The Screengrab : anthony hopkins

Taxing Time: A Screengrab Salute To Beat The Clock Cinema (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 21:00:00 GMT

CELLULAR (2004)

Despite flying under many moviegoers’ radars in 2004, David R. Ellis’ Cellular is a crackerjack thriller that overcomes its somewhat preposterous central conceit via unflagging breakneck energy. Co-written by B-movie master Larry Cohen, the story hinges on a kidnapped woman (Kim Basinger) using a smashed telephone to make a random call to the cell phone of a stranger (Chris Evans). Basinger successfully convinces Evans to help her escape her predicament, though complications arise at every turn, from dying cell phone batteries, to the cops’ unwillingness to lend a hand, to a bit of signal-crossing that forces Evans to steal someone else’s cell phone and car. Bolstered by a strong cast that also includes Jessica Biel as Evans’ ex-girlfriend, Jason Statham as Basinger’s kidnapper, and William H. Macy as a police officer, and enlivened by director Ellis’ no-nonsense, pulse-pounding orchestration of his various high-wire set pieces, Cellular remains the type of efficient, no-frills genre flick that Hollywood has – save for the rare exception – mostly given up on in favor of high-concept, big-budget spectaculars. (NS)

THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (1991)

Jonathan Demme’s 1991 serial-killer fantasia has been so celebrated (after winning a shocking number of Oscars and turning Dr. Hannibal Lecter into a household name) and its performances so justifiably celebrated that it’s easy to forget: at its heart beats a good old-fashioned thriller, cleverly conceived and exquisitely realized. A huge amount of the tension in a movie crammed full of it derives from the fact that Anthony Hopkins’ Dr. Lecter knows exactly what the murderous Buffalo Bill is up to, but he doesn’t care. As he notes, he has all the time in the world, but as for Bill’s latest victim – “Tick tock”, he says with casual menace. Even after it’s become clear that Lecter is doling out information as part of an overarching plan to free himself, the movie never stops screwing with the bloody deadline it’s set; when Buffalo Bill’s house is finally raided, it’s a masterful fake-out that only increases the tension. Demme and his screenwriter, Ted Tally, deserve tons of credit for adding psychological depth and character to what is, at heart, a terrifically paced old-school murder mystery. (LP)

THE ABOMINABLE DR. PHIBES (1971)

This camp horror classic stars Vincent Price as a brilliant madman outfitted with a voice box, a Moe Howard haircut, and the red-rimmed eyes of a lifetime High Times subscriber. Peeved at the medical team he blames for the death of his beloved wife -- and if you looked like this and managed to find a beautiful woman who wanted to marry you, you'd take the loss of her hard, too -- Price sets about dispatching them by means of a series of murder plots inspired by the plagues that God, under Charlton Heston's supervision, once inflicted on Egypt. The climactic zinger is a terrifically tense draining-hourglass sequence that is Price's version of the curse that claimed the country's first born sons. Instead of killing the chief surgeon (Joseph Cotten), he kidnaps and drugs the man's son, implants a key inside the boy's chest near his heart, and leaves him lying on a surgical table beneath an acid-filled container. Doc Cotten has six minutes to perform the delicate surgery necessary to retrieve the key so he can free the boy and move him out of the way before the acid eats its way through and destroys his face. In the end, Cotten pulls it off, and the acid falls on Price's mysterious woman assistant, who thus forfeited the chance to appear in the sequel. (PN)

MURDER BY CONTRACT (1958)

This little-seen but influential 81-minute noir, directed by Irving Lerner on a low budget, stars Vince Edwards as a businesslike hit man who hits Los Angeles and hooks up with a couple of mooks who are to support him in his efforts to kill a government witness who is being kept under heavy guard while waiting to give testimony against Mr. Big. Despite its brief running time, the movie is to most race-against-time films what O. J. Simpson's televised 2004 tour of California was to Vanishing Point. To his assistants' consternation, the brainy Vince chooses to while away his first few days in the city before turning to his work, only to explode when he discovers that the target is a woman -- not because he has any philosophical or sentimental objections to killing a woman, but because he regards women as more "unpredictable" than men, which makes them more likely to veer from the routines on which he bases his elaborate murder plans. After a re-negotiation of his fee, Vince sets to work, but damned if there doesn't seem to be something to his gender-based theory. After bombing out a couple of times. and with the clock ticking down, Vince breaks character and makes a last, desperate, hands-on stab at dispatching his target, finally coming to grief in the end. It's an unusually zen thriller. (PN)

Cut the red wire, the green wire...or Click Here For Part One, Two, Four, Five & Six!!!!

Contributors: Nick Schager, Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent

Morning Deal Report: The Squeakquel

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 15:00:00 GMT

I wish I could tell you there won’t be an Alvin and the Chipmunks sequel. Furthermore, I wish I could tell you it won’t be titled Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel. But I cannot tell you these things. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Betty Thomas will direct the squeakquel, in which “Zachary Levi, star of the NBC action comedy series Chuck, has been cast opposite the computer-generated singing rodents.”

Woody Allen is going back to London. After a brief return to his New York stomping grounds for the upcoming Whatever Works starring Larry David and Evan Rachel Wood, Allen will shoot his latest project across the pond with Josh Brolin and Anthony Hopkins. “As usual, Allen is keeping title and plot under wraps,” Variety reports.

The Departed screenwriter William Monahan has another crime up his sleeve. Monahan will direct an adaptation of “The Art of the Heist: Confessions of a Master Thief, Rock-and-Roller and Prodigal Son, the forthcoming memoirs of career criminal Myles Connor. Connor became an art connoisseur and a rock musician whose band, Myles and the Wild Ones, backed Roy Orbison. He was also an accomplished art and antiques thief who was involved in a series of museum robberies that grabbed headlines in Boston in the 1970s and 1980s,” per Variety.

Jailhouse Rock: The Greatest Prison Films of All Time (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 21:15:00 GMT

TITICUT FOLLIES (1967)

Before I got my driver’s license, the only way to get to Boston from my hometown of Middleboro, Massachusetts (besides a ride from Mom & Dad) was a local bus that stopped at a prison in the neighboring town of Bridgewater to pick up the newly released ex-cons and ship ‘em home (or the nearest equivalent). Years later, I discovered the prison was actually the notorious state hospital for alcoholics, sex offenders and the criminally insane profiled in Frederick Wiseman’s controversial documentary Titicut Follies, a movie even more disturbing than all those long-ago bus rides. In stark black and white, Wiseman shows the subhuman conditions of the 1960s version of the facility and the desperation of the inmates (including one poor bastard I still remember vividly, years after the first and only time I watched the film, who keeps explaining, over and over again, that he’s perfectly sane and would really, really, really like to leave the premises). As an avid psychedelic drug enthusiast in my younger days, winding up in a mental hospital (mistakenly or not) has always been high on my list of worst-case scenarios, but Titicut Follies (named for the grimly surreal inmate “talent show” depicted in the film) is worst-case by way of 18th century Bedlam: “We see men needlessly stripped bare, insulted, herded about callously, mocked, taunted,” Robert Coles wrote of the film in The New Republic. “We see them ignored or locked interminably in cells. We hear the craziness in the air...” Massachusetts was so embarrassed by the film they tried not only to ban it, but also to have all copies destroyed (!) on the grounds that somehow the documentary violated the patients’ dignity more than, say, being held indefinitely in cell blocks without toilets and periodically hosed down. Wiseman asserted repeatedly that he’d received permission from all the patients who appeared in the film (or their guardians), yet (according to Wikipedia, at least) the film wasn’t legally cleared for general public release until 1991, at which point the Massachusetts State Supreme Court also stipulated the film would need to include a “brief explanation...that changes and improvements have taken place at Massachusetts' Correctional Institution in Bridgewater since 1966.” One would hope.

THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (1991)

In this year of Rachel Getting Married, it’s not at all hard to see why Jonathan Demme once made a movie that swept the Oscars. What’s surprising is that he won it for The Silence of the Lambs, a movie that in lesser hands, with a lesser cast, would have been little more than a clever genre exercise. But Demme’s capable direction, a masterful sense of mood and tone, and some stunning performances carried it into the realms of greatness, with Anthony Hopkins’ brutally mannered performance proving what a great villain can do for a movie. Some prison films are all about the experience of being on the inside, but others derive their tension and power from the time-honored tradition of the jailbreak. While Dr. Hannibal Lecter’s escape from his dismal subterranean dungeon (where he’s kept from touching anything solid, even a pen cap) is inevitable, it differs from most escape yarns in that the criminal’s liberation is something that fills us with dread instead of excitement. Lecter’s cruel psychological manipulation leads him out from the underground, and his brutal violence unleashes him on the world again after a decade of imprisonment. The movie’s final scenes are less a triumph than a threat: Satan unleashed upon the world again.

ANIMAL FACTORY (2000)

Steve Buscemi does an admirable job, in his second full-length directorial effort, of conveying the casual brutality and bizarre social cycles of prison life. By refusing both glamorization and utter degradation, he keeps his storytelling solid and balanced, allowing the powerful action on screen to work itself out in more subtle ways. Edward Furlong’s young convict finds himself totally unprepared for prison life, and even after he’s taken under the wing of ex-gang boss Willem Dafoe, he finds himself given over to fear that shapes his reactions to the prison world as much as any real violence or sexual assault. Buscemi’s simple, un-flashy approach is perfect for the material, and he wisely keeps himself off camera and lets his actors and situations tell the story. Of course, he’s aided and abetted, so to speak, by a worthy bunch of co-conspirators: the screenplay to Animal Factory was written by Eddie Bunker – best known as Mr. Blue in Reservoir Dogs, but also an established writer, actor, and career criminal whose own stints in prison inspired the script. Bunker’s friend Danny Trejo – a man he spent time with in prison and who, like him, was redeemed through his art – also has a leading role in the film, which is one of the reasons it reeks of authenticity.

I AM A FUGITIVE FROM A CHAIN GANG (1932)

The melodramatic tone of most ‘30s films leads to an inevitable graying, and Mervyn LeRoy’s then-controversial I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang hasn’t aged like a fine wine. But it’s still an extremely worthwhile movie, with a harrowing escape scene and the nervous, twitchy shoulders of Oscar-nominated Paul Muni as a World War I vet who fled the intolerably brutal justice of the Georgia prison system. Based on a true story – in fact, Robert Burns, the man on whom Muni’s character was based, served as a technical adviser on the film while still a fugitive until he was forced to hit the road again – Chain Gang fudged the facts a bit. It’s no secret that the movie’s particulars were a bit glossed over in order to make Muni more appealing to audiences hard-hit by the Depression. But it certainly doesn’t make him a noble figure by any means; his downward spiral and lowlife ways only make it more shocking when we see how he’s systematically dehumanized by the chain gang system, which was little more than state-sponsored slavery. Even 75 years later, the movie’s final scene packs a punch, as Muni answers the question of how he manages to live with a simple, harsh response: “I steal.”

DOWN BY LAW (1986)

You don’t often hear the phrase “quirky prison comedy”, but if anyone can carry off that particular genre blend, it’s Jim Jarmusch. Assembling a unique cast – John Lurie as a big-talking pimp, Tom Waits as a laconic disc jockey, and Roberto Begnini (in his first English-speaking role, if you can call it that) as a bewildered Italian tourist – he deftly mixes together screwball comedy, existential drama, and the kind of quiet indie strangeness that would become his hallmark over the years to come. Compelled to escape from prison more or less because they can’t stand being stuck in the same cell with one another anymore (their scenes in jail are probably the funniest prison scenes this side of the end of The Producers), the three break out and trudge through the gorgeously photographed Louisiana bayou; they escape imprisonment, but they can’t escape each other, and freedom seems to have precious little to distinguish itself from jail for them. A perfect companion piece to Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise, Down By Law is perhaps the greatest of Jarmusch’s "beautiful losers" movies, and the whole thing should be experienced like your last night before heading off to jail: through a cloud of smoke and a fog of booze, with a good-looking and dangerous girl by your side.

Click Here For Part One, Three, Four & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce

Thursday Poll for December 18, 2008

Paul Clark — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Last week, to coincide with the release of Ron Howard’s big-screen take on Frost/Nixon, we asked you to choose your favorite big-screen version of our 37th President. According to you, the Trickiest Dick of all was the future Lt. Bookman and Jimmy Gator himself, Philip Baker Hall, in Robert Altman’s Secret Honor. Hall brought in 45% of the vote, all the more impressive when you consider that his competition was somewhat stiffer than Nixon’s was in 1972. Coming in second place was Anthony Hopkins in Oliver Stone’s Nixon, followed by the ever-popular “Other” (although readers neglected to specify precisely which Other they meant) and Frank Langella in Frost/Nixon, whose poor showing might be attributable to the fact that his film hasn’t yet been widely released. Sadly, Dan Hedaya’s comedic take on the disgraced Commander in Chief couldn’t manage a single vote, although for my part I would’ve ranked him second behind Hall.

This week, we look at the career of perennial Oscar favorite (and eternal Screengrab crush) Kate Winslet. With two new films on the verge of release, Winslet once again finds herself in the awards hunt for one or possibly even both of these performances. But before she can add yet another nomination to her already impressive five (at the age of 33, no less), let’s compare the relative merits of her already-nominated performances. Which is your favorite?

Which of Kate Winslet's nominated performances is your favorite? | BuzzDash polls

I predict this will be a landslide, although lord knows I’ve been wrong before. As always, the comments section is open. See you next week!

Screengrab Presents: The Worst Stage-To-Screen Adaptations Of All Time (Part Eight)

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 00:30:00 GMT

EVITA (1996)

The Andrew Lloyd Webber/Tim Rice pop-rock opera tells the story of a breathtakingly ambitious woman who sleeps her way to the top, then demands to be taken seriously (to the point of deification), yet no amount of money, power or adulation can ever satisfy her ravenous ego. For some reason, Madonna thought she’d be perfect for the part, and even learned to sing (fifteen years into her career as a singer) to hit the high notes of theater geek staples like “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina.” Unfortunately, the Material Girl’s participation in the project didn’t end with acting: while the Broadway production was about a flawed despot’s wife who embodies style-over-substance “truthiness" (imagining herself as a savior of the common people while really serving no one but herself), Madonna apparently insisted on scrubbing away her character’s flaws, transforming the story into a historically dissonant La Isla Bonita version of A Star Is Born, featuring a scrappy, sexy gal who uses her moxie to make it big (and wear a lot of swanky ‘40s fashion), robbing the musical of most of its thematic purpose and resonance and rendering Antonio Banderas’ role as Evita’s antagonist essentially pointless.

