The Screengrab : chuck norris

Steven Seagal Gets Real

Phil Nugent — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 21:00:00 GMT

In a rare development that outstrips my ability to make up goofy theories that might explain it, 2008 is threatening to be remembered as the year when all the washed-up action stars in Hollywood summoned their last remaining traces of testosterone for a concerted, multi-media assault on the fourth wall. First, Chuck Norris allowed Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee to prove that he, Huckabee, had a sense of humor, by using the uncomprehending but game Texas Ranger as an all-purpose punch line at rallies and in campaign ads. Then Jean-Claude Van Damme agreed to star, as a sadly diminished version of himself, in Mabrouk El Mechri's JCVD, currently on its knees begging for a cult in selected markets. (New York Times reviewer A. O. Scott hails it as "almost clever.") Now comes word that the logiest lummox of them all, the pony tail in search of a personality, Steve Seagal, will be starring in a new reality series on A & E. This surprising development raises many questions, the most pressing of which may be, just how many middle-aged Neanderthal hulks can one cable network afford to support? At least, that's probably the most pressing question now surging through the rickety brain of Dog the Bounty Hunter.

Steve Seagal: Lawman draws its central premise from Seagal's other life as "a fully commissioned deputy with the Jefferson Parish County Sheriff's Office", a position that Variety reports he has held "for nearly two decades", though he's got a lot more time to focus on that area of his life than he did back when the film career was something more than a punch line." One of his stints found him assisting with recovery efforts during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Seagal, who broke the news on a British talk show, says that "I believe it's important to show the nation all the positive work being accomplished here in Louisiana - to see the passion and commitment that comes from the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office in this post-Katrina environment." (Seagal also totes an ID proclaiming him to be an honorary official of the U.S. Customs Service. In what may be the most "late Elvis" move of his career, he once tried to use it to board a commercial airliner while packing a gun and had to have it explained to him what "honorary" means.) The series will also show "his life off the beat, including his musical and philanthropic activities in the Big Easy." (Seagal's musical and philanthropic activities, huh? Good luck doing enough of the one to make up for the other.) One thing that's not clear is whether doubling as a TV star and a bayou crime fighter will represent a break in Seagal's busy schedule. The star of Under Siege has appeared in more than twenty action movies that you haven't heard of--most of them direct-to-video timekillers--since 2001, and that's even if you don't count The Onion Movie. His new TV series isn't scheduled to hit the airwaves until 2009, so his most memorable appearance of this year will probably remain in an interview given by Sylvester Stallone, in which the leathery, sexagenarian steroid freak reminisced fondly about the time that Seagal ran away from Stallone's birthday party because he was afraid of Van Damme.

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Warners DVD Keeps John McCain Interview Under Lock and Key

Phil Nugent — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Warner Brothers is fending off reports that they are keeping promotional materials for the November 11 release of the 1987 film The Hanoi Hilton on DVD under wraps rather than using them to stir up interest in the movie rather than advertise any connection to Republican presidential hopeful John McCain. The movie, which was released during the same wave of Reagan-era Vietnam films that included Platoon and Full Metal Jacket (as well as such gung-ho popcorn entertainments as Rambo: First Blood Part II and the Chuck Norris Missing in Action films), is a sympathetically intended treatment of the American presence in Vietnam that is set among the prisoners of war being held at the Hoa Lo prison where McCain served his time as a P.O.W. (The movie is not meant to depict any actual person's experience. However, it does make room for an appearance by an idiotic American movie star and war protester, played by Gloria Carlin, who is called "Paula" but is obviously meant to be Jane Fonda.) Earlier this year, McCain filmed an interview about his own prison experience which was to be included on the DVD. Now, reports Michael Cieply in The New York Times, Warner Brothers has "moved quietly over the last few weeks to block any promotional showing" of any part of that interview, for fear that it "might embroil the project in electoral politics." A spokesman for Warners' home enterttainment division describes its decision as "just us trying to be cautious and not affect the election one way or the other.” In response, Lionel Chetwynd, the British-born Canadian-American writer-director of The Hanoi Hilton, has fired back that "Finding someone in Hollywood who says they don’t want to affect the election is like finding a virgin in a brothel.” And you thought that British-born Canadian-Americans never got off any good ones!

Released by the infamous Golan-Globus/Cannon Film company, and starring Michael Moriarty in his Method-space alien phase, with a supporting cast that includes David "Hutch" Soul, Jeffrey Jones, Paul Le Mat, John Diehl, and Doug Savant, The Hanoi Hilton originally managed to bring together people of all different political beliefs and attitudes about the war in brotherly agreement that this was one shitty movie. A barely detectable blip on the radar screens during its brief spell in theaters (despite attempts by some commentators to pull in conservative moviegoers by hailing it as the anti-Platoon), it has since found an audience of appreciative veterans and nostalgic military hawks who discovered it on videocassette and late-night showings on cable TV. Chetwynd, a self-styled Hollywood conservative whose screenplay credits include the TV films The Siege at Ruby Ridge and DC 9/11: Time of Crisis and who had a hand in Celsius 41.11: The Temperature at Which the Brain... Begins to Die, a "documentary" feature, intended as a back-atcha to Michael Moore, has recently had his attempts to arrange screenings of the movie squelched by Warners lawyers, although Daniel P. Tokaji, an associate professor at the Ohio State University law school, told the Times that “I don’t immediately see what law they would violate.” Chetwynd, who points out that another studio, Lions Gate, doesn't seem to be keeping the pre-election day release of W. under a barrel, probably sees all this as a part of a liberal-Holywood conspiracy to keep his movie from doing its part to propel John McCain into the White House. Those who've taken a look at McCain's latest poll numbers may suspect that it has more to do with Warners not wanting to damage DVD sales by tying their product to a failing brand.

Take Five: The Arab Movie Hall of Shame

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 19:30:00 GMT

The hotly anticipated release of Towelhead, the controversial Alan Ball adaptation of Alicia Erian's well-received coming of age novel about a young Arab-American girl, gives me a chance to finally feature one of my all-time favorite subjects in a Friday Take Five: the horrendous stereotyping of Arabs and Muslims in Hollywood films. Naturally, I'll be hitting the theaters bright and early this weekend to get my ticket to Towelhead; my hopes are high that it will do a small part to reverse the dismally one-dimensional portrayal of Arabs in cinema since the invention of the medium. (It would have been nice if they could have gotten an actual Arab-American actress to play the lead, but that's a rant for another day.) One of Thomas Edison's very first moving pictures portrayed a seductive odalisque, and ever since then, Arabs have been portrayed on screen as one of what Mazin Q'umsiyeh of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee calls "the three Bs": belly dancers, billionaires, or bombers. Since the late 1970s, when blacks made it known they were a bit tired of being Hollywood's favorite punching bag, Arabs have been killed on screen at a pace that far outstrips the slaughter of Indians in movie Westerns, and with a very few exceptions (sala'am, Tony Shalhoub), if you're an Arab in the movie business, if you don't play a terrorist, you don't work. So I'm off to the multiplex, hoping that Towelhead can start to clean up the mess made by movies like these.

BACK TO THE FUTURE (1985)

Although it's one of the most beloved comedies of the '80s, Back to the Future didn't win a lot of friends in the Arab-American community for its mindless portrayal of north African terrorists. Typically, the Arab villains are portrayed as both sinister (gunning down poor old Doc Brown and, in so doing, teaching a whole generation of American kids to hiss at the swarthy bearded kaffiyeah-wearing dirtbags) and incompetent (so dumb that it took them the whole movie to figure out that they'd been sold a "shiny bomb casing filled with pinball machine parts). Worse still, that's not even the movie's biggest ethnic crime: there's that whole business of whitebread Michael J. Fox teaching black people about rock 'n' roll...

THE HITMAN (1991)

Unsurprisingly from someone who's a dyed-in-the-wool reactionary conservative, Chuck Norris has a special place in the Arab-bashing Hall of Fame; while he's probably killed more Asians on screen, it hasn't been from lack of trying to slaughter Arabs by the score. Already deserving of a hot kebab enema for his role in the Delta Force movies, Norris upped the ante considerably by appearing in this muddled gangster/terrorist picture, where he delivers one of the most racist scenes in history: confronting a group of Arab scumbags in a restaurant, he calls them "camel jockeys", spits out their food and calls it "shit", and then proceeds to slam their heads into the table after mocking their claim that Allah will protect them. Now that's good xenophobia!

IRON EAGLE (1986)

There's nothing special about this mid-'80s blow-'em-up, largely remembered today as a third-rate knockoff of Top Gun featuring some surprisingly homoerotic interaction between Lou Gossett Jr. and some wind-blown creature named Jason Gedrick. However, in many ways, it served as a blueprint for how to portray Arabs in a Hollywood movie: 1. If you have to show them at all, they should be howling, dirty-looking maniacs. 2. They all hate America and want to kill us. No reason need be given. 3. All of them are named Ali, Muhammed or Mustafa. 4. There is no particular need to even mention what country they are from -- they're all the same. 5. By the end of the movie, they should all be dead. See how easy that is? Now go make your own movies, cowboy?

THE BLACK STALLION (1979)

A well-liked children's movie based on a beloved novel, The Black Stallion is a particular disappointment because its racist depiction of Arabs gets in the way of an otherwise fine movie with some good performances and breathtaking cinematography. The movie's evil Arabs mistreat the titular stallion and then steal the boy hero's lifejacket at knifepoint (!) to save themselves; the portrayal is especially galling and cruel because in almost all Arab countries, horses are extremely well-treated and respected. In fact, the Arabian stallion the filmmakers originally hoped to use in the lead role didn't end up in the movie; its Egyptian owners were too afraid the animal would be mistreated or abused.

RULES OF ENGAGEMENT (2000)

Named by the ADC as "probably the most racist film ever made against Arabs in Hollywood", this grotesque William Friedkin actioner piles on the prejudice until your eyes practically roll out of your head. It starts off with hardboiled Marine Samuel L. Jackson facing down a crowd of angry protesters in Yemen (a particularly odd choice, since Yemen is a U.S. ally and the only true democracy on the Arabian peninsula) who are rioting for no reason that is ever adequately explained. Jackson's men gun down the rampaging Arabs (who die in a horribly gory mess, and are portrayed as freakish, almost inhuman monsters); when he's brought to trial for misconduct after slaughtering 83 people, a craven, politically correct diplomat finds videotaped evidence that the Arabs (naturally) attacked first, and destroys the tape lest America's standing in the Arab world be jeopardized. (A few years later, this would seem especially hilarious.) Best of all, in one scene, we are shown that nearly every one of the allegedly innocent Arabs are packing major firepower -- including a five-year-old crippled girl! Kill 'em all, SamJack, and let God sort 'em out.

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Take Five: U.S.A.! U.S.A.!

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 20:45:00 GMT

Patrick Creadon’s I.O.U.S.A., a documentary about the massive national debt being accrued by the United States, opens in limited release today. Using charts, graphs, and mountains of economics statistics, Creadon – the man who brought us the charming crossword puzzle documentary Wordplay – has essentially created An Inconvenient Truth 2: The Doomsday Debt. In the film, which features guest appearances from a pantheon of econ-nerd luminaries including mega-investor Warren Buffet, Comptroller General David M. Walker, and celebrated presidential candidate/crazy person Ron Paul, we are shown how our unthinkably huge national debt may lead to war, inflation, the collapse of our international alliances, economic catastrophe, dogs and cats living together, and mass hysteria. But hey, every movie with those three wonderful letters ‘U.S.A.’ in the title has to be about how we’re all doomed because of the short-sighted policies of warmongering, tax-cutting, pork-barreling, corporate-welfare-loving presidential administrations! Maybe it’s just some residual patriotism from the Fourth of July, but this movie inspired us to create a Take Five featuring other ‘U.S.A’ movies that aren’t quite so bleak. Or, at least, don’t have so many pie charts.

UNDERWORLD U.S.A. (1961)

A little-seen late-period noir from the underrated Sam Fuller, Underworld U.S.A. is a flawed film, particularly in its underwhelming cast, predictable action, and sometimes hokey dialogue. But Cliff Robertson is dynamite as Tolly Devlin, a man who, after seeing his father murdered by two-bit hoods, decided that revenge is a dish served straight out of the freezer, as he spends the next 20 years infiltrating their organization.

MADE IN U.S.A. (1967)

One of the most impenetrable relics from when Jean-Luc Godard really started to go off the narrative rails and into an experimental/revolutionary world of his own, Made in U.S.A. purports to be – and, to a certain albeit incomprehensible degree, actually is – an adaptation of one of Donald Westlake’s “Richard Stark” novels. Bu really, it’s just a glorious excuse for Anna Karina to lounge around in a (French-speaking) Atlantic City hotel room, talking about socialism.

HARLAN COUNTY U.S.A. (1976)

Barbara Kopple set out to make a documentary about the bitter electoral dispute that was tearing the United Mine Workers union apart in the mid-1970s. Instead, after visiting an unauthorized strike in Harlan County, Kentucky, she found a new subject: the desperation, suffering, and nobility of the miners as they struggled to survive under the weight of bosses who crippled them at every turn. Moving, gripping, suspenseful, infuriating, enraging, affirming and beautiful – everything a good documentary should be.

GRANDVIEW, U.S.A. (1984)

Made during that period of the 1980s where they would apparently greenlight a movie about any old thing, this forgotten relic by Randal “The Blue Lagoon” Kleiser involves a painfully underfed C. Thomas Howell, who is a race car driver and aspiring oceanographer for some reason, falling in love with Jamie Lee Curtis, who owns the local demolition derby in the grand tradition of movie sports bosses who look nothing like Bud Selig.

INVASION U.S.A. (1985)

Now we’re talkin’! After all this 'waah-waah, the economy is failing, the unions are dying, some gangsters killed my dad' nonsense, here comes Chuck Norris, with a sleeveless denim shirt and a big pickup truck, to make everything all right. He does this by single-handedly wiping out a huge invasion force, consisting of a wide variety of swarthy foreign nationals, who have had the unmitigated audacity to take over some of our finest shopping malls. Now that’s the U.S.A. I’m talking about!

Hebrew Hammers: The Top 12 Tough Jews in Cinema (Part I)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 15 May 2008 20:00:00 GMT

“If any of us get laid tonight, it’s because of Eric Bana in Munich.”

So says Seth Rogen’s full-time slacker Ben Stone at the start of 2007’s Knocked Up, heralding a recent shift in the pop culture persona of the Chosen People from neurotic schlimazels of the Woody Allen variety to bad-ass playas like Bana.

But, although the concept of “Jewish action star” is a relatively new phenomenon, film history is filled with tales of Hebrew heroes (and heavies), from ancient Egypt to modern Israel.

And thus, in tribute to the upcoming June 6th release of Adam Sandler’s meshuga Israeli commando/hair-stylist comedy You Don’t Mess With the Zohan, we here at the Screengrab are proud to present...THE TOP 12 TOUGH JEWS OF CINEMA!!!!!

ERIC BANA AS AVNER IN MUNICH (2005)

Well, of course we had to start with this one. Bana’s Avner, a Mossad agent tasked with tracking down and executing the terrorists responsible for the murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, isn’t a stone-cold, tough-as-nails killer like his fellow assassin Steve (a dead-eyed Daniel Craig). Not that he isn’t formidable in his own right, surviving explosions, raiding PLO compounds, dodging other assassins and negotiating tense Middle Eastern Mexican stand-offs. But Avner is more than a rage-fueled killing machine, leavening his combat skills with love of family and the mental toughness to question the wisdom of fighting violence and hatred with ever more violence and hatred. Plus, if we’re to believe the ill-conceived, much-maligned “climax” of the film, Bana’s character is tough enough to maintain his mojo during volcanic sex with his wife even while suffering vivid flashbacks of terrible murders he didn’t actually witness. Me, I usually just think of baseball.

JEFF GOLDBLUM AS DAVID JASON IN DEEP COVER (1992)

This anti-Drug War crime thriller supposedly stars Laurence Fishburne (as a fast-rising drug dealer who's actually an undercover cop), but the movie belongs to Goldblum as the lawyer for the local head (Gregory Sierra) of the drug cartel. His character embodies his culture's traditional pursuit of success through education and hard work, but he's also at least half crazed from envy of the thugs he keeps out of jail with his motormouthed brilliance. Their hair-trigger willingness to give in to their violent urges makes him feel unmanly and overcivilized. (Sierra insults Goldblum by calling him "bar mitzvah boy"; Goldblum, in turn, naively thinks he's paying Fishburne a compliment when he likens him to "some beautiful panther or jungle storm...a dangerous, magnificent beast.") After Sierra beats a man to death in front of Goldblum, he asks him if it's the first time he's ever seen a person die, and Goldblum responds with a dreamy monologue about witnessing a fatal accident when he was a kid at summer camp. He sounds as if he 's remembering his first kiss. Goldblum finally snaps, joins Fishburne in toppling Sierra in a bloody coup, and winds up decked out in black leather and slicked-back hair, machine-gunning Clarence Williams III as if in retaliation for The Mod Squad.

JAMES WOODS AS MAX AND ROBERT DE NIRO AS NOODLES IN ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA (1983)

Sergio Leone's final film is an opium dream of a gangster epic starring De Niro and Woods as lifelong frenemies, two products of the Brooklyn Jewish ghetto of the tenement era who grow up to become kings of New York during the Depression years. Part of the tension of their love-hate relationship comes from the fact that they represent clashing approaches to getting the most out of life. Max, the Bugsy Siegel figure, is an unstoppable bullet of wordly ambition, a volatile schemer who won't hesitate to shoot or bitch slap anyone who gets in his way, questions his plans, or looks at him cross-eyed. For most of the film he seems to roll right over the more careful, romantic-spirited Noodles. He ultimately fakes his own death, so that he can disappear into a new life as a respectable, rich businessman (and marry the woman--Elizabeth McGovern--who's the unattainable love of Noodles' life), leaving his old pal broke and stranded with survivor's guilt for thirty-five years. But after Max has played out his string and summons the now-aged Noodles to put him out of his misery, telling him that he's "the only one I can accept it from", we see that Noodles, the mother hen, is one of those people who was born to be sixty, and that everything up to now in his life has been preparation for the moment when Max comes begging, and he says no. It's all been worth it just to get to the end of their lives so that he can say, "I told you so."

CHARLES BRONSON AS BRIG. GEN. DAN SHOMRON IN RAID ON ENTEBBE (1977)

Though it may seem hard to believe now, there was a period of about ten years there where most of the Western world recognized the Israeli military as perhaps the last example of unfailing competence and dependable strength put at the service of a cause that was just--in a nutshell, the good guys. This glorious public relations phase began in the summer of 1967 with the Six-Day War and had its last great hurrah with the rescue mission to recover the hostages taken by Palestinian and German hijackers who sought refuge in Uganda. "Operation Entebbe", which happened to unfold in the early hours of July 4, 1976, as America was gearing up to celebrate its own Bicentennial, was such a movie-ready news event that it was dramatized in three separate movies that went into production practically overnight, including two films originally made for American TV and an Israeli feature that was directed by Menahem Golan, later of the notorious Golan-Globus Productions. The best of them, by miles, was Raid on Entebbe, directed by Irvin Kershner (The Empire Strikes Back) and released to theaters internationally after premiering on NBC TV six months after the actual events. The cast, which was very classy A-list by seventies TV-film standards, included Peter Finch (who died a week after the original broadcast, and who won an Oscar for his performance in Network shortly thereafter) as Yitzhak Rabin and Yaphet Kotto as Idi Amin, but it's Bronson who gives it that all-important shot of testosterone. He doesn't really have that much to do except fill out a uniform and bark orders into his walkie-talkie, but the important thing is that it's Charles fucking Bronson in his Death Wish-era prime who's in charge of this mission, bestowing upon it his macho gravitas and leathery glamor. By comparison, the 1986 Delta Force had to try to squeeze whatever juice it could out of the combination of a past-his-prime Lee Marvin and an not-yet-ironic Chuck Norris on a rocket cycle.

LENA OLIN AS MASHA IN ENEMIES: A LOVE STORY (1989)

In this adaptation of Isaac Bashevis Singer's novel, Olin is a house on fire as a ferociously sexy Holocaust survivor who's having an affair with Ron Silver as a Polish Jew who's been transplanted to New York after spending World War II hiding in a hayloft. (He's now married to the girl, once his servant, who loaned him the layloft.) Fear and guilt have made Silver so nervous that he's a spectral wreck, but her time in Hell has left Olin disinclined to care what anyone thinks of her and determined to take whatever she wants and apologize to nobody; when she finally kills herself, it's her final "fuck you" to a world that doesn't deserve to have somebody as hot as her livening it up. Honorable mention goes to Anjelica Huston as Silver's first wife, who he meets again in New York years after having assumed that she'd died in a concentration camp. His first words to her after they'be been reunited: "I... I didn't know you were alive!" Her smiling reply: "This you never knew."

WOODY ALLEN AS DAVID DOBEL IN ANYTHING ELSE (2003)

I was going to include Ben Kingsley’s portrayal of Meyer Lansky in Bugsy here, but Kosher Nostra mobsters are well-represented elsewhere on the list, and since the Woodman was disparaged in the introduction as the personification of non-threatening Jew-hood, I figured it was only fair to mention his uncharacteristically empowered portrayal of gun-toting, windshield smashing, paranoid conspiracy theorist David Dobel in the underrated, unfairly maligned romantic tragedy, Anything Else. Like his work in the far superior Stardust Memories (which critics also hated), Allen’s performance here (as an unreliable mentor to the likeable, lovelorn Jason Biggs) is cranky and misanthropic, but also darkly funny and refreshingly prickly, with the courage of its own piss and vinegar convictions. Dobel may be just as much of a hard luck case as some of Allen’s previous incarnations, but this character would rather fight than mope, choosing anger over depression in his confrontations with the injustices of the world. Like his cool, successful Bizzaro World alter ego Nick Fifer in Paul Mazursky’s 1991 curiosity Scenes From A Mall, Dobel is the rare Allen character that strays from the comedian’s typical comfort zone to hint at the Tough Jew lurking just beneath the tsuris.

Click here for more Tough Jews!

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

The Ten Greatest Mentors in Movie History, Part 1

Phil Nugent — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Back in 1989, in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg may have been making a point about what a bad-ass their archaeologist superhero when they cast the original James Bond as their hero's father and then showed that he felt no awe for this paragon: instead, he filched his personal style from some whip-wielding, ethically dubious mug in hobo-wear. In the forthcoming new Indy movie, Indy has acquired a son of his own, and it seems a safe bet that the movie will not end without li'l Indy looking up at his dad's craggy face and recognizing how lucky he is to have such an icon to admire and learn from. Thus does Indy come full circle as an instructional figure, an odd fate for a guy who used to sneak out of his campus office through the window so that he wouldn't have to face his students and risk earning his paycheck. If you're looking for a really impressive mentor, educator, guru, you could always do worse than get yourself into a movie.

Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas), WALL STREET (1987)

Mentors don't always do well in Oliver Stone movies. The hero of the autobiographical Platoon had two of them, but one of them got killed and the hero wound up having to shoot the other. The fast-talking uber-capitalist Gekko is luckier; he has a smart wardrobe to construct around his power suspenders, an Academy Award, and a famous speech that will get replayed on the nightly news every time there's a market downturn or somebody who's worth more than the national revenue of Venezuela gets nabbed for insider trading. Actually, Gekko's weak link is agreeing to share his wisdom with the obnoxious little mouth-breather played by Charlie Sheen, the scowling kid from the wrong side of the tracks with the chip on his shoulder. Unable to work out his issues, Sheen screws his sensei over and then adds injury to, well, injury by setting him up and selling him out to the feds. Back when Wall Street was in theaters, it was possible to feel sorry for Gordon at the end, but since then it's become possible to get some perspective on these things. Today, after his stay at some Club Fed, he probably has his own reality TV show. Charlie Sheen can watch it when he gets home from his job scrubbing public toilets.

Mr. Miyagi (Pat Morita), THE KARATE KID (1984)

I feel confident that Pat Morita's martial-arts-instructing janitor richly deserves his place here, even though I'm actually pretty sure that I never did see The Karate Kid. (Hell, I might be less sure if I had seen it.) Consider that this is a guy who, thanks to his Oscar-nominated performance here, managed to pull off a comeback almost a decade after he'd ill-advisedly abandoned the cast of Happy Days for a starring role in the sitcom Mr. T and Tina. (Can you tell me what ever became of Tina?) And he must be really good in this, because a lot of people lined up to see the movie, and they must have had their eyes glued to him, because I did see The Outsiders, and the one thing I remember from that is that looking at Ralph Macchio will make your eyeballs bleed. True, most of his biggest later roles would be in Karate Kid sequels, and while I'm not sure that I ever saw any of them either, I'm sure that they gave him the chance to really explore the possibilities of the character, plus he got to meet Hilary Swank. Clearly he was a fellow anyone would be well advised to seek out for advice, except on the subject of which Gus Van Sant movie to appear in. Wax on, wax off, motherfucker!

W.P. Mayhew (John Mahoney), BARTON FINK (1991)

Lured to Hollywood with the promise of easy money and big-screen glory, Barton Fink (John Turturro) quickly reaches an impasse in his writing. So with nowhere else to turn, his producer suggests that he find an established writer to mentor him. For his troubles, he gets W.P. Mayhew. Mayhew, played by a pre-Frasier John Mahoney, is a literary legend clearly modeled after William Faulkner, one who has toiled on countless screenplays for the studio in all possible genres. Tellingly, Barton first discovers Mayhew while puking out his liquid lunch in the men's room of the studio commissary. But Barton is so starstruck that he pursues him anyway, despite Mayhew's reputation as a washed-up souse. Unfortunately for the would-be student, the master whose guidance he seeks is too busy drinking and ranting at his secretary/live-in lover(Judy Davis) to give him much help with his writing, and indeed, it's Davis who's been doing most of the writing lately anyway. Yet while Mayhew isn't the mentor Fink bargained for, he's nonetheless valuable to Fink, providing him an objective lesson in what can happen to even truly great writers when they've been swallowed up by Hollywood. The lessons he teaches aren't pretty, but Barton isn't likely to forget them.

Patches O'Houlihan (Rip Torn), DODGEBALL: A TRUE UNDERDOG STORY (2004)

The schlubby regulars at Average Joe's gymnasium are facing difficult times. With their beloved gym struggling financially and facing takeover from a more sophisticated fitness center, they have to raise a boatload of money to keep from going under. So they do what any bunch of scrappy underdogs would do in a similar situation- they enter a nationwide dodgeball tournament, even though they're not especially athletic and can't compete with more experienced dodgeballers. What's a ragtag band of self-labeled Average Joes to do? Find a coach, that's what. Or more precisely, let a coach find them. But not just any coach, mind you. None other than Patches O'Houlihan (Rip Torn) a fifties-era dodgeball legend who's now confined to a wheelchair. With a mixture of abuse and tough love, Patches whips the Joes into shape using exercises such as one founded on the theory, "if you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball." Faster than you can say "Eye of the Tiger," the Average Joes are national contenders. Of course, their ascent has less to do with Patches' coaching style than it does to the demands of the plot- to say nothing of divine intervention from Lance Armstrong and Chuck Norris- but Torn is so irascibly funny in the role that it seems wrong not to include him. After all, how can you not love a guy who gets a line like, "is it necessary for me to drink my own urine? No, but I do it anyway, because it's sterile and I like the taste."

Cole (J. T. Walsh), THE GRIFTERS (1990)

Midway through its narrative, Stephen Frears's adaptation of Jim Thompson's seamiest pulp classic pulls the brakes on itself to fill in Myra's (Annette Bening) back story, to show that she learned the intricacies of the con-artist's game at the feet of the old pro Cole--played by J. T. Walsh, an actor with a blandly sturdy facade that, more often than not (Breakdown, Sling Blade, Nixon, The Last Seduction), served as the mask of a mean, sick puppy. Here, he's onscreen just long enough to show the highs of his profession (pulling off a sweet scam and celebrating after) and the lows (he goes nuts). Maybe the filmmakers wanted to get him on and off fast so that he didn't turn to the audience and make a bonus pitch for the United Way.

--Paul Clark; Phil Nugent

Click here for Part 2.

DVD Digest for February 12, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 15:00:00 GMT

This week, one of 2007's best films comes to DVD, and a master's musicals get the box-set treatment.

DVD of the Week: Most of the most beloved films of Ernst Lubitsch's career come from its final years, when the Lubitsch touch had already become well-established. But it's easy to forget that the master had already had a fruitful career long before Ninotchka, The Shop Around the Corner, and To Be or Not to Be. With the films included in this box set, Lubitsch was one of the first filmmakers to integrate song and narrative after the advent of talkies. But this would mean little today if the films themselves didn't hold up, and they do, with all of Lubitsch's trademark charm and Pre-Code sophistication. Eclipse has given their typical treatment (no extras, but lovely transfers) to the films The Love Parade, Monte Carlo, One Hour With You, and The Smiling Lieutenant, which boast some of the era's quintessential stars — Maurice Chevalier, Claudette Colbert, and Jeannette MacDonald. As always, Eclipse and parent company Criterion succeed in filling in another hole in cinema history.

Incidentally, today is my birthday, so if anyone out there is looking for a suitable gift, you could do a whole lot worse than this.

A bumper crop of more recent films being released on DVD this week, including: Ben Affleck's surprisingly great Gone Baby Gone (Buena Vista, also Blu-Ray); James Gray's searing crime drama We Own the Night; Becoming Jane (Buena Vista, also Blu-Ray), the second Austen-themed dramedy in as many weeks; John Cusack in The Martian Child (New Line); No Reservations (Warner, also Blu-Ray), the Catherine Zeta-Jones-starring remake of 2001's Mostly Martha; Tyler Perry's latest hit, Why Did I Get Married? (Lionsgate); the Apollo-mission documentary In the Shadow of the Moon (ThinkFilm); and John Turturro's polarizing star-studded quasi-musical, Romance and Cigarettes (Sony). In addition, this week finally sees the DVD release of Amy Heckerling's long-delayed I Could Never Be Your Woman (Genius Entertainment), starring Michelle Pfeiffer, Paul Rudd, and Atonement Oscar nominee Saoirse Ronan. If nothing else, now we can see what all the fuss was about.

Back to classics, this week also brings Sony's The Stanley Kramer Film Collection, a collection of five films Kramer directed and/or produced. The centerpiece of the set is a new 40th Anniversary Edition of Kramer's once-controversial interracial-marriage drama Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. Also in the set is the Kramer-directed Ship of Fools, as well as The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T, A Member of the Wedding, and The Wild One, all of which he produced.

Other older films coming to DVD include: The Joan Crawford Collection Volume 2 (Warner), which includes Sadie McKee, Strange Cargo, A Woman's Face, Flamingo Road, and Torch Song; Fox's Charlie Chan Collection Volume 4; and Kenneth Branagh's 1991 dramedy Peter's Friends (MGM), boasting an enviable cast, including Branagh, then-wife Emma Thompson, Hugh Laurie, Stephen Fry, and Imelda Staunton. For some reason, MGM has seen fit to package the film in a box set alongside the misguided Elmore Leonard/Paul Schrader satire Touch, the 1988 Patrick Dempsey-Jennifer Connelly vehicle Some Girls, and Scott Baio and Willie Aames in Zapped! Strange bedfellows indeed.

Finally, if you're jonesing for TV on DVD, this week sees the release of season 1 of The Equalizer (Universal), as well as the Vern-approved Blade: the Series (New Line). But fear not — only one more week until the release of Walker, Texas Ranger: The Complete Fourth Season, the rare DVD that can be enjoyed by both Chuck Norris fans and Conan O'Brien watchers.

The Top Ten Action Heroes Who Deserve A Comeback, Part 1

Peter Smith — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 22:30:00 GMT

This week's top ten comes to us from guest writer Gabriel Mckee, friend of Nerve and author of The Gospel According to Science Fiction. Read his fantastic blog here.

Recent years may well be remembered for bringing back the over-the-top action hero. New sequels to Rocky, Die Hard, and Rambo have revived long-dead franchises, and the trend is continuing. Indiana Jones 4 has started filming, and a fourth Mad Max film would have wrapped by now had scheduling conflicts not led director George Miller to make Happy Feet instead. Though it's an easy trend to mock, it opens the door for other action heroes to be resurrected — here are some top candidates.

10. Scott McCoy (Chuck Norris), The Delta Force

Before he was a meme, before he was Walker, Texas Ranger, even before he was a Karate Kommando, Chuck Norris was Maj. Scott McCoy of the Delta Force. This elite antiterrorist strike force, led by Lee Marvin, consists of some thirty soldiers who are highly trained in standing around in the back of a cargo plane while Chuck Norris rides around on a motorcycle killing terrorists. Delta Force came out in the pre-Die Hard world, before we expected our action heroes to have pathos, depth or family troubles. There's not much character to this character, but when it comes to straightforward ass-kicking, Norris is the undisputed master. Norris is ripe for a Stallone-style comeback, and in the and in the age of the War on Terror, a new entry in the Delta Force saga is the perfect vehicle for his revival.

9. Axel Foley (Eddie Murphy), Beverly Hills Cop

Remember when Eddie Murphy made movies that people enjoyed? Barring Dreamgirls, his film career has been on a losing streak for over a decade, putting him just below Robin Williams on the list of actors who need to be rescued from their own careers. A return to the role of Axel Foley, the detective/con man of Beverly Hills Cop, might be the best way to ensure that Norbit never happens again.

8. Jack Carter (Michael Caine), Get Carter

Michael Caine has made a major comeback in recent years, but in most of his recent roles — in Batman Begins, Children of Men,and The Prestige, for instance — he's played the Kindly Old British Guy. It's easy to forget that he made his name playing jerks — first a heartless cad in Alfie, then a brutal-but-suave thug in Get Carter. This story of a London gangster who travels to Newcastle (Britain's equivalent of South Jersey) to investigate his brother's murder isn't as flashy as more recent tales of the U.K. underworld. But Guy Ritchie and Jason Statham nevertheless owe everything to Get Carter's blueprint and Caine's cynical performance. A return to the character of Carter would give Caine a chance to recapture both the grim violence and the effortless sexiness of one of his greatest roles.

7. Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle (Gene Hackman), The French Connection

The most successful action film of the '70s didn't star Clint Eastwood, Bruce Lee or any other established veteran of the genre. The French Connection owes much of its success to Gene Hackman's performance as hot-headed bad cop Popeye Doyle (which earned him his first Academy Award). More than just a tough guy, Doyle is a contemptible bully, and instead of an invincible supercop, his temper makes him a bit of a screw-up. Hackman is still more than capable of this kind of complexity (as proven by The Royal Tenenbaums), and it would be thrilling to see what he could do with this character after thirty-five years.

6. Foxy Brown (Pam Grier)

The 1973 film Coffy established Pam Grier as the undisputed queen of '70s blaxploitation. Foxy Brown (originally intended as a sequel entitled Burn, Coffy, Burn!) justified her ascension — whether infiltrating a high-end call-girl ring, shooting her drug-dealing brother in the ear, or hijacking a drug runner's crop duster, Foxy is "a whole lotta woman." At turns smiling and sneering, she violently opposes an oppressive society symbolized by a white-operated heroin syndicate. Grier has had a slightly higher profile since Quentin Tarantino reintroduced audiences to her charms, but it's been far too long since she's kicked ass like she did in Foxy Brown.

Read PART 2.

"Chuck Norris Doesn't Endorse, He Tells America How It's Gonna Be!"

Peter Smith — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 17:00:00 GMT

Iowa voters (and anyone with an Internet connection) have just begun seeing this campaign ad, in which Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee reels off a few of the more family-friendly and less pretzel-twistingly surreal "Chuck Norris facts" while Norris sits beside him assuring potential voters that the Huckster will protect our Second Amendment rights and "put the IRS out of business." Taken strictly on an aesthetic level, and reminding everyone that any time we use that term in reference to political commercials we're grading on a curve, it's a smart piece of work. Discussing the ad in Slate, the site's "Trailhead" campaign blogger writes, "It's unclear to me why he would base his first Hawkeye State TV campaign on an outdated Internet meme that might not have trickled up to most caucus-goers," thus paradoxically implying that the "Norris facts" angle is all played-out, yet at the same time suggesting that it's too hip for the room. What may really matter is that in a contest where all the other Republican candidates have been concentrating on establishing their grim-manliness bona fides, Huckabee has unexpectedly demonstrated a sense of humor. What's more, he's dared to suggest there's something comical about macho icons, and maybe, by extension, something comical about a bunch of middle-aged rich white guys competing in a "Who Is Most Macho?" contest. Huckabee's delivery in the ad is pretty good, too; he doesn't ham it up, but unlike, say Richard Nixon, whose last words might well have been, "Explain to me again what I was doing on Laugh-In", he does make it clear that he gets the joke. If Huckabee gets anywhere in the primaries, it'll be because he manages to establish himself as the preferred candidate of religious conservatives, but if he builds on that base, it'll be because he manages, as George W. Bush did in 2000, to strike voters who might be inclined to see conservative holy-roller types as kind of scary as reassuringly normal. (How Bush ever pulled this off we still don't understand. Were we all drunk that year?) If nothing else, Huckabee has already pulled off a major comedy coup by inspiring the complaint, "Mike Huckabee has confused celebrity endorsement with serious policy," to pass the lips of his rival Fred Thompson, currently running for president on the basis of his record as New York City's pretend District Attorney. — Phil Nugent