The Screengrab : wong kar wai

DVD Digest for March 3, 2009

Paul Clark — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 15:00:00 GMT

I’ll be reviewing this week’s most notable DVD in a separate post later this morning, but for now here’s a list of this week’s other major releases.

This week’s list of recent releases coming to DVD is looking pretty paltry, with the highest-profile new arrivals being Baz Luhrmann’s Australia (Fox, also Blu-Ray) and (ugh) Beverly Hills Chihuahua (Disney, also Blu-Ray). Also this week is Kristin Scott Thomas in I’ve Loved You So Long (Sony, also Blu-Ray) and Bertrand Tavernier’s long-delayed In the Electric Mist (Image, also Blu-Ray). And, just in time to be tied in with the release of the big-screen blockbuster, Watchmen: The Complete Motion Comic (Warner, also Blu-Ray), which got reviewed here by former Screengrabber Kent Beeson.

Aside from the subject of my DVD review later on, this week’s most notable classic release is Wong Kar-wai’s Ashes of Time Redux (Sony). Likewise, not much in the way of TV on DVD, with the biggest-ticket item being ER Season 10 (Warner).

Finally, in Blu-Ray only releases, this week brings Brokeback Mountain (Universal) and The Silence of the Lambs (MGM).

DVD Digest for December 16, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 15:00:00 GMT

One of this holiday season’s most in-demand gifts is sure to be a shiny new Blu-Ray player to go along with the mess of HDTVs that have flooded the market (what economic crisis?). Consequently, this week’s DVD Digest is heavy on Blu-Ray DVDs in titles both old and new, to serve as last-minute impulse buys for movie lovers of all stripes.

DVD of the Week: With all the new Blu-Rays that have hit stores lately, it seems only fitting that this week’s DVD of the Week be the first wave of Blu-Ray releases from everyone’s favorite DVD company, The Criterion Collection. Earlier this year, Criterion announced just over a dozen upcoming Blu-Ray titles, and today will bring four of them. Two are will be Blu-Ray editions of titles that were recently released by Criterion on standard DVD- Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express and Wes Anderson’s debut feature Bottle Rocket. But no less notable are the Blu-Ray releases of two old favorites from the Criterion vault, Carol Reed’s immortal The Third Man and Nicolas Roeg’s SF classic The Man Who Fell to Earth. As is the case with virtually all Criterion releases, the new Blu-Rays contain many special features, and the increased definition and sharpness that’s possible with Blu-Ray will undoubtedly make the films themselves look better than ever (Third Man and Chungking should be particularly eye-popping). If you own a Blu-Ray player and you don’t plan to buy at least a couple of these, you don’t have much business calling yourself a movie lover…

… In which case, you’ll probably be more inclined to purchase one of the other Blu-Rays that are hitting stores today. Paramount is releasing a quartet of their comedies- Hot Rod, Old School, The Heartbreak Kid, and the ever popular “Holy Schnike!” edition of Tommy Boy- along with the strange double feature of Coach Carter and Into the Wild, all in Blu-Ray only. And Fox is answering Paramount’s challenge rather feebly, releasing only Uwe Boll’s In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale in response. Gonna have to try harder than that, guys.

This week’s recent releases on DVD are highlighted by two late-summer hits that scratch some very different itches. On the one hand, you could watch the Golden Globe-nominated ABBA musical Mamma Mia! (Universal, also Blu-Ray). On the other, you could take a gander at The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (Universal, also Blu-Ray), the latest in Universal’s effects-heavy franchise.

Heck, practically the only new DVD release not to be coming out in Blu-Ray this week is the acclaimed series Generation Kill (HBO). And while I won’t hold the lack of a Blu-Ray edition against the show, it nonetheless feels like the DVD-release version of bringing a knife to a gunfight. Unless, of course, you don’t have a Blu-Ray player in the first place, in which case the point is moot.

DVD Digest for November 25, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 15:00:00 GMT

This week, a surprisingly small selection leading into the so-called “biggest shopping day of the year.”

Recent releases coming to DVD include Will Smith and Charlize Theron in Hancock (Sony, also Blu-Ray), Vince Vaughn making a grab for your Christmas cash in Fred Claus (Warner, also Blu-Ray), Eddie Murphy inside Eddie Murphy in Meet Dave (Fox, also Blu-Ray), and Andy Samberg going from talking to animals as Mark Wahlberg to playing a talking animal himself in Space Chimps (Warner, also Blu-Ray).

