The Screengrab : arnold schwarzenegger

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

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

Arnold Schwarzenegger in TERMINATOR 2: JUDGEMENT DAY (1991)

Why do people keep ruining James Cameron’s perfectly good endings? First, Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley goes through hell to save poor little Newt in Aliens, only to have friggin’ David Fincher whack them both in Alien3 (because, of course, it’s much cooler to kill off beloved, memorable characters than, say, to create interesting new ones). Then, in T2, Cameron finished off the story he began in the original Terminator with a scene of noble, sacrificial self-immolation by the villain-turned-hero/father figure Cyberdyne Systems Model 101 (a.k.a. Arnold Schwarzenegger) that clearly implies the threat of a future evil robot dystopia has been averted...and a decade later, we’re right back where we started with Terminator 3, Terminator Salvation and The Sarah Connor Chronicles. As it turns out, Arnie didn’t have to lower himself into that vat of molten lead after all (a scene I could only illustrate with the clip above, since every other version and parody on YouTube has embedding mysteriously disabled, possibly by Skynet). But the scene nevertheless makes my list of great deaths (even though cyborgs can't technically die) because, even more than the hyper-stylized imagery of 300 or Sin City, the fiery shot of the doomed cyborg descending towards oblivion captures the operatic melodrama at the heart of the modern comic book ethos as well as any Mexican standoff in the days when epic grand finales were Sergio Leone’s stock-in-trade. (AO)

Random Thief in AMERICAN HISTORY X (1998)

There are death scenes, there are gruesome death scenes, there are over-the-top nasty and ridiculous death scenes, and then there’s the unforgettable murder perpetrated by Edward Norton’s white supremacist in Tony Kaye’s American History X. In the ghastly attack, Norton’s skinhead confronts three African-American gentlemen trying to break into his car by shooting at them, killing one and injuring another. While spitting racial epithets, he forces the wounded man to place his open mouth on the street curb, and then stomps on the back of the man’s head, thereby fatally splitting his jaw (and face). Twelve years after first seeing the film, the mere thought of the moment still makes me cringe. (NS)

Jean-Paul Belmondo in BREATHLESS (1960) & PIERROT LE FOU (1965)

If you ever sit down to a compile a list of memorable death scenes from the movies -- an activity that I recommend, by the way -- you may find that they divide neatly into two categories, the quiet and reflective (typified at one end of the scale by the end of McCabe & Mrs. Miller) and the wild and flashy (summed up at the other end by James Cagney in, well, anything). In the films that bookend their period of collaboration, Jean-Luc Godard and his star Belmondo hit both extremes. In their breakthrough hit, Breathless, Belmondo, lying in the street with a bullet in his hide, came to terms with his happily misspent existence and enjoyed telling off his girlfriend one last time. Five years later, in Pierrot le Fou, the older and wiser man bids farewell to this cruel world (and to Godard's universe) by breaking out the boom sticks. (PN)

Godard's love of the purity of cinematic worlds is at its apex here. Pierrot Le Fou is a lusciously colored, beautifully shot film about how films -- along with other pop culture trappings -- steal logic from seemingly intelligent people. His characters vacillate between complex and ridiculous. Emotions are heightened without warning, the highbrow ideas of the film are treated to the most lowbrow signifiers, and suddenly Anna Karina is bursting into lovely song. When Belmondo, as Ferdinand/Pierrot, decides to off himself in the most dadaist way, he suddenly seems to realize that the absurdity that holds him in thrall is about to kill him. Ah, but it's too late. Such is the life of the modern man, I suppose: hypnotized by stories and images until the mere fact of living one's life is the same as starring in a fascinating and bizarre movie. The drama will kill you. (HC)

Janet Leigh in PSYCHO (1960)

Arguably cinema’s most famous death, Janet Leigh’s shower scene in Psycho remains a classic for a variety of reasons: the unexpectedness of the incident; the chutzpah Hitchcock exhibits in killing off his heroine midway through the story; the terrifying notion of being attacked unexpectedly and while defenseless; and the editing of the scene itself, a master class in audio-visual synchronicity that manages to convey a monumental amount of violence and bloodshed while never once showing the murderer’s knife making contact with Leigh’s skin. Plain and simple, it’s the death scene by which all others must be judged. (NS)

King Kong in KING KONG (1933)

For pure iconography, few cinematic sights hold a candle to that of King Kong battling aircrafts while clinging to the Empire State Building. Yet while the gargantuan ape’s subsequent fatal plummet to the NYC streets below is, ostensibly, a “happy” ending, what’s remarkable about the climax is how melancholy it plays. Carl Denham may believe “It wasn’t the airplanes. It was beauty killed the beast,” but the truth is that he – and we, as consumers who crave the type of entertainment sold by hucksters like Denham – are truly responsible for the fallen beast’s death, a truth that lingers long after the final fade to black. (NS)

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Nick Schager, Phil Nugent, Hayden Childs

Screengrab Review: "Terminator Salvation"

Nick Schager — Thu, 21 May 2009 14:00:00 GMT

Terminator Salvation goes Dark Knight-gloomy to reignite James Cameron’s technophobic sci-fi series, jumping forward to post-Judgment Day 2018 to pick up with rebel “prophet” John Conner (Christian Bale) and the human resistance as they wage war against malevolent sentient Skynet and its army of killer robots. The world is now ash-gray and reverberates with cacophonous explosions and squealing metal, a grim, gritty Road Warrior desert dystopia populated only by Terminators and vagabond humans who huddle around barrel fires listening to the radio broadcasts of Connor, a humorless hero embodied by Bale with such monotonous intensity that one fears the greatest threat to his well-being is a self-produced aneurism. Bale’s vehemence suitably meshes with the apocalyptic landscape in which director McG has situated him. Yet working from a script by John D. Brancato and Michael Ferris that places a far greater premium on land, sea and air skirmishes than on meaningful drama, the actor proves no more compelling than the machines against which his protagonist struggles. If only this were a 2001-style commentary on mankind’s devolution. Terminator Salvation, alas, strives for bleak gravity with misguided fervor, dispatching the very traces of warm, generous humanity that, in Cameron’s first two chapters, served as counterbalancing reminders of the necessity for staving off forthcoming mecha-Armageddon.

Given the dreariness of his tale's military resistance, however, McG makes the exact opposite case, positing a human race barely worth saving. At odds with his resistance leadership – namely Michael Ironside, here drained of nails-tough charisma – Conner is determined to use a special transmission signal to shut down Skynet’s HQ, as well as find Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin), the teenager who will someday travel back in time to impregnate his mother and become his father. Conner ceases to exist if Reese dies, a scenario familiar to anyone with passing knowledge of the series. And here, it’s frequently intercut with the saga of Marcus Wright (bland battering ram Sam Worthington), whom we first see on death row in 2003 donating his organs to Helena Bonham Carter’s bald, dying Cyberdyne scientist, and later find emerging from the 2018 primordial muck reborn as…what? One guess is all it takes to deduce the surprise lying in wait. The predictability of this revelation, though, isn’t the bummer it might have been thanks to the more pressing disinterest elicited by the overall story, which is comprised of underlined-meaningful dialogue (“Everybody deserves a second chance”), peripheral hotties with beautiful hair (Moon Bloodgood as the badass female, a preggers Bryce Dallas Howard as the maternal one), and action that’s orchestrated with harsh vigor but – one thrilling semi-truck chase notwithstanding – only mild imagination.

McG nods to his predecessors in ways both strained (managing to shoehorn in, with some difficulty, “I’ll be back”) and amusing (a snippet from Guns N’ Roses’ “You Could Be Mine”), but even less than Jonathan Mostow’s Terminator 3, his franchise entry barely bothers adding something new to the mix, adhering to a strict run-and-gun template at the expense of innovation. That might be pardonable if the film proffered even an ounce of humor, which has always been a secondary but vital series component, whether it was Edward Furlong ordering Ahnold’s emotionless surrogate father figure not to kill in T2, or Kristanna Loken’s red-leather-dominatrix get-up in T3. Terminator Salvation, however, mistakes soberness for seriousness, its gloomy character drama coming off as merely action-figure poses, and its deafening combat, drained of any larger narrative import, registering mainly as impressive CG demo reel material. Where feeling is needed, McG offers only cold steel, such that when Wright finally rebels against his makers with a corny bit of slow-motion window-breaking, and Schwarzenegger shortly thereafter makes a cameo – via face-grafting computer-generated trickery – the sought-after emotional payoff never materializes. In its place, there’s only crashing, crushing indifference.

Morning Deal Report: Straw Dogs Are Barking

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 14:00:00 GMT

I wish I could say it was still April Fool’s Day, but as much as I’ve tried to convince myself this isn’t happening…it is, in fact, happening. Writer/director Rod Lurie is going ahead with his remake of Straw Dogs, and he’s found his star. And it is…drum roll…incredibly bland James Marsden! “The new Straw Dogs, from Screen Gems, follows Los Angeles screenwriter David Sumner (Marsden), who moves with his wife to her hometown in the deep South. Once there, tensions build in their marriage and old conflicts re-emerge with the locals, leading to a violent confrontation,” per The Hollywood Reporter.

Arnold Schwarzenegger has agreed to appear in the upcoming Terminator Salvation, but this time he won’t be doing any acting. All together now: So what’s the difference? Well, the Governator will be making his appearance via the miracle of technology. “A body-cast mold of Schwarzenegger, created when he first appeared as the muscle-ripped cyborg, provided the basis for a digital-effects version of his famous character. The figure appears in Terminator Salvation as a living, breathing actor,” Variety reports.

The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are making their live-action return to the big screen. It’s a reboot, “focusing the origins of the iconic crime fighters. Project, targeted for release in 2011, would mark the fifth bigscreen outing for the sewer-dwelling heroes Leonardo, Michelangelo, Donatello and Raphael as well as their master Splinter.”

