The Screengrab : the dark wind

Morning Deal Report: Megan Fox Crosses the Border

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

Megan Fox will star in the “border thriller” The Crossing. “Byron Willinger and Philip de Blasi penned the pic, in which a couple returning from a Mexican vacation is carjacked and the husband kidnapped. The wife (Fox) must smuggle heroin across the border in order to spring him,” per The Hollywood Reporter. A spokesman for the film claims that Fox is “ideal for the role of a woman who must be both victim and hero,” which I think is his way of saying she’s hot.

Eighteen years after the ill-fated The Dark Wind, Errol Morris is taking another shot at directing a narrative film. Currently known as Untitled Cryonics Project, it’s the true of Robert F. Nelson, “a TV repairman who in the 1960s joined a group of enthusiasts who believed they could cheat death with a new technology: cryonics. But freezing dead people so scientists could reanimate them in the future turned out to be harder than Nelson thought,” Variety reports. It’s described as a dark comedy, and Ira Glass is among the producers.

Catherine Keener has joined Pierce Brosnan and Uma Thurman for Percy Jackson, a Christopher Columbus adaptation of a fantasy series by Rick Riordan. “The books, which put Greek gods in modern times, involve Poseidon's half-human son, Percy, who is on a quest in modern America to prevent a war among the gods.”

Related:
Megan Fox Goes Deep
When Good Directors Go Bad: The Dark Wind

2008 Highlight Reel: The Top Twelve Screengrab Posts of the Year

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Compiling the weekly highlight reels here at the Screengrab is not such an arduous task, but putting together a year's worth of the finest in film bloggery was a considerably more formidable undertaking. Using a complicated points system akin to the BCS in college football, I have surveyed my fellow Screengrabbers, weighted the page views and reader comments, and come up with the following dirty dozen: the best of the year in Screengrab.

Top Ten Reasons The Dark Knight Isn't As Good As You Think It Is

Love it or hate, it's hard to deny The Dark Knight was the pop culture event of the year. Our man Osborne has some qualms.

Why So Serious? The Dark Knight in the Political World

Of course, as with any pop culture phenomenon in an election year, The Dark Knight was used to score political points, few of which made any sense to me.

Forgotten Films: The Oscar

Phil neatly dissects one of the all-time great so-bad-it’s-good movies, and apparently gets legendary author (and The Oscar screenwriter) Harlan Ellison to comment. (L.P.)

The Screengrab Presents: The Five Kinds of Twist Endings

Gwynne knows that, just as there are only seven kinds of stories, there are only five ways to make the endings of those stories totally blow your mind. (L.P.)

Classless Man in Voiceless Brawl

Leonard brings us the heartwarming tale of film critics engaging in a stimulating exchange of ideas.

When Good Directors Go Bad: The Dark Wind (1991, Errol Morris)

Paul focuses on the single fiction film made by one of the cinema’s all-time greatest documentarians – a movie so bad I wasn’t even aware that it existed. (L.P.)

The View through the View-Master: The Iron Giant

Hayden - or as we call him around Screengrab headquarters, "the breeder" - looks at the Brad Bird classic through the eyes of both child and Childs.

CGI Must Die: 5 Reasons Why

Andrew asks the musical question, "Why so much digital crap, Hollywood?"

Take Five: Crime and Pyunishment

Leonard evaluates the oeuvre of one of our most underrated schlockmeisters, Albert Pyun.

Five Reasons We Want Mad Max Back

Enough with Indy, Rocky and Rambo. It's time for our favorite road warrior to make a comeback.

Tom Cruise, at Midlife, with a Freaking Eyepatch

Phil prefers the later, loonier Cruise. Find out why.

Unwatchable: It's Pat

I had to include an Unwatchable on this list, and this one seemed to be a favorite.

(Special thanks to Leonard Pierce for an assist on the comments and to Phil Nugent for diligent research.)

Screengrab Review: “Surfer, Dude”

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 15:00:00 GMT

It’s not always a pretty sight when documentary filmmakers make the leap to fictional features. See – or rather, do whatever you can to avoid seeing – Michael Moore’s Canadian Bacon and Errol Morris’s The Dark Wind. As I implied in this post yesterday, I’m a big fan of S.R. Bindler’s documentary Hands on a Hard Body. Even so, I wasn’t exactly stoked to learn his follow-up (nearly a decade later) would be a surfing movie starring The Shirtless One, Matthew McConaughey. I dunno, maybe it’s just because I watched the entire goofy-ass David Milch series John From Cincinnati, but there’s something about the whole mystical-spiritual aura surrounding surfing that makes otherwise talented people a little loopy.

Surfer, Dude definitely qualifies as loopy – even that comma in the title is a little too self-consciously quirky. McConaughey, a friend of Bindler’s since high school, produced the film through his production company j.k. livin and brought his essential dudeness aboard in the lead role of Steve Addington, a free-spirited “soul surfer” who lives for the waves. Upon returning to Malibu from his latest world tour, Addington is informed by his manager (Woody Harrelson) that his board and shorts sponsorship contracts have been sold to Eddie Zarno, a former surfer turned multimedia mogul. Zarno has big plans for Addington, including a role in a beach house reality series and a virtual reality videogame bearing his image.

