The Screengrab : rendition

He Died, but Then He Got Younger: The Prequel Perplex

Phil Nugent — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 19:00:00 GMT

Ryan Gilbey suggests that, now that it's barely even fun anymore to complain about sequels and remakes, we should shift gears and reserve our disgust for the concept of prequels. By some accounts, the term "prequel" was coined by George Lucas to describe the young-Don-Vito sections of Francis Ford Coppola's 1974 The Godfather, Part II. However, the first time the term was widely used in the press to label a feature film which had no other discernible reason for being may well have been in 1979, when Tom Berenger and William Katt starred in Richard Lester's Butch and Sundance: The Early Years.

This was not the first time that somebody had built a new work around a speculative history of what happened to the characters in an earlier work before they reached the point in their history where they made the audience's acquaintance in the first place. Even before The Godfather, Part II, this approach actually had a tony literary pedigree. Jean Rhys's 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea (filmed by John Duigan in 1993) filled in the pre-history to Jane Eyre, and the 1971 movie The Nightcomers, with Marlon Brando, attempted to lay the groundwork for Henry James's The Turn of the Screw. But Butch and Sundance established the basis for regarding prequels as a singularly uninspired and parasitic form. Apparently it was made because some genius noticed that the tenth anniversary of the money-making Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was approaching, and it seemed a shame to waste such a ripe excuse to try to cash in again. There was just one problem: the first movie ended, famously, with Butch and Sundance being turned into Swiss cheese by the Bolivian army. So a sequel was out of the question, but it might be possible to go backwards. And since there was this new actor in town whose major qualification for stardom seemed to be that he looked a lot like a young Robert Redford...

In the end, Butch and Sundance tanked, William Katt transitioned from starring in movies to appearing on TV each week in The Greatest American Hero and looking as if he was praying to take a bullet between line readings, and it looked as if prequels might turn out to be one of those momentary fancies of the movie industry, like disaster epics or Steven Seagal. A few more prequels did trickle out in later years, ranging from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom to Amityville II: The Possession. But the concept wasn't revived big time until, yes, George Lucas decided to jump-start his fantasy of actually making another Star Wars trilogy, beginning in 1999 with The Phantom Menace. Even now, though, prequels, which are much more commonly found in the ranks of the straight-to-video than among actual theatrical releases, tend to occur only when a franchise has been tapped to pitiful death (see Hannibal Rising) or when the producers are desperate for a gimmick that might help to compensate for the fact that the original stars want nothing to do with it (see Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd).

We might also want to define our terms a little. Gilbey, anticipating the day when movie prequels themselves become "respectable", cites Guillermo del Toro's forthcoming The Hobbit, as a prequel to Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies, but J. R. R. Tolkien wrote the book that del Toro is adapting before he wrote the Rings books; surely that matters more than the fact that the books have somehow managed to get themselves filmed in the wrong order. On the other hand, J. J. Abrams's Star Trek straddles the line between "reboot" and prequel: it means to reinvent the old franchise, but in the process of doing so, it introduces the audience to James T. Kirk and his merry band at an earlier stage of their development than Gene Roddenberry dared, or cared, to go. Ideally, this kind of thing might be done with a little humor, teasing the audience with the shared knowledge we have of what these characters are fated to become. At worst, it might give us the chance to see what it looks like when fan fiction is perpetrated with a $150 million budget.

Of the high-profile releases about to come barging through the door, Wolverine is closest to the dreaded prequel prototype. The signs are pretty much there, except in reverse: the X-Men franchise has been pronounced dead, or at least mothballed, but everybody's favorite moody mutant is indestructibly immortal, and Hugh Jackman is still at an age where he can pull off the role. So maybe the best way to try to squeeze a little more money out of the character, minus his familiar supporting cast, is to zap back to before most of them were born and fill in some of the bad boy's back story, which apparently goes back for fucking ever. Wolverine's director, Gavin Hood, who readily acknowledges that "Prequels are usually bad," adds that, since "most of the audience knows what's coming... the excitement should be not 'what?' but 'how?' It changes the emphasis. Usually a movie is about what will happen. Here it's 'How will what we know will happen, happen?'" That sounds about right. And it's true that even when you think you know exactly what's going to happen, the movies can still surprise you. For instance, I saw Gavin Hood's previous films, Tsotsi and Rendition, and now, people who may well have seen them too have hired him to direct a big-budget summer movie. Boy, am I surprised.

Hollywood's Best Iraq Movie: Generation Kill

Andrew Osborne — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Lions For Lambs, Robert Redford’s think piece about recent U.S. foreign policy, sounded like a pretentious, humorless slog. Rendition: ditto. No End In Sight and about a zillion other well-reviewed documentaries about the current Middle East mess popped up at my local art house for about a week, only to disappear before I got out to see them (though, to be honest, I probably never tried very hard). In The Valley of Elah is # 71 in my Netflix queue, and United 93 haunted my TiVo for months before I finally admitted that waiting 'til I was in the right mood to watch it probably wasn’t something that was likely to happen for years.

It’s not that I want to keep myself ignorant about the truths and half-truths of the War On Terror. It’s not that I can’t handle dramatic subject matter. And it’s not that I don’t support the troops. But, like many Americans already saturated with information about the infuriating incompetence and arrogance of the Bush Administration’s foreign policy misadventures since 9/11, the past seven years have been such a demoralizing downer that spending my free time deliberately subjecting myself to fresh, Hollywood-inspired fits of impotent rage seems like the leisure time equivalent of driving around in rush hour traffic for kicks. And yet, somehow, after numerous box office failures, Hollywood has finally managed to get the War on Terror right...on the small screen, at least, with HBO’s seven-part adaptation of Evan Wright’s book Generation Kill, based on his observations as a Rolling Stone reporter embedded with a Marine battalion during the early days of the current Iraq war.

Are you watching this show? If not, imagine the second half of Full Metal Jacket with more characters, desert locations and hip-hop and you’ll have the basic idea. And yes, I just equated a TV show to a Stanley Kubrick classic, a comparison only possible because, like Jacket, Generation Kill is the product of uncompromising, honest-to-God pop culture genius in the two-headed form of David Simon and Ed Burns (NOT the handsome one from Saving Private Ryan), creators of the justly praised, unjustly underseen and unrewarded HBO masterpiece The Wire.

Like their previous collaboration, which nailed the details of the misbegotten War on Drugs so accurately that cops and drug dealers were among the show’s biggest fans, Simon and Burns have said their main goal with Kill was to depict Marine life during wartime in a way actual Marines would recognize without calling bullshit...and by all accounts they’ve succeeded. Their obsession with verisimilitude over political axe-grinding or boot-in-the-ass patriotism is one of the reasons Generation Kill bears comparison to Full Metal Jacket, Platoon and other grunts-eye-view dramatizations of the day-to-day boredom, frustration, terror, absurdity and pride of military life.

Alternately funny, exciting, terrifying and infuriating, Generation Kill honors the skill, bravery and professionalism of America’s fighting force while also depicting the forces, large and small, that frequently cause it to malfunction so badly.

DVD Digest for February 19, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 15:00:00 GMT

New this week: another Jean-Luc Godard film goes Criterion, and plenty of Oscar-bait (successful and not-so-successful) premieres on DVD.

DVD of the Week: The latest Godard classic to get the deluxe Criterion treatment, Pierrot le Fou is quite possibly the lightest and least didactic of the master's Golden Age output. The film lacks the poetry of earlier films like My Life to Live and Band of Outsiders, as well as the revolutionary fervor of Week End and La Chinoise. In many ways, Pierrot feels like the closest Godard came to making a lark, complete with impromptu musical numbers, gorgeous Cinemascope photography, and Anna Karina at her loveliest. But despite the deliberately minor feel of the film, it's a seminal work, both for the filmmaker and for the period. The two-disc Criterion edition of the film also includes: a new interview with Karina; archival interviews with Godard, Karina, and Jean-Paul Belmondo; the video A "Pierrot" Primer, directed by Godard associate Jean-Pierre Gorin; and a documentary about Godard's personal and professional relationship with Karina.

Also on the Criterion front this week is Alex Cox's Walker, a notorious flop in its day that has become a cult favorite in the intervening years. I haven't had the chance to watch the film yet, so I'll direct you to an appreciation of it by former ScreenGrab editor, and unabashed Walker fan, Bilge Ebiri.

Other new releases on DVD:
American Gangster (Universal, also HD-DVD)
In the Valley of Elah (Warner, also Blu-Ray)
Lust, Caution (Universal)
Margot at the Wedding (Paramount)
Michael Clayton (Warner, also Blu-Ray)
Rendition (New Line)

The new Criterions aside, it's looking like a lean week for classics coming to DVD, although I would be remiss if I didn't mention Sony's Blu-Ray-only release of Tom Tykwer's propulsive arthouse hit Run Lola Run. In addition, Sony is releasing a 1992 documentary about old-school criminals like Lucky Luciano and Bugsy Siegel entitled... The American Gangster. I can't imagine why they'd wait until this week to release it.
Finally, new TV on DVD: Universal's Coach: Season 3; Fox's Newhart: The Complete First Season (note: this is the one where he runs the inn, not the one where he's a shrink); and, as promised, the much-anticipated Walker, Texas Ranger: The Complete Fourth Season. I can't imagine there'll be much overlap between people renting this and those renting the Alex Cox Walker, but you never know.

Box-Office Quagmire

Peter Smith — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 17:00:00 GMT

Remember fifteen minutes ago, when people were complaining that nobody was making movies about Iraq? Well, while you were blinking, the octoplexes got overstuffed with movies about Iraq. The only problem is that, as A. O. Scott points out, nobody's going to see them. The films that've opened this past year — In the Valley of Elah, Rendition, The Kingdom, The Situation — have been greeted with "soft box office returns." Similar commercial fates may await the string of films currently lined up on the runway, which include Brian De Palma's Redacted and Robert Redford's Lions for Lambs, as well as Grace Is Gone, an indie tearjerker starring John Cusack as a father of two who is widowed by the war, and the adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s best-seller The Kite Runner, set in Afghanistan during the reign of the Taliban. (As Kim Masters recently wrote in Slate, Lions for Lambs also has its own special problems: it stands to be the next exploding boxcar in the continuing train wreck of Tom Cruise's career.) For all the automatic clucking about how American audiences don't really want to see movies about real problems, some of the recent Iraq movies make it clear that there's a built-in problem in trying to make drama out of an ongoing national trauma. As Scott puts it: "What is missing in nearly every case is a sense of catharsis or illumination. This is hardly the fault of the filmmakers. Disorientation, ambivalence, a lack of clarity — these are surely part of the collective experience they are trying to examine. How can you bring an individual story to a satisfying conclusion when nobody has any idea what the end of the larger story will look like?" — Phil Nugent

Chicago Film Writing Roundup

Peter Smith — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 19:00:00 GMT

On occasion, the Screengrab lets me bring you news from the rich world of film writing in my home town of Chicago. In the Tribune this week, foreign correspondent John Crewdson — inspired by Rendition — contemplates whether or not 'message' movies are really effective vehicles for spurring social change, and film blogger Michael Phillips talks to Mark Ruffalo about how his religious upbringing influenced his art. In the Sun-Times, Miriam Di Nunzio gets Malcolm McDowell to make the curious admission that he doesn’t think Caligula "is as bad as it once was" (has it somehow gotten better over the years?), and local legend Roger Ebert wins a Gotham Award from the Independent Feature Project. And in the Chicago Reader, Jonathan Rosenbaum, as part of his upcoming "Unseen Orson Welles" project, brings us the Italian neo-Marxist Giorgio Agamben’s choice of "the most beautiful six minutes in the history of cinema." — Leonard Pierce