Features

Brief fling

STEVE VINEBERG — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 03:28:21 GMT

Carole Lombard’s nine years of stardom
Carole Lombard rose to stardom in 1934 and was dead by 1942, killed in a plane crash on her way back from selling war bonds; her last picture, Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not To Be , was released posthumously.

MY MAN GODFREY: This one’s ’30s-style eccentricity is hugely entertaining.

“Carole Lombard: No Dumb Blonde” | Brattle Theatre: October 18-23

Carole Lombard rose to stardom in 1934 and was dead by 1942, killed in a plane crash on her way back from selling war bonds; her last picture, Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not To Be, was released posthumously. She was one of the great funny girls of the Depression era, as witness the five features in the Brattle’s upcoming series “Carole Lombard: No Dumb Blonde” (October 18-23). Her compact but pointed face, the soft blond crown of hair, the sleek, elegant frame that satin and silk and lamé either clung to or dripped off, all made her a ’30s icon — the billboard for her 1936 film Love Before Breakfast is at the center of one of Walker Evans’s photographs. In straight pictures she was competent and always lovely, but she was at her best in comedies, where she could add a goofy quality to her glamor.

The films in the series include her three finest — TWENTIETH CENTURY (October 19-20), MY MAN GODFREY (October 18 + 23), and NOTHING SACRED (October 21-22) — as well as her two last, MR. & MRS. SMITH (October 21-22) and TO BE OR NOT TO BE (October 19-20). Twentieth Century, superbly directed by Howard Hawks from a breakneck script by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, came out in 1934, the year the Production Code went into effect and filmmakers invented romantic comedy as a way of negotiating the creative restrictions it placed on them. It’s a mixture of romantic (screwball) and backstage comedy. Lombard plays Mildred Plotka, a lingerie-model-turned-actress who lands the lead in a Broadway play because producer Oscar Jaffe (the inimitable John Barrymore) — who promptly renames her Lily Garland — is convinced he can turn her into a sensational actress. He succeeds, and they become partners, on stage and off. But his megalomania and jealousy eventually drive her away — to Hollywood, where she becomes an even bigger star. The movie, most of which takes place three years later on board the Twentieth Century, the cross-country train that was all the rage in the period, is about a pair of battling egomaniacs who can’t distinguish between theater and life; even when Lily bemoans her own penchant for unending melodrama, she’s playing a scene.

Paul Newman (1925-2008)

STEVE VINEBERG — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 01:06:02 GMT

Remembering a movie star who turned himself into a great actor
Paul Newman, who died last weekend at the age of 83, was that rarest of creatures, a movie star who turned himself into a great actor.

Paul Newman, who died last weekend at the age of 83, was that rarest of creatures, a movie star who turned himself into a great actor. He emerged in the early ’50s, a time when young hopefuls were intoxicated by the Method approach to acting and live television had just begun to provide an exciting new venue for performers who were already scurrying between movies and the stage. Newman worked in all three. He played the rich boy who loses the girl in the original Broadway production of Picnic. On TV he was George opposite Eva Marie Saint in a musical adaptation of Our Town and Hemingway’s punch-drunk boxer Ad Francis in “The Battler.” His early performances were undeniably Methody — they were eager, searching, still unformed, and you could see the influence of Brando and James Dean like footprints on wet clay. It’s that youthful tentativeness and self-consciousness that make his Billy the Kid in Arthur Penn’s 1958 The Left Handed Gun so affecting — and so much an artifact of its era.

But it wasn’t Newman’s bid to be a genuine actor that made him a movie star. It was a mix of other qualities: the improbable handsome face and form; the immense, breakaway smile that promised sexual availability and freedom; the insouciance; the always surprising vulnerability — the way his face could melt under the effect of betrayal or heartbreak. Audiences went crazy for him in movies like The Long Hot Summer (where he played sexy-funny love scenes with his real-life wife, Joanne Woodward) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (where it took two hours for Elizabeth Taylor to get him into bed), humid Southern melodramas out of Faulkner and Tennessee Williams. And not because his acting was skillful or profound but because he was an all-American dreamboat who took the camera by force like Clark Gable. Even in the best of the movies he made in his first decade of stardom, The Hustler (for Robert Rossen) and Hud (for The Long Hot Summer’s director, Martin Ritt), both superb early-’60s showcases for his incomparable appeal, his acting takes second place to other elements — freshness and ebullience and sexy humor, and of course those looks. The difference between the two performances, shot merely two years apart, is that by Hud he isn’t working as hard: as the womanizing Texas bad boy in the pink Cadillac whose worshipful nephew (Brandon de Wilde) can grow up only by learning not to follow in his footsteps, Newman never breaks a sweat.

Interview: Simon Pegg

BRETT MICHEL — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 21:43:15 GMT

Shaun of the Dead star on losing friends, alienating people, and wanking off to Gillian Anderson
Thirty-eight-year-old British actor Simon Pegg’s US star has been on the rise since his zombie-movie parody Shaun of the Dead shuffled into multiplexes back in 2004.