Addington’s “not feelin’ it.” He’s an all-natural dude and all he needs is his friends, his weed and his waves. “I’m not some assclown in a green room. I’m a surfer, dude!” Despite his manager’s warnings that cash is in short supply, Addington wants nothing to do with the digital world. His spiritual crisis arrives when the waves disappear. As the days pass with no surf to ride, he goes on a fast (including the ganja), but can he remain true to himself and resist selling out to the Man? Duuuuude.

Surfer, Dude has a green theme in more ways than one – in addition to McConaughey and Harrelson, Willie Nelson is on hand as a goat farmer to complete the trinity of Texas stoner icons. But the movie is so lightweight, it’s hard to invest too heavily in Addington’s existential dilemma. It’s a vanity project to the core, an ode to its producer-star in all his toned-and-tanned golden glory. With his lazy honeydew drawl, allergy to shirts and “awright awright awright” party-guy vibe in full effect, McConaughey isn’t playing a character so much as his US magazine persona come to life. His wink and nod towards his lovable rogue image recalls the Burt Reynolds of the late 70s, and that’s one way of looking at this movie: it’s Smokey and the Bandit with surfboards.

Related:
Woody Harrelson Eats Your Brains
Trailer Review: Fool's Gold

When Good Directors Go Bad: Year of the Horse (1997, Jim Jarmusch)

Paul Clark — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 19:00:00 GMT

For almost three decades now, Jim Jarmusch has been one of the heroes of American independent cinema. The deadpan humor and multicultural vibe of his best works have influenced directors worldwide, and his maverick sensibility has practically defined the term “independent filmmaker.” While this sensibility hasn’t endeared him to the Hollywood bigwigs (his insistence that he retain the rights to the negatives of all his films would be a dealbreaker for most studios) it’s made him something of a hero to followers of indie-film, because he’s a director who gets away with making whatever he damn pleases.

Jarmusch’s 1995 masterpiece Dead Man marked his first collaboration with legendary rocker Neil Young, of whom Jarmusch was a longtime fan. Young’s mindbending score was divisive- Roger Ebert famously likened the sound to Young dropping his guitar over and over- but the film cemented a friendship between the two artists. So for his next film Jarmusch decided to go on the road with Neil Young and Crazy Horse, with the goal of making the concert film Year of the Horse. It was Jarmusch’s first documentary.

A few weeks ago I spotlighted in this column The Dark Wind, the sole fiction feature from master documentarian Errol Morris. For Jarmusch, Year of the Horse is no less misbegotten. Now, I don’t begrudge filmmakers- least of all gifted, independent-minded ones like Jarmusch- their attempts to break out of their filmmaking comfort zones. However, with Year of the Horse, Jarmusch shows almost no affinity for the documentary form.

In its opening credits, Year of the Horse proclaims that it was “proudly made in Super-8,” and the film is suffused with a lo-fi aesthetic that’s similar to most of Young’s best work. However, in such films as Stranger Than Paradise, Down by Law, and Dead Man, Jarmusch’s style is tight and deliberate, with little room for the kinds of accidents that one normally finds in a documentary of this sort. As a result, the film feels less like a charmingly hardscrabble Young work than a sloppy, amateurish mess.

Part of the problem is the music in the film. While I prefer Young’s rootsy albums like Harvest to his Crazy Horse work, the songs in the film are pretty solid. However, their concert performances have a tendency to drag on (and on and on), with lots of onstage improvisation between Young and his bandmates. While jamming can make for a great concert experience, it’s tough to make it interesting to those who aren’t actually in attendance, and Jarmusch never figures out how to make it work. Rather than focusing on the audience’s reaction to the music or really zeroing in on the musical chemistry between the band, Jarmusch too often cuts away from the concert to often random and usually uncompelling images.

Some of these images are merely distracting, as when Jarmusch intercuts footage of clouds or a passing train into the songs. But others are downright puzzling, as when the film cuts away from an onstage performance of “Fuckin’ Up” to show some decades-old footage of Crazy Horse bassist Billy Talbot shoplifting and getting arrested, a hamfisted attempt on Jarmusch’s part to turn the song into a music video, another form he isn’t particularly good at. Either way, the cutaways don’t help. Whereas Jarmusch seems to intend them to add interest to the stage performance, they merely serve to remind us of how the song is dragging on well past its logical end (one number finishes with the band playing the same chord nearly two dozen times). The only time the cutaways actually serve their intended purpose is when Jarmusch juxtaposes the 1996 concert performance of “Like a Hurricane” with footage of the same song taken from their 1986 tour. In this footage, in which Young already looks haggard, Jarmusch comes closest to illustrating the idea of how long Neil Young and Crazy Horse have been in the game.

At several times during the (mostly superfluous) band interviews in Year of the Horse, Crazy Horse guitarist Frank “Pancho” Sampedro remarks that Jarmusch will never be able to compress three decades of Crazy Horse history into a documentary. However, based on the evidence on display in the film, two hours seems far too long. I’m sure there were plenty of vivid experiences in the history of the band, but few of them appear to have been “proudly filmed on Super-8.” Seeing as how the most memorable thing that happens offstage in Year of the Horse is a floral centerpiece catching on fire, perhaps Jarmusch would have been better off sticking to the music itself.

But as I said, he’s always marched to his own drummer, and fortunately for his fans his next film was 1999’s fascinating Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, that wonderful one-of-a-kind combination of aging wiseguys and Hagakure-reading lone gunmen. In other words, definitely a step in the right direction. Jarmusch’s next film, The Limits of Control, is currently on track for a 2009 premiere.

When Good Directors Go Bad: The Dark Wind (1991, Errol Morris)

Paul Clark — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 19:00:00 GMT

If there's one thing I've discovered while writing this column, it's that When Good Directors Go Bad™, they usually do so in ways that are strangely compelling. While some of the films they make are merely small missteps and others are unmitigated disasters, generally the films will show enough of the director's style to be of interest as part of the filmmaker's oeuvre as a whole. Yet occasionally, a great director will make a film that just sort of recedes into the background of his career, insignificant even as a footnote to an important career. The Dark Wind, Errol Morris' sole fiction feature to date, is such a film.

The Dark Wind, based on a novel by Tony Hillerman, tells the story of Officer Jim Chee (Lou Diamond Phillips), a young Navajo working as a policeman on his reservation. Most of the time, he's assigned to relatively small duties, like staking out a road that's sometimes traveled by bootleggers, or keeping watch over a disputed well. But when Chee witnesses a mysterious plane crash while keeping watch one night, he stumbles onto the biggest case of his young career, involving murder, drug trafficking, dirty feds, and longstanding tribal disputes between the Navajo and Hopi. With help from Hopi deputy "Cowboy" Dashee (Gary Farmer), Chee tries to get to the bottom of the mystery.

The film's storyline is a pretty basic murder mystery, which aside from the Native American elements could describe thousands of movies. So what drew Morris to Hillerman's novel? When he was asked this question by an interviewer, Morris replied, "I did this for the same reason that everybody does everything in Hollywood: vanity and greed." Morris had had no small amount of difficulty in making his previous films — it supposedly took over two years for him to round up all of the relevant interview subjects to appear in The Thin Blue Line, for example — and no doubt an easy money project looked mighty appealing to him after that.

Trouble is, nobody involved with the film seems to be trying very hard, least of all the director. Morris, who has created some of the most visually arresting documentaries ever made, shows little facility at shooting a fiction film. The Dark Wind is flat and affectless, not in a rigorous way like a Robert Bresson film, but in a way that feels lazy and slapdash. The result is a movie with no style, no momentum, and above all no suspense. Strange, that the director who had turned a real-life case into an honest-to-goodness suspense documentary with The Thin Blue Line can't do the same with a fictional murder mystery.

The listlessness extends to the film's performances. At the time, Lou Diamond Phillips was at the tale end of his brief flirtation with Hollywood leading man status, and he gives such a recessive and uncharismatic performance in The Dark Wind it's easy to see why he didn't become a big star. Most of the supporting performances are forgettable, ranging from mediocre, like Fred Ward as the Lieutenant in charge of Chee, to the downright awful, notably Guy Boyd as sleazy federal agent Johnson. The one exception is the ever-watchable Gary Farmer, who plays his role with a casual charm that's sorely missing from the proceedings.

Of course, some of the blame for the film's failure should be laid at the feet of executive producer Robert Redford. Supposedly Morris had such a difficult time working with Redford that he left the project before it was completed. Some of the film's flaws can probably be chalked up to Redford's involvement, such as its ambling pacing. Other problems were mostly likely an attempt on Redford's part to salvage the project. I hope for Morris' sake that the awful voiceover was Redford's idea.

Yet I'm afraid the lion's share of blame must be given to Morris, who was simply never a good fit for the material. There are occasional touches that feel of a piece with the rest of his work — for example, a former carny who seems to be there for local color purposes until the Law of Economy of Characters kicks in. Mostly though, The Dark Wind comes off as a for-hire job, not unlike Morris' commercials for Miller High Life, but with less of a personal stamp. As Frank Zappa once said, Morris was "only in it for the money," and after a while even that ceased to be enough.

Fortunately, Morris soon made a return to the documentaries that have always been his forte. The next year, he collaborated with none other than Stephen Hawking on the film version of A Brief History of Time. This kicked off a fruitful period for Morris, in which he made his celebrated documentaries Fast, Cheap and out of Control (1997), Mr. Death (1999), and the Oscar-winning The Fog of War. His latest film, Standard Operating Procedure, premiered to Morris' usual enthusiastic reviews at this year's Berlinale.