The Screengrab : denzel washington

The Screengrab's Top Ten Worst...Movies...Ever!!!! (Part Nine)

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 08 May 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Phil Nugent's Top Ten Worst Movies Ever (Part Two)

6. RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD, PART II (1985)

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To judge from the overly polite reactions to the recent Rocky Balboa and Rambo pictures, some critics who were there when Sylvester Stallone was the biggest star in the world and who had sense enough to cringe about it now feel so sorry for the poor has-been son of a bitch that they're happy he's still alive, steroid-addled, and capable of pulling crows to a cornfield at sundown. They were right the first time and need to get over it. Stallone's naked need for not just ticket sales but approval and respect was always pathetic, and in order to reap these ill-gotten rewards, he made a string of movies that were progressively more brutal in their stupidity, to the point that you could actually sit there feeling the collective I.Q. points being shaved off the audience. Nor does it necessarily make one a humorless tight-ass to regret the fact that, in order to get those fists pumping to his satisfaction, he had to throw gasoline on the fantasy that Vietnam in the mid-1980s was full of captive American POWs, which amounted to emotionally torturing the families of MIA servicemen for the sake of an adrenaline surge, as well as the idea that we didn't lose the war but "weren't allowed to win it," a contention that guaranteed one an interesting crowd reaction in theaters where Vietnam vets were present. The next time somebody as hard up for stardom as Stallone and as shameless about how he gets it comes along, for God's sake, let him be satisfied with making movies where he kills Martians or something.

7. BREAKING THE WAVES (1996)
8. AMONGST FRIENDS (1993)

No list of worst movies would be complete without a Scorsese imitation, and while Phil Joanou's State of Grace remains a standout for the blatancy of its appropriation of the uptight guy/crazy guy central dynamic--with Gary Oldman's performance some kind of benchmark for fake Method acting--this embarrassment, made for some $900,000 by the self-promoting tyro writer-director Rob Weiss, doubles as a horror story about overhyped "indie" filmmaking in the wake of sex, lies and videotape and Reservoir Dogs. (For the true and terrible story, see John Pierson's chapter on the movie in Spike, Mike, Slackers and Dykes, titled "Amongst Jerks.") The best thing you can say about the movie's male cast is that they would never be seen onscreen again; Weiss himself has never directed another movie, apparently having concluded that it's too much like work. (Surely he could get another job if he wanted to; if Phil Joanou does it, anybody could.) Instead, he lives out his dreams of show biz glory vicariously, grinding out scripts for the televised circle jerk that is HBO's Entourage.

9. CRY FREEDOM (1987)

Richard Attenborough takes rich, complex dramatic stories about amazing men, turns them into pap, and then stands there beaming with pride at the great favor he's done by making these stories dull enough that any muttonhead can now presumably benefit from them. He does sometimes get great performances in spite of himself, and this movie features a staggering piece of work in Denzel Washington's portrait of the martyred anti-apartheid activist Steven Biko. So it's all the more patently insulting that the movie is shaped as the story of a white family man, Biko's biographer Donald Woods (Kevin Kline), and that Kline's colorless performance as a man who's presented as being unexciting and virtually of no interest--I guess so that we dullards in the audience can "identify" with him--is supposed to be the center of the movie, with Biko in his shade. Attenborough is very lucky that the apartheid government was well on its way to collapsing by the time his movie came out; it distracted attention from his film and made it seem more of an irrelevance than an outrage. But if a Truth and Reconcilation Campaign for movies were ever created, Cry Freedom would be first in line, and few movies would deserve forgiveness less.

10. SGT. PEPPER'S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND (1978)

The practice of grabbing hold of the title of a non-movie-related pop culture touchstone did not in fact begin with Uwe Boll, and in fact, it's hard to think of a computer-game-based movie that would make less sense than this project. Produced by Robert Stigwood in the wake of the success of Saturday Night Fever, the new Beatles who head the all-star cast are the Bee Gees and Peter Frampton, who a year or two before had been the biggest pop star in the English-speaking world. With all due respect to Steve Martin's gonzo movie debut as Dr. Maxwell Edison, the best joke here is that by the time the film was released, Frampton had less clout and credibility with the rock audience than his erstwhile co-star, Mr. George Burns.

Runner-Up: FORREST GUMP (1994)

Combining all the aesthetic crimes of a Hallmark card, a soap opera, an Oscar-bait "very special" performance, and a Fox News report on why the sixties were bad for you, Robert Zemeckis' crime against humanity officially declared the end of the Being There era, a time when most of humanity would have agreed that there was a downside to seeing a well-intentioned moron as a fount of wisdom and moral superiority. And the dubbing in the scenes with JFK and John Lennon sucks donkeys. Sometimes, flipping the channel and coming across a rerun of Bosom Buddies or the scene in Turner & Hootch where he tries to explain Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp to a dog, I'm reminded of how much I miss having had an iota of respect for Tom Hanks.

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

Contributor: Phil Nugent

Screengrab Predicts: The Top 5 Bombs of Summer 2009 (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 22:00:00 GMT

And now, the bombs...though, to be honest, with no Love Guru or Speed Racer in the running, this category (with one consensus exception) is a lot more of an open race for Summer 2009, with ties in the 4th and 5th place spots pretty much decided by coin-toss...well, it was a little more scientific than that, but not by much...

5. YEAR ONE (June 19)

Nick:
Barring The Flintstones suddenly becoming fashionable again, Harold Ramis’ caveman comedy starring Jack Black and Michael Cera will sink like a stone.

Scott:
Maybe this has one good weekend in it, but I’m not seeing a lot of staying power here. If you check your list of successful cavemen comedies, I think you’ll find it’s a bit shorter than you remember.

Andrew:
Oh, I dunno...I remember at least one really good gag in Ringo Starr’s Caveman, and I expect Year One to at least double that batting average...which might be just enough to get me into an air-conditioned theater on some muggy June afternoon. Not exactly a ringing endorsement, true...

4. IMAGINE THAT (June 12)

Scott:
Imagine what? Another toothless “family-friendly” Eddie Murphy comedy larded with sugary sweet life lessons? All too easy to imagine.

Paul:
Dear Eddie Murphy,

It’s been a decade since Bowfinger. Ever since then you’ve made lousy action comedies, lousy family comedies, and computer-animated comedies in which you provide the voice of a talking donkey. Pleasepleaseplease be funny again, both for your own sake and the sake of those who remember when you could still make people laugh. Thank you.

Sincerely,
The Screengrab

Andrew:
Okay, you guys convinced me...I kinda wish I’d put this on my own list of “bombs” now...but I put Transformers in its place on my list instead out of sheer malice.

3. X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE (May 1)

Nick:
Each X-Men film has made more than its predecessor, and this prequel cost more to make than any prior series entry. The Internet leak won’t affect its business, but Star Trek – opening one week after it – will, causing Wolverine to make less than X-Men: The Last Stand and thus be viewed as a modest failure.

Andrew:
For what it’s worth, I’ve seen and dug all the other X-Men flicks, and for some reason I could give a wet fart about this one, which looks to me like the bad Halle Berry Catwoman of the series. Now maybe if there were some musical numbers...

2. THE TAKING OF PELHAM 123 (June 12)

Nick:
With little action-thriller opposition around its June 12th release date, Tony Scott’s remake may open reasonably well. Yet given how blah it looks and how little buzz it’s attracting, it should quickly disappear from the nation’s overcrowded multiplexes.

Scott:
Speaking of ruining the ’70s (see below)...a gritty, grimy little New Yawk thriller with Walter Matthau at his hangdog finest is given the Tony Scott treatment. It looks as though puffy John Travolta and his wacky facial hair have already chewed some of the scenery, but expect him to devour the rest of it when this one hits theaters in June.

1. LAND OF THE LOST (June 5)

Scott:
I have an idea. Let’s completely ruin the ’70s for those of us who spent our childhoods there! Oh wait, we’ve already done that, haven’t we? Then what the hell, we might as well turn a quirky, beloved Saturday morning staple into another crappy Will Ferrell comedy with plenty of dopey sight gags and gobs of CGI effects.

Nick:
Will Ferrell and Danny McBride are inspired comedians, but Brad Silberling’s update of the 1970s TV show seems like the latest action-comedy hybrid destined to be neither exciting nor amusing. Expect a big-time bomb.

Paul:
Who is this movie for, exactly? Will Ferrell isn’t the box-office juggernaut he once was, and the ticket buyers who yearn for him to deliver Ron Burgundy-style laughs probably won’t go for the second-rate Jurassic Park-style dinosaur storyline. Meanwhile, the kids will probably be too busy watching Up and Night at the Museum 2 to care about this one. Does the original series have that many fans clamoring for a big-budget version of the story? I highly doubt it.

Andrew:
I have to say I actually feel bad about Land of the Lost winding up as our runaway number one consensus pick for top bomb of the summer, since I’m a fan of the original TV series and I have every intention of going to see the Will Ferrell version...and yet, my colleagues all make excellent points, plus the promotional stuff has a distinctly low-rent, Brendan Fraseresque feel to it...on the other hand, I wouldn’t be completely surprised if this one bites us on the ass, prediction-wise, and turns into a surprise hit...oh, wait, the budget was $100 million? Uh...never mind.

Click Here For The Hits (Parts One & Two), The Toss-Ups (Part Four) and The Honorable Mentions (Parts Five & Six)

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Nick Schager, Scott Von Doviak, Paul Clark

Fat Actor Watch at New York Times: Paper of Record Alleges That When Russell Crowe Sits Around the House, He Really Sits Around the House

Phil Nugent — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 15:00:00 GMT

Always looking for a fresh angle on the really important movie news of the day, Michael Cieply uses his perch at Thew New York Times to ask" what's with all the male movie stars who are porkers? Who does he have in mind, exactly? Russell Crowe and Jeff Daniels, sharing a screen in State of Play ("Two men. One notebook. Four chins."); Denzel Washington, going "cheek-to-jowl with the bulky John Travolta" in the trailer for the remake of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three; Hugh Grant; and "Even Leonardo DiCaprio, the young heartthrob from Titanic"--Photos from the set of Shutter Island, a thriller on tap from Paramount Pictures and the director Martin Scorsese in October, show a little bit more to love." Oh, snap! Are they handing out chocolate bunnies to whoever can be the biggest bitch at the Times these days?

