The Screengrab : demi moore

DVD Digest for December 30, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Hope everyone had a wonderful holiday! This week, the big studios drop a ton of new DVDs and Blu-Rays into the market to compete for your newly-acquired Christmas cash.

In recent releases, DVD shopping begins early this week, with three new Paramount titles: Shia Labeouf and Michelle Monaghan in Eagle Eye (also Blu-Ray); Ricky Gervais in Ghost Town (also Blu-Ray); and Keira Knightley in The Duchess (also Blu-Ray). Today brings us Nick Broomfield’s Battle For Haditha (Image Entertainment), as well as a “head to head” match up (sorry) between Alan Ball’s Towelhead (Warner) and the Duplass Brothers’ Baghead (Sony).

In TV on DVD, today’s new releases include The Tudors Season 2 (Paramount) and Nip/Tuck Season 5 Part 1 (Warner).

Finally, this week’s bumper crop of new Blu-Ray-only releases includes: Tom Cruise in Days of Thunder (Paramount); the Shining-in-space thriller Event Horizon (Paramount); Demi Moore and the Swayz in Ghost (Paramount); Queen Latifah in Last Holiday (Paramount); Jim Carrey in Peter Weir’s The Truman Show (Paramount); Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn in Wedding Crashers (Warner); and finally, the Browncoats’ favorite, Joss Whedon’s Serenity (Universal).

2008 in Review: Scott Von Doviak's Top 10 Unwatchables of the Year

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 18:00:00 GMT

As your resident movie janitor, I could hardly wrap up the year without a rundown of 2008's greatest crimes against cinema. As always, I see them so you don't have to.

10. STAR WARS: THE CLONE WARS

I have little to add to my earlier rant. The sad thing is, there are still a few George Lucas zombies willing to defend this star dreck.

9. STEP UP 2 THE STREETS

A movie that raises many questions, not least of which is: “There was a Step Up 1?” A teenage street dancer (Briana Evigan, the next Demi Moore, if we needed one) is forced to enroll in an upscale school for the performing arts, leaving her old crew to accuse her of NOT KEEPING IT REELZ. This can only be settled with a dance-off! A thoroughly unconvincing dance-off that looks like an outtake from Night of the Living Dead: The Musical.

8. MAX PAYNE

Here we have a ludicrous new film genre (coincidentally featuring Ludacris): the videogame noir. Based on a first-person shooter game that was influenced by Hong Kong action movies and the "bullet time" effects of The Matrix, Max Payne is at least three steps removed from any semblance of originality. It boasts a stylish surface, but there's nothing new beneath it.

7. THE RUINS

Reviewed here at the time of its release. At least, it was in theaters when I started writing the review; I think it had been pulled by the time I posted it. A gripping, intense read becomes a dead teenager movie with laughable CG effects.

6.TYLER PERRY'S THE FAMILY THAT PREYS

Within the first five minutes of The Family That Preys, four different characters utter some variation on the line, "I need a drink." By the end of this latest Tyler Perry opus, I could definitely relate. Family is a mean-spirited endurance test populated by some of the most unpleasant movie characters in recent history. Perry prides himself on leaving out the sex and violence and making movies the whole family can enjoy. It's hard to imagine families enjoying this one, though; they're more likely to be traumatized when they aren't bored out of their minds.

5. FIRST SUNDAY

So bad that I’ve already covered it here as part of the Unwatchable series. Nuff said.

4. FOUR CHRISTMASES

Here's a movie that spends an hour showing how unpleasant family can be and how grotesque small children are before doing a complete U-turn into sickening sentimentality and hypocritical moralizing. Director Seth Gordon, who made last year's terrific documentary The King of Kong, turns out to be just another sitcom hack. Witherspoon is so chirpy and strident, it's not clear that anyone told her this was supposed to be a comedy. To say that Vaughn is phoning it in these days would be an insult to telecommuters everywhere. Four Christmases with this bunch is four too many.

3. PRIDE AND GLORY

There's nothing wrong with a gritty cop drama, so long as it has something to offer besides grit. Pride and Glory provides murky images, shaky camerawork, a muddy soundtrack, blood by the buckets and profanity by the bushel. It's easy to see why director Gavin O'Connor buried his movie under all this sludge; scrape it away and there's nothing but the most generic "bad cop" movie possible underneath.

2. TRAITOR

Don Cheadle is the world's most boring Muslim - but at least he's not evil like all the other ones! There's very little suspense in this dull, talky thriller, but there is a laughable twist ending for the ages.

1. THE LOVE GURU

Everything you’ve heard is true. This isn’t a case of mass hypnosis or the critical brotherhood sticking together – it really is that bad. Mike Myers described this comedy about a self-help guru’s attempts to help a hockey player win a championship as “a delivery system for some wonderful ideas.” Actually, it’s a delivery system for dick jokes, each one dumber than the last.

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's Top Guilty Pleasures (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 21:00:00 GMT

So, we’ve just survived a teeth-grindingly suspenseful presidential election, and now we’re entering the prestigious “serious film” season of Academy Award predictions and Best of 2008 lists...but in between all the high-minded political rhetoric and contemplations of quality cinema, Screengrab’s chief pollster and trailer-meister Paul Clark thought it might be a good idea for us to get down off our high horses for a week and reveal the movies we’re REALLY watching on our laptops when we SHOULD be dissecting the eschatological subtext of Synecdoche, New York.

Yes, I’m talking about Guilty Pleasures...NOT the overlooked indie gems we totally “get” because we’re smarter than everyone else, NOT the films that were unfairly maligned by the philistines in the mainstream media, but rather the truly flawed and disreputable movies we’re downright embarrassed to admit we kinda like.

So, c'mon, fess up...I’ll show you mine if you show me yours, as we here at the Screengrab reluctantly reveal our ALL-TIME GUILTIEST PLEASURES!

ANDREW OSBORNE’S GUILTY PLEASURES:

Okay, so to get this shame spiral spinning, I figured I’d go ahead and rank my unmentionables from least embarrassing to most indefensible, starting with...

5. MEATBALLS (1979)

So, okay, maybe this one isn’t so bad. Sure, the Animal House-lite Bill Murray vehicle doesn’t really try very hard (while at the same time occasionally trying too hard)...but you know what? It just doesn’t matter. Sure, it’s painfully sincere in its sweetness, and not as remotely hep or ironically detached as, say, Wet, Hot, American Summer...but it just doesn’t matter! Sure, it’s not as highly regarded a “slobs vs. snobs” comedy as Caddyshack (which I never really dug as much as my friends anyway), and, true, it spawned a series of truly horrible sequels...but it just doesn’t matter! IT JUST DOESN’T MATTER! IT JUST DOESN’T MATTER!!! Indeed, that rousing Camp North Star "doesn't matter" chant became my very own motivational Geek Creed throughout high school and college, and while my classmates were rockin’ out to Foreigner, Rush and Zeppelin, I was singing along to the Meatballs soundtrack LP (featuring the “hit” single “Makin’ It”), and to this day I still know all the words to the “Counselor in Training” campfire song (“We are the CITs so pity us...”) -- but for me, the most embarrassing thing about this particular guilty pleasure was how much I yearned (and still yearn) for the simple niceness and camaraderie of its summer camp world (as opposed to the mean, boring streets of reality), and also the extent to which I subsequently modeled my adolescent behavior on Murray’s cool jerk class clown self-assurance in a desperate attempt to hide the full extent of my own breathtaking dorkiness.

4. GUMMO (1997)

There’s a lot of guilt (and guilt-by-association) just being a Harmony Korine fan in the first place. Admit to liking Kids, for example, and people automatically assume you’re some kind of disgusting pervert who actually thinks sexy teenage girls are sexy. Whereas liking Gummo just makes you look crazy: many critics and viewers reacted to Korine’s ugly, plotless, mess of a movie with boredom, confusion or flat-out hostility, and according to Wikipedia, during the film’s premiere at the Telluride Film Festival, “numerous people got up and left during the initial cat drowning sequence.” And, honestly, I can’t blame them. In many ways, Gummo is completely indefensible: it’s not exactly entertaining, it’s not really about anything and it’s hard to argue with people who find it pretentious or, in the words of film critic Ken Hanke, “the vilest waste of two hours of my life.” It’s not a movie I’d normally recommend to anyone...unless you’re the kind of person who's spent a little time in the kind of aimless trailer park wonderland where beating the everlovin’ shit out of a helpless chair makes for a good-time Saturday night. As for myself, I was only ever a dilettante visitor to the type of world Gummo portrays in its artily artless depiction of a fictionalized Xenia, Ohio – a town where the “Pets or Meat” lady from Roger & Me or the “Coven” crew from American Movie might feel right at home – and like those films, it’s easy for viewers to find themselves wondering if Korine is depicting offbeat humanity for its own sake or merely exploiting his subjects (a combination of real people and slumming actors like Chloë Sevigny) as “white trash” art objects (or both). Yet just by questioning whether you are or should be judging, say, the feral kid in the pink bunny ears or the widowed mother tap-dancing in her disaster area basement to get a smile out of her grim-faced son, you’ve instantly become more self-conscious than any of the characters you’re watching...hence the guilt.

3. THE BROWN BUNNY (2004)

And speaking of pretentious art films starring Chloë Sevigny...this one’s a major source of guilt, and I haven’t even SEEN it yet. The Brown Bunny’s been lingering on my Netflix queue for two years now, partly because I’m too embarrassed to just move it to the top and be done with it. Don’t get me wrong: though I’m perfectly willing to believe Vincent Gallo lives up to his reputation as an arrogant pain in the ass, I also thought his auteurial debut Buffalo ’66 was flat-out brilliant, and so I’m willing to believe there’s some merit in his follow-up effort, even though most reviewers (including, famously, Roger Ebert) have condemned The Brown Bunny as 93-118 minutes (depending on the cut) of shameless, tedious navel-gazing with all the entertainment value of, well, a long, boring road trip with Vincent Gallo (though Ebert did later amend his original harsh review after seeing the shorter cut). I suppose the potential boredom factor is the main reason I’ve never quite gotten around to watching the movie...yet it nevertheless remains in my queue month after month, year after year for pretty much the only reason most people have ever heard of The Brown Bunny: the infamous scene near the end where Sevigny blows Gallo on camera. Never mind my wife’s perfectly good question about why on earth I would ever want to see Gallo’s icky gnarled penis. Never mind reports I’ve had from reliable sources that the fellatio is totally faux anyway, and real or not it’s one of the least erotic sex scenes in the history of cinema...I just can’t help it: when it comes to the perverse American fascination with celebrities engaged in real (or even simulated) sex acts, I’m guilty as charged.

2. CAMP (2003)

And now things get really embarrassing. Like the teen drama geeks of its titular summer theater retreat, Camp is homely, dorky, amateurish and way too earnest for its own good...but also sweetly charming and downright irresistible to a fellow drama geek like me. Despite increasingly hostile and exasperated reactions from my loved ones, the "Turkey Lurkey" production number from the movie's super-peppy soundtrack was my holiday theme song for 2003...and, as if it’s not embarrassing enough to own the Camp soundtrack (including a musical theater version of Todd Rundgren’s “The Want of A Nail” you’ll often see me belting at the top of my lungs in traffic whenever my wife’s not in the car...yes, that’s right, I said wife...I am, indeed, a closeted heterosexual), I actually went back for a second dose of inexcusable pep and summer camp geekery (are we beginning to see a pattern here?) when Alexandra Shiva directed a documentary called Stagedoor about the real Catskills inspiration for the Camp camp, featuring a counselor named Jeff Murphy who just so happens to be one of the stars of my own “hey, gang, let’s put on a show!” indie film directorial debut (and fantastic stocking stuffer!), Apocalypse Bop (featuring the Screengrab’s very own Scott Von Doviak)!!!

And finally, my deepest shame...

1. ST. ELMO’S FIRE (1985)

Good Lord. What can I say? There’s so much to hate about Joel Schumacher’s 1985 Brat Pack circle jerk I don’t even know where to begin. Leonard Pierce has gone on record with his belief that Andie Macdowell is just about the worst actress ever committed to celluloid, and she’s just a co-star here, sharing the screen with the quivering lips of Andrew McCarthy, the flaring nostrils of Judd Nelson and Demi Moore in full effect. For those who could barely stomach Friends, St. Elmo’s Fire is a thousand times worse, chronicling as it does the loves and lives of six bland white yuppies as they struggle to become even more rich and privileged. Oh, wait, except for Rob Lowe, who’s the sax-playing pretty boy “rebel,” who’s saddled with all the very worst of the film’s terrible, terrible frat-douche dialogue (“It ain’t a party ‘til something gets broken,” “I suppose a blow job’s out of the question,” etc.). Even as a teenager, I cringed at Demi Moore’s gay stereotype buddy and the fact that the only black character in a movie full of smug whites is an icky black streetwalker (who McCarthy’s struggling writer character raps with ‘cuz he’s such a man of, y’know, “the people”). Yet despite all the movie’s glaring flaws, it remains my Guiltiest Pleasure. I even like the godawful John Parr title song (a.k.a. “Man In Motion”). Why? I can only plead nostalgia on this one. I was and remain a sucker for movies like The Big Chill or Dazed and Confused that feature romanticized groups of witty friends hanging around and kvetching about their problems...and St. Elmo’s Fire featured Nelson, Ally Sheedy and Emilio Estevez in a mini-reunion from one of the all-time classics of the genre, The Breakfast Club (released earlier the same year), coinciding, as it happened, with my own transition from high school to college (and all the attendant coming-of-age melodrama thus implied), when lines like, “We're all going through this, it's our time at the edge,” were a soothing balm to my sheltered teenage soul. Aaaahhh-booogeda-booogeda-booogeda, ha, ha, ha!

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

Contributor: Andrew Osborne

Morning Deal Report: Can Pee-Wee Herman Find Happiness?

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 14:30:00 GMT

The Dark Knight joined the exclusive $500 million club with its weekend take of $11 million. It’s still nearly $100 million behind the only other member of that club, Titanic. Tropic Thunder remained on top of the box office for a third straight week, taking in $14.3 million and keeping the Vin Diesel vehicle Babylon A.D. down in second place. In a sign that we may soon be free of the tyranny of the spoof movie, Disaster Movie finished in seventh.

For some reason, I have failed to mention Todd Solondz’s sequel to Happiness in this space. Let me rectify that immediately. Todd Solondz is making a sequel to Happiness. Actually, Variety describes it as “an untitled part-sequel, part-companion piece to his controversial dark comedy Happiness.” Take that for whatever it’s worth. To me, not much, but your mileage may vary. Emma Thompson, Demi Moore and Paul “Pee Wee” Reubens are rumored to be attached. Attached to the movie, I mean; I’m not trying to imply some sordid love triangle.

Now that you’ve lost your breakfast, take heart in the news that the Poltergeist remake has found its director. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Ukrainian-born Vadim Perelman (House of Sand and Fog, The Life Before Her Eyes) is in negotiations to take the helm. “The film's exploration of an ordinary family's reaction to an extraordinarily intense situation likely appealed to Perelman,” claims the Reporter.

Related:
A Hobbit, a Gnome and a Poltergeist Walk Into a Bar
How Batman is the New Beatles

The Halfway House: Von Doviak’s Unwatchables of 2008 (So Far)

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 17:00:00 GMT

My, my, my, isn’t this a lovely thing! The sun is shining, the birdies are singing, and my fellow Screengrabbers are raving about their favorite movies from the first half of 2008. So far, Andrew Osborne, Paul Clark and Leonard Pierce have all weighed in with their rainbows and pretty, pretty ponies, so I guess it’s up to me to poop in the punchbowl.

Don’t get wrong – it’s not that this year’s first half has been completely worthless as far as cinema is concerned. I enjoyed Wall-E as much as the next guy – I’m not made of stone, you know! (Not entirely, anyway.) Iron Man was about as good as it gets with the superhero genre, which still makes it a movie that ends with one guy in a big metal suit beating the crap out of another guy in an even bigger metal suit, but an awful lot of fun up until that point. Like Mr. Pierce, I’ll go to bat for the terrifying first hour of The Strangers, as well as most of Baghead, the offbeat indie Wellness (screened at SXSW) and the documentaries Crawford and The Unforeseen. But let’s be honest – so far 2008 has been overflowing with crap, and as the resident movie janitor, it’s my job to dig through it. Without further ado, here are the five least watchable movies I’ve seen this year.

1. The Love Guru. Everything you’ve heard is true. This isn’t a case of mass hypnosis or the critical brotherhood sticking together – it really is that bad. Mike Myers described this comedy about a self-help guru’s attempts to help a hockey player win a championship as “a delivery system for some wonderful ideas.” Actually, it’s a delivery system for dick jokes, each one dumber than the last.

2. First Sunday. So bad that I’ve already covered it here as part of the Unwatchable series. Nuff said.

3. Step Up 2 The Streets. A movie that raises many questions, not least of which is: “There was a Step Up 1?” A teenage street dancer (Briana Evigan, the next Demi Moore, if we needed one) is forced to enroll in an upscale school for the performing arts, leaving her old crew to accuse her of NOT KEEPING IT REELZ. This can only be settled with a dance-off! A thoroughly unconvincing dance-off that looks like an outtake from Night of the Living Dead: The Musical.

4. The Ruins. Reviewed here at the time of its release. At least, it was in theaters when I started writing the review; I think it had been pulled by the time I posted it. A gripping, intense read becomes a dead teenager movie with laughable CG effects.

5. Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Comedy Show. You loved The Original Kings of Comedy! You tolerated The Blue Collar Comedy Tour! Now run and hide, because Vince Vaughn’s Indistiguishable Frat Dudes of Comedy are coming to town! Vaughn’s brainstorm was to bring unknown comics from L.A. to heartland cities where folks apparently never get the opportunity to laugh in person at jokes about bumper stickers and apple martinis. And we wonder why middle America hates Hollywood.

Related:
SXSW Review: Wellness
Screengrab Review: The Unforeseen

Girl DisemPowering: Nine Films That Didn't Do Feminism Any Favors (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 20:45:00 GMT

SHOWGIRLS (1995)

“Do you know what they call that useless piece of skin around a twat? A woman!” And that hilarious quip from strip club “comedienne” Henrietta “Mama” Bazoom pretty much sums up the philosophy towards women in this abortion of a cult classic by screenwriter Joe Eszterhas and director Paul Verhoeven. Sure, I get it...this campy, overwrought drag show bitch-fest about amoral sex worker Nomi Malone (Elizabeth Berkley) is so bad it’s good! And we can all just laugh through the parts where Gina Ravera’s Molly (the only vaguely redeemable or recognizably human character in the movie, and a black woman to boot) gets brutally raped by a loathsome white rock star. (I love it when they act out that part in the drag queen version of the show at my favorite hipster bar!) Garish, ridiculous and aggressively stupid, Showgirls is hard for me to enjoy ironically, since it so clearly embraces and truly believes in its own fetid realpolitik Hollywood philosophy that love is a lie, “art” is whatever makes money, winning is everything, men are scumbags, women are worthless (especially if they’re not hot, naked and young), the world is a shithole, if you’re not clawing your way to the top every single minute (and/or don’t know how to properly pronounce the most expensive status symbol brand names) you’re a fool and a loser and deserve what you get. Yeccch. Showgirls ain't just misogynistic: it pretty much hates everyone. And the feeling is mutual.

INDECENT PROPOSAL (1993)

If Demi Moore is, or was, a star, it's not because she's talented (she can't act a lick) or because people like her (a lot of them don't) but because she manages, just through her very presence, to convey the impression that denying her the attention she craves might have consequences that are just too dire to contemplate. Like Madonna at her least interesting and most hard to take, she seems to be all about ambition for its own sake, but possessed of a steely, confrontational gaze that says: You will take me seriously. Although others will prefer to honor her for her services to American literature in The Scarlet Letter, Indecent Proposal may be the definitive Demi Moore movie statement. Here, she takes up where the Material Girl left off in the '80s; Madonna demonstrated that pure commercialism was hip, and this movie gives Moore the chance to show that a woman can assert herself and take control of her life by whoring herself out. When we first meet her, she's totally in thrall to her boyfriend, Woody Harrelson -- his dreams (of making a haul gambling in Vegas to fuel his doomed business venture) are all that matter. But after Harrelson craps out, she agrees to gazillionaire geezer Robert Redford's offer that she sleep with him for a million dollars. Harrelson, who wants the money but also wants some credit for feeling bad about it, ends up basically serving as her pimp, but when she's had it with his whining she makes it clear to him that this was her decision -- she's her pimp. And she's right -- although Harrelson has been her one true love and her ennobling reason for accepting the offer, once he goes into his snit, she has reason to dump him, which she does, thus conveniently giving Daddy Warbucks his opening to step up and sweep her off her feet. Then, because Redford, apparently a big Cheers fan, can't stand to see Woody Harrelson feeling suicidal -- and also, maybe, because the young poor guys whose girlfriends dragged them to this movie would tear out the theater seats if Moore stayed with the old, rich guy -- Redford ennobles himself by gracefully doing a far, far better thing than he has ever done before and giving her back to Harrelson. Moore agrees, somehow failing to notice that she's not just continuing to define herself by which guy she's with, but letting the guys dictate which one of them that will be. Not that I'd want to have to choose myself if I were her; Harrelson has never come across as goofier, and the awestruck, glamour-lighting treatment that Redford is given here just tends to emphasize how much his sun-kissed visage was starting to look like the bottom of a potato chip bag.

KISSES FOR MY PRESIDENT (1964)

In this election year, let us spare a moment's reflection for the sacrifices made by those who came before us, like whoever had to sit through Kisses for My President, a Great Society-era comedy in which a woman -- Polly Bergen -- becomes president of this great land, an idea that at the time must have seemed considerably more far-fetched than anything in the Warren Commission Report. Bergen's Leslie McCloud wasn't the first pretend woman president in American movies -- that honor may fall to the nameless character played by Ernestine Barrier in the 1953 Project Moonbase, which was set in 1970 -- and she may not even be the most pathetic. (Tip your hat to Loretta Swit's President Adams in Whoops Apocalypse.) But she may have been the most retrograde, a sad example of a would-be world leader overtaken by events on the home front. Although Bergen is actually a decisive, effective commander in a dangerous, confused and (this being a 1964 Hollywood comedy) kooky world, she has to fight to stay focused on her job because her husband, Fred MacMurray, is having a twenty-four-seven hissy fit about how unmanning it is to be the First Gentleman. Fred finally solves his problem by getting Bergen pregnant, forcing her to step down so that Dick Cheney can become president. Special prosecutors have been appointed over less.

LEGALLY BLONDE (2001)

Call it last-wave feminism: it has a target market, not a constituency, and they’re the kind of women who don’t even like to use that particular f-word. It’s the feminism of sorority girls with trust funds and breast implants, the feminism of drunk girls making out with each other in main-drag bars. It’s the feminism of marrying up, of buying at full price, of a career as a means not to equality, but to superiority: and Legally Blonde is its favorite movie. The 2001 fish-in-the-wrong-brand-of-bottled-water comedy made a fortune, and turned Reese Witherspoon into a major star; but beyond that, it inspired a legion of imitators that all followed a now-familiar formula. Nice was the new smart, fashionable was the new educated, and rich was the new liberated. It’s easy enough to brush off Witherspoon’s Elle Woods as simply another iteration of the classical comedic underdog, but that only works until you consider the fact that her underdog is rich, well-dressed, trendy and drop-dead gorgeous. She enrolls in Harvard Law School (and is accepted with insulting ease) more or less to spite her equally wealthy, handsome ex-boyfriend, and the movie’s idea of conflict is simply pitting her against a variety of snobbery slightly different than the one she’s used to. The girl power championed by Legally Blonde is the power to wear a push-up bra with pride, and to blend the power of crass nouveau wealth with that of elite establishment power. Sound like any president you know?

Click here for Part One of Girl DisemPowerment.

Or click here for Part One and Part Two of Chick Hits: The Girl Power Top Ten

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

DVD Digest for June 3, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 14:00:00 GMT

With Father’s Day coming in less than two weeks, the studios begin to unveil their snazzy new editions of what TNT used to call “movies for guys who like movies.” We’ve got all the manly movies you need to keep dad happy while mom and her friends are out seeing the Sex and the City movie (seriously, how did we not see that coming?).

Before Clint Eastwood became known as an Academy Award-winning filmmaker (or a guy who co-starred with an orangutan) he was first and foremost a grimacing badass. And while some- including yours truly- have a soft spot for his Man With No Name trilogy- the most enduring character from this period would also certainly be “Dirty” Harry Callahan. This week, Warner unveils new DVD and Blu-Ray editions of all five of Eastwood’s Dirty Harry films, featuring all of the features from previous DVD editions plus a number of new ones. Most notably, Warner Brothers’ box set (the films are also sold separately) includes a new feature-length documentary, Clint Eastwood: Out of the Shadows. In addition, the memorabilia included in the box set includes a 40-page hardcover book and a map of San Francisco detailing Harry’s hunt for Scorpio.

But if dad’s looking for wartime heroism (Blu-Ray only), MGM and Fox both have something that’ll fit the bill. MGM will unveil Blu-Ray editions of A Bridge Too Far and Battle of Britain this week, although these new discs will contain no special features. So if it’s tricked out Blu-Rays (and better movies) you want, go with Fox’s war DVDs. The studio will be releasing three of its classics- Patton, The Longest Day and The Sand Pebbles- exclusively on Blu-Ray, packed with special features and all the bells and whistles he could ever hope for.

But that’s not all, folks. If dad wants some laughs with his testosterone, buy him the new City Slickers: Collector’s Edition (MGM), which gives him some Western action, male bonding humor courtesy of Crystal, Kirby and Stern, and of course Jack Palance, who even in death can still crap bigger than you. Other, more recent dudely comedies releasing this week include Semi-Pro (New Line, also Blu-Ray), Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Comedy Show (Lionsgate), and for the father whose enjoyment of movies far outweighs his taste, Meet the Spartans (Fox, also Blu-Ray). And what’s a list of guy movies with James Bond? Sony will release a new three-disc edition of Casino Royale, Bond’s best big-screen adventure since the sixties (there, I said it).

Other new releases this week include: Anton Corbijn’s Ian Curtis biopic Control (Weinstein Company); the Jessica Alba remake of The Eye (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray); Michael Caine and Demi Moore in Flawless (Magnolia); the long-delayed The Onion Movie (Fox); and Asia Argento just the way we like her (i.e. mostly naked and toting a gun) in Olivier Assayas’ Boarding Gate (Magnolia). The week’s most notable non-guy-movie old-school release is Jean-Jacques Beineix’s seminal Cinema du look classic Diva (Lionsgate). Finally, releasing on Blu-Ray only: Cloverfield (Paramount), Signs (Buena Vista), The Recruit (Buena Vista), There Will Be Blood (Paramount).

Vanishing Act: Savage Steve Holland

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 22 May 2008 18:30:00 GMT

If you’re not of a certain age, you’ve probably never even heard of Savage Steve Holland – or if you have, you may be under the impression that he was a professional wrestler back in the '80s. Well, you got the right decade: for a little while there, Holland was second only to John Hughes as American cinema’s foremost purveyor of comedic teen angst. I honestly couldn’t tell you whether I’ve seen one of his movies in its entirely (though I’m sure I’ve channel surfed through them hundreds of times), but some people my age still swear by the guy.

An animator who studied at CalArts (and who, according to wikipedia, designed the Whammy on the game show Press Your Luck), Holland’s legacy rests entirely on two movies he made with John Cusack: Better Off Dead (1985) and One Crazy Summer (1986). In the former, Cusack gets dumped by his girlfriend, makes several suicide attempts, then hooks up with a foreign exchange student. In the latter, he’s a cartoonist who spends an eventful summer on Nantucket with the likes of Bobcat Goldthwait, Demi Moore and Curtis “Booger” Armstrong. Neither movie set the box office on fire, but both were cult hits with long afterlives on video and cable, thanks to 80s-style wackiness like Cusack’s creation of a claymation Van Halen hamburger:

Or Bobcat Goldthwait wreaking havoc in a Godzilla costume:

Alas, the magic could not last. Holland’s third directorial effort, 1989’s How I Got Into College (which he did not write), was a certifiable box office bomb, and that was it for Holland’s movie career. He found a niche on television, however, directing episodes of Encyclopedia Brown, Shasta McNasty, Lizzie McGuire, and my one-time late night guilty pleasure, V.I.P. But as Indiana Jones is here to remind us, all things '80s will return to haunt us, and that includes Savage Steve Holland. He has no less than three comeback vehicles in the works: a straight-to-video sequel to Legally Blonde, a National Lampoon movie called Ratko: The Dictator’s Son, and The Big One 3, described by the director as the sort-of third part of the Better Off Dead/One Crazy Summer trilogy. But that’s not all. Holland is attached to yet another project, one that can only be summed up by its three word title:

Howard Stern’s Porky’s.

Didn’t I say something about all things '80s returning to haunt us?

Trailer Review: Deception

Paul Clark — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Most thrillers today feel curiously neutered, with studios' demands for PG-13 entertainment making it difficult for directors to inject too much sex into their films. Deception feels like a throwback to the early-90s heyday of the erotic thriller subgenre, when it almost certainly would have been penned by Joe Eszterhas and starred Michael Douglas. As bad as most of those movies where, they had a trashy yet glossy allure to them, which makes it all the more disappointing that Deception comes across as fairly bland by comparison, with the role that would've been played by Sharon Stone or Demi Moore now falling to... Michelle Williams? Even with its female-friendly leading men Hugh Jackman and Ewan McGregor, I can't imagine this really scoring with audiences (especially with that generic-sounding title). On the other hand, I imagine it'll have a solid second life on late-night pay cable. Who knows, I may even catch it there. If I hear there's T&A, that is.

The Ten Worst Hairdos in Movie History, Part 2

Peter Smith — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Woody Harrelson and Bill Murray, KINGPIN (1996)

Bowling is enjoyed by millions of Americans of all ages, but in the Farrelly brothers' second film Kingpin, the professional bowling circuit is portrayed as being forever trapped in the seventies. Professional bowlers are seen as sleazeball would-be lounge lizards, dressing in garish clothes, doing cock-of-the-walk victory dances, and relentlessly chasing women when they're not bowling. But in Kingpin, the most telling remnant of their faded vocation is almost certainly the hairdos they sport. In the seventies, Harrelson's Roy Munson and Murray's Ernie "Big Ern" McCracken were well-coiffed slicksters. Two decades hence, they try, with varying degrees of success, to maintain their youthful appearance by engaging in that age-old solution practiced by creepy old men the world over — the comb over. True to their characters, Big Ern is better at maintaining the façade — his 'do looks like a woodland creature parked itself atop his pate, but at least it doesn't reflect the light. But once the rivals take to the lanes for the climactic showdown, Big Ern shows his true colors. Usually a cool customer, he lets the stress get the better of his hair, and it gradually begins to detach from his head, until it resembles the world's largest ripped seam. In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Kate Winslet's Clementine speaks of having mood hair, but we'd like to think that, as with so many great things in cinema, Bill Murray got there first.

The Leningrad Cowboys, LENINGRAD COWBOYS GO AMERICA

Rock'n'roll has a history of some pretty questionable hairdos, but none like those worn by the Leningrad Cowboys. Almost surely the most rockin' band to get their start north of the Arctic Circle, the Cowboys first entered the scene as the brainchild of director Aki Kaurismäki, who assembled some of his rocker pals for his 1989 stone-faced mockumentary, Leningrad Cowboys Go America. In the film, the Cowboys, tired of playing in Siberia, mount an American tour, despite their uncertain grasp of the English language. But if their songs mark them as foreigners, their hair is positively alien, with all members sporting uniform black pompadours, each with a large, unicorn-like forelock pointing out into the distance. As the film progresses, we discover that this hairdo is actually a congenital signifier of musical skill — the musically-challenged cousin who stalks the combo has but a tiny tuft to his name. Unfortunately for the Cowboys, the U.S. tour is mostly a washout, but they'd find more enduring success at home following the fall of the Iron Curtain. They appeared in two more features, Leningrad Cowboys Meet Moses and the concert film Total Balalaika Show, in which they teamed up with the Alexandrov Red Army Chorus and Dance Ensemble, as well as over half a dozen music videos directed by Kaurismäki. Finally, the Cowboys made their triumphant return to the American stage for the 1994 MTV Video Music Awards at Radio City Music Hall. All the while, the band remained true to their roots, never touching so much as a strand of those terrible, awesome hairdos.

Demi Moore, STRIPTEASE

Some might think the obvious choice here would be G.I. Jane, but somehow even a number-one blade on a pair of clippers only revealed that Demi Moore had a perfectly shaped head, and didn't diminish her hotness in the least. The same cannot be said for the bangs-and-blow-dry look of Striptease. Yeah, we know she's supposed to be playing a stripper, but those are clearly hair extensions, and not very flattering ones at that. Most people at the time were probably distracted by the reveal of Moore's surgically enhanced breasts (we liked the originals just fine, thank you) and there are certainly many places the finger of blame can be pointed in this nuclear stinkbomb of a movie — but you shouldn't underestimate just how bad a haircut had to be back then to make Demi Moore look unattractive.

Kevin Costner, THE BODYGUARD (1992)

The story behind one of Sir Kevin's more laughable haircuts (and, if you've seen his mullet in Robin Hood, that's really saying something) is actually kinda touching: The interracial romance-thriller The Bodyguard was originally conceived as a vehicle for Diana Ross and Steve McQueen way back during the 1970s. When the film was finally made in 1992, starring Costner and Whitney Houston, the star decided to try and channel McQueen; to do so he adopted the legendary icon of cool's trademark close-cropped haircut, which looked fantastic on McQueen but downright surreal on Costner. That said, Costner did have the last laugh: The Bodyguard was one of his worst films, and a stain on screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan's career (it had been his first script — turns out he made up for it with The Empire Strikes Back), but it wound up being a huge hit. Indeed, we're not unconvinced that Costner's follicular follies in this film didn't lead indirectly to the George-Clooney-and-his-Caesar-haircut craze a couple of years later. There you go, folks — one more societal ill you can blame on Kevin Costner.

Nicolas Cage, NATIONAL TREASURE (2004)

Full disclosure: For weeks the spot for this entry stood empty on this list, with simply the words "Nicolas Cage, FILM TO BE DETERMINED LATER" holding its place. Because let's face it, any number of films starring Nicolas Cage from the past few years could go here — from the god-awful toupee he sported in Ghost Rider to the goofy balding curls he fretted over in Adaptation (of course, we don't hold that last one against him, not only because his bad hair was a plot point in that film, but also because we have this disturbing suspicion that, had nature been allowed to take its course, that's what Nicolas Cage's real hair might actually look like today). But we're going with National Treasure, for the simple fact that we spent the whole film staring at the slug-like patch of weave at the very tip of the actor's forehead. Seriously, this isn't hair, it's a lid. In these later years, Cage and Kevin Costner have switched places, but if you'd asked us fifteen years ago which of the two would allow himself to go bald gracefully while the other kept trying new ways to make himself look like he had something resembling a "full" "head" of "hair," the answer might have been different.

— Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Vern, Bryan Whitefield

Click here for Part 1!

Back to the Drawing Board

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 20:30:00 GMT

My long climb to the pinnacle of film industry glory that is the Screengrab began many years ago behind the counter of the original Harvard Square location of Pix Poster Cellar. Although I possessed a bachelor’s degree in film, it was in that cramped, crowded movie memorabilia shop that I was first schooled in the differences between lobby cards and promotional stills, how to differentiate between the large French and large Italian posters without a single language lesson, and which of the items in stock were most precious and rare. Chief among the latter was the original Revenge of the Jedi one-sheet teaser, pictured here in all its folded splendor, which I recall selling one magical afternoon for a cool $200 cash. (A quick flip through the internets reveals that this item is now going for $750, which means I should have followed my first instinct and stolen the sucker.)

I was reminded of that long ago transaction while pondering this collection of rejected movie posters assembled by YuppiePunk. Revenge of the Jedi isn’t included, but then it wasn’t so much the poster that was rejected as the title – the poster was simply collateral damage. The same might be said for Welcome to Valkenvania, the original title of the flop by any other name Nothing but Trouble. Notice that the title change gave the art department time to switch out the original head shots for John Candy and Demi Moore. Who makes these decisions and why? Did Candy balk at his extra chinnage? Did Moore feel her glazed-over expression was better suited to a full-frontal view? We may never know.

Also included: a poster featuring the original Rocky V subtitle: The Final Bell. Ah, if only…

SXSW Preview

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 18:00:00 GMT

The full roster won’t be released until sometime after Super Bowl Sunday, but the preliminary highlights of the 15th annual South by Southwest Film Festival have been announced.

As you read here yesterday, kicking off the 2008 fest on March 7th will be 21, based on the self-explanatory Ben Mezrich book Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions. It’s probably long past time to keep hoping for Kevin Spacey to return to form, but his role as the professor who masterminds the ring of blackjack geniuses would seem to be his most promising in years. Kate Bosworth co-stars as the world’s sexiest math student.

Other intriguing entries include Dreams With Sharp Teeth, a documentary retrospective on the always prickly and entertaining sci-fi author Harlan Ellison, and Wild Blue Yonder, in which Celia Maysles turns the tables on her famous documentarian father and uncle, Albert and David Maysles.

On the back burner, there’s Michael Radford’s Flawless, in which Demi Moore and Michael Caine team up for a diamond heist, and Run, Fatboy, Run, in which Hot Fuzz star Simon Pegg attempts to win a marathon and the respect of his family. It’s directed by David Schwimmer, if you want to start curbing your enthusiasm now.

SXSW runs from March 7th through the 15th, all over Austin, TX.