The Screengrab : 24

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’!

DVD Digest for May 19, 2009

Paul Clark — Tue, 19 May 2009 14:00:00 GMT

This week, the same old stuff you always get from DVD Digest. Also, a new Steven Seagal movie!

For some people reading this column, the news that the recent releases Valkyrie (MGM, also Blu-Ray), Paul Blart: Mall Cop (Sony, also Blu-Ray), and My Bloody Valentine 3D (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray) will be more important than anything else. But we’re looking out for the rest of you as well. And if none of these titles quicken your pulse- and I perfectly understand if they don’t- there’s always the latest from movie-star-turned-musician-turned-energy-drink-magnate (take that, Billy Bob Thornton!) Steven Seagal, Driven to Kill (Fox, also Blu-Ray). On the other side of things, the artsy and fartsy out there should be salivating over the release of John Gianvito’s excellent Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind (E1 Entertainment). In other words, something for everybody!

And what would a DVD Digest be without the classics section, for those of you who aren’t all uptight about black-and-white, subtitles, Academy ratio, and long-dead movie stars. Devotees of the Criterion Collection no doubt already know about the dynamic duo of DVDs hitting streets today. First, Peter Yates' great Boston crime drama The Friends of Eddie Coyle (Criterion) makes its long-awaited DVD debut. Or if you’re in the mood for something more, uh, Eastern, check out Pigs, Pimps & Prostitutes: 3 Films by Shohei Imamura (Criterion)- includes The Insect Woman, Pigs and Battleships, Intentions of Murder. Fans of old Hollywood would be advised to pick up two John Wayne favorites, El Dorado Centennial Edition (Paramount) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance Centennial Edition (Paramount). And by some happy coincidence, today’s release of Fritz Lang’s Nazi-hunting thriller Man Hunt (Fox) is timed perfectly with the release of the aforementioned Valkyrie. Funny how that worked out, dontcha find?

Fans of TV on DVD should find something to enjoy among this week’s releases, which include the ever-popular 24 Season 7 (Fox, also Blu-Ray), Alan Ball’s vampire saga True Blood (HBO, also Blu-Ray), and the no-longer-surprising-in-its-awesomeness Friday Night Lights Season 3 (Universal).

Finally, if you’ve a Blu-Ray player, you’re in luck! Today’s a big one for Blu-Ray only releases, highlighted by the Batman 20th Anniversary Blu-Ray Book (Warner), which includes a Batmobile full of extras, documentaries, and other cool stuff. For the kids, A Bug’s Life (Disney) hits stores to capitalize on the upcoming Pixar release Up, while those who are looking forward to the latest Terminator blockbuster will no doubt pick up Terminator 2 Skynet Edition (Lionsgate). The political drama Lions for Lambs (Fox) is coming out for fans of political speechifying. Finally, Paramount’s got a whole slew of new Blu-Ray only releases hitting stores today, including Three Days of the Condor, Changing Lanes, Enemy at the Gates, Paycheck, and The Machinist.

Screengrab Review: "State of Play"

Nick Schager — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 15:00:00 GMT

A 2003 BBC miniseries condensed from six hours to two for its big-screen Hollywood adaptation, State of Play is so bursting with characters, plots, and hot-button subject matter that some unavoidably receive short shrift. Though its English TV heritage and multifaceted current events-laden narrative both recall Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic, Kevin Macdonald’s (The Last King of Scotland) film nonetheless largely eschews Big Statement grandstanding in favor of murder-mystery tension. It’s a tack that can occasionally be vexing, as some of the issues this tale nominally addresses would surely benefit from further investigation, whether it’s the increasingly edgy relationship between traditional and new media, the role of corporate interests on news reporting, and – in an echo of this season’s 24 storyline – the rise of profit-first private military contractors in international affairs and homeland security. Yet Macdonald’s decision to use these topics primarily as flavoring for a tale of nothing-is-what-it-seems espionage and investigative journalism is, ultimately, a shrewd (if disappointing) one that keeps the focus on suspense and prevents the taut, knotty proceedings from overreaching.

In the nation’s capital, a thief and pizza delivery man are shot dead by a skilled killer, while at the same time, the aide (Maria Thayer) to married congressman Stephen Collins (Ben Affleck), whom she was both screwing and working for as the lead investigator of a Senate committee hearing into Blackwater-esque private military contractor PointCorp, is mysteriously killed by a subway train. Washington Globe reporter Cal McAffrey (a scruffy, long-haired Russell Crowe) is assigned to cover the first deaths but – given that Collins is his former college roommate, as well as married to a woman (Robin Wright Penn) whom he once slept with – inevitably begins looking into the latter case. What he unearths is a tangled web of duplicity, corruption and murder fit for a Raymond Chandler yarn, and one he’s tasked with figuring out while contending with an editor-in-chief (Helen Mirren) under pressure from the paper’s bottom line-driven new owners and a staff blogger named Della Frye (Rachel McAdams) eager to work the story alongside her renowned peer. Double crosses, assassinations, and treachery soon engulf the plucky reporters, and as they breathlessly sift through facts, rumors and revelations, Macdonald’s film achieves suitably swift momentum, the twists and turns coming fast enough to keep one distracted from the obvious, telegraphed denouement lying in wait.

