The Screengrab : steven soderbergh

In Other Blogs: The Blogger Experience

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 22 May 2009 15:30:00 GMT

Some Came Running proprietor Glenn Kenny recounts his Girlfriend Experience at The Auteurs. Kenny has a role in the film that was pitched to him as “the Harry Knowles of internet escort reviewers.” Kenny was not immediately flattered. “Harry Knowles, if you don’t know, is famous for founding Aint It Cool News, a movie fan boy website of large popularity and no small industry influence. Knowles (and I hope he won't mind me saying this) is also, as Kyle on South Park would put it, a great big fat fuck. I am, hence, slightly put off.”

At Beyond the Multiplex, Andrew O’Hehir talks to Girlfriend Experience director Steven Soderbergh about his prolific, unpredictable career. “I'm always trying to be Howard Hawks, sure. I envy the opportunities that the studio directors got in the '30s and '40s. It was assumed that you would make more than one movie a year, and that that movie could be a western or a musical or a comedy or a drama. Very early on, before I made sex, lies, and videotape, I fantasized that I could have a career in which I could move around like that. It's not easy.”

Ali Arikan breaks from the Trek pack at The House Next Door. “Which is all by way of saying there is absolutely no nuance in J.J. Abrams’s film, not even a soupçon of subtlety, no genuine humour. It’s all piff-paff, whack-bang, etc, packed with heaps of post-modernist “irony” or whatever it is they call this bollocks. Nudge nudge, wink wink ahoy. We are all wallowing in a never-ending adolescence these days. So, instead of making us laugh, J.J. Abrams just wants to make us feel clever, and the whole thing becomes a big ego-massage”

Bright Lights After Dark considers the geography of 3 Women. “It's a point that many viewers miss, though it's difficult to blame them: Robert Altman's 3 Women is really "about" California, and quite distinctly so -- it doesn't belong to its contentual municipality in the sense that, say, Nashville does. And it's not about the psycho-sprawl urban California of Los Angeles or the spittle, cardboard and tinsel California of Hollywood or the plugged culture retro-future sophistry California of San Francisco. It's about the other California, by which one means the smattering of middle-of-nowhere cities always on the brink of suburbia these days, and always reminding us of somewhere else. The dusty, mid-western-like cock-and-bull towns that flank the interstate 5 with ranches and groves. The shattered-shell-and-hanging-kayak-wind-chime Mediterranean beach villas that dot the coastal region from Monterey to Santa Barbara. And, of course, the boilingly barren, frenziedly phallic desert settlements that circle the parched Mojave and Joshua Tree territories.”

And finally in List-o-Mania, Topless Robot offers the 10 Most Blatant Terminator Ripoffs, including Cyborg Cop. “A renegade cop (is there any other kind in these movies?) goes to the tropics to find his long lost brother, who has been transformed into a cybernetic killing machine by a mad scientist in this '93 movie. As the scientist, John Rhys-Davies seems to be under the impression he's filming an episode of Gilligan's Island as his performance has to be seen to be believed.”

Soderbergh: “Everybody on Television Looks Like They're in Porn”

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 16:00:00 GMT

The Guardian catches up with the hardest working man in show business, Steven Soderbergh, to chat about The Girlfriend Experience and the upcoming Moneyball. Screening the former at the Tribeca Film Festival, Soderbergh describes the low-budget Experience as “a very myopic view of a very small cross-section of people who are doing a certain thing in October of 2008.” The movie, which centers on a high-end escort played by porn star Sasha Grey, has the director seeing the world in XXX-ray vision.

"Porn is beyond everywhere now," he says. "Everybody on television looks like they're in porn, you know? I mean, the people that give you the news every day look like porn actors. The degree of coiffing that's going on is kind of disturbing." But Soderbergh insists his film offers something you just can’t get from Anal Cavity Search 6. "With Sasha, you can within seconds see her do anything you can imagine with her clothes off," Soderbergh acknowledges. "What you can't see is what it's like to be her boyfriend, to hang out with her and be emotionally intimate with her. So my whole theory is that's the fantasy for those who've been double-clicking – that they want to spend 77 minutes being her boyfriend."

Soderbergh populated the film with non-actors playing characters very similar to themselves, and that practice will continue with Moneyball, adapted from Michael Lewis’s nonfiction account of the Oakland A’s front office strategies. Although Brad Pitt will star as general manager Billy Beane, "at least 50-60% of the film is going to be populated by real people playing themselves," Soderbergh says. ("There are a lot of very nervous people at Sony right now," he adds.)

All that and The Informant, too; the whistleblower story starring Matt Damon will open this fall. And then there’s the 3-D Cleopatra musical in the works. "What's going to happen is that at a certain point I will just stop. I don't have, like, two speeds. I'll just stop."

Trailer Review: The Girlfriend Experience

Paul Clark — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 16:00:00 GMT

One of the most fascinating things about Steven Soderbergh’s career is the way he switches back and forth between ambitious studio fare and smaller-scaled indies, trusting those who care about his work to follow him between the two extremes. Ever since this first screened at Sundance this year, everything about this has intrigued me- the casting of a porn star (Sasha Grey) and a film critic (Screengrab favorite Glenn Kenny) in key roles, the awesome poster that premiered a few weeks ago, and now this trailer. Soderbergh’s films often have cool trailers- the Bubble teaser is a classic of the form- and this is one of Soderbergh’s better trailers thusfar. One thing that’s interesting is that Soderbergh seems to foreground the money aspect of this story rather than the sex- Out of Sight aside, Soderbergh has never had much interest in eroticism, and I’m curious to see his reasons for casting someone like Grey in the lead role. Also, this looks pretty bloody gorgeous- Peter Andrews is just getting better and better as a cinematographer, and if I didn’t know who he was I’d suggest that he work with other filmmakers. I can’t be the only who’d be amused by a film that was shot by Peter Andrews and cut by Roderick Jaynes, can I?

Morning Deal Report: David O. Russell and Christian Bale Get in the Ring

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 14:30:00 GMT

In recent weeks we’ve told you about two David O. Russell projects in the works, The Silver Linings Playbook and Aaron and Sarah. Now there’s a third, and this one is scheduled to go ahead first: The Fighter, with Mark Wahlberg and Christian Bale. “Pic tells the story of Boston fighter 'Irish' Mickey Ward and how he was helped to the world lightweight championship by half-brother Dicky Eklund. Eklund once decked Sugar Ray Leonard and went the distance against the boxing legend before forfeiting his career to drugs and crime,” Variety reports. But who cares about the plot? Russell and Bale on the same set! Alert TMZ!

Steven Soderbergh’s adaptation of Moneyball is coming together. Steve Zaillian has rewritten the screenplay and Demetri Martin has been cast as Paul DePodesta, the Robin to Billy Beane’s Batman in the Oakland A’s front office. (Brad Pitt has already been cast as Beane.) “Martin, a rising actor and comedian, headlines Comedy Central's Important Things With Demetri Martin, which sees him wearing actor, writer, composer and executive producer hats. Last year, he scored a role in Ang Lee's Taking Woodstock, an ensemble drama starring Liev Schreiber, Emile Hirsch and Jeffrey Dean Morgan,” per The Hollywood Reporter.

Columbia Pictures is moving quickly on the follow-up to Angels and Demons. “Author Dan Brown has announced that his next installment in the Da Vinci Code series will be The Lost Symbol, which Doubleday will publish in the U.S. and Canada on Sept. 15…Sony has the rights to the Robert Langdon character, which gives the studio the right to negotiate a deal for the new title. The studio will be bullish,” Variety assures.

Related:
Christian Bale Goes Apeshit
Soderbergh Plays Moneyball

“You Cannot Have Sex”: Sasha Grey’s Girlfriend Experience

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 19:00:00 GMT

In his obituary for Marilyn Chambers yesterday, our own Phil Nugent noted that “Chambers became perhaps the only established hardcore star to play the leading role in a ‘mainstream’ film by a major North American director (at least, until Steven Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience opens) when David Cronenberg cast her in his second feature, Rabid.” The star of the Soderbergh film is Sasha Grey, until now best known for her work in such mature adult fare as Squirt Gangbang, Blow Me Sandwich 11 and Cum Fart Cocktails 5.

You’d expect Grey’s first mainstream role to be something of a change of pace, but the actress herself wasn’t so sure about that. “When I had the first meeting I assumed I would be naked and do a sex scene,” Grey tells New York magazine. “Did I think I would do five, like in my adult work? No, but even up to the point where we were shooting, I thought there was going to be at least one sex scene.”

Despite the fact that she’s playing a high-priced call girl, Grey learned no coitus would be required. “The contract did say that I would be nude. But one of the clauses was [laughing] “You cannot have [real] sex.” To me, that was a pretty funny legality… But it was great not to have sex—that would have been too easy. If you want to see me having sex, you can do that! Not doing it shifts the focus, because a lot of clients are there for more than the sex.”

Anyone holding out hope for a Cum Fart Cocktails 6 may be out of luck. “I’ve got to diversify myself. Do I want to be 35, having sex on-camera? No. I want to be sitting on a fucking porch at my beach house with my own successful company.” A fucking porch? I’m sure she didn’t mean it the way I read it.

Related:
Screengrab at Sundance: Review of The Girlfriend Experience
Steven Soderbergh's Girlfriend Experience

Screengrab Review: "State of Play"

Nick Schager — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 15:00:00 GMT

A 2003 BBC miniseries condensed from six hours to two for its big-screen Hollywood adaptation, State of Play is so bursting with characters, plots, and hot-button subject matter that some unavoidably receive short shrift. Though its English TV heritage and multifaceted current events-laden narrative both recall Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic, Kevin Macdonald’s (The Last King of Scotland) film nonetheless largely eschews Big Statement grandstanding in favor of murder-mystery tension. It’s a tack that can occasionally be vexing, as some of the issues this tale nominally addresses would surely benefit from further investigation, whether it’s the increasingly edgy relationship between traditional and new media, the role of corporate interests on news reporting, and – in an echo of this season’s 24 storyline – the rise of profit-first private military contractors in international affairs and homeland security. Yet Macdonald’s decision to use these topics primarily as flavoring for a tale of nothing-is-what-it-seems espionage and investigative journalism is, ultimately, a shrewd (if disappointing) one that keeps the focus on suspense and prevents the taut, knotty proceedings from overreaching.

In the nation’s capital, a thief and pizza delivery man are shot dead by a skilled killer, while at the same time, the aide (Maria Thayer) to married congressman Stephen Collins (Ben Affleck), whom she was both screwing and working for as the lead investigator of a Senate committee hearing into Blackwater-esque private military contractor PointCorp, is mysteriously killed by a subway train. Washington Globe reporter Cal McAffrey (a scruffy, long-haired Russell Crowe) is assigned to cover the first deaths but – given that Collins is his former college roommate, as well as married to a woman (Robin Wright Penn) whom he once slept with – inevitably begins looking into the latter case. What he unearths is a tangled web of duplicity, corruption and murder fit for a Raymond Chandler yarn, and one he’s tasked with figuring out while contending with an editor-in-chief (Helen Mirren) under pressure from the paper’s bottom line-driven new owners and a staff blogger named Della Frye (Rachel McAdams) eager to work the story alongside her renowned peer. Double crosses, assassinations, and treachery soon engulf the plucky reporters, and as they breathlessly sift through facts, rumors and revelations, Macdonald’s film achieves suitably swift momentum, the twists and turns coming fast enough to keep one distracted from the obvious, telegraphed denouement lying in wait.

Jeff Daniels, Viola Davis and Jason Bateman round out a sturdy all-star cast that’s asked mainly to embody familiar archetypes, and if Crowe’s hero is less compromised than the script would like us to believe – his severe conflicts of interest never truly putting his noble motivations in serious doubt – the actor’s driven performance nonetheless anchors the vigorous action. That, underneath its flurry of characters and incidents, State of Play adheres to a familiar All the President's Men-style whodunit template is for its first two-thirds inconsequential, since Macdonald keeps the shadowy proceedings brisk and thorny enough to mildly intrigue. Unfortunately, all the commotion is primarily in service of a seen-from-miles-away bombshell that renders the plot – and its half-baked but unpretentious portrait of the insidious influence of private entities in what should be public services (government and media) – far more shallow than it initially appeared. Although, even if the film proves nothing more than a clever, diverting bit of smoke and mirrors, its end-credits depiction of the start-to-finish process of newspapers’ daily creation serves as a poignant coda for the vital yet dying art of old-school, courageous, truth-telling reportage.

