The Screengrab : quentin tarantino

Screengrab’s Five to Watch at Cannes

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 13 May 2009 17:00:00 GMT

Greetings from the Croisette on the beautiful French Riviera! The entire Screengrab gang has convened over croissants and café au lait at Le Grande Bleu, and we’re hashing over our picks to click for the fabulous festival kicking off with tonight’s screening of the opening night film, Up. Wait until the crew back at Nerve headquarters gets a look at these expense reports!

OK, so we’re not actually in France. But why should a little technicality like that prevent us from bringing you the best in Cannes coverage? Or at least linking to the best in Cannes coverage, which we’ll do when we launch our daily Cannes Roundup tomorrow. For now, here’s a look at five movies I’d be sure to check out if I actually were on the Riviera instead of sitting at my desk in my underwear.

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS

Maybe Death Proof wasn’t all you dreamed it would be, and Brad Pitt’s cracker accent may not fill you with all the confidence in the world, and it’s just possible I’m describing myself here. Still, I have enough good will stored up for Quentin Tarantino as a filmmaker (if not as a personality) that I can’t help but be excited for his World War II epic, bad spelling and all.

TAKING WOODSTOCK

“It’s 1969, and Elliot Tiber, a down-on-his-luck interior designer in Greenwich Village, New York, has to move back upstate to help his parents run their dilapidated Catskills motel, the El Monaco…When Elliot hears that a neighbouring town has pulled the permit on a hippie music festival, he calls the producers, thinking he could drum up some much needed business for the motel.” Ang Lee’s take on the ‘70s (The Ice Storm) worked out pretty well, so let’s see what he can do with the ‘60s.

THE IMAGINARIUM OF DOCTOR PARNASSUS

Granted, Terry Gilliam’s track record of late has not been stellar. He couldn’t get Don Quixote off the ground, The Brothers Grimm was underwhelming, and I already regret leaving Tideland off my top ten list of the worst movies ever. But judging from the brief clips above, Imaginarium has more of an early Gilliam feel, and the curiosity factor of Heath Ledger’s last ever (partial) performance is definitely a draw. Plus: Tom Waits as the Devil!

PANIQUE AU VILLAGE (A TOWN CALLED PANIC)

I’d never heard of this Belgian film before this morning, but the description certainly intrigues. “Animated plastic toys like Cowboy, Indian and Horse have problems, too. Cowboy and Indian's plan to surprise Horse with a homemade birthday gift backfires when they destroy his house instead. Surreal adventures take over as the trio travel to the center of the earth, trek across frozen tundra and discover a parallel underwater universe where pointy-headed (and dishonest!) creatures live. Each speedy character is voiced -- and animated -- as if their very air contains both amphetamines and laughing gas.”

ANTICHRIST

“A grieving couple retreat to ’Eden’, their isolated cabin in the woods, where they hope to repair their broken hearts and troubled marriage. But nature takes its course and things go from bad to worse...” Hey, I’m always up for a good ol’ scary cabin-in-the-woods movie, and with Lars Von Trier at the helm, this one is sure to either terrify or infuriate – or more likely, both.

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

Quentin Tarantino: The Emperor's New Pumps

Phil Nugent — Thu, 07 May 2009 15:00:00 GMT

The media buildup to the arrival of the new Tarantino movie with the silly fucking goddamn title is well under way, and in your more fashionable quarters, it's taking the form of a buildup to see if the story of how QT Lost His Way gets extended by another chapter. "When Quentin Tarantino climbs the steps of the Grand Palais for the world premiere of his new movie at this month's Cannes Film Festival," Ryan Gilbey writes, "he may feel like he's coming home. It was in Cannes 15 years ago that he received the Palme d'Or for Pulp Fiction. Even those among us who believe it to be a film of moments, as opposed to a momentous film, will concede that it had a seismic effect on what followed... This year, Tarantino is back in Cannes with Inglourious Basterds, not merely a title destined to have "sic" printed after it wherever it is mentioned, but a spaghetti western draped in a Second World War greatcoat...A lot has changed since Pulp Fiction. The former enfant terrible has just turned 46; the films on which his reputation is founded are some distance behind him. Those who marvelled at the assurance and aplomb of Tarantino's 1992 debut, the slippery heist thriller Reservoir Dogs or the unexpected warmth and wisdom of the 1997 Jackie Brown may then be wary of Inglourious Basterds, with its early signs that the director is wading even further into the B-movie hinterlands of his most recent work."

News flash: Tarantino is never going to be able to follow up Pulp Fiction. That isn't meant as a harsh judgement on his gifts or a dismissal of the movies he's made since--I happen to like Kill Bill and Death Proof more than Gilbey, and more than most of my Screengrab brethren. And a lot of people love Jackie Brown more than Tarantino will publicly admit to; arguably his best film, it was also the one that made it clear that every time he cranks out another movie, it will be judged to have fallen short by the only standard the media has for judging a new Tarantino movie: is it Pulp Fiction all over again? Does it rewrite the rule book for "indie" cinema, in terms of how much fun it can be and how far its appeal can extend? At the time, Pulp Fiction was both a surprise and, because of Reservoir Dogs (a festival circuit legend that didn't actually set box offices on fire in its commercial release) and the stories about the director that were kept circulating as other filmmakers made movies based on his early scripts (True Romance, Natural Born Killers), a premature career summing-up. in the fifteen years since, I think that Tarantino has proven that he can make other good movies. What he hasn't managed to do, and what nobody should have expected from him, has been to rewrite the rule book twice.

"The weight of expectation resting on Pulp Fiction was immense," writes Gilbey, "and even the ease with which it surpassed hopes - raking in $250m worldwide and cleaning up at awards ceremonies - hardly indicated what was in store for Tarantino. It is no exaggeration to say that, for the first time since Scorsese, a director was enjoying something like rock star status." He also quotes a line from Tarantino about his early career--"I would have died for Reservoir Dogs. I would have died getting a shot for Pulp Fiction. I don't know if I would have died, would have thrown myself into that kind of harm's way, for Jackie Brown, and that scared me a little bit."--and adds, "How peculiar that of all his films he feels so divorced from Jackie Brown, with its emotional plausibility and understated melancholy." Is it really, though, consider the way the media built Jackie Brown up as Pulp Fiction II and then walked away from it yawning, muttering that it didn't have quite the same adrenaline rush? It's easy to say that Tarantino should have been savvy enough to have known that, after everyone has written the story "New Whiz Kid Hits Town", the obvious next step is to write, "Whiz Kid Loses It", but you turn a high school dropout and video store clerk into a rock star and then jeer at him at your own peril. When the Cannes premiere arrives, will the little bastard bring to your knees with awe and admiration, or by making you feel that he's beaned you with a rock? Stay tuned.

Jim Jarmusch Prefers Pears to Plot

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 19:00:00 GMT

Our own Nick Schager has already weighed in on the latest Jim Jarmusch film, The Limits of Control, finding it more a test of patience than an exciting genre piece, and it doesn’t sound like Jarmusch himself would disagree. “This film is about the trip,” Jarmusch tells Logan Hill of Vulture. “I’m more interested in the plate of pears on the table than the plot payoff. Neruda, he wrote all these odes to ordinary objects, like ‘Ode to an Artichoke.’ And they are incredibly beautiful poems.”

Neruda isn’t the first name Jarmusch drops in the interview, and it’s not the last. His movie’s title is taken from a William S. Burroughs essay (“It’s about language being used as a mechanism of control, but I like the double meaning. Does that mean the limits of our own self-control, or the limits to which people control us?”), it begins with a quote from Rimbaud (“The poem, “The Drunken Boat,” is about the derangement of the senses. He’s starting a very strange adventure of his consciousness, and the film does that, too.”) and was inspired by John Boorman’s Point Blank (“I’m a huge fan of Lee Marvin and Angie Dickinson, and it’s one of John Boorman’s strongest films—a masterpiece, I think.”)

But that’s not all! Jarmusch also finds the time to mention Oscar Wilde, Charles Willeford, James Cain and Isaach De Bankolé. I don’t even know who that is, but he apparently owns a cool iridescent gangster suit, so he must be worthy. I’m not sure if Jarmusch intends to come off like a Quentin Tarantino who went to grad school, but I won’t hold it against him. At least, not until I see The Limits of Control.

Related:
OST: "Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai"
When Good Directors Go Bad: "The Year of the Horse"

Tim Roth's Good Old Days

Phil Nugent — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 16:00:00 GMT

"I can't believe I even did shit like this back then." That's Tim Roth, talking to John Patterson of The Guardian about how he got his breaktrhough role as Trevor the skinhead in Alan Clarke's Made in Britain. "For the final audition - which I think was in front of the producer, the writer David Leland, and Alan - I turned up early on purpose. I came in and I told 'em, 'When you need me I'll be in the park across the way,' knowing full well they'd be watching me through the window. And I did some, you know, character work in the park. And luckily a friend of mine turned up who was in a band called King Kurt. And he has this fucking huge mohawk and I'm bald and we started mock-fighting and he's making a peacock noise - and then the police turned up and got involved - and Alan and his lot are all watching me out the window. And then I went in and did a reading; but by then it was more of a formality than anything else."

Having made his bones with Clarke, and gone on to do memorable work with such directors as Mike Leigh (Meantime), Stephen Frears (The Hit), Chris Menges (A World Apart), Peter Greenaway (The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover), Robert Altman (Vincent & Theo, where his performance as Van Gogh inspired Pauline Kael to describe his acting, admiringly, as "a form of kinetic discharge"), Quentin Tarantino (Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction), James Gray (Little Odessa), and Woody Allen (Everyone Says I Love You), Roth is currently starring in the Fox TV series Lie to Me, a transparent attempt by the network to find another overqualified, sardonic Brit to build a hit around before Hugh Laurie plows his motorcycle under a truck. Under these circumstances, it may be no surprise that Roth seems to have latched onto this interview as an excuse to tell all his best stories to someone who might have trouble comprehending his accent. Roth has actually done a lot of work in American movies: "Gary Oldman came to the States to do State Of Grace and he built the bridge for a lot of us who came after. Then I came out and I thought at the time it would be better to keep playing Americans because the casting directors mostly didn't know who the fuck I was; they thought I was American!"

However, his image here is that of indie guy, thanks to his having done so much of his best work in films like Tarantino's or the sadly neglected black comedy Gridlock'd, which may perhaps have suffered from audience's reluctance to laugh at a film about a couple of junkies when one of them was played by Tupac Shakur, who did not survive to see the premiere. On Reservoir Dogs, Roth recalls, ""My agent had me look at Mr Blonde or Mr Pink. I said, 'No, I like Orange.' Because I liked the idea of an Englishman playing an American, playing a cop, pretending to be a bad guy. Complete deception through and through! And I remember walking back to the trailer with Harvey Keitel one day, us both covered in blood, and saying, 'I think this might be pretty good.'" As for Tupac, "He was a natural. A really good actor. I didn't even know who he was then, which is fucking typical of me, but I didn't. [He was] charismatic, funny, and incredibly articulate. We became very good mates. In fact, somewhere in the vaults of Death Row Records, there's a tape of me and Tupac rapping, which is hilarious." We'll see how funny he thinks it is when someone does the right thing and puts them on eBay.

Roth himself made an impressive directing debut ten years ago with the harrowing family drama The War Zone. He still hasn't had the chance to follow it up, but if Lie to Me hangs around for awhile, the chance to store up his TV money might make for a way back to that. "I learned most about directing from the bad directors I've worked with," he says, "because you're better off knowing what not to do"

Morning Deal Report: Basterds Bound for Cannes

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 14:00:00 GMT

Quentin Tarantino’s long-awaited World War II epic Inglourious Basterds will have its world premiere at Cannes next month. “The Brad Pitt starrer, set in Nazi-occupied France, has been invited to play in competition at the Cannes Film Festival,” Variety reports. “Insiders said Tarantino, a longtime favorite of the French, has accepted the offer and has told the film's backers -- the Weinstein Co. and Universal Pictures -- that the pic will be ready for its world premiere during the May fest. The movie, which follows a band of Jewish-American soldiers whose mission is to take down a group of Nazis, will bow Aug. 21.”

Ellen Page, Marion Cotillard and Cillian Murphy are all in talks to join Leonardo DiCaprio in Christopher Nolan’s latest, Inception. “DiCaprio's character is mentioned as a CEO-type, while Cotillard would play his wife. Page is a young college grad student and DiCaprio's sidekick,” per The Hollywood Reporter. Inception is the sci-fi thriller “set within the architecture of the mind,” lest we forget.

Barry Sonnenfeld will open The Spellman Files for Paramount Pictures. The adaptation of Lisa Lutz's novel “revolves around a single private eye who has to juggle the demands of running her family's business with her dating life.”

Related:
Trailer Review: Inglourious Basterds
Ellen Page Whips It for Drew Barrymore

"Rio Bravo" Turns Fifty

Phil Nugent — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 19:30:00 GMT

"Most cult films are too hip to be popular," Allen Barra writes in The Wall Street Journal, "and most big hits are too popular to be hip. But Rio Bravo is that rarest of films -- both popular and hip." This month marks the fiftieth anniversary of the release of Howard Hawks's Western, which Barra argues "may be the most popular cult film ever made...[which] was shot in glorious Technicolor and starred perhaps the most popular star in movie history", John Wayne, and kudos to him for keeping in an eye on the calendar so as to be sure and catch this. One critic, Robin Wood, has written that "If I were asked to choose a film that would justify the existence of Hollywood, I think it would be Rio Bravo." Another, David Thomson, recently asked, "Is there a film from the fifties so free from strain, or one in which the drift of song is there all the time?" Quentin Tarantino, who once listed it as one of his three favorite movies of all time, introduced a screening of it at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival and informed the room that whenever he starts seeing a woman for the first time, he always wants to show her Rio Bravo. If the woman doesn't like it, it is not his opinion of the movie that he proceeds to re-evaluate.

