The Screengrab : american beauty

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

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

Hayden Childs' Worst Movies Ever (Part Two...plus 5 honorable mention bad movie haikus!)

6. LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL (1997)

Long ago I was happy and carefree, way back when Roberto Benigni was the sorta-annoying Italian guy from those Jim Jarmusch movies. He made funny jokes, I made funny jokes, everything was good, see? But now that happiness is gone forever. The day that I saw Life Is Beautiful, my love - strike that, let’s say “tolerance” - of Benigni became a tearful nightmare. You could call it the day the clown cried. See, the premise of the movie is that Benigni is trying to convince his child that the Nazi concentration camp they are in is all a big, jokey game. Actually, that's only the second half of the movie. The first half is about Benigni trying to woo his lady through a bunch of wacky pratfalls. The second half is Benigni making light of the Holocaust through wacky pratfalls. It's the craziest genocide of a people ever! You'll laugh, cry, puke in horror, and never be able to watch Down By Law again!

7. HAPPINESS (1998)

This was the least repellent clip from this film that I could find. Todd Solondz thinks that he’s the most misanthropic man in movies, but his misanthropy is as meaningless as Natural Born Killers' satire because it has no center. It's one thing to be a misanthrope because you are deeply disappointed in humanity (as with, say, Louis-Ferdinand Céline or Michel Houellebecq), but it's a completely different thing to strive towards misanthropy just because...what? Because deep down, we're all just using each other, right? We're all just biding time until we can rape children, right? We're all just waiting for the numbness of age and indifference to envelope us, right? We're all just wanting to get our own rocks off and to hell with everyone else, right? Beneath contempt.

8. IN THE COMPANY OF MEN (1997)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Everyone’s just waiting for the right moment to stab you in the back. A nation of creeps. Fuck you, LaBute.

9. HIGHLANDER II: THE QUICKENING (1991)

"$34 million? They must have had a limousine every time they went to the john!" Ah, Roger Ebert, you slay me. Most of the movies on my list are repulsive due to their content rather than the complete incompetence of the filmmakers. This one is both! It makes no damn sense, looks like shit, cost the studio a ton of money, and stars Sean Connery! I had seen bad movies before, but this was the first really bad movie that I ever saw where I literally couldn't understand how it had come to be. For that, it'll always have a special place in my heart.

10. THE BROTHERS McMULLEN (1995)

Dimwitted Irish guys from Long Island who fuck around while women swoon all over them? Sign me up! They're going to talk about life and love and pseudo-profound heavy stuff like that, all with the same bada-bing inflection? Whoa nelly! They'll all learn to believe in love again? Warms the ol' cockles of the heart, it does, faith and begorrah! And boy howdy, that Ed Burns is dreamy, isn't he? Whoever made this movie sure thinks so! (HC)

Bonus 5, in haiku:

American Beauty (1999)

Suburbs: repression,
Sadness, revelation. Then
You're shot by a queer.

Armageddon (1998)

Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!
Shazam! Whizz! Bang! Crash! Ba-donk!
Kablooey! KaBLAM!

Dead Poets Society (1989)

Oh, Robin Williams,
Bearded man with life lessons,
You ruined poetry.

You've Got Mail (1998)

Bloody thoughts! Only
One way to quell: watch The Shop
Around The Corner.

Memento (2000)

Start here. Smart conceit
Hides lacuna at the heart
Of story. Start here.

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

Contributor, Haikuist: Hayden Childs

Screengrab Review: "Lymelife"

Nick Schager — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 17:00:00 GMT

In case you haven’t been listening to what prestige and art-house films have been blaring, the suburbs aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. The carefree contentment projected by all those white-picket-fence homes, and the smiling cheer of all those good-looking people in their nice clothes and fancy cars? It’s all lies, joyful facades that mask serious social dysfunction. Despite seeming like the place where happily-ever-afters come true, the suburbs are in reality hotbeds of familial discord, of tumultuous adolescent anger and misery, and of deception, greed, selfishness and alienation. If you thought that moving there from the vile, corrupting city was smart, think again. Relocating to a comfy home, and mingling with your undoubtedly Yuppie neighbors, will only warp you into a desolate conformist zombie like those seen in American Beauty, The Ice Storm and countless other likeminded dramas. And desperately running through the streets like Leonardo DiCaprio’s wretched Revolutionary Road hubby, or performing fatal makeshift abortions on yourself like Kate Winslet’s hopeless wife, are your only avenues of escape!

Excuse the sarcasm, but seriously – does anyone still find this gibberish relevant? Pulling the curtains back on picture-perfect suburbia is such a stale, clichéd modus operandi that it’s long ceased to be of any use. And one suspects that the reason so many recent films address this topic from the detached confines of an earlier era (anywhere from the ‘50s to ‘80s) is because only in the past would characters actually view as revelatory the fact that non-city-living isn’t a surefire blissful existence. Which brings us around to Lymelife, a late-‘70s-set tale about screwed-up Long Island high-schooler Scott Bartlett (Rory Culkin), whose crumbling family includes cold, philandering real-estate developer dad Mickey (Alec Baldwin), military brother Jimmy (Kieran Culkin), and gloomy, quietly suffering mom Brenda (Jill Hennessy). His life a checklist of movie clichés about adolescence, Scott is picked on by the local bully, loves Star Wars, and pines for his pretty older neighbor Adrianna (Emma Roberts), who flirts with and teases him. Also in the mix are Adrianna’s crazy parents: mom Melissa (Cynthia Nixon) is an adulteress sleeping with Mickey, and her dad Charlie (Timothy Hutton) is a mess of a man who, instead of looking for work, smokes pot in his basement, his deterioration ostensibly instigated by a case of lime disease.

I say ostensibly because Charlie – like everyone else in Derick Martini’s film (co-written with brother Steven) – is really suffering from suburbanitis, that stultifying malady in which moving to the ‘burbs not only doesn’t solve, but in fact amplifies, barely suppressed problems. Lymelife shows directorial restraint in depicting Scott’s confused headspace, and its performances are universally solid, with both Rory Culkin and Hennessey conveying a tempered soulfulness that helps prevent their characters from succumbing to cartoonishness. Yet the narrative they’re assigned to breathe life into is irrevocably moldy, a portrait of father-son and husband-wife strife, as well as of budding teenage sexuality and maturity, that’s defined by groaningly bittersweet, paradise-is-an-illusion shots of middle-class homes spied out of school bus windows. Apparently semi-autobiographical, Lymelife sporadically nails sharp (if familiar) details, for example a shirtless Scott rehearsing how to be cool and macho while staring into his mirror, or Scott and Adrianna’s awkward maiden sexual experiences. Too bad, then, that such authenticity is drowned out by an overarching don’t-judge-a-book-by-its-cover message that long ago lost its luster.

Trailer Review: Away We Go

Paul Clark — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 16:00:00 GMT

Sam Mendes returns with another drama about married life, and topic he’s approached before, first through the glossy snark of American Beauty, then with the darkly existential Revolutionary Road. Here he looks like he’s taking the quirky route, approaching it from the point of view of a not-quite mainstream couple (John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph) as they prepare for the birth of their first child. But while Away We Go marks the first cinematic venture by acclaimed author Dave Eggers, I’m not sure his style is particularly compatible with the big screen. Eggers has made off-kilter observational comedy his stock in trade, but it’s one thing to read it on the page and another to hear it from the mouths of actors. Based on the evidence here, the results are mixed, with Allison Janney’s line-readings in the trailer sounding suffering from an overabundance of actorly “spin.” That said, a supporting cast like this one is hard to ignore, especially the casting of Jeff Daniels and Catherine O’Hara as the parents of either Krasinski or Rudolph (hard to tell from the trailer). If nothing else, Away We Go ought to give me my O’Hara fix until the next time Christopher Guest comes a-calling.

Screengrab Review: "Must Read After My Death"

Nick Schager — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 17:00:00 GMT

That tumult and unhappiness often lurk behind cheery suburban facades is a well-worn cliché, resurrected every few years by Hollywood in a manner that implies revelation. Though already deducible to anyone over the age of ten, American Beauty and its myriad ilk (including this past year’s Revolutionary Road) have now definitively established that – to use a relevant hackneyed saying – books cannot be judged by their covers, since outward appearances mainly reveal what a given subject wishes to project about itself. Yet if this truism is no longer an epiphany capable of shattering one’s sheltered worldview, it nonetheless can, when conveyed on a micro rather than macro scale, be quietly devastating, as evidenced by Morgan Dews’ Must Read After My Death. Revolutionary in neither form nor content, Dews’ documentary is – in a manner similar to Capturing the Friedmans and last year’s Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father – a non-fiction archival-elements collage, one that wields its trove of home movies, audio recordings, and still photographs to investigate the past, confess sins, and intimately, poetically evoke the banal tragedies of one family’s 1960s Hartford, CT life.