Related:
Lurie Spring a Leak
Schwarzenegger to Make Cameo in New Stallone Movie

In Other Blogs: Jesus Wept

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 14:00:00 GMT

It’s Good Friday, so somebody out there must be writing about Jesus movies. Ah, here we go – it’s Joshua Land at Moving Image Source comparing The Passion of the Christ and The Last Temptation of Christ. “The single most hollow claim of those who picketed Last Temptation was the notion that Universal was exploiting Christianity in pursuit of the almighty dollar; like The Passion of the Christ, Scorsese’s film was an obviously uncommercial proposition from the get-go, and it remains remarkable that the studio ever pursued it at all, let alone held firm in the face of protests—particularly after Paramount had already dropped the project before it even went into production.”

David Lynch won’t do commentary tracks, so the folks at Shooting Down Pictures have taken it upon themselves to live-blog Inland Empire. “I don’t think it’s an informational kind of film. I don’t think it’s part of his vocabulary. That might be the trouble behind understanding the ‘genre’ of this film. Simply avant-garde play of light, affectations and moods. I think the first time I saw this, by this point I was thinking that it was explicitly about interpretation. And it’s setting up all these signs for you to interpret in any number of ways. But it is going to provide a network of significance, and there are several things that will keep popping up for you to pay attention to how and when. There’s an intuitive kind of architecture to the film. A lot of it is just the face - dreams, and faces. It’s all about cinema as a dream, dreams as cinema. It’s not even a syllogism, it’s all a bunch of links.”

Director Richard Kelly (Southland Tales) blogs on his MySpace page about his new movie The Box. “The film was digitally photographed using the Panavision Genesis camera. In my audio commentary on Tony Scott's Domino, I mentioned that I would never shoot a 1970s period piece using a digital camera. My position on this changed when I saw David Fincher's extraordinary Zodiac. It can be done.”

This open letter to Bill O’Reilly has nothing to do with movies, but Roger Ebert wrote it and it’s too good to pass up: “I understand you believe one of the Sun-Times misdemeanors was dropping your syndicated column. My editor informs me that ‘very few’ readers complained about the disappearance of your column, adding, ‘many more complained about Nancy.’ I know I did. That was the famous Ernie Bushmiller comic strip in which Sluggo explained that ‘wow’ was ‘mom’ spelled upside-down.”

And in List-o-Mania this week…what the hell, let’s go with the 10 Greatest Mall-Set Action Scenes from Spoutblog, including Commando. “There’s nothing like seeing Arnold Schwarzenegger throw off about eight mall cops attempting a circular apprehension. There’s also nothing like seeing Arnold Schwarzenegger swing across the atrium of the Sherman Oaks Galleria using a plastic balloon-like decoration that couldn’t possibly have held him. Yes, there are a lot of over-the-top moments in this action scene, but there’s no denying it’s entertaining, at least to those of us who aren’t employed as mall security.”

Clippy Strikes Back: The Scariest Technology In Cinema History (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 21:30:00 GMT

THE MATRIX (1999)

Spoiler alert! The Matrix is people! Just kidding...but really, if you haven’t seen it by now, allow me to ruin the surprise for you: according to Laurence Fishburne’s Morpheus, the Matrix is a computer-generated dream world built to keep us under control in order to change human beings into the copper-top batteries fueling our cybernetic overlords. And yet, when Keanu “Whoa!” Reeves’ messianic Neo finally “wakes up” in his real world goo pod prison, the all-knowing cybernetic overlords just...uh...flush him down a drain so he can be enlisted by Morpheus and his band of human rebels in their fight to overthrow the Matrix. Huh? Wha? That logical inconsistency blew a gaping hole in my willing suspension of disbelief the first time I saw the Wachowski Brothers' cyberpunk classic, yet later I realized I’d worried my pretty little head over nothing...NOT because the disappointing sequels kinda sorta explained away the seeming plot contrivance (since Neo was really the sixth integral anomaly and thus was supposed to find his way to the Architect and blah, blah, blah...), but rather because the original Matrix was so fresh and visually exciting, with a paranoid, unified-field conspiracy theory of a plot that captured the unease (and exhilaration) of life in the digital age better than any movie since...well...Tron. (AO)

THE TERMINATOR (1984) & T2: JUDGMENT DAY (1991)

A perfect killing machine sent from the future to slay the mother of mankind’s eventual savior, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator was, from 1984 to 1991, the baddest assassin around. But James Cameron’s wildly popular sequel to The Terminator, T2: Judgment Day, further upped the ante, introducing a shape-shifting liquid-metal version of the techno-phobic series’ cyborg destroyers, the T-1000 (Robert Patrick), that stands as one of action cinema’s most daunting evildoers. If both the original and T-1000 Terminators are preeminent examples of malevolent machinery, however, it’s Skynet – the government-sanctioned computer program that goes sentient, instigates a nuclear holocaust, and manufactures an army of robots – that proves the franchise’s true villain. Shrewdly foreshadowing our increasing global inter-connectivity, and postulating that condition as ripe for tragedy, Cameron’s series offers us an apocalypse created by the very devices we rely on for our protection, and then – as further evidenced by T3, TV’s Sarah Connor Chronicles, and presumably the forthcoming Terminator: Salvation – also posits those machines as our sole means of achieving post-doomsday deliverance. (NS)

PULSE (2001)

Many J-horror imports exploit fears of technology, but none do so as effectively – and as thoughtfully – as Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s 2001 masterpiece Pulse. From online computers to cell phones, technology is ubiquitous throughout Kurosawa’s film, and slowly reveals itself to be the cause of a strange, growing phenomenon whereby Tokyo’s citizens begin to mysteriously disappear, often leaving behind only a residual black stain on the wall (shades of the marks found throughout post-atom-bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki). It soon becomes clear that ghosts are attempting to enter the physical world through our gadgets, and Kurosawa’s portrait of a technology-fostered apocalypse is chilling not simply for its raft of indelibly unsettling imagery (a plane hurtling to the ground, shuffling specters spied on a computer monitor), but from its story’s underlying commentary about the alienation and loneliness fostered by our mounting reliance on machines. Modernity’s technological progress leads to communication breakdown, which in turn results in societal disintegration, a set of circumstances Kurosawa chillingly depicts as both unavoidable and irreversible. (NS)

VIDEODROME (1983)

The purifying/corrupting relationship between technology and the human body has long fascinated (and been fetishized by) David Cronenberg, a topic which he superbly addressed in 1983’s Videodrome. In this mind-bending story, the president of a low-rent television station, Max Renn (James Woods), stumbles upon transmissions of the titular S&M horror show – in which rape, torture and mutilation occur in a single orange room – and subsequently begins suffering from horrific hallucinations. From there, the line between real and unreal blurs, though regardless of whether or not the ensuing madness is all in Max’s head, the sight of him inserting organic videotapes into a stomach gash, which in turn produces a gun that melds with his hand, affords a twisted, terrifying view of man’s increasingly fundamental bond with his inanimate creations. “Long Live the New Flesh!” serves as both a rallying cry for the film’s “villains” and the mournful final words of Renn, with Cronenberg ambiguously treating our connection to television as something at once liberating and destructive. (NS)

SECONDS (1966)

John Frankenheimer's nightmare movie, shot by cinematographer James Wong Howe, begins with the chubby, perpetually middle-aged character actor John Randolph (Jack Nicholson's father in Prizzi's Honor) as a married banker who barely recognizes that his life has gone stale until someone is kind enough to point it out. He is recruited as a client by a mysterious, secret organization that arranges for people to be given second chances at life: first their bodies are remade through plastic surgery and an exercise regimen, then they are dropped into a new routine that has been planned for them by a computer program. Of course, they're still the same old dissatisfied dullards they were before they went under the knife, especially if, like Randolph, they're being played by Rock Hudson after the bandages come off. Most techno-phobic sci-fi films are about the dangers of technology that we don't yet have; this one is about what people could have been doing with technology that they already had when the movie came out, if only they were stupid and shameless enough. Which may be why it feels more accurately prophetic now than 2001. (PN)

Click Here For Part One, Two & Three

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Nick Schager, Phil Nugent

Schwarzenegger to Make Cameo Appearance in New Stallone Movie; Old Action Rivals to Bury Freakishly Large, Bursting-Veined Hatchet

Phil Nugent — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 16:30:00 GMT

When Arnold Schwarzenegger announced that he was running for governor of California in the wake of the disappointed reaction to the third Terminator movie, a lot of people were quick to make the obvious joke that turning to politics might be a good career move for him; running a state the size of California had to be easier for a guy who was then in his mid-fifties than trying to continue holding up his end in the action-icon game. In fact, his last movie appearance before taking office was a cameo at the start of 2003's The Rundown, in which he seemed to be graciously passing the baton to Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson. The news that Schwarzenegger has agreed to do another cameo, as himself, in Sylvester Stallone's The Expendables, should probably not be taken as a sign how just bad things have gotten for those who are supposed to be holding the reins out West. The Gov contributed a cameo to the 2004 Around the World in 80 Days, directed by Frank Coraci, a movie that was seen by approximately one-hundred thousandth of the number of people who recently saw Coraci and his leading man, Steve Coogan, making cruel sport of Joaquin Phoenix and Christian Bale. And he can also be seen, briefly and as himself, in a forthcoming Indian film, Kambakkht Ishq, which has an inside-Hollywood story and includes a cameo by...Sylvester Stallone.