Cieply briefly notes that there's a gender-based double standard regarding the weight and age rules in Hollywood so far as leading players are concerned, but after dropping Kathleen Turner's name, he seems to feel that he's discharged his duty, as if the subject bored even him. He seems more taken with the idea that this is an utterly new phenomenon, but despite the historical examples he digs up, that may be a non-starter. "Photos of midcentury stars — Humphrey Bogart, James Stewart, Clark Gable and others — show them to have remained rather gaunt at an age when many of the current crop are anything but." Good thing those photos are handy, since it's not as if movie actors left behind filmed records of their performances so we'd be able to remind themselves what they looked like. That said, it seems a little callous to drag Bogart, one of the best-known victims of cancer sticks ever to go down coughing, into a discussion of how movie stars used to keep themselves svelte. (One well-circulated story has it that, when illness had left Bogie too weak to handle the stairs in his own home, he used to navigate from one floor to another by stuffing himself in the dumb waiter.) It's also worth remembering that Gable, who died of a massive heart attack after completing his last film, The Misfits, had lost 35 pounds on a crash diet to get his weight below 200 before shooting began. If there's any less of that sort of thing going on nowadays because more stars feel comfortable about appearing in public looking something other than whisper-thin, surely it's for the better.

It's also true that, as Cieply would have known if he'd put down the "photographs" and spent a couple of days watching Turner Classic Movies, there have always been counter-examples one could offer to his role call of manly waifs. Wallace Beery never looked as if he'd had trouble locating the desert cart, Spencer Tracey rolled into his onscreen middle age looking as if he'd swallowed a tether ball, James Cagney was getting pretty squared-off by the time of Yankee Doodle Dandy, Robert Mitchum often had an amorphous mass surrounding his midsection that he used to abruptly suck up into his chesticological region whenever he was required to take his shirt off, Gene Hackman's weight always flunctuated, sometimes wildly, depending on just how regular his latest "regular guy" character was supposed to be, and as for Jack Nicholson, in his mid-forties when he more or less officially entered his "middle-aged" period with Terms of Endearment--please. Of course, with movies as with everything else, memory can be a great deceiver. Lawrence Turman, "a veteran film producer who is chairman of the Peter Stark producing program at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts", told Cieply that "“John Wayne always looked a bit portly." I find it disturbing that the Peter Stark producing program at the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts can do no better for its chairman than a guy who's never seen Stagecoach. It may be a tribute to the lingering effect of the image that Wayne cast from around the mid-1950s until his death in 1979 that even some professionals think he always looked like that, but I would propose that, unlikely though it may seem, that if Wayne had looked in his youth like a guy who was fated to someday look the way he did in True Grit, he never would have gotten the chance to grow into that later incarnation--at least, not on movie screens.

This still leaves the question of whether some of these stars, heavier though they may undeniably be, are as hideous to behold as Cieply seems to be implying they are. I will confess that when I saw Travolta, say, in the trailer for Pelham, I did not catch myself thinking, "Here comes Wide Load." (I did catch myself thinking, "Get a load of Weird Hairline with his Fu Manchu mustache. Each of us has his issues.) One possibility worth considering is that such stars as Travolta, Washington, and Hanks, who came up in the 1980s, when a perfect storm of society-embraced body issues and new technology in the gym led to a new species of Americans who seemed to be armor-plated in their own skin and muscle, some of whom hastened to show off their new packaging on the covers of magazines, such as that infamous shot of Travolta on the cover of Rolling Stone to promote Stayin' Alive, looking as if his abs were about to jump out of his torso and his brains had already leaked out of his ears. Maybe, having fallen for that when you had the energy and free schedule to pursue it all the way, you have to let yourself go a little later on or else you'll explode. But then, in the interests of full disclosure, I should concede that I am from The South, where we deep fry our veggie plates and the lost causes that we love to get misty-eyed about include our own arteries in their pre-clotted state. Because of my own cultural conditioning, if I had my way, every other movie made since 1984 would have starred Joe Don Baker, and the others would have been divided between Randy Quaid and the late Dub Taylor, with the result that Michael Cieply would be even more confused.

DVD Digest for April 7, 2009

Paul Clark — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 14:00:00 GMT

This week, a recent Oscar winner finally gets the DVD treatment it deserves, and Warner digs deep into their vaults for a slew of new Blu-Ray titles.

This week’s selection of recent movies is headed by a handful of high-profile December releases, including Jim Carrey in Yes Man (Warner, also Blu-Ray), Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman in Doubt (Disney, also Blu-Ray), the Adam Sandler family vehicle Bedtime Stories (Disney, also Blu-Ray), Keanu Reeves in the remake The Day the Earth Stood Still (Fox, also Blu-Ray), and the animated The Tale of Despereaux (Universal, also Blu-Ray). Also this week: Morris Chestnut and Taraji P. Henson in Not Easily Broken (Sony, also Blu-Ray), and the controversial British horror movie Donkey Punch (Magnolia).

Last year, many DVD fans expressed displeasure over the shabby treatment given to the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men, released in a bare-bones edition to capitalize on the movie’s recent Oscar success. This week, Disney hopes to remedy this with the release of a new “Collector’s Edition” in both standard DVD and Blu-Ray. This new upgrade boasts more than five hours of new features, including documentaries, and interviews with the filmmakers, cast and crew. Also this week: a 75th Anniversary Edition of Cecil B. DeMille’s Cleopatra (Universal); Warner’s Pre-Code Hollywood Collection, which includes The Cheat, Merrily We Go to Hell, Hot Saturday, Torch Singer, Murder at the Vanities, and Search for Beauty; the TCM Spotlight: Doris Day Collection (Warner)- includes April in Paris, It’s a Great Feeling, Starlift, Tea for Two, and The Tunnel of Love; and the controversial-in-its-day La Grande Bouffe (E1 Entertainment).

The big Blu-Ray news this week is Warner’s release of nine (mostly dodgy, I must say) new titles in the format. The Warner Blu-Ray releases are: Peter Hyams’ 2010, Steven Seagal in Above the Law, Edward Norton in American History X, The Governator in Collateral Damage; the Rube Goldberg-esque thriller Final Destination; Denzel Washington standing up to the American health care system in John Q, an extended cut of Angelina Jolie in Taking Lives, and the 80s-set Adam Sandler/Drew Barrymore rom-com The Wedding Singer. Also this week, a double feature of avian-themed Sony releases: Fly Away Home and Winged Migration.

Finally, the selection was pretty thin for plot synopses, so I wasn’t able to find a suitable Synopsis of the Week. The best I can do is a pretty unbeatable title: Britney Spears: The Return of An Angel. Doesn’t that sound like just about the cheesiest thing ever? Too bad the White Elephant Blogathon is over, because that could’ve made for a fun submission. Oh well- there’s always next year…

Morning Deal Report: The Cruise/Cronenberg Circle

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 15:30:00 GMT

David Cronenberg’s adaptation of the Robert Ludlum novel The Matarese Circle is attracting some big names. Denzel Washington is already on board, and now Tom “Eyepatch” Cruise is in talks to join him. “Cruise will go mano a mano with Washington as two bitter enemy spies who, after spending two decades trying to kill each other, grudgingly team up against the Matarese, a powerful group at the root of a conspiracy,” Variety reports.

Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan has set up his latest bat-free project at Warner Bros. His original script Inception is described as a sci-fi action film, but as The Hollywood Reporter notes, “one would suppose a treatment based on some poems he wrote in his fifth-grade journal would have gotten the green light.”

John Malkovich has signed on to play the bad guy in Jonah Hex. “Malkovich will play Turnbull, a wealthy Southern plantation owner whose son is killed by Union soldiers during the Civil War. He blames Hex, a former confederate soldier-turned-hardened bounty hunter and gunslinger,” per Variety.

Related:
Tom Cruise, at Midlife, with a Freaking Eyepatch
Horton Hears a Hex

DVD Digest for January 20, 2009

Paul Clark — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 15:00:00 GMT

With the recent deep freeze that has stricken much of the country, now’s the perfect time to curl up in front of the television and watch a DVD. And don’t think the studios don’t know it.

DVD of the Week: The cream of this week’s DVD releases looks to be the snazzy new Criterion edition of Gregory Nava’s breakthrough film El Norte. This lovely mini-epic about a pair of Guatemalan refugees venturing north to America, Nava’s film told a too-common story that hadn’t been successfully dramatized in movies before. Shooting the film largely on the fly, Nava and his wife/collaborator Anna Thomas helped to kick-start the American independent film movement by redefining the sorts of movies could be made with limited means. Both the standard edition and the Blu-Ray edition include a new commentary track by Nava, interviews with Nava, Thomas, and the film’s principal actors, Nava’s 1972 student film The Journal of Diego Rodriguez Silva, and more. At a time when “Sundance movies” have practically become a formula unto themselves, El Norte is a reminder that independent film can be more than just a cliché.

Also this week in classics is Criterion’s standard-format edition of Douglas Sirk’s Magnificent Obsession, which also includes a remastered version of the 1935 John M. Stahl original. Or if you like your weepies more contemporary, there’s always The Notebook Limited Edition Gift Set (Warner, also Blu-Ray).

This week’s slate of recent releases coming to DVD is headlined Saw V (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray), the latest entry in a series that will surely continue as long as there are people willing to come up with convoluted ways to kill off characters. Also this week: Mark Wahlberg in the video game adaptation Max Payne (Fox, also Blu-Ray), the story of Heisman winner Ernie Davis in The Express (Universal, also Blu-Ray), the family films Igor (MGM, also Blu-Ray) and City of Ember (Fox), Jonathan Rhys-Meyers in the “a white man shall free them” drama The Children of Huang Shi (Sony), the cult-ready musical gorefest Repo!: The Genetic Opera (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray), and the direct-to-DVD horror movie Amusement (Warner, also Blu-Ray).

In TV on DVD, this week brings The Rockford Files Season 6 (Universal), Emergency! Season 5 (Universal), and Moonlight: The Complete Series (Warner).

Finally, this week’s Blu-Ray only titles is highlighted by the enduring classic This Is Spinal Tap (MGM), in an edition that boasts all of the extras from MGM’s standard-format edition. Also this week: Jennifer Garner in 13 Going on 30 (Sony), Denzel Washington’s Antwone Fisher (Fox), Tony Scott’s Domino (Warner) (for my money, the most underappreciated movie of the decade so far), Alexander Payne’s Election (Paramount), Steve Martin making an ass of himself in The Pink Panther (Sony), and Richard Gere and Diane Lane in Unfaithful (Fox).

