The Screengrab

The British writer-director Mike Holdges scored a big hit right out of the box with his first film, Get Carter (1971), which starred Michael Caine as a vengeful hit man and which just about single-handedly created a new kind of gritty British gangster movie. A couple of decades later, he helped make Clive Owen a movie star with another neo-noir, Croupier, a small film that narrowly escaped going to straight to video but managed to become a genuine sleeper. In between, he worked on probably his biggest-budgeted movie, the 1980 Dino De Laurentiis production Flash Gordon, a somewhat underrated entertainment that is one of the few comics-based movies to achieve true camp--the real, gilded thing itself, mind you, not that sniggery TV-Batman stuff. Aside from these high points, Modges has enjoyed the kind of career you might expect from a smart, talented guy who basically works within the industry but whose instincts aren't strictly, safely commercial: he's made some films, such as the 1987 A Prayer for the Dying, that were reportedly mangled by the distributors, and some, such as the 1985 Morons from Outer Space, where it's tempting to think that some mangling could have only helped. He's also made some movies that, as he writes in an article in The Guardian, never had much of a chance to find an audience. Such as his first film after Get Carter, the tantalizingly bizarre comedy Pulp, which also starred Michael Caine. He played a sleazy writer hired to ghost write the memoirs of a movie star (Mickey Rooney) with actual gangland connections.

Hodges writes that the movie bewildered studio executives and so was banished to the vaults, where it "languished for a year or more. Then one day, a technician appeared, brushed the accumulated dust from its label to make sure he had the right unknown, unloved film, and loaded it on to a truck. It was on its way to New York."

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Frank Darabont is back and Stephen King is nowhere to be found. Darabont will direct Law Abiding Citizen, set to star Jamie Foxx and Gerard Butler. “Written by Kurt Wimmer and Darabont, the script follows a successful assistant D.A. (Butler) who finds himself at the center of a vigilante plot hatched by a traumatized victim of the legal system (Foxx). Foxx's character is devastated to learn that, because of a plea bargain, one of his wife and daughter's murderers will be set free. So he unleashes revenge on the killers and those who made the deal,” says The Hollywood Reporter. Hey guys, Charles Bronson just called. He wants his big-ass gun back.

Julie Taymor is collaborating with her first screenwriter, William Shakespeare, again.

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Our goal here at the Screengrab for the Summerfest '08 feature is to give you a dozen or so movies, all of which have "summer" in the title, which you can watch to no great pain while you are waiting for your dog to bring back the tennis ball you threw in the ocean.  Unsurprisingly, most movies with the word "summer" in the title – and, indeed, most movies that are about summer, or are set during the summer, or are released during the summer, or in any way have the lemonade-and-sunscreen scent of summer about them, are pretty light, fluffy concoctions, spilling over with good will, gentle humor, and people wearing far less clothing than they normally would.  Today, though, is different.  Today we'll be featuring a movie by none other than Ingmar freakin' Bergman.  Bergman:  the man who single-handedly inspired Woody Allen to become a huge bummer.  Bergman:  the man whose most famous film involves a dying knight playing a desperate game of chess with the personification of Death itself.  Bergman:  the man whose very name is synonymous with incredibly heavy European art cinema.  Could this man possibly direct a breezy summer movie (or, in this case, a breezy sommar movie)?  Could this man, whose movies are stuffed with miserable families, emotional trauma, and metaphysical turmoil, give us, of all things, a fun little comedy?

Grab a chilled bottle of Svedka, book your tickets on Scandinavian Airlines, and join us for some Smiles of a Summer Night!

THE ACTION:  Meet Frederik Egerman.  He's a Swedish attorney and self-involved clothes horse with a gorgeous teenage wife named Anne.  There's one problem with their marriage:  they haven't consummated it yet.  Meet his son (from a previous marriage) Henrik, a recent graduate from divinity school, who faces a serious impediment to entering the priesthood:  he's got a big hard-on for his stepmother Anne – and since she's off-limits, he's carrying on an affair with Petra, his father's maid.  Meet Desirée Armfeldt, an actress that Frederik used to have a crush on and who is seriously envied by Anne.  She lets it be known that she has feelings for Frederik, which pisses Anne off to no end. Desirée is currently seeing another well-off fop named Carl-Magnus Malcolm, whose wife, Charlotte, is a good friend of Anne.  Are you following all this?  No?  Good.  We weren't either, to be perfectly honest with you.  Just take our word for it that wacky hijinks and hilarity are bound to ensue.

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