Read the full transcript of Brett Michel's interview with Simon Pegg
Part 1 | Part 2

Thirty-eight-year-old British actor Simon Pegg’s US star has been on the rise since his zombie-movie parody Shaun of the Dead (directed by his old pal and fellow geek Edgar Wright and co-starring his portly friend Nick Frost) shuffled into multiplexes back in 2004. That was followed in 2006 by a brief but memorable cameo in J.J. Abrams’s Mission: Impossible III. When Hot Fuzz (directed by Wright and co-starring Frost) came out last year, I described the film as the “unholy offspring of Old Blighty and Hollywood: picture Agatha Christie buggered by Michael Bay, with (old-school) Peter Jackson administering lube.” Pegg’s beloved 1999–2001 BBC television series Spaced was recently released on DVD in the US, and he’s sure to see a rise in fame once Abrams’s reboot of the Star Trek franchise opens in theaters next summer, since he plays Scotty, the role originated by the late James Doohan. Just now, though, you can see him in Robert B. Weide’s adaptation of Toby Young’s memoir How To Lose Friends & Alienate People, headlining a cast that includes Jeff Bridges, Kirsten Dunst, and The X-Files’ Gillian Anderson, an actress he admitted as having “crushed on enormously” when I spoke with him at Boston’s Liberty Hotel.

I just got finished watching Spaced. At the close of the pilot episode, you were about to masturbate to Gillian Anderson’s photo . . .
The first thing Bob Weide said when Gillian sat down in the rehearsal room — with me having said, “Please don’t mention it to her” — was, “So, have you seen the episode where Simon wanks to ya?” I don’t think I’ve ever been as embarrassed. But she is such a good sport, Gillian is. She’s a boy’s girl. For someone as stunningly beautiful as she is, she’s a bit of a lad, which makes it all the more easy. We’ve become good pals now, which is bizarre for me. When I met Piper — her first child, Piper’s like 13 now, and she was conceived at the beginning of the second season of The X-Files, and you could see how Gillian grew on screen — the first thing I said to Piper was, “Ah, you must be the ‘bump’ from season two,” which she must have thought was half-geeky, half-hilarious.

Making us stronger

GERALD PEARY — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 15:09:50 GMT

Boston’s What Doesn’t Kill You scores at Toronto
I’m back from the 33rd Toronto International Film Festival, where the unexpected hit among discerning critics was a Boston-made crime melodrama.

WHAT DOESN’T KILL YOU: Brian Goodman (right, with Mark Ruffalo) has turned his felonious life into an outstanding crime melodrama.

Wicked awesome! Pride of the Hub! I’m back from the 33rd Toronto International Film Festival, where the unexpected hit among discerning critics — check the chirpy reviews in Variety and the Hollywood Reporter and Screen International — was a Boston-made crime melodrama written and directed by an ex-drinker and ex-cokehead and ex-jailbird from Southie. You’ve never heard of Brian Goodman, who bravely re-creates his own seedy, impaired, felonious life in WHAT DOESN’T KILL YOU? Neither had I. But in his first stab at filmmaking, this brawny, unschooled director goes straight to the summit of authentic Boston movies, from The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973) to Mystic River (2003). Dare I say it? What Doesn’t Kill You is better, more credible Boston cinema than Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-winning The Departed. It’s certainly far more heartfelt.

Since 1998, Goodman — paroled and rehabbed — has parlayed his Southie street brio into a freelance acting career, doing character parts in films and TV series. But he couldn’t shake the psychological scarring of his former existence: destitute, sleeping in Southie hallways, years up the river, and almost losing his alienated wife and angry children because of his life of violence and drugs. In search of catharsis, he wrote up his story as a screenplay. In 2001, he brought the script to a new actor friend, Mark Ruffalo. He wanted Ruffalo to play him in a movie.

“Brian hands you a script, ‘This is my life story,’ ” Ruffalo recalled at Toronto. “Thank God I liked it.” He liked it so much that he spent seven years back-of-the-scenes in Hollywood trying to get the movie financed. He related to Goodman’s grim biography so deeply that — and I’ve never seen this before at a press conference! — he broke down crying and became totally speechless when a journalist queried him about playing Goodman.

After a few minutes, he did manage a few words: “It’s a huge responsibility. To know Brian as I do, with all his disadvantages, to see him reliving his life as we shot. It was extremely powerful. I was bowled over.”

“The reality is me and Mark are friends,” said Goodman. “The reality is we’ve both been in a lot of pain. He’s motivated by fear like me.” And when Goodman realized that the gathered journalists really liked What Doesn’t Kill You? “I’ve got stage fright. I feel like I’m in front of the parole board again. This is a miracle dream come true.”

One sings, one doesn’t

PETER KEOUGH — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 15:00:03 GMT

The BFF has little to celebrate; the HFA has ‘Edward Yang’
This year, at least one element in “Boston Film Festival” is no longer true.

YI YI: Edward Yang’s masterpiece is a rich-textured tapestry of the assorted lives in modern-day Taipei.

This year, at least one element in “Boston Film Festival” is no longer true. The BFF now takes place in Cambridge. Clinging to life in its 24th year, the event — which runs September 12-17 — has crossed the river, relocating from the Boston Common to the Kendall Square Cinema.

And when you come down to it, even the “film” part looks a little dicy. Every year the BFF presents an “Excellence in Film” award. This year’s tribute goes to famed local writer Robert B. Parker, author of the novel on which the opening-night film, Edward Harris’s APPALOOSA, is based. It’s a good movie, but what’s with a film festival giving out an award for “Literary Excellence?”

