The Screengrab

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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In a slow week for new DVDs, there are no real world-beaters being released today. However, there are a number of solid picks for movie lovers of various stripes, and if nothing else there should be fewer flubs in this column than there were last week.

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Music critic Terry Teachout salutes Tim Burton and Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd as "easily the most innovative movie of its kind to be made since Bob Fosse’s 1972 Cabaret" and "the best and most artistically serious film ever to be made from a Broadway musical." As Teachout points out, in the early days of al-singing, all-dancing Hollywood musicals, Hollywood routinely raided Broadway for songs and stars and even the titles of hit shows, but generally came up with their own stories for the movie versions; what worked on stage was understood to be different from what worked on screen. "In a Broadway musical, fictional characters sing and dance in everyday situations. On stage, this improbable convention is readily accepted by audiences, since the performers are physically present in the theater and can thus be seen to be 'real,' just as an actor who steps out of the onstage action of a play to address the audience directly does not thereby compromise our sense of his reality. For this reason, stage musicals need not be firmly based on a realistic plot and can make use of non-naturalistic 'presentational' techniques But the live-action sound film, consisting as it does of photographed movement, is essentially a realistic storytelling medium. . . These constraints necessarily caused golden-age film musicals to make use of conventionally naturalistic plots and, typically, to include fewer songs than did stage musicals of the same period. . . Moreover, the songs were far more likely to be performed in settings that 'explained' why the characters were performing them."

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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.

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Although a handful of Stephen Sondheim's musicals have been staged for TV (including a Showtime transcription of Sweeney Todd that featured the original Broadway cast member Angela Lansbury, the new Tim Burton-directed Sweeney Todd will only mark the third time that a show for which Sondheim wrote both music and lyrics has been turned into a movie. The first, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, directed by Richard Lester in 1966, was made before Sondheim fully developed his personal style in the early 1970s with such musicals as Follies and Company, and the 1978 A Little Night Music, directed by Harold Prince, was a thorough waste of everyone's time. Even though the original show was based on a movie, Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night, the film version was flat and stagebound, a problem unlikely to recur under Beetlejuice's creator. Sondheim himself, speaking to Jesse Green in the New York Times, makes it clear that he has no use for those earlier movies, nor even for the more highly regarded movies Gypsy and West Side Story, both based on stage musicals for which he wrote the lyrics.

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With the release of Tim Burton's version of Sweeney Todd this weekend, there’s sure to be a renewed interest among non-theatre buffs in the other works of Stephen Sondheim. To commemorate the occasion, I’m posting videos of two of Sondheim’s most iconic songs, as presented on film. First, here’s his old favorite “Send In the Clowns,” from A Little Night Music. It’s performed in the film version by Liz Taylor, whose voice isn’t exactly ideal for the song, but whose performance is a spectacle all the same. Check it out:



Another of Sondheim’s most enduring musicals is Company, which has yet to be adapted for the big screen.

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