Nowhere In Africa (2001)
Screenplay by Caroline Link, based on the novel by Stefanie Zweig
Directed by Caroline Link
Produced by Constantin Film/ MTM Cineteve/ Bavaria Film International/ Media Cooperation One
Running time: 141 minutes

So, What’s This About?
In January 1938, Walter Redlich (Merab Ninidze) lies stricken with malaria in a remote farmhouse in Rongai, Kenya. A lawyer disbarred from practice in his native Germany because he is a Jew, Walter is nursed back to health by a benevolent Luo cook named Owuor (Sidede Onyulo) and a neighboring farmer named Susskind (Matthias Habich), a Jew who had the foresight to make his exodus from Germany when emigrants could still get out with their money. Walter urgently sends for his pampered wife Jettel (Juliane Köhler) and 6-year-old daughter Regina (Lea Kurka) to flee their home in Leobschütz and join him at the arid farm he does his best to manage.

Regina bonds with Owuor and immerses herself in the customs of her new home. Her mother rejects the trappings of Kenya, hoping for a return to their cozy life, until news from Germany and of family still trapped there turns grim. When war breaks out, the British briefly intern Walter and Susskind at a camp for enemy aliens, while Jettel and Regina are housed with the German women and children at the posh Hotel Norfolk in Nairobi. Walter loses his job and home, but his wife’s liaison with a British officer gets him hired to run a lush farm in Ol Joro Orok. The opportunity enables the Redlichs to send Regina to boarding school, but adopting the farming life in a faraway land continues to strain their marriage.

Who Made It?
Stefanie Zweig spent 40 years as the arts editor of a daily newspaper in Frankfurt, Germany. She lost her job in 1988 — at the age of 56 — but buoyed by the success of a children’s book published to acclaim in 1994, Zweig turned her attention to a memoir chronicling her childhood as a German Jewish émigré growing up on the farms of Kenya. Nowhere in Africa would have no difficulty finding a publisher and arrived in bookstores in 1995. One of its earliest admirers was producer Peter Herrmann and his production company MTM Cineteve, which snagged the film rights as the novel went on to become a bestseller in Germany.

Three years later, Herrmann hooked German director Caroline Link — whose 1996 debut film Beyond Silence was nominated for an Academy Award — to adapt a screenplay and direct. In 1999, Herrmann and Link traveled to Kenya to visit the locations of Zweig’s coming-of-age story. They would reject pleas to shoot Nowhere in Africa in the film-friendly confines of South Africa and from January to April of 2001, marshal an $8 million budgeted production in Kenya. The German/Swahili/English language picture would become the highest grossing German film of 2002 and in March 2003, win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film.

How’d They Do It?
In June 1938, Stefanie Zweig arrived in Rongai, Kenya. Her 34-year-old father had been stripped of his job as an attorney and notary public by the Nazis and chose to immigrate to Kenya because the entry permit was only £50 per head. Without knowing anything about crops or cattle, he was managing a farm. With the help of the Jewish community in Nairobi, he sent for his wife and daughter. Zweig wrote, “Having learned Swahili with the speed and eagerness of a child longing to talk to people other than her parents, I loved everything about Kenya. I loved its beauty, sights and sounds, the animals and birds — but most of all the gentleness of the African heart, the people’s wit and their laughter.”

Zweig spent four decades as the chief editor of the arts section of the Abendpost-Nachtausgabe in Frankfurt. Yearning to be an author, she found solace writing children’s books in her spare time. She recalled her Kenyan experience with A Mouth Full of Earth in 1994, winning National Geographic Society’s best juvenile book in The Netherlands. Zweig then decided it was time for her to tell the mature version of her story. “I thought to myself, ‘You really are a fool to waste all your life in a children’s book, why don’t you tell the true story?’” She added, “I wrote the book in respect for my father, who told me very early in life not to hate, he taught me tolerance and not to give way to sentiments. I loved him very much and I wanted it to be his book.”

In 1993, producer Peter Herrmann helped establish (with Andreas Bareiss) the German television and film production company MTM Cineteve. MTM would produce Romuald Karmakar’s The Deathmaker, Germany’s submission for the 1997 Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. Two years previous, Herrmann was researching African ethnology when he came upon Stefanie Zweig’s then little known memoir Nowhere in Africa. Herrmann recalled, “I bought it very fast, and then the book became a bestseller so I was able to raise money for this movie. Then it was also difficult to find a director who was bankable enough to finance such a film. And then I met a young director, Caroline Link, and thought, ‘She is great, but nobody knows her.’”

Caroline Link grew up in Bad Nauheim, the town just north of Frankfurt where Elvis Presley served his Army stint. She followed high school with an internship at Bavaria Film Studios in Munich and study at the nearby University of Television and Film. Link wrote and directed the 45-minute short The Days of Summer there before graduating in 1990. She entered the German film industry as an assistant director and screenwriter-for-hire. Her critically acclaimed feature film debut — the drama Beyond Silence (1996) — would be Germany’s submission to the Academy Awards in 1998. Link’s sophomore film Annaluise & Anton (starring Juliane Köhler) was equally well received by Germans in 1999.

By the time Caroline Link was shooting Annaluise & Anton, Peter Herrmann deemed her name bankable enough to send Link a memoir he was seeking to produce. Link recalled, “When I first read the book Nowhere in Africa I was fascinated by it. I was caught up by the story it told of a woman from a protected Jewish family who suddenly has to live in the middle of the African desert. I’ve always loved to discover new worlds with my movies, but I remember thinking to myself: ‘Wow, can I do this? Will I really be able to shoot a movie in Kenya?’” Link agreed to adapt a screenplay and direct. In 1999, Herrmann and Link traveled to Kenya to inspect the locales described by Stefanie Zweig in her story.

The trip left little doubt among the filmmakers that in order to remain authentic to Zweig’s memoir, Nowhere in Africa had to be filmed in Kenya. Peter Herrmann mused, “People like to watch films about Africa. But I think that many films about Africa communicate the wrong things. Our decision to film in Kenya was kind of a risk. Kenya’s infrastructure is terrible. It’s difficult to organize things. Everyone in the industry told us to film it in South Africa. All films about Africa are made there. If the Americans — Hollywood — make a movie set in Kenya, they film it in South Africa. They can’t imagine organizing such a complicated thing as a big movie in a country like that and keeping costs low.”

Herrmann added, “Caroline and I were convinced right from the beginning that it was our desired aim to represent things the way they really are. And I think it makes a big difference that the Africans that are shown really are Kenyans, Kikuyus or Pokots or whatever and that they aren’t just South Africans playing them.” In the spring of 2000, Link began assembling a cast. Theater actress Juliane Köhler agreed to play Jettel. (Link offered, “Juliane is not afraid to play a part that is at first unsympathetic.”) Merab Ninidze — a Georgian actor who’d lived in Vienna for 10 years — was chosen to play Walter. Kenya’s Sidede Onyulo was cast as Owuor, while two German schoolgirls — 9-year-old Lea Kurka and 12-year-old Karoline Eckertz — were cast to play Regina at different ages.

With Munich based Constantin Film helping finance the $8 million budget, Nowhere in Africa opened an office in Nairobi in August 2000. Kenya was gripped in a potentially catastrophic drought. Peter Herrmann recalled, “Even in Nairobi, the crisis was felt. The entire city was filled with Massai and their flocks. The animals were feeding on the sad remains of the few plants still growing along the streets. Nairobi was on the brink of disaster. We had already invested too much to turn back, and wouldn’t be able to relocate. It didn’t rain until November. By then we had already started the construction of the farmhouses and planted artificially irrigated cornfields. We had already put our trust in the gods of Africa that they would look favorably upon the country and upon our film.”

In her adaptation — which took two years to finish — Link chose to focus on the relationship between Walter and Jettel. “Stefanie Zweig tells the story from the perspective of a child. She describes her own experiences and memories. But for me, Regina’s mother Jettel is the most exciting character. What is most fascinating is her development into an independent and mature woman, who not only has to rethink her own position and priorities in life but also her relationship towards her family.” Zweig would endorse the film, but differed with Link’s approach. “My mother was a very spoilt woman but she was also very charming and warm-hearted. The actress does not convey that. She is a rather cold and tough woman and, at the time, you did not know what tough women were. My father would have murdered her on the spot if she had been like that.”

Nowhere in Africa commenced filming January 2001 in Rongai. 140 members of the cast and crew spent three weeks camped in a small tent town near Lolldaiga, with guards from the Kenya Wildlife Service posted to watch for lions or cheetahs. Caroline Link admitted to The New York Times the location made her nervous. “And yet I’m surprised that I wasn’t more so. Every night we came to our tents and took showers, and snakes would come out, attracted by the water. I should have been afraid. But I’d just stand there barefoot in the dark, completely distracted, thinking about the next day’s scenes.” Other locations for the four-month shoot included Ol Joro Orok, Nairobi and Mukutani, a community northeast of Lake Baringo which the production built a road in order to access.

Peter Herrmann recalled, “Filming in Mukutani proved to be the greatest challenge. We planted cornfields that had to have three different grades of maturity during the shoot. In order to show on screen that time had elapsed we had to have young, low corn plants, green corn plants and the mature yellow corn plants. One of the highlights of the movie, the attack/plague of the locusts was filmed in the field of ripe corn. The first seeds had already been sown in November so that there would be ripe corn in March. To supervise the growth of the corn we had a ‘corn commissioner’ who traveled once a week 100 km from Nakuru to Mukutani.”

Premiering December 27, 2001 in Germany, Nowhere in Africa became the country’s highest grossing film of 2002. It swept the German Film Awards (the Lolas) in June with five wins: Outstanding Feature Film, Direction (Caroline Link), Cinematography (Gernot Roll), Music (Niki Reiser) and Supporting Actor (Matthias Habich). Germany named Nowhere in Africa its submission to the Academy Awards and in March 2003, it won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. Distributed by Zeitgeist Films in the United States that same month, Nowhere in Africa never expanded beyond 78 theaters, but its Academy Award propelled it to $6.1 million at the domestic box office. Overseas, it racked up $18.1 million in tickets.

Critics responded enthusiastically. David Ansen, Newsweek: “This German movie, with its lush cinematography and lovely score, has the sturdiness of an old-fashioned Hollywood epic. What isn’t Hollywood is Link’s refusal to tell the audience how to feel at every moment.” Marc Savlov, The Austin Chronicle: “Thanks to the superior performances by all four leads (including incredibly expressive Karoline Eckertz, who appears as the teenage Regina midway through), Nowhere in Africa is a meditation on everything from race and class and cultural impermanence to the inexhaustible malleability of youth.” Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun-Times: “It is so rare to find a film where you become quickly, simply absorbed in the story. You want to know what happens next. Caroline Link’s Nowhere in Africa is a film like that.”

Link mused on her decision to take a nuanced approach to Nowhere in Africa, stating, “This is the only chance we have compared to these big Hollywood film studios. When they come up with all the technical equipment and the brilliant quality of their perfect images, to compete, we can only create films that are authentic and lifelike with a genuineness that can’t be bought. It’s more like feeling the things. Trying to direct in a lifelike manner. We tried to be very direct with the camerawork. We didn’t want it to be too stylized and arranged. It was a deliberate decision. We never tried to copy Out of Africa, on the contrary, we wanted something totally different.”

Should I Care?
Imagining the Hollywood version of Nowhere in Africa, I can picture a pleasant travelogue with major stars playing nice characters. There would be a hot and bothered love triangle — standard for movies like Legends of the Fall – and a subplot in which the European parents react against their daughter bringing home a Kenyan boy. While opportunities for retarded storytelling are plentiful in this exotic coming-of-age tale, it isn’t the American version, it’s the German one, and for once, moviegoers are better off for it. Caroline Link’s adaptation of Stefanie Zweig’s vibrant memoir skips over its impulses for brain dead melodrama and swims in historic texture, warm atmosphere and simple, emotionally resonant power.

Nowhere in Africa opens with a bleak, thirsty Africa as seen through the eyes of Europeans who have arrived there against their will. The cinematography by Gernot Roll — shot mostly with the majestic, handheld Steadicam — is worthy of an Oscar nomination, growing more mysterious and lush as the story progresses. In her riveting third film, Link focuses on the trials of a marriage that is anything but ideal, but increases in strength the more Walter and Jettel overcome. The performances are uniformly terrific, particularly Matthias Habich as the bachelor farmer, Lea Kurka as the 6-year-old Regina and the many native Kenyans in the cast. Niki Reiser composed the rousing musical score to what is one of the most satisfying film experiences I’ve had in a while.

