The Screengrab : short cuts

DVD Digest for October 14, 2008

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

This week brings plenty of thrills on Blu-Ray and some interesting arthouse releases coming to DVD. Oh, and some guy with a whip.

Conundrum of the Week: Terrence Malick’s The New World is one of my favorite movies of all time. So why am I not more excited about this week’s release of the “Extended Cut” of the film? You’d think that I would welcome the opportunity to see even more of the film, to luxuriate in its irresistible Malick-ness. Yet I find myself torn. On the one hand, I’m encouraged by the fact that Malick re-cut the film himself, which leads me to believe that maybe he just needed more time to get his vision fine-tuned to his exact specifications (I still yearn, in vain I fear, for his 6-hour cut of The Thin Red Line). But it was the theatrical cut that I fell in love with in the first place. So why can’t the boys at Warner just do what Universal did last week and release all three existing cuts of The New World in one handy box set? Now, there would be an occasion worth celebrating. I know, I know- I’m thinking about it too much. But that’s what they pay me for, after all…

Also notable this week is MGM’s Alfred Hitchcock Premiere Collection, which contains eight Hitchcock titles from their library and features many new commentary tracks and archival material including Hitchcock being interviewed by Peter Bogdanovich and Francois Truffaut. The big titles in the set are Rebecca, Spellbound, and Notorious, each of which went out of print on Criterion DVD a few years ago, and which are now available separately as well as in the set. Other titles in the set are The Paradine Case, Sabotage, Young and Innocent, Lifeboat, and The Lodger. Other classics coming to DVD include: a new release of Robert Altman’s Short Cuts (Criterion), Kon Ichikawa’s An Actor’s Revenge (Koch), Capricorn One (Lionsgate), and the 15th Anniversary of Chaplin (Lionsgate), which features what’s still Robert Downey Jr.’s sole Oscar nomination to date.

The week’s biggest recent release on DVD is, of course, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (Paramount, also Blu-Ray), a movie which I enjoyed but which disappointed a number of fans including Trey Parker and Matt Stone. But if you’re one of the Indy naysayers, check out one or more of this week’s crop of new indies: Errol Morris’ Standard Operating Procedure (Sony, also Blu-Ray), the Genghis Kahn origin story Mongol (Warner, also Blu-Ray), the Cannes-anointed The Edge of Heaven (Strand Releasing), and this year’s Golden Bear-winner at Berlin, Elite Squad (Genius Productions). Or if you’ve got a little too much cash jangling around in your pockets, you can always either buy The Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything: A VeggieTales Movie (Universal) or drive by your local Best Buy and throw $20 out of your car window, both of which produce about the same effect.

This week’s TV on DVD releases include: CSI Season 8 (Paramount), Back to You Season 1 (Universal), Nash Bridges Season 1 (Paramount), and The Unit Season 3 (Fox).

Finally, this week’s releases are a fairly action-packed bunch, including thrills of all sorts. For true-crime thrills, try Eastern Promises (Universal), American Gangster (Universal), or Casino (Universal). If you’ve got a taste for blood, give Interview With the Vampire (Warner) a spin. For adventure and romance, there’s always the double feature of Romancing the Stone (Fox) and Jewel of the Nile (Fox). If you like your action spiced liberally with cyberpunk, you probably don’t need me to tell you about this week’s release of The Ultimate Matrix Collection (Warner). For some Halloween chills, check out Poltergeist (Warner). And if you don’t really care for good movies, Constantine (Warner) should satisfy your movie-watching urges just fine.

Forgotten Films: "Getting to Know You" (1999)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Heather Matarazzo turns 26 next month. Matarazzo was still in her early teens when she starred in Todd Solondz's Welcome to the Dollhouse, in which she gave a brave, risky performance as the iconically dislikable high school nerd Dawn Weiner; in her most recent movie appearance, in Hostel II, she got to hang upside down while a naked woman split her open with a scythe. Whether her future roles will give her more of a chance to show what she can do as an actress, she's already confirmed the promise of her work in Dollhouse. She's never been more affecting than in Getting to Know You, a first feature directed by Lisanne Skyler from a screenplay she adapted from stories by Joyce Carol Oates. Matarazzo plays Judith, who arrives with her pissed-off, uncommunicative brother, Wesley (played by a not-yet-irritating Zach Braff) at the bus station where they'll be waiting to go their separate ways. Judith strikes up a conversation with Jimmy (Mark Weston), who seems to appear out of the ether as if in response to her yearning, lonely vibe. Jimmy claims to know her from school, but he also claims to know the back story to just about everyone in the station, as he spins yarns about how the weary-looking security guard (Bo Hopkins) came to be a haunted man in hiding from his past and a woman (played by the director's sister Tristine Skyler) got mixed up with a manic-depressive gamblin' man (Chris Noth), his glib tongue and honeyed smile are like a red flag alerting her to his untrustworthiness. But the possibility that he's a nut seems less important in a setting like this than whatever his fantasies can provide in the way of entertainment value.

A decade or so ago, following in the wake of Robert Altman's Raymond Carver tribute Short Cuts, there was a mini-trend of independent features--such as Rose Troche's The Safety of Objects, which drew on the writings of A. M. Homes--that mashed together story threads from an author's collected words and tried to shape them into a single movie. Getting to Know You is much more gracefully shaped than most of these; it weaves the character vignettes supplied by Hopkins, Lisanne Skyler, and the other members of a supporting cast that includes Mary McCormack, Sonja Sohn, and Leo Burmeister into a slowly percolating narrative that slowly closes in on the subject that has aroused Jimmy's curiosity, and that Judith is in no hurry to address: what are she and her brother running from, and how has it split them apart, both physically and maybe emotionally? (The answer involves Bebe Neuwirth and Mark Blum as the missing component of their family unit, a pair of self-involved failed ballroom dancers--I didn't even know that was a category--who would rank high on any list of the sorriest sets of parents in the history of independent movies.)Getting to Know You, which has its own look and a wistful emotional tone that stays with you, won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival and the "Someone to Watch" prize at the Independent Spirit Awards. To date, it remains Skyler's only feature film; here's hoping she gets to give us something else to watch soon.

In Other Blogs: The Top 25 L.A. Movies

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 17:00:00 GMT

The L.A. Times recently published their list of the 25 Best L.A. Films of the Past 25 Years. Naturally, some of the choices proved controversial (a lot of folks have trouble with the selection of Jackie Brown over Pulp Fiction, for instance), but Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule thinks it’s a decent list. “There were only eight, perhaps nine instances where I felt like the choices could have been replaced, by another film in the director’s filmography, or by another similarly themed film, or just by another movie to replace one that just shouldn't be there at all. For example, I can certainly understand why Boogie Nights is on the list, but it’s ultimately too diffuse and far more conventional than its electric style would suggest. I much prefer P.T. Anderson’s Magnolia (1999), a high-wire act in which Anderson gets more directly in touch with his inner Altman and dashes all concerns over whether anyone’s having a good time or not, planting Old Testament visual clues that subliminally lay the groundwork for that shocking rain of frogs. (And speaking of Altman, while I'm not the biggest fan of The Player, I was far happier to see it representing the great director here rather than the dour and sour Short Cuts.)”

The Toronto International Film Festival kicked off yesterday, and Spoutblog has the scoop on the film Paris Hilton doesn’t want you to see. “Paris Hilton and her team have successfully pressured the Toronto International Film Festival into canceling all but one screening of Adria Petty’s Paris, Not France, a documentary about the celebrity heiress which ‘attempts to explore the Paris phenomenon and how it defines this moment in culture’ and is also ‘modeled after the 1960s it-girl film Darling.’ Though the film’s TIFF info page still lists three public screenings, TIFF documentary programmer Thom Powers confirmed to me that Paris will screen only once at the festival. ‘From my standpoint, of course, I wish we could do additional screenings,’ Powers told me in an email. ‘But this is certainly a better option than not showing the film at all.’… As Steven Zeitchik joked when he first blogged about this, ‘the mind dances at what kind of footage can be seen so newly shameful to Paris Hilton, the enfant teribles whose entire reputation is based on shamelesness.’”

Cinematical is also on the scene in Toronto, and they’ve had a look at The Brothers Bloom. “Long awaited in the wake of his 2005 debut Brick, Rian Johnson's The Brothers Bloom is a magic trick of a film; the second it's over, you want to see it again so you can try to catch how you were tricked, but you also want to see it again so you can return to the joy and wonder of being wrapped up in the nimble, deck-shuffling hands of a born showman. Watching it at first, some of The Brothers Bloom's creative and thematic elements seem like they're on loan from Paul Thomas Anderson (opening narration by Ricky Jay, pop-whiz-bang camera work, the troubled-but-tender relationship between the two brothers) while others feel as if they've been cribbed from Wes Anderson (deadpan confessions, whimsical set design, a parallel-universe setting where people still travel to Europe by steamship). The truth is, as much as The Brothers Bloom may feel like it's cribbing from other films at first, this is Rian Johnson's movie, and even if my more dreary and discerning critical faculties told me the final act goes on, perhaps, a beat too long, my inner moviegoer was sitting bolt upright, smiling, bright-eyed and carried away.”

At Some Came Running, Glenn Kenny makes an interesting connection between Road House and a David Lynch movie. No, not that Road House. “The terrifying physical contrast between the behemoth and a very delicate woman brought to mind a scene from David Lynch's under-appreciated (to my mind, at least) 1992 Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. This scene, too, is set in a roadhouse of sorts—the back room of the Bang Bang Bar, which actually, if one line of dialogue is to be believed, is located on the Canadian side of the Canada/U.S. border the structure sits on. As it happens, the road house of Negulsco's film is located near the Canadian border; this turns into a significant plot point once Lily and Pete are trying to escape from the psychotic Jefty, played by Richard Widmark with his then-trademark tetchy intensity… I wonder if Lynch had ever seen Negulsco's film. Some shards of it, it seems, lodged their way into the world of Twin Peaks. The road house as portrayed in the '48 picture is a piece of bygone mid-century Americana that I've always found fascinating—it looks way fun. It's got a bar, a restaurant, a sporting-goods store, and a bowling alley!”

And in List-o-Mania this week, Geekdad weighs in with 10 Movies Needing a Muppet Remake. This guy has put way too much thought into this. “Casablanca - The initial temptation is to cast Kermit as Rick, but I think Kermit is better as the utterly noble Victor Laszlo, with Miss Piggy as Ilsa by his side. Gonzo is much better as Rick, with his internal, and external, conflict between love, revenge, and the right thing to do. Rowlf is Sam, for who else could be? Captain Renault is a tough part to play, but I think Fozzie has the right cavalier attitude for the role.”

Morning Deal Report: Palms Are Burning

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Robert Altman couldn’t have known when he directed Short Cuts in 1993 that he was inventing a whole new genre. I don’t know if there’s a name for it – “405 cinema,” perhaps, or “Valleysploitation” – but you know what I’m talking about. It’s the genre that reveals insights into the human condition through intersecting stories set in Los Angeles. Crash, Magnolia, the recent Garden Party – there’s a whole lot of intersecting happening out there in L.A. and there’s soon to be more. Variety reports that “Disturbia scribe Christopher Landon will make his directorial debut with the indie dark comedy Burning Palms, which he penned. What's described as a subversive tale interlaces five stories set in Los Angeles, where no taboo is left unexplored as each character careens toward a dark and often comic fate.” It’s funny, I lived in L.A. for five years and finally left because there just wasn’t enough intersecting going on for my liking.

Doctor Who may be coming to the big screen, according to new show runner Steven Moffat. The Hollywood Reporter quotes Moffat as saying “It would be good to see it in the cinema so long as it is great and fantastic.” Kind of hard to argue with that, I guess.

And in news someone besides me might care about, Audrey Tautou will star in biopic of Coco Chanel for Warner Bros. Variety reports Coco Avant Chanel “will feature dresses from the Chanel collection. Karl Lagerfeld, art director of the House of Chanel, will supervise the re-creation of costumes and accessories.”

Related:
Screengrab Review: "Garden Party"
P.T.A. Report

Screengrab Review: "Garden Party"

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 17:45:00 GMT

Garden Party, opening in limited release next week, is being touted as the arrival of a hot new talent in the person of writer/director Jason Freeland. In fact, though, Freeland's first film was an entire decade ago, a somewhat bewildering James Ellroy adaptation called Brown's Requiem. His new film, though, with its attractive young cast and allegedly verite look at contemporary Los Angeles, is getting way more attention than Brown's Requiem ever did, and if it's not technically his debut, it's at least poised to be his breakthrough. We had a chance to screen Garden Party recently; should you believe the hype?

Boiled down to the one-sentence description that no doubt got it through the vetting process, Garden Party is the story of a group of young people, all recently relocated to the vast construct of the American psyche that is Los Angeles, who try to get by faced with all the pitfalls and perils the wicked city is home to. Peopled with a game young cast, the movie gives us a bunch of characters who aren't quite established enough as archetypes to come across as trite right off the bat; there's the vaguely sinister real estate agent/drug dealer, the allegedly brilliant young musician who drifts through life intersecting with the other characters but never making a real emotional commitment to any of them, the renegade bohemian with a porn fetish, the sexually abused teen, and half a dozen other characters who seem like they just got off the late shift at the Quaalude factory. Needless to say, their stories all intersect in sometimes surprising, sometimes predictable ways; needless to say, a few of them experience what could be called a revelation if it didn't come across as so utterly trifling; and, needless to say, there's lots of fashionable sex, drugs, and pouting to make thing palatable to the drugged-out, pouty teenage couples who are presumably the movie's target audience. With all this stuff being needless to say, you might ask: why was it even necessary to make the film? The answer? That is a good question.

There are a few good reasons to see Garden Party. Freeland has a distinctive, if rather undeveloped, visual sensibility, and his pacing is very fine, keeping you involved in the story even when it spills over into the cliches he generates as a writer. And a number of the members of the largely anonymous cast are worth watching, particularly the lovely, polished Willa Holland in the lead role. However, these aspects are overwhelmed by its overall shapelessness and the fact that it seems kluged together from parts of other, usually better movies: the plot and structure capture the worst aspects of Rent but can't handle the best of Short Cuts. The teen cast and sexual panic aspects play like a lite version of Kids. The pseudo-verite is drawn from Cloverfield and the sense of communal destiny is like a mopier version of Magnolia. It draws its "depressed young white people unable to make significant emotional connections" vibe from the mumblecore movement, and its misunderstood-sensitive-genius characters from the mind of every teenager ever. Even the ad campaign makes it look like a moody remake of Swimfan. Freeland has the talent to make distinctive movies, but he seems to lack the focus to make ones that don't mostly remind us of a million things we've seen before.

Take Five: Belgium!

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 21:30:00 GMT

Opening wide this weekend, Martin McDonagh's In Bruges stars Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson as a pair of exiled hitmen stuck in the Belgian city until it's safe for them to return home, and their sojourn is meant to be hellish in every sense of the word. Belgium has long been Europe's punchline — yes, even more so than Poland; its stolidly middle-class character and reputation as "where culture goes to nap" makes it the butt of many a joke. David Rees of Get Your War On calls the sixteenth-century seer Nostradamus "the last interesting Belgian", which insult is all the more cutting considering he was actually French; and in a memorable Monty Python sketch, game show contestants are challenged to come up with a derogatory term for Belgium, and one noteworthy entrant claims that he can't think of anything more derogatory than just "Belgian". But all kidding aside, if you actually were trapped in Bruges for a prolonged period of time, you could do a lot worse as a way to pass the time than to head for the local cinema. Belgium has, er, sprouted one of the more interesting independent film scenes in Europe recently, and as this short list of some of our favorite Belgian movies of recent years should illustrate, there's a lot more to Belgian filmmaking than just Jean-Claude Van Damme.

MAN BITES DOG (1992)

One of the first Belgian films to create a great deal of buzz outside of Europe, Man Bites Dog (the French title translates, creepily, to "It Happened in Your Neighborhood" or "He is Coming to Your House") is a postmodern twist on the serial killer narrative a good five to ten years before such things became trendy. Anticipating the self-aware American horror films of the 2000s, it follows a small documentary camera crew as they tag along with Ben (played with sinister charm by co-writer/director Benoit Poelvoorde), a disconcertingly media-savvy mass murderer. Crammed with supremely disturbing moments, shocking violence, and genuinely clever moments of humor, Man Bites Dog has held up quite well and is still better than most of the films it undoubtedly helped to inspire.

D'EST [FROM THE EAST] (1993)

One of the best things about Belgian cinema is the experimental filmmaker Chantal Akerman. Her complex, meditative, sometimes almost motionless films lull you into a nearly placid state so that you barely realize it when a moment of epiphany arises. D'Est, a far too little-seen documentary from 1993, is perhaps her greatest film: a deceptively simple series of images of people in Eastern Europe, many of them only a few years removed from the burdens of Soviet rule, are shown. The people take vacations, engage in sport and play, have long moments of leisure, and Akerman's brilliantly photographic sensibilities capture long stretches of beautiful simplicity over a period of almost two hours. The effect is not unlike watching a well-crafted painting slowly mutate into something entirely new and different.

LUMUMBA (2000)

Director Raoul Peck is a Haitian; the film takes place in Africa, and the production itself was a joint effort of Belgium, France, Germany, and Haiti. But almost all of the filming was done in Belgium, the majority of the financing came from there, and in a greater sense, the entire film is a legacy of Belgium's blood-soaked imperial past. The radical reformer Patrice Lumumba (brilliantly portrayed here by Eriq Ebouaney), prior to his assassination, was the ruler of the Congo, a huge country in central Africa that suffered more than most during its colonial period thanks to an incredibly brutal occupation and exploitation by Belgium's King Leopold. The film was an independent success, and a testament to the fact that some countries are more willing to examine their colonial legacies than others.

ANY WAY THE WIND BLOWS (2002)

If Tom Barman's sprawling 2002 film, based in and around the port city of Antwerp, isn't one of the best Belgian movies in recent history, it's at least one of the most ambitious, and definitely one of the oddest. Part travelogue, part documentary, part music video (and showcase for the director, who's also a well-known local pop star), and part bizarre remake/interpretation/'homage' to movies like Short Cuts, Magnolia and Pulp Fiction, Any Way the Wind Blows features a diverse group of French and Flemish citizens, all from different backgrounds and with widely different characters, who all wind up, through a rambunctious and chronoligically confusing narrative, at the same party on the same night. It functions almost like a collage of several more convincingly made films, but it's not without its charm.

THE ALZHEIMER CASE(2003)

When you first hear De Zaak Alzheimer described, you think it can't possibly be anything but a tasteless, awful disaster: it's about a pair of detectives attempting to track down and capture a mob hitman on his final assignment — final because he has an advanced case of Alzheimer's Disease. Amazingly enough, though, director Erik Van Looy manages to pull the thing off without recourse to depressingly tasteless jokes or maudlin sentimentality. Instead, he presents us with a surprisingly plausible plot, a tight, chilling narrative with plenty of suspense, and a nicely presented noir sensibility. An American remake of this movie (which played at festivals under the name The Memory of a Killer) is in the works, but if you can hunt down a DVD copy of the original, it's well worth checking out on its own merits.