The Screengrab : bette midler

Screengrab Death Watch: Day One

Andrew Osborne — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 11:49:00 GMT

And now, the end is near, and so we face the final curtain...

Yes, it’s true...as it turns out, the shitty economy, global warming, the death of print media and the looming Swine Flu pandemic are only the tips of the iceberg of sadness we’ll all have to deal with this year.

We learned yesterday that Nerve.com will be shuttering some of its culture blogs including...(sniff, sniff)...this one: sad to say, the Screengrab is not long for this dirty old world.

So enjoy our beloved, non-commercially viable coverage of the cinematic universe while you can...and stay tuned for plenty of clip-show nostalgia, maudlin eulogizing, a heart-tugging farewell song from Bette Midler and, in a last-ditch attempt to boost hits, 100% more gratuitous Tits & Ass...like, uh...that chick from The Hills showing her butt!

Screengrab Fall Preview: Scott Von Doviak’s Picks

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 17:30:00 GMT

We’ve reached that part of the summer when Rainn Wilson comedies and films by Fred Durst are considered top new releases, so it must be time to look ahead to the fall. Traditionally this is the movie season for Oscar contenders and challenging indie fare, so let’s put away the robots and superhero tights and play a little 3 Up, 3 Down. (Feel free to weigh in with your own picks, my fellow Screengrabbers – if you dare.)

3 UP

1. Burn After Reading – No Country for Old Men was a return to form for the Coens, and we’re all happy they finally got their Oscars. But it’s been a while since we’ve had a pure shot of that Coen Brothers feeling. No Country was adapted from a Cormac McCarthy novel, The Ladykillers was a remake, and Intolerable Cruelty originated with other writers. Based on the trailer, Burn After Reading looks like a return to the inventive goofiness of The Big Lebowski and O Brother Where Art Thou?, which puts it right in my wheelhouse.

2. The Road – Speaking of Cormac McCarthy, the second adaptation of his work in as many years in due in November. The grim post-apocalyptic tale is brought to the screen by John Hillcoat, director of The Proposition, a western that certainly counts McCarthy’s Blood Meridian among its influences. Viggo Mortenson has the lead, and the supporting cast includes Charlize Theron, Guy Pearce, Robert Duvall, Garrett Dillahunt and The Wire’s Omar himself, Michael K. Williams.

3. Synecdoche, New York – Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut didn’t exactly wow most critics at Cannes, but the guy hasn’t let me down yet. (Well, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind didn’t really do it for me, but I’ll blame Sam Rockwell for that.) Even if it doesn’t really work, the premise – which has theater director Philip Seymour Hoffman building a replica of New York in a warehouse – should provide more of the Kauf’s trademark reality-bending weirdness.

3 DOWN

1. The Day the Earth Stood Still – Unnecessary remake of a sci-fi classic, with Keanu Reeves as an alien? The first time I saw this trailer, I thought it was a fake. The second time, I just said “No thanks.”

2. Twilight – I understand I’m not the target demographic for this “y.a.” phenomenon, but I still resent the fact that it’s in my face everywhere I go these days, and that’s only going to get worse as the release of this adaptation approaches.

3. The Women – This has got to be the uber-chick flick of the year: Meg Ryan, Annette Bening, Eva Mendes, Bette Midler and Debra Messing in a remake of the George Cukor classic. If I grow a vagina between now and when it comes out, maybe I’ll reconsider.

WILD CARD

Oliver Stone’s W. This can’t possibly be any good, can it? And yet I can’t wait to see it. We might be looking at a train wreck for the ages here.

Related:
Movie Magic: Making Pittsburgh Ugly Enough For "The Road"
Oliver Stone Finds His Dick

15 Films That (Almost) Could’ve Been Directed By Somebody Else (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 21:30:00 GMT

SCENES FROM A MALL (1991) & 2 DAYS IN PARIS (2007), Not Directed by Woody Allen

While not as legion as Hitchcock (or even Tarantino) imitators, there have certainly been a fair number of pretenders to the Woodman’s throne over the years (including, in the recent period, Mr. Konigsberg himself), but Scenes From a Mall (which, if it were actually part of the Allen oeuvre, would rank well north of Hollywood Ending and somewhere south of Sweet and Lowdown) deserves special mention if only for the Allen-esque stammer of the dialogue delivered by none other than Woody Allen himself, charmingly paired with Bette Midler as a slick, successful, L.A.-loving Bizarro World version of his usual New York schlub persona (yet still kvetching endlessly about the difficulties of getting the whole love and happiness thing to work out). Meanwhile, after numerous attempts at regenerating his aforementioned trademark schlub persona, Dr. Who-style, into the form of younger actors ranging from John Cusack and Will Ferrell to Jason Biggs and Scarlett Johansson, it’s astonishing that Allen has never, to my knowledge, thought to cast the wry, world-class neurotic über-Jew Adam Goldberg in one of his films. Fortunately, writer/director/actress (and former Goldberg paramour) Julie Delpy corrected the obvious cinematic oversight with 2 Days In Paris, the type of hot-blooded, fast-talking, quick-witted meditation on life, romance, family, morality and mortality that used to be Allen's default setting before a string of duds forced his own recent decampment to Europe in search of inspiration.