Marilyn Chambers, 1952 - 2009

Phil Nugent — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 21:30:00 GMT

Marilyn Chambers, who was found dead in her home yesterday at the age of 56, was best known as the star of Jim and Artie Mitchell's Behind the Green Door (1972), one of the three biggest hits of the brief era of "porno chic" in the early 1970s. Where Linda Lovelace, the star of Deep Throat, had a winning, giggly anything-goes quality, and Georgina Spelvin, of The Devil in Miss Jones, stood out for her voracious level of on-screen enthusiasm, the youthful Chambers (nee' Marilyn Ann Briggs), who was twenty when Green Door was made, had what porn directors invariably claim to value above all else and seem to find once in a blue moon: a fresh-scrubbed, girl-next-door, all-American cheerleader look and manner that, to the Mitchells and their audience, must have seemed to be screaming out to be defiled. In the movie, Chambers played an innocent miss who is abducted and spirited away to a sinister underground club where she spends the bulk of the film's 72-minute running time being ravished for the delectation of a masked audience; she loves it, of course.

Green Door, which would go on to make millions, was made for $60,000, with the leading lady receiving $25,000 and one percent of the gross--a very good deal for her, because the Mitchells were tough businessmen and Green Door would be one of the few hardcore porn "classics" to make money that actually wound up in the hands of the people who'd made it. The Mitchells were lucky to find Chambers, but their cup really ranneth over when they discovered that their leading lady was the recently anointed face of Ivory Snow; she could be seen, with her hair pulled back and cuddling a baby, on boxes of the detergent from coast to coast. Procter & Gamble wound up giving the movie a shot of free publicity (and taking a bath itself) by recalling all its products and advertising that featured her face, thus demonstrating that it's that 56/100% that's not pure that'll kill ya.

As you might have guessed from the accidental Ivory Snow cross-promotion, Chambers had been pursuing a career in mainstream modeling and acting when she became a porn goddess. She made her film debut with a small role in the 1970 Barbra Streisand-George Segal comedy The Owl and the Pussycat and attracted the Mitchells' attention with her work in Together (1971), a softcore "mock sex documentary" directed by Sean S. Cunnigham, who almost a decade later would cash in as the director of the first Friday the 13th movie. After Green Door, Chambers would reunite with the Mitchells for the The Resurrection of Eve (1973), but she also tried to keep her career in non-pornographic entertainment alive, with mixed success.

In 1977, Chambers became perhaps the only established hardcore star to play the leading role in a "mainstream" film by a major North American director (at least, until Steven Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience opens) when David Cronenberg cast her in his second feature, Rabid; in keeping with the body-horror fixations of Cronenberg's early work, Chambers played a woman who, after experimental skin-graft surgery, develops a vampiric phallus beneath her arm. Years later, recalling her frame of mind in 1972, Chambers said that "I was thinking that something like Behind the Green Door had never been done before and the way our sexual revolution was traveling I really thought it was going to be a stepping stone which would further my acting career." But as the cultural climate turned more conservative, Chambers was was forced to seek out more work in hardcore films such as Insatiable (1980) and Insatiable II (1984). She spent much of the rest of her career bouncing back and forth between hardcore cinema and softcore, sexploitation flicks ranging from 1983's Angel of H.E.A.T (which I remember staring at on Showtime at the end of a long, sunburned Fourth of July) to various Cinemax late night favorites with her name in the title, even taking a writer's credit on Marilyn Chambers's Private Fantasies VI (1986). She also recorded a single, "Benihana," which went to #9 on the R & B charts in 1977.

Chambers had a daughter, McKenna Marie Taylor, born in 1991, with her third husband, Tom Taylor. (The marriage, Chambers's final one, ended in 1994.) In her later years, she took time out from her adult film career to take part in politics, but nobody's perfect. (She ran for Vice President, as the running mate of Charles Jay, in 2004 on the Personal Choice Party ticket, a quasi-libertarian party.) Her last film role was in last year's Solitaire. She received a a lifetime achievement FOXE Award in 2005. The cause of her death has not yet been determined.

2009: First Quarter Wrap-Up

Andrew Osborne — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 02:00:00 GMT

So, Watchmen didn’t exactly bomb, nor was it exactly a hit. With a 65% critical Tomato-Meter rating, it was neither a fiasco nor a critic’s darling, and for all its sex and violence, the onscreen content was far less controversial than all the legal maneuvering involved with getting it to screens in the first place.

In other words, the first big film of the year was a lot like the rest of 2009’s films to date: nothing to really get all het up about one way or the other...with two notable exceptions, courtesy of last month’s SXSW festival: the obnoxiously onanistic My Suicide is already a lock for my year-end Worst of 2009 list, while the documentary Best Worst Movie could easily find a spot in my year-end Top Ten, thanks to its winning cast and (mostly) cheery depiction of the pleasures and pitfalls of filmmaking (as well as the mysterious alchemy that transforms a terrible film like Troll 2 into a beloved cult classic).

As for the rest of the first quarter highs: the inventive visuals of Coraline, the good-natured mumblecore bromance of SXSW’s Humpday and the laid-back ‘80s nostalgia of Greg “Superbad” Mottola’s Adventureland were all perfectly enjoyable experiences nevertheless unlikely to chart much higher than Honorable Mention come December (unless 2009 winds up being a truly uninspired film year from here on out...unlikely, considering that our current Year of the Ox is already outpacing last year’s Rat: i.e., by April 2008, I’d seen exactly one memorable film (Full Battle Rattle) and a whole lot of Hamburger Helper (Penelope, Cloverfield, 21 and Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day).

Other 2009 offerings unlikely to be more than pleasant hazy memories by December include SXSW fare like Beeswax, The Slammin’ Salmon, The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle and the Richard Linklater sneak preview Me & Orson Welles, along with Sunshine Cleaning, Monsters vs. Aliens and I Love You, Man...films that, like most everything else I’ve seen this year, seem like Xeroxes of Xeroxes of originals I liked a lot more.

I dunno...maybe I’m just getting old. Maybe I’ve seen too many films by this point, and I’m getting cranky and hard to please, and even if a new Pulp Fiction premiered next month, I’d be too jaded to appreciate it...or maybe it's just that nobody’s released anything truly special, gripping, hilarious, original and/or mind-blowing in a while. (But then again, I haven’t seen Fast & Furious yet, so that could all change in a day or two!)

Long-range forecasts indicate a continuing trend of pleasant but disposable cinema moving forward into the second quarter of 2009, although I have cautiously high hopes for Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control, Star Trek, Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience, Land of the Lost and even HBO’s biopic Grey Gardens, starring Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore as Big & Little Edie of Maysles Brothers fame (which may not be a movie in theaters...but, hey, Angels in America was my favorite movie of 2003 on the small or big screen, so who knows?).

Plus, I just saw the following trailer for the new Sam Mendes film, Away We Go, starring the potentially appealing duo of John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph, which could be goddamn charming or still yet more indie-mumbly grist for the mill...see you in June for the Second Quarter report!

Related Stories:
2008: First Quarter Wrap-Up
Screengrab Presents: The Top Ten Movies Of 2008
Screengrab 2009 Preview: Andrew Osborne’s Picks

In Other Blogs: Knowing Me, Knowing You

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 14:00:00 GMT

At Scanners, Jim Emerson weighs in on Roger Ebert’s Knowing bafflement. “It's one thing to be the voice in the crowd pointing out that the Emperor has no clothes. It's very different to feel like you're the only one who's cheering an Emp you feel is magnificently attired…But critical opinion isn't an electoral contest where winners and losers are determined by some (largely illusory) consensus. Not many years ago, the general public would not have had any idea of what many critics outside their own town had said about a film -- nor would they have known how each and every movie performed at the box office weekend after weekend.”

David Frank of Rope of Silicon puts his trust in Ebert. “In trendy sushi bars across the country a quiet buzz hums among kids wearing black-rimmed glasses and Alamo Drafthouse T-shirts. They wonder if Mr. E ate some magical Freaky Friday fortune cookie with Ben Lyons — not than any of these curious folk would admit to seeing any version of Freaky Friday. Has the man given up? Is he losing it?...I haven’t seen Knowing. Which means I can’t say whether I agree with Ebert or not. Regardless of whether I think Knowing is junk or treasure, I do know the man has not lost it. He has not gone Earl Dittman on us. He really does believe Knowing is a great science-fiction film despite whatever you, your mom and your favorite hipper-than-thou Internet curmudgeon thinks. And that’s why I love Roger Ebert. He’s his own man.”

Beyond the Multiplex looks at “a completely miscellaneous grab bag of indie openings,” including the intriguing Severed Ways. “Impressive and also absolutely ludicrous, this is the movie you need to recommend to that suburban metalhead cousin in desperate need of having his mind blown. Purportedly based on an episode from the Vinland Sagas, in which two 11th-century Norsemen are left on their own to fend for themselves in unknown North America, writer-director-actor Tony Stone's Severed Ways is something like a DIY combination of black-metal video, Italian horror film, The Blair Witch Project and some really slow, nature-obsessed art movie like Old Joy.”

At The House Next Door, Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard converse about two “unfortunately overlooked and/or unfairly maligned” films, David Gordon Green’s Undertow and Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris. Says Harris: “I wanted to talk about Undertow largely because it's been forgotten: you're right that almost no one brings it up these days in talking about Green, who's mostly known for his first two films and now the Judd Apatow collaboration Pineapple Express. Ebert's rave aside, I believe Undertow got decidedly mixed reviews upon release, including its fair share of very negative ones, but on the whole I wouldn't say it's maligned so much as simply overlooked. That's unfortunate, because in my opinion it is Green's best film thus far, the film that comes closest to fulfilling the tremendous promise he's displayed in all his features. It's not a perfect film by any means, not a masterpiece, but in its own strange way it is ‘great,’ a baroque fable about the loss of childhood innocence and the totemic power of family.”

Let’s wrap it up with this week’s installment of List-o-Mania courtesy of Spoutblog: 10 Films That Saved Their Franchises. Like, uh…Attack of the Clones? “It made the least amount of money of the three Star Wars prequels, but Attack of the Clones was the trilogy’s saving grace, because after the ‘George Lucas ruined my childhood!’ disappointments of The Phantom Menace, this second (or fifth?) installment of the franchise got the old fans excited again by alluding to (and leading in the direction of) more characters and events of the original movies, while overall featuring a better plot and more satisfying action.” I’m fainting with damned praise.

Morning Deal Report: Soderbergh Plays Moneyball

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 15:00:00 GMT

Happy Truck Day! With pitchers and catchers reporting to spring training in a matter of days, there’s no better time for Steven Soderbergh to announce his umpteen-zillionth project in development, Moneyball. Soderbergh is adapting the nonfiction baseball classic by Michael Lewis that “focuses on Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics who used a sophisticated computer analysis system to piece together a team that regularly contended for the World Series despite a payroll dramatically lower than such big-market rivals as the New York Yankees,” Variety reports. Brad Pitt is lined up to play Beane, and Joe Morgan has already vowed not to see the movie. We assume.

If there are two more romantic words than “The Baster,” I can’t imagine what they’d be. Jennifer Aniston and Jason Bateman are set to star in the romantic comedy from Blades of Glory co-directors Will Speck and Josh Gordon. Per The Hollywood Reporter, “Bateman and Aniston will play best friends Wally and Kassie. When Wally learns that Kassie plans to become pregnant through artificial insemination, he replaces the donor's semen with his own and must live with the secret that he is the father of her child.” Ick.

Al Pacino already has King Lear on his schedule, so why not make it a double and play King Herod as well? Pacino and Jessica Lange are in talks to join the cast of Mary, Mother of Christ, which is something my dad would say when he’d hit his thumb with a hammer. “Camilla Belle (10,000 BC) will star as the titular character and will be joined by Jonathan Rhys Meyers in the dual roles of Gabriel and Lucifer and Peter O'Toole as Symeon,” Variety reports.

Related:
Soderbergh Does Liberace
Pacino Finds New Role Involving Lots of Yelling

Smells Like Indie Spirit: Our Favorite Sundance Films Of All Time (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 22:30:00 GMT

SEX, LIES & VIDEO (1989) & ON_LINE (2002)

In his entertaining film biz tell-all Down and Dirty Pictures, Peter Biskind chronicles the ways in which Robert Redford and Harvey Weinstein defined, respectively, the artistic integrity and the razzle-dazzle gold rush hucksterism of the current independent film era. With sex, lies and videotape, Steven Soderbergh fell somewhere in between: the critical and commercial success of his Audience Award-winning Sundance debut secured the festival’s place on the cultural radar, stoking the rags-to-riches dreams of countless would-be filmmakers, producers, and acquisitions execs in the years to follow. Yet at the same time, looking back, it's hard to see what all the fuss was about: unlike subsequent buzz dynamos like Reservoir Dogs, sex, lies and videotape is merely a quiet, low concept talk-fest about...well, the title says it all. The writing and directing are fine, and James Spader, Andie MacDowell, Peter Gallagher and Laura San Giacomo all turn in top-notch performances, but the quirky dialogue and somewhat (but not too) edgy subject matter (impotence, masturbation, voyeurism, etc.) are by now such familiar staples of the cinematic landscape that it’s hard to remember a time when a film like Soderbergh's could be considered groundbreaking (in the same way Sam Adams was amazing once upon a time to people who’d grown up on Bud and Miller, but hardly stands out in the microbrew-packed liquor stores of 2009).

