The Screengrab : armageddon

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

Yesterday's Hits: There's Something About Mary (1998, Peter and Bobby Farrelly)

Paul Clark — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 19:00:00 GMT

Nowadays, it seems like Hollywood blockbusters are more or less pre-ordained. With budgets routinely crossing the $100 million mark and marketing costs often running into the tens of millions, studios leave very little to chance. By the time movies actually hit multiplexes, the Hollywood hype machine has done its job, and audiences have little choice but to do as they’re told, lining up for movies on opening weekend before moving along to the next big thing. However, occasionally a movie will break free of this usual pattern by striking a chord with audiences. For example, Titanic transcended normal blockbuster status to become a must-see movie, ruling the box office for several months on its way to raking in the highest domestic gross in history. But the following summer brought a word-of-mouth hit that, while it didn’t make Titanic money, completely shattered box-office expectations. The movie was There’s Something About Mary.

Most Hollywood pundits weren’t expecting a whole lot from There’s Something About Mary. In a summer filled with big stars and big budgets, it was a broad comedy with no A-list draws. Leading lady Cameron Diaz made a splash with her debut opposite comedy king Jim Carrey in The Mask, but since then she’d appeared mostly in independent fare, with her only other hit being 1997’s My Best Friend’s Wedding, in which she played a supporting role. Likewise, her costars Matt Dillon and Ben Stiller were hardly major draws- Dillon was seen by many as an aging 80s teen idol who had since entered his character-actor phase, while Stiller was still more of a cult figure than a mainstream star. And while directors Peter and Bobby Farrelly had previously made the popular Dumb & Dumber, its success had been largely attributed to the presence of Carrey in the lead.

Following a series of enormously successful test screenings, the executives at Fox began to realize that they had something big on their hands, if only they played their cards right. Rather than sticking to the usual marketing tactics, they decided to let the movie sell itself, booking an unusually large number of preview screenings across the country, in the hope that the advance word of mouth would boost the film’s box office performance. The gamble paid off, although not right away- Mary was released in mid-July, between the summer’s biggest juggernauts, Armageddon and Saving Private Ryan. But while these movies dominated their first few weekends, Mary opened fairly strongly and maintained this strength as its competitors began to lose steam. Finally, in its eighth weekend of release, There’s Something About Mary topped the box-office charts- a phenomenon that was almost unprecedented.

In retrospect, it’s not hard to see why audiences responded strongly to There’s Something About Mary. In the early nineties, many people started to tire of tepid PG-13 comedies, and hard-R laffers geared to adult audiences began to grow in popularity, in the process making stars out of people like Carrey and Adam Sandler. With Mary, the Farrellys tackled subject matter (and bodily functions) that had previously been taboo in big-budget comedies, and much of the film’s buzz centered around its sheer outrageousness. But there was more to Mary than dirty jokes. Most of the scatological comedies being made at the time were buddy movies, in which the female characters were mostly there for decorative purposes.

By contrast, Mary was at its heart a love story about a woman (Diaz) who attracts all the wrong men, and the mishap-prone guy (Stiller) who is her one perfect match. By breaking away from the usual formula for the genre, the Farellys were able to attract female viewers as well as male, making it the year’s mostly unlikely date movie. And in addition to the jokes themselves, the movie offered Diaz as a kind of dream girlfriend for the men in the audience- beautiful, yes, but also able to drink beer, hit golf balls, and talk about sports as well as any guy. Understandably, Diaz made the leap to A-list status on the basis of her Mary performance, and Stiller quickly became a hot commodity as well.

A decade later, it’s the romance that remains the most successful aspect of the movie, keeping the plot grounded even at its most outrageous. Diaz hasn’t been this appealing before or since, in part because the Farrellys understood her appeal. Many filmmakers have cast Diaz in daffy roles or as the sexpot, but her beauty isn’t so much sultry as baby-doll cute. Stiller makes a good match for Diaz- he’s good-looking enough that the relationship doesn’t seem too far fetched, but looks enough like an every-guy that the outcome of the story is hardly a foregone conclusion. And it says a lot about the Farrellys’ worldview that out of all the (mostly very strange) men who pine for Mary, the one we’re meant to root for is the one who is able to see her as a friend instead of an idealized lust object. When a man can have an extended conversation with a woman about the possibility of “meat in a cone,” the two of them must get along pretty well.