Rio Bravo, Barra writes, "was designed as an Alamo story in which the besieged Texans win. In case viewers don't get the message, the hotel Wayne's sheriff lives in is called "The Alamo," and the outlaw boss hires a Mexican trumpeter to play "El Deguello," supposedly the song that Santa Anna had played for the Alamo's garrison. (Actually, the piece was written by the film's composer, Dimitri Tiomkin, and Wayne liked it so much that he used it in his 1960 film called The Alamo.)" Hawks and Wayne liked to tell interviewers that the movie was designed as a fuck-you to Fred Zinnemann's Oscar-winning High Noon, which was written by the soon-to-be-blacklisted Carl Foreman. In that movie, the townspeople are too cowardly to help sheriff Gary Cooper when word arrives that four vengeful gunman are on their way to shoot it out with him; in the end, Coop mows them all down and throws his badge away in disgust. Oddly, what seems to have rankled Hawks about this wasn't that the townspeople were gutless but that Cooper was, as the director saw it, so unmanly as to stoop to asking for anyone's help. ""I didn't think a good sheriff was going to go running around town like a chicken with his head off asking for help," he said. So Wayne, in a town that barely seems to have any townspeople except for the staff at the hotel, faces down a much larger force than Cooper had to contend with, backed up by a drunk (Dean Martin), a crippled old man (Walter Brennan), and a suburban-rockabilly show biz kid moonlighting as a cow hand (Rick Nelson). "The odds," Barra notes wryly, "are about the same for the good guys in both films."

The fact is that most people couldn't care less about whatever political message the people behind either film imagined they were peddling at the time. Tarantino summed up Bravo's enduring appeal to a great degree when he called it the greatest "hang-out movie" of all time, a term, he explained, refers to movies that hold up under repeated viewings just because the people onscreen are so damned pleasurable to spend time with. Barra refers to Rio Bravo's longish running time (two hours, twenty minutes) and measured pacing, with a time out from the plot for such digressions as a musical interlude in the jail, as evidence of Hawks's "daring", but they play to what Tarantino perceives as the film's strength; the audience, enjoying the unlikely mix of personalities onscreen (which also includes Angie Dickinson, in her breakout role as a seductive lady gambler named Feathers), cares less about suspense and action than in kicking back with them and forgetting about the clock.

This was indeed a gamble on Hawks's part, but he had the elements to make it work. This is all the more remarkable considering how he had gone about casting the picture. Most people assume that the casting of Nelson, who then had one foot in the music charts and one on the set of his parents' The Ozzie and Harriet Show, was a sop to the youth audience and TV watchers, and they are not wrong. (His role was originally written for an older man, and Hawks considered such leathery faces as Robert Mitchum and Jack Palance before deciding to look for a pretty boy. He apparently toyed with the idea of using Michael Landon, then best known as the star of I Was a Teenage Werewolf< before deciding that it would be nice for Dean Martin to have a singing partner.) Surpringly, Walter Brennan, who had worked for Hawks in five earlier movies and won an Oscar for one of them, Come and Get It, was also asked aboard in part because he was, thanks to his series The Real McCoys, now a TV star. According to Todd McCarthy's 1997 biography of Hawks, this would in fact cause the only real tension on the set, when Hawks discovered that Brennan was locked into the lovable, folksy old duffer act he'd been doing on TV and had to scream at his old reliable for a spell before Brennan became sufficiently pissed off to become the picture of a "crabby, evil, nasty old man" that the director had in mind.

Perhaps because some of the things that make the movie seem downright lovable today struck some critics as the time as something between facetiousness and blasphemous, Rio Bravo, despite being a great international success and the second-biggest box office hit of Hawks's career, it won no Oscar nominations, which seems an even more remarkable feat when you consider that Wayne's unfortunate The Alamo racked up seven of them. But we can guess at Hawks's estimation of it from the fact that, for the rest of his career, he continued to rifle it for spare parts. For some of us fans, Rio Bravo stands as the director's last hurrah. He worked for another dozen years, but the slow pace that feels so right here would come to see ever duller and more meandering, especially in the two additional Westerns he made with Wayne, El Dorado (1967) and his final film, Rio Lobo (1970). Both borrow heavily from Rio Bravo for their stories and characters, but at least El Dorado made back its costs. In 1975, when John Wayne walked out onto the stage at the Academy Awards show to present Hawks with a special lifetime achievement Oscar, the star of Red River and Hatari! told the crowd that he and Howard Hawks had made four pictures together. Everyone who knew that the real total was five knew that the one they wanted to forget was Rio Lobo.

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

Phil Nugent — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 15:00:00 GMT

This week's Mickey Rourke Award for the crazy man on the comeback trail goes to David Carradine, though in Carradine's case, the emphasis is a lot stronger on the "crazy man" part. Last Wednesday, Carradine was at the American Cinematheque for a screening of the 1976 Hal Ashby film Bound for Glory, in which he played Woody Guthrie. Carradine kept up a running commentary throughout much of the film, then jumped up on stage, guitar at the ready, to participate in a Q & A with film critic Kevin Thomas. They were joined by Carradine'ss co-star Ronny Cox and the movie's legendary, 87-year-old cinematographer, Haskell Wexler, who Thomas spotted in the audience. The movie was showing as part of series of personal favorites hand-picked by Thomas, but as Carradine got wound up, it became clear that he and Cox were just along for the ride.

In what is shaping up as the definitive account of this well-blogged-about event, Chris Willman writes that Carradine immediately commandeered the microphone and that his flood of anecdotes was "entertaining as all-get-out, in a had-too-many-highballs-before-dinner kind of way." There were signs of friction, though, when Carradine said that when he got cast as Guthrie, he knew nothing about the singer except that he'd written "Goodnight, Irene", and Wexler, who may or may not have been stepping on one of the star's jokes, helpfully piped up to say that "Goodnight, Irene" was actually written by Huddie "Leadbelly" Ledbetter. But then Carradine said that labor unions don't serve the same purpose they did in Guthrie's day, and the wheels started to come off the wagon. This earned him some gentle chiding from the other people on stage, and then a woman in the audience began to holler at him. In his present-tense account, Willman writes: "Carradine starts shouting back, which might've been okay if he wasn't yelling right into the microphone, and it doesn't sound pretty. The woman doesn't let up, either, so for about two minutes both of them are going at it at once. She's the more obnoxious one, but because he's five times as loud, he's coming off as the bully. Some audience members are telling Union Lady to shut up while others angrily holler 'Let her speak!' A couple guys in my vicinity start shouting 'Let's hear from Haskell Wexler !' About a dozen people get up and walk out in the midst of this--one of them, almost unnoticed, being Cox, who makes the smoothest getaway of all time." As for Wexler, the director of Medium Cool and Latino demurred that he wasn't there to talk about politics, which has to be an all-time first and may be interpreted by some biblical scholars as a sign of the coming end of days. Carradine finally tried to get the crowd back on his side by showing his willingness to engage in debate by throwing the microphone to the woman in the audience. Unfortunately, it turns out that there's a reason why Carradine was never cast as Sandy Koufax. The pitch went short and the mike bounced off the head of Cinematheque publicist Margot Gerber--"fortunately for Carradine," notes Willman, "...probably the person in the audience least likely to file an assault charge."

When the subject turned to the look of the film, Wexler got to listen to Carradine declare that the D.P. "got an Academy Award for ruining my movie." He mentions that this is one of his all-time favorite lines, just in case Wexler doesn't know that he's been springing it on people at every opportunity lo these past three decades. (No doubt it really broke up the crew on The Warrior and the Sorceress.) Carradine complained that Wexler made the Depression look too pretty and asserts that Ashby wanted to fire him--a charge calculated to really get under Wexler's skin, since Bound for Glory marked an upturn in his fortunes after he was fired from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Jeffrey Wells has posted an mp3 of part of the discussion at his Hollywood Elsewhere blog; there, you can hear Wexler, sounding a little more pissed-off than a man his age maybe ought to get, insist that any difficulties he had with Hal Ashby were temporary and fueled by the director's coke habit. Carradine shrugs that all this proves is that Wexler is "a little down on people that snorted cocaine." He then goes into a reverie about what a titanic coke fiend Ashby was, then says that "Even Quentin Tarantino doesn't beat Hal Ashby...", and you can hear the crowd tense up, thinking that he's about to say something to the effect that Ashby was an even bigger coke addict that QT. Much to the room's collective relief, Carradine instead finishes, "...in my list of my favorite directors." Then he adds, "And Quentin is incredible. And he's a big cocaine freak, too!"

In the end, Carradine and Wexler found it in themselves to give each other a goodbye hug, even after Wexler pointed out that for all his supposed trespasses against the ideal look of the Woody Guthrie story, he worked with Ashby on three other movies--unlike Carradine, who never worked with him again. (However, a couple of those movies were Second Hand Hearts and Lookin' to Get Out, two films that sealed the fate of Ashby's later career by having trouble getting released at all, with good reason. For his part, Carradine, in the course of extolling Ashby as a "fucking genius", declared that the director had never made a single movie that couldn't be described as "one of the best fucking movies ever made," then reeled off a list of titles that seemed to be based on the idea that Ashby's career ended in the 1970s.) Snapping awake, Kevin Thomas called the evening to a close by thanking the distinguished gentlemen for having provided him with "some fresh insights into the collaborative effort of filmmaking."

SXSW Review: American Prince

Hayden Childs — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 15:00:00 GMT

In 1977, Martin Scorsese made a short film about his friend Steven Prince. American Boy is a remarkably simple movie. There’s a scene of Scorsese and Prince goofing around in a hot tub at the very beginning of the film. There’s a few home movies of Prince as a little boy that are interspersed throughout the film. There’s a sudden and inexplicable brawl between the diminutive Prince and portly character actor George Memmoli because Scorsese loves nothing better than pandering to the ladies. But for most of the film’s 55 minutes, Prince just hangs out in a living room full of friends (including Scorsese) and tells his wildly entertaining stories. American Boy was not easy to find in the days before the Internet, but now, of course, the whole thing is available on YouTube.

American Prince is a sequel of sorts. Most of this movie consists of Prince sitting in someone’s living room, telling stories about his life. At one point near the end of the movie, Prince establishes that they’ve been filming for about five hours, and it’s clear that the bulk of the movie was taken from that same interview. In American Prince, Steven Prince reveals why he walked away from the movie business (a close call with a famous Hollywood murder), what he’s doing now (contractor and co-owner of a medical marijuana clinic in California), and how much he enjoyed sharing a house with Scorsese and Robbie Robertson of The Band in the late 70s (that would be lots and lots and lots). He talks about how two of the stories from American Boy have cropped up in other films. He himself retold one story in Richard Linklater’s Waking Life (and American Prince’s director Tommy Pallotta was a producer of that movie). Another story, in which he had to resuscitate a woman who had overdosed by sticking a needle full of adrenalin straight into her heart, appeared mostly untouched in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. You remember it, I’m sure. It’s hard to forget the image of Uma Thurman with a needle sticking out of her chest.

Steven Prince is a fun guy to spend time with. His stories, and the way he tells them, are fascinating and funny and full of truth. It’s easy to see why both Scorsese and Pallotta thought that a feature film could be made of what is essentially one man’s monologue. The downside of Pallotta’s movie, though, is the camerawork. Scorsese is smart enough to keep his camera at a steady middle distance from Prince so that the viewer can get the full experience of his expressive body language. For some unknown reason, Pallotta frames his picture in close to Prince, way too close, and then he can’t stay still for a second. The camera is jittery, jumping around Prince face, in tight on his mouth, leaping over to a shoulder, sometimes partially obscured by someone in front of it. For a short, couple-minute interview, it would be okay, a little intimate and woozy maybe, but leaving the viewer with the feeling of being there. For nearly an hour, however (the film runs 52 minutes), it’s a dizzingly bad choice. I like Prince, but being that close to him gave me vertigo. In the hot tub scene at the beginning of American Boy, Scorsese sends Prince back over to his own side when he encroaches too much on Marty’s space. Pallotta should have taken note; it’s easier to feel close to someone if you aren't smothered.

The camerawork aside (actually, one more comment, just to make sure that I’m being clear: it’s not bad camerawork, but it’s not right for this picture), American Prince has a lot going for it. It’s entertaining, smart material, and by all rights, it should bring Steven Prince to a new audience.

Better Late Than Never: Phil Nugent's Oscar Predictions

Phil Nugent — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 16:00:00 GMT

Here at the Screengrab, we happily embrace our responsibility, as movie bloggers, to approach the massive, steaming mountain of Oscar speculation coverage and, having considered it, to grab a shovel and do our part. I personally missed the recent group "Oscar predictions" feature, because I hadn't had the chance to see most of the movies nominated for the major awards. Now that time has passed, I still haven't seen them, but a wino who hangs out by the mall near Columbus Circle briefed me on what he'd heard people saying about them as they were filing out of the Loew's multiplex across from Lincoln Center and running their mouths while he was trying to sleep, and now I think I'm all up to speed. Let's do this thing.

BEST PICTURE: Last year, just as our country was collapsing into economic meltdown and post-imperial despair, one movie stood out for its ability to bring a smile to faces whose owners thought that they would never smile again, to fill the air with the laughter of children, to defy the iron laws of miserable reality and nature itself. That film was, of course, Beverly Hills Chihuahua. It's a lead pipe cinch to win Best Picture this year--or would be, if it were nominated. It isn't, due to a terrible blunder. Because most of the rich and powerful industry figures who select the nominees have very busy schedules, what with all the time they spend entertaining the troops overseas and home schooling their children, they entrust the actual selection process to their servants, asking them to fill out and submit their ballots for them. This year, most of them naturally advised the help to vote for the movie about the rich dogs who visit the slums, and something got lost in the translation, much to the benefit of Danny Boyle's movie, which is apparently about some folks in India. Once the voters recognize this slip-up, Slumdog's chances are sure to plummet.

The Weinstein Company has put a lot of muscle behind The Reader, but the film, which turns on the act of reading, and even announces as much in its title, will not be forgiven by the representatives of the movie business for so brazenly calling attention to, and perhaps seeming to encourage, an alternative method of entertainment. If the company wanted to antagonize the entire industry, why didn't they just make a movie called The Video Pirate Who Cost That Poor Studio Janitor in the Short Film You Just Saw His Daughter's College Fund? One film that might stand to profit from these movies' obvious missteps is Frost Nixon, Ron Howard's fact-based follow-up to Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill. (The movie stars Michael Sheen, the most talented and British of the countless actor sons, some legitimate and officialy recognized, some not, of Apocalypse Now star Martin Sheen, as Skid Roper, an itinerant washboard musician who wreaks bloody revenge on his former parter, Mojo Nixon, after Nixon dissolves their partnership and abandons him for solo stardom just as poor Skid was beginning to enjoy the earthly pleasures known only to novelty artists making it big on the collegr radio circuit.) But I predict that the Best Picture award will go the The Dark Knight. Since it's not nominated, its win would constitute a shocking and unexpected twist at the end of the evening, and that's just how Batman rolls!

