The Screengrab : mike d'angelo

When Good Directors Go Bad?: The Frighteners (1996, Peter Jackson)

Paul Clark — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Today, Peter Jackson is best known to most audiences as one of Hollywood’s big-ticker filmmakers, the New Zealand visionary who was responsible for bringing Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings to the big screen in rousing, ambitious fashion. But in 1996, he was still trying to make his way in Hollywood, with a handful of low-budget genre movies and the critically-acclaimed Heavenly Creatures to his name. He came to America in the hope of eventually making a big-budget remake of King Kong, a dream project of his since he first decided to become a filmmaker. But first, he had to make a name for himself in the American film industry, which he hoped to do with a horror movie/comedy like the ones that made his reputation in his native land. That movie was The Frighteners.

Trouble is, most critics weren’t on to Jackson’s game yet. Jackson’s early films such as Meet the Feebles, Bad Taste and Dead Alive had yet to make much headway with American moviegoers, so critics’ only point of comparison was Jackson’s relatively restrained true crime drama Heavenly Creatures. Those who wanted more of the same were sorely disappointed, and found Jackson’s latest film a loud, obnoxious bore. Roger Ebert’s review of the film was typical of this reaction, as he wrote: “One of the more excruciating experiences for any movie lover is to sit through a movie filled with frenetic nonstop action, in which, however, nothing of interest happens. The Frighteners is a film like that… Last year, I reviewed a nine-hour documentary about the lives of Mongolian yak herdsmen, and I would rather see it again than sit through The Frighteners.”

But while those who were in the know were more receptive to the charms of The Frighteners- Mike D’Angelo wrote, “At last, a big-budget summer movie that actually delivers on its promise of entertaining escapist entertainment, without insulting the audience's intelligence in the process”- the film never really caught on even after the Lord of the Rings trilogy propelled Jackson to mainstream fame. And that’s a shame, because while The Frighteners doesn’t reach the frenzied heights of Jackson’s best work in the horror genre, it’s still a blast, especially if you’re a fan of his early films.

For one thing, to dismiss the film as Ebert does as merely being empty, frenetic action is to overlook the infectious strain of sick humor that runs through the film. Look at the character of Judge (played by John Astin), a ghost who’s been dead so long his body is literally falling to pieces. At least once, we see Judge’s jawbone fall to the floor, only to be snatched up by a spectral dog. But that doesn’t stop Judge from forging on with his life, even bursting into a museum exhibition to satisfy his sexual longing with a mummy. After doing the nasty so that his alive, ghost-wrangling pal Frank Bannister (Michael J. Fox) can see him- even though nobody else can- the satiated Judge turns to Frank and sighs, “I like it when they lie still like that.” How many big-studio summer movies would even attempt a joke like that? Very few, I’d wager.

And it’s this refusal to make nice that makes The Frighteners so much fun. Sure, Jackson had executive producer Robert Zemeckis (fresh off Forrest Gump) in his corner, but it’s still surprising how much of Jackson’s sensibility made it into the film intact. One of my favorite elements of the movie is the gleefully unhinged supporting work by Jeffrey Combs as Dammers, a very odd FBI agent. From Dammers’ initial entrance, Combs’ live-wire performance takes the film to a new and more exciting level. It’s the sort of performance most directors would discourage, citing the old saw that, when acting onscreen, “less is more.” But Combs’ work is so inspired and hilarious that it works magnificently in spite of flying in the face of conventional wisdom. Watch him in the scene where he interrogates Frank, as Combs chews up and spits out line after memorable line (my favorite: “What did *he* do? Piss on your Hush Puppies?”). Eventually, it’s all Fox can do with simply sit there and bury his head in his hands, as if to ask the audience, “what? Are you really still watching me?”

Best of all is the climactic sequence of the movie, in which Frank and his love interest Lucy (Trini Alvarado) are chased through an abandoned mental hospital by a deranged Dee Wallace Stone and her ghostly lover, an executed serial killer played by Jake Busey. On one level, it’s exciting to see Jackson’s talent firing on all cylinders, as he effortlessly cuts between past and present, with Frank seeing the murders that took place decades ago even as he is pursued by those very same killers today. But even in the midst of impressive wall-to-wall effects (provided of course by Jackson’s own Weta Digital), the film’s wicked sense of humor remains intact. If you don’t crack a smile when Wallace Stone picks up a pickaxe and declares, “I’m in the mood for a little vivisection,” then chances are you have no soul.

Through some miracle, the disastrous box-office and critical showing of The Frighteners didn’t completely torpedo Jackson’s career in America, and while it took a few years, Jackson even convinced New Line to pony up the dough for his massive Lord of the Rings trilogy. And the rest, as they say, is history. But as much as I love Jackson’s recent films, I do miss him making movies like The Frighteners, and every nod he makes to that side of his sensibility fills me with ghoulish glee. Until Jackson can use his clout to make another movie that fully recaptures that old feeling, there’ll always be The Frighteners, an underappreciated title on his filmography that definitely warrants a second look.

Screengrab Review: My Winnipeg

Peter Smith — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 19:30:00 GMT

By Mike D'Angelo

"I must leave," Guy Maddin intones solemnly at the outset of his hilariously sardonic-affectionate tribute to Manitoba's capital, where he's lived and worked his entire life. "I must leave here now." But while it's Maddin's voice we hear on the soundtrack, the anxious-looking "Guy Maddin" we see booking it out of town on a locomotive in this early sequence is actor Darcy Fehr, in a puckish mix of invention and autobiography that characterizes the movie as a whole. Yes, Winnipeg did experience a turbulent strike in 1919 that was directly inspired by the Bolshevik revolution. No, Winnipeg in all likelihood not does have ten times the sleepwalking rate of any other city in the world. Merrily juxtaposing history and myth, Maddin/"Maddin" decides to "film [his] way out of here," shepherding his surviving family into the apartment-cum-salon where he grew up and re-enacting episodes from his childhood. According to the narration, his tyrannical mother plays herself; those who stick around for the credits will discover that the role is in fact played by Ann Savage, the long-ago star of Detour.

Shot in Maddin's now-standard faux-silent style, complete with apparent celluloid damage and breathless intertitles, My Winnipeg itself amounts to a neverending series of detours. Truth is, the titular subject is entirely ostensible, which is both the film's charm and its greatest limitation.

Unlike Maddin's last feature, the overly plotty Brand Upon the Brain!, this one never wears out its welcome, but neither does it ever achieve the galvanizing force of Maddin's best work, simply because we're forever off to the next random goofy vignette. (Cowards Bend the Knee, which worked similar quasi-autobiographical terrain, derived much of its lunatic power from Maddin's expert use of silent horror tropes.) In other words, the movie is kind of a doodle — and yet, it's a magnificent doodle, with parts so individually flavorful that you don't so much care about pulling out your calculator and working out their sum. Any film deranged enough to include a a fictional '60s TV show called "Ledge Man," which found the hero threatening to leap to his death from a tall building every single week, really must be seen.

Screengrab Review: The Edge of Heaven

Peter Smith — Thu, 22 May 2008 18:00:00 GMT

By Mike D'Angelo

Like his previous dramatic feature, the Berlin prizewinner Head-On, Fatih Akin's The Edge of Heaven explores the increasingly porous borders between East and West, shuttling characters back and forth between Hamburg and Istanbul and observing their rootless confusion. Akin divides the film into three chapters, two of which sport titles that announce the impending death of a major character — a structural device that lends even ostensibly mundane scenes a certain uneasy tension. Part One focuses on a cantankerous Turkish émigré (Tuncel Kurtiz) and the hooker (also Turkish) he hires to be his live-in girlfriend (Nursel Köse), to the consternation of his bookish son (Baki Davrak); Part Two follows the hooker's daughter (Nurgül Yesilçay), a student radical in Istanbul who hightails it to Germany following a demonstration gone wrong and falls into a relationship with a young woman (Patrycia Ziolkowska) she hits up for spare change, to the consternation of the woman's stern mother (Fassbinder vet Hanna Schygulla, the only recognizable cast member for most Americans). Part Three shifts the focus again in ways better left unrevealed.

Those expecting the punkish, masochistic energy of Head-On, with its car-crashing and wrist-cutting and club-hopping, may be a bit surprised by this new film's more measured and contemplative tone. All the same, Akin's keen intelligence, his sensitivity to cultural dislocation and his skill with actors are all still very much in evidence. Scene by scene, The Edge of Heaven (which sounds like a Majid Majidi film; the German title translates as From the Other Side) is an assured and disarmingly inquisitive picture, creating a mosaic of unsettled lives in which the pieces never fit quite where you expect them to. What keeps it from being more than just "solid" is Akin's unfortunate reliance on what I'll call Stupid Writer Tricks — implausible coincidences, chance almost-meetings between characters who don't realize their hidden connection, etc. If someone spends the entire movie plastering HAVE YOU SEEN HER? posters all over town, you can be sure he'll take the last one down just before Someone Who's Seen Her walks in the door, at which point the camera will even pan over to the empty space where the poster used to be. In another kind of movie, that might not be a big deal; in one that's otherwise so scrupulously naturalistic, it feels, well, a little cheap. Fortunately, the ending, with its touching air of forgiveness, will have you in a generous frame of mind.

Screengrab Review: Standard Operating Procedure

Peter Smith — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 18:45:00 GMT

By Mike D'Angelo

In one sense, Standard Operating Procedure is anything but. Errol Morris has few rivals among documentary filmmakers, but he isn't renowned for tackling hot-button issues torn from yesterday's headlines; most of the folks who've sat down before his patented Interrotron camera have been either fascinating eccentrics (Gates of Heaven; Fast, Cheap & out of Control) or aging provocateurs willing to discuss controversies from decades past (Mr. Death, The Fog of War). For all its lurid notoriety, Abu Ghraib seems almost too ordinary a subject for someone as outlandishly gifted as Morris, and while he's done his usual formally sophisticated and journalistically thorough job, S.O.P. is the first movie he's ever made that gives off a faint but unmistakable whiff of déjà vu.

You know the players; you know the photos. Morris has secured interviews with five of the seven MPs who were indicted, including media scapegoat Lynndie England, and coaxed from them a disarmingly candid assessment of their behavior. Anybody who's read Philip Zimbardo's excellent The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil will be familiar with the film's unstated thesis, which blames the persecution and degradation at Abu Ghraib not on the moral lapse of a few "bad apples" but on a poisonous atmosphere created and condoned by those much higher up the military food chain. Still, words on a page can't provide the odd amalgam of shame and defiance that permeates these interviews, nor the dispassionate intimacy of the Interrotron itself.

What gets short shrift, surprisingly, are the photographs themselves. Some have been critical of Morris' decision to commission flashy animated sequences from graphics whiz Kyle Cooper, finding the juxtaposition of the sordid and the high-tech to be somehow unseemly. Those people should chill. But what I really wanted from S.O.P. — especially given the terrific essays Morris has been writing on the nature of photography for the New York Times — was an in-depth exploration of the bizarre disjunction between what the disgraced MPs (persuasively) claim they were feeling and their demeanor in the pictures. Sabrina Harman, for example, wrote letters to her lover at the time that powerfully recount her disgust at what was going on — so why do we see her grinning like a lunatic and giving a big party-hearty thumbs-up beside an Iraqi corpse? Morris asks the question, but he doesn't really delve, being too busy indicting the U.S. military as a whole. Thing is, we don't need Errol Morris to do that. We rely on him to look past the patently obvious.