HAMLET (1969)

The movie versions of John Osborne's "angry young man" plays Look Back in Anger (starring Richard Burton) and The Entertainer (starring Laurence Olivier) -- plays that Richardson himself had staged in the theater -- are marred by clumsy film technique and the deadness one associates with inept efforts to "open out" stage plays, but they remain valuable records of great performances by legendary actors working with material that changed the face of theater. But Richardson's Hamlet, which wears its staginess on its sleeve and stars Nicol Williamson in the title role, is an embarrassing relic of its moment: a disastrous attempt to make Shakespeare relevant to the 1960s by pimping it out with sexual overtones (some of them supplied by Marianne Faithfull, who plays Ophelia, and who comes across as sweet, hard-working, and very confused) while emphasizing the generation gap angle (despite the casting, as Hamlet's stepfather and mother, of performers, Anthony Hopkins and Judy Parfitt, who were younger than Williamson). Williamson's performance itself is some kind of landmark in bad Shakespearean acting: too self-contained to connect with the other performers and wearing a fresh layer of varnish on his popping eyeballs, he gives a demonstration of how it's possible to use the lines to show off the speed of one's word rate and the showiness of one's delivery without using the words to express a thing. From several years' perspective, the whole thing may be best seen as an inside joke done in preparation for Williamson's performance, two decades later, as John Barrymore in Paul Rudnick's I Hate Hamlet. Which had its own problems.

KING LEAR (1971)

Peter Brooks' controversial, celebrated 1960s production was reportedly modeled on Samuel Beckett, with a resigned attitude towards the horrors that befall Lear and the other characters, and with the star, Paul Scofield, employing what Susan Sontag described as "arbitrary vocal mannerisms that deadened the full emotional power of his lines." "Deadened" is an accurate term for the production as it comes across in this black-and-white movie version, which seems to be an attempt to "modernize" the text by making it as far from moving as possible.

MACBETH (1948)

In his greatest Shakespeare movies, Chimes at Midnight and Othello, Orson Welles managed to draw inspiration for striking and powerful images from the desperation caused by his lack of funds, but he came a cropper here, working on too tight a budget and shooting schedule for Republic Pictures. In his cutting and reshaping of the text, Welles sometimes made dramatic logic subservient to his requisite Big Idea, that the witches and their cat's-paw, Macbeth, represented a barbaric, Druidic religion at war with the coming of Christianity. (He didn't do himself or the ears of his audience any favors with his other big idea, that the actors should attempt Scottish accents.) Other problems were beyond his control, such as the cheapo costumes that Republic supplied him with: the movie may be most notorious for its headgear, especially the sight of Welles in a "crown" that looks like a square box with three triangular points glued to the side, which Welles himself acknowledged made him look like he was playing the Statue of Liberty. It must be said that, as befits a play with a curse on it, Macbeth has probably inspired more rotten movie adaptations than any other great play, the most recent being a 2006 Australian movie, directed by Geofrey Wright, which was set among modern drug dealers in Melbourne, with leads who might have stepped out of a photo spread in Maxim; it plays like Miami Vice spoken in verse, with an Aussie accent. And that's not even taking into account all the movies that dump the bard's dialogue while, with a wink to the audience, using his plot. (These include the 1990 gangster movie Men of Respect, starring John Turturro and his wife Katherine Borowitz, and the godawful Scotland, Pa., in which James Le Gros and Maura Tierney attempt to rise in the fast-food industry by feeding their boss, Duncan, into the deep-fat fryer.)

LOVES LABOUR'S LOST (2000)

When Kenneth Branagh's Henry V opened months after the death of Laurence Olivier, critics rushed to embrace its young director-star as Olivier's heir apparent. But though Branagh has certainly had his moments since then, his directing career has been heavier on the Princess and the Showgirls than on the Hamlets. Bad as his attempts to experiment outside his Shakespeare roots (such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Peter's Friends) have been, he really found the worst of both worlds with the first-ever movie version of this Shakespeare comedy, staged as a musical and crammed with actors who lacked experience in both classical theater and singing and dancing. Miramax Studios took one look at the results and flushed its three-picture deal with Branagh down the toilet, thus establishing once and for all that Harvey Weinstein is a Friend of the Theater.

FIDDLER ON THE ROOF (1971)

Norman Jewison is a lousy director, and his thoroughly inept Fiddler On The Roof (source material I don't really care about one way or the other) did me a great service when I was a teenager by demonstrating (years before I'd seen Kevin Smith movies) exactly what inept mise-en-scene looks like. Early on, Topol is dancing in the barn. The frame is widescreen, and Jewison has so little idea of how to fill it that one half of the screen is Topol; the other half is a cow's ass. This is one of the crowning insults in the long history of rejected visual innovations on-screen. Why, if only I could find an amateur video of a Japanese stage production, even that would be an improvement. Oh wait, there it is!

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Vadim Rizov

Screengrab Review: "Frost/Nixon"

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 20:30:00 GMT

I’ve been spending the waning days of the George W. Bush era immersed in Nixonland. Rick Perlstein’s massive, compulsively readable tome makes a convincing case that Richard Nixon capitalized on the divisions in ‘60s America so successfully that he defined the political landscape for decades to come. I’m only halfway through the book – early 1969, to be specific – so please don’t ruin the ending for me. My guess is that Nixon is elected to three more terms and his face is carved on Mt. Rushmore.

But I kid. I’m actually aware that Mr. Nixon had something of an ignominious downfall, and that some years later he sat down to discuss the matter with British chat show host David Frost. I never would have guessed that the backstage finagling behind this momentous meeting would serve as the basis for a critically-acclaimed Broadway play, let alone a Ron Howard movie. Politics does indeed make strange bedfellows. But while I have my doubts that this is a story that needed to be told, Frost/Nixon tells it in such a brisk, engaging way, it’s easy to forgive a few notable missteps.

Don’t get me wrong; it’s not that I’m convinced what has ended up on the screen here bears much resemblance to the actual behind-the-scenes intrigue of the Frost/Nixon interviews. The play by Peter Morgan (who has adapted it for the screen) is probably at least 50% speculative nonsense, but you could say the same for Robert Altman’s 1984 foray into Nixonia, Secret Honor, and that film would be no less riveting for it. Howard isn’t on Altman’s level (please, don’t stop the presses), but for the most part he stays out of the way and lets the two lead actors do their thing.

They’ve been doing that thing for a while now. Michael Sheen and Frank Langella originated the roles of Frost and Nixon on London’s West End, and Langella won a Tony for his presidential portrayal when the production moved to Broadway. As the movie opens, Frost is hosting an Australian variety show, having lost his high-profile gig on American television, and he’s itching to get back to the big time. He sees his opening when President Nixon resigns in disgrace in 1974. Working on his memoirs, the ex-Prez wants a big payday for his first exclusive TV interview, and the U.S. networks are unwilling to pony up.

Enter the unlikely Frost, a man best known for chit-chatting with lightweights. (The real Frost disputes this, insisting he had interviewed many political giants before landing the big fish.) He gets Nixon to agree to four 90-minute specials, the last of which will focus exclusively on Watergate, then sets about cobbling together a syndicated network and sponsorship agreements with the likes of Weed-Wacker in order to meet Nixon’s seven-figure price. Frost brings aboard a team of Nixon experts to help him sharpen the knives for the grand inquisition, but as filming gets underway it is Nixon who has the upper hand, gassing on at length about his accomplishments and leaving Frost gasping for air.

Can Frost pull it together in time to nail Nixon to the wall once and for all in the climactic Watergate interview? As I recall, the general reaction to the actual Nixon/Frost interview has always been…eh, not really. (The real thing is now out on DVD, although I haven’t had a chance to check it out yet.) Still, Howard and Morgan do a capable job of milking the drama out of this question, only occasionally overreaching, as in an imagined late-night drunken phone call from Nixon to Frost.

The supporting cast, including Oliver Platt, Sam Rockwell, Kevin Bacon and Toby Jones, is excellent, but I need to single out Rebecca Hall, mainly because I didn’t recognize her at all from Vicky Cristina Barcelona and so every time she appeared on screen I made a mental note to check IMDb as soon as I got home to find out where this wondrous being had been all my life. The ’70s style definitely works for her.