Screengrab 2009 Preview: Scott Von Doviak’s Picks

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Again using the ever-popular 3 Up, 3 Down format, I will pick up the gauntlet thrown down by my colleague Andrew Osborne. (Hey, nice gauntlet, Osborne! You get a hat with that?) I must say, a cursory scan of the upcoming release schedule doesn’t exactly have me all a-quiver with anticipation, but hey, it’s early yet. Herewith, my picks to click and tips to slip. Or something like that.

3 UP

A SERIOUS MAN

I could really get used to this annual Coen Brothers movie routine. This year’s edition isn’t due until October, but it should be worth the wait. It’s “the story of an ordinary man’s search for clarity in a universe where Jefferson Airplane is on the radio and F-Troop is on TV.” Unlike Burn After Reading, the film doesn’t boast an all-star cast, unless Michael Stuhlbarg, Sari Lennick, Fred Melamed and Richard Kind are at the top of your A-list. But who cares, as long as we get that Coen Brothers feeling.

THE LIMITS OF CONTROL

The long-awaited (by me anyway) return of Jim Jarmusch is “the story of a mysterious loner (Isaach. De Bankolé), a stranger, whose activities remain meticulously outside the law. He is in the process of completing a job, yet he trusts no one, and his objectives are not initially divulged. The film is set in the striking and varied landscapes of contemporary Spain (both urban and otherwise).” Okay, that’s a little vague, but it’s enough to intrigue me. The cast also includes Gael García Bernal, Tilda Swinton, John Hurt and, of course, Bill Murray.

THE ROAD

Left over from last year, which isn’t necessarily a great sign. Then again, there are indications the editing was being rushed to meet the end-of-2008 deadline, and that probably wouldn’t have been a good thing either. Quoting myself from last year’s fall preview, the Cormac McCarthy adaptation is a “grim post-apocalyptic tale brought to the screen by John Hillcoat, director of The Proposition, a western that certainly counts McCarthy’s Blood Meridian among its influences. Viggo Mortenson has the lead, and the supporting cast includes Charlize Theron, Guy Pearce, Robert Duvall, Garrett Dillahunt and The Wire’s Omar himself, Michael K. Williams.”

3 DOWN

THE TAKING OF PELHAM 1-2-3

Oh good, a completely unnecessary remake of a perfectly fine ‘70s movie, over-directed by Tony Scott and featuring John Travolta in an unconvincing villainous mustache. But at least it has Denzel Washington looking dumpy. Maybe that’s his homage to Walter Matthau.

LAND OF THE LOST

''You're not going to see the zipper up the back of the Sleestaks' costumes,” says Will Ferrell, star of this preposterous remake of the beloved Saturday morning show of yesteryear. Is that supposed to make me want to see this?

STATE OF PLAY

The original British miniseries is an intricate work of intrigue about a newspaper with seemingly unlimited resources investigating political scandal. (Eat your heart out, David Simon.) The trailer for the American remake promises a generic, forgettable thriller.

WILD CARD: Watchmen, of course. Will it suck? Will it somehow blow our minds? Heck, will it even be released?

Screengrab Salutes: The Top Biopics of All Time! (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 22:30:00 GMT

MALCOLM X (1992)

There was an Oscar ceremony one year where Denzel Washington and Spike Lee were the co-presenters of some category or tribute, and while I may be misremembering the whole thing, it seemed very much like the two of them were pissed, huddled together, leaning over the podium and glaring at the sea of rich white faces before them as they bit through their teleprompter lines in tones of obvious displeasure. While I’m shaky on the particulars, in my mind, I like to imagine the two of them were reacting to the fact that Lee’s masterful, sweeping adaptation of The Autobiography of Malcolm X only received one major Oscar nomination (for Best Actor)...and, adding insult to injury, Washington’s pitch-perfect performance in the title role somehow lost out to Al Pacino’s “hoo-hah” Scent of a Woman nonsense. I’m not always on Lee’s side when he cries racism (as in his recent dust-up with Clint Eastwood), but it’s hard to think of any other reason for such an obvious snub of the kind of period epic the Academy usually rewards (or at least frickin’ nominates). True, Malcolm X was and remains a controversial figure, but as cinema, Lee’s production is a stylistic masterpiece, capturing the shifting tides of his protagonist’s life as he evolves from Zoot-suited hustler to civil rights icon in a film as indelible and essential as Alex Haley’s canonical source material.

THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD (1996)

Vincent D'Onofrio probably has the best role of his career as Robert E. Howard, the pulp writer and mama's boy (with Ann Wedgeworth as his mama) who created Conan the Barbarian and other musclebound action icons, while spending his whole adult life marooned in the nowheresville of small-town Texas in the 1930s. A mannered Renee Zellweger plays the young budding schoolteacher and writer who makes a tentative stab at befriending him without ever knowing quite what to make of the tortured fellow. This small, affecting film is in some ways a subversive comment on the whole life-of-a-young-American-writer (or "I, John-Boy") genre, because it captures the quiet, rural life that movies so often depict as being an essential part of the back story of healthy, homegrown creative types, and then shows why anyone who had the imagination to be any kind of writer but found themselves physically trapped there would end up wanting to blow their brains out.

MY LEFT FOOT (1989)

Make no mistake: Jim Sheridan's biography of Christy Brown is a rich and scabrous work, full of fury at both the horror of being born into Irish poverty and a body that won't do what you want it to, and the power of Daniel Day-Lewis' performance as a romantic artist with cerebral palsy is in no way compromised or embarrassed by the fact that it won an Academy Award, as if the voters thought this was some Rain Man shit. Sure, for a lot of actors, a role like this would amount to a chance to be applauded and praised for how well they could shake. For Day-Lewis, mastering the physical tremors and folding his body into a pretzel just amounted to laying down the floorboards before he could really go to work.

SERPICO (1973)

When watching Serpico, it's easy to get distracted from the biopic factor. There is the classic man-against-the-machine plot line, the shots of vintage New York...then there is the sense that Al Pacino often seems to be playing Al Pacino, no matter who he is supposed to portray -- though you cannot deny it is interesting to watch him plumb the depths of his own murky psyche. But let's not get lost here: Officer Frank Serpico, was, and is, a real character -- slightly nutty as portrayed by a deliciously young and wounded-looking Pacino, and judging by Serpico's website (hey, go Google it!), quite possibly a few sandwiches short of a picnic in real life. He was of course, a young police officer who went to battle against corruption in the NYPD, for which he paid in health and sanity. Watching Serpico raises some questions: why couldn't Al Pacino be young and beautiful forever? Whatever happened to bringing down the system at all costs? Will people start sticking it to the Man again, now that the economy is in free fall? Will short dark cops start sporting beards and love beads? If American Gangster came out in 2007, does that mean we will have to wait another 34 years for another movie with a similar plot? Who knows...until then, enjoy Al Pacino in a beard.

32 SHORT FILMS ABOUT GLENN GOULD (1993)

Biopics are episodic practically by definition, since it's practically impossible to encompass an entire life without boiling that life down into vignettes. Francois Girard's film about concert pianist Glenn Gould (played by Colm Feore) is probably the most extreme example of this idea. Taking his cue from Bach's thirty-two Goldberg Variations (perhaps Gould's most famous recording), Girard recreates a series of incidents from Gould's life -- from his youth to his concert career, to his later experiments with recording and radio -- with almost nothing in the way of transitional material. In doing so, the film avoids many of the traps of standard-issue biopics, especially the rise-and-fall structure and easy psychoanalysis most filmmakers tend to impose onto the stories of historical figures. There are no subplots about Gould's domestic life, no crisis or obstacle for him to overcome, and scarcely a mention of his relationships or sex life. Girard replaces the convenient formula with a genuine curiosity about who Gould was, what made him tick, and why exactly he retired from public performance at the height of his popularity to devote himself solely to recordings, a moment that feels as offhand here as it allegedly was to Gould himself. What makes the film and its subject all the more fascinating is that Girard doesn't pretend to know the answers, and rather than trying to nail them down, he simply shows us key scenes from Gould's life and encourages us to figure the answers out for ourselves. 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould is the polar opposite of an Oscar-bait biopic, and is that rarest of cinematic creatures -- a completely accessible movie that encourages, and rewards, real thought and reflection. Could this be why it's currently out of print on R1 DVD?

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Sarah Clyne Sundberg, Paul Clark

Morning Deal Report: Sam Mendes Meets the Preacher

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 14:00:00 GMT

The 75-issue Preacher comic book by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon seemed like an ideal fit for HBO, which has struggled to launch a new buzz series since stalwarts like The Sopranos, Sex and the City and Deadwood went dark. The projected series fell through earlier this year, however, and it didn’t take long for Columbia Pictures to secure the rights for a feature film version. Sam Mendes (Revolutionary Road) will direct the supernatural tale, his second graphic novel adaptation following Road to Perdition, which…kind of sucked.

Samuel L. Jackson will play Sho'nuff, the Shogun of Harlem, in a remake of 1985’s The Last Dragon. “The updated plot will be along the same lines of the original, centering on young martial arts student Leroy Green in his quest through the streets of New York to achieve the highest level of martial arts accomplishment, known as the Last Dragon,” says The Hollywood Reporter, which several times refers to the original as a “cult classic.” Can’t say I ever joined that particular cult.

Gary Oldman and Denzel Washington will star in Book of Eli, a post-apocalyptic action movie from the Hughes Brothers. “revolves around a lone warrior (Washington) who must fight to bring society the knowledge that could be the key to its redemption. Oldman has been set to portray the despot of a small makeshift town who's determined to take possession of the book Eli's guarding,” Variety reports.

Related:
Trailer Review: "Revolutionary Road"
Take Five: Bad Cops

Trailer Review: Defiance (Trailer #2)

Paul Clark — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 16:00:00 GMT

”To all of the esteemed voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences,

I consider myself proud to be a part of your illustrious ranks, in the company of so many talented people both in front of and behind the camera. But while I have attempted for years to make a film that would serve as my love letter to you and your impeccable tastes in cinema, I fear I have failed so far. It seems that while you have appreciated many performances in the films I’ve made, nominating several of them and even awarding a much-deserved Oscar to Denzel Washington in Glory, I wonder if perhaps my subject matter hasn’t appealed to you as it was meant to. It certainly would seem that the Civil War, Gulf War I, Arab terrorists, the downfall of the Japanese feudal system, and even the misdeeds of the diamond industry aren’t everyone’s idea of important cinema. So I decided to take on a subject that I’m sure everyone in the Academy will agree is a worthy one- the Holocaust. To underline the seriousness of the topic, I’ve decided to cast one of Hollywood’s newly-anointed action stars (Daniel Craig- James Bond himself!) in the lead role, even having him do an accent to show what a fine serious actor he is in case you still haven’t seen Enduring Love and The Mother. And just so you don’t think I’m making a sober, boring drama, I’m going to tell the inspirational true-life story of a group of Jewish refugees who actually fought back against the Nazis. Surely, no one will be able to resist a tale that so clearly shows a triumph of the spirit (which, not coincidentally, is the title of another wonderful Holocaust movie that you might have forgotten about. In closing, I hope you will find the film as uplifting and hard-hitting as I do, and would like to direct you to the engraved name plate that I’ve conveniently included with this letter. You’ll find that it should fit perfectly on the base of the Oscar statuette in all possible ways.

All the best,
E. Zwick”

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 22:00:00 GMT

10. SIDNEY POITIER (1927 - )

Poitier's breakthrough as the first African-American actor fully recognized as a leading man and star secured him a permanent place in the cultural history of the movies, but his status as a major actor and one of the great talents of his day may have eroded a little. In part this is because a lot of the movies he starred in were high-minded tosh that have dated very badly, not least because of the perceived need to present Poitier's characters as being superhuman and even morally superior to whites, the thinking being that a black man wouldn't be worth building a movie around if he were merely human. But just as Jackie Robinson had to play baseball extraordinarily well to earn his place on the roster of the Brooklyn Dodgers, it was Poitier's enormous talent that made most of his movies watchable at all. Even in something like To Sir, With Love, his powerful presence and banked fires seems informed by the mixture of intelligence and anger that made him stand out as the student worth saving in the juvenile-delinquency melodrama The Blackboard Jungle. It would be nice to report that, as the sixties gave way to the seventies and opportunities began to open up for black artists, Poitier was able to drop the black messiah act and take more challenging, morally complicated parts, but instead, he seemed to accept the idea that "Sidney Poitier" was a fixed concept that had no place in the era of Super Fly and Shaft. (In one of his 1971 movies, Brother John, his mistreated black Southerner character turned out to really be Jesus.) Poitier withdrew from the center of the film world, concentrating on directing and appearing in light comedies, aimed at the underserved African-American family audience, in which he played tightass straight man to such co-stars as Harry Belafonte and Bill Cosby. Them after a long layoff, he turned up acting again in such movies as Shoot to Kill, Little Nikita, and Sneakers. He didn't look as if he'd aged much and he could still command the screen, but the new scripts sucked about as much as the old ones had. He appears to have been effectively retired for the last decade or so.

9. DENZEL WASHINGTON (1954 - )

For a long time, Denzel Washington seemed content to play it safe. He looked good in a military uniform (Glory, Crimson Tide, Courage Under Fire) or a detective's plain clothes (Devil in a Blue Dress, Fallen, The Bone Collector), and his career strategy appeared to be "If Harrison Ford can do it, I can do it," which is admirable in the sense that he clearly never wanted to be pigeonholed as The Black Guy in Hollywood's eyes. There are limitations to this approach, though, and eventually folks start to notice that, for example, in Philadelphia you're the lawyer, not the guy dying of AIDS, and they start to wonder if your career is just going to be one tailored suit after another. (To be sure, many a leading man has built a career on just that.) Of course, you run the risk of upsetting a whole other contingent of your fans when you finally say what the hell, I'm gonna have some fun playing the baddest cop in Los Angeles – especially when that's the role that finally wins you the Best Actor award on Oscar night. All these complaints seem petty now; Washington blew the roof off the joint in Training Day and ever since then, he's been livelier in his straight roles (Inside Man, Deja Vu) and more willing to sprinkle the occasional bad dude (American Gangster) in with the noble characters (The Great Debaters). So hey, maybe he knew he was doing all along.

8. JAMES DEAN (1931-1955)

It’s inconceivable that a career like James Dean’s could happen again. History and circumstance prohibit it; the mere fact of his existence proscribes it. When the blazingly handsome Indiana farmboy blazed out of existence so spectacularly on Route 466, he took with him the possibility of anyone ever repeating his singular, spectacular career. It was not merely the circumstance of his death that made him a legend; plenty of actors had died young before, and plenty would die young after. But so stunning was his rise to the top, and so distinct was his personality both on and off the screen, that no one since would carry into death the legendary quality that makes his a name to conjure with, a shorthand for infinite possibility fatefully snuffed. The closest modern-day analogue, for example, is Heath Ledger – but the young Australian was four years older than Dean at the time of his own death, and had an astonishing sixteen more screen roles. That’s one of the qualities that makes Dean such a towering figure in Hollywood: even ignoring his brooding personality, his smoldering good looks, his pioneering, emotional Method performances, his controversial personal life, and his restless and rebellious off-screen persona, it is staggering to consider that James Dean, as iconic an actor as can be imagined, made only three films in his entire life. Of course, had he lived, he likely would have been instrumental in tarnishing his own fiery purity, but…well, he didn’t live, did he?

7. SEAN CONNERY (1930 - )

Connery became a star because, at a point where his animal presence was enough to hold the camera but his acting was still at the beginner's stage, he became James Bond. What's amazing is that he's still so strongly associated with the role even though he's long since developed not just a strong body of work but a strong screen image that's pretty far from the over-accessorized pretty boy stud of Dr. No and From Russia With Love. In fact, by the time of his last "real" Bond movie, 1971's Diamonds Are Forever (not counting the 1983 rehash Never Say Never Again), his Bond was starting to look more human and fleshy and fallible, never more comfortably in his skin than in a throwaway moment where he gets to apologize to a rat for his body odor. By then, he had given impressive, full-bodied performances in such mid-60s films as The Hill and A Fine Madness, and was known to delight in opportunities to strip off his hair pieces and indulge in his taste for extravagant and weird facial hair choices. One thing that never changed much, whether he was playing an Irish-American cop in The Untouchables or a beefcake messiah assassin circa 2400 A.D. in the visually opulent, brain-damaged Zardoz, was his voice, and that was probably a right call: after purring his way through his first couple of appearancs as 007, Connery had developed one of those voices that makes almost any line seem worth hearing at least once. The Scottish music machine that he calls a larynx may have as much as his strapping form and experienced manliness to do with his status as probably the longest-reigning A-list sex symbol in the history of movies, an iconic musk dispenser who was able to convincingly get younger actresses ranging from Tia Carrere to Catherine Zeta Jones to respond to his first call at an age where most former Mr. Universe contestants have to ring three times just to get the nurse. The odd bit of voice work aside, he has been officially retired since 2003, having cited his experiences during the production of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen with having convinced him that he'd gotten too old for that shit.

6. JIMMY STEWART (1908-1997)

Over the years, there have been as many "young Jimmy Stewarts" in movies as there have been "new Dylans" in music. That alone would probably be enough to qualify the real deal for this list, but what's most interesting about Stewart the actor is how far off the mark most such comparisons are. They're usually intended to evoke an aw-shucks, American as apple pie appeal, and certainly that's part of the story with Stewart -- the stand-up, virtuous hero of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, The Glenn Miller Story and The Spirit of St. Louis, the man of decency who would age into the stammering sentimentalist reading weepy odes to his dead dog on The Tonight Show -- but such shorthand doesn't take into account the disturbed, obsessive Stewart of Vertigo and the Westerns he made with Anthony Mann, notably The Naked Spur. (And despite its status as a perennial holiday favorite, he's not exactly a ray of sunshine in It's a Wonderful Life, either.) His Boy Scout qualities made him an icon, but like David Lynch – the man Mel Brooks called "Jimmy Stewart from Mars" – it's his darker impulses that made him an artist.

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

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Scott Von Doviak, Leonard Pierce

Morning Deal Report: Cronenberg Does Ludlum

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

25. FORBIDDEN GAMES (1951)

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

24. FIRES ON THE PLAIN (1959)

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

23. SALVADOR (1986)

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

22. COME AND SEE (1985)

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

21. GLORY (1989)

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

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Paul Clark

Take Five: Bad Cops

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 20:15:00 GMT

Neil LaBute's new movie, Lakeview Terrace, opens this Friday. Critical opinion is still split, but critical opinion will have its say soon enough about whether the director is returning to the promising form he showed in In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors, or whether he's just cranking out a cheap thriller because he wants to buy a new boat. Lakeview Terrace finds Samuel L. Jackson, Hollywood's default angry black man, in the role of a mean-tempered, menacing L.A. cop who takes offense to an interracial couple (played by Patrick Wilson and Kerry Washington) who move in next door to him. The idea of crooked cops has always been an appealing one to people who write thrillers; the idea of the very people charged with protecting the innocent being the ones who might hurt them has powerful appeal, and plenty of filmmakers -- Alfred Hitchcock comes immediately to mind -- have put their ambivalent feelings about the police front and center in their movies. By the same token, however, due to the strict content restrictions of post-Code Hollywood, it was a taboo subject for decades; with very few exceptions, a crooked or evil cop was one of the very few things it was absolutely verboten to show on screen. When the code era passed, almost as if to make up for lost time, dozens of scriptwriters and directors began to explore the idea of the cop who betrayed the ideals he was sworn to uphold, and the bad cop genre was born. Here's five of the best.

THE ASPHALT JUNGLE (1950)

John Huston's masterful ensemble picture about a daring, carefully calculated jewel theft gone awry is one of the greatest noir films ever made, with an incredible cast (headed by Sterling Hayden as the iron-willed thug Dix Handley and Sam Jaffe as the brilliant crook Doc Riedenschneider) and a taut, fatalistic atmosphere that keeps you glued to the screen. But it's also a fine example of how movies had to creep around the concept of the bad cop at the height of the Hays Code: although it's made clear that Barry Kelley's Lt. Ditrich is on the make, and that his accepting bribes from hoods helps crime flourish, the idea of a crooked policeman being so plainly presented ran afoul of the Code. So a scene was filmed in which his incorruptible chief set him on the straight an narrow, and the end coda assures the viewer that such crooked cops are an aberration that will always be found out and punished, rather than the norm.

