You know his name, as the Super Bowl teaser for the upcoming summer blockbuster Jason Bourne reminded us. In this era of franchise films, that seems to be more than enough to get another entry in the now 15-year-old series greenlit. And gosh darn it if we aren’t into it. Before you catch The Bourne Ultimatum on IFC, here are some surprising facts about the Bourne movies that you may not know. And unlike Jason Bourne, try not to forget them.
10. Matt Damon was a long shot to play Jason Bourne.Universal Pictures
Coming off of Good Will Hunting and The Legend of Bagger Vance, early ’00s Matt Damon didn’t exactly scream “ripped killing machine.” In fact, Brad Pitt, Russell Crowe and even Sylvester Stallone were all offered the part before it fell into the hands of the Boston boy made good. It was his enthusiasm for director Doug Liman’s more frenetic vision that ultimately helped land him the part.
9. Love interest Marie was almost played by Sarah Polley.Universal Pictures
Damon wasn’t the only casting surprise. Franka Potente, of Run Lola Run fame, wasn’t the filmmaker’s first choice for the role or Marie in The Bourne Identity. In fact, Liman wanted his Go star Sarah Polley for the part, but she turned it down in favor of making indie movies back in Canada. A quick rewrite changed the character from American Marie Purcell to European Marie Helena Kreutz, and the rest is movie history.
8. Director Doug Liman was obsessed with the Bourne books.Universal Pictures
Liman had long been a fan of the Bourne book series. When Warner Bros.’ rights to the books lapsed in the late ’90s, Liman flew himself to author Robert Ludlum’s Montana home, mere days after earning his pilot’s license. The author was so impressed with his passion for the material, he sold the rights on the spot.
7. Liman’s father actually worked for the NSA.Universal Pictures
Part of Liman’s fasciation with the Bourne series was that his own father played the same spy craft games portrayed in the books while working for the NSA. In fact, many of the Treadstone details were taken from his father’s own exploits, and Chris Cooper’s character, Alex Conklin, was based on Oliver Stone, whom Arthur Liman famously cross examined as chief counsel of the Iran-Contra hearings.
6. Tony Gilroy threw the novel’s story out while writing The Bourne Identity.Universal Picutres
Despite being based on a hit book, screenwriter Tony Gilroy, coming off of The Devil’s Advocate, had no idea how to adapt it into a movie. He said the book was more concerned with people “running to airports” than character, and would need a complete rewrite. Director Doug Liman agreed, and Gilroy claims to have condensed the original novel into the first five minutes. Getting that out of the way, he then wrote his own story, based on a man who wakes up one day not remembering anything but how to kill.
5. Damon walked like a boxer to get into character.Universal Picutres
Damon had never played a character like Bourne before, and was searching for a way to capture his physicality. Doug Liman told him to walk like a boxer to give Jason Bourne an edge. Damon took that to heart, training for six months in boxing, marital arts and firearms.
4. Damon broke an actor’s nose.Universal Pictures
Damon’s training for the films is legendary, but mistakes still happen. While filming a scene for The Bourne Ultimatum, Damon hit actor Tim Griffin so hard, he shattered his nose. Apparently, the space the scene was filmed in was smaller than originally intended, throwing Damon off just enough to exert a real beat down.
3. James Bond visited The Bourne Legacy set.Eon Productions
Actor Daniel Craig stopped by the set of The Bourne Legacy to visit his wife, actress Rachel Weisz, who was starring in the movie. While having James Bond on a Bourne set must have been exciting, The Bourne Legacy was the only Bourne movie to not actually feature Jason Bourne, meaning our bets on who would kick whose ass would have to wait for another day.
2. The Bourne Identity was nearly a bomb (in the box office sense).Universal Pictures
As reshoots began to pile up, and an all-out war between the studio and director Doug Liman spilled into the press, expectations were that The Bourne Identity was going to flop. Matt Damon told GQ that, “the word on Bourne was that it was supposed to be a turkey…It’s very rare that a movie comes out a year late, has four rounds of reshoots, and it’s good.”
1. Matt Damon wasn’t the first actor to play Bourne.Warner Brothers Television
Aired on ABC in 1988, the TV movie adaptation of The Bourne Identity, while not exactly critically acclaimed, was a more faithful version of Ludlum’s book. Richard Chamberlain, of The Thorn Birds fame, played a much less ass-kicking spy, while “Charlie’s Angel” Jaclyn Smith played love interest Marie. If you like your Bourne movies heavy with poorly lit ’80s melodrama, this might just be the adaptation for you. Otherwise, you should catch The Bourne Ultimatum when it airs this month on IFC.
10 Paranoid Conspiracy Thrillers Worth Investigating http://www.ifc.com/2016/02/10-paranoid-conspiracy-thrillers-worth-investigating Wed, 03 Feb 2016 22:43:03 +0000 Emmy Potter Lists Movies On IFC All the President's Men Blow Out Captain America: The Winter Soldier Marathon Man Minority Report No Way Out The Bourne Identity The Bourne Ultimatum The Conversation The Parallax View Three Days of the Condor http://www.ifc.com/?p=1000259246 Catch The Bourne Ultimatum this month on IFC.After the Kennedy Assassination and Watergate Scandal, the American public found themselves living with a greater sense of paranoia and cynicism toward the powers that be. Those bleak fears bled into popular culture and especially cinema in the 1970s, which gave us arguably the greatest, most influential decade of American film. In the post-9/11 political landscape, fear-mongering and a higher emphasis on invasive government surveillance have reignited Big Brother paranoia all over again. Before you go on the run with superspy Jason Bourne in The Bourne Ultimatum on IFC this month, check out our list of conspiracy thrillers worth investigating. But be careful…You never know who’s watching.
