The Screengrab : carrie fisher

Screengrab Review: "Fanboys"

Nick Schager — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 16:30:00 GMT

The rise of the Internet has helped the geeks inherit the Earth, a development celebrated by Fanboys, a rather formulaic road-trip comedy colored by Star Wars mania. Thanks to having its theatrical release delayed for more than a year, Kyle Newman’s film took on something of a mythic stature in the far corners of the ‘net, as the holdup made it seem like a case study in the mainstream’s condescending disrespect for all things geeky. Now that the wait is over, however, the truth seems more plain: Fanboys struggled to garner a slot at the local multiplex because it’s little more than a broad, juvenile triviality that aims to boost its target audience’s self-esteem about their obsession without ever convincing outsiders why rabid support for certain beloved properties (Star Wars, Star Trek, etc.) is warranted. To be sure, entertainment is the primary modus operandi at work here. Nonetheless, there’s something missing in the film's treatment of its central passion, which – explained by one character with little more than “I like it because I do” – is so lacking in self-analysis that the entire affair proves merely an extended high-five to those already in the Skywalker-adoring club.

A project like this should naturally be guided by Star Wars love, yet were that enthusiasm wedded to even a trace of reflection about the sensibleness of such insane fidelity to a fictional sci-fi saga, Newman’s film might have managed to say something, anything, about the virtues and limits of fervent fandom. Instead, however, funny-ha-ha references are the proceedings’ defining trait, alongside puerile humor, pratfalls and more gay-panic jokes than you can shake a lightsaber at. Oh yes, and cancer – specifically, the terminal kind that nerd Linus (Chris Marquette) has, and which motivates his three Ohio friends Hutch (Dan Fogler), Windows (Jay Baruchel), and Eric (Sam Huntington) to convince him to embark, in 1998, on a cross-country journey to Lucas’ San Francisco Skywalker Ranch to steal a rough cut of Episode I: The Phantom Menace so he can see it before shuffling off his mortal coil. It’s a plot instigator of an embarrassingly lazy sort – what, their lifelong fixation on the franchise wasn’t incentive enough? – though, as befitting the action’s general slapdash quality, it barely plays a factor, too busy is Newman having his characters make late-‘90s-specific comments about chat rooms and letting Seth Rogen flail about in two separate, equally cringe-worthy roles.

In this predictable fantasyland, sexual frustration is alleviated by a hot female who works at a comics store (Kristen Bell), Trekkies are “gay,” and just about everyone understands the preeminent value of Star Wars. Cameos from Kevin Smith, Carrie Fisher and William Shatner only confirm that the film is cheekily self-aware, and don’t distract from the poorly executed stabs at pop culture humor – Canadian prog-rockers Rush may not be cool, but liking them is hardly hilarious – and weak attempts at emotional drama via Eric and Linus’ strained relationship. The white elephant in the room is, of course, that Episode I is terrible, a fact that’s ultimately addressed in a straightforward punchline-y way, rather than used as the crux of a tongue-in-cheek look at the misguided nature of blind devotion. But so it goes with this disposable comedy, so intent on indulging in obscure Star Wars trivia, banal sub-Kevin Smith arguments about the series, and Harry Knowles idolization that one soon craves just a single moment when – as in Triumph the Insult Comic Dog’s legendary Late Night with Conan O’Brien segment – the air might be slightly let out of the insular, full-to-bursting fandom bubble.

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

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

IN THE LOOP

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

MANURE

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

MARY AND MAX

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

WHITE LIGHTNIN’

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

WORLD’S GREATEST DAD

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

Part One

The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: "The Star Wars Holiday Special"

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 20:25:00 GMT

The third episode of our trip through some of the most beloved Christmas movies of all time isn't actually beloved. Notorious would be a better word. Infamous would be another. It also isn't a movie; it's a television special. What's more, it isn't even a television special you can go rent at your local Blockbuster, or queue up via Netflix. In fact, unless you happen to have been watching CBS at 8PM Eastern Time, November 17, 1978, you've probably never seen it. Or, unless you have one of the approximately one hundred billion bootlegged copies that have been floating around sci-fi conventions for the last 30 years. Or unless you have Google video. Anyway, you sure as hell are never going to see an official release: George Lucas -- the man who willingly released Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith into theaters -- has said that he is so ashamed of the Holiday Special that if he could, he would hunt down every copy of it in existence and smash them to pieces with a sledgehammer.

How bad is the Star Wars Holiday Special? It's so bad that even Star Wars geeks, many of whom pretend that the second trilogy wasn't relentlessly awful and have paid real cash money for Star Wars novelizations, think that it's a bad joke. It's so bad that Harrison Ford, during an appearance on the Conan O'Brien show, attempted to deny that he even remembered doing it. It's so bad that it goes beyond so-bad-it's-good into so-bad-it's-actually-terribly-bad and back around into so-bad-it-in-fact-is-immune-to-such-meaningless-abstractions-as-bad-and-good. It's so bad you feel sorry for Jefferson Starship for having had to be in it. Unless you have spent two hours being savagely tortured by members of the Iraqi Republican Guard, it is the most excruciatingly long two hours you will ever spend.

Written and produced during a brief period of time when it wasn't completely certain how humongously successful the Star Wars mythos would become, its creators decided to cash in by putting together something that combined the worst elements of the sci-fi classic with the utter dregs of 1970s variety shows. To get one thing out of the way, the Star Wars Holiday Special does contain the first appearance of Boba Fett, in a nifty little animated sequence by Canada's legendary studio Nelvana. Beyond that, though, it is 100% utterly horrible and awful from the first frame to the last. It's so bad, you don't even know how it ended up on TV even in the late '70s. The plot, such as it is, involves Chewbacca's quest to defy an Imperial barricade and get home to spend "Life Day' -- a sort of outer-space super-Christmas -- with his Wookie family. But the Special isn't so much a story with a plot as it is a bunch of completely disastrous moments strung together so incoherently that it makes you want to commit suicide. At times, you begin to suspect that the Star Wars Holiday Special is what the head of the Silver Shamrock Corporation should have gone with in Halloween III instead of those lame masks that turned kids' heads into bugs.

Picking out the worst moment of the Star Wars Holiday special is like picking out the worst moment of the Second World War: it's really just one unspeakable horror after another, only WWII ended sooner. Every time you think you've seen a scene that is as ungodly bad as it can possibly get, another scene that's even worse shows up, and then you look at your watch and you realize that there's still an hour and a half left to go before it's over. A mere listing of some of the most memorable scenes should be enough to scare off any sane human being: there's the scene where Chewbacca's wife, son and father -- Malla, Lumpy, and Itchy -- bellow at each other in Wookie-speak (which resembles a couple of dying walruses bellowing at each other) for something like fifteen minutes, with no subtitles. There's the scene where Art Carney walks around with his shirt open to the belly-button talking about how he loves to make a Wookie happy. There's the scene where the nauseating old freak Itchy watches Wookie porn, which involves Dihanne Carroll manning a futuristic phone sex line, and makes profoundly disturbing Wookie pleasure noises. There's the scene where an Imperial storm trooper watches a Jefferson Starship music video for no discernable reason. There's the scene where Mark Hammill shows up wearing more makeup than Joan Crawford (and looking considerably less butch, to boot). There's the musical number by a coked-out-of-her-gourd Carrie Fisher, which would be the worst musical number in television history if it weren't for the fact that it comes after an even worse musical number by Bea Arthur. (Yes, that's right, Bea Arthur is part of the Star Wars canon, and there's nothing you can do about it, fanboys.) There's not one, not two, but three comedic roles by Harvey Korman, one of which involves him playing an outer space version of Julia Child called Chef Gormaanda. There's the scene where Han Solo kills a guy just to break up the monotony. And more, more, so much more.

The Star Wars Holiday Special is mind-numbingly bad, but it has a special cachet because of its inexplicable attachment to one of the most popular film franchises of all time. Fans of utter kitsch will enjoy it on its own merits -- I mean, honestly, this thing reeks so bad it's simply amazing that no one breaks character and asks director Steve Binder just what the fuck he think's he's doing -- but for Star Wars fans, it's virtually a rite of passage: if you can watch this colossal stench-bomb, featuring almost all the original cast, and still call yourself a fan, no one can dare question your loyalty to the franchise ever again.

12 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS RATING: An uncontrollable 2 turtledoves crapping all over your kitchen. The only way this thing could possibly be any worse is if it had Jar Jar Binks and/or Hayden Christensen in it.

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

Video of the Day: The Five-Minute "Star Wars" Holiday Special

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 20:30:00 GMT

This week is the 30th anniversary of the Star Wars Holiday Special. If you're one of the lucky ones who missed this made-for-TV abomination, it is widely believed to be not only the worst thing ever made with the name "Star Wars" attached, but the worst thing ever made of any kind. How bad is it? It's so bad that George Lucas -- the man who released the crawling, hideous thing that is Episode III: Revenge of the Sith to theaters worldwide -- yanked it from circulation so that it can only be seen in low-grade bootleg form. It's approximately two hours long, but it seems like it's about two months long -- which is why we're eternally grateful to the good forks at The Late Night Explosion for culling it down to an agonizing but survivable five minutes.

This version gives you tiny snippets of almost all the things that make the original Star Wars Holiday Special so mind-searingly awful -- the endless untranslated bellowing of Chewbacca's family, the wookie porn, the Jefferson Starship music video, the song by a coked-out Carrie Fisher, the interminable clowning by a disco-shirted Art Carney, the sight of Mark Hammill made up like Joel Grey in Cabaret, the Bea Arthur musical number -- but in brief enough doses that your brain doesn't immediately seize up and fall out of your ear the way it does when you have to watch the whole thing. Enjoy!

Fantastic Fest Review: Fanboys

The 12 Greatest Movies Based on TV Shows, Part II

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 08 May 2008 20:30:00 GMT

THE FUGITIVE (1993)

The Fugitive might not have been the first TV series remade for the big screen, but it was almost certainly the one that proved how bankable- and even respectable- such adaptations could be. The film took as its inspiration one of the most influential series of its day, a four-season cat-and-mouse story of an escaped, convicted killer out to clear his name. While The Fugitive remains true to the spirit of the series, director Andrew Davis and his screenwriters do so in a way that reconfigures the formula for the big screen, beginning with a famous, still-impressive bus crash. The film also benefits from placing nearly equal emphasis on the pursued Dr. Richard Kimble (Harrison Ford) as it does on pursuer, U.S. Marshal Samuel Gerrard (Tommy Lee Jones, who in a rare display of Academy affection for a genre performance won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar). The Fugitive also has a sense of place that’s rare for a big-budget thriller, utilizing Chicago so perfectly that the story becomes unimaginable in any other setting. But the best scenes in the film are the ones that remain truest to their television inspirations, specifically the near-miss suspense sequences in which Kimble barely manages to evade capture through a combination of luck and formidable intelligence. Of all the TV adaptations up to that time, it was The Fugitive that showed that films of this kind, when done right, could be much more than a simple grab for nostalgia-driven box office, and in doing so became more or less the standard by which big-budget TV-to-film translations are judged.

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE (1996)

Yes, really. A huge hit on its original release, Mission: Impossible was mostly dismissed by critics as a dopey Tom Cruise action movie, while being criticized by many viewers for having too much plot, not enough stuff blowing up. But a second look at the film reveals what a gripping suspense movie it really is, translating the formula of the TV series- gadgets, undercover missions, realistic masks, and the like- into the form of a summer tentpole release. Mission: Impossible contains at least three or four wonderfully tense scenes- the opening operation gone fatally wrong, the tête-à-tête at Prague’s Akvarium, that awesome Rififi-esque break-in at Langley- more than most Hollywood thrillers can claim. In addition, the film represents the most successful attempt by director Brian DePalma to fuse the silky-smooth cinema-saturated style of his most characteristic work with a big-budget blockbuster, and in the process becomes a surprisingly lean and satisfying thriller. If nothing else, Mission: Impossible deserves respect as the only film in the series to date that’s remained true to the team-centric nature of the show, with subsequent efforts becoming increasingly focused on Tom Cruise saving the world. Supporting players like Jon Voight, Vanessa Redgrave and Henry Czerny make such a strong impression here that it’s a shame that Cruise has become so intent on hogging the spotlight in later films in the franchise.

THE BLUES BROTHERS (1980)

Netflix, video stores and pay cable movie channels are littered with the toxic waste spew of that very special category of cinematic detritus: the SNL movie. Sure, the never-as-funny-as-it-should-be/ never-as-bad-as-its-rep Saturday Night Live has produced more than its share of legitimate comedy stars and second bananas over the years, from Chevy Chase and Bill Murray to Amy Poehler and Tina Fey. But one-dimensional SNL characters, barely tolerable in five minute doses, can be downright unbearable in full-length features (i.e., It’s Pat, A Night At the Roxbury, Coneheads, etc.). Wayne’s World is one notable exception, but to my way of thinking, The Blues Brothers is far and away the best of the SNL films (and, for the purposes of this list, one of my favorite TV-to-movie adaptations), transforming a recurring, ego-driven musical duo (whose routine and appeal I never really understood) into iconic figures in a John Landis/John Belushi/Dan Akroyd phantasmagoria that bends over backwards in its efforts to entertain: car crashes! cast-of-thousands musical numbers! more car crashes! Illinois Nazis! country and western! rhythm and blues! John Candy! Aretha Franklin! Carrie Fisher with a machine gun! (And did I mention the car crashes?) I mean, fuck! The endless, mind-boggling demolition-derby pile-up of police cars in the climactic car chase alone is worth the price of admission (take that, CGI!), but the musical numbers (by Franklin, Ray Charles, James Brown, Cab Calloway, John Lee Hooker, et. al.) are even better, and introduced me and countless other white people to a whole bunch of talented black people we’d never fully appreciated before. And if all that weren’t enough, The Blues Brothers is endlessly quotable (“We’re on a mission from God,” “Three orange whips,” etc.) and spawned a pretty damn tasty jambalaya at the late-lamented Cambridge House of Blues...and how many movies can you say that about? True, The Blues Brothers also spawned the execrable Blues Brothers 2000...but the original, indispensable 1980 version will forever stand as the Cadillac Ranch of movies, a bizarre, fascinating, coke-fueled white elephant at the crossroads of cracked genius and howling oblivion.

HEAD (1968)

It was 1968 and the studio chiefs were very confused. There was something called “youth culture” or “the counterculture” or whatever – you know, dirty smelly hippies who wanted to see weird shit at the movies! Hopelessly out of touch, these suits had to turn to the scruffy people for help. The kids seemed to like that TV show The Monkees, so Columbia Pictures hired the show’s producer Bob Rafelson, and he teamed with that really weird Jack Nicholson dude from the Corman pictures, and they smoked a bunch of weed and they came up with Head. Surreal, satirical, self-referential, psychedelic and pretty much plotless, the movie bore little resemblance to the kiddie show that spawned it and failed at the box office. In retrospect, it never had a chance; the heads wouldn’t be caught dead seeing a Monkees movie and the young fans of the show wouldn’t be able to make heads or tails of it. But there’s enough inspired weirdness, bizarre cameos (Annette Funicello, Frank Zappa, Victor Mature and Sonny Liston) and good music (notably the Michael Nesmith-composed “Circle Sky”) to make it a worthy cult object, if not a great movie.

THE NAKED GUN: FROM THE FILES OF POLICE SQUAD! (1988)

The Naked Gun has very little competition as the least likely TV-to-movie transition of all time. It’s derived from a series that only yours truly and four other people watched, one that lasted six episodes and went off the air six years before the movie reached theaters. But Police Squad! had a pedigree; the Airplane! team of Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker created it, star Leslie Nielsen was nominated for an Emmy for his deadpan turn as Lt. Frank Drebin, and the show became a cult favorite through reruns and home video. Even so, The Naked Gun was an unexpected smash hit, spawning two lousy sequels and an entire craptacular genre of Leslie Nielsen parodies. Don’t hold those sins against it, though. The Naked Gun is a well-oiled laugh machine – from the slapstick stylings of the always hilarious O.J. Simpson to the climactic baseball game honored in an earlier Screengrab list, it’s like a MAD magazine come to life, complete with blink-and-you’ll-miss-it marginalia crammed into every corner of the screen. It’s really the last time Nielsen was ever funny, and that goes triple for the ZAZ triumvirate, who have separately and together foisted the likes of Brain Donors, Rat Race and Scary Movie 4 on their once loyal fans.

TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME (1992)

The second and final season of Twin Peaks ended in a flurry of bizarre cliffhangers, so when rumors of a movie began to circulate, those few of us who were still watching shared a brief moment of hope that at least some resolution would be forthcoming. Then we heard that Fire Walk with Me would be a prequel covering the last seven days of Laura Palmer’s life and, well, so much for that idea. Presumably the reasoning was that a reboot of the story would draw in a larger audience than a continuation, or at least that’s how we imagine David Lynch explained it to the suits at New Line. It’s a safe bet that 99% of any potential new audience fled the theater within the movie’s first 30 minutes, set in a deliberately alienating bizarro Twin Peaks called Deer Meadow, where the cops are unfriendly, the waitresses are hags and the FBI is represented by Chris Isaak as a pale echo of Kyle MacLachlan’s Special Agent Dale Cooper. (MacLachlan makes only fleeting appearances in the movie, unaware that his career is Showgirls-bound.) But those who left early missed out on one of Lynch’s most intense and emotionally charged fever dreams. Stripped of the quirky humor that had soured into tiresome shtick long before the series ended, Fire Walk with Me unwraps Laura Palmer from her plastic for a one-of-a-kind descent into hell. Sheryl Lee burns through the screen in a shoulda-been star-making performance and Lynch cooks up some of his most indelible set pieces, most notably the subtitled “Pink Room” sequence set in what appears to be Satan’s roadhouse. Just don’t ask us about the David Bowie cameo.

- Paul Clark, Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak

READ PART I

Geek Love: The Ten Sexiest Nerds in Cinema, Gen-XX Edition (Part Deux)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 20:30:00 GMT

5. MARY STUART MASTERSON AS DANNI IN HEAVEN HELP US AND WATTS IN SOME KIND OF WONDERFUL

Danni in the 1960s-era Catholic school comedy Heaven Help Us would surely have been too cool for me in the real world, but the tomboy drummer Watts was a perfect fantasy: the groovy gal pal who’s been secretly pining for you all along -- then, when you finally catch wise, she’s dressed in a sleek, Goth-y chauffeur’s uniform. Tellingly, in John Hughes’ gender-flipped version of the same story (Pretty In Pink), Jon Cryer’s groovy guy pal, Duckie secretly pines for Molly Ringwald’s Andie, but then has to just suck it while she runs off with...yes, another popular hunk.

4. MICHELLE MEYRINK AS JORDAN COCHRAN IN REAL GENIUS

I wouldn’t have been smart enough for Jordan Cochran’s motor-mouthed, socially awkward “Pacific Tech” brainiac, but it was nice to know cute girls could be hyper, too!

3. THORA BIRCH AS JANE BURNHAM IN AMERICAN BEAUTY AND ENID IN GHOST WORLD

I’d evolved from a hopelessly geeky adolescent to a somewhat less geeky adult by the time Thora Birch became the definitive fin de siècle geek girl, but her sultry slow-burn cynicism (and surprisingly huge breasts) put the “It” in her misfits. (Scarlett Johnasson in Ghost World, meanwhile, is one of the hottest screen characters of all time, but ScarJo as a nerdy misfit is about as believable as Denise Richards as a nuclear physicist.)

2. CARRIE FISHER AS PRINCESS LEIA IN RETURN OF THE JEDI

The iconic, the unforgettable, the indisputable chain mail bikini. Even my gay nerd friends wanted a piece o’ that.

1. ALYSON HANNIGAN AS MICHELLE FLAHERTY IN AMERICAN PIE

A goofy, accessible, redhead nymphomaniac played by the actress who played the lesbian witch (and the evil vampire lesbian witch) on Buffy the Vampire Slayer? My friends, we have a winner.

And now that we've got you all lathered up in a hot geek frenzy, we'd love to know the nerds that steam up YOUR Coke-bottle glasses...and stay tuned for next week's list of Top Ten Brainy BOYS!

Click here for Part 1!

Rose McGowan: TCM's Latest Essential

Phil Nugent — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 18:00:00 GMT

So it turns out that Rose McGowan is a total movie geek! (Man, does Robert Rodriguez's cup runneth over, or what?) As of last month, McGowan has been supplementing her income by co-hosting Turner Classic Movies' "The Essentials", a weekly slot where TCM host Robert Osborne chews over whichever film classic has just earned the title designation with a regular partner. The show has gone through a different co-host every season, and most of them have been best known for their behind-the-camera talents, even if some of them, such as directors Rob Reiner, Sydney Pollack, and Peter Bogdanovich, have also dabbled in acting. Before McGowan, Osborne's last couple of sparring partners for Osborne were film critic Molly Haskell and Carrie Fisher, who has evolved from actress to professional wisecracker. Whether it was just the luck of the draw or the gender differences had something to do with it, both Haskell and Fisher juiced the show up a little; they were more inclined to turn prickly and even quarrel with the programming choices than their predecessors had been. McGowan's selection may have something to do with the desire to add some youthful glow to its viewing demographic that once had TCM lure Rob Zombie to its studios so that he could stalk out onto the set of what looked like his mom's basement and lecture viewers about Arch Hall, Jr. at two in the morning. But to listen to McGowan talk about movies is to see that the woman does have game. And she likes The Great Escape!

The Osborne-McGowan team has also torn through The Music Box and The Bad and the Beautiful, a movie that McGowan should probably remake, just so we can see her name on the posters next to that title. Of the selections coming up, McGowan is especially high on Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter, a hallucinatory masterpiece starring Robert Mitchum as a murderous preacher. “It’s heavy-handed, sure, I get it. It’s just so smart. It’s very much a classic metaphor for the big person to proclaim for all to hear how Christian he is, and then there’s Lillian Gish, who probably only weighs about 90 pounds. … And she’s the quiet Christian, and it’s her behavior that speaks for her about her Christian belief.” Of the TCM gig itself, McGowan says, “I had no idea that they were even going to pay me. Seriously, a job where I get to sit and discuss these movies? Are you kidding me? I’ve been boring my friends for years!” One can't help but wonder how any lost soul could become so miserably jaded as to ever be bored by the sight of Rose McGowan rhapsodizing about Laurel and Hardy, but perhaps she has better tastes in movies than in friends. Rose, call us! We'll introduce you to some really cool new people at Trivia Night.