The Screengrab : mike nichols

Screengrab Review: "Pontypool"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 29 May 2009 15:30:00 GMT

When thinking of those who, in our lifetimes, have made major contributions to the shape of pop mythology, let no one forget the name of George Romero. When I was a kid, growing up between the time that Romero's first and best movie, Night of the Living Dead, planted the seeds of his achievement, and the release of its sequel, Dawn of the Dead, cemented it, I spent maybe half my young life watching and reading about horror movies. Partly this was research: at the playground, the jury was still out on whether monsters actually existed, and if they did, I wanted to be ready for them when they stormed the house. Mummies didn't occupy my thoughts to any special degree: they were easy to outrun, and besides, so long as you didn't go violating any Egyptian tombs, it was easy to stay on their good side. Vampires and werewolves were a lot worse, but at least there were clear, set-in-stone guidelines for dealing with them: daylight, wooden stakes, silver bullets, full moons, everybody who dipped a toe into the horror genre knew the drill. But zombies? Now there was a disappointing monster. There weren't many zombie movie classics, and those seemed to be vague on the rules regarding zombiedom. Basically, a zombie was a big, reanimated dead guy with bugged-out eyes and no personality who, under the distraction of the voodoo master who had resurrected him, stagger up and throttle you. No zombie ever looked as if he enjoyed his work, and there was no consensus on how to deal with one, or even if it was the zombie you wanted to target or if you should go over his head and take it up with his boss. Vampires, werewolves, and even most mummies were free agents. Zombies were the hired help.

All that changed thanks to Romero. With two movies and some help from a few enthusiastic Italian imitators, Romero completely changed not just the rule book but the contemporary identity and meaning of zombies in horror movie culture. Voodoo? Fuck that noise. The modern zombie may still not be the life of the party, and he tends to travel in packs, but he's out for himself, and there's no mystery about what he wants. The boy is hungry. Zombies lurch around, using their superior numbers to overwhelm their victims, on whom they plan to dine. The solution to the problem is also simple and direct: bring a shotgun and a mop. Think of it: thirty years ago, when Dawn of the Dead was just being released and Night of the Living Dead was an acknowledged midnight classic but not yet seen as the starting point of a whole damn sub-genre, zombies were monster movie runner-ups on the verge of disappearing altogether on account of political correctness. (It's hard to give a dignified representation of a voodoo priestess.)

By now, we're already at a point where the cliches that Romero created are understood to be part of the shared general knowledge of moviegoers, and are drawn upon by filmmakers who like to insist that they're not "really" making a zombie movie. Bruce McDonald's Pontypool (which Scott von Doviak reviewed here when it played at SXSW, and which goes into release today) isn't "really" a zombie movie, in the same way that 28 Days Later, which (like Pontypool) was about virus-maddened mobs, wasn't a zombie movie, just as Guillermo del Toro's Cronos wasn't a vampire movie, and Mike Nichols's Wolf wasn't an update on Lon Chaney, Jr. But both Pontypool and 28 Days Later are zombie movies in the sense that they play by their own version of Romero's rules, and play on the expectations that the audience builds up based on cues the movies send out that we're in Living Dead territory. (In fact, one of the first not-really-zombies zombie movies was Romero's own The Crazies, which came out between the first two installments of his living dead saga and which established some durable new cliches of its own.) Neither Pontypool or 28 Days Later is really imaginable without Romero's movies, and Pontypool in particular depends on the precedent set by Romero's movies to keep the audience with it for the first half hour, when the prolonged wait for something to happen is actually made more tolerable by the fact that we have a pretty good idea of what that something will look like when it does happen.

Pontypool is set almost entirely in a small radio station in the title locale in rural Ontario, and for most of the first half there are only three characters onscreen: the morning DJ Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie), his beleaguered producer Sydney (Lisa Houle), and the fresh-faced young techie Laurel Ann (Georgina Reilly) who's just back from a tour of duty in Afghanistan. (And when circumstances take one of them out oif the picture, a new character appears out of nowhere to ease the transition.) Grant--described by New York magazine reviewer as "an egghead incarnation of Don Imus" (which I think may be a non-litigious way of saying a version of Don Imus that isn't a smug, lazy scumbag)--is an aging, haggard-looking "fight the power" type who likes to gas on about "developing a relationship" with his listeners by challenging them (i.e., pissing them off) and whose catch phrase is "taking no prisoners!" He has apparently been reduced to manning the mike in this jerkwater burg because of his past indiscretions, and the first half of the movie includes the makings of an entertaining comedy about this self-styled provocateur's attempts to adjust to his new surroundings as Sydney fills him in on the sorrows and family connections of the nobodies he's making fun of on the air and lets him in on the local trade secrets, such as the fact that the "Sunshine Chopper" from which the station's traffic reporter delivers his broadcasts is actually a Dodge Dart parked on a hill.

That all pretty much goes out the window as the suspense plot develops. Snug and isolated in their studio, Grant and company begin to pick up reports--from the traffic reporter, from phone-in callers, from a BBC reporter trying to get his own handle on the story--that a deranged, gibbering mob is tearing around Pontypool, tearing people apsrt with their bare hands. As the descriptions of the carnage going on outside the studio grew more detailed and grisly, evidence mounts that there's a virus at work that spreads through the English language; people who succumb to it are particularly susceptible when uttering terms of endearment, such as "honey" and "sweetheart." Conceptually, Pontypool might be a blood-soaked spin-off of William S. Burrough's zen koan "Language is a virus from outer space" (and also, maybe, one of Alan Moore's old comics stories for 2000 A.D.) The script, by Tony Burgess, is based on his novel Pontypool Changes Everything, but it would be a bang-up radio play. Given the War of the Worlds set-up and the metaphorical use of spoken language--and the use of a breakdown in language as a sign that a character is about to start slavering blood--it's kind of amazing that Burgess didn't shape the material with a radio play in mind. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that radio plays are one of the few forms that now have less cultural cachet than Canadian-based midnight movies.

