The Screengrab

Sure, it seems like it would be easy enough to be Guy Ritchie, making your London gangster movies, naming your characters after Dick Tracy villains and generally building a career out of fast-paced, violent Tarantino knockoffs. But Ritchie has hit a rough patch of late. Warner Bros. is said to be down on the American box office prospects of his latest effort, RocknRolla, and the sordid details of his wife Madonna’s alleged dalliance with Yankees slugger Alex Rodriguez were splashed across the New York tabloids for weeks.

Ritchie recently talked to Craig McLean of The Guardian about the former matter, even as he did his best to evade the latter.

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So, last week, Scott Von Doviak picked a trifecta of movies he’s most looking forward to (and three he’s most definitely avoiding) in the Fall/Winter 2008 Oscar Bait/Xmas Blockbuster Season, and challenged his fellow Screengrabbers to do the same.

Paul Clark was the next to weigh in, and now I’ll give it a shot...although I have to admit, with so many interesting and terrible-looking movies on deck, it’s hard to pick just three of each, so I’ll automatically disqualify Burn After Reading and Synechdoche, New York from my Top 3 and Bedtime Stories and The Women from my Bottom 3, since they’ve already been cited on the previous two Fall Preview lists.

Which brings us to MY lists...

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Hello? Oh...Mr. Rooney...what? Uh, no...Scott's not here. This is Andrew...Andrew Osborne...yes, sir, I'm another one of the writers here at The Screengrab. You may have read my ongoing autobiographical posts about the summer I spent working for Troma ...no? Well, maybe you read my special 50th birthday salute to the films of Madonna or my review of Vicky Cristina Barcelona? No? Oh, well...

...uh, what's that, sir? Scott Von Doviak? You mean the author of "Tom Cruise Still Creepy, Still Not Funny," "Anna Faris, Honorary Bunny" and "Unwatchable #74: You Got Served"? Oh, well, he's not here right now, but...

...excuse me? You've heard rumors that Scott is singing "Twist and Shout" in the streets of Chicago with his colleague Leonard Pierce, author of "Video of the Day: Sharon Stone Bares All For Paul Verhoeven," "Summerfest '08: Corvette Summer" and that cool story about the state of DC Comics film adaptations? And that Sarah Sundberg, one of the hardworking contributors to "Screengrab Salutes The Top 20 Animated Feature Films" was riding around with them in a bright red Ferrari convertible?

Oh, no, sir, I'm afraid you must be mistaken...

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Yesterday, my colleague Scott Von Doviak dared all of his fellow Screengrab staffers to weigh in on our most anticipated movies of the fall. Given my lifelong inability to resist a dare (which resulted in my eating far too many unspeakable things in my younger days) I’ve decided to answer the call. Craving an additional challenge- and hoping to spotlight the wide array of good and bad releases coming soon to a theatre near me- I’ve decided to eliminate all contenders that appeared in Scott’s preview. Here goes...

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And now...the stinkers.

6. Marie in Shadows and Fog (1992), Elspeth in Four Rooms (1995)



As noted in Part One, Madonna works best in movies when used as spice in a cameo...except, of course, when the cameo is lousy. Yet, though these two performances are, in fact, terrible, it’s hard to judge Ms. Ciccone too harshly for either of them, given the fact that Lily Tomlin, Jodie Foster and Kathy Bates hardly fare much better in Woody Allen’s limp, pretentious Shadows and Fog, and nobody but the lucky actors in Robert Rodriguez’s section of the misbegotten omnibus film Four Rooms bothered to give a coherent performance, either.

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All right, you caught me. I thought the Dostoevsky dust jacket would fool you, but I admit it: I am, in fact, reading Christopher Ciccone’s mordant tell-all Life With My Sister Madonna. (But it’s my wife’s copy! I swear!)

I’m not very far into the book yet, but my wife informs me one of  Ciccone's startling revelations is that his sister actually thinks she can act, despite the fact that acting, according to Stanislavski and other noted authorities, requires momentarily pretending to be someone other than Madonna.

Yet, while the Material Girl’s film roles never really stray from her four basic personas (Chanteuse, Dominatrix, Knockabout Brooklyn Gal and The “Real” Madonna), she has, technically, portrayed “characters” in more than a dozen movies over the course of 23 years, and, in the 1991 “documentary” Truth or Dare, she went down on a water bottle as if she still gave head to actual humans, drawing on sense memory (I’m guessing) from at least as far back as Sean Penn, and possibly Jellybean Benitez. So maybe she really CAN act.

At any rate, to celebrate her recent Golden Jubilee, we here at The Screengrab would like to present our very special birthday ranking of Madge’s film performances, from least embarrassing to downright painful.