Where’d You Get All of This?
“In the African Sun While Dark Came Over Europe” By Laura Winters. The New York Times, 23 February 2003

“Strangers In a Strange Land” By Stefanie Zweig. The Guardian, 21 March 2003

“Germany’s Road to the Oscar” BBC News, 24 March 2003

“African Love Affair Inspires Oscar” By Rebecca Thomas. BBC News, 4 April 2003

Production Notes – Nowhere in Africa

“Making of Nowhere in Africa” Nowhere in Africa DVD. Sony Home Entertainment (2003)

Stop-Loss (2008)
Written by Mark Richard & Kimberly Peirce
Directed by Kimberly Peirce
Produced by Peirce Pictures/ Scott Rudin Productions/ MTV Films
Running time: 112 minutes

So, What’s This About?
While manning a checkpoint in the Iraqi city of Tikrit, a U.S. Army infantry unit is sucked into an ambush in which three of its men are killed and one critically wounded. Staff Sergeant Brandon King (Ryan Phillippe) finishes his service and returns home to “Brazos, Texas” with two busloads of men on leave. These include his friends Steve Shriver (Channing Tatum) and Tommy Burgess (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). Steve is a marksman going on five years of promises to his fiancée Michelle (Abbie Cornish) that he’s coming home. Tommy is unable to cope as a soldier or civilian and his fiancée (Mamie Gummer) calls off their wedding.

Brandon is notified that he is to be shipped back to Iraq under a clause known as a stop-loss. Challenging the legality of this with his CO (Timothy Olyphant) earns Brandon a trip to the stockade. Overpowering the MPs and going AWOL, Brandon’s mother (Linda Emond) urges him to head to Mexico, while his veteran father (Ciarán Hinds) feels his son should turn himself in. Brandon hopes a senator he knows might help and Michelle drives him to D.C. Along the way, they visit one of Brandon’s men, the disabled and blinded Rodriguez (Victor Rasuk). Brandon comes to realize his options are Canada or Iraq, with the possibility of never coming home from either.

Who Made It?
Kimberly Peirce grew up in South Florida and bounced all over the globe after high school. She moved to the Windy City to enroll at the University of Chicago. Running low on money, Peirce landed in Kobe, Japan next, where she worked as an English instructor (to mob lawyers) and as a model. She also began taking photographs, until a motorcycle accident in Thailand prompted her return to the United States. She completed her bachelor’s degree at U of C — in English and in Japanese literature — and enrolled at Columbia University Film School, where Peirce became absorbed with the murder of Teena Brandon. This became the focus of her first feature film: the award winning Boys Don’t Cry (1999).

After being offered projects from virtually every major film studio, Peirce began dealing with the events of 9/11 and subsequent deployment of her brother to Iraq by interviewing hundreds of soldiers and combing through videos they’d shot within their unit. She considered a documentary, before funneling her research into a screenplay about an AWOL soldier, which she wrote with Texas novelist Mark Richard. With producer Scott Rudin and a 5-minute trailer consisting of soldier videos helping make her pitch, Paramount bought the script and immediately greenlit Stop-Loss, one of six politically charged dramas that would be released around the same time and go largely ignored by audiences.

How’d They Do It?
Kimberly Peirce considers herself a New Yorker and was there on September 11, 2001. She recalled, “New York was in a state of crisis and mourning. There were people still looking for their loved one wondering, ‘Did he miss going to work that day?’ For us, we were in that state of mind and then, it was like, suddenly the country is going to war and I realized we were in the middle of a seismic change here. I became immediately interested why soldiers were signing up, what their experiences in combat were and what was going to happen when they got home. As I started thinking about all that as a movie, that’s when my little brother enlisted.”

She continued, “It wasn’t that I had a problem with him enlisting. I understood the whole patriotic response, the whole wanting to get the guys who did this. I was just very curious what the experience was going to do. My brother is significantly younger than me. I brought him home from the hospital as a baby. This was literally like it was my little baby and he’s pure innocence. Who is he going to be? What’s he going to do?” After Peirce’s first feature film — Boys Don’t Cry — won Hilary Swank an Academy Award for Best Actress and Chloë Sevigny a nomination for Best Supporting Actress, Peirce was deluged with offers from the major studios.

Warner Bros. hired David Mamet to pen a script about John Dillinger for Peirce, which she loved, but the studio got cold feet with. Peirce was attached to direct an adaptation of Dave Eggers’ best-selling memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius for Universal, but that project never got off the ground either. She traveled to the Middle East to research the life and death of Israeli spy Eli Cohen; Columbia enthusiastically bought her pitch and hired Andrew Davies to pen a script, which didn’t work. DreamWorks offered her Memoirs of a Geisha, but Peirce didn’t cotton to the idea of directing a big budget, PG-13 movie about a Japanese courtesan.

Peirce spent years exhaustively researching the case of William Desmond Taylor, the silent film director whose 1922 murder was covered up by the film studios. Titled Silent Star, it almost became Peirce’s sophomore film. “I’d cast that movie: Annette Bening, Hugh Jackman, Ben Kingsley, Evan Rachel Wood, a dream cast. The studios said, ‘We love this movie.’ I was on the one-yard line. We were going to shoot it and they said, ‘We would love to shoot a $30 million version of this movie, but we would like to pay for the $20 million version.’ I was like, ‘Should I cut $10 million?’ They were like, ‘No, we want to see the $30 million version, but we want to pay for the $20 million version.’”

Peirce mused, “This is the thing that people should understand about directors’ careers. Unfortunately, if you want to do stuff that you really believe in and really love, it can take longer than you would like it to take. I was offered millions of dollars and I was offered a number of projects. As I would go down the road with them, for me, it really is about telling stories that I love and that are meaningful to me. I couldn’t just pick up a script and do it if I didn’t believe in it because every day of my life is living and breathing the movie.” On her own dime, Peirce had already begun interviewing soldiers and military families with her friend Reid Carolin.

Brett Peirce enlisted in the Army at the age of 18 and kept in touch with his sister through instant messaging. She recalled, “He came home on his first leave and he brought soldier’s homemade videos. It was shocking. It was like anthropology. It was like archeology. It was discovery. It was Thanksgiving 2003 and I was in my bedroom and I heard, ‘Let the bodies hit the floor, let the bodies hit the floor.’ Came out the door to pounding rock music to see my brother just sitting there, staring at these images.” Peirce hit on the idea of a soldier-made video documentary and buying cameras to send to soldiers in Iraq. Participant Productions was willing to finance it, but Peirce’s research pulled her toward a fictional approach.

Peirce had met Mark Richard in 2005 to work on an adaptation of his short story collection The Ice at the Bottom of the World. That project never came to pass, but when Peirce made the decision to write a spec script about soldiers coming back from Iraq, she contacted Richard, who would quit his day job on the Showtime series Huff and move in with Peirce to work on their script full-time. By his count, they went through 65 drafts. Richard recalled, “I’m this Southern conservative, she’s this incredibly intense liberal, but I think by the end of the process, the scales had fallen off both our eyes. I’ve always respected soldiers’ sense of honor, duty, service to the country. Stop-loss abuses the faith of these guys. You can’t keep sending them back and chewing them up.”

What began as a soldier’s story for the YouTube generation coalesced when a soldier Peirce was instant messaging with in Iraq told her about the stop-loss clause, referring to it as a backdoor draft. After 11 weeks, Richard & Peirce had draft ready to present to buyers, along with a 5-minute DVD trailer Peirce had cut together with Reid Carolin consisting of interviews with soldiers and their self-made videos. Peirce’s experiences in the studio trenches compelled her to seek an ally in producer Scott Rudin and in November 2005, it was announced that Paramount Pictures had outbid several other studios for Stop-Loss, promising a $25 million budget and a start date of April 2006.

Peirce enthused, “I don’t know if it’s ever happened before, but we greenlit a movie off of a script. That was a different experience than the one I’d had on the last movie, and to me it was a corrective experience. It will never take me that long to make another movie because I’ve already learned that lesson. Don’t put the things that are most precious to you in the hands of people who may not make them, whatever the cost.” Working with casting director Avy Kaufman, Peirce spent months auditioning actors and assembling the right cast: Ryan Phillippe, Channing Tatum, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Abbie Cornish. Shooting commenced August 2006 in Lockhart, Texas. Morocco stood in for Iraq in the opening sequence.

Stop-Loss came on the heels of a slew of politically themed films in the fall of 2007: In the Valley of Elah, The Kingdom, Rendition, Redacted, Lions For Lambs. Each divided critics and was ignored by audiences. But hitting the road for a screening tour and Q&A, Kimberly Peirce wasn’t buying that audiences had Iraq War fatigue. “If you tell them the movie is going to be non-stop warfare they’re not going to go, it’s too threatening. But when you deliver a movie about people coming home and human emotions, they’ll go and they’ll love it. There is an appetite for that. I think that the reporting on Iraq and not making the stories personal has numbed the audience out.”

Screened at the South by Southwest Music & Film Festival in March 2008, Stop-Loss opened in the United States that month. Critics nudged it to the head of its class. David Edelstein, New York Magazine: “Stop-Loss doesn’t come together, but in its ungainly way it evokes the anguish of American shit-kickers who’ve lost all sense of autonomy.” Jessica Reaves, The Chicago Tribune: “While Stop-Loss doesn’t pack anything like the emotional wallop of her previous film, the movies do share Peirce’s clear-eyed refusal to answer difficult questions with simplistic answers.” David Denby, The New Yorker: “Stop-Loss is not a great movie, but it’s forceful, effective, and alive, with the raw, mixed-up emotions produced by an endless war.”

While Stop-Loss managed $10.9 million in the United States and $291,386 overseas, Peirce remained buoyed by how well her film had been received on the road. “We went to 24 cities, I showed it to soldiers who were both pro-the-mission and anti-the-mission at this point, wounded warriors, soldier’s families, and over and over what I got was: ‘Thank you for making an emotional movie. Thank you for making a movie that got it right. Thank you for making a movie that’s emotionally moving.’ Because it’s very cathartic for them to see reflections of themselves in the movies, and what they said is that people don’t always take the time to make it from a soldier’s point of view. That’s what was really satisfying — to bring it back to the community of soldiers.”

Should I Care?
With Boys Don’t Cry and now Stop-Loss, Kimberly Peirce has already demonstrated the empathy of a documentarian, the curiosity of a journalist and the eye of a first class filmmaker. Barely mentioning other movies in interviews, Peirce seems less keen on recreating her experiences as a film geek and more interested in answering questions nagging her as a human being. Peirce’s sophomore feature film isn’t bad; it’s exquisitely well made and very well cast, but feels like it needed to be run through the typewriter at least a few more times. Flying either too far over-the-top or so under-the-radar it barely registers as a blip, it’s also fatally flawed at its core.

Cinematographer Chris Menges (The Mission), production designer David Wasco (Kill Bill) and editor Claire Simpson (Platoon) each deliver Oscar caliber work. The movie features star making performances by Abbie Cornish and Channing Tatum. Ryan Phillippe almost had me convinced he was a rugged Texan, so the film totally loses credibility by having his character suddenly disobey stop-loss orders and go AWOL. The film just doesn’t earn this conceit and I didn’t buy it. The melodrama gets poured on too thick at times, while the story and characters just never hit me on a gut level. Victor Rasuk’s role as a disfigured vet committed to staying positive is a standout, but sadly, Stop-Loss never ascends good work to become a great film.

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Phenom Director Goes To War” By Katrina Onstad. The New York Times, 23 March 2008

“War and Peirce” By Karen Valby. Entertainment Weekly, 28 March 2008

“A Soldier’s Story” By Sarah Michelle Fetters. MovieFreak.com, 28 March 2008

“Interview: Kimberly Peirce, Director of Stop-Loss” By Monika Bartyzel. Cinematical, 8 July 2008

“Interview with Kimberly Peirce, Director of Stop-Loss” By Melissa Silverstein. Huffington Post, 8 July 2008

“Kimberly Peirce Interview Stop-Loss” By Sheila Roberts. MoviesOnline

“Unstoppable: An Interview with Filmmaker Kimberly Peirce” By Gregg Shapiro. Chicago Free Press

By Joe Valdez

What the *&#! Are They About?
In the Pacific Northwest, John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) drifts into a small town in search of a buddy he served with in Vietnam. After receiving word that his friend has died, Rambo draws the attention of Sheriff Will Teasle (Brian Dennehy) who doesn’t care for the stranger’s dirty look or sullen attitude and shuttles him to the city limits. Rambo stubbornly tries to return to town, earning himself a trip to jail. There, Teasle’s deputies attempt to clean the prisoner up, triggering Rambo’s memory of being a prisoner of war.

