The Screengrab : magnolia

Phil's Film Faves, Part Two

Phil Nugent — Tue, 26 May 2009 19:00:00 GMT

STOP MAKING SENSE (1984) & SOMETHING WILD (1986)

Jonathan Demme's movies were essential to my having survived the 1980s. I had the closest thing I've ever had to a religious experience during the week when I saw Stop Making Sense five times; I've never seen another movie, including dance films and martial arts flicks, that conveyed to me so much of the pleasure of physicality, of moving your body, and there was something about seeing all those people joining their skills together and losing themselves in the shared experience of being simultaneously brainy, goofy, and hot that suggested everything I wanted to get, and never got, from college. The mixed-tape road trip of Something Wild, where the wild weekend gives way to a trial by fire that leaves the hero and heroine stronger, was everything I wanted out of the rest of life, including the handcuffs and the used-car-salesman cameo by John Waters.

RE-ANIMATOR (1985)

I've always loved horror movies, I've always loved comedy, and I've always loved the idea of comic horror midnight movies that go just far enough in the direction oftoo far. Maybe if more movies that light out in this direction got it right, it would matter less to me that Stuart Gordon got this one just right. But most of them don't.

DUCK SOUP (1933)

What I just said about midnight movies? It goes double for crackhouse-rat comedy.

SONGWRITER (1984)

This movie, starring Willie Nelson and Rip Torn, written by Bud Shrake, and directed by Alan Rudolph during those three weeks a decade when his meds are working, captures the spirit and flavor of Texas hipsterdom as it has always come across in the best of Nelson's music, Torn's acting, and Shrake's writing, and that's about as hip as things get in the South. I myself, a product of the Louisiana/Mississippi border, have spent about a month total in Texas my whole life, but am not above resorting to a contact high.

BEFORE SUNRISE (1995)

Can we talk? I don't get girls. Never have, never will. I miss signals, I misread situations, I don't know...I just don't get girls, okay? And if I may presume to speak for the losers of the world for a second, being one of those people who doesn't get anywhere with other people in that way can sometimes make it a sobering experience to sit in the dark watching a lot of movies in which couple effortlessly hook up. But if I ever saw a movie in which my own fantasy of the best way you could hook up with somebody, this is probably it. Two nice, smart people just run into each other, take a chance, and for as long as the movie is running, it pays off, only to end with a cliffhanger. The director, Richard Linklater, later resolved things with his sequel, Before Sunset, and I like it fine, but I think I may have enjoyed the nine intervening years of wondering even more.

I met Linklater once, not that he would remember. It was at a festival where he was showing his first movie, Slacker, and someone tried to introduce the two of us, and I actually, fairly elaborately snubbed him, because I'd heard about--hadn't seen--his movie and thought it sounded like a pile of shit. After snubbing him (and mortifying the person trying to make the introductions(, I walked away invisibly pinning a medal to my chest, and the last time I looked back at Linklater, he was smiling at me in a very nice way that I may only imagine seemed to say, "Gee, before I made a movie, this fellow would be one of the biggest jackasses I've ever met, but now, he wouldn't even make my personal top 500!" Maybe I don't deserve to get girls.

MAGNOLIA (1999)

I could get very personal here too, but I'll just say that I saw this movie at a moment when I very badly needed to see this movie. It is, of course, the movie that, of all P. T. Anderson's works, is the one most likely to get a shoe thrown at you if you sing its praises before a mixed audience. Both these facts probably have something to do with the fact that, while there are other movies of Anderson's that I think are better, his having made this one is the reason I'd be happy to take a bullet for him.

In Other Blogs: The Top 25 L.A. Movies

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 17:00:00 GMT

The L.A. Times recently published their list of the 25 Best L.A. Films of the Past 25 Years. Naturally, some of the choices proved controversial (a lot of folks have trouble with the selection of Jackie Brown over Pulp Fiction, for instance), but Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule thinks it’s a decent list. “There were only eight, perhaps nine instances where I felt like the choices could have been replaced, by another film in the director’s filmography, or by another similarly themed film, or just by another movie to replace one that just shouldn't be there at all. For example, I can certainly understand why Boogie Nights is on the list, but it’s ultimately too diffuse and far more conventional than its electric style would suggest. I much prefer P.T. Anderson’s Magnolia (1999), a high-wire act in which Anderson gets more directly in touch with his inner Altman and dashes all concerns over whether anyone’s having a good time or not, planting Old Testament visual clues that subliminally lay the groundwork for that shocking rain of frogs. (And speaking of Altman, while I'm not the biggest fan of The Player, I was far happier to see it representing the great director here rather than the dour and sour Short Cuts.)”

