Head Over to the New Screengrab
10/9/2007 10:00:00 AM
Screengrab has a new look and a host of new features; whatever link you clicked to get here will soon redirect to the new blog page, but in the meantime, here's a link. See you there!
— Peter Smith
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Take Five: Hollywood Plays Itself
10/5/2007 4:00:00 PM
This weekend sees the limited release of Finishing the Game, Justin Lin’s chance to redeem himself after the wretched Tokyo Drift. Its plot — about the cynical, comical, disastrous attempt to finish the 1973 martial-arts epic Game of Death after writer/producer/star Bruce Lee died less than two weeks into filming — would make a pretty good actual documentary; but Lin has chosen to ratchet up the absurdity, and the comedy, by making it a fake documentary. That said, it’s one that explores the issues of racial stereotyping and money-hungry (if cash-poor) producers in a very real way, and if it’s as funny as some of the early clips and trailers indicate, Lin might win his way back into the hearts of a lot of fans he lost with his last couple of movies. (If nothing else, it wins points for the swell '70s mise-en-scene, the name "Troy Poon," and casting MC Hammer as a blaxploitation hero.) Why, it might even take its place alongside other films that watch Hollywood watching itself with a gimlet eye!
THE OSCAR (1966)
Given the chock-full-of-insiders cast and a production team that knew a thing or two about Hollywood’s tendency to dash good ideas against the rocks, The Oscar should have been the perfect way to cast a jaundiced eye at L.A’s constant hurry-scurry for fame. But Russell Rouse, for all his writing talents, was no director; screenwriter Harlan Ellison set his prose on extra-purple; and star Stephen Boyd gives a performance so hammy it puts you at risk for trichinosis — his only competition for sheer hootiness comes from crooner Tony Bennett in his first and last starring role. A high-camp cult classic renowned for its delicious badness, and long overdue for a DVD release.
THE PLAYER (1992)
Michael Tolkin’s novel was meant as a stiff middle finger to the Hollywood system that treated him and his fellow writers as the most disposable part of the movie business; when Robert Altman, a director who had his own issues with Tinseltown, got hold of it, he turned it into a crowd-pleaser that magically retained its subversive flavor. The denouement, where Griffin Mill’s screenplay is finally transformed into movie magic, is one of the heartiest — and meanest — laughs Hollywood has ever made at its own expense.
LOST IN LA MANCHA (2002)
If you believe Terry Gilliam, he’s a doomstruck filmmaker whose brilliant cinematic conceptions are constantly being brought low by meddling studios, short-sighted producers, and just plain bad luck. If you believe Terry Gilliam’s detractors, he’s an egomaniacal jackass who dreams up movies he knows are unfilmable and puts himself in situations where he’s bound to fail. Whichever is the case — and we suspect it’s a combination of the two &mdsah; it’s impossible to watch this documentary about the (un)making of his never-completed epic, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, and not think that something very seriously wrong is happening somewhere.
LOS ANGELES PLAYS ITSELF (2003)
Thom Anderson’s masterful look at how Hollywood shows its face onscreen — the good, the bad, and the ugly — is likely to never be commercially released. Much of the footage was put together without official sanction, and given the wide range and depth of the material involved, it’s unlikely that Anderson will ever be able to satisfy the conditions and expenses of all the copyright-holders involved. It’s a shame: Los Angeles Plays Itself is one of the finest films ever made, and absolutely the most profound, and often hilarious, look at Hollywood through its own eyes ever attempted.
THIS FILM IS NOT YET RATED (2006)
Director Kirby Dick plays it a bit cute at times in this documentary about the American movie ratings system, but it’s a topic that was long overdue for a treatment — any treatment — on film. With censorship of movies overseas more and more in the news, it’s about time that someone, even a disingenuous smartass like Dick, examined the prehistoric moral and aesthetic values of the MPAA, which affect not only how movies look when they finally hit the screen, but what kind of films the entire industry chooses to make — or not make. Sadly, professional movie scold Jack Valenti died before this movie found an audience wide enough to string him up themselves.