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SMOKIN’ ACES (2006), Not Directed By Guy Ritchie (or Quentin Tarantino)



Now that Madonna keeps Guy Ritchie's cajones in a vault at the Bank of London (although here's knockin' wood for RockNRola) and Quentin Tarantino's gasbaggery has flared-up to chronic levels (I mean, good Lord, Death Proof would have been about ten minutes long if some brave editor had dared to cut every scrap of verbal diarrhea...but fingers crossed for Inglorious Bastards), there aren't too many directors cranking out simple gun-slingin' all-star demolition derbies like Smokin' Aces anymore. The formula is relatively simple: combine a dozen or so intersecting/doublecrossing thieves/assassins/lawmen/etc. with a simple Maguffin and a zillion rounds of ammunition and overheat, then sit back and see who survives. Like KFC chicken, it's not good for you and you'll probably regret it later (especially if you stick around for Aces' terrible one-twist-too-many ending), but Joe Carnahan’s loving and/or shameless transfer of Lock, Dogs & Two Smokin’ Snatches to a Lake Tahoe casino serves as a more-or-less satisfying delivery system for a whole bunch of tasty, testosterone-flavored empty calories with better-than-necessary performances from a cast including Ray Liotta, Matthew Fox, Ryan Reynolds, Ben Affleck, Andy Garcia, Nestor Carbonell, Common, a luminescent Alicia Keys and about a hundred other people, including a way-too-serious performance by Jeremy Piven as the sleazy informant everybody else in the movie wants to save and/or kill.

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While his wife Madonna continues to dominate the tabloid covers, Guy Ritchie is keeping busy preparing for his Sherlock showdown. As we told you last week, Ritchie’s reboot of Sherlock Holmes is getting some competition from a rival production that will star Sacha Baron Cohen as the great detective and Will Ferrell as the elementary Watson. Now Ritchie has landed his Sherlock: Robert Downey, Jr. As Variety reports, “Downey emerged as an action star with Iron Man and Sherlock Holmes also will take advantage of his physical skills as the character displays brawn as well as brains. The basis for the film is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's classic tales, but also the comicbook Sherlock Holmes.” The “comicbook” Variety refers to is an upcoming take by Lionel Wigram, not the classic DC version pictured here. Sorry, nerds.

Speaking of comics (and nerds): fans of the Elfquest series by Wendy and Richard Pini, commence sharpening your knives. Or swords. Or whatever it is elves carry.

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SHOWGIRLS (1995)



“Do you know what they call that useless piece of skin around a twat? A woman!” And that hilarious quip from strip club “comedienne” Henrietta “Mama” Bazoom pretty much sums up the philosophy towards women in this abortion of a cult classic by screenwriter Joe Eszterhas and director Paul Verhoeven. Sure, I get it...this campy, overwrought drag show bitch-fest about amoral sex worker Nomi Malone (Elizabeth Berkley) is so bad it’s good! And we can all just laugh through the parts where Gina Ravera’s Molly (the only vaguely redeemable or recognizably human character in the movie, and a black woman to boot) gets brutally raped by a loathsome white rock star. (I love it when they act out that part in the drag queen version of the show at my favorite hipster bar!) Garish, ridiculous and aggressively stupid, Showgirls is hard for me to enjoy ironically, since it so clearly embraces and truly believes in its own fetid realpolitik Hollywood philosophy that love is a lie, “art” is whatever makes money, winning is everything, men are scumbags, women are worthless (especially if they’re not hot, naked and young), the world is a shithole, if you’re not clawing your way to the top every single minute (and/or don’t know how to properly pronounce the most expensive status symbol brand names) you’re a fool and a loser and deserve what you get. Yeccch. Showgirls ain't just misogynistic: it pretty much hates everyone. And the feeling is mutual.

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Almost as deadly for an actor as a face made for radio is a style made for theater.  An actor who is thought of primarily as a stage presence will often be considered either too overblown and theatrical for film, from years of playing to the back row, or too subtle and mannered to have the kind of dynamic charisma one looks for in the image-intensive medium of motion pictures.  Occasionally, though, a highly praised stage actor breaks through in film and establishes himself as the class of his field, and if Wales' Jonathan Pryce lacks the good looks and intensity of a Laurence Olivier, he has at least managed — largely due to his longtime association with the troubled, talented director Terry Gilliam — to become one of the most skillful and reliable character actors working today.   A veteran of RADA (on an acting scholarship) and the former artistic director of the celebrated Liverpool Everyman Theater, Pryce's stage credentials are impeccable, but he's also a stalwart movie veteran who's appeared in everything from James Bond movies (he played the main villain in 1997's Tomorrow Never Dies, opposite Pierce Brosnan) to summer blockbusters (he's been the Don Knotts-esque governor of Jamaica, Weatherby Swann, in all three installments of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise).  But despite these occasional gestures at superstardom, he's most at home assaying highly distinctive and memorable character roles, even imbuing his occasional lead performance with a nervous energy and sublime competence that comes straight out of his theatrical training and perfectly feeds into his on-screen persona.

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It was a four-car pile-up with only two survivors. It was Four Rooms, an omnibus film by the hottest Sundance kids in town, the self-proclaimed “Class of ‘92” consisting of Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez, Allison Anders and Alexandre Rockwell. The directors of Reservoir Dogs, El Mariachi, Gas, Food, Lodging and In the Soup decided to join forces before Pulp Fiction went through the stratosphere, but the project didn’t materialize until afterwards. The premise was simplicity itself: each segment of the film took place in a different room in the same hotel, with Tim Roth’s befuddled bellhop as the only common link.

Tarantino’s runaway ego was on full display in his room, “The Man from Hollywood,” yet he would emerge from the wreckage virtually unscathed, along with Rodriguez, whose slapstick contribution “The Misbehavers” was generally regarded as the movie’s highlight.

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It’s just a rumor right now but, according to the Daily Mail, Madonna is trying to get together a remake of Casablanca. A remake of Casablanca set in Iraq in which she plays Ilsa Lund. Go ahead, find something disposable to vomit in. You back? Now think of all her scenes in Dick Tracy. Bet you don’t remember eating those carrots. Now think of Guy Ritchie’s Swept Away remake. Alright, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make you cry.

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Professional cranky bastard Joe Queenan surveys the current contenders for the title of worst movie ever made and finds them lacking. He is appalled that a walking answer to a trivia-quiz lightning round like Paris Hilton can take a few weeks off from doing nothing to doing nothing in front of a camera crew, and that the results can be used to scare people away from theaters for a weekend or two in the late winter season, and this gets called the worst movie ever made, as if enough work had gone into it for it to qualify as a movie, let alone the worst anything. "That is not fair," he grrumbles. "It is not fair to Kevin Costner, it is not fair to Jennifer Lopez, and it is certainly not fair to Madonna. Though it is a natural impulse to believe that the excruciating film one is watching today is on a par with the excruciating films of yesterday, this is a slight to those who have worked long and hard to make movies so moronic that the public will still be talking about them decades later. Anyone can make a bad movie; Kate Hudson and Adam Sandler make them by the fistful." Queenan saves his lowest accolades for movies that are shown real misguided imagination and daring in their very conception. As examples, he cites Futz!, a 1969 hippie extravaganza based on an Off-Broadway play, written in verse, about a farmer whose very close relationship with his pig meets with the disapproval of his neighbors.

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Genealogists have uncovered some startling connections between our current crop of presidential candidates and everyone’s favorite celebrity couple – and for all we know, they’ve given Oliver Stone some casting ideas for a future project.

According to the Associated Press, the good people at the New England Historic Genealogical Society have determined that Barack Obama is a distant cousin of Brad Pitt, while Hillary Rodham Clinton and Angelina Jolie are “ninth cousins.” But that’s not all!

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Hey, film buffs! What does this picture of Madonna remind you of?



Hit the jump for a hint!

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After time served as pop star, actress, model, cheesecake auteur, teenage pregnancy debate flashpoint, capitalist, professional celebrity, marketing guru, dancer, trophy wife, bogus accent advocate, Kaballist, children's book author, and for all we know astronaut, Madonna can finally add "feature film director" to her ridiculously rambunctious résumé.

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In her final, book-length interview with Francis Davis, the late film critic Pauline Kael lamented that entertainment reporters were always wrting about John Travolta as if he were stupid. When Davis suggested that this might have something to do with Travolta's devotion to Scientology, Kael said that nobody seemed to have the same problem with Tom Cruise. That was then and this is now, and the furor over Andrew Morton's forthcoming unauthorized biography of the brainmaster behind Days of Thunder is shaping up to be all about the Scientology association that has done some much in recent years to type Cruise as a towering weirdo in the public eye and may be on the verge of derailing his career.

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After months of doing this feature, we started to wonder:  are we being Europhobic?  Are our America-centric viewing habits getting the best of us?  Are countless Frenchmen, Germans, and Italians snubbing our film blog because of our unwillingness to feature beloved character actors from the Continent in That Guy!?  Well, that ends today.  For today we feature, as the lead singer of Korn gracefully put it, "the man with the fucked-up eyes":  Mr. Udo Kier.  Wherever he goes, Udo (as is befitting a man named Udo) is a candidate for the strangest man in the country.  He has played a vampire or a zombie at least a dozen times, and he is likely the only actor in the history of the world to have appeared in films by Gus van Sant, Ranier Werner Fassbinder, Lars von Trier, Andy Warhol, and Rob Zombie.  Resembling nothing so much as a Helmut Newton photograph come to some semblance of three-dimensional life, Udo Kier -- who was born in Germany and almost died hours later when Allied bombers pulverized the hospital in which he was born -- cannot rightly be called a character actor so much as he can a cult actor.  Whether he's going to be a leader or a member of that cult depends on the role.  Truth be told, Udo isn't even one of the finer actors we've featured in this space; his presence in a film isn't so much a promise of a gripping performance to come as it is a dire warning that something very, very fucked up is about to happen.  He's appeared in a staggering number of films -- as many as 150 at last count -- and it is putting it extremely mildly to say that they range greatly in quality.  He was in Berlin Alexanderplatz; he was also in Spermula, a movie that we assure you we are not making up.  He was in Dogville; he was also in Barb Wire.  He has worked with some of the most talented American and European directors of the last half-century; he also put on a spanking costume and posed in Madonna's "Sex" book, and smeared fresh animal offal over his face at the behest of Paul Morrisey.  What will he do next?  Believe us when we say that a man who has been directed by both Quentin Tarantino and Uwe Boll within the last year is capable of anything.

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