The Screengrab : Paul Reubens

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 21 May 2009 23:00:00 GMT

Philip Seymour Hoffman in SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK (2008)

Do not watch the attached clip until you see the movie. I repeat: see the movie first. Ironic though it may seem given the title of this movie, this scene cannot stand for the whole expericne of Synecdoche, New York. Actually, that's sort of the point of the movie: the little moments of life can never replace the whole of experience. In the above scene, which is the last in the movie, the end is nigh, all is in tatters, and it's too late for new realizations. I find the scene almost unbearably poignant, which is quite the magic trick, considering all of the weird, unsettling elements the run through the scene. And yet: always the tears. (HC)

Kevin Spacey in L.A. CONFIDENTIAL (1997)

The murder of Spacey's Jack Vincennes in Curtis Hanson's adaptation of James Ellroy's '50s-set police procedural is designed to be the single greatest shock in a movie full of them, and a low point in the audience's capacity to hope for a bearable outcome: if a guy this smart could walk right into his killer's kitchen with his guard down, what hope is there that the lugs he leaves behind will be able to crack the case? Spacey does it full justice, running the gamut from dismay to despair to dark-humored self-amusement at having been played, all in about half a minute, while letting the light drain from his eyes as if he'd been able to borrow God's personal dimmer. If Spacey has done little since he won the Academy Award for Best Actor, at least in terms of his choice of movie roles (except give audiences reason to think that he might be far less smart than advertised), let no one doubt that the man has chops. (PN)

Jeff Daniels in SPEED (1994) & Denis Leary in GUNMEN (1994)

Speed is as nifty as high concept gets, a pretty much perfect wind-up toy movie, but it does have one, almost jarring moment of pure, deep feeling: the moment when Daniels, the best actor in the cast by a fair margin, triggers the explosive device that he immediately realizes is going to kill him, and just stands there, trying to be ready for what he knows is coming and can't prevent. Amusingly, the noisy, rolling junkyard that is the Mario Van Peebles-Christopher Lambert flick Gunmen, which came out a few months earlier, includes a scene that, while kind of dandy on its own, gains weight when seen as a pre-emptive parody of the Jeff Daniels scene. Gunmen's chief villain, played by Denis Leary, whose constant flow of exasperated, blustering complaints and insults makes it seem as if he's throwing peanut shells at the screen even as he himself is in the movie, barges into a cabin, throws open the door, and eyeballs the bomb that's set to go off in a second. "Well," he says, choosing his famous last words carefully, "fuck me!" (PN)

Paul Reubens in BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER (1992)

Words fail me. (PN)

Shelley Winters in THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER (1955)

It's safe to say that the ten minutes captured in the clip above constitute a snapshot of one of the worst marriages in cinema. I'm sure Shelley Winters' Willa Harper would have gladly traded her union for the relatively sane one in Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? First, her new husband, the preacher-ish Harry Powell lets her know in no uncertain terms that there will be no canoodling in this marriage. Then there's how her kids claim that Powell is constantly trying to threaten them into revealing where her no-good murdering thief of a first husband hid the money he stole from the bank. And her boss up at the store, Icey Spoon (!!!), who pushed her into this marriage, is always sticking her nose in as if nothing's wrong. Then, when she realizes the truth about Powell, she's too far gone to even attempt to defend herself. Her final resting place (starting at around 3:25 in the clip below) illustrates just how tragic a role that life has chosen for her. (HC)

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

Contributors: Hayden Childs, Phil Nugent

April Fools: The 35 Funniest Movie Characters Of All Time (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 21:00:00 GMT

WILL FERRELL AS RICKY BOBBY IN TALLADEGA NIGHTS: THE BALLAD OF RICKY BOBBY (2006)

