie. The Illuminati were founded in 1776 and were dissolved in 1787. It is obvious that Galileo and Bernini could not possibly have been members: Galileo died in 1647 and Bernini passed away in 1680. More important, the Catholic Church never hunted, much less killed, a single member of the Illuminati. But this hasn’t stopped Brown from asserting that ‘It is a historical fact that the Illuminati vowed vengeance against the Vatican in the 1600s.’" Perhaps sensing how many readers stepped out into the hallway for a smoke while he was rattling off dates, Brown adds, "Moreover, we know from a Canadian priest who hung out with Howard’s crew last summer in Rome (dressed in civilian clothes) just how much they hate Catholicism.” Personally, I have no plans to see Angels & Demons, but I would pay half my body weight in gold bullion to see a movie based on the true-life adventures of an undercover Catholic, dressed in a Canadian priest's idea of "civilian clothes"--I'm picturing Disco Stu with a cross around his neck--who hangs out with Opie and Forrest to listen to them express the true, hateful feelings they have about Catholics when they think all the Pope's children are in the bathroom. ("And the rhythm method--what's that all about!? You look at the size of some of these families, I guess maybe Mel Gibson's had a little trouble finding the backbeat, y'know what I'm saying? Cheese it, here comes Coppola!")

Now, we don't really have a dog in this race. And make no mistake about it, we here at the Screengrab are just crazy about blasphemy and try to encourage it whenever we can. What's discouraging, though, is Howard's good-natured, reasonable tone: yeah, we kind of dis your church's history and make your guys look like nut jobs and gangsters, but we don't mean anything by it! It's just necessary to the plot of a good thriller. What are you saying, that you don't like good thrillers? Go dig Hitchcock up and blow shit at him! Some real moviemakers like Bunuel risked their careers, their standing in the community, and maybe even their lives to make blasphemous movies, and somebody like Howard flirts with it, out of commercial necessity--somebody is going to make movies out of Dan Brown's bullshit--and expects everybody to understand that it doesn't really mean anything to him, so it shouldn't give offense to anyone. I myself am no fan of Oliver Stone's JFK, either as a movie or as an historical argument, but I'll give it this much: I'm willing to believe that the murder of John Kennedy is something that Stone is, or was, genuinely freaked out about. it's understandable that Howard would be baffled and even offended by William Donahue's assertion that he's actually a hater and propagandist against the Catholic church instead of a guy trying to make a buck with a pre-sold property, but if he would open his mind up a little, he might be able to see that, in his way, Donahue is paying him a compliment by suggesting that he's a serious enough man to believe in his own crap. As Al Pacino put it in Dog Day Afternoon, if somebody's going to blow my brains out, I hope it's somebody who does it because he hates my guts, not because it's his job.

Videos of the Day: The Undersea World of Jean Painlevé

Phil Nugent — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 14:30:00 GMT

Happy Earth Day! There are a few ways that you can celebrate while expanding your cinematic vocabulary. One might be to immerse yourself in the work of Jean Painlevé, a member of the Surrealist movement whose fascination with nature, combined with his aesthetic interests, led him to compose a Surrealist "zoological" tract and to serve as "chief ant wranger" on Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali's short film manifesto, Un Chien andalou. Painlevé made hundreds of what might be called nature documentaries, driven by an eye for beauty and a committed search for the unusual. Yesterday, the Criterion Collection released Science Is Fiction, a three-disc collection that brings together 23 of Jean Painlevé's films, along with more than two hours of interviews that he did for TV not long before his death, in 1989, at the age of 96, as well as new soundtrack music recorded by Yo La Tengo. For a taste, check out Painlevé's 1945 short Le Vampire (above), which combines his own film of sealife and vampire bats with footage from F. W. Murnau's great Dracula adaptation Nosferatu, intending an anti-Nazi political message. Below, we see what happens when somebody mates his hypnotically lyrical 1934 sea horse ballet L'Hippocampe with a soundtrack derived from the experimental British band Current 93. Feel free to switch the sound off when the guy starts babbling about spit:

Hello, Dali: Al May Play in Sal in One of Three Planned Biopics

Phil Nugent — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 17:00:00 GMT

Jerome Taylor reports that there are three biopics about Salvador Dali in the works, a perfect storm of competing productions that might make for a much bigger payoff for whoever is the first to get a completed film to market. (Who can forget the great multiple-Truman-Capote-movies dust-up of a few years ago?) The first film to arrive in theaters will probably be Paul Morrison's Little Ashes, which stars Robert Pattison, the vampire hunk from Twilght, as the young Dali, Javier Beltrán as Federico Garcia Lorca, and Matthew McNulty as Luis Bunuel, whose first film, the immortal Surrealist short Un Chien Andalou, was co-directed with Dali and featured a cameo by the artist as a priest. Another film, simply titled Dali, is being planned, by the director Simon West, for a 2010 release and would star Antonio Banderas as the older Dali, alongside his Zorro co-star Catherine Zeta Jones as Dali's wife, Gala. Then there's the chance that we'll get to see the way older Dali played by Al Pacino in a movie based on Dali & I: The Surreal Story, a book by Stan Lauryssens. Lauryssens's book, which has been translated into some thirty languages, had its own scandalous reception when it appeared. Lauryssens, who has written award-winning crime novels, five nonfiction books about the Nazis, and boasted about his expertise at writing and selling "fake interviews" with various Hollywood celebrities, also spent some time in the poky for selling fake Dalis. The book set off fire alarms in Europe for its allegation that Dali himself had effectively authorized the sale of forgeries of his work by setting up an assembly line of "assistants" to create works that he could then decorate with his signature, which amounted to printing money. By the time Dali was in his dotage, Andy Warhol was unapologetically doing pretty much the same thing, with Jeff Koons waiting in the wings; in Warhol's case, his admirers were happy to take the whole thing as some kind of postmodernist gesture and a sardonic comment on the treatment of works of art as high-priced commodities, but even if it was a gesture, Andy still expected people to pay through the nose for the damn things. If Lauryssens's depiction of Dali's operation is accurate, Dali might have been able to talk a pretty good game explaining that he was in charge of a "surreal" parody of the art world as just another industry. Of course, by that time, Dali had long since been read out of the Surrealist movement by his former brothers, who, appalled at what they saw as his selling out and turning himself into a profitable living cartoon of a wacky artist, referred to him by the anagrammatic nickname "Avida Dollars."

Dali himself had one foot in Hollywood for much of his life, engaging in publicity stunts such as presenting Harpo Marx with a "surreal" harp strung with barbed wire and cutlery, and designing the dream sequence for Hitchcock's analytic mystery Spelllbound. (That ended up being pretty much a publicity stunt, too; Hitchcock shot some twenty minutes of film based on the material Dali gave him, but the movie's producer, David Selznick, thought that it just slowed the picture down and cut it back to a few fragments.) He also spent eight months in 1945 working on an animated short for Walt Disney; it never got beyond am 18-minute test reel in Dali's and Disney's lifetimes, but the 2003 Destino was based on Dali's and Disney artist John Hench's storyboards. Back in his Hollywood-fake-journalist days, Laurysssens embroidered on that factoid and "made up a great story about how he and Disney were working on a sort of pornographic cartoon together.” Taylor writes that "That story caught the attention of a shady investment group in Belgium who assumed Lauryssens was a Dali expert and hired him as a fine art dealer. So, at just 25, Lauryssens found himself flying around Europe buying scores of Dali paintings despite having absolutely no prior experience in the world of fine art." According to Lauryssens, “everyone knew that Dali needed close to half a million dollars a month to fund his lavish lifestyle,” which Lauryssens likens to that of "a mini-maharajah,” and fake Dalis sold better by then than Dali's own later works because his "assistants" had a better handle on how to festoon the works with such familiar Dali "trademarks" as "the melting clocks." Of course, any Hollywood interest in Dali now will be based not on any debates over the degree to which he was an artist or a con man but on how sensational his life was, and here, Lauryssens, who is set to be played in the movie by Cillian Murphy, is confident that a film based on his book would qualify as a humdinger. Taylor notes that the book "portrayed the painter and his wife Gala as two voraciously charged lovers who regularly indulged in orgies with famous actresses". But by the last time Lauryssens laid eyes on him, Dali "was balding, his stomach swollen 'and his right arm shook from shoulder to wrist'." Lauryssens says that the movie is all set to go as soon as Pacino signs on. The trick there may be postponing Al's realization that he would be playing the fat old bald guy with the tremor who gets to spend his time on screen flashing back to when Cillian Murphy was involved in all those cool orgies.

