The Screengrab : Shirley Maclaine

Up The Academy: Screengrab Salutes The All-Time Best & Worst Best Picture Winners (Part Six)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 23:30:00 GMT

THE BEST:

ANNIE HALL (1977)

I was downright horrified when Woody Allen’s brainy romantic comedy swiped the Best Picture Oscar away from Star Wars on the night of the Academy Awards’ golden anniversary edition. And considering the innovation and impact of George “the Neck” Lucas’ classic blockbuster (and the fact that a far inferior popcorn flick like Return of the King was considered worthy of the top prize nearly three decades later), I still have issues with the snub. But the choice is more comprehensible now in my reflective middle age dotage than it was in the midst of my pre-pubescent geekery: America in the ‘70s was far more interested in grit and neuroses than fanboy fantasy, and the wookies and Jedi philosophy must have seemed especially goofy compared to the grim realities of then-recent Best Picture winners like The French Connection, The Godfather and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. And if somebody had to shoot down Luke Skywalker, then I’m glad it was Annie Hall. For one thing, it was a fair fight, since the Academy tends to hold comedy and science fiction in the same low regard. More importantly, though, for all the great jokes about dead sharks and Kafka, Annie Hall is a touching, highly relatable masterpiece of character and storytelling, in service of a romantic pairing as iconic as Bogie & Bacall: to this day, whenever the film comes on TV, my parents (a small town Yankee version of Alvy & Annie who somehow stayed together) inevitably wind up holding hands and misting up...which is just about as cute as prickly, overeducated white people get. Plus, with its twisty storytelling, animated sequences and meta sight gags, Annie Hall is far more visually and structurally interesting than most Best Picture winners in any genre. And besides, if a romantic comedy had to beat Star Wars in 1977, at least it wasn’t The Goodbye Girl.

THE APARTMENT (1960)

Billy Wilder’s knack for crafting affecting, humane comedy was close to unparalleled, and few of his films showcased that gift better than 1960’s The Apartment, an effervescent rollercoaster spiked with grown-up melancholy. Jack Lemmon spends his days as one of corporate America’s nondescript suits, and his nights loaning out his apartment to superiors so they can have a place to covertly screw their mistresses. Lemmon’s everyman pines for Shirley MacLaine’s elevator girl, who’s involved with Lemmon’s boss (Fred MacMurray), a thorny love triangle laced with workplace pecking-order tensions, and one given verve by Wilder’s deft satirical hand. Yet for all its bubbly wit, The Apartment’s lasting relevance is partially due to the muted sorrow that lurks around the busy frame’s corners – a nagging sadness wrought from its protagonists’ stubborn willingness to define themselves via their vocations, and which consequently makes Lemmon and MacLaine’s ultimate leap into love feel not fairy-tale preordained, but hard-earned.

FROM HERE TO ETERNITY (1953)

If Brando's dockworker Terry Malloy represented one definitive take on the '50s prole rebel hero, Montgomery Clift's Pvt. Robert E. Lee Pruitt is the alienated '50s hero who thinks he's found a place for himself in the ultimate conformist culture, the army. Clift was on his way to being Brando's equal as a great new kind of movie actor when the car accident that shattered his face also crushed his confidence and derailed his career, and here he's as gentle and sure of the path he should be on as Brando's heroes tended to be instinctively assertive yet lost. But as much as he loves the army and welcomes the chance to be given rules to follow, some part of him can't help bucking when he's given orders that he knows are wrong. He won't box for the company because he's afraid of killing somebody in the ring, and then he kills somebody in retaliation for the murder of his best friend because he knows that the system will simply absorb the injustice. In the end, the system he turned to for a home kills him off, almost as an afterthought. If the Best Picture winners are anything to go by, the 1950s must have been an especially schizoid time in American culture: the list swings back and forth between movies like this one and On the Waterfront, which seemed to be bursting with news and awareness about the state of the country, and such spectacles as The Greatest Show on Earth, Around the World in 80 Days, and Ben-Hur, which seemed like kaleidoscopes imported from a different solar system.

THE WORST:

RAIN MAN (1988)

It's a well-established Hollywood joke that actors can court Oscar by playing someone with a mental or physical disability, but most of these roles still require the actor to try to fit into some kind of narrative context and connect to the other performers while replicating some carefully studied tics or mannerisms. Dustin Hoffman fought for years to get the script of Rain Man filmed, and it's easy to see why: the role of the autistic Raymond gives him an excuse to shut himself off from everything and everyone going on around him, and to be praised for how thoroughly he could ignore everything while concentrating on his little acting exercises. He must have thought that all his Christmases were coming at once. As for his co-star, Tom Cruise, Rain Man dates from the beginning of that unfortunate period where, his box-office appeal being a given, he was concentrating on proving he could "act" by denying the audience his gleaming smile and acting like an obnoxious ass. (Oh, he was "acting." We're certain of it.) The movie itself is nothing but a tear-stained pedestal for two movie stars stuck in self-parody mode.

MILLION DOLLAR BABY (2006)

This rigged, underlit, depressive wallow marks the nadir of Clint Eastwood's serious, craggy old thing period. The quality of the performances, especially Morgan Freeman's and Hilary Swank's, can't disguise the thinness of the stock characters that populate Paul Haggis's screenplay; in particular, Swank's grasping white-trash relations would be judged as vile, condescending stereotypes by a Jerry Springer audience. The best thing about the movie is that it inspired a hilarious public outcry among disability rights groups and assorted loons who thought that by having Swank's character opt to die rather than live out her life as a quadriplegic, it would start a trend and that impressionable disabled people would start offing themselves in droves. But even that was compromised when Eastwood, trying to address the controversy, announced that "I've gone around in movies blowing people away with a .44 magnum. But that doesn't mean I think that's a proper thing to do." He doesn't? Dude, you've earned the right to keep making boring movies for the rest of your life, but you don't have to disillusion us too.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five & Seven

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Nick Schager, Phil Nugent

Bloody Valentines: The Worst Relationships In Cinema History (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 22:30:00 GMT

BURT & LINDA PUGACH, CRAZY LOVE (2007)

If you never saw this documentary by Dan Klores and Fisher Stevens (or the talk show promotional tour by its subjects prior to its release), here’s the set-up: already-married New York City attorney Burt Pugach had an affair with a younger woman named Linda Riss, and when she broke it off, he contracted goons to blind her by throwing lye in her face. But wait, it gets even more romantic! After serving 14 years in prison for his crime, Pugach hooked up with Riss again, and eventually the two kooky lovebirds got married. Now here’s the depressing part: if you didn’t know their history, the kvetchy, passive-aggressive old couple portrayed in the film's contemporary interview segments could be ANY miserable old couple stuck in the comfortable rut of a relatively loveless marriage. So for all you dudes out there who think passion equals love and all you ladies with a thing for the bad boys, Crazy Love is a grimly humorous corrective.

MAE & JIMMY DOYLE, VIRTUE (1932)

Far from DVD but recently restored in a pristine new print by Sony (it's a start), Virtue is a stellar script by frequent Capra collaborator Robert Riskin with a premise that hasn't dated one bit: if a woman comes to a relationship with way more sexual experience than a man and it makes him insecure, paranoid and jealous, is there any way for him to get over that and save the relationship? Mae (Carole Lombard) is a former streetwalker who falls in love with cabdriver Jimmy Doyle (Pat O'Brien) while working behind the drivers' lunch-counter; Doyle's a tough-talking he-man woman-hater, but Mae wins him over. When they get back from their honeymoon day at Coney Island, the cops are there to arrest her for coming back to NYC after her last arrest; Jimmy vouches for her, but after the cops leave, the real test begins. Jimmy's ridiculously suspicious and obviously the walking wounded, his pride and suspicion a relationship toxin. Unfortunately, there's only so far a Pre-Code movie can go, and rather than having Jimmy and Mae work their problems out in open dialogue, Riskin has to resort to a tricksy but stupid melodramatic murder plot to clear the air. Still, Virtue is superior to, say, Chasing Amy, because being a former streetwalker is a much better metaphor for sexual inequality in a relationship than converting a freakin' lesbian. I mean c'mon. There's no clips online, so enjoy the creepy home footage above of Lombard and Clark Gable doing nothing much in particular.

ANN DARROW & KONG, KING KONG (1933)

When Peter Jackson remade Kong, he beefed up the sympathetic vibes between ape and woman, even including an Edward Scissorhands-ish ice-rink moment at the end; it wasn't beauty killed the beast, but society. Not the case in the original, where a shrieking Fay Wray doesn't realize (as someone once pointed out, and I can't remember how) that Kong is, all things considered, far from the worst thing that could happen to her: he keeps her safe on the island and would never, ever drop her from the Empire State Building. But no: she shrills and is generally totally ungrateful. Naomi Watts and Kong are actually kind of a cute couple; Wray and Kong, forget about it. Someone thought the archaic and perfectly-preserved, unreconstructed attitudes of the original weren't enlightening enough and edited a really bad "modern trailer" for it; it's above.

ALGY LONGWORTH & GWEN, BULLDOG DRUMMOND STRIKES BACK (1934)

An immensely amusing movie 20th Century Fox apparently never bought the permanent rights to the source material for — hence insanely hard to see — Bulldog Drummond is embodied for an encore by Ronald Colman, who'd already embodied H.C. 'Sapper' McNeile's emblem of British charm and resourcefulness in 1929. But his companion Algy was being played by Charles Butterworth for the first time. As the movie opens, it's Algy's wedding day to Gwen (Una Merkel), but their honeymoon night keeps getting interrupted by Bulldog's murder investigations and tanglings with generic sinister Oriental Prince Achmed (Warner Oland). Bulldog seems like a man of the world (because he's been out of Britain), but everyone else is asexual and stiff-upper-lip; Algy seems either fatalistically resigned to his wedding night being interrupted or actively looking for excuses to get out of it. (His bride is American, hence presumably experienced, which implicitly adds to the panic.) His final line at the film's final interruption — the relationship is never so much as close to consummation — is astonishing: "Perhaps you and I will be happy in our Platonic little way." They're the most sexually trapped married couple ever.

ED & LOU AVERY, BIGGER THAN LIFE (1956)

The mismatch between Ed (James Mason) and Lou Avery (Barbara Rush) is a geographical one set up in casting: even if you don't know that Mason's British (and not terribly good at concealing his accent) and Rush is a corn-fed Coloradan, you can sense a mismatch from the opening moments, when Ed announces everyone they had over for their suburban party was "dull" and failed to say anything witty, surprising or interesting. When Ed starts binging on cortisone and turns into a raving psychotic with delusions of grandeur, it merely confirms that there's no way he should be in the same suburban house as the rest of America. He needs to get back to where he belongs. Nicholas Ray's movie was a flop when it came out, and now it's a kind of overrated cult classic, but it's still compellingly sardonic stuff.

DAVE HIRSH & GINNIE MOOREHEAD, SOME CAME RUNNING (1958)

When Dave Hirsh (Frank Sinatra) wakes up on a bus back in his hometown, he's got a wicked hangover and a girl he doesn't remember having picked up, Ginnie Moorehead (Shirley MacLaine). He sends her packing, but she keeps hanging around, and eventually they're a couple, out of intertia as much as anything: Hirsh wants to do the Right Thing, and Ginnie is so pathologically needy she's hurt by the slightest rejection. What Dave doesn't realize is that doing the right thing is the wrong thing for both of them; [MAJOR SPOILER] Ginnie ends up dead, and Dave ends up with more guilt than he knows what to do with. Ironically, in reality Sinatra made sure MacLaine would get her big death scene so she could have her big star breakthrough ("Look, I want the kid to get killed, she'll get an Oscar nomination," he reportedly said. "I don't care about my role."), and she got it. But on-screen, they're a couple trapped together by both of their faults: her needs, his unwillingness to be a bastard when it has to be done. Short-term kindness is long-term cruelty.

ROSEMARY & GUY WOODHOUSE, ROSEMARY'S BABY (1968)

This one's a literal from-hell: what could be worse than having a husband who'll trade you in to a Satanic coven in exchange for a boost for his acting career? I've long maintained Rosemary's Baby is actually a black comedy — it has more nervous laughs than most real comedies — but there's no denying that anyone married to John Cassavetes is in for the long haul in general. Mia Farrow just gets an especially bad break.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Five, Six & Seven

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Vadim Rizov

Screengrab Live Blogs The Golden Globes

Andrew Osborne — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 00:39:00 GMT

(All times TiVo approximate)

7:33 - Nice silly bow tie, Brad.

7:35 - Way to step on your annoying daughter’s dress, Billy Ray.

7:38 - Good Lord! Marisa Tomei is wearing the puffy shirt! Is her next movie The Pirates of Penzance?

7:41 - Brangelina blow off Ryan Seacrest...heh-heh-heh...

7:46 - My lovely Polish bride Amy acquaints me with the Golden Globes dinner menu:

APPETIZERS
California organic field green salad with white asparagus
Crisp apricot dill goat cheese in phylo and poached pear
Maple syrup apple cider vinaigrette

ENTREES
Grilled prime tenderloin of beef with green tea pearl and sautéed aromatic Asian spice marinated sea bass
Sherry wine yuzu pepper sauce
Grilled king oyster mushroom
Jicama, Romanesco and potato onion croquette

DESSERT
Golden chocolate Globe with organic yogurt pistachio mousse

7:49 - The E! Channel breaks out their "Star Tracker" technology, wherein video arrows point out the stars to us in wide shots of the red carpet. Note to E! - Just because you CAN do it doesn't mean you SHOULD do it.

7:50 - Jeremy Piven appears on the red carpet. Apparently his mercury levels have returned to normal. Thank you, baby Jesus!

7:53 - Amy is sick of all the sand colored couture. Her favorite gowns of the evening: Drew Barrymore and Christina Applegate. Me, I could eat me some Anne Hathaway with a spoon.

8:02 - Amy thinks J. Lo is wearing one of Cher's Bob Mackie gowns from a 1970s time machine.

8:04 - Okay, I haven't seen The Reader and I love Kate Winslet, but...really? Best Supporting Actress? She must give really good Nazi.

8:06 - Damn, that Kate Winslet is adorable. Meanwhile...um...is Sting in that production of Pirates of Penzance with Marisa Tomei?

8:10 - BROOOOOOOOOOCCCEE!!!!!

8:11 - I'm trying to figure out who or what Darren Aronofsky looks like in his funny weaselly moustache. A villain in a Preston Sturges film? The Guy Fawkes mask in V for Vendetta? Meanwhile, Amy thinks Rumer Willis (in the background as a Golden Globes girl) may have had her chin shaved, since her big square potato head is no longer quite as prominent and she actually looks kinda cute. From a distance.

8:13 - Robert Downey Jr. apparently stuck his toe in the same electrical outlet as Drew Barrymore.

8:18 - Tom Wilkinson has apparently been drinking since noon.

8:20 - Hooray for Laura Dern! Amy's happy she kept her original nose, and I'm happy David Lynch used his mysterious powers of transcendental meditation to help her win.

8:25 - What happened to Don Cheadle's hair?

8:27 - Amy does not care about Eva Mendes. Even if she is a proud Cuban-American. (But we both love whoever that guy was she introduced...I missed what he said because I was Googling Eva Mendes and found this great shot of her plumber's crack while Amy drools over Hamm, John Hamm:

8:31 - Both my mother and Amy's mother call to express outrage over Hamm getting robbed. Amy dubs it Hammgate.

8:36 - Ricky Gervais = hilarious. Tells Kate Winslet, "See? I told you...do a Holocaust movie and you'll win awards!"

8:39 - The hobbits from the Fellowship of the Ring...sorry, I mean, the Jonas Brothers, present the award for Best Foregone Conclusion...I mean, uh, Best Animated Feature. Amy says the middle Jonas Brother looks like the guy she lost her virginity to (although I saw the guy recently and he no longer has that silky Jonas hair...or any hair, really).

8:41 - Amy wants Johnny Depp, meanwhile, to simply wash his hair.

8:43 - Sally Hawkins wins Best Actress for Comedy! I couldn't be happier! Amy is also happy for Sally, but wants to feed her skinny ass some brie.

8:45 - Sally Hawkins is full of love. And, possibly, nitrous oxide.

8:54 - Cheadle: good bald. Ralph Fiennes: not so much. (Amy, meanwhile, loves loves loves Drew Barrymore's dress.)

8:58 - Ledger wins. Universal sadness.

9:03 - Meanwhile, over on CNN, they're interviewing Priscilla Presley, who apparently got some cut-rate plastic surgery that left her looking like a Dick Tracy villain.

9:07 - Colin Farrell has that weird Aronofsky moustache, too! Trend alert!

9:10 - Waltz With Bashir guy: best acceptance speech of the evening.

9:11 - Maggie Gyllenhaal wears my aunt's drapes. Shirley Maclaine is either stoned or just got hit in the face with a frying pan.

9:13 - Paul Giamatti, for some reason, decided to come dressed as Judah Friedlander.

9:18 - Mmm! Look at that sexy Seth Rogen! Amy prefers fat Seth. Either way, Mickey Rourke is probably gonna kick his ass for that coke-snorting joke.

9:21 - What did David Duchovny mouth to the camera while blowing a kiss? Amy's guess: "I love hookers."

9:23 - Alec Baldwin thanks his vile pig of a daughter. Awwww.

9:31 - Giamatti!

9:36 - I don't have any little snarky comment to make, but I must just pause here to acknowledge the comic brilliance of Tracy Morgan, edging past the Waltz With Bashir guy for best speech. (Lorny Mikes!)

9:41 - Didn't mention it at the time, but controversy breaks out here in Somerville over Glenn Close's outfit. Amy says age-appropriate. Her mother, phoning in from New Hampshire, says early '80s Boca Raton.

9:43 - "Mmm...Pierce Brosnan," quoth Amy. "Nothin' wrong with that." She also likes him because he has a fat wife.

9:46 - P. Diddy and Kate Beckinsale step down off a wedding cake to present a nice Indian man with the award for Best Soundtrack (for Slumdog Millionaire).

9:48 - Nice boobs, Tina Fey!

9:54 - Scorcese!

9:58 - Much whispering about the awe-inspiring wonder of Steven Spielberg and his gift to the art of cinema. Bathroom break!

10:06 - All right, snark aside: (A) Spielberg throws some love to Scorcese, which is nice, but (B) that montage of Spielberg movies reminds you...damn, Steven Spielberg sure made a bunch of good-ass movies. (And, y'know, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull). This speech sure is going on, though.

10:09 - Spielberg: still talking.

10:13 - Is it more that Emma Thompson's really big or that Dustin Hoffman's really small?

10:15 - Danny Boyle wins Best Director. Again, the toe-in-electric-outlet hair. Trend alert!

10:19 - Amy says Colin Farrell looks less like a pubic hair with his hair cut short. And I'm happy to see the Bruges love: rent it now! (By the way, I didn't realize when I put In Bruges on my 2008 Top Ten list that the movie's writer/director, Martin McDonagh, is also the playwright responsible for The Lieutenant of Inishmore, the bloodiest play (and one of the most entertaining) I've ever seen on stage. If you get a chance, be sure to check it out!) I have plenty of time to write about all this, incidentally, because Colin Farrell will apparently never stop talking. "You're not Steven Spielberg!" says Amy, who hates him. Me, I thought his speech was kinda sweet.

10:29 - Hayek, Johansson and Cruz all enter my consciousness at once. Amy breaks out the smelling salts.

10:31 - Borat!

10:32 - Really? The Golden Globe audience boos a Madonna joke? Hmm. While I ponder this strange development, Vicky Cristina Barcelona wins best comedy/musical, which makes me think of Salma, Scarlett and Penelope again...mmm...

10:36 - Oh, wait...add Freida Pinto to that fantasy...mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm...

10:39 - Kate Winslet momentarily forgets that Angelina Jolie was also nominated for Best Actress. Angelina Jolie: not happy. Mark Wahlberg says hi to my mother for me.

10:45 - Mad Men? Rules.

10:49 - All the people who wouldn't return Mickey Rourke's calls last year are now very happy for Mickey Rourke.

10:50 - Mickey Rourke thanks David Unger for his balls.

10:52 - Darren Aronofsky flips the bird on national television. "Nice, real nice," says Amy's mother, phoning in from New Hampshire. "John Ford would never do that."

10:54 - Mickey Rourke thanks Scott Franklin for breaking his balls. Somehow Axl Rose was also involved with The Wrestler, making it the New Jersey-est movie of all time. Finally Rourke thanks his dogs. "That's the kinda shit you wait up all night for," says Amy.

10:58 - And...Slumdog! The guy accepting the award jumps the Aronofsky train with a verbal finger flip...trend alert!

Anyway, thanks for playing along at home! And now, to recap...the complete list of winners:

Best Motion Picture - Drama

Winner: Slumdog Millionaire (2008)

Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Drama

Winner: Mickey Rourke for The Wrestler (2008)

Best Television Series - Drama

Winner: "Mad Men" (2007)

Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture - Drama

Winner: Kate Winslet for Revolutionary Road (2008)

Best Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy

Winner: Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008)

Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy

Winner: Colin Farrell for In Bruges (2008)

Best Director - Motion Picture

Winner: Danny Boyle for Slumdog Millionaire (2008)

Best Performance by an Actress in a Television Series - Musical or Comedy

Winner: Tina Fey for "30 Rock" (2006)

Best Original Score - Motion Picture

Winner: Slumdog Millionaire (2008) - A.R. Rahman

Best Television Series - Musical or Comedy

Winner: "30 Rock" (2006)

Best Performance by an Actor in a Mini-Series or a Motion Picture Made for Television

Winner: Paul Giamatti for "John Adams" (2008)

Best Performance by an Actor in a Television Series - Musical or Comedy

Winner: Alec Baldwin for "30 Rock" (2006)

Best Screenplay - Motion Picture

Winner: Slumdog Millionaire (2008) - Simon Beaufoy

Best Performance by an Actress in a Mini-Series or a Motion Picture Made for Television

Winner: Laura Linney for "John Adams" (2008)

Best Foreign Language Film

Winner: Vals Im Bashir (2008)

Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture

Winner: Heath Ledger for The Dark Knight (2008)

Best Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for Television

Winner: "John Adams" (2008)

Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy

Winner: Sally Hawkins for Happy-Go-Lucky (2008)

Best Animated Film

Winner: WALL·E (2008)

Best Performance by an Actress in a Television Series - Drama

Winner: Anna Paquin for "True Blood" (2007)

Best Performance by an Actor in a Television Series - Drama

Winner: Gabriel Byrne for "In Treatment" (2008)

Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Series, Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for Television

Winner: Laura Dern for Recount (2008) (TV)

Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Series, Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for Television

Winner: Tom Wilkinson for "John Adams" (2008)

Best Original Song - Motion Picture

Winner: The Wrestler (2008)("The Wrestler")

Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture

Winner: Kate Winslet for The Reader (2008)

In Search of a Midnight Reality Check: New Year's Eve at the Movies

Phil Nugent — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 16:30:00 GMT

Hey, happy New Year, everybody, but Josh Rosenblatt ain't having it. Rosenblatt has noticed that our attitudes towards important events in our lives tend to be colored by a template for how those events should look based on similar events they've seen in movies. "Even at my father's memorial service, I couldn't help thinking about Vito Corleone's funeral scene in The Godfather, wondering how ours looked by comparison. (Not too badly, as it turns out. A little light on gangsters and a little heavy on rabbis, but otherwise a perfect, totally depressing scene.)" And as he sees it, New Year's Eve is "when Hollywood really cranks up the fantasy quotient and goes out of its way to create the most unreasonable expectations for what a quality holiday experience – and, by extension, what a quality life – should be. New Year's movies play almost like advertisements: You too can fall madly in love with the perfect girl and commemorate the occasion with a 20-minute dance number set to a Gershwin score, like Gene Kelly in An American in Paris! You too can be blessed with economic and creative freedom at the stroke of midnight, like Tim Robbins in The Hudsucker Proxy! You too can find yourself in the middle of the perfect, fleeting romantic moment just by posting a request on the Internet, like Scoot McNairy in In Search of a Midnight Kiss! It's fantasy after fantasy, cultivating in our minds the most absurd notions of what is and isn't possible, of what we should and shouldn't expect from ourselves, on this one arbitrary night of the year."

Rosenblatt breaks "the most pernicious, ridiculous, self-defeating myths in our collective unconscious" associated with New Year's Eve down into a handful of categories. There's "the Myth of the 11th-Hour Conversion", as typified by the scene in When Harry Met Sally where Billy Crystal hies off to tell Meg Ryan that she's the one for him before the year ends, thus promoting "the happy delusion that love conquers all – space, time, disagreement, detachment, disaffection, disillusionment, late-Eighties hairdos, even karaoke – and that the love realized just as one year is turning into another is a love that will last forever. But in reality, what this movie shows us is that loneliness on New Year's Eve makes people do things they probably shouldn't." There's also "the Myth of Secular Redemption." Consider About a Boy, in which Hugh Grant lets Rachel Weisz think he's actually the father of his young chum Marcus so that she'll mistake him for a man of substance. "When Rachel finds out the truth, she dumps him, of course, precipitating an existential collapse that leads Will to the realization that without people to love, life is a spiritual vacuum. The Myth of Secular Redemption assures us that no one is beyond saving – that even the worst among us are capable of great acts of decency, especially when they fall in love on New Year's Eve. What a delightful moral for such a deviant movie to end with. Problem is, that isn't really the moral of the movie. The practiced cynical eye can see what the sad message of About a Boy really is: Lying is the perfect way to start a relationship.

