The Screengrab : al pacino

Morning Deal Report: Al Pacino Goes the Full Kevorkian

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 27 May 2009 14:00:00 GMT

“Al Pacino is in negotiations to star in You Don't Know Jack, an HBO Films biopic about Dr. Jack Kevorkian that Barry Levinson will direct,” per The Hollywood Reporter. Pacino will play Dr. Death “as he builds his infamous ‘Mercy Machine,’ conducts his first assisted suicide, and starts a media frenzy with his epic legal battles defending a patient's right to die.”

Dustin Hoffman and Paul Giamatti will team up for Barney’s Version, based on the novel by Mordecai Richler. Hoffman “will play a retired cop and father of the story's title character -- who has led a reckless life highlighted by three marriages, two children and status as a ‘person of interest’ in the mysterious disappearance of his friend,” Variety reports.

Anyone thrilled at the prospect of a Tomb Raider reboot? Not so much? “The new movie will be an origin story for Croft, meaning a younger actress would be necessary,” Cinema Blend reports. Says producer Dan Lin, “For me, the Lara Croft games and movies have gone a little too action oriented. I wanted to have action but with character.” And big boobs.

Phil's Film Faves, Part One

Phil Nugent — Tue, 26 May 2009 18:00:00 GMT

A while back, we here at the Screengrab made our best stab at listing our picks for the greatest movies of all time. This is a classification that is distinctly different from naming our favorite movies, movies that, in many cases, happened to come into our lives at just the right moment, packing a style or a mindset that happened to hit us right in the soft spot, and that entered our bloodstream, affecting our judgements from that point on--though it not unheard of for favorite movies and greatest movies to overlap. A list of one's nominations for greatest movies tells one a lot about a person's ideas about art and history, about which breakthroughs matter to him in a way that, if they were not a part of what movies have come to be, he would care a lot less about them all. Our favorite movies tell us a lot about ourselves. Permit me to bore you with a little about me.

IT'S TOUGH TO BE A BIRD (1969)

DAD, CAN I BORROW THE CAR? (1970)

Both these short films were made by Ward Kimball, one of the "Nine Old Men" remembered as having been key to the development of the animation department at Walt Disney Studios. They were eventually shown on the TV anthology series The Wonderful World of Disney in the 1970s, which is were my barely formed retinas took them in. Bird is mostly animated, with some live action mixed in; Car is mostly live action, but with lots of animation effects. These range from quick gags to sequences that suggest the surreal, politically charged animation being done in Eastern Europe at the time, as well as Terry Gilliam's brand of animated cut-outs. Kimball, whose reputation is that of the wild man among the Disney old guard, had a simple, direct approach: pick a subject and garland it with as many visual gags as he could come up with. The wildness was all in how far afield his comic imagination could go, and how happy he seemed when he was slapping things together as fast as he could. I saw these films when I was so young that I subsequently forgot having seen them at all, but a few years ago I saw Bird again, and just a few months ago I found Car on a bootleg DVD, and as soon as I recognized what they were, I realized how much I'd loved them as an infant, so much so that I wanted more stuff like that to cram into my head. In a strange way, I think this desire planted the seeds for a lot of things I like, ranging from Svankmajer to Godard at his most discursive to Monty Python to Requiem for a Dream to the rambling monologues of This American Life. Discovering something that had a major impact on shaping your tastes when they were still at the developmental stages can weird you out a little.

JAWS (1975)

This was the first feature film that I loved unreasonably, and I think it's a good pick for a first love. The story is simple and uncomplicated and involving, and Spielberg brought it to life by lavishing upon it an amazing level of inventiveness at telling it visually, so much so that, in scenes such as the famous moment when the shark unexpectedly appears in the background of the shot while Roy Scheider has his head turned and is in the middle of spitting out a line in the other, he was able to give the viewer a jolt at the same time he got you laughing at his mastery of the conventions he was turning inside out and the audience expectations with which he was playing. It also has a subversive, satirical edge that connects it to the best of '70s pop culture: even someone who'd seen as few horror movies as I had by that time knew that it was unusual for the director to implicitly side with the hippie know-it-all scientist with the unsightly beard against the blustering macho man who thinks he's scored a goal in their ongoing war of personalities by glowering and flattening an empty beer can with his paw. (For years afterwards, I was trying to impress people by imitating Richard Dreyfuss's aplomb at squeezing a paper cup in response, not recognizing that it lost a lot of context.) Not long after I saw Jaws for the first of I hate to think how many times--not very long after at all, in fact, because I was too young to see it when it first came out but was allowed, after two years of screaming and crying over my cruel deprivation, to see it when it was re-released in 1977, thanks in no smart to my parents' very well-timed and much-enjoyed divorce, Star Wars came out. I used to try to reason with people who were raving about it at the playground. "Guys," I'd say in my reasoning-with-idiots voice, "there is no shark in this movie."

MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL (1975) & YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN (1974)

I know that she has many suitors, but for my part, let me just say, in all selfishness, that I will always be grateful for having seen Holy Grail at precisely the moment in my life when a movie that begins with the opening credits malfunctioning and ends with a police raid on the set would strike me as the greatest thing in the world. Frankenstein's appeal was less avant-garde. Let's just say that, for all of my childhood and well into my adolescence, I got most of my information about what was going on the movie theaters of our great land from the movie satires in Mad magazine, and it was a great thrill to see what was basically the greatest Mad magazine movie satire ever projected on a thirty-foot screen.

THE LONG GOODBYE (1973) & CALIFORNIA SPLIT (1974)

Elliot Gould's acting in these two Robert Altman's movies is the kind of thing that cults are meant for. It's as if he were living some kind of improvised coffeehouse monologue--too sweet to be by Lenny Bruce, but not requiring the kind of hepcat skeleton key that you might need to make sense of Lord Buckley. He's funny and seemingly detached but not above showing how much he really cares when he realizes that he's made a terrible mistake--a mistake that he invariably makes for the best of reasons, for refusing to sense the worst about a friend. And if he strikes a lot of people as flaky, that may be because he's his own man in a way that, even then, set him completely against the times, which more and more looks like the most genuinely heroic position for an American to take. I tried like hell to achieve this degree of loosness for a few years in my twenties, and I even thought I had it for a while, but in retrospect, I'm afraid that I was just unemployed.

DOG DAY AFTERNOON (1975)

My other big acting man-crush from that period is Al Pacino's performance here, and it couldn't be more different in its appeal, because I'd never seen anybody channel that much controlled energy before. The whole movie is a wonder of the New York actor's art, with people like John Cazale and Charles Durning and Sully Boyer and Chris Sarandon delicately matching their styles to Pacino's and providing the quiet contrast that makes his sustained liftoff possible. I once had a new roommate who had never seen this movie, and I was very eager to show it to her. I still remember the moment, about fifteen minutes into it, when she asked, "Umm...how much longer before they get out of the bank?" It's funny, those moments when you immediately know that it's not going to work.

TWO-LANE BLACKTOP (1971)

Excuse the appearance of cross-promotion, but I've already written about this one.

DVD Digest for May 26, 2009

Paul Clark — Tue, 26 May 2009 14:00:00 GMT

In advance of the upcoming shuttering of The Screengrab- just four more days, folks!- the DVD departments of Disney, Paramount, and Fox have graciously decided not to put out any recent releases this week in protest. Thanks for the support, guys!

Unfortunately, this boycott leaves us with precious little to report in regards to recent movies. Put it another way- when your highest-profile recent release coming to DVD is the forgotten Renee Zellweger/Harry Connick Jr. rom-com New in Town (Lionsgate), the phrase “slow week” doesn’t quite cover it. If you’re looking for Asian fare, this week also brings Mamoru Oshii’s animated The Sky Crawlers (Sony, also Blu-Ray), as well as two Wayne Wang indies, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (Magnolia) and Princess of Nebraska (Magnolia). And let’s not overlook the much-anticipated How to Give Pleasure to a Woman by a Woman (Pacific Media).

Thankfully, there’s a little more of interest in the classics department, although that’s kind of a good news/bad news situation. The good news is that Warner is releasing titles from Michelangelo Antonioni, David Cronenberg, John Boorman, Hal Ashby, and Hugh Hudson. The bad news is that this week’s releases include some of these estimable auteurs’ worst films. Now, I’m aware that Zabriskie Point and M. Butterfly have their defenders. However, I’m not sure people were exactly clamoring for a DVD of Beyond Rangoon or director’s cuts of Revolution and Lookin’ to Get Out, no matter how excited Jon Voight is about the latter. At least they’re not in a box set, so you Zabriskie fans can finally watch stuff blow up real good at the end without having to buy a DVD of Al Pacino fighting the Redcoats as well. Also this week: Falling Down Deluxe Edition (Warner).

Now that Hollywood has seen fit to make Land of the Lost into an expensive summer movie, it was inevitable that Land of the Lost: The Complete Series (Universal) would be hitting stores in advance of that. Or if you’re more into the whole cop-show thing, this week also sees the release of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: The Ninth Year (Universal) and The Closer: Season 4 (Warner).

Finally, this week’s Blu-Ray only slate includes perhaps the “man”-liest triple feature around, with new Blu-Rays of Children of Men (Universal), Cinderella Man (Universal), and Inside Man (Universal) hitting stores today. Also this week: Field of Dreams (Universal), Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves Extended Cut (Warner), Seabiscuit (Universal), Spy Game (Universal), and True Romance Unrated Cut (Warner).

In the words of Annette Hanshaw, “that’s all.”

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 21 May 2009 23:30:00 GMT

And now, the worst...

Bjork in DANCER IN THE DARK (2000)

Most of the deaths on this worst list are disappointing, ill-conceived or simply ridiculous, but Dancer In The Dark is another animal entirely. The end of feel-bad auteur Lars Von Trier’s 2000 sadistic (and ultimately pointless) exercise in suffering and hopelessness was so excruciatingly painful and unpleasant to watch that I felt like I'd been punched in the ribcage. Which is not to say it's a bad movie, exactly. Which is not to say it's a good movie, either. I have to give a certain amount of respect to a film (and scene) that produces such a visceral reaction in me -- but, then again, I had a similar reaction to that infamous bootleg videotape of a politician shooting himself in the head at a press conference. Like somebody said once, it's easy to get a reaction out of an audience: just strangle a puppy. But that don't necessarily make it art. (AO)

Tom Hanks in SAVING PRIVATE RYAN (1998)

Earn this? Blow me. Saving Private Ryan isn't thoroughly terrible, but the schmaltz at the end is hard to take. Tom Hanks is shot by the same guy whose life he spared a few days before? Gimme a break. Why, those evil, ungrateful Germans. I guess they got what was coming to them. All of the swelling strings and tearful codas in the world can't mask how unearned and meaningless this death scene is. I'm fairly sure that Spielberg expects his audience to start laying palm fronds at the feet of the greatest generation who fought the Nazi menace after all this sturm und drang, but I was left wishing it had come some 14 hours earlier, back when I cared about the movie. (HC)

Mel Gibson in BRAVEHEART (1995)

Mel Gibson is really into the torture porn and martyrdom, isn't he? I know this isn't news; even the South Park parody is old and moldy. But at the end of Braveheart, Gibson's weird fetish wasn't old and creepy yet. It was new and creepy! And meant to lead the audience to admire ol' William Wallace for his hearty shout of "FREEEEEEEDOOOOOOMMMMM" despite his (offscreen) pain. And hey, if Mel could take the fake pain of the fake torture and still rally enough shout for freedom, what's a little waterboarding among friends? Perhaps I'm being overly glib; this movie was made well before our nation turned a blind eye to torture. And the message really isn't pro-torture so much as "boy, those English sure enjoyed publicly torturing that Scot guerrilla warrior." But the endless slo-mo, the black-and-white morality throughout, the obnoxious pushy score, all of these were torture enough for me as a viewer before we even approached Mel's craptastic death scene. I wish I'd had the presence of mind to shout freedom and escape the theater. (HC)

William Shatner in STAR TREK: GENERATIONS (1994)

They got Spock’s death right in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, except that he wasn’t really dead. They got Kirk’s death all wrong in Star Trek: Generations, but he still stayed dead – hell, he couldn’t even score a cameo in the new movie. A misconceived bridge between the old school Trek crew – emphasis on “old” by 1994 – and Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) and company, the movie was meant to launch a series of Next Generation movies while giving the outgoing administration a dignified sendoff. It didn’t accomplish either task with much success. The Next Gen flicks quickly petered out, and only three of the original series cast signed on for their farewell voyage – two of whom (James Doohan’s Scotty and Walter Koenig’s Chekov) disappear with little fanfare early in the proceedings. In the final reel, Screengrab MVP Shatner shows up to lend Picard a hand stopping Malcolm McDowell from destroying the universe or something, but Kirk’s “heroic” actions are pretty run-of-the-mill by his standards and his final moments woefully anticlimactic. (SVD)

But don’t take our word for it – here’s the man himself:

Shatner Responds: The Death Of Captain Kirk

Al Pacino in THE GODFATHER, PART III (1990)

No matter your faith, your creed, your political persuasion or your favorite Beatle, there’s one thing upon which all right-thinking people can agree: Michael Corleone’s story ended with the final shot of The Godfather, Part II. Nothing came after that. We all know he died at some point, because that’s how it works, but there was no reason to ever see it happen because the story was over. Unfortunately, some wrong-thinking people disagreed and eventually one of those people turned out to be Francis Ford Coppola, who had some bills to pay. He even wanted to title this movie The Death of Michael Corleone, just to make it clear that this is something he thought we should see. And so, at the end of his very terrible movie The Godfather, Part III, Coppola jumps some unknown distance into the future, where we find Al Pacino sitting alone on a bench with a bunch of grey shit in his hair. And then suddenly – and here I can’t put it any better than my friend John Mitchell did back in the day – he slumps over like Ruth Buzzi just whacked him with her handbag. And a little dog licks his face. I realize this is how I’m probably going to go out, too, but nobody made three movies about me. (SVD)

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Hayden Childs, Scott Von Doviak

Morning Deal Report: Hugh Jackman Unbound

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 13 May 2009 14:30:00 GMT

Madeleine Stowe makes her writing and directing debut with Unbound Captives, a western set to star Hugh Jackman, Rachel Weisz and Robert Pattinson. “Though Stowe's a newcomer behind the camera, getting the job and landing that cast is a payoff for her risky decision to turn down millions of dollars for the script in 1993…She would have played a woman (now to be played by Weisz) whose husband is killed and her two children kidnapped by a Comanche war party in 1859. She is rescued by a frontiersman, to be played by Jackman. Pattinson will play the son,” Variety reports.

Does the phrase “Scent of a Woman with a finance-y twist” make you shiver with anticipation? Please seek medical attention immediately. Al Pacino is in talks to star in Blink, an adaptation of Malcolm Gladwell’s nonfiction bestseller. Stephen Gaghan’s script “will center on the relationship between an older man (Pacino) and the twentysomething son he was never close to. The two reconnect early on in the pic, and the boy, an idealistic drifter who's teaching in a downtown New York school, and the father, a finance type living in Connecticut, must navigate their new relationship,” per The Hollywood Reporter.

Kevin Spacey will try to win back our hearts as Jack Abramoff in Casino Jack, to be directed by George Hickenlooper. “Film, formerly titled Bagman, stars Spacey as the once high-powered lobbyist whose bribery schemes and fraudulent dealings with Indian casinos ultimately landed him in prison.”