1. All The President’s MenThat demise Richard Nixon’s presidency is in part the result of some ace investigative journalism by Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, who are the subjects of director Alan J. Pakula’s classic film, the third and final installment in his unofficial “paranoia trilogy” which includes the excellent Klute and The Parallax View.
As Woodward (Robert Redford) and Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) begin uncovering proof of wire taps, blackmail, and other forms of clandestinely illegal activities tied to Nixon’s administration, their lives are put into greater danger. William Goldman, who also wrote The Princess Bride, was personally chosen by Robert Redford to pen the script, but Redford didn’t like the first draft and had Bernstein and then-girlfriend Nora Ephron write a draft. Ultimately, Goldman’s taut, tense script won out and netted him an Oscar as well.
2. Three Days of the CondorThree Days of the Condor is one of seven films Robert Redford made with director Sydney Pollack before Pollack’s death in 2008. The film centers around Redford’s CIA analyst character, code name “Condor,” who returns from lunch one day to find all six of his co-workers murdered. Turner goes on the run while he tries to uncover who is behind the murders, never knowing whom he can trust, including the CIA.
Three Days of the Condor started shooting about a month or so after Nixon’s resignation in 1974, and is one of the first of a slew of films influenced by the corruption of the Watergate era. Interestingly enough, the film inspired the story structure for Captain America: The Winter Soldier, which also, coincidentally, stars Robert Redford.
3. Marathon ManDepending on when you grew up, Marathon Man may have kept you from visiting the dentist’s office thanks to the sadistic torture techniques used by Sir Laurence Olivier’s terrifying Nazi war criminal Dr. Szell on Ph.D. student, Babe (an intense and neurotic Dustin Hoffman), after he gets mixed up in his older brother Doc’s (Roy Scheider, a smooth operator here in his first postJaws role) unfinished government business.
The infamous torture scene involving teeth-pulling, drilling, and needles was actually much longer in the original cut, but was shortened after test screening audience members fled the theater in disgust. Nevertheless, Olivier was nominated for an Oscar for his performance, which he filmed while battling cancer and a degenerative muscle disorder.
4. Blow OutWhile recording sounds for a slasher film, Jack Terry (John Travolta) overhears an assassination involving a presidential candidate. Terry winds up saving a young woman (Nancy Allen) who also happened to be in the car with the murder victim, and the pair wind up scrambling to assemble proof of the assassination before she can be murdered too.
Based on Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-up, which is about a photographer who accidentally captures a murder on film, Blow Out reteamed director Brian De Palma with John Travolta after the pair worked together on Carrie in 1976. Fun fact: Quentin Tarantino was inspired to cast Travolta as Vincent Vega in Pulp Fiction based on his performance in Blow Out, which is one of Tarantino’s favorite films.
5. Minority ReportEven if you eliminate the sci-fi element, Minority Report is still a tense, elegantly constructed thriller about corruption, murder, and conspiracy in the nation’s capital. Steven Spielberg’s 2002 film, loosely based on Philip K. Dick’s short story of the same name, follows pre-crime Chief John Anderton (Tom Cruise) as he and his team set out to solve murders before they happen based on information given to them via PreCogs or “precognitives.” But after discovering the unsolved murder of a young woman who has special ties to one of the PreCogs, Anderton finds himself on the run from the FBI and his own team when he himself is accused of a murder he has yet to commit.
The film was enthusiastically praised for its writing and especially its visuals, including a breathless chase set in a car factory that was based on an idea Hitchcock had for an unfilmed sequence in North by Northwest. Look for a strong performance from Max Von Sydow as Anderton’s superior, who may or may not have something to hide.
6. Captain America: The Winter SoldierWhile most may think of the second installment in Marvel’s Captain America franchise as a superhero film first, it is highly influenced by many of the 1970s conspiracy films on our list, including Three Days of the Condor, Marathon Man, and The Parallax View. Screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely felt the conspiracy genre was the best match for Captain America’s readjustment to the modern political landscape and his distrust of many of its most prominent players including his own employer, S.H.I.E.L.D.
As Cap (the affable Chris Evans) navigates a web of government lies and cover-ups with Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson, thankfully getting a lot more to do here than she did in The Avengers), he discovers all is not what it appears to be, and his faith in his country and S.H.I.E.L.D. is tested. Captain America: The Winter Soldier also has ties to All The President’s Men beyond Robert Redford: a copy of the book is visible on a bookshelf is Steve Rogers’ apartment. Cap has good taste!
7. The Bourne SeriesMatt Damon saves himself for a change in these fast-paced thrillers about an amnesiac man on the run from the CIA, trying to piece together his memories and uncover a covert conspiracy within the organization. Bourne Identity director Doug Liman originally offered the role of Jason Bourne to Brad Pitt, who turned it down to make a different spy film, Spy Game with Robert Redford. Damon went through three intense months of training for the role, and did many of his own stunts, including several dizzying climbing sequences on the exteriors of buildings.
Though he returned for both The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum, Matt Damon chose to skip out on The Bourne Legacy (Jeremy Renner took a starring role), but will be returning for an as-yet-untitled fifth Bourne film due in July 2016. The Bourne Series, loosely-based on Robert Ludlum’s novels of the same name, have been praised for their realism and reliance on practical stunt work versus computer-generated effects, no doubt inspiring the Bond franchise to branch out into similar, brawling, broody territory when Daniel Craig came aboard in 2006 for Casino Royale.
8. The ConversationThe Conversation was released just a few months before Nixon resigned the presidency, so it’s difficult to not see links between Francis Ford Coppola’s film and the current events of the day, especially given the surveillance and wire-tapping equipment used by main character Henry Caul (a fine Gene Hackman) is the same as that used by the Nixon Administration during the Watergate Scandal (a coincidence that visibly shocked Coppola after the film was released).
Coppola, like De Palma, was inspired by Antonioni’s Blow-up, and began writing The Conversation in the mid-60s, focusing on a humble, intensely private surveillance expert in San Francisco who overhears a conversation about a potential murder. Caul is hesitant to hand over the tape to the man who commissioned it (Robert Duvall) and finds himself under pressure from a bullying aide (a pre-Star Wars Harrsion Ford). The film, both Coppola and Hackman’s personal favorite, happened to be released the same year as The Godfather Part II, which wound up overshadowing it at the Academy Awards.
9. No Way OutNo Way Out is one of two great films Kevin Costner made in 1987 (the other is The Untouchables), and it is widely considered the film that launched Costner as a leading man. A remake of 1948’s The Big Clock, No Way Out centers on Lt. Commander Tom Farrell (Costner) who strikes up an affair with a young woman (Sean Young) he meets at an inaugural ball.
Farrell, who works at the Pentagon under Secretary of Defense David Brice (Gene Hackman), is unaware the woman was having an affair with Brice, and when she winds up dead, Farrell is framed by Brice for her murder and accused of being a KGB agent. No Way Out is, in many ways, a solid precursor to many of the big screen adaptations of John Grisham’s novels that dominated the box office during the ’90s.
10. The Parallax ViewThe opening scene of The Parallax View was purposely shot to mirror Robert Kennedy’s assassination in 1968, heightening the unsettling fear at the heart of the film’s story about a newspaper reporter (Warren Beatty) who gets mixed up in a conspiracy surrounding the assassination of a presidential candidate. Joe Frady’s suspicions are further provoked by his investigation into a mysterious company called The Parallax Corporation, which he discovers is a recruiting front for political assassins.
The film, the third and final of Alan J. Pakula’s Political Paranoia Trilogy, started principal photography without a finished screenplay due to a writer’s strike. Star Warren Beatty took it upon himself to do re-writes with the help of his friend Robert Towne (the screenwriter of Chinatown), and the film was finished on schedule. Though it received mixed reviews at the time (possibly due to its bleak ending), The Parallax View is now considered one of the best films of the conspiracy genre.
The morality of Paul Greengrass’ shaky-cam. http://www.ifc.com/2010/03/greengrass Wed, 10 Mar 2010 22:20:00 +0000 Vadim Rizov Movies Bloody Sunday Carl Bernstein IRA Margaret Thatcher Matt Damon Paul Greengrass The Bourne Supremacy The Bourne Ultimatum The Theory of Flight Tony Gilroy United 93 World In Action http://dev2.ifc.com/articles/greengrass No one could say that Paul Greengrass lacks good intentions. As a reporter for the British current affairs show “World In Action,” Greengrass worked on two contentious stories. The first was an interview with IRA hunger striker Raymond McCartney (preparation for which was done via smuggled messages written on cigarette papers), the second a collaboration […]No one could say that Paul Greengrass lacks good intentions. As a reporter for the British current affairs show “World In Action,” Greengrass worked on two contentious stories. The first was an interview with IRA hunger striker Raymond McCartney (preparation for which was done via smuggled messages written on cigarette papers), the second a collaboration with former MI5 scientific officer Peter Wright, who claimed his former boss was a Soviet mole. This is probably not true (at least according to Christopher Andrew’s 1032-page authorize MI5 history), but Greengrass has the taste of activist blood on his lips. (The fact that Margaret Thatcher allegedly called the show “just a lot of Trotskyists” was probably music to his ears.)
These aren’t the expected background credits of a man responsible for rebooting a huge action franchise — it’s sort of like imagining Carl Bernstein shooting “Indiana Jones.” But Greengrass became an activist director of sorts, working steadily in film and TV (ghoulish trivia: his 1998 drama “The Theory of Flight” was the last movie reviewed on “Siskel & Ebert” before Siskel died). 2002’s “Bloody Sunday” made a bigger international splash than anything he’d done before, Tony Gilroy told Matt Damon to watch it, and the rest is history.
Greengrass is now rewriting history on-screen. Embodying the “one for them, one for me” ideal like none other, Greengrass followed up “The Bourne Supremacy” with “United 93,” and “The Bourne Ultimatum” with this Friday’s “Green Zone.” Two action blockbusters, two Politically Serious films: what could be wrong with that? Plenty.
