The Screengrab : michel gondry

Mia Farrow Plans to Fast for Darfur

Phil Nugent — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 16:30:00 GMT

If you're planning to swing by Mia Farrow's place next week, don't bring chocolates. The actress, most recently seen in Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind, is embarking on a hunger strike "to show solidarity with the people of the war-hit Darfur region of Sudan" and to protest the decision by the Sudanese government to expel foreign aid agencies. In addition to her movie career, Farrow is a goodwill ambassador for Unicef. In a statement, Farrow, 64, decried "a world that is somehow able to stand by and watch innocent men, women and children needlessly die of starvation, thirst and disease," saying, "I undertake this fast in the heartfelt hope that world leaders who know what is just and right will call upon the government of Sudan to urgently readmit all of the expelled agencies or otherwise insure that the [aid distribution] gap is filled." Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir expelled thirteen aid groups last March after the International Criminal Court issued a warrant for his arrest.

In her statement, Farrow called on others to express solidarity with her cause by fasting, "if only for one day." Farrow herself has expressed determination to fast for as long as she can. "Doctors estimated that, given her slim build, this would be for a maximum of three weeks."

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

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

This week, youngsters (and the young at heart) will be treated to the sight of a giant space robot tearing up San Francisco (in 3-D!) in Monsters vs. Aliens (click here for review).

But last week, something really scary happened: my computer completely shut down thanks to some nasty virus, leaving me completely laptop-less for three long, frightening days (right in the middle of SXSW!), during which time I realized I no longer have the ability to think straight, remember things, communicate or even feed and dress myself without my little cybernetic soul mate in good working order.

Fortunately, the fine people at PC Guru in Austin, TX got me up and running...but it was definitely a scary reminder of how much it’s gonna suck when Facebook finally becomes self-aware and turns all our computers, ATMs, DVRs, MP3s and GPS systems against us.

So, as a public service, your (mostly) human friends here at the Screengrab figured now would be as good a time as any to whip up some post-Y2K panic with our list of THE SCARIEST TECHNOLOGY IN CINEMA HISTORY!

METROPOLIS (1927)

Fritz Lang's titanic silent sci-fi masterpiece uses a look derived from a mix of Art Deco and Amazing Stories cover designs to decorate a political allegory that Lang said was inspired by his first sight of New York City, which seems to have fried some of the wiring in his central cortex. (If the old boy were to come back and see what the place looks like today, we'd have to find him a job biting the heads off chickens.) Society consists of the rich who live above ground in glittering skyscrapers and the poor who labor and live in underground tunnels, sort of like in Titanic. The whole shebang is run by Johan, a capitalist uber-lord; meanwhile, down below, Metropolis has found its answer to Samuel Gompers in the beautiful Maria, a saintly labor activist who is rallying the workers. The plot kicks into high gear when Johan's breathtakingly goofy son, Freder, gets a look at Maria and is instantly radicalized. Instead of taking the usual tack of industrialist tyrants in this situation and buying his kid a motorcycle and a lap dance, Johan turns to his trusty house mad scientist, Rotwang, who creates a trouble-making robot duplicate of Maria, in a scene that anticipates The Bride of Frankenstein and Dr. Strangelove in about equal measure, and turns 'er loose, with results that prove instructional for one and all. (PN)

2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968)

Its red eye glowing, its voice calm and soothing, HAL 9000 – on-board computer of the spaceship Discovery – remains, forty-one years after 2001: A Space Odyssey’s debut, cinema’s most iconic piece of evil technology. Or, at least, the sentient HAL is one of the most dangerous pieces of technology to ever be presented on screen, as its homicidal tendencies stem primarily from a desire to fulfill preprogrammed mission directives – aims which are threatened by the plan of astronauts Bowman (Keir Dullea) and Poole (Gary Lockwood) to disconnect it. The fact that self-preservation in service of duty is HAL’s motivation to kill problematizes any attempt to cast it as purely evil, especially since its survival instinct, when viewed alongside its emotive speech (contrasted with the men’s monotonous, monosyllabic utterances), marks the computer as distinctly human-like. Nonetheless, even if HAL isn’t immoral, it most certainly is frighteningly lethal. And rarely have the movies presented a more harrowing, intimidating vision of technology-run-amok than the sight of HAL covertly, calculatingly reading the lips of the scheming astronauts, and soon thereafter sending Poole spinning into the oblivion of space. (NS)

WESTWORLD (1973)

While re-watching Westworld in preparation for this list, I recovered a long-lost childhood memory. I’m on a train with my family when bandits on horseback pull us over, board the train and take our money. This really happened, although I should probably explain that it was supposed to happen – it was no ordinary train ride, but rather a reenactment of the Great Train Robbery. I remember being terrified as the bandits prowled the aisle, brandishing their pistols, bandannas concealing most of their faces – but not so terrified that I actually relinquished the dollar my mother had slipped me so that I could enjoy being robbed along with everyone else. Why am I telling you this? Because, like Westworld, this was a simulation of life in the Old West intended to give us all the thrills without any of the consequences. As far as I know, there were no actual robots involved, but how can I be sure? The other thing it has in common with Westworld is that it scared me as a kid. Now that I’ve seen Westworld as an adult, I realize it’s about as scary as a visit to Six Gun City. The movie serves up some of writer/director Michael Crichton’s patented technophobia with a formula that would be duplicated to better effect in Jurassic Park, as visitors to a high-tech theme park find themselves terrorized by the robots meant to amuse them. It does have one thing going for it: Yul Brynner’s iconic black-hatted Gunslinger, who did the unstoppable killer robot thing more than a decade before The Terminator. (SVD)

ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND (2004)

In screenwriter Charlie Kaufman's world, human beings don't really need technology to screw up their lives, but in this movie they get some help anyway, courtesy of Lacuna, Inc. and its mind-wipe service, which enables the client to have his memory scrubbed of anything that he feels is holding him back or causing him undue pain. Jim Carrey, at his most subdued, is the loser hero who discovers that Clementine (Kate Winslet), the old flame who shook up his life, has had her memories of their time together erased, possibly as a lark, and who opts to have his own mind scrubbed clean of its memories of her, not realizing how hard he'll fight to hang onto any traces of having had her in his life when the process begins. Kaufman and director Michel Gondry manage to wring romantic comedy out of what may be the most painful of romantic truths: everyone wants to be remembered, but the memories of what was most important to you may be the ones that you'd sometimes most like to be rid of. (PN)

Click Here For Part Two, Three & Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Nick Schager, Scott Von Doviak

Screengrab's Favorite Movies About Music: Non-Fiction Edition (Part Seven)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 23:00:00 GMT

Hayden Childs' Favorites:

DAVE CHAPPELLE’S BLOCK PARTY (2005)