DVD Digest for February 10, 2009

Paul Clark — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 15:00:00 GMT

With St. Valentine’s Day less than a week away, you’d think studios would start rolling out some of their romantic classics on DVD. But I’m seeing very little of that this week, unless of course your idea of romance is vastly different than mine…

DVDs of the Week: But then, for me, nothing says romance like a pair of movies from surrealist master Luis Bunuel. This week brings two of his favorites, The Exterminating Angel and Simon of the Desert, courtesy of the folks at Criterion. The Exterminating Angel is the known quantity for me, a wicked satire of bourgeois manners, in which a group of upper-crusters finds itself unable to leave following a dinner party, which brings them no end of trouble. Simon, Bunuel’s telling of the story of an ascetic who stood atop a remote pillar to prove his love for God, is one I’ve yet to see (do I smell a future Reviews By Request?), but its DVD release is no less noteworthy. The films, made during Bunuel’s sojourn in Mexico, have been given the deluxe Criterion treatment, with new transfers, documentaries, new interviews with actress Sylvia Pinal and others, and more.

Other noteworthy this week is Janus’ Essential Art House: Volume 2, which includes The 400 Blows, Black Orpheus, Pygmalion, La Strada, Ikiru, and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp in single-disc editions, also available separately. In addition, Lionsgate is releasing new editions of the Wallace and Gromit short films, A Close Shave, A Grand Day Out and The Wrong Trousers. Finally- and I can’t in good conscience call this a classic, though it’s not new- Universal’s got the “Extreme Edition” of the final film from the great Raul Julia, Street Fighter (also Blu-Ray). So if you enjoy things that suck, set aside money for that one.

If newer movies are more your speed, this week’s recent releases coming to DVD include: Courtney Hunt’s double Oscar nominee Frozen River (Sony, also Blu-Ray); Kevin Smith’s Zack and Miri Make a Porno (Genius Products; Samuel L. Jackson and the late Bernie Mac in Soul Men (Genius Products); Richard Gere and Diane Lane in Nights in Rodanthe (Warner, also Blu-Ray); and a pair of very different showbiz satires, Barry Levinson’s What Just Happened? (Magnolia), and Bruce Campbell directing Bruce Campbell in My Name Is Bruce (Image, also Blu-Ray). Also this week, a quartet of curious films from fascinating filmmakers: Oliver Stone’s W. (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray); Spike Lee’s WW2 drama Miracle at St. Anna (Buena Vista, also Blu-Ray); Fernando Meirelles’ Blindness (Buena Vista); and Eric Rohmer’s The Romance of Astrea and Celadon (E1 Entertainment Distribution), allegedly the master’s final film. Oddly enough, the Rohmer looks to be the most romantic movie in this week’s column. Don’t know if your Dirty Dancing-loving special lady would go for it though…

Finally, a pretty action-packed and bloody lineup of Blu-Ray only releases this week: Martin Scorsese’s classic Raging Bull (MGM); David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence (Warner); a pair of John Grisham adaptations, A Time to Kill and The Pelican Brief (both Warner); a double feature starring The Rock, Doom (Universal) and The Rundown (Universal); and two of Onion AV Club critic Scott Tobias’ New Cult Canon picks, Donnie Darko (Fox) and The Boondock Saints (Fox). Also, Milos Forman’s Amadeus: The Director’s Cut (Warner) and the table-tennis comedy Ping Pong Playa (Image).

Oh, and Pretty Woman (Disney).

Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Marx Brothers

Phil Nugent — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 16:00:00 GMT

In a provocative piece in the Guardian, Danny Leigh uses the ongoing "Punk 'n Pie" program at BAM to ask, where are the great punk movies? At BAM, as in many a retrospective or critical study, punk movies are movies that deal with punk music as a subject, whether as performance movies or biopics or documentaries or anthropological field trips, or movies that are populated by celebrities and hangers-on from the "scene", such as the now-forgotten Downtown detritus cranked out by '80s filmmakers such as Beth B. and Scott B. and the young Susan Seidelman. Leigh writes that "quite apart from the questionable merits of the films concerned, I've always thought there was something grimly pedestrian about the way such a firecracker cultural moment should be represented by something so drab as a canon at all. And yet wheeled out every so often for an audience of ebbing nostalgiacs are the same old dusty reels, those already mentioned joined by or interchanged with the grim Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle, cosy Sex Pistols doc The Filth and the Fury, and/or the various filmic portraits of the Clash, principally the near-unwatchable curate's egg Rude Boy and the Joe Strummer tribute The Future Is Unwritten."

