“The real problem is that Kubrick set out to make a horror picture with no apparent understanding of the genre. Everything about it screams that from beginning to end, from plot decision to the final scene — which has been used before on The Twilight Zone.” Stephen King interviewed for Playboy Magazine, June 1983

The Shining (1980)
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
Screenplay by Stanley Kubrick & Diane Johnson, based on the novel by Stephen King
Produced by Stanley Kubrick
146 minutes (original U.S. theatrical version)/ 144 minutes (U.S. theatrical version)/ 119 minutes (international version)

Debating whether or not Jack Nicholson’s fortissimo performance in The Shining — as a family man who slips into homicidal insanity during his season as caretaker of a haunted hotel — needed to be played at such a high volume is like debating whether Jimi Hendrix really needed to light a perfectly good electric guitar on fire at Monterey Pop. There may have been a perfectly good exercise in gothic terror and things that go bump in the night lurking within Stephen King‘s novel, but the film version was designed and constructed by Stanley Kubrick. Drawn up as a last will and testament to the horror genre as far as the high and mighty Kubrick was concerned, the film inflicts such psychic trauma on the viewer that it needs a joker like Jack in the deck to soften its wicked blow.

Striking ominous chords from the start, schoolteacher Jack Torrance (Nicholson) accepts a six month stint as caretaker of the Overlook Hotel, encouraged that winter’s isolation will give him time to outline a novel. The general manager feels obligated to mention a tragedy in which a previous caretaker killed his wife and two daughters with an axe before shooting himself. Jack responds that his wife — a fan of “ghost stories and horror films” — will be thrilled. The skittish Wendy Torrance (Shelley Duvall) finds the illustrious hotel spooky, while 7-year-old Danny (Danny Lloyd) receives visions of the future that are nothing short of terrifying. A departing cook (Scatman Crothers) confides to the boy that they share a special power his grandmother called ”shining”. Assured there’s nothing  to be scared of, Danny senses something bad lurking at the Overlook, particularly in Room 237.

Warner Bros. president John Calley knew that Stanley Kubrick had an interest in the paranormal and sent him a galleys copy of The Shining in 1977. Ignoring a first draft Stephen King had been contractually guaranteed to author, Kubrick adapted a script with novelist Diane Johnson, who was teaching a course on the gothic novel at UC Berkeley. Certain exterior shots of the Overlook Hotel would be filmed at the Timberline Lodge, on the slopes of Mount Hood in Oregon. The vast majority of the film — including the hedge maze — was manufactured at Elstree Studios outside London. Filming commenced in May 1978 and given Kubrick’s refusal to be hurried through a schedule, didn’t wrap until April 1979. Kubrick tinkered with his film even after it was in U.S. theaters for five days, cutting an epilogue in which the general manager visits Wendy in the hospital.

The film departed so radically from his book  that Stephen King authored the teleplay for a 4-hour mini-series version that aired on ABC in 1997. Kubrick ignored many of the elements King found eerie — an elevator, a firehose, animal shaped shrubs — to focus instead on a child’s subconscious dread of a parent turning into a monster. The magnificence of The Shining is how Kubrick exploits that fear viscerally. Snippets of a blood soaked future flash through Danny’s mind while the corridors of the hotel breathe with living images of the past. Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind provided electronic sound elements, which Kubrick sourced with music from classical composers György Ligeti and Krzysztof Penderecki to create one of the most unnerving film scores ever. Criticized at the time for not watching enough horror movies, the bottom line is that Kubrick’s vision is scary as hell.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 423,027 users: 91% for The Shining

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: N/A

What do you say? The fan trailer below was superior to any I could find from Warner Bros.

“Portmanteau” is French for “coat rack”. Lewis Carroll appropriated the word in 1871 for Through The Looking Glass to explain two words merged into one; “chortle” is a portmanteau Carroll invented, while “Internet”, “blog” and “sexploitation” are three he did not. In the month of January, I’ll take a look at portmanteau films, where we find different coats hanging in the same closet, whether tailored by one filmmaker or the collaborative effort of several.

The Ten (2007)
Directed by David Wain
Written by Ken Marino & David Wain
Produced by Jonathan Stern, Ken Marino, David Wain, Paul Rudd, Morris S. Levy
96 minutes

Few portmanteau films can maintain a steady course throughout, but The Ten is a barrel of monkeys going over Niagara Falls. Ken Marino & David Wain met in 1993 as writers for the MTV sketch comedy series The State, which Wain co-created. The show’s cult following kept it on the air for three short seasons and ultimately, most of the cast formed the core of Reno: 911! on Comedy Central. Marino & Wain continued to write, riffing on the Ten Commandments until they had material to fill the script for a feature film. Producer Jonathan Stern got involved after working with the pair on Diggers, a little seen 2006 drama written by Marino and executive produced by Wain. Their lead actor Paul Rudd also joined as a producer. The Ten got a pass by the major studios, but Danny Fisher of City Lights Media Group and Morris S. Levy of MEGA Films were able to raise roughly $4 million in financing.

Shot in 28 days in Los Angeles, New York and Mexico City, the film was screened for the first time at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, where THINKFilm acquired North American distribution rights and gave it a very limited theatrical release that August in the U.S. The Ten is like a camp for grownups where college humor lives forever. It flounders between obnoxious and tasteless, which would be okay if it were funnier. Using the same blueprint as Wain’s feature film debut Wet Hot American Summer (2001) — the last time Janeane Garafalo was given something to do in a live action movie — The Ten gift wraps Winona Ryder for her best work in decades, maybe ever, with Thou Shalt Not Steal by far the best of the sketches. Augenblick Studios provided the second best piece, an animated one. The rest of the material may bore anybody who’s already declared a major.

Entering stage in front of two giant tablets, Jeff Riegert (Paul Rudd) is harangued by his wife Gretchen (Famke Janssen) as he introduces ten stories inspired by the Ten Commandments. A skydiving mishap confines a man (Adam Brody) to a hole, where celebrity worship goes to his head. A chaste librarian (Gretchen Mol) travels to Mexico, where she takes the Lord’s name in vain by discovering her lover (Justin Theroux) is really Jesus Christ. A doctor (Ken Marino) pays the price for killing a patient as a “goof”. Two black teenagers (Cedric Sanders, Arlen Escapeta) humor their white mother (Kerri Kenney) when she brings home an Arnold Schwarzenegger impersonator (Oliver Platt) to pose as their biological father. Two neighbors (Liev Schreiber, Joe Lo Truglio) covet each other’s goods and compete to acquire the most CAT Scan machines.

Jeff has enough of Gretchen and takes up with a nubile girl (Jessica Alba) he has little in common with. Back to the stories, the imprisoned doctor covets a fellow convict (Rob Corddry) to the chagrin of the cellmate who’s made him his prison bitch. A newlywed (Winona Ryder) becomes so enamored with a ventriloquist’s dummy that she steals it and goes on the run. Dope fiends console the ventriloquist (Michael Zeigfeld) with the tale of a lying rhino bearing false witness to the animals in his neighborhood. Jeff & Gretchen bump into each other and attempt to rekindle their passion, with Jeff’s marriage to Dianne Weist qualifying it as an act of adultery. Finally, a husband (A.D. Miles) rebels against his wife’s desire for him to attend church by starting a club where suburban men can hang out naked and do little else but listen to Roberta Flack on the Sabbath.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 10,291 users: 40% for The Ten

Metacritic “Metascore” average among 22 leading critics: 50 for The Ten

What do you say?

This month’s theme was hatched after someone with better taste than me recommended that I add the 2005 romantic drama Shopgirl to my queue. Looking for films with similar themes, “Department Store”, “Medication” and “Love Triangle” were all considered and rejected before I settled on “May December Romance”. So in the month of December, I’ll take a look at love separated by much more than just six months on the calendar.

Being Julia (2004)
Directed by István Szabó
Screenplay by Ronald Harwood, based on the novella Theatre by W. Somerset Maugham
Produced by Robert Lantos
105 minutes

There’s an ingeniously wicked story about endurance and revenge wrapped inside the extravagant packaging of Being Julia, which boasts one of our Iron Chefs of acting — Annette Bening — slicing and sautéing her way to her much deserved third Oscar nomination. The project originated with W. Somerset Maugham’s 1947 novella Theatre and British producer Mark Milln, who acquired the screen rights and approached Ronald Harwood to write the adaptation. Harwood was not only familiar with the story, but had already considered adapting it into a film.The screenwriter sent his first draft to producer Robert Lantos of Toronto based Serendipity Point Films. Intending to provide Lantos with a writing sample for an open assignment, Harwood not only landed that gig (director Norman Jewison’s final film The Statement) but sold Being Julia as well.

Lantos shared the script with István Szabó, the Hungarian director whom the producer had worked with on the 1999 historical drama Sunshine. Roughly $18 million in financing was secured from investors in the U.S., the U.K., Canada and Hungary and a 54-day shooting schedule commenced in June 2003; the theatre was found in Kecskemet, south of Budapest, where most of the interiors were filmed. Distributed in the U.S. by Sony Pictures Classics, Being Julia has a bit of that artificial, retirement community splendor that practically every Oscar baiting movie from Miramax Films featured in the same period, but once the lavish production design by Luciana Arrighi is filed away, a fanciful and sophisticated comedy about the art of deception takes off. Annette Bening’s comedic gifts are expertly used here and the supporting roles are wound with equal precision.

