The Screengrab : oliver stone

The Screengrab's Top Ten Worst...Movies...Ever!!!! (Part Eight)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 07 May 2009 23:30:00 GMT

Phil Nugent's Top Ten Worst Movies Ever (Part One)

1. FIELD OF DREAMS (1989)
2. JFK (1991)

Some would argue that Natural Born Killers is the ultimate Oliver Stone audiovisual freakout, but this celebration of the noble questing rectitude of a deranged slime ball named Jim Garrison will always have a special place in the spittoon of anyone who, like me, once lived in New Orleans and shared a city with that particular waste of space. There was a time when Stone himself actually seemed to think that Garrison's "theory" about the assassination of Kennedy had something to it, but that misguided period in his life was over by the time the movie opened, and Stone shifted to arguing that while, of course, everything Garrison ever said or did was manure, the important thing was to create a "counter-myth" to balance the "official myth" of the Warren Commission report. Marginally more sophisticated observers have tried to defend the movie on the grounds that, in its hyper thyroid dementia, it "captures" the mindset of many unfortunates who were mentally discombobulated by the turmoil and tragedy of the '60s. Maybe it does; the "Flesh Fair" sequence in Spielberg's A1 perfectly captures my mindset when I'm caught in traffic with a migraine, but I'm not sure that makes it any better. Anyway, we don't really go for rampaging homophobia here at the Screengrab, and however you want to dress this piggy up in fancy bows, it'll still be a street crazy rant about how the queers killed Kennedy. Add to its crimes the fact that it extended Kevin Costner's fifteen minutes.

3. NICKELODEON (1976)

The director Peter Bogdanovich was coming off a couple of terrible failures (At Long Last Love, Daisy Miller) when he came up with the plan for this lavishly scaled comic tribute to the early days of moviemaking, which amounted to his climbing inside his own coffin and personally nailing the lid shut. At Long Last Love may actually be the more revealing film in terms of the nostalgic alienation that killed off Bogdanovich's once soaring career, but it just so happens that this is the one that's just been released on DVD, and as always seems to happen nowadays whenever one horribly (and justly) reviled failure reappears in a new format (and with a gimmick--the DVD version offers the film in black and white, which Bogdanovich says is how he wished he'd made it--a few people have piped up to say that it is and always was an unappreciated masterpiece. Seriously, this shit has to stop. There ought to be some constants in this world.

4. REVOLUTION (1985)

Remember Hugh Hudson, who was garlanded as a major new director after his first feature, Chariots of Fire, won the Academy Award for Best Picture? No, you don't, and here's one of the reasons why. The best thing you can say about it is that it made its star, Al Pacino, realize that his best course might be to take four years off if that's how long it took him to be extra sure about his next script.

5. THE MUSIC LOVERS (1970)

Ken Russell is to Art and Music Appreciation what Oliver Stone is to Contemporary American History: visually overblown, crassly energetic, cheaply sensationalistic, and, like Dick Cheney, proud of his indifference to the facts whenever they contradict the "deeper truth" he knows in his heart to be right. This hysterical take on the life of Tchaikovsky (Richard Chamberlain) also shows that they have a shared affinity for homophobia and conspiracy theories. It's a wonder that Stone didn't ask Christopher Gable to reprise his role as Tchaikovksy's plotting, cast-off lover as one of the conspirators in JFK; it's not as if vampires don't live a long time.

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

Contributor: Phil Nugent

The Screengrab's Top Ten Worst...Movies...Ever!!!! (Part Six)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 07 May 2009 22:30:00 GMT

Hayden Childs' Top Ten Worst Movies Ever (Part One)

1. K-PAX (2001)

K-Pax is not a bad movie merely because it dares to teach us that all mentally ill people can be Magical Negroes if they try. K-Pax is not a bad movie merely because it makes one pine for the relatively wise and somber tones of Patch Adams. K-Pax is not a bad movie merely because its twinkly-winky score underlines every single emotion onscreen, which are themselves shaded in primary colors and writ large enough for a pre-schooler to grasp. K-Pax is not a bad movie merely because Kevin Spacey approaches his mentally ill/spaceman character as if the ideal mentally ill spaceman is part-Jack Nicholson and part-Bono, basically a smirk in shades. K-Pax is not a bad movie merely because supporting characters are constantly telling the audience how awesome Keven Spacey’s mentally ill spaceman is. In truth, any one of these reasons is enough to make K-Pax a bad movie, but the real problem with K-Pax is that it insists that the audience swallow all of this Hallmark-lite hokum when it knows that it’s heading towards a broad Christ metaphor that even Kirk Cameron would shy away from. This movie is the strongest cinematic argument ever made for involuntary lobotomies.

2. FORREST GUMP (1994)

I never intended to see this movie. But I was staying with a friend who insisted that I had to see it now now now because it would change my life. Maybe it did. I swore that as God was my witness, I would never sit through Forrest Gump again. And I’ve kept that promise. Like the title character, I grew up in Alabama. Being from there means that I tend to detest movies set in Alabama, which are all about the oh-so-colorful hicks who live there with their strange okra-eating ways, and usually star people who seem to have learned everything they know about Southern accents by watching Hee Haw reruns (as Hal Crowther once wrote, can you imagine seeing the tables turned with a movie set in New York where the cast was full of genuine rednecks from Alabama and Mississippi mimicking Howard Cosell?). But the setting is just the surface gloss of this movie's bone-deep stupidity. From what I understand, Winston Groom’s novel is a rather clever satire of the late 20th century, but I have never read it. The movie is the opposite of satire, a picaresque story designed to tug and strain at heartstrings, to make grown men weep and ladies quiver with its story of the extraordinary man-child Forrest Gump. But underneath all that gooey Lifetime Movie stuff, the message is that idiots deserve your respect. Idiots make history happen. Idiots stick to their core principles and blindly charge forward, damn the facts, and are blessed by the god of their choice. Did the makers of this film never read Of Mice And Men? Idiots destroy the things they are supposed to protect. Forrest Gump negates that story, and dares to tell the audience that idiots are born leaders. Perhaps it's needless to say, but this movie is directly responsible for the eight long years of the Bush Administration. Whenever you hear the words "mission accomplished" from an official source, you should know that they're really saying "stupid is as stupid does." The success of Bill Kristol makes a lot more sense if you imagine him droning on about how life is like a box of chocolates.

3. MOULIN ROUGE (2001)

Combining all the fun of epilepsy with all the subtlety of musical theater, Moulin Rouge was like a romance novel written by high-fructose corn syrup. I'm pretty sure that this movie gave me inoperable cancer. Of the soul. I know that there's people out there who like it, but I cannot imagine why. Among its sins are bad editing, terrible acting, actors singing the ubiquitous hits of any generic Clear Channel radio station, an eyescaldingly hideous color scheme, and a plot that would embarrass Danielle Steele. The only redeeming thing about it is that it should make it clear to all the homophobes out there that homosexuality cannot be passed around like a virus, because if it were, this movie would be Patient Zero for the Campy Queer Flu.

4. SIGNS (2002)

Are there words in the English language more terrifying than “Written, Produced and Directed by M. Night Shyamalan”? Signs is about aliens who come to Earth to help Mel Gibson recover his faith in God. Signs is also about helping Mel to understand his wife’s dying words, in which she somehow predicted that hostile aliens would invade a planet which is more than 70 percent covered in liquid death and presciently knew that Mel's baseball-loving brother could save her child with a well-swung bat. Signs is also about how brilliant alien invaders who can build spaceships and disrupt electrical signals and stuff like that might decide that the best way to begin their invasion is by invading a child’s birthday party in Brazil, irritating a farmer's dog, or hiding in a pantry. Hoo boy. Too bad these aliens couldn't take the obvious route of replacing everyone around Mel with pod people. Or bursting out of his stomach at a family dinner. That would have been quite the twist!

5. NATURAL BORN KILLERS (1994)

Oh, it’s sooooo deep. Those people will do anything for fame! I realize Oliver Stone thinks he’s being all clever about the MTV generation, but this is a movie devoid of ideas desperately trying to pass itself off as a smart film. It's like The Honeymoon Killers remade by MTV Cribs, only less so. I think that the makers of this movie would say that overexposure to the media makes people crazy and amoral, but that doesn't explain why they fought lawsuits blaming this movie for copycat murders by overexposed fans. They're trying to have it both ways: trying to say that the movie is against the violence it portrays, even as the whole point of the movie is the glorification of that violence. Quentin Tarantino, who wrote the original script, has allegedly disowned the movie, and it's clear why. Tarantino may not be the deepest filmmaker - a lot of his clever flourishes don't have a whole lot of thought behind them - but he has a great eye and a working brain and he understands that satire has a point. All of Tarantino's films have cold-blooded killers in them, and all of them ask for you to sympathize with a killer, one way or another. Tarantino doesn't feel a need to explain how these killers got to be that way, nor does he bludgeon the viewer with faux-irony about how society views these killers, especially not while producing his trademark extremely-stylized violence. But Stone, on the other hand, doesn't know how he feels about his killers. His movie seems to be saying over and over again that they are awesome, and what's more, everyone in his movie (other than the victims, presumably) is a cold-blooded, amoral murderer. That's not satire. It's nihilism. Say what you will about the tenets of Quentin Tarantino, but at least he has an ethos.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Seven, Eight, Nine & Ten

Contributor: Hayden Childs

Morning Deal Report: Shia LeBeouf Goes to Wall Street

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 14:00:00 GMT

Oliver Stone has agreed to direct the sequel to Wall Street, so insert your own “greed is good” joke here. Shia LaBeouf “is negotiating to join Michael Douglas, who won an Oscar for his portrayal of Gordon Gekko in the original pic. The sequel will once again involve a young Wall Street trader, and the recent economic meltdown spurred by rampant greed and corruption will fit prominently into the plot,” per Variety.

The Flanimals are coming! The Ricky Gervais children’s book series Flanimals, that is. Universal will adapt the series into a 3D animated feature, and Gervais will voice the lead character. “The four-volume series, illustrated by Rob Steen, encompasses a world inhabited by 50 species of creatures so ugly and misshapen they become cute and endearing. Gervais' character, a pudgy, perspiring purple creature, goes on a mission to change the world. ‘It will be great to play a short, fat, sweaty loser for a change,’ Gervais said. ‘A real stretch.’”

And finally on the Morning Deal Report…I’m looking for a new deal! As you read here earlier this morning, the Screengrab is shutting down production on movie related news, reviews and snark in about a month. So if you’re in the market for a timely and talented purveyor of such things, contact me through my blog. My new landlord thanks you.

Related:
Michael Douglas Eyes "Wall Street" Return
Shia LaBeouf...Why?

Blasphemy Isn't What It Used to Be: Ron Howard and "Angels & Demons"

Phil Nugent — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 15:30:00 GMT

Ron Howard's new movie, Angels & Demons, starring Tom Hanks as symbologist super sleuth Robert Langdon, is a follow-up to their 2006 piece-of-shit movie The Da Vinci Code, which was based on Dan Brown's bestselling 2003 pice-of-shit novel of the same name. (Angels & Demons is actually based on an earlier novel that Brown published in 2000, which marked the first appearance of the Langdon character.) I couldn't quite follow the thread of The Da Vinci Code, but I think it had something to do with clues hidden in the Mona Lisa that Amélie is Jesus Christ's great-great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter. (I think there was also something about how "the Holy Grail", legendary for being Jesus's favorite thing to drink from, was actually his pet name for Mary Magdalene, but that's so unbelievably filthy that I must have imagined it. We are, after all, talking about a movie made by Opie, starring Forrest Gump.) The new movie reportedly has to do with the return of the Illuminati, which (in Brown's conspiracy-fantasy mythology) was murderously wiped out by the Catholic church some three thousand years ago for being too scientific and artistic and progressive and all. As before, the new movie is being threatened with organized protests from Catholic groups who take offense at seeing their church portrayed as Murder, Inc. with funnier hats. Faced with these complaints, Howard has done what any serious religious history scholar would do: he's gone to the Huffington Post to deliver his Sermon on the Mount.