BEST ACTOR: Everyone agrees that this will be a pitched battle between the two leading candidates: Frank Langella, who plays Mojo Nixon in Frost Nixon, and Brad Pitt for his performance as an eighty-year-old baby in the twenty minutes of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button that some people saw before they fell asleep or went out for a smoke and forgot to return to the theater. In both cases, it will very likely come down to the two bravura musical numbers performed by the stars. Langella's pitched rendition of "Burn Down the Malls" has become a cult sensation, especially since the Gap built their holiday TV commercials around it, but Pitt set the screen on fire with the spectacular production number in which he dances around his New Orlean orphanage, performing Benjamin Button's Oscar-nominated theme song:

Alakazam and whoa, hot damn!

I'm an eighty-year-old baby!

The devil must have sent me here to freak y'all out,

And no, I don't mean maybe.

Oh, I go in my pants like a baby do

But that's what the old folks do too, woo!

Prayin' every night, God, kill me, please!

I'm an eighty-year-old baby!

The rule of thumb with actors nominated for their performances in singing parts is that their odds greatly improve if they did their own singing. When Jamie Foxx was nominated for Ray a few years ago, the general consensus was that he was badly miscast as Johnny Ray, but Foxx was assured of a win as soon as voters heard his own wrenching performance of "The Little White Cloud That Cried". And while Langella did his own singing, not only was Pitt's singing voice dubbed, but his face was CGI-generated, and his dancing was performed by that old guy who used to appear in the Six Flags commercials. Normally, this would give Langella an edge. But we're probably going to have to give Pitt one of these things eventually, and there may never be another time when a Brad Pitt performance has so little Brad Pitt in it. And since the less Pitt contributes to a Brad Pitt performance the better it's likely to be, I think the Academy will do the right thing and strike now while the iron is hot.

BEST ACTRESS: Anne Hathaway is nominated for her performance in Rachel Getting Married, but as I understand, she doesn't play Rachel. Getting nominated for a movie that has a character's name in the title when you didn't play that character is just confusing. It makes Academy voters' heads swim, and trust me, these people don't need that. Kate Winslet is nominated for The Reader, and we've already discussed what's the matter with that title, and I hear that Winslet actually plays the person who the reader reads to, which...well, see above. Sometimes I don't think people even take these things seriously. Melissa Leo is nominated for Frozen River, which is a peerless example of the kind of performance and movie that wins at the Independent Spirit Awards exactly one day before the same names are read aloud at the Oscars ceremony and a murmur passes through the crowd that goes something like, "I dunno, I think maybe she's from Canada." Meryl Streep is nominated for playing a nun in a film based on an acclaimed Broadway play, and that sure sounds like an Oscar sure shot, as I was saying just the other day to President Ronald Reagan and MTV VJ Martha Quinn as we were playing Ms. Pac-Man and eating Frusen Glädjé washed down with New Coke while wearing our "Frankie Say" T-shirts and waiting to go over and stand in line for the opening of Epcot Center...oh, really? That was all that long ago, huh? Okay, then I guess it'll have to go to Angelina Jolie for The Changeling. It should have hit me immediately that they'll need to do that to make it up to Clint for not nominating him for having had jack shit to do with Gran Torino, especially since watching that movie amounted to spending two hours seeing Eastwood screaming at the voters, "Look at these wrinkles! Listen to this raspy croak of a voice! Y'see this kisser? I'm not gonna be here forever, for God's sakes, don't you get it!?" The nice thing is that now Brad and Angelina will both carry one home, on the same night. It'll probably extend the life of the marriage by a good two years.

BEST DIRECTOR: Danny Boyle for Slumdog Millionaire. Just the voters' way of saying that they understand that the mix-up about nominating him instead of whoever directed Beverly Hills Chihuahua wasn't his fault and everybody feels bad about any possible embarrassment this whole mess has cost him

THE JEAN HERSHOLT HUMANITARIAN AWARD: This guy.

Trailer Review: Inglourious Basterds

Paul Clark — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 17:00:00 GMT

There’s always something a bit disappointing about the trailers for Quentin Tarantino’s work- to me, anyway. Perhaps it’s because Tarantino was such a major figure in my education as a moviegoer- Pulp Fiction being the gateway drug to a whole world of classic foreign films both past and present. But while the news that a new Tarantino project is really, truly happening sends a wave of glee coursing up my spine, the trailers tend to lean a little too hard on the elements of his work that his detractors singled out back in the day- the violence, the stylized dialogue and performance style, and the inside-sports film references. In other words, the geeky stuff. But while this trailer doesn’t really seem like anything special to me, I’m nonetheless heartened by its existence, and with that the knowledge that this movie is finally happening. Besides, if there’s one lesson I’ve learned as a moviegoer, it’s that (as a director anyway) Tarantino should never be underestimated- not even when he gets the urge to misspell his title. Come August 21, I’m there, front and center.

Sundance Do-Overs: When the Buzz Turns to Fizzle

Phil Nugent — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 20:00:00 GMT

The Sundance Film Festival, America's largest and arguably most influential showcase for independent movies, has just wrapped up its twenty-fifth, or thirtieth or eighteenth, installment, depending on who's counting. The earliest version of Sundance, the Utah/US Film Festival, was first held in Salt Lake City in September of 1978. From the start, it reflected the taste and interests of its celebrity mascot Robert Redford, the festival's inaugural chairman; the first awards jury included Redford's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid co-star Katharine Ross, who was already at a point in her career where she must have been grateful for the work. In 1981, the festival moved to Park City, where the annual date would eventually be shifted to January to take advantage of the attractions of the ski resort there. As far as Sundance is concerned, "Sundance" began in 1985, when management of the then-struggling festival was taken over by Redford's Sundance Institute, which he ran with festival co-founder Sterling Van Wagenen. By the time the Festival had its biggest, buzziest hit to date with Steven Soderbergh's 1989 sex, lies, and videotape, insiders were routinely referring to it as the Sundance Film Festival, though the name wouldn't officially change until 1991.

sex, lies, and videotape, followed by the likes of Reservoir Dogs, Clerks, Hoop Dreams, and other films, would establish Sundance as a major way station for the films and filmmakers that would define the American indie movie scene in the 1990s. Today the festival is one port of call among many for new moviemakers looking to get some attention, but it remains the recognized big daddy of indie festivals, inspiring all the respect and resentment that label implies. Anyone looking to get a sense of the shape of movie fashions since the mid-1980s could do worse than to examine a list of all the movies that have been rewarded with prizes and press attention after playing Sundance. And, it goes without saying, that history includes some wrong turns.

STACKING (1987): Never one of the best-known of all Sundance entries and now one of the most thoroughly forgotten, Stacking is of interest only for the degree to which it sums up everything that was typical, and typically unappealing, about "indie film" before Soderbergh and company stormed the castle. Back then, it wasn't called independent filmmaking but "regional cinema", and wiseguys had another name for it: granola movies. The regions depicted in regional cinema tended to be those that were said to represent the American heartland, and which could be faked on location in Canada. They tend to feature stock characters--the stolid farmer trying to hang onto his land in the face of changing times, the bored wife wondering where her frisky youth frisked off to, the confused teenager with potential literary gifts, the sexy stranger who's just passin' through--who are often played by good actors earning cinematic karma points. (The cast of Stacking, for instance, includes Christine Lahti, Frederic Forrest, Peter Coyote, James Gammon, and Jason Gedrick.) The reigning master of granola cinema is Victor Nunez, a Sundance perennial fixture who helped launch Ashley Judd's career with the 1993 Ruby in Paradise and Peter Fonda's comeback with the 1997 Ulee's Gold, though his own career, and granola cinema in general, may be best summed up by the title of his early feature, Gal Young 'Un.

For whom were these movies made? Even when they managed to acquire a theatrical release, as Stacking did, they never got far out of the major cities before twitching to death in the hot sun. Certainly there was no audience for them among the people whose lives they tried to ennoble. Speaking as someone who grew up in a rural farming community, I can tell you that nobody who spends his days working on a farm wants to blow his mad money on the chance to watch some poor bastard wonder whether he'll be able to get this year's crop in. Basically, they were made only for the people who'd see them at a festival like Sundance: educated liberals who felt virtuous from seeing people in denim and broad-brimmed hats being boring on-screen and critics who enjoyed denouncing the public for not making these fine, well-meaning movies as successful as Lethal Weapon. One reason they're such period pieces now is that they were made before people started thinking in terms of the Red State/Blue State divide, which makes them bittersweet reminders of a time not so long ago when educated big-city liberals thought of the people who grow their steaks as dull but honorable tillers of the soil instead of that pack of dumbasses who re-elected Bush.

IN THE SOUP (1992): It's not exactly unheard of for a movie to be greeted with awards and recognition at Sundance and then die on the vine when it's sent out into the cold, unfriendly world to fend for itself. That was certainly the case with this comedy, starring Steve Buscemi as an aspiring filmmaker and the veteran character actor Seymour Cassel as a Life Force, which was directed and co-written by Alexandre Rockwell, the rtist formerly known as Mr. Jennifer Beals. (Beals is in it, too, as are Jim Jarmusch, Carol Kane, Stanley Tucci, Debi Mazar, Sam Rockwell, and the late '80s indie stalwart Rockets Redglare.) The movie's Grand Jury Prize wouldn't be so embarrassing if it weren't for the competition: among the movies it beat out was Reservoir Dogs, which got a legendary bad reception from a festival crowd put off by its violence and gaudy showmanship. You don't have to be a Tarantino enthusiast to compare the reaction his movie got to the soft, clumsy whimsey of Rockwell's and feel that Sundance, just three years after sex, lies... had taken it to a new level, was already in danger of seeming out of touch. Nothing Rockwell ever did again would garner as much attention; his biggest break came when Tarantino invited him to contribute a segment to the disastrous implosion of a multi-director feature, Four Rooms. The real winner of this round would be Steve Buscemi, who could boast of having starred in the year's big hit at Sundance and also having a breakout role in the real-world hit that smoked the Sundance hit.

THE BROTHERS McMULLEN (1995): Never has anybody gotten more out of a pretty face and a knack for making connections--he was working in the offices of Entertainment Tonight while making his movie and managed to slip a copy of the film to Redford himself when the great man was on ET plugging Quiz Show--when he had nothing, literally nothing else, to back it up than McMullen star and auteur Edward Burns. Burns's movie, which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and went on to be a modest hit in theaters, was a half-assed sitcom that benefited from his lack of an eye and his inability to parlay his $28.000 budget into a halfway-decent-looking or decent-sounding movie; for a while, people taken with Burns's puppy-dog eyes, floppy locks, and the notion that making a movie while working as a production assistant on Entertainment Tonight counted as a struggling-artist story assumed that the rough poverty-row look of the film must confer artistic respectablity on it. Burns cleared up any lingering misunderstanding with his second film, She's the One, where his lame script was given a pricey big-studio mounting and consequently just looked lame. (He also publicly humiliated his McMullen co-stars Mike McGlone and his then-girlfriend Maxine Bahns by casting them alongside real actors such as John Mahoney, Cameron Diaz, Amanda Peet, and Frank Vincent. McGlone's "performance" in She's the One, which consisted of having a petulant, screaming fit in just about every scene he was in, made him in particular look like a prime candidate for the title Supreme Asshat of the Known Universe.) Burns has directed half a dozen movies since then, none of which has garnered any real attention; he also acts, sort of, in better directors' films, most notably in Saving Private Ryan from back in the days when his name had some heat attached to it. Technically, his name still does, in the sense that he now must spend a certain amount of time wondering if he's obligated to correct people who think he's the Ed Burns responsible for The Wire.

THE SPITFIRE GRILL (1996): This movie about misunderstandings and redemption in rural Maine was the only feature film written and directed by Lee David Zlotoff, best known for his work in TV, as a writer and producer on such series as Remington Steele and Navy NCIS: Naval Criminal Investigative Service. The real creative force behind the movie was Roger M. Courts, a direct mail fundraiser and CEO of a Mississippi-based Catholic fund-raising organization called the Sacred Heart League, Inc. Courts was interested in making a movie that could serve as a film equivalent to the "testimonial" literature religious groups passed around, and he spent many years looking for a script that had what he saw as the right mixture of Christian teaching and solid narrative values. He decided that he'd found it in Zlotoff's screenplay about a young ex-con (played by Alison Elliot) whose death at the end of the movie turns her into the fresh-faced Christ figure of Pepperidge Farm. It seems likely that the humanist audience at Sundance missed the religious undertones completely and simply took the movie's heavy-handed moralizing and rustic dullness as a throwback to the good old days of "regional filmmaking", and that the movie won the festival's Audience Award partly on the strength of nostalgia for the days before Miramax deals and Tarantino rip-offs. Ironically, the movie's popular success at the festival led to a high-priced bidding war among distributors. In the end, it was Castle Rock Entertainment that paid top dollar for the privilege of seeing the movie crash and burn in theaters later that year. The material has since found its true level as a play (with a de-sacrificial happy ending) that is popular with regional theater groups.

HAPPY, TEXAS (1999): Sometimes, the family vibe at a big festival, where a lot of steady filmgoers mix and mingle with filmmakers, can inspire a certain amount of self-deception. This godawful comedy, starring Steve Zahn and Jeremy Northam as escaped convicts posing as gay beauty pageant directors (while Northam fends off the advances of gay small town sheriff William H. Macy), was received with rhapsodic abandon at Sundance, which can best be interpreted as an explosion of love for Steve Zahn, who had delivered a steady stream of amazing supporting performances in such movies as Reality Bites, That Thing You Do, and Out of Sight, and who had his biggest role to date here. He won the Grand Jury Prize for his performance, which isn't completely off the wall: he's very funny in it. But Miramax's decision to shell out what was variously reported as anywhere from $2.5 million to $10 million dollars for the movie itself proved, shall we say, ill-advised. At the time of the purchase, there were actually outraged bleatings in the trade press from people complaining that Miramax got all the cool movies. But after Happy, Texas collapsed in theaters, the movie would be remembered only as the centerpiece of stories about how Harvey Weinstein couldn't be trusted alone with his checkbook at Sundance.

