The Screengrab : drew barrymore

Screengrab Review: HBO's Grey Gardens

Andrew Osborne — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 13:00:00 GMT

If I recall correctly, I first saw the Maysles Brothers documentary Grey Gardens on VHS in the early 1990s, and like every generation encountering the pop culture artifacts of a previous generation for the very first time, I thought I’d stumbled across some rare find that only a handful of lucky people knew about (in the same way Columbus thought he’d discovered America, several million resident natives notwithstanding).

Having missed the first wave of Grey Gardens mania in 1975, I was surprised when my “secret” documentary suddenly became a Broadway musical in 2006, indicating a much larger fan base for the Maysles’ film (and its subjects) than I’d previously suspected -- so later, when I heard Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore were taking on the roles of Jackie O’s eccentric relatives Big & Little Edie in a (relatively) big budget HBO biopic, I already knew the cats (and raccoons) were pretty much out of the bag.

There are three separate audiences for the HBO film: fans of the original documentary, superfans who also caught the Broadway musical, and newcomers who don’t yet know the strange but true story of “Big” Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale and her daughter, “Little” Edith Bouvier Beale, two colorful odd ducks from a privileged background who wound up living in the hideous squalor of a crumbling, critter-infested mansion in East Hampton, New York until they were rescued, in different ways, from poverty, encroaching madness (and, one suspects, rabies) by (A) the Suffolk County Health Department, who threatened to condemn their home, thus generating National Enquirer and New York magazine stories that brought their plight to the attention of (B) Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who paid to upgrade their living conditions and (C) the Maysles Brothers, who became aware of the Beales thanks to the ensuing publicity (and also their work on a documentary about the Bouviers which they wisely ditched so they could make Grey Gardens instead). The story is so bizarre, I can see newcomers being somewhat baffled at first by the HBO film -- and then slowly seduced by the warm, funny and vividly dysfunctional central relationship, not to mention the Emmy (and, frankly, Oscar) worthy performances by Lange (buried beneath old age prosthetics that somehow counteract her late-career Botox, thus enabling the actress’ best and most expressive performance in years) and a radiant Barrymore, acting the shit out of the hands-down best role of her career.

Superfans loyal to the original documentary and/or the stage version (featuring Christine Ebersole’s Tony-winning Broadway performance as Little Edie) may pooh-pooh the new pay cable incarnation -- and I don’t want to oversell what is basically just a very good HBO Original Movie -- but as a fan with fond memories of the Maysles film, yet only a vague sense of the history surrounding it, I was fascinated to watch Michael Sucsy’s biopic fill in the gaps, chronicling the events that led two beautiful, independent women into such co-dependent desperation.

Viewers who snickered at the original Grey Gardens as nothing more than a freak show (or condescendingly tut-tutted it as exploitation) may be surprised by the biopic’s depiction of the Beales as smart women trapped in the wrong decade and social circle, with few options worthy of their outsized aspirations. Lange’s Big Edie has nothing of her own but the house she clings to with ferocious, to-hell-with-the-world tenacity, and Barrymore’s Little Edie is heartbreaking as a fragile firecracker of potential unable to escape her mother’s orbit simply because she can’t find anyone else to recognize what a S-T-A-U-N-C-H character she truly is. For all the disappointments and deprivations we see the Beales suffer, what got my waterworks flowing (and makes this one of my favorite films of the year so far) is the moment when the two proud, neglected women finally find someone to listen to their story.

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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: Star Trek’s Continuing Voyage

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 14:30:00 GMT

The Star Trek reboot won’t be in theaters until May 8, but Paramount is already going forward with a sequel. The studio “has hired Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman and Damon Lindelof to pen the screenplay. J.J. Abrams, who directed and produced the latest chapter, is onboard to produce the follow-up alongside his Bad Robot partner Bryan Burk. No decision has been made yet on whether Abrams will return behind the camera for the sequel,” Variety reports.

Drew Barrymore and Justin Long are Going the Distance. That’s right, Drew Barrymore is making a romantic comedy. You can only get this sort of shocking news right here at the Morning Deal Report. “The story by first-time scribe Geoff LaTulippe follows a couple trying to maintain a long-distance relationship,” per The Hollywood Reporter.

