The Screengrab : the graduate

Th-Th-That's All Folks! The Best & Worst Endings Of All Time! (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 28 May 2009 21:30:00 GMT

THE GRADUATE (1967)

As I noted in our list of the Top Ten Best Movies Of All Time, The Graduate is pretty close to perfect, right down to its classic finale. All by itself, the climactic rush to the altar made our list of great “race-against-time” scenes, and the sequence where Dustin Hoffman’s character pounds the church window and wields a crucifix against the older generation to rescue his lady love from bland suburban mediocrity still feels cathartic today. But the final moments truly seal the deal in one of the greatest ambiguous fade-outs of all time as Katharine Ross’ Elaine stares at the man she’s chosen, suddenly wondering what exactly comes after “happily ever after,” while Hoffman’s Ben stares straight ahead, the lost expression of the opening scenes returning to his face as he clearly wonders, “Now what?” Considering Charles Webb, the author of the source material, spent the next several decades in cash-strapped obscurity, tending a clinically-depressed lady with painted-on eyebrows named Fred while trying to get a Graduate sequel off the ground, maybe Ben and Elaine had reason to worry. (AO)

2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968)

The ending to Stanley Kubrick’s sci-fi masterpiece continues, forty years after its release, to baffle and intrigue, its post-light-show sights – a white room; Keir Dullea’s astronaut seeing himself, as an elderly man at a table and dying in bed; the monolith’s sudden reappearance – forming a tantalizing riddle. In its final, mesmerizing image of the star-child, 2001 does what no subsequent Kubrick film did, presenting a hopeful vision of the future, one in which man is finally free (at least until the forthcoming dystopia of A Clockwork Orange) of his base animalism. (NS)

A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1971)

Let me first make it clear that I’m very much aware that the Anthony Burgess novel A Clockwork Orange was originally published with a final chapter that never saw the light of day in the United States until Rolling Stone featured it in a 1987 issue. That’s when I first read it, and at that point I’d already seen the movie approximately 783 times. (Stanley Kubrick claimed he’d never seen the missing chapter before making his film, but he had – he just didn’t like it.) Burgess’ ending finds the cured Alex out for another night on the town with his new droogies. But he’s not really up for it – he’s getting too old for this shit, and entertaining thoughts of domestic bliss. I never felt like I needed to know this about him. “I was cured all right” strikes the right note for me – it doesn’t preclude the possibility of Burgess’ outcome, after all, but if we’re going to give this guy his free will back…well, we better be prepared for anything. It’s hard to imagine that final chapter fitting in cinematically with the world we’ve been immersed in for over two hours, and as Kubrick later demonstrated when working with Stephen King, he was never one to let the author’s intentions get in the way of his own worldview. (SVD)

STROSZEK (1977)

Werner Herzog has never been interested in sticking to convention, and nowhere is this more in evidence than in the strange and wonderful Stroszek. Beginning with a fairly formulaic setup -- a trio of misfits journey to America in search of a new life -- Herzog then proceeds to spin out his story in the most unexpected of ways. After hard times hit, the film courts cliché as the title character (played by Bruno S.) and his elderly pal Clemens Scheitz decide to hold up their bank, but when the bank is closed they rob the neighboring barber shop instead to the tune of a whopping $35 and use it to go shopping before Scheitz gets arrested. From there, it gets even odder. It’s the images that Herzog finds to conclude his tale that make this a classic, as we witness the sight of the stolen tow truck, now set ablaze, driving in circles around the parking lot with nobody at the wheel. So bizarre is the spectacle that it’s easy to miss Bruno climbing onto the ski lift with his shotgun, followed by the sound of the shotgun firing. Then, of course, there’s that dancing chicken, one of the most famous images in Herzog’s entire oeuvre. According to Herzog, the entire crew hated the damn chicken, but it so fascinated him that he felt the need to journey 600 miles from his principal filming location in order to shoot the final scene in the rest stop where the chicken danced. What does it all mean? Herzog, to his credit, leaves it to us to decide. (PC)

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (2007)

No Country For Old Men denies audiences the grand gesture and the blood. Strange to say about a film that features a killer who is less a man than a force of nature, but it's true. When Llewelyn first comes upon the scene of the drug shootout, the violence is over. When the bullets finally find Llewelyn, it happens offscreen. When Sheriff Ed Tom Bell stumbles into a potential conflict with Chigurh, the killer has melted away. Carla Jean even dies offscreen. It's a bloody movie, sure, but it studiously avoids giving audiences the easy conclusions that they may want. This is especially true at the end of the movie. Sheriff Bell has retired, giving his wife the peace of mind she wants, and he describes a couple of dreams he had to her. Both feature Bell's father, who he told us in the introduction was sheriff before him. In the first, he's lost money that his father gave him. In the second, his father silently passes him, carrying a fire, and Bell knows he will make a fire to protect and warm him. That's one of the beautiful things about this movie: even as it denies audiences their basest impulses, it gives them something unexpected. Here, the language is one of author Cormac McCarthy's major concerns, the existential quest for a moral code in a fallen world. The Coen brothers like to subvert expectations, and it's fair to say that this jolt of philosophy wasn't at all what audiences were expecting. But it was a far greater gift. (HC)

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Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Nick Schager, Scott Von Doviak, Paul Clark, Hayden Childs

Screengrab Presents THE TOP TEN BEST MOVIES EVER!!!! (Part Ten)

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 15 May 2009 01:00:00 GMT

Scott Von Doviak's Top Ten Best Movies Ever!

1. THE GODFATHER PART II (1974)
2. SUNSET BLVD. (1950)
3. THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE (1948)
4. MCCABE AND MRS. MILLER (1971)
5. 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968)
6. TAXI DRIVER (1976)
7. JAWS (1975)

If mechanical shark effects and John Williams' relentless theme music were all it had going for it, Jaws still might have become the highest grossing movie in history at the time of its release. And it likely would still be lumped in with Star Wars as a progenitor of the modern summer blockbuster phenomenon. In truth, Jaws has always been much more than a mere creature feature or special effects extravaganza. From the moment the Universal Pictures logo appears onscreen, accompanied by otherworldly sonar pinging noises signaling unfathomable depths of mystery, to the mournful dinosaur roar that accompanies the shark's final descent back to the murky deep, we are firmly in the grip of a master filmmaker. And while Steven Spielberg's gifts would eventually sour, with sure-handed storytelling giving way to transparent manipulation, here his every instinct is sound and his attention to detail astonishing. His tonal control is absolute; the darkest of horrors coexist with lusty seafaring adventure and character-based comedy, and it is all of a piece. The biggest laughs lead into the most frightening shocks, and vice-versa. It's a balancing act enhanced by the finest score of John Williams' career. His dum-dum-dum-dum shark theme is instantly recognizable to anyone on the planet - hell, sharks probably swim around humming it - but it's a remarkably resilient piece of music, speeding up into bursts of nautical derring-do, slowing down to an ominous, guttural portent of doom. The shark itself, when it is finally seen, remains an impressive movie monster. Even if its artificiality is more apparent to today's effects-jaded movie audience, its appearances are still fleeting enough to startle and delight. Set Jaws beside any of the contemporary summer cash leviathans and the hollowness of modern-day Hollywood's vision of action-adventure entertainment is laid bare.

