The Screengrab : songwriter

Phil's Film Faves, Part Two

Phil Nugent — Tue, 26 May 2009 19:00:00 GMT

STOP MAKING SENSE (1984) & SOMETHING WILD (1986)

Jonathan Demme's movies were essential to my having survived the 1980s. I had the closest thing I've ever had to a religious experience during the week when I saw Stop Making Sense five times; I've never seen another movie, including dance films and martial arts flicks, that conveyed to me so much of the pleasure of physicality, of moving your body, and there was something about seeing all those people joining their skills together and losing themselves in the shared experience of being simultaneously brainy, goofy, and hot that suggested everything I wanted to get, and never got, from college. The mixed-tape road trip of Something Wild, where the wild weekend gives way to a trial by fire that leaves the hero and heroine stronger, was everything I wanted out of the rest of life, including the handcuffs and the used-car-salesman cameo by John Waters.

RE-ANIMATOR (1985)

I've always loved horror movies, I've always loved comedy, and I've always loved the idea of comic horror midnight movies that go just far enough in the direction oftoo far. Maybe if more movies that light out in this direction got it right, it would matter less to me that Stuart Gordon got this one just right. But most of them don't.

DUCK SOUP (1933)

What I just said about midnight movies? It goes double for crackhouse-rat comedy.

SONGWRITER (1984)

This movie, starring Willie Nelson and Rip Torn, written by Bud Shrake, and directed by Alan Rudolph during those three weeks a decade when his meds are working, captures the spirit and flavor of Texas hipsterdom as it has always come across in the best of Nelson's music, Torn's acting, and Shrake's writing, and that's about as hip as things get in the South. I myself, a product of the Louisiana/Mississippi border, have spent about a month total in Texas my whole life, but am not above resorting to a contact high.

BEFORE SUNRISE (1995)

Can we talk? I don't get girls. Never have, never will. I miss signals, I misread situations, I don't know...I just don't get girls, okay? And if I may presume to speak for the losers of the world for a second, being one of those people who doesn't get anywhere with other people in that way can sometimes make it a sobering experience to sit in the dark watching a lot of movies in which couple effortlessly hook up. But if I ever saw a movie in which my own fantasy of the best way you could hook up with somebody, this is probably it. Two nice, smart people just run into each other, take a chance, and for as long as the movie is running, it pays off, only to end with a cliffhanger. The director, Richard Linklater, later resolved things with his sequel, Before Sunset, and I like it fine, but I think I may have enjoyed the nine intervening years of wondering even more.

I met Linklater once, not that he would remember. It was at a festival where he was showing his first movie, Slacker, and someone tried to introduce the two of us, and I actually, fairly elaborately snubbed him, because I'd heard about--hadn't seen--his movie and thought it sounded like a pile of shit. After snubbing him (and mortifying the person trying to make the introductions(, I walked away invisibly pinning a medal to my chest, and the last time I looked back at Linklater, he was smiling at me in a very nice way that I may only imagine seemed to say, "Gee, before I made a movie, this fellow would be one of the biggest jackasses I've ever met, but now, he wouldn't even make my personal top 500!" Maybe I don't deserve to get girls.

MAGNOLIA (1999)

I could get very personal here too, but I'll just say that I saw this movie at a moment when I very badly needed to see this movie. It is, of course, the movie that, of all P. T. Anderson's works, is the one most likely to get a shoe thrown at you if you sing its praises before a mixed audience. Both these facts probably have something to do with the fact that, while there are other movies of Anderson's that I think are better, his having made this one is the reason I'd be happy to take a bullet for him.

Screengrab's Favorite Movies About Music: Fiction Edition (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 21:00:00 GMT

TRUE STORIES (1986)

In a recent interview on The Colbert Report, David Byrne admitted that edgy artists like himself often fear being normal and that while he’s “getting over it” now, there was a time when he was neurotic about enjoying ordinary things or being like everyone else. This brainy misfit’s ambivalence about the straight world enlivens the companion film of the 1986 Talking Heads album True Stories...or maybe the album was the companion to Byrne’s directorial debut about a small Texas town’s sesquicentennial “Celebration of Special-ness,” where the inhabitants (played by John Goodman, Swoosie Kurtz and fellow misfit Spalding Gray, among others) are viewed from a bemused, extraterrestrial distance by Byrne’s Our Town-ish narrator, who may or may not find the “common folk” around him fascinating, ridiculous, contemptible, endearing, inspiring and/or weirder than himself. It perhaps speaks to Byrne’s singular creative vision that I’ve never really seen another movie quite like True Stories, what with its largely plotless structure, catchy musical numbers (including the anthemic “Wild, Wild Life”) and dreamy visuals of late-night traffic stops, avant-garde fashions and a big stage in the middle of the desert where everyone, ultimately, seems welcome to fret and strut...unless the whole thing is really just an elaborate performance art put-on, full of sound and irony, signifying nothing.

