The Screengrab : taxi to the dark side

DVD Digest for September 30, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week, a master’s final film shares the shelves with one of the summer’s biggest hits and a number of classic horror films coming out just in time for Halloween.

DVD of the Week: For years, the Criterion Collection has been committed to releasing superior DVD version of the films of the great director Yasujiro Ozu. Now, they’re continuing their commitment with this week’s release of Ozu’s final film, An Autumn Afternoon. In many ways, the film is a color analogue to Ozu’s classic (and my favorite film of his) Late Spring, this time telling the story of an aging man and his reluctant-to-marry daughter from the perspective of the father, played as ever by Ozu stalwart Chishu Ryu. With the switch in perspective away from youth to old age, it’s tempting to read An Autumn Afternoon as a kind of farewell piece by the filmmaker, a kind of passing of the torch to younger filmmakers. Yet it’s clear while watching the film that Ozu was as talented in his final years as he was in the prime of his career, and his seamless shift to color with his final films provide a hint that he might have been able to gracefully change with the times while keeping his one-of-a-kind style.

Other “classics” coming to DVD this week include the 123-minute cut of Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession (Ryko) and, uh, the “10th Anniversary Edition” of Can’t Hardly Wait (Sony) for which I know you were all clamoring.

The week’s biggest new release on DVD is Iron Man (Paramount, also Blu-Ray), the first and one of the biggest summer blockbusters, and much-anticipated arrival of Robert Downey Jr. on Hollywood’s A-list. Also of note is the Judd Apatow production Forgetting Sarah Marshall (Universal, also Blu-Ray), which is also included in Universal’s Ultimate Unrated Comedy Collection (also Blu-Ray) alongside fellow Apatow films The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up. Other recent releases coming to DVD: Taxi to the Dark Side (Image), CSNY / Déjà vu (Lionsgate), and Jellyfish (Zeitgeist).

This week’s rather sparse TV on DVD selections include: My Name Is Earl Season 3 (Fox) and Numb3rs Season 4 (Paramount).

Finally, in Blu-Ray Only news, this week brings Universal’s “Halloween Starter Pack”, which includes Dawn of the Dead [2004], Land of the Dead, and The Thing, also sold separately, and the director’s cut of Daredevil (Fox).

Gibney v. ThinkFilm: Lawsuit to the Dark Side

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 14:45:00 GMT

With his new film, Gonzo: The Life and Work of Hunter S. Thompson opening soon and filming already started on his adaptation of the best-selling Freakonomics, Alex Gibney -- whose previous work has included Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room -- is developing a reputation as one of the canniest documentary filmmakers in the business. He should have his eyes pointed straight at the future, but instead, he's bogged down with a movie that was released last year: Taxi to the Dark Side.

According to IndieWire, Gibney has filed a lawsuit against ThinkFilm, the distributors of Taxi to the Dark Side, through the Independent Film & Television Alliance. The amount? A cool million. The issue? Gibney insists that ThinkFilm misled him about their preparedness to release the film, misled him about their financial clout, and failed to give Taxi to the Dark Side the theatrical release it needed to turn a profit. Gibney's also asking for legal costs and a return of distribution rights to the film.

For their part, ThinkFilm -- who are currently cash-poor and facing a major crisis as creditors breathe down their necks -- claim bad faith on the part of Gibney. While not denying the charges outright, they do say that Gibney was paid in full, if not on time, and attempt to turn his reputation as a champion of the little guy against him: "How ironic that a man who professes to care so much about the people who worked hard on his film would then inflict such insult and injury upon the blameless and tireless THINKFilm staff," says the company's Mark Urman. Whatever happens with the lawsuit, ThinkFilm is burning a lot of bridges that won't be easy to rebuild.

Related Posts:

Take Five: Taxi!

Morning Deal Report: Bollocks

Truth or Dare: Paul Arthur on Errol Morris's "Standard Operating Procedure"

Phil Nugent — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 21:30:00 GMT

Paul Arthur, an influential film scholar and critic (and author of A Line Of Sight: American Avant-Garde Film Since 1965) died recently; one if his last pieces has now appeared in Artforum, in which he examines the techniques of "nonfiction filmmaker" Errol Morris, whose forthcoming Standard Operating Procedure is about the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. Arthur finds Morris guilty of choosing "to substitute metaphor for analysis"; he compares Morris's approach to that of Alex Gibney's in Taxi to the Dark Side--whose "gritty reenactments, lush landscape shots, interviews lit like Dutch portraiture, and ... ominous music track replete with vaguely religious wailing suggestive of cries of another sort... never supersede or distract from Gibney’s inflamed political indictment"--and find Morris's approach wanting.