The first words heard in Must Read After My Death are those of Allis: “I am not a housewife.” It’s a statement of desperate defiance, as Allis is most surely a homemaker, married to insurance salesman Charlie, who drinks, has low self-esteem, and a mania about his domicile’s cleanliness. Allis, college-educated, married once before and fluent in four languages, gave up professional aspirations because she wanted to bear Charlie’s children. This she did – four in all, each one traumatically affected by their parents’ constant, vicious fighting, which drove more than one into therapy and which was brought on at least in part through their joint, troublesome decision (revealed obliquely by director Dews through snippets of Charlie and Allis’ Dictaphone recordings to each other) to have an open marriage. This thorny history is conveyed via a collection of 8mm films, transcripts, and audio tapes made by Allis, Charlie and their children which Dews first came upon after Allis’ 2001 death, and which he affectingly assembles into a haunting portrait of white-picket-fence familial disintegration. Echoes from an earlier age, his speakers’ tormented voices and images’ flickering appearance lend empathetic consideration to a tale of personal and parental hopes and failings, the director’s depiction given added resonance by nimble editorial overlapping and juxtapositions that evoke the depth of Allis and Charlie’s fury, resentment, doubt and self-loathing.

As Allis buckles under her husband’s chastisements, her daughter Anne flees home for marriage, son Chuck struggles with undiagnosed dyslexia and younger son Bruce is institutionalized, Must Read After My Death coalesces into an indictment of demanding, critical Charlie. However, in Charlie’s own naked admission of his paternal shortcomings, as well as in Allis’ growing antipathy for her psychologist’s belief that she’s to blame for her clan’s degeneration, Dews’ film refuses to simply settle for being a blanket censure of Charlie, expanding to also address the ways in which patriarchal societal pressures drove the family into a tailspin from which it could only ultimately recover through the death of one of its figureheads. Dews’ story may not have anything eye-openingly novel to say about how cultures, and idealistic notions about what happiness is and how it should be attained, compel people to embark upon unwanted paths for which they aren’t truly suited. Still, the formal deftness with which his documentary is crafted, aided by Paul Damian Hogan’s melancholic score and exemplified by a shot of departing cruise ships wedded to Allis discussing her marriage’s “communication breakdown,” nonetheless infuses Must Read After My Death with a mixture of lyrical tenderness and open-wound rawness that’s at once precise and universal.

Trailer Review: Revolutionary Road

Paul Clark — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Once again, Sam Mendes turns to suburban ennui, which previously won him Oscar gold in American Beauty. But while that film had plenty of sassy (some would say snarky) humor courtesy of screenwriter Alan Ball, Revolutionary Road is pretty sober stuff. Of course, the production values look pretty impeccable here- with Roger Deakins behind the camera it’d almost have to be a great-looking movie. And given the movie’s pedigree, the filmmakers clearly have Oscar in their sights again. Who knows- this buzz could very well be warranted. But I worry that the “Leo and Kate reunited” angle perpetuated by the Hollywood hype machine could overwhelm anything else about the movie. Sure, it might put a few more asses in the seats, but in the long term I’m not sure it does the movie any good, especially when it’s quite likely that the original Titanic audience simply hasn’t grown up like its stars have.

'Heading for Trouble

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 17:30:00 GMT

One of the movies I'm most looking forward to this fall is Towelhead, a creepy coming-of-age drama with the twist that the lead character, Jasira Maroun, is an Arab-American girl from a strict traditionalist family. Based on a surprisingly good novel by Alicia Eran (herself of Egyptian descent), Towelhead may be a disappointment or it may be a success, but one thing's for sure: it's already generated a stupid, meaningless controversy, and for a small indie film, that's money in the bank.

As an Arab-American, I've learned to take everything that comes out of CAIR -- the Council on American-Islamic Relations -- with a grain of salt. They do vital, much-needed work in exposing the often insidious amount of racism, prejudice and bigotry that Arabs and Muslims suffer in this country, and since 9/11, their work couldn't be more necessary. They're also particularly adept at pointing out the numerous cultural stereotypes by which Arabs and Muslims are victimized, and they keep up the good work despite the profound hatred they generate from right-wingers, who seem to regard them as quasi-criminals and terror-abbetors who are morally just south of Osama bin-Laden. That's the upside. The downside is that they have the typical thin skin of every advocacy group, and every so often they find themselves on the wrong side of an argument, as is the case now, when they have demanded that Warner Brothers change the name of Towelhead, which they find racist and offensive, to Nothing is Private (the name under which it debuted at the Toronto Film Festival last year).

Of course, the film's writer and director both make the rather obvious point that it's specifically because "towelhead" is a racist word that they chose it as a name. The Hot Blog reports on writer Alicia Erian's comments on the controversy: "I am of course aware that the title of my book is an ethnic slur. Indeed, I selected the title to highlight one of the novel's major themes: racism. Towelhead...is an ugly word. The job of the artist, however, has been, and always will be, to highlight that which is ugly in the hopes of finding something beautiful. This charge, by necessity, will at times put the artist at odds with admirable groups like CAIR. The solution, it seems to me, is not to force the artist to alter his or her work, but instead to use the occasion of that work as an entry point for meaningful debate and discussion."

Towelhead's director, Alan Ball (of American Beauty fame), adds, "As a gay man, I know how it feels to be called hateful names simply because of who I am. Therefore, I felt it was important to retain the title of Alicia Erian's novel, in which she so effectively dramatizes the pain inflicted by such language...I believe one of the unintended consequences of forbidding such words to be spoken is imbuing those words with more power than they ever should have."

Warner is standing by the choice and retaining the name, having issued a boilerplate corporate 'we-apologize-to-anyone-who-is-offended' apology, and CAIR continues to argue for a name change. As someone who has been called a raghead on more than one occasion, what I want to know is this: why couldn't they get an Arab-American actress to play the lead? Summer Bishil looks like she'll do a perfectly fine job in the role of Jasira, but she's of East Indian descent. Is it that hard to find a real Arab in Hollywood?

The Jailbait Sweet 16 (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 22 May 2008 20:30:00 GMT

AMERICAN BEAUTY (1999)

This modern day take on Lolita, reviled by some, adored and Academy-Awarded by others, tells the story of Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey), a miserable hen-pecked middle-aged loser reinvigorated by a surge of life-altering lust for the sexually aggressive friend (Mena Suvari) of his mopey teenage daughter (Thora Birch). To attract Suvari’s character, Angela, Burnham starts working out, pumping up his body while channeling happy memories of his irresponsible, pot-smoking youth. Eventually, Burnham gets his wish to have sex with Angela...but, upon learning that the allegedly promiscuous girl is actually a virgin, he pulls back from the brink at the last moment, suddenly remembering that he is, in fact, an adult. And then he gets shot in the head...a nice, throwback moment to the old Hays Code days when moral transgression always led to a grisly end, cautioning the rest of us against stepping over the line. Yet transgression is part of the film’s DNA, and while I can appreciate the reasons why certain people hate this movie (the artifice, the middle-aged lust thing, the Spacey Smarm Quotient), I nevertheless enjoy the message of the smart Alan Ball script that we are not defined by our age, our possessions, or the way we’re perceived, and lying to ourselves about who we’d rather be instead of accepting who we really are leads to heartache, rage, bad relationships and, occasionally, bullets in the head. Like many dirty old men before him, Lester Burnham thinks he wants sex with a much younger woman, but what he really wants is to simply be much younger, with all of life’s possibilities ahead rather than fading away in the rearview mirror.

AMERICAN PIE (1999)

And speaking of fin de siècle movies with “American” in the title co-starring Mena Suvari...this raunchy-sweet comedy was a throwback to 1980s teen sex comedies like Fast Times At Ridgemont High, Risky Business, Porky’s, Screwballs, Losin’ It, The Last American Virgin, Zapped! and etc., etc. etc. Yet somehow, despite scenes of adolescent pie-fucking, discussions of inappropriate relations with a flute at teenage band camp, tons of high school sex and the deflowering of a pubescent boy by a predatory Mary Kay Letourneau-esque older woman, American Pie barely raised a flicker of controversy upon its release, possibly because it was simply too funny and ridiculous to get all het up about...but also perhaps because of the genuine affection writer/directors Chris and Paul Weitz had for their characters, male and female, as opposed to presenting them as figures of scorn and/or inflatable sex dolls (or just so much bloody meat, like the unfortunate young victims in any number of slasher flicks from Halloween to Hostel, where sex literally equals death). As the esteemed Mr. Pierce’s notes in an earlier post on Lolita, Nabokov’s book, for all the controversy surrounding it, was actually funny...and American Pie, a kind of classic in its own right, proves once again that sometimes the best way to deal with the scary issue of sex is simply to laugh.

FREEWAY (1996)

And then there’s the less funny side of sex: molestation, prostitution and violence against women, all of which is faced and overcome by a modern day So-Cal Red Riding Hood in this astonishing exploitation film by jailbait auteur Matthew Bright, whose fetish for pigtails and ponytails drove him to personally style the hair of his actresses...which must make him a creep, right? And yet, despite Bright's seemingly shady fascination with underage sexuality, this is one of the most empowering, ass-kicking girl power movies I’ve ever seen. Reese Witherspoon leaves this one off her resume, and yet her portrayal of the indomitable white trash warrior Vanessa Lutz is, hands-down, the single best performance of her career, promising a future of nitro-fueled intensity that (Tracy Flick aside) pretty much fizzled into perky romantic comedy fluff. Remember how cool Emilio Estevez was in Repo Man before he became...y’know, Emilio Estevez? Yeah, it’s kinda like that. The story pits Witherspoon’s illiterate, underage Lutz against a crack whore mother (Amanda Plummer), an abusive stepfather, the L.A.P.D. and, most notably, Kiefer Sutherland as the story’s Big Bad Wolf, Bob Wolverton (get it?), a leering bogeyman of a sexual predator. The escalating verbal and physical warfare between Lutz and Wolverton taps into something downright primal and possibly Freudian, as if Bright is investing all his forbidden love for the raw sexuality and electric vitality of youth into Lutz and all the self-loathing shame surrounding his secret, twisted obsessions into Wolverton, then letting the two duke it out in a steel-cage match. The result is the greatest B-movie John Waters never made, a loud, raucous, thriller with jaw-dropping stretches of pitch-black comedy and a truly startling cameo by the queen of Jailbait Cinema, the one and only Brooke Shields, who shows up (along with Mr. Bright’s even more peculiar sequel to Freeway) in part three of this list.

KIDS (1995)

In Kids, the first feature directed by the legendary photographer Larry Clark, a bunch of teenagers spend a day and a night wandering around New York City in the summer. They have sex, shoplift, beat the crap out of somebody, take drugs, and have an orgiastic party. There's no plot to speak of, but there is a suspense hook: Jennie (Chloe Sevigny) has just learned that she's contracted AIDS from the mushmouthed, seventeen-year-old lothario Telly (Leo Fitzpatrick), a serial deflowerer of girls who imagines that his sexual partners will always remember him if he's their first but who loses any interest in them after that, and she sets out to try to find him before he can rack up his next intended victim, Ruby (Rosario Dawson). (She is unsuccessful in this.) The whole movie is sunk so deep inside its obsessions with selfish teenage kicks that it gives the feeling that the screen could use a bath. When it first appeared, Kids was THE controversial indie film of its season, and it was defended by some moralists who argued that Clark and his twenty-two-year-old screenwriting partner Harmony Korine were obviously showing us these youngsters acting like animals--which is the closest thing they have to an interesting quality--as a "wake-up call" to parents. Please. Clark's subsequent films (Bully, Wassup Rockers), and for that matter the photo collections with which he'd made his name (Tulsa, Teenage Lust) have only served to confirm that Clark likes to film teenagers babbling incoherently, acting out nastily and fucking because he likes to watch teenagers babbling incoherently, acting out nastily and fucking; pointing a camera at it gives him an excuse to indulge in his hobby, which he is of course entitled to share with others who have similar interests. Those of us who used to get bored with such things after about three minutes even when we were teenagers need to look elsewhere.

