The Screengrab

Death Defying Acts opens in limited release this weekend, and so far, it hasn't generated much advance buzz.  It's hard to figure out why:  It comes on the heels of other successful movies involving magicians, including The Prestige and The Illusionist;  it's a romance-driven period piece (which should attract women), but it features a murder mystery, psychics, and famed escape artist Harry Houdini (for the fellas); it's got an all-star cast led by perennial heartthrobs Guy Pearce and Catherine Zeta-Jones; and it's directed by none other than girl-geek icon Gillian Anderson.  Maybe people are confused by the premise:  in Death Defying Acts features Zeta-Jones as a spiritualist out to run a con on the master magician.  We haven't seen it yet, so we're not sure if Zeta-Jones' powers are portrayed as being authentic, but in real life, Houdini was a relentless skeptic who didn't believe in any aspect of the paranormal, and who, in fact, went out of his way to disprove all claims of the supernatural as buncombe.  Regardless, Hollywood has always been a sucker for a good psychic yarn, which probably explains why goofy New Age religions tend to take root in southern California before hitting the rest of the country.  For today's Take Five, we bring you a handful of fine films about psychics -- and not a single one starring Shirley MacLaine.

THE SHINING (1980)

Nobody does psychic powers like Stephen King, and nobody realizes those psychic powers on screen better than Stanley Kubrick does in this horror classic.  One of the most effective ideas Kubrick had was to de-emphasize Danny's psychic abilities, to tone down the paranormal aspects of the story (such as the hedge topiary coming to life) in order to play up the much more compelling dramatic element of a family in isolation slowly falling apart.  Not that the terrifying paranormal elements aren't there:  few moments in contemporary horror are creepier than seeing Danny go into a drooling fit, or the bizarre images he sees in the abandoned rooms of the Outlook Hotel -- but by keeping them ambiguous, by allowing the suggestion that none of it is real, that it's all just possibly the byproduct of an epileptic vision or a mind damaged by loneliness and alcohol -- the whole thing is made more compelling and upsetting than if the paranormal elements were made explicit.  

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For what is ostensibly a tent pole for Fox in the summer blockbuster season, there hasn’t been a whole lot of mainstream hype for the yet-to-be-officially-titled X-Files sequel. The film drops on July 25th and it’s only today that an official poster has been released (and it’s quite fetching, as you can see). Then again, there seems to be a method to the marketing madness behind Mulder and Scully’s resurrection. It works like this:

Step 1) Make brief trailer comprised purely of quick cuts, include one shot of beloved characters. Bring trailer to comics convention, allow nerds to spread good news.

Step 2) Make second trailer, include pensive dialogue between beloved characters, more quick cut action, add theme song and classic vague text alluding to “the truth” and it being somewhere. Bring to comic convention, allow nerds to spread good news.

Step 3) Profit without paying for televised marketing until summer.

That Chris Carter’s one smart cookie. Metaphorically speaking. Unless the truth that is out there is that Chris Carter is indeed a delicious, circular confection possibly containing chips of chocolate.

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About four years ago, shortly after I started working for Hooksexup and long before the illustrious Screengrab was born, I had one of my first bona fide celebrity sightings in New York. I was walking out of a music shop when I turned and saw David Duchovny briskly walking with a female companion on 4th street. We made eye contact and the look on Duchovny’s face will forever remain in my mind as one that screamed, “DEAR GOD, DON’T LET THE X-FILES FREAK TALK TO ME! NOT TODAY!” I held my tongue in a way that the audience watching this leaked teaser for the X-Files’ return to the silver screen would find impossible.

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LOS ANGELES: The films of Sergei Paradjanov aren't like most of the films made in the Soviet Union in the sixties and seventies, and not really much like anything else, either: floating, visually poetic works full of charged symbolic imagery. Their meanings may not always be readily clear, but that wasn't enough to keep the government authorities from deciding that whatever they were supposed to mean, it pissed them off; the director, who died at the age of 66 in 1990, just when it was becoming possible for artists such as himself to get some breathing room in their home country, was subjected to official harassment during the most creatively fertile years of his career and spent four years in a labor camp. From February 22 to the 29th, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is showing six of Paradjanov's films, including his breakthrough Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors, the masterpiece The Color of Pomegranates, and the late works The Legend of Suram Fortress and Ashik Kerib, made in the 1980s after the filmmaker was obliged to take a fifteen-year layoff.

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Spider-Man 4 lumbers gradually into production. Sony says this will include a mere two villains, instead of their originally planned 846. Whatever.

Gerard Butler has fled the Escape From New York remake, just after news that Brett Ratner had split for the outer boroughs himself.

The underused Gillian Anderson will star in The Smell of Apples, a drama set in '70s South Africa. Nice to see her again.

That George Romero just really likes zombies, apparently; Diary of the Dead's not even out yet and he's already planning a sequel.

Speaking as the "Andy Summers" in a Police cover band, I'm delighted to hear that the real Andy Summers' autobiography is becoming a documentary. That it's from the director of Tupac: Resurrection is a little less encouraging, but we'll see.

— Peter Smith