The Screengrab : saw v

DVD Digest for January 20, 2009

Paul Clark — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 15:00:00 GMT

With the recent deep freeze that has stricken much of the country, now’s the perfect time to curl up in front of the television and watch a DVD. And don’t think the studios don’t know it.

DVD of the Week: The cream of this week’s DVD releases looks to be the snazzy new Criterion edition of Gregory Nava’s breakthrough film El Norte. This lovely mini-epic about a pair of Guatemalan refugees venturing north to America, Nava’s film told a too-common story that hadn’t been successfully dramatized in movies before. Shooting the film largely on the fly, Nava and his wife/collaborator Anna Thomas helped to kick-start the American independent film movement by redefining the sorts of movies could be made with limited means. Both the standard edition and the Blu-Ray edition include a new commentary track by Nava, interviews with Nava, Thomas, and the film’s principal actors, Nava’s 1972 student film The Journal of Diego Rodriguez Silva, and more. At a time when “Sundance movies” have practically become a formula unto themselves, El Norte is a reminder that independent film can be more than just a cliché.

Also this week in classics is Criterion’s standard-format edition of Douglas Sirk’s Magnificent Obsession, which also includes a remastered version of the 1935 John M. Stahl original. Or if you like your weepies more contemporary, there’s always The Notebook Limited Edition Gift Set (Warner, also Blu-Ray).

This week’s slate of recent releases coming to DVD is headlined Saw V (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray), the latest entry in a series that will surely continue as long as there are people willing to come up with convoluted ways to kill off characters. Also this week: Mark Wahlberg in the video game adaptation Max Payne (Fox, also Blu-Ray), the story of Heisman winner Ernie Davis in The Express (Universal, also Blu-Ray), the family films Igor (MGM, also Blu-Ray) and City of Ember (Fox), Jonathan Rhys-Meyers in the “a white man shall free them” drama The Children of Huang Shi (Sony), the cult-ready musical gorefest Repo!: The Genetic Opera (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray), and the direct-to-DVD horror movie Amusement (Warner, also Blu-Ray).

In TV on DVD, this week brings The Rockford Files Season 6 (Universal), Emergency! Season 5 (Universal), and Moonlight: The Complete Series (Warner).

Finally, this week’s Blu-Ray only titles is highlighted by the enduring classic This Is Spinal Tap (MGM), in an edition that boasts all of the extras from MGM’s standard-format edition. Also this week: Jennifer Garner in 13 Going on 30 (Sony), Denzel Washington’s Antwone Fisher (Fox), Tony Scott’s Domino (Warner) (for my money, the most underappreciated movie of the decade so far), Alexander Payne’s Election (Paramount), Steve Martin making an ass of himself in The Pink Panther (Sony), and Richard Gere and Diane Lane in Unfaithful (Fox).

Morning Deal Report: Joaquin Phoenix Bids Adieu

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 15:00:00 GMT

With Halloween falling on a Friday this year, you’d think those savvy Hollywood moguls would have lined up the scary movies in order to capitalize. But unless your idea of terror is Seth Rogen humping Elizabeth Banks (and it may well be), that didn’t happen. Consquently, High School Musical 3: Senior Year retained its hold on the top spot, adding $15 million to its total haul of $61.8 million. This means we can look forward to either College Musical or High School Musical 4: We All Flunked! Zack and Miri Make a Porno took second place with $10.7 million, while the one horror holdover from last week, Saw V, finished third with $10.1 million. Guy Ritchie’s RocknRolla failed to rock, taking in a dismal $1.8 million in its first weekend of wide release.

We doubted it would ever happen, but shooting has started on the sequel to Boondock Saints in Toronto. “Sean Patrick Flanery and Norman Reedus are reprising their roles as the crusading fraternal twins Connor and Murphy MacManus, who seek revenge on the tough Boston underworld. Billy Connolly is also returning as Poppa M,” per The Hollywood Reporter. And yes, enfant really, really terrible Troy Duffy is back in the director’s chair. Overnight II, anyone?

And from the “get that man a urine test” file, Joaquin Phoenix has announced his retirement from acting. Per Variety, “The words ‘Good Bye’ were penned on the actor's knuckles at a premiere Saturday night for his latest film, Two Lovers, and Phoenix confirmed a surprise announcement he made last week: He's giving up movies.” Phoenix will now concentrate on his music career. I’ve got summer 2011 in the Screengrab comeback pool.

Related:
Screengrab Review: "Zack and Miri Make a Porno"
Vanishing Act: Troy Duffy

Screengrab Presents: The 25 Greatest Horror Films of All Time (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 20:00:00 GMT

This may be the scariest Halloween in recent memory.