Dave Chappelle has a notoriously wary view of the trappings of fame. He walked away from his successful sketch show when he was afraid that he was empowering racists, rather than mocking them out of existence. He’s turned down his share of movie roles. After he went all Bartleby on his show, he had a bit of a reputation as an angry man, perhaps too angry for the bulk of his fans. However, in this project, Chappelle turns all of that suspicion into positive energy. He shares his wealth and fortune by hosting a huge block party in Brooklyn with performances by his favorite hip-hop artists, and what’s more, he is going to fly in as many people from where he lives in Yellow Springs, Ohio as he possibly can. Supposedly inspired by the positive vibes of Wattstax (where Memphis’ Stax Records hosted a big party in Watts in 1972), Chappelle’s Little Party That Could is actually quite a bit more fun. In Wattstax, the fear of violence kept the audience at a distance, up in the bleachers of a football stadium with a whole football field between the performers and fans. In one scene, Rufus Thomas encourages the crowd to leap the fence and take the field, but as soon as the song is over, he has to send them back up into the bleachers. Chappelle has no distance; his crowd is right up at the stage with Kanye West, Mos Def, Jill Scott, Erykah Badu, The Roots, and the Fugees. In his fictional films, Michel Gondry typically takes a magical-reality view of the world, weaving dreams with real life. Here, he makes real life progress with the gossamer ease of dreamlife. Is it fun? Hell, yeah.

JANDEK ON CORWOOD (2003)

Jandek has completely revamped his persona since the release of this documentary in 2003. At the time, no one knew who Jandek was. He was the most enigmatic musician of our times. The typical story of the enigmatic musician has the veil of history to explain why the artist remains shrouded in mystery, but Jandek was all sorts of contradictions: prolific yet invisible, eager for coverage but unwilling to do interviews, among us and yet seemingly the product of another time or, perhaps, another culture that hears music differently. Jandek’s music is certainly not for the casual fan. One has to immerse oneself to understand his language and goals. On many of his first dozen or so albums, he seemed to lack the basic understanding of how to tune a guitar, how songs are structured, how to reach listeners. But his music isn’t exactly impenetrable, just difficult. His aims aren’t that far from other musicians of avant-garde vintage, even though it was unclear at first whether he was intentionally or accidentally flirting with the avant-garde. And because of his unwillingness to meet the public, his documentarians had to reach him through the meager evidence of his footprint in the world: the opinions of rock critics, a Texas Monthly columnist who hunted him down one day (he lives in Houston, which Jandek-seekers knew because of his return address), and his beautifully mundane album covers that hid the hauntingly eerie sounds within. The New Jandek, however, is still making his secretive music, but now he plays concerts. In front of people. I have been to one and it was great, but others have reported awful sound, awful performances, and being left cold. Contradictions: still the essence of Jandekia.

TOUCH THE SOUND (2004)

After making the profoundly gorgeous documentary Rivers And Tides in 2001 about the unique artist Andy Goldsworthy, who works with found objects in nature to create often-ephemeral works of incredible delicacy, director Thomas Riedelsheimer moved on to this documentary about the extraordinary musician Evelyn Glennie, a percussionist who is profoundly deaf. Please get your internal jokes about drummers who can’t hear out of your system now. OK? Alright, Glennie, who speaks with such ease that it seems impossible to believe that she can’t hear herself, at least the way that most of us hear ourselves, claims that she has trained her body to hear the sound. She plays barefoot to feel the vibrations. She feels the waves of sound in the very air. And for the first third of the movie, Riedelsheimer doesn’t even mention her deafness. It is like any other documentary about an extraordinary and accomplished musician. Then they casually drop the information about her condition and, well, this viewer’s jaw hit the floor. Riedelsheimer is an arty director, and his visuals match well with Glennie’s music. She collaborates with a few others during the film, including the avant-garde guitarist Fred Frith, most notably of the English art-rock band Henry Cow. It’s fair to say that this documentary manages to usurp many of my convictions about how music is experienced with an ease that belies just how stunning it is. Definitely see this movie. And see Rivers and Tides while you’re at it.

WE JAM ECONO: THE STORY OF THE MINUTEMEN (2005)

It’s a little-known fact that rocker scientists objectively proved that the Minutemen were the best band ever in the peer-reviewed journal The Politics Of Time in 1986. We Jam Econo is the story of this band, featuring interviews with, well, pretty much everyone who was involved in the U.S. punk scene in the early '80s. Plus there’s lots of footage where bassist Mike Watt, easily the most awesome human being alive today (and well deserving of the Nobel Prize for Being A Hell Of A Great Human Being), rambles about life while driving around San Pedro (that’s Pee-dro, neophytes). If you’re not a fan, you may not know that the band ceased to exist on the verge of greater mainstream success in December 1985, when guitarist/singer D. Boon was killed in a car accident. Given the greatness of the band and the tragedy of their conclusion, I think it would have been well-nigh impossible to screw this documentary up, but the filmmakers acquitted themselves admirably. As a longtime fan, I can tell you that the song in the clip above, an acoustic version of the band’s self-mythologizing “History of the World, Part II,” never fails to bring a tear to these cynical old eyes.

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

Contributor: Hayden Childs

Screengrab Review: "Tokyo!"

Nick Schager — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 16:00:00 GMT

Omnibus films are typically uneven endeavors, comprised as they are of assorted works usually linked by only one common thread. And true to form, Tokyo!, a compilation of three short films by renowned directors Michel Gondry, Leos Carax and Bong Joon-Ho, isn’t an entirely consistent affair. Yet lurking within these Tokyo-set narratives does lie a shared pulsating thread of isolation. In this surprisingly rich anthology, it’s not merely location that proves the primary connective tissue, but a sense of individuals – on a personal and collective scale – struggling to cope with detachment from themselves, their fellow citizens, and their surroundings. Manifesting itself in ways fanciful, austere, unsettling, absurd and magic-realist, this lonely condition may be treated in tonally dissimilar ways by this trio of diverse tales, yet a strain of solitude, and of literal and figurative aimlessness, nonetheless helps this triptych’s vignettes coalesce into an affectingly atmospheric portrait of the city and its inhabitants.

Neither outstanding nor disappointing, Gondry and Bong’s contributions instead prove intriguing, if up-and-down, examples of two directors refining and/or broadening their typical purview. “Interior Design,” about a couple who temporarily move into the cramped metro flat of a friend while the guy (Ryo Kase) attempts to launch a film career and the girl (Ayako Fujitani) searches for her life’s path, is a far more reserved, un-romantic examination of artistic invention for Gondry, who avoids outright whimsy in his depiction of self-definition as a highly personal act of creativity. Poking fun at cinematic pretentions, casting Tokyo as an impersonal, restrictive-box environment, and wrapping up his story with an unexpected quirk of fate that’s less adorable than quietly contemplative, Gondry’s segment may not be as effervescent as The Science of Sleep or Be Kind Rewind, nor substantial enough to earn intense emotional engagement. Still, there’s something gently moving about his female protagonist’s achievement of purpose through surrealistic physical transformation.