— Leonard Pierce
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The Many Faces of the Mumble Master
10/5/2007 3:00:00 PM
Easily the most talked-about film at this year's New York Film Festival is Todd Haynes' Bob Dylan biopic I'm Not There, which features several incarnations of the marble-mouthed master. In an irreverent tribute, New York magazine has put together a Top 10 of Dylan's most incomprehensible interviews. He became notoriously averse to press as he got older, so some of these are from some very unlikely sources, including a random street in Vienna, a hotel room in Tokyo and even a Hasidic telethon. It's nice to see a little balance and humor in covering Dylan, who's usually spoken about in hushed tones of reverence and shoots to the top of critics' lists whenever anything with his name on it is released. — Bryan Whitefield
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The Top 11 Worst Scenes in Great Movies, Part 2
10/5/2007 2:00:00 PM
“Give. . . .Us. . . Free!” AMISTAD (1997)
And it was all going so well. It may have been a financial disappointment at the time, but we believe Steven Spielberg’s anti-slavery epic, about the real-life trial of a group of African prisoners who mutinied on the titular slave ship, to be one of the director’s most powerful films. For most of the film’s running time, Spielberg avoids the kinds of patronizing clichés that come easily to filmmakers grubbing for Oscars, no doubt aided by Djimon Hounsou’s star-making performance as the rebels’ charismatic leader. Heck, the film even features one of John Williams’s more lovely scores. But the center cannot hold. Madness is about to be loosed on the world. Halfway through the courtroom proceedings, Spielberg just can’t hold it in any longer, reverting back to one of those cheap, manipulative "emotional" setpieces that he spent so much of his career living down.
(Clip includes scenes from both versions of the film)
"Get me the FBI!!" INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1956)
This one wasn't the filmmakers' fault. Director Don Siegel had ended his sci-fi classic with a gloriously paranoid, no-hope wrap-up, with Kevin McCarthy, wild-eyed and disheveled, screaming "They're here! They're here!" at passing cars (and the audience). The studio couldn't deal with that, so they inserted a flashback structure, with McCarthy's character in a loony bin describing what he'd been through, all for the sake of an ending where somebody comes running to a report that a truck has jacknifed outside and there's alien pods all over the road. Snapping to action, McCarthy's psychiatrist (Richard Deacon, who was Mel Cooley on The Dick Van Dyke Show) grabs a phone and barks, "Get me the FBI!" (Say what you like about J. Edgar Hoover, he knew how to deal with pods.) When Phil Kaufman remade Body Snatchers in 1978, he restaged the ending, bringing McCarthy in to run around screaming and banging on windshields again, though this time the sequence ended with his character not being rescued. It must have felt like scratching an itch that he hadn't been able to reach for twenty-two years.
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That Fucking Ending, THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS (1942)
It’s perhaps the ultimate in movie-melting bad scenes. (We really wish we had a clip to show you, although, to be fair, its awfulness is best seen in the context of the awesomeness of the rest of the movie.) When RKO took over the cutting of Orson Welles’s follow-up to Citizen Kane, they hacked away over two reels worth of footage and then tried to tie it all together with a ridiculously hokey, "spiritual" happy ending. By most accounts, Welles’s original ending, detailing the sad decline and loneliness of the remaining figures in his family saga, was an exercise in haunting despair. That’s probably why the studio was so bothered by it. In their defense, the film reportedly had a rather divisive test screening. In Welles’s defense, however, he made a lot of cuts and trims himself after the studio requested them. But the unkindest cuts would come later, when the film was taken completely out of his hands. The result is one of the most amazing buzzkills in movie history: a devastating masterpiece that comically fizzles out before it even reaches its climax.
That Unfortunate Episode With the Natives, KING KONG (1933)
We here at ScreenGrab try not to let excesses of political correctness spoil our fun, but there's really no way around it: from The Birth of a Nation to Gone with the Wind to a thousand Westerns and comedies, a lot of older movies with enduring value are tainted with outdated racial or sexual attitudes that make modern viewers squirm a little. The depiction of the sinister yet cartoonish "natives" on Skull Island may not be the most egregious example on record, but it's especially notable for being so integral to the conception of such an established classic. After more than seventy years,
nobody's figured out quite how to tell this story without them, which is why both the 1976 remake and the more recent Peter Jackson version just basically held their noses and duplicated the ooga-booga antics. (Jackson's means of avoiding racism was to make them seem monstrous and not fully human, which, um, didn't help.)
