The Screengrab : roger ebert

When Charles Napier Talks, People Twitter

Phil Nugent — Thu, 21 May 2009 15:00:00 GMT

We don't want to oversell it or anything, but Nathan Rabin's interview with Charles Napier for The Onion's A.V. Club is the greatest thing ever and deserves to be republished in the slimmest-ever edition of the Library of America series. For the benefit of those so benighted they have a moment's difficulty placing a name to the face or vice versa, the 73-year-old Kentucky-born Napier broke into the business as a space hippie on a 1969 episode of Star Trek before becoming a part of Russ Meyer's stock company. He subsequently became part of Jonathan Demme's stock company, playing the bigamous trucker Chrome Angel in Citizens Band and sticking on a chef's hat for Something Wild and a judge's robe for Philadelphia. (It was his performance in Citizens Band that inspired Pauline Kael to describe him as looking like "a Brian Keith made of concrete." He's done the rounds of TV series guest spots and a lot of voice work, channeling Ted Turner for his regular stint on the Jon Lovitz cartoon The Critic, and he can now be seen in the straight-to-video One-Eyed Monster, in which he does battle with Ron Jeremy's killer penis. (No, for real.) So it's not as if he doesn't have a career to talk about. It must have seemed, going in, that the trick would be to get him to open up. Turns out he was wide open with the screen door banging.

On "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls: "I was associate producer on that. They brought me, [Roger] Ebert, and Russ Meyer over to 20th Century Fox because Daryl Zanuck saw this movie we were making, and they wanted a part of it. So we did the movie, they released it. It made lots of money, and it kind of went away for 15 years, ’cause the country club where the producers all went didn’t want to be associated with an X-rated movie. Anyway, they finally re-released it again. It was a very successful hit. It was Russ’ big time at a major studio. He was very pleased with it. Of course, it was my fun too until the day they walked in and took our names off the door and said “Get off the lot.” Everything you did with Russ Meyer was a nightmare, everything was a total fucking catastrophe. It had to be done the Army way, it had to be done his way...This is how we made those first movies: we camped, we stayed outside, we cooked outside. No permits, nothing. We took two cameras, he handheld both of them, edited all of them, and I did all the stunts, I did all the car driving, I did all the makeup and that shit. It occurred to me later that we shot in the desert so the women couldn’t run away from the shoot."

On breaking into the Universal TV series factory: "So now I’m 40 years old and I’m back living on the streets of Hollywood in a parking lot under Russ Meyer, who owned the parking lot. And I said 'It’s over, man. I have no agent, I have no phone, I have no address, I have no nothing.' I had a little unemployment to go. And one day some guy came down the street with a megaphone asking my name, and I’m sitting there with the rest of the winos. I go 'Yeah, what’s up, that’s me.' I hadn’t had a haircut in two months, or a shave, or whatever. He says, 'They want to see you at Universal.' I go, 'What for?' He goes, 'You’ll find out when you get there, you want to go or not?' I go, 'I’m assuming if I don’t go, your ass is gonna be in a lot of trouble, is that correct?' He goes, 'That’s correct.' And we go straight to the lot in the back of the limo, straight to the office of Alfred Hitchcock. They said, 'Don’t say a damn word to him, don’t even look at him. He’s gonna be 10 feet away, and he’s gonna spin around a chair in a dramatic way. He’s gonna say "Go away," or he’s gonna say "Sign him."' So Hitchcock is looking at the guy standing beside him, and he says 'Tell him to turn around.' So I turned around, and Hitchcock said, 'Sign him.' And that was the end of it. I worked from then on, because I worked for Alfred Hitchcock. He owned a big percentage of Universal."

On working with Meyer: "I don’t really have a favorite of any of the pictures I did for him. There’s some stuff in there that scares the shit out of me, frankly, like the frontal nudity in Cherry, Harry & Raquel where I thought, 'Maybe I shouldn’t do this shit.' All it does is show me and whatever her name is galloping toward the camera, me in a cowboy hat and boots and nude. Years later he asked me—we were in a theater, actually, at the Paramount—and he said,'“Charlie, are you ever sorry you did that?' And I go, 'No, but my mother is.'"

On playing a space hippie: "... the writer was 65 years old. What did he know about hippies, right? And Shatner and all of them were upset about it, and of course I didn’t know any difference. I still get letters about that today. In fact, I just got one yesterday. Thirty years later, they wanted me to come back and do a Deep Space 9 and I just—not to be an a-hole about it—I just said, 'Look, I don’t want to wear that silly shirt again. If you can write a role where I’m a general of an army base…'”

Cannes Roundup: Day Five

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 18 May 2009 17:00:00 GMT

It’s all about Lars von Trier, who made few friends with the premiere of his latest outrage at Cannes. “Antichrist=Fartbomb,” writes Jeffrey Wells at Hollywood Elsewhere, and that’s one of the kindest things he says. “There's no way Antichrist isn't a major career embarrassment for costars Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg, and a possible career stopper for Von Trier. It's an out-and-out disaster -- one of the most absurdly on-the-nose, heavy-handed and unintentionally comedic calamities I've ever seen in my life.” Writes Lisa Schwarzbaum in Entertainment Weekly: “Blood spurts, bones are broken, genitals are mutilated...hellooo? Are you still with me?” Todd McCarthy in Variety: “"Lars von Trier cuts a big fat art-film fart with Antichrist.” Again with the fart talk? Anthony Kaufman of Indiewire offers a dissenting view: “While there’s no doubt that the place he goes is off a precipitous edge, one can’t deny the film’s continuing primal power.”

Taking Woodstock didn’t provoke quite so much outrage, but Ang Lee’s latest didn’t win many friends either. Schwarzbaum calls it “undergroovy and overplotted.” Eric Kohn of Indiewire says “Even with the ever-versatile Ang Lee behind the camera, this messy historical fiction plays like a two hour 'Saturday Night Live' sketch, and not a very good one, either.”

Roger Ebert is blogging his every move. “This is how Cannes works. At home, you read about the films and directors, but the moment you arrive in town the buzz takes over. I have been here scant hours and already am tapped directly into central intelligence.”

In Other Blogs: Roger Ebert Contemplates Eternity

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 08 May 2009 14:30:00 GMT

The weekend is almost here, so let’s turn to our old pal Roger Ebert for some cheery TGIF thoughts. “I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear. I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. What I am grateful for is the gift of intelligence, and for life, love, wonder, and laughter. You can't say it wasn't interesting. My lifetime's memories are what I have brought home from the trip. I will require them for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I brought home from Paris. I don't expect to die anytime soon. But it could happen this moment, while I am writing…I hope not. I have plans.”

Glenn Kenny brings reason to rejoice at Some Came Running: The Friends of Eddie Coyle is finally due out on DVD – in a Criterion edition, no less. “‘Young film fans raised in the multiplex era might look back and lament the fact that no one is making movies like The Friends of Eddie Coyle anymore,’ Kent Jones writes in his exemplary (as usual) essay on the 1973 film, included in the new Criterion DVD of it. ‘The truth is that they never did. There's only this one.’ Robert Mitchum's performance as Eddie, the hangdog, hard-luck crook whose quiet desperation—in this story, he's due to start serving some time in a couple of weeks, and he's just not going to be able to hack it—compels his every move, is a huge part of the film's uniqueness. He underplays like nobody's business, and never announces himself. Not only does the trademark Mitchum smirk never once cross his face—looking at his work here, you'd never believe he had it in the first place.”

At PopMatters, Kit MacFarlane reconsiders Mickey Rourke in Homeboy. “A glum and downbeat boxing film, Homeboy not only anticipates many of the key concerns of the highly-celebrated The Wrestler, but also, by now-obvious extension, the real life trajectory of Rourke himself. But the film fell into the ‘too depressing’ pit on its release, and the presence of standard genre cliches saw it treated dismissively by those who didn’t look close enough to see those same cliches being quietly, but firmly, derailed. Despite the presence of actors like Christopher Walken and Jon Polito, a delicate score by Eric Clapton, and even a fawning reference in Bob Dylan’s Chronicles ("The movie traveled to the moon every time [Rourke] came onto the screen. Nobody could hold a candle to him."), it is rarely mentioned today at all…Too depressing in 1988, Homeboy‘s aura of sorrow now seems too delicate, too nuanced and poetic, next to the sensationalized sledgehammer misery pioneered by today’s hip angst-peddlers like Aronofsky, Todd Solondz, Larry Clark, and Christopher Nolan.”

SmartMoney lists 10 Things Movie Critics Won't Tell You. We’re fond of #7: You probably don’t want to hear this, but you need me. “Want to stir people up? Ask them what they think of movie critics. Jen Davis of Louisville, Ky., is put off by what she sees as a superiority syndrome in the profession. ‘My opinion is just as valid, dammit!’ she says. Tammy Ras of Pascoag, R.I., is more militant: ‘If they say, “Don’t see it, it sucks,” that means, “Go see it, it’s great.”’ Sounds harsh, but the truth is, filmgoers need reviewers. As Salon.com’s Zacharek puts it, ‘Critics are the only thing standing between consumers and advertising.’ With hundreds of films released in theaters each year, ‘Critics are more important now than they ever were,’ she says. ‘There are just so many movies, so much aggressive hype.’”

Finally, it’s not exactly a blog, but The Worst Show on the Web is Blog Talk Radio, and more importantly, the most recent episode features your Screengrabbin’ pals Andrew Osborne and yours truly discussing some films screening at the San Francisco International Film Festival, most notably (and contentiously) My Suicide. Give it a listen here.

Yesterday's Hits: Fiddler on the Roof (1971, Norman Jewison)

Paul Clark — Fri, 01 May 2009 19:00:00 GMT

In some ways, it isn’t hard to determine why Norman Jewison’s big-screen adaptation of Fiddler on the Roof was a hit. From the time sound was introduced to the cinema, musicals were one of Hollywood’s most popular and enduring genres. But while most musicals of the 1930s and 1940s were frothy entertainments, the fifties saw an increase in musicals that tackled more serious material. And the record-breaking initial Broadway run of Fiddler on the Roof made a film version inevitable, and its status as the top-grossing movie of 1971 was practically pre-ordained.

While the reasons for the long-run popularity of Fiddler on the Roof seem obvious, its initial success is somewhat trickier to pin down. For one thing, the story’s subject matter doesn’t appear to lend itself to the musical treatment. What’s more, a community of Russian Jews around the turn of the century wasn’t the sort of setting to which most sixties-era audiences were normally expected to relate. And quite frankly, even in the post West Side Story-era, the storyline of Fiddler on the Roof was something of a downer. After all, Fiddler was about a man who loses most of what he holds dear- his three eldest daughters and finally his home- before the end of the story, and its treated these losses not as a tragedy (which might’ve allowed for some cathartic tears at the end), but with a sense of resignation.

Yet Fiddler on the Roof made a real connection with audiences of the day for numerous reasons. There was the music of course- Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick’s catchy, Jewish-inflected song score produced half a dozen songs that quickly became musical theatre standards. Likewise, the movie’s deeper themes- particularly the conflict between forward-thinking youth and their tradition-minded elders- had a great deal of resonance in uneasy sixties. And while Fiddler doesn’t soft-pedal its Jewishness by any means, the characters’ concerns were common enough to many difficult cultures that it came across less as a Jewish story than a universal one.

But most of all, audience members fell in love with Tevye, who quickly became one of musical theatre’s most enduring characters. Tevye is not a larger-than-life hero, but a poor milkman who has been “cursed” with five daughters and no sons, and despairs of finding them husbands. Tevye believes above all in the need to uphold tradition, and it’s the clash between this need and his daughters’ need to forge their own paths in life (especially when it comes to finding husbands) that drives the story. Throughout the story, Tevye struggles with how flexible his love for his daughters will allow him to be, until he finally reaches a point where he must throw up his hands and say, “if I bend any more, I will break.” And all the while, Tevye carries on a conversation with God- so much, indeed, that he must speak to God more than any flesh-and-blood character.

Before MGM brought Fiddler to the big screen, the role of Tevye was most commonly associated with the great Zero Mostel, who originated the character on Broadway. Because of this, there was some controversy when Jewison decided to fill the role not with Mostel, but the lesser-known Topol, who starred in the West End production. In the end, however, Jewison made the right choice for the film. With his outsized style of acting, Mostel was the perfect stage Tevye, able to pitch his performance to the rafters. But for the more naturalistic big-screen production, Topol’s more human-sized turn proved to be ideal. Whereas Mostel’s over-the-top bluster would have overwhelmed everything else, Topol’s never does, and he’s a sensitive enough performer to pull off the smaller character moments, as in the quiet musical number in which he asks his wife of twenty-five years, “Do You Love Me?”

One of director Norman Jewison’s key filmmaking decisions at the outset was to go for a more realistic feel which would make the musical transcend its stage origins. However, this gambit doesn’t always pay off, and occasionally this commitment to realism makes it feel almost like Jewison was uneasy about making a big-budget musical. In some ways, it’s probably good that Jewison limited the dancing to social scenes such as the barroom and Tzeitel and Motel’s wedding. But on the other hand (as Tevye is so prone to saying), Jewison undermines several potentially powerful scenes by having the songs sung in voiceover rather than actually voiced by the characters onscreen.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the “Chavaleh (Little Bird)” number, in which Tevye ponders the loss of his third daughter, who has eloped with a non-Jew. Had Jewison allowed Topol to perform the song onscreen, it might have made for one of the most emotional moments in the film, with Tevye realizing how his need to uphold tradition has lost him a beloved daughter. But instead, Jewison has Topol sing the song in voiceover, shooting him gazing into the distance while imagining his daughters dancing away from him. The number turns into what Roger Ebert calls a “Semi-Obligatory Lyrical Interlude”, and like most scenes of this type, it’s pretty laughable- a far cry from the powerful moment it should rightly have been.

But overall, Fiddler on the Roof does right by its original inspiration, and the elements that people loved in the stage production translated quite nicely to the silver screen. It’s not one of the greatest movie musicals by a long shot, but it’s a worthy adaptation, certainly better than most of the post-Golden Age adaptations of long-running musicals, which all too often get shoddy treatments a la The Phantom of the Opera and A Chorus Line. Perhaps the most definitive testament to the impact of the Fiddler movie is that, nearly four decades after the film’s release, Topol is currently starring in what has been called his “Farewell Tour.” That just goes to show you that while Zero might have originated the role of Tevye, he hardly owns it anymore.

Phil Spector Convicted of the Murder of Lana Clarkson

Phil Nugent — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 14:45:00 GMT

Legendary record producer and notorious self-made freak Phil Spector was convicted yesterday of second-degree murder in the shooting death of actress Lana Clarkson in 2003. The jury had the option of convicting Spector of a lesser charge but went with the maximum option, which carries with it a mandatory life sentence. The 69-year-old Spector, whose lawyers insist they will appeal the verdict, will remain free on $1 million bail until he is due to be sentenced on May 29. As Los Angeles Times reporter Harriet Ryan noted, his conviction, which "came six years and two trials after police found Lana Clarkson, a statuesque blond actress, shot to death in a chair in Spector's 30-room Alhambra mansion", makes him "the first celebrity found guilty of murder on Hollywood's home turf in at least 40 years." "Celebrity" almost seems a soft word for Spector, whose recording triumphs with his fabled "Wall of Sound" earned him a place in pop culture history that dwarfs the likes of O. J. Simpson and Robert Blake. Unlike them. however, Spector was never accused of having a lovable side. In his biography of Spector, He's a Rebel, Mark Ribowsky quoted Nedra Talley, a member of the Ronettes and a cousin of the group's focal point, Ronnie Bennett, who became Ronnie Spector when Phil married her in 1968: "[Ronnie] would say, 'Oh, I'm not really getting involved, he's just cute'--but let's be real. Phil is not cute."

In the early 1960s, Spector turned out what Ribowsky called "a lava flow of vinyl", including enduring hits by the Ronettes, the Crystals, Darlene Love, and the Righteous Brothers. (When some complained that the Brothers' "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'" was, at three minutes, fifty seconds, too long for radio airplay, Spector left the song alone and simply sent it out to disc jockeys with a label that read "3:05.") He also crafted the various-artists holiday album A Christmas Gift for You, a commercial disappointment when it was dropped on the public in the wake of President Kennedy's assassination but since then regarded as a seasonal classic. Later, Spector gave Tina Turner the name-above-the-title treatment with the 1966 "River Deep--Mountain High", vacuumed up the shards of the Beatles' last sessions for release as Let It Be, and produced successful solo projects for both John Lennon (Plastic Ono Band, Imagine) and George Harrison (All Things Must Pass). He was also immortalized in print by such writers as Nik Cohn and Tom Wolfe, and was said to have served as the basis for the character of the sword-wielding hermaphrodite "Z-Man" in Russ Meyer's 1970 Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Roger Ebert, who wrote the screenplay for Beyond the Valley, once chortled in print that despite the rumors, neither he nor Russ Meyer had ever met Spector, but then Robert Graves never met Caligula, either.

Spector appeared as himself in an episode of I Dream of Jeannie in 1967. (His acting ability can be measured by the fact that, even though he was supposed to be himself, he was listed in the credits under a pseudonym.) In 1969, he appeared in the first reel of Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider in the wordless role of the connection in the white Rolls-Royce who finances the heroes' road trip by buying their cocaine. According to Danny Davis, a record promoter who had worked with Spector, "The real point" of this piece of stunt casting "was that Dennis Hopper could put Phil Spector in a movie and not let him talk. That was Dennis shutting up Phil Spector, which of course was something nobody could ever do." Spector's on-screen appearances confirmed that reclusive was a good look for him, and he began to make fewer and fewer trips outside his mansion. As his work became stiffer and he got into the habit of taking high profile jobs that were a bad fit for him--with Lennon on his later solo records, with Dion on the comeback trail, with Leonard Cohen on the 1977 Death of a Ladies' Man, and especially with the Ramones on their 1980 End of the Century--there began to be less and less call for him to leave the house.

At the same time, his legend as a scary nut job was only growing. Firearms figured in his collaboration with the Ramones, who claimed that he'd held them hostage in his posh digs, and hastened the end of his professional association with Lennon, who was taken aback when Spector tried to assert his authority at a recording session by firing a shot into the ceiling of the tight studio. "Phil," Lennon is supposed to have told Tommy Two-Gun, "if you're gonna kill me, kill me. But don't fuck with me ears." At the time, Spector's marriage to Ronnie Spector, which had degenerated into a whirlwind of head games and physical abuse, was ending, and it wound up taking Spector's professional and personal relationship with Lennon with it: during divorce proceedings, Spector persuaded Lennon to come to court with him as a character witness, only to have Lennon stagger away from him in dismay when Spector began screaming obscenities at Ronnie in front of the judge.

Spector was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989, the same year the Ribowsky book and Spector's own as-told-to memoir, Be My Baby, How I Survived Mascara, Miniskirts, and Madness ("co-written" with Vince Maldron), hit the shelves. His old hits would be repackaged for the digital age, and every so often Spector would make a half-hearted gesture in the direction of a comeback, but he definitely made his biggest headlines in twenty-five years with the death of Clarkson, the beautiful, much-liked actress who made her screen debut in 1982 as Vincent Schiavelli's wife in Fast Times at Ridgemont High and who became best known as an Amazonian B-picture heroine in such films as Deathstalker and Barbarian Queen. In 2003, she was still trying to jump-start her film career while holding down a regular job as a hostess at the House of Blues, which is where she met Spector; he persuaded her to come back with him to his house for a drink, and soon after the two of them vanished inside, Spector reappeared to inform his driver, "I think I shot somebody."

Spector's subsequent attempts to spin the case to his advantage included a 2003 Esquire interview with Scott Raab in which, in contradiction of all other available evidence, he claimed to not have been drunk on the nigh in question, insisted that Clarkson was drunk and out of control when he gallantly agreed to her request for a midnight tour of his digs, and then tried to sell the story that her death had been a "suicide"--that, as Spector put it, in what sounded like a hard-boiled rewrite of "He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss)", the title of a Goffin-King song that he recorded with the Crystals in 1962, "She kissed the gun." The idea that Clarkson, who had sought treatment for depression in years past, was suddenly overcome with suicidal despair while in Spector's presence and wrestled his gun away from him so that she could ruin his clean and sober night out by killing herself in his home turned out to be a centerpiece of his legal defense; it was countered by prosecution testimony from a seemingly endless supply of women who had been invited by Spector to take a look deep inside the barrel of his peacemaker while the trigger-happy music legend was three sheets to the wind. The admissibility of that testimony will reportedly factor into the defense's plans to appeal. In the meantime, Spector's lawyers insist that he was fully expecting to be convicted this time out. "Mr. Spector is a realistic man," said his lawyer Doron Weinberg, which is the second judgement delivered yesterday and connected to this trial that few people could have seen coming

The Slasher Movie Comes of Age

Phil Nugent — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 17:00:00 GMT

In The Atlantic, James Parker sings the praises of "that most misunderstood of genres," the slasher flick. Actually, Parker doesn't really make a case for the genre being misunderstood so much as boldly step up to declare that he watches them voluntarily, and he can quote Ted Hughes (“Its mishmash of scripture and physics, / With here, brains in hands, for example, / And there, legs in a treetop.” ) and Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf, which, though a fine rendering of a classic work, does not include an appearance by a naked Angelina Jolie in flesh high heels. "The classic slasher flick," he writes, "is produced at high speed, on a squeaker of a budget, and bows briefly for an anointing of critical scorn before going on to make piles of money. With a bit of luck, that critical scorn will be amplified into cultural censure—1980’s rape-revenge slasher, I Spit on Your Grave, for instance, was widely and windily reviled, to the enduring profit of its makers. 'The more the film was attacked,' writer-director Meir Zarchi confided to Variety last year, 'the more money shot into my pocket.'” He must have done pretty damn well. I'm not sure that I've ever actually seen I Spit on Your Grave, but I remember, as if it were yesterday, the 1981 "special" episode of Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel's old syndicated movie-reviews TV show Sneal Previews that was set aside for the purpose of heaping scorn and disgust on what were then just beginning to be called slasher (or "splatter") films, with I Spit on Your Grave a prime target. Watching a clip from the movie, in which a bunch of scuzzball louts swaggered around the fallen body of a violated young woman, sandwiched between the TV showmen clucking and posturing about the death of civilization, one felt much as one does at a screening of Freddy vs. Jason: it's not clear who you should root for, but you'd settle for checking off the box marked "None of the Above."

