MovingPictureBlog

Oscar Watch III: Best Oscar Tweet of the Day

2012-01-24T13:36:00.000-06:00

Oscar Watch II: Many are advertised, but few are chosen

2012-01-24T13:15:00.000-06:00

My CultureMap commentary on the Oscar nominations announced this morning (along with my early handicapping of the major races) can be found here.

Oscar Watch: Ascent of The Descendants

2012-01-24T12:59:00.000-06:00

Congratulations to Alexander Payne for nabbing multiple Academy Award nominations for The Descendants, one of the very best films of 2011. You can read my recent MovieMaker Magazine interview with the acclaimed director here.

On the radio: Me

2012-01-23T12:10:00.001-06:00

I'll be on the air tomorrow morning with the good folks at News 92FM here in H-Town to talk about... well, what do you think, tonight's Florida GOP debate? No, we'll be chatting about the Academy Award nominations, which will be announced around 7:30 am. Listen for me somewhere between 8:30 and 8:40 am Tuesday. And then make sure you contact the station and tell them how wonderful you thought I was. Remember: You must listen. Resistance is futile.

"Hello"

2012-01-21T16:23:00.000-06:00

Lionel Ritchie's definitive version is so great, it took Woody Allen, Tom Cruise, Elvis Presley and dozens of other luminaries to cover just one chorus. But, to be fair, they're not bad. (Hat-tip to Movie Gal for the find.)

Underworld Awakening

2012-01-20T19:36:00.000-06:00

Have to admit: It's nice to see Kate Beckinsale back in the black skintight latex outfit. But that's not the only reason -- honest! -- that Underworld Awakening is my first guilty pleasure of 2012.

Ricky Gervais goes for the Gold -- and the jugular -- one more time

2012-01-14T18:03:00.000-06:00

You can read my Golden Globes predictions -- and my left-handed compliments to Ricky Gervais -- here.

When Mitt Romney Came to Town

2012-01-09T07:55:00.000-06:00

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo reports that supporters of Newt Gingrich hope to swift-boat Mitt Romney before the upcoming South Carolina GOP primary by releasing a documentary that, judging from this trailer, appears to be a hatchet job concocted by someone to the left of Michael Moore. Not that there's anything wrong with that, you understand. It's just that I never thought I'd live long enough to see conservative Republicans attack another conservative Republican by condemning the latter for... for... well, making too much money.

Next for George Clooney: A tale of real-life heroes

2012-01-09T07:23:00.001-06:00

Fresh from his critical and commercial success with The Ides of March -- which will be released on homevideo Jan. 17 -- George Clooney has announced his next project as a multihyphenate: An adaptation of the nonfiction book The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History by author Robert M. Edsel. The movie will be a true-life, post-WWII adventure drama about a special unit of U.S. Army specialists charged with locating and recovering art seized by the Nazis. And if that sounds just a tad familiar, well, maybe you saw (or at least read about) this fascinating documentary four years ago: The Rape of Europa.

Tangles with Wolves

2012-01-02T19:21:00.000-06:00

I'm kinda-sorta looking forward to seeing The Grey -- i.e., Liam Neeson Tangles with Wolves -- which opens Jan. 27 at theaters and drive-ins everywhere. But after seeing this television spot for the last several weeks, I almost feel like I've already been force-fed a stealth ad campaign for the movie.

My Top 10 of 2011

2012-01-01T19:02:00.001-06:00

To begin, as I do every year, with my standard disclaimer: This may be my list of the Top 10 Movies of 2011 – but it’s not necessary a rundown of the year’s 10 Best Movies. Because, quite frankly, I haven’t seen every single movie released in the US during the past 12 months. But it most certainly is a list of my favorite films to open in U.S. theaters in 2011.

(To be sure, at least one didn't opened in Houston – but that is H-Town's loss.)

These are, of course, purely arbitrary and totally subjective choices. And I’ll freely admit that, a decade or so hence, I might look back on the following lineup and want to make additions or deletions. At this point in time, however, I can honestly state these are the 2011 releases that impressed me most. And best. So there.

Hugo. Martin Scorsese’s awesomely fantastical and fervently heartfelt fable of resilience and renewal is an exhilaratingly loving ode to the magic and immortality of cinema, a stirringly exciting adventure with a delightfully Dickensian flavor, and a powerfully eloquent expression of human longing for a sense of purpose. Not incidentally, it’s also the very best 3D movie ever made. And I must admit: I never thought the sight of a mechanical man drawing a picture ever would get me teary-eyed. But… Well, if you passionately love film and you see this particular film, you’ll understand.

The Descendants. George Clooney gives the finest, strongest performance of his career – so far – in this richly amusing and deeply affecting dramedy by filmmaker Alexander Payne (Sideways, About Schmidt). You could say Clooney’s character – Matt King, a Honolulu lawyer whose life undergoes dramatic changes as his wife hovers near death – is a typical Payne protagonist, a normally risk-averse fellow who gets shaken out of his routine, and shocked out of his expectations. But Clooney makes that character uniquely, memorably and well-nigh perfectly his own.

Daydream Nation. Charged with alternating currents of teen angst, sardonic wit, nervous dread and impudent sensuality, Canadian filmmaker Mike Goldbach’s dazzlingly inventive comedy suggests Juno as reimagined by David Lynch – or a sunnier, funnier Donnie Darko – as it renders the misadventures of its sarcastic, sexually precocious 17-year-old heroine (a breakthrough performance for Kat Dennings) who remains whip-smart and wickedly droll while confronting the peculiarities of life in the weirdest small town this side of Twin Peaks. (This Canadian import received criminally sparse U.S. theatrical release – but it’s well worth catching on cable or home video. And, yes, those are quotes from my original Variety review on the DVD package.)

Young Adult. Charlize Theron’s brilliant performance as a spectacularly self-indulgent thirtysomething author who behaves not just badly but borderline madly while revisiting her hometown is nothing short of jaw-droppingly fearless. And so is the sharply insightful and often discomfortingly comical movie – created by the Juno team of director Jason Reitman and scriptwriter Diablo Cody – that showcases Theron’s Oscar-worthy star turn.

Margin Call. Armed with his own savagely smart and profanely witty script and an impeccable ensemble of perfectly cast actors, first-time feature director J.C. Chandor takes dead aim at the Wall Street wheeler-dealers who – while swept up in a perfect storm of unchecked greed, wanton hubris and self-absorbed panic – triggered the financial meltdown of 2008. The movie is some kind of David-Mametesque masterwork, suspenseful and sardonic in equal measure, but be forewarned: If you play a drinking game that calls for taking a shot each time some anxious character reacts to bad news by gasping “Fuck me!” – you’ll likely be passed out on the floor by the midway point.

50/50. And now for something completely different, a comedy about cancer. No, make that: An extraordinarily funny and exceptionally humane comedy about cancer, inspired by the real-life experiences of scriptwriter Will Reiser. Joseph Gordon-Levitt compellingly ricochets between emotional extremes as a Seattle radio producer who relies (sometimes begrudgingly) on emotional support from a raucously uninhibited buddy (Seth Rogen) and a sincere neophyte therapist (Anna Kendrick) while fighting the good fight against a dread disease.

The Ides of March. George Clooney does his finest work as a film director – so far – in this acerbically crafty and meticulously crafted drama about power plays, double crosses, inconvenient tragedies and brutal disillusionments behind the scenes of a Presidential campaign. Major props go to Ryan Gosling, who so adroitly conveys profoundly mixed emotions as a campaign tactician that even during the final second of the last scene, you’re not entirely certain just what he’ll do next.

Midnight in Paris. Woody Allen’s immensely likable and immoderately clever comedy has Owen Wilson hitting all the right notes (at precisely the right moments) as the sort of character Allen himself used to play in his films, a romantic who’s deeply mistrustful of intellectuals, but equally skeptical of those who don’t know (or care) about the artists and artistry he admires. While on vacation in Paris with his materialistic fiancée (played rather too convincingly as a hectoring nag by Rachel McAdams), Wilson’s Gil, a successful screenwriter determined to write his first novel, is magically transported back to the 1920s and allowed to hang out with such luminaries as Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway and Pablo Picasso. It’s a great place to visit – but perhaps, Gil reluctantly realizes, not the best place to live.

Win Win. Written and directed with subtlety and skill by Tom McCarthy (The Station Agent), this warm-hearted yet clear-eyed comedy surprises and delights while focused on a financially stressed lawyer and part-time high school wrestling coach (Paul Giamatti at his finest) who does the right thing for the wrong reasons when he becomes the surrogate father for a client’s teen-age grandson (Alex Schaffer, arguably the most promising newcomer of 2011).

Moneyball. To be entirely honest, I don’t know nearly enough about the inner workings of The National Pastime to judge whether every minor detail in the storyline – the literally “inside baseball” stuff – is altogether accurate. But I can spot a great movie about dogged persistence and seriocomic obsession when I scout one, and I can tell when a major star (Brad Pitt, take a bow) gives a performance that marks him as a Hall of Fame player, so Moneyball scores a spot in my Top Ten lineup.

Runners–up: Warrior, Buck, Brotherhood, Contagion, We Bought a Zoo, Super 8, Thunder Soul, Rango, Drive and The Artist.

Happy New Year from Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt

2011-12-31T13:56:00.000-06:00

Watching this charming video makes me think: At a different time in Hollywood history, these two would be co-starring in musicals once or twice a year.

Happy Birthday, Cinema!

2011-12-28T10:08:00.002-06:00

On December 28, 1895, cinema in projected form was presented for the first time to a paying audience by two French brothers, Auguste and Louis Lumiere (pictured above), owners of a photographic studio in Lyons. They went to Paris to demonstrate their cinématographe -- the name they'd given their combination camera and projector -- by showcasing short films they had shot with their hand-cranked innovation.

According to legend: At the Grand Café at 14 Boulevard des Capucines, a man stood outside the building all day on December 28, handing out programs to passers-by. But cold weather kept many people from stopping. As a result, only 33 tickets were sold for the first show.

When the lights went down that evening in a makeshift theater in the basement of the Grand Café, a white screen was lit up with a photographic projection showing the doors of the Lumiere factory in Lyon. Without warning, the factory doors were flung open, releasing a stream of workers ... and, wonder of wonders, everything moved. The audience was stunned.

This first film was entitled La sortie de l'usine Lumière à Lyon (Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory). Ten more short scenes followed, each reel roughly 17 meters in length, including Baby's Dinner (kinda-sorta the first home movie by proud parents, later echoed by Spike Lee in Lumiere & Company) and The Sprinkler Sprinkled (arguably the first slapstick comedy, involving a man, his garden hose and a practical joker).

Within a week, with no advertising but word of mouth, more than 2,000 spectators visited the Grand Café each day, each paying the admission price of one franc. The crowds were so huge, police had to called in to maintain order. The age of cinema had begun. Vive le cinema.

The (alleged) politics of Forrest Gump

2011-12-28T01:40:00.000-06:00

Sixteen years after it received the Oscar for Best Picture, Forrest Gump finally has been officially designated as an all-American classic. No kidding: On Wednesday, Robert Zemeckis’ 1994 box-office phenomenon appeared alongside 24 other “culturally, historically or aesthetically” significant films on this year’s list of selections by the Library of Congress for inclusion in the National Film Registry.

But you know what? That doesn’t mean the movie’s haters won’t keep on hating. Indeed, judging from some of the initial reactions throughout the blogosphere to the National Film Registry honor, Forrest Gump remains, in the eyes of its harshest critics, sentimental hokum at best – and right-wing propaganda at worst.

No, I’m not making that up.

The latest attempts to attack Forrest Gump for real or perceived political incorrectness remind me of two conversations I had with Tom Hanks – the man who earned an Academy Award for memorably playing the movie’s title character – within the space of a year spanning from June 1994 (a few weeks before Forrest Gump opened at theaters and drive-ins everywhere) to June 1995 (less than three months after the Gump-dominated Oscarcast notoriously hosted by David Letterman).

The first encounter occurred in a posh suite of a Los Angeles hotel during a well-attended press junket for Forrest Gump. The second was at Johnson Space Center, during an equally hectic junket for Apollo 13.

Back in the day in Los Angeles, I had a one-on-one chat with Hanks after he completed what turned out to be a not-entirely-pleasant cluster of round-table interviews. Hanks and I are not exactly bowling buddies, so, then as now, I’ve based my impressions of him – as a human being rather than a versatile actor –almost entirely on my observations of his behavior at press gatherings. And at those gatherings, he’s always struck me as one of the more gracious professionals in showbiz.

On that June day in L.A., however, Hanks appeared to me visibly rattled when, during a sporadically tense group interview, a few interviewers bluntly referred to Forrest Gump as a “reactionary” or “right-wing” work. One journalist dissed the dramedy as “a movie Pat Robertson and Ronald Reagan could love.” Another complained bitterly, and at considerable length, about what he claimed was the movie’s depiction of Black Panther radicals and anti-war activists as “snarly, ego-tripping assholes.”

Hanks’ polite but dismissive response to the journalist’s complaint: “Well, I think that’s nonsense.”

Throughout the group interviews I observed, Hanks and director Robert Zemeckis seemed genuinely shocked by any suggestion that they had any sort of hidden agenda. As they saw it, Forrest Gump was an engagingly whimsical and resolutely apolitical story of a slow-talking, slow-witted Southerner who wanders through four decades of American history, touching the lives of both the great and the obscure.

Yes, Forrest displays courage under fire while serving as a soldier during the Vietnam War. And, sure, he doesn’t protest against the war after his return home. But, hey, that doesn’t mean he’s meant to represent President Nixon’s so-called Silent Majority. OK?

But what about the scene where Forrest attends a late-1960s anti-war rally in Washington D.C., and has an edgy confrontation with some impolite activists?

“You know,” Hanks replied, choosing his words carefully as we conversed in his suite, “probably a huge percentage of people involved in anti-war demonstrations really were snarly, ego-tripping assholes. They were equal to the number of beautiful flower children who were truly bent on saving the world.

“Look, I have no great affection for the ‘60s whatsoever” – at the time he spoke, Hanks was days away from turning 38 – “but I don’t think we’re saying anything more than that was a time of great confusion, and everybody was yelling at one another.”

Besides, Hanks noted, even if he did feel nothing but fear and loathing for ’60s-era anti-war protestors, he wouldn’t make a movie just to castigate them. Using a film to push a political agenda simply wasn’t his style, he emphasized. Even Philadelphia – the 1993 drama in which he gave an Oscar-worthy performance as an AIDS-stricken lawyer who sues his former employers for wrongful dismissal -- isn’t his idea of “a message movie.”

“I don’t think you can educate anybody with a movie,” Hanks said. “And I don’t think you can send an overt kind of political or sociological message (that) is going to change anybody’s mind.”

Over the next several months, however, Hanks learned the hard way that, sometimes, “message movies” are in the eye of the beholder.

Forrest Gump went on to be a much bigger hit than Tom Hanks (or, for that matter, Robert Zemeckis) ever could have hoped or expected. At the same time, though, Hanks noted, much to his dismay, that the movie was indeed frequently judged -- by commentators on both sides of the political spectrum -- as a warm-and fuzzy embrace of conservative ideology.