Morris himself has called his film "a nonfiction horror movie;” Arthur, taking note of the contributions of the cinematographer Robert Richardson and composer Danny Elfman, and describing Morris's penchant for interrupting interview testimony with creepy imagery, writes, "These visual aperçus, which Morris refers to rather sophistically as 'impressions' rather than reenactments, are undeniably gorgeous. Their style, however, belongs to a film genre that provides titillation through horror. To employ this rhetoric in a documentary about actual horror is obscene, yielding familiar aesthetic thrills as a substitute for specificity of meaning. We aren’t prompted to contemplate the Iraq occupation’s signature scandal as the product of a mercenary chain of executive decisions, cultural attitudes, venalities, and personal pathologies; we are, as it were, let off the hook. It’s only a movie." The article, which will inflame Morris's most devoted fans--and he has lots of them--is provocative and spiky enough to remind those who knew Arthur's work what a valuable man he was in an argument, whether he was on your side or not. With any luck, it might also inspire some who are unfamiliar with his writing to try to find out more about what they've beeb missing.

Indie Box-Office Roundup: Weekend of February 22-24, 2008

Paul Clark — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 15:00:00 GMT

One of the pleasures of doing the weekly Indie Box-Office Roundup is that there are more surprises to be had with this top ten than with the top-grossing films overall. For example, I never thought I'd live to type the following six words: "Jacques Rivette, domestic box-office champ." Naturally, we're talking per-screen average rather than overall gross, but still — wow. Rivette's latest film, The Duchess of Langeais (IFC Films), took in a per-screen average of $11,126 on two screens over the past weekend. What makes this weekend's haul even more of a surprise is that Rivette's last film, L'Histoire de Marie et Julien was snubbed altogether by American distributors as being "too uncommercial." As a long-standing Rivette fan, I'm happy to see that others are responding as positively to his new work as I did. I don't expect it to stay on top, but I'll enjoy its reign while it lasts.

Coming in a strong second was Sunday night's Best Foreign-Language Film winner, Stefan Ruzowitzky's The Counterfeiters (Sony Pictures Classics). In its first weekend in American theatres, the film brought in an average of $10,939 per screen on eight screens. Expect the film's totals to soar next weekend, as Oscar-watchers turn out to see what all the fuss is about.

Sitting at #3 and #4 were last week's top two, The Band's Visit (Sony Pictures Classics) and In Bruges (Focus Features), followed by the weekend's top documentary, A Man Named Pearl (Shadow Distribution). Also worth mentioning is 9th-place film La Traviata (Emerging Pictures), a limited-engagement performance of Verdi's opera. It's hard to gauge how the opera's attendance compares to the other titles in this week's top ten, since although many cities are showing the movie fewer times than their other titles, tickets generally sell for upwards of $20.

Next weekend should see a bump for the Oscar-winners still in release, not just The Counterfeiters but also Best Documentary Feature winner Taxi to the Dark Side, and to a certain extent No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood.

Top 10, Weekend of February 22-24:
1. The Duchess Of Langeais [IFC Films] ($11,126 per screen)
2. The Counterfeiters [Sony Pictures Classics] ($10,939)
3. The Band's Visit [Sony Pictures Classics] ($4,908)
4. In Bruges [Focus Features] ($4,530)
5. A Man Named Pearl [Shadow Distribution] ($3,308)
6. Still Life [New Yorker] ($2,933)
7. Undoing [Indican Pictures] ($2,897)
8. George A. Romero's Diary Of The Dead [Third Rail Releasing] ($2,540)
9. La Traviata [Emerging Pictures] ($2,503)
10. The Year My Parents Went On Vacation [City Lights Pictures Releasing] ($2,485)

Source: IndieWire.

Take Five: Taxi!

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 22:00:00 GMT

We were looking forward to, in light of the Friday premiere of Teeth, bringing you a Take Five featuring nothing but movies featuring a vagina dentata. Unfortunately, the search for five such films proved rather, well, unsettling. So instead, you get this list, about taxicabs. Why taxicabs? Because this Friday also brings us the debut, in New York and L.A., of Taxi to the Dark Side, a new film from Alex Gibney, the prolific documentarian who also brought us Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, No End in Sight, and Who Killed the Electric Car?. His new effort focuses on the dismaying tale of an Afghani hack who was caught up — in error — in the U.S. anti-terrorist net, shedding yet another angle on the seemingly infinite human stories that can be found inside the confines of a taxi. Taxicabs and Hollywood films came into their own at about the same time, and ever since then, some of the most memorable scenes in cinema have involved having someone drive someone else around and urban area for cash. Taxi to the Dark Side, like most things involving the terror war, is likely to be a bummer, so here's some further taxicab confessions to get you from point A to point B.

TAXI DRIVER (1976)

Well, you knew we were going here, didn't you? There's no more indelible vision of life behind the wheel of a cab than in Martin Scorsese's masterwork, one of the greatest screen treatments of alienation and unfocused rage ever captured. From the scenes of Travis Bickle's yellow cab emerging from New York steam-clouds to the look on his face as a murderous passenger (played by Scorsese in full mile-a-minute mode) spells out the grim fate that awaits his cheating wife to the final, anticlimactically calm chit-chat he shares with his fellow hacks after he's somehow emerged a hero from a maniacal bloodbath, Taxi Driver perfectly captures the banality of brutality that lurks on the mean streets of New York and only emerges in the scary moments of privacy that we think we share with cabbies. For an excellent companion piece to this essential American film, track down American Boy: A Profile of Steven Prince, a documentary biography Scorsese filmed at the same time of the unstable, hilarious, deranged young man who plays the gun dealer in Taxi Driver.