Trailer Review: Killshot

Paul Clark — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 17:00:00 GMT

Looking at the IMDb page for Killshot, I can’t help but be a little confused about the parties involved. Sure, I can understand Quentin Tarantino exec-producing an Elmore Leonard adaptation. But somewhat more unexpected is that the director and screenwriter of note on the film have, between then, been responsible for Shakespeare in Love, Wings of the Dove, Proof, and The Four Feathers- in other words, not exactly Hollywood’s reigning kings of taut suspense. But looking at the “trivia” page, it all begins to make sense- Killshot is a former Miramax film, and director John Madden and writer Hossein Amini were Miramax favorites back when the film was shot in 2005. Hell, even the 3 1/2-year delay makes sense considering who ponied up the dough, although the question remains of why anyone would actually sit on a movie for that long. Were they waiting for one of the lead actors to become bankable? Tom Jane’s leading-man career didn’t quite pan out, and Diane Lane isn’t really able to open a movie, so maybe MGM (the new distributor) figures that Mickey Rourke’s Wrestler buzz will boost the box office enough to make it worth releasing. Or perhaps we’ve got a Midnight Meat Train situation here, with MGM contractually bound to give this a theatrical release. Yes, but will it be any good? On the basis of the trailer, it looks pretty uninspired, and is the sort of boilerplate trailer I practically forget while I’m watching. Which probably explains why I devoted so much time to the production history- after all, I had to write about something, didn’t I?

Screengrab 2009 Preview: Paul Clark's Picks

Paul Clark — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 20:00:00 GMT

It’s a little risky looking forward at an entire upcoming year’s worth of releases and cherry-picking the promising-looking ones. It’s not just that many of the movies that are currently slated to come out within the next 12 months might get pushed back or shuttered altogether. It’s also the fact that as good as some movies might look on paper with their high-profile casts and extravagant budgets, they could very well end up awful. Just ask the makers of Town and Country.

That said, here (using the ever-popular “3 Up, 3 Down” format) are a handful of my most anticipated movies of 2009, along with three I’m dreading, and one wild card:

3 Up:

The Tree of Life

Marking the filmmaker’s quickest turnaround to date, Terrence Malick latest film comes a scant four years after his 2005 masterpiece The New World. That Malick has apparently decided to keep making movies is worth celebrating by itself, but that he’s finally getting around to his supposed “dream project” (which he’s allegedly been tinkering with for three decades now) is the stuff of Malick-fanboy fantasies.

Inglourious Basterds

Speaking of fanboy fantasies, it looks like Quentin Tarantino’s long-discussed World War II actioner is for real. Word from those who’ve read the script is that Basterds (Tarantino’s spelling) is all kinds of wanky, but don’t forget that people said the same about Kill Bill and Thunder Bolt Death Proof, and those turned out just fine. Not even Eli Roth’s acting could scare me away from this.

Avatar

I toyed with several choices in this spot- including Pixar’s Up and Von Trier’s Antichrist- but in the end, I kept coming back to Jim Cameron’s state-of-the-arts space opera. It’s been twelve years since Cameron made his last fiction feature (nothing you’d have heard of), and I’m plenty curious to see the project that convinced him to come back. Say what you will about his movies- there’s no denying Cameron’s technical mastery and knack for cinematic grandeur, and I’m eager to see how he pushes the envelope again this time around.

3 Down:

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra

Two summers ago, I hated Michael Bay’s Transformers, the movie that disproved my seemingly ironclad hypothesis that no movie that contains giant robot fights could ever be boring. After that movie’s massive box-office success, Hollywood has responded with a wave of big-screen toy/cartoon adaptations pitched to adults who really ought to know better (coming in 2012: The Jonas Brothers are Voltron!). Is there any chance this will actually be good? Don’t bet on it.

G-Force

You folks already know how I feel about this one. The only way this could’ve possibly been good would be if Robert Smigel or Trey Parker and Matt Stone were behind it, making it as bizarre as possible, but that’s not going to happen. Sorry, G-Force, but my flesh’n’fur cavies could take you all on without breaking a squeak, sassy celebrity voices or no.

Paul Blart: Mall Cop

Yet another sub-Sandler product from the Happy Madison crap factory. Normally, I wouldn’t bother, except that the title character’s name is too close to mine to ignore. I’m hoping this falls out of the public consciousness quickly so that I don’t have to worry about "Mall Cop" jokes for the next few years. Why couldn’t the character be “Paul Blart: Nuclear Physicist” or “Paul Blart: Vascular Surgeon?” How about “Paul Blart: World’s Greatest Film Critic?” Okay, maybe that’s pure fantasy, but I can dream, right?

Wild Card:

Sherlock Holmes

I was a fan of the Holmes series in my youth, so part of me is excited for this, not only for the cast (Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law are inspired choices to play the newfangled Holmes and Watson), but also because the filmmakers are using the classic A Scandal in Bohemia story as their inspiration. So why isn’t this one of my most anticipated movies of 2009? Two words, folks- Guy Ritchie. Maybe he’ll be able to keep his tendencies toward visual noise and narrative incoherence in check this time, but if Ritchie screws the pooch on this seemingly foolproof project, I’m going to be seriously pissed.

Reviews By Request: Sukiyaki Western Django (2007, Takashi Miike)

Paul Clark — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 20:00:00 GMT

As always, I’ll be polling you folks to determine my next Reviews By Request column, although this time the rules will be somewhat different. To vote, see the poll at the end of this review.

Of all of the United States’ contributions to popular culture, one of the most enduring has been the Western genre. In the mid- to late-1800s, stories about cowboys and the Wild West carved out a particularly American idiom in literature, and after the invention of the motion picture, many of the most popular movies- such as Edison and Porter’s The Great Train Robbery- were Westerns. In the classical age of Hollywood, few genres were more popular throughout the world than the Western.

By the 1950s, foreign filmmakers were beginning to show their Western influences, notably Akira Kurosawa in films like The Seven Samurai. And this influence became explicit by the 1960s when a number of Italian filmmakers began to produce Westerns in Europe. The resulting films quickly became known as “spaghetti Westerns,” and their popularity began a wave of Wild West stories made on foreign soil. There were “paella Westerns” in Spain, “cod Westerns” in Scandinavia, even “curry Westerns” in India. It was only a matter of time until a Japanese filmmaker would offer up a Japanese take on the genre, and it seems only natural that the filmmaker would be prolific genre-bender Takashi Miike. It also seems obvious that Quentin Tarantino would have some part in the proceedings, but that’s another issue entirely.

Miike’s Sukiyaki Western Django is first and foremost an homage to classic Westerns of the past. Even its premise- a mysterious mercenary wanders into the middle of a turf war and proceeds to play both sides- is one of the archetypal storylines of the genre. It has served as the storyline for a number of “spaghetti Westerns” including Sergio Leone’s seminal A Fistful of Dollars and Corbucci’s Django, which lent Miike’s film its title. Of course, both films were essentially Western takes on Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, which in turn was a samurai version of Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest. But you get the idea- Miike’s genuflecting before the old masters. There’s even a whiff of Shakespeare in the story, in which the rival gangs are signified by the colors Red and White, in homage to England’s Wars of the Roses.

But although Miike has all his references in order, the end result is somewhat underwhelming. Miike hits all of the expected genre beats, but very little that happens in the film carries much weight. Part of the problem is that the characters just aren’t all that memorable. We meet the mysterious gunfighter, the samurai-styled leader of the Whites, the Shakespeare-obsessed leader of the Reds, the revenge-bent woman, the duplicitous lawman. Hell, there’s even a middle-aged woman who turns out to be the famed warrior Bloody Benten, whose name I would imagine was inspired by the same Japanese deity who lent her name to Screengrab favorite Benten Films. But Miike is so busy with other business that he never finds time to really do much with the people who populate his story. Even the gunfighter gets lost in the shuffle for much of the film.

As I mentioned before, Miike fan and friend Quentin Tarantino appears in the film, playing an old gunfighter named Ringo who tells the saga of Bloody Benten and literalizes the sukiyaki motif. Many of Tarantino’s own films also tend to be elaborate homages, but unlike Sukiyaki they tend to add up to something more than the sum of their references. Much of this has to do the way Tarantino actually manages to take time to establish the characters in his films- for example, the way he actually shows us some of Budd’s life in Kill Bill instead of just making him a rival, or the scene in Death Proof in which he reveals that the fearsome-looking Stuntman Mike is actually a whiny baby. On one level, Tarantino noodles in the margins of his story just as much as Miike, but while Tarantino’s noodlings lend his films additional depth, Miike’s tend to feel like one-off moments, designed to grab the attention but have little relevance on the story at large. Granted, some of these moments are pretty awesome- look at the way Ringo procures an egg for his sukiyaki, or the goofy touch of having the two-faced lawman suffer from multiple personality disorder- but put together they don’t really add up.

Or consider the films of Sergio Leone, whose storylines were every bit as impenetrable as Sukiyaki’s, but whose style pushed the iconography to such frenzied levels that they’re hypnotic on a moment-to-moment basis even if the broad outlines of the story get lost in the process. Leone’s “spaghetti Westerns” are Westerns taken to their stylistic extreme, and while “extreme” is a word that’s often associated with Miike’s films, Sukiyaki Western Django is a rarity- a Miike film that feels too tame. It’s entertaining enough, and the final shootout is good as these things go, but overall it’s a little disappointing. I’ve gone on record as a rabid fan of Audition, but with each subsequent Miike film I see I’ve come to realize that that film’s tight directorial control and bold formal structure was a rarity in his work. Sadly, Sukiyaki Western Django needed a more assured hand on the reins.

In my ongoing effort to see as many 2008 films as possible, I’ve decided to change the rules a bit this time around. Below, I’ve listed five of the most intriguing titles from the last four Reviews By Request polls (sorry, no House Bunny). As usual, I’m asking you to pick your favorite, but rather than only writing up the top vote-getter, I’ll write up the top three, one per week for the next three weeks. So, what’ll it be?

What 2008 movies would you like me to see? | BuzzDash polls

As always, feel free to sound off in the comments section. See you next week!

Screengrab 2009 Preview: Andrew Osborne's Picks

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 18:00:00 GMT

Not to sound morbid, but it occurred to me recently (whilst contemplating my own mortality) that someday – hopefully some far distant day -- I’ll read an Entertainment Weekly Spring/Summer/Fall/Holiday preview issue and/or watch a flock of coming attractions trailers for a whole bunch of movies I won’t, in fact, live long enough to see.

In Zelig, Woody Allen’s chameleon character dies with just one regret: that he never got to finish reading Moby Dick. Imagine Zelig’s disappointment if he’d been a Harry Potter fan in November, forever denied the opportunity to see the cinematic adaptation of Half-Blood Prince (let alone the Deathly Hallows)? And Lord knows at this point whether any of us will live long enough to see Zack Snyder’s much-litigated version of Watchmen. (Ironically, another movie that most of us seem destined never to see is Fanboys, about a cancer-stricken geek in 1998 determined, in yet another layer of sad irony, to see the as-yet-unreleased Phantom Menace before he dies...but I digress.)

Anyhow, with my wife and I both fighting various wintry ailments (and going on a solid week of sleep deprivation thanks to the itchy throats and sinus pressure of the damned), it’s hard to look forward to anything at this point beyond still yet more mucus...but if I should manage somehow to survive this relentlessly cold, snowy New England winter (good Lord...it’s only JANUARY?), then here are the five upcoming 2009 releases I’m most looking forward to:

5. HARRY POTTER & THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE

I originally posted this in my 2008 Fall Preview before Warner Bros. saw fit to switch the release date of the sixth J.K. Rowling adaptation to 2009, but the following still holds true: I haven’t read a single word of Ms. Rowling’s fantastically popular and beloved series of novels, but I’ve followed the relatively unprecedented blockbuster cinematic serialization religiously. I’ll go on record here as a big fan of Christopher Columbus’ unfairly maligned adaptation of Sorcerer’s Stone, and I thought Alfonso Cuarón’s Prisoner of Azkaban was bizarrely overpraised, but in general, the series just keeps getting better and better, and I can’t wait for the next episode.

4. STAR TREK

Yes, I’ve heard the Star Trek 90210 jokes, and no, the last few Star Trek movies have not exactly instilled fans with a lot of confidence in the franchise -- but as with J.J. Abrams’ day job, the increasingly ludicrous and exasperating Lost, I simply have no choice in the matter: I’m still going to watch. My Dad recently reminded me of the time he drove my geeky pubescent ass to a Star Trek convention through a full-scale Perfect Storm blizzard just so I could buy myself a Tribble and hang out with bosomy fangirls dressed like Yeoman Rand. So yes, good or bad, I’ll definitely be seeing this one – (alone, notes my wife).

3. WHIP IT!

I couldn’t find any clips of Drew Barrymore’s upcoming directorial debut about a misfit teen (Ellen Page) who joins an Austin, Texas roller-derby team. Instead, the trailer above is for Hell On Wheels, an astonishing documentary about the girl-powered rockabilly roller derby revival that sparked in Austin and spread across the nation. In the film, director Bob Ray captures the birth and hilarious, harrowing growing pains of the Lonestar Rollergirls, an all-female, D.I.Y. enterprise that transforms from weekend lark to serious business when big money and crippling injuries raise the stakes of a burgeoning start-up, leading to shattered friendships (and fibulas) and a fiery schism between two factions of fiercely independepent entrepeneurs. Short skirts + third wave feminism + breathtaking banked track action + Marxist/capitalist tensions + a fascinating cast of real-life characters & a kick-ass soundtrack = one of the best movies of 2007. I doubt Whip It! will be as good, but with Barrymore, Page, Kristin Wiig and Juliette Lewis strapping on the skates and kneepads, I’m more than willing to give this one the benefit of the doubt.

2. INGLORIOUS BASTERDS

When I saw John Waters interview Quentin Tarantino on a panel at the Provincetown Film Festival last year, the erstwhile Mr. Brown said he’d set himself the goal of finishing his “guys on a mission” World War II spaghetti Western lollapalooza (starring Brad Pitt, Maggie Cheung, The Office’s B.J. Novak, Freaks & Geeks’ Samm Levine and...really? Mike Myers?) in time for this year’s Cannes Film Festival. With the exception of roughly 42 percent of Death Proof, Tarantino has never yet steered me entirely wrong (I didn’t even mind his segment of the disastrous Four Rooms), and when he’s on his game (as he could easily be with this project) he is, like the wallet says, a Bad Motherfucker. It’s possible, of course, he won’t finish the film in time for a 2009 release...in which case, be looking for Basterds at the top of my 2010 movie preview list.

1. THE MEAT CITY BEATNIKS

As I mentioned on Thanksgiving Day in the 2008 Screengrab Holiday Special, I began shooting this ultra-low budget guerilla indie musical about screenwriters on the make and a drug deal gone bad (co-scripted by my esteemed Screengrab colleague Scott Von Doviak, based on a short story by Jim Dryden, with music by Eric Jacobson) way back in January 2008 (or possibly the late fall of 2007...it’s all a bit hazy at this point). Of all the releases I hope to see in 2009, this tops the list if only because it will mean (A) I’ve finally finished post-production and (B) it actually got released. Like Basterds, though, I’m not betting the farm on this one actually seeing the light of day before 2010...but if ever there was a year for hope, it’s this one!

HAPPY YEAR OF THE OX!

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Morning Deal Report: Mickey Rourke’s Whiplash

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 15:00:00 GMT

Mickey Rourke isn’t taking any chances with this whole comeback thing. Just yesterday we told you Rourke has joined The Expendables, and today The Hollywood Reporter has the scoop on The Wrestler’s role in Iron Man 2. “Marvel has been keeping a very tight lid on the script for the sequel, being written by Justin Theroux, but it is known that Rourke would play a tattooed Russian heavy named Ivan who becomes Whiplash, a man with deadly, technologically enhanced coils.” Wait, isn’t that Dr. Octopus? Anyway, Rourke won’t be alone in terrorizing fellow comebacker Robert Downey, Jr. – since one villain never seems to be enough for any superhero sequel, Sam Rockwell is also aboard as “Justin Hammer, a multibillionaire businessman and a rival of industrialist Anthony Stark, AKA Iron Man.”

Leonardo DiCaprio will try to Beat the Reaper. “The protagonist in the novel penned by Josh Bazell is a Manhattan emergency room doctor, whose life becomes complicated when a mobster recognizes the doc from his former life as a hitman who went into the witness protection program,” Variety reports.

It’s official: Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Bastards really is called Inglourious Basterds, and it now has a release date. The World War II epic starring Brad Pitt will reach theaters August 21st, courtesy of The Weinstein Company. Or is that the Winesteen Kumpanee?

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Screengrab Presents: Cinema’s Greatest Comebacks (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 21:30:00 GMT

PAM GRIER in JACKIE BROWN (1997)

I suppose this one doesn’t entirely count as a comeback, since the former blaxploitation star of urban classics like Coffy and Foxy Brown has yet to land another starring role as meaty as Jackie Brown, the drug-mule stewardess who outsmarts both her murderous boss (Samuel Jackson) and the feds on her tail before riding off into the sunset with a suitcase of cash in Quentin Tarantino’s underrated adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s Rum Punch. Then again, hardly any actresses (especially those of, ahem, a certain age) get to star in major motion pictures as realistically smart, complex, vulnerable women like Jackie, who succeed not with machine guns or sex (although there’s plenty of that simmering just under the surface in Grier’s palpable chemistry with Robert Forster, as bail bondsman Max Cherry, Jackie’s reluctant partner in crime -- one of the great screen couples of all time), but rather through believably human ingenuity and courage. Yet, at the very least, Grier finally earned some overdue respect as an actress from those who’d previously looked down on her B-movie roots, and though she didn’t win an Oscar for her Oscar-worthy career best performance, she at least caught a second wind in her career as a character actress, with relatively high-profile gigs like Jane Campion's Holy Smoke and The L Word...though, come to think of it, maybe it's time for yet another Pam Grier comeback so those of us without Showtime can maybe see her a little more often.

ROBERT ALTMAN, THE PLAYER (1992)

The rise and fall and rise of Robert Altman is well-known to movie geeks, but no list of great cinematic comebacks would be complete without a nod to the director who rose to prominence during the anything goes, lunatics-running-the-asylum ‘70s era of American filmmaking, when Uncle Bob churned out a head-spinning number of modern day classics like M*A*S*H and Nashville before biting the Hollywood hand that fed him one too many times and getting banished to the wilderness, only to raise his career from the dead once again by chomping down even harder on that very same Hollywood hand. After foolishly viewing film as a creative means of expression (rather than the branding mechanism and product placement delivery system we now know it to be), Altman was kicked to the curb by the powers-that-be once the Suits reasserted corporate control of the studios in the early eighties. Not only was Altman an idealistic pothead who wouldn’t know a high-concept Eddie Murphy vehicle if it bit him in the ass, but he was OLD, a condition the New Hollywood power elite feared might be contagious. Yet even in exile, Altman found a way to keep on keepin' on: he was an early adapter of cheap, indie video technology, which he used to keep his director-fu sharp with adaptations of stage plays like Secret Honor and prescient experiments like the political fictumentary Tanner ’88, all of which helped him to eventually reboot his career thanks to an independent film about Hollywood full of cameos by old friends and (at least according to Wikipedia) unpaid stars who just happened to show up at the L.A. locations where Altman was shooting and agreed to improvise some lines. The Player, a critical and financial success, was nominated for an “all-is-forgiven” Oscar that gave Altman the clout to work fairly steadily for the remainder of his life, generating both hits (Short Cuts, Gosford Park) and misses (Prêt-à-Porter, Kansas City)...any one of which remains far more interesting and unique today than all the Transformers in Toy Town.

DANIEL DAY-LEWIS in GANGS OF NEW YORK (2002)

In the late eighties and throughout the nineties, Daniel Day-Lewis developed a reputation as one of the world's finest and most versatile actors, due in no small part to the exhaustive amount of work he put into his characterizations. Eventually, the work began to take its toll, and following 1997's The Boxer, Day-Lewis took an extended sabbatical from acting. After five years pursuing various interests (like spending time with his family, not to mention those strange rumors about an apprenticeship with an Italian cobbler) Day-Lewis was finally lured back into the business by his onetime collaborator, Martin Scorsese. Once on board, Day-Lewis threw himself completely into the role of Bill "The Butcher" Cutting as he had with his other great performances, going so far as to speak in the character's voice even when he wasn't on the set. The result was a Day-Lewis performance completely unlike any he'd given before, making Bill a ferocious villain who rules the city by virtue of being the most ruthless monster to prowl the streets. Yet what makes the performance truly scary is his unpredictability, whether he's menacing his former lover with a set of throwing knives ("whoopsie-daisy!"), tap-tap-tapping a dagger against his glass eye, or standing over the body of a man he's just killed with a look-at-what-I-just-did smirk on his face. Day-Lewis has often spoken about how each performance makes him feel uneasy about whether he'll ever act again, and with such single-minded devotion to his craft it's little wonder that he feels that way. Yet it's also this devotion, coupled with Day-Lewis' genius, that makes each of his performances feel like a gift, and we undoubtedly have Scorsese to thank for making his subsequent performances -- including his towering turn as Daniel "Draaaaaaaaaaaaaaainage!" Plainview- possible. And you say his next movie is a musical? We can't wait.

ALEC BALDWIN in THE COOLER (2003)

When Alec Baldwin turned up in a supporting role in the 2003 Mike Myers vehicle The Cat in the Hat, reviewer David Edelstein wrote that, "The movie's grim subtext is the wreck of Baldwin's career — how puffy he looks, and how he never manages to rise above his material." One week later, The Cooler opened, and Baldwin was on his way to Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations for his smooth, multilayered performance as a Las Vegas casino operator who, to his surprise and despair, discovers that he does actually have a heart. Baldwin had always been something of an odd man out among Hollywood A-listers, a classic example of a character actor in a leading man's body: he seemed a little dull trying to play the action hero (The Hunt for Red October, The Shadow) or lover boy (Prelude to a Kiss) but seemed happily liberated whenever he got a crack at playing psychos (Miami Blues, The Juror) or scumbags (State and Main). His role in The Cooler was a personal breakthrough because it gave him the chance to play a scumbag (with psycho tendencies) who had the depth to find himself conflicted, and also to show off both his comic and dramatic chops to a new degree, leading indirectly to his full-blown career renaissance on TV's 30 Rock.

MARTIN LANDAU in TUCKER: THE MAN AND HIS DREAM (1988)

Landau, whose attention-getting performance as the assistant baddie in North by Northwest was followed by several seasons as the master of disguise on TV's Mission: Impossible, never flew as high in his early movie career as some of the names on this list, but he managed to fall farther than just about any of the others anyway. After leaving Mission: Impossible in a contract dispute and taking his wife and co-star Barbara Bain with him, Landau spent fifteen or so years adrift in horror and sci-fi pictures barely worthy of the name, as well as such august TV productions as The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan's Island and The Return of the Six Million Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman. Somehow, Coppola decided to throw him a lifeline when he was casting his long-deferred dream project about the car designer Preston Tucker, and Landau's performance -- a shaft of cranky warmth cutting like a light saber through a hollow movie, coming from an actor with a semi-familiar name but with a face so changed since the last time most viewers had seen him that he was all but unrecognizable -- is the only thing fondly remembered from that picture. Landau got an Oscar nomination and a leading role in Woody Allen's 1989 Crimes and Misdemeanors. He eventually did win an Oscar, for playing the washed-up, half-crazed Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood (1994). Speaking about that performance later, he was quick to give credit to his own years in the show business wilderness; they'd given him a pretty good idea of what Lugosi had gone through.

Click Here For Part One, Three, Four & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Paul Clark, Phil Nugent

DVD Digest for November 25, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 15:00:00 GMT

This week, a surprisingly small selection leading into the so-called “biggest shopping day of the year.”

Recent releases coming to DVD include Will Smith and Charlize Theron in Hancock (Sony, also Blu-Ray), Vince Vaughn making a grab for your Christmas cash in Fred Claus (Warner, also Blu-Ray), Eddie Murphy inside Eddie Murphy in Meet Dave (Fox, also Blu-Ray), and Andy Samberg going from talking to animals as Mark Wahlberg to playing a talking animal himself in Space Chimps (Warner, also Blu-Ray).

In classics this week, Criterion releases two seminal nineties films, Wes Anderson’s debut effort Bottle Rocket and Wong Kar-wai’s awesome and Tarantino-approved Chungking Express. But don’t fret, Blu-Ray fans- they’ll be coming out in that format in December, so don’t cross them off the Christmas list.

In TV on DVD, this week brings the season-bridging special 24: Redemption (Fox), plus everyone’s fake wingnut in A Colbert Christmas: The Greatest Gift of All (Paramount).

Finally, this week’s Blu-Ray only releases are a Jamie Foxx double feature, Jarhead and The Kingdom (both Universal).

OST: "Rushmore"

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 21:45:00 GMT

Wes Anderson, whatever his other faults as a filmmaker -- and I, for one, would argue that they're plentiful -- has developed a justified reputation as a consummate crafter of motion picture soundtracks. Unlike other directors who simply leave it to the judgment of whoever's writing the score to make sure sound and vision are properly attuned, with a complementary mood and tone, Anderson personally supervises the selection of the music that goes into his films, painstakingly matching existing songs and original scoring to make sure every scene is perfectly matched, that viewers not only see what he wants them to see, but hears what he wants them to hear. This gift of blending original music, extant pop music artifacts, and film is one that he shares with a handful of other directors of a distinctly post-modernist bent: Jim Jarmusch, Quentin Tarantino, and the grandaddy of them all, Martin Scorsese. All four men have a positive passion for blending rock, pop and other musical forms into a lively mix and then folding them delicately into their movies. Tarantino, the consummate pastiche artist, may be the most adept at this form of cinematic mix-tape, but Wes Anderson may be the most inspired, and both musically and cinematically, Rushmore is his masterpiece.

For a movie as distinctly modern as Rushmore is, it has a curiously archaic quality. The music borrowed from other sources is intensely retro; the finished product sounds like a mix CD put together by a quirkily aggressive friend who's obsessed with the music of the British invasion. And while that might seem pretty odd for a movie about a kid who came of age in the late 1990s, it's less odd than it might seem once you've seen Rushmore: Max Fisher is undoubtedly one of those insufferable kids who's utterly scornful of any band containing people close to him in age, and ostentatiously listens only to music that was composed before the invention of the cassette tape. In the album's liner notes, Anderson claims that he originally wanted the soundtrack to contain nothing more than Kinks songs, but a combination of legal issues and the pleading of his collaborators made him change his mind. It's probably for the best -- such an extravagant gesture would be too relentlessly outre, more in keeping with Anderson's later, crazily idiosyncratic work than Rushmore, a movie that keeps a relatable and recognizable human heart beating beneath its ironic hipster exterior. And while Quentin Tarantino might have cast Bill Murray as some sort of flamboyant bit of revivalism, Anderson, here, does it because Murray is the only actor who can deliver the blend of sly, wicked humor and melacholy that is reflected in the soundtrack.

Of course, Wes Anderson did more in putting the music of Rushmore together than comb through a couple of late-'60s Britpop anthologies. The music he selects ranges from smash hits to rarities obscure enough to stun newcomers and surprise experts. Beyond that, he does break up the monotony of endless pop snippets by allowing the wise presence of a score -- and a score composed by another '70s throwback element, Devo frontman Mark Mothersbaugh. There are bits and pieces of Mothersbaugh's original music -- mostly burbling, optimistic electronic pieces of the sort that used to show up on bachelor-pad hi-fi samplers in the sixties -- on the Rushmore soundtrack, and they're both brief enough to not be intrusive and skillful enough to not be superfluous. An entire album of them would be pretty intolerable, but used like this -- as leavening for the pop gems that surround them -- they show that Anderson still has confidence in traditional film-music usages, but is clever enough to give them ann interesting twist. Since the making of Rushmore, Anderson's films have gotten more abstract, more arcane, more personal in a way that is almost inaccessible and alienating, and while they still feature some gems (like Seu Jorge's terrific Bowie covers in The Life Aquatic), he's never topped the cinematic and musical magic he displays here.

BEST TRACKS: Aside from a flat track or two and some inessential incidental music from Mark Mothersbaugh, there's hardly a dud in this whole stack. "Making Time" is an absolutely crushing track from the forgotten Creation, a Who knockoff so skillful it could have slipped onto The Who Sell Out without anyone noticing; and the Who themselves are well-represented by one of the slicker, cleaner versions in existence of their charming mini-rock opera, "A Quick One (While He's Away)". Although only one Kinks song remains on the soundtrack, it's an absolute killer -- the quiet, sweetly sinister "Nothin' in the World Can Stop Me Worryin' 'Bout That Girl" -- and two of Cat Stevens' best tunes, "Here Comes My Baby" and "The Wind", make an appearance before the whole thing winds down with the Faces' flawless "Ooh La La".

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Forgotten Films: "American Perfekt" (1997) and "Diamond Men" (2001)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 15:00:00 GMT

The addition of Robert Forster to the cast of Heroes may not be enough to save the faded series, but it'll keep us from deleting it from our DVR for a while. We admit it, we love this guy, almost as much as Quentin Tarantino does. (We'd be willing to consider the possibility that we love him even more than Tarantino does, but let's face it: presuming that you might love something even as much as Tarantino does is a risky thing to do.) It was, of course, QT who put Forster back on the radar in 1987 by giving him the best role of his career as the sage but seducable bail bondsman Max Cherry and tucking his performance into a movie, Jackie Brown, that actually got booked into theaters. But there are other people who were rooting for the man, and a year before Jackie Brown, Forster played the male lead in a smart, quirky little neo-noir called American Perfekt that bypassed theaters but caught a lot of people's attention when it made it to cable. The movie, written and directed by Paul Chart, is a sinister-edged road movie about a criminal psychiatrist (Forster) who decides to take some personal time and conduct an experiment in which he decides to leave all important decisions to the flip of a coin. Inevitably, the decisions come to include matters of life and death. Perfekt has its own weird vein of dark humor and a clutch of striking performances by the kind of actors who ought to be carrying big movies on a regular basis but have become more likely to find themselves playing third fiddle in a remake of Basic Instinct (such as David Thewlis) or getting a role on The Sopranos only to be replaced by another actress after your first short scene has hit the airwaves (such as Fairuza Balk). Balk enters the picture after Forster's first road partner, Amanda Plummer, has Mysteriously Disappeared. The movie has slowly established itself an Internet cult, some of whose members got very excited, and in some cases indignant, when the coin-flip business turned up in No Country for Old Men. Presumably all these people had never heard of Two-Face and subsequently died of massive heart attacks while watching The Dark Knight.

Perfekt gives the viewer a choice taste of Forster at his most affable and untrustworthy. After his Oscar-nominated turn in Jackie Brown, more filmmakers started seeking Forster out with hopes of tapping the vulnerable, world-worn quality that Tarantino showcased so well. The best of these films may be Diamond Men, a gentle little charmer written and directed by Dan Cohen. (This film did actually make it into theaters. Unfortunately, it opened a couple of weeks after September 11, 2001, which was not a great time for small, underpublicized movies.) It too is a road movie: Forster plays Eddie, a widowed salesman for a jewelry company who spends his life tooling from one loyal customer to the next in the Pennsylvania area he has built up over the years. After a heart attack, he's saddled with a younger, brasher partner (Donnie Wahlberg), ostensibly because the company's insurance carrier will no longer let him serve as sole custodian of the merchandise in transit, though you'd have to be dumber than Eddie's boss thinks he is not to recognize that his real function is to teach the ropes to his future replacement before being shoved out the door. And if you don't expect the Wahlberg character to begin to warm to the older guy and care more about him than about his own career future, you must not have seen many movies. But Dan Cohen worked in the diamond trade himself, taking over his father's business after his death, and the movie has the kind of affectionate feeling for and detailed knowledge of a way of life that can give a picture like this enough individuality to transcend its own formula. Eventually, Eddie find romance with Bess Armstrong, as a middle-aged New Age Buddhist ex-hooker. I remember a stretch there in the 1980s when Bess Armstrong's face seemed like a hard thing to avoid if you wanted to watch TV or go to the movies; Diamond Men was just about the first time I'd seen or thought of her since they canceled My So-Called Life, and I don't think I've seen or thought about her since, but the sheer weirdness of her role here must have gotten to her, because she's rather appealing once you abandon the idea that she's going to attack Eddie with an icepick that she keeps under a pillow. Then again, she probably benefited from being partnered with Forster. Both these movies incorporate the special quality that has helped keep Forster's career alive even though it may have made him seem like less of a bet for superstardom than other actors whose reserves of charisma made them seem unapproachable: he just seems like really good company, whether you're in the movie with him or watching him in the audience. Like a lot of great character actors, he makes being fun to watch seem like a lost art.

OST: "Pulp Fiction"

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 20:15:00 GMT

We knew this day would come. We knew that eventually, we were going to have to address the man who is arguably almost as famous for his game-changing approach to soundtracks as for the actual movies he directs. Quentin Tarantino, like a lot of smart-ass culture vultures of his generation, is a pop-cult omnivore, as well-versed in music as he is in literature, film, television, and fashion, and it should come as no surprise that in his greatest accomplishement as a director, 1994's Pulp Fiction, he brought his encyclopedic knowledge of pop music to bear on the soundtrack with a geek's precision and an auteur's passion. Tarantino's instincts as a music director proved as profitable to Sony Music as his instincts as a filmmaker did to Miramax: the movie was a huge success, and the soundtrack went platinum almost immediately after its release. Selling over a million and a half units in its first year, it was one of the most popular soundtracks of the decade, and not only launched one career (that of Urge Overkill, the Chicago band who covered "Girl, You'll Be a Woman Soon" on the album) but revived two more (those of Kool & the Gang and Dick Dale, who enjoyed a popular resurgence after two of their best-known songs were featured in the film).

The curious alchemy that took place when Tarantino put the soundtrack together -- and it is no exaggeration to call him the creator of the Pulp Fiction soundtrack, as he personally selected every single track, often building entire scenes around a piece of music he felt would be appropriate -- has become characteristic of his films, and has led to his reputation as a director who has an uncanny ability to match up visual and musical elements in his films. And yet, many of his detractors -- and, for that matter, a number of his supporters -- are quick to point out that the story of music in Tarantino's films is one of missed opportunities, and a triumph of metareference over originality. After all, in his soundtracks no less than in his movies themselves, Quentin Tarantino is a pastiche artist. A filmmaker of his caliber is perfectly capable of doing what Jim Jarmusch, another director with a reputation for crafting stellar soundtracks, does: use a few existing pieces of music as ringers, and then commission an original score that conjures its own mood and moment, rather than relying on the emotions generated by preexisting songs to create impact. Just as his films constantly serve as a sort of postmodernist irritant, a nagging little voice saying, hey, do you remember this? Do you get what I'm referencing here?, his film music can be viewed as little more than a catalog of referents, a mixtape to the last half-century of junk culture that's designed not so much the create a thrilling film experience so much as remind you of a thrilling film experience you've already had.

And yet, as reluctant as we are to engage in such dismissive approaches, who cares? When the alchemy works so wonderfully, why pick nits? As long as Tarantino isn't being dismayingly obvious in his lifts -- a crime of which Reservoir Dogs was occasionally guilty -- they come in such rapid bursts (as in Kill Bill) or with such a dazzling degree of clever storytelling techniques (as in Pulp Fiction), the gentlemanly thing is not to notice. Sure, Quentin Tarantino is just a gifted rip-off artist. But he's so gifted, and his rip-offs are so amazingly successful, so exquisitely framed in new viewpoints and new contexts, and delivered in such a supremely confident and technically competent way, that he earns our indulgence the way a lesser filmmaker wouldn't. A Pulp Fiction with an original score might have had more integrity and originality, but it probably wouldn't have been as good. The key to Tarantino's genius, musically and as a filmmaker, isn't that he's showing us something we've never seen before; it's that he's showing it to us in a way we've never thought of, and making it seem new and exciting again. The greatness of the Pulp Fiction soundtrack isn't that he gathers together a bunch of songs we've never heard before, but that he's presenting them in such a way that we now inextricably associate them with the images he chose them to accompany. If this is a rip-off, let us make the most of it.

BEST TRACKS: The most memorable use of an extant song on the Pulp Fiction soundtrack is one of the most memorable in movie history: John Travolta's hitman and Uma Thurman's moll dance wildly and seductively to Chuck Berry's "You Never Can Tell." It's the purest distillation of Tarantino's genius for matching music to visual, surpassing even the torture scene in Reservoir Dogs, and it's so smashingly effective that it's entered our cultural vocabulary in half a dozen ways. But there's plenty of other treats to be had here, including Dusty Springfield's "Son of a Preacher Man", Al Green's "Let's Stay Together", a devastating use of "Jungle Boogie", and the weird, creepy ode to isolation, "Flowers on the Wall" by the otherwise sunshiney Statler Brothers. I've always found dialogue snippets on a soundtrack to be gimmicky and distracting, but there's plenty of them here for those that disagree. Worth seeking out is the collector's edition to the soundtrack, issued in 2002, which features a brief but generally enjoyable interview with Tarantino, and a handful of dynamite bonus tracks, including "Rumble" by proto-Dalean Link Wray & HIs Ray-Men, and "Out of Limits" by the Marketts, another surf classic.

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Honorable Mention: The Top Leading Ladies of All Time (Part Six)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 22:30:00 GMT

PAM GRIER (1949 - )

She was the undisputed queen of black '70s cinema. In tight pants, high heels and with razor blades in her Afro, Pam Grier burned up the screen in movies like Foxy Brown and Coffy. Independent black cinema fell on hard times by the end of that decade and she did not make the leap over to the Hollywood mainstream. For years she worked smaller film roles and TV here and there. That is, until Quentin Tarantino cast her in what might have been his — and her — best film ever, Jackie Brown. There Pam plays a middle-aged woman, a struggling air-hostess, slightly frayed at the edges but tough as nails...and what a sight to see.

SOPHIA LOREN (1934 - )

In pure feminine power and deliciousness, few can rival Sophia Loren in her glory years. It is hard to believe now, but the first lady of Italian film actually made her way onto the screen after fellow Italian bombshell Gina Lollobrigida. In fact she was discovered by (and subsequently married, then split with) Carlo Ponti, who also launched Lollobrigida's carreer. While works of Talmudic length could be written on Loren's looks, she's no mean actress. Get thee to a video store for Two Women or El Cid to appreciate her in the fullest.

ANNE BANCROFT (1931-2005)

Born Anna Maria Italiano in the Bronx, she followed that age-old tradition of taking a more WASPy sounding stage name. Anne Bancroft will, however, always be Mrs. Robinson to us. There are more prolific actresses out there, but you can't deny the power of her performance as a beautiful, sad, alcoholic older woman to Dustin Hoffman's younger man in The Graduate. Now that we are sniffing thirty ourselves we realize that (A) Mrs. Robinson wasn't supposed to be particularly old in the movie and (B) at 36, Anne Bancroft was only a few years older than Hoffman. In any case, leopard print never looked so good. And never did a lady lead with so much out-of-control control. It isn't easy to top one of the best movies of all time and nothing Bancroft did after that (no, not even being the voice of the Queen in Antz) made the same splash. Mel Brooks married her, though, so you know she was special.

SHIRLEY MACLAINE (1934 - )

My first Shirley MacLaine memory: sitting in front of my parents' stereo (approximately the size of the desk I'm sitting at now), playing my mother's copy of the Sweet Charity soundtrack and staring intently at the redhead on the album cover. I may have only been six or seven years old, but I had good taste. I lost track of Shirley after that, until she resurfaced as the kook on Larry King talking about her past lives in Atlantis and her UFO frequent-flier miles, just another Hollywood punchline. What a cad I was, forgetting what a beautiful thing we had there in front of the stereo all those years ago. But it all came back to me when I finally got around to seeing the work that made her famous in the first place. In her trademark roles – The Apartment, Irma la Douce, Sweet Charity and especially Some Came Running, she's pixie-cute, charming, funny, sometimes annoying and ultimately heartbreaking. She was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress five times, finally winning for Terms of Endearment. In 1993, I saw her open for Frank Sinatra at the Worcester Centrum; her show-stopper was, of course, "If My Friends Could See Me Now." I'd be lying if I said she looked like she'd stepped right off that long-ago album cover, but I will tell you she still had the gams.

CLAUDIA JENNINGS (1949-1979)

If such redneck romps as Gator Bait, Truck Stop Women and Moonshine County Express aren't part of your cinematic education, you may not have even heard of Claudia Jennings, but in the mid-1970s she was the queen of the drive-in, the ultimate hick chick. Born Mary Eileen Chesterson in St. Paul, Minnesota, Jennings studied dramatic arts as a child and performed with the Hull House theater company in Chicago after graduating high school. She took a day job as a receptionist for Playboy magazine, where her knockout looks did not go unnoticed. She posed for the magazine in 1969 and again in 1970, when she was named Playmate of the Year. Moving to Los Angeles to pursue acting, she landed a supporting role in the 1972 roller derby flick Unholy Rollers. Her role in 1974's Truck Stop Woman, in which she hijacked trucks using sex as her primary weapon, became the model for the rest of Jennings' leading roles: drop-dead gorgeous, sexually uninhibited and tough enough to take on the big boys. Long before Thelma and Louise hit the road, Jennings and Jocelyn Jones played a sexy pair of bank-robbing outlaws in The Great Texas Dynamite Chase. In Gator Bait, Jennings is a bayou woman turned Death Wish-style vigilante after her little sister is murdered by depraved hillbillies. A decade before Sigourney Weaver's supposedly groundbreaking turn in Aliens, Jennings was already kicking ass and taking names – and doing it in the tightest, tiniest pair of Daisy Dukes possible. Her final performance came in David Cronenberg's little-seen 1979 racing picture, Fast Company – ironic, in that Jennings was killed in an auto accident on the Pacific Coast Highway that year, a couple of months shy of her thirtieth birthday. Her cinematic legacy may be a minor one, but in the realm of the hick flick, Claudia Jennings still reigns.