Howard's bete noire is William Donahue of the Catholic League, who, in Howard's words, "writes that I and the people who made this thriller 'do not hide their animus against all things Catholic.'" (Apparently all things Catholic include basic grammar.) "Let me be clear," writes the director of Frost/Nixon: "neither I nor Angels & Demons are anti-Catholic. And let me be a little controversial: I believe Catholics, including most in the hierarchy of the Church, will enjoy the movie for what it is: an exciting mystery, set in the awe-inspiring beauty of Rome. After all, in Angels & Demons, Professor Robert Langdon teams up with the Catholic Church to thwart a vicious attack against the Vatican. What, exactly, is anti-Catholic about that?" As to the details, "Mr. Donohue's booklet accuses us of lying when our movie trailer says the Catholic Church ordered a brutal massacre to silence the Illuminati centuries ago. It would be a lie if we had ever suggested our movie is anything other than a work of fiction (if it were a documentary, our talk of massacres would have referenced the Inquisition or the Crusades)...Mr. Donohue's op-ed [in the New York Daily News] and booklet also suggest that we paint the Church as 'anti-reason.' There is plenty of debate over what the Church did or didn't do with Galileo, but I for one do recognize that the Church did much throughout the ages to encourage and preserve education, the arts and the sciences." As Jesus used to say to Pontius Pilate, passive-aggressive much?

Unmollified by these and other valuable points made by Howard (ranging from "And if fictional movies could never take liberties with reality, then there would have been no Ben-Hur, no Barabbas, The Robe, Gone With The Wind, or Titanic. Not to mention Splash!" to "Even the current 'faith vs. science' debate over embryonic stem cells is briefly depicted in Angels & Demons in a balanced way."), Donahue has struck back in his latest press release: “Dan Brown says in his book that the Illuminati are ‘factual’ and that they were ‘hunted ruthlessly by the Catholic Church.’ In the film’s trailer, Tom Hanks, who plays the protagonist Robert Langdon, says ‘The Catholic Church ordered a brutal massacre to silence them forever.’ Howard concurs: ‘The Illuminati were formed in the 1600s. They were artists and scientists like Galileo and Bernini, whose progressive ideas threatened the Vatican.’ All of this is a lie. The Illuminati were founded in 1776 and were dissolved in 1787. It is obvious that Galileo and Bernini could not possibly have been members: Galileo died in 1647 and Bernini passed away in 1680. More important, the Catholic Church never hunted, much less killed, a single member of the Illuminati. But this hasn’t stopped Brown from asserting that ‘It is a historical fact that the Illuminati vowed vengeance against the Vatican in the 1600s.’" Perhaps sensing how many readers stepped out into the hallway for a smoke while he was rattling off dates, Brown adds, "Moreover, we know from a Canadian priest who hung out with Howard’s crew last summer in Rome (dressed in civilian clothes) just how much they hate Catholicism.” Personally, I have no plans to see Angels & Demons, but I would pay half my body weight in gold bullion to see a movie based on the true-life adventures of an undercover Catholic, dressed in a Canadian priest's idea of "civilian clothes"--I'm picturing Disco Stu with a cross around his neck--who hangs out with Opie and Forrest to listen to them express the true, hateful feelings they have about Catholics when they think all the Pope's children are in the bathroom. ("And the rhythm method--what's that all about!? You look at the size of some of these families, I guess maybe Mel Gibson's had a little trouble finding the backbeat, y'know what I'm saying? Cheese it, here comes Coppola!")

Now, we don't really have a dog in this race. And make no mistake about it, we here at the Screengrab are just crazy about blasphemy and try to encourage it whenever we can. What's discouraging, though, is Howard's good-natured, reasonable tone: yeah, we kind of dis your church's history and make your guys look like nut jobs and gangsters, but we don't mean anything by it! It's just necessary to the plot of a good thriller. What are you saying, that you don't like good thrillers? Go dig Hitchcock up and blow shit at him! Some real moviemakers like Bunuel risked their careers, their standing in the community, and maybe even their lives to make blasphemous movies, and somebody like Howard flirts with it, out of commercial necessity--somebody is going to make movies out of Dan Brown's bullshit--and expects everybody to understand that it doesn't really mean anything to him, so it shouldn't give offense to anyone. I myself am no fan of Oliver Stone's JFK, either as a movie or as an historical argument, but I'll give it this much: I'm willing to believe that the murder of John Kennedy is something that Stone is, or was, genuinely freaked out about. it's understandable that Howard would be baffled and even offended by William Donahue's assertion that he's actually a hater and propagandist against the Catholic church instead of a guy trying to make a buck with a pre-sold property, but if he would open his mind up a little, he might be able to see that, in his way, Donahue is paying him a compliment by suggesting that he's a serious enough man to believe in his own crap. As Al Pacino put it in Dog Day Afternoon, if somebody's going to blow my brains out, I hope it's somebody who does it because he hates my guts, not because it's his job.

Roger Ebert Knows What’s Worth “Knowing”

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 16:30:00 GMT

The fact that Roger Ebert gave the latest Nicolas Cage vehicle Knowing a four-star review is not all that surprising. It’s not like he’s ever held his top rating in reserve for the Chinatowns and Godfathers of cinema; recent four-star reviews include Watchmen, Lakewood Terrace and Oliver Stone’s W. In addition, Ebert has always been a big fan of a previous effort from Knowing director Alex Proyas, Dark City. What’s a little more surprising and unusual is Ebert’s follow-up, published two days after his initial review, in which he expresses astonishment at the overwhelmingly negative critical reception the movie has received.

“Knowing is among the best science-fiction films I've seen -- frightening, suspenseful, intelligent and, when it needs to be, rather awesome.” That’s the first sentence of Ebert’s review. Those of us who have not been overly impressed by Nicolas Cage’s career choices of the past decade or so already have reason to be skeptical. “With expert and confident storytelling, Proyas strings together events that keep tension at a high pitch all through the film,” Ebert continues. “Even a few quiet, human moments have something coiling beneath. Pluck this movie, and it vibrates. Even something we've seen countless times, like a car pursuit, works here because of the meaning of the pursuit, and the high stakes.”

It didn’t take long for Ebert to discover that his enthusiasm was not universally shared amongst his critical brethren. “Either I'm wrong or most of the movie critics in America are mistaken,” Ebert writes in his follow-up article. “This is astonishing. Let's suppose I was completely wrong. Even if I was how bad could the possibly movie be? Half as good as the slasher film Shuttle? A third as good as Last House on the Left?” Ebert does understand how many of us feel about Cage these days. “Some readers said they avoid his movies on principle. Many found him guilty of over-acting. A critic was quoted who referred to his ‘fright wig,’ which is just mean-spirited snark.”

Ebert also says critics had problems with the Biblical parallels in this end-of-the-world thriller. I have to confess I haven’t found the time in my schedule to squeeze in a viewing of Knowing myself, but let’s see what a few of our leading luminaries had to say. Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly calls the movie “so inept that you may wish you were watching an M. Night Shyamalan version of the very same premise.” A.O. Scott of the New York Times notes: “If your intention is to make a brooding, hauntingly allegorical terror-thriller, it’s probably not a good sign when spectacles of mass death and intimations of planetary destruction are met with hoots and giggles.” Says Ty Burr of the Boston Globe, “It's a Nicolas Cage movie, so, admit it, you're expecting crazy. You have no idea.”

Ebert isn’t completely alone, though. Todd McCarthy of Variety calls Knowing a “not-bad supernatural-tinged sci-fier that has more on its mind than the run-of-the-mill effects-driven extravaganza.” What say you, Screengrab readers? The movie topped the box office this weekend, so surely somebody has seen it. Let us know what you thought in the comments.

Related:
Roger Ebert Gives Himself Thumbs Down
Abel Ferrera Would Like Werner Herzog and Nicolas Cage to Please Die in a Fire

Screengrab's Favorite Movies About Music: Fiction Edition (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Last week, as part of our ongoing coverage of the South-By-Southwest Film, Music & Interactive Festival, we decided to get our collective groove on with a list of our favorite movies about real-live musicians.

But who says musicians have to be real to be memorable? Sure, Mitch & Mickey may be fictional characters portrayed by Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara in Christopher Guest’s faux-folkumentary, A Mighty Wind...yet despite the fact the duo never really existed, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house when my lovely Polish bride and I danced at our wedding reception to that non-existent classic hit of sweet, sweet romance, “A Kiss At The End Of The Rainbow." And, sure, the real Sid Vicious was nice and all...but I have equally fond memories of Gary Oldman’s fictional version in Alex Cox’s Sid & Nancy.

To blur the lines of fiction and reality even further, this week’s list also includes movies about make-believe people affected by real musicians and real musicians transforming themselves into make-believe people as your pals at the Screengrab salute OUR FAVORITE MOVIES ABOUT MUSIC: FICTION EDITION!

THIS IS SPINAL TAP (1984)

Yes, we all know it's hilarious. But This Is Spinal Tap is a classic for more reasons than simple hilarity. This was one of the first major films to be classified a "mockumentary", and in order for the style to work at all, director Rob Reiner and stars Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer had to get all the details down cold. This meant concocting an elaborate backstory involving multiple group names, format changes, and a parade of dozens of drummers who met their respective ends under bizarre circumstances. But beyond the more obvious references, Spinal Tap had to walk, talk, and play like a real aging rock band, from the principles writing and performing their own songs before actual crowds to the shorthand that the band members have with each other, as when Nigel (Guest) calls out "GSM" during rehearsal to signal that he wants to practice the song "Gimme Some Money." The gambit worked -- numerous moviegoers at the time were convinced that Spinal Tap was a real touring act, and the movie quickly became a favorite of legitimate rock acts, who identified with such scenes as the group getting lost on their way to the stage. Soon enough, life imitated farce, and Guest, McKean, and Shearer began touring as Spinal Tap, even releasing a second album in 1992 entitled Break Like the Wind. Even today, Spinal Tap endures, both in its cinematic form and its real-life incarnation, with a tour coming later this spring.

24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE (2002)

Steve Coogan has a motor-mouthed smart-guy comedian's dream role as Tony Wilson, TV reporter, pop theorist, and the man behind Factory Records, which brought the sound of Manchester to a postpunk world. Directed by Michael Winterbottom, the movie, which also provides plum roles for Shirley Henderson (as Wilson's first wife), Paddy Considine (as his sidekick Rob Gretton), Andy Serkis (as the deranged genius producer Martin Hannett), and Sean Hayes (as Ian Curtis), covers the first public performance by the Sex Pistols, the rise and end of Joy Division, the band's resurrection as New Order, the slaphappy career of the Happy Mondays and the coming of rave culture, and Factory's death throes, with Coogan's Wilson walking through it explaining himself and the culture he's part of, always talking a mile a minute. Coming from the cerebral Winterbottom, the movie itself could be called a sustained work of rock criticism, except that rock crit hasn't been this funny since Lester Bangs swigged his last bottle of Romilar.

HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH (2001)

John Cameron Mitchell energetically transposed his hit off-Broadway show to celluloid with 2001’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch, the story of a transsexual punk rock goddess named Hedwig (Mitchell) who narrates her life story while travelling across the country playing second-rate venues, her shot at stardom stymied by a former lover and disciple (Michael Pitt) who became a music sensation by stealing her songs. Hedwig’s is a lunatic odyssey which begins in East Berlin where, as a young boy, she undergoes a sex change operation in order to marry her U.S. army lover and escape the Iron Curtain, and which is partially conveyed via a bevy of musical numbers and animated sequences that are striking in both their ingenuity and power. Bolstered by rollicking, blistering tunes that are as well suited for arenas as they are for the stage and screen, Mitchell’s film is rowdy, bombastic, idiosyncratic and heartfelt, a combination to which only a select few movie musicals can legitimately lay claim.

THE DOORS (1991)

A close friend once derided The Doors’ music as “bad poetry with keyboards,” and while I’m generally inclined to concur with his assessment, there’s nonetheless something transfixing about Oliver Stone’s 1991 biopic, which has the type of on-the-edge, trippy-druggy dynamism that typified the director’s creatively fertile early-‘90s period. Stone’s anything-goes aesthetic showmanship is an ideal approach for a portrait of the L.A. band and, in particular, lead singer Jim Morrison, whose larger-than-life persona – drunken fool, callous bastard, earnest poet, sex god – naturally appealed to a filmmaker fascinated with mythologizing socio-political icons. The Doors oozes reverence without alienating those who might think the film’s subjects and their classic-rock canon fall somewhat short of greatness, due in part to uniformly superb performances led by Val Kilmer’s pitch-perfect embodiment of the lizard king, but mostly thanks to Stone’s lack of inhibition, his madman stylistic excesses (and yes, I’m including the Indian in the desert), supremely well-attuned to the careening rollercoaster energy of The Doors.