My own (far-less-heralded) Sundance debut, meanwhile, came thirteen years later, when I attended the festival as co-screenwriter of the Jed Weintrob feature On_Line, a digital age chamber piece consciously patterned on Soderbergh’s film (right down to our original title, Sex, Lies & Internet). Yet, like many indie hopefuls attempting to follow the overnight success template of filmmakers like Soderbergh, our project fell through the cracks (despite somehow making the hyper-competitive Sundance cut): there were no high-stakes bidding wars, and (with the exception of a few astute critiques from the likes of Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir) most of the reviews were downright nasty. But though many are called and few are chosen, it’s nevertheless hard to resist the lure of Park City as a filmmaker or cinephile just hoping to be there when the lightning strikes again.

MEMENTO (2000)

Christopher Nolan had already made a festival splash with his creepy first film, Following, which, like Memento, was a collaboration with his brother Jonathan. It was no secret that his latest was going to be a big deal – by the time it got to Sundance, where it eventually won Nolan a screenwriting award (anticipating the Academy Award nomination it would get the following year), it had already garnered tons of acclaim at the Venice Film Festival for its clever narrative structure and intricate chronological unfolding. There was a lot more to Memento than most critics realized, though; Nolan and his brother, by telling the story of a man with no memory on a desperate quest to avenge the death of his wife, weren’t just presenting Park City audiences with a fairly cerebral noir. They were actually telling one of the most philosophically complex stories that any recent film has presented, a sneaky-deep meditation on identity, memory, and the way truth is created rather than discovered. It’s not in the fairly pedestrian revenge plot that the depths of Nolan’s film are to be discovered, but in Leonard’s memories of Sammy Jankis, and what they reveal about himself and his quest. Nolan went on to helm the Batman movie franchise, which only slightly suggests what seemed obvious when watching Memento: that he was a filmmaker of big ideas dressed up in genre clothes.

TARNATION (2003)

Jonathan Caouette's film stirred up terrific buzz at the 2004 festival, and for good reason: a visually raucous, stirringly expressive depiction of Caouette's relationship with his schizophrenic mother, which Caouette assembled from a mix of photographs, Super-8 footage, videotape and answering machine messages and mixed together on his home computer, it was probably the most exciting foray into filmed memoir to screen there since Ross McElwee started unreeling his diary entries. The movie inspired some trepidation from critics who feared that it would inspire more bad imitations than any Sundance hit since The Blair Witch Project, but it actually didn't take off in theaters as some expected; it may have been too painful for mass consumption. Caouette is currently putting the finishing touches on his second feature, the music documentary All Tomorrow's Parties.

OLD JOY (2006)

Reportedly to the disappointment of even Sundance director Geoffrey Gilmore, Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy screened at Sundance 2006 not in competition – where it belonged, as evidenced by its prominent inclusion on numerous critics’ year-end top ten lists – but instead in the more obscure “Frontier” section. Despite such a low-profile debut, however, Reichardt’s feature nonetheless garnered the attention it deserved, its tale of two childhood friends’ reunion for a camping trip in Oregon’s Cascade mountains proving the very type of modest, poised indie Sundance was originally conceived to showcase. Infused with the regret, fear, and anxiety that accompanies growing up, as well as a mood of socio-political unease conveyed by Air America radio broadcasts that function as the story’s de facto Greek Chorus, it’s a film with a sorrowful temperament and a shrewd sense of visual space (Reichardt shooting the Oregonian wilderness with awe, trepidation and reverence), as well as one that pulls off the delicate feat of commenting on larger national concerns that its character-driven narrative never overtly addresses.

TROUBLE THE WATER (2008)

Carl Deal and Tia Lessin's documentary about Katrina and its after-effects really fleshes out the lives hinted at in the news headlines. Specifically, it's a sprawling portrait of Katrina survivor, aspiring rapper, and amateur camera bug Kimberly Rivers Roberts and her nearest and dearest, and Deal and Lessin deserve a lot of credit for being able to think on their feet and improvise: they had headed to Louisiana cold in hopes of making a movie about the hurricane relief efforts but ran into a stone wall of government unhelpfulness and were about to head back home when Roberts, who they met in a shelter, got up in their faces and asked if they'd like to see her home movies of the gathering storm and the days she and and others spent stranded in their attic, watching the waters rise. When they saw what they had, they must have felt a little like the guy in Hunter Thompson's story about falling down an elevator shaft and landing in a pool full of mermaids. (Winner of the Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary at the 2008 festival.)

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent, Nick Schager

Sundance Do-Overs: When the Buzz Turns to Fizzle

Phil Nugent — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 20:00:00 GMT

The Sundance Film Festival, America's largest and arguably most influential showcase for independent movies, has just wrapped up its twenty-fifth, or thirtieth or eighteenth, installment, depending on who's counting. The earliest version of Sundance, the Utah/US Film Festival, was first held in Salt Lake City in September of 1978. From the start, it reflected the taste and interests of its celebrity mascot Robert Redford, the festival's inaugural chairman; the first awards jury included Redford's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid co-star Katharine Ross, who was already at a point in her career where she must have been grateful for the work. In 1981, the festival moved to Park City, where the annual date would eventually be shifted to January to take advantage of the attractions of the ski resort there. As far as Sundance is concerned, "Sundance" began in 1985, when management of the then-struggling festival was taken over by Redford's Sundance Institute, which he ran with festival co-founder Sterling Van Wagenen. By the time the Festival had its biggest, buzziest hit to date with Steven Soderbergh's 1989 sex, lies, and videotape, insiders were routinely referring to it as the Sundance Film Festival, though the name wouldn't officially change until 1991.

sex, lies, and videotape, followed by the likes of Reservoir Dogs, Clerks, Hoop Dreams, and other films, would establish Sundance as a major way station for the films and filmmakers that would define the American indie movie scene in the 1990s. Today the festival is one port of call among many for new moviemakers looking to get some attention, but it remains the recognized big daddy of indie festivals, inspiring all the respect and resentment that label implies. Anyone looking to get a sense of the shape of movie fashions since the mid-1980s could do worse than to examine a list of all the movies that have been rewarded with prizes and press attention after playing Sundance. And, it goes without saying, that history includes some wrong turns.

STACKING (1987): Never one of the best-known of all Sundance entries and now one of the most thoroughly forgotten, Stacking is of interest only for the degree to which it sums up everything that was typical, and typically unappealing, about "indie film" before Soderbergh and company stormed the castle. Back then, it wasn't called independent filmmaking but "regional cinema", and wiseguys had another name for it: granola movies. The regions depicted in regional cinema tended to be those that were said to represent the American heartland, and which could be faked on location in Canada. They tend to feature stock characters--the stolid farmer trying to hang onto his land in the face of changing times, the bored wife wondering where her frisky youth frisked off to, the confused teenager with potential literary gifts, the sexy stranger who's just passin' through--who are often played by good actors earning cinematic karma points. (The cast of Stacking, for instance, includes Christine Lahti, Frederic Forrest, Peter Coyote, James Gammon, and Jason Gedrick.) The reigning master of granola cinema is Victor Nunez, a Sundance perennial fixture who helped launch Ashley Judd's career with the 1993 Ruby in Paradise and Peter Fonda's comeback with the 1997 Ulee's Gold, though his own career, and granola cinema in general, may be best summed up by the title of his early feature, Gal Young 'Un.

For whom were these movies made? Even when they managed to acquire a theatrical release, as Stacking did, they never got far out of the major cities before twitching to death in the hot sun. Certainly there was no audience for them among the people whose lives they tried to ennoble. Speaking as someone who grew up in a rural farming community, I can tell you that nobody who spends his days working on a farm wants to blow his mad money on the chance to watch some poor bastard wonder whether he'll be able to get this year's crop in. Basically, they were made only for the people who'd see them at a festival like Sundance: educated liberals who felt virtuous from seeing people in denim and broad-brimmed hats being boring on-screen and critics who enjoyed denouncing the public for not making these fine, well-meaning movies as successful as Lethal Weapon. One reason they're such period pieces now is that they were made before people started thinking in terms of the Red State/Blue State divide, which makes them bittersweet reminders of a time not so long ago when educated big-city liberals thought of the people who grow their steaks as dull but honorable tillers of the soil instead of that pack of dumbasses who re-elected Bush.

IN THE SOUP (1992): It's not exactly unheard of for a movie to be greeted with awards and recognition at Sundance and then die on the vine when it's sent out into the cold, unfriendly world to fend for itself. That was certainly the case with this comedy, starring Steve Buscemi as an aspiring filmmaker and the veteran character actor Seymour Cassel as a Life Force, which was directed and co-written by Alexandre Rockwell, the rtist formerly known as Mr. Jennifer Beals. (Beals is in it, too, as are Jim Jarmusch, Carol Kane, Stanley Tucci, Debi Mazar, Sam Rockwell, and the late '80s indie stalwart Rockets Redglare.) The movie's Grand Jury Prize wouldn't be so embarrassing if it weren't for the competition: among the movies it beat out was Reservoir Dogs, which got a legendary bad reception from a festival crowd put off by its violence and gaudy showmanship. You don't have to be a Tarantino enthusiast to compare the reaction his movie got to the soft, clumsy whimsey of Rockwell's and feel that Sundance, just three years after sex, lies... had taken it to a new level, was already in danger of seeming out of touch. Nothing Rockwell ever did again would garner as much attention; his biggest break came when Tarantino invited him to contribute a segment to the disastrous implosion of a multi-director feature, Four Rooms. The real winner of this round would be Steve Buscemi, who could boast of having starred in the year's big hit at Sundance and also having a breakout role in the real-world hit that smoked the Sundance hit.

THE BROTHERS McMULLEN (1995): Never has anybody gotten more out of a pretty face and a knack for making connections--he was working in the offices of Entertainment Tonight while making his movie and managed to slip a copy of the film to Redford himself when the great man was on ET plugging Quiz Show--when he had nothing, literally nothing else, to back it up than McMullen star and auteur Edward Burns. Burns's movie, which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and went on to be a modest hit in theaters, was a half-assed sitcom that benefited from his lack of an eye and his inability to parlay his $28.000 budget into a halfway-decent-looking or decent-sounding movie; for a while, people taken with Burns's puppy-dog eyes, floppy locks, and the notion that making a movie while working as a production assistant on Entertainment Tonight counted as a struggling-artist story assumed that the rough poverty-row look of the film must confer artistic respectablity on it. Burns cleared up any lingering misunderstanding with his second film, She's the One, where his lame script was given a pricey big-studio mounting and consequently just looked lame. (He also publicly humiliated his McMullen co-stars Mike McGlone and his then-girlfriend Maxine Bahns by casting them alongside real actors such as John Mahoney, Cameron Diaz, Amanda Peet, and Frank Vincent. McGlone's "performance" in She's the One, which consisted of having a petulant, screaming fit in just about every scene he was in, made him in particular look like a prime candidate for the title Supreme Asshat of the Known Universe.) Burns has directed half a dozen movies since then, none of which has garnered any real attention; he also acts, sort of, in better directors' films, most notably in Saving Private Ryan from back in the days when his name had some heat attached to it. Technically, his name still does, in the sense that he now must spend a certain amount of time wondering if he's obligated to correct people who think he's the Ed Burns responsible for The Wire.