Bruce McDonald, whose credits include Roadkill, Highway 61, Dance Me Outside, the Ellen Page showcase The Tracey Fragments, and the TV series Twitch City, has always struck me as being sort of like the Canadian Alex Cox. Like Cox, he's a self-styled hipster weirdo who picks his projects to serve his image, but unlike Cox, he's not so infatuated with himself that he makes the mistake of thinking that he's made a wild, provocative movie just by signing his name to it and hanging out on the set while the cameras roll: he does make a little effort to entertain. His greatest success here is with McHattie, who has a great radio voice and who, with his gaunt features and frame and black cowboy hat, is an indelible image of the motor-mouthed hipster malcontent who's just found himself on the wrong side of sixty. The scenes in which McHattie's Grant, on the air and flying by the seat of his pants, valiantly tries to string together the hazy reports coming his way into a coherent picture for his listeners add up to a stirring depiction of professional competence that may be more exciting than the reports themselves.

But the downside of McDonald's relative modesty as a director is that it costs him something in both energy and conviction. And his pursuit of cool at all costs can be self-defeating: a scene in which Sydney undercuts the news of a character's death with a cheap sick joke destroys the emotion that the movie has achieved without replacing it with anything stronger. The last third of Pontypool, which is when it's most like a conventional zombie-attack picture, is the weakest, and it devolves into a real mess. The film will be most satisfying to those who like their horror movies to wear their "conceptual" timber on their sleeve. (When a character says, "Talking is risky, and talk radio is high risk," he might be reading the Director's Statement on camera.) It's "interesting." But it's never scary, and I'm not enough of an avant-guardist to see that as a good thing in what's billed as a horror movie.

The Rep Report (April 14 - April 22)

Phil Nugent — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 20:30:00 GMT

NEW YORK: So far as Western critics and film historians were concerned for most of the past half century, the writer-director Satyajit Ray was that country's film industry, a personal artist whose working methods and concern placed him very much at odds with the Bollywood factory. And as Bollywood films have acquired an exotic cachet in the West in recent years, Ray has slipped into perhaps the greatest chasm of neglect of any long-canonized film artist, a man whose vast body of work is seldom seen in retrospectives and next to nonexistent in terms of representation on home video. "First Light: Satyajit Ray from the Apu Trilogy to the Calcutta Trilogy" (April 15-30) at Film Society of Lincoln Center provides a rare chance to catch up with the master's work through the early 1970s, starting with the films that make up the legendary " Apu trilogy" (Pather Panchali, Aparjito, and The World of Apu) and concluding with the lesser-known "Calcutta trilogy", an attempt to portray an India changing not necessarily for the better, The Adversary, Company Limited, and The Middleman. Also included are such rarely screened but highly cherished films as Three Daughters, Devi, and Days andf Nights in the Forest, as well as Shyam Benegal's 1982 documentary Satyajit Ray, Filmmaker.

The Museum of Modern Art hosts a retrospective of the films directed by Mike Nichols, from his first, hugely successful films, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate through to his more recent Closer and Charlie Wilson's War. Also included are his theatrical adaptations for HBO, Wit and the two-part Angels in America, both starring Emma Thompson. The program runs from tonight through May 1.

BERKELEY: On Thursday, April 16, Pacific Film Archives screens the camp classic cautionary exploitation film Reefer Madness sweetened with a "Live musical soundtrack by UC Berkeley student DJs. Plus shorts and reefer rolling contest!" We make no judgements here at the Screengrab. Now shut up and pass the brownies.

ALBERTA, CANADA: The Calgary Underground Film Festival runs from tonight through April 19. The lineup includes Azazel Jacobs's Momma's Man, the documentaries Nerdcore Rising, Veer, and Monsterland, and the omnibus flick Tokyo!. Plus a number of shorts, including the seasonal horror comedy Treevenge, which can be sampled in the clip below:

Taxing Time: A Screengrab Salute To Beat The Clock Cinema (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 22:00:00 GMT

BEFORE SUNSET (2004)

He only has 90 minutes before he has to catch that plane, and boom!, the love of his life shows up. Last time they met, they had only one night together. Now that they're older, time is even more precious, and they are even more uncertain how to proceed. The last time, the story could look away, passing time through ellipses, but this time, everything has to unfold in real time. Because love doesn't care about your schedule, and it comes and goes as it pleases. In 1995, when Before Sunrise came out, I was 23 and I didn't know how to appreciate the tender little moments life has to offer. I didn't know how hard it is to make a connection with someone, and I let friends and potential loves slip out of my grasp. In short, I understood the characters in Before Sunrise. I could see a little of myself in Jesse, and let this be the only time I admit kinship with Ethan Hawke. I never gave up anything as precious as Jesse and Celine (and, Julie Delpy, how many people my age are in love with you?) in Before Sunrise, but I could easily see how something like that could happen. When its sequel came out in 2004, I was 32, happily married, and I had learned a little more about how the world worked. And Before Sunset just tore my heart out, heedless. How do you deal with the person who makes you remember the person you were, let alone the torrent of old emotions and regrets? The structure of the movie insists that neither has time to dwell on regrets and anger, but they have to address it. Their connection isn't the superficial kind. Richard Linklater has had his ups and downs as a filmmaker, but he's never been finer than he was with this movie. Some people may like their car chases, but the pursuit of the most dangerous game draws more blood and quickens the breath like nothing else. (HC)

BACK TO THE FUTURE (1985)

Back to the Future (yes, that's part one, you fools, what kind of philistine do you take me for?) has plenty of scenes that still make me cringe and/or hold my breath like they did when I first saw them back when I was a wee one. In that department, the Johnny B. Goode scene is rivaled only by the end scene, which is literally a race against time. Young Marty McFly needs to be sent back to the future using 1950s technology and natural sources of electricity. The kid's literally starting to disappear, for crying out loud — that with almost seducing his own mother, and other murky psychological goop. Sure, the 1950s may have looked good to your average Reagan-voting suburbanite, but it was not just fun and games. There was segregation, and more importantly, no rock 'n' roll for white people. Imagine getting stuck back there forever. The horror! So back in 1954, Doc does his best to remedy the disorder he set about thirty years later, dangling from the town hall clock while Marty does his best in the DeLorean. Now if the franchise had only ended there. (SCS)

