The Screengrab : Miley Cyrus

Final Farewells: The Best & Worst Death Scenes In Cinema (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 21 May 2009 20:30:00 GMT

Albert Finney in BIG FISH (2003)

How powerful is Albert Finney’s death scene in Tim Burton’s tall tale of a man with larger-than-life recollections of his own personal history? Well, let’s put it this way: according to New York magazine, “The last his family saw of [monologist Spalding Gray] was Saturday, January 10, [2004] when he took the kids to see Big Fish, the story of a dying father’s relationship with his son, at the Loews Village on Third Avenue and 11th Street. After the movie, Gray wept.” And then, 24 hours later, he tossed himself off the Staten Island ferry into the East River. Perhaps the special power of the movie for Gray (and creative types in general, myself included) is best captured in the final line, after Finney (as Edward Bloom, a character played in flashbacks by Ewan McGregor) inspires his son (Billy Crudup) to mitigate the tragedy of death through art and fantasy: “A man tells a story over and over so many times he becomes the story. In that way, he is immortal.” And, frankly, isn’t reimagining the world and hoping for some existence beyond it (in Heaven and/or in films, novels, scientific discoveries, progeny, blog entries, etc.) more or less the heart of human existence? For me, the greatest terror is thinking my consciousness and memories (not to mention the existence of my friends, relatives...even acquaintances and pets) will be erased forever at death. In particular, I dread the eventual demise of my parents and cling to hopes and fantasies that somehow there’s more than an empty void at the end of our road after all the fun and struggle of life...and so Burton’s film (about a father’s death transformed by flights of fancy) hit me like a 2x4, unleashing an unexpected, uncontrollable torrent of emotion unlike anything I’ve ever experienced at the movies (or maybe it was just the cameo by Miley Cyrus, in her feature film debut, back when she was known as “Destiny"). (AO)

Rutger Hauer in BLADE RUNNER (1982)

Hauer’s Roy Batty is one of the screen’s most nuanced villains; while he’s a ruthless killer who’s not above playing with his victims the way a cat does a gutted rat, he’s also got a higher purpose. Roy is a replicant – an artificial life-form programmed to live only a short time so his intellect and emotions won’t develop to a human level – but in his case, it’s too late: he reaches a near-total self-awareness before his time is up. At the end of this science-fiction masterpiece, Roy toys with Detective Rick Deckard, who has wiped out most of his friends; he brutalizes him while taunting his own moral superiority: “Aren’t you the good man?” But nothing can be done; Roy knows he’s on the way out, and his last act isn’t to kill, but to save Deckard’s life. As he fades out into nonexistence, he drives home the film’s central question of what it means to be human, reminding Deckard that when he dies, his unique mind and irreplaceable memories will be gone forever, “like tears in the rain.” It’s a philosophically deep and emotionally powerful ending in a genre that rarely sees the two combined. (LP)

Duane Jones in NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968)

The zombie movie has reached its oversaturation point and is now just kind of annoying, but the movie that started it all, George Romero’s low-budget classic Night of the Living Dead, still holds the power to chill, and its final scene – extremely massive spoiler alert, for those of you who have somehow missed out on seeing this over the last forty years – is a real gut-punch. Level-headed, competent Ben (played by Duane Jones in what was at the time a controversial casting decision, placing an African-American actor in the lead against a group of whites) has managed to fend off seemingly endless onslaughts of flesh-hungry zombies, conquering threats from without and within, over the course of a nightmarish day when his life was constantly in danger. Finally securing a measure of peace, he beds down in the abandoned farmhouse for the night, plotting how he will make his escape the following morning; when he awakens, without foreshadowing and without fanfare, he is fatally shot by a passing sheriff’s posse who mistake him for one of the living dead he’s spent the entire rest of the movie fighting. It’s an inspired, if exceptionally cruel, ending, and it gives us the first glimpse of the nasty social commentary that would feature in Romero’s later work. (LP)

Faye Dunaway & Warren Beatty in BONNIE AND CLYDE (1967)

The demise of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker at the end of Arthur Penn’s paradigm-busting gangster epic shouldn’t have come as any kind of surprise; after all, anyone who knew the history of the two criminals knew how they met their end, and had probably seen the photos of their car, pierced with hundreds of bullet holes. What Penn’s unforgettable death scene accomplishes, then, isn’t shock because of what happens, but rather how it’s depicted; refusing to take the easy way out, Penn forces us to watch Bonnie and Clyde (with whom we’ve spend the entire movie being forced into a bizarre sympathy) die the way they likely did in real life: in a horrible, convulsing, twitching, gory, pitiful mass of blood and gore. Different people took the ending in different ways, from the straights who saw it as a long-overdue comeuppance to the heads who felt it was another example of rebel heroes dying at the hands of the Man; but no one who saw it forgot it easily, and it substantially upped the ante for violence in Hollywood. From then on, no death would be simple and bloodless and abstracted; over the next two decades, the town would be drowned in gore from movies that picked up the gauntlet that Bonnie and Clyde threw down. (LP)

Orson Welles in CITIZEN KANE (1941)

Orson Welles was already a restless, experimental genius at the astonishingly young age of 26 when he brought Citizen Kane to the screen. It’s widely considered one of the greatest films of all time for good reasons, many of which stem from Welles’ desire to rewrite the rules of filmmaking and start fresh from the ground up; and he doesn’t waste any time, putting the central character’s dramatic death scene at the beginning of the movie and working back from there to solve the mystery. At the top of the film, we see Charles Foster Kane as a bedridden old man, and before we even know who this man surrounded by opulent treasures is, he expires, letting a snow globe crash to the floor, and with his last breath, hissing the word ‘Rosebud’ – the key to the rest of the story. Welles later expressed dissatisfaction with this scene, saying he never quite felt right about it and writing off ‘Rosebud’ as a cheap Freudian gimmick, but its power has remained: it’s still counted as one of the most remembered death scenes in cinema, ‘Rosebud’ is at the top of the list of cinematic famous last words, and the whole sequence has been parodied thousands of times in dozens of media. (LP)

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce

Morning Deal Report: Michael Sheen Trades Fur for Fangs

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 14:30:00 GMT

Apparently Miley Cyrus has been forgiven for her racy photos, as Hannah Montana: The Movie topped the weekend box office with a better-than-expected $34 million. Fast & Furious slowed to second place with $28.8 million, bringing its total to $118 million. (By the way, those of you who told me this installment was as enjoyable as the original? You misled me.) Observe and Report debuted with a disappointing (to someone, I guess) $11.1 million for a fourth place finish.

Frost/Nixon co-star Michael Sheen has joined the cast of the Twilight sequel New Moon. Sheen “will portray the leader of the Volturi, an Italy-based coven of vampires,” per Variety, which also notes that the actor has played a werewolf in all three Underworld movies. That’s quite a conflict of interest.

Brad Pitt’s production company has obtained the screen rights to the Paul Pope graphic novel Battling Boy. “The story line follows the son of a god who comes down from the top of a mountain at his father's urging to rid the giant, continent-sized city of Monstropolis of a plague of beasts,” per The Hollywood Reporter. Watchmen co-writer Alex Tse will pen the adaptation.

Related:
Jailbait Cinema: 16 Films That Make Us Nervous
Screengrab Review: "Frost/Nixon"

Jailbait Cinema: 16 Films That Make Us Nervous (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 22 May 2008 20:00:00 GMT

If we all hit puberty overnight on our 21st birthdays, American life would be a helluva lot less complicated. But, as the recent Miley Cyrus “back-gate” scandal revealed, teenage sexuality is a topic that America doesn’t want to think about, even as it just can't seem to stop thinking about it.

On the one hand, most of us had (or at least thought about) sex in high school...on the other hand, once we’re adults, we’re all supposed to conveniently forget our memories and fantasies of adolescent lust. On the one hand, sex education is viewed as promoting underage promiscuity...but on the other hand, abstinence-only education tends to lead to a lot of unwanted pregnancy, since teenagers somehow figure out how to have sex even without classroom lectures about condoms. On the one hand, innocent teachers, day care workers, 19-year-olds with 17-year-old girlfriends and that 6-year-old boy who smacked a female classmate on the butt have all been branded for life as sexual offenders based on false or flimsy charges in hysterical witch hunts to “protect the children” at all costs...on the other hand, research indicates 20-25% of girls and 5-15% of boys in the U.S. experience some form of molestation at the hands of adults, the Catholic Church ignored its own institutional abuse scandals and the international sex trade in young flesh is thriving.

Clearly, we’re a little conflicted about the whole sex thing. Sure, we’re all shocked and disgusted by those creeps on To Catch A Predator...but somebody out there is watching Gossip Girl, sneaking peeks at Barely Legal magazine, lusting after Zac Efron and buying sexy cheerleader outfits from the Frederick's of Hollywood catalogue...and it’s not all just teens and predators. In fact, if we here at the Screengrab didn’t know better, we’d almost think Americans fetishize taboos instead of just being honest about them, leading to some pretty screwy behavior...AND the following list of films that reside in that dangerous grey area between sexual initiation and exploitation.

