The Screengrab : Kill Bill

Quentin Tarantino: The Emperor's New Pumps

Phil Nugent — Thu, 07 May 2009 15:00:00 GMT

The media buildup to the arrival of the new Tarantino movie with the silly fucking goddamn title is well under way, and in your more fashionable quarters, it's taking the form of a buildup to see if the story of how QT Lost His Way gets extended by another chapter. "When Quentin Tarantino climbs the steps of the Grand Palais for the world premiere of his new movie at this month's Cannes Film Festival," Ryan Gilbey writes, "he may feel like he's coming home. It was in Cannes 15 years ago that he received the Palme d'Or for Pulp Fiction. Even those among us who believe it to be a film of moments, as opposed to a momentous film, will concede that it had a seismic effect on what followed... This year, Tarantino is back in Cannes with Inglourious Basterds, not merely a title destined to have "sic" printed after it wherever it is mentioned, but a spaghetti western draped in a Second World War greatcoat...A lot has changed since Pulp Fiction. The former enfant terrible has just turned 46; the films on which his reputation is founded are some distance behind him. Those who marvelled at the assurance and aplomb of Tarantino's 1992 debut, the slippery heist thriller Reservoir Dogs or the unexpected warmth and wisdom of the 1997 Jackie Brown may then be wary of Inglourious Basterds, with its early signs that the director is wading even further into the B-movie hinterlands of his most recent work."

News flash: Tarantino is never going to be able to follow up Pulp Fiction. That isn't meant as a harsh judgement on his gifts or a dismissal of the movies he's made since--I happen to like Kill Bill and Death Proof more than Gilbey, and more than most of my Screengrab brethren. And a lot of people love Jackie Brown more than Tarantino will publicly admit to; arguably his best film, it was also the one that made it clear that every time he cranks out another movie, it will be judged to have fallen short by the only standard the media has for judging a new Tarantino movie: is it Pulp Fiction all over again? Does it rewrite the rule book for "indie" cinema, in terms of how much fun it can be and how far its appeal can extend? At the time, Pulp Fiction was both a surprise and, because of Reservoir Dogs (a festival circuit legend that didn't actually set box offices on fire in its commercial release) and the stories about the director that were kept circulating as other filmmakers made movies based on his early scripts (True Romance, Natural Born Killers), a premature career summing-up. in the fifteen years since, I think that Tarantino has proven that he can make other good movies. What he hasn't managed to do, and what nobody should have expected from him, has been to rewrite the rule book twice.

"The weight of expectation resting on Pulp Fiction was immense," writes Gilbey, "and even the ease with which it surpassed hopes - raking in $250m worldwide and cleaning up at awards ceremonies - hardly indicated what was in store for Tarantino. It is no exaggeration to say that, for the first time since Scorsese, a director was enjoying something like rock star status." He also quotes a line from Tarantino about his early career--"I would have died for Reservoir Dogs. I would have died getting a shot for Pulp Fiction. I don't know if I would have died, would have thrown myself into that kind of harm's way, for Jackie Brown, and that scared me a little bit."--and adds, "How peculiar that of all his films he feels so divorced from Jackie Brown, with its emotional plausibility and understated melancholy." Is it really, though, consider the way the media built Jackie Brown up as Pulp Fiction II and then walked away from it yawning, muttering that it didn't have quite the same adrenaline rush? It's easy to say that Tarantino should have been savvy enough to have known that, after everyone has written the story "New Whiz Kid Hits Town", the obvious next step is to write, "Whiz Kid Loses It", but you turn a high school dropout and video store clerk into a rock star and then jeer at him at your own peril. When the Cannes premiere arrives, will the little bastard bring to your knees with awe and admiration, or by making you feel that he's beaned you with a rock? Stay tuned.

Set Your DVR!: February 20 - 23, 2009

Hayden Childs — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 19:00:00 GMT

What a strange and marvelous weekend of movie viewing that cable tv is promising! One could even call it felliniesque, should one be so inclined. In fact, after the third part of Hiroshi Inagaki's Samurai trilogy, it's all Fellini for the rest of the weekend. So you'd best bring your sense of wonder and delight, open a bottle or two or three of wine, fix yourself a delicious bowl of gnocchi and fresh pesto, and settle in!

First up is Samurai III: Duel At Ganryu Island on IFC Saturday morning, February 21 at 7 am central/8 am eastern. This is the climax of the Samurai trilogy that IFC has been showing on Saturday mornings for the last three weeks. And it's fantastic. As the accompanying video shows (and warning: there are spoilers in the video, although for those who have been watching the trilogy, the revelations within shouldn't be much of a surprise), the swordfight in Kill Bill: Volume I was nearly a shot-for-shot remake of the samurai battle in this movie.

Next, on Saturday evening, February 21 at 7 pm central/8 pm eastern and again at 10 pm central/11 pm eastern, Ovation is showing Fellini's 8 1/2, which is my second-favorite Fellini movie. I'm sure most of the readers of this blog are at least familiar with this movie, but man oh man, is it a worthwhile viewing, even for those who've seen it a dozen times. Marcello Mastroianni plays Guido Anselmi, a director of films who is so caught up in his own emotional turmoil that he cannot finish the screenplay for his current production. (Sidenote: His name is possibly a play on the names of the Renaissance painter Michelangelo Anselmi and the early philosopher St. Anselm, the father of ontology [which is the philosophy of being] and one of the first Western philosophers who attempted to argue rationally for the existence of God.) Anselmi is trapped in his memories and trying to hide from the mess he's making of his current project. This is required viewing for anyone who takes movies seriously as an artform. Another note: Ovation seems to be a recent addition to my cable lineup and I don't know anything about the format in which it shows movies. Are they uncut? Do they mess with the aspect ratio? I'm trying to assess whether this is more like AMC, which modifies movies so much that I'm loathe to recommend any, or TCM and IFC, which should be the gold standards for movies shown on cable. If it's the former, I'm less likely to recommend these in the future.

Finally, on Sunday, February 22, at 7 am, IFC is showing Fellini's Amarcord. If 8 1/2 whetted your appetite, Amarcord should be quite a feast. This is my favorite Fellini film, a fictional memoir of sorts based on a year in Fellini's childhood. It's funny and bawdy and sweet and terrifying, just like adolescence. Here's Salon's Andrew O'Hehir on why you should watch it. I don't always agree with his opinion, but here I wholeheartedly concur.

Better Late Than Never: Phil Nugent's Oscar Predictions

Phil Nugent — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 16:00:00 GMT

Here at the Screengrab, we happily embrace our responsibility, as movie bloggers, to approach the massive, steaming mountain of Oscar speculation coverage and, having considered it, to grab a shovel and do our part. I personally missed the recent group "Oscar predictions" feature, because I hadn't had the chance to see most of the movies nominated for the major awards. Now that time has passed, I still haven't seen them, but a wino who hangs out by the mall near Columbus Circle briefed me on what he'd heard people saying about them as they were filing out of the Loew's multiplex across from Lincoln Center and running their mouths while he was trying to sleep, and now I think I'm all up to speed. Let's do this thing.

BEST PICTURE: Last year, just as our country was collapsing into economic meltdown and post-imperial despair, one movie stood out for its ability to bring a smile to faces whose owners thought that they would never smile again, to fill the air with the laughter of children, to defy the iron laws of miserable reality and nature itself. That film was, of course, Beverly Hills Chihuahua. It's a lead pipe cinch to win Best Picture this year--or would be, if it were nominated. It isn't, due to a terrible blunder. Because most of the rich and powerful industry figures who select the nominees have very busy schedules, what with all the time they spend entertaining the troops overseas and home schooling their children, they entrust the actual selection process to their servants, asking them to fill out and submit their ballots for them. This year, most of them naturally advised the help to vote for the movie about the rich dogs who visit the slums, and something got lost in the translation, much to the benefit of Danny Boyle's movie, which is apparently about some folks in India. Once the voters recognize this slip-up, Slumdog's chances are sure to plummet.

The Weinstein Company has put a lot of muscle behind The Reader, but the film, which turns on the act of reading, and even announces as much in its title, will not be forgiven by the representatives of the movie business for so brazenly calling attention to, and perhaps seeming to encourage, an alternative method of entertainment. If the company wanted to antagonize the entire industry, why didn't they just make a movie called The Video Pirate Who Cost That Poor Studio Janitor in the Short Film You Just Saw His Daughter's College Fund? One film that might stand to profit from these movies' obvious missteps is Frost Nixon, Ron Howard's fact-based follow-up to Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill. (The movie stars Michael Sheen, the most talented and British of the countless actor sons, some legitimate and officialy recognized, some not, of Apocalypse Now star Martin Sheen, as Skid Roper, an itinerant washboard musician who wreaks bloody revenge on his former parter, Mojo Nixon, after Nixon dissolves their partnership and abandons him for solo stardom just as poor Skid was beginning to enjoy the earthly pleasures known only to novelty artists making it big on the collegr radio circuit.) But I predict that the Best Picture award will go the The Dark Knight. Since it's not nominated, its win would constitute a shocking and unexpected twist at the end of the evening, and that's just how Batman rolls!

BEST ACTOR: Everyone agrees that this will be a pitched battle between the two leading candidates: Frank Langella, who plays Mojo Nixon in Frost Nixon, and Brad Pitt for his performance as an eighty-year-old baby in the twenty minutes of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button that some people saw before they fell asleep or went out for a smoke and forgot to return to the theater. In both cases, it will very likely come down to the two bravura musical numbers performed by the stars. Langella's pitched rendition of "Burn Down the Malls" has become a cult sensation, especially since the Gap built their holiday TV commercials around it, but Pitt set the screen on fire with the spectacular production number in which he dances around his New Orlean orphanage, performing Benjamin Button's Oscar-nominated theme song:

Alakazam and whoa, hot damn!

I'm an eighty-year-old baby!

The devil must have sent me here to freak y'all out,

And no, I don't mean maybe.

Oh, I go in my pants like a baby do

But that's what the old folks do too, woo!

Prayin' every night, God, kill me, please!

I'm an eighty-year-old baby!

The rule of thumb with actors nominated for their performances in singing parts is that their odds greatly improve if they did their own singing. When Jamie Foxx was nominated for Ray a few years ago, the general consensus was that he was badly miscast as Johnny Ray, but Foxx was assured of a win as soon as voters heard his own wrenching performance of "The Little White Cloud That Cried". And while Langella did his own singing, not only was Pitt's singing voice dubbed, but his face was CGI-generated, and his dancing was performed by that old guy who used to appear in the Six Flags commercials. Normally, this would give Langella an edge. But we're probably going to have to give Pitt one of these things eventually, and there may never be another time when a Brad Pitt performance has so little Brad Pitt in it. And since the less Pitt contributes to a Brad Pitt performance the better it's likely to be, I think the Academy will do the right thing and strike now while the iron is hot.

BEST ACTRESS: Anne Hathaway is nominated for her performance in Rachel Getting Married, but as I understand, she doesn't play Rachel. Getting nominated for a movie that has a character's name in the title when you didn't play that character is just confusing. It makes Academy voters' heads swim, and trust me, these people don't need that. Kate Winslet is nominated for The Reader, and we've already discussed what's the matter with that title, and I hear that Winslet actually plays the person who the reader reads to, which...well, see above. Sometimes I don't think people even take these things seriously. Melissa Leo is nominated for Frozen River, which is a peerless example of the kind of performance and movie that wins at the Independent Spirit Awards exactly one day before the same names are read aloud at the Oscars ceremony and a murmur passes through the crowd that goes something like, "I dunno, I think maybe she's from Canada." Meryl Streep is nominated for playing a nun in a film based on an acclaimed Broadway play, and that sure sounds like an Oscar sure shot, as I was saying just the other day to President Ronald Reagan and MTV VJ Martha Quinn as we were playing Ms. Pac-Man and eating Frusen Glädjé washed down with New Coke while wearing our "Frankie Say" T-shirts and waiting to go over and stand in line for the opening of Epcot Center...oh, really? That was all that long ago, huh? Okay, then I guess it'll have to go to Angelina Jolie for The Changeling. It should have hit me immediately that they'll need to do that to make it up to Clint for not nominating him for having had jack shit to do with Gran Torino, especially since watching that movie amounted to spending two hours seeing Eastwood screaming at the voters, "Look at these wrinkles! Listen to this raspy croak of a voice! Y'see this kisser? I'm not gonna be here forever, for God's sakes, don't you get it!?" The nice thing is that now Brad and Angelina will both carry one home, on the same night. It'll probably extend the life of the marriage by a good two years.

BEST DIRECTOR: Danny Boyle for Slumdog Millionaire. Just the voters' way of saying that they understand that the mix-up about nominating him instead of whoever directed Beverly Hills Chihuahua wasn't his fault and everybody feels bad about any possible embarrassment this whole mess has cost him

THE JEAN HERSHOLT HUMANITARIAN AWARD: This guy.

Screengrab 2009 Preview: Paul Clark's Picks

Paul Clark — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 20:00:00 GMT

It’s a little risky looking forward at an entire upcoming year’s worth of releases and cherry-picking the promising-looking ones. It’s not just that many of the movies that are currently slated to come out within the next 12 months might get pushed back or shuttered altogether. It’s also the fact that as good as some movies might look on paper with their high-profile casts and extravagant budgets, they could very well end up awful. Just ask the makers of Town and Country.

That said, here (using the ever-popular “3 Up, 3 Down” format) are a handful of my most anticipated movies of 2009, along with three I’m dreading, and one wild card:

3 Up:

The Tree of Life

Marking the filmmaker’s quickest turnaround to date, Terrence Malick latest film comes a scant four years after his 2005 masterpiece The New World. That Malick has apparently decided to keep making movies is worth celebrating by itself, but that he’s finally getting around to his supposed “dream project” (which he’s allegedly been tinkering with for three decades now) is the stuff of Malick-fanboy fantasies.

Inglourious Basterds

Speaking of fanboy fantasies, it looks like Quentin Tarantino’s long-discussed World War II actioner is for real. Word from those who’ve read the script is that Basterds (Tarantino’s spelling) is all kinds of wanky, but don’t forget that people said the same about Kill Bill and Thunder Bolt Death Proof, and those turned out just fine. Not even Eli Roth’s acting could scare me away from this.

Avatar

I toyed with several choices in this spot- including Pixar’s Up and Von Trier’s Antichrist- but in the end, I kept coming back to Jim Cameron’s state-of-the-arts space opera. It’s been twelve years since Cameron made his last fiction feature (nothing you’d have heard of), and I’m plenty curious to see the project that convinced him to come back. Say what you will about his movies- there’s no denying Cameron’s technical mastery and knack for cinematic grandeur, and I’m eager to see how he pushes the envelope again this time around.

3 Down:

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra

Two summers ago, I hated Michael Bay’s Transformers, the movie that disproved my seemingly ironclad hypothesis that no movie that contains giant robot fights could ever be boring. After that movie’s massive box-office success, Hollywood has responded with a wave of big-screen toy/cartoon adaptations pitched to adults who really ought to know better (coming in 2012: The Jonas Brothers are Voltron!). Is there any chance this will actually be good? Don’t bet on it.

G-Force

You folks already know how I feel about this one. The only way this could’ve possibly been good would be if Robert Smigel or Trey Parker and Matt Stone were behind it, making it as bizarre as possible, but that’s not going to happen. Sorry, G-Force, but my flesh’n’fur cavies could take you all on without breaking a squeak, sassy celebrity voices or no.

Paul Blart: Mall Cop

Yet another sub-Sandler product from the Happy Madison crap factory. Normally, I wouldn’t bother, except that the title character’s name is too close to mine to ignore. I’m hoping this falls out of the public consciousness quickly so that I don’t have to worry about "Mall Cop" jokes for the next few years. Why couldn’t the character be “Paul Blart: Nuclear Physicist” or “Paul Blart: Vascular Surgeon?” How about “Paul Blart: World’s Greatest Film Critic?” Okay, maybe that’s pure fantasy, but I can dream, right?

Wild Card:

Sherlock Holmes

I was a fan of the Holmes series in my youth, so part of me is excited for this, not only for the cast (Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law are inspired choices to play the newfangled Holmes and Watson), but also because the filmmakers are using the classic A Scandal in Bohemia story as their inspiration. So why isn’t this one of my most anticipated movies of 2009? Two words, folks- Guy Ritchie. Maybe he’ll be able to keep his tendencies toward visual noise and narrative incoherence in check this time, but if Ritchie screws the pooch on this seemingly foolproof project, I’m going to be seriously pissed.

Reviews By Request: Sukiyaki Western Django (2007, Takashi Miike)

Paul Clark — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 20:00:00 GMT

As always, I’ll be polling you folks to determine my next Reviews By Request column, although this time the rules will be somewhat different. To vote, see the poll at the end of this review.

Of all of the United States’ contributions to popular culture, one of the most enduring has been the Western genre. In the mid- to late-1800s, stories about cowboys and the Wild West carved out a particularly American idiom in literature, and after the invention of the motion picture, many of the most popular movies- such as Edison and Porter’s The Great Train Robbery- were Westerns. In the classical age of Hollywood, few genres were more popular throughout the world than the Western.

By the 1950s, foreign filmmakers were beginning to show their Western influences, notably Akira Kurosawa in films like The Seven Samurai. And this influence became explicit by the 1960s when a number of Italian filmmakers began to produce Westerns in Europe. The resulting films quickly became known as “spaghetti Westerns,” and their popularity began a wave of Wild West stories made on foreign soil. There were “paella Westerns” in Spain, “cod Westerns” in Scandinavia, even “curry Westerns” in India. It was only a matter of time until a Japanese filmmaker would offer up a Japanese take on the genre, and it seems only natural that the filmmaker would be prolific genre-bender Takashi Miike. It also seems obvious that Quentin Tarantino would have some part in the proceedings, but that’s another issue entirely.

Miike’s Sukiyaki Western Django is first and foremost an homage to classic Westerns of the past. Even its premise- a mysterious mercenary wanders into the middle of a turf war and proceeds to play both sides- is one of the archetypal storylines of the genre. It has served as the storyline for a number of “spaghetti Westerns” including Sergio Leone’s seminal A Fistful of Dollars and Corbucci’s Django, which lent Miike’s film its title. Of course, both films were essentially Western takes on Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, which in turn was a samurai version of Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest. But you get the idea- Miike’s genuflecting before the old masters. There’s even a whiff of Shakespeare in the story, in which the rival gangs are signified by the colors Red and White, in homage to England’s Wars of the Roses.

But although Miike has all his references in order, the end result is somewhat underwhelming. Miike hits all of the expected genre beats, but very little that happens in the film carries much weight. Part of the problem is that the characters just aren’t all that memorable. We meet the mysterious gunfighter, the samurai-styled leader of the Whites, the Shakespeare-obsessed leader of the Reds, the revenge-bent woman, the duplicitous lawman. Hell, there’s even a middle-aged woman who turns out to be the famed warrior Bloody Benten, whose name I would imagine was inspired by the same Japanese deity who lent her name to Screengrab favorite Benten Films. But Miike is so busy with other business that he never finds time to really do much with the people who populate his story. Even the gunfighter gets lost in the shuffle for much of the film.

As I mentioned before, Miike fan and friend Quentin Tarantino appears in the film, playing an old gunfighter named Ringo who tells the saga of Bloody Benten and literalizes the sukiyaki motif. Many of Tarantino’s own films also tend to be elaborate homages, but unlike Sukiyaki they tend to add up to something more than the sum of their references. Much of this has to do the way Tarantino actually manages to take time to establish the characters in his films- for example, the way he actually shows us some of Budd’s life in Kill Bill instead of just making him a rival, or the scene in Death Proof in which he reveals that the fearsome-looking Stuntman Mike is actually a whiny baby. On one level, Tarantino noodles in the margins of his story just as much as Miike, but while Tarantino’s noodlings lend his films additional depth, Miike’s tend to feel like one-off moments, designed to grab the attention but have little relevance on the story at large. Granted, some of these moments are pretty awesome- look at the way Ringo procures an egg for his sukiyaki, or the goofy touch of having the two-faced lawman suffer from multiple personality disorder- but put together they don’t really add up.

Or consider the films of Sergio Leone, whose storylines were every bit as impenetrable as Sukiyaki’s, but whose style pushed the iconography to such frenzied levels that they’re hypnotic on a moment-to-moment basis even if the broad outlines of the story get lost in the process. Leone’s “spaghetti Westerns” are Westerns taken to their stylistic extreme, and while “extreme” is a word that’s often associated with Miike’s films, Sukiyaki Western Django is a rarity- a Miike film that feels too tame. It’s entertaining enough, and the final shootout is good as these things go, but overall it’s a little disappointing. I’ve gone on record as a rabid fan of Audition, but with each subsequent Miike film I see I’ve come to realize that that film’s tight directorial control and bold formal structure was a rarity in his work. Sadly, Sukiyaki Western Django needed a more assured hand on the reins.

In my ongoing effort to see as many 2008 films as possible, I’ve decided to change the rules a bit this time around. Below, I’ve listed five of the most intriguing titles from the last four Reviews By Request polls (sorry, no House Bunny). As usual, I’m asking you to pick your favorite, but rather than only writing up the top vote-getter, I’ll write up the top three, one per week for the next three weeks. So, what’ll it be?

What 2008 movies would you like me to see? | BuzzDash polls

As always, feel free to sound off in the comments section. See you next week!

Dear Santa: Cinematic Comebacks We’d Most Like To See (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 17:00:00 GMT

NATASHA LYONNE

As a jailbait Jewish American Princess with the voice and delivery of a wised-up, middle-aged dame, Natasha Lyonne was the tough-tender soul of the priceless coming-of-age dramedy Slums of Beverly Hills and the best thing about the first two American Pie movies (well, aside from Alyson Hannigan, I mean). She even managed to bring a surprising amount of relatable dignity to her role as a bulimic escaped convict on the lam (and in love) with a psychopathic gal pal in what otherwise might have been the even campier and trashier Freeway 2: Confessions of a Trick Baby. Actresses frequently complain about the dearth of good roles for women in film, but in her too-brief above-the-radar career, Lyonne’s bright, bemused persona made even underwritten roles compelling, the clear mark of a comeback-worthy talent. Bland contemporaries like Jessica Alba and Kate Hudson are considered A-list, but I’d rather hear Lyonne read the back of an Oxycontin bottle out loud for two hours than watch Good Luck Chuck or Bride Wars. Unfortunately, booze, heroin and other substances have derailed Lyonne’s life and career in recent years, leading to hospitalizations and legal troubles (one involving threats of dog molestation...even Lyonne’s criminal record is fascinating)! But if Robert Downey, Jr. and Mickey Rourke can make it back from self-inflicted career immolation, here’s hoping Lyonne’s recent stint on Broadway (in the play Two Thousand Years) and busy upcoming film slate (including, according to the Internet Movie Database, projects called Goyband, Heterosexuals, Jelly, Outrage and The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle) are good signs that Lyonne has cleaned up her act, quit the dog molestation and will soon return to us in some decent roles (though, to be honest, the fact she’s co-starring with Michael Madsen in Outrage is less than comforting).

KATHLEEN TURNER

Following a scorching debut in the neo-noir Body Heat in 1981, Kathleen Turner – who was already in her late 20s when she made her big-screen debut – did as much as she could to establish herself as more than just a great body, a pretty face, and one of the screen’s sexiest voices. She soon established herself as a versatile and engaging actress, and had a strong career in the 1980s, but Hollywood is notoriously unforgiving of the reality of aging, and she began a slow decline in the 1990s. A combination of personal tragedy, ill health and the general lack of good roles offered to women over forty in Hollywood have caused her to be nearly invisible in the last decade or so, but she’s remained busy on the Broadway stage, and some reports of her savagely controlled performance as Martha in a revival of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? suggest that she may have plenty of surprises left in her. If given the chance – and if she has the inclination – Turner could still have a late-period career like that of one of her idols, Katherine Hepburn. Time will tell.

WILLIAM PETER BLATTY

Okay, this one’s probably a bit much to hope for, considering that the man is eighty years old and not in the best condition in the world. But we’ve always believed that William Peter Blatty – best known as the author of the jillion-selling religious thriller The Exorcist – was a great filmmaker trapped inside a good novelist’s body. When he couldn’t find anyone interested in making a big-screen adaptation of his novel Twinkle, Twinkle, Killer Kane, he decided to do it himself, with no formal training as a filmmaker – and the result was the astounding The Ninth Configuration, a genuine cult classic and one of the most surprising directorial debuts of all time. Likewise, when he became understandably unsatisfied with the direction the Exorcist franchise was taking after the rotten Exorcist 2: The Heretic, he took matters into his own hands again with The Exorcist III. And while that’s a deeply flawed film, it’s at least an imaginative one, with terrific glimpses of mood and tone that suggest the kind of thing its director might be capable of with more money and a better cast and crew. Blatty probably has neither the time nor the desire to make another movie, but as both a writer and a director, he’s shown more than once that he’s got greatness in him, and if he never has a Sidney Lumet moment and directs a great movie at the age of 83, we’ll at least always wonder what might have been.

GENE HACKMAN, SEAN CONNERY & WARREN BEATTY

When considering the later careers of many of cinema's most beloved actors, it's difficult to say which is worse -- taking role after role in a string of unworthy projects just to keep busy, or turning your back on acting altogether. In the case of the three actors listed above, we suppose it's understandable that after decades in the business, they would want to put acting aside and enjoy a nice retirement, and given the work they've done, we certainly don't begrudge them that choice. However, it's their most recent films that make us question their decisions. Hackman, always the busiest of the three, usually appeared in several movies a year prior to his decision to retire from acting after starring in 2004's Welcome to Mooseport -- Lord knows that playing second banana to Ray Romano might sour us on acting too. Connery, on the other hand, was still capable of carrying a movie well into his seventies, a gift which, alas, was usually squandered on subpar projects like Finding Forrester and his most recent film, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. And Beatty, never the most prolific actor to begin with, has been absent from screens since 2001's noxious Town & Country. While Hackman has busied himself writing books and doing voiceover work for Lowe's and Oppenheimer Funds, Connery and Beatty have been content to rest on their laurels and turn down project after project -- Connery declined to reprise his role in the latest Indiana Jones (yet another disappointing aspect of the film), whereas Beatty memorably bowed out of Kill Bill in favor of David Carradine. Still, hope springs eternal. As long as they're still alive and healthy, there will be the possibility that one can't-miss role will come along to lure these guys out of retirement for one final hurrah. After all, they deserve some time for themselves, but they also deserve to take one last triumphant lap before retiring for good.

Click Here For Part One, Two & Three

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Paul Clark

Forgotten Films: "Mad Dog Time" (1996)

Phil Nugent — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Having had a versatile, many-sided career does have its down side: when Isaac Hayes died last Sunday, it quickly became a hipster punch line that mainstream obituaries often referred to him as "perhaps best known" for his role as Chef on South Park. Hayes was well-known for a great many very different things, and Chef happened to have been the most recent of these. Then there are people like Larry Bishop, who are not especially well-known at all for anything, but have a number of things for which they may be sort of semi-recognizable: add them all up, and it kind of equals minor celebrity. For example, you might trigger a faint recognition in people who are well-versed in Rat Pack mythology by noting that Bishop is the son of the late comedian Joey Bishop. Experts in Hollywood dynasties may care for all of two seconds that he once performed comedy with Rob Reiner at a time when the director of Misery was himself best known as Carl's kid. And bad-movie junkies of a certain stripe may find it in themselves to think it worth knowing that, in the late '60s and early '70s, he appeared in such pictures as The Savage Seven, The Devil's 8, Angel Unchained, and Chrome and Hot Leather. It was these credits that helped convince Quentin Tarantino (who cast Bishop as Michael Madsen's grouchy boss at the strip club in Kill Bill, Vol. 2) that, as a writer-director-star, he had a great motorcycle movie in him. Tarantino served as executive producer on the years-in-the-making Hell Ride, which reunites Bishop with Madsen, and which Tarantino believes it was Bishop's "destiny" to make. Anyone who's seen Tarantino's performance in Destiny Turns on the Radio, which established that our boy QT should be prevented, by federal law if necessary, from throwing around the "D" word, can guess at how well that's turned out.

If Bishop and Tarantino are soul mates of a sort, it's because they share a knack for throwing together ready made slogans and catch phrases and parts of old movies and kinky twists on the same, and getting an incredible number of cool people to come together to act out their fantasies. In his best work, QT has been able to shape these raw materials in such a way that the kick he gets out of them is transferred directly to the audience. In Bishop's only work as a director--Hell Ride and its predecessor, the 1996 gangster fantasia Mad Dog Time--the results tend to be an inert mess, interesting chiefly for the challenging aesthetic questions it raises, such as What was he thinking? and How hid he get this cast? The best answer to the second question probably has something to do with how many favors a man can get owed in the course of a thirty-year career in which he's done everything from episodes of I Dream of Jeannie and Love, American Style to such oddities as the William Castle-Marcel Marceau collaboration Shanks.

Mad Dog Time is set in some weird gangland society where everybody is a mobster or a moll and all the characters spend their time entertaining each other with weird acting exercises and showy turns--it's as they were trapped at an improv comedy club in Hell--while plotting their next bloody move up the ladder. (There's a palpable '50s-Vegas vibe to the decor, which may be an in-joke on Bishop's lineage.) Richard Dreyfuss, whose 1978 starring vehicle and pet project The Big Fix featured Bishop in a supporting role, is the nominal head of the mob, Vic, who, making his entrance wearing a bathrobe over his PJs, has just returned from a stint in the nut house, where it was probably quieter. The other people who appear here doing things that they probably would have thought twice about if they'd known that Larry was going to be able to get the film developed include Jeff Goldblum, Kyle MacLachlan, Ellen Barkin, Gabriel Byrne, Diane Lane, Burt Reynolds, Billy Idol, Michael J. Pollard, Henry Silva, Gregory Hines, Billy Drago, Angie Everhart, Paul Anka, and a sick, callously exploited Richard Pryor. For hardcore devotees of movie character actors, the prize catch was Christopher Jones, whose work in such movies as the 1968 Wild in the Streets (in which Bishop played a bassist with a hook for a hand) and Three in the Attic earned him a reputation as a James Dean a the new age. But Jones, high-strung and drug-damaged, quit acting after finishing his work as the romantic lead in the troubled David Lean production Ryan's Daughter (1970). Tarantino, who offered him a role in Pulp Fiction, was unable to lure him out of the shadows, but Bishop was able to get him to drop by the set just long enough to play a sneering supposedly fearsome assassin whose bite turns out to be worse than his bark. As Tarantino himself pointed out, Jones "really doesn't have a character to play", but he still had the old charisma to go with his creepy, walking-death's-head look, and in this, his only movie appearance in the past twenty-eight years, he makes enough of an impression to make you wish that Bishop had used whatever line it took to get him to come out and play to persuade him to work for someone who might have been able to construct a real movie around him. Larry Bishop isn't the most obnoxious hustler who's ever rolled down Santa Monica Boulevard with show business in his DNA and a pile of I.O.U.s in his glove compartment, but I suspect that if it were his really his destiny to make the kinds of movies he's been trying to make--if he really knew how and it were in his blood--he'd have tried making them before Tarantino showed up and took out a patent on them. It may be that Tarantino's patronage of Bishop is really based on Tarantino feeling touched that one of the people he grew up watching in all kinds of trash is actually now trying to imitate him.

Thursday Morning Poll for July 31, 2008

Paul Clark — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 14:00:00 GMT

On the heels of Quentin Tarantino’s recently announced Inglorious Bastards, we polled Screengrab readers about their favorite QT project to date. As expected, the favorite among our readers was his much feted 1994 Palme d’Or winner and Oscar nominee, Pulp Fiction. With 45% of the vote, Pulp bested all comers, with the second-place finisher, the Kill Bill saga, pulling in 27%, followed by a tie between Reservoir Dogs and Jackie Brown. Alas, no one went to the mat for Death Proof, which came across as second-tier QT to most fans and a summation of everything that rankled his detractors. Here’s hoping Bastards finds him at the top of his game again.

This week, we take on the Dark Knight hype, which has become more or less inescapable. As with many a pop culture phenomenon nowadays, Dark Knight fever caught on like wildfire, emerging atop the IMDb Top 250 Movies list by the end of its opening weekend. Then, just as quickly, the backlash began. Not even two weeks into its release, it seems like everyone around the blogosphere has an opinion on the movie, not to mention the hype. So, where do you stand?

Which most accurately describes your opinion of THE DARK KNIGHT? | BuzzDash

As always, the comments section is open. See you next week!

Trailer Review: Hell Ride

Paul Clark — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 16:00:00 GMT

For the past week the blogosphere has been abuzz with the announcement of Quentin Tarantino’s upcoming project Inglorious Bastards. Which I suppose goes to show you that QT’s fanboy cachet is as strong as ever way. For more evidence of this, look no further than Hell Ride, the upcoming biker flick written and directed by and co-starring QT pal Larry Bishop. Quentin fans will no doubt recognize Bishop from his scene in Kill Bill: vol 2 as Larry the strip-club owner, but while Tarantino’s name is all over this trailer, Bishop’s isn’t mentioned until the very end. For good reason, too- Bishop’s last film, made a dozen years ago, was the godawful crime caper Mad Dog Time. Watching the grindhouse stylings of the Hell Ride trailer, it seems a shame that this is advertising a real movie, while Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving and Edgar Wright’s Don’t exist only in their creators’ imaginations.

Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds” Unleashed

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Heads up, Tarantino freaks: those culture mavens at New York magazine’s Vulture blog got their mitts on the maestro’s screenplay for Inglorious Bastards (or as the hand-scrawled cover has it, Inglourious Basterds), the World War II epic set to start shooting in October. Or at least, they’re pretty sure they have it. “We wondered at times if this script was a fake, and it's still possible that it is — but if so, it's such a skillful fake that the author has even mastered Tarantino's ability to write moments that seem almost like parodies of his own tastes.” I’m not sure I’ve unraveled exactly what that means, but it doesn’t necessarily sound like a good thing.

The Vulture does proclaim Bastards to be “exactly as batshit over-the-top insane as we hoped… The script is 165 pages long and follows a squad of American soldiers called the Bastards — a guerrillalike force who travel behind German lines in 1944, striking terror into the hearts of Nazi soldiers. The Bastards are headed by Lieutenant Aldo Raine — the role we'd imagine Tarantino is hoping to land Brad Pitt for — described by the script as a ‘hillbilly from the mountains of Tennessee,’ who has around his neck a scar from where he survived a lynching… The script is definitely the ur-text of Quentin Tarantino's career up to now; it combines his love of old movies (war movies, Westerns, and even prewar German cinema), his attraction to powerful female protagonists, his love of chatter, and his willingness to embrace the extreme — visually and in his storytelling...All in all, it reads like Kill Bill meets The Dirty Dozen meets Cinema Paradiso.”

If the title sounds familiar, it’s because QT lifted it from a 1977 Italian war movie directed by Enzo G. Castellari, due out on DVD in a deluxe 3-disc edition (!) at the end of this month. Until then, you can read the rest of Vulture’s take on the script here.

Related:
Screengrab Reports Actual Facts About Quentin Tarantino
Digging Dirt on Terrence Malick's "Tree of Life"

Chick Hits: The Girl Power Top Ten

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 20:00:00 GMT

After the big screen edition of Sex & The City exceeded the low expectations of industry gurus who were shocked...shocked...to discover that people were actually interested in a movie about, y'know, gurlz, Missy Schwartz wrote a depressingly familiar story for Entertainment Weekly: “It was an unqualified triumph...one the industry observed in a stunned, slack-jawed state. As the weekend rolled to a close, news outlets filed their reports with words like unexpected, surprising, and shocking. ‘What do you know?’ they all seemed to be saying. ‘Women go to the movies!’”

And if Sex and the City 2 (or The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 or Mama Mia!) or any other female-centric movie succeeds in the near future, Hollywood will be surprised all over again, and Entertainment Weekly and other publications will run similar articles about the American movie-going public’s "unexpected," "surprising" and "shocking" desire for strong female characters...a desire Hollywood will more or less continue to ignore as it continues its relentless pursuit of teenage boys, no matter how many Speed Racers crash and burn along the way.

Because, after all, many studio execs are just overgrown boys themselves. They dig gadgets, explosions and special effects, and CGI creations are easy to control and merchandise. Female-centered movies tend to rely on well-written screenplays, relatable characters, nuanced direction and...yecccch...feelings: all the things most studio execs pretend to champion but secretly hate.

But we here at The Screengrab aren’t afraid to get in touch with our feminine sides as we raise our Cosmos to these Top Ten “chick hits”: films that put their empowered female characters front and center (without resorting to stripper poles OR big gauzy Prince Charming/Bridezilla wedding porn).

THELMA AND LOUISE (1991)

Okay, so I’m not sure how empowering it is to drive off a cliff in real life, but this Ridley Scott film (based on an iconic script by wunderkind, zeitgeist-tapping Academy Award-winning screenwriter Callie Khouri) caused a sensation upon its release by (A) objectifying Brad Pitt as a hunky slab of beefcake (thus electrifying and pretty much launching his career) and (B) allowing Susan Sarandon’s Louise to gun down the scumbag who was raping Geena Davis’ Thelma (and later blow up the truck of a leering male chauvinist pig) without even feeling all that bad about it, just like any number of male actors in any number of male-centric revenge fantasies...except in films like Dirty Harry, Death Wish, Taxi Driver, etc., the male heroes didn’t have to die in the end to satisfy Hays Code-style notions of karmic retribution for stepping outside the lines of acceptable social conduct. Still, the film’s outlaw motif energized female audiences by (melo)dramatizing the common stereotypical perception of men as either (a) dangerous assholes or (b) hapless boobs while providing enough action and sex to attract audiences of every gender.

THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA (2006)

There’s a beloved feminist koan that goes something like this: ruthless, aggressive men who go after what they want are called winners, while ruthless, aggressive women are called bitches. Of course, most thinking people realize that ruthless, aggressive men are actually called assholes...and it’s the universal, gender-blind nature of the eternally confusing success vs. happiness equation faced by Anne Hathaway’s aspiring fashionista “Andy” Sachs that helped to make the film version of The Devil Wears Prada a $300 million dollar monster hit. And, let’s see...two seconds of Googling and...yep! There’s a TMZ article from 2006 with a, shall we say, certain familiar ring to it: “Blah blah blah, female-centered film exceeded all expectations...yadda-yadda-yadda...industry analysts surprised,” etc., etc. etc. As Meryl Streep’s formidable Gordon Gekko-in-stilettos magazine mogul Miranda Priestly might say to those industry Suits who stubbornly refuse to acknowledge the existence of fifty percent of their audience, “Details of your incompetence do not interest me.”

BRING IT ON (2000)

This broadly played late-summer sleeper is actually packing a lot of heavy metaphorical lumber for a teen flick about a cheerleading competition. Kirsten Dunst is the new head of the Toros, who cheer for the (rich, white) Rancho Carne High School in Los Angeles; they're gearing up for the national championships, which they've won the past six years with the spectacular routines provided by departing team leader Big Red. But when a new girl with a gymnastics background and an attitude -- Eliza Dushku, who was too cool for Buffy the Vampire Slayer's school -- joins the squad, she has unsettling news. It turns out that Big Red was stealing her plays from the fly girls who cheer for the (black, poor) East Compton Clovers, thus making the Toros the cheerleading equivalent of Pat Boone to the Clovers' Little Richard. Dunst actually does her best to rationalize this cultural parasitism rather than destroy her cheerleading institution overnight, but the situation becomes intolerable after the Clovers attend a Toros game and mock their blonde plagiarists by performing the stolen moves in the stands. In the end, both teams attend the finals and show that they can use their brains and talents to compete honorably on the field of battle. There is, however, one scene that shows that contemporary standards of empowerment may be thornier, and weirder, than is commonly acknowledged. Dunst offers the Clovers, who have been prevented from attending the national competition by financial hardship, the chance to come by talking her father into getting his company to sponsor them, but the head Clover (Gabrielle Union) contemptuously rejects the offer, telling Dunst that they don't need her charity; they'll raise the money themselves, their own way. Their own way turns out to be going on an "Oprah"-like TV show and raising contributions by guilt-tripping viewers with their tale of woe. I guess it's honest labor and not charity if it helps "Oprah" kill an hour.

JACKIE BROWN (1997)

Such '70s blaxploitation films as Coffy and Foxy Brown may have made Pam Grier a cult star, but it was always a degraded form of stardom, and not just because the movies were cheap genre knockoffs; she may have had the chance to show that she could hold the camera and kick ass in the final reel, but she still also had to get her top ripped off before being raped by guys who looked like the Ku Klux Klan's answer to Uncle Fester, while being called things like "this big-jugged jigaboo." Jackie Brown catches up with Grier more than twenty years down the road, when she's at an age when Hollywood regards actresses as disposable. It's not a great age to be a flight attendant, either, which is why Jackie is working for a low-grade Mexican airline and acting as a courier for Los Angeles-based gun dealer Ordell Robbie (Samuel L. Jackson). Both Ordell and the federal agents setting up a case against him regard Jackie as a pawn who can easily be taken out of play at any moment. But -- and here's the key difference between this and Grier's '70s vehicles -- the movie respects her. The way she looks through Tarantino's lens, you sort of picture the camera shuffling its feet nervously as it tries to work up the nerve to ask her if she's been seeing anybody lately. And so Ordell, whose fearsomeness would cut him a lot more ice in a different Tarantino movie, is reduced to a comic figure; for all his bluster and firepower, his assumption that the middle-aged black woman with the low-paying job must be a bit player (which Jackie will use against him, and against the feds, too), makes him ridiculous. The only man in the movie who can see Jackie for what she is remains Robert Forster's bail bondsman Max Cherry, who, unlike the film's younger, strutting cocks, lacks the ego and capacity for self-deception that might get in the way of his seeing clearly what's in front of him. Tarantino included a riff (borrowed from Jules Feiffer's The Great Comic Book Heroes) on the arrogance of Superman in the second Kill Bill film, and Jackie Brown is in some ways a black, female Superman fantasy, except that Jackie doesn't have to put on a pair of eyeglasses to trick the dull-witted into thinking she's no match for them.

BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER (1992)

Long before Joss Whedon was a small-screen institution, he was just a fresh-faced young script doctor with a dream. That dream was to create a richly detailed fantasy world featuring nubile teenage girls. Sure, you’re saying: how does that make him any different than millions of other guys? Here’s how: his nubile teenage girls kicked ass. And not just any ass, but demonic vampire ass! Within a decade, Buffy the Vampire Slayer would find its way onto television and prove a major cult hit, giving the country a brand new definition of girl power and adding an entirely new dimension to teen angst as Buffy Summers and her Scoobies battled monsters and bloodsuckers at Sunnydale High. But it all started with this low-budget big-screen number. Whedon, once he’d decided he was a highbrow auteur, more or less disavowed the Buffy movie, but in many ways, it holds up a lot better than people give it credit for: it doesn’t take itself so deadly serious, it has tons of terrific comic turns from Paul Reubens and Stephen Root in supporting roles, and while Kristy Swanson’s Buffy may not carry the emotional weight that Sarah Michelle Gellar’s did, she looks mighty fine in a half-shirt, and she furthers the cause of female empowerment the way only a vampire slayer can. She’s rough, she’s tough, and she maintains her keen fashion sense: what could be more feminine than that?

Click here for Part Two!

Related Posts: Girl DisemPowering: Nine Films That Didn't Do Feminism Any Favors (Part One & Part Two)

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce