The Screengrab : nashville

Th-Th-That's All Folks! The Best & Worst Endings Of All Time (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 28 May 2009 20:30:00 GMT

PINK FLAMINGOS (1972)

Okay, first of all...how cool is it that John Waters was the officiant at David “The Wire” Simon’s wedding? But, of course, a certain brotherhood between the seemingly unlikely pair makes perfect sense, given their shared warts-and-all love of Charm City, a.k.a. Bodymore, Murderland. And before he became pop culture’s deviant bon vivant uncle, Waters also shared the hustler rebel aesthetic of Simon characters like Omar and Bubbles, conceiving Divine’s infamous shit-eating grin at the end of Pink Flamingos as more of a calculated publicity stunt than an attempt to pervert the fabric of decent society. As the director says in his book, Shock Value, “I knew I only had $10,000 to work with, so I figured I had to give the audiences something no other studio could dare give them even with multimillion-dollar budgets. Something to leave them gagging in the aisles. Something they could never forget.” Mission accomplished. (AO)

NASHVILLE (1975)

Robert Altman’s clearest claim to having made the Great American Movie has an ending that pulls off the neat trick of seeming both surprising and inevitable. It’s another of those movies that absolutely earns its ending, with the exhausting and exhilarating feeling that we have followed its many fascinating characters to the logical extreme of their stories; and when they all gather for a political rally in honor of the unseen candidate Hal Philip Walker, it seems inexorable, in light of what we’ve seen before, that there will be an attempt on his life. But the gunshot, when it finally comes, finds an unexpected target – and, what’s even more unexpected, the movie doesn’t end there. Instead, it throws out a new wrinkle, as the little-known striver Barbara Harris, in one of the show biz tropes that is rarely handled so masterfully, steps up to calm the crowd and forge her own legend singing “It Don’t Worry Me” as the fallen Ronee Blakey is carried away. The song turns into a transcendent chant for all of America as Altman’s camera, which has captured absolutely everything, goes the only place it has left to go: up, out, and away. (LP)

THE BAD NEWS BEARS (1976)

What was it about 1976 that made losing acceptable at the movies? Was it a Vietnam hangover? The famous malaise Jimmy Carter spoke of? There must be some significance to the fact that the two most successful sports-themed movies of the year – Rocky and The Bad News Bears – ended with the heroes on the losing side. As losing goes, however, the Bears do it right. A thrilling rally in the bottom of the ninth that falls just short. A round of beers in the dugout. And of course, Tanner’s immortal response to the fake rah-rah good sportsmanship of the privileged: “Hey, Yankees! You can take your apology and your trophy and shove it straight up your ass!” Words to live by. (SVD)

DROWNING BY NUMBERS (1988)

For someone so relentlessly postmodern, director Peter Greenaway has often proven himself a master of what Barthes called the “proairetic sequence” – the movement of the narrative through signifiers related to plot and action. Although Drowning By Numbers is as beautifully designed as any of his less narrative structural work, Greenaway creates an almost tangible, physical need to see the plot (involving the murder by drowning of three men at the hands of their identically-named lovers) all the way through to its conclusion. He does this through a trick that’s elegant in its simplicity: almost every scene features a number, starting with 1 and increasing by one in every scene, going all the way up to 100. Greenaway cleverly snares you into an addiction for spotting the next number before you’re really even aware what he’s doing, and by the end of the movie, the number 100 shows up as the typically brilliant Michael Nyman score reaches its frantic crescendo and the story reaches its grim but inescapable conclusion. (LP)

BEFORE SUNSET (2004)

I covered this for a previous list of romantic moments, so pardon me for repeating myself: It's a safe bet that few people who watched backpacking Gen X-ers Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) spend a memorable night together in Vienna in 1995's Before Sunrise ever expected to see a sequel, much less wait nine years for one. When that follow-up finally did arrive in 2004, it could hardly have been confused with a traditional movie romance. As befitting a Richard Linklater film, their belated reunion in Paris is all talk — talk about missed connections, the impermanence of youth and the mysteries of love. Jesse has a flight to catch, so we're always aware of the ticking clock — that is, until the sublime final moments, when the urgency melts away to the appropriate tones of Nina Simone singing "Just in Time." Delpy does a shuffling little dance. Hawke sinks into the couch with a silly grin on his face. And we all learn that the most romantic words of all are not "I love you" — they're "Baby, you are gonna miss that plane." (SVD)

Click Here For Part One, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven & Twelve

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak

In Other Blogs: The Blogger Experience

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 22 May 2009 15:30:00 GMT

Some Came Running proprietor Glenn Kenny recounts his Girlfriend Experience at The Auteurs. Kenny has a role in the film that was pitched to him as “the Harry Knowles of internet escort reviewers.” Kenny was not immediately flattered. “Harry Knowles, if you don’t know, is famous for founding Aint It Cool News, a movie fan boy website of large popularity and no small industry influence. Knowles (and I hope he won't mind me saying this) is also, as Kyle on South Park would put it, a great big fat fuck. I am, hence, slightly put off.”

At Beyond the Multiplex, Andrew O’Hehir talks to Girlfriend Experience director Steven Soderbergh about his prolific, unpredictable career. “I'm always trying to be Howard Hawks, sure. I envy the opportunities that the studio directors got in the '30s and '40s. It was assumed that you would make more than one movie a year, and that that movie could be a western or a musical or a comedy or a drama. Very early on, before I made sex, lies, and videotape, I fantasized that I could have a career in which I could move around like that. It's not easy.”

Ali Arikan breaks from the Trek pack at The House Next Door. “Which is all by way of saying there is absolutely no nuance in J.J. Abrams’s film, not even a soupçon of subtlety, no genuine humour. It’s all piff-paff, whack-bang, etc, packed with heaps of post-modernist “irony” or whatever it is they call this bollocks. Nudge nudge, wink wink ahoy. We are all wallowing in a never-ending adolescence these days. So, instead of making us laugh, J.J. Abrams just wants to make us feel clever, and the whole thing becomes a big ego-massage”

Bright Lights After Dark considers the geography of 3 Women. “It's a point that many viewers miss, though it's difficult to blame them: Robert Altman's 3 Women is really "about" California, and quite distinctly so -- it doesn't belong to its contentual municipality in the sense that, say, Nashville does. And it's not about the psycho-sprawl urban California of Los Angeles or the spittle, cardboard and tinsel California of Hollywood or the plugged culture retro-future sophistry California of San Francisco. It's about the other California, by which one means the smattering of middle-of-nowhere cities always on the brink of suburbia these days, and always reminding us of somewhere else. The dusty, mid-western-like cock-and-bull towns that flank the interstate 5 with ranches and groves. The shattered-shell-and-hanging-kayak-wind-chime Mediterranean beach villas that dot the coastal region from Monterey to Santa Barbara. And, of course, the boilingly barren, frenziedly phallic desert settlements that circle the parched Mojave and Joshua Tree territories.”

And finally in List-o-Mania, Topless Robot offers the 10 Most Blatant Terminator Ripoffs, including Cyborg Cop. “A renegade cop (is there any other kind in these movies?) goes to the tropics to find his long lost brother, who has been transformed into a cybernetic killing machine by a mad scientist in this '93 movie. As the scientist, John Rhys-Davies seems to be under the impression he's filming an episode of Gilligan's Island as his performance has to be seen to be believed.”

The Screengrab Holiday Special: Movies We're Thankful For (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 16:00:00 GMT

PHIL NUGENT GIVES THANKS FOR:

BLUE VELVET (1986)

I'm not sure that it's possible to fully appreciate how thankful some of us are for Blue Velvet, the greatest American movie of the 1980s, without having suffered the indignity of being a movie freak in the 1980s, when this picture arrived like cool water to a man stranded in the desert. The biggest surprise may not have been that David Lynch, who by that time had Eraserhead and The Elephant Man to his credit, had this inside him, but that he was allowed to get it out of his system with the financial assistance of Dino De Laurentiis, who bought the property out of development hell and gave Lynch carte blanche to express his vision, asking only that the sucker come in at no longer than two hours. This was apparently De Laurentiis' way of thanking Lynch for all the unhappy work the director had put in cranking out Dune, another De Laurentiis production. Given that Dune failed to result in the intended franchise hit, nobody in Hollywood would have been surprised, let alone appalled, if Dino had told the boy from Missoula to take a hike, and take his leading man (Kyle MacLachlan, who made his film debut in Dune, and who had signed to appear in a string of sequels that were never going to happen) with him. Instead, De Laurentiis succumbed to an unusually well-timed bout of honor, and given the results, only the churlish would whisper that it's too bad that it didn't last long enough for Lynch to cut a deal with him to make Ronnie Rocket. Because of this, anyone who's thinking of talking some shit about Dino De Laurentiis -- the man whose other credits in 1986 alone included Tai-Pan, King Kong Lives, and Maximum Overdrive -- had better check with me first to make sure you've got the right. Unless you've paid for a movie masterpiece and been married to Silvano Magnano, you probably haven't.

MOUSEHOLES (1999)

Helen Hill, who died in 2007, and who earlier this week was awarded a Leo Award by the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, was a friend of mine. Helen was an independent filmmaker, though given the way that term is bandied about these days, it doesn't begin to capture just how independent she was; she never had an agent or a distributor, but finished her short animated films when she could and trucked them around to festivals with a reel tucked under her arm. Her masterpiece, Mouseholes, is a tribute to her dead grandfather that draws on home movies, Helen's own childlike animation, and tape-recorded conversations to make something sublime out of one of the most remarkable things about movies, and one of the key ways in which they have forever changed our world: their ability to enable us to hold onto a few invaluable pieces of the people we've lost, like ghosts trapped in bottles. For Helen, the film was about hanging onto part of her grandfather; now, for those of us left behind, the film has become about holding onto part of the woman who made it.

HIS GIRL FRIDAY (1940)

Let's be clear about this: the reason that one of the best, funniest comedies in the history of movies exists is that its producer-director, Howard Hawks, had the balls and the taste to be corrupt in just the right way. A lot of people with as much talent as Hawks would never have thought of taking The Front Page, which then had a pretty good claim to being the greatest American play yet written and is nothing to sneeze at now, and turning it into a romantic comedy by giving the lead role a sex change and turning the other male lead into her ex-husband, who's waiting to make his next move. And while Hollywood was, and always will be, full of crass jackals who'd think nothing of trying something like that, hardly any of them would have been able to pull it off. (A 1988 remake of Hawks' rip-off, set in the world of TV news and starring Burt Reynolds and Kathleen Turner called Switching Channels was apparently made just to demonstrate this very point.) By now, His Girl Friday is so solidly (and deservedly) entrenched in its super-plus classic status that most people are barely aware of what a cold-blooded commercial calculation it's based on, or even that it has a title that ought to make you barf. I bring all this up now not because it takes anything away from the wonderfulness of the movie, because it doesn't: if I'm ever exiled to a desert island, this son of a bitch is coming with me. But it's worth keeping in mind, so that in a movie culture increasingly open to conventional wisdom and partisan warfare, everyone keeps in mind the final word on how greatness is achieved: you just never know.

TOKYO OLYMPIAD (1065)

Kon Ichikawa's 170-minute documentary record of the 1964 Olympic Games was commissioned by the Japanese government as part of their effort to use the games as their announcement that the country had transformed itself since World War II and was eager to be regarded as a smoothly functioning, hospitable member of the world of nations. Originally, the Japanese telegraphed both the ambition of the project, and their willingness to meet the rest of the world halfway, by hiring Akira Kurosawa, who at that time had no serious challengers for the title of the Japanese director who was best-known and most revered outside Japan. Luckily, somebody had a reality check and realized that Ichikawa, who was known for his ability to improvise in the face of changing conditions, was better suited temperamentally to this mission that the proud old samurai and control freak Kurosawa. Besides, the world already had one great Olympics documentary showing what the games looked like through the eyes of a director accustomed to bending reality to her will: Leni Riefenstahl's Olympiad, legendary for the way it transforms the musclular bodies on display into black-and-white film poetry. Ichikawa's brightly colored film captures the atmosphere, the flavor, the summer fun aspect of the whole spectacle, as well as the awesome mixture of the personalities involved. And though it's a measure of Ichikawa's mastery that it all looks effortless -- a few thousand people got together and had some contests, and all he did was point a camera at it and boil the results down to the good stuff -- the sense it gives you of the scale of the enterprise is explanation enough as to why there weren't more Olympics movies like this prior to the mid-1960s. Of course, there'll never be anything like it ever again; none of the people who might put up the money would see the point, because now we get to watch it all while it's happening, on TV. Whoopy-dink.

THE FILMS OF W.C. FIELDS

Pauline Kael: "From their titles, it's hard to tell the W.C. Fields movies apart; as John Mosher observed, 'Fields is Fields, a rose is a rose.' " Wilfrid Sheed:"...we demand more of Fields than even comic genius. We have to believe he meant it. We want certification that such a one existed: a mean, child-hating con man who was so funny about it that he made these things all right." Although there were other great screen comedians who were funnier in a greater number of ways, such as the Marx Brothers, and others who were more gifted visually as moviemakers, such as Buster Keaton, Fields' scraggly, underfunded, rattily uneven body of work retains the special fascination of representing one mean-spirited bastard's judgement on, and self-defense strategy against, the world. Fields has turned out to be one of those movie figures, like Bogart, who never goes out of style or fully loses connection with the modern world, yet it doesn't get any easier, as the years go by, to believe that the movies themselves got made on the level. The Fatal Glass of Beer, Million Dollar Legs, Mississippi, It's a Gift, The Man on the Flying Trapeze, My Little Chickadee, The Bank Dick, Never Give a Sucker an Even Break -- they all look as if they made late at night when the studio bosses had gone home and the security guards had passed out drunk, using money that whimsically crooked bookkeepers had skimmed from the budgets of Rin Tin Tin pictures. Although there are people working today who are probably as talented as Fields, and maybe even as idiosyncratic, there are no parallels for his career; as soon as Bill Murray, probably the closest living point of comparison, showed that he could make people laugh in a thrown-together movie like Stripes, he was thrown into big-budget special effects exravaganzas like Ghostbusters and eventually forced to turn character actor, which might have been his strategy for self-defense. To find anything close to Fields' vehicles today, you'd probably be best off searching the schedule of the Animal Planet channel.

RICHARD PRYOR LIVE IN CONCERT (1979)

Hard to believe now, but there was a time in our culture when stand-up comedians didn't get to leave behind every inflection of their act, cusswords included, perfectly preserved on cable TV specials. Lenny Bruce, who more or less invented the modern conception of the nightclub comic as satirical firebrand and verbal cartoonist, left behind only a posthumously released film record of one of his last performances, caught after his legal and drug problems had snuffed out his energy and wit and reduced him to a wry, paranoid figure snuffling in front of a bare brick wall. (Earlier clips of Bruce doing a TV-friendly version of his act on the Steve Allen show give you some idea of how much of his act was physical, and so is missing from the performances that were released on records.) Bruce's greatest disciple, Richard Pryor, was much luckier: this full-feature performance film caught him in full flight at the height of his powers, at a time when he was using everything he'd learned about working a crowd and applying it to a young lifetime's worth of experiences and observations. The film was released a year before Pryor, in a guilt-stricken, coke-baser's frenzy of despair, lit himself on fire; its sequels, starting with the 1982 Richard Pryor Live on the Sunset Strip, record his partially successful attempt to relaunch himself after that traumatic meltdown, and his subsequent discovery that both his health and his inspiration were all but shot. But at least future generations won't be in any danger of thinking that this man was just the guy in The Toy.

McCABE & MRS. MILLER; THE LONG GOODBYE; THIEVES LIKE US; CALIFORNIA SPLIT; NASHVILLE (1970s)

In 1970, Robert Altman, then 45, directed the first hit film of his career, M*A*S*H. Ten years later, on a wavering leash from producer Robert Evans and a fluctuating budget, he directed Popeye, which was to be his second hit, even though it turned out to be the kind of commercial success whose star, Robin Williams, would still be apologizing for it twenty years later. In between those two hits, Altman would be able to make thirteen feature films, make them his way, for good or ill, and get them distributed by major studios whose bosses were still reeling in confusion from the collapse of the old system and cowed by Altman's many prizes and adulatory reviews. The five listed above are my favorites from that amazing body of work, which is as alive and unconventional as any large-scale attempt to understand America that any artist has ever embarked on. You might prefer five others; I'm generally up to taking another look at any of them, except maybe for Quintet and A Perfect Couple, because I find that revisiting even the ones that I think stink on ice feels less like looking at dead, bad old movies than like revisiting distant, weird members of the family who I haven't seen since the last time they got out of rehab. The fact that any of them exist at all is conclusive proof that desperate bewilderment at the top is not the worst thing you could have in the movie business. You might think that the same guys who were prepared to sponsor Altman to such a degree on the basis of one hit would have handed him the keys to the kingdom after he'd had a second one, but by 1980, the corporate heads had decided they knew what they were doing again, and the next year, Altman gave up on Hollywood and spent the rest of the decade working in theater and cable TV and making filmed plays on shoestring budgets, with only one small return to actual feature filmmaking, the barely released O. C. and Stiggs. He restarted his movie career right on schedule, in 1990, beginning with Vincent and Theo, a Van Gogh biopic that is as great as anything he ever made, and as unprofitable.

THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962)

The greatest fusion of commercial thriller and political satire ever to come out of Hollywood -- and, as directed by John Frankenheimer, a still-stunning mixture of old-studio technique and new-style TV-age hipness -- is fairly high on the list of movies that nobody should have been able to get made at all. The novel, by Richard Condon, was a great success but also widely taken for being unadaptable. In fact, George Axelrod, who did the masterful screenplay, has said that he was stymied with a concrete case of writer's block until the film's star, Frank Sinatra, cured him by calling up and saying that it had been a while and he would like to see some pages. (Axelrod was the film's co-producer, alongside Frankenheimer, so technically, he was Sinatra's boss, but let's get real: having Frank Sinatra call you up and tell you that he sure would like to see you flap your arms and fly over the Chrysler Building might turn out to be the cure for gravity.) It wouldn't be until the late 1970s that the mercurial Sinatra would gain control of the picture himself and pull it from theatrical distribution or TV broadcast until 1988. The reasons for this, mostly financial in nature, aren't altogether clear, but contrary to popular urban myth, it doesn't seem to have anything to do with guilty feelings related to the possibility that the movie anticipated the Kennedy assasination. (By then, Richard Condon had written a novel, Winter Kills, that was directly based on JFK assassination conspiracy lore, and that book was made into a movie, written and directed by William Richart and starring Jeff Bridges, the blighted production and distribution history of which would spur rumors and allegations related to the organized-crime connections of some of its financiers and the disinclination of Embassy Pictures to alienate its own connections in the defense industry.) But I can say that I remember finally seeing The Manchurian Candidate for the first time -- actually, the first three times -- in the spring of 1988 at the Prytania Theater in New Orleans, and that of all my experiences with movies that have been re-introduced to the public after a spell in the vault, none has been as far from disappointing as my experience with this one.

CHILDREN OF PARADISE (1945)

Marcel Carne's three-hour-plus romantic celebration of the life of the theater, as rich and satisfying as any epic-scale film entertainment in history, was made during the Nazi occupation of France, a time when the Vichy government imposed rationing and other restrictions on materials and did not permit the production of any movie intended to be longer than 90 minutes. (Carne got approval to proceed with his script only by pretending that the finished product would be released in two parts.) The production provided employment, and gave cover, to many Resistance members, who worked as extras alongside Nazi loyalists who had been assigned to the project by Vichy, smiling and nodding in polite conversation with those scumbags while memorizing their faces and imagining how they were going to look with nooses draped around their necks. (Legend has it that Carne dragged out the production towards the end in anticipation of the arrival of the Allies so that the movie could wrap in a free France.) This kind of big moviemaking is commonly associated with decadence now, but Carne's commitment to his elegant conception and vast canvas was strong enough that he plowed ahead, creating the illusion that he had much greater material resources than he had. Some contemporary "independent" filmmakers who think they're demonstrating their own artistic integrity when they can't bother to focus the camera properly ought to be made to sit through this movie and then handed ritual seppeku blades, in trust that they'll do the right thing.

JAWS (1975)

I was eight years old. She was two: this was 1977, the first year she was "officially" re-released after her debut in 1975, to compete with this slutty new number on the block named Star Wars. A lot of the kids I knew were all excited about the new girl, and couldn't understand why I was so excited about the chance that I might get to see some old hag who everybody had been talking about for a couple of years, but I had done some asking around, and everything I discovered seemed to confirm that the new girl didn't have a shark. And I had been fascinated by the thought of Jaws for, it seemed, my whole life; it seemed that, for as long as I could remember, I'd heard people talking about her in vague, soft whispers. I knew that I was supposed to be too young for her, because I'd spent so many hours -- yes, hours -- lying on my belly looking at the newspaper ads, and gazing at that special box that read, "May Be Too Intense for Younger Children." (As the Mad magazine parody pointed out, putting that line in the ads as a means of keeping kids out of the theaters was like trying to keep ants away from a picnic by pouring sugar on the ground.) Ultimately, I got to see it because the Disney cartoon The Rescuers was also playing at McComb, Mississipp's only two-screen theater -- McComb, Mississippi's only movie theater -- and because my mom decided that she'd rather be getting her hair done and shooting shit with the girls for those two hours than sitting next to me watching Bob Newhart and Eva Gabor lend their voices to the characters of a couple of mice. After I got home -- following a very awkward car ride during which I, still in a state of shock, deflected my mom's questions about the movie she thought I'd seen with a series of "Hah?"s -- I would go through many stacks of white typing paper trying to adapt the movie to comic-strip form, in much the way that Hunter Thompson, I would read later, had spent his youth copying pages of Hemingway and Fitzgerald longhand, so that he could feel their prose rhythms coursing through his fingers. It was the closest I had come at that time to writing a movie a love letter. In retrospect, she probably thought I was kind of goofy, if she thought of me at all. I was just one of millions of boys staring at her with my eyes and mouth wide open, I know that. And in the years since -- Christ, in the decades since -- I've known a lot of movies that were smarter, sweeter, more generous, more mature, more beautiful, and had more to teach me about the world. But you never forget the first one. This year she turned thirty-three, and it would be an understatement to say that she still looks good for her age. I expect that, if I'm still around when she's sixty-six, I'll still want to drink her bath water.

Click Here For More Thanks From Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Paul Clark, Leonard Pierce & Sarah Clyne Sundberg

Contributor: Phil Nugent

Screengrab's Top Guilty Pleasures (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 23:00:00 GMT

VADIM RIZOV'S GUILTY PLEASURES:

HEALTH (1980)

A lot of Altman films have bad reputations, at least among non-believers, but HealtH was legendarily deemed unreleasable; planned for a release during the 1980 presidential election, it didn't play anywhere before it was finally let into a grudging run at New York's Film Forum in 1982; it's subsequently plunged into obscurity, seen only in extremely rare revivals and occasionally on the Fox Movie Channel. A memorably facile regular charge against Altman is that he did little more than cluster people together and occasionally zoom in; HealtH basically is that movie, but if you enjoy Altman, it's a blast. A naked attempt to update Nashville for the 1980 election, HealtH's political commentary is just as weak as that of Nashville, with less density to cover it up. Kent Jones once wrote that Altman's "tendency ... to go systematic" almost killed this movie, but if you enjoy that process on top of little more than a string of verbal and visual non sequiturs (my favorite: a guy in a tomato costume — don't ask — jumping into a pool for no good reason), it's well worth tracking down. Truly a fans-only effort.

KILLA SEASON (2006)

I guess I'm kind of ridiculously humorless, because the whole idea of "guilty pleasures" strikes me as part of the reason people are getting dumber: it's easier to recognize bad material, sit back and mock it than try to engage with anything serious and remotely challenging. For some people, the whole genre of "guilty pleasures" takes over entirely from the non-guilty kind and they surrender. Which is fair enough if you're working a demanding job or have a tough life and don't really care about movies and just want the laughs. But if you have the time and leisure (unemployment induced or otherwise) to want a guilty pleasure that actively challenges your endurance, say hello to Cam'ron's directorial debut Killa Season. Not technically a direct-to-video film (limited tri-state area screenings were scheduled for its release), Cam'ron's endless ode to gangsta life begins with a back-alley craps game which turns into a man getting whacked over the head with an empty bottle for a minor betting infraction, then everyone cheering as Cam'ron pisses all over him while chanting "No homo." Killa Season's main achievement is being consistently morally depraved and technically incompetent at all times. If the amateur videography and dialogue that makes mumblecore sound like the snappiest film noir you ever saw (Juelz Santana: "They trying to take over the block"; cut to random guy: "Yo, let's take over the block") aren't enough to entice you, stay for levels of moral filth surpassing Salo. For sheer grossness, the close-ups of coke pellets being shat out by mules are hard to beat, but less-extreme scenes like the ones where Cam'ron spits on a little girl are constantly forthcoming. At well over two hours, Killa Season will make you question your dedication to unintentional hilarity. Me, I watch it once a year.

TRANSPORTER 2 (2005)

Transporter 2 treats real-world physics with less precision than your average Looney Tunes cartoon. Over the course of Louis Leterrer's film, Jason Statham, when not systematically evading and defeating various goons and hirelings (including a hired assassinatrix who, for good kinky measure, shoots up a hospital in her lingerie — Transporter 2 defeats subtext by being even dumber than you'd expect) — consistently test-drives cars in ways I've never seen. My favorite is when, to get rid of a time-bomb on the car's underside, Statham's character hooks it on a construction crane as part of a perfect 360 that lands him on the opposite roof just as the bomb explodes. But there's also the completely nonsensical climactic fight, where Statham and his Euro-foe (Alessandro Grassman) duke it out, bullets and all, while a plane plummets into the ocean, and even after. With such sublime visions of human possibility, why carp about the real world? There's also a smaller pleasure here: anyone fond of the Europudding productions of the '70s — where a bunch of awkwardly accented actors were brought together into an under-written film calculated for nothing so much as maximum exploitation of every country the cast came from — should dig the awkward polyglot cast. When Grassman hisses (in relation to his evil plot to disseminate air toxins) "That's right. Breathe, my friend, breathe" — well, if you're not amused, I can't help you.

HANNIBAL (2001)

The Silence Of The Lambs is a well-crafted and compelling film, but it's basically kind of a drag: with every year, the sexual tensions driving Buffalo Bill seem a little less compelling and defensible, and the sexism card seems like more of a time capsule. Hannibal, on the other hand, is just stupid. Although Ridley Scott's come a long way since Alien, it takes a truly brain-dead mind to settle on his unique way of expressing conflict. When Hannibal's on, the "Goldberg Variations" play; when his nemesis (Gary Oldman) is chewing the screen, the "Blue Danube" plays. And when they meet, they both play at the same time. Hannibal is mostly remembered for its final gross-out brain-eating scene, but it offers more than that: if the sexism seems a little dated in Silence, the leering misogyny of Ray Liotta here is entirely, uh, Liotta-esque, and the constant shots of Florence are pretty without getting all Merchant-Ivory.

Click Here For More Guilt From Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Leonard Pierce, Hayden Childs & Sarah Clyne Sundberg

Contributor: Vadim Rizov

The Barack Obama Film Festival

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Our British friends are delighted with America’s choice as new president, which hasn’t always been the case. (Who can forget the Daily Mirror headline from four years ago, “How Can 59,054,087 People Be So Dumb?”) In fact, they’re already prepared with some advice for President-elect Obama, even if that advice is as seemingly unimportant as the five films he should watch before taking office.

As Xan Brooks notes in The Guardian, Obama’s favorite film is The Candidate. “Robert Redford's idealism harks back to a better day. That said, my team won't let me watch the end for some reason.” In case you’ve forgotten, Brooks reminds us the film “ends with Redford's hero unable to cope with his victory; so drained and compromised by the campaign that he loses sight of why he ran in the first place. ‘What do we do now?’ he murmurs, as the mob runs in to claim him.”

Brooks understands that Obama may not have a lot of couch time between now and January 20, but he does offer five movies for the incoming president’s consideration. They include The Grapes of Wrath (“an angry, humane account of the last Great Depression”) and Nashville (‘a warts-and-all celebration of the American melting-pot”) as well as the cautionary tale A Face in the Crowd. Maybe Sarah Palin can take some time over the next four years to check that one out.

Summer of '78: "A Wedding"

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 23:00:00 GMT

All summer long we’ve been flipping back the calendar to see what was new and exciting at the neighborhood moviehouse thirty years ago. Today is Labor Day, the unofficial end of summer, and the official grand finale of…The Summer of ’78!

A Wedding

Release Date: August 29, 1978

Cast: Desi Arnaz, Jr., Carol Burnett, Geraldine Chaplin, Lillian Gish, Mia Farrow

The Buzz: If your only problem with Nashville was that you thought there just weren’t enough characters – have we got a movie for you!

Keywords: Wedding, Dancing, Dental Braces, Unplanned Pregnancy, Frog, Greenhouse

The Plot: This is about as plotless as it gets, even by Robert Altman standards. The title is no lie – it’s a wedding. The ceremony takes up the first 15 minutes or so, as feckless Dino Corelli (Desi Arnaz, Jr.) is married to braces-wearing daughter of privilege Muffin Brenner by near-senile Bishop Martin (John Cromwell). The matriarch of the groom’s family (Lillian Gish) dies while awaiting the reception guests at the family manse, but her demise is concealed by the family doctor. As at any wedding reception, numerous subplots unfold as the alcohol flows. Mother of the bride Tulip (Carol Burnett) is wooed by guest Mac Goddard (Pat McCormick). Dino is accused of impregnating the bride’s sister Buffy (Mia Farrow), much to the dismay of her overly attentive father Snooks (Paul Dooley). Exes of both bride and groom turn up to complicate matters, as does a tornado. Events take a seemingly tragic turn as it appears the happy couple is killed in a car accident en route to their honeymoon, but it turns out it was just their exes leaving together in the car meant as a wedding present – so who cares?

The Test of Time: During the production of 3 Women, a reporter asked a badly hungover Altman what his next project would be. “We’re shooting a wedding,” he snapped. It figures that a project based on an offhand sarcastic comment would end up being one of the director’s lesser efforts. In a DVD commentary (and in several interviews), Altman lays out his basic plan for the film: first, he wanted to double the number of characters from his most ambitious effort, Nashville. And he wanted the near real-time film to catalogue the follies of the typical wedding, when two families and sets of friends are thrust into an artificial union. It could have worked, but the delicate Altman alchemy fizzled this time around. All the usual tics are present – zoom-ins and –outs, overlapping dialogue, actor improvisation – but the magic just isn’t happening. Part of the blame goes to the cast: Desi Arnaz, Jr. and company aren’t exactly the Nashville A-list. But blame Altman for crowding so many of them into such a confined space and time. We spend too much time trying tell the bridesmaids and distant relatives apart, and by the time we’ve figured it out, few of the storylines are compelling enough – or developed enough – to command our attention. There is the odd worthy moment – a handful of wedding workers and guests passing a joint around outside the greenhouse as the dusky mist descends – but the disproportionately dark denouement is a downer that sums up the cynicism of the whole endeavor. Robert Altman made at least a half-dozen of my all-time favorite movies, so it’s pretty easy for me to shrug off his missteps. Still, the summer of ’78 sure ended with a bummer of A Wedding.

Quotable Quote: “You mean you don’t drink? In other words, when you get up in the morning, that’s as good as you’re gonna feel all day.”

2008 Equivalent: There will never be another Altman.

Thanks for joining us for the Summer of ’78! If we’re all still alive a year from now, tune in for the Summer of ’89!

Previously on Summer of '78: The Driver

OST: "The Pink Panther"

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 21:00:00 GMT

In the past, we've discussed here in the OST feature how soundtracks often happily combine musicians and filmmakers at the height of their powers in a collision of sound and vision that justifies and enhances the existence of both soundtrack and film. In some of these entries -- especially Nashville, Blade Runner, and Fight Club -- we've seen composers and directors perfectly suited for each other, starting great partnerships or merely cementing a similar vision that would inform their work for years to come. Today, though, we're going to look at an excellent soundtrack that's atypical for both participants: a film score done by a great composer working out of his element and a skilled director whose career would, follwing this film, go into a long, slow decline.

The Pink Panther series marked director Blake Edwards at the peak of his powers. While he would never be considered a great director, he at least would develop, largely on the strength of the early installments of the series, as a competent and sure-handed director of comedies, and with the first of the series -- appropriately named The Pink Panther -- he was at his very best, giving the movie exactly the style, atmosphere and pace that it needed. It's not Citizen Kane by anyone's measure, but it's light-years away from the dross that he would later helm in movies like A Fine Mess, Skin Deep and Switch. Henry Mancini, likewise, was a titan of film music, but it was largely through professionalism and dedication than brilliance or inspiration. He had a reputation as a good, fast worker, capable of quick turnarounds of impressively hook-laden scores; while he may never have taken your breath away, he certainly fought you for its attention. Mancini had an extensive background in jazz, but it was never his speciality; he was too tempted by the sounds of '50s pop and exotica to nail down anything like an authentic sound. If anything, he tended to gravitate towards what was known then as "exotic", a sort of symphonic jazz-lite tinted with hints of what would later be called "world music" and heaping helpings of cheese. He too would decline in power as the decades dragged on, but here, both of them hit their strides something fierce, resulting in a widely hailed comedy classic that produced one of the most memorable figures in cinema, and a soundtrack whose main theme is one of the most recognizable tunes in movie history.

While the soundtrack to The Pink Panther is a mighty fine listen on its own -- cue it up at your next swingin' bachelor pad party and offer everone a round of pink squirrels, you wannabe -- it works best in the context of the film, where, as a unified whole, the combination of music and visual creates an absolutely perfect evocation of Europe at the tail end of the Swingin' Sixties. Listening to it in full, as the immediately remembered but somehow never overworn main theme swings its way into your soul, lets you forget about what comes next and remember the days when Peter Sellers was young, alive and full of prome, Henry Mancini wasn't a shadow of his former self grinding out TV hackwork for the paychekc, and Blake Edwards actually knew how to direct funny movies. Doesn't seem that long ago now, does it?

BEST TRACKS: Of course, "The Pink Panther Theme" -- signifying on screen the appearance not of Sellers' Inspector Clouseau, but of David Niven's infamous jewel thief, the Phantom -- is one of the certified classics of cinema soundtracks. Its slow, sinister build into a rip-roaring lounge jazz number is unforgettable from the first time you hear it, and seems to lose not an ounce from repetition. But there's more here than just that famous number: take a listen for "Meglio Stasera (It Had Better Be Tonight)", a swinging vocal number with a Continental feel written for young starlet Fran Jeffries, which went on to be a big hit for crooner (and frequent Mancini collaborator) Johnny Mercer. There's also the oddly named "Shades of Sennett", a rollicking piano number used in the movie's final chase number, that conjures British comedies and American honky-tonk blues -- but rarely the silent movie era it seems to predict in the title!

Related Posts:

OST: Fight Club

OST: Blade Runner

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

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

YOUNG MR. LINCOLN (1939)

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

MOSCOW ON THE HUDSON (1984)

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

JAZZ ON A SUMMER'S DAY (1960)

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

DAVE CHAPPELLE'S BLOCK PARTY (2005)

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

NASHVILLE (1976)

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

Click here for Part One & Part Two

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce

Unwatchable #96: “Track of the Moon Beast”

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 13 May 2008 20:30:00 GMT

Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

As was the case with Devil Fish, this low-budget 1976 tale of reptilian horror has made its way onto the Bottom 100 list courtesy of its appearance on Mystery Science Theater 3000. I suspected this would become a recurring problem, and that appears to be the case. (I’m not 100% certain only because I’m not peeking too far ahead on the master list. You see, I view the Unwatchable series as a major league baseball team views its season. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. You’ve got to take it one game at a time, lest ye be overwhelmed by the insurmountable odds of achieving your goal. In this case, my odds are roughly equivalent to those of the Washington Nationals.)

I find the MST3K situation problematic for several reasons. In a strange way, the presence of movies that have been eviscerated on that show taints the purity of the Bottom 100 list. If you voted for Devil Fish or Track of the Moon Beast because you happened to see them at the drive-in or on late night television, fine. But I’m betting most people who voted for them did so because the MST3K crew pre-approved them as bad movies. Who among us can say we have seen Track of the Moon Beast as it was meant to be seen, without robots cracking wise in the foreground? Not me. But in the future, I will do my best to obtain and view non-MST3K versions of the movies on the list. That is my Unwatchable vow.

The second problem is, of course, that all the jokes to be made about Track of the Moon Beast have already been made. You might think there’s an unlimited amount of humor to be derived from the story of a man who gets a shard of meteorite imbedded in his skull which causes him to turn into a giant lizard. But you would be wrong. And the MST3K gang likewise drained every possible laugh from the name of the victim’s faithful Indian companion, Johnny Longbow. And what can I possibly add that would bring any additional mirth to the line uttered by the hotpants-clad love interest of the were-lizard: “Come on, Johnny Longbow – I’d like to see you live up to your name.” Not a thing, I confess.

One interesting thing – OK, the only interesting thing – about Track of the Moon Beast is that is was co-written by Bill Finger, the writer of many early Batman comics. It’s the one and only directorial effort by Richard Ashe, who takes a very small budget and does very little with it. The one eye-catching image in the movie comes in the first two minutes, when a big creepy, shiny mask appears before our hero in the desert. (It turns out to be a prank played by two of Professor Longbow’s mischievous students.) The only genuinely scary scene is the sudden, unexplained appearance of a country-rock singer in the mold of Keith Carradine from Nashville. There are low-budget horror movies that use their lack of resources to their advantage in creating a dank, grubby mood of despair, and then there are those with crappy rubber lizard suits. This is one of the latter.

Previously on Unwatchable:

97. Bolero
98. Kickboxer 4: The Aggressor
99. The Honeymooners
100. Devil Fish

Take Five: Assassination!

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 22:00:00 GMT

Ever since a November afternoon in 1963, a man in a high place with a rifle and a head full of malice directed at the President of the United States has arguably been our most persistent national nightmare. And from Abraham Lincoln's assassination by one of the nation's best-known actors to the appropriately ham-handed attempt on the life of the ineffectual Gerald Ford by a Manson Family hanger-on, the murder of famous politicians has absorbed our national attention in the news, so why shouldn't it equally influence the kind of movies we watch? Pete Travis' Vantage Point opens across the country this weekend; early buzz has it that the movie, about the assassination of someone pretending to be the president, is all style and little substance, wasting its interesting cast on a movie filled with jump-cuts and car chases. The assassination of a political leader, more often than not (especially in recent big-budget actioners like Shooter), is just a McGuffin to carry us to the punch-outs and crashes. Still, there have been a number of movies in which the killing of a high-profile politician has driven the plot with highly engaging results; today in Take Five, we'll look at a few of the best.

THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962)

One of the first post-Kennedy assassination films, John Frankenheimer's best film was actually released before that fatal day in Dallas; but its theatrical run was unluckily ill-timed with the events of November 22nd, 1963. It was pulled from release and remained unavailable for decades until Frank Sinatra, who played the movie's protagonist, personally intervened to help get it back into production in the VHS era. It was a generous decision: the original Manchurian Candidate remains a masterwork of suspense and intrigue, with a towering performance by Laurence Harvey as the doomed assassin of a presidential candidate. The movie's stunning fantasy sequences, bittersweet moments of drama and romance, constant air of paranoid menace, and final bloody ending make it an assassination classic.

NASHVILLE (1975)

It's easy to forget that Robert Altman's sprawling, brilliant evocation of the Great American Movie revolves not around the country music industry, but the assassination of a political aspirant. Hal Phillip Walker is the unnerving, straight-talking and possibly deranged populist running for president as a political caucus convenes in Tennessee, and if we can see the assassin (played as an enigmatic cipher by David Hayward) coming a mile away, we are at least allowed the final shock in his choice of targets. In the end, as Walker's ominous black limos swarm around and speed him to safety and away from the body of beloved country star Barbara Jean, the schmaltz-peddling Haven Hamilton shows a surprising degree of grace under fire, intoning the charged lines "This isn't Dallas, it's Nashville! They can't do this to us here in Nashville! Let's show them what we're made of."

TAXI DRIVER (1976)

Widely condemned upon its release for allegedly glorifying vigilante justice, Martin Scorsese's masterpiece in fact does something entirely more subtle. Travis Bickle is the perfect psychological profile of a crazed assassin: alone, isolated, alienated, a military veteran with a gun fetish and a desire to be something -- anything -- to someone. The scenes where he stalks the presidential candidate Charles Palatine (like Hal Phillip Walker, a somewhat mysterious populist) are highly influenced by the life of Arthur Bremer, are a terrible portent -- but our expectations are short-circuited when Bickle misses his chance, and a potential monster becomes a local hero simply by changing his choice of targets. Bizarrely, the performance eventually helped inspire John Hinckley when he shot Ronald Reagan four years later.

MALCOLM X (1992)

Spike Lee's epic biopic nicely answers a tricky question: how do you make the story of an important historical figure suspenseful and compelling when you already know what's going to happen to him in the end? It helps that Malcolm X -- played perfectly here by Denzel Washington in perhaps his finest hour as an actor -- had an endlessly compelling life story even before the hail of gunshots that ended his life. Lee likewise makes a difference by letting his opinions about the circumstances of Malcolm's death be clearly known and telegraphing the final moments with a deluge of high-pitched emotional moments, but never letting the entire thing slide into self-parody or triteness. Not only a terrific story about a squalid and unnecessary political killing, but also one of Hollywood's finest biopics.

MUNICH (2005)

Stephen Spielberg still doesn't seem to know how to make a movie without screwing it up somehow, and the sad truth is that Munich's ridiculously over-the-top sex scene just about sinks it; filmgoers and critics seem to be able to talk about little else. It's too bad, because you take that monstrous aberration away, and what you've got is a compelling and effective little psychological thriller. Spielberg has never been the most subtle filmmaker in the world, and there's no way he's not going to let you leave the theatre without being beaten over the head with the movie's central thesis that there's not much moral or psychological difference between the men who assassinate innocent people in the name of a cause and the men who assassinate the assassins, but the movie is still expertly done and well worth seeing as long as you close your eyes when Eric Bana takes his clothes off.