VELVET GOLDMINE (1998) and I'M NOT THERE (2007)

With these two films, Todd Haynes has produced the finest examples of fictional rock movies that I can imagine. Both have taken the lives of real rock musicians -- Bowie & Iggy in the former, Dylan in the latter -- and played up the mythic qualities to create a transcendent hyper-reality. No, Bowie and Iggy and Dylan didn't really live like this. But speaking from the point of view of poetry and mythology and literature, these are more true than mere reality can manage. That's what myths and stories are about: heightening everyday reality into a more universal truth. Most people's lives aren't up to the examples set by Ulysses or Hercules or even Ishmael or Natty Bumppo. But I think few would deny that there's a universal recognition of the truth in the lives of these wandering heroes. Celebrities sometimes play the role of real-life analog to idealized heroes. That's why so many urban myths leap up about the lives of celebrities; people need to believe in the extraordinariness of others. Rock musicians in particular often play the debauched Dionysian role of the glorious artistic mess, the pleasure-seeker who indulges in sex and drugs to feed his or her creative output. With these movies, Haynes pushes past the mere facts to feed the stories, and the results are fascinating, part narrative and part critique. In Velvet Goldmine, Christian Bale plays a journalist in an Orwellian Britain of the late '80s. A series of events causes him to investigate -- and recall -- the heyday of glam rock and its figurehead Brian Slade, who is basically the Platonic ideal of David Bowie (with elements of Brian Eno thrown in for good measure) as played by Jonathan Rhys Meyer. Slade's closest associate is Curt Wild (Ewan McGregor), who is mostly Iggy with a little Lou Reed thrown in. The two are lovers, and Slade gleefully expresses his fluid sense of sexuality. So there's three layers right there: Orwellian future, permissive past, rockers as trangressors. But there's more. Haynes dares to suggest that the bisexual/creative impulse was a gift from aliens (or angels) to Oscar Wilde in the Victorian era, and has passed down through the ages to the instigators of glam. That's, well, audacious as all hell. Haynes specifically compares Slade to both Wilde and his horrendous creation Dorian Gray. So, that's at least two more layers, maybe more. So, yes: gay theory, rock theory, lit theory, treatises on repression and freedom combined with the cults of youth and beauty. There's a lot going on in this movie. And it rocks like hell.

In I'm Not There, Haynes similarly adopts all of the myths about Bob Dylan into a narrative that's both fractured and more meaningful than a straightforward film could convey. There are six Dylans in this film, which is fewer Dylans than real life has given us. But these six Dylans represent the greatest periods of his life. Marcus Carl Franklin, an 11-year-old African-American boy, represents the youngest Dylan myth, the farmboy who rides the rails calling himself Woody Guthrie, learning America's traditional folk and blues music along the way. Ben Whishaw plays the interior Dylan, the playful interviewee who calls himself Arthur Rimbaud and comments cryptically on the rest of Dylan's life. Christian Bale plays the young and sincere New York folksinger Dylan, the socially active songwriter who calls himself Jack Rollins and travels to the South to sing to Civil Rights workers in a field. Rollins will later morph into Pastor John, the born-again Christian Dylan of the late '70s and early '80s. Heath Ledger plays the actor Dylan, the one who is horrible to his beautiful wife and torn in two by their divorce. His name is Robbie Clark and his wife, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, is Claire, and their story evokes the mid-'70s Dylan of Renaldo and Clara and Blood On The Tracks. Cate Blanchett plays Jude Quinn, the rock star Dylan of the mid-'60s and Don't Look Back. Quinn is explicitly shown as dead from a motorcycle accident at the beginning of the movie, which references Dylan's 1966 motorcycle accident which effectively killed off his Don't Look Back-era persona. Richard Gere plays Billy the Kid, who is the Dylan of The Basement Tapes, John Wesley Harding, and Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid. Gere's Billy lives in Riddle County, where the carnivalesque/Old West/Old Testament world of the Basement Tapes springs to life. So, that's the shallowest overview I could provide, and it more or less ate up all my space. Layers and layers in these films. Watch 'em again. And again.

Click Here For Part Two, Three, Four & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Paul Clark, Phil Nugent, Nick Schager, Hayden Childs

DVD Digest for February 10, 2009

Paul Clark — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 15:00:00 GMT

With St. Valentine’s Day less than a week away, you’d think studios would start rolling out some of their romantic classics on DVD. But I’m seeing very little of that this week, unless of course your idea of romance is vastly different than mine…

DVDs of the Week: But then, for me, nothing says romance like a pair of movies from surrealist master Luis Bunuel. This week brings two of his favorites, The Exterminating Angel and Simon of the Desert, courtesy of the folks at Criterion. The Exterminating Angel is the known quantity for me, a wicked satire of bourgeois manners, in which a group of upper-crusters finds itself unable to leave following a dinner party, which brings them no end of trouble. Simon, Bunuel’s telling of the story of an ascetic who stood atop a remote pillar to prove his love for God, is one I’ve yet to see (do I smell a future Reviews By Request?), but its DVD release is no less noteworthy. The films, made during Bunuel’s sojourn in Mexico, have been given the deluxe Criterion treatment, with new transfers, documentaries, new interviews with actress Sylvia Pinal and others, and more.

Other noteworthy this week is Janus’ Essential Art House: Volume 2, which includes The 400 Blows, Black Orpheus, Pygmalion, La Strada, Ikiru, and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp in single-disc editions, also available separately. In addition, Lionsgate is releasing new editions of the Wallace and Gromit short films, A Close Shave, A Grand Day Out and The Wrong Trousers. Finally- and I can’t in good conscience call this a classic, though it’s not new- Universal’s got the “Extreme Edition” of the final film from the great Raul Julia, Street Fighter (also Blu-Ray). So if you enjoy things that suck, set aside money for that one.

If newer movies are more your speed, this week’s recent releases coming to DVD include: Courtney Hunt’s double Oscar nominee Frozen River (Sony, also Blu-Ray); Kevin Smith’s Zack and Miri Make a Porno (Genius Products; Samuel L. Jackson and the late Bernie Mac in Soul Men (Genius Products); Richard Gere and Diane Lane in Nights in Rodanthe (Warner, also Blu-Ray); and a pair of very different showbiz satires, Barry Levinson’s What Just Happened? (Magnolia), and Bruce Campbell directing Bruce Campbell in My Name Is Bruce (Image, also Blu-Ray). Also this week, a quartet of curious films from fascinating filmmakers: Oliver Stone’s W. (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray); Spike Lee’s WW2 drama Miracle at St. Anna (Buena Vista, also Blu-Ray); Fernando Meirelles’ Blindness (Buena Vista); and Eric Rohmer’s The Romance of Astrea and Celadon (E1 Entertainment Distribution), allegedly the master’s final film. Oddly enough, the Rohmer looks to be the most romantic movie in this week’s column. Don’t know if your Dirty Dancing-loving special lady would go for it though…

Finally, a pretty action-packed and bloody lineup of Blu-Ray only releases this week: Martin Scorsese’s classic Raging Bull (MGM); David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence (Warner); a pair of John Grisham adaptations, A Time to Kill and The Pelican Brief (both Warner); a double feature starring The Rock, Doom (Universal) and The Rundown (Universal); and two of Onion AV Club critic Scott Tobias’ New Cult Canon picks, Donnie Darko (Fox) and The Boondock Saints (Fox). Also, Milos Forman’s Amadeus: The Director’s Cut (Warner) and the table-tennis comedy Ping Pong Playa (Image).

Oh, and Pretty Woman (Disney).

Reviews By Request: Shotgun Stories (2007, Jeff Nichols)

Paul Clark — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Now that I’ve caught up with just about all of the major 2008 releases I’ve really wanted to, we’ll be going back to the old alternating-weeks format of Reviews By Request and Yesterday’s Hits starting next week. So, as before, I’ll be polling you folks to determine the first of two Oscar-themed Reviews By Request columns, which will run in two weeks. To vote, see the poll at the end of this review.

One of the better surprises among last week’s Oscar nominations was Michael Shannon’s nomination for best supporting actor in Revolutionary Road. Shannon has been acting in movies for well over a decade, but he first made an impression on me in Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center, in which his frayed-nerve intensity provided that ponderous film its only sign of life. Since then, Shannon has given vivid performances in Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead and William Friedkin’s Bug, which along with Revolutionary Road have turned him into Hollywood’s go-to character actor for playing hyper-focused crazies. Shannon’s character in Jeff Nichols’ revenge drama Shotgun Stories might seem on paper to be another unhinged role, but in his capable hands it instead becomes his deepest and most complex performance.

Shannon plays Son, the eldest of three brothers living in a small southern town. Shannon’s character’s name is not a nickname, but rather the legacy of a drunken, uncaring father (his brothers are named Kid and Boy). That he wasn’t named Sue is no doubt of small consolation to Son, whose father left them “in the care of a hateful woman” only to sober up, find Jesus, start a second family and become an all-around productive member of the community. It’s at his father’s funeral that the story is set in motion, when Son and his brothers show up and speak out against the man who abandoned them. Son’s act of spitting on his father’s casket causes the long-simmering resentments between the father’s two families to escalate into an all-out feud.

Normally, the revenge movie isn’t one of my favorite genres, because most movies of the type either emphasize violent action in a way that makes me feel vaguely unclean, or engage in so much hand-wringing that the ethics overwhelm the storytelling. With Shotgun Stories, Nichols avoids falling into either trap. This isn’t a pumped-up thrill ride, but neither is it a pious anti-revenge screed. Instead, it’s a sad, low-key story of two families whose mutual hatred for each other overwhelms their better judgments. Making the story especially tragic is that those who fueled the hatred (the deceased father and the two mothers) don’t bloody their hands from the violence- it’s their sons who suffer from their parents’ misdeeds. As Son tells his mother, “you’ve taught us to hate those boys, and we do. And now it’s come to this.”

Key to the movie’s effect is its setting, an “empty-ass town” with few opportunities available to its residents. In its feel for small-town life, Shotgun Stories owes a debt to filmmakers like David Gordon Green, who executive-produced. Son and Kid work together in a fish hatchery, Boy coaches a youth basketball team, and Son’s hopes of bettering himself hinge on his perfecting a technique to scam the local casino. Son’s wife Annie has moved out of the house with their son, but it’s clear that she still loves Son despite all the disappointment she feels for him. There are moments of happiness to be found in these people’s lives, but this happiness is either fleeting (as when Boy rigs up a blender to his car battery so he can fix margaritas while watching the sun set) or bittersweet due to the difficulties they face. It’s telling that Kid is reluctant to propose marriage to his longtime girlfriend not because he doesn’t love her, but because he’ll have a hard time affording a ring and a place of their own.

In short, these aren’t the stone-cold killers who usually inhabit movies of this sort, so when the violence begins, it doesn’t play out quite the way we expect. At one point, a character purchases a shotgun to use against an enemy, only to realize that he needs lessons in how to assemble and use it. And rather than emphasizing the violence, Nichols focuses on its horrible aftermath, the irreparable damage it causes. For example, Nichols cuts away from a brutal fight that kills one brother on each side, lingering instead on a scene in which both families gather in the hospital, staring each other down from opposite ends of a long hallway.

And in the middle of it, there’s Shannon’s performance, almost certainly the best he’s given to date. It’s been said that intelligence is the ability to hold opposing viewpoints simultaneously, and much of Shannon’s talent is his ability to convey seemingly contradictory impulses in his character. On the one hand, he wants to protect his family and uphold its honor; on the other, he wants to prove to his wife that he can care for her. In theory, these two impulses aren’t so different (they’re simply different facets of his need to do the right thing), but in practice it’s much more complicated. It’s a burden that weighs heavily on Son, and what makes Shannon’s performance such a marvel is that he’s able to convey this burden with a minimum of dialogue or affect, and without resorting to actorly histrionics. With his other notable performances and now Shotgun Stories, Michael Shannon is quickly becoming one of my favorite character actors, and the news that he’s playing the lead role in an upcoming Werner Herzog film is very, very good news indeed.

As you’re all aware, the Oscar ceremony will be airing later this month, and in anticipation of the Academy Awards, I’ll be running special Oscar-themed features over the next four weeks. For my next Reviews By Request column, I’m asking you to choose from five Oscar-nominated favorites, none of which I’ve seen all the way through. So, which will it be?

Which should I write about next? | BuzzDash polls

As always, the comments section is open. See you in two weeks!

DVD Digest for January 27, 2009

Paul Clark — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 15:00:00 GMT

This week, a whole bunch of late-summer/early-fall releases are coming on DVD to help soothe the midwinter moviegoing blues.

Of this week’s bumper crop of recent theatrical releases coming to DVD, the most noteworthy is Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona (Genius Products, also Blu-Ray), which became the Woodman’s biggest hit in years due in no small part to the promise of hot Penelope Cruz-on-Scarlett Johansson action. That it was also a welcome change of scenery for the filmmaker- shooting for the first time in Spain- helped matters somewhat as well. It’s definitely worth a look if you haven’t seen it yet- come for the sexy stuff, stay for the memorable performances by Oscar nominee Cruz, Javier Bardem playing a character 180 degrees removed from his Anton Chigurh, and the ever-dependable Rebecca Hall.

Also this week, Warner unleashes the cops’n’robbers trifecta of Edward Norton and Colin Farrell in Pride and Glory (also Blu-Ray), Neil LaBute’s Lakeview Terrace (also Blu-Ray), and Guy Ritchie’s Rocknrolla (also Blu-Ray). Other releases include: Rainn Wilson in The Rocker (Fox, also Blu-Ray); Kirk Cameron’s inspirational melodrama Fireproof (Sony), the Iraq War drama The Lucky Ones (Lionsgate); Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired (Image), a docuymentary about the filmmaker’s controversial court case; the French thriller Tell No One (MPI); the babes-and-binge-drinking comedy College (Fox); and a pair of direct-to-DVD animated releases, Hulk Vs. (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray) and Open Season 2 (Sony, also Blu-Ray).

This week’s selection of classics coming to DVD is highlighted by MGM’s The Pink Panther Film Collection (MGM), which includes all of the films including a new pressing of the original, also available in separately as The Pink Panther (1963) Collector’s Edition (MGM, also Blu-Ray). There’s also The Pink Panther Classic Cartoon Collection (MGM), a nine-disc set of the televised Pink Panther shorts. All of this Pink Panther news might be happier if it didn’t portend the release of the second crappy remake starring Steve Martin, but what can you do. Also this week: Mary Poppins 45th Anniversary Edition (Disney).

Finally, the big Blu-Ray only news this week is the release of Universal’s The Bourne Collection, which includes all three theatrical features (sorry, no Richard Chamberlain TV movie), along with a raft of extras. Also this week: Oliver Stone’s Any Given Sunday Director’s Cut (Warner), the college band drama Drumline Special Edition (Fox), and the annual release of Groundhog Day (Sony).

Sundance Roundup: Day Five

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 17:00:00 GMT

Suddenly the deals are falling into place. After a slow start and gloomy rumblings about the economy, a handful of Sundance movies found owners over the long weekend. Magnolia snapped up the rights to Humpday, paying in the mid-six figures for “a lo-fi buddy comedy that attracted six offers and a protracted bidding war.” Sony spent close to $2 million to acquire Black Dynamite, proclaiming that the blaxploitation spoof, “which was snapped up soon after its smash Sunday midnight screening, has franchise potential.” The hottest property may be An Education, which has a number of suitors and has already rejected an offer in the $1 million range from Fox Searchlight.

Spoutblog talked to Tom DiCillo about his Doors documentary When You’re Strange and found he had little positive to say about the Oliver Stone biopic. “I looked at the first three minutes and I had to turn it off. I just found it utterly phony. ..It was completely one dimensional. No human being is one dimensional. No story is one dimensional. I was bored by it.”

Our Screengrab pick-to-click Cold Souls got a fairly warm reception. LA Weekly’s Scott Foundas writes that director Sophie Barthes’ “low-fi futurism, generous good humor and respect for the audience's literacy are easy to admire,” while IndieWire’s Eric Kohn says “Barthes builds a fully believable universe around her seemingly ridiculous premise.” Cinematical has an interview with star Paul Giamatti, who claims “I kind of forgot that I was playing myself in this.”

Previously:
Sundance: Day Four
Sundance: Day Three

Sundance Preview: Five Must-See Documentaries

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Beginning later this week, I’ll be bringing you the most comprehensive Sundance coverage possible by a person who isn’t actually going to be there. (Hey, it’s cold up there! Sure, I could have tried to fool you with this eight-year-old photo, but I don’t play like that.) But hey, I don’t have to be in Park City to comb through the Sundance website and engage in some uninformed speculation about films that may be of interest to you and me. Tomorrow we’ll look at narrative features, but today let’s look at five nonfiction films I’d try to see if, y’know, I wasn’t a thousand miles away.

BIG RIVER MAN

Normally a swimming documentary wouldn’t be my cup of tea, but having read up a bit on endurance swimmer Martin Strel, my interest in Big River Man is piqued. An endurance swimmer from Slovenia, Strel has already conquered the Mississippi and the Danube, but the subject of this film is his craziest feat yet: swimming the length of the Amazon river while consuming two bottles of wine a day. “In his fifties and rather overweight, his treacherous journey brings him face to face with many obstacles, including water predators, rapids, and toxic pollution… Part world-class sporting event, part circus sideshow, the film follows the colorful characters 3,375 miles over 66 days on history's longest, most perilous swim.”

NOLLYWOOD BABYLON

Could this be the Not Quite Hollywood of 2009? Well…probably not, but just as that documentary covered the too-little-explored Ozsploitation film industry down under, Nollywood Babylon promises the lowdown on “the wild and wacky world of Nollywood, Nigeria’s explosive homegrown movie industry, where Jesus and voodoo vie for screen time… a cadre of resourceful filmmakers creating a garish, imaginative, and wildly popular form of B-movie that has frenzied fans begging for more.”

TYSON

Screengrabber Andrew Osborne has an interesting James Toback story he’d like to share with you if he ever gets clearance from our team of lawyers. In the meantime, you’ll have to settle for this profile of perpetually embattled former boxer Mike Tyson (who made a memorable appearance in Toback’s Black and White). “Candid interviews with Tyson reveal an often-misunderstood persona that encompasses a broad spectrum of decidedly human instincts… Toback manages to crack Mike Tyson’s brooding exterior to expose both the best and worst of the most explosive and controversial enigma in the history of the sport.”

WHEN YOU’RE STRANGE

Tom DiCillo has directed one movie I love (Living in Oblivion) and then…a handful of other peculiar but not particularly good movies (Box of Moon Light, The Real Blonde). I don’t have any evidence that he’s the man to make us forget Oliver Stone’s bombastic biopic The Doors, but surely any nonfiction treatment of the story would be an improvement. The Sundance guide assures us DiCillo’s take is “far from a nostalgic journey and much more than a biopic,” consisting only of original footage shot between 1966 and 1971. We thank the director for not allowing Ray Manzarek another opportunity to gas on about making the myths.

WOUNDED KNEE

The above clip is not from the new documentary Wounded Knee, but rather from Michael Apted’s 1992 film Incident at Oglala. Sorry, it’s all I could find, but both films revolve around confrontations between the FBI and Indian activists at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. While Apted’s movie concerns the murder of two federal agents in 1975, Wounded Knee takes us back to February of 1973, when “a caravan of cars carrying 200 armed Oglala Lakota—led by American Indian Movement (AIM) activists—entered Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation and quickly occupied buildings, cut off access, and took up defensive positions. When federal agents arrived, they declared, ‘The Indians are in charge of the town,' and a 71-day standoff ensued.’”

Thursday Poll for December 18, 2008

Paul Clark — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Last week, to coincide with the release of Ron Howard’s big-screen take on Frost/Nixon, we asked you to choose your favorite big-screen version of our 37th President. According to you, the Trickiest Dick of all was the future Lt. Bookman and Jimmy Gator himself, Philip Baker Hall, in Robert Altman’s Secret Honor. Hall brought in 45% of the vote, all the more impressive when you consider that his competition was somewhat stiffer than Nixon’s was in 1972. Coming in second place was Anthony Hopkins in Oliver Stone’s Nixon, followed by the ever-popular “Other” (although readers neglected to specify precisely which Other they meant) and Frank Langella in Frost/Nixon, whose poor showing might be attributable to the fact that his film hasn’t yet been widely released. Sadly, Dan Hedaya’s comedic take on the disgraced Commander in Chief couldn’t manage a single vote, although for my part I would’ve ranked him second behind Hall.

This week, we look at the career of perennial Oscar favorite (and eternal Screengrab crush) Kate Winslet. With two new films on the verge of release, Winslet once again finds herself in the awards hunt for one or possibly even both of these performances. But before she can add yet another nomination to her already impressive five (at the age of 33, no less), let’s compare the relative merits of her already-nominated performances. Which is your favorite?

Which of Kate Winslet's nominated performances is your favorite? | BuzzDash polls

I predict this will be a landslide, although lord knows I’ve been wrong before. As always, the comments section is open. See you next week!

Helming the Heroes

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 17:15:00 GMT

The recent proliferation of superhero movies have taught us that, of all things, auteur theory ain't quite dead yet. Hand your project over to a director of unique vision, a man with deep obsessions and specific stylistic and thematic ideas, and you get The Dark Knight. Hand your project over to a director with big ideas but not enough talent to carry them off, and you get Daredevil. Hand your project over to a director with no ideas and no talent, and you get Elektra. As goes art, so goes action: even in the cinema of capes and cowls, it's all about the director.

So, given that, what can we expect from yesterday's announcements about who will be helming two hotly anticipated comic book projects? The new Captain America flick, the last big Marvel solo adventure until we're treated to the long-awaited Avengers movie, will be directed by Joe Johnston; the new Conan the Barbarian (which isn't based on a comic, but features a character whose prominence in modern-day geek consciousness is more attributable to Roy Thomas' 1970s Marvel comics series than it is to Robert E. Howard's original stories) has fallen into the hands of Brett Ratner.

Neither of these guys are Christopher Nolan-level filmmakers, or even Bryan Singer-level filmmakers. How successful these films will be depends on which director shows up with his A-game; if we get the Joe Johnston who directed the charming, underrated superhero movie The Rocketeer, then Captain America could be a patriotic, nostalgic romp, but if we get the Joe Johnston who directed Jumanji, we could be in for a long wait until The Avengers comes out. Ratner has nothing as good as The Rocketeer on his resume, and he's also single-handedly responsible for trashing the X-Men franchise. Add to that the fact that, instead of legit heavyweights like John Milius and Oliver Stone (who did the original 1982 film version of Conan) providing him with a script, he's got the guys who did A Sound of Thunder, and we don't think anyone will be forgetting Schwarzenegger's version anytime soon.

Benecio del Toro is The Wolfman

Insufficiently Forgotten Films: "Seizure" (1974)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 17:00:00 GMT

THE MOVIE: This scare picture is set at the country home of a horror novelist, played by Jonathan Frid, the Barnabas Collins of TV's Dark Shadows. The novelist is having a bunch of friends he despises come over for the weekend so they can all get drunk and recoil from each other in disgust, but this fun time is spoiled by the appearance of three malevolent figures who appear to have sprung from the darkest resources of his own fevered brain: Herve Villechaize as a bossy dwarf named Spider, British screen queen Martine Beswick in silky dominatrix gear (playing a character billed as "Queen of Evil"), and a giant hooded bodybuilder who brought along his enormous ax in case the generator breaks down and some firewood needs a-cuttin'. These worthies proceed to organize the weekend activities, which turn into a series of truth games and tests that result in the steady thinning out of the cast (which includes Mary Woronov, Richard Cox, Christina Pickles, and Troy Donahue). At the end, Frid makes the welcome disovery that this has all been a dream. Then the remaining members of the audience, which has also thinned out somewhat since the opening credits, finds out that, oh, no it wasn't.

