The Screengrab : thelma and louise

Screengrab Review: “S. Darko”

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 22 May 2009 17:00:00 GMT

The “latest features” sidebar over there in the right-hand column of your screen has been a running joke amongst us Screengrab staffers for almost exactly a year now…because it’s been that long since the latest features featured there have been updated. There’s no point in doing it now, of course; I merely point it out to draw attention to the “Donnie Darko Part Deux!?” headline, which manages to convey a mixture of horror and bafflement at the prospect of such an animal’s existence.

That animal is now here in the form of S. Darko, and Richard Kelly would presumably still want you to know that he had absolutely nothing to do with its existence. Instead, it’s the product of screenwriter Nathan Atkins (author of the TV-movie Point of Entry) and director Chris Fisher, the man behind several serial killer movies and a handful of Cold Case episodes. I’ve not seen any of their earlier work, so I won’t hold it against them. I have seen S. Darko, however, so that one is fair game.

The only returning cast member from the original Donnie Darko is Daveigh Chase, who you’ll remember as the littlest member of Sparkle Motion, Samantha Darko. As S. Darko opens (in 1995, though you’d never know it if not for the helpful title cards), Sam is all growed up into a confused 18-year-old. Still haunted by her brother’s bizarre death, Sam is driving cross-country with best friend Corey (Briana Evigan of Step Up 2: The Streets, and yes, daughter of BJ and the Bear star Greg Evigan); Sam is the angsty one, Corey the slutty one. When their car breaks down in a nowhere town and they hole up in a cheap motel, you could be watching Thelma and Louise: The Early Years.

That’s when the weird stuff starts happening. And by “weird stuff,” I mean secondhand effects cribbed from Kelly’s cult favorite: time loops, transparent, tentacle-like blobs, bunny-like apparitions and another end-of-the-world countdown. Characters die and come back to life, and it’s all part of the personal growth experience – figuring out who you are and your place in the world the hard way. The question that never gets answered: Why should we care about these people? Sam is a mopey downer, while Corey is simply one of the most abrasive, unlikable characters in recent memory.

Far more entertaining than the movie itself is the “making of” documentary included on the DVD. It’s hilarious to watch everyone from the screenwriter to the cast to the best boy try to justify their involvement in this pointless endeavor. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll sign on to write, direct or set up lawn chairs for Gomer Darko if there’s a decent paycheck in it, so I’m not moralizing here; it’s just that no one is honest enough to admit that’s their motivation. They all bend over backwards to emphasize that this is a “continuation,” not a sequel, and that it’s very respectful of Kelly’s vision and the rules of the world he set up. No one can adequately explain why this movie was made in the first place. After all, the original Darko was barely released in theaters and only acquired a cult following after its DVD release. Cult audiences don’t tend to respond well to this kind of cash-in attempt, as the makers of Shock Treatment can attest.

In Other Blogs: Defending the New Classics

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Earlier this week, our own Paul Clark took a few well-deserved shots at Entertainment Weekly’s list of 100 New Classics. At Some Came Running, Glenn Kenny offers up a (weak) defense. “Let's begin with a fundamental fact: lists are bullshit. Lists are such blatant bullshit that any magazine person will admit to you that they're bullshit. Some might need to have had a couple of drinks first, others might be more effectively cajoled by having you complain for the millionth time in the course of a conversation about how your own favorite cultural artifact was left off some list or another, but they'll admit it… ‘Glenn,’ I hear you asking, ‘if lists are such bullshit, why do magazines and websites do them almost all the frickin' time?’ Well, because lists are putatively ‘fun.’ People notice them, argue about them. They take them fairly seriously, pretty much regardless of what their sources are...oddly enough. For a magazine in particular, a list is a potential goldmine of publicity. It gets your product noticed. TV news, radio outlets, they LOVE lists.” As list-lovers ourselves, we can’t argue with this – our weekly top 10 (or 15 or 20) offerings are inevitably our most popular posts, and just as inevitably attract the most “Hey bozos, you forgot Ernest Scared Stupid!” type comments. Heck, that’s why we do ’em! Try as we might, though, we can’t actually find the part where Kenny defends the EW list. Maybe it’s in code.

At Scanners, Jim Emerson offers his own take on the list. “From the last quarter century, EW chose Pulp Fiction as its #1 classic, calling it ‘a time-warping, mind-bending work of movie-mad genius.... Its revolutionary structure (John Travolta dies... then lives!) opened a new universe of mainstream storytelling, but the eternal joy of Pulp Fiction is that it recast the future of movies by living, so thrillingly, in the moment." I can't really argue with that, though it doesn't take into consideration what I see as the movie's flaws (I hate all the chewy, self-consciously pop-aware dialog), its negative influences (we're still suffering the ‘Tarantinian’ fallout from wannabes far less talented than QT), and its overemphasized novelty (the structure wasn't really revolutionary -- it just didn't tell you the order in which its chapters were arranged, so you could be surprised to recounter characters in an unforseen context). But I'm not going to begrudge Pulp Fiction the top slot…No, the bizarre choices on the list for me (in addition to several of the ones cited in the third paragraph above) include Moulin Rouge (#10), Pretty Woman (#37), Gladiator (#43), Rain Man (#45), Dirty Dancing (#65), All About My Mother (#69), Thelma & Louise (#72)... but I detect my own gender bias in the selection. Some of these were hits, some of them won Oscars, some had star-making performances (Julia Roberts, Patrick Swayze, Brad Pitt)... but, even if you liked 'em at the time, do you feel like watching them anymore?”

At Beyond the Multiplex, Andrew O’Hehir warns that the indie film is dying – unless it isn’t. “Even as the potential moviegoing public has become distracted by an explosion of electronic options and devices unimagined a generation ago, the marketplace has been swamped by a poisonous glut of new movies. As Gill explains, in 1993, the Sundance Film Festival received roughly 500 submissions. For 2008, that number had swollen to more than 5,000. The reasons for that are various: The cost of producing a small-budget motion picture has fallen sharply in the digital age, and the success of a handful of indies in the late '90s and early 2000s drew investors large and small to pour countless billions of dollars into filmmaking. It hasn't turned out to be a sensible investment. Gill calculates the odds of losing all your money on an independent film at 99.95 percent. Most of those 5,000 movies, in his words, are ‘pre-ordained flops,’ made by people ‘who forgot that their odds would have been better if they'd converted their money into quarters and taken the all-night party bus to Vegas’… Then there's the fact that while enthusiasm, access to technology and an eagerness to become famous may be widespread, talent and craftsmanship are not. As anybody who's ever served on a film-festival selection committee learns the hard way, most of those movies should never have been made in the first place and definitely should not be inflicted upon the public. There has indeed been an explosion of ultra-low-budget filmmaking -- just try to wade through the self-produced movies available on YouTube -- but so far it has not revealed a nation full of unheralded Orson Welleses in embryo.”

And finally, speaking of “lists are bullshit,” this week’s List-o-Mania entry comes from the MuchMusic blog: it’s allegedly the Top 10 Music Moments in Movies. I know it’s hard to argue with a list containing both Adventures in Babysitting and Napoleon Dynamite, but really – the Wayne’s World "Bohemian Rhapsody" sing-along is the greatest music moment in movie history? Not.

Related:
EW Makes Great Movies List, Screengrab Points, Laughs
EW Makes List of Vile Villains, Isn't as Cool as Screengrab Lists

Chick Hits: The Girl Power Top Ten

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 20:00:00 GMT

After the big screen edition of Sex & The City exceeded the low expectations of industry gurus who were shocked...shocked...to discover that people were actually interested in a movie about, y'know, gurlz, Missy Schwartz wrote a depressingly familiar story for Entertainment Weekly: “It was an unqualified triumph...one the industry observed in a stunned, slack-jawed state. As the weekend rolled to a close, news outlets filed their reports with words like unexpected, surprising, and shocking. ‘What do you know?’ they all seemed to be saying. ‘Women go to the movies!’”

And if Sex and the City 2 (or The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 or Mama Mia!) or any other female-centric movie succeeds in the near future, Hollywood will be surprised all over again, and Entertainment Weekly and other publications will run similar articles about the American movie-going public’s "unexpected," "surprising" and "shocking" desire for strong female characters...a desire Hollywood will more or less continue to ignore as it continues its relentless pursuit of teenage boys, no matter how many Speed Racers crash and burn along the way.

Because, after all, many studio execs are just overgrown boys themselves. They dig gadgets, explosions and special effects, and CGI creations are easy to control and merchandise. Female-centered movies tend to rely on well-written screenplays, relatable characters, nuanced direction and...yecccch...feelings: all the things most studio execs pretend to champion but secretly hate.

But we here at The Screengrab aren’t afraid to get in touch with our feminine sides as we raise our Cosmos to these Top Ten “chick hits”: films that put their empowered female characters front and center (without resorting to stripper poles OR big gauzy Prince Charming/Bridezilla wedding porn).

THELMA AND LOUISE (1991)

Okay, so I’m not sure how empowering it is to drive off a cliff in real life, but this Ridley Scott film (based on an iconic script by wunderkind, zeitgeist-tapping Academy Award-winning screenwriter Callie Khouri) caused a sensation upon its release by (A) objectifying Brad Pitt as a hunky slab of beefcake (thus electrifying and pretty much launching his career) and (B) allowing Susan Sarandon’s Louise to gun down the scumbag who was raping Geena Davis’ Thelma (and later blow up the truck of a leering male chauvinist pig) without even feeling all that bad about it, just like any number of male actors in any number of male-centric revenge fantasies...except in films like Dirty Harry, Death Wish, Taxi Driver, etc., the male heroes didn’t have to die in the end to satisfy Hays Code-style notions of karmic retribution for stepping outside the lines of acceptable social conduct. Still, the film’s outlaw motif energized female audiences by (melo)dramatizing the common stereotypical perception of men as either (a) dangerous assholes or (b) hapless boobs while providing enough action and sex to attract audiences of every gender.

THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA (2006)

There’s a beloved feminist koan that goes something like this: ruthless, aggressive men who go after what they want are called winners, while ruthless, aggressive women are called bitches. Of course, most thinking people realize that ruthless, aggressive men are actually called assholes...and it’s the universal, gender-blind nature of the eternally confusing success vs. happiness equation faced by Anne Hathaway’s aspiring fashionista “Andy” Sachs that helped to make the film version of The Devil Wears Prada a $300 million dollar monster hit. And, let’s see...two seconds of Googling and...yep! There’s a TMZ article from 2006 with a, shall we say, certain familiar ring to it: “Blah blah blah, female-centered film exceeded all expectations...yadda-yadda-yadda...industry analysts surprised,” etc., etc. etc. As Meryl Streep’s formidable Gordon Gekko-in-stilettos magazine mogul Miranda Priestly might say to those industry Suits who stubbornly refuse to acknowledge the existence of fifty percent of their audience, “Details of your incompetence do not interest me.”

BRING IT ON (2000)

This broadly played late-summer sleeper is actually packing a lot of heavy metaphorical lumber for a teen flick about a cheerleading competition. Kirsten Dunst is the new head of the Toros, who cheer for the (rich, white) Rancho Carne High School in Los Angeles; they're gearing up for the national championships, which they've won the past six years with the spectacular routines provided by departing team leader Big Red. But when a new girl with a gymnastics background and an attitude -- Eliza Dushku, who was too cool for Buffy the Vampire Slayer's school -- joins the squad, she has unsettling news. It turns out that Big Red was stealing her plays from the fly girls who cheer for the (black, poor) East Compton Clovers, thus making the Toros the cheerleading equivalent of Pat Boone to the Clovers' Little Richard. Dunst actually does her best to rationalize this cultural parasitism rather than destroy her cheerleading institution overnight, but the situation becomes intolerable after the Clovers attend a Toros game and mock their blonde plagiarists by performing the stolen moves in the stands. In the end, both teams attend the finals and show that they can use their brains and talents to compete honorably on the field of battle. There is, however, one scene that shows that contemporary standards of empowerment may be thornier, and weirder, than is commonly acknowledged. Dunst offers the Clovers, who have been prevented from attending the national competition by financial hardship, the chance to come by talking her father into getting his company to sponsor them, but the head Clover (Gabrielle Union) contemptuously rejects the offer, telling Dunst that they don't need her charity; they'll raise the money themselves, their own way. Their own way turns out to be going on an "Oprah"-like TV show and raising contributions by guilt-tripping viewers with their tale of woe. I guess it's honest labor and not charity if it helps "Oprah" kill an hour.

JACKIE BROWN (1997)

Such '70s blaxploitation films as Coffy and Foxy Brown may have made Pam Grier a cult star, but it was always a degraded form of stardom, and not just because the movies were cheap genre knockoffs; she may have had the chance to show that she could hold the camera and kick ass in the final reel, but she still also had to get her top ripped off before being raped by guys who looked like the Ku Klux Klan's answer to Uncle Fester, while being called things like "this big-jugged jigaboo." Jackie Brown catches up with Grier more than twenty years down the road, when she's at an age when Hollywood regards actresses as disposable. It's not a great age to be a flight attendant, either, which is why Jackie is working for a low-grade Mexican airline and acting as a courier for Los Angeles-based gun dealer Ordell Robbie (Samuel L. Jackson). Both Ordell and the federal agents setting up a case against him regard Jackie as a pawn who can easily be taken out of play at any moment. But -- and here's the key difference between this and Grier's '70s vehicles -- the movie respects her. The way she looks through Tarantino's lens, you sort of picture the camera shuffling its feet nervously as it tries to work up the nerve to ask her if she's been seeing anybody lately. And so Ordell, whose fearsomeness would cut him a lot more ice in a different Tarantino movie, is reduced to a comic figure; for all his bluster and firepower, his assumption that the middle-aged black woman with the low-paying job must be a bit player (which Jackie will use against him, and against the feds, too), makes him ridiculous. The only man in the movie who can see Jackie for what she is remains Robert Forster's bail bondsman Max Cherry, who, unlike the film's younger, strutting cocks, lacks the ego and capacity for self-deception that might get in the way of his seeing clearly what's in front of him. Tarantino included a riff (borrowed from Jules Feiffer's The Great Comic Book Heroes) on the arrogance of Superman in the second Kill Bill film, and Jackie Brown is in some ways a black, female Superman fantasy, except that Jackie doesn't have to put on a pair of eyeglasses to trick the dull-witted into thinking she's no match for them.

BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER (1992)

Long before Joss Whedon was a small-screen institution, he was just a fresh-faced young script doctor with a dream. That dream was to create a richly detailed fantasy world featuring nubile teenage girls. Sure, you’re saying: how does that make him any different than millions of other guys? Here’s how: his nubile teenage girls kicked ass. And not just any ass, but demonic vampire ass! Within a decade, Buffy the Vampire Slayer would find its way onto television and prove a major cult hit, giving the country a brand new definition of girl power and adding an entirely new dimension to teen angst as Buffy Summers and her Scoobies battled monsters and bloodsuckers at Sunnydale High. But it all started with this low-budget big-screen number. Whedon, once he’d decided he was a highbrow auteur, more or less disavowed the Buffy movie, but in many ways, it holds up a lot better than people give it credit for: it doesn’t take itself so deadly serious, it has tons of terrific comic turns from Paul Reubens and Stephen Root in supporting roles, and while Kristy Swanson’s Buffy may not carry the emotional weight that Sarah Michelle Gellar’s did, she looks mighty fine in a half-shirt, and she furthers the cause of female empowerment the way only a vampire slayer can. She’s rough, she’s tough, and she maintains her keen fashion sense: what could be more feminine than that?

Click here for Part Two!

Related Posts: Girl DisemPowering: Nine Films That Didn't Do Feminism Any Favors (Part One & Part Two)

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

When Good Directors Go Bad: 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992, Ridley Scott)

Peter Smith — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 18:00:00 GMT

The setup: To celebrate the 500th anniversary of Columbus' discovery of the New World, Paramount Pictures needed a filmmaker who could be counted upon to create a handsome and commercial film about the great man and his momentous voyage. Who better than Ridley Scott, a dependable stylist best known for Alien and Blade Runner, and whose faltering career had been revived the prior year with the critical and audience favorite Thelma and Louise?

What went wrong: Scott, for all his directing skill, has always been a journeyman, making films from material originated by others. Because of this, the screenplays are usually the keys to his films' success. While no one would deny that Columbus' story lends itself well to cinema, the 1492 script (credited to Roselyne Bosch) simply isn't very good, and Scott was unfortunately unable to cover that up with style.

One problem was the film's conception of Columbus himself. The real-life Columbus was a forward-thinking man, but he was also highly ambitious, and the film glosses over this aspect of his personality. Instead of a portrait of a man driven by his nature to seek greatness, 1492 gives us Columbus, the passionate idealist, selflessly dreaming of the future. The film's star, Gerard Depardieu, could have given us a fierce, larger-than-life Columbus, but he's largely called upon to play twinkly-eyed in the early scenes and disillusioned in the later ones.

Additionally, even with a two-and-a-half-hour running time, 1492 feels rushed. One never really feels the strain of the long ocean voyages — after the first one, Scott does away with them altogether. Likewise, character development is largely dictated through tonsorial choices — whereas Columbus shares the shaggy look of the men he commands, the bad guys invariably sport eccentric, intricate beards and hairdos. The most surprising thing about the violent, sneeringly-entitled nobleman Moxica (played by Michael Wincott) is that he doesn't have a mustache to twirl along with his Slayer-worthy flowing black hair. And Sigourney Weaver, playing Queen Isabella, has so little to work with that she mostly looks lost.

Finally, a lot of the film is hard to take seriously. Consider the scene in which a fist fight breaks out in a monastery; or the hurricane sequence, during which Columbus' native translator runs away after admonishing him, "You never learned my language;" or practically every scene involving Moxica or the sinister judge Bobadilla (Mark Margolis). 1492 tried to be the definitive Columbus movie, but the best it could manage was to be the best Columbus movie of 1992, and since the competition was Christopher Columbus: The Discovery, that's nothing to write home about.

The fallout: 1492: Conquest of Paradise failed with critics and bombed at the box office, and Scott floundered for the rest of the decade before he came roaring back with 2000's Best Picture Oscar-winner Gladiator. His most recent film, American Gangster, is currently in theatres.

— Paul Clark