Whatever happens in the election, it's going to be a nightmare for tens of millions of Americans. But until then, we’ve got a few days to dress like Joe the Plumber and Sarah Palin, drink pumpkin-flavored beer and relax with ghosts, vampires and zombies instead of all those scary talking heads on TV.

There was some debate here in the Screengrab Crypt regarding whether this was a list of the BEST horror films of all time or the SCARIEST (or if there’s a difference)...which naturally got us thinking about just what makes a film scary in the first place.

When my mother-in-law was a wee little French-Canadian, she went to a screening of Murders in the Rue Morgue where a theater employee in a gorilla suit popped out when the lights came up, sending the audience screaming into the streets of Nashua, New Hampshire...now THAT’S scary.

On the other hand, there are some horror movies that skip the gotcha! moments in favor of sheer dread, a creeping mood of hopeless, helpless paranoia that haunts your nights long after the adrenalin rush from the guy in the gorilla suit has faded. I remember squirming my way through all the maggots and vomited intestines of Lucio Fulci’s Gates of Hell as a teenager, but what scared me the most was the Italian film’s pervasive sense of inescapable doom...

...not that I have especially fond memories of the film. Just because it scared me didn’t mean I liked it, in the same way I’d rather read a 700-page grad school dissertation on the cultural significance of the torture porn craze than sit through Saw V.

Like comedy, it’s hard to nail down the secret of great horror, but we know it when it lurches up...RIGHT BEHIND YOU!!!!!

Just kidding. Enjoy the list, and Happy Halloween from your pals here at The Screengrab!

25. RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD (1985)

What is it with zombies? Why do we love them so? We’ve got at least a half dozen killer corpse movies on this list...but personally, I’ve always had a special place in my braaaaiiiiiinnnssss for Dan O’Bannon’s punk-rock tribute to the genre, starring the venerable, indispensable B-movie staple Clu Gulager as the boss of two medical warehouse employees who accidentally unleash a zombie apocalypse. According to the film’s clever, way-better-than-it-has-to-be script (also by O’Bannon), Night of the Living Dead was a true story, but the government covered the whole thing up...and they would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for a mishap involving a missing barrel of deadly zombie toxin and the aforementioned bumbling warehouse employees: Freddy (whose friends are rockin’ out to the Damned and the Flesh Eaters -- and, for some reason, getting naked -- in a nearby graveyard) and Frank, whose eventual fate is actually kinda touching thanks to a horror movie hall-of-fame performance by character actor James Karen. One of my all-time favorites in the “disappearing characters” genre, Return is frightening, funny and exciting by turns, and pioneered “fast zombie” technology long before Danny Boyle hogged all the credit in 28 Days Later. Plus, the soundtrack totally kicks ass...and, of course, BRAAAAIIIINNNSSSS!!!!!

24. THE INNOCENTS (1961)

One of the most effective ghost story movies ever made is also perhaps the finest of all the attempts to adapt Henry James to the screen. (John Mortimer and a pre-In Cold Blood Truman Capote worked on the screenplay, which is based on a theatrical adaptation of James' The Turn of the Screw.) Deborah Kerr is a fascinating jangle of authoritative command and nervous anxiety as the new governess who thinks she's seen the apparitions of her predecessor and that woman's lover, the valet Quint, who both came to mysterious ends. Ten years later, Michael Winner's The Nightcomers would offer a speculative version of what happened before, with Marlon Brando as Quint. That movie is best remembered as a cautionary tale involving how it came to be distributed in this country: Universal agreed to pick it up as part of a deal to cancel its contract with Brando, who they assumed would never have another hit in his life. Of course, his next picture was The Godfather. Hollywood: it's a scary place.

23. THE STEPFATHER (1987)

A wholly unexpected high point for the slash/fill-in-the-blank-from-Hell genre, with an original script by the matchless crime novelist Donald Newlove which achieves just the right balance of wit and nastiness. Terry O'Quinn makes anonymity terrifying as the title character, a serial murderer of the type known as a "family annihilator" -- unable to deal with cracks in his fantasy ideal of a perfect family, he keeps wiping out one domestic unit and moving on to another. The movie was inspired by Newlove's meditating on the case of the infamously colorless John List, who butchered his family in 1971, and who was still unapprehended when the movie came out; he was arrested in 1989, after being the subject of an episode of America's Most Wanted, and died in prison last March. A TV movie about List was made in 1993. He was played by Robert Blake.

22. NEAR DARK (1987)

Kathryn Biglow's artspolitation movie about a "family" of white trash vampires traveling the back roads in a van with the windows blacked out has an unusually potent mix of striking visual beauty and cutthroat action. Bill Paxton and Lance Henrikson have never looked closer to shitkicker heaven than in the movie's bloody set piece in a roadhouse; the wonderful, and much-missed Jenny Wright is hard to resist as the teen-sister figure, who winsomely infects the country-boy hero (Adrian Pasdar) with vampirism so that she'll have someone nice to talk to between massacres. And where have you gone, Jenette Goldstein? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.

21. THE MUMMY (1932)

The legendary cinematographer Karl Freund, whose credits ranged from Metropolis and The Last Laugh to 149 episodes of I Love Lucy, worked as a director of English-language films for only three years in the early-to-mid '30s. This was his Hollywood directorial debut; the last film he directed was the 1935 horror movie Mad Love, and that title would have been a neat fit for this one, too. It stars Boris Karloff as a 3,000-year-old Egyptian who was entombed alive for trying to restore his dead beloved to life; resurrected, he gets right back on the case, having identified the heroine, Zita Johann, as the woman's reincarnation. Slow and dreamily poetic, this is very different from later mummy movies -- Karloff is unbandaged for most of the picture -- and also very different from most of the other classic Universal monster movies. It's the rare film about eternal love than makes you appreciate the fact that most loves have a natural shelf life.

Click Here For Part Two, Three, Four, Five, Six & Seven

Contributors: The Zombie Andrew Osborne, Kill Nugent

Morning Deal Report: Jim Carrey Believes – Or Not

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 14:30:00 GMT

Sequels ruled the weekend box office, with High School Musical 3: Senior Year opening to a “Holy shit, America, first the Chihuahua and now this?” $42 million. And moviegoers still can’t get enough of that lovable mass murderer Jigsaw, as Saw V took in $30.5 million, good for second place. Pride and Glory performed about as well as you’d expect from a movie that’s been sitting on the shelf since there were only three Saw movies, mopping up $6.3 million. And it should come as no surprise that W. dropped precipitously in the polls, with a weekend take of $5.3 million.

Believe it or not, Jim Carrey is set to play Robert Ripley for director Chris Columbus. The Ripley’s Believe It or Not project has been floundering in development hell for a while (Tim Burton was formerly attached), but Paramount has given Columbus the go-ahead. “Once Columbus’ deal is closed, the studio will hire a writer to draft the project, which remains a Par priority: The studio is aiming for a 2011 release and is hoping the pic spawns a franchise,” Variety obviouslies.

Speaking of Burton, the inevitable has happened: Crispin Glover has joined the cast of Alice in Wonderland. The Mad Hatter role is already taken, so Glover will appear as the Knave of Hearts, who is “put on trial for stealing the Queen of Hearts' tarts and is defended by Alice,” per The Hollywood Reporter.

Related:
Crispin Glover Requires Cash, Sushi
Anne Hathaway in Wonderland

Screengrab Exclusive: “Synecdoche, New York” Clip

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 15:00:00 GMT

One of the most anticipated movies of the fall opens tomorrow in selected cities. I am, of course, referring to Saw V, although some of you might be more interested in Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut, Synecdoche, New York. (Unless you’re worried about embarrassing yourself at the ticket window by mispronouncing the title, in which case you should either order your ticket online or bear in mind that it more or less rhymes with Schenectady, New York.) I’m one of the lucky few to have already seen the film, and while you’ll have to wait until tomorrow for a full review, I will say that it is probably even better than Saw V. For now, we’ll tantalize you with a clip from the film provided exclusively to the Screengrab by Sony Pictures Classics. In this scene, theater director Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is holding auditions for a key role in his very ambitious production.

Here's the clip.

Saw: Ride the Torture!

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 20:00:00 GMT

A long, long time ago -- no, really! It was five whole years ago! We'd just won the war in Iraq! -- a movie came out called Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. Professional movie watchers like myself were a tad taken aback, largely because we had severe doubts about the quality of a movie based on a theme park ride. As it happens, the movie was actually pretty engaging, and for a few years, before Pirates of the Caribbean went to hell and became as bad as we thought it was going to be in the first place, people got to cluck their tongues at us and go "See? You never know."

Unfortunately, that's not entirely true. Sometimes you know. For example, I know that, even though amusement park rides based on movies are far more common, and generally of higher quality, than movies based on amusement park rides, the recently announced Saw: The Ride is going to go down in history as nothing but one more step towards the ultimate humilation, degradation and sad, slow death of the human race.

No, we're not kidding: there really is going to be such a thing as Saw: The Ride. Based on the depressingly popular torture-porn horror series, it's set to open at Surrey's Thorpe Park in Britain in March of 2009. Alleged to be the first roller-coaster to be based on a horror movie, the ride features a 100-foot vertical drop in free fall, which is so scary that it induced Saw producers Lionsgate to release a suicide-inducing press release claiming that "Saw: The Ride is a reflection of how thoroughly the Saw franchise has crossed over into pop culture at large." The rides will evoke the nausea-inspiring horror caused by serial killer Jigsaw as he systematically murders people for your amusement. Bring the kids!