Okay, a festival should be judged by its films, not its awards. And if the three-hour ANNE OF GREEN GABLES: A NEW BEGINNING (September 15 at 8:15 pm) sounds like a TV movie, that’s because it is — it’s scheduled to broadcast on Canadian TV some time this fall. Kevin Sullivan (this is his fourth entry in the made-for-TV Gables franchise, which started in 1985 with his adaptation of the original Lucy Maud Montgomery children’s classic) has spun a prequel of sorts to the story about the feisty red-haired orphan and her adventures in turn-of-the-century Prince Edward Island. After watching the show, I would say it could only benefit from commercial breaks; it resembles a Nicholas Sparks novel with forays into Charles Dickens parody.

An older and wiser Anne Shirley (played by Barbara Hershey, who shows she’s just a girl at heart by galloping about in her big 1940s pants), now a successful writer, mother, and widower (husband Gilbert having been killed in World War II), has returned to the homestead of the title to write a play about her early origins. A packet of letters found under a floorboard springs the flashback machine into motion. Left to his own narrative devices, Sullivan leaves no shrieking, melodramatic cliché untouched, and plucky Anne meets every iniquitous twist of fate with a high-pitched, overwrought oration.

Sample dialogue: Wicked Poorhouse Headmistress: “A little beggar like you should thank the Lord that we’ve taken pity on you at all!” Anne: “To sleep in such cramped conditions is more than my imagination can abide!” WPH: “Put up or shut up! At least this bunch doesn’t have fleas!”

Autumn peeves

PETER KEOUGH — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 16:02:47 GMT

Films with a full agenda
With pundits already reading political significance into summer blockbusters like The Dark Knight (“Is Batman a stand-in for George Bush? Discuss.”), the meatier movies of fall arrive not a moment too soon.

VIDEO: The trailer for Zack and Miri Make a Porno

With pundits already reading political significance into summer blockbusters like The Dark Knight (“Is Batman a stand-in for George Bush? Discuss.”), the meatier movies of fall arrive not a moment too soon. This is an election year, after all, and those trying to escape the issues are just going to have to stay home and watch all the campaign ads on TV. These movies take the word “fall” seriously, tending toward the dark and apocalyptic, from Fernando Meirelles’s adaptation of José Saramago’s BLINDNESS to John Hillcoat’s rendition of Cormac McCarthy’s THE ROAD. And speaking of the Apocalypse: we’ll be getting War (Spike Lee’s MIRACLE AT SAINT ANNA), Pestilence (John Erick Dowdle’s QUARANTINE), and Death (Ricky Gervais’s GHOST TOWN), plus Bill Maher making an appearance as the Antichrist in Larry David’s RELIGULOUS.

VIDEO: The trailer for Choke

SEPTEMBER
Before getting into the heavier items on the agenda, let’s start with a tip of the hat to those who made those huge summer grosses possible: the FANBOYS (September 19). Kyle Newman directs this tale about a bunch of Star Wars fans who travel cross-country to break into the Skywalker Ranch so their terminally ill buddy can see Episode I — The Phantom Menace before he dies. If they’d really wanted to do the kid a favor, they’d have let him die in blissful ignorance. Nerd-of-the-moment Jay Baruchel stars.

These are the kids who a generation or two earlier would have been playing cowboys-and-Indians, like Viggo Mortensen and Ed Harris in the latter’s adaptation of Robert B. Parker’s novel APPALOOSA (September 19). They’re a couple of gunslingers out to clean up a Western town in thrall to an evil rancher until a pretty young widow comes between them. I can buy Jeremy Irons as the bad guy, but Renée Zellweger as the femme fatale?

Also on the escapist side is IGOR (September 19), an animated comedy about the hunchbacked assistant to an evil scientist with dreams of becoming an evil scientist himself. John Cusack takes a break from his politicking to provide his voice, along with John Cleese, Steve Buscemi, and Jay Leno. Tony Leondis makes his directorial debut.

The real world, however, makes a comeback in Neil LaBute’s LAKEVIEW TERRACE (September 19), in which an interracial couple’s marital bliss collides with the ill will of an unfriendly neighbor, an African-American cop. Samuel L. Jackson, Patrick Wilson, and Kerry Washington star. At least their antagonist is a living person, unlike the specters that haunt the hero of GHOST TOWN (September 19) — he’s plagued by demanding dead people after he recovers from a near-death experience. David Koepp directs; Ricky Gervais, Greg Kinnear, and Téa Leoni star.

When men were men

STEVE VINEBERG — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 16:02:05 GMT

Sam Peckinpah at the Harvard Film Archive
Since Sam Peckinpah’s untimely death at the age of 59, he has acquired such legendary status that it’s startling to remember that he made only 14 films over a period of 22 years.

THE WILD BUNCH: In contrast with this film’s jackals and vultures, the Bunch act like men and die with honor.

“Sam Peckinpah, Blood Poet” | Harvard Film Archive | September 5-12

In the nearly two and a half decades since Sam Peckinpah’s untimely death at the age of 59, he has acquired such legendary status and his influence has been so pervasive that it’s startling to remember that he made only 14 films over a period of 22 years — and that even now many of them are still obscure. So the long-overdue retrospective that begins this Friday at the Harvard Film Archive, “Sam Peckinpah, Blood Poet,” is most welcome.

There were gaps in Peckinpah’s output owing to his uneasy relationship with the studios: fired off The Cincinnati Kid in 1965, he couldn’t get work again in Hollywood until after he’d returned to television, his original venue, and attracted critical notice with an hour-long adaptation of Katherine Anne Porter’s story “Noon Wine.” Only then did he direct THE WILD BUNCH, his masterpiece — and almost inarguably the greatest Western ever made. (The HFA will conclude the series with a screening of The Wild Bunch on September 12 at 7 pm, pairing it with Paul Seydor’s extraordinary 1996 documentary “THE WILD BUNCH: AN ALBUM IN MONTAGE,” which contains footage of the filming of the Bunch’s last stand that demonstrates how this classic sequence was assembled.) Five years turtled by between the release of Convoy in 1978 and his swan song, The Osterman Weekend. And he spent much of his too-brief career battling studio heads who insisted on dumping his pictures (like the exquisite Ride the High Country, which got relegated to the lower half of double bills) or recutting them. Major Dundee, The Wild Bunch, and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid were all released in versions he did not approve, though the last two can now be seen as he intended them to be.

Devil at the Gate

BRETT MICHEL — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 15:50:58 GMT

Giving voice to Red Heroine
The ensemble has spent the better part of a decade composing and performing soundtracks for silent films, creating their own brand of musical alchemy.

WHERE’S THAT ERHU? You can’t see it here, but you might hear it this weekend.

If the name Devil Music Ensemble conjures an apparition of musicians accompanying Rupert Julian’s adaptation of Gaston Leroux’s 1909-’10 serial Le fantôme de l’Opéra, then you might not be surprised to hear that such an outfit exists. And though Boston bandmates Brendon Wood, Jonah Rapino, and Tim Nylander have yet to achieve the fame of Cambridge’s Alloy Orchestra (or accompany Julian’s 1925 film, as Alloy have), they have spent the better part of a decade composing and performing soundtracks for silent films, creating their own brand of musical alchemy.

This weekend, they debut their latest work, an original score for the sixth (and only surviving) episode of the 13-part Chinese serial Red Knight Errant, Wen Yimin’s 1929 silent Red Heroine [Hongxia], the oldest extant martial-arts film. It will screen on Friday at the Chinatown Gate (on the vacant paved lot on Hudson Street) at 7:30 pm as part of the “Films at the Gate” free outdoor festival, and then on Saturday in Somerville’s Union Square at approximately 8 pm.

So, where did “Devil Music” come from? “Well, there are a couple of stories,” Rapino tells me. The main one has to do with George Crumb’s Black Angels (Images I): 13 images from the dark land. It’s really amazing music, composed during the Vietnam era. ‘Devil-music’ is the name of a piece of one of the movements.”

“That’s the more sophisticated version,” laughs Wood. The “real story,” he confides, involves a lazy afternoon spent cranking Van Halen’s Fair Warning after school. “I was playing the record pretty loudly when my grandmother comes in yelling, ‘What’s that devil music?!’ I knew right then that that would make a great name for a band someday.”

That day came in 1999, when Wood formed the rock band Devil Music with Rapino and Nylander. But the film influence didn’t creep in till a couple of years later. Rapino: “We used to play at AS220 in Providence. Brendon was a fan of Jean Cocteau’s Le sang d’un poète, and he installed a monitor on stage showing the 1930 film “purely as a backdrop to our playing.” In 2002, Devil Music Ensemble (“We added the ‘Ensemble’ after we started playing live accompaniment for films,” says Wood, “since we sometimes bring in more musicians”) performed their soundtrack to René Clair’s 1926 film Le voyage imaginaire during the “Celluloud” series at the Coolidge Corner Theatre.

Kino pravda

MICHAEL ATKINSON — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 18:03:35 GMT

‘Envisioning Russia’ at the MFA
Because Mosfilm, the subject of the Museum of Fine Arts’ “Envisioning Russia” retrospective, was the Soviet state production studio, any cross-section of its history lays out the entirety of Soviet film history.

THE MIRROR: Tarkovsky’s film is a unique autobiographical testament.

Because Mosfilm, the subject of the Museum of Fine Arts’ “Envisioning Russia” retrospective, was the Soviet state production studio, any cross-section of its history lays out the entirety of Soviet film history — not only in its mainstream, but on its catapulting visionary fringes. Of course, Soviet filmmaking always resounded with the electric tension between state propaganda and individualistic artistry, often within a given film. Sure, the famous dialectic montage experiments from the 1920s salad days of Eisenstein and Pudovkin were motivated by pure Marxist guile, but it’s more difficult to see the extraordinary development of the long traveling shot as being anything but cinema rising to its own expressive level in spite of Politburo politics. Mosfilm was still the empire’s Hollywood, churning out populist fodder for the masses while sometimes conscientiously undercutting the government’s simplistic anti-Westernism to degrees that can make our own industry’s McCarthyite years seem outright pathetic.