Cannes 2008: Meet the Jury!

Paul Clark — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Yesterday, The Screengrab was the 152nd blog on the web to post the Competition slate for next month's Cannes Film Festival. But before you start predicting the winners sight unseen, we suggest you get to know the members of the Competition jury. That way you'll know whose names to curse when your favorite filmmaker gets smoked by some little-known furriner whose name you can't pronounce.

This year's Cannes Competition Jury:

Sean Penn (Jury President) is a filmmaker of some note, directing four films since his 1990 debut, The Indian Runner. His most recent film is the memorably Oscar-snubbed Into the Wild. When not behind the camera, Penn is also known for his political and charitable work, which has taken him to Iran and to the post-Katrina New Orleans. Penn has also been known to act on occasion.

Sergio Castellitto has appeared in several films in Competition, including 2001's Va Savoir and 2002's The Religion Hour (My Mother's Smile). Once referred to by Screengrab favorite Mike D'Angelo as "maybe the most underrated thesp alive," he also starred in the popular Mostly Martha, better known as No Reservations, Except Good. Castellitto has also directed two features, including the 2004 film Don't Move, in which he exercised his director's clout in order to give himself several love scenes with Penelope Cruz.

Natalie Hershlag, alternately known as Natalie Portman, made her big-screen debut at age 13 in Luc Besson's The Professional, sometimes referred to as Léon by various talkbackers on Ain't It Cool News. Since that time, she has become one of the most sought-after actresses of her generation, particularly among horny fanboys who despair that she will never get completely naked onscreen. Hershlag is set to make her directorial debut in this year's omnibus film New York, I Love You, where her short film will appear alongside new works by such acclaimed filmmakers as Brett Ratner and Scarlett Johansson. She also wants you to know that the Shins will totally change your life.

Alfonso Cuaron first gained international critical attention with his 1995 film A Little Princess, and subsequent films like Y Tu Mama Tambien and Children of Men have proven him a formidable talent (he also allegedly made a low-budget adaptation of a little-known English fantasy novel, but no one knows what became of this). In 2006, his high-profile friendship with fellow Mexican filmmakers Guillermo Del Toro and Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu let to the trio briefly becoming known as "The Three Amigos" for several months before they were sued by Chevy Chase, Martin Short and Steve Martin.

Apichatpong Weerasethakul has such a long name that I run the risk of hitting my character limit simply by typing it. Luckily for me, he prefers to simply be called "Joe." Joe has garnered widespread critical acclaim for his whimsical, magical-realist films, which include Mysterious Object at Noon, Blissfully Yours, and Syndromes and a Century. His 2004 film Tropical Malady won the Jury Prize at Cannes, and Roger Ebert called the film "a meditation on portentous but incoherent themes." By which we're guessing he meant "awesome."

Alexandra Maria Lara, a ravishing Romanian who moved to Germany at age 4, made her movie debut at 16. However, the role that brought her international acclaim came in 2004's Downfall, in which she portrayed Hitler's personal secretary Traudl Junge. Since then, she costarred in Francis Ford Coppola's Youth Without Youth and in last year's Ian Curtis biopic Control, where she met current boyfriend Sam Riley (isn't that cute?). Lara will next appear in Stephen Daldry's The Reader, as well as taking a supporting role in Spike Lee's WWII drama Miracle at St. Anna, a role you won't find out about by looking her up on IMDb.

Rachid Bouchareb is a French director-producer who last appeared at Cannes with his 2006 drama Days of Glory. In addition to his own films, he has also produced the work of numerous other filmmakers, including all four features to date by Bruno Dumont. Sorry, I have nothing humorous to say about this guy.

So there you have it. Seven jury members, down from nine last year. How will they vote? Will Penn insist on a political bent, or at least something appeals to his artier side? Will Cuaron stump for his fellow Latin Americans? Which Bouchareb will show up- the one who directed the rousing WW2 or the guy who produces Bruno Dumont movies? Will Joe gravitate to fellow talking-primate lover Charlie Kaufman? Will the paparazzi devote most of their attention to Portman and Lara (yes, they will)? Let the blind prognosticating commence in 5, 4, 3...

Screengrab Review: Paranoid Park

Peter Smith — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Review by Mike D'Angelo.

Taking a brief and very welcome break from memorial filmmaking — Columbine, Kurt Cobain, a forthcoming Harvey Milk biopic — Gus Van Sant achieves thrilling new heights of lyrical expressionism with Paranoid Park, his fractured adaptation of a young-adult novel by Blake Nelson. Frankly, I was so certain that I never wanted to see this particular director set foot on a high-school campus again that I contemplated a restraining order. But this brilliantly schizoid character study — structured as the letter-cum-journal entry of Alex, a skate punk with a guilty conscience (sensational newcomer Gabe Nevins, found via MySpace) — digs into the teenage mindset with a clarity and eloquence that Elephant, with its distracting (and, to my mind, obscene) echoes of real-world tragedy, couldn't possibly achieve. Ostensibly, the plot concerns Alex's involvement in the accidental death of a security guard. But since this act of involuntary manslaughter (briefly seen in gruesome detail) is wholly fictional, Van Sant and Nelson's appropriation of it as an overarching metaphor for the furtive, free-floating sense of shame that accompanies puberty feels bold and incisive rather than deeply disrespectful.