The Screengrab's Top Ten Worst...Movies...Ever!!!! (Part Eight)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 07 May 2009 23:30:00 GMT

Phil Nugent's Top Ten Worst Movies Ever (Part One)

1. FIELD OF DREAMS (1989)
2. JFK (1991)

Some would argue that Natural Born Killers is the ultimate Oliver Stone audiovisual freakout, but this celebration of the noble questing rectitude of a deranged slime ball named Jim Garrison will always have a special place in the spittoon of anyone who, like me, once lived in New Orleans and shared a city with that particular waste of space. There was a time when Stone himself actually seemed to think that Garrison's "theory" about the assassination of Kennedy had something to it, but that misguided period in his life was over by the time the movie opened, and Stone shifted to arguing that while, of course, everything Garrison ever said or did was manure, the important thing was to create a "counter-myth" to balance the "official myth" of the Warren Commission report. Marginally more sophisticated observers have tried to defend the movie on the grounds that, in its hyper thyroid dementia, it "captures" the mindset of many unfortunates who were mentally discombobulated by the turmoil and tragedy of the '60s. Maybe it does; the "Flesh Fair" sequence in Spielberg's A1 perfectly captures my mindset when I'm caught in traffic with a migraine, but I'm not sure that makes it any better. Anyway, we don't really go for rampaging homophobia here at the Screengrab, and however you want to dress this piggy up in fancy bows, it'll still be a street crazy rant about how the queers killed Kennedy. Add to its crimes the fact that it extended Kevin Costner's fifteen minutes.

3. NICKELODEON (1976)

The director Peter Bogdanovich was coming off a couple of terrible failures (At Long Last Love, Daisy Miller) when he came up with the plan for this lavishly scaled comic tribute to the early days of moviemaking, which amounted to his climbing inside his own coffin and personally nailing the lid shut. At Long Last Love may actually be the more revealing film in terms of the nostalgic alienation that killed off Bogdanovich's once soaring career, but it just so happens that this is the one that's just been released on DVD, and as always seems to happen nowadays whenever one horribly (and justly) reviled failure reappears in a new format (and with a gimmick--the DVD version offers the film in black and white, which Bogdanovich says is how he wished he'd made it--a few people have piped up to say that it is and always was an unappreciated masterpiece. Seriously, this shit has to stop. There ought to be some constants in this world.

4. REVOLUTION (1985)

Remember Hugh Hudson, who was garlanded as a major new director after his first feature, Chariots of Fire, won the Academy Award for Best Picture? No, you don't, and here's one of the reasons why. The best thing you can say about it is that it made its star, Al Pacino, realize that his best course might be to take four years off if that's how long it took him to be extra sure about his next script.

5. THE MUSIC LOVERS (1970)

Ken Russell is to Art and Music Appreciation what Oliver Stone is to Contemporary American History: visually overblown, crassly energetic, cheaply sensationalistic, and, like Dick Cheney, proud of his indifference to the facts whenever they contradict the "deeper truth" he knows in his heart to be right. This hysterical take on the life of Tchaikovsky (Richard Chamberlain) also shows that they have a shared affinity for homophobia and conspiracy theories. It's a wonder that Stone didn't ask Christopher Gable to reprise his role as Tchaikovksy's plotting, cast-off lover as one of the conspirators in JFK; it's not as if vampires don't live a long time.

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

Contributor: Phil Nugent

Blasphemy Isn't What It Used to Be: Ron Howard and "Angels & Demons"

Phil Nugent — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 15:30:00 GMT

Ron Howard's new movie, Angels & Demons, starring Tom Hanks as symbologist super sleuth Robert Langdon, is a follow-up to their 2006 piece-of-shit movie The Da Vinci Code, which was based on Dan Brown's bestselling 2003 pice-of-shit novel of the same name. (Angels & Demons is actually based on an earlier novel that Brown published in 2000, which marked the first appearance of the Langdon character.) I couldn't quite follow the thread of The Da Vinci Code, but I think it had something to do with clues hidden in the Mona Lisa that Amélie is Jesus Christ's great-great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter. (I think there was also something about how "the Holy Grail", legendary for being Jesus's favorite thing to drink from, was actually his pet name for Mary Magdalene, but that's so unbelievably filthy that I must have imagined it. We are, after all, talking about a movie made by Opie, starring Forrest Gump.) The new movie reportedly has to do with the return of the Illuminati, which (in Brown's conspiracy-fantasy mythology) was murderously wiped out by the Catholic church some three thousand years ago for being too scientific and artistic and progressive and all. As before, the new movie is being threatened with organized protests from Catholic groups who take offense at seeing their church portrayed as Murder, Inc. with funnier hats. Faced with these complaints, Howard has done what any serious religious history scholar would do: he's gone to the Huffington Post to deliver his Sermon on the Mount.

Howard's bete noire is William Donahue of the Catholic League, who, in Howard's words, "writes that I and the people who made this thriller 'do not hide their animus against all things Catholic.'" (Apparently all things Catholic include basic grammar.) "Let me be clear," writes the director of Frost/Nixon: "neither I nor Angels & Demons are anti-Catholic. And let me be a little controversial: I believe Catholics, including most in the hierarchy of the Church, will enjoy the movie for what it is: an exciting mystery, set in the awe-inspiring beauty of Rome. After all, in Angels & Demons, Professor Robert Langdon teams up with the Catholic Church to thwart a vicious attack against the Vatican. What, exactly, is anti-Catholic about that?" As to the details, "Mr. Donohue's booklet accuses us of lying when our movie trailer says the Catholic Church ordered a brutal massacre to silence the Illuminati centuries ago. It would be a lie if we had ever suggested our movie is anything other than a work of fiction (if it were a documentary, our talk of massacres would have referenced the Inquisition or the Crusades)...Mr. Donohue's op-ed [in the New York Daily News] and booklet also suggest that we paint the Church as 'anti-reason.' There is plenty of debate over what the Church did or didn't do with Galileo, but I for one do recognize that the Church did much throughout the ages to encourage and preserve education, the arts and the sciences." As Jesus used to say to Pontius Pilate, passive-aggressive much?

Unmollified by these and other valuable points made by Howard (ranging from "And if fictional movies could never take liberties with reality, then there would have been no Ben-Hur, no Barabbas, The Robe, Gone With The Wind, or Titanic. Not to mention Splash!" to "Even the current 'faith vs. science' debate over embryonic stem cells is briefly depicted in Angels & Demons in a balanced way."), Donahue has struck back in his latest press release: “Dan Brown says in his book that the Illuminati are ‘factual’ and that they were ‘hunted ruthlessly by the Catholic Church.’ In the film’s trailer, Tom Hanks, who plays the protagonist Robert Langdon, says ‘The Catholic Church ordered a brutal massacre to silence them forever.’ Howard concurs: ‘The Illuminati were formed in the 1600s. They were artists and scientists like Galileo and Bernini, whose progressive ideas threatened the Vatican.’ All of this is a lie. The Illuminati were founded in 1776 and were dissolved in 1787. It is obvious that Galileo and Bernini could not possibly have been members: Galileo died in 1647 and Bernini passed away in 1680. More important, the Catholic Church never hunted, much less killed, a single member of the Illuminati. But this hasn’t stopped Brown from asserting that ‘It is a historical fact that the Illuminati vowed vengeance against the Vatican in the 1600s.’" Perhaps sensing how many readers stepped out into the hallway for a smoke while he was rattling off dates, Brown adds, "Moreover, we know from a Canadian priest who hung out with Howard’s crew last summer in Rome (dressed in civilian clothes) just how much they hate Catholicism.” Personally, I have no plans to see Angels & Demons, but I would pay half my body weight in gold bullion to see a movie based on the true-life adventures of an undercover Catholic, dressed in a Canadian priest's idea of "civilian clothes"--I'm picturing Disco Stu with a cross around his neck--who hangs out with Opie and Forrest to listen to them express the true, hateful feelings they have about Catholics when they think all the Pope's children are in the bathroom. ("And the rhythm method--what's that all about!? You look at the size of some of these families, I guess maybe Mel Gibson's had a little trouble finding the backbeat, y'know what I'm saying? Cheese it, here comes Coppola!")

Now, we don't really have a dog in this race. And make no mistake about it, we here at the Screengrab are just crazy about blasphemy and try to encourage it whenever we can. What's discouraging, though, is Howard's good-natured, reasonable tone: yeah, we kind of dis your church's history and make your guys look like nut jobs and gangsters, but we don't mean anything by it! It's just necessary to the plot of a good thriller. What are you saying, that you don't like good thrillers? Go dig Hitchcock up and blow shit at him! Some real moviemakers like Bunuel risked their careers, their standing in the community, and maybe even their lives to make blasphemous movies, and somebody like Howard flirts with it, out of commercial necessity--somebody is going to make movies out of Dan Brown's bullshit--and expects everybody to understand that it doesn't really mean anything to him, so it shouldn't give offense to anyone. I myself am no fan of Oliver Stone's JFK, either as a movie or as an historical argument, but I'll give it this much: I'm willing to believe that the murder of John Kennedy is something that Stone is, or was, genuinely freaked out about. it's understandable that Howard would be baffled and even offended by William Donahue's assertion that he's actually a hater and propagandist against the Catholic church instead of a guy trying to make a buck with a pre-sold property, but if he would open his mind up a little, he might be able to see that, in his way, Donahue is paying him a compliment by suggesting that he's a serious enough man to believe in his own crap. As Al Pacino put it in Dog Day Afternoon, if somebody's going to blow my brains out, I hope it's somebody who does it because he hates my guts, not because it's his job.

The Best & Worst Get Rich Quick Schemes In Cinema History! (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 20:00:00 GMT

President Obama is two weeks away from the end of his first 100 days as Commander-In-Chief, and it’s been a wild ride so far, what with all the pirates, puppies and Queen-touching...but naturally, the administration’s main focus has been moving heaven and earth to ensure that nothing will prevent Bank of America executives from receiving my tax money while they charge me 24% interest on my credit card debt, thus ensuring I’ll never be able to afford any of the hundreds of empty, overpriced luxury condos in my neighborhood...because, as we all know, if the day ever comes when bankers and real estate developers make less than a zillion percent profit every second of the day, no matter how badly or unethically they run their businesses, then the terrorists win! (Or something like that...frankly, I’m just happy gas isn’t four dollars a gallon anymore. Hooray, bad economy!)

Anyway, the point is, now that Bernie Madoff has all the world’s money buried in a treasure chest somewhere on Skull Island, Americans have finally realized that money can’t buy happiness, and at long last we’re no longer trying to keep up with the Joneses, but instead living within our means, valuing the simple pleasures of life and judging people on their character, rather than the size of their wallets or the labels on their clothes.

Nah, just kidding: in truth, we’re all still cheating on our taxes, begging for bailouts and building bigger and better Ponzi schemes, because in the words of Danny Devito’s crooked fence in David Mamet’s Heist, “Everybody needs money. That’s why they call it money.” And so, in that altruistic spirit, your pals here at the Screengrab hereby present our very own economic stimulus package: THE BEST & WORST GET RICH QUICK SCHEMES IN CINEMA HISTORY!

OFFICE SPACE (1999)

By the time Mike Judge’s half-brilliant Office Space gets around to its get-rich-quick scheme, its best moments are behind it. It starts out so well, with the story of a chronically bored office drone (Ron Livingston) who finds himself – after an accidental dose of post-hypnotic suggestion – completely incapable of giving a shit about his job. This is Office Space at its best, a note-perfect satire of cubicle life enlightened hugely by the appearance of a character who upends the whole idea of consequence and thus makes for some of the most viciously barbed gags of its day. Once it gets around to Livingston and his colleagues hatching a Superman III-inspired, computer-aided plan to steal millions by shaving half-pennies off of every transaction, it becomes more or less a goofy caper comedy, which, while well-executed, can’t hold a candle to its truly inspired first half. Still, as get-rich-quick schemes go, it’s a classic, and damned if it doesn’t almost work. (LP)

HEAT (1995)

Heat famously brought Al Pacino and Robert De Niro together on-screen – if only for one diner conversation and a climactic chase sequence – yet it’s Michael Mann’s direction that elevates this cat-and-mouse saga to near-greatness. The story revolves around the efforts of Pacino’s cop to catch De Niro’s crook, two kindred warriors on opposite sides of the law. Though this dynamic is, to put it mildly, hackneyed, Mann’s film is an energized, invigorated work that recalls Jean-Pierre Melville’s noirs, which also focused on peerlessly cool lawmen and thieves whose dedication to customs, habits and ethical codes leaves them isolated. As the criminal struggling to reconcile personal desires for happiness with instincts that warn against being something he’s not, De Niro delivers his last great performance. Pacino’s trademark quiet-screaming overacting and a few too many narrative diversions prove occasionally aggravating, but De Niro’s superb turn helps offset these slight missteps, as does the thrilling in-broad-daylight centerpiece robbery that cements Heat’s status in the pantheon of heist films. (NS)

OCEAN’S 11, 12, 13… (1960, 2001, etc.)

The original 1960 Ocean’s 11’s best get-rich quick scheme didn’t take place onscreen; it was the Rat Pack’s all night, every night ring-a-ding-ding showcase at the Sands while shooting the film on location in Las Vegas. Sure, knocking over five casinos during a blackout on New Year’s Eve has a certain flair to it, but there’s nothing like working 22 hours a day for six straight weeks to really fatten the wallet. In 2001, a Frat Pack led by George Clooney and Brad Pitt staged their own Vegas heist, lifting $150 million from the Bellagio vault with the help of a Chinese acrobat, a Cockney explosives expert mysteriously played by Don Cheadle, and the always indispensible Elliott Gould. The remake took in even more than $150 million at the box office, which led to two further get-rich-quick schemes: the winky, self-referential Ocean’s 12, a sort of spiritual cousin to The Cannonball Run II, and Ocean’s 13, which proved once again that the death knell of a franchise sounds a lot like Al Pacino yelling. (SVD)

THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE (1948)

Part of the point of John Huston's classic is that prospecting for gold isn't actually an easy or quick way to strike it rich at all, but once you've laid out for the tools and traveled all the way out into the middle of the Mexican desert and gotten used to the sight of Walter Huston jeering at you without his dentures, you're more than likely to stick with it until you've got something to show for it. After that, all you have to worry about is whether your paranoid, half-mad partner is going to be able to convince himself that you're plotting to steal his share of the "goods" so that he can feel justified in knocking you off and helping himself to your share. Whatever moral and practical defects can be found in Bogart's plan, it has to be said that he's a sage and a prince compared to the hippopotamus-toothed bandit played by the immortal Alfonso Bedoya, whose master plan involves decapitating Bogart and stealing his burros, after he's thrown away those saddlebags filled with the funny yellow powder that's weighing them down. (PN)

Click Here For Part Two, Three, Four, Five & Six

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Nick Schager, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

Morning Deal Report: Jackie Earle Haley's Nightmare

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 14:00:00 GMT

He’ll always be Kelly Leak to some of us, but in his recent comeback phase, Jackie Earle Haley has played a child molester, a violent vigilante and now…a violent child killer. And he seemed like such a nice boy. Haley will indeed assume the mantle of Freddy Krueger in a new remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street. I think every Wes Craven movie has now been remade, except that one with Meryl Streep playing the violin. “Looking at his performance in Watchmen, here’s a guy playing a character under a mask yet you feel tremendous empathy for him,” director Samuel Bayer told The Hollywood Reporter. “And in Nightmare, he is going to be under prosthetic make-up. You have to feel something for the character. The greatest villains are multi-dimensional and I think he will bring that to the character.”

“Larry Charles is set to take on geriatric sex in his next project,” Variety tells me before I’ve even had my first cup of coffee. Thanks, Variety! “The Borat director is in final negotiations to helm Columbia Pictures comedy Winter's Discontent, which centers on a sexually frustrated widower who moves into a retirement community with his best buddy -- looking to get laid.”

More yelling for Al Pacino! Pacino will play Napoleon! It’s “a screen adaptation of Staton Rabin's children's book Betsy and the Emperor”! You child!

Related:
Freddy and the Furious Go to Cloverfield
Pacino Finds New Role Involving Lots of Yelling

Morning Deal Report: The Passion of the Rourke

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 14:30:00 GMT

He’s never going away, folks. Mickey Rourke has signed on to yet another project, this one called Passion Plays. “Mitch Glazer will write and direct the indie tale, the logline of which is being kept under wraps,” per The Hollywood Reporter. “Glazer is the screenwriter behind the Al Pacino CIA saga The Recruit and the Bill Murray holiday comedy Scrooged.”