HARD CANDY (2005)

At 21, Ellen Page sure is a hard-working gal. Juno may have made her a star when it opened late last year, but in recent months we've seen the arrival of three other movies in which she stars or has prominent roles (Smart People, The Tracey Fragments, and An American Crime, which played at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival but recently premiered on Showtime cable). In fact, the success of Juno was the explosion coming at the end of a long fuse set by the cult home video success of Hard Candy, a two-character drama that uses the then-teenaged actress's mixture of seductiveness and spikiness for all it's worth. She plays a 14-year-old who has struck up an Internet correspondence with an adult photographer (Patrick Wilson); when she meets him for the first time, she invites herself back to his place with the promise of hearing a Goldfrapp mp3 he boasts of having. Once they get back to his place, it turns out that she's springing a trap; taking him prisoner, she informs him that she knows that he's a pedophile who's involved in the murder of a girl, and she proceeds to torture him, threaten him with exposure and castration, and cajole him to do the right thing and commit suicide. It's to Page's considerable credit that, by turns enticing, alarming, and outright scary, she remains fascinating throughout, even though she can't make her character believable; she has a degree of infallible self-assurance that would be hard to buy in a SWAT team leader, let alone a 14-year-old girl playing cat and mouse with a psycho on his home turf. Her choicest moment of degradation for her prey may be when, having gotten him where she wants him, she casually reveals that she actually thinks Goldfrapp is pretty lame. Other movies (such as The Professional) know that the viewer's inner pedophile will be flattered by seeing a young girl insist that she wants the older man even if he has the nobility (and the box-office savvy) to not follow through; Hard Candy knows that, while castration threats are pretty bad, the best way to make the older man shrivel up is to let him know that, when he thought he was being cool and up to date, he was actually sounding like an old fart.

For more jailbait: Part One, Part Three

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

Revenge of the Nerds - The 10 Sexiest Guy Geeks In Cinema (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Last week, Screengrab celebrated the 10 Sexiest Girl Geeks in Cinema...and now, in tribute to the return of that dreamy Professor Henry Jones, Jr. (in the hotly anticipated Kingdom of the Crystal Skull), we present our equal opportunity list of ten hot nerdy guys.

As with the previous list, most of these so-called nerds, geeks, dorks and maxi-zoom dweebies are played by actors who, in real life, are pretty easy on the eyes. But their characters, at least, are misfits and loners, undervalued diamonds in the rough just waiting to be discovered by some lucky, sharp-eyed lady (or gentleman).

Why lucky? Because as Robert Carradine’s Louis Skolnick says in Revenge of the Nerds (and as we at The Screengrab know oh so well), “Jocks only think about sports, nerds only think about sex.”

10. William Hurt as Professor Eddie Jessup in Altered States

Back in the 1980s, William Hurt was the poster child for brainy-sexy-cool, thanks to his breakthrough role in Ken Russell’s nerd-tastic acid trip Altered States. Hurt stars as Professor Eddie Jessup, a Harvard scientist who is so totally obsessed with his research into universal consciousness that he’d rather “experiment” on himself than have sex with his hot primatologist wife...and what’s geekier than that?

9. Alan Tudyk as Wash in Serenity

Not being a lady or a gay gentleman, I was a little unsure of the actual “hotness” of some of the geeks on this list, and when I ran my original #9 (Jeff Goldblum as doomed scientist Seth Brundle in The Fly) by my wife, she shrugged, “Yeah...uh...I guess.” And while no less an authority than Geena Davis apparently found Brundlefly plenty damn sexy, I nevertheless decided instead to dedicate this space to the late, lamented pilot of the good ship Serenity, who my friend Julia informs me is quite the nerd hottie. Sweet, technology-obsessed and a little bit dorky, poor Wash is gone but evidently not forgotten.

8. Cary Grant as David Huxley in Bringing Up Baby

In last week’s girl geek list, I noted that Scarlett Johansson playing a geek in Ghost World was about as believable as Denise Richards playing a nuclear physicist, and I freely admit it seems hypocritical to list this uber-suave icon of urbane manliness in a top ten list of cinematic nerds...yet Grant’s stuffy paleontologist is the ancestor to any number of sweetly sexy absent-minded professor characters too obsessed with their studies to recognize their biological needs or the effect of their powerful chemistry on the world around them. Speaking of which...

7. Ryan O’Neal as Dr. Howard Bannister in What’s Up Doc?

I deferred again to my wife here in the #7 spot after she violently rejected my original pick: Jon Cryer as Phil “Duckie” Dale in Pretty in Pink, about whom I said: “Sure, Molly Ringwald’s Andie Walsh ultimately chose Andrew McCarthy’s limp noodle preppie, but in the same way all my guy geek friends preferred the pre-makeover Allison in The Breakfast Club, just about every alterna-girl I know would have picked Jon Cryer’s sometimes annoying but always stylish and devoted Duckie in a heartbeat.” To which my wife, an alterna-girl in her own right, shot back, “No. He’s not a hot nerd. He’s just a dork.” So, instead, I’ve substituted Ryan O’Neal’s befuddled, wife-approved musicologist as my #7 pick, in part to beef up the 1970s content of this list, and in part because any character who spends the majority of his time obsessed with igneous rock formations yet still manages to attract offbeat beauties like Madeline Kahn’s Eunice Burns and 1970s-sex-kitten-era-Barbara Streisand’s Judy Maxwell is clearly a nerd to be reckoned with.

6. Wes Bentley as Ricky Fitts in American Beauty (by Paul Clark)

When we first came up with the idea for this list, we went back and forth about the idea of including Ricky Fitts. Sure, he's an outcast at school, but does that make him a true geek? Ricky certainly doesn’t fit the mold on the surface -- no horn-rims, not especially studious, and so on. But, to quote American Beauty's tagline, "look closer." With his ever-present camera and intense gaze, he has the bearing of someone who's spent his life on the outside looking in, the way all geeks feel during their high-school years. Listen to his famous monologue about the plastic bag -- there's an analytical mind at work here that distinguishes him from his more socially-adept, less self-aware peers. Being a loner has given him plenty of time to step back from life and think about the world around him in a way most people his age don't have time for. It's also given him a serene acceptance of his life that proves irresistible to his troubled next-door neighbor Angela (Thora Birch). When she's not sneaking him up to her bedroom to have sex, he's everything a good boyfriend should be -- sensitive, empathetic, a good listener, the whole shebang. So Ricky doesn't look the part, but so what? In many ways, he's the real deal in a way those Urkel wannabes aren't, and a kind of ideal for young women who find themselves frustrated with the limited possibilities of dating popular jocks. -- Paul Clark

Click here for part 2.

Geek Love: The Ten Sexiest Nerds in Cinema, Gen-XX Edition (Part Deux)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 20:30:00 GMT

5. MARY STUART MASTERSON AS DANNI IN HEAVEN HELP US AND WATTS IN SOME KIND OF WONDERFUL

Danni in the 1960s-era Catholic school comedy Heaven Help Us would surely have been too cool for me in the real world, but the tomboy drummer Watts was a perfect fantasy: the groovy gal pal who’s been secretly pining for you all along -- then, when you finally catch wise, she’s dressed in a sleek, Goth-y chauffeur’s uniform. Tellingly, in John Hughes’ gender-flipped version of the same story (Pretty In Pink), Jon Cryer’s groovy guy pal, Duckie secretly pines for Molly Ringwald’s Andie, but then has to just suck it while she runs off with...yes, another popular hunk.

4. MICHELLE MEYRINK AS JORDAN COCHRAN IN REAL GENIUS

I wouldn’t have been smart enough for Jordan Cochran’s motor-mouthed, socially awkward “Pacific Tech” brainiac, but it was nice to know cute girls could be hyper, too!

3. THORA BIRCH AS JANE BURNHAM IN AMERICAN BEAUTY AND ENID IN GHOST WORLD

I’d evolved from a hopelessly geeky adolescent to a somewhat less geeky adult by the time Thora Birch became the definitive fin de siècle geek girl, but her sultry slow-burn cynicism (and surprisingly huge breasts) put the “It” in her misfits. (Scarlett Johnasson in Ghost World, meanwhile, is one of the hottest screen characters of all time, but ScarJo as a nerdy misfit is about as believable as Denise Richards as a nuclear physicist.)

2. CARRIE FISHER AS PRINCESS LEIA IN RETURN OF THE JEDI

The iconic, the unforgettable, the indisputable chain mail bikini. Even my gay nerd friends wanted a piece o’ that.

