While geek show operators like Takashi Miike continue to dominate articles about "new, exciting" Japanese cinema, the writer-director Kiyoshi Kurosawa has spent the past ten or twelve years quietly building a strong, surprising body of work that adds up to an ongoing portrait of a society cracking under unbelievable stress--stress so great that people who've never let themselves express a rude sentiment before snap and turn violent, and the line between our world and that of the departed spirits fizzles and melts away. Like Miike, Kurosawa is a provocateur, but while Miike gets your attention with weird concepts and bloody shocks, Kurosawa unsettles you with long, contemplative takes that get under your skin and shake up your nervous system. He was originally tagged as one of the "J-Horror" specialists, but there's a reason that his scariest movies, such as Cure (1997) and 2001'a Pulse (which was calamitously remade by Hollywood a few years ago), haven't inspired English-language franchises like the Ring and Grudge pictures. They're the product of a highly individual sensibility and way of looking at the world, and they don't make a lot of sense without Kurosawa's unifying style, which gives them the ineffable logical plausibility of a bad dream. Sometimes, as with Charisma, starring Kurosawa's favorite leading man, Koji Yakusho, as a big city detective who flees to the country and gets involved in local warfare over what may be a haunted tree, they don't even make sense with Kurosawa at the helm, and his daring conceptions and mix of good and bad ideas hit the wall with a splat. But at his best, he can justify a familiar rationalization sometimes offered by horror fans about much lesser artists--what may seem confusing or illogical about his movies makes them that much more frightening. His new Tokyo Sonata is being touted as a change of pace for the director, because it doesn't feature ghosts or serial murderers. Instead, it achieves the same kind of magnetic tension as Kurosawa's earlier movies, but here they're inspired by such everyday elements as uneasiness about economic stability, social class, and a family's lapses of faith in each other. If you think that makes it less scary, more power to you.

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Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

Turkish cinema is yet another hole in my film studies education. (Yeah, I actually have a degree in this stuff. No one has ever asked to see it.) I’ve seen clips of the Turkish Wizard of Oz and Turkish Batman and the like, but I have a feeling those are not representative examples of the current state of Istanbullywood. (I just made that up. At least I thought I did until I googled it and got seven hits.)

That being the case, I can’t really tell you where Araf (known in this country by the cheery title The Abortion) ranks on the spectrum of Turkish filmmaking. To my eyes, it looks like a very low-budget movie with a threadbare story, subpar acting and unimpressive special effects, but for all I know this is a top-of-the-line product in its country of origin. I would like to think not, and if the IMDb commenters claiming to be from Turkey are to be believed, I would be justified in thinking not. “Listen. I do not like to criticize my own country's movies for we are in the birthing pains of a stable film industry, but what the hell, this movie is horrific,” one earnestly proclaims. I feel his pain.

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15. THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT (1999)



Yes, I know you never actually see the witch. Yes, my wife and my father and countless other people got motion sickness from all the whip-pan video camera shots, and many others felt ripped off when the scariest thing in the much-hyped “new horror classic” was a bundle of sticks. And, true, the sequel was a jaw-dropping fiasco. And yet, I defend The Blair Witch Project on many levels. First, it did its job and creeped the bejesus outta me. Now, maybe that’s because I grew up (and later got stoned) in the dark woods of New England, where we used to actually burn witches, and so I’m the ideal audience for a flick about the paranoid possibilities of a forest at night. I also saw the movie on the big screen, after watching the brilliant small screen promotional faux-documentary Curse of the Blair Witch, so I was up-to-speed on all the Elly Kedward/Rustin Parr mythology and ready to be seduced by the film's tone of ominous forboding (rather than waiting to be impressed by gory special effects or whatever the haters didn’t find in the film). Plus, directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez turned a $22,000 budget into a $200 million dollar indie smash and then disappeared without a trace, kinda like the actors from the movie...so maybe there really is a curse.

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According to the famous quote, Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, only backwards and in high heels.