If that was the worst of it, we probably wouldn't care so much; but with Saw V (there have been five of these already? Seriously?) opening worldwide, it's almost a certainty that by the time the franchise drags out to its ninth or tenth installment -- and assuming no one has actually been killed on the ride -- the idea-bereft producers are sure to release a flick in which Jigsaw menaces people on the roller-coaster, confronting innocent human beings with Saw: The Ride: The Movie. When will the suffering end?

Related Posts:

Take Five: Take Four

ARRR! Another Pirate Movie

Screengrab Fall Preview: Andrew Osborne's Picks

Andrew Osborne — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 05:05:00 GMT

So, last week, Scott Von Doviak picked a trifecta of movies he’s most looking forward to (and three he’s most definitely avoiding) in the Fall/Winter 2008 Oscar Bait/Xmas Blockbuster Season, and challenged his fellow Screengrabbers to do the same.

Paul Clark was the next to weigh in, and now I’ll give it a shot...although I have to admit, with so many interesting and terrible-looking movies on deck, it’s hard to pick just three of each, so I’ll automatically disqualify Burn After Reading and Synechdoche, New York from my Top 3 and Bedtime Stories and The Women from my Bottom 3, since they’ve already been cited on the previous two Fall Preview lists.

Which brings us to MY lists...

3 UP

1. Frost/Nixon – I’m a big fan of what I call “Guys In Suits” movies, featuring the behind-the-scenes machinations of top-level professionals tackling complex problems and/or competing in high-stakes political/diplomatic jousting matches. The Queen was a fine example of the genre (even though Helen Mirren’s Elizabeth II wore pantsuits and was certainly no guy), and this tale of the 1977 cat-and-mouse tango between Tricky Dick and the TV interviewer attempting to coax a smoking gun mea culpa from the disgraced ex-president shares a screenwriter (Peter Morgan) and co-star (the always great Michael Sheen) with that earlier film, while adding a Broadway-honed performance by Frank Langella...plus I heard the stage version was outstanding.

2. W. – So, originally, I had Harry Potter & The Half-Blood Prince here, until Noel Murray reminded me (in the comments section below) that the very same Scott Von Doviak who started this whole "Fall Preview" mania recently posted about Warner Bros.'s decision to bump the next Hogwarts episode to summer '09. And that self-same Von Doviak, in the Wild Card section of his Fall Preview, said of W., "This can’t possibly be any good, can it?" Well, sir, my answer to that question would have to be...maybe? I mean, sure Ollie more or less accused LBJ of murder in JFK...but the historical whodunnit was still compelling and fascinating (as was Nixon) despite (and maybe because of) all the director's usual batshit crazy excess. George W. Bush is a far less tortured protagonist than Richard Milhouse or Jim Garrison, but his unlikely rise to power, his rogue's gallery of blueblood, secret society and redneck cronies and the duality of his goofy antics vs. his creepy daddy issues, addictions, arrogance and ruthless ambition (combined with Stone's usual kitchen-sink sturm und drang) make this one a must-see, thumbs up, down, or sideways.

3. Zack and Miri Make A Porno – For my third pick, it was a toss-up between Doubt, another Guys In Suits (or, in this case, Nuns In Habits) movie adapted from a Broadway play, Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist, which has a charming trailer and Michael Cera (who’s developed into a pretty good indicator of quality in his short career) or this goofy new Kevin Smith joint, which could very well be terrible. But I’m not sick of star Seth Rogen yet and I have many pleasant memories of past visits to Mr. Smith's View Askewniverse, so I gotta give the nod to Silent Bob.

3 DOWN

1. Marley & Me – The Chariots of Fire theme plays while a cute widdle dog runs along a beach pursued by the ever-more-icky Jennifer Aniston and a newly soulful, poignant, life-affirming, ix-nay on the uicide-say Owen Wilson. The tag line is “Heel the Love.” Based on the coming attractions trailer, let’s just say I am very much not the target demographic for this movie and we'll leave it at that.

2. Filth and Wisdom – Sure, Madonna’s an easy target when it comes to cinematic misadventures, and maybe it’s banal and predictable to assume her directorial debut about quirky London flatmates with big dreams will be as pretentious and self-important as its title...but my friend Heidi caught a screening at the Provincetown Film Festival and said it sucked, and I'm more than willing to believe her.

3. Saw V – Really? Even still yet more torture porn? Dude, the shit was old when Troma released Bloodsucking Freaks back in 1976. Enough already.

WILD CARD

The Road - I'm fascinated, but jeez, this post-apocalyptic road movie sounds like the entertainment equivalent of my father's recent painful nose surgery or, y'know, Dancer in the Dark.