In an interview with Andrew L. Urban, Greengrass described the main message of “United 93” — a total gut-punch, but a seemingly pointless one — as “what the fuck are we going to do about it?” By most reliable accounts, “Green Zone” knows exactly what to do about it, which is to claim a top-down conspiracy of Good vs. Evil. I doubt anyone will top the New Yorker‘s Anthony Lane‘s line that it is “a left-wing movie that looks and sounds like a right-wing one.”
That’s a first for Greengrass, whose ambivalence was previously overpowering, often productively. On “Bloody Sunday,” the stated goal was “to make a film where at the end of it we could all say, yes, it must have been a bit like that.” But tying together all of Greengrass’ work of a decade is that shaky-cam, which yields mixed aesthetic results but always implies the same thing: what you’re watching is real.
That’s a standard mockumentary trope, but it has the weird side-effect of equalizing Matt Damon on the run and 9/11. That makes me queasy, and it’s not just motion sickness. Whether Damon is realistically fleeing fictional CIA overlords or in search of The Truth About Iraq makes no difference (and when “Green Zone” gets into dubious conspiratorial territory, that goes double). Building up off “United 93″‘s almost impeachable veracity, now we have… this. Let the games begin.
[Photos: “Green Zone,” Universal, 2010; “United 93,” Universal, 2006]
The Naughts: The Actor of the ’00s http://www.ifc.com/2009/11/naughts-actor Mon, 30 Nov 2009 21:23:00 +0000 R. Emmet Sweeney Features Gerry Gus Van Sant Matt Damon Naughts Project The Bourne Ultimatum The Good Shepherd The Informant http://dev2.ifc.com/articles/naughts_actor Quietly and unexpectedly, Matt Damon has become the premier Hollywood actor of the past decade. He’s lent his minutely constructed, surprisingly athletic performances to the films of directors Steven Soderbergh, Gus Van Sant, Paul Greengrass, Martin Scorsese and Clint Eastwood, a roster that’s not coincidentally produced some of the most vital and successful films of […]Quietly and unexpectedly, Matt Damon has become the premier Hollywood actor of the past decade. He’s lent his minutely constructed, surprisingly athletic performances to the films of directors Steven Soderbergh, Gus Van Sant, Paul Greengrass, Martin Scorsese and Clint Eastwood, a roster that’s not coincidentally produced some of the most vital and successful films of the past ten years.
His remarkable career isn’t simply a matter of a good agent. It’s all in the manner in which he so carefully adapts his particular skills to the roles.
Damon’s commitment is displayed on his body, which he relentlessly crafts to the specifications of each character — he’s almost the anti-movie star in his physical malleability. Take a look at how he changes from “The Bourne Identity” in 2002 to the Farrelly Brothers’ “Stuck On You,” a year later. In the former, he carved himself down to muscle and bone, a tightly packed bundle of paranoia and frightening physicality. For the latter, he packed on a paunch, with his granite Bourne-head turned into a model of doughy affability. He managed a similar weight gain more recently between 2007’s “The Bourne Ultimatum” and this year’s “The Informant!”, and as the latter film’s Mark Whitacre, he achieves his most finely modulated performance underneath layers of fat and a fake nose.
These types represent the two poles of Damon’s preferred personas: withdrawn nebbishes or moody muscular specimens. The first group would include the “Ocean’s” franchise, “Stuck On You,” “The Good Shepherd,” and “The Informant!”. The second contains “All the Pretty Horses,” the “Bourne” franchise, “The Departed” and the forthcoming “Invictus.” “Gerry” lies somewhere in between. But each extreme utilizes his physicality, with his literally weighty roles emphasizing the slapstick and satire of uncooperative bodies instead of the precise control of his action work. Even in “The Good Shepherd,” Damon buries himself in a trenchcoat and wire-rimmed glasses, eschewing parody but emphasizing his CIA analyst’s passivity and hyper-intellectualism.
The effectiveness of Damon’s portrayals isn’t simply achieved by his physicality, however, but by the subtle variations and tics he works into them. In taking on Bob Tenor, the conjoined twin in “Stuck On You,” he ably pulls off a number of ridiculous pratfalls, like being caught in a bus door, but incorporates a number of quiet gestures to convey the inner life of the character. Bob is the blue-collar nice guy to his rakish twin Walt (Greg Kinnear), and Damon lifts Bob out of cliché with a series of small moves. First is his posture, which is pitched forward as he holds his arms limp at his sides — a look of constant un-readiness, of a guy just waiting to be punched. He adds a backing-in, scuttling crab walk, a pinched sing-song delivery and a penchant for shutting his eyes before speaking to complete the vision of a man simply wanting to disappear.
Damon takes a similarly detailed approach to his signature role, Jason Bourne. It’s a streamlined take that only begins with the weight trainer. He deadens his voice and clips his delivery into staccato bursts, the mark of a man only concerned with how to stay alive for the next five minutes. He stands ramrod straight, and bores holes into people’s eyes, rarely blinking. It’s a coiled readiness that’s the inverse of Bob’s closed-off vulnerability. In fight or flight scenes, he pistons his arms and legs down with mechanical regularity, bulldozing through crowds with the same speed as director Paul Greengrass’ edits. His entire character is defined by forward motion — if he stops, he dies, so regardless of bullet wounds or broken bones, he wills himself ahead. His is an action hero that bleeds. This kind of blunt physicality and relentless pacing set the tone for the entire decade’s worth of action films, lifted most successfully for the new Daniel Craig cycle of James Bond movies.
There’s always the presence of fleshly mortality in Damon’s work, from Bourne’s elusive brushes with death to the decadent decay of Mark Whitacre’s middle-aged body. It’s present most explicitly in “Gerry,” Gus Van Sant’s artistic throat-clearer after he hit bottom with “Finding Forrester.” Retrenching in Bela Tarr mode with long takes and oblique storytelling, it paved the way for the layered triumphs of “Elephant,” “Last Days” and “Paranoid Park.” That Damon was at the center of the blockbusting “Bourne” and “Ocean’s” franchises as well as Van Sant’s revival speaks to his wide-ranging tastes and apparent dismissal of highbrow/lowbrow distinctions.
He and Casey Affleck play wandering fools both named Gerry, who drift around Utah’s national parks after their car breaks down. They exchange opaque bits of improvised dialogue as they slowly dehydrate and collapse in the salt flats. Damon lopes through the movie with a self-confidence verging on psychosis, as the pair’s attempts at re-orienting themselves devolve into childish game playing. Their faith in play, re-shaping words and actions into little blackout sketches, is unerring until the last desperate shot of the duo, caked with dust and dying by the side of the road. As drama, it’s thin, but it works as a laid-back comedy with a commentary on how performance can generate (and annihilate) identity. It’s also an eccentric forebearer to what A.O. Scott has termed American neo-neo-realism, the long-take, location-shot dramas of Kelly Reichardt, Ramin Bahrani, Lance Hammer and So Yong Kim.
Damon’s work in “The Informant!” extends his interest in performance and self-delusion, but in the withdrawn nebbish mode. Mark Whitacre’s body is a walking punchline, a marvel of ill-fitting suits, manicured mustaches and rapidly expanding waistlines. He’s literally coming apart at the seams physically before he does it psychologically. The whistleblower who brought down a price-fixing scheme at Archer Daniels Midland, Whitacre is also a classic American overachiever, raking in millions from an embezzlement scheme that he kept a secret from everyone, including himself. He proliferated so many lies he began to believe some of them, almost willing himself into bipolar disorder. Director Steven Soderbergh emphasizes the man’s duality through his use of voiceover, which features Whitacre’s perplexing digressions, constantly veering away from personal revelations to ponder the weather, food prices and polar bears.
Damon’s voice is slightly nasal, flat and disarmingly vulnerable. He’s at pains to make everyone love him, but his anxiety seeps in at the edges through his constant fidgeting with his glasses, his slightly stooped walk and the furtive tugs at his delicately poofy wig. It’s a finely wrought performance, which slowly reveals Whitacre’s duplicity while never abandoning the character’s pathos. He’s an eminently likable pathological liar, a seemingly transparent dope who hides his pain in nervous twitches and brief explosions of self-doubt. His hesitation when an FBI agent uncovers his letter forgery is quietly devastating. You can see Damon’s eyes scan back and forth, looking to construct another rhetorical defense, but he’s finally pushed past his breaking point, and even his voiceover collapses and tells the truth: he didn’t have any answers.
Yet up until this point in his career, Matt Damon seemed to have all of them. Off the success of the “Bourne” franchise, he’s been able to write his own ticket, working only with the directors he wants. This has led to an improbable string of smart, multifaceted turns that reveal an actor of precise physical control and dense emotional shading, whose action heroes are given the same detailed treatment as his indie film grotesques, all of which are at the center of the most influential films of the decade. He’s a subtle miniaturist who also happens to be a gigantic star, a rare and wonderful thing.
This feature is part of the Naughts Project. Check out our other picks so far, for the emblematic TV show, buddy pairing and film critics of the decade.
[Additional photos: “Gerry,” THINKFilm, 2003; “The Informant!,” Warner Bros., 2009]
Top 10 of the Decade List Time: Surfing the Zeitgeist. http://www.ifc.com/2009/11/top-10-decade-list-time-surfin Tue, 10 Nov 2009 20:33:38 +0000 Vadim Rizov Movies aughts Cache Import Export The Bourne Ultimatum top 10s http://dev2.ifc.com/articles/top_10_decade_list_time_surfin Welcome to the end of the decade (unless you’re one of those “decades start in the year one, not zero” cranks). More specifically, welcome to the end of the decade as seen by every publication wanting to list the aughts’ best films. The rundown from the UK’s The Times is a peculiarly schizophrenic juxtaposition of […]Welcome to the end of the decade (unless you’re one of those “decades start in the year one, not zero” cranks). More specifically, welcome to the end of the decade as seen by every publication wanting to list the aughts’ best films. The rundown from the UK’s The Times is a peculiarly schizophrenic juxtaposition of highbrow, middlebrow and pop hits: it’s probably the only list you’ll see “L’Enfant,” “There Will Be Blood” and “Anchorman” placed in sequence. Number two is the duo of “The Bourne Ultimatum”/”The Bourne Supremacy”; number one is “Caché.”
In praising “Caché,” The Times inadvertently reveals the dangers of praising something based solely on zeitgeist-y extrapolation: “The film’s twin themes resonate perfectly with the defining concerns of the time: tacit national guilt about a questionable foreign policy, in the film it’s France’s occupation of Algeria, but it’s not hard to piece together the parallels with more recent conflicts. Plus, as round-the-clock surveillance became a part of our daily lives, here was a film that captured the creeping paranoia that resulted from the eyes of unseen strangers invading private life.” Much the same could be said of the Paul Greengrassdirected “Bournes”: what’s Matt Damon doing but running from guilt about his CIA past? What’s the run through Victoria Station if not an implicit comment on the surveillance state? Oh well.
My personal pick for zeitgeistiest-of-the-zeitgeist is Ulrich Seidl’s underappreciated “Import/Export,” a movie so NSFW that its IMDB link will lead you to an inappropriate poster. If the whole “national guilt”/”surveillance culture” thing seems a bit overwrought to you, consider Seidl’s clear-eyed gem instead (not that you can Netflix it or anything). It’s got Eastern Europe and Western Europe switching countries (a nurse goes from Ukraine to Austria, a shiftless Austrian makes the reverse move) in search of economic opportunity; the whole movie’s mired in prescient economic gloom. Seidl’s film is specifically about the literal/symbolic of Old Europe — but a few years into our recession, the shoe fits further out. And whereas Haneke fixates on surveillance, “Import/Export” keeps an eye on webcam sex and porn, which is probably of greater concern to a lot of people who wouldn’t admit it. There’s more than one way to skin a zeitgeist, is all I’m saying here. Needless to say, the below trailer should not be viewed anywhere near co-workers.
[Photo: “Caché,” Sony Pictures Classics, 2005.]
The 25 Scariest Moments in Non-Horror Movies http://www.ifc.com/2009/10/25-scariest-nonhorror-movies Tue, 27 Oct 2009 12:00:00 +0000 Alison Willmore Lists Al Gore Albert Maysles Alfred Hitchcock Amy Berg An Inconvenient Truth Casino ceti eel Charlotte Zwerin Danny Boyle Darren Aronofsky David Lynch David Maysles Davis Guggenheim Deliver Us From Evil Deliverance Ewan McGregor Fanny and Alexander Full Metal Jacket George Sluizer Gimme Shelter Indiana Jones Ingmar Bergman Joe Pesci John Badham John Boorman John Stahl Leave Her To Heaven Luis Buñuel Martin Scorsese Mel Stuart Mulholland Drive Paul Greengrass Pinocchio Raiders of the Lost Ark Requiem for a Dream Safe Saturday Night Fever Stanley Kubrick Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan Steven Spielberg The Bourne Ultimatum The Vanishing The Wicked Witch of the West The Wizard of Oz Todd Haynes Trainspotting Un chien andalou Vertigo Victor Fleming Walt Disney Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory http://dev2.ifc.com/articles/25_scariest_nonhorror_movies When you sit down to a horror film, you know, at least on a basic level, what you’re getting into. Whether or not the movie delivers, what you’ve been promised, and what you’re braced for or looking forward to, are scares. Which is why, when we look back on those truly traumatic movie memories, the […]
When you sit down to a horror film, you know, at least on a basic level, what you’re getting into. Whether or not the movie delivers, what you’ve been promised, and what you’re braced for or looking forward to, are scares. Which is why, when we look back on those truly traumatic movie memories, the titles that come to mind often are not horror films at all.
The most frightening movie moments can arrive out of nowhere, in the midst of where they shouldn’t belong, catching you when you’re vulnerable — which is why there are a few alleged children’s films on this list. But they can also creep up on you, working a different kind of dread, which is where some of the documentaries included below fit in. Fear is a funny thing. It comes in different varieties, it can work its way on you in unanticipated, and, as our collection here proves, it definitely doesn’t always stem from things that go bump in the night.
Skip to: [#25-21] [#2016] [#15-11] [#10-6] [#5-1] 25. Carol gets a perm
“Safe” (1995)
Directed by Todd Haynes
Never has Billy Ocean’s “Get Outta My Dreams, Get Into My Car” been used to more chilling effect than when it’s blaring at the hair salon where Carol White (Julianne Moore) awaits her hair stylist. In what is supposed to be a respite from the pollution of urban life and the confines of a predictable life as an upper class housewife, Carol attempts indulging herself after other late ’80s panaceas like New Agey meditation videos and strenuous workouts don’t do the trick. (As one of Carol’s exercise partners notice, she doesn’t even break a sweat.) Yet when Carol arrives at the salon, it feels as inviting as one of those elaborate Rube Goldberg death traps — even Carol’s stylist’s (Janel Moloney) tentative agreement to fit Carol’s perm into her schedule after a cancellation sounds foreboding. After an afternoon of having her hair tightly wound around rollers and drowned in chemicals, Carol sits unfazed by her new wavy do as a rivulet of blood drips from her nose in a confirmation that she has been somehow poisoned by modern life. Producer Christine Vachon complains of Moore’s hair on the DVD commentary, “This was the day the hair would not curl.” Hair? No. Toe-curling? Yes. – Stephen Saito
24. The wrong man is disappearedThe dogged pursuit of Jason Bourne through jampacked Waterloo Station is one of the “Bourne” trilogy’s great set-pieces, but it’s also a profoundly unnerving comment on the impunity with which covert government agencies operate in the “war on terror” era. The sequence climaxes with Paddy Considine, a journalist for a major British newspaper, being gunned down in broad daylight — no surreptitiously cut brake cables or undetectable poisons here — but even that’s not as unsettling as the matter-of-fact manner in which an unsuspecting civilian who’s been mistaken for Bourne is grabbed, drugged and thrown into a van, never to be heard from again. The abruptness with which an innocent bystander is converted to enemy combatant is breathtaking, not least because the film lets the moment pass unremarked upon. Bourne never mounts a rescue operation to rescue the poor soul, nor is there so much as a stray line indicating he’s been found unharmed. In the government’s pursuit of extralegal justice, ordinary citizens are just cannon fodder, and even the good guys don’t have time to save them. – Sam Adams
23. Father O’Grady takes a walk in the park
“Deliver Us From Evil” (2006)
Directed by Amy Berg
Ten minutes into the documentary “Deliver Us From Evil,” when the film has just begun to hint at the full scope of the crimes committed by Father Oliver O’Grady, it cuts to a shot of the former priest walking toward the edge of a playground full of young children. To this point, we’ve only heard vague allusions to the “trouble” O’Grady got into some 30 years prior. From the shot of him watching the children, we cut to the innocent looking old man standing in what looks like the same park, talking to the camera about his sexual proclivities. “If [someone] said to me… ‘Do you feel aroused when you see children?’ [I’d say] well, maybe… ‘How about if you saw children naked?’ I’d say ‘Mmhmm, yeah!’ ” O’Grady isn’t embarrassed or ashamed; he’s downright cheerful in a way that suggests he has no conception of the heinousness of his behavior. The most sickening part involves O’Grady describing his preferred victim, someone on what he calls “a younger level.” To indicate that he likes smaller children, he makes a yea-high gesture with his hand, just as an oblivious child of almost that exact height walks through the shot. Berg essentially ends the scene there, maybe because she felt as uncomfortable shooting it as we do watching it. – Matt Singer
22. Alexander and the puppetsDylan Walsh may have recently dispatched a swinging table saw on his new brood in “The Stepfather” remake, but he’s got nothing on the Bishop Edvard Vergérus (Jan Malmsjö), the silver-haired man of God who wastes no time in doing ungodly things to his recently inherited stepchildren. Compassionate only in the sense that when he catches Alexander in a lie, the bishop offers the child a choice of “cane, castor oil or [to stay in a] cubbyhole” as forms of punishment, so when the children are snuck out of the house by an antiques dealer and taken into his home, where he lives with his nephew Ishmael, Alexander is filled with fear and contempt. Surrounded by Ishamel’s creepy collection of puppets, Alexander believes he’s found God when he hears a voice from behind a locked door as the other puppets tremble. “Is this is the end of me,” asks a resigned Alexander, as director Ingmar Bergman ratchets up the terror with only the pluck of violin strings to pierce the silence. When a bearded puppet emerges and falls to the floor, Alexander realizes Ishmael was only playing a joke on him, with the puppeteer whispering to the child, “I didn’t mean to scare you. At least, not that much.” Tell that to the audience. – Stephen Saito
21. Opening the ArkFor every kid growing up in the 1980s, there was one childhood-defining test of your movie-watching cojones: could you keep your eyes open during the Ark-cracking sequence from “Raiders”? Few scenes in movie history have been watched with more hands in front of more faces than the icky, melty, explody fate that awaits Belloq, Toht and the rest of the Nazis at the end of Indiana Jones’ first adventure. Hell, even Indy himself keeps his eyes closed for as long as the Ark is open; who could blame anyone for following his lead and doing the same? The disturbing imagery — skin peeling away from skulls, while white pus and red blood pour out of every orifice — was so grisly that the MPAA initially slapped “Raiders” with an R rating. In order to secure the PG he needed to convince our parents that it was okay to sit their children in front of this nightmare fuel, Spielberg superimposed a wall of flames over the most intense shots. Still, as potentially traumatic as the images are, the scariest part is the fact that the movie invites you to do what Indy doesn’t, to look into the Ark and perhaps share the Nazi’s fate. Once you’d watched the scene and survived the initial fright, you still had to endure an interminable, panic-stricken night waiting for the Ark’s spirits to show up at your house and melt you into a big pile of goo. – Matt Singer
The Action Movie Auteurs http://www.ifc.com/2009/06/actionmovie-auteurs Mon, 29 Jun 2009 18:30:00 +0000 Alison Willmore Podcasts Bourne Ultimatum Deja Vu Hurt Locker Jackie Chan John Woo Kathryn Bigelow Miami Vice Michael Mann Paul Greengrass Public Enemies Steven Spielberg The Bourne Ultimatum The Hurt Locker Tony Scott http://dev2.ifc.com/articles/action_movie_auteurs Michael Mann, Kathryn Bigelow… Tony Scott? It takes a certain type of action movie director to earn the love of the Film Comment crowd. This week on the IFC News podcast, we look at which action filmmakers are taken seriously as artists and why. Download: MP3, 36:50 minutes, 33.7 MB Subscribe to the podcast: [iTunes] […]Michael Mann, Kathryn Bigelow… Tony Scott? It takes a certain type of action movie director to earn the love of the Film Comment crowd. This week on the IFC News podcast, we look at which action filmmakers are taken seriously as artists and why.
Download: MP3, 36:50 minutes, 33.7 MB
Subscribe to the podcast: [iTunes] [XML]
Everybody Loves Jason: Why Even Contrarians Like The Bourne Trilogy http://www.ifc.com/2008/01/everybody-loves-jason-why-even Mon, 14 Jan 2008 05:00:00 +0000 R. Emmet Sweeney Features Doug Liman Jason Bourne Matt Damon Paul Greengrass The Bourne Identity The Bourne Supremacy The Bourne Ultimatum http://dev2.ifc.com/articles/everybody_loves_jason_why_even By R. Emmet Sweeney IFC News [Photo: “The Bourne Ultimatum,” Universal Pictures, 2007] Matt Damon’s furrowed brow is saving Hollywood. Gracing each of the three insanely popular “Bourne” films, Damon’s agitated wrinkles have implacably faced down an army of psychotic CIA stooges without so much as a sweat, and brought in nearly a billion dollars […]By R. Emmet Sweeney
IFC News
[Photo: “The Bourne Ultimatum,” Universal Pictures, 2007]
Matt Damon’s furrowed brow is saving Hollywood. Gracing each of the three insanely popular “Bourne” films, Damon’s agitated wrinkles have implacably faced down an army of psychotic CIA stooges without so much as a sweat, and brought in nearly a billion dollars in box office globally. But the most surprising part of the trilogy’s world domination is its critical reception. “The Bourne Identity,” the first in the franchise, received grudging respect, but the recent “Ultimatum” is being said to “advance[s] the art of action filmmaking and will change it forever” — a quote not from an overheated fanboy after a press screening, but rather from Anne Thompson, the reliably insightful columnist for Variety.
And it’s not only Thompson who’s contracted “Bourne” fever. It’s also the hardcore cinephiles who vote on the Village Voice year-end film poll. “Ultimatum” placed 25th on the list, beating out critical darlings like “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead” and “Sweeney Todd.” No other Hollywood blockbuster was even close — “The Bourne Ultimatum” probably outgrossed the rest of the list single-handedly. It’s also achieved a mainstream cult — enough so that the IFC Center is showing the complete trilogy during its January Midnight series. How has “Bourne” become the only gargantuan Hollywood franchise that’s impressed both mainstream and alternative presses (along with contrarian, smug bastards like myself)?
Most of the recent chatter about the series has focused on director Paul Greengrass’s controversial rapid fire editing techniques, but I think much of the film’s success has to do with Doug Liman’s original conception of the series (along with that aforementioned brow of Damon’s). Liman, director of the first “Bourne” and executive producer of all three, had just come off the successes of helming “Swingers” and “Go” and was given free reign on his next project. He chose “Bourne,” wanting to make a different kind of action film, one with a relatively modest budget of $60 million and a different conception of screen combat. In talking to the BBC about the martial arts used in the film, Liman said, “It is ridiculously efficient. You don’t break a sweat or expend any energy, you use your opponents energy against him. And we thought — that’s Jason Bourne, that’s how he’ll do everything in this movie. He’ll figure out the simplest, least energetic, most efficient way to get something done.”
All three “Bournes” have this emphasis on process, on Damon solving a series of puzzles as quickly and effortlessly as possible. It drops heroism in favor of a robotic rationality and a feel for the traumas of real physical violence. Jason Bourne, an amnesiac, cannot express himself through speech, so he does so through action — you can almost read his mind’s calculations through every blunt force gesture. Such attention to physical detail was a breath of fresh air in the action genre, which had veered closer to the self-parodic cartoonishness of the “Mission: Impossible” films. And since most critics came of cinematic age in the ’70s, the throwback grittiness of the series gave them ample space for the William Friedkin comparisons they love so well. Toss in some vague political commentary about civil liberties, which became groaningly obvious in “Ultimatum,” and there was more than enough to fill up a generous word count.
When Greengrass took over the series with the second entry, “The Bourne Supremacy,” he retained the general concept of action as puzzle solving, but elided much more visual information by cutting shots to shreds. While Liman’s “Identity” moved fast, it’s nothing in comparison to the latter two. David Bordwell, the prominent Wisconsin film professor, has measured the seconds per shot of the trilogy, and “Identity”‘s seems downright slow at three, while “Ultimatum” runs at a faster clip of two seconds per shot. But as Bordwell argues on his blog, it’s not the relative quickness of the shots that has bothered people — it’s the shots’ “spasmodic” quality. Greengrass’ editing style cut gestures and camera movements short, keeping viewers constantly on edge, always wondering what lies behind the next cut — but what it sacrifices is a coherent articulation of the geography of Bourne’s world. This isn’t to deny the thrills to be had at “The Bourne Ultimatum” (the parking garage smashup is a technical marvel), but it pushes this editing strategy to an extreme that drains the film of the power of its original conception. Bourne was a character who expressed himself through the economy of his actions. Now, what we see are abstracted shards of movement that are more interested in forward motion than character.
If, as Anne Thompson says, that this is the future of action films, it’ll be an exhausting ride with diminishing returns. But what marks the “Bourne” franchise out is its ability to garner this kind of controversy — one actually about a film’s style, a conversation that is so rare in modern film criticism but so necessary. While I think Liman’s “The Bourne Identity” was the more rewarding, there’s no denying that all three are films worth grappling with — and their influence will be felt for years to come, especially in the next cycle of “Bourne”-ian Bond flicks.
When life gives you a hundred reasons to cry, show life that you have a thousand reasons to smile
© Copyright 2015 - 2024 PDFFOX.COM - All rights reserved.