Personally, we applaud the Governor's efforts to help cover the school budget by taking part time jobs. It's not as if he could sign up for a shift at Mickey D's--there's no way they make those hats big enough that head. And while some might worry that a state leader should not put his dignity in peril, in Schwarzenegger's case, that ship probably sailed somewhere around the time of Hercules in New York. (When you're making your movie debut alongside Arnold Stang, and you're the one whose voice they decide to redub, dignity is not a product that you're ever going to be asked to endorse.) Still, for those of us who remember the '80s, it's a little funny to see him doing Stallone a favor, and even funnier to see Stallone asking him for one. I don't suppose they were ever Spider-man and Doc Ock in the heated-feuds department, but from at least the mid-80s, when Schwarzenegger began to overtake Stallone in the steroid-idol sweepstakes just when Sly had impressed himself mightily by proving, with the success of Rambo, that he had it in him to embody more than one franchise meathead character with a five-letter name beginning with "R", there's always been an undercurrent of competitive tension between them, made all the more savory by Stallone's spectacular job at failing to hold up his end. One critic detected a "fear of Schwarzenegger" theme running through many of Stallone's mid-80s films--not just Rambo but also Rocky IV and Cobra--in which he was roughed up but not bested by huge, muscleheaded figures who often came with scary accents. Stallone even tried to duplicate Schwarzenegger's career-expanding success in turning to comedy, but while it not for us to say that Oscar and Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot did not compare to Twins or Kindergarten Cop in the laugh riot department, they didn't do nearly as well at the box office. But the fact remains that last year's Rambo, and its predecessor, Rocky XXXVII, did a lot better than a great many thoughtful observers--feel free to take that as a synonym for "me"--expected them to. That means that Stallone has had two geriatric hits while Arnold has been off running some dumb ol' state. If Schwarzenegger misses his old job, being on the set of The Expendables should make him feel right at home: in addition to Stallone, who's also on board as writer-director, the cast includes Dolph Lundgren, Eric Roberts, and Roberts's new P.R. man, Mickey Rourke, making the set a virtual watering hole for has-beens and comeback kids. It's been reported that Schwarzenegger has been preparing for his cameo by telling people that Stallone is "a a terrific director and writer, and a great actor." If he's really been doing that, without crossing his eyes to keep a straight face, he's both a master politician and a better actor than we remember.

Taking Stock: Why Cinemark Shouldn't Get Your "Milk" Money

Phil Nugent — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 19:00:00 GMT

On Election Night, November 4, California voters passed Proposition 8, which will amend the state Constitution to officially define marriage as an union between a man and a woman, effectively canceling out a state Supreme Court decision that recognized same-sex marriage as a Constitutional right in California. Other anti-gay initiatives were passed in other states that night, but the California measure struck many as a special betrayal; as Caitlin MacRae wrote last week, "News of its passing left many shaking their heads, wondering how a state like California could give its votes to Changey McHoperson and at the same time approve a socially regressive constitutional revision. But in spite of its hippie radical reputation, California's voting trends generally look a lot like the rest of the nation's: a wide red middle, book-ended by blue. And though change has been the watchword of recent months, we sometimes forget that with change comes an inevitable backlash from those who fear becoming displaced in society." (MacRae also wrote, "Still, Prop 8 is on the losing side of history. The sex-panic button regularly gets hit in response to social change, racial tension, economic instability and foreign wars. The majority gets majorly freaked out when other people win the rights that they already enjoy, as though rights are finite and should be stockpiled like so many cans of beans in case of nuclear fallout.") Among the many grossed out by this squalid display of petty bigotry was Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who in the past has toed the (Republican) party line against same-sex marriage, but now, like the hero of an action movie who, having come face to face with the suffering he has inadvertently caused, turns against his vile masters, urged supporters of same-sex marriage to "never give up. They should be on it and on it until they get it done." (Schwarzenegger also advised the California Supreme Court to see what it can do about overturning Prop 8 before he has to go down there himself and start some shit.) In the meantime, those pissed off have been making their voices and pocketbooks heard by levying boycotts against some of the people who donated vast sums to the campaign for Proposition 8, which has to be one of the stupidest ways anyone ever came up with to announce to the world that they have too much money. One of these worthies is Alan Stock, whose position as CEO of the Cinemark theater chain has made it possible for his new enemies to make him the center of a gesture so improbably perfect that even Schwarzenegger might have to let out a low, admiring whistle.

"No Milk for Cinemark" is a Facebook-based campaign designed to encourage people to make whatever effort they must to not see Gus Van Sant's Milk, which stars Sean Penn as the martyred gay rights activist Harvey Milk, and which is one of the most highly touted pictures of the year, at a Cinemark chain theater. The movie opens November 26; it only took the protest organizers a few days to hit their initial gosl of thousand names, so what happens between now and then is gravy. Whatever one thinks of boycotts in general, it's hard to imagine that Milk himself wouldn't have had a few choice things to say about the idea of a company whose boss spent close to $10,000 to prevent gay marriage benefitting from a movie that celebrates his own efforts to prevent the adoption of legal measures designed to make the lives of gays worse. The third-largest cinema chain in the country, Cinemark was last in the news some ten years ago as the result of a long, drawn-out battle with the Department of Justice, which alleged that the design of the theaters' stadium-style seating was discriminatory against disabled patrons. (Cinemark finally settled the case out of court.) In Stock's defense, it should be noted that it makes all the sense in the world for him to be really concerned about what people can and can't do in California, since he lives in Plano, Texas. Reportedly his hobbies include staring straight ahead, parking in handicapped spaces, casting long, lingering gazes at the pool boy when he has his shirt off, and receiving e-mails and phone calls from people who want to know, since he has so much cash to spread around, how's about he help out with their mortgage?

Unwatchable #68: “Kazaam”

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

No, loyal Unwatchable readers, you have not missed an installment. Number 69 on the big list of failure is last year’s The Perfect Holiday, which will not be released on DVD until November. We’ll get back to it then, but meanwhile, let’s move on to the 1996 family movie that made you believe in Shaquille O’Neal as a seven-foot-tall rapping genie.

To his credit, Shaq does an admirable job of convincing us that he is, in fact, seven feet tall. Honestly, I would place little of the blame for Kazaam’s failures at the big man’s big feet, even if they are encased in goofy pointy-toed genie shoes for much of the running time. True, his rapping ability is largely a figment of his imagination. But the fact remains that someone in an office somewhere decided it would be a good idea for the genie played by Shaq to rap, and we can hardly blame the amiable giant for going along with the plan. He may not be much of an actor, but he’s got undeniable charisma and I appreciated his willingness to get silly. I don’t think Kobe Bryant would be caught dead in those MC Hammer pants.

With that, I’ve just about run out of good things to say about Kazaam. Some might tell you it’s a clever conceit that the genie, moving on with the times, has abandoned his traditional bottle for a boombox. I am not among them. Anyway, Kazaam is dislodged from his portable stereo home by Max Connor (Francis Capra, later of Veronica Mars), a mild troublemaker being raised by a single mom. Max gets the traditional three wishes, but he can’t wish for “ethereal” things like a second chance for his estranged father, only material things like a room full of junk food.

At first Kazaam is eager for Max to get his wishes over with so he can get back to his boombox, but when his sensational rapping takes the clubs by storm (even Da Brat is impressed), the big genie starts to get used to life outside the box. Meanwhile, Max gets to know his dad, who, it turns out, is something of a sleazebag. Especially compared to the heroic firefighter mom is dating. Along the way we keep trying not to notice that this is a movie about a little white kid who owns a big black man, but it’s not easy, especially in the scene where Max yells at Kazaam, “I own you!”

I guess it all works out in the end, although I retain some confusion over how Kazaam transforms himself into a ‘djinn’ who actually can grant ethereal wishes. I must have been distracted by all the rapping. So much rapping. Why so much rapping? Let’s blame director Paul Michael Glaser. You know him best as TV’s Starsky, of course, but don’t overlook his directorial career, which began with Band of the Hand in 1986. The only thing I know about Band of the Hand is the theme song by Bob Dylan, which is actually the most listenable thing Dylan produced in the mid-80s, even if I have no idea how or why he did it. Glaser next directed the oddly prescient Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle The Running Man, followed by the hockey romance The Cutting Edge and the basketball comedy The Air Up There. But even with all of those dubious achievements under his belt, it took Kazaam to kill off his career in feature filmmaking. That alone makes it worth three Maurys. Well, that and the rapping.

Previously on Unwatchable:
70. Epic Movie
71. Gigli
72. Meet the Spartans
73. Fascination
74. You Got Served

DVD Digest for September 2, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week’s DVD Digest is highlighted by a bumper crop of new TV-on-DVD releases in conjunction with the upcoming fall season. In addition, a large number of Blu-Ray only releases and a crush of new indie films on DVD helps to smooth over the lack of a first-rate “DVD of the Week”-worthy release.

This week’s high-profile new releases on DVD include Ira Sachs’ acclaimed fifties-set drama Married Life (Sony, also Blu-Ray), the Norwegian import Reprise (Buena Vista) (click here for Bryan Whitefield’s interview with the filmmaker), and the animated direct-to-DVD Marvel feature Next Avengers: Heroes of Tomorrow (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray). Also, in a strange coincidence, this week also brings the release of four films I caught at Columbus’ Out@Wex series of GLBT films this past spring: Jacques Nolot’s Before I Forget (Strand), the coming-of-age drama Water Lilies (Koch), the gender politics comedy Itty Bitty Titty Committee (Wolfe Video), and Lagerfeld Confidential (Koch), a documentary about the fashion designer.

This week’s slate of classics coming to DVD is highlighted by three new Fox Noir releases: Elia Kazan’s Boomerang, Jean Gabin in Moontide, and Road House (no, not that one), which includes a commentary track from Screengrab favorite Kim Morgan. Somewhat less notable is MGM’s 20th Anniversary Edition of the unholy union of Michael J. Fox and Jay McInerney, Bright Lights, Big City.

In the TV-on-DVD department, this week brings Desperate Housewives Season 4 (Disney), Eli Stone Season 1 (Disney), Ghost Whisperer Season 3 (Paramount), It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia Season 3 (Fox), Life Season 1 (Universal) starring the ever-underrated Damian Lewis, Supernatural Season 2 (Warner), and The Office Season 4 (Universal).

Finally, this week’s action-heavy Blu-Ray only releases include: Jet Li in Black Mask (Lionsgate), Arnold Schwarzenegger in Eraser (Warner), the Clint Eastwood double feature Every Which Way But Loose (Warner) and The Gauntlet (Warner), Marvel’s animated The Invincible Iron Man (Lionsgate), the killer-virus thriller Outbreak (Warner), Michael Bay’s Transformers (Paramount), and Steven Seagal ridin’ the rails in Under Siege 2: Dark Territory (Warner).

DVD Roundup for August 26, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week’s bumper crop of Westerns necessitates a temporary name change for this column.

DVD of the Week: 1962’s How the West Was Won may not have been the greatest classic Western ever made, but it was almost certainly the biggest, boasting three directors (Henry Hathaway, John Ford, and George Marshall) and an all-star cast (led by John Wayne, Henry Fonda, James Stewart, Gregory Peck, Debbie Reynolds, and Richard Widmark) to tell a Western family saga spanning half a century. In addition, the film boasting some stunning Western vistas designed to fully exploit the three-screen Cinerama process- this was one of only two narrative features to be exhibited using honest-to-goodness Cinerama. The biggest advantage of this week’s new Ultimate Collector’s Edition (Warner, also Blu-Ray) of the film is that it comes closer than any DVD edition to date to replicating the look of Cinerama in digital form. Instead of the “join lines” and standard 2.35:1 ‘Scope framing of previous editions, this new edition of the film features a new technology that effectively unifies the three Cinerama frames into the original aspect ratio of 2.89:1. There are also a number of special features, notably the 2002 documentary Cinerama Adventure that explores the famed camera process, as well as a trailer, archival featurette, audio commentary, and plenty of collectible memorabilia about the film and its stars. Nothing will be quite like watching How the West Was Won in Cinerama, but this new edition makes the home viewing experience better than ever.

In other oater news, this week also brings the Warner Home Video Western Classics Collection, which includes the 1960 remake Cimarron, Escape From Fort Bravo, Many Rivers to Cross, Saddle the Wind, The Law and Jake Wade, and The Stalking Moon, with each film also sold individually. In addition, Warner is also releasing the Errol Flynn Westerns Box Set (Warner), which contains Montana, Rocky Mountain, San Antonio, and Virginia City. And don’t overlook the Blu-Ray only release of Clint Eastwood’s Pale Rider (Warner).

Meanwhile, this week’s recent releases coming to DVD include: Cameron Diaz and Ashton Kutcher in What Happens in Vegas (Fox, also Blu-Ray); David Mamet MMA drama Redbelt (Sony, also Blu-Ray); the acclaimed documentary Chicago 10 (Paramount), Lynch (Ryko Entertainment), a documentary about the ever-popular David Lynch; Uwe Boll’s must-see Postal (Universal Music & Video Distribution), costarring former DVD Digest contributor David Huddleston; and the latest release from our pals at Benten Films, Team Picture.

Other classics coming to DVD this week include: a new pressing of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s notorious final film Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom (Criterion); the Henry Selick-directed The Nightmare Before Christmas Collector’s Edition (Disney); Jeunet and Caro’s Delicatessen Special Edition (First Look); and Monica Bellucci’s nude body transforming into a rolling landscape for your enjoyment in Brotherhood of the Wolf: Director’s Cut (Universal).

In TV on DVD, there’s Entourage Season 4 (HBO), Everybody Hates Chris Season 3 (Warner), Heroes Season 2 (Universal, also Blu-Ray), NCIS Season 5 (Paramount), and The Shield Season 6 (Sony).

Finally, this week’s action-packed lineup of Blu-Ray only releases includes: Errol Flynn (again) in The Adventures of Robin Hood (Warner); Gov. Schwarzenegger fighting Satan in End of Days (Universal); the first season of NBC’s Heroes (Universal); Crockett and Tubbs hitting the big screen in Michael Mann’s Miami Vice (Universal), and the submarine thriller U-571 (Universal).

In Other Blogs: Faster, Britney...Kill! Kill!

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 15:00:00 GMT

At Some Came Running, Glenn Kenny is skeptical about a rumored remake. “A couple of my esteemed colleagues have expressed slightly guarded enthusiasm over the extremely shaky prospect that Quentin Tarantino will direct Britney Spears in a remake of Russ Meyer's 1965 exploitation classic Faster Pussycat...Kill! Kill!, but I can't say it pushes any of my buttons, personal or otherwise. Of course the argument that, for what it's worth, Pussycat got made but good the first time isn't gonna cut any ice if in fact a remake is in the cards. But really...Britney Spears. Who cares. Her cultural currency—which is entirely distinct, as I'm sure you know, from tabloid currency—is as low as it's ever been…Having Tarantino hand-hold her through a turn as a loudmouth psycho drag-racing lesbian stripper will do exactly what for her at this point?” I don’t think this one’s worth worrying about. It’s taken how many years to get Inglorious Bastards going? Cooler heads will prevail.

Flickhead checks out some obscure DVD releases from restoration house Legend Films. “Set in the trendy inner sanctum of late 1970s encounter groups where narcissism overtakes self awareness, Bill Persky’s Serial (1980) is as safe as an episode of Love, American Style peppered with four-letter words, Sally Kellerman’s boobs and Lalo Shifrin’s quaint muzak score. (With some embarrassment, I confess the theme, ‘A Changing World,’ rattled around in my head for days after.) It’s a quietly amusing time capsule of Marin County after the fall of The Sixties, where middle age and middle class values are perpetually analyzed by quack psychologists and individuals fearful of commitment. An intriguing companion piece to Phil Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1979), this slice of Left Coast lunacy includes Tuesday Weld, Martin Mull, Bill Macy, a coked-out therapist played by Peter Bonerz, the woefully undervalued Barbara Rhodes, and Christopher Lee — Christopher Lee! — as a gay biker named ‘Skull.’”

At the House Next Door, Andrew Johnston revisits Risky Business. “As much as I loved them, teen sex comedies didn’t exactly make me feel good about being the kind of kid I was in 1983, the year I turned 15. They all took place in a world where smart and sexually inexperienced kids (i.e., guys like me) were always laughably pathetic, and rich ones (me again) were universally evil and arrogant. Here, finally, was a movie that didn’t pass judgment on those qualities. In the opening scene, our hero Joel Goodson recounts a dream in which he’s riding his bike home through his affluent neighborhood and winds up inside a neighbor’s house where a nubile girl invites him to join her in the shower, a dream that turns into a nightmare when the shower stall turns into a classroom full of his peers taking the SAT, for which he’s three hours late. How could I not identify with the guy?”

At Scanners, Jim Emerson becomes the last film blogger on earth to see The Dark Knight. “When we were in college, a music critic friend of mine who delighted in making "best ever / worst ever" statements proudly (and sincerely) proclaimed that Bob Dylan's Blood On the Tracks was the single greatest artistic achievement in the history of mankind. We teased him about the hyperbole, but I admit I liked him all the more for saying it. Unguarded, unbounded enthusiasm is a wonderful thing to behold, to feel, and to share…I waited a couple weeks to see The Dark Knight and I even though I felt lukewarm about the movie, I couldn't wait to talk about it.”

And in List-o-Mania this week, in honor of the Tom Cruise cameo in Tropic Thunder, Spoutblog presents the 10 Best Small Roles for Big Stars. Some are fairly obvious (no such list would be complete without Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glenn Ross), but I admittedly had forgotten all about Arnold Schwarzenegger as “Prince Hapi” in Around the World in 80 Days. “Schwarzenegger’s hilarious appearance as a lecherous Turkish prince — one of his last roles filmed before becoming Governor of California — is one of the few highlights, if not the sole highlight (personally, I enjoy Jackie Chan in anything, and I liked more of this movie than most people did). The role is especially funny and creepy if you’ve ever seen that old footage of Schwarzenegger being sleazy at Carnival in Rio.”

Morning Deal Report: Spielberg Gets a Clue

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Actually, Steven Spielberg gets The 39 Clues, or at least the screen rights to the “multiplatform adventure series to be launched in the fall by Scholastic Media,” Variety reports. A planned 10-book series with additional elements including an online game and collectible cards, Clues is about “the most powerful family in the world, the Cahills, who count Napoleon and Houdini among their relatives. Readers will be challenged to discover the source of the family's powers, revealed through 39 clubs that are hidden around the world and scattered throughout history.” Spielberg already has a full plate, including an adaptation of Tintin and a Lincoln biopic starring Liam Neeson, but anything that keeps him away from another Indiana Jones movie is fine by us.

The Hollywood Reporter uncovers a secret conspiracy headed by X-Files mastermind Chris Carter. Carter is in the middle of shooting Fencewalker, “a coming-of-age semiautobiographical character piece with no supernatural elements…Carter wrote the script for what is thought to be his passion project some time ago and raised the financing himself. The film has a modest budget and no distributor at this point.” The truth is out there, even if no one is talking.

Finally, you may have heard that Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger are set to make their Bollywood debuts. It turns out that this story is only half-true. The U.K. Telegraph claims that “Stallone has signed up for a cameo role in Kambakht Ishq, a big budget blockbuster starring Indian heart-throb Akshay Kumar. Schwarzenegger has also been approached - and it would be the first time the two action heroes have shared the big screen.” But in a Reuters U.K. report, the California governor’s spokesman dismissed the rumors. Stallone’s participation is confirmed in the story of an Indian stuntman in Hollywood, which will set a Bollywood record with its $21 million budget.

Related:
Steven Spielberg: Teacher's Pet
Stallone All Juiced to Play Rambo Again

New "Terminator" Trilogy on Tap: Christian Bale to Play John Connor, Times 3

Phil Nugent — Thu, 22 May 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Christian Bale is turning out to be quite the franchise monkey. (We say it with love.) Having already done well following in the footsteps of Adam West, Michael Keaton, Val Kilmer and George Clooney, he'll be seen next year playing John Connor, savior of mankind in its battle against our mechanized tyrants, a job that calls for him to go where Edward Furlong, Nick Stahl, and (on TV) Thomas Dekker have gone before. Bale and director McG are currently shooting Terminator Salvation: The Future Begins, which is due to arrive in theaters on May 22, 2009. Now the BBC has reported that the producers of the current production, Halcyon, intend to make three Terminator movies, and Bale has agreed to come back for all of them. "He read the script and he loved it," said Derek Anderson, "so he's signed on for all three." His partner, Victor Kubicek, who calls Bale "really an actor's actor," adds that Bale "was our first choice and he's a big fan of The Terminator, so we're very lucky."

The Terminator series sure has come a long way since James Cameron cobbled together a surprise sleeper hit that, sneaking into theaters in the fall of 1984, blew more expensive, long-awaited sci-fi movies such as Dune and 2010 out of the water and, to the industry's slack-jawed amazement, made a bona fide movie star out of Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was already fairly famous but regarded as a steroid freak with a funny accent, a useful guy to have around if you had a leading role that needed to be played in a loincloth. O. J. Simpson, famously was rejected for the role by producers who didn't think audiences would accept him as a villain, and by the time the first Terminator sequels rolled around, it was felt that Schwarzenegger wouldn't be accepted as a bad guy anymore either--or, at any rate, that he didn't want to play one--which meant that the scripts and special-effects people on those movies had to perform terrific feats of contortion to make it seem that the reformed Arnold-model robot might be plausibly vulnerable when pitted against the products of superior but skinnier technology. (Terminator 2 and the twelve-minute theme park attraction T2 3-D: Battle Across Time are the only Terminator spin-offs that Cameron has had a hand in besides picking up a check for the use of his characters.) The last Terminator movie, Terminator 3: The Rise of the Machines, had made it look as if the franchise was pretty well played out--ready for a TV series, in fact.

Who knows how hard the makers of the still-ongoing TV show The Sarah Connor Chronicles and the upcoming film trilogy will work to make sure their plotlines match up, but the really daunting task for the filmmakers may be proving that there's a big-screen audience for this material without Schwarzenegger. (Terminator 3 proved that there's considerably less of an audience for it with the Schwarzenegger of 2003 than there was for it with the Schwarzenegger of 1984.) The casting of Bale signals that the John Connor character is now the de facto headliner; whereas on the TV show, where his mom gets top billing, the humans are regularly upstaged by the quizzical mechanical hottie played by Summer Glau. The producers of the new franchise are purposefully vague about whether Schwarzenegger, who does have a state to run, will have any participation in the new movies. (His only film appearances since Terminator 3 have been cameos in the Jackie Chan-Steve Coogan bomb Around the World in 80 Days and in The Rundown, where he good-naturedly passed the action-movie sceptre to Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson.) Theoretically, there's no reason that the Terminator series can't go on forever and a day, because its time-travel gimmick is built around the idea that the characters who are on the verge of being vanquished can always return to the past and change things. The down side is that there must be a point where even the most stubbonly devoted fans have to get fed up and want to see something stick.

Japandering: The Five Most Embarrassing Celebrity Commercials

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 06 May 2008 14:30:00 GMT

We’ve known for a long time that famous American movie stars who would never deign to sully themselves doing television commercials at home have no such compunctions about doing them abroad, most often in Japan. This phenomenon was immortalized in Lost in Translation, of course, but the tasteful Suntory ad that Bill Murray’s character struggles to complete is not necessarily representative of the antics our most respected and treasured movie icons will get up to when they don’t think we’re watching. Nowadays, of course, thanks to YouTube and the invaluable resource Japander, we’re always watching! Let’s assume these five stars haven’t been humiliated enough and put them through the wringer one more time.

NICOLAS CAGE for FEVER PACHINKO

It’s not always easy to tell what these Japanese commercials are advertising, and here is a case in point. At first I thought Cage was selling gum, then possibly a car. While this may be the actor’s best performance in years, those of us unfamiliar with pachinko gaming devices may be a little unclear on the message.

BRUCE WILLIS for ENEOS

Once again I had to do a little research to determine exactly what product or service Willis is shilling here. As far as I can tell, it’s motor oil. I should have been able to figure that out, what with the yellow paint and the Elvis impersonator and the backpack raygun thingy and…what was I talking about?

MICHAEL J. FOX for SOME SORT OF BEVERAGE

Honestly, I can’t tell if Fox is selling beer or canned coffee or some sort of energy drink here. Whatever it is, it makes you do crazy things, like trim hedges into animal shapes! Note Fox’s reprisal of the distressed yelp noise that made him famous in the Back to the Future movies. That’s branding, folks.

ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER for DIRECT TV

It’s hard to pick just one of Arnie’s ads – he seems to be the king of Japandering. I chose this one because of the multiple roles he plays. It gives us a moment to reflect on what was lost when he went into politics.

BEN STILLER for KIRIN

Are we sure this isn’t an outtake from Zoolander or something? No? How embarrassing.

Watching "The Watchman": An Interview with Kent M. Beeson

Paul Clark — Mon, 05 May 2008 19:00:00 GMT

In case you’ve slept through this past weekend, the summer movie season got off to a roaring start with the big-budget adaptation of Iron Man. With many more comic book movies in store this summer, and even more after that, I figured it was about time to catch up with former Screengrab contributor and all around good dude Kent M. Beeson. As a comic-book fan and movie buff of long standing, Kent recently secured a position with the Web site comiXology, writing a bi-weekly column entitled The Watchman. Kent was gracious enough to take time out of his busy schedule- which also includes numerous freelance jobs as well as a wife and 14-month-old daughter- to conduct this interview via e-Mail.

How did you get your position with Comixology?

Dumb luck, if you ask me! Peter Jaffe, the Online Content Editor for Comixology, asked former ScreenGrab editor Bilge Ebiri to recommend someone to cover film and TV for Comixology, and he named me. I'd done some writing for ScreenGrab, including several on comic books, so I suppose that's why name came up. if I had to guess, I'd say that my ScreenGrab posts on the Watchmen and Shazam! movies had something to do with it, but really, I have no idea.

Why do you suppose Hollywood has made so many comic book movies in the past few years?

I suppose the standard reasons are that the executives greenlighting these movies are the ones that grew up in the 70s and 80s, and grew up reading these comics, coupled with CGI that lets filmmakers show just about anything they can imagine. When those two moments in history coincided, it was bound to be a fertile period. What's really interesting to me, though, isn't that so many comic book movies are being made, but just how important fidelity to the source material has become. It still boggles my mind that Zack Snyder is keeping Watchmen in the 80s -- that never would have happened just a few years ago. We've come a long way from the aborted Tim Burton Superman with Nicolas Cage in a freaky black suit. But even this is a bit of a quirk of history -- I don't think we'd be seeing so many faithful adaptations if it weren't for Bryan Singer's X-Men showing it could be done and Raimi's Spider-Man showing just how friggin' huge it could be.

What are your favorite comic books?

Watchmen is my favorite book of all time, comic or otherwise. Paul Smith's run on X-Men -- I think I might prefer it to Byrne's, actually. Ambush Bug was way ahead of its time. One I loved back in the day, that seems to have been forgotten, was an horror anthology called Wasteland. It was written by John Ostrander and, of all people, improv pioneer Del Close. Some really twisted shit -- I can still remember one story called "R.Ab" that is just... soul-crushingly dark. Like Idiocracy without the safety of the comedy. I always thought this is what reading the E.C. comics back in the day must've been like.

Favorite comic book movies?

The stupidly-titled X2 is, fortunately, stupidly awesome. Spider-Man, I can watch over and over. Akira is great, but it's animated, so maybe that shouldn't count. I have a soft spot for Batman Returns, but the unfortunate practice of overloading a film with villains can be laid squarely at its feet.

Best adaptation?

Spider-Man is the best, I think, but it's adapting a character and his world and not so much a single story (other than the origin), so if you eliminate those, I guess that leaves me with Sin City. Visually, it's breath-taking and kind of addictive -- it's hard to look away from it when it's on. More importantly, though, it turned a series of borderline-unreadable books into something pleasing.

Most underappreciated/overappreciated comic book movies?

Let me go ahead and catch hell from two different camps. The first Superman movie is pretty terrific for about forty minutes when dealing with his origin, but once Luthor enters the picture, it gets too jokey and lame. Reeve and Kidder are impeccable, however. And Ghost World is pretty much ruined by Zwigoff's cheap misanthropy. I mean, Clowes isn't exactly Mr. Positive, but it's clear from the book that he's trying to find some kind of hope. Zwigoff buries it under shots of pregnant women smoking and Blockbuster gags that would never have made it past the Mad TV writing room. There's a reason Bad Santa works -- it's all misanthropy.

I think Hellboy is a bit underappreciated. Considering that the comic isn't very well-written and has one of the most non-sensical origin stories ever -- Mignola came up with the look of the character first and made up everything after, and it shows -- it holds together pretty well. Del Toro's really coming into his own, he's starting to find just what he's capable of, so I'm looking forward to Hellboy II.

When a comic book movie doesn't remain true to its source, how difficult is it for you to turn off your comic book side and simply appreciate it as a movie?

Well, my attack plan for the stuff I'm unfamiliar with -- like Darwyn Cooke's The New Frontier, or the upcoming Wanted -- is to watch the movie first. I want to be able to enjoy the movie -- or not -- as a movie first, without any baggage, which is how most viewers are going to see these things anyway. And then I go back to the comic. The comic is usually going to have more information anyway, and I don't need to bring that into the movie. I actually started watching Persepolis after reading the first 20 pages or so of the comic, and it totally fucked it up for me -- I had to go back and see it again to fully appreciate how well the filmmakers were able to streamline the story for the movie. Luckily, most comic movies are adapting characters and not specific stories, so it's pretty easy to turn off the preconceptions.

Obviously, with something like Watchmen, that's not going to be possible. I'm not sure how that's going to work. I might have to conk myself on the head and induce amnesia just before I walk into the theater.

What big-screen comic book adaptations have actually improved on their sources?

I just finished the original A History of Violence, and wow, what a stinker. The movie pretty much repudiates the source, which, admittedly, is an interesting way to go about adapting something. Sin City -- well, my loathing of Frank Miller runs pretty deep, so it was great to see such a tiring and self-important comic turned into high camp by simply giving the thing motion. Whenever I see Clive Owen float down to the street in his red shoes, I crack up.

In your opinion, what are the keys to making a successful comic book adaptation?

Jesus, I really have no idea. The first thing that comes to mind is balance -- knowing when to be faithful to the source, and when to realize, hey, this has to work as a movie first and foremost, and just go off. A History of Violence is pretty faithful for the first 1/3 of the book, then it jettisons the rest, to its credit. I don't think the adaptation of The New Frontier went far enough -- there were small changes here and there that indicated that they knew the story wasn't going to work as is, but they really should have rethought the whole thing from top to bottom. But, saying that, I bet we'll see (if we haven't already) a movie that either is completely faithful or totally throws everything out but the title and works perfectly well.

Now that Watchmen is being made, what are some of your other dream adaptations?

I want to say FLCL, but the comic came later. Does Cowboy Bebop count? It was a serialized manga first. I could totally see an adaptation with, say, Ryan Gosling as Spike, Selma Blair as Faye and The Rock as Jet. I think The Rock is underrated as a performer -- for someone who was supposed to be Schwarzenegger's heir apparent, he displays more genuine warmth and a sense of humor about himself than Arnold ever did. While Jet is a badass, he's still essentially the mother of the group, and it'd be interesting to see him in a movie where his physicality is in strict contrast to his role. Matthew Vaughn is doing Thor, but I'd kill for a Gilliam version -- nobody does giants better, and I'd love to see them get their ass kicked by a blonde dude with a hammer.

The Watchman runs every other Wednesday on comiXology. Kent’s piece on Iron Man will run this week.

Geek Love: The Unmanliness of the New Action Heroes

Phil Nugent — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 17:00:00 GMT

"Now the geek is god in Hollywood." That's emerging conventional wisdom as expressed by publicist Tony Angellotti. emerging declares the veteran publicist and Oscar campaigner Tony Angellotti. "Every generation redefines its heroes and the heroes of today are slight of stature and geeky." The emergence, not just in starring roles but in action hero roles, of such as Shia LaBeof (Disturbia, Transformers, and now Indiana Jones's kid), James McAvoy (Wanted), and Emile Hirsch (Speed Racer) is apparently setting off a wave of soul-searching in Hollywood, where it seems somehow significant that these are the fellows stepping up to "replace" the likes of Bruce Willis, Mel Gibson, and Sylvester Stallone. If this were, say, 1968, there'd probably be think pieces appearing analyzing this development in terms of a political shift in the zeitgeist; the Iraq war and other setbacks to our great national ego trip have tarnished the steroid-addled heroes who emerged full-bore in the 1980s and made audiences quicker to look for heroes who seem more thoughtful and capable of self-doubt. But nobody talks like that anymore, and today's self-appointed experts are more likely to speak the language of the pop psychologist. Angellotti, who seems personally affronted by some of the newer success stories ("Do these kids even shave?"), has this theory: "For decades, we wanted our heroes to be who we could never be, but this generation of filmgoers wants heroes they can relate to, who are similar to them. They see themselves in these somewhat awkward, geeky, hairless-faced guys. They can relate to them. Stars like Clint Eastwood and Bruce Willis were men; these are boys, and they're appealing to younger audiences."

Others, such as Peter Safran, a man so smart that he freely admits to having produced Meet the Spartans, thinks it's a supply-and-demand issue. "I don't think it's happening because it's what the audience is demanding; it's happening because the old-style action hero isn't emerging. These are the people who are emerging now and clearly audiences respond to seeing themselves up on the screen. Shia LaBeouf's audience grew up with him - they are very familiar with him and he's a legitimate star today." Some of these deep thinkers may be getting a bit ahead of themselves. Whatever he can or can't bench-press, Shia LaBeouf is a talented guy with tremendous reserves of audience rapport; whatever his future holds, he's much more plausible star material than a lot of the people who've been hyped as alleged up-and-comers since Andrew McCarthy and Judd Nelson were figuring out which end of the razor you held to your face. (Judd's still working it out.) More to the point, some of the "men" that these guys (who, let's face it, may have their own deep-seated personal reasons for preferring heroes with hairline issues and calorie-intake counselors) love so much had their own callow periods when they first appeared on film. There were a few years there, between the point where Moonlighting started to turn brown and Die Hard's opening weekend, where it wasn't clear that Bruce Willis would ever wipe the smirk off his face and evolve into something more durable than an overage frat rat, and Mel Gibson's early success as the stone-faced pain merchant Mad Max was something he had to grow past on his way to becoming an assured, emotionally expressive leading man. (Then space worms ate his brain. But that's another story.)

In the end, the overmuscled, inaccessible terminators of the last couple of decades may be the ones who look like an aberration in the history of Hollywood stardom. Pauline Kael once defined the recipe for success as a male movie star as having the strength "to be one's own man" while still expressing "the sensitivity that is attractive to women." Stallone conveyed some of that sensitivity in the movie that made him a star, Rocky, then lost it when he pumped himself into a cartoon killing machine, a move that proved to have only short-term dividends at the box-office. And Schwarzenegger never became enough of an actor to express it even if he had access to it; if his political career continues to prosper, it'll enhance the likelihood that he'll ultimately be seen as an all-around celebrity success story whose movie career was just a stepping stone to bigger things. These guys were big, the biggest stars in the world at a time when testosterone overload was what the world seemed to want, but when the world moved on, they were painted in a corner, and left behind no progeny above the level of, say, Dolph Lundgren. (Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, who Arnold more or less officially designated as his rightful heir in a cameo in The Rundown, has shown himself more interested in developing as a character actor than in making a quick payday from walking away from explosions in slow motion.) The Shias and the Emiles may actually be closer to the true face of Hollywood tradition.

DVD Digest for April 8, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week, a cracked fantasy favorite finally gets the DVD it deserves, and DVD lovers can finally order their milkshakes to go.

For most moviegoers, the big news this week is the arrival of Paul Thomas Anderson's latest masterpiece There Will Be Blood in DVD. But while that's cause for celebration, be warned- as with Sweeney Todd last week, Paramount is releasing the film in two separate versions, a bare-bones single-disc release and a two-disc set featuring some deleted scenes and a number of featurettes about the making of, and history behind, the film. Normally, I'd be skeptical about the relatively slim pickings even on the two-disc set, but Anderson's recent DVD releases haven't contained too much in the way of commentaries and the like, so this was to be expected from him. Besides, it's not like you're NOT going to buy There Will Be Blood- it's awesome enough to stand on its own merits without all the snazzy bells and whistles.

But no less noteworthy is the release of a new version of Terry Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (Sony, also Blu-Ray). Munchausen, a notorious flop in its day, has since become something of a cult favorite, and it's good to see Sony finally giving it a good DVD treatment. Naturally, there's a Terry Gilliam commentary track, which should be reason enough to buy the DVD, considering that Gilliam's commentaries are never better than when he's talking about films that were mishandled by their distributors. The two-disc set also includes the three-part documentary "The Madness and Misadventures of Munchausen," as well as storyboard sequences that supposedly feature "all-new vocal performances by Terry Gilliam and Chris McKeown." Dare I hope Gilliam drew the storyboards in Pythonimation style?

In other classics coming to DVD news, Fox is continuing the celebration of Bette Davis with a six-disc Bette Davis Centenary Celebration Collection that includes a new two-disc version of All About Eve along with bare-bones discs of The Nanny, The Virgin Queen, Phone Call From a Stranger, and the gothic-horror classic Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte. Other than that, not much to write about in the classics department, unless of course the Blu-Ray release of Arnold Schwarzenegger in The 6th Day blows your hair back. In which case don't let me stop you.

More recent titles being released on DVD this week include John C. Reilly in the musical biopic spoof Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (Sony, also Blu-Ray), the family fantasy The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep (Sony, also Blu-Ray), Robert Redford's star-studded Iraq War dud Lions For Lambs (MGM), and the Leonardo DiCaprio-produced and -narrated tree-hugger documentary The 11th Hour (Warner).

Finally, David Huddleston's checking in again this week, this time to offer his condolences to Warner's HD-DVD release of I Am Legend. You know, Huddleston's condolences might make me feel bad for Will Smith's character in the film, except I'm guessing he'd be grateful for the company.

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.

Hulu: Destroying Worker Productivity One Movie at a Time

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Are you down with Hulu yet? The latest online on-demand viewing site launched two weeks ago, and is drawing rave reviews for its library of free TV shows and movies. The former is none of our business here at the Screengrab (although just look at all those episodes of Archie Bunker’s Place!), but the latter is…well, let’s just call it a work in progress.

Not that we’re complaining; Hulu is just getting started, after all. You can watch a movie for free as long as you’re willing to sit through a trailer of Baby Mama, and the video and sound quality is certainly leaps and bounds beyond your YouTubes. But for the moment at least, the selection is a bit sparse and, how shall we say…random. The most popular items are of relatively recent vintage: Ice Age, Fever Pitch, 28 Days Later and The Big Lebowski are all available if you’re looking to burn off the rest of your work day. But there are also some more obscure offerings, like 1958’s Attack of the Puppet People, John Huston’s The Barbarian and the Geisha, and both Dr. Goldfoot movies starring Vincent Price.

It’s hard to know where to start. Arnold Schwarzenegger (or “Arnold Strong” as he was billed) in Hercules in New York? Cheech & Chong in The Corsican Brothers? How about the 1977 version of The Island of Dr. Moreau? You can browse the full list here, but if you end up getting fired, don’t blame us.

The Rock IS "The Tooth Fairy" and Other Worst-Case Scenarios

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 20:30:00 GMT

As soon as Jon Stewart bid us goodnight and told us to drive home safely, the powers that be in Hollywood breathed a sigh of relief. Finally, they could put all of this "quality filmmaking" nonsense behind them and open the crapgates for another load of sequels, remakes and high-concept star vehicles.

Leading the parade is Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, who will play an ordinary Joe who takes over the Tooth Fairy's duties in, well, The Tooth Fairy. Yes, it's basically The Santa Clause all over again, and appropriately enough, it will be directed by Michael Lembeck, who helmed the two Clause sequels. The concept might also ring a bell for those who have closely followed Arnold Schwarzenegger's career. As Entertainment Weekly reported in 1992, The Man Who Would Be Governator had his choice of several projects, including "Sweet Tooth, an action comedy about a U.S. Marine who finds out at his father's deathbed that he's inheriting the family legacy — the job of tooth fairy." (He opted for The Last Action Hero. We'll call this one a draw.)

In other news, despite their claims to the contrary, it appears that Paul Greengrass and Matt Damon are both on board for a fourth Bourne adventure. (If they're looking for a title, may we suggest Bourne to Be Wild?) We've enjoyed all the jittery suspense as much as anyone, but surely these guys have better things to do than go to this particular well one more time.

Finally we have the latest in unwanted and unnecessary horror remakes. The duo behind the fourth and fifth Saw installments (Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan, who scripted Feast for Project Greenlight) have been hired to resurrect Hellraiser, while Dylan Walsh of Nip/Tuck will attempt to fill Terry O'Quinn's shoes as The Stepfather. We're trembling with fear already.

OST: "Conan the Barbarian"

Leonard Pierce — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 19:30:00 GMT

In my other life, when I'm not in a theater watching whatever art films manage to find their way down to San Antonio or in front of my TV watching obscure experimental films I scared up from Netflix, I am also a music critic. And there's one area where my two favorite forms of opinionated bloviating come together: in the OST, or "original soundtrack". Music has been a big part of the moviegoing experience since before there were talkies, and a good score or the right selection of a song on the soundtrack can make a film memorable just as certainly as an overbearing and obvious score or the use of a trite, predictable song can make a film irritating. On occasion, we'll take a moment to review some of our favorite soundtracks or scores, starting off this week with Basil Poledouris' score from Conan the Barbarian.

The movie itself — directed by John Milius and written by Oliver Stone — is a lot better than most people give it credit for. Arnold Schwarzenegger's lead performance is pretty goofy at times, and the movie is as subtle as a broadsword decapitation, but it delivers on its action scenes like nobody's business, it has a much better script than you might expect from such a movie, and is very close in spirit to Robert E. Howard's original Conan stories. Similarly, the score, by the prolific and talented Greco-American film composer Basil Poledouris, is perfectly pitched to its material: grand and sweeping, but never over-the-top or bombastic, and dynamic and tense without being screechy or noisy. It's also got a remarkably diverse set of musical markers and cues — a little bit of Oriental mysticism here, a sprinkle of Teutonic grandeur a la Wagner there, and touch of exotica from time to time, making it that rarity, a film score that's interesting enough to listen to apart from the film. In fact, the score's reputation has rather outpaced the reputation of the film it was made for; few people would count Conan the Barbarian as one of the best movies of all time, but many music critics have singled out the Conan the Barbarian soundtrack as one of the best film scores ever released. So influential has Poledouris' score become that it's often used as a temp track for timing out scenes before actual soundtrack work is completed; it also shows up from time to time in trailers and elsewhere because of its wealth of effective cues and powerful stings. Anyone interested in building up a film soundtrack collection should make this one a building block.

BEST TRACKS: The bold, percussive, stunning main theme (also known as "The Anvil of Crom"); the repetitive, despairing, almost minimalist surge of "Wheel of Pain"; the decadent, playful exotica of "The Kitchen/The Orgy", with its goof on Ravel's Bolero.

The Ten Worst Medical Breakthroughs in Movie History, Part 1

Phil Nugent — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 21:30:00 GMT

This weekend marks the opening of The Eye, starring Jessica Alba as a blind young woman who regains her sight thanks to corneal transplant surgery. Unfortunately, this happy situation brings her to grief when her new peepers start feeding her frightening, apocalyptic visions. If the plot sounds familiar, if may be because The Eye is a remake of a 2002 Hong Kong film by the Pang brothers. But it might also have something to do with the fact that, from the 1960 French horror classic Eyes Without a Face to more recent films such as the 1991 Body Parts (itself based on a French novel called Choice Cuts), it's easy to think of other movies where experimental transplant surgery has had unhappy side effects for the lucky beneficiary. (Steven Spielberg's first professional directing gig was "Eyes", one of the segments of the 1969 pilot for the horror anthology series Night Gallery, in which the fates play a cruel joke on a nasty eye transplant patient, played by Joan Crawford.) Although a great many movie doctors have plied their trade wisely and humanely, saving many fake lives in the process, it's still true that there have been a great many ambitious medical breakthroughs in the movies that have yielded questionable results, and worse. To wit:

THE INCREDIBLE TWO-HEADED TRANSPLANT (1971)

Case in point. This low-budget horror movie really nails the potential dangers of reckless and unregulated transplant surgery. Or maybe it really nails the potential dangers of giving Bruce Dern a medical license. Dern plays an unprincipled, deranged — dare we say, Dernesque — mad genius who's squatting out in the desert, idly sticking extra heads on raccoons. When a drooling, murderous sex maniac stops by to ask Dern how's tricks, our hero sees his chance and grafts the head of this leering cretin onto the oversized body of the pure-hearted village half-wit. It turns out that the pervert, by virtue of his stronger will and general alpha maleness, gains control of the shared body, a development that leads to scenes where helpless innocents are killed and molested by the monster, scenes that are intercut with close-ups of the actor playing the meanie resting his head on the shoulder of the actor playing the sweet idiot; the latter moans, rolls his eyes, and generally registers his disapproval, while the former sniggers and makes Billy Idol faces. Dern and his creation are destroyed at the end of the movie, but a year later, some exploitation film scientists who somehow got ahold of his notes grafted Ray Milland's head onto the body of Rosey Grier in The Thing with Two Heads. It can easily be distinguished from this movie because the scientists who perform the operation on Grier and Milland do not have a concerned best friend played by Casey Kasem.

JUNIOR (1994)

For some of us, the disappointments related to this Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle began with the news that he was not playing the Peter Bagge comics character of the same name. Instead, the future Governor of California plays a gynaecological scientist (check) who specializes in fertilization medication (double check) who, in order to draw attention to the effectiveness of his new super-drug, doses himself with progesterone, estrogen, and his own meds, has an egg that's been fertilized with his own sperm implanted in his abdominal cavity, and conceives a child which he then decides to carry to term, because it will make him a better person (with you so far), much as cross-dressing did for Dustin Hoffman. The fellow scientist who anonymously supplies the egg is played by Emma Thompson, who comes to love Arnold and looks forward to raising the child with him — and that's where I get off the boat. It should be noted that Schwarzenegger was not the first man to give birth in a Hollywood comedy; the same thing happened to Billy Crystal in the 1977 Rabbit Test which comprises the entirety of Joan Rivers's directing career. But that movie made no attempt to explain or justify its plot scientifically: Crystal's pregnancy was best explained as a miracle, though Crystal probably thinks that the only miracle related to Rabbit Test is the fact that he was ever able to find work again.

THEY SAVED HITLER’S BRAIN (1963)

If saving the brain of a man widely considered to be history’s greatest monster doesn’t count as the very definition of a bad application of medical technology. Worse still, they don’t just save Hitler’s brain — they save his whole head, so we don’t even get any respite from that annoying push-broom ‘stache of his. No, he just sits there, looking as evil as a stand-in who doesn’t actually look all that much like Hitler can possibly look, burbling around in his jar, waiting for someone to invent Futurama and hatching many a nefarious scheme. By the time this movie came out, Hitler was well on his way to becoming less a sinister historical figure and more of a Dr. Octopus type, a comic-opera supervillain trotted out every time someone wrote a cheap take-over-the-world screenplay. And screenplays don’t come any cheaper than the one in this doozy, which is actually two almost completely unrelated movies (check out the different hairstyles, car models, even film stock from scene to scene) crammed together and broadcast more or less as a TV timefiller in the mid-‘60s. Not since the Golden Age of Ed Wood have there been so many bad special effects, so much terrible acting, so many egregious continuity errors. We here at the Screengrab don’t pretend to be experts on the psychology of Adolf Hitler, and we certainly don’t say this to excuse the man or his lifetime of evil deeds, but we feel quite certain that if someone did bring his head back to life in the confines of an electrified jar, that disembodied, unholy head in a jar could make a better movie than this.

FLATLINERS (1990)

Flatliners was meant to be an intelligent, provocative, moody thriller that blurred the line between good and evil. Unfortunately, they gave it to Joel Schumacher to direct, and so it instead turned out to be yet another object lesson in the ongoing saga of Schumacher’s incredible ability to destroy anything with which he is even remotely involved. In the film, a bunch of medical students decide to take a break from getting drunk and complaining to subject themselves to clinical death in order to determine if stories of what lie beyond the veil of mortality are really true. Each time, they experience more and more of the other side before being resuscitated; and each time, they become whinier and poutier until Kevin Bacon, In his most Judd Nelsonish performance to date, starts bitching and moaning to a stained glass window like it was his mom and it had just told him he was grounded on prom night. Indeed, while the characters in the film channel the eerie experiences of a world beyond death, the actors who play them – including Bacon, Julia Roberts, and a delightfully pissy Kiefer Sutherland – do an amazing job of channeling the relentless unpleasantness of the Brat Pack. We won’t give anything away for those who have yet to see this misbegotten pile of Schumakings, but rest assured, it won’t be long that you’ll be praying for the entire cast to die for real.

UNIVERSAL SOLDIER (1992)

It is a little-known but nonetheless completely true fact that sometime after the Vietnam War, the United States military developed secret technology that would allow them to bring dead people back to life and turn them into ultra-efficient, superhuman robotic killing machines. Unfortunately, the technology only seemed to work on heavily muscled men of northern European origin, which is how we ended up sending both Dolph Lundgren and Jean-Claude Van Damme to the Persian Gulf to blow up terrorists. There were practical reasons not to use these two (they are both terribly bad actors, and at times, the screen threatens to fold in on itself like a quantum singularity at the sheer blankness of their personalities) as well as psychological ones (if you’re going to send two ultra-efficient, superhuman robotic killing machines on a top secret mission together, why would you pick two guys who hated each other so much that they essentially murdered each other the last time they were paired up), but none of that makes any difference when there’s towelhead ass to be kicked, so off they go on one of the most overblown, ridiculous 1980s action movies to not actually be made in the 1980s. Apparently, the medical technology that allows people to be brought back from the dead and turned into murderous cyborgs can do nothing to prevent their tendency to smirk, pose shirtless, and make terrible puns at the drop of a hat, which is probably why the program was ultimately abandoned. This rank cheeseball of a picture was directed by Roland Emmerich, who would later inflict such god-awful stinkbombs as Independence Day and the 1999 Godzilla remake on the world. How anyone could sit through Universal Soldier and come out of it thinking “You know what that guy needs is a MUCH BIGGER BUDGET” is itself a medical miracle.

DEEP BLUE SEA (1999)

Many of the medical breakthroughs on this list are included because they're just plain inexplicable. After all, who in his right mind would think grafting a second head onto a human body constitutes scientific progress? But there is a different strain of movies of this sort, in which the researchers' goals are admirable but the experiments themselves are misguided at best. Perhaps the best example of this kind of movie is Renny Harlin's Deep Blue Sea. Now, anyone who has ever lost a loved one to Alzheimer's Disease will be sympathetic to the aims of the project headed by Saffron Burrows' Dr. Susan McCallister. But when she discovers that sharks maintain a constant level of brain activity even in advanced age, she hits upon the brilliant crazy-ass idea of creating giant mutant sharks with giant mutated brains that she can harvest in the hope of finding a cure. Trouble is, she neglects to give the sharks a healthy, socially productive outlet for their increased mental capacities, no doubt because with all the time her research demands, she has no time left to teach her subjects underwater chess or to translate Proust into shark language. So the giant mutant geniussharks do what giant mutant genius sharks are prone to doing- they escape and chow down on all nearby humans, most memorably the project's chief investor, played by Samuel L. Jackson. Happily, the sharks go down in the end, a setback for Alzheimer's research but a victory for human mental superiority. How else to explain the genius-fish being vanquished by the likes of LL Cool J and the future star of Homeless Dad?

— Paul Clark, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

Click here for Part 2!

That Guy!: Yaphet Kotto

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 20:00:00 GMT

A lifetime of playing character roles may not have exactly made Yaphet Kotto into Hollywood royalty; but he doesn't have to settle. He's the real thing: though a lifelong New Yorker, Kotto is the son of a genuine Cameroonian prince, the great-grandson of the king of the Douala people in the late 1800s, and (according to the man himself — and are you going to call Yaphet Kotto a liar?), the great-great-great-grandson of Queen Victoria. That ought to get him a seat on the House of Lords and nice swanky country estate, but until his relatives stop treating him like, er, the black sheep of the family, he'll have to keep on being one of our all-time favorite African-American character actors. It's easy to see why Kotto is often cast as a soldier or a tough cop: even at age seventy, he struts through life in his powerfully built 6'4"-inch frame looking as if he owns the place. Although he resembles nothing less than a real-life John Shaft, with his strong features and a wide grin that hovers between gregarious and feral, he hasn't always had an easy time of it: in addition to being born with the wrong color skin to make it as a Hollywood superstar in the '50s and '60s, Yaphet Kotto is also a devout Jew, going back generations to his African roots. (He's a real study in contradiction: he's also a staunch Republican, rare enough for urban blacks and almost unheard of in Hollywood.) Some of his best moments have been on televison; he was particularly outstanding as Lt. Giardello on Homicide: Life on the Street, and he provided some hilarious moments in Michael Moore's short-lived series TV Nation when he tried to get a cab in NYC, being passed by time and time again in favor of a white guy who was a multiple felon. But he's likewise got a storied film career behind him, and even if film buffs can't agree on which of his memorable movie roles is the best, we can all agree that he deserves better than to be slumming around with Larry the Cable Guy.

Where to see Yaphet Kotto at his best:

LIVE AND LET DIE (1973)

Perhaps Yaphet Kotto's most well-known role came when he snagged the part of the villain in the eighth official James Bond movie. It's a bizarre little number, too, a slightly manic mix of traditional 007 spy-caper fare and overheated '70s blaxploitation. It's into this milieu that Yaphet gets thrown head first, and he does his best with what's probably an unsalvageably offensive character: a West Indian would-be dictator named Kananga who also happens to rule the Harlem heroin underworld as "Mr. Big". Kotto veers nicely between hammy and menacing, and if nothing else, he provides us with one of the most ridiculous on-screen deaths of all time.

RAID ON ENTEBBE (1977)

Forest Whitaker was rightfully applauded for his portrayal of Ugandan strongman Idi Amin Dada in The Last King of Scotland, but in fact, he was only following in the footsteps of the mighty Yaphet Kotto. In this 1977 made-for-television movie (directed by Irvin Kershner, best known for The Empire Strikes Back — a movie for which Kotto turned down the role of Lando Calrissian for fear of being stereotyped), the focus is on the famous Israeli commando raid in which Amin played a prominent part. Kotto would absolutely own the role with his physicality and forceful personality until Whitaker came along; it earned him an Emmy nomination the following year.

MIDNIGHT RUN (1988)

One of the problems with putting together a That Guy! entry for someone like Yaphet Kotto is that there's just so much to choose from. We could literally pick a dozen roles to fill this last slot — his memorable appearance as Parker in the first Alien movie; his role in the blazingly over-the-top racial potboiler The Liberation of L.B. Jones; his brief but enjoyable appearance in the hooty blaxploitation flick Truck Turner; or his turn as Bill Laughlin in the crazed Arnold Schwarzenegger action movie The Running Man. And that's to name just a few. But we'll always have a soft spot for his role as permanently beleaguered FBI man Alonzo Mosely in the terrific Midnight Run.

The Top Ten Action Heroes Who Deserve A Comeback, Part 2

Peter Smith — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 14:00:00 GMT

5. Alan "Dutch" Schaefer (Arnold Schwarzenegger), Predator

When it comes to sheer coolness, few action movies can top John McTiernan's Predator. The uncomplicated tale of a Special Forces unit being stalked by an alien trophy hunter has little time to waste on anything that doesn't involve an explosion. Though the Predators themselves have returned to the screen several times (most recently in this year's Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem), Dutch Schaefer has yet to be granted a rematch with the beasts. The role of the wisecracking soldier who transforms into an instinct-driven animal is one of the roles that put Arnold Schwarzenegger on the map. The sooner his political career ends, the sooner Arnold can get back to doing what he does best — punching extraterrestrials in the face.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoRHcyf3lv0

4. Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell), Escape from New York

John Carpenter's Escape From New York is set in a bleak near-future in which Manhattan is a prison colony. The film is a bare-bones affair with little budget for flashy set-pieces, which may be why the film's fans feel so much affection for megacool antihero Snake Plissken. In 1980, Kurt Russell was best known for Disney's The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes, and his portrayal of the grim Plissken changed the trajectory of his entire career. The 1995 remaquel Escape From LA is oft-mocked, but it's both more showy and more fun. Its conclusion follows the nihilism of the bad-guy action hero to its furthest extreme: Plissken single-handedly destroys civilization and plunges the world back to the Stone Age. It's a great setup for further adventures in an even wilder setting, and with Russell riding a wave of newfound respect after Grindhouse, the time is ripe for Plissken to return.

3. William Bonney/Billy the Kid (Emilio Estevez), Young Guns

Jack Torrance and Hannibal Lecter are certainly great screen maniacs, but for my money, one of the greatest psychopaths in film history is Emilio Estevez's Billy the Kid. In this flashy revisionist western, Billy turns a gang of would-be heroes into a group of coldblooded killers. He takes obvious glee in bloodshed, often toying with his victims before pulling the trigger. His stated reason for killing his first victim: "He was hackin' on me." The framing sequence of Young Guns 2 reveals that Billy survived well into the twentieth century, so there's plenty of room for continuing adventures.

2. Casey Ryback (Steven Seagal), Under Siege

For a brief period in the early '90s, Steven Seagal was the king of the action flick. In 1992, following a string of generically-titled bloodbaths, he made the best film of his career: Under Siege. Much of the film's charm comes from its over-the-top villains, portrayed by Gary Busey and Tommy Lee Jones, whose scheme to hijack a soon-to-be-decommissioned battleship comes straight from the Bond villain playbook. But the film's real strength is Steven Seagal's ebullient performance as Casey Ryback, a demoted Navy SEAL serving out his term as a cook — "a lowly, lowly cook." Ryback is calm about the hijacked ship; he only gets really angry when Busey insults his cooking. Seagal's films never stopped being fun, but he's never had another character anywhere near as entertaining as Ryback.

1. Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood), Dirty Harry

With Dirty Harry, Don Siegel created the standard by which action films would be judged for decades to come. The film's story of a copy whose hunt for a serial killer is hampered by red tape and the Bill of Rights led to four sequels and a legion of imitators. Subsequent action heroes owe a lot to Harry, from Kurt Russell and Steven Seagal's gruff whispers to Axel Foley and Popeye Doyle's refusal to play by the rules. In the years since The Dead Pool, the fifth and final Dirty Harry film, Clint Eastwood has gained a reputation for both sophistication and simplicity, both as an actor and a director. A return to the character of Callahan would almost certainly become a meditation of the nature of violence and the lingering ghosts of past carnage. But it would also be fucking awesome. There are rumors that Eastwood has retired from acting, but for the sake of action films past, present, and future, Dirty Harry deserves a swansong.

Read PART 1.