The Screengrab : sweet sweetback's badasssss song

The Top 20 Movies About Movies (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 21:30:00 GMT

LIVING IN OBLIVION (1995)

Despite one of the cheesiest posters in cinema history (which, come to think of it, may itself be some kind of meta parody of the habitual cheesiness of zero-budget indiewood marketing campaigns), writer/director Tom DiCillo’s Living in Oblivion more than earns its place on this list through its flawless depiction of the cast and crew of every single dentist-financed independent film of the ‘90s, from the taciturn sound guy in the hipster glasses (“Speeeed”) and the creepy, addled production assistant to the catty make-up girl and, yes, the ubiquitous dream sequence dwarf (played with simmering, hilarious contempt by Peter Dinklage in a breakthrough performance). The project, allegedly inspired by DiCillo’s enervating experience directing Brad Pitt in the indie misfire Johnny Suede, is a hilarious cautionary tale starring Steve Buscemi as a harried director afraid to admit his passion project might just be a colossal waste of time and money, James Le Gros as an insanely arrogant would-be movie star and Catherine Keener as an insecure actress whose slow disintegration over the course of multiple takes of an emotional scene is like a graduate course in on-camera acting.

DAVID HOLZMAN'S DIARY (1967)

Jim McBride's debut feature stars L. M. Kit Carson as a young aspiring filmmaker who begins compulsively shooting a documentary record of his life, a life that soon disappears under the weight of all that celluloid. A special kind of modern horror comedy, sort of like watching a mirror eat the world it's supposed to be reflecting. The inevitable remake, David Holzman's Blog, is still out there waiting to be made.

BAADASSSSS! (2003)

Mario Van Peebles makes some kind of history by playing his own father, Melvin, in the stirring tale of how dad managed to somehow pull together the pioneering X-rated art-blaxsploitation independent film Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song. Wearing a '70s 'stache and chomping on his father's trademark stogie, Van Peebles actually gives a more exciting performance than he'd ever managed before (and a more appealing one than his dad had ever managed) while mining the chaos of no-budget filmmaking for some ripe comedy. (He also makes time to document the time that dad, having enlisted young Mario to appear in the film, ordered someone to shave ringworm scars in the sensitive lad's head.) Plus: Rainn Wilson's worst hair day ever! Adam West declares himself lustful! And Seinfeld's Uncle Leo in stereo!

DEMON LOVER DIARY (1980)

This lost classic (never officially released on home video in any form) is American Movie's evil twin. In 1975, MIT grad student and cinematographer Jeff Kreins agreed to shoot the horror flick Demon Lover for a pair of Midwestern factory workers looking to make a splash in the film world. (Financing for the film came in the form of insurance payments when one of the would-be Cravens cut off his finger on the job.) One of Kreins' conditions in agreeing to take on this task was that he be able to bring along his gal pal Joel DeMott so that she could film a cinema verite documentary on the making of Demon Lover. She couldn't have known at the time that she would be chronicling a harrowing descent into madness that literally ends with Kreins and DeMott fleeing in panic while gunshots are fired. The two would-be filmmakers at the documentary's center are bizarro dopplegangers of American Movie's Borchardt and Schank, but proving once again that life is stranger than fiction, co-director Donald G. Jackson went on to have a long if not distinguished directorial career, with credits including Lingerie Kickboxer and Hell Comes to Frogtown.

Click Here for Part One, Part Two, Part Three & Part Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Scott Von Doviak

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

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

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

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

HARLAN COUNTY U.S.A. (1976)

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

HESTER STREET (1975)

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

SERPICO (1973)

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

THE SEARCHERS (1956)

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

Click here to read Part One and Part Two

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent

Tribeca Film Festival Review: "Confessions of an Ex-Doofus-Itchy-Footed Mutha"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 02 May 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Melvin Van Peebles has been well-established as a maverick independent filmmaker and provocateur since at least 1971's Sweet Sweetback's Badassss Song. His new film, Confessions of an Ex-Doofus-Itchy-Footed Mutha, confirms that he's also still got a way with titles. He also still has an admirable willingness to make a public jackass of himself and an impressive ability to coax other people into coming along for the ride. Aside from that, though, there isn't a lot else to say about this smeared-looking video fantasy, spun off from one of his old stage shows, Waltz of the Stork. There might have been a few things that should have been said to Van Peebles before he made it, but I don't know who would have been deputized to say them. When the man's own son, Mario, has signed off for a cameo appearance as a pirate, it's hard to say who might have been best qualified to stage an intervention.

Confessions makes full use of the quality that has always been Van Peebles's secret weapon and that has outweighted everything else he's ever brought to the table, which is his absolute and fearless shamelessness. The seventy-five-year-old auteur plays the vagabond hero from the time he's fourteen through his mid-forties. This conceit might have been fun if Van Peebles were an actor, but he's usually gotten by on being a presence, and aside from the occasional outbreak of eye-popping, face-pulling hamminess, he doesn't have any idea what to do with himself here except stand around looking slack, sad-eyed, and grizzled. (As for costuming, Van Peebles tends to favor either one of two looks, the funeral director and the rodeo clown.) It's less amusing that embarrassing to watch him stealing apples as if he were in an Our Gang comedy or acting out his character's sexual initiation and confirming that, however long ago Sweetback was, once a stud, always a stud. (Yes, there are sex scenes. Yes, you do get to see Melvin with his shirt off and snuggling with the ladies, though a body double arrives in the nick of time when things get steamy. And no, none of this is as bad as the scene with the apple: Van Peebles has to be one of the movies' least photogenic eaters this side of Mr. Creosote.) I understand that Van Peebles is so taken with himself and his legend that he thinks the last thing in the world he needs is some distance and perspective in relation to himself, but the fact remains that Mario Van Peebles's swaggering performance as his dad in his own movie BAADASSSSS! from a few years back was both the best work Mario's ever done in movies and the smartest performance ever given by someone purporting to play Melvin Van Peebles. It is indeed a tribute to Melvin Van Peebles's spirit that, at seventy-five, he's still getting movies made and trying to use them to raise hell. But anyone who cares about him ought to pay him the soundest tribute they can by pretending that his latest movie doesn't exist.