THE HARDER THEY COME (1972)

The first feature made in Jamaica (by the late director Perry Henzell) stars Jimmy Cliff as an aspiring pop star who winds up on the run with a gun in his hand, which turns out to be an excellent career move. This movie didn't attract much attention at first when it opened in the States, but when it hit as a long-running midnight movie, its influence turned out to be lasting and deep, especially when its soundtrack album, featuring classics by the Maytals, the Melodians, and Desmond Dekker as well as four new songs by Cliff, instantly became everybody's favorite compact reggae sampler. The film itself captures a world never before seen on film: a sun-baked lanscape where people who dress in bright Pop-Art colors live in squalid poverty row landscapes, so that it makes a kind of sense that someone could cross over from aspiring singer to public enemy number one as easily as crossing the street.

PAYDAY (1973)

Rip Torn makes the most of his rare starring role as Maury Dann, a country music celebrity crossing the country one low-rent concert date at a time in a two-car caravan. Directed by Daryl Duke from an original script by the novelist Don Carpenter, this movie doesn't exactly celebrate music or the musician's life: nobody would have bought the soundtrack album, if the studio had bothered to release one. But it's just about peerless as a snapshot of the second- or third-tier musician's life at its least rewarding. The expert supporting cast includes one of the long-lost great character actresses of the '70s, Ahna Capri, perfectly cast as the one mistress likely to not only stand up to Torn but finally push him too far.

SONGWRITER (1984)

Bud Shrake, the sportswriter and journalist who later co-wrote Willie Nelson's autobiography, cooked up this script for Nelson and Kris Kristofferson to star in; a comic celebration of the sagacity and self-preservation skills of a uniquely self-reliant and unstable race of people, it looks as if Shrake and his buds had read one too many references in the music press to country music "outlaws" and thought, You want outlaws, I'll give you outlaws. The film is also graced with one of the funniest of Rip Torn's wild man turns as a bearded music promoter who is not above armed robbery when his attempts to collect all the money in the surrounding area through less threatening means of persuasion prove unsuccessful. The only way this movie could be more entertaining would be if Torn's character had been able to face off against his character from Payday in a steel cage death match.

BANDWAGON (1996)

Ah, to be young and naive and forming a band for the first time! John Schultz, who has made nothing but bottom-feeding Hollywood dreck ever since, directed this film about young people who are a little naive and the band they form and take on the road. Kevin "If I'm In It, It Debuted At Sundance" Corrigan and Doug "Lead Singer of the Connells" MacMillan are about as close as this movie gets to having name actors. It has the common problems of many a little debut indie film, such as amateurish actors and an occasional loss of focus. These are all forgiveable sins. The way that Schultz captures the feeling of the road is inspired and obviously the result of hard-earned wisdom. There's the initial thrill, then the frustration of playing gigs for not quite enough people to call your audience a "handful," the sheer pleasure of making music, the growing realization that you can't stand some of the people you make music with, the tedium, the smell, the damn van that keeps breaking down, the poverty, the ashtrays, floors, dirty clothes, and filthy jokes. Makes one grow nostalgic, is what it does. Schultz was the original drummer of The Connells, and I realize that I should explain that The Connells were (or are? Are they still a going concern?) a North Carolina-based indie rock band who produced a fine string of power pop albums throughout the '80s and into the '90s. I don't think it's a stretch to say that Bandwagon is the result of his time on the road with his band. Anyway, the plot is simple: Tony has written some songs about a girl named Ann. Tony and some acquaintances put a band together and go on tour. A record label is interested in them, but they are a little dubious. There's some lovely details along the way, such as Tony's stage fright, which leads him to play with his back to the audience. When Corrigan's character Wynn gets upset, he wants to go fishing, anywhere and now. The purely symbolic act of placing a guitar on train tracks has the sudden and obvious conclusion. When Ann shows up, she likes Tony's most obnoxious bandmate more than him. Great stuff, and sadly hard-to-find at the moment.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Four & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Hayden Childs

