Register Now!

November 2007 - Posts

  • Take Five: The Betrayal of the Body

    Posted by Peter Smith

    Julian Schnabel, who's proved to be a much more interesting film director than he was a painter, has caused quite a stir in France with his latest, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Opening in limited release this weekend, the film deals with a French fashion magazine editor who suffers a paralyzing stroke and is forced to communicate with the world — telling tales not only of his internal imprisonment, but also of his rich interior life — the only way he can: by blinking out the words with his left eyelid, the sole part of his body he can still control. The idea that the human body is as much a prison as a vehicle is as old as Shakespeare, and it's likewise yielded a number of fine films, particularly from directors who've had their own bodies betray them, or those of their loved ones. When the mind is still sharp but seems to exist solely as a captive of a body, without which it cannot survive, but to which it is frustratingly bound, some outstanding, if terribly depressing, dramatic situations can ensue. Here are five films dealing with the ways in which the mind can become a prisoner of the body — and the ways in which those minds seek escape.

    Read More...


    + DIGG + DEL.ICIO.US + REDDIT
  • Jessica Yu's Protagonist

    Posted by Peter Smith

    Jessica Yu's previous documentary feature, In the Realms of the Unreal, did a scarily inventive job of fleshing out the fantasy life of the reclusive "outsider artist" Henry Darger and detailing the lonely existence from which Darger had only his imagination as escape. For her next trick, Yu was offered the job of making a film about one of the great shapers of classical tragedy, Euripides. Yu took them up on it, sort of: her new film Protagonist intercuts between four men as each describes part of the major dramatic arc of his life, according to Euripides' chain-reaction formula of "Provocation" followed by "Opportunity", leading to "Doubt", etc. Yu sifted through hundreds of potential candidates before settling on her four stars. As it happens, the final four included her husband, the writer Mark Salzman, who narrates a hilarious account of his adolescent attempt to transform himself into Caine from Kung Fu.

    Read More...


    + DIGG + DEL.ICIO.US + REDDIT
  • YouTube Fight Club

    Posted by Peter Smith

    In late fall and winter, as the weather turns cold and the Oscar bait drives all the decent action movies out of the multiplex, a young man's thoughts to staying indoors, watching idiots beat each up on homemade fight videos posted on YouTube. Carlo Rotella has the definitive connoisseur's guide to and meditation on this emerging art form. Rotella breaks down the sub-genres, offers helpful advice to aspiring filmmakers and battlers, and makes a heartfelt plea for better color commentary from those in the crowd: "'Damn, he just hit you,' a voice from the crowd will say as the opponents tear into each other. 'He just hit you again. He's beating your ass!' To whom is this commentary directed? Who benefits from it? Not the fighters. They already know who hit whom." His essay, liberally illustrated with clips, is also a fount of lessons that it would have done me some good to have learned before adolescence, such as this: "These guys likewise commit the double error of messing with the wrong opponent and being unready for a fast start. As a general rule, if you pick a fight with someone who immediately assumes a relaxed but erect shuffle-stepping stance with his hands up and his chin tucked and a blandly businesslike expression on his face, you have probably just answered the question of the day wrong. . ." — Phil Nugent


    + DIGG + DEL.ICIO.US + REDDIT
  • The Movie Moment: Killer of Sheep (1977, Charles Burnett)

    Posted by Peter Smith

    Of all the films to be reissued in 2007, the most important was Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep. The film finally arrived in commercial theatres after thirty years, having been withheld due to music-rights issues. Killer of Sheep was made while Burnett studied at UCLA's film program, and not having the money to buy the rights to the songs, he included them anyway. With a soundtrack including Dinah Washington, Paul Robeson, and Louis Armstrong, Burnett wanted to reflect the diverse history of African-American music in the United States.

    Thirty years later, it's as easy to appreciate Burnett's musical choices as it is difficult to picture the film without them, had Burnett decided to cut or change them in order to make the film releasable. One scene that's unimaginable without the music finds young Angie (played by Angela Burnett) playing with her doll while Earth, Wind and Fire's "Reasons" plays on a nearby turntable. Once the song starts, Angie sings to the doll, cheating her way through most of the words. Occasionally, she comes upon a lyric she knows for certain, and once she arrives at the song's refrain, she sits up straight and smiles widely, proudly singing the "la-la-las" with the utmost confidence.

    Read More...