LOLITA (1962 & 1997)

Of course, no list of jailbait cinema would be complete without the grandmother of them all, or this previous Screengrab post on the screen adaptations of Nabokov's novel.

TAXI DRIVER (1976)

The best joke in Martin Scorsese’s masterful meditation on violence and alienation is when Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle is turned into a hero for ‘rescuing’ Jodie Foster’s teenage prostitute by gunning down her pimps and johns; the best joke outside Taxi Driver is that a lot of critics actually believed Scorsese was being sincere in his depiction of the event. More than one film writer, including a few who should have know better, saw in the movie’s chaotic ending an endorsement of vigilantism, a baffling interpretation that came back to haunt Scorsese – who clearly couldn’t have been more taken aback by this turn of events – when realities like the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan and the saga of subway shooter Bernard Goetz impinged on the fantasy of his film. The notion that Bickle is any kind of a hero is subverted at every turn: his diary is filled with racism and paranoia, his targeting of lowlifes and criminals only happens when he’s frustrated in his attempt to assassinate a politician; ordinary people can’t spend more than a few minutes in his presence without thinking he’s crazy; and even his targeting of Iris’ pimp (as with his targeting of presidential candidate Charles Palatine) is motivated as much by sexual jealousy as it is any kind of desire for justice. Travis is rightly appalled by the menu of sexual acts Iris will perform when read to him by the pimp Sport, and he does seem to have some genuine concern for her well-being, but he’s as oblivious to his own sexual desire for her as he is the impropriety of taking a date to a porno theater. Iris herself treats Bickle like he’s from another planet, and the film’s crowning irony comes at the end, when Travis, a marginalized psychotic only saved from suicide by a redemptive bloodbath and only saved from being a spree killer by his fortuitous choice of victim, receives a letter from Iris’ parents, filled with gratitude for having saved their daughter. It’s certain that if Travis ever took up the Steensmas’ invitation to visit them on their farm, they’d peg him for a maniac within seconds, but it’s the intricate chain of happenstance that turns a maniac into a hero which forms part of the genius of Taxi Driver – and totally upends Travis and Iris’ ‘relationship’ in a way no other jailbait movie has managed.

MANHATTAN (1979)

Woody Allen’s lovely, funny Manhattan is to movies about jailbait-chasing creeps what Citizen Kane is to, er, movies not about jailbait-chasing creeps. Mariel Hemingway earned an Oscar nomination for her performance as Tracy, the high school paramour of Woody’s Isaac Davis, and the Wood-Man himself got a nod from the Academy for his light, adept screenplay. So successful was Manhattan as a breezy, skillful romantic comedy that hardly anyone got creeped out by the fact that Woody’s character was technically committing statutory rape; when he explained “She's 17. I'm 42 and she's 17. I'm older than her father; can you believe that? I'm dating a girl wherein I can beat up her father”, he wasn’t being grammatical, but he was at least being really funny and self-deprecating. Those were the qualities that let us overcome our moral compunctions about what was really happening in the movie, and ignore the fact that, when Isaac tries to convince Tracy not to go away for six months to act with a theater group, he’s actually trying to talk her out of leaving him just long enough to be legal when she comes back. It was all very amusing, and even redeeming when he makes the ‘mature’ decision to start seeing Diane Keaton’s Mary Wilkie instead. Of course, all good things must come to an end, and the plot of Manhattan, one of the few times a Hollywood movie allowed us to not be utterly skeezed out by a middle-aged man jumping into the sack with a 17-year-old, took on a whole different dimension when the Soon-Yi Previn scandal broke. The prospect of a real-life Woody, then in his mid-50s, carrying on an illicit affair with a girl barely in her 20s was, somehow, much less appealing and light than a fictional Woody carrying on with a teenage girl, and all the worse that he was still married and the girl was his adopted daughter. For moviegoers, the worst thing about the scandal is that it’s made Manhattan almost impossible to watch without feeling an edge of ickiness it hadn’t previously possessed.