The Rep Report (February 27 - March 5)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 18:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: It's a great week for wild men in the Big Apple repertory scene. The Italian-born Marco Ferreri was the kind of artist who is unimaginable without the 1960s but who wasn't quite of the '60s: he was the kind of older, shaggy figure who was attracted to exploring ideas of liberation, revolution, self-transformation, and chaos but who was never easily convinced that they led to utopia. An eight-film DVD box set of Ferreri's work was released here last year; with any luck, it might create a new audience for such works as La Grande Bouffe and Tales of Ordinary Madness (starring Ben Gazzara as a stand-in for Charles Bukowski). One film not included in the set is the 1969 Dillinger Is Dead, which, starting today, plays for a week in a new 35 mm. print at BAM. The film stars the pre-eminent French Mr. Smooth of his generation, Michel Piccoli, who comes home one night for a long evening of cooking, gun-polishing, and soul-searching while his missus, played by Keith Richards muse Anita Pallenberg, is zonked out in the bedroom. Dillinger does not come our way often, so this screening is highly recommended.

Actors like Rip Torn don't come dancing down the main drag every day, either, and it's hard to think of another irascible, once-borderline-unemployable thespian crazy who's mellowed into such a surefire entertainer without losing much of his edge, piss, and vinegar. Anthology Film Archives has concocted a mini-Rip Torn festival that begins next Thursday with Maidstone, the legendary Norman Mailer improv party that ends with our hero, dissatisfied with the ending Mailer had settled for, trying to juice things up by attacking his director with a hammer after Mailer thought the shoot had wrapped, and 1973's Payday, arguably the finest full-length showcase of Torn's career, in which he stars as a third-rate country music star barnstorming across the back roads while his fuse gets shorter and shorter and his heart rate gets perilously faster. The retrospective, which runs for a couple of weeks, also includes Alan Rudolph and writer Bud Shrake's joyously entertaining Songwriter, in which Rip demonstrates that he may be the only man alive who can turn Willie Nelson into his straight man; the little-seen 1970 Tropic of Cancer, starring Rip as Henry Miller; Milton Moses Ginsburg's Coming Apart, a virtual one-man show with Rip as a demented psychiatrist filming himself in a mirror; Beyond the Law, another Mailer psychodrama; and the more recent 40 Shades of Blue, starring the grizzled older Torn as a legendary Southern music producer. There's also a special program labeled "A Rip Torn Miscellanea", consisting of "rare footage of Torn, including documentation of some of his renowned stage performances, forgotten talk-show appearances, excerpts from some of his lesser-known film and TV work," including a half-hour TV film from 1976 in which he plays Walt Whitman.

SAN FRANCISCO: At the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, "Fearless: Strand Releasing Turns 20" is in full swing and continues through Saturday and continues from March 6 through March 8. This celebration of the risk-taking distributor's films includes a double feature from the neglected French director-actor Jacques Nolot, Before I Forget and Porn Theater.

BERKELEY: "Women’s Cinema from Tangiers to Tehran" at Pacific Film Archives (March 1 - April 29) is a "celebration of women filmmakers from North Africa and the Middle East, as well as the diaspora in Europe" that offers "a remarkable geographic, cultural, and stylistic range. In documentaries, features, and experimental works, the directors depict urban attitudes and rural traditions, the dream of escape and the isolation of exile, and the comforts and entrapments of family." Director-actress Niki Karimi will be present at the opening-day screenings of her One Night and A Few Days Later... The program also includes Iranian director Marziyeh Meshkini's wrenching The Day I Became a Woman and Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud's animated memoir Persepolis.

COLUMBIA, MISSOURI: The True/False Film Festival, which kicked off last night and runs through the weekend, is an international documentary festival with a fast-growing reputation based on the breadth and quality of its selections, which last year included this year's Academy Award winner for Best Documentary Feature, Man on Wire. indieWIRE has an interview with festival founders David Wilson and Paul Sturtz.

America the Beautiful: 15 Movies That Show What's RIGHT With U.S. (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 20:00:00 GMT

It’s easy to criticize America (and, in fact, we did...just last week, with our list of movies showing what’s wrong with the U.S.). Yet, as we fire up the grills and sparklers for the long Independence Day weekend, it’s worth noting that, for all the flaws of our presidents, our corporations and ourselves, we’ve still managed to accomplish some amazing things: declaring independence, defeating the Nazis, putting a man on the moon, Wall*E, etc.