    + DIGG + DEL.ICIO.US + REDDIT
  • Today in the Hooksexup Film Lounge: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, The Savages, Chronicle of an Escape

    Posted by Peter Smith

    The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: "It's the real-life story, not the artistry involved in its telling, that does all the heavy lifting here."

    The Savages: "The Savages boasts plenty of keenly observed moments, but it's also the kind of film in which someone says 'He won't marry me, but he cries when I make him eggs,' and two scenes later, sure enough, there the guy is choking back tears at the breakfast table."

    Chronicle of an Escape: "Chronicle of an Escape feels scrupulously, nauseatingly accurate in its unstinting depiction of deprivation and torture, but it also seems to have no other purpose; the film belongs to that large, undistinguished subset of historical dramas that achieve little more than informing viewers that the events onscreen did in fact take place."

    Q&A: Tamara Jenkins: "I definitely wasn't interested in a sentimental portrait [of death] or a sanctimonious portrait or a maudlin portrait."

    Still Crazy After All These Years: "Generally, cinematic controversies seem less relevant as the years go by. But for Pier Paolo Pasolini, the rule does not apply."

    Twin Peaks: Definitive Gold Box Edition: "Remastered, and still a masterpiece."


    + DIGG + DEL.ICIO.US + REDDIT
  • Morning Deal Report: Norton Gets Wacky

    Posted by Peter Smith

    Edward Norton is directing himself (twice) in a comedy about twins, "one a philosophy professor, the other a career criminal who gets his more erudite twin into big trouble with some murderous potheads." With all due respect to Norton — and that's plenty — he's not exactly high on the list of wild and crazy guys. And his last comedy was. . . let's see. . . uh oh.

    Peter Sarsgaard and Vera Farmiga have joined the horror movie Orphan, about parents who lose a child and then adopt an evil one to make up for it. Good ol' evil children. This makes Farmiga's second mother-of-demon-spawn role in a row.

    Not really film-related, but WGA-strike-related: Conan O'Brien is paying the salaries of his eighty-person staff until production resumes. Conaners, we tip our hat.

    Peter Smith


    + DIGG + DEL.ICIO.US + REDDIT
  • Pregnant Pause

    Posted by Peter Smith
    Ah, what a fecund year 2007 has been at the cinema. Katherine Heigl got Knocked Up. Keri Russell found herself in the family way in Waitress; yet another waitress tested positive in the independent drama Bella. And sassy sixteen-year-old Juno (opening in New York Dec. 5) joined the baby-bump club. Congratulations, ladies! Or not. In every one of these movies, the pregnancy iss unplanned. And in every one of these movies, the mothers-to-be opt not to terminate the pregnancy. Somewhere, the cinematic doppleganger of Randall Terry is doing a little dance of joy.

    This isn't so much about taking those movies to task. Bella in particular was made with a specifically "pro-life" agenda; the other three were comedies of situation, and abortion doesn't lend itself to big yuks (Citizen Ruth notwithstanding). But for some time now, the supposedly left-leaning movie world has studiously avoided stories about women opting for abortion — which makes the raw guts of Tony Kaye's documentary Lake of Fire all the more startling for acknowledging this hard reality.

    Thirty years ago, Kay Corleone announced to Michael in The Godfather Part II that she had aborted their unborn son rather than bring another child into this "Sicilian thing." Today, look who's carrying to term: A career woman who risks her big shot after a one-night-stand. A woman in an abusive relationship. A high-school student. You could call these brave narrative decisions. Or you could wonder if "lib'rul Hollywood" hasn't decided that "pro-choice" is all well and good, except when it comes to alienating potential ticket-buyers.

    Scott Renshaw

    + DIGG + DEL.ICIO.US + REDDIT
  • State of Play in Hollywood

    Posted by Peter Smith

    David M. Halbfinger reports that the uncertain state of the political thriller State of Play may offer some insight into how the game is being played this minute in a movie industry driven half-nuts by labor difficulties. Brad Pitt, who was locked in to star in the movie, pulled his Hamlet act and waltzed away from the project last week, just as it was about to go into production. Like many high-level productions, State of Play was all set to go so as to complete shooting by next June, when Hollywood may face an actors' strike. Now Universal, if it decides to proceed on schedule, will have to re-cast the lead quickly before other fully-booked-up actors in the cast start dropping out to make their other pre-June committments. On the plus side, they can consider any number of leading men, such as Tom Hanks and Johnny Depp, who are suddenly available because the projects they were about to start work on have been put on hold until after the writers' strike ends, because it's been decided that the scripts still need work.