“Honest to God,” Hanks said when I raised the issue one year later at Johnson Space Center, “I didn’t see that coming. I just didn’t see that coming. I don’t think of us involved with the picture did.”

Hanks added that he was especially miffed by Sen. Robert Dole’s effort to lionize Forrest Gump as entertainment that upheld traditional family values. Dismissing “Mr. Dole’s political grandstanding” as “ludicrous,” he wondered aloud: Forrest Gump is in the forefront of good, quality family films? OK, let’s see. Forrest Gump’s mother [played by Sally Field] slept with the principal of the school so Forrest could go there. I guess that must be forgotten in the course of choosing family films. That and the fact that Forrest fathers a child of wedlock” with his sweetheart, played by Robin Wright.

And yet, Dole wasn’t the only person who read Forrest Gump as a movie with a stealth agenda. Many commentators on the right lauded it for the same reasons (or, perhaps more accurately, the same perceptions) that led many commentators – and, yes, film critics – on the left to blast it.

“This obviously is in retrospect,” Hanks said, “but I think it comes down to that very key part of the film that deals with Vietnam. I think it’s because we presented Forrest in Vietnam in a nonpolitical way, and that fed into the conservative revisionist history that says, ‘We lost Vietnam because of subversive activities of the American public back home.’

“And it fed into the left-of-center political circle because we failed to show [the Vietnam War] as amoral and corrupt. Instead, we showed Vietnam as this thing that guys went through, regardless of it being right or wrong. We showed Vietnam as this terrible, horrible thing that happened to these certain guys.”

At this point in the conversation, I felt emboldened to offer a theory – one regarding Hanks’ unpleasant surprise, not the movie’s alleged agenda. As I recall, I said something like this:

“OK, I’m four years older than you. And under most circumstances, that age difference would be insignificant. But because of that difference – I had to worry about being drafted during the Vietnam War, and you didn’t. People my age and older grew up with Vietnam hanging over our heads during most of our formative years. And so for many of us – maybe most of us – the Vietnam War was the defining event in our lives. So every time we see or read anything that involves the Vietnam War – we’re going to instinctively parse it for any kind of political commentary or interpretation.

“But you – and other people your age or younger – might not. And that might be why you were so surprised by the partisan fires this movie stoked.”

(Actually, I don’t think I was quite that eloquent – but, hey, it’s my anecdote.)

Hanks nodded silently, considering what I had said. He didn’t immediately agree. Nor did he disagree. But he acknowledged that his own view of the Vietnam War was not “the same point of view of somebody who had to live in fear of his [draft] lottery number coming up. No matter what happens, I am ex post facto.

“I remember going to the Selective Service office when I was 18, and they said, ‘Listen, you’re not going to have to do this after the first of the year. So if anybody asks you, just tell them you forgot.’ So, for me, it was never an issue.”

Echoing his words from a year earlier, Hanks added: “I have no affection for the ‘60s whatsoever.” By the time the tumultuous decade ended, he was a high school student in Oakland, California. “And I was not on the cutting edge of a social revolution, or a sexual revolution. I was essentially a very confused kid. And by the time I was walking home from school, kind of cognizant of the greater world around me, the sky was full of helicopters dropping tear gas on the people at Berkeley during the People’s Park demonstrations. Huey Newton was in jail for a couple of murders.

“And I figured that, because I was a pretty naïve kid in the first place, and also because I was very confused, and also because I wasn’t on the forefront of either side of that political schism that was going on -- I just thought things were going to hell in a handbag.”

Which most certainly was not an unreasonable response, as anyone who lived through that era will tell you, regardless of how they felt about the Vietnam War, if they’re entirely honest.

On the other hand: Many of the movie’s most virulent detractors will insist that their contempt for Forrest Gump has nothing to do with politics, and everything to do with sentimentality. They simply don’t like it because… because… well, because they don’t like it, period. And as I learned a long time ago, you can’t really argue anyone into liking a movie that they don’t. Especially if that movie beat a movie they liked a lot more – did somebody say Pulp Fiction? – in the battle for the top Academy Award.

My own reaction? Well, I greatly enjoyed Forrest Gump when I saw it back in 1994, all by myself in a small theater on the Paramount lot in L.A. (No, I’m not that important: The studio arranged a private screening for me only because I arrived late from Houston, and missed the screening all of the other junketeers attended.) I felt just as favorably disposed toward it when I saw it a second time in an H-Town multiplex a few months later. And I included it on my Top Ten list – alongside Hoop Dreams, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Eat Drink Man Woman, The Shawshank Redemption, Quiz Show, Fresh, Nobody’s Fool, Colonel Chabert and, yes, Pulp Fiction -- for 1994.

But I would be less than honest if I didn’t admit that, outside of catching the random glimpse of this scene or that scene while channel surfing, I haven’t seen it again since it won its Oscar. Haven’t had the time – or, really, the inclination. Too many new movies to see, too many old movies to catch up with.

Of course, now that it’s been officially designated as an all-American classic…

Looks like Santa didn't put a lump of coal in my stocking

2011-12-25T13:22:00.000-06:00

As if having Vladimir Putin around weren't troublesome enough, now Russia has to deal with thousands of of killer electromagnetic orbs from outer space. That's the bad news. The good news is, The Darkest Hour -- which I went out to see on Christmas Eve -- is better than I expected, and well worth catching in 3D. (Mind you, I haven't always been so lucky with my Christmas Day movie reviewing.) You can read my Variety review here.

Michael Caine is Ebeneezer Scrooge in Muppet Christmas Carol

2011-12-24T15:02:00.000-06:00

Over the years, several people -- including, I must admit, Michael Caine himself -- have reacted with bemused skepticism when I've told them that I think Caine's performance as Ebeneezer Scrooge in The Muppet Christmas Carol not only ranks with Caine's all-time finest performances -- it's also, in my view, the best portrayal of Charles Dickens' miserly character in any movie, ever. Seriously. The beauty part of it is, unlike a lot of actors who perform opposite Muppets, Caine isn't merely trying to be a good sport -- he's being a great actor. After watching the movie again recently -- an annual tradition, I must admit -- I remain convinced: If you could somehow digitally lift this performance from Muppet Christmas Carol and drop it into a more conventional adaptation of Dickens' story -- that is, a movie in which all of Caine's co-stars would be, well, you know, human beings -- it would be every bit as effective and affecting.

It's still a Wonderful movie

2011-12-22T19:19:00.000-06:00

‘Tis the season to jolly, of course, but that’s not the main reason why I plan to savor a double dose of Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life this weekend.

At 7:30 pm Friday, I’ll introduce a special presentation at the Alamo Drafthouse West Oaks, where Capra’s 1946 masterwork will be shown on the big screen, the way God intended you to see it. At 7 pm Saturday, I’ll settle down with family members for a repeat of the annual broadcast on KPRC-TV/NBC.
And on both occasions, I am certain, I’ll once again appreciate It’s a Wonderful Life as a gift that keeps on giving. No kidding.

Sorry, but I turn a deaf ear and a blind eye whenever some cynic tries to convince me that this enduring classic is nothing but cloyingly sentimental Capra-corn. Indeed, I’ve always been struck by the movie’s hard edges and dark undercurrents -- by what film critic and historian Dave Kehr recently described as its “bleak, film-noir imagery and barely suppressed undertone of suicidal despair” -- as it considers the life of George Bailey (James Stewart at the top of his form), a small-town savings-and-loan manager whose grand ambitions and stirrings of wanderlust have always been stifled by civic duty and family responsibility.

On a particularly bleak Christmas Eve, George thinks of prematurely ending what he feels has been a useless, worthless existence. (Hey: Been there, felt that.) George sells himself much too short, of course. But it requires nothing short of divine intervention – i.e., the appearance of a guardian angel -- for him to fully appreciate that his life has touched and enriched many other lives, much the same way we all affect (for better or worse) the people around us, often without our knowing.

And even then, George has to learn his lessons the hard way: By seeing, in harrowingly precise detail, what the world might have been like if he’d never been around.

Over the past three or four decades – thanks in large part to countless TV airings during the 1970s and ‘80s – It’s a Wonderful Life has become enshrined as America’s official Christmas movie. And, to be sure, the final scenes of rejuvenation and reconciliation speak in an optimistic and encouraging voice to all of us. (Jodie Foster offers her enthusiastic appraisal of the film here.)

But even as he provides a comforting tableau of peace on earth, good will toward men, Frank Capra doesn’t entirely dispel the unsettling chill left over from George Bailey’s long dark night of the soul. And we’re forced to consider: In the real world – a place where even harsher lessons are taught and learned -- how many George Baileys don’t get the miracle they need? When the best among us begin to think the least of themselves, what happens when their angels don’t show up?

More than a half-century after Capra’s classic kicked off its initial theatrical run – and, ironically, proved to be a box-office under-achiever – Spike Lee ended 25th Hour, his furiously melancholy meditation on life and dread in post-9/11 New York, with a character’s bittersweet (and bitterly ironic) summing-up: “This life came so close to never happening.” Anyone who knows and loves It’s a Wonderful Life will know exactly what he’s talking about.

I fought cancer. Cancer lost.

2011-12-17T16:02:00.003-06:00

Some friends have asked if I was scared when, in September 2009, I was diagnosed with prostate cancer. The weird thing is, I got the bad news smack-dab in the middle of a film history class at Houston Community College. I was introducing a screening of His Girl Friday for my students when my cell phone buzzed. So I excused myself, stepped outside, took the call from my doctor -- and then went back into the classroom to finish, without skipping a beat, my enthusiastic explanation of why Hawks' masterwork is so gosh-darn funny. At the risk of sounding immodest, I think people have won Oscars for performances that were less convincing than the one I pulled off that day.

Of course, I went home that night and drank, oh, I dunno, about a gallon of Merlot. And the whole time I was getting sloshed, I kept fixating on something my doctor had said: My cancer was "aggressive." I found myself imagining the cancer cells as a rowdy bunch of drunken Irishmen, fighting in a pub. Geez.

After sobering up, I opted for radiation therapy. I managed to delay the kick-off date for a few weeks because... because... well, because I'd already committed to doing an on-stage Q&A with Hal Holbrook at the Starz Denver Film Festival, and I figured that, what the hell, if my number was up, I probably wouldn't get too many more chances to do anything else as cool as that.

But, of course, you can't delay the inevitable. The first day of treatment finally arrived -- and yeah, I'll admit it, I was goddamn terrified. And as I sat in a waiting room around 6:30 am, clad in a hospital gown, counting the minutes until I'd be escorted down the hall to the room where I would be irradiated, I remembered what Francois Cluzet says in Late August, Early September: "You're all alone with what goes on inside your body." So I impulsively raced back to the locker where I'd stored my clothes, dug out my cell phone, and snapped this photo. Because I never wanted to forget that moment when I felt totally and completely all by myself.

For a long time, I thought it would be unseemly and/or self-indulgent to merely talk, much less write, about any of this. But I have had a change of heart as I've come to realize that people who are just as sacred as I was that morning might need a little encouragement.

So consider this: I endured weeks of early-morning radiation therapy -- and for about three of those weeks, I worked at least part-time at a full-time job while devoting evenings and Saturday mornings to teaching a mini-semester Social Aspects of Film course at University of Houston. I continued to write free-lance articles, blog postings -- including obits for Eric Rohmer and Erich Segal, an enthusiastic appreciation of Sandra Bullock's Oscar prospects and, ironically, a brief mention of Dennis Hopper's own battle with prostate cancer -- and movie reviews. At one point, one of the very few people who knew about my condition asked how I was able to do so much at the same time. I blithely replied: "I'll sleep when I'm dead." Then, after considering what I'd said, I added, "You know, maybe I should have phrased that differently..."

I look back now, and I see what I really was doing: I was telling myself and the world at large and Great God Almighty that I would not bend and I would not break and I would not, could not, be knocked down. Or something like that. Basically, I stopped being scared, and started getting angry. I stopped praying -- after all, God has, then as now, more important things to worry about than whether or not I shuffle off this mortal coil -- and started being pissed off. I don't recommend this approach to everybody. But, hey, it appears to have worked for me.

I completed my radiation therapy on Jan. 27, 2010. (That's when I posed for the photo at the very top of this blog posting.) Nearly two years later, my PSA level continues to trend down, down, down. Last April, it measured 3.0. Today, I received an early Christmas present: According to the nice folks who handled my blood work Friday at Kelsey-Seybold Clinic, the magic number is 1.0.

So you know what? Cancer can kiss my irradiated ass. Because I am not afraid.

Blasts from the past: Me on MSNBC

2011-12-14T16:05:00.003-06:00

Back when I had a place of honor in some producer's Rolodex at MSNBC, I was periodically called upon to offer Oscar predictions, mini-movie reviews, respectful obituaries and other sage commentary. (I think I was the guy they called when Roger Ebert's line was busy, or when they couldn't get anyone else on a holiday weekend.) I had a lot more hair back then -- and relatively little of it had yet turned gray. (Of course, it helped that I occasionally touched up the beard with Just for Men hair coloring.) In the above clip, I chat with anchor Gregg Jarrett (now a Fox News Channel employee) about the great George C. Scott the morning after the reluctant Oscar winner's death in 1999.

And in this clip, I chat talk with the lovely and talented Ashleigh Banfield about three movies -- Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Thirteen Days and O Brother, Where Art Thou? -- that had Oscar-qualifying runs in New York and L.A. in late 2000, but didn't open until January 2001 in most markets. (You'd never guess that I bought that spiffy-cool faux leather jacket off the rack at a Target store in Seattle, would you?)

And even though I already referenced this one in an earlier blog post, here I am talking with the man himself, Keith Olbermann, about The Day After Tomorrow in 2004. (More beard, and a lot more gray in this one. Now you know why I went back to the goatee.) Which reminds me: I guess I need to get myself planted in some Rolodex over at Current TV, don't I?

Brokeback Mountain II: Running on Empty

2011-12-08T23:08:00.000-06:00

Some things are beyond parody. Others, however, are not.

Congratulations, Lucas Mireles!

2011-12-07T00:16:00.000-06:00

Just found out one of my former University of Houston students has had a short accepted by the Sundance Film Festival. Mind you, his achievement has absolutely nothing to do with me. But, hell, I'm going to hitch a ride on this gravy train, because I have no shame.

Say it loud and proud: We Still Live Here screens Wednesday at Rice Media Center

2011-11-30T00:57:00.003-06:00

So here's the pitch: Jessie Little Doe, a Native American social worker, starts to have recurring dreams in which vaguely familiar people from another era talk to her in an incomprehensible language. Jessie -- a feisty and inquisitive thirtysomething -- is befuddled and annoyed: Why can't these folks just speak English? Only gradually does she realize that they're speaking Wampanoag, the ancient language of her tribal ancestors. A language no one had used for more than a century.

These and other events send Jessie and members of the Aquinnah and Mashpee Wampanaog communities on an odyssey to uncover hundreds of documents written in their language. Which in turn leads her to pursue a master's degree in Linguistics at MIT and, more important, accomplish something no one has ever done before – bring a language alive again in an American Indian community many generations after its last Native speakers had passed away. Jessie's now six-year-old daughter, Mae Alice, is the first Native speaker of Wampanaog since a time before movies talked and radios broadcast.

It may sound like the stuff of uplifting fiction, but it's actually the true-life tale compellingly told by award-winning filmmaker Anne Makepeace (pictured above) in We Still Live Here. The acclaimed documentary, a presentation of Public Television's Independent Lens series, will have a free screening at 7 pm Wednesday at the Rice Media Center as part of the ongoing Community Cinema project.

"I was profoundly moved by this story," Makepeace told PBS NewsHour, "and by Jessie herself, who never ceased to amaze me with her earthy humor, her loyal friendship, and her fierce dedication to the work of reviving the language."

Even so, Makepeace feared she would face resistance if she tried to make a movie about that revival: "Jessie and other members of the Wampanoag Language Reclamation Project had a strict policy of never allowing their language to be used in anything that could be sold. They had refused many requests by teachers, filmmakers, and writers for translations and use of the language, because they want to nurture the language and keep it to themselves, at least until they reach a critical mass of fluent speakers."

And there was another complication: Makepeace's own family history.

"My ancestors were Puritans who came to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630," Makepeace said, "and over the decades and centuries [they] proceeded to co-opt Wampanoag lands" in present-day Massachusetts and Rhode Island. "Distant Makepeace relatives own Ocean Spray, and have thousands of acres of cranberry bogs in what was once Wampanoag territory. One of my direct ancestors took part in the Great Swamp Massacre during King Philip's War, a devastating conflagration that decimated Native people in New England in 1676."

Near the of 2007, however, Makepeace mustered the courage to approach Jessie and her associate, Linda Coombs. "I told them that I would love to make a film about the resurrection of their language, that their story had grabbed me by the heart and wouldn't let go. I said that I didn't know how I would do it but that I felt it was an incredibly important story, that it had reached a place very deep in me and that I would be honored to tell it. And then I told them of my family history, even though I feared that this would put an end to the idea right then and there.

"Instead, they listened carefully, and when I was done, one of them simply said, 'You're closing the circle.'"

Now that We Still Live Here is complete and in circulation -- the film is getting public screenings in many other venues nationwide, and is available on DVD -- Makepeace hopes it will inspire the efforts of other indiginous people.

"It is a story of Native Americans taking charge of their history and their identities," the filmmaker says, "reaching back to the words of their ancestors and forward to their children's futures. My hope is that Native Americans and indigenous people around the world whose languages and cultures are endangered will take heart and renew their efforts to revive and revitalize their Native tongues, so that this country and this world retains its rich and infinitely varied cultural diversity.

"I would also like every American to see this film and acquire a deeper understanding and a greater awareness of the Indian people they celebrate at Thanksgiving every year, and of the unique and diverse histories and cultures of Native American communities living in our midst."

Here's a trailer for We Still Live Here.

Blast from the past: Harrison Ford and Brad Pitt in The Devil's Own

2011-11-27T18:56:00.000-06:00

Not very long before the 1997 release of The Devil's Own -- the late Alan J. Pakula's thriller about an IRA terrorist (Brad Pitt) who hides out under an assumed name in the home of a too-trusting New York cop (Harrison Ford) -- Pitt was quoted by interviewers as being highly displeased by the way IRA activists were depicted in early rewrites of the script. (Midway through production, he denounced the movie as the "most irresponsible bit of film making — if you can even call it that — that I've ever seen." He seemed to have changed his mind about the project by the time I caught up with him at the New York junket for Devil's Own. (At the very start of the video, we're caught briefly chatting about the long-delayed release of Hard Eight -- a.k.a. Sydney -- which starred his then-sweetheart Gwyneth Paltrow.)

But I have to say: Looking back at my interview with Ford at the same junket, it strikes me that he was still a tad unhappy about his co-star's going public with complaints. Come to think of it, Ford doesn't seem much happier about the then-upcoming re-release of Star Wars movies, does he?

3DS vs. Nintento DS Lite

2011-11-25T14:39:00.000-06:00

The nephew of a dear friend prepared this "review" for YouTube. And, frankly, I'm impressed. Even if YouTube had existed back in the day, I'm not sure I could have produced something equally slick for King Kong vs. Godzilla.

Posters for movies that may or may not ever exist

2011-11-18T10:46:00.000-06:00

For more, check here. And don't say you weren't warned: At least one or two appear to be forthcoming releases from those wild and crazy guys over at The Asylum.

Me & Ethan Hawke

2011-11-15T23:12:00.000-06:00

Ethan Hawke was so witty, gracious and enthusiastically forthcoming Saturday night at Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, he actually made me look like I knew what I was doing during the Q&A we did for Cinema Arts Festival Houston. We talked about everyone from the late River Phoenix to the indestructible Albert Finney, and everything from surviving early failure (Explorers, the first film for both Hawke and Phoenix, was a box-office flop) to muddling through an on-stage embarrassment (and laughing off a comparison to Rick Perry).

Among the highlights:

Blast from the past: Barry Levinson talks about Wag the Dog

2011-11-14T17:26:00.000-06:00

Back in 1997, I talked with director Barry Levinson about Wag the Dog, his bold and barbed satirical comedy starring Dustin Hoffman as a movie producer enlisted by a political fixer (Robert De Niro) to help distract the public from a White House scandal by "creating" a nonexistent war. Of course, that was back before either of us could have known that you just as easily could create a real war with nonexistent weapons of mass destruction.

Blast from the past: Christian Slater in Very Bad Things

2011-11-13T13:22:00.002-06:00

At the 1998 Toronto International Film Festival, Christian Slater told me that he felt like he had "a higher calling to make" the jet-black comedy Very Bad Things. And, really, who am I to argue?

Blast from the past: Clint Eastwood in Absolute Power

2011-11-04T00:55:00.001-05:00

Those were the days, my friend: Back when I'd just take a couple days off from covering the Sundance Film Festival to mosey on over to Carmel-By-the-Sea, California, to drop by the Mission Ranch Hotel and Restaurant and kick back with Clint Eastwood.

We started out talking about... well, believe it or not, about Lawrence Welk, actually. But the conversation soon turned to Eastwood's about-to-be-released movie, Absolute Power, in which he played a sly cat burglar who inadvertently witnesses a horndog US President (E.G. Marshall) do a bad, bad thing. (Note that Eastwood is much too polite to correct me when I refer to his character as "Luther Wilson" -- even though the guy's name actually was Luther Whitney.)

After that, we kinda-sorta drifted over to his ongoing balancing act as director and lead actor -- and then discussed his next project, a film adaptation of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. I would like to say that it was during this get-together that I suggested he do a biopic about J. Edgar Hoover, or maybe play a feisty senior citizen who wants those damn kids to stay off his lawn. But, well, no one would believe me, quite possibly because I'd be lying...

On the other hand: I actually did get Clint Eastwood to promise that we'll never see him tangling with dinosaurs or extraterrestrials. That should count for something, right?

Blast from the past: Renee Zellweger in Jerry Maguire

2011-11-03T00:51:00.000-05:00

I like to joke that I “discovered” Texas native Renee Zellweger way back in 1995, when I singled her out for praise as “the most formidable scream queen since Jamie Lee Curtis went legit” while reviewing The Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre for Variety at the SXSW Film Festival. (Come to think of it, I also “discovered” Matthew McConaughey in the same flick.) Unfortunately, by the time that film was theatrically released two years later as Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation, blockhead or blockheads unknown had decided to trim some of the best scenes – including an expository sequence that indicated Zellweger’s character had for a long time been forced to defend herself against the sexual advances of her mother's husbands and boyfriends. After those experiences, Return appeared to be saying, it would take something a lot more formidable than some masked doofus with a chainsaw to keep her intimidated for very long.

But never mind: Zellweger went on to earn praise and touch hearts as schoolteacher (and aspiring writer) Novalyne Price, the very special friend of author Robert E. Howard (Vincent D’Onofio) in The Whole Wide World. I was happy to chat with her (and D’Onofio and director Dan Ireland) when that unjustly overlooked drama premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. And I was downright overjoyed when, later in 1996, I caught up with her at the junket for one of my favorite films of the ‘90s – Jerry Maguire.

Just in time for Halloween: Scary stuff, kids!

2011-10-30T13:35:00.000-05:00

Here is my CultureMap round-up of 10 classic scary movies suitable for Halloween viewing. And speaking of Halloween, here's a blast from the past: My 2006 guide to the movies featuring bogeyman Mike Myers.

Thank you, Mr. Obama

2011-10-24T17:03:00.001-05:00

Ummmm! Doughnuts!

R.I.P.: Sue Lloyd (1939-2011)

2011-10-23T22:53:00.000-05:00

My sincere condolences to the friends and family of Sue Lloyd, the talented Brit actress who passed away Thursday at age 72 -- and who, at the zenith of her va-va-voom hottiness back in the 1960s, had a profound effect on me. No kidding. In The Ipcress File, she played a secret agent who vamped fellow spy Harry Palmer (Michael Caine) during what was, by '60s standards, a torridly sexy scene.

Lloyd: Do you always wear your glasses?
Caine: Yes. Except in bed.
Lloyd removes Caine's glasses. Fade to next scene.

A few weeks after I saw Ipcress File for the first time -- in 1965, during my freshman year of high school -- I had an eye exam, and was told by the examiner that I was near-sighted and would have to wear glasses. Most guys my age usually whined and complained when given that news. I think the examiner was very surprised when all I did was smile.

Holly smoke! Buffy the Vampire Slayer is in the Avengers movie!

2011-10-21T14:54:00.000-05:00

Now I really want to see this one!

The Mighty Macs is "Family Friendly!" Really. It says so right here.

2011-10-21T10:29:00.000-05:00

Guess somebody read my Variety review.

"New Shoes"

2011-10-21T09:29:00.000-05:00

To fully express my pleasure and gratitude upon receiving a spiffy new pair of shoes from my thoughtful son, I'm posting the above video of the Bus Boys performing an appropriate tune from the killer soundtrack of 48 HRS. Let joy reign supreme. (Hey, maybe he did appreciate my passing on the Marrakech trip after all.)

Next month at Denver Fest: Wish Me Away

2011-10-20T18:52:00.001-05:00

On today of all days, I'm especially pleased and proud to announce that I'll be conducting an on-stage Q&A with singer-songwriter Chely Wright and filmmakers Bobbie Birleffi and Beverly Kopf at next month's Starz Denver Film Festival after the Nov. 4 festival screening of Wish Me Away, the spirit-lifting, prize-winning documentary about Wright's bold decision to stride out of the closet and stand tall as a role model.

As I noted in my Variety review after the film's premiere last spring at the Nashville Film Festival, Wish Me Away is fascinating both as a biographical portrait of Wright, the first significant American country music artist to openly identify herself as gay, and as a backstage look at how an entertainer prepares to make a revelation that many might view as career suicide.

Co-directors Birleffi and Knopf begin by tracing Wright's rise as a small-town girl (born in Wellsville, Kansas) who manages to fulfill her childhood dreams of success as a country music singer-songwriter in Nashville. Unfortunately, dreams have a nasty habit of turning into nightmares.

Even as she developed a loyal audience, earned accolades (including the Academy of Country Music’s 1995 prize for Top New Female Vocalist), and climbed the charts with popular singles (such as the No. 1 hit “Single White Female”), Wright was tormented by guilt and fear while hiding (and often denying) her sexual orientation.

During her youth in Wellsville, Wright admits in one of the film's affectingly blunt-spoken interviews, she prayed every night: “Dear God, please don’t let me be gay.” The product of a conservative religious upbringing – and the daughter of an unstable, affection-withholding mother – she arrived in Nashville determined to take Music City by storm. Trouble is, success only served to intensify her determination to live a lie while in the spotlight -– even while, off stage and in secret, she shared a home with a female lover. Deception and denial took a heavy toll: At one point, Wright says, she placed the barrel of a gun in her mouth, and seriously considered pulling the trigger.

All of which makes it all the more satisfying when, after accompanying Wright on her journey of self-discovery, we get to see her at the end of Wish Me Away as she is now -- obviously happier for being honest to and about herself, and determined to use her “public capital” as a celebrity to provide comfort and encouragement for young gay people who fear rejection or worse if they come out.

Yeah, I know: The above paragraph is something of a spoiler. But there are days when I think it's forgivable to tell people about a happy ending even before they actually see the movie that contains it. Especially when some of those people might need to be reassured that, yes, it really does get better.

(BTW: If you can't make it to Denver, don't fret -- Wish Me Away also will be screened Nov. 10 at the Houston Cinema Arts Festival.)

Yearning to ride the Marrakech Express

2011-10-19T15:28:00.001-05:00

Just received an e-mailed press release for the 11th annual Marrakech International Film Festival, and all I can say is: Dear Lord, is there some way I can scam an invite to this event? What if I started praying now?

I mean, consider: A chance to visit an exotic country. Scads of intriguing movies on the agenda -- and a Tribute to Mexican Cinema, which would certainly help me fill gaps in my woefully incomplete knowledge of that country's film history. An opportunity to again chat with filmmaker Emir Kusturica, whom I haven't seen since I interviewed him after his When Father Was Away On Business won the top prize at the 1985 Cannes Film Festival. And.. and.. well, OK, I'll say it: Sigourney Weaver. Cowabunga. As ubiquitous blog commentator LexG might say: "Just look at her!"

Of course, I'd probably have to learn French before I went there. But, hey, while I'm praying for that invite, I could also ask for a Berlitz course...

Actually, the lovely and talented Ms. Weaver isn't the only reason why I'd want to crash this party. Seriously: Several years ago, I was offered an all-expenses-paid trip to Morocco to attend an event -- organized by no less a notable than the country's King Hassan II -- to celebrate the restoration of Orson Welles' Othello (which Welles had filmed off and on over a three-year period decades earlier in and around Morocco). It was a very tempting invitation -- especially since, because I'd be expected to take part in panel discussion and other activities, I wouldn't be impeded by the no-freebies-allowed policy of The Houston Post, where I was working at the time. (Actually, I found that policy to be rather porous -- but that's a topic for another posting.)

There was only one problem: The event would take place on the weekend of my son's birthday. And, mind you, this was way back when my son was young enough to really want his old man to be around to help celebrate his birthday.

Now, I won't lie: When I say I was tempted, I was sorely tempted. But in the end, much to the amazement of the U.S. publicist who was handling the invites, I had to pass. Of course, not every father can (truthfully) tell his child: "A king invited me to a big party, but I had to tell him no because I wanted to be here for your birthday instead." And, sure enough, I did earn some major Daddy Points from my dazzled young'un.

Son: Is a real king?
Me: Well, yes, he certainly is.
Son: Does he have a crown?
Me: I believe he does.
Son: Does he have a castle?
Me: Actually, I believe it's a palace.
Son: Wow.

Of course, by the time my son reached his late teens, he felt compelled to appear a great deal less impressed, if not downright scornful, about all of this. When I reminded him about the incident near his 21st birthday, he replied: "Damn, dad, you should've gone! I would have!" But he smiled while he said that. And I smiled while I listened.

And now that I've shamelessly exploited my own child to entertain readers with a sentimental anecdote, I can't help thinking: Well, OK, his birthday has already come and gone, so maybe this time...?

Take Three: Cinema Arts Festival

2011-10-18T22:46:00.000-05:00

The Cinema Arts Festival of Houston has announced the full lineup for its 2011 edition, and H-Town audiences should be happy to know that one of the main attractions this year will be... well, me. Yes, that's right: I'll be at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston on Nov. 12 to interview some guy -- that's his picture up there -- about the books he's written, the movies he's directed, the performances he's given and, I dunno, maybe some other stuff. But I'll tell you this right now: He better not grab my ass.

Take 59: Sherlock, Jr. (1924)

2011-10-17T01:36:00.000-05:00

Several years ago, my wife and I were invited to a preview screening of a newly restored print of Lawrence of Arabia. And about 20 minutes into the movie, my wife whispered to me, in a tone that neatly balanced amazement and embarrassment: “I just realized – I’ve never seen this movie before.” And I smiled, but I did not laugh, because I knew exactly how she felt.

Indeed, on numerous occasions before and since that screening, I’ve confidently sat down to savor some cinematic classic, absolutely certain that I’ve seen it many times before but determined to find things in it that I never previously noticed or fully appreciated. And, yes, usually all it takes is a few minutes – sometimes, very few minutes – for that smug smile to vanish from my face, and a sinking feeling to develop in my stomach, as I realize: Uh-oh.

The thing is, there are some movies that loom so large in our pop culture, that are so frequently excerpted in film-clip accumulations prepared for biographical and historical documentaries, that are referenced verbally and visually so ubiquitously in both textbooks and magazine features, that have been the subject of reverent homage and mocking parody in so many venues for so many years – that, even if you’ve never seen them, you may not only assume, you may be absolutely convinced that you have.

Just ask yourself, and then ask your friends: Have you ever really, actually seen all of the original Frankenstein with Boris Karloff? Or the original Dracula with Bela Lugosi? How about The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari? Or Edwin S. Hart’s The Great Train Robbery? The Public Enemy? Citizen Kane? The 1933 version of King Kong?

Don’t feel ashamed: The whole point of my ongoing Take 59 project is to plug up some gaps in my own cinematic experiences. But I have to admit: I originally thought I knew precisely what movies would qualify as first-time experiences for me during this year-long marathon. That was before I decided to watch a DVD of Buster Keaton’s Sherlock, Jr. My intent was to make sure that the disc, a much-appreciated hand-me-down from a colleague, was in tip-top shape before showing it to my students at University of Houston and Houston Community College. About five minutes into my viewing, however: Uh-oh.

For the benefit of those who tuned in late: From 1920 to 1928, as writer-director-star with his own company, Buster Keaton made 19 short films and 10 features, including such silent masterpieces as The Navigator (1924), Seven Chances (1925), The General (1927), Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928), The Cameraman (1928) and others that I've actually seen. In almost all of these films, he appears as a calmly stoic young man who exhibits amazing physical dexterity in his naively single-minded but ultimately successful struggles to overcome intractable machines (a locomotive, an ocean liner) or forces of nature (a waterfall, a rockslide). As I have noted elsewhere, Charlie Chaplin, Keaton's celebrated contemporary during the golden age of silent movie comedy, might have been driven batty by his dehumanizing drudgery on a high-speed assembly line in Modern Times -- but Keaton usually remained steadfast in his determination to impose control over troublesome technology through sheer force of will.

Sherlock, Jr. is Keaton’s jauntily surrealistic 1924 masterwork about a movie projectionist who yearns to become a dashing detective, and who daydreams of literally entering a movie that's screening at his theater – and, of course, doing derring-do there as the title hero – after a rival frames him for the theft of his girlfriend’s father’s watch. For decades, I’ve seen clips of the film’s still-astonishing set piece, a sequence that shows the projectionist walking into the movie frame, interacting with other characters, and then being thoroughly discombobulated as he’s tossed from location to another -- from an African vista (where lions prowl) to a rugged mountain terrain to a snow-blanketed winterscape and on and on – thanks to editing that changes everything in the frame but him. Other directors have borrowed the basic gimmick – mostly notably, Woody Allen in The Purple Rose of Cairo, when Mia Farrow lures her favorite movie star off the silver screen and into the gritty Great Depression, and Gary Ross in Pleasantville, when Tobey McGuire is magically transported from his '90s living room to a '50s TV sitcom. And I’d swear I’ve seen Daffy Duck or Bugs Bunny (or both) endure similarly confounding transportations in old Warner Bros, cartoons.

But Keaton’s version of the movie magic obviously made the greater impact on me. So great, in fact, that at some long-ago point after enough exposure, I evidently assumed I’d seen everything else in his classic comedy.

Wrong!

The good news is, there’s an abundance of other funny stuff surrounding that unforgettable set piece, much more than enough for Sherlock, Jr. to qualify as one of Keaton’s grandest achievements. (The folks at the Library of Congress must agree with that appraisal – they added Sherlock, Jr. to the National Film Registry in 1991, two years after placing Keaton’s The General on that exclusive list.) Stripped to absolute essentials at a fleet 45-minute running time, the movie showcases “The Great Stone Face” at his most ingeniously uproarious on either side of the dividing line between the real world and the reel fantasy.

Consider the scene in which Keaton’s projectionist hero proves too honest for his own good when, while sweeping the theater, he finds dollar bills amid the garbage. He’s briefly overjoyed – well, OK, as overjoyed as Keaton ever permits himself to appear on screen – because now he can afford a huge box of candy for his sweetie. But one patron, and then another, shows up to claim the lost money. To his credit, Keaton returns the cash – reluctantly -- but not before asking for detailed description of the dollar bills.

Or consider a later scene in which Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. prepares for a confrontation with bad guys gathered in an inner-city shack. Much like Chow Yun-Fat took the precaution of placing loaded guns in strategic locations along a hallway before bursting in to attack his foes in John Woo’s The Killer, Sherlock Jr. affixes a hoop to a window – so that, when he has to make a quick escape by jumping through that window, he quick-changes into a disguise, that of an elderly woman, that he stuffed into that hoop. So, of course, when the bad guys come outside… yeah, you guessed it, they overlook the old lady. For a while, at least.

And then there’s the thoroughly remarkable sequence that has Sherlock Jr. perched atop the handlebars of a motorcycling racing throughout the city and into the nearby countryside, all the while blissfully unaware that his assistant has toppled off the bike, and there’s actually no one steering the rapidly speeding vehicle. Keep in mind: Sherlock, Jr. was made back in 1924, when special effects were relatively primitive and CGI simply didn’t exist. It’s entirely possible that Keaton cheated a bit during some of the hairier stunts. But when the motorcycle approaches a lengthy gap in a bridge, and it looks like two trucks just might not position themselves on the road below in time to fill that gap for the oblivious Sherlock Jr. – well, I defy you not to interrupt your laugher with a full-throated “Yikes!”

On at least two occasions, Jackie Chan has told me – and, I’m sure, many other people – that he doesn’t merely want to be like Buster Keaton, he wants to be Buster Keaton, period. (Which, of course, explains all the seriocomic Keatonesque stunts in Chan’s action-adventures, particularly Supercop.) It’s easy to understand his admiration: Like Keaton, Chan insists on doing his own stunts. And, again like Keaton, he often has suffered for his art.

But it’s unlikely that even Jackie Chan has ever suffered as much, or risked as much, as Keaton did during the making of Sherlock, Jr. when the projectionist runs across the tops of several freight cars on a moving train, then tries to break his fall after he reaches the end by grabbing the waterspout of a water tower along the track.

Unfortunately, the projectionist doesn’t count on the spout being pulled down by his weight, and dousing him with water. Even more unfortunately, Keaton didn’t count on the force of the rushing water slamming him onto the railroad track below.

In the movie, the ever-resilient hero, in true Keatonesque fashion, immediately rebounds from his temporary setback and continues his mad dash. In real life, however, Keaton felt enormous pain at the time of the accident, and would complain of sporadically severe headaches for months afterward.It wasn’t until a routine medical exam years later that Keaton learned he had fractured his neck during the incident, and easily could have been killed.

Knowing that makes it a little chilling to watch the gag that nearly cost Buster Keaton his life. Still, you can't help laughing out loud. At least, that was my experience while finally watching Sherlock, Jr. for the first of what I’m sure will be many, many times.

Take 59 returns this week

2011-10-09T19:13:00.001-05:00

Due to cirumstances not entirely beyond my control, I have neglected to write my weekly Take 59 postings for... oh, jeez, a month. Sigh. Well, I will make amends, starting this week. Honest. I swear. Scout's honor.

Another accolade for Shirley MacLaine

2011-10-09T18:40:00.000-05:00

Congratulations to Shirley MacLaine for being selected to receive the 40th annual Life Achievement Award of the American Film Institute. But just remember, AFI: Houston's Cinema Arts Festival had her first. So there: Nyah, nyah, nyah!

(And while she was here, she had me. So to speak.)

Yes, I know: That's an unforgivably childish response. And, honestly, I mean no disrespect to Ms. MacLaine, who is a grand and gracious lady, an excellent actress, and an all-around icon worthy of every accolade doled out by the entertainment industry. But, what the hell, I learned a long time ago that you better root for the home team as loud as you can, every chance you get. Otherwise...

Well, let me put it this way: Decades ago, while I was covering the New York Film Festival for the Dallas Morning News, I tried to set up an interview with French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, whose most recent movie was in the NYFF lineup. But when I placed a call to the Manhattan press rep for the French New Wave icon, she seemed less than impressed by my outlet. Indeed, after a pause pregnant enough to produce quintuplets, she asked -- and, I swear, this is a verbatim quote -- "Do they show Monsieur Godard's movies in Texas?"

Now here's the ironic part: This particular Godard film (Every Man for Himself) not only got shown in Texas -- it wound up being shown in Dallas at a suburban art-house managed by Bob Berney. (Maybe you've heard of him: He's gone on to bigger and better things.) And I already knew that was a possibility. So I wanted to be polite to the condescending functionary, in the hope of landing an interview. (Which, you probably won't be surprised to learn, I didn't manage to do.)

But I must confess that what I really wanted to say in response was: "Yeah, lady. They show his movies at the goddamn drive-in in Eagle Pass. On double bills with movies by that Frankie Truffaut guy."

R.I.P.: Roger Williams (1924-2011)

2011-10-09T13:36:00.000-05:00

During the heyday of Easy Listening radio, Roger Williams -- who passed away Saturday at age 87 -- was positively inescapable.

That's not to say, of course, that he wasn't highly visible (and ubiquitously audible) elsewhere -- atop record charts, on TV variety shows, in concert halls throughout the world, etc. But if you're of a certain age, you can't help but be reminded when you hear his name of a time (roughly speaking, from the mid 1960s to the late '80s) when all you had to do to temporarily escape from workaday stress, or simply find a pleasant soundtrack for office work, long commutes or dreary household chores, was turn the dial or punch a button to hear stations like "Bayou Radio" WBYU in New Orleans or Houston's KYND ("Kind 92"), where the playlist was limited to the likes of André Kostelanetz, 101 Strings, Ferrante & Teicher -- and, yes, Roger Williams.

I must confess that even as my musical tastes evolved from The Beatles and The Rolling Stones to Bruce Springsteen and The Police, I frequently returned to Easy Listening stations -- when I was alone, naturally, and not in the company of friends who'd make predictably derisive comments about "elevator music" -- more often than not in search of instrumental versions of popular movie themes. I seldom had to wait very long to hear a selection from some soundtrack because, as I recall, the '60s and '70s were a golden age for movie themes that were recorded by literally dozens of Easy Listening artists. Indeed, even themes from movies that hardly anyone had ever seen -- like the themes from Pieces of Dreams and The Picasso Summer -- remained fixtures for decades on Easy Listening playlists.

Roger Williams recorded an abundance of movie music, scoring hits with themes from such diverse films as Born Free, Somewhere in Time, Summer of '42, The Godfather, The Rose, Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet, Dr. Zhivago -- "Laura's Theme," my late father's all-time fave -- and on and on and on. You don't often hear music like that on commercial broadcast radio these days. But, trust me, if you heard it then, you remember it still. Ever better, it remans readily available on CDs and downloads -- and at places like this. And this.

Michael Caine: Don't fear the reaper

2011-09-27T10:51:00.000-05:00

From Sir Michael Caine, words to live by: "You are going to make every moment count. I mean, you better make every moment count. Live your life now; start in the morning. You mustn’t sit around waiting to die. When it happens you should come into the cemetery on a motorbike, skid to a halt by the side of the coffin, jump in and say: 'Great. I just made it.'" Works for me.

Another weekend, another film festival

2011-09-24T18:25:00.000-05:00

Yeah, I know: I haven't completed all my reviews of films I saw at the Toronto Film Festival. And I'm already about 2 or 3 weeks behind on postings for my Take 59 project. But here I am in Austin this weekend for Fantastic Fest because... because... because I'm just a ramblin' kind of guy.

No more excuses for not posting reviews

2011-09-18T21:40:00.000-05:00

Thanks to some patient tech tutoring by one invaluable colleague, and some gentle nudging and eagle-eyed proof-reading by another, I'm back to posting some of my archived movie reviews on my too-long-neglected Moving Picture Show website. Just in case you're interested, you can see what I had to say back in the day about Big Night, White Hunter, Black Heart (pictured above), The Two Jakes and Four Rooms. More to come. I promise.

From Toronto: Trespass

2011-09-18T20:33:00.000-05:00

Nicolas Cage, Nicole Kidman and Joel Schumacher -- together again for the first time. The last time Cage and Schumacher collaborated, the result was a movie -- 8mm -- that I admired, but many people despised. And when Schumacher last directed Kidman -- well, OK, you have to admit that Batman Forever was better than Batman & Robin, right? Anyway: They're all involved in Trespass, and you read my mostly positive Variety review here.

Big Al is coming to H-Town

2011-09-18T17:57:00.000-05:00

And you can read all about it here, in my Houston CultureMap.com preview.

Why did Dogs die?

2011-09-18T17:39:00.000-05:00

Hollywood Elsewhere blogger Jeff Wells asks: Why did Rod Lurie's remake of Straw Dogs tank at the North American box-office this weekend? Well, as I have noted elsewhere: Maybe the title meant absolutely nothing to its presumptive target audience of young male moviegoers.

Yes, I know, we're talking about an updated version of a Sam Peckinpah classic. But based on my admittedly unscientific research -- i.e., asking students in my film studies classes at University of Houston and Houston Community College -- I would argue that it's not unreasonable to suspect most people under the age of 30 have never heard of that 1971 film, much less watched it. And, perhaps more important, there's the title itself: What the hell does it mean? Seriously. I'm old enough to remember that, as early as the original film’s second week of release, the distributor felt compelled to buy newspaper ads and print lobby posters that actually featured a ceremonial straw dog set ablaze, to kinda-sorta explain the symbolic meaning of the title. Obviously, that helped. Just as obviously, though, it was a necessary marketing move.

I haven't seen Lurie's Straw Dogs yet, and for all I know, it's every bit as terrific as my friend Roger Ebert says. But as far as doing a post-mortem on its failure to find an opening weekend audience? With all due respect, James Marsden, Kate Bosworth and Alexander Skarsgard have yet to prove themselves as consistent box-office draws. And then, of course, there's the title. Maybe Lurie would have done better to use the title of the book -- The Siege of Trencher's Farm -- that inspired Peckinpah's original film in the first place?

Hot girl on girl action. No, seriously.

2011-09-06T16:09:00.001-05:00

Why do I get the feeling I won't be seeing this commercial on Sports Center or Sunday Night Football anytime soon? Or during the pre-movie cavalcade of ads before screenings at my friendly neighborhood megaplex?

Countdown to Toronto

2011-09-05T22:28:00.003-05:00

How many times have you seen this place in movies, commercials and TV dramas? Probably a lot more than you'd think. It's Honest Ed's, a massive discount store that takes up an entire block on the corner of Bloor and Bathurst in Toronto. And the gaudily lit storefront has proven irresistible for scores of directors and location scouts who have shot on location in Toronto over the decades. I never fail to smile when I see it in a film or television production -- particularly when that film or television production supposedly is set somewhere else (New York, Chicago, anywhere) and Honest Ed's is the dead giveaway that, well, somebody thought shooting in Toronto would be much cheaper. Or easier. (After all, eh, we're talking about one of North America's film production hubs.) Or both.

And when it pops up in a movie that is set in Toronto -- well, as I joked with filmmaker Edgar Wright after he directed Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, his prominent placement of Honest Ed's in his film (which, not incidentally, also looms large in the graphic novel on which Scott Pilgrim was based) must have been his way of telling the world that, yeah, this really is Toronto playing Toronto for a change.

But I must confess: The chief reason I enjoy seeing Honest Ed's is a sentimental one: It's very near the home of dear friends I look forward to visiting every year that I cover the Toronto Film Festival. I'll be seeing Honest Ed's again -- up close, in real life -- in less than 48 hours. I can't wait.

Take 59: Confessions of a Nazi Spy

2011-09-04T17:37:00.000-05:00

One of the first mainstream, major-studio American movies to explicitly warn against the menace posed by fascism both aboard and at home, Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939) also is one of the relatively few Hollywood productions of any sort ever to be disdainfully criticized – and robustly defended – on the floor of the US Senate.

It’s a corking good ripped-from-the-headlines melodrama, brisk and brash in the unmistakable style that defined Warner Bros. films of its period. And like many of those other Warners films, this one basically is a rousingly entertaining crime story about a blunt-spoken, hard-charging lawman bent on taking down wily outlaws backed by thuggish henchmen and cretinous confederates.

The big difference in Confessions is, the good guy – FBI agent Edward Renard – is portrayed Edward G. Robinson, a pit-bullish dynamo who’d previously made his mark playing criminally inclined hard cases in Little Caesar and other Warners gangster flicks. And the bad guys are Nazi spies, Gestapo goons, and subversive spokesmen for the German-American Bund.

Dr. Karl Kassel (Paul Lukas), a German immigrant, seems thoroughly assimilated -- he’s even a Navy reserve officer! – and red-white-and-bluish. But no: He’s really a fervent National Socialist who’s doing his bit to make the whole world go to heil by delivering fiery speeches at Bund rallies, exhorting his fellow German transplants (and gullible native-born citizens) in New York and elsewhere to support Adolf Hitler and join the Fatherland’s campaign to “save America from the chaos that breeds democracy and racial equality.”

On rare occasions, Kassel must employ uniformed “German patriots” to subdue dissenters in his audience. (Ward Bond – who, just three year later, would play an ex-con seeking to claim a bounty on Der Fuhrer in the exuberantly daft B-movie Hitler – Dead or Alive -- has a memorable cameo as war vet who’s shouted down, and beaten up, when he rails against Nazism: “We don’t want any –isms in this country except Americanism!”) Much more often, however, Kassel’s words resound well with useful fools such as Kurt Schneider (Francis Lederer), a malcontent who’s so certain that he’s destined for greatness that he never bothers to hold down a steady job – we learn that, years earlier, he spent prison time for being a military deserter – and is all too willing to perform, for a price, services that might gain him the place he richly deserves in the inner circle of the Master Race.

Fairly early on, it’s obvious that Schneider isn’t the sharpest knife in the schnitzel store: He actually tries to make contact with Nazi spylords by writing an application letter to a German newspaper. Amazingly enough, however, this is not viewed as a bad career by a potential employer, a haughty Kraut who comments: “The Americans are a very simple-minded people. One doesn’t need a wolf where a weasel will do.” And so German intelligence chief Franz Schlager (George Sanders, sporting a whitewall haircut and a Teutonic screw-you sneer) sails to America to offer Schneider sliding-scale payments for any info on military armaments and troop stationing.

It doesn’t take long for Schneider to screw up conspicuously enough to eventually alert G-man Renard, an eagle-eyed patriot who’s long suspected the existence of a Nazi spy network in the good ol’ US of A. Openly scornful of the delusional dim bulb in his sights, Renard berates Schneider in a contemptuous harangue. How contemptuous? Well, try to imagine Edwin G. Robinson barking these lines: “He’s been listening to speeches and reading pamphlets about Nazi Germany, and believing them. Unfortunately, there are hundreds like him in America – hysterical, half-witted crackpots who go Hitler-happy from overindulgence in propaganda that makes them believe that they’re supermen.”

Renard plays Schneider like a violin, deftly appealing to the preening loser’s vanity while getting him to give names, more names, and names of people who haven’t even been born yet. (OK, I’m making up that last part – but it’s not much of an exaggeration.) After that, it’s just a matter of connecting the dots to make small-timers rat on big cheeses, all without the messy necessity of enhanced interrogation techniques. (One character takes pains to emphasize: “Don’t worry, there’s not a third degree with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”) The lucky spies wind up in a New York courtroom before a gravely outraged judge. The unlucky ones are transported, unwillingly, back to the Fatherland to face displeased Nazi overlords.

Cue the uplifting speeches and dire warnings, passionately delivered before the final credits roll as “America the Beautiful” swells on the soundtrack. (No, I’m not making up that.)

Part of what makes all of this so fascinating – and occasionally, as I discovered while watching the film for my Take 59 project, absolutely gobsmacking – is the fact that, back in 1939, when Confessions of a Nazi Spy was produced and released, the US had an official policy of neutrality toward Germany and, perhaps more important, the US film industry’s censoriously conservative Production Code Administration routinely neutered or entirely removed anything that smacked of negative criticism of foreign governments in American movies.

As Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black note in their invaluable history Hollywood Goes to War, PCA chief Joseph Breen was one of many fervent non-interventionists among film-industry higher-ups who didn’t want anything appearing in Hollywood movies that might upset foreign leaders – and lead to the banning of all Hollywood releases in countries controlled by those leaders -- or give American ticketbuyers (and Washington politicians) the idea that studio chiefs were pushing for active American involvement in what appeared to be an inevitable war in Europe. As a 1938 PCA internal memo fretted: “Are we ready to depart from the pleasant and profitable course of entertainment, to engage in propaganda?”

That the events depicted in Confessions of a Nazi Spy were based on real-life events – Nazi spies actually were caught and tried in New York in 1938, thanks in part to the efforts of a G-man not unlike the one played by Robinson – didn’t entirely mollify Breen. (Nor did the factual basis for the scenario deter the German consul in Los Angeles from warning Breen that production of Confessions might lead to “difficulties.”)

But the unabashedly anti-fascist mogul Jack Warner forged ahead anyway, defying all suggestions to soft-pedal what he and his filmmakers saw as Nazi Germany’s threat to the American way of life. Unlike, say, Idiot’s Delight, the 1936 Broadway hit that had to be transported from the Italian Alps to an unnamed European Country, and scrubbed of any unpleasant remarks about Benito Mussolini, before a movie adaptation could be released, Confessions switched back and forth between a New York infiltrated by Nazi spies and Bund propagandists, and a Germany where swastika-emblazoned bad guys hail Hitler – whose image appears in prominently displayed photos and portraits -- and plot deviltry.

Confessions of a Nazi Spy wound up being a box-office hit. But that wasn’t enough to mollify various non-interventionist firebrands in Washington, D.C. Gerald P. Nye, an isolationist Republican senator from North Dakota, loomed large among those who called in 1941 for a specially empanelled subcommittee of the Committee on Interstate Commerce to investigate “war propaganda disseminated by the motion picture industry” -- specifically, movies such as Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, Fritz Lang’s Man Hunt (in which Walter Pidgeon plays a big-game hunter who considers taking a shot at Hitler) and, yes, Confessions of a Nazi Spy.

It’s worth noting that Harry M. Warner, present of Warner Bros., appeared before the subcommittee and, in a prepared statement, defended Confessions of a Nazi Spy: “I cannot conceive how any patriotic citizen could object to a picture accurately recording a danger already existing in our country… Civic, patriotic and labor organizations endorsed this picture. Hundreds of thousands of movie patrons paid to see it.”

It’s also worth noting that the subcommittee hearings on “interventionist propaganda” were adjourned on Sept. 16, 1941. On Dec. 8, they were permanently abandoned.

Take 59: Good Times

2011-08-22T23:49:00.003-05:00

You may feel tempted, as I did, to take a gander at Good Times (1967), if only because of its curiosity value and camp potential as the one and only movie to jointly showcase Sonny and Cher at the height of their mid-1960s pop-chart prominence.

And the allure of this near-forgotten concoction may be well-nigh irresistible for cineastes who know it was the very first feature film directed by future Oscar winner William Friedkin (The French Connection) (but, on the other hand, Jade).

But after finally catching up with Good Times for this initial posting of my Take 59 project, I feel compelled to warn you: Sometimes, you should resist temptation. Because, trust me, this deservedly obscure curio would have to be considerably better than it is to begin to qualify even as a guilty pleasure, much less a high camp classic. Because, to paraphrase Huey Lewis and The News, sometimes bad simply is bad.

Good Times is unmistakably a product of that Old Hollywood era when teen-fave chart-toppers routinely were rushed into rattletrap star vehicles to exploit their probably evanescent appeal to fickle fans. Occasionally – such as when Elvis Presley was at the top of his game in Jailhouse Rock or Viva Las Vegas -- the movies cranked out as fodder for pop star fans could be enjoyed as flashy, trashy fluff. And on very rare occasions – like, when the inspired Richard Lester made merry with The Beatles in A Hard Day’s Night and Help! – enduring classics were the borderline-miraculous result.

Unfortunately, Good Times falls somewhere in the middle ground – or, to be more precise, the no man’s land – between the exuberant junkiness of the Elvis movies and the satirically inclined sophistication of the Beatles romps. The plot (attributed to screenwriter Tony Barrett, a prolific TV vet) has something to do with the naïve cluelessness of Sonny and Cher – played, in a bold stroke of casting, by Sonny and Cher – as they contemplate a move from the recording studio to the sound stage, and something else to do with the silken villainy of Mr. Mordicus (George Sanders – yes, that George Sanders), a smooth-talking producer who wants to make a quick buck by casting the couple in a low-budget quickie that may or may not involve upwardly mobile hillbillies.

Sonny imagines himself and the conspicuously indifferent Cher in three different spoofy scenarios – a labored Western musical, a lame Tarzan parody, and a mercilessly protracted film noir misadventure – in the hope of coming up with a big-screen project that will be sufficiently hip and groovy to not make them seem like, well, sell-outs. (Or, barring that, won’t be as career-stallingly crappy as a movie about upwardly mobile hillbillies.) Meanwhile, Friedkin – then deemed a promising up-and-comer because of his attention-grabbing work in TV documentaries – keeps things moving in a manner that suggests he is what he is, a first-time feature filmmaker who’s in way over his head, who lacks enough experience to make any of his production numbers as infectiously bouncy as similar sequences in Elvis’ movies, but who’s desperately eager to prove that he, too, is not a sell-out. (Listen closely, and you'll hear a throwaway reference to the kind of movie Friedkin no doubt feared he might be accused of making -- Out of Sight, a silly 1966 teen-skewing spy spoof that featured musical performances by, among others, Gary Lewis and The Playboys.)

And every so often, Sanders pops up – either as Mr. Mordicus or a bad guy in a movie fantasy – to come across as either wearily bored or dryly condescending or some mixture of both. Here and there, he appears poised to drop some sort of devastating bon mot, much like his iconic Addison DeWitt in All About Eve. Alas, he never delivers on that promise. Indeed, you get the feeling that he simply didn’t feel this movie was worth that sort of effort. When Mr. Mordicus ultimately tosses the hillbilly script into a conveniently placed trashcan, it’s hard to shake the feeling that Sanders really, really enjoyed that day on the set, if only because he surreptitiously slipped his Good Times screenplay into the binder.

To their credit – assuming, of course, they had screenplay input – Cher (exuding a biker-chick insouciance and, in the Tarzan sequence, revealing incredibly long legs) and Sonny do engage in a fair amount of self-parody here, particularly when it comes to acknowledging what, for many non-fans, was at the time a major turn-off: Their very obvious age difference. In the film noir escapade, they have this pointed exchange:

Cher: We’ve been engaged for seven years. People are beginning to talk.

Sonny: Not as much as they talked when we first got engaged.

In fairness, it should be noted that a couple of the musical sequences – most notably, one meant to represent a TV variety show performance of “It’s the Little Things” – appear, not unlike many sequences in the Beatles movies, to presage MTV videos. On the other hand, it should also be noted that by the time Good Times hit theaters in 1967, The Monkees was near wrapping up its first season of episodes filled with similar sequences. No wonder that moviegoers – at least, the relatively few who bought tickets – were unimpressed.

Also worth noting: The give and take between Sonny and Cher throughout the film, while not exactly Shavian in its wittiness, no doubt established the template for the bandying between the stars during their own real-life ‘70s variety show. Sonny: “Shucks, ma’am, I can’t sing.” Cher: “Don’t let that stop you.” And it doesn’t.

BTW: Don’t expect “The Beat Goes On” or “Baby Don’t Go” or even the original version of “I Got You Babe” here. They’re conspicuous by their absence from the soundtrack. So, really, why bother?

Fright Night: When is a "classic" maybe not really one?

2011-08-22T13:29:00.000-05:00

Given the way folks carelessly toss about the term "classic" -- using the word to describe everything from ugly muscle cars to '80s slasher flicks -- I really shouldn't be surprised that some nostalgic movie buffs are eager to apply that appellation to the original 1985 Fright Night, if only to differentiate that film from its recently released, reportedly underwhelming remake.

But at the risk of sounding like the critical equivalent of the cranky old coot who wants those damn kids to get off his lawn -- I can't say I share the love for the '85 flick. This is, reprinted verbatim, my original review of the original Fright Night, as it appeared Aug. 2, 1985, in the now-defunct Houston Post:

Fright Night takes a great idea and makes the very least of it.

For his debut as a director, scriptwriter Tom Holland has come up
with a doozy of a premise: A teen-ager discovers his next-door neighbor is a
vampire, and must call on a TV horror movie host for help when no one else
believes his fantastic story. Unfortunately, Holland fritters away his
inspiration as he scuttles back and forth between grisly shocks and campy
put-on. One moment, we have a heavy-handed sight gag: the vampire's home is
the only house on the block surrounded by swirling fog and low-hanging clouds.
The next moment, we have Richard Edlund's yuck-o special effects: green slime
oozes from a bad guy's corpse, before the skeletal remains crumple into dust.

Holland had similar trouble balancing gore and giggles in his script for
Psycho II. Here, however, the schizophrenia is even more obvious, since
Holland lacks the directorial skill to merge the disparate elements. His movie
doesn't jell until the final 20 minutes, when, despite some glaring gaps in
the narrative logic, it generates some genuine suspense. By that time, alas,
it's too late in the evening for Fright Night.

Roddy McDowall [pictured above] gives a stylized, sympathetic performance as Peter Vincent,
the horror movie host who displays grace and surprising bravery under
pressure. Chris Sarandon plays the vampire, Jerry Dandrige, with adequate
suavity and menace.

But William Ragsdale, the teen-age hero, is a bland cipher. Amanda Bearse
is supposed to be his leading lady, but she could pass for his mother. (Of
course, her obvious maturity comes in handy when Sarandon starts vamping her
in a silly disco sequence. If she looked younger, he'd look like a child
molester.) Stephen Geoffreys, who plays the hero's eccentric classmate and
reluctant ally, looks and sounds like a Jack Nicholson clone that was somehow
damaged in the laboratory. Dorothy Brewster, cast as Ragsdale's mother,
overacts with the tiresome stridency of a supporting player determined to make
herself memorable.

Fright Night could have been something special. Its mediocrity is not
merely disappointing, it is almost infuriating.

R.I.P.: Silvio Narizanno (1927-2011)

2011-08-21T02:28:00.000-05:00

While trolling the obituaries in Variety yesterday – don’t ask why, you don’t want to know – I was surprised to find a piece on Canadian-born filmmaker Silvio Narizzano. Surprised, that is, because this was the first mention I’d read of the guy’s death, even though he’d passed away on July 26, and the obit had posted on Variety.com Aug. 8. And as I Googled his name, to read what others had to say, my surprise gave way to amazement because, except for this respectful appreciation in The Australian, and this article in the Guardian, I really couldn’t find much else anywhere. Seriously: No other obit of any substance, not even in The New York Times or Los Angeles Times.

And why, you might ask, would I have expected otherwise?

Well, to be honest, I would have anticipated at least a fleeting mention of Narizzano’s death in a few movie blogs because he directed Tallulah Bankhead (in her final screen performance) and a very young Donald Sutherland in Die! Die! My Darling! (1965), arguably the campiest of all those high-camp ‘60s gothic thrillers that provided gainful employment for aging screen queens (a subgenre spawned by the classic Bette Davis-Joan Crawford matchup in 1962’s What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?).

And surely (or so I would have thought) devotees of Le Bad Cinema might have wanted to tip their Stetsons to Narizzano in acknowledgement of Blue (1968), his legendarily ill-conceived Western starring Terence Stamp – yes, that Terence Stamp – as a moody young gringo who was raised by Mexican bandits and befriended by Texas settlers, but inexplicably spoke with a thick British accent that made him sound like… like… well, like Terence Stamp.

Just how bad was Blue? Well, let me put it this way: The film was produced by Paramount back in the day when Robert Evans and Peter Bart lit most of the green lights. When I recently interviewed Bart about Infamous Players: A Tale of Movies, The Mob (and Sex), his hugely entertaining account of his Paramount misadventures, I noted, only half-jokingly: “I’m probably the only interviewer you’ll meet while promoting this book who actually paid first-run admission to see Blue.” Bart, not even a quarter-jokingly, replied: “I guess I should apologize to you for that.”

But seriously folks: The real reason I was surprised by the dearth of obits for Silvio Narizzano is another movie that looms large on his resume. An era-defining film that launched a few notable careers, earned a few major Oscar nominations, helped kick off the ‘60s cycle of seriocomic flicks about Swinging England, and introduced an irresistibly bouncy title song that, to this day, remains a staple of Golden Oldie radio stations: Georgy Girl.

Yes, this Georgy Girl – the affectingly bittersweet comedy-drama starring Alan Bates, Charlotte Rampling, James Mason and, in the title role, the late, great Lynn Redgrave. Not a masterwork, perhaps, and not the kind of film that people under 30 often are exposed to. I can’t say it’s even discussed much by serious cineastes anymore, or screened at all in college film studies courses. But, trust me, for those of us who were the right age to see it way back during its original theatrical run – well, whenever someone or something reminds you about it, you remember it very fondly.

Looking back at Narizzano’s resume, it’s painfully obvious that whatever career momentum he gained from Georgy Girl – which netted him a DGA Award nomination – was dissipated by the train wreck that was Blue. (Another problem: He reportedly had a lifelong problem with depression.) He continued to work off and on in movies and TV until the ‘90s, accumulating a few respectable credits here and there – including filmizations of Loot, a Joe Orton comedy starring Lee Remick, Milo O'Shea and Richard Attenborough, and Come Back, Little Sheba, a William Inge drama starring Sir Laurence Olivier, Joanne Woodard and Carrie Fisher – but never quite managing to make lightning strike a second time.

And yet: Despite all that, despite the obscurity that had enveloped Narizzano long before his death, the general lack of attention paid that death is, as I’ve said, surprising. And, yes, a little sad. I’ve often claimed that, sometimes, all it takes is one classic film for a filmmaker to achieve a kind of immortality. On other occasions, however, it appears that really isn’t enough.

Take 59: My year of remedial movie-watching is about to start

2011-08-19T01:09:00.003-05:00

On Monday, Aug. 22, I turn 59. Which means that, if there's anything I want to accomplish while I'm still in my 50s -- I have only 52 weeks left to cross it off my to-do list. And there's the rub: Even though I have spent a goodly portion of my life writing about films, interviewing film actors and filmmakers, and teaching college-level film studies courses, and hope to continue doing so until I'm even deeper into my dotage, there are many noteworthy movies -- some classic, some not -- that I have not seen. Yet.

So I'm launching -- with, I admit, no small amount of trepidation -- a project that I've dubbed Take 59. During the next 52 weeks -- from Aug. 22, 2011 to Aug. 21, 2012 -- I'm going to view, once a week, a 20th century movie that I've never seen before, that I feel I should see before I turn 60. But wait, there's more: I'm also going to post an appraisal of each movie, and each posting will come with the Take 59 label.

I’m likely going to embarrass myself, and get a fair amount of heckling, when I fess up and name the names of classics that I've missed up until now. Because, mind you, I'm not talking about movies I saw decades ago at on-campus screenings, or watched on late-night TV, or viewed at the Gentilly-Orleans art house in New Orleans way back in the day, but can't recall very clearly, if at all. Much to my chagrin, I've never -- ever -- seen Intolerance. Or Out of the Past. Or Heaven's Gate. (OK, maybe that's not really a classic, but still....) Or The Lady from Shanghai. Or Masculin, Féminin. Or Say Anything.

In the course of my Take 59 project, I plan to catch up with all of those films. But I also want to include some non-classics in the mix -- movies I've always heard about and meant to see, but for various reasons always managed to miss. (Until now.) Especially some '60s and '70s films. Like, I've never seen Roger Corman's The Trip. Or Richard Lester's How I Won the War (which many folks actually consider to be a classic -- and many others don't). Or Christian Nyby's Operation C.I.A. (with Burt Reynolds fighting the Viet Cong -- in 1965). Or Robert Mulligan's The Pursuit of Happiness (which, as far as I can tell, has nothing whatsoever to do with the similarly titled drama starring Will Smith).

And here's the beauty part: I already have DVDs (or, in a few cases, Blu-Rays) of these and many other movies I've never seen before. Hell, they're all still shrink-wrapped, stacked on a closet shelf dedicated to films I've always intended to see... someday.

There will be 52 somedays as Take 59 unwinds. I cordially invite you to join me for all of them.

Between Iraq and a hard case

2011-08-18T10:59:00.000-05:00

According to Sharon Waxman of The Wrap: "Twentieth Century Fox has made a deal with writer-producer Peter Mehlman for a new comedy pilot about a young couple who get a new neighbor: notorious mobster Whitey Bulger. In an exclusive interview with TheWrap Wednesday, Mehlman shared his amazement that the 81-year-old Bulger lived the leasurely life of a fugitive in Santa Monica for 15 years... In the pilot pitch, a couple, like Mehlman, remain unaware that their next-door neighbor is a murderer. (The character is based on Bulger, but is not him.)"

The funny thing is, a few years ago, not long after the US invasion of Iraq, I had a Broadcast and Film Writing student at University of Houston turn in a treatment for a proposed sitcom. The premise: In post-war Iraq, Kentucky Fried Chicken sends a rep to Baghdad to open the company's first franchise fast-food restaurant there. Among the rep's eclectic group of employees: Saddam Hussein, barely disguised, more or less hiding out in plain sight under an alias as the KFC restaurant's autocratic (and very demanding) assistant manager. (A running gag: Saddam really, really admires Col. Sanders' white suit.) It was actually quite funny -- the KFC rep, of course, was an earnest young go-getter who was completely clueless about Iraqi culture and customs, and had no idea whatsoever who was working for him -- but I warned the student that it might be a tough sell because some people would find it tasteless.

Maybe I was wrong.

Actress sleeps with director to land acting gig

2011-08-17T09:39:00.000-05:00

Michael Biehn shamelessly exploits his wife -- the muy caliente Jennifer Blanc -- in a shameless exploitation film. And she's a very willing accomplice. You can read all about the fun couple -- and their wild movie, The Victim -- here.

They've got Michele Bachmann eyes

2011-08-15T21:13:00.002-05:00

For more of the same, check here. (Hat-tip to Joanne Harrison, who obviously has friends in all the right places.)

Since Rick Perry is running for President...

2011-08-13T20:13:00.000-05:00

Maybe more folks should take a look at Incendiary: The Willingham Case, a fascinating documentary I reviewed at SXSW last spring. It's a frequently unsettling account of how dubious "science" possibly led to an irreversible miscarriage of justice. Specifically, the film deals with the case of Cameron Todd Willingham, who was convicted for the 1991 arson murders of his three young children in Corsicana, Texas, and executed in 2004, despite serious doubts raised about the prosecution's evidence. Rick Perry, the governor of the great state of Texas, doesn't come off too well in the movie. And for good reason, according to Scott Keyes of Think Progress.

Austin Powers 4: The Franchise Never Dies

2011-08-13T14:58:00.000-05:00

What's this? Another Austin Powers movie is in development? Why? Didn't Mike Myers get all that out of his system in the last sequel?

The Lone Ranger rides... into turnaround

2011-08-12T23:50:00.000-05:00

Both Mike Fleming and The Hollywood Reporter wonder: Did Disney pull the plug on The Lone Ranger because Cowboys & Aliens under-performed at the box-office?

Francois Truffaut disses Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman trashes Orson Welles, Tim Burton flips off Kevin Smith -- and everybody piles on Jean-Luc Godard

2011-08-12T23:04:00.001-05:00

At a dinner party I attended several years ago, it was my great misfortune to be seated near a woman who wanted to know -- no, make that demanded to know -- what was so freakin' great about Citizen Kane. I politely attempted to explain why the movie was such an artistic breakthrough, how it continues to influence other movies and moviemakers, what technical and storytelling elements are so thrillingly impressive... and she didn't buy any of it. It all boiled down to this: She thought that it was a pretentious bore, and that anyone who thought otherwise was a pompous twit. Finally, I had to tell her -- again, politely -- that she had every right to her opinion, and we'd have to agree to disagree.

(It's an occupational hazard for film critics: Random encounters with folks who seem irrationally enraged by the possibility that they don't "get" something that other people do. As I have told several such aggressively opinionated people: "Look, I can't argue you into liking something you obviously don't.")

I was reminded of this unpleasant encounter while reading "The 30 Harshest Filmmaker-on-Filmmaker Insults In History," Jason Bailey's funny and fascinating piece for Flavorwire.com. Bailey catalogs some of the nastiest critiques, putdowns and bitchslaps ever aimed by one auteur at another. And No. 3 on his list is a scathing dismissal of Orson Wells in general and Citizen Kane in particular, offered by no less a luminary than -- are you ready for this? are you sitting down? -- Ingmar Bergman:

“For me he’s just a hoax. It’s empty. It’s not interesting. It’s dead. Citizen Kane, which I have a copy of — is all the critics’ darling, always at the top of every poll taken, but I think it’s a total bore. Above all, the performances are worthless. The amount of respect that movie’s got is absolutely unbelievable.”

Ouch. Maybe I should have asked the lady at the dinner party if she liked The Seventh Seal or Wild Strawberries.

Elsewhere in the Flavorwire piece, Bailey quotes Francois Truffaut on Michelangelo Antonioni (described by Truffaut as “the only important director I have nothing good to say about"), Tyler Perry on Spike Lee ("Spike can go straight to hell!"), and Tim Burton on Kevin Smith (who, you will not be at all surprised to discover, responds in kind). And while I should be shamed to admit this -- indeed, it might even get my film reviewing license revoked -- I laughed out loud while noting that Bergman and Welles did agree on at least one thing: The films of Jean-Luc Godard are far short of unalloyed delights.

How many of these barbs were inspired by professional jealousy or private agendas? Who knows? After all, not every filmmaker is as honest as Norman Jewison, who once told me he “didn’t necessarily want to like” The 400 Blows when Francois Truffaut unveiled his first feature in 1959, “because I knew he had been a critic for Cahiers du Cinema, and there were a lot of things that I disagreed with him on. And when he said he was going to make a film, I said, ‘Here you are, you asshole. Now you’ll find out that it’s not so goddamn easy.’"

But then Jewison got a look at Truffaut's handiwork. "And he was brilliant," Jewison said, expressing equal measures of amusement and appreciation. "Totally brilliant.”

Final Destination 5: You can run, but you can't hide

2011-08-11T12:42:00.000-05:00

Constrained by a formula as restrictive as the elements that define haiku or iambic pentameter, scriptwriter Eric Heisserer and first-time feature director Steven Quale nevertheless generate a respectable amount of suspense in Final Destination 5. This latest entry in the 11-year-old horror series duly adheres to tradition by providing inventively grisly demises for various characters. But there's cheeky cleverness on display in the Rube Goldberg-style setups -- and darkly ironic payoffs -- for most of those death scenes. And while the movie's ingeniously nasty ending would serve as satisfying closure for the franchise, its likely success at the box-office (and as homevideo fodder) should guarantee even more sequels. You can read my Variety review here.

(BTW: The carnage kicks off with the spectacular collapse of a suspension bridge. Don't be surprised if certain pundits -- yes, I'm looking at you Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow and Ed Schultz -- use footage of this disaster to illustrate their commentary while advocating more government funding of infrastructure repair. Not that there's anything wrong with that, you understand.)

Warrior scores a knockout

2011-08-09T19:53:00.000-05:00

An improbably effective and affecting mix of raw emotions and exciting smackdowns, Warrior shapes up as a strong contender for critical kudos and box-office bounty. You can read my Variety review here.

Kris Kristofferson: Looking back, looking forward

2011-08-09T16:28:00.000-05:00

For over four decades, Kris Kristofferson has loomed large in the pop culture firmament as both a renowned singer-songwriter and an acclaimed film actor. Even now, at the ripe young age of 75, he continues to impress and entertain with his performances on concert stages and in motion pictures. So I considered it a rare privilege and honor to interview him for the September issue of Cowboys & Indians, The Premier Magazine of the West.

On the day after he received the prestigious Career Achievement Award at the Nashville Film Festival last April, Kristofferson sat down with me to reminisce about working with country music greats who became close friends – including Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings – and acting for filmmakers as diverse as Sam Peckinpah, Shane Dax Taylor (director of Kristofferson’s latest film, the moody drama Bloodworth) and Martin Scorsese.

Kristofferson credits Scorsese with giving him -- during the making of Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore -- the best advice he's ever received as an actor. “When I read the script for Alice,” he says, “I really didn’t know if I was up to the guy. I felt I didn’t have the acting experience – just the mechanics of it -- that probably was necessary. But when I got the job, Marty said something to me that was one of the most helpful things that a director ever told me. He said, ‘Don’t worry about what it says in the script when it says, “He says sternly,” or something like that. Just go through and cross out all of the directorial comments and just leave the dialogue. And figure how you would say that – how you would react to that.’ And that changed everything for me.”

You can read more of what Kristofferson had to say during our chat here. And you can read a web-only sidebar about some of his Western movies here.

Hulu Flashback: Seven Samurai

2011-08-05T00:09:00.000-05:00

When Steven Spielberg hailed Akira Kurosawa as “the visual Shakespeare of our time,” the American admirer likely was thinking of the Japanese master’s Seven Samurai. Kurosawa’s stunning 1954 epic is one of those absolutely indispensable films that practically everyone has heard about, regardless of whether they’ve actually seen it. Indeed, even if you haven’t, you may think you’ve seen it, given its strong influence on so many other films and filmmakers. For five decades, directors ranging from John Sturges (who remade it as The Magnificent Seven) to John Sayles (who borrowed the basic plot while writing a 1980 sci-fi cheapie called Battle Beyond the Stars) have drawn from Kurosawa’s tale of honor among warriors in 16th-century Japan.

By turns sage and savage, avuncular and authoritarian, the great Takashi Shimura (Ikiru) heads the ensemble cast as Kambei, an unemployed samurai who agrees to help peasants defend their village against periodic pillaging by marauding bandits. Even though the pay is meager — a few handfuls of rice — Kambei is able to recruit other hired swords who have little else to do after being cast adrift by the lords they once served. By appealing to their pride, sense of justice and respect for tradition, he attracts such tough customers as Kyuzo (Seji Miyaguchi), a taciturn professional who never wastes a word or gesture, and Kikuchiyo (Toshiro Mifune), a bearish hot-head who takes great pains to hide his less-than-noble ancestry.

Seven Samurai shows Kurosawa at the top of his form, demonstrating rigorous control of his medium with an inspired balance of formal precision and kinetic exuberance. His epic opens with rapid panning shots of bandits riding over hills, and climaxes with the thundering chaos of a rain-soaked, mud-and-blood battle. In between, there is scarcely a single shot that does not contain motion. Even when people in the frame are stationary, the camera itself glides, thrusts and recoils like a restless animal. More than a half-century after its initial release, Seven Samurai still makes most other action movies seem positively pokey.

Appropriately enough, this classic by “the most Western of Japanese filmmakers” is, at heart, an old-fashioned Hollywood Western in even older-fashioned Japanese regalia. Kurosawa made no apologies for embracing the style and substance of Occidentals as diverse as John Ford and Vincent Van Gogh. (He rendered the latter as a workaholic sage — played by Martin Scorsese, no less! — in his 1990 anthology film, Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams.) A lifelong student of Shakespeare, he audaciously re-imagined Macbeth as Throne of Blood (1957), an epic drama of medieval warfare; recycled elements of Hamlet in The Bad Sleep Well (1960), a modern-day tale of deadly serious corporate intrigue; and and reconstituted King Lear as Ran (1985), his last incontestable masterpiece.

Even so, despite his borrowings from other cultures, Kurosawa remained forever mindful of his roots. And while he refused to err on the side of romanticized nostalgia in his re-creations of Japan’s turbulent past, he viewed social changes, technological advancements and other breaks from tradition as extremely mixed blessings. It is well worth remembering that in Seven Samurai, the 16th-century swordsman who best represents the ancient bushido code of honor -- the very embodiment of revered tradition -- is felled by a rifle shot.

The old guard gives way to the new?

2011-08-04T23:32:00.000-05:00

Marc Malkin of E! reports that at today's Hollywood Foreign Press luncheon in Beverly Hills, Mark Wahlberg warned Leonardo DiCaprio that they'd been rendered obsolete -- by Taylor Lautner. I think he was kidding. I mean, surely Wahlberg knows that Lautner has yet to make a movie as cool as Four Brothers or Inception -- right?

Son of Cats That Look Like Hitler

2011-07-29T16:37:00.001-05:00

Four years after my shocking blog post... another tale of a feline that resembles Der Führer .

Hulu Flashback: Rashomon

2011-07-27T00:47:00.000-05:00

A bandit subdues a nobleman in a secluded woodland and forces himself on his captive’s wife. The nobleman dies, the wife flees, the bandit is captured – and everything else in Rashomon remains open to conjecture. Decades before The Usual Suspects warned moviegoers not to accept subjective testimony as verifiable fact, Akira Kurosawa’s breakthrough masterpiece suggested that no eyewitness can be entirely trusted, that truth itself may be forever elusive.

Four different accounts of the fateful, fatal incident – including one offered by the late nobleman through a court-ordered medium – are considered by three strangers in 11th-century Japan. While stranded under the Rashomon gate during a raging thunderstorm, they wonder: Was the nobleman truly a man of honor? Was his wife an innocent victim or willing participant? Could the bandit (Toshiro Mifune at his most swaggeringly uninhibited) have twisted the truth for a selfless reason? The possibilities are perplexing. Each testimony is dramatized in flashback, and none seems more credible than the others. Indeed, Kurosawa strongly hints that all four stories are, to varying degrees, deceptions born of self-delusion. “Human beings,” he wrote in Something Like an Autobiography, his acclaimed memoir, “are unable to be honest with themselves about themselves.”

Rashomon has spawned many imitators, including The Outrage, a 1964 Americanized remake with Paul Newman miscast as a Mexican bandit. But Kurosawa’s 1950 original continues to be the paradigm for this particular sort of beguilingly simple yet provocatively complex drama. Even now, the title is used to describe anything – from Wonderland to Boomtown, from Senate hearings to Seinfeld episodes – in which a story is told from multiple, and often contradictory, points of view.

The last word on The Undefeated

2011-07-27T00:03:00.000-05:00

"The box office fate of Sarah Palin's bio-documentary The Undefeated has uncannily mimicked the political fortunes of its subject: after a bright start, much publicity and high hopes the film has fizzled out to disappointing reviews and waning popularity." That's how Richard Adams of The Guardian sees it -- and I can't say I disagree. I will add, though, that I'm slightly surprised that the ex-governor's more rabid admirers didn't turn out in greater number to buy tickets. Assuming, of course, she has as many rabid admirers as she used to.

Of course, it's altogether possible that her fans are biding their time, waiting to buy the DVD at Wal-Mart. Which, by the way, is where I bought a copy of The Undefeated several weeks ago. No, not that Undefeated. This Undefeated

Free flick: Daughter from Danang

2011-07-25T17:08:00.000-05:00

Who says you can't get something for nothing? To celebrate their 20-year run of funding independent filmmakers, the folks at The Independent Television Service will be make 20 feature-length documentaries by ITVS storytellers available for free on-line viewing -- starting today, and continuing through Sept. 23. First on tap: Daughter from Danang, an exceptionally fine nonfiction film that you can view -- for free -- through Wednesday here. Here's my original 2002 review. (By the way: I did mention that you can see the movie for free, didn't I?)

Our parents and teachers were right to warn us: Be careful what you wish for. Heidi Bub, the subject of a poignant documentary titled Daughter from Danang, has doubtless taken that lesson to heart. And after seeing the film, I’d be willing to bet that its directors, Gail Dolgin and Vicente Franco, have the maxim embroidered on a sampler somewhere.

Heidi, the documentary informs us, was born Mai Thi Hiep, the daughter of a Vietnamese mother and an American soldier stationed in Danang during the Vietnam War. Just before the withdrawal of U.S. forces, Mai Thi Kim, Hiep’s mother, turned her 7-year-old daughter over to Operation Babylift, a program designed to place orphans with American adoptive parents. Why? Kim wanted the best for her little girl, and feared the worst after hearing horror stories about Viet Cong mistreatment of mixed-race children. Not incidentally, she also feared the reaction of her returning husband, who had spent years away from his family while fighting with the VC.

Interweaving testimony from Heidi, her husband and a few of her childhood friends, Dolgin and Franco fashion a fascinating portrait of a Vietnamese-born youngster who eagerly and easily assimilated as an all-American girl with a brand new name in southern Tennessee. Of course, it helped that, even as a child, Heidi didn't look very Asian. It helped more, however, that Heidi seldom spoke of her heritage, at the insistence of her emotionally distant adoptive mother.

During her college years, we’re told, Heidi became permanently estranged from her American mom. (The latter’s absence from Daughter is never directly explained; presumably, she didn’t wish to be interviewed.) And even though Heidi remained relatively close to her American uncle and grandmother, who both appear on camera here, she was determined to find a mother who might grant her unconditional love.

Which is why, 22 years after her departure from Vietnam, Heidi found a way to contact her biological mother.

Dolgin and Franco tagged along for Heidi’s sentimental journey to Danang. As they frankly admitted while introducing their documentary at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival, they expected to record a happy ending at a family reunion. Instead, they witnessed, and we see, something much more emotionally and psychologically complicated.

At first, Kim and Heidi are overjoyed to see each other, and Heidi's half-sisters and half-brother seem equally glad to greet their lost-long sibling. Even Do Huu Vinh, Kim's husband, professes to be pleased. In a provocatively ambiguous scene, he claims -- not altogether convincingly -- that, had little Hiep not been shuttled off to America, he would have raised the child as his own daughter.

The longer Heidi stays in Danang, however, the enormous cultural differences between her and her family become increasingly – and frustratingly -- apparent. At first, the dissimilarities are mild annoyances. (Kim loves to hug and caress her little girl; Heidi wasn't raised to be a touchy-feely type.) As her discomfort escalates, however, Heidi wonders aloud if she should cut short her stay.

Daughter from Danang reaches its emotional climax during a heart-wrenching family gathering, and ends, ambiguously, on a note of plaintive regret. You can’t help admiring the empathetic tact of the filmmakers: One wrong move at the wrong moment, and they would have intruded upon, or even interrupted, the real-life drama unfolding before their cameras. On the other hand, you can’t help thinking that they must feel greatly disappointed, because they don’t quite get what they came for.

Alas, neither does Heidi Bub.

Good news, bad news about Harry Potter

2011-07-22T15:07:00.001-05:00

The good news: The Wrap reports there is going to be another Harry Potter movie. The bad news: It's going to be a remake of this. Yikes.

2001: A Space Odyssey, 2011: Return to earth

2011-07-21T12:27:00.002-05:00

On the occasion of the end of the space shuttle program, I offer these concluding paragraphs of an essay I wrote back in 2004 for my book Joe Leydon’s Guide to Essential Movies You Must See. (No, the title wasn’t my idea.) My subject: Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. My mood: Somewhere between bittersweet nostalgia and rueful resignation.

Of course, some things – titles, for instance -- never go out of date. And just as 1984 continues to serve as shorthand for a dystopian vision of technologically-enhanced totalitarianism, 2001 retains its mythic resonance – an optimistic prediction of first contact with other, presumably wiser, life forms -- long after people stopped scribbling that cluster of numbers in checkbooks. Instead of inspiring awe, however, the film itself now is more likely to evoke a kind of wistful melancholy that Kubrick never intended. It’s sad, but true: These days, we simply don’t view interstellar exploration with the same wonder-fueled enthusiasm shared by Kubrick and millions of others back in 1968.

To be sure, there’s the occasional media frenzy about images beamed from Mars by unmanned spacecraft. And there’s always a ready audience for every new chapter of the Star Wars franchise. But with each passing year, it’s increasingly more difficult to imagine that anything short of a real-world appearance by a beckoning Monolith would re-ignite our intergalactic wanderlust. All you have to do is read news accounts of petty Congressional squabbling over NASA funding, and you’ll realize that, never mind what the calendar might tell you, we’re still a long, long way from the bold new age of discovery we were promised all those years ago.

All about Buck

2011-07-20T16:15:00.001-05:00

David Poland of Hot Blog fame gets up-close and personal with real-life "horse whisperer" Buck Brannaman and filmmaker Cindy Meehl, the folks who have given us one of the year's finest documentaries, Buck. Which fortuitously gives me another chance to plug my recent CultureMap interview with Brannaman. I think they call this synchronicity.

Hulu Flashback: The existential cool of Bob le Flambeur

2011-07-20T15:14:00.000-05:00

Bob Montagne (Roger Duchesne) walks like a slumming prince through the shadowland of pre-dawn Paris. His hat tilted at a jaunty angle, a cigarette dangling from his frowning lips, he's a trenchcoated knight errant, master of all he surveys.

Still ruggedly handsome in his autumnal years, he has the imperturbable bearing of someone who has seen it all, done it all, and cared for little of it. Even so, there's still some spark in the old boy. As he notes the sidewalk flirtations of a teen-age temptress, you can see a flash of disapproval in his near-impassive eyes. But if you look closely enough, you'll also see a flicker of bemused appreciation.

Quite an entrance, eh? And quite a larger-than-life creation, this Bob Montagne, the hardboiled but honorable hero of Bob le Flambeur (Bob the Gambler), the classic 1956 melodrama directed and co-written by the late, great Jean-Pierre Melville.

A forerunner of the auteurs who launched the French New Wave in the late '50s and early '60s, Melville eschewed studio sets and lavish production values, preferring to work on real locations -- on real streets, in real apartments and alleyways -- with small camera crews. He used many of the same semi-guerrilla techniques later adopted by such New Wavers as Francois Truffaut (who cast Decomble, the grizzled cop of Bob le Flambeur, as a strict schoolteacher in The 400 Blows) and Jean-Luc Godard. In 1959, Godard acknowledged the debt by casting Melville as a visiting celebrity in Breathless, and peppered that movie's dialogue with references to a certain Bob Montagne.

Much like many of the younger New Wavers, Melville paid affectionate tribute to American film-noir thrillers of the '40s and early '50s. The big difference is, Melville's tributes came first.

Bob Montagne obviously is blood kin to the noble tough guys once essayed by Humphrey Bogart and George Raft. But Bob le Flambeur is not a slavish imitation, or an overly reverential homage. The movie can be enjoyed on its own terms, for its own merits, as a street-smart comedy of manners, and as a slyly stylized evocation of underworld life in post-World War II Paris. Call it pulp fiction elevated to high art by a romantic sensibility, and you won't be far off the mark.

You can read my full review of Bob le Flambeur -- written in 2001, on the occasion of the film's theatrical re-release -- here. And you can read my review of The Good Thief, Neil Joran's exceptionally entertaining 2003 remake starring Nick Nolte -- here.

Hey, kids! Want to know what Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly will be frothing about tomorrow?

2011-07-19T16:13:00.000-05:00

Robert Redford has announced plans to direct and star in The Company You Keep, which Variety describes as "a political action thriller" about "a former Weather Underground militant wanted by the FBI for 30 years who must go on the run when a young, ambitious reporter exposes his true identity." (Shia LaBeouf is set to play the reporter.) Er, with all due respect, Mr. Redford: Don't you remember all the grief Barack Obama got when he got tied to a Weather Underground alumnus? No? Well, I strongly suspect you're about to reminded. Very soon.

Captain America: The Musical

2011-07-19T14:21:00.000-05:00

OK, I'll admit it: Back in the day, when these cheesy cartoons with Marvel Comics superheroes aired in New Orleans on a weekday afternoon children's show -- Cap Canaveral, if memory serves me correctly -- I thought they were pretty freakin' dreadful. Even as a 12-year-old, I could tell that pennies had been pinched, corners had been cut, and the animation left something to be desired. (Something like, oh, I dunno, maybe real animation.) And yet I felt compelled to watch. Why? Well, I was a big Marvel fan at the time. And, yeah, there was something about the theme song for the Captain America cartoons...

And the Spider-Man theme was so endearingly and enduringly neat, it was reprised -- briefly -- by a street musician in the movie Spider-Man 2.

But really, there's never been any excuse for that.

Coming soon to a bookstore near you

2011-07-18T23:37:00.000-05:00

It's official street date is Aug. 30. And, yes, I'm once again a contributor for this new edition.

Before there was The Undefeated, there was Journeys with George

2011-07-17T01:35:00.002-05:00

With all the coverage being generated this weekend by the Sarah Palin documentary, I'm reminded of a delicious irony regarding another movie about another polarizing Republican: Journeys with George, arguably the most sympathetic film ever made about George W. Bush, was directed by... Nancy Pelosi's daughter. No, really.

When I reviewed it for Variety at the 2002 SXSW Film Festival -- at a time when then-President Bush was near the peak of his post-9/11 popularity spike -- I noted: George "recalls a time not so long ago when the untested son of President No. 41 was considered even by some Republicans to be an intellectual lightweight sorely lacking in presidential gravitas. [The documentary] strongly suggests that Bush's image as a callow boob was only partially justified and likely was much more apparent than real."

The film started out more or less as a pastime for director Alexandra Pelosi, "shot during downtime from her duties as a producer for NBC News. At first, she's simply one of the faceless dozens among the print and TV journalists on a shaky Access Air plane -- which, Pelosi pointedly notes, is usually used to transport convicts. (A much nicer aircraft is provided once Bush actually nails the Republican nomination.) But a funny thing happens along the campaign trail: The more she aims her mini-DV camera at Bush between stump speeches and photo ops, the more the candidate opens up while noticing, and gradually befriending" the first-time filmmaker.

At its frequent best, I wrote, the documentary offered audiences "a golden opportunity to witness the 'unplugged,' after-hours George W. Bush at his most congenial. George offers a portrait of a gregariously charming and self-mocking fellow who's perfectly at ease in his own skin, and who's no less slick and savvy a politician for being willing to make himself the butt of jokes. Indeed, at one point, he even goes on the press plane loudspeaker to mock his own verbal gaffes at the last campaign stop."

I caught a good deal of heat from a few of my liberal friends -- and was somewhat snidely criticized, years later, by no less an august personage than James Wolcott -- for concluding: "At first, Bush's handlers try to keep the candidate inaccessible to the press pack. But after he loses a few primaries to rival John McCain -- whose half-hearted speech in support of Bush is screamingly albeit unintentionally funny -- the candidate suddenly becomes accessible, unplugged -- and indefatigably charming.

"It's been reported some of President Bush's current handlers are worried that Journeys With George will make Dubya look somehow 'less presidential.' Actually, the only thing they have to complain about is the timing of the [documentary's] release: Had it appeared prior to the 2000 election, there likely would not have been any disputes over the Florida vote count, because Bush's electoral victory would have been all the more resounding."

I still stand by that last sentence, despite everything that unfolded during President Bush's two terms in office. It continues to annoy the hell out of many people -- hey, it annoys the hell out of me -- but a key to the guy's success as a candidate in 2000 was what can only be described as his regular-guy charm. Mind you, I've always been immune to that charm -- so much so, in fact, that I took time off from attending the Fort Lauderdale Film Festival on Election Day 2000 to do volunteer work for a local Democartic Party "Get out the vote" effort. (That's right -- I was at Ground Zero in Broward County when the chads started hanging.) But Journeys with George enabled me to better understand why other voters might have opted to cast their ballots for someone who... who... well, who proved that, hey, in this country, anybody really can grow up to become the President.

A hot photo of Helen Mirren

2011-07-16T14:02:00.000-05:00

Actually, it looks even better in the current issue of Esquire. Of course, the magazine's cover-story interview with Daniel Craig keyed to Cowboys & Aliens ain't chopped liver. But I have to say: That isn't the reason I'm so very glad to be a subscriber today

Hitler rages because he got the Sarah Palin doc into only 10 theaters, decides to go see Harry Potter instead

2011-07-15T15:54:00.000-05:00

Palin Campaign Headquarters - Launch of 'The Undefeated' - 7/14/2011 from Moosehelmet Films on Vimeo.

Curiously enough, he seems especially upset that he's booked The Undefeated into only two Texas theaters. But never mind: He's still wild about Harry.

Another shameless attempt to attract blog traffic with something else about the Sarah Plain doc

2011-07-15T14:57:00.000-05:00

Here's another insightful and elegantly written review -- which just happens to quote me. Yeah, you guessed it: I'm going to milk this cow until the teats run dry, and then I'll make belts and hamburgers. (Note to the humor-impaired: That was a joking reference to a barnyard animal, not a sexist remark about... well, you know.)

Is God punishing cities where the Sarah Palin doc is screening?

2011-07-15T13:56:00.000-05:00

PalinWeek.com reports. You decide. Meanwhile, Judy Berman of Flavorwire.com rounds up reviews written by people who have seen The Undefeated -- including me, of course -- so you don't have to. And Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic reports that moviegoers are conspicuous by their absence at an opening-day screening of the Sarah Palin documentary. Which is not to say, however, that the film doesn't have its defenders here and there.

Fantastic Fest: It's baaaaaack!

2011-07-14T16:07:00.000-05:00

The seventh edition of Fantastic Fest -- the world's wildest genre-movie extravaganza -- is set for Sept. 22-29 in Austin, Texas, the only place on the planet weird enough to handle its spectacular excess. Judging from today's announcement of the first 20 titles confirmed for the FF2011 schedule, I'd say festivalgoers are in for the usual smorgasbord of heavy artillery, sexual perversity, edgy sci-fi, scantily clad cuties, flesh-eating zombies and unrestrained ultra-violence. Still no word yet, however, on whether creative director and co-founder Tim League will be getting back into the ring with anyone.

Confession of a news junkie

2011-07-14T14:36:00.000-05:00

I keep telling myself: OK, tonight I'm not going to watch all those freakin' news shows. No Keith, no Rachel, no Hardball or Last Word. I'm not gonna plant myself at my dining room table and divide my attention between MSNBC or Current on my HDTV, and Talking Points Memo or Daily Kos on my laptop. I'm gonna go out to a screening, or watch a movie on my HDTV -- hell, I still haven't caught up with all the Harry Potter films! -- or write something for this blog or some other venue, or connect my new Blu-Ray player so I can downstream movies, or even try to organize the piles of magazines and stacks of DVDs in my home office. But then a story like this breaks, and I know -- I just know, dammit! -- what I'll really be doing tonight. (Hat tip to Kelly for the above illustration. You can check out her other work here.)

Trailer watch: John Carter

2011-07-14T12:18:00.001-05:00

OK, I admit: This first trailer for John Carter -- set to open March 9, 2012 at theaters and drive-ins everywhere -- appeals to my inner geek. But did I miss something, or have the folks at Walt Disney decided to downplay the movie's literary source? I mean, it's based on Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter of Mars novels, right? So what's with the bland movie title? Shouldn't the Disney brass be afraid that some folks will buy tickets expecting to see Noah Wyle back in the emergency room?

While waiting to take a meeting about making a movie... the Polish Brothers decided to go ahead and make another movie

2011-07-14T11:19:00.000-05:00

Steve Pond of The Wrap reports on the off-the-radar success of a no-budget indie movie that could very well encourage and inspire other indie moviemakers. (Of course, it does help if you have a popular TV actress as one of your leads.) Haven't seen it yet, but I must admit: The above clip, which suggests a collaboration of John Cassavetes and Claude Lelouch, definitely has piqued my interest.

Happy Birthday, Harrison Ford

2011-07-13T23:02:00.000-05:00

Yeah, he turns 69 today. And, sure, he admits that his agent thought he might be too old to "get" Cowboys & Aliens. But you know what? Jon Favreau told me that Harrison Ford can still do some serious ass-kicking. And I believe him.

Hulu Flashback: The compassionate farce of Ed Wood

2011-07-13T22:03:00.002-05:00

[Back on October 7, 1994, at a time when Johnny Depp was better known for soulful sensitively, not self-satirical swashbuckling, I praised his change-of-pace turn in this under-rated gem.]

Edward D. Wood Jr. -- war veteran, Hollywood fringe-dweller and uncloseted cross-dresser -- wanted to make movies in the worst way. Unfortunately, that is exactly what he did.

Long before the term ''high camp'' conjured up images of anything other than a mountaintop military base, Wood labored indefatigably in the 1950s netherworld of no-budget, fly-by-night film production. Among his most notorious credits: Glen or Glenda, a passionately sincere but largely incoherent defense of transvestism as a way of life; Bride of the Monster, a stark and stupid cheapie-creepie that climaxes with Bela Lugosi battling frantically, albeit none too convincingly, with a rubber octopus; and, most infamously, Plan 9 from Outer Space, the sci-fi howler that deserves a place of dishonor on anyone's Top Ten list of Le Bad Cinema.

Each of these films is of a mind-frying, jaw-dropping awfulness that must be seen to be disbelieved. And yet, at the same time, each clearly is the work of someone who passionately believes in the seriousness of his endeavor, whose intensity of purpose is surely no less than that of the people who made Birth of a Nation or Battleship Potemkin.

Which goes a long way toward explaining why Tim Burton (Edward Scissorhands, the Batman movies), one of Hollywood's hottest properties, chose to direct Ed Wood, a hugely entertaining and sweetly sympathetic tribute to one of the worst moviemakers -- if not the worst -- who ever darkened a soundstage.

Ed Wood is an extremely funny film, but its humor is not that of the hectoring, cheap-laugh variety. Maybe the mondo-bizarro Burton responded to Wood's misadventures with a kind of ''There but for the grace of God ...'' recognition. Or maybe he simply was taken by the notion that any kind of artistic impulse, even that of someone with all of the ego and ambition but none of the talent of a true artist, is worthy of consideration.

For whatever reason, Burton has managed to make something altogether unique -- a compassionate farce -- that can be enjoyed even by people who never heard of Wood, who would never willingly submit themselves to a Wood work.

And if you are familiar with Wood's slapdash Z-movies, so much the better. You will be prepared to appreciate the astonishing fidelity of Burton's efforts to re-create their look and feel.

Johnny Depp, who was effectively cast as Burton's Edward Scissorhands, gives an atypically exuberant and marvelously crackpot performance as Ed Wood. The most striking thing about his portrayal is the boundless, never-say-die enthusiasm he constantly conveys. Early in the film, while reading a blistering pan of a Los Angeles stage production he directed, Wood focuses on the review's only left-handed compliment. ''See!'' he enthuses. '''The soldiers' costumes are very realistic.' That's positive!''

Much later, Wood remains equally chipper when, shortly before production begins on Plan 9 from Outer Space, he must cope with the inconvenient death of a leading player, Bela Lugosi. Wood decides to use footage of Lugosi he has already filmed, and rely on a stand-in -- a much younger, taller stand-in -- to play Lugosi's role in other scenes.

Sure, this means the other actor will have to keep his face covered with a cloak. But so what? “Filmmaking is not about tiny details!'' he warns a naysayer. ''It's about the big picture!''

The heart of Ed Wood is Wood's symbiotic but genuinely affectionate relationship with Lugosi, played with richly comical crankiness by Martin Landau. When they first meet, Lugosi is a reclusive has-been -- as he puts it, ''just an ex-bogeyman'' -- who hasn't worked in four years, and has been a morphine addict for two decades. Wood uses him to raise the meager financing for his threadbare films, but always treats the burnt-out star with the utmost respect. Lugosi responds with touching gratitude and, when the cameras are rolling, utter professionalism.

Of course, Lugosi can't quite figure out what Wood is doing during the production of Glen or Glenda, a movie in which the hero (played by Wood himself) reveals his fondness for women's clothing to his lovely bride-to-be (played by Wood's off-camera girlfriend, Dolores Fuller, who is in turn played by Sarah Jessica Parker). But that's OK. Nobody else, except Wood, can make much sense of the film, either.

Burton and screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski present a shamelessly romanticized view of Wood's life, work and eccentricities. They end their story long before the real-life Wood began to churn out sleazy paperbacks and porno movies while he wasn't drinking himself to death. And the filmmakers even succeed at making Wood's transvestism seem like a harmless, even lovable quirk. The movie is never funnier, or more endearing, than when Wood explains to a low-rent producer that, even though he loves to wear high heels and angora sweaters, he is proudly heterosexual. In fact, he's so wholesome, he fought bravely in World War II. ''Of course,'' he admits, ''I was wearing women's undergarments the whole time.''

In addition to Depp and Parker, who are extremely good, and Landau, who will be an Oscar nominee if there's any justice in the world, Ed Wood also features Jeffrey Jones as the fake mentalist Criswell, Patricia Arquette as Wood's incredibly accepting wife, and Bill Murray as an effeminate hanger-on and transsexual wanna-be. Vincent D'Onofrio is priceless in his brief bit as Orson Welles -- yes, that Orson Welles -- who pops up just long enough to offer Wood some valuable encouragement: ''Visions are worth fighting for.'' Not surprisingly, Wood takes this advice to heart.

If he's not getting any younger, then...

2011-07-12T12:18:00.000-05:00

OK, I can accept that Terence Stamp has come a long, long way since I first viewed him on theater screens as an impossibly handsome young star in Modesty Blaise, Billy Budd and The Collector. I know that he long ago aged into being a craggy character actor, most notably in The Limey (a film, as I noted in my 1999 review, that cleverly utilized "flashbacks" from the 1967 Poor Cow to show Stamp's grizzled avenger as a much younger man). But this report that Stamp has been cast as a "grumpy pensioner" in an upcoming film is... well, enough to make me feel pretty damn grumpy myself.

The Undefeated: The thriller from Wasilla

2011-07-08T15:31:00.000-05:00

Oddly enough, this is the second documentary titled Undefeated that I've reviewed for Variety this year. I must admit: I preferred the previous one. But compared to what Kyle Smith had to say in the New York Post -- yeah, that New York Post -- I'd say my review of the Sarah Palin movie was a flat-out rave.