Will Ferrell’s Anchorman may be more absurd, but Talladega Nights is still the SNL alum’s greatest big-screen achievement to date, a NASCAR-set bit of lunacy that mocks American culture while simultaneously exhibiting fondness for it. Via the character of Ricky Bobby, a nitwit car-racing star, Ferrell manages to send up our national gluttony and materialism, as well as Southern political and social conservatism, with a no-holds-barred goofiness that’s nonetheless underscored by affection for his redneck milieu and its inhabitants. To keep things evenhanded, Sacha Baron Cohen’s aggressively homosexual French F-1 champ Jean Girard provides a hilarious caricature of liberalism. It’s Ferrell’s titular clown, however, that truly embodies the film’s fair-minded attitude, his Ricky Bobby an egotistical good ol’ boy whose jingoism is as inane as his predilection for saying grace to the baby Jesus – an extended bit that gets funnier with every subsequent viewing – and yet whose me-first ridiculousness is laced with a childish kindness that makes him both an embarrassing and endearing personification of 21st century southern America. (NS)

CHEVY CHASE AS CLARK GRISWOLD IN CHRISTMAS VACATION (1989)

While the original remains the most popular, and European Vacation is probably the funniest, the Vacation series’ most heartwarming entry was 1989’s Yuletide saga, in large part because its holiday setting provided Chevy Chase with the best opportunities to convey not only Clark Griswold’s buffoonery, but to root that silliness in his deep, abiding love of family and tradition. In this second sequel, Clark’s homestead is invaded by parents, in-laws and the clan of Cousin Eddy (Randy Quaid), and this raft of supporting players – which also comes to include the Griswold’s prissy Yuppie neighbors (Nicholas Guest and Julia Louis-Dreyfus) – helps take some of the comedic burden off of Chase. Despite surrounding him with talented co-stars, however, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation’s spotlight nonetheless remains squarely on its headliner, whose pratfall skills are in fine form, and whose sympathetic embodiment of his well-intentioned doofus patriarch – aggravated by his kin, disappointed over not receiving the work bonus he was counting on, and tormented by a squirrel let loose in his abode – lends the manic, messy proceedings real warmth. (NS)

PAUL REUBENS AS PEE-WEE HERMAN IN PEE-WEE'S BIG ADVENTURE (1985)

Too much fun in a porn theater may have destroyed Paul Reubens' career – and, consequently, the life of his iconic Pee-Wee Herman character – but his 1985 big-screen debut, helmed by first-time director Tim Burton, stands up as a perfectly realized idiosyncratic original. In this fanciful, carnival-esque saga, Reubens' strange-talking man-child Pee-Wee embarks on a cross-country odyssey to recover his beloved red bike, which he believes was stolen by his rich, spoiled, nasty neighbor Francis (Mark Holton). Even on his first feature, Burton’s flair for crafting strange, wild, wondrous visions was in full effect, as was Danny Elfman’s aptitude for offbeat scores. Nonetheless, it’s Pee-Wee who cements his place in the film-comedy pantheon. From the colorful, gadgety confines of his home (where he chows down on some Mr. T breakfast cereal), to the Alamo (whose basement he foolishly hopes to investigate), to a roadside bar where he famously displays his dance moves while surrounded by a horde of nasty-looking bikers, Pee-Wee proves himself a one-of-a-kind weirdo whose irrepressible cheer is infectious, and whose childlike innocence is endearing. (NS)

ALBERT BROOKS AS ALBERT BROOKS IN REAL LIFE (1979)

Albert Brooks has built a career – and a pretty fine one, if you ask us – out of portraying himself as a complete jerkoff. Even when he’s not playing a fictional character who’s kind of a schmuck, he’s kind of a schmuck: the “Albert Brooks” he plays in his films is a rampaging egomaniac who’s completely oblivious to how he comes across to people. Nowhere is this better realized than in his first full-length feature as a writer and director, 1979’s Real Life. This criminally underseen comedy, which brilliantly anticipates the reality-TV craze of 20 years later, sees Brooks playing himself as a desperate-to-please filmmaker who decides to film a normal, average American family; the comedy lies in the fact that he quickly assesses that the moviegoing public will be bored stiff by normality and averageness, and immediately sets about interfering with their lives for entertainment value. Unsurprisingly, this ruins the experiment, and starts to ruin the family’s life as well – but right up until the very end (where he hits upon the brilliant idea of burning their house down in order to provide his disastrous movie with a suitably exciting ending), Brooks is completely blind to the fact that the only thing wrong with his movie is that he’s the one making it. “Albert Brooks”, as portrayed by Albert Brooks, is so fine a portrait of a self-absorbed Hollywood phony it must have made Robert Evans blush.

CHICO MARX AS BARAVELLI IN HORSE FEATHERS (1932)

Although we’ve chosen his role as Baravelli in the campus comedy Horse Feathers as representative, it’s really just a stand-in for any Chico Marx performance. In the Marx Brothers’ films, Groucho’s role was to be the anarchist, the fly in the ointment, the wild card who refused to play by society’s rules and hilariously wrecks the smooth running order of things; Chico’s role was to do the same thing – only to Groucho. Often stereotyped as the dimwitted punster, Chico’s roles went far deeper than that: he was a true comic foil to his younger brother, reminding him that he couldn’t always win, that there was always someone there who could outhustle even the great Groucho – even if it was by playing dumb. Groucho was the subversive riddle that brought down authority, and Harpo was the dynamite bomb thrown right in the middle of the room, but Chico was a Chinese finger puzzle: it looked so simple, but once you were caught in it, no matter how smart you were, you couldn’t get out. Nowhere is that more clear than in the famous “Tutti Frutti” scene in Horse Feathers, where a supremely confident Chico prevents a slow-burning Groucho from betting on the horse he wants to win. It’s one of the greatest examples of pure comic timing ever captured on film.

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

Contributors: Nick Schager, Leonard Pierce

The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: "The Nightmare Before Christmas"

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 17:20:00 GMT

If you are anything like me -- and why wouldn't you be? -- you're a sucker for Christmas. The arbitrary yet somehow natural-seeming traditions; the carols which somehow only sound right when you've got just enough bourbon-fortified eggnog in you; the extra days off from work; the fact that people give you free stuff wrapped in shiny paper; the way everyone pretends to be nice to each other for a change: what's not to like? It's also one of those Western cultural touchstones so universal (suck it, Judaism!) that pretty much everybody gets into the act; despite the bogus claims from pouty conservatives about a "war on Christmas", the birth of Baby Jesus is still commemorated on almost every TV show on the air, and Yuletide is second only to summer as a Hollywood high holy day.

So, in the spirit of this year's Summerfest series -- where I lazily Netflixed a dozen or so movies with "summer" in the title and reviewed them so you'd know what to watch while the pool guy skimmed the drowned crow out of your Jacuzzi -- I present the Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon, where I get drunk and watch some of the finest Christmas movies that Hollywood has crammed down our throats, and ask: will this movie fill you with holiday cheer or seasonal depression?

First up is 1993's The Nightmare Before Christmas, also known as Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas and Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas in Disney Digital 3-D, although a more accurate name for it would be Not Actually Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas or even Hi Everybody We're Henry Selick and Caroline Thompson and We Directed and Wrote This Movie Respectively And What Do We Have To Do To Get a Little Credit For That?'s The Nightmare Before Christmas. While Burton created the lead characters and wrote a poem that served as the movie's inspiration, he had very little to do with making the film itself, and the fact that he's generally given all the kudos for it is a shame, because if nothing else, it proves how other people are capable of taking his quirky, creepy aesthetic and running with it.

Made using a daring, innovating, and highly striking form of 3-D animation, The Nightmare Before Christmas uses the clever (and somewhat underexplored) notion that all holidays are represented geographically in an otherworldly tableau to tell the story of Halloween bigwig Jack Skellington -- voiced by Chris Sarandon, with song vocals by the film's composer, Burton stalwart Danny Elfman. Jack happens upon the existence of Christmastown, and, meaning well but flummoxed -- and slightly jealous -- of the universal love showered on its big shot, one "Sandy Claws", resolves to cut in on his action. Hilarity ensues, lessons are learned, and all that standard Christmassy crap, but filtered through a truly weird visual sensibility.

One thing that director Selick and screenwriter Thompson share with Tim Burton is a sort of whimsical disregard for the conventions of storytelling. Setpieces ramble one to the other, and the story rolls gregariously along without ever making a lot of sense -- you get the idea that the filmmakers were as impatient as some of their younger audience to get on to the next bit of cool stuff. That said, the movie is breathtakingly gorgeous, with incredibly clever and intricate visuals that took as much time and effort as the story didn't. (There's currently an exhibit of some of the models used in the film on display at an art museum here in San Antonio, where I live, and seeing them up close, you get an unexpected sense of how elaborate and careful the building of them was; it's clearly no accident the movie looks as good as it does.) Kids old enough not to be freaked out by some of the jarring elements of the movie will adore its highly successful visual style, which blends cute and creepy in a way rarely seen outside of Japanese animation, and adults will be engaged by the swell performances and the overall intricacy of the movie's design.

Despite the Halloweeny themes and the often shocking visual play, there's really nothing gloomy or depressing about The Nightmare Before Christmas; it's an old-fashioned entertaining all-ages romp like rarely gets made any more, and the songs, while not exactly unforgettable, are loads of fun while you're experiencing them, especially "The Oogie Boogie Song", a monster's rollicking threat towards a kidnapped Santa Claus. In contrast to Burton's own weepy-assed Christmas effort, Edward Scissorhands, the only bummer to be found is that some of the great talents on display in the voice cast -- including Paul Reubens, Catherine O'Hara, and Glenn Shadix -- don't get nearly as much work as their talent deserves.

12 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS RATING: A solid 8 Maids a-Milking. The story and the script won't stay with you past Christmas morning, but it's a pure good time you can sing along to after you've gotten deep in the punch bowl Christmas Eve -- and you won't even have to chase the kids out of the living room.

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Screengrab Movie Vacations #4: The Wheel Inn, Cabazon, CA

Andrew Osborne — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Back in the day, I used to spend a lot of time “commuting” the 20-hour back and forth haul from stinky ol’ Los Angeles to the Happiest Place On Earth, a.k.a. Austin, Texas, in an attempt to live somewhere I actually liked while attempting to maintain some semblance of a screenwriting career with all the necessary Hollywood schmoozing and whatnot.

Anyway, during one of those sleep-deprived, turkey-jerky-fueled jaunts along the good ol’ I-10 West, I happened to glance out the passenger window of my beloved hatchback Honda CRX and notice a very familiar pair of dinosaurs looming on the desert plains.

After slapping myself to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating from gas fumes and Diet Coke intoxication, I realized I was staring at the very spot where Pee-Wee Herman pitched woo to the Francophile truck stop waitress Simone (just before getting chased around the feet of a life-sized Tyrannosaurus Rex by Simone’s jealous, Bluto-esque boyfriend Andy in Tim Burton’s 1985 breakthrough classic, Pee Wee’s Big Adventure.

According to Wikipedia, the dinosaurs (Mr. Rex, the aforementioned T-Rex, and Dinny, who used to be a brontosaurus until scientists changed the name to Apatosaurus in tribute to the hilarious films of Judd Apatow) were created by a Knott’s Berry Farm employee named Claude K. Bell to draw attention to the Wheel Inn Café (50900 Seminole Drive, Cabazon, CA), which opened in 1958.