Mind you, it was ever thus with rock music, which in its first flush of exploitable excitement was packaged in a shelf's load of movies that collected performances ranging from the leading acts of the time, bound together with the flimsiest of connective tissue. To see what this kind of movie might look like if it were good--which is to say, if it were made by people who lacked contempt for the music and its audience--the world would have to wait for 1978's American Hot Wax, made at a time when its biggest names, including Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Screamin' Jay Hawkins, were, in rock 'n' roll terms, practically senile. (In fact, one of the best ways to tell these movies apart from those made by the greatest punk bands is that the punks, coming along after the official invention of pop culture, tended to get involved with projects that were self-consciously, conceptually screwy. Not content to make a cheesy high school musical for producer Roger Corman, the Ramones agreed to make what was supposed to be a cheeky put-on of a cheesy high school musical for producer Roger Corman, though independent taste tests found it hard to tell it apart from the real, semi-spoofy thing. The idea behind Rude Boy, featuring the more politically minded the Clash, seems to have been to let the guys the fans wanted to see play second fiddle to uncharismatic roadie Ray Gange, the designated stand-in for all the little people out there to whom the band's music means so much. As the hilarious but seemingly well-intended Wikipedia entry for Gange notes, "In his one and only well-known film appearance, Gange displayed a variety of expressions, although some have pointed out that they all look somewhat similar to the one at the start of the film which shows him waking up and looking out the window.")

There are some great rock performance films, but it's hard not to feel a special affectionate respect for those movies that somehow come across as "rock movies" to their core because they seem to embody something essential to the spirit of the music, even if the music in the movies scarcely captures its essence. Thus Walter Hill's The Warriors is a better "rock movie" than Jailhouse Rock, even if nobody in his right mind thinks that Arnold McCullers's version of "Nowhere to Run" deserves to shine the shoes of Martha and the Vandellas'. And the '50s mutli-performer rock film that holds up best today is Frank Tashlin's The Girl Can't Help It, not because Tashlin was especially sympathetic to the music but because a man who'd cut his teeth putting Bugs Bunny and Jerry Lewis through their paces had a built-in appreciation of that which was not culturally respectable. (Truth be told, the singing cast member who seems to elicit the highest degree of respect from the director is Julie London, who was more likely to be recruited by NASA than she is to ever be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.) Leigh argues that "if a film has any aspiration at all to being 'punk' then it cannot be about a band - any more than surrealist cinema can be represented only by biopics of Dalí and Breton...Indeed, it's one of the stranger aspects of British punk films that, if it's debatable whether any ever had anything genuinely punk about them, it's certain that none ever captured the sense of punk. Not punk as a mere footnote in the history of guitar rock, but punk as a democratic shifting underfoot best expressed by the misfits in the audience." As examples of films that do catch hold of that snarling spirit, Leigh nominates the Marx Brothers circa Horse Feathers (featuring Groucho's anarchist anthem "Whatever It Is, I'm Against It"), Dennis Hopper's Out of the Blue (which takes its title from Neil Young's tribute to Johnny Rotten, and which a not-yet-detoxed Hopper took over directing after being cast as the heroine's daughter), "the anti-corporate self-immolation of the Monkees' Head; the volatile brevity of Punch Drunk Love and the outsider portraiture of John Sayles' The Brother from Another Planet." He also drops the name of Eraerhead, and there he will get no argument from me.

Punk shares affinities with the concept of "termite art" championed by the late Manny Farber, and traces of the stuff itself can be found in many of his favorites, from the ratty, volatile action films of such directors as Don Siegel and Sam Fuller to the art-conscious apocalypse of Godard's Weekend, which suggests both the splenetic fury of bands such as the Pistols and the icier, critical-intellectual stance of Gang of Four and Wire. (There are echoes of the latter approach in both Alan Clarke's Elephant and more recent films by Gus Van Sant and Todd Haynes.) The Ramones recognized Todd Browning's Freaks as kindred spirits, leading the way to the pre-multiplex films of John Waters and also to Night of the Living Dead, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Re-Animator, and all those midnight flicks that were born with one foot in the art house and one in the gutbucket. And of course the aforementioned Luis Bunuel anticipated punk both with the Surrealist shock effects of his earliest work and his unflinching depiction of those clinging to the bottom of society in such films as Los Olvidados. Although a movie that seems punk to its core still comes along every so often--Matthew Bright's Freeway leaps to mind--it's generally easier to think of movies that anticipate the movement than movies made since 1976 or so that reflect its ideals, probably because nothing kills the spirit quicker than deliberately straining to do it justice.