State of Play director Kevin Macdonald will direct the Roman military drama The Eagle of the Ninth. “The story revolves around a wounded Roman soldier and his loyal Celtic slave who try to solve the mystery of the Ninth Legion, a brigade of Roman soldiers that vanished after heading into the untamed Highlands of Scotland 15 years earlier.” Jamie Bell is set to star.

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Morning Deal Report: Scarlett Johansson, Amazon Warrior

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 14:00:00 GMT

Are we ready for Scarlett Johansson, action hero? Ready or not, here she comes in her new dark red hairdo. Johansson is set to star in Amazon Warrior, set in the year 200 B.C. “I think I'm supposed to be a gladiatrix,” Johansson tells Variety. “These film guys are crazy about gladiatrixes. But do I fit into the Amazon mold? I'm a Danish/Jewish girl from New York. I've done weapons training. I've fired all kinds of guns: 9 mm, semi-automatics, machine-guns, shotguns. I've jumped off a 60-foot building. I learned to ride for The Horse Whisperer. But I've never done a full-on action role. I guess I'm still waiting for my Cirque du Soleil moment. It would be fun.”

The third Twilight movie may have found its director. “Sources indicate that horror wunderkind -- and Guillermo Del Toro protege -- Juan Antonio Bayona has emerged as one of the finalists to direct Eclipse,” per The Hollywood Reporter. “Bayona's name has come up in recent months, though generally in a group of other directors -- an eclectic list that's ranged from Paul Weitz to Drew Barrymore to James Mangold.” Any movie that could just as easily be directed by any of those people is surely one to look forward to.

Chariots of the Gods is returning to the big screen, but sadly it’s not a Sunn Classics documentary this time. Paradox Entertainment has acquired the rights to “Erich von Daniken's 1968 bestselling book that pressed the case that Earth was visited by aliens. The premise will be turned into a science fiction film that will be produced by Paradox's Fredrik Malmberg and Amber Entertainment's Mark Ordesky.”

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Screengrab 2009 Preview: Andrew Osborne's Picks

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 18:00:00 GMT

Not to sound morbid, but it occurred to me recently (whilst contemplating my own mortality) that someday – hopefully some far distant day -- I’ll read an Entertainment Weekly Spring/Summer/Fall/Holiday preview issue and/or watch a flock of coming attractions trailers for a whole bunch of movies I won’t, in fact, live long enough to see.

In Zelig, Woody Allen’s chameleon character dies with just one regret: that he never got to finish reading Moby Dick. Imagine Zelig’s disappointment if he’d been a Harry Potter fan in November, forever denied the opportunity to see the cinematic adaptation of Half-Blood Prince (let alone the Deathly Hallows)? And Lord knows at this point whether any of us will live long enough to see Zack Snyder’s much-litigated version of Watchmen. (Ironically, another movie that most of us seem destined never to see is Fanboys, about a cancer-stricken geek in 1998 determined, in yet another layer of sad irony, to see the as-yet-unreleased Phantom Menace before he dies...but I digress.)

Anyhow, with my wife and I both fighting various wintry ailments (and going on a solid week of sleep deprivation thanks to the itchy throats and sinus pressure of the damned), it’s hard to look forward to anything at this point beyond still yet more mucus...but if I should manage somehow to survive this relentlessly cold, snowy New England winter (good Lord...it’s only JANUARY?), then here are the five upcoming 2009 releases I’m most looking forward to:

5. HARRY POTTER & THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE

I originally posted this in my 2008 Fall Preview before Warner Bros. saw fit to switch the release date of the sixth J.K. Rowling adaptation to 2009, but the following still holds true: I haven’t read a single word of Ms. Rowling’s fantastically popular and beloved series of novels, but I’ve followed the relatively unprecedented blockbuster cinematic serialization religiously. I’ll go on record here as a big fan of Christopher Columbus’ unfairly maligned adaptation of Sorcerer’s Stone, and I thought Alfonso Cuarón’s Prisoner of Azkaban was bizarrely overpraised, but in general, the series just keeps getting better and better, and I can’t wait for the next episode.

4. STAR TREK

Yes, I’ve heard the Star Trek 90210 jokes, and no, the last few Star Trek movies have not exactly instilled fans with a lot of confidence in the franchise -- but as with J.J. Abrams’ day job, the increasingly ludicrous and exasperating Lost, I simply have no choice in the matter: I’m still going to watch. My Dad recently reminded me of the time he drove my geeky pubescent ass to a Star Trek convention through a full-scale Perfect Storm blizzard just so I could buy myself a Tribble and hang out with bosomy fangirls dressed like Yeoman Rand. So yes, good or bad, I’ll definitely be seeing this one – (alone, notes my wife).