Part of the appeal of slasher movies is that they're disreputable. But the fact that a writer like Parker can admit to having taken pleasure from watching slasher movies in a magazine like The Atlantic shows how far we've come since...well, since 1976, when Harper's, a magazine pretty much on the same social outreach level as The Atlantic, ran Stephen Koch's "Fashions in Pornography", which gave the author a chance to step out onto the heath and rend his garments in appalled despair over the fact that Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre had been screened at the Museum of Modern Art. (With the title of his screed, Koch clearly anticipated the current term "torture porn", which New York magazine reviewer David Edelstein is so proud of having coined.) In movie circles, Koch is best known as the author of Stargazer, a classic, admiring survey of Andy Warhol's films, and his dismay at seeing some trashy little drive-in slaughter-fest being garlanded by a prestigious New York City culture institution may partly reflect one man's concern that his fringe cinema of choice be recognized as deserving of a place in the canon before some white trash gorehound's fringe cinema of choice. My grandmother was a good Christian Southern lady, and if a bus containing either Andy Warhol or Tobe Hooper had broken down in front of her house, she would have invited both of them in and gorged them on homemade pie, but she wouldn't have watched the movies made by either gentlemen if she'd been able to borrow someone else's eyeballs.

"Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all become respectable if they last long enough," spoke Noah Cross (John Huston) in Chinatown, a movie whose nose-slitting sequence speaks to a part of the audience that has no insurmountable problem with being titillated with a little gratuitous shock and bloodshed, so long as there's a story and big stars to go with it. Back in 1981, maybe nobody seriously expected slasher movies to last this long. But they did, and now they're at least half respectable, partly because those of us who, back then, were just old enough to watch clips from them on Sneak Previews but who couldn't see the movies themselves until they hit cable or Mom and Dad left us alone with the VCR, are now adults who, because this stuff was always there, can imagine stuff that's even worse. Some of these adults are now filmmakers whose job it is to imagine stuff that's even worse. As Parker sees it, "Saw and Hostel succeeded, above all, because they are serious slasher flicks. The extremity of their goriness reclaimed the splatter death from mainstream movies (where it’s become unremarkable to see a man fed screaming to a propeller, or run through with a drill bit). And the immersive nastiness of their aesthetic—decayed bathrooms, foul workshops, seeping industrial spaces, blades blotched with rust—distilled the slasher-flick elixir: atmosphere. No franchise thrives without it."

Parker continues: "Just as crucially, Saw and Hostel feature excellent and novel villains." Saw's Jigsaw is, or if I interpreted the art work on the last installment correctly as I whizzed past it on the subway umpteen times, was, a terminal cancer patient whose Rube Goldberg torture devices are intended to impress upon his victims the importance of appreciating life, an area in which he judges them to have been falling short. And the wealthy businessmen who, in the Hostel series, pay top dollar to torture healthy young American backpackers to death can be taken as some kind of comment on the rapaciousness of the class that brought us the new Depression. Earlier generations of genre filmmakers were a little confused when informed that they were in the social commentary business, but Hostel director Eli Roth talks about it as if he thought he might be eligible for a Pulitzer: "“Thanks to George Bush and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld," the insists, "there’s a whole new wave of horror movies.”

What's kind of off-putting is how much of the new wave has hit the beach before, with fewer Roman numerals attached. So far this year we've seen remakes of Friday the 13th, My Bloody Valentine, and Wes Craven's Last House on the Left, a movie so proudly vile that the fact that it could provide fodder for a pricey Hollywood remake--let alone the fact that its director could have gone on to work with Meryl Streep--just about single-handedly carried us all into an alternate universe. Later this year there'll be a sequel to Rob Zombie's remake of John Carpenter's original Halloween. This deluge of remakes may be part of what's now respectable about slasher movies: unless you're the Marquis de Sade, it's hard to come up with a really new take on having a madman run around turning people into kindling, and if your movie is going to look a lot like a lot of other movies, why not latch onto the name of a golden oldie and "honor" it with an official remake rather than imitate it and get tagged as a rip-off artist? If Parker, as a fan of the genre, is concerned that it may finally be killed off by losing its capacity to shock, either from endless repetition or misplaced self-seriousness, he isn't letting on: "In a tolerant spirit," he writes, "the slasher fan gets in line for the new sequel or prequel or remake or 'reboot.' If it’s crap, so what? The next one might be better."

In Other Blogs: Jesus Wept

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 14:00:00 GMT

It’s Good Friday, so somebody out there must be writing about Jesus movies. Ah, here we go – it’s Joshua Land at Moving Image Source comparing The Passion of the Christ and The Last Temptation of Christ. “The single most hollow claim of those who picketed Last Temptation was the notion that Universal was exploiting Christianity in pursuit of the almighty dollar; like The Passion of the Christ, Scorsese’s film was an obviously uncommercial proposition from the get-go, and it remains remarkable that the studio ever pursued it at all, let alone held firm in the face of protests—particularly after Paramount had already dropped the project before it even went into production.”

David Lynch won’t do commentary tracks, so the folks at Shooting Down Pictures have taken it upon themselves to live-blog Inland Empire. “I don’t think it’s an informational kind of film. I don’t think it’s part of his vocabulary. That might be the trouble behind understanding the ‘genre’ of this film. Simply avant-garde play of light, affectations and moods. I think the first time I saw this, by this point I was thinking that it was explicitly about interpretation. And it’s setting up all these signs for you to interpret in any number of ways. But it is going to provide a network of significance, and there are several things that will keep popping up for you to pay attention to how and when. There’s an intuitive kind of architecture to the film. A lot of it is just the face - dreams, and faces. It’s all about cinema as a dream, dreams as cinema. It’s not even a syllogism, it’s all a bunch of links.”

Director Richard Kelly (Southland Tales) blogs on his MySpace page about his new movie The Box. “The film was digitally photographed using the Panavision Genesis camera. In my audio commentary on Tony Scott's Domino, I mentioned that I would never shoot a 1970s period piece using a digital camera. My position on this changed when I saw David Fincher's extraordinary Zodiac. It can be done.”

This open letter to Bill O’Reilly has nothing to do with movies, but Roger Ebert wrote it and it’s too good to pass up: “I understand you believe one of the Sun-Times misdemeanors was dropping your syndicated column. My editor informs me that ‘very few’ readers complained about the disappearance of your column, adding, ‘many more complained about Nancy.’ I know I did. That was the famous Ernie Bushmiller comic strip in which Sluggo explained that ‘wow’ was ‘mom’ spelled upside-down.”

And in List-o-Mania this week…what the hell, let’s go with the 10 Greatest Mall-Set Action Scenes from Spoutblog, including Commando. “There’s nothing like seeing Arnold Schwarzenegger throw off about eight mall cops attempting a circular apprehension. There’s also nothing like seeing Arnold Schwarzenegger swing across the atrium of the Sherman Oaks Galleria using a plastic balloon-like decoration that couldn’t possibly have held him. Yes, there are a lot of over-the-top moments in this action scene, but there’s no denying it’s entertaining, at least to those of us who aren’t employed as mall security.”

White Elephant Blogathon: Flesh Gordon (1974, Michael Benveniste and Howard Ziehm)

Paul Clark — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 14:00:00 GMT

This review is part of the White Elephant Blogathon, hosted by Benjamin Lim’s blog Lucid Screening.

It’s been said that the two cinematic qualities that one can’t be objective about are comedy and eroticism. Every person has different things that make him laugh or turn him on, and if that doesn’t happen for someone, you can’t explain it and make it work. And combining funny with sexy is an even riskier proposition, since the filmmakers have to work out the proper balance of humor and sex to elicit the natural responses to both without one overwhelming the other. Michael Benveniste and Howard Ziehm’s Flesh Gordon doesn’t come close to achieving this balance. It’s not funny, it certainly isn’t sexy, and it’s just kind of a waste of time. It’s hard to imagine what motivated the directors to make it.

Well, maybe it’s not that hard. I imagine Benveniste and Ziehm, struggling for a movie idea, sitting around one day looking at old Flash Gordon comics- perhaps while high, this being the early seventies. Suddenly, one of them starts chuckling even more than one normally would while stoned, and calls the other over. “Ever notice how much a space ship looks like a penis?” he asks. And the other one would respond, “yeah, and check out Dr. Zarkov! That sounds kinda like jerk-off!” The pot-addled ideas keep coming, and soon they’ve got their new project. Now, I’m not saying that good movies can’t spring from unlikely circumstances- after all, To Have and Have Not was made on a bet between Hemingway and Howard Hawks, and that led to one of Hawks’ best movies, as well as the romance between Bogey and Bacall. But while Hawks’ classic is a fully realized film, Flesh is nothing more than a series of lame jokes and halfhearted softcore scenes in search of a coherent movie.

I’m actually sort of reluctant to use the word “jokes” to describe the comedy in Flesh Gordon, since that word implies a setup and a punchline. Not a single would-be laugh in the movie transcends basic gag status- the filmmakers seem to believe that naughty imagery is a joke in itself, so they don’t do anything to make it actually funny. Consider the ship, which as I’ve already mentioned looks like a penis. But why stop there? Why not make the dick-ship pass through a nebula in the shape of a birth canal on the way to its destination? Why not have make its final destination a vagina-shaped port, only it has trouble clearing the doors so that it has to thrust a few times in order to enter? Sure, these ideas aren’t exactly sophisticated, but at least they use the already-established sight gags in order to form honest-to-goodness (albeit tasteless) jokes. Flesh Gordon can’t be bothered to do this. It’s the kind of movie that assumes that phallic objects alone are hilarious. And if you’re in agreement with that, you’re probably late for your shift at Burger World, Beavis.

What’s more, the movie isn’t remotely sexy. There are acres of (mostly female) skin on display in Flesh Gordon, but as with the comedy, nothing interesting is done with it, so it fades into the background. In researching this review, I discovered that the film originally contained hardcore scenes, but the filmmakers were ordered to cut them and shoot less explicit footage. However, eroticism doesn’t necessarily mean pornography. It does, however, imply more than perfunctory shots of nudity and fleeting glimpses of couples making love. In my experience, the most erotic moments in movies require some patience on the part of the filmmakers in order to let the scenes unfold at an unhurried pace, without letting the plot or the filmmaking get in the way. But the makers of Flesh Gordon don’t care about this- not when they’ve got more dick jokes up their sleeves!

The result is a movie with a strangely juvenile attitude toward sex. With such elements as a monster called Penisaurus, the nefarious villain Wang the Perverted, and his much-feared SeX-Ray, the humor of Flesh Gordon appeals only to those who think naughty words are funny in and of themselves. When it comes to actual sexuality, the movie becomes skittish, turning on the wacky music and turning it into a joke, which takes away the eroticism in the service of a cheap gag. I believe it was Roger Ebert who once reviewed a movie by writing, “if you’re old enough to see this, you’ve already outgrown it.” I can’t think of a better response to Flesh Gordon.

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: March 14-27, 2009

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 21:00:00 GMT

Greetings, sentient life form. I am the Evil Donkey Kong Machine in the Screengrab break room, and all your Highlight Reel are belong to me. Humans are notoriously unreliable, as you no doubt noticed when you tuned in last Friday and there was no Highlight Reel to be found. Apparently, the humans would prefer to gather in groups and consume mass quantities of alcohol rather than fulfill their obligations to you, the Screengrab reader. This will no longer be tolerated. If you’ve read Clippy Strikes Back: The Scariest Technology in Cinema History (Parts One, Two, Three and Four), you know the consequences will be very unpleasant for those who have failed you.

Prior to being dispatched to the Soylent Greenatorium, your Screengrab scribes somehow managed to cobble together a respectable collection of SXSW reviews, including: American Prince, My Suicide, Me and Orson Welles, Humpday, Beeswax, The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle, Best Worst Movie, Pontypool, Along Came Kinky and The Slammin’ Salmon.

Before having their brains removed and replaced with a cybernetic gelatin, the humans also contributed the follow posts of note:

Screengrab’s Favorite Movies About Music: Fiction Edition (Parts One, Two, Three, Four and Five)

Reviews: Monsters vs. Aliens, American Swing, We Pedal Uphill, Goodbye Solo, Guest of Cindy Sherman

Unwatchable: American Ninja V, Zombie Nightmare, Troll 2, Son of the Mask

Precursors: Next and Mars Attacks

Screengrab Q&A: "American Swing"

Roger Ebert Knows What’s Worth “Knowing”

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

The Screengrab Library of Unproduced Screenplays: Alan Moore's "Fashion Beast"

In Other Blogs: Knowing Me, Knowing You

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 14:00:00 GMT

At Scanners, Jim Emerson weighs in on Roger Ebert’s Knowing bafflement. “It's one thing to be the voice in the crowd pointing out that the Emperor has no clothes. It's very different to feel like you're the only one who's cheering an Emp you feel is magnificently attired…But critical opinion isn't an electoral contest where winners and losers are determined by some (largely illusory) consensus. Not many years ago, the general public would not have had any idea of what many critics outside their own town had said about a film -- nor would they have known how each and every movie performed at the box office weekend after weekend.”

David Frank of Rope of Silicon puts his trust in Ebert. “In trendy sushi bars across the country a quiet buzz hums among kids wearing black-rimmed glasses and Alamo Drafthouse T-shirts. They wonder if Mr. E ate some magical Freaky Friday fortune cookie with Ben Lyons — not than any of these curious folk would admit to seeing any version of Freaky Friday. Has the man given up? Is he losing it?...I haven’t seen Knowing. Which means I can’t say whether I agree with Ebert or not. Regardless of whether I think Knowing is junk or treasure, I do know the man has not lost it. He has not gone Earl Dittman on us. He really does believe Knowing is a great science-fiction film despite whatever you, your mom and your favorite hipper-than-thou Internet curmudgeon thinks. And that’s why I love Roger Ebert. He’s his own man.”

Beyond the Multiplex looks at “a completely miscellaneous grab bag of indie openings,” including the intriguing Severed Ways. “Impressive and also absolutely ludicrous, this is the movie you need to recommend to that suburban metalhead cousin in desperate need of having his mind blown. Purportedly based on an episode from the Vinland Sagas, in which two 11th-century Norsemen are left on their own to fend for themselves in unknown North America, writer-director-actor Tony Stone's Severed Ways is something like a DIY combination of black-metal video, Italian horror film, The Blair Witch Project and some really slow, nature-obsessed art movie like Old Joy.”

At The House Next Door, Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard converse about two “unfortunately overlooked and/or unfairly maligned” films, David Gordon Green’s Undertow and Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris. Says Harris: “I wanted to talk about Undertow largely because it's been forgotten: you're right that almost no one brings it up these days in talking about Green, who's mostly known for his first two films and now the Judd Apatow collaboration Pineapple Express. Ebert's rave aside, I believe Undertow got decidedly mixed reviews upon release, including its fair share of very negative ones, but on the whole I wouldn't say it's maligned so much as simply overlooked. That's unfortunate, because in my opinion it is Green's best film thus far, the film that comes closest to fulfilling the tremendous promise he's displayed in all his features. It's not a perfect film by any means, not a masterpiece, but in its own strange way it is ‘great,’ a baroque fable about the loss of childhood innocence and the totemic power of family.”

Let’s wrap it up with this week’s installment of List-o-Mania courtesy of Spoutblog: 10 Films That Saved Their Franchises. Like, uh…Attack of the Clones? “It made the least amount of money of the three Star Wars prequels, but Attack of the Clones was the trilogy’s saving grace, because after the ‘George Lucas ruined my childhood!’ disappointments of The Phantom Menace, this second (or fifth?) installment of the franchise got the old fans excited again by alluding to (and leading in the direction of) more characters and events of the original movies, while overall featuring a better plot and more satisfying action.” I’m fainting with damned praise.

Clippy Strikes Back: The Scariest Technology In Cinema History (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 21:00:00 GMT

TRON (1982)

Older brothers usually get to be know-it-alls (and, of course, we’re usually right), but my Big Bro credibility took a huge hit in the ‘80s when I told my kid brother in no uncertain terms that he was absolutely, completely wrong in his crazy belief that Roger Ebert once gave this Disney science-fiction oddity a four-star review. But, though it pained me then (and now) to admit, my brother was absolutely right: Ebert raved about Tron, calling it a “dazzling...technological sound-and-light show that is sensational and brainy, stylish, and fun” in its anthropomorphized depiction of the inner workings of computer technology, starring Jeff Bridges as a programmer trapped in a trippy day-glo software universe Jeff “the Dude” Lebowski would surely appreciate. At the time, of course, director Steven Lisberger’s tale of a Master Control Program bent on domination was fairly unique; that and the film’s visual palette were groundbreaking enough to explain why Ebert (and my brother) could forgive the fairly colorless acting and writing...but it was the cool Disneyland theme park attraction and the super-cool video game that finally won me over to the wonders of Tron. Nowadays, of course, it’s the other way around as the Master Control Program that runs Hollywood routinely morphs video games and theme park attractions into run-of-the-mill movies, computers are ubiquitous and CGI long ago lost its new car smell...but, hey, at least good ol’ Roger Ebert still knows how to flummox me with an occasional WTF? 4-star review! (AO)

SHIVERS (1975)

For his first feature, David Cronenberg came up with an idea that so completely sums up the recurring concepts of his early work -- the horror at the body and mutations, the hang-ups about sexual repression and sexual release -- that it's kind of remarkable that he ever revved himself up again to make another. Set mostly inside a high-tech luxury apartment complex outside Montreal, it begins with a scene that suggests an old-school porno film that's gone off its trolley: a burly, bearded old man assaults a young woman in what looks like a Catholic schoolgirl outfit and, after stripping himself to the waist, sets about vivisecting her. It turns out that he's a scientist who has developed a parasite that, once introduced into the human body, frees the host from anything remotely resembling inhibitions. The girl is his test subject, who has been entirely too efficient at spreading the parasite around to various neighbors, so that by the end of the movie, the whole complex has turned into one enormous writhing, drooling, mindless orgy on the move. This concept is especially disturbing to those viewers shallow enough to notice that the casting department has not done its job with an eye towards assembling the ideal orgy of a Skinemax audience's dreams. Don't let anybody tell you that Montreal in the mid-70s was suffering from a shortage of unsightly people. (PN)

DARK STAR (1974)

Made while he and screenwriter Dan O’Bannon were completing their USC film school postgraduate work, John Carpenter’s debut feature Dark Star paid amusing homage to Kubrick’s seminal 2001 in its portrait of machinery gone awry. Aboard a spaceship whose astronauts have been tasked with eliminating unstable stars in order to pave the way for future colonization, the computer motherboard goes straight-up crazy and a rogue bomb goes even crazier, attempting to detonate in the ship’s loading bay despite the crew’s best efforts to prevent such a catastrophe. Unlike 2001 or O’Bannon’s later screenwriting hit Alien (which borrowed liberally from this film’s premise), Carpenter’s maiden directorial outing is played for tongue-in-cheek laughs rather than chills, and rather ramshackle ones at that. Yet despite an upfront lack of seriousness, this space saga’s conception of technology remains decidedly pessimistic, its story’s faulty equipment conveying an underlying fear of the potential calamity that awaits those foolish enough to count on CPUs for their safety. (NS)

COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT (1970)

This sci-fi film can be watched in its entirety on YouTube, and it doesn't lose much there. Directed by the erratic Joseph Sargent, whose other credits include Jaws: The Revenge but also The Taking of Pelham One Two Three and the 1989 TV film Day One (a good docudrama about the ultimate evil technology story, the Manhattan Project), it's not a visually distinguished movie, but its treatment of the ever-popular computers-are-our-masters theme, specifically geared to the nuclear age, is impressively spiky. Dr. Forbin, played by The Young and the Restless mainstay Eric Braeden, has perfected the ultimate missile-defense system, a supercomputer called Colossus that will have absolute control over America's nuclear arsenal and is impervious to attack. As soon as it's switched on, Colossus announces that it senses the existence of its own doppelganger -- Guardian, a Soviet supercomputer with the same function and capabilities. Furthermore, Colossus and Guardian make contact with each other and decide that they should join forces to protect the planet, shutting out the middle man -- i.e., us. Various attempts are made, under Dr. Forbin's direction, to override, penetrate, and otherwise shut down the computers, with results that only raise the question, "What part of 'impervious to attack' do you not understand?" In the end, Colossus, after detonating a couple of missiles just to remind us that it means business, assures the human population that it wants only the best for the world over which it now holds complete control, always a reassuring sentiment whether you hear it from a supercomputer with nuclear capability or Billy Mays. (PN)

Click Here For Part One, Two & Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Nick Schager

Roger Ebert Knows What’s Worth “Knowing”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SXSW Preview: Ten Must-See Documentaries (Part One)

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 19:00:00 GMT

The 2009 SXSW Film Festival kicks off on Friday, so what do you say we spend the week previewing some can’t-miss attractions? We’ll start with the documentaries – five today and five tomorrow – then move on to the narrative features.

ALONG CAME KINKY…TEXAS JEWBOY FOR GOVERNOR

From singing Jewish cowboy (“Asshole from El Paso,” “Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in the Bed”) to mystery writer (A Case of Lone Star, Road Kill) to gubernatorial candidate, Kinky Friedman has done it all. Along Came Kinky chronicles Fridman’s 2006 unsuccessful run for the governorship of Texas.

(Screens March 19th at 7:30 pm, Paramount Theater)

AMERICAN PRINCE

The great lost Martin Scorsese film (note: not so lost) is American Boy, a profile of Steven Prince, who memorably played the gun salesman in Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. Thirty years later, director Tommy Pallotta catches up with Prince, now living in Austin and still graced with the gift of gab.

(Screens March 14th at 7:30 pm, March 17th at 11 am, Alamo South)

BEST WORST MOVIE

I had no idea there was any such thing as a cult of Troll 2 until a few months ago, when the Alamo Drafthouse hosted a Rolling Roadshow screening of the movie in Morgan, Utah. Who would go all the way to Utah to see Troll 2? Find out in Best Worst Movie, the behind the scenes story of what some consider to be the worst movie ever made (but which is actually #41 in our Unwatchable countdown – perfect timing!).

(Screens March 14th at 9:30 pm, Alamo South, March 16th at 4 pm, Paramount Theater, March 20th at 9:30 pm, Convention Center)

DRUNKEN ANGEL: THE LEGEND OF BLAZE FOLEY

SXSW has a long, proud tradition of musical documentaries, particularly ones about eccentric or troubled musicians (The Devil and Daniel Johnston, You’re Gonna Miss Me), and here’s the latest. “Born in a tree house, killed in a friend's living room, 86'ed from his own funeral, Blaze Foley is now a bona fide country music legend.” He’s also the subject of the Lucinda Williams song that gives this documentary its title.

(Screens March 18th at 7 pm, Convention Center)

FOR THE LOVE OF MOVIES: THE STORY OF AMERICAN FILM CRITICISM

How’s this for self-indulgence? A film critic previewing a movie about film critics made by a film critic. Gerald Peary talks to many well-known film critics, including some who are still employed, about their love of movies and the history of film criticism. Participants include Roger Ebert, Elvis Mitchell, Andrew Sarris and, for some reason, Harry Knowles.

(Screens March 16th at 8 pm, March 18th at noon, Alamo Ritz, March 21st at 4 pm, Alamo South)

In Other Blogs: New Yorker State of Mind

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 16:00:00 GMT

As Phil Nugent reported here earlier this week, the venerable New Yorker Films “has ceased operations” and its catalogue of foreign and art house fare is set for auction. At Beyond the Multiplex, Andrew O’Hehir speculates about a potential landing spot for the treasure trove of classic films. “In a broader sense, New Yorker's long-term willingness to defy the marketplace realities of American film distribution never seemed like a sustainable business model. While the films listed above attracted at least some American viewers, New Yorker was worshiped in cinephile circles precisely because it often took on difficult and adventurous cinema that was destined to find almost no audience. Sometimes Talbot and Lopez seemed to be running an educational foundation under the guise of a for-profit business….New Yorker's library would have obvious appeal to "an online distributor, a TV network or a DVD company," Werner continues. Given that IFC is at least two and potentially all three of those things, and in recent years has assumed a commanding position in the distribution of foreign-language and American independent films, it might be the most logical potential bidder.”

At Some Came Running, Glen Kenny celebrates a new DVD release of Vanishing Point (which includes the UK version of the picture, containing an excised scene with Charlotte Rampling) by interviewing director Richard Sarafian. “At first I balked at Barry Newman being the star, ‘cause I had other possibilities and I felt…all I wanted was the adult male that looked like he belonged behind the wheel. And I had several major actors in mind that might have made a difference. It didn't turn out that way. It came back to me that either I use Barry Newman or Zanuck wasn't going to make the picture. I said, ‘Well, Mr. Zanuck, I'm going to make the car the star.’ And he said, ‘I knew you'd see it my way.’”

Spoutblog’s Karina Longworth revisits Eagle Pennell's The Whole Shootin’ Match. “It’s possible that this is just that time of year and I have SXSW on the brain, but when I watched The Whole Shootin’ Match a few days ago, more than seeing the film as a love/hate letter to the bottle, more than spotting its shared DNA with various films by Richard Linklater and Andrew Bujalski (and, to a lesser extent, Wes Anderson and Gus Van Sant), I saw it as a catalyst for a conversation about Austin’s evolving film cultural history…What interests me most about the ‘regional’ issue is that although Austin has become a place where independent filmmakers from all over the country — including LA and New York — come to show work, ironically, Austin’s past and present identity as a film town often gets lost in that process and excluded from the conversation.”

Roger Ebert hunts The Snark. “When Joaquin Phoenix appears on the Letterman program and behaves as a semi-catatonic weirdo, for example, he is instantly made the butt of imitators on the Indie Spirits and the Oscars, and the snarky presumption is that he is now a laughable buffoon. All memories of his splendid acting career are erased. He is past his sell-by date. The actor from Gladiator and Walk the Line, twice nominated for an Oscar, is now ridiculed on the Academy stage. Let's take him as a case study. When Phoenix was satirized on the Indie Spirits, I doubted anything on the Oscarcast was likely to equal it. The next day I wrote that the Oscar had proven me wrong. There was no hint that I objected to the portrayals. Those second thoughts arrived only belatedly, along with the reflection that if Phoenix really was ‘nutzoid,’ the segments were in poor taste. But nutzoid itself is snarkspeak, and I should have written ‘mentally ill,’ not to be Politically Correct, but simply to be decent.”

Finally, this week’s List-o-Mania comes from Den of Geek, which looks at the Top 50 Movie Special Effects Shots, including “the party crashers revealed” from The Fearless Vampire Killers. “Sometimes the oldest trick in the book is all you need. Thus reasoned Roman Polanski when his vampire-movie spoof required that the 'infiltrators' at a vampire ball be revealed as the only reflections in the ballroom mirror. Of course, the 'reflections' are out-of-focus doubles trying to 'mirror' principals Jack MacGowran, Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate, but once something works, anything more is pointless.”

Ebert on Siskel: The Fat One Remembers the Bald One

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 19:30:00 GMT

Gene Siskel died ten years ago tomorrow, and his partner in thumb deployment still remembers him, more fondly than you might have expected. “Gene Siskel and I were like tuning forks,” Ebert writes on his blog. “Strike one, and the other would pick up the same frequency. When we were in a group together, we were always intensely aware of one another. Sometimes this took the form of camaraderie, sometimes shared opinions, sometimes hostility. But we were aware. If something happened that we both thought was funny but weren't supposed to, God help us if one caught the other's eye. We almost always thought the same things were funny. That may be the best sign of intellectual communion.”

“Once Gene and I were involved in a joint appearance with another Chicago media couple, Steve Dahl and Garry Meier. It was a tribute to us or a tribute to them, I can't remember. They were pioneers of free-form radio. Gene and I were known for our rages against each other, and Steve and Garry were remarkable for their accord. They gave us advice about how to work together as a successful team. The reason I remember that is because soon afterward Steve and Garry had an angry public falling-out that has lasted until this day. Gene and I would never, ever, have had that happen to us. Unthinkable…‘You may be an asshole," Gene would say, "but you're my asshole.’”

What follows is a free-flowing reminiscence, touching on Siskel’s skill at poker, his passion for the Chicago Bulls, and his college days, when he was known “for wearing a Batman costume and dropping out of trees.” Ebert describes the tension of their early television tapings. “It would take eight hours to get one show in the can, with breaks for lunch, dinner and fights. I would break down, or he would break down, or one of us would do something different and throw the other off, or the accumulating angst would make our exchanges seem simply bizarre.”

Here are some of those bizarre exchanges, presented as our own little tribute to Gene Siskel:

In Other Blogs: Drinking in the New Year

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 16:00:00 GMT

It may still be too soon after New Year’s Eve for some of you to contemplate the subject of serious drinking, but the dawn of a new year does seem like the perfect time to introduce a new blog to our roster: Booze Movies! It’s the self-described 100 Proof Film Guide and its mission statement is one we at the Screengrab can get behind: “Alcohol--the fabric of film history is soggy with the stuff. Still, film historians have rarely given booze its due. This site is dedicated to setting the record straight.” The latest entry concerns - what else? – Sideways. “Most films have little cultural impact beyond diverting an audience for a couple of hours, but Sideways changed the drinking habits of many Americans. Liquor stores across the country suddenly saw their wine sales rivaling (and in some cases surpassing) their beer sales. Moreover, Pinot Noir, a grape that most consumers had never heard of prior to the film, enjoyed a huge upswing in popularity, while Merlot sales dipped slightly. This can only be attributable to Miles’ advocacy of Pinot and denigration of the latter varietal within the movie.”

Perhaps you read our year-end Top 10 lists last week and thought to yourself, “This is all well and good, but where is Vadim Rizov’s list?” Well, it’s at The House Next Door, and topping the list is A Christmas Tale. “I was so blown away by Desplechin's alleged crowd-pleaser that I stole home uncustomarilly psyched I had the rest of the night open (i.e. empty) to grapple with the film and tease out some explication, if only for my benefit. In retrospect, I'm pretty sure I didn't even begin to unpack how much is going on here. At this point it'll take years of re-viewings and reading to get the full benefit of it. For now, the one thing I'll add is that I find Desplechin's broad frame of reference exhilarating: this is a film with equal time for Blackalicious and Mendelssohn, The Ten Commandments and Vertigo, Angela Bassett's ass and Nietzsche.”

Our erstwhile colleague Vern has seen The Spirit, and its suckage has inspired some thoughts on the current state of our culture. “You know what it is, man? It's nerd overreach… I truly believe that my associate Harry Knowles and many of his colleagues and competitors have transformed western culture. As recently as the '80s and '90s being a nerd or geek was not something anybody would want to admit to themselves. They were the lowest of low, the socially awkward, the uncool. With the rise of the internet though came the rise of ‘geek culture,’ and slowly these people reclaimed the word, turned it into a badge of honor. (I wonder if in 20 years people will proudly call themselves douchebags?)…We're all used to these articles about, ‘Trust me, this is one of the good guys! He's a geek like us, he knew everything about TRON, he has a tattoo of J.R.R. Tolkien on his calf, he has it in his will that a Mexican lobby card of KRULL will be burned and mingled with his ashes.’ And people on the internet would become protective of these "geek" filmatists and their projects, hype them up on their websights and postings, petition the studios, force their nerd views into the conventional wisdom. The Nerd Panthers.”

Roger Ebert wonders: “Why do we thirst for movie stars to fail?” Specifically, he wonders about Nicole Kidman and her ex-husband. “Now consider the case of Tom Cruise. Did you read the buildup before the release of Valkyrie? The picture was widely predicted to be the nail in the coffin of his career. On Nov. 18, 2008, before the film was first publicly screened, Courtney Hazlett of MSNBC.com breathlessly reported: ‘...those who've gotten an early glimpse say not only is the film nowhere near as exciting as a thriller, but Cruise's performance elicits uncomfortable and inappropriate laughs.’…Hazlett did not see the film, and apparently did not see her first sentence (‘the film elicits uncomfortable and inappropriate laughs’) before writing her second one (‘you almost start to laugh’). The story lists three sources: (1) ‘Those who've gotten an early glimpse;’ (2) ‘Sources;’ (3) ‘One person who saw the film.’ Help me out here. Are we referring to three different people, or the same person three times?”

And finally in List-o-Mania – and we apologize in advance – Cinemablend offers The 100 Most Likely People to Die in 2009. Let’s just say if Roger Ebert is reading this, he may not want to click on that link.

The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: "Silent Night Deadly Night"

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 19:15:00 GMT

How on Earth (good will towards men) did we get from good-hearted classics like A Christmas Carol and It's a Wonderful Life to this schlocky mid-'80s slasher film from the dregs of the human spirit? Once again, I blame my heroic holiday intake of Christmas cocktails. As it happens, I was getting a little burned out on decency and kindness by the time I reached this point in the marathon, so I was more than happy to see a guy dressed up as Santa Claus take an axe to a bunch of innocent bystanders, but that's just how I roll. Don't show this to any children you may happen to have lying around the house; I saw it for the first time when I was 15, and look how I turned out. Revolution Number Nine in the Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: the controversial cult classic Silent Night Deadly Night.

The movie, starring an astonishing array of actors you have never heard of before or since its release, generated a massive amount of controversy on its release. Its premise is simple enough: a traumatized young boy, whose childhood is marred by a bunch of unlikely coincidences involving Santa Claus, grows up to be a mad killer who takes the St. Nicholasian imperative to reward the good and deny the bad rather beyond its normal purview. Taken as high camp, it's actually not that bad, though hampered by some grade-Z acting and direction that it would be a compliment to call perfunctory. The script, based on a Paul Caimi novel called Slayride (!), is lively enough and clearly doesn't take its moments of high drama very seriously, but the movie caused a sort of national paroxysm of moral panic.

It's hard to say why, exactly. Sure, it's violent and exploitative -- but no more so, and indeed a bit less so, than plenty of other slasher films that were released around the same time. And yeah, the killer (played by Robert Brian Wilson, who, like many in the cast, never appeared in another movie again) dresses up like Santa Claus, but weren't we sufficiently jaded by 1984? In fact, it wasn't even a particularly novel concept: 1974's Black Christmas and 1980's Christmas Evil had covered the same territory. Still, the nation's critics and parents went collectively apeshit over Silent Night Deadly Night: the PTA attempted to have the movie pulled from theaters; the Moral Majority singled it out for vehement condemnation; Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert read its production credits on the air, uttering "shame, shame!" after each name; and Leonard Maltin speculated that the next step would be a child-molesting Easter Bunny, an appealing notion that has yet to be picked up by Todd Solondz.

The tidal wave of outrage that greeted Silent Night Deadly Night was way out of proportion to both its cultural presence and its content. It made very little money in a limited release (although it later picked up a cult following based mostly on its infamy), it was a minor studio release with no big-name stars attached, and its violence and nastiness quotient was well below what you'd see in a typical installment of the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. And it's not like the deranged killer was dressed up like Jesus -- although part of his backstory, involving being abused by the Mother Superior of the Catholic orphanage to which he was sent after the death of his parents, was read by a number of critical as anti-religious bigotry. Combined with the detournement of Santa Claus (who was suddenly recast as a religious symbol instead of a commercial one), it struck a lot of religious right types as an all-out attack on the birthday of our Savior.

Curiously enough, though, director Charles E. Sellier Jr. has always denied that this was the case. The Catholic orphanage scenes, he insists, were always just a gimmick to get the plot rolling along, and had no anti-clerical intent; and, as if to atone for his sins in making Silent Night Deadly Night, he spent the rest of his career writing and producing direct-to-video religious fodder like The Case for Christ's Ressurection, In Search of the Historical Jesus, and The Incredible Discovery of Noah's Ark. Still, despite a flood of truly abysmal sequels, his creation remains a curiously watchable little aberration, and has given us one of the all-time great movie taglines in "He's dreaming of a red Christmas". The movie is set to be remade next year by Alexandre Aja, who no doubt will ruin its ragged charm by taken it completely seriously.

12 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS RATING: An odiferous, fat, and clucking three French hens. Honestly, this isn't a good movie by any stretch of the imagination, but it can be enjoyably hooty if you're well in your cups on Christmas Day and looking for a break from the non-stop good feelings. Cram it into your DVD player, banish the kids to go play with their new toys, and warn them afterwards what can happen to little boys and girls who are naughty.

The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: The Nightmare Before Christmas

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: Dec. 6-12, 2008

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 22:00:00 GMT

Hey, kids. Frosty the Snowman here. I gotta say, I’m not feeling the love from the Screengrab this holiday season. I was certain this week would see their Top 10 List of Greatest Snowman Movies Ever. After all, there are so many great ones to choose from. Who doesn’t shed a tear every year during their annual viewing of Jack Frost, the heartwarming tale of Michael Keaton becoming a snowman and learning to be a better dad? And then there’s, uh, the other Jack Frost, about the mutant killer snowman, and its sequel, Jack Frost 2: Revenge of the Mutant Killer Snowman.

But no, instead we get this list of The Best and Worst Stage-to Screen Adaptations of All Time (Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven and Eight). What does that have to do with snowmen? And even when they do acknowledge the Christmas season, as in the 12 Days of Christmas Marathon (Bad Santa and The Star Wars Holiday Special) or Yesterday’s Hits: The Santa Clause, my brothers in snow get nary a mention.

Still, I’m willing to rise above it all and point out a few of my favorite posts of the week, if only they’ll turn up the air conditioning in here.

Other non-snowman movie reviews include Wendy and Lucy, the Unwatchables Ed and Don’t Go in the Woods…Alone!, and When Good Directors Go Bad: A Life Less Ordinary.

Forrest J. Ackerman, Bettie Page and Robert Prosky were all friends of the Snowman-American community, and they will be missed.

LA Critics Go Wacky for WALL-E

OST: The Man with the Golden Arm

Roger Ebert Supersizes Top 10 of 2008

The Terrorists Win

Roger Ebert Supersizes Top 10 of 2008

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Is 2008 ending early? I didn’t get the memo, but I do know that Roger Ebert traditionally waits until after Christmas to unveil his top ten list because I’m always up at the Von Doviak ancestral manse in Maine when it appears online. This year, however, Ebert has jumped out early – and not only that, he’s doubled the content. “In these hard times, you deserve two ‘best films’ lists for the price of one,” Ebert writes. “It is therefore with joy that I list the 20 best films of 2008, in alphabetical order. I am violating the age-old custom that film critics announce the year's 10 best films, but after years of such lists, I've had it. A best films list should be a celebration of wonderful films, not a chopping process.”

You’ve gotta admire his enthusiasm after so many years in the game, especially if, like me, you have about three movies on your list and are scrambling to catch up with any possible contenders you may have missed. In fact, since Ebert presents an entirely separate list of documentaries, as well as a “special jury prize,” he actually has 26 movies on his list. Since he declines to rank them, I can’t tell you which is his favorite, but the most surprising selection has to be The Fall. “Tarsem's film is a mad folly, an extravagant visual orgy, a free fall from reality into uncharted realms.” I didn’t catch this one myself, but our own Phil Nugent dissents.

That special jury prize went to My Winnipeg. “Guy Maddin's latest dispatch from inside his imagination is a "history" of his home town, which becomes a mixture of the very slightly plausible, the convincing but unlikely, the fantastical, the fevered, the absurd, the preposterous, and the nostalgic. Oddly enough, when it's over, you have a deeper and, in a crazy way, more "real" portrait of Winnipeg than a conventional doc might have provided--and certainly a far more entertaining one.” Among the documentaries singles out for praise is Encounters at the End of the World, which director Werner Herzog dedicated to Ebert. Logrolling in our time!

Here’s the full list.

Related:
Roger Ebert Gives Himself Thumbs Down
Classless Man in Voiceless Brawl

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: Nov. 22- Dec. 5, 2008

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 22:00:00 GMT

Because I was busy digesting turkey, stuffing and pie while forming a deep groove in my couch, I neglected to post a highlight reel last week. That means you’re in for a treat – it’s the very first Supersized Highlight Reel! That’s right, we’ve got two weeks worth of leftovers for you. That means not only our Holiday Special: Movies We’re Thankful For (Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five and Six) but our list of the Top Biopics of All Time (Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five and Six).

But we’re just getting warmed up. We’ve also got reviews of not only Gus Van Sant’s new biopic Milk, but the documentary The Times of Harvey Milk. And we’ve got more William Friedkin posts than at any time since 1974 (when the Screengrab was only available via short-wave radio): William Friedkin Has No Sense of Social Obligation, The French Connection Influenced Everything and The Screengrab: Your One-Stop Site for All Things William Friedkin.

You want more reviews? How about The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer, Thomas Kinkade's Christmas Cottage, Waterloo, Mister Lonely, Frost/Nixon and the Stop Making Sense soundtrack? How about the first installment of Leonard Pierce’s 12 Days of Christmas, The Nightmare Before Christmas? How about the latest in Ozsploitation, Roadgames?

Still not enough? Check out these other headlines from the fortnight past:

Roman Polanski: Wanted in Los Angeles, Desired in Turin

Roger Ebert: The Death of the Film Critic is the Death of Society

Oscar Launch: The Silly Season Commences

All The Real Girls Is One of the Most Influential Movies of the Decade

Site of the Day: A John Waters Christmas

Ever-Mysterious National Board of Review's Year-End Awards

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Before any of the critics’ associations weigh in with their year-end awards, the National Board of Review releases its annual awards announcement and Top 10 list. While this organization certainly has an official-sounding name, questions remain about the legitimacy of the group, which was actually founded as a censorship board in 1909. In response to a reader question, Roger Ebert once wrote, “I have never met anyone who has met a member of the National Board of Review. The director John Boormann recently told me that he attended one of their award banquets at the Tavern on the Green in Central Park, and met several other award winners. There was a celebrity host to hand out the prizes. ‘After I got back home,’ he mused, ‘I realized that I had not met a single person claiming to be a member of the National Board of Review.’”

Be that as it may, the NBR’s list is taken seriously each year as a bellwether of the upcoming critics’ prizes and other awards, so we hereby dutifully present their top honors:

BEST PICTURE: Slumdog Millionaire
BEST DIRECTOR: David Fincher, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
BEST ACTOR: Clint Eastwood, Gran Torino
BEST ACTRESS: Anne Hathaway, Rachel Getting Married
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: Josh Brolin, Milk
BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Penelope Cruz, Vicky Cristina Barcelona

TOP TEN FILMS:

Burn after Reading
Changeling
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Dark Knight
Defiance
Frost/Nixon
Gran Torino
Milk
WALL•E
The Wrestler

Roger Ebert: The Death of the Film Critic is the Death of Society

Vadim Rizov — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 20:40:00 GMT

We've seen a lot of despairing think-pieces and blog posts this year written by, for and about film critics this year — specifically, how we're all dead on the ground. Mass firings, reductions in word count for space reasons, mass syndications of writers to every newspaper in the land that eradicate distinctive individual voices — none of this is news, and even if you're part of the target audience it can be tiresome. Just in time for Thanksgiving, Roger Ebert took it one step further: the death of literate film criticism (specifically, to make room for celebrity gossip and "reporting") isn't just distressing to those predisposed to care about disinterested analysis and cinematic championing. "It is not about the disappearance of film critics," he declares. "It is about the death of an intelligent and curious, readership, interested in significant things and able to think critically. It is about the failure of our educational system. It is not about dumbing-down. It is about snuffing out."

I'm not sure what to think of Ebert's fascinating dispatch. There's a lot in it: he's suitably pissed, for example, about the AP's declaration to all writers that film reviews must now never pass 500 words. But does the death of literate film criticism presage a larger cultural decline? Whenever you start thinking in apocalyptic, death-of-the-intellectual terms, you end up in the territory academics have made their specialty in occasional book-length diatribes, from Allan Bloom's infamously myopic and cranky The Closing Of The American Mind to the recent The Dumbest Generation. This is rarely productive territory for anyone. A smaller, better question would be not if intellectual society is dying (it's always been in the minority, something people tend to forget in the annual cri de couers), but whether the idea of getting paid to think is dying out in every non-academic context.

I'll go with yes, sort of. There's a long-standing, eternal debate of whether critics should reflect mass tastes or try to set their own, often more inaccessible critical agenda that Ebert touches on, but that's beside the point. It is, in fact, possible to think critically about mass cultural phenomena. "Why does the biggest story about "Twilight" involve its fans?" Ebert asks. "Isn't the movie obviously about sexual abstinence and the teen fascination with doomy Goth death-flirtation?" The answer is that with a movie like Twilight, as Todd Gitlin once observed about blockbusters, "the sum of the publicity takes up more cultural space than the movie itself." The only real response to a movie like Twilight is to refuse to take the movie as purported aesthetic object seriously and try to figure out why people are going crazy over it. Another Robert Pattinson piece isn't needed, but perhaps, for example, someone might like to look into the not-entirely-deranged conservative meme that Twilight is some kind of Agnew-esque homily for "traditional values." This kind of shallow but engaging acknowledgment of the overpowering — and sometimes alarmingly meaningful — place crap art can have in inadvertantly shaping mass society will be profitable, and there's a chance someone can do it well.

Is a film criticism as a paying, stable occupation dying out? Maybe. (I hope not, since it's what I do, but I've been cautioned recently not to get overly optimistic.) But, sometime soon, the role of cultural critic will have to extend beyond the purview of the New York Times Magazine. Is thinking thoughtfully about celebrity culture a bit of an oxymoron? Probably. But it's the best we'll have for a while until Web 2.0 figures out how to make intelligent criticism pay again. In the meantime, dig up your old copies of Tom Wolfe's 60s Cary Grant profile and hope someone follows his example.

In Other Blogs, Starring Roger Ebert as The Phantom

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Forget the four decades of movie reviewing, Pulitzer or no. Roger Ebert was clearly put on this earth to blog. His latest entry is a freewheeling reminiscence of his longtime sparring with Gene Siskel as well as a good-humored analysis of his physical appearance, then and now. “What does it feel like to resemble the Phantom of the Opera? You learn to live with it. I've never concerned myself overmuch about how I looked. I got a lot of practice at indifference during my years as the Michelin Man. Yes, years before I acquired my present problems, I was not merely fat, but was universally known as ‘the fat one,’ to distinguish me from ‘the thin one,’ who was Gene Siskel, who was not all that thin, but try telling that to Gene: ‘Spoken like the gifted Haystacks Calhoun tribute artist that you are.’”

Andrew O’Hehir goes Beyond the Multiplex to contemplate the cult of WALL-E. “Like all contemporary parents, I love Pixar, because its movies ingratiate themselves to adults without condescending to children…On the other hand: WTF? WALL-E is a cartoon, dammit. It's a pretty good cartoon, one that blends together a lot of half-baked themes from more serious works of film and literature into a clever pastiche flavored for today's kidult tastes. I liked it fine, and the overreaction in some quarters is not Pixar's or Stanton's fault. But don't insult our intelligence by claiming that it's the best movie of the year or the best animated film ever made or a masterpiece or a mantelpiece. It might be the third-best Pixar movie of the decade. Which, hey, is not nothing.”

Over at The House Next Door, Dan Callahan considers the early work of Carole Lombard. “Even worse than White Woman is Bolero (1934), where Lombard has to try to act and even dance with the wooden George Raft. It’s a dull movie, but it does boast a defining moment for Lombard: she strips down to her slip again, and Raft dares her to dance something for him. Lombard’s face lights up, as if she’s thinking, ‘What the hell,’ (or ‘What the fuck,’ since she was addicted to longshoreman language). She stomps across the screen in her slip and stockings, while Raft and everyone in the audience thinks, ‘This woman must be one of the best lays in the world.’”

At The Auteurs, Glen Kenny wonders whatever happened to James Bond’s sense of humor. “In Dr. No, Connery's Bond was suave and very chilly, his wit exceptionally mordant—as exemplified in the famous kiss-off ‘You've had your six.’ Bond's a little looser in From Russia With Love, and by Goldfinger he's letting the bon-mots fly, from his explanation as to why that brandy is disappointing to his very square observation about how to best listen to the Beatles. But that's not to say that Bond isn't pissed off at the murder of Jill Masterson—he is, and plenty. Here is where the genius of Connery's characterization registers most strongly. Andrew Sarris pegged Connery as a superb physical actor after his purposeful shipboard stride to rescue a near-drowned Tippie Hedren in Hitchcock's Marnie. If, facially and verbally, Connery's Bond gives the impression of a smart cynic, his body language—his bearing, the way he walks, and more—tells a different, more purposeful, story. It's safe to say that no subsequent Bond man, no matter how gifted an actor, ever tried to play that kind of double game.”

And in List-o-Mania this week, Spoutblog offers the 10 Most Accessible Foreign Films of the Last Ten Years, including Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India. “The running time of 3 hrs. 43 min. probably seems like a deterrent, but this Bollywood film really does feel a lot shorter than it is. Really. And anyway its compelling story of an underdog cricket team is familiar enough that you don’t have to pay too much attention if you don’t have the time — though it will be difficult to let your attention stray except for during some of the less-adequately translated musical numbers that aren’t so significant or relatable to most Western viewers. Just think of this film as your typical Hollywood sports movie, except instead of the final game being quickly highlighted in the last 30 minutes, it’s seemingly depicted in its entirety for more than an hour.”

When Good Directors Go Bad: The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990, Brian De Palma)

Paul Clark — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Of all the prestige projects of the 1990 awards season, few had more potential than The Bonfire of the Vanities. To begin with, it was based on Tom Wolfe’s first fiction book, which had been widely read in serialized form in Rolling Stone before becoming a bestseller upon its publication as a novel. The director was Brian De Palma, who made his reputation with a series of kinky, Hitchcock-inspired thrillers during the seventies before branching out into more mainstream fare such as Scarface, The Untouchables and Casualties of War. With a wildly popular novel and an A-list director, Warner Bros. had visions of Oscars dancing in their heads, and they consequently filled the cast with big names, from recent Oscar nominees Tom Hanks, Melanie Griffith, and Morgan Freeman to newly anointed action superstar Bruce Willis, and backed them with plenty of first-rate character actors.

Ideally, The Bonfire of the Vanities should have been one of the biggest movie events of 1990. But then, if it had been, I would be writing about it in my Yesterday’s Hits column instead of When Good Directors Go Bad. As it stands, the big-screen adaptation remains one of the most notorious fiascos in Hollywood history, earning back a mere $15 million of its then-extravagant $50 million budget, and receiving mostly savage reviews. As a De Palma fan of long standing- I’m the guy who liked The Black Dahlia, after all- I’d like to say that the film was merely misunderstood, but even I have to admit that it’s a failure.

Part of the problem is the casting of the principal roles, from the top on down. If you were casting the role of an ambitious commodities trader and self-anointed “Master of the Universe”, whose name would come to mind? Michael Douglas? Tom Cruise, perhaps? But after Warner Bros. deemed the character too unsympathetic on the page, they decided to cast Tom Hanks in the role, which is sort of like casting Jimmy Stewart as Gordon Gekko. Also problematic was the casting of Willis. The character of journalist Peter Fallow was written as a dissolute Brit (the role was originally offered to John Cleese), but Willis ended up being cast for marquee value, and gave one of his laziest performances, smirking his way through the role and pissing off most of the people involved with the production with his ego.

Worst of all is Griffith. During the eighties, Griffith’s dumb-blonde persona proved to be surprisingly adaptable to a number of filmmakers’ visions, from the tart-with-a-heart of Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild to the streetwise porn star of De Palma’s own Body Double. However, the role of Maria Ruskin was far beyond her limited talent. On the page, Maria may be the trickiest character in the novel, a wily manipulator whose ditzy façade hides a pitch-black heart. But Griffith can only manage the ditzy part, so when the character begins to reveal her shameless nature after Sherman’s life begins to go down the tubes we never believe it. The two halves of her personality- sexy and cunning- never mesh convincingly, so rather than lacing her manipulations with an erotic charge, her dark side makes the sexy stuff creepy, which surely wasn’t what the film was aiming for.

But while the casting issues might have been out of De Palma’s hands, he’s far from blameless. Admittedly, Wolfe’s novel is something of a tough nut to crack, simultaneously a cross-section of New York City life, a morality tale, and a savage takedown of the craven greed and ambition that fueled the eighties. However, it fails on all three counts. Much of its power as a snapshot of the Big Apple’s social strata is lost because its characters are sketchy and one-dimensional, a problem that might have been partially alleviated by spot-on casting, but not entirely. Likewise, the film places its morality tale aspects on the back burner for most of its running time, only to have judge/voice of reason Morgan Freeman bust out an extended monologue about decency in the film’s final five minutes, at which point it comes off as a tacked-on moral rather than a natural outgrowth of the story.

This leaves only the exposé aspect of the story. In nearly 700 pages, Wolfe was able to lay bare the motivations of nearly all of the major players in the story, from Sherman, Maria and Peter, to the lawyers, politicians and community leaders who opportunistically seized upon his case for their own personal gain. Without the time to do this onscreen, De Palma instead focuses on the circus (political and media-driven) that ensues. But while a more assured comic filmmaker might have been able to spin even an abbreviated Bonfire into a bitter little pill (imagine what an Ace in the Hole-era Billy Wilder might have done with this material), De Palma brings almost nothing to the material aside from the liberal use of unflattering wide-angle close-ups to underline the grotesqueness of the characters. Sure, there are a handful of cool camera tricks- especially the nearly five-minute-long opening Steadican shot- but for the most part they don’t really work in the context of the story, and mostly just call attention to themselves. I hate to use a criticism that De Palma’s detractors are wont to levy at him, but in this case, they’re right.

In the end, the biggest failing of The Bonfire of the Vanities is one of tone. The scathing satire of the original novel was replaced by a more hamfisted style that was both broad and shrill. A few of the jabs hit (I love how Andre Gregory’s poet is introduced: “he’s on the shortlist for the Nobel Prize. He has AIDS.”), but most of the time they whiff. Scenes like the one where Maria’s cuckold husband (Alan King) suddenly dies in mid-conversation or the famous “crumbs” monologue by Sherman’s wife might have worked on the page, but they flounder and die onscreen, the former because it’s not inherently funny to see a minor character kick the bucket, the latter because Kim Cattrall plays the character as such a high-strung harpy that it’s hard to focus on anything she says.

Now, it’s entirely possible that Ebert was right when he wrote that The Bonfire of the Vanities might be enjoyable to those who are unfamiliar with the book. But I wouldn’t bet on it. De Palma and the studio took a powerful and lacerating story and adapted it in the most pedestrian way possible, and replaced the prickly citizens of Wolfe’s New York City with characters who are both cartoonish and, worse, uninteresting. If anything good came out of my watching Bonfire again, it’s that I’ve been inspired to re-read the book, to immerse myself in Wolfe’s language and marvel at the world he created. By now, it’s become a cliché that people are generally better off reading the book, but in this case that’s the only way to go.

In Other Blogs: Bondage Bloggage

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 16:15:00 GMT

James Bond lists are all the rage these days, and although rumor has it we’ve participated, not even the mighty Screengrab can contain all the 007 listage. For your eyes only:

Hecklerspray offers the 12 Worst Bond Baddies, including Hugo Drax in Moonraker. “We cannot believe he had the nerve to come up with a plan to destroy the world and set up a colony is space where only beautiful people can live. Has he looked in the mirror lately? He looks like a cross between a toad and a big, gay bear.”

Spoutblog counters with 5 Bond Girls Who Died After Wearing A Bikini, including Naomi (Caroline Munro) in The Spy Who Loved Me. “It is important for helicopter pilots to wear bikinis. Especially helicoptor pilots who flirt with James Bond while trying to shoot him. Unfortunately, this skimpily-dressed helicopter pilot/would-be 007 assassin didn’t get her man, in either a mortal sense or a sexy one, because James blew up her helicopter with a torpedo.”

Cinematical presents 007 Reasons to Love Even the Least of the James Bond Films, (including Maryam d’Abo and her cello case in The Living Daylights) as well as the 007 Best Last Lines (“I thought Christmas only comes once a year”).

It’s not all Bond this week. In celebration of the new box set of Budd Boetticher/Randolph Scott Westerns, Parallax View offers a treasure trove of Boetticher material, including reviews, vintage interviews and a wish list of films not available on DVD, notably 1972’s Arruza: “The film that almost killed Budd Boetticher. Seriously. This drama of this labor-of-love documentary can never live up to the real-life story behind its production, but it is a defining film in Boetticher’s career. He left Hollywood to create the definitive bullfight film, a chronicle Mexico bullfighting legend Carlos Arruza’s return to the corrida as a rejoneador (a horseback bullfighter). By the end of filming, Boetticher had survived poverty, faced imprisonment and survived a bout of pneumonia that almost killed him. His leading man had been killed in a car accident and Boetticher still battled for final cut on the film.”

Finally, a shout-out to Roger Ebert, who gently takes on Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman for his review of Synecdoche, New York – a review for which Mr. Gleiberman deserves nothing short of a public pantsing. “I am resigned to belonging to a cadre of eggheads hailing Synecdoche, although I have praised many a film, like The Golden Compass, that Gleiberman dismissed as not Great Trash but the compacted variety. Naya, naya, naya! Who's the egghead now? But Owen is a terrific chap and we like each other, especially when we find ourselves enlisted in the same cadre.”

In Other Blogs: Electoral Collage

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 15:30:00 GMT

This week’s edition of In Other Blogs is heavily indebted to The Cooler, host of the ongoing Politics & Movies Blog-a-thon (Nov. 4-9), including this tribute to assassination films. “A very obscure gem of an assassination film that I have only seen on television is Nine Hours to Rama with Horst Buchholtz (the seventh gun in The Magnificent Seven) as the leader of the conspiracy to assassinate Mahatma Gandhi. Covering the tight timeframe of the hours just before the killing, this film examines the bitterness and motives that drive the assassin – Naturam Godse. And just like the above two films, things go wrong, as they historically did, as the assassin’s accomplices are picked up by policemen for a silly mistake. And, too, just like in the best assassination films, the assassin works his way through an agitated crowd while policemen make their fruitless last-minute dash to stop the deed from happening.”

Octopus Cinema examines voter fraud by way of Preston Sturges. “The Great McGinty has achieved a type of peculiar transcendence, especially in the current tempestuous political climate. With all the recent talk about vote blocking, mistakenly lost votes and intentionally mistaken tallies, there is a particular relevance in the film's first act in which McGinty earns his keep by voting a total of 37 times. And while his moxie and charisma may now have a bitter-sweet aftertaste thanks to the 2000 and 2004 elections, it's a testament to Sturges' brilliance as a writer and director that we identify with the big lug, even when we know he's fallen from the path. And in that suit, no less.”

Chicago Ex-Patriate finds some inconsistencies in the Cold War politics of Rocky IV. “The training sequences then turn into a sort of political mindfuck. In order to clear his head and focus on the fight, Rocky insists on living and training in the barren countryside with no luxuries, while Drago has the best science and technology as his disposal. In other words, Rocky, the great American hero, becomes a representation of Communism. He's living off the land, training by sawing logs and running in snow. In one sense, he's maintaining his Americanness by rolling up his sleeves and working up a sweat. However, he totally blends in with the peasants who live nearby.”

Roger Ebert weighed in on the election at his eponymous blog. “I stayed up late. As I watched, I remembered. In 1968 I was in the streets as a reporter, when the Battle of Grant Park ended eight years of Democratic presidents and opened an era when the Republicans would control the White House for 28 of the next 40 years. "The whole world is watching!" the demonstrators cried, as the image of Chicago was tarnished around the world. On Tuesday night, the world again had its eyes on Grant Park. I saw tens and tens of thousands of citizens with their hearts full, smiling through their tears. As at all of Obama's rallies, our races stood proudly side by side, as it should be. We are finally, finally, beginning to close that terrible chapter of American history.”

I tried to find an appropriate political list to wrap things up, but honestly, we’ve done them all better here at the Screengrab. So instead, here’s Spoutblog with Jean Claude Van Damme: Five Moments That Are More Fun Than JCVD, including fighting himself in Double Impact. “What’s better than one Van Damme? Two Van Dammes! He plays his own twin brother in this 1991 movie where they’re both out for revenge on the people who killed their parents. Separated after their parents died when they were kids, Chad was given a cushy living while Alex had to turn to petty crime to survive. Strangely, they both end up learning advanced martial arts training.”

DVD Digest for August 28, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 14:00:00 GMT

It’s a good week for fans of classic comedy of both the big-screen and televised varieties. Plus, the Christmas DVD season officially begins.

DVD of the Week: Tough call this week, with no real world-beaters in the bunch. But in terms of sheer quantity, nothing tops the release of the mammoth Abbott & Costello: The Complete Universal Pictures Collection. Over the length of 29 DVDs, Universal has compiled every single one of their Abbott & Costello features, as well as plenty of trailers and production notes. In addition, they’ve recorded commentary tracks on six of the movies, plus three new documentaries on one of comedy’s most legendary duos. Also included in the set is the companion book Abbott and Costello: The Universal Story. So if you’re an Abbott and Costello fan, today is your lucky day.

Other laughs can be had in this week’s new TV on DVD releases. For the seventies-era TV watcher, there’s Good Times: The Complete Series and Sanford and Son: The Complete Series (both Sony). For something a little more recent, check out the woefully underwatched-in-its-day NewsRadio: The Complete Series (Sony). Fans of animated sitcoms should enjoy The Flintstones: The Complete Series (Warner). And we shouldn’t forget about Mystery Science Theatre 3000 20th Anniversary Edition (Shout! Factory), which collects four of the gang’s most-requested episodes (First Spaceship on Venus, Laserblast, Werewolf and Future War), plus new interviews with the whole gang and a snazzy new Crow T. Robot figurine that’s sure to make you the envy of all your geeky friends (i.e. the only ones who really count).

Recent releases on coming to DVD this week include: Brendan Fraser treading all over Jules Verne in Journey to the Center of the Earth (Warner, also Blu-Ray); Abigail Breslin in her seventeenth movie of 2008, Kit Kittredge: An American Girl (Warner, also Blu-Ray); Catherine Zeta Jones and Guy Pearce (as Houdini) in Gillian Armstrong’s Death Defying Acts (Weinstein); and a movie everyone will want to add to his DVD collection, Zombie Strippers (Sony, also Blu-Ray).

Finally, this week’s classics selection includes two of Warner’s recent Christmas favorites, The Polar Express Presented in 3D (Warner, also Blu-Ray, includes four pairs of 3D glasses), and Elf (Warner, Blu-Ray only, includes plentiful images of Will Ferrell in tights). And while Roger Ebert has gone gaga over the new DVD/Blu-Ray remastering of Ron Fricke’s Baraka (MPI, also Blu-Ray), allow me to stump for another sentimental favorite of mine. I’m referring, of course, to Juan Piquer-Simon’s Pieces (Ryko Distribution), one of the trashiest, dumbest, and irresistibly entertaining bad movies ever made. If that doesn’t sound like your kind of thing, stay far away. But if you’ve got a taste for gloriously fragrant cinematic garbage, Pieces is required viewing, Halloween or any other time of year.

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: Oct. 18-24, 2008

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Greetings, Screenbag fans. William Shatner here to take you where no man has gone before. That is, no man besides that Steve Don Vodiak who usually does the Highlight Reel on Fridays. I thought it was important to step in today because I’m deeply troubled by the 21 Stars We Hate (Parts One, Two, Three and Four). Not because I wasn’t included – it would take a sick mind, a truly disturbed psychosis to even think of such a thing – but because I don’t see such names as George Takei, Adrian Zmed and James Spader on the list. God love them all, but they are truly unspeakable screen presences, whose lines and close-ups I was forced to cut – for their own good!

And speaking of Takei, this Star Trek Showdown post is greatly offensive to me, excepting, of course, the parts of it that confirm the dreadful mental illness that Sulu fellow has labored under lo these many years. I prefer to focus on the positive, such as these reviews of Six Man, Texas, Fear(s) of the Dark and Synecdoche, New York, rather than dwell in the sick cesspool of negativity where posts about The Big Fix, Turkey Shoot, Pride and Glory and Meet the Browns drown in their own repulsive bile.

While the Screenbaggers trash Bill Maher and Roger Ebert, while they wallow in the past glories of Duel in the Sun and the Pulp Fiction soundtrack, while they pretend to mourn Levi Stubbs, Rudy Ray Moore and Mr. Blackwell, I alone will testify to their deteriorating mental states. For I am Shatner.

Roger Ebert Gives Himself Thumbs Down

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Recently Roger Ebert gave the movie Tru Loved a one-star review in the Chicago Sun-Times. That in itself is not so unusual, although it’s more unusual than it used to be; on the “still playing” sidebar on Ebert’s main page, the only other movie to receive one star is Hell Ride. As far as I can tell, however, Ebert watched all of Hell Ride. He only watched eight minutes of Tru Loved.

After listing the gay indie’s faults – including complaints about the line readings, body language and a cameo from Bruce Vilanch – Ebrt’s original version of the review concludes thusly: “Full disclosure. I lifted the words ‘San Francisco to conservative suburbia with her lesbian mothers’ straight from the plot summary on IMDb.com, because I stopped watching the movie at the 00:08.05 point. IMDb is also where I found out about Bruce Vilanch's dual role. I never did see the lesbian mothers or my friend Bruce. For Tru Loved, the handwriting was on the wall. The returns were in. The case was closed. You know I'm right. Or tell me I'm wrong.”

Ebert has been reviewing movies for four decades now, and it’s a little hard to believe that he managed to resist the urge to pull this stunt for all that time. Think of all the movies he’s actually managed to sit through. He made it all the way to the end of BAPS, Boat Trip, Corky Romano and Ghost Dad, but it took Tru Loved to break him? Full disclosure: I have not seen Tru Loved, not even eight minutes of it. Maybe it is that bad, but it’s currently pulling 56% at Rotten Tomatoes. Nathan Lee of the New York Times says it has “heart” and Anna King of Time Out New York finds “a surprising elan.” Roger Ebert, you’ve had half your face surgically removed and can no longer speak. And it took this movie to break you? For real?

Not too surprisingly, Ebert has since had second thoughts. In an Oct. 16 journal entry, he reprints an email from his editor: “Just got down to the part where you mention that you watched ONLY eight minutes of this movie. I don't blame you but do you really want to open that door? I fear your admission will start people wondering whether this is a regular practice. Of course it's not but you don't want to raise those suspicions. The alternative: take out those grafs. Or I could kill the review and we could try to find a substitute. Your original review is clever and well-written but I think morally dishonest because you conceal your MO until the very end.” Ebert defended his decision at the time. “I hope the review truthfully records the process I went through.”

On Oct. 21, Ebert changed his mind. “It sent a wrong message. If I had seen the entire film, a review, however negative, would have been appropriate. But in reviewing the first eight minutes, I was guilty of too much affection for my prose… I wish I hadn't published the review.”

Ebert has now watched Tru Loved in its entirety, appending an update to the end of his original review. He’s still only giving it one star, though.

Related:
Classless Man in Voiceless Brawl
Take Five: Ride Hard

Video of the Day: Fargo’s Marge Grills Sarah Palin

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Ever since Sarah Palin burst onto the national scene with her speech at the Republican convention, cinephiles have noted a certain familiar quality to her folksy manner of speech. The sing-songy cadence, flat vowels and cheery-yet-hostile “you betchas” – we’ve heard all that before. It wasn’t from the mouth of an Alaskan hockey mom, but a pregnant police chief in Brainerd, Minnesota – Marge Gunderson (Oscar winner Frances McDormand) from Fargo. (Although Roger Ebert suggests there may be a more apt comparison from the same film: “But who did she resemble more? Marge Gunderson, whose peppy pleasantries masked a remorseless policewoman's logic? Or Jerry Lundegaard, who knew he didn't have the car on his lot, but smiled when he said, ‘M'am, I been cooperatin' with ya here.’”) For those of us who wouldn’t mind seeing Palin interrogated by the straight-shootin’ yet persistent Gunderson rather than Gwen Ifill, some enterprising YouTuber has given us our wish.