The Screengrab : scarface

Reviews By Request: King of New York (1990, Abel Ferrara)

Paul Clark — Fri, 29 May 2009 19:00:00 GMT

Once again, thanks to Scott Tobias from the Onion AV Club for recommending this film, which he previously selected for his weekly column “The New Cult Canon.”

One of Christopher Walken’s greatest assets as an actor is his unpredictability. Watching Walken onscreen, it’s hard to tell how he’s going to deliver even the most mundane bit of dialogue, much less predict how his characters will behave under pressure. But while Walken’s off-kilter presence has garnered him a sizable cult following, it’s easy to overlook what a fascinating actor he can be in more complex roles. In many of his character roles, Walken has fun with his image, but he’s not afraid to play it straight when the part calls for it. Abel Ferrara’s King of New York is one of those parts, and consequently one of his best performances.

Frank White, the crime lord Walken plays in King of New York, is one of the most frightening criminals I’ve ever seen in a movie, due in large part to the unpredictability that Walken brings to the role. From the first time we meet Frank, he seems to be capable of anything, which gives him an edge in his criminal endeavors. Most of his competition sticks to hard and fast traditions, the most important being that the bigwigs keep their hands clean while the foot soldiers fight the wars. Frank has no use for such traditions- when he needs someone killed, he’d just as soon do it himself. There are many possibilities as to why Frank would do this, but I think it’s because he wants people to think he’s the baddest, scariest man in New York. And when he follows the killing of a rival gang leader by inviting his underlings to join his gang, it sends a very specific message- if you’re crazy enough to follow a guy who does this, I want you on my side.

Consequently, many of Frank’s foot soldiers are as volatile as he is- and some even share his flair for the theatrical, as when one storms into a hotel room shootout screaming, “room service, motherfuckers!” In addition, Frank’s gang could be called “post-racial”- whereas Frank’s rivals generally adhere to ethnic boundaries, such concerns are beneath Frank. Most of his underlings are African-American- two of his most prominent foot soldiers are played by Laurence (then Larry) Fishburne and Giancarlo Esposito- but Steve Buscemi also turns up as Frank’s in-house drug tester. And Frank’s own ethnicity- just look at his name- allows him an entry in legitimate society that would be more limited to other criminals of his stature.

It’s this air of near-legitimacy that rankles the NYPD, especially a trio of cops played by David Caruso, Wesley Snipes, and Victor Argo. Whereas the power of the city’s other top criminals is relatively contained to the underworld, Frank hobnobs with New York’s elite, turning up at black-tie parties and charity events. “He’s a movie star,” says Caruso, who bemoans the fact that Frank is running roughshod over the city while he and his partners are only bringing in a modest policeman’s salary. But how to stop him? Caruso and Snipes determine that in order to catch Frank, they need to be as crazy as he is. It isn’t until it’s too late (when Frank crashes one cop’s funeral to kill another one) that that discover that crazy isn’t enough- one must also be lucky.

Argo’s Roy Bishop is the one exception to the film’s cycle of brutality- the one “good cop” who sticks to his principles and hopes to bring Frank in not by sneaking around but by nuts-and-bolts police work. We see him sitting at home in front of his computer, sifting through police files in an attempt to make a case. Throughout the film, Ferrara contrasts Roy’s steadfast adherence to old-fashioned morality with Frank’s more slippery kind of ethics, and Frank understandably sees Roy as his biggest threat. I found it interesting to see Argo, who usually played wiseguys, playing the closest thing this film has to a steady moral compass.

King of New York is one of the bleakest crime movies I’ve ever seen, with one scene of unsparing violence after another. But it’s stylish enough that it’s anything but a slog- like GoodFellas and Scarface before it, it’s amassed a considerable cult, even serving as an inspiration for the late Notorious B.I.G. I’ve only seen a handful of Ferrara films to date, but one thing that’s impressed me about them is how stylish his films can be despite their budgetary limitations. In King of New York, Ferrara uses the low budget to his advantage, setting scenes in scruffy back-alleys and abandoned buildings to give the film a grittier feel than most movies of its kind. I also liked that Frank’s home isn’t an expansive estate but a suite at the Plaza, which combines a location in the heart of New York (perfect for shots of him overlooking the city) with a kind of rented luxury that says everything about the mystique Frank wants to create for himself.

At the center of it all is the enigma of Frank White. Throughout the film Ferrara and Walken invite us to ask the question, what drives this man? Late in the film, he confronts Roy in his apartment and tells him that he considers himself a businessman rather than a criminal, and states that “I never killed anybody that didn’t deserve it.” But how to reconcile that with the charge he seems to get from his power? Or for that matter, what of his efforts to save a children’s hospital in a poor neighborhood? One thing’s for sure- he’s hooked on his sense of power. When he says he wants to run for mayor, everyone laughs until Frank tells them he’s serious. Is he? Who are we to question him?

Screengrab Review: "Gomorrah"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 18:00:00 GMT

There's a popular nitwit theory that movies like The Godfather and TV series like The Sopranos "glamorize" Mafia life and make it look attractive. Again and again, the point may get made that Michael Corleone and Tony Soprano and the people in their orbit are ruthless moral idiots who actually grow less and less loyal to their closest associates the longer they have to endure the sight of them, but the idea seems to be that as long as they're treated as fascinating characters, people worthy of the audience's interest, somebody's going to look at their way of life and think, it doesn't look half bad. The new Italian movie Gomorrah may be less likely than any crime movie ever made to be accused of romanticizing gangsterism. The movie, which runs two hours and fifteen minutes, uses Robert Saviano's nonfiction book about the Neapolitan-based criminal organization known as "the Camorra" (which means, simply, the gang) as its jumping-off point. The book is fiercely angry about what the Camorra and its corrupting influence does to innocent people who are just trying to live their lives. The movie, which was directed by Matteo Garrone, provides grounds for anger, though its own emotional temperature is basically even and steady, even frigid. It cuts back and forth among several characters, most of them barely blips on the Camorra's radar screen: a bookkeeper who works distributing money to the families of clan members who are in prison; a mobbed-up tailor; a thirteen-year-old boy just beginning to get his bearings in the crooked world in which he'll be growing up; a couple of teenage meatheads who, unlike the professional big boys, see themselves as romantic outlaws and run around with guns causing so much aggravation that they'll eventually have to be put down. (To better make the point about what kind of movie this isn't, the knuckleheads shout lines from Brian De Palma's Scarface as they play cowboys and Indians.) There are also some guys who work in "toxic waste management", which translates into directing trucks full of poisonous materials to out-of-the-way sites where they can be dumped or buried. Thus the Camorra's influence extends to literally despoiling the land itself, adding one more thoughtful conceit to a movie already groaning with them.

Gomorrah has been highly praised for its stubbornly unexciting handling of this potentially shocking material, but for Matteo, that may be the choice of a director who doesn't have many other options. His previous movies, the dysfunctional love story Primo Amore (2004) and The Embalmer (2002), about a dwarfish taxidermist who is employed by the Camorra to hook up a corpse so that it can serve as a drug mule, also treated sensational material in a flat, affectless way that minimized the viewer's ability to connect with whatever was going on. He either doen't know how to involve the audience or consciously rejects involving them because he's aiming for something more challenging and cerebral. He mostly winds up with something flatter and deader. He's not above using violence and noise to get a rise out of you; the movie opens with a bloody mass execution carried out in a tanning salon, and Matteo makes a point of never making it clear who the victims were or why their were killed. Because the movie never invites you to care about its characters beyond the level of seeing them as faceless victims of a corrupt society, the frequent violent explosions serve the same purpose they do in the sleaziest kind of exploitation films: they nudge you awake between the lapses into total boredom.

Any movie that deals with power and crime that doesn't acknowledge the attractions of those things is as much a lie as a movie that makes a gangster's life seem noble. When Francis Ford Coppola made The Godfather, he didn't think he had to make the Corleones both colorless and unrelentingly disgusting to prevent viewers from thinking he was making a campaign commercial for the Mafia, because he assumed that most people have more sense than that. Gomorrah is being congratulated for assuming that people don't, and that a gangster movie's moral intelligence can best be judged by how hard it is to sit through it. The first step towards constructing a meaningful condemnation of organized crime might be to examine why people are drawn to it, but in Gomorrah, the reasons seem boiled down to: there's no resisting it. Nobody wants it, but if you try to stand up to it or even live apart from it, you'll get your head blown off. A lifeless depiction of a hopeless world, Gomorrah is an epic shrug of resignation.

The Rep Report (February 6 - 13)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 19:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: The Film Forum's lollapallooza four-week series "Breadlines & Champagne" lays out an awesome spread of 1930s Hollywood entertainments that might come in handy if you're looking to get some tips on how to handle the death of your stock portfolio with a little grace. In Guy Maddin's nostalgia-drenched The Saddest Music in the World (2003), a brash player in the contest to select the titular song promises to deliver "sadness with some sass and pizazz", and that's how the best early talking pictures responded to hard times, whether it took the form of mixing romance with wisecracks and slapstick (as in My Man Godfrey and the Preston Sturges-scripted Easy Living), hard-boiled tabloid melodrama (such as Night Nurse with Barbara Stanwyck and Three on a Match with a coke-crazed Ann Dvorak), and such varieties of escapism as the Mae West vehicle I'm No Angel and the bug-eyed Busby Berkeley musical Gold Diggers of 1933. Say hello to the bad guy with Little Caesar and the original Scarface; proclaim Hallelujah, I'm a Bum with an exuberant Al Jolson, and show up every Tuesday to participate in the free drawings as Film Forum revives the Depression tradition of Bank Night. These movies are reminders of a time when Americans saw themselves as all being in the soup together and managed to shave enough off the hard-won grocery money to come out to see movies that addressed their problems, both personal and societal, with an insouciant, nose-thumbing attitude and a can-do spirit. Of course, those Americans never dreamed that their great-grandhildren would someday queue up to pay twelve dollars for a movie ticket.

From February 6 through the 19th, Film Society of Lincoln Center remembers "Oscar Micheaux and Black Pre-War Cinema". Long a forgotten and even much-mocked figure, Micheaux has been unearthed in recent years as a pioneering African-American movie mogul and showman, a writer turned filmmaker who began his career with a film based on his own successful novel, The Homesteader. "Unhappily," the theater notes, "few of the films by Micheaux or his contemporaries—Spencer Williams, Richard Norman, Richard Maurice, William Alexander, and many others—have survived in pristine condition. The scratched, sometimes faded copies we’ll be showing are, for the moment, all that is available." But the fact that watching some of these movies now is like seeing something freshly recovered from a tomb may only enhance the alternative-universe-eye view that is part of their incalcuable historical value. Mixed in are some of the earliest attempts by white Hollywood to utilize the talent of black performers, including King Vidor's Hallelujah and Vincente Minnelli's endlessly enjoyable 1943 Cabin in the Sky, a pedestal to the sky-high talent of such entertainers as Ethel Waters, Lena Horne, Louis Armstrong, and the peerless song and dance man John W. Bubbles.

Early Howard Hawks Blog-a-thon at Only the Cinema

Phil Nugent — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 15:30:00 GMT

The long-awaited, two-week "Early Howard Hawks Blog-a-thon" at Ed Howard's Only the Cinema kicks off today. "During this time," announces Howard, "my blog Only The Cinema will be exclusively devoted to the films Hawks made up until 1936, and I'll also be soliciting and posting links to writing about these early Hawks films from many other bloggers and critics." Howard also explains that This arbitrary cutoff point has been established in order to encourage people to investigate the less often discussed portions of Hawks' career, before he made the majority of his most famous films. Everyone has something to say about His Girl Friday and Rio Bravo, but how often do you hear anyone even mention Tiger Shark?" That would be the one where a damn woman (Zita Johann) has to go and get between Edward G. Robinson (in fine form, Portuguese accent and all) and his best mate, Richard Arlen, while they're trying to catch some damn tuna. I'm sorry, I know it's early in the day for that kind of language, but seeing Edward G. Robinson in a vulnerable place just brings out the mother hen in me. Great tuna-catching scenes, too. When's the last time you saw that on the poster for Michael Bay's latest?

The 1936 cut-off date doesn't exactly restrict potential contributors to a bottomless pit of obscurities: Hawks, who had another thirty-five years of career left him, had already knocked off Scarface and Twentieth Century by that time. That still leaves plenty of movies, especially those from his days in silent films, that don't get the kind of attention now that his "later" stuff gets. So this public service going on at Only the Cinema stands to be educational if a few people with something to say about the movies hardly any of us have seen choose to pipe up. It's not too soon to start giving some back.

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.

Take Five: Stoned

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Oliver Stone's hastily assembled, curiously timed film biography of George W. Bush, W., opens everywhere today. "Why?" is a question for the ages; Bush is not only still alive, he's still President of the United States, and the movie was completed before one of the major events of his administration actually happened. Couldn't Stone have waited a few years? After all, Jim Morrison had been in the ground for two decades before Stone got around to making a crappy movie about him. Our own Scott Von Doviak has already done the heavy lifting of actually seeing W., and his review suggests that it's another non-triumph for Ollie; but in this case, as much as we may find the guy off-putting, Take Five comes to praise Stone, not to bury him. As we do every time he comes out with a new movie, we float our favorite theory about the man: that he's actually a very good writer who failed upwards and became a very mediocre director, a living example of the Peter Principle. With the sole (and bewildering) exception of Evita, Oliver Stone hasn't written a movie he didn't also direct in over twenty years; but lest we forget, in his early years, Stone was considered a top-notch screenwriter who was expert at plucking the key themes out of someone else's vision -- making them lean, mean, and, perhaps most memorably, violent in an incredibly compelling way. So today, we're going to look at five movies which Stone didn't direct, but whose screenplays he fully or partly wrote -- almost all of which we like more than most of the films where he was behind the camera.

MIDNIGHT EXPRESS (1978)

Directed by the erratic Alan Parker, the infamous, controversial Midnight Express was a 32-year-old Oliver Stone's first major motion picture as a screenwriter. It went on to become a huge box office success, as well as spurring a major moral panic over drug smuggling and making the words "Turkish prison" as paralyzing as an ice cube down the back of the shirt. Unsurprisingly, in later years, it became clear that Stone's screenplay was a wildly over-the-top exaggeration full of fabrications, distortions and outright nonsense, despite its claim of being based on a true story; even the real-life Billy Hayes repudiated it. But that was, and to some extent still is, the genius of Oliver Stone: he could extrapolate the juciest meat of a story and sizzle it up into an absurd paranoid fantasy you couldn't help but devour.

CONAN THE BARBARIAN (1982)

Still, in our opinion, the greatest thing that Oliver Stone has ever done, the hugely underrated Conan the Barbarian found him paired in the screenwriting duties with director John Milius. Milius, an unabashed right-wing war hawk and suspected crypto-fascist, had a habit of butting heads with '60s liberals like Stone, with the conflict bringing out the best in both of them; he'd previously worked with Francis Ford Coppola, even more of a lefty than Stone, on Apocalypse Now, and their diametrically opposed viewpoints about the Vietnam War resulted in a crazed masterpiece. Conan is no less so; Stone's cynical pro-civilization standpoint and Milius' joyously pro-barbarian views resulted in a movie that is uncannily faithful to Robert E. Howard's violent, amoral books.

SCARFACE (1983)

Even to Brian DePalma's most vociferous defenders -- a dwindling number in which we count ourselves members in good standing -- there is a general recognition that Scarface, his updating of the 1930s gangster classic to the Miami drug trade days, isn't actually a very good movie. But it is a very important movie, insofar as it influenced dozens of later thug-life pictures both better and worse than it was; and, what's more, for its many, many failings, it's a compulsively watchable movie. Even if you know about its overblown performances, its ridiculous ending, and its general sense of aimlessness and enervation, you hardly ever want to turn it off. And a lot of that is down to screenwriter Oliver Stone, who crammed it full of so many hilariously quotable lines that it became the biggest influence on hip-hop since James Brown.

YEAR OF THE DRAGON (1985)

Michael Cimino and Oliver Stone have been tied together by fate since early on. They share similar styles and similar obsessions, and both were rumored for many years as wanting to do a remake of the woozy film version of Ayn Rand's ridiculous novel, The Fountainhead. The one time they worked together was on 1985's Year of the Dragon, a film in which all of their strengths and weaknesses were apparent. Just before giving full voice to his Vietnam experiences in Platoon, Stone hints at them here, constantly and darkly; his dialogue is often flat and creaky, as opposed to the gloriously lurid bombshells of Scarface, but his characters and scenarios compliment Cimino's hyperactive sense of busy detail and rhetorical bombast, and he plays on themes of male bonding and sudden violence as a social actor that he'd later explore as a director.