A tad less successful is Bong’s “Shaking Tokyo,” hinging as it does on some too-cute elements that grate rather than endear. Bong’s short focuses on a shut-in (Teruyuki Kagawa) known as a “hikikimori” who’s spent the past eleven years holed up in his apartment, avoiding even eye contact with the delivery people who bring him his weekly pizza. When he catches a glimpse of the pizza girl’s (Yu Aoi) garter belt, and then instinctively looks into her eyes, his sheltered world begins to truly crumble, the earth vigorously shaking in an excessively on-the-nose manifestation of the character’s inner change. Bong’s compositions are as spatially immaculate as his protagonist’s sterile, neatly arranged living abode, but between the girl’s computer-button tattoos – which activate her, like a Mac – and the everyone’s-a-recluse finale, “Shaking Tokyo” feels a tad too obvious in its address of estrangement, at least until the piercing, almost-redeeming penultimate shot of a hand attempting to shield one’s eyes from the sun’s wavering rays.

And then there’s Leos Carax’s crazy, ambiguous, go-for-broke middle segment “Merde.” In his first work since 1999’s Pola X, Carax opens with a Hitchcockian scene-setting cinematographic tour through Tokyo’s skyscrapers that winds down as an iris-shot of a manhole, from which emerges a disheveled Caucasian man (a freakish-looking Denis Lavant) with a twisted goatee, long filthy fingernails, and one milky white eye. In a subsequent, superlative tracking shot, this monster storms down a crowded city street stealing and consuming cigarettes, chrysanthemums, and money, all set to the score from Godzilla. After massacring innocents with grenades, Merde (as he’s known) is captured in the sewers where he dwells, and subsequently defended in court by a French lawyer (Jean-François Balmer) with similar physical characteristics who – as evidenced by an insanely protracted, un-translated chat with Merde – can speak the madman’s gibberish language. Living amidst WWII tanks and armaments, and suspected by the Americans and Japanese of involvement with al-Qaeda and the Aum cult (respectively), Merde proves a shrewdly amorphous stand-in for irrational terrorism, right through both his trial (in which he admits to hating “innocent people” and slanders the Japanese for having eyes that resemble “woman’s sex”) and an arresting execution sequence that’s deft enough to both evoke Syndromes and a Century and playfully set up an American-set sequel.

Morning Deal Report: Green Hornet Goes Gondry

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 14:30:00 GMT

Here’s a startling turn of events that potentially makes the Seth Rogen vehicle The Green Hornet a bit more interesting. “Columbia has set Michel Gondry to direct The Green Hornet, and the studio has set a June 25, 2010, release date for the film,” Variety reports. “Gondry, best known for far-out fare like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Science of Sleep and Human Nature, brings an unusual sensibility to what will be the most overtly commercial film of his career.” Can Charlie Kaufman’s Elongated Man be far behind?

It’s getting harder to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to making jokes about movies based on board games. I may be imagining things here, but I seem to recall a notorious bomb from the ‘80s adapted from Clue. And yet: “Universal is moving several spaces up the board with Clue, a big-screen take on the classic game, and is in final negotiations with Pirates of the Caribbean helmer Gore Verbinski to direct and produce,” per The Hollywood Reporter. Let the Johnny Depp as Colonel Mustard rumors start now.

If board game adaptations aren’t your thing, how about a movie based on a series of paintings? “Warner Bros. has acquired screen rights to The Lonely Dog, a limited-edition book of paintings done by Queenstown artist Ivan Clarke. The studio will turn the dog tale into a CG animated film,” Variety reports. “Clarke hatched the project when he left his dog alone, caught the look on the pooch's face and painted a fully clothed character with a lonely look on its mug.”

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Trailer Review: Tokyo!

Paul Clark — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 17:00:00 GMT

There’s something about omnibus films that always sounds exciting in concept- after all, when you get a half-dozen or so great directors involved in a single film, it would seem to be a sampler platter of awesomeness. Yet how many of these movies are actually any good? Part of the problem is that they generally tap feature filmmakers for these things (rather than short-form masters like, say, Lewis Klahr and Don Hertzfeldt) and not everyone who excels at feature length can translate their skill to the short form. With only three filmmakers involved, Tokyo! would appear to be a safer bet. However, advance word on the film has been mostly mixed, and even negative when it comes to the short by Leos Carax (a shame, considering the guy hasn’t gotten a feature off the ground since Pola X ten years ago). So while I’m eager to see new work by Carax, Michael Gondry, and Bong Joon-ho, this one looks like a wait and see.

Reviews By Request x2: Reprise (2006, Joachim Trier) and Son of Rambow (2007, Garth Jennings)

Paul Clark — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 20:00:00 GMT

When I asked you folks to vote on my next three Reviews By Request columns a few weeks ago, one thing I hadn’t anticipated was that there’d be a tie for third place. Under other circumstances, I might simply have chosen one film to write about over the other, but I’m more or less a man of my word. I briefly toyed with the idea of running a poll to determine which I’d write about, but when I realized that both of the films- Joachim Trier’s Reprise and Garth Jennings’ Son of Rambow- deal with creative sorts, I figured that the best way to solve my problem would simply be to write a tandem review of the films.

The act of creation can be tricky to portray cinematically. When someone is inspired to create a work of art, it can be the most exciting feeling in the world for that person. But it’s much more difficult to convey this excitement to others in the form of a film. Moreover, some media are better-suited to a cinematic treatment than others. While the making of a movie consists not only of a series of creative decisions but also the logistics and politics of collaboration with others, writing is essentially an inward, self-absorbed act. In this sense, Reprise begins at somewhat of a disadvantage compared to Son of Rambow. Does Trier’s film transcend this disadvantage to become a more memorable finished product than Jennings’? Not quite.

There’s an old writers’ joke that says that because young writers are told to “write what they know,” this explains why there are so many books and movies about writers. Reprise doubles up the usual beginning-writer-on-the-make storyline by focusing on two budding authors, a pair of friends who we first see mailing off their manuscripts at the same time. Of course, not all writers are created equal, and while Phillip (Anders Danielsen Lie) finds literary success almost overnight, Erik (Espen Klouman-Høiner) gets turned down by the publisher. From that point forward, the film cuts back and forth between the two, with Phillip suffering a nervous breakdown, Erik finding his own measure of success, and each of them trying to find their ways in life.

Unless they’re especially well-written, I find that educated twentysomethings can make for some of the least interesting and most insufferable characters in films, partly because their intelligence has yet to be tempered with maturity, humility, and the wisdom that gets born from actual real-world experience. The protagonists of Reprise harbor some lofty ideas both about life and literature (Erik’s first novel is entitled Prosopopeia, fer chrissakes), but when they give voice to them, they come out mostly in writerly clichés, like when Erik decides to dump his girlfriend in order to live the stereotypical writer’s life of booze and cheap sex. If the film had shown any real self-awareness about its characters in the manner of Arnaud Desplechin’s My Sex Life…, this might have worked. But it doesn’t.

And that’s a shame, since Trier’s film has plenty of interesting ideas that would have been worth exploring. In one subplot, we see Phillip, recently released from a mental hospital, trying to re-connect with his ex-girlfriend Kari (Viktoria Winge). Phillip’s mother has gotten rid of his photographs of Kari, fearing they might trigger another mental collapse. So Phillip decides to take Kari to Paris, where they vacationed shortly after they met, in order to re-take the photos and, consequently, re-live the memories. There are a number of other compelling ideas in Reprise that mark Trier as a talent to watch. Even if this feels very much like a first film, there’s real potential here.

~~~

Compared to Reprise, Son of Rambow is a relatively modest work, one with little more than a desire to entertain. Yet it succeeds in this sense in a way that Trier’s film can’t quite manage to fulfill its loftier ambitions. I’m not a huge fan of the sorts of festival darlings that are routinely labeled “crowd-pleasers”- I’m not drinking the Kool-Aid™ on Slumdog Millionaire, for example- so I was a little surprised by how well Son of Rambow worked on me.

Like Reprise, Son of Rambow tells the story of two young friends, although the heroes of Jennings’ film are preteen boys, which tends to cut down quite a bit on the navel-gazing. The unlikely friends are Lee (Will Poulter), a troublemaker who spends his free time working on elaborate home movies, and Will (Bill Milner), a pint-sized boy from a staunchly religious family who Lee cons into working for him as a stunt man. Inspired by a bootleg of First Blood that he sees at Lee’s house, Will gets the inspiration to turn Lee’s movie into a kind of sequel to the Stallone opus- one that stars himself.

In its story of DIY movie-making against a small-community backdrop, Son of Rambow bears a casual resemblance to Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind. However, I think Son is the more successful film, in part because the story works better with kids in the lead roles instead of adults, even if one of those adults happens to a man-child like Jack Black. What’s more, the visual flights of fancy Jennings brings to the story- inventive production design, flashes of hand-drawn animation- are more effective than Gondry’s, since Jennings’ touch is lighter and the whimsy never wears out its welcome.

Son of Rambow flags a bit in its second half, after other characters (led by a Culture Club-ready French exchange student) are brought in to collaborate on Will and Lee’s movie. Thankfully, Jennings recognizes this, and acknowledges it when he has Lee confront Will to tell him as much. But for much of its duration, Son of Rambow is fun and occasionally even enchanting, as in the scene when Will’s drawings come to life. And it’s hard to resist a movie that manages to combine Lee’s anarchic spirit with Will’s wide-eyed innocence without making us decide on one over the other. Son of Rambow isn’t perfect, but it’s a real charmer.

Thursday Poll for New Year's Day 2009

Paul Clark — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 23:00:00 GMT

The celebration of some obscure holiday caught me completely off guard a week ago, and so shocked was I by its sudden emergence that I completely forgot to run a Thursday poll. Because of this, I neglected to report that fully half of our readers, when given the choice between Kate Winslet’s Oscar-nominated performances, preferred her turn as the mood-haired Clementine in Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Somewhat less expected was the 25% showing for the second-place finisher, 2006’s Little Children, followed by her performances in Sense and Sensibility and Iris. Bringing up the rear was her starmaking role in a little sleeper hit called Titanic, which brought in no votes whatsoever. So that only leaves us with the question of whether she’ll finally take home an Oscar this year, either as Revolutionary Road’s disenchanted housewife or the “illiterate Nazi cougar” (thanks, Uncle Crizzle!) of The Reader.

Over the past week, the writers of The Screengrab have posted their lists of the best movies of 2008. Now it’s your turn. Which of the Screengrab’s top five favorites from the past year do you prefer?

Which is your favorite? | BuzzDash polls

Feel free to post your lists of the best of 2008 in the comments section if you wish. See you next week!

Set Your DVR!: October 13 - October 20, 2008

Hayden Childs — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Here’s upcoming Movies of Interest in the next week! I realized that last week’s entry gave all times in Central Time. From here on out, I’ll do the Central/Eastern thing. I will also spill things over to the following Monday, because several great movies show on Sunday night. Finally, let me know in comments if you see something I missed!

Other than that, the rules are the same: I’m trying to avoid recommending obvious movies, but I know you’re a knowledgeable reader, so some of the ones here might seem large and unsubtle to you. But that’s alright. I’m using an in-law test: I’ll stick with movies that my in-laws have most likely never heard of. And no premium channels, because I’m too broke to afford them.

Mon, Oct 13:

10:30/11:30 am: The Circus Queen Murder on TCM. Pre-code murder mystery starring Adolphe Menjou. Not available on DVD.

11:00 am/12:00 pm: George Washington on IFC (repeat at 4:15/5:15 pm and again on 10/14 at 4:30/5:30 am). Slow and thoughtful take on African-American youths in a go-nowhere Southern town directed by the guy who made Pineapple Express. Obvious influences: Terrence Malick and Charles Burnett.

2:00/3:00 pm: Vanishing Point on FMC. The lesser of the two great existential car movies of 1971 (Two-Lane Blacktop is the other). This one’s still a pop culture point-of-reference, especially for Tarantino movies. Definitely worth a viewing.

5:00/6:00 pm: Dave Chappelle’s Block Party. As mentioned last week, this one is a fun and light take on the concert film, directed by Michel Gondry and built around Dave Chappelle’s general awesomeness.

7:00/8:00 pm: My Man Godfrey on TCM. Now that we’re headed into a genuine financial depression, take a moment to consider one of the great films about the repercussions of the Great one.

Tues, Oct 14:

5:15/6:15 pm: Gerry on IFC (repeat at 7:45/8:45 am and 12:45/1:45 pm). I mentioned this one last week, too. And I think it’s on again next week. No matter, though, because it’s just brilliant. Since I mentioned it last, Scott Tobias at the AV Club wrote a great article on it.

Wed, Oct 15:

12:00/1:00 am: The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. on TCM. Dr. Seuss’s live-action insanity. Check it out!

5:00/6:00 am: Shall We Dance on TCM. Fred & Ginger. Score by the Gershwins. A dance scene on roller skates.

10:00/11:00 am: The Legend of Drunken Master (aka Drunken Master II) on G4 (repeat 10/16 at 1:00/2:00 am). It seems hard to believe now, but long before teaming up with Chris Tucker, Jackie Chan made movies that were actually funny. I mean, there’s ass-kicking galore, but the gags he stole from Buster Keaton are just delightful.

10:30/11:30 am: Carefree on TCM. More Fred & Ginger. More dancing. More joking around.

12:00/1:00 pm: Room Service on TCM. Not a bad movie for delving a little deeper into the Marx Brothers.

5:00/6:00 pm: Swing Time on TCM. And even more Fred & Ginger!

Th, Oct 16:

Got nothing for today. Go to the park!

Fri, Oct 17:

1:00/2:00 am: Kiss of Death on FMC. Film noir classic with a great turn by Richard Widmark.

Sat, Oct 18:

3:00/4:00 am: Them! on CHILLER. I don’t know what CHILLER is, but apparently it is a channel I have. Them! is a classic monster movie, complete with proto-environmentalist themes, officious foolishness from the authorities, and monsters deserving of a pronoun and an exclamation point and nothing more.

6:30/7:30 am: Gods and Monsters on LOGO (repeat at 1:00/2:00 pm). Lots of biopics want to wallop you over the head with their themes (hey, did you catch that drugs and womanizing might have affected Ray Charles’s life? I wonder if his brother’s death had anything to do with that), but Gods and Monsters, which is about the horror film director James Whale, has a lighter touch.

7:00/8:00 am: Samurai 3 on IFC. The apex of the Samurai trilogy, also known as Duel on Ganryu Island. Toshiro Mifune is in top form, and the climactic battle is the template for Quentin Tarantino’s understanding of Japanese cool.

12:30/1:30 pm: The Day The Earth Stood Still on AMC. Y’know, fuck Keanu Reeves. Go to the source.

11:00 pm/12:00 am: Dick on Oxygen. I mentioned last week that this movie is hilarious. It still is.

11:45 pm/12:45 am: Crash on IFC. This isn’t the noxious Oscar-bait Crash, but the deeply perverse Cronenberg movie based on the J.G. Ballard story.

Sun, Oct 19:

11:00 pm/12:00 am: The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) on TCM. The silent version starring Lon Chaney. Yes, indeed.

Mon, Oct 20 (the overnight spillover):

1:00/2:00 am: Eyes Without A Face on TCM. Georges Franju’s horror classic that is guaranteed to give you the creeping heebie-jeebies. It's also well-written, well-shot, and well-acted, so what are you waiting for?

5:00/6:00 am: Kongo on TCM. Pre-Hayes Code movie that must be seen to be believed. A celebration of depravity loosely based on Conrad’s The Heart Of Darkness. As envisioned by Michel Houellebecq. There’s no DVD, so watch it while you can.

6:45/7:45 am: Ghost Ship on TCM. A Val Lewton production, this little horror film was on the losing end of a lawsuit that kept it out of the public eye for most of the last century. N.B. This is not the CGI craptacular from a few years back.

8:00/9:00 am: The Seventh Victim on TCM. Another Val Lewton production. I’ve never seen this one, but I know the Lewton name means it’s a moody little no-budget horror film that will stick with you for days.

1:30/2:30 pm: The Haunting on TCM. My good friend David Smay (author of the 33 1/3 book on Tom Waits’ Swordfishtrombones album, which you should buy and read and, preferably, love [plug!]), notes that when I mentioned this movie last week, I failed to include the following information, all of which increases your need to see it: (a) the coolness of Claire Bloom's sapphic sexy psychic, and (b) that she was lovers with Philip Roth for a long time (and then briefly married him). Also, if you've never seen her in James Joyce's Women then you should, because her performance of Molly Bloom's soliloquy at the end of Ulysses is AWESOME. Thanks, David! I will!

The Rep Report (September 18--25)

Phil Nugent — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 21:30:00 GMT

AUSTIN, TEXAS: This year's Fantastic Fest, a hearty wallow in horror, sci-fi, martial arts, and other forms of genre mania, kicks off today and runs through the 28th. This year's line-up of feature films include Tokyo!, an omnibus film featuring segments directed by Michel Gondy, Bong Joon-Ho, and Leos Carax; boundary-pushing shockers ranging from the infamous Deadgirl (which tested the limits of the Toronto Film Festival's Midnight Madness venue) to the lovable Jack Brooks Monster Slayer, starring Robert Englund; Your Name Here, a sci-fi fantasy starring Bill Pullman as a fictionalized version of Philip K. Dick; and documentaries on gimmickmeister William Castle, the renegade roots of the Australian film scene, and the efforts of a 12-year-old filmmaker named Emily Hagins to craft her own zombie flick. Local coverage of the event kicks off in earnest with Austin Chronicle reporter Joe O'Connell's visit with the talent behind the homegrown Bigfoot movie Wild Man of the Navidad.

VICTORIA, BRITISH COLUMBIA: The 11th Annual Antimatter Film Festival kicks off tomorrow and runs through September 27. The aritstically ambitious festival has long been established as perhaps the biggest showcase for short films in North America; this year marks a sort of breakthrough for the degree to which they've stepped up their list of features, but a glance at the crowded schedule their dedication to the underappreciated world of short cinema remains heroically undiminished.

America the Beautiful: 15 Movies That Show What's Right With U.S. (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 21:00:00 GMT

YOUNG MR. LINCOLN (1939)

One of the most famous lines from any John Ford movie is, "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." Not great advice for a reporter, but Ford got away with in this picture, which isn't a straight biopic but a romantic fantasy about the pre-fame Abraham Lincoln (Henry Fonda) as we'd like to imagine it. The movie's script does have a basis in history: the story is built around a murder trial that young Abe took on as a fledgling lawyer. The movie uses this set-up to provide Fonda with the chance to show Lincoln demonstrating his folksy sagacity, his humor, his basic decency and the canniness that would make him a successful politician, but in embryonic form, as a young leading man learning the ropes on his way to becoming a legend. He may not know, as we know, that he's the great Abraham Lincoln. But as we see him figuring out that he has that in him, the movie elevates patriotic corn to the level of folk poetry.

MOSCOW ON THE HUDSON (1984)

Yes, Virginia, Robin Williams used to be good for something. In this melancholy comedy from director Paul Mazursky, Williams slips easily and deeply into the role of a Russian musician who surprises himself by defecting during a trip to New York. It's easy to differentiate this movie from the run of hard-sell, Commie-bashing Cold War movies that Hollywood churned out in the Reagan '80s, and not just because Williams never picks up a machine gun or steps into a boxing ring to beat some patriotic respect into a Russkie villain who's built like a moose. The movie respects the pain of self-exile and the dislocation that comes from the struggle to adjust to a new culture, whether its hero is cursing America after he's been mugged or passing out in a grocery store after suffering a cerebral overload from trying to choose among too many varieties of coffee. Because it sees the craziness in a chauvinistic country composed of immigrants from all over, its tribute to the reasons for taking pleasure and pride in America go down easy, without dishonesty or embarrassment.

JAZZ ON A SUMMER'S DAY (1960)

Bert Stern's record of the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival (featuring performances by Thelonious Monk, Louis Armstrong, Mahalia Jackson, Jack Teagarden, Anita O'Day, Dinah Washington, Chuck Berry, Gerry Mulligan, and others who did more for our nation's good name than anybody whose name you've ever seen on a ballet) preserves, without embalming, the sensation of spending a day blissed out in the sunshine sampling the wide range of everybody's favorite indigenous American art form. With cute kids, chilled babes, pretty boats, and no sunburn.

DAVE CHAPPELLE'S BLOCK PARTY (2005)

Top 5 reasons why I love America: (1) freedom of speech, (2) freedom of assembly, (3) our rich, diverse culture, itself a mix-and-match patchwork of multiple overlapping cultures, (4) the ability of all those overlapping cultures to co-exist and mingle while maintaining their own distinct perspectives and points of view and (5) our greatest export, entertainment. All of these elements are in full effect in Dave’s Chappelle’s Block Party, a rollicking concert documentary that manages (like Woodstock and Stop Making Sense before it) to capture a very specific moment in our national timeline. It’s not just a movie, it’s an event...and I don't mean simply the titular block party, an all-day, all-inclusive jam for the residents of one hardscrabble Brooklyn neighborhood (and one lucky Midwestern marching band) featuring undervalued performers like Erykah Badu, the Roots and Jill Scott and socially conscious rappers like Kanye West and Talib Kwelli. Among other things, the film was a fantastically classy, big-hearted, easy-going comeback for Dave Chappelle after his 2005 "meltdown" (actually a shockingly rare example of celebrity integrity). But, more importantly, in this post-9/11, post-Katrina, post-optimistic, pre-apocalyptic era, director Michel Gondry captures a joyfully defiant moment of celebration, hope and community sorely needed but sorely missing from our recent media landscape.

NASHVILLE (1976)

Everyone wants to write the Great American Novel, but very few people even come close. The same thing goes for films, but if any one qualifies for the title of Great American Movie, it's Robert Altman's masterpiece about the events of a single weekend in the country music capitol. Altman was not then and would never be a jingo: Nashville shows us the very worst that people are capable of throughout its running time and right up until its dramatic conclusion. But while it's a movie about America's flaws and deceptions, it's also a movie about America's grace and possibilities, about how little moments of decency and humanity can shine through even at the worst of times. With its sprawling cast and complex characters, we are shown cynicism, deceit, selfishness, callowness, stupidity and cruelty, but we're also shown beauty, honesty, kindness, determination, charity and insight – often from the same people at different times. Like the best and most ambitious art, Nashville attempts to put the world and everything in it within a limited setting and a restricted narrative, and it succeeds not cleanly, but messily, which is the only way it could have succeeded. Made at a crucial time in American history, where the pride many felt at the upcoming national bicentennial conflicted with recent events, including war, economic uncertainty, and political scandal. It couldn't have been more timely, and in its two hours and forty minutes, it does what a great American work of art must do: illustrate what is dreadful about our nation, in order to throw what is glorious about it into sharp relief.

Click here for Part One & Part Two

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce

DVD Digest for June 17, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week, a French tough guy classic comes to DVD, and musical lovers will go bananas… so to speak.

DVD of the Week: Today, director Claude Sautet is best-known to lovers of French cinema for his relationship dramas such as Nelly et Monsieur Arnaud and Un Coeur en Hiver. However, closer examination of Sautet’s career shows that he’s more versatile than his reputation would suggest. One fascinating recent discovery for me was Sautet’s breakthrough film, 1960’s Classe Tous Risques (The Criterion Collection). Starring two of French cinema’s most iconic badasses- Lino Ventura and Jean-Paul Belmondo- Classe Tous Risques is a character study that walks and talks like a taut, stylish crime thriller, but it works on both levels. Ventura in particular is sublime, so effortless and minimalistic that one can almost see the young Belmondo taking notes during their scenes together. Criterion’s new DVD edition features an interview with Ventura, along with documentaries on Sautet and writer Jose Giovanni, and numerous essays including two by directors Bertrand Tavernier and Jean-Pierre Melville. Pretty much a must-buy for lovers of big-screen tough guys… and French cinema fans, for that matter.

This week’s other notable classic DVD is Fox’s Carmen Miranda Collection, which features five of the colorful songstress’ best-loved titles. The set includes a newly restored version of The Gang’s All Here plus DVD debuts of Doll Face, Greenwich Village, If I’m Lucky and Something For the Boys. Other new Miranda titles coming to DVD this week (sold separately) are Weekend in Havana, That Night in Rio and Down Argentine Way. Also of note are Popeye the Sailor, 1938-1940: Vol. 2 (Warner), The Sword and the Stone 45th Anniversary Special Edition (Disney), and in conjunction with the release of Mike Myers in The Love Guru, So I Married An Axe Murderer (Sony, also Blu-Ray).

Recent movies coming to DVD include: Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind (New Line, also Blu-Ray); the long-awaited reteaming of Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey in Fool’s Gold (Warner, also Blu-Ray); Martin Lawrence and family in Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins (Fox); and the arthouse sleeper hit Under the Same Moon (Fox).

Finally, the week’s sole Blu-Ray only titles? Men in Black (Sony). So now you know.

Cannes Rundown, Day 3: A Christmas Tale and more!

Paul Clark — Sat, 17 May 2008 02:21:00 GMT

Of all the films in competition this year at Cannes, the one that has me most excited was A Christmas Tale, the latest film by the masterful Arnaud Desplechin, whose Kings and Queen was one of the finest films of recent years. Not wanting to have everything spoiled for me before I see it myself, I’ve tried to avoid reading the reviews coming from Cannes too much or too deeply, but based on the little I’ve read my hopes for the film are well-founded. Here’s the one and only Glenn Kenny:

“The creation of such a vivid, individualized group of characters and such a compelling roster of dilemmas is a staggering enough feat. But what makes this movie such a darkly exuberant feast is Desplechin's storytelling. Calling his directorial style "eclectic" simply doesn't do. He has packed himself an almost inexhaustible kit bag of cinematic techniques that he deploys here with an ease that makes his previous film, the incredibly impressive Kings and Queen, look relatively forced. Not only is there not a single dull moment in this two-and-a-half-hour family drama; the film practically teems with ferocious moments, and the novelistic detail offered by Desplechin (here collaborating on the screenplay with longtime writing partner Emmanuel Bourdieu) is always spot-on.”

Thanks, Glenn. Let’s see what others have to say…

Andrew O’Hehir: “Rather than supplying the holiday healing suggested by the title, Desplechin (and co-writer Emmanuel Bourdieu) have constructed a tale as emotionally challenging, fragmentary and unresolved as family life itself. At the press conference after the film, Desplechin said he always aimed to make films that were "strange and personal," and that were singular rather than generic. He has succeeded, perhaps at the cost of demanding too much from his viewers.”

Attaboy, Arnaud! And of course, this being Cannes, several other films screened today as well, though none as intriguing (to me anyway) as Arnaud’s. Let’s check out the rundown:

Time Out London’s Geoff Andrew gives us a second opinion on Three Monkeys- “This fifth feature is arguably the most ambitious film yet from the maker of ‘Uzak’ and ‘Climates’. It has the dry humour, assured pacing, astute psychological insights and sharp sense of moral and dramatic irony that has been conspicuous in all his work, but in many respects the film feels like an expansion upon ‘Climates’, not only in extending that film’s clear-eyed, unsentimental assessment of male-female relationships from a couple to a whole family and its acquaintances, but in exploring the rich potential afforded by digital technology; if you thought Ceylan’s photographer’s eye produced stunning images in ‘Climates’, ‘Three Monkeys’ pushes the envelope still further.”

ScreenDaily’s Lee Marshall weighs in on the out of competition omnibus film Tokyo!- “One out of three ain't bad for this Tokyo-themed directorial three-hander. Whimsical Michel Gondry delivers a thirty-minute segment that resonates, while compatriot Leos Carax spoils an otherwise tasty genre exercise by pressing it into service as a message film. Korea's Bong Joon-ho, meanwhile, delivers an artsy rom-com that is too slight even for its half-hour running time.”

Finally, two opinions on Scarlett and Penelope making out Vicky Cristina Barcelona, a pro from Variety’s Todd McCarthy- “Just as London did when Allen went there for "Match Point," the Catalan capital serves as an evident stimulus for the director. Even if the film provides a strictly tourist's view of the city (a perspective justified by the scenario, in fact), and one just as upscale and heedless of money as ever for Allen, "VCB" is by several degrees more hot-blooded than his usual norm, thanks especially due to the palpable chemistry of Bardem and Cruz in the second half.”

… and a con from (who else?) Jeffrey Wells- “I haven't the time to write any kind of comprehensive review of this sometimes unintentionally comedic, frequently cliche-ridden parody of a Woody Allen film, but it dawned on me early on that it plays exactly like a Ben Stiller Show parody of a typical Allen effort. Allen has been accused of parodying himself for years, but now he's really done it. And it pains me to say this. No one filmmaker has given me greater pleasure for a longer period of time than Allen. I worship the guy, but VCB is agony to sit through at times.”

Ouch. Let’s leave on a high note, shall we? Any positive press for Desplechin’s film counts as good news in my book. So here’s Cineuropa’s Fabien Lemercier on A Christmas Tale- “This exploration of a family – made of viciousness, a tormented past and a painful present – goes straight to the heart, in particular those psychologically unpleasant zones that Desplechin loves to depict. The result is a high-class feature that is both complex and subtle.”

Woohoo!

Tribeca Film Festival Review: "Mister Lonely"

Peter Smith — Thu, 01 May 2008 19:30:00 GMT

By Bryan Whitefield

By now you're probably aware that Harmony Korine's third film as director follows a Michael Jackson impersonator (Diego Luna) in Paris as he meets and follows a Marilyn Monroe look-a-like (Samantha Morton) to a castle in Scotland filled with even more people dressed as iconic figures as varied and ridiculous as Queen Elizabeth, James Dean and Abraham Lincoln. Ironically this wildly original concept is also Korine's closest attempt at a traditional narrative. That said, the bizarre but beautiful opening shot of Luna as Michael on a miniature motorcycle set in super slo-mo to the Bobby Vinton classic the title refers to is a quick reminder that Korine's films are as close to belonging at the Whitney Biennial as they are the Tribeca Film Festival.

The newly sober Korine may not rely as heavily on stunts or shock value here, but there are still several of his signature moments, including Luna's Michael entertaining a French old folks home with dance moves interspersed with chants of, "I want you to live forever! Don't die! Don't die!" There is also a pre-teen Buckwheat riding a miniature pony repeating his love for chickens and women's breasts, "They make me so hot!" But with Korine nothing is literal or necessarily related, as is the case with a strangely satisfying sub-plot with Werner Herzog as a small plane pilot who takes nuns up in the air to skydive back safely to the ground with prayer instead of parachutes. These incredibly beautiful scenes look like found footage from a Super 8 archive and further explore the idea of sublimating one's own identity for a belief in something greater than yourself.

While Luna (in his best performance to date), Morton and Denis Lavant as her Charlie Chaplin/Adolf Hitler husband are all excellent, the impersonator idea ends up a missed opportunity, with only Luna able to carry over any behavioral attributes of the celeb he emulates. A conversation between the Pope and Madonna might've been more interesting than just seeing them at a dinner table together.

Mister Lonely is easily Korine's most personal film; its themes of redemption and rebirth in some ways mirror the director's own struggle to get it made. When Diego Luna's character comes out of the Michael Jackson shell, he is seeing the world for the first time, reflecting how Korine himself might've felt with his vision finally freed from drugs. There are several moments throughout the film that confirm Korine's sharp eye for the potent and absurd in his cinema but he, like other indie auteurs (Michel Gondry, Todd Haynes and Vincent Gallo to name a few) who rely on instinct, image and impression to tell a story, fills the movie with beautifully crafted, half-finished ideas. He does however continue to make uncompromising films that have next to no concern for commercial appeal, and while the movies themselves may be uneven there is a certain joy and excitement in getting a glimpse of a filmmaker's overactive imagination almost completely unfiltered.

Trailer Review: Son of Rambow

Paul Clark — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 17:00:00 GMT

A few weeks ago, Screengrab's own Phil Nugent wrote a column on the phenomenon of "fan remakes." But the truth is that fan remakes have been around for years. The most famous example of the genre, Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation, dates to the late 1980s, and indeed my friends and I got into the act with a short remake of Pulp Fiction, with the twist of turning all the characters into morons. But with such high-profile films as Be Kind Rewind and this film, fan remakes — or, as Gondry calls it, "Sweding" — are more ubiquitous than ever. While Gondry's film appears to be one of his trademark lo-fi flights of fancy, Son of Rambow looks to be taking another path, that of the twee Brit-com. Personally, my patience for films like this ran out in roughly 1999, but it should at least be interesting to see how a cute film in which children mount a remake of First Blood plays in the wake of Stallone's latest ultra-violent installment in his other signature series.

In addition, here's a link to Mike D'Angelo's review of the film from last year's Sundance.

Look Back in Analog: VHS Nostalgia

Phil Nugent — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 18:00:00 GMT

VHS cassettes are clunky, fragile, easily damaged and easy to accidentally tape over. When VHS was still new, and later, when it was a staple of everyday life, moviemakers tended to use it as a symbol of lonely alienation, as in sex, lies, and videotape or David Cronenberg's Videodrome (where the cable-TV huckster played by James Woods, his mind twisted into Silly Putty shapes by exposure to sinister cathode rays, is controlled by his minders via fleshy cassettes that are inserted into a slit he grows in his stomach), or as a chilly modern form of trespass, as in David Lynch's Lost Highway, where someone leaves tapes on Bill Pullman and Patricia Arquette's doorstep, recording ever-closer invasions of their privacy. Introduced in 1976, VHS would somehow defeat Beta in the marketplace and have no trouble dominating laser disc, even though those rival forms offered superior picture quality, but when DVD appeared, offering superior quality and various bells and whistles in a durable, easily portable format, it was as if home video had suddenly caught up with compact disc technology, except that nobody has ever made the claims for VHS that many audiophiles still make for vinyl records as a "warmer", superior recording medium. The last movie released on VHS was A History of Violence in 2005, which means that VHS's commercial life stopped just short of twenty years. But, as 8-track enthusiasts have demonstrated, it's possible to feel nostalgic for anything, and Dennis Lim sees a growing wave of nostalgia for VHS represented in such forthcoming films as Be Kind Rewind and Son of Rambow, as well as such cult objects as the song "Videotape" on the new Radiohead album and "the deliberately lo-fi video" look of the Snoop Dogg video "Sensual Seduction".

Lim points out that "The generation that came of age in the ’80s, as the VCR was becoming a staple, is especially prone to VHS nostalgia," and this really isn't surprising. For those who grew up during the first stages of the home entertainment revolution, VHS will always be like the first car you ever drove. It was the means by which consumers redefined their relationship to movies; suddenly, we were no longer at the mercy of theater and TV programmers, but could dig through film history or take the latest blockbuster home in a little box and watch and re-watch it until we were barking sick of the damn thing. It's hard not to feel some lingering affection for a liberating force like that even after you've been made all too aware of its flaws, and I suspect that I'm not the only movie geek in the world who doesn't continue to hoard a little collection of VHS editions of movies and random oddities that haven't been released on DVD. Lim also reports on a "rarer and geekier phenomenon of VCR nostalgia" represented by Andy Hain, "a software engineer in Brighton, England, [who] maintains the Web site and 'virtual museum' Total Rewind, which scrupulously charts the evolution of VCRs from prehistory to obsolescence. Pride of place is given to the 70-plus vintage video players and cameras in the collection that Mr. Hain has been building since 1993. 'It was mainly the technology that appealed to me,' he wrote in an e-mail message. 'The more I discovered, the more strange and unlikely machines I came across, and I wanted to get hold of them and tinker with them. I also liked the design aspect. The early machines were very expensive and would have been proudly displayed in living rooms. They were styled like top-end hi-fi components, or in some cases like the bridge of the starship Enterprise.'” As for the director of Be Kind Rewind, Michel Gondry, he probably speaks for many in describing one of the natural impulses that makes it harder to let go and ride the wave: “Today new product comes so fast that sometimes the human brain doesn’t have the capacity to adapt.”

Copy Cat Culture

Phil Nugent — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 16:30:00 GMT

In Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind, Jack Black and Mos Def play old-school video store clerks who, having accidentally erased their entire inventory of VHS tapes, "remake" their own versions of such rental-house perennials as RoboCop and Driving Miss Daisy with a Camcorder and the kind of props that an eight-year-old might use to construct his cardboard puppet theater. "They call this process "Sweding", for reasons that Gondry has already made his best attempt to explain to the Los Angeles Times' Chris Lee: "'I wanted a name that meant nothing,' Paris native Gondry said in Clouseau-esque Franglais about the invention of the verb. 'I had in mind, like, the suede shoes -- a fake velvet. A sort of ultra-suede? But I always get the word wrong because I'm French.'" Hey, they say that the first step is just admitting that you have a problem.

Aaron Sugarman, New Line Cinema's senior vice president for interactive marketing, thinks that the key to selling the movie may be turning people on to the great new world of Sweding, which shouldn't be hard; the way he sees it, the process is already well underway. "Everyone's taken by this idea of taking these great movies you love and remaking them into your own thing," he says. "It's what half the stuff on YouTube is." (Not to mention this fan favorite, whose makers might want to have a little chat with Gondry and Sugarman about their sources of inspiration.) The movie's own website extends the idea to the Internet, offering Sweded versions of such sites as IMDB and MySpace, and encouraging visitors to apply the Sweding process to their own lives, which had better have a lot of spare time set aside. The filmmakers plan to set up a "Sweding suite" at the Sundance Film Festival and offer workshop space to potential Sweders at SoHo's Deitch Projects gallery; Sweded fan films will shown at the gallery and on YouTube, though Gondry, to his credit, drew the line at a cross-promotion with Blockbuster, saying that turning what's meant as a celebration of independence and amateur creativity into a deal with a big corporation would amount to "contradicting ourselves." Meanwhile, New Line is reportedly "reaching out" to such directors as Robert Zemeckis and Ivan Reitman, whose works are Sweded in the movie, and inviting them to return to favor by producing their own Sweded versions of Be Kind Rewind. Ivan Reitman's version of a Michel Guidry film? Sounds like a sure-fire formula for turning gold into straw, but when it comes to surreal thinking, few filmmakers could have anything on a senior vice president in charge of interactive marketing.

Trailer Roundup End of Year Special- Best Comedy Trailer, 2007

Paul Clark — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 17:00:00 GMT

Be Kind Rewind

For a time, I was toying with the idea of simply calling this "Funniest Trailer" and giving the award to Superbad, but I've rewatched the Be Kind Rewind trailer so many times that I couldn't bear with the thought of not recognizing it here. The trailer has a distinct 80s-style wacky buddy comedy feel to it, with Jack Black and Mos Def teaming up to shoot low-budget remakes of some of their favorite movies. But I don't think the familiarity of the genre is necessarily a bad thing here, and it could provide a certain amount of grounding for the Michel Gondry flights of fancy, which was sorely lacking in last year's The Science of Sleep. But mostly, this just looks like a lot of fun. Also, ever since the trailer first emerged I've taken advantage of every chance I've gotten to quote Jack Black's priceless line, "I will shoot you, and I know robot karate." So that's something, right?