The case of Alex Cox, who probably worked as hard to create a punk cinema as any director working in the last twenty-five years or so, may be instructive. In his first feature, the 1984 Repo Man, he delivered the ultimate sick joke of Los Angeles punk, complete with a self-parodying appearance by the Circle Jerks and a tossed-off homage to Kiss Me Deadly. In Straight to Hell and Walker, he exposed the connections between punk filmmaking and the dusty fever dreams of Sergio Leone and the Sam Peckinpah of Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, a director who never saw a scene of blood-soaked carnage that he didn't figure could be improved with just a few more buzzing flies. But when Cox set out to deliberately recreate the hallelujah days of British punk in Sid and Nancy, he made a soft, nostalgic, dishonestly self-pitying film with speeches about the music's importance and Gary Oldman's sweetly sleepy, harmless Sid Vicious. His closest American counterpart may be Penelope Spheeris, whose Decline of Western Civilization documentaries had a sharp, smart edge entirely missing from her attempts to take punk mainstream in such films as Suburbia (1984), a standard-issue misunderstood youth film with a Mohawk, and the highly regrettable Dudes (1987), which set some kind of record for toxic obnoxiousness just by sticking Jon Cryer and Flea in the same film frame. Part of the thrill of punk is that it tends to pop its head out when and where you least expect it. Well, not literally where you absolutely least expect it, because there's not a lot of it in Spheeris's 1994 version of The Little Rascals.

The Screengrab Holiday Special: Movies We’re Thankful For (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 16:30:00 GMT

PAUL CLARK IS THANKFUL FOR:

BETTY BLUE (1986)

It would be a mistake for me to trace the birth of my love for movies to one film, and if I was foolish enough to do so, a better candidate would be something like Pulp Fiction. But while Tarantino pushed me down the road of cinephilia, I was still a sheltered suburban high schooler for whom subtitled movies were still, well, foreign. So I suppose it makes sense that my first experience with French cinema was motivated by the same factor that has led generations of curious moviegoers to the arthouses and dusty “foreign” shelves at the video store: sex. “Check this one out,” said the pierced twentysomething guy behind the counter to me and my pack of renting buds. “It’s French -- you know what that means.” And in the course of the evening, if anyone didn’t know what that meant, they would soon be educated. It wasn’t just the subtitles or the sexuality though -- Betty Blue introduced me to the sort of woman I’d never seen before in a movie. As played by Beatrice Dalle, Betty was a stark contrast to the teenage girls who mostly snubbed me throughout my high school years -- she was a feral life force, fiercely carnal, both sexy and more than a little scary. But even more than that, Betty Blue was the gateway drug that got me hooked on French cinema, leading me to Truffaut, Renoir, Godard, and all my auteurial pals. Not bad for a movie I watched primarily to see some tits.

BELLE DU JOUR (1967)

Every movie lover has that one movie that speaks to him in ways that defy explanation, and that causes him to cling to it and defend it like a lioness defends her cubs. For me, it’s Luis Bunuel’s late-period masterpiece. Why, you ask? Part of it is no doubt the eternal allure of Catherine Deneuve -- still my favorite actress and movie star -- in the role that practically defined her on- and offscreen persona from that point forward. But Deneuve aside, there’s the film itself, an enigmatic puzzle-box of dreams, fantasies and fetishes that refuses to let itself be pinned down. I must have watched Belle de Jour at least fifty times over the years, and each time something new pops out at me. For one thing, it gets a whole lot funnier the more you watch it, especially the scenes involving Deneuve and the ever-lecherous Michel Piccoli. But most of all, I guess I love how slippery the character of Severine is -- unlike most filmmakers, who boil down their characters to a handful of defining events and motivations, it’s never quite clear what drives Severine, and the extensive flashbacks and fantasy sequences bait us with the possibility of an answer before pushing us away again, confounding us. In the end, it’s nothing but a tease, but as any successful tease can tell you, that’s what keeps ‘em coming back for more.