On the other hand, the wackier stuff hasn’t dated nearly so well. At the time of the film’s release, much of the buzz centered around such scenes as Stiller’s zipper mishap and the infamous “hair gel” gag, but now that the shock is worn off they come off not so much funny as desperate. There’s a certain comedic logic to the zipper scene, as one person after another crowds into Mary’s powder room to survey the damage (a nod to the stateroom scene in A Night at the Opera), but the scene’s “money shot” is nothing but an oh-no-they-didn’t sight gag. And the hair gel bit just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, either narratively or physically.

Likewise, the rogue’s gallery of crazy supporting characters wears thin pretty quickly. Matt Dillon’s performance as the untrustworthy shamus Pat Healy is growing on me, mostly because his performance acknowledges the disconnect between the hard-boiled sleazy detective Healy imagines himself to be and the manic loser he actually is. And when he’s trying to play smooth he’s a scream, especially during his priceless “retards” speech. But Chris Elliott is downright creepy as Stiller’s friend with a secret, and Lee Evans’ performance isn’t nearly as funny as the Farrellys think it is. When the camera lingers on his attempts to navigate a pair of crutches, it’s kind of pathetic, and once we find out the truth about Evans’ character, he futzes with an American accent so unconvincing that it’s hard to concentrate on anything else.

In the past decade or so, There’s Something About Mary has failed to live up to the “funniest movie ever” hype that once surrounded it. Yet considered in light of the Farrelly brothers’ more recent films, it may be more interesting now than it ever was. After Mary, the Farrellys were Hollywood’s reigning kings of lowbrow humor, but after their disappointing follow-up Me, Myself & Irene, their subsequent projects have grown less reliant on sight gags, generally favoring a more gentle, character-based kind of comedy. So far, these opposing comedic impulses achieved their most ideal balance in the brothers’ most personal film (and in my opinion, their best), 2003’s Stuck on You, but this shift was already evident in Mary, even if we didn’t know it yet. There’s Something About Mary may not be as uproariously funny as it was, but it’s a key film in the careers of its makers, and one without whose success their subsequent works may not have been possible.

The Hype Report: "Esquire" Reporter Falls Into '90s Time Warp, Catches a Ride with Ben Affleck

Phil Nugent — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 17:00:00 GMT

Tom Chiarella's profile of Ben Affleck for the April issue of Esquire might best be explained as an attempt by the magazine to keep its discontinued "Dubious Achievements" feature by other means. Topped by a headline describing Affleck as "A Smart, Talented Man Trapped in Lindsay Lohan's Life", it begins with a scene of the reporter in a car with his subject after the subject has picked him up, always a sure sign that what the writer most wants to convey in this piece is the message, "Mom! Fill-in-the-blank [name of celebrity] hung out with ME, in a CAR, and HE drove!!" There's just one spot of mold on the six foot hoagie that is Chiarella's life: Affleck picked him up in a loaner. But Chiarella makes lemons with it, seizing this sour persimmon as an excuse for him to dazzle the reader with his deductive skills and ability to buffalo his way into the mind of his superstar quarry: "For some reason Ben Affleck doesn’t want me to see his car. So he's picking me up at my hotel in a new hybrid sedan. White. Nice car but distinctly anonymous, devoid of detail, interior unblazoned by the obvious signifiers of a personal life. A fitted Red Sox cap on the floor and his BlackBerry — that's it...We both know this is a tell that the guy doesn't want to show me anything he doesn't have to." Chiarella doesn't take it personally, because he knows that Affleck is besieged in his everyday life by "sweatpants-wearing, camera-wielding, junior-college-dropout paparazzi"--those other guys who document the lives of celebrities for a living. Chiarella finished junior college, by God! And to prove it, he paints a vivid man-crush prose poem of Affleck, that recognizes that the key to Ben's awesomeness is how much he superficially a regular guy, only better, right? "He's both jumpy and liquid in his movement. He carries himself as if held together with kite string, which means he looks at once crinkly and cool. Jeans, no belt, plain-Jane sneakers, a black long-sleeved T-shirt. And he looks a little more fragile than you'd expect, like a guy thinking about his persistent back pain. The effect: He walks light on the depthless veneer of the world, here on this lambent late afternoon at the joining edge of Beverly Hills and Culver City, where and when the house shadows always insinuate a little doom to me." "Lambent" is the present participle of lambere, i.e., "to lick." I looked it up.

"I'm fresh off four days in Las Vegas," Chiarella writes with an eagerness to share his personal information with the reader that marks him as one of those exciting "New Journalists" the kids are talking about, "just coming into the shallow end of my hangover, feeling as spiritless and empty as the very car we're riding in." (You're not bored with the car stuff yet, are you? That tree has not yet begun to be tapped.) Chiarella aches for his new friend, "Ben Affleck, the one guy in the world who should own this particular geography. But being out in the world hurts him a little. That's what Affleck shows." Like Anthony Quinn in Lawrence of Arabia, he has riches and yet he is poor, because he is a river to his people. He is the only man alive who can never pull himself back from the ledge of despair by reminding himself that if he just hangs on long enough, he may yet once again enter a movie theater and restoreth his soul by gazing on the unparalleled beauty and life force of Ben Affleck. (Well, except for blind people. And those who are technically living but in comas. And those folks you read about in the Post sometimes who are too fat to squeeze through the doors of their homes. But then, they might get to see him when the movies make it to cable.) And then Affleck turns his eyes on his interlocutor and interrupts his reverie by telling him, ""You need to eat." It is just the first insight of Affleck's that reveals that he understands his passenger, and that he cares whether or not he dies of malnutrition while in his care. Upon learning that Chiarella spent four days in Vegas, Affleck sympathizes: "Man, you stayed there too long." There's a lot of Yoda in Ben Affleck.

This stuff would be pretty funny if Chiarella were hanging out with Nelson Mandela, but what makes it priceless is that he's advertising how starstruck he is by Ben Affleck, a man whose dozen or so years in the limelight have a clear, commonly shared arc in terms of public perception. When he first broke through in 1997, partly through his starring role in Kevin Smith's Chasing Amy, but mostly as Matt Damon's co-star and Academy Award-winning screenwriter on Good Will Hunting, Affleck was greeted as a major star, every girl's dream date, and a classy creative presence--he could write! Hollywood, and the entertainment media, very, very much wanted to treat him as a big deal, deserving of box office, respect, awards, and Gwynneth Paltrow. It would have taken a lot of very lazy performances in especially cheesy movies to turn that around, and Affleck was more than happy to oblige. Armageddon, Pearl Harbor, The Sum of All Fear, Paycheck, Gigli, Daredevil--those are just the high-profile cow turds, and while there are lots of stars who've struggled to keep their good name while making bad movie after bad movie, one of the great constants of Affleck's terrible movies was how frequently he was the worst thing in them. By 2003, when New York Times critic A. O. Scott wanted to indicate that Edward Burns's performance in the movie Confidence did not make him prime Golden Globe material, he wrote that Burns was "so glib and lazy as to make Ben Affleck look like the young Dustin Hoffman."

Now, Affleck pulled out of it a couple of years ago--not by improving his acting, but by stepping behind the camera and directing a very good version of a Dennis Lehane novel, Gone Baby Gone. More power to him--everybody loves a good comeback story. But what's amazing, and a little disturbing, about Chiraella's mash note is that he doesn't seem to know what is known to everyone who, at some point between Shakespeare in Love and Smokin' Aces, picked up a copy of People in a hair salon in North Carolina. To him, Affleck is and always has been "that Boston guy, the man's man, the guy who tore off three of the best monologues in movie history — at the end of Good Will Hunting, in a cameo in Boiler Room, and at the climax of Chasing Amy — man-o-logues, transformative, deconstructible speeches that speak right into the skull box of the self-aware. They are what you remember about him. Not J.Lo. Not Gigli. Not his dim pass in Jersey Girl. Affleck the writer, once a cat-around guy, still a seriously good cardplayer, and now the emergent actor-director of his generation. He's hard on the heels of Gone Baby Gone, a film so provocative in its moral questioning, so deep in the tissue of a Boston neighborhood that it made Scorsese's much celebrated The Departed look genteel and chockablock with its crank-up-the-Goodfellas intensity. There was one great movie about Boston a couple of years ago: It was Affleck's. And he wrote it, adapted it from Dennis Lehane, with a friend from high school. He is a man's man, a friend's friend." He and Damon go way back too, of course. It's hard to know too much about Affleck without starting to wonder if maybe his greatest talent--unless you can call having a face a talent--was for making the right friends in high school.

"When we dropped the car, a guy at the valet stand took out his camera phone and asked, just by poking the camera in the air, a gesture that didn't exist ten years ago, Can I have your image to carry in my pocket?" I guess we could have had the gesture ten years ago, but it seemed prudent to wait until camera phone technology was more widely disseminated. I probably only imagine that a vote was taken at some point. "Affleck squinted, dipped his head. He gives in to this outside world — Yes, take my image — but it does not interest him to see it." Of course, he has easier access to his image than the rest of us, assuming that there are reflective surfaces in his home. "He grinds things"--eyeglass lenses? spare keys? his teeth?--" as he speaks, winnows details, finds a thread and pulls it. He speaks in runs, funny, at times halting, always bearing in on a cleaner, more relevant point. This tends to lead him to the larger issues of his work, his career, his path through life. And although there's nothing obviously self-possessed about him, his answers always take the shape of a metaphor for himself." Reading this, many readers will wish that Chiarella had filmed Affleck while he was talking, and gridning and winnowing and finding and pulling, and posted it on YouTube. Chiarella may have thought that would cross a line, but instead, as a fun party game, he proposes a way for the reader to pretend for a few seconds that he is Ben Affleck: "Look at this next passage, for example. Read it aloud and you will automatically sound like Ben Affleck. I typed it carefully, direct from the tape, leaving out no stutter or fragment. Read it with speed, with considered imprecision, as if what's occurring to you might really lead you to the next point. Replace calculation with momentum. Speak a little quicker at the end of sentences; be excited as you near conclusions." Sing out, Louise! Smile, baby.

It's no small offering Chiarella offers the common man, this chance to sound like Ben Affleck, especially when he's "not throwing a bunch of monkey shit against the actor wall to see what sticks. He's taking a boilerplate, stupid, out-of-the-gate question on my part and road-mapping his psyche with the answer." But Chiarella does himself an injustice by denigrating his own question; clearly, Affleck was impressed with his new friend, and felt that he was right to let him inside his life, because after they split up and were trading e-mails, Affleck took pity and sent him a detailed description of the inside of his real car, the one that Chiarella was not privileged to ride inside. I'm sure that he knew that he'd done the right thing to entrust this information to Chiarella when he cracked open his copy of Esquire and saw that the hellzapoppin author actually used the term "man-o-logue" twice! Here's hoping he copyrights it before it spreads.

Charlton Heston (1924-2008)

Paul Clark — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 06:39:00 GMT

Charlton Heston, one of only a handful of honest-to-goodness stars remaining from Hollywood's Golden Age, has passed away at his home in Beverly Hills. He was 84 years old. He is survived by Lydia, his wife of 64 years, and his two children and three grandchildren. Details about Heston's death are still sketchy at this point, but he had suffered from symptoms similar to Alzheimer's Disease for years.

Heston began his acting career on the stage, with his first movie role coming from a filmed theatre performance of Ibsen's Peer Gynt, recorded when Heston was all of 17. But the film that brought him into the public eye was Cecil B. DeMille's Oscar-winner The Greatest Show on Earth, in which he played Ben Braden, the manager of the circus and held his own opposite James Stewart and Betty Hutton, among others. In the next few years, Heston split his time between film and television, one of the few actors who managed to work steadily in both media.

However, his stardom skyrocketed when DeMille came calling again, casting Heston as Moses in his final film, 1956's The Ten Commandments. The role required a truly commanding presence, not just to be convincing as the man who led the Israelites out of Egypt, but also to hold his own against the then-awe inspiring special effects, but Heston pulled it off. From there Heston specialized in similarly larger-than-life heroes, often in period adventures such as The Big Country, El Cid, and Ben-Hur, for which he won the Oscar for Best Actor.

In the 1960s, Heston's stardom continued even as his career choices became more inconsistent- for every Major Dundee, there was a The Agony and the Ecstasy in which he was severely miscast in the role of Michelangelo (yes, that one). But he once again found his groove at the end of the decade with Planet of the Apes, now considered a science fiction classic. It was the first in a series of futuristic dramas for Heston, who went on to appear in the film's sequel, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, before starring in The Omega Man and Soylent Green.

During the 1970s, even as young filmmakers and new actors were gaining clout in Hollywood, Heston stuck to his guns and continued playing the sorts of heroes that made him a star. His presence was right at home in square blockbusters like Earthquake and Airport '75, as well as 1976's bloated war epic Midway. Shortly thereafter, Heston began to turn again to television, starring in a number of TV movies, as well as making a guest appearance on Dynasty as Jason Colby, who was later given his own series, The Colbys.

In the 1990s, Heston's leading-man opportunities had mostly dried up, and after that he worked regularly as a dependable character actor, lending an old-Hollywood authority to films like Tombstone, In the Mouth of Madness, and Any Given Sunday, as well as putting in a cameo in Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes remake. In addition, he also did a good amount of voiceover work, his commanding baritone gracing films as diverse as Armageddon and Disney's Hercules. He also showed a surprising ability to kid his square-jawed image. After two hosting stints on Saturday Night Live, he had arguably the best scene in the otherwise disposable Wayne's World 2, playing "The Better Actor." He also appeared in True Lies as Arnold Schwarzenegger's CIA boss, a role that allowed him to pass the torch to Arnold as Hollywood's biggest right-leaning star.

In recent years, Heston's politics have increasingly overshadowed his acting. Heston, a longtime supporter of the National Rifle Association, served as its president in 1998, a position he served in until his diagnosis with Alzheimer's. But rather than remembering Heston for his politics- or his final major big-screen appearance in Michael Moore's Bowing For Columbine- I prefer to remember the good times. Of his storied career, I treasure most two performances he gave nearly two decades apart.

The first, of course, is Touch of Evil. Hollywood legend has it that Orson Welles was only supposed to act in the film, and that Heston (who had only taken the role to be directed by Welles) was largely responsible for Welles directing the film. At first glance, Heston's brand of straightforward heroism seems at odds with Welles' morally twisty vision. However, Heston is exactly what the film needs, an uncomplicated but compelling protagonist to contrast with the rest of the proceedings, in particular Welles' corrupt, seedy Hank Quinlan. It all works perfectly, and Heston deserves much of the credit for this, despite the fact that he may just have made film history's least convincing Mexican.

At the other end of his career, in the middle of his elder-statesman period, Heston gave what may have been his best performance in Kenneth Branagh's epic production of Hamlet. Ever since his early work, Branagh has had a love for stunt casting, often to disastrous ends. But Heston's performance is no stunt. In the small but important role of The Player King, he shows a real aptitude for Shakespeare's language, as well as a sensitivity to the nuances of the material. The first time I saw his performance, I couldn't help but think that I'd underestimated Heston all these years. More than just a presence, Heston was an actor, and one who will be greatly missed.

Morning Deal Report: Dreamboat to the Moon

Peter Smith — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 15:00:00 GMT

Jake Gyllenhaal is going to the moon! Maybe he'll stay. Oh, that was mean.

Oliver Stone is producing, and Antoine Fuqua directing, an upcoming biopic of infamous drug lord Pablo Escobar. This is not the same as Joe Carnahan's Killing Pablo; a Deep Impact / Armageddon situation in the making.

Buzz Bissinger's writing a Sugar Ray movie, says Variety. Sugar Ray: They Just Wanted to Fly. No, actually, I think this is about the boxer, not the '90s pseudo-funk band.

— Peter Smith