THE SPITFIRE GRILL (1996): This movie about misunderstandings and redemption in rural Maine was the only feature film written and directed by Lee David Zlotoff, best known for his work in TV, as a writer and producer on such series as Remington Steele and Navy NCIS: Naval Criminal Investigative Service. The real creative force behind the movie was Roger M. Courts, a direct mail fundraiser and CEO of a Mississippi-based Catholic fund-raising organization called the Sacred Heart League, Inc. Courts was interested in making a movie that could serve as a film equivalent to the "testimonial" literature religious groups passed around, and he spent many years looking for a script that had what he saw as the right mixture of Christian teaching and solid narrative values. He decided that he'd found it in Zlotoff's screenplay about a young ex-con (played by Alison Elliot) whose death at the end of the movie turns her into the fresh-faced Christ figure of Pepperidge Farm. It seems likely that the humanist audience at Sundance missed the religious undertones completely and simply took the movie's heavy-handed moralizing and rustic dullness as a throwback to the good old days of "regional filmmaking", and that the movie won the festival's Audience Award partly on the strength of nostalgia for the days before Miramax deals and Tarantino rip-offs. Ironically, the movie's popular success at the festival led to a high-priced bidding war among distributors. In the end, it was Castle Rock Entertainment that paid top dollar for the privilege of seeing the movie crash and burn in theaters later that year. The material has since found its true level as a play (with a de-sacrificial happy ending) that is popular with regional theater groups.

HAPPY, TEXAS (1999): Sometimes, the family vibe at a big festival, where a lot of steady filmgoers mix and mingle with filmmakers, can inspire a certain amount of self-deception. This godawful comedy, starring Steve Zahn and Jeremy Northam as escaped convicts posing as gay beauty pageant directors (while Northam fends off the advances of gay small town sheriff William H. Macy), was received with rhapsodic abandon at Sundance, which can best be interpreted as an explosion of love for Steve Zahn, who had delivered a steady stream of amazing supporting performances in such movies as Reality Bites, That Thing You Do, and Out of Sight, and who had his biggest role to date here. He won the Grand Jury Prize for his performance, which isn't completely off the wall: he's very funny in it. But Miramax's decision to shell out what was variously reported as anywhere from $2.5 million to $10 million dollars for the movie itself proved, shall we say, ill-advised. At the time of the purchase, there were actually outraged bleatings in the trade press from people complaining that Miramax got all the cool movies. But after Happy, Texas collapsed in theaters, the movie would be remembered only as the centerpiece of stories about how Harvey Weinstein couldn't be trusted alone with his checkbook at Sundance.

Screengrab at Sundance: Slamdance

bilge — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 22:30:00 GMT

Screengrab editor emeritus Bilge Ebiri reports from the frontlines of Park City.

I’ve always felt guilty about not doing enough coverage of Slamdance, the underdog cousin to Sundance that runs in Park City around the same time. It often shows excellent films – especially in the shorts department – and is staffed by cheerful, enthusiastic people who love to watch and make movies. I didn’t get around to it this year either – I did drop by their office and pick up some screeners – and judging by the fact that most writers I knew were complaining about how little time they had, I imagine most of them didn’t either. Which is a shame. And I’m not sure it’s going to get any better. Which is why I’ve come to a realization: Slamdance should consider moving its dates, its location, or both.

Hear me out, hear me out: Slamdance has become a world class festival. For cryin’ out loud, it’s where Christopher Nolan and Marc Forster got their starts, among many others. Larry Clark and Steven Soderbergh have shown films here. Part of being a world class festival, though, is to establish your own identity and to carve out your own space. Slamdance has done this, to some extent, by taking over the top of Main Street in Park City and sending its scrappy, attention-hungry filmmakers out onto the street with their postcards, their goofy costumes, and their persistence, in an effort to grab the attentions of Sundance attendees. This has worked up until now. But how long can they go on feeding off Sundance’s crumbs? Maybe the solution is to just shift the dates slightly, so that there are a few non-Sundance days when press and other assorted folks can take a look at Slamdance films?

This will probably never happen – being here during Sundance is Slamdance’s raison d’etre. And for all I know maybe they get enough while they’re here – this year they got coverage in the LA Times, Indiewire, and some other venues. I do know that many of their screenings sell out. And I’m sure their sponsors would have something to say about the notion of moving the festival away from Sundance’s bracket. But I feel like being thought of simply as the Bizarro to Sundance’s Superman isn’t doing Slamdance’s filmmakers any favors. True, they get to be in town while all these agents and producers and reps and critics are also in town, and maybe they even get lucky and meet some of these people. But it’s hard enough for a Sundance film to get noticed during Sundance. I imagine it ain’t easy for a Slamdance film to get noticed during Sundance. Anyway, it’s just a thought. One that will go unheeded, but whatever, I’ve had my say.

Jailhouse Rock: The Greatest Prison Films of All Time (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 21:30:00 GMT

OUT OF SIGHT

Most people remember Stephen Soderbergh’s 1998 Elmore Leonard adaptation Out of Sight as the start (and, essentially, end) of J.Lo®’s serious acting career, and also the movie where George Clooney traded in the training wheels and became an official movie star. Yet, while the hunk-in-the-trunk romance between Lopez’s cop (Federal Marshal Karen Sisco) and the Cloon’s robber, Jack Foley, may be the heart of the story, the prison (and eventual jailbreak) scenes are the muscle. Doing time in the Lompoc federal pen, Foley protects a weasely businessman (the ever-great Albert Brooks) from the unwanted attentions of scarier convicts like the part-time pugilist, full-time sociopath Maurice “Snoopy” Miller (played to the scary hilt by Don Cheadle, a full 180 degrees away from his loveable porn star performance the previous year in Boogie Nights). When the men are eventually released back into the real world, Foley visits Brooks’ character in search of legitimate employment, only to be offered a lousy security guard job and a condescending pep talk: “You’re a bank robber. This is not a marketable skill...show me that you’re really willing to change and we’ll talk about something better.” Foley is not pleased, reminding his would-be benefactor, “Back in prison, guy like you, place like that, you were ice cream for freaks...I saved your ass.” And that, in a nutshell, is what makes Out of Sight one of the great modern prison flicks: in addition to all the endlessly quotable exchanges, the Leonard story (and screenplay by Scott Frank) is memorable for its depiction of jail as a funhouse mirror, reflecting back a distorted version of society where definitions of decency, morality and manhood get all wiggly and reversed.

THE CRIMINAL CODE (1931)

Howard Hawks' famous dictum about a good movie being nothing more than three good scenes and no bad ones gets its purest expression here, because that's all this is. Idealistic warden Mark Brady (Walter Huston) gets a new prison and proceeds to shake things up. There's a real plot — the script is exceptionally clever, building in a more-than-usually-convincing happy ending with a clever plant, making both audiences and the production code happy — and also young Boris Karloff, but as usual Hawks doesn't seem terribly invested in the mechanics. The three great scenes: an opening bit where cops debate the finer points of a card game while inspecting a crime scene (beating The Wire by some 70 years; it's just as sophisticated), Walter Huston walking through and staring down an entire prison yard through sheer force of will, and Karloff intentionally getting himself sent into solitary confinement by announcing to the first guard unlucky enough to pass him, "Hey! I don't like you!" None of these scenes are available on video (or DVD, for that matter), so enjoy as best you can the above context-free clip of dubious quality with Italian subtitles, which still gives you a feel for Huston's masterful underacting. Here, as in Capra's American Madness a year later, Huston was way ahead of the naturalistic curve.

RIOT IN CELL BLOCK 11 (1954)

The first of Don Siegel's two archetypal prison movies, Riot In Cell Block 11 is better as a social document than a movie. Character actors (Neville Brand! Frank Faylen!) wait the minimum amount of time before everything explodes into a frenzy. It's strong stuff, if not particularly revelatory or fun; still, Siegel got there way before Attica and made it fairly plausible. There are no clips on YouTube, so here's a completely context-free excerpt from Private Hell 36, the frankly superior noir he made the same year. Siegel would have the clout and confidence to increase the overt stylization in his movies as he made more films; here, he's still working in a fairly traditional '50s-problem-film/exploitation potboiler mode.

LE TROU (1960)

Jacques Becker's brilliantly terse prison-break movie is longer than A Man Escaped, and hence inevitably somehow even more oppressive and claustrophobic; Bresson is concerned with transcendence, while Becker shoots down that possibility entirely. (Becker has more in common with Jean-Pierre Melville's fatalistic male cameraderie.) They're both invested in physical actions speaking much louder than words, though; the highlight is a riveting one-shot of the men pounding through the floor of their jail cell in a go-for-broke one-chance-only action. Becker's film is a notch below — wince in pain at symbolic spider-webs — but it's still a classic of the genre. Here's an amazingly long trailer in unsubtitled French; after decades of bootlegs, though, this was recently made available by Criterion, in another selfless act of public service.

THE ROUND-UP (1966)

This isn't really a prison movie; it's a prison-camp movie, which might conceivably make a difference to someone. Ruthless formalist Miklos Jancso (Bela Tarr's stylistic father) is trying to make a movie about oppression by the state; what he comes up with is an open-air equivalent to Kafka, reducing concrete political problems to a grimly amusing all-purpose absurdism. Prisoners are herded from one part of the open-to-the-sky grounds to another, without any discernible point or rhyme, except to serve as compositional elements for Jancso's immaculate tracking shots. [MAJOR SPOILER] Our ostensible protagonist is killed with half-an-hour to go, which makes the point better than any overt speech could've. There's no clips available from this film on YouTube, so here's a clip from the previous year's The Red And The White, which is stylistically pretty much the exact same movie.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Four & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Vadim Rizov

Screengrab at Sundance: Review of The Girlfriend Experience

bilge — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 19:00:00 GMT

Screengrab editor emeritus Bilge Ebiri reports from the frontlines of Park City.

I’m a bit late in getting to The Girlfriend Experience, which Steven Soderbergh premiered two nights ago at a secret Sundance Sneak Preview. (Full disclosure: I had to first write about it for my other outlet.) I was initially hesitating to review the film, simply because the director deemed it a “work in progress” and I have this weird feeling that he’s still trying to find his movie. But then everybody else went and reviewed it, so I guess that shouldn’t stop me. Yet it still sort of does: Maybe it’s because I had some more issues with it than most other writers seemed to.

True, the film seemed to play fine with the audience – it’s a return to the deliberately elliptical, improvised storytelling the director last explored in Bubble (which I loved). Porn star Sasha Grey seemed at ease acting out the role of a cold, high-priced call girl reassessing her long-term relationship while a series of increasingly futile transactions make her question the state of her life. “Transaction” seems to be the key word here – every exchange, every moment of intimacy is dulled down and treated as a bland procedural by Soderbergh’s cold, often static camera. I’d add “to a fault,” as the film often feels adrift amid all the dry negotiations and small talk. In his post-screening Q&A, Soderbergh said he was influenced by Antonioni’s Red Desert, and yet Desert is quiet, hypnotic, and tense – like a horror film in slow motion. The Girlfriend Experience, in its current state, is talky and immersive – it could use some of Desert’s tautness and dreamy melancholy.

That dry blandness is the point, of course: In 21st century America, everything has become a transaction. No wonder our heroine eventually confuses a particularly receptive trick for a potentially life-altering love affair. I wonder if there’s a double meaning to that title: A “girlfriend experience” is apparently the term for the full suite of services our heroine offers. In other words, you get more than a meaningless fuck when you’re with her; you get to go watch a film at the IFC Center, talk about it over an expensive meal, then go home, cuddle, and ease into your meaningless fuck. But is our heroine, who spends most of the film emotionally inert, finally duped by a desire to have her own “girlfriend experience”?

A mood of late-period capitalist doom hangs over the proceedings, as if we’re watching the whole system in all its intricate, soul-destroying glory right before it all comes collapsing. Appropriately enough, the story takes place in October of 2008 – the financial crisis is constantly referenced, as is the Presidential election. This was partly a result of circumstance – the film takes place in October because that’s when Soderbergh shot it – but it may also be a hedge: It makes a fitting bookend to Bush-era filmmaking, an epitaph for the Old New America.

Sundance Roundup: Day Seven

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 17:30:00 GMT

That sneaky Steven Soderbergh screened his latest work-in-progress, The Girlfriend Experience, in the “Sneak Preview 2” slot at Sundance this week. In Entertainment Weekly, Owen Glieberman describes it as “one of the director's wee, semi-improvised, non-star-cast, shot-on-easy-to-tote-video doodles,” and apparently means that as a compliment. The movie is already semi-notorious for Soderbergh’s casting of an actual porn star (pictured here in one of the few photos we can, uh, picture here). The director address the issue in a post-screening Q & A: “Even though the film's not very explicit," Soderbergh said of Sasha Grey, "there's a comfort level she obviously has from making all of those films that I think is difficult to fake. There's a kind of attitude.”

Good news for fans of Nazi zombie comedies! IFC has acquired the rights to Sundance feature Dead Snow. “The Norwegian horror pic about medical student co-eds on a ski holiday who meet up with evil Nazi zombies premiered in the international narrative feature section.” That’s about it deal-wise, although The Killing Room is also reportedly close to finding distribution.

Otherwise, the big news was reported earlier today by our man on the scene Bilge Ebiri: the steel cage match between Variety critic John Anderson and Dude inspiration Jeff Dowd. “Offering support for Anderson was filmmaker Nicholas Winding Refn, who received a glowing review from the critic for his movie Bronson, an explosive biopic about Britain’s most violent prisoner, Charles Bronson,” the Vulture reports. “‘I will pay his bail money if needed,’ Winding Refn told us. ‘But think about it, we now live in a new era of film criticism thanks to John Anderson. Now, when some jerk gets into a critic’s face and he fights back, we’ll say he went Bronson on them.’”

Previously:
Sundance Roundup: Day Six
Sundance Roundup: Day Five

Sundance Roundup: Day Four

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 17:30:00 GMT

Sundance remains a buyer's market so far, but if you're a filmmaker having little success attracting interest from distributors, don't panic yet. "IFC will probably turn out to be one of the most aggressive buyers at the Sundance Film Festival here when it comes to the number of films bought, if not the prices paid," the New York Times reports. "Jonathan Sehring, IFC’s president, and his crew were already here last Thursday to begin stocking up on pictures for their In Theaters and Festival Direct services, which send first-run movies to more than 50 million viewers in all, through their video-on-demand services." By the way, IFC will be making Steven Soderbergh's Che available on demand starting Wednesday.

The gay romance/con movie I Love You Phillip Morris has yet to find a buyer, but it seems only a matter of time. Blogging for the Houston Press, Steve McVicker, author of the book upon which the movie is based, proclaims himself satisfied with the result. "Directors/screenwriter Glen Fecarra and John Requa, were both true to my book, but also put their creative stamp on it. They kept most aspects of the book, but condensed and compressed the material in a true dark screwball comedy, which is also a poignant love story between the two jailhouse lovers, Morris and Steve Russell, who also blossomed as an escape artist...No offense to John or Glenn, but at time it felt like I was watching a Coen Brothers' comedy." Owen Glieberman of Entertainment Weekly sort of agrees, saying the movie is "like one of those out-of-the-frying-pan capers by the Coen brothers crossed with Catch Me If You Can, featuring a hero as blithely comfortable with the metaphysics of identity fraud as Tom Ripley."

CNET has the scoop on enjoying Sundance from the comfort of your own couch, as 10 shorts from the festival are available for viewing online. "The shorts made available on iTunes, with distribution and encoding services by Shorts International, were chosen "as a sampling of the festival's unique shorts filmmakers' voices," says programmer Todd Luoto. "Some are funny; some are sad. Some are serious. Some are just plain crazy and need no classification, and some couldn't be classified if we tried--just the way we like it."

J. Hoberman on "Che" in VQR

Phil Nugent — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 15:30:00 GMT

The excellent new issue of Virginia Quarterly Review, which is devoted to the fifitieth anniversary of the Cuban revolution, includes a J. Hoberman essay on Steven Soderbergh's epic biopic Che, starring Benecio Del Toro as Ernesto Guevara. "Within eighteen months of his death, this instant immortal had been embalmed—in the form of Egyptian matinee idol Omar Sharif—by Twentieth Century Fox, as the subject of a tediously self-important and ridiculously old-fashioned Hollywood biopic. Early evidence of the hyperreal: noting the production’s budget, John Leonard observed in the New York Times Magazine that making a movie about revolution was considerably more expensive than the revolution itself, 'about $10,000 an hour.' ” Hoberman describes the intentions behind that clueless turkey (which co-starred Jack Palance, in a Silly Putty nose, as Fidel Castro), as having been "in the tradition of Fox’s 1952 Viva Zapata—a melancholy, heartfelt, prestigious, star-spangled tribute to revolutionary failure" starring a "hardcore New Left action tough guy." Actually, as Che's resurrection via T-shirt image (the history of which was described in the recent documentary Chevolution shows, he was the guerrilla as rock star. Consciously or not, most of his modern fans understand him as being part of the lineage of hip rock martyrs that includes Jimi, Janis, the lost Rolling Stone, and the Lizard King. More recently, Gael Garcia Bernal played the hunky young (pre-"Che") Ernesto in the Sundance-friendly The Motorcycle Diaries, based on a road trip the lad took with a buddy, a trip that was immortalized in a book that appeared more than twenty years after his death. Directed by Walter Salles (with Robert Redford acting as executive producer), it was a gorgeous-looking movie that gave receptive audiences the chance to admire it's hero's liquid eyes and bone structure while he visited peasants in pastoral settings and felt his yet-unformed social conscience become all tingly.

Is Soderbergh's Che a history lesson or the latest act of what Hoberman calls "co-optive commodification"? It "remains a film object—a thing to be experienced. The movie demands to take its time, with both parts taken in at a single sitting." Hoberman, who saw the film at last year's Cannes Film Festival before Soderbergh took a scalpel to it, reports that "Many initial viewers were confounded to the degree that Che appeared as a non- or even an anti-biopic. Despite a stellar performance by Benicio Del Toro, who had initiated the project some years ago with Soderbergh as producer and Terrence Malick attached as writer and director, Che presents its subject almost entirely as the protagonist in the context of two specific events. Moreover, the director seemed to keep his distance and reserve his judgment. Skillfully didactic, as well as nervily dialectical, this feel-good/feel-bad combat film thus had less in common with the touchy-feely Motorcycle Diaries than with Peter Watkins’s spare, self-reflexive reconstruction of the Paris Commune, La Commune (Paris, 1871)." However, since its premiere, "Soderbergh has tweaked his movie's first half in ways that soften its strangeness and blunt its intellectual range." These additions, which interrupt the story of the revolution with flash-forwards to Che's life as a political celebrity during a trip to New York, serve the purpose of "Annotating the past with the 'present' and tightening the movie’s overall sound/image connections," even as "these inserts do allow for another sort of dialectic, but their presence serves to subtly normalize Soderbergh’s distancing strategy. (Or what was taken to be his strategy. “With all the subtitles, we thought it was Jean-Luc Godard,” a colleague joked.)"

"Che," Hoberman writes, "is an act of will rather than a work of art, overtly concerned with technical issues—the revolution’s and its own." In short, it is a movie by Steven Soderbergh, a director who (with his first feature, sex, lies, and videotape) helped invent independent American moviemaking as a concept (and, in part, as a marketing concept); who, with his comeback movie, Out of Sight, showed how just how much smarts and technical pizzazz could be applied to a solid piece of romantic-action-comedy goods while accepting the material on its chosen level; and who has spent the last decade or so veering from one extreme to the next, trying to find the ideal balance between commercial work that won't rot the brain and experimental work that tries to speak to at least part of the mass audience. As Hoberman sees it, "Che is superb filmmaking—forcefully edited, purposefully repetitive. Everything is foreshadowed; each sequence has its parallel. There is no scene that cannot be seen as part of an ongoing argument." But how many movies made by big Hollywood players wouldn't be embarrassed by a phrase like "an ongoing argument"?"Soderbergh is less a driven auteur or even an enthusiastic cinephile than he is a highly intelligent technician who sets himself a problem and goes about solving it. "

Screengrab Self-Promotion Theater #1: De Zomer Kamp

Andrew Osborne — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 15:19:00 GMT

We've reached the Horse Latitudes of the film-going year, and Screengrab feels your pain. Sure, there's 17 hours of Steven Soderbergh's Che to look forward to, but then what? If you've already seen all of the prestigious 2008 releases, you're basically stuck with off-season programmers like Hotel For Dogs or (egad) Bride Wars.

And so, to help alleviate the mid-winter entertainment blahs, I'm launching a new feature, Screengrab Self-Promotion Theater, whereby I selflessly share a few of my old zero-budget short movies with you, the grateful public.

First up is De Zomer Kamp, an entry in the 2008 Boston edition of the 48 Hour Film Project (featuring the music of theremin supergroup, The Lothars). Enjoy!

The Best of 2008: Leonard Pierce's Picks for the Best Movies of the Year, Part Two

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 19:45:00 GMT

5. WALL*E (Andrew Stanton, dir.)

Pixar has been on such a roll of late that if they were a single director, they’d be getting mention in the same breath as the golden age greats. But they’re not; they’re an aggregate of many clever, talented folks who make computer-generated cartoons that are at least partly intended for children. I’m not going to argue that this isn’t sometimes a weakness; in WALL*E, the environmental message only seems fitting and appropriate because I happen to agree with it, and the crypto-Objectivism in The Incredibles only bothered me because I don’t. But regardless of the heavy-handedness of the moral, it can’t be denied that WALL*E is flat out the most wonderful film of the year, hopeful and funny and romantic and bittersweet all at the same time, and wrapped up in a package so beautiful to look at you wonder why anyone ever questions the potential of CGI. And if this astounding motion picture spawned an obnoxious marketing empire, one can only shake one’s head and say “Damn kids don’t know how good they’ve got it.”

4. RACHEL GETTING MARRIED (Jonathan Demme, dir.)

If you ever want to flummox a music critic, ask him to describe one of his favorite new bands without comparing them to another band. Of course, Rachel Getting Married proves that the same can occasionally be said for movie critics: it seems impossible to talk about without referencing something else. It’s got the dysfunctional family dynamics of Il y a Longtemps Que Je T’aime; the comeback-kid story of The Wrestler; the hateful-misanthrope-as-vehicle-for-joyous-redemption jawn of a Wes Anderson film (only better) and the structure and form of the late Robert Altman’s best work (only different). With all of these elements at play, though, it never seems derivative of anything else, only reminiscent in the best possible way. In the end, Rachel Getting Married is its own film, familiar yet new and impressive, and carried along by some of the finest acting of the year, most especially from Anne Hathaway and Bill Irwin.

3. CHE (Steven Soderbergh, dir.)

Steven Soderbergh keeps on making great movies, and never the same one twice. His latest is getting lots of what child care experts call “good attention” and “bad attention”; it’s certain that Soderbergh intended it that way, with its rigid formal structure, back-spasm-inducing length, difficult tonal shifts, and…oh, yeah, it’s a biopic about one of the most controversial figures of the 20th century. It’s just as hard to figure out how much of the negative reception is due to political and moral judgment of the revolutionary Che Guevara as it is to figure out how much of the positive reception comes from those who valorize him, but taken purely as a movie, Che is hard to beat: it’s formally daring, adventurously directed, risk-taking, well-made, and held together by a powerful performance that shows its subject neither as a heroic rebel or a vicious murderer, but simply as a man so consumed by his cause that he didn’t know what else to do than keep fighting for it.

2. WENDY AND LUCY (Kelly Reichardt, dir.)

There have been a number of exceptionally well-done documentaries in recent years about ordinary people dangling from the precipice of financial ruin in economically uncertain times, but successful narrative films dealing with the same subject have been few and far between. That’s largely because it’s hard to approach the topic in fiction without becoming didactic, maudlin, or treacly – and those challenges are certainly, and perilously, evident in Kelly Reichardt’s story about a young woman in brutally limited circumstances who loses her beloved dog while pursuing a slender chance at a decent job. But the miraculous thing about Wendy and Lucy is that it toes that line from its first frame to its last without ever tumbling down and making a mess of itself. That’s a testament to the top-notch script, the surprisingly deep direction, and the beautiful performance by lead actress Michelle Williams. No one could ever have predicted that an heir to the Italian neo-realist tradition would emerge in 2008 from America’s Pacific Northwest; that it happened is one of the year’s greatest surprises.

1. SYNECHDOCHE, NEW YORK (Charlie Kaufman, dir.)

There are so many things that could have gone wrong with Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut. I first heard him talk about his desire to direct way back in 2004, when I interviewed him for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and when Synechdoche, New York was finally announced, I was full of dread. The video stores of America are choked with mediocre-to-bad movies by talented writers who decided what they really wanted to do was direct. I needn’t have worried: Synechdoche, New York is easily my favorite film of the year. Kaufman approached directing with the same meticulous, self-searching approach that he does writing, and the result is nothing short of astounding. The best movies, for me, are the ones that seem to completely rewire my head – that are so profound and well-crafted that they redefine my basic approach to their subject, form or content. Charlie Kaufman accomplishes that his first time out of the gate, and that’s the mark of a major talent.

ALMOST MADE IT: The Strangers, Doubt, Iron Man, The Wrestler, Bigger Stronger Faster*.

DIDN'T SEE THEM: Entre les Murs (The Class), Standard Operating Procedure, Lat den Ratte Komme In (Let the Right One In), Dear Zachary: A Letter To His Son About His Father, Trouble the Water, Full Battle Rattle, Le Voyage du Ballon Rouge (Flight of the Red Balloon).

PERFORMANCES OF THE YEAR: Mickey Rourke, The Wrestler; Bill Irwin, Rachel Getting Married; Kristin Scott Thomas, Il y a Longtemps Que Je T'aime; Viola Davis, Doubt.

MADE IN 2007, BUT GREAT IN 2008: 4 Luni 3 Saptamani si 2 Zile (4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days); Paranoid Park; My Winnipeg; Une Vielle Maitress (The Last Mistress); Auf der Anderen Seite (The Edge of Heaven); Encounters at the End of the World; Chop Shop.

OVERRATED: Waltz with Bashir; In Bruges; Happy-Go-Lucky; Slumdog Millionaire; Kung Fu Panda.

Click for Part One

Screengrab Presents: Cinema’s Greatest Comebacks (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 22:30:00 GMT

JACKIE EARLE HALEY in LITTLE CHILDREN (2006)

Some people on this list needed comebacks after destroying their own careers through bad choices or behavior, but the triumphant, Oscar-nominated comeback of Jackie Earle Haley in 2006’s Little Children was extra sweet because it was such a Cinderella story...and, as they say, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. After memorable breakthrough roles as the punk turned Little League champ in The Bad News Bears (1976) and the Cutter with the heart of gold in Breaking Away (1979), Haley suffered the child star curse and saw his career nosedive into obscurity during the ‘80s, ‘90s and most of the oughts. According to Haley (as quoted on the Internet Movie Database), “I'd always avoided stuff like 'Where are they now?' or 'Whatever happened to?'...You tell me, have you ever seen a 'Whatever happened to' where they seemed anything but pathetic? I could do that or just disappear.” And so, like so many creative types before him who’d ridden their dreams as far as they could, Haley rejoined the everyday rat race where most of us live, delivering pizzas, refinishing furniture, working variously as a security guard, a limousine driver and such, until A-list director Steven Zaillian, in the kind of wet dream moment that (usually) never comes true, just happened to remember the actor’s earlier work and cast him, more or less out of the blue, in the 2006 Sean Penn adaptation of All The President’s Men, which in turn led to Haley’s true comeback via his harrowing, heartbreaking performance later that year as the neighborhood pedophile in Todd Field’s Little Children...which in turn led to a part in Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island and the plum role of Rorschach in Zack Snyder’s 800-pound gorilla, Watchmen. So who knows? Maybe there’s hope.

STERLING HAYDEN in DR. STRANGELOVE: OR, HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1964)

Tall, striking Sterling Hayden developed into one of the biggest stars of the 1950s thanks to his unique looks, cruelly laconic performances and ability to bring mysterious depths to even noir lowlifes. But his heart had never really been in acting, which he found to be a frivolous and often unengaging profession. He had an extremely standoffish relationship with capitalism, and his ability to land roles in high-grossing films was, to him, merely a means to an end: i.e., his habit of sailing, which got him away from an American consumer culture he often reviled. In 1958, he was involved in a nasty divorce and decided to leave it all behind once and for all; defying a court order, he took his kids, packed up a sailboat for the long haul, and headed off to Tahiti, where he would remain for almost six years. Aside from one brief television appearance, the only thing he did during that time that had anything to do with the entertainment industry was to write a hugely entertaining and profoundly thoughtful autobiography called Wanderer, in which he essentially repudiated his life as a movie star. Still, a nautical life is expensive, and in the 1960s, he enjoyed a protracted comeback which began in the best possible way: with an unforgettably loony performance as the unhinged General Jack D. Ripper in Stanley Kubrick’s pitch-black Cold War comedy Dr. Strangelove.

JOHN HUSTON, UNDER THE VOLCANO (1984)

John Huston couldn’t possibly have had a more charmed career. He was practically born into Hollywood royalty; his father, Walter Huston, preceded him in a career as a double-threat director and actor. John himself added more to the package: he was a terrific writer, an intellectual, a keen spotter of talent. His very first movie as a director, The Maltese Falcon, is one of the greatest Hollywood movies of all time, and he followed it up with classics like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Key Largo, The Asphalt Jungle, The African Queen and Beat the Devil. Things started to go awry for him in the mid-‘50s, though, after an ambitious but failed adaptation of Moby Dick, and by the 1960s, he was directing second-tier work like The List of Adrian Messenger and the disastrous Reflections in a Golden Eye. In the 1970s, he launched some work that contained sparks of genius, but nothing that coalesced into coherence: there were moments of greatness in The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, The Man Who Would Be King, and Wise Blood, but all of them fell apart under the weight of their flaws. By the 1980s, he was producing pure schlock like Victory and Annie. Forty years as a director is far longer than anyone has a right to be successful, and people were willing to forgive his sad descent because of the greatness of his earlier work: but Huston, a career rebel, wasn’t about to go out without a fight. In 1984, he directed a stunning Albert Finney in an imperfect but still highly impressive adaptation of the great Malcolm Lowry novel Under the Volcano; it signaled a genuine late-career comeback for Huston, who went on to direct the enjoyable Prizzi’s Honor and the astonishing movie version of James Joyce’s The Dead before finally dying himself in 1987.

TERENCE STAMP in THE LIMEY (1999)

While most of the people on this list have rejuvenated their careers once or twice, the outstanding British actor Terence Stamp has had more comebacks than most people have had hot dinners. He rose to fame alongside his old flatmate Michael Caine and went on to become one of the most celebrated actors of the 1960s, as well as a sort of living symbol of the Carnaby Street crowd of London’s swinging sixties; it was at the end of that decade, after a highly public breakup with girlfriend Jeannie Shrimpton, that he had his first downturn, decamping for an Indian ashram and taking much of the 1970s off. He followed that with his first major comeback, in the juicily hammy role of General Zod in Superman II, and enjoyed a brief resurgence in the ‘80s that faded just as quickly in the waning part of that decade. 1994 found him mounting another big comeback through the simple act of donning a dress in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, but he floundered a bit after that, until 1999, when screenwriter Lem Dobbs and director Steven Soderbergh came through with a role crafted especially for him. Revisiting (and updating) Stamp’s nasty, edgy, working-class persona, and even going so far as to use recycled footage from one of his old films as “archival footage” of the character he was playing, the two created, in the vengeful ex-hoodlum Wilson, the role he’d been working towards his whole career. Stamp’s performance was universally celebrated and allowed him to stage yet another comeback – which has now faded enough that he’s about due for one more.

BEN AFFLECK, GONE BABY GONE (2007)

Ben Affleck never deserved to be a walking punchline for the following reasons: 1) Good Will Hunting was weak and should never had made anyone famous; 2) the kind of callow, narcissistic performances Affleck gave in movies like Paycheck perfectly reflected and commented upon the material 3) "Bennifer" doesn't mean anything. Nonetheless, having become an all-too-easy punchline, Affleck retreated behind the camera and demonstrated a knack for drawing perfectly judged performances and local color. If Gone Baby Gone seems to be under the delusion that the camera exists solely to record said elements, Affleck has a scarily grounded feel for his Boston hometown. The best decision he ever made was figuring out that the SAG-mandated extras should remain out of sight at all times and he should instead train his camera upon incidental alcoholics and degenrates without flinching. This remains the most pungent film of 2007.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Vadim Rizov

Cinema’s Greatest Comebacks & Comebacks We’d Like To See (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 10:30:00 GMT

JACKIE EARLE HALEY in LITTLE CHILDREN (2006)

Some people on this list needed comebacks after destroying their own careers through bad choices or behavior, but the triumphant, Oscar-nominated comeback of Jackie Earle Haley in 2006’s Little Children was extra sweet because it was such a Cinderella story...and, as they say, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. After memorable breakthrough roles as the punk turned Little League champ in The Bad News Bears (1976) and the Cutter with the heart of gold in Breaking Away (1979), Haley suffered the child star curse and saw his career nosedive into obscurity during the ‘80s, ‘90s and most of the oughts. According to Haley (as quoted on the Internet Movie Database), “I'd always avoided stuff like 'Where are they now?' or 'Whatever happened to?'...You tell me, have you ever seen a 'Whatever happened to' where they seemed anything but pathetic? I could do that or just disappear.” And so, like so many creative types before him who’d ridden their dreams as far as they could, Haley rejoined the everyday rat race where most of us live, delivering pizzas, refinishing furniture, working variously as a security guard, a limousine driver and such, until (in the kind of wet dream moment that never really happens) A-list director Steven Zaillian just happened to remember the actor’s earlier work and cast him, more or less out of the blue, in the 2006 Sean Penn adaptation of All The President’s Men, which in turn led to Haley’s true comeback via his harrowing, heartbreaking performance later that year as the neighborhood pedophile in Todd Field’s Little Children...which in turn led to a part in Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island and, of course, the plum role of Rorschach in Zack Snyder’s 800-pound gorilla, Watchmen. So who knows? Maybe there’s hope.

STERLING HAYDEN in DR. STRANGELOVE: OR, HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1964)

Tall, striking Sterling Hayden developed into one of the biggest stars of the 1950s thanks to his unique looks, cruelly laconic performances and ability to bring mysterious depths to even noir lowlifes. But his heart had never really been in acting, which he found to be a frivolous and often unengaging profession. He had an extremely standoffish relationship with capitalism, and his ability to land roles in high-grossing films was, to him, merely a means to an end: i.e., his habit of sailing, which got him away from an American consumer culture he often reviled. In 1958, he was involved in a nasty divorce and decided to leave it all behind once and for all; defying a court order, he took his kids, packed up a sailboat for the long haul, and headed off to Tahiti, where he would remain for almost six years. Aside from one brief television appearance, the only thing he did during that time that had anything to do with the entertainment industry was to write a hugely entertaining and profoundly thoughtful autobiography called Wanderer, in which he essentially repudiated his life as a movie star. Still, a nautical life is expensive, and in the 1960s, he enjoyed a protracted comeback which began in the best possible way: with an unforgettably loony performance as the unhinged General Jack D. Ripper in Stanley Kubrick’s pitch-black Cold War comedy Dr. Strangelove.

JOHN HUSTON, UNDER THE VOLCANO (1984)

John Huston couldn’t possibly have had a more charmed career. He was practically born into Hollywood royalty; his father, Walter Huston, preceded him in a career as a double-threat director and actor. John himself added more to the package: he was a terrific writer, an intellectual, a keen spotter of talent. His very first movie as a director, The Maltese Falcon, is one of the greatest Hollywood movies of all time, and he followed it up with classics like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Key Largo, The Asphalt Jungle, The African Queen and Beat the Devil. Things started to go awry for him in the mid-‘50s, though, after an ambitious but failed adaptation of Moby Dick, and by the 1960s, he was directing second-tier work like The List of Adrian Messenger and the disastrous Reflections in a Golden Eye. In the 1970s, he launched some work that contained sparks of genius, but nothing that coalesced into coherence: there were moments of greatness in The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, The Man Who Would Be King, and Wise Blood, but all of them fell apart under the weight of their flaws. By the 1980s, Huston was producing pure schlock like Victory and Annie. Forty years as a director is far longer than anyone has a right to be successful, and people were willing to forgive his sad descent because of the greatness of his earlier work: but Huston, a career rebel, wasn’t about to go out without a fight. In 1984, he directed a stunning Albert Finney in an imperfect but still highly impressive adaptation of the great Malcolm Lowry novel Under the Volcano; it signaled a genuine late-career comeback for Huston, who went on to direct the enjoyable Prizzi’s Honor and the astonishing movie version of James Joyce’s The Dead before finally dying in 1987.

TERENCE STAMP in THE LIMEY (1999)

While most of the people on this list have rejuvenated their careers once or twice, the outstanding British actor Terence Stamp has had more comebacks than most people have had hot dinners. He rose to fame alongside his old flatmate Michael Caine and went on to become one of the most celebrated actors of the 1960s, as well as a sort of living symbol of the Carnaby Street crowd of London’s swinging sixties; it was at the end of that decade, after a highly public breakup with girlfriend Jeannie Shrimpton, that he had his first downturn, decamping for an Indian ashram and taking much of the 1970s off. He followed that with his first major comeback, in the juicily hammy role of General Zod in Superman II, and enjoyed a brief resurgence in the ‘80s that faded just as quickly in the waning part of that decade. 1994 found him mounting another big comeback through the simple act of donning a dress in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, but he floundered a bit after that, until 1999, when screenwriter Lem Dobbs and director Steven Soderbergh came through with a role crafted especially for him. Revisiting (and updating) Stamp’s nasty, edgy, working-class persona, and even going so far as to use recycled footage from one of his old films as “archival footage” of the character he was playing, the two created, in the vengeful ex-hoodlum Wilson, the role he’d been working towards his whole career. Stamp’s performance was universally celebrated and allowed him to stage yet another comeback – which has now faded enough that he’s about due for one more.

BEN AFFLECK, GONE BABY GONE (2007)

Ben Affleck never deserved to be a walking punchline for the following reasons: 1) Good Will Hunting was weak and should never had made anyone famous; 2) the kind of callow, narcissistic performances Affleck gave in movies like Paycheck perfectly reflected and commented upon the material 3) "Bennifer" doesn't mean anything. Nonetheless, having become an all-too-easy punchline, Affleck retreated behind the camera and demonstrated a knack for drawing perfectly judged performances and local color. If Gone Baby Gone seems to be under the delusion that the camera exists solely to record said elements, Affleck has a scarily grounded feel for his Boston hometown. The best decision he ever made was figuring out that the SAG-mandated extras should remain out of sight at all times and train his camera upon incidental alcoholics and degenrates without flinching. This remains the most pungent film of 2007.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Five, Six & Seven

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Vadim Rizov

In Other Blogs: The Movie Killer

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Film critics may be disappearing from the pages of daily newspapers by the dozen, but it’s still not happening fast enough for some in Hollywood. Specifically, as Patrick Goldstein writes in The Big Picture, New York Times critic Manohla Dargis is feared and loathed by studio brass. “It's an open secret in indie Hollywood that no one wants Manohla Dargis to review their movie, fearing that the outspoken critic will tear their film limb from limb. It's the ultimate backhanded compliment, since what they really fear is Manohla's persuasiveness -- that she'll write a review whose combination of vitriolic snarkiness and intellectual heft will actually persuade high-brow moviegoers to drop the film from their must-see list. (To be fair, she can be equally passionate about films she loves; for example, Synecdoche, New York, or anything by David Lynch.)… No one blinks an eye when a critic eviscerates a dumb summer comedy -- that's a fair target. It's the filmmakers who've aimed high and been brought to their knees by a Dargis pan who feel as if they've been gored for sport. You might say Manohla occupies a unique perch: She's the critic you love to read, just as long as you're not reading about your movie.”

Karina Longworth takes issue with Goldstein at Spoutblog. “It’s almost as if Goldstein is advocating for a kind of affirmative action for art (or, at least, artsy) films: all pictures may be on a level playing field in Manohla’s eyes, but a certain type of picture should be given special consideration for at least trying to be art, even if it fails… I guess it’s not that surprising that Goldstein’s attack on Manohla would resemble the faux-populist, ‘Let’s see you do better’ line of the over-protective commenter class. But if he’s actually suggesting that critics should allow “empathy” for the architects of blatant awards bait to temper their judgements, then this might be his harshest anti-criticism statement yet.”

At Beyond the Multiplex, Andrew O’Hehir chats with Steven Soderbergh about Che. ‘It was still, for a long time, one script. And it was becoming really unwieldy. And worse than that, because it was so long, we were still trying to make it into one film, or one normal-length film. The themes were really, really short, and you really couldn't go into any detail about anything and it started to feel like a two-hour trailer for a four-hour movie. And that's when I suggested busting it in half…My attitude was like, "Look, in nature, when a cell gets too big, it divides in order to survive. That's what we've got here. That's what we have to do." And I think, in retrospect, it was the right thing to do. Now I look at it and wish we'd just gone to HBO and done 10 hours.”

Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule pays tribute to Forrest J. Ackerman with a video presentation: My Visit to the Ackermansion. “In 1998 my wife and I made a pilgrimage to the Ackermansion and, some 20 or so years after my obsession with Famous Monsters had been tabled, I finally got to meet the man who had meant so much to me in the formative years of my film education. I brought along a video camera and taped the entire affair, a glimpse inside the halls of the most famous movie mansion of them all…if you never got a chance to take the trip yourself, spend some time with the Ackermonster and enjoy him doing what he enjoyed most—interacting with fans and reliving a life well spent chronicling his beloved history of horror.”

Year-end lists are trickling in. Marshall Fine’s top ten at Hollywood and Fine is topped by Revolutionary Road. “Director Sam Mendes returns to suburbia circa 1956 and reteams Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet in this film version of Richard Yates’ novel. The acting is terrific – nuanced yet passionate – and Mendes captures the novel’s era-defining feeling of seekers putting their dreams on hold to chase conventional success.” Nathan Lee has five underrated films that deserve your love, including Mother of Tears. “Dario Argento’s deranged b-movie extravaganza about the uncorking of a witch from an ancient urn that ushers in the second Fall of Rome is the most fun I’ve had at the movies…ever?” Hello, Netflix!

Trailer Review: Che

Paul Clark — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Most trailers, even really good ones, do little more than to provide a snapshot of the movie- what it’s about, its cast, sometimes the tone it’s going for. Rare is the trailer that actually has a trajectory to it in a way that encapsulates the journey taken by the film itself. What’s most impressive about the trailer for Steven Soderbergh’s epic Che is that it begins just the way one would expect it to only to switch gears, almost imperceptibly, to something difference and less endearing to many audiences. Perhaps the most useless thing a Che bio could do at this point is to simplify and lionize its hero like so many t-shirts and dorm room posters have before, and I was somewhat put off by the early scenes in this trailer, in which it looks like the film is painting Che (Cannes prizewinner Benicio Del Toro) as a romanticized revolutionary. However, later on the trailer switches gears to make him much less idealized, and the war he’s fighting is much uglier (love the aspect ratio shift too). And the final exchange is perfect. Che has gotten wildly diverging reviews since its premiere at Cannes, but I’m still hopeful that it’ll be one of this year’s significant films.

Morning Deal Report: We Can't Stop the Three Stooges Revival

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 15:30:00 GMT

The Farrelly brothers are doing their best to ensure that we never go to the movies again. Last week we reported their involvement in the farting dog movie. Now Variety reports that Bobby and Peter Farrelly “will renew their quest to channel the comic mayhem of the Three Stooges into a contemporary comedy.” If visions of Michael Chiklis as Curly are dancing (and slapping) in your head, Peter Farrelly would like to reassure you. “"It’s not a biopic. It takes place in present day, and they look, dress and sound exactly like the Stooges…When the economy started turning, we felt like the world could use a Stooges slapfest.” You know, he’s right. I do need a movie that won’t tempt me to spend any money.

Add another project to the 57 or so Steven Soderbergh already has in the works. With Che due in theaters and The Girlfriend Experience and Liberace on deck, Soderbergh will lend his name as executive producer to the mob movie Making Jack Falcone. Che screenwriter Peter Buchman will pen “the story of Joaquin ‘Jack’ Garcia, also known as Jack Falcone, a Cuban-American FBI agent who successfully went undercover in the Gambino crime family,” per The Hollywood Reporter.

Charlize Theron may co-star with Tom Cruise in The Tourist. She’d play “a female Interpol agent who uses an American tourist in an attempt to flush out an elusive criminal with whom she once had an affair,” per Variety. Just do what she says, Mr. Cruise.

Related:
Steven Soderbergh's "Girlfriend Experience"
Charlize Theron is a Sexual Creature

In Other Blogs: Watching the Watchmen Watchers

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 14:30:00 GMT

Warner Bros. invited a number of bloggists to take a gander at 26 minutes worth of Watchmen footage and, scandalously, our man Leonard Pierce was not among them. They’ll pay for this. Kevin Kelly of Spoutblog was among them, and if you simply can’t wait for a minute-by-minute breakdown, he’s got it. “As the footage opens, the Comedian is sitting back watching Richard Nixon give a speech on television about aggression from the Soviet Union. He’s having a cup of tea and enjoying a cigar, just a quiet evening at home. He starts flipping channels and settles on a commercial for Nostalgia Perfume from Veidt Industries, with music provided by the idyllic velvet tones of Nat King Cole. Just a quiet evening at home for a former costumed vigilante. That is, until a figure dressed in black busts his door down and proceeds to kick his ass all over the place before hurling him out the window. As he hurtles to the ground, his iconic smiley face pin, now with a dollop of blood on it, lands beside him, providing the iconic cover for the graphic novel, and the most identifiable image from the Watchmen universe.” Yeah, that’s how I would have done it, too.

At Scanners, Jim Emerson makes the case that movie critics are the best political pundits. “One of the things film critics do for a living is to pay close attention to how people behave, and how that behavior is presented through visual media. This applies not only to actors playing characters, but to people who play themselves, in fictional or nonfictional settings, on and off the screen. It should come as no surprise to learn that some of our best movie critics have backgrounds in psychology. When Bill Clinton said, ‘I did not have sex with that woman,’ it now seems impossible to believe that he fooled anyone at that particular moment. But if any movie critic misread Clinton's voice and body language, that critic should have been impeached.”

The Cooler announces the Politics & Movies Blog-a-Thon, to take place between Nov. 4-9. “The parameters are these: Your post must deal with politics and movies. Simple as that. If that means you write an appreciation of a political-themed drama like The Candidate, perfect! If that means you analyze a documentary like No End In Sight, that’s great, too. If instead you want to dive into the deeper political themes of a blockbuster like The Dark Knight, be my guest. Politics and movies are the essential ingredients. Go forth and be creative.” I’m guessing we’ll participate in some fashion.

At Some Came Running, Glenn Kenny flicks an old chestnut off his plate. “I can't honestly say if this is more of a personal quirk than a reflection on genuine critical principle, but one thing that drives me right up a wall is the complaint, apropos a given film (okay, apropos a given film that I happen to be fond of), ‘I didn't care about the characters.’ The word ‘care,’ admittedly, gets right up my nose almost as quickly as the word ‘relate’ does…Of the films that are unspooling at the New York Film Festival, it's Steven Soderbergh's Che that's eliciting the most sniffy care-bear reactions, this notwithstanding the fact that the film isn't really asking you to care, not in the traditional sense of getting cozy with its title character, being roused by his victories, going all snurfly at his eventual fate. It is not, however, an entirely objective film, particularly as one appreciates the effects of Alberto Iglesias's score (and the music does in fact go a bit mournful at the very end). But the film is an environmental immersion and an examination; it's not designed to get you going.”

And in List-o-Mania this week, Cracked looks into the 6 Baffling Mistakes Every Movie Criminal Makes. Number 4 is Working with Far More People Than Necessary. “You know those girls on Myspace who have 23,138 friends? It doesn't matter to them that no human being needs that many friends, or that no person could maintain a reasonable level of sanity with that many people bugging them to hang out. The large number makes them feel popular and validated. Well, Hollywood thinks that criminals are pretty much the same.”

Morning Deal Report: Kirsten Dunst is a Jealous Ghost

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Its title makes A Jealous Ghost sound a lot like too many recent rom-coms about the recently deceased haunting their exes, like Over Her Dead Body or Ghost Town, due out Friday. That’s apparently not the case, however, as The Hollywood Reporter describes the upcoming Kirsten Dunst vehicle as a “literary horror movie.” Dunst will play “a young American woman who travels to London to write a dissertation on Henry James' classic ghost tale, The Turn of the Screw, only to find that her own circumstances begin to reflect the strange happenings of the story.”

Michael Douglas is keeping busy. In addition to his upcoming turn as Liberace for Steven Soderbergh, he’ll play “a car magnate with a runaway libido” in Solitary Man. That sounds more his speed. Per Variety, Susan Sarandon, Danny DeVito and Jenna Fischer are in talks to co-star.

Nicole Kidman is attached to The Eighth Wonder, which “centers on an archeological discovery that sets off a globe-spanning race.” Quoth The Hollywood Reporter: “The goal is to create a movie that will be to Raiders of the Lost Ark what the Bourne movies are to James Bond movies: a character-driven, treasure-hunting thriller.” Isn’t that what the Tomb Raider movies were supposed to be? Well, apart from the “character-driven” part, I guess. Those were more boobies-and-shorts-driven.

Related:
Soderbergh Does Liberace
Chick Hits: The Girl Power Top Ten

In Other Blogs: Canadian Edition

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Many luminaries from the film blogosphere attended the Toronto International Film Festival this week. (I would have gone, but I don’t speak Canadian.) Spoutblog chatted with Paris, Not France director Adria Petty to find out the story behind those cancelled screenings. “I’ll just tell you the truth,” she said. “The truth is that we just didn’t want the film pirated. There’s a lot of people involved in the film that own it or financed it. It was in a lot of different camps and different layers. And basically, at the end of the day, instead of having the whole thing canceled or pulled because of all these greedy or annoying people, Paris and I, who wanted the film to screen at Toronto and were honored by it, we were like, look let’s just do it once in one big theater. And then we put the night vision goggles in one time––because everybody is like, who pays for the night vision?”

In this Toronto dispatch, Green Cine Daily asks the musical question: “Does postmodernism have a future?...Without a doubt, this year's grand test case for the future viability of any form of large-scale political cinema, if not for outsized American auteur cinema in general, is Steven Soderbergh's Che. Divided into two full-length films, each slightly over two hours, Che could be the ultimate sinkhole for our day, a giant leftist vacuum into which someone's money vanished without a trace. How can this film even exist, and who is its presumed audience? To Soderbergh's credit, there seems to have been little consideration of this question. I would like to be able to weigh in passionately on the debate around Che, but the sad truth is, there's little onscreen to justify passions in either direction.”

At Scanners, Jim Emerson applauds our Canadian oppressors. “One difference between Canadians and Europeans: They are not into power-tripping you at the entrance to movie theaters. I arrived too late (about ten minutes before starting time) for the one and only press/industry screening of Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker yesterday…Then word came that no more seats could be found. Some of us (the Americans and Canadians) were saddened and disappointed and frustrated. Others (those with European accents, though it is possible they were Quebecois) were indignant. They waved their passes and accused the theater staff of ignoring them or cheating them in some way….Finally, a staffer had to explain: There. Were. No. More. Seats. She was not trying to cheat people out of seeing the Kathryn Bigelow movie. She was not attempting to wield arbitrary authority over a gaggle of eager festivalgoers in order to make herself feel powerful and important. She was doing her job and telling the truth: The theater was full.”

Slant supplies its own Canadian content with a look at Adoration. “A characteristically masterful welter of bad vibrations, Atom Egoyan's latest finds the director back in Canadian Traumaland after his Hollywood sojourn in Where the Truth Lies. Keyed to the characters' sense of lingering grief, the narrative unfurls as a time-hopping maze of action and consequence—its deftness and delicacy shame Arriaga's tawdry temporal gymnastics in The Burning Plain. A button-pushing essay by a high-schooler (Devon Bostick) gives the absence-riddled film its center: Turning an article about a failed terrorist plot into a faux-eulogy to his dead parents, the boy uncorks a reservoir of sorrow that brings together his uncle (a surprisingly excellent Scott Speedman), teacher (Egoyan axiom Arsinée Kanjian), and other members of the community… Moody, gliding filmmaking and ripples of quizzical humor save it from being a lugubrious game of therapeutic musical chairs.

And in List-o-Mania, PopMatters offers the Top Ten Things I Loved About TIFF 08, including the return of Debra Winger. “She was only in about four scenes of Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married, but in her scant screen time, she conducted a master class in scene-stealing as the mother of the title character and Anne Hathaway’s noxious Kym. Yes, it may be the ‘mother’ role, but Winger is understatedly elegant, and rock-solid. Here’s to hoping this high-profile release gains her some traction on the awards circuit, in tandem with Hathaway. It’s a small, quietly fuming turn that should be lauded for its poetic simplicity.”

Coming Soon: A Screengrab Salute To Movie Trailers (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 20:00:00 GMT

We were going to continue our Back To School salute with this week’s Top Ten list, but thought we should pause for a moment to pay tribute to Don LaFontaine, the king of movie trailer voiceover talent (who died on September 1) with a list of some of our favorite coming attractions.

This is a strange subject, perhaps, for a Top Ten(-ish) List, since many people regard previews as nothing more than glorified commercials that give away all the good parts, annoying time wasters before the movie you really wanted to see (or, at best, a last minute chance to rush out and get popcorn without missing anything important).

As for me, I sometimes go to movies I’m not even all that excited about just to get myself a good dose of coming attraction action. Trailers are like a perfect little ADD film festival: four or five upcoming releases boiled down to their purest essence in high velocity speedballs of action, music and memorable sound bites designed to goose my anticipation of movies I’m looking forward to or draw my attention to unheralded films I might otherwise have missed.

Most of the time, though, previews allow me to vicariously enjoy all the best moments of flicks like Death Race and Disaster Movie without requiring me to actually sit through them, thus expanding my cinematic horizons while saving wear and tear on both my ass and my wallet.

So here’s a quick Screengrab preview of coming attractions: next week, The Top College Movies of All Time!

And now...on with our feature presentation.

DON LAFONTAINE: THE VOICE

The man...the myth...the trailers. Hard to choose just one LaFontaine original to write about, so this seemed appropriate. But as far as individual coming attraction previews go, there’s no better place to start than with...

The trailer for THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK (1980)

In a previous Screengrab list, I wrote: “After the pure, cinematic orgasm of Star Wars blew my pre-pubescent mind beyond any hope of repair, even The Empire Strikes Back was something of a let-down (although watching the teaser trailer for the sequel during one of the theatrical re-releases of the original may stand as the most exciting two minutes of my entire movie-going life).” Allow me to elaborate, for those who were NOT 12-year-old boys in 1979: I had Star Wars sheets, a Star Wars poster above my bed and roughly 1200 plastic Star Wars figures, vehicles, playsets and little tiny guns in my toy chest. I’d seen Star Wars theatrically at least a dozen times, and I’d already read the screenplay, the novelization AND the Marvel Comics adaptation. I knew every frame of film, line of dialogue and Ben Burtt sound effect by heart. And then, in the Year of Our Lord 1979, they re-released THE BEST FILM EVER once again into theaters...only THIS time with the promise of a trailer at the end for the long and desperately awaited sequel, The Empire Strikes Back. And so I paid my parents’ money yet again, and watched Luke blow up the Death Star yet again, and then...at last...the music surged, a brand NEW logo in that funky Star Wars font drifted into view...and...well, the rest was such an undiluted rush of adrenalized oxytocin bliss I essentially disappeared into a barely cognizant state of pure sensation usually reserved for ketamine addicts and William Hurt’s character in Altered States. I only began to process the experience on the second or third viewing of the trailer (following my 14th or 15th viewings of Star Wars)...but, in a nutshell, seeing Luke, Leia, Han Solo and the rest busting free of scenes I knew like Catholic liturgy to suddenly act out BRAND NEW scenes, in BRAND NEW vests and hairdos was equivalent to waking up and discovering the sky was suddenly green and ice cream was a breakfast food. Reminiscing on the embarrassing geekiness of my pre-pubescent obsession (and, uh, this entire blog entry), I can fully empathize with the new generation of kids who waited up ‘til midnight in full Harry Potter drag to snag their Deathly Hallows hardcovers the second they went on sale...and I even (almost) forgive George Lucas for Jar-Jar Binks and (ugh) Stinky the Hutt and all the future disappointments that eventually followed that one glorious trailer.

The trailers for INDEPENDENCE DAY (1996), TWISTER (1996) & THE PERFECT STORM (2000)

And then, of course après Star Wars, le deluge. It may not be fair to blame George Lucas (and/or Steven Spielberg) for double-handedly ending the glorious era of ‘70s filmmaking, but the Midas-fingered directors certainly helped to usher in the current era of commerce driven “event” movies. But unlike the aforementioned Empire Strikes Back trailer, which enthralled my pre-pubescent soul while promoting an actual movie worth seeing, many of today’s “event” trailers have become stand-alone short subjects far superior to the films they ostensibly advertise. Independence Day may not have been a great movie, but the trailer (with its exploding White House, embattled New York and stirring call to arms by a faux-macho American president) was certainly a grabber (and, in retrospect, an eerie pre-post-9/11 propaganda film). The same CGI highlight-reel approach, featuring at least one big compelling “gotcha!” moment -- like the glimpse of that giant wave in The Perfect Storm preview or the truck (or is it a tractor?) flying right at the audience in the final seconds of the Twister trailer -- has become an art form unto itself in recent years, not unlike a carnival barker spiel far more entertaining than whatever the unwary are likely to find if they actually buy a ticket and step inside the tent.

The trailer for ROBOT MONSTER (1953) and this freaky-ass trailer for VIDEODROME (1983)

But, of course, mainstream blockbusters aren’t the only productions that generate trailers as good or better than the films they promote. With no stars or Burger King tie-in promotions to aid them, B-movies and indies have always lived or died by their posters and trailers. The 1950s was a golden age of schlock movie previews (like this one for Robot Monster), with all the wooden acting and dull exposition stripped down to just the juicy monster money shots. Meanwhile, indies prefer to entice with their critical raves, film fest appearances, and/or (in the case of this Videodrome teaser) a freaky, inexplicable smörgåsbord of sight and sound compelling enough to lure audiences into uncharted waters if only to find out what the hell is going on...even when said imagery bears little relation to actual scenes from the movie.

The trailer for BUBBLE (2005)

If you were a big-name director who’d just made a low-budget film with no stars in a town most people couldn’t locate on a map, how would you sell it? If you’re Steven Soderbergh, you’d break pretty much every rule of trailer-making. This brilliant spot for Bubble contains exactly none of the following: voiceover, shots of the actors, plot summary, or critical or festival notices. Heck, there’s barely even a human presence at all, aside from the “Another Steven Soderbergh Experience” credit at the very end. Instead, Soderbergh gives us a montage taken from the inside of a doll factory (the film’s primary setting), with isolated doll parts progressively taking the final shape of the dolls. All this set to a jaunty yet creepy orchestral piece (anybody know where it’s from?), giving the proceedings an eerie feel. In the context of the story, the montage has an air of hopelessness -- are we merely dolls slapped together by an uncaring hand? -- but taken on its own merits, it’s a brilliant bit of salesmanship, a distinctive trailer for a movie that otherwise might fall quickly under the radar.

The trailer, website, etc. for THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT (1999)

It figures that The Blair Witch Project would have made good use of the fleeting-glimpse concept that has been at the heart of so many great trailers; after all, it was at the heart of the movie, too. The trailer's real innovation was to combine a tried-and-true gimmick that linked it to such films as Psycho, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and even Fargo -- the deliberate confusion as to whether this was a "true" story and what was then still a new idea, the use of a promotional web site -- and really work that sucker in a way that no one ever had before. By using the trailer to whet the viewer's curiosity and then flashing the site's URL with its implicit promise to provide more information at the click of a mouse, Blair Witch really fuzzed the line between hype and hoax, and in the process served up an all-encompassing promotional campaign that may have been more fun than the movie itself.

The trailer for THE BIRDS (1963)

This sinister mini-movie – a twisted take on the educational short film – may be the most clever theatrical trailer ever produced. Alfred's macabre sense of humor is on full display here, and he draws out the gag just a little too long, making the audience comfortable before -- gaa! scary birds! The Birds never explains why all the world's winged creatures suddenly revolt, which only adds to the horror. This trailer's answer? They were just tired of being made into chicken dinners and fancy hats.

Click Here for Part 2!

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Paul Clark, Phil Nugent, Gwynne Watkins

Morning Deal Report: Soderbergh Does Liberace

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 14:30:00 GMT

Steven Soderbergh prides himself on being an eclectic filmmaker and you can’t get much more eclectic than following up a biopic of Che Guevara with one of Liberace. Actually, the Liberace project won’t be next on Soderbergh’s agenda – that would be The Girlfriend Experience for Mark Cuban’s HDNet – but it’s definitely on the back burner. Variety reports “Soderbergh is in discussions with Matt Damon to play Scott Thorson, who sued Liberace in 1982 for $113 million in palimony, claiming he was the entertainer’s companion for five years. Even though Liberace never wavered from career-long denials that he was gay, Thorson reportedly settled for $95,000 in 1986.” And who will play the flamboyant entertainer? Would you believe…Michael Douglas?

While you’re processing that mental image over your morning bowl of Frankenberries, here’s some chick flick news for you. Drew Barrymore will produce How to Be Single, adapted from the best-selling novel by Liz Tuccillo. Barrymore is already producing He’s Just Not That Into You by the same author, but lest you be confused, The Hollywood Reporter explains that while “Into You was a non-fiction how-to look at relationships, Single is Tuccillo's fiction debut. It follow the dating lives of five single New York women, one of whom, the narrator, is writing a book about how bachelorettes across the world manage. The woman embarks on a trip around the world for the book and gets involved in an international affair, while her four friends duke it out on the New York dating scene.” For some reason, I’m picturing a Sarah Jessica Parker type for the lead.

If you’re excited about the upcoming Land of the Lost movie with Will Ferrell, you’ll be thrilled to learn that Sigmund and the Sea Monsters is also coming to the big screen. Sid and Marty Krofft will produce the movie scripted by Dana Gould (The Simpsons). And yes, according to Variety, live-action versions of Lidsville, The Bugaloos and Dr. Shrinker may not be far behind.

Related:
Steven Soderbergh's "Girlfriend Experience"
Will Ferrell and the Retro Boys