More importantly, Sheen and Langella expertly tango their way through the steps of this adversarial alliance between interviewer and subject. Sheen is equal parts showman and con man, revealing just enough vulnerability to earn our affections. Like Philip Baker Hall and to some extent Anthony Hopkins before him, Langella is a mythic, larger-than-life Nixon, but he leaves you with at least a smidgen of sympathy for the devil.

Related:
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That Guy! Philip Baker Hall

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

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

FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS (1998)

Biopics have always blurred the line between fact and legend, a stylistic practice that both fueled and destroyed the career of Hunter S. Thompson, who (at his best) went beyond the bounds of traditional journalism by injecting himself into the stories he covered, amplifying the reality of his subject matter through wild exaggeration. But, as a certain lame duck American president can certainly attest, “truthiness” is a slippery slope, and Thompson eventually began to confuse himself with his journalistic doppleganger, Raoul Duke, the drug-addled party monster at the heart of Terry Gilliam’s psychedelic adaptation of the college dorm room staple once considered unfilmable. While a “straight” biopic of the actual events of Thompson’s life would be fascinating (as long as Art Linson, director of the tedious Bill Murray fiasco Where the Buffalo Roam, had nothing to do with it), Gilliam instead captured the legend of Thompson/Duke and his infamous 1971 road trip to Sin City with his “attorney,” Dr. Gonzo (a funhouse mirror fictionalization of the Mexican-American political activist Oscar Zeta Acosta). Critics loathed the over-the-top depiction of Thompson’s hallucinated wonderland, yet despite an excess of shrieking in Benicio del Toro’s headache-inducing performance as Gonzo, Johnny Depp admirably captures both the real Thompson and his alter ego in an underrated performance. Plus, the movie’s a flat-out hoot: after howling through a near empty screening with fellow Screengrabber Scott Von Doviak, another audience member who’d ignored all the scathing reviews approached us to hazard the minority opinion, “Yeah! It was funny...right?”

RAGING BULL (1980)

Directors who specialized in noir – drawn as they were to doomed heroes and disorienting levels of moral ambiguity – loved to make films about boxers. Carnal, visceral creatures, they seemed particularly drawn to the sort of manipulative femme fatales the genre celebrated, and they played to the notion of destiny’s brute: they were men, after all, whose primary form of human communication was savage physical violence. Martin Scorsese, who brought the dynamic emotional energy of the ’70s and the gorgeous visual iconography and crushing sense of guilt and shame of Catholicism to the noir framework, clearly felt the same way, so it’s no coincidence that one of his greatest films is a breathtaking refinement of the old-school pug-centered crime drama. What makes Raging Bull such a shocker, then, is that it’s a true story: Jake LaMotta’s meteoric rise, brutal determination, mercurial mood swings, and destructive relationships with his wife, his family, and his God seem like the stuff of lurid, overblown pulp drama. Given the material they had to work with, it’s no wonder Scorsese and his collaborators created such a stunning, immediate film. While much is made of the admittedly astonishing physical transformation made by Robert DeNiro as his LaMotta slid from lean, hungry contender to fat, washed-up ex-champ, his emotional and psychological transformation is just as incredible, as the cocky, unstoppable self-confidence of the young man inexorably decays into the pitiful, indulgent self-loathing of age.

MISHIMA: A LIFE IN FOUR CHAPTERS (1985)

Paul Schrader wrote the screenplay to Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull, which may have served as a sort of apprenticeship for his directing, four years later, the moving screen biography of Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima. Not only did he borrow heavily from Scorsese’s visual handiwork (notice the overhead camera angles, and the visual tonality that mixes elegiac near-silences with scenes of fiery violence), but he chose as his subject a public figure who shared more in common with Jake LaMotta than either of them would have cared to admit. Like LaMotta, Mishima’s story was so bizarre as to seem like the stuff of fiction: a weak young man who transformed himself through sheer willpower into a physically perfect bodybuilder; a barely closeted homosexual with poetic inclinations who married one of his country’s most famous female beauties and preached a gospel of rabid militarism; and a famous celebrity, considered the greatest writer of his generation, who ended his life in the most base possible manner, staging a would-be fascist revolution that ended with him clumsily committing suicide as the soldiers he hoped to inspire laughed at his grand ideals. Deftly blending intense psychological moments from Mishima’s life with gorgeous evocations of some of the most famous scenes in his fiction, Schrader creates a biopic that shows how much he learned from Scorsese – and how much he brought to the table himself.

THE ELEPHANT MAN (1980)

There were a million ways The Elephant Man could have gone wrong. (It’s easy to see how, in the innumerable one-joke parodies of it that sprang up in its wake.) A film about John Merrick, the terribly deformed Victorian-era man whose intelligence and perception transformed the lives of many who met him, could have been overly mawkish if taken too far in one direction, or grotesque and exploitative if taken too far in the other. Mel Brooks, who financed the film, knew this, and his first and best decision was to keep his name out of the production, realizing that audiences and critics would expect the film to be a joke if they thought it was coming from him. He took a major risk in hiring David Lynch to helm The Elephant Man, especially given Lynch’s penchant for unnerving surrealism, but Lynch was the best possible choice, and hit the necessary tone just right: he let Merrick’s appearance speak for itself, trusting John Hurt to communicate the agony of his mere existence as well as the man’s essential dignity. Lynch made the right decision to transfer his sense of the absurd and the bizarre onto Merrick’s surroundings, presenting us with a view of Victorian London as unsettling and alien as that of the world of Eraserhead, while putting Merrick in the position not of a monster, but of a man who did his best to be human in a world that would not allow him that role. The collaboration was so successful it’s a shame that the project Brooks next intended to do with Lynch – a surreal nightmare biography of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels set entirely inside the subject’s head - never got off the ground.

SAMURAI I: MUSASHI MIYAMOTO (1954)

When the historical figure you’re portraying in your biopic is less a human being than a character straight out of legend, you’ve got a lot of leeway in how you can portray him. There have been dozens of films in which legendary swordsman and duelist Miyamoto Musashi is the central figure, but the best of them all is director Hiroshi Inagaki’s Samurai trilogy. Though they’re best viewed as a whole, the first of the three movies is probably the strongest installment, telling the story of the epic figure from his humble beginnings to his utter transformation in the crucible of an unimaginably bloody battle. What Inagaki does right, and what distinguishes Musashi Miyamoto from the innumerable other films about the characters, is to strike a powerfully clear balance between historical storytelling and epic filmmaking; he is able, through solid storytelling and some highly inventive composition, to convey the sense that he is allowing us a glimpse of a real human figure who came from a particular time and place and ended up the way he did for discernable reasons, but he never lets go of the sweep and tension that remind us we’re watching a movie about a hero who is as much demigod as man. Of course, much of the credit must go to Toshirô Mifune, who gives the first of many towering performances in the lead role, yet Inagaki – rarely thought of as one of the first-rank Japanese directors of his day – does a fine job of sustaining the mood, tone, pace and look (abetted by some terrific EastmanColor cinematography by Jun Yasumoto) that distinguishes the whole trilogy. It’s as close to a definitive biopic as one can hope for when dealing with a legend.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce

Screengrab's Top Guilty Pleasures (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 23:00:00 GMT

VADIM RIZOV'S GUILTY PLEASURES:

HEALTH (1980)

A lot of Altman films have bad reputations, at least among non-believers, but HealtH was legendarily deemed unreleasable; planned for a release during the 1980 presidential election, it didn't play anywhere before it was finally let into a grudging run at New York's Film Forum in 1982; it's subsequently plunged into obscurity, seen only in extremely rare revivals and occasionally on the Fox Movie Channel. A memorably facile regular charge against Altman is that he did little more than cluster people together and occasionally zoom in; HealtH basically is that movie, but if you enjoy Altman, it's a blast. A naked attempt to update Nashville for the 1980 election, HealtH's political commentary is just as weak as that of Nashville, with less density to cover it up. Kent Jones once wrote that Altman's "tendency ... to go systematic" almost killed this movie, but if you enjoy that process on top of little more than a string of verbal and visual non sequiturs (my favorite: a guy in a tomato costume — don't ask — jumping into a pool for no good reason), it's well worth tracking down. Truly a fans-only effort.