In classics this week, Criterion releases two seminal nineties films, Wes Anderson’s debut effort Bottle Rocket and Wong Kar-wai’s awesome and Tarantino-approved Chungking Express. But don’t fret, Blu-Ray fans- they’ll be coming out in that format in December, so don’t cross them off the Christmas list.

In TV on DVD, this week brings the season-bridging special 24: Redemption (Fox), plus everyone’s fake wingnut in A Colbert Christmas: The Greatest Gift of All (Paramount).

Finally, this week’s Blu-Ray only releases are a Jamie Foxx double feature, Jarhead and The Kingdom (both Universal).

Honorable Mention: The Top Leading Ladies of All Time (Part Eight)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 23:30:00 GMT

DREW BARRYMORE (1975 - )

As inspiring figures go, Barrymore pulls double duty by proving that it's possible to be both a Barrymore and a former child star and still not go tragically off the rails, even though the attractions of the grape are not unknown to her. (Lindsay! We know you read this feature religiously! Put down that bottle and pull over to the side of the road and take some notes!) She made her film debut at five in the aptly titled Altered States; two years later, E.T. the Extra-terrestrial made her a household name and led to her becoming the youngest-ever host of Saturday Night Live, a record that I hope is still in her name: I'm too afraid to check to see who might have broken it since. After an early spell (she was barely in her teens) as a tabloid star with stints in and out of rehab, Barrymore's mature career began with her attention-getting bad girl performance in the 1992 Poison Ivy, in which she played the jailbait from hell. Her work in that film was highly creditable, but it soon became clear that she wasn't really cut out to be playing mean girls: she was just too damned lovable. Since then, she's contributed her glow to such offbeat projects as Guncrazy, Home Fries, and Donnie Darko, which was partly financed by Flower Films, the company she co-founded in 1999, and which has produced such vehicles as Never Been Kissed and the Charlie's Angels films. Her charitable endeavors extend to many of her romantic comedies: she has convincingly simulated a yearning interest in such male co-stars as Adam Sandler (twice!), Jimmy Fallon, and Tom Green. (Let's not go there.) Barrymore has the potential to be a major dramatic actress, as has been most clearly demonstrated by her remarkable turn as a girl whose life is twisted out of shape by a pregnancy born of a mercy fuck (with Steve Zahn), but in the meantime, in fluffy comedies and talk show appearances, she continues to do the great work that it sometimes seems that she, alone of all the actresses in Hollywood, is fully capable of doing: she gives cuteness a good name.

CLAUDIA CARDINALE (1938 - )

You might have noticed that the first clip is in Italian sans subtitles. But I make no apologies for including it! Still, I love you, dear Screengrab reader, almost as much as I love Claudia Cardinale, so there’s a second clip, this time with subtitles, of Ms. Cardinale being charming. Now here’s an amazing fact: both of these films (The Leopard and 8 1/2, that is) are from the same year. You might have noticed that Cardinale is one of the most beautiful women to grace the big screen. You might have noticed that these clips are from two of the finest films in Italian cinema. You are quite observant!

GENEVIEVE BUJOLD (1942 - )

Bujold got her first big break co-starring with Yves Montand in Alain Resnais's La Guerre est Finie; that movie opened up possibilities in French films that she spurned to star in two godawful independent Canadian productions, Isabel and The Act of the Heart, that were directed by filmmaker and jackass Paul Almond, to whom she was married from 1967 to 1973. This detail set the tone for much of her career: a great actress with the ability to make direct contact with an audience, Bujold spent the seventies being courted by Hollywood studios and touted in the press as a big star in the making, but she kept slipping away from the bonds of real fame by her insistence on doing the roles she wanted to do. (One big exception was Earthquake, in which she played Charlton Heston's girlfriend as part of the settlement of a lawsuit filed by Universal Pictures for breach of contract.) During her ingenue period, she won an Academy Award nomination for playing Anne Boleyn to Richard Burton's Henry VIII in her first U.S. picture, Anne of the Thousand Days (1969), then slipped away to Greece to contribute a stunning cameo as Cassandra in the Michael Cacoyannis film of The Trojan Women (1971), had a freak-out scene for the ages in Brian De Palma's Obsession (1976), and came as close as she would ever come to mainstream stardom in Michael Crichton's Coma (1978). In her mature-actress period, she stirred strange longings in Clint Eastwood in Tightrope (1984), stirred even stranger ones in Jeremy Irons in Dead Ringers (1988), and introduced some experience and earthiness to Alan Rudolph's soap-bubble worlds in Choose Me (1984), Trouble in Mind (1985), and The Moderns (1988). It's been a while since she was in anything that anybody saw, but she is never to be counted out and it's good to know that she's still out there, waiting for some young hotshot director who isn't afraid of writing a part for a strong woman to do himself a favor.