The Toronto International Film Festival kicked off yesterday, and Spoutblog has the scoop on the film Paris Hilton doesn’t want you to see. “Paris Hilton and her team have successfully pressured the Toronto International Film Festival into canceling all but one screening of Adria Petty’s Paris, Not France, a documentary about the celebrity heiress which ‘attempts to explore the Paris phenomenon and how it defines this moment in culture’ and is also ‘modeled after the 1960s it-girl film Darling.’ Though the film’s TIFF info page still lists three public screenings, TIFF documentary programmer Thom Powers confirmed to me that Paris will screen only once at the festival. ‘From my standpoint, of course, I wish we could do additional screenings,’ Powers told me in an email. ‘But this is certainly a better option than not showing the film at all.’… As Steven Zeitchik joked when he first blogged about this, ‘the mind dances at what kind of footage can be seen so newly shameful to Paris Hilton, the enfant teribles whose entire reputation is based on shamelesness.’”

Cinematical is also on the scene in Toronto, and they’ve had a look at The Brothers Bloom. “Long awaited in the wake of his 2005 debut Brick, Rian Johnson's The Brothers Bloom is a magic trick of a film; the second it's over, you want to see it again so you can try to catch how you were tricked, but you also want to see it again so you can return to the joy and wonder of being wrapped up in the nimble, deck-shuffling hands of a born showman. Watching it at first, some of The Brothers Bloom's creative and thematic elements seem like they're on loan from Paul Thomas Anderson (opening narration by Ricky Jay, pop-whiz-bang camera work, the troubled-but-tender relationship between the two brothers) while others feel as if they've been cribbed from Wes Anderson (deadpan confessions, whimsical set design, a parallel-universe setting where people still travel to Europe by steamship). The truth is, as much as The Brothers Bloom may feel like it's cribbing from other films at first, this is Rian Johnson's movie, and even if my more dreary and discerning critical faculties told me the final act goes on, perhaps, a beat too long, my inner moviegoer was sitting bolt upright, smiling, bright-eyed and carried away.”

At Some Came Running, Glenn Kenny makes an interesting connection between Road House and a David Lynch movie. No, not that Road House. “The terrifying physical contrast between the behemoth and a very delicate woman brought to mind a scene from David Lynch's under-appreciated (to my mind, at least) 1992 Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. This scene, too, is set in a roadhouse of sorts—the back room of the Bang Bang Bar, which actually, if one line of dialogue is to be believed, is located on the Canadian side of the Canada/U.S. border the structure sits on. As it happens, the road house of Negulsco's film is located near the Canadian border; this turns into a significant plot point once Lily and Pete are trying to escape from the psychotic Jefty, played by Richard Widmark with his then-trademark tetchy intensity… I wonder if Lynch had ever seen Negulsco's film. Some shards of it, it seems, lodged their way into the world of Twin Peaks. The road house as portrayed in the '48 picture is a piece of bygone mid-century Americana that I've always found fascinating—it looks way fun. It's got a bar, a restaurant, a sporting-goods store, and a bowling alley!”

And in List-o-Mania this week, Geekdad weighs in with 10 Movies Needing a Muppet Remake. This guy has put way too much thought into this. “Casablanca - The initial temptation is to cast Kermit as Rick, but I think Kermit is better as the utterly noble Victor Laszlo, with Miss Piggy as Ilsa by his side. Gonzo is much better as Rick, with his internal, and external, conflict between love, revenge, and the right thing to do. Rowlf is Sam, for who else could be? Captain Renault is a tough part to play, but I think Fozzie has the right cavalier attitude for the role.”