Jeff Daniels, Viola Davis and Jason Bateman round out a sturdy all-star cast that’s asked mainly to embody familiar archetypes, and if Crowe’s hero is less compromised than the script would like us to believe – his severe conflicts of interest never truly putting his noble motivations in serious doubt – the actor’s driven performance nonetheless anchors the vigorous action. That, underneath its flurry of characters and incidents, State of Play adheres to a familiar All the President's Men-style whodunit template is for its first two-thirds inconsequential, since Macdonald keeps the shadowy proceedings brisk and thorny enough to mildly intrigue. Unfortunately, all the commotion is primarily in service of a seen-from-miles-away bombshell that renders the plot – and its half-baked but unpretentious portrait of the insidious influence of private entities in what should be public services (government and media) – far more shallow than it initially appeared. Although, even if the film proves nothing more than a clever, diverting bit of smoke and mirrors, its end-credits depiction of the start-to-finish process of newspapers’ daily creation serves as a poignant coda for the vital yet dying art of old-school, courageous, truth-telling reportage.

Kal Penn Puts Acting Career on Hold to Mind Obama's Front Door

Phil Nugent — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 15:00:00 GMT

First Joaquin Phoenix, and now this: Kal Penn, the 31-year-old actor best known for his roles in the Harold and Kumar films and the TV series House, has taken what we hope will be a temporary retirement from acting to take a position as President Obama's associate director in the White House office of public liaison, which he describes as an outreach position in what is "basically the front door of the White House." A native of Montclair, New Jersey, the actor was born Kalpen Modi to Indian immigrants in 1977. (He uses the name "Kal Penn" professionally; according to Penn, he originally put the "Americanized" version of his name on his acting resume as an experiment to prove that it wouldn't make a difference to casting directors, then stuck with it when his callbacks instantly rose by fifty percent.) Although the official announcement of Penn's appointment wasn't made until yesterday, savvy House fans first sussed out that something was up on Monday night, when they tuned in to the latest episode and learned that Penn's character, Dr. Lawrence Kutner, had unceremoniously shot himself in the temple. It was a shocking tragedy, not least for special guest sick people Meat Loaf Aday and Colleen Camp, whose storyline had to be awkwardly sandwiched in between extended fits of grieving. It was only the next morning, when Penn broke the story to Entertainment Weekly, that it became clear that TV Land's loss was the White House's gain.

Penn campaigned for Obama in the 2008 campaign and served on his National Arts Policy Committee. More recently, he was one of the featured performers at the Obama Inaugural Celebration at the Lincoln Memorial, where he and George Lopez delivered quotations from Dwight Eisenhower and Barbara Jordan. He has also taught a course in “Images of Asian Americans in the Media” at the University of Pennsylvania. Still, what might be most impressive about the appointment is that Obama wasn't scared off by Penn's stoner movie comedy past. (In addition to the Harold and Kumar movies, he first attracted major attention for his role in National Lampoon's Van Wilder, and starred in the sequel, The Rise of Taj. In a more dignified but possibly less entertaining vein, he also starred in Mira Nair's The Namesake, for which he received the Asian Excellence Award for Outstanding Actor, and appeared as one of Lex Luthor's henchmen in Bryan Singer's Superman Returns. In 2007, Penn also played a terrorist in four episodes of 24; about that role, he's said, "I have a huge political problem with the role. It was essentially accepting a form of racial profiling. I think it’s repulsive. But it was the first time I had a chance to blow stuff up and take a family hostage." The guy's gonna do just fine in Washington. In the meantime, fans needing closure can visit the online memorial to his character that Fox has set up.

Trailer Review: Taken

Paul Clark — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 17:00:00 GMT

Of the dozens of Luc Besson productions that have come out over the past decades, Banlieue 13 (released here as District B13) was one of the better ones, due in no small part to the stylishly-directed action scenes courtesy of first-timer Pierre Morel. Morel’s follow-up Taken, which has already been released elsewhere in the world, shows similar potential as a high-octane thriller. The premise looks like an alpha-male-friendly cross between Ransom and 24, yet I liked the way the trailer actually concentrates on setting up that premise instead of simply cutting to the chase, so to speak. Of course, it helps to have Liam Neeson at the center of the story, as his tall, forceful presence and authoritative baritone voice give his character credibility in a way that most actors couldn’t. But I also liked the way the trailer ended- rather than building to a crescendo of thrills, it pulls back, taking time for an obvious but effective response from the kidnappers. Taken may be nothing more than a Euro-inflected thrill ride, but if the trailer is any indication, it could be a highly entertaining one.

