The Screengrab : ben affleck

In Other Blogs: Shoot Out the Lights

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 29 May 2009 14:30:00 GMT

I should probably use this final installment of In Other Blogs to suggest alternatives to the Screengrab for our fans about to go into withdrawal. (This is it folks, the last day, closing time, 50% off all posts, everything must go!) But let’s get real – there’s no replacing the Screengrab! Oh, if you must keep up with ongoing developments in the world of cinema, I suppose there are some alternatives (and I remind you to bookmark this page, which has a whole passel of ‘em). Instead, I’m going to take one last opportunity to pay tribute to…well, us.

At The Phil Nugent Experience, Phil Nugent takes aim at Kiefer Sutherland’s Jack Bauer. “Sutherland's performance, which has thoroughly redefined his image and career, shows just how irresistible the self-pitying enforcer act can seem when it's done to a crisp. In his first several years in movies, Sutherland was a weird-looking Brat Pack also-ran; as his youth started to slip away, his most striking roles, as a big bad wolf of a serial killer in Freeway and as the exposition merchant in the sci-fi fantasy Dark City, made it look as if he might be turning into the new Dwight Frye. His transformation into a TV action hero seemed a mighty unlikely development, but as soon as he turned into Jack Bauer, he developed a new, flinty authority that he'd never shown before. The few movies he's appeared in since 24 launched were in and out of theaters pretty quickly, and probably it helped that, as a TV star, he suddenly had smaller screens to fill, but it's possible to fail even at that: compare him to Christian Slater in My Own Worst Enemy if you want to know how thoroughly it's possible to belly flop in both media.”

At Silly Hats Only, Paul Clark announces his plans for what might qualify as the anti-Unwatchable. “For a long time, I’ve had a goal of watching every title represented by the Criterion Collection, and it occurred to me that if I didn’t set about to watch and write about every Criterion title I haven’t seen, I’ll never do it. And while it’s not the most original goal for a cinephile, I’d say it’s a worthy one all the same.”

At The AV Club, Leonard Pierce has the goods on The Goode Family. “I've always been precariously on the fence about Mike Judge. I thought Office Space was half of a brilliantly subversive satire that degenerated, in in its second half, into a predictable caper movie with a strangely reactionary message; Idiocracy, likewise, had some killer comic observations but couldn't seem to present them with much coherence in the end. So here we are with The Goode Family, Judge's new animated sitcom, and its promise to take a poke at political correctness. This all would have seemed very timely in, say, 1994, or even when King of the Hill debuted in '97.”

At From Here to Obscurity, Hayden Childs continues his alphabetical journey through his music collection. “The Cramps - Gravest Hits EP, Songs The Lord Taught Us, Psychedelic Jungle, and Bad Music For Bad People. Man! What can I possibly say about the Cramps that hasn't been said a million times already? People who enjoy the kind of music called rock & roll love the The Cramps. Some critics apparently consider Bad Music For Bad People to be a watered-down version of a better best-of that was released in England, but for me, well, that's the Cramps album that I first heard at 15 years old, and that's THE Cramps album for me. Besides all these other ones, I mean.”

At Slant, Nick Schager checks out Night in the Museum 2. “Commotion ensues, most of it functionally but unexcitingly executed, including an into-the-artwork sequence that pales in comparison to a similar bit from Loony Tunes: Back in Action.”

At The Ol’ Blog Shop, Andrew Osborne spends Memorial Day in America’s Heartland…Somerville, Mass. “But, really, for me it was all about the Shriners, or whoever those guys in the Aleppo fezzes were, and there were scores of them, possibly hundreds, taking up easily half the parade with their flags and weird Arab trumpet noodling and fake goatees and turbans and their candy-tossing...and forget about tiny little cars: the Somerville Shriners had tiny little 18-wheelers, not to mention tiny golf carts, tiny buggies, pop-wheelie clown cars, horses, horse cars, Segways and a trailer broadcasting a Shriner quartet as they sang “Yankee Doodle went to Baghdad riding in a Humvee” into dangling CB radio handsets.”

At Scott Von Doviak (someone please come up with a better blog name for me), I look at some recent movie Crime Scenes, including Gone Baby Gone. “Here are four words that inspire very little confidence when they appear on a movie screen: ‘Directed by Ben Affleck.’”

And remember, your one-stop shopping destination for keeping track of the ol’ Screengrab gang is Screengrab in Exile. Don’t stop believin’!

Getting Darrined: When the Sequel Doesn’t Need You

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 19:30:00 GMT

Out on the promotion trail for Fighting, Terrence Howard is still miffed about being replaced by Don Cheadle in Iron Man 2. “‘It was a very, very bad choice,’ fumed Howard, who played Iron Man's Army buddy Lt. Col. James "Rhodey" Rhodes in the first film, to Parade magazine about Marvel Studios' decision to reboot the part with Don Cheadle in the role. ‘You don't make $800 million and then try and shake everyone down. That's not nice,’ he said to MTV News, exaggerating the film's worldwide box-office gross by a mere $200 million.”

As the L.A. Times reports, however, Howard is hardly the first actor to get the “don’t call us, we’ll call you” treatment when sequel time rolls around. Rachel Abramowitz has even come up with a name for it – getting Darrined, as in Dick Sargent replacing Dick York as Samantha’s husband on Bewitched. “Or perhaps being ‘Baldwinized’ is a better term, for Alec Baldwin, who starred as Jack Ryan in the movie of Tom Clancy's The Hunt for Red October but was replaced by the far more popular Harrison Ford for the next two installments.” (OK, but then what do we call it when Ben Affleck replaces Harrison Ford in the same series? Besides a terrible, terrible idea?)

One explanation for Darrenization is simple penny-pinching; in Howard’s case, he was actually the highest-paid actor in the original Iron Man and was asked to take a significant pay cut for the follow-up. Howard wasn’t having it, and “it didn't help that, as some critics pointed out, Howard struggled to hold his own against the razor-sharp comedic stylings of Robert Downey Jr., who played Tony Stark, a.k.a. Iron Man.” Nobody seemed to miss Katie Holmes in The Dark Knight, in which she was replaced by Maggie Gyllenhaal, but then again, Batman himself has been recast so many times, there’s probably not much reason to expect a consistent love interest.

The all-time greatest bit of sequel recasting isn’t even mentioned in the Times article. Of course I’m referring to the third Smokey and the Bandit movie, which was originally titled Smokey IS the Bandit and was allegedly shot with Jackie Gleason playing both roles – his traditional part as Sheriff Buford T. Justice as well as the one vacated by Burt Reynolds when he declined to play the Bandit a third time. I say “allegedly” because no footage or stills of Gleason in Bandit drag have ever surfaced, but the story is oft repeated that this version was screened for test audiences (including by Leonard Maltin in his movie guide). In any case, the finished Smokey and the Bandit 3 sees Jerry Reed taking over the driver’s seat for Reynolds, who does provide a brief cameo as the Bandit. Either way, the movie was a flop. Some roles simply weren’t meant to be recast.

Related:
Marvel Comics is Ready for its Close-Up
Yesterday's Hits: Smokey and the Bandit

Trailer Review: Extract

Paul Clark — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 16:00:00 GMT

Back in 2007, Mike Judge’s Idiocracy became something of a cause célèbre around these parts following its dumping by Fox’s powers that be. So the good news is that it looks like Judge’s follow-up Extract will be getting a real theatrical release. The bad news is that it doesn’t look to be nearly as much fun as Idiocracy was, partly because it appears to be a whole lot more run-of-the-mill. Despite a funny cast- Jason Bateman still has plenty of Arrested Development goodwill to burn, and Ben Affleck gets points for trying something different- this looks like Judge just moved Office Space a couple of rungs down the economic ladder to address the trials of a factory manager. Also, would’ve been nice to find out what that instantly forgettable title is all about. Of course, Miramax trailers (even in this post-Weinstein era) tend to be pretty bland, and it’s entirely possible that they just want to sell this as yet another time-wasting comedy about work and with plenty of jokes about testicular trauma ("Ow, My Balls!") and smoking weed. But sadly, it’s just as likely that Judge learned an unfortunate lesson from the Idiocracy release debacle, and he’s just trying to keep working. Then again, Office Space's trailer was only mildly amusing, and look how well that worked out.

Screengrab Review: "State of Play"

Nick Schager — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 15:00:00 GMT

A 2003 BBC miniseries condensed from six hours to two for its big-screen Hollywood adaptation, State of Play is so bursting with characters, plots, and hot-button subject matter that some unavoidably receive short shrift. Though its English TV heritage and multifaceted current events-laden narrative both recall Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic, Kevin Macdonald’s (The Last King of Scotland) film nonetheless largely eschews Big Statement grandstanding in favor of murder-mystery tension. It’s a tack that can occasionally be vexing, as some of the issues this tale nominally addresses would surely benefit from further investigation, whether it’s the increasingly edgy relationship between traditional and new media, the role of corporate interests on news reporting, and – in an echo of this season’s 24 storyline – the rise of profit-first private military contractors in international affairs and homeland security. Yet Macdonald’s decision to use these topics primarily as flavoring for a tale of nothing-is-what-it-seems espionage and investigative journalism is, ultimately, a shrewd (if disappointing) one that keeps the focus on suspense and prevents the taut, knotty proceedings from overreaching.

In the nation’s capital, a thief and pizza delivery man are shot dead by a skilled killer, while at the same time, the aide (Maria Thayer) to married congressman Stephen Collins (Ben Affleck), whom she was both screwing and working for as the lead investigator of a Senate committee hearing into Blackwater-esque private military contractor PointCorp, is mysteriously killed by a subway train. Washington Globe reporter Cal McAffrey (a scruffy, long-haired Russell Crowe) is assigned to cover the first deaths but – given that Collins is his former college roommate, as well as married to a woman (Robin Wright Penn) whom he once slept with – inevitably begins looking into the latter case. What he unearths is a tangled web of duplicity, corruption and murder fit for a Raymond Chandler yarn, and one he’s tasked with figuring out while contending with an editor-in-chief (Helen Mirren) under pressure from the paper’s bottom line-driven new owners and a staff blogger named Della Frye (Rachel McAdams) eager to work the story alongside her renowned peer. Double crosses, assassinations, and treachery soon engulf the plucky reporters, and as they breathlessly sift through facts, rumors and revelations, Macdonald’s film achieves suitably swift momentum, the twists and turns coming fast enough to keep one distracted from the obvious, telegraphed denouement lying in wait.

