Hey, Pansy Nation. Why don’t you get your fat faces out of your computer screens for five minutes and go get some fresh air? Maybe do a push-up or something. Y’know, when they asked me to host the Highlight Reel this week, I figured I was gonna be showing clips of The Outlaw Josey Wales and Any Which Way You Can. I didn’t realize the Screengrab was nothing but a bunch of limp-wristed globbers. Well, I never had a glob. Never saw the need for it. What am I gonna do, sit around writing about Strangers in a Strange Land: Screengrab’s Favorite Fish-Out-of-Water Stories (Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five and Six)? Hell no, I’ve got boars to shoot.

I’ve never been to Sundance, either. I always figured it was just an excuse for Redford and his pinko friends to hit the slopes before going back to the lodge for tea and fairycakes. But I guess if you care, you can read about Five Must-See Documentaries, Ten Must-See Narrative Features (Parts One and Two) and Five Movies to Skip. Hell, you can even read about Slamdance if you want.

Here’s some more crap I don’t care about:

Read More...

Patrick McGoohan, who died this past week at the age of 80, was cooler than the ice in your lemonade. Born in Astoria, New York but raised in Ireland and England, the young McGoohan worked a string of odd jobs before landing at Sheffield Repertory Theatre as stage manager, where he found his true vocation when he was pressed into service to fill in on-stage for an ailing actor. With his striking presence, rounded diction and rapid-fire delivery, he quickly established a name for himself on the English stage, especially after Orson Welles cast him as Starbuck in Welles's celebrated London production based on Moby Dick. (That and a few of McGoohan's other stage performances, including his acclaimed turn in the title role of Ibsen's Brand, were later recorded for TV.) McGoohan was something of a dabbler in movies, where his pleased-pussycat manner and what the critic Peter Rainer once called "perhaps the most villainous enunciation in the history of acting" made him a natural choice for sinister roles. His most notable movie credits included Ice Station Zebra (1968), The Moonshine War (1970), Mary, Queen of Scots (1971), Escape from Alcatraz (1979), Scanners (1980), and Silver Streak (1976), where he established his villainous bona fides by calling Richard Pryor a "nigger", in response to which Pryor slapped the taste out of his mouth. After a long absence from the big screen, he had a brief comeback in the mid-90s when Mel Gibson case him in Braveheart (1995) as the vile English king who made no effort to conceal the fact that he did not love his dead gay son. McGoohan followed that up with appearances in The Phantom (1996), as Billy Zane's dad, and the John Grisham potboiler A Time to Kill (1996), where he played a Southern judge with the unreassuring name of Omar Noose. His last movie credit was in 2002, when he did a voice for the animated feature Treasure Planet.

That's the movie stuff covered, because this is a movie site. Of course, it was in television that McGoohan really achieved pop culture immortality. He took his first baby steps towards that goal in 1960 with the first season of the half-hour spy series Danger Man.

Read More...

Death Defying Acts opens in limited release this weekend, and so far, it hasn't generated much advance buzz.  It's hard to figure out why:  It comes on the heels of other successful movies involving magicians, including The Prestige and The Illusionist;  it's a romance-driven period piece (which should attract women), but it features a murder mystery, psychics, and famed escape artist Harry Houdini (for the fellas); it's got an all-star cast led by perennial heartthrobs Guy Pearce and Catherine Zeta-Jones; and it's directed by none other than girl-geek icon Gillian Anderson.  Maybe people are confused by the premise:  in Death Defying Acts features Zeta-Jones as a spiritualist out to run a con on the master magician.  We haven't seen it yet, so we're not sure if Zeta-Jones' powers are portrayed as being authentic, but in real life, Houdini was a relentless skeptic who didn't believe in any aspect of the paranormal, and who, in fact, went out of his way to disprove all claims of the supernatural as buncombe.  Regardless, Hollywood has always been a sucker for a good psychic yarn, which probably explains why goofy New Age religions tend to take root in southern California before hitting the rest of the country.  For today's Take Five, we bring you a handful of fine films about psychics -- and not a single one starring Shirley MacLaine.

THE SHINING (1980)

Nobody does psychic powers like Stephen King, and nobody realizes those psychic powers on screen better than Stanley Kubrick does in this horror classic.  One of the most effective ideas Kubrick had was to de-emphasize Danny's psychic abilities, to tone down the paranormal aspects of the story (such as the hedge topiary coming to life) in order to play up the much more compelling dramatic element of a family in isolation slowly falling apart.  Not that the terrifying paranormal elements aren't there:  few moments in contemporary horror are creepier than seeing Danny go into a drooling fit, or the bizarre images he sees in the abandoned rooms of the Outlook Hotel -- but by keeping them ambiguous, by allowing the suggestion that none of it is real, that it's all just possibly the byproduct of an epileptic vision or a mind damaged by loneliness and alcohol -- the whole thing is made more compelling and upsetting than if the paranormal elements were made explicit.  

Read More...