THE GRADUATE (1967)

Maybe I'm just partial to The Graduate. Could be. But there is something delicious about the penultimate part of the movie, where Dustin Hoffman's Ben is skidding around dusty California roads in his little red Alfa Romeo, desperately trying to find the chapel where Elaine is going to be wed to her hunky purebred husband. Part of what makes this so great is that it breaks two (or perhaps three) of the cardinal rules of cinematic races against time: first, there is a feeling of horrible slowness to Ben's car ride and search for the chapel. This is less fast and furious and more like one of those dreams where you need to run and run fast, but somehow it's all in slow motion no matter how much you power on. Second, Ben loses his race against time; he gets to the church too late...second-and-a-half being too late doesn't matter. (SCS)

THE TESTAMENT OF DR. MABUSE (1933)

Fritz Lang's masterpiece of German Expressionism is part horror film, part crime syndicate saga, part procedural, and all about the force of obsession. The last third is given over to a race against the clock, as veil upon veil slips away to reveal Mabuse's ambitious plan, the unlimited reign of crime. The trailer above is in German, but it conveys just how stunningly creepy and exciting the movie is: the superimposition of images, the whispering voice, the car chase, the real sense of danger pervading every scene. Joseph Goebbels, no fool, saw it as a condemnation of Nazism and banned it from Germany under the Third Reich. It's up for debate whether Lang was intentionally condemning Nazis, but even if Lang wasn't sure what his message was, one cannot doubt his skill as a filmmaker. The visual power of the film, the unsettling use of sound, the wheels-within-wheels of the plot: all reach across the gap of time and still hold sway over modern viewers. Even as one easily discounts the psychology of the film, its coherent view of a world spiralling out of control cannot be denied. (HC)

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

Contributors: Hayden Childs, Sarah Clyne Sundberg

Screengrab Presents: The Best Stage-To-Screen Adaptations Of All Time (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 23:00:00 GMT

DEATHTRAP (1982)

One set, five characters, a couple of twists and a few good, juicy murders: that’s the formula for success in Ira Levin’s puzzle box of a murder mystery about a struggling veteran playwright desperate for a hit. Add a nervous spouse with a weak heart, a gay lover, a weird psychic, a cagey agent and a wall full of handcuffs, pistols and crossbows and you’ve got one of the few stage plays with the power to make audiences scream and jump like a creature double-feature. The movie version wisely sticks to the basics, letting the cat-and-mouse triple-double-cross plotting speak for itself while sticking mostly to the confined but never claustrophobic Long Island home of the plotting protagonist (Michael Caine at his very Michael Caine-iest, having a helluva time). And though certain naysayers here at the Screengrab may say nay, I also give kudos to Christopher Reeve’s performance in the film, which tweaks his goody-two-shoes Superman image while letting him exercise the underutilized mischievous side of his (admittedly limited) range. Meanwhile, Dyan Cannon gives good scream as the wife, and if all that doesn’t win you over, the movie has at least one immortal line, delivered by a snarky critic (Joel Siegel) after Caine’s playwright Sidney Bruhl premieres a hackneyed whodunit nowhere near as clever as Deathtrap: “I'll tell you who done it. Sidney Bruhl done it. And he done it in public."

THE RULING CLASS (1972)

Adapted for the screen by Peter Barnes from his own deeply subversive play, The Ruling Class was sort of a last gasp for the British “Angry Young Man” movement. But its demise was also its salvation: the play – and the subsequent and very successful film – kept in place the elements of class warfare, generational conflict and family drama and turned them on their heads. It replaced rage with whimsy, a tone of rebellion with a sense of absurdity, and an overall tone of Pythonesque lunacy that proved the movement wasn’t entirely devoid of humor. The story of an upper-class family of British aristocrats forced by fortune into restoring as its head a deranged son who thinks he’s the second coming of Christ (played with delightfully silky craziness by Peter O’Toole, in one of his greatest roles), The Ruling Class is, even today, as vicious as it is hilarious. It expands on the play by adding a few memorable characters and trading up in the players (most especially Nigel Green as McKyle, “the Electric Christ”, and the unforgettable Alastair Sim as the bewildered Bishop Bertie Lampton) as well as taking the sets out-of-doors, but what made the stage version so great was its devastatingly funny and fiendish dialogue. Barnes and director Peter Medak are wise enough not to change a bit of that.

SWEENEY TODD: THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET (2007)

Tim Burton’s first full-blown attempt at a musical is so successful, it’s a wonder that he never tried it before. Without sacrificing the elements that have made him famous – the gloomy atmospherics, the high gothic sensibilities, the manic pace, the deft blend of dark humor and absurd violence – his big-screen adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s notorious musical gives him the perfect format. Why? Because musicals are infinitely forgiving of the qualities that, in many of Burton’s other films, can rightly be considered weaknesses: his overblown dialogue, his clumsy grasp of the dynamics of storytelling, his slight characterization, and his love of style over emotional substance. Everything really comes together for him here, and the result is one of the most enjoyable musicals in decades. Dismissals of the lead actors (Johnny Depp as the vengeance-addled Victorian hairstylist and Burton’s wife, Helena Bonham Carter, as the vendor of unhygienic meat pies) as unable to sing at the level expected from a big-screen musical somewhat miss the point: Sweeney Todd is a fiendishly difficult production, its songs and structure much more akin to an opera than a musical comedy, and it contains precious few toe-tappers, so putting the words in the mouths of those not well-suited to the old school of musicals doesn’t sink it one bit.

INHERIT THE WIND (1960)

Almost fifty years down the road, there are a lot of problems with the Stanley Kramer adaptation of the then-controversial play (by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, no relation) about the Scopes Monkey Trial. It’s excessively stagey; Kramer doesn’t bother to open up the set very much, and too many scenes are given no chance to work in the very different medium of film. The casting is problematic; Spencer Tracy and Frederic March are terrific in the lead roles (as stand-ins for Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan, respectively), and there are some good supporting jobs, especially by Elliott Reed as the county prosecutor, but Dick York and Donna Anderson as the romantic leads are flat as pancakes, and Gene Kelly playing a thinly-veiled H.L. Mencken is one of the biggest botch-jobs in casting history. It’s unfair, imbalanced, and historically inaccurate. And in a certain sense, it’s simply not as relevant as it once was; Inherit the Wind isn’t about what it’s about, but rather a Cold War narrative about the long-faded dangers of McCarthyism. But there are still some gorgeous speeches in this moldy oldie, and since America is, astonishingly, still debating the rightness of teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution in schools some eighty-odd years after the Scopes Trial, it maintains a relevance its authors couldn’t possibly have anticipated.

WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? (1966)

While many directors attempt to open up adaptations of stage plays for the big screen by taking the action up and out, Mike Nichols helps make Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? a masterpiece by doing the opposite. Although he does take us outside once or twice, what makes the film so visually arresting is his camera’s perfect pace with the legendary dialogue: instead of going out, it circles endlessly in and around, like a shark. It darts in and out of scenes, whirls around like the heads of the characters after a stinging rejoinder, and creeps in for powerful closeups that reveal faces as ugly as the words they’re speaking. Who exactly gets credit for the screenplay has been the subject of endless disputes, arguments and lawsuits, but really, it’s as simple as going to the source; almost all of the hypnotic dialogue that takes place between timid, repressed college professor Richard Burton and his domineering, disapproving wife Elizabeth Taylor is present in Edward Albee’s original stage play. Not for nothing is Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? a sort of literary shorthand for viciously feuding married couples: as Burton and Taylor go for each other’s throats, the camera matches them slash for slash, portraying a couple so sick of each other – but so used to each other – that the object of their hatred fills their eyes and becomes all that they can see.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Six, Seven & Eight

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce

Screengrab's Back To School Round-Up: The Top 15 College Movies (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 20:30:00 GMT

THE FRESHMAN (1990)

For the recent high school graduate, going to college can feel like entering a strange new world, so it makes perfect metaphorical sense that this comedy, written and directed by the prankish Andrew Bergman, is about a film student (Matthew Broderick) who goes to a different school, in a different city, and finds himself entering a different movie: his new employer and mentor, played by Marlon Brando, is a heavyset, gray-haired Italian gentleman who talks in a gravelly near-whisper and is highly reminiscent of a certain classic American movie from the early 1970s in which a business negotiation involved a decapitated horse. No such atrocities occur here, but you do get to see longtime Miss America pageant host Bert Parks serenade a Komodo dragon.

THE GRADUATE (1967)

Watching Animal House in high school may have given me a somewhat warped idea about what to expect from my undergraduate years, but The Graduate turned out to be an unnervingly accurate depiction of the terrifying unstructured malaise waiting to devour the unwary in those first uncertain years after college graduation. True, my parents didn’t have a sunny Southern California pool for me to float around in while I tried to figure out my life, but their friends and they offered plenty of well-meaning but fantastically unhelpful advice of the “Plastics” variety, while embodying exactly the type of suburban sameness I was so desperate to avoid. And, no, I didn’t have an older Mrs. Robinson to school me in sex and cynicism, but Simon & Garfunkle soothed my weary, alienated soul on numerous occasions. Career highlight efforts by stars Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft, director Mike Nichols, writer/cameo artiste Buck Henry and even wax effigy Katharine Ross make this film a best-of-show masterpiece of any genre, and the movie’s final shot of young lovers Ben & Elaine riding off into an unknowable future on a crosstown bus is an image of hope and terror for the ages...specifically, the ages 21-25.

GOOD NEWS (1947)

This candy-colored MGM musical is probably the best example of a lost genre, that of the collegiate musical that centers on football and builds to the big game. It had been enough of a mainstay of American entertainment for the Marx Brothers to have parodied it fifteen years earlier in Horse Feathers; in fact, this movie has its roots in a 1927 stage musical that was first filmed in 1930. By the time this remake was hatched, both the stage original and the first movie version were regarded as too dirty, by post-World War II standards, for Production Code-era Hollywood. So the script was laundered, and the most sexless, blandest leads in movie history, Peter Lawford and June Allyson, were brought into play as, respectively, the gridiron hero (no, seriously, that was Peter Lawford's role) and the brainy librarian who has to tutor him so that he doesn't do so badly in his courses that he's not allowed to remain on the football team. (Truly the American musical is a pure fantasy realm.) Part of what makes this bowdlerized production charming is that it represents nostalgia for the 1920s as seen from the vantage point of the late 1940s, which seen today gives it an odd, unearthly appeal. It also helps that the people hired to plug the holes left by the editing actually added some good songs and found people livelier than Lawford and Allyson to perform them. The movie's real star is the vivacious and weird Joan McCracken, a Broadway dancer-singer who died young without ever having built much of a movie career: she triumphs in the movie's opening and in her showcase number, the possibly-insulting-to-Native-Americans novelty piece "Pass That Peace Pipe."

DRUMLINE (2002)

This go-for-it movie, starring Nick Cannon as an unpolished bullet of raw talent who upsets the equilibrium of the marching band at a prestigious all-black university, has the kind of silly plot mechanics one expects from the genre, but it also has a lot of freshness and energy and a surprisingly impressive performance by Orlando Jones as the upright professor in charge of the band. As staged by director Charles Stone III, the precisely choreographed final battle of the bands at the big championship competition is a winner-take-all moment undreamt of in Sylvester Stallone's philosophy.

WONDER BOYS (2000)

Michael Douglas gives one of his most winning performances in this adaptation of Michael Chabon's terrific novel about Grady Tripp, a stalled novelist and aging pothead whose gig teaching creative writing at a Pittsburgh university has turned into a not unpleasant form of limbo. This is one of the few movies that features a halfway believable facsimile of some form of the writer's life, a virtue that extends to Tobey Maguire's amazing turn as the most talented and mercurial of Tripp's students, and also for a characteristically high-wire performance by Robert Downey, Jr. as the great man's literary agent. The studio had enough faith in the movie's entertainment value that, after it bombed in its initial run, they rolled it out again a few months later with a new ad campaign, whereupon it bombed all over again. It still hasn't developed the cult following on DVD that one might have hoped for, and Tobey Maguire remains much better known as Peter Parker than as James Leek, but the movie did win Bob Dylan an Academy Award for his original theme song, "Things Have Changed."

Click Here for Part One & Part Three

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Andrew Osborne

Charles H. Joffe, 1929-2008

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 17:30:00 GMT

Charles H. Joffe, a talent agent, business manager, and producer best known to casual filmgoers as the producer of a number of Woody Allen's best films, has died in his home town of Los Angeles at the age of 78.

Felled by a persistent lung ailment, Joffe had been ill for some time, but since the 1950s, he had been a powerhouse wheeler and dealer in Hollywood and New York. His Rollins Joffee talent agency, founded with partner Jack Rollins, was the first to book Lenny Bruce, and later handled the careers of some of the biggest names in comedy, including David Letterman, Dick Cavett, Robin Williams, Martin Short, Billy Crystal, Robert Klein, and the team of Mike Nichols & Elaine May. He had a reputation as a tough, old-school, cigar-chewing negotiator whose gift for big-money contracts often saw his clients turning over huge profits within a short time of signing with him.

Joffe's first film as a producer with Woody Allen was Take the Money and Run, the success of which he was able to leverage into a then-unprecedented degree of artistic control over his films for the director. He is listed either as producer, co-producer or executive producer on all of Allen's films up to and including the yet-to-be-released Vicki Cristina Barcelona, and when Annie Hall won the Best Picture Oscar in 1977, it was Joffe who picked up the prize in Woody Allen's stead. According to the New York Times, he was a stern and frank figure in the careers of his proteges, and offered up the following advice to a young Allen, frustrated at the dues-paying period he spent making films like Casino Royale: "You're trying to get into the film business. It's going to be a big picture, and you're in it with a lot of stars. You're having a nice time in London, playing poker every night and visiting all the museums. Just shut up."

The Gay Pride Top Twenty (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 20:00:00 GMT

It’s Gay Pride Month, the 10th Annual Provincetown Film Festival kicks off this weekend and George “Mr. Sulu” Takei and Ellen DeGeneres are getting married (though not to each other, of course) in California (hooray California! And what’s taking you so long, New York and Vermont and Washington and Hawaii and Illinois and...y’know, all the rest of the country?)...

...so, anyway, to help celebrate, we here at the Screengrab thought it would be a good time to salute some of the highpoints in gay (and lesbian and bisexual and transgender) cinema with our very own rainbow collection of Queer Nation classics (not that there’s anything wrong with that)!

ANGELS IN AMERICA (2003)

"Hey, wait just a cotton-pickin' minute!" the purists among you may cry. “I thought this was a list of Gay Pride films, not TV shows!” Well, for starters, Mike Nichols’ all-star, six-hour, multiple Emmy and Golden Globe winning adaptation of Tony Kushner’s Tony and Pulitzer Prize winning rumination on homosexuality, homophobia and the better angels of human nature wasn’t TV...it was HBO. But more importantly, in a media landscape of generally low ambitions, lowered expectations and lowest common denominator multiplex landfill, it’s hard to ignore a six-hour celluloid phantasmagoria of staggering audacity, master class filmmaking, sharp dialogue, potent visuals, timely thematic resonance and knockout performances (including a multi-tasking Meryl Streep, future Weeds costars Justin Kirk and Mary-Louise Parker, Jeffrey Wright, Patrick Wilson, Emma Thompson, James Cromwell, Ben Shenkman and Al Pacino, using his late-career bluster to good effect as prototypical self-hating conservative closet case Roy Cohn). Sure, it gets a little silly sometimes, but who would've thought a movie about the AIDS pandemic (as depicted through intertwining tales of two infected men haunted by ghosts and other celestial messengers) would find time for so much humor, imagination and hope...and, as opposed to, say, a certain lengthy, operatic, sometimes silly (but Oscar-winning) big-screen multi-part epic about heroic bravery in the face of faceless evil, lethal apathy and looming death, the cultural and political battles depicted in Angels in America are no fantasy, and continue to rage on and on and on...

HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH (2001)

The most original film musical of the decade began as a drag act at Squeezebox!, a weekly gay performance event in mid-90s New York City. Performer and creator John Cameron Mitchell based his iconic character Hedwig on details from his own life: his childhood in East Berlin, his idenitification with queer rock stars, his struggles with being the gay son of a military general. The crux of Hedwig's character is both a fiction and a metaphorical truth: she is the victim of a botched sex change operation, leaving her a little bit male and a little bit female. Fueled by the anti-showtunes of Stephen Trask and Mitchell's gender-bending charisma, the film Hedwig and the Angry Inch is a glam-rock spirit quest: Hedwig begins as a self-loathing wannabe rock star looking to complete herself through sex, and by the end of the story, she is walking naked into the world, stripped of makeup and bitterness, finally learning to love herself. If that's not pride, then what is?

FAR FROM HEAVEN (2002)

Though he’d established himself since Poison, his first major feature, as the most talented director to come out of the so-called ‘New Queer Cinema’ movement of the 1990s, it wasn’t until Far From Heaven that Todd Haynes' talents were recognized by the mainstream media. His previous films had been too controversial, too oblique, too postmodern; but with this 1950s period piece, Haynes finally gained widespread acceptance and, with it, four Oscar nominations. Ironically for one of the most original filmmakers in Hollywood, the movie that gained him this recognition was a pure throwback. With its high melodrama, ginger treatment of interracial relations, and gorgeous color palette, it was unmistakably reminiscent of the films of the melodrama king of the fifties, Douglas Sirk; and with its highly stylized acting, uncomfortable emotional weight and unapologetic addressing of gay sexual desire, it likewise conjured the films of Sirk’s most famous devotee, Ranier Werner Fassbinder. In a way that blends the fantastic, romantic sensibilities of Sirk and the gritty, rich realism of Fassbinder – and with a freedom to frankly address issues of racism and homosexuality that were denied to them both – Haynes manages to make a film that’s both moving and incredibly frustrating. Always able to coax winning performances out of his actors, he also gets Dennis Quaid to deliver an exceptionally sensitive performance in a role where both understatement and overreaching could have been a disaster.

MY BEAUTIFUL LAUNDRETTE (1985)

For obvious reasons, European cinema was several decades ahead of the curve when it came to addressing homosexuality (or, for that matter, any sexuality) on screen. It’s impossible to even conceive of an American film in 1985 – let alone one with the relative high profile of Stephen Frears’ My Beautiful Laundrette – being as frank, and as frankly erotic, about a gay couple. Like Far From Heaven, it succeeded largely by not making its focus too narrow; the story of young Pakistani Omar and his white lover, a former skinhead played with verve by a young Daniel Day Lewis, is made especially lively and vital by placing it within the context of a broader story of the British immigrant experience at the peak of Thatcherism. Deftly blending issues of race, class, culture and economics with a star-crossed romance, My Beautiful Laundrette owes much to a top-shelf script by Hanif Kureishi; but what shouldn’t be overlooked is its intensely erotic scenes, which were among the first in mainstream film to illustrate that gay sex on the big screen could pack as much power as its heterosexual counterpart. Gordon Warnecke as Omar is a real find in his big screen debut, and Daniel Day Lewis, in only his third film, already shows signs of being the titanic actor he would eventually become.

MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO (1991)

Gus van Sant has always specialized, at least in his personal films (that he finances with tripe like the Psycho remake and Good Will Hunting), in convincingly portraying the sad, proud lives of lowlifes, drifters and people with no real home to go to, whether by choice or by circumstance. He also has a particular talent for showing us characters who desperately need the love of someone, but who are none too wise in selecting who that someone should be. Those two themes come together with audacity and depth in My Own Private Idaho, the story of two hustlers – the poverty-stricken, vulnerable, narcoleptic Mike Waters (played by the late River Phoenix) and the slumming, proud, arrogant Scott Favor (played by Keanu Reeves who, God bless him, at least seems to be trying). For a movie so charged with homosexual love, it’s strangely lacking in sex, and not in the self-denying, passionless way that’s required from most gay characters on the big screen: rather, sex for the two of them is a largely joyless professional operation reserved for the making of money or the killing of time. This doesn’t mean they don’t need love, though, and therein lies the movie’s great tragedy: Mike wants the love of only Steve, and Steve wants the love of only his estranged, wealthy father. All of this plays out with an aesthetic derived not from Warhol’s cool surface gayness, or Fassbinder’s melodramatic near-camp: it’s given a thick sheen of the classics, drawing directly from Shakespeare. This can be both its damnation (several of the openly Shakespearian scenes come across as contrived and hokey) and its salvation (framing the entire struggle in the trappings of real tragedy gives it dramatic depth and resonance it might otherwise lack), but it’s a movie that certainly can’t be faulted for its ambition, and whatever its flaws, it’s a worthy step forward in the mainstreaming of gay characters in American cinema.

Click here for Part Two, Part Three and Part Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Gwynne Watkins, Leonard Pierce

Thursday Morning Poll for June 5, 2008

Paul Clark — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Well, the Rambo fans have spoken, and it’s been determined that Screengrab’s favorite Rambo adventures are First Blood and… er, Son of Rambow. The initial Rambo adventure- which some may recall was originally slated to star Dustin Hoffman and be directed by Mike Nichols!- eked out a win in last week’s poll, taking 46% of the vote. Coming in a close second with 38% was the Stallone-free Son of Rambow, a sweet little British movie about kids who decide to make their own low-budget version of the original. All well and good, I suppose, but why not more love for the awkwardly-titled fourth installment, Rambo? Yes, it was ridiculous to see the sixtysomething Sly sticking it to the Burmese military, but it was so violent and crazy that it was pretty irresistible. To me, anyway.

With the $57 million opening weekend gross for the Sex and the City movie, it’s become next to impossible for even the straightest of guys to deny that the film has become a phenomenon. As much ink as been spilled over the movie, both by people who’ve seen it and people who haven’t, it’s clear that everyone has an opinion on Sex and the City. So what’s yours?

“S.O.” stands for “Significant Other”, in case you couldn’t guess. And as always, feel free to share your thoughts in greater detail in the comments section below.

DVD Digest for April 22, 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Spirit of '67

Phil Nugent — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Pictures at a Revolution, a new book by Entertainment Weekly staffer Mark Harris, zeroes in on a signal moment in popular culture — 1967, a time when the old Hollywood studios were losing their grip on mass taste and hip young American filmmakers were beginning to be influenced by the European New Wave directors — by examining the making of each of the five films nominated for that year's Academy Award for Best Picture. The list consists of In the Heat of the Night, the eventual winner, and the four also-rans, Bonnie & Clyde, The Graduate, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, and Dr. Dolittle. The films themselves go a long way towards making Harris's point that Hollywood was cracking apart at the time from confusion, internal conflict, and dry rot; it's hard to believe that they were all made in the same year, let alone that an industry would have chosen all of them to point to with pride as the best of which they were capable.

The ones that seem most clearly of their time are Bonnie & Clyde and The Graduate. The latter was a crowd-pleasing zeitgeist movie, a time-stamped movie of the moment, but Bonnie & Clyde was a genuinely revolutionary film at the time — the writers, Robert Benton and David Newman, had originally hoped to attract Francois Truffaut to direct — and a certified classic. It was also a movie that, had it won the Oscar, would have set off a chain of massive coronaries through three-quarters of the executive suites in Hollywood. As for In the Heat of the Night, it was recently re-issued on a new DVD, which set off a fresh round of condescending notices pointing up its flaws. It is in fact an entertaining little murder melodrama with a number of strong virtues — notably the dazzling cinematographer by Haskell Wexler and Rod Steiger's Oscar-winning performance — but it is the kind of movie that was overrated in its day and is now fated to be underrated, as punishment for being a good movie that won an award that should have gone to a great movie. It looks even better if compared to the other big racial-tolerance message movie, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, which is where most of the dry rot settled.

In its general outlines, this will be familiar territory to many readers of film books; the Bonnie & Clyde story has been especially thoroughly covered already, but even the ringer, the expensive and unwatchable Dr. Dolittle, has already been dealt with at some length in a well-known book: John Gregory Dunne's 1969 The Studio, a first-hand journalistic account of how thoroughly that movie's tortured production bollixed Twentieth-Century Fox at the time. But Harris is a good writer and has managed to wring fresh material from such interview subjects as Mike Nichols, Arthur Penn, Warren Beatty, Dustin Hoffman, Robert Towne, and Buck Henry, while plugging the gaps with well-chosen insights drawn from such sources as Sidney Poitier's memoirs. Overblown title and all, Harris's book is a fascinating, five-sided snapshot of a remarkable moment in movie history.

Forgotten Films: "The Designated Mourner" (1997)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Mike Nichols really doesn't direct movies that often, so maybe it's not so surprising that whenever he does unwrap a new film, such as Charlie Wilson's War, the critical response tends to run from polite to rapturous, the occasion treated in the media as a serious cultural event. (Even Regarding Henry inspired thoughtful meditative pieces exploring the question: what heavy object might have fallen on Mike's head?) But for some of us, the real puzzler is, why doesn't Nichols act more? He made his name doing revue sketches with his old partner Elaine May. Elaine May doesn't act much, either, but she seems to be a far less social creature to begin with, and between her appearances in Enter Laughing and Luv in the 1960s and her most recent on-screen role, in Woody Allen's Small Time Crooks in 2000, she has done enough — turning up with some kind of almost-every-ten-years regularity — to keep the movie world aware that she has a corporeal form. Nichols, on the other hand, has in the course of his career taken exactly one on-screen acting role in a feature film. It was a doozy, though — the title role, which is one-third of the cast, of David Hare's 1997 film version of Wallace Shawn's play The Designated Mourner.

Having chosen to be exclusive, Nichols also went out of his way to make his big starring debut in a project guaranteed to be seen by as few people as possible. In terms of potential mass-audience appeal, The Designated Mourner is not an ingratiating work in either its form or its content. It's a theater piece written for three actors, who never interact; they deliver their accounts of how the world fell apart in long monologues delivered straight to the camera. David de Keyser plays Howard, a distinguished literary figure and political thinker; Miranda Richardson is his daughter, Judy; and Nichols plays Jack, her husband, an English professor. The main action that the characters describe is the collapse of their country (America? Maybe.) into a thugocracy, a fascistic police state that uses the threat of a revolution by a communist guerrilla movement said to be taking root. The government sees Howard and the world he represents as the enemy — the "elitists" — and members of that world, friends of the central triumverate, have begun disappearing and being jailed and executed. Though Howard and Judy rail, in their elegant, cultured way, against the government repression, they're just as likely to be targeted by the lower-class guerrillas, who don't like elitists either. The joker in the deck is Jack, who is assumed by the members of Howard and Judy's circle to be in staunch sympathetic agreement with them about everything, including Howard's magisterial saintliness. In fact, he confesses to the audience, he has never felt entirely comfortable around Howard and resents the standards that Howard and Judy, just by their own conduct, have always seemed to be demanding that he live up to. When the changing tide of the country forces him to adjust to a less cultural exalted way of life — by basically wiping out "highbrow" culture through a climate of fear and the systematic extermination of its more dedicated adherents — Jack has to admit that he finds himself happier, under less pressure. He takes on the identity of the "designated mourner" for that culture because there's no one else left — he is the last person, he says, who can understand a poem by John Donne — but whatever remorse he may feel over the loss of Judy, he wouldn't really have things back the way they were.

How are we supposed to feel about Jack's confession? Elitism and John Donne aren't cool subjects to be defending these days, and the Howard that we see is indeed both an admirable man of principle and more than a bit of a stick. At the same time, Jack, whose plea for the unambitious, unoffending pursuit of basic, self-interested modest enjoyment of one's time on earth, is a monster, even if he sometimes sounds not so different from Wallace Shawn himself, in My Dinner with Andre, saying that he'd rather sit at home reading Charlton Heston's diaries and sipping a cup of cold coffee than head out to reinvent theater in a Bavarian forest. (in live performances of the play, Shawn has often played Jack.) It's a disturbing, ambiguous role, and Nichols seems to embody it down to his flesh tones. (Jack keeps his soft-looking, pale, doughy hands in view, as if he enjoyed reminding you that for all his whining, he's never done an honest day's labor in his life.) As a text and as a piece of staging, The Designated Mourner has none of the show biz pizzazz that made Nichols phenomenally successful directing in both movies and the theater, but something in this weird little play must have spoken to him very deeply: both he and Hare are credited among the film's producers, and if it remains his only extended piece of screen acting, it'll serve an important function in determining the way he's remembered after he's gone. Future biographers looking for clues about what it was like to be in the room when Mike Nichols was there will turn to it, and see the director of The Graduate and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? talking about how liberating it felt to place a book in the bathtub and shit on it.

When Good Directors Go Bad: Ishtar (1987, Elaine May)

Paul Clark — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 20:00:00 GMT

I don’t have a set method for choosing the subjects of my When Good Directors Go Bad columns. Occasionally, I’ll try to spotlight a director who recently released a new film, and once I even used an acclaimed filmmaker’s death as an excuse to re-examine his most notorious work (sorry, Michelangelo). But most of the time I’ll just write up whatever I can get my hands on in time. However, when I wrote a piece on Mike Nichols a few weeks ago, I knew there was only one logical follow-up: his former onstage partner Elaine May. And Elaine May meant one thing: Ishtar.