The retro serves as a crash lesson in Russian film, starting obligatorily with Eisenstein’s BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN (1925; September 11 at 5:15 pm). For too long now, this one has been reflexive university viewing to such a suffocating extent, American students may be surprised to find that early Soviet filmmaking was not all hammer-to-the-head editing and Marxist cant. In fact, Eisenstein’s position as one of the medium’s looming giants has silently deteriorated; the more time passes, the more mechanical and manipulative his work seems. The limitations were built-in: his entire æsthetic was predicated on his being the omniscient god and the audience his easily controlled minions. (Spielberg and Lucas, it could be said, have demonstrated similar sensibilities.) Free of historical intents or contexts, propaganda art is usually beguiling in its naïveté, but Battleship Potemkin feels bitter, as if revolutionary discontent unconsciously expressed Eisenstein’s outrage that of all the nations in all the eras for this artist to be born into, it had to be this one.

Interview: Ludivine Sagnier

PETER HYMAN — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 16:24:12 GMT

Nude? Naked?
As sultry French starlets go, 29-year-old Ludivine Sagnier is as advertised.

As sultry French starlets go, 29-year-old Ludivine Sagnier is as advertised. Seductive, clever, sensual, and often at the center of a torrid love triangle, the Prix Romy Schneider winner first bared her soul to American audiences as the skinny-dipping ingénue in François Ozon’s Swimming Pool (2003). Her wide-eyed enthusiasm and fragile sexuality will be on display again next week in Claude Chabrol’s erotically chilling A Girl Cut in Two [La fille coupée en deux], in which she plays a provincial TV weather girl torn between an older author and a rich young dissolute. Now five months pregnant with her second child, Mlle. Sagnier sat down with me in New York to discuss nudity, submissiveness, older men, and American politics.

One of the film’s themes is the question of whether French culture is moving toward decadence or Puritanism. Which do you prefer?
Decadence. But . . . not the hypocritical decadence that we have now, which encourages people to get more and more stupid.

How close are you to the character of Gabrielle Deneige?
She’s more frustrating because she’s desperately looking for a father figure, and she is also very provincial, whereas I come from a very balanced family in Paris. I’ve been much less naive in my life. I don’t fall into those traps. I fall into other traps, but that’s a story for another time.

You’ve been nude in at least five of the films you done, most notably to American audiences in Swimming Pool. Does being naked come naturally to you?
No. That’s a legend, an image you have here in America. I’m not necessarily open to being nude. It’s just a question of performance. And all the times where I play naked, it’s always done with dignity. It’s not like these are lousy movies.

A Girl Cut in Two has little overt nudity, yet it was more sexually charged than anything you’ve done.
Yes, it’s all about sex. Even Chabrol joked that he was doing his porn movie. I was like, “Come on Claude, you don’t even show anything.” And he said, “I don’t need that, I’ve put obscenity in the eyes of the audience, they can put it wherever they like.”

Was that more difficult to do than simply taking off a robe and lounging in the sun with no clothes on?
It was very destabilizing because everything is possible. The only boundary is the imagination, and when you’re playing that, it’s very disturbing. I wasn’t comfortable at all. I felt dirty, much more than I did just being physically naked.

Smoke screens

PETER KEOUGH — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 15:21:51 GMT

Does a surge of stoner movies mean America is going to pot?
What does it say about America that marijuana movies are a hot genre right now, perhaps hotter even than in the heyday of Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong’s 1978 Up in Smoke ?

K.Banks.

I don’t much like getting stoned — it makes me stupid and paranoid (some may say not much different from my usual frame of mind). But I do like watching other people get stoned in the movies. Vicariously enjoying the pleasure of others onscreen, that’s the definition of a movie critic. Though the chances of my wanting to get high after watching, say, The Wackness, are slight, I just might crave seeing more films in which the protagonists inhale. And, as stoner movies might be gateway films, perhaps I’d then want to see movies about harder drugs, such as peyote, LSD, heroin, and crack. I might down a couple of bags of Cheetos and a box of Yodels while I’m at it.

The 16 greatest stoner movies of all time. By Lance Gould.

But I’m a professional: what about the rest of the country? What does it say about America that marijuana movies are a hot genre right now, perhaps hotter even than in the heyday of Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong’s 1978 Up in Smoke? Knocked Up, Harold & Kumar (both Go to White Castle and Escape from Guantánamo Bay), and Superbad have made piles of green at the box office. Just this past week, Pineapple Express topped the box office at $12.5 million, a record for a Wednesday opening in August. And those are just the obvious offenders; nowadays any film rated above PG-13 flaunts casual toking. This month alone, the list includes Hell Ride, Bottle Shock, In Search of a Midnight Kiss, Tropic Thunder (I think that’s a Thai stick the boy drug lord is smoking), Hamlet 2, College, and The Rocker.

It’s spread from the big screen to the tube, too: Weeds, a series about a suburban widow who pays the bills by dealing (a premise stolen from the 2000 British comedy Saving Grace), is in its fourth season on Showtime. Seth Rogen and James Franco of Pineapple Express also stirred controversy (and hyped publicity for their film) this past June by “pretending” to light up while presenting on the broadcast of the MTV Movie Awards. But for the most part, you’re safer from the FCC and the MPAA these days smoking a joint than smoking a cigarette. (For more info on the recent push to ban cigarettes, see “Outlawing Cigarettes: Beginning Another Hopeless Drug War?” at thePhoenix.com/blogs/freeforall.)