3. WHIP IT!

I couldn’t find any clips of Drew Barrymore’s upcoming directorial debut about a misfit teen (Ellen Page) who joins an Austin, Texas roller-derby team. Instead, the trailer above is for Hell On Wheels, an astonishing documentary about the girl-powered rockabilly roller derby revival that sparked in Austin and spread across the nation. In the film, director Bob Ray captures the birth and hilarious, harrowing growing pains of the Lonestar Rollergirls, an all-female, D.I.Y. enterprise that transforms from weekend lark to serious business when big money and crippling injuries raise the stakes of a burgeoning start-up, leading to shattered friendships (and fibulas) and a fiery schism between two factions of fiercely independepent entrepeneurs. Short skirts + third wave feminism + breathtaking banked track action + Marxist/capitalist tensions + a fascinating cast of real-life characters & a kick-ass soundtrack = one of the best movies of 2007. I doubt Whip It! will be as good, but with Barrymore, Page, Kristin Wiig and Juliette Lewis strapping on the skates and kneepads, I’m more than willing to give this one the benefit of the doubt.

2. INGLORIOUS BASTERDS

When I saw John Waters interview Quentin Tarantino on a panel at the Provincetown Film Festival last year, the erstwhile Mr. Brown said he’d set himself the goal of finishing his “guys on a mission” World War II spaghetti Western lollapalooza (starring Brad Pitt, Maggie Cheung, The Office’s B.J. Novak, Freaks & Geeks’ Samm Levine and...really? Mike Myers?) in time for this year’s Cannes Film Festival. With the exception of roughly 42 percent of Death Proof, Tarantino has never yet steered me entirely wrong (I didn’t even mind his segment of the disastrous Four Rooms), and when he’s on his game (as he could easily be with this project) he is, like the wallet says, a Bad Motherfucker. It’s possible, of course, he won’t finish the film in time for a 2009 release...in which case, be looking for Basterds at the top of my 2010 movie preview list.

1. THE MEAT CITY BEATNIKS

As I mentioned on Thanksgiving Day in the 2008 Screengrab Holiday Special, I began shooting this ultra-low budget guerilla indie musical about screenwriters on the make and a drug deal gone bad (co-scripted by my esteemed Screengrab colleague Scott Von Doviak, based on a short story by Jim Dryden, with music by Eric Jacobson) way back in January 2008 (or possibly the late fall of 2007...it’s all a bit hazy at this point). Of all the releases I hope to see in 2009, this tops the list if only because it will mean (A) I’ve finally finished post-production and (B) it actually got released. Like Basterds, though, I’m not betting the farm on this one actually seeing the light of day before 2010...but if ever there was a year for hope, it’s this one!

HAPPY YEAR OF THE OX!

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The Screengrab 24-Hour Stephen King Marathon: The Final Chapter

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 18:30:00 GMT

Introduction

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

6 p.m. – 8 p.m. CUJO (1983)

My very first published review is lost to the ages. It was a book review I wrote during my freshman year of high school, published in our school newspaper The Schoodic Breeze (derisively known to its detractors among the faculty and student body as The Schoodic Sneeze). The subject was Stephen King’s Cujo, the first of the horrormeister’s books that truly disappointed me. (It wasn’t until many years later I learned King had written most of the book while either drunk or coked-up or both, and had no memory of writing it.) Now, 20-odd years later, I guess I’ve come full circle, writing a review of the movie version of Cujo while too drunk to remember it. (I’m kidding! Maybe.) Here’s the problem: the copy of Cujo I secured (never mind how) turns out to be in Spanish with no subtitles, and there’s no time left to get a new one. I probably missed some of the subtleties in the first half, which mainly consists of scenes of domestic discord amongst the Trenton clan. After checking with Wikipedia, I confirmed that mom Donna (Dee Wallace) is having an affair, dad Vic’s advertising career may be in the hopper because a client’s kiddie cereal is making the wee ones shit pink, and son Tad is afraid of monsters in his closet. When Donna and Tad take the family clunker out to Joe Camber’s garage on the outskirts of town, Tad has a real monster to worry about: Cujo, the Camber family St. Bernard, has been bitten by a bat and gone rabid. The second half of the movie mainly consists of Donna and Tad trapped in their car, which the mangy mutt occasionally attacks. It’s not that scary, probably because no matter how menacing you try to make a St. Bernard look, he still just comes off as dopey and lovable. One thing in the book’s favor: King kills off the whiny kid, while the movie lets him live.