8 MILLION WAYS TO DIE (1986)

The last movie Stone would write for a director other than himself (aside from the aforementioned Evita, to which his contributions were minimal) was Hal Ashby's 8 Million Ways to Die, a movie reviled by many but regarded by others as a miniature masterpiece that doesn't get nearly the attention it deserves. Whatever the case, its favors -- which, for its defenders, include some gorgeously lurid violence and dialogue so scuzzy it borders on the beautiful, as well as a nice lead performance by Jeff Bridges -- are hard to discern under lots of muddle. Did Ashby really direct, or did Stone take over when he was fired? Did Stone really write, or is Robert Towne responsible for the script Stone could no longer handle when he ended up behind the camera? We may never know; and a lot of people simply don't care.

Related Posts:

Dissecting/Debating W.

Stone vs. Iran, Round 2

EW Makes Great-Movies List; Screengrab Points, Laughs

Paul Clark — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 19:00:00 GMT

With last week blessedly free of celebrities getting knocked up and/or being caught without underwear, Entertainment Weekly has seized upon this fallow period in entertainment news to unveil yet another list for your perusal. In this week’s double issue, EW’s writing staff unveiled their lists of “The New Classics” in a number of media, including their top 100 movies of the last quarter century. There were a few pleasant surprises- like #4 pick Blue Velvet making its second prominent appearance on a high-profile list in less than a week (after the latest AFI special)- and you can't really argue with Pulp Fiction at #1, but many of the choices left something to be desired. Put it another way- if you know both jack and shit about cinema, EW’s list is bound to feel pretty unsatisfactory, with a whopping six foreign-language films and two documentaries out of 100.

Of course, the makers of such lists are always prone to stating that their goal is to “stir up debate.” So in the proud Screengrab tradition of speaking truth (or at least strongly-worded fibs) to power, I’d like to go on record to state that a number of masterpieces of the past 25 years were ignominiously robbed in order to make way for the likes of Pretty Woman. On top of that, a few of the movies that made the list were so unceremoniously- and undeservingly- buried near the bottom that their inclusion is arguably even more of a disgrace when you consider the titles that outrank them. In keeping with EW’s format, I’ve kept the artsy-fartsy to a minimum- no shorts, no avant-garde, no mentions of Peter Watkins. Instead I’ve selected five pretty accessible movies (including a foreign-language pick) and one classic that deserved far better than EW wanted to give it.

But first, a note to EW’s webmaster: your online feature on the 26 greatest movie posters doesn’t want to scroll over to the poster for The Limey. Please fix this immediately. Thank you.

Now, my alternate selections, in no particular order:

The New World- to my eyes, the finest American film of the last 25 years. Should have qualified just by being one of the most beautiful films ever made, but there’s more to Terence Malick’s masterpiece than gorgeous cinematography and panoramic shots of nature. Malick’s re-creation of the founding of Virginia and the resulting “settlement” of the land is always completely convincing, transporting the viewer into the lifestyle (and mindsets) of the time in a way few period pieces can manage. But it’s also a heartrending love story of a particularly mature kind, as Pocahontas (the glowing Q’Orianka Kilcher) must learn to let go of her childish love in order to find sustainable happiness with another. The New World is a marvel, and I expect that we’ll be seeing it on plenty of lists in the decades to come.

Naked- Now, I can kind of understand leaving Malick off your list, since the guy’s only made two movies during the eligible period. But what’s your excuse when it comes to Mike Leigh? Even the Academy has caught on to Leigh’s greatness- witness the bevy of nominations for Secrets and Lies, Topsy-Turvy and Vera Drake- but for my money his best work to date is still Naked. Of course, it’s something of a bitter pill to swallow, with an almost painfully bleak view of human nature. And in the middle of it all is David Thewlis, giving one of the all-time great performances, as the compulsively verbal misanthrope Johnny, the kind of bastard whose sole redeeming virtue is that he knows exactly how much of a bastard he is. Thewlis owns the film, creating from the ground up a character so fascinating that we can’t help but watch him, mouth often agape, up through the film’s magnificent final shot.

Heavenly Creatures- Hey EW, you know that Peter Jackson guy? The one whose most famous films you’ve placed prominently at #2? Well, he did make movies before Lord of the Rings, and in its way Heavenly Creatures is just as good if not better. Beginning with a true-crime story that would in other hands have lent itself to sensationalism- teenage lesbian murderers!- Jackson instead crafted in alternately invigorating and harrowing movies about the seductiveness, and the dangers, of fantasy. As Pauline and Juliet (Melanie Lynskey and Kate Winslet, in their breakthrough roles) grow ever more attached to their King-Arthur-meets-Ayn-Rand fairy tale land, they increasingly feel compelled to defend it against the encroachment of the everyday world, until the story commences in a sudden, shocking act of violence that sends these killer angels crashing back to Earth forever.

Once Upon a Time in America- Once again, Sergio Leone’s final masterwork is the odd man out among gangster dramas, with the EW writers forwarding the unfortunate notion that the genre began with The Godfather and ended with GoodFellas, with a brief stopover in Scarface Land. Leone’s film may not have the iconic status of Coppola, the seductiveness of Scorsese, or the gangsta cachet of DePalma, but as a cinematic achievement, it deserves respect, at least in its 227-minute long version. As a minor-key elegy for a crime culture that has long since passed, Once Upon a Time in America mops the floor with The Godfather, Part III, with as many classic moments as any film in Leone’s oeuvre. You’ll never look at a garbage truck the same way again.

Three Colors Trilogy- I debated including Decalogue on this list but decided against it because it premiered on television. But I had no such problem with Kieslowski’s trilogy, a wholly unique- yet entirely approachable- grand work in three parts. In telling three intimate stories, Kieslowski manages to capture a specific end-of-the-millennium worldview, as well as some surprising insights into human nature in general. But the film’s true power comes from their simplicity- Kieslowski tells us everything we need to know about these people and their lives, if only we know where (and how) to look. Beyond that, they’re just ravishing cinema, with the scores of Zbigniew Preisner ranking among the greatest ever written for the screen.

And finally…

Back to the Future- #91? Really? Working from perhaps the tightest and cleverest screenplay ever made into a Hollywood blockbuster, Robert Zemeckis and company turned what was essentially a comedic take on Americana into a genuine piece of Americana itself. How many movies of the past quarter century are this widely seen, or so beloved by all sectors of the moviegoing audience? Back to the Future is a textbook case of all the pieces lining up just so, as well as a testament to how wonderful a big-budget movie when the filmmakers trust their assembled elements enough to stay out of their own damn way. But hey, if you guys really think Shrek, Gladiator, Speed, Fatal Attraction, Scream, Beverly Hills Cop, Dirty Dancing (?!?!?), Out of Africa, and Napoleon Dynamite are all better than Back to the Future, I guess I don’t have anything left to say to you.

Home Video Rep Report: "Forbidden Hollywood Collection - Vol.2"

Phil Nugent — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 19:00:00 GMT

As Paul Clark recently pointed out, this is the week that No Country for Old Men came out on DVD. Which is all well and good, but I just saw it a few months ago. So did you, probably, but when's the last time you saw Clark Gable, in a mondo-bondage chauffeur outfit, punch out Barbara Stanwyck for interfering with his plans to keep their employer drunk so he can starve her children to death, or Humphrey Bogart taking one look at wide-eyed Ann Dvorak and miming sniffing something powdery while flashing his dirtiest grin and snickering, "Uh-oh!" These charming relics of Hollywood's early wildcat period can be found in the new three-disc set Forbidden Hollywood Collection - Vol.2, assembled from the vaults of Turner Classic Movies. (Volume One, which came out last year, included the long-lost Stanwyck vehicle Angel Face and the giddily scandalous Jean Harlow movie Red Headed Woman.) The discs provide a handy sampler of what Hollywood comedies and melodramas got into in the Pre-Code days before censors roused the rabble and threw a corset around Mae West. For sheer entertainment value, the new set is worth picking up just for 1931's Night Nurse, the hard-headed, hard-boiled nifty starring Stanwyck, Gable, and the platinum wisecrack dispenser Joan Blondell, and the 1932 Three on a Match, in which Blondell is the smart good girl who gets the guy, Ann Dvorak is the good-time girl who doesn't appreciate the guy, and Bette Davis is the one who makes contemporary audiences go, "Jesus Christ, Ann Dvorak makes Bette Davis look like a whipped mouse!" Match makes the case that the cult icon Dvorak, best remembered now as Paul Muni's sister in the original Scarface, deserves to be remembered as the quivering embodiment of the Pre-Code spirit. In the inevitable TCM documentary that's included in the DVD set, she's likened to a sputtering live wire, and she seems to be having a more exciting time than anyone else onscreen whether she's resisting temptation (which was something she never did for long), giving in to temptation (diving in with both feet), or paying for her sins by diving out a window with instructions to the police written on her nightie with lipstick.

The set also includes two Norma Shearer pictures, The Divorcee, which won the boring old thing an Academy Award for Best Actress of 1930, and A Free Soul, which came out the next year and won a Best Actor Award for Lionel Barrymore, who played her father. As that data may suggest, these were A-pictures in their day, but they don't hold up as well as the B's do. But they do have some historical interest, in part because they reveal what people who thought they were looking for something wild and steamy but who couldn't deal with the sight of Ann Dvorak in full writhe were prepared to settle for. Coiffed and dressed to the nines, Shearer could pass for a pretty hot number, though she could never act for shit, and the whole point of her pictures was to let her get just enough of a whiff of liberated hedonism to get her to run back to hubby and daddy. Like Night Nurse, A Free Soul is notable for bottling the dirty essence of Pre-Code Clark Gable, who is once again cast as a magnetic crook who keeps a highborn gal, Shearer, in sexual thrall, to the point that her fiancee. Leslie Howard, is obliged to shoot the blighter. (After that, Barrymore, a lawyer, is obliged to defend Howard in court by telling the jury that none of this would have happened if he'd just had the foresight to lock his daughter in the bedroom until her hormones settled down.) Also included is Female (1932), which stars Ruth Chatterton as a rich car company owner whose casual affair with George Brent turns all serious and shit. It falls between the two stools set by Dvorak and Shearer; Chatterton gets to have some fun early on treating her employee pool as her own personal stud stable, but by the end she's imploring Brent not just to marry her but to take charge of her company so she'll be free to stay at home and turn out enough kids that they can start their own baseball team.

The Ten Best Cussing Scenes in Movies, Part 2

Phil Nugent — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 15:00:00 GMT

SCARFACE (1983)

Here’s something funny about Oliver Stone: he seems to have a lot more fun when he’s writing movies than when he’s directing them. While the movies where he’s behind the camera have become self-important bores, the movies where he’s behind the typewriter are highly enjoyable, if completely demented. Conan the Barbarian may have been the purest distillation of his bloodthirstily goofy aesthetic, but it was the screenplay for Brian DePalma’s Scarface a year later where he really let his freak flag fly. A perfect example of a movie that’s compulsively watchable without actually being very good, Scarface also proves that the one thing more enjoyable than a movie with non-stop vulgarity is a movie with non-stop vulgarity in an incredibly over-the-top quasi-Cuban accent. (A chainsaw execution can’t hurt, either.) Al Pacino’s Tony Montana isn’t an obscenity artist; he is but a humble craftsman, a busy businessman who relies on the word "fuck" because he hasn’t got the time to learn any other ones. For every cleverly crafted "Why don’t you try sticking your head up your ass? See if it fits," there’s a workmanlike get-over like "You know what? Fuck you! How about that?" How about that, indeed. It’s hard to know if Scarface would have been the deranged, hyperactive masterpiece that it is without Pacino’s constant Hispanic-causing-panic vulgarisms, but it surely wouldn’t have been as much fun. If you don’t believe us, try to imagine Paul Muni saying "This town is like a great big pussy just waiting to get fucked." Now that’s comedy!

GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS (1992)

David Mamet's ode to testosterone-soaked salesmen is a veritable symphony of profanity, with even legendary milquetoast Jack Lemmon attempting to wrap his mouth around words like "cocksucker." (Not to speak ill of the dead, but he's no Ian McShane.) Alec Baldwin is the soloist who takes home top honors, though his inspirational speech to the troops does not rely solely on foul language for its power. With his reptilian delivery, lines like "coffee is for closers" and "third prize is you're fired" sound nearly as venomous as the blunt rejoinder "Fuck you – that's my name!" Though he doesn't say it in so many words, Baldwin makes the point that the sales game is a dick-measuring contest and everybody but him is coming up short. Like all the best motivational speakers, he uses props. "It takes brass balls to sell real estate," he announces, brandishing a pair for effect. Don't try this in your own boardroom unless you have good lawyers.

SECRET HONOR (1984)

When the transcripts of the Nixon White House tapes started to come out, what shocked a lot of people wasn't the president's amorality so much as the language with which he expressed it. His obscene ramblings suggested a potty-mouthed genie bubbling and rumbling and thrashing beneath the surface of his carefully fostered image as the last defender of Middle America, subsisting on a diet of cottage cheese and Norman Rockwell illustrations. In Robert Altman's one-man show, Nixon (Philip Baker Hall), sealed in the wood-paneled tranquility of his study like William Hurt set to de-evolve in his isolation tank in Altered States, runs through his whole life and political career in a spastic monologue punctuated by sputtered out "shit!"s and "fuck!"s. It all builds to the moment when Nixon, having considered blowing his brains out as penance for his sins, decides that this would give too much satisfaction to the real monsters, the ones who "elected me, not once, not twice, but all my goddamn life," and signs off with an endless, Tourette's-like chant of "Fuck em! Fuck 'em!!" As he bellows out the same two words, again and again, Altman frames his wild face in the screens of the TV monitors that line the room. The genie has been isolated.

POETIC JUSTICE (1993)

John Singleton's Poetic Justice actually played against Tupac's ever-growing reputation as an out-of-control thug and notorious player. His character Lucky is a postman who gets dissed in the very first scene and then has to endure a road trip with the same girl that made him the butt of the joke. This is every guy's worst nightmare – confined space with a girl who shot you down. Unless you're counting her role on Good Times or Rhythm Nation 1814, this was essentially Janet Jackson's film debut, and even though she may have told us she was nasty, most people still assumed, looking at that angelic face, that she was probably very nice. This scene is so memorable because all of that is blown to pieces as she trades fuck yous with Mr. Thug Life himself. Although the scene can certainly stand on its own in terms of pure firepower, you might want to brush up on the back story – outlined in our previous Top 10 Offscreen Feuds list – to help you understand the uncanny authenticity of the venom being spit here.

NIL BY MOUTH (1997)

When it comes to vulgar language in movies, there is quality, and then there is quantity. Whether or not Gary Oldman’s directorial debut, Nil By Mouth, counts as a lodestone of quality obscenity, it is the all-time grand champion in terms of quantity. It’s actually a fine little film, and Oldman’s script about growing up in a dysfunctional working-class family in South London is quite compelling at times, but where it truly excels is in its non-stop barrage of obscenity. No less than the Guinness Book of World Records has certified it as the film containing the most iterations of "fuck": the word appears an astonishing 470 times, or almost four times a minute. It’s that sort of dedication that separates the pretenders from the true masters, and Oldman doesn’t stop there: he also favors us with the word "cunt" a whopping eighty-two times, or once every minute and a half. Most of the fucks and cunts issue from the lager-stained mouth of Ray Winstone, playing a character based on Oldman’s own father. (Oldman dedicates the film to his old man, which must have made him feel pretty good about himself.) Some films don’t even have as much punctuation as Nil By Mouth has "fuck"s; if its director grew up in an environment anything like the one portrayed here, it’s a wonder he can communicate at all. Other films may be more artful in their use of the f-word, and other films may save it for when it counts more instead of going for total sensory overload, but until someone manages to make a movie in which someone uses the word "fuck" in every frame, then Nil By Mouth will be the reigning king.

– Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak, Bryan Whitefield

Check out Part 1 here.

Jay-Z At The Movies

Peter Smith — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 21:00:00 GMT

In his music, Jay-Z has always quoted and referenced his favorite gangster movies, from Scarface and Carlito's Way to the 1992 banger's character drama South Central. His new album, American Gangster, was "inspired" by the new movie of the same name; it mixes Jay-Z's raps and samples from the picture to tell the story of Frank Lucas, the old-school high roller played by Denzel Washington. It's not the first time that Jay-Z has experimented with music as movies, and vice versa; as Kelefa Sanneh writes, "in the late 1990s Jay-Z did American Gangster in reverse when he used a handful of his tracks as the basis for Streets Is Watching, a mini-feature. (It’s essentially a hip-hop musical starring Jay-Z, and it proves that hearing him rap about murder is much more fun than watching him pretend to commit it.)" The new project also gives him a chance — sometimes wittily, sometimes maybe not so much — to point up some of the contradictions and ironies implicit in hip-hop attitudes regarding self-styled Super Flys like Lucas. At one point, Jay-Z likens himself to Lucas in terms of utter coolness but feels compelled to add, "Like Frank Lucas is cool, but I ain’t tryna snitch." Does this mean that he forgives Lucas for having made his money off the drug addicts of Harlem, but not for having turned state's witness? — Phil Nugent