Cock and bull?

PETER KEOUGH — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 22:09:36 GMT

Interview: Not if it’s British actor Steve Coogan
Americans will finally know who Steve Coogan is.

Except for the few who caught him in Michael Winterbottom’s brilliant Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story or 24 Hour Party People, not many in America know who Steve Coogan, is. Other than, perhaps, as the guy who got Courtney Love pregnant, or the guy whom Courtney later accused of driving Owen Wilson to a suicide attempt. Both charges have been denied so often by Coogan that I hesitate even to bring them up.

All this is about to change, however, since Coogan is appearing in two huge movies this month. (Not to mention his performance in the recent Finding Amanda, the only reason to see that movie.) Ben Stiller’s Tropic Thunder opens this Friday; it’s followed August 22 by the Sundance smash Hamlet 2. By the end of the month, one imagines, he’ll be basking in the kind of adulation he’s received for years back home in Britain, for his TV shows featuring brilliant comic inventions like Alan Partridge and Tommy Saxondale. Americans will finally know who Steve Coogan is.

Or will we?

You’ve got two movies coming out this month. Do you mix them up when you’re discussing them?
Not really, no, ’cause I’m a big part in a small movie and a small part in a big movie, so it’s easy to distinguish, really.

Do you have any preference?
Obviously I like the one where I’ve got the bigger part, but Hamlet 2 is totally different. Tropic Thunder [in which he plays a talentless British director overwhelmed trying to make a Vietnam War movie à la Apocalypse Now] is kind of like a shotgun assault on the senses where you’re dying laughing at the end of it. Hamlet 2 [in which he plays a talentless drama coach in a Tucson high school trying to restart his career by mounting a musical sequel to Shakespeare’s play] is a bit more uplifting in a kind of life-affirming, feel-good kind of way.

So you think Hamlet 2 is more the feel-good movie?
I think so. There’s more warm fuzzy stuff.

It’s the least ironic character of yours that I’ve seen on screen.
That’s true. There’s a lack of cynicism about him, and that’s why I wanted to do it, to see if I could pull it off. Also, I like the fact that it’s smart and it’s got that edginess, but at the end, it becomes the thing it satirizes. It satirizes inspirational teachers and sort of becomes one at the end.

The 16 greatest stoner movies

LANCE GOULD — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 20:03:43 GMT

Our favorite marijuana movies
We’re picking the best 16 stoner films of all time — one for every easily weighable segment of an ounce.

Slideshow: Found in translation

CHRIS WANGLER — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 18:12:34 GMT

A new book looks at the golden age of international movie marketing
As movies began to gain worldwide attention, Hollywood studios tailored their marketing to specific geographic locations, allowing local distributors to create their own publicity campaigns.

Author and gallery owner Sam Sarowitz worked in film development hell before turning his extensive collection of movie posters (now 12,000+) into a lucrative business, and now a book. Translating Hollywood: The World of Movie Posters (Mark Batty Publisher), culled from Sarowitz’s Posteritati Gallery in New York, offers a fascinating look at several golden ages of movie marketing. Most of the posters come from the late 1950s and after. Hollywood classics are the focus, but there’s a nice selection of French New Wave, world cinema classics, and genre pictures (Halloween, Deep Throat), with some telling nuggets thrown in: the US poster for In Cold Blood, for example, used the eyes of the real killers, not the actors.

The way it is

SHARON STEEL — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 20:18:43 GMT

Interview: Talking about American Teen
Nanette Burstein admits that “through the pain and torture” of high school, she was able to come to terms with who she was.

VIDEO: Interview with Nanette Burstein

High-school confidential: American Teen is no wasteland. By Sharon Steel.

Nanette Burstein admits that “through the pain and torture” of high school, she was able to come to terms with who she was. The director of the Sundance award-winning documentary American Teen (opening August 1) sat down with me at the Nine Zero Hotel to reflect on fiction-film archetypes, the social fluidity of senior year, and the circumstances through which an artsy girl with a complicated heart and a sweet yet immensely popular jock can briefly transcend their own pre-determined roles.

Before you began filming American Teen, what made you decide to chronicle the lives of teenagers culled from various places on the high-school food chain: a jock, a princess, a nerd, a misfit?
If you watch teen fiction films, you see the same stories told over and over again. There’s basically four of them. The Romeo and Juliet story across class or race of clique lines, like the forbidden love. Triumph over adversity, which often involves sports, but not necessarily. The underdog looking for acceptance, which is the nerd, usually. And the mean girl’s power struggle. And all of those stories, I found, existed in reality.

What prompted you to try to create another narrative of the high-school experience, a period that’s been defined and redefined ad nauseam?
I hadn’t seen a really complicated high-school movie that took a lot of the experiences that I felt or saw around me. High school was a really formative time in my life — I think for a lot of people in both a good and bad way. Through the pain and torture, I realized who I was.

Tell me about your selection and screening process. Why did you choose the town of Warsaw, Indiana, as the setting?
I looked in the Midwest because I think there’s a timelessness and more of an innocence about that part of the country than the rest of America. And I wanted to be in a town that only had one high school because I think that there’s more social pressure that way. You can’t escape — or you’re super-powerful. I wanted it to be economically mixed; I was hoping for it to be racially mixed, but that was hard to find in the Midwest, in small towns, at least. We called, you know, just hundreds of schools that sort of fit this demographic . . . and out of that found the best stories all in one place.

Flying high

PETER KEOUGH — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 17:19:51 GMT

Is The Dark Knight the best movie ever?
Every summer, it seems like another superhero movie has broken some box-office record or other and made movie history.

Our superheroes, ourselves

JAMES PARKER — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 20:27:29 GMT

What the current crop of comic-book action movies tells us about America's identity crisis
Is there a breed of person more tenderly optimistic, more winsomely hopeful for the best, more loyal to the possibility of good, than the American summer moviegoer?

Shrink wrapped: Gamma rays got you down? The doctor will see you now. By Dr. Robin S. Rosenberg

Is there a breed of person more tenderly optimistic, more winsomely hopeful for the best, more loyal to the possibility of good, than the American summer moviegoer? To put it another way, has there ever been a bigger sucker? Year after year, he stands in line and hands over his money, to receive, year after year, the same treatment: i.e., Hollywood shivering in icy gratification as it pisses on him from a great height. It’s become one of nature’s biorhythms, like the return of the swallows to Capistrano: the dog days come around, the asphalt softens in the heat, and the megaplexes begin to bloat and boom with big-budget idiocy.

And idiocy, being always the sequel to some other idiocy, is never original. You’ve seen it all before! National Treasure 14: Hell’s Gate. . . The Matrix Deionized. . . Son of Son of Fool’s Gold. . . No Way Can You Die This Fucking Hard. . . The product is poor, the contempt is palpable. If you bought it once, goes the thinking, you’ll buy it again. In fact you’ll never stop buying it — why should you?

This summer, however, things are a little different. True, we’re getting the usual rash of run-ons and sequelae — Hellboy II (opens this weekend), a second attempt at the Hulk (from a few weeks back), our seventh installment of Batman (next weekend) — but when you add Iron Man and Hancock (which have earned $312 million and $112 million so far, respectively) to the roster, a more interesting picture begins to emerge. There’s a certain thematic density to these nearly simultaneous releases. We seem . . . preoccupied. Indeed, we may be said to be obsessed. A sensitive interplanetary visitor, alighting at AMC Boston Common and watching a few of these movies back-to-back, might conclude that we are in the middle of a national nervous breakdown.

The lean green schizophrenia machine
Just take a look at the protagonists: Tony Stark (Iron Man) is a repentant billionaire arms dealer; Hellboy is a demon outgrowing his infernal beginnings; Bruce Banner is a cool-headed scientist incorporating a maddened green monster (that would be the Hulk); Hancock is a celestial being descending gnostically through bum-like levels of mortality and despair; and Batman . . . Batman broods on the turrets of Gotham, ears pricked, phobias squashed, dispensing terror to the bad guys. Common to all these movies is a CGI-blowout of an ending, in which the hero faces down his fear, his temptation, his vengefulness, his will-to-power, his not-self. Good Hulk battles Bad Hulk; Nice Iron Man battles Nasty Iron Man; red-and-blue Spiderman battles all-black Spiderman; Hellboy, who has been assiduously sanding down the stumps of his demon horns (see the hell sparks fly!), sprouts a whole new pair . . . and on and on.

Believe it or not

PETER KEOUGH — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 21:26:48 GMT

Interview: Guy Maddin tells the truth
Even the titles of his films are a little weird.

VIDEO: More from Guy Maddin

Urban myths: Maddin’s Winnipeg is the city that always sleeps. By Peter Keough.

Even the titles of his films are a little weird: The Saddest Music in the World, Cowards Bend the Knee, Brand upon the Brain! And then the images: Isabella Rossellini as a double amputee with artificial legs made of glass and full of beer; a girl who keeps her father’s severed hands preserved in a jar; Maddin’s father drilling into the skulls of orphans to extract the “nectar” that keeps Maddin’s mother eternally young — that last filmed like a silent three-reeler with iris shots and intertitles. In short, Guy Maddin makes Luis Buñuel and David Lynch look like Ron Howard. So it makes sense that he not only is Canadian but hails from that most Canadian of cities.

My Winnipeg is, he says, a documentary about his home town, and he insists that everything in it is true. I can believe that 5000 Nazis took over Winnipeg on “If Day” in 1942 and maybe even that his mother starred on a TV show that ran for 50 years called Ledge Man in which every day she talked a man out of committing suicide. But one of the film’s claims I just can’t accept, and when I get a chance to talk with Maddin, I have to ask him about it.

Tell me that the story about the horses freezing solid in the river was a legend, because otherwise it’s just too sad.
It is sad, and it did happen, and you can double-check that one. Eleven horses had their heads stuck for the course of winter above the surface of the ice. But the movie as a whole is about one-third fact, one-third legend, and one-third opinion.

So it’s your basic Michael Moore movie.
It may be looked at that way. I wanted to make it like a film equivalent to a W.G. Sebald book, where he sets out on a stroll and ends up digressing and winds up in a really interesting place. It doesn’t matter whether Sebald really went on the stroll or not, he’s managed to cobble together a wonderful trip, and you realize the landscape that he covered with his feet doesn’t matter as much as the landscape of his heart.

But Ledge Man — this is a landscape of the heart, I’m assuming.
No. It was a TV version of a movie called Fourteen Hours. It was on TV when I was a kid. But it’s not in the IMDB or anything . . .

They always beat Gypsies

A.S. HAMRAH — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 18:18:52 GMT

Joseph Losey at the HFA
From the beginning of his career in movies, Joseph Losey was persecuted — chased out of town.

THE SERVANT: Self-consciousness and fruity whining — but it still fascinates.

From the beginning of his career in movies, Joseph Losey was persecuted — chased out of town. His films are melodramatic, political, and weird, marked by noirish hysteria or arty creepiness. But it’s unclear whether persecution accounts for the strange combination of outrage and interiority that defines his work.

That’s because it’s been hard to look back over Losey’s œuvre. His pictures are scattered, products of several countries made over 46 years, infrequently revived, rarely grouped together, barely represented on DVD. What is clear is that he had an innate sense of persecution and conflict that initially found expression in the right place at the wrong time — Hollywood in the late 1940s, during the House Un-American Activities Committee’s anti-Communist witch hunts.

Together at last, all of his films are showing in the Harvard Film Archive’s retrospective “The Complete Joseph Losey,” which runs through August 11. He made several shorts in New York and at MGM before embarking on his first feature, and these are included in the HFA series as well. With 1948’s THE BOY WITH GREEN HAIR (July 12 at 7 pm), his first full-length work, Losey established himself as a director of a new kind of socially conscious and hyper-sensitive post-war melodrama — “sensitive” in a child-psychology sense: touchy, prone to violence.

An anti-racist and anti-war parable, The Boy with Green Hair could have been approved only under a studio regime of engaged liberalism like the one headed by Dore Schary at RKO. At the same time, the film was a victim of the increasing right-wing paranoia of its day. Its producer, Adrian Scott, was blacklisted and fired. Losey was cast adrift in the RKO of Howard Hughes, where movies with titles like I Married a Communist became standard.

A film about persecution, The Boy with Green Hair tells the story of a war orphan (Dean Stockwell) ostracized by his town after he wakes up one morning to find that his hair has turned a deep punk-rock green. Right from the beginning, persecution is inscribed into the work of a director who would soon be forced out of Hollywood under the blacklist. The film is a prescient mixture of classroom civics lesson and mass hysteria. By turns sentimental and tough, it shows small-town America as a crimped, herd-like place where the slightest disturbance throws the social order out of whack.

Cherchez les femmes

PETER KEOUGH — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 21:23:29 GMT

Women dominate the 13th Annual Boston French Film Festival
Women have always dominated French cinema — just not from behind the camera.

UNE VIEILLE MAÎTRESSE: Asia Argento’s La Vellini is a kind of a cross between Goya’s Naked Maja and Carmen Miranda.

The 13th Annual French Film Festival | Museum Of Fine Arts: July 10-27

Women have always dominated French cinema — just not from behind the camera. Until recently, the French rivaled Hollywood in their scarcity of female directors. There were, of course, a few greats — Agnès Varda, Marguerite Duras, Claire Denis — but for the most part, French film has meant men mooning over some misconceived image of womanhood. So this year’s Boston French Film Festival, in which eight of the 21 entries (all of them from the past three years) are by women, comes as something of a shock. What’s more, many of these women are actresses making their feature directing debut. Are the prisoners of the male gaze finally breaking free and asserting their independence?

Stylistically, not so much. At least not in Mia Hansen-Løve’s TOUT EST PARDONNÉ|ALL IS FORGIVEN (July 11 at 6 pm; July 12 at 6:15 pm), which resembles the calculated kitchen-sink formlessness of Olivier Assayas’s 1998 multi-character melodrama Fin août, début septembre (in which Hansen-Løve, now Assayas’s fiancée, played a part). Victor (Paul Blain), an aspiring writer much like the protagonist in Louis Malle’s 1963 Le fou follet, can’t kick his addictions to booze, smack, and self-pity — despite the long-suffering loyalty of his wife, Annette (Marie-Christine Friedrich), and the resilient innocence of his six-year-old daughter, Pamela (Victoire Rousseau). Annette gives him the heave-ho, 11 years pass, and the now-teenage Pamela (Constance Rousseau) must come to grips with her long estranged dad. A simple tale told simply, allowing the characters and the commonplaces of life to come to the fore, and thus affording a glimpse into their mystery.

More formally ambitious and certainly more self-conscious is Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi’s ACTRICES|ACTRESSES (July 13 at 5:30 pm; July 18 at 6 pm). Bruni-Tedeschi plays Marcelline, a diva-esque actress who in turn is playing Natalya Petrovna in a production of Turgenev’s A Month in the Country. Her inability to connect with the part might be attributed to her need to have a baby before her biological clock ticks out. Meanwhile, her old drama schoolmate Nathalie (Noémie Lvovsky) is assisting the director, Denis (Mathieu Amalric), and wishing she could dump her husband and kid and have Denis and the glamorous theater life to herself. Bruni-Tedeschi achieves some wry, Fellini-esque moments, such as a scene in which Marcelline’s dotty aunt and mother watch their grand piano get hoisted into a window like a wounded elephant. More such moments instead of fanciful visitations by ghosts or by the spirit of Natalya Petrovna might have brought this artifice to life.