Morning Deal Report: Palms Are Burning

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Robert Altman couldn’t have known when he directed Short Cuts in 1993 that he was inventing a whole new genre. I don’t know if there’s a name for it – “405 cinema,” perhaps, or “Valleysploitation” – but you know what I’m talking about. It’s the genre that reveals insights into the human condition through intersecting stories set in Los Angeles. Crash, Magnolia, the recent Garden Party – there’s a whole lot of intersecting happening out there in L.A. and there’s soon to be more. Variety reports that “Disturbia scribe Christopher Landon will make his directorial debut with the indie dark comedy Burning Palms, which he penned. What's described as a subversive tale interlaces five stories set in Los Angeles, where no taboo is left unexplored as each character careens toward a dark and often comic fate.” It’s funny, I lived in L.A. for five years and finally left because there just wasn’t enough intersecting going on for my liking.

Doctor Who may be coming to the big screen, according to new show runner Steven Moffat. The Hollywood Reporter quotes Moffat as saying “It would be good to see it in the cinema so long as it is great and fantastic.” Kind of hard to argue with that, I guess.

And in news someone besides me might care about, Audrey Tautou will star in biopic of Coco Chanel for Warner Bros. Variety reports Coco Avant Chanel “will feature dresses from the Chanel collection. Karl Lagerfeld, art director of the House of Chanel, will supervise the re-creation of costumes and accessories.”

Related:
Screengrab Review: "Garden Party"
P.T.A. Report

Screengrab Review: "Garden Party"

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 17:45:00 GMT

Garden Party, opening in limited release next week, is being touted as the arrival of a hot new talent in the person of writer/director Jason Freeland. In fact, though, Freeland's first film was an entire decade ago, a somewhat bewildering James Ellroy adaptation called Brown's Requiem. His new film, though, with its attractive young cast and allegedly verite look at contemporary Los Angeles, is getting way more attention than Brown's Requiem ever did, and if it's not technically his debut, it's at least poised to be his breakthrough. We had a chance to screen Garden Party recently; should you believe the hype?

Boiled down to the one-sentence description that no doubt got it through the vetting process, Garden Party is the story of a group of young people, all recently relocated to the vast construct of the American psyche that is Los Angeles, who try to get by faced with all the pitfalls and perils the wicked city is home to. Peopled with a game young cast, the movie gives us a bunch of characters who aren't quite established enough as archetypes to come across as trite right off the bat; there's the vaguely sinister real estate agent/drug dealer, the allegedly brilliant young musician who drifts through life intersecting with the other characters but never making a real emotional commitment to any of them, the renegade bohemian with a porn fetish, the sexually abused teen, and half a dozen other characters who seem like they just got off the late shift at the Quaalude factory. Needless to say, their stories all intersect in sometimes surprising, sometimes predictable ways; needless to say, a few of them experience what could be called a revelation if it didn't come across as so utterly trifling; and, needless to say, there's lots of fashionable sex, drugs, and pouting to make thing palatable to the drugged-out, pouty teenage couples who are presumably the movie's target audience. With all this stuff being needless to say, you might ask: why was it even necessary to make the film? The answer? That is a good question.

There are a few good reasons to see Garden Party. Freeland has a distinctive, if rather undeveloped, visual sensibility, and his pacing is very fine, keeping you involved in the story even when it spills over into the cliches he generates as a writer. And a number of the members of the largely anonymous cast are worth watching, particularly the lovely, polished Willa Holland in the lead role. However, these aspects are overwhelmed by its overall shapelessness and the fact that it seems kluged together from parts of other, usually better movies: the plot and structure capture the worst aspects of Rent but can't handle the best of Short Cuts. The teen cast and sexual panic aspects play like a lite version of Kids. The pseudo-verite is drawn from Cloverfield and the sense of communal destiny is like a mopier version of Magnolia. It draws its "depressed young white people unable to make significant emotional connections" vibe from the mumblecore movement, and its misunderstood-sensitive-genius characters from the mind of every teenager ever. Even the ad campaign makes it look like a moody remake of Swimfan. Freeland has the talent to make distinctive movies, but he seems to lack the focus to make ones that don't mostly remind us of a million things we've seen before.