With the wisdom of her mentor Jimmie Langton (Michael Gambon) in her head, diva of the London stage circa 1938 Julia Lambert (Annette Bening) thrills the audience of her latest play. Feeling exhausted, she musters the energy to waylay her husband, well-intentioned theater producer Michael Gosselyn (Jeremy Irons) into closing the show so she can let herself go over a holiday, eating potatoes and drinking beer. Julia’s vanity makes her oblivious to how this might impact her loyal assistant Evie (Juliet Stevenson) or devoted investor Dolly de Vries (Miriam Marygolyes). She begrudges her husband by accompanying him to lunch with a young American, the son of a friend of a friend looking to get into the accounting side of the theater business. To her amusement, the penniless Tom Fennel (Shaun Evans) exhibits a wanton lust for the actress despite the 20 years separating their ages.

When Julia’s friend Lord Charles (Bruce Greenwood) deflects her romantic overtures, the lonely diva agrees to meet Tom for tea at his flat. With Jimmie in her ear reminding her what a good fling might do for her stagecraft, Julia falls in love with Tom. Rejuvenated, she changes her mind about closing the play and briefly recaptures her shine onstage. The expensive gifts she showers on Tom push him away until he crushes Julia by admitting he’s fallen in love with another woman, a bland but beautiful young actress named Avice Crichton (Lucy Punch). Under the impression she’s still smitten, Tom manipulates Julia into awarding Avice an audition for her new play. During rehearsals, the cunning diva surprises everyone with her generosity toward the ingenue, but on opening night, reminds London who is truly the greatest actress in town with a different kind of performance.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 1,962 users: 71% for Being Julia

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: 65 for Being Julia

What do you say?

As days get shorter, nights get longer and All Hallow’s Eve beckons, I can say that I won’t be wandering the streets dressed as Chewbacca begging for candy. What I can’t say is whether or not at my age, horror movies still have any surprises left in them. In the search for originality, it’d be a good idea to start anywhere but Hollywood. For the month of October, I take a trip around the globe to see what’s scaring some of my favorite countries these days.

The Substitute (2007)
Directed by Ole Bornedal
Written by Ole Bornedal & Henrik Prip
Produced by Michael Obel
93 minutes

It doesn’t quite hold up under a complete engine diagnostic, but as far as a movie that takes you on a spin around the block, The Substitute is a blast. Filmmaker Ole Borendal shot to international acclaim with his 1994 Danish language thriller Nightwatch, sank to anonymity with a poorly received U.S. remake in 1997 and returned home. One of his ideas was a science fiction comedy geared for kids that would be produced in Denmark. Borendal passed his outline for The Substitute to actor/playwright Henrik Prip, an old friend. Revising Prip’s draft, Borendal took the property to producer Michael Obel, whose Copenhagen based Thura Films had collaborated with Borendal on three prior films. Financed for roughly €3.2 million, the genre bender became a hit in Denmark. Sam Raimi and his Ghost House Pictures are in the process of developing a U.S. remake.

The Substitute could be summed up as Fright Night meets The Simpsons if you wanted to stop at two genre related movies or TV shows riffed on for the film’s mad dash to the finish line. When Borendal slows down to let us savor the intelligence and wit of his schoolroom scenes, his movie soars. The half dozen or so 6^th graders in the cast come off like real kids occupying a real classroom, while Paprika Steen is beautifully cast as their nemesis in a role the Danish actress/director devours like candy. The wildly divergent elements — sci-fi, comedy, horror, coming-of-age, melodrama — suggest that appealing to every moviegoer was more of a concern than coherence; the musical cues by composer Marco Beltrami are like Coca Cola shot through a crazy straw. Stylishly shot on a low budget, The Substitute somehow makes those kinks work in its favor.

On a distant planet whose inhabitants know only war, a probe is dispatched to Earth to gather an understanding of love. A silver ball crashes into a chicken farm on the outskirts of Copenhagen and after a luminescent firefly immobilizes the farmer, the critter takes over the body of his snoozing wife. In the city, 12-year-old Carl Osböll (Jonas Wandschneider) copes with the loss of a mother killed in a traffic accident by holding one-sided conversations with her in heaven. Carl’s widowed father Jesper (Ulrich Thomsen) is a sociologist whose latest book deals with the quality that makes human beings unique in the universe: love. At school, Carl receives a new classmate named Rikke (Emma Juel Justesen), who moves in next door with a single mother (Sonja Richter) whom Jesper realizes is a cop only after he disparages the police force.

Alerted by their principal that their teacher has salmonella poisoning, a substitute arrives to a strange chorus of every student’s cell phone ringing at once. Giving the name Ulla Harms (Paprika Steen), Class 6B’s new teacher exhibits whip-like callousness, a mind as vast as a computer and the uncanny ability to read the minds of her pupils. When news of her behavior gets out, concerned parents flock to the school. Their fears are allayed by the appearance of the Education Minister, who vouches for Miss Harms and allows her to win over the adults. Having observed the substitute conjure the government official from a silver ball in her bag, Carl steals several slides from Miss Harms, one of which is a photo that over time is populated by more of Carl’s classmates, all staring up at the sky. Rallying his fellow students, Carl sets out to discover Miss Harm’s plan and stop her.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 452 users: 46% for The Substitute

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: Not available

What do you say?

As days get shorter, nights get longer and All Hallow’s Eve beckons, I can say that I won’t be wandering the streets dressed as Chewbacca begging for candy. What I can’t say is whether or not at my age, horror movies still have any surprises left in them. In the search for originality, it’d be a good idea to start anywhere but Hollywood. For the month of October, I take a trip around the globe to see what’s scaring some of my favorite countries these days.

The Orphanage (2007)
Directed by J.A. Bayona
Written by Sergio G. Sánchez
Produced by Joaquín Padró, Mar Targarona, Álvaro Augustín, Guillermo del Toro
105 minutes

To call The Orphanage a Steven Spielberg ghost story is actually more of a compliment to Mr. Spielberg than to the Spaniards who crafted one of the most thrilling explorations of the afterlife in many years. Sergio G. Sánchez had Peter Pan and The Turn of the Screw in mind when he finished a draft of The Orphanage in 1998. Hoping he might direct it, Sánchez set out to prove himself behind the camera with a 17-minute short, which caught the eye of director J.A. Bayona at a film festival. Asking Sánchez if he had written anything else, the director took The Orphanage to Barcelona based producers Joaquín Padró & Mar Targarona, whose company Rodar y Rodar had employed Bayona in his commercial career. Another call was put in to Guillermo del Toro, who Bayona had met at the 1992 Sitges Fantastic Cinema Festival when del Toro was screening his debut feature Cronos.

With the name “Guillermo del Toro” above the title, Rodar y Rodar was able to raise $4 million in financing, partnering with commercial network Telecinco for Bayona to make his feature film debut. The result became the highest grossing Spanish language film in Spain’s history and was named their entry in the 2008 Academy Awards.  The Orphanage is a jewel among junk in the fantasy and horror genres. Instead of showcasing special effects, the sophistication of old-fashioned storytelling is what shines through here. Sánchez’s intricate puzzle box of a script taps into our mutual fear and our fascination of the unknown, grounded by Belén Rueda playing a modern day Mrs. Darling haunted by the disappearance of children who’ve been taken away to Neverland. In his first feature outing, Bayona juggles magic, fright and melodrama to beautiful and remarkable effect.

7-year-old Simón (Roger Príncep) wakes in the night crying for his mother Laura (Belén Rueda). An only child, Simón both entertains and scares himself with a rich fantasy life that includes a couple of invisible friends. Newly arrived in the 19^th century mansion where she was raised when the house was an orphanage, Laura takes a break preparing an open house for her own orphanage with husband Carlos (Fernando Cayo) to accompany her son to the seashore. After exploring a cave, Simón asks permission to invite home a boy he claims he met in there. Laura receives a visit from an old social worker (Montserrat Carulla) inquiring about Simón, who has not yet been told he is adopted and is receiving treatment for HIV. Waken in the night by strange noises in the garage, Laura finds the social worker snooping around and chases her away.

Simón introduces his mother to a game his invisible friends have invented: hiding something of value and replacing it with clues that lead back to the missing object. Pressed by Laura to stop lying, Simón reveals that it’s his parents who have been lying to him; his new friend Tomás told him so. During the open house, a strange child wearing a sack over his head and the name “Tomás” sewn on his shirt locks Laura in a bathroom. By the time she’s rescued, Simón has vanished. The state has no record of the social worker Laura reported in her home and the police have no clues in the disappearance of her son. Convinced Simón still in the house and that his “friends” know where, Laura invites a medium (Geraldine Chaplin) and a team of parapsychologists to help, fracturing her marriage, but revealing a secret about the Good Shepherd Orphanage and the fate of her son.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 38,413 users: 85% for The Orphanage

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: 74 for The Orphanage

What do you say?

