The Screengrab : channing tatum

Precursors: Lionheart (1990)

Nick Schager — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 16:30:00 GMT

Underground street fighting proves an alluring profession for Channing Tatum in this Friday’s unimaginatively titled Fighting, but no matter how awesome it turns out to be, it’s hard to imagine it outshining the king of all brawlers, Lionheart. Starring Jean-Claude Van Damme at the beginning of his absolute peak – his career beginning its long downward spiral four years later with the insanely bad Street Fighter – Sheldon Lettich’s ‘90s action classic features the Muscles From Brussels as a French Foreign Legion soldier who deserts his post and heads to the Big Apple once he learns that his brother has been murdered by drug dealers. While searching for the killers, Van Damme teams up with an alcoholic (Harrison Page) who introduces him to the world of high-stakes street fighting, in which tough guys duke it out to the death for the entertainment of the rich and famous. Taking on opponents in a parking lot’s circle of cars and an empty swimming pool – matches that earn him dough to support his widowed sister-in-law (who naturally falls for him) and young niece – Van Damme predictably shows off his martial arts expertise, while also making time for his trademark gratuitous naked-ass shot. “Honor or revenge, he has no choice” reads the tagline. Neither do you, action film aficionados, but to rent this rock ‘em sock ‘em B-movie classic.

Spring Movie Poster Preview

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 19:30:00 GMT

It’s time for everyone’s favorite occasional feature, wherein I preview a handful of upcoming movies I know nothing about based solely on their posters. It’s like judging a book by its cover, but in motion picture form!

Dragonball Evolution (April 10)

An ordinary suburban paperboy is infused with superpowers when a meteor from deep space crashes into his crotch, leaving him with one giant glowing testicle he calls Dragonball! They said this controversial graphic novel was unfilmable, but when the new line of Dragonball action figures hits toy stores next week, the streets will be filled with kids hucking rocks at each other’s family jewels.

Is Anybody There? (April 17)

Michael Caine will have Academy voters in the palm of his hand with his warm, autumnal performance as Mortimer Digbottom, a retired mortician in Blandford-on-Stoatswallow who decides to accompany his grandson on a train trip to the spelling bee championship in London. The grandson isn’t participating in the spelling bee; he just wants to watch.

Mutant Chronicles (April 24)

If you’ve already watched Wolverine online and you still want to get your mutant on, here’s some dark, gritty apocalyptic action for you. Gloomy, underlit, over-edited and certain to be beloved by everyone who feels there simply haven’t been enough Underworld movies.

Fighting (April 24)

In Step Up, Channing Tatum was dancing. Now Channing Tatum is…fighting! Probably with his shirt off. I mean, he’s wearing a shirt in this poster, but I’m sure it won’t last. Terrence Howard co-stars as the guy who got written out of Iron Man 2.

Next Day Air (May 8)

Let’s see, we’ve got two guns in the foreground, which means action. But we’ve got comical expressions on the faces of the cast, which means comedy. Folks, I think what we’ve got here is one o’ them action-comedies I’ve heard tell about. I’m guessing some overnight delivery personnel got their hands on the wrong package at the wrong time. Also, the girl with the big boobs has a shirt that says “Protect Your Package.” If it’s a hit, the sequel can only be called Second Day Air.

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2009 Movie Poster Preview
Screengrab Movie Poster Preview

Public Enemies: The Many On-Screen Faces of John Dillinger

Phil Nugent — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 15:00:00 GMT

Michael Mann's Public Enemies doesn't open until July, but the appearance last week of the movie's trailer was enough to get chat rooms buzzing and fan boys clapping and speaking in strange tongues. Based on Bryan Burroughs's book Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933–34, the movie features an all-star Depression-era rogue's gallery that includes Channing Tatum as Pretty Boy Floyd, Giovanni Ribisi as Alvin "Creepy" Karpis, Stephen Dorff as Homer Van Meter, David Wenham as Harry Pierpont, Stephen Graham as Baby Face Nelson, and John Ortiz as Frank Nitti, along with such enforcers of the law as Christian Bale as Melvin Purvis, the G-man who brought John Dillinger to heel and Billy Crudup as J. Edgar Hoover, who was able to turn the headlines about rampaging criminals into a call for a national police force, the FBI. The real attraction, of course, is Johnny Depp as Dillinger, the most charismatic and legendary of the celebrity crooks and a figure who personified the image of the 1930s bank robber as dashing desperado.

Bonnie and Clyde had their doomed-love thing; Baby Face Nelson, who played super-villain team-up with Dillinger for a while, was a genuinely scary thug; Machine Gun Kelly was a hype. But Dillinger, conscious of the good it did him to keep world opinion on his side, actively courted the public with his dimples and courtly manners, so that even his hostages came out talking to reporters about what splendid company he'd been. He tried to avoid the use of violence, pulled off dazzling escapes, and stuck to robbing banks, at a time when nobody had a good word for those financial institutions. It was partly in response to Dillinger's popularity that Hollywood created the movie image of the endearing gangster, and Dillinger himself was not immune to the charms of that image: the movie he was exiting when he was shot down by Purvis's men was Manhattan Melodrama, a juicy ear of corn in which Clark Gable played a lovable rapscallion named Blackie whose best boyhood pal (William Powell) grew up to be District Attorney. When Blackie rubs out a nogoodnik who was threatening to spread some damaging slander about his buddy, who's getting ready to run for Governor, Powell is forced to prosecute Blackie for murder, while Blackie sits through the trial grinning in pleasure at his pal's sturdy principles and courtroom flair. Blackie's last act is to warn Powell, who's now Governor, not to even think about commuting his death sentence, before heading to the electric chair with a smile on his face and a swagger in his walk. Presumably Dillinger spent his last minutes in the theater feeling suitably flattered.

There have been enough wildly different screen takes on Dillinger by now that it's anyone's guess what Depp's will look like. But it seems a safe bet that Captain Jack Sparrow will find a way to clearly differentiate himself from such notable predecessors as these:

Humphrey Bogart, THE PETRIFIED FOREST (1936)

Bogart's character here, "Duke Mantee", represents the playwright Robert Sherwood's theatrical conceit of Dillinger as social outlaw and voice of the blunt common man. (His gang includes a black member, who enjoys goading his opposite number, a subservient black chauffeur.) Duke takes over a roadside diner where the hostages include Leslie Howard as the hero and mouthpiece, a crestfallen intellectual who makes poetic speeches about fate and destiny and other assorted claptrap. Bogart, who has a terrific, untamed look here, had been part of the Broadway cast of the play, as had Howard. His success on stage helped turned around a career that had been stalled, but he was almost denied the chance to be in the movie because Jack Warner wanted his own house gangster, Edward G. Robinson, to play the part. But Robinson was getting tired of waving gats around, and Howard announced that he didn't want to do the movie without Bogart, and there was no way Warner could replace Howard--no one else in the business could have delivered most of his lines with a straight face. The film version did finally get Bogart's movie career properly launched, but his performance wasn't as fresh as it must have been early in the Broadway run, and it would be another five years before another gangster role, in High Sierra, officially made him a star.

Lawrence Tierney, DILLINGER (1945)

Made a decade after Dillinger's death, this was the first film that claimed to tell his story and call him by name, and it also marked the big-time starring debut of Lawrence Tierney. These two things do not compute. In his mid-twenties, Tierney still had a thick head of black hair and a handsome profile, but he already had the voice of a mudslide survivor and emitted mean vibes potent enough to turn sunflowers black and fill nearby rivers with dead fish. He was simply not ideally cast as man for whom violence was a last resort, and the screenwriters, Philip Yordan and the uncredited William Castle, having taken a quick check of which of the two men, Dillinger or Tierney, they had greater need to fear, astutely shaped the script to Tierney's personality. Shot under the working title "John Dillinger, Killer", it's a portrait of a hell-raising psycho with a chip on his shoulder. Directed by the no-name Max Nosseck, it's also an energetically slapped-together knuckle buster of a poverty row production, with a running time of an hour and ten minutes and an especially exciting bank robbery scene that Nosseck didn't shoot: the footage was lifted from Fritz Lang's 1937 Bonnie-and-Clyde movie, You Only Live Once.

Warren Oates, DILLINGER (1973)

This film marked the directing debut of screenwriter John Milius, whose nostalgia for old movies and the era they were made in almost matches his enthusiasm for flamboyantly choreographed displays of bloody mayhem. Warren Oates, in one of his rare flings as a leading man, is Big John, while Ben Johnson, who played Oates's brother in The Wild Bunch, is supposed to be Melvin Purvis. (Twenty years older than Purvis was at the time and radiating a confident, bearlike serenity, Johnson might have been more convincing as Hoover than as the junior agent who, a title card at the end of the movie informs us, ultimately committed suicide, but Milius must have just loved the idea of the two time-tested character actors battling it out in the field.) The movie is full of people like Harry Dean Stanton (who goes out in a blaze of shotgun fire, wearing a fur coat he's taken off a carjacked college student, soon after delivering the line that ought to be on his family crest: "Things ain't workin' out for me today."), Geoffrey Lewis, Richard Dreyfuss (as a surly, punk-ass Baby Face Nelson), Frank McRae, and Cloris Leachman as the Lady in Red, and Milius seems to be having a good time staging many of the actual highlights of Dillinger's and the other gangsters' careers--in scrambled order, so that he can close with the killing of Dillinger, which actually predated some of the other events he wants to include. Weightless, never as dangerous as it wants to be, but kind of lovable, seeing this picture is like watching a bunch of people in period dress play cops and robbers on a movie studio's dime.

Robert Conrad, THE LADY IN RED (1979)

Of all the actors who've been cast as Dillinger, Conrad strikes me as perhaps the most unlikely, though all votes for Mark Harmon (who played the role in a 1991 TV movie that somehow never came across my radar screen) will be counted. Dillinger is actually a supporting character in this film, which was one of the first produced screenplays by John Sayles. Sayles told the story of how a poor farm girl (Pamela Sue Martin) who traveled to Chicago and had to use whatever means came to hand to survive life in the cold, hard city during the Depression came to be on Dillinger's arm the night he was gunned down faster than you can say, "Boy, that Clark Gable's a pisser, ain't he?" Tapping into his trademark liberal concern, Sayles tried to use the Pamela Sue Martin character to show how people are driven to desperate measures by an unfeeling capitalist society, and just to make sure that audiences wouldn't miss that she was meant to be sympathetic, he revealed that she had gotten a bad rap as the woman who set Dillinger up; both she and her new boyfriend (who tells her that he works for "the Board of Trade") were the victims of her Linda Tripp-doppelganger "friend" Anna Sage (Louise Fletcher), who deduced the boyfriend's identity and sold them out to the Feds. This protective screenwriting device has the downside of making the Martin character seem more stupid than necessary, and Conrad gives his usual convincing impersonation of a self-satisfied macho dickweed so full of himself that it's easier to see why people would want to gun him down on the sidewalk than it is to understand how he got a date to the movies. The Lady in Red, which was later re-issued under the title Guns, Sin and Bathtub Gin, was directed by Lewis Teague, who would team up again with Sayles a year later for Alligator, a probing, class-conscious exploration of the worst that can happen if you flush your pets.

Afternoon Deal Report: A Fitting Tribute to Hasbro's Tradition of Quality

Peter Smith — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 17:20:00 GMT

Dennis Quaid and Channing Tatum have joined the cast of G.I. Joe. This seems apt, given Tatum's startlingly realistic face.

Julianne Moore will star in the supernatural thriller Shelter.

After (ahem) a monstrous opening, Cloverfield has dropped 68% at the box office. Course, when you're up against an aesthetic triumph like Meet the Spartans, which made $18 million last weekend. . .

Crash is becoming a series on Starz. That's the ensemble drama Crash, not the Cronenberg flick about car-fucking, unfortunately.

Luc Besson's next project will be a three-film adaptation of Aventures, a beloved French comic about a novelist in World War I-era Paris.

Trailer Roundup: Stop-Loss

Paul Clark — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 19:00:00 GMT

If I were more of cynic I would probably roll my eyes and brace myself for the inevitable op-ed pieces about how Americans don't want to see Iraq War movies that would follow the eventual failure of this film at the box office. But if I'm going to be honest, I've got pretty high hopes for this one. Maybe I'm just glad to see Kimberly Peirce making another film, as it's been a full nine years since Boys Don't Cry. Judging by the trailer, it appears she hasn't lost any of her feel for portraying flyover-country (now called "red state") life onscreen. In addition, Stop-Loss looks to be a more ground-level approach to the Iraq War, more a soldier's story than a grand statement, which is a welcome change from all the lofty rhetoric on either side of the issue. Gordon-Levitt aside, the cast isn't especially promising, but we didn't exactly think much of the girl from The Next Karate Kid either before Peirce got her hands on her, and look how well that turned out.