Meanwhile, Van Sant's formal dexterity just grows more and more astounding. He sometimes rivals Alain Resnais here with his conflation of editing and memory, skipping back and forth in time in a dissociative frenzy that has no use for conventional signposts or explanations. And even when Van Sant flirts with cliché, he does so in a way that's forbidding and strange: You've seen the scene where the distraught protagonist sublimates his/her grief in the shower a hundred times — but never like this, with the contrast cranked up to near-abstraction and the camera intently focused on the rivulets of water that flow from Alex's long hair as he stands silently, head bowed. I could have done with a bit less emphasis on Elliott Smith on the soundtrack, perhaps, but the film's other musical choices, ranging from Billy Swan's "I Can Help" to snatches of Nino Rota's score for Juliet of the Spirits, are magnificently contrapuntal. This is still very much a mood piece, but Van Sant, after two consecutive films centered on sacrificial lambs, has made an overdue and welcome return to recognizable human beings.

Screengrab Review: The Duchess of Langeais

Peter Smith — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 17:30:00 GMT

It's rather unfortunate that Jacques Rivette's latest film is being released here with a title that conveys generic period stodginess à la Masterpiece Theatre, since the original French title — Ne touchez pas la hache, or "Don't Touch the Axe" — better conveys the razor-sharp edges of this superlative, expertly calibrated battle of wills. Faithfully adapted from Honoré de Balzac's novella, it opens in and around a Spanish convent, where gimpy, sullen war veteran Armand de Montriveau (Guillaume Depardieu, son of Gérard) seeks an audience with a Barefoot Carmelite nun who calls herself Sister Theresa (Jeanne Balibar). Their brief, impassioned interview, conducted under the suspicious eye of the Mother Superior, abruptly concludes when an agonized Sister Theresa cries out, "Mother, I have lied to you! This man is my lover!" At which point the film jumps back five years in order to recount the torturous quasi-courtship of the nun — now revealed as the titular Duchess — and the general, an affair characterized by elaborate, courtly head games that amount to a 19th-century equivalent of The Rules.

Nobody understood the maddening allure of the almost attainable better than Balzac, and Rivette matches the author's emotional precision with one subtly stunning composition after another, buttressed by a handful of short yet heartbreaking lateral pans that move us from master to close-up without the violence of a cut. (It's the cut afterward that draws blood.) He also makes much more effective and perverse use of textual intertitles than did Patrice Chéreau in Gabrielle, a film that now looks even more overwrought and mannered by comparison. Balibar's wily, impassioned performance was a given — her best work to date was as the star of Rivette's 2001 effort La Savoir — but I hadn't expected such muted volcanic ardor from Depardieu fils, who practically broods a hole in the floor of every room he enters. And while I'm weary of the structural device in which we open with the penultimate scene and then flash back to see the events that led to this crisis/impasse, here the device is absolutely crucial, tainting every bit of gamesmanship that follows/precedes it. Indeed, I desperately hoped that the film would end without returning to the convent, and was somewhat disappointed when there turned out to be an epilogue of sorts. But even that perfunctory flourish slices clean. — Mike D'Angelo

Trailer Review: Snow Angels

Paul Clark — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 17:00:00 GMT

With this summer's Judd Apatow-produced comedy Pineapple Express, David Gordon Green appears to be turning his back on the modestly-budgeted dramas that made his reputation. However, fans of his old style can rejoice in the fact that he's still got one more indie waiting to be released: Snow Angels, which premiered at Sundance last year. In his coverage of the festival, Nerve's Mike D'Angelo called this "Green’s most conventional work to date", and one gets the same impression from the trailer, which plays up the dysfunctional relationship between ex-marrieds Sam Rockwell and Kate Beckinsale while only giving a few glimpses of the quirky All the Real Girls-style courtship between teens Michael Angarano and Olivia Thirlby. Still, I'm eager to see this, partly to check out Rockwell- who in my eyes gave the performance of 2007 in Joshua- but also to give Green a proper send-off before he makes the journey into Apatow-land.

Mike D'Angelo at Sundance: Part 9

Peter Smith — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 19:05:00 GMT

Mike D'Angelo reports from the Sundance Film Festival:

As the festival winds down, some quick notes on movies I didn't have time to address earlier. (I'm gonna include the walk-outs here, despite the wrath of one reader who believes that saying anything at all about a movie you didn't see from start to finish constitutes dereliction of duty. Obviously, you should take such judgments with a grain or two of salt — and maybe an entire shakerful in the case of Ballast, which I'll very likely see again, and in full, at some point. But at the same time, you can get a mighty strong sense of a film in thirty-five to forty minutes.)

Traces of the Trade: A Story From the Deep North (Documentary Competition): Painfully earnest young woman with unbearably whiny voice — she narrates, alas — discovers that her esteemed ancestors were slave traders, corrals nine relatives for self-indulgent journey to sore spots from the family's past. For hardcore aficionados of liberal white guilt only. (W/O)

Time Crimes (Park City at Midnight): I'm a sucker for time-travel stories, but even I had trouble warming to this Spanish gloss on 2004 Sundance prizewinner Primer, in which a middle-aged schlub travels ninety minutes into the past and finds himself engaged in unwitting battle with other versions of himself who've developed wildly divergent agendas. Ineptly directed, for the most part, and the concluding twist is singularly unsatisfying. Come back, Shane (Carruth).

The Wave (World Cinema Dramatic Competition): German filmmaker Dennis Gansel turns the true story of a high-school history experiment gone awry into a glossy, pulse-pounding thriller, employing methods almost as fascistic as those of The Wave itself. Intentional irony? One can't help but be riveted by the spectacle of ordinary teenagers willingly submitting to autocratic rule — their überhip teacher is attempting to demonstrate that the Nazis weren't anomalous monsters — but earmarking one kid as emotionally unstable from the get-go means that we're just twiddling our thumbs as we await the inevitable moment when he finally snaps.

What Just Happened? (Premieres): Hollywood made yet another mildly lacerating self-portrait, that's what. Loosely based on the memoirs of producer Art Linson (Fight Club, Into the Wild, several Mamet films), it boasts the most relaxed De Niro performance in ages and a smattering of truly hilarious jokes, most of them involving out-of-control entitlement. Too bad Bruce Willis, sporting a Grizzly Adams beard that he refuses to shave prior to the start of filming on a new picture, isn't nearly as funny as Alec Baldwin must have been in real life. (Read Linson's equally diverting book for the lowdown; it happened on 1997's The Edge.)

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (Dramatic Competition): Michael Chabon's complicated first novel has been reduced (by Dodgeball's Rawson Marshall Thurber) to a simple bisexual love triangle, with two major characters — Arthur and Cleveland — melded into one, and another, the improbably named Phlox, distorted almost beyond recognition. And yet the movie still almost kinda works, mostly because Peter Sarsgaard commits himself so fully to his ludicrous bad-boy manipulator that we, like the dazed young protagonist, are completely taken in.

Downloading Nancy (Dramatic Competition): I'd had about enough of this repugnant exercise in nihilism at the point when Maria Bello, playing a masochistic housewife who's hired a stranger she found on the Internet (Jason Patric) to torture and kill her, walks barefoot into a mouse trap, over and over and over, shrieking with laughter each time it snaps on her toes. By all accounts from those who stuck it out, it gets much, much worse thereafter. At least the "revelation" that she was sexually abused as a child isn't saved for the final reel. (W/O)

Mike D'Angelo at Sundance: Part 8

Peter Smith — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Mike D'Angelo reports from the Sundance Film Festival:

My guess is that a lot of the people reading this have at least one screenplay in progress. Might I make a suggestion? You know that Big Secret you've got lurking somewhere in the third act — the traumatic past incident that retroactively explains your characters' troubling present-day neuroses? Ditch it. Lose it. Nuke it. You don't need it. It doesn't help.

Had I made this plea a year ago, perhaps we might all have been spared the ordeal of Sunshine Cleaning, one of the big-buzz titles in this year's Dramatic Competition. Directed by New Zealand native Christine Jeffs, whose mildly promising debut Rain now seems a distant memory (she also made Sylvia, the inert Plath biopic starring Gwyneth Paltrow), it stars Amy Adams and Emily Blunt, both in reasonably fine form, as hard-luck sisters who start a new business wiping up the blood and viscera that accumulates at crime scenes. The ick factor makes for a few funny moments, but, alas, screenwriter Megan Holley has more serious issues in mind. Both young women seem devoted to their father (Alan Arkin, reprising his labored shtick from that other Sunshine movie), but Mom is nowhere in sight. Might our heroines possibly be working through some personal issues related to the discovery of a bloody, horrific mess? And isn't that conveeeenient. People, this sort of Freudian nonsense is killing narrative fiction. Characters are far more intriguing and memorable when their behavior can't be reduced to the sum of their childhood traumas. Just let them be however screwed up they are; we'll happily speculate about the cause. (Case in point: the underrated Margot at the Wedding.)

Unfortunately, I failed to get into Sugar, which all reports suggest boasts the same impressive degree of relaxed naturalism as Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden's previous Sundance triumph, Half Nelson. But it sounds like the antidote to the Sunshine Cleanings that infest this festival.

Mike D'Angelo at Sundance: Part 7

Peter Smith — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 17:30:00 GMT

Mike D'Angelo reports from the Sundance Film Festival:

The hottest ticket at Sundance 2007 — for the increasingly desperate press, if not for the general public — was Hounddog, in which Dakota Fanning played a barefoot farm girl so desperate for tickets to see Elvis Presley that she was willing to strip naked and gyrate around à la The King, only to get brutally raped for her trouble. Many fewer journalists flocked to see this year's less sensationalistic Phoebe in Wonderland, starring Dakota's equally precocious younger sister Elle — which is a shame, since it's a much more interesting film, albeit somewhat muddled. Phoebe's dangerous obsession isn't Elvis but Alice: Her mother (Felicity Huffman) has been working for years on a Lewis Carroll dissertation, and Phoebe desperately wants the lead role in her grade school's production of Alice in Wonderland, to be directed — sort of — by a singularly bizarre new drama teacher (Patricia Clarkson). So badly does Phoebe want the part, in fact, that she devises an elaborate system of games and rituals designed to secure it for her. She paces the school hallway for hours, carefully avoiding any cracks in the floor. She hops up the stairs at her house, then hops down twice, backwards, then up again, then a half-turn, clapping, then repeat. She washes her hands again and again and again, until they bleed.

Writer-director Daniel Barnz plays a rather pointless game of keep-away with Phoebe's condition, which isn't named until the movie's final moments, but I'll respect his wishes. (I'm pretty sure it's two comorbid conditions, actually, though the script doesn't specify; if I tell you that she also shrugs her shoulders a lot and occasionally repeats other people's sentences, that should clinch it for the neuro-heads.) Barnz's goal here — quite an admirable one, in an after-school special kind of way — is to suggest that such conditions are only the extreme end of a continuum upon which we all reside. But he also wants to make a more general plea for tolerance, so we get a subplot about an effeminate little boy in Phoebe's class who wants to play the Red Queen in drag and is immediately labeled queer. And he also wants Clarkson's drama teacher to be one of those Dead Poets Society educational martyrs who encourage kids to chuck all rules and regs before being marched to the guillotine by some humorless authority figure (here, inexplicably, Campbell Scott, who can't do humorless with a gun to his head). And he also wants to beguile us with Gilliamesque fantasy sequences, at which he sucks, quite frankly. The main reason to see Phoebe in Wonderland is for yet another astonishing Fanning performance. How these little girls are able to summon such powerful reserves of fear and anguish and terror, I have no idea. I'm not really sure I want to know, to be honest.