The Bechdel Test was named for Allison Bechdel, whose comic strip Dykes To Watch Out For in 1985 measured the female presence in movies by employing three criteria: Are there two or more women in it, with names? Do the women talk to each other? About something other than a man? Far too many mainstream movies flunk this test, but in the month of September, I take a look at ten recent movies that pass.

Trucker (2009)
Directed by James Mottern
Written by James Mottern
Produced by Celine Rattray, Galt Niederhoffer, Daniela Taplin Lundberg, Scott Hanson
93 minutes

Stripped so bare that any clichés fall by the wayside, Trucker is like a television concept workshopped at the Austin Film Festival into something much greater. Screenwriter James Mottern set up his script — first at The Bob Yari Company, later at Hart-Sharp Entertainment — only to have both companies dissolve before financing could be arranged. With the help of producer Robert Kessel, Mottern got his script to Celine Rattray, Galt Niederhoffer and Daniela Taplin Lundberg, the trinity whose Manhattan based Plum Pictures raised roughly $1.5 million for Mottern to make his directorial debut. Michelle Monaghan read the script in 2006 and stayed attached for the year it took Mottern to find money; she also earned her CDL to prepare for the part. Trucker was shot in Granada Hills and Riverside and along Interstate 5 north of Los Angeles over 18 days.

While Trucker offers a storyline that anyone with a basic cable subscription might feel they’ve seen — female truckers on the History Channel, latchkey kids on the Learning Channel, low key affairs on the Sundance Channel — what’s unique about Mottern’s script is how vividly it captures the world of a woman who spends two weeks of every month on the road and fears of slowing down, even for the son she gave up. The characters are honest, the dialogue terse and the sentiment is earned. In casting Michelle Monaghan in the title role, Mottern had all he really needed to complete a strong debut film; Monaghan seems to have absorbed everyone she’s ever met at a California truck stop into a defining performance. Director of photography Lawrence Sher (Garden State) provided the stark lighting and composer Mychael Danna (500 Days of Summer) furnished the rustic score.

After a roll in the hay with the server from a truck stop diner, owner/operator Diane Ford (Michelle Monaghan) is back on the highway delivering a load to Reno.  She returns to her one bedroom home in the trucking hub of Riverside, California, where her neighbor Runner (Nathan Fillion) invites Diane out for drinking and dancing at the VFW. A jack-of-all-trades in construction, Runner has kept his relationship with Diane strictly plutonic due to the fact that he’s married.  Stumbling home, Diane is met by Jenny (Joey Lauren Adams) and an 11-year-old named Peter (Jimmy Bennett). Girlfriend of Diane’s ex-husband, Jenny is unable to look after Peter while the boy’s father is being treated for colon cancer and she has a funeral to attend. This leaves the couple no choice but leave Peter with his estranged mom for three weeks.

With neither Peter nor his biological mother comfortable with the arrangement, Diane visits her ex-husband Len (Benjamin Bratt) at the hospital but discovers his condition is more serious than Jenny let on. Diane takes her son with her to Oklahoma City, sacrificing her on-time bonus so Peter can enjoy the sights. Trying to be maternal, Diane is unable to reconcile her lifestyle with the demands of parenting and Peter resents her for it. Enrolled in school and Little League baseball in Riverside, Peter adapts to his temporary home, with Runner looking after him while Diane is on the road. The boy begins to see through his mother’s tough veneer and realizes how scared she is. As Len’s health continues to decline, mother and son try to make the best of the hand they’ve been dealt.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 397 users: 57% for Trucker

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: 61 for Trucker

Read Marilyn Ferdinand’s effusive review of Trucker at Ferdy on Films.

Changeling (2008)
Directed by Clint Eastwood
Written by J. Michael Straczynski
Produced by Clint Eastwood, Brian Grazer, Ron Howard, Robert Lorenz
141 minutes

Marketed as more than just “based on a true story” but actually “a true story”, there’s a great piece of pulp fiction lurking beneath Changeling, a breathtaking recreation of early 20^th century Los Angeles and a journey down a dark passage almost too lurid to support the claims of its advertising. That’s the dilemma of this highly touted spec script by J. Michael Straczynski, a career TV writer who was tipped off by a source at City Hall about a long forgotten case of a missing child and massive civic corruption. Ron Howard was eager to direct, until Frost/Nixon caught his attention. Howard’s name on the credits certainly doesn’t buy much critical cache these days, but as directed by Clint Eastwood, Changeling has a jeweler’s eye for historical detail and a rough edge that recalls James Ellroy, not Lifetime Television For Women.

Changeling moves through Los Angeles of yore by street car, where LAPD gun squads mowed through organized crime and women who threatened the department ended up branded as hysterical at best and in mental hospitals at worst. The drama is put into motion by a mass murder so gruesome it might have made Robert Stack piss himself, prime real estate for film noir, but promoted as a true life drama, the film’s intentions seems confused. The cast is superb, with Angelina Jolie’s exquisite features giving a silent film performance in a talkie and Amy Ryan doing work as her two-fisted friend. Unlike L.A. Confidential, the characters are unable to shake themselves out of the rigors of plot, but the fact that Eastwood chalks the sights and feelings of that noir classic so convincingly makes it worth visiting.

On March 10, 1928 in the Lincoln Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles, single mother Christine Collins (Angelina Jolie) is called to cover a shift at Pacific Telephone and Telegraph, postponing an afternoon with her 9-year-old son Walter (Gatlin Griffith). Returning home to find Walter missing, Christine is unable to marshal the full resources of the LAPD, which according to the weekly radio address of a pastor at St. Paul’s Presbyterian named Gustav Briegleb (John Malkovich) ranks as “the most violent, corrupt and incompetent police department this side of the Rocky Mountains”. In July, police captain J.J. Jones (Jeffrey Donovan) notifies Christine that her son has been found alive in Illinois. With the press in attendance as mother and son are reunited at Union Station, Christine does not recognize the boy who gets off the train to be Walter.

Despite assertions by Capt. Jones that Walter’s appearance may have changed due to his ordeal, neither Christine nor her son’s dentist or schoolteacher believe him to be the same boy. When she refuses to accept the LAPD’s conclusion and takes her story public, Jones has Christine interned at a psychiatric hospital. There, a prostitute (Amy Ryan) reveals that most of the women have been committed to keep them from making trouble for the beleaguered LAPD for one reason or another. While Briegleb and powerful attorney S.S. Hahn (Geoff Pierson) rally to her defense, Detective Lester Ybarra (Michael Kelly) begins to unravel the ghoulish case of rancher Gordon Northcott (Jason Butler Harner) who appears to have kidnapped and murdered up to 20 boys before fleeing to Canada. Once captured, Northcott remains dubious as to whether or not Walter was one of his victims.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 191 users: 61% for Changeling

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: 63 for Changeling

What do you say?

The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)
Directed by Martin Scorsese
Screenplay by Paul Schrader, based on the novel by Nikos Kazantzakis
Produced by Barbara De Fina
Running time: 164 minutes

Should I Care?
It was a long shot that Martin Scorsese’s passion project The Last Temptation of Christ — filmed after almost five years of false starts and dashed hopes — was going to live up to its immense expectations. Then on its way to a theater relatively near you, the film ignited a culture battle between a splinter group of evangelical Christians and their old adversary Hollywood. The dust settled some time ago, but the movie that sparked a public outcry is an ambitious failure at best, a laborious art film at worst. Envisioned as a contemporary revitalization of the message of Christ — love for all creatures, even if it means turning the other cheek against your enemy — the disappointment of the picture is that it remains mired in the novel by Nikos Kazantzakis, which was born out of the author’s experience living in Nazi occupied Greece. The film feels lost in that time, deeply philosophical, swimming in abstraction. Instead of making Jesus more palatable, the effect is it more distancing than the filmmakers probably intended.

Willem Dafoe — between Platoon and Mississippi Burning and all but promising to break out as a leading man — was great casting, combing all the vulnerability and strength you’d imagine from a Biblical prophet. Right to left the film is supremely well cast, with Harry Dean Stanton as Paul and David Bowie as Pontius Pilate in particular doing beautiful work. Peter Gabriel composed the musical score, drawing from North African, Turkish, Greek and Armenian instrumentation in keenly subtle, introspective and evocative ways. There are bursts of visual energy scattered through the film, with the camera sweeping through a fig orchard for the memorable opening shot, but much of the 164-running time feels like what it probably was, a long, dry crawl to get the movie — any movie about Jesus — made. As much as inner monologue, theatrical staging and supernatural imagery dull the film, it did make me think longer and deeper about the life and legacy of Jesus than just about any Biblical film ever made.

So, What’s This About?
Awakened from a nap by a powerful migraine, Jesus (Willem Dafoe) experiences physical pain manifested from a spiritual struggle raging inside him. A Jewish carpenter plying his trade building crucifixes for the Roman occupying forces in Israel, he incurs the wrath of Judas (Harvey Keitel), who accuses Jesus of being a disgrace, a “Jew killing Jews”. Self-flagellating himself before carrying wood to the crucifixion site, Jesus is cursed and hit with rocks by the people of Nazareth. The prostitute Mary Magdalene (Barbara Hershey) spits in his face despite the attempts of his mother Mary (Verna Bloom) to protect her son. The execution of Lazurus (Tomas Arana) — nailed to the cross on charges of sedition — tortures Jesus, and he leaves home to determine whether it’s God or the devil plaguing him. He visits Mary Magdalene at a brothel and asks her forgiveness, but after being rejected by Jesus in her youth, Mary is not yet able to forgive him.

On the edge of the desert, Jesus comes to a monastery, where an aging master (Roberts Blossom) invites him to stay the night. The following morning, Jerobeam (Barry Miller) informs Jesus that the man he spoke to had already died; the monk interprets this as a communication from God. Judas intercepts Jesus on orders to kill him, but claiming to have been purified, Jesus is unafraid. Judas asks what the secret is and is told “Pity for man. I feel pity for everything.” In order to understand, Judas accompanies Jesus on his travels. He begins to build followers by proposing that justice is what they’re hungry for. A preacher baptizing Jews in the River Jordan, John the Baptist (Andre Gregory) is convinced that Jesus is a true prophet, but tells him that love is not enough. If a tree is poisonous, you have to take an ax and cut it down. While Judas is also unwilling to turn the other cheek on his enemies, Jesus comes to believe that spiritual salvation is not in war, but in his own self-sacrifice.

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
A psychological examination of the self-doubts that might have plagued Jesus while he was a man, Nikos Kazantzakis’ 1955 novel The Last Temptation survived attempts by the Greek Orthodox Church to ban it the author’s native country. Published in the United States in 1960 under the title The Last Temptation of Christ, the novel was embraced as a counterculture text by Americans moving away from religious dogma and searching for their own spiritual answers. One of the book’s fans was Barbara Hershey, who in 1971 was shooting a B-movie in Arkansas titled Boxcar Bertha when she realized her director was working through some of his own spiritual struggles by making films. Hershey gave him a copy of the book. A slow reader, Martin Scorsese took until the decade’s end to finish it, but was already determined to adapt the book into a film. In 1976, his agent Harry Ufland acquired the film rights from Kazantzakis’ widow. Paul Schrader — who adapted Raging Bull for Scorsese — turned in a first draft in 1981.

Paramount Pictures agreed to finance The Last Temptation of Christ. Scorsese polished the script with Jay Cocks, Aidan Quinn cast as Jesus and sets were constructed in Israel for the production, slated to begin shooting January 1984. But as the budget escalated to $16 million and the studio was pestered with letters from evangelical Christians upset about the book, Paramount pulled the plug. Efforts to set the project up elsewhere faltered for the next three years, until Michael Ovitz — head of Creative Artists Agency — took over as Scorsese’s agent. Universal Pictures quickly agreed to distribute the picture, partnering with Cineplex Odeon to finance the reduced budget of $6.5 million. With Aidan Quinn unavailable, Willem Dafoe took over the role of Jesus and shooting finally commenced October 1987 in Morocco. Met with open hostility by a relatively small number of evangelical and Catholic groups, The Last Temptation of Christ opened in August 1988 to the most intense protests ever leveled at a movie in the United States.

How’d They Do It?
Martin Scorsese heard about The Last Temptation of Christ while attending NYU, but it was after he’d wrapped Boxcar Bertha 1972 that Barbara Hershey handed Scorsese the novel by Nikos Kazantzakis. During the sound mix for Taxi Driver, Scorsese instructed his agent Harry Ufland to negotiate an option for the film rights. Robert Chartoff and Irwin Winkler — producing New York, New York for Scorsese and lining up Raging Bull — would produce and to adapt a script, Scorsese had in mind Paul Schrader. In Schrader on Schrader & Other Writings, the screenwriter recalled, “The greatness of the book is its metaphorical leap into the imagined temptation; that’s what separates it from the Bible and makes it a commentary upon it. If I could have come up with a similar kind of inspiration I would have loved to do something like that myself — if I had written a Christ film from the Bible I would have come up with something similar to keep it fresh, some hook. The great hook of The Last Temptation of Christ is the idea of the reluctant God — the person whom God is imposing himself on — that’s pure Kazantzakis.”

Schrader recalled, “As soon as I read it I knew that it had to open with narration, and with a description of a migraine. And as soon as I knew that, I knew the tone — there is this kid with these vicious headaches and he just doesn’t know what to make of them. It’s a 600 page novel and a 100 page script, so I had to throw out a lot, and then I added new scenes as well. Essentially what I did was to make a long list of everything that happens in the novel, every single event, and then put a check mark beside the events that related to things I was interested in — how they related to the struggle ‘What does God want of me?’; or how they related to the central triangle of the film, which is Jesus, Judas and Magdalene — and just focus on these elements.” Schrader ended up with about thirty-five scenes. He added, “It’s really much more of a psychological film about the inner torments of the spiritual life; it’s not trying to create a holy feeling. That’s what the book is like, that’s what Marty wanted and that’s the script I wrote.”

In March 1982, Schrader turned in a first draft. Jeffrey Katzenberg, head of production at Paramount Pictures, was so eager to work with producer Irwin Winkler that he expressed interest in Scorsese’s passion project. Winkler was dubious that a studio with movies like Grease 2 and Airplane II: The Sequel on its slate would want to make The Last Temptation of Christ. Scorsese recalled, “I had one meeting with Barry Diller, the head of the company, along with Jeff Katzenberg and Michael Eisner, and when I was asked why I wanted to make this film, I replied ‘So I can get to know Jesus better.’” He added, “In a way all my life I wanted to do that: first I was going to be a priest, but it didn’t work out. The idea of loving and forgiving one’s enemies seemed so obvious and Gandhi had shown that it could be put into practice. I felt that maybe the process of making this film would make me feel a little more fulfilled. Their reaction was very sweet, but they didn’t want that answer.” When Scorsese added that he saw the film as a low budget character drama, Paramount opened up its checkbook.

Scorsese, Robert Chartoff & Irwin Winkler landed in Israel for a location scout in January 1983. Art director Boris Leven began designing sets. Casting began that summer. Schrader revealed, “You know, originally this was written, again, with DeNiro in mind. But DeNiro didn’t want to play it, and as he said at the time, he said, ‘No one will believe me in a sheet.’ And I suspect that maybe he was right. Although I would have liked to have seen him take up the challenge.” Christopher Walken, John Malkovich, Jonathan Pryce and Eric Roberts auditioned for the role of Jesus reading opposite Harvey Keitel’s Judas. Aidan Quinn — set to make his screen debut in a teen exploitation flick called Reckless — was the actor both Scorsese and the studio agreed to cast. Once transportation and various permits were factored in, a schedule of 100 days and a budget of $16 million was forecast. Dubious about flagging support at Paramount, as well as the daunting prospect of shooting in Israel, Irwin Winkler dropped out. The studio tapped Jon Avnet to replace him and with a reduced budget of $11.5 million, shooting was scheduled to begin January 1984.

The first religious leader to target The Last Temptation of Christ was Reverend Donald Wildmon, a United Methodist preacher from Tupelo, Mississippi. A group of Lutheran nuns headquartered in Arizona calling themselves The Sisters of Mary — who’d condemned the play Godspell as being blasphemous — also launched a crusade against the film, which the sisters pegged a “gross distortion of the actual Biblical account of Jesus’ life up to the Crucifixion”. By October, 5,000 pieces of mail a week were being delivered to the corporate headquarters of Paramount’s parent company Gulf + Western in New York. Many of the letters suspiciously featured the same passages and postmarks in calling for The Last Temptation of Christ to be stopped from being made. But citing both the escalating production costs and the evangelical outcry coming through the mail, on Thanksgiving Day, Barry Diller summoned Scorsese and Ufland to his office and informed them that Paramount was canceling the production.

Scorsese returned to his low budget roots in New York and directed After Hours (1985), but Last Temptation was still on his mind. In 1986, Harry Ufland made overtures to Island Films, Vestron, United Artists, Imagine Films and Hemdale about financing the picture. Scorsese took a job directing The Color of Money, and was introduced to Paul Newman’s agent, the co-founder and head of Creative Artists Agency, Michael Ovitz. Agreeing to let Ovitz represent him, Scorsese was asked what he wanted most. The director replied, The Last Temptation of Christ. Ovitz turned to Tom Pollock, the new chairman of Universal Pictures. Ovitz suggested that a multi-picture deal with Scorsese would be good for the studio. All Pollock had to do first was figure out how to get Last Temptation made. Universal had acquired a 49.7% stake in Canadian based theater chain Cineplex Odeon. Pollock proposed that if the exhibitor came in as a 50% equity partner to finance The Last Temptation, Cineplex Odeon would attain distribution rights both in Canada and in U.S. markets where they currently had theaters.

In March 1987, Universal gave Scorsese and his wife Barbara De Fina — now producing — the go-ahead to commence location scouting in Morocco for their stripped down version of Last Temptation budgeted at $6.5 million. With Aidan Quinn busy filming Crusoe in the Seychelles Islands, to play Jesus, Scorsese turned to Willem Dafoe, who months earlier had received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for Platoon. Casting director Cis Corman stated, “There was an innocence about Aidan, and a charm, you know, and Willem I always thought of as being stronger and deeply emotional.” In addition to Quinn, a number of cast members assembled for the 1984 version of Last Temptation were not coming back. Paul Sorvino was committed to the CBS cop show The Oldest Rookie; Tomas Arana took the role of Lazurus instead. Kathy Baker was busy shooting Clean and Sober, so the role of Lazurus’ sister Martha went to Peggy Gormley. Sting was busy on an Amnesty International concert tour; David Bowie took the role of Pontius Pilate. To the dismay of the studio, one actor who was back in the movie was Harvey Keitel as Judas, whose Lower East Side accent was too thick for Tom Pollock’s taste.

Recording an audio commentary for the Criterion Collection DVD in 1997, Scorsese stated, “When you saw the old spectaculars, you know, the curtains would open up and a big screen would come on, stereophonic sound would come up and you’d have this extraordinary music, very glorious, and everybody would pretty much speak with a British accent and beautiful poetry in a way, as much as possible, beautifully written dialogue, like in Ben Hur, which is some excellent dialogue. Even in The Robe, the very first Cinemascope film has that. King of Kings, Nicholas Ray’s film, and that sort of thing. These are pictures I always loved as a child. I always wanted to make one. But what I understood — by the time we got to make this picture — what I understood is that if the audience heard that language and heard a British accent, they could be safe, they could turn off, they could say it’s just a Biblical epic movie. Here, if they hear the language spoken by Keitel, by other people in the film, it’s like somebody standing on a street corner and engaging you in this argument.” He added, “The idea was that it should be Jesus like on 8^th Avenue and 42^nd Street, you see.”

After five years of preparations, The Last Temptation of Christ commenced a 55-day shooting schedule October 1987 in Morocco. There was no second unit. Collaborating with director of photography Michael Ballhaus for the third film in a row, Scorsese ended up shooting most of the film on dusty streets or hillsides, or among ruins. The only sets constructed were the monastery huts in the desert; the monastery interiors were built in a stable in the town of Meknes. Jay Cocks believed that the aesthetic actually benefited the picture. “When you’re working at that kind of energy, under that kind of time structure, you really can get a kind of a boldness that might not come through otherwise if you’re a little fatter and a little slower.” Scorsese’s only comments to the press were a brief statement he issued in January 1988 reaffirming his passion for the story both as a filmmaker and Christian, and urging viewers to withhold judgment until they got a look at the film.

Though Scorsese — huddled with editor Thelma Schoonmaker in New York — assembled 40 minutes of footage for Tom Pollack and Universal executive Sean Daniel in January, as the director’s custom, Scorsese did not grant interviews while immersed in post-production. By April 1988, rumors were swirling on talk radio that The Last Temptation of Christ was some kind of sex film about Jesus. Reverend Donald Wildmon was among those evangelical Christians who’d campaigned against the project in 1983 now clamoring to get a look at the film. He procured what he believed was a copy of the shooting script, but was later verified to be an early draft Paul Schrader had written and was used during the audition process in ’83. Wildmon later wrote, “Never in almost 12 years of fighting the media’s bias against Christian values had I ever come across a more blatant attack on Christianity than this movie. I realized that if there ever were a time for Christians to let the Hollywood elite know that the entertainment industry’s constant Christian-bashing should stop, this was it.”

In June, Wildmon was making headlines by demanding that CBS remove three seconds of a Mighty Mouse cartoon by animator Ralph Bakshi that allegedly showed cocaine being snorted. Now Wildmon spearheaded a campaign to punish Universal’s parent company MCA with a boycott by the estimated 330,000 evangelical Christians who subscribed to his American Family Association (AFA) Journal. Ministries like Campus Crusade For Christ, and Focus on the Family that had struck a far more conciliatory tone in the past now sided with Wildmon, believing that Universal had acted in bad faith by barring Christian groups from the screening process. On July 16, about 200 members of a fundamentalist Baptist church in downtown Los Angeles assembled outside Universal Studios with banners and signs picketing the studio. Four days later, a smaller contingent protested outside MCA chairman Lew Wasserman’s home in Beverly Hills. Then on July 20, KKLA-FM talk show host John Stewart organized a rally outside Universal Studios estimated at 2,500 people.

Paul Schrader later commented, “You have to understand that most of the people who attacked the movie didn’t bother to see it. You know, perhaps rightly so because their attack really wasn’t based on the film itself but the idea of the film. There was never an attack on the film where it wasn’t combined with an appeal for money. You know, one of the easiest ways to raise money is to say ‘Hollywood is against our Lord, we are defending our Lord. Please send us money to help us in this fight’. So it was an economic engine for those who were opposed to the film. I’m not saying they had purely cynical motives, but it certainly helps when you can latch onto a cause that not only brings you media attention but it also brings you income.” The original plan was to premiere The Last Temptation of Christ at the New York Film Festival in September. Realizing that whether the protests grew in strength or fizzled out that neither option bode well for the film, Universal chose to open it a month early, in August 1988.

The first exhibitors to back away from The Last Temptation of Christ were the smaller chains: Premiere Theaters in Texas, Wometco Theatres in Florida, Greater Huntington Theatres in West Virginia. Wisconsin’s biggest theater chain Marcus Theatre refused to screen the film. Carmike Cinemas — the nation’s fifth largest chain — declined. Edwards Cinemas, with half the screens in Orange County and another 60 elsewhere in Southern California, announced that they would not screen Last Temptation. General Cinemas — the third largest theater chain, with headquarters in Boston — buckled under pressure from Cardinal Law, the archdiocese who’d called for a boycott of the film. Tom Pollock conceded that part of the problem was that exhibitors were given a window of only two days to see the film, speculate how unpopular it was going to be with their customers and decide whether they wanted to book it or not. Most of the country’s major theater chains — AMC, United Artists, Mann’s — agreed to book the new Scorsese picture in select markets.

The Last Temptation of Christ drew mixed reviews, evoking positive and negative reactions often from the same critic. Janet Maslin, The New York Times: “In contrast with the real spiritual torment conveyed by many of Mr. Scorsese’s other characters, his version of Jesus is a controlled, slightly remote figure, despite the screenplay’s many allusions to his pain. Fortunately, Willem Dafoe has such a gleaming intensity in this role, so much quiet authority, that the film’s images of Jesus are overwhelming even when the thoughts attributed to him are not.” Hal Hinson, The Washington Post: “Watching it, you feel as if you’re trapped inside a hallucination, the meaning of which is only partly comprehensible. Yet you can sense Scorsese’s commitment to his message and his passion for his art in every frame. He is working out of the center of his talents — and his obsessions — as a filmmaker. And undeniably, there’s a prodigious greatness on display here. But just as undeniably, it is failed work.”

On Siskel & Ebert At The Movies, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert strongly endorsed the picture. Siskel commented, “The effect — at least on me — was not to trash Jesus, but rather to make His message more accessible; for if He has doubts and fears, we can be more comfortable with our own. It’s a very simple construction and it works beautifully.” Ebert added, “And this movie is a devout movie that does Jesus the compliment of taking Him more seriously than any other movie ever made, so that’s it’s an ironic, I think, contradiction that people who worship Jesus and haven’t seen the film are attacking this film, which is actually more of a religious experience than any other movie they could think of.” Siskel retorted, “The controversy is quite silly. I mean, people can have their objections based on what they’ve seen, of course. But if they haven’t seen it, then it’s just so silly.” Siskel would later place The Last Temptation of Christ #1 on his list of the year’s best films.

Looking back at the furor in 1997, Scorsese decalred, “We didn’t throw this out into theaters for people to be upset, you know. I believe certain things about Christianity and about Jesus and I think it’s just as valid as the person who believes in the fundamental word of the Gospel. I know lots of priests who are for this picture, lots of priests who are not. I’m a Roman Catholic and very often even though we have stipulations of dogma, there’s lots of discussion, open discussion about the relationship with God, to man, vice versa, etcetera, Jesus, all of this, the nature of Jesus, lots of discussion. It’s discussion.” He added, “But we were very disappointed when a very small percentage of people in America were able to skew it in such a way that a lot of people refused to see the film, and that a place like Blockbuster Video to this day does not stack this picture in its racks. In this country you’re supposed to be able to say what you want to say — it’s a free country to do that — but what they did by being so vociferous about it and so loud about it and so strident about it was to make people afraid to go to the theater to see it.”

Where’d You Get All of This?
Scorsese on Scorsese. Edited by David Thompson and Ian Christie. Faber and Faber (1989)

Schrader on Schrader & Other Writings. Edited by Kevin Jackson. Faber and Faber (1990)

The Last Temptation of Christ. DVD audio commentary by Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader and Jay Cocks and Willem Dafoe. The Criterion Collection (1997)

Hollywood Under Siege: Martin Scorsese, The Religious Right and Culture Wars. By Thomas R. Lindlof. The University Press of Kentucky (2008)

A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001)
Directed by Steven Spielberg
Screenplay by Steven Spielberg, screen story by Ian Watson, based on the short story Supertoys Last All Summer Long by Brian Aldiss
Produced by Kathleen Kennedy, Steven Spielberg, Bonnie Curtis
Running time: 146 minutes

Should I Care?
There are science fiction films that improve with age — Blade Runner tops the list and Donnie Darko is right behind it — and then there’s A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, Steven Spielberg’s ambitious tribute to his friend, the late Stanley Kubrick. The good news for Kubrick fans is that unlike the master filmmaker’s aborted Napoleon project circa 1970, we’ll never have to ponder what Kubrick’s future faerie tale would have looked like had he lived long enough to figure out the story and direct it himself. The bad news is that despite the streamlined elegance of its industrial look — production designer Rick Carter and his team were nominated by the Art Directors Guild for an Excellence in Production Design Award, while Dennis Muren, Scott Farrar, Stan Winston and Michael Lantieri were robbed of an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects — the conceit of an artificial boy who longs to be real after his adoptive mother reads him Pinocchio is artificially sweetened at best, tedious at worst.

The landscape A.I. spirits us across — an energy efficient single family home, an anti-robot carnival of destruction, a sin city over the Delaware River, the ruins of a Manhattan deluged by the rising tides — is as visually compelling as any you’d expect from the greatest director of boys’ adventure movies of all time. But Spielberg’s screenplay spins its wheels trying to engender sympathy for an artificial boy and validate its childish perceptions of the world. The script squanders opportunities to fully explore humanity and the direction we’re headed and seems devoted instead to pushing the comforts of fantasy. The result is less E.T. The Extra Terrestrial and more Harry and the Hendersons. Jude Law fills in for Bigfoot as comic relief, but doesn’t seem to even be acting in the same movie as the hapless Haley Joel Osment, who does the best he can with a role that would have better realized fifteen years later as a completely digital character. The vibrant and penetrating musical score by John Williams is perfect as is.

So, What’s This About?
In an unspecified future, greenhouse gases have melted the polar ice caps, submerged the coastal regions of the world and displaced millions of people. To assist mankind with labor without draining resources, artificial beings referred to as “mecha” have been created. Unlike organic beings, mecha require no food, no sleep and will never grow old. The latest mechas even look human, but lack our emotional responses. Professor Hobby (William Hurt) challenges his colleagues at New Jersey based Cybertronics to develop a mecha child with the capacity to love, the ideal product for families unable to acquire a license for children. Hobby approves a test family consisting of Cybertronics employee Henry Swinton (Sam Robards) who views the mecha child as something of a toy. His wife Monica (Frances O’Connor) grieves the loss of their biological son Martin (Jake Thomas), suspended in a cryogenic state for the last five years while doctors attempt to cure a rare illness.

The arrival of the artificial surrogate David (Haley Joel Osment) upsets Monica at first, but after growing attached to the mecha, she chooses to initiate its imprinting protocol, emotionally coupling David to her forever. When Martin recovers and returns home, David finds the love of his mother elusive. Sibling rivalry increases tensions in the Swinton home and David is soon seen as a threat. Rather than send him to Cybertronics for destruction, Monica sets David loose with a walking and talking teddy bear (voiced by Jack Angel) for companionship. David falls in with a group of castaway mecha including Gigolo Joe (Jude Law), a pleasure model framed for murder by the husband of one of his clients. The pair escapes a Flesh Fair, a futuristic tractor pull where humans celebrate the destruction of artificial beings. Having been read Pinocchio by his mother, David believes he can win her love back by finding the Blue Fairy, who will turn him into a real boy. With Joe’s help, David embarks on a journey to meet his creator.

Who Made It?
Supertoys Last All Summer Long was a short story by British science fiction writer Brian Aldiss published in 1969. Four years later, Aldiss co-authored a history of sci-fi titled Billion Year Spree that included a flattering reference to Stanley Kubrick, the master filmmaker of Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange. Having settled in the village of St. Albans north of London, Kubrick invited Aldiss to lunch in 1976 and latched onto the idea of adapting Supertoys into a feature film. Aldiss agreed to sell Kubrick the film rights in 1982 and worked with him on a screenplay, but when Kubrick insisted on incorporating elements of Pinocchio to tell the story of an android yearning to be a real boy, the partnership stalled. Failing to respark their collaboration in 1990, Kubrick turned to sci-fi author Ian Watson to draft a story based on Aldiss’ concepts. Working with Watson, Kubrick fashioned a 90-page treatment for a “robot version of Pinocchio”, which Kubrick was calling A.I.

Kubrick commissioned hundreds of illustrations from graphic artist Chris Baker and even shot some test footage, but unable to make the film with the technology that existed at that time, the director put A.I. on the shelf. Jurassic Park compelled Kubrick to revive the project in 1993, but he convinced himself that the ideal director for the material would be Steven Spielberg, who Kubrick had discussed A.I. with as early as 1984. Envisioning a Stanley Kubrick production of a Steven Spielberg film, Kubrick temporarily got the director on board before Spielberg insisted that Kubrick direct A.I. himself. Kubrick’s death in March 1999 threatened to keep A.I. on the drawing board, until his brother-in-law Jan Harlan and widow Christiane proposed to Warner Bros. revive A.I. with Spielberg at the helm. The finished product — with Spielberg adapting Kubrick’s treatment and designs into his own script — would sharply divide critics and moviegoers when released two years later.

How’d They Do It?
In an interview with BBC News in September 2001, Brian Aldiss recalled the genesis of Supertoys Last All Summer Long, published in Harper’s Bazaar 32 years previous. “I wrote that story in 1969 when computers were not the household toys, pleasures and working tools they are now — they were lodged in laboratories. At that time possibly, because of their novelty, there was a theory that the human brain was roughly like a computer; it calculated in the same way and moreover the dreams we dreamt at night were indications that the computer was downloading data. If that was the case, it was quite easy to imagine that one might create an android boy and program him to believe (a) that he was a real boy, and (b) he loved his mother. The gist of the story is that however the boy android David tried to please his mother, he could never do it — the essence of the story is about love and the failure of love. And that was what I think attracted Stanley Kubrick to the story.”

Aldiss made a passing reference to the master filmmaker in a sci-fi history he wrote with David Wingrove titled Billion Year Spree, in which Kubrick was described as “a great science fiction writer of the age”. Kubrick invited the author to the first of several lunches in 1976. In conversations about what type of movie Aldiss thought would be successful, the author suggested Martian Time-Slip by Philip K. Dick. Kubrick was interested in Supertoys and in 1982 purchased the film rights. By November ‘82, Aldiss went to work with the director at his estate in St. Albans, attempting to expand the 2,000-word short story into a screenplay. Aldiss recalled, “Kubrick always told me that if you had a six or eight-part episodic structure, then you’d got the film made. He kept saying to me, ‘Look, Brian, forget about narrative. What we want are six non-submersible units.’ That was his philosophy. You can really see it working well in 2001, with these disparate elements that don’t quite connect, and that’s what gives the film its mystery.”

Aldiss continued, “You have to work to make the connection yourself; the most brilliant one, of course, being when the ape-man throws the femur up into the air and Kubrick cuts to the space vehicle. If ever you want to prove Kubrick’s genius, then you only need look at the juxtaposition of those two shots.” But Aldiss was uncomfortable with where Kubrick wanted to go with the source material. “Stanley was set upon making a modernized version of Pinocchio in which David the android boy meets the Blue Fairy and becomes transformed into a real boy. I hoped that Stanley would create another future myth and not really look back. In the end we weren’t seeing eye to eye and things were not moving forward and I got the push.” In 1990, Kubrick phoned Aldiss and briefly invited him back in an effort to jumpstart Supertoys. Kubrick had arrived on the melting of the polar ice caps and the flooding of New York as a non-submersible unit, but Aldiss’ unwillingness to work the Blue Fairy into the script put him on the outs.

British science fiction author Ian Watson then entered the picture. In a memoir published in The New York Review of Science Fiction ten years later, Watson recalled, “Early in 1990, in my cottage in a little English village sixty miles north of London, the phone rang. Stanley Kubrick’s assistant, Tony Frewin, introduced himself and said that Stanley wished to talk to me. Why me? It transpired that Tony had phoned various specialist SF book dealers to ask who they rated as a writer with lots of bright ideas, and several of my story collections, such as Slow Birds and Evil Water, were duly delivered to Stanley. A few hours later the courier arrived and handed over a package containing nine sheets of flimsy fax paper bearing the text of Super-Toys Last All Summer Long, faded as if retrieved from an ancient file.” Describing the movie Kubrick had in mind as “a picaresque robot version of Pinocchio”, Watson was put under contract to Warner Bros. and from May 1990 to January 1991, huddled with Kubrick to produce a 90-page treatment for A.I.

As early as 1984, Kubrick confided in Steven Spielberg his plans for A.I., which inched closer to reality once he saw the advances in visual effects that Industrial Light & Magic made in 1993 with Jurassic Park. Kubrick shot test footage of oil rigs in the North Sea, imagining that he could digitally replace them with skyscrapers. Discussing A.I. in a behind-the-scenes featurette for the film’s DVD release, Spielberg revealed, “Stanley investigated several things. He actually built a complete mechanical child that was a complete disaster. The mechanics of what we can do today cannot simulate the liquid movements of let’s say of computer graphics animation, but CGI has also not yet reached a state of the art where it can replicate a human being. We mixed it a bit in Jurassic Park where the animals were CGI and the people of course were not and Shrek is all CGI and that’s an art form onto itself, but to put a digital boy in amongst a cast of human beings photographed on 35 millimeter, we’re still years away from that technologically.”

In 1994, Kubrick summoned Spielberg to St. Alban’s for a chat. Interviewed by Mark Kermode for The Culture Show in November 2006, Spielberg revealed, “He didn’t want to make A.I. I mean, he developed it, for himself and then he said, ‘This is more you than me.’ And he began to produce it for me to direct. We actually made a deal with Warner Bros. for Stanley to produce it, for me to direct it based on Stanley’s script with Ian Watson. And it was great. It was going to be a great relationship and then I kept getting faxes from Stanley all night long.” Spielberg added, “And the amount of information he was giving me, including shots and where the camera should go was so extraordinarily precise and detailed that I finally called him on the phone and said, ‘Stanley, I can’t direct this movie. These faxes are crying out to me to say to you, you have to direct it. This is your movie.’ And I withdrew from the project.” Kubrick put A.I. on the backburner once again and began a five-year odyssey to get Eyes Wide Shut on the screen. It would be Kubrick’s final film.

Kubrick passed away suddenly at his home in March 1999. Several months later, Kubrick’s wife Christiane and his associate producer Jan Harlan contacted Warner Bros about reviving A.I. under a new director. Harlan recalled, “It simply would have disappeared into the archives if Steven Spielberg had not taken it.” With an April 2000 start date for Minority Report looming, the director poured over Watson’s 90-page treatment and some 600 storyboards that graphic artist Chris Baker had drawn for Kubrick.“So many of the visual iconic moments in the film were based on ideas that Stanley had — like the Flesh Fair, the moon with the gondola underneath it, the whole concept of Teddy, which was part of the original Brian Aldiss five-page short story that he wrote back in the late 1970s. But Stanley left behind boxes of his notes and I could read his handwriting because I had eighteen years of learning how to read his faxes mostly in longhand and it was just interesting little tidbits and not really philosophical but mainly ways that he wanted the picture to feel and look.”

In March 2000, it was announced that Spielberg had chosen to push Minority Report back a year to direct A.I. from a screenplay he’d adapted himself. Budgeted at roughly $90 million, shooting commenced that August. Other than a jaunt up to Gresham, Oregon to film the forest scenes, A.I. was mostly shot over 68 days on the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank. For a 2001 TV documentary produced in the U.K. titled Steven & Stanley, the director confided, “The hard thing about making A.I.: I didn’t want to lose myself and you know, just slave and service Stanley’s vision. I had to put as much of myself in this project as I could to also make it my while.” He added, “Stanley wanted to put the Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio story in synchronocity with Brian Aldiss’ story of David, Monica and Henry. As a matter of fact, Brian Aldiss called me when he found out that I was in the picture to beg me to drop the entire Pinocchio idea. He said, ‘Pinocchio’s one story and my story is another. You should make my story and not Pinocchio’s story.’ And I explained to him that I was really making Stanley’s story at this point.”

Opening June 2001, A.I. divided critics almost evenly as a movie could. A.O. Scott, The New York Times: “A.I. is the best fairy tale — the most disturbing, complex and intellectually challenging boy’s adventure story — Mr. Spielberg has made. Once again he asks us to identify with a young boy, exiled from the only home he knows and forced to find his way in a strange and unsympathetic world.” Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun Times: “Greatness and miscalculation fight for screen space in Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence, a movie both wonderful and maddening. Here is one of the most ambitious films of recent years, filled with wondrous sights and provocative ideas, but it miscalculates in asking us to invest our emotions in a character that is, after all, a machine.” Marc Savlov, The Austin Chronicle: “What is of note is the fact that what we’re left with — Kubrick or no — is a muddled, messy disaster of a film, something that seems more like a drastically edited miniseries, cut down to incomprehensible levels with whole sections missing. You may wonder what’s going on more that once. You’re not alone.”

With box office receipts leveling off at $78.6 million in the United States, A.I. was a blockbuster overseas, grossing $157.3 million. Confiding to Mark Kermode five years later, Spielberg addressed the criticism heaped on the film, namely, that it was either too long, too candy coated or both. “All the blame I get for destroying Stanley’s vision are scenes that Stanley actually came up with. You know, the scenes that people can’t believe Stanley conceived — and would have directed himself — are the scenes I’m most credited with spoiling A.I. You know, the whole ending, where after, where David and Teddy are actually rescued underwater, and when it turns to ice and brought into their own future of super mecha. This was Stanley and Ian’s treatment. It was their 97 page treatment that I adapted into my screenplay.” He admitted, “But I think what’s also interesting is I think one of the things that scared Stanley away from A.I. was it was too much of a film for me and too little of the kind of movie he is known for, as a great cineaste.”

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Plumbing Stanley Kubrick” By Ian Watson. New York Review of Science Fiction, May 2000

“Regarding Stanley” By Rachel Abramowitz. The Los Angeles Times, 6 May 2001

“The Steven & Stanley Story” By Jenny Cooney Carrillo. Urban Cinefile, 6 September 2001

“Brian Aldiss: Kubrick, Spielberg and Me” By Matthew Sweet. The Independent, 14 September 2001

“The Mind Behind AI” BBC News. 20 September 2001

Steven and Stanley (2001). Kensington Television Productions

A.I. Artificial Intelligence: Widescreen Two-Disc Special Edition. DreamWorks Video (2002)

“An Interview with Steven Spielberg” By Mark Kermode. The Culture Show, 4 November 2006

Laurel Canyon (2003)
Written by Lisa Cholodenko
Directed by Lisa Cholodenko
Produced by Antidote Films/ Kuleshov Productions
MPAA rating: “R for sexuality, language and drug use”
Running time: 103 minutes

Should I Care?
Watching Lisa Cholodenko’s sophomore film the year it was released, I didn’t care much for it. Laurel Canyon never picks up the gauntlet thrown down by Pulp Fiction, L.A. Confidential or Boogie Nights, the modern day standard bearers of pop culture soaked decadence in the City of Angels. In a bummer, the characters actually seem intelligent and reasonably well-intentioned enough to keep from selling their souls to the devil. But what the movie lacks in visceral thrills it makes up for in a kind of finely honed reserve, recalling Five Easy Pieces or Shampoo, two ‘70s classics Cholodenko and her collaborators seem to be channeling here. Laurel Canyon is much better than generally given credit for at the time, a well crafted and strongly performed drama. This is one movie where the devil is definitely in the details.

The chief reason to see Laurel Canyon is Frances McDormand playing a record producer willing to own up to her failings while everyone around her traffics in bullshit. This includes her son, played by Christian Bale, before his earnestness as a master thespian got a bit ridiculous. Here, Bale’s scenes opposite McDormand are tense and poignant and ring true. Natascha McElhone and Alessandro Nivola — lonesome presences in the movies these days — are both insatiably watchable in supporting roles. Tip toeing away from exploitation, Cholodenko still delivers one of the most intensely erotic scenes between two clothed actors I’ve seen. Cinematographer Wally Pfister and production designer Catherine Hardwicke lend Laurel Canyon an exquisitely detailed look, one that needs a second viewing to appreciate.

So, What’s This About?
Leaving their lives in the Ivy League to begin promising careers in Los Angeles, Sam (Christian Bale) is to start a residency in psychiatry at a mental hospital, while his fiancée Alex (Kate Beckinsale) is finishing her Ph.D in genomics. They land at the Laurel Canyon enclave of Sam’s mother Jane Bentley (Frances McDormand), a record producer with a history of soured relationships, including the one with her son. Sam was under the impression that she’d vacated to her beach house in Malibu, but arrives to discover his uninhibited mom smoking a bong with four British pop rockers. Not only is Jane still at work on their album, she’s shacked up with the band’s charismatic frontman (Alessandro Nivola), a singer/songwriter her son’s age.

While Sam rejects the free wheeling environment he was raised and doesn’t approve of his mother’s choices, Alex loses interest in her dissertation and sits in on the band’s recording sessions, smoking some weed with Jane and being solicited for her musical opinion. Instead of looking for a house to rent, Alex begins spending more time with Jane and is drawn into that world. Meanwhile, an Israeli colleague named Sara (Natascha McElhone) starts giving Sam rides to work. His controlled, decisive nature attracts her, but Sam refuses to indulge his physical urges for his fellow psychiatrist. Realizing how distanced he’s become from his girlfriend, Sam heads to the band’s record release party at the Chateau Marmont. There, he finds out how deep his girlfriend has fallen into his mother’s orbit.

Who Made It?
Lisa Cholodenko grew up in the San Fernando Valley. Exposed to the experimental film program at San Francisco State as an undergrad, she lucked into a job as a post-production assistant on Boyz N the Hood and worked as an assistant editor on Used People. Cholodenko was accepted into the graduate film program at Columbia University, where director Milos Forman became one of her mentors. She wrote, produced and directed two acclaimed short films — Souvenir (1994) and dinner party (1997) — that dealt with the fractured love lives of female couples. Her feature film writing and directing debut High Art earned Cholodenko the Waldo Salt Screenwriting award at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival and revitalized the career of Patricia Clarkson, who co-starred with Ally Sheedy and Radha Mitchell.

Editor Amy Duddleston was cutting High Art with Cholodenko when she brought in Joni Mitchell’s 1970 LP “Ladies of the Canyon”. Inspired by what the songwriter’s life might have been like in that place and time, Cholodenko wrote a script, hoping to jump into her next film quickly. Reteaming with High Art producers Jeffrey Levy-Hinte and Susan Stover, the project took four years to get cast and financed. The director ultimately met Frances McDormand — game for a role that called for nudity — and once the Oscar winner was cast, Christian Bale and Kate Beckinsale became interested. Levy-Hinte raised roughly $5 million in financing and was able to accommodate McDormand’s family schedule as well as the Cannes Film Festival, with Laurel Canyon finished in time to screen at the Director’s Fortnight in May 2002.

How’d They Do It?
Lisa Cholodenko elaborated on the origin of her sophomore feature film. “I think the first germ of the story came when I was finishing up High Art. I was in the editing room in New York with my editor Amy Duddleston. We’d been cutting for a long time and to keep our energy up we took a lot of breaks and listened to a lot of music. One morning, Amy brought in the Joni Mitchell record ‘Ladies of the Canyon’. I hadn’t heard that record in a long time. We listened to it beginning to end. I was looking at the cover — a painting that Joni Mitchell did of a hillside up in Laurel Canyon where she lived at the time. We started spinning a yarn about people who lived up there: what their lives were like, what Joni Mitchell’s life must have been like.”

She continued, “Laurel Canyon is a strange island in the middle of Los Angeles: it’s a kind of time warp wedged between Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley. It has its own history and morality and culture that’s distinctive from anywhere else in L.A. It has a kind of hippie quality and it also has a timeless quality. It has a lawless quality to it as well, which seems to change each decade. Rumor has it was an outpost for Hollywood players to conduct their clandestine affairs and in the ‘60s and ‘70s it had the rock ‘n roll drug culture which gave way to a more seedy hard drug/ porno culture — the Boogie Nights era. Then recently there was a resurgence of the younger movie industry and nouveau music culture. I think it’s always been attractive to people who are less conventional or are interested in being identified with a culture that is less conventional.”

Cholodenko hoped to get her second feature off the ground as soon as possible. That process took four years. She recalled, “And I’d say those four years were about half of the writing stage. I’m a slow writer and I’m a detailed writer and I had to work in between drafts, I guess. I went and directed some television and did other rewrite jobs and whatever. So it was about two and a half years later and we were ready to try to get this film made and October Films — who originally had the movie, was developing it before it had become USA Films — and by the time that we were sort of ready to get it rolling, USA not only in trouble and soon to become Focus Features, but decided to put it in turnaround. They wanted to do much, you know, sort of broader and bigger films.”

After USA Films officially lost interest in the summer of 2001, the prospect of Laurel Canyon being produced was looking unlikely. “Jeffrey Levy-Hinte and Susan Stover and I, we were moving on from High Art to sort of create an environment we had created on High Art, which was done independently and anyway, we realized that was how we were going to have to go and around that time, there was supposed to be a strike in the industry, a writers strike and an actors strike. So not only were we kind of at a stalemate with sort of getting studio money to make this movie, but we were figuring we’d kind of missed the window of opportunity because everyone was shutting down and there was no cast that was going to work because they were going to strike and the rest of it, so it was a pretty dark season with Laurel Canyon for a while.”

Fortunately, the threatened 2001 actors strike never materialized. Then, the Academy Award winning Best Actress of Fargo read Cholodenko’s script and wanted to meet her. Frances McDormand recalled at the time, “I had this general idea that I wanted to do nudity. I’m 45 years old. A couple of years ago I decided, ‘All right, it’s time.’ I wasn’t really interested in that when I was 25. But now that I’m 45, I’m kind of pleased with myself.” She added, “There’s nothing wrong with middle-aged people expressing their sexuality on film. Lisa wrote a great part for a 45-year-old woman. It’s not because I get to be nude in a swimming pool, but because she’s an interesting person. Lisa was really conscientious in making her three-dimensional.” Once McDormand came aboard, other actors suddenly got interested.

Christian Bale appraised his collaboration with Lisa Cholodenko by stating, “The story seemed to be so highly personal to her. From working with Lisa, I know she has a great deal going on internally — always — even if she doesn’t think she’s communicating it. I found her face to be very easily readable, and I found myself kind of looking at her rather than listening to her. I would imagine that her real enjoyment comes through the writing of a film. I think she’s really more interested in the whole emotional side of it. You get some directors who fall in love with the whole technical side of it and the physical staging of things, but she is definitely someone whose first love is the whole emotional side of what’s happening.” With a cast finally coming together, producer Jeffrey Levy-Hinte’s Antidote Films was able to raise around $5 million in financing.

Director of photography Wally Pfister — heavily in demand after shooting Memento and Insomnia for Christopher Nolan — signed up to work with Lisa Cholodenko on Laurel Canyon. He recalled, “From the outset, Lisa and I had a common language that we wanted to use in the storytelling of this film. It was based in par on films of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, by great filmmakers like Mike Nichols, Hal Ashby and Robert Altman. Not so much in the look of the films, but more in the tone and spirit of the storytelling.” Cholodenko confessed, “The big inspiration for this film was The Graduate. And another film I adore is Five Easy Pieces. Those are two classic films of young-person-on-existential-journey to deal with family, and the trappings of expectation, and sort out their identity on their own terms, and those kinds of things.”

Jeffrey Levy-Hinte owned a property in Santa Monica Canyon designed by architect Richard Neutra that he was planning to tear down and restore to its original architecture; production designer Catherine Hardwicke helped transform the location into Jane’s house. In the search for the music Jane would been working on, music supervisor Karyn Rachtman and Cholodenko settled on two songs written by Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse: “Someday I Will Treat You Good” and “Shade & Honey”. Alessandro Nivola lent his vocals to the tunes, while Lou Barlow, Imaad Wasif and Russ Pollard of Folk Implosion were cast as his bandmates. Production was scheduled to accommodate Frances McDormand, who lives in New York with husband Joel Coen and their (at that time) 8-year-old son. Laurel Canyon was finished in time for it to screen in the Director’s Fortnight of the 2002 Cannes Film Festival.

While the filmmakers beat the clock getting Laurel Canyon finished, critics praised the film’s star and little else. J. Hoberman, The Village Voice: “The spectacle of pretty people floating languidly across the screen notwithstanding, Laurel Canyon is short on conviction and long on contrivance. McDormand, however, has a ball.” Manohla Dargis, The Los Angeles Times: “There wasn’t a moment in the film that I didn’t enjoy, but neither was there anything that got my mind or heart racing. Cholodenko is clearly talented but it’s less clear whether she’s afraid to push harder or whether this is as far as she can go.” Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun Times: “Not a successful movie — it’s too stilted and pre-programmed to come alive — but in the center of it McDormand occupies a place for her character and makes that place into a brilliant movie of its own.”

Following a screening at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival, Sony Pictures Classics acquired domestic distribution rights to Laurel Canyon. A month later, Good Machine picked up international rights, but when the film opened March 2003 in the United States, it would tally only $3.6 million at the box office, adding $748,847 overseas. Cholodenko found the reaction very familiar. “What I find with High Art is people tell me they enjoy it a lot on the second and third viewing and I think with this film it’s sort of the same. There’s a lot of detail and I think it’s fun to go back and discover it after you’ve already seen the film, you’d be able to focus on different characters doing the different plotlines and stuff like that. The detailey stuff. That’s what I like in films. I’m kind of a detailey person.”

Where’d You Get All of This?
Laurel Canyon – Press Kit

“Lisa Cholodenko” By Jennifer M. Wood. MovieMaker, 21 March 2003

“Interview with Lisa Cholodenko” By Marty Mapes. Movie Habit, 3 April 2003

“Lady of the Canyon” By Steve Bloom. High Times, 4 April 2003

Laurel Canyon. DVD audio commentary with Lisa Cholodenko. Sony Pictures Home Entertainment (2003)

“Cinematography Serves the Story” By Jennifer M. Wood. MovieMaker, 3 February 2007