THE GODFATHER (1972)

The Hays Code had been more or less dead in the water for a dozen years by the time Francis Ford Copolla started filming his epic American gangster movie, and those dozen years had seen a lot of wearing away of the notion of the policemen as a friendly, helpful, vigilant and unimpeachable protector of the innocent. But a few taboos still remained on screen, and The Godfather did its not insubstantial bit to overcome them. In the course of the Corleone family's conflict with the slimy drug dealer Virgil Solozzo, Tom Hagen warns that "The Turk" cannot be gotten to because he enjoys the protection of New York police captain McCluskey (played by Sterling Hayden, acting the flip side of his Asphalt Jungle character) -- and that it is simply not done to kill a cop. When young Michael Corleone, who had previously been the victim of McCluskey's bullying, argues "Where does it say you can't kill a cop?", and points out that Hayden is a dirty cop on the make with his fingers in the drug racket, he's not just talking to the family -- he's talking to the audience.

MANIAC COP (1988)

William Lustig's bizarre little thriller, combining traditional police thriller elements with a sadistic slice of slasher-era horror, was the last movie you'd expect to start a franchise. But so it did, and in the the process launched the career of the hulking, iron-jawed Robert Z'dar. The sequels are generally not worth watching, but the original Maniac Cop -- in which a serial killer dressed as an NYPD patrol officer starts preying on innocent victims -- it a remarkably tight and rather exciting (if extremely lurid) piece of cinema that more than justifies its cult reputation. As a director, Lustig doesn't waste time or film, and the movie carries on at a deadly, involving clip; it's abetted by tons of fine performances from respectable character actors like Sheree North, Bruce Campbell, and original That Guy!/friend of the Screengrab Tom Atkins.

BAD LIEUTENANT (1992)

Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant was, at the time of its release, what it still is today: an atom bomb of bad-cop movies. Harvey Keitel, at the peak of his "I must appear naked in every movie I make" phase, plays a nameless New York police detective who is far and away the worst portrayal of a policeman in cinematic history: a brutal, violent drunk, a drug addict, a crook, a thief, a gambling addict, and a whoremonger. But this isn't just shock cinema: Keitel's Lieutenant is not just the worst big-screen cop imaginable, he's also, in many ways, the most complex. Ferrara throws Keitel into a deep, dark hole because he wants to show him the way out of it. Bad Lieutenant is a terrific film, which is why the as-yet-unconfirmed rumors that Werner Herzog is going to remake it with Nicolas Cage in the title role are so bewildering.

TRAINING DAY (2001)

Antoine Fuqua's nasty 2001 Los Angeles gang story hasn't held up spectacularly well in the years since it was made. Co-star Ethan Hawke seems out of place; the plot doesn't hold up particularly strongly, the tone wanders all over the place, and though it's quite well made, it's never spectacular. What does hold up, however, is Denzel Washington's electrifying performance as Alonzo, a narcotics officer so deep on the take that he barely recognizes -- or cares -- what side he's on. In the annals of crooked cop movies, it stands alongside Harvey Keitel's Bad Lieutenant, and skillfully illustrates the way that a bad man can justify his evil by thinking that he's doing good. The role earned Washington his second acting Oscar and his first Best Actor; though he'd deserved it for Malcolm X, this was no mere compensatory gesture, but a well-earned recognition of a stunning performance.

Related Posts:

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Take Five: Bring On the Bad Guys

Spike Lee's Next "Miracle"

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

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

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

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

OST: "He Got Game"

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 21:30:00 GMT

Although there's no reason that a bad movie can't feature a good soundtrack -- after all, there's plenty of good movies that feature rotten ones -- we've tended to focus, here in the OST feature, on movies that have both. A soundtrack, after all, is meant as complementary; it's an enhancement to a good movie, not a substitute for one. Still, every once in a while, a movie rolls around where the product on screen is pretty lousy, or at the very least forgettable, but which provides us with a soundtrack or score that will provide enjoyment years after anyone's forgotten what the movie was even about. The relatively recent Hollywood trend of propagating otherwise mediocre would-be hit movies with pop songs -- often by bands under contract with the studio's parent company -- has been particularly helpful in this regard, as it can ensure that the filmmakers will be able to recoup at least some of the losses they took from no one going to see the movie from those same people deciding to take a flyer on the soundtrack, because at least it has that one good song on it by Sevendust or whoever.

Which is not to say that Spike Lee's movie on the wicked world of college basketball, He Got Game, is a terrible movie. It's not even a terrible Spike Lee movie. It's just not a great movie. A skillful performance by Denzel Washington gets cancelled out by a pretty dismal one by real-life basketball star and non-actor Ray Allen; a skillful script about a subject of genuine interest is scuttled by one too many over-the-top scenes, and -- surprisingly, given Lee's love of basketball and the presence of genuine NBA stars in the cast -- the sports action scenes generally fall somewhat flat. However, the soundtrack definitely has emerged as a much more worthwhile endeavor than the movie. Originally conceived by Spike and Public Enemy frontman Chuck D. as a straightforward soundtrack to the film, PE's He Got Game eventually emerged as an entire and distinct album by the revolutionary rap group -- and one which came at a time when many critics had written them off as a thing of the past. Taking the thematic elements of the film (basketball, family life, big money, and the temptations of being successful and black) as jumping-off points for their usual firebrand political concerns, Chuck and his crew crunched their lyrics down over the baddest beats they'd used since Fear of a Black Planet -- more stripped down and minimalist than their old Bomb Squad production work, but perfectly suited to the material, and timely insofar as they were heavily influenced by the dense East Coast hardcore style pioneered by the Wu-Tang Clan's RZA and others. Although they'd never recapture the groundbreaking immediacy and power of It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, Public Enemy -- fronted by a then 40-year-old Chuck D who sounded as furious as ever -- proved that they were still a going concern; the Bomb Squad proved that there was more to their sound than just the busy collage-making that gained them such fame in the late 1980s; and Spike Lee proved that, even with his lesser projects, he was still capable of inspiring those who worked with him to hit new heights. Film and hip-hop have been together since the rap genre was invented, and it's often been a rocky relationship, but rarely has a hip-hop soundtrack so complimented, dominated, and eventually surpassed a movie than in He Got Game.

BEST TRACKS: The track most remembered from the He Got Game soundtrack is the title song, noteworthy for the catchy hook which straightforwardly samples the hook from Buffalo Springfield's "For What It's Worth". But in a lot of ways, it was one of the weaker tracks on the album, overly simplistic and with lyrics that didn't do a strong enough job of selling the hook as relevant to a young black audience. Far stronger, however, are many of the less celebrated tracks: "Unstoppable", which finally pairs Boogie Down Productions' KRS-One with his chief rival from the 1980s, Chuck D, and makes us wish that they'd been collaborating all along; the cutting, incisive and insightful "Politics of the Sneaker Pimps"; the perennially underrated Flavor Flav showcases (the raucous party anthem "Shake Your Booty" and the sinister, insinuating "Is Your God a Dog?"); the nasty, plodding "Super Agent", which, with its rattling percussion and taunting background vocals, wouldn't have seemed out of place on Fear of a Black Planet; and, perhaps best of all, the powerhouse "What You Need is Jesus", which starts off with a mocking Charles Barkley saying "Hallelujah, Jesus, hallelujah!" to the movie's title character and goes on to feature Chuck D kicking some of his fiercest rhymes in a decade.

Take Five: We're Playin' Basketball

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 19:45:00 GMT

Opening in limited release this weekend, the goofily titled Gunnin' for That #1 Spot is a compelling documentary look at the annual Rucker Park basketball tournament, made up of the majority of New York's best streetball players. It may not be the biggest money game in the history of professional hoops, and it hasn't produced many NBA superstars, but its distillation of pure street ball has been hugely influential, and the style of play in both the pro and college ranks has been greatly affected by the smooth moves and trash-talking traditions that evolved in Rucker Park. Gunnin' for that #1 Spot is also attracting a great deal of attention because of who's behind it: Oscilloscope Pictures is a new production house headed by the film's director, Adam Yauch, better known as MCA of the Beastie Boys. Having polished his craft directing videos for his crew, he's now taking his game to the next level, and has made sure that the banging soundtrack matches the smooth hoops action on screen. The movie's release, in seven cities (all of which have NBA franchises), is being timed to coincide with the NBA draft; if all that isn't enough for your hoops-hungry self, try these five examples of big-screen action from the world's most cinematic sport.

HOOSIERS (1986)

Generally acknowledged as the greatest basketball film of all time, Hoosiers -- directed by the forgotten David Anspaugh and written by sports-triumph specialist Angelo Pizzo -- is based on the true story of the Milan Indians, an unlikely small-town outfit who went on to win the 1954 Indiana State Championships against some of the powerhouse teams in that basketball-crazy state. Unabashedly sentimental and unrepentently traditional, Hoosiers is nonetheless is a winner, illustrating that you can avoid criticism for making a straightforward sports film by simply getting it right at every turn. From the terrific period details and the astonishing degree of verisimilitude to the terrifically staged sports action scenes, Hoosiers never makes a wrong turn, and is held together from the first frame to the last by a tremendous performance by Gene Hackman as the gruff coach, Norman Dale.

HOOP DREAMS (1994)

Even if it hadn't turned into one of the most successful documentaries of the modern era, Hoop Dreams -- the story of two struggling African-American teens with visions of making it to the National Basketball Association in their heads -- would have been noteworthy just on its own merits. It's an assured, moving piece of filmmaking, an exemplary specimen of what its director likes to term the "longitudinal documentary", a film which follows its subjects over a long period of time with no fixed idea of what the outcome will be or what story specifically they're eventually going to tell. But beyond that, it's also important for what it accomplished: it helped usher in a golden age of documentary filmmaking; it launched director Steve James' productive career, and it almost single-handedly kick-started a national conversation of the perils of young black men investing all their dreams of success in the idea of playing in the NBA.

REBOUND: THE LEGEND OF EARL "THE GOAT" MANIGAULT (1996)

Originally made for HBO, Rebound: The Legend of Earl "The Goat" Manigault proved so popular that it was almost immediately released to home video. It tells the story of Earl Manigault, an original superstar of the Rucker Park scene (and student of Holcombe Rucker himself) who many say is the greatest street basketball player of all time. He's also one of the great basketball tragedies of all time, as his natural talent, determination, and constant self-improvement never led to a professional career thanks to years of drug addiction. Rebound is hindered by its below-average action sequences (especially unforgivable when placed in the context of the pure poetry of street ball), but it's bouyed to the rim by surprisingly competent di rection from actor Eriq LaSalle, and a handful of powerhouse performances from the cast, including a fiery Don Cheadler in the lead role, terrific supporting turns by James Earl Jones, Forest Whitaker, Glenn Turman and Ronny Cox.

HE GOT GAME (1998)

Spike Lee has always been obsessed with basketball since his directorial debut, and has even managed to noisily insert himself -- to the joy of everyone except fans of his beloved New York Knicks -- in actual NBA games. Curious, then, that his first movie totally devoted to basketball would receive such a cool reception. In fact, He Got Game is one of his finest and most underrated movies, and in some ways, it serves as a dramatic adaptation of the issues and emotions that ran through Hoop Dreams. If real-life NBA star Ray Allen is less than convincing in his first acting role, a smoldering, exceptionally intense Denzel Washington more than makes up for it in his role as the father of a widely feted college basketball star who looks to use his son's imminent fame as a big-time hoops player to secure his own legal and financial security. It's also noteworthy for the stylish action sequences, assured direction, and a minor comeback by Public Enemy, who put together the must-have soundtrack.

QUANTUM HOOPS (2007)

Any successful athlete will tell you that accomplishment is a matter of perspective. For someone at the top of his game, the goal is constant self-improvement, to go from good to great; for someone in the middle of the pack, the goal is to win that elusive championship; and for someone at the very bottom, even one victory can be enough. Such is the case with the hapless Cal Tech basketball team. Despite the school's reputation as producing some of the greatest scientists, computer programmers, and academics of our age, its athletic program is substantially less respectable; when Rick Greenwald filmed this alternately hilarious and moving documentary about the team, they were on a losing streak that had lasted over twenty years without a single win and seen the team lose by an average of 60 points per game as recently as 2004. In the 2006 season, however, Greenwald found a team of earnest but realistic players -- many of whom are likely to win Nobel Prizes in their respective fields someday -- who were thrilled at the prospect not of winning an NCAA title, but of maybe, possibly, walking off the court one time as the winners of a single game. A wonderful inversion of the typical sports-team film.

DVD Digest for April 29, 2008

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

This week: Criterion caters to the kids, Anthony Mann's final historical epic gets the deluxe treatment, and a pair of critics-turned-DVD-distributors unveil their latest hidden treasure.

DVD of the week: Winning awards at both Cannes and the Oscars in 1956, Albert Lamorisse's The Red Balloon has, in the last fifty years become a short-form classic. It's long been a classroom staple throughout the world, and the film it inspired, Hou Hsiao-hsien's Flight of the Red Balloon is currently playing in limited release to enthusiastic reviews. The Red Balloon makes its DVD premiere this week as the centerpiece of the latest Criterion box set, Three Children's Classics. The set also includes Lamorisse's 1953 short White Mane and William Mason's 1966 film Paddle to the Sea, both of which are also making their DVD debut. At a time when most entertainment geared to kids seems concerned primarily with feeling current, these three films are in the tradition of classic family entertainments that stimulate their imaginations without pandering or condescending. Even if you don't have children of your own, they're well worth buying for yourself.

The week's other classic coming to DVD is the Weinstein Company's release of Anthony Mann's Roman epic The Fall of the Roman Empire, as part of their "Miriam Collection." Produced by super-producer Samuel Bronston, the film was one of the last mega-budgeted historical epics (and box-office flop), and one of the most interesting aspects of the seeing the film is simply to marvel at its sheer largesse. The Weinsteins include a commentary and a number of documentaries on both the "Two Disc Special Edition" and the "Limited Collector's Edition Gift Set," but of primary interest is the film itself. If nothing else, it should be interesting to compare Mann's film to the Oscar-winning Gladiator, which tells much the same story using CGI effects.

On the new-release front, this week brings the DVD debut of Julian Schnabel's acclaimed The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Buena Vista), which garnered nominations for best director, best adapted screenplay, and best cinematography at last year's Academy Awards. Also of note this week: The Golden Compass (New Line, also Blu-Ray), which is being released in both single- and double-disc editions; Katherine Heigl in 27 Dresses (Fox, also Blu-Ray); and the Denzel Washington-directed and -starring The Great Debaters (The Weinstein Company).

Finally, a shout out to our friends Andrew Grant and Aaron Hillis, critics-turned-proprietors of the upstart distribution shingle Benten Films. For their third release, Grant and Hillis have selected Todd Rohal's Slamdance-winning indie The Guatemalan Handshake. Not content to shine a light into overlooked corners of American independent cinema, Benten seeks to give its releases the first-class treatement, and Guatemalan Handshake arrives this week in a two-disc edition that includes commentary, a music video, behind-the scenes footage, short films, and an essay by filmmaker David Gordon Green. I'm looking forward to checking out the film and all subsequent Benten releases.

Take Five: Assassination!

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 22:00:00 GMT

Ever since a November afternoon in 1963, a man in a high place with a rifle and a head full of malice directed at the President of the United States has arguably been our most persistent national nightmare. And from Abraham Lincoln's assassination by one of the nation's best-known actors to the appropriately ham-handed attempt on the life of the ineffectual Gerald Ford by a Manson Family hanger-on, the murder of famous politicians has absorbed our national attention in the news, so why shouldn't it equally influence the kind of movies we watch? Pete Travis' Vantage Point opens across the country this weekend; early buzz has it that the movie, about the assassination of someone pretending to be the president, is all style and little substance, wasting its interesting cast on a movie filled with jump-cuts and car chases. The assassination of a political leader, more often than not (especially in recent big-budget actioners like Shooter), is just a McGuffin to carry us to the punch-outs and crashes. Still, there have been a number of movies in which the killing of a high-profile politician has driven the plot with highly engaging results; today in Take Five, we'll look at a few of the best.

THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962)

One of the first post-Kennedy assassination films, John Frankenheimer's best film was actually released before that fatal day in Dallas; but its theatrical run was unluckily ill-timed with the events of November 22nd, 1963. It was pulled from release and remained unavailable for decades until Frank Sinatra, who played the movie's protagonist, personally intervened to help get it back into production in the VHS era. It was a generous decision: the original Manchurian Candidate remains a masterwork of suspense and intrigue, with a towering performance by Laurence Harvey as the doomed assassin of a presidential candidate. The movie's stunning fantasy sequences, bittersweet moments of drama and romance, constant air of paranoid menace, and final bloody ending make it an assassination classic.

NASHVILLE (1975)

It's easy to forget that Robert Altman's sprawling, brilliant evocation of the Great American Movie revolves not around the country music industry, but the assassination of a political aspirant. Hal Phillip Walker is the unnerving, straight-talking and possibly deranged populist running for president as a political caucus convenes in Tennessee, and if we can see the assassin (played as an enigmatic cipher by David Hayward) coming a mile away, we are at least allowed the final shock in his choice of targets. In the end, as Walker's ominous black limos swarm around and speed him to safety and away from the body of beloved country star Barbara Jean, the schmaltz-peddling Haven Hamilton shows a surprising degree of grace under fire, intoning the charged lines "This isn't Dallas, it's Nashville! They can't do this to us here in Nashville! Let's show them what we're made of."

TAXI DRIVER (1976)

Widely condemned upon its release for allegedly glorifying vigilante justice, Martin Scorsese's masterpiece in fact does something entirely more subtle. Travis Bickle is the perfect psychological profile of a crazed assassin: alone, isolated, alienated, a military veteran with a gun fetish and a desire to be something -- anything -- to someone. The scenes where he stalks the presidential candidate Charles Palatine (like Hal Phillip Walker, a somewhat mysterious populist) are highly influenced by the life of Arthur Bremer, are a terrible portent -- but our expectations are short-circuited when Bickle misses his chance, and a potential monster becomes a local hero simply by changing his choice of targets. Bizarrely, the performance eventually helped inspire John Hinckley when he shot Ronald Reagan four years later.

MALCOLM X (1992)

Spike Lee's epic biopic nicely answers a tricky question: how do you make the story of an important historical figure suspenseful and compelling when you already know what's going to happen to him in the end? It helps that Malcolm X -- played perfectly here by Denzel Washington in perhaps his finest hour as an actor -- had an endlessly compelling life story even before the hail of gunshots that ended his life. Lee likewise makes a difference by letting his opinions about the circumstances of Malcolm's death be clearly known and telegraphing the final moments with a deluge of high-pitched emotional moments, but never letting the entire thing slide into self-parody or triteness. Not only a terrific story about a squalid and unnecessary political killing, but also one of Hollywood's finest biopics.

MUNICH (2005)

Stephen Spielberg still doesn't seem to know how to make a movie without screwing it up somehow, and the sad truth is that Munich's ridiculously over-the-top sex scene just about sinks it; filmgoers and critics seem to be able to talk about little else. It's too bad, because you take that monstrous aberration away, and what you've got is a compelling and effective little psychological thriller. Spielberg has never been the most subtle filmmaker in the world, and there's no way he's not going to let you leave the theatre without being beaten over the head with the movie's central thesis that there's not much moral or psychological difference between the men who assassinate innocent people in the name of a cause and the men who assassinate the assassins, but the movie is still expertly done and well worth seeing as long as you close your eyes when Eric Bana takes his clothes off.

