The Screengrab : paranoid park

Set Your DVR: April 13 - 19, 2009

Hayden Childs — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 13:00:00 GMT

Yes, it's been a while since I've done one of these. Life is busy and these take a lot of research, y'know? But this week is full of great movies on cable, so I couldn't resist making a few recommendations. After all, if I can't share this stuff with Screengrab readers, who can I share it with?

Let's start with tonight! On Monday, April 13 at 10 pm eastern/9 pm central, TCM has The Grand Illusion, Jean Renoir's great movie about war and class and prejudice and sorrow and about a million other things. This is one of my all-time favorite movies, and I suspect it's the same for many of you.

I have nothing else this week until Friday, April 17. At 3 pm eastern/2 pm central and again at 6 pm eastern/5 pm central, Ovation is showing Living In Oblivion, a fun movie about the frustrations involved in making a bad movie. It stars Steve Buscemi and Catherine Keener, and features a showstopping tirade by Peter Dinklage. Ovation has a few problems when it shows movies - bleeped words and lots of commercials are the worst - but it also keeps the original screen aspect and goes out of its way to find quality programming, so there's that. Later, at 8 pm eastern/7 pm central, TCM is showing The Maltese Falcon, and there's rarely a good reason not to watch that. If, however, you'd rather take your murder with teenage ennui instead of hardboiled cynicism, IFC is showing Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park at 8:15 eastern/7:15 central. If you can't stand to miss either, IFC is showing it again at 1:30 am eastern/12:30 am central.

The next morning on Saturday, April 18 at 8 am eastern/7 am central, IFC has The Hidden Fortress, Akira Kurosawa's strangely familiar movie about a couple of bumbling peasants who get involved with a movement to shepherd a princess across enemy territory before the Evil Empire can discover the location of the hidden rebel base on the fourth moon of Yavin and... Wait, I got off track there somewhere. Anyway, it all takes place a long time ago in a country far, far away. See you next week!

The Best of 2008: Leonard Pierce's Picks for the Best Movies of the Year, Part Two

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 19:45:00 GMT

5. WALL*E (Andrew Stanton, dir.)

Pixar has been on such a roll of late that if they were a single director, they’d be getting mention in the same breath as the golden age greats. But they’re not; they’re an aggregate of many clever, talented folks who make computer-generated cartoons that are at least partly intended for children. I’m not going to argue that this isn’t sometimes a weakness; in WALL*E, the environmental message only seems fitting and appropriate because I happen to agree with it, and the crypto-Objectivism in The Incredibles only bothered me because I don’t. But regardless of the heavy-handedness of the moral, it can’t be denied that WALL*E is flat out the most wonderful film of the year, hopeful and funny and romantic and bittersweet all at the same time, and wrapped up in a package so beautiful to look at you wonder why anyone ever questions the potential of CGI. And if this astounding motion picture spawned an obnoxious marketing empire, one can only shake one’s head and say “Damn kids don’t know how good they’ve got it.”

4. RACHEL GETTING MARRIED (Jonathan Demme, dir.)

If you ever want to flummox a music critic, ask him to describe one of his favorite new bands without comparing them to another band. Of course, Rachel Getting Married proves that the same can occasionally be said for movie critics: it seems impossible to talk about without referencing something else. It’s got the dysfunctional family dynamics of Il y a Longtemps Que Je T’aime; the comeback-kid story of The Wrestler; the hateful-misanthrope-as-vehicle-for-joyous-redemption jawn of a Wes Anderson film (only better) and the structure and form of the late Robert Altman’s best work (only different). With all of these elements at play, though, it never seems derivative of anything else, only reminiscent in the best possible way. In the end, Rachel Getting Married is its own film, familiar yet new and impressive, and carried along by some of the finest acting of the year, most especially from Anne Hathaway and Bill Irwin.

3. CHE (Steven Soderbergh, dir.)

Steven Soderbergh keeps on making great movies, and never the same one twice. His latest is getting lots of what child care experts call “good attention” and “bad attention”; it’s certain that Soderbergh intended it that way, with its rigid formal structure, back-spasm-inducing length, difficult tonal shifts, and…oh, yeah, it’s a biopic about one of the most controversial figures of the 20th century. It’s just as hard to figure out how much of the negative reception is due to political and moral judgment of the revolutionary Che Guevara as it is to figure out how much of the positive reception comes from those who valorize him, but taken purely as a movie, Che is hard to beat: it’s formally daring, adventurously directed, risk-taking, well-made, and held together by a powerful performance that shows its subject neither as a heroic rebel or a vicious murderer, but simply as a man so consumed by his cause that he didn’t know what else to do than keep fighting for it.

2. WENDY AND LUCY (Kelly Reichardt, dir.)

There have been a number of exceptionally well-done documentaries in recent years about ordinary people dangling from the precipice of financial ruin in economically uncertain times, but successful narrative films dealing with the same subject have been few and far between. That’s largely because it’s hard to approach the topic in fiction without becoming didactic, maudlin, or treacly – and those challenges are certainly, and perilously, evident in Kelly Reichardt’s story about a young woman in brutally limited circumstances who loses her beloved dog while pursuing a slender chance at a decent job. But the miraculous thing about Wendy and Lucy is that it toes that line from its first frame to its last without ever tumbling down and making a mess of itself. That’s a testament to the top-notch script, the surprisingly deep direction, and the beautiful performance by lead actress Michelle Williams. No one could ever have predicted that an heir to the Italian neo-realist tradition would emerge in 2008 from America’s Pacific Northwest; that it happened is one of the year’s greatest surprises.

1. SYNECHDOCHE, NEW YORK (Charlie Kaufman, dir.)

There are so many things that could have gone wrong with Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut. I first heard him talk about his desire to direct way back in 2004, when I interviewed him for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and when Synechdoche, New York was finally announced, I was full of dread. The video stores of America are choked with mediocre-to-bad movies by talented writers who decided what they really wanted to do was direct. I needn’t have worried: Synechdoche, New York is easily my favorite film of the year. Kaufman approached directing with the same meticulous, self-searching approach that he does writing, and the result is nothing short of astounding. The best movies, for me, are the ones that seem to completely rewire my head – that are so profound and well-crafted that they redefine my basic approach to their subject, form or content. Charlie Kaufman accomplishes that his first time out of the gate, and that’s the mark of a major talent.

ALMOST MADE IT: The Strangers, Doubt, Iron Man, The Wrestler, Bigger Stronger Faster*.

DIDN'T SEE THEM: Entre les Murs (The Class), Standard Operating Procedure, Lat den Ratte Komme In (Let the Right One In), Dear Zachary: A Letter To His Son About His Father, Trouble the Water, Full Battle Rattle, Le Voyage du Ballon Rouge (Flight of the Red Balloon).

PERFORMANCES OF THE YEAR: Mickey Rourke, The Wrestler; Bill Irwin, Rachel Getting Married; Kristin Scott Thomas, Il y a Longtemps Que Je T'aime; Viola Davis, Doubt.

MADE IN 2007, BUT GREAT IN 2008: 4 Luni 3 Saptamani si 2 Zile (4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days); Paranoid Park; My Winnipeg; Une Vielle Maitress (The Last Mistress); Auf der Anderen Seite (The Edge of Heaven); Encounters at the End of the World; Chop Shop.

OVERRATED: Waltz with Bashir; In Bruges; Happy-Go-Lucky; Slumdog Millionaire; Kung Fu Panda.

Click for Part One

Set Your DVR! December 29, 2008 - January 5, 2009

Hayden Childs — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Ugh. The post-Xmas blues are coming on strong. Hell, let's drink to baby new year 2009 and get it over with! Here's the DVR-worthy scoop for the coming week. Times are Central/Eastern and overnight movies go with the previous day.

Monday, December 29:

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is all wacky postmodernism, while The Sweet Hereafter is quite the opposite. The Player is somewhere in-between, but a lot funnier.

1:30/2:30 pm: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead on IFC.
9/10 pm: The Sweet Hereafter on IFC.
11 pm/12 am: The Player on IFC.
3:05/4:05 am: The Sweet Hereafter on IFC.

Tuesday, December 30:

The penultimate day of 2008 is all about the past and the future! Ang Lee's Ride With The Devil is a topsy-turvy Civil War film, while Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch is not just the greatest Western, but the greatest film that this country has ever produced. CQ is about a lost young screenwriter in swinging Europe during the 60s making a Barbarella-like retro-future flick. Soylent Green is, uh, people. Heaven's Gate is an amazing, dull something.

4:30/5:30 pm: Ride With the Devil on AMC.
7/8 pm: The Wild Bunch on AMC.
7:30/8:30 pm: CQ on IFC.
9/10 pm: Soylent Green on TCM.
1/2 am: Heaven’s Gate on TCM.

Wednesday, December 31:

It's the last day of the year, spend the sober part of it with America's (fictionalized) history. Stagecoach, the film that Orson Welles studied to learn how to direct movies, is surprisingly claustrophobic, given that it was shot in Monument Valley, and one of the most influential films ever made. And of course you've seen the two Sergio Leone movies before, but there's never a bad reason to watch one of the Man With No Name films.

5/6 am: Stagecoach on TCM.
9/10 am: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly on AMC.
1/2 pm: A Fistful of Dollars on AMC.

Thursday, January 1:

If you find yourself up early (or late), The Coen Brother's gangster film Miller's Crossing is the best movie they've made. TCM has a Cary Grant film festival running during the day, with the screwball classics Bringing Up Baby, The Awful Truth, and It Happened One Night (there's others, too, but these are the best). In prime time, TCM is running the original King Kong, which is an awe-inspiring movie. And Reservoir Dogs is, of course, the movie that launched Madonna's career.

8:15/9:15 am: Miller’s Crossing on IFC.
10/11 am: Bringing Up Baby on TCM.
2:30/3:30 pm: Miller’s Crossing on IFC.
3:15/4:15 pm: The Awful Truth on TCM.
5/6 pm: It Happened One Night on TCM.
7/8 pm: King Kong (1933) on TCM.
9:15/10:15 pm: Reservoir Dogs on IFC.
2:35/3:35 am: Reservoir Dogs on IFC.

Friday, January 2:

While IFC has the weirdness of Blue Velvet, TCM is running a Randolph Scott film festival. The first two were directed by Budd Boetticher and are great, sometimes dark, versions of the classic Western style. I don't know anything about The Cariboo Trail. Western Union was directed by Fritz Lang. Excuse me, I mean Fritz "Kick Ass" Lang.

6:25/7:25 pm: Blue Velvet on IFC.
7/8 pm: The Tall T on TCM.
8:30/9:30 pm: Ride Lonesome on TCM.
10/11 pm: The Cariboo Trail on TCM.
11:30 pm/12:30 am: Western Union on TCM.
2:15/3:15 am: Blue Velvet on IFC.

Saturday, January 3:

Saturday doesn't have much. The 47 Ronin is the first part of an epic samurai tale. I'm guessing the second half will run the following Saturday. And Modern Times is the classic Chaplin film.

7/8 am: The 47 Ronin, Part I on IFC.
7/8 pm: Modern Times on TCM.

Sunday, January 4:

Burden of Dreams is the documentary about the ambitious dreamer Werner Herzog slowly going insane while trying to film Fitzcarraldo, a movie about an ambitious dreamer who slowly goes insane. Harlan County, USA is a documentary about a mining strike in Kentucky in the 70s. After watching this movie, you may join the IWW. And Paranoid Park is Gus Van Sant's 2008 film about skateboarders and murder. It's in the vein of his Death Trilogy rather than his more conventional style, and it's topping many Best Of 2008 lists.

7/8 am: Burden of Dreams on IFC.
8:45/9:45 am Harlan County, USA on IFC.
12:05/1:05 pm: Burden of Dreams on IFC.
5:30/6:30 pm: Paranoid Park on IFC.

Monday, January 5:

Back to the grindstone again! In this case, the grindstone will be played by Andrei Tarkovsky's experimental film Solaris and Michael Winterbottom's trippy history of Tony Wilson and the Manchester scene, 24 Hour Party People.

1:35/2:35 pm: Solaris on IFC.
4:30/5:30 pm: 24 Hour Party People on IFC.

2008 in Review: Paul Clark's Favorite Movie Moments

Paul Clark — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Starting tomorrow, the writers of Screengrab will be unveiling their lists of the top 10 films of 2008. But before that begins, I’d like to post a different sort of list of highlights from the past year. For those of you who’ve only started reading recently, I used to write a bi-weekly column called “The Movie Moment,” in which I’d explore in depth some of my favorite scenes from movies both old and new. This past spring, I had to put the column on indefinite hiatus for various reasons, but I wanted to bring it back for this week only so I could celebrate some of my favorite Movie Moments of 2008. However, I had such a devil of time trying to narrow down my list that I’ve decided to simply list all of the moments that made me laugh out loud, cry like a baby, bite my nails uncontrollably, or which otherwise rocked my world this past year. This list is by no means meant to be taken as comprehensive, but merely were the moments which readily sprang to mind while I was writing the piece. So without further ado, I give you…

2008: The Year in Movie Moments:

(in no particular order)

The little boy’s confession notes- In Bruges

“No-no-no. I kill the bus driver.” - The Dark Knight

The security guard makes his rounds - Man on Wire

Sidney’s musical vows - Rachel Getting Married

The kiss that launched a thousand lens flares - Silent Light (only one of several transcendent moments in the film- the swimming-hole scene or the epic rainstorm might just as easily have qualified)

Mike’s late-night visit (or really, anytime Merle Haggard’s “Mama Tried” is played) - The Strangers

Peekaboo nudity - The Romance of Astrea and Celadon

Harry unveils the machine - Burn After Reading (honestly, who could possibly enjoy THAT?)

Madame Gaudens’ confession - A Girl Cut in Two

Incident at the race track - My Winnipeg

Most hilarious random line of the year: “When it comes to women, you’re Michael Jordan. I’m… Bill Laimbeer.” - Baghead

The new army suits up for battle - Role Models

Alex takes a shower - Paranoid Park

Brandi forgets her cell phone - Stuck

Black Kold Medina puts on a show - Trouble the Water

Runaway penguin - Encounters at the End of the World

Jung-rae Kim diagrams his neuroses - Woman on the Beach

Alex’s sex surprise, both inevitable and strangely erotic - XXY

The director’s big exit - Tropic Thunder

Most unlikely tearjerking moment of the year: Fred Knittle sings “Fix You”, Young@Heart

Three-way fist fight: Seth Rogen vs. James Franco vs. Danny McBride - Pineapple Express

The Richard McGuire segment - Fear(s) of the Dark

Ninjas! - In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale (yes, really)

And finally, my five favorite openings and finales of the year:

Perfect openings: “Put on Your Sunday Clothes”, WALL*E; Sunrise, Silent Light; The piano, The Silence Before Bach; The Jean-Claude Van Damme Stunt Spectacular, JCVD; The Legend of Po, Kung Fu Panda

Great final scenes (no spoilers): Synecdoche, New York, The Duchess of Langeais, Shine a Light, The Visitor, Burn After Reading

I would invite all of you to share some of your favorites in the comments section. After all, I’m surely missing at least a couple of really good ones.

Thursday Poll for December 11, 2008

Paul Clark — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Last week, the Thursday Poll took a look back at the recent films of Gus Van Sant to commemorate with the release of his latest film, Milk. In the process we made one unmistakable discovery- you folks like your Van Sant movie arty. To wit: of Van Sant’s last five movies, your favorite (and mine too) was 2002’s minimalist slackers-in-the-desert saga Gerry, which simultaneously won the week and conquered Thebes with a 44% showing. In our closest showing in a while, Van Sant’s Cannes prizewinner Elephant finished with a strong 38%, followed by Last Days with 13% and the sadly underrated Paranoid Park with 6%. And while awards-giving bodies will no doubt show plenty of love for Milk, its more mainstream style didn’t make much of an impact with our readers, garnering not a single vote. But hey, it’s better than Finding Forrester, right?

This week, in conjunction with the upcoming release of Frost/Nixon, the latest bit of middlebrow Oscar-bait from the guy who narrated Arrested Development (the best thing he ever did, by the way), we take a look at the varied cinematic portrayals of the Trickiest Dick to ever inhabit the White House. So, who’s your favorite big-screen Nixon?

Who's your favorite big-screen Nixon? | BuzzDash polls

As always, the comments section is open. We'll see you next week, provided nobody Gerries the rendezvous. Don't forget your shirt-basket!

Take Five: Van Sant

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 21:30:00 GMT

Gus Van Sant is certainly one of the most curious figures in contemporary American cinema. He pioneered a very specific breed of indie filmmaking before it even had a name, but his forays into mainstream cinema have alternated between clever successes and embarrassing failures. He gives some of the oddest interviews in Hollywood (compared to him, David Lynch is a downright pedestrian chit-chatter), and he's as dedicated to constant reinvention -- or at least refinement -- as anyone in the industry. And his career would seem downright schizophrenic if it weren't so marked by intensely personal qualities; he's done everything from big, Oscar-baiting biopics (such as Milk, his take on the rise and demise of openly gay San Francisco politician Harvey Milk) to small, artsy, improvised tales with almost no commercial potential. He's equally capable of having his characters spout unadulterated Shakespeare and having them say nothing at all for endless minutes of screen time, and make both choices seem perfectly natural. He has a curiously critical eye towards his own work -- that is to say, it's not curious that he is self-critical, but rather it's curious how much he talks like a film critic; many of his longer discussions with journalists have sounded more like a well-informed film critic discussing Gus Van Sant's work than it does a director talking about himself. His stabs at mainstream credibility have yielded decidedly mixed results; his successes have been noteworthy (see below), but his failures, especially flattened-out duds like Finding Forrester and Good Will Hunting, and an utterly pointless remake of Psycho, have been spectacular. Through it all, he's remained one of the film industry's hardest men to figure out, but it seems no one ever tires of watching what his next move will be. Here's five of our favorites by the Prince of Portland.

MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO (1991)

Mala Noche was the movie that made the underground sit up and take notice of Gus Van Sant's talent; Drugstore Cowboy won over the burgeoning indie world and made him a critic's darling. But the daring, explosively risky My Own Private Idaho was the movie that convinced me that I was seeing the work of an American genius in the making. The story of two sad, sincere male hustlers (played by River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves), it blended elements of Shakespearean drama, class warfare, transgressive queen cinema, and pure street poetry in a way that so clearly shouldn't have worked that it's downright amazing how well it did. Van Sant crammed the movie with real characters from his beloved Portland and made an intensely personal film that nonetheless hit everyone who saw it right where they lived.

TO DIE FOR (1995)

Gus Van Sant's first stab at commercial credibility was Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, which, despite a plethora of good intentions, was his first major dud. In fact, its ineptness in spite of itself might be noted as a pattern that the director would follow in much of his mainstream work, if it wasn't for the existence of his follow-up film, To Die For. Working from Buck Henry's sharpest, nastiest script in decades, Van Sant directs a movie that almost invisibly echoes some of the themes of his previous work, especially in those scenes featuring lovestruck, dimwitted local teen Joaquin Phoenix and his crew. Van Sant rarely overreaches, and manages to let the black comedic tone of the script do its work; his greatest accomplishment is to get a truly memorable performance out of Nicole Kidman, who's better here than she would be again for some time.

GERRY (2002)

In 2002, Van Sant was on the tail end of a bad time. Hollywood hadn't been good to him over the previous half-decade, but to be fair, he hadn't been very good to it, either, with Good Will Hunting, Psycho and Finding Forrester gunking up his resume. Returning to his strange interiors for another shot at indie filmmaking, he released the first of his "Death Trilogy", the underrated Gerry, and a lot of critics were ready to call it his fourth disaster in a row: it's static to the point of tedium, its improvised dialogue (by two actors not especially beloved by highbrow reviewers) was sometimes silly and sometimes impenetrable, and it had nothing resembling a plot. But Gerry was a quiet triumph, a movie that builds almost unnoticably and marks a return to greatness by a director who can do very much with very little.

ELEPHANT (2003)

Van Sant followed up the surprising and effective Gerry with the triumphant Elephant, the best film of 2003. The second of his death trilogy takes an almost transcendently naturalistic look at a small high school on the day of a Columbine-style murder spree; the dialogue, again largely improvised, and the endless, unintrusive tracking shots make Elephant a brilliant contradiction: a movie so banal that it's almost mystical. Through the whole event, from boring ordinariness to life-shattering violence, Van Sant's particular genius is to steadfastly refuse to lead the viewers to anything resembling an explanation for the horror. Forcing us to view everything from the eyes of those who don't understand why they have to die, Elephant reflects our own maddening desire to have random violence made explicable -- and the world's refusal to comply.

PARANOID PARK (2007)

A strangely stirring and deeply affecting film, 2007's Paranoid Park -- based largely on a successful young adult novel -- finds Gus Van Sant returning to Portland and making a key transition from the relentlessly bleak indie sensibilities of the Death Trilogy to the artsy mainstream appeal of Milk. Once again trusting an amateur cast (many of whom were recruited off of MySpace) and a good deal of improvised dialogue to carry the tone of the film, Van Sant also lays in a heavy, dark directorial touch that nails the mood of the story perfectly. He's greatly aided in this attempt by the gorgeous cinematography by Wong Kar-Wai's cameraman, Christopher Doyle, and the Zoo-York-clad Gabe Nevins as the affectless skateboarding protagonist. Paranoid Park is a perfect bridge between To Die For and Elephant.

Related Posts:

Screengrab Review: Milk

Gus Van Sant and Paranoid Park: 'It's the End of a Certain Way I Was Making Films'

DVD Digest for October 7, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 14:00:00 GMT

It’s a massive week for classic films, and a surprisingly good one for new releases too, once you get past the big Hollywood titles…

DVD of the Week: There was no small amount of competition for this spot, not merely because of the jaw-dropping number of classic titles being release but also due to one of TV’s best sitcoms seeing its most recent season bow on DVD store shelves. But with all the great stuff that’s hitting stores this week, to my eyes there was only one logical choice- Universal’s Touch of Evil 50th Anniversary Edition. It would be one thing if this DVD was simply a cash-in, a new pressing of the previously released 1998 cut of the film. But joining the “restored” version of the film are both the original theatrical cut and an additional “preview version”, both of which are being released on DVD for the first time. In addition, there are plenty of extras both old and new, including commentary tracks to correspond with each of the three available versions of the movie. What more could a Touch of Evil fan ask for? How about a reproduction of the legendary Orson Welles memo that led to the 1998 restoration? Yep, that’s in here too. I don’t normally double-dip my DVDs, but I’m definitely going to make the upgrade this time.

But wait, there’s more! Disney is releasing a 2-disc “Platinum Edition” of their 1959 classic Sleeping Beauty, packed with plenty of extras for both family audiences and animation buffs. Criterion is releasing two more films from the French master of crime dramas, Jean-Pierre Melville- Le Doulos (starring Jean-Paul Belmondo) and Le Deuxieme Souffle (with Lino Ventura). There are new 2-disc special editions of three of Hitchcock’s most iconic classics- Psycho, Rear Window, and Vertigo (all Universal). And Ray Harryhausen is representin’ here too, with a new DVD of The 7th Voyage of Sinbad 50th Anniversary Edition (Sony, also Blu-Ray), plus the Ray Harryhausen Giftset (Sony, also Blu-Ray), which includes previously-released editions of 20 Million Miles to Earth, It Came From Beneath the Sea, and Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, plus collectible Ymir figurine.

Also, like musicals? Then pick up Fox’s The Alice Faye Collection Volume 2, which contains Hollywood Cavalcade, The Great American Broadcast, Four Jills in a Jeep, Rose of Washington Square, and Hello, Frisco, Hello (also available separately). And with the winter months coming sooner than you’d think, you can start traveling in the comfort of your own home with The Michael Palin Collection (Warner), which collects the amiable Python’s adventures Around the World in 80 Days, Pole to Pole, Full Circle, Hemingway Adventure, Great Railways Journeys, Sahara and Himalaya into one handy box set. Finally, Warner is releasing two very different classic titles, The Picture of Dorian Gray and the Watership Down Deluxe Edition. So yeah, something for everyone.

But wait, there’s more! Two of my favorite films from the first half of 2008 are hitting the streets today- Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park (Genius Productions) and Stuart Gordon’s Stuck (Image Entertainment). And two other acclaimed indies are getting released as well, The Visitor (Anchor Bay, also Blu-Ray) starring Screengrab fave Richard Jenkins, and Boy A (Genius Productions). And, oh yeah… The Happening (Fox, also Blu-Ray) and You Don’t Mess With the Zohan (Sony, also Blu-Ray). Although I’m not sure I want to know anybody who’d buy these instead of any of the aforementioned classics.

This week’s TV on DVD release is 30 Rock Season 2 (Universal), which finds Liz, Jack, Tracy, Kenneth the Page, and the rest of the TGS gang taking a trip to MILF Island, among other misadventures. Also this week: Brotherhood Season 2 (Paramount), How I Met Your Mother Season 3 (Fox), and The Simpsons Season 11 (Fox).

Finally, this week’s Halloween-heavy Blu-Ray only releases include: The Amityville Horror (MGM), Beetlejuice 20th Anniversary Deluxe Edition (Warner), Body Heat (Warner), Young Frankenstein (Fox), Carrie (MGM), and Otis (Warner). No word on whether Carré Otis is somehow involved.

Half Measures: Paul Clark's Favorites of the First Half of '08

Paul Clark — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Last week, Screengrab’s Andrew Osborne shared with you his favorite movies from the second quarter of 2008, so I figured that I might as well get in on the act as well. Unlike Andrew, I’ll be writing about my favorite releases dating back to the beginning of the year, mostly because I didn’t write one of these back in April. But I’d like to concur with Andrew’s statement that the moviegoing year, like so many others, started slowly but quickly improved in quality as it continued, with both big-budget blockbusters and limited-release arthouse fare making strong showings thusfar.

My top five:

1. The Duchess of Langeais- had Jacques Rivette not made a film called L’Amour Fou forty years ago, he very well might have given his most recent film that title. Based on a novel by Balzac, Duchess often plays like a mirror image of The Age of Innocence- only this time, the knowledge (and flouting) of propriety only serves to drive an emotional wedge between the two lovers. The Duchess (Jeanne Balibar) and her officer (Guillaume Depardieu) must play games with each other in lieu of an actual relationship, and almost imperceptibly their innocent courtship spirals out of their control. All the while, Rivette’s formal boldness remains intact, resulting in his best film in over a decade- no mean feat for a master of Rivette’s standing.

2. WALL*E- speaking of masters, was anyone really surprised that Pixar’s latest turned out as wonderful as it did? In perhaps their most experimental gambit to date, much of WALL *E is practically dialogue-free, as director Andrew Stanton and his team make most of their points visually. And what visuals! So beautifully-rendered is the dusty Earth future of the film’s first half that the more traditionally eye-popping second half (with its interstellar mega-mall) looks almost chintzy by comparison, like all the life and heart was drained from it. Which is of course the point, as WALL*E’s message isn’t so much anti-corporate as anti-complacency, celebrating the industriousness and determination of its robotic protagonist while despairing of those who would content themselves with having their decisions made and lives lived for them.

3. Stuck- like The Duchess of Langeais, Stuart Gordon’s latest film tells the story of a man and a woman locked in a tragic, fateful duet. The difference is that this one is about a guy who gets stuck in a windshield. There’s nothing pretty about Stuck, from Gordon’s grimy visuals and grayish color palette to the behavior his film portrays, as the film’s anti-heroine (played by Mena Suvari) hides the accident victim (Stephen Rea) in her garage rather than risk jeopardizing the insignificant promotion she supposedly has coming to her. Stuck is a film born of its working-class setting, in which the poor fight over the scraps the rich give them, with little regard for the lives of those who get in their way. It’s ugly, harrowing stuff, but it’s also thrilling like the best exploitation films are, and Stuck is one of the best movies of this kind to come along in ages.

4. Paranoid Park- for years, Gus Van Sant has specialized in films about outsiders, but this is the closest he’s come thusfar to seeing the world through an outsider’s eyes. Much of the credit goes to the subjectivity inherent in Van Sant’s favored style, which he perfects with this film, as he follows a marginalized teenager (newcomer Gabe Nevins) who views his world- his parents, his peers, his girlfriend- from a distance, even before the killing he may or may not have been responsible for causes him to sever emotional ties from them altogether. He would sooner escape into his own mind as find a place for himself in this world, a point Van Sant makes most vivid in the scene where the protagonist takes a shower as the soundtrack becomes overrun with rainforest sounds. Simultaneously nightmarish and poetic, Paranoid Park is a major work by a filmmaker who remains as experimental as ever.

5. Speed Racer- yes, really. I sort of wonder if the overwhelming critical drubbing that was afforded the Wachowski Brothers’ adaptation of the animated series was due to the directors’ key inspirations- comic books, video games, Saturday morning cartoons- not being part of the critics’ pasts. Granted, I too was skeptical about the film going in, but it didn’t take long for it to win me over. I’ll be damned if I can find a subtext, but with its dazzling array of eye-popping colors, deliberately unrealistic effects, and snazzy edits (Ang Lee could take a lesson in the latter from the Wachowskis), that scarcely matters. The racetrack scenes alone gave me that rush that all big summer movies promise but which few deliver, playing like the Day-glo daydream of a Pixie Stick-fueled kid racing and smashing up Matchbox cars. Plus there are ninjas, and as any young boy can tell you, ninjas make every movie better.

Indie Box-Office Roundup: Weekend of March 7-9, 2008

Paul Clark — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Note: Due to a delay on the part of IndieWire's Box Office Charts, I was unable to post this until today. So for all of you who were hoping to read this week's Roundup over a mid-morning snack (hi Mom!), I'm truly sorry. I'll do my best to post on time in the future.

In a busy weekend for specialty releases, Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park came out on top, with an impressive per-screen average of $14,914 on two screens. The IFC Films release, which debuted at Cannes last year, led a weekend that saw eleven new arthouse releases plus a number of strong holdovers from previous weeks. According to Mark Boxer, IFC's VP of Sales and Distribution, "The audience for the film consisted of Gus Van Sant fans and a strong turnout from the youthful/skateboarding community. The reviews for the film have been very strong from New York and the film will roll out to the top fifteen markets within the next two weeks."

Holding steady at #2 was last weekend's champion, Ramin Bahrani's Chop Shop (Koch Lorber), which in its single-screen engagement dropped only 5% from last weekend's take. Debuting strongly at #3 was David Gordon Green's Snow Angels (Warner Independent), with another debut, Ira Sachs' Married Life (Sony Pictures Classics), coming in at #5. Rounding out the top five was the Oscar-winner for Best Foreign-Language Film, The Counterfeiters (Sony Pictures Classics).

Also of note was #7 finisher Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day (Focus Features), which was the weekend's highest-averaging release playing on more than 500 screens. Mostly middling reviews couldn't scare away crowds who were no doubt jonesing for more Amy Adams cuteness in a slightly more adult context. Meanwhile, The Duchess of Langeais fell to #9 (sigh) and longtime list mainstays The Band's Visit (Sony) and In Bruges (Focus) dropped off entirely.

Finally, I feel like I ought to mention this week's #10 film by a nose, the documentary Fighting For Life. I mention it not because I've seen it or even because I've heard anything about it, but because its distributor (Truly Indie) would no doubt like me to believe it's the only movie that truly belongs on this list, much like this week's #8 film would like to remind me that girls do indeed rock.

These are the jokes, people.

Top 10, Weekend of March 7-9:
1. Paranoid Park [IFC Films] ($14,914 per screen)
2. Chop Shop [Koch Lorber Films] ($7,944)
3. Snow Angels [Warner Independent Pictures] ($7,124)
4. The Counterfeiters [Sony Pictures Classics] ($6,820)
5. Married Life [Sony Pictures Classics] ($6,206)
6. Blindsight [Spark Entertainment] ($5,279)
7. Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day [Focus Features] ($4,656)
8. Girls Rock! [Shadow Distribution] ($4,246)
9. The Duchess Of Langeais [IFC Films] ($3,723)
10. Fighting For Life [Truly Indie] ($3,423)

Source: IndieWire.

Gus Van Sant and "Paranoid Park": "It's the End of a Certain Way I Was Making Films"

Phil Nugent — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Sam Adams writes in The Los Angeles Times that Gus Van Sant sees his new film, Paranoid Park, as "a transitional film, moving him once again toward the mainstream." The first thing to say about this is that, compared to the so-called "Death Trilogy" of films that Van Sant has made since 2002 (Gerry, Elephant, and Last Days) while under the influence of director Bela Tarr, he may be right. The second thing is that Van Sant's notion of the mainstream and Michael Bay's may barely be on speaking terms. It's not clear that it has all that much in common with the Van Sant of Good Will Hunting or Finding Forrester, either. The new movie differs from his other recent work in that it had an honest-to-goodness script (based on Blake Nelson's young adult novel). But as Mike D'Angelo noted here recently, it has many of the trademarks of Van Sant's forays into experimental filmmaking: nonlinear storytelling, long, long takes, even oddball music choices. The teenage skateboarder hero, who is carrying a secret that's killing him inside, strolls down a high school corridor on his way to a sit-down meeting with a police detective as Billy Swan's lovably woozy "I Can Help" ("It would sure do me good/ To do you good") wobbles on the soundtrack.

Back in the late 1980s, Mala Noche and Drugstore Cowboy made Van Sant the great hope of the indie movement before the movement itself really had a star system and an identity. After the ambitious My Own Private Idaho, his adaptation of Tom Robbins's Even Cowgirls Get the Blues turned out to be the kind of disastrous conflagration that can turn a filmmaker's reputation to ash in one puff. Even those who thought the director needed to re-invent himself were surprised at how thoroughly he dug in as a Hollywood pro, first with the commercial-indie black comedy To Die For and then with Good Will Hunting and Finding Forrester. If Van Sant sees these kinds of films as marking distinct stages in his career — he has said that with the Death Trilogy and Paranoid Park he has reached "the end of a certain way I was making films" — he's always worked hard at doing the best job he can and is fluid in his notions of what collaborators belong on which projects. Harris Savides, his cinematographer on Gerry, Elephant, and Last Days, first teamed up with him on Finding Forrester. Now they're working together on his next movie, Milk, starring Sean Penn as the martyred, openly gay San Francisco politician Harvey Milk, a large-scale period drama that will give the director the chance to recreate San Francisco in the 1970s, in the first full glow of gay liberation — what Van Sant himself describes as "the creation of a gay class of people, from nothing, or from a subclass that was below the surface." The new project, the realization of a long term dream of Van Sant's, returns him to the general subject of Elephant, et al. — death in the public sphere — with a "more conventional" storytelling approach, but for Van Sant, conventionality remains something with which he has to make his uneasy peace. "You can never really get there," he says of such concepts as "the real" Harvey Milk, "So you might as well have an analogy rather than a biographical depiction."

Screengrab Review: Paranoid Park

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

Review by Mike D'Angelo.

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

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

Trailer Review: Paranoid Park

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

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