Hobbit Pillow Fight, LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RETURN OF THE KING (2003)
It’s probably not quite right to call this a bad scene from a great film. The Lord of the Rings trilogy is a great series, to be sure [I contest that. — ed.], but the third installment, which lacks the immediacy and novelty of the first and the grandeur and majesty of the second, is the least of the three films. Its biggest problem, though, is that it doesn’t know when to quit; by our count, it’s got at least five endings, none of them satisfactory. By this point, we’re torn between how fond we’ve grown of the characters and how much we want to get some damn closure, already. And while it’s understandable for director Peter Jackson to be unsure where to go out, given his sprawling source material, there’s absolutely no excuse for the false ending (we think it’s the second or third) where Frodo is reunited with his fellow hobbits, who commence to hop up and down on his sickbed in a disturbing display usually referred to as "the reunion scene" but probably better entitled Big Gay Midget Pillow Fight Party. Jackson’s LotR is already chock-full of homoerotic subtext, but this is ridiculous.
"Tell Me I’m a Good Man," SAVING PRIVATE RYAN (1998)
Look, it’s not that we’re trying to pick on Steven Spielberg here. (After all, why would we want to do that to the most powerful man in Hollywood?) The fact is, as we’ve noted elsewhere, you can’t truly attain greatness unless you take some risks. Despite what some of our more snooty colleagues might say, Spielberg has attained greatness. But along the way, he’s also made more than his share of missteps. (Think of it like this: Michael Jordan scored a lot of baskets, but he also took a lot of shots. He missed a ton of them; he just didn’t let it get to him.) The final bookend of Saving Private Ryan is a perfect example. Having already gone for the jugular several times in the preceding two and a half hours, Spielberg just can’t let it go, and has to pull for our heartstrings one last time. It’s one time too many, resulting in a scene of schmaltzy sanctimoniousness that would make your average TV-movie director blush.
— Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce
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The Top 11 Worst Scenes in Great Movies, Part 1
10/5/2007 1:00:00 PM
The title says it all. There you are, enjoying a film that may well be a masterpiece, when you get the distinct sense that something has changed. Like you’ve accidentally noticed a slight whiff of cat poo in your filet mignon. Very often, a bad scene makes itself irrelevant in its own way, rendering a film immune to its pernicious influence. (Notice how many people think Psycho is a masterpiece, despite that hideous ending.) But not always. Sometimes they actively sink perfectly good movies. We’ve brought together a list of some truly awful scenes that popped up in some truly great films. One important note: It was only when we were almost done compiling this list that we realized the AV Club did a similar list a couple of years ago. We went with ours anyway; there are only a couple of overlaps, and we just don’t understand how they could have overlooked that Searchers scene. Anyway, here they are: The 11 Worst Scenes from Great Movies.
Obligatory Cowpoke Roughhousing, THE SEARCHERS (1956)
John Ford had a great many impressive qualities as a director, but his sense of humor tended to run to scenes of drunken galoots with comical accents (Irish, hayseed) rasslin' each other. One of the most prolonged and ill-fitting of his roughhousing exhibitions comes just before the climax of what many consider to be his darkest and most unsettling film, a film that's arguably all the richer for the way that the scenes intended as comic relief make you long for the comparatively soothing images of John Wayne's Ethan Edwards shooting a dead Indian's corpse in the face. The plot is picking up steam, urgent matters need attending to, but time just stops so that everyone can watch Ethan's sidekick Martin bust up the wedding of his love-object, Debbie and tussle with her betrothed, Charlie, played by Ken Curtis. (Curtis was later to be known as Festus on TV's Gunsmoke; the scene would at least make better sense if Martin were presented as a theater buff who could no longer tolerate Ken Curtis's acting. As Ken himself might put it, HAW-haw!) Martin Scorsese paid homage to Ford by including this scene in Mean Streets when his heroes go to the movies, just dropping it in without warning or preparation, so that one second you're watching a bunch of urban mooks threaten each other in Little Italy, and then suddenly a pair of rustic types are thrashing each other out back of the meetin' hall. Truth be told, it didn't look any more bizzarely out of place there than it ever did in its own movie.
Some Very Bad Sex, MUNICH (2005)
We were tiptoeing and whispering all through Munich; could it be that Spielberg, the master of overstatement and bombast, had finally made a small, quiet, subtle movie about hard men facing a morally shaky situation? So it seemed for most of this otherwise excellent film’s runtime, but one of us must have coughed or sneezed or made our chair squeak, because BAM! — out of nowhere comes The Sex Scene. Out of nowhere, our tortured hero, abed with his wife, starts having a spasm not seen in motion-picture love scenes since Kyle MacLachlan sat underneath Elizabeth Berkeley. He flashes back on all the recent events in his blood-soaked life while shaking, sweating, glowering and, er, doing his manly duty, all in hyper-serious slo-mo, while the audience sits there aghast and wonders who let this guy into their movie. The overall effect is like someone farting during a eulogy, and then doing it over and over and laughing about it. The movie never recovers, but at least you can watch the rest of it at ease, knowing that nothing Spielberg’s going to do will be any worse.
Cot wrestling, LOLITA (1962)
With the Production Code still in force, Vladimir Nabokov’s classic was a tricky novel to adapt for the big screen. That Stanley Kubrick managed to make a near-masterpiece despite the pressure is a testament to how well he translated Nabokov’s prose style into cinematic terms. So how to explain an awful mid-film slapstick scene involving an uncooperative hotel cot? It’s bad enough that the broad style of the scene doesn’t match the rest of the film, but it's also painfully unfunny on its own terms. As he and the porter flail around trying to pry open the cot, James Mason appears to be summoning all of his patented British reserve just to maintain his dignity. It doesn’t help that the porter is little more than a stereotype, stumbling and flopping down on the seesawing cot and consistently speaking in a loud voice despite the presence of the sleeping Lolita nearby. On top of it all, the scene goes on forever. What went wrong here? Did the famously exacting Kubrick get called away on personal business mid-shoot? Was there a hidden clause in the Production Code calling for the mandatory use of bumbling minorities in potentially controversial movies? Did the studio editors mistakenly insert footage of James Mason that was originally intended for a Curly Joe-era Three Stooges picture?
Simon Oakland Explains It All For You, PSYCHO (1960)
Alfred Hitchcock played games with viewer expectations all the way through his groundbreaking shocker, but surrendered to the squarest Drama 101 impulse in the final reel when, having given the entire theater audience a collective heart attack, he wheeled Simon Oakland on to deliver an endless lecture explaining Norman Bates. The other characters onscreen seem rapt, too, though you might expect that at this point the only question they'd want or need answered would be, "You did triple-check the ties on his straight-jacket, right?" Some part of Hitchcock must have rebelled at what he was doing, because when the psychiatrist finally runs out of balloon juice and Hitch cuts to Anthony Perkins looking into the camera, smiling what Norman imagines to be his reassuringly harmless-looking smile, it undercuts the speech completely, reminding us that some things are way beyond anyone's ablity to explain them.
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Susan Tyrrell Single-Handedly Brings Down FAT CITY (1972)
John Huston's slice-of-life picture starring Stacy Keach as a washed-up boxer was filmed in actual bars and flophouses in Stockton, California, and most of it is bracing in its documentary realism. That makes it all the more jarring when the movie welcomes an emissary from another planet: Susan Tyrrell, the camp diva of baroque overacting whose other credits include Andy Warhol's Bad, Forbidden Zone and John Waters's Cry-Baby, where she was paired with Iggy Pop — who must have thought he was back on heroin. Here, she reaches her peak in a scene where Keach's punch-drunk fighter decides to approach her, even though he doesn't have a whip and a chair. Her shiny, painted face and bright red hair make her look like Shirley Temple grown up and gone on a bender, and her sing-song line readings recall Norma Desmond declaring, "I am big! It was the pictures that got small." (This picture would be too small for Tyrrell's performance if you ran it in IMAX.) While she scales the rafters, Keach can't think of much to do but stare at her while she babbles about her sexual history; he finally has to get up and ram the jukebox with his head just to slow her down a little. The scene is meant to be a love duet between two people on the bottom of the society, but it looks more like a fight to the death between two actors who are barely in the same movie.
— Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce
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Today in the Hooksexup Film Lounge
10/5/2007 12:00:00 PM
Finishing the Game: "Unfortunately, Finishing the Game fails to make much of its promising conceit."
My Kid Could Paint That: "Superb. . . Bar-Lev couldn't possibly have anticipated the tangled philosophical thicket into which his movie plunges."
Q&A: Amir Bar-Lev: "I felt like the audience of the film was really being indicted.
The audience and the filmmaker, I think. We live in a time when public humiliation is probably the most popular form of entertainment today. I wanted to show that when you're involved in something like that, it doesn't feel like gold. It feels like shit."
A review of The Heartbreak Kid is on the way.
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Morning Deal Report: Hack Update
10/5/2007 11:00:00 AM
The Escape From New York movie might not be Len Wiseman's gig at all. Instead, it may pass to an even hackier director: Brett Ratner. John Carpenter must be rolling over in his, um, bed.
Despite the massive success of Halo 3, it looks like the Halo movie is kiboshed for good. Damnit, where will we ever find another movie about guys fighting in space?!
Music-video director Sam Bayer will remake Near Dark.
Todd Phillips (Old School, etc) will direct Hangover, about a pair of dudes who go around doin' dude stuff and acting dudely. I assume. (Or maybe it'll be about guys bein' guys.)
— Peter Smith
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The Kite Runner Uproar
10/4/2007 4:00:00 PM
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| Marc Forster |
Marc Forster, the director of the forthcoming, high-profile film version of Khaled Hosseini's best-selling novel The Kite Runner, says that he saw the movie, which he filmed last year on location in Afghanistan, as a chance to give "a voice and a face to people who’ve been voiceless and faceless for the last thirty years." Now it seems that he may be on the verge of giving the local child stars of the picture a public face that has them in fear of their lives. The movie, which is set in the public from the Russian invasion to the arrival of the Taliban, includes a scene in which the character played by twelve-year-old Ahmad Khan Mahmoodzada is raped by another boy. Forster has said that Afghanistan seemed like a nice place at the time and describes a congenial, collaborative working relationship with the boy and his father. So he and the studio, Paramount, were caught off guard when the family started contacting reporters and telling them that they fear violent reprisals once the movie opens. They also go out of their way to make it sound as if Forster somehow tricked them into letting him shoot the scene against their will. For his part, Forster describes a process in which, to address the boy's discomfort with being shown nude, he adjusted his original concept; in the finished film, "the rape is conveyed impressionistically, with the unstrapping of a belt, the victim’s cries and a drop of blood."
After what sounds like more serious deliberation and the weighing of more informed viewpoints than ever went into the planning of the Iraq war, Paramount has decided to take the film's three young stars and their families out of Kabul, and is even pushing the release date of the picture back by six weeks so that the kids can finish their school year before being choppered out. In the meantime, different authorities on the region are all over the map in their assessments of just how much damage the movie will end up doing, though no one seems to think that the ultimate result will be universal peace and brotherhood. Some envision it setting off a "Dutch cartoons scenario" or serving as a recruiting poster for the Taliban; according to the New York Times, "a Hazara member of Parliament warned that Pashtun and Hazara 'would be killing each other every night' in response to the film’s depiction of them." Of course, the Times also notes that, in the great tradition of The Last Temptation of Christ, "None of the interviewees had seen the movie." — Phil Nugent
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"I Should Have Been More Stubborn"
10/4/2007 3:00:00 PM
That’s the lesson Ridley Scott says he learned in dealing with the studios over Blade Runner’s long, tortured career. With the definitive box set DVD preparing for release, allegedly containing a version of the film even more director’s-cutty than the now-antiquated director’s cut that debuted in 1992, Geoff Boucher at the Los Angeles Times takes a look at the convoluted legacy of the frustrating and brilliant film, how it got to where it is today, and how it changed the people involved. — Leonard Pierce
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Whitefield at NYFF: Flight of the Red Balloon
10/4/2007 2:00:00 PM
With films like Café Lumiere and last year’s Three Times, Hou Hsiao-hsien has proven that he's capable of creating beautiful cinema, and his latest entry only solidifies that. Commissioned by the Musee d’Orsay in Paris, this loose remake of the famous 1956 Albert Lamorisse short is much less focused on the balloon in the title, instead giving an intimate portrait of a mother (the eternally beautiful Juliette Binoche), her son and his Chinese au pair.
The film is for the most part without a script, and this device infuses all the action with a feeling of spying in on reality. The story is a simple one; the director is more interested in creating an impression of this family and the city around them. The naturalistic yet inventive photography is a pleasure to look at, and helps translate a story that is both modern and classic. My only real complaint was the use of a CGI-ed balloon that probably made the director’s life a lot easier but was a consistent hang-up for me. — Bryan Whitefield
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