The latest writing from all your favorite Screengrab refugees
by Scott Von Doviak
The Austin branch of The A.V. Club is closing down, and I’m not sure if my stuff there is going to disappear, so here are some of my greatest hits, starting with Chicken Shit Bingo.
Twelve Austin Haunts That Didn’t Survive The Decade
The best—or least most characteristically forceful—Samuel Fuller movies veer excitedly from one violent moment and camera movement to the next, like someone justifiably punching you in the face. 1955′s House of Bamboo is a calmer production. Fuller novices shouldn’t start here: for a introduction to the two-fisted director’s earlier work, try on the sleazy Cold War noir Pickup on South Street (made two films before this) or 1957′s Forty Guns, a widescreen Western that often accelerates to warp speed. House of Bamboo has patches of standard-issue narrative tissue to get through, and the camera’s less mobile and impulsive than usual. Compared with, say, 1952′s Park Row, in which Fuller tracks so fast the camera gets wobbly out of sheer urgency (speed trumps thought), Bamboo is more tableaux-bound.
O Bando - O Bando (1969). Tropicalia from the psych-garage side. It’s okay, but it’s nowhere in the league of the identically named (given the translation) The Band.
Jim O’Rourke – Long Night (2008). From O’Rourke’s experimental side, this is a single work split into two parts, each about an hour and 20 minutes long. While I like it, I’m not sure that I got enough out of it to justify the time I put into it.
Part recent-history documentary, part puff-piece profile, Chasing Madoff details the efforts to uncover the titular scumbag’s $50 billion Ponzi scheme by financial analyst Harry Markopolos. As he attempted to inform the SEC and mainstream press about Bernie Madoff’s scam a full nine years before it came to light in 2008, Markopolos is a figure whose whistleblowing efforts are worthy of praise, and Jeff Prosserman’s documentary (based on Markopolos’s book No One Would Listen) digs deep enough into the number-crunching details of that inquiry to pay it adequate justice.
by Paul Clark
A few months ago, I received an invite via Facebook to my 15-year high school reunion. I’ve never harbored much nostalgia for my high school days- I wasn’t a popular guy, partly because I wasn’t popular but also because I was, quite frankly, a bit of an asshole to anyone outside my strange little circle of friends. Still, I’m curious as to how the event will go for me, not least because I’m genuinely curious to find out of I changed that much in the last decade and a half.
by Andrew Osborne
Politics, priest scandals and Stryper have soured religion for many in the 21st Century, spurring an atheist movement that often recoils (or, in the case of Christopher Hitchens, raises a bemused, condescending eyebrow) at burkas, Bible-thumping and other such conspicuous displays of piety. But given the upcoming release of Higher Ground (Vera Farmiga’s directorial debut about a Christian woman’s struggle with faith), your pals at Nerve have compiled a list of true believer films even non-believers can enjoy.
Continue reading ‘Five Religious Movies Even An Atheist Could Love’
Nirvana - Bleach (1989), Nevermind(1991), In Utero (1993), MTV Unplugged In New York (1994). Is there a point to writing about these guys at this stage? I think everything that I could possibly say has been said ad nauseam. I will say that my favorite of these is the Unplugged album, not least because it has the Meat Puppets on it.
Among other things, this blog preserves old exiled Screengrabber articles that Nerve doesn’t feel the need to keep archived on their site, including this one from 2009 (which happens to be a personal favorite)…enjoy!
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Entertainment Weekly recently noted the trend of edgy, offbeat auteurs like Spike Jonze, Tim Burton and Wes Anderson turning their talents to edgy, offbeat adaptations of youngster classics (like Where the Wild Things Are, Alice in Wonderland and Fantastic Mr. Fox, respectively). Sadly, an overdeveloped sense of childhood wonder may not be the only reason the aforementioned directors have gone all gee-whiz on us. According to EW, “As art-house movies quickly become an endangered species, family films are a refuge for serious-minded filmmakers looking to tell personal stories in a marketable genre.”
Continue reading ‘Nerve Archive #1: Beyond Where The Wild Things Are’
Tom Holland’s 1985 Fright Night was a precursor to the horror deconstruction made trendy 11 years later by Wes Craven’sScream—a cheeky meta-genre work that both critiqued and celebrated scary movie contentions, albeit without many honest-to-goodness shocks. The same holds true of Craig Gillespie’s remake, which, with a similar brand of self-aware playfulness, retains its predecessor’s sturdy narrative foundation: horny geek Charley (Anton Yelchin) discovers that new next-door-neighbor Jerry (Colin Farrell) is an ancient bloodsucker, and enlists the help of famed vampire killer Peter Vincent (David Tennant) to help execute the undead fiend.
Baseball has always been known for its colorful characters, but the shelf life of the game’s oddball denizens can be brief indeed. If you’re not producing, your shtick can go from endearing to annoying faster than a Nolan Ryan heater. The most purely enjoyable team of my adult life was the 2004 Red Sox, and not just because of the comeback, breaking the curse, the bloody sock, and all the other Stations of the Cross you Red Sox-haters are sick of hearing about. The team known as the Idiots had scruffy goofballs galore, and seemed to be having so much fun, you could almost forget they were getting paid millions to play ball.