Jeff Daniels, Viola Davis and Jason Bateman round out a sturdy all-star cast that’s asked mainly to embody familiar archetypes, and if Crowe’s hero is less compromised than the script would like us to believe – his severe conflicts of interest never truly putting his noble motivations in serious doubt – the actor’s driven performance nonetheless anchors the vigorous action. That, underneath its flurry of characters and incidents, State of Play adheres to a familiar All the President's Men-style whodunit template is for its first two-thirds inconsequential, since Macdonald keeps the shadowy proceedings brisk and thorny enough to mildly intrigue. Unfortunately, all the commotion is primarily in service of a seen-from-miles-away bombshell that renders the plot – and its half-baked but unpretentious portrait of the insidious influence of private entities in what should be public services (government and media) – far more shallow than it initially appeared. Although, even if the film proves nothing more than a clever, diverting bit of smoke and mirrors, its end-credits depiction of the start-to-finish process of newspapers’ daily creation serves as a poignant coda for the vital yet dying art of old-school, courageous, truth-telling reportage.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Screengrab Salutes The Best & Worst Comic Book Movies Of All Time (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 21:30:00 GMT

The Worst:

CATWOMAN (2004)

Attacking Catwoman is almost too easy: it’s such an obvious, defenseless target, what with stinking up the box office like week-old kitty litter, damaging the careers of all responsible and winning Razzies for Worst Picture, Worst Screenplay, Worst Director (for “Pitof,” if that IS your real name) and Worst Actress for Halle Berry (whose Golden Raspberry acceptance speech alone very nearly redeemed both her performance AND her embarrassingly overwrought Oscar speech for Monster’s Ball, including gems like, “First of all, I want to thank Warner Bros. Thank you for putting me in a piece of shit, God-awful movie . . .it was just what my career needed”). But...nope, we’ll never be done kicking Catwoman, for oh, so many reasons. Geeks hated the flick (set in “Lake City” rather than Gotham) for heedlessly violating the sacred mythology of the source material, straight guys hated the way Berry dishonored the legacy of Kitt, Newmar, Meriwether and Pfeiffer by somehow making Catwoman (CATWOMAN!!!!!) distinctly unsexy, fashionistas hated the godawful costume, feminists hated the fact that while male superheroes were out saving the world, Berry’s crusader was investigating a frickin’ cosmetics company and right-thinking people everywhere coughed up hairballs of disgust to discover the whole tacky disaster somehow managed to cost 100 million dollars. But even worse is the nagging sense of how totally awesome a good Catwoman movie might have been...and how we’ll never, ever get to see it now. Thanks a bunch, Pitof.

FROM HELL (2001)

If you think Zack Snyder had a dense, intricate Alan Moore work on his hands when he set about adapting Watchmen, consider what the Hughes Brothers stepped into when they decided to bring Moore’s graphic novel From Hell to the screen. A speculative fiction based on the legend of Jack the Ripper, From Hell is an insanely detailed look at an alternate Victorian England and the massive conspiracy at its heart. It’s endlessly fascinating stuff, and the Hughes Brothers threw away just about all of it in order to make a nonsensical Se7en-style serial killer bloodbath. Johnny Depp is the police investigator, who is given opium-induced psychic powers here that he never possessed in the comics, while that great British actress Heather Graham plays the cockney prostitute he romances. The entire plot has been re-jiggered into a lame whodunit, thus jettisoning almost every unique aspect of Moore’s take on the Ripper story. It’s not shocking that such minutiae as the extensive tour of London’s Masonic architecture wouldn't make it to the screen, but keeping the Ripper's identity a secret throughout the movie only robs the story of its most interesting character. Worst of all, Hughes and Hughes don’t even bother trying to recreate the look of the comic – the whole sooty, early-Industrial vibe. From Hell looks like it was shot on the set of a Batman movie, which is probably what the brothers would have rather been doing in the first place.

BATMAN AND ROBIN (1997)

After the departure of Tim Burton and Michael Keaton, Warner Bros. put the Batman franchise in the unsteady, garish hands of director Joel Schumacher, who told everyone within earshot that he wanted to return to the "campy" tone of the old Adam West series, as if daring everyone in earshot to scream at him, "What're ya, high!?" Schumacher's first Batman movie, Batman Forever, which featured Tommy Lee Jones giving a performance that would have embarrassed Rip Taylor and Chris O'Donnell capering in his underoos and declaiming, "Holy twisted metal, Batman!", was one of the worst big-budget horrors ever, and damned if the old boy didn't manage to top it in his follow-up. Pre-release word on the movie was terrible, but Schumacher stubbornly continued to talk it up until his megaton bomb hit theater screens, inducing pain and suffering in all who had eyes that see. Schumacher reacted defensively at first -- "I had no idea that putting nipples on the Batsuit and Robin suit were [sic] going to spark international headlines," he pouted, in stubborn denial of the likelihood that people were trying to be nice and the nipples were the least objectionable thing about his movie. By then it was clear that, in the summer comic-book movie sweepstakes, the Caped Crusader had gotten his nuts crushed by Men in Black, a movie based on a comic little read by people outside the artist's and writer's immediate families.

DAREDEVIL (2003)

With X-Men and Spider-Man having solidified its status as king of the superhero-film hill, Marvel must have thought itself invincible, because only hubris could possibly explain the comic giant’s decision to okay Mark Steven Johnson’s take on Daredevil, the blind lawyer who combats crime at night. From the cheesy tone, to Johnson’s habit of turning his camera on extreme angles, to the miscasting of Ben Affleck, to the soft-core love scene featuring Daredevil and Jennifer Garner’s sexy assassin Elektra, Daredevil is a fiasco through and through, turning its hero into a second-rate Batman whose every extraordinary leap, jump and twirl is the byproduct of lame CGI. Johnson shoots every action sequence with maximum spasticity, setting his fights in rain and strobe lights and editing them to ribbons. Stuck headlining this misbegotten adaptation, Affleck vainly attempts to act tortured by flashing a variety of grimaces, all while an overacting Colin Farrell attempts to devour any scenery in sight as the hysterically corny villain Bullseye.

THE SPIRIT (2008)

With The Dark Knight proving in 2008 that it was possible to make a truly great superhero movie, it was actually kind of a relief to have Frank Miller remind us that same year that it was still possibly to make a truly rank one. Miller himself is one of the greatest comic artists and writers the industry has ever seen; though his work has been spotty in recent years, in the 1980s, he put out a fistful of some of the greatest superhero stories in the history of the medium. As a director, though, he’s a hell of a banjo player. Utilizing the same tricks he relied on in Sin City, but with a notably weaker cast and a downright rotten script, he took the Spirit – a venerable crimefighting character created by the beloved Will Eisner – and stuck him in a movie that would have to be twice as good as it is to be an embarrassment. Sidled with an incoherent screenplay, a tone-deaf sense of mood and pacing, a lot of wasted femmes fatale, and Samuel Jackson in one of the most deranged (and not in a good way) villain roles in recent memory, The Spirit would have been a disaster regardless, but the final nail in the coffin was the casting of charisma-free nobody Gabriel Macht in the lead role. Macht brought a Twinkie-heavy sense of anti-gravity to the Spirit the likes of which we haven’t seen since a young fellow named Klinton Spilsbury donned the mask of the Lone Ranger in his first, and last, motion picture role. Miller’s lucky he built up so much credibility in his comics career, because movies as crappy as The Spirit have ruined lesser men.

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

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

Screengrab Presents: Cinema’s Greatest Comebacks (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 22:30:00 GMT

JACKIE EARLE HALEY in LITTLE CHILDREN (2006)

Some people on this list needed comebacks after destroying their own careers through bad choices or behavior, but the triumphant, Oscar-nominated comeback of Jackie Earle Haley in 2006’s Little Children was extra sweet because it was such a Cinderella story...and, as they say, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. After memorable breakthrough roles as the punk turned Little League champ in The Bad News Bears (1976) and the Cutter with the heart of gold in Breaking Away (1979), Haley suffered the child star curse and saw his career nosedive into obscurity during the ‘80s, ‘90s and most of the oughts. According to Haley (as quoted on the Internet Movie Database), “I'd always avoided stuff like 'Where are they now?' or 'Whatever happened to?'...You tell me, have you ever seen a 'Whatever happened to' where they seemed anything but pathetic? I could do that or just disappear.” And so, like so many creative types before him who’d ridden their dreams as far as they could, Haley rejoined the everyday rat race where most of us live, delivering pizzas, refinishing furniture, working variously as a security guard, a limousine driver and such, until A-list director Steven Zaillian, in the kind of wet dream moment that (usually) never comes true, just happened to remember the actor’s earlier work and cast him, more or less out of the blue, in the 2006 Sean Penn adaptation of All The President’s Men, which in turn led to Haley’s true comeback via his harrowing, heartbreaking performance later that year as the neighborhood pedophile in Todd Field’s Little Children...which in turn led to a part in Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island and the plum role of Rorschach in Zack Snyder’s 800-pound gorilla, Watchmen. So who knows? Maybe there’s hope.

STERLING HAYDEN in DR. STRANGELOVE: OR, HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1964)

Tall, striking Sterling Hayden developed into one of the biggest stars of the 1950s thanks to his unique looks, cruelly laconic performances and ability to bring mysterious depths to even noir lowlifes. But his heart had never really been in acting, which he found to be a frivolous and often unengaging profession. He had an extremely standoffish relationship with capitalism, and his ability to land roles in high-grossing films was, to him, merely a means to an end: i.e., his habit of sailing, which got him away from an American consumer culture he often reviled. In 1958, he was involved in a nasty divorce and decided to leave it all behind once and for all; defying a court order, he took his kids, packed up a sailboat for the long haul, and headed off to Tahiti, where he would remain for almost six years. Aside from one brief television appearance, the only thing he did during that time that had anything to do with the entertainment industry was to write a hugely entertaining and profoundly thoughtful autobiography called Wanderer, in which he essentially repudiated his life as a movie star. Still, a nautical life is expensive, and in the 1960s, he enjoyed a protracted comeback which began in the best possible way: with an unforgettably loony performance as the unhinged General Jack D. Ripper in Stanley Kubrick’s pitch-black Cold War comedy Dr. Strangelove.