Overpowering his captors, Rambo escapes into the chilly rain forest above town. The police learn that their fugitive is a decorated Green Beret, an expert in guerilla warfare tactics and survival. 200 National Guard troops are mobilized to help track him down and Rambo’s mentor Col. Traughtman (Richard Crenna) is sent in by the Pentagon to advise. Traughtman notifies the authorities that he’s not here to protect Rambo from them, but the other way around.

When a chopper carrying a cabinet minister goes down in Central America, a seven-man Special Forces team is sent on a rescue mission. Dutch (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is reunited with Vietnam buddy Dillon (Carl Weathers) who’s gone to work for the CIA and insists on participating in the operation. Rappelling into the jungle, the team discovers the skinned bodies of a Green Beret team that appears to have been sent in before them.

After assaulting a rebel camp, the squad — which includes a macho gunner (Jesse Ventura) and Indian tracker (Sonny Landham) — realize the story of a captive cabinet minister was cooked up to get them to strike the guerillas, who Dillon believes shot down the chopper of Green Berets. Heading to the evacuation site with a prisoner (Elpidia Carrillo), things go from bad to worse when the squad falls prey to a seven-foot tall, heavily armed and camouflaged alien big game hunter.

Writing
First Blood and the character of Rambo had their genesis in a 1972 novel by David Morrell, a Canadian born professor of English at the University of Iowa who experienced the effects of what became known as post-traumatic stress through students who were returning from the Vietnam War. Morrell’s action thriller was optioned by Warner Bros., where the best of many, many drafts was written by the team of Michael Kozoll & William Sackheim in the mid-1970s, when it was ultimately decided by the studio that audiences didn’t care much about Vietnam anymore.

By 1981, Sylvester Stallone had accepted a $3.5 million offer from producers Mario Kassar & Andrew Vajna to play Rambo. To keep the star aboard the project when he got cold feet, the producers encouraged Stallone to rewrite the script to his particular sensibility. The resulting story tapped into the rooting interest of the underdog that Stallone had developed so well in the Rocky pictures. Despite its superb visceral elements — including a frenzied pursuit through the Pacific Northwest rain forest and a claustrophobic sequence where Rambo is trapped in a mine — the original First Blood never veers into comic book territory, revealing both Rambo and his adversary Sheriff Teasle to be men of duty. Both are seen bending under the stress of their ordeal.

Predator began as a spec script written by Jim Thomas & John Thomas. Titled Hunter, their concept was human beings being stalked by a dilettante from another world, like big game hunters stalking exotic animals and returning home with a trophy, I guess. The Thomas brothers completed their script in September 1983 and sold it in early 1984 to Fox, where producer Joel Silver ultimately developed it as a vehicle for Arnold Schwarzenegger.

After an uncredited polish by David Peoples, Hunter would become The Predator during its production and ultimately, Predator. While the personalities of the badass Special Forces unit are allowed to bubble to the surface of a ceaselessly entertaining conceit, there’s not a terrific amount of suspense here, with Arnold’s triumph over the Predator never really in question. The inclusion of a female POW who comes along for the ride and a needlessly convoluted set-up do get in the way of the film’s roll licking factor.

Writing edge: First Blood

Casting
Behind his image as a monosyllabic he-man, it’s often overlooked how good an actor Sylvester Stallone can be. The original First Blood is one of the best performances of his career. It’s easy to imagine Rambo as an orphan; yeah, he’s a trained killer, but instead of emphasizing invincibility, Stallone plays the character’s loneliness and disquiet beautifully. Kirk Douglas was eagerly pursued to play Col. Traughtman and reported for work before bowing out when director Ted Kotcheff and the producers demurred over Douglas’ script revisions, which included Rambo dying at the end. The late Richard Crenna is no Spartacus, but does a credible job.

The Stallone flicks that are worth revisiting are the ones where Sly was given a great adversary — like Nighthawks, or to a much lesser extent, Rocky III and Demolition Man — and First Blood is no exception. In addition to being a tremendous character actor, Brian Dennehy takes what in the sequels would have been just a brutal redneck sheriff and here, gives him the texture of a real man doing a job. Never entirely likable, he’s never unlikable either, much like a real sheriff. Lisa Freiberger did a yeoman’s job casting Jack Starrett, Chris Mulkey, David Caruso and Michael Talbott as deputies.

Arnold Schwarzenegger was still pretty much developing his chops as an actor when he was offered the lead in Predator, but his sense of self, his ability to toss out one liners (“Stick around” as he impales a rebel with a machete) and physique made him perfect for this type of flick. But personally, I find Predator 2 a much better take; even though Danny Glover is playing a tough cop, he’s much more vulnerable and the outcome is called into greater question than if you have the Terminator as your hero.

Casting director Jackie Burch had room to maneuver with the supporting cast and this is where Predator goes into another gear. Carl Weathers — who briefly played linebacker for the Oakland Raiders – brings as much charisma here as he does athletic prowess. Producer Joel Silver had previously worked with Bill Duke and Sonny Landham, two heavies you would not want to fuck with in a bar, and brought them aboard. Jesse Ventura — a former Navy SEAL, bodyguard and professional wrestler — adds even more color to the film, while 7 foot, 2 inch tall Kevin Peter Hall was both menacing and graceful as the title villain.

Casting edge: Predator

Production value
One of the reasons First Blood is so fucking good is the approach taken by director Ted Kotcheff, best known for this film and the even more masculine North Dallas Forty, but who probably wouldn’t have been influenced by MTV even if it had been around a decade earlier. This is a classically mounted picture, with certain restraint taken to making things look and feel as real as possible, while delivering entertainment in the process. The cinematography by Andrew Laszlo — framed in anamorphic format — is nothing short of stunning, soaking up the mist covered rain forests of Hope, Canada.

John McTiernan had a B-movie called Nomads to his credit when he was hired to direct Predator. His energy and ideas are all over the picture — essentially a Tarzan flick with guns — but this is firmly a B-movie produced by a major studio. While makeup effects maestro Stan Winston saved the day by coming in near the end of production to redesign the creature, the shooting location is a slightly less than exotic Puerto Vallarta, Mexico and the optical effects dated. The film has some nice compositions, but the lighting by Donald McAlpine is nothing to rave over.

Production value edge: First Blood

Music
No contest. Jerry Goldsmith is my favorite film composer/ conductor in modern Hollywood, and his score for First Blood — commissioned between Poltergeist and Psycho II — is as emotionally rousing as his best. Chords of Goldsmith’s theme for this film, which put Mario Kassar & Andrew Vajna on the map as Hollywood players, would later be heard over the logo of Carolco Pictures during the early 1990s.

Alan Silvestri then and now is probably best known as the composer of Back to the Future, but always struck me as someone you approached if John Williams and Jerry Goldsmith were unavailable. His work for Predator is pretty serviceable, rising to the level the production probably had to pay a good composer. It might still be one of the more recognizable themes of the genre, right up there with Brad Fiedel’s work on The Terminator. It does get the job done.

Music edge: First Blood

Cultural impact
Opening in October 1982, First Blood was a huge hit with audiences, pulling down box office receipts of $47.2 million in the U.S. and $78 million overseas, back when tickets were three bucks. The decision not to kill Rambo off made somebody a billionaire; by the end of the decade, Rambo had spawned two cartoonish sequels and an actual cartoon titled Rambo: Force of Freedom. Rambo: First Blood Part II transformed David Morrell’s scarred war vet into a symbol of American military muscle, spawning bumper stickers, knives and bubble gum and name dropping into media addresses given by President Reagan, much to the chagrin of liberals.

Hitting theaters in June 1987, Predator also went over well at the box office, grossing $59.7 million in the U.S. and adding $38.5 million overseas. It helped Joel Silver on his way to becoming the Action King of Hollywood and for a brief spell, put John McTiernan at the top as well. An Arnold-less sequel attracted significantly less business in 1990, but the uber-equipped Predator seemed to resonate with genre fans, returning in 2004 (Alien vs. Predator) and 2007 (Alien vs. Predator: Requiem), sort of making him the Frankenstein Monster of the new millennium. A full “reboot” can’t be too far around the corner.

Cultural impact edge: Even

Winner: First Blood

Your thoughts?

What the *&#! Is This About?
In the town of “Castle Rock,” Maine, a powerful electrical storm sends a tree through the lakeside home of graphic designer David Drayton (Thomas Jane), his wife (Kelly Collins Lintz) and their nine-year-old son Billy (Nathan Gamble). Surveying the damage the next morning, David tells her, “It’s just stuff, you know. We’re safe, that’s all that matters.” His wife appears anxious about a strange mist drifting off the mountains and headed toward them across the lake. Father and son are more interested in a tree belonging to their obstinate attorney neighbor Norton (Andre Braugher) that has flattened the Drayton boathouse. The men put aside past differences when David offers Norton a ride into town for supplies. Taking Billy along, they pass an army convoy. The soldiers are stationed at a base in the mountains known to the locals only as “the Arrowhead Project”. The convoy appears to be in a hurry, prompting Norton to comment, “Maybe their power’s out too.”

At the Food House, David chats with a teenage clerk (Alexa Davalos), amiable assistant manager (Toby Jones), Castle Rock’s resident nutter Mrs. Carmody (Marcia Gay Harden), schoolteacher (Frances Sternhagen) and realtor (Susan Watkins). David also observes an MP abruptly cancel leave for three soldiers. Everything at the store comes to a dead halt when an air raid siren sounds. A monstrous mist overtakes the town on the heels of a panic stricken local (Jeffrey DeMunn) who makes it to the store covered in blood. Warning the others to shut the doors and not to go outside, a shopper decides to make a break for his car. Disappearing in the mist, the last that’s heard of him are his terrified screams. One theory voiced is that the mist may be a chemical explosion from the local mill. Mrs. Carmody believes this is the end of days. Norton tries to keep the crowd calm, while David is more focused on trying to calm his hysterical son.

Searching for a blanket in the storeroom, David hears something outside attempt to rip down the loading dock door. A mechanic (William Sadler) copes with the disaster by trying to get the store’s generator working, with a bag boy (Chris Owen) eager to go outside and clear whatever’s blocking the duct. When David is unable to convince them that this is a bad idea, the door is raised; tentacles slither inside, tear into Norm’s skin and drag him into the mist. When confronting Norton with this, the attorney’s logic prevents him from accepting it. He organizes a group to venture outside for help, but a rope one of them ties to their waist only makes it 300 feet before returning a torso. As Mrs. Carmody begins spreading her Old Testament gospel of a stern and vengeful god – slowly converting frightened followers – David, a third grade teacher (Laurie Holden) and a few others start worrying more about the monsters inside the store than the ones in the mist.

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
The Mist began with a phone call Stephen King received in 1980 from his literary agent Kirby McCauley. King recalled, “Kirby McCauley was putting together an anthology called Dark Forces and he wanted all these original stories from people who wrote in the genre. I said, ‘You know, Kirby, I don’t think I can do that because I’m blocked, I’m not writing anything.’ And I hadn’t. I had just finished three books. There was Carrie, ‘Salem’s Lot, Night Shift, and I was kind of stuck, really. I happened to be in the local market one time and a lot of people were shopping. I looked at the front windows and thought, if something bad happened, those windows would all blow in — because that’s the way I think. It’s not necessarily a good thing, but it’s been a profitable thing over the years.” The resulting story – The Mist – unblocked the author and a slightly re-edited version appeared in King’s 1985 short story collection Skeleton Crew. At 155 pages, it qualified as a novella.

A couple of years later, Frank Darabont was getting his feet wet as a screenwriter. He recalled, “Nightmare on Elm Street 3 was my very first credit as a writer and there was The Blob remake and there was The Fly II. I remember sitting on the set of Nightmare on Elm Street 3 one night and thinking I’d love to have something in my pocket that I could nurse along and try to get made as a director.” Darabont had taken advantage of Stephen King’s “Dollar Babies” initiative, in which the author makes available to student filmmakers the movie rights to select King short stories for the fee of only $1. In 1983, Darabont directed a short based on The Woman In the Room. Searching for a feature length project, it came down to either The Mist or Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption. In choosing the latter, the emotionally resonant 1994 prison drama starring Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman earned seven Academy Award nominations and set Darabont on the path to prestige.

Darabont’s company Darkwoods Productions entered into a first-look development deal with Paramount Pictures, which was where the filmmaker brought The Mist in 2004 when he was ready to return to his horror roots. Darabont recalled, “What always appealed to me about it was, okay, here’s this story about monsters, very basically, on the surface of it. Underneath, Steve King was telling a completely different story. He was telling a story about the fragility of human behavior under pressure. What he was saying was that civilization has a very thin veneer and it can crumble very quickly, especially when you apply fear. And people turn against one another when subjected to stress and fear. It winds up being great sociological context for how we are as a species, how screwed up we are, how fearful we are.” Paramount agreed to put up $30 million to produce The Mist, provided Darabont reconsider the ending he’d written, which was … downbeat, to say the least.

Darabont concluded, “Obviously not a studio movie. That’s the ultimate horror for a studio, is a horror movie that might actually horrify people. You give ‘em something that might upset the audience they run screaming in the other direction.” He added, “Through this whole set of circumstances I wound up with Bob Weinstein at Dimension. He was the only guy who said, who had the balls to say, ‘Yeah, I love this ending, I love this movie, let’s make it.’ With the understanding of course that it had to be done very quickly and very inexpensively. Let me put it this way: A lot of great horror movies that I love, that I grew up watching have a tradition of being done under extreme duress of time and on very, very low budgets. And I thought, okay, if we’re really going to embrace what I love – horror movies – let’s embrace that tradition as well. Let’s embrace the tradition of shoot it as fast as you can, shoot it as cheaply as you can.”

In October 2006, it was announced that Dimension Films would bankroll The Mist, with a spring 2007 start date. The budget was roughly $17 million. Casting the lead, Darabont’s first choice was Thomas Jane. “I had met him a few times and he read for The Green Mile I always remembered his work. I’ve seen roles that he’s done, smallish roles in other movies. He’s one of those guys that I just knew had way more depth that he’s generally been elicited to show in other roles that he’s done. So I called him and I said, ‘I got this script and I’d love for you to play the lead. Let’s read it and let’s discuss it.’ And our very first conversation once he’d read it was, ‘Tom I think you have more depth than something like Deep Blue Sea allowed you to show. What I don’t want is a square-jawed action hero here. What I want is a really flawed, well intentioned guy who loves his son and it’s a movie about a guy trying to protect his little boy. As far as you’re concerned that’s what the whole movie is about. Are you ready to take that leap?’ And indeed it was something he had been hungry to do.”

The rest of the cast quickly fell into place. Darabont recalled, “Jeff DeMunn and Bill Sadler, both of them were those roles, and Laurie Holden, she was also always in my head for the role of Amanda. Others you have to think about a little bit, and there’s where you really have to depend on a great casting director, is, okay, who’s going to play Mrs. Carmody? Who’s going to play Billy? Where do we find a nine-year-old boy who’s got that kind of ability? Deb Aquilla and her associates, they found Nathan Gamble and she brought him to my attention and we hired him immediately. It was Deb’s inspiration to cast Toby Jones as Ollie, which I couldn’t be more delighted with. Toby’s a brilliant guy and gave us a fantastic performance, but he’s not the obvious actor. I’m also the very grateful beneficiary of a lot of good will, so I get to work with people like Andre Braugher and Marcia Gay Harden who wouldn’t necessarily be lookin’ for a horror movie to do, but suddenly, bam, they’re there.”

Darabont added, “We prepped the movie in six weeks, folks. I’ve never prepped a movie in less than five months, but this was part of the spirit of this movie: Get in, do it, don’t over think it, don’t second guess, do it fast, do it loose, and that’s pretty much the way it went.” Darabont signed up for a crash course in guerilla style filmmaking by directing an episode of the FX cop drama The Shield in late 2006. The experience proved so invigorating, Darabont tapped the show’s cinematographer – Rohn Schmidt – and camera operators Bill Gierhart and Richard Cantu to shoot The Mist. Filming commenced February 2007, mostly on a soundstage at StageWorks of Louisiana in downtown Shreveport. Nearby Cross Lake doubled for lakeside Maine, while the exteriors of the Food House were shot in the Louisiana town of Vivian.

Opening November 2007 in the U.S., even critics who admired The Mist seemed to object to it, in part. Anthony Lane, the New Yorker: “The Mist is itself a supermarket of B-movie essentials, handsomely stocked with bad science, stupid behavior, chewable lines of dialogue, religious fruitcakes, and a fine display of monsters.” Marjorie Baumgarten, the Austin Chronicle: “The Mist has extended passages that pause to preach, to demonstrate the dark impulses of irrationality, magical thinking, and mob mentality. Sadly, these interludes only take away from the magnificent moments in which the stunningly crafted beasties in the mist … come out to prey.” Justin Chang, Variety: “Much nastier and less genteel than his best-known Stephen King adaptations (The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile), Frank Darabont’s screw-loose doomsday thriller works better as a gross-out B-movie than as a psychological portrait of mankind under siege, marred by one-note characterizations and a tone that veers wildly between snarky and hysterical.”

In April 2008, Eugene Novikov – who ranked The Mist among the best films of 2007 – opened the floor on website Cinematical to a discussion of what viewers thought about that ending. John: “In regards to the ending: it’s one of the better twist endings I’ve seen in a while. Nowadays, I feel like twists or reveals have become cheapened by how frequent they have become in movies, and most of them just happen to trick the audience. But with The Mist, the twist ending was surprising AND thought-provoking.” Gary Triestman: “Balderdash and hogwash! I saw The Mist yesterday, and am utterly pissed at the ending. Pissed not such because it was bleak and useless, it was, but because it absolutely did NOT fit into the personalities, drives or character motivations of the people who allegedly assented to being sacrificed.” Okie: “I thought the ending was perfect. Its what made me recommend this movie to so many people. Most don’t like the ending because they don’t think they could ever do that to their child. But the alternative was definitely worse.”

The Mist would gross $25.5 million in the U.S. and $31.5 million overseas, then quickly dissipate from theaters. Even a two-disc DVD – which supplemented the theatrical version of the film with a black & white version closer to Frank Darabont’s retro vision of the material – did little to spark a reevaluation of the film. Less than enthralled with many of the flicks based on his work, Stephen King mused, “This movie has echoes of political and religious situations that we find ourselves in now, it raises a lot of interesting topics that have been debated in the press and current events over the last couple of years and all of those things obviously played a part when Frank got around to writing the screenplay and directing the movie, casting the movie – which is part of direction – but they’re not for me to say, other than to say he and I share some political convictions. As to what they are, the viewer who comes to the movie with an open mind and a clear eye will see that for themselves.”

Should I Care?
The Mist tries to be a provocative movie, one I was supposed to love or hate with a passion and occupy no middle ground on. While that’s true of he ending, as time passes, the film has actually inched into a twilight zone for me; not the failure I originally thought it was, but ultimately, not up to snuff with the nihilistic freakshows that inspired it, like Night of the Living Dead or John Carpenter’s remake of The Thing. But for all its flaws – and there are a gaggle here – it’s not easy to put The Mist out of your mind. For one thing, instead of the usual bag of bogeymen, Stephen King’s source material unleashes an ecosystem of hideous animals – equipped with tentacles, stingers, beaks, acid webs or giant pincers – that disturb on some primal level. Along with The Shining, this may be most terrifying story King has ever concocted.

Frank Darabont was inspired to adapt this material with the same thrift store economy Alfred Hitchcock brought to Psycho, but the results here are more amateurish than masterful. The abbreviated schedule not only handicaps the extensive makeup and digital effects, but turns what might have been an atmospheric and profoundly disturbing story about mass hysteria into a blunt, condescending and at times silly moral sermon. The Mist is short on B-movie nastiness and long on message. Ugh. Superbly cast in spite of the script’s high handedness – with local actors Robert Treveiler. Melissa Suzanne McBride and Kelly Collins Lintz doing outstanding work – the story might have been better realized with a more elegant, less in-your-face approach. The controversial ending is a failure simply because Darabont rushes headlong into a Big Message at the expense of credibility. The results are similar to trying on a bomb vest and plunging the detonator to see what happens.

© Joe Valdez

Where Are You Getting This *&#!?
“An Exclusive Interview with Mr. Frank Darabont!” By Edward Douglas. Shock Till You Drop, 16 November 2007

“Stephen King and Frank Darabont Step Out of The Mist” By Brad Balfour. Pop Entertaiment.com, 23 November 2007

“When Darkness Came: The Making of The Mist” The Mist (Two-Disc Collector’s Edition). Genius Products (2008)

[All through the month of February, Jeremy Richey at Moon in the Gutter has declared a tribute to films that are "M.I.A. on Region 1 DVD." This article is a contribution to his series.]

Synopsis
In Planet Terror - the first half of a double feature – go-go dancer Cherry Darling (Rose McGowan) walks off the job and ends up reuniting with her enigmatic ex-boyfriend El Wray (Freddy Rodriguez) at a Texas barbecue shack. At a nearby military base, a platoon led by the stoic Lt. Muldoon (Bruce Willis) accidentally unleashes a nerve toxin, exacerbating the marriage between Dr. Dakota Block (Marley Shelton) and her temperamental husband Dr. William Block (Josh Brolin) as townspeople filter into the ER with grotesque skin conditions. A full blown outbreak of cannibalistic sickos is soon at hand. Cherry is attacked and loses her leg, which the resourceful El Wray replaces with a table leg and later, a machine gun. Also banding together against the onslaught of freaks are the sheriff (Michael Biehn), his estranged brother and rib shack owner (Jeff Fahey) and a pair of nutty babysitters (Electra Avellan, Elise Avellan).

In the bottom half of the bill – Death Proof – Austin drive-time deejay Jungle Julia (Sydney Poitier) is picked up by her friends (Vanessa Ferlito, Jordan Ladd) and goes in search of a party the night of her birthday. They end up drunk, stoned and bored at the “Texas Chili Parlor,” where the girls cross paths with a scarred loner who goes by the name Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell). When the girls decide to head to Lake LBJ, Stuntman Mike follows them out, giving a ride to a bar patron (Rose McGowan again) in his loaded for bear 1970 Chevy Nova. None of the ladies reach their destinations. Months later, Stuntman Mike appears in Tennessee, where a pair of stuntwomen (Zoe Bell, Tracie Thoms), a makeup artist (Rosario Dawson) and a model/actress (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) takes a prized 1970 Dodge Challenger for a spin through the backroads. Stuntman Mike intercepts the girls, but gets a little more than he bargained for.

Production history
Robert Rodriguez met Quentin Tarantino in 1992 at the Toronto Film Festival. “I knew about his movie, Reservoir Dogs already ’cause my agent had seen it and said, ‘You’re going to love this guy Quentin Tarantino; he’s made a new movie, Reservoir Dogs, it’s really cool.’ I saw it at the Telluride Film Festival; he wasn’t there, but then we met in Toronto. So Toronto Film Festival, we ran into each other in the lobby; I had already seen the movie and I just went on and on about it. And he hadn’t seen Mariachi yet … We went to the El Mariachi screening together; he sat next to me, because by then we had become fast friends. I was video taping all my screenings at that time to get audience reactions; I couldn’t believe anyone was screening the movie. And so I had gotten the Telluride screening on tape with Quentin’s laugh track through the whole movie.”

After shooting a 3-D picture in 2004 (The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl), Rodriguez was kicking around ideas for another gimmick that would lure audiences into a theater. He came up with the idea of a double feature. Before Rodriguez could get very far, he was in post-production on Sin City, which featured a scene that he’d invited Tarantino to direct. “When I went to show him my cut of Sin City, I went to his house and laying on the floor with a bunch of other junk was a double bill poster for Rock All Night and Drag Strip Girl which was the same one I had at my house also on the floor. I was using that as inspiration for my double feature – just the layout of it. I said, ‘I got that same poster and it’s on my floor.’ This underlined how similar we were, but then I thought, ‘You know what? I had this crazy idea. I was going to do two short features but you do one and I’ll do one.’ He said, ‘I love double features! I love double features! We gotta call it Grindhouse.’”

In the film’s production notes, Tarantino described the experience of the grindhouse. “… they were all-night theaters that would play three or four movies. It would be a place for the bums to go and sleep. If you’re hiding out from the law you’d go there for the night. Then, at six in the morning they wake you up and send you out, and you’d walk around for ninety minutes and come right back in again. Drive-ins had the same shows, but were a whole different setting. Grindhouse theaters were in more urban areas. Dallas would have grindhouses, and Houston would have grindhouses, but when you get into the outer regions of Texas, it’s more about drive-ins.” In terms of the motion picture typically offered at the grindhouse, Tarantino exclaimed, “That shit was raw. The shit was off the hook. Sexuality was wild. You couldn’t even believe some of the sexuality and brutality that they got away with in these movies, and gore. You literally had to pinch yourself and say, ‘Am I even watching what I’m watching?’”

Rodriguez had 30 pages of a zombie script he’d been doodling on for close to a decade. Makeup effects artist Greg Nicotero recalls, “I remember during Spy Kids, maybe even as early as The Faculty, that Robert said, ‘I’ve got this cool idea for this zombie movie. I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen yet, but there’s going to be a doctor and his wife, and they’re going to be working in a hospital, and there’s going to be this really great scene where we see a girl on the road, and every time a car passes we reveal silhouettes of zombies getting closer and closer to her.’” Titled Planet Terror, Rodriguez styled his contribution to Grindhouse as a brooding B-movie John Carpenter might have directed between Escape From New York (1981) and The Thing (1982), with zombies. Sort of. Nicotero adds, “It’s a big misconception because technically they’re not zombies. They don’t die then come back, and they don’t necessarily all eat flesh. We have a couple guys that eat brains, and people get torn apart and get disemboweled, but generally they don’t really die. They just become infected and become these mindless killers.”

To write his segment, Tarantino started virtually from scratch. “And the first idea was a bunch of young college history students that were going through a tour of the plantations of the old South. And there’s a ghost of an old slave that is part of negro folklore. Jody the Grinder actually went down and bested the devil, by fucking him. And so the devil put him on earth for all eternity to fuck white women. And that was the devil’s punishment. The opening scene would take place in the classroom, with the professor telling the story of Jody the Grinder in a big four-page monologue. I would probably have had Sam Jackson playing that part. And it was really good. But then I didn’t have anywhere to go with it, because if you have a story about a killer slave with supermacho powers done in the style of a slasher films, then even if he’s doing it today, and even if the white girls are innocent, how can you not be on the slave’s side?”

Tarantino continued, “Then I remembered a time when I told somebody I was thinking about getting a safer car. I was thinking about a Volvo and he says, ‘Oh, Quentin, if you want a safer car all you have to do is buy any car and give it to a stunt team plus $10,000 and they’ll make it death proof.’ And for two seconds I actually thought about doing that. He actually used the words ‘death proof’ but I forgot about it – this was 11 years ago. So now I’m thinking about this tale, and I thought, what if he uses a car? And what if his thing is to follow girls who travel in a posse? His car wipes the girls out and he gets to live, because it is death proof. To me he was a sex act, so what he was doing was a rape murder, his act of sex. He does it in such a way that it looks like an accident so he gets away with it. Then we wait until he recovers and, like a serial killer, he goes to another state and does it again.” Tarantino titled his segment Death Proof.

As far as Bob and Harvey Weinstein – co-owners of Dimension Films – were concerned, Grindhouse would cost $40 million to produce, with Rodriguez and Tarantino delivering segments running 70 minutes each. But Tarantino – who enjoyed inserting vintage trailers into grindhouse film festivals he programmed for his buddies – got directors Eli Roth and Edgar Wright involved. “They just seemed natural guys to just step into the breach, especially where their interests were concerned. Eli would make a slasher film trailer using the one holiday that hadn’t been used: Thanksgiving. And Edgar was going to do a ’70s-style British horror film trailer because he remembered that nobody opens their mouth in the trailers. You never wanted the audience to know that it’s a British movie.” Rob Zombie – directing a remake of Halloween for Dimension – also wanted in on the act. He got the go-ahead from Rodriguez to shoot a trailer based on his title alone: Werewolf Women of the S.S. The production cost for Grindhouse soon rose to $53 million.

Planet Terror commenced filming March 2006 at Troublemaker Studios, the production facility Rodriguez and then-wife Elizabeth Avellan built on the former site of the Robert Mueller Municipal Airport in Austin. Tarantino not only made a cameo appearance in Planet Terror (as Rapist #1) but filmed second unit as well. He somehow found time to direct an audition reel Josh Brolin submitted for a role in No Country For Old Men. With the intended release date of Christmas scrubbed, Tarantino began shooting Death Proof in August 2006, also around Austin. The high speed stuntwork took until January 2007 to complete, leaving Tarantino with a mere six weeks to edit his film. By chance, both Planet Terror and Death Proof would clock in at 85 minutes. This prompted the Weinsteins to suggest the directors release their segments as two separate movies, but Tarantino – who had gone along with the scheme to split his last movie (Kill Bill) into two volumes – insisted that Grindhouse would give audiences two movies for the price of one.

While Dimension always planned on exhibiting Planet Terror and Death Proof separately as extended versions in non-English speaking countries – where moviegoers had little idea what a double feature was – the design was always to present Grindhouse in the U.S., the U.K. and Australia as one epic theatrical experience. Headed into theaters April 2007 in the States – over the Easter holiday – Harvey Weinstein felt the picture was a throwback to the gambles he’d taken out of necessity in the early days of Miramax Films, with groundbreaking films like sex, lies and videotape, The Crying Game and Pulp Fiction. “When you see it, you just say, ‘OK, you’ve got to be brain-dead not to get that one, it’s so good and fun.’ It’s the fastest three hours you ever spent in a theater. It’s an event, like a Stones concert, or The Who at Leeds. We’re asking people to go to the movies. It’s not something to watch on DVD or cable.”

Critics flew out of their pants praising Grindhouse. Nathan Lee, the Village Voice: “Rodriguez, Tarantino, and Co. aim for nothing more noble than to freak the funk, and it’s about goddamn time. Go wasted, go stoned, go without your parents’ permission. In paying homage to an obsolete form of movie culture, Grindhouse delivers a dropkick to ours.” Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly: “Grindhouse, like Ed Wood and Boogie Nights, celebrates how certain low-grade entertainment, viewed in hindsight, looks different now than it did then, since we can see the ‘innocence’ of its creation – the handmade quality of it – in a world not yet ruled by corporate technology.” Scott Foundas, L.A. Weekly: “I suspect that Death Proof will throw some of its director’s admirers for a loop, though it may be the most revealing thing Tarantino has yet done – a full-throttle expression of a singular artistic temperament disguised, like so many gems of grindhouses yore, as a glittering hunk of trash.”

But for reasons that would be debated beginning the Monday after its opening weekend, audiences stayed away from Grindhouse, which would gross a shabby $25 million in the U.S. and $25.1 million overseas. Daily Variety’s Anne Thompson offered theories galore: “What went wrong? Let’s list the ways. Grindhouse was a cult concept, with a cult following. It was the kind of movie critics praise (Metacritic gave it a very good 78) but it was beat by Ice Cube’s execrably reviewed comedy Are We Done Yet? (Metacritic ranking: 39). Many audiences said: ‘I don’t have three hours.’ The Rodriguez half of Grindhouse was for horror fans, and was far too gross for women, who might have liked the Tarantino half, which is a total female empowerment flick. My friend in Chicago who eagerly took a pal on opening day reported about 30 people in the theater. Not a good sign.”

Plans to turn Grindhouse into a franchise – with Rodriguez interested in adapting his fake trailer Machete into a feature length film – were put on hold. The Grindhouse experience now exists as two separate DVDs; Planet Terror is extended 20 minutes over its theatrical running time, while Death Proof is padded with almost 30 minutes of trivial footage. Rodriguez’s fake trailer for Machete can be found on the Planet Terror disc, but the other trailers and promos exist only on YouTube. Some observers pegged the failure of Grindhouse on the seeming inability of its filmmakers to put away their childhood obsessions, to which Tarantino mused, “I remember 25 years ago reading critics slugging on Lucas, on DePalma, on Spielberg saying these guys are so talented but they’ve dedicated their lives to recreating the junk of their childhood. I guess the same people could say that about me and Robert Rodriguez.”

Opinion
Grindhouse was a theater going experience like no other. Viewing Planet Terror or Death Proof on a DVD is a lot like showing up first for a party; the kegger is out, but without other guests, the event leaves something to be desired. In an era where even the decent movies resemble consumer entertainment product – to be guzzled down, tossed in the recycle bin and forgotten – almost every scene of Grindhouse beams with sincere adulation for B-movies, busting out three hours worth of intense audience appreciation. Planet Terror is the best work Robert Rodriguez has done yet. It’s loaded with a ridiculous amount of gags – my favorite is the steely eyed anesthesiologist who loses use of her arms for half the film – but aside from recapturing the ingenuity of El Mariachi, Rodriguez pulls together a complete film for once, as opposed to what feels like six or seven shorts held together by duct tape.

Death Proof provoked the usual suspects who rant “Tarantino is a hack” at the drop of a lightsaber. These are the same douche bags who can tell you shot-by-shot how Reservoir Dogs ripped off City on Fire; if they’re bitching about the length of Death Proof, they might actually have an argument this time. At 85 minutes the exhaustive banter between the girls tested my endurance, while at 113 minutes on the DVD version, the chatter becomes nearly unbearable. It’s too idle for too long, but like all master directors, Tarantino knows how to play an audience, and rewards our patience with not only the greatest car stunt sequence of all time, but the audacity to cast an actual stuntwoman (the charismatic Zoe Bell) as the lady in peril. Like the male leads in all Tarantino films, Kurt Russell gives his best performance in decades. To watch Tarantino give us his version of My Bloody Valentine or Vanishing Point - completely breaking with formula while worshipping it at the same time – is fucking exhilarating.

© Joe Valdez

Sources
“Weinsteins ready for Grindhouse” By Anne Thompson. Variety, March 30, 2007

“Filmmakers and Friends Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez Talk Grindhouse” By Rebecca Murray. About.com, March 31, 2007

“Enter the Grindhouse with Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez” By Steve Chupnick. MovieWeb, April 1, 2007

Grindhouse production notes. Dimension Films, April 2007

“Quentin Tarantino: Cult Hero” By Philip Berk. Film Ink, November 2007

“Tarantino Bites Back” By Nick James. Sight & Sound, February 2008

Synopsis
Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the citizens of Southern California brace for an invasion. In a spoof of Jaws (with the same stuntwoman, Susan Backlinie), a nude swimmer goes for a dip in the ocean, but instead of a shark, a Japanese submarine surfaces, dangling her on the periscope. The captain (Toshiro Mifune) is in search of something honorable to attack in California and settles on Hollywood, despite the objections of a German officer (Christopher Lee) that his crew will never find it. We’re next introduced to a busboy (Bobby Di Cicco) who dreams of winning a Jitterbug contest with his sweetheart (Dianne Kay). Serving coffee to a U.S. Army tank crew – which includes Dan Aykroyd and John Candy – the busboy’s dance moves upset one of the tank crewmen (Treat Williams) and a food fight ensues.

Army Air Corps pilot Wild Bill Kelso (John Belushi) lands his P-40 at a gas station in Death Valley. In search of a squadron of Zeros he believes he lost over Fresno, Kelso succeeds only in blowing up the gas station. We then meet the stoic General Stilwell (Robert Stack), who’s been assigned to protect California from attack. Stilwell’s aide (Tim Matheson) recalls that the general’s smoldering secretary (Nancy Allen) is aroused by planes and schemes to get her airborne in one. Meanwhile, the Japanese sub crew wanders ashore, where they abduct Christmas tree farmer Hollis Wood (Slim Pickens) to help them locate Hollywood. Also part of the insanity is a homeowner (Ned Beatty) whose lawn turns into an artillery range, two civilians (Murray Hamilton and Eddie Deezen) stuck on a ferris wheel, and Colonel Mad Man Maddox (Warren Oates) who’s convinced the Japs have an airfield in the alfalfa fields of Pomona.

Production history
Graduating from USC Film School, Robert Zemeckis & Bob Gale interned at Universal Studios. They wrote an episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker that made it on the air (in January 1975) but what they really wanted was to write and direct their own movies. One of their scripts was about a radical group that steals a Sherman tank and threatens to blow up the corporate headquarters of an oil company. “The Bobs” got their spec – Tank – to John Milius, a USC alum who’d been awarded a four-picture deal at MGM following the success of The Wind and the Lion. Zemeckis recalls, “He wasn’t crazy about the story, but he liked the way we wrote and he said, ‘Have you guys got any other ideas for any other movies?’ And we immediately came up with this outrageous concept of hysteria on the home front during World War II. I have to credit John; it was my recollection that John thought of the title, and he said, ‘Hey that’s a great idea and we’ll call it The Night the Japs Attacked.’”

Gale recalled their meeting with Milius by stating, “And we told him we had come across in the research for Tank, we’d come across this very fascinating historical event where the city of Los Angeles – it was actually February 1942 – thought that there was an air raid, that Japanese were bombing L.A. They blacked out the city for six hours and thousands of rounds of ammunition were shot up at the sky at nothing. And we thought it was just a wonderfully absurd historical event, could make a great movie.” Milius – whose deal at MGM stipulated two pictures he’d write and direct, and two pictures he’d produce – had researched General “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell for a script. “And it was Milius who said, ‘Yeah! We can put General Stillwell in this movie! He could be running around, being the voice of sanity in all this insane stuff.’ … So he hired Bob and me to write one of the pictures that he was going to produce and he said: ‘The title of it should be The Night the Japs Attacked.’ And for the first year and a half of it or so, that was what the title was.”

Zemeckis & Gale wrote two drafts of The Night the Japs Attacked for MGM, but production chief Dan Melnick was not amused, particularly by the word “Japs” in the title. Undeterred, Milius raved about the project to a buddy of his named Steven Spielberg, who recalled, “The first time I heard about 1941 it was called The Night the Japs Attacked. And I heard it during an afternoon when I was skeet shooting with my friend John Milius and our then two protégés Bob Zemeckis & Bob Gale. And the two Bobs had come up with this crazy screenplay they had written and they told me about it. And I think what got me to want to read the script was they described at one point the scene where the Japanese they think they’re attacking an important strategic target but in fact have targeted Pacific Ocean Amusement Park and blow the ferris wheel, which rolls down the pier and into the water … And I must say there’s a part of me in my nice conservative life that is probably as crazy and insane as Milius and the two guys who wrote that script that really got me attracted to the project.”

Immersed in pre-production on Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Spielberg committed to direct what he was calling The Rising Sun next, inviting Zemeckis & Gale to the soundstage in Alabama where he was shooting his UFO epic to work on the script. Zemeckis recalls, “It was the opposite of a disciplined type of collaboration. It was an outrageous collaboration and we were just sort of topping each other with how we could just put more outrageous spin on every incident that we wrote. And of course Bob and my mission was every time Steven would get an idea, no matter how outrageous it was, we worked very diligently and spent hours and days to try and figure out a way to actually fit it into the structure of the story. So it basically just kept accumulating. That’s why I call it the kitchen sink. We just kept throwing everything into the screenplay, including the kitchen sink until it just became this mountain of gags.”

Spielberg vowed “I will not make this movie if it costs a penny over $12 million” so many times that it ended up (as a joke by Zemeckis & Gale) on the title page of the script. But as the gags piled up, so did the budget. Columbia Pictures – now run by Dan Melnick – partnered with Universal Pictures to finance what would be Spielberg’s fourth feature film at a production cost of $26 million. Columbia attained international rights, while Universal was set to distribute the picture in the United States. Meanwhile, the script continued to undergo changes. Zemeckis recalls, “Mine and Bob’s, our first intention when we wrote the early drafts of the screenplay was that it was supposed to be a very black, black comedy and it was very dark and very cynical. And a lot of that was tempered by Steven and a lot of the cast that came in, so the film shifted from this very dark satire to more of a screwball comedy.”

Wild Bill Kelso was a minor character who flew in at the very end of the script, but was inserted into much more of the action once John Belushi took the role. The character of a farmer – who bumbled onto the Japanese after they wandered ashore – didn’t even have dialogue, but once Spielberg cast Slim Pickens in the part, Zemeckis & Gale were tasked with beefing up his role as well. Dan Aykroyd, John Candy, Tim Matheson, Nancy Allen, Bobby Di Cicco, Toshiro Mifune, Christopher Lee, Ned Beatty, Lorraine Gary, Murray Hamilton, Eddie Deezen, Warren Oates and Robert Stack (taking a role John Wayne and Charlton Heston both turned down) also joined the cast. Once the film’s immense miniature and physical effects work was factored into the schedule, 1941 took 247 days to shoot, wrapping in May 1979. The final budget would rest at $31.5 million.

When 1941 was ready to go before an audience in October 1979, Spielberg chose the Medallion Theater in Dallas, the scene of wildly successful test screenings for all three of his feature films. But as his latest entertainment began to unreel, audience satisfaction evaporated. Spielberg recalls, “That was a preview where, you know, people laughed and tittered at the beginning of the film, then as the film got noisier and more confusing and more riotous, the laughter became just kind of wonderment and wonderment became kind of amazement and I even saw people holding their ears. I actually looked over the whole preview audience and midway through the film – I had never seen this before at a preview – audiences, at least twenty percent of the audience, had their hands over their ears. I’ve seen audiences covering their eyes during Jaws, but never over their ears. That’s a whole new experience for me. And I knew we were in trouble at that point.”

1941 garnered varying degrees of praise from critics like David Denby in the New Yorker, but the bad news was plentiful. Vincent Canby, the New York Times: “It may possibly be that Mr. Spielberg has chosen gigantic size and unlimited quantity as his comedy method in the awareness that he has no gift whatsoever for small-scale comic conceits. The slapstick gags, obviously choreographed with extreme care, do not build to boffs; they simply go on too long. I’m not sure if it’s the fault of the director or of the editor, but I’ve seldom seen a comedy more ineptly timed.” Frank Rich, Time Magazine: “While it was generous of Spielberg to employ so large a percentage of the Screen Actors Guild, the huge cast almost immobilizes the movie. It takes too long to establish who everyone is and to knit all the plot strands together. Even though the film is relentlessly busy – there seems to be a physical gag in every shot – it has little of the director’s usual narrative drive. The movie’s story does not so much move forward as gradually selfdestruct.”

John Milius recalls, “We all knew that it wouldn’t get good reviews. We knew when we made the movie that it was politically incorrect and we loved it for that. As matter of fact the term that we used at that time was ’social irresponsibility’ … We even had a Latin motto: ‘Civitas Sine Providentia,’ which means ‘a citizenry without prudence.’ And that was the idea, that this movie was truly socially irresponsible and that’s what we really loved about it. So we knew that critics would hate it because they were all gunning for Steven anyway.” 1941 grossed $31.7 million in the U.S. and $60 million overseas, but the revenues paled in comparison to Jaws or Close Encounters of the Third Kind and stigmatized the film as one of the biggest box office letdowns in memory. The film industry did bestow three Academy Award nominations on 1941: Best Cinematography (William Fraker), Best Sound and Best Visual Effects.

In the intervening years, an appreciative cult following has sprung up around 1941, which was released on laserdisc in 1996 and DVD in 1999 with a behind-the-scenes documentary by Laurent Bouzereau and 28 minutes of additional footage restored to the running time. Around the same time, Spielberg – who remains refreshingly candid about the failings of 1941 – offered his post-mortem: “Power can go right to the head. I felt immortal after a critical hit and two box office hits, one being the biggest film in history up to that moment. But 1941 was not a screw-you film, I can do anything I want, watch me fail upward. I was very indulgent on 1941, simply because I was insecure with the material. It wasn’t making me laugh, or any of us laugh, either in the dailies or on the set. So I shot that movie every way I knew how, to try to save it from being what I thought it actually became, which is a demolition derby.”

Opinion
If a movie is supposed to be a better union formed between material and a director, then 1941 is one of the all-time Hollywood marriages from hell. Below the pandemonium of glass breaking, houses crumbling, buildings exploding and bodies flying, there is evidence that Robert Zemeckis & Bob Gale set out to write a comedy that simply mocked truth, justice and the American way in an acidic, outrageous and frequently juvenile manner (for further evidence, see Used Cars). There’s a sly, “everything is not all right” sensibility buried in 1941 that may be responsible for winning it admirers, particularly in Europe or among people who’d read the Huffington Post. But Zemeckis didn’t direct this movie; Steven Spielberg did and in hindsight, this arrangement works out about as well as a geek taking a cheerleader to the prom. Actually, the results are more like the twister from The Wizard of Oz hitting the prom.

The scenes in 1941 dealing with children or vintage aircraft seem to elicit a sparkle in the eye of Spielberg, the greatest director of boys’ adventure movies of all time. But most anything involving his principal cast – particularly humor – flies around the room like a balloon with the air farting out of it. An end credits curtain call featuring most of the actors screaming sums up the approach here; nobody is given a character to play or the encouragement to deliver anything in an unhurried, unforced manner. Dan Aykroyd, Murray Hamilton, Slim Pickens and Wendie Jo Sperber (as a Jitterbug contestant with the hots for servicemen) are a lot of fun to watch, but they aren’t at any time permitted to be funny. John Williams – who Spielberg credits with writing a march for Belushi rivaling the one from Raiders of the Lost Ark – turned in a fantastic musical score for what amounts to a giant model train wreck.

© Joe Valdez

Sources
The Making of 1941. Directed by Laurent Bouzereau. 1941 (Collector’s Edition). MCA/Universal Home Video (1996)

Steven Spielberg: A Biography. Joseph McBride (1999)

Easy Riders and Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ‘N’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood. Peter Biskind (1998)

Synopsis
On the 6th of January 1917, five condemned French soldiers are brought to a trench in Somme: a once cheerful carpenter, who accidentally shot himself scattering away rats; a welder so disillusioned by the war that he burns his hand in an attempt to win a discharge; a brave farmer (Clovis Cornillac) who wounds himself in shame after murdering a superior officer; a Corsican pimp whose self-inflicted wound fails to win him a reprieve from combat, and a young lighthouse keeper named Manech (Gaspard Ulliel) who cracks under the horror of trench warfare. Each are sentenced to be thrown over the front lines, to starve or be shot by the Germans.

Though three years have passed without word from Manech, Mathilde Donnay (Audrey Tautou) refuses to believe that her lover died at the trench. Mathilde is a limp orphan who lives with her uncle (Dominique Pinon) and aunt (Chantal Neuwirth) on the Brittany coast. A veteran who escorted the condemned soldiers to their deaths meets with Mathilde, but can’t say whether he saw Manech killed. Presented with a box containing personal effects belonging to each soldier, Mathilde uses the clues to begin her own investigation. Her first lead involves a Corsican prostitute named Tina Lombardi (Marion Cotillard) who may have news about the prisoners’ fates.

Hiring a diligent private detective (Ticky Holgado) to pick up the trail of the mysterious Tina Lombardi, Mathilde resorts to her own guile to steal government documents and fan out across France in search of those who may hold a piece of the puzzle in her mystery. These include the carpenter’s girlfriend (Julie Depardieu), the Mess Hall Marauder (Albert Dupontel) who served Manech his last meal, and a war widow named Elodie Gordes (Jodie Foster) who was engaged in an extramarital affair with one of the condemned. Unknown to Mathilde, the vengeful Tina Lombardi is conducting her own investigation, tracking down military officers implicit in her pimp’s execution and killing them.

Production history
Un Long Dimanche de Fiancailles was a 1991 novel by Sébastien Japrisot. The hybrid storybook romance, detective mystery and social commentary on the Great War had been awarded the Prix Interallia by French authors and journalists on its way to becoming an international bestseller. Among its fans was Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who had just co-directed his first feature, Delicatessen. Jeunet was fascinated by the era of World War I and intrigued with the possibilities of recreating 1920s Paris on a massive scale. Jeunet recalls, “When I was a teenager I read everything about the First World War, every book. I wasted a lot of holidays because they gave me nightmares, even today it’s very difficult to read some of that stuff.”

Warner Brothers was eager to work with Jeunet following his 2001 magical romantic comedy Amelie, which had become the highest grossing French language film in history. The studio purchased the screen rights to A Very Long Engagement, wooing the director away from French studio UGC, which had hoped to produce Jeunet’s next project. He again collaborated with his Amelie co-writer Guillaume Laurant on a screenplay. Laurant recalls, “First we worked together to agree on what had to be kept and what discarded and decide upon a structure. Then Jean-Pierre wrote a 30-page synopsis. On the basis of that, I wrote a first version of the script. After that, it was a constant to-and-fro between myself and Jean-Pierre until we came up with a final version. I really enjoyed working with Jean-Pierre because of his constant concern for simplicity and efficiency.”

Jeunet had a few requests from Warner Bros. He wanted to make A Very Long Engagement a French language picture, in France, with a French cast and crew. He also wanted final cut. Jeunet recalls, “At every point they said, ‘Yes, OK.’ I said, ‘When are the troubles going to start?’ And they never did. I had as much freedom as I had doing Amelie. One hundred percent.” Warner Brothers set up a company it called 2003 Productions, financing a third of the film’s $56.5 million USD budget, the second highest ever for a French language film at that time. A five and a half month shooting schedule commenced in August 2003 in Corsica, before moving to the Paris area, then to Brittany for the coastal scenes and the Poitiers area for the trench warfare sequences. Interiors were shot at Bry-sur-Marne Studios.

The troubles started when Jeunet finished A Very Long Engagement and submitted it to the French government for subsidies awarded to films made in France. This raised a furor by two unions of French film producers, who argued that the film wasn’t French because it had been financed by Warner Bros. Jeunet felt that the three major producers in France – Gaumont, UGC and Pathe – were wary of Hollywood intruding on their turf. “It’s quite simple. There are three supermarkets and a fourth opens; the other three are not too happy about it and do everything they can to block it. Warner Bros. wants to be a fourth supermarket but making French films. I defend those who make movies. We gave work to 600 technicians, 80 actors and 2,000 extras; we saved Duboi, which was in trouble; and we spent €35 million in France. We didn’t delocalize.”

