The latest writing from all your favorite Screengrab refugees
You’re The Guy I Want To Share My Money With (with William S. Burroughs and John Giorno, 1981). Contains rough versions of tracks from Laurie Anderson’s United States Live show plus a number of tracks of Burroughs telling his wry stories and two unlistenable John Giorno long-form poems. They might be good, but I can’t tell because both use voice modulators that have me reaching for the forward button faster than the opening chords of “Hotel California.”
Another week, another legendary filmmaker, another creepy New England island crawling with mysteries — that is, if Martha’s Vineyard can be considered “creepy” (hint: when recreated on location in Germany, it definitely qualifies), and if Roman Polanski is still as revered for his movies as he is reviled for his extracurricular activities.
by Leonard Pierce
Welcome to the latest installment of Crazy Cable, in which I randomly select a program from the upper reaches of the dial and tell you what it’s all about, who else might be watching it, and what we learned from our viewing.
Show: Craziest Canine Castles (Various times, Fine Living Network)
What it’s all about:
People with too much money who choose to spend that money on their pets. The show is set to a narrative soundtrack of endless dog-puns delivered by a generic announcer. By the time this hour-long show was over, I was ready to punch the next person who used the phrase “No bones about it.”
Given his fixation on the tensions between interior and exterior spaces, as well as on domineering father-son dynamics and masculine identity development, it’s only natural that Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet is situated primarily within a roughneck French prison. Another of the director’s scintillating crime sagas, this jail-set story centers on Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim), a French Muslim who enters his new home to serve six years for scuffling with cops and promptly discovers that his plans to lay low and quietly ride out his sentence are hopeless. Upon his arrival, Malik is approached by Corsican inmates—led by boss César Luciani (Niels Arestrup)—who’ve determined that his ethnicity and lack of inside allegiances make him the perfect candidate to carry out the assassination of a Muslim witness temporarily staying at the facility. Thus Audiard’s two-hour-plus character study-cum-genre thriller is set in motion, a familiar tale of illicit enterprise that’s enlivened by taut, gritty filmmaking punctuated by flashes of poeticism, and which soon comes to double as both a loose allegory for Arab ascendancy in France and a micro-portrait of criminal (and general) power-structure mechanisms.
by Nick Schager
Role-playing games are built around talking. And talking in video games is, in most cases, seriously boring.
The most appealing part of game interactivity is action — being able to control how your avatar moves, fights, behaves. Sitting through long-winded expository discussions between characters can be a monumental drag, either because you have next to no influence over the course of the conversation, or because, if given the option to pick from a predetermined set of questions and answers, the minor control you’re given doesn’t make up for the inertia-inducing dullness of the chats.
Participating in talky sequences is certainly better than just sitting through totally scripted cutscenes. But they still break up the action’s momentum in a noticeable way, and give you such a flimsy sense of actual contribution to the direction of the storyline that they mostly just frustrate by highlighting the limitations of game construction.
And then there’s “Mass Effect” and its recently released sequel “Mass Effect 2,” produced by expert RPG outfit BioWare.
Kris Kristofferson – Kristofferson (1970), The Silver Tongued Devil And I (1971), Jesus Was A Capricorn (1972), Breakaway (with Rita Coolidge, 1974), Songs Of Kristofferson (1970-1976), and Singer/Songwriter (1966-1986). I can’t mention Kristofferson without referring to Nathan Rabin’s excellent write-up at the AV Club from just last week. Rabin’s dead-on about Kristofferson: he’s unique and and has a unique take on country music. Take “The Pilgrim, Ch. 33,” the song that so caught Rabin, in which Kristofferson breaks basic rules of English with the thrill of a Rhodes scholar (“all he ever gets is older and around”) while simultaneously glorifying and mocking the archetypical self-destructive Nash Vegas singer-songwriter (“he’s a poet/and he’s a picker/he’s a prophet/and he’s a pusher/he’s a pilgrim and a preacher and a problem when he’s stoned”).
Lt. Archie Hicox: Well, if this is it, old boy, I hope you don’t mind if I go out speaking the King’s.
Major Dieter Hellstrom: By all means, Captain.
Lt. Archie Hicox: [picks up his glass of scotch] There’s a special rung in hell reserved for people who waste good scotch. Seeing as I might be rapping on the door momentarily…
[drinks it]
The opening frames are straight out of a Hitchcock movie: a boat emerges from a thick fog pumped in from the Hollywood dream factory. Two men in fedoras are aboard, chain-smoking and discussing the reason for their ferry ride: they are federal marshals en route to an island in Boston Harbor in search of an escaped mental patient.
by Leonard Pierce
Fox’s Human Target is only the latest, if not the greatest, TV show to spring from the pages of four-color comic books. While comics on television haven’t touched the crossover success of films like Iron Man and The Dark Knight, they’ve still got a long history of supplying material to the small screen; we’ve rounded up some of the best and worst comics-to-TV adaptations and, just for kicks, the real-life creative superheroes with feet in both worlds.
Film reviewing like life itself is a subjective experience. So when I started thinking about which actors stood out as the “best” of the decade I inevitably thought of which performances became seared into my own mind with the visceral force of a hot iron. And that in turn has led me to these five thespians that with the slightest gesture, with a single syllable raised the powerful films they were in to a shamanistic level.
