The Screengrab

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: Director’s Cut

Scott Von Doviak — Sun, 31 May 2009 21:00:00 GMT

This is it, gang. The long goodbye is over and it’s just about time to roll the credits and bring up the house lights, but before we go, let’s take one last moment to look back at the good times. Here are some of our favorite posts from throughout Screengrab history:

The Screengrab Holiday Special: Movies We’re Thankful For

Face/Off: Breaking the Waves

The 13 Greatest Long-Ass Movies of All Time

Take Five: We Love the 80s

Forgotten Films: The Oscar (1966)

Unwatchable #85: Battlefield Earth

Take 5: Character Actors Who Take the Lead

Face/Off: Fargo

The Screengrab Presents: The Five Kinds of Twist Endings

Jailbait Cinema: 16 Films That Make Us Nervous

That Guy! Special Godfather Edition

Q&A: Bob Balaban

CGI Must Die: Five Reasons Why

Sundance Do-Overs: When the Buzz Turns to Fizzle

The Screengrab 24-Hour Stephen King Marathon

The Letdowns: Lifeforce (1985)

OST: Repo Man

When Good Directors Go Bad: Dreamcatcher

Forget Indy and Rambo: Five Reasons We Want Mad Max Back

Top Ten Reasons The Dark Knight Isn’t as Good as You Think It Is

That’s a wrap! Thanks once again for making us a little part of your day, for as long as it lasted. Please make your way to the exits in an orderly fashion. You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.

Now Playing At The Screengrab In Exile...

Andrew Osborne — Sun, 31 May 2009 14:12:00 GMT

Andrew Osborne Reviews T.V. Party: The Documentary

Phil Nugent's "Don't Forget The Flaming Arrows!"

Paul Clark Promises Famous Last Words To Return!

Scott Von Doviak Reviews Sons Of A Gun

And more to come at the Screengrab In Exile...stay tuned!

The Rep Report (May 29 -- ...)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 29 May 2009 20:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Of all Akiri Kurosawa's films, Rashomon (1950) may not be the one that's nearest and dearest to anyone's hearts, but it's the one that added a word to the international language and opened the floodgates of Japanese movies to the West. A two-week revival at the Film Forum starts today, showcasing a handsome new 35 mm. print. Don't sit in the front row or it'll feel as if Toshiro Mifune is chewing on your leg.

This year marks the fortieth anniversary of the Woodstock festival. For three days in August of 1969, thousands of people converged on a farm in Bethel, New York for a three-day celebration of peace, love and music. Consequently, all gun owners voluntarily turned in their firearms, an international conference agreed to ban war forever, and the United States Marine Band was replaced at all official functions by Crosby, Stills, and Nash. If you just don't feel like dropping acid and rolling naked in mud for fear that your kids will call the cops, there are a couple of ways you can celebrate the occasion in the air-conditioned comfort of a movie theater. One way is to see Ang Lee's comedy Taking Woodstock, but by now most of us have seen the trailer, and doesn't it look as if it blows? The other way is to attend the June 3 screening at the Film Society of Lincoln Center of Woodstock: The Director's Cut!. The classic '60s time capsule is now four hours and five minutes long; it'll be shown with an intermission and with the promise of "free popcorn and soda", which in this economy would strike me as reason enough to check out a six-hour director's cut of Freddy Got Fingered. Director Michael Wadleigh will present in case anyone wants to ask him what the hell he was thinking when he made Wolfen.

BAM begins its retrospective of the work of the late Youssef Chahine today; it runs through June 7. When Chahine died last year, the Guardian called him "the leading voice of the Arab cinema for over half a century" and credited him with "one of the boldest careers in the movies," in which "Egypt's modern history is etched". Things kick off tonight with probably his best-known film, 1958's Cairo Station.

BERKELEY: May 30 through June 17, Pacific Film Archives pays tribute to "Selected Work from Zaentz Films." These are the epic literary adaptations paid for by Saul Zaentz, onetime head of Fantasy Records, and the only film producer ever to be denounced by John Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater Revival in a song (and music video) featuring a dancing pig. John Fogerty is a great man and an artist, and given his differences with the man, he might want to skip the chance to see The Unbearable Lightness of Being on the big screen, a choice that in his case I have no argument with. Others had better present a note signed by their mother.

Unbearable Lightness is a movie that can make you want to sample some of the work done by artists, the more ornery the better, living in what is now the Czech Republic. Conveniently enough, PFA is also hosting "Karel Vachek: Poet Provocateur" from May 31 through June 28. The series includes the four epic-length films, made between 1992 and 1996, that comprise his "Little Capitalist Tetralogy": New Hyperion, Bohemia Docta, Who Will Watch the Watchman?, which doesn't have a damn thing to do with Alan Moore, and What Is to Be Done?, an attempt to come to grips with the country's redefining and remaking itself as the Cold War expired. Vachek will be present at the June 21 and June 24 screenings.

Then, starting June 5 and running through the month, PFA sweats out the first weeks of summer with "Tight Spot: Phil Karlson in the Fifties", a retrospective devoted to a B-picture action specialist so seamy and perpetually underappreciated he makes Edgar G. Ulmer look like Ron Howard. Karlson, who twenty years later was able to get himself a 401K in the form of Walking Tall, was at the peak of his powers when he made The Phenix City Story, Kansas City Confidential, and Tight Spot itself (starring Ginger Rogers as a floozy pressured by Edward G. Robinson to testify against the mob, while conflicted cop Brian Keith straddles the fence); all you need to know about them is those titles aren't setting you up for a let-down.

This is my last Rep Report column, and in fact my last post for the Screengrab, as the blog is shutting down today, which is something of which we've probably already made too much. But it was a big part of my life for two years and one of the best jobs I've ever had, so maybe anyone who's ever lost a job he'd really enjoyed before he was completely, absolutely sick to death of it will cut us some slack. The Rep Report was the first regular feature I ever had here; it was intended as something that might actually be useful to part of the readership, and while it was never one of our major attractions in terms of hits, I really enjoyed doing it. It became less dependably regular in recent months, not because I didn't still enjoy doing it, and certainly not because revival movie theaters in the U.S. don't need all the help they can get, but because after more than a year and a half, I discovered that there's only so many ways you can write, "They're showing The Umbrellas of Cherbourg again, and it rocks, so you ought to do yourself a favor and get off the fucking couch!"

Anyway. At the risk of sounding like Norma Shearer, I'd like to take this last chance to say thank you to Bilge Ebiri, who hired me in the first place, and to our mutual friend George Wu, who swore to Bilge that I was smarter than I looked, and to Peter Smith and Nicole Ankowski for everything, some of which was way beyond the call of duty, and to everyone who ever invited me to a screening or slipped me a piece of gossip under the false impression that it would do them some good, and of course to all my colleagues here, except for the ones who persisted in being a little more brilliant than they had to be and in the process made me look like more of a mouth-breather than usual. You know who you are. 'Bye.

Reviews By Request: King of New York (1990, Abel Ferrara)

Paul Clark — Fri, 29 May 2009 19:00:00 GMT

Once again, thanks to Scott Tobias from the Onion AV Club for recommending this film, which he previously selected for his weekly column “The New Cult Canon.”

One of Christopher Walken’s greatest assets as an actor is his unpredictability. Watching Walken onscreen, it’s hard to tell how he’s going to deliver even the most mundane bit of dialogue, much less predict how his characters will behave under pressure. But while Walken’s off-kilter presence has garnered him a sizable cult following, it’s easy to overlook what a fascinating actor he can be in more complex roles. In many of his character roles, Walken has fun with his image, but he’s not afraid to play it straight when the part calls for it. Abel Ferrara’s King of New York is one of those parts, and consequently one of his best performances.

Frank White, the crime lord Walken plays in King of New York, is one of the most frightening criminals I’ve ever seen in a movie, due in large part to the unpredictability that Walken brings to the role. From the first time we meet Frank, he seems to be capable of anything, which gives him an edge in his criminal endeavors. Most of his competition sticks to hard and fast traditions, the most important being that the bigwigs keep their hands clean while the foot soldiers fight the wars. Frank has no use for such traditions- when he needs someone killed, he’d just as soon do it himself. There are many possibilities as to why Frank would do this, but I think it’s because he wants people to think he’s the baddest, scariest man in New York. And when he follows the killing of a rival gang leader by inviting his underlings to join his gang, it sends a very specific message- if you’re crazy enough to follow a guy who does this, I want you on my side.

Consequently, many of Frank’s foot soldiers are as volatile as he is- and some even share his flair for the theatrical, as when one storms into a hotel room shootout screaming, “room service, motherfuckers!” In addition, Frank’s gang could be called “post-racial”- whereas Frank’s rivals generally adhere to ethnic boundaries, such concerns are beneath Frank. Most of his underlings are African-American- two of his most prominent foot soldiers are played by Laurence (then Larry) Fishburne and Giancarlo Esposito- but Steve Buscemi also turns up as Frank’s in-house drug tester. And Frank’s own ethnicity- just look at his name- allows him an entry in legitimate society that would be more limited to other criminals of his stature.

It’s this air of near-legitimacy that rankles the NYPD, especially a trio of cops played by David Caruso, Wesley Snipes, and Victor Argo. Whereas the power of the city’s other top criminals is relatively contained to the underworld, Frank hobnobs with New York’s elite, turning up at black-tie parties and charity events. “He’s a movie star,” says Caruso, who bemoans the fact that Frank is running roughshod over the city while he and his partners are only bringing in a modest policeman’s salary. But how to stop him? Caruso and Snipes determine that in order to catch Frank, they need to be as crazy as he is. It isn’t until it’s too late (when Frank crashes one cop’s funeral to kill another one) that that discover that crazy isn’t enough- one must also be lucky.

Argo’s Roy Bishop is the one exception to the film’s cycle of brutality- the one “good cop” who sticks to his principles and hopes to bring Frank in not by sneaking around but by nuts-and-bolts police work. We see him sitting at home in front of his computer, sifting through police files in an attempt to make a case. Throughout the film, Ferrara contrasts Roy’s steadfast adherence to old-fashioned morality with Frank’s more slippery kind of ethics, and Frank understandably sees Roy as his biggest threat. I found it interesting to see Argo, who usually played wiseguys, playing the closest thing this film has to a steady moral compass.

King of New York is one of the bleakest crime movies I’ve ever seen, with one scene of unsparing violence after another. But it’s stylish enough that it’s anything but a slog- like GoodFellas and Scarface before it, it’s amassed a considerable cult, even serving as an inspiration for the late Notorious B.I.G. I’ve only seen a handful of Ferrara films to date, but one thing that’s impressed me about them is how stylish his films can be despite their budgetary limitations. In King of New York, Ferrara uses the low budget to his advantage, setting scenes in scruffy back-alleys and abandoned buildings to give the film a grittier feel than most movies of its kind. I also liked that Frank’s home isn’t an expansive estate but a suite at the Plaza, which combines a location in the heart of New York (perfect for shots of him overlooking the city) with a kind of rented luxury that says everything about the mystique Frank wants to create for himself.

At the center of it all is the enigma of Frank White. Throughout the film Ferrara and Walken invite us to ask the question, what drives this man? Late in the film, he confronts Roy in his apartment and tells him that he considers himself a businessman rather than a criminal, and states that “I never killed anybody that didn’t deserve it.” But how to reconcile that with the charge he seems to get from his power? Or for that matter, what of his efforts to save a children’s hospital in a poor neighborhood? One thing’s for sure- he’s hooked on his sense of power. When he says he wants to run for mayor, everyone laughs until Frank tells them he’s serious. Is he? Who are we to question him?

Katrin, We Hardly Knew Ye: The Screengrab's Long Goodbyes for Early Exits, Part Two

Phil Nugent — Fri, 29 May 2009 18:30:00 GMT

DANA HILL (1964-1996)

Hill started working as a child actress on TV in the late 1970s, then gave a smashing dramatic performance in her 1982 movie debut as the oldest daughter of Albert Finney and Diane Keaton in the classic divorce movie Shoot the Moon. She was almost as good as Rip Torn's daughter, a year later, in Cross Creek. In 1985, she took on the mysteriously ever-shifting role of Audrey Griswold in National Lampoon's European Vacation. However, she was still playing characters at the vaguely pubescent stage while Hill herself was by now in her early twenties; she suffered from diabetes so serious that it stunted her growth and which, by the mid-80s, was affecting her health to such a degree that, except for a cable TV production of Picnic and Jack Fisk's Final Verdict, she shifted the focus of her career entirely to voice work. Her distinctive rasp kept her much in demand until her death from a stroke in 1996.

CLAUDIA JENNINGS (1949-1979)

Jennings was Playboy's Playmate of the Year in 1970, and if you think that guarantees you a movie career, try reeling off the names of Playmates of the Year 1971 through 2008. In such drive-in fare as Unholy Rollers, Truck Stop Women, Moonshine County Express, Deathsport, and my personal favorite, Gator Bait, in which she played a Cajun terminator in cut-offs named Desiree Thibodeau, Jennings had the special aura of someone who the camera just loves. (You could practically hear the camera kicking dirt while it tried to work up the courage to ask if she was seein' anybody.) In 1979, David Cronenberg added to her luster by adding her, along with William "Big Bill" Smith and John Saxon, to the thinking-person's exploitation-movie case of his little-seen labor-of-love drag race film, Fast Company. But that same year, she got a sense of the glass ceiling above her career when she was rejected for the cast of Charlie's Angels, reportedly because the network was uncomfortable with the Playboy connection. She died later that year in a car accident.

LARRY RILEY (1953-1992)

Riley had a good year in 1984, when he made his movie debut in Louis Malle's flop comedy Crackers, appeared in a classic episode of Miami Vice (you remember, the one with Charlie Barnett and the killer Jamaicans), and then delivered a sensational performance in A Soldier's Story as C. J. Memphis, the high-spirited, blues-playing barracks musician whose country accent and laid-back affability inspire the self-hating sergeant who sees him as a geechie clown to railroad him into the stockade and drive him to suicide. After that, Riley bounced around in other roles on TV series and TV movies before settling in for five seasons on Knots Landing. When he discovered that he'd contracted AIDS, Riley tried to keep it a secret, and so the first sign most people got that he was ill came when he reported to work after a hiatus with eighty pounds missing from his once-burly frame. He died just months later.

LYDA ROBERTA (1906-1938)

The madcap Mata Hari of our beloved Million Dollar Legs was the offspring of circus performers who, having given birth to her in Warsaw, kept her on tour with them, eventually breaking her in as a trapeze artist. Her mother, a trick rider, got fed up with her father and jumped ship in Shanghai with her daughter in tow. Lyda helped support the two of them by singing, and by 1931, they had made it to the States and Lyda had secured her Broadway debut, charming the patrons both with her talent and with the patchwork carpet accent and manhandled syntax that she'd developed in her travels: she really sounded like that! An established commodity on Broadway and radio, she appeared in such films as The Kid from Spain, George White's 1935 Scandals, and The Big Broadcast of 1936. Slowed by heart disease, she died of a heart attack when she was 31.

DIANA SANDS (1934-1973)

Sands played the younger sister of the hero in the original Broadway cast of A Raisin in the Sun when she was 25, then recreated the role for the 1961 movie version. It was her first real movie role, though she'd had uncredited bits in earlier films, including A Face in the Crowd and Odds Against Tomorrow. It soon became clear that her talent and beauty would take her as far as she could get in an entertainment industry that still had no idea what to do with black actresses more suited to leading lady roles than mammy parts, though it was not immediately clear just how far that might be. She did a lot of TV, appearing on such shows as East Side/ West Side, Dr. Kildare Julia, and I, Spy; appeared on Broadway in The Owl and the Pussycat and The Gingham Dog; and starred in a handful of small movies, including Willie Dynamite, a botched action flick called Honeybaby, Honeybaby, the soapy soft-core Doctors' Wives, and Georgia, Georgia, which was written by Maya Angelou and set in Stockholm. Her best movie, and best role, was in Hal Ashby's The Landlord, in which she was caught in an interracial triangle with Beau Bridges and Louis Gossett, Jr. She won the title role in the 1974 romantic comedy Claudine, but by then, she was already ill and was forced to drop out.

TRINIDAD SILVA (1950-1988)

For most of his career, from the unintentionally hilarious 1979 Walk Proud (starring Robby Benson, in brownface makeup and a Frito Bandito accent, as a Chicano) to his ever-evolving role as Jesus on Hill Street Blues to Dennis Hopper's Colors, Silva was the go-to guy for a Latino gang leader. He also appeared in Alambisto!, The Jerk, El Norte, Crackers, The Milagro Beanfield War, and the Weird Al Yankovich movie UHF, which he was shooting when he killed by a scumbag drunk driver, and which is dedicated to him. He gave an exceptionally fine performance in another film he didn't live long enough to see, the 1988 TV movie Stones for Ibarra, based on Harriet Doerr's novel. There, liberated from having to flash gang signs, he gave a comic heartbreaker of a turn as a Mexican villager who's devoted his life to trying to build a better future for the girlfriend and younger brother who end up running off together.

KELLIE WAYMIRE (1967-2003)

Waymire is a good stand-in for all the actors who never get their name above the title in big movies but who leave a small imprint on the memories of anyone who ever saw them at their best. A quirky comic find, she had small roles in such films as Playing by Heart and also made memorable guest appearances on The X-Files, CSI, The Practice, Wonderfalls, Six Feet Under, and assorted Star Trek spin-offs. For my part, I've been packing around a crush on her since seeing her on a late Seinfeld episode in which she played a single mother who seemed to have contracted a terminal disease in order to threaten Elaine Benes with leaving her custoy of her kids, before doing something with George Costanza on the floor of her kitchen that was clearly dirty and probably illegal and seemed to involve pastrami ("the most sensual of all the smoked meats"). She died of cardiac arrhythmia in 2003.

ROBERT WILLIAMS (1897-1931)

Williams was a stage veteran best known as the star of Abie's Irish Rose on Broadway, with a short string of forgettable movies to his credit, when Frank Capra cast him as the hero of the 1931 comedy Platinum Blonde, a newspaperman who marries an heiress (Jean Harlow) while the audience keeps pointing at the Loretta Young, as the platonic gal pal standing beside him, and yelling, "What're ya, blind?" Williams's performance here nicely combines the stylized, staccato delivery and wisecracking toughness of the smartass reporter stereotype so popular at the time with the suggestion of a regular-guy sensitivity necessary for the character to function as a romantic hero, and the general consensus at the time was that it would make him a star. General consensus wasn't counting on Williams's appendix, which burst four days after the film premiered.

TREY WILSON (1948-1989)

Wilson made his first movie appearance in 1976's Drive-In and started to get decent roles around 1984, but he really burst loose during the last year or so of his life, by which time he had ripened into the very image of a middle-aged, weather-beaten cracker of a comic authority figure. His performance as Nathan Arizona, the unpainted furniture king who irritably describes the pajamas his kidnapped tyke was wearing at the time of his disappearance--"Jammies! They had Yodas and shit on 'em!"--amounted to handing out to each member of the audience engraved notices announcing that his career had now begun in earnest. As if aware that time was of the essence, he quickly appeared in Bull Durham as the team manager who can barely contain his contempt for lollygaggers; in Married to the Mob, as the FBI director whose explanation of the difference between working for the federal government and working for the Mafia can be, and probably has been, enjoyed by good liberals and militia group members alike; Twins; and the three films released after his death from a cerebral hemorrhage, Miss Firecracker, Great Balls of Fire (in which he played Sam Phillips), and Welcome Home, all of which are dedicated to him. Before he died, he had been set to play the Albert Finney role in Miller's Crossing.

Click here for Part One

Katrin, We Hardly Knew Ye: The Screengrab's Long Goodbyes for Early Exits, Part One

Phil Nugent — Fri, 29 May 2009 18:00:00 GMT

I don't know if you all got the memo, but today is lights out for the Screengrab. It's been fun. We'll never know for sure whether we were cut down in the prime of life just as we were about to ascend to undreamed-of heights or five minutes before we finally wore out our welcome for good, but either way, I'm going to miss the place when I'm dancing for nickles in front of the bus station. We could go down all stoic and stiff upper lip as if it weren't killing us inside, but who the hell are we, Clive Brook? (That's one of the beloved obscure movie references that have made us such a blockbuster hit.) But if we're going to get maudlin, at least we can show a little class and get maudlin about the loss of something grander than our own paychecks. So, before we leave some cheese on the table for the student loan collection officers and slip out the back window and over that hill there, we'd like to burn off some bandwidth by listing our precursors: some of the people who had barely begun to show what they could do in movies before they were cruelly yanked away.

Two points: Jean Harlow, Jean Vigo, F. W. Murnau, James Dean, Phil Hartman, River Phoenix, Heath Ledger, Natasha Richardson-- all the prematurely departed who have taken on legendary status or seem well on their way to claiming it, aren't here, not as any implied put-down of them but because we wanted to concentrate on some people who perhaps haven't had their full fifteen minutes of public mourning. And if we missed somebody, the comments box is right there. Do the right thing.

PHILLIP BORSOS (1953-1995)

Borsos built up a strong reputation in the '70s based on his documentary shorts (Cooperage, Spartee, and Nails) before hitting a home run with his first feature film, the 1982 Western The Grey Fox, a Canadian production that won seven "Genie" awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and, for its American star Richard Farnsworth, "Best Foreign Actor." More recently, it was selected for preservation by the Audio-Visual Preservation Trust of Canada. The movie was a cult success when released in the U.S., and Borsos went to Hollywood, though the high-profile pictures he made there in 1985, The Mean Season and One Magic Christmas, failed to keep up the momentum. He made two more features, Bethune (1990) and Far From Home: Adventures of Yellow Dog; it was around the time he working on the last one that he was diagnosed with leukemia. He died before the picture was released in 1995.

BARRY BROWN (1951-1978)

As a young actor makiing his way in the 1970s, Brown developed a screen image as a sweetly decent old-fashioned boy cast adrift, a James Stewart throwback in a Robert Mitchum world. His big break came in 1972 when he was cast in a pair of offbeat Westerns, Phil Kaufman's The Great Northfield, Minnesota Raid, and, as the lead alongside Jeff Bridges, in Robert Benton's Bad Company. Both films were critically respected but neither was a hit, and his next big movie, Peter Bogdnaovich's Daisy Miller, was an attempted vehicle for Cybill Shepard that did no one involved in it any good. Alcoholism and depression hampered his career, and after starring in a cheesy action film called The Ultimate Thrill, he continued to work on the stage and in TV but made no more movies except for a small role that the director Joe Dante wrote for him in the 1979 horror comedy Piranha. He died a year before its release, a suicide.

MERRITT BUTRICK (1959-1989)

In his short life, Butrick managed to get involved in two different TV-based cults. He first attracted attention on Anne Beatts's high school sitcom Square Pegs, where he was cast as a punk. Standards & Practices forced Beatts to soften the character, but Butrick managed to turn this to his advantage, playing "Johnny Slash" not as the stereotypical angry dweeb but a confused, sweet soul whose brain is phoning its instructions to its body in from distant cloud. (Whether through influence, imitation, or great minds thinking alike, Gary Oldman brought much the same spirit to his Sid Vicious.) By the time the show premiered, he had already made his movie debut in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, playing the son of James T. Kirk. (The character was later killed off in a calamitously staged scene in Star Trek III, a low moment for the franchise on every level.) His other movie credits include Head Office, Shy People, and Fright Night Part II, but his most memorable later role may have been on an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, in which he played an alien trying to get his hands on a drug to ease the suffering on his home planet, which had been ravaged by plague. At the time, Butrick knew that he was dying of AIDS.

KATRIN CARTLIDGE (1961-2002)

American audiences will always associate Cartlidge for her work with Mike Leigh, though by the time she entered movies, she was already a familiar face to British audiences after five years on the TV serial Brookside. She was stunning in Leigh's Naked as Lesley Sharp's flatmate, huddled in on herself, her eyes bright and wary but not quite comprehending, a woman who always feels as if she might scream but is hoping that something will make her laugh instead. Leigh subsequently built Career Girls around her and also shoehorned her into a small role in Topsy Turvy. She also appeared in Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves, in the title role of Lodge Kerrigan's Claire Dolan, in Chris Menges's The Lost Son, as Rade Serbedzija's English lover in Before the Rain, as Varya in Mihalis Kakogiannis's film of The Cherry Orchard, in Kathryn Bigelow's The Weight of Water, as a TV reporter in the Bosnian film No Man's Land, and as one of Jack the Ripper's victims in From Hell. She died suddenly from complications of pneumonia and septicaemia. Von Trier's Dogville is dedicated to her.

JOHN CAZALE (1935-1978)

Cazale earned instant immortality by creating the role of Fredo in the Godfather films, thus ensuring that his character's name will come up whenever someone is fumbling for a shorthand way of saying that someone should perhaps not be trusted with matches. This achievement is all the more impressive if you've read Mario Puzo's novel and know that Cazale basically built that underwritten character from the ground up, brick by brick, which in turn must have inspired Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola to be sure and do right by him when they wrote the screenplay for Part II. Not counting a short film made in 1962, The Godfather was his movie debut; in the six years left to him, he played Gene Hackman's assistant in Coppola's The Conversation, partnered with Pacino again in Dog Day Afternoon, and played Sal in Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter, alongside his fiance, Meryl Streep. If that was a batting average, it would make Ted Williams smash his own slugger and piss on the pieces in envious despair. Cazale had already been diagnosed with bone cancer when he was making The Deer Hunter; he died before it was released.

BARBARA COLBY (1939-1975)

With her deep, nasal twang and the kind of choppers that look as if they were made to chew gum the way a vampire's fangs are made to draw blood, Colby was the stuff of which legendary comic character actors are made. She had a special way of delivering the most devastating wisecracks in a warm way, as if she thought you'd hate to miss out on this great zinger she had about your wardrobe. She got her first real movie roles in 1974 and 1975, making her debut in a little movie called Memory of Us, and then playing Jeff Goldblum's receptionist in California Split and appearing in the road movie Rafferty and the Gold Dust Twins. By that time, she had attracted attention for her work on TV, notably in an episode of Columbo that was directed by the young Steven Spielberg, in which she played one of those ninnies who thinks that the best way to handle a man you know is guilty of murder is to blackmail him into marrying you, and a recurring role as a hooker on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Hired as a regular on the spin-off series Phyllis, she had completed the first three episodes before she and a fellow actor were shot to death in a Los Angeles parking lot. The crime was never solved.

RUPERT CROSSE (1927-1973)

In the 1969 William Faulkner adaptation The Reivers, Crosse gave the kind of performance where you can all but see the film's nominal star, Steve McQueen, saluting him and telling him what an honor it is to have the picture stolen from him by such a worthy adversary. Some of the galloping high spirits of that performance can also be seen in his debut, in the 1959 improvisation-based Shadows, directed by John Cassavettes. Cassavettes later gave him a role in Too Late Blues, and he turns up briefly at the start of Ride in the Whirlwind, written by and starring his pal Jack Nicholson. Crosse was overdue for a breakout role when Nicholson and director Hal Ashby offered him the second lead in The Last Detail, but the routine physical required to get the production insured revealed that he had lung cancer and wound be dead within the year. In Peter Biskind's book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Nicholson gave props to Ashby for his decision to give Crosse a few days to think about whether he wanted to spend his last months working on the movie or if, as he eventually concluded, he had other priorities.

STEVE GORDON (1938-1982)

After several years in televion, Gordon made his movie debut as a director with the 1981 Dudley Moore film Arthur, which he also wrote. That movie had a lot that was stale in the set-up and a lot that was misconceived in the execution, so the fact that it made audiences howl the way it did is a tribute to Gordon's way with a one-liner. The writer Cynthia Heiml toasted Gordon for finally bringing some new, good jokes, actual jokes, to the screen, and Pauline Kael paid him the back-handed compliment of saying that, as a director, he was a long way from being able to do with images what he could already do with words. Sadly, he would get no farther; Gordon died of a heart attack a year later, leaving Arthur looking very lonely on his IMDB page.

Click here for Part Two

Not Readily Available on Legally Authorized Commercial DVD Release in the Continental United States: "Dreamchild" (1985)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 29 May 2009 17:00:00 GMT

This fanciful British movie boasts one of the unlikeliest collaborations of the last twenty-five years, Dennis Potter and Jim Henson. Potter wrote the script, which is built on a culture-clash factoid from 1932: that year, the 80-year-old Alice Liddell--who, many decades earlier, had been Alice Hargreaves, the model for Lewis Carroll's heroine and the original audience for his Wonderland stories--sailed to the United States to visit Columbia University as part of the celebration of Carroll's centennial. (She died two years later.) Alice is played, by Coral Browne, as a grumpy, out-of-sorts old woman at odds with the new world and a trial to her hired companion, a waifish young girl named Lucy (Nicola Cowper). When they arrive in New York, the two women become attached to Jack (Peter Gallagher), a motormouth newspaperman who decides to serve as Alice's promoter. He also begins a romance with Lucy, which distracts the girl from her usual focus on her employer's every whim and leaves the increasingly befuddled Alice more unmoored than ever. Life is slipping away from Alice, and as it does, her memories, which are ever more indistinguishable from her fantasies, rise up to engulf her.

In flashbacks, we see the young Alice (Amelia Shankley) in her relationship with the Reverend Dodgson (i.e., Carroll), played by Ian Holm, which is based on shared love and affection but also creepy, and not just because Dodgson's feelings for the child may be tinged with sexual longing, but because the girl, acting on what she senses about him, can't resist flaunting her power over him by humiliating him and making him squirm. (Does one reason this movie hasn't made it to DVD have to do with the reluctance in the culture at large to view someone like Dodgson--a man who may have had desires that he channeled into creative work because there was no acceptable way for him to act on them in life--as something more sympathetic than a monster? Can Lewis Carroll co-exist in a world with Dateline NBC?) She also steps into the world of Carroll's books and has conversations with his characters--the Mad Hatter, the March Hair, the Gryphon, the Mock Turtle--that are often disorienting and upsetting. Henson's Creature Shop created huge puppets modeled on the John Tenniel illustrations from the books, and they are not cuddly. The Mad Hatter looks as if he'd taken a dose of radiation that only made him both stronger and meaner; the March Hare could bite your head off.

Like a lot of Dennis Potter's works, Dreamchild is a mixed bag, and there are times, especially in the scenes involving the endearingly mismatched young lovers, where the director, Gavin Millar, seems to not have a clue how to stage this stuff but is prepared to hold his nose, dive in, and hope for the best. But it's generally entertaining except for the sequences that are just downright stunning, and it builds to a remarkable scene when the aged Alice, thinking back on her cruelty towards Dodgson, is able to incorporate her better understanding of their relationship and forgive them both. It gives way to an equally remarkable ending, with the older Alice on a rock by the sea, reunited with both Dodgson and his characters. You can believe they're all still out there somewhere.

Trailer Review: In the Loop

Paul Clark — Fri, 29 May 2009 16:00:00 GMT

For my final Trailer Review here at Screengrab, I thought it would be nice to go out on an up note. So in lieu of the trailer for something I’m dying to see- what, still nothing from Avatar or Tree of Life out there?- I’m posting one of the best trailers I’ve seen lately, for Armando Iannucci’s political comedy In the Loop. Since the international trailer for this posted earlier this year, I’ve been getting a vibe similar to that of the original British Office, but to my eyes that’s a good thing. And I’m something of a sucker for trailers that don’t just stick to the usual trailer tricks- the style of this one is an homage to Kubrick’s original Clockwork Orange spots, down to the use of the Wendy Carlos sped-up electronic version of the “William Tell Overture.” But what I like most about this is that it doesn’t come right out and tell you everything you know about the premise of the movie, but it puts enough out there in one form or another that one can more or less figure out what’s going on if he’s paying attention. But then, what’s not to love about a trailer that includes a reference to Bugsy Malone- hardly the sort of allusion one generally finds in movies, much less the trailers for them.

Screengrab Review: "Pontypool"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 29 May 2009 15:30:00 GMT

When thinking of those who, in our lifetimes, have made major contributions to the shape of pop mythology, let no one forget the name of George Romero. When I was a kid, growing up between the time that Romero's first and best movie, Night of the Living Dead, planted the seeds of his achievement, and the release of its sequel, Dawn of the Dead, cemented it, I spent maybe half my young life watching and reading about horror movies. Partly this was research: at the playground, the jury was still out on whether monsters actually existed, and if they did, I wanted to be ready for them when they stormed the house. Mummies didn't occupy my thoughts to any special degree: they were easy to outrun, and besides, so long as you didn't go violating any Egyptian tombs, it was easy to stay on their good side. Vampires and werewolves were a lot worse, but at least there were clear, set-in-stone guidelines for dealing with them: daylight, wooden stakes, silver bullets, full moons, everybody who dipped a toe into the horror genre knew the drill. But zombies? Now there was a disappointing monster. There weren't many zombie movie classics, and those seemed to be vague on the rules regarding zombiedom. Basically, a zombie was a big, reanimated dead guy with bugged-out eyes and no personality who, under the distraction of the voodoo master who had resurrected him, stagger up and throttle you. No zombie ever looked as if he enjoyed his work, and there was no consensus on how to deal with one, or even if it was the zombie you wanted to target or if you should go over his head and take it up with his boss. Vampires, werewolves, and even most mummies were free agents. Zombies were the hired help.