Opening October 2004 in France, A Very Long Engagement was a hit, ultimately selling $63.5 million in tickets outside the U.S. Arriving in the States in November, the response was not as stellar. Critics who liked the film had a peculiar way of communicating it. Carina Chocano, the Los Angeles Times: “A resolutely odd, occasionally absurd movie, but it’s as charming and stylish as one could expect from this pair – if you like that sort of thing.” Ken Tucker, New York Magazine: “When this long movie is over, all you want to do is clap and weep and watch it all over again immediately.” Variety: “Told with a blend of visual mastery and emotional intimacy, ambitious venture sustains a special melding of romance and pragmatism that should engage discerning audiences.” Expanding to 219 screens, it managed only $6.5 million in the U.S.

Opinion
For anybody suffering withdrawal over director Terry Gilliam’s seeming inability to finance a movie that lives up to the droll vision displayed in Time Bandits or Brazil, A Very Long Engagement is the magic show you’ve been waiting for. A plot summary really can’t do any more justice to Sébastien Japrisot’s richly intricate novel than it can to Jeunet’s immensely whimsical vision of it. This is a cinematic dessert tray, with French digital animation studio Duboi recreating 1920s Paris on an eye popping scale and rendering some 300 trick shots to make the treats even richer. But underneath the visual sheen are reminders of wartime loss, regret and futility that only a European filmmaker would hint at in an enterprise this lavish.

Because this story is so dependent on exposition – with lots of subtitles for non-French speakers to keep pace with – A Very Long Engagement is challenging. And unlike Amelie, it doesn’t rate as a gigglefest. As a visceral experience, it’s beyond peer. Jeunet and cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel borrowed a warm color palette from the Little Italy sequences of The Godfather Part II and much of the film resembles less a movie than it does a painting. The digital effects add depth to this world, instead of overwhelming it. In terms of the cast, watching Audrey Tautou, Marion Cotillard and Jodie Foster (speaking impeccable French she studied at the Lycée Français prep school in L.A. as a teen) is a treat. Jeunet lets enough light into the cellar to keep the film from being overwhelming, creating one of the finest anti-war movies in recent memory.

Noel Megahey at DVD Times writes, “All of this fabulous spectacle however is at the cost of any real feeling or emotion, it being smothered under the next spectacular, beautifully lit scene. Even when Mathilde visits what she believes is the grave of her fiancé it should be a solemn private moment, but Jeunet can’t resist filling every inch of the full scope ratio of the screen with as many crosses as will fit. Visually impressive, yes – emotionally resonant, no.”

Chris Luedtke at Passport Cinema writes, “Basically, this is what we call in the business ‘some good stuff.’ A lot of directors nowadays could take some cues from Jeunet’s originality in his displays of characters and plot drive … Jeunet has no problem making you believe that her long lost love may be alive one minute and then dead the next. For those willing to pop this in, you’ll be pleasantly delighted with it. Don’t expect some overly sappy romance story but do be prepared for a character driven mystery that’ll keep you guessing.”

© Joe Valdez

Synopsis
Animal rights activists infiltrate the “Cambridge Primate Research Centre” to find a chimpanzee being monitored for its reaction to civil unrest on TV monitors. Ignoring warnings that the animals have been infected with “rage,” the activists unlock the cages. One of them is bitten. Going into convulsions and vomiting blood, she then attacks the others. 28 days later, Jim (Cillian Murphy) wakens in a deserted hospital. Crossing the Westminister Bridge, he finds the entire city of London to be seemingly devoid of human activity as well.

Wandering into a church, Jim discovers piles of bodies and a priest with bloodshot eyes stricken by a violent illness. Chased by more of these infected, he’s rescued by Mark (Noah Huntley) and Selena (Naomie Harris), survivors armed with Molotov cocktails and gas masks. Jim reveals he’s a bicycle courier who was hit by a car. Selena tells him that while he was comatose, what began as rioting in small villages spread to the cities. “It was a virus. An infection. You didn’t need a doctor to tell you that. It was the blood. Something in the blood. By the time they tried to evacuate the cities, it was all ready too late.”

Mark and Selena accompany Jim to check on his parents, who are found dead from drug overdose. What used to be neighbors attack the house and when Mark is bitten, Selena wastes no time hacking him to death with her machete. She and Jim head for a beacon atop a housing project, where they find a cab driver named Frank (Brendan Gleeson) and his 12-year-old daughter (Megan Burns). Frank has picked up a radio signal from a barracks in Manchester. The four survivors attempt to make it there by car, but instead of a cure or even safety, find an army major (Christopher Eccleston) whose unit is even more dangerous than the infected.

Production history
In 1999, Alex Garland was in Thailand visiting the set of The Beach, a film version of his novel starring Leonardo DiCaprio and directed by Danny Boyle. Cost overruns, protests from environmentalists and pressure from Fox for the dark film to duplicate the success of Titanic were taking their toll on the production. In spite of this, producer Andrew Macdonald was eager to work with Garland again. “Alex is just a natural story teller and I wanted to make a film that had the same energy and excitement of reading one of his books. When he said that he’d always wanted to do science fiction, I encouraged him to look to H. G. Wells, The Time Machine, something set in Britain.”

Garland recalls, “Most British schoolboys have read The Day of the Triffids, and also I’m a huge J.G. Ballard fan. He wrote three novels set after an apocalypse, each with a different premise: no water, lots of water, the world setting into crystal. And I loved those novels, I loved the atmosphere. And also the films of George Romero.” While Garland was writing, The Beach was bombing. Danny Boyle – who’d segued from theater to television to film in England – was struggling to live up to the pedigree he’d earned with Trainspotting. He followed the disappointing reception of The Beach by making two short films for the BBC on digital video.

Working with Macdonald, Alex Garland expanded a fifty-page draft he’d showed the producer into a screenplay for 28 Days Later. Macdonald approached Danny Boyle with the project. The director had little desire to make a zombie flick, but liked Garland’s take, which was to introduce a psychological plague as opposed to a biological one. Garland’s scenario reminded Boyle of the foot and mouth outbreak that had ravaged England. He recalls, “They were followed by this absence of many months of any livestock in the countryside. If you took a train journey, everything was still and motionless outside the train or outside your car as you drove through. All this kind of fed into it.”

Macdonald secured half the film’s $8.7 million USD budget through a lottery endowment from the Arts Council of England, while the other half came from Fox Searchlight, whose president Peter Rice read the script at the Cannes Film Festival. Less than four months later – on September 1, 2001 – Boyle started filming 28 Days Later in London on Canon XL-1 Mini DV cameras, which retailed for around $4,000 at consumer electronics stores. Boyle stated, “Digital cameras are much more responsive to low light levels and the general idea was to try and shoot as though we were survivors too.”

Digital video afforded Boyle advantages to film. Few, if any, turf battles erupted with the lighting crew. The actors got to spend more time performing each day as opposed to waiting for a setup. Boyle adds, “Digital video is very good for stunts. Normally, unless you’re working at the level Ridley Scott’s working at – where for a big stunt he can have twelve movie cameras – on the kind of films we do, if you have a big stunt, you can really only afford three cameras. Whereas with digital, you can have twenty.” With the resources to clear traffic from London’s streets for only ninety seconds to two minutes at a time, Boyle could shoot from as many different angles as a mega film.

After opening in the U.K. November 2002, Fox brought 28 Days Later to the Sundance Film Festival in January 2003. Instead of magazines, billboards or talk shows, the studio took the unusual step of promoting the film on the Internet, spending $1 million for banner ads on AOL and Yahoo!, inviting Harry Knowles to a screening so he could hype it on his Ain’t It Cool News website and making six minutes of footage available for download on Apple’s Quicktime website. With no stars and little money, 28 Days Later took in a surprising $45 million in the U.S. and another $37 million overseas.

Playing well with critics – “Clever enough not to be too clever, Boyle and Garland play their story straight, they just want to give you the creeps, and, by so doing, bring the undead back to cinematic life,” wrote John Powers in L.A. Weekly – and audiences alike, Fox took another leap by attaching an alternate ending to the film after it had already been playing in the U.S. for 29 days. The darker conclusion had been rejected by Boyle and appeared as an extra on the DVD in the U.K. It now followed the ending in theaters, preceded by the title “But what if.”

Opinion
In reviving the horror subgenre of “zombie movie” – which had been lying dormant since the early days of Cinemax and Return of the Living Dead – this film stands as a classic because it almost completely ignores those movies and creates its own brazen aesthetic. Apocalyptic, realistic, European in tone, raw and edgy, there’s no slickness to 28 Days Later, no moments that feel dedicated to the great directors of horror or suspense. Even a scene where a crow drops infected blood into the eyelid of one of the main characters is not storyboarded like a Hitchcock tribute, but instead, unfolds as if a news crew had stumbled onto it.

Like the zombies in Alex Garland’s no frills script, the style Danny Boyle energized the film with is quick and brutal. It’s exceedingly well cast for a B-movie, with Cillian Murphy and Naomie Harris making a well matched Last Man and Final Girl. Brendan Gleeson and Christopher Eccleston have portrayed a long line of screen heavies and bring a welcome weight and deviousness to the other survivors. Short on plot or artifice, 28 Days Later is one of the best documents on the end of the world ever made. The atmosphere is heightened by Anthony Dod Mantle’s digital photography and the foreboding soundtrack, which uses “East Hastings” by Godspeed You Black Emperor to memorable effect in the early go.

Eamonn McCusker at DVD Times writes, “I can’t wholly recommend 28 Days Later as it just won’t be for everyone but it isn’t bad – no better, no worse, just not bad. It is, however, difficult to feel any greater reaction than simply saying that – it passes the time – but a socially aware zombie film, set in a post-apocalyptic Britain with relevant points to make as to how we are currently living our lives should make one feel and react to a rather greater extent. 28 Days Later is, sadly, a wasted opportunity.”

“Danny Boyle cannot be praised enough for trying something new within such a well-loved fan-fanatic genre as the zombie/apocalyptic horror film. True, 28 Days Later is not 100% successful, but when compared to other independent (or big budget) attempts at rewriting the living dead niche, it’s less of a video game and more of a personally moving motion picture. It gets its dread and despair down perfectly, and isn’t afraid to amplify the threat when necessary. There is something compact and contained about the film, with just enough of a ring of truth to turn a ‘what if’ into a ‘when,’” writes Bill Gibron at DVD Verdict.

Vince Leo at QWipster’s Movie Reviews writes, “28 Days Later leaves many questions unanswered, many ideas unexplained, and doesn’t really hold up to scientific scrutiny. It requires a good deal of suspension of disbelief and a willingness to give the creators the benefit of the doubt. It is recommended for fans of post-apocalyptic science fiction, zombie flicks, and those who have been disillusioned with the paltry amounts of intelligent horror films to come out in recent years. Yes, it’s complete nonsense, but completely riveting at the same time.”

© Joe Valdez

Synopsis
In April 1805 off the coast of Brazil, the HMS Surprise – 28 guns and 97 souls – has been ordered by the British Royal Navy to intercept the Acheron, a French vessel intent on carrying Napoleon’s war to the Pacific. As the Surprise cruises into a fog bank, officer of the watch Hollom (Lee Ingleby) glimpses something. Too indecisive to take action, young midshipman Callamy (Max Benitz) is the one who issues a beat to quarters. Captain Jack Aubrey (Russell Crowe) spots the enemy moments before it fires on them. The Surprise escapes into the fog, but Dr. Stephen Maturin (Paul Bettany) reports nine lives lost in the attack.

The first lieutenant (James D’Arcy) states that with repairs they can make it home, but Aubrey notifies his officers they’re not going home. Though outclassed, the captain intends to stop the Acheron before it reaches the South Seas. In a typhoon, the Surprise is ambushed again, forcing Aubrey to choose the life of one of his men for the survival of the ship. Dr. Maturin – also the captain’s friend – confides that perhaps they should have turned back weeks ago. “You’re not accustomed to defeat. When chasing this larger, faster ship with its long guns, it’s beginning to smack of pride.”

Aubrey concludes that the Acheron will head for the British whaling fleet at the Galapagos Islands and charts a course there, promising Maturin, “You can wander at will, collecting bugs and beetles to your heart’s content.” But when survivors of a sunken whaler alert Aubrey to the position of the Acheron, those plans change, “Subject to the requirements of the service.” The doctor considers it another sign of Aubrey’s abuse of power and questions how they can best serve their country, as a ship of war, or a ship of discovery.

Production history
In 1995, production executive Tom Rothman was on vacation in rural Connecticut and was stuck indoors due to weather. His father-in-law gave him a copy of Master and Commander, the first in what became twenty-one novels by Patrick O’Brian chronicling the friendship between English naval captain Jack Aubrey and his ship’s physician, Stephen Maturin, during the Napoleonic Wars. The New York Times Book Review raved in 1991 that the books were “the best historical novels ever written.” Rothman was told if he could make it through the first hundred pages, he’d probably like it.

Rothman not only made it through the first hundred pages, he was hooked. “I thought if it could be done right it would be wonderful for as many reasons. It could be one of the great buddy films of all time on a vastly romantic, thrilling canvas, a return to what great studio filmmaking used to be.” Rothman suggested this to his boss, Samuel Goldwyn Jr., who flew O’Brian to Los Angeles to talk. The author stated that the appeal of the Hornblower period of English history was in its high adventure, but what was typically lacking – and what he invested his books with – was “lifestyle.”

Goldwyn set the project up at Touchstone Pictures. A fan of Picnic At Hanging Rock, Gallipoli and Witness, he approached Peter Weir to direct. Weir turned the offer down. John McTiernan was considered, but the scripts that came out of the studio emphasized action at the expense of O’Brian’s “lifestyle.” Touchstone put the project into turnaround, where Fox ultimately picked it up after Rothman ascended to co-chairman of the studio. By this time, Weir had completed The Truman Show and was in L.A. bidding his services for his next film.

Instead of giving the director a pitch, Rothman presented Weir with a sword and asked him to take command of the adaptation of O’Brian’s naval adventures. Weir recalled, “I read all the books. I loved the series, but I really didn’t think Master and Commander would make a good movie. I said if I were going to do O’Brian, I’d start somewhere in the middle with one of the long voyages and get to know these men when they were already friends. Tom told me to go away and do just that.”

Working with John Collee, Weir adapted the tenth book – The Far Side of the World – trimming most of the scenes that took place ashore. According to Weir, “I didn’t want any architecture. I didn’t want crinolines, or carriages rolling down the streets. I wanted to be at sea, to open the picture at sea and to hardly touch land.” Before the project was even greenlit, Weir implored Fox to purchase a vessel he found suitable to stand in for the HMS Surprise at sea; the Rose, a tall ship whose namesake served as a sail-trainer for the British in the 1750s. The cost: $1.5 million.

The filmmakers wooed Russell Crowe to play Captain Jack Aubrey. Crowe had dreamed of working with Peter Weir, but not only voiced reservations about the script – which Akiva Goldsman was brought in to polish, emphasizing “Jack’s confusions, metaphors and aphorisms” – but was committed to star in Cinderella Man, at that time for director Lasse Hallström and Miramax. When Weir refused to wait a year for Crowe, the star agreed to go to sea first. Partnering with Miramax and Universal, the film was greenlit at $135 million. Shooting commenced in June 2002 in a 6.5-acre tank at Fox Studios in Baja, Mexico.

Eighteen weeks of filming in the tank and a week in the Galapagos, the film’s budget climbed to $150 million. Once Weir and Industrial Light & Magic realized how long the 730 effects shots were going to take to render believably, their release date was delayed from June to November 2003. A lukewarm test screening in Aurora, Colorado complicated matters even further. To help the film appeal to women, the studios suggested inserting scenes on land between Aubrey and a wife. Weir refused. The expensive film played to nearly universal acclaim by critics, but fell short of expectations for a franchise, grossing $210 million worldwide.

Opinion
The advent of digital effects and the box office take of Titanic paved the way for a new slate of historical epics at the turn of the century, but the only one to reach the bar set by genre master David Lean was Peter Weir and Master and Commander. Gladiator, Cold Mountain, The Last Samurai and Troy have their moments, but this is an epic that succeeds from beginning to end. It does so because the film devotes just as much detail to the nuances of character, friendship and morality as its does to action, without giving the short end of the stick to either one.

While the lack of a love story or a nasty villain may have dimmed the commercial appeal of Master and Commander, the film doesn’t heap dopey plot developments on the audience. Its richness lies in the devotion of the filmmakers to recreating a bygone world, stitch by stitch, word by word, aboard a British naval vessel in the early 19th century. This is a marvel on every conceivable technical level, particularly the miniature model work by Weta Workshop and the visual effects by ILM, which are seamless. Intelligent and captivating, the film stands out as the best “guys movie” in recent memory.

Marilyn Ferdinand at Ferdy on Films, etc. writes, “Master and Commander is a film that goes from strength to strength. Following the blueprint of authenticity that made the O’Brian books so popular, this film is a time machine … The customs of the British Navy at this time are well observed, from the manner of salutes given to the officers, to the details of a flogging, to the medical practices of the time, and the fine craftsmanship of the carpenters who were always aboard to build spare parts, make repairs, and fashion objects in their idle time that collectors can’t get enough of these days.”

“It’s a The Perfect Storm with a far more rousing story, or a U-571 with hugely better dialogue. And since I liked both of those critically-panned ocean-going films, I can’t help but love this one. It won’t teach you much of anything about the Napoleonic Wars, but if you’re interested in old-time military conflict from one ship’s perspective, you’re not going to do much better than Master and Commander,” writes Brian Webster at Apollo Movie Guide.

David Levine at Filmcritic.com writes, “Master and Commander could have easily become a stereotypical action picture where every scene is punctuated with explosions and other big budget special effects. While the film’s budget does exceed $100 million, Weir refreshingly concerns himself most with the relationships between all classes of seamen, from cook and carpenter to midshipman and lieutenant … But the real credit here should go to Weir, whose transformation of O’Brian’s novels into a completely literate and engrossing on-screen drama deserves nothing short of the highest honor. Master and Commander is a masterpiece.”

© Joe Valdez

Synopsis
As Sputnik orbits Earth in the year 1957, something from outer space plummets through the eye of a storm and lands in the waters off the coast of “Rockwell,” Maine. The next day, Hogarth Hughes (Eli Marienthal) visits his mother (Jennifer Aniston) at the diner where she works. A local salt (M. Emmet Walsh) is convinced he saw “an invader from Mars” crash into the sea. When he’s ridiculed, a beatnik named Dean (Harry Connick Jr.) sticks up for him, befriending Hogarth in the process.

With his mother working late, Hogarth stays up watching a sci-fi movie. Hearing something in the woods, he wanders outside and encounters a one hundred foot tall robot tangled in power lines. Hogarth saves the giant. The government sends the hyper vigilant Kent Mansley (Christopher McDonald) to investigate the weird goings-on in Rockwell. Hogarth returns to the woods the next day and befriends the giant, which doesn’t speak, but seems to understand the boy. When it accidentally causes a train derailment, Hogarth hides the giant in a barn.

Mansley discovers Hogarth was at the scene of the accident and rents a room from his mother to find out what the boy knows. Hogarth moves the giant into the junkyard managed by the beatnik Dean, an aspiring iron sculptor. Their ruse works, until the giant’s awesome defense system mistakes Hogarth’s toy gun for a threat and almost vaporizes him. The giant runs away, and when the U.S. Army discovers it, attacks. Mansley is so zealous he orders a nuclear strike on Rockwell. As the town awaits their destruction, the giant realizes it can choose whether to destroy life, or protect it.

Production history
The Iron Man was a 1968 children’s book by British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes. Published in the U.S. as The Iron Giant, the book concerned a giant robot that surfaces from the ocean and befriends a young boy. Hughes originated the story to console his two children following the suicide of their mother, poet Sylvia Plath in 1963. Pete Townsend of The Who was later searching for material to adapt into a rock opera and in 1986, settled on The Iron Man. A concept album was spawned three years later and in 1993, a stage musical in London.

With The Lion King a sensation at the box office and Hollywood studios all racing to set up their own feature animation units, Townsend’s collaborator – theater producer Des McAnuff – sold the property to Warner Bros. The studio was eager to work with Brad Bird, a 39-year-old animator best known for directing a very well received animated episode of Amazing Stories called Family Dog and serving as an executive consultant on The Simpsons and King of the Hill.

Bird looked at the projects the studio had in development and saw a drawing of a young boy and a robot. He read The Iron Man and ultimately pitched his own version to Warner Bros. “Hughes’ book is a great story that tries to show kids about the cycle of life. Even though there is death, life has a continuity. My version is based around a question I asked the execs at Warner Bros. What if a gun had a soul and chose not to be a gun? Basically I wanted to honor the book, but also take it in a new direction.”

In January 1997, Tim McCanlies and Brent Forrester were hired to work from Bird’s story treatment and to adapt a screenplay with the director. Working at Warner Bros. Feature Animation in Glendale – with “one-third of the money of a Disney or DreamWorks film, and half of the production schedule” according to Bird – the filmmakers received a green light for production. Tony Fucile was chosen as head of animation and hired the team to design the movie. While drawn mostly in traditional two-dimensional animation, the Iron Giant proved so difficult to visualize that CGI was employed to give the character mass and solidity.

Working from sketches by Joe Johnston, Bird, production designer Mark Whiting and supervising CGI animator Steve Markowski also incorporated visual cues from ‘50s sci-fi classics like The Day the Earth Stood Still for the look and feel of the Giant. Bird rejected the idea of designing the characters around whichever movie stars they could cast. Instead, he looked for voices that fit his concept of who the characters were. Jennifer Aniston, Harry Connick Jr., Vin Diesel and Christopher Macdonald were selected.

The film scored high with test audiences and began to build enthusiastic word of mouth, but Warner Bros. was reeling from a disastrous experience producing an animated film called The Quest For Camelot. Their feature animation unit was already being scaled back and the decision was made to market The Iron Giant strictly to kids. None of its actors were booked on talk shows. No magazine ads were taken out. Bird wasn’t even permitted to cut his own trailer. Both Danny Elfman and John Williams were considered to score the picture, but the studio opted for Michael Kamen instead.

Arriving in theaters August 1999, The Iron Giant went on to gross $23 million in the U.S. It added another $80 million overseas, but the film was pronounced a box office failure. President of production Lorenzo di Bonaventura would later state, “People always say to me, ‘Why don’t you make smarter family movies?’ The lesson is, every time you do, you get slaughtered.” Bird maintained that disarray at the studio actually enabled him to make the film he wanted, and he remained grateful to Warner Bros. for giving him the opportunity to direct his first feature.

Opinion
By producing an animated film without talking animals, musical numbers or smug pop culture references, Bird’s directorial debut would’ve towered over recent fare from Disney or DreamWorks merely because it does something creative in its medium. The reason The Iron Giant is a classic is its unwavering devotion to story and character, qualities you rarely see most live action movies. The film isn’t an excuse to sell toys or commercial tie-ins to kids. This is a film that engages the emotions of the audience and engages them beautifully.

Bird’s passion for comic book mythology, domestic situation comedy and science fiction – the sequence where the Giant unleashes his alien weaponry against the Army is any film geek’s dream – is ideally suited for this material. The film is loaded with visual wit, like a Duck and Cover newsreel, or the yin and yang icon on the back of Dean’s bathrobe. Beyond it’s visceral excitement and humor, the film’s characters are invested with heart, and the story has something relevant to say about humanity. The Iron Giant has it all and stand as one of the great animated films of the ‘90s.

Angus Wolfe Murray at Eye For Film writes, “The film works on almost every level, particularly its central relationship. The animators, scriptwriter (Tim McCanlies) and Vin Diesel, who creates a mode of speech for the giant, have succeeded in giving the massive Meccano model a heart and soul, without resorting to those special Spielberg moments.”

“The Iron Giant is one of those rare, truly magical animated movies that has a heart as big as Mount Everest, but never becomes too saccharine sweet. There’s a fabulous voice cast, including Jennifer Aniston in (for this reviewer) her first un-annoying role ever as Hogarth’s mom … Add to this a soundtrack that gives that extra zing to proceedings and we’re left with a near-perfect melding of computer graphics and traditional cel animation that presents to us a truly moving story that never drags,” writes Amy Flower at DVD Net.

Jen Walker at AboutFilm.com writes, “The Iron Giant offers a look back into an era fondly remembered. It is steeped in 1950s paranoia and naivete, a story whole and separate from the world in which millenial children currently exist. In a decade full of extreme advertising, extreme sports, and even extreme snacks, modern children may not appreciate a movie such as The Iron Giant. But if we can get them to slow down long enough to give it a chance, they will be treated to something truly special in this day and age: a damn good story.”

© Joe Valdez