8 p.m. – 10 p.m. CAT’S EYE (1985)

Cujo director Lewis Teague also helmed this trilogy of tales, loosely connected by a wandering cat. There’s an amusing moment near the beginning when the cat is chased by Cujo and they are nearly hit by Christine, but Teague ruins it by cutting to the “I am Christine” bumper sticker on the red Fury. Oh, now I get it! Anyway, the three stories here are presented more for amusement than scares – at least, I hope that was the idea. In the first, James Woods attempts to quit smoking with the aid of a shadowy organization that employs extreme measures (such as giving his wife a series of electric shocks the first time he sneaks a butt). In the middle segment, a mobster forces the man who’s been boinking his wife (Robert Hays) to walk all the way around a tall building on a tiny ledge. The finale brings us the return of Drew “Firestarter” Barrymore, who is menaced by a funny little troll in a jester cap. Woods and Alan King provide some chuckles, and I did like that troll – Was there a tiny person in there? A monkey, perhaps? – but this is pretty typical mid-80s cheese. If it’s late at night and you happen upon it on cable, it’s a good movie to semi-watch while conking out on the couch. And by this point in the marathon, I’m doing a lot of conking.

King’s cameo: In addition to the in-joke mentioned above, there’s also a scene with Woods watching The Dead Zone, and another with Barrymore’s mother reading Pet Sematary in bed.

10 p.m. – Midnight SILVER BULLET (1985)

Did someone mention typical mid-80s cheese? I’ve saved the least for last, assuming anyone is still awake out there. Silver Bullet may not actually be the worst King adaptation, but it doesn’t offer much besides a pop culture anthropologist’s glimpse of Ground Zero for modern celebreality rehab shows. Both Corey Haim and Gary Busey appear in this lame werewolf flick, which also features Everett “Big Ed” McGill as the preacher-turned-lycanthrope. (That’s technically a spoiler, I guess, but since everyone with an IQ above room temperature will figure it out five minutes into the movie, it shouldn’t count as one.) Haim is the crippled boy in the souped-up motorized wheelchair Silver Bullet and Busey is his drunken Uncle Red, a part he could play even more convincingly today. Considering that Silver Bullet came out several years after The Howling and American Werewolf in London, it’s remarkable how shoddy the were-suit is. Of course, it’s not quite as shoddy as the Casiotone soundtrack, which conjures all the excitement of a game of Simon. (Ask your drunken uncle, youngsters.)

Well, looks like we made it all the way to the end. Except…wait! I’ve actually been dead since 8 a.m. and the rest of this has been written by the zombie Scott Von Doviak. BWA HA HA HA HA!!!!

Nah, just joking. I meant to say I’ve actually been drunk since 8 a.m. I forget – did we watch Cujo?

The Screengrab 24-Hour Stephen King Marathon (Part One)

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Introduction

Midnight – 2 a.m. FIRESTARTER (1984)

Here’s an inauspicious beginning to our little festival. We can start with the resume of director Mark L. Lester, a career on the fringes highlighted by Truck Stop Women, Roller Boogie and Class of 1984. Then there’s the second-rate source material, seemingly inspired by the question, “What if Carrie got her powers before her first period and had a more supportive parent?” Put them together and you have a shoddy little supernatural thriller starring a puffy little Drew Barrymore as Charlie, the girl who sets fires with her mind. Charlie was born with this ability after her parents Andy (David Keith) and Vicky (Heather Locklear) took part in a medical experiment conducted by the shadowy government agency The Shop. This same agency, headed up by Martin Sheen with an impressively poofy head of hair, is now pursuing Andy (who has that kind of ESP that makes your nose bleed) and Charlie, who they believe will develop the capability of burning down the entire planet. To that end, Sheen brings in John Rainbird, a maniacal child-killer with an eyepatch and a ponytail. Would you cast George C. Scott in this role? Mark Lester did. Terrible performances abound – I’m gonna go ahead and guess that Barrymore started drinking on this set – but at least there’s always a chance that the actors will burst into flames. The horrendous score by Tangerine Dream carbon dates the movie to the exact second of its release. The ending is stolen outright from Three Days of the Condor, but at least in the book, King had the good sense to admit that’s what he had in mind.

2 a.m. – 4 a.m. THE MANGLER (1995)

Before he was the world’s best-selling author, King worked in an industrial laundromat and supplemented his income by selling short stories to skin magazines. The Mangler is based on one such story, which concerns an industrial laundry machine that becomes possessed by a demon and starts killing people. And you wonder where he gets his ideas. To the best of my recollection, the short story (found in the Night Shift collection) runs only a few pages. It’s been a long time since I read it, so I’m not sure exactly what director Tobe Hooper and his screenwriters added to stretch it out to feature length. It couldn’t have been much, though. Hooper gives us an impressively Dickensian laundry, all hissing steam and dark grinding gears and sweaty, filthy, bosomy workers. Robert “Freddy Krueger” Englund seems to think he’s Dickensian in his layers of old age makeup and clanky mechanical legs, but my guess is his performance was sponsored by Honey Baked Ham. The premise: the gigantic folding machine gets a taste of virgin blood, awakening its inner demon. Said machine begins feeding on the laundresses and then, when it breaks free of its moorings and goes mobile, everyone else. Ted Levine gives an enjoyably unhinged performance as the cop investigating this peculiar turn of events, but there’s nowhere near enough story here to sustain a 106-minute running time.

4 a.m. – 6 a.m. CHRISTINE (1983)

One of King’s recurring themes is Our Machines Will Kill Us. (Perhaps you’ve heard of The Mangler?) Another one is Revenge of the Nerd (as in the abovementioned Carrie). Put them both together and you’ve got Christine, in which nerd meets car, car turns nerd into cool guy, car starts killing cool guy’s enemies. Fresh off his remake of The Thing, John Carpenter directed this solid if undistinguished adaptation of King’s killer car tale. (“Solid if undistinguished” is pretty much Carpenter’s stock in trade; he’s a meat-and-potatoes B-movie guy, and I’m guessing he’d take that as a compliment.) Give him this much: Carpenter was the first to use George Thorogood’s “Bad to the Bone” in a movie – it plays as the red 1958 Plymouth Fury rolls off the assembly line under the opening credits – and Terminator or no Terminator, it’s still the best use of the song ever. Twenty years later, loser Arnie Cunningham (Keith Gordon) spots the Fury rusting in a vacant lot and it’s love at first sight. Before long, Arnie has ditched his nerd glasses and restored the car named Christine to its former glory, and the bullies who once plagued him are meeting untimely ends beneath her wheels. Carpenter makes spooky use of ’50s rock and roll, which effectively acts as the ghost in the machine, and comes up with a few nifty images, notably Christine ablaze and pursuing one of Arnie’s tormenters like a literal Car From Hell. The pre-CGI shots of the car regenerating itself after being vandalized are a hoot, and the grand finale, in which Christine is run over with a bulldozer and crushed into a cube, is cathartic for any disgruntled car owner.

Part Two

Honorable Mention: The Top Leading Ladies of All Time (Part Eight)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 23:30:00 GMT

DREW BARRYMORE (1975 - )

As inspiring figures go, Barrymore pulls double duty by proving that it's possible to be both a Barrymore and a former child star and still not go tragically off the rails, even though the attractions of the grape are not unknown to her. (Lindsay! We know you read this feature religiously! Put down that bottle and pull over to the side of the road and take some notes!) She made her film debut at five in the aptly titled Altered States; two years later, E.T. the Extra-terrestrial made her a household name and led to her becoming the youngest-ever host of Saturday Night Live, a record that I hope is still in her name: I'm too afraid to check to see who might have broken it since. After an early spell (she was barely in her teens) as a tabloid star with stints in and out of rehab, Barrymore's mature career began with her attention-getting bad girl performance in the 1992 Poison Ivy, in which she played the jailbait from hell. Her work in that film was highly creditable, but it soon became clear that she wasn't really cut out to be playing mean girls: she was just too damned lovable. Since then, she's contributed her glow to such offbeat projects as Guncrazy, Home Fries, and Donnie Darko, which was partly financed by Flower Films, the company she co-founded in 1999, and which has produced such vehicles as Never Been Kissed and the Charlie's Angels films. Her charitable endeavors extend to many of her romantic comedies: she has convincingly simulated a yearning interest in such male co-stars as Adam Sandler (twice!), Jimmy Fallon, and Tom Green. (Let's not go there.) Barrymore has the potential to be a major dramatic actress, as has been most clearly demonstrated by her remarkable turn as a girl whose life is twisted out of shape by a pregnancy born of a mercy fuck (with Steve Zahn), but in the meantime, in fluffy comedies and talk show appearances, she continues to do the great work that it sometimes seems that she, alone of all the actresses in Hollywood, is fully capable of doing: she gives cuteness a good name.

CLAUDIA CARDINALE (1938 - )

You might have noticed that the first clip is in Italian sans subtitles. But I make no apologies for including it! Still, I love you, dear Screengrab reader, almost as much as I love Claudia Cardinale, so there’s a second clip, this time with subtitles, of Ms. Cardinale being charming. Now here’s an amazing fact: both of these films (The Leopard and 8 1/2, that is) are from the same year. You might have noticed that Cardinale is one of the most beautiful women to grace the big screen. You might have noticed that these clips are from two of the finest films in Italian cinema. You are quite observant!

GENEVIEVE BUJOLD (1942 - )

Bujold got her first big break co-starring with Yves Montand in Alain Resnais's La Guerre est Finie; that movie opened up possibilities in French films that she spurned to star in two godawful independent Canadian productions, Isabel and The Act of the Heart, that were directed by filmmaker and jackass Paul Almond, to whom she was married from 1967 to 1973. This detail set the tone for much of her career: a great actress with the ability to make direct contact with an audience, Bujold spent the seventies being courted by Hollywood studios and touted in the press as a big star in the making, but she kept slipping away from the bonds of real fame by her insistence on doing the roles she wanted to do. (One big exception was Earthquake, in which she played Charlton Heston's girlfriend as part of the settlement of a lawsuit filed by Universal Pictures for breach of contract.) During her ingenue period, she won an Academy Award nomination for playing Anne Boleyn to Richard Burton's Henry VIII in her first U.S. picture, Anne of the Thousand Days (1969), then slipped away to Greece to contribute a stunning cameo as Cassandra in the Michael Cacoyannis film of The Trojan Women (1971), had a freak-out scene for the ages in Brian De Palma's Obsession (1976), and came as close as she would ever come to mainstream stardom in Michael Crichton's Coma (1978). In her mature-actress period, she stirred strange longings in Clint Eastwood in Tightrope (1984), stirred even stranger ones in Jeremy Irons in Dead Ringers (1988), and introduced some experience and earthiness to Alan Rudolph's soap-bubble worlds in Choose Me (1984), Trouble in Mind (1985), and The Moderns (1988). It's been a while since she was in anything that anybody saw, but she is never to be counted out and it's good to know that she's still out there, waiting for some young hotshot director who isn't afraid of writing a part for a strong woman to do himself a favor.

MAGGIE CHEUNG (1964 - )

Born in Hong Kong, Cheung later moved with her family to the U.K. when she was eight, which accounts for the British accent with which she spoke her English dialogue in the French film Irma Vep (1996), directed by her sometime husband Olivier Assayas. Her dry, witty performance in that movie as some version of herself, politely standing around between takes on a movie set while an assistant with a spray bottle applies the right sheen to her shiny black cat suit, was a measure of how far she'd come since her early days in movies: a former model and First Runner-Up in the Miss Hong Kong beauty contest (who beat her? who the fuck beat her!?), Cheung can be seen not doing much besides looking damned good in a number of HK films, including such Jackie Chan classics as Police Story and Project A Part II. Cheung has given credit for her emergence as an actress to Wong Kar-wei, master of all things beautiful, who brought her out in As Tears Go By and later used her in Days of Being Wild, Ashes of Time, In the Mood for Love, and 2046. While developing her talent, Cheung has also managed to maintain a presence in the Hong Kong action-fantasy cinema, co-starring in such films as The Heroic Trio and Green Snake; both strands of her career came together triumphantly in Zhang Yimou's Hero, where she kicked ass and broke hearts with the best of them. She gave her finest dramatic performance to date in her most recent film, Assayas's Clean, for which she won the Best Actress prize at Cannes. She has since announced that she's quitting acting to concentrate on her music. Her fans can be forgiven for hoping that she eventually finds composing to be insufficiently gratifying to her ego and comes slouching back.