THE SCARECROW (1920)

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Part 3:

If I have a favorite filmmaker, it’s Buster Keaton, whose films have brought me more pure pleasure than any other director’s. Of course, his features are magnificent -- especially The General, Sherlock Jr. and Seven Chances -- and the feature form allowed him to sustain his filmmaking brilliance in a way that has set an impossibly high bar for future generations (so far, only Tati has managed to vault it, though Jerry Lewis came close once or twice). However, for pure laughs, give me his short films any day. The lunacy of One Week and the athleticism of Neighbors have their defenders, but for me, it doesn’t get any better than The Scarecrow, which begins with an uproarious scene in a house filled with sight gags and just gets more blissfully inspired from there, wrapping up in a scant twenty minutes. There’s a reason why The Scarecrow has become my most dependable cinematic cure-all -- for me, no other movie can turn around a crappy day faster or more reliably than this one. But don’t take my word for it -- thanks to the magic of YouTube, the entire short can be viewed above.

THE FILMS OF DON HERTZFELDT

It was back in 2005 that I had my first Don Hertzfeldt experience. I headed to the local theatre to watch the first installment of The Animation Show, and sometime during the Hertzfeldt-directed introductory short -- probably around the “Egg!” “Egg!” “Flower!” “Egg!” bit -- it hit me like a slap in the face. “This guy is a stone cold genius,” I thought. And nothing I’ve seen since has dissuaded me from that opinion. Naturally, I love his early work -- the twisted angst of Ah, L’Amour, the tentative dating saga Lily and Jim, the gloriously sick joke of Billy’s Balloon. But Hertzfeldt, to his credit, has never rested on his laurels. Rejected is a blast to be sure -- nominating it for Best Animated Short has to be one of the coolest things the Academy has ever done -- but the incendiary chaos of its final minutes pointed the way to the more experimental films that were to come. And Hertzfeldt hasn’t looked back, first tackling The Meaning of Life, then turning inward with the profound, Raymond Carver-esque Everything Will Be OK. After seeing the latter film, I wrote, “against all odds, Hertzfeldt just gets deeper and better with every film. I'm almost afraid of his next movie.” I only hope that his latest, I Am So Proud of You, makes it to Columbus sooner rather than later to scare the proverbial pants off me.

THE COLUMBUS MOVIEGOING SCENE

For most Columbus residents, Ohio State football casts a long shadow over the local scene. Yet growing up in the suburbs has made me better-equipped to appreciate the city’s more cultured side. For one thing, where I grew up I had to drive for over an hour to attend a movie theatre that played subtitled films. So I’m thankful that I have several in town now, presenting me with a number of tantalizing cinematic possibilities. All right, so maybe we don’t get the artsy stuff until weeks or even months after it opens in New York City. And fine, our local arthouse situation has become somewhat tenuous of late (here’s hoping that the Grandview Theatre can re-emerge better than ever next spring). But by gum, there’s still a lot to love about going to movies in Columbus. There’s the Horror and Sci-Fi Marathons which I’ve written about on innumerable occasions, giving geeks from miles around a chance to converge on Cowtown twice a year. But most of all, there’s the Wexner Center, an invaluable resource to the artistically-minded moviegoer. Not only can I catch up on the latest works from the masters of world cinema, but the Wex also plays plenty of classics, both in its theatre (equipped with the city’s only working 70mm projector) and occasionally in the galleries, where I’ve recently been haunting the Warhol exhibition. I’m still waiting for the day when Columbus takes its rightful place as the Austin of the North, but until that happens, what we’ve got now will do quite nicely, thank you very much.

Click Here For More Thanks From Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce & Sarah Clyne Sundberg

Contributor: Paul Clark

Fitting Farewells: The Top Ten Great Final Films (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 20:30:00 GMT

Desmond Llewelyn, THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH (1999)

Despite a pretty decent theme song, The World Is Not Enough hardly qualifies as a great film (or even a particularly great Bond film), but it earns a spot on this list for one perfect scene. Desmond Llewelyn first appeared as the cranky go-to guy for state-of-the-art British spy paraphernalia in 1963’s From Russia With Love and returned in every subsequent 007 installment (except for 1973’s Live and Let Die) thereafter, outlasting Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore and Timothy Dalton before finally teaming with Pierce Brosnan for three late ‘90s adventures. In his final big screen appearance, the aging Q is seen schooling his protégé (and eventual replacement) R, played by John Cleese, before disappearing from view with the classic exit line, “Never let them see you bleed, and always have an escape plan.” Sadly, Llewelyn died shortly after the production wrapped, not of old age (he was 85), but in a car crash, on his way home to his beloved wife of 61 years after dinner with a friend...not, as my dad pointed out, the worst way to go, especially after spending your life as a beloved cinema icon (who once said he’d play his signature role “as long as the producers want me and the Almighty doesn't").