JOHN HUSTON, UNDER THE VOLCANO (1984)

John Huston couldn’t possibly have had a more charmed career. He was practically born into Hollywood royalty; his father, Walter Huston, preceded him in a career as a double-threat director and actor. John himself added more to the package: he was a terrific writer, an intellectual, a keen spotter of talent. His very first movie as a director, The Maltese Falcon, is one of the greatest Hollywood movies of all time, and he followed it up with classics like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Key Largo, The Asphalt Jungle, The African Queen and Beat the Devil. Things started to go awry for him in the mid-‘50s, though, after an ambitious but failed adaptation of Moby Dick, and by the 1960s, he was directing second-tier work like The List of Adrian Messenger and the disastrous Reflections in a Golden Eye. In the 1970s, he launched some work that contained sparks of genius, but nothing that coalesced into coherence: there were moments of greatness in The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, The Man Who Would Be King, and Wise Blood, but all of them fell apart under the weight of their flaws. By the 1980s, he was producing pure schlock like Victory and Annie. Forty years as a director is far longer than anyone has a right to be successful, and people were willing to forgive his sad descent because of the greatness of his earlier work: but Huston, a career rebel, wasn’t about to go out without a fight. In 1984, he directed a stunning Albert Finney in an imperfect but still highly impressive adaptation of the great Malcolm Lowry novel Under the Volcano; it signaled a genuine late-career comeback for Huston, who went on to direct the enjoyable Prizzi’s Honor and the astonishing movie version of James Joyce’s The Dead before finally dying himself in 1987.

TERENCE STAMP in THE LIMEY (1999)

While most of the people on this list have rejuvenated their careers once or twice, the outstanding British actor Terence Stamp has had more comebacks than most people have had hot dinners. He rose to fame alongside his old flatmate Michael Caine and went on to become one of the most celebrated actors of the 1960s, as well as a sort of living symbol of the Carnaby Street crowd of London’s swinging sixties; it was at the end of that decade, after a highly public breakup with girlfriend Jeannie Shrimpton, that he had his first downturn, decamping for an Indian ashram and taking much of the 1970s off. He followed that with his first major comeback, in the juicily hammy role of General Zod in Superman II, and enjoyed a brief resurgence in the ‘80s that faded just as quickly in the waning part of that decade. 1994 found him mounting another big comeback through the simple act of donning a dress in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, but he floundered a bit after that, until 1999, when screenwriter Lem Dobbs and director Steven Soderbergh came through with a role crafted especially for him. Revisiting (and updating) Stamp’s nasty, edgy, working-class persona, and even going so far as to use recycled footage from one of his old films as “archival footage” of the character he was playing, the two created, in the vengeful ex-hoodlum Wilson, the role he’d been working towards his whole career. Stamp’s performance was universally celebrated and allowed him to stage yet another comeback – which has now faded enough that he’s about due for one more.

BEN AFFLECK, GONE BABY GONE (2007)

Ben Affleck never deserved to be a walking punchline for the following reasons: 1) Good Will Hunting was weak and should never had made anyone famous; 2) the kind of callow, narcissistic performances Affleck gave in movies like Paycheck perfectly reflected and commented upon the material 3) "Bennifer" doesn't mean anything. Nonetheless, having become an all-too-easy punchline, Affleck retreated behind the camera and demonstrated a knack for drawing perfectly judged performances and local color. If Gone Baby Gone seems to be under the delusion that the camera exists solely to record said elements, Affleck has a scarily grounded feel for his Boston hometown. The best decision he ever made was figuring out that the SAG-mandated extras should remain out of sight at all times and he should instead train his camera upon incidental alcoholics and degenrates without flinching. This remains the most pungent film of 2007.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Vadim Rizov

Unwatchable #69: “The Perfect Holiday”

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 18:00:00 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.

Folks, I’m taking the rest of 2008 off the Bottom 100 beat. I need a break and there’s no time like the holidays, am I right? Your regularly scheduled Unwatchable series will resume in the new year, and there can be no doubt 2009 will be one for the history books as we count down the 57 worst movies of all time. But before I call it a year, we have a bit of catching up to do. As you may dimly recall, I had to skip #69 on the list because it was not yet available for home viewing at the time. That excuse has expired, so it’s time for a very special Christmas edition of Unwatchable: The Perfect Holiday.

For the most part, this is your basic, run-of-the-mill holiday warmedy tailored for African-American audiences. Beautiful, well-to-do Nancy (Gabrielle Union) is raising three kids on her own since divorcing hip-hop star J-Jizzy (Charlie Murphy), and all she wants for Christmas is a man under the tree. OK, not literally under the tree. Really, she’d settle for a compliment from a nice fella with no shady ulterior motives. Her daughter informs a department store Santa of this wish, little realizing that under the snowy white beard is a suitable nice fella, songwriter Benjamin (Morris Chestnut).

For reasons that eluded me, Benjamin passes himself off as an office supply salesman as he first compliments, then woos Nancy, much to the chagrin of eldest son John-John (Malik Hammond), who holds out hope of his parents getting back together. We know there’s not much chance of that happening, as J-Jizzy is a self-absorbed, womanizing jackass who can barely be bothered to cobble together a quickie Christmas album. His producer Delicious (Katt Williams) doesn’t smell a hit single until he accidentally plays a demo tape submitted by Benjamin. The tape contains a treacly holiday ballad that would make Lionel Ritchie weep hundred dollar bills, so J-Jizzy rings up Benjamin and offers him a recording deal. Benjamin is excited until he realizes he’s talking to Nancy’s ex-husband and sitcom-ish complications are about to ensue.

So far so bland, but on the family holiday movie scale, there’s nothing out of the ordinary to justify The Perfect Holiday’s place in the Bottom 100. Except…I haven’t mentioned Queen Latifah and Terrence Howard, have I? Well, they’re in the movie too, although I’m not sure I could tell you why. I guess they’re angels or magical elves or…some sort of shape-shifting Greek chorus, anyway. They keep appearing in different guises – security guards, hot dog vendors and such – and Latifah even introduces a little magical realism into the proceedings late in the game. She’s one of the movie’s producers, so I can’t stop her.

Still, that’s hardly enough to warrant a spot as one of the 100 all-time worst, particularly with an appealing and funny supporting cast (notably Murphy, Williams, and Faizon Love) to distract from the ongoing sappiness. The past couple of years alone have seen far worse Christmas movies, including The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause and the deadly Vince Vaughn duo of Fred Claus and Four Christmases. While channel-surfing the other night I came across that atrocity with Ben Affleck and James Gandolfini’s big scary beard. Surely that would have been a very special holiday Unwatchable for us all to enjoy. Ah well, fear not – cinematic sewage galore awaits us in the new year.

Previously on Unwatchable:
58. Ed
59. Don’t Go in the Woods…Alone!
60. Carry On Columbus
61. Yu-Gi-Oh!: The Movie
62. Turbo: A Power Rangers Movie

Morning Deal Report: YouTube the Movie

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 14:30:00 GMT

“Producers Chris Adams and Steve Kearney are joining with producer-director RJ Cutler to create a feature documentary about a true-life love story that played out on YouTube.com,” per The Hollywood Reporter. “The film will follow the romance of teenage video blogger Daniel Meadows, an Austalian who fell in love with an American teen, Shannon Jones, online, where they documented their relationship.” If this is a success, we can look forward to Leave Britney Alone: The Motion Picture.

Keanu Reeves will strap on the sword and sandals for 47 Ronin. Wanted screenwriter Chris Morgan will pen the story “based on the true tale of a band of samurai swordsmen who avenged the death of their master in 18th century Japan," according to Variety. "The film will tell a stylized version of the story, mixing fantasy elements of the sort seen in The Lord of the Rings pics, with gritty battle scenes akin to those in films such as Gladiator.”

“Ben Affleck is in negotiations to follow up his directing debut, Gone Baby Gone, with the story of the death of Arizona journalist Don Bolles and the events it provoked,” THR reports. “In 1976, Bolles was a reporter for the Arizona Republic looking into political corruption and the convergence of New York, Chicago and Detroit mobsters in Phoenix. When lured to a downtown hotel by a source who didn't show up, Bolles was blown up in his car. He died days later.” Spoiler!

Related:
21 Stars We Hate
Ben Affleck on the Town

The Screengrab Holiday Special: Movies We're Thankful For (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 15:15:00 GMT

I grew up right next door to Thanksgiving Town, USA: Plymouth, Massachusetts, former home of the Pilgrims and Wampanoag Indians and future home of Plymouth Rock Studios and a nice big casino.

My next door neighbors used to work at Plimoth Plantation, where docent actors dress up in 17th century drag and mosey up and down the streets of a life-size replica Pilgrim settlement, discussing crops and Calvinism, while modern Native Americans in traditional buckskin attire give their side of the story in a nearby encampment.

So I like to think I know a thing or two about Thanksgiving. And let me tell you: it’s not all about the yams.

In fact, before the Macy’s Day Parade and the advent of that delicious Brundlefly monstrosity known as Turducken, the fourth Thursday of November was all about chowing down eel and corn and celebrating a bountiful harvest. In fact, as I learned on a recent visit to Plimoth Plantation, the name for the annual kick-off to the Christmas shopping season is actually a compound word that literally means “giving thanks”!

And so, as we here at the Screengrab prepare our traditional Turkey Day feast of pretzel sticks, jelly beans, two slices of toast and a handful of popcorn, we’d like to just take a few moments to express our gratitude for the people, places and movies that made us the full-on film geeks we are today.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING FROM THE SCREENGRAB!

