The Screengrab : billy bob thornton

DVD Digest for May 19, 2009

Paul Clark — Tue, 19 May 2009 14:00:00 GMT

This week, the same old stuff you always get from DVD Digest. Also, a new Steven Seagal movie!

For some people reading this column, the news that the recent releases Valkyrie (MGM, also Blu-Ray), Paul Blart: Mall Cop (Sony, also Blu-Ray), and My Bloody Valentine 3D (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray) will be more important than anything else. But we’re looking out for the rest of you as well. And if none of these titles quicken your pulse- and I perfectly understand if they don’t- there’s always the latest from movie-star-turned-musician-turned-energy-drink-magnate (take that, Billy Bob Thornton!) Steven Seagal, Driven to Kill (Fox, also Blu-Ray). On the other side of things, the artsy and fartsy out there should be salivating over the release of John Gianvito’s excellent Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind (E1 Entertainment). In other words, something for everybody!

And what would a DVD Digest be without the classics section, for those of you who aren’t all uptight about black-and-white, subtitles, Academy ratio, and long-dead movie stars. Devotees of the Criterion Collection no doubt already know about the dynamic duo of DVDs hitting streets today. First, Peter Yates' great Boston crime drama The Friends of Eddie Coyle (Criterion) makes its long-awaited DVD debut. Or if you’re in the mood for something more, uh, Eastern, check out Pigs, Pimps & Prostitutes: 3 Films by Shohei Imamura (Criterion)- includes The Insect Woman, Pigs and Battleships, Intentions of Murder. Fans of old Hollywood would be advised to pick up two John Wayne favorites, El Dorado Centennial Edition (Paramount) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance Centennial Edition (Paramount). And by some happy coincidence, today’s release of Fritz Lang’s Nazi-hunting thriller Man Hunt (Fox) is timed perfectly with the release of the aforementioned Valkyrie. Funny how that worked out, dontcha find?

Fans of TV on DVD should find something to enjoy among this week’s releases, which include the ever-popular 24 Season 7 (Fox, also Blu-Ray), Alan Ball’s vampire saga True Blood (HBO, also Blu-Ray), and the no-longer-surprising-in-its-awesomeness Friday Night Lights Season 3 (Universal).

Finally, if you’ve a Blu-Ray player, you’re in luck! Today’s a big one for Blu-Ray only releases, highlighted by the Batman 20th Anniversary Blu-Ray Book (Warner), which includes a Batmobile full of extras, documentaries, and other cool stuff. For the kids, A Bug’s Life (Disney) hits stores to capitalize on the upcoming Pixar release Up, while those who are looking forward to the latest Terminator blockbuster will no doubt pick up Terminator 2 Skynet Edition (Lionsgate). The political drama Lions for Lambs (Fox) is coming out for fans of political speechifying. Finally, Paramount’s got a whole slew of new Blu-Ray only releases hitting stores today, including Three Days of the Condor, Changing Lanes, Enemy at the Gates, Paycheck, and The Machinist.

Billy Bob Thornton's Boxmasters Retreat from Canada; Radio Comments Made Band Member Sick

Phil Nugent — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 15:00:00 GMT

Last Friday, Billy Bob Thornton and his band the Boxmasters called an early end to their tour of Canada, where they've been opening for Willie Nelson. Last week, Thornton did his part for better relations between our two countries by getting pissy during a radio interview with CBC host Jian Ghomeshi, first playing mum because he felt that, by mentioning the fact that Thornton has a movie career, he had suggested that his music career is merely a "hobby", then opening up enough to say that Canadian audiences are too "reserved" and unresponsive to suit his rowdy ways. "We tend to play places where people throw things at each other and here they just sort of sit there," he told Ghomeshi, adding, "It's mashed potatoes with no gravy." Thursday night, the Boxmasters were greeted with the responsive audience of Thornton's dreams; the group was, reportedly, loudly booed, with a few shouts of "Here comes the gravy!"

The band subsequently dropped out of Nelson's final shows in Montreal and London, Ontario, with an explanatory note on Nelson's web saying that "several" crew members and one member of the band had been stricken with flu. The web site seemed confident that everyone would be in the pink of health and ready to resume full participation in the tour come Tuesday, when the Nelson show returns to the relative safety of Stamford, Connecticut. Presumably, if Thornton feels like sharing his views of Stamford audiences with some hardy local radio personality, he'll be beating potential interviewers off with a stick.

Video of the Day: Billy Bob Thornton Blames Canada for Lack of Gravy on His Mashed Potatoes

Phil Nugent — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 15:00:00 GMT

This week's international incident comes to us courtesy of Jian Ghomeshi, the apparently unflappable host of the daily arts program Q on CBC Radio One in Canada; the Boxcutters, a music group currently touring with Willie Nelson and Ray Price; and the Boxcutters' lead singer, drummer, and songwriter, Billy Bob Thornton, who gets sulky if you make passing mention of his side career in movies when he's there to talk about his goddamn music! The band stopped by the station for a live interview Wednesday morning; in the ensuing fracas, which started spreading across the Internet like kudzu yesterday, the talkier members of the band, who may possibly be unconvinced that their proceeds from their latest album, Modbilly, will leave them set for life, talked about the inspiration they have taken from such diverse sources as Buck Owens, Michael Nesmith, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and Chad and Jeremy. However, Billy Bob, peeved that Ghomeshi had referred to his movie career in his introduction, chose to express his displeasure by claiming not to be too clear on how long he and the boys had been playing together, how they came to be touring with Willie Nelson, and whether or not he had ever almost pursued a professional baseball career. Thornton also seemed less than thrilled with Ghomeshi's description of his band's music as a combination of hillbilly with British invasion, which seems reasonable, and expressed a preference for the term "cosmic cowboy", which might actually be worse. For his part, Ghomeshi earned some kind of grace under pressure award just by not reaching over and yanking the soul patch off his guest's face.

Once Billy Bob did start talking, he managed to piss off the Canadian listening audience by referring to the audiences of the Great White North as "mashed potatoes with no gravy," which seemed to be his poetic way of saying that he was disappointed to play for people who didn't throw beer bottles at him for his trouble. Since Bily Bob was there to talk about his music, he might he annoyed with us for reporting on his travails at what's supposed to be a movie blog, so before you proceed to the clip, let's have a shared understanding that we're posting it here so that everyone can bask in the hardy tunesmith's passionate and heartfelt tribute to the recently deceased Famous Monsters of Filmland editor, Forrest J. Ackerman. Booga booga!

Trailer Review: The Informers

Paul Clark — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 17:00:00 GMT

This, the latest Bret Easton Ellis adaptation to come out of Hollywood, is making its premiere at Sundance this week. As with all Ellis adaptations, this movie has to toe a very tricky line, trying doing justice to Ellis’ stories of hard-partying, disaffected people while coming off as something more than empty hedonism. The closest a filmmaker’s gotten so far is Mary Harron with American Psycho, not just because she could confine herself to one character’s viewpoint but also because her constitutional inability to buy into the world Patrick Bateman was selling allowed her to find the satire. Alas, The Informers looks to be closer to the Less Than Zero approach, with Gregor Jordon turning Ellis into a cautionary tale for the ennui that plagues L.A.’s privileged classes. That said, the cast looks pretty solid- why shouldn’t it be, given the number of showy parts to be found in Ellis’ works?- and it’s always nice to see Billy Bob Thornton in a meaty role instead of simply playing one-dimensional weirdos or cops.

Sundance Preview: Ten Must-See Narrative Features (Part Two)

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 21:00:00 GMT

IN THE LOOP

I know what you’re thinking: I only picked this movie so I could run this ridiculous picture of James Gandolfini in his Crazy General outfit. Well, perhaps you’re right. The film itself is a political farce described thusly: “Wickedly sardonic and filled with secrets, lies, leaks, plugs, and faulty intelligence and walls, In the Loop leads us behind closed doors to reveal bungling bureaucrats entangled in petty rivalries, obsequious aides jockeying for favor, and the Keystone Cops of government, including a minister who hopes there’s no war because it’s bad enough coping with the Olympics, and an unscrupulous bureaucrat who doctors intelligence because he believes that “in the land of truth, the man with one fact is king.” Director Armando Iannucci is a veteran of British comedy TV, including I’m Alan Partridge and the short-lived but no doubt beloved Time Trumpet.

MANURE

The Polish Brothers are back and they’ve got poop on their minds! The men behind such uncategorizables as Northfork and Twin Falls Idaho return with “scene after scene of wonderfully rendered, pure cinematic imagination.” Tea Leoni is the heir to to Rose’s Manure Company and Kyle Maclachlan finally has the role he was born to play – “a ruthless, slick-talking fertilizer rep.” OK, so maybe Agent Dale Cooper was the role he was born to play. But Billy Bob Thornton as a manure salesman? Sold!

MARY AND MAX

The opening night film (that’s tomorrow night, people, so start lining up) is an Australian claymation tale “of a 20-year pen-pal friendship between two very different people: Mary Dinkle, a chubby, lonely 8-year-old girl living in the suburbs of Melbourne, and Max Horowitz, a 44-year-old Jewish man, who is severely obese, suffers from Asperger’s syndrome, and lives an isolated life in New York City.” If you guessed that Philip Seymour Hoffman voices the latter, you win a door prize. Toni Collette is the 8-year-old, no doubt a warm-up for her upcoming multiple personality role(s) on Showtime’s United States of Tara.

WHITE LIGHTNIN’

Not a remake of the Burt Reynolds hixploitation classic, but nonetheless a remake of sorts: White Lightnin’ is a fictional take on the real-life subject of the documentary Dancing Outlaw, Jesco White. “At the tender age of six, he started getting high by huffing gasoline and stolen lighter fluid. Growing up, Jesco often found himself shuffling between reform schools, work camps, and his home in West Virginia—until his father, famous mountain dancer D. Ray White, taught him how to tap. After his father's murder, Jesco begins to dance to control his increasingly wicked ways.” Crazy casting note: Carrie Fisher co-stars as Cilla, the love of Jesco’s life.

WORLD’S GREATEST DAD

I can hardly believe I’m including a movie starring Robin Williams among my picks, but writer/director Bobcat Goldthwait, maker of the greatest alcoholic clown movie and the greatest dog-blowing movie ever made, has a knack for the perversely comic. Presumably that holds true for World’s Greatest Dad, but the Sundance guide description is so vague as to only tantalize: Williams plays a high school poetry teacher who “suddenly faces both the worst tragedy of his life, and the greatest opportunity. Determined to make lemonade from life’s lemons, Lance treads a path that could land him everything he’s ever dreamed of, as long as he can live with the knowledge of how he got there.”

Part One

Video of the Day: Bad Santa

Leonard Pierce — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 19:15:00 GMT

It's going to be a light posting week here at the Screengrab, as we all spend time with our loved ones and relations at this sacred time of year. However. we didn't want to leave you without at least one Video of the Day -- this one, a clip of one of the funniest scenes from our 12 Days of Christmas Marathon favorite, Bad Santa.

We know we end up asking one of Billy Bob Thornton's questions to at least one relative per year at the family gatherings. No, not "What's the house number?"

Related Posts:

Video of the Day: Drunk History

Video of the Day: Gremlins 2.5

The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: "Bad Santa"

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 21:30:00 GMT

Welcome to installment #2 of the Screengrab's leisurely holiday stroll through some of the most beloved Christmas movies in holiday history: the 12 Days of Christmas marathon! You certainly don't have to do what I did, and watch all of these movies in a row over a period of two days, but if you do go that route, make sure you have a really comfortable chair and a lot of stuff to mix with your eggnog. For our second go-round, we decided to follow the path set for us by The Nightmare Before Christmas and move on to another movie with a somewhat jaundiced view of the season. But while The Nightmare Before Christmas was a harmless kid's toy, the equivalent of a scampish M-80 in the toilet of Christmas cinema, today's movie is substantially more dangerous and unpredictable, a grenade pitched into a urinal.

Released in 2003, Bad Santa was the second narrative film directed by Terry Zwigoff, and his first attempt at full-blown comedy. It's a movie that could easily have gone astray: the last thing the world needs is another picture about a cynical, world-weary rogue who cons his way through Christmas only to find redemption and learn to love again at the hands of a good woman and/or an adorably winning urchin. And to be sure, Bad Santa has those elements in spades, to the degree that plenty of people, already leery of Zwigoff's ability to handle broad humor as adeptly as he'd handled teen angst in his previous effort Ghost World were getting pretty nervous. Casting Billy Bob Thornton, who had already been tempted to the dark side of mediocre but high-paying blockbusters, didn't help much.

But audiences and critics who doubted what the combination fo Zwigoff and Thornton were capable of in this most subversive of holiday fairy tales were severely underestimating how far they were willing to go to fuck up the formula. Although there are tiny moments of redemption buried in the mountain of hiliarious sludge that make up the movie, they carry around them not a whiff of treacle, because of the degree of virulence the director and star apply to their extended middle finger to the genre. Willie T. Sokes isn't just some tired old wag who's seen one too many people being naughty on Christmas Eve; he's a genuinely loathesome old creep so impossibly degraded that even the kind of life-changing redemption that such movies save for their third act would manage only to transform him from irredeemable to merely disgusting.

And Bad Santa doesn't stop there in its ruthless determination to make hash out of one's expectations from this sort of thing. The adorably irascable sidekick is an African-American elf so breathtakingly foul-mouthed that he wouldn't be out of place in an episode of Deadwood, and he doesn't like the main character very much either. The love interest is a hopeless superfreak. And best of all, the adorable waifish child, in whose name the hero is expected to get his shit together and walk the narrow path towards salvation, is less an elfin Dondi clone than a borderline sociopath fat kid who inspires feelings of helpless creep-out. Like a lot of holiday movies, this one is about lost souls finding each other; but once they do, they don't know what the hell to do with each other, or even particularly like each other very much.

Bad Santa isn't a perfect movie. It oversells itself on occasion; it goes for one too many cheap gags; and it does, at its black and evil core, want us to walk away with a song in our hearts and the sun on our shoulders. But happily for those raised on a steady diet of the unpalatable saccharine of most holiday movies, it's still admirable and highly successful in its determination to ape the formal structure of those movies while yanking the rug out from under them at every turn. It's not the kind of thing you want to share with the whole family, but it's a hell of a funny movie, and after the stress of spending 14 hours with that one uncle who keeps telling the same story about when he worked at the dog food factory in Newbridge, it's the perfect palliative to too much holiday cheer.

12 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS RATING: An acrobatic 10 Lords a-Leaping. Despite its early placement in the 12 Days of Christmas Marathon, this is one you probably want to save for after darn on Christmas Day, when you and your special someone are cranked full of enhanced adult beverages and sick to the gills of all the fake-ass festivities.

Related Posts:

New Holiday Classics: Reindeer Games

The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: The Nightmare Before Christmas

Dead-Eyed and Bushy-Tailed: Dubya in the Movies

Phil Nugent — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Slate offers a timely rundown, in the form of a video slide show by Elbert Ventura, on the ways in which George W. Bush has been represented in movies and TV lo these last eight eventful years. I'll admit that I needed reminded that the decision to cast Josh Brolin in Oliver Stone's W. probably hit Timothy Bottoms pretty hard. For a brief moment there in the early 1970s, his roles in such pictures as Johnny Got His Gun, The Last Picture Show, The Paper Chase, and The White Dawn made it seem as if Bottoms was Hollywood's favorite sweet, slightly boring hippie lead, but when the wave of counterculture films rolled back into the oceans of time, Bottoms's career began to resemble a beached whale that had been out in the sun for a few days. Then Matt Stone and Trey Parker cast him in That's My Bush!, their short-lived parody sitcom that treated life at the White House as a string of broadly played shenanigans accompanied by a shrieking laugh track. The show, which had already begun development under the provisional title Everybody Loves Al before the Supreme Court announced that it was recasting the lead role, wasn't exactly long on precisely targeted political satire: in one memorable episode, wacky high jinks ensued after Laura overheard George talking about his desire to have the family cat put to sleep because of the animal's foul, unhealthy odor and assumed he was talking about the pungent aroma of her gynecological region. (Odd to think that in the course of more than 190 episodes, I Love Lucy never went there.) But Bottoms managed to spin his Bush impression off into a cameo in the Crocodile Hunter movie and then a dramatic starring role in DC 9/11: Time of Crisis, a Showtime cable TV movie that was produced and written by professional "Hollywood conservative Lionel Chetwynd. It was a stroke of casting both obvious and very weird, sort of as if Tina Fey were to star in a celebratory feature-length biopic about Sarah Palin. Of course, the difference between Bottoms in 2003 and Tina Fey now is that Fey has other career options.

DC 9/11 was first broadcast four days short of the second anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. In other words, at a point (four months after the "Mission Accomplished" speech aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln) when many Americans felt that the Iraq War was won and concluded, and just as the actual Bush was warming up his re-election campaign. It's a very pure propaganda movie, with Bottoms playing a resolute, on-top-of-things commander in chief who explicitly connects the case against Saddam Hussein to the need to protect the nation from terrorism and to avenge the lives lost on 9/11. It's a measure of the national mood at that time that the film didn't arouse much in the way of head-shaking or tongue-clucking in the mainstream media. But as it became clear that the war wasn't going to be one of those little problems that can be wrapped up in the course of one man's eight years in offices--not this man, anyway--and support for it began to plummet, it became less common to see Bush depicted onscreen as a one-man Mount Rushmore. But the funny thing is that, even as Bush began to be portrayed as stupid and inept and gutless, he continued to be portrayed as, well, kind of sympathetic. The original media cartoon of Bush, as captured in the campaign-diary documentary Journeys with George (co-directed by Nancy Pelosi's daughter Alexandra), was that he was a dopey but lovable regular guy, who might as well be given the country to run, since everyone knew it wasn't that hard. Then, after a brief interlude in which Bush was portrayed in the media as a down-home cross between George Washington and Nick Fury, the earlier stereotype was reinstated, with the new fillip that being lovably dumb didn't qualify run to be leader of the free world--but how can you blame such a nice guy for that?

When the nice but dumb Bush made his comeback, it was in such movies as the global-warming disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow, in which the sweetly dense president (Perry King), looking lost and frightened, politely asks his Cheneyesque vice president if there's anything he should do in response to the end of the world. The scene is a stand-in for the Bush administration's original answer to the eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap in the Watergate tapes, a scene that Oliver Stone declined to stage: what the hell happened between the time Bush set down that copy of The Pet Goat and the time he next showed his face on TV. (The Day After Tomorrow actually kills the Bush stand-in off quick, the better to shift the blame for everything that's gone wrong to the Cheney figure, played by Kenneth Welsh--to you Twin Peaks, the actor who played Windom Earle, the serial psychopath who tied Major Briggs to an archery target and failed to closely examine the fine print on his contract regarding his capacity to ask visitors to the Black Lodge for their souls.) For even softer treatment of Bush, you can turn to such "satires" as American Dreamz and Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, which portray Dubya as a friendly middle-aged frat boy who is either ignorant of the effects of his own policies or too cowed by his own advisers to take a stand--at least until some righteous weed and male bonding has had its effect.

In W., Stone, too, treats him as basically a nice, well-meaning guy hobbled by his inability to overcome his daddy issues. (And for good measure, he has James Cromwell playing the dithering, unfeeling Bush, Senior as a noble, aristocratic Rudy Vallee type whose greatest crime is to tear up when Bill Clinton hands him his ass at the polls.) It will irritate many Bush haters to see him continue to evade responsibility like this. On the other hand, it may be a sign that however lingering the effects of his presidency will be, Bush's personal mark on history may be slight and transient. After all, the modern president who still looms largest in the national imagination may be Richard Nixon, who is also the one who has turned up in the most movies behaving like a cross between Dracula and a James Bond villain. For that matter, movies of the last eight years have done less to hold Bush responsible for the effects of his presidency than '90s movies like Primary Colors, Wag the Dog, and Absolute Power did to hold Bill Clinton to task just for his inability to keep it in his pants. As Elbert Ventura points out, the meanest version of Bush to turn up onscreen is probably the American president played by Billy Bob Thornton in Love, Actually, who bullies the British prime minister--Hugh Grant playing a fantasy of Tony Blair as a likable lonely guy--until the P.M. catches him hitting on his own object of romantic desire, at which point he hitches up his britches and marches to the nearest bank of microphones to stand up to the little toad. In other words, to get an unsympathetic version of George W. Bush into a movie, you have to jump to another continent and give him Bill Clinton's zipper problem.

Related Stories: Screengrab Review: "W."

The Screengrab Top Ten: The Baseball Movie All-Stars, Part 2

Phil Nugent — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 20:30:00 GMT

Lou Gehrig (Gary Cooper), THE PRIDE OF THE YANKEES (1942)

Some of the most memorable depictions of famous baseball players in movies have undercut the boy's-book images of childlike saints in cleats by showing the darker and more neurotic sides of driven professional athletes, but everyone with an informed opinion on the matter seems to agree that Lou Gehrig really was what a great ball player was supposed to be: hard-working, clean-living, decent, and somehow not even boring because of it, maybe because in the context of the Murderers' Row of the Babe Ruth-era Yankees, his boy scout qualities kind of gave him curiosity value. Like most celebrity biopics of the old studio era, especially ones made about athletes, this movie substitutes corn for depth or factual accuracy, and it has its snoozy side. But Gary Cooper's delivery of Gehrig's legendary farewell speech puts it at the top of the pile for male weepies.

Elmer Kane (Joe E. Brown), ELMER THE GREAT (1933)

"Imagine a cross-roads apple-knocker like that high-hatting the Chicago Cubs!, sneers the great talent scout Bull McWade, having traveled all they way (by horse-drawn sleigh apparently) to the little town of Gentryville, Indiaina, in order to welcome minor league wunderkind Elmer Kane into the majors. But, enigmatically, the swaggering, cossetted man-child will have nothing to do him, hiding in his room until the man leaves, and it is safe for him to descend for another of his endless ritualized breakfasts (towards the end of the gargantuan meal, asked by his housekeeper if he wants a slice of apple pie, he says, "Well, bring it on in and I'll flirt with it!"), where he reveals nothing either to his unbelieving brother (the great Sterling Holloway) other than boasting that his not joining the team will mean the Cubs will have no chance to win the "World Serious" that year, or dispensing xenophobic homilies to his dim ("Who's Babe Ruth?") doting mother (Emma Dunn), such as, "I hate places that I ain 't never seen!""

Inevitably it's love that keeps the poor sap trapped in Hicksvillle. He's fallen long and hard for his boss, the lovely Patricia Ellis, the women who runs the dry good store down the street . And he's lucky enough that she realizes the only way to loosen this barnacle is with a quick scrape of the brush; she rejects him as soon as he painfully mumbles out his feelings, then fires him, and in the cold fury of her apparent rejection he takes up the contract for the major leagues and heads out broken-hearted for fame and fortune. Elmer Kane , like many of Brown's characters, can have the tendency to set modern audience's teeth on edge, with the overbearing, know-it-allrube on the outside, barely covering up a world of ignorance and naiviete on the inside. Talented enough at baseball to lead his team to victory, but at the same time too dumb to know the difference between a sun lamp and microphone; hero to millions but also able to fall into the grips of organized crime boss because he thought he was "playing for fun" at the dice table, he often comes across as dim and otherworldly as an American Kasper Hauser. And if in the end if it's hard not to cheer for him when inevitably brings in that finally, muddy home run, and wins the pennant for the Cubs, you get the feeling that you still wouldn't really want to invite him over for breakfast after the game.

Nicky Rogan (Michael Keaton), GAME 6 (2005)

Life couldn't be much better for Red Sox fans these days, what with two world championships in four years and even the much-maligned Bill Buckner getting a hero's welcome for throwing out the first pitch at this week's Fenway Park home opener. The image of the tormented Sawx fan has pretty much passed into mythology by now, so the Don DeLillo scripted Game 6, which takes us back to the fateful night that "little roller up along first" dribbled between Buckner's legs in the 1986 World Series, is more of a quaint time capsule than was probably intended. Still, baseball brings out the best in DeLillo as anyone who read the dazzling "Pafko at the Wall" segment of the otherwise turgid Underworld knows, and it brings out the best in Michael Keaton, too. As playwright Nicky Rogan, whose latest effort is opening the same night as the pivotal Game 6, Keaton has his best role in years; he captures the feverish intensity of the true believer who sees the Red Sox as metaphor for all that's tragic in life, yet still can't take his eyes off them.

Morris Buttermaker (Walter Matthau), THE BAD NEWS BEARS (1976)

Sure, it's a good thing for kids to have larger-than-life role models, like Reggie Jackson or Aquaman. But it can't hurt to develop a more attainable view of adulthood, which is where Morris Buttermaker, the manager of the Bad News Bears, comes in. (And with all due respect to Billy Bob Thornton, who essayed the role in the 2005 Richard Linklater remake, and Jack Warden, who took it to the small screen in a short-live 1979 series, the definitive Buttermaker is the original: Walter Matthau.) A failed minor leaguer turned swimming pool cleaner, perpetually disheveled and hungover, owner of a crappy car and so hard up for cash he takes a job coaching kids he can't stand--these are recognizable qualities of a man in full. He gets a bail bondsman to sponsor the team uniforms, he lets the kids drink beer in the dugout, and his idea of an inspirational speech is "Tanner almost got a base hit in the fourth inning." It is often said that baseball is a game of failure, in that even the best player makes an out in six out of ten tries. If that's the case, then what better manager for our nine? Two, four, six, eight, who do we appreciate? Buttermaker!

Frank Drebin (Leslie Nielsen), THE NAKED GUN (1988)

We can't have a ballgame without an umpire, so we might as well pick one who can double as our national anthem singer. I've long maintained that the original Naked Gun movie (from the files of Police Squad!, natch) was the last shining moment for Leslie Nielsen, comic actor, because it's the last movie he made before he realized he was supposed to be funny and started mugging like crazy instead of maintaining his serene deadpan. Here is one of his finest moments, a slapstick sendup of every arrogant ump who ever decided he was the show all the fans came to see. Unfortunately, this clip doesn't include his equally sublime butchering of "The Star-Spangled Banner" in the guise of opera singer Enrico Pallazzo, nor the repeated bad calls he makes in order to delay the game and prevent the assassination of Queen Elizabeth, but you probably know it all by heart anyway.

--Robert Gomez, Phil Nugent, Scott Von Doviak

Click here for Part 1!

That Guy! Classic: Peter Boyle

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 20:30:00 GMT

In all of our occasional looks back at great character actors of the past, we've never written about anyone as universally beloved as Peter Boyle. The husky Irish-American with the wry smile worked, during his forty-year career, in everything from quiet, thoughtful little independent films to blockbuster sitcoms, but despite a number of controversial positions in his private life and the friendship of some of the entertainment industry's most despised liberals (he was a close friend to both John Lennon and Jane Fonda), the American public always took him to heart, and it's impossible to find anyone he worked with that doesn't remember him fondly after his death in 2006.

Originally intending to enter the priesthood, Boyle was bitten by the acting bug early on (his father hosted a children's show in his native Pennsylvania) and after a few minor roles on film and television, hit it big with his lead performance in 1970's Joe. Although he did a tremendous job as a racist factory worker and the breakthrough role opened doors for him, Boyle was deeply shaken by the role: attending his first screening of the film, he was disturbed to hear people cheering the character's reactionary lines, and was extremely selective about choosing his parts from then on. In fact, it's ironic that some of Boyle's most memorable roles have been those of violent, brutal men; the actor himself was, by all accounts, an extremely gentle man, a liberal, and a lifelong pacifist who opposed the war in Vietnam, championed civil rights, and worried constantly about the impact of his performances as brutes, thugs and killers. But his career was also peppered with some extremely adept comic performances, and his greatest success came as a cast member of the highly successful situation comedy Everybody Loves Raymond. He also did some top-flight work in other television dramas, including a swell turn as Fatso Judson in the TV movie adaptation of From Here to Eternity and a lead role in the short-lived but extremely well-made cop show Joe Bash. But it was on the big screen that he had the greatest impact; his odd features and quirky approach ensured that he'd never be a leading man, but he absolutely barnstormed every character role he was given. Although we'll list our favorites below, everyone remembers Boyle fondly from a different performance, and he's sure to go down in history as not just one of the best, but one of the best-loved, character actors in Hollywood.

Where to see Peter Boyle at his best:

YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN (1974)

After a half a decade of playing moody dramatic roles, Boyle shocked and charmed movie audiences when he turned up as the monster in Mel Brooks' brilliant homage/parody of the classic Univeral horror franchise. Showing an aptitude for comedy that would sustain him for the rest of his career, Boyle managed to bring down the house in every scene he was in, often without saying a word; his clumsy, bellowing song-and-dance with Gene Wilder is a paralyzingly funny classic, and the scene he shares with Gene Hackman proves that while the silent era is long dead, the best comic actors can still kill an audience with nothing more than an exasperated look.

TAXI DRIVER (1976)

Amazingly, the very next film that Boyle made after wrapping Young Frankenstein was Martin Scorsese's devastating Taxi Driver, a movie as emotionally intense and dark as Brooks' film was light and breezy. Boyle took on the role of Wizard, the pontificating, droning hack guru who passes for a font of wisdom amongst the cab drivers of New York. It's an important role, especially insofar as it helps establish Travis Bickle's inability to relate to anyone, even the friendly (though completely full of shit) Wizard. Boyle handles it deftly, getting some comic mileage out of Wizard's stories but also giving him the gravitas to act as a sounding board for Robert De Niro's deep alienation.

MONSTER'S BALL (2001)

Just as Boyle's first major success as an actor came from playing a misguided racist in Joe, his last major role on the screen came from playing the unreconstructed bigot of a father to Billy Bob Thornton in Monster's Ball. The lead performances of Thornton and Halle Berry got all the attention, but Boyle was just as riveting as Buck Grotowski, the unapologetically racist father of Thornton's prison guard and the patriarch of his highly dysfunctional family. It's also yet another irony in Peter Boyle's career: though Boyle was a crusader for civil rights, two of his most memorable and powerful roles are as virulently prejudiced men.

The Ten Best Murderous Duos in Movies, Part 2

Phil Nugent — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 21:30:00 GMT

Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson) & Vincent Vega (John Travolta), PULP FICTION (1994)

For all the talk about the brilliance of Quentin Tarantino’s filmmaking, his resurrection and reanimation of ‘70s pop culture, and the way he redefined the crime drama for a postmodern generation, there’s a profound misunderstanding of why his two most famous creations – the black-suited hitmen Jules Winnfield and Vincent Vega – are so enjoyable to watch. It’s not the hip pseudo-philosophical dialogue; it’s not the bad-ass speechifying; it’s not even the rapport between Samuel L. Jackson and born-again-hard John Travolta that makes Jules & Vincent so downright charming. No, what really makes them work is that Tarantino manages to do what no one else had ever done: he transformed the story of two murderous assassins into an engaging workplace comedy. When you get right down to it, Jules & Vincent are just two working stiffs whose job happens to be a tad idiosyncratic. When they’re not filling some rip-off artist full of hot lead, they’re just like any two likeable jerks at the office or factory of your choice: they swap vacation stories, they get annoyed at each other’s long-established social tics, they blame each other for workplace fuckups, they laugh at each others’ jokes, they eat junk food together at break time, and they drive around aimlessly between jobs trying to think of something to do, whether it’s fall in love with the wrong girl or have a profound religious awakening. For all the goofy trappings, from the automatic weapons to the mysteriously glowing box to the wallet that says BAD MOTHERFUCKER, we relate so strongly to Jules & Vincent because, despite their bloody way of making a living, we recognize in them the comfortable familiarity of workplace ritual. If anyone tells me that their scenes with Harvey Keitel’s Mr. Wolfe are anything but extremely well-done sitcom detritus, we'll call them a liar to their face.

Ray (Billy Bob Thornton) & Pluto (Michael Beach), ONE FALSE MOVE (1992)

One of the scariest of the many scary moments in Carl Franklin's modern backwoods noir (which Thornton co-wrote) comes when the intelligent and more calculating member of the duo, Pluto, instructs the more volatile Ray not to flip out when they're stopped by a highway cop: "We don't want to kill him if we don't have to." Ray takes Pluto's advice on this one because he understands that Pluto is smarter than he is; it's not as if the idea that there might be reasons not to simply kill someone who poses an inconvenience to him is something he understands on any deeper emotional level. Both men are prepared to do whatever it takes to keep them free and on the move, and to pick up a little scratch on the side as they go, and both are useful to the other, though it's Pluto's genius for sizing up a situation and deciding that it's time to wipe somebody out that keeps them free and on the move for as long as they are. The fact that they're a biracial team adds sauce to the mix, even as the redneck live wire (with the black girlfriend from the South) and his cucumber-cool partner resist the urge to ever acknowledge it.

Sappensly (Robert Webber) & Quill (Gig Young), BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA (1974)

If Fante and Mingo had lived to middle age, smartened up their wardrobes, and gone freelance, they might have ended up like these guys. Alfredo Garcia, a bizarre modern Western with white men in suits, equipped with planes, cars, and machine guns, tearing around Mexico in search of a guy's rotting melon that has a million dollar bounty on it, is the director Sam Peckinpah's scurviest film, a response to Hollywood's refusal to let him make the kind of movies he wanted to make, and Sappensly and Quill are probably meant as his fuck-you note to the studio executives he regarded as no better than manicured hyenas, gutless wonders, amoral killers. Peckinpah always had conflicted feelings about his characters and everything else he put on screen, and there's an unexpected, and unexpectedly affecting moment, when Quill is killed; Sappinsly looks at his body, utters his name in a voice cracking with grief, and then turns his gun on the movie's hero (Warren Oates) in what may be a desperate need to lash out at a world in which he's suddenly found himself alone or what may be a gunman's (successful) bid for suicide, forcing Oates to put him out of his misery. It's the closest thing to a moment of warm feeling in the movie.

Mr. Wint (Bruce Glover) & Mr. Kidd (Putter Smith), DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER (1971)

Neither of these guys looks like much of a threat; in fact one of them looks like the love child of David Crosby and Gallagher. (Putter Smith, who made his film debut as Mr. Kidd, made only a couple of other films and is actually best known as a jazz bassist. Bruce Glover played one of Jack Nicholson's "associates" in Chinatown but may now be best known as Crispin Glover's father.) Yet they manage to achieve memorability just on the basis of their archness, and for serving as the James Bond series' concession to the value of teamwork. Oddjob or Jaws would probably beat the shit out of either of them if one tried to sit at next to him in the villains' commissary, but so long as they stick together, respect must be paid: you never know what one of them might be up to behind your back while you're throttling the other. As for the homoerotic element alluded to elsewhere in this feature, it's there for sure, but it's best to not dwell on it, and not just because nobody wants to picture these guys kissing. (And make no mistake about it, we don't just mean that nobody wants to picture them kissing each other.) For all its charms, the Bond series has seldom been out front in terms of images of social progress, and the close-up of Mr. Wint appearing to leer pleasurably as Sean Connery literally shoves a bomb up his ass is not 007's proudest moment.

Eric (Eric Deulen) & Alex (Alex Frost), ELEPHANT (2003)

Standing in marked contrast to most of the murderous duos on this list are the teenage killers in Gus Van Sant’s impenetrable, elegiac evocation of the Columbine massacre, Elephant. Though one of them shares a name with the real-life Colorado school shooters, it’s not by design; like most of the characters in the film, actor Eric Deulen lends his name to his creation. Alex (played by the revoltingly compelling Alex Frost) is the dominant member of the twosome, plotting the massacre during class and delivering its terrifying final lines, but unlike most big-screen killer combos, there’s nothing flashy, clever or even wickedly likable about Eric & Alex. Though their actions are, in the end, far more costly in human lives than other big-screen killers, they are meant to be neither nightmarish horror-film bad-asses or appealing anti-heroes. In keeping with the tone of this wonderful, frightening film, they are ciphers: we know little more about them when the movie ends than we did when it began, and it’s easy to see that Van Sant made the movie not to explicate Columbine, but to mock our pretense that Columbine was explicable. A number of viewers detected an element of homophobia in the scene where the two kiss in a shared shower, but Van Sant no more suggests that repressed homosexuality is to blame for the boys’ rampage than video games, social isolation, or any one of a dozen red herrings he throws out. We greedily devour every one, so hungry are we for some hint, any hint that such a horrid, pointless waste of human life must have an explanation, any explanation. But in the end, we are left only with a lot of bodies and a pair of enigmas. That’s murder for you.

— Paul Clark; Phil Nugent; Leonard Pierce

Click here for Part 1.

Ten Movies for a Snow Day

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 16:00:00 GMT

It’s that time of the year when Screengrab readers in certain parts of the country can pretty much count on an unexpected day off or two thanks to Mother Nature’s fury. In my part of the country (Austin, TX), said fury usually comes in the form of about a half-inch of freezing drizzle, but having grown up in the Northeast, I am certainly well acquainted with the concept of the Snow Day. And what could be better on a day when you can’t leave the house than a pile of movies featuring a veritable blizzard’s worth of snow?

Herewith, then, the Screengrab’s list of the ten snowiest movies. Please note that we have not included the Chevy Chase/Chris Elliott movie Snow Day. We wouldn’t do that to you.

Ice Station Zebra

Sure, for much of its running time, this much-maligned Rock Hudson vehicle is a submarine movie, but the climactic scenes are set at the Arctic Circle, where the crew has been sent to track down some important Cold War whatsis. In his 1969 review, Roger Ebert describes the action thusly: “Hudson and his men start out with parkas, mufflers, goggles and the whole works. But by the time of the confrontation with the Russian commander, all the leading actors are shown bareheaded and barefaced. At Arctic temperatures, their noses would freeze, crack and fall off before they got their argument well launched. Another funny thing: When the actors talk, their breath doesn't freeze.”

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service

There are several Bond movies that explore the action-packed possibilities of snow, notably For Your Eyes Only, but when in doubt we always opt for the golden age of Lazenby. Here 007 puts his skis to work both on the slopes (dig that nighttime rear-screen projection) and as weapons of strangulation and defenestration. Always a multi-tasker, our man Bond.

Quintet

I’ve written about Robert Altman’s frostbitten foray into post-apocalyptic sci-fi before, so to quote myself: “Set in a future Ice Age, Quintet is so white with snow and glare, you will notice streaks of dust on your television screen that were hitherto imperceptible. To give it that extra ‘futuristic’ edge, Altman has smeared his camera lens with enough lube to fuel a three-day orgy at Elliott Gould’s place.” Stare at it long enough and you will go blind, one way or another.

The Shining

Sure, a snow day sounds like all fun and games. But then you realize you’re trapped in the house with your family for who knows how long, and it’s only a matter of time before someone gets a bad case of cabin fever and starts chasing you around with an axe. Our advice? Lead them outside into the hedge maze. This works best if they’re drunk and/or completely insane.

Fargo

Forget the compelling argument about whether or not the Coens have contempt for their heroine Marge Gunderson. What we really want to know is – what do they think of this guy?

Alive

This is an especially good one to watch from the safety of your couch on your unplanned day off. See what leaving the house gets you? Before you know it, you’ve crash-landed in the snow-capped Andes and the seatmate you bummed a magazine from early in the flight is now gnawing on your elbow. Better take an extra day off tomorrow just to be on the safe side.

A Simple Plan

From the golden age of snow noir (approx. Feburary 1996 to December 1998) comes Sam Raimi’s adaptation of the Scott Smith novel about earflapped yokels squabbling over a sack o’ cash rescued from another crashed plane. If you’re only familiar with the recent work of Billy Bob Thornton, it might surprise you to learn he once played characters who weren’t hard-assed authority figures. To wit:

Dreamcatcher

It shouldn’t be a surprise that this list contains two movies based on Stephen King books, since the horrormeister is a native of Maine and therefore no stranger to the perils of wintry weather. Of course, in Dreamcatcher those perils include ass-weasels from outer space and Morgan Freeman’s equally extraterrestrial eyebrows, so this one doesn’t qualify as the most naturalistic look at snowbound life on this list.

McCabe and Mrs. Miller

Honestly, you can skip Quintet if you want. McCabe is the Altman masterpiece you must move to the head of your Netflix queue immediately. And if you’ve never seen it, do not – repeat DO NOT – watch the clip below.

Smilla’s Sense of Snow

It’s been a while, but as best we can recall, this movie did not make a lick of sense. Julia Ormond is a scientist investigating a conspiracy using her unique, uh, sense of snow. Save this one for last, when you’re really tired.

Morning Deal Report: Whither The Dark Knight?

Peter Smith — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 16:45:00 GMT

Heath Ledger's death this week, as many speculated, has left several upcoming films up in the air. Production on The Dark Knight is finished, with all of Ledger's post-production done, but the film's ad campaign centered on him. Meanwhile, production on The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, the next film by Terry "Can't Get A Break" Gilliam, is on hold while the insurers figure out what to do. (Please, someone figure out how to make this movie. Tom Waits plays the devil.) And Ledger's directing debut, The Queen's Gambit (about a young female chess prodigy, possibly to have been played by Ellen Page) is needless to say on hold.

We can finally stop saying "Bond 22," for the second Daniel Craig Bond movie finally has a title. And it's. . . Quantum of Solace? Pardon?

Billy Bob Thornton and Tom Wilkinson join Clive Owen and Julia Roberts in Duplicity, Bourne screenwriter Tony Gilroy's directorial follow-up to Michael Clayton.

The Ten Greatest Prosthetics in Movie History, Part 2

Peter Smith — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 21:00:00 GMT

Nicole Kidman's Nose in THE HOURS (2002)

Can a fake nose win an Oscar? Some might say it already did, when Nicole Kidman's turn as Virginia Woolf in The Hours was awarded the golden statue for Best Actress. We've got nothing against Kidman's performance in that film, but judging by the reams of press that her lightly reoriented schnozz got at the time, you'd think that it was the nose that was wearing Kidman, instead of the other way around. Of course, this was yet another award in a long series of Best Actress Oscars that went to Beautiful Women Doing Unglamorous Things — whether it was playing a tarted-up legal secretary (Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich), having sex with Billy Bob Thornton (Halle Berry in Monster's Ball) or looking like a burn victim (Charlize Theron in Monster). Which is, really, the only way we can explain Kidman's decision to use such a subtle prosthetic in the first place; it's not like the American moviegoing public had any idea what Virginia Woolf looked like in the first place.

Jeff Goldblum's Jaw, Cheeks, Eyes, His Very Fucking Being, in THE FLY (1986)

Some of us were prohibited from watching more than two hours of TV a week as children. Luckily, some of us were also latch-key kids, so naturally, whenever no one was home, we gorged, often on both food and shlocky afternoon TV movies. And those of us who were unlucky enough to see The Fly at this time didn't quite grasp the extent of our mistake until it was too late. There you are, happily eating your delivery pizza, and in the middle of a big, meaty bite, you're confronted by the spectacle of one of Brundlefly's eyes falling off, like an egg yolk dripping into batter. You assume that's the most disgusting scene they're gonna throw at you. Again, big mistake. Jeff Goldblum's Brundlefly is possibly the single most hideous, repugnant creature ever seen on film — worse than the Alien mother, worse than any other close competitor. Every negative trait of Jeff Goldblum's physiognomy is brought into stark relief onto an insect face; when it decays, we dare you to keep eating. We certainly didn't.

Penelope Cruz's Ass, VOLVER (2006)

Since her Hollywood debut, Cruz has been the poster child for foreign-born performers who aren't half as compelling in English as they are in their native tongue. Which is why her reunion with Pedro Almodovar was a cause for celebration — not only would she be working in Spanish again, but she was collaborating with a filmmaker who always brought out the best in her. But strangely enough, much of the buzz around Penelope's role in 2006's Volver focused less on the performance than around the generous fake derrière she strapped on for the role. According to Almodovar, the padded rump was necessary for the character, an earthy, hard-working mother in the Anna Magnani tradition, and this makes sense, since Penelope Cruz is lovely, but talk about bun cakes — she ain't got 'em. But then a funny thing happened. Instead of drawing undue attention to Penelope's prodigious prosthetic posterior, the hype allowed moviegoers to grow accustomed to the sight of the suddenly callipygian Cruz, much in the same way Alejandro Amenabar leaked stills of a heavily made-up Javier Bardem to the Spanish press so the public would get used to his appearance in The Sea Inside. The gimmick paid off in the end, as Cruz's full-bodied (sorry) performance made the rockin' world go 'round, garnering her unprecedented critical praise and a rare (for a foreign-language performer) Best Actress Oscar nomination. In fact, after the success of Volver, the only question that remains for Penelope Cruz's career is: how can she leave this behind?

Vincent Gallo's Penis in THE BROWN BUNNY (2003)

When people actually got around to seeing Vincent Gallo's The Brown Bunny rather than just making fun of it (which isn't to say that they stopped making fun of it afterwards, or that many people actually got around to seeing it), the scene that generated the most buzz was what is delicately referred to as "the blowjob", where Gallo's lodge pole is climbed by Chloe Sevigny, for whom one has never felt more pity. The scene's verite qualities and (literally) naked emotional power are what most people talked about, although we think they were just grateful that something was actually happening in the movie after endless shots of Gallo driving aimlessly across country. Gallo, who tends to be pretty sensitive about things like this, has always claimed that the hog in question belongs to him; French director Claire Denis, on the contrary, claims that it is an artificial wang, and that, worse yet, it isn't even Vince's artificial wang — she says he stole it off the set of her 2001 film Trouble Every Day, in which he had a large part, but not that large part. In the absence of, er, concrete evidence from Gallo, we're going to go with Claire Denis' version of events; we figure that since she's not on record as hoping Roger Ebert gets cancer for giving one of her films a bad review, she's got the moral high ground.

Gwyneth Paltrow's Body in SHALLOW HAL (2001)

Hollywood's relationship with the overweight isn't exactly a history of sensitivity and kindness. Particularly where women are concerned, the mere suggestion of being a few pounds beyond anorexic means you're virtually unemployable; and in a city where people like Christina Ricci, Drew Barrymore and Britney Spears can be attacked in the press for being fat, roles for actual human women, let alone fat women, are few and far between. When the Farrelly brothers decided to make a movie about a shallow womanizer who falls in love with a 300-pound woman to prove that he can see 'inner beauty,' they had a casting decision to make: hire two people to play Rosemary Shanahan — one a beautiful, thin Hollywood blonde, to portray Hal's perception of her, and one a genuine 300-pound actress to portray the 'real' character — or just stick Gwyneth Paltrow in a fat suit? (It didn't help the whole unpleasant aftertaste of the movie that its male lead was Jack Black, an actor who gets romantic leads despite his own flabby physique; no actress with a body like Black's would ever nail down a leading-lady part.) Perhaps it's too much to expect anything like insight from filmmakers whose reputation is built on the gross-out comedy, but the fat suit is already a ethical minefield (representing, as it does, a sort of physical proof of Hollywood's allergy to hiring anyone genuinely overweight to appear in a prominent role) without filling it with an actress who probably weighed 110 pounds soaking wet when she was filming the role.

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

Willem Dafoe's Teeth in WILD AT HEART (1990)

The whole world seems to be rotting in David Lynch's nightmare road movie, and nowhere is this clearer than in the misbegotten mouth of white-trash villain Bobby Peru, played by Willem Dafoe in full-moon mode. Unholy, irredeemable, and defiantly unflossed, Bobby Peru is meant to be the ultimate dark void awaiting the young lovers at the end of their road to nowhere, and no Satanic movie character ever displayed a less welcoming smile. Perverse to the end, the still-smiling Bobby finally slides a shotgun beneath his chin and blows his own head off, after which the part of his body above the gum line must have felt a certain amount of relief.

Goldie Hawn's Fat in DEATH BECOMES HER (1992)

In this special-effects comedy, Goldie Hawn and Meryl Streep play lifelong rivals who achieve "undead" immortality and spend the rest of the movie blowing holes in each other, twisting each other's necks into pretzels, knocking their heads into their chest cavities, and generally behaving as if Chuck Jones were their stunt coordinator. But the most effective physical mutation in the picture may come when Hawn slips into an old-fashioned fat suit and layers of latex makeup to depict her character's depressive obesity after Streep has waltzed off with her fiancee. Nothing in the movie is funnier than Hawn's expression of malicious satisfaction, with her features sunk deep in the mass of her cream puff head, as she imagines raining destruction down on her gal pal. At the time, Hawn was forty-six years old and had spent a quarter of a century doing her damndest to hang onto the body and mannerisms of a teenage girl. Maybe she felt wickedly giddy at even pretending to have let herself go.

Dennis Hopper's False Leg in RIVER'S EDGE (1987)

Dennis Hopper, fresh from his comeback in Blue Velvet, lays claim to the being the counterculture's answer to Walter Brennan in this generation-gap study of alienated youth. John Heard made a good grab for the position in Cutter's Way, where he staggered around pretending to be one-legged and wore an eye patch to boot, but that was nothing compared to what you get when you equip Hopper with an artificial leg, an inflatable sex doll, and the name "Feck", and sit back to watch him rock. When Hopper, who deals dope to the local teenagers, sits down to remove his false leg, it symbolizes the loss of his own youthful innocence and the disconnect between the older characters and the young people, which is fed by their use of his own product. Or something like that. And did we mention that his character's name is Feck!?

— Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Vadim Rizov