    Read More...


    + DIGG + DEL.ICIO.US + REDDIT
  • Different Cinema: Two Views of Raphaël Bassan

    Posted by Peter Smith
    Senses of Cinema brings us a double-shot of the Bulgarian-born experimental filmmaker, critic, writer, teacher and producer Raphaël Bassan, who has been a fixture in Paris's small but dynamic 'different' film scene since the 1960s. In the first, he is interviewed by fellow experimental filmmaker Viviane Vagh, who discusses with him his influences, his attitudes and what has kept him so dedicated to a marginalized art form his entire life. Talking about how he chose to cast his latest film, Lucy en miroir, with other experimental filmmakers, Bassan notes, "These people were singular in their philosophy. They did not have the desire to go down in history. It wasn't an issue for them to be talked about in the press. A film critic was not an especially necessary part of their environment." Next, Vagh brings us a translation of one of Bassan's most recent essays, "Identity of Cinema," a retrospective of the history and qualities of the cinema of difference, and concludes that "Without choosing the head-on attack attitude against the system, unlike the avant-garde cinema, the experimental cinema pursues its development thanks to groups of filmmakers whose visibility increases, and whose presence nourishes and renews film culture in general." — Leonard Pierce
    + DIGG + DEL.ICIO.US + REDDIT
  • Forgotten Films: Mr. Jealousy (1997)

    Posted by Peter Smith

    Noah Baumbauch, the writer-director of the new Margot at the Wedding, first made a splash in 1995 with his Gen-X comedy Kicking and Screaming. Ten years later, that film and Baumbach's name had slipped so far into neglect that a major studio thought nothing of recycling its title for one of Will Ferrell's more negligible vehicles. That same year, Baumbach enjoyed a comeback with The Squid and the Whale, and since then Kicking and Screaming has enjoyed the honor of being issued on DVD as part of the Criterion Collection. Meanwhile, his sophomore effort, the 1997 Mr. Jealousy (available for home viewing in a no-frills DVD) remains largely unknown. Which is a shame; it's a near-perfect modern screwball comedy that uses Baumbach's favorite subject — the way that intelligent, literate people screw up their relationships — as the basis for some smart satire.

    Read More...


    + DIGG + DEL.ICIO.US + REDDIT
  • Strike Four?

    Posted by Peter Smith

    Labor on the march! The Writer's Guild of America strike is a month old, and Hollywood is starting to feel the effects — a number of shows are set to start showing reruns and clip shows, while 'replacement programming' is about to rear its ugly head. Greg Saunders, writing on Tom Tomorrow's blog, discovers some sneaky anti-writer reporting on CNBC and shows us how to lie with statistics; news writers for CBS — who have been working without a contract for over two years — join the strike; and Michael Eisner, who doesn’t exactly have a rich history of supporting workers, tells the New York Times that the striking writers are "stupid" and "foolish" and that "there’s not a crumb to spare" for them in the digital media.  Eisner’s salary, bonuses and stock options in his final year at Disney totaled over $100 million — barely a fifth of his peak earnings! — and you didn’t see him go on strike, did you? — Leonard Pierce


    + DIGG + DEL.ICIO.US + REDDIT
  • Morning Deal Report: This Film Is Not Approved By Barry Bonds

    Posted by Peter Smith

    Frequent sports-movie screenwriter Ron Shelton (Bull Durham, White Men Can't Jump, Tin Cup) is adapting the Barry Bonds expose Game of Shadows for HBO. Possible title: Don't Get a Big Head

    New Line signs a deal with Samuel L. Jackson and what do they do with it? They put him in a movie called Man Who Rocks the Cradle, as a "kid whisperer."

    The Wayans brothers are back! Aren't you happy? And they're. . . adapting The Munsters?

