The Screengrab : billy crystal

Precursors: Monsters, Inc. (2001)

Nick Schager — Tue, 26 May 2009 14:30:00 GMT

Pete Docter will likely be showered with praise come Friday, when his newest film Up – my review appears later this morning – arrives in theaters. Yet the director also deserves kudos for his feature debut, Monsters, Inc., which despite being a financial and critical success upon its release in 2001, seems to have become something of a forgotten member of the illustrious Pixar club. It’s an undeserved fate, given the pitch-perfect blend of sweetness and wise-cracking comedy delivered by this tale of two monsters, shaggy blue Sully (voiced by John Goodman) and one-eyed Mike Wazowski (Billy Crystal), whose lives harvesting human children’s screams for Monster’s Inc. – screams being the energy source that powers all of Monstropolis – are thrown for a loop when a young girl, affectionately dubbed “Boo” and thought by Mike and Sully to be, like all kids, toxic, crosses over into their world. Envisioning monsters as a humorous species who frighten tykes for a living is cute. Yet what sets Monsters, Inc. apart is the execution of its set-up, with Docter (working from a script co-written by Finding Nemo and WALL-E helmer Andrew Stanton) generating squish-free pathos by keeping the focus on his leads’ interpersonal dynamics – a rapport enlivened by Crystal’s expert vocal performance, and superb Abbot-and-Costello-ish chemistry with Goodman – while also spiking his material with the sharp, rat-a-tat-tat, anything-goes wit of a stand-up routine.

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: Feb. 14-20, 2009

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 22:00:00 GMT

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. You look marvelous. I must confess I was touched, as am I every year, when the good people at AMPAS called once again to ask me to host the Oscars. Although they begged and pleaded and cajoled and nearly stooped to bribery, as they always do, I simply could not work the telecast into my very busy schedule. I’m currently touring with my very touching one-man show about going to Yankee Stadium with my dad, watching Mickey Mantle gracefully prancing through the lush green outfield of the House That Ruth Built, sharing the laughs and the tears that only a father and son can truly know. So I don’t have time to do all the research, such as reading Up the Academy: The Screengrab Salutes the All-Time Best & Worst Best Picture Winners (Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six and Seven). Truly I wish I could squeeze Phil Nugent’s Oscar Predictions, In Other Blogs: Oscar Overload, Harvey Weinstein Predicts Another Great Oscar Year for Harvey Weinstein, Oscar Prospectus and Academy Awards Show Cuts Best Song Nominee "Down to Earth" Down to 65 Seconds; Peter Gabriel Vows Silent Protest into my busy schedule. But I cannot.

Nor can I read any of the following:

If It's Tuesday, It Must Be Time for Another Post About "The Godfather"

Screengrab Review: "Must Read After My Death" and "Eleven Minutes"

Mike White’s Amazing Race

Counting Down to “Watchmen”

Reviews By Request: How Green Was My Valley (1941, John Ford)

Unwatchable #51: “Simon Sez”

Steve Spielberg's Recession-Era "Lincoln" Biopic: Brother, Can You Spare $50 Million?

Thursday Poll for January 15, 2009

Paul Clark — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 00:00:00 GMT

With the Oscar ceremony little more than a month away and nominations being announced next week, I used last week’s Thursday Poll to ask you about your tastes in Oscar hosts. And you responded rather decisively that when it comes to recent Oscar emcees, your preference was for Jon Stewart, erstwhile host of The Daily Show and star of such cinematic gems as Death to Smoochy, Big Daddy and Playing By Heart, who brought in 57% of the votes. By some not-all-that-odd coincidence, Stewart also shared the screen with your second-favorite recent host, Steve Martin (24%), in Stewart’s big-screen debut, 1994’s Mixed Nuts (yeah, we’ve expelled it from our memory banks too). In third place was one-timer Ellen DeGeneres, with former Oscar mainstay Billy Crystal and the hugely divisive Chris Rock in a dead heat for last. How will Hugh Jackman compare? Well, he couldn’t be any worse than Rock, could he?

This week, on the tail of Clint Eastwood’s latest directing effort Gran Torino, we look at the iconic actor/director’s most celebrated films. A perennial Oscar favorite, Eastwood’s films have been nominated for Best Picture four times to date, winning twice. Which Eastwood-directed Best Picture nominee is your favorite?

Which is your favorite? | BuzzDash polls

As always, the comments section is open. See you next week!

In Search of a Midnight Reality Check: New Year's Eve at the Movies

Phil Nugent — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 16:30:00 GMT

Hey, happy New Year, everybody, but Josh Rosenblatt ain't having it. Rosenblatt has noticed that our attitudes towards important events in our lives tend to be colored by a template for how those events should look based on similar events they've seen in movies. "Even at my father's memorial service, I couldn't help thinking about Vito Corleone's funeral scene in The Godfather, wondering how ours looked by comparison. (Not too badly, as it turns out. A little light on gangsters and a little heavy on rabbis, but otherwise a perfect, totally depressing scene.)" And as he sees it, New Year's Eve is "when Hollywood really cranks up the fantasy quotient and goes out of its way to create the most unreasonable expectations for what a quality holiday experience – and, by extension, what a quality life – should be. New Year's movies play almost like advertisements: You too can fall madly in love with the perfect girl and commemorate the occasion with a 20-minute dance number set to a Gershwin score, like Gene Kelly in An American in Paris! You too can be blessed with economic and creative freedom at the stroke of midnight, like Tim Robbins in The Hudsucker Proxy! You too can find yourself in the middle of the perfect, fleeting romantic moment just by posting a request on the Internet, like Scoot McNairy in In Search of a Midnight Kiss! It's fantasy after fantasy, cultivating in our minds the most absurd notions of what is and isn't possible, of what we should and shouldn't expect from ourselves, on this one arbitrary night of the year."

Rosenblatt breaks "the most pernicious, ridiculous, self-defeating myths in our collective unconscious" associated with New Year's Eve down into a handful of categories. There's "the Myth of the 11th-Hour Conversion", as typified by the scene in When Harry Met Sally where Billy Crystal hies off to tell Meg Ryan that she's the one for him before the year ends, thus promoting "the happy delusion that love conquers all – space, time, disagreement, detachment, disaffection, disillusionment, late-Eighties hairdos, even karaoke – and that the love realized just as one year is turning into another is a love that will last forever. But in reality, what this movie shows us is that loneliness on New Year's Eve makes people do things they probably shouldn't." There's also "the Myth of Secular Redemption." Consider About a Boy, in which Hugh Grant lets Rachel Weisz think he's actually the father of his young chum Marcus so that she'll mistake him for a man of substance. "When Rachel finds out the truth, she dumps him, of course, precipitating an existential collapse that leads Will to the realization that without people to love, life is a spiritual vacuum. The Myth of Secular Redemption assures us that no one is beyond saving – that even the worst among us are capable of great acts of decency, especially when they fall in love on New Year's Eve. What a delightful moral for such a deviant movie to end with. Problem is, that isn't really the moral of the movie. The practiced cynical eye can see what the sad message of About a Boy really is: Lying is the perfect way to start a relationship.

Finally, there's the Myth of the Better You, as seen in The Apartment, in which Shirley MacLaine, the girl who's been screwing Jack Lemmon's mean, powerful prick of a boss (Fred MacMurray) who's been using Lemmon's apartment as his adulterous love nest, finds out, on New Year's Eve, that Lemmon has told MacMurray to take a flying leap and quit his job. She rushes to Lemmon's side, "and they play a game of bridge. Beautiful, right? The perfect New Year's movie? Love triumphs over cynicism; the nice guy gets the girl; our heroes become the most decent versions of themselves? Well, the sad truth about The Apartment is enough to make a grown film critic cry, so jaded is it in its view of human nature: She's going to cheat on him. No doubt about it. 'Shut up, and deal,' will soon sound like a thousand daggers" in Lemmon's heart. "Here's the thing," Rosenblatt writes. "Hollywood consistently paints New Year's Eve as a night of redemption, hope, and possibility, when in reality it's almost invariably a night of dashed expectations, disappointment, and anxiety." Believe me, I'm convinced. Now I just wish I could turn this guy loose on Forrest Gump.

That Guy! Special "Godfather" Edition, Part Two

Phil Nugent — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 16:00:00 GMT

This week, "The Godfather--The Coppola Restoration", a DVD and Blu-ray set consisting of newly remastered editions of the three "Godfather" films directed by Francis Ford Coppola, hits the stores. To honor the release of the home video set, That Guy!, the Screengrab's sporadic celebration of B-listers, character actors, and the working famous, is devoting itself this week to the backup chorus of these remarkable films.

RICHARD CASTELLANO: Squat, fat, and fleshy, Castellano casts a broad shadow as the loyal Corleone lieutenant Clemenza. Castellano, who is said to have ad-libbed his best-remembered line--the sage advice, "Leave the gun, take the cannoli."-- makes such a strong impression in The Godfather, and is so memorable because of his work in it, that it's kind of dumbfounding to realize how little else he left behind on film. After almost a decade or so of small parts in movies, TV, and the theater, his big break came with a role in the Joseph Bologna-Renee Taylor play Lovers and Others Strangers; he was nominated for a Tony Award for it, then won an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor when he recreated his performance for the movie version in 1970. His breakout success as Clemenza led to a string of starring roles in failed TV sitcoms (The Super, Joe and Sons) and supporting roles in Godfather knockoffs, such as the TV movies Incident on a Dark Street and Honor Thy Father (based on Gay Talese's nonfiction bestseller) and the short-lived dramatic series The Gangster Chronicles. Castellano maneuvered himself out of what should have been his one sure shot at a triumphant follow-up, in The Godfather, Part II: Francis Ford Coppola wrote him out of the screenplay after being confronted with what he felt were unreasonable demands involving salary, script approval, and other perks. It's easy to understand how Castellano, after slogging away in the business for so long, would find it hard not to pass up a chance to demand a little star treatment when he felt he could get away with it; it's just as easy to understand how Coppola, who already had his plate full with the million other details to the enormous production that demanded his production, would feel inclined to tell this ego-tripping fat load to take a walk. Castellano made his last film appearance in 1982 and died six years later.

MICHAEL V. GAZZO: In The Godfather, Part II, Michael Corleone has a moment where he tells the aging gangster Frankie "Five Angels" Pentageli how glad he is that his old family house "never went to strangers. First Clemenza took it over, and then you." Thus with one speck of throwaway dialogue did Francis Ford Coppola make his one gesture to filling in whatever happened to Clemenza after Michael's ascension to the throne. After things didn't work out with Richard Castellano, Coppola was obliged to create a new character and assign to him the function in the sequel that he had planned for Clemenza: that of the leftover representative of the old ways turned alienated betrayer. It put Gazzo, the man brought in to play the part, in a tough situation: he couldn't very well do an impression of Castellano, but he had to build from scratch someone who the audience could respond to with the same kind of affection that they would someone they remembered fondly from the first movie. Gazzo, with his walrus mustache, friendly gravelly croak, and effusive but elegaic manner, actually managed to pull this off, helped by a wonderful entrance scene where he begs for a drink of water from a garden hose and then reveals that he's not too big a man to put up with Fredo's company for a few minutes. Although Gazzo, a graduate of the Actors Studio who went on to form a West Coast theater workshop in his own name, had done some acting going back to the 1950s--he's an uncredited bit player in On the Waterfront-- before he played Pentageli, he was best known for writing the "I-was-a-Method-dope fiend" play A Hatful of Rain. (He would eventually get to adapt that text for the movies, and also worked on the script for the Elvis Presley vehicle King Creole.) Godfather II effectively made him America's favorite aging goombah; it left him all but guaranteed of steady work, especially on TV, where he usually played characters whose last name ended in a vowel and who could be counted on to at some point deliver a variation on the line, "I want this Kojak/Baretta/B.J. and the Bear problem taken care of!" His second most notable movie role was in James Toback's 1978 directorial debut, Fingers, where he was funny and poignant as a whipped, washed-up loan shark who is treated protectively by his violently unhinged son, played by Harvey Keitel. He died in 1995.

BRUNO KIRBY: The son of the actor Bruce Kirby, Bruno Kirby was the epitome of the potato-faced, fast-talking, New York-honking character guy whose specialty was amusing audiences while appearing to drive everybody who has to share a screen with him right up the wall. At his most high-profile, he was the kind of actor who gets to play sidekick to the kind of actor--such as Billy Crystal in City Slickers or Albert Brooks in Modern Romance--who had to produce or direct the movie in order to star in it. Perhaps his best, most weirdly typical role was in "The Gas Man", an episode of the TV series Homicide, in which he played an embittered ex-con who was twisted and ambitious enough to plot a baroque plan for the detective (Andre Braugher) who'd put him away but not quite mad enough to carry through on it when he had the chance. In The Godfather, Part II, the most handsome item on his resume, he's thoroughly un-typical: cast as the young Clemenza, and billed as "B. Kirby, Jr.", he's not immediately recognizable in his padded suits and with his Italian accent, which inhibits him from doing his customary high-pitched jabbering. But many years later, he'd get to bring his customary type into the Corleone's world through the side door when he was cast as helpmate to Marlon Brando in his mock-Don Vito role in the 1990 comedy The Freshman. Kirby died from complications from leukemia in 2006.

Yesterday's Hits: City Slickers (1991, Ron Underwood)

Paul Clark — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 19:00:00 GMT

What made City Slickers a hit?: The Western was one of classical Hollywood’s most popular genres. But while the greatest Westerns have endured in the American consciousness to this day, the popularity of Western films went downhill during the 1960s. By the 1980s, the number of Westerns made by Hollywood had dwindled to a handful of titles per year, and only a few of these (Young Guns, Dances With Wolves) made any money. At a time when people sat through long commutes to work and sweated the economic recession, it was hard for most audiences to relate to the old-fashioned cowboy mythos.

Yet even then, Westerns exerted a pull on our imaginations. The inspiration behind City Slickers was the way it combined the pleasures of an old-fashioned cattle-drive Western with characters with whom the audience could identify. The movie’s heroes weren’t larger than life, but rather a trio of middle-aged everyguys trying to escape the doldrums of modern life- bad marriages, dead-end jobs, fears of growing old- by embracing (after a fashion) the cowboy lifestyle, if only for two weeks. Add to this the presence of popular comic Billy Crystal, who has recently shown his leading-man chops with 1989’s When Harry Met Sally, and the combination of comedy and cowboys proved irresistible to audiences. City Slickers became one of 1991’s biggest hits, raking in nearly $125 million at the domestic box office.

What happened?: Sometimes, there’s no easily-pinpointed factor to explain a movie’s fall from its original level of popularity. While some blockbusters continue to factor prominently in popular culture and others fall from grace, most just sort of fade into the background. Of course, the misbegotten 1994 sequel City Slickers II: The Legend of Curly’s Gold didn’t help matters. But mostly, City Slickers’ lack of enduring pop culture influence can be chalked up to the fact that it appealed primarily to middle-aged moviegoers, rarely the sort of audiences that fanatically obsess over a movie until it enters the popular lexicon.

Does City Slickers still work?: It mostly does, although it’s not without its drawbacks. For a movie that was sold primarily on its famously funny leading man, the comedic scenes are among the movie’s least effective. Part of the problem is Crystal, whose trademark kvetching (and oft-repeated refrain of “hel-loooooooooo???”) quickly becomes irritating. Not helping matters is director Ron Underwood’s misguided decision to underscore all of the big slapstick moments with jaunty, cutesy music by Marc Shaiman. These scenes lean too heavily on the wacky factor, which drains away whatever wit was originally there.

But while it’s not nearly as funny as it thinks it is, City Slickers is a sturdy and self-aware twist on the Western genre. Despite their fast-paced modern lives, lifelong friends Mitch (Crystal), Phil (Daniel Stern) and Ed (Bruno Kirby) were raised on Westerns, and this colors their experiences on the trail. They show both fear and respect for aging trail boss Curly (Oscar-winner Jack Palance), who Mitch proclaims “the toughest guy I’ve ever seen,” but the two of them also bond during their time together on the trail. The characters explicitly reference Red River, The Magnificent Seven, Rawhide, Bonanza, and other favorites, but they do so in a way that presents them as shared pieces of their past instead of simply clever allusions. And the movie becomes surprisingly exciting when the unlikely cowpokes have to bring the herd in by themselves, and it’s a satisfying scene when they actually pull it off.

However, City Slickers is at its best when dealing with the friendship between its heroes. Screenwriters Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel were Hollywood’s go-to guys in the late eighties and early nineties for mainstream fare about middle-aged everyguys, and this movie demonstrates why. Likewise, Crystal, Stern and Kirby have an easy and infectious bonhomie that makes them convincing as three men who’ve remained friends through both good and bad. The late Kirby is especially good as the most pragmatic of the three, who worked his way up from a difficult childhood to create a comfortable life, but has never lost his taste for adventure. And verbal shtick aside, Crystal is affecting as the ill-at-ease salaryman Mitch, who ventures West with his lifelong friends with the goal of “finding his smile.” In the end, he does, and so did I.

Charles H. Joffe, 1929-2008

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 17:30:00 GMT

Charles H. Joffe, a talent agent, business manager, and producer best known to casual filmgoers as the producer of a number of Woody Allen's best films, has died in his home town of Los Angeles at the age of 78.

Felled by a persistent lung ailment, Joffe had been ill for some time, but since the 1950s, he had been a powerhouse wheeler and dealer in Hollywood and New York. His Rollins Joffee talent agency, founded with partner Jack Rollins, was the first to book Lenny Bruce, and later handled the careers of some of the biggest names in comedy, including David Letterman, Dick Cavett, Robin Williams, Martin Short, Billy Crystal, Robert Klein, and the team of Mike Nichols & Elaine May. He had a reputation as a tough, old-school, cigar-chewing negotiator whose gift for big-money contracts often saw his clients turning over huge profits within a short time of signing with him.

Joffe's first film as a producer with Woody Allen was Take the Money and Run, the success of which he was able to leverage into a then-unprecedented degree of artistic control over his films for the director. He is listed either as producer, co-producer or executive producer on all of Allen's films up to and including the yet-to-be-released Vicki Cristina Barcelona, and when Annie Hall won the Best Picture Oscar in 1977, it was Joffe who picked up the prize in Woody Allen's stead. According to the New York Times, he was a stern and frank figure in the careers of his proteges, and offered up the following advice to a young Allen, frustrated at the dues-paying period he spent making films like Casino Royale: "You're trying to get into the film business. It's going to be a big picture, and you're in it with a lot of stars. You're having a nice time in London, playing poker every night and visiting all the museums. Just shut up."

DVD Digest for June 3, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 14:00:00 GMT

With Father’s Day coming in less than two weeks, the studios begin to unveil their snazzy new editions of what TNT used to call “movies for guys who like movies.” We’ve got all the manly movies you need to keep dad happy while mom and her friends are out seeing the Sex and the City movie (seriously, how did we not see that coming?).

Before Clint Eastwood became known as an Academy Award-winning filmmaker (or a guy who co-starred with an orangutan) he was first and foremost a grimacing badass. And while some- including yours truly- have a soft spot for his Man With No Name trilogy- the most enduring character from this period would also certainly be “Dirty” Harry Callahan. This week, Warner unveils new DVD and Blu-Ray editions of all five of Eastwood’s Dirty Harry films, featuring all of the features from previous DVD editions plus a number of new ones. Most notably, Warner Brothers’ box set (the films are also sold separately) includes a new feature-length documentary, Clint Eastwood: Out of the Shadows. In addition, the memorabilia included in the box set includes a 40-page hardcover book and a map of San Francisco detailing Harry’s hunt for Scorpio.

But if dad’s looking for wartime heroism (Blu-Ray only), MGM and Fox both have something that’ll fit the bill. MGM will unveil Blu-Ray editions of A Bridge Too Far and Battle of Britain this week, although these new discs will contain no special features. So if it’s tricked out Blu-Rays (and better movies) you want, go with Fox’s war DVDs. The studio will be releasing three of its classics- Patton, The Longest Day and The Sand Pebbles- exclusively on Blu-Ray, packed with special features and all the bells and whistles he could ever hope for.

But that’s not all, folks. If dad wants some laughs with his testosterone, buy him the new City Slickers: Collector’s Edition (MGM), which gives him some Western action, male bonding humor courtesy of Crystal, Kirby and Stern, and of course Jack Palance, who even in death can still crap bigger than you. Other, more recent dudely comedies releasing this week include Semi-Pro (New Line, also Blu-Ray), Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Comedy Show (Lionsgate), and for the father whose enjoyment of movies far outweighs his taste, Meet the Spartans (Fox, also Blu-Ray). And what’s a list of guy movies with James Bond? Sony will release a new three-disc edition of Casino Royale, Bond’s best big-screen adventure since the sixties (there, I said it).

Other new releases this week include: Anton Corbijn’s Ian Curtis biopic Control (Weinstein Company); the Jessica Alba remake of The Eye (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray); Michael Caine and Demi Moore in Flawless (Magnolia); the long-delayed The Onion Movie (Fox); and Asia Argento just the way we like her (i.e. mostly naked and toting a gun) in Olivier Assayas’ Boarding Gate (Magnolia). The week’s most notable non-guy-movie old-school release is Jean-Jacques Beineix’s seminal Cinema du look classic Diva (Lionsgate). Finally, releasing on Blu-Ray only: Cloverfield (Paramount), Signs (Buena Vista), The Recruit (Buena Vista), There Will Be Blood (Paramount).

A Brief Guide to this Year's Academy Awards Outrages

Phil Nugent — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 18:00:00 GMT

The Academy Awards were handed out this past weekend in an annual ceremony whose main reason for being, aside from giving me the chance to look like a mouth-breathing chucklehead in my "Oscar predictions" piece, is to give the bloggers of this great nation a chance to pick out things to be scandalized over. It's important to make sure that everyone can read about the three-ring circus of horrors with extra added attractions that is the Oscars show, since it's already been well established that nobody actually watches the damn thing. But people who read the Screengrab but otherwise have lives may have missed out on a few of the finer points of this year's extravaganza. Here's a handy breakdown of all the terrible things they did this time to help you make conversation this weekend with your hairdresser or bookie.

They dissed Whoopi Goldberg: Goldberg, who stepped in to host the Oscars ceremony four times, presumably because Billy Crystal was feeling light-headed those years and was afraid that if he went on he might slip and say something funny, was not included in a montage of past emcees. It has been reported that the next day, Goldberg "choked up" and "forced back tears" on her day job, The View, because she was so hurt by the perceived slight. I would assume that this is, at the very least, a gross exaggeration, but I once saw a clip from The View where one of the regular co-hosts proudly announced that she didn't know whether or not the Earth is flat because there was no way that she could investigate the subject and still have time "to feed my child" — what's the kid weigh, six hundred pounds? — and she didn't immediately vanish through a trap door, never to be seen again, so I can only assume that anything goes on that show, so long as it's stupid. Anyway, Gil Cates, the distinguished veteran director and Oscars honcho whose own children refer to him as "Phoebe's uncle", is said to have called Goldberg and assured her that no insult was intended and urged her to dry her tears on his slightly used handkerchief.

They also dissed Brad Renfro: Renfro, who died a month ago at the age of twenty-five, was not included in the montage honoring movie people who passed on over the course of the past year. The inescapable point of comparison here was with Heath Ledger, who died a week to the day after Renfro's death. Rather than send Gil Cates over to the cemetary to cry on Renfro's grave, the Academy felt content with just sending out a spokesperson to say, "Unfortunately we cannot include everyone." With TMZ and Perez Hilton leading the charge, some entertainment news outlits and random bloggers tried to erect a conspiracy theory that Renfro had been denied a place in the memorial roster because his youthful death of a drug overdose after a prolonged slide in his career and personal life was not a "feel good" kind of death; they seemed oblivious to the fact that they seemed to be suggesting that Ledger's death had, by comparison, made everybody feel all warm and fuzzy inside. A lot of people checking in at the comments sections seemed to be awfully well-adjusted to the idea that Renfro just wasn't as big a name as some of the others who had made it in. The whole sad business served mainly to underline the fact that, by a quirk of fate, Renfro's death was overshadowed by that of Ledger, which the public and the press alike seemed to agree was more tragic, or at least more shocking and unexpected. Also omitted from the montage: Roy Scheider, whose death a couple of weeks ago came too late for him to be included.

They didn't do F. W. Murnau any favors, either: Handing out the award for Best Cinematography, Cameron Diaz reported that the first award ever given in that category had gone to F. W. Murnau's 1927 silent masterpiece Sunrise and then mentioned that the lead characters in that movie were identified in the credits only as "The Man", "The Wife", and "The Woman from the City," and giggled, "Sounds like a fun shoot." Film savvy bloggers such as Self-Styled Siren and James Wolcott were put out by Ms. Diaz — or, to assign the blame where it really belongs, by whatever nimrod wrote that "joke" to go on the cue cards — for apparently mocking a masterpiece. I'm not even sure that anything as self-confident and opinionated as mockery was intended; maybe it was just a tone-deaf stab at double entendre, it's really hard to tell. But it's easy to share in the feeling that it's a strange way for people who are presumably gathered to honor the art of the motion picture to behave, to snicker at a classic in a way that seems to presume that nobody who's not dead or kicking back in an iron lung has seen or would want to, just to kill thirty seconds of a show that's too long anyway. The really funny thing is that, by general consensus, the highlight of the evening was provided by the kids from Once — whose characters in that movie are officially identified in the credits as "Guy" and "Girl."

And their mama dresses them funny: The main news about this year's collection of carps about ugly-looking clothes of the rich and famous may be that the daughter of a legendary American playwright and the wife of the world's greatest actor seems to have inspired more incredulous stares than the award-winning screenwriter and former stripper whose name sounds like a '70s porn star's CB handle. Writing in Slate, Dana Stevens took this gracious approach with regard to Rebecca Miller: "She's a published fiction writer who's also directed several films (Personal Velocity, The Ballad of Jack and Rose). She's just too smart and cool to be wearing that dress unironically." A few brave souls elsewhere did note that Mr. Rebecca Miller, one Daniel Day-Lewis, was wearing shoes he stole from the kid who always gets picked last for red-rover, red-rover and a tuxedo that actually looks like one of those T-shirts that's supposed to look like a tuxedo. And to judge from his hair, the couple had recently moved into Jerry Seinfeld's building after the super installed the low-pressure shower heads. Is it possible that one of them first tried on his or her outfit as a joke that the spouse didn't get, and that then the spouse went out of his or her way to pick out a ridiculous-looking outfit so at least that the other wouldn't be publicly humiliated without a little company? And you thought The Gift of the Magi was a heart-tugger!

The Ten Worst Medical Breakthroughs in Movie History, Part 1

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

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

THE INCREDIBLE TWO-HEADED TRANSPLANT (1971)

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

JUNIOR (1994)

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

THEY SAVED HITLER’S BRAIN (1963)

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

FLATLINERS (1990)

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

UNIVERSAL SOLDIER (1992)

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

DEEP BLUE SEA (1999)

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

— Paul Clark, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

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