ANDREW OSBORNE IS THANKFUL FOR:

WHAT’S UP, DOC? (1950 & 1972)

Forget Mickey Mouse: Bugs Bunny was there from the start, teaching me the importance of carrots, proper directions to Albuquerque and a wised-up appreciation of life (for all its feathered frenemies, megalomaniacal Martians and gun-toting Fudds). So I was a bit disappointed when I realized What’s Up, Doc? (the first movie I can remember seeing in a theater) wasn’t a cartoon...but Peter Bogdanovich’s madcap screwball homage soon won me over with its igneous rocks and silly accents and, especially, that endless, blissful car chase through the streets, alleys and staircases of San Francisco (and, eventually, San Francisco Bay). All that (plus a gratifying act three cameo by Mr. Bunny himself!) made this goofy-smart romantic comedy my first favorite movie, and it only got better with time as I grew up and came to appreciate the chemistry of Ryan O’Neal and Barbara Streisand (both at their cinematic finest) and the comedic brilliance of the irreplaceable Madeline Kahn, Austin Pendleton and Kenneth Mars. But the real reason this movie’s on the list is so I can say thank you to my film geek parents for always bringing me to whatever movie they went to go see on a Saturday night (even when it scared the bejesus out of me), thus instilling a life-long love of pop culture that’s guided my cinematic view of the world ever since. (Thanks, Mom & Dad!)

STAR WARS (1977)

I’ve already written an embarrassing number of posts about the life-changing religious experience of seeing this movie as an excitable, impressionable ten year old nerd, but looking back on it now, I can only say...George Lucas, all is forgiven. (And besides, what’s Thanksgiving without the Star Wars Holiday Special?)

THE BIG CHILL (1983)

Given the embarrassing Baby Boomer reverence for Lawrence Kasdan’s self-congratulatory, navel-gazing Love Generation touchstone of growing up and selling out (not to mention the way the film pretty much ruined all the songs on its mega-hit Motown soundtrack by making them go-to clichés for every subsequent entry in the “Diane Keaton dancing around a living room” genre), this one almost wound up on last week’s Guilty Pleasures list. But despite all the people who deride the film as just a shallow rip-off of John Sayles’ Return of the Secaucus Seven, I have no guilt and nothing but love for The Big Chill. I first saw it after a particularly painful orthodontist’s appointment in my junior year of high school, and though I may not have been the intended target audience, I took the movie instantly to heart, partly for its evocation of the sixties (an era I romanticized desperately in the Just Say No Reagan eighties), but mostly for its celebration of the enduring power of friendship.

JOHN WATERS & DIVINE

Then, after high school, I stopped Saying No and dove headfirst into the psychedelic wonderland of college, that freaky, institutionalized Rumspringa when America’s sons and daughters move away from home and go batshit crazy for a year or three. After spending the first eighteen years of my life as an upright goody two-shoes, I was itching to break bad and take a walk on the trashy side...and when it comes to desperate living, I quickly discovered there was no better tour guide than John Waters and his large and lovely muse, Divine. From Mondo Trasho to Hairspray, Baltimore’s favorite son and fake daughter warped my young adult mind with their glorious bad taste, healthy disrespect for convention and pre-punk aesthetic, while also serving as self-made role models of DIY ingenuity for those determined to live a life less ordinary.

DAZED AND CONFUSED (1993)

In 1993, my then-girlfriend and I attended an L.A. cast and crew screening of Dazed and Confused (with, if memory serves, my future Screengrab colleague Scott Von Doviak). We didn’t know any of the soon-to-be-famous actors in the stellar ensemble cast (including Matthew McConaughey, Adam Goldberg, Parker Posey and Ben Affleck) when the lights went down, but when the lights came up, we suddenly found ourselves surrounded by characters we’d only just met but felt like we’d known forever: hey, look! It’s O’Bannion and Darla! And over there! It’s Wooderson! (All right, all right, all right!) A few months later, I got dumped by the aforementioned girlfriend, but numerous subsequent screenings of Dazed and Confused helped to ease the pain, and today I remember Richard Linklater’s last day of school and first night of summer vacation at least as fondly as my actual high school experience.

PULP FICTION (1994)

Some movies you see and forget just as soon as the lights come up. Pulp Fiction was not one of those movies. In 1994, I spent every last dime I had (and a lot of dimes that I didn’t have) attempting to surf the Spike, Mike, Slackers & Dykes indie renaissance with my own no-budget 16mm production, Apocalypse Bop (starring the indomitable Mr. Von Doviak), which I’d spent the summer directing back in my home town near Thanksgiving Town, USA. At the time, I was living in Los Angeles, and so when the movie wrapped, I decided to road trip back to the West Coast with a couple of friends from the Bop shoot. Stopping for breakfast in Austin, Texas, one of those friends met a girl and couldn’t stop thinking about her, so when we finally reached California, he called her up and asked if she wanted to go see Pulp Fiction with him on opening night. She said yes, and so he turned around and flew right back to Austin. Meanwhile, my return to L.A. woke me up from my filmmaking fandango to the cold, hard reality that I was unemployed, with no prospects and no money to pay my rent. I had exactly twenty dollars to my name. And I’m happy to say I spent that twenty dollars on popcorn and a ticket to go see the opening night of Pulp Fiction with my pals in the San Fernando Valley, while my other friend was watching the same movie on the same night on his cross-country date in The Lone Star State. He wound up staying in Austin for the next several years, and days after watching Jules and Vincent Vega strut across the screen to the strains of “Misirlou,” my own bacon got snatched from the brink of disaster by an out-of-the-blue offer to go work on a war movie in the Philippines. And so I’m eternally grateful to have once been young and foolish enough to have those kinds of adventures, living in extremis at exactly the right time and with exactly the right people the night Quentin Tarantino got medieval on our ass.

SXSW, THE PROVINCETOWN FILM FESTIVAL & THE MEAT CITY BEATNIKS (2009)

And speaking of Austin, the city of Slacker has been, at different times, my literal and spiritual home away from home for years now, and never is it more glamorous (or crowded) than the middle of March, when the capitol of Texas plays host to the South-By-Southwest music and film festival, a fantastic collision of pop culture, booze and barbecue that makes Thanksgiving look like Arbor Day. Every spring, it renews my faith in the vaunted “indie film” spirit (even though I’m old enough to know better), and then every summer, I take another, mellower sip of the indie Kool-Aid (not to mention the world’s best Bloody Marys) at the Provincetown Film Festival, with John Waters presiding as patron saint in the same way Richard Linklater is the Mayor of South-By...and with all that friggin’ indie spirit washing over me, it was only a matter of time before I succumbed once again to its siren song, so I’ll just wrap up this list with thanks to my collaborators on The Meat City Beatniks, an indie film musical (co-written by me, Scott Von Doviak, Eric Jacobson and Jim Dryden) and starring Elliot Dort, Ben Gallant, Sheree Bass, Matthew Woodward, Rob McKim, Ms. Amar, Joe Gallo, Michael Sesling, Kellianne MacFarlane, Bill Christensen and Amy Jeglinski-Osborne...a production which (thankfully) I mostly managed to wrap in 2008 and which will (hopefully) premiere in 2009...so stay tuned! (And have a Happy Thanksgiving!)

Click Here For More Thanks From Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent, Paul Clark, Leonard Pierce & Sarah Clyne Sundberg

Contributor: Andrew Osborne

Morning Deal Report: Ben Affleck on the Town

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 14:30:00 GMT

Gone Baby Gone director Ben Affleck “will rewrite, direct and star in The Town, a Warner Bros. adaptation of the Chuck Hogan novel The Prince of Thieves,” according to Variety. He’ll play a thief who falls for a bank manager in the movie “based in Charlestown, Mass., a gritty blue-collar Boston suburb similar to the one that Affleck captured in his directorial debut.” Way to make those Red Sox season tickets work for you, Ben.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Loser gets shot at redemption by coaching team of young misfits. This time around it’s called The Winning Season and stars Sam Rockwell as the has-been coach “asked to run the local high school's girls basketball team,” per The Hollywood Reporter. Emma Roberts and Rob Corddry co-star.

Seven Children of the Corn movies simply weren’t enough, so the original will be remade. David Anders of Heroes and Kandyse McClure of Battlestar Galactica will play “Burt and Vicky, a couple with marital problems whose attempt at a second-honeymoon driving trip ends up taking them into a seemingly deserted rural community that conceals a grim secret among its rows of tall corn.”

Related:
Unwatchable #71: "Gigli"
Trailer Review: "Choke"

Unwatchable #71: “Gigli”

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 20:00:00 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.

Based solely on its critical reception, it would have been easy to confuse the release of Gigli in theaters with the release of a notorious child murderer from prison. The title became an instant punchline, made even funnier by the fact that no one could pronounce it. (As the title character informs us repeatedly throughout the movie, it “rhymes with really.”) Few movies could be as terrible as it was purported to be, and indeed, Gigli isn’t one of them. In fact, it seems as though America has re-evaluated the movie since its release. I expected to find it much higher on the Bottom 100 chart, but #71 sounds about right.

The wave of bad publicity that crushed the movie can largely be blamed on the off-screen shenanigans of its stars, Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez. You could argue that it was unfair of reviewers to take out their frustrations on the movie itself, and you would have a point, but let us not forget how truly obnoxious the whole Ben ‘n Jen circus became. Somebody had to pay and writer/director Martin Brest got caught in the crossfire.

Brest was originally set to direct Rain Man but resigned over creative differences. Apparently he never got over them, because Gigli revolves around a similar autistic character, this one the brother of the L.A. district attorney. In an effort to blackmail the DA, a lowlife thug enlists two contractors, Larry Gigli (Affleck) and Ricky (Lopez), to kidnap and babysit the kid. Gigli and Ricky mistrust each other, especially when Gigli learns Ricky is a lesbian and immune from his charms, but their relationship evolves in an almost interesting way as Ricky undermines Gigli’s masculinity, engineering a gender role-reversal of sorts.

Meanwhile, Brest the screenwriter undermines Brest the idea man. His notion of stylized tough guy dialogue amounts to putting words like “excoriate” and tortured syntax like “Might you know what it is I’m getting at?” in the mouths of his goombah characters. That’s a minor offense compared to Lopez’s big speech on the merits of the vagina over the penis, a monologue that must be a big hit at off-Broadway auditions these days. J-Lo is also stuck with a sub-Tarantino soliloquy on the subtleties of ripping someone’s eyeball out of its socket. It’s almost harder to listen to than “Jenny From the Block.”

As the not terribly bright protagonist, Affleck is playing to his strengths. His Gigli is like one of those blowdried dumbasses who works for Christopher on The Sopranos and ends up getting whacked for doing something really stupid. Christopher Walken makes an unusually constipated appearance, while Al Pacino shows up at the end to deliver one of his patented late-career hameos.

The critical outrage over Gigli might be understandable in a vacuum, but in the context of the Affleck oeuvre, it’s a little puzzling. A cursory check of Rotten Tomatoes shows Gigli with a freshness rating of 7% on the Tomatometer, while Reindeer Games garnered 23% and Paycheck pleased 25% of the critics. Even Surviving Christmas edged out Gigli, with an 8% freshness rating. Clearly the outrage is misplaced here. Then again, Armond White called it “the only Hollywood movie of the summer with ideas,” so maybe it’s worse than I thought.

(NOTE: Today's installment of Unwatchable first appeared in slightly different form in this High Hat piece. Sorry if you already read it, but it's not like I was gonna watch Gigli again and come up with a whole new set of thoughts about it.)

Previously on Unwatchable:
72. Meet the Spartans
73. Fascination
74. You Got Served
75. The Last Sign
76. Kickboxer 3: The Art of War

Morning Deal Report: Mike Judge Tries Again

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 14:30:00 GMT

Mike Judge hasn’t had much luck with his live action big-screen work to date. Sure, Office Space is one of the most beloved comedies of all time now, but its theatrical release was not a success. That is, unless you compare it to the theatrical run of Idiocracy, which could only have been measured with a stopwatch. I’m not sure, but I may be the only person outside Mr. Judge’s immediate family to see both of these movies during their brief stints on the big screen, so it’s a safe bet I’ll be lining up for Extract, Judge’s latest effort, should it be fortunate enough to make its way into theaters. According to Variety, Ben Affleck “is in negotiations to play an ambulance-chasing lawyer in the pic, which centers on a flower extract factory owner (Jason Bateman) who's dealing with workplace problems and a streak of bad luck, including his wife's affair with a gigolo.”

Somewhat less likely, given its low ratings during its television run, is a big screen Veronica Mars vehicle. Creator Rob Thomas and star Kristen Bell haven’t ruled it out, however. Per Entertainment Weekly, “ ‘Kristen and I ran into each other, and we did discuss a Veronica movie,’ confirms Thomas, who says he has also had ‘a few conversations’ with Mars executive producer Joel Silver.”

Danny Boyle has found a distributor for his latest, Slumdog Millionaire. Variety reports Fox Searchlight will release the film “based on a true story about an impoverished Indian youth who improbably strikes it rich with an appearance on the Subcontinental version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?”

Related:
Brawndo Over Brains
No Forgetting Kristen Bell

Jason Statham: I Dare You

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 18:30:00 GMT

Marvel's recent forays into the world of superhero films have been dynamite. With the Spider-Man franchise more or less held up as the gold standard of super-action, the X-Men movies still holding up strong despite the disastrous third installment, the recent Iron Man film reminding everyone of how much fun comics are supposed to be, and even the Hulk reboot carrying with it the perception of success even though it basically matched the box office numbers of its unfairly vilified Ang Lee predecessor, it's easy to forget they're plenty capable of super-duds. The 2003 adaptation of Daredevil is one of Marvel's few notable duds (the less said about the Elektra spinoff the better); a lukewarm lead performance by Ben Affleck, a morally and technically confused plot, and uncertain direction by Mark Steven Johnson were largely to blame.

Still, for comics fans, the character has a lot of life to give, and most devotees of the comic -- particularly of the so-called "Born Again" plot arc of the 1980s, with its stark religious imagery, sense of moral atonement, and brutal, noirish crime elements, all of which were present in the 2003 movie but ineptly handled -- would be more than willing to give a chance to a potential remake. And while there's nothing official in the works, according to Geoff Boucher, proprietor of the L.A. Times' genre-driven "Hero Complex" blog, if a remake ever gets made, it may benefit from an infusion of a much more dynamic, enthusiastic and charismatic lead actor in the person of Jason Statham.

In the waning hours of the San Diego ComicCon, Boucher found himself in a hotel bar in the presence of stuntman turned actor Statham (there to promote his remake of Death Race 2000) and Frank Miller, who wrote the "Born Again" stories and was primarily responsible for Daredevil's stunning renaissance of the 1980s and early 1990s (and who was there to hype his movie version of Will Eisner's The Spirit). Statham expressed a keen interest in playing the alter ego of blind lawyer Matt Murdock: "Just give me the chance. I would love to play Daredevil." Miller quietly agreed that he thinks Statham's good for the role. But does the rest of the world? It's easy to see the explosive, rough-and-tumble Statham turning Daredevil's action scenes into gripping, bloody street combat, but it's less easy to imagine him losing his bluster to play the sightless attorney, who hides himself behind a mask of timidity to lull his many opponents. Whether or not this really happens is contingent on Marvel's permission (though they maintain strong times to Miller), and how successful the Spirit movie is -- a bomb may take Miller out of the driver's seat, while a success may make him a player with the resources to make whatever movie he wants, including an adaptation of one of his best-loved works in "Born Again".

Can you see Statham in the devil horns and red long johns? Sound off in comments...

Marvel Comics is Ready for Its Close-Up

Morning Deal Report: Feeling a Little McClammy

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 14:30:00 GMT

You may not have heard of Wayne McClammy, but if you’ve been anywhere near YouTube in the past six months, you’ve probably seen his work. He’s the guy behind the Jimmy Kimmel video “I’m Fucking Matt Damon” and its inevitable follow-up, “I’m Fucking Ben Affleck.” Now he’s got a movie deal, which is making me rethink my plan to shelve my proposed short, “I’m Blowing Ernest Borgnine.” In any case, McClammy will co-write and direct Le Car, which the Hollywood Reporter says “is designed to unspool as a ‘found film’ made in the 1980s about a group of CIA agents who try to foil a plot by an evil car aiming to detonate an H-bomb at the Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, N.Y.” Oh please, not that old story again.

Time travel is all the rage in Hollywood. Just the other day we told you about Spike Lee’s The Time Traveler, and now Variety reports that James Mangold (Walk the Line) is on board to direct The Archive, scripted by Proof playwright David Auburn. More time-bending comedy, albeit in the Groundhog Day mode, comes from Universal, which has picked up Repeat After Me. Per the Hollywood Reporter, it “revolves around a couple who realize that they are reliving their disastrous wedding day again and again and start to question getting married in the first place.”

Can Back to the Future IV be far behind? Or ahead? Whatever?

Morning Deal Report Returns

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 14:30:00 GMT

Please, people, stop with the telegrams and picket lines and frivolous lawsuits already! We get it! You can’t live without the Screengrab’s daily roundup of the latest wheeling and dealing out of Hollywood. You need to know which superheroes, videogames and misguided horror remakes may or may not ever make it someday to a theater near you. Well, we’ve heard you loud and clear, and we’re pleased to present the return of the Morning Deal Report.

Speaking of videogames, the Hollywood Reporter has the scoop on Gears of War, to be directed by Len Wiseman (Live Free or Die Hard) for the “reconfigured” New Line. “Set on the planet Sera, the game thrusts players into a battle for survival between humans and a race of creatures that surface from the bowels of the planet known as the Locust Horde. Players assume identities of soldiers on Delta Squad as they fight to save Sera's inhabitants.” The game’s designer, Cliff Bleszinski, says, “Disney made a great movie out of a theme park ride, and somebody is sooner or later going to make a great one out of a video game.” And by that logic, sooner or later someone will make a great movie out of stereo instructions.

Variety reports that Sam Raimi will helm the latest Dennis Lehane adaptation, this one of a book that hasn’t even been released yet. The Given Day, due in September, revisits Lehane’s Boston turf, this time in 1919 “with the city in turmoil as soldiers are returning home from WWI, having brought back an epidemic of Spanish influenza. Attempts to unionize the police department have set the stage for a historic strike and two cops take center stage.” The same report notes that Raimi is “also aligned to reinvent the Jack Ryan franchise at Paramount,” presumably without either Harrison Ford or fellow Lehane adapter Ben Affleck.

And some news that’s either out of Variety or one of my deepest, darkest nightmares: Kevin Spacey will star in Shrink as a psychiatrist to the stars whose clients include Robin Williams. Stock up on scenery, because there won’t be any left once these two are finished chewing it.

When Movies Are Too Timely for Their Own Good

Phil Nugent — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Everybody complains that big Hollywood movies don't show enough awareness of current events, but a lot of people get just as uncomfortable when their escapist entertainments seem to be getting to close to reminding them of what they were hoping to get their minds off when they fled to the theaters. Last year, a full-blown media circus sprung up in Britain around the still-unsolved case of Madeleine McCann, a three-year-old girl who was reported missing from the Portugal resort where she and her family were on vacation. (The case received a lot of media attention partly because the parents actively sought it out in their public calls for help in finding their daughter, which in turn attracted shout-outs from celebrities.) One side effect of the case is that Ben Affleck's cracking directorial debut, Gone Baby Gone, which happens to deal with a murky case involving a lost little girl, had its English premiere postponed out of deferrence to sensitive feelings stirred up by the actual case. (Affleck himself has said, "We are acutely aware of the situation... we don't want to release the movie if it is going to touch a nerve or inflame anyone's sensitivities." Now, with the movie finally slipping into British theaters, Andrew Hubert does a quick run-down of other high-profile releases that had to bob and weave to keep from being overshadowed from actual events, in many cases unsuccessfully. Perhaps the most obvious forerunner to Gone Baby Gone in this department is The Good Son, which was made at a time when its star, Macaulay Culkin, was seen as having worn out his welcome as America's favorite twinkling child freak. Directed by thriller specialist Joseph Ruben from a screenplay by Ian McEwan, the movie was supposed to exploit the queasy feelings that Culkin inspired in some while easing his transformation to "real actor" by casting him as an evil child psycho. Unfortunately, by the time it was ready for theaters, a news story about a British toddler who was murdered by a couple of ten-year-olds had helped set off a wave of paranoia about killer kids. The movie was denied a theatrical release in England, and while it made it into theaters in the states, it did disappointing enough business that poor Culkin was required to paste his smile back on and star in Richie Rich.

There was also a real spate of these things in the wake of 9/11; Hubert doesn't mention Collateral Damage, in which Arnold Schwarzenegger, in the last throes of his action movie career, played a fireman on the revenge trail after Arab terrorists blow up his family, but he does cite the over-the-top black comedy Buffalo Soldiers, which was punished for depicting members of the American military in an unflattering light at a time when hyper-patriotism was suddenly the flavor of the year. (Ironically, not long before September 11, 2001, Tim Blake Nelson's O was quietly dumped into theaters after two years on the shelf. That movie, which updates Othello to a modern high school, with Mekhi Pfifer as a basketball star dating Julia Stiles while Josh Hartnett whispers poison in his ear, reportedly freaked studio chiefs out because they saw "parallels" to Columbine in it, an unlikely enough possibility that it's worth considering that maybe they just felt like burying a movie that centered on an interracial romance. (By the time O was released, Stiles had starred in another interracial high school romance, Save the Last Dance; it was a hit, which might have helped spring O from movie jail.) Then there's Dr. Strangelove, which did manage to overcome having its first test screening on November 22, 1963. For some of us, the great modern movie mystery is: why did they cut the pie fight scene in the war room that was originally supposed to end the film? Everyone who might have some inside knowledge of that one has been asked about it, and so far as we've been able to determine, no one has ever given an answer that matched up with somebody else's. George C. Scott told a Playboy interviewer that the scene--which, as he recalled, included the line, "Gentleman, out beloved president has been struck down in the prime of life by pie! We demand merciful retaliation!"--was cut because of the Kennedy assassination. However, Terry Southern once told a Yale writing class that the real problem was that the people onscreen were smiling too broadly, because, according to writer Jeff MacGregor, they "all had too much fun hurling pies at George C. Scott." Peter Sellers once gave a long, vivid description of the scene to a Rolling Stone interviewer before explaining that "Stan" just thought it went on too long; discussing it in a documentary about the film, critic Alexander Walker insisted that the pies flew so hard and fast that "you couldn't tell what you were looking at." Always Mr. Analytical, Stanley Kubrick just insisted that he was making a "satire" and that the pie-throwing was too "farcical". Reports that Kubrick kept obsessively going back to the drawing board, and that somewhere in the vaults there are scenes of HAL 9000 hitting Keir Dullea with a pie and Private Pyle squirting the drill sergeant with his rubber carnation, remain unconfirmed.

Vanishing Act: The “Greenlight” Gang

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 20:30:00 GMT

For three seasons (two on HBO and a final one on Bravo), Project Greenlight attempted to capture the filmmaking drama found in documentaries like American Movie or Overnight. Since Greenlight was a reality show, a certain amount of the drama was contrived: the subjects were contest winners, and despite the stated intentions of producers Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, their projects were not necessarily selected on the basis of artistic merit.

For the inaugural season in 2002, apple-cheeked neophyte Pete Jones and his family-friendly script Stolen Summer were selected for production, with budget to be provided by Miramax (which also produced the series). Jones directed his own script (an arrangement that would not be repeated in subsequent seasons), and while the series documenting his efforts proved to be quite entertaining, the resulting film was neither a critical nor a commercial success. Still, even though he came off as somewhat oafish and full of himself on the show, the old adage that there’s no such thing as bad publicity held true. Jones made enough of a name for himself to take some meetings in L.A. and pitch a new comedy about a closeted gay man who decides to come out to his family, only to find they don’t believe him. No deal materialized, and eventually Jones and his brothers financed the movie, Outing Riley, themselves. Jones took on the title role and snagged Nathan Fillion and Curb Your Enthusiasm’s Jeff Garlin for the supporting cast. The film played some festivals in 2004 and was released on video last year.

Project Greenlight’s second season suffered from sequel-itis. Producer Chris Moore, breakout reality star of the first season, apparently read his reviews and played up his villainous persona to an embarrassing degree. The victims were screenwriter Erica Beeney and co-directors Kyle Rankin and Efram Potelle, the mismatched creative team behind The Battle of Shaker Heights. Rankin and Potelle have talent, as evidenced in their wacky short films like Pennyweight, but seemed ill-suited to bring Beeney’s coming-of-age story to life. Nonetheless, Shaker Heights has enjoyed a long afterlife on cable, probably because it stars current It Boy Shia LeBeouf. Beeney has no writing credits since, but Rankin has written and directed the horror-comedy Infestation (with Potelle producing, acting and supervising the special effects), due later this year from Mel Gibson’s Icon Productions.

After the second season, HBO cut ties with Greenlight, which relocated to Bravo. In a desperate attempt to keep the series going – and keep the money flowing from the Weinstein brothers – Moore, Damon and Affleck announced that the third Greenlight movie would be a commercial genre piece. This turned out to be good news for the winning screenwriters, Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton, whose horror screenplay Feast led to gigs writing later installments of the Saw series, as well as a remake of Hellraiser. In addition, the DVD release of Feast was successful enough to spawn two sequels, both penned by Dunstan and Melton and directed by John Gulager, Greenlight III’s designated goofus. In this respect, the show’s third season can be regarded as the most successful, but the producers’ hoped-for outcome never materialized, as future installments of the series got the red light. Still, we’ll always have Feast:

Top Five Oscar Moments

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 20:15:00 GMT

First, I must extend heartiest congratulations on behalf of the Screengrab to our colleague Paul Clark, who absolutely smoked the rest of us in the Oscar pool. Next year I’m giving my ballot to my dog (who didn’t much care for the bee montage, by the way).

Secondly, who agrees with me that the Oscars are ten times more enjoyable here in the DVR age? The ceremony clocked in at about an hour and fifteen minutes for me, after zapping through the commercials, Enchanted musical numbers and acceptance speeches in languages I couldn’t understand. The purists may frown on my methods, but I know the Academy Awards well enough by now to take matters into my own hands. Herewith, the top five moments:

1. Although technically not part of the Oscar ceremony itself, the nine hours of red carpet nonsense preceding the telecast is always good for at least one squirm-inducing, soul-shriveling moment, and who better than former actor and current crazy person Gary Busey to deliver it? And it’s always fun to see Ryan Seacrest’s smug façade dissolve into sheer terror. After watching this clip, picture Ben Affleck fuming at the Spago after-party, telling a sympathetic Seth Rogen how he’s gonna kick Busey’s ass.

2. Jon Stewart’s monologue wasn’t a nonstop rollicking roller coaster of laughter, but it got the job done. Sure, it’s a little disappointing that the writer’s strike ended and we weren’t able to see the full 12-minute version of the “waking up from a dream” montage, but two magic words make it all worthwhile. And those words are, of course, Gaydolf Titler.

3. Tilda Swinton’s win for Best Supporting Actress was my first clue that I wouldn’t be taking home the new Cadillac in the Screengrab pool, but it did provide one of the night’s best acceptance speeches. It’s not just any respected British actress who can work both her agent’s buttocks and George Clooney’s bat-nipples into her speech.

4. If you aren’t happy for Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, then…well, you probably wrote the songs from Enchanted. Hansard’s heartfelt exhortation “Make art! Make art!” sounded like the most subversive words ever spoken on the Oscar stage, and Stewart’s intervention to allow Irglova to make her speech after the orchestra rudely played her off was a clear victory for the good guys.

5. Most of us probably never thought we’d see the day that Joel and Ethan Coen would be anointed Hollywood royalty, but they took the honors with typical deadpan good humor. We still want to see Henry Kissinger: Man on the Go.

Gary Busey Attempts To Make Out With Jennifer Garner In Public

Peter Smith — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 20:05:00 GMT

Because we here at the Screengrab respect the inestimable refinement of our readership, we normally wouldn't stoop to lowbrow material like this (cough). But the above is the kind of headline we film writers dream of, and we'll be damned if we're going to let it get by. Hit the jump for what's possibly the most awkward red-carpet moment of the year. (Special props to the cameramen for catching Seth Rogen and Jonah Hill gawking in the background.)

DVD Digest for February 12, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 15:00:00 GMT

This week, one of 2007's best films comes to DVD, and a master's musicals get the box-set treatment.

DVD of the Week: Most of the most beloved films of Ernst Lubitsch's career come from its final years, when the Lubitsch touch had already become well-established. But it's easy to forget that the master had already had a fruitful career long before Ninotchka, The Shop Around the Corner, and To Be or Not to Be. With the films included in this box set, Lubitsch was one of the first filmmakers to integrate song and narrative after the advent of talkies. But this would mean little today if the films themselves didn't hold up, and they do, with all of Lubitsch's trademark charm and Pre-Code sophistication. Eclipse has given their typical treatment (no extras, but lovely transfers) to the films The Love Parade, Monte Carlo, One Hour With You, and The Smiling Lieutenant, which boast some of the era's quintessential stars — Maurice Chevalier, Claudette Colbert, and Jeannette MacDonald. As always, Eclipse and parent company Criterion succeed in filling in another hole in cinema history.

Incidentally, today is my birthday, so if anyone out there is looking for a suitable gift, you could do a whole lot worse than this.

A bumper crop of more recent films being released on DVD this week, including: Ben Affleck's surprisingly great Gone Baby Gone (Buena Vista, also Blu-Ray); James Gray's searing crime drama We Own the Night; Becoming Jane (Buena Vista, also Blu-Ray), the second Austen-themed dramedy in as many weeks; John Cusack in The Martian Child (New Line); No Reservations (Warner, also Blu-Ray), the Catherine Zeta-Jones-starring remake of 2001's Mostly Martha; Tyler Perry's latest hit, Why Did I Get Married? (Lionsgate); the Apollo-mission documentary In the Shadow of the Moon (ThinkFilm); and John Turturro's polarizing star-studded quasi-musical, Romance and Cigarettes (Sony). In addition, this week finally sees the DVD release of Amy Heckerling's long-delayed I Could Never Be Your Woman (Genius Entertainment), starring Michelle Pfeiffer, Paul Rudd, and Atonement Oscar nominee Saoirse Ronan. If nothing else, now we can see what all the fuss was about.

Back to classics, this week also brings Sony's The Stanley Kramer Film Collection, a collection of five films Kramer directed and/or produced. The centerpiece of the set is a new 40th Anniversary Edition of Kramer's once-controversial interracial-marriage drama Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. Also in the set is the Kramer-directed Ship of Fools, as well as The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T, A Member of the Wedding, and The Wild One, all of which he produced.

Other older films coming to DVD include: The Joan Crawford Collection Volume 2 (Warner), which includes Sadie McKee, Strange Cargo, A Woman's Face, Flamingo Road, and Torch Song; Fox's Charlie Chan Collection Volume 4; and Kenneth Branagh's 1991 dramedy Peter's Friends (MGM), boasting an enviable cast, including Branagh, then-wife Emma Thompson, Hugh Laurie, Stephen Fry, and Imelda Staunton. For some reason, MGM has seen fit to package the film in a box set alongside the misguided Elmore Leonard/Paul Schrader satire Touch, the 1988 Patrick Dempsey-Jennifer Connelly vehicle Some Girls, and Scott Baio and Willie Aames in Zapped! Strange bedfellows indeed.

Finally, if you're jonesing for TV on DVD, this week sees the release of season 1 of The Equalizer (Universal), as well as the Vern-approved Blade: the Series (New Line). But fear not — only one more week until the release of Walker, Texas Ranger: The Complete Fourth Season, the rare DVD that can be enjoyed by both Chuck Norris fans and Conan O'Brien watchers.

Trailer Review: Red Cliff

John Constantine — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 19:03:00 GMT

After 2003’s Ben Affleck vehicle Paycheck, the worst of the Philip K. Dick adaptations, John Woo disappeared. He took his guns and his doves and seemingly went back up the mountain to live out his days in peace, producing movies and not directing. Who could blame him? Woo spent close to a decade making American action trash when a new generation of Hong Kong action — movies that owe more than a little to Woo’s legacy — gained mainstream acceptance in the same market. Looks like John’s coming back down from the mountain with Red Cliff, his first Chinese-language film since Hard-Boiled. From this trailer, the movie looks very promising, a historical epic that eschews the neon bombast of recent Asian entries in the genre and replaces it with western grit. Despite the apparent influence of Ridley Scott though, Cliff also looks to capture some of the classic melodrama of '60s and '70s Hong Kong historical action. Here’s hoping it’s as good as it looks here.

You can check out the trailer at Yahoo Taiwan here.

It’s good to have you back, John.

Top Ten of 2007: Paul Clark

Paul Clark — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Note: Like Leonard, I don’t live in one of what Hollywood would consider a major cinematic market, so I have yet to see some of the year’s best-reviewed films, such as There Will Be Blood and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. But I think it’s better to post this now rather than waiting until I’ve seen all the major movies, which for all I know won’t happen for months.

10. The Hunting Party

It’s been said before, but I’ll say it again- 2007 was a damn fine year to be a movie lover. Because of this, there were probably a dozen films competing for the final spot on this list, but in the end I had to go with a sentimental favorite, one that deserves much more love than it’s gotten so far. Richard Shepard's darkly comic tale of three journalists (Richard Gere, Terrence Howard, Jesse Eisenberg) searching for a Bosnian warlord succeeds not so much because of its story as for its salty, unironic portrait of male friendship. As in Shepard’s last film The Matador, The Hunting Party is a story about men drawn to violence who booze and bond in outposts far off the beaten path. At a time when Brokeback Mountain is still a punchline, it takes real chutzpah to write a scene in which one man tells another, “that’s why I love you,” without going for a laugh.

9. Time

Korea’s prolific and controversial director Kim Ki-duk has become something of a whipping boy for the cinematic cognoscenti, but there’s no denying that the guy’s got skills. Time, his best film to date, appears on the surface to be a response to Korea’s plastic-surgery craze, but at its heart it’s a story of amour fou, like Seconds played for tragedy rather than thrills. In Kim’s hands, plastic surgery becomes a metaphor for how self-conscious we’ve become, so insecure in our skin that we’re no longer able to simply give ourselves over to others, not even those we love. Also, Kim’s gift for astonishing imagery is as keen as ever, especially in his use of a seaside sculpture park.

8. I’m Not There

The premise- six actors playing six different versions of Bob Dylan- sounds like an academic exercise only a semiotics major could love. But each onscreen Dylan is only a pawn in the game of director Todd Haynes, a piece of the puzzle that has become the Dylan mythos. With his ingenious structure, Haynes highlights the contradictions, tall tales, and outright fabrications of Dylan’s legend, revealing him to be less a self-conscious chameleon reinventing his image for the public as a lifelong searcher who cared little whether we wanted to follow. The wonder is that I'm Not There is so much fun- sometimes electrifying, sometimes goofy, but always fascinating.

7. Offside

The idea that Iranian women aren’t allowed to attend soccer games would seem to be the setup for a dour polemic, but director Jafar Panahi has other plans for their story. In Panahi’s eyes, the law isn’t so much an injustice as a colossal pain for all involved, and by highlighting the absurdity of the situation, Offside becomes the stuff of high comedy. And a rousing crowd-pleaser to boot- Panahi shot much of the film in the bowels of the stadium during an actual World Cup qualifying match, and even at a distance from the field, the energy is palpable. In the end, football is a uniter, not a divider, and once the detained women escape their captors to mingle with their celebrating countrymen, they’re able to share in the victory that their laws had tried to deny them.

6. Joshua

In a year that saw Rob Zombie’s Michael-heavy remake of Halloween, one might be excused for wondering what an evil-kid thriller was doing on my list. But George Ratliff’s Joshua is another breed altogether- a genre movie in the abstract, but a particularly chilly and thematically-rich one. Moreover, Joshua is very much an of-the-moment bad seed, not some pint-sized supernatural boogeyman but the product of ineffectual and indulgent parenting. Jacob Kogan is creepy in the title role, but the real revelation is Sam Rockwell, giving the performance of the year as his father, a man whose parenting skills are limited at best, and who is ill-equipped to deal with a son whose behavior goes so sharply against his own. When he finally realizes what he’s up against it’s too late to stop it, and thanks to Ratliff and Rockwell, this realization hits with the power of a gut punch.

5. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

In Assassination, director Andrew Dominik plays a tricky game- to make a Western that doesn’t so much de-mythologize the genre as re-mythologize it by making explicit the undercurrent of mythmaking that was always a part of the West. It could have been a disaster, but somehow it works beautifully, thanks not only to the beauty of the filmmaker but also the performances. Brad Pitt is fine as a Jesse James who is all too mindful of the larger-than-life figure he cut in the West, but the film belongs to Casey Affleck as Ford, the youngster whose boyish hero worship festered into violent obsession. Ford was foolish enough to believe that he could create his own legend, but all he did was to be swallowed up by Jesse’s, and because of Affleck’s performance this reviled figure becomes downright tragic.

4. The Host

The best giant monster to attack theatres this past year didn’t stomp Tokyo, but Seoul, in the superior Korean creature feature The Host. With a flair for showmanship and populist storytelling that nearly equal those of Spielberg in his Jaws days, director Bong Joon-ho has made a monster movie to stand alongside the greats in the genre. Part of the credit should go to the effects wizard who created the disgusting yet somehow lovable monster, but I dare say the movie wouldn’t work so well if not for the endearingly flawed family at the movie’s center. Even on a list this full of darkness and despair, there’s always a place for pure, unadulterated entertainment, and The Host gave me more sheer moviegoing pleasure than any film of 2007.

3. Gone Baby Gone

Most of the praise for Gone Baby Gone has centered on the film’s performances- especially the much-feted Amy Ryan- and the surprising amount of thematic resonance to be found in the film. But I think director Ben Affleck deserves a great deal more credit for how powerful this film is than he’s been getting. Most obviously, Affleck has a real feel for his setting- a working-class South Boston neighborhood- and the people who inhabit it. But while this location seems at first like backdrop to a mystery involving a kidnapped child, it eventually takes center stage in the story, which turns into an breathlessly compelling study in the consequences of tribalism. “Guys take pride in where they’re from, like it was something they did,” states protagonist Patrick Kenzie (Casey Affleck- again!) in the film’s opening voiceover. The tragedy is that Kenzie- thinks himself above it all- buys into this idea as much as anybody.

2. No Country for Old Men

For most of its running time, No Country for Old Men works primarily as an uncommonly exciting chase thriller, in which the overmatched Lewellyn Moss struggles to stay ahead of stone-cold killer Chigurh (Javier Bardem). But while first two acts of the film are enough to mark it as the Coen brothers’ best work in years, it’s the final act, which avoids the expected confrontation between Chigurh and Lewellyn in favor of something more philosophical, that the film to another level of greatness altogether. An observer for most of the story, Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) suddenly comes face to face with the idea that even if you run from the evil that you fear may be hiding behind one door, there’s no guarantee that it won’t be waiting for you behind another. “You can’t stop what’s coming,” indeed.

1. Zodiac

From the beginning, David Fincher’s evocation of the still-unsolved case of the Zodiac killer has been something of an anomaly. It’s a serial-killer movie that practically never goes for cheap thrills, and a three-hour fact-based period piece that’s almost bereft of epic sweep. In short, it’s tough to put my finger on what exactly makes Zodiac such a masterpiece. For me, the most awe-inspiring aspect of the film is its near-obsessive attention to detail, one that’s downright fanatical even by the standards of the true-crime genre. But using the thousands of tiny clues and incidental pieces of business that surrounded the Zodiac case, Fincher immerses us fully in the world of the case, one in which the crime-solving technology and interdepartmental procedures of the day were always several steps behind the schemes of the killer.

Also worth mentioning: Everything Will Be OK (sorry, no trailer)

When I was making this list, I decided to restrict myself to feature-length films. However, taking into account all new movies I saw this past year, none hit me quite as hard as Don Hertzfeldt’s thrilling new animated short, Everything Will Be OK. In little more than fifteen minutes, Hertzfeldt tells the story of a man who is doomed to die. His doctors give up on him, his mother moves in to help, and the man himself goes off the deep end. And then, without warning, he suddenly gets better, much to everyone's annoyance. Everything Will Be OK has the feel of an especially good Raymond Carver story, both in its sense of irony and its reliance on small but significant detail, but the twisted sense of humor and unique animation style is all Hertzfeldt. Call it number zero in my top 10.

Morning Deal Report: Bollocks.

Peter Smith — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 16:00:00 GMT

Oh, the good ol', progressive ol' MPAA: they've rejected the poster (visible at right) for Alex Gibney's documentary Taxi to the Dark Side, about the U.S. military's torture of foreign detainees. No blood, no gore, what's the problem? Well, it might upset children. And remember, all American political discourse must be pitched (gently, underhand) to the comfort level of an eight-year-old.

After the Fight-Club-reunion hype around State of Play, with Brad Pitt and Edward Norton sharing a screen once more, Pitt fled the coop. Now Norton has done the same, and Ben Affleck will replace him.

Jerry Bruckheimer gets into video games. This probably won't be a very difficult transition.

New Holiday Classics: Reindeer Games

Peter Smith — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 19:00:00 GMT

In his new memoir Born Standing Up, Steve Martin recalls that, back in the late ‘60s, he romanced the daughter of screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, until the director John Frankenheimer stole her from him while filming Trumbo's script for The Fixer. After mentioning that, two decades later, the director tried to seduce Victoria Tennant at a time when she was Martin's wife, Martin notes that "Frankenheimer died a few years ago, but it was not I who killed him." Unlikely though it may seem, John Frankenheimer actually did get a few movies directed when he wasn't concentrating on screwing with Steve Martin's love life. The 2000 Reindeer Games was his last film, and though not in the same league as his masterpiece The Manchurian Candidate, it's actually one of his live ones.

This thriller, from an original screenplay by plot-twist specialist Ehren Kruger, stars Ben Affleck as a prison inmate who's sort of a Cyrano de Bergerac in reverse; Ben's best pal in prison has been exchanging love letters with a young lady he's never met in the flesh, but when the pal is killed in the prison yard and Ben, after being released, meets the girl and she turns out to be Charlize Theron, he pretends to be the dead man. (This may sound like a bad idea, but remember that Entertainment Weekly has recently determined that Ben is only the fiftieth-smartest person in Hollywood.) Enter Theron's blue collar werewolf of a brother (Gary Sinise) and his posse of plug-uglies (Clarence Williams III, Donal Logue and Danny Trejo), who are under the mistaken impression that Ben used to work at the local casino and can help serve as tour director during their big Christmas Eve heist.

Reindeer Games is jerry-built on a switchback trail of reversals, revelations, and sputtered, improvised fake outs. It finally pushes its luck in its attempt to get one last twist in before the closing credits; we've read campaign literature from Lyndon LaRouche that makes more sense than this movie's last fifteen minutes. But up until then, this wintry, violent movie offers some good cheap thrills with its adrenaline overload. The cast of supporting baddies are as amusingly sleazy as any collection of movie lowlifes since Frankenheimer's 52 Pick-Up, which also featured Clarence Williams III looking very scary and completely out to lunch. It's a plot-driven movie, but with many diverting moments of local color, such as Danny Trejo thoughtfully laying out his plan to institute a second mid-summer Christmas season to boost the national economy, and Dennis Farina, as the stressed-out wiseguy in charge of the snowbound casino blasting away with a machine gun while calling out, "Hey, Santa, merry Christmas!" All this, plus the fiftieth-smartest guy in Hollywood takes several heavy blows to the face. Ho ho ho!

— Phil Nugent

The Fifty Dumbest People in Hollywood

Peter Smith — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 20:00:00 GMT

In reaction to Entertainment Weekly's cover story listing the "Fifty Smartest People in Hollywood" (including such brainiacs as Will Smith and Brian Grazer), the New York Daily News has now compiled its own list of the fifty dumbest people in Hollywood. Though the Daily News openly mocks the EW list, they did manage to come up with fifty names that did not overlap with it; considering that the EW list of "smartest" people included Ben Affleck, the temptation must have been great. But then it might have been a distraction from what appears to be the real purpose of something like this, which is of course to provide an excuse to run Lindsay Lohan's mug shot again. Face it, kid; until Mel Gibson drunkenly plows a tank into a chorus line of orphans and nuns, you are the new Nick Nolte. — Phil Nugent

The Rep Report (November 16 - December 2)

Peter Smith — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 19:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Early in his foreshortened career as a film director, Albert Lamorisse made two of the most enduringly beautiful "children's movies" in the pantheon: the 1956 Oscar-winning, thirty-two-minute The Red Balloon, co-starring the title character and the director's six-year-old son Pascal, and the 1952, forty-minute White Mane. Film Forum is showing both as a single program for ten days from November 16-25. Lamorisse, who was born in Paris in 1922 and who was killed in a 1970 helicopter crash while shooting footage for a documentary, had developed a fine eye working as a photographer before making his first moving pictures. (He is fondly remembered in another department of geekdom as the creator of the board game "La Conquette Du Monde", which Parker Brothers would eventually market in the United States under the name "Risk".) His eye for beauty and fanciful poetic imagination proved to be perfectly scaled to these short works, which in their bittersweet way are basically perfect. Seen back-to-back, they're almost as ideal a start to the holiday season as getting crushed to death by a stampede of customers when the mall doors open the day after Thanksgiving.

There may also be an eye-popping children-of-all-ages feel to some of the pictures stocked in the Museum of the Moving Image program, Glorious Technicolor! (November 17 - December 2). The schedule includes a restored print of the gob-smackingly great-looking outdoor melodrama Trail of the Lonesome Pine, as well as The Adventues of Robin Hood with Errol Flynn strutting his stuff in leafy-green tights and classic musicals as Singin' in the Rain, The Wizard of Oz, The Band Wagon, and one of Busby Berkeley's all-time "can you get me some of what the choreographer's been smoking?" eye-poppers, The Gang's All Here. Plus a little something called Gone with the Wind and, on December 2, that yuletide perennial Apocalypse Now Redux.

Before there was such a thing as "independent film", there was the mildly condescendingly named "regional-film movement," a system by which people who lacked the wherewithal or the desire to relocate to New York or Los Angeles made movies wherever they were whenever they could scrape the money together, tried to get them shown at festivals, sometimes succeeded, and then, as often as not, were never heard from again. The Texas-based writer-director Eagle Pennell had his moment right on the cusp of the new dawn of independent-film distribution. In fact, he's partly, if indirectly responsible for it, since it's been reported that it was Pennell's first feature, the 1978 The Whole Shootin' Match, that inspired Robert Redford to found the Sundance Film Festival, just to see if maybe there was anything else like that being made in the wide open spaces between the two coasts. Pennell's second feature, Last Night at the Alamo attracted even more attention in 1984, but by the time Sundance was turning "independent" directors into cult superstars on their way to being industry players, Pennell was yesterday's news, as well as an increasingly hopeless alcoholic on his way to being homeless. (He died in 2002, eight days before what would have been his fiftieth birthday.) From November 16-21, the Film Society of Lincoln Center is bringing back The Whole Shootin' Match in a restored print. It's a chance to pay tribute to a lost pioneer and also to see what the part of America that's outside Hollywood — specifically, the highly distinctive part that was Austin, Texas — looked like thirty years ago.

CHICAGO: From November 17 through December 4, the Gene Siskel Film Center pays tribute to the neo-Bresson stylings of Portuguese director Pedro Costa, an avant-garde narrative minimalist renowned for the painterly beauty of his compositional sense. The program begins with his early 1989 feature The Blood (O Sangue) and includes his recent, highly acclaimed Colossal Youth.

BOSTON: Now that Ben Affleck, of all people, seems to have gotten Boston better than half-right in the firmly rooted thriller Gone Baby Gone, it's as good a time as any to look back on how Hollywood has done by Beantown. Boston Filmed (November 16-22) at the Brattle devotes a week to such diverse on-location entertainments as the original The Thomas Crown Affair and Love Story, up to the more recent Mystic River and The Departed, as well as two indies from director Brad Anderson, the romantic comedy and ode-to-postponed-gratification Next Stop, Wonderland and the minimalist mind-fuck horror story Session 9. Buried deep in the mix, towards the middle of next week, are some obscure, modest, not-available-on-DVD gems: the 1977 Between the Lines, Joyce Micklin Silver's likable little comedy about the death of the counterculture as seen from the offices of an underground newspaper, and the 1973 crime drama The Friends of Eddie Coyle ,with a cast that includes Robert Mitchum, Peter Boyle, Richard Jordan, Alex Rocco and Steven Keats all having the time of their lives rolling George V. Higgins's dialogue around on their tongues.

SAN FRANCISCO: This weekend, the Castro proudly presents a bunch of movies I've never heard of as part of the Fifth Annual Third I Film Festival, promoting South Asian cinema "art-house classics to experimental visions to next-level Bollywood." I'm going to be honest here. With everything else that's going on in the world, even just the world of film, it's not going to be possible for even an authority so utterly devoid of a life as The Rep Report to be up on all of it until my cloning experiments bear fruit, and though I never made anything like a conscious decision about it, it seems that experimental South Asian movies and next-level Bollywood are my major field of personal ignorance. If you're in the San Francisco area and don't have a wedding to attend, I encourage you to sneer at my boring provincialism and check this program out.

— Phil Nugent