Mike D'Angelo at Sundance, Part 6

Peter Smith — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 21:30:00 GMT

Mike D'Angelo reports from the Sundance Film Festival:

Has Billy Crudup ever successfully portrayed an ordinary human being? There's something vaguely otherworldly about the guy — a guileless quality that makes him best suited for playing befuddled innocents, like the childlike heroin addict Fuckhead in Jesus' Son. Pretty Bird, the directorial debut of equally oddball actor Paul Schneider (All the Pretty Girls), finds Crudup in full-on Ed Wood mode as a gladhanding entrepreneur who persuades a buddy with a large savings account (David Hornsby) and an unemployed aerospace engineer (Paul Giamatti) to help him build a futuristic "rocket belt." For a while, Crudup's deliberately stilted line readings and panoply of quizzical expressions are amusing enough to carry the film, especially given Giamatti's apoplectic support and a typically stonefaced comic turn from SNL's Kristen Wiig. Thing is, though, Schneider based his screenplay on a true story, one that takes a surprisingly dark turn. Major characters wind up dead, kidnapped and imprisoned. And yet the film's tone never really wavers from goofball geniality. Schneider presents us with a gaggle of one-dimensional caricatures, then expects us to actually care about what happens to them; as the disjunction between style and content grows wider and wider, the actors' antics — Crudup's in particular — start to feel laborious. File this one under Fascinating Failure, and mark Schneider down as a talented eccentric who needs someone a little more grounded, à la David Gordon Green, to prevent him from escaping Earth's atmosphere.

Mike D'Angelo at Sundance, Part 5

Peter Smith — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 17:15:00 GMT

Mike D'Angelo reports from the Sundance Film Festival:

You know it's a strange year at Sundance when the best movie you've seen was directed by the guy responsible for Jerry Springer's crass bid at big-screen stardom. Can't say I much blame Neil Abramson for omitting Ringmaster from his press kit bio, but his latest film, American Son, more than atones for that admittedly grievous sin. Just please don't immediately click the hell outta here when I tell you the premise: Mike (Nick Cannon), a young Marine fresh out of whatever the jarheads call basic training, spends a four-day furlough in Bakersfield, CA, visiting friends and family — none of whom know that he's shipping off to Iraq the moment he returns to base. I know, I know. Really, though, this isn't an Iraq movie. Think of it more as 25th Hour with combat duty in lieu of prison. Nothing that happens, least of all Mike's "character arc," is especially revelatory, but the film boasts an immediacy and specificity that puts most of this year's other American indies to shame. It's a rare film in which you genuinely feel as if you've just been plunked down in the middle of a life in progress; every character, no matter how small or insignificant, seems to have an existence that extends beyond the requirements of that particular scene. Even Mike's hesitant romance with a Latino girl he meets on the Greyhound into town (Melonie Diaz, who's become the breakout actor from Raising Victor Vargas) mostly succeeds in avoiding cliché. Screenwriter Eric Schmid has a knack for introducing salient aspects of Mike's background — his parents' messy divorce; his brother's descent into criminal behavior — without belaboring them or turning them into pat psychological explanations; he also has a strong feeling for the reckless anomie that tends to overcome young adults trapped in small towns and devoid of realistic prospects. In the unlikely event that the film does get picked up, though, I hope they find a better title for it than American Son, which makes it sound like precisely the sort of grandiose, tendentious Thesis Statement that Abramson, Schmid and the cast so deftly avoid.

Trailer Review: Paranoid Park

Paul Clark — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 17:00:00 GMT

In his review from last year's Cannes Film Festival, Nerve's Mike D'Angelo called Gus Van Sant's latest a "lyrical and evocative portrait of contemporary adolescence." So naturally, the domestic trailer focuses almost entirely on the murder-mystery aspect of the film. After all, the story of a bunch of skateboard kids is a tough sell to the masses. Still, the Van Sant touch is unmistakable — the intrusive flourescent lighting inside the school, the sun-dappled exteriors (courtesy of cinematographer Christopher Doyle, subbing for Van Sant's usual DP Harris Savides), and the cast of androgynous-looking young men. All in all, this trailer should make little difference in regards to bringing in an audience — if you always see Van Sant's films, you'll see this one; otherwise, you'll stay home. I'm sure you all know where you stand.

Mike D'Angelo at Sundance: Part 4

Peter Smith — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 20:15:00 GMT

Mike D'Angelo reports from the Sundance Film Festival:

Just a few minutes into Ballast, Lance Hammer's methodically withholding feature debut, I already felt confident of two things. One, I wasn't going to like this movie. Two, everybody else would, for reasons having little to do with Hammer's artistry and a great deal to do with his sensibility. Sure enough, shortly after I bailed at the end of reel two, weary of the film's mannered silences and artless shakycam, I found Robert Koehler's Variety rave, which predictably declared Hammer "a humanist artist" and praised his film for "engag[ing] audiences' best human responses." (As opposed to, say, their arachnoid responses.)

Alas, since I don't subscribe to the self-congratulatory notion that a film's worth hinges on the degree to which it reflects your own worldview, thereby making you feel good about yourself for admiring it — a phenomenon I've dubbed "soup kitchen cinema" — I can't join in the hosannahs. My friend Noel Murray of the Onion AV Club, who stayed to the end (and was somewhat underwhelmed), assures me that Ballast does eventually shake off its sub-Dardennes torpor and achieve some genuine power. But let me briefly recount the moments that made me decide I'd seen more than enough. (This will involve some mild spoilers concerning events that happen in the first few minutes, which you're likely to encounter anyway if you're so much as skimming other reviews/synopses.)

After a brief, lyrical pre-title sequence, we discover Lawrence (inexpressive nonprofessional Micheal J. Smith, Sr.), a heavyset black man, sitting on the couch in the darkened living room of a dilapidated house, just staring into space. A neighbor appears, first knocking and then, when Lawrence fails to respond, opening the unlocked front door and stepping inside. The neighbor, a middle-aged white guy, is looking for someone who turns out to be Lawrence's twin brother, and finds him lying dead in the bedroom, an apparent suicide. Naturally, the neighbor has questions for Lawrence, but Lawrence says nothing. He just keeps staring into space. Eventually, as the neighbor calls 911, Lawrence silently stands and walks out the front door, without so much as a glance at the neighbor; through the open door, we can see him disappear around a corner.

At which point I had to restrain myself from saying aloud "Aaaand gunshot in five. . . four. . . three. . ." I wasn't 100% certain whether Lawrence was about to return with a gun and blow the neighbor away or just shoot himself offscreen. But Hammer's setup for an "unexpected" act of violence couldn't possibly have been more clumsily blatant. If you don't know that a nonresponsive, near-catatonic character who abruptly leaves the room is about to do something horrific, you can't have seen very many movies in your life.

One offscreen gunshot later, Lawrence is in the hospital, having survived his suicide attempt. We get a series of brief, uninflected shots showing his surgery, his recovery, his discharge. (This is all in the film's first five to ten minutes.) People speak to Lawrence, but he never says anything in return. Weeks have now passed — we hear from a doctor that Lawrence was unconscious for ten days — and the same neighbor shows up, wanting to know whether Lawrence is okay; he's also come to return Lawrence's dog, which he's been looking after since the "accident." Lawrence opens the door when the neighbor knocks and then just stands there, silent, for the entire scene. Are you okay, Lawrence? Silence. I brought your dog back, figured you'd want him now. Silence. I guess I'll just keep him a while longer, then. Silence. You sure you're okay? Silence. All right then.

I'm sorry, but this is bullshit. We're not talking here about the melancholy expressionism of a Tsai Ming-liang or the perverse whimsy of a Kim Ki-duk. This is by no means a deliberately stylized world in which a mute character violates no rule of verisimilitude. Hammer is aiming for raw naturalism, and we're apparently expected to believe not only that Lawrence's behavior is a credible expression of grief (which I might buy in the immediate aftermath of his brother's death, but not weeks later following a lengthy hospital stay), but that the neighbor, who in all respects appears to be an ordinary guy, would simply accept these unmistakable signs of mental imbalance, never once pressing or protesting.

Ask yourself how you would react if someone you knew just stood there like a statue, making no response of any kind to anything you said. This nonsense bears no relationship whatsoever to genuine human behavior — it's just a novice filmmaker's misguided notion of what might constitute badass minimalism. That so many people seem prepared to take it seriously only shows how far good intentions will take you.

Mike D'Angelo at Sundance: Part 3

Peter Smith — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 17:15:00 GMT

Mike D'Angelo reports from the Sundance Film Festival:

So far no good on the Dramatic Competition front — which is a bit of a bummer, since those are the movies I came here to see, for the most part. I must confess that I didn't even last halfway through buzz magnet The Wackness, which expends most of its creative energy in its title, leaving writer-director Jonathan Levine with nothing to do but find jokes predicated on our knowledge that we're no longer living in 1994. ("Does this have anything to do with Kurt Cobain?" asks Ben Kingsley's pothead shrink of a patient.) Apparently, Kingsley makes out with an Olsen twin after I hit the exit; somebody more tuned into the zeitgeist than myself will have to explain why this is a big cultural event. Other Competition titles are such well-intentioned mediocrities that badmouthing them feels like kicking an injured dog, and word on Good Dick, which I was planning to see this afternoon, is so toxic that I'll likely wind up defecting to some obscure foreign film.

On the other hand, this year's documentaries continue to impress, and I say that as someone who much prefers fiction to nonfiction when it comes to cinema. Slingshot Hip Hop, an energetic portrait of the burgeoning Palestinian rap scene, features a bevy of great music and spotlights a truly sobering irony: In a genre that thrives on collaboration — name any significant hip-hop single of the last few years that doesn't include the word "Feat." — it's hard to create and sustain a movement when you're not permitted to travel ten short miles to meet the peers who've inspired you.

Even more politically trenchant is the articulate policy debate called Secrecy, which tackles what is arguably the key question of the information age — namely, how do we reconcile freedom and security? Directors Peter Galison and Robb Moss don't attempt to hide their belief that the U.S.'s government's increasing obsession with classification does more harm than good, and is being used today primarily as a means for the executive branch to avoid accountability. To their credit, however, they also give ample screen time to former CIA and NSA employees, who make a strong case for the opposing viewpoint — so strong, in fact, that I left the movie feeling as if the problem might be inherently insoluble. Like many expository docs, Secrecy sometimes feels more like an animated book than a movie, despite attempts to jazz things up via animated interludes and a propulsive score; you can't help but feel as if the surface of this enormous subject has barely been scratched. But much more than last year's bizarrely overpraised, in-case-you-missed-several-years-worth-of-the-news compendium, No End in Sight, this evenhanded act of advocacy is required viewing for the hundreds of millions of us who have consented to be governed.