Sadly, Ms. Rogers didn’t make our Top 25 list, but the sentiment holds true for the Leading Ladies who did: after all, like the actors in our recent posting of The Top 25 Leading Men of All Time, the following matinee idols managed to fascinate and captivate over the course of varied careers with astonishing on-screen performances (and off-screen personas)...yet they also achieved their success in a notoriously sexist, looks-obsessed business with a tendency to relegate women to underimagined wife and girlfriend parts...

...or, to quote Goldie Hawn’s actress character in The First Wives’ Club, there are usually three stages to a woman’s Hollywood career: "Ingénue, district attorney, and Driving Miss Daisy.”

But not always, thankfully, as we here at the Screengrab hereby celebrate with our salute to 25 celluloid dames (some of them actual Dames) who defined and redefined our notions of film and femininity...backwards, forwards, up and down, in high heels, cowboy boots and everything in between.

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The Dark Knight  is currently smashing box office records with the same alacrity that the Joker makes a pencil disappear, and as with the first Christopher Nolan Batman movie, its soundtrack is provided by two veteran industry hands in the person of James Newton Howard and Hans Zimmer.  While it seems like this time around, their work was heavily influenced by the seething, screeching, atonal score that Jonny Greenwood wrote for There Will Be Blood, it's still highly reminiscent of the work they did for Batman Begins.

The two had their work cut out for them when they accepted the assignment from Warner Brothers to score the rebooting of the Batman franchise.  DC Comics' famed vigilante already had a number of memorable pieces of music associated with him:  from the jaunty, swinging theme song to the campy '60s TV show composed by jazz veteran Neal Hefti to the brooding, chaotic main theme written by Danny Elfman for the first Tim Burton Batman (which later became the theme music for the celebrated Batman animated series), and even Johann Strauss's operetta Die Fledermaus have been associated with the hero in the past.  Their goal when putting together a new score for Nolan's reboot of the franchise was to create something that conjured the proper tone of darkness and struggle without too obviously drawing on what had come before.  Howard, whose previous work has included The Prince of Tides and The Sixth Sense, took charge of the main theme and the loftier passages, while Zimmer, the German-born composer who created the eerie score for The Ring as well as the memorable soundtrack to Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line, worked on the incidental music and quieter, more sinister passages.  It was imperative that they create something that enhanced the brooding, bleak tone of Batman Begins while never threatening to overwhelm the action on screen or make the psychological development of the characters too obvious.

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One of the oldest and most respected independent distribution houses in the United Kingdom, Tartan Films, is taking down its shutter.  Plagued by financial difficulties and distribution concerns, Tartan has closed down its offices, dismantled its American arm (Tartan Video USA), released all of its employees, and begun the process of selling off its highly respectable catalogue to other distributors.  In recent years, Tartan had been best known for its "Asia Extreme" series, which brought movies like Oldboy and the original Japanese version of The Ring to the West, but the catalog of the 26-year-old company included everything from Bergman's Wild Strawberries to The Death of Mr. Lazarescu.

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With the new Hollywood remake of the Pang brothers' The Eye arriving in theaters this coming Friday — and with the new Hollywood remake of Takashi Miike's One Missed Call hustling out to make room for it — Terrence Rafferty ponders this thing called the glut of American remakes of recent Asian horror pictures. (Not everything gets a pithy term around here.) The success of Gore Verbinski's The Ring (based on the Japanese film Ringu, and Takashi Shimizu’s The Grudge, the director's English-language remake of his own Ju-On, guaranteed that there will many more films of this kind, even though, whether taken individually or as a singular continental phenomenon, adapting Asian horror movies for the Hollywood assembly line is a precarious business. Not that there aren't worse ways to go about it: as Rafferty notes, back in "the Stone Age of exploitation-movie history, shrewd Hollywood producers would simply have done what they did with the Japanese monster movies of that era: chop them up, hastily dub them into English and — if the repackagers were feeling particularly frisky — shoot a few minutes of new footage with a minor, familiar and presumably desperate American actor. Say what you will about remakes, they seem, all in all, a better option than Raymond Burr in Godzilla."

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