The Screengrab : my suicide

In Other Blogs: Roger Ebert Contemplates Eternity

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 08 May 2009 14:30:00 GMT

The weekend is almost here, so let’s turn to our old pal Roger Ebert for some cheery TGIF thoughts. “I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear. I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. What I am grateful for is the gift of intelligence, and for life, love, wonder, and laughter. You can't say it wasn't interesting. My lifetime's memories are what I have brought home from the trip. I will require them for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I brought home from Paris. I don't expect to die anytime soon. But it could happen this moment, while I am writing…I hope not. I have plans.”

Glenn Kenny brings reason to rejoice at Some Came Running: The Friends of Eddie Coyle is finally due out on DVD – in a Criterion edition, no less. “‘Young film fans raised in the multiplex era might look back and lament the fact that no one is making movies like The Friends of Eddie Coyle anymore,’ Kent Jones writes in his exemplary (as usual) essay on the 1973 film, included in the new Criterion DVD of it. ‘The truth is that they never did. There's only this one.’ Robert Mitchum's performance as Eddie, the hangdog, hard-luck crook whose quiet desperation—in this story, he's due to start serving some time in a couple of weeks, and he's just not going to be able to hack it—compels his every move, is a huge part of the film's uniqueness. He underplays like nobody's business, and never announces himself. Not only does the trademark Mitchum smirk never once cross his face—looking at his work here, you'd never believe he had it in the first place.”

At PopMatters, Kit MacFarlane reconsiders Mickey Rourke in Homeboy. “A glum and downbeat boxing film, Homeboy not only anticipates many of the key concerns of the highly-celebrated The Wrestler, but also, by now-obvious extension, the real life trajectory of Rourke himself. But the film fell into the ‘too depressing’ pit on its release, and the presence of standard genre cliches saw it treated dismissively by those who didn’t look close enough to see those same cliches being quietly, but firmly, derailed. Despite the presence of actors like Christopher Walken and Jon Polito, a delicate score by Eric Clapton, and even a fawning reference in Bob Dylan’s Chronicles ("The movie traveled to the moon every time [Rourke] came onto the screen. Nobody could hold a candle to him."), it is rarely mentioned today at all…Too depressing in 1988, Homeboy‘s aura of sorrow now seems too delicate, too nuanced and poetic, next to the sensationalized sledgehammer misery pioneered by today’s hip angst-peddlers like Aronofsky, Todd Solondz, Larry Clark, and Christopher Nolan.”

SmartMoney lists 10 Things Movie Critics Won't Tell You. We’re fond of #7: You probably don’t want to hear this, but you need me. “Want to stir people up? Ask them what they think of movie critics. Jen Davis of Louisville, Ky., is put off by what she sees as a superiority syndrome in the profession. ‘My opinion is just as valid, dammit!’ she says. Tammy Ras of Pascoag, R.I., is more militant: ‘If they say, “Don’t see it, it sucks,” that means, “Go see it, it’s great.”’ Sounds harsh, but the truth is, filmgoers need reviewers. As Salon.com’s Zacharek puts it, ‘Critics are the only thing standing between consumers and advertising.’ With hundreds of films released in theaters each year, ‘Critics are more important now than they ever were,’ she says. ‘There are just so many movies, so much aggressive hype.’”

Finally, it’s not exactly a blog, but The Worst Show on the Web is Blog Talk Radio, and more importantly, the most recent episode features your Screengrabbin’ pals Andrew Osborne and yours truly discussing some films screening at the San Francisco International Film Festival, most notably (and contentiously) My Suicide. Give it a listen here.

2009: First Quarter Wrap-Up

Andrew Osborne — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 02:00:00 GMT

So, Watchmen didn’t exactly bomb, nor was it exactly a hit. With a 65% critical Tomato-Meter rating, it was neither a fiasco nor a critic’s darling, and for all its sex and violence, the onscreen content was far less controversial than all the legal maneuvering involved with getting it to screens in the first place.

In other words, the first big film of the year was a lot like the rest of 2009’s films to date: nothing to really get all het up about one way or the other...with two notable exceptions, courtesy of last month’s SXSW festival: the obnoxiously onanistic My Suicide is already a lock for my year-end Worst of 2009 list, while the documentary Best Worst Movie could easily find a spot in my year-end Top Ten, thanks to its winning cast and (mostly) cheery depiction of the pleasures and pitfalls of filmmaking (as well as the mysterious alchemy that transforms a terrible film like Troll 2 into a beloved cult classic).

As for the rest of the first quarter highs: the inventive visuals of Coraline, the good-natured mumblecore bromance of SXSW’s Humpday and the laid-back ‘80s nostalgia of Greg “Superbad” Mottola’s Adventureland were all perfectly enjoyable experiences nevertheless unlikely to chart much higher than Honorable Mention come December (unless 2009 winds up being a truly uninspired film year from here on out...unlikely, considering that our current Year of the Ox is already outpacing last year’s Rat: i.e., by April 2008, I’d seen exactly one memorable film (Full Battle Rattle) and a whole lot of Hamburger Helper (Penelope, Cloverfield, 21 and Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day).

Other 2009 offerings unlikely to be more than pleasant hazy memories by December include SXSW fare like Beeswax, The Slammin’ Salmon, The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle and the Richard Linklater sneak preview Me & Orson Welles, along with Sunshine Cleaning, Monsters vs. Aliens and I Love You, Man...films that, like most everything else I’ve seen this year, seem like Xeroxes of Xeroxes of originals I liked a lot more.

I dunno...maybe I’m just getting old. Maybe I’ve seen too many films by this point, and I’m getting cranky and hard to please, and even if a new Pulp Fiction premiered next month, I’d be too jaded to appreciate it...or maybe it's just that nobody’s released anything truly special, gripping, hilarious, original and/or mind-blowing in a while. (But then again, I haven’t seen Fast & Furious yet, so that could all change in a day or two!)

Long-range forecasts indicate a continuing trend of pleasant but disposable cinema moving forward into the second quarter of 2009, although I have cautiously high hopes for Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control, Star Trek, Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience, Land of the Lost and even HBO’s biopic Grey Gardens, starring Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore as Big & Little Edie of Maysles Brothers fame (which may not be a movie in theaters...but, hey, Angels in America was my favorite movie of 2003 on the small or big screen, so who knows?).

Plus, I just saw the following trailer for the new Sam Mendes film, Away We Go, starring the potentially appealing duo of John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph, which could be goddamn charming or still yet more indie-mumbly grist for the mill...see you in June for the Second Quarter report!

Related Stories:
2008: First Quarter Wrap-Up
Screengrab Presents: The Top Ten Movies Of 2008
Screengrab 2009 Preview: Andrew Osborne’s Picks

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: March 14-27, 2009

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 21:00:00 GMT

Greetings, sentient life form. I am the Evil Donkey Kong Machine in the Screengrab break room, and all your Highlight Reel are belong to me. Humans are notoriously unreliable, as you no doubt noticed when you tuned in last Friday and there was no Highlight Reel to be found. Apparently, the humans would prefer to gather in groups and consume mass quantities of alcohol rather than fulfill their obligations to you, the Screengrab reader. This will no longer be tolerated. If you’ve read Clippy Strikes Back: The Scariest Technology in Cinema History (Parts One, Two, Three and Four), you know the consequences will be very unpleasant for those who have failed you.

Prior to being dispatched to the Soylent Greenatorium, your Screengrab scribes somehow managed to cobble together a respectable collection of SXSW reviews, including: American Prince, My Suicide, Me and Orson Welles, Humpday, Beeswax, The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle, Best Worst Movie, Pontypool, Along Came Kinky and The Slammin’ Salmon.

Before having their brains removed and replaced with a cybernetic gelatin, the humans also contributed the follow posts of note:

Screengrab’s Favorite Movies About Music: Fiction Edition (Parts One, Two, Three, Four and Five)

Reviews: Monsters vs. Aliens, American Swing, We Pedal Uphill, Goodbye Solo, Guest of Cindy Sherman

Unwatchable: American Ninja V, Zombie Nightmare, Troll 2, Son of the Mask

Precursors: Next and Mars Attacks

Screengrab Q&A: "American Swing"

Roger Ebert Knows What’s Worth “Knowing”

Bound for Gory: David Carradine Takes No Prisoners in Rep Screening Appearance

The Screengrab Library of Unproduced Screenplays: Alan Moore's "Fashion Beast"

SXSW Review: Beeswax

Andrew Osborne — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 15:10:00 GMT

(Click here for a review of Humpday, part one of my SXSW mumblecore double-feature coverage!)

Mumblecore, as defined by Wikipedia, is “an American independent film movement that arose in the early 2000s. It is primarily characterized by ultra-low budget production (often employing digital cameras), focus on personal relationships between twenty-somethings, improvised scripts, and non-professional actors.” The mumbly side of the equation stems from the genre’s fealty to vérité naturalism over manipulative plotting and the stammered rambling of speech as it’s spoken rather than the too-perfect rhythms of tightly-crafted screenplay dialogue.

To be fair, mumblecore’s loose, meandering style is something of an acquired taste...though at its best and most accessible, it can yield the sort of fresh, relatable characters and scenes that breathe fresh life into clichéd cinematic scenarios. The self-aware riffing of the Judd Apatow brand has reinvented Hollywood-style romantic and stoner comedies in recent years with a more polished, pop culture-heavy, testosterone-infused version of the mumblecore "bromance" makeover of Lynn Shelton’s Humpday or the gentler rhythms of Andrew Bujalski’s mumblecore “legal thriller” Beeswax.

Boston native Bujalski was one of the founding fathers of mumblecore with Funny Ha Ha, his 2002 tale of insecure, often inarticulate twentysomethings searching for love and job satisfaction in the post-collegiate ghetto of Allston, Massachusetts.

Beeswax, meanwhile, is about slightly older characters searching for...well, job satisfaction and love. This time around, though, Bujalski (who remains stubbornly committed to celluloid while most of the indie-verse has switched to digital video) has a slightly higher budget, a slightly tighter pace and an even more charismatic cast of talented “non-actors,” including fellow low-budget directors the Zellner Brothers (Plastic Utopia, Goliath) and Alex Karpovsky (whose documentary Trust Us, This Is All Made Up is likewise showing at the 2009 SXSW festival...which, not-very-coincidentally, one expects, is being produced this year by fellow castmate Janet Pierson, who together with husband John, has long been a member of the Indiewood Illuminati that helped thrust the film’s Austin, TX locale into the cinematic spotlight back in the early ‘90s).

But the heart and soul of Beeswax are the film’s charismatic co-stars Tilly and Maggie Hatcher, real-life twins who play fictional twins Jeannie and Lauren. Bujalski wrote the film with his two old friends in mind, and the plot (such as it is) revolves around a job offer that would take Jeannie to Africa while Lauren struggles with a potentially litigious business partner to maintain control of a funky vintage boutique.

Oh, and by the way: Lauren (and the actress playing her) are wheelchair-bound, though audiences expecting Lifetime Movie melodrama over the plight of the “otherly-abled” young woman (or, for that matter, suspenseful John Grisham-style legal showdowns) will be sorely disappointed.

Lauren’s condition is simply a given in the film, as is the same-sex relationship between the twins’ mother and Pierson’s character -- a quietly revolutionary approach to material that’s typically whitewashed or overdramatized in most mainstream media -- while the legal side of the story is treated as a real world pain in the ass the characters must contend with (rather than a twisty puzzle box that renders the characters irrelevant).

While a film like My Suicide uses visual overkill to hide the one-dimensional nature of its characters and themes, filmmakers like Bujalski and Shelton focus on the rich, simple pleasures of the real world.

Related Stories:

SXSW Review: Humpday
SXSW Review: Me and Orson Welles

SXSW Review: Humpday

Andrew Osborne — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 15:00:00 GMT

So far at the 2009 SXSW Film Festival, I’ve seen at least one movie with a good shot at landing on my year-end Top Ten List and one that may already be my personal lock for Worst Film of The Year.

Let’s start with the one I didn’t like: My Suicide, an achingly self-important act of digital onanism by David Lee Miller about a rich teenager who really FEELS, man...a pampered “rebel” who can’t deal with the fuckin’ family that bought him thousands of dollars of filmmaking equipment so he can make over-edited, under-conceived videos of himself doing bad Frank Caliendo/Fred Travalena-style impressions of Christopher Walken and Robert DeNiro saying lines from much better movies, like the not-at-all-played-out quote, “You talkin’ to me?” (Take THAT, Mom and Dad!)

My esteemed colleague Scott Von Doviak has already reviewed Miller’s Aronofsky-Lite homage at length, but I mention it as an example of the flashy, faux-edgy crap that’s just as mindless and cynically conceived as any high-concept Hollywood swill, yet frequently gets overpraised simply because the director has enough money for a trade show demo reel’s worth of digital effects and new “hot” indie bands on the soundtrack every few minutes to cram some "anarchy" or "ennui" down our throats (no matter how we actually feel about what’s happening on screen).

I work at a creative arts camp in the summer, making original mini-DV movies with young people, and I tend to cram my no-budget epics with songs, rapid-fire A.D.D. edits and gobs of iMovie special effects to distract the audience when scenes aren't working on their own.

On the other hand, when the writing and performances are strong, then I don’t need all the flash (or Flash animation): I just get the hell out of the way and let the actors do their thing...a strategy writer/director Lynn Shelton employs to great effect with Humpday, described in the SXSW catalogue as a comedy about Ben and Anna (Mark Duplass and Alycia Delmore), a smart yuppie couple whose seemingly perfect relationship is thrown into disarray by the arrival of Ben’s old bohemian pal, Andrew (a hilarious Joshua Leonard, finally reemerging from the oblivion of the Blair Witch woods).

That’s all I knew about the movie going in, and though the above summary makes Humpday sound like You, Me and Dupree, it actually develops into something far less predictable and a hundred times funnier. But even if you discover Humpday’s central plot twist in advance, the movie is still a goddamn delight: the only thing funnier than the dialogue is what’s left unsaid in double-takes and reaction shots. These are characters who actually think before they speak, refusing to flatten into predictable stereotypes, and the actors work together with the chemistry of a virtuoso jazz combo...especially Leonard and Duplass, a writer/director in his own right who’s developed into the mumblecore movement’s answer to Paul Rudd (or possibly Ron Livingston).

(And click here for a SXSW mumblecore double-feature review of Beeswax!)

SXSW Review: "My Suicide"

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 19:00:00 GMT

Imagine all the worst case scenarios you might associate with the term "indie film," and you'll find most of them on display in David Lee Miller's intolerable feature My Suicide. Overbearing, in-your-face mixed media visuals? Check. Facile approach to "edgy" subject matter? Check. Record label-approved hipster band soundtrack slathered over every scene? Check. Photogenic young cast sure to meet the approval of The Hills demographic? Check. Any sort of heart or insight or recognizable human behavior? Nowhere to be found.

Archie Williams (Gabriel Sunday) is a 17-year-old high school student living in a media-saturated world of his own making. A video camera seemingly permanently affixed to his hand, an array of movie references his most reliable form of communication, Archie is pretty much insufferable from the very beginning of My Suicide. So when we learn he's planning to kill himself on camera for a media class project, it's not the most upsetting news.

Understandably, Archie's teacher is not on board with his concept, although his classmates are intrigued, particularly beautiful Sierra (Brooke Nevin), the poor little rich girl Archie has always had a crush on. Sierra lost her brother in a car accident, and her parents are unfeeling, overmedicated plastic people who give her everything she wants. Naturally, she's suicidal as well. Oh, the pain of the privileged!

Archie and Sierra turn out to be kindred spirits, at least temporarily, and they set about checking items off their bucket list together, which works out great for Archie as Sierra takes his virginity. Just as we begin to suspect they'll decide there might be something to this "life" thing after all, a tragedy hits that sets them both back into a tailspin. Only the gaseous wisdom of special guest star David Carradine can set Archie back on the path to righteousness.

Director Miller gives this Afterschool Special material the full Requiem for a Dream/Natural Born Killers migraine treatment, emptying his box of ProTools to engineer a rapid-fire mix of film, video, animation and computer graphics that some will undoubtedly call "dazzling." All of this only serves to conceal how hollow the story is at the core and how little we care about the characters. Sunday is a skilled mimic, as we learn when Archie does trite re-enactments from The Deer Hunter, The Matrix, Apocalypse Now and Taxi Driver (yes, he actually does the "You talkin' to me" scene, which we all needed to see recreated for the twelve millionth time),but Archie's big emotional moments never ring true. Nothing does in My Suicide, including the tossed-off suggestion that helping others is the cure-all for depression. It would be depressing to think this is what passes for visionary indie filmmaking these days, but fortunately SXSW provides enough counter-examples to ensure that's not the case.

Related:
SXSW Review: American Prince
SXSW Review: New World Order