    Peter Smith


    + DIGG + DEL.ICIO.US + REDDIT
  • That Guy!: Wallace Shawn

    Posted by Peter Smith
    "Squat", "toadlike" and "bespectacled" are not the first three adjectives you want on the list when you're building your movie star résumé. But That Guy! isn't about movie stars. It's about character actors, B-listers, stock-in-traders — and Wally Shawn is one of the best. Best imagined as the guy who gets parts for which Bob Balaban is simply too macho and charismatic, Shawn suffered perhaps the ultimate indignity when, playing Diane Keaton's ex in Manhattan (his movie debut), he was described as a "homunculus" by none other than Woody Allen, himself not entirely lacking in homuncular qualities. Still, the son of legendary New Yorker editor William Shawn has managed to carve out a decent Hollywood career playing nebbishes, losers and schnooks — while simultaneously building an eminently respectable career in New York as an insightful, volatile playwright whose work is intelligent, fiercely political and often controversial. Harvard-educated and terrifically well-informed, Shawn has written opinion pieces for The Nation, interviewed Noam Chomsky, and produced a widely-read translation of Bertolt Brecht's The Threepenny Opera, all while appearing in Hollywood fare ranging from Clueless to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

    Read More...


    + DIGG + DEL.ICIO.US + REDDIT
  • Hoberman Hails Haynes

    Posted by Peter Smith
    In a long piece in the Village Voice, J. Hoberman calls Todd Haynes's I'm Not There "part of the larger, ongoing Dylan revival brilliantly orchestrated by his manager, Jeff Rosen" and also "the movie of the year." Hoberman suggests that this might be the Bob Dylan movie that Dylan himself repeatedly tried to make but never could have achieved; nobody but Haynes, "who studied film as semiotics" and who in Superstar and Velvet Goldmine had already "taken pop stars or pop music for a text," could have. As Hoberman sees it, only a filmmaker as audacious as Haynes could be worthy of this subject. "Certain cultural figures have a particular inevitability. Charles Chaplin and Elvis Presley rode technological waves, surfing to superstardom on powerful socio-economic currents. Had Chaplin never come to America, another slapstick comic would have emerged to reign over the nation's nickelodeons; Elvis might never have been born, but someone else would surely have brought the world rock 'n' roll. No such logic accounts for Bob Dylan. No iron law of history demanded that a would-be Elvis from Hibbing, Minnesota, would swerve through the Greenwich Village folk revival to become the world's first and greatest rock 'n' roll beatnik bard and then — having achieved fame and adoration beyond reckoning — vanish into a folk tradition of his own making." — Phil Nugent
    + DIGG + DEL.ICIO.US + REDDIT
  • Schnabel Speaks

    Posted by Peter Smith

    After Julian Schnabel made his directorial debut with the 1996 biopic Basquiat, the art critic Robert Hughes called it a movie about the worst painter of the 1980s, made by the second worst. (Because Schnabel cast it from the ranks of all his fashionable New York character actor friends, he also made it possible for The New Yorker's Anthony Lane to describe it as the kind of movie in which "Christopher Walken passes for normal.") Rather surprisingly, Schnabel has kept at it, and now, seven years after his remarkable second film Before Night Falls, he's back with The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, based on the acclaimed memoir by Jean-Dominique Bauby.

    Read More...


    + DIGG + DEL.ICIO.US + REDDIT
  • Not Just for Kids: The Columbus International Children's Film Festival

    Posted by Peter Smith
    This weekend brings this year's incarnation of the Columbus International Children's Film Festival, being held from Thursday, November 29 through Sunday, December 2, at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio. Currently in its fourth year, the Children's Fest is co-organized by Wex assistant film/video curator Chris Stults and youth program educator Kendra Meyer, as a collaboration between the Center's Film/Video and Education departments. Similar festivals geared to children are held in Toronto, New York, and Chicago, and they're extremely popular in Europe.

    The Children's Fest seeks to spotlight a diverse lineup of international family-friendly fare, and this year is no exception. The films include Full Monty director Peter Cattaneo's Opal Dream, Michel Ocelot's African animated film Kirikou and the Wild Beasts, the classic educational film The Way Things Go, documentaries Third Monday in October and Darius Goes West: The Roll of His Life, and a program of cartoons. "One constant," Stults says, "is that we always show a classic silent film — with live music when possible — and it's a delight to see how well those films still play for young audiences." This year's silent selection is one of the greats: Charlie Chaplin's City Lights.

    Read More...


    + DIGG + DEL.ICIO.US + REDDIT
  • Life After Bergman

    Posted by Peter Smith

    In the Los Angeles Times, Kevin Thomas, in the course of interviewing Max von Sydow about his role in Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, gets the legendary Swedish actor to open up about his special relationship with the late Ingmar Bergman, and to discuss the kinds of scripts (ranging from "boring" to "flat-out bad") he has to pass up to get to the truly choice roles he says he can now afford to take in his sunset years.  "Most roles I am offered are fathers or grandfathers who die after twenty-five pages," says Von Sydow. — Leonard Pierce


    + DIGG + DEL.ICIO.US + REDDIT
  • Morning Deal Report: "Look At Them Sideburns! He Looks Like A Girl!"

    Posted by Peter Smith

    (w/ apologies to Abe Simpson)

    Jake Gyllenhaal will play Joe Namath, in a biopic of the shaggy-maned football hero.

    Liev Schreiber has joined the sci-fi adaptation Repossession Mambo, about "a futuristic credit union dealing in artificial organs" — not to be confused with Repo! The Genetic Opera, the other movie about futuristic organ reposession. (So much for Schreiber's lifelong dream of working with Paris Hilton, I guess.)

    Matthew Perry will play a grown-up Zac Efron in 17, the "reverse Big" about the adult who magically returns to his teenage years. This does not bode well for Zac Efron.

    Peter Smith


    + DIGG + DEL.ICIO.US + REDDIT
  • Peckinpah and the Coens

    Posted by Peter Smith

    Michael Sragow discusses the late, great Sam Peckinpah and finds his imprint on the Coen brothers' violent modern Western, No Country for Old Men. Taking a cue from Paul Seydor, Sragow also links Peckinpah with Norman Mailer "as artists defined by their pursuit of extreme action, their rebellion against official culture and bureaucratized society, and their recognition that the quest for authentic manhood is absolute and never-ending. Their paradoxical linkage of fragility with appetite and strength — so different from the cheap certainty of macho camp — drove Peckinpah to create the most dynamic of all visual lexicons and Mailer to master a dazzling variety of rhetoric in both intimate and epic modes." Although a quick scan of what's playing in theaters today might suggest that neither artist is having much of an influence on current cinema, Sragow believes that "No Country for Old Men renews the legacy of Mailer and Peckinpah, who extended the reach and freedom and redefined the positive and negative limits of the male character in American literature and movies." — Phil Nugent


    + DIGG + DEL.ICIO.US + REDDIT
  • Filming in Byzantium

    Posted by Peter Smith

    It’s not often than the best foreign film of the year wins the Oscar for Best Foreign Film of the year. Part of this is attributable to the Motion Picture Academy’s usual lack of standards, but a lot of it can be credited to the Byzantine rules governing what films can even be considered for the Foreign Film Oscar. As this article in the Hollywood Reporter notes, this year is typical insofar as many of 2007’s best-regarded foreign films are ineligible for nomination: Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution is out of the running because the Academy does not consider that Taiwanese talent had enough to do with its filming (a situation James Schamus regards as "absolutely unfair and ridiculous," pointing out that Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which won a Best Foreign Film Oscar, was made under precisely the same circumstances); Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is disqualified because countries are only allowed to submit one film for consideration, and this year France went with Persepolis; the Israeli film The Band’s Visit is a no-go because it contains too much English dialogue; and The Kite Runner won’t be considered because of its international crew — particularly absurd, because in its absence, Afghanistan has no other entry in the category. — Leonard Pierce


    + DIGG + DEL.ICIO.US + REDDIT
  • YouTube Cabinet of Curiosities: Track 29 (1988, Nicolas Roeg)

    Posted by Peter Smith



    The popular line on Nicolas Roeg's directing career is that he cranked out a string of classics in the 1970s before sliding into irrelevance during the 1980s. I can't argue with this assessment of his 70s output, but the more of his '80s work I see the more interesting and undervalued I find it to be. Consider his 1988 film Track 29, long out of print on video and as yet unreleased on DVD, which I finally caught up with when someone helpfully posted it, in its entirety, on YouTube. The film stars Roeg's then-wife Theresa Russell, Gary Oldman and Christopher Lloyd, and was penned by the great Dennis Potter (Pennies From Heaven, The Singing Detective). It's a strange, uncategorizable work that I found fascinating, a film that manages to feel completely like a Roeg film AND a Potter film. I'm posting the first segment here — click the link for the rest, but only when you’ve got a couple of hours free to watch them all. (Hat tip: Andrew Bemis.)— Paul Clark


    + DIGG + DEL.ICIO.US + REDDIT
  • Oprah's Favorite Things Include Watching Road House

    Posted by Peter Smith

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

    Read More...


    + DIGG + DEL.ICIO.US + REDDIT
  • The Rep Report (November 27 - December 4)

    Posted by Peter Smith

    NEW YORK: The Senegalese writer-director Ousmane Sembene, who died last summer, gets his first major posthumous respective at Film Forum from November 30 to December 12. The series kicks off with Xala, the 1974 satire that climaxes with a memorably ghastly, well, spitting scene, and includes the early works that put Sembene on the map (Black Girl, Emitai) as well as the more recent films (Faat-Kine and his last movie, Moolaade) that showed that he was still in strapping form. This is a rare chance not just to pay tribute to a fallen master but to catch up with the work of a major filmmaker who remains sorely underrepresented on DVD.

    Pier Paolo Pasolini has been dead for a good long time now, but doesn't seem to have become much less controversial, an accomplishment that might have put a smile on his face. The Film Society of Lincoln Center's Heretical Epiphanies: The Cinematic Pilgrimages of Pier Paolo Pasolini (November 28 – December 4) covers his career from the neo-realist debut film Accattone to the hyper-scandalous, posthumously released Salo. On December 4, Lincoln Center also presents the U.S. premiere of Accattone in Jazz, a live presentation in which "Pasolini's celebrated screenplay for Accattone is revisited by Italian movie star Valerio Mastandrea, as he weaves a unique interplay of words and music together with Italian jazz legends and longtime collaborators Roberto Gatto and Danilo Rea."

    Read More...


    + DIGG + DEL.ICIO.US + REDDIT
  • Morning Deal Report: Step Up for Scorsese Pic

    Posted by Peter Smith

    Mark Ruffalo has joined Leonardo DiCaprio in Martin Scorsese's Dennis Lehane adaptation Shutter Island.

    John Cusack may star in Weinstein Co.'s period drama Shanghai. Gong Li is already attached. Sort of a departure for him.

    Remember the Tom Swift books? Neither do I, but if you do have fond memories of the series, prepare for them to be trampled.

    Peter Smith


    + DIGG + DEL.ICIO.US + REDDIT
  • (Belated) Take Five: Stephen King

    Posted by Peter Smith
    So, have you heard of this Stephen King fellow? Apparently he’s pretty widely read. Hs popularity as a novelist is matched only by his profligacy — he’s written over thirty novels and hundreds of short stories on his way to becoming one of the best-selling authors of all time. This level of popularity is like heroin to Hollywood producers, and adaptations of his books and stories — as well as original screenplays by King himself, an inveterate movie nerd — have led to an astonishing 100+ films and television shows. Like their source material, though, they’re a decidedly mixed bag: for every Shawshank Redemption, there’s a Children of the Corn 666: Isaac’s Return. And just as King enjoys a decidedly muddled critical reception, films made from his works, while occasionally made by talented filmmakers who find in the material the bones of something great, tend towards third-rate exploitation horror. Still, with The Mist having opened last week, it’s good to remember that a number of genuinely worthwhile projects have made the translation from the mind of King to the big screen. Here are five of the best. 

    Read More...


    + DIGG + DEL.ICIO.US + REDDIT
  • Movies We Missed: Interkosmos (2006)

    Posted by Peter Smith

    One of the sad truths about our current distribution system is that many unique films are overlooked by distributors in favor of movies deemed more "marketable." Such was the case with Interkosmos, the wholly original debut feature from Chicago video artist Jim Finn. Finn uses a faux documentary format to tell the story of an apocryphal Eastern bloc space mission to colonize the outer reaches of our solar system- not exactly the most commercial of projects. But Interkosmos is so wonderfully strange that it deserves to find a cult audience on DVD.

    Why we missed it: After making the festival rounds last year, Interkosmos only played a handful of theatrical venues, so it's not like we were the only once who bypassed it.

    Unless the names Nandini Khaund and Ruediger van den Boom mean anything to you, there aren't any name actors to be found in the cast.

    Read More...


    + DIGG + DEL.ICIO.US + REDDIT
  • American Gangster vs. Mr. Untouchable

    Posted by Peter Smith
    A few weeks ago, we reported here on the ongoing rivalry between Nicky Barnes and Frank Lucas, who were both drug dealers in the New York of the 1970s. Both men were eventually arrested and imprisoned, after which both turned snitch, ratted out their former associates, and are both now "retired" and back out in the world. This is of interest to us mainly because both men are also the subjects of movies — the high-profile Ridley Scott epic American Gangster and the documentary Mr. Untouchable — that opened within a week of each other. As part of the publicity for each movie, both men have been granting interviews in which they've talked about the bad old days and also jockeyed for position as the real ultimate big-city badass of their era. But of course, given the Screen Grab's recognized and unquestioned authority on movies and everything else fly, they have both secretly been sitting on the edge of their seats, nervously waiting to hear what we think. First, just to state the obvious and get it out of the way: both men are sociopathic predators and dishonored tattletales, who should in no way be mistaken for glamorous figures or role models. But a job's a job. There can be only one.

    Read More...


    + DIGG + DEL.ICIO.US + REDDIT
  • Trailer Roundup: Vantage Point, Midnight Meat Train, Mama's Boy

    Posted by Peter Smith

    Vantage Point



    This trailer has actually been floating around for a while now, but I’ve only now gotten around to writing it up because I’ve been a little unsure how I feel about it. Namely, I questioned the use of an attempted assassination as a central plot point, much as I questioned the wisdom of same in such forgettable mid-'90s fare as The Jackal and Murder at 1600. But then I realized that similar stuff goes on every week on 24, and if it’s OK for Jack Bauer to do it on television than movies are surely fair game. And make no mistake — Vantage Point looks like nothing so much as a feature-length episode of 24, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. And the cast is fairly impressive, anchored by Dennis Quaid, who has become the new Harrison Ford — the no-nonsense middle-aged man of action — now that Ford himself can barely be bothered anymore.

    Read More...


    + DIGG + DEL.ICIO.US + REDDIT
  • "Chuck Norris Doesn't Endorse, He Tells America How It's Gonna Be!"

    Posted by Peter Smith



    Iowa voters (and anyone with an Internet connection) have just begun seeing this campaign ad, in which Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee reels off a few of the more family-friendly and less pretzel-twistingly surreal "Chuck Norris facts" while Norris sits beside him assuring potential voters that the Huckster will protect our Second Amendment rights and "put the IRS out of business." Taken strictly on an aesthetic level, and reminding everyone that any time we use that term in reference to political commercials we're grading on a curve, it's a smart piece of work. Discussing the ad in Slate, the site's "Trailhead" campaign blogger writes, "It's unclear to me why he would base his first Hawkeye State TV campaign on an outdated Internet meme that might not have trickled up to most caucus-goers," thus paradoxically implying that the "Norris facts" angle is all played-out, yet at the same time suggesting that it's too hip for the room. What may really matter is that in a contest where all the other Republican candidates have been concentrating on establishing their grim-manliness bona fides, Huckabee has unexpectedly demonstrated a sense of humor. What's more, he's dared to suggest there's something comical about macho icons, and maybe, by extension, something comical about a bunch of middle-aged rich white guys competing in a "Who Is Most Macho?" contest. Huckabee's delivery in the ad is pretty good, too; he doesn't ham it up, but unlike, say Richard Nixon, whose last words might well have been, "Explain to me again what I was doing on Laugh-In", he does make it clear that he gets the joke. If Huckabee gets anywhere in the primaries, it'll be because he manages to establish himself as the preferred candidate of religious conservatives, but if he builds on that base, it'll be because he manages, as George W. Bush did in 2000, to strike voters who might be inclined to see conservative holy-roller types as kind of scary as reassuringly normal. (How Bush ever pulled this off we still don't understand. Were we all drunk that year?) If nothing else, Huckabee has already pulled off a major comedy coup by inspiring the complaint, "Mike Huckabee has confused celebrity endorsement with serious policy," to pass the lips of his rival Fred Thompson, currently running for president on the basis of his record as New York City's pretend District Attorney. — Phil Nugent


    + DIGG + DEL.ICIO.US + REDDIT
  • Morning Deal Report: Pitt Splits Would-Be Hit

    Posted by Peter Smith

    Forget that Ed-Norton-Brad-Pitt-reunion buzz around State of Play; Pitt has flown the coop, and Russell Crowe is rumored to be replacing him.

    Speaking of fantasy movies about Jesus, here comes The 13th Disciple, about (wait for it) Jesus's evil twin brother.

    The director of The U.S. vs. John Lennon is at work on a documentary about Michael Hutchence of INXS.

    Peter Smith


    + DIGG + DEL.ICIO.US + REDDIT
More Posts Next page »