MAGGIE CHEUNG (1964 - )

Born in Hong Kong, Cheung later moved with her family to the U.K. when she was eight, which accounts for the British accent with which she spoke her English dialogue in the French film Irma Vep (1996), directed by her sometime husband Olivier Assayas. Her dry, witty performance in that movie as some version of herself, politely standing around between takes on a movie set while an assistant with a spray bottle applies the right sheen to her shiny black cat suit, was a measure of how far she'd come since her early days in movies: a former model and First Runner-Up in the Miss Hong Kong beauty contest (who beat her? who the fuck beat her!?), Cheung can be seen not doing much besides looking damned good in a number of HK films, including such Jackie Chan classics as Police Story and Project A Part II. Cheung has given credit for her emergence as an actress to Wong Kar-wei, master of all things beautiful, who brought her out in As Tears Go By and later used her in Days of Being Wild, Ashes of Time, In the Mood for Love, and 2046. While developing her talent, Cheung has also managed to maintain a presence in the Hong Kong action-fantasy cinema, co-starring in such films as The Heroic Trio and Green Snake; both strands of her career came together triumphantly in Zhang Yimou's Hero, where she kicked ass and broke hearts with the best of them. She gave her finest dramatic performance to date in her most recent film, Assayas's Clean, for which she won the Best Actress prize at Cannes. She has since announced that she's quitting acting to concentrate on her music. Her fans can be forgiven for hoping that she eventually finds composing to be insufficiently gratifying to her ego and comes slouching back.

MIA FARROW (1945)

The daughter of film director John Farrow (The Big Clock) and actress and Tarzan main squeeze Maureen O'Sullivan, Farrow burst into the late '60s with a waif-like quality that, married to her china doll features, was at its best sexily androgynous and at its not-best borderline elfin. She became a star from her role in the TV series Peyton Place, which she quit at the behest of her new husband, Frank Sinatra; she then blew off the marriage to Sinatra by refusing to give up her starring role in Rosemary's Baby. That movie made her an even bigger star, but it also raised the possibility that she might wind up being exploited in picture after picture as the most defenselessly threatenable potential victim since the days of silent melodrama. Perhaps alert to this danger, she spent most of the next ten years alternating between very bad choices (Secret Ceremony, The Great Gatsby) and, so far as a movie career was concerned, making no choices at all. In 1978, she appeared as a member of ensemble casts in Robert Altman's A Wedding and the Agatha Christie film Death on the Nile and, in both, revealed a new eagerness to subvert audience's sympathetic expectations of her and to use her own weirdness for comic effect. It wasn't long after that she took up with Woody Allen, and starting with 1982's A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy, embarked on a ten-year stretch where she appeared almost exclusively in his movies. In the best of them, he examined every angle from which she could be charming, and she has him to thank for having broadened and solidified her enduring screen image. There's a whole lot of other stuff he did for which she has not been inclined to thank him, and when their professional and personal relationships both ended with an abrupt thud around the time of the release of 1992's Husbands and Wives, she hurtled out of his orbit and latched onto supporting roles in other people's movies with what looked an awful lot like relief. From the first of her post-Woody movies, John Irvin's Widow's Peak (1994) to the most recent, Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind, she can generally be counted on to serve as a delightful addition to any project that is salvageable and as something fascinatingly odd in any project that isn't. Last year, Time magazine named her as one of the world's most influential people for her various humanitarian endeavors.