OST: "There Will Be Blood"

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 20 May 2008 19:00:00 GMT

The recent direction in which Radiohead has turned causes much split opinion, as might be expected from one of the biggest bands in the world. Some feel that the more avant-garde turn their music has taken is a sign of growth, development, and change for the better, a step away from the simple but distinctive pop craftsmanship that marked their early days and towards an entirely new sensibility, more attuned to the voice of modern minimalist composers than to the pop or even indie-rock tradition. Others think it's been a disaster, a pretentious and overwrought plunge into the alienatingly highbrow at the cost of the band's credibility, relatability and listenability. Whatever one's opinion (and I'm certainly in the former camp), a lot of tears have been shed over the fate of the band's guitarist, Jonny Greenwood. Though he's been vocally supportive of Radiohead's direction and has adapted his playing admirably well to the demands of the more stripped-down, electronic-influenced work, many have wondered -- especially given the sound of lead singer Thom Yorke's solo work -- if he was fully behind the shift in tone. But after the release of the stunning soundtrack to Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, no one should worry, least of all Greenwood himself. It's a masterful album, perfectly suited to the material onscreen, that shows how fully possessed he is by moody minimalism and dissonant, striking tones.

There were legitimate worries when Greenwood was announced as the composer to the score to There Will Be Blood. A number of people, myself included, questioned the prominent role assigned to Aimee Mann's music in Magnolia; boosters found it fitting, a natural extension of the movie's story. Others found it extremely inclusive, smacking of the cart driving the horse. It turns out they have nothing to worry about: Greenwood's score in There Will Be Blood is as subtle and insinuating as Mann's songs in Magnolia were obvious and intrusive. From the first squalling, snakeline chords the the last smothering cluster of strings, it's a tightly controlled, sinister, and utterly appropriate score, a musical realization of the struggles and excesses in Daniel Plainview's soul. While the movie itself is epic, the score is minute and precise, coming from a stripped-down version of a full orchestra and delivering a terrible sense of struggle from its very first notes. At times, Greenwood almost seems to be fighting a horrible battle to make the dissonant blasts and squalling notes force meaning and emotion from the barren landscapes of the film's oil-town settings: there is pain and effort in this music as real and as clear as Plainview's horribly willful efforts to drag himself out of a hole in the ground with a wooden leg. Some notes sound relentlessly, again and again, with a furious insistence worthy of Ligeti; other notes creep loosely around the edges of perception, bringing the entire thing an almost ambient quality like Brian Eno's instrumental efforts. It's an astonishing piece of work on every level, instantly marking Greenwood as a force to be reckoned with as a film composer. (Unfortunately, the presence of a slight three-minute quote from his own "Popcorn Superhet Receiver", an avant-garde piece influenced by the Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki, disqualified the widely praised score from Oscar contention.)

BEST TRACKS: the stirring, magnificent (and ironically claustrophobic) "Open Spaces", which opens the album; the angry, jerking, ,almost psychotic "Eat Him By His Own Light"; and the lonely, dismal, haunting "Daniel Plainview" are standouts here, but give the entire album a listen, all the way through, divorced from the context of the film: it's a testament to how well it's done that, as perfectly as it works onscreen, it holds up amazingly well on its own.

"Barringer82"'s YouTube Movie Montages

Phil Nugent — Mon, 05 May 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Steve Bryant at Reel Pop drew our attention to these beautifully assembled little montages by YouTube user "barringer82", who ought to be working for the Academy Awards people. They're like eating peanuts. "The Films of the 1970s" makes a case for that era as a time when actors who knew what the hell to do with a long, unbroken silent take, in particular Jack Nicholson and Al Pacino, ruled the world, and it feels so perfectly assembled, as if flows from one clip to the next in synch with the music and Peter Finch's big speech from Network, that we couldn't care less that Blow Out was actually released in 1981. (It also made us realize, for the first time ever, that one reason that Finch works so brilliantly in that part is his vocal resemblance to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Before he actually appeared on screen, I thought the clip of him talking was from a fireside chat that FDR must have given after snacking on hash brownies.) "The Films of the 1980s" is remarkable for the way it captures what 75% of the population found delightful about that decade, with sneaking hints about why the rest of us experienced as a George A. Romero movie in 3-D Technicolor. (It goes on too long, but then so did the 1980s.) And "The Films of the 1990s" makes the second-best argument I know of for Magnolia as the key, unifying film of that decade. (The best argument for that has been made by myself, and I'm not sure I could ever get enough drinks in me again to repeat it.)

Barringer25 has also assembled video seminars on such directors as Stanley Kubrick, David Lynch, Quentin Tarantino, the Coen brothers, P. T. Anderson, Michael Mann (parts one and two), and Martin Scorsese (parts one and two.)

