The Screengrab : sidney lumet

Ron Silver, 1946 - 2009

Phil Nugent — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 14:00:00 GMT

Ron Silver has died, at 62, after a two year battle with esophageal cancer. The living image of the "New York actor", Silver, was something of a specialist in fast-talking, saturnine cynics, an association that became even greater after he won a Tony Award for his semi-legendary performance as a Hollywood shark in David Mamet's 1988 Broadway hit Speed-the-Plow. Silver's performances in the Mamet play and in David Rabe's 1984 Hurlyburly--neither of which, sadly, he got to repeat on film--cemented his image as the great white way's modern notion of a successful movie industry sleazeball. Ironically, he never became the star in movies that he was onstage, but he had a long and healthy career in TV and movies anyway. After a barely detectable film debut in the unfunny underground comedy Tunnel Vision (1977) and a recurring role alongside a fellow Broadway baby on 1980's The Stockard Channing Show, Silver began to develop a name for himself in movies with his rambunctiously funny performances in the romantic comedies Best Friends (1982), in which he played, yes, a Hollywood producer, and Lovesick (1983), in which his character, a Hollywood star returning to his New York stage roots, gave him the chance to mock Al Pacino.

Throughout the rest of the decade, Silver would move freely from stage to TV to movie roles, including a starring role in Sidney Lumet's Garbo Talks (1984). His peak of national visibility probably came in 1989 and 1990, when he played Jerry Lewis's son in a multi-episode story arc of the cult series Wiseguy; gave the performance of his movie career as the lead in Paul Mazursky's superb movie version of Isaac Bashevis Singer's Enemies, a Love Story; stalked Jamie Lee Curtis as a deranged stockbroker turned serial gunman in Kathryn Bigelow's Blue Steel; starred as a leftish screenwriter navigating the 1950s blacklist era in the British TV film Fellow Traveller; and don a Groucho mustache to play Alan Dershowitz in counterpoint to Jeremy Irons's Oscar-winning turn as Claus von Bulow in Barbet Schroeder's torn-from-the-headlines Reversal of Fortune.

Though he continued to work steadily, his days of playing leads in theatrical features that people went to see receded behind him, and he began to enjoy his best opportunities in movies as a campy villain, in such movies as the Jean-Claude Van Damme picture Timecop (1994), where he confronted his younger self with a plea that he lay off the candy bars, and The Arrival (2006), where he got to deliver a speech explaining that global warming was part of a plan for an imminent extraterrestrial takeover of the Earth. (He parodied this side of his career in the famous Ben Stiller-directed, unaired TV pilot Heat Vision and Jack, in which he played a sinister character named Ron Silver whose acting career was a cover for his principal occupation of serving the conspiracy to install a New World Order.) He made his directing debut with the 1993 TV film Lifepod, a sci-fi variation on Hitchcock's Lifeboat. He returned to the courtroom to play Robert Shapiro in American Tragedy, a 2000 O. J. Simpson docudrama written by Norman Mailer, was hilarious as tennis hustler Bobby Riggs in the TV film When Billie Beat Bobby (2001), convincingly dogged as Angelo Dundee in Michael Mann's The Greatest biopic Ali (2001), and reunited with Lumet for Find Me Guilty (2006), yet another fact-based courtroom drama, for which he was upgraded from lawyer to judge.

Silver also had recurring or regular roles on the TV series Chicago Hope, Veronica's Closet, Skin, and The West Wing, where he played a political consultant who, over the course of the show, had a political conversion from left to right. Silver himself experienced his own sea change after September 11, 2001, and became a highly public proponent for his changed views, making the rounds of the TV talk shows, appearing at the 2004 Republican National Convention, and blogging for Pajamas Media. He also narrated FahrenHYPE 9/11 (a 2004 documentary response to Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, and co-directing, with Kevin Knoblock, the documentary Broken Promises: The United Nations at 60. His last performance was in the 2008 Distant Runners.

Reviews By Request: Shotgun Stories (2007, Jeff Nichols)

Paul Clark — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Now that I’ve caught up with just about all of the major 2008 releases I’ve really wanted to, we’ll be going back to the old alternating-weeks format of Reviews By Request and Yesterday’s Hits starting next week. So, as before, I’ll be polling you folks to determine the first of two Oscar-themed Reviews By Request columns, which will run in two weeks. To vote, see the poll at the end of this review.

One of the better surprises among last week’s Oscar nominations was Michael Shannon’s nomination for best supporting actor in Revolutionary Road. Shannon has been acting in movies for well over a decade, but he first made an impression on me in Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center, in which his frayed-nerve intensity provided that ponderous film its only sign of life. Since then, Shannon has given vivid performances in Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead and William Friedkin’s Bug, which along with Revolutionary Road have turned him into Hollywood’s go-to character actor for playing hyper-focused crazies. Shannon’s character in Jeff Nichols’ revenge drama Shotgun Stories might seem on paper to be another unhinged role, but in his capable hands it instead becomes his deepest and most complex performance.

Shannon plays Son, the eldest of three brothers living in a small southern town. Shannon’s character’s name is not a nickname, but rather the legacy of a drunken, uncaring father (his brothers are named Kid and Boy). That he wasn’t named Sue is no doubt of small consolation to Son, whose father left them “in the care of a hateful woman” only to sober up, find Jesus, start a second family and become an all-around productive member of the community. It’s at his father’s funeral that the story is set in motion, when Son and his brothers show up and speak out against the man who abandoned them. Son’s act of spitting on his father’s casket causes the long-simmering resentments between the father’s two families to escalate into an all-out feud.

Normally, the revenge movie isn’t one of my favorite genres, because most movies of the type either emphasize violent action in a way that makes me feel vaguely unclean, or engage in so much hand-wringing that the ethics overwhelm the storytelling. With Shotgun Stories, Nichols avoids falling into either trap. This isn’t a pumped-up thrill ride, but neither is it a pious anti-revenge screed. Instead, it’s a sad, low-key story of two families whose mutual hatred for each other overwhelms their better judgments. Making the story especially tragic is that those who fueled the hatred (the deceased father and the two mothers) don’t bloody their hands from the violence- it’s their sons who suffer from their parents’ misdeeds. As Son tells his mother, “you’ve taught us to hate those boys, and we do. And now it’s come to this.”

Key to the movie’s effect is its setting, an “empty-ass town” with few opportunities available to its residents. In its feel for small-town life, Shotgun Stories owes a debt to filmmakers like David Gordon Green, who executive-produced. Son and Kid work together in a fish hatchery, Boy coaches a youth basketball team, and Son’s hopes of bettering himself hinge on his perfecting a technique to scam the local casino. Son’s wife Annie has moved out of the house with their son, but it’s clear that she still loves Son despite all the disappointment she feels for him. There are moments of happiness to be found in these people’s lives, but this happiness is either fleeting (as when Boy rigs up a blender to his car battery so he can fix margaritas while watching the sun set) or bittersweet due to the difficulties they face. It’s telling that Kid is reluctant to propose marriage to his longtime girlfriend not because he doesn’t love her, but because he’ll have a hard time affording a ring and a place of their own.

In short, these aren’t the stone-cold killers who usually inhabit movies of this sort, so when the violence begins, it doesn’t play out quite the way we expect. At one point, a character purchases a shotgun to use against an enemy, only to realize that he needs lessons in how to assemble and use it. And rather than emphasizing the violence, Nichols focuses on its horrible aftermath, the irreparable damage it causes. For example, Nichols cuts away from a brutal fight that kills one brother on each side, lingering instead on a scene in which both families gather in the hospital, staring each other down from opposite ends of a long hallway.

And in the middle of it, there’s Shannon’s performance, almost certainly the best he’s given to date. It’s been said that intelligence is the ability to hold opposing viewpoints simultaneously, and much of Shannon’s talent is his ability to convey seemingly contradictory impulses in his character. On the one hand, he wants to protect his family and uphold its honor; on the other, he wants to prove to his wife that he can care for her. In theory, these two impulses aren’t so different (they’re simply different facets of his need to do the right thing), but in practice it’s much more complicated. It’s a burden that weighs heavily on Son, and what makes Shannon’s performance such a marvel is that he’s able to convey this burden with a minimum of dialogue or affect, and without resorting to actorly histrionics. With his other notable performances and now Shotgun Stories, Michael Shannon is quickly becoming one of my favorite character actors, and the news that he’s playing the lead role in an upcoming Werner Herzog film is very, very good news indeed.

As you’re all aware, the Oscar ceremony will be airing later this month, and in anticipation of the Academy Awards, I’ll be running special Oscar-themed features over the next four weeks. For my next Reviews By Request column, I’m asking you to choose from five Oscar-nominated favorites, none of which I’ve seen all the way through. So, which will it be?

Which should I write about next? | BuzzDash polls

As always, the comments section is open. See you in two weeks!

Screengrab Presents: The Worst Stage-To-Screen Adaptations Of All Time (Part Seven)

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 00:00:00 GMT

And now, the not so good...

A CHORUS LINE (1985)

I’m a theater geek from way back, and so I’ve always had a special place in my heart for A Chorus Line, that old warhorse musical tribute to the nameless show biz gypsies who sing and dance their hearts out not for money or fame but (to paraphrase the show’s unabashedly sincere lump-in-the-throat anthem) simply for the love of their art. And, really, what better way to pay tribute to that altruistic, egalitarian spirit than...um...a cynical vehicle for a non-singing, non-dancing movie star which pretty much banishes the musical’s main characters to, well, the chorus. Michael Douglas hogs the spotlight in a role played by an offstage voice in the stage version, while Sir Richard Attenborough (a director hardly known for intimate chamber dramas) eschews the original's claustrophobic stage door setting in favor of “opening up” the action, restlessly tracking Douglas around Manhattan while the songs and stories of the rest of the characters -- the people the show's about -- somehow keep winding up offscreen and ignored.

OLEANNA (1994)

I've had some disastrous first dates in my day, but it's hard to know what I was thinking when I chose the May 1992 premiere of David Mamet's incendiary exploration of sexual politics Oleanna at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass. as a means of wooing the cute blonde of my affections. In my defense, I hadn't heard much about the play when I bought the tickets; I think I was under the mistaken impression that it was about pirates. In fact, it's a calculated but highly effective outrage about a smug college professor who is stunned to be accused of sexual improprieties by a young female student he claims he was only trying to help with her studies. The play is designed to start arguments – it's either about sexual harassment or political correctness run wild, depending on your point of view – so it's not exactly primo first date fodder. (As it happens, it wasn't even my least successful date with this young lady, but let's not even go there.) It was undeniably riveting as a theatrical experience, however – William H. Macy and Rebecca Pidgeon, certainly the Mamet-est pairing imaginable, tore the house down. Two years later Mamet turned Oleanna into a movie, in the process giving no indication that he had any idea how or why it had worked in the first place. Pidgeon was gone, replaced by some nonentity named Debra Eisenstadt. Macy was still aboard, but given such a dull, flat adversary, his professor character now tilted too far to the monstrous side. Everything elliptical and ambiguous in the play had become blunt and obvious; there was no longer anything to argue about. Incidentally, Doubt shares these same problems, but at least it has a striking Meryl Streep performance. That's not to say I'm recommending it as a date movie.

ABOUT LAST NIGHT... (1986)

David Mamet's first big stage success, the 1974 Sexual Perversity in Chicago -- a hilariously cold-eyed and profane take on the mating rituals of young urban types in the age of singles bars, porno chic, and "serial monogamy" -- was a one-act that needed to be expanded on (i.e., padded out) to make its weight as a feature film, and by the time it was green-lighted, America was in the post-sexual revolution "age of AIDS" and newspapers, nervous about legal reprisals from the Reagan-Meese Department of Justice, were reluctant to even run ads with the original title. All of which would have presented a problem for filmmakers with a little integrity, as opposed to the makers of this Rob Lowe-Demi Moore vehicle, which bears less resemblance to any Mamet ever produced than a scaled-down, MTV-friendly St. Elmo's Fire II. The only one of the four main characters who retains some detectable link to his stage version is Lowe's male-chauvinist sidekick Bernie, who, as regrettably incarnated by Jim Belushi, is reduced to bellowing in the background of what's now a conventional young-spuds-in-love movie.

EQUUS (1977)

The British playwright Peter Schaffer is the Maxwell Anderson of our day, a mediocre dramatist who dresses up fancy, fraudulent conceits in fake-poetic language and palms it off as high theatrical art by invoking historical giants and Greek deities. The success of the current Broadway revival of his horse-god bullshit play Equus (starring Harry Potter and his naked pudder) is sad evidence that people can still be suckers for this stuff, though the work fared less well in its movie incarnation, which had the misfortune to be directed by a man -- that famous tough customer Sidney Lumet -- who actually seemed to think it was the literary masterpiece that it keeps screaming that it is. If Lumet had seen through this hunk of junk, he might have been so disrespectful as to try to turn it into a movie, the way John Huston did with Key Largo, the only film based on an Anderson text that remains watchable today. Instead, he was content to stick Richard Burton, fresh from his career-crowning performance in Exorcist II: The Heretic, facing the camera from within a sea of black, and have him hurtle through his monologues as if daring us not to be awed. The ideas he has come to set before us, poor Burton declaims, are "less than worthless; they are in fact subversive." Got it right the first time.

FOOL FOR LOVE (1985)

Burned out on Hollywood, Robert Altman spent most of the 1980s working on filmed plays. Some of these worked out a lot less well than others, but this mounting of what, at the time, was widely held as Sam Shepard's masterpiece as a playwright stands out partly for how perfect it sounds in theory and how thoroughly it goes splat in the execution. Altman employed Shepard to both do the screenplay and star as Eddie, the cowpoke who's meant to have an untamed, fiery, yet sporadic relationship with May (Kim Basinger), who may be his half-sister. But in altering the text of his play (which takes place entirely in a motel room) so that the action rolls all around the motel complex and adjoining highway, Shepard inadvertently revealed how silly the material could be made to seem without the tension produced by two actors going head to head in a tight, enclosed space. And by casting Shepard in the difficult leading role, Altman inadvertently revealed his limitations as a film actor: the poor guy wrote his own part, yet he has trouble keeping up with Kim Basinger.

THE FUGITIVE KIND (1959)

After A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams was understandably eager to write another role for Marlon Brando, and he was also keen to see Brando paired with Anna Magnani, the Italian powerhouse who had enjoyed a great success in the movie version of Williams' play The Rose Tattoo. Sadly, the only time that Brando and Williams did team up again was for this version of Williams' play Orpheus Descending, which all too perfectly captures the playwright's florid, self-parodic side. The opening, with Brando, as Val Xavier (Williams' notion of a modern Orpheus as a tortured blues-playing Adonis with a guitar and a snakeskin jacket) seen alone on screen as he faces the bar of justice hits the wall as soon as it opens out into a grotesque and unbelievable world -- and as Brando has his first scenes with Magnani: not until Godzilla met Megalon would the screen see such chemistry in action. Also doing their reputations no favors are Joanne Woodward in a misguided attempt by a likably grounded, naturalistic actress to enter the pantheon of the movies' all-time great weirdos, and Victor Jory as a rich cracker so rotten that Cape Fear's Max Cady would report him to the Neighborhood Watch Program.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six & Eight

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

Screengrab Presents: The Best Stage-To-Screen Adaptations Of All Time (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 22:00:00 GMT

COUNSELLOR AT LAW (1933)

If you're curious to see what an A-list straight Broadway play looked like circa the 1930s, preserved faithfully but with enough cinematic flair that it's not quite as if they'd just propped a camera in front of the stage (which is what a lot of filmed stage plays from that era look like now), you could scarcely do better than William Wellman's film of Elmer Rice's top-class, socially conscious potboiler, from a script adapted by Rice himself. The cherry on top is John Barrymore, starring as the heroically high-strung lawyer, in a role that he never played on the stage, for the very good reason that it might have seemed the height of insanity to hire him to play a guy who'd fought his way up from a ghetto-born background; in the movie, this has the virtue of letting him show how thoroughly he could power a star vehicle from the starting gun to the finish line even when he seemed miscast, not that you were likely to be troubled by that while you were watching him.

THE BEGGAR'S OPERA (1953)

Peter Brook's movie of John Gay's satirical ballad opera (first peformed in 1728) is a high-spirited anomaly: a production of what ought to be a dead form that is powered by the director's delight at exploring the possibilities offered to him by a new medium. Laurence Olivier was cast as the dashing brigand Macheath and, after it had been confirmed that the sound of his voice, when raised in song, would not panic the horses or stop viewers' hearts, was permitted to do his own singing. Among its other distinctions, the movie would be Olivier's only musical, and the only evidence ever recorded on film that Peter Brook was once in a good mood.

HENRY V (1944)

When Kenneth Branagh's 1989 version opened, one New York critic referred to director-star Laurence Olivier's earlier version as "quaint." As if, as Elizabeth I once told the King of Spain. The play -- celebrating the English monarch's ability to rally his countrymen and fill them with the spirit needed to whup enemies who have them outnumbered and outarmored (or so it seems, until the shiny bastards discover that, once knocked down, they can't get up out of the mud) -- was a jingoistic work of propaganda, and Olivier's movie, unlike Branagh's "antiwar" edition, is a jingoistic propaganda movie, designed to give comfort and warmth to British audiences looking forward to seeing Hitler's head disconnected from his body. The wonder of the play is that it raises jingo propaganda to the level of art, and the wonder of the movie is that, from its candy-colored photography, Book of Days production design, and the star's triumphant, roaring performance, it does full justice to the text. It's a sophisticated, literate entertainment that makes you feel about twelve years old, in a good way.

KING LEAR (1971)

This final film by the Russian director Grigori Kozintsev (who died two years later, and whose 1964 Hamlet is nothing to sneeze at either) was released the same year as the film version of Peter Brook's freeze-dried Lear, which tried to make the material seem modern and relevant by flattening out its emotional peaks, and that approach could scarcely seem like more of a folly than when laid alongside this picture. It builds to an awesome concluding section of transcendent apocalyptic imagery; the battles and burning buildings and senseless carnage do full, horrifically beautiful justice to Shakespeare's conception of a world turned upside down. Kurosawa aimed to touch the hem of its garment with the most flamboyant imagery in his own take on Lear (the 1985 Ran)...and he came this close.

LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT (1962)

One of the great things about filmed theater is that it may provide the opportunity to see a classic work performed by a dream cast that would be unlikely to gather for a theatrical run, and this may be the ultimate fulfillment of that possibility made good on: Ralph Richardson, Katharine Hepburn, Jason Robards, and Dean Stockwell making magic out of Eugene O'Neill's long, grinding, mesmerizing masterpiece of an American family play. Sidney Lumet, who made his name directing plays for TV (including the famous 1960 production of O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh starring Robards as Hickey), made this five years into his still-ongoing movie career, and he hasn't topped it yet.

SECRET HONOR (1984)

Working with a text that amounts to a monologue performed by one man -- Richard Nixon, played by Philip Baker Hall -- in one room, the director, Robert Altman, uses the handsomely designed set (which features banks of computer monitors) and Hall's sweating, cursing whirlwind of a performance to create such a stream of fireworks that the movie seems amazingly alive visually. As political mind trips go, it covers more ground with more smarts and to greater effect than any of Oliver Stone's presidential portraits, at half the length and God knows what fraction of the cost.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Four, Five, Six, Seven & Eight

Contributor: Phil Nugent

Screengrab Salutes: The Paul Newman Top Ten (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 15:00:00 GMT

4. BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID (1969)

Straddling the line between the revolutionary filmmaking of the 1970s and the tail end of classic Hollywood, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is one of those movies that isn’t legendary because it’s important, or because it’s meaningful, or because it broke some rich new ground in the language of filmmaking. It’s legendary because it’s funny, fun, and incredibly entertaining. It’s also one of those films where everyone seems to be firing on all cylinders; the sly buddy-western could easily be counted as a career high for Robert Redford, director George Roy Hill and his cameraman Connie Hall, screenwriter William Goldman, and even composer Burt Bacharach. But Paul Newman is the glue that holds everything together: taking on Goldman’s witty dialogue, he gives it just enough of a human, weary edge that it doesn’t seem as over-the-top as it might coming from some actors. Some performers go their whole lives without snaring a part like Butch Cassidy, and others get one, but handle it all wrong. You sometimes hear actors referred to as intelligent, but rarely movie stars; it’s a testament to how bright Paul Newman was that he was handed a role as rich as this one and figured it out immediately, playing it on screen as perfectly as it could be played. This is a real movie star role, and Newman handles it like a real movie star.

3. NOBODY’S FOOL (1994) & THE VERDICT (1982)

I’ll admit I'm cheating here, attempting to squeeze an eleventh film into this Top Ten list, but I simply couldn’t decide which late-period Newman film I liked best, so I figured I’d call it a tie. Two sides of the same rumpled coin, The Verdict’s beaten-down Boston lawyer Frank Galvin, fighting an impossible battle against the Catholic Church, and Sully, the beaten-down small town ne’er-do-well Newman plays in Nobody’s Fool are both men with no expectations of success or happiness in their lonely lives who nevertheless find redemption despite and because of their own stubborn tenacity. One of the hallmarks of Newman’s career was the Mercedes caliber acting, writing and directing he seemed to attract to most of his star vehicles, and these two films more than hold their own with regard to above-the-line talent. Charlotte Rampling, Jack Warden, James Mason and helmer Sidney Lumet provide typically stellar support in The Verdict, but one of the pleasures of Nobody’s Fool is watching Newman (and acclaimed co-stars like Jessica Tandy and Phillip Seymour Hoffman) bring out the best in frequently wasted and underestimated actors like Bruce Willis (in a supporting role as a big fish businessman in a small upstate New York pond) and Melanie Griffith (happily erasing memories of their previous on-screen pairing in Bonfire of the Vanities as Willis’ dissatisfied trophy wife). Yet despite all the impressive talent surrounding him, Newman is the heart and soul of both films, dominating them with master class, world-weary performances that just make you want to punch the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences right in the face for awarding him his only Best Actor Oscar for The Color of freakin’ Money.

2. HUD (1963)

Newman never took his anti-hero routine farther into "anti-" territory than in this family drama, set in a dusty, unromantic modern Texas. He plays the title role, which turns out not to be that of the Department of Housing and Urban Development but rather a selfish but dashing heel who, in the context of a small rural town situated on the wrong end of the 1960s, qualifies as about as hot as hot shit gets. Hud roughly fits the mold but finally breaks the tradition of such earlier Hollywood characters as the Bogart heroes, who were always talking about how they stuck their neck out for nobody and only cared about keeping their own hides safe and comfortable because Hud really means it; he remains defiantly unredeemed to the movie's end. Seen as daring in its day, the movie actually risks being too morally clear-cut. What keeps it alive and spiky after all these years is that, thanks to Newman, it's hard not to feel closer to this bastard than to his pure and upright antagonists, the boringly earnest young man (Brandon De Wilde) who has to learn to see through him, and the crotchety father (Melvyn Douglas) who seems to have been judging him as harshly as possible for every minute of their shared lives, and who finally seems to die of impacted self-righteousness...especially since Newman and the director, Martin Ritt, seemed to understand something real about the sensual attractiveness of evil: in this, the least sympathetic role of the first half of his career, Newman was probably sexier than he'd ever been before, which is saying something.

1. THE HUSTLER (1961)

Newman entered his second decade as a movie star, and established himself as a man with staying power, as Fast Eddie Felsen, the cocky pool shark who's set on proving himself a winner -- which he does, though at the loss of his innocence, a girl (Piper Laurie), and the game that's the only thing he's ever been able to claim to be the best at. In addition to the tart dialogue and the opportunity to go head-to-head with George C. Scott (at the peak of his powers as a sly stealer of scenes) and Jackie Gleason (in the most pleasingly assured dramatic performance of his life), the role gave Newman the chance to grow up on camera. In the final battle of the billiard balls, he trades in the self-infatuated, head-jiggling grins and showy flare-ups of the early scenes for a quiet gravity, with suggestions of violent emotions kept under powerful control beneath the surface. It was a good indicator of just how well the actor himself would be able to weather the aging process in the years to come, steadily improving with time while the careers of so many of his contemporaries receded to the background or turned brown at the edges.

Click Here for Part One & Part Two

Contributors: Leonard Pierce, Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

America the Critical: 15 Movies That Show What's Wrong With U.S. (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 20:45:00 GMT

SWEET SWEETBACK'S BAADASSSSS SONG (1971) & BAADASSSSS! (2003)

In 1971, director Melvin Van Peebles, sick of Hollywood’s portrayal of African Americans, risked everything to present his own version of the black experience where, according to his own manifesto for the project, “niggers could walk out standing tall instead of avoiding each other's eyes.” For White America, the most shocking aspect of Van Peebles’ film was the fact that its hero, falsely-accused murder suspect Sweetback (played by the director himself) not only escapes “The Man,” but also takes out a few white cops along the way and, in the final credits, offers the warning: “Watch out - a baad assss nigger is coming to collect some dues." Unlike the “can’t we all just get along” sentiment of the Civil Rights Movement, Van Peebles’ film dared to publicly acknowledge the black community’s righteous indignation after 300 years of mistreatment at the hands of Caucasians (a still-shocking sentiment, as evidenced by the media’s recent saturation bombing of Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s “God damn America!” soundbite), influencing everything from the blaxploitation genre that followed directly on the heels of Sweetback’s box office success to the politicized rap of N.W.A. and Public Enemy and Mookie’s controversial decision to hurl a garbage can through the window of Sal’s Pizzeria in Spike Lee’s iconic Do The Right Thing (1989). But (as the director’s son and Sweetback co-star, Mario, dramatized in his own 2003 biopic, BAADASSSSS!), Van Peebles was more a social crusader than a wild-eyed militant, providing opportunity and experience to minorities both in front of and behind the camera...plus, he gave Earth, Wind & Fire their first big break, which all by itself helped to make America (and the world) a slightly better place to be.

HARLAN COUNTY U.S.A. (1976)

Barbara Kopple's groundbreaking documentary on a bitterly contested coal miner's strike in Kentucky is widely cited as one of the finest examples of the form. Made in a year when miners' wages were at a then-record low, and mining company profits were at a then-record high, Harlan County U.S.A. not only captures the horrible conditions, dangerous nature (guns are everywhere in the film, a murder takes place, and Kopple is to this day convinced that she was meant to be killed by company blacklegs) and contentious rivalries of the mine work, but also shows the little triumphs, the conviviality, and the never-give-in determination for the people for whom this life is not an entertainment, but a reality. What is most appalling – and most damning of the "dirty capitalist system" bemoaned by coal minders in their century-old union songs – is the fact that now, over 30 years after the movie was completed, things have gotten even worse. The power of the unions, which could barely protect the workers of Harlan County then, would be almost completely shattered in the subsequent decades. The workers of today, now often illegal immigrants or unskilled workers paid barely more than minimum wage, still do some of the most dangerous industrial work imaginable, and there is no one left to protect them. So, watching Harlan County U.S.A. today, one still has to catch one's throat at the terrible injustice being done to the workers of 1976 – and try and comprehend the awful truth that since then, the situation has only continued to decline, and even the simple pride in the face of impossible struggle evidenced by the workers and their wives seems like a relic of an idealized past.

HESTER STREET (1975)

Like a number of entries on this list, Joan Micklin Silver's low-budget, independent hit was made in the 1970s, a time when a great many movies were examining time-honored American values and finding them wanting. Hester Street is a coming-to-America story about Jewish immigrants making new lives for themselves in the Lower East Side of New York in 1896, and what immediately sets it apart from earlier movies of this kind, such as Elia Kazan's America, America, is that it dares to suggest that what some of the newcomers have lost in their passage from the Old World is dearer than what they've gained. The central characters are Yekl, who quickly adopts the name Jake (Stephen Keats) and his wife, Gitl (Carol Kane), and what makes Gitl the heroine is that she, unlike Jake -- who practically welds his derby to his head and takes to making such pronouncement as, "I don't care for nobody, I'm an American fella!" -- recoils from the noise and bustle of the New World and cannot assimilate. Kane's eccentric, almost unearthly qualities, which would eventually make her a tremendous comedienne, are used very tenderly here; the fact that she can't quite fit in with her surroundings is proof of her value, she is rewarded with the attentions of a disgruntled fellow immigrant, Bernstein (Mel Howard), who gives voice to the filmmakers' objections to the crass vulgarity of American materialism, which Jake and his haughty new girlfriend Mamie (Dorrie Kavanaugh) embody. Gitl and Bernstein find happiness together while remaining too good for the place they've come to.

SERPICO (1973)

At a time when movies like Dirty Harry (and its sequel Magnum Force) were inviting audiences to cheer brutalist cops on the theory that "the system" was too sensitive to the rights of the accused to allow a good, rule-obeying cop to get anything done, this fact-based story (from back in the days when the phrase "inspired by a true story" meant that what you were seeing in the movie bore some actual relation to something that had actually happened in real life) invited the audience to save some of its sympathy for a good cop -- Frank Serpico, a NYPD officer played by Al Pacino -- who just wanted to do his job and stay honest while he did it but was hassled, probably set up to be killed, and ultimately run off the force by all the grafting bullies in the department who were so enthusiastically committed to their lives of corruption that they couldn't see him as anything but a freak, and, worse, a potential snitch. Serpico eventually served as a witness at the Knapp Commission investigating police corruption, though he did so reluctantly; he would have preferred to remain a cop, but it must be a bitch chasing rapists and murderers down dark alleys when you're never sure when the other cops running with you are going to take the opportunity to put a cap in your ass. Although the director, Sidney Lumet, sets a downbeat tone for the ending, Serpico was actually set at what could have been seen as a hopeful moment, with the Watergate hearings mirroring the Knapp Commission and when society seemed to be trying to run the rascals out of the halls of power. Eight years later, when Lumet made Prince of the City, another fact-based story about a corrupt NYPD detective who tries to cleanse his conscious by gathering information on crooked lawyers and judges, the idea that you have to be at least a little bit crooked to function in American society had become so well-accepted that Lumet reported that, well into filming, he and his screenwriter were still arguing about whether their tattletale protagonist deserved to be regarded as some kind of hero or just a dirty rat.

THE SEARCHERS (1956)

This movie, set in Texas in the 1860s and 1970s and starring John Wayne as the unrepentant Confederate veteran Ethan Edwards, is widely regarded as the greatest of all John Ford's Westerns by people who might regard that designation as synonymous with saying that it's the best movie ever made. It's a tribute to the heroic qualities that Wayne embodied, demanding as they do the viewer's respect without flinching from the qualities that went with them -- machismo, racism, and a capacity for sadism, all of them carried to the point, in the phrase used by more than one observer, of borderline psychosis. The Confederate Ethan's attitude towards the enslavement of black people is never made clear, but his searching for the niece who's been kidnapped by Comanches -- a chase fueled by his need to kill her, because by the time he's found her she'll have bedded down with and "become" Comanche herself, which he regards as a fate worse than death -- clearly provides him with the opportunity for a new, one-man race war, a war against the Indians that doesn't end when his enemies lie dead: he shoots out the eyes of a fallen nemesis, because according to the Indian's religion that will prevent him from entering Heaven. Ford, whose relation with Wayne was known to have had its prickly moments, taps into that side of his star who would later tell a Playboy interviewer that the Native Americans deserved to be wiped out for having been so "selfish" as to want to keep their land, and the result is something very strange to see: an apotheosis of a man at his most morally petty. In the end, Ethan returns the girl to civilization and, with all the surviving major characters gathered inside her family's house, is last seen walking away from its entrance. He's an iconic hero without who the American West could never have been tamed...and civilization can't wait until it knows it's seen the last of him.

Click here to read Part One and Part Two

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent

DVD Digest for April 15, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 16:00:00 GMT

For those of you looking to spend this year's tax refund check on DVDs, this won't be a particularly good week for you. But there is at least one exception...

Had you going there, didn't I? My well-documented soft spot for Dr. Uwe Boll notwithstanding, the real gem this week is The Criterion Collection's release of Blast of Silence. Criterion has long been beloved for its top-notch DVD editions of canonical favorites, but just as important in my mind is their tendency to unearth forgotten treasures. Allen Baron's Blast of Silence definitely qualifies, a grim, gritty noir about a hitman carrying out an assignment during the Christmas season. In many ways, the film feels ahead of its time, with Lionel Stander's narration- delivered in the second person- translating wonderfully to our post-Tarantino age. Blast of Silence is ripe for rediscovery by a new generation, and this Criterion release should ensure it reaches the audience it deserves.

Of course, if it's something new you're looking for, there are a couple of those this week. For people looking for indie quirk, there's two different versions of the Oscar-nominated juggernaut Juno (Fox, also Blu-Ray), the two-disc special edition of which includes featurettes called Diablo Cody Is Totally Boss, Jason Reitman for Shizz, and Honest to Blog! Creating Juno. But if you've already gotten all the Juno you can handle, or you simply craving characters who don't talk in grating sound bites, there's also MGM's Lars and the Real Girl, which isn't perfect but which I preferred to its better-hyped counterpart.

In addition, this week also sees the release of Sidney Lumet's "comeback" vehicle Before the Devil Knows You're Dead. I wasn't nearly as big a fan of the film as Scott von Doviak was, but it's good to see Lumet still making films that are worth getting excited about.

And I would be remiss if I didn't at least mention the release of Dr. Boll's In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale (Fox). After catching this in theatres, I remarked to my friends that it was "not good, but kind of awesome," exactly the kind of movie that I would have enjoyed when I was ten years old and fantasy movies weren't as popular as they are now. If nothing else, it's more entertaining than this week's other think-at-your-own-peril new release, Aliens vs. Predator- Requiem (Fox, also Blu-Ray).

As for classics, there's not much outside of our DVD of the week. Fans of late, logy Lean films can get their fix with the release of the A Passage to India Collector's Edition (Sony, also Blu-Ray). Also of note is MGM's two-pack of Mannequin and Mannequin 2: On the Move, for those who are so inclined. And for TV fans, there's The Woody Woodpecker and Friends Classic Cartoon Collection: Volume 2 (Universal), MGM's Alien Nation: Ultimate Movie Collection (which is missing the original theatrical feature), and American Dad, Volume 3.

Finally, we arrive at the moment where I turn over the column to my friend and yours, Mr. David Huddleston. Not too many condolences this week, only Warner Brothers' HD-DVD release of Bonnie and Clyde. Still, Mr. Huddleston wishes that his condolences weren't necessary, and that the DVD companies would take the hint and get on the Blu-Ray bandwagon so he could make other, more enjoyable plans for his Tuesday mornings.

Forgotten Films: "Just Tell Me What You Want" (1980)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 20:00:00 GMT

In his the most recent film of his incredibly long, checkered, impressive career, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (out on DVD next week), director Sidney Lumet played to his strengths: his rapport with his actors, and his ability to tap into an energy that can be exciting even when it turns scabrous. Lumet turned those qualities on his own show-business-industry set in his 1980 comedy Just Tell Me What You Want, which came out early in 1980, got appalled reviews, and vanished from sight. Like much of Lumet's work, the movie is uneven and feels patched-together in places, but the very qualities that seemed to gross out critics at the time are part of what makes it such a bold, distinctive entertainment, a romantic comedy without illusions. It's cynical without being judgemental, which is so unusual that some reviewers may have had trouble believing what they were seeing. (Lumet got great reviews for some of his duller '80s films that were eager to point fingers at their characters' moral defects.)

Its hero, and its target, is Max Herschel, a self-made corporate head (played by the stand-up comic Alan King) who sees everything, including his love life, as a succession of deals to be made. Max is married (to a drug-addled, bejewelled WASP goddess played by Dina Merrill), but he's been juggling a long-term affair with a TV producer (Ali MacGraw), and when she leaves him for a playwright (Peter Weller) who represents artistic purity and uncommercial values, Max freaks. What makes his decision to wage war on his ex-girlfriend, by wrecking her career while offering her writer-lover the chance to corrupt himself by adapting his own work to the movies, weirdly charming is that, like Cary Grant in His Girl Friday, he's trying to win her back by bringing her to her senses. He's right to think that she really belongs in the executive suite with him instead of blowing on her fingers in a cold hovel playing muse to some proud literary loser. And Alan King, in his only starring movie role, makes Max a hard man to dislike. (The large, lively cast also includes Myrna Loy, smooth as silk in her final screen role as Max's secretary.) Just Tell Me What You Want may have been a few years ahead of its time; a year after its release, Ronald Reagan was president, manipulative rich bastards were on their way to being redefined as glamorous "Masters of the Universe", and in People magazine and on TV series such as Dynasty, Americans were cheering on pushy, multimillionaire hustlers without a fraction of Max's charm. It might be the tragedy of Donald Trump's life that he had to settle for playing himself instead of staying home and letting Alan King do it for him.

New York Magazine Picks the New Yorkiest Movies Since 1968

Phil Nugent — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 15:00:00 GMT

To celebrate its fortieth anniversary, New York magazine has set its writers to assemble a "canon" of cultural works (books, music, TV, movies) from the last forty years that "capture something emblematic about New York." This, as David Edelstein's list of movies makes clear, isn't necessarily about selecting the best, nor is it limited to movies made by New Yorkers in New York: El Topo is here, for its role in creating that urban institution, the midnight movie. (By a felicitous quirk of timing, the first title on the list is Planet of the Apes with Charlton Heston, for its indelible closing image of the Statue of the Liberty after a wild weekend.) Also cited: Mean Streets, The Godfather, Part II, Taxi Driver, Dog Day Afternoon, Death Wish, The French Connection, Shaft, Deep Throat, Annie Hall, Saturday Night Fever, Tootsie, Wild Style, My Dinner with Andre, Stranger Than Paradise, and Wall Street.

Edelstein sort of half-apologizes for having picked so many movies from the 1970s, but how could it be otherwise? It was in the seventies that Hollywood declared studio lots passe and invaded the city with film crews, which were often manned by smart-ass native New Yorkers like Sidney Lumet, Paul Mazursky, and Brian De Palma, whose sensibilities came through so strongly that thet sometimes seemed to be making a "New York movie" even when they weren't. The American movie renaissance of the seventies is inextricably tied up with the breakdown of "the ungovernable city" in the same period; at the same time that the country at large was so attuned to the virtues associated with New York that Woody Allen could emerge as a sex symbol, the city went bankrupt and all but imploded, and the movies were here to record that. Movies as great as Scorsese's early features and as klutzy as Shaft all double as time capsules that tap into the urban chaos and make it look exciting, which is why there are people now who are nostalgic for the "good, old" (pre-Disneyfied) Times Square of hookers, three-card monte, and garbage-strewn streets. Movies don't feel as if they have that kind of combined impact anymore, though one movie that tried hard was Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, which both Edelstein and Lee credit with helping to drive Ed Koch from office. In an accompanying Q & A, Lee appears to also take credit for hooking up Barack and Michelle Obama, since "Barack told me the first date he took Michelle to was Do the Right Thing. I said, 'Thank God I made it.'" Timing is everything. If they'd met a year earlier or a year later, and he'd taken her to School Daze or Mo' Better Blues, she might have gone right home and changed her phone number.

Famous Last Words: Round 1, Week 5

Paul Clark — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 20:00:00 GMT

It seems that most high schoolers in the U.S. have to sit through a screening of Sidney Lumet's 12 Angry Men at least once in civics class. But with its totemic presence as the pre-eminent celebration of American jurisprudence, it's sometimes overlooked how terrific it is as a film. Reginald Rose's justly acclaimed screenplay has spawned hundreds of regional theatre productions and at least two remakes. But none has quite lived up to the original, which is a tribute to both the excellent ensemble- which includes Henry Fonda, Martin Balsam, Lee J. Cobb, E.G. Marshall, Jack Klugman, Jack Warden, and Ed Begley- and Lumet's direction, which turns the jury room where nearly all the action takes place into a kind of pressure cooker as the day drags on. Congrats to all those who guessed it.

This week, we've got another multi-line quote for you. See if this rings a bell:

“I think I’m all right.”
“Maybe the next time, darling. Maybe the next time."

As always, submit your guesses to famouslastwords@nerve.com. For a list of rules, click right here. And remember, all guesses for this week's quiz are due in by next Wednesday at 11:59 PM Eastern. Good luck!

The Rep Report (February 7--14)

Phil Nugent — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 18:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Over the course of a remarkably long career, Sidney Lumet has taken a crack at directing just about every kind of movie, while making a certain kind of film — the high-energy, acting-centered New York melodrama — his own. Last year he enjoyed a bit of a comeback with his 44th feature film, Before the Devil Know You're Dead, so the career retrospective at the Film Forum that kicks off this Friday with the 1976 Network couldn't be more timely. Highlights include Long Day's Journey into Night starring Katherine Hepburn, Ralph Richardson, Jason Robards, and Dean Stockwell, the greatest production of Eugene O'Neill ever caught on film and the high point of Lumet's sideline as a TV-trained specialist in filming plays; The Hill (1965), The Anderson Tapes, and The Offense, all of which feature powerfully charged performances by Sean Connery, an actor who Lumet was prescient in seeing as having the potential to be more than James Bond; and of course the two "based on a true story" films co-starring Al Pacino and the city of New York, Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon, which had such an impact that Lumet and his star could have practically taken out a copyright on Fun City in the seventies. Also, from 1939: One Percent of a Nation, a little-seen, independently produced New York film that includes the only record of the director's work as an actor. (He was fifteen at the time.) On Monday, February 11, the director will appear in person to discuss his career in "An Evening with Sidney Lumet", to be moderated by historian Foster Hirsch.

On the afternoon of Sunday, February 10, the Museum of the Moving Image will host "A Tribute to St. Clair Bourne", in honor of the documentary filmmaker, who died last December. The critic Armond White, film and literary scholar Clyde Taylor, Black Enterprise columnist George Alexander, and journalist and poet Esther Iverem will discuss the filmmaker's career and show clips of his work.

PORTLAND: The 31st Annual International Portland Film Festival opens Thursday, February 7 and runs through the 23rd, offering more than two weeks worth of jam-packed programming of feature films and shorts from around the world, in the city that Scott Favor and Bob Pigeon were proud to call home.

Paste Magazine's Art House 100

Phil Nugent — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Paste magazine has published its "Art House Powerhouse 100", devoted to listing "the people behind the movies we love." The feature is self-consciously designed to serve as an alternative to the other "power lists" that such magazines as Vanity Fair and Entertainment Weekly get such a thrill out of assembling, with Paste's list striving to determine, "Who are the power players in the world of quality cinema? What individuals and organizations make intelligent, well-crafted movies and have the profile, financial resources and/or critical esteem to attract discerning audiences? In short, we looked for those at the intersection of art and commerce who make independent film the viable and sustainable industry that we’ve come to enjoy." After that buildup, the magazine proceeds to serve up a list of names that for the most part will not be unfamiliar to many people with a passing interest in high-profile moviemaking a little further off the beaten track than say. Transformers. But if few of them have been starving for media attention, most of them are certainly deserving of a pat on the back. The lists of directors (which includes Martin Scorsese, the Coen brothers, Paul Thomas Anderson, David Lynch, David Cronenberg, Todd Haynes, Tim Burton, Guillermo del Toro, Michael Winterbottom, Stephen Frears, and comeback kid Sidney Lumet) and actors (among them Naomi Watts, Viggo Mortensen, Laura Linney, Forest Whitaker, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Cate Blanchett, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Don Cheadle, Daniel Day-Lewis, Cillian Murphy, Ryan Gosling, Johnny Depp, and Javier Bardem), can be found at the website. The hard copy, available at your local newstand, also tots up noteworthy cinematographers (such as Roger Deakins, the hard-working D.P. on No Country for Old Men, In the Valley of Elah, and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford) and producers, as well as listing the magazine's favorite film festivals.

Paul Clark Predicts the Oscar Nominees

Paul Clark — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 19:00:00 GMT

"Nobody knows anything." Screenwriter William Goldman immortalized that phrase a few decades ago, and it's as true this Oscar season as it's always been. Perhaps even more so — not only are many Oscar races still wide-open, but the status of the ceremony itself is up in the air. But for now the show is still happening, which means the nominations are set to be announced tomorrow morning. Here are my hasty, shot-in-the-dark predictions in the top six categories:

Best Picture:
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Into the Wild
Juno
Michael Clayton
No Country for Old Men

I think we can all agree that No Country is in, right? Beyond that, it's something of a crap shoot. Michael Clayton is the kind of classy star vehicle the Academy usually responds to, and audience favorite Juno has become too big a word of mouth phenomenon to ignore. At one point, Atonement was looking like a front-runner for the win, but its Oscar buzz has subsided. On the other side of the coin, There Will Be Blood may be too bleak for the voters to embrace — it would have a better chance were it the year's undisputed critical champ, but with No Country in the mix, PTA's masterpiece could be shut out here. Instead, I'm predicting The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, an acclaimed true-life story that's only gaining momentum, and Into the Wild, the year's most Oscar-baity film directed by a respected actor, which is something that tends to go over well with the actor-filled Academy membership.

Best Actor:
George Clooney, Michael Clayton
Daniel Day-Lewis, There Will Be Blood
Johnny Depp, Sweeney Todd
Emile Hirsch, Into the Wild
Viggo Mortensen, Eastern Promises

Even if the Academy decides to overlook There Will Be Blood, they won't be able to deny the awesomeness of Day-Lewis' blazing performance as Plainview. Likewise, Clooney and Depp have recently become Academy favorites, and I dare say that had Sweeney Todd done more business Depp would've been the one to beat here. Hirsch is a bit iffier here given his age, but he carries Into the Wild on his capable shoulders, and if the film gets nominated I'm guessing he will be too. With the recent groundswell for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, I think Matthieu Amalric should be seen as a contender here, although not nearly as much as if he was an American star. Instead, I'm going with Mortensen — Eastern Promises didn't exactly set the world on fire, but his performance was the highlight, and I think voters will take the opportunity to honor him not only for this role but also for his overlooked turns in A History of Violence and the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Best Actress:
Amy Adams, Enchanted
Julie Christie, Away From Her
Marion Cotillard, La Vie en Rose
Angelina Jolie, A Mighty Heart
Ellen Page, Juno

Throughout this awards season, three names kept popping up in this rare — Christie, Cotillard, and Page. So it's pretty safe to assume they'll make it in. That leaves us two spots in a relatively weak year for buzzed-about performances (sadly, Black Book's Carice Van Houten has no traction whatsoever). With very little competition, Jolie should make the cut — the film didn't make much of a dent, but her stardom has kept her in the race. The final spot is anyone's guess. High-profile star turns (Jodie Foster in The Brave One, Cate Blanchett in Elizabeth: The Golden Age) have flopped at the box office, while respected performers in independent films (notably Laura Linney in The Savages) have been lost in the year-end shuffle. That leaves Amy Adams in Enchanted, a star-making performance by a previous nominee in a hit movie that's still fresh in people's minds.

Best Director:
Paul Thomas Anderson, There Will Be Blood
Joel and Ethan Coen, No Country for Old Men
Tony Gilroy, Michael Clayton
Sean Penn, Into the Wild
Julian Schnabel, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

At this point, Best Director is the Coens' to lose. Even if someone else takes home Best Picture, I think it's still their year in this category. I also think the Directors Branch will be impressed by Sean Penn's metamorphosis into serious filmmaker, as well as Schnabel's unconventional, inspired filmmaking choices in Diving Bell. For this year's semi-obligatory non-Best Picture-nominated director, I'm predicting Anderson, a respected maverick whose filmmaking chops in There Will Be Blood are undeniable even if the film itself is too much for some audiences. Of the two remaining Best Picture nominees, I think Gilroy has the edge over Juno's Jason Reitman for two reasons: (1) crowd-pleasing comedies tend to get shut out of this category, and (2) Gilroy is a veteran screenwriter makes an impressive directorial debut. But don't be surprised if another "lone director" — say, Sidney Lumet for Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, or Tim Burton for Sweeney Todd — gets the nod instead.

Best Supporting Actor:
Javier Bardem, No Country for Old Men
Philip Seymour Hoffman, Charlie Wilson's War
Hal Holbrook, Into the Wild
Tommy Lee Jones, No Country for Old Men
Tom Wilkinson, Michael Clayton

In a year without Bardem, this race might have come down to Grand Old Actor Holbrook vs. veteran character actor Wilkinson. But Bardem casts a long shadow over this category, with Chigurh the creepiest villain in an Oscar-feted film since Hannibal Lecter. Charlie Wilson's War wasn't the Oscar juggernaut that it was predicted to be, but I still think Hoffman's scene-stealing turn will make it in. I think this year's biggest surprise will be the absence of Casey Affleck's performance in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Affleck's the only serious competition Bardem has had among the precursor awards, but Jesse James was a box-office flop and Affleck's performance could give voters the willies. Max Von Sydow's affecting turn in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly might have had a chance here — as a means of honoring one of the world's most esteemed actors and, by extension, his recently-departed longtime collaborator Ingmar Bergman — except that he might not have enough screentime to be a contender. Instead, I'm giving the edge to Jones, an Academy favorite who came roaring back this year to give two acclaimed performances after a decade's worth of commercial crap.

Best Supporting Actress:
Cate Blanchett, I'm Not There
Catherine Keener, Into the Wild
Kelly MacDonald, No Country for Old Men
Amy Ryan, Gone Baby Gone
Tilda Swinton, Michael Clayton

Once again, three names keep popping up in this category: Blanchett, Ryan, and Swinton. I think they'll all get nominated, though who will win remains to be seen (early shot-in-the-dark prediction: a Swinton upset). The other two spots are less certain. But consider that, more than any other category, the Best Supporting Actress nominees are largely composed of performers who starred opposite other Oscar nominees. In this respect, I think contenders such as Ruby Dee in American Gangster, Marisa Tomei in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, and especially Saoirse Ronan in Atonement, are at a disadvantage here. Instead, I'm predicting the fourth spot to go to Catherine Keener, getting her third nomination in this category for her moving turn in Into the Wild. The final slot comes down to Jennifer Garner in Juno and Kelly MacDonald in No Country for Old Men. Despite Garner's greater name recognition, I'm giving the edge to MacDonald, both for No Country's frontrunner status and for playing one of Oscar's favorite characters, the supportive, long-suffering wife. But honestly, it could go either way.

Watch for the Oscar nominations tomorrow, January 22. And remember, nobody knows anything.

Top 10 of 2007: Scott Von Doviak

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 19:30:00 GMT

People say I’m a weenie for thinking this, but I feel these year-end top ten lists should be handled like the Hall of Fame: there should be a five-year waiting period in order to avoid any embarrassing blunders. Believe me, I have a record of top tens dating back to 1999 preserved forever on the Internet, and never fail to experience twinges of regret, shivers of shame and head-scratching moments of pure bewilderment when I look back at them. I’d feel much better right now if I were compiling my favorites of 2002, but rules are rules, so here are 10 movies I hope I won’t feel terrible about praising when 2012 rolls around:

10. Zodiac

For about three-quarters of its running time, David Fincher’s serial killer procedural is about as engrossing, stylish and smartly assembled as mainstream cinema gets, expertly evoking the 1970s (Mark Ruffalo, in particular, transforms himself into a broody ’70s actor in the De Niro/Pacino mode) and humanizing a story that could have been run-of-the-mill exploitation. It’s penalized a few notches here for running out of gas in the final reels: those scenes between the obsessed investigator and his long-suffering wife were already old and tired in the ’70s.

9. Juno

The first five minutes of Juno are so overloaded with quirkiness, it’s as if director Jason Reitman and screenwriter Diablo Cody are desperate enough to make an immediate impression that they’ll settle for making a bad one. That the movie is able to not only recover but go on to become an affecting (and very funny) story about real people making difficult choices is a tribute to their talent, and especially that of Ellen Page in a star-making performance as the titular pregnant teen.

8. Knocked Up

Why settle for one unplanned pregnancy comedy when 2007 was fertile enough to produce twins? You could quibble about gender politics, but then you’d miss out on some of the year’s biggest laughs courtesy of the ever-expanding Apatow Comedy Empire. (Honorable mention: Superbad. Not so much: Walk Hard.)

7. Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead

Speaking of movies that recover from the opening five minutes, here’s one that treats you to the sight of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s heaving, flabby buttocks obscuring some delightful Marisa Tomei nudity (don’t worry, though – there’s plenty of that later). In what is not so much a comeback as a rejuvenation, octogenarian Sidney Lumet has crafted a twisty tale of familial betrayal enlived by a Hoffman performance so vivid, you can smell the desperation.

6. Breach

Billy Ray makes his own special brand of what one friend of the Screengrab refers to as “guys in suits” movies. Like Ray’s debut Shattered Glass, Breach is a low-key yet subtly gripping thriller about a man whose life of lies crumbles within the institution that has defined him. In this case, that man is contradictory CIA agent Robert Hanssen (Chris Cooper, never better), a deeply religious, sexually kinky traitor to his country. No 007-style glamour and action here; the suspense emerges from the mundane but meticulously detailed life of a Cold War spy trying to stay one step ahead of his colleagues.

5. Deep Water

Sure, having too much money and free time sounds like fun, but that way of life is not without its pitfalls. This fascinating, disquieting documentary details a 1968 solo sailboat race around the world, and the amateur sailor, Donald Crowhurst, who pinned his family’s future on the whim of winning it. Pieced together from newsreels, Crowhurst’s original 16mm film and contemporary interviews, what begins as a bracing tale of men against the sea becomes a full-blown descent into madness.

4. Killer of Sheep

I am assured by publicists that Charles Burnett’s 1977 thesis film counts as a 2007 release, so there’s no reason not to include it here. This stark slice of inner city life finds drama in the smallest moments; even the routine purchase of a used motor becomes an exercise in heartbreaking futility. Never stooping to heavy-handed message-making, Sheep packs an emotional wallop in the end.

3. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters

Don’t wait for the inevitable scripted remake of this simple tale of two men vying for the world’s record high score in Donkey Kong. It won’t begin to capture the wit, drama and humanity of Seth Gordon’s outrageously entertaining documentary. Pitting an ’80s relic coasting on past glories against a regular guy with a history of failures in life, overseen by an indelible gallery of game-geeks and marked with unexpected developments and reversals of fate, it’s the most purely joyful movie experience of the year.

2. No Country for Old Men

For much of the decade Joel and Ethan Coen looked like they were heading down the long road of diminishing returns, but they came all the way back with this transcendent thriller set on the Texas border. The most faithful adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel imaginable, it still couldn’t be anything other than a Coen Brothers movie. The brilliant suspense sequences and Javier Bardem’s chilling turn as a malevolent killer are the obvious attractions, but it’s the final lyrical moments that linger when the lights come up.

1. I’m Not There

Less perfect in every way than No Country, this fractured Bob Dylan biopic is nonetheless my pick for movie of the year. Scrambling the singer-songwriter’s legend and bouncing it off a series of funhouse mirrors, director Todd Haynes delights in the ever-more distorted reflections that result. Six different actors embody various aspects of the Bard, none more memorably than Cate Blanchett, who virtually channels Dylan’s hipster-dandy incarnation. It’s a dazzling mind-fuck for hardcore Dylan fans and perhaps a complete trainwreck for anyone else, but as a biography of an artistic sensibility – warts and all – it can’t be topped.

Is David Lynch Serious?

Peter Smith — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 17:00:00 GMT

The answer to that question could fill a book. This time around, though, it’s Guardian film blogger Danny Leigh asking the question, and Lynch’s recent claim that he’ll never again shoot on film that’s at issue. (Sidney Lumet has also stated recently that he’s done with celluloid, but somehow, that announcement doesn’t have quite the same impact.) Leigh wonders if Lynch would ever have become the filmmaker he is today if he’d had the option to go digital early in his career, and it’s a fair enough question; the trouble is, he starts off the piece by asking if we’re ready for Inland Empire II. Frankly, some of us weren’t even ready for the first one. (Elsewhere in the Guardian, Leigh asks if, in light of recent dismal box office performances, the golden age of the documentary is over. We didn’t even know we were in one.) — Leonard Pierce

Whitefield at NYFF: Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead

Peter Smith — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 19:00:00 GMT

Let it not be said that I don’t respect Sidney Lumet. I read his book Making Movies and found it both practical and enlightening. I loved Dog Day Afternoon (who doesn’t?) and Running on Empty. But let’s face facts. Lumet is eighty-three. He made 12 Angry Men in 1957 — fifty years ago! When you receive a lifetime achievement award at the Oscars, you can probably read that as Hollywood’s polite way of saying, "It’s a wrap." Apparently Mr. Lumet is hard of hearing.

Though not nearly as bad as his last film, Find Me Guilty, Before The Devil Knows You're Dead turns out to be twice as frustrating, as it squanders an outstanding cast and a knockout script. Lumet chose to go the Tarantino/Babel route and skew the story’s narrative timeline, but by doing so he takes all the suspense out of what could have been huge dramatic windfalls by giving you three major (and I mean major) plot twists within the first fifteen minutes. As if that wasn’t crime enough, each time sequence change is signaled by the two frames locking into one another as opposing triangles in a square that click and spin into the next scene. This and the poor film quality make Before The Devil Knows You're Dead look like a made-for-tv movie circa 1991.

A dream cast of Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ethan Hawke, Albert Finney and a remarkably sexy Marisa Tomei do an admirable job of trying to prop this dog up on four legs, but in the end it’s just too much to ask. The film’s story spirals from tragic family drama of epic proportions into the realm of the absurd, with plot points that are increasingly unbelievable and distracting. The person I feel the worst for is first-time screenwriter Kelly Masterson, who probably thought her dream had come true when she heard Lumet would bring her script to life, only to find herself the victim of an outdated director. I can only imagine the kind of film someone like Rian Johnson (Brick) or Christopher Nolan would have made given the exact same elements. — Bryan Whitefield