Robert Mitchum in DEAD MAN (1996)

Most of Robert Mitchum's contemporaries from the Golden Age made their onscreen farewells as frail shadows of their former selves (as we'll explore in-depth next week). Not Big Bad Bob. There could be no greater contrast between the classic Hollywood tough guys and the man-children of today's cinema than Mitchum's brief scene with Johnny Depp near the beginning of Dead Man. Even pushing 80, Mitchum looks like he could snap Depp in half like a breadstick. As John Dickinson, owner of a steelworks in the Old West town of Machine, Mitchum has a mane of white hair, an ever-present shotgun, and a life-sized self-portrait lurking behind him as if he is already in the process of passing into legend. When he hires a band of bounty hunters to track down Depp's William Blake, he can hardly bring himself to acknowledge their existence, instead addressing his initial remarks to the stuffed grizzly bear mounted in the corner of his office. It's as if he can only relate to the one other larger than life creature in the room.

THAT OBSCURE OBJECT OF DESIRE (1977)

Born in 1977, the legendary great director and provocateur Luis Bunuel cashed out with this minor classic, in which the rage and audience-baiting tricks of his early work seemed to have been replaced by a serene but sly playfulness. He gives the impression here that he's just enjoying the company of one of his favorite actors (Fernando Rey) and a couple of beautiful women (Carole Bouquet and Ángela Molina) as he uses them to jauntily illustrate his story about a gentleman who is driven half mad with frustration by a young woman who alternately invites and repels his advances. (The women is played by both of the lead actresses; a great deal of ink has been spent by critics speculating on what this device means, though it could have been something as simple as Bouquet having quit or been fired from the production and Bunuel deciding that he didn't feel like reshooting her scenes.) Having enjoyed one final round of good reviews and hossanahs, Bunuel settled in for a few years of drinking, studying insects, and working on his autobiography, My Last Sigh, which appeared not long before his death in 1983.

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

Click here for Part One and Part Three

Crispin Glover Requires Cash, Sushi

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 20:00:00 GMT

A few months ago I was a bit startled to emerge from a movie at the world famous Alamo Drafthouse in downtown Austin to find Crispin Glover chatting in seemingly amiable fashion with a few folks in the lobby. It took me a second to remember that the Alamo was hosting a screening of Glover’s latest opus, What Is It? It occurred to me that it must sometimes be a little awkward for whoever is assigned to tend to the needs of a, shall we say, unusual guest like Mr. Glover, but for at least that passing moment, he didn’t seem particularly inclined to kick anyone in the face.

I was reminded of that night when reading about Glover’s recent appearance at Chandler Cinemas in Phoenix. "For $18, it's a very long night," midnight movie hostess Andrea Beesley-Brown told Stephen Lemons of the Phoenix New Times. "You get your money's worth of Crispin. You get to meet him and get your freaky photo with him. He'll sign stuff. It's a good value for the patron." That’s swell for Glover fans, but not so swell for Beesley-Brown and the theater. “The lion's share of the take went to Glover — $14 out of the $18 ticket price, and Glover's food, in-town travel, and sundry expenses were covered by the event's promoters. Glover required a regular diet of sushi, and had the promoters man his merchandise booth and police the crowd for possible bootleggers filming his surreal, Luis Buñuel-esque film with smuggled-in camcorders. There is but one 35mm print of the film, as Glover has opted not to release it on DVD. So piracy issues are a constant concern to the bizarre star.”

That doesn’t sound so unusual considering the outrageous demands we’ve seen in contract riders posted on the Smoking Gun over the years, but it gets worse. Glover demanded to be paid in cash, despite the fact “that many of the tickets had been sold online through a service that paid the promoters only after the fact… ‘He wanted it in all the nice, new bills because he takes his money to the Czech Republic, where he has land or a castle or something,’ Beesley-Brown claimed he told her. ‘Apparently, he has to take all the nice bills over there because the Czechs won't take ripped bills.’”

Glover also claimed the theater damaged his print and demanded restitution. When contacted, the actor responded with his own version of the story. A series of emails documenting the whole chain of events from both sides can be found here, for those with an in-depth interest in peculiar quasi-celebrity behavior.

Related:
Portrait of the Artist as a McFly
What It Is: The Mind of Crispin Glover

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.