So, just for a moment, let's all put down those copies of Mother Jones and the Noam Chomsky Reader, switch off Fox News and simply join together in commemorating fifteen films that remind us why the United States is still a nation worth celebrating.

1776 (1972)

Let’s start at the very beginning, shall we? Sure, Stephen Dillane, Tom Wilkinson and Paul Giamatti were good as Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin and the eponymous revolutionary in HBO’s recent miniseries, John Adams... but in my book, Ken “The White Shadow” Howard, Howard Da Silva and William “K.I.T.T.” Daniels’ definitive Adams have always been the Founding Fathers to beat. This cinematic adaptation of the Tony-award winning musical by Sherman Edwards and Peter Stone pumps blood (and catchy showtunes!) into the hoary old high school history class tale of the founding of America while actually managing to generate suspense about whether the Declaration of Independence will actually get signed by vividly detailing the players and dueling agendas (North vs. South, entitled conservatives vs. scrappy progressives, same as it ever was) involved in Philadelphia’s pressure cooker Second Continental Congress of 1776. With all the story’s passion and pathos (Adams’ tender affection for his truly better half, Abigail, Jefferson’s overpowering lust for his new bride, Martha, the bloody cost of independence paid by the young soldiers in the fields of Lexington and Concord), the songs (“Yours, Yours, Yours”, “He Plays the Violin,” the heartbreaking “Momma Look Sharp,” etc.) are never intrusive and fit quite nicely into the plot...including “Cool, Considerate Men” (sung by the movie’s conservative characters) which then-President Nixon wanted producer Jack Warner to remove from the movie for its clear-eyed assessment of the once and future G.O.P. and its mysterious appeal to voters whose interests it barely pretends to represent: “...don’t forget that most men without property would rather protect the possibility of becoming rich than face the reality of being poor...and that is why they will follow us to the right, ever to the right, never to the left, forever to the right!” And, while the film clearly sides with the progressives, it’s fairly even-handed in its presentation of the struggle for true independence in America. When Massachusetts homeboy Adams insists on anti-slavery language in the Declaration of Independence, John Cullum’s conservative South Carolina delegate Edward Rutledge slaps back at his smug liberal hypocrisy by pointing out New England’s intimate financial stake in the shipping industry that made the slave trade possible. Ultimately, of course, the warring factions manage to put aside their differences just long enough to form a more perfect union, birthing the nation and establishing a pattern of governance and congressional behavior that continues to this day: deadlock, division, short-sighted compromise and, every now and then, an inspiring historical moment. Happy Birthday, America!

YANKEE DOODLE DANDY (1942)

Okay, so it's pretty hokey. And yeah, it lacks the subtlety and nuance of many of the other films on this list. And sure, we'll even go as far as to say that Yankee Doodle Dandy – the 1942 biopic of George M. Cohan, starring an irrepressible James Cagney – is a bit jingoistic. But its rambunctious pro-American sentiment, at least, isn't at anyone else's expense: it's the story of a guy who thinks America is just swell, gosh darn it, and he'll be hanged if he isn't gonna let everybody know how swell it is. Indeed, it's even aware of its flag-waving nature, and revels in it: during his own lifetime, after all, Cohan was accused of being overly rah-rah, and responded by writing a serious, issues-driven play – which completely bombed. Audiences didn't want Cohan to be socially relevant. They wanted him to be a singing, dancing dynamo who celebrated the best things about their culture, so that's what he delivered; and Yankee Doodle Dandy does the same. Never a great hoofer (especially in a role originally intended for Fred Astaire) or the world's best singer, Cagney compensates for what he lacks in technical prowess with indefatigable energy, enthusiasm, and charisma. Working with the notoriously strict Casablanca director Michael Curtiz, Cagney managed to add a number of improvised bits that are, today, remembered fondly as some of the movie's best moments. Yankee Doodle Dandy is a big, dumb, fun movie that does nothing but put a gifted performer with a goofy smile in front of our faces to wave the flag for an hour, but sometimes, that's just what you need.