Elaine May was one of the great unheralded filmmaking talents of the 1970s. While guys like Scorsese, Coppola and Spielberg were turning Hollywood upside down, May carved out a fascinating niche for herself. All three of her 1970s films — A New Leaf, The Heartbreak Kid, and Mikey and Nicky — were characterized by May’s probing curiosity about the male psyche and her ramshackle directing style. But if May appeared slapdash behind the camera, she was a perfectionist in the editing room, and both A New Leaf and Mikey and Nicky were taken out of her hands at various points in post-production.

Ishtar was May’s first effort behind the camera in a decade, and it seemed a strange project for her, considering her previous work. Gone was the misanthropic view of relationships found in A New Leaf and The Heartbreak Kid, and the caustic portrait of friendship in Mikey and Nicky. Instead, the film’s protagonists are a pair of chummy, not-too-bright aspiring singer-songwriters, Rogers (Warren Beatty) and Clarke (Dustin Hoffman). They’re lousy, but they’re endlessly enthusiastic about their work ("Shit, man," says Clarke to Rogers when they’re hammering out a new song, "when you’re on you’re on!"), and this attitude extends to their friendship.

Ishtar has amassed a cult following over the years, and watching the film’s opening half hour it’s easy to see why. When Rogers and Clarke sing songs like "(I’m Leaving Some) Love in My Will" before dumbfounded audiences, the movie is pretty priceless. The wonderfully awful songs were penned by Paul Williams (assisted by May and Hoffman), and Hoffman and Beatty are wonderful playing against type, with Hoffman as the would-be lothario and Beatty as a romantic sadsack. Had May simply made a film about these two guys trying to make a name for themselves as musicians, composing songs and performing, it might have been a comedy classic.

Alas, the movie isn’t called Rogers and Clarke. It’s called Ishtar, and before long the film drops its heroes off in the titular (fake) North African country, and drops most of the laughs with it. As the film progresses, Rogers and Clarke become pawns in a civil war involving a CIA agent (Charles Grodin), a band of revolutionaries led by sexy Isabelle Adjani, and an ancient map. Oh, and a blind camel.

Much of the film’s then-notorious $55-million price tag went to the scenes in North Africa, but almost nothing about these scenes works. I can’t decide if May simply miscalculated her strengths as a filmmaker, or if she decided sometime during production that her heart really wasn’t in the civil-war material but figured she might as well grit her teeth and finish anyway. Either way, it’s a little heartbreaking how far astray Ishtar has gone by the time Beatty, Hoffman, and Adjani are firing machine guns at a pair of CIA helicopters in the desert. If there’s any truth to the belief that a big budget is the enemy of comedy, then Ishtar is Exhibit A.

Most of the filmmakers I’ve spotlighted in this series have rebounded from their films to recapture their reputations, or at least to continue having productive careers. But Ishtar effectively torpedoed May’s career as a director — due both to its budget overruns and to May’s unwillingness to make nice with Hollywood — and she’s worked exclusively as a screenwriter and occasional actress since. It’s a shame, since I for one would love to see May direct another film. At a time when even "edgy" comedies like Juno are essentially warm and fuzzy, we need her prickly comedic sensibility more than ever.

When Good Directors Go Bad: Regarding Henry (1991, Mike Nichols)

Paul Clark — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 20:00:00 GMT

In the past four decades, the career of Mike Nichols has gone through its share of ups and downs. Nichols made his name as a director with a number of popular, acclaimed films, but he also has several inexplicable films to answer for. I might have spotlighted 2000’s awful What Planet Are You From? had Nathan Rabin not done so already. But Regarding Henry is a more than acceptable alternative, with the bonus of demonstrating the worst tendencies of Nichols’ later films.

Nichols has long been one of Hollywood’s go-to filmmakers for classy star vehicles, particularly “dramedies” geared to adults like Working Girl, Postcards From the Edge, and Primary Colors. But much of Nichols’ enduring critical rep still rests on his seminal early classics Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Graduate, and (my favorite) Carnal Knowledge. Without these films, Nichols would be little more than a slightly more upscale version of Lasse Hallstrom.

In short, Regarding Henry is a pandering comfort blanket of a movie that’s smothering instead of cozy. It’s also a textbook White-Collar Guilt movie, in which an affluent protagonist (in this case, a lawyer played by Harrison Ford) suffers a tragedy (here, a shooting that causes memory loss) that forces him into a crisis of conscience that makes him a better person. Movies like this invariably divide people into two categories- morally-compromised rich people, and salt-of-the-earth poor people. This dichotomy feels like a cynical attempt on Hollywood’s part to flatter the less financially successful viewers while allowing the more privileged to vicariously experience the hero’s awakening before speeding home in their BMWs.

Regarding Henry, based on the first produced screenplay by Jeffrey (later J.J.) Abrams, contains no surprises on this front. In fact, the film is so intent on concentrating on the psychological stuff that it skates right through the physical healing process. Once Henry learns to walk and talk (his first word is “Ritz,” the significance of which feels like a bad joke) again, he’s soon ready to go home. After he arrives back in his expensive apartment, everything happens as it should- his once-rocky marriage is quickly mended, he becomes a better father, all that. Heck, the movie begins with Henry successfully smooth-talking a jury in defense of a hospital that’s being sued by a dying old man. If you can’t see where that subplot is going, then congratulations, because you’ve finally seen your first movie! Too bad it’s this one. And let’s not get started on the film’s simplistic view of minorities, especially Bill Nunn’s ever-cheerful Magical Black Man caregiver.

After his shooting, Henry’s memory loss causes him to regress to a state of childlike naïveté. But while Ford is about the 500th actor one would cast to play childlike, the movie itself does a bang-up job of regressing to a grade-school mindset. Regarding Henry is a movie in which the hero’s problems are solved by getting a puppy, moving to a new house, quitting his job, and pulling his daughter out of her exclusive boarding school. Sure, the money won’t hold out forever, but you don’t think about those things when you’re young, do you? The way Regarding Henry paints it, it’s a wonder more rich people haven’t tried to put themselves through the profound spiritual experience of getting shot in the head.

Click here for previous When Good Directors Go Bad posts.