DIANE KEATON (1946 - )

Keaton's warmth and talent, and her special ability to make neurosis seem cuddly, made her everybody's favorite screen comedienne in the seventies, when she starred with her off-screen partner Woody Allen in Play It Again, Sam, Sleeper (where she did a mean Brando impression), Love and Death, Manhattan, and of course, Annie Hall, which made her not just a star but a zeitgeist figure. Although she's kept working since that peak -- unlike other actresses, such as Jill Clayburgh, who seemed to embody something very much of the moment for, well, a moment -- there's a sense that Keaton doesn't really get her full due, maybe because her moment is supposed to have passed. (She's always criticized for being too "contemporary" when she plays period roles, even though she's been brilliant in such movies as Mrs. Soffel, where she springs Mel Gibson from a Pittsburgh jail at the turn of the century, and, of course, Reds.) Even when her career was red-hot after her Oscar win for Best Actress in Annie Hall, her success in comedy and the relative dullness of her role in the Godfather movies led to a false impression that she's a funny woman wasted in heavy drama. This may have led to her being overpraised for her work in the strident Looking for Mr. Goodbar, which came out the same year as Annie Hall, but it also cost her full recognition for her greatest performance, in the stunning divorce drama Shoot the Moon in 1982. She also gave a wrenching performance in The Little Drummer Girl, reasserted her comedic chops carrying Baby Boom to the finish line, partnered beautifully with Jessica Lange and Sissy Spacek for Crimes of the Heart, re-teamed with Woody Allen for Manhattan Murder Mystery, and directed for TV (including episodes of Twin Peaks) and movies (including the oddball documentary Heaven and the underrated Unstrung Heroes). She also helped produce Gus Van Sant's Elephant and dabbled in real estate. Her biggest recent splash in movies was in 2003's Something's Gotta Give, where she has a nude scene, the point of which was the horror that the sight of a naked woman only a decade younger than him inspired in her co-star Jack Nicholson. In fact, she looked pretty good -- certainly better than Nicholson does with his clothes on -- and her performance (and unsurgically enhanced body) helped make the movie a hit among women who enjoyed seeing Keaton getting hit on by Keanu Reeves. She can now be seen in TV commercials as the face of L'Oreal.

MAE WEST (1893-1980)

Mae West was beautiful, talented, versatile, and groundbreaking. Big deal. So were a million other women who don’t have nearly the reputation she does in the history of Hollywood. The reason that we’re writing about Mae West is because she took what was implicit in showbiz and made it explicit: her career, from beginning to end, was all about sex. Never before had anyone become so famous speaking so openly about what goes on between men and women – and she didn’t limit it to that paradigm, either. West was sexually experimental and was rumored to have had affairs with a number of women; and, despite the greater fag-hag veneration of Joan Crawford and Judy Garland, she was also one of the earliest advocates of gay rights, having written a sympathetic play about homosexual men as early as 1928. Oh, yeah: she was a writer, too. Always more than just a pretty face and a round set of hips, West was an engaging speaker, a witty and talented writer, and by all accounts, a legendarily adept improviser. (She said one of her greatest regrets is that she never got to share the screen with Groucho Marx, the only comic she considered her equal at thinking on one’s feet.) Like most people who considered sex a serious business, she couched much of her speculations about it in humor, but that didn’t save her from being repeatedly censored, censured, prosecuted (at least twice successfully) for obscenity, and banned from half the radio and television networks in the country. West never stopped working, and while her latter-day projects like Sextette are often considered more creepy than funny, considering that she kept her career going for some 70 years while pioneering gay rights, women’s liberation, and sexual freedom some thirty years before the rest of the country came around, we’d say she earned a little indulgence.

Click Here for Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, & Seven

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Hayden Childs, Leonard Pierce

DVD Digest for July 1, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week, one of the great writers of the twentieth century gets some Criterion love, plus plenty of Blu-Ray releases to last for the rest of the summer.

DVD of the Week: Continuing Criterion’s summer of awesomeness this week is the release of two films that function as a primer for anyone curious about the life and work of Japanese author Yukio Mishima. To begin with, there’s the new special edition of Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, Paul Schrader’s greatest directorial achievement to date. Rather than attempting to take on Mishima’s life in a conventional manner, Schrader begins on the final day of the writer’s life, as he and his private army take control of a military compound so that Mishima can commit ritualized suicide. This framing device is intercut with stark re-creations of Mishima’s early life, as well as lush Technicolor dramatizations of several of his stories. Mishima is a gorgeous film, but it’s also more insightful about its protagonist’s one-of-a-kind life than any straightforward telling could hope to be. For more insight into Mishima, Criterion is releasing separately the author’s rarely-seen directorial effort, Patriotism, which not only starred Mishima in the lead role but also anticipated his own suicide. Anyone looking to learn more about Yukio Mishima could do a lot worse than to start with these two must-see DVDs.

This week’s recent releases coming to DVD: Owen Wilson in Drillbit Taylor (Paramount, also Blu-Ray); The 24-meets-Rashomon thriller Vantage Point (Sony, also Blu-Ray); Tyler Perry’s Meet the Browns (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray); Wong Kar-wai’s English-language debut My Blueberry Nights (Genius); the City of God quasi-sequel City of Men (Disney); and the direct-to-DVD spinoff Get Smart’s Bruce and Lloyd Out of Control (Warner, also Blu-Ray). This week’s TV-on-DVD releases include Mad Men Season 1 (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray) and The Closer: The Complete Third Season (Warner).

Finally, in Blu-Ray-only news, this week brings Batman: The Movie Special Edition (Fox), Gangs of New York (Disney), In the Line of Fire (Sony), and Point Break: Special Edition (Fox).

Indie Box-Office Roundup: Weekend of April 11-13, 2008

Paul Clark — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Move over, Juliette Binoche, Jude Law and Natalie Portman. There's a new arthouse star in town- Richard Jenkins. The character actor extraordinaire, known to many as the deceased father on Six Feet Under, parlayed a rare leading role in Tom McCarthy's new film The Visitor (Overture Films) into the weekend's top per-screen box office take. The film took in a mighty $22,622 per screen average on four screens this past weekend, which promises a healthy overall gross once the film expands wider in two weeks.

Finishing in second place was Fox Searchlight's crowd-pleasing documentary Young@Heart, raking in a sturdy $12,734 average on four screens. The film, about a chorus of retirees who perform rock'n'roll songs, has received mostly ecstatic reviews thusfar, which leads me to think the awful trailer may simply have been a botch by Fox's marketing department.

Making strong showings in the their second weeks of release were last week's top two, Hou Hsiao-hsien's Flight of the Red Balloon (IFC Films) and Wong Kar-wai's English-language debut My Blueberry Nights (The Weinstein Company). Rounding on the top five was the Vietnam drama Holly (Slowhand Cinema).

Also of note were: First Independent's release Dark Matter, whose sturdy grosses can be mostly attributed to the presence of Meryl Streep in a supporting role; Body of War (The Film Sales Company), an Iraq documentary co-directed by Phil Donahue (last seen puking in the trombone); and the weekend's top-performing wide-ish release, Miramax's Smart People. Less successful was Sony Pictures Classics' new English dub of Persepolis, taking in a mere $561 per screen- little more than the already-on-DVD There Will Be Blood.

Top 10: Weekend of April 11-13:
1. The Visitor [Overture Films] ($22,622 per screen)
2. Young@Heart [Fox Searchlight] ($12,734)
3. The Flight Of The Red Balloon [IFC Films] ($11,959)
4. My Blueberry Nights [The Weinstein Company] ($7,292)
5. Holly [Slowhand Cinema Releasing] ($5,994)
6. Dark Matter [First Independent Pictures] ($4,351)
7. Body of War [The Film Sales Company] ($3,850)
8. The Dhamma Brothers [Balcony Releasing] ($3,710)
9. Smart People [Miramax] ($3,700)
10. Priceless [IDP/Samuel Goldwyn Films] ($3,604)

Source: IndieWire.

Indie Box-Office Roundup: Weekend of April 4-6, 2008

Paul Clark — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Think of the kinds of movies that are typically called "arthouse hits." I'm guessing that visions of cred-hungry stars working for peanuts, inspiring sports documentaries, and open-faced moppets of all ethnicities are popping into your mind. The last thing you'd imagine would be new films from the festival-feted auteurs of world cinema. Yet that's who topped the box-office charts this past weekend.

Competing for the top spot were the latest films from master filmmakers Hou Hsiao-hsien and Wong Kar-wai. Admittedly, both Hou's Flight of the Red Balloon (IFC Films) and Wong's My Blueberry Nights (Weinstein Company) had their opening weekend grosses bolstered by the presence of name stars- Juliette Binoche in the Hou, Norah Jones, Natalie Portman and Jude Law in the Wong. Still, a $17,611 per-screen average is mighty impressive for any film, especially one from a celebrated but not-exactly-popular auteur like Hou.

In second place, My Blueberry Nights came in with a strong $12,358 average. But even more surprising was the performance of #3 film Alexandra (Cinema Guild), the latest from Russian director Aleksandr Sokurov. Like Hou, Sokurov has long been a festival darling, but to see the film performing so well at the box office ($9,086 on one screen), in its second weekend no less, is quite the pleasant surprise.

Holdovers from last week's list include The Singing Revolution (Abramorama Entertainment), Embrem Entertainment's A Four Letter Word, and the documentary The Unforeseen (Cinema Guild). Jumping into the top ten in its second weekend of release is the Audrey Tautou vehicle Priceless (IDP/Samuel Goldwyn), which even if it's not looking like a hit of Amélie proportions, demonstrates that arthouse-goers still enjoy their frothy foreign comedies as much as they ever did.

Top 10, Weekend of April 4-6:
1. The Flight Of The Red Balloon [IFC Films] ($17,611 per screen)
2. My Blueberry Nights [The Weinstein Company] ($12,358)
3. Alexandra [Cinema Guild] ($9,086)
4. Jellyfish [Zeitgeist] ($6,338)
5. The Singing Revolution [Abramorama Entertainment] ($6,183)
6. A Four Letter Word [Embrem Entertainment] ($6,017)
7. Body of War [The Film Sales Company] ($4,942)
8. The Unforeseen [Cinema Guild] ($4,317)
9. Shelter [Regent Releasing] ($4,073)
10. Priceless [IDP/Samuel Goldwyn Films] ($4,018)

Source: IndieWire.

Trailer Review: My Blueberry Nights

Paul Clark — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Regular readers of this column are only too aware of my disdain for foreign-language trailers that avoid dialogue so as to fool gullible audiences into thinking the film's in English. But what about a trailer for an English-language film that's cut this way? Granted, My Blueberry Nights is the latest film by Wong Kar-wai, which would be pretty unmistakable even if Wong's name wasn't in the trailer, given the appearance of many familiar Wong tropes such as clock faces, train windows, and liberal use of smeary neon. But while Wong fans can groove on the visuals (courtesy of Darius Khondji, pinch-hitting for Wong's usual DP Christopher Doyle), what does this trailer have to offer the non-fan? Do the Weinsteins honestly think they can lure fans of stars Jude Law, Norah Jones, and Natalie Portman into the theatres without even giving them a shred of plot or dialogue? Wong has a hard enough time with American audiences (and, judging by the reviews from Cannes last year, with critics as well) without a distributor who doesn't really want to sell the film.

Famous Last Words: Round 1, Week 9

Paul Clark — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 20:00:00 GMT

The influence of Quentin Tarantino loomed large over mid-90s pop culture, not only in the films he directed, but also those he starred in, and even the movies he claimed as his influences. But as ubiquitous as he became, he can take credit for at least one unambiguously good deed- convincing the Weinstein Brothers to give Wong Kar-wai's gorgeous Chungking Express (the source of last week's quotation) an American release. In doing so, he introduced many a budding film nerd- myself included- to the magical career of Wong Kar-wai, as well as to an Asian art cinema that previously took a backseat to John Woo and Tsui Hark-helmed actioners on the world film scene. While In the Mood for Love seems to get the most critical love of any of his films nowadays, Chungking Express remains my personal favorite. Congrats to those who guessed it.

Two-thirds of the way through the round, and there are still plenty of contenders for the prizes. Here's this week's quote, the shortest of this round so far:

"You're working for me now."

Submit your guesses to famouslastwords@nerve.com. If you need to brush up on the rules of the game, click click here, and remember, all submissions must be received by next Wednesday night at 11:59 PM Eastern. Good luck!

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.

Rep Report Follow-Up: Recent Hong Kong Cinema at Lincoln Center

Peter Smith — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 19:00:00 GMT

As noted in our Rep Report last week, the Film Society of Lincoln Center is presenting a week-long series dedicated to recent Hong Kong Cinema. This is a diverse series as evidenced by the two films I was able to catch — Wong Kar-Wai’s criminally underseen Happy Together and Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s Confession of Pain. Both feature Tony Leung in a lead role but are otherwise polar opposites.

Happy Together is an exploration of the dissolving relationship between two gay Chinese men who came to Buenos Aries as vacationers and now find themselves stranded without enough money to return home. The film is more raw and intimate than any of the master director’s other work, but explores similar themes of loneliness, displacement and the inability to find happiness. Christopher Doyle’s incredible camera work switches from black and white to pastels to faded color, and creates a sense of stylized reality that is not only beautiful but helps propel the film’s story with its immediacy. Throwing traditional narrative structure out the window, this film is unflinching in its honesty and craftsmanship.

Confession of Pain is an ultra-modern, big-budget thriller from the same creative team behind Infernal Affairs, the film from which The Departed was adapted. This is popcorn fare, simply too glossy to ever feel authentic. The story also goes through a predictable series of twists and turns. But where the audience for Happy Together is surely limited by both its subject matter and challenging presentation, Confession of Pain has a much broader appeal. Not un-tasty, but it's empty calories. — Bryan Whitefield

The Rep Report (October 17 - November 1)

Peter Smith — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 19:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Now, here's what I'm talking about: the Film Society of Lincoln Center celebrates the successful completion of the New York Film Festival by firing its guns in the air with 10 Years and Running: Recent Hong Kong Cinema (October 17 - 25). The program ranges from Wong Kar Wai's Happy Together and 2046 to a very welcome helping of action master Johnnie To, whose steady refining of his technique and stubborn reluctance to bolt for Hollywood give his recent work a last-man-standing quality. (He is represented here by the The Mission, the 1999 brothers-in-arms shoot-em-up that was of no small help to its star, Anthony Wong, in his quest to be crowned World's Coolest Actor, and the more recent Election and its companion piece, Triad Election.) The newer offerings include Triangle, a caper flick co-directed by the three Hong Kong amigos, Tsui Hark, Ringo Lam and Johnnie To, and films by the team of Andrew Lau and Alan Mak, whose Infernal Affairs is perhaps (if unjustly) best known in the U.S. as the original version of Scorsese's The Departed.

The Brooklyn Academy of Music presents its sixth annual selection of highlights from the Pordenone Silent Film Festival (October 18 - 21). The program, which plunders the vaults of the Danish studio Nordisk, includes documentary footage of the German front lines during World War I, as well as fanciful adventures involving trips to Mars, runaway meteors and the ever-present fight against the white slave trade. Film preservationist Serge Bromberg will also be on hand with yet another of his personal selections of precious silent rarities. Most screenings will feature live musical accompaniment by Donald Sosin.

Sergei Bondarchuk's adaptation of War and Peace, which is playing the Film Forum in a seven-hour cut (shown in two parts, with a separate admission for each) from October 19 through November 1, is somewhere between a great lost film and a towering curiosity. As much an example of technological competition between the Cold War powers as the space race, it was in production for seven years and cost $100,000,000 in 1968, which makes it still the most expensive movie ever made. Yet it's not just an historical oddity. Bondarchuk, who first gained celebrity as an actor (he plays Pierre in the film), was a greatly gifted director clearly drunk on the possibilities of filmmaking. There are many stunning moments and a striking, dynamic use of the camera that take the film out of the Masterpiece Theater/Merchant-Ivory category of embalmed classics; despite the impossibility of fully capturing the novel on film, it's not a negligible achievement. This was only Bondarchuk's second movie, and he never got to follow it up; after it won him an international acclaim and an Academy Award, he blew his reputation on the 1970 English-language bomb Waterloo, starring Rod Steiger as Napoleon, then came crawling back to Mother Russia, only to spend the rest of his career snarled up in the compromises and political confusion of the post-Khrushchev, pre-glasnost era. He died in 1994. To now see the one film that forms the bulk of his career is to marvel at what driven and talented people are capable of putting on the screen, and what the strain of doing it, and the desire to do it again, can sometimes do to their lives.

BOSTON: When Martin Scorsese's great concert film The Last Waltz came out in 1978, one of the most talked about moments in it was the single, unbroken shot for most of Muddy Waters' performance of "Mannish Boy." On the DVD commentary, we learned it's a wonder that Muddy got into the movie at all. Scorsese had gotten his song list mixed up and given the camera crew a break, and then when the blues legend strolled out onstage, the director, thinking that no one was recording the moment, had a fit collosal even by his standards. The reason that one sustained shot exists is that one of the star cinematographers working on the project, Laszlo Kovacs, didn't know that he was supposed to be on a break; he had taken his headset off because he had somehow grown weary of the sweet music of Martin Scorsese screaming in his ear. Kovacs died last July, and the Brattle pays tribute to the work he did in his career prime with Seventies Shooter: A Tribute To Laszlo Kovacs, running through the 25th. And since the series begins with such films as Five Easy Pieces and Easy Rider and then winds down with one of the earliest requiems for the 1960s, Shampoo, and the rough-housing, "un-P.C." cop comedy Freebie and the Bean, it doubles as a rare chance to see the counterculture rise and fall in the space of a week's worth of films.

— Phil Nugent