SONGWRITER (1984)

On any worthwhile list of the most beloved living Americans, you'd find Willie Nelson's name somewhere near the top. Beware false prophets claiming to be uniters, not dividers; it was Willie who brought together the hippies, the rednecks, the bikers and the good ol' boys when he moved to Austin in the '70s and helped launch the cosmic cowboy movement. He's the only longhaired stoner your grandmother loves, and the one guy we'd forgive for singing "To All the Girls I've Loved Before" without a second thought. There can be no more quintessentially American story than Willie's, and that makes Songwriter, a freewheeling take on the red-headed stranger's legend penned by Nelson biographer Bud Shrake, a quintessentially American – not to mention criminally under-appreciated – movie. One-time Altman protégé Alan Rudolph actually bests his mentor for once; with all due respect to Nashville, found elsewhere on this list, Songwriter is a warmer, wittier and wiser take on the country music scene and its denizens. Willie plays Doc Jenkins, a country superstar with no financial acumen but a genius for exploiting loopholes (such as playing multiple instruments on a record by a supposed 11-piece supergroup and collecting all the extra paychecks). His nemesis is Rodeo Rocky, a Chicago wiseguy in Nashville drag who has swindled Doc out of his copyrights. A showdown looms, but as Doc's erstwhile partner Blackie Buck (Kris Kristofferson) says, "I'm puttin' my money on a con man gypsy badass true blue legendary bandit hero. And when it's all over they can say he did it for the love, but he was not above the money." Con movies too often become mechanical exercises, but Songwriter is as relaxed and buoyant of spirit as a Willie Nelson concert on the Fourth of July.

THE MIRACLE OF MORGAN'S CREEK (1944)

The late Veronica Geng once wrote of the writer-director Preston Sturges that he "had a supreme gift for making people laugh without representing the world as better or worse than it is." Sturges saw America as a place where politics was crooked and rigged, business was crazy, and the few people who had any brains were liable to misplace them in the throes of passion. Yet his tone towards it all remained affectionate: he was a realist with a romantic streak who appreciated lunacy, corruption and chaos for their entertainment value and could forgive any thug his trespasses if he had a gaudy line of slang and a colorful croak with which to deliver it. (William Demarest never had a better patron.) Sturges knew that the little guy didn't always come out on top in America, but he felt that he should, and he used his movies to set about improving on reality. In this, his slapstick tribute to the virtues of the heartland as he saw them, Betty Hutton is Trudy Kockenlocker, a good small town girl whose response to the nation's call that our brave boys in uniform be shown the affection they deserve before heading overseas leaves her pregnant by some fellow whose face she can't remember, though she thinks his name might have been something like "Private Ratskywatsky." This development brings shame and disgrace on Trudy, her family, and her boyfriend Norval (Eddie Bracken), until Trudy gives birth to sextuplets, a feat that so impresses the newspapers and the clods who read them that she and Norval and proclaimed national heroes. Private Ratskywatsky could not be reached for comment.

WHY WE FIGHT (1942-1945)

Frank Capra, so the story goes, was terrified. The legendary director had seen a screening of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, and witnessed the power of cinema to sway the loyalties of an entire nation. Despite the attack on Pearl Harbor, America in the early days of World War II wasn't entirely certain, after the disaster of the First World War, that it wanted to be involved in another European conflict; Capra needed a way to counter the Nazi use of film as a propaganda medium, and convince a largely isolationist nation that this was a war worth fighting. His solution, produced in conjunction with the United States government, was Why We Fight. A series of seven documentaries (most about an hour long and initially targeted at American military men before their runaway popularity demanded they be shown to a receptive civilian audience as well), Why We Fight examined great battles, war crimes, and political differences between the democratic Allies and the fascist Axis. It was composed largely of stock footage, brilliantly edited together by Academy Award winner William Hornbeck, and enhanced by animations provided by Walt Disney Studios. The Why We Fight series is undoubtedly propaganda – it makes no pretense towards fairness or balance, contains more than a few factual distortions, and is meant to stir up the feelings of an entire nation in favor of a devastating war – but it is propaganda of the best kind, which helped the country understand that there were real humanitarian reasons for opposing Germany and Japan. One of the most celebrated works of filmmaking in American history, Why We Fight still has the power to stir the spirit today. Ironically, in a time when America has largely abandoned the moral leadership it carried in the Second World War, the documentary lent its name to another (2005) film which profoundly questioned our militaristic bent, but nothing can distract from the power and purpose of the original, which shows the American fighting spirit at its very best.

Click here for Part Two and Part Three

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent