Okay, this isn't really an opening to a movie I like, but it does feature a favorite opening song of mine---I mean, it rocks, and you can't get it out of your head!! A real earworm. Anyway, this is sort of a fan vid for a movie called The Sheriff and the Satellite Kid (El sheriff y el pequeño extraterrestre in Italian!). I have an interesting little story about this movie under my belt, but for right now, just enjoy the theme to this 1979 romp starring Italian superstar Bud Spencer as a Southern U.S. sheriff trying to protect a little E.T. tyke (played by former Close Encounters of the Third Kind kid Cary Guffey) from evil, black-suited U.S. forces. (Do you think it's possible Spielberg just saw this on TV one day and said "Heyyy, I think I can make something of this...")
Oh, boy, does this screenplay pop. Paper Moon, Peter Bogdanovich's fine blend of retro-comedy trappings with disarmingly modern touches, also has one of the best scripts around. It's written by Alvin Sargeant, who's also provided the screenplays for Julia (Fred Zinnemann, 77), Dominick and Eugene (Robert M. Young, 88), Ordinary People (Robert Redford, 80), and the last two Spiderman movies by Sam Raimi. This scene, adapted from Joe David Brown's novel Addie Pray, is one of his career best. In it, Tatum O'Neal plays the watchful Addie, a worldwise moppet who meets up with conman Ryan O'Neal at her mother's funeral ("Baby, I bet your ass is still warm," O'Neal whispers into her grave). He agrees to drive her to an aunt in Missouri, but not before deciding to make a little money off the girl. What follows is the explosive, rightfully famous "Nehi and Coney Island scene."
I always think the best trailers are the ones in which at least some of the footage is specifically shot for the advert. Case in point: many of the the opening shots of this preview for Bob Fosse's All That Jazz don't appear in the movie (though they were obviously part of the shoot for the short opening credits sequence). Definitely in hindsight, such a trailer makes the movie AND the preview more special, if not more symbiotic. The editing here is superb, and it's already a wonderfully edited (by Alan Heim) movie! My advice is to see All That Jazz, even if you think you won't like it. Believe me, it's a weird trip--very sobering, energetic, cynical, and stunning to look at. A life-changing movie for me.
It's rare a movie has a scene in it that sticks out so perfectly and unusually as does this one from Michael Mann's The Insider (1999). What's unusual about it? Well, it stands out largely on the backs of two actors who barely have another moment in the film. Here, Russell Crowe is Jeffery Wigant, a "big tobacco" scientist about to take the stand to say that cigarette companies knew nicotine was addictive. But Crowe is in the background only here as two character actors--Wings Hauser as the tobacco lawyer, and Bruce McCall as the Wigant lawyer--battle it out, with McCall making a VERY memorable one-scene impression in The Insider, a film that gets better and better each time I see it.
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Monday, June 16, 2008
Bet 100 on The Flaming Nose
This is the intro to a ten-part series I'm contributing to The Flaming Nose, the web's premier website devoted to television. With each of my introductory articles, I'll be covering my very personal choices for my 100 favorite TV series of all time. I'm about to post #70-61, so if you haven't checked all three previous articles out, do. And make time for everything else TV-related at The Flaming Nose. All the contributors there are proven experts in their field! I'm proudly a junior amongst them now.
Anyway, here the intro to my first appearance on The Nose:
I’m not in the habit of writing about TV. Movies are my thing, really. But so much of television has truly shaped my tastes that it’s hard to ignore its influence.
The greatest thing, as all of you know, about TV shows is their ability to envelope you, week after week, so completely you get to know every tiny detail of the on- and off-air personalities that make it live. And the best narrative TV shows are the ones in which you cannot, absolutely cannot believe that there are actually actors playing these roles. This, too, goes for the variety, news and game show personalities. I mean, if you saw Alex Trebek walking down the street, you’d simply have to drop your jaw because he’d be so out of his element. You’d be, like, “Heyyyy, Potent Potables for 500, Alex!” It's got something to do with watching this stuff in our shorts, eating chili with our fingers—we figure if these guys are with us through those moments, we must be pretty close buds!
My association with Lisa, the one of the mistresses of The Flaming Nose--the world’s finest TV-related website--is a long one. No one loves TV more than Lisa. Years ago, when we worked together at Turner Network Television, I’d be talking about movies
with her and, though she always took my opinions truly to heart, I could tell that, deep in the center of her being, she’d way rather be watching a TV show than any ol’ movie. This mystified me then, but it got me to thinking in the years since we’ve worked together that TV is pretty amazing. Its pacing is exquisite. TV shows are designed to sink their hooks into you, to keep you watching through the commercials or even from show to show, so it therefore has a snappiness, a rhythm and flavor all its own. If the average Joe were shown 30 seconds of a TV show he’d never heard boo about, and then shown a similar 30 second clip of a movie (both with equal production values), I guarantee Joe would be able tell which one belonged to which medium, just because of this intrinsic pacing.
Because of this quality, I’ve found myself in recent years taking more and more refuge in a lot of television. I find I can’t watch an endless array of movies like I used
to, not only because most of them now are terrible or simply boring, and not only because I’ve seen almost everything already, but because I find myself longing for the companionship of characters I get to know intimately, bit by bit, and thoroughly, too. Given this newfound appetite for boob-tubeage, I thought I would, for the first time in my life, compose a list of my 100 favorite TV shows. And I thought I’d offer it to Lisa to publish on The Nose while I stick mostly to film on my own movie-related blog, filmicability. Since the list is so long, only ten entries only will be published at a time (and only two articles a week). And at the end of this five-week series? A television smorgasbord!
So if you wanna see more, go to The Flaming Nose and look for
Dean's List: My 100 Favorite TV Shows (#100 - 91)
Dean's List: My 100 Favorite TV Shows (#90 - 81)
Dean's List: My 100 Favorite TV Shows (#80 - 71)
Dean's List: My 100 Favorite TV Shows (#70 -61)
Dean's List: My 100 Favorite TV Shows (#60 - 51)
Cheers.
Anyway, here the intro to my first appearance on The Nose:
I’m not in the habit of writing about TV. Movies are my thing, really. But so much of television has truly shaped my tastes that it’s hard to ignore its influence.
The greatest thing, as all of you know, about TV shows is their ability to envelope you, week after week, so completely you get to know every tiny detail of the on- and off-air personalities that make it live. And the best narrative TV shows are the ones in which you cannot, absolutely cannot believe that there are actually actors playing these roles. This, too, goes for the variety, news and game show personalities. I mean, if you saw Alex Trebek walking down the street, you’d simply have to drop your jaw because he’d be so out of his element. You’d be, like, “Heyyyy, Potent Potables for 500, Alex!” It's got something to do with watching this stuff in our shorts, eating chili with our fingers—we figure if these guys are with us through those moments, we must be pretty close buds!
My association with Lisa, the one of the mistresses of The Flaming Nose--the world’s finest TV-related website--is a long one. No one loves TV more than Lisa. Years ago, when we worked together at Turner Network Television, I’d be talking about movies
with her and, though she always took my opinions truly to heart, I could tell that, deep in the center of her being, she’d way rather be watching a TV show than any ol’ movie. This mystified me then, but it got me to thinking in the years since we’ve worked together that TV is pretty amazing. Its pacing is exquisite. TV shows are designed to sink their hooks into you, to keep you watching through the commercials or even from show to show, so it therefore has a snappiness, a rhythm and flavor all its own. If the average Joe were shown 30 seconds of a TV show he’d never heard boo about, and then shown a similar 30 second clip of a movie (both with equal production values), I guarantee Joe would be able tell which one belonged to which medium, just because of this intrinsic pacing.
Because of this quality, I’ve found myself in recent years taking more and more refuge in a lot of television. I find I can’t watch an endless array of movies like I used
to, not only because most of them now are terrible or simply boring, and not only because I’ve seen almost everything already, but because I find myself longing for the companionship of characters I get to know intimately, bit by bit, and thoroughly, too. Given this newfound appetite for boob-tubeage, I thought I would, for the first time in my life, compose a list of my 100 favorite TV shows. And I thought I’d offer it to Lisa to publish on The Nose while I stick mostly to film on my own movie-related blog, filmicability. Since the list is so long, only ten entries only will be published at a time (and only two articles a week). And at the end of this five-week series? A television smorgasbord!
So if you wanna see more, go to The Flaming Nose and look for
Dean's List: My 100 Favorite TV Shows (#100 - 91)
Dean's List: My 100 Favorite TV Shows (#90 - 81)
Dean's List: My 100 Favorite TV Shows (#80 - 71)
Dean's List: My 100 Favorite TV Shows (#70 -61)
Dean's List: My 100 Favorite TV Shows (#60 - 51)
Cheers.
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
Film #45: The Celebration
The Dogme 95 film movement was the brainchild of Danish directors Lars Von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, who, on a spring day in 1995 Copenhagen, penned a filmmaking "Vow of Chastity" as a laugh and a liberating gesture from the expensive technologies and tired formulas that plague many filmmakers. Then, along with fellow Danes Soren Kragh-Jacobsen and Christian Levring, they created Dogma 95, the strict yet freeing film movement whose works pulse with vitality, all while sticking to this "Vow of Chastity," which prohibits Dogma-bound filmmakers from using artificial light, weapons (as plot elements), music scores, make-up, sets (all films are shot on location), props and costumes (to be owned by the actors themselves) and which demands that Dogma films be shot on digital video, with on-location sound and hand-held cameras. If a Dogma filmmaker achieved these goals (and if the list of any broken rules was approved by the four filmmakers on the board), then they got a certificate like this one awarded to Von Trier for his difficult but rewarding The Idiots:
The idea behind all this is that, if a filmmaking team could concern itself less with complicated production concerns, then emphasis would naturally shift back to a film's really important elements -- story and performance. Von Trier and company maintain they did this as a joke assignment for themselves, but the idea took an insane root (to the point where Dogma wanna-be Harmony Korine tried to get then-girlfriend Chloe Sevigny pregnant so she could play a pregnant character!). To date, though, the movement has, alas, contributed only one masterpiece.
But the first Dogma 95 movie is an undisputed stunner. The Celebration , coming across like a distaff version of Bergman's Fanny and Alexander, tells the story of a well-to-do family who, having just returned from the funeral of the patriarch's suicidal daughter, launch too
soon into a 60th birthday party for Father (chillingly played by Henning Moritzen). As the "celebration" gets underway, the dead girl's twin brother (a tricky Ulrich Thomsen) lets loose with some shocks that leave the party's guests -- and the viewer -- questioning their loyalties. No more will be revealed, for this is arguably the most suspenseful movie ever made that doesn't have a bloody death threatening its characters. The whiff of a gloomy supernatural presence, though, does spook The Celebration, which is given a distinctively hazy look through the use of digital video noise. Immediate and alive, 1998's The Celebration, directed by Thomas Vinterberg, has rightfully ascended as a crown jewel in the Danish film output. See it immediately.
The idea behind all this is that, if a filmmaking team could concern itself less with complicated production concerns, then emphasis would naturally shift back to a film's really important elements -- story and performance. Von Trier and company maintain they did this as a joke assignment for themselves, but the idea took an insane root (to the point where Dogma wanna-be Harmony Korine tried to get then-girlfriend Chloe Sevigny pregnant so she could play a pregnant character!). To date, though, the movement has, alas, contributed only one masterpiece.
But the first Dogma 95 movie is an undisputed stunner. The Celebration , coming across like a distaff version of Bergman's Fanny and Alexander, tells the story of a well-to-do family who, having just returned from the funeral of the patriarch's suicidal daughter, launch too
soon into a 60th birthday party for Father (chillingly played by Henning Moritzen). As the "celebration" gets underway, the dead girl's twin brother (a tricky Ulrich Thomsen) lets loose with some shocks that leave the party's guests -- and the viewer -- questioning their loyalties. No more will be revealed, for this is arguably the most suspenseful movie ever made that doesn't have a bloody death threatening its characters. The whiff of a gloomy supernatural presence, though, does spook The Celebration, which is given a distinctively hazy look through the use of digital video noise. Immediate and alive, 1998's The Celebration, directed by Thomas Vinterberg, has rightfully ascended as a crown jewel in the Danish film output. See it immediately.
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