Thursday Morning Poll for April 17, 2008

Paul Clark — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 14:00:00 GMT

You know what they say- timing is everything. So perhaps it was unfair of me to wonder after your favorite Paul Thomas Anderson a scant two days after the DVD release of There Will Be Blood. In the end, the film walked away with a victory in last week's poll, racking up an impressive 44% percent of the vote. Running neck and neck for the runner-up spot were Boogie Nights and Magnolia. The comparatively modest Punch-Drunk Love and Hard Eight- awesome though they are- just couldn't keep up.

This week, in advance this weekend's release of The Forbidden Kingdom, we settle the age-old question that the film itself attempts to answer: who would win?

If you want to be more specific about your answer- say, "Jet circa Black Mask" or "Jackie in his Project A/Police Story days" feel free. You know what to do.

After Forty Years, the End of the New Line

Phil Nugent — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 16:30:00 GMT

It's been announced that New Line Cinema is being folded into Warner Bros. Entertainment. (Both studios are subsidiaries of Time Warner. New Line's connection to Time Warner goes back to 1996, when the corporation picked up New Line's parent company, Turner Broadcasting. As Forbes reports, "The decision to merge the two film divisions didn't come as a surprise. Time Warner Chief Executive Jeff Bewkes said during a Feb. 6 conference call that 'there is an obvious question about whether it still makes sense for us to have two completely separate studio infrastructures at Warner and New Line.' In a statement Thursday, Time Warner said that New Line will keep its own development, production, marketing, distribution and business affairs operations, but will coordinate them with Warner Bros. 'to maximize film performance and operating efficiencies, achieve significant cost savings and improve margins.' " It't not yet clear how many jobs will be lost in the downsizing process, but Robert Shaye and Michael Lynne, who co-founded the company forty years ago, and who had been sharing the titles of chairman and chief executive, are both already out the door.

The latest development marked the end to a long, strange trip to the top for a funky little company that had its first big successes in the early 1970s marketing John Waters's 1972 Pink Flamingos and the camp revival of the 1936 drug-hysteria picture Reefer Madness. New Line hit a new level of mainstream commercial success with the 1984 A Nightmare on Elm Street, which the company built into a powerhouse franchise. By the end of the eighties, New Line had one foot in the art house and one in exploitation/genre movies, a formula that it made work with a lively mix of films such as The Evil Dead, Sid and Nancy, The Hidden, House Party, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Player, Glengarry Glen Ross, Menace II Society, The Mask, Dumb and Dumber, Se7en, Boogie Nights, and Magnolia, as well as Austin Powers, Friday, Blade, and Final Destination and the franchises that grew out of them. The studio's biggest gamble, and biggest success, was probably the Lord of the Rings trilogy, a high-stakes commitment that left the company CEOs looking brilliant--at least, until they proceeded to alienate the director Peter Jackson so badly that he become but one of a long line of litigants who filed lawsuits that grew out of controversy about the company's accounting practices and charges that they failed to honor various pledges and legal committments to everyone from bit players in the movies to the heirs of J. R. R. Tolkien. New Line had recently updated its corporate logo to celebrate its fortieth birthday last October 5.

Video of the Day: PTA vs. Mike Figgis

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 18:45:00 GMT

When Mike Figgis sat down with him for a lengthy BBC interview back in 1998, Paul Thomas Anderson wasn't yet the conquering hero of There Will Be Blood. He was still a young maverick filmmaker with only two movies under his belt and a hell of a lot to prove.

But even though Magnolia, Punch-Drunk Love and his masterwork with Daniel Day-Lewis were still to come, the man gave great interview. With hands flailing, eyes flashing, mouth full of snacks, and the air around him turning blue, he spends quite some time trading barbs, laughs and film theories with Figgis in a three-part chat as part of the "Hollywood Conversations" series on Film Four. (The equally enjoyable second and third installments are here and here.) The consensus is that TWBB has cemented Anderson's rep as a great filmmaker, but even those who disagree will allow that he's a fun guy to listen to.

Take Five: Belgium!

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 21:30:00 GMT

Opening wide this weekend, Martin McDonagh's In Bruges stars Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson as a pair of exiled hitmen stuck in the Belgian city until it's safe for them to return home, and their sojourn is meant to be hellish in every sense of the word. Belgium has long been Europe's punchline — yes, even more so than Poland; its stolidly middle-class character and reputation as "where culture goes to nap" makes it the butt of many a joke. David Rees of Get Your War On calls the sixteenth-century seer Nostradamus "the last interesting Belgian", which insult is all the more cutting considering he was actually French; and in a memorable Monty Python sketch, game show contestants are challenged to come up with a derogatory term for Belgium, and one noteworthy entrant claims that he can't think of anything more derogatory than just "Belgian". But all kidding aside, if you actually were trapped in Bruges for a prolonged period of time, you could do a lot worse as a way to pass the time than to head for the local cinema. Belgium has, er, sprouted one of the more interesting independent film scenes in Europe recently, and as this short list of some of our favorite Belgian movies of recent years should illustrate, there's a lot more to Belgian filmmaking than just Jean-Claude Van Damme.

MAN BITES DOG (1992)

One of the first Belgian films to create a great deal of buzz outside of Europe, Man Bites Dog (the French title translates, creepily, to "It Happened in Your Neighborhood" or "He is Coming to Your House") is a postmodern twist on the serial killer narrative a good five to ten years before such things became trendy. Anticipating the self-aware American horror films of the 2000s, it follows a small documentary camera crew as they tag along with Ben (played with sinister charm by co-writer/director Benoit Poelvoorde), a disconcertingly media-savvy mass murderer. Crammed with supremely disturbing moments, shocking violence, and genuinely clever moments of humor, Man Bites Dog has held up quite well and is still better than most of the films it undoubtedly helped to inspire.

D'EST [FROM THE EAST] (1993)

One of the best things about Belgian cinema is the experimental filmmaker Chantal Akerman. Her complex, meditative, sometimes almost motionless films lull you into a nearly placid state so that you barely realize it when a moment of epiphany arises. D'Est, a far too little-seen documentary from 1993, is perhaps her greatest film: a deceptively simple series of images of people in Eastern Europe, many of them only a few years removed from the burdens of Soviet rule, are shown. The people take vacations, engage in sport and play, have long moments of leisure, and Akerman's brilliantly photographic sensibilities capture long stretches of beautiful simplicity over a period of almost two hours. The effect is not unlike watching a well-crafted painting slowly mutate into something entirely new and different.

LUMUMBA (2000)

Director Raoul Peck is a Haitian; the film takes place in Africa, and the production itself was a joint effort of Belgium, France, Germany, and Haiti. But almost all of the filming was done in Belgium, the majority of the financing came from there, and in a greater sense, the entire film is a legacy of Belgium's blood-soaked imperial past. The radical reformer Patrice Lumumba (brilliantly portrayed here by Eriq Ebouaney), prior to his assassination, was the ruler of the Congo, a huge country in central Africa that suffered more than most during its colonial period thanks to an incredibly brutal occupation and exploitation by Belgium's King Leopold. The film was an independent success, and a testament to the fact that some countries are more willing to examine their colonial legacies than others.

ANY WAY THE WIND BLOWS (2002)

If Tom Barman's sprawling 2002 film, based in and around the port city of Antwerp, isn't one of the best Belgian movies in recent history, it's at least one of the most ambitious, and definitely one of the oddest. Part travelogue, part documentary, part music video (and showcase for the director, who's also a well-known local pop star), and part bizarre remake/interpretation/'homage' to movies like Short Cuts, Magnolia and Pulp Fiction, Any Way the Wind Blows features a diverse group of French and Flemish citizens, all from different backgrounds and with widely different characters, who all wind up, through a rambunctious and chronoligically confusing narrative, at the same party on the same night. It functions almost like a collage of several more convincingly made films, but it's not without its charm.

THE ALZHEIMER CASE(2003)

When you first hear De Zaak Alzheimer described, you think it can't possibly be anything but a tasteless, awful disaster: it's about a pair of detectives attempting to track down and capture a mob hitman on his final assignment — final because he has an advanced case of Alzheimer's Disease. Amazingly enough, though, director Erik Van Looy manages to pull the thing off without recourse to depressingly tasteless jokes or maudlin sentimentality. Instead, he presents us with a surprisingly plausible plot, a tight, chilling narrative with plenty of suspense, and a nicely presented noir sensibility. An American remake of this movie (which played at festivals under the name The Memory of a Killer) is in the works, but if you can hunt down a DVD copy of the original, it's well worth checking out on its own merits.

P.T.A. Report

Phil Nugent — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 18:00:00 GMT

For those who've been handicapping the race for supremacy among the American filmmakers who achieved big-deal status during the 1990s, here's how things stand as this year winds down: with Quentin Tarantino providing the half of a double feature that followed the half that much of the audience walked out on, Richard Linklater taking a well-deserved breather, David O. Russell becoming a reality star on YouTube, Alexander Payne ducking through corners in a Groucho mask to avoid explaining his screenwriting credit on I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, and Kevin Smith unable to make a long-term thing out of his job directing the pilot for the TV show about an underachieving minimum-wage ape with a secret life battling dark forces that isn't Chuck. We extend wishes of good luck and productivity in the year to come to all of them, except maybe for Kevin Smith. In the meantime, with less than a week of 2007 left to go, Paul Thomas Anderson has vaulted into first place with his first movie in five years, There Will Be Blood. Opening today, Anderson's period epic, starring Daniel Day Lewis as an obsessive, misanthropic prospector, is making a scramble for becoming the best-reviewed movie of the year.

This was not an altogether predictable development. In a thoughtful piece on where Anderson has been so far and where he's at now, Dennis Lim describes Anderson as a thirty-seven-year-old "enfant terrible" who "incites strong, divided opinions." "Strong, divided opinions" may seem to be a soft way of putting it for anyone who went through the great Magnolia wars of 1999. In that high-pitched, three-hour film, which had the feel of an attempted career summation despite its only being the director's third movie, Anderson delivered a titanic audience-divider, just in time for the end of the millennium. Since it came out, the movie has gradually acquired more and more supporters who tend to regard it not just admiringly but downright protectively, but at the time of its release, the roars of derision were deafening. To a great degree, Magnolia was not criticized as a disappointment or an honest failure but as some sort of violation of aesthetic law whose creator ought to be stripped of his epaulets and driven into the Forbidden Zone. For a self-taught filmmaker who wasn't yet thirty, dealing with that must have been an interesting experience. The bonus-features disc on the Magnolia DVD includes a little home movie in which Anderson's then-girlfriend, Fiona Apple, apparently playing the movie, performs an interpretive dance while Anderson hisses, "Boogie Nights made money! You want to be the only one that doesn't...It's too fucking long, there's too many blow-ups--it's all just too fucking too!"

As Lim points out, Anderson is indeed "a size freak", but he also "invites emotional responses because he's an emotional filmmaker, and this, too, distinguishes him from most of his cohorts. The signature trait of the '90s indie school is detachment, whether in the form of self-conscious cleverness or numb ennui, but there's nothing detached about Anderson's films...Given the dominant American pop idioms of snark and quirk, Anderson's sensibility can be confounding. He's satirical, but also achingly sincere. His characters often speak with a declarative directness that is both breathtaking and a little ridiculous." Those viewers not swept up in Magnolia's emotional flow seem to have responded to its steady stream of heartfelt monologues by desperately unhappy people desperate to connect (to the people onscreen and to the people in the audience) as proof that they were at the mercy of a high-school amateur. In his follow-up to Magnolia, the Adam Sandler movie Punch-Drunk Love, Anderson sensibly scaled down and tightened the focus on a single character, but the picture was still huge in the audacity of its approach. Anderson is as much a cerebral movie geek as any of his contemporaries, but he's probably the only one of them who might have taken a look at Adam Sandler's screen image and actually thought about it on an emotional level, dissecting it and exploring what it might be like to live at such an unstable level of passive-aggressiveness. The movie was still direct in its emotional current but more atylized, with a central character nowhere near as articulate as those in Magnolia. (The movie was much better received critically than Magnolia but it didn't do much business; the publicity department failed to rise to the challenge of somehow alerting people that this was an Adam Sandler movie for people who can't stand Adam Sandler.)

With his fifth film, Anderson may have found a story that enables him to indulge his taste for spectacle and vast canvasses while presenting a conventional enough surface to appease the likes of The New Yorker's David Denby, who dismissed both Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love as "whimsical". (Denby likes There Will Be Blood, except for the conclusion, which he figures proves that "some part of him must have rebelled against canonization." I must have been dozing when we all agreed to put Jughead in charge of the canon.) For the moment, for some of us, the price of Anderson's surprise success may be having to listen to some people use his new movie as a club to beat on his earlier work. But we'll settle so long as he doesn't get in the habit of making us wait five years between movies.