KILLA SEASON (2006)

I guess I'm kind of ridiculously humorless, because the whole idea of "guilty pleasures" strikes me as part of the reason people are getting dumber: it's easier to recognize bad material, sit back and mock it than try to engage with anything serious and remotely challenging. For some people, the whole genre of "guilty pleasures" takes over entirely from the non-guilty kind and they surrender. Which is fair enough if you're working a demanding job or have a tough life and don't really care about movies and just want the laughs. But if you have the time and leisure (unemployment induced or otherwise) to want a guilty pleasure that actively challenges your endurance, say hello to Cam'ron's directorial debut Killa Season. Not technically a direct-to-video film (limited tri-state area screenings were scheduled for its release), Cam'ron's endless ode to gangsta life begins with a back-alley craps game which turns into a man getting whacked over the head with an empty bottle for a minor betting infraction, then everyone cheering as Cam'ron pisses all over him while chanting "No homo." Killa Season's main achievement is being consistently morally depraved and technically incompetent at all times. If the amateur videography and dialogue that makes mumblecore sound like the snappiest film noir you ever saw (Juelz Santana: "They trying to take over the block"; cut to random guy: "Yo, let's take over the block") aren't enough to entice you, stay for levels of moral filth surpassing Salo. For sheer grossness, the close-ups of coke pellets being shat out by mules are hard to beat, but less-extreme scenes like the ones where Cam'ron spits on a little girl are constantly forthcoming. At well over two hours, Killa Season will make you question your dedication to unintentional hilarity. Me, I watch it once a year.

TRANSPORTER 2 (2005)

Transporter 2 treats real-world physics with less precision than your average Looney Tunes cartoon. Over the course of Louis Leterrer's film, Jason Statham, when not systematically evading and defeating various goons and hirelings (including a hired assassinatrix who, for good kinky measure, shoots up a hospital in her lingerie — Transporter 2 defeats subtext by being even dumber than you'd expect) — consistently test-drives cars in ways I've never seen. My favorite is when, to get rid of a time-bomb on the car's underside, Statham's character hooks it on a construction crane as part of a perfect 360 that lands him on the opposite roof just as the bomb explodes. But there's also the completely nonsensical climactic fight, where Statham and his Euro-foe (Alessandro Grassman) duke it out, bullets and all, while a plane plummets into the ocean, and even after. With such sublime visions of human possibility, why carp about the real world? There's also a smaller pleasure here: anyone fond of the Europudding productions of the '70s — where a bunch of awkwardly accented actors were brought together into an under-written film calculated for nothing so much as maximum exploitation of every country the cast came from — should dig the awkward polyglot cast. When Grassman hisses (in relation to his evil plot to disseminate air toxins) "That's right. Breathe, my friend, breathe" — well, if you're not amused, I can't help you.

HANNIBAL (2001)

The Silence Of The Lambs is a well-crafted and compelling film, but it's basically kind of a drag: with every year, the sexual tensions driving Buffalo Bill seem a little less compelling and defensible, and the sexism card seems like more of a time capsule. Hannibal, on the other hand, is just stupid. Although Ridley Scott's come a long way since Alien, it takes a truly brain-dead mind to settle on his unique way of expressing conflict. When Hannibal's on, the "Goldberg Variations" play; when his nemesis (Gary Oldman) is chewing the screen, the "Blue Danube" plays. And when they meet, they both play at the same time. Hannibal is mostly remembered for its final gross-out brain-eating scene, but it offers more than that: if the sexism seems a little dated in Silence, the leering misogyny of Ray Liotta here is entirely, uh, Liotta-esque, and the constant shots of Florence are pretty without getting all Merchant-Ivory.

Click Here For More Guilt From Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Leonard Pierce, Hayden Childs & Sarah Clyne Sundberg

Contributor: Vadim Rizov

Screengrab Salutes: The Best & Worst James Bond Films of All Time! (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 23:00:00 GMT

THE BEST:

4. ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE (1969)

Okay, stop laughing. Yes, we realize this is the one with George Lazenby. But have you actually watched this lately? It holds up a whole hell of a lot better than most Bond movies, including some of Connery’s classics. But while Lazenby doesn’t have the same 007 magic as Connery did, fortunately the movie realizes this and makes it work to its advantage. By the time he hung up the tux for the first time, Connery was beginning to look a little too superhuman, so OHMSS begins with the new Bond getting a serious beatdown and quipping, “this never would’ve happened to the other guy.” From there, the movie gets really interesting, as the more vulnerable 007 is sent on one of the character’s best-written adventures to date, leading him to a remote Alpine clinic that could have been inspired by Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain if not for the bevy of nubile patients found therein. Likewise, the film contains its share of spectacular stunts, with special mention going to an impressive ski chase. But while Bond’s lustiness and flair for action are fully intact, OHMSS sees him do something he hadn’t done onscreen before -- fall in love. But then, with the object of his affections played by Diana Rigg, who could blame him? This revelation of Bond’s romantic side makes this installment more human than most, giving its hero a greater emotional stake in his mission, capped by a shocker of an ending that the series has yet to top. It’s tempting to wonder whether the film would’ve worked even better with Connery, but no matter -- even with a former Australian underwear model, it’s still bloody great.

3. FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE (1963)

For a long time, From Russia with Love – the second 007 movie – was considered the best. It later fell into a long battle with Goldfinger, and nowadays it’s often surpassed even for second place by some critics. It’s hard to see why: From Russia with Love is a roaring, energetic success from first frame to last. It cranks up everything from the first movie – the action scenes are wilder, the sexy scenes are sexier, the dialogue is wittier, and most of all the villains are top-shelf foes worthy of Bond. The opening scene is a killer, a fake-out that still packs a punch even after you know what’s coming, and it introduces all of the bad guys that make From Russia so juicy: the chess grandmaster Alexi Kronsteen, who hatches the movie’s plot; the vicious torturer Rosa Klebb (played by opera singer Lotte Lenya, slumming divinely); the brutal defector/assassin Red Grant, played by a stone-faced Robert Shaw; and, as the bait, Tatiana Romanova – played by Daniela Bianchi, one of the most gorgeous Bond girls. There’s also the usual dynamite set-pieces (including a raucous fight at a gypsy camp) and memorable weapons (Klebb’s poisoned shoe-blades), and one of the most enjoyable endings of any Bond movie. And it was JFK’s favorite!

2. DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER (1971)

This begins with a terrific sequence showing Bond on the warpath, tracking down Blofeld so that he can pay him back for having killed Tracy (Diana Rigg), who Bond wooed and wed in the previous installment, On Her Majesty's Secret Service. It also marked Connery's okay-but-just-this-once return to the series after sitting out OHMSS, and he plays this pre-title section with the controlled fury of a man who just missed out on his chance to get paid nine figures to make out with Diana Rigg. This is also the movie that proved that, no matter how many gadgets and goils are in place, it matters who plays the lead role. In a lot of ways, Diamonds is subpar Bond: it was the first film in the series made without the participation of Peter R. Hunt, who as editor and second unit director was integral to the look and feel of the action sequences on the earlier films, and who left after taking over as director on OHMSS, and the car chases and beatings lack the fluid aesthetic charge they once had. (At some points, they rival the Las Vegas setting itself for sheer tackiness.) But Connery, at forty-one, was just hitting his stride as an actor after almost ten years as a movie star, and he endows Bond with an ironic awareness and some vulnerability that are beautiful to see. It's probably the best performance he, or anyone else, ever gave in the part.

