The Screengrab : david mamet

Screengrab Review: "The Brothers Bloom"

Nick Schager — Tue, 12 May 2009 15:00:00 GMT

The Brothers Bloom, Rian Johnson’s follow-up to his kiddie-noir Brick, prances about with a virtual “WWWAD?” – What Would Wes Anderson Do? – emblazoned on its every frame. Taking his debut’s affectations to their ultimate extreme, Johnson’s film is a con man saga in which every symmetrical composition, whip pan, folksy song, hand-written title card, and bubbly, droll caricature seems meticulously modeled after those found in Anderson’s oeuvre, a connection furthered by the focus here on close but at-odds siblings. The duo in question are Stephen (Mark Ruffalo) and his younger bro Bloom (Adrien Brody), a couple of grifters who, as an intro sequence elucidates, moved about from one foster home to another as kids, their transience the result of their preference for causing mischief such as an early ruse in which they swindled local classmates with a yarn about secret caves, hidden treasure, and fantastical creatures. Decked out in matching black suits and bowler hats that reflect their precociousness, they’re an adorable pair who grow into wannabe David Mamet protagonists, with Stephen the cocky author of their convoluted schemes, and Bloom the morose antihero who yearns for a life unscripted by his brother.

Their adventure revolves around Stephen’s plan to con a wealthy shut-in eccentric named Penelope (Rachel Weisz), the type of kook who habitually crashes her canary-yellow Ferrari and then orders a new one, and whom Stephen has chosen as a mark in order to provide Bloom with a shot at true love. Or has he? Working from his own script, Johnson immediately establishes by-now hackneyed circumstances in which nothing is as it seems, and thus nothing can be trusted, a situation meant to keep viewers on their toes but instead reduces the proceedings to a shallow, uninvolving whirligig. The Brothers Bloom wants to fool us narratively as well as trick us into caring about Bloom’s budding relationship with Penelope. Yet it fails to realize that it’s nigh impossible to invest oneself in the plight of characters who only register as fast-talking, quirkily dressed cartoons with weird hobbies, with Penelope’s raft of random, self-taught leisurely pursuits – she plays a range of musical instruments, does gymnastics, juggles chainsaws, and break-dances and DJs – conveyed via such a blatantly Anderson-esque montage that the Rushmore director could just about file a lawsuit on grounds of plagiarism.

According to Bloom, Stephen concocts cons “like dead Russians write novels,” a bit of braggadocio that isn’t confirmed by an ensuing tale that primarily amounts to a formulaic series of rug-pulling scenarios. Yet more than the particulars of the central con, which comes to include the participation of Robbie Coltrane as a buffoonish Danish accomplice and Babel’s Rinko Kikuchi as a mute animé-ish sidekick, The Brothers Bloom falters in its conception, since by forcing us to view every moment with a skeptical eye, it frustrates any opportunity to emotionally care about the madcap shenanigans engulfing the screen. Asked to embody superficially strange ciphers defined by idiosyncrasies, the cast predictably plays down to their material, the charming Weisz and soulful Brody’s performances reduced by the twee atmosphere into merely broad gestures and exaggerated expressions. From their costume-y clothes to their inflated mannerisms and dialogue, everyone involved acts like a child playing dress-up. And while Kikuchi’s too-cool-for-school mime is the story’s most gratingly cute character, it’s Johnson’s equally self-satisfied stewardship that ultimately shoulders the lion’s share of the blame. “I want an unwritten life,” may be Bloom’s recurring plea, but it’s one Johnson thoroughly rejects, his film infinitely pleased with its derivative, fanciful writerly convolutions.

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 21:00:00 GMT

FARGO (1996)

Any number of Coen Brothers movies revolve around bumbling get-rich-quick schemes, many of them involving kidnapping, but few characters in film history have gotten in as far over their heads as car salesman Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy). Jerry’s not looking to make a big score just for the sake of accumulating wealth; as the movie begins, he’s already in deep financial doodoo, although we never find out the exact nature of his troubles. To his credit, one of his schemes is not so boneheaded: a property investment proposal he brings to his wealthy father-in-law Wade Gustafson. In fact, the plan is so good Wade decides to take on the investment himself rather than lending the necessary money to Jerry – though he does offer a nominal finder’s fee. In Jerry’s mind, this betrayal may make his alternate plan more palatable – arranging for the kidnapping of his wife and bilking Wade out of the ransom money. This plan goes much, much worse, however, and before it’s over Wade and his daughter are dead, Jerry is led away in handcuffs and Steve Buscemi is fed into a wood chipper. All that for a little bit of money. (SVD)

THE GRIFTERS (1990)

Stephen Frears’ tight little modern noir is immeasurably aided by strong efforts at every level: the source novel is one of legendary noir novelist Jim Thompson’s best, the screenplay is provided by Donald Westlake, another crime novel pro, and of course, the cast is dynamite, from the leads to bit parts to Pat Hingle’s chilling mob boss, Bobo Justus. But one of the least-noticed thematic bits of brilliance is how it treats the different layers of confidence games, and how getting rich quick through the art of the con means very different things to different people. John Cusack’s Roy Dillon is strictly a short-con operator: pulling little hustles, tricks and sleight-of-hand jobs that keep him in nice suits and decent hotels as long as he keeps moving. His mother, the determined Lilly, is much more the get-rich-quick type, handling her mobster employer’s money as he manipulates the outcome of horse races through cleverly spread-out bets. And the seductive Myra Langtry is a long con type – although she’s reduced to hustling, her specialty is big-money cons that take months or years to pay off, but when they do, they pay off in the millions. It’s a fascinating look at the economics and expectations of the day-to-day life of the habitual criminal. (LP)

HOUSE OF GAMES (1987)

There’s no heist in David Mamet’s House of Games, but there are more cons than one film should be able to support. That Mamet’s debut delivers its endless barrage of tricks and ruses with exhilarating proficiency is a tribute to the writer/director, whose interest in hard men living hard lives and pulling off very hard endeavors is encapsulated by this tale of a psychologist (Lindsay Crouse) lured by a master crook (Joe Mantegna) into a web of lies. As with most of Mamet’s work, women – in this case, Crouse’s protagonist, the lone female in a story full of men – don’t fare very well. Yet there’s something fascinating about the way the writer/director stages Crouse and Mantegna’s duel as a sort of primal battle of the sexes, the latter’s attempts to swindle the former coming off as a conflict of both gender and education (she the intellectual, he the graduate of the school of hard knocks). House of Game’s psychological warfare may not always be pleasant, but the head-games played by Mamet remain magnetic, so skillfully constructed and executed that one relishes the opportunity to be duped. (NS)

X: THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES (1963)

This Roger Corman sci-fi flick stars Ray Milland as Dr. Xavier, whose experiments give him the special X-ray vision that he first uses to turn a suburban dance party into his own personal stag show, only to find himself reduced to plying his trade at a carny operated by Don Rickles. Finally, though, Xavier makes the trek to Vegas to use his creepy peepers to clean up at the tables, using perhaps the best method of outsmarting Sin City that the movies have ever come up with, since it doesn't require knowledge of advanced math or buying a suit for Dustin Hoffman. We eagerly await the day when some gifted film student has the brainstorm of doing, as his thesis project, a mash-up of this movie and Scorsese's Casino, so that the haunted Xavier can flee from Don Rickles only to find himself running into Don Rickles. How could Hell be any worse? (PN)

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

Contributors: Scott Von Doviak, Leonard Pierce, Nick Schager, Phil Nugent

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 20:00:00 GMT

President Obama is two weeks away from the end of his first 100 days as Commander-In-Chief, and it’s been a wild ride so far, what with all the pirates, puppies and Queen-touching...but naturally, the administration’s main focus has been moving heaven and earth to ensure that nothing will prevent Bank of America executives from receiving my tax money while they charge me 24% interest on my credit card debt, thus ensuring I’ll never be able to afford any of the hundreds of empty, overpriced luxury condos in my neighborhood...because, as we all know, if the day ever comes when bankers and real estate developers make less than a zillion percent profit every second of the day, no matter how badly or unethically they run their businesses, then the terrorists win! (Or something like that...frankly, I’m just happy gas isn’t four dollars a gallon anymore. Hooray, bad economy!)

Anyway, the point is, now that Bernie Madoff has all the world’s money buried in a treasure chest somewhere on Skull Island, Americans have finally realized that money can’t buy happiness, and at long last we’re no longer trying to keep up with the Joneses, but instead living within our means, valuing the simple pleasures of life and judging people on their character, rather than the size of their wallets or the labels on their clothes.

Nah, just kidding: in truth, we’re all still cheating on our taxes, begging for bailouts and building bigger and better Ponzi schemes, because in the words of Danny Devito’s crooked fence in David Mamet’s Heist, “Everybody needs money. That’s why they call it money.” And so, in that altruistic spirit, your pals here at the Screengrab hereby present our very own economic stimulus package: THE BEST & WORST GET RICH QUICK SCHEMES IN CINEMA HISTORY!

OFFICE SPACE (1999)

By the time Mike Judge’s half-brilliant Office Space gets around to its get-rich-quick scheme, its best moments are behind it. It starts out so well, with the story of a chronically bored office drone (Ron Livingston) who finds himself – after an accidental dose of post-hypnotic suggestion – completely incapable of giving a shit about his job. This is Office Space at its best, a note-perfect satire of cubicle life enlightened hugely by the appearance of a character who upends the whole idea of consequence and thus makes for some of the most viciously barbed gags of its day. Once it gets around to Livingston and his colleagues hatching a Superman III-inspired, computer-aided plan to steal millions by shaving half-pennies off of every transaction, it becomes more or less a goofy caper comedy, which, while well-executed, can’t hold a candle to its truly inspired first half. Still, as get-rich-quick schemes go, it’s a classic, and damned if it doesn’t almost work. (LP)

HEAT (1995)

Heat famously brought Al Pacino and Robert De Niro together on-screen – if only for one diner conversation and a climactic chase sequence – yet it’s Michael Mann’s direction that elevates this cat-and-mouse saga to near-greatness. The story revolves around the efforts of Pacino’s cop to catch De Niro’s crook, two kindred warriors on opposite sides of the law. Though this dynamic is, to put it mildly, hackneyed, Mann’s film is an energized, invigorated work that recalls Jean-Pierre Melville’s noirs, which also focused on peerlessly cool lawmen and thieves whose dedication to customs, habits and ethical codes leaves them isolated. As the criminal struggling to reconcile personal desires for happiness with instincts that warn against being something he’s not, De Niro delivers his last great performance. Pacino’s trademark quiet-screaming overacting and a few too many narrative diversions prove occasionally aggravating, but De Niro’s superb turn helps offset these slight missteps, as does the thrilling in-broad-daylight centerpiece robbery that cements Heat’s status in the pantheon of heist films. (NS)

OCEAN’S 11, 12, 13… (1960, 2001, etc.)

The original 1960 Ocean’s 11’s best get-rich quick scheme didn’t take place onscreen; it was the Rat Pack’s all night, every night ring-a-ding-ding showcase at the Sands while shooting the film on location in Las Vegas. Sure, knocking over five casinos during a blackout on New Year’s Eve has a certain flair to it, but there’s nothing like working 22 hours a day for six straight weeks to really fatten the wallet. In 2001, a Frat Pack led by George Clooney and Brad Pitt staged their own Vegas heist, lifting $150 million from the Bellagio vault with the help of a Chinese acrobat, a Cockney explosives expert mysteriously played by Don Cheadle, and the always indispensible Elliott Gould. The remake took in even more than $150 million at the box office, which led to two further get-rich-quick schemes: the winky, self-referential Ocean’s 12, a sort of spiritual cousin to The Cannonball Run II, and Ocean’s 13, which proved once again that the death knell of a franchise sounds a lot like Al Pacino yelling. (SVD)

THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE (1948)

Part of the point of John Huston's classic is that prospecting for gold isn't actually an easy or quick way to strike it rich at all, but once you've laid out for the tools and traveled all the way out into the middle of the Mexican desert and gotten used to the sight of Walter Huston jeering at you without his dentures, you're more than likely to stick with it until you've got something to show for it. After that, all you have to worry about is whether your paranoid, half-mad partner is going to be able to convince himself that you're plotting to steal his share of the "goods" so that he can feel justified in knocking you off and helping himself to your share. Whatever moral and practical defects can be found in Bogart's plan, it has to be said that he's a sage and a prince compared to the hippopotamus-toothed bandit played by the immortal Alfonso Bedoya, whose master plan involves decapitating Bogart and stealing his burros, after he's thrown away those saddlebags filled with the funny yellow powder that's weighing them down. (PN)

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Nick Schager, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

Ron Silver, 1946 - 2009

Phil Nugent — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 14:00:00 GMT

Ron Silver has died, at 62, after a two year battle with esophageal cancer. The living image of the "New York actor", Silver, was something of a specialist in fast-talking, saturnine cynics, an association that became even greater after he won a Tony Award for his semi-legendary performance as a Hollywood shark in David Mamet's 1988 Broadway hit Speed-the-Plow. Silver's performances in the Mamet play and in David Rabe's 1984 Hurlyburly--neither of which, sadly, he got to repeat on film--cemented his image as the great white way's modern notion of a successful movie industry sleazeball. Ironically, he never became the star in movies that he was onstage, but he had a long and healthy career in TV and movies anyway. After a barely detectable film debut in the unfunny underground comedy Tunnel Vision (1977) and a recurring role alongside a fellow Broadway baby on 1980's The Stockard Channing Show, Silver began to develop a name for himself in movies with his rambunctiously funny performances in the romantic comedies Best Friends (1982), in which he played, yes, a Hollywood producer, and Lovesick (1983), in which his character, a Hollywood star returning to his New York stage roots, gave him the chance to mock Al Pacino.

Throughout the rest of the decade, Silver would move freely from stage to TV to movie roles, including a starring role in Sidney Lumet's Garbo Talks (1984). His peak of national visibility probably came in 1989 and 1990, when he played Jerry Lewis's son in a multi-episode story arc of the cult series Wiseguy; gave the performance of his movie career as the lead in Paul Mazursky's superb movie version of Isaac Bashevis Singer's Enemies, a Love Story; stalked Jamie Lee Curtis as a deranged stockbroker turned serial gunman in Kathryn Bigelow's Blue Steel; starred as a leftish screenwriter navigating the 1950s blacklist era in the British TV film Fellow Traveller; and don a Groucho mustache to play Alan Dershowitz in counterpoint to Jeremy Irons's Oscar-winning turn as Claus von Bulow in Barbet Schroeder's torn-from-the-headlines Reversal of Fortune.

Though he continued to work steadily, his days of playing leads in theatrical features that people went to see receded behind him, and he began to enjoy his best opportunities in movies as a campy villain, in such movies as the Jean-Claude Van Damme picture Timecop (1994), where he confronted his younger self with a plea that he lay off the candy bars, and The Arrival (2006), where he got to deliver a speech explaining that global warming was part of a plan for an imminent extraterrestrial takeover of the Earth. (He parodied this side of his career in the famous Ben Stiller-directed, unaired TV pilot Heat Vision and Jack, in which he played a sinister character named Ron Silver whose acting career was a cover for his principal occupation of serving the conspiracy to install a New World Order.) He made his directing debut with the 1993 TV film Lifepod, a sci-fi variation on Hitchcock's Lifeboat. He returned to the courtroom to play Robert Shapiro in American Tragedy, a 2000 O. J. Simpson docudrama written by Norman Mailer, was hilarious as tennis hustler Bobby Riggs in the TV film When Billie Beat Bobby (2001), convincingly dogged as Angelo Dundee in Michael Mann's The Greatest biopic Ali (2001), and reunited with Lumet for Find Me Guilty (2006), yet another fact-based courtroom drama, for which he was upgraded from lawyer to judge.

Silver also had recurring or regular roles on the TV series Chicago Hope, Veronica's Closet, Skin, and The West Wing, where he played a political consultant who, over the course of the show, had a political conversion from left to right. Silver himself experienced his own sea change after September 11, 2001, and became a highly public proponent for his changed views, making the rounds of the TV talk shows, appearing at the 2004 Republican National Convention, and blogging for Pajamas Media. He also narrated FahrenHYPE 9/11 (a 2004 documentary response to Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, and co-directing, with Kevin Knoblock, the documentary Broken Promises: The United Nations at 60. His last performance was in the 2008 Distant Runners.

Reviews By Request: The Foot Fist Way (2006, Jody Hill)

Paul Clark — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 20:00:00 GMT

For the next three weeks, I’ll be reviewing three movies you requested in last week’s column. Polling for future Reviews By Request columns will begin again on January 30.

Over the past few decades, there has emerged in American popular culture something that can be called the “comedy of awkwardness.” In this style of comedy, which draws heavily from British humor, the comedy comes not merely from a character’s strange behavior, but also the discomfort their behavior causes. Often, in comedies of this sort, it’s the surrounding characters’ dumbfounded reactions that generate the most laughs. Comedy of awkwardness has become an integral part of some of the most popular and acclaimed sitcoms in this country like The Office and 30 Rock, and it’s begun making inroads into movies as well.

However, to successfully pull off the comedy of awkwardness, one must walk a thin line. To begin with, the character who generates the discomfort has to think he’s acting perfectly normally. If there’s any sense that this person is aware of how crazy he looks, the comedy is lost. In addition, the audience has to get a sense that the people who surround the crazy character acknowledge, if only to themselves, how strange his actions are. Jody Hill’s The Foot Fist Way gets only the first rule right, while ignoring the second altogether. So in spite of a fine and wholly committed performance by Danny McBride in the lead role, the film never takes off as comedy, coming off not so much funny as simply odd.

The Foot Fist Way focuses on the character of Fred Simmons (McBride), a boorish one-time tae kwon do champion-turned-small town instructor. Fred presides over his dojo with the authority of a drill sergeant, barking out orders and insisting that his students address him as “sir.” Meanwhile, Fred’s life begins to fall apart when he discovers that his wife cheated on him with the manager at her new job. Soon, Fred falls apart and becomes consumed with rage and grief, surely the last emotions one wants to see from a man who makes his living instructing people- children, even- how to fight. Fred discovers that his wife’s boss’ name is Mr. Fisher, and when he assumes that a student, also named Fisher, is the boss’ son, Fred decides to take out his rage on the boy, with predictable results.

But let’s look at that particular scene. A grown man beating the hell from a young boy is not inherently funny, but there are comic possibilities for such a scene if done right. Unfortunately, The Foot Fist Way doesn’t deliver. Hill shows McBride fighting the boy in long shot, but never takes the time to show us how the other characters in the scene feel about this. Just one well-timed reaction shot from a disbelieving onlooker could have salvaged some laughs, but that reaction shot never comes. The whole film is like that- plenty of promise, but very little end result. There are a few scenes that work, such as Fred’s misguided attempts to seduce a pretty female student or a weepy monologue in which he schools a young student in life’s harsh realities, but many more that don’t. By the time the story has become a mano a mano between Fred and karate movie superstar Chuck “The Truck” Wallace (played by the film’s co-writer, Ben Best), the movie’s comedic potential has long since been squandered.

It’s a shame, since McBride’s performance is really very good, in large part because he’s completely convincing in the role. I’ve never taken a martial arts class, but I can imagine that many of the instructors are more or less like Fred, attracted less to its traditions than to the power teaching gives them. Tae kwon do is rooted in self-discipline, but my guess is that most students sign up for martial arts so they can learn to fight, and when one is teaching people who are clearly weaker and less skilled, there can be a temptation to prove one’s superiority by cutting others down to size. In many ways, Fred is the flip side of Chiwetel Ejiofor’s character in David Mamet’s Redbelt, who is more of an old-school purist. Fred, on the other hand, enjoys being in control and doesn’t know any better way to go about it than by intimidating others, and McBride effortlessly projects the arrogance of a man who harbors no doubts whatsoever that he can kick your ass, while also showing occasional deference to those who are more powerful than he is. It makes perfect sense that when Fred’s wife tries to patch up their marriage, Fred insists on telling her, “I’m the stronger man, and you’re the weaker woman.” Although considering what a ringer she's already put him through, is he trying to convince her of this, or himself?

If nothing else, The Foot Fist Way should be remembered as that movie that introduced Hollywood to the brilliance of Danny McBride. McBride had previously appeared as the scene-stealing Bust-Ass in David Gordon Green’s All the Real Girls, but with this film, he quickly made fans of Will Ferrell and Judd Apatow, and has since been cast in such high-profile films as Pineapple Express, Tropic Thunder, and the upcoming big-screen version of Land of the Lost. But while McBride’s comic skills are undeniable, there are also moments in The Foot Fist Way that hint at darker undercurrents, leading me to think that he might become a fine character actor if given the chance. The Foot Fist Way isn’t much of a movie, but it announces McBride as a talent to watch.

Robert Prosky, 1930-2008

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Hollywood lost one of its most reliable stalwarts -- and the Screengrab lost one of its favorite character actor "That Guy!"s -- when Robert Prosky died Tuesday in a Washington, DC hospital from complications following heart surgery. He was 77 years old.

Probably best-known for his television work, especially as the dispatch sergeant who replaced Michael Conrad's Sgt. Esterhaus on Hill Street Blues, Prosky -- born Robert Prozuczek in Philadelpia -- also had a lively screen career and appeared in nearly three dozen big-screen productions, from Michael Mann's Thief to Tim Robbins' Dead Man Walking. Already in his fifties when he netted his first movie role, Prosky specialized in playing world-weary older men, from working-class fathers to judges. He had a light touch with character, and one of his most beloved film roles was as the Al-Lewis-like horror movie host Grandpa Fred in the cult hit Gremlins 2: The New Batch.

For all his work in film, though, Prosky was most closely identified with his work on stage, and it was the theater which he enjoyed the most. He appeared in over 200 stage productions, nearly half of them at the Arena Stage in his beloved hometown of Washington, D.C. Although he did a great deal of work elsewhere -- including, famously, originating the role of Shelly "The Machine" Levene in David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross -- he worked most of his life to support and raise the profile of the theater in Washington.

Screengrab Presents: The Worst Stage-To-Screen Adaptations Of All Time (Part Seven)

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 00:00:00 GMT

And now, the not so good...

A CHORUS LINE (1985)

I’m a theater geek from way back, and so I’ve always had a special place in my heart for A Chorus Line, that old warhorse musical tribute to the nameless show biz gypsies who sing and dance their hearts out not for money or fame but (to paraphrase the show’s unabashedly sincere lump-in-the-throat anthem) simply for the love of their art. And, really, what better way to pay tribute to that altruistic, egalitarian spirit than...um...a cynical vehicle for a non-singing, non-dancing movie star which pretty much banishes the musical’s main characters to, well, the chorus. Michael Douglas hogs the spotlight in a role played by an offstage voice in the stage version, while Sir Richard Attenborough (a director hardly known for intimate chamber dramas) eschews the original's claustrophobic stage door setting in favor of “opening up” the action, restlessly tracking Douglas around Manhattan while the songs and stories of the rest of the characters -- the people the show's about -- somehow keep winding up offscreen and ignored.

OLEANNA (1994)

I've had some disastrous first dates in my day, but it's hard to know what I was thinking when I chose the May 1992 premiere of David Mamet's incendiary exploration of sexual politics Oleanna at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass. as a means of wooing the cute blonde of my affections. In my defense, I hadn't heard much about the play when I bought the tickets; I think I was under the mistaken impression that it was about pirates. In fact, it's a calculated but highly effective outrage about a smug college professor who is stunned to be accused of sexual improprieties by a young female student he claims he was only trying to help with her studies. The play is designed to start arguments – it's either about sexual harassment or political correctness run wild, depending on your point of view – so it's not exactly primo first date fodder. (As it happens, it wasn't even my least successful date with this young lady, but let's not even go there.) It was undeniably riveting as a theatrical experience, however – William H. Macy and Rebecca Pidgeon, certainly the Mamet-est pairing imaginable, tore the house down. Two years later Mamet turned Oleanna into a movie, in the process giving no indication that he had any idea how or why it had worked in the first place. Pidgeon was gone, replaced by some nonentity named Debra Eisenstadt. Macy was still aboard, but given such a dull, flat adversary, his professor character now tilted too far to the monstrous side. Everything elliptical and ambiguous in the play had become blunt and obvious; there was no longer anything to argue about. Incidentally, Doubt shares these same problems, but at least it has a striking Meryl Streep performance. That's not to say I'm recommending it as a date movie.

ABOUT LAST NIGHT... (1986)

David Mamet's first big stage success, the 1974 Sexual Perversity in Chicago -- a hilariously cold-eyed and profane take on the mating rituals of young urban types in the age of singles bars, porno chic, and "serial monogamy" -- was a one-act that needed to be expanded on (i.e., padded out) to make its weight as a feature film, and by the time it was green-lighted, America was in the post-sexual revolution "age of AIDS" and newspapers, nervous about legal reprisals from the Reagan-Meese Department of Justice, were reluctant to even run ads with the original title. All of which would have presented a problem for filmmakers with a little integrity, as opposed to the makers of this Rob Lowe-Demi Moore vehicle, which bears less resemblance to any Mamet ever produced than a scaled-down, MTV-friendly St. Elmo's Fire II. The only one of the four main characters who retains some detectable link to his stage version is Lowe's male-chauvinist sidekick Bernie, who, as regrettably incarnated by Jim Belushi, is reduced to bellowing in the background of what's now a conventional young-spuds-in-love movie.

EQUUS (1977)

The British playwright Peter Schaffer is the Maxwell Anderson of our day, a mediocre dramatist who dresses up fancy, fraudulent conceits in fake-poetic language and palms it off as high theatrical art by invoking historical giants and Greek deities. The success of the current Broadway revival of his horse-god bullshit play Equus (starring Harry Potter and his naked pudder) is sad evidence that people can still be suckers for this stuff, though the work fared less well in its movie incarnation, which had the misfortune to be directed by a man -- that famous tough customer Sidney Lumet -- who actually seemed to think it was the literary masterpiece that it keeps screaming that it is. If Lumet had seen through this hunk of junk, he might have been so disrespectful as to try to turn it into a movie, the way John Huston did with Key Largo, the only film based on an Anderson text that remains watchable today. Instead, he was content to stick Richard Burton, fresh from his career-crowning performance in Exorcist II: The Heretic, facing the camera from within a sea of black, and have him hurtle through his monologues as if daring us not to be awed. The ideas he has come to set before us, poor Burton declaims, are "less than worthless; they are in fact subversive." Got it right the first time.

FOOL FOR LOVE (1985)

Burned out on Hollywood, Robert Altman spent most of the 1980s working on filmed plays. Some of these worked out a lot less well than others, but this mounting of what, at the time, was widely held as Sam Shepard's masterpiece as a playwright stands out partly for how perfect it sounds in theory and how thoroughly it goes splat in the execution. Altman employed Shepard to both do the screenplay and star as Eddie, the cowpoke who's meant to have an untamed, fiery, yet sporadic relationship with May (Kim Basinger), who may be his half-sister. But in altering the text of his play (which takes place entirely in a motel room) so that the action rolls all around the motel complex and adjoining highway, Shepard inadvertently revealed how silly the material could be made to seem without the tension produced by two actors going head to head in a tight, enclosed space. And by casting Shepard in the difficult leading role, Altman inadvertently revealed his limitations as a film actor: the poor guy wrote his own part, yet he has trouble keeping up with Kim Basinger.

THE FUGITIVE KIND (1959)

After A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams was understandably eager to write another role for Marlon Brando, and he was also keen to see Brando paired with Anna Magnani, the Italian powerhouse who had enjoyed a great success in the movie version of Williams' play The Rose Tattoo. Sadly, the only time that Brando and Williams did team up again was for this version of Williams' play Orpheus Descending, which all too perfectly captures the playwright's florid, self-parodic side. The opening, with Brando, as Val Xavier (Williams' notion of a modern Orpheus as a tortured blues-playing Adonis with a guitar and a snakeskin jacket) seen alone on screen as he faces the bar of justice hits the wall as soon as it opens out into a grotesque and unbelievable world -- and as Brando has his first scenes with Magnani: not until Godzilla met Megalon would the screen see such chemistry in action. Also doing their reputations no favors are Joanne Woodward in a misguided attempt by a likably grounded, naturalistic actress to enter the pantheon of the movies' all-time great weirdos, and Victor Jory as a rich cracker so rotten that Cape Fear's Max Cady would report him to the Neighborhood Watch Program.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 20:00:00 GMT

In the summertime, studios roll out their big budget cinematic adaptations of the hottest comic books, video games and Pez dispensers, but as the kids trudge off to the hallowed halls of academe (and then later return home for the holidays with their heads full o’ book learnin’), Hollywood gets all classy for a second and does its best to lure us away from actual theaters and libraries with big screen versions of all the hot Broadway plays we couldn’t get tickets for and all the literary classics we never quite got around to reading.

The Screengrab Book Club is already loading up on barbiturates in preparation for our field trip to the Titanic road show version of novelist Richard Yates' dour de force Revolutionary Road, but THIS week the play’s the thing as Doubt and Frost/Nixon open wide, dangling their multiple Tony awards and nominations like so much Oscar bait.

Yet, while it’s true that some of filmdom's greatest movies have greasepaint in their DNA (like Casablanca which, according to resident dramaturg, Paul Clark, was based on a play that never quite made it to opening night), there’s an equally long list of productions that somehow went rotten like Denmark in the tricky transition from footlights to klieg lights...

...prompting your internet pals down here in the cheap seats to put aside our Playbills for a moment and pay tribute to THE BEST (AND WORST) STAGE-TO-SCREEN ADAPTATIONS OF ALL TIME!

HAIR (1979)

Oh, sure, I know what you’re thinking: everybody hates hippies. But me, I was only a baby when the REAL flower children walked the Earth, dropping brown acid, failing to bathe and tripping out to six hour Grateful Dead guitar solos. And sure, by the time I was old enough to mythologize Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, most of the Woodstock Generation had either overdosed or transformed into hateful Regan Democrats or politically correct fascists. So in a way, Hair has always been my Camelot: an idealistic, romanticized fictionalization of an era that sounds good in theory but was kind of a drag to actually live through. I was a prepubescent tot when my parents took me to a fantastic, anarchic live production of the show with a cast that stripped right down to their bushy pubes at the end of the first act and brought the audience up on stage to dance around with them at the end of the second: easily one of the best experiences I’ve ever had in a theater (or anywhere else, for that matter). And, yes, live rock combined with real live nudes is a pretty tough hand to beat...yet Milos Forman did an admirable job translating the experience to celluloid a few years later with an adaptation that combined the energy and catchy pop-rock score of the stage show with a relatively coherent storyline, a bunch of loose-limbed Twyla Tharp choreography and some big budget frills no theatrical production could ever hope to match, like a cast-of-thousands production number on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. and a memorable money shot of Beverly D’Angelo’s naked boobies. The Age of Aquarius RULES!!!!

GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS (1992)

Pay attention to me now because you wanna what? You wanna make a real fuckin' movie out of Glengarry Glen Ross, a movie with brass balls, not some pussified Masterpiece Theater bullshit. What does it take to make that movie? It takes ABFAM to make that movie! A for Al, as in Pacino, as in his only performance in the past 20 years that's worth a shit, where he isn't just yelling all the time like he lost his fuckin' hearing aid. B is for Baldwin, as in one of the great five-minute performances in movie history. You're in, you're out, bada bing. F is for fuck, which we say a lot, but also for Foley, as in director James Foley, who doesn't try to "open the play up" with some flashback about how Ricky Roma's dad was mean to him or any of that Hollywood shit. A little moody lighting, a jazzy James Newton Howard score, and a fistful of talented actors, that's all you need. That brings us to another A, and that's for Alan Arkin, not to mention A-listers Ed Harris and Kevin Spacey before he went all gooey on us. Now that's a hell of a cast, and I'll even let you get away with Jack Lemmon if he lays off the heart-tugging crap once in a while. Finally you got M for Mamet in his prime – a maestro composing a profane symphony from the bitter grievances of loser salesmen and the greasy machismo of the winners – and not some half-assed parody like you're reading right now.

THE PHILADELPHIA STORY (1940)

In truth, I never hear of the two Philip Barry plays George Cukor filmed (1938's Holiday and this) being revived in the theater much, and there's good reason for that. It's hard to top Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn, for one thing; more pertinently, if cruelly, the plays simply aren't that good. Holiday is all downhill after the first hour, and Philadelphia similarly tends to collapse into sogginess whenever Hepburn has a nervous breakdown; humanism becomes bad melodrama. But there's much greatness here, almost enough to justify the film's high reputation: the social tete-a-tetes, of course, Grant's opening assault on Hepburn, and the rare, to-be-savored interaction of Grant and Jimmy Stewart. In the clip above, a drunken Stewart trades banter with (and somehow almost holds his own against) a sober Grant; filming good theater, Cukor doesn't push the pacing much, allowing much time for "business" just for its own delightful sake.

ORDET (1955)

If you watch the opening titles of Carl Th. Dreyer's Ordet, you will see only one person credited -- not Dreyer or any of the cast members, but Kaj Munk, who penned the passion play on which the film is based. This deference Dreyer shows to Munk here is important, since few adaptations of plays respect their source material more than Ordet does. In bringing the drama to the screen, Dreyer employs next to none of the traditional devices that are generally used to "open up" a play -- most of the action takes place inside of two neighboring houses, few extras are seen, and characters can sometimes be seen looking at offscreen action, much like they would on the stage, without a cutaway to what they're seeing. Yet at the same time, Ordet is always completely cinematic, using the resources of film less to enlarge the film's world than to observe it in keen, precise detail. If Ordet is deliberately paced, that's because Dreyer takes the time to burrow deeply into his characters' lives and the community in which they live. In the hands of a less capable director, Kaj Munk's play would come off as shameless and more than a little preachy, especially considering how the story ends. But with Dreyer's serenely confident direction, Ordet creates a hushed atmosphere that infuriates most audiences but which will enthrall more patient viewers. And it's this hush that's key to the movie's greatness, creating a world with plenty of empty spiritual space just waiting to be filled. It's only because Dreyer's direction has created a world in which the possibility of grace is very real that the film's final scene has the impact it has.

CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT (AKA FALSTAFF) (1965)

As far as adaptations go, Orson Welles' Chimes at Midnight is an interesting case. All the dialogue comes right out of Shakespeare, but the structure of the film comes from Welles' production "Five Kings." No matter -- Chimes is a great Shakespeare movie, the dramatic saga of the portly knight that the Bard never got around to writing. Aside from the comic romp The Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff was largely a supporting player, yet he became one of Shakespeare's most enduring and beloved characters, and Chimes at Midnight perfectly encapsulates why. A far cry from the noble rulers in whose orbit he circled, Falstaff was a knight gone to seed -- fat, dissolute, always in debt, with a weakness for women and the drink. But then, this was what makes him so relatable to the groundlings -- after all, it's difficult to empathize with the troubles of ruling a sovereign nation, but easy to identify with being low on cash. In addition, the more expansive nature of the cinematic medium allowed Welles to mount a battle scene, all the better to show Falstaff packed into a suit of armor, wandering aimlessly at the rear of the battle, the polar opposite of the valiant knights of legend. But while Falstaff sometimes came off as a figure of fun in Shakespeare, Welles' choice to shift the focus from the kings to Falstaff himself works to give the character nobility in his own right. Welles' performance helps immeasurably -- he's such a life force that you can understand why those in his life love him and forgive him his trespasses. The shift in focus pays off most profoundly in the end once his old companion Prince Hal, now Henry V, has assumed the throne. In the original, this scene marks the new king's putting aside his old, innocuous ways. But by seeing the action through Falstaff's eyes, Henry's cold proclamation, "I know thee not, old man," becomes heartbreaking. It's easy to understand why Henry snubs his old friend, but still -- Falstaff really deserved better.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Vadim Rizov, Paul Clark

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 23:00:00 GMT

And now, the war films that didn't quite make our official Top 25...

HONORABLE MENTION

LAND AND FREEDOM (1995)

Land and Freedom is Ken Loach at his most unabashedly leftist and over-earnest, but by Jove it is enjoyable! It certainly helps that unlike many other Ken Loach films, Land and Freedom is not set among pale, pudgy and poorly nourished people in some post-industrial British shithole. Well, it may start and end there, but no mind, that isn't what you will remember. The story quickly whisks you off to the heady days of the Spanish Civil War. A young English Socialist goes to Spain to fight the good fight and finds himself chanting "¡No Pasarán!" among the Catalonian hills amid leftist in-fighting galore, and plenty of sexy comrades who believe in free love. As icing on the cake, Ian Hart plays our hero (you may remember him as a young John Lennon in Back Beat — if you swing that way. No one does sullen English working class desperation with quite the same verve.

HAMBURGER HILL (1987)

This movie, directed by the British John Irvin from a script by James Carabatsos, who served with the First Air Calvary Division in Vietnam, is the plainest and most direct of all the 'Nam movies. It introduces you to the guys in a U.S. Army battalion and then documents the ten days they spend trying to carry out their orders to take an occupied hill that affords them minimal cover from the fire raining down. Although Hill shows some of the soldiers complaining about how unappreciated their efforts are back home, the film has no real political statement to make and no larger messages about the nature of warfare aside from the obvious ones, principally that the war looks a lot different to the officers who are off somewhere deciding which orders to give than it does to the guys on the ground who are staring up at the building about to collapse on top of them, and dying for a decision that makes no sense to you sucks. A lot of Vietnam movies have been made with the stated aim of providing a requiem for the people lost in that war; of all of them, this one gets that job done with the least fuss and confusion.

THE STEEL HELMET (1951)

This was the first war film written and directed by Samuel Fuller, a World War II infantryman who would later tell interviewers how proud he was when a military representative complained to him that his movies would have no value as recruiting tools. Like his follow-up film, Fixed Bayonets, it's a Korean War picture that serves as a showcase for Gene Barry, a big, brusque galoot with a beady-eyed, unshaven mug who Fuller judged to be the ideal actor to play a grunt. (Suggestions from one studio that they enlarge the budget and try to reel in John Wayne sent Fuller swooning in horror.) With its garage-sale props, pissed-off acting, and quick bursts of chaotic action, it perfectly represents the mixture of cartoon, off-Broadway theater, whirligig violence and real anger that struck Fuller as the appropriate response to war. Spielberg later paid homage to the movie in the second Indiana Jones picture by giving Indy's child sidekick the same name (Short Round) that Fuller gave to the Korean kid who attaches himself to his hero.

WAG THE DOG (1997)

If you think this comedy about a political spin specialist (Robert De Niro) and a Hollywood producer (Dustin Hoffman, doing his patented Robert Evans impression) helping to deflect attention from a presidential sex scandal by stirring up public support for an attack on Albania isn't really a war movie, what channel have you been watching? At the time of its release, just as the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal was breaking, the movie seemed prescient, but David Mamet's script borrowed its basic idea from a novel, American Hero by Larry Beinhart, in which the president was George H. W. Bush and the phony war was the 1991 attack on Iraq; the novel depicted real-life Republican slimeball Lee Atwater literally handing over the worked-out plans for the war and its likely effect on the president's approval rating on his death bed, along with the advice -- which the White House failed to heed -- that George not get overexcited and be sure to save the plan until closer to the 1992 election so that it would do him some good. Mamet and company may have cost the project some of its edge by making it about a fictional president and a fictional war, thus rendering it more "universal." On the plus side, they did give us the image of Willie Nelson, hard at work on his new novelty propaganda song, trying his damndest to think up a rhyme for "Albania."

UNDER FIRE (1982) & WELCOME TO SARAJEVO (1997)

These two movies are both about white English-speaking reporters trying to cover violent trouble spots in remote corners of the world while having to grapple with their ethics about playing nonjudgemental observers of the horrors going on in front of their noses. (Oliver Stone's Salvador is in a similar mold except that James Woods' Richard Boyle, who by most official professional standards has the loosest ethics of any reporter imaginable, is so sure he knows what's right and what's wrong that he isn't troubled about a thing.) In Under Fire, the setting is Nicaragua in the days leading up to the Sandinista revolution in 1979. The hero, a photographer played by Nick Nolte, agrees to help the rebels keep up morale by faking a photo "proving" that their dead leader is still alive. The politics of the movie flew in the face of the Reagan administration's policy that the Sandinista government was unacceptable and needed to be taken down by proxy warriors. The movie was, accordingly, buried, but the director, Roger Spottiswoode, and the writer, Ron Shelton, manage to achieve a clear-eyed view of all the competing forces propping up the Somoza dictatorship or trying to bring it down, including a fun-loving psycho of a professional mercenary (Ed Harris), a mysteriously well-connected Frenchman played by Jean-Louis Trintignant, and Richard Masur as Somoza's mealy-mouthed American flack, who's trying to turn things around with media spin while Somoza's soldiers are shooting down people in the street. In Michael Winterbottom's Welcome to Sarajevo, which is set during the conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovia (and which was shot on location there while the ruins were still smoking), Stephen Dillane plays a British journalist who weighs the pros and cons of adopting a little girl and smuggling her out of the country. Challenging and involving, the movie is also blessed by one of Woody Harrelson's most entertaining wild man turns as a well-respected establishment TV journalist whose off-camera behavior in the field is pure double-live gonzo.

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

Contributors: Sarah Sundberg, Phil Nugent

DVD Roundup for August 26, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week’s bumper crop of Westerns necessitates a temporary name change for this column.

DVD of the Week: 1962’s How the West Was Won may not have been the greatest classic Western ever made, but it was almost certainly the biggest, boasting three directors (Henry Hathaway, John Ford, and George Marshall) and an all-star cast (led by John Wayne, Henry Fonda, James Stewart, Gregory Peck, Debbie Reynolds, and Richard Widmark) to tell a Western family saga spanning half a century. In addition, the film boasting some stunning Western vistas designed to fully exploit the three-screen Cinerama process- this was one of only two narrative features to be exhibited using honest-to-goodness Cinerama. The biggest advantage of this week’s new Ultimate Collector’s Edition (Warner, also Blu-Ray) of the film is that it comes closer than any DVD edition to date to replicating the look of Cinerama in digital form. Instead of the “join lines” and standard 2.35:1 ‘Scope framing of previous editions, this new edition of the film features a new technology that effectively unifies the three Cinerama frames into the original aspect ratio of 2.89:1. There are also a number of special features, notably the 2002 documentary Cinerama Adventure that explores the famed camera process, as well as a trailer, archival featurette, audio commentary, and plenty of collectible memorabilia about the film and its stars. Nothing will be quite like watching How the West Was Won in Cinerama, but this new edition makes the home viewing experience better than ever.

In other oater news, this week also brings the Warner Home Video Western Classics Collection, which includes the 1960 remake Cimarron, Escape From Fort Bravo, Many Rivers to Cross, Saddle the Wind, The Law and Jake Wade, and The Stalking Moon, with each film also sold individually. In addition, Warner is also releasing the Errol Flynn Westerns Box Set (Warner), which contains Montana, Rocky Mountain, San Antonio, and Virginia City. And don’t overlook the Blu-Ray only release of Clint Eastwood’s Pale Rider (Warner).

Meanwhile, this week’s recent releases coming to DVD include: Cameron Diaz and Ashton Kutcher in What Happens in Vegas (Fox, also Blu-Ray); David Mamet MMA drama Redbelt (Sony, also Blu-Ray); the acclaimed documentary Chicago 10 (Paramount), Lynch (Ryko Entertainment), a documentary about the ever-popular David Lynch; Uwe Boll’s must-see Postal (Universal Music & Video Distribution), costarring former DVD Digest contributor David Huddleston; and the latest release from our pals at Benten Films, Team Picture.

Other classics coming to DVD this week include: a new pressing of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s notorious final film Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom (Criterion); the Henry Selick-directed The Nightmare Before Christmas Collector’s Edition (Disney); Jeunet and Caro’s Delicatessen Special Edition (First Look); and Monica Bellucci’s nude body transforming into a rolling landscape for your enjoyment in Brotherhood of the Wolf: Director’s Cut (Universal).

In TV on DVD, there’s Entourage Season 4 (HBO), Everybody Hates Chris Season 3 (Warner), Heroes Season 2 (Universal, also Blu-Ray), NCIS Season 5 (Paramount), and The Shield Season 6 (Sony).

Finally, this week’s action-packed lineup of Blu-Ray only releases includes: Errol Flynn (again) in The Adventures of Robin Hood (Warner); Gov. Schwarzenegger fighting Satan in End of Days (Universal); the first season of NBC’s Heroes (Universal); Crockett and Tubbs hitting the big screen in Michael Mann’s Miami Vice (Universal), and the submarine thriller U-571 (Universal).

The Top 20 Movies About Movies (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 20:00:00 GMT

According to conventional Hollywood wisdom (which, of course, is never wrong), movies about the moviemaking process are bad box office bets, since the subject is far too esoteric for mainstream audiences, too “inside” for Joe Multiplex. Never mind that Americans are obsessed with pop culture, with every other person in the nation either writing a screenplay, uploading their own mini-masterpieces to YouTube and/or tracking box office returns, buzzworthy coming attractions and day-to-day movie star minutiae in every form of media from Entertainment Tonight and our own humble website to CNN and Cigar Aficionado magazine. And never mind the fact that movies about movies are just as likely to succeed (Get Shorty, The Blair Witch Project...yes, The Blair Witch Project! They were making a movie, remember?) or fail (that awful Alec Baldwin/John Cusack movie I rented a few months ago about a fake movie financed by the FBI...ugh) as any other genre.

Naturally, as film geeks, we here at The Screengrab have always had a special place in our black little hearts for stories about the high-powered moguls and desperate hustlers drawn like doomed moths to the lights, cameras and especially action of the Dream Factory (in all its forms).

Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll be rushing out to see Ben Stiller’s latest comedy (about a group of spoiled actors who start off shooting a war film and wind up in a real shooting war), but the release of Tropic Thunder does give us a chance to reflect on past favorites from our favorite post-modern genre: movies about movies!

AMERICAN MOVIE (1999)

As Spinal Tap is to rock and roll, so American Movie is to the world of low-budget independent filmmaking. Detailing working class Wisconsinite Mark Borchardt's failed attempts to launch production of his dream project Northwestern and subsequent determination to complete the 35-minute horror film Coven, Movie is both hilarious and thoroughly moving. The pitfalls of no-budget filmmaking provide some of the most uproarious moments, such as a Coven scene in which Borchardt's character shoves his support group sponsor's head through a non-breakaway cabinet door, but the film's surprising emotional depth derives from Borchardt's relationships with his family and friends, including gentle burnout Mike Schank and the increasingly decrepit and fatalistic Uncle Bill. Schank's maniacal screeching during a sound effects dubbing session and Uncle Bill's repeated attempts to nail his single line of dialogue leave some doubt as to whether Borchardt will be able to pull off his project, but the finished product reveals flashes of wit and an eye for the sort of harsh, gloomy compositions he professes to admire (as well as some admittedly Ed Wood-level writing and acting). Last time we checked, Borchardt was still hoping to make Northwestern, but even if he never pulls it off, the essence of that dream project informs this documentary, investing it with an indomitable spirit and passion for life.

STATE AND MAIN (2000)

When David Mamet set his poison pen to a Hollywood satire, the result was far from the scathing warts-and-all expose one might expect from the author of Glengarry Glenn Ross. Instead, State and Main is a frothy, good-natured screwball comedy pitting the cast and crew of what appears to be an earnest period melodrama, The Old Mill, against the residents of their filming location, the quintessentially picturesque New England town of Waterford, Vermont. William H. Macy is the exasperated director, Alec Baldwin is the leading man with a weakness for underage girls, and Philip Seymour Hoffman is the screenwriter forced to rewrite his script when it turns out Waterford doesn't have an old mill after all. The usual course of events would have the simple but good-hearted natives teaching the soulless Hollywood invaders a lesson or two about small town values, but that's not what Mamet is up to here. He knows media-saturated America has reached the point where everyone's a show biz insider; thus a scraggly pair of diner denizens chew over Variety's weekend box office figures while the cook ponders the trajectory of Warner Bros. stock since 1985. Locals and La-La-landers alike get their fair share of jabs, but the tone is generally more affectionate than condescending or malicious.

THE STUNT MAN (1980)

Richard Rush's kinetic action comedy -- in which a possibly crazy Vietnam vet (Steve Railsback) on the run from the law takes refuge among the crew on a location film shoot and discovers that, compared to a bunch of Hollywood professionals, he doesn't know from craziness -- features maybe the greatest depiction of a big-time movie director ever caught on film: Peter O'Toole as Eli Cross, a megalomaniac and a madman but not a bad guy. Eli, who's trying to keep the people working under him simultaneously entertained and cowed while doing whatever he can think of to inject some purifying "madness" into the stock World War I movie he's shooting, makes his entrance in a helicopter and is often perched seated on a crane, so that he can dip into the frame from on high; "If God could do the tricks we can do," he cackles, "He'd be a happy man!" As Rush's reward for having made one of the best movies about moviemaking, he got to watch as his picture became semi-legendary for the efforts of the studio to declare it unreleasable despite fawning reviews and solid business when they booked it into a West Coast theater for a weekend just to prove that it would bomb.

THE BIG PICTURE (1989)

This was the first feature film directed by Christopher Guest, but it's not a "mockumentary"; it's a scripted comedy starring Kevin Bacon as an eager, idealistic young director whose award-winning short film gets him snatched up by a big studio, which promises him carte blanche to make his first real movie. He goes straight into the shredder head first. Far superior to Guest's more recent For Your Consideration, it features a stellar rogue's gallery of Hollywood phonies, including J. T. Walsh and Tracy Brooks Swope as revolving-door studio heads, Teri Hatcher as a starlet looking for the right shark to hook onto, Jennifer Jason Leigh as a confused young would-be artist, and most amazing of all, Martin Short as a scumbag agent. With his frizzy 'do and lying eyes, he looks like a Hobbit who found the One Ring and pawned it for a ticket to L.A.

Click Here for Part Two, Part Three, Part Four & Part Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

DVD Digest for July 29, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 14:00:00 GMT

As we get ready to tear into the dog days of summer, this week brings a number of great new DVDs to help you beat the heat.

DVDs of the Week: In a banner week for culty fare, I would like to spotlight two especially noteworthy new DVD releases. First is the long-awaited release of Alex Proyas’ director’s cut of Dark City (Warner, also Blu-Ray). A flop on its original release, Dark City has in the intervening years become something of a cult film, its critical reputation salvaged in part by the ongoing support of Roger Ebert, who memorably chose it as his #1 film of 1998. With this director’s cut, Proyas has added more than ten minutes of footage to an already compelling original, in addition to making other noticeable changes (not least, dropping the introductory voiceover that was present in the theatrical cut). In addition to the original disc’s commentaries by the filmmakers and Ebert, the new edition includes two new featurettes, a review of the film by Neil Gaiman, and a number of other features. Most double-dips and “director’s cuts” are largely marketing department bluster, but Dark City should prove to be worth the upgrade.

My other pick this week is Peter Watkins’ Privilege (New Yorker), a movie which as some of you might recall I loved so much I kind of want to marry it. At the time I originally saw the film, I had no inkling that it would be released on DVD, as for years it had been unavailable in any home-viewing format, and was only available to theatrical venues in a single print. So if you’ve been waiting eagerly to see Privilege- and Lord knows you should have been- your day has finally arrived. New Yorker’s DVD is light on special features, but you know what? It doesn’t matter. That it’s available is cause enough for celebration, and should lead to the film becoming the cult classic it so richly deserves to be.

Other classics coming this week to DVD include the Tyrone Power Matinee Idol Collection (Fox, includes 10 feature films) and WarGames: 25th Anniversary Edition (MGM).

As for recent releases, you know it’s a good week when the release of a Martin Scorsese film on DVD isn’t the biggest story. Nevertheless, it’s still nice to have Scorsese’s Stones doc Shine a Light (Paramount, also Blu-Ray) available, even if it can’t match the spectacle of seeing the film in IMAX. Other recent releases coming to DVD include: the stoner sequel Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay (New Line, also Blu-Ray); Owen Wilson in Drillbit Taylor (Universal, also Blu-Ray); the famously Oscar-snubbed Israeli crowdpleaser The Band’s Visit (Sony); Doug Pray’s documentary Surfwise (Magnolia); the year’s non-Mamet MMA drama Never Back Down (Summit); the postapocalyptic actioner Doomsday (Universal, also Blu-Ray). Also, three direct-to-DVD sequels: Lost Boys: The Tribe (Warner, also Blu-Ray), WarGames: The Dead Code (MGM), and Stargate: Continuum (MGM, also Blu-Ray).

This week’s TV on DVD releases include: Centennial: The Complete Series (Universal); Law & Order: Special Victims Unit Season 7 (Universal); and Witchblade: The Complete Series (Warner). This week also brings the release of Masters of Horror Season 2 (Anchor Bay), and while many of the installments are of dubious quality, at least the box set can boast this week’s coolest packaging.

Finally, Blu-Ray only releases this week include the Paramount’s Jack Ryan tetralogy of The Hunt for Red October, Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger, and The Sum of All Fears. Also of note: Beowulf: The Director’s Cut (Paramount); Top Gun (Paramount); The Lost Boys (Warner); and Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle (New Line).

Screengrab Pub Crawl: The Top 15 Bars of Cinema (Part 2)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 29 May 2008 20:30:00 GMT

BOB’S COUNTRY BUNKER, THE BLUES BROTHERS (1980)

I’m not exactly sure where Bob’s Country Bunker is supposed to be. I lived in Chicago for 15 years, and there’s no place in the city even remotely that rowdy – not even on the South Side. The closest we got was the Hideout, and even they managed to keep the boisterous crowd placated without the aid of chicken wire. But if I’d ever managed to find Bob’s Country Bunker, I would have spent every night there, especially if it meant getting to see the Good Ol’ Blues Brothers Boys Band play dubiously down-home versions of “Rawhide” and “Stand By Your Man”. Bob’s Country Bunker may not have been the best place to play – their willingness to cut off the power of anyone without enough Hank Williams songs in their repertoire and their stingy no-comped-drinks-for-the-band policy can’t have made them many friends – but the mood was infectious, the waitstaff was brave even in the face of hundreds of pounds of flying broken glass, and the atmosphere was just perfect, all Nudie suits and unironic trucker hats. Plus, they had both kinds of music – country and western!

THE CHINK’S, GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS (1992)

Another bar I never managed to track down in Chicago was the impolitically named Chink’s. (It had to be in Chicago, because everything David Mamet does takes place there, even when it’s explicitly stated that it doesn’t.) But maybe it’s for the best; it didn’t look like the most relaxing place in the world. Oh, sure, it was a quiet little dive with cheap tiki drinks, and the Chink made a mean egg roll, and the décor was decent enough – all mail-order-catalog Chinese and whorehouse-red light bulbs. It was the kind of people you met that would stress you out: let’s say you just go in for a nice cocktail to beat the murderous heat, as did Jonathan Pryce’s helpless James Lingk. The next thing you know, some desperate, flop-sweating real estate salesman, like Al Pacino’s Ricky Roma, has sat down next to you, given you some borderline terrifying spiel about how he sometimes takes a massive shit that feels like sleeping for twelve hours, and before he even finishes telling you it’s okay to fuck little girls, you’ve agreed to buy some overpriced condo in Arizona somewhere. Nope, a man can’t relax in a place like that...

...so instead, we’ll am-scray outta Big Windy and bar hop Back East to...

TONY’S PLACE, MEAN STREETS (1973)

Arriving for the night's festivities at the crimson-tinted neighborhood dive where he and all his buddies hang out, Robert De Niro makes a phenomenal entrance, with "Jumpin' Jack Flash" playing as he glides along the length of the bar in slow motion to meet the best friend (Harvey Keitel) whose face registers his approach as if it were a death sentence. Soon De Niro and Keitel are adjourning to the back room for a two-man improvisational jam session in which the English language gets slapped around a little, which barely prepares the viewer for the confrontations to come: between a punk on the make (Robert Carradine) and a target he corners in the men's room (David Carradine), between a returned military veteran (Harry Northrup) and his demons, and finally between De Niro's Johnny Boy and the affronted loan shark Michael (Richard Romanus), who has to deal with Johnny Boy's amused disbelief that Michael could have ever seriously imagined that he was ever going to get his loan repaid. The movie also features a visit to a rival joint, a pool haul where the guys get into the movie's famous brawl choreographed to "Please Mr. Postman," which feels like Our Gang hijinx compared to what goes on at the home front. It's about as good a vision as any movie's ever offered of a bunch of guys trying desperately to enjoy themselves in Hell...

...not unlike the Greenwich Village denizens of the next stop on our tour...

HARRY’S BAR, THE ICEMAN COMETH (1973)

Harry Hope's waterfront bar in The Iceman Cometh is the anti-Cheers, a place where all the regulars know each others' names, and have got each others' numbers, to boot. They're really regular, too; most of them haven't left the premises in ages, not even just to stick their heads out the door to confirm that the sky is still blue. These desperate lost souls are so hard up for some diversion that all they've got to look forward to is the semi-annual arrival of their favorite drunken traveling salesman, Hickey (played in the 1960 movie version by Jason Robards, in 1973 by Lee Marvin and later on stage by Kevin Spacey), in the hopes that maybe this time his dirty jokes will have funny endings. Woe to them, Hickey has just murdered his wife and is so impressed with himself for having finally taken an active approach to dealing with his problems that he wants to make all his washed-up friends shave, change their socks, and get back out into the world. Luckily, in his big monologue, Hickey reveals that he may have had less than pure motives for throttling the Missus and is hauled off by the cops, and Harry and company, relieved to discover that they've just been humoring a psycho, can return to their daily routine of talking about how they're going to turn their lives around the day after tomorrow, just as soon as they drain this keg. If the story were set in the present day, Hickey would be given his own daytime TV series and released into the custody of Oprah.

TREES LOUNGE, TREES LOUNGE (1996)

But don’t let all the big city neuroses and overpriced drinks get you down. Just a short stagger from Manhattan in neighboring Long Island, you’ll find a slightly less depressing breed of barfly whiling away the hours at Trees Lounge, the neighborhood haunt of Steve Buscemi’s hangdog hero Tommy Basilio in the beloved character actor’s writing/directing debut. This semi-autobiographical tale unspools in a parallel universe where Buscemi never got serious about the acting thing, but instead spent his entire life in the self-loathing stupor that defined his early twenties, driving an ice cream truck and bedding inappropriate women like Daniel Baldwin’s teenage daughter, Debbie (played by Chloë Sevigny in a wise-child performance we somehow forgot to mention in last week’s Jailbait Sweet 16). Yet, while sometimes grim, Buscemi’s gin-soaked world is never hopeless, thanks to healthy shots of gallows humor, a great soundtrack on the jukebox and a who’s-who of top-notch indie drinking companions like Debi Mazar, Mark Boone Junior, Rockets Redglare, Eszter Balint, Seymour Cassel, Kevin Corrigan and Samuel L. Jackson.

Who’s up for another round? The night is still young and Screengrab’s buying as the Pub Crawl continues through Boston, Europe and beyond in Part 3!

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent

Indie Box-Office Roundup: Weekend of May 2-4, 2008

Paul Clark — Wed, 07 May 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Sometimes, the headlines just write themselves. A stronger-willed writer than I might be able to resist, but alas, I can’t. So I might as well give in. Here goes: “It’s Lonely at the top.” That’s right, this week’s top indie per-screen average is Harmony Korine’s latest effort, Mister Lonely (IFC Films), which brought in a mighty $16,769 in its single-screen showing at the IFC Center in New York City. Some of the credit should go to the infamous auteur/enfant terrible, but don’t discount the eclectic cast (Diego Luna, Samantha Morton, Werner Herzog), or the unique hook (a commune full of celebrity impersonators). All of these factors practically confer cult status on the film right off the bat, which never hurts a movie’s chances at the Indie Box Office. What remains to be seen is what kind of legs the movie will have outside of NYC.

But while many prognosticators pegged this as a slow weekend at the indie box office due to the release of Iron Man, several other films played to strong business, with a total of four taking upwards of $10,000 per screen. Debuts of note were the festival hit Son of Rambow (Paramount Vantage) and David Mamet’s mixed martial arts film (still feels weird to type that) Redbelt (Sony Pictures Classics), which ran almost neck and neck for third and fourth place, respectively, behind the weekend’s top holdover, Claude Lelouch's Roman de Gare (IDP/Samuel Goldwyn). Rounding out the top 5 was another debut, the French sexploitation-inflected drama Viva (Vagrant Films).

Also worth mentioning is the continued presence on the chart of Tom McCarthy’s The Visitor (Overture Films), which expanded its release again, this time to 130 screens, while residing comfortably here at #8. The film has brought in more than $1.5 million to date, and with its strong word of mouth it doesn’t show signs of letting up.

Finally, I feel compelled to mention the box-office take for the Kentucky Derby documentary First Saturday in May (Truly Indie), which expanded its release to seven screens just in time for this weekend’s Run for the Roses. However, the timeliness of the expansion failed to goose business, as it brought in a meager $572 per screen average.

Top 10: Weekend of May 2-4, 2008:
1. Mister Lonely [IFC Films] ($16,769 per screen)
2. Roman De Gare [IDP/Samuel Goldwyn Films] ($11,267)
3. Son Of Rambow [Paramount Vantage] ($10,758)
4. Redbelt [Sony Pictures Classics] ($10,560)
5. Viva [Vagrant Films] ($8,688)
6. Up the Yangtze [Zeitgeist] ($6,838)
7. The Dhamma Brothers [Balcony Releasing] ($4,718)
8. The Visitor [Overture Films] ($4,666)
9. The Singing Revolution [Abramorama Entertainment] ($4,411)
10. Fugitive Pieces [IDP/Samuel Goldwyn Films] ($3,407)

Source: IndieWire.

Tribeca 2008 Wraps Up

Phil Nugent — Sun, 04 May 2008 23:00:00 GMT

The sixth annual Tribeca Film Festival wraps up tonight with the premiere of the Wachowski brothers' Speed Racer, which will soon be joining the festival's earlier glossy Hollywood premieres, Baby Mama with Tiny Fey and Amy Poehler and David Mamet's Redbelt, in general theatrical release. Most of the major festivals awards were handed out last Thursday. These included Tomas Alfredson's young-vampire story Let the Right One In, winner of the Founders Award for Best Narrative Feature; Hüseyin Karabey, winner of the Best New Narrative Filmmaker prize for his acted-documentary love story My Marlon and Brando; young Thomas Turgoose and Piotr Jagiello, who share the Best Actor honors for their teamwork in Shane Meadows's Somers Town; Eileen Walsh, winner of the Best Actress award for her work in Declan Recks's Eden; Gini Reticker's Pray the Devil Back to Hell, which won as the Best Documentary Feature; and Old Man Bebo, which earned its director, Carlos Carcas, a citation as Best New Documentary Filmmaker. The final prize, the Cadillac Award given to the "audience favorite" film based on ballots filled in by festivalgoers, was announced last night on the TV show Tribeca Presents: Best of the Festival. It went to C. Kareim Chrobog's documentary War Child, about the Sudanese heip-hop performer Emmanuel Jal, who fled civil war in his homeland and who, in the course of the filming, returned to Susan and was reunited with his family for the first time in eighteen years. (The effects of the African civil wars on the children of that region was something of an unplanned subtheme running through many of the best documentaries at Tribeca this year, from Pray the Devil Back to Hell to the ESPN film Kassim the Dream.) "Our audiences fell in love with Emmanuel Jal through Karim's film," said festival co-founder Jane Rosenthal. "I hope this movie not only serves to entertain people but is a call to action to help the millions of children in Africa in need of food, education, and love."

Tribeca is still a very young festival, one that has been both blessed and cursed by being bathed in a much denser concentration of publicity and critical scrutiny than, say, the Sundance or Toronto Film Festivals had to deal with at a comparable point in their development. Mention of last year's sprawling event, which was accused of overreaching, confusion, and inflated ticket prices, still inspires shudders in some of the people who worked on it and have the streak of white in their hair to prove it. This year things seemed to go much smoother, and in general the 2008 festival did pretty well by its self-made mandate to provide a forum for the art of film without giving a cold shoulder to the virtues of quality mass entertainment. Now that it's over, everyone who's spent the past dozen days in Tribeca can carry that mission forward by finally going to see Iron Man.