Culture in the Bush Years: A Time of Black Hawks, Battlestars, and Borat

Phil Nugent — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 17:00:00 GMT

So Newsweek asked a bunch of folks to select one cultural artifact from the past eight years that "exemplifies what it was like to be alive in the age of George W. Bush." Nobody picked W., thank God--instead, there were votes for a Jeff Koons knickknack ("Much as the Bush administration has waved off an intimacy with Big Oil and professed down-home empathy for regular "folks," Koons likes to pretend that he's not an avatar of irony for billionaire collectors.") and Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, the long-in-the-writing novel that dropped weeks before September 11, 2001, and which "conjures up a nation kept awake at night by nameless dread."--but a few movies did slip by the guy at the door. Specifically, Black Hawk Down, Ridley Scott's re-staging of the Battle of Mogadishu (based on the nonfiction book by Mark Bowden) and Borat, Sacha Baron Cohen's road trip through an America that had just started reconsidering whether this all-hail-the-retarded-boy-king business was really the best defense against national decline.

In this context, they do make for an intriguing double bill. Black Hawk Down, which was made before 9/11 but released some four months later, is about a mission that, at the time, was widely used as Exhibit A by politicians and pundits who wanted to denounce the Clinton administration for its use of military intervention overseas in the name of "nation building." But the movie itself was a hit with many supporters of the Bush administration's plans to spread democracy in the Middle East by kicking ass and taking names. It was also a big success with Somali audiences who turned out in mass numbers to cheer the sight of American soldiers getting blown to pieces. However you want to take the ironies involved, none of these reactions are surprising, nor are the testimonies of soldiers, including those who've been to Iraq, that the movie captures how it feels to be under fire. Scott achieved the movie's visceral effectiveness by eliminating anything that might get in the way of it, including historical and political context and even much in the way of character definition. The movie includes a number of fine actors, but it's all boiled down to the sensory overload of creating how it feels to get shot at, over and over and over, from every direction. So it's no wonder that different audiences would decide who they should be rooting for based on which non-characters look more like them, and also no wonder that the film, which features a predominately white U.S. military, had to endure charges of racism from both Somalis and American writers. For all its technical mastery, the movie goes charging too scarily far in the direction of other Jerry Bruckheimer productions, whose only intent is to make you raise a fist and go, "Whooo!" Five years later, Borat, which was the number one movie in America around the time that the president's party took a battering in the 2006 midterm elections, made that triumphant war whoop sound like a cry for help. It's a candid snapshot of a country that seems populated with people who want to dazzle the world with their indomitable swagger but who reveal the depths of their insecurity with how badly they take being teased. (The movie made headlines while it was in production with stories that Baron Cohen had barely escaped from a Texas rodeo with his life after daring to mangle the National Anthem, and it says a lot that the rodeo organizers seemed, if anything, more eager to brag about how hot-tempered their audience was than the filmmakers.)

Still, a lot of people of a geekish bent will agree with Joshua Alston that no movie released during the war president's time in office quite caught the national mood as well as a small-screen offering, Battlestar Galactica, which Alston hails for presenting "a world that looks nothing like our own, and yet evokes it with chilling accuracy." Alston also scores a direct hit when comparing it to 24, "with its neocon fantasies of terrorists who get chatty if Jack Bauer pokes the right pressure point. Of the two shows, Battlestar has been more honest about the psychological toll of the war on terror. It confronts the thorny issues that crop up in a society's battle to preserve its way of life: the efficacy of torture, the curtailing of personal rights, the meaning of patriotism in a nation under siege. It also doesn't flinch from one question that 24 wouldn't dare raise: is our way of life even worth saving? Plus, the guy who looks like John McCain turned out to be a robot. How's that for prophecy!?

“The French Connection” Influenced Everything

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 21:00:00 GMT

The Blu-ray edition of The French Connection is due next month, so director William Friedkin is making the rounds, talking up the film and reminding people he’s still employable. The Independent helps him make his case by crediting Connection with influencing everything from The Wire to Grand Theft Auto IV. “Roughly a third of the way through, gamers are faced with a mission, the Puerto Rican Connection, which emulates the famous chase scene at the heart of Friedkin's thriller,” writes James Mottram. “Commandeering a car, just as Gene Hackman's rogue cop "Popeye" Doyle does, you are asked to trail a target, who boards an elevated train, through the streets of Liberty City (the GTA version of New York)…Unsurprisingly, the 73-year-old Friedkin hasn't played the game, let alone completed the mission, but he doesn't seem concerned that the film that launched his career has been ripped off.”

“Joel Surnow, who created 24, told me he was most influenced by The French Connection,” Friedkin notes, and indeed, until now I had forgotten about the amnesiac cougar subplot in the 1971 Best Picture winner. It isn’t known whether the creators of CSI are similarly indebted to the director, but they did hire him to direct an episode – his most recent screen credit to date. “"It was fun and successful, so they've asked me to do another one in January.”

As for The French Connection, Friedkin plays it modest en route to patting himself on the back. “We thought we were making a little B picture, a little cops-and-robbers movie. So the fact that it became so celebrated, so memorable, and a standard for the genre – which I realize has been copied over and over again, including its attitudes – was a huge surprise.” He discounts the Oscar-winning script by Ernest Tidyman, claiming that hardly a word ended up in the mostly ad-libbed movie. And he takes a shot at Bullitt, Connection’s most oft-cited competition for the title of greatest car chase on film. “I don't think the chase is that great," claims Friedkin. "What they did basically was clear out the streets of San Francisco and drive these cars over the hills. There were no people on the streets. I decided I had to put the public in jeopardy.” Good to know.

Related:
William Friedkin Has No Sense of Social Obligation
When Good Directors Go Bad: Cruising (William Friedkin)

DVD Digest for November 25, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 15:00:00 GMT

This week, a surprisingly small selection leading into the so-called “biggest shopping day of the year.”

Recent releases coming to DVD include Will Smith and Charlize Theron in Hancock (Sony, also Blu-Ray), Vince Vaughn making a grab for your Christmas cash in Fred Claus (Warner, also Blu-Ray), Eddie Murphy inside Eddie Murphy in Meet Dave (Fox, also Blu-Ray), and Andy Samberg going from talking to animals as Mark Wahlberg to playing a talking animal himself in Space Chimps (Warner, also Blu-Ray).

In classics this week, Criterion releases two seminal nineties films, Wes Anderson’s debut effort Bottle Rocket and Wong Kar-wai’s awesome and Tarantino-approved Chungking Express. But don’t fret, Blu-Ray fans- they’ll be coming out in that format in December, so don’t cross them off the Christmas list.

In TV on DVD, this week brings the season-bridging special 24: Redemption (Fox), plus everyone’s fake wingnut in A Colbert Christmas: The Greatest Gift of All (Paramount).

Finally, this week’s Blu-Ray only releases are a Jamie Foxx double feature, Jarhead and The Kingdom (both Universal).

DVD Digest for July 1, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week, one of the great writers of the twentieth century gets some Criterion love, plus plenty of Blu-Ray releases to last for the rest of the summer.

DVD of the Week: Continuing Criterion’s summer of awesomeness this week is the release of two films that function as a primer for anyone curious about the life and work of Japanese author Yukio Mishima. To begin with, there’s the new special edition of Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, Paul Schrader’s greatest directorial achievement to date. Rather than attempting to take on Mishima’s life in a conventional manner, Schrader begins on the final day of the writer’s life, as he and his private army take control of a military compound so that Mishima can commit ritualized suicide. This framing device is intercut with stark re-creations of Mishima’s early life, as well as lush Technicolor dramatizations of several of his stories. Mishima is a gorgeous film, but it’s also more insightful about its protagonist’s one-of-a-kind life than any straightforward telling could hope to be. For more insight into Mishima, Criterion is releasing separately the author’s rarely-seen directorial effort, Patriotism, which not only starred Mishima in the lead role but also anticipated his own suicide. Anyone looking to learn more about Yukio Mishima could do a lot worse than to start with these two must-see DVDs.

This week’s recent releases coming to DVD: Owen Wilson in Drillbit Taylor (Paramount, also Blu-Ray); The 24-meets-Rashomon thriller Vantage Point (Sony, also Blu-Ray); Tyler Perry’s Meet the Browns (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray); Wong Kar-wai’s English-language debut My Blueberry Nights (Genius); the City of God quasi-sequel City of Men (Disney); and the direct-to-DVD spinoff Get Smart’s Bruce and Lloyd Out of Control (Warner, also Blu-Ray). This week’s TV-on-DVD releases include Mad Men Season 1 (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray) and The Closer: The Complete Third Season (Warner).

Finally, in Blu-Ray-only news, this week brings Batman: The Movie Special Edition (Fox), Gangs of New York (Disney), In the Line of Fire (Sony), and Point Break: Special Edition (Fox).

Will Barack Obama Be America's Next Great Black President?

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 14:30:00 GMT

You know how there’s usually nothing good on TV, and then finally there are TWO shows you want to watch and they’re both on at the same time? That’s what this election has been like for me. After a a lifetime of troubled Democratic administrations and doomed Democratic candidates from McGovern to Kerry (and don’t even get me started on the disastrous Gore/Lieberman campaign, Nader haters), we finally get two really strong contenders...IN THE SAME FREAKIN’ ELECTION YEAR. And they just spent the past few months beating the shit out of each other.

But that's all behind us now: according to media scuttlebutt, Hillary will officially concede the Democratic nomination on Saturday and become America’s #1 Obama Girl, while Barack moves one step closer to becoming our nation’s first real black president, after many years of fake black presidents on TV and the big screen.

And so, in honor of Senator Barack Obama’s historic achievement, Screengrab decided to look back at some of the African Americans who occupied the Oval Office in fiction before reality finally caught up:

Morgan Freeman as President Tom Beck in Deep Impact (1998)

After playing God in Bruce & Evan Almighty, President of the United States was actually a step down for Morgan Freeman...but America was lucky to have his wisdom, authority and soothing, inspirational baritone during a crisis involving a potential Extinction Level Event, a.k.a. a giant comet on a collision course with Earth. Rather than farming out the whole thing to Haliburton, President Beck freezes wages and prices to prevent an economic disaster and dispatches Robert Duvall’s Capt. Spurgeon "Fish" Tanner and a multinational crew of astronauts, who sacrifice themselves to destroy the big rock, thus saving (most of) humanity. Heckuva job, Fishie.

Dennis Haysbert as President David Palmer on 24 (2002-2004)

After surviving assassins in a truly harrowing California primary, Haysbert’s resilient, basso profundo commander-in-chief is faced with nuclear and biological terrorism, as well as attempts by corrupt American businessmen to manufacture war in the Middle East in order to drive up oil prices and...uh...hey, isn’t this a Fox show with a big conservative fan base? Must be all the torture...so much torture, in fact, that West Point Academy worried cadets were starting to view such behavior as acceptable interrogation procedure, and I’ve personally heard talk radio guys condone extreme neo-con interrogation policies because, heck, they always work for Jack Bauer. Yet isn’t it also possible, given the show’s impact, that Haysbert’s performance as the indomitable President Palmer in some way helped Middle America get used to the idea of a handsome young African American Democrat in the White House?

Bill Clinton as President Bill Clinton in Contact (1998)

While not technically African American, Bill Clinton received an honorary designation as the nation’s first black president (until the real thing comes along) from a plurality of U.S. comedians. And while not technically a cast member of Robert Zemeckis’ adaptation of Carl Sagan’s tale of Earth’s first contact with extraterrestrial life, Clinton nevertheless received more screen time than Rob Lowe or Angela Bassett thanks to a presidential speech about rocks found on Mars that was repurposed (controversially) as a fictional proclamation about alien transmissions received by astronomer Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster). Ironically, the only reason Clinton got to portray the president in the movie was because Sidney Poitier passed on the role.

Terry Crews as President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho in Idiocracy (2006)

Of course, some presidents are better than others, though given the average IQ of the dumbed-down populace of Mike Judge’s little-seen, depressingly spot-on social satire, Idiocracy, Crews’ President Camacho doesn’t really do that bad a job. Sure, he almost executes the smartest man in the world (Luke Wilson’s cryogenically-preserved average Joe, whose 21st century common sense reads as genius in 2505 America). But he does have leadership skills, and when Joe’s brilliant plan to water crops with, y’know, water instead of corporate sports beverages helps to end a crippling food shortage, Camacho has the wisdom to actually listen to expert opinion rather than (ahem) stubbornly staying the course.

Tommy “Tiny” Lister as President Lindberg in The Fifth Element (1997)

Forget the Axis of Evil...Lister’s science-fictional administration has to deal with The Great Evil, a sentient flaming asteroid intent on, yes, wiping out all life on Earth. While Bruce Willis’ cab driver and Milla Jovovich’s supernatural supermodel do most of the heavy lifting in the fight against Evil (and its chief henchman Zorg, played by Gary Oldman in a peculiar plastic hat), President Lindberg nevertheless doesn’t ask and Chris Tucker’s Ruby Rhod doesn’t tell when his ultra-flamboyant radio host joins the mission, and the intergalactic commander-in-chief even supports his troops by preventing a naggy mother from cock-blocking Willis’ eventual clone chamber tryst with Jovovich...talk about advocating stem cell research!