1. GOLDFINGER (1964)

The third James Bond film is close to being a consensus pick as the favorite. It was the first one to be considered a blockbuster success, making back its then-hefty $3 million budget in record time, and it’s not hard to see why: it’s really the first 007 adventure that has every single element of Bond greatness in place. It begins with the unforgettable theme song, performed by Shirley Bassey; it features a memorable villain in Gert Fröbe’s meaty precious metals enthusiast Auric Goldfinger, and one of the best henchmen of all time in Harold Sakata’s Oddjob, whose razor-brimmed fedora set the tone for future gimmick weapons. It had a clever plot, a solid script, lots of great action set-pieces, and a memorable deathtrap for Sean Connery’s 007, who must bluff his way out of being castrated by an industrial laser. Honor Blackman, fresh off The Avengers, plays Pussy Galore, one of the few Bond girls who aren’t total pushovers, and there’s lots of fun action from M and Q, as well as the full introduction of Bond’s tricked-out Aston Martin. Why is Goldfinger the best? Simple: it’s the quintessential Bond movie, containing everything a Bond movie should have in perfect order.

HONORABLE MENTION:

And finally...three Bond films that were disqualified from Best and Worst consideration for being close but not exactly actual Bond films at all...

OK CONNERY (1967); FFOLKES (1980); THE TAILOR OF PANAMA (2001)

Any association with a role like James Bond can result in an actor being typecast, but sometimes it's up to the actor to decide what to do with that. By 1980, Roger Moore was all but hermetically sealed in the role of 007, so much so that his only way to take a paid vacation was to accept the lead in a lame action-adventure movie, ffolkes, that was marketed to theaters with an ad campaign that tried to sell it as a Bond movie in all but name. The funny thing is that Moore latched onto the movie as a chance to escape Bond; the title character, a nautical-rescue-mission specialist who is prevailed upon by the British government to prevent Anthony Perkins from blowing up an oil rig, is an "eccentric" brainiac more in the Sherlock Holmes mode of antisocial superheroes, with a full beard and a pathological distaste for the fairer sex. The film didn't get much play, but Moore is said to prefer it to any of his Bond films.

The Tailor of Panama, directed by John Boorman and based on a John le Carre novel, provided Pierce Brosnan with a more direct route to giving his most iconic role an extended middle finger. Brosnan plays a horny total cynic of a secret agent whose compulsive womanizing inspires his bosses to ship him off to Panama to get him out of their hair. Incapable of behaving myself, Brosnan hires a tailor (Geoffrey Rush) to slip him information about his powerful clients; Rush, who can't find out anything but needs the money Brosnan is offering him, begins cooking up wild tales that Brosnan, who couldn't care less if they were true, is happy to send back to the home office. Between the two of them, they almost create an international crisis that is narrowly averted when the moviemakers had their budget slashed.

The booby prize in the Almost-Bond Sweepstakes goes to a 1967 movie that is alternately known as OK Connery, Operation Kid Brother, and Operation Double 007 -- that last being the title under which it was shown on Mystery Science Theater 3000. Made at a time when Sean Connery was already inching away from the role that had made him a star, this semi-spoof stars Connery's non-actor brother Neil as the little brother of an unidentified master secret agent who is unavailable for an important assignment. For the benefit of those very slow to get the point, any point, producer Dario Sabatello hired Bernard Lee and Lois Maxwell, the "M" and Miss Moneypenny of the regular Bond series, as well as Daniela Bianchi, of From Russia with Love, Adolfo Celi (who basically reprises his villainous role from Thunderball), and Anthony Dawson, who played a minor baddie in Dr. No and whose hands played the hands of Blofeld in a couple of later films. The role didn't led to much, though in 1984, Neil did contribute a cameo to a Hong Kong 007 spoof, directed by Tsui Hark, whose cast also included Richard ("Jaws") Kiel and Harold ("Oddjob") Sakata.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three & Four

Contributors: Paul Clark, Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent

Screengrab Scream-Off: Beowulf’s Grendel vs. Pumpkinhead 2’s Wild Boy

Andrew Osborne — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 15:00:00 GMT

So, the wife and I just got around to watching Robert Zemeckis’ 2007 adaptation of Beowulf last night, and in addition to the film’s soulless video game versions of a vagina-less Angelina Jolie, a buff Ray Winstone and a naked Anthony Hopkins, one of the creepiest parts of the movie was Crispin Hellion Glover’s scarily believable crazy person screaming as the mushy-headed monster, Grendel.

Yet, even as Glover’s weirdly accented ululations scared the piss out of our cat Zuzu, I found myself harkening back to my OWN sadly neglected turn as the screaming voice of doomed wild boy Tommy (and his demonic doppelganger) in the 1994 Soleil Moon Frye horror classic Pumpkinhead 2: Blood Wings.

True, the roles of Tommy the Wild Boy and Mr. Head were officially played by J.P. Manoux and Mark McCracken, respectively, but for reasons I can’t quite remember now (and probably having to do with the fact I just happened to be at the post-production facility at the time), I was nevertheless called upon to sweeten the dying/rage-filled screams of the aforementioned two characters in the P2 sound mix with my own shrieky talents.

So who’s the better screamer in a side-by-side comparison?

YOU decide!

Screamer #1: Crispin Hellion Glover, Beowulf

Screamer #2: Andrew Hellion Osborne, Pumpkinhead 2

Related Stories:
Crispin Glover: Modern-Day Vaudevillian
Stan Winston, 1946--2008

21 Stars We Hate (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 21:00:00 GMT

SEAN PENN

Spicoli in Fast Times At Ridgemont High? Classic. Matthew Poncelet in Dead Man Walking? Harrowing. Emmett Ray in Sweet and Lowdown? Hilarious. Milk? Looks great. And nobody’s better at playing sketchy, fidgety weasels like the coked-out traitor in The Falcon and The Snowman, the coked-out lawyer in Carlito’s Way and, uh, the incredibly annoying coked-out movie producer in Hurlyburly. But, ugh...it’s amazing how a guy capable of sporadically fantastic character performances can be such a humorless, pretentious tool in real life. I’m guessing he’s calmed down a lot since the Shanghai Surprise days when (as observed by Christopher Ciccone in his book Life With My Sister Madonna) the middle class white boy from the comfortable home enjoyed presenting himself as a tough street kid, trashing hotel rooms, assaulting paparazzi and hanging out with Charles Bukowski. But Penn still can’t take a joke, as evidenced by his humorless retort to Chris Rock’s joke about the low-wattage stardom of Jude Law during the 2005 Academy Awards, not to mention the stereotypical "serious artist" grim=quality aesthetic he brings to his directorial work (i.e., two films about dead children, one about feuding brothers and one about a completely egocentric guy who dies moronically ‘cuz he’s just gotta be free, man). Even when the actor pokes fun at his own self-serious image, it’s hard to believe it’s all just for laughs: his recent cameo in What Just Happened? paints him as the kind of actor who equates depressing bummers with integrity and...well, something tells me Penn takes that characterization as a compliment. As the old saying goes, it’s hard to make people laugh, but drama’s easy: just kill a puppy and you’ll get a reaction...which more or less describes Penn’s m.o. If you dare to mock his maudlin, manipulative performance as the mentally-challenged protagonist of I Am Sam, that just means you’re insensitive, dude (so many thanks to Ben Stiller and Robert Downey, Jr. for doing it for me in Tropic Thunder). If you’d prefer not to drag yourself through the boring slog of 21 Grams, it’s just that you don’t “get” it. And if you laughed out loud during Mystic River when Penn’s character discovers the latest dead child in his oeuvre, then screams “NOOOO!!!!” to the heavens in the type of overblown “ACTING!” moment that was already a parody of itself years before the movie was released...well, maybe you just can’t handle “serious” art.

MICHAEL DOUGLAS

Michael Douglas was born to be a movie star. Which is too bad, because he sucks at it. His father, Kirk Douglas, was an actor of limited talents, and too often prone to gassy overplaying, but he was also fortunate enough to work with a lot of great directors and get a handful of great scripts. No such luck for Michael: though he made tens of millions of dollars in his career and appeared in tons of hit films in the ‘80s and ‘90s, they tend to be forgettable (The Star Chamber), obnoxious (Wall Street), dated (The Jewel of the Nile), or downright terrible (The Game). Which, really, is only appropriate, since all those adjectives apply equally to Douglas himself, who resembles his father less as an actor than he does Charlton Heston. His personality and his performances also tend to be forgettable (surely no one remembers Basic Instinct because he was in it), terrible (he was the world’s least convincing action hero as Jack Colton), dated (who on earth isn’t deeply ashamed to watch Falling Down nowadays?), and, especially, obnoxious. Unless we know him – and hey, give the guy credit, he’s nailing Catherine Zeta-Jones and we’re not – we can never be sure if he just happened to pick about a hundred scripts in a row where he plays an annoying, self-important, egomaniacal, horse-cock jerk, or if he just happens to be an annoying, self-important, egomaniacal, horse-cock jerk who brings those qualities to every role he plays. But that’s not really the kind of micro-fine distinction you want to hang a career on.

JOHN WAYNE

Since I’m going to hell anyway, I might as well take this one. “Hey,” some of you asked when we posted our list of the all-time great leading men a few weeks back, “how come John Wayne didn’t even make the top 25?” Well, I’ll tell you, Mr. or Ms. Screengrab Reader: it’s because John Wayne was a miserable actor. While there’s no denying Wayne’s importance in Hollywood history, and without minimizing his role as a film icon, the fact remains that he was really bad at the thing he did for a living. He basically only played one role in every movie he ever made, and it wasn’t a very interesting one. It’s a role that could have been played better by any number of other actors, many of whom were appearing with him in those very films. And in his case, you can’t blame a short career or an inability to get good scripts: Wayne lived a long time, and by all accounts showed almost zero interest in playing anything outside his war/western tough-guy métier. By the end of his life, he was getting offered roles that would have allowed him to slightly redefine his image, but instead chose ones that let him stretch about a centimeter in every direction. He was either a miserable judge of scripts or had the world’s worst agents; for someone who made almost 175 movies, he sure didn’t make that many good ones. While I’m willing to concede that Wayne was an effective movie star, the distance between what he did on screen and what I think of as acting is abyssal; I remember getting into an argument with a friend that concluded with me saying that if John Wayne was a good actor, I obviously didn’t understand what acting means.

JAMES DEAN

We don't want to spend too much time here talking shit about the dead. Just because we Screengrab people are barely human doesn't mean we're vultures. But after more than fifty years, the upward trajectory of Dean's posthumous reputation is long overdue for a course correction. In his first two (of three) starring movie roles, Dean had the mixed fortune to play desperately troubled teenagers in material pitched directly at a teen audience that liked to project itself onto stories of the tragically misunderstood, under the guidance of directors (Nicholas Ray on Rebel Without a Cause and Elia Kazan on East of Eden) who never saw an emotional flourish they didn't like and would have been reluctant to declare a performance over the top even if the fallout from it brought about nuclear winter. Dean's unrestrained, sometimes apparently uncontrolled exploration of the wronged-and-unloved theme made him a legend and a cult hero, but it also meant that what he left behind in the way of an acting legacy is very heavy on him breaking down into a shivering mess and howling, "You're tearing me apart!" For some of us, a little of this sort of thing goes a very long way, which makes it that much more remarkable that Dean's most devoted fans have watched those movies scores if not hundreds of times: we can barely believe that we made it throught them once. To Dean's credit, he seemed very ready to move on to new things if his last film, Giant, is any indication: there, as a cocky poor boy who becomes a self-made asshole, he's better-controlled, more winning, more resilient and funnier than he ever had a chance to be in a movie released during his lifetime. This is especially true because the movie, in which Dean has only a supporting role, is in a traditional-boring-prestige-epic mode that can just barely accommodate Dean's Method style, and the actor serves the same function in it that his character serves in the story. It's not just about Jett Rink getting up in the face of Jordan Benedict, Jr., and weirding him out with a scary taste of a new world in which he'll be an anachronism, but also about James Dean doing that to Rock Hudson.

ANTHONY HOPKINS

Hopkins was in his early fifties and had been acting, and even sometimes starring in, movies since 1967, when Jonathan Demme made him a household name with The Silence of the Lambs. This was not a case of genius being discovered late. Hopkins is talented and hard-working and had already given a number of excellent performances, such as his sensitive but restrained Dr. Merrick in David Lynch's The Elephant Man. But he was always more meticulous than exciting onscreen, and when he was cast at the center of a movie, whether it was a popcorn horror flick like Magic (1978) or a serious contemporary drama like the British film The Good Father (1987), he tended to veer so heavily into depressiveness that watching him could be like talking somebody in off a ledge. He had already been smoked in the Hannibal Lecter role before Lambs even came out: as all true connoisseurs of character acting know, Brian Cox's brief performance as Hannibal in the 1986 Manhunter had a rich, convincing creepiness that sank into viewers' bones. By contrast, Demme spoon-fed viewers Hopkins' Hannibal with frozen close-ups of his face held in a jack-o-lantern gaze, with just a suggestion of the raging ham behind his features. The results somehow passed for realistic, but there was enough camp in the recipe that it's no wonder the monstrous Lecter ultimately struck audiences as so enjoyable as to be strangely endearing, to the point that Hopkins would not only reprise the role in Hannibal, the movie version of the sequel that author Thomas Harris felt obliged to write in response to the success of the Lambs picture, but in a paralyzingly unnecessary remake of Manhunter (filmed under Harris' original title, Red Dragon), in which, adding insult to injury, he had more screen time than Brian Cox did back in 1986. By then, Hopkins had become Hollywood's go-to guy for a leading role as a classy middle-aged or older male in a prestige film, be it Nixon or Picasso or Van Helsing or (in The Human Stain) an African-American professor passing for white. But Hopkins had never had the range this kind of resume suggests, and he could still be a dull lump when he was too much at the center of things and wasn't cast just right. (And, having been richly rewarded for having laid it on thick as Hannibal, he was now as much in touch with his inner ham as William Shatner.) He's still an ingenious actor who has his moments, and after his long apprenticeship, it feels churlish not to wish him well. But after he and Antonio Banderas co-starred with Catherine Zeta-Jones in 1998's The Mask of Zorro, the young Zeta-Jones informed a TV interviewer that she couldn't decide for sure which of her two leading men was sexier. And by God, that shit ain't right.

Click Here For Part One, Part Two & Part Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent

The 10 Greatest Psychiatrists in Movie History, Part 1

Phil Nugent — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Cinema, a form that makes it possible for the artist to actually devise and stage his own dreams and record them for posterity, has always had a fascination with psychiatrists, explorers of the mind who endeavor to delve into their patients' subconscious for clues as to how to better understand and regulate their conscious behavior. The new HBO series In Treatment is remarkable for how accurately it captures the droning frustration of a session with a typical modern shrink, whose concern that he not appear judgemental or nonobjective leaves him with little to do but sit there grunting noncommittally while the person who's paying for his time sits there tearing his hair out. But it wasn't always that way. As depicted in movies, psychiatry was once a dashing profession, inhabited by risk takers who jumped into their patients' lives with both feet and made a real effort to make a difference. More often than not, the differences they made were scary, destructive, and hair-raising. Still, it must have been nice for their patients to know that they were sharing their problems with someone who cared. Such as these worthies:

1. DR. CALIGARI (WERNER KRAUSE) in THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI (1919)

Dr. Caligari (Werner Krause) runs the laughing academy in the picturesque German mountain village of Holstenwall. As the film's narrator tells it, Caligari has been using hypnotism to control his charge Cesare (Conrad Veidt), and has also been trying to help the patient to find a place for himself in society by exhibiting him at the local geek show. When Caligari invites members of the crowd to test Cesare's omniscient powers by asking him an unanswerable question, the narrator's friend, being German, asks him not when Chinese Democracy is going to be finished but when he, the friend, will die. Cesare tells him that he will die the next dawn, and because the doctor has taught him that words must be backed up by action, makes sure that the prophecy comes true by tracking the fellow down and throttling him to meet the deadline. At the end of the movie, all this is revealed to a delusional fantasy of the narrator's, who is in fact an inmate in the asylum where Caligari really is chief of staff. The film ends with Caligari's happy announcement that, now that the narrator has gone to the trouble of envisioning a landmark work in the history of silent German Expressionist cinema, Caligari now has the key to his treatment. Maybe if a few more of the people in analysis had cared a little more about breaking new ground cinematically, the success rate among those in therapy would skyrocket.

2. DR. YEN LO (KHIGH DHIEGH) in THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962)

At first glance, Dr. Yen Lo seems to be the ideal psychiatrist. He has a wife he dotes on, an easy bedside manner, an encyclopedic knowledge of the latest medical and behavioral techniques, and a quick wit. “Always with humor!”, he tells a colleague, with a beaming smile on his Chinese face. It’s only when you realize that the joke he’s just told his nervous compatriot involves using him as the test dummy on which to unleash his newly reprogrammed assassin, and that his gregarious, friendly bedside manner only comes after he has completely rewired your brain and turned you into a remorseless killer that the bloom starts to come off the rose. And sooner or later, you’re going to realize that he may have gotten you to lose weight and play a mean game of solitaire, but he’s also gotten you hooked on yak dung cigarettes. To sum up, Dr. Yen Lo isn’t the kind of doctor who is going to get a lot of referrals through the HMO. But he is, as played by omnipresent character actor Khigh Dhiegh in the immortal 1962 political thriller The Manchurian Candidate, the man who made an unstoppable, relentless killer out of war hero Raymond Shaw, and one of the most sinister psychiatrists in cinematic history. (Dhiegh specialized in portraying menacing Chinese – he was also Wo Fat on Hawaii Five-0 – but he was actually not east Asian at all, but of North African Arab origin.) It’s his jolly, disarming manner that makes his aptitude at destroying innocent men’s minds so particularly monstrous; and worst of all, he gets off scot-free in a movie soaked with bloody murder: the last time we see him, he’s tottering off to Macy’s to tick some items off of Madame Lo’s shopping list.

3. DR. LOUIS JUDD (TOM CONWAY) in CAT PEOPLE (1942)

When you think about how many overpaid chin-scratchers are using their psychiatry degrees as a license to tap into the bank accounts of people who have abandonment issues or wished that daddy had hugged them more, you have to feel a certain admiration for Dr. Louis Judd (Tom Conway), who bravely agreed to take on the more difficult case of a deeply troubled young woman (Simone Simon) who was reluctant to consummate her marriage because she was convinced that if she did, she would turn into a sharp-clawed, fang-toothed jungle cat, with dire effects for any naked man who happened to be embracing her at the time. Dr. Judd's breakthrough method of treatment for her condition--i.e., putting the moves on her--remains controversial; some feel that he violated the boundaries of the doctor-patient relationship, while others, pointing out that it was the patient's husband who retained him, argue that anyone who puts his confused, hot young wife in the hands of a guy with a pencil line mustache and a family resemblance to George Sanders is begging for whatever happens. In the end, Dr. Judd surprised himself, if no one else, by establishing that if anyone hit on his patient hard enough she really would turn into a murderous jungle cat, and in his last moments on Earth he wrapped up the case by shooting his client, thus making himself a hero figure to therapists everywhere.

4. COL. VINCENT KANE (STACY KEACH) in THE NINTH CONFIGURATION (1980)

“I’m telling you, Billy, Kane is Gregory Peck in Spellbound,” says Lt. Frank Reno (who is adapting Shakespeare’s plays for dogs) to the depressed astronaut Captain Billy Cutshaw. “It’s just like that movie. He comes to take over the nuthouse and he’s nuts himself.” Cutshaw responds to this news by requesting that Reno drop out of a tree like an overripe mango, but the lieutenant is right: Col. Vincent Kane, the Marine Corps psychiatrist sent to take charge of an insane asylum staffed by disturbed Vietnam veterans, is in fact the craziest man in the joint. The actual extent of his insanity is slowly teased out over the course of this gripping, underrated movie written and directed by The Exorcist’s William Peter Blatty; it begins as a surreal, endlessly quotable comedy, and, as Kane’s madness is revealed, becomes a dark, deep philosophical drama. Colonel Kane is played by Stacy Keach in what can only be described as the role of a lifetime, and he meets it with gusto. At first, he’s full of quiet compassion and boundless sympathy, but with the right provocations and the slightest circumstance, he’s fully transformed into the raging, lethal “Killer” Kane. One of his most memorable scenes comes when his subordinate, Major Groper, cavils at having to play dress-up as part of the inmates’ role-playing therapy; demanding love and compassion from Groper, Kane morphs, werewolf-like, from an impossibly kindly shrink to a seething, hissing, screaming maniac of a Marine drill instructor who’d just as soon see someone dead as insubordinate. Groper, by the way, gets one of the movie’s funniest lines earlier in the movie: warning the men – who he considers to be goldbricking fakers – that the asylum will soon be taken over by the formidable Kane, he hollers: “Too bad, boys! Tough shit! Because guess who’s coming? A PSYCHIATRIST! The best! The best in uniform! The greatest fucking psychiatrist since Jung!” Naturally, he pronounces it with a hard J.

5. DR. HANNIBAL LECTER (BRIAN COX) in MANHUNTER (1986) and ANTHONY HOPKINS in THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (1991), HANNIBAL (2001), and RED DRAGON (2002)

In many ways, this is an atypical entry for this list, as in the four films set during Dr. Hannibal Lecter's adult life, we almost never actually see him working with patients. Yet I doubt anyone would contest his inclusion here. Formidably intelligent, impossibly cultured, and certifiably wacko, Lecter's appetites take him all over the world and into many realms of human experience. Yet even more than his taste for human flesh, what makes him truly scary is the way he uses that great big brain of his to toy with those he perceives as being beneath him. As a character explains in Hannibal, Lecter preys on what he calls "the rude," and his most severe mind games are reserved for those who offend his cultivated sensibilities. Think of the way he talks Multiple Miggs into swallowing his own tongue after Miggs insults Clarice. Or the way he drugs Mason Verger and convinces him to carve up his own face. But even when he's dealing with people he respects more, he can't help himself — consider his conversations with Clarice, in which he drops hints about the case she's working on, but in the form of riddles rather than as straightforward clues. One almost feels sorry for him after a while — after all, what else does he have left to enjoy in life but his mind?

— Paul Clark, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

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