MICHELLE PFEIFFER (1958 - )

Although it wasn't her first movie, most filmgoers got their first good gawk at Pfeiffer in the 1983 Scarface. Although opinions were mixed (and would remain so for a while) about whether she could act, the camera loved her, and the way she embraced the role of the world's surliest cokehead gangster's moll established that she wasn't persnickety about wanting to be liked. Any doubts about her acting had been pretty much cleared up by the time of Dangerous Liasons, in which she was excellent in one of the film's major roles that was probably the least fun to play. That movie and her other 1988 releases, Married to the Mob and Tequila Sunrise, made it clear that likability itself was comfortably within her range. Her singing sexpot in The Fabulous Baker Boys was pure starshine, her alienated early '60s runaway housewife in Love Field a terrific stretch, and with all due respect to Julie Newmar, her Catwoman gave the most insouciant reading of the line "Meow!" on record. Her movies have gotten worse, and her last one, I Could Never Be Your Man. ended up going straight to DVD. But she remains a welcome presence on-screen.

ANNA MAGNANI (1908-1973)

If Sophia Loren could have taken out a patent on the movie image of the Italian woman as lusty, ripe, and sensual, Magnani embodied the idea of the Italian as a woman who might have stepped off an opera stage, made of common clay but transcendently beautiful in a way that represents what people used to call "a force of nature." She had been acting in movies (and also singing and performing in cabaret and nightclubs) since the earliest days of sound pictures, but it was Roberto Rossellini's 1945 Open City, and in particular her death scene, that made her an international star. She continued to work in Europe with such directors as Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti (Bellissima), and Jean Renoir, who after using her in The Golden Coach proclaimed her the greatest actress he'd ever worked with. Hollywood never quite knew just what to do with her, but she did find something of a patron in Tennessee Williams, and she won an Oscar for the film version of The Rose Tattoo. Magnani once said that "Women like me can only submit to men capable of dominating them, and I have never found anyone capable of dominating me," and in that movie you can see what she meant: she looks at her co-star, Burt Lancaster, as if he were Arnold Stang. (She was apparently perceived as a bit much even by her co-star in The Fugitive Kind -- the ill-fated screen version of Williams' Orpheus Descending -- a shy, retiring fellow named Marlon Brando. "Every time I play a scene with her," Brando is supposed to have said, "I'm gonna have a rock in each hand.") Her death in Rome, at the age of 65 from pancreatic cancer, occasioned a public funeral ceremony rumored to have made the Pope jealous.

Click Here for Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Seven & Eight

Contributors: Sarah Sundberg, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

OST: "Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai"

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 20:00:00 GMT

If you've been following the "OST" feature here at the Screengrab for a while, or even if you're just familiar with the kind of chicanery that goes on in the music business under the guise of protecting intellectual property, you'll know that an astonishingly large number of movie soundtracks present you with a product that's wildly -- even borderline fraudulently -- different from what you encountered in the movie. The difficulty and cost of obtaining clearance rights to music, especially for small, cash-poor independent films, and the greed and short-sightedness of record companies (or just their willingness to butt heads with equally greedy movie companies over the size of their slice of the pie) has sunk many a soundtrack. Jim Jarmusch's inventive, compelling Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai ran afoul of this very problem, but with a curious endgame: there are, in fact, two available records affiliated with the movie -- one best described as a soundtrack, and the other a score. Both are extremely worthwhile, but neither is completely successful on its own; both are very different in character, although they were written by the same person; and both feature material from the film as well as material that never appeared in it, though only one is available in the United States.

It should come as no surprise that Jarmusch's 1999 pseudo-remake of Jean-Pierre Melville's fantastic Le Samourai features a terrific soundtrack. As befits his image as a New York hipster filmmaker, Jim Jarmusch's movies have always placed music in a prominent position; from the haunting, unnerving guitar wails of Neil Young that formed the basis of the soundtrack to Dead Man to the exotic, emotionally powerful jazz-funk of Ethiopian composer Mulatu Astaque that was featured in Broken Flowers, Jarmusch is one of a handful of directors -- others include Quentin Tarantino, Wes Anderson, and Sofia Coppola -- who can be counted on to take as much care with the soundtrack as they do with the film itself. After reading that Italian-American mafiosi were fond of gangsta rap, and consulting with his star Forest Whitaker, Jarmusch decided to bring in the RZA, producer and mastermind behind the hugely influential Wu-Tang Clan, to write both the score and the soundtrack to Ghost Dog. This began a collaboration between the two that became deeper and more profound than either had anticipated; the RZA ended up consulting with Jarmusch on some of the language of the street hustlers in the film, helped out with the design and costuming, and even appears briefly in the film (as do Timbo King and a handful of the Wu-Tang Killa Bees auxiliary). The movie and the music are gorgeously integrated on every level, reflecting a realness that couldn't have come about if any other director and any other musician had been behind it: scenes are perfectly broken up by the intrusion of killer hip-hop tracks (all of which the RZA wrote, produced, or both); the scenes themselves feature gorgeous nighttime driving shots of Whitaker's lethal but loyal assassin, accompanied by evocative, skeletal beats also made by the RZA.

Unfortunately, things went awry, as things often do. Epic, which then had a stranglehold of a contract on the RZA's work, saw the release of the film -- which they couldn't have cared less about -- as nothing more than an opportunity to release new RZA-penned singles to the hip-hop market. They saw no value whatsoever in the instrumental score he'd worked so hard on, and which so perfectly complemented the film. As a result, when the licensing deal was penned with Razor Sharp, the company that released the soundtrack, Epic gave them permission only to use the hip-hop songs the RZA produced, and none of the instrumental score. Eventually, an alternate version of the soundtrack -- this time featuring a number of excellent selections from the score -- was released, but only in Japan. The result is the unsatisfying split alluded to above: here in America, the only version of the soundtrack you're likely to find is the one featuring the rap songs -- which, make no mistake, are almost uniformly excellent, but suffer from a lack of completeness. If you're lucky enough to live in Japan, or shell out extra money to import the version available there, you'll get parts of the score -- at the cost of the great rap singles. So, in the end, the Ghost Dog soundtracks remain two imperfect halves of an incredible whole, and are likely to remain so as long as greed gets in the way. Or, to put it another way, forever.

BEST TRACKS: Assuming you're either unable or unwilling to get hold of the Japanese version of the soundtrack to Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, we'll assume that you're listening to the American version, illustrated above. (The score segments are replaced by rather useless "samurai code quotes" from the movie.) Don't despair, though; while you aren't hearing the whole picture, you're still getting some amazing RZA-penned hip-hop. Some of the best tracks here include the Wu-Tang's featured track, "Fast Shadow", a raw-sounding, desperate slice of urban paranoia; "Strange Eyes", a groovy, expressive effort by the Wu spinoff group Sunz of Man; and, especially, "Don't Test/Wu Stallion", an evocative, insinuating dub groove by underrated Jamaican toaster Suga Bang Bang, which slithers from one pole to another over a killer minimalist beat by the RZA, which suggests the score that you're missing.

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Mickey Rourke Gets Up Off the Canvas

Phil Nugent — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 15:00:00 GMT

As the opening of the New York Film Festival draws near and with it, the American premiere of Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler, Scott Foundas checks in with the movie's star, Mickey Rourke. Given the reception to Aronofsky's last movie, The Fountain, his new one (which won the Best Film prize at the recent Venice Film Festival) would qualify as a back-from-the-dead comeback even if it starred Michael Phelps, but the fact that it's a Mickey Rourke movie--the first time that Rourke has claimed the starring role in a full-length, non-multiple-story movie in many a moon--makes it even bigger news. Looking back to his early days, when he moved from Miami to New York with an itch to act, Rourke recalls, ""I wanted to be like Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Chris Walken, and Harvey Keitel. I wanted to be a really great actor. And if I worked really, really fucking hard, maybe one day I could do that. And I worked really, really hard. I had no social life. I lived like a monk. For weeks on end, I slept on the couch at the Actors Studio, working on scenes nonstop." And when he followed up his scene-stealing small role as an arsonist named Teddy in Body Heat with his performance as the overgrown tomcat Boogie in the ensemble picture Diner, a lot of people were very impressed with his charisma, his seductiveness, his "look into my eyes" audience rapport, and his ability to overcome playing characters with really dopey names. Thinking back on what happened next, Rourke says, "I look at these guys like Matt Damon, George Clooney, Sean Penn—they're all very bright, educated guys who understand that it's a business and there's politics involved. I wasn't educated or aware enough. I thought I was so good I didn't have to play the game. And I was terribly wrong."

Here, as in his other post-crash interviews, Rourke is admirable in his insistence on blaming himself for screwing up his career. Still, talk of office politics can scarcely convey how weirdly Rourke began to handle himself, and to style himself, as soon as he began to get a little control over his movie roles. In such horndog entertainments as 9 1/2 Weeks and Wild Orchid, he seemed to be trying to prove that, given the right wardrobe, leading ladies, and exotic locales, even a Miami boy could qualify as Eurotrash. In Angel Heart and Barfly, he continued to bang away at his female co-stars like a screen door during a typhoon, while also demonstrating his "authenticity" as a manly Method actor by reporting to work looking as if he'd been tied to the back bumper of a jeep and dragged through a swamp. All this time, he was living far beyond his means and turning down roles in movies that might have made his status in Hollywood a lot sturdier. Meanwhile, stories about his unmanageable behavior on the set and the storm surrounding his on-again, off-again marriage to his Wild Orchid co-star Carre' Otis (who accused, and then non-accused him, of spousal abuse) were helping to turn him into a joke. Rourke dates the point of no return to his decision to co-star with Don Johnson in the 1991 Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man. The movie was a critically derided bomb, and for once Rourke, who had done it because he desperately needed the money, couldn't claim to have had any grand artistic hopes for the finished product. "They paid me a lot of money, and I went fuckin' bonkers because I sold out and I hated myself for it. Some kind of anger kicked off, about the fact that I'd put myself in a position to have to do that movie. The demons took over." Rourke's sense of shame over having done the kind of movie that most stars routinely laugh off drove him to abandon acting for several years and take up professional boxing, a sport he had practiced as an amateur back in the early seventies. (Although Rourke remains vague about his age, he must have been around forty when he climbed back into the ring.) Eventually he started shopping around for movie roles again, having concluded a physical testing that one hopes did more good for his soul than it did for his face. He was very funny as a self-pampering, sleazeball lawyer in Francis Ford Coppola's adaptation of the John Grisham thriller The Rainmaker. He worked a long time filming a good-sized role in Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line, but sadly, his whole performance was edited out of the movie. He played the villain in the Tsui Hark film Double Team, which co-starred Jean Claude Van Damme and Dennis Rodman, but sadly, his performance stayed in the movie.

Rourke's real salvation came from fellow actors who, when they took their own turns directing movies, reached out to him as a worthy brother in need. In small roles as a bookie in Vincent Gallo's Buffalo 66, as a prison drag queen in Steve Buscemi's Animal Factory, and as a man who can't get past his daughter's murder in Sean Penn's The Pledge, Rourke was given the chance to demonstrate both his range and, especially in the Penn film, his daring willingness to go very deep emotionally while remaining handsomely in control of his effects as an actor. In 1994, Rourke had been too occupied with boxing to say yes when Quentin Tarantino invited him to play the Bruce Willis part in Pulp Fiction. Now, Tarntino's sidekick Robert Rodriguez cast him in a small role in Once Upon a Time in Mexico and then in a biggerm, showier (and CGI-augmented) one in Sin City, a movie whose most awesome special effect was Rourke's ability to make his presence felt through all that latex and computer trickery. But in the eyes of the suits, he was still unbankable and probably insurable.

But Aronofsky and his screenwriter, Robert D. Siegel, had planned The Wrestler with Rourke in mind, and when Rourke agreed to meet the director, Aronofsky gave him what sounds like one hell of a pep talk. As Rourke describes it, "He sits down, and for the first five minutes, he tells me how I fucked up my whole career for 15 years behaving like this, and I'm agreeing with everything. Yes, I did. That's why I haven't worked for 15 years, and I've been working real hard not to make those mistakes... He goes: 'You have to listen to everything I say. You have to do everything I tell you. You can never disrespect me. And you can't be hanging out at the clubs all night long. And I can't pay you.' And I'm thinking: 'This fucker must be talented, because he's got a lot of nerve to say that.' " But Aronofsky discovered that he couldn't get the movie funded without a big star, and when Rourke was told that he was going to be out of the picture, part of him was relieved, ""because I knew that Darren wanted me to revisit these dark places, these painful places." Then suddenly, he was back in again. If Rourke had any complaints about the resulting collaboration, he's keeping them to himself. "He knew how to push my buttons," he says of Aronofsky. "I do a take, and I nail it. I look over at Darren and I think: 'OK, we're moving on.' And he walks over to me and says: 'Do it better.' And you know what surprised me? I did it again, and I did it better. He knew that if he challenged me, that's what I wanted. A lot of people don't like that; me, I need it."

Fantastic Fest Review: “Not Quite Hollywood"

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 19:45:00 GMT

Granted, I haven’t seen everything, but it’s hard to believe there’s a more outrageously entertaining movie at this year’s Fantastic Fest than Mark Hartley’s “Ozsploitation” documentary Not Quite Hollywood. Virtually the entire history of the Australian film industry from its inception in the early ‘70s to the rise of home video in the late ‘80s is crammed into its 110 minutes, with a decided emphasis on drive-in fare over gauzy period pieces. And what drive-in fare it was – based on the evidence here, the Aussie exploitation movies were faster, cheaper, gorier and downright crazier than their American counterparts.

In the beginning, there was no Australian film industry outside the occasional international production such as Age of Consent with James Mason. With the introduction of the R rating in 1971, all of that changed. It began with lewd and crude sex comedies like The Adventures of Barry McKenzie and the very popular Alvin Purple series, featuring Fosters-swilling Outback yahoos getting it on with large-breasted, very nude women. By the middle of the decade, these movies had given way to action and horror pictures, most of them little-known in America. Aussie Roger Cormans like Brian Trenchard-Smith and Antony I. Ginnane churned out exploitation films with titles like Turkey Shoot, The Man from Hong Kong, Dark Age and Dead-End Drive In.

Apparently there wasn’t much in the way of regulation and oversight in those days; as we learn from interview subjects ranging from Barry “Dame Edna” Humphries to – of course – Quentin Tarantino, the makers of these films had few qualms about staging car crashes on public roads or setting their actors on fire. The stuntmen were up for seemingly anything, as you can see in the trailer below. (The official Not Quite Hollywood site has a number of vintage trailers for these films as well.) As with the Corman factory, a number of “respectable” filmmakers got their starts in Ozploitation, including Simon Wincer, Bruce Beresford and of course, George Miller. A few productions had sufficient budgets to import an American star or two, such as Stacey Keach and Jamie Lee Curtis for Roadgames and (most memorably) Dennis Hopper for Mad Dog Morgan.

Admittedly, this subject matter is right up my alley. As I never fail to remind you, my book Hick Flicks: The Rise and Fall of Redneck Cinema (which makes a great Halloween present) deals with the Southern-fried drive-in movies of the ‘70s and ‘80s, so watching Not Quite Hollywood was like stumbling upon a hidden mirror universe of that era. The Aussies even have their own word for redneck – “ocker” – and certainly a fetish for automobile culture to rival our own. (They also have spectacular, desolate locations, great accents and funny words like billabong and didgeridoo, and for these reasons and many others, I plan on catching up on some of these movies by launching a new weekly Ozploitation series here at the Screengrab, starting this Thursday.)

Not Quite Hollywood isn’t perfect – for all its encyclopedic breadth, it barely touches on the Aboriginal actors in Aussie cinema – but it’s a raucous, informative and often very funny roller coaster ride through a neglected time and place in film history.

Screengrab Review: "Sukiyaki Western Django"

Leonard Pierce — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:30:00 GMT

It's been a busy week for screenings; imagine my surprise when a DVD of the new (well, newish; it opens in limited release here in the States this Friday, but it was actually made in 2007) movie by Takashi "The Filmmaker of Love" Miike showed up in my mailbox. Miike, the mind behind such twisted cinematic fare as Audition, Ichi the Killer and Visitor Q, has a reputation for extreme weirdness, and his new one is no exception. It may bewilder, confuse and infuriate, but it certainly isn't going to bore.

Set in some nebulous time zone between the Battle of Dannoura in the 12th century and the wild and wooly days of the Wild West (or, in this case, the Wild East), Sukiyaki Western Django essentially does to A Fistful of Dollars what Dollars did to Yojimbo: lifts its plot wholesale and plops it into a western setting. But, since it's Miike behind the lens, you know you won't see the story of warring clans bloodily competing for gold done up in any kind of pedestrian fashion. Taking his cues from Sergio Leone, he sets the movie's action in "Nebada", a section of the old west that's about as authentic as the remote deserts of Tuscany. He also instructs his actors -- almost all of whom are Japanese, though see below -- to speak in an extremely bizarre form of phoenetic English, which proves to be extremely distracting, if sporadically amusing. And in one of the movie's most ridiculous divergences, Quentin Tarantino plays a freakish admixture of the Man With No Name and the cowboy narrator in The Big Lebowski. Tarantino, who cannot act in his native language, also cannot act in Japanese, but Miike simply has him imitate the other actors, who are speaking cod English with thick Japanese accents, and the result is...well, you really just have to see it for yourself.

The movie itself is pretty much a boilerplate western featuring characters created by second-tier spaghetti western director Sergio Corbucci; with the exception of some exciting (if convoluted) flashbacks, the plot almost directly follows A Fistful of Dollars. And while the acting seems to be strong from moment to moment (clan boss Yusuke Iseya and ex-gunslinger/retired grandma Kaori Momoi are lots of fun to watch), it's hard to tell through the goofy conceit of the vocalized English. What saves it from collapsing into a total mess is Miike's generally unimpeachable visual style: the production design and costumes are brilliantly done, combining a genuine Old West flavor with colorful spaghetti western conceits and traditional Japanese heraldry, with the end effect that you genuinely feel as if you're watching an alternate universe where feudal Japan developed along the lines of the Wild West. And the pacing of the film is exquisite, with the bloody and electrifying battle scenes coming at exactly the right time to keep the viewer riveted to the screen. Without the gimmicks, Sukiyaki Western Django might have been a better film, but it wouldn't have been a Takashi Miike film.

Embattled Guy Ritchie “Caught Up in the Zeitgeist of Slaggery”

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Sure, it seems like it would be easy enough to be Guy Ritchie, making your London gangster movies, naming your characters after Dick Tracy villains and generally building a career out of fast-paced, violent Tarantino knockoffs. But Ritchie has hit a rough patch of late. Warner Bros. is said to be down on the American box office prospects of his latest effort, RocknRolla, and the sordid details of his wife Madonna’s alleged dalliance with Yankees slugger Alex Rodriguez were splashed across the New York tabloids for weeks.

Ritchie recently talked to Craig McLean of The Guardian about the former matter, even as he did his best to evade the latter. About Warner Bros. president Alan Horn’s concerns about RocknRolla, Ritchie is diplomatic. “'Well, first of all I like Warner Brothers very much. They've been very good to me,' he replies. He's about to begin shooting his next film, a Sherlock Holmes story with Robert Downey Jr. in the title role, and that's a Warner Brothers project. 'And I like and respect Alan very much. I mean, they're still talking about an 800-screen release [in the US]. If it's on 800 screens that's bigger than what I would do anyway - I would go smaller. So there's not much I can say.'”

Ritchie gets a little more prickly when the subject of Revolver, his underperforming and critically panned previous film, arises. “'I was disappointed in the respect that...I'm not sure if the film was being slagged off as much as...We got caught up in the zeitgeist of slaggery, so it was clearly at some point not about the film. And I just don't accept it's a bad film. I know how to make a film. So to say it's a bad film, to say it's constructed badly or anything - it's just not.”

Ritchie turns politic again when the topic of his wife’s acting in his remake of Swept Away is raised. For that and more, check out the full interview here.

Related:
Madonna on Film: Screengrab Celebrates Her Top Ten "Best" and Worst Performances
No Shit, Sherlock: Guy Ritchie Reimagines Holmes

Vanishing Act: Monte Hellman

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Hellman! His is one of the great “What if?” stories in American cinema. As in, “What if someone had given the poor guy some money to make a few movies over the past 40 years or so?” The beginning of Hellman’s career bears a close resemblance to that of many heavy-hitters from his generation, including Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese and Jonathan Demme. That is, he got his filmmaking education on the cheap from Roger Corman, churning out quickies like Beast from Haunted Cave and Flight to Fury. Once Hellman had put in enough hours in the basement, Corman teamed him with fellow stalwart Jack Nicholson for a pair of offbeat westerns, The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind. Hellman’s breakthrough and downfall arrived simultaneously with 1971’s Two-Lane Blacktop, declared “The Movie of the Year” by Esquire and then released to general indifference.

Had the movie caught on with the youth culture in the same way Easy Rider did, Hellman’s subsequent filmography might have been a treasure trove, but instead it’s more of a trivia quiz. There’s Shatter, a 1974 Hong Kong action picture Hellman departed after three weeks of shooting; China 9, Liberty 37, a Spaghetti western in which Warren Oates and Sam Peckinpah appear in support of the immortal Fabio Testi; The Greatest and Avalanche Express, both of which Hellman took over after the original directors died; Iguana, a seafaring tale of a disfigured sailor that never received a theatrical release; and Cockfighter, the only one of the bunch that lives up to the promise of the early westerns and Blacktop – and even that one had its original theatrical release sabotaged when Corman recut it to add more action.

By 1989, it was as if Hellman had come full circle to his disreputable early days with Corman, as he helmed the horror sequel Silent Night, Deadly Night III: Better Watch Out! His best shot at a comeback arrived in the form of Quentin Tarantino, who approached Hellman to direct his script Reservoir Dogs. Of course, Tarantino eventually decided to direct it himself, leaving Hellman with only an Executive Producer credit. That led to pretty much nothing.

So where is Hellman now? He’s got a teaching gig at CalArts, helping to educate future filmmakers who may someday hire him and then decide to direct themselves, leaving him only with an Executive Producer credit. He was heavily involved with Criterion’s superb 2-disc DVD release of Two-Lane Blacktop, which includes commentary tracks, a documentary field trip to some of the film’s locations as well as an uneasy conversation between Hellman and Blacktop star James Taylor, who has never seen the film. And after seventeen years, he finally returned to the director’s chair for a segment of the horror anthology Trapped Ashes.

Having recently watched Ashes, just out on DVD, I can attest that Hellman’s segment, “Stanley’s Girlfriend,” is worth a look. Although it’s never explicitly stated, the Stanley of the title is clearly Kubrick, and Hellman has fun with what we know of the legend, weaving the 2001 filmmaker’s love of photography and chess into a supernatural explanation for his permanent exile from the United States. “Stanley’s Girlfriend” isn’t much more than a doodle, but it’s easily the standout in a movie that includes a cautionary plastic surgery tale about vampiric breast implants. See for yourself:

Previously on Vanishing Act:
Christopher McQuarrie
Savage Steve Holland

Forgotten Films: "Mad Dog Time" (1996)

Phil Nugent — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Having had a versatile, many-sided career does have its down side: when Isaac Hayes died last Sunday, it quickly became a hipster punch line that mainstream obituaries often referred to him as "perhaps best known" for his role as Chef on South Park. Hayes was well-known for a great many very different things, and Chef happened to have been the most recent of these. Then there are people like Larry Bishop, who are not especially well-known at all for anything, but have a number of things for which they may be sort of semi-recognizable: add them all up, and it kind of equals minor celebrity. For example, you might trigger a faint recognition in people who are well-versed in Rat Pack mythology by noting that Bishop is the son of the late comedian Joey Bishop. Experts in Hollywood dynasties may care for all of two seconds that he once performed comedy with Rob Reiner at a time when the director of Misery was himself best known as Carl's kid. And bad-movie junkies of a certain stripe may find it in themselves to think it worth knowing that, in the late '60s and early '70s, he appeared in such pictures as The Savage Seven, The Devil's 8, Angel Unchained, and Chrome and Hot Leather. It was these credits that helped convince Quentin Tarantino (who cast Bishop as Michael Madsen's grouchy boss at the strip club in Kill Bill, Vol. 2) that, as a writer-director-star, he had a great motorcycle movie in him. Tarantino served as executive producer on the years-in-the-making Hell Ride, which reunites Bishop with Madsen, and which Tarantino believes it was Bishop's "destiny" to make. Anyone who's seen Tarantino's performance in Destiny Turns on the Radio, which established that our boy QT should be prevented, by federal law if necessary, from throwing around the "D" word, can guess at how well that's turned out.

If Bishop and Tarantino are soul mates of a sort, it's because they share a knack for throwing together ready made slogans and catch phrases and parts of old movies and kinky twists on the same, and getting an incredible number of cool people to come together to act out their fantasies. In his best work, QT has been able to shape these raw materials in such a way that the kick he gets out of them is transferred directly to the audience. In Bishop's only work as a director--Hell Ride and its predecessor, the 1996 gangster fantasia Mad Dog Time--the results tend to be an inert mess, interesting chiefly for the challenging aesthetic questions it raises, such as What was he thinking? and How hid he get this cast? The best answer to the second question probably has something to do with how many favors a man can get owed in the course of a thirty-year career in which he's done everything from episodes of I Dream of Jeannie and Love, American Style to such oddities as the William Castle-Marcel Marceau collaboration Shanks.

Mad Dog Time is set in some weird gangland society where everybody is a mobster or a moll and all the characters spend their time entertaining each other with weird acting exercises and showy turns--it's as they were trapped at an improv comedy club in Hell--while plotting their next bloody move up the ladder. (There's a palpable '50s-Vegas vibe to the decor, which may be an in-joke on Bishop's lineage.) Richard Dreyfuss, whose 1978 starring vehicle and pet project The Big Fix featured Bishop in a supporting role, is the nominal head of the mob, Vic, who, making his entrance wearing a bathrobe over his PJs, has just returned from a stint in the nut house, where it was probably quieter. The other people who appear here doing things that they probably would have thought twice about if they'd known that Larry was going to be able to get the film developed include Jeff Goldblum, Kyle MacLachlan, Ellen Barkin, Gabriel Byrne, Diane Lane, Burt Reynolds, Billy Idol, Michael J. Pollard, Henry Silva, Gregory Hines, Billy Drago, Angie Everhart, Paul Anka, and a sick, callously exploited Richard Pryor. For hardcore devotees of movie character actors, the prize catch was Christopher Jones, whose work in such movies as the 1968 Wild in the Streets (in which Bishop played a bassist with a hook for a hand) and Three in the Attic earned him a reputation as a James Dean a the new age. But Jones, high-strung and drug-damaged, quit acting after finishing his work as the romantic lead in the troubled David Lean production Ryan's Daughter (1970). Tarantino, who offered him a role in Pulp Fiction, was unable to lure him out of the shadows, but Bishop was able to get him to drop by the set just long enough to play a sneering supposedly fearsome assassin whose bite turns out to be worse than his bark. As Tarantino himself pointed out, Jones "really doesn't have a character to play", but he still had the old charisma to go with his creepy, walking-death's-head look, and in this, his only movie appearance in the past twenty-eight years, he makes enough of an impression to make you wish that Bishop had used whatever line it took to get him to come out and play to persuade him to work for someone who might have been able to construct a real movie around him. Larry Bishop isn't the most obnoxious hustler who's ever rolled down Santa Monica Boulevard with show business in his DNA and a pile of I.O.U.s in his glove compartment, but I suspect that if it were his really his destiny to make the kinds of movies he's been trying to make--if he really knew how and it were in his blood--he'd have tried making them before Tarantino showed up and took out a patent on them. It may be that Tarantino's patronage of Bishop is really based on Tarantino feeling touched that one of the people he grew up watching in all kinds of trash is actually now trying to imitate him.