The Screengrab

The L.A. Times recently published their list of the 25 Best L.A. Films of the Past 25 Years. Naturally, some of the choices proved controversial (a lot of folks have trouble with the selection of Jackie Brown over Pulp Fiction, for instance), but Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule thinks it’s a decent list. “There were only eight, perhaps nine instances where I felt like the choices could have been replaced, by another film in the director’s filmography, or by another similarly themed film, or just by another movie to replace one that just shouldn't be there at all. For example, I can certainly understand why Boogie Nights is on the list, but it’s ultimately too diffuse and far more conventional than its electric style would suggest. I much prefer P.T. Anderson’s Magnolia (1999), a high-wire act in which Anderson gets more directly in touch with his inner Altman and dashes all concerns over whether anyone’s having a good time or not, planting Old Testament visual clues that subliminally lay the groundwork for that shocking rain of frogs. (And speaking of Altman, while I'm not the biggest fan of The Player, I was far happier to see it representing the great director here rather than the dour and sour Short Cuts.)”

The Toronto International Film Festival kicked off yesterday, and Spoutblog has the scoop on the film Paris Hilton doesn’t want you to see.

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Robert Altman couldn’t have known when he directed Short Cuts in 1993 that he was inventing a whole new genre. I don’t know if there’s a name for it – “405 cinema,” perhaps, or “Valleysploitation” – but you know what I’m talking about. It’s the genre that reveals insights into the human condition through intersecting stories set in Los Angeles. Crash, Magnolia, the recent Garden Party – there’s a whole lot of intersecting happening out there in L.A. and there’s soon to be more. Variety reports that “Disturbia scribe Christopher Landon will make his directorial debut with the indie dark comedy Burning Palms, which he penned. What's described as a subversive tale interlaces five stories set in Los Angeles, where no taboo is left unexplored as each character careens toward a dark and often comic fate.” It’s funny, I lived in L.A. for five years and finally left because there just wasn’t enough intersecting going on for my liking.

Doctor Who may be coming to the big screen, according to new show runner Steven Moffat.

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Garden Party, opening in limited release next week, is being touted as the arrival of a hot new talent in the person of writer/director Jason Freeland.  In fact, though, Freeland's first film was an entire decade ago, a somewhat bewildering James Ellroy adaptation called Brown's Requiem.  His new film, though, with its attractive young cast and allegedly verite look at contemporary Los Angeles, is getting way more attention than Brown's Requiem ever did, and if it's not technically his debut, it's at least poised to be his breakthrough.  We had a chance to screen Garden Party recently; should you believe the hype?

Boiled down to the one-sentence description that no doubt got it through the vetting process, Garden Party is the story of a group of young people, all recently relocated to the vast construct of the American psyche that is Los Angeles, who try to get by faced with all the pitfalls and perils the wicked city is home to.  Peopled with a game young cast, the movie gives us a bunch of characters who aren't quite established enough as archetypes to come across as trite right off the bat; there's the vaguely sinister real estate agent/drug dealer, the allegedly brilliant young musician who drifts through life intersecting with the other characters but never making a real emotional commitment to any of them, the renegade bohemian with a porn fetish, the sexually abused teen, and half a dozen other characters who seem like they just got off the late shift at the Quaalude factory.  Needless to say, their stories all intersect in sometimes surprising, sometimes predictable ways; needless to say, a few of them experience what could be called a revelation if it didn't come across as so utterly trifling; and, needless to say, there's lots of fashionable sex, drugs, and pouting to make thing palatable to the drugged-out, pouty teenage couples who are presumably the movie's target audience.  With all this stuff being needless to say, you might ask:  why was it even necessary to make the film?  The answer?  That is  a good question.

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The recent direction in which Radiohead has turned causes much split opinion, as might be expected from one of the biggest bands in the world.  Some feel that the more avant-garde turn their music has taken is a sign of growth, development, and change for the better, a step away from the simple but distinctive pop craftsmanship that marked their early days and towards an entirely new sensibility, more attuned to the voice of modern minimalist composers than to the pop or even indie-rock tradition.  Others think it's been a disaster, a pretentious and overwrought plunge into the alienatingly highbrow at the cost of the band's credibility, relatability and listenability.  Whatever one's opinion (and I'm certainly in the former camp), a lot of tears have been shed over the fate of the band's guitarist,  Jonny Greenwood.  Though he's been vocally supportive of Radiohead's direction and has adapted his playing admirably well to the demands of the more stripped-down, electronic-influenced work, many have wondered -- especially given the sound of lead singer Thom Yorke's solo work -- if he was fully behind the shift in tone.  But after the release of the stunning soundtrack to Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, no one should worry, least of all Greenwood himself.  It's a masterful album, perfectly suited to the material onscreen, that shows how fully possessed he is by moody minimalism and dissonant, striking tones.

There were legitimate worries when  Greenwood was announced as the composer to the score to There Will Be Blood.  A number of people, myself included, questioned the prominent role assigned to Aimee Mann's music in Magnolia; boosters found it fitting, a natural extension of the movie's story.  Others found it extremely inclusive, smacking of the cart driving the horse.  It turns out they have nothing to worry about:  Greenwood's score in There Will Be Blood is as subtle and insinuating as Mann's songs in Magnolia were obvious and intrusive.  From the first squalling, snakeline chords the the last smothering cluster of strings, it's a tightly controlled, sinister, and utterly appropriate score, a musical realization of the struggles and excesses in Daniel Plainview's soul.  While the movie itself is epic, the score is minute and precise,  coming from a stripped-down version of a full orchestra and delivering a terrible sense of struggle from its very first notes.  At times, Greenwood almost seems to be fighting a horrible battle to make the dissonant blasts and squalling notes force meaning and emotion from the barren landscapes of the film's oil-town settings:  there is pain and effort in this music as real and as clear as Plainview's horribly willful efforts to drag himself out of a hole in the ground with a wooden leg.  Some notes sound relentlessly, again and again, with a  furious insistence worthy of Ligeti; other notes creep loosely around the edges of perception, bringing the entire thing an almost ambient quality like Brian Eno's instrumental efforts.  It's an astonishing piece of work on every level, instantly marking Greenwood as a force to be reckoned with as a film composer.  (Unfortunately, the presence of a slight three-minute quote from his own "Popcorn Superhet Receiver", an avant-garde piece influenced by the Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki, disqualified the widely praised score from Oscar contention.)

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Steve Bryant at Reel Pop drew our attention to these beautifully assembled little montages by YouTube user "barringer82", who ought to be working for the Academy Awards people. They're like eating peanuts. "The Films of the 1970s" makes a case for that era as a time when actors who knew what the hell to do with a long, unbroken silent take, in particular Jack Nicholson and Al Pacino, ruled the world, and it feels so perfectly assembled, as if flows from one clip to the next in synch with the music and Peter Finch's big speech from Network, that we couldn't care less that Blow Out was actually released in 1981. (It also made us realize, for the first time ever, that one reason that Finch works so brilliantly in that part is his vocal resemblance to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Before he actually appeared on screen, I thought the clip of him talking was from a fireside chat that FDR must have given after snacking on hash brownies.)

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You know what they say- timing is everything. So perhaps it was unfair of me to wonder after your favorite Paul Thomas Anderson a scant two days after the DVD release of There Will Be Blood. In the end, the film walked away with a victory in last week's poll, racking up an impressive 44% percent of the vote. Running neck and neck for the runner-up spot were Boogie Nights and Magnolia. The comparatively modest Punch-Drunk Love and Hard Eight- awesome though they are- just couldn't keep up.

This week, in advance this weekend's release of The Forbidden Kingdom, we settle the age-old question that the film itself attempts to answer...

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It's been announced that New Line Cinema is being folded into Warner Bros. Entertainment. (Both studios are subsidiaries of Time Warner. New Line's connection to Time Warner goes back to 1996, when the corporation picked up New Line's parent company, Turner Broadcasting. As Forbes reports, "The decision to merge the two film divisions didn't come as a surprise. Time Warner Chief Executive Jeff Bewkes said during a Feb. 6 conference call that 'there is an obvious question about whether it still makes sense for us to have two completely separate studio infrastructures at Warner and New Line.' In a statement Thursday, Time Warner said that New Line will keep its own development, production, marketing, distribution and business affairs operations, but will coordinate them with Warner Bros. 'to maximize film performance and operating efficiencies, achieve significant cost savings and improve margins.' " It't not yet clear how many jobs will be lost in the downsizing process, but Robert Shaye and Michael Lynne, who co-founded the company forty years ago, and who had been sharing the titles of chairman and chief executive, are both already out the door.

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When Mike Figgis sat down with him for a lengthy BBC interview back in 1998, Paul Thomas Anderson wasn't yet the conquering hero of There Will Be Blood. He was still a young maverick filmmaker with only two movies under his belt and a hell of a lot to prove. 

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Opening wide this weekend, Martin McDonagh's In Bruges stars Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson as a pair of exiled hitmen stuck in the Belgian city until it's safe for them to return home, and their sojourn is meant to be hellish in every sense of the word. Belgium has long been Europe's punchline — yes, even more so than Poland; its stolidly middle-class character and reputation as "where culture goes to nap" makes it the butt of many a joke. David Rees of Get Your War On calls the sixteenth-century seer Nostradamus "the last interesting Belgian", which insult is all the more cutting considering he was actually French; and in a memorable Monty Python sketch, game show contestants are challenged to come up with a derogatory term for Belgium, and one noteworthy entrant claims that he can't think of anything more derogatory than just "Belgian". But all kidding aside, if you actually were trapped in Bruges for a prolonged period of time, you could do a lot worse as a way to pass the time than to head for the local cinema. Belgium has, er, sprouted one of the more interesting independent film scenes in Europe recently, and as this short list of some of our favorite Belgian movies of recent years should illustrate, there's a lot more to Belgian filmmaking than just Jean-Claude Van Damme.

MAN BITES DOG (1992)

One of the first Belgian films to create a great deal of buzz outside of Europe, Man Bites Dog (the French title translates, creepily, to "It Happened in Your Neighborhood" or "He is Coming to Your House") is a postmodern twist on the serial killer narrative a good five to ten years before such things became trendy. Anticipating the self-aware American horror films of the 2000s, it follows a small documentary camera crew as they tag along with Ben (played with sinister charm by co-writer/director Benoit Poelvoorde), a disconcertingly media-savvy mass murderer. Crammed with supremely disturbing moments, shocking violence, and genuinely clever moments of humor, Man Bites Dog has held up quite well and is still better than most of the films it undoubtedly helped to inspire.

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For those who've been handicapping the race for supremacy among the American filmmakers who achieved big-deal status during the 1990s, here's how things stand as this year winds down: with Quentin Tarantino providing the half of a double feature that followed the half that much of the audience walked out on, Richard Linklater taking a well-deserved breather, David O. Russell becoming a reality star on YouTube, Alexander Payne ducking through corners in a Groucho mask to avoid explaining his screenwriting credit on I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, and Kevin Smith unable to make a long-term thing out of his job directing the pilot for the TV show about an underachieving minimum-wage ape with a secret life battling dark forces that isn't Chuck. We extend wishes of good luck and productivity in the year to come to all of them, except maybe for Kevin Smith. In the meantime, with less than a week of 2007 left to go, Paul Thomas Anderson has vaulted into first place with his first movie in five years, There Will Be Blood.

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