Danny De Vito is bringing the Crazy Eddie story to the big screen. De Vito will direct the biopic of Eddie Antar, founder of the electronics chain, Variety reports. After “losing control of his company in a hostile takeover, Antar went on the lam after the new owners uncovered his financial shenanigans and the SEC charged him with stock fraud.” By the way, if you remember the TV ads for Crazy Eddie’s – “His prices are in-SAAANE!!” – that’s not Antar. It’s an actor. Another illusion shattered.

Here’s a remake we never thought we’d see – X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes. Spanish director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo has signed to update the original Ray Milland thriller. If you’ve somehow forgotten, it’s the story of a “scientist who is near a breakthrough in X-ray vision technology when his funding is cut off. Desperate to show results, the doc applies eye drops that eventually cause him to lose control over his growing powers.”

Related:
Mickey Rourke's Whiplash
Coming Soon: 55 Remakes!

Hello, Dali: Al May Play in Sal in One of Three Planned Biopics

Phil Nugent — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 17:00:00 GMT

Jerome Taylor reports that there are three biopics about Salvador Dali in the works, a perfect storm of competing productions that might make for a much bigger payoff for whoever is the first to get a completed film to market. (Who can forget the great multiple-Truman-Capote-movies dust-up of a few years ago?) The first film to arrive in theaters will probably be Paul Morrison's Little Ashes, which stars Robert Pattison, the vampire hunk from Twilght, as the young Dali, Javier Beltrán as Federico Garcia Lorca, and Matthew McNulty as Luis Bunuel, whose first film, the immortal Surrealist short Un Chien Andalou, was co-directed with Dali and featured a cameo by the artist as a priest. Another film, simply titled Dali, is being planned, by the director Simon West, for a 2010 release and would star Antonio Banderas as the older Dali, alongside his Zorro co-star Catherine Zeta Jones as Dali's wife, Gala. Then there's the chance that we'll get to see the way older Dali played by Al Pacino in a movie based on Dali & I: The Surreal Story, a book by Stan Lauryssens. Lauryssens's book, which has been translated into some thirty languages, had its own scandalous reception when it appeared. Lauryssens, who has written award-winning crime novels, five nonfiction books about the Nazis, and boasted about his expertise at writing and selling "fake interviews" with various Hollywood celebrities, also spent some time in the poky for selling fake Dalis. The book set off fire alarms in Europe for its allegation that Dali himself had effectively authorized the sale of forgeries of his work by setting up an assembly line of "assistants" to create works that he could then decorate with his signature, which amounted to printing money. By the time Dali was in his dotage, Andy Warhol was unapologetically doing pretty much the same thing, with Jeff Koons waiting in the wings; in Warhol's case, his admirers were happy to take the whole thing as some kind of postmodernist gesture and a sardonic comment on the treatment of works of art as high-priced commodities, but even if it was a gesture, Andy still expected people to pay through the nose for the damn things. If Lauryssens's depiction of Dali's operation is accurate, Dali might have been able to talk a pretty good game explaining that he was in charge of a "surreal" parody of the art world as just another industry. Of course, by that time, Dali had long since been read out of the Surrealist movement by his former brothers, who, appalled at what they saw as his selling out and turning himself into a profitable living cartoon of a wacky artist, referred to him by the anagrammatic nickname "Avida Dollars."

Dali himself had one foot in Hollywood for much of his life, engaging in publicity stunts such as presenting Harpo Marx with a "surreal" harp strung with barbed wire and cutlery, and designing the dream sequence for Hitchcock's analytic mystery Spelllbound. (That ended up being pretty much a publicity stunt, too; Hitchcock shot some twenty minutes of film based on the material Dali gave him, but the movie's producer, David Selznick, thought that it just slowed the picture down and cut it back to a few fragments.) He also spent eight months in 1945 working on an animated short for Walt Disney; it never got beyond am 18-minute test reel in Dali's and Disney's lifetimes, but the 2003 Destino was based on Dali's and Disney artist John Hench's storyboards. Back in his Hollywood-fake-journalist days, Laurysssens embroidered on that factoid and "made up a great story about how he and Disney were working on a sort of pornographic cartoon together.” Taylor writes that "That story caught the attention of a shady investment group in Belgium who assumed Lauryssens was a Dali expert and hired him as a fine art dealer. So, at just 25, Lauryssens found himself flying around Europe buying scores of Dali paintings despite having absolutely no prior experience in the world of fine art." According to Lauryssens, “everyone knew that Dali needed close to half a million dollars a month to fund his lavish lifestyle,” which Lauryssens likens to that of "a mini-maharajah,” and fake Dalis sold better by then than Dali's own later works because his "assistants" had a better handle on how to festoon the works with such familiar Dali "trademarks" as "the melting clocks." Of course, any Hollywood interest in Dali now will be based not on any debates over the degree to which he was an artist or a con man but on how sensational his life was, and here, Lauryssens, who is set to be played in the movie by Cillian Murphy, is confident that a film based on his book would qualify as a humdinger. Taylor notes that the book "portrayed the painter and his wife Gala as two voraciously charged lovers who regularly indulged in orgies with famous actresses". But by the last time Lauryssens laid eyes on him, Dali "was balding, his stomach swollen 'and his right arm shook from shoulder to wrist'." Lauryssens says that the movie is all set to go as soon as Pacino signs on. The trick there may be postponing Al's realization that he would be playing the fat old bald guy with the tremor who gets to spend his time on screen flashing back to when Cillian Murphy was involved in all those cool orgies.

If It's Tueday, It Must Be Time for Another Post About "The Godfather"

Phil Nugent — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 18:00:00 GMT

Every time Carmine Caridi turns on the TV and sees James Caan kicking the shit out of his brother-in-law or getting gunned down at the toll booth in The Godfather, something inside him dies a little. In his account of the making of that movie in the new Vanity Fair, Mark Seal report that Caridi was cast, as in told that he had the role, as Sonny Corlone, and managed to hold onto it for a few days. "Caridi", Seal writes, "was a Sonny straight out of [Mario] Puzo’s book: a six-foot-four, black-haired Italian-American bull who came from a tough section of New York. Told that he had the part, Caridi quit the play he was appearing in and got fitted for wardrobe. When he walked down the block he had grown up on, people hanging out of windows screamed, 'One of the boys made it!' 'Women were coming up to me with their babies to kiss for good luck,' Caridi says. Caan recalls, 'He was running around with some friends of mine, celebrating. And I said, "Hey, don’t do this. They’re very shaky up there, and I know what Francis wants—no disgrace to you." … He was going to this club and that club,' meaning clubs frequented by the boys from Caan’s old neighborhood. 'They said, "What do you want to hang around us for?" And he says, "Well, I want to get the feeling." They said, "We’ll give you the feeling. We’ll throw you out of the fucking car at 90."'”

Caridi may have been the very image of Sonny Corleone down to his toes, but he didn't have the inside view of the casting process that Caan had by then. Caan was part of the core group of four--along with Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, and Robert Duvall--who Francis Coppola wanted from the very start. He met with active resistance to both Brando and Pacino from the studio, and though Caan seemed to have the best chance of all them of getting into the movie, the studio wanted Coppola to consider him for Michael, Pacino's part. "That was the last thing Francis wanted," Caan says now, "because he had it in his mind that Michael was the Sicilian-looking one and Sonny was the Americanized version." (It may be some kind of proof of the genius of this casting idea that, after the movie came out, Caan says that he "won Italian of the Year twice in New York, and I’m not Italian.") While Caridi was out spending his salary, Coppola made one last hard press for Pacino as Michael, a move that would practically demand that Caan, then officially cast as Michael, be shifted to the role of Sonny because of the difference in height between Pacino and Caridi. Finally, the Paramount chieftain Robert Evans--who looked much more like a classically tall-and-handsome Hollywood star than Pacino, and who thought that the role demanded a classically tall-and-handsome Hollywood star type because it was the role he'd have coveted if he were still an actor, relented. "“I don’t think I’ve gotten over it, still,” says Caridi, who at 74 is still a working actor. Coppola must have felt just godawful about all this, because he cast Caridi in small roles in both The Godfather, Part II and, many years later, The Godfather III. Caridi did strike other casting directors as sufficiently mobish that he got to play Frank Costello in Bugsy (1991) and Sam Giancana in Ruby (1992). Whatever happened to all those babies he kissed for luck has not yet been determined.

We've read a lot of articles about the making of The Godfather by now, and if you follow these links the way we tell you to, so have you. The special fascination of Seal's account is the emphasis it places in the actual (ahem) Mafia's role in almost preventing the movie from getting made, in its getting made, and the enthusiasm for it that overtook them once it was finished. Although neither Puzo nor Coppola ever met a real gangster--Coppola recalls that “Mario told me to never meet them, never agree to, because they respected that and would stay away from you if they knew you didn’t want contact.”--many people tried to get into the movie by boasting of their real-life organized crime bona fides. Alec Rocco, A.K.A. Moe Greene, wanted everyone to know that he had a past as a bookie and had the butt-ugly mugshot to prove it. Al Martino, the singer who played Johnny Fontaine, let it be known that he had the role coming to him because he was Johnny Fontaine, mob connections and all, which must have given Frank Sinatra, who reportedly wanted the production shut down because he thought everyone in the world thought that he was supposed to be Johnny Fontaine, mixed feelings. In the end, Martino got the role, despite Coppola's reported preference for Vic Damone, despite the fact that he was so inexperienced an actor that Brando had to resort to throwing an unscripted slap to the face into their big scene together in an effort to startle him enough to get him to come out and play. Bettye McCartt, assistant to producer Al Ruddy, broke her watch on the set one day and was approached by Lenny Montana, the mountainous former wrestler who played the Corleone family emforcer Luca Brasi. McCartt recalls that “He said, ‘What kind of watch would you like?,’ and I said, ‘I’d like an antique watch with diamonds on it, but I’ll get another $15 one.’ A week passes, and Lenny comes and he’s got a Kleenex in his hand wadded up, and he’s looking over his shoulder every step of the way.” He placed the wad of Kleenex on her desk. She opened it, and there was an antique diamond watch inside. “And he says, ‘The boys sent you this. But don’t wear it in Florida.’”

Meanwhile, Joe Colombo, the most "media-savvy" of the leaders of the Five Families, was battling the production through his "civil rights" organization, the Italian-American Civil Rights League, which had "a membership of 45,000 and a $1 million war chest." Looking to make peace, Al Ruddy invited Colombo to come to his office and examine the screenplay. “So next day Joe shows up with two other guys. Joe sits opposite me, one guy’s on the couch, and one guy’s sitting in the window.” Ruddy pulled out the 155-page script and gave it to the Mob boss. “He puts on his little Ben Franklin glasses, looks at it for about two minutes. ‘What does this mean—fade in?’ he asked. And I realized there was no way Joe was going to turn to page two.” Luckily, Colombo decided to cut to the chase: his only demand was that the word "Mafia" be deleted from the script and never appear in the movie. This, it turned out, was not the most difficult thing he could have asked for: the word appeared in the script exactly once, when the movie studio boss played by John Marley read Duvall's Tom Hagen the riot act, telling him in the most offensive way possible that he has no fear of Italian crime lords. Considering that Marley's diatribe also contained the words "dago", "wop", "greaseball", and "goombahs", the general feeling was that even with the "M"-word removed, the speech would still retain the necessary flavor. In the end, the movie would become a beloved totem among Italian Americans, law-abiding and otherwise, but Colombo himself would not live to see it. He was executed by a gunman, presumed to have been hired by rival gangster Joey Gallo, while appearing at an Italian-American Civil Rights League Unity Day celebration in New York in June 1971, at the same time that part the movie was being filmed a few blocks away. Al Ruddy had declined an offer to sit beside Colombo on the dais.

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 23:00:00 GMT

HARVEY & JACK, MILK (2008)

Most every straight guy I know has tangled at some point with the Sexy Crazy Girl (y’know, the one that stole your wallet and set your bathroom on fire but looked so damn good in that little plaid miniskirt), and most straight girls have their horror stories about that Hot But Psycho Bad Boy all their friends warned them about, to no avail. From Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction and Leslie Mann in The 40 Year Old Virgin to Brad Pitt in Thelma & Louise and Mark Wahlberg in Fear, Sexy Crazy Girls and Hot But Psycho Bad Boys have been well-represented in mainstream cinema over the years. And while independent films (not to mention six seasons of The L Word) have provided numerous rainbow-flavored versions of the aforementioned archetypes, the gay characters depicted in most Hollywood films are usually too sexless and/or noble to fall into the sorts of messy romantic entanglements that pit brains and common sense against libido, heart and instinct. Gus Van Sant’s Milk, of course, was a recent and notable exception, dramatizing not only Harvey Milk’s heroic struggle for gay rights, but also the concrete realities of the complicated human relationships beneath all the abstract rhetoric. Like Hillary and Julia Goodridge, who recently got divorced after helping to pave the way for same-sex marriages in Massachusetts (yeah, MA!), Sean Penn’s Harvey Milk is only human as he fights for human rights. Like any number of hard-working professionals before and since, he has trouble balancing his personal and professional life, and falls into a mid-life crisis affair with Diego Luna’s clingy, troubled good-time-guy Jack Lira. For those who haven’t seen the movie, let’s just say that, in the tradition of countless real world and cinematic Crazy Girl/Bad Boy relationships, it doesn’t end well.

BOBBY & HELEN, THE PANIC IN NEEDLE PARK (1971)

Not giving your characters last names to make them more universal is always generally kind of a cheap trick, but Joan Didion co-wrote this, so I suppose we should just let it go. The Panic In Needle Park outdid Requiem For A Dream by nearly 30 years through a really simple expedient: just show people shooting up in needle close-ups. You don't need the anal dildo or hallucinations then. Bobby (Al Pacino) and Helen (Kitty Winn) don't use at first; he just deals, and she stares adoringly. Then he starts "chipping," she sneaks some while he's sleeping to see what it's all about, and much OD'ing, jail time and bad decision-making ensue. They're a couple who accelerate each others' downward spirals; thanks to one of Pacino's early galvanizing performances (before the ham set in) and Winn's essentially passive, worshipful gaze, it works.

MIMI & OSCAR, BITTER MOON (1992)

Oscar, an older American expat writer meets Mimi, a hot young French girl on a bus in Paris. After the initial meet-cute hot romance ensues. Years later we meet Oscar again, a broken man, as he tells his story to an awkward young Brit (Hugh Grant) on a Mediterreanean cruise. Don't let the presence of Hugh Grant fool you. This is a Polanski flick. The gist is that a man hasn't truly loved a woman unless there were animal masks and water sports invoved and he treated her like shit. Conversly, a lady never really loved a man unless she let him dismantle her self-confidence brick by brick and then took her revenge by putting him in a wheel chair and flaunting her magnificently muscled lover in front of him. Sounds like fun, no?

GEORGE & SHERRY PEARY, THE KILLING (1956)

There may be no film genre richer in sordid, back-stabbing, and generally unrewarding relationships than that of film noir, and they never got nastier than when Marie Windsor, star of Cat Women of the Moon, was in the room. With her heavy lids, bottle-blonde Wilma Flintstone 'do, a nose that she seemed to be looking down at men from even when they were taller than her, and a voice that could make any line sound withering, Windsor was born to nag, and in Stanley Kubrick's classic caper movie, she's partnered with an actor who was such a natural sucker that he first made crime movie history getting sold out by Sidney Greenstreet. Loitering around their apartment, Windsor casually reduces her short hubby to asking why she married him --"You used to love me. You said you did, anyway." -- to which she responds that he hasn't exactly delivered on those promises he made about hitting it big and setting her up in style, adding that she doesn't mind the lack of money so long as she has "a big, strong intelligent brute like you" to be down with. Even Homer Simpson would have trouble missing the sarcasm. The final proof that this marriage cannot be saved comes when she finds out that her husband George is involved in a million dollar racetrack robbery scheme; rather than just wait for him to pull off the heist and show up at home to wave the dough in her face, she just can't resist getting her boy toy -- Vince Edwards, all muscles and smirk -- to oil his own gun and go try to rip off the robbers. Poor George finds out that his lovey-dove has set him up for the last time when he hears Edwards break into the room, look around for him, and ask, "Hey, where's the jerk?"

