The Screengrab : christopher walken

Reviews By Request: King of New York (1990, Abel Ferrara)

Paul Clark — Fri, 29 May 2009 19:00:00 GMT

Once again, thanks to Scott Tobias from the Onion AV Club for recommending this film, which he previously selected for his weekly column “The New Cult Canon.”

One of Christopher Walken’s greatest assets as an actor is his unpredictability. Watching Walken onscreen, it’s hard to tell how he’s going to deliver even the most mundane bit of dialogue, much less predict how his characters will behave under pressure. But while Walken’s off-kilter presence has garnered him a sizable cult following, it’s easy to overlook what a fascinating actor he can be in more complex roles. In many of his character roles, Walken has fun with his image, but he’s not afraid to play it straight when the part calls for it. Abel Ferrara’s King of New York is one of those parts, and consequently one of his best performances.

Frank White, the crime lord Walken plays in King of New York, is one of the most frightening criminals I’ve ever seen in a movie, due in large part to the unpredictability that Walken brings to the role. From the first time we meet Frank, he seems to be capable of anything, which gives him an edge in his criminal endeavors. Most of his competition sticks to hard and fast traditions, the most important being that the bigwigs keep their hands clean while the foot soldiers fight the wars. Frank has no use for such traditions- when he needs someone killed, he’d just as soon do it himself. There are many possibilities as to why Frank would do this, but I think it’s because he wants people to think he’s the baddest, scariest man in New York. And when he follows the killing of a rival gang leader by inviting his underlings to join his gang, it sends a very specific message- if you’re crazy enough to follow a guy who does this, I want you on my side.

Consequently, many of Frank’s foot soldiers are as volatile as he is- and some even share his flair for the theatrical, as when one storms into a hotel room shootout screaming, “room service, motherfuckers!” In addition, Frank’s gang could be called “post-racial”- whereas Frank’s rivals generally adhere to ethnic boundaries, such concerns are beneath Frank. Most of his underlings are African-American- two of his most prominent foot soldiers are played by Laurence (then Larry) Fishburne and Giancarlo Esposito- but Steve Buscemi also turns up as Frank’s in-house drug tester. And Frank’s own ethnicity- just look at his name- allows him an entry in legitimate society that would be more limited to other criminals of his stature.

It’s this air of near-legitimacy that rankles the NYPD, especially a trio of cops played by David Caruso, Wesley Snipes, and Victor Argo. Whereas the power of the city’s other top criminals is relatively contained to the underworld, Frank hobnobs with New York’s elite, turning up at black-tie parties and charity events. “He’s a movie star,” says Caruso, who bemoans the fact that Frank is running roughshod over the city while he and his partners are only bringing in a modest policeman’s salary. But how to stop him? Caruso and Snipes determine that in order to catch Frank, they need to be as crazy as he is. It isn’t until it’s too late (when Frank crashes one cop’s funeral to kill another one) that that discover that crazy isn’t enough- one must also be lucky.

Argo’s Roy Bishop is the one exception to the film’s cycle of brutality- the one “good cop” who sticks to his principles and hopes to bring Frank in not by sneaking around but by nuts-and-bolts police work. We see him sitting at home in front of his computer, sifting through police files in an attempt to make a case. Throughout the film, Ferrara contrasts Roy’s steadfast adherence to old-fashioned morality with Frank’s more slippery kind of ethics, and Frank understandably sees Roy as his biggest threat. I found it interesting to see Argo, who usually played wiseguys, playing the closest thing this film has to a steady moral compass.

King of New York is one of the bleakest crime movies I’ve ever seen, with one scene of unsparing violence after another. But it’s stylish enough that it’s anything but a slog- like GoodFellas and Scarface before it, it’s amassed a considerable cult, even serving as an inspiration for the late Notorious B.I.G. I’ve only seen a handful of Ferrara films to date, but one thing that’s impressed me about them is how stylish his films can be despite their budgetary limitations. In King of New York, Ferrara uses the low budget to his advantage, setting scenes in scruffy back-alleys and abandoned buildings to give the film a grittier feel than most movies of its kind. I also liked that Frank’s home isn’t an expansive estate but a suite at the Plaza, which combines a location in the heart of New York (perfect for shots of him overlooking the city) with a kind of rented luxury that says everything about the mystique Frank wants to create for himself.

At the center of it all is the enigma of Frank White. Throughout the film Ferrara and Walken invite us to ask the question, what drives this man? Late in the film, he confronts Roy in his apartment and tells him that he considers himself a businessman rather than a criminal, and states that “I never killed anybody that didn’t deserve it.” But how to reconcile that with the charge he seems to get from his power? Or for that matter, what of his efforts to save a children’s hospital in a poor neighborhood? One thing’s for sure- he’s hooked on his sense of power. When he says he wants to run for mayor, everyone laughs until Frank tells them he’s serious. Is he? Who are we to question him?

In Other Blogs: Roger Ebert Contemplates Eternity

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 08 May 2009 14:30:00 GMT

The weekend is almost here, so let’s turn to our old pal Roger Ebert for some cheery TGIF thoughts. “I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear. I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. What I am grateful for is the gift of intelligence, and for life, love, wonder, and laughter. You can't say it wasn't interesting. My lifetime's memories are what I have brought home from the trip. I will require them for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I brought home from Paris. I don't expect to die anytime soon. But it could happen this moment, while I am writing…I hope not. I have plans.”

Glenn Kenny brings reason to rejoice at Some Came Running: The Friends of Eddie Coyle is finally due out on DVD – in a Criterion edition, no less. “‘Young film fans raised in the multiplex era might look back and lament the fact that no one is making movies like The Friends of Eddie Coyle anymore,’ Kent Jones writes in his exemplary (as usual) essay on the 1973 film, included in the new Criterion DVD of it. ‘The truth is that they never did. There's only this one.’ Robert Mitchum's performance as Eddie, the hangdog, hard-luck crook whose quiet desperation—in this story, he's due to start serving some time in a couple of weeks, and he's just not going to be able to hack it—compels his every move, is a huge part of the film's uniqueness. He underplays like nobody's business, and never announces himself. Not only does the trademark Mitchum smirk never once cross his face—looking at his work here, you'd never believe he had it in the first place.”

At PopMatters, Kit MacFarlane reconsiders Mickey Rourke in Homeboy. “A glum and downbeat boxing film, Homeboy not only anticipates many of the key concerns of the highly-celebrated The Wrestler, but also, by now-obvious extension, the real life trajectory of Rourke himself. But the film fell into the ‘too depressing’ pit on its release, and the presence of standard genre cliches saw it treated dismissively by those who didn’t look close enough to see those same cliches being quietly, but firmly, derailed. Despite the presence of actors like Christopher Walken and Jon Polito, a delicate score by Eric Clapton, and even a fawning reference in Bob Dylan’s Chronicles ("The movie traveled to the moon every time [Rourke] came onto the screen. Nobody could hold a candle to him."), it is rarely mentioned today at all…Too depressing in 1988, Homeboy‘s aura of sorrow now seems too delicate, too nuanced and poetic, next to the sensationalized sledgehammer misery pioneered by today’s hip angst-peddlers like Aronofsky, Todd Solondz, Larry Clark, and Christopher Nolan.”

SmartMoney lists 10 Things Movie Critics Won't Tell You. We’re fond of #7: You probably don’t want to hear this, but you need me. “Want to stir people up? Ask them what they think of movie critics. Jen Davis of Louisville, Ky., is put off by what she sees as a superiority syndrome in the profession. ‘My opinion is just as valid, dammit!’ she says. Tammy Ras of Pascoag, R.I., is more militant: ‘If they say, “Don’t see it, it sucks,” that means, “Go see it, it’s great.”’ Sounds harsh, but the truth is, filmgoers need reviewers. As Salon.com’s Zacharek puts it, ‘Critics are the only thing standing between consumers and advertising.’ With hundreds of films released in theaters each year, ‘Critics are more important now than they ever were,’ she says. ‘There are just so many movies, so much aggressive hype.’”

Finally, it’s not exactly a blog, but The Worst Show on the Web is Blog Talk Radio, and more importantly, the most recent episode features your Screengrabbin’ pals Andrew Osborne and yours truly discussing some films screening at the San Francisco International Film Festival, most notably (and contentiously) My Suicide. Give it a listen here.

Morning Deal Report: Katie Holmes in the Dark

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 07 May 2009 14:30:00 GMT

Guillermo del Toro and Matthew Robbins have scripted the thriller Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, a thriller that will star Katie Holmes. The movie “is based on a 1973 ABC telepic about a young girl who moves in with her father and his girlfriend and discovers they are sharing the house with devilish creatures,” Variety reports.

The Irishmen are coming! “Ray Stevenson, Christopher Walken and Val Kilmer will play the leads in The Irishman, a crime story that Jonathan Hensleigh will direct,” per The Hollywood Reporter. Stevenson will play Danny Greene, “a violent Irish-American gangster who competed with the Italian mob in 1970s Cleveland and ended up provoking a countrywide turf war that crippled the mafia. Walken will play the loan shark and nightclub owner Shondor Birns, and Kilmer is a Cleveland police detective who befriends Greene.”

Robert De Niro and Edward Norton will reunite for the psychological thriller Stone. “Story centers on a correctional officer (De Niro) who is seduced by the wife of a convicted arsonist (Norton) up for parole.” De Niro and Norton previously appeared together in The Score.

Up The Academy: Screengrab Salutes The All-Time Best & Worst Best Picture Winners (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 21:00:00 GMT

Forget Christmas: for movie geeks, the period from New Year’s Eve to the third week in February is truly the most wonderful time of the year, from the endless Best of Lists and Golden Globes straight through the Saggies and Spirit Awards to the reddest carpet of all...Mama Oscar.

As per recently made-up tradition, the Screengrab will be live-blogging the Academy Awards this coming Sunday...and while we’re on the subject, can we please call a moratorium on bitching about the length of the show? Do sports fans cry every year about the length of the Super Bowl? Do they squeeze all the punt returns into a 65-second medley to streamline the running time? NO! If you’re a sports fan, you want the Super Bowl to last all day. And if you’re NOT a sports fan, then why the hell are you even watching? Just check out the highlights on the news and leave the rest of us in peace, ferchrissakes!

Sorry...just had to vent. And, if you think about it, strong opinions about trivial nonsense is pretty much the lifeblood of Oscar season. Arguments about who deserved to win and who got robbed have livened up the annual ceremony ever since Sunrise totally stole Best Unique and Artistic Production from Chang in 1928.

Sadly, our recent calls to reinstate the Best Unique and Artistic Production category have fallen on deaf ears (sorry, Synechdoche, New York), but there’s plenty more Oscar opining ahead as we here at the Screengrab salute (and condemn) THE BEST (AND WORST) BEST PICTURES OF ALL TIME!

THE BEST:

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (2007)

This wasn't supposed to happen. While they might win the occasional token screenplay award (as they did for Fargo), the Coen Brothers were never going to be respectable and mainstream enough to take home the top Oscar honors. Perhaps emboldened by their belated coronation of Martin Scorsese, however, the Academy saw fit to award this dark, ultra-violent neo-noir with the coveted Best Picture prize. Maybe the literary pedigree helped – after all, even Oprah had given her seal of approval to Cormac McCarthy, author of the novel No Country for Old Men. The film is certainly the most faithful adaptation of the book imaginable, and yet it couldn't be anything other than a Coen Brothers movie. Much of McCarthy's story unfolds through the sort of sardonic, deadpan dialogue that's always been right in the Coens' wheelhouse, and the more action-oriented scenes are rendered with such an uncanny grasp of McCarthy's evocative and precise geography, readers of the book may experience severe déjà vu. Javier Bardem, himself an Oscar winner for Best Supporting Actor, is a uniquely malevolent presence as the killing machine Chigurh. While there are several suspense sequences destined for the Coens greatest hits reel (notably an attack dog's pursuit of Josh Brolin's doomed Marlboro Man into the Rio Grande, and a deadly game of 'musical rooms' at a rundown motel), in its final lyrical moments, No Country for Old Men transcends genre and lays waste to any notion of the Coens as the sniggering egghead pranksters of cinema.

THE LAST EMPEROR (1987)

In truth, The Last Emperor is kind of a silly movie: its take on China's 20th century political landscape is kind of vacuous and unenlightening, and it centers around an appropriately blank protagonist played by a totally undistinguished actor who seems to have been cast only because his last name, almost too conveniently, was "Lone." But it's also an apex of Bernardo Bertolucci's unhinged formalism (or, more accurately, of Vittorio Storaro's insane but effective color schemes), and as a lush, consistently gorgeous aesthetic exercise, it's pretty untoppable. If the Academy wanted pretty and inoffensively political, at least they got one out of two.

THE DEER HUNTER (1978)

Michael Cimino’s reputation was so tarnished by the epic financial and critical failure of 1980’s (unjustly vilified) Heaven’s Gate that it’s almost impossible to watch his preceding film, 1978’s The Deer Hunter, without thinking about the once-promising director’s impending fall from grace. Purely on its own merits, however, Cimino’s Best Picture winner holds up remarkably well as a marriage of New Hollywood authenticity and Old Hollywood scope, and as a portrait of not only the Vietnam War’s toll on those who fought it, but of war’s careless misuse of human life, the latter point epitomized by the iconic Russian Roulette finale involving Christopher Walken’s battle-scarred vet. Shot by Vilmos Zsigmond with a haunting, melancholic loveliness that’s at odds with much of the material’s harrowing grimness, Cimino’s film (partially indebted to the work of Visconti) plays like a messy, sprawling novel, intimately evoking its characters’ Russian heritage and Pennsylvania steel town roots, poignantly utilizing rituals and ceremonies to express their bonds of love and friendship, and ably casting its tale as emblematic of America’s post-Vietnam moral and emotional disarray.

OLIVER! (1968)

This adaptation of Lionel Bart's stage musical version of Oliver Twist is one of those Oscar winners that isn't especially well-remembered these days and may be regarded as a fluky choice at best, which is unfair. It represents a late show of mastery by the great British director Carol Reed, who had suffered through a lousy decade since his last successful production, the 1959 Our Man in Havana. Working with a first-rate cast that includes Ron Moody as Fagin, Shani Wallis as Nancy, and non-singing (thank God) Oliver Reed as Bill Sikes, Carol Reed managed to use the rather undistinguished musical as a way to create a stylized version of the Dickens story, utilizing the energy and wit of the performers and his own cinematic brio to compensate for the limitations of Bart's songs. The movie also has its place in history for marking the last moment when Hollywood felt comfortable declaring that an all-ages movie was the best of the year; the next year, the Best Picture award would go to the adults-only Midnight Cowboy.

THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI (1957)

There’s a case to be made that David Lean’s early, more modestly sized efforts were superior to his later epics, though if the legendary auteur ultimately sacrificed emotional and dramatic tautness in favor of marathon distension, it occurred at some point after 1957’s The Bridge on the River Kwai, a peerless example of larger-than-life filmmaking. As the British military commander who, in a Japanese POW camp during WWII, spearheads the construction of a bridge that his British compatriots plan on destroying, Alec Guinness brilliantly personifies the destructive folly of pride. His army officer, determined to complete the bridge as a means of proving British cultural/political supremacy, is opposed by Sessue Hayakawa’s Japanese colonel, driven to break his Western prisoners’ spirits and terrified that the British will humiliate his own men (and nation) by successfully completing their bridge-building task. Their one-on-one conflict is enlivened, rather than dwarfed, by Lean’s grand direction, culminating in a finale that’s memorable not just for its scale, but for the unforgettable look of sudden awareness, and regret, on Guinness’ face.

Click Here For Part Two, Three, Four, Five, Six & Seven

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Vadim Rizov, Nick Schager, Phil Nugent

Meryl Streep Don't Take Nun of Your Crap in "Doubt"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 18:00:00 GMT

John Patrick Shanley's Doubt is one of the most unusual pieces of Oscar bait laid out before the public this holiday season. Based on Shanley's play of the same name, which is set in a Catholic school in the Bronx in 1964, and which the playwright-filmmaker has managed to transpose to the screen with every bit as much style and as full a grasp of the movie medium as one expects from the director of Joe vs. the Volcano. Superficially, at first glance, it appears to be a simply a filmed version of the play. The text is the blueprint for a naturalistic acting contest in which the four main characters dance around each other, trying to determine what, if anything, Father Flynn did with little Donald Miller in the rectory with the communion wine. However, in an audacious choice, the movie subtly shifts into a science fiction fantasy, about how a stable-seeming institution is driven insane by the presence in it midst of an alien intruder. This major change is entirely the work of one of the principal performers, Meryl Streep, who plays the unforgivingly snoopy old nun who has Father Flynn's backside in her rifle scope, and who makes it clear from her entrance, trailing alongside the benches stuffed with children attending a service and leaving a path of popping eyes and frightened mugging in her wake, that the character is...not of our world. Just as the movie seeks to keep viewers in...doubt!!--as to whether or not Father Flynn has been a dirty, dirty boy, it never spells out just what universe Sister Aloysius Beauvier may have come from, or to what species she might belong. (Her name is a grim indication of the flailing effort she has made at self-invention since coming to live among the humans; presumably, having entered our world from God knows what unguarded cosmic border, she adopted the name of the dead president's widow.)

Is she an extraterrestrial? Or is she a distant cousin of the Wicked Witch of the West, having fled Oz steps ahead of the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman's Republican Guard? While that possibility might be a stretch, Streep's ever increasing resemblance to Margaret Hamilton automatically brings it to mind. It's only a physical resemblance, because Margaret Hamilton was a much subtler performer. But the mysterious dialect that sometimes slips through when Sister Aloysius can't think of a word in what she would call "Earth language" to convey what she means might be Oz-speech, or it could just as easily be something spoken on the Moons of Tralfamadore. In one key scene, Sister Aloysius goes on a desk-raiding expedition while her helpless Earth slave--played by Amy Adams, her fair face a trembling mask of horror--stands by. Pulling a bag out of the desk, Streep cries triumphantly, "Khye! Yandi!" Adams, taking her life in her hands, fearfully points out that the bag only contains cough drops. "Khye! Yandi!..by another name!" Streep retorts. The audience thus learns that in Sister Aloysius's home world, "Khye! Yandi!" is a ritual exclanation made whenever someone detects the presence of something sweet, or what we Earthlings call "candy". The movie, which never shows Sister Aloysius greeting a spaceship to take her home or chugging live frogs or doing whatever it is that those of her kind do to take nourishment, is almost grudging in the slivers of information it offers about Sister Aloysius, so much so that, if you watched it after being up for forty-eight hours straight while messed up on cough syrup and with a hat pulled low over your eyes and listening to the ball game on the radio with headphones, you might just think that it was about the weirdest nun in the world and not fully grasp that there's no way in hell that a serious, trained professional like Streep could have ever intended the good sister to be taken for a member of the human race. The movie's reticence on the point of Streep's inhuman freakishness ultimately makes it a much more disturbing experience than if she has ever actually pulled off a rubber mask to reveal the lizard face beneath.

Having consulted David Thomson, I am forced to conclude that there is no term for a performance that single-handedly upends a movie by completely changing the context of the movie lucky enough to contain it, and any discussion of Christopher Walken's career is surely poorer for that. But Streep's performance in Doubt is not wholly without precedent. Perhaps the most famous example in recent years was Tim Robbins's Night Gallery-style performance in Clint Eastwood's Mystic River. Playing a character who was abducted as a child, Robbins, pop-eyed and trembling throughout, created suspense by transforming the key mystery of the film into just what had been returned to his family in place of the boy who had been taken away. Did the two even share the same body? It might have been less horrifying to speculate that what had grown into Robbins was cobbled together from scratch by his kidnappers before they returned to their mold-encrusted tomb or faraway planet. The movie provided only the most nightmare-inducing, tantalizing hint of what it could be like to live with this thing, in the person of his nerve-racked wife, played by Marcia Gay Hardin, who looked ready to jump out of her skin at the slightest sound and spoke as she supported herself dubbing lines for Tweety Bird. Frustratingly, the film kept waving the mystery of Robbins's zoological classification--was he vampire, zombie, local chief organizer for Nader in 2004--while actually focusing on the far less intriguing question of whether he not he had killed Sean Penn's daughter in the course of his ghoulish nightly rounds. Several years earlier, Eastwood had directed, and starred himself in, White Hunter, Black Heart, playing a role modeled on John Huston. This central piece of casting transformed what should have been a movie about a charming scared monster of a worldy movie director into a movie about the fleeting wish of a guy who became rich and world famous for the casual ease with which he dropped extras into their coffins to appear dashing and debonair, and also to talk as if cacti were blooming in his larynx. He couldn't bring off the former, but the latter as come to him quite naturally in the years since.

William Hurt's ninth-inning appearance in A History of Violence did a nice job of turning a mostly sober-sided movie into The Three Stooges Meet John Gotti. John Turturro's comic relief performance in Transformers, complete with whimsically deployed underwear, occupies its own realm with natural laws all its own. Then there is the matter of late Brando. Actually, many of the movies in which late Brando was permitted to run amok had so little identity without him that it would be silly to make too much of the way that his presence turned, say, The Missouri Breaks into Late Brando Kills Cowboys. Then there's the 1996 version of The Island of Dr. Moreau. Here the chief mischief maker is actually Val Kilmer, playing the dope-addled chief assistant to the title character, played by Brando in the fey, epicene manner that he had deployed more than thirty years earlier in the remake of Mutiny on the Bounty, complete with sorta-English accent. In Moreau, after Brando's character is killed, Kilmer tries to mollify the doctor's murderous, ravening creations by dressing up as the Doc and imitating him over the loudspeaker system. However, Kilmer doesn't imitate Brando's character in the movie but instead does his best after-hours impersonation of the Brando of Stanley Kowalksi, Terry Malloy, etc. What sense the critters onscreen could be expected to make of this we cannot know, but for the people in the theater, it turns the movie into a Val Kilmer production entitled Late Brando, Early Brando, and Whichever Brando Cut Ahead of Me at the Catering Table Can All Kiss My Ass.

For me, the all-time king of these kinds of performances will always be, not Brando or Kilmer or Streep or even Walken, but Wings Hauser, the high-spirite musician and soap opera veteran who menaced half the hookers in L.A. in Vice Squad, turned Richard Pryor onto cocaine in Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling, and abused his position as the police chief of Provincetown more than one might have thought possible in the Norman Mailer-directed spree Tough Guys Don't Dance. Unless handled carefully, say with large animal tranquilizers, Hauser always approaches his roles as if he had been employed to engage in hand-to-hand combat with Godzilla while the people of Tokyo gaze on amazement. His profile in movies has receded in recent years, and the film scene is saner but poorer for that.

Screengrab Presents: The Best Stage-To-Screen Adaptations Of All Time (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 22:30:00 GMT

SWIMMING TO CAMBODIA (1985)

It’s probably not a great sign that two of my heroes wound up killing themselves once old age began to creep in. After famously inserting himself into the gonzo dispatches he filed from the trenches of the American Dream, Hunter S. Thompson infamously inserted a ball of hot lead into his cranium as a permanent cure for depression and the nagging pain of various medical conditions. Likewise, the late, great monologist Spalding Gray jumped off a ferry in 2004 after years spent battling his own depression (stemming partly from his mother’s 1967 suicide) and pain (from a 2001 car accident) while also chronicling his own misadventures and neuroses in a series of seriocomic one-man shows for New York’s experimental Wooster Group theater company. Several of Gray’s monologues were filmed over the years (by directors including Steven Soderbergh and Nick Broomfield), but the first and best screen adaptation of his stage work was Jonathan Demme's Swimming To Cambodia, a rambling, fascinating (and extremely quotable) collage of national and personal history encompassing the Thai sex trade, the weird insanity of Richard Nixon, the horrific reign of the Khmer Rouge and Gray’s own search for a perfect moment while employed as a character actor on the set of Roland Joffe’s 1984 biopic The Killing Fields.

BILOXI BLUES (1988)

I understand my wife’s disdain for Neil Simon. His schticky, schmaltzy brand of lowbrow theater ain’t for everyone (and he extended the career of Marsha Mason way past its natural expiration date). Yet there’s a lot to recommend Biloxi Blues, the charming middle installment of the playwright’s alliterative autobiographical trilogy (bookended by Brighton Beach Memoirs and Broadway Bound). For one thing, Matthew Broderick is at his Ferris Beuller best as a World War II-era army recruit forced outside his blue state comfort zone during basic training in a deep red Mississippi boot camp. The film, which never feels the least bit stagy, is two parts nostalgic coming-of-age comedy and one part “don’t ask, don’t tell” culture war drama, but the true highlight is Christopher Walken in a memorable supporting role as a deceptively affable, quietly menacing drill sergeant just as scary in his way as the more traditional expletive-spewing Full Metal Jacket variety.

SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION (1993)

John Guare's finest play, a steadily escalating comedy of modern manners, was given the instant-classic treatment by director Fred Schepisi and a cast headed by first lady of the theater Stockard Channing, grizzled counterculture figure turned acting eminence Donald Sutherland, and Will Smith, then best known as the Fresh Prince. A movie whose wit and sophistication can make your head swim, it looks easy enough to make you wonder why all deserving plays haven't gotten as deft a movie treatment. Your first clue to the answer to that question may be that not even any other play of Guare's has made it to the Hollywood starting gate.

A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE (1951)

Working with Tennessee Williams' great play and the director Elia Kazan, Marlon Brando created thunder and lightning onstage during the Broadway run. Then he and Kazan packaged it in film cans and sent it out across the country to poison the minds of lucky youths everywhere. (Though there have always been people who expressed their regrets that Brando's performance hadn't been filmed early in the run -- you know, when it was really good.) Most of the rest of the Broadway cast came along for the ride, but the one key exception, Vivien Leigh as Blanche, turned out to be one of those uncanny marriages of a great, difficult role to a performer with an unsteady career who had something of her own that the character had always needed. The movie lives as a record of one of the most startling and sublime acting duets ever performed.

THE TRIUMPH OF LOVE (2002)

Clare Peploe, a gifted director probably best known as the wife of Bernardo Bertolucci, had a small, too-little-seen triumph with this joyous and charming version of a romantic comedy written by the French Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux in 1732. The plot, which involves Mira Sorvino as a seductive royal and Ben Kingsley as a crackpot philosopher who has taught the object of Sorvino's romantic designs (Jay Rodan) to regard love with disdain, is a roundelay of schemes, masks, and mind fucks that Peploe weaves into a comic celebration of theatrical artifice itself.

LES PARENTS TERRIBLES (1948)

Jean Cocteau had already enjoyed a scandalous triumph with his play, an explosion of the form of the "boulevard comedy" likened to "Noel Coward on opium." He dove in head first when he decided to film it, resisting the urge to open up a text that has the small, overheated cast waging familial warfare in the confines of their cramped Paris apartment. The masterful handling of the farcical complications within the claustrophobic setting can make a viewer happily delirious.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

Screengrab Salutes: The Best & Worst James Bond Films of All Time! (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 21:30:00 GMT

THE WORST:

5. CASINO ROYALE (1967)

By 1967, the James Bond franchise was so fully entrenched as an iconic series that it was begging for a smart, funny satire to deflate its growing gasbaggery. Unfortunately, Casino Royale wasn’t it. The best Bond spoof of the era was on television, in the form of Mel Brooks and Buck Henry’s terrific Get Smart series, while Casino Royale – a one-off production of dubious legal status – proved to be a sprawling, unfunny mess. It’s too bad, too; it wasted one of the best 007 novels (the first, in fact), with a great villain and some excellent set-pieces, and worse than that, it wasted a fantastic cast including Peter Sellers, David Niven, Orson Welles, Woody Allen, William Holden, Deborah Kerr and John Huston. What’s the problem? The direction is a total mess which tries to cram far too much plot (and far too many jokes that don’t work) into far too small a space. The script, likewise, just isn’t funny enough – the rapid pace of the gags can’t conceal the fact that they mostly don’t work, and none of the great actors are given much of a role to chew on. It’s fortunate that the Daniel Craig era of 007 did so much to rehabilitate the Casino Royale name; for nearly forty years, it had been associated with one of the crummiest Bond films ever made.

4. GOLDENEYE (1985)

Here was a (pardon the pun) golden opportunity to re-invent the James Bond series: a new leading man (Pierce Brosnan, succeeding the poorly received Timothy Dalton) and a new era (following the collapse of the Soviet Union) should have added up to a new 007 ready to take on the 21st century. It was not to be. GoldenEye is about as rote as the series gets, plodding joylessly through all the usual Stations of the Cross. If not for the presence of Famke Janssen at maximum hottitude as femme fatale Xenia Onatopp, it would easily be the dullest of all Bonds. Certainly Sean Bean, as a fellow MI6 agent turned traitor, is the most boring Bond villain ever. The only real innovation is the casting of Judi Dench as M, but aside from one throwaway line about Bond being a misogynist and a Cold War relic, the potential sparks never fly. The movie's highlight is the obligatory Q scene, which plays like a Get Smart outtake. Not a good sign.

3. LIVE & LET DIE (1974)

In a series that has spanned more than three decades, a big part of the trick of keeping the Bond franchise alive has been finding the right balance between stubbornly maintaining its own identity and incorporating enough elements from a changing world to keep Bond from seeming like an anachronism. Never did the series lose its footing more disastrously than in the first installment starring Roger Moore. For a start, it was the first Bond movie to feature a theme song by an out-and-out rock band instead of a jazz singer or lounge crooner -- and make no mistake, if the song itself is no great highlight of Paul McCartney's career, better him than Duran Duran or A-Ha. But at a deeper level, it's the "blacksploitation" Bond movie, a real historical artifact and a pretty embarrassing one. First-time viewers who had barely begun to start adjusting to the new, male-mannequin Bond of the Roger Moore era were subjected to the sight of this smarmy British cracker sauntering into a Harlem restaurant called "Fillet of Soul" and mixing it up with the confused-looking brothers inside, who might have thought they were waiting for John Shaft. Yaphet Kotto, as great an actor as ever got assigned the job of trying to think up an amusing death for 007, got stuck with the lamest super-villain role in the series to date: his name ("Mr. Big"), his mission (to dominate...not the world, but the heroin trade), and his death scene, which is reminiscent of the time that the Pink Panther balloon in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade ran amok, all are pitifully unworthy of him. The movie, which is set in a world where every black person in North America (including Gloria Hendry as the first black Bond girl) seems to be in on Mr. Big's conspiracy to blanket the cities with horse, and in which these wretched lost souls are kept in line by their primitive susceptibility to voodoo, tries to balance things out by including a stereotypical big-bellied Loozianna sheriff (Clifton James) who co-stars in an endless back country car chase that would have been beneath the dignity of Hal Needham.

2. MOONRAKER (1979)

This post-Star Wars meld of Bond with sci-fi space opera finds the series sunk deep in its decadent phase. The film cost a reported $34 million, twenty million more than its predecessor, The Spy Who Loved Me, and while the investment paid off at the box office, the strain shows. No other Bond film surpasses it in terms of the number of exotic locations, huge sets, and beautiful women for Bond to beat off, but it's short on energy and wit, which were once the defining qualities of the series -- and which the producers, and maybe audiences hooked on the formula, now judged to be superfluous. Most of the cast, including Moore, Lois Chiles as the heroine, and Michel Lonsdale as the supervillain Drax, look ready to join a crowd scene in a George Romero zombie movie; the movie's only charm comes from Richard Kiel, reprising his role as a lovesick Jaws before being consigned to join Sheriff J. W. Pepper in Recurring Character Limbo.

1. A VIEW TO A KILL (1985)

Considering how easy it is to get fans to start arguing about most aspects of the Bond series, the general consensus that this is without a doubt the sorriest Bond movie of all time is so solidly formed that it's almost uncanny. Aside from the fact that, at 57, Roger Moore looked readier than ever to be put out to pasture, it didn't necessarily look doomed on paper. The title theme by Duran Duran is so howlingly, garishly wrong that it's kind of right, it was sweet of them to give John Steed, i.e. Patrick McNee, a role as one of Bond's doomed helpmates, and whose ears didn't perk up at the suggestion of Christopher Walken as a Bond villain? Walken, his hair artificially lemon-flavored, plays a psychopathic ex-KGB agent who was created by a Nazi mad scientist; now rich as the owner of a microchip-manufacturing company, he is meant to be such a cool killer as to be devoid of human emotions -- which turns out to be not such a hot idea, because when Walken applies all his considerable Method intensity to being devoid of emotion, he's da void, all right. Also not helping out are Grace Jones, who packs surprisingly little personality inside her outre exterior but whose bedroom clinches with either Moore or Walken can still give you nightmares, and, as the heroine, Tanya Roberts, who actually does less for this movie than she did for her starring gig the year before as Sheena, Queen of the Jungle.

Click Here For Part One, Three, Four & Five

Contributors: Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

A Whole Lotta Walken Goin' On

Phil Nugent — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 17:00:00 GMT

In the back and forth that finally resulted in last week's list of the Screengrab's favorite leading men [favorite leading ladies list is being compiled now, will your favorites make the cut!?], one name that never seemed to come up was that of Christopher Walken. I cannot speak for my colleagues, but I know that one reason that Walken's name never passed my own lips was that...well, I hate to say that I am not worthy, but it's kind of like that. It's not even that Walken is such a great actor (though on many occasions he has proven himself to be just that) but that he's turned into such a strange mixture of artist, self-parodying comedian, cultural icon, and "X" the unknown: who wants to take on a subject that slippery? The answer to that last question turns out to be Patrick O'Sullivan, a San Francisco standup comic and creator of (in the words of Lisa Marks in the Guardian) "a partly scripted, partly improvised, partly biographical" Los Angeles stage show called All About Walken. O'Sullivan has his own measure of Walken's place in our world: "Here was a man doing big-budget movies, independent movies, music videos, Saturday Night Live - and standups were impersonating him. So all around there was this melding of Walken and pop culture. Not everyone knows his name, but they know his persona, from little kids who know what 'More cowbell!' means, to 65-year-olds who admired him in The Deer Hunter. He floats across it all."

The show grew out of O'Sullivan's experiences with his college pals trading impersonations of celebrities, a common enough experience that in his case somehow led to assembling a cast that includes two women and five men in a theater on Hollywood Boulevard doing Christopher Walken impressions. They also do impressions of other actors, including Woody Allen and Robert De Niro, recreating scenes from Walken's movies, as well as impressions of other actors, including Jennifer Tilly and Colin Farrell, doing their Christopher Walken impressions. They take suggestions from the audience, which, on the night that Marks caught the show, resulted in a missing scene from the Sex and the City movie in which Sarah Jessica Parker got to meet you-know-who. The show has been successful enough that it's scheduled to move to San Francisco, after which O'Sullivan hopes to take it to New York. O'Sullivan told Marks that Walken himself hasn't seen it yet, "But some of his family have, and also his agent, who thought it was fantastic. One time, one of the guys in the show was at the agent's office and had a speakerphone conversation with him ... as Christopher Walken. Walken told him he was very flattered." Anything that brightens Christopher Walken's day is all right with us, but there are other social considerations to take into account. "I've had many calls over the past two years that go something like this: 'Hi. I went to the show last week with my husband and now he will not stop impersonating Christopher Walken. I ask him to put the trash out and he answers as Walken. And I just want you to know that you're responsible for that.'"

In Other Blogs: Critical Condition

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 15:00:00 GMT

As regular readers of this column know, we like to single out blog posts that bring a fresh perspective to these pictures we call motion; finely crafted, passionate posts that allow us all to see cinema through new eyes. But more than that, we love a good pissing contest.

This latest one began with another lamentation over the position of the modern film critic – otherwise known as the unemployment line. A piece called “Where Have All the Film Critics Gone?” from The Brooklyn Rail quoted several notable film bloggists, like Matt Zoller Seitz who said, “I think we’re fast approaching the point where criticism will become, for the most part, a devotion rather than a job.” And then there was Michael Atkinson, who wrote on his Zero For Conduct blog: ““[T]he existence of full-time staff film reviewers is a nutty aberration in the history of periodical publishing…I’d love to see every magazine employ an army of full-time culture reviewers, and pay them millions, but it doesn’t make very much sense, for the simple reason that it’s not truly a full-time job.”

That didn’t sit well with Glenn Kenny, who recently lost his own full-time job with Premiere. At his “own bought-and-paid-for-blog, thank you very g-ddamn much,” Some Came Running, Kenny responds, “Gee, thanks, Michael. Whether you know it or not—and I rather suspect you do—you've just given a long belt of ammunition to the Sam Zells of the world. The gutters, the "cost-cutters," the content-haters, the obscenely rich resenters who think this whole "journalism" thing is a racket enacted by a bunch of smarty-pants elitist slackers. Way to be, pal. And while we're at it, define ‘full time.’ ‘I've done the job. I know how much time it takes,’ you puff to Rossmeir. (And um, just when did you turn into John fucking Milius, anyway?) What was it Red Smith said? ‘Writing is easy. You just sit down at the typewriter and open a vein.’ I know, Michael, I know—Red Smith was probably some kind of pussy…You told Rossmeir that you didn't think critics who only work 10 to 12 hours a week should be paid like other professionals who work 40. Well, you know, that's why there's freelance journalism, which pays by the word, or by the piece. Generally speaking, if you're a staff member at a magazine, the amount of time you spend at your job is compounded merely by the fact that you're a staff member. NYT critics A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis aren't woolgathering when they're not writing reviews. Frequently, they're writing other pieces, for Arts and Leisure or for the magazine. Scott does video reviews. Both do on-line stuff. And both partake in the culture of being a staff member, that is, they go to meetings and such.” I’ve been a freelance movie reviewer for years, and used to yearn for a staff job, but – they go to meetings? Forget it!

At Scanners, Jim Emerson weighs in on the kerfuffle. (Yes, I’m officially dubbing it a kerfuffle.) “I've never had to support myself by working at a weekly or a monthly, and I don't know what Atkinson's situation was at the Voice, but if all he had to do as a staff critic was see ‘three or four movies a week’ and then knock out ‘1,000 or 1,500 words’ (apiece? altogether?) -- and he could live on the money he made from doing that -- then, wow, that's a really sweet gig and I don't blame him for feeling that he was running a scam. Somebody was. Because, in my experience, those numbers don't come close to adding up. Three or four movies a week wouldn't even cover major-studio wide releases. Who covers the rest (four? eight? a dozen?) for the week, the ‘art house,’ revival house, museum and nonprofit venue pictures that rely on reviews to find an audience? And since when do writers of any kind get paid by the hour? You're cashing checks just for the time you spend actually sitting at a keyboard, but for all the things you have to do in order to enable you to write. So a salary for a writer, reporter and/or film critic (and all three job descriptions fit the ‘critic’ designation) isn't exactly an hourly job, nor is it the equivalent of tenure. It's more like a retainer, for your work and what goes into producing it, but also for your availability. What's actually published is just the tail end of a much larger and longer process.”

David Poland at The Hot Button gets in on the action. “Yes, writers are valued in a different way than the people who print the papers, sell the papers, and even, to some degree, edit the papers. The work of a daily Metro writer or a daily political writer is something else. A daily byline is a special kind of grind that is more like a traditional job. But that’s not the part I have a problem with. What Atkinson misunderstands – and by dint of his own exit from the print work, understandably as an ego protection – is that ‘writers' availability and flow of copy’ is every bit as valued today as it ever was. What is quite different is that publishers expect to see some cause and effect from those they keep on board. If you are a film critic or highly paid entertainment journalist at a print outlet, you better have a following that cares about what you say – which doesn’t necessarily translate to ticket sales – or you are dead.”

Okay, enough about that. Let’s wrap it up with List-o-Mania, circling back to Glenn Kenny’s former place of employment, Premiere, for a special Father’s Day feature: The 10 Maddest, Baddest Daddies in Film. We’d never quibble with the inclusion of Jack Torrance from The Shining or Terry O’Quinn’s Stepfather, but whither Christopher Walken from At Close Range?

Taverns On The Screen: The Top Ten Barroom Scenes of Cinema (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 20:00:00 GMT

So, last week (as those of you who didn't black out may recall) we here at The Screengrab took you on a very special Pub Crawl through some of the most distinctive gin joints of celluoid.

This week, it’s hair of the dog time as we return to the world of booze (although we can stop anytime we feel like it...really!) for a survey of movies where the dives themselves may be forgettable, but not so the people (and, occasionally, vampires) who inhabit them.

So belly up to the bars and join us for another round of the finest alcoholic action, drunken destruction, boozy balladeering and sudsy seduction in cinema!

LOST IN TRANSLATION (2003)

Sofia Coppola’s fantasia about a depressed movie star and a directionless young woman stranded in a Tokyo luxury hotel is short on plot but long on atmosphere and the pleasures of indolence...and it’s hard to think of two better people to kill time with than Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson (in what, hopefully, won’t turn out to be her career zenith). The fizzy high point of Lost In Translation takes place during a haphazard bar hop (involving strange Japanese...spud guns? Anyone?) that ends (as all the finest bar hops do) in a private Plexiglas karaoke pod high above the city, where Murray’s Bob Harris surprises Johansson’s Charlotte (and, possibly, himself) with the naked romantic yearning in his rendition of Roxy Music’s “More Than This,” leading to lots of platonic foreplay and climaxing in one of the greatest smooches in all of celluloid. (And if you think your warm, fuzzy memories of the movie would be ruined forever if you ever discovered just what, exactly, Bill Murray whispered into ScarJo's ear following that famous kiss, then for God’s sake, don’t CLICK HERE!)

AFTER HOURS (1985)

Our own Phil Nugent recently covered the convoluted history of Martin Scorsese’s After Hours and the question of its true authorship. Whoever really wrote it and whoever deserves credit for it, though, it’s a deftly made and smartly directed little comedy, and plays up Scorsese’s rarely credited ability to handle comedy. Despite taking place in the wards and dungeons of Manhattan, After Hours focuses on only a few locations; but the one it gets the most use out of is the punk club Berlin, where the tortured soul Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne), already punished beyond reason for the high crime of trying to get into Rosanna Arquette’s pants, must visit in an attempt to do the only thing in the world he wants to do: go home. Just getting in to Berlin is hard enough: he must confront a side-of-beef bouncer (Clarence Felder) who quotes Kafka at him. When he finally gets in the door, he finds that the price of entry is being forcibly corralled by the staff and given a Mohawk as a filmmaker (a cameo by Scorsese himself) shines a spotlight in his face and Bad Brains’ “Pay to Cum” blares on the the P.A. system. And even that isn’t the end: when, later in the wee hours, Paul is forced to return to Berlin to avoid the fury of a mob who think he’s a housebreaker, he finds it nearly deserted save for an avant-garde artist (Verna Bloom) who ‘saves’ him by encasing him bodily in a shell of shellac and old newspapers. For this he paid a five-dollar cover charge?

THE HUDSUCKER PROXY (1994)

Look, we’ve all found ourselves in the same situation as Tim Robbins’ Norville Barnes once in a while. Broke, hopeless, down on your luck; everyone thinks you’re crazy, your best girl thinks you’re a heel, and your former elevator operator is stealing your ideas. (Well, okay, maybe not that last one.) And, to make things worse, it’s New Year’s Eve, and you don’t even have a date. So the least you can do is to stumble into the nearest bar and kill the pain with a slow, steady supply of martinis. But when Norville hits Ann’s 440 – the beatnik bar favored by his gal Friday, the fast-talking Amy Archer (Jennifer Jason Leigh) – even that doesn’t help: Ann’s, as the exasperated bartender played by Steve Buscemi in the Coen Brothers’ screwball homage The Hudsucker Proxy explains time and time again, doesn’t serve “al-key-hool”. It’s a juice bar, with coffee drinks for the extra-adventurous, and no matter how many times Norville asks for a martini (and he asks a lot), he can’t get one, and is forced to live on the ten or twelve he’s already got percolating in his bloodstream. Finally, Amy arrives and tries to talk him down to earth – even favoring him with a rendition of the Muncie High fight song – but it’s no good; Norville flees the bar and before the night is up, he’ll end up on a ledge. Frankly, we can’t blame him; Ann’s 440 looks cool enough, but as Norville drunkenly asks, what kind of bar is it if you can’t get a martini?

FAT CITY (1972)

John Huston's comeback film is set in Stockton, California and stars Stacy Keach as Tully, an alcoholic boxer who's managed to become a has-been without ever having been much of anything in the first place, and Jeff Bridges as Ernie, a younger man who Tully takes a shine to. Tully encourages the kid to take up boxing, as if encouraging anyone to follow in his own career path counted as a favor. The movie has its fair share of scenes in rowdy, darkly lit bars full of people with nowhere else to go in the middle of the day, but its most haunting moment comes at the end, in an unnaturally bright-looking cafe bar that seems to be a hangout for dry drunks. Tully has pulled Ernie there after the kid, spurning his offer that they go out together for a drink, has agreed to grab a cup of coffee. After an exchange of ideas on the subject of the ancient looking bar man ("How you like to be him?" "Maybe he's happy." "Maybe we're all happy."), Tully looks around the place, and Huston freezes the frames to pinpoint the moment of horrified sobriety. Ernie starts to leave, only to agree to Tully's desperate plea that he stick around and "talk some," but the two men have nothing to say to each other, and the credits roll over the image of them sitting together not talking. The actors move just enough to remind you that this time the frame isn't frozen. Maybe they're happy.

PENNIES FROM HEAVEN (1981)

Christopher Walken earned his hoofer's stripes in this phantasmagorical Depression musical, in which he appears as Tom, a politely soulless pimp who meets his latest employee, Bernadette Peters, when she's sitting in a bar trying to recover from being fired from her job as a schoolteacher for being pregnant by a married man who she hasn't heard from lately. In the movie, the characters use music-inspired fantasies to help them get through what their lives have turned into; here, Peters, who can't think of any way to support herself besides turning tricks, is doing her limited best to deal with the awful fact that she's actually met someone who can teach her how, and Walken, who can dance like a son of a bitch, has no problem making you believe that you're seeing something that a person could only pull off in a daydream. After the number is over, Tom rudely snaps her back to reality by warning her that if he discovers she's a tease who's wasting his time, "I'll cut your face." Walken doesn't have any problem with that part, either.

NEAR DARK (1987)

"Just how old are you, Jesse?" someone asks Lance Henriksen, and Henriksen, smiling like a redneck crocodile, replies, "Let me put it this way, son: I fought for the South." Henriksen's Jesse is the father figure in a brood of vampires who look like a white trash family and travel around in a van with the windows blacked out. In the movie's money scene, they wander into a roadside bar that Bill Paxton -- the "big brother" -- declares to be "Shitkicker Heaven" and proceed to use it as their own personal buffet table. A young Adrian Pasdar plays the hero, an innocent young dude who's been inducted into the family by the bite of a winsome, lonely blonde bloodsucker (Jenny Wright) and is still learning the ropes. Once the bodies start dropping, the bartender pulls out a shotgun and blasts Pasdar in the torso. Reflexively, Pasdar reacts as if he were dying and then stops and stands there with a hole in his chest, registering his surprise that he isn't. "It's a trip, ain't it?" says Paxton. There have been a shitload of reworkings of the vampire genre in the last twenty or so years, but in few of them does the blood flow so red and thickly potent as in this scene.

Related Stories:

Taverns On The Screen - The Top Ten Barroom Scenes of Cinema (Part Two)

Sweet Nothings: The Lost Words of Lost In Translation, Translated

Separated at Birth: "After Hours" and Joe Frank's "Lies"

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

Screengrab Pub Crawl - The Top 15 Bars of Cinema (Part Two)

Screengrab Pub Crawl - The Top 15 Bars of Cinema (Part Three)

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent

Christopher Walken Wigs Out

Phil Nugent — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Every year, Harvard's Hasty Pudding Theatricals selects a man and a woman to publically humiliate in recognition of their years of selfless hard work devoted to enriching America's traditional role as the entertainment capital of our galaxy. A couple of weeks ago, it was Charlize Theron's turn to show what a good sport she is, and this past weekend, America's most beloved living song and dance man, Christopher Walken, hit the campus to show the enthusiastic youngsters how it's done. According to BBC News, the star of The Deer Hunter, King of New York, and The Country Bears "sang a tune from the musical Hairspray during the performance and took part in a sketch involving cow-bells, which parodied an earlier appearance of his on the US TV show Saturday Night Live. He said he was 'amazed and thrilled' to receive his prize, although he joked: 'I hope nobody's watching.'" Not much more to this one, really, but there was no way in hell we weren't going to find an excuse to post this photo.

(Belated) Take Five: Stephen King

Peter Smith — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 21:00:00 GMT

So, have you heard of this Stephen King fellow? Apparently he’s pretty widely read. Hs popularity as a novelist is matched only by his profligacy — he’s written over thirty novels and hundreds of short stories on his way to becoming one of the best-selling authors of all time. This level of popularity is like heroin to Hollywood producers, and adaptations of his books and stories — as well as original screenplays by King himself, an inveterate movie nerd — have led to an astonishing 100+ films and television shows. Like their source material, though, they’re a decidedly mixed bag: for every Shawshank Redemption, there’s a Children of the Corn 666: Isaac’s Return. And just as King enjoys a decidedly muddled critical reception, films made from his works, while occasionally made by talented filmmakers who find in the material the bones of something great, tend towards third-rate exploitation horror. Still, with The Mist having opened last week, it’s good to remember that a number of genuinely worthwhile projects have made the translation from the mind of King to the big screen. Here are five of the best.

CARRIE (1976)

The first hint that Stephen King’s novels might be the stuff of memorable movies came in 1976, when Brian DePalma got hold of his tale of a shy, stunted teenage girl who happened to have vast telekinetic powers. As the rest of this list will make clear, it’s no secret that King’s books tended to make good films only in the hands of a competent director, but DePalma in particular blew the doors off of this one, picking out the meaty insides and discarding the extraneous baggage. Ratcheting up the tension of King’s patented adolescent-angst narrative and turning the end into something beyond gore and well into Grand Guignol territory, DePalma also delivers one of the best jump-out-of-your-seat shocks in horror movie history near the end of Carrie.

SALEM'S LOT (1979)

The story of a small town infested by vampires was one of King’s first big successes as a novelist, and this TV movie adaptation — helmed by horror maven and Texas Chainsaw Massacre director Tobe Hooper — does a terrific job conveying its sense of paranoia and night terror without resorting to gore or cheap thrills. Indeed, working within the restrictions of television seemed to suit Hooper and screenwriter Paul Monash, who paced and teased the moments of shock out quite effectively. They’re also aided greatly by a cast crammed full of top-shelf character actors, including Elisha Cook Jr., Fred Willard, James Mason, Ed Flanders and George Dzundza.

THE SHINING (1980)

Not a lot of genuinely great directors have taken on the works of Stephen King, but Stanley Kubrick was unquestionably the greatest. Made only three years after the publication of the novel, The Shining is a work of genuine genius, containing one of Jack Nicholson’s greatest screen performances, some absolutely tremendous camerawork, and a sense of creeping horror that’s absent in many of the plodding, obvious shock films made from King's work. (Amazingly, the best-ever movie adaptation of a Stephen King novel was one of King’s least favorites; he later helped a far-inferior TV movie reworking into existence.)

CREEPSHOW (1982)

In a perfectly wonderful and appropriate twist of fate, one of Stephen King’s best friends is zombie auteur George Romero, and while Creepshow, their only true collaboration (King wrote the screenplay and Romero directed) isn’t the best movie based on the horror writer’s works, it’s easily the most enjoyable. The two sought to recreate the goofy, gory tone of the EC horror comics they had both enjoyed in their youth, and they succeeded to an admirable degree — and if the overall feel of the movie, as well as a hysterically nutty performance by King himself, are any indication, they had a hell of a time doing it.

THE DEAD ZONE (1983)

The story of a man who can see the future, and whether or not he has the chance to alter it, is a pretty whoozy old trope in science fiction, and to be honest, it doesn’t fare all that much better even in the hands of a man who, like Stephen King, can lend a patina of respectability to even the hoariest stock plots. David Cronenberg does what he can with the material he has, but it’s not the script or the direction that makes The Dead Zone worth watching: it’s the lead performances, most especially Christopher Walken (sublimely nutty as usual) in the role of the seer and Martin Sheen (hamming it up like nobody’s business) as a politician he suspects may someday trigger a nuclear war.

— Leonard Pierce