The Screengrab : terry gilliam

Cannes Roundup: Day One

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 14 May 2009 16:30:00 GMT

The Cannes Film Festival kicked off last night with the latest from Pixar, Up, and the early word is predictably positive. “Up possesses all the aesthetic and philosophical values that audiences have come to expect from Pixar: rich, intricately detailed visuals, un-snarky humor and a genuinely affecting story,” writes Ann Hornaday of the Washington Post. Eugene Hernandez of Indiewire calls it “a grand visual spectacle on a big screen, pulling viewers into a striking three dimensional world and eschewing the sort of visual sight gags found in typical 3-D movies.” The Telegraph reports a minor quibble: “I'm not convinced it needs to be seen in 3-D: the images are less distinct than is ideal. But the quality of writing, its delicious sound design, and the emotional punch it packs all make this one of Pixar's finest achievements to date.”

Charlotte Higgins of the Guardian does her best to reassure us that we aren’t missing anything by not being there. “Most news journalists I know have a love hate relationship with it. My day (I'm writing this Wednesday evening) is far from over – but at least I wasn't sitting up till 3am, like my colleague at the BBC Razia Iqbal, putting together a package for the Today programme. Mostly it consists of queuing, with some occasional shoving or sweaty rushing, spliced with trying to ask questions in enormous press conferences – but the mic rarely gets passed to you, because there are hundreds of reporters, from everywhere from Iceland to Hong Kong, also competing to get a word in.”

As he prepares for the Cannes premiere of The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus on May 24, Terry Gilliam speaks to The Independent about completing the project without Heath Ledger. “I suppose I’m in an interesting position because while I’m cutting the film I’m basically working with him every day and he’s fine; he’s in good shape…Ideas are floating around. Then finally we decided, ‘OK, let’s get three other people to take over the part’. And we were lucky because we have a magic mirror in this movie. Not every movie has a magic mirror. So you can very genuinely say that these other actors are different aspects of the character that Heath plays. And it works.”

Tales from the Golden Age, which will have its premiere in the Un Certain Regard section, has secured distribution from IFC. “I am very glad that IFC Films decided to stay close to me and continue the difficult work of presenting Romanian films in US,” said director Cristian Mungiu (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days).

Screengrab’s Five to Watch at Cannes

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 13 May 2009 17:00:00 GMT

Greetings from the Croisette on the beautiful French Riviera! The entire Screengrab gang has convened over croissants and café au lait at Le Grande Bleu, and we’re hashing over our picks to click for the fabulous festival kicking off with tonight’s screening of the opening night film, Up. Wait until the crew back at Nerve headquarters gets a look at these expense reports!

OK, so we’re not actually in France. But why should a little technicality like that prevent us from bringing you the best in Cannes coverage? Or at least linking to the best in Cannes coverage, which we’ll do when we launch our daily Cannes Roundup tomorrow. For now, here’s a look at five movies I’d be sure to check out if I actually were on the Riviera instead of sitting at my desk in my underwear.

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS

Maybe Death Proof wasn’t all you dreamed it would be, and Brad Pitt’s cracker accent may not fill you with all the confidence in the world, and it’s just possible I’m describing myself here. Still, I have enough good will stored up for Quentin Tarantino as a filmmaker (if not as a personality) that I can’t help but be excited for his World War II epic, bad spelling and all.

TAKING WOODSTOCK

“It’s 1969, and Elliot Tiber, a down-on-his-luck interior designer in Greenwich Village, New York, has to move back upstate to help his parents run their dilapidated Catskills motel, the El Monaco…When Elliot hears that a neighbouring town has pulled the permit on a hippie music festival, he calls the producers, thinking he could drum up some much needed business for the motel.” Ang Lee’s take on the ‘70s (The Ice Storm) worked out pretty well, so let’s see what he can do with the ‘60s.

THE IMAGINARIUM OF DOCTOR PARNASSUS

Granted, Terry Gilliam’s track record of late has not been stellar. He couldn’t get Don Quixote off the ground, The Brothers Grimm was underwhelming, and I already regret leaving Tideland off my top ten list of the worst movies ever. But judging from the brief clips above, Imaginarium has more of an early Gilliam feel, and the curiosity factor of Heath Ledger’s last ever (partial) performance is definitely a draw. Plus: Tom Waits as the Devil!

PANIQUE AU VILLAGE (A TOWN CALLED PANIC)

I’d never heard of this Belgian film before this morning, but the description certainly intrigues. “Animated plastic toys like Cowboy, Indian and Horse have problems, too. Cowboy and Indian's plan to surprise Horse with a homemade birthday gift backfires when they destroy his house instead. Surreal adventures take over as the trio travel to the center of the earth, trek across frozen tundra and discover a parallel underwater universe where pointy-headed (and dishonest!) creatures live. Each speedy character is voiced -- and animated -- as if their very air contains both amphetamines and laughing gas.”

ANTICHRIST

“A grieving couple retreat to ’Eden’, their isolated cabin in the woods, where they hope to repair their broken hearts and troubled marriage. But nature takes its course and things go from bad to worse...” Hey, I’m always up for a good ol’ scary cabin-in-the-woods movie, and with Lars Von Trier at the helm, this one is sure to either terrify or infuriate – or more likely, both.

Basterds in the Imaginarium: Cannes Lineup Unveiled

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 15:30:00 GMT

Quentin Tarantino, Ang Lee, Terry Gilliam, Pedro Almodovar, Lars von Trier and Jane Campion are among the big-name directors with films set to screen at the 2009 Festival de Cannes. Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds will have its premiere at the festival, where it will compete with von Trier’s Antichrist, Lee’s Taking Woodstock, Almodovar’s Broken Embraces and Campion’s Bright Star. Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus will screen out of competition.

“More recent Palme d’Or recipient Ken Loach will appear once again in Cannes with Looking for Eric, about a troubled young soccer fan and Gallic soccer sensation Eric Cantona. The film will vie for the Palme d’Or against Johnny To’s French-made Vengeance starring pop sensation Johnny Hallyday as a hitman out to avenge his daughter’s death,” per The Hollywood Reporter.

Other notable films screening in competition include Les herbes folles, directed by Alain Resnais, The White Ribbon, directed by Michael Haneke, and Enter the Void, directed by Gaspar Noe. The opening night film will be Pixar’s Up and the closer will be Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinski. The festival kicks off on May 13.

Related:
Tarantino's Ingluourious Basterds Unleashed
Terry Gilliam Bites Back

The Screengrab Library of Unfilmed Screenplays: Sam Hamm's "Watchmen"

Phil Nugent — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 15:00:00 GMT

[If there's one subject that holds more fascination for film geeks than the movies they've seen or are planning to see, it may be the movies that have not been made and may never will be: the scripts that go into permanent turnaround or excite some interest, only to be abandoned. A few of these attain the status of legends, a process that in the last several years has been exacerbated by the ability to disseminate them through the Internet. Because a screenplay is a physical object but also a blueprint for something fuller and richer, which would probably end up deviating from the script at any number of key points, reviewing unfilmed scripts is a movie critic's form of cryptozoology, kind of like examining a muddy footprint and trying to sketch Bigfoot from it. This week, to kick off our new series dedicated to the unicorns, mermaids, and moderate Republicans of the movie world, the Screengrab looks back at the "Watchmen"-the-movie that might have been.]

When Warner Bros. which owns DC Comics, started looking for someone to adapt its property Watchmen to the movies, it must have seemed a natural choice to call in Sam Hamm, who had written the script for the 1989 Batman, a movie that commercially kick-started the superhero-comic-book movie genre. Hamm's Batman script, which was rushed into production without benefit of the polishing it would have received had not the 1988 Writers' Guild strike intervened, is not without its problems, and if there's a comics convention going on near you, I can introduce you to several people who'd be overjoyed at the chance to list them for you. But it also has Hamm's freshly thought-out take on its hero, which laid the psychological foundation for Michael Keaton's performance and, to a great extent, much of the batlore that's come since.

As Hamm would later write, he considered young master Wayne's having elaborately built his life around the murder of his parents and concluded "that Bruce had become Batman as a result of being spoiled. He had grown up with sufficient money and leisure to luxuriate in his own tragedy, to wallow in the false sense that it made him somehow unique. In other words, Bruce had never learned to cut his losses. For good or bad, he'd become addicted to his own pain—and he relied on the outward nobility of his mission to conceal the true perversity of his addiction. In this psychological scheme the Batman persona would function both as a symptom of, and justification for, his madness. To keep it alive, he'd have to relive the death of his parents again and again, killing them anew each night." This sort of talk must have made it seem as if Hamm would be a natural soul mate to Alan Moore, who'd made his name in the American marketplace by applying his own nasty insight to such stock characters as Swamp Thing and the Joker. In fact, Hamm's earliest involvement in the project overlapped with the days when Moore and DC Comics were still on speaking terms, and after Hamm made a pilgrimage to Northampton to sup with Rorshach's creator, Moore declared that he had "complete faith" in him. What neither of them may have grasped is that, whatever Watchmen needed to successfully navigate its way to the big screen, a sharp reading of the motivations of a fifty-year-old pop myth was not among them. Long before Zack Snyder came calling, Watchmen had a reputation for being unfilmable, and watching Hamm try to wrestle it into shape points up some of the reasons for that.

[Please note: while it may seem odd to attach a spoiler's advisory to a discussion of a script that was never filmed, it is impossible to discuss the Watchmen that didn't get made without mentioning the details it shares, and deviates from, the movie that was finally made and the comic book it started out from. Consider yourself warned.]

Moore's Watchmen is set in a specific time and place--his fantasy of an America that is a very different place from the America of the 1980s because a repressive U.S. government has had access to a superpowered figure Dr. Manhattan, who was able to keep a lid on things and shut down the cultural and political explosions of the '60s and '70s. It is also a product and reflection of a specific time and place: America in the actual mid-1980s, when it was fashionable to sneer at those explosions and even to try to pretend they hadn't happened. It was also a time when nuclear jitters, exacerbated by the last tremors of the Cold War, seemed to color everything. The first thing anyone trying to adapt Watchmen has to figure out is, what time is it set in, and what version of that time? Hamm's script opens with an action sequence set during the 1976 Bicentennial celbrations. Some terrorists inside the Statue of Liberty have taken hostages and are threatening to kill them and blow up the monument. Riding to the rescue are our heroes, Nite Owl, Rorshach, the Comedian, Silk Spectre, and Adrian Veidt--Moore's Ozymandias, who in an ominous geature is called "Captain Metropolis" here--who have a contract with the government to fight crime and who are banded together under the group moniker "The Watchmen", a name that never actually appears in the comic book. The fact that our heroes actually fight under the handle in the script is our first strong indication that Hamm has a healthy willingness to make drastic changes in the source material to make it fit the new medium. It is also our first strong indication that he kind of doesn't get it.

In Moore's Watchmen, people have been running around in homemade costumes fighting crime since World War II; it's the accidental creation of the omnipotent Dr. Manhattan, whose powers are soon put to service rendering the U.S. government beyond question, that has rendered them obsolete. Hamm eliminates most of the alternative-historical background, so that here, it seems as if Dr. Manhattan's appearance might have inspired others to turn to free-lance heroism, a career option that is shut down after things go dreadfully wrong at the Statue of Liberty. (He also deploys the revelation that Richard Nixon is still president, which Moore announced at the outset of the comic to help set its tone, as a late-inning shockeroo.) Except for Dr, Manhattan's origin story and the revelation of what pushed Rorshach over the edge, Hamm dispenses with Moore's intricate flashback structure. The predecessor versions of Nite Owl and Silk Spectre are gone, and after the murder that announces our jump to 1986, so is the Comedian; he's mentioned in passing a few times (never affectionately) but never seen again, and the news of his special connection to Silk Spectre never arrives. Hamm floorboards it to the end, which even die-hard fans of the comic have been known to concede has always been "problematic." In the original, Adrian Veidt obliterated part of Manhattan to scare the world powers into working together; in Hamm's rethinking, Veidt decides that in order to prevent an apocalyptic Cold War confrontation, he has to kill the indestructible Dr, Manhattan, a hat trick that involves producing some kind of time ripple through which he can prevent Dr. Manhattan from ever having existed, this negating the preceding couple of decades. When he succeeds, the central heroes find themselves deposited, in full costume, in the "real" New York of 1986.