MYSTERY MEN (1999), Not Directed By Tim Burton

This loudly hyped, much derided, and in fact somewhat underappreciated superhero parody (based on characters created by Flaming Carrot writer-artist Bob Burden) boasts elaborate set design, a smashing pop-Gothic look mixed with improvisational comedy riffs, satirical homages to various geekish interests, and Paul Reubens, all of which helped remind viewers of Tim Burton. In fact, the unusal-sounding name of the film's first-time director, Kinka Usher, actually helped inspire a rumor that the movie was, in fact, directed by Burton under an obviously contrived alias, even though Burton was busy at the time trying to bring his own Sleepy Hollow to market. Other evidence that Burton had nothing to do with it include the fact that the action scenes are fairly coherent, along with the movie's role in making Smash Mouth's "All Star" the hardest-to-avoid pop song in America for a good two or three years. (If the devoutly contrarian Burton had had a hand in that, he'd have probably joined the French Foreign Legion to atone.) Based on available evidence, there is in fact a Kinka Usher, but after the disappointing reception to this movie, his film career seems to have folded up its tent.

CITY OF LOST CHILDREN (1995), Not Directed by Terry Gilliam

Thanks to the fluke of his having broken in with Monty Python's Flying Circus and what that seems to have done to his sense of humor, the Minnesota-born Terry Gilliam has been fated to spend most of his life striking many people as sort of English. Oddly enough, the most successful Gilliam movie of the last fifteen or so years may have been cooked up by a couple of Frenchmen. Like Gilliam, Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet began their work as collaborators working in animation; with their first feature, Delicatessen, they announced their intent to make live-action films with the same degree of frenzied visual imagination (and the same sort of sick humor) usually found only in cartoons. But with Lost Children, they dove head-first into Gilliam's territory, with a sophisticated take on childlike fantasy that boasted a complicated plot, a look that was half fairy tale and half cyberpunk, and a villain out to steal the dreams of children. If Gilliam had made it himself after Time Bandits and Brazil, it would have made a far more fitting end to his "imagination trilogy" than the film he did make, The Adventures of Baron Muchausen. Instead, Gilliam did at least recognize the filmmakers as kindred spirits, and was quick to issue a blurb that they could use in the trailer.

And finally...

CHARADE (1963), Not Directed By Alfred Hitchcock

To tell the truth, we here at The Screengrab think that the tendency to compare just about any attempt at a stylish thriller to the work of Alfred Hitchcock has been overblown. Hitchcock didn't invent the concept of screen thrills, any more than (say) John Ford invented men on horseback or Stanley Donen, the director of Charade, invented singing and dancing. They all just happened to be really good at their specialties. What makes Charade, with its Parisian setting and alternately jokey and spooky murders, so much of a special case is its use of its star, Cary Grant, and the way it links this charmingly light romantic-mystery-comedy to North by Northwest and To Catch A Thief, the films that Hitchcock built around Grant after the strain of Hollywood comedy that made Grant a star had dried up or curdled. (Hitchcock also directed Grant in one of his best movies from the 1940s, Notorious, but that was in a darker, more hard-boiled style of tortured romance.) In all these movies, the filmmakers take Grant's star image into account in a slightly ironic way that makes it all the more glamorous and irresistable. (This is the movie where Audrey Hepburn, the damsel in distress, asks Grant, "Do you know what's wrong with you?" and then answers her own question: "Nothing.") They all hold up a lot better than the other movies that Grant made during the last twenty years or so of his career, and in fact, Charade, which he made just before he turned sixty, is for all practical purposes the last real "Cary Grant" movie. He did star in two more pictures, Father Goose and Walk, Don't Run (a remake of The More the Merrier), but they were half-hearted stabs at seeing if Grant could delight the public as, respectively, a boozy, unshaven old grump or a lovable match-making old busybody. Neither was a success, and Grant, sensing that his fans had no interest in seeing him evolve into anything besides Cary Grant, graciously retired from the screen. (Trivia note: in 2002. Jonathan Demme remade Charade as The Truth About Charlie, a movie whose Big Idea was, as Demme explained it, to see what Charade would look like if it had been directed in the flyblown experimental style of a French New Wave director working in 1964. It turned out that if the movie had been made that way, it would have kind of sucked.)

Click Here For Part One, Part Two & Part Three

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

Screengrab Movie Poster Preview

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 18:00:00 GMT

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we’ve been known to review the occasional movie trailer here at the Screengrab. Some people feel this is unfair – that we are making snap judgments based solely on some marketing executive’s dumbed-down notion of how to sell the product. To which I say: fie! (And I rarely say fie.) You know what would be really unfair? Previewing upcoming movies I know absolutely nothing about based solely on their posters! So let’s do it!

DEAL

Burt Reynolds is the aging gambling legend banned from all the casinos in Vegas and forced to undergo radical reconstructive surgery on his face in order to gain entry. When this duplicity fails due to sophisticated facial recognition technology, Reynolds recruits cocky but raw up-and-coming poker star Bret Harrison, offering to share his tricks of the trade in exchange for a cut of the profits. The two men butt heads, especially when Shannon Elizabeth enters the picture as the naïve cocktail waitress. But surprise! She’s actually conning them both.

DECEPTION

Ewan McGregor thinks he has it all – great job, new house, gorgeous wife Michelle Williams. That is, until mysterious stranger Hugh Jackman shows up. Williams claims he’s her uncle and that he’ll only be staying with them for a few days while he’s in town for a grooming seminar. McGregor begins to grow suspicious when he discovers Jackman’s boxer shorts in his bed. He snaps when he catches Williams and Jackman in the hot tub together, and kills both of them…but Jackman was never really there at all!

FRONTIER(S)

It seemed like such a quaint small town, the perfect place to spend the night while driving cross-country. Little did they know this town was actually populated by CANNIBALISTIC DEVIL WORSHIPPERS!!!

THEN SHE FOUND ME

Helen Hunt is a successful lawyer in New York, falling in love with neighbor Matthew Broderick, the advertising exec she met at Starbucks when he spilled his mochacinno in her lap on the morning of her big trial. All is going well until her estranged mother Bette Midler shows up to beg forgiveness for accidentally killing Hunt’s father with a waffle iron. The healing begins, and Hunt is finally able to get over her lifelong fear of waffles.

THE FALL

OK, this one is a challenge, but I’m gonna say it somehow involves a gay pirate, a time machine and an awful lot of peyote.

Simple Simon

Leonard Pierce — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 15:45:00 GMT

If there's one thing we here at the Screengrab love more than movies, it's crazy right-wing cranks. Luckily, when Roger L. Simon is around, we don't have to pick just one. Simon, who prior to co-founding doomed conservative clearinghouse Pajamas Media could boast as his greatest accomplishment having penned Scenes from a Mall, a film which brought us the delightful vision of Woody Allen going down on Bette Midler in a movie theater, has recently been on a tear about how those traitorous dogs in Hollywood, a town which apparently has corrupted everyone who sojourns there except himself, Burt Prelutsky, and Stephen Baldwin, are so alienated from real Americans that they keep making anti-war movies even though they lose money doing so. His first installment in what is shaping up to be an interminable series on the subject revealed the reason the damn dirty hippies of Tinseltown keep making these hateful anti-American screen screeds: it's because if you are a Hollywood liberal, you are, de facto, a "miserable self-serving bastard". He also makes the curious argument that people like Brian DePalma, director of Redacted, are making movies that "validate the orthodoxy", which seems to go against his point that these movies are economic failures due to the widespread support of the war displayed by most red-blooded Americans. Simon follows up that one with a claim that since Hollywood liberals know nothing of what they speak when it comes to war (an assessment with which Oliver Stone might take issue), their films are the "addled product of unacknowledged moral confusion"; he then settles back and says that since the surge is working so well, he's beginning what may be a very long wait for the Iraq War version of Casablanca. His latest on the subversive commie rats who lurk in the Hollywood hills is a hatchet job on Paul Haggis, who he first suspected of anti-American treachery when he saw Crash -- after all, Simon argues, he's lived in L.A. for years and hardly ever saw any racism, so there must not be any. Simon goes on to savage In the Valley of Elah, and 'explains' the deviltry of this life-hating scum by noting that, like Sean Penn, he is under the sway of that charismatic Stalinist cult leader Dennis Kucinich. He knows it's true, because he read it on Wikipedia! Keep up the great work, Roger.