WHY IT DESERVES TO BE FORGOTTEN: Seizure was the first feature directed by the then-twenty-eight-year-old Oliver Stone, from an original screenplay credited to Stone and Edward Mann, the writer-director of Hallucination Generation, Hot Pants Holiday, and Who Says I Can't Ride a Raindbow!, the only film I know of whose cast includes both Morgan Freeman and Skitch Henderson. Even allowing for its director's youth and inexperience, Seizure reeks of technical incompetence and is very hard to remain focused on. More turgid than scary, it isolates you in a poorly shot dark of night someplace and leaves you stranded there with a bunch of people who are pretty unpleasant in some pretty uninteresting ways. Then it leans on you to feel bad when they're picked off, if only because it serves as a memento mori. It has a gruesome, amateurish sort of integrity: a more cynical hack who cared more about entertainment value than his vision would have gotten a sense of how the characters were coming across and tilted things so that at least the audience could get a chuckle out of seeing the snarling bastards bite the dust.

WHY IT CAN NEVER POSSIBLY BE FORGOTTEN ENOUGH: A lot of major directors have a Seizure, or a Dementia 13 or a Boxcar Bertha, near the beginning of their resumes. Working on a piece of shlock is probably a good way for an untested new talent to learn the basic moves he'll need to master to make the movies he really cares about. What's embarrassing about Seizure is that it gives you the feeling that Stone really cared about it, or at least that he thought he could use it impress people not just with his (then non-existent, from the look of it) abilities as a filmmaker but with his creativity and the quality of his mind. The movie is not fun in a way that screams out "misguided artistic aspirations." The sub-Twilight Zone "Is it all a dream?" stuff seems meant to pass for the kind of illusion vs. reality gamesmanship then all the rage in bad student films, and the character dynamics suggest the work of someone who'd seen a bunch of Antonioni flicks in college and had concluded that what was supposed to be so great about them was that they were full of rich bores treating each other badly. In any case, Seizure was too little seen to do Stone's career much damage, but then it may not have been produced with the intention that it would ever be seen at all. Rumors persist that the production was actually funded by organized crime figures as part of a money laundering operation, something that neither Tony Montana nor Gordon Gekko ever stooped to.

Part of a becoming an artist is learning what you're not good at, which is why the existence of Seizure became a thousand times more embarrassing seven years later, when Stone, now a Hollywood player after winning an Academy Award for his screenplay for Alan Parker's Midnight Express (1978), attempted for the second time to launch himself as a writer-director, and once again chose to do so in the ill-fitting garb of a Master of Horror. The Hand (1981), Stone's first big studio job as a director, stars Michael Caine as a cartoonist who loses his drawing hand in a grisly car accident, with his nagging soon-to-be-ex-wife (Andrea Marcovicci) at the wheel. His marriage disintegrating, his career over, Caine takes a teaching gig and settles into his bachelor life at a house in the woods, where he is plagued by dreams of his diembodied hand committing a string of murders--murders that actually take place, though the film teases you about whether this is actually the work of a monster hand possessed by the revenging fury of its former owner, or if Caine has simply gone batshit. Once again, Stone seems to be taken with the horror genre mainly because of the excuse it gives him to fuck around with what's "real" and what's "unreal", this time in the form of a psychological thriller that may be taking place partly inside the head of a madman.

Maladroit though it is, The Hand much more clearly anticipates the movies that Stone would go on to make when--third time's a charm!--he reinvented himself yet again as a political filmmaker with 1986's Salvador and Platoon. You can see Stone in its overwrought hysteria and also its ugly misogyny, which Stone tries to pass off as the governing personality trait of the hateful, one-pawed protagonist, who starts out as an unpleasant bloke and steadily becomes so repellant that not even Caine can get us to identify with him or feel for him much. (There's also a nod to Stone's mystical macho side and his next project--the screenplay for John Milius's Conan thr Barbarian (1982)--in the glimpses we see of the cartoonist's work, which is a sinewy swords-and-sorcery adventure strip about a muscular fellow called Mandro. In the original novel that Stone adapted for the screenplay--Marc Brendel's The Lizard's Tail, a much better and more subtle piece of work than the movie--the cartoonist was a Jules Feiffer-style satirist.) And even though he got to work with a professional crew this time and turned out a much more polished piece of goods than Seizure, Stone found out the hard way that the technology for showing disembodied hands strangling pop-eyed actors was still very much as the MST3K stage. (One of those strangled is none other than Oliver Stone himself, making a cameo appearance as a drunken bum who falls prey to the monster, and in the process paying homage to Larry Hagman, who made a similar cameo in the 1972 film he directed, Son of Blob.) Tha Hand, which actually earned a few kind reviews, did just well enough at the box office to send Stone back to writing screenplays until it was time for him to find himself yet again, this time as a righteous auteur with a camera in one hand and a copy of Mother Jones in the other. That was the incarnation that stuck, but in the many years since, he hasn't attempted another horror movie, unless W. counts.

“W.”: The Footnotes

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Oliver Stone still hasn’t gotten over all the criticism he faced from Kennedy assassination scholars after the release of JFK. Once it was made clear that the film was based more on wild conspiracy theories than factual evidence, Stone was quoted as saying, “"I believe the Warren Commission Report is a great myth. And in order to fight a myth, maybe you have to create another one, a counter-myth.” This always sounded just a tad defensive (and, of course, convenient), especially when the release of Nixon was accompanied by a published screenplay annotated with hundreds of footnotes citing sources. There’s your “facts,” buddy! He’s done the same with W., his new George W. Bush bio, but there’s no need to purchase the screenplay to get the footnotes. They’re available online!

Here’s an index to the 83 footnotes, each corresponding to a scene from the movie. For example, footnote #20 is titled Bush-Pretzel Incident. “On January 14, 2002, U.S. President George W. Bush emerged in front of a press conference with a very prominent broken blood vessel welt on his cheek, and said that he had choked on a pretzel while watching television the day before. Bush had reportedly been sitting on his couch, 90 minutes into watching an NFL football Miami vs. Baltimore play-off game on television, when he choked on the pretzel, falling to the ground, injuring himself, and briefly losing consciousness before awakening to see his dogs Barney and Spot showing alarm at his state. Laura Bush was reportedly in the adjoining room at the time, and Bush was alone watching the football game.” The source cited for this information is…well, it’s Wikipedia. But I’m sure the Wikipedia page cites someone reliable. (Really, how alarmed was Spot? Was he interviewed?)

The film also depicts W. as being behind the infamous “Willie Horton” ads during his father’s 1988 campaign – and Karl Rove being behind W. Footnote 33 provides some documentation supporting the involvement of “Junior,” but Rove is not mentioned – probably because Rove was actually running Supreme Court campaigns in Texas at the time. Let’s just call that one creative license; it doesn’t quite rise to the level of “counter-myth.” And as for the scenes in which Bush swills O’Doul’s non-alcoholic beer? Total fiction. According to Footnote #60, Bush’s brand is Buckler.

Related:
Screengrab Review: "W."
Take Five: Stoned

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: Oct. 11-17, 2008

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 21:30:00 GMT

Hey there, Screengrab readers. Joe the Plumber here. You don’t want to know the details, believe me, but there’s been an unusual toilet incident here at Screengrab headquarters and I’ve been called in to take care of the situation. It’s cool, I don’t mind helping these guys out because they pay cash under the table. No taxes! But they did ask if I wouldn’t mind handling the Highlight Reel while I’m here. I’ll admit, I don’t usually read the Screengrab – I’m more of a Modern Materialist guy – but they slipped me a few extra bucks, so what the hell. Here’s the best stuff I saw this week:

They did a decent job with the Top 25 Leading Ladies of All Time (Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven and Eight), although I personally would have included Raquel Welch. Always had a thing for her. And this list of the Top 007 James Bond Theme Songs (Parts One and Two) is all right, but where’s For Your Eyes Only? That Sheena Easton had some pipes – and I know from pipes!

I don’t get out to the pictures much, so I probably won’t see W. and What Just Happened, but I am looking forward to that new Star Trek. Does anyone know if it has tribbles in it? I never saw Cockfighter, My Neighbor Totoro, Swept Away or Boiler Room – but I’ve seen my share of boiler rooms, let me tell you!

Aw, jeez, this toilet is bad news. What is that green stuff? Anyway, I gotta wrap this up, but if you’re interested in Tony Curtis’s book, Oliver Stone movies, the Saw amusement park ride or Jabba the portly Irish gent, go read about ‘em.

Oh, and this isn’t funny. These are tools, not weapons.

In Other Blogs: Hangover Edition

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 14:30:00 GMT

You’ll have to excuse my disheveled appearance and fogginess of mind this morning, but the Red Sox made me drink a lot last night. Was that an amazing comeback or what? Am I right? Huh? Oh, right. Movies. Let us segue through this Beyond the Multiplex post on Madonna’s directorial debut, Filth and Wisdom, as Andrew O’Hehir ponders his love for Madge and the obstacle in his way. “Does A-Rod possess the spiritual and/or aesthetic wealth that Madonna and I share? I say nay. He may not, for instance, recognize the precise odor of hipster familiarity surrounding Filth and Wisdom, which seems like a movie Jim Jarmusch might have started in 1991 and then abandoned because it wasn't going anywhere. Filth and Wisdom isn't laughable or embarrassing; instead it's rather sweet and 100 percent recycled, which might not be a bad way of describing its creator at this vulnerable time in her personal and professional life. It's a little bit Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, a little bit John Waters, a little bit Darren Aronofsky, a little bit (God help us) Desperately Seeking Susan. It's dumb. I sort of liked it.”

At his new blog Hollywood & Fine, Marshall Fine disagrees. “The phrase ‘Madonna’s directorial debut’ does not so much trip off the tongue as sound like a punchline, which is appropriate in this case. Based on Filth and Wisdom, she hasn’t lost her knack for creating unwatchable cinema. Filth and Wisdom is a silly stew of phony profundity that will have you checking your watch almost as soon as the movie starts. Like Hiro on Heroes, Madonna has mastered the ability to make time stop – or, at least, crawl. Are we there yet? No, sorry, better settle in for a long slog.”

Did you know that the Screengrab’s own Phil Nugent has a blog called, oddly enough, The Phil Nugent Experience? Not only is it the finest source of hilarious and insightful political coverage in all the Bronx, but occasionally Phil even writes about movies. What can I say – the man loves his job so much, he does it in his spare time. Here Phil defends the unloved Intolerable Cruelty. “For me, the Coens' fun machines tend to turn cold without a strong, magnetic performance at their center. The warming star power at this movie's core is generated by Clooney, who parodies his own image by magnifying his golden boy attractiveness to such a degree that the gap between it and the Miles's myopic, self-enthralled fatuousness becomes an amazing thing to behold. (It's much more entertaining than seeing him send up his image in Burn After Reading by having the other characters react to him as if he were the irresistable George Clooney even though he seems to be imitating Warren Oates.)”

It’s never too early for Halloween at Arbogast on Film, now in the midst of a month-long 31 Screams celebration. Today he looks at the original 1958 version of The Fly. “I'm not sure what to make of the flyman. As most of the dead scientist's intelligence was retained within his manfly brain, there obviously isn't much left for that of the flyman... who screams pitiably as he meets his doom. His voice is high-pitched - just within the range of human hearing - but his pleas are unmistakeable. ‘Help me,’ he cries out. ‘Help me.’ And as the spider draws closer, it sounds as if he is yelling ‘Go away... go away’ to the spider in childish desperation. And that's just it-- this scene horrifies, it cuts to the bone because it's like watching a child being murdered right in front of you.”

And finally, with W. arriving in theaters today, our good friends at Spill have reimagined Oliver Stone’s film as a Sarah Palin biopic:

Find more videos like this on The Spill.com Movie Community<

Screengrab Review: "W."

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 16:00:00 GMT

It's not for me to offer unsolicited advice to a famous and successful filmmaker like Oliver Stone, especially when it's too late for said advice to be taken anyway – but what the hell, while I'm here I might as well tell you my idea for the movie Stone should have made instead of W. As you may have read here in the Screengrab or elsewhere in the liberal elite media, W. is a biopic of our current president, George W. Bush, who is not up for re-election and is leaving office in January no matter who wins. (Unless he barricades himself inside the Oval Office with a shotgun and a bottle of whiskey, which might have made for a good scene in W…but I'm getting ahead of myself.) As such, W. is unlikely to have a substantial effect on the upcoming election.

What if, instead, Stone had made a movie about the administration of President John McCain? Stone and his screenwriter Stanley Weiser could have cooked up a juicy, paranoid fantasia of a potential McCain Era in American history, supplemented by flashbacks from McCain's actual colorful past. It would be a similar movie in many ways; as Tom Dickinson writes in the fascinating Rolling Stone cover story "Make-Believe Maverick," McCain and Bush were both youthful fuck-ups with daddy issues, the major difference being that "George W. Bush was a much better pilot."

