The Screengrab : bring me the head of alfredo garcia

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 21 May 2009 22:00:00 GMT

Bambi’s Mother in BAMBI (1942) & Debra Winger in TERMS OF ENDEARMENT (1983)

The actual moment that Debra Winger’s character dies in Terms of Endearment is all well and weepy (and fairly Goth, what with that deathbed make-up job), but the real reason James L. Brooks’ ten-hanky drama makes the list is the gut-punch scene where Winger’s dying Emma Greenway Horton says goodbye to her two sons in the hospital, easily the most harrowing family tragedy scene since the national trauma induced by the off-screen demise of Bambi’s mother (thanks to goddamn Man entering the forest) way back in 1942. In the all-time Top Ten of throat-lump-inducing lines of dialogue, it’s hard to beat Mr. Bambi’s grim pronouncement, “Your mother can’t be with you anymore.” But for me, no single moment of cinema is sadder than Winger’s Emma telling her youngest son, after their final visit together, “I think it went pretty well, don’t you?” -- except maybe the look on the little kid’s face when he bravely nods goodbye. (Now if you'll excuse me, I...uh...think there’s something in my eye...) (AO)

Warren Oates in BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA (1974)

Bennie the down-on-his-luck piano player just wanted to make an easy buck. Some rich guy who calls himself El Jefe was promising money in exchange for proof that a poonhound Bennie knows, one Alfredo Garcia, was dead. Sure, Bennie knew that proof might involve a little grave robbery, but the promise of money and a new beginning with his ladyfriend Elita gave his small-change dreams a lift. What he didn't know was that every step he made was shadowed by death and failure. First he has to kill a couple of bikers who intend to rape Elita. Then, when he finds the body, he loses Elita along with whatever remnants of his soul he had kept scraped together. After he recovers his precious proof of death, the severed head of the poonhound, the death toll mounts furiously while Bennie grows more and more unhinged, monologuing in his car to the filthy, fly-streaked bag in which Garcia's head rots. There's something rotten in Bennie now. There's something rotten in the whole scenario, and when he finally confronts El Jefe, he's beyond caring about life and death. He has nowhere else to go, and the trajectory of his life will soon converge into a single point with the probability of his death. (HC)

Warren Oates in MAJOR DUNDEE (1965)

It's supposed to be Moby-Dick in the Old West, but where the Great Whaling Book starts cooking with grease about 2/3 of the way in, Major Dundee falls to pieces. With Charlton Heston and Richard Harris in the lead roles, there's a Christmas dinner's worth of ham smeared all over even the good parts. But the supporting cast is excellent. And when Warren Oates, playing ne'er-do-well Confederate soldier O.W. Hadley, deserts and is captured, the supporting staff quietly, almost wordlessly, shows up the stars of the movie. In the above scene, consider how natural Oates seems, how L.Q. Jones and Ben Johnson express their characters' tension, sorrow, and anger with barely a sentence between them. The movie falls apart after this. It seems that Oates, with his weird energy and comic timing, was the thread holding everything together. (HC)

Joel McCrea in RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY (1962)

Although the clip is nowhere to be found on YouTube, Joel McCrea's Steve Judd goes out with a dignity that all who live by the gun -- or whatever "living by the gun" means metaphorically these days -- should aspire to. Earlier, he tells his old friend Gil Westrum (Randolph Scott) that he "just wants to enter [his] house justified." When Westrum makes to steal the gold that's under their protection, Judd is a step ahead of him, but the disappointment in the way he looks at Westrum is almost worse than his threat to make Westrum stand trial. The final shootout isn't about the gold, though. It's about the girl they're protecting from the feral mining family she's gotten herself mixed up with. Westrum redeems himself at the end, choosing to take the honorable side and stand with his friend. When Judd is mortally wounded, Westrum has the wisdom to step back, shield the young people from the blunt reality of death, and give Judd the closure he wants: alone, justified, eyes gazing up at his beloved high country. (HC)

Toshiro Mifune in THRONE OF BLOOD (1957)

Here's something all of you aspiring regicides should know: when the witch or witches make a prophecy about your success or failure, don't share it with anyone. Macbeth saw his thanes defect to the other side and was finally dispatched by Macduff, whose rough birth made him Macbeth's ideal assassin. Toshiro Mifune's Lord Washizu meets death at the hands of his own archers in a spectacular rain of arrows as he runs from place to place, bamboo shafts sticking out of his body at odd angles, his face a mask of horror, fear, betrayal, and anger. It's a crime that this scene isn't available on the youtubes. (HC)

Takashi Shimura in IKIRU (1952)

Takashi Shimura's face is, even in rest, a remarkable vehicle for his emotions. Perhaps its highest calling was carrying the stricken look he uses throughout Ikiru as Kanji Watanabe, a dying bureaucrat who realizes that his life will mean nothing when he is gone. He decides that his decades of pointless public service will be worth it if he can turn a stinking cesspool of a lot in an unappreciated corner of Tokyo into a park with a playground for children. The final third of the movie leaps forward to his funeral, as his family and co-workers discuss his drive and mission, growing more and more grief-stricken as they realize why he fought so hard for this little playground. At the end, we hear and see the testimonial of a police officer who saw Watanabe on the final night of his life, sitting on a swing in the park that is his legacy for the world, with his face transformed. All of the fear and sadness that he had been carrying in every scene of the movie has become into a beaming look of pure and simple satisfaction and joy. It's one of the most impressive and powerful emotional gut-punches in all of cinema. (HC)

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Hayden Childs

Screengrab Presents THE TOP TEN BEST MOVIES EVER!!!! (Part Six)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 14 May 2009 22:30:00 GMT

Nick Schager's Top Ten Best Movies Ever!

1) DAYS OF HEAVEN (1978)
2) THE SHINING (1980)

With all due respect to Stephen King, who famously disliked this adaptation of his novel, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is horror cinema nirvana, an unsettling vision of paternal and spousal madness crafted with the director’s trademark icy precision. Jack Nicholson’s performance is deservedly iconic, yet it’s the disquietingly unnatural atmosphere – generated by, among other things, those little twin ghouls, the nude grandma specter in the bathtub, Looney Tunes cartoons, and subtle allusions to Native American history – that truly turns this haunted hotel tale into a nerve-jangling classic.

3) MCCABE & MRS. MILLER (1971)
4) ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (1968)
5) BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA (1974)
6) LE SAMOURAI (1967)
7) STALKER (1979)
8) AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD (1972)

The production of Aguirre: The Wrath of God was so troubled that, as rumor has it, director Werner Herzog either threatened to shoot star Klaus Kinski, or plotted to have his indigenous cast members do the dirty deed once shooting was completed. Such insanity may be fantasy, but it’s in keeping with the spirit of Herzog’s mesmerizing 1972 feature about the titular Spanish conquistador, whose adventurous exploration of the wild unknown in search of greatness makes him a fitting surrogate for the mad genius director.

9) POINT BLANK (1967)
10) CRISS CROSS (1949)

Robert Siodmak is better remembered for 1946’s The Killers, a superb noir in its own right. Yet it’s this relatively unsung gem that stands as the director’s finest work in the genre, a beautifully constructed, sensual and tense thriller – about Burt Lancaster’s lovesick loner returning home to L.A. and becoming embroiled in a love triangle with his ex, Yvonne De Carlo, and her new gangster beau Dan Duryea – that expertly delivers all those things noir is famous for: love, obsession, betrayal, and a fatalism so potent that it leaves a lasting mark.

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

Contributor: Nick Schager

Sam Peckinpah's Head Movie: Ringing in the New Year with "Alfredo Garcia"

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

"They really don't make 'em like this any more. Truth is, they never did. This is the only one." That's John Patterson weighing in on Sam Peckinpah's Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia,, a great holiday film that's being shown as part of a BFI tribute to the director but is always a splendid way to ring in the new, begin anew, or start killing a fresh six-pack. (The hero even gets knocked off and buried halfway through, only to rise from his grave, dust himself off, and start all over again. It's also a great Easter movie!) This is the last of four movies Peckinpah made with the great character actor Warren Oates, and it may not be much of a coincidence that it was both the biggest fling that Oates ever got to have as a leading man and the terminal last word on Peckinpah's nihilistic world view. With his dark glasses and mustache, Oates looks like Peckinpah here, though as often is the case when a director seems to have turned his star into his own doppelganger, he's playing a fantasy of the director as a man who embodies what the director might prize most about himself. In Peckinpah's case, that doesn't mean that the role would have ever called for Cary Grant. Slouching up to the bar in a South-of-the-border cantina, Oates's demands, "Gimme a double bourbon, a soda back, none o' your Tejano bullshit and get lost." "No wonder he dies in the end," Patterson writes. "It's amazing Oates lasts as long as he does."

There's an argument to be made about just how long he does make it; in my own long history of pissing people off by chewing on this movie, I have been known to take the position that Bennie dies midway through but is too ornery to take it like a man and keeps going anyway, until the final moments, when he is so bent, folded, and mutilated that to persist in the illusion that he's still alive would just be unseemly. At any rate, he is a man who has lost what little he had in the way of love, companionship, and dignity that he's as good as dead. The sick joke of the movie is that this liberates him, transforming him from a greasy little chiseler whose greatest goal in life is to pull off a coup of grave-robbing into what the Joker would call "an agent of chaos". In this new incarnation, he manages to lay waste to a great many people who are upholstered in corruption and so well-protected that they could only be punished for their sins by someone who plainly does not give a rat's ass about suffering the worst consequences imaginable. As Patterson points out, this was a movie that Peckinpah had more or less complete creative control over, after a long history of having his movies butchered and messed with by studio ghouls, and it may have come a movie or two too late. The precision and whiplash daring of Peckinpah's editing and staging and the rhapsodic celebration of natural beauty are only sporadically in evidence; there are scenes, such as ineptly assembled picnic tableau, where the director's lack of interest in bothering to get it right is palpable, and there are also scenes, such as one of Oates waking in a toxic-looking bed and examining himself for parasitic vermin, that seem designed to clear the wussies out of the theater. But the sheer power of the movie's emotional ugliness, and its faith in that ugliness as the last potent thing a man has in the tool chest after the jackals have picked him clean, makes it a vital entry in the director's filmography in a way that a more polished piece of commercial goods like The Getaway could never be. I've said it before, and as we all try to summon up whatever it'll take to carry us into the new year, I'll say it again: Sam Peckinpah invented punk if anybody did.

Take 5: Character Actors Who Take The Lead

Hayden Childs — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 18:15:00 GMT

Film critics often love character actors more than leading men or women. With good cause, too: as we saw with our Leading Men and Leading Ladies Top 25 lists, some of the people at the top of the ticket couldn't act their way out of a wet paper bag. But they have charisma in spades, and that's what it takes for a leading actor to make the big bucks. Character actors, on the other hand, are the craftsmen of the profession, learning how to bring their own sense of self to many different roles. They have charisma, too, but it's a weird, flawed charisma. Character actors seem more like regular people, although they are usually the hardest-working actors in the trade. They often don't have the luxury of choosing their projects, and many seem happy to be earning a paycheck. But they don't just spin their wheels, no. They bring their game to even the paltriest of projects. For them, acting is about the love.

Often character actors gather around strong directors. John Ford had a company of them that appeared in various permutations in his films. So did Sam Peckinpah. David Milch brought together one of the greatest assortment of character actors in recent history for HBO's Deadwood (Brad Dourif, Ricky Jay, Powers Boothe, Molly Parker, Jason Jones, Brian Cox, Jim Beaver, and this list could just keep going) and returned to many of them for John From Cincinnati. But Judd Apatow's tv shows and films have done something exciting: they lift the weirdos who would normally be on the edge of the screen to the central spot. And Apatow is not the first person to think of this, just one of the more recent. The Coen Brothers have certainly played with the idea of leading actors, often pushing tried-and-true lead actors to their weirdest performances and othertimes asking honest-to-goodness character actors to take the central role of the film. Preston Sturges, a clear antecedent to both Apatow and the Coens, was a similar proponent of the charming weirdness of life, and his decision to hang a couple of his great movies on the nervous shoulders of Eddie Bracken is more than perversity.

Let's hope someone takes this to heart and makes a buddy movie starring Stephen Root, Ricky Jay, and Jon Polito. Sometimes filmmakers put a character actor in the lead role out of expedience or budget. Sometimes filmmakers want to let the world see just how special this actor on the periphery is. Whatever the reason, here's a list of five of the best character actors who have made classic movies when they ascended to the lead.

1. Warren Oates. With his droopy mouth and off-center face, Oates was the guy directors used to telegraph ROUGHNECK to the cheap seats. But Oates wasn't just any redneck peckerwood, but a powerhouse able to make the most stockish of stock characters bleed for you, and you for them. Consider his parts in the Peckinpah movies: the roughest Hammond brother in Ride The High Country, unwilling to bathe for his brother's wedding; the reddest of the Rebel soldiers in Major Dundee, who has a death scene that steals the whole damn movie away from Charlton Heston and Richard Harris; the skankier Gorch brother in The Wild Bunch, forever the butt of the joke. Phil Nugent just wrote a brilliant article about his all-too-small role in Monte Hellman's Two-Lane Blacktop, to which I'll link in lieu of adding anything. Then he popped up in Malick's Badlands as Sissy Spacek's doomed father, unprepared for the amoral type of generational backlash. That was the year before Hellman and Peckinpah independently put Oates front-and-center for two movies, each one among their finest, both impossibly uncommercial and both utterly raw and honest about the nature of human struggle and strife: Cockfighter and Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia.

Hellman's Cockfighter, which Paul Clark recently reviewed here, is stunningly simple. Oates plays Frank Mansfield, a competitive cockfighter who has taken a vow of silence until he wins the cockfighting championship. The sport - as unsportsmanlike as it is - is appalling, and the movie doesn't try to hide that. But the characters are immersed in it. Most of them being products of farm life, they don't even notice the dubious morality. It's hard to value the life of a chicken when you've raised them. The vow of silence, explained in a flashback, means that Oates hardly speaks a word in the whole movie, despite being in every scene. But Oates carries the character through body language alone, and there's no doubt whatsoever about who Mansfield is and what he's about. I can hardly think of another actor who could come close to doing what he does here. Paul neglected to mention my favorite scene, the last in the movie, where Mansfield rips the head off of a chicken and presents it, plumage upwards like a flower, to his disgusted lady love. It's equal measures horror and beauty. You will never forget it.

Peckinpah's Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia is another celebration of ugly beauty. It's unbelievable crude in parts, but it's the crudity of a master craftsman. Oates plays Bennie, a down-and-out pianist who takes a road trip through Mexico with his prostitute girlfriend to recover the head of her deceased ex-lover. A powerful man has put a bounty on the head, and Bennie sees the money as a way to turn his life around. He's very wrong. The movie follows him from debasement to debasement until there's nothing left, which is where he finds his last shred of dignity and humanity. I don't know if I can overemphasize the intensity of this movie, especially through the second half, but I will say that it's a completely rewarding and powerful experience, and no one other than Warren Oates could have played Bennie.

2. Forest Whitaker. Whitaker is a huge presence in the movies that he's in, but he's also always on the sidelines. He had almost no words in Fast Times At Ridgemont High. He smiled at Robin Williams a lot in Good Morning, Vietnam, for which he was awarded a Purple Heart. He played the lead in Bird, Clint Eastwood's stillborn ode to Charlie Parker, but let's not speak of that. Since Bird, he's made a lot of movies where he plays key supporting roles, often involving that "still waters run deep" face that he has perfected, where his smile is tempered by the pain in his eyes. However, Jim Jarmusch made him the lead again in Ghost Dog: The Way Of The Samurai, which was batshit crazy enough to assert that the hulking Whitaker could be a whisper-silent urban ninja taking down hardened mobsters. Jarmusch's movies never bat an eye at the battiest behavior, and many of his movies allow guys with a character-actor affinity (like Johnny Depp and Bill Murray) to pretend they haven't moved up to the major leagues as leading men. But Ghost Dog was special sort of pastiche, a movie where the Wu-Tang Clan met The Sopranos in a Shaw Brothers kung fu movie. Well, there's no real kung fu in Ghost Dog, just the apparent agreement of everyone involved that kung fu is awesome. And Forest Whitaker, playing the same damaged-but-noble guy he often plays, makes you believe that this tremendous bear of a man is capable of these amazing feats of stealth and cunning.

3. Richard Farnsworth. Farnsworth went from stuntman to character actor to The Grey Fox and The Straight Story, all in 62 years. That's a heck of a career arc! Although he started off doing stunt in Westerns in the 1930s, his acting career didn't take off until the 1970s. His IMDB page shows that he appeared mostly uncredited and unnamed in a number of great movies in the early 70s, but by the end of the decade, he'd been nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role in Comes A Horseman. In 1982, he played the lead in the entertaining train robber throwback The Grey Fox. Seventeen years later, David Lynch cast him as the lead in his only G-rated movie (produced by Disney!), The Straight Story. Lynch is fascinated by the weirdness that crops in on everyday life, and The Straight Story was both deeply weird and as wholesome as apple pie. Farnsworth plays the same old-timer that he usually played, but his Alvin Straight was a man who knew how to look beyond his limitations. In the movie, he leaves his mentally-challenged daughter (played by Sissy Spacek, who might have been a character actor if she hadn't crossed over to leading lady so early in her career) to travel across the Midwest by lawnmower so that he can make up with a long-estranged brother (Harry Dean Stanton, keeping the weirdness real). It's an amazing movie, and it was also his last film.

4. Takashi Shimura. Shimura, like Oates, has a great droopy face that carries the weight of the world. Perhaps he was a great star in Japan, but in almost all of the movies I've seen, he's the guy on the side. Toshiro Mifune usually plays a guy who either looks up to him or treats him like trash (if he even notices Shimura's character at all, that is), but in every case, Shimura's characters have been passed by time. His hangdog look is the crux of his lead role in Kurosawa's Ikiru, one of the finest films made by anyone in cinema's all-too-brief history. Ikiru (Japanese for "To Live") is about a bureaucrat who, upon discovering that he is dying, decides to leave a tiny little legacy after a lifetime of invisibility. It is also, by a large margin, the most tearjerking tearjerker ever made. Shimura is a master of conveying his character's every little emotion, often without saying a word, and one would need to have a heart of dust not to be moved by his final scene.

5. Klaus Kinski. Is Kinski a character actor or a leading man? I really don't know. I have not seen many of his pre-Herzog movies, but my impression is that he was too odd and spooky for leading man status. In For A Few Dollars More, he doesn't have much to do other than creep out everyone around him. I'd forgotten he was in Doctor Zhivago, which may say more about how long it's been since I watched it than his performance. None of his many, many spaghetti westerns seem to center on his character. But then Werner Herzog made put him front-and-center for Aguirre, Wrath of God, and thus loosed his insanity on the world, as ordained in the Book Of Revelations. Herzog and Kinski had a complicated relationship, to say the least. I'm fairly certain that Kinski had a complicated relationship with any and all other human beings and several inanimate objects, as well. As Burden of Dreams shows, Herzog was coming fairly close to completely losing his mind during the midpoint of their collaboration. Still, after being the Wrath of God, Kinski appeared as the lead in Herzog's remake of Nosferatu, then in Woyzeck, Fitzcarraldo, and Cobra Verde. All are worth a viewing, but none matches the greatness of Aguirre, Wrath of God. Kinski appeared in a number of other movies around the same time, mostly European productions. He doesn't appear to have played the lead in any of them. Too weird, as I say. Too uncontrollable. One would have to be used to exploring human behavior at its breaking point to even attempt to deal with Kinski's mad energy.

Reviews By Request: Cockfighter (1974, Monte Hellman)

Paul Clark — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Note: Since the poll format of selecting movies for future Reviews by Request columns worked so well last time, I’ve decided to keep it for the time being. See the bottom of this piece to pick a Halloween column from five horror favorites I’ve never seen. But before you do, enjoy this review of the movie that was chosen by popular vote two weeks ago- Monte Hellman’s Cockfighter.

I honestly have no excuse for not seeing Cockfighter before. After all, I’ve long been a fan of Warren Oates, who I believe to be one of the finest and most undervalued of all screen actors. And I’ve enjoyed a number of Monte Hellman’s films in the past, particularly The Shooting and Two Lane Blacktop, both of which also starred Oates. So why have I taken so long to see Cockfighter? It wasn’t the violence against animals, which I’ve been able to handle in numerous other films. Maybe I was just waiting for the right occasion to see it. So thanks to those of you who voted for it.

As those of you who haven’t seen it might guess from the title, Cockfighter tells the story of a man who raises gamecocks to fight for sport. The man’s name is Frank Mansfield and is played, of course, by Oates. Cockfighting isn’t a lucrative line of work, but Frank seems to be pretty good at it. He’s got a house, a farm, and a mobile home- that is, until he loses it by making a too-rich bet against a longtime rival, played by Harry Dean Stanton. It’s not the first time that Frank has let his greed get the best of him, and the film flashes back to a previous occasion when he lost his best rooster and his chance at the Cockfighter of the Year medal by running off his mouth. Since then, he’s maintained a vow of silence (though he’s prone to talking in his sleep). It’s Frank’s quest to make it to the top that serves as the film’s story.

Given its subject material and Deep South setting, it should go without saying that Cockfighter is a B-movie. But like all of Hellman’s best-known work, it’s a B-movie of the highest caliber, which is to say that it takes advantage of the possibilities of working quick and cheap. A more extravagantly-budgeted film on the subject would spare no expense to re-create the world of Southern cockfighting. But because all Hellman could afford was to film real cockfights, the world more or less created itself. The fans don’t feel like extras because they aren’t, and the blood from the fights is real. It’s this aspect of the film that troubles many viewers, who object to the non-simulated violence against the animals. But Hellman directs these scenes in a matter-of-fact style that avoids the cheap thrills that are often part and parcel with exploitation movies. Cockfighting is a way of life for these people in the movie, and for the most part they’re long past the point of being affected by the violence they see in the ring.

My only prior experience with cockfighting, either in real life or onscreen, came from Claire Denis’ No Fear, No Die. The difference between the two films is striking. In Denis’ film, cockfighting is an underworld activity, run by criminals and dominated by immigrants, with fights taking place in shady back rooms. By contrast, Frank’s world is out in the open- there are special cockfighting arenas, police officers are seen at the fights, and the final tournament is sponsored by a Senator. Everyone involved in the cockfighting world- be they trainers, sponsors, or fans who bet on the matches- accepts the way it is, which makes it all the more affecting when an outsider is invited in only to discover she can’t take it. A lesser film might take the side of Mary Elizabeth (Patricia Pearcy), who loves Frank before seeing the disgusting business he’s in. But the film is above all a character study of a man who has chosen a less-than-savory path, but is committed to riding it as far as it’ll take him.

For this reason, Oates’ presence is invaluable. Hellman fills the film with plenty of vivid character actors- Harry Dean Stanton, Richard B. Shull, Laurie Bird, a young Ed Begley Jr., the inimitable Millie Perkins- but Oates owns the film. Cockfighter was released the same year as another of Oates’ too-rare lead roles, in Sam Peckinpah’s Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia, and the differences between the two performances illustrate Oates’ formidable acting talent. In his own way, Frank is just as desperate as Garcia’s Benny, but whereas Benny was a down-and-out loser, Frank sublimates his desperation into the pursuit of his goal and blocks out anything that’s unrelated to it. And Frank’s vow of silence allow Oates to demonstrate his gift for physical acting, which often leads to priceless bits of comedy (the film is sometimes very funny, something I’ve somehow neglected to mention before).

All the while, Oates never allows the character to become too charming or too heroic. Perhaps that was his greatest asset as an actor- his ability to keep his characters human-sized, with all the frailty and foolishness that implies. Rather than serving as larger-than-life vessels for audience wish fulfillment, Oates’ performances reflect the way we believe (or fear) that we ourselves would react to life’s biggest challenges. And while that’s not the stuff of top-flight movie stardom, it’s real grown-up acting of the highest order, and few did it better than Warren Oates.

So, what’ll it be? The Hammer release that introduced the world to Christopher Lee’s Dracula? A semi-forgotten Euro-zombie movie that’s allegedly ripe for cult resurgence? A late-period Jacques Tourneur fright favorite? A Criterion-anointed Japanese classic? Or will it be a Dario Argento giallo, a subgenre in which I’m woefully underversed? You decide!

Choose a movie for my next Reviews By Request column: | BuzzDash polls

As always, feel free to stump for your favorites in the comments section, or suggest possibilities for upcoming columns. See you in two weeks!

Nobody Here but Us Chick Flicks

Phil Nugent — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 17:00:00 GMT

There have always been "women's pictures"--or "chick flicks", to use the self-referential, lightly mocking phrase that Tom Hanks barks out in Sleepless in Seattle as he watches his own off-screen wife, Rita Wilson, tear up while relating the plot of An Affair to Remember. The ever-evolving problem of the chick flick--what Michael Cieply calls "a label that is increasingly viewed as a marketplace trap"--is how to court women without alienating potential male viewers, a big part of your audience if you're hoping to hit date-movie gold. (You also want to hit women in their soft emotional receptors without making them feel stupid about it. Nora Ephron, who wrote and directed SIS after some fifteen years as a journalistic essayist whose specialty was finding smart ways to negotiate her own relationship to the zeitgeist, was well suited by experience and temperament to pull this off. Incidentally, filmmakers pitching their work squarely at the male demographic don't have nearly as hard a time of it. Many men do appreciate it when someone like Tarantino finds a way to serve up shootouts draped with wisecracks in a way that makes us feel smart, but that doesn't mean that a lot of us won't still clomp off to see Rambo, and have no trouble going by themselves if no dates will humor them.) Now chick movies are being wrought from "chick lit" books, a relatively new development in publishing, or maybe just a standard development with a new name. This new wrinkle has yielded such hits as Bridget Jones's Diary and The Devil Wears Prada, as well as duds such as last fall's non-starter The Nanny Diaries. That last one may have revealed something about the precarious nature of chick-flick chemistry. It starred Scarlett Johansson, who, I have reason to believe, doesn't have as many female fans as she does male admirers. And while a quick scan of the box-office returns on most of Johansson's starring vehicles begs the question of just what it is the guys would pay to see her do in a movie, I'm guessing that tucking in Paul Giamatti's kids isn't it.

Right now, two past masters of the chick flick are working on projects with roots in the genre: Ephron with Julie & Julia, starring Meryl Streep (as Julia Child) and Amy Adams, and Confessions of a Shopaholic, which is based on a book by Sophie Kinsella and is being directed by P. J. Hogan, the Australian filmmaker who made the Julia Roberts hit My Best Friend's Wedding. As Cieply observes, part of the fun of talking to the people whose beach houses are riding on the fate of these movies is watching them try to avoid being pigeonholed in the chick-flick ghetto. Jerry Bruckheimer, who is one of the producers working on Shopaholic, actually had the brass to liken it to "another Wedding Crashers," which, given the source material, is kind of like saying that, with enough slow-motion in the action scenes, the next Harry Potter film will be hard to tell apart from Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. (As for the Julia Child movie, one of its [male] producers will only say, "We hope this will be a movie for everyone who likes eating.") In the end, writes Cieply, "Trying to pin down what, exactly, constitutes a supposed chick flick is more of a parlor game than a science. An Affair to Remember, in which Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr played star-crossed lovers, clearly makes the cut. Knocked Up, in which Ms. Heigl and Seth Rogen played a star-crossed couple of another sort, probably does not."

The Ten Best Murderous Duos in Movies, Part 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Paul Clark; Phil Nugent; Leonard Pierce

Click here for Part 1.

That Guy! Classic: Warren Oates

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 20:00:00 GMT

As character actors go, they don't come much more iconic than Warren Mercer Oates. A tall Marine Corps vet from rural Kentucky's Muhlenberg County, Oates came west in the 1950s and, after working a number of menial jobs, started to get a string of acting jobs in western movies and televisions shows, thanks largely to his hunched six-foot frame, throwback looks, and thick rustic accent. But it was his acting chops that won him the attention of some of Hollywood's greatest directors; over the years, he worked with, among others, Norman Jewison, Monte Hellman, Stephen Spielberg, John Milius, William Friedkin, Terrence Malick, and Philip Kaufman. But it was with Sam Peckinpah that Oates found his greatest success; the two shared a no-nonsense approach to filmmaking and a similiarly straightforward (and sometimes abrasive) personality. After first working together on Ride the High Country, Peckinpah and Oates worked together repeatedly over the years, and Peckinpah even gave Oates one of his few leading man roles in the controversial and underrated Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. Extremely prolific during his 25 years in Hollywood, Warren Oates and his sneering, crooked smile became one of the few character actors as immediately recognizable as many lead actors of his day. Sadly for the many fans of this gifted actor and storyteller, he didn't live to enjoy his greatest success: he died unexpectedly of a heart attack just months after completing Stripes. His role as the straight-edge Sgt. Hulka won him legions of new fans and scored him more money than he'd made in any of his previous movies, but he would make only three more films, both of which were released after his death. Since then, a posthumous cult has grown up around Warren Oates, and it's hard not to read various bits of casting without imagining what he'd do with the role. Luckily, he left us with a lot of good work to chew on.

Where to see Warren Oates at his best:

THE WILD BUNCH (1969)

Outside of Stripes, Warren Oates' best-known, and most beloved, film role is that of the bandit Lyle Gorch in Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch. Gorch combines Oates' two most common roles in western genre pictures — the craven and the brute — into an incredibly memorable, whore-chasing, washer-stealing character. Better still, Oates is paired in the barrier-busting revisionist western with Ben Johnson, another genre great, as his conniving brother Tector. An essential role in an essential film.

TWO-LANE BLACKTOP (1971)

Monte Hellman was the director Warren Oates worked with most often outside of Sam Peckinpah (Oates claimed that he would work with either man at any time on any film for any reason). This bizarrely minimalist existential road picture was probably their finest collaboration, though Cockfighter has its partisans: Oates plays "G.T.O", an enigmatic, constantly self-inventing figure who becomes embroiled in a cross-country road race for the same reason men climb Everest: because it's there.

BADLANDS (1973)

Oates has only a minor role in Terrence Malick's stunning retelling of the story of Charlie Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate, but it's an undeniably effective one. Playing the father of Sissy Spacek's Holly Sargis, Oates' laconic performance contains unexpected depth, and his character, by acting as the barrier between the two callow young lovers, is the one who sets off their oddly casual, affectless killing spree. Proof that even in small parts, Oates could make a huge impact.