The Screengrab : chinatown

Th-Th-That's All Folks! The Best & Worst Endings Of All Time! (Part Seven)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 28 May 2009 23:00:00 GMT

SOME LIKE IT HOT (1959)

Sometimes, bringing a movie to a transcendent stop just comes down to the right sign-off line. Take it away, Joe E... (PN)

RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY (1962)

You might think we're double dipping here, since this same scene wound up on our list of great deaths scenes last week, but fuck it: Babe Ruth was a great hitter and a great pitcher. And when Joel McCrea, having taken what satisfaction he can from making the world a few louts shorter and knowing that his old pard (Randolph Scott) has had his trustworthiness restored to him, sinks to the bottom of the frame, and out of our world, it's a better than fitting end to both the character and the movie. Later Peckinpah films would end memorably and well, but never again would he get such a massive emotional effect so quietly. (PN)

YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN (1974)

The kind of unstructured crazy comedy that Mel Brooks (and, back then, Woody Allen) practiced in the '70s tended to collapse when time came to give the movies some kind of wrap-up. His collaboration with Gene Wilder is the best-sustained -- maybe the only sustained -- movie of Brooks' career, and part of what makes it satisfying is that he actually managed to provide a logical, happy ending that develops from the story instead of crashing through the rafters. You've got to be glad for these crazy kids. (PN)

CHINATOWN (1974)

Forget it, Jake. What did you do in Chinatown? As little as possible. One of cinema's best indictments of the corruption of power, Chinatown pulls no punches. No movie has better illustrated the brutal correlation between money and water rights in the arid climates of the Southwestern U.S., nor been quite so willing to show how the stewards of the public interest debase themselves acting as lackeys to the wealthy and powerful. This is exactly what American exceptionalism is trying to cover up, but the truth is that hiding something rotten only adds to the stench and decay. It takes a European eye, but not just any European eye, to see through the high gloss of rhetoric covering the post-War growth of the U.S. No, to get it right, you'd need a very particular European: one who had lived in the U.S. for a number of years, a person who lost his mother to Auschwitz and who himself spent his childhood surviving by wits alone while ducking Nazis and Nazi informers, a man who lost his wife, unborn child, and a bunch of his friends to the uniquely American Manson Family. That's the guy to look his audience in the eye and tell them that their cynical gumshoe is going to lose everything through his faith in the system, the monstrous Noah Cross is going to get away with rape, murder, and incest, and the femme fatale with the heart of gold is going to die for their sins. Forget it, he says, we're all in the dark, and no one knows if sticking their neck out makes things better or worse. I usually find nihilism appalling, but I'll be damned if Chinatown isn't a much-needed slap in the face. Where your run-of-the-mill misanthropes like Todd Solondz never got over being bullied in 7th grade, Polanski offers concrete reasons to assume the worst about people, especially when power and money are involved. It leaves you with a sour taste in the mouth and a queasy gut, but it leaves you wiser, too. (HC)

THE LONG GOODBYE (1973)

TERRY LENNOX: Nobody cares.

PHILIP MARLOWE: Nobody but me.

LENNOX: Yeah, well, that's you, Marlowe. And you're a born loser.

MARLOWE: Yeah; I even lost my cat.

[Reaches for his gun...]

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven & Twelve

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Hayden Childs

Not Readily Available on Legally Authorized Commercial DVD Release in the Continental United States: Jack Nicholson's "Drive, He Said"

Phil Nugent — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 15:00:00 GMT

[Note: When this feature premiered here some weeks back, it was under the title "Not on DVD". As several readers were thoughtful enough to point out, this was not technically accurate, because there isn't anything that you can't find in some version on DVD provided you have access to an all-region player, live at one of the far corners of the earth, and know a guy what knows a guy. Since then, researchers in the Screengrab test labs have labored to come up with a title for this feature that will be both honestly descriptive and pithy. As you can see, they failed. But you get the idea, right?]

Today marks the 72nd birthday of Mr. Jack Nicholson. In 1958, Nicholson made his movie debut in the title role of the 70-minute Roger Corman production Cry Baby Killer, which would lead to more than a decade's worth of solid employment in low-paying jobs in low-budget indie films, many of them for Corman, most of them exploitation and drive-in fare, though a few of them (such as Irving Lerner's 1960 Studs Lonigan and the pair of "existential" Westerns, The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind, that Monte Hellman directed back to back on Corman's nickel in the mid-'60s. (Nicholson also wrote the script for Whirlwind and had writing credits on a few other '60s films, including Hellman's 1964 Flight to Fury, The Trip, and the Monkees vehicle Head, with whose director, Bob Rafelson, he later made Five Easy Pieces, The King of Marvin Gardens, The Postman Always Rings Twice, and Blood and Wine.) The movie that made Nicholson a star, Easy Rider, was basically an art-house version of the biker movies that Corman had made, starting with The Wild Angels, which starred Easy Rider's Peter Fonda. Nicholson had come on board Easy Rider as an afterthought, when Rip Torn, who was set to play the good-hearted good ol' boy George Hanson, got into a bitch-slapping contest with Dennis Hopper and got his invitation to join the production rescinded. In fact, at the time, Nicholson thought that his acting career was over. He was tired of bashing his head against walls trying to break into the industry and had arranged to make his directing debut with an adaptation of Jeremy Larner's 1964 campus novel, Drive, He Said. It was only when he saw Easy Rider with an audience and picked up on the crowd's reaction to his performance that Nicholson realized that his career as a movie star had just begun.

Like Richard Farina's 1966 Been Down So Long, It Looks Like Up to Me, Larner's novel (which takes its title from a Robert Creeley poem) was published early enough in the 1960s to later seem prescient about campus unrest in the Vietnam era, and both books were turned into movies that were released in 1971, by which time the campus protest movement had peaked in the wake of Kent State. Nicholson's movie was filmed in Eugene, Oregon on and around the state university. William Tepper, who looks here like a stork-legged cross between Abbie Hoffman and the Robert De Niro of Mean Streets, made his movie debut as Hector Bloom, a star basketball player who is called out by his coach (Bruce Dern) for having an attitude problem. Hector, who could have any girl on the campus he wanted, has pulled the genius move of having an affair with Olive (Karen Black), who is married to a professor played by Robert Towne, who had also labored in the Corman factory as a screenwriter (The Last Woman on Earth, The Tomb of Ligeia) before writing a couple of movies that gave Nicholson two of his most memorable roles, The Last Detail and Chinatown. (Towne took the name of his Chinatown hero, J. J. Gittes, from Harry Gittes, a friend of Nicholson's who co-produced Drive, He Said. Though the script for this movie is credited to Larner and Nicholson, both Towne and Terrence Malick are said to have taken an uncredited crack at it.) Things turn out badly, but not necessarily in the way you might expect. It turns out that Olive's husband is an overly cerebral, phlegmatic type who knows perfectly well that Hector is balling his wife--it's not easy to miss--but wants to impress everyone with how well he's taking it; a part of him is sort of proud that the great athlete deems him worthy of cuckolding. Olive eventually pushes both of them away, telling them that they're "both big babies" who "deserve each other."

The surprising crosscurrents between the actors caught in this triangle, and also between Tepper and Dern (whose tightly focused performance as the hard-ass coach is some of the very best work he's ever done) capture what's best about Drive, He Said and suggest what Nicholson might have been able to bring to movies if he'd stuck with it as a director. Tepper himself gives an extraordinary performance as an inarticulate but deeply troubled man with the manner of a put-on artist and a romantic soul. (After Drive, He Said bombed, Tepper did some TV but disappeared from movies for a decade. In the early 1980s, he turned up in Miss Right, a comedy that reunited him with his co-star Karen Black, and he had supporting roles in the 1983 remake of Breathless and the 1984 Tom Hanks-Adrian Zmed comedy Bachelor Party, and hasn't been seen on-screen since.) Nicholson shows a free but sure hand with the cast, which also includes Michael Warren (of the TV series Hill Street Blues) and, in smaller roles, David Ogden Stiers (lean and hirsute and recognizable only by his voice, even though he's attempting a cracker accent), Cindy Williams, and June Fairchild, beloved to many for her role as the woman who snorts Ajax in the Cheech and Chong movie Up in Smoke.

For all that's brilliant (or at least brilliantly promising) about Drive, He Said, it's easy to see why it tanked in 1971. Nicholson doesn't seem to have any idea how to shape the material into a cohesive hold, so it feels like a succession of sequences rather than a movie, and the audience is left to get its bearings on its own. Probably a lot of people sat through as much of it as they could stand without ever getting them. There's also the subplot involving Michael Margotta as Gabriel, Hector's roommate, whose character must have struck some people as embarrassingly dated even in 1971. Nicholson fails to establish any basis for a relationship or even any kind of emotional bond between Hector and Gabriel, but what does come through is that, while Hector resists bending to the demands of The Establishment, Gabriel can't even consider it, and the pressure is driving him crazy, at a time when it was fashionable to view going crazy as a noble quest. Gabriel never has a quiet moment in the movie; he's always attacking the M.P.s during his draft induction physical, taking a sword to a TV set after screaming, "They staged the moon landing in Phoenix, Arizona!", throwing commodes out of second story windows, etc. At the climax, he tries to rape Olive, during an assault on her house (and body) that he (maybe with a little prodding from the director) stages as if it were a night of bad experimental theater, and after that doesn't work out, he walks naked into the campus biology lab and sets free the various critters caged there. It must be said, though, that even here Nicholson keeps a tight enough rein on Margotta's performance that only intermittently does this stuff play as foolishly as it sounds. (And in the scene in the lab, there is one glorious caught shot of one of the freed mice appearing to try to make out with one of the frogs, which spurns its advances and hops away.)

Nicholson didn't direct another movie until 1978's barnyard comedy Goin' South, in which he also starred, and that wasn't until after he'd added The Last Detail, Chinatown, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor) to his resume. After he won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Terms of Endearment, Nicholson began telling interviewers that his ultimate dream was to take home one more Academy Award, for Best Director. He pretty much stopped saying that after his third and, to date, last film as director, The Two Jakes, slithered out from under a rock in 1990. An attempted sequel to Chinatown from a fresh Robert Towne script that Towne had tried and failed to make himself five years earlier, it was the kind of movie that absolutely had to have propulsion and a clear plot line, and once again, Nicholson didn't know how to put it together so that the sum would amount to more than a pile of scenes strung together. Maybe it's not that surprising that, with so little practice sitting in the director's chair, Nicholson had gotten no better at what he had been hopeless at twenty years earlier, but he had also lost his touch at guiding his fellow actors: he couldn't even get a decent performance out of himself.

You'd have to be crazy to suggest that Nicholson took the wrong road after savoring that explosion of applause for his performance in Easy Rider. Chances are that Drive, He Said (which played at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival) wouldn't even have gotten as much attention as it did if its director hadn't been a movie star, and if Nicholson hadn't worked as hard as he did at his acting career in the early 1970s, he might not have stayed a movie star for long. (Peter Fonda, the real star of Easy Rider, sure didn't.) As it is, he became the biggest, most durable star of his generation. But he did have something special when he directed Drive, He Said, and it's a shame that, when he reached for it again, it had dissipated.

The Slasher Movie Comes of Age

Phil Nugent — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 17:00:00 GMT

In The Atlantic, James Parker sings the praises of "that most misunderstood of genres," the slasher flick. Actually, Parker doesn't really make a case for the genre being misunderstood so much as boldly step up to declare that he watches them voluntarily, and he can quote Ted Hughes (“Its mishmash of scripture and physics, / With here, brains in hands, for example, / And there, legs in a treetop.” ) and Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf, which, though a fine rendering of a classic work, does not include an appearance by a naked Angelina Jolie in flesh high heels. "The classic slasher flick," he writes, "is produced at high speed, on a squeaker of a budget, and bows briefly for an anointing of critical scorn before going on to make piles of money. With a bit of luck, that critical scorn will be amplified into cultural censure—1980’s rape-revenge slasher, I Spit on Your Grave, for instance, was widely and windily reviled, to the enduring profit of its makers. 'The more the film was attacked,' writer-director Meir Zarchi confided to Variety last year, 'the more money shot into my pocket.'” He must have done pretty damn well. I'm not sure that I've ever actually seen I Spit on Your Grave, but I remember, as if it were yesterday, the 1981 "special" episode of Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel's old syndicated movie-reviews TV show Sneal Previews that was set aside for the purpose of heaping scorn and disgust on what were then just beginning to be called slasher (or "splatter") films, with I Spit on Your Grave a prime target. Watching a clip from the movie, in which a bunch of scuzzball louts swaggered around the fallen body of a violated young woman, sandwiched between the TV showmen clucking and posturing about the death of civilization, one felt much as one does at a screening of Freddy vs. Jason: it's not clear who you should root for, but you'd settle for checking off the box marked "None of the Above."

Part of the appeal of slasher movies is that they're disreputable. But the fact that a writer like Parker can admit to having taken pleasure from watching slasher movies in a magazine like The Atlantic shows how far we've come since...well, since 1976, when Harper's, a magazine pretty much on the same social outreach level as The Atlantic, ran Stephen Koch's "Fashions in Pornography", which gave the author a chance to step out onto the heath and rend his garments in appalled despair over the fact that Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre had been screened at the Museum of Modern Art. (With the title of his screed, Koch clearly anticipated the current term "torture porn", which New York magazine reviewer David Edelstein is so proud of having coined.) In movie circles, Koch is best known as the author of Stargazer, a classic, admiring survey of Andy Warhol's films, and his dismay at seeing some trashy little drive-in slaughter-fest being garlanded by a prestigious New York City culture institution may partly reflect one man's concern that his fringe cinema of choice be recognized as deserving of a place in the canon before some white trash gorehound's fringe cinema of choice. My grandmother was a good Christian Southern lady, and if a bus containing either Andy Warhol or Tobe Hooper had broken down in front of her house, she would have invited both of them in and gorged them on homemade pie, but she wouldn't have watched the movies made by either gentlemen if she'd been able to borrow someone else's eyeballs.

"Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all become respectable if they last long enough," spoke Noah Cross (John Huston) in Chinatown, a movie whose nose-slitting sequence speaks to a part of the audience that has no insurmountable problem with being titillated with a little gratuitous shock and bloodshed, so long as there's a story and big stars to go with it. Back in 1981, maybe nobody seriously expected slasher movies to last this long. But they did, and now they're at least half respectable, partly because those of us who, back then, were just old enough to watch clips from them on Sneak Previews but who couldn't see the movies themselves until they hit cable or Mom and Dad left us alone with the VCR, are now adults who, because this stuff was always there, can imagine stuff that's even worse. Some of these adults are now filmmakers whose job it is to imagine stuff that's even worse. As Parker sees it, "Saw and Hostel succeeded, above all, because they are serious slasher flicks. The extremity of their goriness reclaimed the splatter death from mainstream movies (where it’s become unremarkable to see a man fed screaming to a propeller, or run through with a drill bit). And the immersive nastiness of their aesthetic—decayed bathrooms, foul workshops, seeping industrial spaces, blades blotched with rust—distilled the slasher-flick elixir: atmosphere. No franchise thrives without it."

Parker continues: "Just as crucially, Saw and Hostel feature excellent and novel villains." Saw's Jigsaw is, or if I interpreted the art work on the last installment correctly as I whizzed past it on the subway umpteen times, was, a terminal cancer patient whose Rube Goldberg torture devices are intended to impress upon his victims the importance of appreciating life, an area in which he judges them to have been falling short. And the wealthy businessmen who, in the Hostel series, pay top dollar to torture healthy young American backpackers to death can be taken as some kind of comment on the rapaciousness of the class that brought us the new Depression. Earlier generations of genre filmmakers were a little confused when informed that they were in the social commentary business, but Hostel director Eli Roth talks about it as if he thought he might be eligible for a Pulitzer: "“Thanks to George Bush and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld," the insists, "there’s a whole new wave of horror movies.”

What's kind of off-putting is how much of the new wave has hit the beach before, with fewer Roman numerals attached. So far this year we've seen remakes of Friday the 13th, My Bloody Valentine, and Wes Craven's Last House on the Left, a movie so proudly vile that the fact that it could provide fodder for a pricey Hollywood remake--let alone the fact that its director could have gone on to work with Meryl Streep--just about single-handedly carried us all into an alternate universe. Later this year there'll be a sequel to Rob Zombie's remake of John Carpenter's original Halloween. This deluge of remakes may be part of what's now respectable about slasher movies: unless you're the Marquis de Sade, it's hard to come up with a really new take on having a madman run around turning people into kindling, and if your movie is going to look a lot like a lot of other movies, why not latch onto the name of a golden oldie and "honor" it with an official remake rather than imitate it and get tagged as a rip-off artist? If Parker, as a fan of the genre, is concerned that it may finally be killed off by losing its capacity to shock, either from endless repetition or misplaced self-seriousness, he isn't letting on: "In a tolerant spirit," he writes, "the slasher fan gets in line for the new sequel or prequel or remake or 'reboot.' If it’s crap, so what? The next one might be better."

The Letdowns: Tequila Sunrise (1988)

Nick Schager — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 18:30:00 GMT

In this recurring column, we revisit (and reconsider) eagerly anticipated films that didn’t seem to fulfill their pre-release promise.

Having cemented his place in the screenwriting pantheon with 1974’s Academy Award-winning Chinatown, Robert Towne embarked on a directorial career with 1982’s reasonably well-received lesbian track-and-field saga Personal Best. For his second behind-the-camera outing, however, the writer/director returned to the terrain that had nabbed him Oscar gold, as 1988’s Tequila Sunrise was, like Chinatown, a knotty, star-studded L.A. noir full of shifting allegiances and difficult-to-decipher truths. Or, at least, that was the heritage responsible for the rather considerable hype that preceded Towne’s sophomore effort. Unfortunately, such comparisons now seem by and large superficial, given that the film – despite some sleek cinematography by Conrad L. Hall, a comfortable familiarity with its City of Angels cops-and-crooks milieu, and the participation of Mel Gibson, Kurt Russell, Michelle Pfeiffer, and the late, great J.T. Walsh and Raul Julia – turned out to be a striking example of a project with the ingredients for greatness that nonetheless came out half-baked.

A tale of best friends on opposite sides of the law who wind up at personal and professional odds, Tequila Sunrise charts the friction between high school buds Mac (Gibson) and Nick (Russell), the former a big shot drug dealer trying to ditch the business (for barely explicated reasons), and the latter an LAPD lieutenant who wants to keep Mac from prison but still feels compelled to nail him to the wall. Towne suitably sets up these tense dynamics, yet the central love triangle the two blood brothers eventually form with restaurant hostess Jo Ann (Pfeiffer) never gets off the ground, mainly because Towne, rather than fleshing out Jo Anne, simply reduces her to a lazy narrative pawn dressed up like an ‘80s department store mannequin. This doesn’t make her appear any less silly than Russell’s Nick, whose slicked-back hair was Towne’s deliberate nod to the coiffure of then-L.A. Lakers coach Pat Riley (whom, astonishingly, he even thought about casting). But unlike his co-stars, Russell at least has a character with clear, identifiable personality traits.

Matching Pfeiffer’s blandness, Gibson, in one of the least charismatic performances of his career, seems totally unsure of who Mac actually is, a situation caused in part by Towne’s preposterous conception of the character as a family-first average Joe without a dastardly bone in his body. The result is that Gibson mutes his every line, action and reaction to the point that Mac’s behavior seems solely spurred by the logistical plot demands of Towne’s talk-heavy, energy-deficient script. An occasional bit of sharp dialogue helps balance out the more groan-worthy hardboiled utterances about loyalty and friendship, just as Russell’s morally dubious Nick provides sporadic life to the lethargically paced proceedings. Yet whenever Tequila Sunrise seems poised to hit a vigorous noir groove, the writer/director shoots himself in the foot, whether it’s his clumsily self-conscious expressionistic imagery (such as a shot of Mac and Nick silhouetted against the sunset while sitting on a beach swing set) or, worst of all, a blaring saxophone-scored sex scene between Gibson and Pfeifer that’s literally, embarrassingly “steamy.”

Set Your DVR!: February 23 - 27, 2009

Hayden Childs — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 18:00:00 GMT

I'm having to break my pledge to stick to a handful of movies per week. Because this week is just so freakin' chock-full of goodness! It's so movie-riffic that it would be absurd for me to try to cut it down to three or four. I don't remember being made the Mayor Of Television, but since there's no other reasonable explanation, I expect to be cutting a bunch of ribbons until my corrupt administration is thrown in jail. Enjoy it while it lasts!

Only two movies to mention on Monday, February 23. At 7 pm central/8 pm eastern and again at 10 pm central/11 pm eastern, OVATION is showing Spalding Gray's Swimming To Cambodia, a monologue that highlights what a fun and nimble mind Gray had. It's directed by Jonathan Demme and scored by Laurie Anderson, both of which add extra layers of cool. Then overnight, TCM is showing Jean Renoir's The Southerner at 1:15 am central/2:15 am eastern (2/24). I'll be honest: The Southerner can be a tough movie. Renoir at his best was perhaps the most sympathetic and humanist director of the 20th century. But he was quite out of his depth with this movie. It's not terrible, but it's not his first tier. Still quite worthwhile for fans of Renoir or star Zachary Scott.

On Tuesday, February 24, TCM is out of control with awesomeness. First, at 11:15 am central/12:15 pm eastern, TCM is showing Jacques Tati's Mr. Hulot's Holiday, which is a funny and charming, if not uproarious, movie about the habits of the French middle-class during the 50s. Afterwards, TCM is showing François Truffaut's The 400 Blows at 12:45 pm central/1:45 pm eastern. It's not just one of the earliest classics of the French New Wave, but also a powerful semi-autobiographical story about institutional mistreatment of juvenile delinquents. The misbegotten memories of mistreatment of French youth continues at 2:45 pm central/3:45 pm eastern with Louis Malle's Au Revoir, Les Enfants, which is a semi-autobiographical work about a boarding school that hides a few young Jews during the Second World War. Afterwards is René Clément's Gervaise at 4:45 pm central/5:45 pm eastern. I have not seen this movie, but I don't believe that it has been released on DVD.

TCM leaves France for Japan in the evening with four stone classics of Japanese cinema: The Burmese Harp at 7 pm central/8 pm eastern, then Rashomon at 9 pm central/10 pm eastern, followed by The Seven Samurai at 10:30 pm central/11:30 pm eastern, and finally Kwaidan at 2 am central/3 am eastern (2/25). The Burmese Harp is an anti-war story, Rashomon is (of course) about the shifting nature of narrative and observations (or so I recall), The Seven Samurai is the greatest film the world has ever known (although I don't mean to overpraise it - and, well, I'm not) and Kwaidan is a collection of ghost stories.

Also of note on Tuesday night is The Order of Myths, appearing on the show Independent Lens, which most PBS channels run at 10 pm central/11 pm eastern on Tuesdays. The Order of Myths is one of the best documentaries of 2008, which was an unusually strong year for documentaries. The movie deals with the racially divided Mardi Gras of Mobile, Alabama with a deft touch that makes villains of none while carefully examining the history of racism and power that created the situation. It's stunningly great, and I don't just say this because I grew up in Mobile and am intimately familiar with the sticky racial and familial issues that filmmaker Margaret Brown bravely tackles. If you miss this because of your dedication to the Kurosawa movies on TCM, check your listings. My PBS channel is showing it again overnight on Wednesday night/Thursday morning at 3 am central time.

TCM is showing three excellent movies on Thursday, February 26, as well. In the morning is Charlie Chaplin's The Gold Rush at 5 am central/6 am eastern. In the evening, there's Bogey and Hepburn in The African Queen at 7 pm central/8 pm eastern and later Roman Polanski's masterpiece Chinatown at 11:15 pm central/12:15 am eastern.

Roman Polanski: Wanted in Los Angeles, Desired in Turin

Phil Nugent — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 16:00:00 GMT

For almost a year now, Marina Zenovich's documentary Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, which deals with the Los Angeles criminal case that turned the director of Chinatown and Rosemary's Baby into a fugitive from American justice, has been kicking up dust in both film and legal circles. In 1977, Polanski was arrested on six felony counts arising from charges that he had drugged and raped a thirteen-year-old girl at a private photo shoot he had arranged at his friend Jack Nicholson's house. In a plea bargain, Polanski, who had been staring down a possible life sentence if convicted on all counts, pled guilty to a single count of "unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor", and expected to receive probation, a sentence that would have been in keeping with recommendations made by psychiatrists advising the court. In the end, Polanski fled the country, though only after spending 42 days locked up in a maximum-security prison where he was to receive a "psychological evaluation." What the documentary, which draws on interviews with both defense and prosecution attorneys involved in the case, makes clear is that Polanski skipped out only after deciding that he couldn't trust the judge, Lawrence J. Rittenband, a starstruck jackass whose delight at being at the center of a high-profile case had turned to distress over the bad publicity he was getting from Hollywood reporters chastising him for going easy on a rich pervert filmmaker with a "Children of the night!" foreign accent. (The subtitle of Zenovich's film is a sly reference to the different ways that Polanski was regarded in America and in Europe.) On two occasions, Rittenband demanded that the lawyers play-act scenes with him for the benefit of the reporters, and reneged on deals he'd made when he didn't like his press clippings. (Rittenband has since died, but in the movie, retired Deputy District Attorney Roger Gunson, who speaks about Polanski as if he were something he'd found sticking to his shoe, recalls warning Polanski's lawyer about Rittenband and says that if he'd found himself at the legal mercy of a freak like Rittenband, he probably would have been on the next plane himself.) Now lawyers for Polanski have filed a request the dismiss the outstanding warrant against him, citing the evidence of "a pattern of misconduct and improper communications" revealed in the film. If the charges are dropped--a move that Polanski's alleged victim calls for in the film--the 75-year-old winner of the 2002 Academy Award for Best Director (for The Pianist) will finally be able to visit the U.S. for the first time in thirty years. A spokeswoman for the District Attorney's office told reporters that she couldn't comment on the new developments because the D.A. was s till waiting to be served with the motion. She knew all about it, though. Saw it on the TV news.

While he waits for the results of the Los Angeles Superior Court hearing scheduled in January, Polanksi is maintaining his regular schedule of getting his feet kissed in Europe. He recently showed up at the Turin Film Festival, site of an enormous career retrospective thrown in his honor. Neil Harris reports that "At the nearby Museo Nazionale del Cinema, the gantry that snakes around its spectacular five-storey exhibition hall is decorated with blown-up photographs from the director's own collection. Viewed together, they offer fascinating insights into the making of such iconic masterworks as Repulsion, Chinatown and Rosemary's Baby. A snap from the latter's set sees its star Mia Farrow visibly delighted by a chart breaking down her performance into separate components. Polanski, whose directing style has not always inspired descriptions of his actors as being "visibly delighted", rolled into town to co-star in a Q & A session with director Nanni Moretti (The Son's Room), the festival's artistic director. Describing the challenges he's placed in front of himself on some projects, Polanski said that "Telling stories is not enough. I need something more difficult to achieve." He also admitted to the odd failure or two. The most spectacular of these on his resume is Pirates, the $40 million bellyflop that Polanski had actually been working on before his arrest and that was finally released in 1986, only to serve as a reminder to the world that if you're working on an expensive project that you've conceived for Jack Nicholson to star in and find yourself making it with Walter Matthau in the lead, something has gone terribly wrong. "It was a nightmare from beginning to end. Every day something new would go wrong," Polanski recalled of the shoot, adding, "I should have got a special award just for finishing it." Or maybe, as Chico Marx might put it, he should have been offered a really special award in exchange for agreeing not to finish it.

How Not to Interview Faye Dunaway: Latest in a Series

Phil Nugent — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 17:00:00 GMT

At the Guardian, Xan Brooks has a diverting account of how he came to get ejected from Faye Dunaway's presence while conducting her "first British press interview in nearly 20 years ". Dunaway is across the pond for the Raindance Film Festival showing of her latest film, Flick, a horror movie directed by David Howard. Brooks opens his account by describing how Howard listed for him all "the things I am absolutely not to ask her. Firstly, there must be no mention of Mommie Dearest, the Joan Crawford biopic credited with destroying Dunaway's career. Nor must I ask her about Andrew Lloyd Webber, who bumped her from the Los Angeles production of Sunset Boulevard in 1994; or about her adult son, who may or may not be adopted; or about the cosmetic surgery that she may or may not have undergone. Is that it? 'Yes,' says Howard. 'I think that's the lot.' He turns out to be wrong." Brooks veered into a minefield when he chose to ask her about Roman Polanski's Chinatown and how much reports of tensions on its set might have damaged her career. ("Oh," Dunaway says, "The Roman thing.") When our intrepid correspondent asks the ladylike Dunaway if it's true that she once threw a cup of urine at her pint-sized director, the interview wraps itself up in short order.

Before the meltdown, Dunaway gives what sounds like an amusing performance, half elegant and half dippy, as an aging star who may only be a faded name to younger moviegoers and who seems surprisingly intent on being judged a creature of regal dignity. In Flick, she plays "a one-armed Memphis cop on the trail of a zombie Teddy boy." Brooks marches right out onto thin ice at the start, mentioning that Howard has said that in casting her, "he was taking his lead from Roger Corman, the B-movie producer who made a habit of hiring older Hollywood legends such as Ray Milland to appear in his movies" Dunaway's response: "I think he was going for - not old Hollywood, let's not say that. But maybe a little of the old-style glamour." Despite the dragon-lady demeanor that made Dunaway stand out in the '60s and '70s and that made her a neat fit for both the role of Joan Crawford and the nostalgic setting of Chinatown, Dunaway describes her breakout role as Bonnie Parker as the one "that's closest to me. I was a southern girl and so was Bonnie. We share the frustrations of living in that small, limited environment - dying to get out and move forward in the world. That was part of my makeup as a girl." Cut short though it was, the conversation does give you a feeling that you might have glimpsed something about Dunaway, and why she hasn't done better at staying afloat in the last couple of decades: women have to fight to stay alive in Hollywood, and Dunaway, who clearly has the resources to be a fighter, doesn't want to be seen that way: it conflicts with her surprising desire to be seen as a lady. She doesn't seem to grasp that Brooks is trying to help her out, not trap her, when he suggests that the nasty stories told against her for having been difficult might "come down to a case of Hollywood sexism, I ask her. After all, nobody ever complained about her former co-stars Jack Nicholson, Steve McQueen or Marlon Brando being a little bit wild or rebellious. But Dunaway doesn't bite: she can't think what I mean."

List-o-Mania Addendum: The Bleakest Movie Endings

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 16:30:00 GMT

I’ve been alerted to a list we missed in last week’s roundup, so in the interest of equal time, please direct your attention to the REEL Addict’s Top 15 Bleakest Film Endings. But tread lightly, spoiler-phobes, because as you may have deduced, the list does reveal the endings to 15 films, some of which you may not have seen. In fact, I won’t even reveal any of the titles until after the jump (although I guess that picture is kind of a giveaway, huh?).

As regular Screengrab readers may recall, I’ve already determined that the title of bleakest movie ending of all time belongs to Beneath the Planet of the Apes. But perhaps the REEL Addict found it hard to take that one seriously, so he goes with a perfectly acceptable alternative in Chinatown. “The girl dies, the bad guy wins, and all the efforts of our hero to solve the case go for nothing. ‘Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.’” Well, gee, when you put it that way, I guess I can go along with it. Second place goes to Requiem for a Dream, and I have to disagree: the ending meant the movie was over and I could leave the theater, which I found a greatly uplifting experience. You can check the rest out for yourself, along with a selection of clips. My favorite is the finale of No Country for Old Men; I saw the movie twice, and I don’t recall the Burger King appearing over Tommy Lee Jones’ shoulder during his final monologue, but hey – YouTube don’t lie.

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.

When Good Directors Go Bad: Texasville (1990, Peter Bogdanovich)

Paul Clark — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 20:00:00 GMT

There's a general rule of thumb that any sequel worth making is generally made within four or five years of the original film. Naturally, there are exceptions to this rule, but they're few and far between. Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles, anyone? It's best for sequel makers to strike while the iron is hot, not merely from a business point of view, but also to build on the goodwill of the original. Yet the cinematic landscape is littered with sequels that arrived well past their franchise's expiration date. For every Before Sunset, there's a dozen Oliver's Storys, standing on the dusty highway of cinema history, angrily shaking a tire iron at the pop-culture bus as it passes them by.

1990 brought us three notable examples of this phenomenon, all follow-ups to canonical classics of 1970s Hollywood cinema. The most famous of the bunch was, of course, The Godfather, Part III, an admittedly unnecessary film that's still mostly better than its rep. Then there's The Two Jakes, the Jack Nicholson-directed sequel to Chinatown that's a mess but boasts a fine Harvey Keitel performance. The worst of the lot is easily Peter Bogdanovich's Texasville.

Some of you might not remember this, but Peter Bogdanovich was once known primarily as a fine filmmaker, rather than for playing Dr. Melfi's shrink on The Sopranos or as the boring dude who keeps turning up on DVD commentaries. But in his salad days as a filmmaker, he made a number of excellent films, with his 1971 film The Last Picture Show enduring as a honest-to-goodness masterpiece. But after his career cooled off — a cooling due in no small part to 1975's disastrous At Long Last Love — Bogdanovich had much more trouble getting films made, so he finally decided to make a Last Picture Show sequel, adapting the second Anarene novel by Larry McMurtry and reuniting the lion's share of the original cast.

Some sequels exist to build on and deepen the story of the originals, while others are more about catching up with characters we've gotten to know and love some years down the line. In theory, Texasville should fall into the latter category, but this can be a tricky thing to pull off, especially in a setting like Anarene where everyone knows each other and not a whole lot changes over the years. So instead of exploring how many of these old relationships have played out since the last film, Bogdanovich tightens his focus to Duane Jackson (played in both films by Jeff Bridges), the former football captain who now primarily exists to be picked on by his wife, children, and life in general.

Part of the problem with Texasville, and a major reason why it can't even come within spitting distance of The Last Picture Show, is because Bogdanovich is no longer the young tyro he was in the seventies. That's apparent from the film's opening shot, where we see the Texas landscape in lifelike color, whereas Last Picture Show was in beautiful black and white. But the new color scheme is the least of Texasville's issues. The original film was a realistic fifties-era slice of life about a town so small that there was little to do but go to the movies and fool around as each day brought you a little closer to death. It was a world so desolate that the movie theatre ended up closing.

Texasville is also founded upon the same conception of the town, but it's hard to reconcile the two worlds. The original film's roads and houses were almost always empty, but the more modern version of Anarene is a flurry of activity. Yes, the characters still screw around, but it's played almost as a joke rather than the sad reality we saw in the original film. It's as though Bogdanovich no longer had the nerve to play the story as tragedy anymore, so he settled instead on farce.

Making Duane the central character in the film was probably a mistake as well, although I suppose it's as much McMurtry's fault as anyone's. But regardless of who's to blame, Duane wasn't a character we especially cared about in The Last Picture Show, and while Bridges is a fine actor, even he can't distract us from the fact that we're too busy wondering what happened to the more interesting folks. Honestly, did McMurtry and Bogdanovich really think audiences had waited nineteen years to find out what would happen if Jacy (Cybill Shepherd) came back into his life? Or that he now has a son who can't keep it in his pants, just like his daddy was back in high school?

Texasville is almost perverse in the way it avoids rekindling the old feelings that were originally summoned up by The Last Picture Show. Consider the original film's protagonist Sonny (Timothy Bottoms), who's now relegated to a supporting part in the story. Aside from the dearly departed Sam the Lion (played in the original by Ben Johnson), the heart of The Last Picture Show was Sonny's relationship with Ruth Popper, played in both films by Cloris Leachman.

Yet Texasville gives the two almost no screen time together. The film practically forgets Sonny altogether at several points, returning to him every so often to show him getting steadily crazier, as when he visits the abandoned (after thirty years!) Royal Theatre to "watch movies in the sky.” Even when Sonny moves in with Ruth after a nervous breakdown, we never see them together as we did in the first film. Does Bogdanovich even care? Surely he could have found some tender moments between Sonny and Ruth had he not devoted so much time to, say, an awful scene in which Sonny's troublemaking twins spearhead a mass egging of the town's centennial festivities.

While Texasville isn't the all-time worst sequel to a great film, it may be the most disheartening. To see Bogdanovich so colossally misjudge what made The Last Picture Show so great makes me wonder whether he ever knew in the first place. In a way, the fate of the Royal Theatre sums up the difference between these two movies. In the original film, it played a central role in the town, and brought joy and goodwill into the lives of its residents. In Texasville, it's a ruin, an eyesore, a pale shadow of what it once was, and you pretty much have to be crazy to go there.

And the ReOscar Goes to…Peter Fonda?

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 17:00:00 GMT

While we’ve been busy with our spreadsheets and slide rules, trying to figure who the big winners will be come Sunday night, Time’s Richard Corliss is just getting around to giving his picks for the 1998 Oscars. No, Corliss hasn’t slipped through some sort of wormhole in the space-time continuum. Instead he’s presenting Time’s First Annual Re-Oscars.

The premise is that the Academy may have occasionally made a mistake or two over the years, a controversial notion we’re nonetheless prepared to embrace. "What we're offering is a second chance at the Academy Awards handed out on March 23, 1998," Corliss writes. "To a lot of people, the record eleven Oscars that James Cameron's Titanic lapped up that night were suitable acknowledgment of a much-loved movie that quickly became the top box-office attraction in film history. We're asking how Titanic, which was named the Best Picture of 1997, and the performances that won in the four actor categories have stood the test of time. And we're answering: Eh, not so well."

If your memory of the films that challenged Titanic for Best Picture that year is a little shaky, we don’t blame you. Somehow we’d forgotten those timeless classics As Good as It Gets and The Full Monty were nominated as well, although with guns to our heads we probably could have guessed Good Will Hunting made the final five. Given those choices, we’ll go along with Corliss’s selection of L.A. Confidential as the first Re-Oscar winner, although his reasoning is a little shaky: “A guilty secret of film criticism is that reviewers often lavish their fondness on modern versions of the kinds of genres they don't make any more. Thus The English Patient, a film in the David Lean epic tradition, was my choice for best film of 1996. L.A. Confidential is a time trip back to the period in which it's set, the early '50s, when film noir (as the French called Hollywood's crime dramas) argued that postwar optimism was a lie — that brutality and betrayal lurked around the every city street corner, where the cop on the beat might also be on the take.”

Corliss also reminds us of one of the laziest Academy decisions in recent memory: Jack Nicholson winning his third Oscar for his Jack Nicholson-esque performance in As Good as It Gets. "Nicholson had lost an Oscar a few times when he deserved one: in Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces and especially Chinatown, a great performance that lost to Art Carney's turn as a lonely older guy with health problems in Harry and Tonto. . . Chalk up Nicholson's third Oscar as an early Life Achievement Award." Instead, Corliss chooses to recognize Peter Fonda’s nearly forgotten turn in the all-around understated Ulee’s Gold. Hey, we’re happy for him. For the rest of the ReOscar roster, click here.

Mike D'Angelo at Sundance: Part 1

Peter Smith — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 19:50:00 GMT

Mike D'Angelo reports from the Sundance Film Festival:

Sundance is playing things close to the vest this year, for some reason. Upon my arrival late Thursday night — too late, alas, to catch the opening-night attraction, In Bruges, which everyone who did see it seems to think is ill-served by its hyperactive trailer — I picked up a copy of the Salt Lake City Weekly, expecting to find my friend Scott Renshaw's capsule reviews of perhaps two dozen films that had been screened for local press before the festival proper even began. Instead, there only was a page of wild guesswork, advance screenings having apparently been scuttled. Nor were Friday's press screenings particularly appetizing, as most of the morning and afternoon was devoted to soporific-sounding selections from the World Documentary section. Did I really want or need to learn anything further about Mumia Abu-Jamal? (In Prison My Whole Life.) Would Up the Yangtze, about China's Three Gorges Dam project, be any more illuminating than Jia Zhang-ke's 2006 Venice prizewinner Still Life, just now opening in limited U.S. release? Hoping the homegrown docs might be more energizing, I stuck my head into Traces of the Trade, a personal-essay film in which the director and nine relatives tour the locations where their ancestors purchased slave labor with rum and molasses, but fled after forty minutes of unbearably self-indulgent white-liberal guilt.

As I write this, most of the potentially heavy hitters are still to come. Today, however, people are buzzing, with good reason, about yet another documentary, Marina Zenovich's Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired. (Full disclosure: I roomed with Marina at Cannes a few years ago, though we barely spoke since I tend to fall asleep at festivals within fifty-two seconds of hitting my room.) As the title suggests, the film focuses on Polanski's 1977 arrest for "unlawful sexual intercourse" (plea-bargained down from rape) with a thirteen-year-old girl and his subsequent flight from justice just hours before he was due to be sentenced, resulting in what may well be lifelong exile in France. Even for those familiar with the general details of the case, though, Wanted and Desired will likely prove revelatory. Zenovich dutifully provides basic psychological context for Polanski's odious conduct — mom murdered by Nazis, pregnant wife slaughtered by Manson Family — and wittily illustrates various points with well-chosen clips from Rosemary's Baby, Chinatown, The Tenant, and other favorites. Ultimately, however, she's less interested in Polanski's crime than she is in the outlandish farce of judicial corruption that the banal crime somehow inspired. If you've ever run into a celebrity and found yourself instantly transformed into a babbling cretin, this fascinating film will provide some solace: At least the celeb's life and freedom weren't in your shaking hands.

Morning Deal Report: If Variety's Short on Stories, Think How I Feel

Peter Smith — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 16:00:00 GMT

Some big names were picketing outside Rockefeller Center yesterday, and now a certain colleague who was trying to get me to go up there with him is mad at me for ruining his chance to propose to Tina Fey. John, I think she's spoken for.

JJ Abrams's Star Trek has put out an open casting call for extras. Cinematical has the dope on what the production's looking for: Talent with interesting and unique facial features such as: long necks, small heads, extremely large heads, wide-set eyes, bug eyes, close-set eyes, large forehead, short upper lip, pronounced cheekbones, over- or undersized ears and/or nose, facial deformities, ultra plain-looking people, ultra perfect-looking people, pure wholesome looks, twins, triplets, emaciated talent, regally poised and postured talent, or other visually unique characteristics. Awesome. It's too bad John Matuszak is dead.

Jack Nicholson is apparently working on a second sequel to Chinatown, claiming a trilogy was always the plan.

— Peter Smith