All that changed thanks to Romero. With two movies and some help from a few enthusiastic Italian imitators, Romero completely changed not just the rule book but the contemporary identity and meaning of zombies in horror movie culture. Voodoo? Fuck that noise. The modern zombie may still not be the life of the party, and he tends to travel in packs, but he's out for himself, and there's no mystery about what he wants. The boy is hungry. Zombies lurch around, using their superior numbers to overwhelm their victims, on whom they plan to dine. The solution to the problem is also simple and direct: bring a shotgun and a mop. Think of it: thirty years ago, when Dawn of the Dead was just being released and Night of the Living Dead was an acknowledged midnight classic but not yet seen as the starting point of a whole damn sub-genre, zombies were monster movie runner-ups on the verge of disappearing altogether on account of political correctness. (It's hard to give a dignified representation of a voodoo priestess.)

By now, we're already at a point where the cliches that Romero created are understood to be part of the shared general knowledge of moviegoers, and are drawn upon by filmmakers who like to insist that they're not "really" making a zombie movie. Bruce McDonald's Pontypool (which Scott von Doviak reviewed here when it played at SXSW, and which goes into release today) isn't "really" a zombie movie, in the same way that 28 Days Later, which (like Pontypool) was about virus-maddened mobs, wasn't a zombie movie, just as Guillermo del Toro's Cronos wasn't a vampire movie, and Mike Nichols's Wolf wasn't an update on Lon Chaney, Jr. But both Pontypool and 28 Days Later are zombie movies in the sense that they play by their own version of Romero's rules, and play on the expectations that the audience builds up based on cues the movies send out that we're in Living Dead territory. (In fact, one of the first not-really-zombies zombie movies was Romero's own The Crazies, which came out between the first two installments of his living dead saga and which established some durable new cliches of its own.) Neither Pontypool or 28 Days Later is really imaginable without Romero's movies, and Pontypool in particular depends on the precedent set by Romero's movies to keep the audience with it for the first half hour, when the prolonged wait for something to happen is actually made more tolerable by the fact that we have a pretty good idea of what that something will look like when it does happen.

Pontypool is set almost entirely in a small radio station in the title locale in rural Ontario, and for most of the first half there are only three characters onscreen: the morning DJ Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie), his beleaguered producer Sydney (Lisa Houle), and the fresh-faced young techie Laurel Ann (Georgina Reilly) who's just back from a tour of duty in Afghanistan. (And when circumstances take one of them out oif the picture, a new character appears out of nowhere to ease the transition.) Grant--described by New York magazine reviewer as "an egghead incarnation of Don Imus" (which I think may be a non-litigious way of saying a version of Don Imus that isn't a smug, lazy scumbag)--is an aging, haggard-looking "fight the power" type who likes to gas on about "developing a relationship" with his listeners by challenging them (i.e., pissing them off) and whose catch phrase is "taking no prisoners!" He has apparently been reduced to manning the mike in this jerkwater burg because of his past indiscretions, and the first half of the movie includes the makings of an entertaining comedy about this self-styled provocateur's attempts to adjust to his new surroundings as Sydney fills him in on the sorrows and family connections of the nobodies he's making fun of on the air and lets him in on the local trade secrets, such as the fact that the "Sunshine Chopper" from which the station's traffic reporter delivers his broadcasts is actually a Dodge Dart parked on a hill.

That all pretty much goes out the window as the suspense plot develops. Snug and isolated in their studio, Grant and company begin to pick up reports--from the traffic reporter, from phone-in callers, from a BBC reporter trying to get his own handle on the story--that a deranged, gibbering mob is tearing around Pontypool, tearing people apsrt with their bare hands. As the descriptions of the carnage going on outside the studio grew more detailed and grisly, evidence mounts that there's a virus at work that spreads through the English language; people who succumb to it are particularly susceptible when uttering terms of endearment, such as "honey" and "sweetheart." Conceptually, Pontypool might be a blood-soaked spin-off of William S. Burrough's zen koan "Language is a virus from outer space" (and also, maybe, one of Alan Moore's old comics stories for 2000 A.D.) The script, by Tony Burgess, is based on his novel Pontypool Changes Everything, but it would be a bang-up radio play. Given the War of the Worlds set-up and the metaphorical use of spoken language--and the use of a breakdown in language as a sign that a character is about to start slavering blood--it's kind of amazing that Burgess didn't shape the material with a radio play in mind. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that radio plays are one of the few forms that now have less cultural cachet than Canadian-based midnight movies.

Bruce McDonald, whose credits include Roadkill, Highway 61, Dance Me Outside, the Ellen Page showcase The Tracey Fragments, and the TV series Twitch City, has always struck me as being sort of like the Canadian Alex Cox. Like Cox, he's a self-styled hipster weirdo who picks his projects to serve his image, but unlike Cox, he's not so infatuated with himself that he makes the mistake of thinking that he's made a wild, provocative movie just by signing his name to it and hanging out on the set while the cameras roll: he does make a little effort to entertain. His greatest success here is with McHattie, who has a great radio voice and who, with his gaunt features and frame and black cowboy hat, is an indelible image of the motor-mouthed hipster malcontent who's just found himself on the wrong side of sixty. The scenes in which McHattie's Grant, on the air and flying by the seat of his pants, valiantly tries to string together the hazy reports coming his way into a coherent picture for his listeners add up to a stirring depiction of professional competence that may be more exciting than the reports themselves.

But the downside of McDonald's relative modesty as a director is that it costs him something in both energy and conviction. And his pursuit of cool at all costs can be self-defeating: a scene in which Sydney undercuts the news of a character's death with a cheap sick joke destroys the emotion that the movie has achieved without replacing it with anything stronger. The last third of Pontypool, which is when it's most like a conventional zombie-attack picture, is the weakest, and it devolves into a real mess. The film will be most satisfying to those who like their horror movies to wear their "conceptual" timber on their sleeve. (When a character says, "Talking is risky, and talk radio is high risk," he might be reading the Director's Statement on camera.) It's "interesting." But it's never scary, and I'm not enough of an avant-guardist to see that as a good thing in what's billed as a horror movie.

That Guy! Joe Don Baker

Phil Nugent — Fri, 29 May 2009 15:00:00 GMT

It's possible that Joe Don Baker's name is as well known as his face, which sort of goes against the grain of those featured in the "That Guy!" franchise. However, one reason the name is well-known is that, in the last several years, it's picked up some currency as a punch line. Any name that starts out "Joe Don" and keeps going for another couple of syllables is apt to strike some people as that of a thuggish redneck hick, and that's how Baker was caricatured by the wisecracking robots of Mystery Science Theater 3000 when they ran a couple of his tackier starring vehicles in the 1990s. Is it out of deference to the fine tastes and sensibilities of the robot critical community that Joe Don has yet to appear on Inside the Actors Studio? This is one thing that sets him apart from, say, Billy Joel and Ricky Gervais. Another is that Joe Don actually attended the Actors Studio.

There is always cause to be wary whenever a white male claims to have suffered from discrimination based on his physical appearance. Usually there is cause to be openly derisive. Still, back in the 1980s, Joe Don Baker told an interviewer that it was very hard for him to get Hollywood to see him as anything other than a violent cracker with a pea-sized brain, and he told the interviewer this in response to a question about why he had taken to spending so much of his time working in England. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. In the '60s, Baker appeared in movies and on TV, in Westerns (Guns of the Magnificent Seven, Wild Rovers) and working-guy parts (Adam at 6 A.M.). He got a boost from the 1971 TV film Mongo's Back in Town, which served notice that he could bring a compelling degree of sensitivity to a tough-guy part, and also served notice that he might have to spend a certain amount of his career playing guys with names like "Mongo." He got a bigger boost the next year, playing Steve McQueen's brother in Sam Peckinpah's Junior Bonner, although he would later assure interviewers that he and Peckinpah were not the best thing that had ever happpened in each other's lives.

The success of his next film, Walking Tall, made him a star of a specialized, B-movie sort, and led to him taking pre-emptive measures against all many of unsavory types in a string of films, including Phil Karlson's Framed and the notorious Mitchell. His fling as a leading man burned out with the TV film To Kill a Cop and the short-lived TV series spun off from it, Eischied. After that, he settled into the familiar That Guy! routine of long patches of honest labor with the occasional stretch of lying in clover. He played a fictionalized Jimmy Hoffa in the TV film Power (1980), threatened Chevy Chase in Fletch, jousted with James Bond in License to Kill, got throttled by De Niro while attempting to enjoy a midnight snack in Cape Fear, had a high old time playing Joseph McCarthy to James Woods's Roy Cohn in Citizen Kane, stood viciously accused of being Winona Ryder's father in Reality Bites, did the dirty work for the man in Panther, took seeing his son get killed by evil white gorillas really well in Congo, kissed and made up with James Bond in Goldeneye and Tomorrow Never Dies, and showed, in Tim Burton's Mars Attacks!, that he could make fun of his trailer-park image as well as any robot. For TV, he played Governor "Kissin' Jim" Folsom in the biopic George Wallace and buckskinned superlawyer Gerry Spence in The Siege of Ruby Ridge.

Where to see Joe Don Baker at his best:

WALKING TALL & CHARLEY VARRICK (1973)

Like it or not, the role of Buford Pusser, scary Tennessee lawman extraordinaire, will always be the first thing that leaps to most people's minds when Baker's name comes up. There are reasons enough to like that fine: Baker gives a strong star performance that endows the club-swinging sheriff considerable dignity. Like Dirty Harry, Pusser has to be portrayed as self-righteous, but Baker also gives him a quality that would be unthinkable in an Eastwood character: a longing for a peaceful life, a desire to just settle down and raise his family and tend to his own back yard, which the villains, by the sheer spreading force of their wickedness, have made an untenable option. (The movie opens with Buford bringing his wife and kids back to their country home, presumably to escape the corruption of the cities. If someone doesn't step up, the small-town corruption may make the country culture just as dangerous and unlivable.) Walking Tall is a primitive, pro-head-cracking movie, but Baker gives it its human dimension: he's the hero partly because he suffers for his actions, never because he happens to be the one who looks coolest when blowing people's heads off.

Even in the wake of the film's success, there were signs that Baker might not be looking to retire from acting and get into the more profitable business of Charles Bronson imitations. One was that he followed up Walking Tall with the supporting role of the Mafis enforcer Molly in Don Siegel's The title character is played by Walter Matthau; he's a bank robber who has chosen his bank recklessly and wound up with several hundred thousand dollars that Molly's employers very much want back. Baker swaggers through the role with a vast grin on his face, as if he never quite got over the kick of seeing his character's name in the script. The film is one of those twist-upon-twist capers in which the omniscient hero is always at least a couple of steps ahead of everyone else, which could easily become tiresome. It benefits greatly from Baker's way of making it clear that, as far as he's concerned, Molly is very much the undefeatable star of the movie playing out in his head. His confidence almost makes you think that he might just turn out to hold the winning hand after all, whereas the glee with which he looks forward to indulging in his full capacity for sadism when he dispatches the hero makes you glad that he doesn't.

THE NATURAL (1984)

In the early '80s, Baker had dropped far enough off the radar screen that his cameo here as "the Whammer"--i.e., Babe Ruth--amounted to a juicy comeback. The movie is a travesty of Bernard Malamud's baseball novel, but Baker does full justice to his end of it: he tears into the role of parodying the Babe as if he were playing a contemporary figure who had seized control of the globe's supply of penicillin. He gives the Whammer a magnified version of Molly's gloating self-satisfaction in what a hot shit he thinks he is, and some of Molly's sadism, too: engaging the green kid Roy Hobbs in a contest, batter versus pitcher, in order to impress a mystery woman (Barbara Hershey), he sums Hobbs up, wrongly, as an innocent hick, and still licks his chops at the prospect of humiliating him. Yet you can't help rooting, or at least feeling for him a little. He lives up to the descriptions of Babe Ruth as the ultimate Jazz Age celebrity, a one-man parade through Times Square.

EDGE OF DARKNESS (1985)

This six-hour British TV miniseries is the proudest accomplishment of Baker's time across the pond. It was directed by Martin Campbell, who later made Goldeneye, as well as the Daniel Craig Casino Royale and the Antonio Banderas Zorro pictures, and who is now readying a big-screen remake of Edge of Darkness with Mel Gibson and Ray Winstone. For the love of God, try and get your hands on the original so that when you see the remake, you can better appreciate all the ways in which they're certain to fuck it up. The TV series is a Thatcher-era paranoid thriller about the dangers of nuclear proliferation. The late Bob Peck plays a Yorkshire police detective who witnesses the murder of his daughter (Joanne Whalley), which he and his colleagues assume must have been a botched attempt on his own life; it turns out that she was active in anti-nuclear politics and involved in what the government considered to be terrorist activities.

Baker enters the picture playing Darius Jedburgh, a CIA agent stationed in the country who is aware of some sort of skulduggery that might be connected to the daughter's murder. Baker, who took a cut in his usual salary for the chance to be a part of this, took full advantage of the opportunities that acting in a miniseries can provide for fleshing out the odd little corners of a character's range of personality. The memory of his big climactic moments, bawling out the assembled guests at a NATO conference while disintegrating from radiation poisoning and brandishing a pair of plutonium bars, stays fresh in the mind, but so does the image of him sitting in front of the TV in his house in London, cradling a huge bowl of popcorn in his lap and watching the ballroom dancing competitions, marveling, "How do they move like that?"

In Other Blogs: Shoot Out the Lights

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 29 May 2009 14:30:00 GMT

I should probably use this final installment of In Other Blogs to suggest alternatives to the Screengrab for our fans about to go into withdrawal. (This is it folks, the last day, closing time, 50% off all posts, everything must go!) But let’s get real – there’s no replacing the Screengrab! Oh, if you must keep up with ongoing developments in the world of cinema, I suppose there are some alternatives (and I remind you to bookmark this page, which has a whole passel of ‘em). Instead, I’m going to take one last opportunity to pay tribute to…well, us.

At The Phil Nugent Experience, Phil Nugent takes aim at Kiefer Sutherland’s Jack Bauer. “Sutherland's performance, which has thoroughly redefined his image and career, shows just how irresistible the self-pitying enforcer act can seem when it's done to a crisp. In his first several years in movies, Sutherland was a weird-looking Brat Pack also-ran; as his youth started to slip away, his most striking roles, as a big bad wolf of a serial killer in Freeway and as the exposition merchant in the sci-fi fantasy Dark City, made it look as if he might be turning into the new Dwight Frye. His transformation into a TV action hero seemed a mighty unlikely development, but as soon as he turned into Jack Bauer, he developed a new, flinty authority that he'd never shown before. The few movies he's appeared in since 24 launched were in and out of theaters pretty quickly, and probably it helped that, as a TV star, he suddenly had smaller screens to fill, but it's possible to fail even at that: compare him to Christian Slater in My Own Worst Enemy if you want to know how thoroughly it's possible to belly flop in both media.”

At Silly Hats Only, Paul Clark announces his plans for what might qualify as the anti-Unwatchable. “For a long time, I’ve had a goal of watching every title represented by the Criterion Collection, and it occurred to me that if I didn’t set about to watch and write about every Criterion title I haven’t seen, I’ll never do it. And while it’s not the most original goal for a cinephile, I’d say it’s a worthy one all the same.”

At The AV Club, Leonard Pierce has the goods on The Goode Family. “I've always been precariously on the fence about Mike Judge. I thought Office Space was half of a brilliantly subversive satire that degenerated, in in its second half, into a predictable caper movie with a strangely reactionary message; Idiocracy, likewise, had some killer comic observations but couldn't seem to present them with much coherence in the end. So here we are with The Goode Family, Judge's new animated sitcom, and its promise to take a poke at political correctness. This all would have seemed very timely in, say, 1994, or even when King of the Hill debuted in '97.”

At From Here to Obscurity, Hayden Childs continues his alphabetical journey through his music collection. “The Cramps - Gravest Hits EP, Songs The Lord Taught Us, Psychedelic Jungle, and Bad Music For Bad People. Man! What can I possibly say about the Cramps that hasn't been said a million times already? People who enjoy the kind of music called rock & roll love the The Cramps. Some critics apparently consider Bad Music For Bad People to be a watered-down version of a better best-of that was released in England, but for me, well, that's the Cramps album that I first heard at 15 years old, and that's THE Cramps album for me. Besides all these other ones, I mean.”

At Slant, Nick Schager checks out Night in the Museum 2. “Commotion ensues, most of it functionally but unexcitingly executed, including an into-the-artwork sequence that pales in comparison to a similar bit from Loony Tunes: Back in Action.”

At The Ol’ Blog Shop, Andrew Osborne spends Memorial Day in America’s Heartland…Somerville, Mass. “But, really, for me it was all about the Shriners, or whoever those guys in the Aleppo fezzes were, and there were scores of them, possibly hundreds, taking up easily half the parade with their flags and weird Arab trumpet noodling and fake goatees and turbans and their candy-tossing...and forget about tiny little cars: the Somerville Shriners had tiny little 18-wheelers, not to mention tiny golf carts, tiny buggies, pop-wheelie clown cars, horses, horse cars, Segways and a trailer broadcasting a Shriner quartet as they sang “Yankee Doodle went to Baghdad riding in a Humvee” into dangling CB radio handsets.”

At Scott Von Doviak (someone please come up with a better blog name for me), I look at some recent movie Crime Scenes, including Gone Baby Gone. “Here are four words that inspire very little confidence when they appear on a movie screen: ‘Directed by Ben Affleck.’”

And remember, your one-stop shopping destination for keeping track of the ol’ Screengrab gang is Screengrab in Exile. Don’t stop believin’!

Th-Th-That's All Folks: THE SCREENGRAB CURTAIN CALL!

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 29 May 2009 03:00:00 GMT

So, th-th-that's all folks. Enjoy the last precious remaining hours of the Screengrab while you can, and be sure to look for us here at Nerve.com, in the archives at www.thescreengrab.com, at our new blog the Screengrab In Exile, and also...

Andrew Osborne:
Look for me at The Ol' Bait Shop, The Ol' Blog Shop, New England Screenwriters, and if The Meat City Beatniks ever comes to a theater near you, be sure to buy a ticket!

Scott Von Doviak:
Check out Scott's blog, his tweets, his book Hick Flicks and the continuation of his journey into Unwatchable madness!

Leonard Pierce:
Look for Leonard at A schediastic hootenany and the Onion A.V. Club!

Phil Nugent:
The Phil Nugent experience rolls on at The Phil Nugent Experience!

Hayden Childs:
Read Hayden at From Here To Obscurity, and check out his book, Shoot Out The Lights!

Paul Clark:
I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to write for the Screengrab for the last two years or so. In the future, I’ll be devoting more of my energy to my blog Silly Hats Only, where I’ll be carrying on a few of my favorite Screengrab traditions- including the reincarnated Famous Last Words, starting in June- and exploring some new ideas as well, I hope. I’ll also continue to be involved in The Muriel Awards, and you can follow me on Twitter under the username “opalfilms”. Be seeing you.

Nick Schager:
Nick can be found at Lessons of Darkness, Slant magazine, IFC News, Cinematical, and on Twitter.

Sarah Clyne Sundberg:
For more Sarah go to: http://www.sarahclynesundberg.com/

Vadim Rizov:
Vadim lives on at The House Next Door.

Lauren Wissot:
Lauren's work can be found at Beyond The Green Door.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten & Eleven

Good night, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are!