8. PSYCHO (1960)
9. ANNIE HALL (1977)
10. THE WILD BUNCH (1969)

Andrew Osborne's Top Ten Best Movies Ever!

1. STAR WARS (1977)
2. THE GODFATHER (1972)
3. THE GRADUATE (1967)

There are various movies that speak to me very personally -- and this one certainly qualifies, having spent most of my existence as an alienated, overeducated white dude -- but Mike Nichols’ tight, elemental collaboration with the dream team of Buck Henry, Dustin Hoffman, Anne Bancroft, Paul Simon & Art Garfunkle makes my list of Best Movies Ever because, like all the other movies in my Top Ten, it’s both an elemental, near-perfect example of -- and also rises above -- its genre to become a once-in-a-lifetime cinematic milestone. Plus, as a friend of my parents once said, it features the best use of a crucifix ever.

4. THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939)

When a movie penetrates as deeply into the culture and the collective unconscious as this adaptation of Frank L. Baum’s first Oz novel, the filmmakers must have done something right. The fact that it was considered a commercial disappointment upon its initial release but nevertheless went on to become a beloved American classic also says something. But the main reason I include it here is because it’s a fully realized work of art that fully utilizes all the possibilities of cinema, from the grim black and white cinematography that suddenly explodes into color and the infectious soundtrack to the special effects that brought flying monkeys to a grateful world. It’s easy to take The Wizard of Oz for granted in this cynical, ironic, post-modern world, but honestly: who in cinema history kicks more freakin’ ass than Margaret Hamilton as Miss Elmira Gulch and the mean green you-know-who? Answer: nobody.

5. APOCALYPSE NOW (1979)

As crazy-ass Dennis Hopper’s unhinged Kurtz acolyte would say, “I wish I had words...” Here are three -- epic, unsettling, iconic -- but they don’t even begin to capture the essence of the surrealistic war opera Francis Ford Coppola dragged into existence at the (temporary) cost of his own sanity four years after the Fall of Saigon. It’s difficult to separate the finished product from the legend of its infamously agonizing production history (see: Hearts of Darkness), and the generally terrible footage unearthed for the Redux version released in 2001 clearly demonstrates the razor thin line between genius and drek (and, seriously, what kind of zap did U.S.C. put on the heads of Coppola, Spielberg and Lucas that none of them can ever just leave friggin’ well enough alone)? Still, whenever people refer to the original 1979 theatrical version of Apocalypse Now as a flawed masterpiece, I always get confused, since the flaws (fat Brando, crazy Hopper, the slow descent into anarchy) are part of what makes it a masterpiece.

6. ANNIE HALL (1977)

7. SUNSET BOULEVARD (1950)

8. SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN (1952)

9. YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN (1974)

Many of the movies in our consensus and individual Top Tens are beautiful downers, primarily concerned with death, violence, heartbreak and/or the inescapable ennui of existence -- and, while it’s true that depressing themes and great films often go together, it’s important to remember that celluloid is also a great delivery system for adrenalin shots of pure joy like Young Frankenstein, a nearly perfect movie with a hilarious script and a dream ensemble that ranks 9th on my list instead of 8th because (“Puttin’ On The Ritz” notwithstanding) the even more nearly perfect Singin’ In The Rain has slightly better song and dance numbers.

10. THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS (2001)

You may have noticed by now that the vast majority of the Best Movies picked for these lists by the Screengrab brain trust were released prior to 1980, which does a great disservice to the Sundance generation of filmmakers like Jim Jarmusch, P.T. Anderson, the Coen Brothers, Spike Lee, Richard Linklater, Quentin Tarantino, etc. Maybe it’s just that films like Down By Law, Boogie Nights, Fargo, Do The Right Thing, Dazed and Confused or Pulp Fiction need to marinate for another decade before we’re ready to start comparing them head-to-head with the likes of Sunset Boulevard and Citizen Kane...but as far as I’m concerned, The Royal Tenenbaums already qualifies as one for the ages. By turns wistful, cynical, romantic, suicidally gloomy and insanely optimistic, Wes Anderson’s richly imagined masterpiece (about a burned-out family of geniuses in a dream-world New York) is everything I could possibly ask for in a movie: career-topping performances from everyone involved, whip-smart writing, gorgeous visuals, fearlessly eccentric style and Gwyneth Paltrow French-kissing a naked chick...top that, Orson!

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

Contributors: Scott Von Doviak, Andrew Osborne

Taxing Time: A Screengrab Salute To Beat The Clock Cinema (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 22:00:00 GMT

BEFORE SUNSET (2004)

He only has 90 minutes before he has to catch that plane, and boom!, the love of his life shows up. Last time they met, they had only one night together. Now that they're older, time is even more precious, and they are even more uncertain how to proceed. The last time, the story could look away, passing time through ellipses, but this time, everything has to unfold in real time. Because love doesn't care about your schedule, and it comes and goes as it pleases. In 1995, when Before Sunrise came out, I was 23 and I didn't know how to appreciate the tender little moments life has to offer. I didn't know how hard it is to make a connection with someone, and I let friends and potential loves slip out of my grasp. In short, I understood the characters in Before Sunrise. I could see a little of myself in Jesse, and let this be the only time I admit kinship with Ethan Hawke. I never gave up anything as precious as Jesse and Celine (and, Julie Delpy, how many people my age are in love with you?) in Before Sunrise, but I could easily see how something like that could happen. When its sequel came out in 2004, I was 32, happily married, and I had learned a little more about how the world worked. And Before Sunset just tore my heart out, heedless. How do you deal with the person who makes you remember the person you were, let alone the torrent of old emotions and regrets? The structure of the movie insists that neither has time to dwell on regrets and anger, but they have to address it. Their connection isn't the superficial kind. Richard Linklater has had his ups and downs as a filmmaker, but he's never been finer than he was with this movie. Some people may like their car chases, but the pursuit of the most dangerous game draws more blood and quickens the breath like nothing else. (HC)

BACK TO THE FUTURE (1985)

Back to the Future (yes, that's part one, you fools, what kind of philistine do you take me for?) has plenty of scenes that still make me cringe and/or hold my breath like they did when I first saw them back when I was a wee one. In that department, the Johnny B. Goode scene is rivaled only by the end scene, which is literally a race against time. Young Marty McFly needs to be sent back to the future using 1950s technology and natural sources of electricity. The kid's literally starting to disappear, for crying out loud — that with almost seducing his own mother, and other murky psychological goop. Sure, the 1950s may have looked good to your average Reagan-voting suburbanite, but it was not just fun and games. There was segregation, and more importantly, no rock 'n' roll for white people. Imagine getting stuck back there forever. The horror! So back in 1954, Doc does his best to remedy the disorder he set about thirty years later, dangling from the town hall clock while Marty does his best in the DeLorean. Now if the franchise had only ended there. (SCS)

THE GRADUATE (1967)

Maybe I'm just partial to The Graduate. Could be. But there is something delicious about the penultimate part of the movie, where Dustin Hoffman's Ben is skidding around dusty California roads in his little red Alfa Romeo, desperately trying to find the chapel where Elaine is going to be wed to her hunky purebred husband. Part of what makes this so great is that it breaks two (or perhaps three) of the cardinal rules of cinematic races against time: first, there is a feeling of horrible slowness to Ben's car ride and search for the chapel. This is less fast and furious and more like one of those dreams where you need to run and run fast, but somehow it's all in slow motion no matter how much you power on. Second, Ben loses his race against time; he gets to the church too late...second-and-a-half being too late doesn't matter. (SCS)

THE TESTAMENT OF DR. MABUSE (1933)

Fritz Lang's masterpiece of German Expressionism is part horror film, part crime syndicate saga, part procedural, and all about the force of obsession. The last third is given over to a race against the clock, as veil upon veil slips away to reveal Mabuse's ambitious plan, the unlimited reign of crime. The trailer above is in German, but it conveys just how stunningly creepy and exciting the movie is: the superimposition of images, the whispering voice, the car chase, the real sense of danger pervading every scene. Joseph Goebbels, no fool, saw it as a condemnation of Nazism and banned it from Germany under the Third Reich. It's up for debate whether Lang was intentionally condemning Nazis, but even if Lang wasn't sure what his message was, one cannot doubt his skill as a filmmaker. The visual power of the film, the unsettling use of sound, the wheels-within-wheels of the plot: all reach across the gap of time and still hold sway over modern viewers. Even as one easily discounts the psychology of the film, its coherent view of a world spiralling out of control cannot be denied. (HC)

Click Here Immediately For Part One, Two, Three, Four & Six

Contributors: Hayden Childs, Sarah Clyne Sundberg

The Screengrab Holiday Special: Movies We’re Thankful For (Part Six)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 17:30:00 GMT

SARAH CLYNE SUNDBERG IS THANKFUL FOR:

BILLY LIAR (1963)

Billy Fisher is a young man with a well-developed fantasy life and a rather disappointing real one. He lives in some unfun industrial Northern town in drab post-war England. Life after graduation is not all it was cracked up to be — despite working at a funeral parlor that hawks plastic coffins and having two fiancés, plus a girl on the side — Billy still lives with parents and grandmother. His closet is stuffed with calendars pilfered from work and unpublished manuscripts. In his spare time he escapes to his own private dictatorship where he is a leader-war hero and adoring citizens greet him with a "left-handed salute." He also dreams of moving to London to work as a scriptwriter, but doesn't seem to be able to get it together sufficiently to leave. A young and beautiful Julie Christie assures him, "It's easy, you get on a train, then four hours later you are there." Billy is not convinced. I saw this movie when I was about 16 and couldn't wait to get out of the European satellite town I lived in. Like some of the best pop music to come out of England, Billy Liar told me that I was not alone and that others had felt my pain. For this I am thankful.

FOXY BROWN (1974)

I saw Foxy Brown at an underground film festival in my hometown, I think I was in my late teens. Despite the rather ramshackle storyline and low production value I fell in love. Hard. There is this one scene where Pam Grier is getting dressed and ready for business. She's all fierce hotness and a little bit of one of her ample boobs is spilling out underneath her bra. She looks amazingly strong and sexy, but not so perfect that you cannot relate. Meanwhile she is stuffing razor blades into her Afro in order to prepare for a fight. As a teenage girl not particularly happy with the state of things in the world, Foxy Brown impressed me. She has a good job and a useless little brother. She knows no one was going to look out for her if she didn't do it herself. In short, she kept it together in a world that did its best to break her. This was a woman to follow. Over the course of the movie she is bruised, battered, raped and nearly killed. But she is a lady all the way and ultimately she comes out on top. Jack Hill wrote the script, but the movie would be nothing without Pam Grier. Thank you, Pam.

THE GRADUATE (1967)

There are few truths in life that aren't dealt with in The Graduate: love, aging, quashed dreams, generational strife, loneliness. It's a great movie to begin with and gets better with each viewing. (I should know, given that I've seen it upwards of fifteen times.) I think I may have started out just liking the story and the exquisite cinematography. Somewhat later I identified with poor Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) and his existential angst. (Who doesn't?) Now, as I begin to enjoy high balls and have accumulated more than my fair share of animal print clothing, I have shifted to feeling more kinship with Mrs. Robinson, Benjamin's aging paramour. She once was an art history major, but after getting knocked up by Mr. Robinson, her life took a more prosaic course than the one she hoped for. Now, she and Ben are two outsiders with vaguely artistic aspirations, too dark and severe for the sunny Southern California they inhabit. In short, The Graduate is like a Nina Simone compilation, the bible, or a nice flask; It'll help you through just about any situation.

Click Here For More Thanks From Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent, Paul Clark & Leonard Pierce

Contributor: Sarah Clyne Sundberg

So Much For That "Never-Ending Story" Sequel, or, Guber Goes To College

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 15:30:00 GMT

You know, you spend the best years of your life arguing against the conservative notion that academia is full of navel-gazing, pointy-headed nudniks so out of touch with the real world that they suck up millions to pursue theses that anyone with an ounce of common sense could disprove in thirty seconds, and then something like this comes along.

In a story that smacks equally of grant-chasing and pure desperation, the Massachussets Institute of Technology -- providing dynamic proof of what happens when people trained in science attempt to apply objective standards to subjective fields of study -- has collaborated with a number of Hollywood big-shots to create something called the Center for Future Storytelling. The premise behind this colossal boondoggle is pure crankery: the movies, they say, are running out of stories. Despite record profits at the box office, we're apparently running dry of narrative (an argument their spokespeople bolster with such fist-shaking geezer logic as blaming text messaging, <i>Guitar Hero</I> and cell phones). It's basically an updated version of the argument advanced in the 1970s that thanks to the proliferation of rock 'n' roll music, we were rapidly running out of melody, and within thirty years there would be no such thing as a new song.

The whole thing is patently absurd. Narrative is a rhetorical device, not a natural resource; it can't be depleted like a coal mine. We'll no more run out of stories than we'll run out of metaphors. Even the act of defining different types of stories in order to prove that we're running out of them is a form of narrative. Do we see an increasing number of shitty movies based on old TV shows? Sure we do. But it's not because there aren't any original stories; it's because Hollywood keeps financing hackwork. And why does Hollywood keep financing hackwork? Because people pay to see it. Blaming some kind of imaginary depletion of the Narrative Zone on scriptwriters' inability to write decent endings ignores the fact that the whole thing is largely a business transaction, not a creative endeavor. And even if the ridiculous claim were true -- which it isn't -- it ignores the fact that there are other ways to tell innovative stories on film than narrative, and Hollywood has shown precious little interest in them, either.

What's especially ridiculous about the article, though, isn't just its moronic premise, or the fact that a bunch of college professors with nothing better to do are going to spend the next ten years dicking around with it. It's the involvement of Hollywood big-shots, and their shockingly hypocritical statements about the whole affair. One of the Center for Future Storytelling's primary backers is Peter Guber, who teaches a class devoted to traditional narrative and shakes his wise old head, lamenting, "How do you compete with Transformers?" This, of course, is the same Peter Guber who brought us Flashdance, D.C. Cab and Tango & Cash. Also involved in the project is Bobby Farrelly, who blames low-brow audiences for the dearth of sophisticated writing and mourns the disappearance of masterful films like The Graduate. Mr. Farrelly, you may remember, brought you highbrow fare such as Dumb and Dumber, and is currently working on a movie about those masters of complex narrative, the Three Stooges.

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Screengrab's Back To School Round-Up: The Top 15 College Movies (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 20:30:00 GMT

THE FRESHMAN (1990)

For the recent high school graduate, going to college can feel like entering a strange new world, so it makes perfect metaphorical sense that this comedy, written and directed by the prankish Andrew Bergman, is about a film student (Matthew Broderick) who goes to a different school, in a different city, and finds himself entering a different movie: his new employer and mentor, played by Marlon Brando, is a heavyset, gray-haired Italian gentleman who talks in a gravelly near-whisper and is highly reminiscent of a certain classic American movie from the early 1970s in which a business negotiation involved a decapitated horse. No such atrocities occur here, but you do get to see longtime Miss America pageant host Bert Parks serenade a Komodo dragon.

THE GRADUATE (1967)

Watching Animal House in high school may have given me a somewhat warped idea about what to expect from my undergraduate years, but The Graduate turned out to be an unnervingly accurate depiction of the terrifying unstructured malaise waiting to devour the unwary in those first uncertain years after college graduation. True, my parents didn’t have a sunny Southern California pool for me to float around in while I tried to figure out my life, but their friends and they offered plenty of well-meaning but fantastically unhelpful advice of the “Plastics” variety, while embodying exactly the type of suburban sameness I was so desperate to avoid. And, no, I didn’t have an older Mrs. Robinson to school me in sex and cynicism, but Simon & Garfunkle soothed my weary, alienated soul on numerous occasions. Career highlight efforts by stars Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft, director Mike Nichols, writer/cameo artiste Buck Henry and even wax effigy Katharine Ross make this film a best-of-show masterpiece of any genre, and the movie’s final shot of young lovers Ben & Elaine riding off into an unknowable future on a crosstown bus is an image of hope and terror for the ages...specifically, the ages 21-25.

GOOD NEWS (1947)

This candy-colored MGM musical is probably the best example of a lost genre, that of the collegiate musical that centers on football and builds to the big game. It had been enough of a mainstay of American entertainment for the Marx Brothers to have parodied it fifteen years earlier in Horse Feathers; in fact, this movie has its roots in a 1927 stage musical that was first filmed in 1930. By the time this remake was hatched, both the stage original and the first movie version were regarded as too dirty, by post-World War II standards, for Production Code-era Hollywood. So the script was laundered, and the most sexless, blandest leads in movie history, Peter Lawford and June Allyson, were brought into play as, respectively, the gridiron hero (no, seriously, that was Peter Lawford's role) and the brainy librarian who has to tutor him so that he doesn't do so badly in his courses that he's not allowed to remain on the football team. (Truly the American musical is a pure fantasy realm.) Part of what makes this bowdlerized production charming is that it represents nostalgia for the 1920s as seen from the vantage point of the late 1940s, which seen today gives it an odd, unearthly appeal. It also helps that the people hired to plug the holes left by the editing actually added some good songs and found people livelier than Lawford and Allyson to perform them. The movie's real star is the vivacious and weird Joan McCracken, a Broadway dancer-singer who died young without ever having built much of a movie career: she triumphs in the movie's opening and in her showcase number, the possibly-insulting-to-Native-Americans novelty piece "Pass That Peace Pipe."

DRUMLINE (2002)

This go-for-it movie, starring Nick Cannon as an unpolished bullet of raw talent who upsets the equilibrium of the marching band at a prestigious all-black university, has the kind of silly plot mechanics one expects from the genre, but it also has a lot of freshness and energy and a surprisingly impressive performance by Orlando Jones as the upright professor in charge of the band. As staged by director Charles Stone III, the precisely choreographed final battle of the bands at the big championship competition is a winner-take-all moment undreamt of in Sylvester Stallone's philosophy.

WONDER BOYS (2000)

Michael Douglas gives one of his most winning performances in this adaptation of Michael Chabon's terrific novel about Grady Tripp, a stalled novelist and aging pothead whose gig teaching creative writing at a Pittsburgh university has turned into a not unpleasant form of limbo. This is one of the few movies that features a halfway believable facsimile of some form of the writer's life, a virtue that extends to Tobey Maguire's amazing turn as the most talented and mercurial of Tripp's students, and also for a characteristically high-wire performance by Robert Downey, Jr. as the great man's literary agent. The studio had enough faith in the movie's entertainment value that, after it bombed in its initial run, they rolled it out again a few months later with a new ad campaign, whereupon it bombed all over again. It still hasn't developed the cult following on DVD that one might have hoped for, and Tobey Maguire remains much better known as Peter Parker than as James Leek, but the movie did win Bob Dylan an Academy Award for his original theme song, "Things Have Changed."

Click Here for Part One & Part Three

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Andrew Osborne

When Good Directors Go Bad: Ryan's Daughter (1970, David Lean)

Paul Clark — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 19:00:00 GMT

By the late 1960s, old-fashioned epics had fallen on hard times. With the counterculture movement in full swing, fewer young moviegoers were interested in large-scale entertainments, with sweeping vistas and larger-than-life filmmaking. However, Hollywood has always been a little slow to catch up with popular tastes, and this led to a string of big-budget flops, as the roadshow musicals and bloated period pictures failed to rope in audiences who went wild for The Graduate and Easy Rider. But if anyone could still make an old-school epic under these circumstances, it was David Lean, coming off the award-winning blockbusters Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago. Unfortunately, Ryan’s Daughter wasn’t remotely up to the standard of the director’s best work.

From the beginning, Ryan’s Daughter had problems. The filmmakers took a suspiciously long time to cast the film, with name actors like Marlon Brando and Peter O’Toole turning down the role of the British Maj. Doryan before up-and-comer Christopher Jones was cast. But things got far worse once production began. Lean was a notorious perfectionist, often taking hours to set up a single shot, which angered several of the film’s stars, with Leo McKern commenting, “I don’t like to be paid 500 pounds a week for sitting down and playing Scrabble.” And Jones’ acting talent- or, more appropriately, the lack thereof- caused friction between him and both Lean and leading lady Sarah Miles.

Of course, stories like this are nothing new in show business. Moreover, had the movie turned out well none of this would have mattered. Unfortunately, Ryan’s Daughter was a flop with critics and audiences, to the point that Lean didn’t direct another film for more than a decade. The film is a lumbering bore, without so much as an interesting character to hold the audience’s interest. Naturally, this being a Lean movie, Ryan’s Daughter is often gorgeous to look at, but that’s hardly enough to tide the audience over for upwards of three hours.

In fact, I’d say the visuals are part of the problem, or more accurately, that Lean cares more for the pictoral beauty of the film than he does for the people who inhabit it. Now, I realize that this criticism has also been levied at several films of another notorious perfectionist, Stanley Kubrick. The difference is that if you look at films such as 2001 and Barry Lyndon, you’ll see that Kubrick’s style demands a degree of distance from the characters, and the visuals are a large part of this. By contrast, Lean means to tell a human story in Ryan’s Daughter, and this distance only hinders his ability to do so.

Consider the early scene in which Rosy Ryan (played by Miles) sees her former teacher Charles Shaughnessy (Mitchum) after he comes home from a conference in Britain. As Rosy has long felt love for Charles- the man she will eventually marry, mind you- you’d think it might be good to see her reaction to his arrival. However, Lean’s staging of the event is so clumsy that he forgets to show us. One minute, Rosy is alone at the shoreline, then suddenly Lean cuts to an extreme long shot as Charles walks into the frame, so that they’re hardly more than specks on the beach moving toward each other. It’s only after they come together and begin talking that he cuts to their conversation. I wish I could say this was atypical of Lean’s style in Ryan’s Daughter, but this isn’t the case. Time and again, Lean’s characters are upstaged by the landscapes that surround them.

Then again, perhaps extreme long shots would’ve been the best way to deal with Christopher Jones, so that the audience couldn’t have seen how untalented and inexpressive an actor he was. Of course, this was hardly the first time a director was faced with the challenge of a difficult leading man, but Lean never figures out how to successfully work around this. Initially, the film gives most of Jones’ dialogue to a subordinate, but once he embarks on his affair with Rosy this becomes impossible, so Lean resorts to swelling music, longing glances from Miles, and cutaways to nature. But worst of all are the scenes in which Maj. Doryan flashes back to the battlefield- Jones screws up his face and flails around, but never convinces us that there’s anything underneath the surface. Jones’ performance is so inept that our antipathy toward him extends to the character itself, and by extension to Rosy, who by forsaking Robert Mitchum for this clown looks less like an impetuous youth than a horny little fool.

Speaking of fools, if Christopher Jones’ performance is inept, John Mills’ is downright embarrassing. Mills plays Michael, a local oaf who sadly has nobody to grapple with, in what surely has to be one of the most ignominious performances ever to net an Oscar. But even if Mills’ hammy turn isn’t completely Lean’s fault, the way the character is used has to be, as Michael functions as a comic mirror to the events of the story, eavesdropping on the lovers and following them around at pivotal moments. It’s a cheesy touch on the part of Lean and frequent screenwriter Robert Bolt, one that they should have known better than to include.

All of this isn’t to say that Ryan’s Daughter doesn’t have good points. For one thing, Miles’s and Mitchum’s performances would distinguish a film that told this story on a more intimate level (especially Mitchum’s). However, Lean’s style here is so unnecessarily grandiose that we lose sight of any reason why we should care about them or anything else we see onscreen. By the time the film actually justifies the magnitude of its scope, it’s far too late. There’s a spectacular sequence in which the townspeople aid a band of IRA fighters in bringing weapons ashore in the middle of a storm. But impressive though it is, all I could think of was how difficult it must have been to film. And that’s just about the last thing one should be thinking about during a scene like this.

Yesterday's Hits: Summer of '42 (1971, Robert Mulligan)

Paul Clark — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 19:00:00 GMT

One of the many cool regular columns that we’re running right now on Screengrab is Leonard Pierce’s weekly feature Summerfest 2008. All summer long, Leonard has tasked himself to write about one movie a week with the word “summer” in the title. Personally, I’m hoping he gets around to one of Eric Rohmer’s seasonal classics- either Summer/The Green Ray or A Summer’s Tale- but I realize that at one movie a week, the series will be far from comprehensive. Happily, Leonard has given me permission to help him out on that front, to write up a Yesterday’s Hits that neatly dovetailed with his goal. So to that end, I’ve decided to review a summer-y hit of yesteryear, Robert Mulligan’s 1971 film Summer of ‘42.

What made Summer of ‘42 a hit? After the fall of the Production Code, the newfound permissiveness changed the face of Hollywood filmmaking. But while many filmmakers tried to push the envelope of what was acceptable, Summer of ‘42 took a different approach, injecting sexuality into the framework of what was essentially a nostalgia piece for a more innocent time- the 1940s. It was this period setting- and the tastefulness of the storytelling- that appealed to older audience members who otherwise might not have been interested in an R-rated movie about the sexual stirrings of teenagers. At the same time, it was this same nostalgia which appealed to the children of a more permissive era, who marveled at how naïve the children of the period were, learning about sex from books and hemming and hawing at the idea of buying birth control at the local pharmacy.

But one also shouldn’t underestimate the appeal of the film’s most prominent storyline, the deflowering of the film’s teenaged protagonist “Hermie” (Gary Grimes) by the recent war widow Dorothy (Jennifer O’Neill). The older-woman fantasy has long been a popular one among young men, and Summer of ‘42 was one of the first Hollywood films to portray it in any detail. Unlike The Graduate, which pretty much turned its older woman into a predator all the better to hammer home its youth-friendly message, Summer of ‘42 told its older-woman/younger-man story with a tenderness befitting those fantasies held by generations of teenagers. Combine all of these factors with a fresh-faced cast of unknowns and the film became a surprise hit, one of the top grossers of 1971 and an Academy Award winner for Michel Legrand’s bittersweet score.

What happened? Compared to most hits of the day, Summer of ‘42 was fairly small-scale and unassuming, so it didn’t linger in the zeitgeist in quite the same way as, say, contemporaneous fellow Yesterday’s Hits selections The Way We Were and Love Story. For one thing, the nostalgia Mulligan’s film offered paled in comparison to the melodramatic pull of Love Story, and its low-wattage cast couldn’t compare with the pairing of Streisand and Redford. Finally, while the sincerity of the film’s portrayal of 1940s sexual innocence originally appealed the audiences, it became less relatable as the years passed, to the point where the famous condom-buying scene was parodied in an English television commercial. Like so many films, both in the past and today, Summer of ‘42 just wasn’t made to withstand the passage of time.

Does Summer of ‘42 still work? Kind of. One of the most charming aspects of the movie is its time-capsule quality, both of the 1940s and the 1970s’ concept of 1940s life. In our more sexually-frank age, it’s hard to remember a time when sex wasn’t just a mouse-click away, but Mulligan and writer Herman Rauscher portray this time with warmth. At the same time, the movie gets a lot of more universal details right, especially the way young men always try just a little too hard to impress women, to say nothing of those tentative grope session in the back row of the local movie house- a detail that rings just as true when the movie is Now, Voyager as when it’s Iron Man.

But there’s always something that has stuck in my craw about the older-woman fantasy, both in the film and in general. Namely, what does the older woman think? In Alfonso Cuaron’s Y Tu Mama Tambien- currently the benchmark for onscreen portrayals of this premise- the question was answered by making the older woman the central player in the story. By contrast, in Summer of ‘42, Dorothy exists almost entirely to be admired by Hermie- first from a distance, then up close, then closer still. After Dorothy’s husband ships off to war, she befriends the kid, and the same day she finds out her husband has been killed, she responds by sleeping with him. After that, she disappears forever. To quote the Church Lady, “how conveeeeeeeeeenient!”

In the end, Summer of ‘42’s nostalgia is too rose-colored by half. The film was based on the real-life experiences of screenwriter Herman Rauscher (note the protagonist’s name), whose memories of the actual events were surely smoothed out from almost three decades’ distance. But the reality of one’s teenaged sexual awakening- not only Rauscher’s but practically everyone’s- is almost never this tidy. Most of the time, it’s fraught with anxiety and more than a little shame, two factors that can’t be dealt with simply by staring meaningfully into the distance as Hermie does in the film. By downplaying this emotional prickliness, Summer of ‘42 became a favorite date movie for 1971 audiences, but had the film kept more of this, it could very well have become a true-blue classic.

The Spirit of '67

Phil Nugent — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Pictures at a Revolution, a new book by Entertainment Weekly staffer Mark Harris, zeroes in on a signal moment in popular culture — 1967, a time when the old Hollywood studios were losing their grip on mass taste and hip young American filmmakers were beginning to be influenced by the European New Wave directors — by examining the making of each of the five films nominated for that year's Academy Award for Best Picture. The list consists of In the Heat of the Night, the eventual winner, and the four also-rans, Bonnie & Clyde, The Graduate, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, and Dr. Dolittle. The films themselves go a long way towards making Harris's point that Hollywood was cracking apart at the time from confusion, internal conflict, and dry rot; it's hard to believe that they were all made in the same year, let alone that an industry would have chosen all of them to point to with pride as the best of which they were capable.

The ones that seem most clearly of their time are Bonnie & Clyde and The Graduate. The latter was a crowd-pleasing zeitgeist movie, a time-stamped movie of the moment, but Bonnie & Clyde was a genuinely revolutionary film at the time — the writers, Robert Benton and David Newman, had originally hoped to attract Francois Truffaut to direct — and a certified classic. It was also a movie that, had it won the Oscar, would have set off a chain of massive coronaries through three-quarters of the executive suites in Hollywood. As for In the Heat of the Night, it was recently re-issued on a new DVD, which set off a fresh round of condescending notices pointing up its flaws. It is in fact an entertaining little murder melodrama with a number of strong virtues — notably the dazzling cinematographer by Haskell Wexler and Rod Steiger's Oscar-winning performance — but it is the kind of movie that was overrated in its day and is now fated to be underrated, as punishment for being a good movie that won an award that should have gone to a great movie. It looks even better if compared to the other big racial-tolerance message movie, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, which is where most of the dry rot settled.

In its general outlines, this will be familiar territory to many readers of film books; the Bonnie & Clyde story has been especially thoroughly covered already, but even the ringer, the expensive and unwatchable Dr. Dolittle, has already been dealt with at some length in a well-known book: John Gregory Dunne's 1969 The Studio, a first-hand journalistic account of how thoroughly that movie's tortured production bollixed Twentieth-Century Fox at the time. But Harris is a good writer and has managed to wring fresh material from such interview subjects as Mike Nichols, Arthur Penn, Warren Beatty, Dustin Hoffman, Robert Towne, and Buck Henry, while plugging the gaps with well-chosen insights drawn from such sources as Sidney Poitier's memoirs. Overblown title and all, Harris's book is a fascinating, five-sided snapshot of a remarkable moment in movie history.

Forgotten Films: "The Designated Mourner" (1997)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Mike Nichols really doesn't direct movies that often, so maybe it's not so surprising that whenever he does unwrap a new film, such as Charlie Wilson's War, the critical response tends to run from polite to rapturous, the occasion treated in the media as a serious cultural event. (Even Regarding Henry inspired thoughtful meditative pieces exploring the question: what heavy object might have fallen on Mike's head?) But for some of us, the real puzzler is, why doesn't Nichols act more? He made his name doing revue sketches with his old partner Elaine May. Elaine May doesn't act much, either, but she seems to be a far less social creature to begin with, and between her appearances in Enter Laughing and Luv in the 1960s and her most recent on-screen role, in Woody Allen's Small Time Crooks in 2000, she has done enough — turning up with some kind of almost-every-ten-years regularity — to keep the movie world aware that she has a corporeal form. Nichols, on the other hand, has in the course of his career taken exactly one on-screen acting role in a feature film. It was a doozy, though — the title role, which is one-third of the cast, of David Hare's 1997 film version of Wallace Shawn's play The Designated Mourner.

Having chosen to be exclusive, Nichols also went out of his way to make his big starring debut in a project guaranteed to be seen by as few people as possible. In terms of potential mass-audience appeal, The Designated Mourner is not an ingratiating work in either its form or its content. It's a theater piece written for three actors, who never interact; they deliver their accounts of how the world fell apart in long monologues delivered straight to the camera. David de Keyser plays Howard, a distinguished literary figure and political thinker; Miranda Richardson is his daughter, Judy; and Nichols plays Jack, her husband, an English professor. The main action that the characters describe is the collapse of their country (America? Maybe.) into a thugocracy, a fascistic police state that uses the threat of a revolution by a communist guerrilla movement said to be taking root. The government sees Howard and the world he represents as the enemy — the "elitists" — and members of that world, friends of the central triumverate, have begun disappearing and being jailed and executed. Though Howard and Judy rail, in their elegant, cultured way, against the government repression, they're just as likely to be targeted by the lower-class guerrillas, who don't like elitists either. The joker in the deck is Jack, who is assumed by the members of Howard and Judy's circle to be in staunch sympathetic agreement with them about everything, including Howard's magisterial saintliness. In fact, he confesses to the audience, he has never felt entirely comfortable around Howard and resents the standards that Howard and Judy, just by their own conduct, have always seemed to be demanding that he live up to. When the changing tide of the country forces him to adjust to a less cultural exalted way of life — by basically wiping out "highbrow" culture through a climate of fear and the systematic extermination of its more dedicated adherents — Jack has to admit that he finds himself happier, under less pressure. He takes on the identity of the "designated mourner" for that culture because there's no one else left — he is the last person, he says, who can understand a poem by John Donne — but whatever remorse he may feel over the loss of Judy, he wouldn't really have things back the way they were.

How are we supposed to feel about Jack's confession? Elitism and John Donne aren't cool subjects to be defending these days, and the Howard that we see is indeed both an admirable man of principle and more than a bit of a stick. At the same time, Jack, whose plea for the unambitious, unoffending pursuit of basic, self-interested modest enjoyment of one's time on earth, is a monster, even if he sometimes sounds not so different from Wallace Shawn himself, in My Dinner with Andre, saying that he'd rather sit at home reading Charlton Heston's diaries and sipping a cup of cold coffee than head out to reinvent theater in a Bavarian forest. (in live performances of the play, Shawn has often played Jack.) It's a disturbing, ambiguous role, and Nichols seems to embody it down to his flesh tones. (Jack keeps his soft-looking, pale, doughy hands in view, as if he enjoyed reminding you that for all his whining, he's never done an honest day's labor in his life.) As a text and as a piece of staging, The Designated Mourner has none of the show biz pizzazz that made Nichols phenomenally successful directing in both movies and the theater, but something in this weird little play must have spoken to him very deeply: both he and Hare are credited among the film's producers, and if it remains his only extended piece of screen acting, it'll serve an important function in determining the way he's remembered after he's gone. Future biographers looking for clues about what it was like to be in the room when Mike Nichols was there will turn to it, and see the director of The Graduate and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? talking about how liberating it felt to place a book in the bathtub and shit on it.

Top Ten of 2007: Leonard Pierce

Leonard Pierce — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Unlike many of my fellow bloggers here at the Screengrab, who live in urbane, sophisticated metropoli, I make my home in San Antonio, Texas. We have a ratio of approximately one movie theatre for every million people here, and "art house" is just what the locals call a museum. I hear if we play our cards right, we might be getting a one-week screening next year of that movie The Graduate all the cool kids are talking about, but until then, it's pretty much Transformers on nineteen of the twenty-four screens down at Huebner Oaks. So you'll forgive me if my list leans pretty heavily on stuff that's already available on Netflix; at least half the movies on my list were ones that I had to drive an hour up to Austin to even have a chance of seeing before their DVD release, and there's more than a few movies that likely would have a chance of appearing here (I think specifically of There Will Be Blood and Syndromes and a Century) that there was simply no way for me to see before the year was up. Still, I'll be happy to go along with the prevailing wisdom that 2007 was an especially rich year for film; there was plenty to see, even if you had to go out of your way to see it.

#10: THE LIVES OF OTHERS (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, dir.)

Although it was released in 2006, this masterful film from Germany didn't receive an American audience outside of the Telluride Film Festival until February. It was well worth the wait. Far too many movies that pick up Best Foreign Film Oscars are the international doppelgangers of Best Picture winners -- overblown, overpraised, middlebrow 'prestige' pictures lacking in resonance, depth and any particular qualities that will result in their being remembered far down the line. But The Lives of Others -- best thought of as a brilliant reworking of The Conversation against the dreadful backdrop of Soviet East Germany -- deserved every bit of praise heaped on it by critics both here and abroad. It's a stunning, terrifying film, brilliantly illustrating Hannah Arendt's 'banality of evil' in the person of the astonishing Ulrich Mühe.

#9: SWEENEY TODD, THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET (Tim Burton, dir.)

One of the few of a year-end spate of high-profile films that I actually got a chance to see, Sweeney Todd is Tim Burton's adaptation of the notoriously blood-soaked and difficult Stephen Sondheim musical. I've never been especially fond of Tim Burton as a director, but the qualities of his filmmaking that usually work against him -- the broad emotional strokes, the barely-held-together plots, the characters as caricatures, and the meticulous set design at the expense of believability -- are turned into such strengths that it's hard to believe no one ever had the idea of having him do a musical before this. The result is certainly the best film he's ever done and likely the best film he'll ever do, an absolutely gorgeous thing to look at, and with some surprisingly fine performances. One of the best musicals I've ever seen.

#8: EASTERN PROMISES (David Cronenberg, dir.)

Conversely, I've long been a staunch defender of David Cronenberg's, even with films like Crash and Spider, which met with widespread revulsion from a lot of my fellow critics. Unfortunately, I found his most celebrated film -- 2005's A History of Violence -- sadly lacking, a formulaic and uninspiring drama that bore so little of his unique imprint as a filmmaker that it could have been directed by almost anyone. If the Russian mob drama Eastern Promises isn't strong enough to stand alongside his greatest works, though, it's at least a return to form and a revisiting of some of the themes -- muddled self-identity, the grace and brutality of violence, and a simultaneous revulsion at and fascination with the human body -- that have made him one of the signature talents of the day. Plus, naked Viggo Mortensen, ladies!

#7: BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU'RE DEAD (Sidney Lumet, dir.)

If you'd have told me last year -- hell, if you'd told me twenty years ago -- that one of the best film of 2007 would be by ancient journeyman Sidney Lumet, I'd likely have scoffed. But damned if the old trooper doesn't turn in a remarkably swift and sure-handed job behind the helm here, presenting a neo-noir thriller about a simple caper gone disastrously wrong that wouldn't be entirely out of place in the early 1960s and yet never loses a fresh sense of modernity. Before the Devil Knows You're Dead isn't a groundbreaking piece of cinema art; it's simply an assured, highly professional piece of moviemaking of the sort we rarely see anymore, and which Lumet is eminently qualified to give us. It's further bolstered by a dynamite performance from Philip Seymour Hoffman, who has simply owned 2007 on screen.

#6: LUST, CAUTION (Ang Lee, dir.)

Ang Lee continues to be the most versatile moviemaker in the business with his best work since Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; if he is absolute master of no genre, he at least never ceases to amaze with his ability to dive confidently into all genres. Bouyed by astonishing performances so tightly controlled and confidently directed that they seem drawn from lost Wong Kar-Wei footage, Lust, Caution maintains a killing pace throughout and doesn't fail to deliver on its near-constant sense of tension and frustration. The much-discussed sex scenes are indeed intense and scarily erotic, but they also accomplish something that's so rarely done that it's become an industry joke: they're not arbitrary, but essential, not only to the plot, but also to the slow but inexorable revelation of the nature of the characters.

#5: THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY (Julian Schnabel, dir.)

I was never fond of Julian Schnabel, the visual artist, and while I thought that his debut film, Basquiat, showed promise, I tended to agree with the New York art critic Robert Hughes, who called it a movie about the worst painter of the 1980s made by the second worst. I'm not sure what Hughes has to say about The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, but I think it's an amazing film by a director who's finally come into full posession of the tools of his craft. Schnabel has said that he still considers himself an artist first and a director second, but this visually rewarding, complex and beautiful movie is better than anything he ever put to canvas, and even without the tremendous lead performance by Mathieu Amalric, it would be a film worth watching for its mastery of internal landscapes far richer than Schabel's art ever suggested.

#4: MANUFACTURED LANDSCAPES (Jennifer Baichwal, dir.)

In what is widely regarded as a banner year for documentaries, the finest one I saw had nothing to do with the war in Iraq, the peccadilloes of the president, or the politics of personality. Instead, it was a little-seen film about a little-known photographer named Edward Burtynsky. His photographs -- and the like-minded film by Jennifer Baichwal -- document the vastness and power of man-made constructs, and convey the awe and the terror one feels at observing objects, from China's Three Gorges Dam to American junkyards, that are made by the hand of humans but can dwarf or even overwhelm the natural surroundings in which they appear. A slow-paced, deliberate, and provocative film made as a collaboration between two artists who understand each other in an perfectly asynchronous way.

#3: ZODIAC (David Fincher, dir.)

Much has been made of the fact that David Fincher, best known for his visual pyrotechnics, allegedly made his most successful film without them. That's not entirely true; among other scenes, the opening drive-by tracking shot, the first murders, and the construction montage of the San Francisco skyline can stand next to some of the most stylish set-pieces in his other films. But it's undeniable that his best film to date, and one of the best films of the year, is at its best when he simply stands back and lets the audience become spellbound with the absorbing interplay of his characters. A fascinating treatment of the nature of obsession and a subtle treatise on the way we become ensnared in the grotesque and the perverse, Zodiac is revelatory in the way it defies expectations of what a serial-killer drama should be.

#2: BRAND UPON THE BRAIN! (Guy Maddin, dir.)

Guy Maddin has been quietly establishing himself as one of the finest, most idiosyncratic directors in the world for several years now, and Brand Upon the Brain! is both his most autobiographical film to date (the lead character in the film is, well, Guy Maddin, ably and amusingly played by young Sullivan Brown) and his best. There was some fear amongst critics who had a chance to see it in its 'touring edition' -- a live extravaganza featuring on-site music, celebrity voice-overs and sound effects composed right there in the theater -- that the film wouldn't hold up without all the show-stopping theatrical gimmicks, but they needn't have worried: this is the purest distilliation of Maddin's unique sensibilities as a filmmaker: sexual obsession, throwback surrealism, fantastic dreamscapes, and madness as part of the everyday.

#1: NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (Joel & Ethan Coen, dirs.)

There are plenty of filmmakers who would trade their favorite limb for a track record like Joel and Ethan Coen -- from 1984 to 2001, they didn't make a bad film, and the 9 features they put in the can over those 17 years add up to the most robust corpus by any living American filmmaker you can name. Things started to go awry with Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers; many placed the blame on the fact that, for the first time, the Coens were filming material they didn't write. That's not a problem with No Country for Old Men, a triumphant masterpiece of genre filmmaking based on a minor Cormac McCarthy novel that once again places the brothers (credited, for the first time ever, as co-directors) where they belong: at the very pinnacle of American moviemaking. An astonishing comeback that will be discussed for decades.

Movie of the Year(s)

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 19:30:00 GMT

Movie geeks like your humble authors here at the Screengrab are no different than geeks of any other sort. That is to say, we are compulsive listmakers, inveterate rankers and categorizers, and the sort of people who will happily mouth off our opinions about things that happened years before we were born. And we're proud to say that over at the Onion A.V. Club, the reviewing staff (friends of this program, as they say in the biz) have found a delightful way of upholding the tradition by combining all three of those geeky tendencies: in their enjoyable new "My Favorite Movie Year" feature, each of their film reviewers picks one year in the past they think of as an exceptional one for film and ranks the top five movies that debuted in that year. The exercise kicked off a week ago when Noel Murray discussed the best films of 1974, and this week, the redoubtable Keith Phipps takes a look at 1967, singling out Bonnie and Clyde, Play Time, Point Blank, The Graduate and Two for the Road as reasons that year was particularly praiseworthy. (Sure, Keith. How quickly we forget Hillbillies in a Haunted House.) Next week should also be worth looking in on as the always-amusing Nathan Rabin picks the best of 1994.

Oprah's Favorite Things Include Watching Road House

Peter Smith — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 18:00:00 GMT

We're not so into this trend of giant DVD box sets; they tend to be padded with lots of half-baked featurettes, useless production stills, and other things you'd never pay money for if they weren't all packaged together in a pretty box with a movie you really like. But United Artists just took it to the next level with its 90th Anniversary Prestige Collection — a massive 110-disc set that features ninety films from seven decades. Oprah just named it one of her Favorite Things, which means it will sell like hotcakes. $870 hotcakes to be exact. But let's look at exactly which ninety movies are featured, shall we?

First off, the box set starts with the '40s, leaving out the opportunity to include earlier United Artist benchmarks like Broken Blossoms (1919), The Gold Rush (1925) and Stagecoach (1939).

The '40s/'50s selection, including Marty, Night of the Hunter and Some Like It Hot, is fairly solid — although Rebecca and The African Queen are among the missing.

The '60s brings a bunch of Bond films and some second-tier Billy Wilder. Good picks: The Apartment, In the Heat of the Night, Satyricon, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, Midnight Cowboy. Questionable: It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, The Thomas Crown Affair, The Battle of Britain, I Could Go On Singing. Notable omission: The Graduate.

The '70s has some interesting stuff: Rocky, Annie Hall, The Last Waltz, Carrie, Manhattan, Last Tango in Paris and Lenny would make for a quality weekend of film-watching. But The Pink Panther Strikes Again? Equus? And how much James Bond do we really need? Missing in action: Network and Being There.

By the '80s, things are getting a bit random. Enjoy a triple feature of Heaven's Gate, WarGames and Child's Play! Or alternately, Baby Boom, Raging Bull and Road House! Top it off with the most unnecessary Bond film of them all, the Timothy Dalton vehicle The Living Daylights. No big omissions here, unless you want to count I'm Gonna Git You Sucka.

Finally we reach the '90s-'00s, a short selection featuring Bowling for Columbine, the little-seen Pieces of April, The Birdcage, Hotel Rwanda, Leaving Las Vegas, and five others. What, no Showgirls?

Overall, the set feels like a stranger's DVD collection: a few classics, a few childhood favorites, a few questionable selections they probably got for $5 at the drugstore. But it doesn't feel like the collection of a movie buff, nor does it have any particular coherence beyond the name of the studio. If an alien landed on Earth and asked me how to quickly amass an American film collection, I might advise him to get this box set. However, if you live on this planet, you can probably find a better use for your $900. Like, for example, buying forty-five copies of Network. — Gwynne Watkins