HEAVY METAL (1981)

Much as with the rest of the film, there are many levels at which you can appreciate the "Harry Canyon" segment of this legendary (or, rather, notorious) Canadian animated production based on a number of strips from the French-language fantasy comic anthology of the same name. You can enjoy the low-grade stunt casting of TV hack Richard Romano as futuristic New York City hack Harry Canyon. You can enjoy the attempt at animating the striking, ultra-detailed visual style of outstanding Spanish underground cartoonist Juan Giménez, and think of how much more enjoyable it would have been if the producers had more than $200 to spend on the segment. You can give yourself over to the goofball interpretation of 1940s noir dialogue set in the far future and written by a 1970s pseudo-hippie. And, believe it or not, you can actually appreciate one of the more interesting revisions of the cynical-cabbie-and-his-fare-on-the-lam. But honestly, we'd advise you to do what millions of other people have done when watching this movie: light up a fattie and wait for Harry to get it on with the hot alien chick.

D.C. CAB (1983)

Crap-movie auteur Joel Schumacher didn't just come out of nowhere. No, the man behind such memorably rotten movies as The Number 23, Batman & Robin and Dying Young has, in fact, been making unwatchable movies for three decades, and this was one of the first. Schumacher actually wrote this stinker as well, which delivers on the promise of its title by being set in Washington, D.C. and featuring taxicabs, but is somewhat of a letdown in other areas, such as its claim of being a 'comedy' despite having no jokes and its claim of featuring a 'cast' even though no one in it can act. Still, it's instructive to watch in order to see why Barney Miller's Max Gail didn't become a big movie star (answer: because he's a terrible actor), how many bad movies Bill Maher was in before he hit it big with his talk show (answer: fifty billion kazillion), why anyone ever thought that Adam Baldwin might have potential (answer: his brother Stephen made him look good by comparison), and what the eternal appeal of Mr. T is (answer: it's fun to watch him yell at people). A must-see, if your only other option is Batman & Robin.

NIGHT ON EARTH (1991)

One of Jim Jarmusch's most inconsistent films, but that's the nature of the beast: it's an episodic tale of five people in five different cities taking five different taxis to five different places for five different purposes, and the movie stands or falls by the strength of the performances and how deeply the viewer identifies with the characters in each segment. One of the problems with the film, and one reason why it enjoys a generally low critical opinion, is the 'lead' story, a cutesy and uncompelling bit of stunt casting with Winona Ryder (then Hollywood's It Girl) and a bored-looking Gena Rowlands. But the Helsinki segment is deeply affecting, one of the most moving stories the often ice-cool Jarmusch has ever delivered; the Rome segment features one of the last performances by Roberto Begnini that can't be described as insufferable; and the Paris segment is downright charming. All told, it's not a complete success, but it's a small and sometimes effective movie, one that perfectly captures the often-surreal interactions between driver and passenger familiar to anyone who spends a lot of time in taxis.

THE BIG LEBOWSKI (1998)

Okay, okay, we're cheating. There are a million other movies about taxicabs, and almost any of them would be a better fit on this list than The Big Lebowski. But dammit, it's one of our favorite movies all the same, and even though only about three of its 117-minute running time is spent in a taxicab (understandable, since it's set in modern-day Los Angeles, where everyone has their own car), for our money, it's the funniest three minutes in a cab ever captured on film. The miserable cab ride home from Malibu after mistreatment at the hands of the sheriff — and exacerbated by a cabbie (played by a furious Ajgie Kirkland) who insists on exposing him to the Eagles — is one of the most memorable scenes in a movie full of great, funny moments. And it's not just stuck in there, either; like many scenes in the Coen's delightfully flipped noir, it's an echo of The Big Sleep. In that unforgettable adaptation of Raymond Chandler's impenetrable detective yarn, Bogie (as Philip Marlowe) seduces a friendly cab driver while on his way to chasing down a lead; here, the Dude has no such luck, ending up by the side of the road with Don Henley ringing in his ears.

Morning Deal Report: Bollocks.

Peter Smith — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 16:00:00 GMT

Oh, the good ol', progressive ol' MPAA: they've rejected the poster (visible at right) for Alex Gibney's documentary Taxi to the Dark Side, about the U.S. military's torture of foreign detainees. No blood, no gore, what's the problem? Well, it might upset children. And remember, all American political discourse must be pitched (gently, underhand) to the comfort level of an eight-year-old.

After the Fight-Club-reunion hype around State of Play, with Brad Pitt and Edward Norton sharing a screen once more, Pitt fled the coop. Now Norton has done the same, and Ben Affleck will replace him.

Jerry Bruckheimer gets into video games. This probably won't be a very difficult transition.