GHOST WORLD (2001)

Jailbait all-star Thora Birch’s performance as Enid Coleslaw in Ghost World is well-played on a number of levels: as we showed in our Girl Geeks list a few weeks back, she appealed to audiences (especially the, uh, male members thereof) because of her intelligence, hipness, cynicism and what seemed to be a wisdom beyond her years. But the other edge of the blade was the fact that for all her toughness and sophistication, she was still a high school girl. She was vulnerable and emotionally fragile and bound to get herself into situations she couldn’t handle. When she first encounters Steve Buscemi’s sad-sack loser Seymour, she toys with him the way she does her bewildered peer Josh; but when she gets to know him, she discovers that he’s as bitter, resentful, and out of step with the mainstream world as she is. They begin to develop a deep friendship based on the things they mutually hate (hey, there are worse things on which to base a relationship), but the astonishing thing about the way things develop between Enid and Seymour is that it’s an almost total inversion of the normal jailbait romance. Almost from the beginning, we sense that somehow, the two are going to end up in bed together, but unlike in most such movies, where no matter how much the writers try to pretty it up with the language of love, it’s still a predatorial relationship where the man has all the power, in Ghost World, we feel just as sorry for Seymour as we do for Enid. They’re both out of their depth, and as much as we like them both and are glad they’ve found each other, we know it can only end in disaster and we almost beg them not to hook up. When they do, we can tell it’s the beginning of the end for Seymour – and sure enough, he disappears from the film soon after, leaving Enid more vulnerable than she’s ever been. Because of this sense of sadness and loss, it’s one of the truest portrayals of such relationships ever put on film.

INNOCENCE (2004)

One of the principal allures of cinema has always been the way it affords its audience a chance to peek in on activities that would normally go unseen. However, this sort of voyeurism can occasionally feel like a curse when it confronts people with images they aren’t comfortable seeing. So it is with Innocence, a strange yet somehow magical film about a remote boarding school for young girls. Sequestered from the world, the girls are free to live and play without a single male gaze being cast upon them, which makes for the movie’s most fascinating conundrum- by showing us this hidden world founded upon the girls not being seen, director Lucile Hadzihalilovic forces us to deal with the question of why we’re so uncomfortable seeing them this way. Hadzihalilovic (wife of Irreversible director Gaspar Noé) doesn’t shy away from some potentially controversial images- a group of prepubescent girls swimming, a bathing teenager staring at her still-developing nude body in the mirror- which played a large part in the film being dismissed by many critics as fodder for the raincoat crowd. Yet Hadzihalilovic knows exactly what she’s doing, and this becomes obvious in the film’s final reel when we discover that the girls’ dance lessons are designed to train them for nightly performances the school puts on for shadowy male benefactors. That this revelation coincides with the beginning of the girls’ sexual development is deliberate, as Hadzihalilovic suddenly re-introduces men back into the lives of the girls just at the time they would begin paying them serious attention. With this final twist of the knife, Innocence asks whether the loss of the girls’ innocence is merely part of nature, or if others force it upon them, and Hadzihalilovic wisely leaves it for us to decide.

THE PROFESSIONAL (1994)

Luc Besson's violent fantasy about a hit man (Jean Reno) who takes in an orphaned twelve-year-old (Natalie Portman) and tutors her in the art of murder may go farther than any other commercial Hollywood movie in blatantly eroticizing a preteen girl. Other actresses not much older than Portman was here have played girls who aroused inappropriate feelings in older men; Portman, with her perfect little features set off by a Louise Brooks haircut and something around her neck that makes her look gift-wrapped, is treated as an object, or a pet, who first begs to be taken in by Leon the professional, and then (in a scene that was first cut from the American prints) begs him to make love to her. How did Besson get away with this? Partly by casting Jean Reno, who's a whiz at holding the camera while signaling that his pilot light has long since gone out, so you can feel confident that he'll stoically decline her entreaties. (Before she showed up, his best friend was a plant.) And partly by the black humor scenes of Leon teaching his little soul mate to become a killer, so that if you object to the film on moral grounds, you're liable to become dizzy from not being able to decide where to begin. It seems a little odd to complain about the unrequited, consensual pedophilia if you have no problems with the violence, but complaining about the violence just makes you feel like a square. The Professional is a truly outrageous movie, but it's extremely (and self-protectively) calculated in its outrageousness.

For more jailbait: Part Two, Part Three

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Paul Clark, Phil Nugent

Prince Caspian: Now That's Some Goofy-Ass Shit

Andrew Osborne — Sat, 17 May 2008 22:56:00 GMT

So as I write this (on Saturday), Variety is reporting The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian “will easily take the weekend crown, and its B.O. will only gain momentum from Saturday and Sunday family matinees,” although the pic’s “opening day haul came in slightly lower than industry expectations” and behind its predecessor, The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. Nevertheless, we here at Screengrab feel confident this weekend now puts us three-for-three in our summer box office predictions! Woo-hoo!!!!

As for the actual quality of said movie...well, let me put it this way: I started reading The Chronic- (wha?)-cles of Narnia way back when I was a mere yoot, and I vividly recall The Lion, The Witch and Etc., but I petered out somewhere between Prince Caspian and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, remembering no details about them except (spoiler alert!)...

...well, actually, I hate those spoiler alerts where they say “spoiler alert!”, like, two words before the spoiler, after you've already seen it in your peripheral vision, so let's just say I didn’t really remember very much at all about the actual plot going into Disney's film version of Prince Caspian.

The one thing I did know (aside from the afore-un-mentioned spoiler) was that, like The Lion, etc., Prince Caspian was (A) produced by (allegedly) Christian-ish Walden Media because (B) C.S. Lewis included certain overt Christian allegories in the Narnia books, meaning (C) the Narnia films are the summer blockbusters of choice for all the good, upstanding Christian families out there who don’t want to risk eternal damnation by supporting Harry Potter and his evil pagan agenda.

The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe featured a simple good versus evil story, complete with temptation, redemption and the sacrifice and resurrection of Christ-like super-lion, Aslan...none of which struck me as particularly dogmatic or objectionable. I mean, despite our many, many differences as a species, I'm pretty sure, at the very least, that Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Wiccans, pagans, atheists, Unitarians and pretty much everyone else (except maybe those pesky Satanists) can agree that good people are better than bad people, too much Turkish delight is unhealthy and being enslaved by an evil witch is a relatively bad form of government.

That said, the religious message in Prince Caspian seems noticeably more pronounced while at the same time, far less cohesive. Whether this is due to bad scripting or my own personal issues with certain aspects of Christian doctrine (or both) is unclear. The story, set hundreds of years after the first installment, takes place in a world where the happy, magic creatures of Narnia have been mostly wiped out by nasty humans called Telmarines. Aslan, the protector of goodness and niceness, has gone mysteriously and conspicuously AWOL in the interim, and it’s up to the young heroes of the first tale (siblings Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy) to join forces with the exiled Telmarine Prince Caspian and the myriad talking badgers, dwarves, centaurs and whatnot of Narnia to restore freedom and equality to the kingdom.

So far so good...but underlying all the swords-and-sorcery swashbuckling is the question of whether or not Aslan will finally show up and help our heroes defeat the forces of evil. Again, without (ahem) giving anything away, the agnostic in me couldn’t help but think, well, wait a minute...sure, it’s an allegory for having faith and whatnot, but does the message really work if it defies storytelling logic? In the movie’s rigged deck, all the Narnians who’ve suffered terribly for hundreds of years because Aslan inexplicably vamoosed on them are implicated as somehow spiritually inferior to pure, faithful Lucy, who pops into Narnia out of the blue, hasn’t suffered at all and has visions of Aslan nobody else gets to see. In other words, the non-believers have lost their faith because they have no proof of Aslan’s existence, while Lucy says they should have faith, even though her faith is based on the very proof the others don’t have...and let’s just say the internal logic doesn’t exactly resolve itself in the film’s overlong CGI finale.

Another curious aspect of the Narnia films, given the recent national panty-twist about Miley Cyrus’ naked back in Vanity Fair, is the way nobody in the world seems to care about all the people getting shot by arrows, hacked with swords and otherwise, y’know, killed dead dead dead by the teenage Pevensie children (and, yes, I know they're supposed to be hundreds of years old in the story, etc., etc., but work with me here). In The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe, the kids pretty much just killed beasties, but this time around, they're wasting flesh-and-blood humans...BAD, freedom-hating, kinda shifty, olive-skinned foreign-looking humans, sure...and I know America loves violence and hates sex and whatnot...but I do find it curious that most of America seems to go completely bug-eyed, batshit crazy at the mere idea of teenagers as sexual beings (despite, y’know, all the heavy petting and whatnot America did in high school) and yet America's totally cool with the concept of teenagers killing people as long as it's in a family film and not one of the Grand Theft Auto cities. ‘Cuz, y’know, that shit leads to Columbine.

All the too-much-thinking aside, though, Prince Caspian was relatively exciting and plenty entertaining enough for a Saturday afternoon, allowing Peter Dinklage to somehow maintain his dignity as a soulful, cranky dwarf warrior called Trumpkin.

Bring the whole family!