The Screengrab : vincent gallo

Trailer Review: Tetro

Paul Clark — Wed, 06 May 2009 16:00:00 GMT

The popular line on Francis Ford Coppola is that after directing four of the most important films of the seventies, his career hit the skids in the wake of his Zoetrope Studios failure, and he’s never quite recovered. But while it’s hard to deny that he’s never lived up to his seventies salad days, he’s still capable of crafting fascinating and beautiful work. Most of his best middle- and late-period films (One From the Heart and Tucker, to name two) are highly stylized films that hearken back to classical Hollywood traditions, and based on this trailer, I’d say that Tetro finds Coppola up to that same game. One thing I particularly love about this trailer is how is introduces the themes of the film while revealing little about the plot, aside from the two brothers (the older one played by Vincent Gallo) and the long shadow cast by their father. Plus, it looks bloody gorgeous. Yeah, it could turn out to be another Youth Without Youth, but I’d rather have the Coppola who made that ambitious mess than the one who made Jack, thank you very much.

Video of the Day: Coppola on “Tetro”

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 20:30:00 GMT

According to Screen Daily, American Zoetrope will self-release Francis Ford Coppola’s Tetro on June 11. Today Coppola launched a website for Tetro, which he not only directed but wrote; it’s his first original screenplay since The Conversation in 1974. “The story tells of two brothers, of family lost and found, and the conflicts and tragedies within a highly creative Argentine-Italian family. Vincent Gallo stars in the title role alongside Maribel Verdu, Klaus Maria Brandauer, Carmen Maura and newcomer Alden Ehrenreich.”

Content on the website is scarce so far, but Coppola did self-direct a video introduction, which offers a little insight on the film and a few unfortunate angles accentuating the maestro’s chins and nostrils. Enjoy!

Smells Like Indie Spirit: Our Favorite Sundance Films Of All Time (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 21:30:00 GMT

BUFFALO 66 (1998)

At some point in the recent past, we here at the Screengrab compiled a list of our guiltiest pleasures, and one of mine was The Brown Bunny, which I pretty much only wanted to see because of the notorious...uh...love scene between director/star Vincent Gallo and his co-star (and former paramour) Chloe Sevigny. Such a prurient interest is sad on two levels: first, that a grown, married man would rent a movie just to watch a quasi-famous actress get busy with an allegedly prosthetic schwanzstucker...but secondly that Gallo’s sophomore directorial effort would have so little else going for it after the flat-out brilliance of Buffalo 66. Starring as an ex-con loser who kidnaps a bored teen (Christina Ricci) in hopes of passing her off as his wife in a doomed effort to impress his hateful parents (Ben Gazzara and Anjelica Huston), Gallo's Billy Brown is all jittery desperation and hostile self-loathing...yet somehow, by the end of the movie, you’re rooting for both the character and the director, while the grim, hellish landscape of upstate New York in winter (a perfect reflection of the protagonist’s stunted isolation) has somehow blossomed with unexpected hope.

YOU CAN COUNT ON ME (2000)

Sundance, like most film festivals, has never lacked for sensitive dramatic films about dysfunctional families. This entry, which marked the film directing debut of playwright Kenneth Lonergan, stood out enough to count as a redemption of the genre. It also upped the profile of its star, Laura Linney, and all but launched the career, after some ten mostly uneventful years in movies, of Mark Ruffalo. The film won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2000 festival, and Lonergan (who himself picked up the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award) finally follows it up later this year when his second feature, Margaret, starring Anna Pacquin and Ruffalo, arrives in theaters.

AMERICAN PSYCHO (2001)

In the wake of The Blair Witch Project, Sundance slowly fell victim to that most dreaded of industry catchwords: “Buzz.” And as the fest’s spotty post-1999 reputation confirms, the most troublesome thing about encouraging and promoting buzz is that, when the buzzed-about don’t live up to their advanced billing, it’s the festival itself that suffers. Few films have ever arrived at Sundance with more early-bird hype than did Mary Harron’s American Psycho in 2001, given that, as an adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ infamous serial killer tome, its mixture of tongue-in-cheek ‘80s details and brutal violence, all wrapped up in a Kubrickian chill, seemed to make it, in the minds of many prognosticators, an “edgy” film with Fight Club-ish cult-fave potential. Such similarities, it turned out, were superficial at best. Still, American Psycho remains, eight years on, one of the few to match its lofty Sundance expectations, thanks to Christian Bale’s pitch-perfect personification of yuppiedom as a lethal mental affliction, Harron’s eerily composed, sterile direction, and a superlative murder scene set to the ominous sound of Huey Lewis and the News.

DONNIE DARKO (2001)

Every once in a blue moon, Sundance provides a platform for a truly exciting new voice, and in 2001, that was Richard Kelly, whose Donnie Darko received enthusiastic critical and audience response upon its premiere. Kelly hailed from a film-geek background but, with his debut, refused to simply indulge in name-check homages and cheesy nostalgia, instead creating an authentic sense of his ‘80s time period and suburban milieu (and the discomfort liberals felt during Michael Dukakis’ failed ’88 presidential bid), all while offering up one giant head-scratcher of a sci-fi saga involving time travel, Tears for Fears’ “Mad World,” and a menacing, knife-wielding giant rabbit who foretells news of the coming apocalypse to Donnie (Jake Gyllenhaal). As assured as it is beguiling, Donnie Darko, like Christopher Nolan’s Memento (which preceded it by a year), is a genre piece that rewards and, in certain respects, requires repeat viewings to unlock its twisted chronological mysteries, something that can’t, unfortunately, be said of Kelly’s follow-up Southland Tales. Me, I say come for the mystery, stay for the entrancing atmosphere of doomed-teen-romanticism.

SUPER TROOPERS (2001)

Broken Lizard, the comedy troupe behind Super Troopers, Club Dread (2004) and Beerfest (2006), is a decidedly hit-or-miss outfit, inspired one moment and flat the next. That description certainly applies to their debut about a group of misfit-slacker state troopers, which first screened at Sundance 2001 and amounts to a series of gags that range from the brilliant to the dreary. If the latter slightly outnumber the former, however, they don’t overshadow them, thanks in part to some inspired casting – how Broken Lizard convinced serious thesp Brian Cox to participate in such inanity remains baffling – that energizes the film’s humor. But moreover, Super Troopers thrives thanks to its pièce-de-résistance involving a couple of troopers pulling over a speeding car in which the backseat teenage passenger, in an effort to avoid arrest and prosecution, has engulfed a giant bag of marijuana. The bizarre incident that follows is dim-witted goofiness of a virtuosic variety, delivering a hilarious high so powerful that it carries one through quite a bit of ensuing patchiness.

Click Here For Part One, Three, Four & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Nick Schager

Screengrab's Top Guilty Pleasures (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 21:00:00 GMT

So, we’ve just survived a teeth-grindingly suspenseful presidential election, and now we’re entering the prestigious “serious film” season of Academy Award predictions and Best of 2008 lists...but in between all the high-minded political rhetoric and contemplations of quality cinema, Screengrab’s chief pollster and trailer-meister Paul Clark thought it might be a good idea for us to get down off our high horses for a week and reveal the movies we’re REALLY watching on our laptops when we SHOULD be dissecting the eschatological subtext of Synecdoche, New York.

Yes, I’m talking about Guilty Pleasures...NOT the overlooked indie gems we totally “get” because we’re smarter than everyone else, NOT the films that were unfairly maligned by the philistines in the mainstream media, but rather the truly flawed and disreputable movies we’re downright embarrassed to admit we kinda like.

So, c'mon, fess up...I’ll show you mine if you show me yours, as we here at the Screengrab reluctantly reveal our ALL-TIME GUILTIEST PLEASURES!

ANDREW OSBORNE’S GUILTY PLEASURES:

Okay, so to get this shame spiral spinning, I figured I’d go ahead and rank my unmentionables from least embarrassing to most indefensible, starting with...

5. MEATBALLS (1979)

So, okay, maybe this one isn’t so bad. Sure, the Animal House-lite Bill Murray vehicle doesn’t really try very hard (while at the same time occasionally trying too hard)...but you know what? It just doesn’t matter. Sure, it’s painfully sincere in its sweetness, and not as remotely hep or ironically detached as, say, Wet, Hot, American Summer...but it just doesn’t matter! Sure, it’s not as highly regarded a “slobs vs. snobs” comedy as Caddyshack (which I never really dug as much as my friends anyway), and, true, it spawned a series of truly horrible sequels...but it just doesn’t matter! IT JUST DOESN’T MATTER! IT JUST DOESN’T MATTER!!! Indeed, that rousing Camp North Star "doesn't matter" chant became my very own motivational Geek Creed throughout high school and college, and while my classmates were rockin’ out to Foreigner, Rush and Zeppelin, I was singing along to the Meatballs soundtrack LP (featuring the “hit” single “Makin’ It”), and to this day I still know all the words to the “Counselor in Training” campfire song (“We are the CITs so pity us...”) -- but for me, the most embarrassing thing about this particular guilty pleasure was how much I yearned (and still yearn) for the simple niceness and camaraderie of its summer camp world (as opposed to the mean, boring streets of reality), and also the extent to which I subsequently modeled my adolescent behavior on Murray’s cool jerk class clown self-assurance in a desperate attempt to hide the full extent of my own breathtaking dorkiness.

4. GUMMO (1997)

There’s a lot of guilt (and guilt-by-association) just being a Harmony Korine fan in the first place. Admit to liking Kids, for example, and people automatically assume you’re some kind of disgusting pervert who actually thinks sexy teenage girls are sexy. Whereas liking Gummo just makes you look crazy: many critics and viewers reacted to Korine’s ugly, plotless, mess of a movie with boredom, confusion or flat-out hostility, and according to Wikipedia, during the film’s premiere at the Telluride Film Festival, “numerous people got up and left during the initial cat drowning sequence.” And, honestly, I can’t blame them. In many ways, Gummo is completely indefensible: it’s not exactly entertaining, it’s not really about anything and it’s hard to argue with people who find it pretentious or, in the words of film critic Ken Hanke, “the vilest waste of two hours of my life.” It’s not a movie I’d normally recommend to anyone...unless you’re the kind of person who's spent a little time in the kind of aimless trailer park wonderland where beating the everlovin’ shit out of a helpless chair makes for a good-time Saturday night. As for myself, I was only ever a dilettante visitor to the type of world Gummo portrays in its artily artless depiction of a fictionalized Xenia, Ohio – a town where the “Pets or Meat” lady from Roger & Me or the “Coven” crew from American Movie might feel right at home – and like those films, it’s easy for viewers to find themselves wondering if Korine is depicting offbeat humanity for its own sake or merely exploiting his subjects (a combination of real people and slumming actors like Chloë Sevigny) as “white trash” art objects (or both). Yet just by questioning whether you are or should be judging, say, the feral kid in the pink bunny ears or the widowed mother tap-dancing in her disaster area basement to get a smile out of her grim-faced son, you’ve instantly become more self-conscious than any of the characters you’re watching...hence the guilt.

3. THE BROWN BUNNY (2004)

And speaking of pretentious art films starring Chloë Sevigny...this one’s a major source of guilt, and I haven’t even SEEN it yet. The Brown Bunny’s been lingering on my Netflix queue for two years now, partly because I’m too embarrassed to just move it to the top and be done with it. Don’t get me wrong: though I’m perfectly willing to believe Vincent Gallo lives up to his reputation as an arrogant pain in the ass, I also thought his auteurial debut Buffalo ’66 was flat-out brilliant, and so I’m willing to believe there’s some merit in his follow-up effort, even though most reviewers (including, famously, Roger Ebert) have condemned The Brown Bunny as 93-118 minutes (depending on the cut) of shameless, tedious navel-gazing with all the entertainment value of, well, a long, boring road trip with Vincent Gallo (though Ebert did later amend his original harsh review after seeing the shorter cut). I suppose the potential boredom factor is the main reason I’ve never quite gotten around to watching the movie...yet it nevertheless remains in my queue month after month, year after year for pretty much the only reason most people have ever heard of The Brown Bunny: the infamous scene near the end where Sevigny blows Gallo on camera. Never mind my wife’s perfectly good question about why on earth I would ever want to see Gallo’s icky gnarled penis. Never mind reports I’ve had from reliable sources that the fellatio is totally faux anyway, and real or not it’s one of the least erotic sex scenes in the history of cinema...I just can’t help it: when it comes to the perverse American fascination with celebrities engaged in real (or even simulated) sex acts, I’m guilty as charged.

2. CAMP (2003)

And now things get really embarrassing. Like the teen drama geeks of its titular summer theater retreat, Camp is homely, dorky, amateurish and way too earnest for its own good...but also sweetly charming and downright irresistible to a fellow drama geek like me. Despite increasingly hostile and exasperated reactions from my loved ones, the "Turkey Lurkey" production number from the movie's super-peppy soundtrack was my holiday theme song for 2003...and, as if it’s not embarrassing enough to own the Camp soundtrack (including a musical theater version of Todd Rundgren’s “The Want of A Nail” you’ll often see me belting at the top of my lungs in traffic whenever my wife’s not in the car...yes, that’s right, I said wife...I am, indeed, a closeted heterosexual), I actually went back for a second dose of inexcusable pep and summer camp geekery (are we beginning to see a pattern here?) when Alexandra Shiva directed a documentary called Stagedoor about the real Catskills inspiration for the Camp camp, featuring a counselor named Jeff Murphy who just so happens to be one of the stars of my own “hey, gang, let’s put on a show!” indie film directorial debut (and fantastic stocking stuffer!), Apocalypse Bop (featuring the Screengrab’s very own Scott Von Doviak)!!!

And finally, my deepest shame...

1. ST. ELMO’S FIRE (1985)

Good Lord. What can I say? There’s so much to hate about Joel Schumacher’s 1985 Brat Pack circle jerk I don’t even know where to begin. Leonard Pierce has gone on record with his belief that Andie Macdowell is just about the worst actress ever committed to celluloid, and she’s just a co-star here, sharing the screen with the quivering lips of Andrew McCarthy, the flaring nostrils of Judd Nelson and Demi Moore in full effect. For those who could barely stomach Friends, St. Elmo’s Fire is a thousand times worse, chronicling as it does the loves and lives of six bland white yuppies as they struggle to become even more rich and privileged. Oh, wait, except for Rob Lowe, who’s the sax-playing pretty boy “rebel,” who’s saddled with all the very worst of the film’s terrible, terrible frat-douche dialogue (“It ain’t a party ‘til something gets broken,” “I suppose a blow job’s out of the question,” etc.). Even as a teenager, I cringed at Demi Moore’s gay stereotype buddy and the fact that the only black character in a movie full of smug whites is an icky black streetwalker (who McCarthy’s struggling writer character raps with ‘cuz he’s such a man of, y’know, “the people”). Yet despite all the movie’s glaring flaws, it remains my Guiltiest Pleasure. I even like the godawful John Parr title song (a.k.a. “Man In Motion”). Why? I can only plead nostalgia on this one. I was and remain a sucker for movies like The Big Chill or Dazed and Confused that feature romanticized groups of witty friends hanging around and kvetching about their problems...and St. Elmo’s Fire featured Nelson, Ally Sheedy and Emilio Estevez in a mini-reunion from one of the all-time classics of the genre, The Breakfast Club (released earlier the same year), coinciding, as it happened, with my own transition from high school to college (and all the attendant coming-of-age melodrama thus implied), when lines like, “We're all going through this, it's our time at the edge,” were a soothing balm to my sheltered teenage soul. Aaaahhh-booogeda-booogeda-booogeda, ha, ha, ha!

Click Here For More Guilt From Scott Von Doviak, Leonard Pierce, Hayden Childs, Vadim Rizov & Sarah Clyne Sundberg

Contributor: Andrew Osborne

Mickey Rourke Gets Up Off the Canvas

Phil Nugent — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 15:00:00 GMT

As the opening of the New York Film Festival draws near and with it, the American premiere of Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler, Scott Foundas checks in with the movie's star, Mickey Rourke. Given the reception to Aronofsky's last movie, The Fountain, his new one (which won the Best Film prize at the recent Venice Film Festival) would qualify as a back-from-the-dead comeback even if it starred Michael Phelps, but the fact that it's a Mickey Rourke movie--the first time that Rourke has claimed the starring role in a full-length, non-multiple-story movie in many a moon--makes it even bigger news. Looking back to his early days, when he moved from Miami to New York with an itch to act, Rourke recalls, ""I wanted to be like Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Chris Walken, and Harvey Keitel. I wanted to be a really great actor. And if I worked really, really fucking hard, maybe one day I could do that. And I worked really, really hard. I had no social life. I lived like a monk. For weeks on end, I slept on the couch at the Actors Studio, working on scenes nonstop." And when he followed up his scene-stealing small role as an arsonist named Teddy in Body Heat with his performance as the overgrown tomcat Boogie in the ensemble picture Diner, a lot of people were very impressed with his charisma, his seductiveness, his "look into my eyes" audience rapport, and his ability to overcome playing characters with really dopey names. Thinking back on what happened next, Rourke says, "I look at these guys like Matt Damon, George Clooney, Sean Penn—they're all very bright, educated guys who understand that it's a business and there's politics involved. I wasn't educated or aware enough. I thought I was so good I didn't have to play the game. And I was terribly wrong."

Here, as in his other post-crash interviews, Rourke is admirable in his insistence on blaming himself for screwing up his career. Still, talk of office politics can scarcely convey how weirdly Rourke began to handle himself, and to style himself, as soon as he began to get a little control over his movie roles. In such horndog entertainments as 9 1/2 Weeks and Wild Orchid, he seemed to be trying to prove that, given the right wardrobe, leading ladies, and exotic locales, even a Miami boy could qualify as Eurotrash. In Angel Heart and Barfly, he continued to bang away at his female co-stars like a screen door during a typhoon, while also demonstrating his "authenticity" as a manly Method actor by reporting to work looking as if he'd been tied to the back bumper of a jeep and dragged through a swamp. All this time, he was living far beyond his means and turning down roles in movies that might have made his status in Hollywood a lot sturdier. Meanwhile, stories about his unmanageable behavior on the set and the storm surrounding his on-again, off-again marriage to his Wild Orchid co-star Carre' Otis (who accused, and then non-accused him, of spousal abuse) were helping to turn him into a joke. Rourke dates the point of no return to his decision to co-star with Don Johnson in the 1991 Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man. The movie was a critically derided bomb, and for once Rourke, who had done it because he desperately needed the money, couldn't claim to have had any grand artistic hopes for the finished product. "They paid me a lot of money, and I went fuckin' bonkers because I sold out and I hated myself for it. Some kind of anger kicked off, about the fact that I'd put myself in a position to have to do that movie. The demons took over." Rourke's sense of shame over having done the kind of movie that most stars routinely laugh off drove him to abandon acting for several years and take up professional boxing, a sport he had practiced as an amateur back in the early seventies. (Although Rourke remains vague about his age, he must have been around forty when he climbed back into the ring.) Eventually he started shopping around for movie roles again, having concluded a physical testing that one hopes did more good for his soul than it did for his face. He was very funny as a self-pampering, sleazeball lawyer in Francis Ford Coppola's adaptation of the John Grisham thriller The Rainmaker. He worked a long time filming a good-sized role in Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line, but sadly, his whole performance was edited out of the movie. He played the villain in the Tsui Hark film Double Team, which co-starred Jean Claude Van Damme and Dennis Rodman, but sadly, his performance stayed in the movie.

Rourke's real salvation came from fellow actors who, when they took their own turns directing movies, reached out to him as a worthy brother in need. In small roles as a bookie in Vincent Gallo's Buffalo 66, as a prison drag queen in Steve Buscemi's Animal Factory, and as a man who can't get past his daughter's murder in Sean Penn's The Pledge, Rourke was given the chance to demonstrate both his range and, especially in the Penn film, his daring willingness to go very deep emotionally while remaining handsomely in control of his effects as an actor. In 1994, Rourke had been too occupied with boxing to say yes when Quentin Tarantino invited him to play the Bruce Willis part in Pulp Fiction. Now, Tarntino's sidekick Robert Rodriguez cast him in a small role in Once Upon a Time in Mexico and then in a biggerm, showier (and CGI-augmented) one in Sin City, a movie whose most awesome special effect was Rourke's ability to make his presence felt through all that latex and computer trickery. But in the eyes of the suits, he was still unbankable and probably insurable.

But Aronofsky and his screenwriter, Robert D. Siegel, had planned The Wrestler with Rourke in mind, and when Rourke agreed to meet the director, Aronofsky gave him what sounds like one hell of a pep talk. As Rourke describes it, "He sits down, and for the first five minutes, he tells me how I fucked up my whole career for 15 years behaving like this, and I'm agreeing with everything. Yes, I did. That's why I haven't worked for 15 years, and I've been working real hard not to make those mistakes... He goes: 'You have to listen to everything I say. You have to do everything I tell you. You can never disrespect me. And you can't be hanging out at the clubs all night long. And I can't pay you.' And I'm thinking: 'This fucker must be talented, because he's got a lot of nerve to say that.' " But Aronofsky discovered that he couldn't get the movie funded without a big star, and when Rourke was told that he was going to be out of the picture, part of him was relieved, ""because I knew that Darren wanted me to revisit these dark places, these painful places." Then suddenly, he was back in again. If Rourke had any complaints about the resulting collaboration, he's keeping them to himself. "He knew how to push my buttons," he says of Aronofsky. "I do a take, and I nail it. I look over at Darren and I think: 'OK, we're moving on.' And he walks over to me and says: 'Do it better.' And you know what surprised me? I did it again, and I did it better. He knew that if he challenged me, that's what I wanted. A lot of people don't like that; me, I need it."

Coming Soon: A Screengrab Salute To Movie Trailers (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 21:00:00 GMT

The fake trailers from TROPIC THUNDER (2008), GRINDHOUSE (2007) & KENTUCKY FRIED MOVIE (1977)

Of course, no tribute to the art of coming attraction trailers would be complete without a nod to the art of FAKE coming attraction trailers. Tropic Thunder recently delighted many and outraged some with its fake preview for Simple Jack, a dead-on parody of the odious, manipulative genre of faux-inspirational retar...I mean, “mentally challenged”-sploitation potboilers like I Am Sam. And last year, the interstitial glimpses of fictional schlock classics like Machete, Thanksgiving, Werewolf Women of the SS and Don’t (by Robert Rodriguez and cameo directors Eli Roth, Rob Zombie and Edgar Wright, respectively) were the best reasons to sit through the entire 191-minute cut of Grindhouse in one sitting. But perhaps the granddaddy (or granddaughter?) of all fake trailers is the "teaser" for Catholic High School Girls In Trouble, one of the definite hits in John Landis’ hit-or-miss cult classic, Kentucky Fried Movie (but, uh, you might not wanna watch this one at work).

The trailer for BUFFALO ’66 (1998)

Whether you love him or hate him, you have to agree that Vincent Gallo doesn’t make ordinary movies. Gallo’s taste for the strange extended to his trailer for his first directorial effort, Buffalo ’66. Cut by Gallo himself, the trailer is a montage of still images from the film, set to the opening passages of Yes’ “Heart of the Sunrise.” As a montage it’s pretty irresistible, with the percussive cutting matching the rhythm of the song, down to the way Gallo animates the stills of Anjelica Huston gesticulating at the dinner table. But what makes this trailer even cooler is that it’s one of the few that show more or less everything in the movie without giving it away. We see the characters, the style, the grey and dingy setting, but we’re wondering how it all fits together. And thanks to how well Gallo sells it, we can’t wait to find out.

The trailer for MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL (1975)

The Python boys never met a phenomenon they couldn’t satirize, so it was only natural that with the trailer for their first feature, they’d hold the art of movie advertising up to scorn. This epic three-minute spot begins with a panoramic shot that’s meant to underline the majesty of the film that’s ostensibly being advertised, accompanied by properly stentorian narration. Naturally, the boys soon pull the rug out from under this seriousness, revealing it to be merely auditions for a voiceover artist. Eventually, we end up with narration in subtitled Chinese (this at a time when studios were avoiding non-English dialogue in trailers), after which the trailer goes to work on the self-important rhetoric of studio marketing. The narrator calls the movie “run-of-the-mill” and says, “compared to something like Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, it’s all rather silly.” In addition, the editing of the trailer is reminiscent of the work of fly-by-night distributors who more or less assembled highlights from the film with little regard for coherence. But here, that’s all part of the magic, although it may be difficult to notice while you’re laughing at the trailer’s version of a rave review or the abrupt segue to an advertisement for a nearby Chinese restaurant. So few classic movies have the trailers they deserve, but Monty Python and the Holy Grail definitely does.

The trailer for COMEDIAN (2002)

When it was announced that Don “The Voice” LaFontaine had passed away, many movie lovers flashed back to this trailer, only to discover that its featured talent wasn’t LaFontaine at all, but fellow voiceover titan Hal Douglas. No matter: we’d like to think that LaFontaine would have approved of this “anti-trailer”, still the most succinct and priceless distillation of the deathless voiceover clichés that he spouted so many times over the years. But while on the surface this teaser has nothing but contempt for the inane catchphrases that get recycled by the studios, there’s also a real affection for the men whose job it is to give them authority. By giving a face to the usually faceless voiceover artist, we gain respect for him, and for the way he forges on even when he realizes that the things he’s made to say are completely absurd. As much as lines like “in a world…” have become a joke to trailer watchers, they’re also a kind of comfort, and when Douglas responds to his being fired with, “No, I like it in here,” we can’t help but think that, yes, we like you in there too.

The trailer for SLEEPER (1973)

This trailer for Woody Allen's futuristic "love story about two people who hate each other" parodies the convention by which the great filmmaker is caught by the camera crew and an unseen interviewer while busily working on his next masterpiece. The trailer itself benefits from clips drawn from one of Allen's few films to include both vivid cartoon imagery and an elegant production design. And the scenes in which Allen promises a movie "with very little overt comedy" and scenes "of a cerebral, almost didactic nature" look even funnier now, considering that they could pass as an accurate description of any of a dozen stink bombs he's made since this slapstick classic came out.

The trailer for ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND (2004)

Instead of emphasizing popular stars Kate Winslet and Jim Carrey, early promotions for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind featured supporting player Tom Wilkinson – if you knew to look for him. This teaser trailer mimicks the low-budget aesthetic of commercials for the local dentist’s office, but the service they’re offering – a selective memory erasure – is purely the stuff of Charlie Kaufman’s imagination. The poker-faced buzz campaign for Eternal Sunshine was entirely based around Lacuna, Inc., including a website with coupons.

The trailer for LITTLE CHILDREN (2006)

You can keep your big explosions and breathtaking panoramas. This trailer for Todd Field’s Little Children holds everything in, and the mounting tension – symbolized by a child’s toy train chugging through a dozen ordinary suburban moments – is almost unbearable.

The trailer for THE SHINING (1980)

Often the most memorable and effective trailers aren't those that sweat to cram in the movie's every high point and plot point but those that boil a picture down to an especially striking image and sell it in a way that sutures it to the viewer's imagination. Stanley Kubrick provided an especially choice example with this early and mysterious look at his 1980 horror movie. It consists of a single shot that turned up late in the film, tricked up here with electronic music and mechanical-sounding voices chanting "Redrum." (Did Kubrick bring in HAL 9000 to work on the soundtrack?) It appeared several months before the movie itself was released, and played briefly before being pulled in favor of a more conventional and far less disturbing trailer.

Click Here for Part One!

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Paul Clark, Phil Nugent, Gwynne Watkins

Movies Make You More Smarterer

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 17:45:00 GMT

Take heed, cinephiles! You know how the eyes of your friends and relatives tend to glaze over when you talk about your favorite movies' editing and directing style? It turns out you're not just gassing on pretentiously – you're really describing how the human brain works!

ScienceDaily reports that, according to a new scientific study carried out in Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind (no, we never heard of it either), researchers from NYU and elsewhere have discovered that not only do movies exert a powerful hold on higher brain functions, but also that the movie's style, content, editing and direction can make a considerable impact on its neurological effects.

The study, believed to be the first quantitative neuroscientific assessment of the impact of motion pictures on the human brain, was carried out using MRI scanners, inter-subject correlation analysis, and other things we dropped out of college to avoid learning about. Using a baseline of a ten-minute, unedited clip of a concert in Washington Square Park (we'd have suggested Vincent Gallo's The Brown Bunny), the researches determined that films exert a "tight grip on viewers' minds" through a "sequence of perceptual, emotional and cognitive states, which stimulate overall brain activity. In the test, highly detailed, constructed aesthetics – such as in the films of Sergio Leone and Alfred Hitchcock – engaged the minds of test subjects the most.

It's good to know all of our movie geekery over the years is actually improving our minds, but you know there had to be a downside, and here it is: according to the article, the study "may serve as a valuable method for the film industry to better assess its products, and offer a new method for exploring how the brain works." Even as we speak, someone is in a pitch meeting, explaining how the new Uwe Boll video game movie is actually an important neurological tool.

Tribeca Film Festival Review: "Mister Lonely"

Peter Smith — Thu, 01 May 2008 19:30:00 GMT

By Bryan Whitefield

By now you're probably aware that Harmony Korine's third film as director follows a Michael Jackson impersonator (Diego Luna) in Paris as he meets and follows a Marilyn Monroe look-a-like (Samantha Morton) to a castle in Scotland filled with even more people dressed as iconic figures as varied and ridiculous as Queen Elizabeth, James Dean and Abraham Lincoln. Ironically this wildly original concept is also Korine's closest attempt at a traditional narrative. That said, the bizarre but beautiful opening shot of Luna as Michael on a miniature motorcycle set in super slo-mo to the Bobby Vinton classic the title refers to is a quick reminder that Korine's films are as close to belonging at the Whitney Biennial as they are the Tribeca Film Festival.

The newly sober Korine may not rely as heavily on stunts or shock value here, but there are still several of his signature moments, including Luna's Michael entertaining a French old folks home with dance moves interspersed with chants of, "I want you to live forever! Don't die! Don't die!" There is also a pre-teen Buckwheat riding a miniature pony repeating his love for chickens and women's breasts, "They make me so hot!" But with Korine nothing is literal or necessarily related, as is the case with a strangely satisfying sub-plot with Werner Herzog as a small plane pilot who takes nuns up in the air to skydive back safely to the ground with prayer instead of parachutes. These incredibly beautiful scenes look like found footage from a Super 8 archive and further explore the idea of sublimating one's own identity for a belief in something greater than yourself.

While Luna (in his best performance to date), Morton and Denis Lavant as her Charlie Chaplin/Adolf Hitler husband are all excellent, the impersonator idea ends up a missed opportunity, with only Luna able to carry over any behavioral attributes of the celeb he emulates. A conversation between the Pope and Madonna might've been more interesting than just seeing them at a dinner table together.

Mister Lonely is easily Korine's most personal film; its themes of redemption and rebirth in some ways mirror the director's own struggle to get it made. When Diego Luna's character comes out of the Michael Jackson shell, he is seeing the world for the first time, reflecting how Korine himself might've felt with his vision finally freed from drugs. There are several moments throughout the film that confirm Korine's sharp eye for the potent and absurd in his cinema but he, like other indie auteurs (Michel Gondry, Todd Haynes and Vincent Gallo to name a few) who rely on instinct, image and impression to tell a story, fills the movie with beautifully crafted, half-finished ideas. He does however continue to make uncompromising films that have next to no concern for commercial appeal, and while the movies themselves may be uneven there is a certain joy and excitement in getting a glimpse of a filmmaker's overactive imagination almost completely unfiltered.

Francis Ford Coppola’s Sex Change Operation

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Some headlines just write themselves, you know? If that one made you throw up in your mouth a little, fear not. This isn’t a Wachowski Brothers situation, just a creative decision from the set of Tetro, Francis Ford Coppola’s follow-up to his fizzled comeback, Youth Without Youth. Per the Hollywood Reporter: “In what Francis Ford Coppola is calling a ‘sex change’ operation, Carmen Maura is replacing fellow Spaniard Javier Bardem in the family drama Tetro.” See? His words, not mine.

If the name Tetro rings a bell, you may recall an incident from last September: the computer on which Coppola had saved the screenplay was stolen from his home in Buenos Aires. Fortunately the Godfather auteur had backup copies, and production has now commenced in Argentina. “One of the important roles in the script is a mentor and teacher to Tetro (Vincent Gallo), and I originally wrote it for a man,” he said. “As I read and reread (the script), I felt that the interaction between the two characters would be far more intriguing if they were of the opposite sex.”

Other sources claim that Bardem never attended rehearsals for Tetro and “‘became unavailable’ for the project and is reading drafts of the script for his starring role in Rob Marshall's Nine.” Whatever the case, Almodovar regular Maura will now play the “literary critic and mentor to Tetro, whose younger brother (Alden Ehrenreich) searches for him in Argentina's capital city.”

Coppola has been splitting his time between the San Francisco Bay area and his new home in Buenos Aires, where he hopes to make a film a year, taking advantage of Argentina’s “relatively low production costs and the creative inspiration he finds on the streets of its capital,” according to an AP story. “After a while I realized that I was getting further and further away from what my original intentions had been. So at this age I decided, 'Well, why don't I make the kinds of films I wanted to do when I was 18? I'll just do it later in life.'” Nice work if you can get it.

Happiness: The Video Game

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 15:55:00 GMT

It used to be a novelty worth commenting on that someone would make a movie based on a video game. Now, of course, in the Uwe Boll era, it's commonplace to make a movie out of a video-game franchise; for that matter, we also have movies based on amusement-park rides, board games, and for all we know, the lunch special at the Warner Brothers studio cafeteria. Video games based on movies are likewise no big deal anymore; any franchise picture worth its salt has a console adaptation on the shelves often before the movie actually gets made, and in at least one instance — the upcoming Ghostbusters game — the console game actually stands in place of a movie sequel.

Unfortunately, as Karina Longworth points out at Spout.com, indie films are left almost entirely out of the equation. In a highly amusing piece, she points out the notable dearth of video game adaptations based on successful independent films — and suggests ways in which this problem might be rectified.

Her online MMORPG based on Todd Solondz's Happiness seems like a real winner, especially (given that similar games like World of Warcraft are massive time- and money-pits) since she proposes that "because true, lasting happiness can never be achieved, no one can ever win and the game goes on forever." We're likewise fond of the idea of a Gummo first-person shooter with an all-black-metal soundtrack. But the best idea by far is a racing game based on Vincent Gallo's The Brown Bunny where "you're the only one on the road, and when you finish the race, instead of a trophy you get an absurdly long blow job from your dead girlfriend." Someone get Prince Vince on the line — I have a feeling he'll pay for this himself.

Morning Deal Report: Ellen Page Whips It For Drew Barrymore

Peter Smith — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 16:45:00 GMT

Rumors confirmed: Ellen Page will star in Drew Barrymore's directorial debut, Whip It!. According to Variety, the film "follows the exploits of alterna-teen Bliss. . . [who finds] herself after joining a female roller derby team." Story by one "Maggie Mayhem." Yup, this sounds like an Ellen Page project all right. Ellen Page: the Winona Ryder of the '00s? Discuss.

Dario Argento is working on Giallo, "an English-language homage to the genre that made him a cult helmer." (That would be giallo, I take it.) Argento's daughter Asia costars with Ray Liotta and Vincent Gallo. Gallo plays "a solipsistic, penis-obsessed lout who makes movies." No, I made that up.

Forest Whitaker to play inspirational basketball coach.

The Ten Greatest Prosthetics in Movie History, Part 2

Peter Smith — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 21:00:00 GMT

Nicole Kidman's Nose in THE HOURS (2002)

Can a fake nose win an Oscar? Some might say it already did, when Nicole Kidman's turn as Virginia Woolf in The Hours was awarded the golden statue for Best Actress. We've got nothing against Kidman's performance in that film, but judging by the reams of press that her lightly reoriented schnozz got at the time, you'd think that it was the nose that was wearing Kidman, instead of the other way around. Of course, this was yet another award in a long series of Best Actress Oscars that went to Beautiful Women Doing Unglamorous Things — whether it was playing a tarted-up legal secretary (Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich), having sex with Billy Bob Thornton (Halle Berry in Monster's Ball) or looking like a burn victim (Charlize Theron in Monster). Which is, really, the only way we can explain Kidman's decision to use such a subtle prosthetic in the first place; it's not like the American moviegoing public had any idea what Virginia Woolf looked like in the first place.

Jeff Goldblum's Jaw, Cheeks, Eyes, His Very Fucking Being, in THE FLY (1986)

Some of us were prohibited from watching more than two hours of TV a week as children. Luckily, some of us were also latch-key kids, so naturally, whenever no one was home, we gorged, often on both food and shlocky afternoon TV movies. And those of us who were unlucky enough to see The Fly at this time didn't quite grasp the extent of our mistake until it was too late. There you are, happily eating your delivery pizza, and in the middle of a big, meaty bite, you're confronted by the spectacle of one of Brundlefly's eyes falling off, like an egg yolk dripping into batter. You assume that's the most disgusting scene they're gonna throw at you. Again, big mistake. Jeff Goldblum's Brundlefly is possibly the single most hideous, repugnant creature ever seen on film — worse than the Alien mother, worse than any other close competitor. Every negative trait of Jeff Goldblum's physiognomy is brought into stark relief onto an insect face; when it decays, we dare you to keep eating. We certainly didn't.

Penelope Cruz's Ass, VOLVER (2006)

Since her Hollywood debut, Cruz has been the poster child for foreign-born performers who aren't half as compelling in English as they are in their native tongue. Which is why her reunion with Pedro Almodovar was a cause for celebration — not only would she be working in Spanish again, but she was collaborating with a filmmaker who always brought out the best in her. But strangely enough, much of the buzz around Penelope's role in 2006's Volver focused less on the performance than around the generous fake derrière she strapped on for the role. According to Almodovar, the padded rump was necessary for the character, an earthy, hard-working mother in the Anna Magnani tradition, and this makes sense, since Penelope Cruz is lovely, but talk about bun cakes — she ain't got 'em. But then a funny thing happened. Instead of drawing undue attention to Penelope's prodigious prosthetic posterior, the hype allowed moviegoers to grow accustomed to the sight of the suddenly callipygian Cruz, much in the same way Alejandro Amenabar leaked stills of a heavily made-up Javier Bardem to the Spanish press so the public would get used to his appearance in The Sea Inside. The gimmick paid off in the end, as Cruz's full-bodied (sorry) performance made the rockin' world go 'round, garnering her unprecedented critical praise and a rare (for a foreign-language performer) Best Actress Oscar nomination. In fact, after the success of Volver, the only question that remains for Penelope Cruz's career is: how can she leave this behind?

Vincent Gallo's Penis in THE BROWN BUNNY (2003)

When people actually got around to seeing Vincent Gallo's The Brown Bunny rather than just making fun of it (which isn't to say that they stopped making fun of it afterwards, or that many people actually got around to seeing it), the scene that generated the most buzz was what is delicately referred to as "the blowjob", where Gallo's lodge pole is climbed by Chloe Sevigny, for whom one has never felt more pity. The scene's verite qualities and (literally) naked emotional power are what most people talked about, although we think they were just grateful that something was actually happening in the movie after endless shots of Gallo driving aimlessly across country. Gallo, who tends to be pretty sensitive about things like this, has always claimed that the hog in question belongs to him; French director Claire Denis, on the contrary, claims that it is an artificial wang, and that, worse yet, it isn't even Vince's artificial wang — she says he stole it off the set of her 2001 film Trouble Every Day, in which he had a large part, but not that large part. In the absence of, er, concrete evidence from Gallo, we're going to go with Claire Denis' version of events; we figure that since she's not on record as hoping Roger Ebert gets cancer for giving one of her films a bad review, she's got the moral high ground.

Gwyneth Paltrow's Body in SHALLOW HAL (2001)

Hollywood's relationship with the overweight isn't exactly a history of sensitivity and kindness. Particularly where women are concerned, the mere suggestion of being a few pounds beyond anorexic means you're virtually unemployable; and in a city where people like Christina Ricci, Drew Barrymore and Britney Spears can be attacked in the press for being fat, roles for actual human women, let alone fat women, are few and far between. When the Farrelly brothers decided to make a movie about a shallow womanizer who falls in love with a 300-pound woman to prove that he can see 'inner beauty,' they had a casting decision to make: hire two people to play Rosemary Shanahan — one a beautiful, thin Hollywood blonde, to portray Hal's perception of her, and one a genuine 300-pound actress to portray the 'real' character — or just stick Gwyneth Paltrow in a fat suit? (It didn't help the whole unpleasant aftertaste of the movie that its male lead was Jack Black, an actor who gets romantic leads despite his own flabby physique; no actress with a body like Black's would ever nail down a leading-lady part.) Perhaps it's too much to expect anything like insight from filmmakers whose reputation is built on the gross-out comedy, but the fat suit is already a ethical minefield (representing, as it does, a sort of physical proof of Hollywood's allergy to hiring anyone genuinely overweight to appear in a prominent role) without filling it with an actress who probably weighed 110 pounds soaking wet when she was filming the role.

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

Willem Dafoe's Teeth in WILD AT HEART (1990)

The whole world seems to be rotting in David Lynch's nightmare road movie, and nowhere is this clearer than in the misbegotten mouth of white-trash villain Bobby Peru, played by Willem Dafoe in full-moon mode. Unholy, irredeemable, and defiantly unflossed, Bobby Peru is meant to be the ultimate dark void awaiting the young lovers at the end of their road to nowhere, and no Satanic movie character ever displayed a less welcoming smile. Perverse to the end, the still-smiling Bobby finally slides a shotgun beneath his chin and blows his own head off, after which the part of his body above the gum line must have felt a certain amount of relief.

Goldie Hawn's Fat in DEATH BECOMES HER (1992)

In this special-effects comedy, Goldie Hawn and Meryl Streep play lifelong rivals who achieve "undead" immortality and spend the rest of the movie blowing holes in each other, twisting each other's necks into pretzels, knocking their heads into their chest cavities, and generally behaving as if Chuck Jones were their stunt coordinator. But the most effective physical mutation in the picture may come when Hawn slips into an old-fashioned fat suit and layers of latex makeup to depict her character's depressive obesity after Streep has waltzed off with her fiancee. Nothing in the movie is funnier than Hawn's expression of malicious satisfaction, with her features sunk deep in the mass of her cream puff head, as she imagines raining destruction down on her gal pal. At the time, Hawn was forty-six years old and had spent a quarter of a century doing her damndest to hang onto the body and mannerisms of a teenage girl. Maybe she felt wickedly giddy at even pretending to have let herself go.

Dennis Hopper's False Leg in RIVER'S EDGE (1987)

Dennis Hopper, fresh from his comeback in Blue Velvet, lays claim to the being the counterculture's answer to Walter Brennan in this generation-gap study of alienated youth. John Heard made a good grab for the position in Cutter's Way, where he staggered around pretending to be one-legged and wore an eye patch to boot, but that was nothing compared to what you get when you equip Hopper with an artificial leg, an inflatable sex doll, and the name "Feck", and sit back to watch him rock. When Hopper, who deals dope to the local teenagers, sits down to remove his false leg, it symbolizes the loss of his own youthful innocence and the disconnect between the older characters and the young people, which is fed by their use of his own product. Or something like that. And did we mention that his character's name is Feck!?

— Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Vadim Rizov