Tribeca Film Festival Review: "Redbelt"

Phil Nugent — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 15:00:00 GMT

In his recent, attention-getting Village Voice article proclaiming himself to no longer be a "brain-dead liberal", David Mamet chided those who fail to appreciate how great it is here in the land of the free and who sit around trying to think up reasons to be dissatisfied with democratic capitalism, just so they can have something to be sore about. In Redbelt, Smiley Mamet's latest stab at writing and directing a movie, the hero, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, is a hard-working, incorruptable black man who's trying his damndest to make an honest living running a martial-arts academy that does its bit for society by training police officers in methods of self defense. But when we meet him, he's already in danger of going out of business, and then evil Hollywood types steal his technique of pitting combatants against each other after selecting one to be "handicapped" for the bout. Robbed of the only thing he has that may have monetary value so that these sharks can cheapen it by using it in circus-like arena ring competitions, he's ultimately reduced to agreeing to compete in one of the bouts in hopes of at least winning some prize money, and then he discovers that the contests are fixed. ("Whenever two guys are fighting for money," mewls the crooked promoter played by Ricky Jay, "the fight is never fair.") Does Mamet ever see any of the plays and movies he signs his name to, or is he so committed to the capitalist system that he has a bunch of cranks hired off park benches staffing a sweatshop where they grind this stuff out by the yard?

Chiwetal Ejifor brings his role a strong presence and the ability to convey complex thought and emotional storms going on beneath a placid surface. He deserves a lot of credit for not appearing ridiculous when his character pounds away at the jujitsu formula that appears to be his all-purpose mantra for life: "There is no situation you can't escape from. There is no situation you can't turn to your advantage." The movie only leaves him completely out to dry once, when Mamet, letting his hand (and his woman problem) show all too nakedly, has him bestow these wise words on a woman (Emily Mortimer) who's been raped, while demonstrating that with more skill and determination, she could have fought off her attacker. Although Mortimer is required to make a full-blown crazy-broad entrance, twitchy and paranoid and all but frothing at the mouth, it turns out that she's the movie's Good Woman; after Ejifor starts telling her what to do, she shuts her yap and gratefully concentrates on supporting him, while Ejifor's wife (Alice Braga), a "Brazilian princess" who worries about her business and dares to have doubts about whether her husband's noble principles will be enough to keep the lights turned on, throws in her lot with the rotten show business people who are conspiring against him. They include Tim Allen, insanely cast as a tough-guy movie star with a bad haircut, and Joe Mantegna, all too perfectly cast as the movie star's slimeball manager, who gives you the feeling that he could produce a line of male body oils from his pores and market it under the brand name "Dishonestee'." Having used these guys to establish that the world is totally rigged and everything's phony, Mamet then turns around and flatters the audience by insisting that the ticket-buying rubes the world over will still notice and appreciate true quality when they see it; when Ejifor and a bad guy get into a tussel in the corridor leading to the stage of the big fight, every head in the place ignores the glitz they've paid to get in to see and swivels to pay attention to the true jujitsu master in action. Mamet himself is the show-business equivalent of one of those politicians who've spent twenty-five years in Congress screaming about how you need to keep re-electing him in order to send a message to those out-of-touch Washington insiders.

The Ten Best Cussing Scenes in Movies, Part 2

Phil Nugent — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 15:00:00 GMT

SCARFACE (1983)

Here’s something funny about Oliver Stone: he seems to have a lot more fun when he’s writing movies than when he’s directing them. While the movies where he’s behind the camera have become self-important bores, the movies where he’s behind the typewriter are highly enjoyable, if completely demented. Conan the Barbarian may have been the purest distillation of his bloodthirstily goofy aesthetic, but it was the screenplay for Brian DePalma’s Scarface a year later where he really let his freak flag fly. A perfect example of a movie that’s compulsively watchable without actually being very good, Scarface also proves that the one thing more enjoyable than a movie with non-stop vulgarity is a movie with non-stop vulgarity in an incredibly over-the-top quasi-Cuban accent. (A chainsaw execution can’t hurt, either.) Al Pacino’s Tony Montana isn’t an obscenity artist; he is but a humble craftsman, a busy businessman who relies on the word "fuck" because he hasn’t got the time to learn any other ones. For every cleverly crafted "Why don’t you try sticking your head up your ass? See if it fits," there’s a workmanlike get-over like "You know what? Fuck you! How about that?" How about that, indeed. It’s hard to know if Scarface would have been the deranged, hyperactive masterpiece that it is without Pacino’s constant Hispanic-causing-panic vulgarisms, but it surely wouldn’t have been as much fun. If you don’t believe us, try to imagine Paul Muni saying "This town is like a great big pussy just waiting to get fucked." Now that’s comedy!

GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS (1992)

David Mamet's ode to testosterone-soaked salesmen is a veritable symphony of profanity, with even legendary milquetoast Jack Lemmon attempting to wrap his mouth around words like "cocksucker." (Not to speak ill of the dead, but he's no Ian McShane.) Alec Baldwin is the soloist who takes home top honors, though his inspirational speech to the troops does not rely solely on foul language for its power. With his reptilian delivery, lines like "coffee is for closers" and "third prize is you're fired" sound nearly as venomous as the blunt rejoinder "Fuck you – that's my name!" Though he doesn't say it in so many words, Baldwin makes the point that the sales game is a dick-measuring contest and everybody but him is coming up short. Like all the best motivational speakers, he uses props. "It takes brass balls to sell real estate," he announces, brandishing a pair for effect. Don't try this in your own boardroom unless you have good lawyers.

SECRET HONOR (1984)

When the transcripts of the Nixon White House tapes started to come out, what shocked a lot of people wasn't the president's amorality so much as the language with which he expressed it. His obscene ramblings suggested a potty-mouthed genie bubbling and rumbling and thrashing beneath the surface of his carefully fostered image as the last defender of Middle America, subsisting on a diet of cottage cheese and Norman Rockwell illustrations. In Robert Altman's one-man show, Nixon (Philip Baker Hall), sealed in the wood-paneled tranquility of his study like William Hurt set to de-evolve in his isolation tank in Altered States, runs through his whole life and political career in a spastic monologue punctuated by sputtered out "shit!"s and "fuck!"s. It all builds to the moment when Nixon, having considered blowing his brains out as penance for his sins, decides that this would give too much satisfaction to the real monsters, the ones who "elected me, not once, not twice, but all my goddamn life," and signs off with an endless, Tourette's-like chant of "Fuck em! Fuck 'em!!" As he bellows out the same two words, again and again, Altman frames his wild face in the screens of the TV monitors that line the room. The genie has been isolated.

POETIC JUSTICE (1993)

John Singleton's Poetic Justice actually played against Tupac's ever-growing reputation as an out-of-control thug and notorious player. His character Lucky is a postman who gets dissed in the very first scene and then has to endure a road trip with the same girl that made him the butt of the joke. This is every guy's worst nightmare – confined space with a girl who shot you down. Unless you're counting her role on Good Times or Rhythm Nation 1814, this was essentially Janet Jackson's film debut, and even though she may have told us she was nasty, most people still assumed, looking at that angelic face, that she was probably very nice. This scene is so memorable because all of that is blown to pieces as she trades fuck yous with Mr. Thug Life himself. Although the scene can certainly stand on its own in terms of pure firepower, you might want to brush up on the back story – outlined in our previous Top 10 Offscreen Feuds list – to help you understand the uncanny authenticity of the venom being spit here.

NIL BY MOUTH (1997)

When it comes to vulgar language in movies, there is quality, and then there is quantity. Whether or not Gary Oldman’s directorial debut, Nil By Mouth, counts as a lodestone of quality obscenity, it is the all-time grand champion in terms of quantity. It’s actually a fine little film, and Oldman’s script about growing up in a dysfunctional working-class family in South London is quite compelling at times, but where it truly excels is in its non-stop barrage of obscenity. No less than the Guinness Book of World Records has certified it as the film containing the most iterations of "fuck": the word appears an astonishing 470 times, or almost four times a minute. It’s that sort of dedication that separates the pretenders from the true masters, and Oldman doesn’t stop there: he also favors us with the word "cunt" a whopping eighty-two times, or once every minute and a half. Most of the fucks and cunts issue from the lager-stained mouth of Ray Winstone, playing a character based on Oldman’s own father. (Oldman dedicates the film to his old man, which must have made him feel pretty good about himself.) Some films don’t even have as much punctuation as Nil By Mouth has "fuck"s; if its director grew up in an environment anything like the one portrayed here, it’s a wonder he can communicate at all. Other films may be more artful in their use of the f-word, and other films may save it for when it counts more instead of going for total sensory overload, but until someone manages to make a movie in which someone uses the word "fuck" in every frame, then Nil By Mouth will be the reigning king.

– Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak, Bryan Whitefield

Check out Part 1 here.

The Ten Best Cussing Scenes in Movies, Part 1

Phil Nugent — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 14:55:00 GMT

Back in 1970, Pauline Kael, reviewing Robert Altman's M*A*S*H, praised it for its "blessed profanity" and wrote, "I salute M*A*S*H for its contribution to the art of talking dirty." (Altman's father reportedly put it another way, warning members of the family to stay away from the theaters because "Bob made a dirty movie!") There's been a lot of cusswords under the bridge since then, so much that when a playwright-turned-moviemaker such as Martin McDonagh gives his actors some floridly profane lines to speak, it isn't even worth a concerned piece in the Arts & Lesiure section from the kind of writer who'd pitch a fit if language half as dirty turned up on one of his kid's rap CDs. So when somebody has managed to distinguish himself by cussing in a movie in a way that stays with you, a salute is in order. Andrew Dice Clay, watch and learn.

GONE WITH THE WIND (1939)

It may not seem like such a big deal now, but seen in context, at the end of a big old-style Hollywood movie, spoken by Clark Gable in response to a tearful lover's plea, it's easy to imagine what a shocker it must have been at the time. God knows that, sixty years later, my own grandmother was just starting to recover from the shock. You can just see the fabric of civilization starting to come apart.

THE BAD NEWS BEARS (1976)

Kids love to swear. I'm sorry, parents, but it's true. Your little angel is/has been/will someday soon be a potty-mouth. The first phase of cussing is the most innocent one: you know the words are taboo, but have no idea what most of them mean. You never really think through the implications of calling your best friend a "pussy-eating cocksucker" – you simply don't have all the information you need to understand how wrong it is. The thrill comes from learning and then repeating the words, and for us kids who came of age in the 70s, The Bad News Bears was an invaluable resource. Hearing obnoxious little Tanner describe his teammates as "a bunch of Jews, spicks, niggers, pansies, and a booger-eating moron" was liberating not because we were a bunch of racists, Nazis and boogerphobes, but because we knew we'd just learned some new words our parents would kill us for saying. And there's still no more triumphant sentiment in the history of sports movies than Tanner's final kiss-off: "Hey Yankees – you can take your apology and your trophy and shove 'em straight up your ass!"

FULL METAL JACKET (1997)

The training sequences at the beginning of Full Metal Jacket are so famously vulgar, intense and energetic that once they’re over, the air sort of gets let out of the movie for the entire middle passage and doesn’t pick back up until the end. For this reason, it’s often considered a lesser Stanley Kubrick film, which is somewhat unfair; there’s a lot to like about the movie even once Private Leonard Lawrence and Gunnery Sergeant Hartman exit the stage. But oh, that opening sequence! As Hartman, character actor (and actual Marine Corps sergeant) R. Lee Ermey works in obscenity the way that Picasso worked in paint; so staggeringly awful (and hilariously funny) are his vulgar degradations of his raw recruits that by the time he has his final confrontation with Private Pyle, no one in the audience has any trouble believing that someone would want to shoot him. Although Ermey has tried to claim credit for many of Hartman’s lines, what he really brings to the role is the pitch-perfect delivery; most of the lines are taken directly from Gustav Hasford’s novel The Short-Timers, on which the movie is based. There’s a telling moment early in Hartman’s tirade where he singles out Pyle for abuse, after he has committed the crime of laughing at his obscene explosions, but it cuts directly to the heart of the matter: as violent, hateful and repulsive as the sarge’s speeches are, they’re also incredibly amusing. His recruits don’t have the luxury of laughter, but we do.

NETWORK (1976)

In the first on-air flip-out scene by Peter Finch's Howard Beale, the newly fired newsman gazes serenely into the camera and promises to shoot himself on the air because he just can't take "the bullshit" anymore. The real punch line came a couple of years after the movie premiered in theaters, when it was first shown on network TV. CBS, eager to show that they were in on the joke, allowed Beale's supposedly unbroadcastable "bullshits" to go throw uncensored. Bravo! But the scene was followed by one in which the movie's executives gather to discuss what just happened, and they are a foul-mouthed crew. And the soundtrack, on TV, turns into a veritable conga line of bleep!s.

TAXI DRIVER (1976)

"You never had no pussy like that. You can do anything you want with her. You can come on her, fuck her in the mouth, fuck her in the ass, come on her face, man. She get your cock so hard she'll make it explode. But no rough stuff, all right?"

On one level, it's the world's filthiest sales pitch, a street-corner pimp's patter for the passing johns who want to buy what he's selling. But consider the line that precedes these:

"Man, she's twelve and a half years old."

With those eight simple words, Sport's routine becomes something totally different, and altogether more chilling, thanks in no small part to Harvey Keitel's performance. Screenwriter Paul Schrader originally wrote Sport as African-American, but with Keitel standing in that doorway instead of, say, one of the gentlemen Travis sees at the Belmore Cafeteria, the scene takes on a different tone altogether. What might have been written as a scary, foreboding conversation now comes off as almost genial, with Keitel joking around with Travis' squareness before launching into his prepared monologue. It's an inspired touch by Scorsese and his actors, and one that ultimately makes the scene even creepier. It's not simply that Sport is selling wayyyyyyyyy underage girls to passersby, but that it's no big deal to him. In his mind, he's just catering to demand – after all, if nobody paid for twelve-and-a-half-year old prostitutes (it's the "and a half" that makes the line extra-creepy) he wouldn't need to sell them, right?

– Paul Clark, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak

Click here for Part 2.

Trailer Review: Redbelt

Paul Clark — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 17:00:00 GMT

When I first heard about this, I wasn't sure how it would work — I mean, David Mamet taking on the world of mixed martial arts? And now, seeing the trailer, I still don't know what to think. On the one hand, there's that patented Mamet dialogue, here delivered both by Mamet regulars Ricky Jay and Joe Mantegna and by newcomers like Chiwetel Ejiofor and Emily Mortimer. But how will it mesh with the mixed martial arts scenes? And it remains to be seen how well Mamet will direct the fights themselves — early word is that they're the movie's most glaring flaw. Also, there's the whole Tim Allen thing. Still, it's Mamet, so I'll give it a chance, especially considering how much better Spartan was than it had any right to be.

Mike D'Angelo at Sundance: Part 9

Peter Smith — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 19:05:00 GMT

Mike D'Angelo reports from the Sundance Film Festival:

As the festival winds down, some quick notes on movies I didn't have time to address earlier. (I'm gonna include the walk-outs here, despite the wrath of one reader who believes that saying anything at all about a movie you didn't see from start to finish constitutes dereliction of duty. Obviously, you should take such judgments with a grain or two of salt — and maybe an entire shakerful in the case of Ballast, which I'll very likely see again, and in full, at some point. But at the same time, you can get a mighty strong sense of a film in thirty-five to forty minutes.)

Traces of the Trade: A Story From the Deep North (Documentary Competition): Painfully earnest young woman with unbearably whiny voice — she narrates, alas — discovers that her esteemed ancestors were slave traders, corrals nine relatives for self-indulgent journey to sore spots from the family's past. For hardcore aficionados of liberal white guilt only. (W/O)

Time Crimes (Park City at Midnight): I'm a sucker for time-travel stories, but even I had trouble warming to this Spanish gloss on 2004 Sundance prizewinner Primer, in which a middle-aged schlub travels ninety minutes into the past and finds himself engaged in unwitting battle with other versions of himself who've developed wildly divergent agendas. Ineptly directed, for the most part, and the concluding twist is singularly unsatisfying. Come back, Shane (Carruth).

The Wave (World Cinema Dramatic Competition): German filmmaker Dennis Gansel turns the true story of a high-school history experiment gone awry into a glossy, pulse-pounding thriller, employing methods almost as fascistic as those of The Wave itself. Intentional irony? One can't help but be riveted by the spectacle of ordinary teenagers willingly submitting to autocratic rule — their überhip teacher is attempting to demonstrate that the Nazis weren't anomalous monsters — but earmarking one kid as emotionally unstable from the get-go means that we're just twiddling our thumbs as we await the inevitable moment when he finally snaps.

What Just Happened? (Premieres): Hollywood made yet another mildly lacerating self-portrait, that's what. Loosely based on the memoirs of producer Art Linson (Fight Club, Into the Wild, several Mamet films), it boasts the most relaxed De Niro performance in ages and a smattering of truly hilarious jokes, most of them involving out-of-control entitlement. Too bad Bruce Willis, sporting a Grizzly Adams beard that he refuses to shave prior to the start of filming on a new picture, isn't nearly as funny as Alec Baldwin must have been in real life. (Read Linson's equally diverting book for the lowdown; it happened on 1997's The Edge.)

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (Dramatic Competition): Michael Chabon's complicated first novel has been reduced (by Dodgeball's Rawson Marshall Thurber) to a simple bisexual love triangle, with two major characters — Arthur and Cleveland — melded into one, and another, the improbably named Phlox, distorted almost beyond recognition. And yet the movie still almost kinda works, mostly because Peter Sarsgaard commits himself so fully to his ludicrous bad-boy manipulator that we, like the dazed young protagonist, are completely taken in.

Downloading Nancy (Dramatic Competition): I'd had about enough of this repugnant exercise in nihilism at the point when Maria Bello, playing a masochistic housewife who's hired a stranger she found on the Internet (Jason Patric) to torture and kill her, walks barefoot into a mouse trap, over and over and over, shrieking with laughter each time it snaps on her toes. By all accounts from those who stuck it out, it gets much, much worse thereafter. At least the "revelation" that she was sexually abused as a child isn't saved for the final reel. (W/O)

That Guy!: Wallace Shawn

Peter Smith — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 21:00:00 GMT

"Squat", "toadlike" and "bespectacled" are not the first three adjectives you want on the list when you're building your movie star résumé. But That Guy! isn't about movie stars. It's about character actors, B-listers, stock-in-traders — and Wally Shawn is one of the best. Best imagined as the guy who gets parts for which Bob Balaban is simply too macho and charismatic, Shawn suffered perhaps the ultimate indignity when, playing Diane Keaton's ex in Manhattan (his movie debut), he was described as a "homunculus" by none other than Woody Allen, himself not entirely lacking in homuncular qualities. Still, the son of legendary New Yorker editor William Shawn has managed to carve out a decent Hollywood career playing nebbishes, losers and schnooks — while simultaneously building an eminently respectable career in New York as an insightful, volatile playwright whose work is intelligent, fiercely political and often controversial. Harvard-educated and terrifically well-informed, Shawn has written opinion pieces for The Nation, interviewed Noam Chomsky, and produced a widely-read translation of Bertolt Brecht's The Threepenny Opera, all while appearing in Hollywood fare ranging from Clueless to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. His distinctively nasal, high-pitched voice has made him a natural for animation, and he's provided memorable voice-overs as Rex the dinosaur in the Toy Story franchise and Bob Parr's insufferable boss in The Incredibles. Only a few of Wallace Shawn's outstanding plays have made it to film; while a David Hare-directed version of The Designated Mourner (perhaps his finest work) was made in 1997, it was seen by precious few people, and his most popular script, Aunt Dan and Lemon, remains unfilmed. But as an actor, Shawn has endeared himself and his ungainly appearance to thousands of people who know nothing about his off-Broadway existence.

Where to see Wallace Shawn at his best:

MY DINNER WITH ANDRE (1981)

The movie that put Wally Shawn on the map — and gave him his first and last leading-man role to date — was made at a time when he was still known only as the author of some well-reviewed plays in New York. Louis Malle's filmed adaptation of a number of actual conversations Shawn had with his friend Andre Gregory, who has been the director of a number of Shawn's plays, turned out to be a surprise hit, proving that there was a bigger audience than previously suspected whose idea of a good time was watching two overeducated Manhattanites argue about whether or not an electric blanket is morally defensible.

THE PRINCESS BRIDE (1987)

Wallace Shawn's best-known role is as the not-so-masterful criminal mastermind Vizzini in Rob Reiner's beloved adaptation of William Goldman's The Princess Bride. It is here that he gives new meaning, or lack thereof, to the word "inconceivable," and gets to play straight man to Andre the Giant in one of Hollywood's oddest comic pairings. (Shawn claims that he played the role of Vizzini perfectly straight, since he lacks a sense of humor. That claim in and of itself would seem to suggest otherwise.)

VANYA ON 42nd STREET (1994)

A meta-referential film that is both an adaptation of Anton Chekov's Uncle Vanya and a movie about making that adaptation (and making the movie about making the adaptation), Vanya on 42nd Street is one of the most successful blends ever of film and theatre, thanks largely to its explosion of talent: aside from Wallace Shawn in the title role, it features great performances from Julianne Moore as Yelena and Brooke Smith as Sonya, a crackerjack script by David Mamet and tight, taut direction by Louis Malle, and a big-screen reunion of Shawn and Andre Gregory, again playing himself.

— Leonard Pierce

Commercial Projects

Peter Smith — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 17:00:00 GMT

Television commercials were once where movie directors ended up when they just couldn’t hack it in Hollywood anymore. As ad agencies got more creative and campaigns more expensive, commercials became a fertile breeding ground for future big-screen talent. Nowadays, as a feature in the New York Times explains, commercials are a place for successful, established filmmakers to pick up some quick capital, show off their chops, or even acquire new skillsets in an industry where the technology curve grows ever shorter. Talents like Michael Mann (for Nike), Wes Anderson (for AT&T) and David Mamet (for Ford) are in on the game. To our surprise, the Ford spots (see above) feature Mamet’s patented rapid-fire back-and-forth dialogue; to our disappointment, the actors don’t call each other cocksuckers. — Leonard Pierce