Our 43rd president's career as a pilot isn't covered in W. but Stone's film samples most of the greatest hits from Bush's misspent youth. We see his hazing as a Yale fraternity pledge, his inability to hold down a job for long (whether it be on a Texas oil rig or on Wall Street), his fondness for the demon alcohol, his courtship of librarian and future wife Laura (Elizabeth Banks), his baseball dreams, his sobriety and salvation, and finally his entry into "the family business." And although we don't see much of brother Jeb in the movie, it's clear that (in Stone's view, anyway) patriarch George Herbert Walker Bush (James Cromwell) sees the boy he calls "junior" as the Fredo of the family.

These blasts from the past are scattered throughout W., which primarily concerns itself with the Bush administration’s ramp-up to the war in Iraq. The film opens months after the 9/11 terror attacks, as the president and his cabinet brainstorm a catchphrase that will resonate with the American people. “Axis of hatred” falls short, but…ahhh, “Axis of Evil! I like that!” This scene plays exactly like the moment in Stone’s The Doors when Ray Manzarek dreams up the keyboard intro to “Light My Fire.” Sometimes it seems there is only one biopic in the world.

Stone’s unique brew of absurdity, paranoia and psychobabble is at its most potent in these Strangelovian war room scenes. The cast alone makes for compelling viewing, if only for the wide variety of acting approaches. As Condoleezza Rice, Thandie Newton is such a near-perfect replicant, she doesn’t come close to resembling an actual human being – she’s like something Disney shipped in from the Hall of Presidents. Jeffrey Wright is doing a voice as Colin Powell, but to the best of my recollection, it’s nothing like Powell’s actual voice. Others barely attempt any imitation at all; as the man Bush calls “Vice,” Richard Dreyfuss only once hints at Cheney’s Penguin grin, but he’s got the prince of darkness vibe down pat. When Cheney explains what the real plan is for Iraq – that is, the establishment of a new American Empire in the Middle East and Asia, with delicious black oil flowing from every pipe – W. is at its most giddily satirical and subversive.

It’s a shame the rest of it is so pedestrian. It all flows together and moves along at a brisk pace – it doesn’t feel like a movie that was shot, edited and released within the span of a baseball season – but the script is far too reductive and simple-minded. (Yes, you could argue that’s appropriate to the central character, but then you still have to sit through it.) Stone likes to be able to claim he’s depicting both sides of the story, so he appears to treat key points like W’s religious conversion and romance with Laura seriously. Then he turns around and gives us one of those classic Bushisms (“Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?”) and jars us right out of the movie.

As Phil Nugent posted earlier this week, Stone had originally planned to include more black comedy and surreal elements, and I do think that might have been the more fruitful approach. To the extent that W. does work, give credit to Josh Brolin – he’s the one member of the cast who gives both a pitch-perfect impression and a genuine performance. It’s hard to play dumb and spoiled and, y’know, carelessly destructive of an entire country, and still maintain a modicum of likeability – but Bush did pull it off for a while and Brolin pulls it off here. Poor Elizabeth Banks is saddled with a conception of Laura Bush that doesn’t extend much beyond “enabling airhead,” and James Cromwell projects too much gruff gravitas to pass for the patrician elder Bush.

It all comes down to “Poppy didn’t love me best, so I’ll show him,” and even if that’s true in reality, it’s a boring cliché on the screen. And since we’re dealing with Oliver Stone, a point worth making once is worth making a hundred times, in 100-point boldface type, until not even the dimmest bulb in the audience can possibly miss it. I’m reminded of a scene in Barcelona, where a character explains that he understands subtext to mean a “hidden message or import of some kind,” but wonders what you call “the message or meaning that's right there on the surface, completely open and obvious?” That is, of course, the text – and Stone’s movies are all text all the time, right there on the surface, completely open and obvious.

Watch It For Free: Crawford

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Oliver Stone’s W. is due in theaters a week from Friday, and those of you who want to do a little homework ahead of time have a golden opportunity today. The documentary Crawford, which I reviewed during SXSW this year (and Andrew Osborne also chimed in on) is streaming for free online for your cubicle-viewing pleasure. It’s the story of George W. Bush’s hometown – but not really of course, because he just moved there before the 2000 election to secure his Texas good ol’ boy image. For everyone crossing days off the calendar until the end of the Bush era, it’s a must-see. Hit the jump for the linkage.

Hulu has your free Crawford today.

Red Suspension of Disbelief: Gordon Gekko's Speechwriter Would Like to Clarify

Phil Nugent — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Stanley Weiser, Oliver Stone's co-writer on the 1987 Wall Street, has just published his apologia for his part in the creation of the popular image of the morally shifty, massive-balled financial insider as American hero. (Weiser also wrote Stone's forthcoming W. as well as other politically crusading movies and TV films such as Murder in Mississippi, Freedom Song, Rudy: The Rudy Guiliani Story, and 1987's Project X, in which Matthew Broderick fearlessly rescued monkeys from The Man.) Wall Street, which starred Michael Douglas as maverick financier Gordon Gekko and Charlie Sheen, who had already done time as Stone's youthful fantasy alter ego in Platoon, as his corruptible protege. Douglas, playing a role designed to click with moviegoers' memories of the kind of charismatic heel role that his father had all but taken out a copyright on decades earlier, had his star heightened by the movie, for which he won an Academy Award. (As for Sheen, he can now be seen rotting before the viewer's very eyes on the TV sitcom Two and a Half Men. The other representatives of the show's title are played by Jon Cryer and some kid. I think somebody's math is off.) Meanwhile, Gekko's showboat moment, the "'Greed is good' speech", has become not just a one-scene highlight reel of Douglas's career but a signpost moment in 1980s culture, a phenomenon that's been challenging the 60's status as The Decade That Refused to Leave. (Oliver Stone, of course, has a foot solidly in both.) A recent critics' symposium on the possible effects of the Wall Street crash pointed to that speech as a choice example of satire that was adopted by people who steadfastly refused to get the joke.

With the current financial meltdown, Gekko's name has been coming up a lot lately, always with the understanding that to cite the character by name is to use a form of shorthand to conjure up images of predatory jackals in power suspenders. What isn't always apparent is that the people citing Wall Street as some kind of dire prophecy remember that the movie started out as stale news and then had the great good fortune to become an unplanned comment on breaking news, circa 1987. Stone had decided to do a movie about Wall Street around the time that the hammer started coming down on insider traders, including Ivan Boesky, who was arrested and started selling out his fellow street rats in 1986, the same year that he had delivered a "greed-is-good"-type speech ("I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself") at the University of California. (Weiser says that Gekko was partly based on Boesky and partly based on other high rollers. He was also partly based on Stone; Weisner writes that the director's "rants" and "unpublishable barbs proved to be the precise varnish with which I needed to coat Gekko.") The movie was treated as a big deal leading up to its release--Stone had won the Oscar for Platoon earlier in the year--but there was also a feeling reported in the trade press that nobody really had huge box office hopes for what amounted to "two hours of people talking about money." Then the 1987 Wall Street crash hit, and audiences who knew that something important was happening but were having trouble figuring out just what it was from reading the business section crowded into theaters to see if they could better make sense of the big news story of the day if it had Darryl Hannah in it. At the time, the 1987 Wall Street freak-out was widely reported as the death knell of the go-go-80s/Reagan era, but it turned out that greed had been, if not necessarily good, then sorely misunderestimated.

According to Weisner, Stone conceived of the idea of "a movie about Wall Street" pretty much on the spot, veering away from the idea of a movie that he had ordered Weisner to research about the 1950's quiz show scandals, and casting it in ambitious literary terms before either he or his collaborator had any idea of what it might entail in terms of a story or characters. "Read Crime and Punishment over the weekend," he told Weisner, "and we'll talk Monday." Weisner, to his credit, admits to having made do with the Cliff's Notes. When he reported back that he didn't see anything in there that they could apply to Wall Street, Stone, who may very well not have been clear about anything about Crime and Punishment except that he liked the title, told him to go read The Great Gatsby instead. (Weisner rented the movie.) After this unpromising beginning, things went on to work out okay, but Weisner marvels at the fact that in the last twenty years he's "run into quite a number of younger people, who upon discovering that I co-wrote the film, wax rhapsodic about it . . . but often for the wrong reasons...A typical example would be a business executive or a younger studio development person spouting something that goes like this: 'The movie changed my life. Once I saw it I knew that I wanted to get into such and such business. I wanted to be like Gordon Gekko.'" If he had it all to do over again, he says, he would rewrite Gekko's big line to read: "Greed is Good. But I've never seen a Brinks truck pull up to a cemetery." This would certainly have had a different effect on audiences, assuming that, like me, they would have had no earthly idea just what it's supposed to mean.

Trailer Review: W. Trailer #2

Paul Clark — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Ah, there’s the Oliver Stone we all know. When it was announced that Stone was making a movie about George W. Bush to be released on the eve of the Presidential election, many people scratched their heads. How would he take on our most prickly and controversial Commander in Chief since Nixon? But the more I see of W., the more interested I get. Sure, Stone and screenwriter Stanley Weiser could very well make mincemeat of the historical record, but hell- that’s par for the course with Stone. Yet I like the chutzpah he shows here, using a strange cocktail of fact, conjecture and outright fabrication to attempt to figure out what makes Bush tick. Moreover, he’s actually done it in a context that looks like a rollicking entertainment instead of a muckraking screed. More and more, it’s looking like I’ll be there opening weekend.

Screengrab Presents: The Top 25 War Films (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 21:00:00 GMT

15. THE NIGHT OF THE SHOOTING STARS (1982)

This Italian film, directed by the brothers Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, is about the people who don't fight in war but who just do their best to keep their lives from being completely overrun when it comes to town. In this case, the people are Tuscan, and it's late in the summer of 1944, with World War II winding down and the local fascists preparing to blow up anything they can before the Americans arrive. The people of the village sneak out under dead of night and prepare to hit the road, hoping to stay alive until they encounter the Yanks; the movie is presented as the memories of a woman who was six years old then, and it's infused with a playful surrealism that colors the many incidents, making them seem touched by magic. Which, at this point, is entirely appropriate for a movie where the people can't wait to embrace the invading Americans.

14. PLATOON (1986)

Drawing on memories from his own experiences in combat, Oliver Stone won Best Director and Best Picture for his grunt’s-eye view of the Vietnam War, where (in the words of star Charlie Sheen, back when he was a serious actor rather than a smirky sitcom star), “We did not fight the enemy; we fought ourselves.” Earlier films (notably Apocalypse Now) had, of course, tackled the Southeast Asian “police action,” but the topic was generally as unpopular on the big screen as Iraq films are today. Platoon, premiering four years after the dedication of the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C., marked a cathartic cultural shift in America’s perception (and digestion) of the war: without Platoon’s critical and commercial success (and the flood of Vietnam movies, TV shows and video games that followed), a parody like 2008’s Tropic Thunder would have been unthinkable, not to mention sacrilegious. Yet, even though Vietnam era slang (being in “the shit”) and combat details (cigarette packs in helmet bands, etc.) are now war movie clichés, I’ll never forget seeing Platoon for the first time, when the wounds of America’s last great military misadventure were finally starting to heal, then watching shaken veterans around the theater hanging back after the lights came up, grouping together in pain and reminiscence.

13. SHAME (1968)

It’s probably no coincidence that most of Ingmar Bergman’s starkest films were made at the height of the Vietnam War, a time when the horrifying images of battle were being broadcast on television sets all over the world on a nightly basis. Bergman’s most explicit take on the horror and senselessness of war, Shame, begins in quintessential Bergman fashion, focusing on a pair of married musicians (played by Liv Ullmann and Max Von Sydow, of course) who have retreated from their old lives onto a remote Swedish island. Their marriage could hardly be called happy, but it’s comfortable and secure, far removed from the rest of world, including a war that’s been raging in the distance. Suddenly and without warning, the war comes to their doorstep. But despite the handful of battle sequences, Shame has nothing to do with combat, and everything to do with the poisonous effect of war on everyone it touches. Ullmann, who is concerned only with the well-being of herself and her husband, finds herself accused of treason. Their home is destroyed. Ullmann sleeps with a local bureaucrat, perhaps out of self-preservation, but perhaps for other reasons. And Von Sydow reveals himself to be either a coward or a vindictive scumbag, depending on one’s perspective. Bergman refuses to pin the story to a single war -- it’s certainly not Vietnam, in spite of when he made it. Instead, Shame is a condemnation of the very idea of war and the effect it has on humanity -- not merely the literal death and destruction, but also the psychic fallout it leaves in its wake, which can linger long after any memory of why the war was fought in the first place.