Loopy as all this is--and it is sufficiently loopy to have guaranteed that any mention of the script garners howls of derision from fanboys coast to coast--it's worth keeping in mind just what Hamm was up against. The script, too, is a dated relic from a specific time and place: i.e., a Hollywood where comic book movies were now seen as potential cash cows but not prestige ventures, before Time magazine had included Watchmen on its list of the 100 best novels published since 1923. And the era in which the comic first appeared and the time in which Hamm was cobbling together his adaptation had been separated by its own time ripple: the cordial meetings between Reagan and Gorbachev had effectively killed the nuclear-clock atmosphere that the comic was a part of, even before the Berlin Wall came down. Hamm was taking an instant period piece and trying to find a way to keep it making sense, presumably with a contractually mandated running time of two hours or thereabouts.

In between the new opening and the changed ending, he serves up a sort of Cliff's Notes of the most excitingly filmable moments from the comic, and some of the new details he adds--such as the "Vietnam War Memorial" that resulted from Dr. Manhattan's quick winning of that war, a statue of the big blue bastard cradling a fallen soldier in his arms--catch the flavor of the comic to a T. He also performed a few cosmetic changes on such scenes as Rorshach's origin nightmare, concocting a gruesome new punishment for the masked vigilante to inflict on a child killer. (This was probably a necessary touch, since in a movie, it would be harder to ignore the fact that Moore had stolen the original scene wholesale from George Miller's Mad Max.) Less to his credit, Hamm also had Rorshach making Leno-worthy wisecracks about clogged toilets and street mimes. Even the scenes he retained and did justice to don't mean as much without the background Moore provided, especially since the connective tissue between them and Hamm's altered framework is thin and flimsy. But there's a bigger problem: the changes Hamm made conventionalize Watchmen. Terry Gilliam, who produced another draft with his co-writer Charles McKeown before concluding that there was no way to accommodate all the detail necessary to make a Watchmen movie that would be meaningful and comprehensible in the space of an acceptable running time, complained that Hamm's script just seemed like a bunch of superheroes running around, and he was not wrong.

The script for the current Watchmen movie is credited to David Hayter and Alex Tse. Tse is said to have worked from a pair of efforts Hayter wrote years ago, with an eye to eventually directing the movie himself. Hayter, too, had to grapple with the same road blocks as Hamm, the time period and the ending, and he apparently discarded the former only to have the current team bring it back. The new Watchmen was made according to rules that no one could have anticipated twenty years ago, namely a director with the inclination to make a film that would be as close a physical approximation of the comic book as possible (and the muscle, after the success of 300, to get the studio to go along with him), and a new entertainment business climate full of adults who grew up thinking of the comic as a masterpiece and who'd could envision an audience who'd want it treated not just respectfully but with slavish fan-worship. Confronting Nite Owl at the climax, Adrian Veidt accuses him of "a lack of vision", and that's the problem with any movie version of Watchmen whether the would-be adapter tinkers with the source material or solemnly traces over it. Whatever the billboards insist, it's a vision that somebody else already had, more than twenty years ago.

Screengrab Review: “Watchmen”

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 20:00:00 GMT

There are a million reasons a Watchmen movie should never have been made and no good reason it should have, aside from the obvious one: superheroes are big box office, and Watchmen was one of the most tantalizing untouched superhero properties available. It’s also an incredibly dense, multi-layered work, deriving much of its power from its subversion of five decades worth of comic book conventions. Having read the script Sam Hamm penned for Terry Gilliam’s aborted attempt at mounting Watchmen for the screen back in the early ‘90s, I know the new adaptation of the acclaimed graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons from “visionary director” Zack Snyder isn’t the worst case scenario. Nor does it exceed expectations. It’s just sort of pointless, which is what most fans of the classic comic have probably been expecting all along.

So can we separate the movie from its source material and judge it on its own merits? We can try, but Snyder doesn’t make it easy. It’s not a good sign when the movie kicks off with the image of an aging Richard Nixon portrayed by an actor wearing a ridiculous putty ski-slope nose and tons of awful aging makeup, quickly followed by a “Pat Buchanan” who looks and sounds exactly nothing like Pat Buchanan. The set-up here, should you be completely unfamiliar with the world of Watchmen: it’s 1985, and Richard Nixon has been re-elected to an unprecedented fifth term as President. Tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union are at an all-time high, and nuclear war appears to be inevitable.

The events of this alternate timeline have been aided and abetted by costumed heroes, among them The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), who helped lead the U.S. to quick victory in Vietnam. As Watchmen opens, the aging Comedian is murdered in his own apartment, leading masked vigilante Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley) to believe that someone is picking off the Watchmen, a superhero group whose members also include dumpy Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson), sultry Silk Spectre (Malin Akerman), and superhuman Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup, boasting a pendulous blue schlong that may disturb and frighten younger viewers – or any viewers, really).

In the comics, Moore and Gibbons amplify the major plotlines concerning the hunt for the mask-killer and the quest to avert global armageddon with flashbacks to the heroes’ origins (some of which date back to a superhero team of the 1940s called the Minutemen), along with various subplots including a love triangle among Silk Spectre, Nite Owl and Dr. Manhattan and a prison detour for Rorschach. To their credit, Snyder and screenwriters David Hayter and Alex Tse include as much of this material as possible (the Watchmen comic-within-the-comic Tales from the Black Freighter is getting a separate DVD release)…so why does the 168-minute running time still seem bloated beyond all necessity?

Part of it comes down to your definition of what constitutes a “faithful” adaptation. Great swaths of dialogue are lifted intact from the graphic novel, and the major visual set-pieces are painstakingly recreated (with at least one notable exception), and that may be enough to satisfy a segment of the audience. But the pacing is often leaden, the plotting lumpy and disjointed, the storytelling single-layered at best. The connective tissue between the big moments is thin to nonexistent; for instance, viewers coming to the movie cold may be forgiven for wondering how a sketchy character like Ozymandias (Matthew Goode and his dreadful wandering accent) turns out to be so crucial to the proceedings. Snyder seems most fully engaged when the action is at its most conventional, as when Nite Owl and Silk Spectre rescue kids from a burning building or Rorschach fends off assailants in prison.

Watchmen does have its moments. The closest it comes to capturing the texture of the graphic novel is the lyrical sequence in which Dr. Manhattan, having exiled himself to Mars, relives the events that led to his transformation into a godlike being. There’s visual razzle-dazzle to spare: an arctic fortress, a demolished city, a massive clockwork gizmo floating above the surface of Mars. And Jackie Earle Haley is terrific – he knows he’s playing a Clint Eastwood character times five, and he brings the appropriate psycho gusto to lines like “I’m not locked in here with you – you’re locked in here with me!”

I’ll even give Snyder some credit for improving the ending slightly, which wasn’t difficult (blasphemy, I know, but I re-read the last two Watchmen issues last night just to refresh my memory and that is not good stuff). But I can’t think of too many “visionary” directors who would use so many obvious, overplayed music cues (the love scene set to Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” is snicker-out-loud embarrassing) or cast so many nonentities in major roles (the listless Akerman is the worst offender). His approach is depressingly literal, and none of the scenes build on what has come before – they’re just meticulously reconstructed Scenes From Watchmen. It took more than 20 years to bring his most famous work to the big screen, and now Alan Moore isn’t the only one wondering why anybody bothered.

Alan Moore’s Stealth “Watchmen” Campaign

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 16:00:00 GMT

You may have noticed that Alan Moore isn’t doing a lot of press in support of the Watchmen movie. If you’re familiar at all with Moore and his usual m.o., this doesn’t surprise you. Moore has distanced himself from pretty much all the previous adaptations of his work, including From Hell, V for Vendetta and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, so why should Watchmen be any different? But maybe we’re looking at this all wrong. Maybe Moore is actually employing some reverse psychology, some of the mind-bending trickeration that makes his comic book work so compelling, in order to convince us all to see the Watchmen movie. Let’s examine this new Wired interview with Moore for clues.

“I think that adaptation is largely a waste of time in almost any circumstances,” says Moore. “There probably are the odd things that would prove me wrong. But I think they'd be very much the exception. If a thing works well in one medium, in the medium that it has been designed to work in, then the only possible point for wanting to realize it on ‘multiple platforms,’ as they say these days, is to make a lot of money out of it. There is no consideration for the integrity of the work, which is rather the only thing as far as I'm concerned. I've got enough money to be comfortable. I live comfortably, I can pay the bills at the end of every month. I don't want a huge amount of money by diluting something that I happen to be rather proud of at its outset. That pretty much describes my attitude toward the idea of any of my works being realized in another form, really.”

OK, so maybe he’s building his way up to telling us that Watchmen is one of the rare exceptions? “With a comic book you can dart your eyes back to a previous panel, or you can flip back a couple of pages to check whether there is some reference in the dialog to a scene that happened earlier. You can also spend as much time as you want absorbing every image. This is especially true of something like Watchmen, where I was trying to take advantage of Dave Gibbons' brilliant capacity as a former surveyor for including incredible amounts of detail in every tiny panel, so we could choreograph every little thing. The little symbols and signs appearing in the background, every little touch could be choreographed to the last detail, and we knew that the audience—because they'd be reading at their own pace—would be able to study each panel and to take in these almost subliminal details. Even the best director in the world, even a person as talented as Terry Gilliam, could not possibly get that amount of information into a few frames of a movie.”

Surely the twist is coming now. He’s about to tell us how it could actually be done. “When we did meet—which was mainly just because I thought it would be really good fun to meet Terry Gilliam, and so it proved—Mr. Gilliam did ask me how I would go about translating Watchmen into a film, and I said to him, ‘If anybody had asked me, Terry, I would have advised them not to.’ I think Terry is an intelligent man and came to that conclusion himself. And I think he said something to that effect, that he thought it was something probably best left as a comic and shouldn't be made into a film.”

Oh, well. So much for that theory. If you want to read more from Moore, including some tidbits on his upcoming novel Jerusalem, check out the Wired interview.

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: Jan. 31-Feb. 6, 2009

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 22:00:00 GMT

What the fuck is it with you? What don't you fucking understand? You got any fucking idea about, hey, it's fucking distracting having somebody clicking on a link in the middle of the fucking Highlight Reel? Give me a fucking answer! What don't you get about it?

I’m trying to tell you about the fucking Screengrab Predicts the Oscars: Winners (Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six and fucking Seven)! Do you want me to fucking go trash your blog? Then why are you clicking my links? Why are you clicking on posts about Christian Bale Goes Apeshit or Christian Bale Freakout – Remixed! like I’m some kind of fucking trained chimp for your amusement?

Fuck’s sake, man, you’re amateur! I’m trying to fucking figure out a clever way to mention Screengrab Review: Fanboys and The Three Catastrophes of Terry Gilliam and fucking Star Trek Showdown IV: Shatner’s Last Nerve and you’re distracting me! Are you professional? Fuck it, do your own Highlight Reel.

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A Few Minutes with Neil Gaiman

SXSW Lineup Announced

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The Three Catastrophes of Terry Gilliam

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 20:30:00 GMT

Terry Gilliam is set to receive the Bafta Fellowship, the most prestigious award bestowed by the British Academy of Film and Television, during the “British Oscars” ceremony this Sunday night. Presumably this is a lifetime achievement award for his unique body of work, although in an interview with The Guardian, Gilliam himself speculates otherwise. “Voters must, he assumes, have felt sorry for him because his latest film, The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus, has been hit by three catastrophes.”

That seems about par for the course for Gilliam, who should be able to knock off three catastrophes over lunch break, but these circumstances have been particularly trying. First, of course, was the death of the movie’s star Heath Ledger. “"It just isn't possible that he's dead," he says. "There's nothing he can't do, it just flows out of him with ease and grace. He lifted everybody. He wasn't like Marlon Brando or James Dean or any of the more neurotic actors, his was all positive energy. I knew he was tired but that Saturday he had been doing all his own stunts, he was leaping off wagons, indestructible. On no level did his death make sense."

The film’s producer, Bill Vince, also died, leaving Gilliam’s daughter Amy to take the reigns. And this past fall, Gilliam was hit by a car, breaking his back. (He got better.) Gilliam came up with a unique solution to the problem of losing his lead actor, adding three additional actors (Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell) to play the same character following various trips through a “magic mirror.”

Dr. Parnassus is due this fall, assuming no further catastrophes befall it. Read the rest of The Guardian piece here.

Related:
Heath Ledger Through the Looking Glass
When Good Directors Go Bad: The Brothers Grimm

Screengrab's 2008 Person of the Year

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Next to People's Sexiest Man Alive, there is no more coveted honor in Hollywood than Screengrab's Person of the Year. At least, that's what we're hoping; we've never actually done it before. After combing the archives over the past year, I have determined the five individuals who recieved the most coverage - for good or for ill - here at our humble blog. Can you guess Screengrab's Person of the Year? The top five, after the jump:

5. Zooey Deschanel

Described by our Phil Nugent as "the unofficial muse of the Screengrab," Ms. Deschanel has an open invitation to our New Year's Eve party. We celebrated her SXSW performance, her survival of the Shyamalan bomb The Happening, her role in the surprisingly influential All the Real Girls, and her "Sweet Ballad" in Yes Man. Call us, Zooey!

4. Werner Herzog

The year in Werner news began with the director reminiscing over his gravedigging days with Errol Morris. Later, Herzog expounded on his many unmellow moods. More shocking developments arrived with the Cannes Film Festival, at which it was announced that Herzog would remake The Bad Lieutenant, a very bad idea indeed. Abel Ferrara agreed, and a celebrity feud was born. Next, Werner signed a cocktail napkin deal to collaborate with fellow weirdo David Lynch. In the end, Herzog redeemed himself with the acclaimed (here, anyway) Encounters at the End of the World.

3. Heath Ledger

Dying at the beginning of the year is perhaps not the most satisfying path toward Screengrab Person of the Year. We ran the breaking news of his death, the initial coroner's report, the Esquire diaries, the fate of Terry Gilliam's Doctor Parnassus and the somewhat unseemly buzz on Ledger's Oscar chances. We'd prefer he was only on this list for his performance as the Joker, but that's life (and death).

2. Uwe Boll

We're a little hurt that our favorite crapmeister hasn't been in touch to thank us for all the publicity. We've covered everything from the petition urging him to retire to his many feuds to the efforts of a gum company to end his career. We've reviewed his Unwatchables Alone in the Dark and BloodRayne 2: Deliverance, and watched as theaters shunned Postal. Heck, Paul Clark even defended the man! Come on, Uwe. Take out an ad in Variety to thank us already.

1. Scarlett Johansson

Oh Scarlett, what would we do without you? I think you can tell the Screengrab is sharply divided over you. Phil Nugent, for one, has little use for you, as you can probably tell from posts like Scarlett Johansson, Yellow Journalism, Grammys Snub Scarlett, Toast Tia, Scarlett Johansson and Ryan Reynolds: 2 B 2-Gether 4-Ever and Scarlett Johansson Sings! Sings Tom Waits Songs!! Others of us - like me - are more enamored of your attributes, as you might glean from such posts as Scarlett Johansson, Cover Girl, Your Scarlett Johansson Music Video Has Arrived, and the all-time favorite, And Now Scarlett Johansson Making Out with Penelope Cruz. Either way, there's no denying it: Scarlett Johansson, you are Screengrab's 2008 Person of the Year!

Screengrab Salutes: The Top Biopics of All Time! (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 22:00:00 GMT

FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS (1998)

Biopics have always blurred the line between fact and legend, a stylistic practice that both fueled and destroyed the career of Hunter S. Thompson, who (at his best) went beyond the bounds of traditional journalism by injecting himself into the stories he covered, amplifying the reality of his subject matter through wild exaggeration. But, as a certain lame duck American president can certainly attest, “truthiness” is a slippery slope, and Thompson eventually began to confuse himself with his journalistic doppleganger, Raoul Duke, the drug-addled party monster at the heart of Terry Gilliam’s psychedelic adaptation of the college dorm room staple once considered unfilmable. While a “straight” biopic of the actual events of Thompson’s life would be fascinating (as long as Art Linson, director of the tedious Bill Murray fiasco Where the Buffalo Roam, had nothing to do with it), Gilliam instead captured the legend of Thompson/Duke and his infamous 1971 road trip to Sin City with his “attorney,” Dr. Gonzo (a funhouse mirror fictionalization of the Mexican-American political activist Oscar Zeta Acosta). Critics loathed the over-the-top depiction of Thompson’s hallucinated wonderland, yet despite an excess of shrieking in Benicio del Toro’s headache-inducing performance as Gonzo, Johnny Depp admirably captures both the real Thompson and his alter ego in an underrated performance. Plus, the movie’s a flat-out hoot: after howling through a near empty screening with fellow Screengrabber Scott Von Doviak, another audience member who’d ignored all the scathing reviews approached us to hazard the minority opinion, “Yeah! It was funny...right?”

RAGING BULL (1980)

Directors who specialized in noir – drawn as they were to doomed heroes and disorienting levels of moral ambiguity – loved to make films about boxers. Carnal, visceral creatures, they seemed particularly drawn to the sort of manipulative femme fatales the genre celebrated, and they played to the notion of destiny’s brute: they were men, after all, whose primary form of human communication was savage physical violence. Martin Scorsese, who brought the dynamic emotional energy of the ’70s and the gorgeous visual iconography and crushing sense of guilt and shame of Catholicism to the noir framework, clearly felt the same way, so it’s no coincidence that one of his greatest films is a breathtaking refinement of the old-school pug-centered crime drama. What makes Raging Bull such a shocker, then, is that it’s a true story: Jake LaMotta’s meteoric rise, brutal determination, mercurial mood swings, and destructive relationships with his wife, his family, and his God seem like the stuff of lurid, overblown pulp drama. Given the material they had to work with, it’s no wonder Scorsese and his collaborators created such a stunning, immediate film. While much is made of the admittedly astonishing physical transformation made by Robert DeNiro as his LaMotta slid from lean, hungry contender to fat, washed-up ex-champ, his emotional and psychological transformation is just as incredible, as the cocky, unstoppable self-confidence of the young man inexorably decays into the pitiful, indulgent self-loathing of age.

MISHIMA: A LIFE IN FOUR CHAPTERS (1985)

Paul Schrader wrote the screenplay to Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull, which may have served as a sort of apprenticeship for his directing, four years later, the moving screen biography of Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima. Not only did he borrow heavily from Scorsese’s visual handiwork (notice the overhead camera angles, and the visual tonality that mixes elegiac near-silences with scenes of fiery violence), but he chose as his subject a public figure who shared more in common with Jake LaMotta than either of them would have cared to admit. Like LaMotta, Mishima’s story was so bizarre as to seem like the stuff of fiction: a weak young man who transformed himself through sheer willpower into a physically perfect bodybuilder; a barely closeted homosexual with poetic inclinations who married one of his country’s most famous female beauties and preached a gospel of rabid militarism; and a famous celebrity, considered the greatest writer of his generation, who ended his life in the most base possible manner, staging a would-be fascist revolution that ended with him clumsily committing suicide as the soldiers he hoped to inspire laughed at his grand ideals. Deftly blending intense psychological moments from Mishima’s life with gorgeous evocations of some of the most famous scenes in his fiction, Schrader creates a biopic that shows how much he learned from Scorsese – and how much he brought to the table himself.

THE ELEPHANT MAN (1980)

There were a million ways The Elephant Man could have gone wrong. (It’s easy to see how, in the innumerable one-joke parodies of it that sprang up in its wake.) A film about John Merrick, the terribly deformed Victorian-era man whose intelligence and perception transformed the lives of many who met him, could have been overly mawkish if taken too far in one direction, or grotesque and exploitative if taken too far in the other. Mel Brooks, who financed the film, knew this, and his first and best decision was to keep his name out of the production, realizing that audiences and critics would expect the film to be a joke if they thought it was coming from him. He took a major risk in hiring David Lynch to helm The Elephant Man, especially given Lynch’s penchant for unnerving surrealism, but Lynch was the best possible choice, and hit the necessary tone just right: he let Merrick’s appearance speak for itself, trusting John Hurt to communicate the agony of his mere existence as well as the man’s essential dignity. Lynch made the right decision to transfer his sense of the absurd and the bizarre onto Merrick’s surroundings, presenting us with a view of Victorian London as unsettling and alien as that of the world of Eraserhead, while putting Merrick in the position not of a monster, but of a man who did his best to be human in a world that would not allow him that role. The collaboration was so successful it’s a shame that the project Brooks next intended to do with Lynch – a surreal nightmare biography of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels set entirely inside the subject’s head - never got off the ground.

SAMURAI I: MUSASHI MIYAMOTO (1954)

When the historical figure you’re portraying in your biopic is less a human being than a character straight out of legend, you’ve got a lot of leeway in how you can portray him. There have been dozens of films in which legendary swordsman and duelist Miyamoto Musashi is the central figure, but the best of them all is director Hiroshi Inagaki’s Samurai trilogy. Though they’re best viewed as a whole, the first of the three movies is probably the strongest installment, telling the story of the epic figure from his humble beginnings to his utter transformation in the crucible of an unimaginably bloody battle. What Inagaki does right, and what distinguishes Musashi Miyamoto from the innumerable other films about the characters, is to strike a powerfully clear balance between historical storytelling and epic filmmaking; he is able, through solid storytelling and some highly inventive composition, to convey the sense that he is allowing us a glimpse of a real human figure who came from a particular time and place and ended up the way he did for discernable reasons, but he never lets go of the sweep and tension that remind us we’re watching a movie about a hero who is as much demigod as man. Of course, much of the credit must go to Toshirô Mifune, who gives the first of many towering performances in the lead role, yet Inagaki – rarely thought of as one of the first-rank Japanese directors of his day – does a fine job of sustaining the mood, tone, pace and look (abetted by some terrific EastmanColor cinematography by Jun Yasumoto) that distinguishes the whole trilogy. It’s as close to a definitive biopic as one can hope for when dealing with a legend.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce

Visions of Change: Cinematic Utopias & Worst Case Scenarios (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 22:00:00 GMT

LOCAL HERO (1983)

Whither Bill Forsyth? Withering, apparently: after a charming run of movies in the 1980s (including Gregory’s Girl, Comfort and Joy and Housekeeping), the Scottish director flamed out with 1993’s Being Human (a terrible film which, unsurprisingly, stars Robin Williams), disappearing for good after 1999’s Gregory’s Two Girls (which may or may not be terrible, since I only just learned of its existence through the Internet Movie Database). But Forsyth can make sequels and terrible Robin Williams movies from now until doomsday and he’ll still be one of my favorite directors of all time, if only for bringing Local Hero into existence. A simple but compelling vision of utopia, the film takes place in a gorgeous Scottish fishing village where everyone is welcome and accepted at the local ceilidh, from punk rockers and homeless beachcombers to American businessmen, Russian sailors, African preachers and pretty big city scientists who just might turn out to be mermaids. Movies (especially the Hollywood variety) are usually too impatient, loud and cynical to capture the best parts of actually being human – the beauty of a fantastic night sky, the electric giddiness of a new flirtation, the relaxed camaraderie of smart, decent people – but Forsyth seduces us with the salty sweetness of his celluloid world the way the fictional village of Ferness eventually seduces the film’s shaggy dog protagonist, Mac (played with deadpan cable-knit sweater warmth by the ever-reliable Peter Riegert), an oil company executive tasked with paving paradise to put up a shiny new oil refinery...and, like most real-life utopias, the sense of bittersweet impermanence only heightens the appeal of the place.

SOLARIS (1972)

The beginning of Tarkovsky's Solaris takes place in a retro-future world so sterile and strange that it was filmed in Tokyo. There's a lovely long tracking shot as our hero, Kelvin, drives through the city. I long to sync it with the retro-future sounds of the krautrock band Neu!, which similarly used repetition, driving drums and avant-noise to achieve transcendence. Kelvin visits his parents' house, too, and it is a little Eden of a cottage with a nearby pond. Kelvin soon leaves the cold, clean Earth for the broken-down spaceship circling the planet Solaris, which is potentially sentient. It's not long before his ex-wife, a suicide, shows up in the flesh, so to speak. The end of the film finds Kelvin in his little Eden again, although everything is different now. It's a mirror of Kelvin's perfect little Eden, but the reflection cannot live up to the reality. And the reality is lost to memory, anyway. The above clip is from the end of the movie, so be forewarned. (Soderbergh's remake is interesting, but lacks the punch of Tarkovsky's film.)

BRAZIL (1985)

Terry Gilliam, according to legend, had always wanted to do a movie of George Orwell’s totalitarian dystopia, Nineteen Eighty-Four. But Michael Radford beat him to it, so he had to invent his own version. It’s probably a good thing he did – Gilliam, whatever his strengths as a director (and they are many, as many as his weaknesses), is probably too weird to make an adaptation of the rise and fall of Winston Smith that made any kind of sense. But as great as Radford’s movie was, Brazil is greater, not in spite of, but because of the fact that it’s so relentlessly strange. The ever-watching eyes of the state peer endlessly at its own civil servants, with results that are as hilarious as they are tragic. Technology is meant to be miraculous but is instead disastrous, and the most subversive thing someone can do is to fix things. Government torturers dress in absurd masks and order the deaths of the wrong people through bureaucratic cock-ups. The heads of state and upper-level party functionaries, instead of being grim and faceless tyrants, are self-deluding clowns who make themselves unrecognizable with plastic surgery or spout endless, hollow sports metaphors. Orwell had seen life’s horrors in his time, and reflected them in his novel; but Terry Gilliam chose to focus on life’s absurdities, and his nightmare vision of the future was one of a man who couldn’t believe that human beings, asinine and incompetent as they were, could even get a dystopia working properly.

PUNISHMENT PARK (1971)

When it was released (to complete indifference from the public and general hostility from the handful of critics who saw it), Peter Watkins’ unnerving pseudo-documentary seemed, to some, unnervingly real. Its nightmarish dystopia seemed, to those who opposed Nixon and his crackdown on anti-war activists, right around the corner: dissidents would be rounded up and used as little more than cannon fodder in military training exercises. Watkins is still the master of the alternate-historical documentary, and for its target audience, the scenes (mostly improvised by an amateur cast) of sneering young soldiers putting increasingly hysterical political prisoners through their paces must have come across as chillingly plausible. In later years, the film became hard to find, which might have seemed for the best: with the eschatological frenzy of the Vietnam era beginning to fade, it probably came across as increasingly strident and paranoid, with every thoughtful dissenter who claims that in a time of government oppression, the honorable path is that of a criminal, there’s an overblown windbag spitting at the pigs and screaming about the Man. It finally came to DVD at just the right time, though: in the post-9/11 era of the USA-PATRIOT Act and governmental scorn for Constitutional protections, it was newly relevant. Latter-day conservatives feverishly dreaming of being locked in confiscation camps by Comrade Obama might even find something to like in it, if its protagonists weren’t a bunch of dirty hippies.

Click Here For Part One, Part Three & Part Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Hayden Childs, Leonard Pierce

When Good Directors Go Bad: Death Becomes Her (1992, Robert Zemeckis)

Paul Clark — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Robert Zemeckis has been one of Hollywood’s most bankable filmmakers for nearly three decades. A former protégé of Steven Spielberg, Zemeckis began his career making broad comedies before a move to big-budget fare demonstrated his flair for cutting-edge special effects. Yet in his best work, Zemeckis is able to seamlessly integrate the demands of ambitious effects with involving storylines that have surprising emotional pull. For example, in his 1985 film Back to the Future, Zemeckis took a science fiction comedy about a teenager traveling back in time to his parents’ high school years and turned it into the story of the boy trying to make things right with his family.

Following the runaway box office success of Back to the Future, Zemeckis rose to the ranks of Hollywood’s A-list directors, and with the release of his even more ambitious Who Framed Roger Rabbit, he became Hollywood’s go-to director for effects-heavy blockbusters infused with plenty of humor and heart. At this point in his career Zemeckis could more or less write his own ticket, so after expanding on the Back to the Future saga with two sequels, he decided to film a script written by Martin Donovan, an up-and-coming filmmaker who had recently released a cultish science fiction film entitled Apartment Zero. Donovan’s screenplay provided ample opportunities to indulge the darker side of his sense of humor, which had largely gone unused since 1980’s Used Cars, as well as giving him a chance to experiment with the body-morphing effects for the first time. The project was entitled Death Becomes Her.

Having read some of the Death Becomes Her screenplay, it’s easy for me to see how Zemeckis might have been attracted to it. Like Back to the Future, Roger Rabbit, and even Back to the Future Part III, Death Becomes Her combines two seemingly incompatible elements- in this case, a Grand Guignol-style story of two lifelong rivals and a darkly comic morality tale about the allure of youth and beauty. But while the screenplay had potential, much of that potential was lost on the way to the screen, and the finished product really doesn’t work very well. The movie’s not very funny and pretty shrill, but there are a number of other issues as well.

One big problem is the casting. In conceiving the ageless divas at the center of the story, Donovan no doubt took a cue from the legendary rivalry between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. Unfortunately, actresses who can fill those shoes are few and far between, not just talent-wise, but also because their reputations as world-class pills preceded them. By contrast, Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn are merely actresses playing a role. Streep, quintessential actress that she is, comes closer to pulling it off, but whereas audiences never had a problem believing Davis or Crawford as divas (probably because they were), with Streep it merely feels like a performance. For her part, Hawn is never quite convincing as a worthy opponent for Streep- even in her more sinister moments, she comes off as too much of a lightweight. And Bruce Willis, as the ineffectual surgeon-turned-mortician who comes between then, is given next to nothing to do, and never fills in the blank spot where his character should be.

As for the Oscar-winning visual effects, they’re still pretty impressive, but they don’t have the same kind of magic as, say, the groundbreaking effects in Roger Rabbit. Whereas Zemeckis managed to use the effects of Roger Rabbit to create a convincing world which humans and cartoons convincingly inhabited together, he never successfully integrates his effects into the story here. The giveaway is the lack of camera movement in the big effects scenes. Usually, Zemeckis likes to keep his camera in motion, but whenever the special effects kick in, Death Becomes Her literally stops dead in its tracks. The result is a movie in which story takes a backseat to the demands of CGI, a trap that Zemeckis’ previous work managed to successfully avoid.

But in the end Death Becomes Her’s biggest problem may simply be its lack of nerve. Rather than embracing the twisted possibilities of its storyline, the movie wimps out in the final reel by becoming a morality tale about the necessity of living life to the fullest. I’m guessing some of this was the result of studio mandates (a PG-13 rating, the rewrites from Universal’s in-house scribe David Koepp) in order to preserve their no doubt sizable investment in the film. However, Zemeckis has always been more at home with Americana than in the realm of the macabre. It’s tantalizing to imagine what Terry Gilliam or a young Peter Jackson might have done with the material. But while Death Becomes Her holds some interest both as a wellspring of the body-morphing effects that are still used today and as an early incarnation of Meryl Streep’s recent metamorphosis from leading lady into character actress, on its own merits it just isn’t very good.

Cartoon Fever: The World’s Greatest Animated Shorts (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 21:00:00 GMT

QUASI AT THE QUACKADERO (1975)

I can't say for certain whether or not I first encountered the work of Sally Cruikshank in general (or Quasi at the Quackadero in particular) on the USA Network's 1980s stoner staple Night Flight, but either way, I'm pretty sure I wasn't entirely in a legal frame of mind at the time. Not that psychedelic substances are required to appreciate Quasi's dreamy, stream-of-consciousness groove: Cruikshank's anarchic style is a mind-altering substance all by itself, a subterranean version of the (relatively) clean, orderly mainstream Disney/Looney Tune style of animation with all the color, personality, wisecracking animals and fairy tale fancy reflected in a funhouse mirror of surrealistic Id.

NEIGHBOURS (1952)

You wouldn’t get very far in a discussion of great animated shorts without mentioning the National Film Board of Canada. Since 1941, the NFB has supported and funded important and groundbreaking works from some of Canada’s most important animators, beginning with the great Norman McLaren. McLaren experimented with a number of animation techniques throughout his career including pixellation and even scratching and painting on the film stock itself. But today, his most famous work is Neighbours, a hybrid of stop motion animation and live action photography. The film -- an allegory for the Cold War -- finds McLaren using his human subjects not as actors, but as mannequins to be literally manipulated in the service of his story (somewhere, Robert Bresson must have swooned). Stylistically playful yet thematically serious, Neighbours became one of the most feted animated shorts of its day, yet it’s a testament to its topicality that it ended up taking home not the Best Animated Short Oscar, but rather the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject.

MIRACLE OF FLIGHT (1974)

Terry Gilliam made this five minute film after the original Monty Python's Flying Circus TV series had completed its final season but before Python caught on in the United States, a development that, along with the success of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, made it clear that the troupe would remain a going concern for years to come. Gilliam would later develop his own voice as a live-action filmmaker, but this cartoon is basically a stray Python skit that's developed at greater length than most of the animated bits that Gilliam contributed to the TV shows. Not that there's a goddamn thing wrong with that.

CREATURE COMFORTS (1989)

Nick Park, the co-founder of Aardman Animation (and the creator of Wallace and Gromit) had a weirdly accomplished triumph with this award-winning short, which attaches the thoughts expressed by man-on-the-street interview subjects to animals doing time in a zoo. The success of the film led to a series of TV commercials in a similar style and then, in 2003, to a brilliant TV series that ran for two seasons in Britain. (CBS commissioned an American version for a summer series last year but pulled the plug after broadcasting three of seven completed episodes.)

THE CRITIC (1963)

Pauline Kael once wrote that "the best way" that Mel Brooks "could be employed on any movie" would be for him to "hang around on a cloud" during shooting, "with permission to replace any actor at any point." Nice image, Pauline, but Ernest Pintoff trumped you when he made this parody of an arty animated short, and then put the icing on the gravy by asking Brooks to assume the persona of an old Jewish man -- this was back when Brooks was still a young Jewish man -- and record this worthy's baffled responses to what the hell his eyeballs were being subjected to as punishment for having dared to venture into a movie theater with an expectation of being entertained. It's too bad that Brooks doesn't still have a way of getting in touch with that cranky old guy; we'd love to sit next to him at Young Frankenstein on Broadway.

FRANK FILM (1973)

Frank Mouris wrote, directed, edited, and narrates this autobiographical collage, which aims to sum up the artist's life as best he can through nine minutes of words and images. Mouris talks about his experiences and impressions on the soundtrack while pictures of things important or just pleasing to him crowd onto the frame. The total effect is of an amazingly cool, elegant fever dream.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Paul Clark, Phil Nugent

15 Films That (Almost) Could’ve Been Directed By Somebody Else (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 21:30:00 GMT

SCENES FROM A MALL (1991) & 2 DAYS IN PARIS (2007), Not Directed by Woody Allen

While not as legion as Hitchcock (or even Tarantino) imitators, there have certainly been a fair number of pretenders to the Woodman’s throne over the years (including, in the recent period, Mr. Konigsberg himself), but Scenes From a Mall (which, if it were actually part of the Allen oeuvre, would rank well north of Hollywood Ending and somewhere south of Sweet and Lowdown) deserves special mention if only for the Allen-esque stammer of the dialogue delivered by none other than Woody Allen himself, charmingly paired with Bette Midler as a slick, successful, L.A.-loving Bizarro World version of his usual New York schlub persona (yet still kvetching endlessly about the difficulties of getting the whole love and happiness thing to work out). Meanwhile, after numerous attempts at regenerating his aforementioned trademark schlub persona, Dr. Who-style, into the form of younger actors ranging from John Cusack and Will Ferrell to Jason Biggs and Scarlett Johansson, it’s astonishing that Allen has never, to my knowledge, thought to cast the wry, world-class neurotic über-Jew Adam Goldberg in one of his films. Fortunately, writer/director/actress (and former Goldberg paramour) Julie Delpy corrected the obvious cinematic oversight with 2 Days In Paris, the type of hot-blooded, fast-talking, quick-witted meditation on life, romance, family, morality and mortality that used to be Allen's default setting before a string of duds forced his own recent decampment to Europe in search of inspiration.

MYSTERY MEN (1999), Not Directed By Tim Burton

This loudly hyped, much derided, and in fact somewhat underappreciated superhero parody (based on characters created by Flaming Carrot writer-artist Bob Burden) boasts elaborate set design, a smashing pop-Gothic look mixed with improvisational comedy riffs, satirical homages to various geekish interests, and Paul Reubens, all of which helped remind viewers of Tim Burton. In fact, the unusal-sounding name of the film's first-time director, Kinka Usher, actually helped inspire a rumor that the movie was, in fact, directed by Burton under an obviously contrived alias, even though Burton was busy at the time trying to bring his own Sleepy Hollow to market. Other evidence that Burton had nothing to do with it include the fact that the action scenes are fairly coherent, along with the movie's role in making Smash Mouth's "All Star" the hardest-to-avoid pop song in America for a good two or three years. (If the devoutly contrarian Burton had had a hand in that, he'd have probably joined the French Foreign Legion to atone.) Based on available evidence, there is in fact a Kinka Usher, but after the disappointing reception to this movie, his film career seems to have folded up its tent.

CITY OF LOST CHILDREN (1995), Not Directed by Terry Gilliam

Thanks to the fluke of his having broken in with Monty Python's Flying Circus and what that seems to have done to his sense of humor, the Minnesota-born Terry Gilliam has been fated to spend most of his life striking many people as sort of English. Oddly enough, the most successful Gilliam movie of the last fifteen or so years may have been cooked up by a couple of Frenchmen. Like Gilliam, Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet began their work as collaborators working in animation; with their first feature, Delicatessen, they announced their intent to make live-action films with the same degree of frenzied visual imagination (and the same sort of sick humor) usually found only in cartoons. But with Lost Children, they dove head-first into Gilliam's territory, with a sophisticated take on childlike fantasy that boasted a complicated plot, a look that was half fairy tale and half cyberpunk, and a villain out to steal the dreams of children. If Gilliam had made it himself after Time Bandits and Brazil, it would have made a far more fitting end to his "imagination trilogy" than the film he did make, The Adventures of Baron Muchausen. Instead, Gilliam did at least recognize the filmmakers as kindred spirits, and was quick to issue a blurb that they could use in the trailer.

And finally...

CHARADE (1963), Not Directed By Alfred Hitchcock

To tell the truth, we here at The Screengrab think that the tendency to compare just about any attempt at a stylish thriller to the work of Alfred Hitchcock has been overblown. Hitchcock didn't invent the concept of screen thrills, any more than (say) John Ford invented men on horseback or Stanley Donen, the director of Charade, invented singing and dancing. They all just happened to be really good at their specialties. What makes Charade, with its Parisian setting and alternately jokey and spooky murders, so much of a special case is its use of its star, Cary Grant, and the way it links this charmingly light romantic-mystery-comedy to North by Northwest and To Catch A Thief, the films that Hitchcock built around Grant after the strain of Hollywood comedy that made Grant a star had dried up or curdled. (Hitchcock also directed Grant in one of his best movies from the 1940s, Notorious, but that was in a darker, more hard-boiled style of tortured romance.) In all these movies, the filmmakers take Grant's star image into account in a slightly ironic way that makes it all the more glamorous and irresistable. (This is the movie where Audrey Hepburn, the damsel in distress, asks Grant, "Do you know what's wrong with you?" and then answers her own question: "Nothing.") They all hold up a lot better than the other movies that Grant made during the last twenty years or so of his career, and in fact, Charade, which he made just before he turned sixty, is for all practical purposes the last real "Cary Grant" movie. He did star in two more pictures, Father Goose and Walk, Don't Run (a remake of The More the Merrier), but they were half-hearted stabs at seeing if Grant could delight the public as, respectively, a boozy, unshaven old grump or a lovable match-making old busybody. Neither was a success, and Grant, sensing that his fans had no interest in seeing him evolve into anything besides Cary Grant, graciously retired from the screen. (Trivia note: in 2002. Jonathan Demme remade Charade as The Truth About Charlie, a movie whose Big Idea was, as Demme explained it, to see what Charade would look like if it had been directed in the flyblown experimental style of a French New Wave director working in 1964. It turned out that if the movie had been made that way, it would have kind of sucked.)

Click Here For Part One, Part Two & Part Three

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

A “Beverly Hills Chihuahua” By Any Other Name

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 13 May 2008 16:00:00 GMT

In Jack Mathews’ book The Battle of Brazil, which recounts Terry Gilliam’s struggle to get his director’s cut of Brazil released by Universal Pictures, the author reprints a list of alternative titles the Universal suits presented to Gilliam. Apparently they felt Brazil was confusing or misleading – after all, the movie didn’t take place in Brazil, and they certainly didn’t want to give audiences the wrong impression. And you can certainly see how these titles would have proved clearer and more appealing to the masses: If Osmosis, Who Are You?, Explanada Fortunata Is Not My Real Name, The Girl in the House on the Truck That's on Fire, and my all-time favorite, Gnu Yak, Gnu Yak and Other Bestial Places.

The point is, choosing the title of a movie can be a multi-million dollar decision, as Josh Friedman reports in the L.A. Times. It’s so important, there’s even a consulting firm called TitleDoctors, started by marketing consultants Seth Lockhart and Jamil Barrie. Imagine, this is a job you can have – meeting with movie executives and presenting them with a list of old song titles you think would be a perfect fit for their new romantic comedy or crime drama.

“Getting studios to agree on a name change is never easy (none of the titles for the 13 films Lockhart and Barrie consulted on during their first year in business has been adopted),” Friedman writes. “Filmmakers and production executives can become enamored of a movie's ‘working’ title. And studios may have already invested millions in marketing a project under a particular name, making it financially costly to alter.”

Some title changes are for the best; it’s hard to imagine Annie Hall achieving classic status under its original moniker Anhedonia, after all, and if you’re making a comedy about a pampered pocket dog from the 90210, you might as well call it Beverly Hills Chihuahua. But as Friedman points out, audiences are likely to flock to Hancock as much as they would the proposed alternate titles Heroes Never Die and Less Than Hero. And it’s probably for the best that the original title, Tonight, He Comes was jettisoned. As star Will Smith told Entertainment Weekly, ““You don’t want your movie to already have the porno title.”

That Guy!: Jonathan Pryce

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 07 May 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Almost as deadly for an actor as a face made for radio is a style made for theater. An actor who is thought of primarily as a stage presence will often be considered either too overblown and theatrical for film, from years of playing to the back row, or too subtle and mannered to have the kind of dynamic charisma one looks for in the image-intensive medium of motion pictures. Occasionally, though, a highly praised stage actor breaks through in film and establishes himself as the class of his field, and if Wales' Jonathan Pryce lacks the good looks and intensity of a Laurence Olivier, he has at least managed — largely due to his longtime association with the troubled, talented director Terry Gilliam — to become one of the most skillful and reliable character actors working today. A veteran of RADA (on an acting scholarship) and the former artistic director of the celebrated Liverpool Everyman Theater, Pryce's stage credentials are impeccable, but he's also a stalwart movie veteran who's appeared in everything from James Bond movies (he played the main villain in 1997's Tomorrow Never Dies, opposite Pierce Brosnan) to summer blockbusters (he's been the Don Knotts-esque governor of Jamaica, Weatherby Swann, in all three installments of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise). But despite these occasional gestures at superstardom, he's most at home assaying highly distinctive and memorable character roles, even imbuing his occasional lead performance with a nervous energy and sublime competence that comes straight out of his theatrical training and perfectly feeds into his on-screen persona.

Pryce (the son of a Welsh shopkeeper, and originally named Price; the reason for the name change is murky and doubtless irrelevant) still keeps extremely busy with stagework, and even his big-screen roles maintain elements of the theatrical: one of the few times he broke away from his normal roles as precise and deliberate, almost timid, characters is when he played Argentine strongman Juan Peron opposite Madonna in the 1996 big-screen adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Evita. But despite the moneymaking blockbuster roles he takes, and the occasional foray into television work, he still wins his highest praise for independent or 'little movie' screen work, and in 1995, he received what he's described as one of the highest honors of his storied career, winning the Best Actor award at the Cannes film festival for his sensitive, powerful and emotional portrayal of British novelist Lytton Strachey in director Christopher Hampton's little-seen Carrington. Recently, Pryce got the chance to fulfill a lifelong dream and portray Sherlock Holmes on British television, but he's been taking less work recently to spend time with his family. He'll be appearing (as the president of the United States, no less!) in the upcoming G.I. Joe movie, although his devotees are much more excited about next year's My Zinc Bed, where he'll be playing the lead in a new David Hare adaptation. Pryce just recently turned sixty, and with a few more choice roles (and, well, a few less G.I. Joes, he's still got a good chance at following in Olivier's footsteps as a Grand Old Man of British cinema.

Where to see Jonathan Pryce at his best:

SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES (1983)

Though it wasn't the breakout role that would come his way two years later, Pryce's performance as the sinister Mr. Dark in this spotty but entertaining adaptation of a Ray Bradbury novel is incredibly compelling. As the proprietor and ringleader of a curious and somewhat menacing circus that comes to visit a small town, Pryce strikes a perfect balance of sophistication and terror; throughout his entire time on screen, it's hard to take your eyes off of him, and he swills Bradbury's ripe dialogue around in his mouth like a fine wine, making the moments when he loses control all the more effective. A stunning performance from a nearly forgotten film.

BRAZIL (1985)

The movie that really thrust Jonathan Pryce into the public eye was his performance as the hapless and ultimately hopeless Sam Lowry, best described as Winston Smith with even more British repression. It would be the first of many collaborations between Pryce and Terry Gilliam, and while it made quite clear the reasons why he wasn't cut out to be a typical romantic lead, it was a brilliant piece of acting, aided and abetted by the clever and theatrical scripting of Tom Stoppard. Gilliam and Pryce would work together several more times, from The Adventures of Baron Munchausen to The Brothers Grimm, but it would never be this magical again.

GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS (1992)

As the terrified and uncertain would-be real estate investor James Lingk, Jonathan Pryce not only gets the chance to act in one of the most powerhouse ensemble casts in recent memory (including getting to play the majority of his scenes off of Al Pacino at the very last moment in his career when he did any actual acting, as opposed to just yelling at things), but he also played the unusual role of the film's moral center, getting to act like a normal human being among these amoral Type-A monsters. Curiously enough, Pryce went on to play Shelley "The Machine" Levene -- portrayed here by Jack Lemmon -- in a London revival of the David Mamet play.

Watching "The Watchman": An Interview with Kent M. Beeson

Paul Clark — Mon, 05 May 2008 19:00:00 GMT

In case you’ve slept through this past weekend, the summer movie season got off to a roaring start with the big-budget adaptation of Iron Man. With many more comic book movies in store this summer, and even more after that, I figured it was about time to catch up with former Screengrab contributor and all around good dude Kent M. Beeson. As a comic-book fan and movie buff of long standing, Kent recently secured a position with the Web site comiXology, writing a bi-weekly column entitled The Watchman. Kent was gracious enough to take time out of his busy schedule- which also includes numerous freelance jobs as well as a wife and 14-month-old daughter- to conduct this interview via e-Mail.

How did you get your position with Comixology?

Dumb luck, if you ask me! Peter Jaffe, the Online Content Editor for Comixology, asked former ScreenGrab editor Bilge Ebiri to recommend someone to cover film and TV for Comixology, and he named me. I'd done some writing for ScreenGrab, including several on comic books, so I suppose that's why name came up. if I had to guess, I'd say that my ScreenGrab posts on the Watchmen and Shazam! movies had something to do with it, but really, I have no idea.

Why do you suppose Hollywood has made so many comic book movies in the past few years?

I suppose the standard reasons are that the executives greenlighting these movies are the ones that grew up in the 70s and 80s, and grew up reading these comics, coupled with CGI that lets filmmakers show just about anything they can imagine. When those two moments in history coincided, it was bound to be a fertile period. What's really interesting to me, though, isn't that so many comic book movies are being made, but just how important fidelity to the source material has become. It still boggles my mind that Zack Snyder is keeping Watchmen in the 80s -- that never would have happened just a few years ago. We've come a long way from the aborted Tim Burton Superman with Nicolas Cage in a freaky black suit. But even this is a bit of a quirk of history -- I don't think we'd be seeing so many faithful adaptations if it weren't for Bryan Singer's X-Men showing it could be done and Raimi's Spider-Man showing just how friggin' huge it could be.

What are your favorite comic books?

Watchmen is my favorite book of all time, comic or otherwise. Paul Smith's run on X-Men -- I think I might prefer it to Byrne's, actually. Ambush Bug was way ahead of its time. One I loved back in the day, that seems to have been forgotten, was an horror anthology called Wasteland. It was written by John Ostrander and, of all people, improv pioneer Del Close. Some really twisted shit -- I can still remember one story called "R.Ab" that is just... soul-crushingly dark. Like Idiocracy without the safety of the comedy. I always thought this is what reading the E.C. comics back in the day must've been like.

Favorite comic book movies?

The stupidly-titled X2 is, fortunately, stupidly awesome. Spider-Man, I can watch over and over. Akira is great, but it's animated, so maybe that shouldn't count. I have a soft spot for Batman Returns, but the unfortunate practice of overloading a film with villains can be laid squarely at its feet.

Best adaptation?

Spider-Man is the best, I think, but it's adapting a character and his world and not so much a single story (other than the origin), so if you eliminate those, I guess that leaves me with Sin City. Visually, it's breath-taking and kind of addictive -- it's hard to look away from it when it's on. More importantly, though, it turned a series of borderline-unreadable books into something pleasing.

Most underappreciated/overappreciated comic book movies?

Let me go ahead and catch hell from two different camps. The first Superman movie is pretty terrific for about forty minutes when dealing with his origin, but once Luthor enters the picture, it gets too jokey and lame. Reeve and Kidder are impeccable, however. And Ghost World is pretty much ruined by Zwigoff's cheap misanthropy. I mean, Clowes isn't exactly Mr. Positive, but it's clear from the book that he's trying to find some kind of hope. Zwigoff buries it under shots of pregnant women smoking and Blockbuster gags that would never have made it past the Mad TV writing room. There's a reason Bad Santa works -- it's all misanthropy.

I think Hellboy is a bit underappreciated. Considering that the comic isn't very well-written and has one of the most non-sensical origin stories ever -- Mignola came up with the look of the character first and made up everything after, and it shows -- it holds together pretty well. Del Toro's really coming into his own, he's starting to find just what he's capable of, so I'm looking forward to Hellboy II.

When a comic book movie doesn't remain true to its source, how difficult is it for you to turn off your comic book side and simply appreciate it as a movie?

Well, my attack plan for the stuff I'm unfamiliar with -- like Darwyn Cooke's The New Frontier, or the upcoming Wanted -- is to watch the movie first. I want to be able to enjoy the movie -- or not -- as a movie first, without any baggage, which is how most viewers are going to see these things anyway. And then I go back to the comic. The comic is usually going to have more information anyway, and I don't need to bring that into the movie. I actually started watching Persepolis after reading the first 20 pages or so of the comic, and it totally fucked it up for me -- I had to go back and see it again to fully appreciate how well the filmmakers were able to streamline the story for the movie. Luckily, most comic movies are adapting characters and not specific stories, so it's pretty easy to turn off the preconceptions.

Obviously, with something like Watchmen, that's not going to be possible. I'm not sure how that's going to work. I might have to conk myself on the head and induce amnesia just before I walk into the theater.

What big-screen comic book adaptations have actually improved on their sources?

I just finished the original A History of Violence, and wow, what a stinker. The movie pretty much repudiates the source, which, admittedly, is an interesting way to go about adapting something. Sin City -- well, my loathing of Frank Miller runs pretty deep, so it was great to see such a tiring and self-important comic turned into high camp by simply giving the thing motion. Whenever I see Clive Owen float down to the street in his red shoes, I crack up.

In your opinion, what are the keys to making a successful comic book adaptation?

Jesus, I really have no idea. The first thing that comes to mind is balance -- knowing when to be faithful to the source, and when to realize, hey, this has to work as a movie first and foremost, and just go off. A History of Violence is pretty faithful for the first 1/3 of the book, then it jettisons the rest, to its credit. I don't think the adaptation of The New Frontier went far enough -- there were small changes here and there that indicated that they knew the story wasn't going to work as is, but they really should have rethought the whole thing from top to bottom. But, saying that, I bet we'll see (if we haven't already) a movie that either is completely faithful or totally throws everything out but the title and works perfectly well.

Now that Watchmen is being made, what are some of your other dream adaptations?

I want to say FLCL, but the comic came later. Does Cowboy Bebop count? It was a serialized manga first. I could totally see an adaptation with, say, Ryan Gosling as Spike, Selma Blair as Faye and The Rock as Jet. I think The Rock is underrated as a performer -- for someone who was supposed to be Schwarzenegger's heir apparent, he displays more genuine warmth and a sense of humor about himself than Arnold ever did. While Jet is a badass, he's still essentially the mother of the group, and it'd be interesting to see him in a movie where his physicality is in strict contrast to his role. Matthew Vaughn is doing Thor, but I'd kill for a Gilliam version -- nobody does giants better, and I'd love to see them get their ass kicked by a blonde dude with a hammer.

The Watchman runs every other Wednesday on comiXology. Kent’s piece on Iron Man will run this week.

Tribeca Film Festival Review: "Sita Sings the Blues"

Phil Nugent — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 15:00:00 GMT

In her comic book work from some fifteen years ago, Nina Paley spoofed the trend towards "confessional" autobiographical comics such as those done by people like Julie Doucet and Joe Matt. Drawing in a goofy, bigfoot-cartoonist style, Paley complained that she hadn't enjoyed enough unhealthy, grotesquely unstable life experiences to compete with the real trailblazers in that field. Sita Sings the Blues, Paley's first animated feature, shows that time has helped her catch up a little in the miserable-experience department, and it also shows an artist who's blossomed a bit in the face of the possibilities offered by moviemaking. It also shows that Paley has found a way to be confessional without being exhibitionist or soppy.

The center of the movie is taken from part of the Sanskrit epic The Ramayana, dealing with Rama and his wife, the goddess Sita, who maintains her devotion to him even as he repeatedly seeks out reasons to doubt her chastity and cast her away. (In response to this treatment, Sita tends to express her regret over having not killed herself earlier before others had suffered on her behalf.) The film happily juggles a fun-house buffet of styles. Parts of it are narrated by a trio of shadow puppets with Indian voices--provided by Aseem Chhabra, Bhavana Nagulapally, and Manish Acharya--who relate the story in a conversational, sometimes argumentative way that sounds as if they were drawing on their memories of having heard it as children and haven't been allowed to consult Wikipedia. It's also depicted on-screen through brightly colored animation that suggests an Eastern version of Terry Gilliams' cut-out world-classics work with Monty Python. There are even several lively musical numbers, with Sita's singing voice provided by Annette Hanshaw, a 1920s vocalist whose old records are used on the soundtrack. All this is intercut with the bare bones of the story from Paley's own life that got her thinking about this story: how her husband got a job in India; how he persuaded her to sublet their San Francisco apartment, complete with cat, and join him after his contract was extended; and how he waited until she had gone to New York on business to break up with her by e-mail. Sita is funny and eye-popping and never bogs down. It might also double as a great introduction for kids to the Eastern canon, assuming you don't mind your kids asking you to explain the joke about the mile-high club.

Famous Last Words, Round 1 Winners! (Finally)

Paul Clark — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Well, it's about stinkin' time. After 12 weeks of regular competition and three tiebreakers- encompassing a total of 21 quotations- we finally have a group of winners for this first round of Screengrab's Famous Last Words game. Even with all of the extra weeks of play, I was unable to whittle down the winners to the pre-determined three, so I decided to award prizes to the five top finishers. The worthy winners are: Ben Herrera, Brian Kennedy, Victor Morton, Marshall Savitt, and Cameron Worden. Each will receive a $25 gift certificate from The Criterion Store.

A prize which, I might add, could potentially be used to help pay for two of the three films represented by last week's quotes. Here are the films in question, for those of you playing at home:

1. "It's the tin lids... when- how- will the world ever..."
"End?"
"Yes." ~ this exchange marks the final dialogue we hear in Mike Leigh's masterpiece Naked, taking place before one of the greatest parting shots in movie history.

2. "Jones is my name. I'm in insurance." ~ this was the gimme of the bunch, coming at the tail end of Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys.

3. "Will there be a last letter?" ~ And this comes from Chris Marker's towering 1982 essay film Sans Soleil. Oddly enough, the film shares a Criterion DVD with Marker's classic La Jetee, which was the inspiration for Twelve Monkeys. I assure you I didn't do that on purpose.

Congratulations to all of the winners, and thanks to everyone who participated. The game will be taking a break for the next few months, but I'm planning to start it up again this summer with a whole new batch of quotes. Until then, remember:

"The end is important in all things."

Depp vs. Murray: Dueling Gonzos

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Many people think of Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson as the drug-addled grotesque at the center of Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas, a buffoonish personification of the worst of ‘60s & ‘70s excess...and, by most accounts, Thompson both played up and fell victim to this public persona in the latter part of his life and career, trading on his wild-and-crazy persona in the pop culture fast lane like a counter-culture Hugh Hefner while his writing became ever more lazy and diffuse. "I'm leading a normal life and right alongside me there is this myth,” he admitted as early as 1977, “and it is growing and mushrooming and getting more and more warped. When I get invited to, say, speak at universities, I'm not sure if they are inviting [his crazed, quasi-fictional alter-ego Raoul] Duke or Thompson. I'm not sure who to be."

In his prime, however, Thompson was not only a larger-than-life, groundbreaking literary stylist, but also a crack-shot political reporter with a formidable grasp of American realpolitik. Nearly four decades before Hilary and Barack started trading body blows in the 2008 primaries, Thompson was bemoaning the essential fracture he saw at the heart of the modern Democratic Party in Fear and Loathing On The Campaign Trail ’72: “I think what most people seem to be tired of are the sort of lint-headed, wooly-minded—what a lot of people call do-gooders—people who would like to do the right thing, but who just can’t get it up.”

On The Campaign Trail ’72 is a fantastically insightful cautionary chronicle of the doomed McGovern presidential campaign, essential reading for anyone interested in the health of the Republic (especially in an election year)...and, in fact, I'd only just recently finished re-reading the book when a friend, out of the blue, sent me a DVD packed with various bits of Thompson-alia, including The Crazy Never Die, a 1988 documentary short about Dr. Gonzo by the Mitchell Brothers Film Group of San Francisco, along with material from the two extant fictional depictions of Thompson’s life: Terry Gilliam’s Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas (1998) and Art Linson’s Where The Buffalo Roam (1980).

I had seen both Thompson biopics before, but it was interesting to compare the movies and their lead performances side by side. According to Doug Hill & Jeff Weingrad’s backstage history Saturday Night, Bill Murray became so immersed in his semi-autobiographical portrayal (in Buffalo) that he palled around with and virtually became Hunter S. Thompson, “complete with long black cigarette holder, dark glasses, and nasty habits,” a pseudo-Method transformation that lasted until the movie came out and bombed like the Enola Gay, after which the comedian returned to his regular, affable self, as if waking from a long, strange coma.

Despite all his apparent mental immersion in the role, however, Murray the actor never really disappears into the character, and his performance as Thompson is not markedly different from his 1979 performance as Trip Harrison in Meatballs or his later depiction of Carl Spackler in Caddyshack. If anything, his Thompson seems like the bastard child of Carl and Trip, with a few Gonzo quotes and props thrown into the mix.

Johnny Depp also palled around with Thompson before, during and after his portrayal of the man, but the actor’s performance as “Raoul Duke” in Gilliam’s adaptation of the allegedly unfilmable Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas is a believably stylized depiction of a more fully-realized character, grounding the film’s bombastic excesses with deadpan wit and an undercurrent of genuine sadness for the lost utopian dreams of the '60s counter-culture.

In the final analysis, Depp (arguably) offers a better performance in a better film, but after Gilliam’s surrealistic take (and Benicio del Toro’s intense but off-putting performance as Duke/Thompson’s friend, Dr. Gonzo/Oscar Acosta), Where The Buffalo Roam’s more laid-back, relatively naturalistic approach, while meandering (and, well, bad), still makes me wish for an accurate, insightful biopic of the real Hunter S. Thompson, beyond all the same old fear and loathing.

DVD Digest for April 8, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week, a cracked fantasy favorite finally gets the DVD it deserves, and DVD lovers can finally order their milkshakes to go.

For most moviegoers, the big news this week is the arrival of Paul Thomas Anderson's latest masterpiece There Will Be Blood in DVD. But while that's cause for celebration, be warned- as with Sweeney Todd last week, Paramount is releasing the film in two separate versions, a bare-bones single-disc release and a two-disc set featuring some deleted scenes and a number of featurettes about the making of, and history behind, the film. Normally, I'd be skeptical about the relatively slim pickings even on the two-disc set, but Anderson's recent DVD releases haven't contained too much in the way of commentaries and the like, so this was to be expected from him. Besides, it's not like you're NOT going to buy There Will Be Blood- it's awesome enough to stand on its own merits without all the snazzy bells and whistles.

But no less noteworthy is the release of a new version of Terry Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (Sony, also Blu-Ray). Munchausen, a notorious flop in its day, has since become something of a cult favorite, and it's good to see Sony finally giving it a good DVD treatment. Naturally, there's a Terry Gilliam commentary track, which should be reason enough to buy the DVD, considering that Gilliam's commentaries are never better than when he's talking about films that were mishandled by their distributors. The two-disc set also includes the three-part documentary "The Madness and Misadventures of Munchausen," as well as storyboard sequences that supposedly feature "all-new vocal performances by Terry Gilliam and Chris McKeown." Dare I hope Gilliam drew the storyboards in Pythonimation style?

In other classics coming to DVD news, Fox is continuing the celebration of Bette Davis with a six-disc Bette Davis Centenary Celebration Collection that includes a new two-disc version of All About Eve along with bare-bones discs of The Nanny, The Virgin Queen, Phone Call From a Stranger, and the gothic-horror classic Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte. Other than that, not much to write about in the classics department, unless of course the Blu-Ray release of Arnold Schwarzenegger in The 6th Day blows your hair back. In which case don't let me stop you.

More recent titles being released on DVD this week include John C. Reilly in the musical biopic spoof Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (Sony, also Blu-Ray), the family fantasy The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep (Sony, also Blu-Ray), Robert Redford's star-studded Iraq War dud Lions For Lambs (MGM), and the Leonardo DiCaprio-produced and -narrated tree-hugger documentary The 11th Hour (Warner).

Finally, David Huddleston's checking in again this week, this time to offer his condolences to Warner's HD-DVD release of I Am Legend. You know, Huddleston's condolences might make me feel bad for Will Smith's character in the film, except I'm guessing he'd be grateful for the company.

The Top Ten Uncompleted Movies, Part 1

Phil Nugent — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 20:00:00 GMT

The sad death of Heath Ledger caused speculation that the film he had been shooting, Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, might be in jeopardy. This isn't the first time that the loss of a principle cast member has threatened to shut down a movie. Witness the battle Doug Trumbull had to fight to keep Brainstorm from being written off when Natalie Wood died. Of course, there are various movies that had not been finished for one reason or another, some through accidents and others to a simple lack of interest. What follows is a list of 10 of the more promising or at least potentially interesting films that were not released in their intended form for one reason or another.

--Faisal A. Qureshi

DARK BLOOD

River Phoenix's death in October 1993 led to the complete shutdown of George Sluzier's film. Already a troubled production, with reports of tension between Judy Davis and Phoenix, the film only had 11 days of shooting left before tragedy struck. The British company Palace Pictures, which was funding the production, decided that the film couldn't be salvaged. Even though Jim Barton's script received a postive reception when it was given a read through by the Script Factory, there have been no takers for trying to re-shoot or complete the picture.

THE MAN WHO SHOT DON QUIXOTE

Terry Gilliam's first experience of getting a film written off was luckily recorded in a documentary, Lost in La Mancha, shot by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe. After one week of shooting, Jean Rochefort, injured himself while getting on a horse, flew back to France and received doctor's orders to never ride again. There are rumours that Jeremy Thomas would take over the project and re-start production with Johnny Depp still attached, but until then all we have are rushes of Depp berating a fish.

I, CLAUDIUS

The 1976 BBC Adaptation of Robert Graves I, Claudius has been hailed as one of the greatest works of British TV drama. Forty years earlier, however, Alexander Korda tried producing a feature adaptation of the book starring Charles Laughton as Claudius and Merle Oberon as the nymphomaical Messalina, with Josef Von Sternberg directing. Unfortunately, Merle Oberon suffered an accident that resulted in the abandoning of filming. Luckily, the footage that had been completed survived and was later the center piece of the excellent BBC Documentary, The Epic That Never Was, which was itself released to film theaters.

ORSON WELLES'S DON QUIXOTE

Orson Welles had worked on Don Quixote for years, going through various scripts and cast changes, and shooting in Mexico and Spain. Financed out of his own pocket, Welles started shooting in 1955 just after he was kicked off the editing of Touch of Evil, and carried on until the death of his Sancho Panza, Akim Tamiroff. Strangely enough, the job of assembling the surviving footage into something coherent was given to Spanish exploitation filmmaker Jesus Franco, who had been Welles's first assistant director during some of the shooting. Reviled when it premiered in Cannes, it leaves one hoping that someday there will be another attempt to "complete" the job by someone with more artistry and closer to Welles's own wavelength than a second-rate horror hack.

SOMETHING'S GOT TO GIVE

Marilyn Monroe's final film, which was shelved after her death. On paper it looked great, with George Cukor directing and a cast that included Phil Silvers and Dean Martin. The story, a remake of the 1940 My Favorite Wife (which was itself derived from Tennyson's "Enoch Arden") involved a husband who has his wife declared dead after she's been missing for five years, only for her to turn up when he's getting re-married. Unfortunately Monroe's inability to come in to shoot her scenes (she was apparently off 17 days out of 30 of the duration of the production) and with Fox hemorraging money from the even more expensive, Cleopatra, decided to sack the actress and re-organise the production. Unfortunately, Monroe's death killed the project altogether, and it wasn't until 1999 that Fox allowed the release of 39 minutes of footage shot for the film to celebrate Monroe's 75th birthday. (My Favorite Wife was ultimately remade as Move Over, Darling, with Doris Day and James Garner.)

--Phil Nugent, Faisal A. Qureshi

Click here for Part 2.

"Chicago 10": Cartooning the Sixties

Phil Nugent — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 18:00:00 GMT

When Alex Cox was trying (unsuccessfully) to make a movie version of Hunter Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and later, when Terry Gilliam was (successfully) trying to make it, both of them reportedly pissed off Thompson by announcing their intention to incorporate animated sequences into their films. The good doctor is said to have objected to the idea of having his masterpiece reduced to "a goddamn cartoon." This reticence, which in Thompson's case may have been related to a feeling that Garry Trudeau owed him some royalties, may turn out to be the key failing in Dr. Gonzo's longtime mission to make sense of the sixties. Since Gilliam's movie came out, a younger generation of filmmakers seems to have taken up the idea that the period can only be captured as a goddamn cartoon. A couple of years ago, with A Scanner Darkly, Richard Linklater used rotoscope animation to capture a look and feel that he found appropriate to Philip K. Dick's surreal vision of paranoia among druggie burn-outs. Now, the documentarian Brett Morgen (best known for The Kid Stays in the Picture, the movie version of the autobiography of Robert Evans — speaking of cartoons) has employed brightly colored "motion capture" technology for Chicago 10, his film about the trial of '60s political radicals that grew out of the violent chaos of the 1968 Democratic Convention. (At the start of the trial, the defendents were collectively known af "the Chicago eight"; they became better known as "the Chicago seven" after one of them, Bobby Seale, after being bound and gagged in the courtroom at the orders of Judge Julius Hoffman, had his case severed from that of the others. The title of the movie is meant as a way of paying tribute to all of them as well as their lawyers, Leonard Weinglass and the late William Kuntsler.)

Morgen, who was born not long after the convention, sees his relative youth as an advantage here. "The world simply did not need another movie about the ’60s made by someone from the ’60s," he says. "We weren’t making a movie about 1968 per se. I don’t want to smell patchouli. I don’t want to see bell-bottoms." He says that he was driven to return to the protest culture of the sixties as a way of challenging what he sees as the political apathy of his own generation and those younger — and towards that end, instead of the usual hippy-dippy music choices, he includes newsreel footage of Chicago cops thrashing protestors to the accompaniment of Rage Against the Machine. (The movie also features voice work by Jeffrey Wright as Seale, Liev Schrieber as Kunstler, Hank Azaria as Abbie Hoffman, Mark Ruffalo as Jerry Rubin, James Urbaniak as Rennie Davis, Dylan Baker as David Dellinger, and the late Roy Scheider as the famously demented Judge Hoffman.) Towards that end, the movie concentrates on the trial as an example of (often hilarious) political theater, a kind of media prank. Though by all accounts it is scrupulously accurate in its details, some of the original participants take exception to its revolution-can-be-fun angle. "This is an Abbie Hoffman story." says Tom Hayden. "Abbie was a great rebel, but there is a danger in theatricalizing history." To which Leonard Weinglass adds, "The film is entertainment, but it is not a political education." (It should be noted that the idea that the trial could best serve its political purposes as an example of living satire also dates back to the time of the trial itself; as early as 1970, just months after the trial ended, Bantam published a paperback collection of comic highlights from the court transcripts. It was titled The Tales of Hoffman and included a chortling introduction by the radical "political critic" Dwight Macdonald.) For his part, Morgen is so high on trying to "get the story out" that he's thrilled by the news that Steven Spielberg is thinking of making his own Chicago seven/ eight/ whatever movie: "We’ve been consulting with them and providing them with our databases." In the meantime, the surviving participants will continue to learn what Hunter Thompson already knew about the dangers of becoming a cartoon. Or as Leonard Weinglass says, complaining about his animated doppelganger's costume design, "Never in my life have I had a lavender suit."

Oscar Shorts, Part 2: Best Animated Short Film

Paul Clark — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 20:00:00 GMT

More often than not, the winner of the Best Animated Short Film category seems like a foregone conclusion. With such major Hollywood players as Pixar, Disney, and Blue Sky in the mix, it can be hard for the up-and-coming animator to compete for the prize. But this year is different. There’s no big animation studio in the mix, which should make for an interesting Oscar race. In addition, there are a number of worthy nominees in the race, so one hopes quality will be the primary factor in voters’ decisions.

At a time when Hollywood animated features all seem to boast a similar visual aesthetic — largely a modified CGI take on the classic Disney style — it’s good to see diversity in this year’s crop of Oscar-nominated shorts. Consider the Russian entry, My Love, animated in a painterly style with plenty of swirling brushstrokes. This style is a good match for its classically-bound story, set in czarist Russia and inspired by Turgenev. My Love, directed by Alexander Petrov, is a poignant evocation of first love, and a rich and rewarding film.

The film with the broadest mainstream appeal is Josh Raskin’s I Met the Walrus, which also boasts the best backstory of the five nominees. In 1969, fourteen-year-old Jerry Levitan snuck into John Lennon’s hotel room and persuaded him to do a short interview, and almost four decades later Levitan and Raskin have turned that interview into a film. If only the film itself were so interesting — Raskin’s style is shallow and uninspired, literalizing Lennon’s remarks by matching them with sub-Gilliam visual equivalents. As far as films like this go, it pales in comparison with Chris Landreth’s 2004 Oscar-winner Ryan, which was similarly inspired by an interview but made for compelling cinema with its expressive style and bittersweet tone. By comparison, I Met the Walrus is a stunt.

Also taking its cue from a dearly departed musical master is Suzie Templeton and Hugh Welchman’s Peter and the Wolf, a new take on Prokofiev’s classic. One of three stop-motion films in competition this year, the film follows Peter and his animal friends into the forest where of course they meet a wolf. The story is nothing new, but the animation is impressive. I especially liked the backgrounds, full of gnarly trees and dark corners, but the characters were fun as well, my favorite being a fat, mean cat who looked suspiciously like Orson Welles as Falstaff.

I was somewhat more mixed on the French stop-motion nominee, Même les Pigeons Vont Au Paradis (Even Pigeons Go to Heaven). Samuel Tourneux and Simon Vanesse’s short tells the story of a priest who tries to convince an old miser to buy a machine that will guarantee him entry into heaven. The animation is good-looking, but the filmmaking isn’t particularly inspired, and the pacing feels rushed. In the end, Pigeons is more or less a one-joke movie, not up to the high standard set by some of the other nominees.

Finally, the third stop-motion entry and the best of this year’s nominees is Madame Tutli-Putli, which follows the titular mousy heroine as she experiences a number of strange events on a bizarre night train. Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski’s film is light on story, but overflowing with style. In addition, Madame Tutli-Putli is a masterpiece of tone, perfectly capturing the forlorn feel of an overcrowded train car, as well as moments of humor, suspense, and visual poetry. Madame Tutli-Putli is perhaps too obscure for the Academy voters — pessimist that I am, I anticipate that they might go for I Met the Walrus or Even Pigeons Go to Heaven. But it’s a wonder, and I expect that it’ll still be watched long after the other films have been forgotten.

Heath Ledger Through the Looking Glass

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 19:00:00 GMT

In the aftermath of Heath Ledger’s death, we wondered whether the Terry Gilliam Curse had struck again. Ledger had completed only a few weeks of shooting on Gilliam’s latest phantasmagoric epic, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, and it looked like the project was headed towards the same dead end as the director’s ill-fated The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.

Perhaps inspired by the multiple Dylans of I’m Not There — one of which was played by Ledger — Gilliam has hit on an ingenious solution to his dilemma. According to Variety (which cites Ain’t It Cool News as its only source, so take it with however many grains of salt you feel necessary), Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell have all signed on to fill Ledger’s shoes. How will this work? Apparently "Ledger's character is transported into three separate dimensions in the fantasy pic; these new worlds, which Ledger accesses via a paranormal mirror, will now be inhabited by Depp, Law, and Farrell."

While I’m Not There may have sparked the idea, the above explanation calls to mind another possible inspiration: longtime BBC staple Doctor Who. As you may recall, the Doctor is a Time Lord with the convenient ability to regenerate into a new incarnation. Each time he does this, a new actor is cast in the role. It’s not too much of a stretch to imagine Gilliam running into one Doctor or another backstage at the BBC back in his Monty Python days. In fact, the late Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams wrote for both shows, so there’s your connection right there. That’s my theory and I’m sticking to it.

Our 11 Favorite Romantic Moments in the Movies, Part 1

Phil Nugent — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 21:30:00 GMT

First things first: before you all start sending in your complaints, take a look at the headline there. It's not "The Best Romantic Moments" or "The Most Classic Romantic Moments", and the American Film Institute was not consulted in the making of this list. These are our favorite romantic moments, chosen by us, the good people of the Screengrab. Romance is a very big part of what makes movies so central to our imaginative lives, and what strikes a person as deeply romantic is about as personal as responses get. Here are a few moments that got to us. Happy Valentine's Day.

OUT OF SIGHT (1998)

You have to figure that this movie would have a special place in the heart of any movie geek: the hero and heroine first detect a spark between them while talking about movies. The fact that they're having that conversation while holed up in the trunk of a car after one of them has taken the other hostage in the course of a prison break...well, let's call that the "meet cute", an essential part of any story that you look forward to telling the grandchildren someday. That scene lights the fuse that spreads out into a smooth hot glow in this scene, the one where George Clooney officially became a movie star and the repository of our best fantasy hopes on the big screen. As for Jennifer Lopez, well, let's just say that if she had retired from the screen to enter a nunnery or marry the Prince of Monaco immediately after shooting this movie, we'd still be driving ourselves crazy wondering what we'd all missed out on.

BLUE VELVET (1986)

Some believe that David Lynch's greatest movie is so deeply encased in something called "irony" that it is devoid of true feeling and honest emotion. These worthies must have been on an extended jujubee break in the lobby during the dance scene, with Kyle MacLachlan and Laura Dern trancing out to the unearthly sound of Julee Cruise performing the Lynch-Angelo Badalamenti song "Mysteries of Love." If anything, Lynch's Pop distancing makes it possible for the viewer to appreciate how ridiculous romantic love can seem to the observer, and also to recognize how little that matters in relation to the way it make you feel. Or as that great romantic poet Jerry Lee Lewis once put it, "I laughed at love 'cause I thought it was funny. You came along and you moved me, honey..."

TRULY, MADLY, DEEPLY (1991)

Juliet Stevenson was happy before the movie started, because she was with Alan Rickman, but then he went and died on her, and she became just miserable. It got so bad that Alan Rickman had to come back to comfort her, and she was happy again for a while, but then she got confused because she met another guy who, though perhaps not measuring up to Alan Rickman in many respects, did have the clear home-field advantage of still being alive, and so Alan Rickman, who is sensitive about these things, finally told her that he thought he'd better leave, because he was prepared to put what was best for her first, and it would probably be better for her to get back to having close relationships with living people. All in all, you should maybe just watch the clip: they explain it a lot better than we do.

MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO (1991)

Mike (River Phoenix) is a no-account hustler. He's a narcoleptic, unable even to control whether he stays conscious. He's got nobody, no home, and in all likelihood, not much future beyond the point at which the movie stops. But he is a romantic hero, because he loves unconditionally, asking only that the undeserving object of his love treat him with a little respect when he has to ask him a direct question: "What am I to you?"

McCABE & MRS. MILLER (1971)

Love does a job on people. Consider the case of John McCabe (Warren Beatty), frontier enterpeneur in partnership with the whore and brothel keeper Mrs. Miller (Julie Christie), who has the misfortune to be in love with a woman who he brought to the territory in order to profit from her selling herself to any client ambitious enough to get into bed with her. Believing that "If a man is fool enough to get into business with a woman, she ain't going to think much of him" and lamenting that all his association with Mrs. Miller has "cost me so far is money and pain," McCabe retreats to his room and, alone, rages at the woman he feels doesn't see him: “I got poetry in me. I do! I got poetry in me. But I ain’t gonna put it down on paper. I ain’t no educated man. I got sense enough not to try.” Delivered by one of the sexiest male movie stars of his generation, the speech may in fact be one of the most poetic of all depictions in movies of the ability of romantic frustration to make any of us feel pathetically inarticulate.

LA JETÉE (1962)

It is often said of people in love that the world only seems to exist, that things only seem to come to life, when they are with the people they love. In experimental filmmaker Chris Marker’s brilliant, haunting narrative masterpiece La Jetée, that notion is made visually explicit, in one of the most memorable sequences in all of film history. It’s a moment of delicate beauty that manages to be not only an iconic piece of filmmaking but a moment of breathtaking tenderness and romance, as well. The film (upon which Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys was based) is in fact a series of still photographs, telling the story of a world devastated by nuclear warfare, and the attempt of a group of survivors to travel back in time searching for an answer, any answer, to their dire predicament. The man that is chosen as the time traveler, played by Davos Hanich, is haunted by a vague visual memory that will assume grave importance when he arrives in the present day, but through it all, the story is told only through a compelling voice-over narration and Marker’s exquisitely paced still photographs. Except for one moment. In the latter half of the film, Hanich gazes down at the face of the woman he loves (played by the beautiful Hélène Chatelain) and, almost imperceptibly at first, and then clearly like breaking through water, her face begins to move, and she blinks, in the movie’s only filmed sequence. It’s not only a tremendously effective piece of direction, but one of the most moving, romantic moments in cinema.

— Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

Click here for Part 2.

When Good Directors Go Bad: The Brothers Grimm (2005, Terry Gilliam)

Paul Clark — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Terry Gilliam is as widely known for his production troubles as he is for the quality of his films. Gilliam has had to contend with studio interference on nearly all his recent films, and has weathered such troubles as litigation over screenplay credit on Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a literal pain-in-the-ass star who shut down production on The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, and the death of leading man Heath Ledger while shooting his latest project, The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus. It’s gotten to the point where it’s a shock when a Gilliam project runs smoothly.

After finally abandoning Don Quixote, Gilliam needed a new project, and around the same time, Bob and Harvey Weinstein of Miramax were looking for a fantasy franchise to cash in on the recent success of Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. Of course, the eternal troublemaker Gilliam and the famously meddling Weinsteins were hardly an ideal match, but I’d guess that Gilliam was so frustrated with not making films that he took The Brothers Grimm so that he could keep working.

However, from the beginning there were problems. Both Gilliam and leading man Matt Damon wanted Oscar nominee Samantha Morton for the film’s female lead, but the Weinsteins vetoed her, allegedly because she wasn’t deemed attractive enough. Let me repeat that: she wasn’t good-looking enough for these guys. Another point of contention was a prosthetic nose that Gilliam wanted Damon to wear in the film, but which was nixed by the studio. And the troubles continued throughout production (regular Gilliam cinematographer Nicola Pecorini was fired mid-filming) and even post-production (the film’s most expensive effects sequence was cut from the film after the effects were nearly finished). Gilliam and the studio differed so greatly over the film’s final cut — surprising, I realize — that Gilliam placed the editing on hold for six months and shot his subsequent film, Tideland, in the interim.

But though The Brothers Grimm clearly suffered from studio meddling, Gilliam is hardly blameless. The screenplay is mediocre at best, cribbing the main storyline of The Frighteners — a charlatan exploiting people’s superstitions for personal gain suddenly comes up against a genuine supernatural threat. Into this formula, Gilliam, screenwriting collaborator Tony Grisoni, and Miramax house scribe Ehren Kruger shoehorn as many references to Grimm fairy tales as they can, most of which practically club you over the head with their obviousness.

Perhaps sensing how thin the material was, Gilliam tries to compensate with his direction, which is brimful with such familiar Gilliam tropes as swooping camera shots, wide-angle lenses, and all manner of extreme tilts. Likewise, he directs his supporting players to go wayyyyyyyyy over the top instead of giving them three-dimensional characters. Most embarrassing is Peter Stormare as the bumbling Cavaldi, giving less a performance than a failed parody of commedia dell’arte-style acting. At one point, Cavaldi says of the German tongue, “every word is like an execution,” but the line would more aptly be applied to his performance.

Amidst the chaos, there are elements of The Brothers Grimm that work. Chiefly among them is the performance by Heath Ledger as the nebbishy Jakob Grimm, who actually believes in the stories that he and his brother are exploiting. Ledger makes the most of what he’s given to create a funny, surprisingly touching character who gives the film what little heart it contains. In 2005, Ledger was beginning to really demonstrate his range, and based on the evidence here we might have expected some richly comic performances in his future. Damon is solid as well in a more conventional role, but it’s Ledger who steals the show.

There are also a handful of magical moments in which Gilliam transcends the screenplay and lets his imagination run wild. Most effective is a scene in which a puddle of mud takes a human form to abduct a child, and it’s such a creepy image that not even a line pointing out that the mud-man is meant to be the Gingerbread Man can ruin it. I also like a macabre moment in which a girl is swallowed whole by a possessed horse, which Gilliam shows almost completely in shadow. And there’s a priceless bit involving a kitten, one of the few times in the film when Gilliam’s twisted sense of humor shines through.

After sticking it on the shelf for months, the Weinsteins released The Brothers Grimm in late summer 2005, as one of roughly a dozen films they dumped in theatres just prior to relinquishing Miramax to Disney. Leading up to the film’s release, the Weinsteins allegedly placed a gag order on Gilliam forbidding him to say anything against the film for fear that he’d try to sabotage its box-office chances. But Gilliam had mostly moved on, as Tideland would make its world premiere less than a month later. Tideland received many negative reviews, but love it or hate it, it’s unmistakably a Gilliam film, which is more than I can say about The Brothers Grimm.

Vanishing Act: Michael Cimino

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 17:30:00 GMT

When contemplating a subject for the “Vanishing Act” column, I often find myself wondering, “Why hasn’t this person worked in so long?” In the case of Michael Cimino, I did not ask this question. My query was more along the lines of, “How many incriminating photos of which top Hollywood executive blowing what particular kind of farm animal did this person have in order to keep working for so long after Heaven’s Gate?”

Indeed, Gate is such a storied, monumental flop in the annals of motion picture history, it’s some sort of credit to Cimino that it took him so long to vanish. This is particularly true when you consider a slate of aborted projects that makes Terry Gilliam look prolific and bankable by comparison. For instance, did you know that at one time, Cimino was actually hired to direct Footloose? Personally, I would like to see documentary footage of the meeting at which this decision was reached. I’d much rather see that than ever again sit through Desperate Hours or Year of the Dragon, two Cimino films that actually were made. (Quoth Footloose producer Craig Zadan: “Cimino wanted to make a darker movie. We wanted to make an entertainment.” And Kenny Loggins rejoiced.)

The man has never lacked for ambition. Other Cimino projects that never got off the drawing board include an adaptation of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, biopics of Dostoevsky and Janis Joplin, and a multi-generational American Indian saga to be filmed entirely in the Sioux language. At one time or another, legend has it that he was slated to direct The Dogs of War, The King of Comedy, The Dead Zone and Mutiny on the Bounty. (There’s gotta be a sequel to Final Cut in here somewhere, right?)

Cimino’s final completed feature to date is 1996’s The Sunchaser, starring Woody Harrelson as a wealthy doctor who is kidnapped by a terminally ill gangbanger hoping to find a magical lake of healing. Grossing a grand total of $23,107 at the box office, the barely released Sunchaser appears to have done what Heaven’s Gate could not: make Cimino a complete untouchable.

In 2001, Cimino published his first novel, Big Jane. The following year he gave a rare interview to the Independent, dispelling rumors that he’d had a sex change operation and talking up a big-screen comeback with an adaptation of Man’s Fate, “Andre Malraux's dense, heady novel about the squelched 1927 Communist uprising in Shanghai.” It never happened.

The good news is: they love him in France! Last year, Cimino earned his first film credit in over a decade, contributing the three-minute segment “No Translation Needed” to the omnibus film Chacun son cinema. Don’t call it a comeback yet, but at least it’s a start.

Morning Deal Report: Toy Story 3, D

Peter Smith — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 16:45:00 GMT

This 3D business is really taking off, apparently; Pixar will rerelease Toy Story and the superior Toy Story 2 in 3D in 2009 and 2010 respectively, leading up to the unveiling of Toy Story 3 in summer 2010.

According to The Sun (via Cinematical), Johnny Depp may replace Heath Ledger in Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus.

Laurence Fishburne, Jean Reno and Milo Ventimiglia will star in the action/heist movie Armored.

Morning Deal Report: Whither The Dark Knight?

Peter Smith — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 16:45:00 GMT

Heath Ledger's death this week, as many speculated, has left several upcoming films up in the air. Production on The Dark Knight is finished, with all of Ledger's post-production done, but the film's ad campaign centered on him. Meanwhile, production on The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, the next film by Terry "Can't Get A Break" Gilliam, is on hold while the insurers figure out what to do. (Please, someone figure out how to make this movie. Tom Waits plays the devil.) And Ledger's directing debut, The Queen's Gambit (about a young female chess prodigy, possibly to have been played by Ellen Page) is needless to say on hold.

We can finally stop saying "Bond 22," for the second Daniel Craig Bond movie finally has a title. And it's. . . Quantum of Solace? Pardon?

Billy Bob Thornton and Tom Wilkinson join Clive Owen and Julia Roberts in Duplicity, Bourne screenwriter Tony Gilroy's directorial follow-up to Michael Clayton.