Mike D'Angelo at Sundance: Part 2

Peter Smith — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 00:05:00 GMT

Mike D'Angelo reports from the Sundance Film Festival:

Persepolis didn't impress me much as a coming-of-age memoir, but even I, filing one of the few dissenting reviews amidst the tsunami of fervent acclaim, had to admit that its monochromatic animation style was stunning to behold on a frame-to-frame basis. If you, like me, are partial to stark black-and-white drawings, but would rather watch some poor dude being used as an insect incubator than a little girl in a chador singing "Eye of the Tiger," keep an eye out for Fear(s) of the Dark, a French-financed omnibus horror film that provides six renowned artists and illustrators with a forum to explore their personal phobias, using any graphic tool save for color. As with any collection of shorts, quality varies widely; a couple of the entries here are little more than gorgeously baffling, and one amounts to a predictable sick joke. But Charles Burns — he of the aforementioned insect bit — turns in a hilariously grotesque tribute to EC's classic Weird Science/Weird Fantasy line of comics, complete with boldfaced irony and (it was the ‘50s) unapologetic misogyny. And the final segment, animated by Richard McGuire and set in a time-honored Old Dark House lit only by a roving candle and the embers of a dying fire, is simply one of the most eye-popping exercises in contrast ever attempted on the big screen. In a way, it's too dazzling to be scary — it's hard to get nervous about offscreen bumps and creaks when you're marveling at the way McGuire captures a bottle of booze rolling across the floor via only the light that reflects off of its white label. Sundance has buried Fear(s) of the Dark in its little-attended New Frontier section (why not Park City at Midnight?), so you may not see a whole lot of coverage from other sources. But for devotees of innovative animation — and the severely colorblind — this is a must-see.

Mike D'Angelo at Sundance: Part 1

Peter Smith — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 19:50:00 GMT

Mike D'Angelo reports from the Sundance Film Festival:

Sundance is playing things close to the vest this year, for some reason. Upon my arrival late Thursday night — too late, alas, to catch the opening-night attraction, In Bruges, which everyone who did see it seems to think is ill-served by its hyperactive trailer — I picked up a copy of the Salt Lake City Weekly, expecting to find my friend Scott Renshaw's capsule reviews of perhaps two dozen films that had been screened for local press before the festival proper even began. Instead, there only was a page of wild guesswork, advance screenings having apparently been scuttled. Nor were Friday's press screenings particularly appetizing, as most of the morning and afternoon was devoted to soporific-sounding selections from the World Documentary section. Did I really want or need to learn anything further about Mumia Abu-Jamal? (In Prison My Whole Life.) Would Up the Yangtze, about China's Three Gorges Dam project, be any more illuminating than Jia Zhang-ke's 2006 Venice prizewinner Still Life, just now opening in limited U.S. release? Hoping the homegrown docs might be more energizing, I stuck my head into Traces of the Trade, a personal-essay film in which the director and nine relatives tour the locations where their ancestors purchased slave labor with rum and molasses, but fled after forty minutes of unbearably self-indulgent white-liberal guilt.

As I write this, most of the potentially heavy hitters are still to come. Today, however, people are buzzing, with good reason, about yet another documentary, Marina Zenovich's Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired. (Full disclosure: I roomed with Marina at Cannes a few years ago, though we barely spoke since I tend to fall asleep at festivals within fifty-two seconds of hitting my room.) As the title suggests, the film focuses on Polanski's 1977 arrest for "unlawful sexual intercourse" (plea-bargained down from rape) with a thirteen-year-old girl and his subsequent flight from justice just hours before he was due to be sentenced, resulting in what may well be lifelong exile in France. Even for those familiar with the general details of the case, though, Wanted and Desired will likely prove revelatory. Zenovich dutifully provides basic psychological context for Polanski's odious conduct — mom murdered by Nazis, pregnant wife slaughtered by Manson Family — and wittily illustrates various points with well-chosen clips from Rosemary's Baby, Chinatown, The Tenant, and other favorites. Ultimately, however, she's less interested in Polanski's crime than she is in the outlandish farce of judicial corruption that the banal crime somehow inspired. If you've ever run into a celebrity and found yourself instantly transformed into a babbling cretin, this fascinating film will provide some solace: At least the celeb's life and freedom weren't in your shaking hands.

Critics Make Lists, Give Awards, Close Book on '07

Paul Clark — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 17:00:00 GMT

It's nearing the end of the moviegoing year, and you know what that means- a heaping portion of top ten lists and awards from critics around the country. We here at Screengrab plan to post our best-of-2007 lists over the next week or so, but until that happens there are plenty of other year-in-review pieces all over the Internet that should tide you over. We won't link to every one of them here, but you can find two of our favorites after the break.

First off, there's the Critics' Poll over at Indiewire. Indiewire polled 106 critics for this survey of the best cinematic achievements of 2007, with participants including quite a few very cool critics, such as former Screengrab editor Bilge Ebiri, Screengrab contributor Vadim Rizov, and Nerve.com critic Mike D'Angelo. The Critics' Poll also does away with a longstanding awards tradition by refusing to separate awards by gender- the acting categories are simply "Best Performance" and "Best Supporting Performance." Best of all, there's plenty of commentary from the participating critics, providing plenty of fun for all you inveterate list junkies out there. You know who you are.

But for the more visually-oriented among you, deliverance has arrived in the form of Jim Emerson. Not content with simply banging out a list, Jim has cut together a short video of shots from his top ten movies of 2007, and invites everyone to try to guess the movies in question. As most of the shots Jim includes feature architecture rather than actors, this is harder than it sounds. I was able to identify 9 out of 10- see how you fare over at Jim's blog, Scanners.