The Second (or Third, or Fourth) Coming of the 1970s Movies

Phil Nugent — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Ross Douthat thinks that moviemakers have brought back the '70s, again. But when Tarantino and other filmmakers of a certain age set out to redeem the '70s as a cool decade after all, they fixated on the stylistic tics and mannerisms of gritty urban thrillers and genre hybrids such as blaxsploitation flicks, and what's been brought back now, in direct response to the Bush administration and its cheerleaders in the media, is the paranoid hopelessness of such Vietnam-and-Watergate-era pictures as The Parallax View, The Day of the Condor, and the vigilante genre epitomized by Charles Bronson in Death Wish. This is not how it was supposed to be. In the wake of 9/11, there were a lot of predictions, both inside the industry and in the press, that audiences would now reject cynicism and violent thrills and embrace the second coming of John Wayne, a simple man with a simple plan to solve all our problems, starting with wiping that smirk off your face, and do me some push-ups, smart boy! (Remember that "irony is dead" horseshit?) But the few overt attempts to play to this "new reality" — say, that remake of The Four Feathers that didn't do anybody any good, or that documentary about "good Americans" that was marketed as a bitch slap to Michael Moore — died a dog's death, and the more cunning of the filmmakers who might have once considered catering to it got with the program. As Douthat points out, after the failure of Tears of the Sun, a 2003 movie about some American special-ops guys in Nigeria who remember what they're really fighting for and who proceed to, well, really fight for it, its director, Antoine Fuqua, was back last year with Shooter, in which a special-ops guy who's back from the Middle East discovers that he's really fighting a conspiracy made up of sleazeball U.S. government guys — plutocrats who disregard the laws, sneer at the common people, and the depth of whose villainy can be accurately gauged according to the degree of their physical resemblance to Dick Cheney. Audience who ate it up may not have been conscious of responding to having their political prejudices stroked, but it was a much bigger hit than Tears of the Sun without being a much better movie. Also instructive: the career of Stephen Gaghan, who made a splash with his screenplay for Steven Soderbergh's (pre-9/11) Traffic, which summed up the war on drugs as a misguided, empty enterprise, but did also allow for the existence of a few good people working inside the system and scoring whatever little victories they could. Since then, Gaghan made his debut as a writer-director with Syriana, commonly referred to as "Traffic with oil instead of drugs," but which has a much more paranoid vibe, and which ends with its most intelligent, good-hearted, and plugged-in characters — its best hopes for positive change — literally blown off the road. It's the difference that makes Syriana feel like a product of the current zeitgeist.

The James Bond of the current era is Jason Bourne, the killing machine who, having lost his identity, starts out knowing nothing except that the world is out to get him. Over the course of three very busy pictures, he's yet to learn anything that might cheer him up. (The closest thing to good news in any of the Bourne pictures is that an amnesiac with a target on his back might still be able to hook up with Franka Potente — but he won't be able to keep her for long.) Even the Napoleon Solo of the current era, 24's Jack Bauer, though regarded by some as a right-wing hero standing almost alone in the liberal fantasyland that is topical-minded Hollywood, is at odds with the pasty-white, Nixonian government leaders who, more often than not, are at the bottom of the latest villainy he has to bust. (Jack's real "ideology" amounts to a bland willingness to do anything to anybody to get his way, in a universe where torture works. Like many a self-identified law-and-order type, he's not a real conservative so much as a barbarian with a cell phone and a muscle shirt.) But because the similarities between the '70s and today have more to do with a shared national mood of fatalistic helplessness than with the specifics giving rise to that mood, the "new '70s" atmosphere works best when the filmmakers skirt the issue of just what it is they're mooning about. So last year's slate of "Iraq war" movies had a beside-the-point feel to them, and even the vigilante-hero template doesn't have the same impact when transferred to contemporary New York — a place that certainly has its problems but that, compared to the city Travis Bickle called home, is relatively bloodless and well-scrubbed. (As Douthat points out, "Jodie Foster’s gun-toting avenger [in The Brave One] alone would have been responsible for more than one percent of the city’s annual killings." The anxieties of the '70s movies were part of something not just huge but pervasive, a societal rot that you couldn't miss — you couldn't leave home or turn on the news without being reminded of it. However bad things seem now, they don't seem out of control — if anything, just the opposite — and most people probably assign most of the blame squarely to one or two powerful people whose guts they hate. So the movies that try to take on society's ills head on feel as if they'd fit all too snugly onto YouTube.

Clone Wars, Batman Soars and Other ShoWest Tidbits

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 17:00:00 GMT

While your quaint little Iraq documentaries and mumblecore movies were unspooling at South by Southwest, the big guns of the movie industry were gathering for ShoWest in Las Vegas. The annual exhibitors convention is all about putting butts in the seats – and making sure the seats are available for said butts by flying in superstars to grin and glad hand with theater owners and show a few clips from their upcoming product. None of your faithful Screengrab scribes were able to attend this year, but fortunately Entertainment Weekly was on hand to run down the highlights for us.

3-D Animation: Two upcoming 3-D animated features were previewed. The Belgian-made (but English language) Fly Me to the Moon “follows three adorable house flies who hitch a ride on Apollo 11 during the first moon landing in 1969…Even ordinarily mundane things — e.g. shards of glass flying through weightless space or dust being kicked up under Neil Armstrong's boots — appear remarkably realistic when seen through those plastic 3-D specs.” EW was even more impressed with the “Ultimate 3-D” footage from Dreamworks Animation’s Monsters vs. Aliens, “which has the effect of bringing the viewer into the world of the movie, rather than having stuff pop off the screen. (Really, you have to see it to believe it.)”

The Dark Knight: Both director Christopher Nolan and star Christian Bale are interviewed. Nolan talked about raising the bar for the Batman Begins follow-up: “I'd never done a sequel — kind of never imagined I would; it's not something I had really seen myself doing. Even, on completing the first one, it has a great tease for the Joker, but I just wanted to send the audience out with a sense of possibility for what we might see, not specifically as a sequel. It took me a long time to come around, talking to [Batman Begins cowriter] David Goyer and Jonathan, my brother [and frequent collaborator], to figure out that, actually, there's something very compelling there. So what I've tried to do with this film, the only reason was to try and make the best film in the first place. And the great sequels that I've enjoyed and looked up to over the years have managed to do that — there aren't many of them. You know, whether you're looking at The Godfather Part II or The Empire Strikes Back — those are sequels that I think built on what the first ones did really amazingly well. And that's what we're aspiring to with this film.” Meanwhile, Bale is ready for more: “I would, knowing the Dark Knight story, I would like very much to complete a trilogy. And I think that knowing the story of The Dark Knight, it leaves you anticipating something that really can get very, very interesting for a third.”

The Clone Wars: A George Lucas interview finds the Star Wars maven anticipating the upcoming animated Clone Wars feature and series, as well as a separate live-action TV serial set between episodes three and four of the movies. “Some of the characters from the features find their way in there, so it's not completely divorced. It's as if we just went down the street and told a different story. You know, we were doing, I don't know, 24, and now we're going to move down the street here and do The Wire. Same thing, it's just different people doing the same thing in the same city.” George Lucas’s The Wire? We’ll believe it when we see it.

Animated Film Awards Announced: "Ratatouille" Takes the Cheese

Phil Nugent — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 16:00:00 GMT

The 35th annual "Annies" awards, held in Los Angeles by the International Animated Film Society, has given a slew of prizes, including the top award of Best Animated Feature, to Pixar's Ratatouille, thus making it the No Country for Old Men of films about gifted culinary-minded vermin. The film's writer-director, Brad Bird won for Best Director and Best Screenplay; the film also took home prizes for Best Music, Best Character Design, Best Character Design, Best Storyboarding, and Best Voice Actor: Ian Holm, who played the villainous French chef Skinner, and whose thorough deservingness of this award can perhaps be measured by the fact that I myself saw the movie twice and didn't realize until I saw this announcement that I was listening to Ian freakin' Holm! Awards also went to a couple of Ratatouille spin-offs: the movie's animated video game and the short film Your Friend the Rat, which features characters from Ratatouille and is included in the movie's DVD editions. The awards for Best Animated Effects and Production Artist went to the penguin-hits-the-waves movie Surf's Up, possibly because whoever labels the awards just got really sick of writing "Ratatouille." The Best Animated Feature award is seen as a strong indicator of which film is liable to take the Academy Award in that category, though this year it may not be as strong an indicator of Ratatouille's chances as the fact that if Bee Movie wins instead, we're gonna burn Los Angeles to the ground! The society also celebrates excellence in the field of television animation; notable winners this year included Seth Green for directing the Star Wars episode of Robot Chicken and Ian Maxtone-Graham and Billy Kimball for writing the episode of The Simpsons that lampooned 24, choices designed to set an army of geeks somersaulting past Forbidden Planet at noon with Roman candles held between their teeth. The society also its Winsor McKay career achievement awards on independent animated filmmaker and animation historian John Canemaker, Disney filmmaking veteran Glen Keane, and Ren and Stimpy's dad, John Kricfalusi.

Kisses for My Precedents

Phil Nugent — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Writing in Newsweek, Joshua Alston reflects on the history of fake black presidents and woman presidents in the movies and on TV, a lineage that may have greased the way for the real-life battle between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. It's sobering to realize that the very notion of a woman or an African-American becoming president has, until recently, been treated mostly as a subject for comic or something close to science fiction, as in the 1964 movie Kisses for My President, which is all about how emasculating it is for Fred MacMurray to be cast in the role of First Husband after his wife, Polly Bergen, is elected president. Bergen eventually resigns the presidency to answer to what the film sees as a woman's higher calling: she's pregnant, and her family needs her. At least she was actually elected. The first black president in the movies, Douglass Dilman, played by James Earl Jones in the 1972 The Man (adapted, from an Irving Wallace novel, by that exemplar of socially conscious entertainment, Rod Serling), rose to the office after a perfect storm hit the line of succession. He just happened to be the President Pro Tempore of the Senate when both the president and the speaker of the house are killed by a collapsed roof in West Germany. After the ailing, elderly vice-president politely declines the job because he already has one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel, the cabinet actually urges the secretary of state to ignore the rules and jump ahead of Dilman; he turns them down (no Al Haig he), but The Man remains rooted firmly in the concept that a black man could become president only through a surreal set of circimstances and that much, if not most of the country would balk at regarding his presidency as legitimate. At the end, Dilman is planning to fight to hang onto the job (no Polly Bergen he), but in order to demonstrate that white America can trust him to govern in "moderation", he has to turn over a black revolutionary (Georg Stanford Brown) to the apartheid government of South Africa.

A lot has changed since then, but as recently as 2003, the Chris Tucker-Bernie Mac movie Head of State was predicated on the idea that a black president was both unlikely and hilarious, and more recently than that, the TV series Commander in Chief, in which Geena Davis ascended to the president after the guy who was elected at the top of the ticket suffered a cerebral aneuryam, earned a fair number of perplexed and hostile notices just for its premise. On the other hand, that show also set off a fair amount of tsk-tsking and throat-clearing among people who were appalled to discover how many people still felt comfortable with expressing dismay at the very concept of a woman president; in that sense, Commander in Chief may have been more successful at propelling the debate into, say, the twentieth century than it was as entertainment. Of course, the real triumph may be in Jack Bauer's alternate universe. 24, a show frequently criticized as right-wing propaganda (and one that premiered in the fall of 2001, shortly after Everything Changed), began with David Palmer (Dennis Haysbert) campaigning for the presidency and wound up with him becoming first leader of the free world, then a martyr, and finally, with his little brother following him to the Oval Office, as the head of a dynasty. In the next season, Cherry Jones is set to play the first woman president who'll be telling Jack who to blow up next. The show has had its share of white male presidents, too, but they have tended to be a far less inspiring lot. After the last one, the Nixonian President Charles Logan (Gregory Itzin), Jack Bauer might not ever have take orders from another white guy again.

That Guy!: Xander Berkeley

Peter Smith — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 18:00:00 GMT

This week’s That Guy!, the long-awaited Xander Berkeley, is a groundbreaker in many ways. He’s the first character actor we’ve featured in this spot whose name starts with an X; he’s also the first to have designed his own my-skin-is-falling-off makeup while portraying a person suffering from acute radiation poisoning. But he also follows in some well-traveled paths: he’s the second person we’ve featured to have come to prominence as a cast member of 24, a show that seems to specialize in snatching up talented Hollywood character actors, as evidenced by previous That Gal! Mary Lynn Rajskub and future That Guy! Dennis Haysbert. Like a lot of other contemporary character actors, he’s found steady work as a voiceover specialist (appearing, as has almost every other B-lister in the business, on the Justice League cartoon), and he bankrolls artsy projects like his back-to-back appearances in Timecode and The Cherry Orchard with, er, slightly more pedestrian fare like Barb Wire and The Rock. A favorite of maverick director Alex Cox, Berkeley appeared in three of his films in a row early in his career. His first role was as a grown-up Chris Crawford in the infamous Mommie Dearest, and he’s gone on to make almost seventy feature films in twenty years (his most recent was Seraphim Falls), qualifying him as one of the hardest-working men in show business despite being almost completely unknown to most people who don’t watch 24. Berkeley, a New Yorker by way of Jersey, has specialized, in his latter days, in bland, arrogant schmucks who are up to no good. But he's displayed a terrific range in his remarkably prolific career, playing everything from typical romantic male leads to scene-stealing darkly comic turns, as in his cameo role as a cab driver in Leaving Las Vegas. He’s also almost certainly the only actor we’ve ever featured who has portrayed an eight-armed violinist who robs banks alongside a robotic Soviet vending machine.

Where to see Xander Berkeley at his best:

SID AND NANCY (1986): The first and best of Xander Berkeley’s lengthy collaboration with Alex Cox comes in this desperate, moving biopic of Sex Pistols provocateur Sid Vicious and his clinging, doomstruck girlfriend Nancy Spungeon. Berkeley portrays the drug dealer Bowery Snax, a living symbol of the pathetic degradation of the couple’s final days; when he delivers the line “Sid, Nancy, pull up your pants”, it encapsulates everything sadly wrong with their entire lives as well as an ugly reflection of the day-to-day reality of the junkie.

SAFE (1995): Berkeley’s finest hour came in this Todd Haynes masterpiece of the alienation of affluence. Playing the husband of Julianne Moore’s panic-stricken housewife, he must transition from unlikable standoffish breadwinner to bizarrely sympathetic and utterly confused caregiver, as the woman he married undergoes a transformation neither she nor anyone else can explain or even articulate. It’s a tremendous performance, in some ways the moral center of the film, and in a just world, it would have made him a big star.

AIR FORCE ONE (1997): It’s hard to pick a favorite from Berkeley’s mainstream movie appearances; he’s done good work in, among other films, Terminator 2, Apollo 13, A Few Good Men and Shanghai Noon. Our favorite, though, is probably his rogue Secret Service agent in Air Force One, part of a rash of "fightin’ president" movies in the late 1990s. Not only was it a reunion of sorts with Sid and Nancy’s Gary Oldman, but it was perhaps the pinnacle of his understated snotty jerk roles, even if the script requires him, along with everyone else in the movie, to do far too much yelling.

— Leonard Pierce