The Screengrab : blade runner

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 21 May 2009 20:30:00 GMT

Albert Finney in BIG FISH (2003)

How powerful is Albert Finney’s death scene in Tim Burton’s tall tale of a man with larger-than-life recollections of his own personal history? Well, let’s put it this way: according to New York magazine, “The last his family saw of [monologist Spalding Gray] was Saturday, January 10, [2004] when he took the kids to see Big Fish, the story of a dying father’s relationship with his son, at the Loews Village on Third Avenue and 11th Street. After the movie, Gray wept.” And then, 24 hours later, he tossed himself off the Staten Island ferry into the East River. Perhaps the special power of the movie for Gray (and creative types in general, myself included) is best captured in the final line, after Finney (as Edward Bloom, a character played in flashbacks by Ewan McGregor) inspires his son (Billy Crudup) to mitigate the tragedy of death through art and fantasy: “A man tells a story over and over so many times he becomes the story. In that way, he is immortal.” And, frankly, isn’t reimagining the world and hoping for some existence beyond it (in Heaven and/or in films, novels, scientific discoveries, progeny, blog entries, etc.) more or less the heart of human existence? For me, the greatest terror is thinking my consciousness and memories (not to mention the existence of my friends, relatives...even acquaintances and pets) will be erased forever at death. In particular, I dread the eventual demise of my parents and cling to hopes and fantasies that somehow there’s more than an empty void at the end of our road after all the fun and struggle of life...and so Burton’s film (about a father’s death transformed by flights of fancy) hit me like a 2x4, unleashing an unexpected, uncontrollable torrent of emotion unlike anything I’ve ever experienced at the movies (or maybe it was just the cameo by Miley Cyrus, in her feature film debut, back when she was known as “Destiny"). (AO)

Rutger Hauer in BLADE RUNNER (1982)

Hauer’s Roy Batty is one of the screen’s most nuanced villains; while he’s a ruthless killer who’s not above playing with his victims the way a cat does a gutted rat, he’s also got a higher purpose. Roy is a replicant – an artificial life-form programmed to live only a short time so his intellect and emotions won’t develop to a human level – but in his case, it’s too late: he reaches a near-total self-awareness before his time is up. At the end of this science-fiction masterpiece, Roy toys with Detective Rick Deckard, who has wiped out most of his friends; he brutalizes him while taunting his own moral superiority: “Aren’t you the good man?” But nothing can be done; Roy knows he’s on the way out, and his last act isn’t to kill, but to save Deckard’s life. As he fades out into nonexistence, he drives home the film’s central question of what it means to be human, reminding Deckard that when he dies, his unique mind and irreplaceable memories will be gone forever, “like tears in the rain.” It’s a philosophically deep and emotionally powerful ending in a genre that rarely sees the two combined. (LP)

Duane Jones in NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968)

The zombie movie has reached its oversaturation point and is now just kind of annoying, but the movie that started it all, George Romero’s low-budget classic Night of the Living Dead, still holds the power to chill, and its final scene – extremely massive spoiler alert, for those of you who have somehow missed out on seeing this over the last forty years – is a real gut-punch. Level-headed, competent Ben (played by Duane Jones in what was at the time a controversial casting decision, placing an African-American actor in the lead against a group of whites) has managed to fend off seemingly endless onslaughts of flesh-hungry zombies, conquering threats from without and within, over the course of a nightmarish day when his life was constantly in danger. Finally securing a measure of peace, he beds down in the abandoned farmhouse for the night, plotting how he will make his escape the following morning; when he awakens, without foreshadowing and without fanfare, he is fatally shot by a passing sheriff’s posse who mistake him for one of the living dead he’s spent the entire rest of the movie fighting. It’s an inspired, if exceptionally cruel, ending, and it gives us the first glimpse of the nasty social commentary that would feature in Romero’s later work. (LP)

Faye Dunaway & Warren Beatty in BONNIE AND CLYDE (1967)

The demise of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker at the end of Arthur Penn’s paradigm-busting gangster epic shouldn’t have come as any kind of surprise; after all, anyone who knew the history of the two criminals knew how they met their end, and had probably seen the photos of their car, pierced with hundreds of bullet holes. What Penn’s unforgettable death scene accomplishes, then, isn’t shock because of what happens, but rather how it’s depicted; refusing to take the easy way out, Penn forces us to watch Bonnie and Clyde (with whom we’ve spend the entire movie being forced into a bizarre sympathy) die the way they likely did in real life: in a horrible, convulsing, twitching, gory, pitiful mass of blood and gore. Different people took the ending in different ways, from the straights who saw it as a long-overdue comeuppance to the heads who felt it was another example of rebel heroes dying at the hands of the Man; but no one who saw it forgot it easily, and it substantially upped the ante for violence in Hollywood. From then on, no death would be simple and bloodless and abstracted; over the next two decades, the town would be drowned in gore from movies that picked up the gauntlet that Bonnie and Clyde threw down. (LP)

Orson Welles in CITIZEN KANE (1941)

Orson Welles was already a restless, experimental genius at the astonishingly young age of 26 when he brought Citizen Kane to the screen. It’s widely considered one of the greatest films of all time for good reasons, many of which stem from Welles’ desire to rewrite the rules of filmmaking and start fresh from the ground up; and he doesn’t waste any time, putting the central character’s dramatic death scene at the beginning of the movie and working back from there to solve the mystery. At the top of the film, we see Charles Foster Kane as a bedridden old man, and before we even know who this man surrounded by opulent treasures is, he expires, letting a snow globe crash to the floor, and with his last breath, hissing the word ‘Rosebud’ – the key to the rest of the story. Welles later expressed dissatisfaction with this scene, saying he never quite felt right about it and writing off ‘Rosebud’ as a cheap Freudian gimmick, but its power has remained: it’s still counted as one of the most remembered death scenes in cinema, ‘Rosebud’ is at the top of the list of cinematic famous last words, and the whole sequence has been parodied thousands of times in dozens of media. (LP)

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce

Taxing Time: A Screengrab Salute To Beat The Clock Cinema (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 21:30:00 GMT

ALIENS (1986) & GALAXY QUEST (1999)

Life will be more stressful in the future, partly because of the ravenous extraterrestrials and tyrannical galactic tyrants we’ll encounter, but mostly because the ticking clocks in our race-against-time adventures will be replaced by soothing female voices announcing our impending doom every few seconds. That’s the case in Aliens anyway, a movie Roger Ebert called “so intense that it creates a problem for me as a reviewer: Do I praise its craftsmanship, or do I tell you it left me feeling wrung out and unhappy?” How’s this for suspense: not only does Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley find herself trapped in a space colony infested with slimy, ravenous xenomorphs (and the equally slimy Paul Reiser), but following a mishap with a nuclear reactor, the whole joint winds up on the verge of self-destruction! And then the evil Alien Queen grabs Newt (Carrie Henn), the sweet little orphan girl Ripley’s been trying to save for most of the movie!! And then, just when Ripley and Newt finally escape to the roof of the burning, exploding complex, they discover their ride is gone!!! And then it turns out the Alien Queen knows how to use elevators!!!! And she’s got David Fincher with her!!!!! And that damn soothing female voice won’t stop reminding everyone how close they are to death!!!!!! Aiiiieeeeee!!!!!!!!! Later, in the smartly high-concept Galaxy Quest, Weaver once again winds up in a desperate space race against time, trapped with co-star Tim Allen in a real-life starship designed by a much friendlier bunch of aliens to mimic the specs of their old TV starship...including the standard issue self-destruct gizmo that always counts down to zero in the most suspenseful possible way. (AO)

BLADE RUNNER (1982)

At first, time doesn’t appear to be much of a factor in the visionary sci-fi classic Blade Runner. Harrison Ford’s Deckard has to hunt down the escaped replicants, true, but they don’t seem to have a particular goal in mind, and for a while, his search for them is discursive, even leisurely. But it soon becomes clear that even if he’s not racing against time, the replicants are – their leader, Roy Batty, beautifully played by Rutger Hauer, knows that his kind is programmed with a finite lifespan, and that any moment could be his last. The brutish Leon taunts Deckard with this information in their confrontation, but in the end, Roy turns it into a tragedy. His death is the only thing that saves Deckard’s life, but by that time, it’s clear that something truly unique and precious is being lost, and the sensation is not one of relief, but of profound grief and regret. Fading from existence, Roy half-sneers, half-laments that he has seen things that Deckard cannot even begin to imagine; but because he is both more and less than human, it will all be lost at that moment the clock makes its final tick. (LP)

ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981)

Lean, mean and exhilarating, John Carpenter’s Escape From New York confirmed that the Halloween auteur was capable of delivering more than just horror. In a nightmarish future 1997, New York City has been transformed into a massive, walled-off maximum-security prison, and when Air Force One crashes on the island and the president is taken hostage one day before an all-important nuclear summit, badass criminal Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell) is recruited for a daring rescue mission. Plissken is given a 24-hour deadline that’s made more pressing by the fact that he’s been injected with micro-explosives that’ll blow if he fails his task in the allotted time-frame, a set-up that Carpenter mines for as much rousing action as possible. From a fight with an enormous bruiser, to a cab ride over a bridge covered in mines, iconic anti-hero Plissken’s efforts to save the commander-in-chief from the clutches of Isaac Hayes’ baddie – an undertaking that involves enlisting help from Ernest Borgnine, Harry Dean Stanton and Adrienne Barbeau – remains a thrilling, kick-ass sci-fi saga, and a testament to Carpenter’s still-underappreciated directorial greatness. (NS)

THE TAKING OF PELHAM ONE TWO THREE (1974)

There are endless thrillers and caper flicks that depend on split-second timing for the bad guys’ nefarious plan to succeed, but the genius of Joseph Sargent’s tight little ‘70s thriller is that it places the action on a New York subway train, a milieu in which people already get terribly bent out of shape if there’s any deviation from the strict timetable. Populated by a cast of old-school character actors (including Walter Matthau Robert Shaw, Martin Balsam, Hector Elizondo, and Jerry Stiller) who virtually define the word “craggy”, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three features a quartet of criminals – presciently given colors as code names, twenty years before Reservoir Dogs – who must ensure perfect timing and clever planning to overcome the fact that they’re committing their caper on a form of transportation that can’t possibly deviate from its course. A big-budget remake is being released later this year, but its flashy cast and jillion-dollar price tag almost guarantee it won’t have any of the grubby charm or jangling energy of the original. (LP)

Only a few precious seconds remaining to Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Five & Six!!!!

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Nick Schager

Trailer: 9

Paul Clark — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 17:00:00 GMT

A few years ago, I saw Shane Acker’s original animated short 9 as part of one of Mike Judge and Don Hertzfeldt’s Animation Show programs and was mightily impressed. Rather than aping the look of sci-fi benchmarks like Blade Runner or the style of anime, Acker and his animation team created a unique futuristic vision. But while I’m curious to see whether Acker, now backed by Tim Burton and Wanted’s Timur Bekmambetov, I’m not all that thrilled with this first trailer. Rather than really drawing the audience into the world Acker has created, the folks who cut this trailer together have instead thrown together a montage of images, with plenty of explosions and brief peeks at the characters who drive the story. Don’t get me wrong- I’m still looking forward to Acker’s feature. I’m just not sure Hollywood knows what to do with it.

Set Your DVR!: December 15 - 22, 2008

Hayden Childs — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 16:00:00 GMT

What a great week for movies on cable! Here’s what’s coming up that’s worth your time. In the spirit of the holidays, I’ve even gotten a little expansive. But this week brings another embarrassment of riches.

The times are, as always, in Central/Eastern format. Also, as always, please let me know in comments if you see something coming up that I’ve missed. I’ll try to add it to the regular column if I can, but my time will be tight in the next few weeks, so please don’t be too disappointed if I don’t get to your recommendation.

Monday, December 15:
2:45/3:45 pm: Mystery Train on IFC. Jim Jarmusch’s triptych about the strange charms of Memphis, TN.
6:25/7:25 pm: George Washington on IFC.

Tuesday, December 16:
3:25/4:25 am: Mystery Train on IFC.
6:50/7:50 am: George Washington on IFC.
7/8 am: Decision at Sundown on TCM. A Randolph Scott & Budd Boetticher Western, and that means good.
7:30/8:30 am: Batman on AMC. This is the 1966 Batman, the very definition of campy.
10:25/11:25 am: Howl’s Moving Castle on IFC. Miyazaki’s great animated film about war and magic and love and identity, presented here in the original Japanese with subtitles.
12:30/1:30 pm: George Washington on IFC.
4:05/5:05 pm: The Thin Red LIne on IFC. Malick’s unconventional anti-war drama is a force of nature.
5/6 pm: The Cincinnati Kid on TCM. What could be more exciting than Steve McQueen playing high-stakes poker?
7/8 pm: Shadow of a Doubt on TCM. Great little second-tier Hitchcock film that ought to be in the first tier.
11 pm/12 am: The Third Man on TCM. If you like movies and haven’t seen this, you MUST rectify your oversight immediately.

Wednesday, December 17:
8:30/9:30 pm: Death on the Nile on TCM. A Hercule Poirot mystery that was a favorite of mine when I was a kid. The nonstop excitement practically screams “heavyset Belgian detective!”
8/9 pm: The Thin Red Line on IFC.
11 pm/12 am: The New World on IFC. That's a lot of Malick for one sitting!

Thursday, December 18:
1:30/2:30 am: The Thin Red Line on IFC.
4:25/5:25 am: The New World on IFC.
9:15/10:15 am: The Naked City on TCM. One of the greatest film noirs.
10:30/11:30 pm: Blade Runner on SCIFI. Always worth a viewing.
11 pm/12 am: Vanishing Point on FMC. As the Zen koan says, -There is no why. There is only Kowalski driving through the desert.

Friday, December 19:
12/1 am: Before Sunset on WE. I try not to mention movies that will be broken by commercials, but this one, a sequel to 1995’s Before Sunrise, has a certain charm in its older, wiser take on young love.
1:30/2:30 am: Elephant on IFC. Dreamy Van Sant flick about high school snipers.
3/4 am: Vanishing Point on FMC.
8:45/9:45 am: Paths of Glory on TCM.
5:30/6:30 pm: The Others on OXYGEN. Pleasantly creepy ghost story starring Nicole Kidman.
6:15/7:15 pm: The Player on IFC. Altman’s tour de force “conventional Hollywood” film, which starts with an extended homage to Touch of Evil and proceeds to tear down the walls of Old Hollywood.
8:30/9:30 pm: The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou on IFC. Many Wes Anderson fans felt that this was the moment when his whimsy and prop fetish finally overwhelmed his ability to tell a story. I think there’s a beating heart in this story, but The Darjeeling Limited was an unpleasant stillborn mess.
11 pm/12 am: The Face of Another on IFC. Brilliant and creepy Japanese horror film about the slippery nature of identity.

Saturday, December 20:
2/3 am: The Face of Another on IFC.
5:30/6:30 am: The Ox-Bow Incident on AMC.
7/8 am: The Hidden Fortress on IFC. Akira Kurosawa’s tale of a princess in peril, swept away by war, protected by her loyal general, and kept constantly on the verge of trouble by a couple of bumbling peasants. Reportedly one of the major inspirations for Star Wars.
7/8 am: The Others on OXYGEN.
7:15/8:15 am: My Darling Clementine on AMC. Iconic John Ford Western about the shootout at the OK Corral.
2:30/3:30 pm: 8 Women on LOGO.
5:35/6:35 pm: Gosford Park on IFC. Robert Altman’s brilliant upstairs/downstairs Edwardian murder mystery.
8:30/9:30 pm: Mulholland Dr. on LOGO. One of David Lynch’s best films, propelled by dream-logic and horror.

Sunday, December 21:
8:45/9:45 am: Kiss of Death on FMC. Top-notch film noir. Unfortunately, it’s playing at the same time as...
8:45/9:45 am: The Testament of Dr. Mabuse on IFC. Fritz Lang’s 1933 thriller that didn’t just invent the procedural, but built it on a parable about a crime boss able to mesmerize his subordinates with his words and imagery. Lang fled the Nazis for America almost immediately after its release. The ability of many of the scenes to retain their shock value today is a testament to this movie's sheer brilliance.
12:15/1:15 pm: Gosford Park on IFC.

Monday, December 22:
2:45/3:45 am: The 400 Blows on TCM. Francois Truffaut’s incredibly powerful ode to child neglect and juvenile delinquency.
7/8 am: Au Revoir, Les Enfants on IFC. Fantastic Louis Malle flick about a boarding school in France during the Nazi occupation that’s hiding a young Jew.
11 am/12 pm: Bringing Up Baby on TCM. A screwball comedy classic that everyone should see at least once in this all-too-short life.
12:30/1:30 pm: Au Revoir, Les Enfants on IFC.

Visions of Change: Cinematic Utopias & Worst Case Scenarios (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 23:00:00 GMT

THE ROAD WARRIOR (1981)

Before he went all screwy on us (or, rather, before we discovered how screwy he’d apparently always been), Mel Gibson starred in The Road Warrior (a.k.a. Mad Max 2), just about the purest (and best) action film ever made. By the end of 1979’s Mad Max, things are already pretty bleak for Gibson’s titular character, an ex-cop whose family and best friend have all been killed by anarchic speed demon terrorists. But things are much worse in the sequel: society has broken down completely, people are killing and dying for petrol and for some reason everyone is required to wear football shoulder pads. Our protagonist has become a leather-clad man with no name, roaming the Outback with only a dog (who, like anyone else that gets too cozy with Gibson’s character, is doomed from the start). Eventually, Max’s need for fossil fuel forces him to choose between a bunch of dirty socialists living family-style in a fortified compound and Lord Humungus’ torture-loving, not-gay-at-all free market enthusiasts, who spread democracy with cool wrist-mounted crossbows. The film’s fuel-depleted landscape is a wonderland for plucky, self-sufficient mavericks who like to shoot things from helicopters (or, more specifically, gyro-copters), but like most totally cool, under-populated places where you don’t have to think about anyone but yourself, the pedal-to-the-metal, smash-and-grab wasteland freedom of The Road Warrior eventually gives way to the pesky forces of civilization (complete with charismatic black leader) in 1985’s Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome.

LOST HORIZON (1973)

It’s a cliché to say that one man’s utopia is another man’s dystopia; the only way to make it interesting is to show us why. Lost Horizon, a 1973 remake of a 1937 classic, sets out to show us how even the best human intentions can make a Hell of Heaven, and it certainly succeeds, but not in the way it intends. Instead of illustrating its point by skillfully telling how a group of outsiders come to Shangri-La and spoil its utopian purity with their unchecked desires, it illustrates the concept of a dystopia by being a really, really shitty movie. It’s hard to know exactly what the worst thing about this stink-bomb of a musical is: is it the crappy songs, surely the worst things ever to have Burt Bacharach’s name attached? Is it the bad acting from bad actors, or the worse acting from good actors? Is it Charles Jarrott’s incompetent directing, Larry Kramer’s wildly stupid screenplay, or producer Ross Hunter’s ability to spend gobs of money on a movie that looks absolutely terrible? Yeah, those are all good candidates, but for our money, the worst part is the decision to make it a singing, dancing musical and then cast people in it – the corpselike Peter Finch, the ungulate Liv Ullman, the bombed-out-of-her-mind Sally Kellerman, and the completely lost George Kennedy – who have no apparent ability to dance or sing. Let’s not even get into Bobby Van. Long unavailable for home audiences, Lost Horizon is a so-bad-it’s-just-incredibly-bad classic that screams for a DVD release.

BLADE RUNNER (1982)

Movies have shown us a near infinite number of futuristic dystopias, but few of them have seemed as plausible as the Los Angeles of 2019 in Ridley Scott’s sci-fi masterpiece. Heavy enough is the basic plot, which is the stepping stone to all sorts of explorations on the nature of memory, the meaning of freedom, and what it is to be human: in the near future, big corporations provide humanity with perfect duplicates, android servants who do our dirty work so that we can have lives of luxury. What makes them not human, and what will happen if they decide that being human is just what they want, even if it means their own destruction? But beyond that, there are eerie convocations of class, race, and wealth that seem eerily relevant today: the future L.A. is populated with losers. Those with money and connections – save for the corporate masters who stay behind to manufacture the androids – have left earth for a cushy life in the outer space colonies, while the rabble remain behind. Scott’s masterful imagination of the futuristic city is stunningly evocative: an ethnic mélange, a collision of fashions and cultures, sex and violence around every corner, crooked cops and criminals alike speaking a curious language that is an amalgam of dozens of immigrant voices. The losers live by scrounging, while the winners sit in remote towers above them. The vision of a dystopic futuristic metropolis as imagined by Scott (and Philip K. Dick) was so compelling that Blade Runner later became a founding document of the cyberpunk movement.

SLACKER (1991)

Here's the thing about utopias: your ideal society may not look a whole hell of a lot like mine. Yours may resemble the Garden of Eden, perhaps with a chocolate river running through it, but mine probably looks a lot like Richard Linklater's no-budget 1991 debut Slacker. Here's a magical land full of interesting people, and you don't have to spend more than two minutes with any of them. It's a bohemian crazy quilt of coffee houses, bars, rock clubs and used book stores crammed with conspiracy literature, a laid-back enclave percolating with oddball creativity, where time has no meaning. When I first moved to Austin more than a dozen years ago, hardly a day went by that I didn't run into Ultimate Loser at the Continental Club or Been on the Moon Since the Fifties on the hike and bike trail, and it was almost – but not quite – as if I'd found myself living in the movie. (One of the characters nearly punched me in the eye for hitting on his girlfriend, which is a nice memory to have now, if not so much fun then.) Austin is still a cool place to live, all things considered, but it's changed so much since then that Slacker is almost a relic; you could make a drinking game out of spotting the locations that have since been supplanted by condos or Starbucks. Still, it's nice to know I can still visit that place any time I want just by cueing up the Slacker DVD.

V FOR VENDETTA (2005)

The fascist England of Alan Moore’s graphic novel, upon which the James McTeigue film was based, was a very British affair: tawdry, dirty, steeped in a very 1930s understanding of totalitarianism and suffused with an English sense of racial purity. The film did what such films always do – it took liberties. (Which is why Alan Moore refuses to have anything to do with film adaptations of his work.) Gone was a the filthy, hardscrabble Orwellian vision of a nearby dystopia, triggered by an unexplained nuclear exchange: in its place was a very modern authoritarian state, its parallels to Bush’s America as blaring and obvious as Moore’s references to Thatcher’s England were subtle and quiet. The great dictator is transformed from a hard, driven, religious man to a cartoonish supervillain appearing on giant screens as if he were a James Bond nemesis; his right-hand man is transformed from an advantage-taking careerist to a sneering Dick Cheney type; nuclear conflict becomes terrorism, blacks lose their status as the scapegoat of choice to Muslims; and, in a choice that painfully subverts the intent of the original, the state’s highest crime isn’t oppression, it’s deceit. In the absence of the fascist trappings, and the obvious references to modern society (completely with the recreation of state propaganda with talk-show blathering), the story loses much of its muscle. But the terrorist V remains a powerful symbol, and a memorable scene where police inspector Stephen Rea dispassionately explains, like a man who’s seen it happen a dozen times before, how state authority easily gets out of hand, is a compelling vision of the simple corruption of power.

Click Here For Part One, Part Two & Part Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak

Morning Deal Report: Seth Rogen's With Cancer

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 14:30:00 GMT

In our time of financial crisis, a nation turns to a tiny talking dog for comfort. Hey, we’ve all been there, right? Er…not that my tiny dog talks out loud. Not often anyway. Heh heh heh. Anyway, Beverly Hills Chihuahua continues to rule the box office chart, digging up $17.5 million over the weekend for a total haul of $52.5 million so far. And then there are those who seek respite from our trying times in the comfort of flesh-eating monsters, as Quarantine took second place with $14.2 million. The one-two punch of Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe had to settle for third, as Body of Lies debuted with $13.1 million. America apparently decided a terrorism thriller wasn’t really the salve it was looking for.

Seth Rogen will make you laugh at cancer. That’s the plan, anyway. Rogen will co-produce and co-star in I’m With Cancer, from an autobiographical script by Will Reiser. Rogen will have a supporting role in “Reiser's account of his struggle to beat cancer, with the story centering on a 25-year-old who finds out he has the disease,” per The Hollywood Reporter. I’m laughing already.

Ridley Scott has apparently put that Monopoly movie on the back burner. He’s now planning to adapt the 1974 Joe Haldeman novel The Forever War, which Variety reminds us will be the director’s “first science fiction film since he delivered back-to-back classics with Blade Runner and Alien.” I guess G.I. Jane doesn’t count.

Related:
Face/Off: Judd Apatow and "Pineapple Express"
OST: "Blade Runner"

Morning Deal Report: Blade Running?

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

We’ve always had a “truth is stranger than fiction” motto here at the Morning Deal Report. The most ridiculous projects in development are generally going to get top billing here, because we never tire of shining a spotlight on just how stupid people in Hollywood can be. Of course, some of these projects need to be taken with a bigger grain of salt than others, and such is the case with the hotly rumored Blade Runner 2. Slashfilm ran an exclusive report yesterday based on an email from a reader who was in attendance at a Q &A by the screenwriters of Eagle Eye. That email read, in part, “During the Q&A, the writer said that he and whomever it was that helped him co-write the Eagle Eye screenplay were in the process of writing a sequel to Blade Runner, and had already contacted the producers of the original, etc., etc.” So some guy is spending his free time down in the basement figuring out whatever happened to Deckard? Hey, that’s good enough for us! I’ll let you all know when I’ve finished my script for Deliverance 2: Still Squealin’.

On the other hand, we apparently have to take the dubious notion of a Fame remake seriously. Thomas Dekker of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles “is gunning to play Marco, a working-class kid with some gnarly acting chops who is competing with thousands of other hopefuls to get into and survive an elite New York public high school for the arts,” per The Hollywood Reporter. All together now: What a feeling!

Bugmaster is coming! The live-action adaptation of a Japanese manga comic “stars Joe Odagiri as a natural healer with power over mysterious creatures called Mushi,” Variety reports. The North American rights have been acquired by FUNimation Entertainment. Sounds like FUN!

Related:
OST: "Blade Runner"
Akira Goes Live Action

OST: "The Pink Panther"

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 21:00:00 GMT

In the past, we've discussed here in the OST feature how soundtracks often happily combine musicians and filmmakers at the height of their powers in a collision of sound and vision that justifies and enhances the existence of both soundtrack and film. In some of these entries -- especially Nashville, Blade Runner, and Fight Club -- we've seen composers and directors perfectly suited for each other, starting great partnerships or merely cementing a similar vision that would inform their work for years to come. Today, though, we're going to look at an excellent soundtrack that's atypical for both participants: a film score done by a great composer working out of his element and a skilled director whose career would, follwing this film, go into a long, slow decline.

The Pink Panther series marked director Blake Edwards at the peak of his powers. While he would never be considered a great director, he at least would develop, largely on the strength of the early installments of the series, as a competent and sure-handed director of comedies, and with the first of the series -- appropriately named The Pink Panther -- he was at his very best, giving the movie exactly the style, atmosphere and pace that it needed. It's not Citizen Kane by anyone's measure, but it's light-years away from the dross that he would later helm in movies like A Fine Mess, Skin Deep and Switch. Henry Mancini, likewise, was a titan of film music, but it was largely through professionalism and dedication than brilliance or inspiration. He had a reputation as a good, fast worker, capable of quick turnarounds of impressively hook-laden scores; while he may never have taken your breath away, he certainly fought you for its attention. Mancini had an extensive background in jazz, but it was never his speciality; he was too tempted by the sounds of '50s pop and exotica to nail down anything like an authentic sound. If anything, he tended to gravitate towards what was known then as "exotic", a sort of symphonic jazz-lite tinted with hints of what would later be called "world music" and heaping helpings of cheese. He too would decline in power as the decades dragged on, but here, both of them hit their strides something fierce, resulting in a widely hailed comedy classic that produced one of the most memorable figures in cinema, and a soundtrack whose main theme is one of the most recognizable tunes in movie history.

While the soundtrack to The Pink Panther is a mighty fine listen on its own -- cue it up at your next swingin' bachelor pad party and offer everone a round of pink squirrels, you wannabe -- it works best in the context of the film, where, as a unified whole, the combination of music and visual creates an absolutely perfect evocation of Europe at the tail end of the Swingin' Sixties. Listening to it in full, as the immediately remembered but somehow never overworn main theme swings its way into your soul, lets you forget about what comes next and remember the days when Peter Sellers was young, alive and full of prome, Henry Mancini wasn't a shadow of his former self grinding out TV hackwork for the paychekc, and Blake Edwards actually knew how to direct funny movies. Doesn't seem that long ago now, does it?

BEST TRACKS: Of course, "The Pink Panther Theme" -- signifying on screen the appearance not of Sellers' Inspector Clouseau, but of David Niven's infamous jewel thief, the Phantom -- is one of the certified classics of cinema soundtracks. Its slow, sinister build into a rip-roaring lounge jazz number is unforgettable from the first time you hear it, and seems to lose not an ounce from repetition. But there's more here than just that famous number: take a listen for "Meglio Stasera (It Had Better Be Tonight)", a swinging vocal number with a Continental feel written for young starlet Fran Jeffries, which went on to be a big hit for crooner (and frequent Mancini collaborator) Johnny Mercer. There's also the oddly named "Shades of Sennett", a rollicking piano number used in the movie's final chase number, that conjures British comedies and American honky-tonk blues -- but rarely the silent movie era it seems to predict in the title!

Related Posts:

OST: Fight Club

OST: Blade Runner

Take Five: Bring On the Bad Guys

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 20:00:00 GMT

As you may have heard unless you've just gotten back from an alternate dimension with no public relations industry, The Dark Knight opens this weekend, and even our resident skeptic Scott Von Doviak is hailing Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker as one of the pinnacles of big-screen malevolance. Batman is the perfect illustration of the principle that a hero is only as good as his villains; the Clown Prince of Crime is the outstanding member of an unforgettable rogue's gallery that throws the lonely heroism of Bruce Wayne into sharp relief by illustrating the other facets of his personality and demonstrating how terrible he might have been had he not taken the path of righteousness. Indeed, there are any number of genres, from true crime to film noir to serial thrillers to even Shakespearean tragedy, that prove that a story is only as strong as its most detestable character. Crime, as the man once said, is only a left-handed form of human endeavor, and for every enigmatic nihilist like the Joker who simply wants to watch the world burn, there's a figure whose vileness and evil are the result of a good man gone just a little bit bad. If your showing of The Dark Knight is sold out, here's five movies featuring some of our favorite big-screen villains to tide you over until you get to hear Ledger's deadly cackle for yourself.

THE STEPFATHER (1987)

These days, Terry O'Quinn is best known for his portrayal of John Locke, the mysteriously healed castaway from Lost who can be both hero and villain as he attempts to forge a mystical connection with the island. But 20 years ago, when the veteran stage actor first came to the attention of the moviegoing public, it was in this smart little thriller about a man so obsessed with having the perfect family that he was willing to kill to get it. His face an affable blank, O'Quinn goes about his father-knows-best routine with barely a harsh word for anything, until something goes wrong. That's when the devil inside him comes up, and he moves quickly from tearing up his tool room to butchering his whole family. O'Quinn's tightly controlled performance here is what makes the movie, and his quiet intensity is what makes it so devastatingly effective when he temporarily forgets the careful fiction he's made of his life and asks, with genuine confusion, "Who am I here?" -- before remembering, and delivering the news to his new wife in an especially brutal way.

THE MINUS MAN (1999)

Though a flawed movie, The Minus Man -- directed by Hampton Fancher, best known for penning the screenplay to Blade Runner -- is also a compelling one, thanks to the strong performance by Owen Wilson as the main character, Vann Siegert. Turning the usual serial killer narrative on its head, The Minus Man presents Siegert as a kind, handome, likable young man who wants to put down roots, to fit in, to be somebody -- but most of all, to help people. The problem is, he thinks that most people are so miserable that the best way to help them is to kill them (gently, of course, with a fast, painless poison). So decent is this mass murderer that his own conscience has to step in occasionally and remind him that what he's doing is wrong, in the person of two imaginary FBI agents who torment him. And so convincing is Wilson in making Vann a likable figure that more than once, the viewer finds himself wishing they would just go away and leave the poor boy alone.

THE ADVENTURES OF BUCKAROO BANZAI ACROSS THE 8TH DIMENSION (1984)

Great villains don't always have to be grim, sinister, humorless killing machines. Sometimes, as in this delightful neo-pulp sci-fi musical comedy, they can be goofy, pompous, overblown killing machines with the worst fake Italian accents since Chico Marx. Dr. Emilio Lizardo, the nefarious Red Lectroid living in the body of a long-dead rocket scientist, is played in the film by John Lithgow, who hams it up like there's no tomorrow. He sticks electrodes on his toungue, he tortures helpless women with honey, he gives plagiarized inspirational speeches to his handful of followers, and he deliberately mispronounces the names of his underlings -- and he has a hell of a time doing it. Dressed up in cobbled-together bits and pieces of a dozen pulp archetypes, Lithgow gets support from a colossal cast of veteran character actors, including Dan Hedeya, Christopher Lloyd and Vincent Schiavelli, but he outshines them all, investing each one of his often hilarious lines with hooty gravitas.

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (2007)

Some critics found the character of Anton Chigurh in the Coen Brothers' masterful adaptation of a Cormac McCarthy novel to be so over-the-top as to read like a cartoonish supervillain. Others, though, found the understated psychopath, played by a preternaturaly detached Javier Bardem in one of the big screen's most memorable haircuts, to carry surprising depth for someone described by another character in the film as "the ultimate bad-ass". The most compelling thing about Chigurh is that, while everyone else perceives him as totally insane, his madness has the impenetrable integrity of the lunatic. To himself, his actions make perfect sense, and the more time we spend around his insanity, the more we begin to understand it: in the chilling scene near the movie's end where he pays a visit to the tragedy-stricken Carla Jean, we know that he's playing his own deranged interpretation of fair with her, and the terror we feel as the tension mounts comes from the fact that we know and she doesn't.

ROCKY III (1982)

Made at the exact moment in time that the Rocky franchise was becoming a laughable self-parody, but Mr. T had yet to do the same, Rocky III, while more or less a disaster in its second half and filled with hokey, ridiculous moments, does manage to give us some of the most thrilling scenes in the series. Why? Because it also gives us the greatest villain in the series: the brutal, granite-hard, contemptous Clubber Lang, a street-fighting brawler who has nothing but loathing for the soft celebrity smooth-talker that Stallone's Rocky Balboa has become. Patterned partly after the young George Foreman, Clubber Lang is a monster in the ring who lives to destroy his opponents and has developed a line of trash-talk so electrifying that it sends the gregarious Rocky into a rage while providing the most quotable dialogue in the whole Rocky series. And though he never showed himself capable of doing more than he does here, Mr. T is stunning: his hostile, spitting hatred of everyone but himself is so exciting to watch that for the film's first hour, it's hard to take your eyes off him.

Separated at Birth: "Wall-E" and "Silent Running"

Phil Nugent — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 14:30:00 GMT

The new Pixar film Wall-E might be considered the real blockbuster of the summer movie season so far, if only because most of the other obvious lollapaloozas--Iron Man, Sex and the City, that Harrison Ford thing--opened a month or so before summer officially started a little more than a week ago. A very funny, beautifully designed, unexpectedly affecting (I cried, okay? The walking trash compactor with the googly eyes fell in love and I cried. And I'd do it again.) animated fable, Wall-E deserves all the riches it will earn for its makers, which will probably only pile up faster and faster as people look for something to take the kids to see even as the remaining summer sure-shots, such as the new Batman and Hellboy films, turn weirder and darker. Because the movie carries a pretty explicit satirical message indicting the human race--or Americans, not that there's that much difference--of having selfishly abandoned their stewardship of their own ruined planet, it will also set off a publicity-getting barrage attacks by conservative commentators denouncing it as tree-hugging propaganda, which I'm sure will do it at least as much harm as those attacks on Mr. Incredible and his family for being elitists.

In the meantime, some canny repertory theater programmers would be well advised to cash in on the movie's success by pulling Silent Running out of mothballs, toot sweet. Although Wall-E pays comic homage to 2001 and includes an in-joke for Alien fans by employing Sigourney Weaver as the Mothering voice of a spaceship's computer, its strongest debt, both visually and spiritually, is to the 1972 hippie sci-fi film that marked the directing debut of Douglas Trumball, still best known for his work as a special effects wizard on such films as 2001, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Blade Runner. Both Wall-E and Silent Running posit a time when mankind has completely squandered the natural resources of its home planet, though Silent Running never gives you a look at what Earth itself has come to. Set entirely in space, it stars Bruce Dern as Freeman Lowell, a crew member aboard the Valley Forge, a vessel that has been tending the last surviving gardens in an orbiting greenhouse dome. After Dick Cheney ascends to the presidency, orders come in to blow up the domes and return to Earth. Lowell is the only person who seems troubled by this, and in the end he takes command of the ship and sets off into deep space so that he can tend his garden without being hassled by the man. He has to kill his three fellow human crew members (Ron Rifkin, Cliff Potts, and Jess Vint) in order to pull it off, a detail that the movie doesn't linger on but that gives it a tough edge that makes it genuinely provocative and perhaps saves it from squishiness. Like Edward Abbey's cult novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, it can be taken as an implicit endorsement of eco-terrorism. (It should be noted that Trumball devised an out for himself with the movie's soundtrack, which raises the possibility that Dern's character has been driven insane from having to listen to Joan Baez trilling in his ears.)

Of course, there's always been a glass ceiling on the number of people in the audience who were prepared to root for Bruce Dern even when he's on his best behavior. The real heroes of Silent Running are Lowell's helpers, the drones--pint-sized, waddling robots that he whimsically renames Huey, Dewey, and Louie. The drones seem to grow their own eccentric personalities after Lowell has liberated them from their lives of anonymous drudgery and programmed them to concentrate on tending the garden, and when one of them "dies", it seems to matter much more than the deaths of Lowell's mostly cretinous human companions. To realize his concept for the drones, Trumball actually went low-tech: the robots are suits (weighing some twenty pounds each) that were inhabited by double-amputees. The character of Wall-E, in turn, is unmistakably a drone as re-imagined by Chuck Jones and liberated from live-action gravity. (Although Pixar is still technically an arm of Disney--maybe the only arm that works with any reliability--Wall-E and the accompanying short film Presto, about a stage magician with a hungry rabbit, makes it more clear than ever that if the company's contract is with Uncle Walt, its artists' hearts and souls belong to classic Warner Brothers' Termite Terrace.)

Silent Running isn't the solid knockout entertainment that Wall-E is. Originally produced for Universal's doomed early-seventies "youth division", it is a searching and sometimes fumbling film, but one whose weaknesses are redeemed both by its sweetness and the incongruously razor-blade-chewing presence of its leading man. It is in some ways a movie made for the sake of a central image, and that image--the leafy green forest in the glass dome floating silently in space, carefully preserved and safe where no man can see it, or despoil it--can still give you shivers. (Unfortunately, so can Joan Baez.) It's an oddball personal movie, but Wall-E isn't the first mainstream picture to take inspiration from it: the drones had a strong effect on the look and behavior of Star Wars's R2-D2. In turn, Pixar hired Ben Burtt, the sound designer best known as the "voice" of R2-D2, to provide the same for Wall-E. Whatever else they don't have in common, these movies could all be said to share a core language--a language of clicks and beeps.

Screengrab Pub Crawl: The Top 15 Bars of Cinema (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 29 May 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Back in my misspent Hollywood days, my friends and I used to enjoy the occasional round of “bar golf” through the dives and strip clubs of Hollywood Boulevard. The rules were simple: a “par one” bar meant we’d have one drink and move on, “par two” meant two drinks, etc., and the goal was to drink in at least nine separate bars by the end of the night. We’d usually “tee off” in the lobby of the Roosevelt Hotel, followed by pitchers of cheap beer in the “par two” Power House on Highland, and somehow the night always seemed to wind up with fire-breathing transvestite strippers at Jumbo’s Clown Room.

And so now, in honor of the recent Memorial Day kickoff to the official Summer Drinking Season, we here at The Screengrab invite you to join us on another pub crawl, though the Top 15 watering holes of cinema...so brace yourself with a nice starchy meal, grab your smokes and aspirin, and join us as we tee off at our first bar of the evening...

THE DRESDEN ROOM, SWINGERS (1996)

Unlike most of the bars on this list, The Dresden Room actually exists in the real world (1760 N. Vermont Avenue, Los Feliz, CA), as well as the fictional universe of Jon Favreau’s neo-rat pack classic Swingers. Maybe it was just the booze talking, but whenever my friends and I would hit the swanky-tacky Dresden on the Back Nine of an East Hollywood bar golf jaunt, we’d all feel as “money” as Favreau, Vince Vaughn, Ron Livingston and the rest of the film’s hepcat posse of unemployed actors, even though I’m pretty sure we never (A) dressed as well, (B) Lindy-Hopped as well or (C) scored digits from (or even met) any super-friendly, super-nice, conveniently single ladies with the suspiciously low standards and drop-dead movie star looks of Heather Graham’s swing-dance enthusiast, Lorraine (who, in L.A., at least, is a mythological figure on par with Liv Tyler’s elf princess in The Lord of the Rings). We did, however, spend plenty of nights enjoying the peculiar jazz stylings of Dresden’s house band staples, Marty & Elayne, who also straddle the line between reality and fiction...much like our drinking buddy a little further down the street in...

THE SKID ROW DIVE BARS OF BARFLY (1987)

To all my freeeeenz! The late Charles Bukowki, the poet laureate of the Thunderbird wine company, wrote this semi-autobiographical fantasy after he himself had stopped going to bars, and he must have wanted to get both his dream image of himself -- the great wino writer Henry Chinaski, played by Mickey Rourke -- and his idea of the bar of his dreams on film to warm himself in his dried-out dotage. The bar in question is a magical place where the women all look like hookers played by Sylvia Miles and the men stand around gawking in awe as our boy Henry shows off his verbal gifts by giving the bartender-bouncer (Frank Stallone) such tips as, "Your mother's cunt stinks like carpet cleaner." When Rourke (who holds his body here in a way that makes him look like a chicken carcass that was taken apart and reassembled by a blind crackhead with a science project due) and Stallone aren't taking turns going back in the alley to stomp a mud hole in each other's ass, Faye Dunaway and Alice Krige are celebrating Ladies' Night by rolling around on the floor, having a diva cat fight over this gorgeous hunk of man. They were going to include a scene showing what goes on there during Trivia Night, but then the picture would have been rated NC-17.

Next stop...the future, as we settle in for a little synthetic skin (and we don’t mean silicon boobs) at...

TAFFEY’S BAR, BLADE RUNNER (1982)

The world of Ridley Scott’s masterful Blade Runner is, for all its gorgeous set design, a pretty intimidating one: creepy warehouses full of nervous marionettes, run-down tenements and strangely glowing noodle shops, and huge corporate arcologies belching fire into the skies of Los Angeles. The only place we can see really spending a lot of time in the L.A. of 2019 is at Taffey Lewis’ rambunctious nightclub. It’s got a highly picturesque clientele, chainsmoking weird tobaccos and speaking the polyglot Creole of the moment; Taffey himself (greasily portrayed by Hy Pyke) always has Louie the bartender ready to hand out free drinks to anyone who can jeopardize his liquor license; and best of all, it’s a full-service erotic establishment, complete with robotic animal acts and the finest in genetically engineered bestiality. In fact, until her unexpected retirement, it was the only place in town where you could see the lovely Zhora (Joanna Cassidy, a million miles from Falcon Crest) “take the pleasures from the serpent which once corrupted Man”! Now that’s the kind of entertainment that money just can’t buy.

Tired of the city? Then grab a designated driver and we’ll head out to the desert for last call at...

THE BEER TAVERN, FEAST (2005)

This horror comedy, directed by John Gulager, is, if you'll excuse a real low ball of a compliment, by far the best of the movies produced by the Miramax-sponsored Project Greenlight TV series and talent contest. It's set in the Beer Tavern, a rickety-looking juke joint whose customers have to get all Straw Dogs when the place is besieged by slavering, man-eating monsters. It's a real mystery where they've come from -- the customers, I mean. The Beer Tavern looks to be set all by itself in the middle of a desert, and the people there appear to be a modest cross-section of everyone within a hundred miles who've worn out their welcome in all the more civilized establishments and no longer dare stick their head in the door anywhere else for fear of getting it shot off. Luckily, the bar is so well-equipped with secret exits and tunnels and hidey-holes, as well as such diversionary elements as the deer head mounted on the wall that one of the monsters, well, mounts, that it seems to have been constructed with a creature assault in mind. When Judah Friedlander is one of your best customers, it pays to take every precaution.

And, since we’re heading north anyway, might as well stop in for a quick one at...

THE PINK ROOM, TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME (1992)

Welcome to Canada! The conversation may not be all that stimulating ("I am the Great Went." "Don't expect a turkey dog here."), if you can even hear it, but the ambiance is out of this world. In our recent list of TV shows-turned-movies, we singled out this scene from Fire Walk with Me, noting that it's "set in what appears to be Satan's roadhouse." That's evident from the pulsing red lighting, the grinding, relentless rock band (playing a Lynch-composed track called "The Pink Room," which may or may not be the name of this place) and the array of seedy characters and half-naked zombie-women among the clientele. This is where innocence comes to die, as Laura Palmer, who long ago lost it, learns when she spots squeaky-clean pal Donna in a drugged topless clinch on the dance floor. As you can see from the above clip, somebody thinks this is one of the worst movie scenes of all time, which is ludicrous. It contains at least two signature Lynch shots I'll take to my grave: a vertiginous, drunken whirl past the repulsive Jacques Renault and into the lights above, and a pan across the unbelievably filthy floor, piled high with broken bottles and the smoking ash from thousands of cigarette butts.

Then it’s back across the border for a little marital advice at...

THE OVERLOOK HOTEL BAR FROM THE SHINING (1980)

On the surface, this nook in the corner of the Overlook Hotel's grand ballroom would appear to be the perfect bar. The stock is self-replenishing, you have the bartender's full attention, and most importantly, your money's no good here. On the other hand, since the place is supposed to be closed up for the winter and completely deserted except for you and your wife and son, there might be a problem: either you're crazy or the joint is haunted or both. But why worry about that? It's always New Year's Eve here, and Lloyd – "the best goddamn bartender from Timbuktu to Portland, Maine – or Portland, Oregon for that matter" – will always be happy to serve you the hair of the dog. As long as you steer clear of awkward encounters with the waitstaff in the blood-red bathroom…what could possibly go wrong?

And speaking of bathrooms, we’re gonna take a quick break to go “powder our nose,” but we’ll meet you over in Chicago for Part Two of the Screengrab Pub Crawl!

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

OST: "Blade Runner"

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 27 May 2008 14:45:00 GMT

Blade Runner has been described as a movie where everything comes together. This might seem like an odd description for such a rambunction mess of a film, which was marred by so much studio interference and difficulties in editing that director Ridley Scott felt that the director's cut of the movie left something to be desired, but what's meant is that it was a movie that in many ways was the career peak for everyone involved. Scott, a talented visionary but also an undisciplined egomaniac, never again made a film where he was so fully in command of his powers. Screenwriter Hampton Fancher went on to do some interesting work, but nothing on this level. Harrison Ford became a superstar, but one often defined by mediocrity and flatness; Sean Young's career would be sunk by rumors of her unpredictable emotional state; and Rutger Hauer would sabotage his own acting talents by appearing in anything that came with a paycheck -- but all three turned in fantastic performances. Even the movie's rich population of character actors, all of whom did great work elsewhere, seemed to hit their peak in Blade Runner -- including Edward James Olmos, M. Emmett Walsh, William Sanderson, Brion James, and Joe Terkel. Even Daryl Hannah isn't an embarrassment. The cinematography is among Jordan Cronenweth's best; the set direction, costumes, and production design are all top-notch; and it would be far and away the best movie adapted from a Philip K. Dick novel -- not that the author would live to see any of the rotten ones to come.

Even the composer of the film's score did what many consider to be his best work in Blade Runner. Vangelis (born Evangelos Papathanassiou) had built a career around his light New Age compositions that, if they weren't exactly triumphant, were at least slightly less boring than the music of most of his peers, but he scored a major success in 1981 with his stirring soundtrack work for Chariots of Fire. On the strength of that album, director Ridley Scott personally selected him to write the score to Blade Runner, instructing him to capture the film's mixture of depressing urban dystopia and shimmering, artificial advertised reality. Vangelis himself claimed he was attracted to the tortured character of ex-cop/blade runner Rick Deckard, and some of the thematic movements reflect this, shying away from the composer's usual use of high-toned, open chords to indicate triumph and transcendance, replaced with contracted, moody, jazzy movements and a sense of melancholy and despair. Much like the movie, the album fools you: the key notes, fills and musical cues are all a bit off, a bit subverted and turned around, leaving you uncertain how to feel, just as the script intends with characters like Deckard and Roy Batty. Vangelis would go on to have a rich and rewarding career as a film composer, but he'd never do anything this good again. Unfortunately, legal disputes with the record company -- as well as objections from the composer himself -- kept an 'official' soundtrack from being released for many years; the most widely available one featured the score being played by a thrown-together and inferior group of studio musicians. The multi-disc set released decades later at least features the original music, but it's lacking a number of cues, bits of incidental music, and one of the best compositions on the record; let's hope that a "final cut" of the film music is imminent, just as we now have the definitive version of the film.

BEST TRACKS: The "Blade Runner (End Title)" theme is the most recognizable piece of music on the album, and in many ways, it's the best: the soaring synth riffs cut off at their zenith with menacing rolls on a kettle drum as a relentless percussive beat worthy of Giorgio Moroder drives the entire thing along. The haunting "Rachel's Song", an inchoate piano piece with jazz chords and a peculiarly eerie feel, perfectly suits its scene, where Sean Young's character learns that she's a machine and that all the memories she has -- including taking piano lessons -- are inventions. And the "Love Theme from Blade Runner" breaks up the otherwise almost impenetrable darkness and moodiness of the score with a romantic saxophone melody that seems lifted from classic noir. (Sadly, one of the best pieces of music from the film -- the bizarre middle eastern techno piece played in a strip club, with vocals in the wierd melange of languages used by street people in the movie's futuristic setting -- is not included on any official release of the score.)

John Alvin, 1948 - 2008

Phil Nugent — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 21:00:00 GMT

The painter John Alvin, one of the most iconic movie poster artists of the last three decades, has died of a heart attack at fifty-nine. Alvin's first official movie poster design was for Mel Brooks's Blazing Saddles; its depiction of Cleavon Little flashing a peace sign while straddling a horse, set against a profile of Brooks, in Native American makeup and headdress, on a nickel emblazened with the words, "Hi, I'm Mel, trust me," established Alvin's gift for cariacture and for his knack for boiling the elements of a movie down to punchy image that captured a movie's flavor. His career made in the business, Alvin would work on more than a hundred movie campaigns; among the most celebrated and memorable were his posters for Young Frankenstein, Phantom of the Paradise, Blade Runner, Melvin and Howard, The Princess Bride, Gremlins, Empire of the Sun, New Jack City, the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter series, and a slew of Disney movies, among them The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast, and The Pirates of Caribbean pictures. One project that had a special place in his heart was the campaign for E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. For the poster image, inspired by Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam, Alvin used his daughter Farah as a hand model.

The Top Ten Movies With Alternate Cuts, Part 1

Phil Nugent — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 22:00:00 GMT

What is it about alternate cuts? A cynical marketing tool to sell an old movie or the chance for the filmmakers to finally unveil their true vision of the film? In the old days, studios wouldn't bother with keeping trims and outtakes; better to dump them in the sea and save the space for something more worthwhile. Most of the great filmmakers suffered from this. Orson Welles couldn't reconstruct his version of The Magnificent Ambersons, and even more recently, William Friedkin couldn't find the footage to finally unleash his preferred cut of Cruising. In the old days, if you wanted to see the alternate cut of a movie, you had to go to another country. Graham Greene didn't dig the shortened version of Once Upon A Time In The West, so he told his readers to go to Paris to see the uncut version. Friedkin went apeshit when he found out that Sorcerer, his beloved remake of The Wages of Fear, had been completely re-cut by the European distributors, so that the opening character prologues instead appeared as flashbacks, usually whenever a character was just about to blow up. Here, though, is a list of ten alternate cuts that are well worth your time. — Faisal A. Qureshi

BLADE RUNNER (1982, Ridley Scott)

How many different versions of this film are there? Warner Brothers did everyone except eBay bootleggers a favor when they put all five on one platter. First there was the U.S. voice-over cut, then the international cut (for a few frames of ultra-violence that those decadent Europeans dig) and then the authorized director's cut. Hold on a minute though, Ridley Scott kept saying that actually wasn't his final cut, so he went back to the editing room and came out with his definitive final cut (and let's not forget the 70mm Workprint that kicked the whole thing off). Basically, film lovers wouldn't have alternate cuts of movies if it wasn't for Blade Runner. It was the film that showed that ten years after the first release and proved you could still make cash from your old films. Which version is the best though? Well, that's up to you. I thought changing Rutger Hauer's "I want more life, fucker" to "father" kind of sucked and spoiled an otherwise decent flick, but WB did the decent thing and actually made sure all of them are there for your perusal. Heck, maybe I should go into the editing room and cut my own personally approved cut of Blade Runner. I mean, they do give you everything in this package.

THE SHINING (1980, Stanley Kubrick)

How can a filmmaker allow two different cuts of a film in release? If you're Stanley Kubrick, you can do everything. Whilst US audiences had the pleasure of a 147-minute cut of the Stephen King adaptation, the rest of the world just had the pleasure of a two-hour cut of the film, both approved by the director. Sure, Eyes Wide Shut had CGI figures covering some naughty bits, and he trimmed twenty minutes from 2001 after its world premiere, but this is different: Kubrick allowed both cuts to co-exist. What's the difference between them? Well, it's mostly scene shortening and dialogue trims, including bits where Scatman Crothers' character is going back to the Overlook Hotel to see what the heck is going on there. At one point you could get both versions on DVD, but with the recent re-release of the longer cut of The Shining, expect to see the shorter cut to disappear from existence. And did you know that there's a third version that had an alternate ending that was trimmed from all prints a week after its US release?

APOCALYPSE NOW (1979, Francis Ford Coppola)

As far as I'm aware, there are four versions of this film lying around, the longest being a five hour workprint that you can probably bit torrent now from bad VHS dupes. But Coppola re-released the original theatrical and the Redux edition together. Which one's better? For my money, I prefer the theatrical release, as Sheen just comes out as a mean brooding muthafucka. Redux is good to have, but for me, that music in the French plantation scene just spoiled the entire mood of the flick and the film never recovered completely from that moment on. Currently available on DVD but without the excellent Hearts of Darkness documentary included, what really spoils the film is cinematographer Vittorio Storraro's insistence that the film be transferred at his preferred retrospective Univisium 2:1 aspect ratio instead of 2.35:1 of its original release. If you want to see it properly, best to record a HD broadcast straight onto your hard drive, cause Storraro ain't having you watch it any other way.

EXORCIST 4 (2005, Renny Harlin, Paul Schrader)

Orson Welles had his ending for The Magnificent Ambersons re-shot by a studio hack, but enough of the film survived to be eventually regarded as a butchered classic. When Paul Schrader was kicked off the Exorcist prequel by Morgan Creek, rumors started circulating of his cut being some horror classic that had been 99% re-shot by studio hack Renny Harlin. A vocal internet campaign and the disastrous reception of the Harlin version resulted in Schrader's film being released to re-coup some of Morgan Creek's investment in the film, but the response was indifferent. Harlin's cut is goofy fun, with OTT sequences that make no sense but do crank up some foley effect on the soundtrack. Schrader's is Bergmanesque in comparison, interesting to watch and with a great performance by French pop star Billy Crawford as the possessed boy in need of exorcism. Both prequels are interesting to see a study in rhythm: Harlin has the actors play it fast and cuts every couple of seconds, whilsts Schrader meditates on his scenes, trying to build the tension up slowly.

TOUCH OF EVIL (1958, Orson Welles)

Orson Welles' sleazy cop thriller was first known only in a ninety-minute version, then in an extended 108-min cut that was found and re-released in 1976, but cineastes had to wait until 1998, when Rick Schmidlin and Walter Murch did a re-cut of the film based on a fifty-eight-page memo that Welles had sent the studio. (Needless to say, the studio ignored him completely.) After the restoration was released, the 1976 cut was retired to the vault, and what a pity that was. I'm not a fan of the restored edition; the limitations of the picture restoration can be seen in the opening sequence, when the picture softens at each point where a title had originally appeared. But the worse aspect is the removal of the excellent Henry Mancini score. Universal has no plans to re-release both cuts on DVD so until then, compare both openings and see what you'd like.

Click here for Part 2!

The Most Unnecessary Movies of 2007

Phil Nugent — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Here at the Screengrab, we've pitched in our two cents on the best films of 2007, and my esteemed colleague John Constantine has weighed in on the year's worst. But to paraphrase the late Roman Hruska, don't mediocre movies deserve a little recognition too? They make up the bulk of each year's crop of movies that get released (and probably also the bulk of those that will barely see the light of day), and every so often you see one whose unexceptionalism really stands out. So now, as the new film year begins to heat up with the arrival of the Sundance Film Festival and the first big commercial releases of 2008, let's take one last minute to salute 2007, by remembering the movies that everyone has already gotten a head start on forgetting.

BROOKLYN RULES: This '80s-set tough-neighborhood movie attracted a little attention upon its release because it was written by Terence Winter, who won acclaim for his work on The Sopranos. Winter must have been worried about being accused of repeating himself if his movie too closely resembled The Sopranos, so he wrote something that, like 98% of the tough-neighborhood movies of the last thirty-odd years, rather resembles Mean Streets, except there's no crazy young Robert De Niro figure, and he is greatly missed. Instead, we have our audience surrogate, the clean-cut young dude who's going to grow up to be a writer and tell this story, played by Freddie Prinze, Jr.; his buddy who ever since he was a kid always wanted to be a gangster, played by Scott Caan; and their harmless goofball pal who was born with a target on his back, played by that asshole who plays the unendurable Turtle on HBO's Entourage. The cast also includes Alec Baldwin as the local hot-tempered mob boss, who demonstrates that his transformation into a comedian hasn't been so complete that seeing him carve someone's ear off at a deli counter isn't exactly on a par with seeing a post-Airplane! Leslie Nielson playing a hooker's mean trick in the 1987 Nuts. The best way to tell this movie apart from a thousand other Mean Streets/GoodFellas knock-offs is that it's the one that goes the farthest to pull its punches; it keeps hinting that terrible things are on the verge of happening to the principle characters, and then nothing really terrible ever does, unless for some reason you think there's something regrettable about finally seeing Turtle get his.

I'M REED FISH: Better you than me, as they say. This strained exercise in indie quirkiness was written by Reed Fish and stars Jay Baruchel (the goofy aspiring boxer in Million Dollar Baby) as Reed Fish, who everyone in his small town loves and counts on to help them make sense of this crazy old world. But Reed has relationship troubles: he's engaged to Kate, played by Alexis Bledel (of Gilmore Girls), but what is he supposed to do about these tender feelings developing between him and Jill, played by Schuyler Fisk (the fetching and talented daughter of Sissy Spacek and There Will Be Blood production designer Jack Fisk)? These are the kind of problems you'd sell your soul to the devil to have. The movie has been failing to involve the audience for quite a long time before it pulls a whammy and reveals that what we're watching is a movie within a movie, and that the actual Reed, Kate, and Jill are in the audience, and experiencing mixed emotions about seeing their intricate love lives captured on film. The "real" Reed, Kate, and Jill are played by actors named, respectively, John Penner, Valerine Azlynn, and Shiri Appleby. It's all very meta. There apparently really is a Reed Fish who wrote the thing; at least, he has his own IMDB and MySpace pages and blog, which is about as real as you can get these days. On the blog, he celebrated the mixed reviews and middling box office of his labor of love by writing, "We didn't do crazy big business or anything, but hey, most movies like ours don't ever even get the chance to get into theaters, so no sweat." Low aspirations can seem an appealing thing compared to full-blown show business megalomania, but you don't really want them to show up quite so nakedly on the screen.

NEXT: Ever since Blade Runner made science-fiction guru Philip K. Dick a recognizable name in the movie industry, Hollywood has practically developed a whole subgenre in big, noisy, cluttered action pictures that are ostensibly "inspired" by Dick's work. In 2006, with his rotoscope-animated A Scanner Darkly, Richard Linklater actually found a way to film one of Dick's late novels so that the black-comic eeriness would slowly, quietly envelop the viewer and the ideas would have room to breathe. Hollywood gets back on track with this big-budget slice of sound and fury, directed by Lee Tamahori, once the respected director of the emotionally searing Once Were Warriors, now a man who tells the actors where to stand so they'll be properly positioned in relation to the exploding fireballs that the CGI guys will fill in later. Nicolas Cage plays the hero, a man who can see what's going to happen a couple of minutes into the future. This is a talent that comes in handy when he hits the casinos, or tries to evade an FBI capture team led by Julianne Moore, who recites her lines as if she were only using as much of her brain as she can spare while silently counting her money and memorizing her lines for the next Todd Haynes picture. (As for Cage, for all the abuse he takes these days, he remains a talented guy who does generally try to stagger his roles so that he does one picture of at least nominal artistic credibility for each sewer-dwelling money gig. As it happens, this movie came out between Ghost Rider and the National Treasure sequel, suggesting that he may have gotten his calendar dates screwed up.) The whole thing ends with a shockeroo twist ending that effectively cancels out everything that's come before it, which is fine by me, and that also could be seen as a threat to launch a sequel, which is not.

EVER SINCE THE WORLD ENDED and BEHIND THE MASK: THE RISE OF VERNON LESLIE: These aren't as grating as some movies I saw this year, and Angela Goethals does give a very winning performance as the heroine of Vernon Leslie. But between the two of them, they do a lot to sum up why the fake documentary, usually presented in the guise of sci-fi fantasy or satirical comedy, has fast become the most half-assed, tedious subgenre popular among low-budget indie filmmakers. You can see the reasons for its appeal: it enables filmmakers to patch a movie together largely from simple shots of actors talking directly to the camera or "interviewing" one another, and it allows them to pass off things like shitty lighting and cruddy visuals as a mark of "authenticity." But when you set out to use this form to do something like depict life in a world that's been nearly depopulated by a killer virus (as in Ever Since the World Ended), you'd better have a script that's cleverly worked out to the nth degree instead of one that makes it seem that you're just aimlessly kicking the idea around the parking lot. Vernon Leslie is more professional — the supporting cast includes Scott Wilson, Zelda Rubinstein, and genre-movie stalwart Robert Englund — but that just makes its disposable feel that much more irritating. (It's also more derivative; it's about a film crew that's making a tag-along documentary about a serial killer, an idea that, fifteen years earlier, served the makers of the Belgian black comedy Man Bites Dog. The big difference between the two films is that Man Bites Dog was supposed to be about a "real" murderer, whereas Vernon Leslie is set in the B-movie universe inhabited by Michael Myers and Freddy Kruger. It's built on a familiarity with the rules of the slasher-movie genre that makes you want to get the filmmakers a library card.) There's been a bit of an explosion in fake documentaries these last few years, and most of them seem to have been made by people who have no grasp of how much care and planning goes into making something like Zelig seem like a real movie. With any luck, Cloverfield will help to blow the wheels off this particular bandwagon.

Morning Deal Report: Less Lederhosen In This Version

Peter Smith — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 16:00:00 GMT

They're remaking Metropolis. That seems like a terrible idea, but could really go in a dozen directions. (Actually, you could argue it already has, between Blade Runner, the Tezuka/Otomo anime Metropolis and the totally sweet Giorgio Moroder/Queen version.) Just remember: the mediator between the head and hands MUST BE THE HEART!

Lucky you: rumor has it Sex and the City is going to be a trilogy. We New York residents can look forward to the streets being re-glutted with expensive-shoe-wearing twenty-year-olds all excited about how their newly cosmopolitan lives are just like Sex and the City. Bah! Feh!

Nobly following in Hot Fuzz's footsteps, the Wayans brothers will next spoof action films.

— Peter Smith

When Good Directors Go Bad: 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992, Ridley Scott)

Peter Smith — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 18:00:00 GMT

The setup: To celebrate the 500th anniversary of Columbus' discovery of the New World, Paramount Pictures needed a filmmaker who could be counted upon to create a handsome and commercial film about the great man and his momentous voyage. Who better than Ridley Scott, a dependable stylist best known for Alien and Blade Runner, and whose faltering career had been revived the prior year with the critical and audience favorite Thelma and Louise?

What went wrong: Scott, for all his directing skill, has always been a journeyman, making films from material originated by others. Because of this, the screenplays are usually the keys to his films' success. While no one would deny that Columbus' story lends itself well to cinema, the 1492 script (credited to Roselyne Bosch) simply isn't very good, and Scott was unfortunately unable to cover that up with style.

One problem was the film's conception of Columbus himself. The real-life Columbus was a forward-thinking man, but he was also highly ambitious, and the film glosses over this aspect of his personality. Instead of a portrait of a man driven by his nature to seek greatness, 1492 gives us Columbus, the passionate idealist, selflessly dreaming of the future. The film's star, Gerard Depardieu, could have given us a fierce, larger-than-life Columbus, but he's largely called upon to play twinkly-eyed in the early scenes and disillusioned in the later ones.

Additionally, even with a two-and-a-half-hour running time, 1492 feels rushed. One never really feels the strain of the long ocean voyages — after the first one, Scott does away with them altogether. Likewise, character development is largely dictated through tonsorial choices — whereas Columbus shares the shaggy look of the men he commands, the bad guys invariably sport eccentric, intricate beards and hairdos. The most surprising thing about the violent, sneeringly-entitled nobleman Moxica (played by Michael Wincott) is that he doesn't have a mustache to twirl along with his Slayer-worthy flowing black hair. And Sigourney Weaver, playing Queen Isabella, has so little to work with that she mostly looks lost.

Finally, a lot of the film is hard to take seriously. Consider the scene in which a fist fight breaks out in a monastery; or the hurricane sequence, during which Columbus' native translator runs away after admonishing him, "You never learned my language;" or practically every scene involving Moxica or the sinister judge Bobadilla (Mark Margolis). 1492 tried to be the definitive Columbus movie, but the best it could manage was to be the best Columbus movie of 1992, and since the competition was Christopher Columbus: The Discovery, that's nothing to write home about.

The fallout: 1492: Conquest of Paradise failed with critics and bombed at the box office, and Scott floundered for the rest of the decade before he came roaring back with 2000's Best Picture Oscar-winner Gladiator. His most recent film, American Gangster, is currently in theatres.

— Paul Clark

Revisiting Diva

Peter Smith — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 18:00:00 GMT

Diva may have been the first foreign-language film I ever saw. I don't remember well enough to say for sure, but I do recall that it shared space with The Tin Drum and Mephisto on my hometown video store's shelf of foreign films. (When I say shelf, I mean that literally — the entire collection amounted to less than a dozen videotapes.) When I was sixteen, Diva's vision of a Parisian mailman who rides around the city on a motorbike, chased by thugs and hanging out with a waif who shoplifts jazz records, seemed impossibly hip. Just re-released in a new print by Rialto Pictures, it now seems slow and sedate compared to Paul Greengrass and Tony Scott's recent films.

In the '80s, Jean-Jacques Beineix was lumped in with Luc Besson and Leos Carax as one of the creators of the 'cinéma du look.' Diva had the misfortune of being ahead of its time for about six months, until MTV went on the air. Coincidentally, Blade Runner, made around the same time, is also being re-released now. The two films share several points of contact, especially a nostalgia for film noir and an indulgence in style that manifests itself in blue-tinged cinematography and impossibly detailed production design.

After initial failure, Blade Runner has gone down as a classic; Diva is largely a footnote in French cinema history. Yet Ridley Scott was essentially an Anglo proponent of the 'cinéma du look'; he just happened to be working from better source material and with more talented collaborators. Diva's 'exercise in style' sensibility still has its merits — the motorbike subway chase scene is exhilarating, and the characters' lofts are spaces to luxuriate in — but as a narrative, its crime story seems unwieldy and out of place. (With Collateral and Miami Vice, Michael Mann has finally accomplished what Beineix and Besson had often set out to do.) I'd rather see a film about the same people and places in which they sat around smoking cigarettes, taking nude photos and talking about opera rather than throwing awls at each other and tossing thugs down elevator shafts.

Diva has often been cited as a case of style over substance, but now that twenty-six years have passed, it's clear that Beineix had something on his mind: the conversion of art, as represented by opera singer Cynthia Hawkins' refusal to record her voice, into a commodity. The late French critic Serge Daney castigated Diva as an example of the influence of advertising upon cinema, but both media have moved on since 1981. The 'cinema du look' finally produced a masterpiece, Leos Carax's 1991 Les Amants de Pont-Neuf, but by that time, Beineix's career had entered free fall. Luc Besson figured out how to beat Hollywood at its own game; Beineix's films could never pass for American genre fare in multiplexes, as Besson's The Fifth Element did. His follow-up to Diva, The Man in the Gutter, was an interesting, ambitious failure that resembles Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Querelle and early '80s Francis Ford Coppola. I haven't seen any of Beineix's subsequent films; few Americans have.

Diva doesn't fit comfortably into the 'classic French film revival' slot that Rialto has created so successfully for itself. I don't think the middle-aged or elderly crowd that supports Jean-Pierre Melville re-releases would go for it, and I'm not sure that contemporary teenagers would find anything attractive about its quasi-punk posturing. But I'm thankful for the opportunity to test whether this vision that helped define the '80s has stood the test of time. — Steve Erickson

Halloween Costume Contest: We Have a Weiner!

Peter Smith — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 18:00:00 GMT

Congratulations to Jon Parsons, of Sackville, NB, who correctly ID'd Mandalee and John as Pris from Blade Runner and Lance from Pulp Fiction at 1:43 PM yesterday. Apologies to Kevin Macauley, who got the same correct answer in at 1:45. For the many entrants who thought John was the Dude — well, an understandable guess, but note the un-Dudely Speed Racer t-shirt worn by John and Eric Stoltz's unforgettable character from Pulp. Don't worry, there are more contests to come — you will still have your chance at a free copy of Delta Farce. — Peter Smith

Today in the Nerve Film Lounge/From the Nerve Film Issue

Peter Smith — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 16:00:00 GMT

In the Film Lounge:

American Gangster: "It's not just that other movies and TV shows have been here. It's that they've done it better."

Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten: Review coming soon.

Help!: "It's the weakest Beatles movie, but that's not to deny its pleasures."

And from the Nerve Film Issue:

The Manhood Behind the Mustache: Ada Calhoun interviews Rob Perri, the director of a gonzo "documentary" about Mets legend Keith Hernandez.

To Sleep With Anger: Bilge Ebiri traces the long, strange career of Kenneth Anger.

Character Types: Nicole Ankowski figures out which Drew Barrymore or John Cusack archetype you're dating.

We're All Replicants Here: I finally get to wax rhapsodic about Blade Runner.

— Peter Smith

Exclusive Clip: Twin Peaks Gold Box Edition

Peter Smith — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 20:00:00 GMT

We're pleased to have an exclusive clip from the new Twin Peaks "Gold Box Edition" DVD set, which finally supplants a couple of incomplete older releases. The old Season 1 box didn't even feature the pilot, a ridiculous omission that this set corrects with both the U.S. and European versions. It's also got a ton of bonus stuff (including, I'm delighted to report, Kyle MacLachlan's Twin Peaks sketch on SNL), assembled by DVD maestro Charles de Lauzirika, who produced the spectacular Alien Quadrilogy box and whose new Blade Runner set I am itching to get my hands on. In any case, it's good news, and you will surely relish this clip from the bonus features, of the costume contest at the "Return to Twin Peaks" fan convention. (That guy really looks like MacLachlan, no?) — Peter Smith

Conglomerated Baddies: The 22 Most Evil Corporations in Movie History, Part 3

Peter Smith — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 17:00:00 GMT

Engulf & Devour, SILENT MOVIE (1976)

Mel Brooks's generically titled comedy stars Brooks as a movie director who plans to save the troubled Big Picture Studio with a star-studded silent picture. This makes him the target of Engulf & Devour, the monstrous corporation (whose motto is "Our Hands Are In Everything") planning to gobble up the studio. Their methods of sabotaging the film's success range from sending Bernadette Peters to vamp the director, a former drunk, and knock him off the wagon, to stealing the picture itself before its grand premiere. Weirdly, all this is said to have been partly inspired by the actual takeover of Paramount Pictures by Gulf & Western, which was probably a lot noisier.

Union Broadcasting System (UBS), NETWORK (1976)

In screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky's attack on television, new anchor Howard Beale (Peter Finch) is saved from cancellation and becomes a major star — "the mad prophet of the airwaves" — after he reacts to news of his firing by flipping out and promising to kill himself on the air, a spectacle that the mass audience finds entertaining. With Beale's ratings on the rise, the head of the entertainment division (Faye Dunaway) takes over the news department, a speculative joke that some thought came to fruition one year later when the ABC news division was handed to sports-broadcast head Roone Arledge. Unfortunately, Beale's diatribes against the loss of individuality and free will are regarded by Arthur Jensen (Ned Beatty), the head of the company that owns the network, as a threat to corporate power, so he summons the prodigal newsman to his office for a lecture on "the primal forces of nature." ("There is no America; there is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.") Beale is so impressed with this wisdom that he agrees to "preach" Jensen's philosophy to the television audience, which finds it so demoralizing that they tune out in droves, which leads to Beale's on-camera assassination. In the years since Network came out it has become customary to salute Chayefesky for having been clairvoyant, though it's hard to think of an easier way of predicting the future accurately than guessing that TV is always going to keep getting worse.

The Phone Company, THE PRESIDENT'S ANALYST (1967)

At one point in this spy spoof, a globe-trotting KGB agent observes that no matter where he goes, everyone he meets there hates the phone company. It turns out they have good reason. In a movie that features assassins of many lands picking each other off while trying to kill or kidnap the title character (James Coburn), the ultimate force of evil revealed at the climax is The Phone Company, whose android spokeman (William Redfield) unveils a diabolical plan to force all Americans to have a call-receiving device implanted in their heads. Of all the evil corporations in movie history, this one is almost certainly the funniest, though it must be conceded that the movie's depiction of the phone company as a sinister, monolithic force is dated in certain ways. For one thing, it turns out that most Americans today would probably be happy to sign up to have a chip put in their heads if it enabled them to download free movie trailers and video clips.

OMNI Consumer Products, ROBOCOP (1987)

Screenwriter Edward Neumeier was reportedly inspired to pen the script to Paul Verhoeven’s classic cyberpunk satire of American capitalism run amok after spending time on the set of Blade Runner. Like the Tyrell Corporation, OCP is a monolithic enterprise that virtually controls the police, and likewise has a run of bad luck with a series of robotic creations that do their jobs a bit too well. (If only Tyrell had the good sense to hire Miguel Ferrer.) Back in 1987, Omni Consumer Products’ stated intention to fully privatize organizations that had previously been thought of as the purview of government — "hospitals, prisons, space exploration. . . we practically are the military," says CEO Ronny Cox — seemed like absurdist comedy at best. Now, in the era of privately-run prisons, for-profit hospitals, billionaires in space, and Blackwater, the joke’s not quite so funny anymore.

Cyberdyne Systems, TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY (1991)

Most of the companies covered in this week’s list are up to no good — a little profiteering here, some inside trading there, maybe even endangering a few people’s health to turn a profit. But only Cyberdyne Systems, a second-tier Silicon Valley B2B manufacturer, brings about the destruction of the entire human race. Through convoluted events of the sort that only take place in movies involving time travel, Cyberdyne is responsible for the development of SkyNet, the nuclear defense computer network that eventually becomes self-aware and decides that we humans are too troublesome for our own good. From then on, it’s nuclear holocausts, killer robots, and grim, inevitable doomsday for everybody. We’re pretty sure that, despite their cunning manipulation of the situation and determination to put profit over safety, this isn’t the way that Cyberdyne’s managers would have wanted things to turn out; a global atomic extinction can’t have done much for their stock value.

The Tyrell Corporation, BLADE RUNNER (1982)

The very model of the 'megacorp' that constituted the primary villains in the cyberpunk fiction Blade Runner helped create, the Tyrell Corporation’s gigantic, pyramid-shaped arcology looms over a ruined polyglot Los Angeles. While the ‘little people’ are sold a steady diet of drugs, sex, cheap food and promises of off-world salvation, Tyrell (and its founder, the oleaginous Eldon Tyrell, brilliantly portrayed by Joe Turkel) controls the police, using them as hired goons to hunt down rogue replicants. These artificial life forms were created by the brilliant and unscrupulous Tyrell to serve as soldiers, sex slaves and workers in highly dangerous conditions, but he designed them too well; some achieved self-awareness and sought to eliminate the built-in expiration date that kept them from becoming too human. Tyrell’s desire to create the perfect being and then destroy them shapes this brilliant film's central conflict.

— Paul Clark, Pazit Cahlon, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Vadim Rizov, Bryan Whitefield