Finally, there's the Myth of the Better You, as seen in The Apartment, in which Shirley MacLaine, the girl who's been screwing Jack Lemmon's mean, powerful prick of a boss (Fred MacMurray) who's been using Lemmon's apartment as his adulterous love nest, finds out, on New Year's Eve, that Lemmon has told MacMurray to take a flying leap and quit his job. She rushes to Lemmon's side, "and they play a game of bridge. Beautiful, right? The perfect New Year's movie? Love triumphs over cynicism; the nice guy gets the girl; our heroes become the most decent versions of themselves? Well, the sad truth about The Apartment is enough to make a grown film critic cry, so jaded is it in its view of human nature: She's going to cheat on him. No doubt about it. 'Shut up, and deal,' will soon sound like a thousand daggers" in Lemmon's heart. "Here's the thing," Rosenblatt writes. "Hollywood consistently paints New Year's Eve as a night of redemption, hope, and possibility, when in reality it's almost invariably a night of dashed expectations, disappointment, and anxiety." Believe me, I'm convinced. Now I just wish I could turn this guy loose on Forrest Gump.

Honorable Mention: The Top Leading Ladies of All Time (Part Six)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 22:30:00 GMT

PAM GRIER (1949 - )

She was the undisputed queen of black '70s cinema. In tight pants, high heels and with razor blades in her Afro, Pam Grier burned up the screen in movies like Foxy Brown and Coffy. Independent black cinema fell on hard times by the end of that decade and she did not make the leap over to the Hollywood mainstream. For years she worked smaller film roles and TV here and there. That is, until Quentin Tarantino cast her in what might have been his — and her — best film ever, Jackie Brown. There Pam plays a middle-aged woman, a struggling air-hostess, slightly frayed at the edges but tough as nails...and what a sight to see.

SOPHIA LOREN (1934 - )

In pure feminine power and deliciousness, few can rival Sophia Loren in her glory years. It is hard to believe now, but the first lady of Italian film actually made her way onto the screen after fellow Italian bombshell Gina Lollobrigida. In fact she was discovered by (and subsequently married, then split with) Carlo Ponti, who also launched Lollobrigida's carreer. While works of Talmudic length could be written on Loren's looks, she's no mean actress. Get thee to a video store for Two Women or El Cid to appreciate her in the fullest.

ANNE BANCROFT (1931-2005)

Born Anna Maria Italiano in the Bronx, she followed that age-old tradition of taking a more WASPy sounding stage name. Anne Bancroft will, however, always be Mrs. Robinson to us. There are more prolific actresses out there, but you can't deny the power of her performance as a beautiful, sad, alcoholic older woman to Dustin Hoffman's younger man in The Graduate. Now that we are sniffing thirty ourselves we realize that (A) Mrs. Robinson wasn't supposed to be particularly old in the movie and (B) at 36, Anne Bancroft was only a few years older than Hoffman. In any case, leopard print never looked so good. And never did a lady lead with so much out-of-control control. It isn't easy to top one of the best movies of all time and nothing Bancroft did after that (no, not even being the voice of the Queen in Antz) made the same splash. Mel Brooks married her, though, so you know she was special.

SHIRLEY MACLAINE (1934 - )

My first Shirley MacLaine memory: sitting in front of my parents' stereo (approximately the size of the desk I'm sitting at now), playing my mother's copy of the Sweet Charity soundtrack and staring intently at the redhead on the album cover. I may have only been six or seven years old, but I had good taste. I lost track of Shirley after that, until she resurfaced as the kook on Larry King talking about her past lives in Atlantis and her UFO frequent-flier miles, just another Hollywood punchline. What a cad I was, forgetting what a beautiful thing we had there in front of the stereo all those years ago. But it all came back to me when I finally got around to seeing the work that made her famous in the first place. In her trademark roles – The Apartment, Irma la Douce, Sweet Charity and especially Some Came Running, she's pixie-cute, charming, funny, sometimes annoying and ultimately heartbreaking. She was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress five times, finally winning for Terms of Endearment. In 1993, I saw her open for Frank Sinatra at the Worcester Centrum; her show-stopper was, of course, "If My Friends Could See Me Now." I'd be lying if I said she looked like she'd stepped right off that long-ago album cover, but I will tell you she still had the gams.

CLAUDIA JENNINGS (1949-1979)

If such redneck romps as Gator Bait, Truck Stop Women and Moonshine County Express aren't part of your cinematic education, you may not have even heard of Claudia Jennings, but in the mid-1970s she was the queen of the drive-in, the ultimate hick chick. Born Mary Eileen Chesterson in St. Paul, Minnesota, Jennings studied dramatic arts as a child and performed with the Hull House theater company in Chicago after graduating high school. She took a day job as a receptionist for Playboy magazine, where her knockout looks did not go unnoticed. She posed for the magazine in 1969 and again in 1970, when she was named Playmate of the Year. Moving to Los Angeles to pursue acting, she landed a supporting role in the 1972 roller derby flick Unholy Rollers. Her role in 1974's Truck Stop Woman, in which she hijacked trucks using sex as her primary weapon, became the model for the rest of Jennings' leading roles: drop-dead gorgeous, sexually uninhibited and tough enough to take on the big boys. Long before Thelma and Louise hit the road, Jennings and Jocelyn Jones played a sexy pair of bank-robbing outlaws in The Great Texas Dynamite Chase. In Gator Bait, Jennings is a bayou woman turned Death Wish-style vigilante after her little sister is murdered by depraved hillbillies. A decade before Sigourney Weaver's supposedly groundbreaking turn in Aliens, Jennings was already kicking ass and taking names – and doing it in the tightest, tiniest pair of Daisy Dukes possible. Her final performance came in David Cronenberg's little-seen 1979 racing picture, Fast Company – ironic, in that Jennings was killed in an auto accident on the Pacific Coast Highway that year, a couple of months shy of her thirtieth birthday. Her cinematic legacy may be a minor one, but in the realm of the hick flick, Claudia Jennings still reigns.

MICHELLE PFEIFFER (1958 - )

Although it wasn't her first movie, most filmgoers got their first good gawk at Pfeiffer in the 1983 Scarface. Although opinions were mixed (and would remain so for a while) about whether she could act, the camera loved her, and the way she embraced the role of the world's surliest cokehead gangster's moll established that she wasn't persnickety about wanting to be liked. Any doubts about her acting had been pretty much cleared up by the time of Dangerous Liasons, in which she was excellent in one of the film's major roles that was probably the least fun to play. That movie and her other 1988 releases, Married to the Mob and Tequila Sunrise, made it clear that likability itself was comfortably within her range. Her singing sexpot in The Fabulous Baker Boys was pure starshine, her alienated early '60s runaway housewife in Love Field a terrific stretch, and with all due respect to Julie Newmar, her Catwoman gave the most insouciant reading of the line "Meow!" on record. Her movies have gotten worse, and her last one, I Could Never Be Your Man. ended up going straight to DVD. But she remains a welcome presence on-screen.

ANNA MAGNANI (1908-1973)

If Sophia Loren could have taken out a patent on the movie image of the Italian woman as lusty, ripe, and sensual, Magnani embodied the idea of the Italian as a woman who might have stepped off an opera stage, made of common clay but transcendently beautiful in a way that represents what people used to call "a force of nature." She had been acting in movies (and also singing and performing in cabaret and nightclubs) since the earliest days of sound pictures, but it was Roberto Rossellini's 1945 Open City, and in particular her death scene, that made her an international star. She continued to work in Europe with such directors as Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti (Bellissima), and Jean Renoir, who after using her in The Golden Coach proclaimed her the greatest actress he'd ever worked with. Hollywood never quite knew just what to do with her, but she did find something of a patron in Tennessee Williams, and she won an Oscar for the film version of The Rose Tattoo. Magnani once said that "Women like me can only submit to men capable of dominating them, and I have never found anyone capable of dominating me," and in that movie you can see what she meant: she looks at her co-star, Burt Lancaster, as if he were Arnold Stang. (She was apparently perceived as a bit much even by her co-star in The Fugitive Kind -- the ill-fated screen version of Williams' Orpheus Descending -- a shy, retiring fellow named Marlon Brando. "Every time I play a scene with her," Brando is supposed to have said, "I'm gonna have a rock in each hand.") Her death in Rome, at the age of 65 from pancreatic cancer, occasioned a public funeral ceremony rumored to have made the Pope jealous.

Click Here for Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Seven & Eight

Contributors: Sarah Sundberg, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

Yesterday's Hits: Around the World in 80 Days (1956, Michael Anderson)

Paul Clark — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 19:00:00 GMT

If there’s one thing Hollywood is sorely lacking nowadays, it’s larger-than-life figures. Nowadays, most moviegoers want their industry types to be down to earth, but in the classical era of Hollywood, it was a different story. Tinseltown was ruled by grandiose, even vulgar men who flaunted their wealth, made bold statements and engaged in dangerous behavior just to fuel their taste for adventure. Today’s peekaboo paparazzi photos and pregnancy gossip pale in comparison to the stories of Errol Flynn’s legendary parties and John Huston deciding to make a movie in Africa with the notion of shooting an elephant while he was there.

Michael Todd was one of these men. Todd began his career in Hollywood by running a construction company that specialized in soundproofing studio stages, but after he was bankrupted by the Depression, his colorful life really began. He began producing stage shows, often of ill repute. He romanced Gypsy Rose Lee, star of one of his productions. He married Joan Blondell, after his first wife died under suspicious circumstances. He gambled and spent money like a decadent prince, causing Blondell to divorce him and leading to his second bankruptcy. He staged a nudie musical written by the future king of Thailand. And if that’s not enough drama for one lifetime, he later married Liz Taylor. Todd also had a hand in the development of the three-screen Cinerama process before pioneering a technological breakthrough of his own, the Todd-AO process, which Todd envisioned as being “Cinerama coming from one hole.” And the crown jewel of Todd-AO was 1956’s Around the World in 80 Days.

What made Around the World in 80 Days a hit?: In addition to its wide screen and greater clarity (Todd-AO cameras shot at 30 frames per second instead of the usual 24), Todd-AO also employed the widest-angle lens of the era, approximately 150 degrees. These factors made the format ideal for filming grand epics and panoramic vistas. The first Todd-AO release was 1955’s Oklahoma!, but the maximum potential of the format was realized the following year with Around the World in 80 Days. A long in-development project that had yet to come to fruition, Todd used his newly-regained resources- much of which had been earned by his stake in 1952’s This Is Cinerama- to film his adaptation of Jules Verne’s novel on location all around the world, showing off what Todd-AO was truly capable of doing.

For such an ambitious production, it was only fitting that Todd would fill it to the brim with international stars, all the better to draw in moviegoing audiences worldwide. After pairing up-and-coming Hollywood leading man David Niven with popular Mexican entertainer Cantinflas (as Phileas Fogg and Passepartout, respectively), Todd then surrounded them with a galaxy of stars in cameo roles. It seemed like wherever the travelers went, another handful of familiar faces would drop in to greet them, with bit roles for the likes of Noel Coward, John Gielgud, Trevor Howard, Charles Boyer, Ronald Colman, Charles Coburn, Peter Lorre, George Raft, Marlene Dietrich, Frank Sinatra, Buster Keaton, and Edward R. Murrow as the narrator of the film’s introduction. The combination of globetrotting adventure and big stars worked like gangbusters, with the Around the World in 80 Days pulling in $23.1 million dollars- the second-highest gross of 1956 behind The Ten Commandments- and taking home five Oscars including Best Picture.

What happened?: Jules Verne’s novel, written in 1872, was meant to inspire a sense of wonder in its readers. But as is often the case with gee-whiz science fiction, much of the wonder evaporated once the fantasy became reality. By 1956, humanity had long since “conquered the air,” and the notion of circumnavigating the globe in four score days didn’t hold too much magic. So while Around the World in 80 Days offered audiences the irresistible combination of big stars and widescreen vistas, the story was little more than an excuse for a series of misadventures involving Phileas and/or Passepartout rather than the wondrous futuristic spectacle Verne had intended.

In addition, while Michael Anderson was credited as the director, this was without a doubt Mike Todd’s film, something that was discovered early on by the film’s original director, John Farrow. But Todd wouldn’t be around much longer to enjoy his success. In 1958, while flying his unfortunately-monikered plane “The Lucky Liz,” Todd suffered a fatal crash. This negated the possibility of any more ambitious Todd-produced epics, as well as beginning the slow decline of the Todd-AO process, which continued in a more conventional 24fps format through the sixties before dying out altogether.

Does Around the World in 80 Days still work?: Not really. If the film was charming in 1956, it’s merely quaint today. For one thing, the much-ballyhooed international shoot comes across mostly as hype nowadays. To modern audiences’ more sophisticated eyes, the seams in the production really show, as when the film cuts from a sweeping foreign vista to a shot of the stars gazing at it in wonder. Much of the action that actually involves the actors looks like it was filmed on soundstages. This isn’t categorically a problem, but when a movie’s primary selling point is that it was filmed on locations around the world, it feels like something of a cheat when the international shots appear to be second-unit work.

In addition, the principal actors in the film are consistently underwhelming. Watching his work as Phileas Fogg, it’s clear why David Niven never became a superstar- not only does he lack the necessary star presence, but his screen persona isn’t very interesting. Phileas Fogg is clearly meant to be an upper-class eccentric- independently wealthy, time-obsessed yet impulsive. Yet with Niven in the role, we have to take the movie’s word for it as regards his eccentricity, since all he brings to the table is a vague air of urbane sophistication. Perhaps a leading man who was more adept at comedy- Cary Grant, perhaps, or Alec Guinness- could have made the role enjoyable, but with Niven it just sort of sits there.

Similarly, despite his celebrity status south of the border, Cantinflas wasn’t cut out for stardom stateside. He looks fairly uncomfortable acting in English, and his physical schtick isn’t very funny, although Anderson and Todd’s insistence on extreme long shots doesn’t help any. Shirley MacLaine, in one of her first films, is sorely miscast as the Indian maiden Aouda, in keeping with classic Hollywood’s highly uncool tradition of “browning-up” white actors for ethnic parts. And while Around the World in 80 Days popularized the practice of “cameo” roles, they’re almost always distracting. Is that brief flash of recognition that comes over audience members when the piano player turns out to be Frank Sinatra really worth the tedious setup? I would argue that it’s not.

In the end, Around the World in 80 Days hardly seems to warrant the “epic” label that many ascribe to it. Far from justifying the largesse of the production, the film feels like an amusing trifle with some picturesque scenes interspersed in order to make the film feel like an event. With comedy that isn’t especially funny and lead actors who get outshone by both the scenery and the stars in the bit roles, Around the World in 80 Days amounts to little more than a widescreen travelogue- diverting in spots with some pleasant company, but not very interesting cinematically, and not really worth revisiting.

Take Five: Psychics

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 19:15:00 GMT

Death Defying Acts opens in limited release this weekend, and so far, it hasn't generated much advance buzz. It's hard to figure out why: It comes on the heels of other successful movies involving magicians, including The Prestige and The Illusionist; it's a romance-driven period piece (which should attract women), but it features a murder mystery, psychics, and famed escape artist Harry Houdini (for the fellas); it's got an all-star cast led by perennial heartthrobs Guy Pearce and Catherine Zeta-Jones; and it's directed by none other than girl-geek icon Gillian Anderson. Maybe people are confused by the premise: in Death Defying Acts features Zeta-Jones as a spiritualist out to run a con on the master magician. We haven't seen it yet, so we're not sure if Zeta-Jones' powers are portrayed as being authentic, but in real life, Houdini was a relentless skeptic who didn't believe in any aspect of the paranormal, and who, in fact, went out of his way to disprove all claims of the supernatural as buncombe. Regardless, Hollywood has always been a sucker for a good psychic yarn, which probably explains why goofy New Age religions tend to take root in southern California before hitting the rest of the country. For today's Take Five, we bring you a handful of fine films about psychics -- and not a single one starring Shirley MacLaine.

THE SHINING (1980)

Nobody does psychic powers like Stephen King, and nobody realizes those psychic powers on screen better than Stanley Kubrick does in this horror classic. One of the most effective ideas Kubrick had was to de-emphasize Danny's psychic abilities, to tone down the paranormal aspects of the story (such as the hedge topiary coming to life) in order to play up the much more compelling dramatic element of a family in isolation slowly falling apart. Not that the terrifying paranormal elements aren't there: few moments in contemporary horror are creepier than seeing Danny go into a drooling fit, or the bizarre images he sees in the abandoned rooms of the Outlook Hotel -- but by keeping them ambiguous, by allowing the suggestion that none of it is real, that it's all just possibly the byproduct of an epileptic vision or a mind damaged by loneliness and alcohol -- the whole thing is made more compelling and upsetting than if the paranormal elements were made explicit.

SCANNERS (1981)

There's nothing subtle or ambiguous, on the other hand, about David Cronenberg's early sci-fi terror masterpiece. Before his transition to an artist of the decay and dysfunction of the body in modern classics like The Fly, Cronenberg's obsession was the abuse and alteration of the mind -- and as he showed in movies like Altered States, The Brood and Videodrome, an unhinged mind could do a vast amount of damage. Nowhere is this given a sharper point than in his cult classic Scanners, which works pretty much like HIghlander except with exploding heads instead of sword decapitations. As shadowy corporations struggle to control the massive psionic powers of a handful of people, we witness the battle firsthand through the activities of a highly game cast which includes mopey Stephen Lack, sinister Michael Ironside, and hammy Patrick McGoohan. Scanners also features one of our favorite taglines ever: "There are four billion people on Earth. 237 are scanners. And they are winning." Choice!

THE FURY (1978)

After having wet his beak in the unhinged-psychic game with a now-legendary film adaptation of Stephen King's Carrie (see, there's king again), Brian De Palma warmed to the subject and cranked out a modest but highly energetic (and entertaining) teen-psychics-in-trouble picture called The Fury. Featuring Amy Irving and Andrew Stevens as the two fresh-faced kids who have to worry about blowing up a city block instead of needing to pick up some Clearasil, the plot revolves around their being sent to a government research lab where their overseers must walk a thin line between making sure their prize specimens don't get away and make them happy enough that they don't turn their considerable powers on their masters. Playing almost like a trial run of some of David Cronenberg's laer stuff, The Fury is bounding with energy (and not just of the psychic variety), and its B-movie plot is highly abetted by the top-notch cast, including a wildly overaheated Kirk Douglas as Stevens' father and a gravely understated John Cassavetes as one of the government flunkies.

AKIRA (1988)

As any teenager -- including the ones on this list -- can tell you, being young is no picnic. Your body starts to change, girls don't like you and you can't figure out why, you start feeling sick and alienated for no reason, and before you know it, you're hanging out with a bunch of nogoodniks in a biker gang. But if you start to develop horrific psychic powers, ones that can kill your friends, turn you into a grotesque monster, and even level the entire city of Toyko with the power of a nuclear bomb? Well, that, brother, as a very wise man once said, is when your heartaches really begin. Katsuhiro Otomo's groundbreaking animated feature, based on his own graphic novel series, featured stellar animation, top-shelf voice acting, creepy effects, a complex but not incomprehensible storyline (it turns out, to no one's real surprise, that a nefarious military intelligence project is behind poor Akira's transformation into a psionic monstrosity), and some great effects at the movie's unforgettable end all helped open up western markets to both anime and manga, transforming the world of comics and film forever.

INVINCIBLE (2001)

Anyone can make a movie about deranged psychics who threaten the lives of their loved ones. Leave it to Werner Herzog to up the ante by making a movie about a deranged psychic in the employ of the Nazi party who enlists a Jewish strongman to help him put on a carnival show about Siegfried, the legendary Aryan hero of myth. It's this kind of intensely focussed eccentricity, and reckless disregard for making sense, that seperates the men like Herzog from the boys. This was Herzog's first narrative feature after a prolonged stretch of making documentaries, and while it's not nearly in the same league as movies like Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre: The Wrath of God, it's still got his knack for breathtaking imagery and his gift for illustrating the mad inner lives of obsessives in spades. The psychic in question in Invincible is Erik Jan Hanussen, the doomed faux-Dane who, for a while, operated as Hitler's personal clairvoyant until falling out of favor with Der Fuhrer's inner circle and getting himself assassinated. His story is also told in the relatively straightforward biopic Hanussen (1988), but that movie can't compete with Tim Roth's giddy performance or Herzog's fiery direction.

Original Vs. Remake: Ocean's Eleven

Andrew Osborne — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 17:00:00 GMT

In honor of the ten year anniversary of the passing of Ol’ Blue Eyes (and the recent timely release of several DVD box sets of his cinematic output), we here at Screengrab decided to have Frank’s original 1960s casino caper and George Clooney’s 2001 remake face off in the ring-a-ding to see which is truly the heavyweight champ of hangin’-out-with-your-famous-pals cinema. Awright, boys...come out swingin’!

DANNY OCEAN

I vividly remember the day when my esteemed Screengrab colleague, Scott Von Doviak, told me I had to drop whatever I was doing and go check out Steven Soderbergh’s Elmore Leonard adaptation, Out of Sight. “You mean the movie with that guy from E.R.?” I replied, incredulous, thinking perhaps I’d misunderstood. "The guy from One Fine Day? Batman & Robin? That guy?” “Yes,” Mr. Von Doviak replied. “I’m afraid we have to start liking George Clooney now.” And, in fact, the statement was prescient, because soon The Cloon had established himself as the Sexiest Man Alive, the Last True Movie Star, the eternal bachelor, the guy with the pot-bellied pig, the sensible humanitarian do-gooder, and the guy my wife has informed me she’d run off with in a heartbeat...and I wouldn’t even blame her, because he’s just that fucking cool. But you know what? He’s still not as cool as Frank Sinatra in 1960. Advantage: Original.

THE ELEVEN

Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Don Cheadle, Casey Affleck, Carl Reiner, Bernie Mac...these are all fairly cool people. Sammy and Dino? They're so cool I don’t even need to mention their last names (though I suppose it’s a toss-up whether Joey Bishop is cooler than Scott Caan or vice-versa). The big problem is that no matter how cool Sammy and Dino are, and as well as they wear suits and swill cocktails, they’re part of a gang that just doesn’t have many good scenes, good lines, or all that much to do. Advantage: Remake.

THE DAME

Not that she had all that much to work with in an underwritten role, but the best part of Julia Robert’s performance (as the art curator at the Bellagio?) is the meta gag of “introducing” her in the credits like a dewy fresh unknown. Angie Dickinson doesn’t fare much better, despite an arguably better wardrobe, and this category would probably be a draw if not for the mitigating factor of Shirley Maclaine’s great cameo as “Tipsy Girl” in the original, giving what noted Rat Packologist John Mitchell calls “the only actual performance in the movie,” cementing her as “any reasonable drunk’s pin-up girl.” Advantage: Original.

THE HEIST

The original scores big points for its highball concept, cooked up by five writers, including Billy Wilder(!). Meanwhile, by plotting a heist where Sammy Davis, Jr.’s character masquerades as a tap-dancing garbage man, the film either criticizes 1960s racism or embodies it (depending who you ask). But the heist in the remake (scripted by Ted Griffin) is faster paced, requires more costumes and gadgets, and wraps up with a nice, lyrical moment by the Bellagio’s dancing waters (as opposed to the original’s surprisingly downbeat buzzkill pall of failure and mortality). Advantage: Remake.

THE SCORE

Even without the groovy remix of Elvis Presley’s lost classic “A Little Less Conversation,” the soundtrack to the 2001 edition of Ocean’s is worth a listen for the space age bachelor pad rhythms of David Holmes’ swingin’ retro score and classic cuts from Perry Como, Percy Faith, Quincy Jones and Claude DeBussy. But the original featured Sammy’s aforementioned sanitation song and dance “Ee-O-Leven” and Dean Martin performing a vibe-tastic version of “Ain’t That A Kick In The Head”...and you really can’t argue with vibes. Advantage: Original

THE SEQUELS

This one is pretty close to a draw, but Ocean’s Twelve and Ocean’s Thirteen were marginally less dreadful than the original’s quasi-sequels Sergeants 3, 4 For Texas and Robin and the 7 Hoods, so... Advantage: Remake.

And thus, in a tight race between style and substance, the winner is...REMAKE!

(Coming up next: the dueling Dawns of the Dead!)