That Guy!: Laurence Fishburne

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 22:30:00 GMT

February is Black History Month, and since we enjoyed combing through the stacks in preparation for last week's featured That Guy!, Yaphet Kotto, we figured we'd continue on in that vein and take a look at some of Hollywood's finest African-American character actors. We've discussed before how it's much harder for a woman to make a reputation playing character roles; actresses tend to be valued more for their looks than their acting skills, and women who aren't traditionally beautiful have far fewer opportunities to build a career based on their chops and personalities than do men who aren't conventionally handsome. Similarly, it may actually be easier for African-Americans to become character actors, for no other reason than for a very long time, leading man roles were generally denied to them. With his commanding demeanor, strong and handsome face and forceful personality, there's no reason that Larry Fishburne shouldn't have become one of Hollywood's biggest stars, and for a brief period in the early 1990s, it seemed like he would be — but for various reasons, it became clear that even at that late date, the movie business had only one opening for Serious Black Superstar, and it was already being filled by Denzel Washington. (It still is, for that matter.) So Fishburne — a rare black child star who became an even rarer black actor who never fell into stereotypical action or comedy roles — had to settle for nabbing some of the highest-profile second-banana roles available. Fishburne has always been a remarkably gifted actor, even as a child, and despite often being cast as a militant, a prophet, or some other variety of visionary, he's willing to take the piss on occasion (witness his almost satirically self-important voicing of the Silver Surfer in the recent Fantastic Four sequel), and is actually a lot more fun in light comic roles than anyone gives him credit for, as he showed when he played Cowboy Curtis on Pee Wee's Playhouse. Still not yet fifty years old, Fishburne has a lot of good roles ahead of him, if he doesn't give up acting altogether and move into writing, directing or producing — all areas at which he's shown talent. And if he never became America's next black superstar, he did get to marry the luscious Gina Torres, and that ain't bad as a second prize.

Where to see Laurence Fishburne at his best:

APOCALYPSE NOW (1979)

It wasn't his first movie — the former child star had already impressed audiences with his teenage turn in Cornbread, Earl and Me — but Francis Ford Coppola's Vietnam nightmare was certainly the film that put young Laurence Fishburne on the map. As Mr. Clean, he gives the purest and most human performance in the movie, and his death is the most touching and tragic. It's all the more astonishing that Larry (as he called himself at the time) was only fourteen years old when filming began, having fudged his age to get the part. Of course, the filming of Apocalypse Now took so long, he was approximately thirty-eight years old when it wrapped.

BOYZ N THE HOOD (1991)

This was the movie that seemed to predict superstardom for Fishburne; so successful and influential was it at the time of its release that it's also the film that inspired him to start going by Laurence instead of Larry. John Singleton's directorial debut, Boyz N the Hood is one of the first, and undoubtedly the best, of a mini-wave of ghetto-realist gangsta films, and despite heavy competition from pre-living-joke-status Cuba Gooding and Ice Cube (and Angela Bassett, with whom he would later shine as Ike Turner in What's Love Got to Do With It?), Fishburne anchors the cast as the morally complex, conflicted Furious Styles.

THE MATRIX (1999)

The Wachowski Brothers' high-toned blend of wire-fu, gunplay and slapdash philosophy holds up less well with each year that passes by. But at the time of its release, it perfectly synthesized a number of elements of the zeitgeist into an action movie that, if it wasn't as smart as it thought it was, at least wasn't dumb. Fishburne landed the role of a lifetime as the mystical hacker Morpheus, and it's a testament to his acting skills and more or less permanent sense of gravitas that he managed to avoid magical Negritude in a role that pretty much defines the magical Negro. It probably also managed to buy him a pretty nice house, so who's complaining?

The Screengrab Super Bowl Highlight Reel

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 22:00:00 GMT

Here it is, two days before Super Sunday, and we haven’t run a single Super Bowl-related item here at the Screengrab. Sure, you could flip back through the archives to this list of the All-Time Worst Athletes Turned Actors, which includes Super Bowl heroes Broadway Joe Namath and Howie Long, but it would be downright un-American if we let this most hallowed day pass with no new content. So to pump you up for the big game, here’s a selection of the most rousing inspirational football speeches ever to be found on YouTube on a Friday afternoon.

Any Given Sunday

Notice how Al Pacino, as Miami Sharks coach Tony D’Amato, begins with an almost Belichickian monotone before building to his trademark full-throated bellowing. That’s how you fire up the troops, folks.

Remember the Titans

You would expect Denzel Washington to have some memorable, impassioned words for his team, but all we can find is Will Patton. It’s not exactly “win one for the Gipper,” but bonus points for (almost) working the title of the movie into the pep talk.

Rudy

Frankly, we don’t see this one inspiring anyone to win a tiddlywinks match, let alone the big game, but maybe you have to hold back a little when there’s a priest in the room.

Radio

Ed Harris may have felt this was the low point of his career, but all he had to do was glance over at Cuba Gooding, Jr. to know it could be so much worse.

The Waterboy

In our moment of need, we don’t turn to Pacino or Patton or even Knute Rockne himself. No, when the inspiration is low and the Screengrab is crying out for just one more post, it’s the timeless words of Clint Howard that see us through.

American Lawsuit

Phil Nugent — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Ridley Scott's American Gangster, ostensibly based on the real story of the '70s drug dealer Frank Lucas, ends with Lucas (Denzel Washington) basically joining forces with Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe), the detective who's nailed him, by agreeing to testify against their shared enemies, the crooked lawmen who shake down crooks and sneer at clean cops. The movie wraps up its story with a series of titles that state that "three-quarters of the drug enforcement agents assigned to New York" wound up being convicted thanks to Lucas' testimony. The DEA and its agents are pissed off about this, and they're not settling for barging into Scott's home and shooting his dog; a bunch of former feds have filed a class-action defamation lawsuit against the movie. The suit charges that "the defamation involved the defendant NBC Universal, through its Universal Studios, falsely communicating, in writing, to millions of people in a motion picture called American Gangster that three-quarters of New York City's DEA, from approximately 1973 through approximately 1985, were convicted criminals."

Dominic Amoroso, a former federal prosecutor who tried Lucas and is now representing the agents in their claim, says that, with regard to the titles suggested that Lucas' testimony brought down crooked feds, "No such thing ever occurred. Not a single agent of New York City's DEA, or any other law enforcement officer, was convicted of anything based upon the so-called 'collaboration' of Lucas and Roberts. Nor was a single agent of New York City's DEA or officer of the NYPD convicted in any case or investigation involving Frank Lucas whether based upon a collaboration of Lucas and Roberts or any other resource." NBC Universal earlier blew off the agents' demand for a retraction and an apology by issuing a statement that read in part, "The film in no way charges or even insinuates wrongdoing on the part of the federal Drug Enforcement Administration. " Assuming that someone at Universal has actually seen the movie, this would seem to apply that the studio heads and its lawyers do not regard graft, theft, and violent shakedowns as "wrongdoing", which, depending on how long they've been working in Hollywood, might not be implausible.

Trailer Roundup: Speed Racer, The Great Debaters, In Bruges

Peter Smith — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 18:00:00 GMT

Speed Racer

I never really watched the old Speed Racer cartoons, so I can't say how faithful this is. But I find the cartoonishness of the trailer to be pretty charming. With something as stylized as the original, it would be a mistake to try for realism, so the Wachowskis are aiming for a more animated style in the lighting and the CGI, and this has extended to the performances. What clinched it for me was Emile Hirsch's vigorous nodding when he asks the little kid, "oh no?" toward the end of the trailer — this is about as un-naturalistic an acting decision as one can make, and it fits in perfectly. Whether this movie will please the fans is a question I can't hope to answer here. I only know that this looks like a lot of fun.

The Great Debaters

If someone told me there was a movie coming out about a group of African-American college students in the 1930s starting a debate team, I would be able to predict with relative certainty how the trailer would play, and in this case I would be more or less correct. From the time I saw Denzel Washington standing on top of a table while the words "based on a true story" appeared onscreen, I knew I was in the presence of a movie with almost nothing new to say. Frankly, outside the presence of Oscar winners Washington and Forest Whitaker, this feels more like a TV movie, down to the presence of Oprah Winfrey as producer. Also, debate isn't that interesting, folks. Sure, it allows actors to give impassioned speeches that rile up an audience one way or another, but that doesn't exactly make for great cinema. At least this year's Rocket Science, which portrayed the world of contemporary policy debate, had novelty going for it.

In Bruges

Maybe it's the Irish I inherited from my mother's side of the family, but this trailer makes me giggle uncontrollably. The cast is clearly having a great time — Colin Farrell flexing his Irish accent for a change, plus the great Brendan Gleeson, and Ralph Fiennes, who's so much more fun now that he's stopped playing so serious all the time. When I heard the plot synopsis for this, I was afraid it would come off like a Guy Ritchie gangster movie, but there's enough blarney on display in the trailer to put those thoughts to rest. I'm partial to the scene where Farrell and Fiennes negotiate their way through a shootout, but why choose? In Bruges might not break the bank at the box office, but I for one will be in line to buy a ticket.

— Paul Clark

American Gangster vs. Mr. Untouchable

Peter Smith — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 19:00:00 GMT

A few weeks ago, we reported here on the ongoing rivalry between Nicky Barnes and Frank Lucas, who were both drug dealers in the New York of the 1970s. Both men were eventually arrested and imprisoned, after which both turned snitch, ratted out their former associates, and are both now "retired" and back out in the world. This is of interest to us mainly because both men are also the subjects of movies — the high-profile Ridley Scott epic American Gangster and the documentary Mr. Untouchable — that opened within a week of each other. As part of the publicity for each movie, both men have been granting interviews in which they've talked about the bad old days and also jockeyed for position as the real ultimate big-city badass of their era. But of course, given the Screen Grab's recognized and unquestioned authority on movies and everything else fly, they have both secretly been sitting on the edge of their seats, nervously waiting to hear what we think. First, just to state the obvious and get it out of the way: both men are sociopathic predators and dishonored tattletales, who should in no way be mistaken for glamorous figures or role models. But a job's a job. There can be only one.

THE MOVIE: American Gangster, directed by Ridley Scott; written by Steve Zaillian

OUR HERO: Frank Lucas, as played by Denzel Washington, is a smooth, well-dressed powder keg of an urban entrepreneur, more Fortune 500 than Detroit 9000. The only time he casts off his smart suits is to attend the Ali-Frazier fight in a white Super Fly ensemble that sits on him about as comfortably as tight jeans and a wifebeater might have on Cary Grant. (The movie stresses that this was his wife's idea; after the clown clothes earn Frank some unwanted attention, he goes right home and literally throws them in the fireplace.) Though Washington gets to have a few violent tantrums — and, in a moment of purely calculated coldness, lays claim to supremacy on his turf by casually shooting a rival in the head in front of about a hundred witnesses — the performance has none of the scary volatility of his bad cop in Training Day. The movie seems to want you to like him, and to make sure the mainstream audience likes him, it defines his ambitions in terms of upper-middle class acquisition: a beautiful wife and home, a nice place for his momma (Ruby Dee), a low profile.

HIS BETE NOIRE: Nicky Barnes is played here by Cuba Gooding, Jr., which is kind of a slap in the face right there. Actually, as is often the case, Gooding's acting is much better than his track record at selecting his roles. He's brooding and charismatic, albeit in a ridiculous, coked-up way. He goes in for the Super Fly flashiness that Frank rejects. At one point, he's seen at a party proudly handing out copies of The New York Times Magazine with his picture on the cover — a nod to an actual incident that insiders will recognize as having marked the beginning of the end for Barnes. It was after seeing Barnes's posed picture on the cover, alongside the legend "Mr. Untouchable", that President Carter got on the phone to the Justice Department and ordered them to make Barnes priority number one.

THE MILIEU: Production-designed to death but with little sense of breathable air, American Gangster recalls the Elvis Mitchell line about applying grit with an aerosol can. The most disappointing thing about it is that the fine supporting cast is largely wasted; there's really nobody in the movie but Washington as Lucas and Russell Crowe as Richie Roberts, the New Jersey police detective on his trail. Scott inflates their starry icons until they blot out the sun, as well as the supporting actors.

THE END: No spoiler warning here; the fact that Lucas (like Barnes) was busted and turned state's witness has been widely reported in the publicity surrounding the movie. What counts is how the moviemakers treat this less-than-heroic aspect of their story. It must be said that they wimp out. In real life, not only did Lucas sing for a reduced sentence, but the actual Richie Roberts retired from the force to become a defense attorney and accepted a fat fee from Lucas to represent him at trial. The way the movie presents it, the drug dealer and the good cop join forces because they recognize a common enemy: the bad cops who have been making Roberts's life miserable while shaking down Lucas. The movie comes dangerously close to presenting Lucas as just a successful businessman who made himself rich the only way white society would allow him to do it, and whose testimony against others wipes the slate clean.

THE MOVIE: Mr. Untouchable, directed by Marc Levin

OUR HERO: Nicky Barnes, who details his life while protectively photographed in shadows. Much of the time, we only see his bony, expressive hands working as he tells his tale and offers his justifications for what he's done. He lived big, and now it's over, but no matter what he says, he leaves you with the feeling that he thinks it was worth it. He offers a compelling picture of a megalomaniacal sociopath who's outlived the good times.

HIS BETE NOIRE: Whereas American Gangster treats Nicky Barnes as a fact of life in Frank Lucas's world, someone who may be treated dismissively but cannot be ignored, Lucas is only mentioned glancingly in Mr. Untouchable, Barnes speaks of him with the contempt one usually reserves for something unpleasant that's gotten stuck to one's shoe, and mocks the idea that Frank would ever have done anything so disrespectful as to have put out a contract on him, as Lucas has claimed. Also, a single photograph of Lucas is briefly shown. He's wearing the same stupid-looking coat and hat that Denzel wears on fight night, and to say that he at least looks at home in that getup is to acknowledge that he doesn't look very Denzelesque.

THE MILIEU: Since Mr. Untouchable is a documentary about people who weren't often recording their illegal activities with camcorders, much of the period atmosphere must be laid in with old news footage and photos and such, but it does have what American Gangster sorely needs, and what every good crime picture thrives on: a teeming and colorful supporting cast. That includes not just Barnes's former colleagues (one of whom is named Frank James) and his ex-wife, Thelma Grant, whose picture ought to be in the dictionary next to the entry on "gangsta love", but such characters as Bob Geronimo, who walked into the offices of the DEA to volunteer his services as an undercover informant and bring Barnes's and his whole organization down after one of Barnes's lieutenants, seriously underestimating the man's ability to hold a grudge, stole his car. (Geronimo's code name on the operation was "Barbarino", as in John Travolta's character on Welcome Back, Kotter. This information is supplied by a fed who adds that he was never clear on why somebody whose real name was "Geronimo" needed a code name.) Incidentally, Geronimo and others who worked to bring Barnes down agreed to be filmed in full light, which makes or a sly, unspoken comment on Barnes's preferring to linger in shadows. The filmmakers also interviewed Barnes' lawyer, David Breitbart, who supplies his version of the New York Times Magazine cover picture story: he had advised Barnes not to co-operate with the paper and told the photographers to stay the hell away from his client until A. M. Rosenthal himself called up and informed him that unless Barnes agreed to come in to pose, they'd use the mug shot he had taken after he was arrested for murder, a photo that was taken after he was roused from bed in the middle of the night "and it looks like he ate the victim's eyeballs."

THE END: The movie doesn't try to sell Barnes's decision to testify against others as a heroic crime-busting operation, but it makes it seem something other than cowardly by stressing that it was, in fact, an act of revenge: rightly or wrongly, Barnes felt that those still on the outside (including his wife) were screwing him over and wanted payback. He broke his whole operation himself just to show how bad he was. The movie also differs from American Gangster by balancing his say with the testimony of those he turned on.

THE VERDICT: It seems clear that of the two gentlemen in question, Nicky Barnes is the more deserving of the title Mr. Ultimate Seventies Badass Heroin Dealer Turned Squealer. His mother must be so proud.

— Phil Nugent

Morning Deal Report: The Travolta-ing of Pelham 1 2 3

Peter Smith — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 15:00:00 GMT

John Travolta will play the villain in the Tony Scott/Denzel Washington remake of The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3. Who knows, maybe he'll swing it.

Good news for those who just can't get enough Underworld: more Underworld. Apparently for the first time we'll experience the Underworld universe through the eyes of the Lycans. I feel a little more complete inside.

Actual good news: The Brothers Bloom, the second movie from Brick director Rian Johnson (well, third if you count Ninja Ko), got a distributor. This one is about con men, but I'm very curious about the details.

Ed Burns's new movie will be released on iTunes. Now that's low-budj filmmaking.

— Peter Smith

American Gangsters' Reunion

Peter Smith — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 18:00:00 GMT

Movie screens are about to be awash in black crime lords from the 1970s, what with the imminent release of Ridley Scott's American Gangster, starring Denzel Washington as Frank Lucas, and Mark Levin's documentary Mr. Untouchable, about Leroy "Nicky" Barnes. Lucas and Barnes were high-rollers and business competitors thirty years ago; now both are retired and living in the witness protection program, having turned for the government when their backs were against the wall. In Barnes's case, he can boast of having been broken under direct orders from the president of the United States; Jimmy Carter reportedly turned the dogs on him after reading a 1977 New York Times Magazine article on the drug kingpin's "untouchable" status and deciding, that ain't right.

This week in the Los Angeles Times, Robert W. Welkos catches up with with the seventy-four-year-old Barnes and finds that he's interested in maintaining his legacy; he's upset about the high-profile movie starring Denzel Washington as his old rival. "Hollywood is so full of baloney," he told Mark Levin. "They got it all upside down. [Lucas] and his 'countryboys,' they didn't run New York, I did." Levin was able to use that to convince Barnes to cooperate and be interviewed for his movie. But Levin says that when Barnes and Levin hooked up recently to discuss the good old days, "Their conversation, if I could characterize it a little, was like a reunion of fraternity brothers." (They also bonded over presidential politics. Rudy Giuliani will be delighted to hear that both men are ready to give him their endorsement.) Less eager to let bygones be bygones and shoot the shit are the old cronies whom Barnes ratted out as part of his deal with the Feds. Many of these guys had already filmed interviews with Levin before he managed to rack down Barnes; how did they react to the news that he would be sharing the screen with them? "There were some heated discussions," is how Levin describes it. — Phil Nugent

The Movie Moment: The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974, Joseph Sargent)

Peter Smith — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 19:00:00 GMT

Over the last few weeks, we have repeatedly bemoaned the idea of remaking Joseph Sargent’s The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. But at a time when even the most revered genre films get remade (e.g. Halloween), why fret about this one, especially when it’s already been remade for television? It’s hard to say. Perhaps it has something to do with the stripped-down style of the film, which never calls attention to itself. Sargent, a Hollywood veteran who worked mostly in television, foregoes flash for detail, portraying the subway hijacking more or less realistically, with an invaluable assist from the New York City Transit Authority.

Then there’s the cast. Today, the only leading roles available in Hollywood for men who look like Walter Matthau, Robert Shaw, and Martin Balsam would be in lowbrow comedies with the word "grumpy" in the title. But these actors were perfectly suited to the style of the film, playing not hotshot heroes and villains, but men doing a job primarily for the money. Given the usual visual pyrotechnics of remake director Tony Scott and the leading-man appeal of his star, Denzel Washington, it appears that the only thing left over from the original film is the subway hijacking. If that’s all that’s left, you might as well be remaking Money Train.

And no matter how good the remake is, it would be hard to come up with an ending that works even half as well as the original. After his partners-in-crime have been killed, Balsam’s disgraced ex-subway engineer takes his share of the loot back to his apartment, and Matthau and his fellow transit cops set about finding him by questioning former transit employees in the area. After a few false leads, Matthau and his boss (played by Jerry Stiller) drop in on Balsam, who appears nervous as the transit cops question him. After they look around the apartment, Matthau and Stiller start to leave the apartment, on their way to interview the next possible suspect.

Then Balsam sneezes.

Earlier in the film, when the hijackers called in their demands to the Transit Authority, Balsam could be heard sneezing twice in the background, to which Matthau absentmindedly would always respond "gesundheit." Now that same sneeze, which Matthau thought almost nothing of before, gives away Balsam’s identity.

It’s also just a good bit of suspense, with Balsam (the most sympathetic of the hijackers) worrying that the transit cops will find his money hidden in his oven or see through his alibi. In addition, there’s the way the scene ends the film long before we expect it to. In most films, Matthau would question all of the suspects on his list, go back to the station and hash out his clues. Here, it’s one sneeze and it’s over.

But most of all, it’s Pelham’s final shot that makes the scene great. Who else could have sold that closeup like Matthau did?

"Gesundheit." Gotcha.

— Paul Clark

We're working on getting the old Movie Moment columns into the new Screengrab admin; for the meantime, you can find them at Paul's own site. — ed.