The Screengrab : se7en

The Rep Report (December 26-January 4)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 19:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: "Essential Sturges" at Film Forum crams a week's worth of the good stuff into what's left of the year, with a day after another of the funniest double bills ever offered to a city full of people in full need of a sanctuary from all the sorry weather. Also booked through January 1, but showing only at early-afternoon matinees: the 1941 Hoppity Goes to Town, the 84-minute animated feature that marked the end of the Fleischer Brothers' challenge to the Disney monopoly. It's an unusual movie that saw the Fleischers toning down the trademark anarchy and injecting more of the Disney cuteness into their mix in what now looks like a desperate attempt to stave off the collapse of their company. The attempt failed: pushed back from its original release date so as to avoid direct competition with Disney's Dumbo, the movie wound up being released two days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, an event that did little to whet America's appetite for the tuneful tale of a lovelorn grasshopper's attempts to save his community from human onslaught. The movie's failure led to the end of Fleischer Studios, leaving it behind as a little-seen relic from a remarkable time in the history of American animated films.

From December 26 through the 31st, Film Society of Lincoln Center offers "Scorsese Classics", a full plate of films by the city's favorite son that includes the early Who's That Knocking at My Door?, the breakthrough masterpieces Mean Streets and Taxi Driver and more recent fare such as GoodFellas and Casino and the exhilarating Bob Dylan doc No Direction Home. Of special interest: the double bill of two short documentaries from the mid-70s that remain unavailable on DVD, the Scorsese family portrait Italianamerican and the jaw-dropping biography-by-monologue American Boy, starring Stephen Prince, who sold Travis Bickle his boom stick in Taxi Driver. Then starting on January 1, Lincoln Center passes the baton for "Under the Sign of Fincher", three days of David Fincher movies double billed with movies Fincher has selected as important to his development as a filmmaker, followed, on January 4, by a screening of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and, for separate admission, a Q & A about its making between the director and critic Kent Jones. If nothing else, this is probably your only chance in this lifetime to see Se7en paired with Mary Poppins.

Taking "The Midnight Meat Train"

Paul Clark — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Last fall, I wrote up a Trailer Review for a movie called The Midnight Meat Train, based on a short story by horror maestro Clive Barker. At the time, I had some misgivings about the movie- largely due to director Ryuhei Kitamura- I was intrigued enough by the premise and the Barker name that I filed it away in my mind as one to watch for. Now, nearly nine months later, the movie has arrived in a limited number of theatres, courtesy of its distributor, Lionsgate. According to the horror site Shock Till You Drop, the movie was caught in the middle of a regime change at the studio, with new chief Joe Drake dumping the remaining projects left behind by his predecessor, Peter Block, aside from sure things like the unkillable Saw franchise. Due to the niceties of studio politics, the movie has been quietly opened in roughly 100 theatres, mostly of the discount variety, in order to fulfill a contractual obligation with production company Lakeshore Entertainment. The movie was scheduled to play for a week on its way to a fall DVD release.

With the marketing and distribution costs at an all-time high, and DVD and on-demand supplanting theatrical viewing as the moviegoing experience of choice for the majority of Americans, it’s becoming more and more common to see movies getting this treatment. It can happen for a number of reasons: the films might be difficult to market, there might be the aforementioned studio infighting, or maybe one of the executives simply doesn’t like the movie. Sometimes, the movie just isn’t very good. These factors and others can come into play when it comes to which movies get the shaft from studios.

But how’s the movie, you ask? Is it the horror equivalent of Idiocracy- a cult-y oddball that didn’t get the studio love it deserved? Or was Lionsgate right in dumping The Midnight Meat Train into mostly-empty theatres to be quickly forgotten? Actually, it’s somewhere between these two extremes. Neither a genre masterpiece nor a travesty, it’s a fairly effective, hard-R horror movie. If it’s guts and gore you want, The Midnight Meat Train should satisfy your cravings.

One aspect I liked about the movie was that it belongs less to the tradition of slasher movies than it does to the old-school “meat movie” and, as such, feels less beholden to formula and cliché. Unlike slasher movies- which devote an inordinate amount of attention to the killing and mutilation of women- Kitamura and Barker are pretty equal-opportunity in portraying their victims, which I appreciated. In addition, the movie plays in parts like the straight-horror flipside to David Fincher’s Se7en, as our protagonist (played by Bradley Cooper) finds himself unable to look away from the violent heart of the city. It’s not until he’s spurred on to really probe this hear that he finds much more darkness and horror than he could have imagined. I haven’t read the Barker story upon which it’s based, but I would imagine that this theme is present there as well.

Unfortunately, the movie doesn’t work as well as it could, due in large part to director Ryuhei Kitamura. Kitamura is a favorite of Asian cinema fans, but I found his previous films consistently underwhelming. Versus’ zombies-versus-yakuza premise cemented the movie’s rep in the hearts of fanboys, but it was too slipshod and unevenly paced to work for me. Likewise, Godzilla: Final Wars succeeded in the giant-monster scenes but failed when the director tried to inject human storylines into the mix. But most of all, Kitamura’s tendency toward show-offy camera work and needless CGI have been consistently problematic, and it’s these same issues that keep The Midnight Meat Train from being as good as it could’ve been. During the most potentially frightening scenes, Kitamura’s use of computer generated gore and camera trickery took me right out of the movie, making me think of how he pulled off the shot rather than being scared.

Yet I would still recommend The Midnight Meat Train to anyone who’s into horror. Bradley Cooper makes a sympathetic protagonist in his early scenes, and is convincingly crazy later on. I also liked Vinnie Jones as the silent killer, his imposing frame used to good effect here. And in spite of Kitamura’s look-at-me! direction, the movie contains a number of effective sequences, including a final-reel revelation that left me quite pleasantly surprised. So if you like horror, give The Midnight Meat Train a look when it comes to DVD. After all, it’s not like Lionsgate is giving you many other options.

The Twelve Greatest Opening Credits in Movie History, Part 2

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 22:00:00 GMT

THE HAWKS AND THE SPARROWS (1966)

The great Ennio Morricone has contributed to some of the greatest opening credit sequences of all time, but the opening to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1966 masterpiece The Hawks and the Sparrows holds a special place in the hearts of anyone who has seen and heard it. Here, in tune with Pasolini’s conception of the film as “a comic opera,” the credits are actually sung, in a boisterous vocal performance (courtesy of the great Domenico Modugno) that ranges from cackling laughter to pronounced wail to gentle whisper. Reminiscent of both the rhythmic Spaghetti Western scores Morricone was becoming famous for and the more wacked-out electronic experimentation he was beginning to dabble in, it also displays a weirdo playfulness that is pure Pasolini. Indeed, try to imagine what’s going through the head of this fellow, as he performs this strangest of compositions in concert with Morricone, decades later.

RAGING BULL (1980)

With Martin Scorsese directing and Michael Chapman doing the cinematography, it’s no surprise that the Jake LaMotta biopic has opening credits that are a treat for the eyes (and they’re tremendously aided by the simple choice of making the title of the film show up in red against the black and white of the rest of the sequence, another little touch that makes the whole so incredibly memorable). The ears are also given their due, with the selection of the intermezzo from Pietro Mascagani’s Cavalleria Rusticana providing a mournful, rising sound against which the slow-motion camerawork and the silently exploding flash bulbs play like a dream. But the truly astonishing thing about the opening credit sequence of Raging Bull is how perfectly and precisely it echoes the thematic content of the film: the ring seems impossibly huge, almost as if it’s an open field, but to Jake LaMotta – a snarling, raging animal even before the fight starts, bounding about and throwing phantom punches, champing at the bit for the violence to start – it’s a cage that stifles him, that can barely contain him. Fighting is as close as he gets to Heaven, yet smoke encircles the arena and transforms it into Hell; and while he is at his greatest, his most legendary, in the ring, he seems somehow tiny against its permanence, and he grows as he dances, faceless, towards the camera, only to shrink again into anonymity and nothingness as he once again drifts away. It’s as if the entire film and everything it has to say is contained in these two and a half minutes.

DO THE RIGHT THING (1989)

Even the stinkiest of Spike Lee joints generally boast memorable opening credits; think of the kids playing street games like hopscotch and double-dutch in the otherwise problematic Crooklyn, or the unlikely slice of Americana – a lyrical slo-mo basketball montage scored to Aaron Copland’s “John Henry” – that opens He Got Game. So it’s no surprise that Lee’s finest film features one of the most vivid, arresting main title sequences of the past 20 years. Lee obviously knew he had created an incendiary piece of work, and determined to grab the audience by the throat right from the beginning as the pulsating, near-apocalyptic beat of Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” kicks in on the soundtrack, accompanied by a take-no-prisoners one-woman dance-off. Alternately clad in colorful, curve-hugging tights and boxing apparel, Rosie Perez embodies the tale of tensions boiling over on a hot summer day with her aggressive, near-violent gyrations. This was Perez’s first screen appearance; it’s hard to imagine a more mesmerizing introduction.

SE7EN (1995)

It’s hard to believe how long ago Se7en was. It was not only pre-Brangelina, it was pre-Brad&Jen – it was, in fact, circa Brad and Gwyneth. It was before the gruesome goresploitation of all the Saw flicks and before the mind-f@#$ing of Memento. And the opening credits alerted you right away: you were watching something different. Someone was going to great detail to set a tone, and the tone made you uneasy. The jittery stop-motion, the yellowed pages, hand-scratched letters, red darkroom light, and the Nine Inch Nails “Closer to God” remix, it was all indicative of some serious sociopathology. Like the Tom Waits song, “What’s he doing in there?”, you were privy to someone obsessively doing something. And you just knew all that snipping, scrawling photo-developing, photocopying, and bandaged-fingers hand-sewing would amount to no good. Se7en’s opening credits not only caught you up in the horror of the film before the film started, it also launched director Kyle Cooper’s career. It set the bar pretty high for all the horror flick opening credits that came later. For all we know, it may even be responsible for launching a different creepy trend: the scrap-booking craze.

LOST HIGHWAY (1997)

A great title sequence does not guarantee a great movie, of course; sometimes the opening credits promise more than the filmmaker is able to deliver. The hypnotic opening of David Lynch’s Lost Highway is a prime example. Designed by Jay Johnson, the sequence is deceptively simple: a driver’s seat point-of-view of an endless road stretching out ahead into pitch blackness. Our progress is swift, but unsteady – we’re weaving all over the broken yellow line in the middle as credits swoop out of darkness ahead, pause briefly, then shatter against the windshield. David Bowie is no comfort on the radio, singing “I’m Deranged.” Wherever we’re going, something terrible is going to happen when we get there. Well, the movie that follows isn’t terrible; it has its moments, although on the whole it’s ponderous and half-baked, nowhere near the dangerous thrill ride promised by the opening. With its themes of identity confusion, it’s almost a rough draft of the much more successful Mulholland Drive; you almost wish Lynch could keep the title and the credits and take another crack at the rest of it.

PANIC ROOM (2002)

David Fincher, one of the most visually inventive directors working today, usually pulls out the stops when creating his title sequences (see Se7en, elsewhere on this list, as well as Fight Club and Zodiac). Panic Room, though a neat little thriller, isn’t his finest film, but it’s another fantastic accomplishment in terms of setting the table for what’s to come. Its very simple setup belies how incredibly effective it is: we see a number of exterior shots of Manhattan, as the names of the cast and crew appear in stylized photography throughout the sequence. But this bare-bones description in no way communicates the unsettling nature of the actual credits: the names appear as if they were floating in mid-air, part of the physical landscape of New York, carved into nothingness by the hand of God himself like the writing on the walls at Nebuchadnezzar’s palace as a quietly ominous score by the usually overwrought Howard Shore plays on the soundtrack. There’s a disturbing air to the entire sequence, even though nothing menacing actually happens (other than an almost subliminal glimpse of the film’s tagline – “FACE YOUR FEARS” – that appears on a Telex screen). A collaboration between Fincher, design company Picture Mill and special effects outfit Computer Café, the credits took almost a full year to finish, and the fruits of their labors are extremely rewarding, full of subtle menace and nameless dread.

- Bilge Ebiri, Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak, Pazit Cahlon

Read Part 1 of this feature

After Forty Years, the End of the New Line

Phil Nugent — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 16:30:00 GMT

It's been announced that New Line Cinema is being folded into Warner Bros. Entertainment. (Both studios are subsidiaries of Time Warner. New Line's connection to Time Warner goes back to 1996, when the corporation picked up New Line's parent company, Turner Broadcasting. As Forbes reports, "The decision to merge the two film divisions didn't come as a surprise. Time Warner Chief Executive Jeff Bewkes said during a Feb. 6 conference call that 'there is an obvious question about whether it still makes sense for us to have two completely separate studio infrastructures at Warner and New Line.' In a statement Thursday, Time Warner said that New Line will keep its own development, production, marketing, distribution and business affairs operations, but will coordinate them with Warner Bros. 'to maximize film performance and operating efficiencies, achieve significant cost savings and improve margins.' " It't not yet clear how many jobs will be lost in the downsizing process, but Robert Shaye and Michael Lynne, who co-founded the company forty years ago, and who had been sharing the titles of chairman and chief executive, are both already out the door.

The latest development marked the end to a long, strange trip to the top for a funky little company that had its first big successes in the early 1970s marketing John Waters's 1972 Pink Flamingos and the camp revival of the 1936 drug-hysteria picture Reefer Madness. New Line hit a new level of mainstream commercial success with the 1984 A Nightmare on Elm Street, which the company built into a powerhouse franchise. By the end of the eighties, New Line had one foot in the art house and one in exploitation/genre movies, a formula that it made work with a lively mix of films such as The Evil Dead, Sid and Nancy, The Hidden, House Party, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Player, Glengarry Glen Ross, Menace II Society, The Mask, Dumb and Dumber, Se7en, Boogie Nights, and Magnolia, as well as Austin Powers, Friday, Blade, and Final Destination and the franchises that grew out of them. The studio's biggest gamble, and biggest success, was probably the Lord of the Rings trilogy, a high-stakes commitment that left the company CEOs looking brilliant--at least, until they proceeded to alienate the director Peter Jackson so badly that he become but one of a long line of litigants who filed lawsuits that grew out of controversy about the company's accounting practices and charges that they failed to honor various pledges and legal committments to everyone from bit players in the movies to the heirs of J. R. R. Tolkien. New Line had recently updated its corporate logo to celebrate its fortieth birthday last October 5.