STEVE BOLANDER & LAURIE HENDERSON, AMERICAN GRAFFITI (1973)

When American Graffiti begins, the plan is for Steve and his buddy (and Laurie's sister) Curt to go off to the East Coast and attend college; this means that his relationship with Laurie will be going long-distance, but not to worry -- Steve has thought about that and proposes to Laurie that they strenghten their bond to each other by seeing other people. This goes down about as well as you could expect. Bad as this is, those of us who actually know people who saw the momentous event of their high school graduation as a cue to marry their first serious dating partner will recognize that the real sign of horror to come arrives when Steve and Laurie take to the dance floor, and she clings to him with such fierce tenacity that his bare back must look as if he'd gone a couple of rounds with Lon Chaney, Jr. She then forces him to recognize the depth of his "true feelings" for her -- defined here as his acquisitive male jealousy -- by flouncing off and landing in Harrison Ford's lap. Come dawn and they're so solidly committed to each other that Steve isn't going away to college anymore, which means that in a few years, he'll have someone handy to blame for the fact that he's stuck in a shitty job in the same podunk town he grew up in, and she can't look at him without thinking about the twenty minutes when she was Indiana Jones' girl.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Vadim Rizov, Sarah Clyne Sundberg, Phil Nugent

Bloody Valentines: The Worst Relationships in Cinema History (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 21:00:00 GMT

To paraphrase Edwin Starr: Valentine’s Day! Huh! What is it good for?

Well...depends who you ask: it certainly didn’t work out too well for the poor Roman priest who got himself beaten, stoned, beheaded (and later canonized) for nuptializing Christian couples out of season, nor for any of the other Catholic martyrs named Valentine whose various grisly fates somehow led to the annual tradition of grown-ass men dropping seventy bucks a pop to have teddy bears in boxer shorts with hearts on them delivered to grown-ass women in the middle of winter.

Scholars blame Geoffrey Chaucer for ruining February 14th by linking a bunch of obscure Roman Catholic feast days with the aggravating concept of courtly love, thus stressing out singles and couples alike for centuries to come with unrealistic, unattainable expectations about all the perfect moments of romance we’re all supposed to be having (instead of weeping lonely tears into our popcorn at solo matinees of He’s Just Not That Into You or forgetting to buy a frickin’ card for our significant others and never hearing the goddamn frickin’ end of it).

It should, of course, be remembered that St. Valentine’s ol’ pagan buddy Cupid is the son of both a goddess of love AND a god of war, and thus not all the couples the little bastard shoots with his arrows wind up living happily ever after. Therefore, as a cheery reminder that things could always be worse in this infernal season of l’amour, your friends-with-benefits here at the Screengrab are proud to present BLOODY VALENTINES: THE WORST RELATIONSHIPS IN CINEMA HISTORY!

PROF. IMMANUEL RATH & LOLA LOLA, THE BLUE ANGEL (1930)

A sort of preemptive riposte to the 20th century's literary canon of professors effectively leveraging their intellectual heft for the purpose of seducing their students, The Blue Angel has stuffy Rath (Emil Jannings) falling for cabaret singer Lola Lola (Marlene Dietrich) when he goes down to waggle his finger in her face and tell her to stop distracting his students. Instead, she captivates and reduces him to a pathetic spectacle, as pathetic in the public's eyes as he is in hers. If Rath had at least a little touch of submissiveness in him, maybe he'd enjoy being constantly humiliated in a sub-dom 24/7 way; as it is, Lola reduces him to a man with no free will. Dietrich's star was made in this first collaboration with Josef von Sternberg; meanwhile, Jannings' performance is frequently looked down upon as an anachronistic acting style from another age. Which actually makes perfect sense for the character he's playing. As a depiction of a May-December, intellectual-emptyheaded, pompous-earthy, and every other kind of mismatch possible relationship, The Blue Angel isn't painful only because it's more conducive to distanced contemplation and sarcastic laughter than visceral empathy. Should you have extra time at work (should you still be employed, in fact), some kind soul has uploaded the whole German version to YouTube, but the embedding has been disabled, so enjoy the trailer above, then click here to watch the whole thing.

GEORGE & MARTHA, WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? (1966)

There may be bloodier couples in the history of cinema, but there are none whose hatred burned brighter. George and Martha – a small-time failure of a college professor and his crude harpy of a wife, played by real-life couple Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor – may not want to kill each other, but it’s only because dead they would be past inflicting pain, which is all that keeps them going. Considering that Martha speaks of their marriage in terms of total warfare, and George’s idea of whimsical banter is to point a rifle at his wife’s head during a cocktail party, it’s no surprise that this movie has become shorthand for violently feuding couples. This is a couple that’s beyond mere feuding, but whose initial passion has never soured: it’s been transformed into something just as fiery, a loathing built on complete knowledge of, and complete dependence upon, one another. The film shocks us right out of the box by presenting us with a couple whose fury and loathing for each other is deeper than the love in an any big-screen romance; it then shocks us even further by showing how deeply, albeit bizarrely, they care for each other, and how much more profound their relationship is than the seemingly happy couple that contrasts them.

MICHAEL & KAY CORLEONE, THE GODFATHER (1972) and THE GODFATHER, PART II (1974)

There's a lesson here that a lot of you girls would do well to heed: when your boyfriend runs off to Sicily without a word, gets married to a perfect stranger he met over there about ten minutes after he got off the boat, and then, after somebody sticks dynamite under the hood of the car and blows her sky high, he shows up where you work, again without a word, and announces that, lucky you, he's looking to fill the position of second wife and he's prepared to consider your qualifications -- honey, take a breath. If you feel swayed by his liquid brown eyes and passionate words, try and think about how you're going to feel waking up next to him in a few years, when the face is set off by a toupee like an earth-tone fireworks display and that insinuating voice keeps erupting "HOO-hah!" Then you tell Casanova that as much as you appreciate the offer, you feel that you might be overqualified on account of your ability to count above ten without taking off your shoes. Unless you've got some kind of fetish for having doors slammed in your face.

JACK & WENDY TORRANCE, THE SHINING (1980)

If you've seen The Shining as many times as I have – and there's very little chance of that – you've probably spent some time speculating about the marriage of Jack and Wendy Torrance. How did they meet? What was the attraction? When did they decide to get married, and didn't they have any friends or family to talk them out of it? Some would point to the obvious incompatibility of the brooding, hot-tempered Jack (Jack Nicholson) and the frail, skittish Wendy (Shelly Duvall) as a flaw in the movie, but to those people I would pose this query: Do you know any married people? Because if you do, surely you are aware that for every couple that seems inevitable and perfect for each other, there are at least three that make no sense whatsoever on any rational level. It's easy to blame Jack for the eventual dissolution of the relationship. He is the guy who starts talking to ghosts and running around with an axe, after all. But let's not let Wendy entirely off the hook. She did go along with a plan that entailed living in total isolation with a man who has a history of alcohol abuse and domestic violence (no matter how much she may have tried to downplay it), and she brought her young son Danny into it. At the very least, she's guilty of poor judgment, but at least it all works out in the end.

FRANK BOOTH & DOROTHY VALLENS, BLUE VELVET (1986)

Frank Booth and Dorothy Vallens, the two emblems of maniacal deviance and defiled virtue (respectively) in David Lynch’s surrealistic neo-noir Blue Velvet, may share things...but love isn’t one of them. Dorothy (Isabella Rossellini) is a nightclub singer with a daughter and an air of mystery, which – as Kyle MacLachlan’s amateur sleuth Jeffrey peeps after being shoved, post-blowjob, into a closet – is due to her association with Frank (Dennis Hopper). Frank is a sociopath holding Dorothy’s husband hostage so she might sexually gratify him, and the twisted sadomasochistic tryst (replete with helium inhalations and erotic asphyxiation) that Jeffrey witnesses while hiding in that closet may stand as some of the most disturbingly unsettling material ever shot by the peerlessly out-there Lynch. The couple’s relationship ultimately ends when Jeffrey shoots Frank dead, but this being Lynch, the ensuing happy ending is laced with perversion, due in part to the earlier suggestion that Dorothy, conditioned to Frank’s beatings, has been warped into associating pleasure with pain.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Vadim Rizov, Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent, Scott Von Doviak & Nick Schager

Morning Deal Report: Soderbergh Plays Moneyball

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 15:00:00 GMT

Happy Truck Day! With pitchers and catchers reporting to spring training in a matter of days, there’s no better time for Steven Soderbergh to announce his umpteen-zillionth project in development, Moneyball. Soderbergh is adapting the nonfiction baseball classic by Michael Lewis that “focuses on Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics who used a sophisticated computer analysis system to piece together a team that regularly contended for the World Series despite a payroll dramatically lower than such big-market rivals as the New York Yankees,” Variety reports. Brad Pitt is lined up to play Beane, and Joe Morgan has already vowed not to see the movie. We assume.

If there are two more romantic words than “The Baster,” I can’t imagine what they’d be. Jennifer Aniston and Jason Bateman are set to star in the romantic comedy from Blades of Glory co-directors Will Speck and Josh Gordon. Per The Hollywood Reporter, “Bateman and Aniston will play best friends Wally and Kassie. When Wally learns that Kassie plans to become pregnant through artificial insemination, he replaces the donor's semen with his own and must live with the secret that he is the father of her child.” Ick.

Al Pacino already has King Lear on his schedule, so why not make it a double and play King Herod as well? Pacino and Jessica Lange are in talks to join the cast of Mary, Mother of Christ, which is something my dad would say when he’d hit his thumb with a hammer. “Camilla Belle (10,000 BC) will star as the titular character and will be joined by Jonathan Rhys Meyers in the dual roles of Gabriel and Lucifer and Peter O'Toole as Symeon,” Variety reports.

Related:
Soderbergh Does Liberace
Pacino Finds New Role Involving Lots of Yelling

Morning Deal Report: Pacino Finds New Role Involving Lots of Yelling

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 15:00:00 GMT

Michael Radford (Merchant of Venice) will direct a new version of King Lear with Al Pacino in the title role. “While Pacino has played many Shakespearean characters, he has never played King Lear, the aging monarch who selects his successor by parsing his kingdom in three parts, ruled by his trio of daughters. Two of them are scheming connivers who flatter their father, while the one loving daughter, Cordelia, refuses to play that game and is exiled. The king ultimately loses everything,” Variety reports, without even the courtesy of a spoiler alert.

It’s Barry Levinson’s turn to make a World War II movie. The director “has signed on to helm a $35 million feature version of Anatoly Kuznetsov's WWII classic Babi Yar. Novel is the author's harrowing account of witnessing mass executions of Jews, gypsies, Poles and prisoners of war during the German occupation of Kiev. The title refers to a ravine called Babi Yar where the atrocities took place."

Robert Stone’s 1998 novel Damascus Gate is coming to the screen. The political thriller “is set in a world in which a groundbreaking accord between Palestinians and Israelis is nearly complete when a burned-out journalist comes upon an extremist plot to sabotage the effort,” per The Hollywood Reporter.

Related:
The 88 Longest Minutes of Al Pacino's Career
Screengrab Review: "What Just Happened?"

The Rep Report (January 30 - Feburary 5)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 19:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Positif, affectionately known as "the other French film magazine" for its often confrontational stance in regard to the institution that is Cahiers du Cinema, has its say about that matters in the American indie canon with "Mavericks and Outsiders: Positif Celebrates American Cinema", January 30 - February 5. The program, curated by the magazine's longtime editor Michel Climent, includes such cultish provocations as James Toback's directorial debut Fingers (1978); Paul Schrader's working-man dirge Blue Collar (1978); the living-tabloid The Honeymoon Killers (1970), the sole directing job by Leonard Kastle (who took over from the original hire, Martin Scorsese); Wanda (1971), a character drama written and directed by its star, Barbara Loden, a heartbreakingly gifted actress perhaps better known for having been married to Elia Kazan; the presecient my-camera-ate-my-life mock-documentary David Holzman's Diary (1967); and the little-seen 1989 Reunion, starring Jason Robards and directed by Jerry Schatberg from a script by Harold Pinter. Climent will introduce many of the screenings and also host discussions with such special guests as Toback and director Larry Clark.

If all that only serves to whet your appetite for vintage American indies, The Panic in the Needle Park, the 1971 New York City junkie drama that boasts Al Pacino's first starring role, checks into the Film Forum for a week starting today. Directed by the aforementioned Jerry Schatzberg, from a script by Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, and produced by Dunne's brother (and Didion's brother-in-law) Dominick Dunne before he began his own writing career, the movie is a well-made downer that has special historical value for its location shooting, which captures Fun City at its most rat-infested and raggedy--and which is augmented by an impressively grungy-looking supporting cast that includes Richard Bright, Raul Julia, Kiel Martin, Warren Finnerty, Joe Santos, Alan Vint, Marcia Jean Kurtz, Sully Boyar, and a tubby young Paul Sorvino in a bit as a cop--and of course for the first starring movie appearance by Pacino, 31 years old and a year away from The Godfather. He plays a scuffling heroin addict who falls in love with a young slummer played by Kitty Winn and sucks her into his vortex. The movie played at the Cannes Film Festival, where, surprisingly, it was Winn who came home with a prize for her performance. She would go on to play the assistant of the mother of the possessed little girl in both The Exorcist and Exorcist II: The Heretic, and disappear from the radar a few years later.

Douglas Sirk's 1950's films Magnificent Obsession and Imitation of Life would go on to win him a high-toned critical reputation as some kind of subversive master of stormy, hyperbolic melodrama and an inspiration to later filmmakers ranging from Fassbinder to Todd Haynes. Meanwhile, the older studio director John M. Stahl is known as, well, somebody who made a batch of movies that were later remade by Douglas Sirk. (In addition to the original Magnificent Obsession and Imitation of Life, Stahl directed the 1939 When Tomorrow Comes, which Sirk remade in 1957 as Interlude. But many old-movie lovers maintain that Stahl's originals are unself-conscious, well-wrought classics that have been unfairly overshadowed by Sirk's versions, and Anthology Film Archives is giving viewers a rare chance to compare them side by side with screenings this weekend of all six movies. Just on the basis of the on-screen talent, the 1934 Imitation, co-starring Claudette Colbert and the great black actress Louise Beavers, may have a clear edge.

Your 2008 Razzie Nominees

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 16:30:00 GMT

Getting the jump on the Oscar nominations by 24 hours, the contenders for this year’s coveted Golden Raspberry Awards have been announced. It should come as no surprise that The Love Guru leads the pack with seven nominations, including Worst Picture, and Worst Actor (Mike Myers). (The Love Guru has already suffered the disappointment of being named the Screengrab’s Worst of the Year, so this should be a cakewalk.)

Check out the major nominees after the jump.

WORST PICTURE

Disaster Movie
The Happening
The Hottie and the Nottie
The Love Guru
Meet the Spartans

WORST ACTOR

Mike Myers (The Love Guru)
Eddie Murphy (Meet Dave)
Al Pacino (88 Minutes and Righteous Kill)
Mark Wahlberg (The Happening)
Larry the Cable Guy (Witless Protection)

WORST ACTRESS

Jessica Alba (The Eye and The Love Guru)
The Cast of The Women
Cameron Diaz (What Happens in Vegas)
Paris Hilton (The Hottie and the Nottie)
Kate Hudson (Fool’s Gold and My Best Friend’s Girl)

The Worst Career Achievement award goes, of course, to Uwe Boll. The full list of nominees can be found at the official Razzies site.

DVD Digest for January 6, 2009

Paul Clark — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 15:00:00 GMT

This week brings a cavalcade of crap from the lean seasons of 2008. But if you’re willing to wade through it, there are treasures to be found.

DVD of the Week: The best news in a relatively slow week is the much-anticipated arrival of two very different films by the great British director Michael Powell. For years, fans of Powell and his longtime collaborator Emeric Pressburger have yearned for a DVD of one of their greatest films, 1946’s Stairway to Heaven, also known as A Matter of Life and Death. Finally, the film has arrived in a new pressing from Sony, complete with an introduction by longtime Powell fan and friend Martin Scorsese and an interview with film scholar Ian Christie. But wait, there’s more! Paired in the set with Stairway is Powell’s late-period film Age of Consent. I have yet to see the film, which by most accounts is fairly minor Powell. Yet how can one possibly resist a movie that stars James Mason and a luscious young (and often-nude) Helen Mirren, set against some lovely Australian settings? Not me, that’s for sure.

This week’s most notable recent releases on DVD are a pair of 2008’s highest-profile pot-themed movies- David Gordon Green’s Pineapple Express (Sony, also Blu-Ray) and Jonathan Levine’s The Wackness (Sony, also Blu-Ray). Also this week is the fiction debut of documentarian Jessica Yu, Ping Pong Playa (Image, also Blu-Ray), plus a quintet of shame: Nicolas Cage in Bangkok Dangerous (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray); Vin Diesel in Babylon A.D. (Fox, also Blu-Ray); Pacino and DeNiro cashing their paychecks in Righteous Kill (Anchor Bay, also Blu-Ray); Disaster Movie (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray), the latest in the seemingly deathless cycle of cut-rate parodies from the Friedberg/Seltzer team; and the right-wing spoof/jeremiad An American Carol (Universal). Whew.

This week’s big TV on DVD is Battlestar Galactica Season 4.0 (Universal). And in Blu-Ray only news, this week sees the release of Peter Jackson’s King Kong (Universal), the pigskin drama Friday Night Lights (Universal), and Season 1 of Showtime’s Dexter (Paramount).

Screengrab Presents: Cinema's Greatest Comebacks (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 21:00:00 GMT

“Don’t call it a comeback, I been here for years,” implored L.L. Cool J (shortly before his mother told him to knock us unconscious), raising an interesting point in the endless Hollywood parlor game of career perception: after all, the recent Golden Globe nominations for Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem would seem to mark Vicky Cristina Barcelona as a return to form for Woody Allen...but what then to make of the fact that Match Point, Sweet & Lowdown, Manhattan Murder Mystery, Crimes & Misdemeanors, etc. etc. were all considered phoenix-like returns to form in the Woodman’s prolific (and sometimes crappy) oeuvre? How many times can a person come back if they never really go away?

Sometimes, though (as in the case of pugilist/thespian Mickey Rourke), the weepy entertainment magazine profiles and welcome home parties seem entirely appropriate. After all, the one-time heartthrob used to be a bona fide movie star (and light bondage icon) thanks to hits like Diner and 9 ½ Weeks, and though he’s done interesting work since then in films like Buffalo '66 and Spun, among others, there’s a big difference between co-starring with Eric Roberts and generating Oscar buzz.

Sure, Rourke essentially torpedoed his own career by stomping around like the Pope of Douchebag Village for years and years...but as the auto and financial industries have shown, everybody gets a second chance in America, no matter how bad you fuck up (unless, of course, you’re poor).

So, in honor of this week’s release of The Wrestler, we here at The Screengrab hereby salute...THE GREATEST COMEBACKS OF ALL TIME!

(And stay tuned next week as we ask Santa for THE COMEBACKS WE’D MOST LIKE TO SEE!)

JACK NICHOLSON in TERMS OF ENDEARMENT (1983)

Though you could be forgiven for not believing it, there was a stretch there where it looked touch and go for the continued health of Jack Nicholson's continued career and reputation. After winning the Academy Award for Best Actor for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), Nicholson jumped head first into a series of high-profile ventures -- The Missouri Breaks, Goin' South (which he also directed), The Postman Always Rings Twice, and, yes, friends, The Shining, which did disappointing box office and was badly mauled by most reviewers. However many fans it's racked up in the years since, the reaction to his performance in The Shining was typical: the conventional wisdom was quickly turning towards the direction that a man once capable of sensitive work had turned into an eyeball-rolling self-parodist, and in a Playboy interview published a year before his 1982 death, the gentle-spirited Henry Fonda criticized Nicholson for having thrown away his career and disgracing his profession. The actor's critical reputation began to recover around the time the magazine hit the stands, starting with his supporting performance in Reds and then with his starring role in the little-seen The Border, but it was Terms of Endearment that set the tone for Nicholson's successful reinvention of himself as a post-counterculture elder statesman who styled himself as a broad but soulful entertainer, someone who was still prone to go over the top but could usually make you love him for it. It could be argued that Nicholson lost something beautiful in the process -- as Anthony Lane later wrote, Nicholson rose to stardom as a man who seemed deeply pained by the state of the world, and sustained his stardom into old age by turning into someone who seemed very pleased with himself -- but it was still an audacious pull back from the career abyss. The role of the pear-shaped horndog Garrett Breedlove won him a second Academy Award, this time for Best Supporting Actor, neatly bookending his time of trouble. It also established that he was smarter than Burt Reynolds, who famously turned the role down to honor his commitment to Hal Needham to do Stroker Ace, which in career terms was like honoring his commitment to show up in front of the firing squad at dawn with a cigarette in his mouth and the blindfold in place.

AL PACINO in SEA OF LOVE (1989)

This entertaining, twisty little thriller made the leap to event status on the strength of its announcement that Pacino had returned to functionability. Pacino had entered into a nightmarishly sustained slump after The Godfather, Part II and Dog Day Afternoon, starring in a series of movies that rank among the very worst of their time (Bobby Deerfield, Revolution), films so thoroughly mediocre and tinny that it was impossible to imagine what appeal they'd ever had for him (...And Justice for All, Author! Author!), as well as Cruising and Scarface, which, for whatever cult status they would come to enjoy, earned him more in bad press at the time than they did in good reviews or box office. Compared to some of those misfires, the relative modesty of Sea of Love was part of its appeal at the time: it was a relief to see Pacino, returning to the screen, after a four-year absence, in a clever little cop opera that gave him a chance to look worn-down and middle-aged but not romantically implausible, enjoying the Richard Price-scripted byplay with such solid pros as John Goodman and Richard Jenkins, and -- an eternal Pacino specialty -- demonstrating that he wasn't afraid to pitch on-screen woo with an actress (Ellen Barkin) who looked as if she could fold him up and stick him in her purse. His spirit refreshed, Pacino was back a year later as Big Boy Caprice in Dick Tracy, happily gnawing the last traces of meat from the hambone.

CHRISTOPHER LEE in THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING (2001) & STAR WARS EPISODE II: ATTACK OF THE CLONES (2002)

Lee has scarcely stopped working since entering movies in the late 1940s, but his ghettoized stardom in horror movies failed to translate into mainstream screen prominence, and as the decades went by, he seemed most likely to appear in high-profile pictures when the director was someone like Joe Dante or Tim Burton, who'd cut his teeth on Hammer films and felt an affectionate debt of gratitude to the old gent. Which is nice, but self-paroding cameos in Gremlins 2 and Sleepy Hollow do not a comeback make. The first real sign in years that the then-78-year-old Lee still had strapping reserves of energy going to waste came when he turned up in the 2000 BBC version of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast, where he was dashingly costumed and looked and moved like a man twenty years younger. But the cherries on top of his career came with his villainous performances as Rings' malignant sorcerer Saruman and the abuser of the Force Lord Dooku -- subtle, George -- which, by drawing on memories of his screen past even as they threaded him into the texture of the two biggest multi-part fantasy series of the turn of the century, honored his career while tying it up with a handsome bow. After which, Lee being Lee, he called his agent and went back to work.

DENNIS HOPPER & DEAN STOCKWELL in BLUE VELVET (1986)

For most of his career, Hopper had led the league in blackballings, being driven out of the acting profession by the director Henry Hathaway, then remaking himself as a director and returning in glory with the 1969 Easy Rider. The box office success of that movie was so bewildering to the studios that Hopper was given a big bag with a dollar sign on it and absolute creative freedom to do whatever he wanted for his next movie as director, which resulted in 1971's The Last Movie...and cue blackballing number two. Hopper would spend most of the next fifteen years reeling from his intake of drugs and drink while working on a string of offbeat projects for European and American maverick directors, ranging from Apocalypse Now and Rumble Fish for Coppola and Wim Wenders' The American Friend to Neil Young's Human Highway, Henry Jaglom's Tracks and Orson Welles' unfinished The Other Side of the Wind. His performances in most of them were pretty unsteady; Hopper seemed to have his notion of artistry boiled down to the actor's willingness to do anything, but nobody ever hesitated to hire Dennis Hopper because they were concerned that he might not be crazy enough. He's said that Blue Velvet, one of a string of films he appeared in around 1986 which also includes River's Edge, Hoosiers, and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre Part II, was the first job he'd gotten after getting clean and sober, though he apparently almost talked himself out of it by telling David Lynch that he had to play Frank Booth because he was Frank Booth, after which Lynch considered hiding under the table. It's a measure of how impressed Hollywood was with both Hopper's performance and the sheer feat of rendering himself employable that Entertainment Tonight had a camera installed in Hopper's home when the Academy Award nominees were announced on television so that they could record his reaction, it being a forgone conclusion that his name would be among those read aloud. (It's a measure of just how freaked out Hollywood was by Blue Velvet that the E.T. cameras got to record Hopper's momentary confusion when it turned out that he'd been nominated instead for his work in Hoosiers.) Hopper's long shadow also obscured some of the triumph of his Blue Velvet co-star, one-scene wonder Dean Stockwell, who had also appeared with him in The Last Movie, Tracks, and Human Highway. A child actor back in the 1940s, Stockwell had kept his career going into adulthood, winning the Best Actor award at Cannes for 1959's Compulsion and co-starring with Katharine Hepburn, Ralph Richardson, and Jason Robards in 1962's Long Day's Journey into Night. He went counterculture and turned his back on Hollywood in the late '60s and '70s, then slowly began creeping back with parts in Paris, Texas and To Live and Die in L.A., as well as Lynch's Dune, which he later told an interviewer was the only role he wanted badly enough to screen test for. (The interviewer next asked if he'd care to explain why he'd wanted it so badly. Stockwell replied that he'd rather not.) But it was his performance in Blue Velvet that made him hot enough that he could quit his second job hustling real estate.

JOHN TRAVOLTA in PULP FICTION (1994)

Travolta may have mixed feelings about having had his career resurrected by Quentin Tarantino, given that he's been known to insist to interviewers that he wasn't that far down the ladder when Pulp Fiction broke -- those Look Who's Talking movies made a lot of darn money, thank you very much! -- but most people who cared knew that Tarantino's dialogue and taste in hair extensions restored cachet and hipness to a star brand that had gotten badly devalued since 1981. Travolta cemented his comeback with Get Shorty, a project that he, yes, turned down before Tarantino called him up and advised him to snap to attention. His filmography since then has more than its fair share of stinkers, but it's better remembered now than it was in 1993 that he really is a terrific actor, and he retains the special dignity of a star who came back after being depicted as having been reduced to tending bar in a '70s nostalgia club on an episode of The Simpsons, an episode on which -- the ultimate indignity! -- he didn't even get to provide his own self-mocking voice. And, lest we forget, he did get to name Harry Knowles's site.

Click Here For Part Two, Three, Four & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

Screengrab Presents: The Best Stage-To-Screen Adaptations Of All Time (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 20:00:00 GMT

In the summertime, studios roll out their big budget cinematic adaptations of the hottest comic books, video games and Pez dispensers, but as the kids trudge off to the hallowed halls of academe (and then later return home for the holidays with their heads full o’ book learnin’), Hollywood gets all classy for a second and does its best to lure us away from actual theaters and libraries with big screen versions of all the hot Broadway plays we couldn’t get tickets for and all the literary classics we never quite got around to reading.

The Screengrab Book Club is already loading up on barbiturates in preparation for our field trip to the Titanic road show version of novelist Richard Yates' dour de force Revolutionary Road, but THIS week the play’s the thing as Doubt and Frost/Nixon open wide, dangling their multiple Tony awards and nominations like so much Oscar bait.

Yet, while it’s true that some of filmdom's greatest movies have greasepaint in their DNA (like Casablanca which, according to resident dramaturg, Paul Clark, was based on a play that never quite made it to opening night), there’s an equally long list of productions that somehow went rotten like Denmark in the tricky transition from footlights to klieg lights...

...prompting your internet pals down here in the cheap seats to put aside our Playbills for a moment and pay tribute to THE BEST (AND WORST) STAGE-TO-SCREEN ADAPTATIONS OF ALL TIME!

HAIR (1979)

Oh, sure, I know what you’re thinking: everybody hates hippies. But me, I was only a baby when the REAL flower children walked the Earth, dropping brown acid, failing to bathe and tripping out to six hour Grateful Dead guitar solos. And sure, by the time I was old enough to mythologize Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, most of the Woodstock Generation had either overdosed or transformed into hateful Regan Democrats or politically correct fascists. So in a way, Hair has always been my Camelot: an idealistic, romanticized fictionalization of an era that sounds good in theory but was kind of a drag to actually live through. I was a prepubescent tot when my parents took me to a fantastic, anarchic live production of the show with a cast that stripped right down to their bushy pubes at the end of the first act and brought the audience up on stage to dance around with them at the end of the second: easily one of the best experiences I’ve ever had in a theater (or anywhere else, for that matter). And, yes, live rock combined with real live nudes is a pretty tough hand to beat...yet Milos Forman did an admirable job translating the experience to celluloid a few years later with an adaptation that combined the energy and catchy pop-rock score of the stage show with a relatively coherent storyline, a bunch of loose-limbed Twyla Tharp choreography and some big budget frills no theatrical production could ever hope to match, like a cast-of-thousands production number on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. and a memorable money shot of Beverly D’Angelo’s naked boobies. The Age of Aquarius RULES!!!!

GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS (1992)

Pay attention to me now because you wanna what? You wanna make a real fuckin' movie out of Glengarry Glen Ross, a movie with brass balls, not some pussified Masterpiece Theater bullshit. What does it take to make that movie? It takes ABFAM to make that movie! A for Al, as in Pacino, as in his only performance in the past 20 years that's worth a shit, where he isn't just yelling all the time like he lost his fuckin' hearing aid. B is for Baldwin, as in one of the great five-minute performances in movie history. You're in, you're out, bada bing. F is for fuck, which we say a lot, but also for Foley, as in director James Foley, who doesn't try to "open the play up" with some flashback about how Ricky Roma's dad was mean to him or any of that Hollywood shit. A little moody lighting, a jazzy James Newton Howard score, and a fistful of talented actors, that's all you need. That brings us to another A, and that's for Alan Arkin, not to mention A-listers Ed Harris and Kevin Spacey before he went all gooey on us. Now that's a hell of a cast, and I'll even let you get away with Jack Lemmon if he lays off the heart-tugging crap once in a while. Finally you got M for Mamet in his prime – a maestro composing a profane symphony from the bitter grievances of loser salesmen and the greasy machismo of the winners – and not some half-assed parody like you're reading right now.

THE PHILADELPHIA STORY (1940)

In truth, I never hear of the two Philip Barry plays George Cukor filmed (1938's Holiday and this) being revived in the theater much, and there's good reason for that. It's hard to top Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn, for one thing; more pertinently, if cruelly, the plays simply aren't that good. Holiday is all downhill after the first hour, and Philadelphia similarly tends to collapse into sogginess whenever Hepburn has a nervous breakdown; humanism becomes bad melodrama. But there's much greatness here, almost enough to justify the film's high reputation: the social tete-a-tetes, of course, Grant's opening assault on Hepburn, and the rare, to-be-savored interaction of Grant and Jimmy Stewart. In the clip above, a drunken Stewart trades banter with (and somehow almost holds his own against) a sober Grant; filming good theater, Cukor doesn't push the pacing much, allowing much time for "business" just for its own delightful sake.

ORDET (1955)

If you watch the opening titles of Carl Th. Dreyer's Ordet, you will see only one person credited -- not Dreyer or any of the cast members, but Kaj Munk, who penned the passion play on which the film is based. This deference Dreyer shows to Munk here is important, since few adaptations of plays respect their source material more than Ordet does. In bringing the drama to the screen, Dreyer employs next to none of the traditional devices that are generally used to "open up" a play -- most of the action takes place inside of two neighboring houses, few extras are seen, and characters can sometimes be seen looking at offscreen action, much like they would on the stage, without a cutaway to what they're seeing. Yet at the same time, Ordet is always completely cinematic, using the resources of film less to enlarge the film's world than to observe it in keen, precise detail. If Ordet is deliberately paced, that's because Dreyer takes the time to burrow deeply into his characters' lives and the community in which they live. In the hands of a less capable director, Kaj Munk's play would come off as shameless and more than a little preachy, especially considering how the story ends. But with Dreyer's serenely confident direction, Ordet creates a hushed atmosphere that infuriates most audiences but which will enthrall more patient viewers. And it's this hush that's key to the movie's greatness, creating a world with plenty of empty spiritual space just waiting to be filled. It's only because Dreyer's direction has created a world in which the possibility of grace is very real that the film's final scene has the impact it has.

CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT (AKA FALSTAFF) (1965)

As far as adaptations go, Orson Welles' Chimes at Midnight is an interesting case. All the dialogue comes right out of Shakespeare, but the structure of the film comes from Welles' production "Five Kings." No matter -- Chimes is a great Shakespeare movie, the dramatic saga of the portly knight that the Bard never got around to writing. Aside from the comic romp The Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff was largely a supporting player, yet he became one of Shakespeare's most enduring and beloved characters, and Chimes at Midnight perfectly encapsulates why. A far cry from the noble rulers in whose orbit he circled, Falstaff was a knight gone to seed -- fat, dissolute, always in debt, with a weakness for women and the drink. But then, this was what makes him so relatable to the groundlings -- after all, it's difficult to empathize with the troubles of ruling a sovereign nation, but easy to identify with being low on cash. In addition, the more expansive nature of the cinematic medium allowed Welles to mount a battle scene, all the better to show Falstaff packed into a suit of armor, wandering aimlessly at the rear of the battle, the polar opposite of the valiant knights of legend. But while Falstaff sometimes came off as a figure of fun in Shakespeare, Welles' choice to shift the focus from the kings to Falstaff himself works to give the character nobility in his own right. Welles' performance helps immeasurably -- he's such a life force that you can understand why those in his life love him and forgive him his trespasses. The shift in focus pays off most profoundly in the end once his old companion Prince Hal, now Henry V, has assumed the throne. In the original, this scene marks the new king's putting aside his old, innocuous ways. But by seeing the action through Falstaff's eyes, Henry's cold proclamation, "I know thee not, old man," becomes heartbreaking. It's easy to understand why Henry snubs his old friend, but still -- Falstaff really deserved better.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Vadim Rizov, Paul Clark

Paul Benedict, 1938-2008

Phil Nugent — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Paul Benjamin, who died this week at the age of 70, was a character actor in the all but lost tradition of classic Hollywood comedies, the missing link between the likes of Mischa Auer and Franklin Pangborn and the counterculture improv theater of the 1950s and '60s. With his lanky frame and elongated jaw--the result of a childhood illness--he seemed to have been built for a career in the Sunday Funnies, and when he spoke, he had a special gift for seeming both professorial and slightly insane. In one of his earliest film roles, in Milos Forman's Taking Off (1971), he counseled a meeting of middle-class parents trying to figure out how to better understand their teenage kids on how to smoke marijuana. He followed that up by playing sidekick to Alan Arkin in the little seen Deadhead Miles (1972), which was written by Terrence Malick; gave Christianity a bad name as a frontier clergyman with the sniffles in Jeremiah Johnson (1972); lectured partygoers on the tribal mating rituals in Up the Sandbox (1972); helped Bruce Dern pass for normal as one of the California rotary club types in Smile (1975); helped David Warner pass for almost sort of normal as his Teutonic butler in The Man with Two Brains (1983); and tried to school Matthew Broderick in the art of film as the immortal Professor Arthur Fleeber in The Freshman (1980). He was also a recurring figure in the Christopher Guest mockumentary industry, with small roles in This Is Spinal Tap, Waiting for Guffman, and A Mighty Wind (2003). For all that, he was probably best known to most people as the giddily unsocialized Mr. Bentley on The Jeffersons, a job that he held down for ten years from 1975 to 1985, and one that left most of the country stubbornly convinced that Benedict, who was born in Silver City, New Mexico, was English. He also had a recurring role as the Number Painter on Sesame Street.

A theater veteran, Benedict also directed the original off-Broadway production of Terrence McNally's Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, starring Kathy Bates and Kenneth Welsh, in 1987, and co-starred with Al Pacino in a 1996 Circle in the Square production of the Eugene O'Neill two-hander Hughie. Last year, Benedict, who made his home at Martha's Vineyard, appeared in the American Repertory Theatre production of Harold Pinter's No Man's Land in Cambridge. His last film appearance was in the 2004 Pierce Brosnan movie After the Sunset.

Screengrab Salutes: The Top Biopics of All Time! (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 22:30:00 GMT

MALCOLM X (1992)

There was an Oscar ceremony one year where Denzel Washington and Spike Lee were the co-presenters of some category or tribute, and while I may be misremembering the whole thing, it seemed very much like the two of them were pissed, huddled together, leaning over the podium and glaring at the sea of rich white faces before them as they bit through their teleprompter lines in tones of obvious displeasure. While I’m shaky on the particulars, in my mind, I like to imagine the two of them were reacting to the fact that Lee’s masterful, sweeping adaptation of The Autobiography of Malcolm X only received one major Oscar nomination (for Best Actor)...and, adding insult to injury, Washington’s pitch-perfect performance in the title role somehow lost out to Al Pacino’s “hoo-hah” Scent of a Woman nonsense. I’m not always on Lee’s side when he cries racism (as in his recent dust-up with Clint Eastwood), but it’s hard to think of any other reason for such an obvious snub of the kind of period epic the Academy usually rewards (or at least frickin’ nominates). True, Malcolm X was and remains a controversial figure, but as cinema, Lee’s production is a stylistic masterpiece, capturing the shifting tides of his protagonist’s life as he evolves from Zoot-suited hustler to civil rights icon in a film as indelible and essential as Alex Haley’s canonical source material.

THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD (1996)

Vincent D'Onofrio probably has the best role of his career as Robert E. Howard, the pulp writer and mama's boy (with Ann Wedgeworth as his mama) who created Conan the Barbarian and other musclebound action icons, while spending his whole adult life marooned in the nowheresville of small-town Texas in the 1930s. A mannered Renee Zellweger plays the young budding schoolteacher and writer who makes a tentative stab at befriending him without ever knowing quite what to make of the tortured fellow. This small, affecting film is in some ways a subversive comment on the whole life-of-a-young-American-writer (or "I, John-Boy") genre, because it captures the quiet, rural life that movies so often depict as being an essential part of the back story of healthy, homegrown creative types, and then shows why anyone who had the imagination to be any kind of writer but found themselves physically trapped there would end up wanting to blow their brains out.

MY LEFT FOOT (1989)

Make no mistake: Jim Sheridan's biography of Christy Brown is a rich and scabrous work, full of fury at both the horror of being born into Irish poverty and a body that won't do what you want it to, and the power of Daniel Day-Lewis' performance as a romantic artist with cerebral palsy is in no way compromised or embarrassed by the fact that it won an Academy Award, as if the voters thought this was some Rain Man shit. Sure, for a lot of actors, a role like this would amount to a chance to be applauded and praised for how well they could shake. For Day-Lewis, mastering the physical tremors and folding his body into a pretzel just amounted to laying down the floorboards before he could really go to work.

SERPICO (1973)

When watching Serpico, it's easy to get distracted from the biopic factor. There is the classic man-against-the-machine plot line, the shots of vintage New York...then there is the sense that Al Pacino often seems to be playing Al Pacino, no matter who he is supposed to portray -- though you cannot deny it is interesting to watch him plumb the depths of his own murky psyche. But let's not get lost here: Officer Frank Serpico, was, and is, a real character -- slightly nutty as portrayed by a deliciously young and wounded-looking Pacino, and judging by Serpico's website (hey, go Google it!), quite possibly a few sandwiches short of a picnic in real life. He was of course, a young police officer who went to battle against corruption in the NYPD, for which he paid in health and sanity. Watching Serpico raises some questions: why couldn't Al Pacino be young and beautiful forever? Whatever happened to bringing down the system at all costs? Will people start sticking it to the Man again, now that the economy is in free fall? Will short dark cops start sporting beards and love beads? If American Gangster came out in 2007, does that mean we will have to wait another 34 years for another movie with a similar plot? Who knows...until then, enjoy Al Pacino in a beard.

32 SHORT FILMS ABOUT GLENN GOULD (1993)

Biopics are episodic practically by definition, since it's practically impossible to encompass an entire life without boiling that life down into vignettes. Francois Girard's film about concert pianist Glenn Gould (played by Colm Feore) is probably the most extreme example of this idea. Taking his cue from Bach's thirty-two Goldberg Variations (perhaps Gould's most famous recording), Girard recreates a series of incidents from Gould's life -- from his youth to his concert career, to his later experiments with recording and radio -- with almost nothing in the way of transitional material. In doing so, the film avoids many of the traps of standard-issue biopics, especially the rise-and-fall structure and easy psychoanalysis most filmmakers tend to impose onto the stories of historical figures. There are no subplots about Gould's domestic life, no crisis or obstacle for him to overcome, and scarcely a mention of his relationships or sex life. Girard replaces the convenient formula with a genuine curiosity about who Gould was, what made him tick, and why exactly he retired from public performance at the height of his popularity to devote himself solely to recordings, a moment that feels as offhand here as it allegedly was to Gould himself. What makes the film and its subject all the more fascinating is that Girard doesn't pretend to know the answers, and rather than trying to nail them down, he simply shows us key scenes from Gould's life and encourages us to figure the answers out for ourselves. 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould is the polar opposite of an Oscar-bait biopic, and is that rarest of cinematic creatures -- a completely accessible movie that encourages, and rewards, real thought and reflection. Could this be why it's currently out of print on R1 DVD?

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Sarah Clyne Sundberg, Paul Clark

When Good Directors Go Bad: Cruising (1980, William Friedkin)

Paul Clark — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Usually, when I watch a potential When Good Directors Go Bad title, I’m pretty sure of how I feel about it. Generally, it’ll be a movie I already know that I dislike, or one that I’ve heard enough negative things about that I’m almost positive I’ll join the chorus of naysayers. Occasionally, I’ve tried to defend movies which are much better than their reputations would suggest. But I don’t think I’ve ever been so conflicted about my feelings about a selection than I was with William Friedkin’s Cruising.

Let’s get this out of the way- as straight-up narrative, Cruising is pretty terrible. Plotlines are introduced and abandoned, the central mystery doesn’t really work, and there’s a final “twist” that’s borderline incoherent. Yet for all it faults, Cruising is too haunting and strange a piece of work to be dismissed lightly. It made me scratch my head and occasionally pissed me off, but I was never bored.

Much of the narrative muddiness can be doubt be attributed to the film’s provocative nature. Released in 1980, Cruising tells the story of a murderer who’s prowling New York City’s gay S&M underworld. It was the post-Stonewall, pre-AIDS era, when homosexuality had become more visible in society yet was still misunderstood and frowned upon by most Americans. Naturally, Cruising aroused quite a bit of controversy from both sides. The increasingly-vocal gay rights groups protested the film for its portrayal of homosexuals as being scary, violent psychopaths. Meanwhile, United Artists was looking to make a commercial thriller, so many of the more risqué elements of the film were left on the cutting room floor.

Friedkin has stated that his original cut of Cruising was 140 minutes long, which means that nearly one-fourth of the movie had been shorn away by the time the 102-minute final cut hit theatres. And boy, do the seams show. There’s at least one major subplot- involving a pair of crooked cops who strong-arm a drag queen into performing sexual favors- that the film does absolutely nothing with. Likewise, the film presents a sympathetic homosexual friend for undercover officer Steve Burns (Al Pacino), only to forget about him for a long stretch of time until he turns up dead.

Faring even worse is the character trajectory of Burns himself. After being sent undercover to investigate the killings due to his resemblance to a number of the victims, Pacino is purported to be changed greatly by his experience in the gay underworld. Unfortunately, the film has to come right out and tell us this, having Pacino tell his girlfriend (Karen Allen) that “what I’m doing is affecting me.” Really? It seems to me like he isn’t really touched by most of what he sees. It doesn’t help that the film shies away from the more graphic details of Burns’ experiences inside a club called The Ramrod. Does he ever actually have sex with any of the other men, or does he simply walk into the clubs, look around, and leave? The film doesn’t seem to know.

Some of the blame can no doubt be placed on United Artists and the MPAA for demanding such liberal re-cutting of the film. Yet Friedkin is not altogether blameless. Looking back at Friedkin’s Oscar-winning The French Connection, one can find another cop character- Popeye Doyle- who gets far too caught up in his work. But while Friedkin had Popeye define himself almost entirely through his work, Cruising gives Burns a personal life to make him more three-dimensional. However, the scenes we see both of Burns’ personal life and his undercover work are unrevealing, and so he remains largely an enigma. Popeye Doyle was similarly enigmatic, but while we liked him we weren’t meant to care about him. By contrast, we’re meant to get caught up in Burns’ psychological journey, so the fact that we don’t should be construed as a failure on the film’s part. What’s unfortunate is that Pacino gives a fine, surprisingly low-key performance in the role that might distinguished a better film.

In addition, the gay rights protestors did have a point when they spoke out against Cruising. While Friedkin’s portrayal of the S&M underworld is certainly not meant to be a definitive statement about all homosexuals, the character of the killer is nonetheless pretty troubling. The killer is eventually revealed to be a musical theatre student whose father made him feel guilty about his homosexuality, and who takes his guilt out on the denizens on the men he picks up in clubs. After he seduces them, he stabs them repeatedly with a knife while telling them, “you made me do that.” Unfortunately, the killer-queen stereotype was one that wouldn’t go away, as evidenced by the character of Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs. To say nothing of the film’s ending, which seems to be saying that Burns’ experiences have turned him into a killer himself. If this is the case, then it’s both laughable and highly troubling.

Yet while Cruising has a multitude of problems, I found myself fascinated by it, and not in a train-wreck sort of way. For one thing, the film’s portrayal of its seamy underworld is still bold by Hollywood standards. In a time before the PC police patrolled every big-studio release and homosexuals became dependable romantic-comedy sidekicks and prestige-picture martyrs, it’s bracing to see a major motion picture that actually allows its homosexual characters to be sexual beings. Although Burns is ostensibly all about the ladies, Friedkin doesn’t shy away from the details of the sex lives of the other denizens of The Ramrod (how’s THAT for un-PC?). There’s a tangible allure to the danger this world presents to those who inhabit it, yet when you consider that the very real danger of AIDS still hadn’t announced itself, these scenes feel almost poignant. Also, it’s hard to believe Friedkin got away with a shot in which a character lubes up his entire forearm, but there you go.

On top of it all, the movie’s just too damn weird to dismiss, and it’s easy to see why Cruising has amassed a sizable cult since its original release. What can one say about a movie that pauses for Powers Boothe to describe the meanings of the various bandanas that are worn by the cruising men, to say nothing of a police interrogation that’s abruptly interrupted by a hulking black man wearing only a cowboy hat and a jockstrap? On balance, I suppose Cruising does indeed qualify as a case of Friedkin “going bad,” another step in the downward spiral that torpedoed the career of the once-hot director of The French Connection and The Exorcist. But damn if it’s not fascinating.

Morning Deal Report: Scorsese and De Niro Heard You Paint Houses

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 15:15:00 GMT

Now that we’ve all finally recovered from the awesome reunion between Robert De Niro and Al Pacino in Righteous Kill (“He squints! He yells! Together they solve crimes!”), word comes down that De Niro and Martin Scorsese are teaming up for – are you sitting down? – a mob movie! Steve Zaillian will adapt I Heard You Paint Houses, the story of hitman Frank "the Irishman" Sheeran. “Pic’s title refers to mob slang for contract killings, and the resulting blood splatter on walls and floors,” Variety helpfully clarifies. “Book was written by Charles Brandt, who befriended Sheeran shortly before the latter’s death in 2003. Among the crimes Sheeran confessed to Brandt, according to the 2004 book, was the killing and dismemberment of Hoffa, carried out on orders from mob boss Russell Bufalino.” Yes, that would be Jimmy Hoffa. Call me a sucker, but I actually have some hope for this one.

What is the complete opposite of a Scorsese/De Niro mob movie? It’s a hard question to answer scientifically, but I’m going to have to go with a Yogi Bear and Boo Boo feature film. Yes, “Warner Bros. is taking a trip to Jellystone Park,” according to The Hollywood Reporter. Surf’s Up director Ash Brannon is attached, and the movie will combine live-action with CG animation. I was always more of a Huckleberry Hound man myself.

Elsewhere in animation – or stop-motion claymation, to be specific – Philip Seymour Hoffman will lend his pipes to Mary and Max. “Pic looks at the unlikely pen-pal friendship between Mary, a chubby lonely 8-year-old girl in Melbourne, Australia, and Max, a 44-year-old, severely obese, Jewish man with Asperger's Syndrome living in New York,” per Variety. There is no truth to the rumors that Hoffman has gained 200 pounds for the role.

Related:
Pacino and De Niro Punch the Clock
Scorsese to Direct Final Harry Potter Film

That Guy! Special "Godfather" Edition, Part Four

Phil Nugent — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 16:00:00 GMT

This week, "The Godfather--The Coppola Restoration", a DVD and Blu-ray set consisting of newly remastered editions of the three "Godfather" films directed by Francis Ford Coppola, hits the stores. To honor the release of the home video set, That Guy!, the Screengrab's sporadic celebration of B-listers, character actors, and the working famous, is devoting itself this week to the backup chorus of these remarkable films.

RICHARD CONTE: Classically handsome and deep-voiced, with a trace of something anxious and melancholy behind the eyes, Conte made his Broadway debut in 1939 and was scooped up by the movies later that same year. The studio announced its intention to shape him into "the new John Garfield", but although Conte had plenty of starring opportunities during World War II when many other established and potential stars were busy overseas, he never seemed to be cast right or to have the material he needed to make a real impression. He did solid enough work in war pictures like Guadalcanal Diary and A Walk in the Sun, where his down-to-Earth, Jersey boy quality provided a much appreciated contrast to that film's misguided poetic intentions. But in muddled, sub-par noirs such as Jules Dassin's truckin' picture Thieves' Highway and Otto Preminger's demented, drooling Whirlpool, he just looked as despondent and confused as the people in the audience. He was much better in Joseph Mankiewicz's 1949 drama House of Strangers, which, while not strictly speaking a crime movie, has similarities to The Godfather, with its squabbling Italian family balling itself up over questions of loyalty and patriarchal authority.

It soon became clear that film noir was Conte's natural milieu, but by the time he gave his strongest performance in the strongest movie of his career to date, Joseph H. Lewis's intense 1955 low-budget crime picture The Big Combo, film noir had slid down to a B-movie genre. Conte starred in Fritz Lang's The Blue Dahliah and Phil Karlsen's The Brothers Rico, then rid out the 1960s alternating between TV guest shots and opportunities to hang out with Frank Sinatra. (He appeared in the original Ocean's Eleven and then turned up in three other Sinatra movies, Assault on a Queen, Tony Rome, and Lady in Cement. Maybe Sinatra decided that, on Ocean's Eleven, he'd taken one for the team by agreeing to play the character who is required to say the line, "Give it to me straight, Doc. Is it the big casino?") Conte was reportedly considered for the role of Don Vito himself, but that was in the early stages, when the studio was thinking of making The Godfather as a cheap little action movie. Its elevation to prestige-epic level automatically took him out of the running for the title role, but by casting him as Don Barzini, the smiling-cobra nemesis of the Corelones who plays toastmaster general at the big meeting of the five families, Francis Ford Coppola was counting on Conte's movie past, with its long-time connection to the world of gangsters and other classic movie toughs (such as Edward G. Robinson, who played Conte's blustery Italian papa in House of Strangers) to give added weight to a character whose brief amount of screen time belies his power and importance in the narrative. Barzini was Conte's last hurrah as a Hollywood actor. He died in 1975 after spending the last three busy years of his life working in Italy and France, where even hacks know enough to be impressed with a long-time professional who has Fritz Lang pictures on his resume.

RICHARD BRIGHT: Was ever an actor more misleadingly named? It's not that Bright was dull, by any means. But he seemed to be allergic to flashiness and determined to never call undue attention to himself. He was very close to being the ideal example of a hard-working, serious character actor who finds his place in the overall pattern of whatever movie or play he's in, selflessly executes it with an unfussy mastery, and then recedes into the background until he's needed again. In 1965, he did his part for free expression and the counterculture by playing Billy the Kid (to his co-star Billie Dixon's Jean Harlow) in Beat poet Michael McClure's experimental play The Beard, which ended with a scene in which Dixon delivered a closing monologue while Bright simulated cunnilingus on her; the play so impressed the authorities that every night, the police came around after the performance to take Bright and Dixon down to the station house so that their eager fans there could have their fingerprints. In 1971, Bright appeared in The Panic in Needle Park, a young-junkies-in-love movie that marked Al Pacino's starring debut. The next year, he found the role for him as Al Neri, the most durable and colorlessly loyal of Corleone underlings in The Godfather. He would reprise the role of Al in Part II, and Part III, made fifteen years and set twenty-odd years later, found him still faithfully plugging away. He can also be seen in The Getaway, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Rancho Deluxe, Mararthon Man, Looking for Mr. Goodbar, Citizens Band, Once Upon a Time in America, and a great many other films. In 2002, he contributed a brief but memorable cameo to an episode of The Sopranos, playing the leader of a low-rent murder-for-hire crew, who negotiates a contract between puffs on an oxygen inhaler stuffed up his nose. Four years later, he was accidentally and fatally struck by a New York City bus.

AL LETTIERI: Lettieri kicked around in TV and movie bit parts for a decade or so before starting to get real supporting roles in such movies as The Bobo with Peter Sellers and The Night of the Following Day, a godforsaken kidnapping-plot movie starring a peroxided Marlon Brando. His performance as Solozzo the Turk is not the most subtle and nuanced element of The Godfather--Lettieri's performance was never the most subtle and nuanced element in any of his movies, not even the ones that starred Charles Bronson--but he had energy and the distinctive presence of a man who'd decided to act as if looking like a warthog in spats was really working for him. The Godfather established Lettieri as a good man to hire if you were making a movie whose heroes were killers and thieves and you needed a clearly contrasting type to make it clear why these other killers and thieves were the good guys. If sheer, unadorned vicious meanness is what floats your boat, it's hard to think of a riper example than Lettieri's bad guy in the 1972 The Getaway, who enlivens his pursuit of the movie's ostensible hero and heroine by abducting a husband and wife (played by Archie Bunker's little girl, Sally Struthers, and Jack Dodson, formerly Howard Sprague on The Andy Griffith Show) and indulges in an infantile, trashy affair with the wife while the husband is forced to watch from the back seat. Off camera, Lettieri seems to have been one of those uncontainable, life of the party types who other character actors tell stories about until they turn into legendary figures. He is said to have arrived on the set of the Bronson vehicle Mr. Majestyk in a car full of hookers he'd thoughtfully brought along to service the crew, which definitely puts those gift baskets that Jay Leno sends out into perspective. Once there, he persisted in addressing his co-star, who played a melon rancher in dutch with the mob, as "my melon-Chollie baby," something that all the witnesses agree seemed to strike Bronson as the single least amusing thing in the world. Sadly, Lettieri would have no more time to feel around for the location of Charles Bronson's funny bone. He died of a heart attack in 1975, at 47.

That Guy! Special "Godfather" Edition, Part Three

Phil Nugent — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 16:00:00 GMT

This week, "The Godfather--The Coppola Restoration", a DVD and Blu-ray set consisting of newly remastered editions of the three "Godfather" films directed by Francis Ford Coppola, hits the stores. To honor the release of the home video set, That Guy!, the Screengrab's sporadic celebration of B-listers, character actors, and the working famous, is devoting itself this week to the backup chorus of these remarkable films.

LEE STRASBERG: Co-founder of the Group Theatre and a director of the Actors Studio, Strasberg was a legendary acting teacher and Method guru but had barely had an acting career of his own when his former studio Al Pacino suggested that, at 72, he might be the right man to incarnate Hyman Roth, the ancient Mafia rainmaker who is said to have earned Vito Corleone's respect but never his trust. There may have been a bit of sly mischief mixed in with Pacino's worship when he put the actor and the character together; Strasberg had inspired a fair amount of gossip over the years about his manipulation of those under his sway--particularly Marilyn Monroe, who left him the bulk of her estate in her will--and there are moments when it's easy to see in Roth an old actor who's used to playing up both his accumulated wisdom and his infirmities to get attention, and also to gull those around him into thinking that he's as harmless as he seems. Yet Strasberg, handed this unexpected opportunity to show what he could do with rich material after many years of talking the talk, really dove in and acted the hell out of the role. Given his reputation for stressing the importance of emotional groping in acting, one might be surprised at how technically accomplished his work is, especially in the scene where he talks about the grounds he has for harboring a grudge against Michael, begins to make a painful-sounding noise indicating that he's having trouble controlling his breathing, and just plows on ahead with his monologue, mastefully using the painful-sounding grunts as counterpoint to the lines. Strasberg won an Academy Award nomination for the performance but lost to another of his old students, Robert De Niro, for De Niro's performance in the same movie. It's no surprise that after this late-life fling, he was eager to do more film acting, though it's also no surprise that, at his age, there seemed to be no surplus of appropriate roles halfway worthy of him. He played Pacino's grandfather in the 1979 ...And Justice for All and co-starred with Ruth Gordon in Boardwalk and with Art Carney and George Burns in Going in Style that same year, and died in 1982.

DOMINIC CHIANESE: Chianese, who played Hyman Roth's right-hand man Johnny Ola, is unique in the annals of Godfather cast members in that he didn't really get much of a career boost from the movie but later became a celebrity thanks to his work in another organized-crime drama made twenty-five years later, which often used The Godfather itself as a handy reference point: The Sopranos. Chianese began his show business career as a musician with one foot in musical theater-- Gilbert and Sullivan, off-Broadway musicals, Oliver! He was working for the man, giving guitar lessons in a rehab center, when he landed the role of Johnny Ola and performed it with a skillfully applied veneer of polished smarm. (It was his second movie role, after a bit part in the 1972 Fuzz.) It did lead to fairly steady work in film and TV and a continuing association with Al Pacino: a year after The Godfather, Part II, he played Pacino's father in Dog Day Afternoon, and twenty years after that, Pacino invited him to participate in his documentary about acting Shakespeare, Looking for Richard. But none of that brought him anywhere near the attention he earned when David Chase stuck a pair of Mr. Magoo eyeglasses on him and dubbed him Uncle Junior. Since then, he has appeared in such movies as Unfaithful (2002) and When Will I Be Loved (2004) but has mostly used the boost he got from the TV show to re-energize his singing career, making personal appearances and releasing the CDs Hits and Ungrateful Heart.

ABE VIGODA: Vigoda was hired at an open casting call to play Tessio, the dignified and, to his ultimate misfortune, the tragically "smarter" of the Don's two oldest and most trusted close associates. At the time, he had done some stage work and a little TV, but had gained an embarrassingly slight toehold in the business for a working actor who'd recently entered his fifties. The shot of him at the Don's daughter's wedding, smiling while dancing with a little girl who's standing on his shoes, is as endearingly human as any image in the film; the later shot of him, lit like Boris Karloff at a black masque and laughing at the idea of the upstanding Michael carrying out an assassination, is scary enough to make you lose it in your pants. The movie automatically raised Vigoda's profile among casting directors. (Vigoda would tell interviewers that it also raised his profile among traffic cops, who took to stopping the shifty, baleful-looking man who they knew they'd seen someplace before...) Vigoda's big post-Godfather break was, of course, that of Fish, the senior citizen member of the detective squad on the TV comedy Barney Miller. That role made him semi-beloved, but after a couple of years, the network insisted on spinning him off onto his own goddamn sitcom with a bunch of goddamn kids, and after that was quickly canceled, Vigoda was stranded, overexposed, and badly typecast.

But he didn't turn into an official joke until the premature reports of his death started in 1982, with a false item in People magazine. It might have helped if Vigoda hadn't seemed so grateful for the attention. By now, late night talk shows, Conan O'Brien's in particular, have gotten a lot of mileage out of treating Vigoda as a punch line, the way comedians of an earlier generation used Sonny Tufts or The Horn Blows at Midnight. Sometimes the joke is that Vigoda, who turned 87 this year, is still alive; that may be an inevitable result of his having had his greatest success playing walking dead men before he himself was sixty. Sometimes, the joke seems to just be that there's this fellow named Abe Vigoda out there who was once in a great movie and whose name is still recognizable. It doesn't help that in Vigoda's few appearances in movies that have actually been released to theaters since 1974--such deathless classics as Joe Versus the Volcano and North--he seems to have been cast on the theory that it'll just tickle people to see Abe Vigoda turn up in a movie, as if he were an actor or something. Perhaps sensing this, Vigoda has generally seemed less alive and committed in these roles than he does when Conan or Dave has trotted him out to use as a sight gag. It's not altogether clear just what he's done to deserve this, but sometimes the world is just brutal on people who insist on continuing to exist after we've decided that that their fifteen minutes are up.

Face/Off: "The Godfather Part III"

Phil Nugent — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 18:00:00 GMT

["Face/Off" is a recurring feature in which two Screengrab regulars who on their friendliest day couldn't agree on whether or not the sun is hot trade reactions to a movie. This week, in tribute to the release of "The Godfather: The Coppola Restoration" on DVD and Blu-Ray, Sarah Clyne Sundberg and Phil Nugent attempt to set each other straight on "The Godfather Part III."]

SARAH CLYNE SUNDBERG:OK Phil, here she goes:

I think The Godfather: Part III is a great movie. There, I said it. It has always been a bit of a mystery to me why it is so maligned by just about anyone who thinks they know anything about movies.

I also love the two previous Godfathers, but what would the cycle be without Part III? Part II suffers from the common mid-trilogy malaise of the confused and incomplete story arc. Part III, like the first Godfather movie, is a stand-alone.

The Godfather: Part III is a movie by a middle-aged man about people past their prime looking, back on their regrets. We see the extent of Michael Corleone's fall from young idealistic college boy. We get inside his head and see his disgust at his own corruption and at that of humanity in general. The Vatican is utterly unholy, as are the highest reaches of the "legitimate" business world to which he once aspired. His American dream has turned to shit. The dream house on lake Tahoe is in ruins.

Michael's curse is surviving. He will die among the tomatoes and the olives in Sicily. Utterly alone. Unlike his father, there are no grandchildren to make orange-peel false teeth for.

It isn't subtle but who watches The Godfather for subtlety? Who can't relate to Michael's pain at the way things turned out? Who doesn't feel a tug at the heartstrings when Michael and Kay talk about how it all went wrong?

One common complaint is Sofia Coppola's acting. Yeah, her delivery could be better. But she is playing a rich and vapid teenage girl. She isn't supposed to come off as heartfelt and deep. How about that scene where Andy Garcia's character asks, "Who's your father?" and she bats her big heavy eyelids and goes, "I'll give you a hint, he's Italian." Can't mess with that. Moreover, she's so amazingly beautiful to look at that everything else is beside the point. The movie as a whole is easy on the eyes. Take that scene on the steps of the opera house in Palermo: Loved ones shot down, the Anglo ex-wife howling like a Sicilian widow. What other way could one possibly wrap up a story like this?

PHIL NUGENT: Sarah,

There are a lot of niggling little problems with The Godfather Part III that I could niggle over, but the movie was released almost twenty years ago, to a movie press that did have its knives out, and most of those nits have been well picked already. So I'll jump right ahead to what looks to be our core disagreement: the idea that the story that Coppola had already lavished so much time on needed completing. I think that The Godfather Part II is about as great as movies get, and I don't think it left anything unresolved that needed resolving. You can leave the theater or switch off the DVD wondering what Michael Corleone did with himself to kill whatever time he had left to him, but he's a hollow shell and a lost soul, beyond redemption. Wherever you pinpoint the moment at which his soul turned to ash--whether it was when he shot up that restaurant or saw his first wife blown up or cast his second wife out of his life or ordered a hit on his own harmless dope of a surviving brother--he's sunk deep into the life that he was determined to forswear at the start of the first film, and he ain't coming back. It's the logical conclusion to his story and the point at which his life can yield no further meaning.

For some of us, the truly awful thing about The Godfather, Part III is that it betrays what Coppola and Pacino achieved in the first two movies. They didn't get around to making it until they'd both had the chance to discover that the career apotheosis they'd enjoyed between 1972 and 1974 is not the natural order of things, and they allowed their nostalgia for their own better days to get to them and took it as a license to go soft on the character of Michael Corleone. Now he's a loving old booger with a Gertrude Stein haircut who keeps Kay (Diane Keaton), the outsider he ran out of his house on a rail, standing around in the hallway oozing tolerant acceptance. It's not clear what exactly he's been up to in the twenty years left unaccounted for since the end of the second picture and the beginning of this one, though he does have the overscaled self-righteous self-pity of a man who gave filmmaking a try and doesn't understand why his visually ambitious adaptations of S. E. Hinton movels weren't better received. But even if he was busy building hospitals for Mother Teresa in the off-season, the movie shows an unseemly eagerness to let him off the hook. With no transitional explanation, he's gone from being a monster to a man whose worst failing is that, with all the millions of dollars at his disposal and all those button men to order around, he was unable to defeat his powerful enemies from murdering the Pope.

There are some good things in this movie that don't get talked about enough. Talia Shire's Connie's transformation into the widowed Lady Macbeth of the Upper East Side is the one piece of characterization that represents a strong, believable, and compelling line from the first movie to the last, and the cold fire in her eyes could make the Cloverfield monster remember that he has urgent business in another hemisphere. And though Sofia Coppola's performance isn't nearly as strong, it's nice to see someone sticking up for. When GF III opened, Sofia Coppola took the brunt of the harsh criticism like a beachhead taking a tsunami. Sofia was pushed into appearing in the movie after Winona Ryder dropped out, and having a bunch of assholes in the press and on TV sneer at you and accuse you of not having done as good a job as Winona freaking Ryder would have done is a hell of a punishment for having tried to humor Daddy. I don't think she's very good in the movie--would it have killed Daddy to have at least sprung for a vocal coach?-- but she's a great camera subject and has a touching presence, and she's very winnable in those little moments like the one where, all yearning uncertainty, she tells Andy Garcia, "I love you, cuz." She did not have a great acting career ahead of her, but I take some satisfaction in the fact that, eighteen years later, her place in contemporary film history seems a lot more secure than Winona Ryder's.

SARAH CLYNE SUNDBERG: First of all, stopping at The Godfather: Part II would be ludicrous. Everybody knows that the important things in life come in threes: The golden era Supremes, the patriarchs, the Three Stooges.

It looks like our fundamental disagreement is over whether or not there is a worthwhile story left to tell at the end of Part II.

The way I see it is as follows: Beside the blood and the gore and the cannoli, the Godfather is a fairly universal story about life.

Most of the times our lives don't turn out the way we wanted. Like Michael Corleone everyone with half a heart is an idealist when they are young. Like Michael Corleone everybody with half a brain learns that they are no less corrupt and compromised than other people and certainly not than their parents. Life then, like The Godfather is about learning to face yourself and the world despite the inherent disappointment and imperfection. This is why Part III is vital.

You are right. It isn't clear exactly what Michael Corleone has been up to since we last saw him. But it is fair to assume he hasn't been building hospitals for Mother Teresa. His medal of honor from the Vatican is meant to indicate the corruption of the Catholic Church, rather than the goodness of Michael Corleone's business activities.

Perhaps he is in some sense a monster. An aged monster. But also just a petty little man. He goes to confession for the first time in years. He knows and we know and the priest knows there is no absolution for what he has done. Still, he's got to go on living, he's got to get a long with his family.

Analogy: The holocaust happened, we still have to live in the world. I can sit in Berlin in 2008 and enjoy a beer and a beautiful sunset. These to concepts don't exclude each other. Dealing with the contradictions is what being human is all about. The Godfather: Part III is a movie about two middle-aged men, by two middle aged men, about how to keep living in the face of overwhelming evidence that most things turn to shit.

This is what makes The Godfather: Part III a story worth telling. A life that ends at thirty or forty is but half a life, after all.

PHIL NUGENT: Half a life? I'm aiming to live to a hundred sixty myself. For one thing, I'm looking forward to seeing a new home video release of The Godfather movies, with each successive release being hailed as the first one that does the movies justice and makes all its predecessors look like dogshit, every seven or eight years. I figure that by 2140, they'll have it tweaked to the point that I can reach out and give Apollonia a shoulder massage. But my own longevity aside, I tend to think that most stories reach a logical stopping point long before everybody, or even just the main character, dies. I think The Godfather Part III itself does that: I wish to God they'd faded to black on the scene with Pacino and Sofia on the steps and not shoved in that unnecessary last shot of Pacino toppling off the bench. (Couldn't they at least have hired Ruth Buzzi to come in to sit next to him and occasion the toppling by hitting him with her handbag?)

I'll say this, though: it's definitely a tribute to the power of these movies that it's understandable that people could come out of the sixth hour in the company of these characters and feel that they hadn't gotten enough. (And with the flashbacks in Part II, Coppola managed to make the telling of the lead-in to the story as compelling as spinning it out further. Though he couldn't have known it at the time, this meant that he got to trump George Lucas, who did okay with the Star Wars sequels, but with the prequels, not so much.) It's not as if he's spent the last twenty-five years fighting off demands from the studios that he let them pay him to make Rumble Fish II. And I have to respect Coppola's insistence on treating the third one as if it were part of the family, keeping it included in the box sets. (He could easily weasel his way out of doing that by saying that the point of the re-issues is the restoration of the originals, and that Part III, which was made more recently with pretty current technology, is already available in an acceptable format and doesn't require the same herculean restoration labors as the older films, which were made with a since discontinued color process.) Coppola has done everything short of piss mercury to expand on his cinematic legacy since 1974, and while many of the movies he's made since then have their supporters, none of them have gone very far in denting the impression that he was basically put on Earth to make movies about the Corleones. I guess he ought to have some say in deciding how many of these movies there are.

That Guy! Special "Godfather" Edition, Part One

Phil Nugent — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 16:00:00 GMT

This week, "The Godfather--The Coppola Restoration", a DVD and Blu-ray set consisting of newly remastered editions of the three "Godfather" films directed by Francis Ford Coppola, hits the stores. Not the least of the many glories of the first two "Godfather" movies is that they represent one of the greatest showcases of American acting ever caught on film, six hours that can stand as a master class demonstration of why American movie acting caught the imagination of the world and inspired generations of young English and European actors to try to do their own version of the Method shuffle. The first movie served as a meeting ground for Marlon Brando, the greatest of all postwar American stars, and several up-and-coming talents--Al Pacino, Robert Duvall, James Caan--who had grown up idolizing him and were about to join him at the Big Deal table; the second one served as a coronation for Robert De Niro, whose role as the young Don Corleone called on him to deliver a performance that could both stand on its own and match up with a viewer's fantasies about the old man Brando had already made indelible. But both films are also plastered with brilliant work by countless character actors and supporting players, some of whom never had a comparable moment in the sun, some of whom were just marking one more notch in the course of a long and busy career, but all of whom will probably be best remembered for their time spent in the Corleone's territory. To honor the release of the home video set, That Guy!, the Screengrab's sporadic celebration of B-listers, character actors, and the working famous, is devoting itself this week to the backup chorus of these remarkable films.

JOHN CAZALE: Probably no actor ever left behind a better batting average than Cazale. In part, this is because of his tragically short life: having made his film debut in The Godfather in 1972, when he was 36, he died six years later, of cancer, several months before the release of his final film, The Deer Hunter. Still, the record shows that he gave solid performances playing four different characters in five movies--the others were The Conversation (1974) and Dog Day Afternoon (1975)--each of which is regarded by trustworthy observers as a classic film from a classic period in American movies. Each also boasts a strong Godfather connection: Dog Day Afternoon paired him, again, with Pacino, The Deer Hunter finally gave him the chance to share scenes with De Niro, and The Conversation was written and directed by Coppola.

He was, bar none, the best screen partner that Pacino ever had. They had worked together in New York theater, most famously in Israel Horovitz's play The Indian Wants the Bronx. Both Pacino and Cazale were late breaking into movies, but where in Pacino's case that can be chalked up to his getting a late start becoming an actor, in Cazale's it may have had something to do with the reticent, shy, gentle nature to which everyone who knew him seems to testify. Onscreen, alongside such powerhouses as Pacino and James Caan, that gentle side could easily read as weakness, and each of Cazale's movie characters is a weakling of some kind. But it's a tribute to his deft brushwork and the nuances he could bring even to a thinly written part that each of these weaklings has his own emotional and intellectual range and distinctively wilted plumage, just as each has a different degree of acceptance regarding his own limitations. So the same man who, as Fredo, could inspire a mixture of pity, revulsion, and comic horror when he reveals that he actually thinks he might have made a credible leader of an organized crime family if he'd been given the chance can also, as Sal, the most poignantly incompetent bank robber in movie history in Dog Day Afternoon, turn your laughter to a choking sob as it begins to sink in that Sal had given himself up for dead long before the movie started and is only waiting to get the official word, in the form of a bullet between the eyes, from some reliable authority figure that it's okay for him to finally lie down and stop trying. In his last picture, The Deer Hunter, he had the chance to work with Meryl Streep, who he had met when they worked together in a Public Theater production of Measure for Measure in 1976, and to whom he was engaged at the time of his death.

ALEX ROCCO: Do you know who he is? He's Moe Green! The Jewish mobster who built Las Vegas was played by an actor with thick Boston Irish roots and, it's been reported, a distant "youthful indiscretion" connection to that city's Winter Hill criminal gang. Rocco is the kind of energetic, scene-stealing actor who can deliver some finely shaded detail work or convey some plot information in a conspiratorial whisper that makes you lean closer to the screen and then indulge in some hamming and scenery-nibbling in a way that's more likely to make you grin than turn your head away. As in his famous speech where he tells Michael Corleone off, he's able to make it seem as if it's the character he's playing who can't resist making a scene. Though he's played a vast range of characters over the course of his long career, he has a specialty that Moe Greene fits into snugly: that of the fast-talking showboat who's very smart but not quite as smart as he thinks he is--and it's that tiny difference between his egotistical self-image and cruel reality that, again and again-- as Moe Greene, or as a slick bank robber in The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973), or a racist police detective trying to adapt to changing times but unsure how in Detroit 9000, or a befuddled police chief in The Stunt Man (1980), or a talent agent in his Emmy-winning performance on the TV sitcom The Famous Teddy Z--causes him to get cut off at the knees. Notable among his other TV work, he supplied the voice of Roger Meyers, Jr., the vulgarian in charge of the Itchy & Scratchy cartoon empire on The Simpsons. And he recently appeared in a TV commercial for Audi that parodied the horse's head scene from The Godfather.

JOHN MARLEY: In that commercial, Rocco serves as a stand-in for John Marley, who played the rancid studio head Jack Woltz in The Godfather, and who died in 1984 at the age of 77. Before he refused to give Johnny Fontaine that part in his new war picture, Marley was probably best known for his work with John Cassavettes, who used him in the compromised Hollywood picture A Child Is Waiting and in the more purely Cassvettian agony-fest Faces, as well as for having played Ali MacGraw's father in Love Story. (Inexplicably, it was for that movie, and not The Godfather, that he ratcheted up his sole Academy Award nomination. He lost to John Mills for his work as a lovelorn hunchback in Ryan's Daughter, and for that, "inexplicable" can not begin to cut it.) Marley's most notable movie role after The Godfather may have been in Bob Clark's anti-Vietnam War horror movie Deathdream (1974), which in recent years has taken on cult classic status. (The screenwriter, Alan Ormsby, has said that the role--that of a jingoistic American father whose twisted values have contributed to the death of his son--was written with someone like John Wayne in mind, but that once Clark and Ormsby took a reality check and accepted that, of course, they were never going to get John Wayne or a star of comparable stature, they might as well go to the opposite end of the spectrum and get someone who looked like Marley--a short, wizened-looking old man whose unimpressive appearance served as an ironic counterpart to his overscaled bluster.) Towards the end of his life, Marley--a man whose stony glower and harsh rasp were clearly the mark of someone who was always up for a good chuckle--turned up on a very special episode of SCTV where he got to parody his Godfather role. There, playing Leonard Bernstein, he made the mistake of showing off his new horse while bragging that he would never give Johnny Pavarotti (John Candy) the part he wanted in his new war opera.

DVD Digest for September 16, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week is a busy one for lovers of classic cinema- to say nothing of the folks at Warner Home Video.

DVD(s) of the Week: Continuing their ongoing commitment to spotlight film history’s greatest filmmakers, the good folks at Criterion fill a glaring hole in the DVD market with this week’s release of three classics by Max Ophüls- La Ronde, Le Plaisir, and The Earrings of Madame De…. These three films, all made at Ophüls’ artistic and commercial peak, make a lovely introduction to the man’s work, with all the continental sophistication, exquisitely-wrought melodrama, and lavish production values that made his reputation. And stars? You bet- between the three films, you’ll find Jean Gabin, Simone Signoret, Anton Walbrook, Charles Boyer, Danielle Darrieux, and Simone Simon. If you can only shell out for one disc, go with Earrings, whose DVD features not only scholarly commentary and a number of featurettes (including an interview with Paul Thomas Anderson, whose complex camera movements were clearly inspired by Ophüls’ work), but also a new printing of the source novel, Louise de Vilmorin’s Madame De…. But really, they’re all worth your money. Now all we need is a Region 1 DVD of Letter From an Unknown Woman…

In addition, this week is a banner occasion for musical fans, led by a double dose of Oscar-winning Vincente Minnelli titles, An American in Paris and Gigi (both Warner), each presented in snazzy new Two-Disc Special Editions. There’s also Warner’s The Busby Berkeley Collection Volume 2, which includes Gold Diggers of 1937, Gold Diggers in Paris, Hollywood Hotel and Variety Show. Other classics coming to DVD this week include: Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice 20th Anniversary Deluxe Edition (Warner); young Tom Cruise and his Ray-Bans in Risky Business 25th Anniversary Deluxe Edition (Warner, also Blu-Ray); Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains (Ryko Distribution), which was spotlighted last week by our very own Phil Nugent; Glenn Close in the live-action 101 Dalmatians and 102 Dalmatians (Disney); and The Charlie Chan Collection Volume 5 (Fox).

This week’s roster of recent releases on DVD is headed up by The Wachowski Brothers’ financial and critical bomb Speed Racer (Warner, also Blu-Ray), which I believe is still the most underappreciated movie so far this year. Other recent titles coming to DVD include: Patrick Dempsey in Made of Honor (Sony, also Blu-Ray); Al Pacino in 88 Minutes (Sony, also Blu-Ray); Mike Myers making an ass of himself again in The Love Guru (Universal, also Blu-Ray); the surprisingly affecting Young@Heart (Fox); David Gordon Green’s Snow Angels (Warner); the acclaimed documentary Constantine’s Sword (First Run); and two direct-to-DVD titles, 101 Dalmatians II: Patch’s London Adventure (Disney) and Another Cinderella Story (Warner, also Blu-Ray).

This week’s new TV on DVD titles include: Chuck Season 1 (Warner); Criminal Minds Season 3 (Paramount); Dirty Sexy Money Season 1 (Disney); My Name Is Earl Season 3 (Fox); Private Practice Season 1 (Disney); and Pushing Daisies Season 1 (Warner, also Blu-Ray).

Finally, in Blu-Ray only titles, this week brings 1408 (Weinstein), Hulk (Universal), Madagascar (Paramount), The Mist (Weinstein), and Shrek the Third (Paramount).