The Screengrab : robert forster

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.

The Gay Pride Top Twenty (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 20:30:00 GMT

DESERT HEARTS (1985)

Unlike the much-heralded 1982 Olympic-athletes-in-love drama Personal Best, 1985’s lower-profile lesbian romance Desert Hearts (based on a novel by Jane Rule) was (A) actually directed by a woman (Donna Deitch) and (B) depicted a love story where neither participant ultimately winds up going back to a man after a tentative Sapphic fling. Like Marilyn Monroe’s character years before in The Misfits, Helen Shaver’s restrained English professor Vivian Bell finds herself in Reno, Nevada, sweating out the state’s six-week residency requirement in order to obtain a quick divorce from her husband. While killing time in a no-boys-allowed guest house (run by Jack Tripper’s old landlady, Audra Lindley), Vivian meets a free spirit named Cay (Patricia Charbonneau) and, much to her own surprise, discovers an intense spiritual and sexual connection she never experienced with the XY chromosome set. Given the don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t even acknowledge that homosexuality exists mindset of the story’s 1959 setting, Vivian isn’t even entirely aware that she’s been living in a closet, but once she’s out, her feelings trump her fears of a life less ordinary, and she invites Cay to follow her back to New York, and Cay admits that Vivian “reached in and put a string of lights” around her heart, one of the great swoony lines in the annals of romantic cinema.

THIS FILM IS NOT YET RATED (2006)

A funny, real-life detective yarn, a brief history of film and a timely exposé of American cultural hypocrisy...all that AND a compendium of notorious, uncensored sex scenes? What's not to like? This Film Is Not Yet Rated is a gotcha! documentary in the Super Size Me tradition, where the filmmaker explores a larger topic by subjecting himself to a series of misadventures. In this case, the subject is the shadowy, puritanical Motion Picture Association of America, an unelected, unimpeachable board which subtly shapes our national cultural agenda by determining which films (and values) are "family-friendly" and which are marginalized by means of the current G-PG-PG13-R-NC17 ratings system. Combining movie clips and filmmaker interviews, director Kirby Dick demonstrates how the MPAA habitually demonizes sex in movies (particularly the homo- variety) while letting violence slide...but the real fun of the movie is watching the ironically-named Dick track down the secretive MPAA board members together with a spunky private detective (who, coincidentally but with obvious thematic irony, also happens to be a lesbian mother) before submitting the very film you're watching to the very group it's about for a rating in a great meta moment of "Fuck You" brio.

REFLECTIONS IN A GOLDEN EYE (1967)

Long before the "Don't ask, don't tell" era, a Southern army post was probably the least healthy environment for a deeply closeted homosexual imaginable. That's certainly the case in John Huston's adaptation of the Carson McCullers novel Reflections in a Golden Eye, in which pretty much every character has a psychosexual hang-up of some sort. Marlon Brando is Major Weldon Penderton, whose pride is entirely tied up in being something he's not: a portrait of courage, a leader of men. Elizabeth Taylor is his wife Leonora, one of the all-time ballbusters, and she's definitely got his number. "Firebird is a horse," he grumbles one morning, annoyed at his wife's devotion to the animal. "Firebird is a stallion," she hisses, and though it may have taken the 1967 audience a while to catch on (the words "gay" or "homosexual" are never mentioned – probably couldn't be mentioned), Penderton could hardly feel more emasculated if she horsewhipped him across the face in front of his colleagues – which she later does. A pent-up bottle of rage and self-loathing (he rides a horse like he's got the post's flagpole up his ass), Penderton finally pops his cork when he catches the object of his obsession, a hunky but dim young soldier played by Robert Forster in his movie debut, in his wife's bedroom sniffing through her undies. The movie's ending is a bit overheated, but Brando is brilliantly bizarre as a gay man who is definitely in the wrong place at the wrong time.

FOX AND HIS FRIENDS (1975)

He certainly wasn’t the first gay filmmaker, but a legitimate argument can be made that the brilliant German director Rainier Werner Fassbinder was the first gay filmmaker of importance. Fassbinder himself was openly gay, and homosexuality often played a part in his films, whether obviously or subtly, but Fox and His Friends was the first movie he made where a homosexual romance was the centerpiece of the plot. More importantly, though, as the director stressed in interviews, the gayness of the characters is not “a problem, or a comic term”. Fassbinder wanted nothing more – and nothing less – than to bring us a moving, tragic soap opera romance in which the main characters were not heterosexual. To accomplish this, he had to make the movie extremely personal (he filmed many of its scenes in the gay Berlin demimonde he frequented in his private life, and he chose to play the character of naïve working-class lottery winner Fox Biberkopf himself), but he also had to ensure that the movie would neither humiliate nor glorify its gay characters. In order for it to work, he had to show that gays were just as noble, as innocent, and as decent as other people, but he also had to show that they were just as base, as manipulative and as cruel as other people. The result is a masterpiece that contains everything that is great about Fassbinder as a director, and one of the most sad and human stories in the history of film drama: what Fox gives up for love, and the way his need for acceptance and affection leads him to ruin, resonates universally. That’s what good movies – be they ‘gay’ or ‘straight’ – are supposed to do.

BEN-HUR (1959)

One of the most iconic gay performances in cinema history came from a man who not only wasn’t gay, but apparently had no idea he was supposed to be playing a gay character, and when he found out, vehemently denied it for decades. The story goes that director William Wyler and screenwriter Gore Vidal found the notion that Messala and Judah Ben-Hur would have been so close, only to come to a position of extreme hatred over a fairly arcane dispute over politics, a tad hard to believe. Vidal, whose reputation as a bit of a troublemaker has never been a secret, came up with the notion that the two men had been lovers when they were young, and their split was not over politics, but over Ben-Hur’s eventual rejection of Messala. Wyler thought it was worth a shot, and while the two men discussed it with Stephen Boyd, who played Messala, they dared not bring the subject up with Heston, who was none too fond of gays. Naturally, the script never directly mentioned the situation either, but given the way Heston’s adult Ben-Hur interacts with Messala (the result, according to both Vidal and Boyd, of precise wording in the script and careful direction from Wyler), it’s a bit hard to believe that Heston couldn’t figure out that something was going on. Still, for reasons of his own, Heston spent the next forty years as the sole representative of the “I did not play a homo in Ben-Hur” position, going so far as to deny Gore Vidal had anything to do with the finished script of the film – a claim Vidal handily disproved, using, among other things, passages in Heston’s own autobiography as a source.

Click here to read Part One, Part Three and Part Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Andrew Osborne

Chick Hits: The Girl Power Top Ten

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 20:00:00 GMT

After the big screen edition of Sex & The City exceeded the low expectations of industry gurus who were shocked...shocked...to discover that people were actually interested in a movie about, y'know, gurlz, Missy Schwartz wrote a depressingly familiar story for Entertainment Weekly: “It was an unqualified triumph...one the industry observed in a stunned, slack-jawed state. As the weekend rolled to a close, news outlets filed their reports with words like unexpected, surprising, and shocking. ‘What do you know?’ they all seemed to be saying. ‘Women go to the movies!’”

And if Sex and the City 2 (or The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 or Mama Mia!) or any other female-centric movie succeeds in the near future, Hollywood will be surprised all over again, and Entertainment Weekly and other publications will run similar articles about the American movie-going public’s "unexpected," "surprising" and "shocking" desire for strong female characters...a desire Hollywood will more or less continue to ignore as it continues its relentless pursuit of teenage boys, no matter how many Speed Racers crash and burn along the way.

Because, after all, many studio execs are just overgrown boys themselves. They dig gadgets, explosions and special effects, and CGI creations are easy to control and merchandise. Female-centered movies tend to rely on well-written screenplays, relatable characters, nuanced direction and...yecccch...feelings: all the things most studio execs pretend to champion but secretly hate.

But we here at The Screengrab aren’t afraid to get in touch with our feminine sides as we raise our Cosmos to these Top Ten “chick hits”: films that put their empowered female characters front and center (without resorting to stripper poles OR big gauzy Prince Charming/Bridezilla wedding porn).

THELMA AND LOUISE (1991)

Okay, so I’m not sure how empowering it is to drive off a cliff in real life, but this Ridley Scott film (based on an iconic script by wunderkind, zeitgeist-tapping Academy Award-winning screenwriter Callie Khouri) caused a sensation upon its release by (A) objectifying Brad Pitt as a hunky slab of beefcake (thus electrifying and pretty much launching his career) and (B) allowing Susan Sarandon’s Louise to gun down the scumbag who was raping Geena Davis’ Thelma (and later blow up the truck of a leering male chauvinist pig) without even feeling all that bad about it, just like any number of male actors in any number of male-centric revenge fantasies...except in films like Dirty Harry, Death Wish, Taxi Driver, etc., the male heroes didn’t have to die in the end to satisfy Hays Code-style notions of karmic retribution for stepping outside the lines of acceptable social conduct. Still, the film’s outlaw motif energized female audiences by (melo)dramatizing the common stereotypical perception of men as either (a) dangerous assholes or (b) hapless boobs while providing enough action and sex to attract audiences of every gender.

THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA (2006)

There’s a beloved feminist koan that goes something like this: ruthless, aggressive men who go after what they want are called winners, while ruthless, aggressive women are called bitches. Of course, most thinking people realize that ruthless, aggressive men are actually called assholes...and it’s the universal, gender-blind nature of the eternally confusing success vs. happiness equation faced by Anne Hathaway’s aspiring fashionista “Andy” Sachs that helped to make the film version of The Devil Wears Prada a $300 million dollar monster hit. And, let’s see...two seconds of Googling and...yep! There’s a TMZ article from 2006 with a, shall we say, certain familiar ring to it: “Blah blah blah, female-centered film exceeded all expectations...yadda-yadda-yadda...industry analysts surprised,” etc., etc. etc. As Meryl Streep’s formidable Gordon Gekko-in-stilettos magazine mogul Miranda Priestly might say to those industry Suits who stubbornly refuse to acknowledge the existence of fifty percent of their audience, “Details of your incompetence do not interest me.”

BRING IT ON (2000)

This broadly played late-summer sleeper is actually packing a lot of heavy metaphorical lumber for a teen flick about a cheerleading competition. Kirsten Dunst is the new head of the Toros, who cheer for the (rich, white) Rancho Carne High School in Los Angeles; they're gearing up for the national championships, which they've won the past six years with the spectacular routines provided by departing team leader Big Red. But when a new girl with a gymnastics background and an attitude -- Eliza Dushku, who was too cool for Buffy the Vampire Slayer's school -- joins the squad, she has unsettling news. It turns out that Big Red was stealing her plays from the fly girls who cheer for the (black, poor) East Compton Clovers, thus making the Toros the cheerleading equivalent of Pat Boone to the Clovers' Little Richard. Dunst actually does her best to rationalize this cultural parasitism rather than destroy her cheerleading institution overnight, but the situation becomes intolerable after the Clovers attend a Toros game and mock their blonde plagiarists by performing the stolen moves in the stands. In the end, both teams attend the finals and show that they can use their brains and talents to compete honorably on the field of battle. There is, however, one scene that shows that contemporary standards of empowerment may be thornier, and weirder, than is commonly acknowledged. Dunst offers the Clovers, who have been prevented from attending the national competition by financial hardship, the chance to come by talking her father into getting his company to sponsor them, but the head Clover (Gabrielle Union) contemptuously rejects the offer, telling Dunst that they don't need her charity; they'll raise the money themselves, their own way. Their own way turns out to be going on an "Oprah"-like TV show and raising contributions by guilt-tripping viewers with their tale of woe. I guess it's honest labor and not charity if it helps "Oprah" kill an hour.

JACKIE BROWN (1997)

Such '70s blaxploitation films as Coffy and Foxy Brown may have made Pam Grier a cult star, but it was always a degraded form of stardom, and not just because the movies were cheap genre knockoffs; she may have had the chance to show that she could hold the camera and kick ass in the final reel, but she still also had to get her top ripped off before being raped by guys who looked like the Ku Klux Klan's answer to Uncle Fester, while being called things like "this big-jugged jigaboo." Jackie Brown catches up with Grier more than twenty years down the road, when she's at an age when Hollywood regards actresses as disposable. It's not a great age to be a flight attendant, either, which is why Jackie is working for a low-grade Mexican airline and acting as a courier for Los Angeles-based gun dealer Ordell Robbie (Samuel L. Jackson). Both Ordell and the federal agents setting up a case against him regard Jackie as a pawn who can easily be taken out of play at any moment. But -- and here's the key difference between this and Grier's '70s vehicles -- the movie respects her. The way she looks through Tarantino's lens, you sort of picture the camera shuffling its feet nervously as it tries to work up the nerve to ask her if she's been seeing anybody lately. And so Ordell, whose fearsomeness would cut him a lot more ice in a different Tarantino movie, is reduced to a comic figure; for all his bluster and firepower, his assumption that the middle-aged black woman with the low-paying job must be a bit player (which Jackie will use against him, and against the feds, too), makes him ridiculous. The only man in the movie who can see Jackie for what she is remains Robert Forster's bail bondsman Max Cherry, who, unlike the film's younger, strutting cocks, lacks the ego and capacity for self-deception that might get in the way of his seeing clearly what's in front of him. Tarantino included a riff (borrowed from Jules Feiffer's The Great Comic Book Heroes) on the arrogance of Superman in the second Kill Bill film, and Jackie Brown is in some ways a black, female Superman fantasy, except that Jackie doesn't have to put on a pair of eyeglasses to trick the dull-witted into thinking she's no match for them.

BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER (1992)

Long before Joss Whedon was a small-screen institution, he was just a fresh-faced young script doctor with a dream. That dream was to create a richly detailed fantasy world featuring nubile teenage girls. Sure, you’re saying: how does that make him any different than millions of other guys? Here’s how: his nubile teenage girls kicked ass. And not just any ass, but demonic vampire ass! Within a decade, Buffy the Vampire Slayer would find its way onto television and prove a major cult hit, giving the country a brand new definition of girl power and adding an entirely new dimension to teen angst as Buffy Summers and her Scoobies battled monsters and bloodsuckers at Sunnydale High. But it all started with this low-budget big-screen number. Whedon, once he’d decided he was a highbrow auteur, more or less disavowed the Buffy movie, but in many ways, it holds up a lot better than people give it credit for: it doesn’t take itself so deadly serious, it has tons of terrific comic turns from Paul Reubens and Stephen Root in supporting roles, and while Kristy Swanson’s Buffy may not carry the emotional weight that Sarah Michelle Gellar’s did, she looks mighty fine in a half-shirt, and she furthers the cause of female empowerment the way only a vampire slayer can. She’s rough, she’s tough, and she maintains her keen fashion sense: what could be more feminine than that?

Click here for Part Two!

Related Posts: Girl DisemPowering: Nine Films That Didn't Do Feminism Any Favors (Part One & Part Two)

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

The Spirit of '68 Lives on in "Medium Cool"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 19:00:00 GMT

In this election year, Ann Hornaday remembers Medium Cool, the great cinematographer ""Haskell Wexler's weird and riveting 1969 directorial debut", which he filmed during the summer of 1968, with the climax shot against scenes of actual political protest and street violence at that year's Democratic Chicago Convention. The movie stars Robert Forster (thirty years away from Max Cherry, the bail bondsman he played in Quentin Tarantinio's Jackie Brown) as a TV news cameraman, and Verna Bloom as a single mother from the South who's struggling to keep her nose above water. The movie's "story" is little more than a peg for the set pieces that Wexler and his cast improvised in documentary locations, and the characters have only as much life as the actors could breathe into them on the fly, but the film retains considerable interest for the history it captured and for its then-radical mixture of staged drama and nonfiction backdrop. Its most famous line was delivered, impromptu, by a member of the crew to the director as the tear gas was released and the cops unholstered their billy clubs: "Look out, Haskell, it's real!"

A few years ago, Wexler appeared in the documentary Tell Them Who You Are, directed by his son, Mark; though his place in film history is secure thanks to his work for other directors, Tell Them made it clear that Wexler was deeply disappointed at not having had a substantial directing career of his own, something that he wanted to ascribe to his politics. (Others --such as Michael Douglas, who fired him from the production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest--ascribe it to his being a pain in the ass. The true answer might involve a little from column A and a little from column B.) His only other nonfiction feature as a director is another political drama, 1985's Latino, set in Nicaragua during the Contra war; it was made with a more conventionally scripted approach than Medium Cool, and, well, it's a dull fucker. The older movie meanwhile, continues to pass over from a record of and comment on a tumultuous time in recent American history to a piece of history itself. The new documentary Chicago 10, about the conspiracy trial of war protesters that grew out of the disrupted convention, contains documentary footage from the period that's said to have been partly drawn from Wexler's outtakes.

Our 11 Favorite Romantic Moments in the Movies, Part 2

Phil Nugent — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 15:00:00 GMT

JACKIE BROWN (1997)

Max Cherry (Robert Forster) knows damn well he's not going to get the girl. He's not one of those idiots you meet in film noirs who feel some flicker of lust and start thinking that they can pull off some big score and get away and have it all; Max knows that whatever happens, he's going to end up back where he started, riding the deak at his bail bonds office, but in the meantime, he's prepared to do whatever he can to help Jackie (Pam Grier), because he figures he owes it to her, just for the way she made him feel the first time he laid eyes on her. He knows that she's out of his league, and he's okay with that; knowing that he could still feel that way is more than he expected to get out of one more trip to the jailhouse. What's amazing is that none of the other characters seem to see what Max sees when they look at Jackie: to them, she's just a middle-aged black woman, someone to be used and screwed over and forgotten. That's why they deserve the worst that can happen to them, and why Max deserves more than it would ever occur to him to ask for.

THE MORE THE MERRIER (1943)

Supernaturally avuncular matchmaker Benjamin Dingle (Charles Coburn, naturally) finally sees his plans come to fruition in this classic scene from George Stevens' comedy, More the Merrier. By trapping her dreary fiancé, Charles J. Pendergast, in a pointlessly prolonged meeting, genially uptight Constance Milligan (Jean Arthur) is forced to rely upon her inadvertent roommate and true love, hunky propeller designer Joe Stevens (Joel McCrea), to escort her back to her apartment on a warm summer night. As they make their way down the dark street, feeling the steam rising from other couples canoodling in the shadows, their conversation is all banal pleasantries on the surface, but McCrae's hands are in constant motion, laying Arthur's tiny jacket over her bare shoulders, kneading her hand in his (watch how gently he holds onto one of her fingers before letting her hand drop), guiding her forward with his hand pressed against the small of her back. Finally he dips her gently onto her front steps, draws her in close, kisses her hand, and, as she prattles on helplessly about the evaporating qualities of her former chosen one, he closes in for a deep, fatal neck nuzzle. She lifts her head, begins to stammer and is lost.

THEREMIN: AN ELECTRONIC ODYSSEY (1993)

This documentary tells the story of the Russian interventer Leon Theremin and his creation, in 1919, of the electronic musical instrument that bears his name. Although the theremin is best known in popular culture as the maker of spooky sounds in sci-fi movies (The Thing from Another World, The Day the Earth Stood Still) and freaky ones in pop songs such as the Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations", Theremin intended it to revolutionize classical music, and he worked closely with Clara Rockmore (seen here playing "Romance"), the acknowledged supreme master of the instrument, to tinker and perfect his device according to her suggestions and specifications. In 1938, Theremin was scooped up by the KGB and disappeared from the public eye. For most of the movie, the viewer who doesn't know better is likely to assume that he was dead. But it turns out that Theremin was alive and kept busy by the Soviet government until the end of the Cold War — working, he says, on "different kinds of bad things" — and the filmmakers brought him to the States and arranged a reunion between the maestro and his favorite pupil, when both of them were in their nineties. For a minute, they just stand framed in the doorway, smiling at each other. Then Rockmore ushers him inside, and as she prepares to shut the door, she says to the camera crew, "You go now." Yes ma'am!

LAW OF DESIRE (1987)

In this ripe specimen of early Pedro Almodovar, twenty-six-year-old Antonio Banderas plays a fellow called, for convenience's sake, Antonio, who is attracted to the film and stage director Pablo (Eusebio Poncela), but isn't sure that he can have sex with another man. Pablo offers to take him home so they can figure it out together. Things go swimmingly, but the next morning, Antonio is totally, obsessively in love, but Pablo considers him a one-night stand. So, to get Pablo's attention, Antonio tracks down the guy that Pablo is in love with, throws him off a cliff, then finds Pablo's sister Tina, who used to be Pablo's brother, and Tina's niece (who was actually fathered, or mothered, or something, by her transexual ex-lover) and takes them hostage, yelling to the police who are soon surrounding the house that he'll give himself up if Pablo will consent to one more hour between the sheets. Pablo does consent, and after their hour together is up, Antonio, have known the touch of his love object once more, can walk into the police bullets feeling that his life has been fulfilled. In real life, this would be an unhappy situation for everybody involved and would require the combined services of Dr. Phil and S.W.A.T. In a movie, it is the Technicolor apotheosis of everyone's fantasy of doing whatever the hell it takes to convince the reluctant prospective partner that the two of you have to be together, and ultimately succeeding. In Almodovar's world, it probably counts as a slow news day.

BEFORE SUNSET (2004)

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

— Phil Nugent, Robert Gomez, Scott Von Doviak

Click here for Part 1.

Morning Deal Report: Larry David and Woody Allen, Together at Last

Peter Smith — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 16:30:00 GMT

Woody Allen's next movie will star Larry David and Evan Rachel Wood, a combination of cranky neurotic Jew and precocious jailbait so patently Allen-esque that one wonders what took him so long.

Michael Douglas, Anne Archer and Robert Forster join Matthew McConaughey and Jennifer Garner in Ghosts of Girlfriends Past.

Hayden Panettiere will star as Kim Gordon in the Sonic Youth biopic Daydream Nation. No, I kid. It's just your standard teen movie with an alt-rock nod that'll probably be the best thing about it. (See also Can't Hardly Wait.)