1. ALYSON HANNIGAN AS MICHELLE FLAHERTY IN AMERICAN PIE

A goofy, accessible, redhead nymphomaniac played by the actress who played the lesbian witch (and the evil vampire lesbian witch) on Buffy the Vampire Slayer? My friends, we have a winner.

And now that we've got you all lathered up in a hot geek frenzy, we'd love to know the nerds that steam up YOUR Coke-bottle glasses...and stay tuned for next week's list of Top Ten Brainy BOYS!

Click here for Part 1!

DVD Digest for March 18, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week, a memorable trio of new Criterions shares a release date with three of the most critically lambasted films of 2007. Who will prevail?

DVD of the Week: In the past decade, the suburban-dysfunction genre has had a lot to answer for, not least the seemingly endless string of glib American Beauty clones full of easy laughs and cheap stabs at profundity. But The Ice Storm shouldn't be held accountable for this- an uncommonly sensitive take on similar material, Ang Lee's adaptation of Rick Moody's novel ventures into uncomfortable corners of the bourgeois lifestyle without softening them with irony. Lee's film also boasted a cast that if anything is more impressive now than it was then, given the subsequent careers of then-newcomers Tobey Maguire and Katie Holmes, as well as former child stars Elijah Wood and Christina Ricci. Criterion's new two-disc set features commentary from Lee and writer/producer James Schamus, interviews with Moody and many of the film's stars, and much more, plus it promises to make Frederick Elmes' cold, wet cinematography look particularly gorgeous. It's the perfect opportunity to revisit a film that warrants a second look.

Also this week, Criterion brings us two films that are new to DVD, Alberto Lattuada's Mafioso and Hiroshi Teshigahara's documentary Antonio Gaudi. Not having seen either of these films I can't pass judgment on them, but I'm glad Criterion has seen fit to give them the best treatment possible, particularly Teshigahara's film, the latest effort on their part to celebrate his often-overlooked career.

Recent releases coming to DVD include: Joe Wright's Oscar-nominated Atonement (Universal), the kid-friendly princess comedy Enchanted (Disney, also Blu-Ray), the surprisingly good I Am Legend (Warner, also Blu-Ray), Fox's failed attempt at a Potter-like franchise The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising, and the aforementioned trio of critically-drubbed films, Love in the Time of Cholera (New Line), Revolver (Sony), and Southland Tales.

New TV on DVD includes Volume 1 of the 2007 reboot of The Bionic Woman (Universal) and Season 8 of Married... with Children (Sony). That's a strange juxtaposition of flashy action and soundstage-bound low comedy, but then when it comes to television, you can't have one without the other.

Also of note is MGM's trio of new DVD editions of baseball-themed movies to get viewers geared up for Opening Day: Bull Durham, Eight Men Out, and Pride of the Yankees. Indeed, these new editions appear to be geared more toward baseball fans than movie lovers, as they're chock full of baseball-themed extras, particularly the Curt Schilling-heavy Pride of the Yankees platter.

Finally, we bring you yet another edition of the ever popular Huddleston Corner. This week, we're offering shout-outs to two new HD-DVD releases, Atonement (Universal) and Justice League: The New Frontier (Warner). However, Mr. Huddleston would like to inform you that he doesn't know how many more condolences he has left in him, and he hopes that the bums companies who are still stuck on HD-DVD will get their acts together soon.

Morning Deal Report: Noooo!

Peter Smith — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 16:55:00 GMT

Justice League is on hold. Damn you, Hollywood! America needs more superheroes!

First Run Features will distribute the documentary Jihad for Love — the first documentary ever made about gay Muslims, from the directors of Trembling Before G-d, about gay Orthodox Jews. This is sure to go over well in the Muslim world. In more Islam-baiting news, Warner Independent will release the new film directed by American Beauty writer (and Six Feet Under creator) Alan Ball: Towelhead, about "the sexual awakening of a thirteen-year-old Arab-American girl." At least it's not the sexual awakening of a gay thirteen-year-old Arab-American boy. That'd really rile 'em.

Hayden Panettiere may star in the adaptation of Larry Doyle's comic novel I Love You, Beth Cooper. The book's supposed to be great, and gets a nod from me for employing the underappreciated Evan Dorkin as cover artist.