Distressingly, Wikipedia also informs me Dinny’s interior “has been recently turned into a creationist museum promoting intelligent design theory,” so depending on your political beliefs, you might want to skip the $5.00 “dino burger” at the neighboring diner and save your money instead for the more liberal-friendly House of Waffles & Abortion further down the highway. But if you happen to find yourself on the Interstate 10, roughly 90 miles east of L.A., the Cabazon Dinosaurs will be waiting to offer an authentic slice of roadside Americana (and, uh, challenge your views on that whole elitist “scientific method” thing).

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Screengrab Movie Vacations #1: The Very Large Array

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Screengrab Movie Vacations #3: Devil’s Tower, Wyoming

Morning Deal Report: Can Pee-Wee Herman Find Happiness?

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 14:30:00 GMT

The Dark Knight joined the exclusive $500 million club with its weekend take of $11 million. It’s still nearly $100 million behind the only other member of that club, Titanic. Tropic Thunder remained on top of the box office for a third straight week, taking in $14.3 million and keeping the Vin Diesel vehicle Babylon A.D. down in second place. In a sign that we may soon be free of the tyranny of the spoof movie, Disaster Movie finished in seventh.

For some reason, I have failed to mention Todd Solondz’s sequel to Happiness in this space. Let me rectify that immediately. Todd Solondz is making a sequel to Happiness. Actually, Variety describes it as “an untitled part-sequel, part-companion piece to his controversial dark comedy Happiness.” Take that for whatever it’s worth. To me, not much, but your mileage may vary. Emma Thompson, Demi Moore and Paul “Pee Wee” Reubens are rumored to be attached. Attached to the movie, I mean; I’m not trying to imply some sordid love triangle.

Now that you’ve lost your breakfast, take heart in the news that the Poltergeist remake has found its director. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Ukrainian-born Vadim Perelman (House of Sand and Fog, The Life Before Her Eyes) is in negotiations to take the helm. “The film's exploration of an ordinary family's reaction to an extraordinarily intense situation likely appealed to Perelman,” claims the Reporter.

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15 Films That (Almost) Could’ve Been Directed By Somebody Else (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 21:30:00 GMT

SCENES FROM A MALL (1991) & 2 DAYS IN PARIS (2007), Not Directed by Woody Allen

While not as legion as Hitchcock (or even Tarantino) imitators, there have certainly been a fair number of pretenders to the Woodman’s throne over the years (including, in the recent period, Mr. Konigsberg himself), but Scenes From a Mall (which, if it were actually part of the Allen oeuvre, would rank well north of Hollywood Ending and somewhere south of Sweet and Lowdown) deserves special mention if only for the Allen-esque stammer of the dialogue delivered by none other than Woody Allen himself, charmingly paired with Bette Midler as a slick, successful, L.A.-loving Bizarro World version of his usual New York schlub persona (yet still kvetching endlessly about the difficulties of getting the whole love and happiness thing to work out). Meanwhile, after numerous attempts at regenerating his aforementioned trademark schlub persona, Dr. Who-style, into the form of younger actors ranging from John Cusack and Will Ferrell to Jason Biggs and Scarlett Johansson, it’s astonishing that Allen has never, to my knowledge, thought to cast the wry, world-class neurotic über-Jew Adam Goldberg in one of his films. Fortunately, writer/director/actress (and former Goldberg paramour) Julie Delpy corrected the obvious cinematic oversight with 2 Days In Paris, the type of hot-blooded, fast-talking, quick-witted meditation on life, romance, family, morality and mortality that used to be Allen's default setting before a string of duds forced his own recent decampment to Europe in search of inspiration.

MYSTERY MEN (1999), Not Directed By Tim Burton

This loudly hyped, much derided, and in fact somewhat underappreciated superhero parody (based on characters created by Flaming Carrot writer-artist Bob Burden) boasts elaborate set design, a smashing pop-Gothic look mixed with improvisational comedy riffs, satirical homages to various geekish interests, and Paul Reubens, all of which helped remind viewers of Tim Burton. In fact, the unusal-sounding name of the film's first-time director, Kinka Usher, actually helped inspire a rumor that the movie was, in fact, directed by Burton under an obviously contrived alias, even though Burton was busy at the time trying to bring his own Sleepy Hollow to market. Other evidence that Burton had nothing to do with it include the fact that the action scenes are fairly coherent, along with the movie's role in making Smash Mouth's "All Star" the hardest-to-avoid pop song in America for a good two or three years. (If the devoutly contrarian Burton had had a hand in that, he'd have probably joined the French Foreign Legion to atone.) Based on available evidence, there is in fact a Kinka Usher, but after the disappointing reception to this movie, his film career seems to have folded up its tent.

CITY OF LOST CHILDREN (1995), Not Directed by Terry Gilliam

Thanks to the fluke of his having broken in with Monty Python's Flying Circus and what that seems to have done to his sense of humor, the Minnesota-born Terry Gilliam has been fated to spend most of his life striking many people as sort of English. Oddly enough, the most successful Gilliam movie of the last fifteen or so years may have been cooked up by a couple of Frenchmen. Like Gilliam, Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet began their work as collaborators working in animation; with their first feature, Delicatessen, they announced their intent to make live-action films with the same degree of frenzied visual imagination (and the same sort of sick humor) usually found only in cartoons. But with Lost Children, they dove head-first into Gilliam's territory, with a sophisticated take on childlike fantasy that boasted a complicated plot, a look that was half fairy tale and half cyberpunk, and a villain out to steal the dreams of children. If Gilliam had made it himself after Time Bandits and Brazil, it would have made a far more fitting end to his "imagination trilogy" than the film he did make, The Adventures of Baron Muchausen. Instead, Gilliam did at least recognize the filmmakers as kindred spirits, and was quick to issue a blurb that they could use in the trailer.

And finally...

CHARADE (1963), Not Directed By Alfred Hitchcock

To tell the truth, we here at The Screengrab think that the tendency to compare just about any attempt at a stylish thriller to the work of Alfred Hitchcock has been overblown. Hitchcock didn't invent the concept of screen thrills, any more than (say) John Ford invented men on horseback or Stanley Donen, the director of Charade, invented singing and dancing. They all just happened to be really good at their specialties. What makes Charade, with its Parisian setting and alternately jokey and spooky murders, so much of a special case is its use of its star, Cary Grant, and the way it links this charmingly light romantic-mystery-comedy to North by Northwest and To Catch A Thief, the films that Hitchcock built around Grant after the strain of Hollywood comedy that made Grant a star had dried up or curdled. (Hitchcock also directed Grant in one of his best movies from the 1940s, Notorious, but that was in a darker, more hard-boiled style of tortured romance.) In all these movies, the filmmakers take Grant's star image into account in a slightly ironic way that makes it all the more glamorous and irresistable. (This is the movie where Audrey Hepburn, the damsel in distress, asks Grant, "Do you know what's wrong with you?" and then answers her own question: "Nothing.") They all hold up a lot better than the other movies that Grant made during the last twenty years or so of his career, and in fact, Charade, which he made just before he turned sixty, is for all practical purposes the last real "Cary Grant" movie. He did star in two more pictures, Father Goose and Walk, Don't Run (a remake of The More the Merrier), but they were half-hearted stabs at seeing if Grant could delight the public as, respectively, a boozy, unshaven old grump or a lovable match-making old busybody. Neither was a success, and Grant, sensing that his fans had no interest in seeing him evolve into anything besides Cary Grant, graciously retired from the screen. (Trivia note: in 2002. Jonathan Demme remade Charade as The Truth About Charlie, a movie whose Big Idea was, as Demme explained it, to see what Charade would look like if it had been directed in the flyblown experimental style of a French New Wave director working in 1964. It turned out that if the movie had been made that way, it would have kind of sucked.)

Click Here For Part One, Part Two & Part Three

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

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?

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Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce