The Screengrab : clint eastwood

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 28 May 2009 21:00:00 GMT

REPO MAN (1984)

Mike18xx, the nice fellah who posted the clip above, notes in his YouTube comments that “Seeing the ending won’t actually ‘spoil’ the film if you haven’t seen it before,” which is absolutely true. The plot of Alex Cox’s first, best film (involving aliens, car thieves, secret government shenanigans and the search for a very special 1964 Chevy Malibu -- what Mike18xx rightly calls the best McGuffin in film history) isn’t nearly as important as the overall vibe, a pleasant reminder of a more innocent pop culture moment when punk and indie weren’t just corporate flavors and Emilio Estevez was actually kinda badass (although, judging by a recent feud unwittingly instigated by our own Scott Von Doviak, it seems both Cox and the Mighty Duck still have at least a little piss left in their vinegar). Plus, like all the best endings, Repo Man features an effective curtain call of characters and themes, as well as a memorable epigraph for my own particular hipster doofus generation: “The life of a repo man is always intense.” (AO)

ZABRISKIE POINT (1970)

Love him or hate him -- and there are plenty of cinephiles in both camps -- it’s hard to deny that nobody could end a movie quite like Michelangelo Antonioni. With plenty of wonderful conclusions in his work, it was hard to confine ourselves to just one Antonioni film (or even two, as we ended up doing), but ultimately we couldn’t possibly overlook the finale of this, his most critically-savaged work. Taken as a whole, Zabriskie Point is a scattershot vision of late-sixties America -- sometimes visionary, sometimes ponderous, often both. But even if you aren’t a fan of the movie, the ending packs a wallop. Sure, it’s somewhat obvious what Antonioni’s up to here, blowing up a gaudy “modern” house that has intruded on the natural majesty of the desert, even showing the explosion from multiple angles for extra emphasis. But it’s how he does it that turns the scene from sledgehammer symbolism to transcendent cinema (besides, this is relatively subtle compared to Antonioni’s other proposed ending, which involved an airplane writing “Fuck You, America” across the sky). As Antonioni shifts the film into some of the slowest slow-motion the cinema has ever seen in order to capture the explosions in exhaustive detail, he manages to exact his cinematic revenge on consumer culture -- watch as he blows up a television, a refrigerator, even a loaf of Wonder Bread -- while simultaneously transforming the destruction into something beautiful, with an assist from a modified version of Pink Floyd’s “Careful With That Axe, Eugene.” For lack of a better phrase, it’s pure cinema. And if that’s not good enough for you, there’s the notion that even a director as art-damaged as Antonioni knows sometimes his hardened audiences just want to watch stuff blow up real good. (PC)

PLANET OF THE APES (1968) & BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES (1970)

Sorry to ruin it for you, but the planet of the apes? It was Earth all along! Charlton Heston sure feels silly now. But not as silly as he’ll feel when he finds himself the prisoner of underground mutants in the sequel. Now he’s really had enough, and it’s hard to blame him for overreacting. I’ve told this story before, but one more time before they turn out the lights: Having had quite enough of talking apes and telepathic mole-people, Heston unleashes a mighty cry of "You bloody bastards!" and plunges onto the detonator with his dying breath. And you can pry it from his cold, dead hands, if you can find them, which you can't because, indeed, the planet explodes. Or as the abrupt final line of narration has it: "In one of the countless billions of galaxies in the universe, lies a medium-sized star, and one of its satellites, a green and insignificant planet, is now dead." Hey, thanks for coming to the show, ladies and gentlemen! Drive home safely! It's an ending that provokes laughter in your modern sophisticated audience, much to the bafflement of a gentleman who was sitting behind me at a revival house screening some years ago. "I dunno what everyone's laughing at," he muttered. "It's gonna happen." (SVD)

WEEKEND (1967)

By the end of the ‘60s, it was clear to everyone that Jean-Luc Godard was through fucking around. He was using cinema less as a means of communication and more as a weapon, but how deadly serious he was about deploying that weapon didn’t become clear until the final scenes of his dizzying film Weekend. The circumstances are brutal enough; the bourgeois couple we’ve followed throughout the film, cheated of their inheritance, resort to murder and end up in cahoots with a pack of radical revolutionaries with a taste for human flesh. But throughout Weekend, Godard was operating on a higher level: it’s full of meta-reference, and the director makes no bones about his characters being tuned into their own artificiality at every juncture. He planned it not as a mere statement, but as a command: this art form, he said, is dead; leave the theatre not to discuss it, but to seize and tear down. It was a powerful message, and a prescient one a year before Paris exploded into a nearly miraculous revolution. But even in that atmosphere, only Godard would have had the balls to give Weekend its famous ending: a simple title card reading “END OF CINEMA/END OF WORLD.” (LP)

THE GOOD, THE BAD & THE UGLY (1966)

Spaghetti Westerns, particularly Leone's, aren't concerned with Western realism, but the myth of the West, which they blow up like Greco-Roman gods. This might be the most iconic and expressionist movie ending outside of, y'know, German Expressionism. The clip above starts after Tuco and Blondie find the graveyard, with the camera spinning through the graves as Tuco races through the rows, looking for the right name. Then Blondie forces him to dig. Angel Eyes appears and there's the first double-cross: the grave Tuco is digging up has bones rather than money in it. The Mexican standoff. The second and third double-cross: Tuco's gun is empty and Blondie didn't write anything on the rock. Tuco digs at the right grave, but as soon as he strikes the gold, there's the fourth double-cross: Blondie has hung a noose over his head while he was working. The camera stays with Tuco as Blondie rides away, and we all watch him disappear, thinking, "wait, that one is The Good?" But he returns and frees Tuco, calling back to an earlier scene of camaraderie between them. It sounds like a story from The Odyssey even as I describe it here. If there had been such a thing as a Mexican standoff when Homer was writing, I'm certain that Odysseus would have found himself at one point of the triangle, one step ahead of the others. (HC)

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Paul Clark, Scott Von Doviak, Leonard Pierce, Hayden Childs

The Best & Worst Get Rich Quick Schemes In Cinema History (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 22:00:00 GMT

KELLY’S HEROES (1970)

Like Three Kings (which it no doubt inspired), Kelly’s Heroes drops a heist flick into the middle of a war movie and winds up making some interesting points about free will versus obedience in a military setting where the grunts on the ground sometimes have more in common with the low-level enemy soldiers they’re fighting than they do with their high-ranking, high-living superiors. “You and us, we’re just soldiers, right?” Telly Savalas’ Master Sergeant “Big Joe” says to a German tank commander at one point. “We don’t even know what this war’s all about. All we do is we fight and we die and for what? We don’t get anything out of it.” True, the sentiment’s a little sketchy when the conflict in question is “The Good War” and the enemy solider in question is wearing Nazi S.S. stripes...but in the midst of the far less good Vietnam War, director Brian G. Hutton’s celebration of enlightened self-interest reached out to peaceniks and free market capitalists alike, courting both groups with a truly bizarre combination of actors including Savalas, Clint Eastwood, Caroll O’Connor, Donald Sutherland, Harry Dean Stanton and Don Rickles. Sure, the movie’s pretty good...but I’m guessing it’s nowhere near as entertaining as the wrap party must have been. (AO)

USED CARS (1980)

This rowdy, ingenious comedy with the iconic title is like the history of con game farce impacted into a single, shiny object. It's about a war that breaks out between two rival car lots run by a pair of brothers (both played by Jack Warden), and it consists of one bold act of one-upmanship after another, with most of the schemes tinged with personal maliciousness. The nicer of the two Jack Wardens checks out early after his meaner number hires a stunt driver to take him on a test ride so scary that it induces a fatal coronary in the old duffer; his second-in-command, Kurt Russell, takes charge and prevents his nemesis from inheriting the lot by installing the boss' corpse behind the wheel of an old jalopy and burying it on the property. The movie's high point of brash invention comes when Russell and his team hire a couple of underground mechanical wizards (Michael McKean and David L. Lander, then joined at the hip as TV's Lenny and Squiggy) to jack into a televised presidential address so that they can cut into it with a live commercial, filmed on their rival's lot. (PN)

EATING RAOUL (1982)

Cult director Paul Bartel had his biggest indie hit with this homemade black comedy, in which he and the Amazonian Mary Woronov play an uptight, asexual married couple -- Paul and Mary Bland -- who accidentally murder a "swinger" (Garry Goodrow) who has invaded their home and tried to put the greasy moves on Mary. After cleaning out his pockets and coming to the conclusion -- which the movie seems to support -- that these polyester-clad degenerates will never be missed, the Blands adapt their discovery to an assembly line, putting ads in "swinger" papers to attract perverts who Paul dispatches with a konk to the head from his skillet. It adds something to the charm of the whole enterprise that the movie itself was a get-rich-quick scheme, which Bartel filmed in spurts over the course of several months, gathering cast and crew whenever he had enough money to proceed. Funding for the planned sequel, Bland Ambition, fell through, but the movie did inspire a comic book adaptation by underground legend Kim Deitch, as well as a later stage adaptation. Bartel and Woronov also revived their characters in a cameo for the 1986 horror movie Chopping Mall, for no clear reason except that they must have been in the area and the director offered them pie. (PN)

NIGHT SHIFT (1982)

This early Ron Howard film benefits immeasurably from Michael Keaton's performance, in his feature film debut, as a morgue attendant who persuades his rabbity supervisor (Henry Winkler) to turn the premises into the center of operations for a prostitution ring. This idea has detectable flaws, but they don't seem to matter much because of the enthusiasm with which Keaton embraces his brilliant concept and allows -- no, encourages -- it to take over and remake his life. His white boy with a taste for the pimp style now actually looks kind of prescient. And the fact that actual pimps made no serious attempt to adopt his euphemism for the profession, "love broker", make one weep for the lack of imagination of the human race. (PN)

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four & Six

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

Screengrab Review: "An Unlikely Weapon"

Nick Schager — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 15:00:00 GMT

Susan Morgan’s An Unlikely Weapon: The Eddie Adams Story has an aesthetic blandness that would likely have turned off its subject, the famed photojournalist behind the iconic, Pulitzer Prize-winning 1968 snapshot of Saigon police chief Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Vietcong soldier. Many, including Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings, contend that picture helped end the Vietnam War by bringing home the brutal, horrific awfulness of the conflict. And though Morgan’s non-fiction techniques are only serviceably straightforward, the director engagingly makes clear that Adams’ most renowned image haunted him but did not, ultimately, define his work, which eventually included photos from thirteen wars, of six United States presidents, and of virtually every notable culture figure from the past fifty years. A cantankerous “pain in the ass” who started with the AP and ended as an independent entrepreneur, he was an individual who lived life on his own terms, and whose career embodied the notion that greatness isn’t found in the attainment of perfection, but in the striving for it.

Forgoing background on Adams’ upbringing, Morgan begins her biographical story (narrated by Keifer Sutherland) in ‘Nam, where his brash, gung-ho, coach-like attitude endeared him to the troops and resulted in a series of stunning photographs culminating with the shot of the murder perpetrated by Loan, a picture he derided as not very good and whose impact he later claimed to not fully understand. As confirmed by the comments of friends, colleagues and admirers, others most certainly did comprehend the power and significance of Adams’ signature work, and also the abundant talent the man possessed. An Unlikely Weapon employs its talking heads, archival film clips, and both photos taken by, and interviews with, Adams (who died in 2004 of ALS) to paint a reasonably evocative portrait of the artist as a take-no-shit iconoclast. A contradictory personality drew him to both victims of combat and larger-than-life despots – in one amusing anecdote, he refuses to take guff from Fidel Castro and winds up going duck-hunting with the Cuban dictator – and, once he tired of covering wars, he segued smoothly into a more laid-back celeb-focused second career as a hired gun for, among other publications, Penthouse and Parade magazines.

An Unlikely Weapon’s reverence for Adams is complemented by a refusal to shy away from his often-difficult, combative personality and his habitual self-criticisms, the latter of which suggest the constant determination to be better that typically distinguishes the preeminent from the merely good. Though clips find Adams both discussing the Loan photo as well as describing his reunion with the officer years later in the man’s Virginia pizza parlor, Morgan never quite fully expresses the complicated central role that the photo played in Adams’ life, a shortcoming due in part to the fact that she’s forced to rely mostly on archival interviews for his first-hand thoughts. Still, touching upon the subsequent 1977 pictures that helped convince President Carter to grant Vietnamese refugees entry into the country, as well as the human rights book “Speak Truth to Power” he made with Kerry Kennedy, the film conveys the deep humanism of his work, an abiding compassion and respect that, ultimately, can be felt in everything from his close-up of a somber Vietnamese child to the back-turned photo of Clint Eastwood that graces the poster for Unforgiven.

Eddie Murphy, "Dreamgirls" Director to Collaborate on Richard Pryor Biopic

Phil Nugent — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 20:30:00 GMT

It's been reported that Eddie Murphy is prepared to waive his usual fee for the chance to play Richard Pryor in Is It Something I Said?, a biopic of the late comic that's being planned by Bill Condon; Condon's last movie, Dreamgirls, earned Murphy the first Oscar nomination of his 25-year-old movie career. It's not the first time that Pryor and Murphy's names have been uttered in the same breath. In the early 1980s, when both men were at the height of their box office appeal, the freshly hatched Murphy was featured on the cover of People magazine alongside Pryor and often described as his comedic heir, and in 1989, the two co-starred in Harlem Nights, the only movie that Murphy has ever directed. Pryor himself took directing credits on two features: his final stand-up performance feature, the 1983 Here and Now, and the autobiographical Jo Jo Dancer...Your Life Is Calling, in which Pryor played a comedian who rises from being the son of a Peoria, Illinois prostitute to a rich and beloved celebrity entertainer who can't manage his love life or his taste for addictive substances. A shapeless mess that restages, to diminishing returns, many scenes from Pryor's life that he had already turned into comic gold in his stand-up act, the movie is perhaps most notable for portraying the calamitous 1980 event when Pryor suffered life-threatening over more than half his body, as a suicide attempt, with Pryor's character lighting himself on fire after dousing his clothes with rum. Pryor's injuries had been officially reported as having been the result of a freebasing accident, but some ten years after Jo Jo came out, Pryor, in a book and in interviews, would describe it in much the same way it was shown in the movie. By that time, the comic had been physically waylaid by multiple sclerosis.

The idea that Eddie Murphy is the best possible fit for the role of Richard Pryor may be one of those ideas that seems so obvious that the first thing that should be done with it is to re-examine it. Even back when the two of them were sharing magazine covers, it was clear that they had little enough in common in terms of presence, image, shared experiences and preferred subject matter that the talk of Murphy as being "the new Richard Pryor" seemed redolent of a bygone era when it was thought that America could only handle one black superstar in any particular medium at a time. Whatever was going on in his personal life, there was always something childlike about Richard Pryor, whereas Murphy could credit his fast rise to the fact that, even when he was barely out of his teens, there seemed to be a forty-year veteran of the Vegas club circuit inside him. In the age of Reagan and Rambo, he had his biggest success in what were essentially action pictures (48 Hrs., Beverly Hills Cop and its sequel) in which he functioned as both the gun-waving hero and the wisecracking comic relief; he may have been willing to double as a thief (in 48 Hrs.) or dress down (in the Beverly Hills Cop movies) if it would help audiences relate to him as an "underdog", but he was still an authority figure at heart, compared to Pryor's eternal outsiders. In this week's "Random Roles" feature in The Onion, Margot Kidder says that the key to the much-married Pryor's great appeal was partly his "vulnerability"; that's not a quality that ever turned up much in Murphy's character descriptions.

Pryor himself had a long-cherished, off-and-on plan to star in a bipic about Charlie Parker, who would eventually be portrayed by Forest Whitaker in Clint Eastwood's Bird, which came out in 1988, around the same time that Pryor's movie career wa winding down. (Pryor's last starring role was in the 1991 Another You. He later contributed cameo roles to two movies, Larry Bishop's 1996 Mad Dog Time and David Lynch's 1997 Lost Highway, made after M.S. had him firmly in its grip, which might not have been the greatest idea in show business history.) We'll never know whether Pryor, under ideal laboratory conditions, would have been able to get far enough outside his own very powerful persona to convincingly play Charlie Parker, though another lacerating stand-up comedian, Dick Gregory, gave a performance, as a character based on Parker in the 1967 Sweet Love, Bitter, that compares quite favorably to the one Whitaker gave in Bird. One thing that Pryor, Gregory, and Parker had in common was that they had all spent their young adulthood struggling to make it in a tough business; it's no insult to Murphy's talent or imagination as an actor that, having achieved superstardom at twenty on Saturday Night Live, he may not be able to really imagine what drove someone like Pryor, who worked him way up from performing in strip clubs and neighborhood bars to mainstream success in Vegas and on TV, only to dynamite and rebuild his career from scratch because he felt that his early success was a betrayal of what he really knew. There's also the fact that, at 47, Murphy is already much closer to being the age where Pryor's career began rolling itself up than the point at which he was firing on all cylinders and shooting off sparks. I'll keep my fingers crossed, but I'd be more interested in seeing him played by someone like Dave Chappelle--someone who's not just funny and talented, but whose concept of show business success has traps and demons in it.

Screengrab Review: “Watchmen”

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 20:00:00 GMT

There are a million reasons a Watchmen movie should never have been made and no good reason it should have, aside from the obvious one: superheroes are big box office, and Watchmen was one of the most tantalizing untouched superhero properties available. It’s also an incredibly dense, multi-layered work, deriving much of its power from its subversion of five decades worth of comic book conventions. Having read the script Sam Hamm penned for Terry Gilliam’s aborted attempt at mounting Watchmen for the screen back in the early ‘90s, I know the new adaptation of the acclaimed graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons from “visionary director” Zack Snyder isn’t the worst case scenario. Nor does it exceed expectations. It’s just sort of pointless, which is what most fans of the classic comic have probably been expecting all along.

So can we separate the movie from its source material and judge it on its own merits? We can try, but Snyder doesn’t make it easy. It’s not a good sign when the movie kicks off with the image of an aging Richard Nixon portrayed by an actor wearing a ridiculous putty ski-slope nose and tons of awful aging makeup, quickly followed by a “Pat Buchanan” who looks and sounds exactly nothing like Pat Buchanan. The set-up here, should you be completely unfamiliar with the world of Watchmen: it’s 1985, and Richard Nixon has been re-elected to an unprecedented fifth term as President. Tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union are at an all-time high, and nuclear war appears to be inevitable.

The events of this alternate timeline have been aided and abetted by costumed heroes, among them The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), who helped lead the U.S. to quick victory in Vietnam. As Watchmen opens, the aging Comedian is murdered in his own apartment, leading masked vigilante Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley) to believe that someone is picking off the Watchmen, a superhero group whose members also include dumpy Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson), sultry Silk Spectre (Malin Akerman), and superhuman Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup, boasting a pendulous blue schlong that may disturb and frighten younger viewers – or any viewers, really).

In the comics, Moore and Gibbons amplify the major plotlines concerning the hunt for the mask-killer and the quest to avert global armageddon with flashbacks to the heroes’ origins (some of which date back to a superhero team of the 1940s called the Minutemen), along with various subplots including a love triangle among Silk Spectre, Nite Owl and Dr. Manhattan and a prison detour for Rorschach. To their credit, Snyder and screenwriters David Hayter and Alex Tse include as much of this material as possible (the Watchmen comic-within-the-comic Tales from the Black Freighter is getting a separate DVD release)…so why does the 168-minute running time still seem bloated beyond all necessity?

Part of it comes down to your definition of what constitutes a “faithful” adaptation. Great swaths of dialogue are lifted intact from the graphic novel, and the major visual set-pieces are painstakingly recreated (with at least one notable exception), and that may be enough to satisfy a segment of the audience. But the pacing is often leaden, the plotting lumpy and disjointed, the storytelling single-layered at best. The connective tissue between the big moments is thin to nonexistent; for instance, viewers coming to the movie cold may be forgiven for wondering how a sketchy character like Ozymandias (Matthew Goode and his dreadful wandering accent) turns out to be so crucial to the proceedings. Snyder seems most fully engaged when the action is at its most conventional, as when Nite Owl and Silk Spectre rescue kids from a burning building or Rorschach fends off assailants in prison.

Watchmen does have its moments. The closest it comes to capturing the texture of the graphic novel is the lyrical sequence in which Dr. Manhattan, having exiled himself to Mars, relives the events that led to his transformation into a godlike being. There’s visual razzle-dazzle to spare: an arctic fortress, a demolished city, a massive clockwork gizmo floating above the surface of Mars. And Jackie Earle Haley is terrific – he knows he’s playing a Clint Eastwood character times five, and he brings the appropriate psycho gusto to lines like “I’m not locked in here with you – you’re locked in here with me!”

I’ll even give Snyder some credit for improving the ending slightly, which wasn’t difficult (blasphemy, I know, but I re-read the last two Watchmen issues last night just to refresh my memory and that is not good stuff). But I can’t think of too many “visionary” directors who would use so many obvious, overplayed music cues (the love scene set to Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” is snicker-out-loud embarrassing) or cast so many nonentities in major roles (the listless Akerman is the worst offender). His approach is depressingly literal, and none of the scenes build on what has come before – they’re just meticulously reconstructed Scenes From Watchmen. It took more than 20 years to bring his most famous work to the big screen, and now Alan Moore isn’t the only one wondering why anybody bothered.

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 23:30:00 GMT

THE BEST:

ANNIE HALL (1977)

I was downright horrified when Woody Allen’s brainy romantic comedy swiped the Best Picture Oscar away from Star Wars on the night of the Academy Awards’ golden anniversary edition. And considering the innovation and impact of George “the Neck” Lucas’ classic blockbuster (and the fact that a far inferior popcorn flick like Return of the King was considered worthy of the top prize nearly three decades later), I still have issues with the snub. But the choice is more comprehensible now in my reflective middle age dotage than it was in the midst of my pre-pubescent geekery: America in the ‘70s was far more interested in grit and neuroses than fanboy fantasy, and the wookies and Jedi philosophy must have seemed especially goofy compared to the grim realities of then-recent Best Picture winners like The French Connection, The Godfather and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. And if somebody had to shoot down Luke Skywalker, then I’m glad it was Annie Hall. For one thing, it was a fair fight, since the Academy tends to hold comedy and science fiction in the same low regard. More importantly, though, for all the great jokes about dead sharks and Kafka, Annie Hall is a touching, highly relatable masterpiece of character and storytelling, in service of a romantic pairing as iconic as Bogie & Bacall: to this day, whenever the film comes on TV, my parents (a small town Yankee version of Alvy & Annie who somehow stayed together) inevitably wind up holding hands and misting up...which is just about as cute as prickly, overeducated white people get. Plus, with its twisty storytelling, animated sequences and meta sight gags, Annie Hall is far more visually and structurally interesting than most Best Picture winners in any genre. And besides, if a romantic comedy had to beat Star Wars in 1977, at least it wasn’t The Goodbye Girl.

THE APARTMENT (1960)

Billy Wilder’s knack for crafting affecting, humane comedy was close to unparalleled, and few of his films showcased that gift better than 1960’s The Apartment, an effervescent rollercoaster spiked with grown-up melancholy. Jack Lemmon spends his days as one of corporate America’s nondescript suits, and his nights loaning out his apartment to superiors so they can have a place to covertly screw their mistresses. Lemmon’s everyman pines for Shirley MacLaine’s elevator girl, who’s involved with Lemmon’s boss (Fred MacMurray), a thorny love triangle laced with workplace pecking-order tensions, and one given verve by Wilder’s deft satirical hand. Yet for all its bubbly wit, The Apartment’s lasting relevance is partially due to the muted sorrow that lurks around the busy frame’s corners – a nagging sadness wrought from its protagonists’ stubborn willingness to define themselves via their vocations, and which consequently makes Lemmon and MacLaine’s ultimate leap into love feel not fairy-tale preordained, but hard-earned.

FROM HERE TO ETERNITY (1953)

If Brando's dockworker Terry Malloy represented one definitive take on the '50s prole rebel hero, Montgomery Clift's Pvt. Robert E. Lee Pruitt is the alienated '50s hero who thinks he's found a place for himself in the ultimate conformist culture, the army. Clift was on his way to being Brando's equal as a great new kind of movie actor when the car accident that shattered his face also crushed his confidence and derailed his career, and here he's as gentle and sure of the path he should be on as Brando's heroes tended to be instinctively assertive yet lost. But as much as he loves the army and welcomes the chance to be given rules to follow, some part of him can't help bucking when he's given orders that he knows are wrong. He won't box for the company because he's afraid of killing somebody in the ring, and then he kills somebody in retaliation for the murder of his best friend because he knows that the system will simply absorb the injustice. In the end, the system he turned to for a home kills him off, almost as an afterthought. If the Best Picture winners are anything to go by, the 1950s must have been an especially schizoid time in American culture: the list swings back and forth between movies like this one and On the Waterfront, which seemed to be bursting with news and awareness about the state of the country, and such spectacles as The Greatest Show on Earth, Around the World in 80 Days, and Ben-Hur, which seemed like kaleidoscopes imported from a different solar system.

THE WORST:

RAIN MAN (1988)

It's a well-established Hollywood joke that actors can court Oscar by playing someone with a mental or physical disability, but most of these roles still require the actor to try to fit into some kind of narrative context and connect to the other performers while replicating some carefully studied tics or mannerisms. Dustin Hoffman fought for years to get the script of Rain Man filmed, and it's easy to see why: the role of the autistic Raymond gives him an excuse to shut himself off from everything and everyone going on around him, and to be praised for how thoroughly he could ignore everything while concentrating on his little acting exercises. He must have thought that all his Christmases were coming at once. As for his co-star, Tom Cruise, Rain Man dates from the beginning of that unfortunate period where, his box-office appeal being a given, he was concentrating on proving he could "act" by denying the audience his gleaming smile and acting like an obnoxious ass. (Oh, he was "acting." We're certain of it.) The movie itself is nothing but a tear-stained pedestal for two movie stars stuck in self-parody mode.

MILLION DOLLAR BABY (2006)

This rigged, underlit, depressive wallow marks the nadir of Clint Eastwood's serious, craggy old thing period. The quality of the performances, especially Morgan Freeman's and Hilary Swank's, can't disguise the thinness of the stock characters that populate Paul Haggis's screenplay; in particular, Swank's grasping white-trash relations would be judged as vile, condescending stereotypes by a Jerry Springer audience. The best thing about the movie is that it inspired a hilarious public outcry among disability rights groups and assorted loons who thought that by having Swank's character opt to die rather than live out her life as a quadriplegic, it would start a trend and that impressionable disabled people would start offing themselves in droves. But even that was compromised when Eastwood, trying to address the controversy, announced that "I've gone around in movies blowing people away with a .44 magnum. But that doesn't mean I think that's a proper thing to do." He doesn't? Dude, you've earned the right to keep making boring movies for the rest of your life, but you don't have to disillusion us too.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Nick Schager, Phil Nugent

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 22:00:00 GMT

THE BEST:

UNFORGIVEN (1992)

To my way of thinking, the best Best Pictures are both flawless examples of their genre and also communicate something about the era that produced them. Clint Eastwood’s revisionist Western scores on both counts. Not only does the film offer blue ribbon acting from a Master Class ensemble featuring Gene Hackman, Morgan Freeman, Frances Fisher, Jaimz Woolvett, Richard Harris and the Man With No Name himself, but Unforgiven also draws on the audience’s familiarity with Eastwood’s (and America’s) history of violence to reevaluate those legacies after twelve years of the Republican Party’s '80s go-round with faux-cowboy heroics. The beautifully constructed screenplay by David Webb Peoples is a sharp rebuke to the black-and-white moral simplicity of the Reagan/Bush years (not to mention a fair handful of Eastwood’s earlier films): drunken cowboys in the town of Big Whiskey maim one of the local whores, the whores seek retribution by hiring gunmen to kill the cowboys, and the town’s sadistic sheriff beats and kills the gunmen who show up. In the end, a lot of people are dead, nobody’s better off and justice has not been served. Sadly, the film’s grim portrayal of the futility of violence is just as timely now as it was at the dawn of our last “hope and change” administration.

AMADEUS (1984)

For starters, Amadeus is probably the best of the four other films nominated in 1984 (A Passage To India, The Killing Fields, Places In The Heart and A Soldier's Story), so it passes that basic test. Oddly enough, Amadeus is also one of the few movies that won Best Picture that I'd consider one of the ten best of its year — or at least close — and for a year that included Stranger Than Paradise, Once Upon A Time In America and The Terminator (just for starters), that's not bad at all. Amadeus probably won because it hit a number of reflexive buttons: it's a period costume drama where all the production and costume money is on-screen, it genuflects before Culture in the form of classical music without losing anyone with something truly alienating, it's based on a hit play, and it comes from a respectable, previously-lauded producer-director team. But the reasons Amadeus is actually pretty great have nothing to do with that and everything to do with the typical dry intelligence Milos Forman brought to the film. Forman treats this like a gigantic Brechtian exercise, paying meticulous attention to physical verisimilitude, then blowing it out with the likes of Jeffrey Jones and Tom Hulce — unmistakably American, out-of-place types. As in his later (not as good, still misunderstood) The People Vs. Larry Flynt and Man On The Moon, Forman scrupulously obeys the biopic formula, hitting all the high points of his subject's lives while refusing to shed any light on what made them tick. Point being: who/what could possibly explain that? It drives Salieri crazy that he can't figure out why God would waste his music on a drunken, disrespectful buffoon, but to Forman, that's just par for the course.

THE FRENCH CONNECTION (1971)

Arguably the first action movie to win Best Picture, The French Connection really announced (along with 1969's Midnight Cowboy triumph) a shift in what was considered acceptable award-winning fare; only a few years before, it was all treacly musicals and your occasional "serious" film. (In 1971, it was up against Nicholas And Alexandra, whose makers badly miscalculated the changing zeitgeist at some point.) But it wasn't a permanent shift: The French Connection — absolutely lean, more reliant on atmosphere and street grit than characterization or take-home morals — is as anomalous-seeming a Best Picture winner now as it was then, which speaks badly of the Academy's heavy suet-pudding tastes. (Cue outraged Dark Knight fans here.)

LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (1962)

David Lean is perhaps the only filmmaker whose natural inclinations and talents coincided perfectly with exactly the kind of material the Academy responds to: big, splashy physical filmmaking, heavy on conspicuous visual coups and visibly virtuoso acting. As it happens, Lawrence is one of my favorite films, and therefore the most important time the Academy got it right. Lawrence actually is the Best Picture of 1962, a beautiful film that (without getting too heavyhanded about it) uses exterior landscapes as a mirror for its otherwise unknowable protagonist. But surely it helped that it's long, launched Peter O'Toole in an instantly starmaking performance, and somehow managed to avoid taking a single meaningful political stance. Lawrence Of Arabia wears its ambitions plainly in every aspect — title, length, subject matter — but it lives up to them, too.

REBECCA (1940)

Hitchcock’s first American film was a contentious one, as the Master of Suspense famously quarreled with mega-producer David O. Selznick over myriad issues regarding his adaptation of Daphne Du Maurier’s novel. Such squabbles may have resulted in a film that feels somewhat more conventional than Hitch’s prior British works, but its preoccupation with emotional and psychological traumas nonetheless ultimately helped pave the way for the director’s future daring psychodramas. In Rebecca, Joan Fontaine takes up residence in the Brontë-esque home of her wealthy husband Laurence Olivier, where the specter of his deceased first wife looms large thanks in part to Judith Anderson’s unsettling manor servant, who remains devoted to her dead employer. Although devoid of significant aesthetic inventiveness, the director still generates a sumptuously creepy, unreal atmosphere that’s equally indebted to Wuthering Heights and Val Lewton’s horror classics. A technically superb thriller, it’s also an enduringly resonant depiction of societal expectations for, and demands on, women.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Vadim Rizov, Nick Schager

DVD Digest for February 17, 2009

Paul Clark — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 15:00:00 GMT

This week, if you’re lucky enough to be getting some stimulus money, read this column to figure how to use some of it to help build up your collection of movies on DVD and Blu-Ray. And if you’re not getting any money, you can at least see what you’ll be missing.

This week’s highest-profile recent release coming to DVD is the teen sensation High School Musical 3, available in a new “Extended Edition” from Disney on standard-definition and Blu-Ray. Other big-ticket releases this week include Ridley Scott’s Body of Lies (Warner, also Blu-Ray), Angelina Jolie in Clint Eastwood’s Changeling (Universal, also Blu-Ray), and the horror double feature Quarantine (Sony, also Blu-Ray) and The Midnight Meat Train (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray). Also this week: Sam Rockwell in Choke (Fox); Greg Kinnear in Flash of Genius (Universal); Bill Maher pulling a Morgan Spurlock in Religulous (Lionsgate); Simon Pegg in How to Lose Friends and Alienate People (MGM); and Jiri Menzel’s I Served the King of England (Sony).

In classics, this week brings Warner’s “The Paul Newman Series”, which includes five first-time DVD appearances of five Newman films- his directorial debut Rachel, Rachel, plus The Silver Chalice, The Helen Morgan Story, The Outrage, and When Time Ran Out…. Also this week, Criterion is releasing David Lean’s Hobson’s Choice, and single-film re-pressings of two more John Cassavetes films, Faces and Shadows. And let’s not forget the High School Musical Remix Edition (Disney), for those kids who can’t get enough High School Musical.

This week’s TV on DVD releases include a pair of basic cable rerun favorites, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit Eighth Year (Universal), and Murder, She Wrote Season 9 (Universal).

Finally, this week’s Blu-Ray only releases include a trio from Sony of Oscar favorites: the Best Picture winning Gandhi and Kramer vs. Kramer, and a package deal that includes both Capote and In Cold Blood. Also this week, just in time for Lent- The Passion of the Christ Definitive Edition (Fox).

Five 3-D-tastic Films

Nick Schager — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 16:30:00 GMT

What’s better than a night out at the movies? A night spent having the movies come right out at you! In honor of today’s release of Henry Selick’s dark, enchanting stop-motion 3-D fantasy Coraline, here are five films that take thrilling and/or unintentionally hilarious advantage of the gimmicky special effects process.

Creature From the Black Lagoon

As a child, Creature From the Black Lagoon’s 3-D effects (viewed on TV) just about blew my mind. While that likely wouldn’t happen today, Jack Arnold’s 1954 three-dimensional horror show remains a classic of its time, thanks largely to its iconic fiend. His likeness imitated many times (I’m looking at you, Monster Squad) but never quite surpassed for pure aquatic creepiness, the Black Lagoon’s gilled villain is one of Universal’s finest (and most unheralded) movie monsters, and the cheesy terror he spreads in this memorable scare-fest – and, to a far lesser extent, in 1955’s sequel Revenge of the Creature (which featured Clint Eastwood’s big-screen debut) – is definitely amplified by the illusion that he’s coming. Right. Off. The. Screen.

Amityville 3-D and Friday the 13th Part 3

In the ‘80s, quite a few horror films attempted to augment their scares via 3-D, and failed miserably. Two of the most amusing examples of the genre’s use of the technology for cheap, corny chills were the third installments of the Amityville and Friday the 13th franchises – and, a few years later, the sixth Nightmare on Elm St. as well – which both figured that a few shots of spears, eyeballs and candles jutting out at the viewer were enough to electrify audiences, as well as overshadow embarrassingly tossed-off threequel stories. In fairness, though, at least Friday the 13th’s 3-D installment has something else going for it, as it stands as the series’ first to feature Jason in his signature hockey mask.

Jaws 3-D

“The third dimension…is terror” proclaims the trailer for 1983’s Jaws 3-D. Really? I seem to remember it being pretty silly in this case, but then, I was only seven at the time of the film’s theatrical release, and probably didn’t understand why the sight of a young Dennis Quaid trying to flush his career down the toilet with this watery dreck was so frightening. Despite the needlessness of a Jaws without Roy Scheider, much less one that required red-and-blue glasses, Joe Alves’ film does use its 3-D for one great climactic shot, in which the great white shark bursts through a control room’s plate glass barrier and directly into your lap.

House of Wax

A 3-D pioneer, André De Toth’s 1953 gem was the film that solidified Vincent Price’s status as the master of the macabre, as well as featured a young Charles Bronson as the evil Professor Jarrod’s (Price) deaf-mute man-servant, Igor. In an ironic twist, despite expertly helming the project, De Toth was blind in one eye and thus couldn’t properly experience the project's special effects. His handicap, however, didn’t hinder his ability to create a handful of memorable three-dimensional moments, from the superlative final sequence inside Jarrod’s melting museum of horrors, to the long, kicking legs of a can-canning dance troupe.

Thursday Poll for January 29, 2009

Paul Clark — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 15:00:00 GMT

With Oscar nominations, there of course comes the second-guessing. While many of our favorites made the cut this year, it seems like just as many got the shaft. But which was most egregiously snubbed? In a shocking turn of events, the Best Picture omission of fanboy favorite The Dark Knight was narrowly edged out by Academy voters’ lack of love for Happy-Go-Lucky’s persistently positive Poppy, Sally Hawkins. Hawkins’ non-nomination brought in 37% of the vote (compared to Dark Knight’s 32%), and prompted Steve C. to ask how the Academy could honor the screenplay for Mike Leigh’s film but not Hawkins herself. Astute question, Steve, and I’d add that it’s doubly odd considering that, this being a Mike Leigh film, Hawkins would no doubt have had a good amount of input on the screenplay, given his methods. Coming in third and fourth place, respectively, were Clint Eastwood’s growly star turn in Gran Torino and The Boss' title track from The Wrestler. Finally, only 5% of the voters found Woody Allen’s inability to procure a fifteenth Best Original Screenplay nomination for Vicky Cristina Barcelona to be the Academy’s biggest oversight this year. I guess that makes sense, since after all, it’s not like he’ll show up for the ceremony anyway…

Moving on to the movies that were nominated, I find myself surprisingly unmoved by this year’s crop of Best Picture nominees. Maybe it’s just that we’re coming off a year in which not only did I actually like all five nominated movies, but I thought that two of them- including the eventual winner- were out-and-out masterpieces. This year, on the other hand… yeesh. Of the five nominees, I can only claim to have liked two of them, and I wasn’t even all that keen on those. How about you? How many of this year’s Best Picture nominees did you like?

(In case you’ve forgotten, and I wouldn’t blame you if you have, the Best Picture nominees are: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Frost/Nixon, Milk, The Reader, and Slumdog Millionaire)

How many of this year's Best Picture nominations did you LIKE? | BuzzDash polls

Bonus poll: much has been made of how this year’s Best Picture nominees are the least box-office-friendly in years, with only one having played in more than 1,000 prior to nomination day. So, just for curiosity’s sake, how many of this year’s Best Picture nominees have you seen?

How many of this year's Best Picture nominations have you SEEN? | BuzzDash polls

As always, the comments section is open. Please keep death threats addressed to non-Dark Knight nominating Academy members to a minimum. See you next week!

JENKINS!!!!! (a.k.a., Screengrab's Oscar Nod Prediction Results)

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 15:00:00 GMT

Just wanted to give a big Screengrab high-five to the always hardworking, frequently overlooked (until now) character actor Richard Jenkins for his well-deserved Best Actor nomination for The Visitor. I’ve been a Jenkins fan ever since his great comic role as the long-suffering federal agent in Flirting With Disaster, and I’m happy to see him get bumped to the A list (or at least the B+ list) at last.

It was also nice to see Michael Shannon vault onto the red carpet outta nowhere. The wife and I just saw Revolutionary Road the other night, and shortly thereafter we turned to each other and said, “Why no Best Supporting Actor buzz for the crazy guy?” So we’re glad the Academy felt the same way. (And Penelope Cruz was always a lock for a Best Supporting Actress nod, but I’m still happy it’s official.)

On the other hand, while I wasn’t really expecting Oscar love for Debra Winger or Sally Hawkins, it’s still too bad they got snubbed (although Hawkins at least got a nice shiny Golden Globe for her trouble).

In other news, the ongoing Benjamin Button love fest (really? Brad Pitt gave a better performance than Clint in Gran Torino?) continues to baffle me as much as the curious case of Doubt not being a Best Picture or Best Director contender despite nominations for the screenplay and just about every actor with a speaking part in the movie. (Man, the Academy must really hate Dutch angles!)

But the big question you’re asking yourself is: which Screengrab staffer (or reader) scored highest in our Oscar Nomination Prediction Pool?

Well, first I should mention the staff as a whole scored a (fairly) respectable B- with our collective overall picks, correctly guessing 24.5 out of 30 nominations (for an 81.67% accuracy rating, if I did the math right).

Although we flubbed one Best Picture prediction and one Best Director slot, I can’t say I’m terribly upset about the Academy snubbing Christopher Nolan or The Dark Knight. (Scott Von Doviak and Sarah Clyne Sundberg, meanwhile, were the only ones on the staff who picked The Reader for the fifth Best Picture spot, having fortuitously remembered that Academy bylaws require at least one Holocaust-themed nomination per year).

Speaking of which, the Screengrab accurately anticipated a Best Actress nomination for Kate Winslet...but only Sarah had the ESP-Fu to anticipate the nod would be for The Reader, not Revolutionary Road. EW.com explained it thusly: “The Academy overruled a campaign and placed Kate Winslet in the lead-acting category for The Reader instead of Revolutionary Road. She may not have gotten two nominations, but this increases her chance at an eventual win.” (Unfortunately, I’m not entirely sure what they’re talking about.)

We also mistakenly forecast Best Actress noms for Cate Blanchett and the delightful Ms. Hawkins (although a few of us managed to correctly forecast nods for Angelina Jolie and Melissa Leo in our individual picks).

Nobody here (except, ahem, me) saw the Jenkins nomination coming, but I also joined the general mistaken consensus that Clint would snake a Best Actor nod away from Brad Pitt.

Finally, we only scored three and three and a half out of five in both tricky Best Supporting categories, favoring Ralph Fiennes and James Franco over Josh Brolin and Michael Shannon and (in a tie) Debra Winger and Kate Winslet (for The Reader...we’re still confused about that whole thing) over Taraji P. Henson.

As for which Screengrab writer (or reader playing along at home) had the most correct individual nomination predictions...well (ahem), I’ll just let the scores speak for themselves...

15 – Leonard Pierce
16 – Sarah Clyne Sundberg
21 – Iris Steensma
22 – Paul Clark
22 – Scott Von Doviak
24 – Andrew Osborne

Woo-hoo! Yes! In your face...uh...esteemed colleagues!

Okay, that's it for now! See you soon for the next round!

Related Stories:
Oscar Nominations Announced
Your 2008 Razzie Nominations
Screengrab Live Blogs The Golden Globes

Thursday Poll for January 22, 2009

Paul Clark — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 22:49:00 GMT

Long an industry favorite, Clint Eastwood’s films has been nominated for Best Picture four times to date. But which of his nominated films has held up the best? In the eyes of our readers, his first Best Picture nominee (and winner), Unforgiven, still reigns. Bringing in a decisive 72% of the vote, Unforgiven trounced the competition. In fact, our readers preferred Eastwood’s orangutan comedies to any of his other nominated films by a margin of 17% to 11% (all brought in by 2004’s Million Dollar Baby). As for Mystic River and Letters From Iwo Jima, they got no love whatsoever from our voters. And while some would maintain these movies didn’t deserve to be ignored altogether, I believe it was Clint himself who once said, “deserve’s got nothin’ to do with it.”

Speaking of deserve having nothing to do with it, you may have noticed that Oscar nominations were announced this morning. And with the nominations come the inevitable surprises. Few people saw the The Reader (which has been met so far mostly with indifference from critics and audiences) being the force it was this morning, although if history teaches us anything it’s that tastefully-made adaptations of respectable Holocaust-related novels should never be counted out. Then again, some surprises were happier- for example, I didn’t see Michael Shannon’s nomination coming, but I was happy to hear his name called. And how awesome does “Werner Herzog, Oscar nominee” sound? On the other hand, there are the snubs. Some of them were obvious from the beginning- much as I loved Synecdoche, New York, I didn’t think it had much of a shot at anything. Others were more shocking, to say the least. In this week’s poll, I’ve listed five of the more notable snubs this year, four of which were considered legitimate front-runners, the fifth a longtime Oscar favorite who many thought might be invited back to the party again. So which of this year’s snubs was most egregious?

Which was the most egregious snub? | BuzzDash polls

As always, the comments section is open, in case you’d like to complain or praise the nominations. See you next week!

Jailhouse Rock: The Greatest Prison Films of All Time (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 22:00:00 GMT

DEAD MAN WALKING (1995)

The funny thing about Dead Man Walking (and, admittedly, “funny” doesn’t come up a lot in discussions of Tim Robbins’ excellent but grim 1995 adaptation of the memoir by Sister Helen Prejean) is the way its tale of a nun (Susan Sarandon) driven to become an activist against capital punishment in the wake of her experiences with death row inmates (embodied by Sean Penn’s fictional composite, Matthew Poncelet) did nothing to change my own views on capital punishment at the time. In the film, Sarandon (as Prejean) is contacted by Poncelet, a convict facing execution who swears he was only an innocent bystander to the crimes he’s been charged with and needs help with his final appeal. Yet for all her Christian charity, it’s hard for Prejean not to see Poncelet for what he truly is: an arrogant, ignorant, self-pitying racist thug...not to mention, as it eventually turns out, a rapist and cold-blooded killer. When his appeal is denied and Poncelet eventually gets lethally injected for his senseless, brutal crimes, I remember my thought at the time was...good. True, with death staring him in the face (and after weeks of selfless work by Sister Prejean), Poncelet finally starts acting like a human being and feels bad for his evil behavior, but...so what? Without the catalyst of his own looming execution, it’s doubtful Poncelet would have shown any remorse at all, and his jailhouse conversion is too little too late: the victims are dead and even a last-minute call from the governor would only upgrade Poncelet’s remaining time on Earth to life in prison (while offering no closure for the victim’s families). Recounting my initial reactions, I realize I’ve mellowed a bit since 1995: given the inequities of the American legal system, I’ve come around to a generally anti-capital punishment perspective (except in extreme cases involving no-doubt-about-it Hall-Of-Fame assholes like Timothy McVeigh and...well, I'll get back to you on Cheney). But it’s a tribute to Sarandon, Penn, Prejean and Robbins (not usually known for his subtlety in political matters) that Dead Man Walking is even-handed enough to credibly illustrate both sides of a difficult issue without preaching exclusively to any particular choir.

BRUTE FORCE (1947)

Most film noir dealt with men doing everything possible to stay out of prison. But master noir director Jules Dassin was never one to do things the easy or predictable way, so he set Brute Force -- one of the most memorable, intense, and violent post-war crime dramas -- inside the walls of the big house. Crammed with character actors who had worked with Dassin in the theater (and who, like him, would soon be victims of the anticommunist blacklist), Brute Force is also noteworthy for making a star out of Burt Lancaster, in only his second film after The Killers. Lancaster plays a nihilistic con who stages a prison riot, putatively to escape, admittedly to get out from under the thumb of a brutal yard boss, but really just to feel alive in a prison that feels to him like a living death. Hume Cronyn, as the prison guard, is likewise locked in a power struggle with a reformist administrator, and the three-way clash sets up a denoument that is as brutal as it is surprisingly human. Unsurprisingly, the director and his actors find a way to cast the whole thing in a political light until its doomed finale. It’s a powerhouse film with gorgeous William Daniels photography that deserves to be counted with Dassin’s best.

SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS (1941)

Joel McCrea’s pampered director John L. Sullivan has his heart in the right place. He wants to make an epic about how tough it is for the little guy. He can see it all already. It will be called O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and it will tell the truth in a way that movies so rarely do. His producers, however, would prefer that he make another comedy, because let's face it, those make lots of money for everyone. All Preston Sturges comedies come with a swift punch to the gut, a remedy highly recommended for all moviegoers on occasion. We can be a lazy bunch when we’re not watching out for that fast right. When Sullivan finally gives up on his dream of living like a hobo, the movie spins on a dime and hard times catch up with him faster than he expected. He learns the hard way how tough it is to be the little guy. He winds up with a sentence of six years of hard labor in a Southern prison camp, a brutal and bitter place in which even Cool Hand Luke would work to avoid any failures to communicate with his captors. The scene in the clip above is from that sequence, where Sullivan figures out what charity really is and what people really want from the movies. Fat lot of good it’ll do him, though, unless he figures out how to get sprung from jail. Luckily for him, despite all his boneheaded doofery, Sullivan is a clever guy. At least, he's written by a very clever guy, that Preston Sturges.

THIEVES LIKE US (1974)

Thieves Like Us isn't a prison movie -- it's about criminals trying to stay out of jail -- but it does have one of the all-time great prison escape sequences. With Chicamaw (John Schuck) in the pen once more, it's up to Bowie (Keith Carradine!) to break him out. Bowie drives straight into the prison: it's the South in the 1930s, and with rampant inequality everywhere (Thieves Like Us presses way less heavily on this point than Bonnie And Clyde, which is all to the good), the warden is sitting down mid-day to a sweat-inducing fried chicken feast. The rail-thin Bowie has no trouble outfoxing and tying him up.

ESCAPE FROM ALCATRAZ (1979)

Don Siegel's second great prison movie owes a lot (maybe too much) to A Man Escaped, but it also owes a lot to Clint Eastwood's fully-developed badass persona. The best parts aren't the methodical depictions of how Eastwood breaks out of the unbreakable, but his laconic assertions of selfhood. If you haven't seen Gran Torino yet (and you should!) and wonder how Clint Eastwood being racist sounds, watch the (possibly NSFW) clip above. What Escape From Alcatraz doesn't do is offer hardly any social context; it's just Clint versus the world, and it happens, almost incidentally, to be set in a jail.

THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION (1994)

Depending on when you check the IMDB, The Shawshank Redemption is either the first or second greatest movie of all time as elected by we, the people. (It duels back and forth with The Godfather.) How this came to pass is one of those mysteries that will never be answered. No one really expects IMDB users to be our most reliable cultural curators (see the #5 greatest film of all time: The Dark Knight), but one of those things that drives my cinematic acquaintances nuts is trying to figure out how a movie that performed only moderately on initial release has managed to somehow assume top rank in many people's hearts. The movie's fine -- it's nice and slow, bolstered by patience, a generous dose of well-judged sap and a rare non-smarmy turn from Tim Robbins -- but it cribs egregiously from basically every prison movie ever made without offering a whole lot back. Still, the people have spoken: it's the greatest film of all time, hence easily the greatest prison film of all time. Enjoy yourselves, folks.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three & Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Hayden Childs, Vadim Rizov

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: Jan. 10-16, 2009

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 22:00:00 GMT

Hey, Pansy Nation. Why don’t you get your fat faces out of your computer screens for five minutes and go get some fresh air? Maybe do a push-up or something. Y’know, when they asked me to host the Highlight Reel this week, I figured I was gonna be showing clips of The Outlaw Josey Wales and Any Which Way You Can. I didn’t realize the Screengrab was nothing but a bunch of limp-wristed globbers. Well, I never had a glob. Never saw the need for it. What am I gonna do, sit around writing about Strangers in a Strange Land: Screengrab’s Favorite Fish-Out-of-Water Stories (Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five and Six)? Hell no, I’ve got boars to shoot.

I’ve never been to Sundance, either. I always figured it was just an excuse for Redford and his pinko friends to hit the slopes before going back to the lodge for tea and fairycakes. But I guess if you care, you can read about Five Must-See Documentaries, Ten Must-See Narrative Features (Parts One and Two) and Five Movies to Skip. Hell, you can even read about Slamdance if you want.

Here’s some more crap I don’t care about:

Screengrab 2009 Preview: Paul Clark’s Picks and Scott Von Doviak’s Picks

Keyword Theater: The Winter Edition

Screengrab Live Blogs the Golden Globes

Nine-Point Plans

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button's Undeserved Oscar Buzz

Patrick McGoohan, 1928 – 2009

Netflix Killed the Video Store…Or Did It?

Why Must Steve Martin Suck?

Nine-Point Plans

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 18:15:00 GMT

It ain't Thanksgiving, but everyone wants a slice of the turkey. Most people have already made their New Year's resolutions (some of us have already broken them, for that matter), but up north, in Edmonton's Vue Weekly newspaper, critic Brian Gibson is asking not what he can do for Hollywood, but what Hollywood can do for him.

Shocked into a wishful reverie by a chance viewing of Clint Eastwood's embarrassing end-of-life project Gran Torino, Gibson delivers a nine-item wish list for what he hopes the movies will deliver in 2009. On his checklist are more realistic films about class and race, big comebacks from fading Hollywood actresses (including Screengrab favorite Debra Winger), more films by female directors, and "a damn good Canadian movie from a director other than Cronenberg, Egoyan or Maddin".

Never ones to miss out on the chance to jump someone else's train, we'd like to echo several of Gibson's wishes -- especially his desire to see serious film criticism make a comeback, and a better distribution system that ensures that people in locations like, oh, say Edmonton and San Antonio get a chance to see something other than blockbusters on the big screen a couple of times a year. And, to round out his list to an even dozen, here's three more things we'd like to see from the film world in 2009:

1. The emergence of a new and exciting national cinema. The last several years have seen the emergence of exciting and vibrant film scenes in places like South Korea, Spain, Thailand, and even Iran. But how about a new national cinema taking center stage? Enough great films have come out of Africa in the last few years to suggest they're due for a major renaissance; Arab cinema might finally bloom in the unlikely event that a prolonged period of politcal and economic stability settles in the Gulf; and Italian cinema has been in the doldrums for a number of decades.

2. Directors breaking out of their boxes. While there's something to be said for finding what you're good at and sticking with it, the emergence of several major talents in recent years who have confined themselves to the dreary and limited world of torture-porn horror movies gives one pause. Rob Zombie's movies are made by a man with a careful and crafty eye for visuals and a keen grasp of mood, and the first half The Strangers proved that young Bryan Bertino is a master of timing and a guy who knows how to wring tension out of a dramatic scene or a simple framing shot. We'd like to stop imaging what it would be like if these guys turned their obvious skills towards something a little bit more mature, and actually see it.

3. Watchmen being worth watching. It doesn't seem like so goddamn much to ask.

RELATED POSTS:

Debra Winger: Searched For and Found

Dear Santa: Cinematic Comebacks We'd Most Like to See

Screengrab Predicts the Oscars: Nominations (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 22:30:00 GMT

BEST ACTOR

Scott Von Doviak Predicts:

NOMINEES
Clint Eastwood (Gran Torino)
Frank Langella (Frost/Nixon)
Sean Penn (Milk)
Brad Pitt (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button)
Mickey Rourke (The Wrestler)

If Sean Penn can get nominated for I Am Sam, there's no reason to think his beautiful work in Milk will be overlooked. Everyone loves a comeback, so even if they're a little worried he'll take a drunken stumble into Jack Nicholson's lap, Mickey Rourke will be nominated for The Wrestler. Rounding out the leading men will be Frank Langella (Frost/Nixon), Brad Pitt (Benjamin Button), and this year's sentimental "Hey, you're almost friggin' 80!" nominee, Clint Eastwood (Gran Torino).

WINNER
Rourke. Watch out, ladies!

Sarah Clyne Sundberg Predicts:

NOMINEES
Christian Bale (The Dark Knight)
Philip Seymour Hoffman (Synecdoche, NY)
Sean Penn (Milk)
Brad Pitt (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button)
Mickey Rourke (The Wrestler)

Since Philip Seymour Hoffman appeared in two movies likely to figure in the Academy Awards this year, it follows that he must be nominated for at least one. Brad Pitt will be nominated for long and faithful service, Christian Bale for being in a blockbuster that didn't suck, and Mickey Rourke for appearing again out of nowhere. Sean Penn will win, because he is playing a gay man. But also because this is the best role he has done in a good while, if not ever. Madonna will be jealous.

WINNER
Sean Penn

Paul Clark Predicts:

NOMINEES
Clint Eastwood (Gran Torino)
Frank Langella (Frost/Nixon)
Sean Penn (Milk)
Brad Pitt (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button)
Mickey Rourke (The Wrestler)

Where’s Richard Jenkins, you ask? The Screengrab favorite won numerous early accolades for his work in The Visitor, but the risky plan to open the film early to build steam for Jenkins has led to the unassuming actor getting lost in the end-of-the-year shuffle, as most of the honors have been split between Penn and Rourke. With early predictions such as Leonardo DiCaprio (Revolutionary Road) and Benicio Del Toro (Che) having largely stalled out, Jenkins is the only potential spoiler here, but between Rourke’s comeback-kid status, the high-profile biopic turns of Penn and Langella, and two big stars in Eastwood and Pitt, I’m predicting that Jenkins pulls a Paul Giamatti and gets shut out of a nomination despite the early hosannas. As for the eventual winner, it seems too soon for Penn to win a second Oscar, and unless Rourke torpedoes his chances between now and February 22, I suspect that capping off his comeback with a statuette will prove too perfect an ending for voters to resist.

WINNER
Mickey Rourke

Andrew Osborne Predicts:

NOMINEES
Clint Eastwood (Gran Torino)
Richard Jenkins (The Visitor)
Frank Langella (Frost/Nixon)
Sean Penn (Milk)
Mickey Rourke (The Wrestler)

After all the endless hype about Mickey Rourke’s comeback in The Wrestler, it’d be heee-larious if he didn’t actually get nominated. And I’m guessing there’s more than a few Academy voters not exactly wishing Mickey well...but Hollywood and professional sports are all about storylines, so a Rourke nod seems inevitable. Unlike Rourke, Frank Langella and Sean Penn were playing other people in their movies rather than semi-autobiographical stunt-casting versions of themselves...and doing it well: Penn, in particular, seemed like an entirely different human being in Milk (which, y’know, is probably why the award is “Best Actor” instead of “Best Comeback”). Then again, there’s something to be said for a beloved screen icon just playing a stylized, hyper-real version of themselves, especially when they’re still kicking more ass in their seventies than alleged action star Shia LaBeouf will kick on the ass-kickingest day of his life, and especially when said role occurs in what may be said icon’s last screen role ever...in other words, I’ll be surprised if Clint Eastwood doesn’t grab a nomination for Gran Torino. And speaking of beloved movie stars, I’m supposed to pick Brad Pitt for the fifth spot, but what if the Academy decides his performance in Benjamin Button was more to do with CGI than acting chops? In that case, they might choose a dark horse, under-the-radar industry vet who’s paid his dues and (unlike Pitt) may never get another shot at the brass ring: the lovely and talented “that guy” Richard Jenkins for his role in The Visitor. (But Penn’s gonna actually win, partly thanks to Proposition 8...and I mentioned that whole crazy “acting” thing, yes?)

WINNER
Sean Penn

Leonard Pierce Predicts:

NOMINATIONS
Leonardo DiCaprio (Revolutionary Road)
Frank Langella (Frost/Nixon)
Sean Penn (Milk)
Brad Pitt (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button)
Mickey Rourke (The Wrestler)

Goodness knows why anyone continues to insist that Leonardo Di Caprio is a good actor, but I’d bet my next paycheck on him getting the nod. Frank Langella, likewise, plays Nixon like a broad majestic Shannon – that ain’t acting, that’s overacting – but the Academy loves an old pro. Pitt’s Button nom makes up for the Burn After Reading one he won’t get. In the end, though, it’ll be a battle between comeback kid Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler and Sean Penn’s well-deserved nomination for Milk; I’ll predict that Rourke gets it, though, since Penn has had (and will have) many more moments in the sun, while this is likely Mickey’s last dance. BIGGEST SCREWJOB: Benicio Del Toro’s incredibly tight performance in Che won’t get recognized because the public won’t sit through a 17-hour movie, and right-wing critics will yap endlessly that the movie glorifies a killer, which has never, ever happened before in a Hollywood movie.

WINNER
Mickey Rourke

SCREENGRAB CONSENSUS: NOMINEES
CLINT EASTWOOD, FRANK LANGELLA, SEAN PENN, BRAD PITT, MICKEY ROURKE

SCREENGRAB CONSENSUS: WINNER
MICKEY ROURKE

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

Contributors: Paul Clark, Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Sarah Clyne Sundberg, Scott Von Doviak

Pat Hingle, 1924 - 2008

Phil Nugent — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 16:00:00 GMT

Pat Hingle, who died this past weekend at the age of 84, was one of the most familiar and dependable of all American character actors, over the course of a career in film, TV, and the stage that spanned some fifty years. Born in Denver, Colorado, he served in the navy during World War II and studied acting at the University of Texas. In the first several years of his career, Hingle appeared in the Broadway productions of Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (as Gooper, father to the no-neck monsters), Archibald Macleish's J.B. (in the title role), and William Inge's The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (for which he received a Tony nomination). He also made his movie debut (not counting an uncredited small role in On the Waterfront) in the 1957 Method melodrama End as a Man (A.K.A. The Strange One, based on a play that he had also appeared in. Hingle was offered the title role in the 1960 Elmer Gantry, but before the film started shooting, he suffered a horrendous accident, falling more than fifty feet down an elevator shaft. He was laid up for more than a year recovering from his injuries, which included a fractured skull, his left leg broken in three places, and the loss of a finger. Elmer went ahead with Burt Lancaster , who won an Academy Award for it. Hingle maintained a good-natured attitude towards the whole thing: ""I know that if I had played Elmer Gantry, I would have been more of a movie name. But I'm sure I would not have done as many plays as I've done. I had exactly the kind of career I had hoped for. And I never, never forget that I'm the recipient of the blessing that is life. It was given to me to try again."

Hingle returned to work looking older, gruffer, squatter, and craggier: an easy casting call for authority figures at a time when those roles often meant dads who don't understand their kids (as in Splendor in the Grass, where he played the father of Warren Beatty, who was all of fourteen years his junior) or cops who were either crooked or self-righteously brutal or both. He appeared with Clint Eastwood in Hang 'Em High, The Gauntlet, and Sudden Impact, played Sally Field's father in Norma Rae, starred in the original Broadway production of Arthur Miller's The Price, and did an unholy shitload TV, notably playing Colonel Tom Parker to Kurt Russell's Elvis Presley in John Carpenter's 1979 Elvis and Sam Rayburn to Randy Quaid's Lyndon Johnson in the 1987 LBJ: The Early Years.

Unlike a lot of actors who work that much, Hingle has the distinction of having continued to get better, tapping into deeper veins of regret and exposing a streak of wry humor as he started to get almost as old as his characters. Reviewing the 1985 The Falcon and the Snowman, in which he played the hardass FBI-agent father of Timothy Hutton, Pauline Kael wrote, "It's a role Hingle has played dozens of times --he's a pop-culture joke in this role--but I doubt if he has ever done it as well." Five years later, he went to town in perhaps his best movie role, the terrifying cracker crime lord Bobo Justus in Stephen Frears's Jim Thompson adaptation The Grifters, giving Anjelica Huston the shivers and making it seem as if all the secrets to the universe might be contained in the line, "You'll never shit right again." He also played Commissioner Gordon in the 1989 Batman, a role that he would reprise in three other movies, playing it alongside a total of three different different--Batmans? Batmen? Whatever. More recently, he played Ben Franklin in a late-'90s revival of the Broadway musical 1776 and turned up in the movies A Thousand Acres, Muppets from Space, Shaft, and Talladega Nights. He died at his home in Carolina Beach, North Carolina, where he decided to settle after working there shooting the 1986 Maximum Overdrive, Stephen King's directing debut. ""I really do believe there was a divine hand that headed me here," he had told a local reporter.. "I am happy that I think it's going to end here."

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.

Ever-Mysterious National Board of Review's Year-End Awards

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Before any of the critics’ associations weigh in with their year-end awards, the National Board of Review releases its annual awards announcement and Top 10 list. While this organization certainly has an official-sounding name, questions remain about the legitimacy of the group, which was actually founded as a censorship board in 1909. In response to a reader question, Roger Ebert once wrote, “I have never met anyone who has met a member of the National Board of Review. The director John Boormann recently told me that he attended one of their award banquets at the Tavern on the Green in Central Park, and met several other award winners. There was a celebrity host to hand out the prizes. ‘After I got back home,’ he mused, ‘I realized that I had not met a single person claiming to be a member of the National Board of Review.’”

Be that as it may, the NBR’s list is taken seriously each year as a bellwether of the upcoming critics’ prizes and other awards, so we hereby dutifully present their top honors:

BEST PICTURE: Slumdog Millionaire
BEST DIRECTOR: David Fincher, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
BEST ACTOR: Clint Eastwood, Gran Torino
BEST ACTRESS: Anne Hathaway, Rachel Getting Married
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: Josh Brolin, Milk
BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Penelope Cruz, Vicky Cristina Barcelona

TOP TEN FILMS:

Burn after Reading
Changeling
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Dark Knight
Defiance
Frost/Nixon
Gran Torino
Milk
WALL•E
The Wrestler

Oscar Launch: The Silly Season Commences

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 17:00:00 GMT

As the days of 2008 dwindle down to a precious few, the year-end think-pieces, Oscar prognostications and meta “we’re not really prognosticating, but rather ironically commenting on the ridiculous awards process” articles proliferate at an alarming rate. How to keep up? How to ensure that you’re familiar with not only the consensus Academy Award front-runners, but also the reasons they have been anointed, while more worthy efforts have been snubbed? Now more than ever you need to the Screengrab, where we consume and digest this information, then regurgitate the salient points in tasty bite-size increments.

We begin with The New York Times, where David Carr calls himself The Carpetbagger, an alias that lends him the aura of being above it all while he’s actually wallowing in it. “Against the backdrop of a historic presidential election and a vortex of economic dysfunction, the burgeoning Oscar season seems even sillier than usual,” Carr harrumphs. “After all, who really cares about the throwdown for best supporting actor at a time when the citizenry seems poised for a run on its own banks?” With that out of the way, he proceeds to handicap the horse race thusly: “This year, by the Bagger’s count, seven or eight films have a shot at best picture. The consensus, in no particular order — well, O.K., in a little bit of a hierarchy — includes The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Slumdog Millionaire, Frost/Nixon, Revolutionary Road, Milk, Doubt and The Reader. And a surprise may be waiting in the wings: Clint Eastwood, a durable crush object of the Academy, has a habit of swinging out of the trees late in the game, as he did two years ago with Letters From Iwo Jima, so keep an eye on Gran Torino.” This all seems commonsensical enough, although to my eyes The Changeling looks more Oscar-y than the “get off my lawn” movie. I guess Gran Torino has the advantage of not having already flopped, however.

The Hollywood Reporter’s Steven Zeitchik wonders if indie film awards have become redundant. “The indie film movement sprang up as a reaction to mainstream Hollywood, so its awards should do the same. It's also good. The awards business may be awash in star and industry back-scratching, but in the Spirits and Gothams, a category of writers, directors and producers have trophy shows to call their own. But there's one thing these awards didn't count on as they forged their contrarian mission: They'd become too successful. Indie movies are now such a part of the awards mainstream that they regularly trump studio movies… the downside is that the shows now no longer seem like a necessary antidote to the Academy Awards; they seem like the Academy Awards lite.” Zeitchik suggest setting a ceiling of a $10 million budget and making previous Oscar winners ineligible for consideration for “indie” awards. Methinks the horse is already out of that particular barn; adopting these stringent guidelines is the best way to make these awards disappear entirely.

Dan Zak of The Washington Post would like the Oscars to lighten up. “In February, the Oscar for Best Picture went to No Country for Old Men, a highbrow slasher movie, the bleakest contender to take the top prize since -- well, since the year before, when The Departed won. Further cementing the notion that bleak movies get made in order to strike gold, three out of four acting Oscars were given to people who played villains: Daniel Day-Lewis as the monstrous oilman in the nihilistic There Will Be Blood; Tilda Swinton as the sniveling attorney in Michael Clayton, a movie in which every person has mortgaged his soul; and Javier Bardem as the dead-eyed killer Anton Chigurh, who cattle-gunned the entire cast of No Country save for Tommy Lee Jones, whose character ended the movie on a note of despair, not death. This year, that might count as a happy ending. Big movies have tent-poled 2008 with a tarp of cruelty. No resolution, no absolution. Just the raw misery of the human condition. Buh-leak. We expect this of fringe foreign films, the confounding subgenre of torture porn, and most documentaries, but not the biggest hits and highest-praised movies of the year.” How to cure this case of the bleaks? Why, the recession might just be the ticket! Expect an onslaught of inoffensive feel-good movies, which is good news for everyone except those of us who find the likes of Beverly Hills Chihuahua infinitely more depressing than any Cormac McCarthy adaptation.

Related:
Top Five Oscar Moments
Jokers Wild About Heath Ledger's Oscar Chances

Screengrab's Top Guilty Pleasures (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 22:30:00 GMT

HAYDEN CHILDS' GUILTY PLEASURES:

ROCK 'N' ROLL HIGH SCHOOL (1979)

I'm generally bad at guilty pleasures lists because I'm not really embarrassed about my taste in pop culture, bad or good. However, some more serious-minded movie critics might mock my love of these movies. So, for your pleasure, instead of just laughing them off, here's why I like these movies. Rock & Roll High School is a Roger Corman film starring P.J. Soles as the world's biggest Ramones fan, Riff Randall. It's directed by Allan Arkush, who went on to helm such thoughtful, profound movies as Heartbeeps and Caddyshack II. Mary Woronov, the former Velvet Underground/Exploding Plastic Inevitable dancer, plays the tyrannical Principal Togar. And the Ramones play the most awesome and beloved band in the world. In the real world, they were indeed awesome, but nowhere as beloved as this movie indicates, which is what we in the business call "a crying shame." Anyway, Principal Togar has boundary issues and enjoys burning albums and generally overstepping her authority. So when the Ramones arrive in town, all hell breaks loose at her school. There's a subplot about a pretty nerdy girl getting the dorky jock guy, but it's slight enough to pass by without sticking to memory. What's important: footage of The Ramones in their prime. And then the school explodes (spoiler!).

HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER (1973)

I seem to love this movie, which is a mostly indefensible horror-Western starring Clint Eastwood. See, this town's got some bad mojo because they paid some bad dudes to kill off a crusading sheriff and then they double-crossed the bad dudes. And now, a few years later, the bad dudes are getting out of prison. Who could have foreseen this? Since when have prison terms come to an end? So, Eastwood appears out of nowhere at the beginning of the movie and immediately starts killing men and raping women because he's a real man, not some namby-pamby liberal who doesn't kill and rape. Naturally, the townsfolk decide that this guy is the guy to help them beat the bad dudes (this is also the reasoning behind the PATRIOT Act), and they go along with his increasingly insane demands because... uh, I don't know. One guy balks and Eastwood kills him, too, so I guess they're scared or something. Eastwood's character is never named, and the end of the movie suggests that he is either a supernatural entity or a semi-famous celebrity with a high opinion of himself. The supernatural angle ought to be some comfort to the women he raped in town, because ghost-rapes don't count. Or so says Camille Paglia. In the swinging spirit of bad '70s movies, both of the women are really into him after he, y'know, violates them anyway. Progressive! So, yeah, this movie is indefensible. And pretty dumb. And yet I watch some of it every single time I catch it playing on TV, which is pretty much every third night. Does this make me a bad person? My religion of choice says yes. Another note: the Wikipedia page for the film includes a picture of Eastwood on his horse with the helpful subtitle, "The stranger on the white horse is symbolic." Thanks, Wikipedia! You're the best.

MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON (1939)

Li'l Jimmy Stewart is a golden-hearted guy with a heart of gold. And I don't know if I mentioned it, but he's a guy. This movie takes place in the 1930s, and only white guys like Li'l Jimmy could be Senators in the 1930s. And most were! At least, those that didn't live in Hoovervilles. The upper crust, if you know what I mean. Our humble director Frank Capra believes the best of the common upper-crust man, or at least, he knows that people will pay good money to hear that they're better than those fat cats in Washington. So Li'l Jimmy (known as Mr. Smith in this movie) goes to Washington as a Senator. But those bad fat cats are up to something nefarious. Something to do with earmarks or bridges to unknown destinations or some fat-cat stuff like that. But they didn't count on Mr. Smith and his golden-hearted maverick ways! Although we don't know what party (Republican!) Mr. Smith is in (Republican!), he bucks the fat cats in a crazy, awe-inspiring filibuster. Yes, a filibuster! The parliamentary procedure whereby a legislator talks for an infinite number of hours about anything that strikes them. It's crazy and awe-inspiring, I say! And much better in montage than real time. Anyway, blah blah maverick blah. After 45 straight days of talking (while the awestruck galleries fill up with spectators, because what person in their right mind could resist an extremely privileged white guy talking about whatever comes to mind for hours upon hours? I get chills just thinking about it), Li'l Jimmy is turning into a broken shell of a man. But then! The indulgent Vice-President presiding over the Senate (or is he the Senate Majority Leader? I don't know. Or care.) smiles at him. And IT'S ON! Suddenly Boy Scout-proxies are trumpeting the news all over his state! And in the face of his waning blather, all the bad-guy fat-cats admit that their earmarks are no match for his mavericky ways and then they all cheer and elect Sarah Palin to be President. WOW! Someone give this movie an award!

Shoot, I forgot to say what I like about all this hokum. But I think the clip says it better than I could.

HOOPER (1978)

In the coveted Oscar category of Burt Reynolds Movies Involving Rocket Cars, there's little that can stand up to Hooper. Directed by former stuntman Hal Needham and starring Reynolds, Sally Field, Jan-Michael Vincent, Brian Keith, and Robert Klein, it's an attempt to recapture the successful hicksploitation (thanks for the term, Scott!) of the previous year's Smokey And The Bandit. Reynolds plays the greatest stuntman who's ever lived, who finds himself being pushed into an extensive stunt involving multiple explosions and the aforementioned rocket car. Despite the constant jokey macho bullshit in the movie, Hooper features a surprisingly tender and complex relationship between Reynolds and Field. And there's a lot of darkness in the depiction of the downside of stuntman life. Who would have guessed that constantly hurting yourself and risking danger could have potentially dire consequences? Not me.

SWEET TALKER (1991)

I've never actually seen this Aussie romantic comedy starring Karen Allen during her lost years, but the soundtrack was composed and performed by cult musician Richard Thompson. Coincidentally, I wrote a book about an album by Mr. Thompson and his ex-wife called Shoot Out The Lights and, seeing as how the holiday season is almost upon us, I thought I would mention it here. Self-promotion: the guiltiest pleasure of all!

Click Here For More Guilt From Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Leonard Pierce, Vadim Rizov & Sarah Clyne Sundberg

Contributor: Hayden Childs

Thursday Poll for November 13, 2007

Paul Clark — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 00:00:00 GMT

With a little more than two months left until Oscar nominations are announced, who stands the best chance of being nominated from the movies that have already gotten released? If the predictions of Screengrab’s readership hold any water (and we like to think they do), then Anne Hathaway should be very happy come nomination day. Once best known as the star of the Princess Diaries franchise (and later as the girl who gets topless in the otherwise regrettable Havoc), Hathaway’s revelatory lead performance in Jonathan Demme’s near-masterpiece Rachel Getting Married has made a real impression on our readers, nearly half of whom voted for it in last week’s poll. In second place was eternal paparazzi-magnet Angelina Jolie in Clint Eastwood’s Changeling, followed by The Jenkins for his performance in this spring’s word-of-mouth hit The Visitor. Perhaps the biggest surprise was the scant 7% of the vote received by Penelope Cruz in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, if only because a decade ago she would’ve been practically a shoo-in to get nominated, given Woody Allen’s awards prowess during the nineties.

This week, we presented our list of our favorite 007 movies. Now we leave it to you- which of our top five choices leaves you the most shaken… or stirred?

Which of these 007 movies is your favorite? | BuzzDash polls

As always, the comments section is open. See you next week!

Trailer Review: Gran Torino

Paul Clark — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 16:00:00 GMT

The movies that Clint Eastwood directs are a lot like his performances- lean, wiry, but with a certain softness that belies the gruff exterior. And while I suppose a small part of me is a tad let down that this isn’t another chapter in the Dirty Harry saga, I like that Gran Torino seems to give Eastwood another of his patented no-bullshit roles, only in the context of his more recent “golden years” stories. While in the past he was prone to canoodling onscreen with women half his age, he’s made no bones about his own, and it’s sort of awe-inspiring to consider him kicking ass like he did thirty years ago without looking stupid while doing it. Of course, there will be plenty out there who are curious about Gran Torino’s Oscar chances, and while this doesn’t look on the surface like an Oscar-bait movie, neither did Million Dollar Baby, and look how well that turned out. So watch out, Awards Season competition- Clint wants you to get off his lawn.

21 Stars We Hate (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Three weeks ago, we paid tribute to Paul Newman, a fantastically decent and charitable movie star possessed of great taste, artistic integrity and that elusive hat-trick of looks, talent and charisma that elevated him to the status of beloved international icon and left the world a sadder place when he left it.

Newman’s passing (and, to some extent, his dressing) got us thinking about other Leading Men and Leading Ladies we loved, or at least admired, or who at the very least satisfied most of the basic requirements of stardom: unforgettable performances in memorable films, a uniquely fascinating persona and maybe even some crazy knee-wobbling sex appeal for good measure.

But in the midst of all our recent celebrity praising, we couldn’t help noticing the preponderance of past and present “stars” who could more accurately be described as black holes: a whole lotta nothing endowed with tremendous powers of suck...false matinee idols who never really earned their overpraised, overpaid stations in the pop culture firmament, or genuine icons who long ago squandered whatever legitimacy they once had, and now just bug the shit out of us.

Given the fleeting, fickle nature of fame and the contrarian curmudgeonliness of your friends here at the Screengrab, you may notice a few of the names we praised less than a fortnight hence are back this week as figures of scorn and ridicule...

...but hey, that’s show biz, kid, so let’s get ready to RUUUUUUMMBLE!!!!!!

SHIA LABEOUF

Like Sarah Palin (but far less scary and secessionist), “The Boof” was plucked from relative obscurity and forced down America’s collective throat despite a staggering lack of qualifications for a job that any number of people could do better. Unlike Palin, whose ascendancy was engineered for cynical political advantage, I have no idea why Hollywood in general (and Steven Spielberg in particular) picked LaBeouf as their Gen-Y A-List representative...but for now I guess we’re stuck with him (and since I already posted a longer rant on the subject back in April, I’ll leave it at that...at least until Stockholm decides he’s ready for his Nobel Peace Prize for, y’know, bein’all peaceful an’ shit).

ROBIN WILLIAMS

I'll grant you that this one is like shooting fish in a barrel – but if you're going to set a barrel of fish in front of me and hand me a gun, what am I supposed to do? Anyway, it's not as if I'm a lifelong Williams hater. I was there when he debuted as Mork from Ork on a 1978 episode of Happy Days; I even remember taping the show (on audio cassette – this was pre-VCR) and listening to it over and over. (This was perhaps the 374th dorkiest thing I did in 1978. Number 212 was dressing up as Mork for Halloween, although my mother did a fabulous job with the costume.) I had his comedy album, Reality, What a Concept, some of which I even understood. He was a fine Popeye, and although it's been many years since I've seen either The Survivors or Moscow on the Hudson, I remember liking them at the time. So when did it all go awry? Some would point to Dead Poets Society, and certainly the seeds of sentiment and sanctimony were planted there, but I would argue in favor of Awakenings, in which those seeds sprouted into the Sensitive Man Beard. Into the early '90s, Williams could still garner critical acclaim by hacking through the same eight voices he always uses in Aladdin, but after a sickly stretch including Jumanji, Jack, Father's Day, Patch Adams and Bicentennial Man, defenders were harder to come by. (Somewhere in there he won an Oscar by breaking out the SMB again for Good Will Hunting, but I'd like to think a re-vote today would send it to Burt Reynolds for Boogie Nights instead.) After a brief but failed flirtation with a "dark phase" (including One Hour Photo and Insomnia), Williams has returned to serving up his patented cocktail of shtick and schmaltz. By 2007's License to Wed, even he seemed to be tired of his own act.

EWAN McGREGOR

McGregor first attracted attention for his work in the films of director Danny Boyle, with whom he was supposed to have some Scottish, post-MTV Scorsese-and-De Niro thing going on. In Boyle's debut feature, Shallow Grave, McGregor had the most prominent and sympathetic of the three main roles, alongside Kerry Fox, who made him her bitch, and Christopher Eccleston, who out-acted him into the next county. They followed that up with the much bigger hit Trainspotting, where Robert Carlyle swabbed the screen with him. The Boyle-McGregor partnership finally came to an acrimonious end when Boyle cast Leonardo DiCaprio as the lead in The Beach, thus sparing McGregor the chance to have his clock cleaned by Tilda Swinton. (They also worked together on A Life Less Ordinary, another movie full of actors who might have easily stolen it from Ewan, except who would have wanted it?) On his own, McGregor has provided evidence of an adventurous spirit by agreeing to star in several of the most unpleasantly misconceived big projects of the last dozen years, including Peter Greenaway's pervy art exhibit The Pillow Book, Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge, and David Mackenzie's lyrical ode to post-coital depression, Young Adam. McGregor also acted and sang in Todd Haynes' glitter rock movie Velvet Goldmine, where his famous and often-exposed physique, while certainly hunky enough as the physiques of pampered, hard-drinking young Scottish actors go, looked a little marshmallowy for someone who was meant to be Iggy Pop; however, we like the suggestion brunted by some admiring reviewers that this made it easier to accept that he was really meant to be Iggy and Lou Reed. His most high-profile role since Trainspotting was, of course, that of the young Ob-wan Kenobi in George Lucas' Star Wars prequels. Better actors than Ewan had trouble making their presence felt in those pictures, so it would be wrong to be too hard on him for that chapter of his career, though it does seem amazing that anyone could picture this guy someday turning into Alec Guinness. One hates to be too hard on McGregor for anything, really: unlike some names on this list, not to mention a whole lot of more talented people, he seems like a nice guy, and he's generally not painful to watch. It's just that, seeing him acting in a movie, you often find yourself staring at him and wondering where the rest of the donut went.

CLINT EASTWOOD

Sergio Leone, the director who made Eastwood a star with the Italian Western A Fistful of Dollars, once told an interviewer that, "When Michelangelo was asked what he had seen in the one particular block of marble which he chose among hundreds of others, he replied that he saw Moses," adding that he cast Clint after experiencing the same epiphany, except in reverse: watching Eastwood in action, "What I saw, simply, was a block of marble." The canny Leone would make some terrific pictures with that block of marble, and once the marble was established as the biggest international movie star in the world, he would go on to make a lot of other, shittier movies with a lot of lesser directors, a roll call that includes himself. During his peak years as a movie star, Eastwood established himself as the king of his thing: monolithic, inexpressive, yet implicitly self-righteous in his need to dish out retributive (and pre-emptive) violence to anyone who had it coming to him, which in most of those movies is anyone who's on-screen who he isn't fucking or who isn't played by an orangutan. Back in those days, the conventional wisdom on Eastwood was that it might be fun to watch him pistol whip people on screen, but that you wouldn't want to admit to being a fan if you were applying for a government job. But whatever you think of his earlier action hits, for the last couple of decades we've been sharing the planet with Clint the Auteur, the increasingly hard-to-listen-to, sinewy old guy with the glare of an Old Testament prophet and the voice of a rattlesnake's death rasp who keeps sliding behind the camera to direct a long string of ever more obvious movies with creaking joints that are invariably hailed as masterpieces by people who must need to get their eyeballs oiled. It's easy to think of other cases where it took the critics a while to catch up with an American original, but sometimes they do get it right the first time. John Huston -- who Clint impersonated in White Hunter, Black Heart, something he had as much business attempting as Huston himself would have had playing Shirley Temple -- said in Chinatown that politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all become respectable if they last long enough, and there's a little of all three in Eastwood.

NICOLE KIDMAN

Between Dead Calm, the 1989 Australian thriller that was her first film released in the U.S., and her Hollywood debut the next year in Days of Thunder, Kidman's onscreen image seemed to lose ten years and at least that many brain cells. Her '90s screen partnership with her then-husband Tom Cruise, which also resulted in Far and Away and Eyes Wide Shut, was like some post-modern parody of the public marriage and tie-in movie career of Liz Taylor and Richard Burton, itself no great moment in the history of human dignity. By the time it was over, any personality or expressive qualities that Kidman ever had were smothered in "glamour." If she's really a star, then she's a star of a very strange kind, with an odd, limited sort of appeal: she's had her greatest successes playing characters who the audience is meant to want to strangle (as in To Die For and Malice) or in movies where somebody already beat us to it: her best performance, by miles, was in the ghost story The Others, where she was completely convincing as a woman so tightly buttoned up and horribly repressed that she didn't even know she was dead. Since the divorce from Tom Cruise, in which she seemed to win official custody of the media and the industry's solicitous respect, she's picked her roles like a politician with a desire to cover as much ground as possible without offending anyone, and they've been a testament to the awfulness of her taste: jumping at the chance to miscast herself in Oscar-bait literary adaptations like The Hours, The Human Stain, and Cold Mountain while courting the groundlings in terribly misconceived remakes of The Stepford Wives, Invasion (as in "of the Body Snatchers"), and the TV series Bewitched. Having some arch, boring glamourpuss making movies for them seems to give studio heads a kick, at least for a while: in 2006, Kidman was the most highly paid actress in movies, even though a look at the returns on her films made it seem that she couldn't draw crows to a cornfield at sundown.

Click Here For Part Two, Part Three & Part Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

When Good Directors Go Bad: Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997, Clint Eastwood)

Paul Clark — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Forty years ago, the idea that Rowdy Yates from TV’s Rawhide would turn out to be a talented director would have seemed ridiculous. Yet it came to pass, with Clint Eastwood proving to be one of Hollywood’s most celebrated filmmakers. In addition, he’s also one of its most prolific, churning out an average of one film almost every year over the past decade. But in spite of making such well-regarded films as Unforgiven, Mystic River, and Million Dollar Baby, the truth is that when a filmmaker works at such a rate, there are bound to be some clunkers in the bunch. Surely enough, Eastwood had his share of mediocre or even subpar films throughout his career, even in the fertile period of the nineties. In the case of movies like True Crime and Blood Work, the middling quality of the films wasn’t too big a deal, as they were disposable adaptations of forgettable airport novels.

Then there was Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. A far cry from the likes of Absolute Power, Midnight was based on an honest-to-goodness acclaimed work of literature. John Berendt’s book, based on an actual Savannah, GA murder case, was a publishing phenomenon, residing on the New York Times bestseller list a full four years. For the first time since his Academy Award-winning Unforgiven, Eastwood was making an honest-to-goodness prestige project, and he devoted all his attention to directing the film, handing over the acting duties to the likes of Kevin Spacey and John Cusack. Anticipation was high, especially among fans of the novel who were curious to see how Eastwood would translate it to the screen.

Trouble is, like many really good books, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil doesn’t exactly lend itself to being adapted. While most good adaptations are inspired by books with strong, tight stories, much of the appeal of Berendt’s book is anecdotal, with plenty of fascinating characters orbiting around the story’s center, the trial of Jim Williams. Unfortunately, Eastwood is generally at his best when working with a relatively straightforward plot, and consequently, his attempts to mix the court case with the incidental dramas in Savannah just don’t quite work. It doesn’t help that Eastwood never really allows Savannah to become a natural element of the story like it ought to be. Watching his more successful adaptation of Mystic River, it’s hard to imagine the story taking place anywhere else, but I almost never got that vibe from Midnight, in which the city feels more like a backdrop than an actual setting.

Part of the problem is that Eastwood shies away from one of the book’s most important themes- the hypocrisy of Savannah’s upper-class when confronted by Williams’ homosexuality. Berendt’s novel addresses the almost tangible sense of abandonment that Williams felt when his “friends” refused to testify on his behalf once word of his sexual predilections came to light. But while it’s mentioned in passing in the film, Eastwood makes far too little of which should be a central issue. Without this undercurrent, the trial loses most of its energy, becoming little more than a mediocre courtroom drama with a few mild twists.

Also disappointing is the film’s treatment of the friendship between protagonist John Kelso, a Berendt surrogate played by John Cusack, and the story’s most famous supporting player, The Lady Chablis, who plays herself. In both the book and the film, the two characters- one a straitlaced northerner, the other a local transsexual- get to know each other as the story progresses, and while it’s pretty clear that nothing sexual ever transpires between them, there’s a tantalizing ambiguity about Chablis’ feelings toward Kelso. Sadly, Eastwood and screenwriter John Lee Hancock seem skittish about the possibility that audience members might think their hero is gay, so they concoct him a love interest who wasn't in the book, played by Eastwood’s daughter Alison. The romantic subplot is a complete waste of time, never advancing the story or working in any other way other than to reassure the audience that John Kelso is all about the ladies.

That said, both Cusack and The Lady Chablis are actually quite good in the movie. Cusack plays his usual charming, brainy type, but then, the story needs a levelheaded character in the middle of the eccentric locals. And The Lady Chablis is pretty priceless, especially when she’s playing off Cusack- I can’t imagine a more established actor playing the role even half as convincingly, no doubt because she’d already been playing the role for years even before the book, let alone the movie. And most of the rest of the cast is also fine- Spacey is courtly but subtly menacing in one of finest performances, and Jack Thompson has fun as Spacey’s defense attorney, a local hero (he’s the owner of the University of Georgia’s mascot “Uga”) who’s surprisingly neither a blowhard nor an over-the-top rube. The weak links are Alison Eastwood (who to her credit has almost nothing to do) and Jude Law as the murder victim, who when we see him in flashbacks is too mannered by half.

More than most filmmakers working today, Eastwood works in the classic tradition, allowing the film’s story to dictate his directorial decisions. Unfortunately, it never feels like he got a handle on the story. The courtroom scenes have no momentum, there’s too much gratuitous material involving Alison Eastwood’s character, and the local color just doesn’t work like it does on the page. After all, it’s one thing to imagine a guy walking a nonexistent dog or tethering flies to his clothing, and another entirely to actually see them. And late in the game, Eastwood abandons his low-key and realistic style to inject some magical realism into the film, but the moment doesn’t work because it feels so out of place with his style.

In the end, one gets the sense that Eastwood’s brand of filmmaking just didn’t mesh with Berendt’s story. Perhaps someone like Robert Altman could have pulled it off, given his gifts with ensemble casts and Southern settings, or even the documentarian Ross McElwee, chronicler of the Deep South in films like Sherman’s March and Bright Leaves. I might have suggested Errol Morris, considering his ability to portray eccentrics without condescending to them, but then, Morris' previous fiction feature didn’t turn out so well, did it?

Screengrab Salutes: The Top 25 Leading Men of All Time (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 21:00:00 GMT

20. GENE HACKMAN (1930 - )

Hackman was 33 when he made his movie debut in Robert Rossen's Lilith; he got to play a scene with Warren Beatty, who, admiring his colleague's mastery of his craft and maybe also thinking that his potato-faced plainness provided a splendid contrast on-screen to his own Colgate smile and dashing looks, cast him as his brother in Bonnie and Clyde. By that time, Hackman, voted Least Likely to Succeed by the good folks at the Pasadena Playhouse (a title he shared with his roommate Dustin Hoffman), had begun to build a steady career on the basis of his hard-won dependability as an actor. The impression he made as Buck Barrow lit a fire under his career, one that fanned out four years later when he starred in The French Connection and won the Academy Award for his performance as the obsessive cop Popeye Doyle, a job that he has often cited as something less than his favorite. Hackman's admiring notices in this period are full of tributes to his "anonymity" and lack of sex appeal; it was as if everyone was glad that he was getting treated by the casting office as if he were a star but wanted to get their personal disavowals of responsibility on the record in anticipation of the day when the world realized that a terrible mistake had been made. But Hackman remained a genuine movie star, a testament to the surprising fact that every once in a while, exceptional ability and hard work just seem to pay off. Maybe because he never really had any youthful bloom to lose, his stardom only grew more secure as he got older and grew into authority figure parts, some benevolent (such as the many father figures he played in movies like Twice in a Lifetime and Hoosiers), some malignant (like the sadistic Western sheriff in Unforgiven). Let the record show that he even, by God, developed sex appeal: in that department, he had an especially trumphant year in 1988, when he stirred many hearts playing the FBI agent who seduces Frances McDormand in Mississippi Burning and the smaller but indelible role of The Good Man Who Got Away Because You Told Him to Leave, You Stupid Cow in Woody Allen's Another Woman. He has given many noteworthy performances since then, the standout perhaps being his lovingly cracked variation on the father figure role in Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums. He has not appeared onscreen since 2004's Welcome to Mooseport, perhaps because he's waiting for someone to explain to him what the hell he was doing in Welcome to Mooseport.

19. MICHAEL CAINE (1933 - )

When Caine became a big star in the mid-1960s, be brought back something that had been lost in American films -- the kind of actor's energy born of naked desperation. In the Depression years, people like James Cagney went into acting as an alternative to starvation, but by the '60s, American stars from comfortable middle-class backgrounds entered acting because, as Paul Newman put it, they were escaping a life spent working in the family sporting goods store. But the Cockney Caine was trying to break away from an early life informed by class consciousness and poverty. The fact that he'd been hungry at one point in his life may help to account for his eagerness to keep working, even in poor films, a decision that actually got him teased by that guardian of lofty cultural values, People magazine. It might also account for the fact that he owns so many restaurants. (Regarding Jaws: The Revenge, the movie that caused People so much consternation, Caine has said, "I have never seen the film, but by all accounts it was terrible. However I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific.") As Harry Palmer, the entertainingly grubby spy in eyeglasses in The Ipcress File and the serial seducer in Alfie, Caine magnetized the camera with his working man's anger and ambition, which he was skillful enough to channel into the characters' own drives and delusions. One critic analyzed the secret of Alfie's success with women and concluded that it was that he didn't know his own limitations, but it may have been that Caine himself was too frightened of failure to dare consider that any limitations might not be overcome. One might have expected Caine to lose his edge when he became rich and famous and the chip on his shoulder started to fray, but he just keeping getter better and better as an actor. The official notice that he had become something like acting royalty probably came in 1975, when John Huston asked him to co-star in the film version of The Man Who Would Be King (which Huston had longed to make for decades, in the role once intended for Humphrey Bogart); for the movie-loving Caine, that must have been a little like getting a call from John the Baptist asking if he could do a chore that Jesus just wasn't up to. Other especially notable roles from his sprawling filmography include his gangster antihero in Get Carter (1971) and, fifteen years later, his supporting role as the criminal kingpin Mortwell in Neil Jordan's Mona Lisa, a crook who would have scared the shit out of Frank Booth. He won his first Oscar that same year, for his supporting role in Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters; he won another one for his surpassingly beautiful performance in 1999's The Cider House Rules, after which he played wintry roles in Last Orders and The Quiet American. After making that last one, and campaigning like hell to get it seen when Miramax threatened to dump it, Caine announced that he was, as far as he was concerned, "retired", which for Caine means that he now shows up in only a couple of pictures a year and doesn't take leading roles unless, as was the case with last year's Sleuth, they give him the chance to remake one of his older pictures so that he can play the role that he wasn't old enough to play the first time around. Some day he will die. When that happens, it would probably be a good idea to leave any messages for me with the doorman for a few weeks.

18. TOSHIRO MIFUNE (1920-1997)

Just try to look away when Toshiro Mifune's on screen. It's almost impossible. With his odd charisma and brooding intensity, he completely dominates any scene he's in. You can tell that he's trying to be generous with the other actors, but nature made him a cinematic powerhouse. Credited on IMDB with 181 movies between 1947 and 1995, Mifune is the Western face of Japanese cinema. Movies like Midway, 1941, and the miniseries Shogun brought him to the American masses, but it was his earlier work that made his career. He was the John Wayne to Akira Kurosawa's John Ford, casting as huge a mythic shadow across the face of cinema. Consider: Kurosawa made 32 movies during his life, and Mifune starred in 15 of them. Seven of those are five-star, drop-everything, must-see-immediately movies: Stray Dog, The Seven Samurai, I Live In Fear, Throne of Blood, The Hidden Fortress, Yojimbo, and High and Low. Mifune also made four other movies that rank among the best movies ever made: Samurai 1 - 3 and The Sword of Doom. But enough about his importance to the canon! Let's talk about the man's signature moments, such as the mirthless laughter that rips out of his head like a bird from a cage, driving home just how close to the edge of sanity this character really is. Or the impassive-yet-sad dignity, when Mifune seems to be made of stone while the other actors flow around him like river water. Or, best of all, the way he could turn either of those on a dime into fear, horror, and pain, letting viewers in on an unspoken backstory that needs no further explanation. Even if you speak not a word of Japanese, you always know everything you need to know about Mifune's characters.

17. WILLIAM HOLDEN (1918-1981)

William Holden made a lot of movies, but the movies that made William Holden were few and far between. Don't get me wrong; Holden was a great actor, but his standout roles were so much brighter than his getalong roles that it's hard to believe they could coexist. That's probably true of most leading men, but it seems especially true of Holden. With Billy Wilder, he made Sunset Blvd, Stalag 17, and Sabrina. He made a bunch of war movies other than Stalag 17 (his face always seems to be hinting at the horrors he's seen and is trying to forget, thank you very much), but the best was The Bridge On The River Kwai with David Lean. He made a whole bunch of Westerns, even working with the great John Ford, but the really memorable one was Sam Peckinpah's stunning The Wild Bunch, which might be the best Western ever made. And he also made overrated Oscar bait like Love Is A Many-Splendored Thing and Network, for which the Academy duly rewarded him. I don't know whether Holden was a handsome man, but he was definitely a commanding and intriguing actor, and that's all that counts.

16. CLINT EASTWOOD (1930 - )

I’m not a hippie, a swinger or a Mormon, but I nevertheless live a polygamist lifestyle, sharing my wife on a regular basis with a septuagenarian jazz enthusiast whose talent, machismo and flinty good looks still, apparently, inspire lust in at least one small Polish woman decades after inspiring much wider lust during the tight pantsed, bare-chested, absurdly large biceped days of his youth. Despite my wife’s leftist political philosophy, she’s willing to forgive Eastwood’s right-wing libertarian political leanings and starring roles in all those reactionary Dirty Harry movies and violent spaghetti westerns, partly because those early films were so damn entertaining, but mostly because Clint has mellowed since then, producing, directing and/or starring in deeply human films like Unforgiven and Letters From Iwo Jima which explore the root cause and grisly aftermath of the human fascination with violence that helped to make him a star in the first place. Yet even though Eastwood would have qualified for this list based merely on his collaborations with Sergio Leone (let alone his cop movies, let alone his Oscar-caliber directing chops), that’s still only half the story. Unlike largely one-trick action stars of the Bronson/Stallone/Seagal variety, the erstwhile “man with no name” ain’t afraid to let his freak flag fly or get down with his sensitive feminine side, headlining everything from weepy “women’s” films (The Bridges of Madison County, Million Dollar Baby) to weird experiments (The Beguiled, White Hunter Black Heart) and inexplicable monkey comedies (Every Which Way But Loose), proving there’s a whole lot more to my wife’s beloved fake husband than just his big, big guns.

Click Here for Part One, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven & Eight

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Hayden Childs, Andrew Osborne

Morning Deal Report: Cronenberg Does Ludlum

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 14:15:00 GMT

Back in the early days of the interwebs, I used to butt heads with a contrarian boob who insisted that Tony Danza was our greatest comic resource and that Robert Ludlum was a modern-day Dickens, among other dubious claims. While Danza remains sadly under-appreciated (although he did appear on a 2005 All My Children episode as Erica Kane’s wedding planner, so there’s that), Ludlum has been the recipient of a posthumous reputation bump thanks to the Bourne movies. Now creepmaster David Cronenberg is getting in on the action, as he negotiates to direct The Matarese Circle, a thriller based on a Ludlum novel. Denzel Washington is attached to star in the movie in which “two rival intelligence agents -- one American, one Soviet -- find themselves working together to ferret out and vanquish members of a mysterious group of criminals called the Matarese that has infiltrated the highest levels of American government,” per The Hollywood Reporter. No word yet on whether or not there’s a part for Tony Danza.

Forest Whitaker’s first leading role 20 years ago was Charlie Parker in Clint Eastwood’s jazz biopic Bird. Now Whitaker takes on another jazz legend as the director and star of What a Wonderful World, the first Louis Armstrong biopic authorized by Satchmo’s estate. Ron Bass will write the script that “will kick off during the musician’s impoverished early years in New Orleans and primarily chronicle his career as a trumpet virtuoso and improvisational singer,” Variety reports.

Its producer compares it to Soylent Green, but it sounds more like Quintet to me: it’s Fortuna, starring Dominic Monaghan and Freddy Rodriguez. “Set in 2100, Fortuna envisions an Earth where a collapsed economy and climate crises have eliminated the middle class, leaving a few very wealthy and the teeming masses in severe poverty. To give hope and avoid revolt, the elite create Fortuna, a mysterious game where one in a thousand wins a big payday and joins the upper classes. But their hidden goal to ‘reduce poverty’ by 30% over 50 years comes with a deadly price tag,” says THR. I dunno – collapsed economy? Climate crisis? Sounds like crazy way-out science fiction to me!

Related:
No, But I've Read the Movie: NAKED LUNCH
Popular Mechanics Makes List of Most Prescient Sci-Fi Flicks

Screengrab Presents: The Top 25 War Films (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 20:00:00 GMT

WAR!!!!! (Huh! Good God!) What is it good for? Absolutely nothing...

...unless, of course, you’re a Halliburton stockholder...and, well, I guess World War II was helpful in pulling the U.S. out of the Great Depression and ridding Europe of fascism...and, y’know, we’d still be a British colony if not for the Revolutionary War.

And certainly the world of cinema, in particular, would suffer without the violence, spectacle and grand drama of humanity’s battles through the ages, since war has generated some of our greatest works of art (as well as our most cynical, manipulative, xenophobic hunks of exploding propaganda).

In his classic monologue, Swimming to Cambodia (about his participation in Roland Joffé’s 1984 film The Killing Fields), the late, great Spalding Gray suggested a potentially beneficial marriage of the human impulses towards creation and destruction: “WAR THERAPY! Every country should make a major war movie every year. It would put a lot of people to work, help them get their rocks off” (and, of course, reduce the psychic and physical devastation of the real thing).

This week, Spike Lee does his part by releasing Miracle at St. Anna, a World War II drama featuring all the black actors Clint Eastwood didn’t cast in Flags of Our Fathers, and so in tribute to both films (and all the real life soldiers, civilians and politicians who inspired them), we here at the Screengrab present our picks for the Top 25 War Movies of All Time!

25. FORBIDDEN GAMES (1951)

Rene Clement's film opens with a crowd of people trying to march out of Paris as the Germans invade the city at the start of World War II. A couple are strafed, and their five-year-old daughter (Brigitte Fossey) wanders off in shock, holding onto her dead dog. She winds up in the countryside where she's befriended by a ten-year-old boy (Georges Poujouly) with whom she establishes a private cemetery for the dead animals they begin to collect, which they decorate by stealing crosses from a nearby (human) cemetery. One of the strangest and most haunting commentaries on war ever filmed, and the talented Clement never made anything remotely like it again. But then it's not as if anybody else has ever made anything quite like it either.

24. FIRES ON THE PLAIN (1959)

Kon Ichikawa's masterpiece is set on an island in the Philippines in the dying days of World War II. Japanese soldiers have begun resorting to cannibalism to stay alive; the hero, Tamura (Eiji Funakoshi), has been turned out of his platoon after being diagnosed with tuberculosis. Stumbling along in search of a field hospital, Tamura refuses to sink to the level of eating human flesh. The one thing he has going for him is that, because of his medical condition, nobody he meets wants to eat him, either. This is one of the rare great movies that might be called honestly nihilistic. It's a vision of pure hopelessness, but it's emotionally moving because of the depth of the hero's desire to believe that human beings might be better than the behavior that he's seeing.

23. SALVADOR (1986)

This wasn't the first movie written and directed by Oliver Stone, but it did represent the official arrival of the Stone we've all come to know, love, and roll out eyes at, the outspoken topical "political" melodramatist. He's never had a better combination, for his talents and temperament, of subject, actor, and lead character than he did in this excitingly overblown, impassioned attack on Central American politics, which came out at the start of the year that ended with the release of his Oscar-winning Platoon. James Woods plays Richard Boyle, an actual reporter whose stories about trying to get close enough to the political violence in El Salvador in the early 1980s (and come out alive) inspired the screenplay. (It's co-credited to Boyle and Stone, and for a while Stone even flirted with the idea of having Boyle play himself.) Even though the movie was seen by almost no one when it was in theaters, a late-year push by the Los Angeles cable station the Z Channel helped get Woods an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor, and it's easy to see why: his hyperactive fast rap gives the movie almost as high a kinetic charge as the bullets and explosions do.

22. COME AND SEE (1985)

It’s been reported that the late Francois Truffaut once said that it was impossible to make a film that was truly anti-war because they tend to make war look like fun. However, the ultimate rebuke to Truffaut’s statement came a year after his death, in the final and greatest film by Soviet filmmaker Elem Klimov. Telling the story of the Nazi invasion of Belarus through the eyes of a young boy, Klimov’s unflinching camera depicts the atrocities vested upon the Soviet people during World War II. As the boy journeys through the countryside following the killing of his family, he is less protagonist than witness, always propelled forward by his terror at what he’s seen only to discover something even more horrifying once he’s arrived at his destination. The film culminates in the extended siege of a small town, where the boy is held at gunpoint while other soldiers herd the townspeople into a church and set the building ablaze. Throughout the film, Klimov’s dominant image is the face of his young leading man, Alexei Kravchenko, frozen in a mask of abject horror -- so committed was Klimov to eliciting this response from the young man that he attempted to hypnotize him, as well as using live rounds in some of the battle scenes, some of which (according to Kravchenko) reportedly came only inches from his head. Yet while Klimov’s methods might have been suspect, the results are undeniable -- a war movie that’s harrowing and despairing, but nowhere even close to entertaining.

21. GLORY (1989)

This Civil War movie tells the story of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, the first all-black regiment of the U.S. military, formed on the novel idea that the people whose freedom was contingent on the war's outcome might actually be of some use in fighting it. (Some objected to the idea on the basis that the abolitionists' cause might be undermined if it turned out that black men couldn't figure out how to operate shoes or march in formation.) The director, Edward Zwick, shows a sure hand in the amazing combat scenes but is shaky on some of the dramatic scenes and lets the composer, James Horner, pour too much syrup into the gears. But the movie's flaws don't count as much as its great subject and the performances of Morgan Freeman, Denzel Washington, and Andre Braugher (in his movie debut).

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Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Paul Clark

Trailer Review: Changeling

Paul Clark — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 04:00:00 GMT

Like Doubt, which we spotlighted here on Wednesday, Changeling is an obvious piece of Oscar-bait- period piece, true story, starring one of Hollywood’s most visible leading ladies, and directed by four-time Academy Award-winner Clint Eastwood. But what surprised me here was how unsentimental this looks. Angelina Jolie’s Christine Collins comes off less as a defiant crusader than a vulnerable victim of a corrupt system, and Jolie’s performance doesn’t come off as steely heroism but rather a loving mother who’s scared shitless by what she’s up against. Consequently, I think this will help her to successfully disappear into the role, since this element of fear will make it easier for audience members to distinguish her from the activist/babe/super-mom Jolie of the supermarket tabloids. I also think it helps that John Malkovich is playing the anti-corruption pastor here, which should give the character a much less self-righteous form of advocacy than one usually finds in films of this sort. Changeling received almost uniformly positive reviews at Cannes this year, and based on the trailer, this acclaim for Eastwood (one of Hollywood’s most consistently solid filmmakers) appears to be well-founded.

Spike Lee's Next "Miracle"

Phil Nugent — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 17:00:00 GMT

In anticipation of the release next week of Miracle at St. Anna, Spike Lee's first movie since his biggest hit, the atypically good Inside Man, John Colapinto profiles the director in The New Yorker. [Not available online] Colapinto notes that Lee has made eighteen feature films, "three of which (Do the Right Thing, Jungle Fever, and Malcolm X) have earned him a reputation as a filmmaker obsessed with race." That count seems a little soft: for instance, it's hard to think of any reason besides an obsession with race for making Bamboozled, and even the movie that Lee clearly intended as a showcase for his warmer, fuzzier side, Crooklyn, included a subplot about the foul odor emitted by the film's token white man, played by David Patrick Kelly in outrageous honky drag. After scoring a great success with an ingenious genre picture that required him to mostly give it a rest, Lee's new movie, "the first by a major American director to treat the experience of black soldiers" in World War II, gives him a chance to climb back on his hobbyhorse and also to issue the public proclamations that have sometimes seemed to be his real art, which his movies are only intended to promote. As Colapinto writes, the film is meant "as redress not only for [Clint] Eastwood's Iwo Jima pictures but for an all-white Hollywood vision of the Second World War which dates to the 1962 John Wayne movie The Longest Day--and before." It will be remembered that Lee instigated a vicious back-and-forth between himself and Eastwood by complaining about the absence of black soldiers in Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima; after Eastwood invited the younger filmmaker to shut the fuck up, Lee called him "an angry old man" and advised Dirty Harry that "we're not on a plantation either." That stroke was standard operating procedure for Lee, who has a history of shutting down discussions by accusing his attackers of racism, a move that has traditionally left them sputtering defensively. The down side of this tactic that it's left Lee with a public image that he may now regret, if only because it may have overshadowed his reputation as a moviemaker. "People think I'm this angry black man walking around in a constant state of rage," he told Colapinto. This misperception makes Lee very angry, and the article describes a man who, because of that, is walking around in a constant state of rage.

One reason he has for being ticked off--even when he has access to Colapinto, a writer who is so much on his side that he even seems to like Summer of Sam and the godforsaken color dance interlude in Lee's debut feature She's Gotta Have It--is that getting funding isn't as easy for him as it used to be. Lee would probably argue that it's never been easy for him, but a lot of filmmakers before Lee wanted to make a biopic about Malcolm X, and Lee was the one who got to bitch in the press about not being given a big enough budget after the epic production was given the green light. (One of the other filmmakers who wanted to make it was Norman Jewison, who was almost ready to go, with Lee's star Denzel Washington in the lead role, when Lee nudged him aside by making a public stink about how wrong it would be for a white director to be entrusted with Malcolm's story.) Miracle at St. Anna wasn't Lee's first choice for a follow-up to Inside Man; it was what he could get funded after he discovered that the box-office cachet he had picked up from that movie wasn't enough to get studios interested in his other dream projects, a James Brown biopic and a movie about the 1992 Los Angeles riots. (St. Anna didn't make the studios salivate, either; Touchtone Pictures signed on to distribute it only after European companies ponied up the money.) It'll be interesting to see whether an historical drama benefits from some of the gravity that Lee has acquired in recent years, seen best not in Inside Man but in his documentaries 4 Little Girls, whose title refers to the victims of a racially motivated church bombing in Birmingham in 1963, and the Katrina epic When the Levees Broke. Stanley Crouch, who wrote a searing attack on Lee back in 1989, believes that his nonfiction-film work has had a strong, salutary effect on Lee: "There was something about the dignity of those people he encountered when he was making 4 Little Girls that had a very deep impact on him, and in some way they seemed to help him grow up. When you got kids yourself and you're talking to the father of someone whose child was blown up by the kind of people who blew those kids up, and you see that this person is not ranting and raving in some kind of theatrical purported rage of the sort that you see in Do the Right Thing." Miracle at St. Anna opens on September 26.

Related stories: Clint Eastwood Would Like Spike Lee to Shut His Face