12. HENRY V (1944) & (1988)

Shakespeare's play, which came in so handy for pundits looking for a point of comparison for George W. Bush's transformation into a great war leader after 9/11, was a propaganda piece celebrating the great victory of the outnumbered English by the overburdened French at the Battle of Agincourt. But because Shakespeare knew the value of ambiguity and multiple meanings, the work is open to various interpretations and can be staged in different ways to emphasize different possible themes. Laurence Olivier had a personal triumph as both director and star with the 1944 version, which, being made during World War II, not surprisingly treated the material as the occasion for a rousing, jingoistic hard sell for patriotic warfare. Forty-five years later, Kenneth Branagh, making his movie debut as a director and also starring in the title role, had no war to promote and so saw fit to stage the work as a big, baroque spectacle with ironic attitudes towards the expressions of patriotic fervor, film noir lighting, and what Pauline Kael called a "deranged Darth Vader entrance" for himself. As it is, both movies are huge, happy wallows in showy stagecraft and the best acting the British can always offer at the snap of a finger. (Branagh's, in particular, is the kind of movie where Paul Scofield has a walk-on.)

11. BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN (1925)

Sergei Eisenstein, master of the montage and one of the greatest pioneers of early cinema, made two classic war films, both very different from one another. His first, Battleship Potemkin, is often cited as one of the greatest movies of all time, and that’s not just hype: aside from the legendary Odessa Steps sequence, it contains some of the earliest uses of montage, and generally establishes itself as a movie using visual language light-years beyond what anyone else was doing at the time. But as a war film, it is unquestionably subversive: it was designed as a piece of pure propaganda in which the oppressed sailors of the battleship rise up in righteous anger against their cruel Czarist overlords. At no point do we have anything but sympathy for the heroic mutineers, and no less a personage than Josef Goebbels declared that anyone might become a Bolshevik after viewing the movie. Alexander Nevsky, on the other hand, is as much a celebration of patriotism and loyalty as Potemkin was of rebellion and revolution. It didn’t reach its peak of popularity until a few years after it was made, when Russia and Germany were at each other’s throats, but its ability to induce a patriotic fervor, as audiences cheered at the Russian peasant army driving out the Teutonic Knights, was unmistakable. And while it wasn’t the artistic success that Battleship Potemkin was, it did feature an unforgettable score and one scene that rivals the Odessa Steps sequence: the famous battle on the ice of Lake Peipus, which stands as one of the most thrilling battle sequences ever staged for film.

Click Here for Part One, Part Two, Part Four, Part Five, Part Six & Part Seven

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Andrew Osborne, Paul Clark, Leonard Pierce

Screengrab Presents: The Top 25 War Films (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 20:00:00 GMT

WAR!!!!! (Huh! Good God!) What is it good for? Absolutely nothing...

...unless, of course, you’re a Halliburton stockholder...and, well, I guess World War II was helpful in pulling the U.S. out of the Great Depression and ridding Europe of fascism...and, y’know, we’d still be a British colony if not for the Revolutionary War.

And certainly the world of cinema, in particular, would suffer without the violence, spectacle and grand drama of humanity’s battles through the ages, since war has generated some of our greatest works of art (as well as our most cynical, manipulative, xenophobic hunks of exploding propaganda).

In his classic monologue, Swimming to Cambodia (about his participation in Roland Joffé’s 1984 film The Killing Fields), the late, great Spalding Gray suggested a potentially beneficial marriage of the human impulses towards creation and destruction: “WAR THERAPY! Every country should make a major war movie every year. It would put a lot of people to work, help them get their rocks off” (and, of course, reduce the psychic and physical devastation of the real thing).

This week, Spike Lee does his part by releasing Miracle at St. Anna, a World War II drama featuring all the black actors Clint Eastwood didn’t cast in Flags of Our Fathers, and so in tribute to both films (and all the real life soldiers, civilians and politicians who inspired them), we here at the Screengrab present our picks for the Top 25 War Movies of All Time!

25. FORBIDDEN GAMES (1951)

Rene Clement's film opens with a crowd of people trying to march out of Paris as the Germans invade the city at the start of World War II. A couple are strafed, and their five-year-old daughter (Brigitte Fossey) wanders off in shock, holding onto her dead dog. She winds up in the countryside where she's befriended by a ten-year-old boy (Georges Poujouly) with whom she establishes a private cemetery for the dead animals they begin to collect, which they decorate by stealing crosses from a nearby (human) cemetery. One of the strangest and most haunting commentaries on war ever filmed, and the talented Clement never made anything remotely like it again. But then it's not as if anybody else has ever made anything quite like it either.

24. FIRES ON THE PLAIN (1959)

Kon Ichikawa's masterpiece is set on an island in the Philippines in the dying days of World War II. Japanese soldiers have begun resorting to cannibalism to stay alive; the hero, Tamura (Eiji Funakoshi), has been turned out of his platoon after being diagnosed with tuberculosis. Stumbling along in search of a field hospital, Tamura refuses to sink to the level of eating human flesh. The one thing he has going for him is that, because of his medical condition, nobody he meets wants to eat him, either. This is one of the rare great movies that might be called honestly nihilistic. It's a vision of pure hopelessness, but it's emotionally moving because of the depth of the hero's desire to believe that human beings might be better than the behavior that he's seeing.

23. SALVADOR (1986)

This wasn't the first movie written and directed by Oliver Stone, but it did represent the official arrival of the Stone we've all come to know, love, and roll out eyes at, the outspoken topical "political" melodramatist. He's never had a better combination, for his talents and temperament, of subject, actor, and lead character than he did in this excitingly overblown, impassioned attack on Central American politics, which came out at the start of the year that ended with the release of his Oscar-winning Platoon. James Woods plays Richard Boyle, an actual reporter whose stories about trying to get close enough to the political violence in El Salvador in the early 1980s (and come out alive) inspired the screenplay. (It's co-credited to Boyle and Stone, and for a while Stone even flirted with the idea of having Boyle play himself.) Even though the movie was seen by almost no one when it was in theaters, a late-year push by the Los Angeles cable station the Z Channel helped get Woods an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor, and it's easy to see why: his hyperactive fast rap gives the movie almost as high a kinetic charge as the bullets and explosions do.

22. COME AND SEE (1985)

It’s been reported that the late Francois Truffaut once said that it was impossible to make a film that was truly anti-war because they tend to make war look like fun. However, the ultimate rebuke to Truffaut’s statement came a year after his death, in the final and greatest film by Soviet filmmaker Elem Klimov. Telling the story of the Nazi invasion of Belarus through the eyes of a young boy, Klimov’s unflinching camera depicts the atrocities vested upon the Soviet people during World War II. As the boy journeys through the countryside following the killing of his family, he is less protagonist than witness, always propelled forward by his terror at what he’s seen only to discover something even more horrifying once he’s arrived at his destination. The film culminates in the extended siege of a small town, where the boy is held at gunpoint while other soldiers herd the townspeople into a church and set the building ablaze. Throughout the film, Klimov’s dominant image is the face of his young leading man, Alexei Kravchenko, frozen in a mask of abject horror -- so committed was Klimov to eliciting this response from the young man that he attempted to hypnotize him, as well as using live rounds in some of the battle scenes, some of which (according to Kravchenko) reportedly came only inches from his head. Yet while Klimov’s methods might have been suspect, the results are undeniable -- a war movie that’s harrowing and despairing, but nowhere even close to entertaining.

21. GLORY (1989)

This Civil War movie tells the story of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, the first all-black regiment of the U.S. military, formed on the novel idea that the people whose freedom was contingent on the war's outcome might actually be of some use in fighting it. (Some objected to the idea on the basis that the abolitionists' cause might be undermined if it turned out that black men couldn't figure out how to operate shoes or march in formation.) The director, Edward Zwick, shows a sure hand in the amazing combat scenes but is shaky on some of the dramatic scenes and lets the composer, James Horner, pour too much syrup into the gears. But the movie's flaws don't count as much as its great subject and the performances of Morgan Freeman, Denzel Washington, and Andre Braugher (in his movie debut).

Click Here for Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five, Part Six & Part Seven

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Paul Clark

Screengrab Fall Preview: Paul Clark's Picks

Paul Clark — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 17:30:00 GMT

Yesterday, my colleague Scott Von Doviak dared all of his fellow Screengrab staffers to weigh in on our most anticipated movies of the fall. Given my lifelong inability to resist a dare (which resulted in my eating far too many unspeakable things in my younger days) I’ve decided to answer the call. Craving an additional challenge- and hoping to spotlight the wide array of good and bad releases coming soon to a theatre near me- I’ve decided to eliminate all contenders that appeared in Scott’s preview. Here goes:

3 UP

1. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – for years, David Fincher has been one of Hollywood’s most gifted filmmakers, with last year’s Zodiac his best film yet. With Button, Fincher turns his camera on an honest-to-goodness work of literature (an F. Scott Fitzgerald story, fer chrissakes), but don’t expect a workmanlike Tradition of Quality-style adaptation. Button re-teams Fincher with Brad Pitt, who continues to improve as an actor by seeking out adventurous material, and this story gives him his biggest challenge yet, not only playing a character from childhood through old age, but playing him while aging in reverse. It’s the kind of story that requires a visionary to pull off, and I can think of few better candidates for the job than Fincher. Every year, there’s at least one high-profile movie that I actively root for to be great, and this year, it’s Benjamin Button.

2. A Christmas Tale – Unlike Benjamin Button, the latest film by the great French filmmaker Arnaud Desplechin is something of a known quantity, premiering at Cannes to almost universal acclaim. But even if it hadn’t already screened, my hopes for this one would be through the roof. In the past few years, Desplechin has become one of my favorite filmmakers, and he’s coming off his finest work yet, 2004’s Kings and Queen. Factor in that Christmas Tale re-unites four of that film’s stars- Matthieu Amalric, Catherine Deneuve, Emmanuelle Devos, and Hippolyte Girardot- and I’m sold. That the film’s IMDb recommends the Steve Martin remake of Cheaper By the Dozen shouldn’t be held against it.

3. The Brothers Bloom – as I stated in my Trailer Review earlier this week, I’m in the pro-Brick camp, so naturally I’m excited for Rian Johnson’s follow-up project. But he’s also assembled an irresistible cast (I love Brody and Ruffalo as brothers, and Rachel Weisz is always best when she plays daffy), so I’m extra-stoked for this one. Could we be witnessing the rise of a major American filmmaker? Here’s hoping.

3 DOWN

1. Defiance – tell me if you’ve heard this one before: Ed Zwick directs a film about an outsider who aids a group of minorities in fighting about those who oppress them. That the minorities are Jews and the time period is during World War II only makes Defiance’s Oscar-grubbing even more blatant. Thanks, but no thanks.

2. RockNRolla – you know, I was under the impression that the abject failure of Revolver coupled with the divorce from Madonna meant that the moviegoing public would get a break from Guy Ritchie. Alas, that beautiful dream wasn’t to be. It was nice while it lasted though…

3. Bedtime Stories – Adam Sandler’s comic persona might be juvenile, but he’s always been at his best at unleashing his rage onscreen in decidedly un-kid-friendly ways. Less successful are his attempts to warm the heart, which makes the idea of a Sandler family comedy all the more misguided. The presence of Adam (The Pacifier) Shankman in the director’s chair doesn’t inspire much confidence either.

WILD CARD

It’s not as odd as Scott’s choice of Oliver Stone’s W. (what could be?), but I’m pretty conflicted about Quantum of Solace. What made Casino Royale so damn good is that it combined a kickass James Bond thrill ride with a legitimately compelling story. But although hiring director Marc Forster hints that the producers might be trying for that same balance of action and drama, I have my doubts that lightning will strike twice. Add to this Forster’s lack of experience in the action genre, plus the fact that unlike Casino this one doesn’t have an Ian Fleming novel to provide a solid narrative foundation, and Quantum has a lot to live up to. Sure, it might be diverting, but after Casino Royale, that just doesn’t cut the mustard anymore. However, I’d love nothing more than to be wrong about this.

Screengrab Fall Preview: Scott Von Doviak’s Picks

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 17:30:00 GMT

We’ve reached that part of the summer when Rainn Wilson comedies and films by Fred Durst are considered top new releases, so it must be time to look ahead to the fall. Traditionally this is the movie season for Oscar contenders and challenging indie fare, so let’s put away the robots and superhero tights and play a little 3 Up, 3 Down. (Feel free to weigh in with your own picks, my fellow Screengrabbers – if you dare.)

3 UP

1. Burn After Reading – No Country for Old Men was a return to form for the Coens, and we’re all happy they finally got their Oscars. But it’s been a while since we’ve had a pure shot of that Coen Brothers feeling. No Country was adapted from a Cormac McCarthy novel, The Ladykillers was a remake, and Intolerable Cruelty originated with other writers. Based on the trailer, Burn After Reading looks like a return to the inventive goofiness of The Big Lebowski and O Brother Where Art Thou?, which puts it right in my wheelhouse.

2. The Road – Speaking of Cormac McCarthy, the second adaptation of his work in as many years in due in November. The grim post-apocalyptic tale is brought to the screen by John Hillcoat, director of The Proposition, a western that certainly counts McCarthy’s Blood Meridian among its influences. Viggo Mortenson has the lead, and the supporting cast includes Charlize Theron, Guy Pearce, Robert Duvall, Garrett Dillahunt and The Wire’s Omar himself, Michael K. Williams.

3. Synecdoche, New York – Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut didn’t exactly wow most critics at Cannes, but the guy hasn’t let me down yet. (Well, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind didn’t really do it for me, but I’ll blame Sam Rockwell for that.) Even if it doesn’t really work, the premise – which has theater director Philip Seymour Hoffman building a replica of New York in a warehouse – should provide more of the Kauf’s trademark reality-bending weirdness.

3 DOWN

1. The Day the Earth Stood Still – Unnecessary remake of a sci-fi classic, with Keanu Reeves as an alien? The first time I saw this trailer, I thought it was a fake. The second time, I just said “No thanks.”

2. Twilight – I understand I’m not the target demographic for this “y.a.” phenomenon, but I still resent the fact that it’s in my face everywhere I go these days, and that’s only going to get worse as the release of this adaptation approaches.

3. The Women – This has got to be the uber-chick flick of the year: Meg Ryan, Annette Bening, Eva Mendes, Bette Midler and Debra Messing in a remake of the George Cukor classic. If I grow a vagina between now and when it comes out, maybe I’ll reconsider.

WILD CARD

Oliver Stone’s W. This can’t possibly be any good, can it? And yet I can’t wait to see it. We might be looking at a train wreck for the ages here.

Related:
Movie Magic: Making Pittsburgh Ugly Enough For "The Road"
Oliver Stone Finds His Dick

DVD Digest for August 19, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 14:00:00 GMT

The seemingly endless run of crappy spring releases continues unabated this week, as I reach into last week to select a noteworthy release I somehow overlooked.

Belated DVD of the Week: With Criterion still digging into film history to bring cinephiles the best of classic cinema, it’s easy to overlook what’s going on at their kid-sister company, Eclipse. To wit: I was so caught up last week’s in Criterion’s impressive DVD of Guy Maddin’s Brand Upon the Brain that I completely forgot to mention the release of Eclipse Series 11: Larisa Shepitko. As with Eclipse’s previous box sets devoted to William Klein and Raymond Bernard, Eclipse has rescued a worthy if unsung filmmaker from semi-obscurity, this time by releasing two of her greatest achievements on DVD. This Shepitko set includes the war films Wings and The Ascent, two key films in her all-too-brief filmography, and which gives some insight of what a major director she might have become had she not died in a car accident at the age of forty. As with Shepitko’s husband Elem Klimov’s masterpiece Come and See, both films in this Eclipse set are hardly cheerful entertainment, but like Come and See they’re indispensible viewing, and I’m glad Eclipse has taken the care of releasing them.

Meanwhile, Criterion this week has new DVDs of Powell and Pressburger’s The Small Back Room and Keisuke Kinoshita’s Twenty-Four Eyes. Also in classics coming to DVD: Oliver Stone’s Nixon: Election Year Edition (Disney, also Blu-Ray).

New releases coming to DVD this week include: Frances McDormand and Amy Adams in Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day (Universal); tween-bait Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds 3-D Concert (Disney, also Blu-Ray); Jay Roach’s funny/depressing HBO film Recount (Warner); yet another horror remake in Prom Night (Sony, also Blu-Ray); Keanu Reeves as a crooked cop in Street Kings (Fox, also Blu-Ray); and the grief-porny The Life Before Her Eyes (Magnolia). Also, two notable direct-to-DVD releases: My Sassy Girl (Fox), a remake of the Korean cult hit starring thespian extraordinaire Elisha Cuthbert; and mixed martial arts champ Randy Couture taking over for The Rock in The Scorpion King 2: Rise of a Warrior (Universal, also Blu-Ray).

This week’s TV on DVD releases include: Dexter Season 2 (Paramount); Gossip Girl Season 1 (Warner); House Season 4 (MGM); Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles Season 1 (Warner). And in Blu-Ray only news, this week brings the release of Justice League Season 1 (Warner).

Trailer Review: W.

Paul Clark — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Once again, Oliver Stone finds himself faced with the same questions that accompanied his previous film, World Trade Center- is it too soon to make a movie that dramatizes an American tragedy? Okay, settle down folks, I'm just kidding. And so, it seems, is Stone, making a movie about a boozing, tomcatting son of privilege who somehow rose to the highest office in the land. More than ever, the film feels like something of a put-on, what with George H.W. Bush threatening his son with an ass-whuppin’. But at the same time, I’m intrigued as to what the hell Stone is going to do with this. At the very least, it should prove to be a million miles removed from the stately apologia that was Nixon, to say nothing of his pious WTC.

Morning Deal Report: “The Godfather” – Now With Pimps!

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 15:00:00 GMT

It’s been a while since the work of hard-boiled crime writer Jim Thompson was adapted for the screen (since 1997, to be precise, which is when This World, Then the Fireworks debuted), but producer Charlie Loventhal is giving it a shot. He’ll bring a feature based on Thompson’s 1953 novel Recoil to the screen, Variety reports. “Story follows a young inmate who's sprung from prison, only to be set up for murder by the same corrupt political insiders who sponsored his parole.” Ralph Pezzullo, who recently scripted an adaptation of his nonfiction book Jawbreaker (co-written with Gary Berntsen) for Oliver Stone, will write the screenplay.

The Hughes brothers are pimpin’ again. Per the Hollywood Reporter, Albert and Allen Hughes, directors of the 1999 documentary American Pimp, have signed with HBO to develop a series called Gentlemen of Leisure. The show “will explore the generational conflict of old-school pimps living by honor codes and creeds who are being pushed aside by violent upstarts who are coming ‘with their guns blazing,’ mixing prostitution with drugs and thievery,” says Allen Hughes, who adds: “These are some of the themes from The Godfather but in the world of pimping.” Guys, it’s HBO. You meant to say, “It’s like The Sopranos – but with pimps!” They need all the help they can get these days.

And finally, here are five words I’d never hoped to see in this order: “Erotic comedy starring Ashton Kutcher.” The movie is Spread, which “tells the story of a womanizing conman who meets his match when he crossing the path of a female hustler,” says Variety.

Related:

No, But I've Read the Movie: The Killer Inside Me
Forgotten Films: This World, Then the Fireworks

Vanishing Act: Christopher McQuarrie

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 18:30:00 GMT

It’s rare that the screenwriter for a splashy indie film will get as much or more attention than the director, but that was the case when The Usual Suspects hit it big in 1995. Boyhood friends Bryan Singer and Christopher McQuarrie first collaborated on 1993’s Public Access, which went nowhere despite winning the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. Their second effort become a modern crime classic, and there was no ignoring the fact that McQuarrie’s twisty narrative and twisted characters contributed greatly to the success of Suspects. In fact, when the Academy Awards were held the following year, it was McQuarrie who walked away with the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.

It was Singer, however, who used Suspects as a launching pad to a blockbuster career. After the Stephen King misfire Apt Pupil, Singer bounced back with the first two X-Men movies and the semi-successful Superman Returns. McQuarrie went his own way, hoping to realize his dream project: bringing Alexander the Great to the screen. This turned into a long, frustrating odyssey that ended when Oliver Stone made his own much-mocked version with Colin Farrell. McQuarrie’s sole effort as a writer-director, The Way of the Gun, was released in 2000, but it was something of a disappointment, getting lost in the post-Tarantino crime wave. Since then, McQuarrie has worked as a script doctor (doing uncredited rewrites on the first X-Men, among others) and has been involved in a number of aborted projects, including a Bryan Singer remake of Logan’s Run, but he has a grand total of zero screen credits since 2000.

That’s finally about to change. Today McQuarrie’s name popped up in this AP story about yet another controversy surrounding the upcoming Tom Cruise film Valkyrie. It seems Slate has had to retract a claim that the film’s producers altered photographs of German officer Claus von Stauffenberg in order to make them more closely resemble Cruise. This claim turned out to be false, and commenting on the situation was one of Valkyrie’s producers – Christopher McQuarrie. Per the AP: “‘The picture United Artists used of Colonel Stauffenberg can be found all over the Internet,’ said Valkyrie co-writer and producer Chris McQuarrie in a written statement released by a United Artists spokeswoman Tuesday. McQuarrie, who won a screenplay Oscar in 1995 for The Usual Suspects, added that it would have been easier to ‘alter Tom Cruise’ than to doctor ‘every available picture of Claus von Stauffenberg.’”

Valkyrie is the first full-fledged reunion of Singer and McQuarrie since The Usual Suspects. The duo was also set to re-team for the Harvey Milk biopic The Mayor of Castro Street, but that was before Gus Van Sant went forward with Milk. McQuarrie’s next announced project as a writer-director is The Stanford Prison Experiment, based on the actual psychological study gone awry in 1971. Rumored cast members include Ryan Phillippe and Paul Dano, but given the bumps in the road McQuarrie has already hit, it’s best to take such information with a grain of salt.

Related:
Tom Cruise Career Downward Spiral Update
A Brief History of Milk

A Brief History of “Milk”

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 14:30:00 GMT

There have been some awkward moments lately for Craig Zadan and Neil Meron, who spent 16 years trying to bring an adaptation of Randy Shilts’ 1982 Harvey Milk biography The Mayor of Castro Street to the screen. There is indeed a Milk biopic set to hit theaters this fall, and Zadon and Meron “have fielded all sorts of congratulatory calls in recent months from people excited to hear that after years of struggle,” that film has finally been made.

But the problem is that film, directed by Gus Van Sant and starring Sean Penn, isn’t their film. According to the L.A. Times, “Zadan and Meron's project is dead in the water, beaten into production by the Van Sant film, which is due for release this fall from Focus Features. To add salt to the wound, several key people involved with Milk, including Van Sant, were once involved with Zadan and Meron's film.”

We’ve seen Hollywood release two near-simultaneous volcano movies and even two Truman Capote biopics within a few months of each other, but don’t count on history repeating in this case. Still, as Times writer Patrick Goldstein notes, “The movie may be dead, but it leaves a colorful corpse behind. During the project's odyssey, Zadan and Meron worked with an impressive set of filmmakers, including Bryan Singer, Van Sant and Oliver Stone, the last having spent a memorable evening with the producers visiting a string of gay bars in the Castro district. Over the years, a host of actors had shown interest in the project, including Robin Williams, Kevin Spacey, Daniel Day-Lewis, Kevin Kline, James Woods, Richard Gere and Steve Carell.”

It’s too bad the Stone version didn’t get made, if only because we’d love to see a DVD extra documenting his Castro tour. This happened before Stone completed JFK, a movie that didn’t exactly endear him to the gay community, “which was infuriated by the film's portrayal of several key assassination conspirators as debauched homosexuals. Never one to back away from a fight, Stone gave an incendiary interview to the gay and lesbian newsmagazine the Advocate, in which he compared Queer Nation to a Nazi group, saying ‘they work through intimidation and fear.’ ” Whoops! Stone then suggested that hey, maybe Gus Van Sant might be a better man for the job, and even though it worked out that way, Zadan and Meron were left behind.