MIA FARROW (1945)

The daughter of film director John Farrow (The Big Clock) and actress and Tarzan main squeeze Maureen O'Sullivan, Farrow burst into the late '60s with a waif-like quality that, married to her china doll features, was at its best sexily androgynous and at its not-best borderline elfin. She became a star from her role in the TV series Peyton Place, which she quit at the behest of her new husband, Frank Sinatra; she then blew off the marriage to Sinatra by refusing to give up her starring role in Rosemary's Baby. That movie made her an even bigger star, but it also raised the possibility that she might wind up being exploited in picture after picture as the most defenselessly threatenable potential victim since the days of silent melodrama. Perhaps alert to this danger, she spent most of the next ten years alternating between very bad choices (Secret Ceremony, The Great Gatsby) and, so far as a movie career was concerned, making no choices at all. In 1978, she appeared as a member of ensemble casts in Robert Altman's A Wedding and the Agatha Christie film Death on the Nile and, in both, revealed a new eagerness to subvert audience's sympathetic expectations of her and to use her own weirdness for comic effect. It wasn't long after that she took up with Woody Allen, and starting with 1982's A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy, embarked on a ten-year stretch where she appeared almost exclusively in his movies. In the best of them, he examined every angle from which she could be charming, and she has him to thank for having broadened and solidified her enduring screen image. There's a whole lot of other stuff he did for which she has not been inclined to thank him, and when their professional and personal relationships both ended with an abrupt thud around the time of the release of 1992's Husbands and Wives, she hurtled out of his orbit and latched onto supporting roles in other people's movies with what looked an awful lot like relief. From the first of her post-Woody movies, John Irvin's Widow's Peak (1994) to the most recent, Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind, she can generally be counted on to serve as a delightful addition to any project that is salvageable and as something fascinatingly odd in any project that isn't. Last year, Time magazine named her as one of the world's most influential people for her various humanitarian endeavors.

DIANE KEATON (1946 - )

Keaton's warmth and talent, and her special ability to make neurosis seem cuddly, made her everybody's favorite screen comedienne in the seventies, when she starred with her off-screen partner Woody Allen in Play It Again, Sam, Sleeper (where she did a mean Brando impression), Love and Death, Manhattan, and of course, Annie Hall, which made her not just a star but a zeitgeist figure. Although she's kept working since that peak -- unlike other actresses, such as Jill Clayburgh, who seemed to embody something very much of the moment for, well, a moment -- there's a sense that Keaton doesn't really get her full due, maybe because her moment is supposed to have passed. (She's always criticized for being too "contemporary" when she plays period roles, even though she's been brilliant in such movies as Mrs. Soffel, where she springs Mel Gibson from a Pittsburgh jail at the turn of the century, and, of course, Reds.) Even when her career was red-hot after her Oscar win for Best Actress in Annie Hall, her success in comedy and the relative dullness of her role in the Godfather movies led to a false impression that she's a funny woman wasted in heavy drama. This may have led to her being overpraised for her work in the strident Looking for Mr. Goodbar, which came out the same year as Annie Hall, but it also cost her full recognition for her greatest performance, in the stunning divorce drama Shoot the Moon in 1982. She also gave a wrenching performance in The Little Drummer Girl, reasserted her comedic chops carrying Baby Boom to the finish line, partnered beautifully with Jessica Lange and Sissy Spacek for Crimes of the Heart, re-teamed with Woody Allen for Manhattan Murder Mystery, and directed for TV (including episodes of Twin Peaks) and movies (including the oddball documentary Heaven and the underrated Unstrung Heroes). She also helped produce Gus Van Sant's Elephant and dabbled in real estate. Her biggest recent splash in movies was in 2003's Something's Gotta Give, where she has a nude scene, the point of which was the horror that the sight of a naked woman only a decade younger than him inspired in her co-star Jack Nicholson. In fact, she looked pretty good -- certainly better than Nicholson does with his clothes on -- and her performance (and unsurgically enhanced body) helped make the movie a hit among women who enjoyed seeing Keaton getting hit on by Keanu Reeves. She can now be seen in TV commercials as the face of L'Oreal.

MAE WEST (1893-1980)

Mae West was beautiful, talented, versatile, and groundbreaking. Big deal. So were a million other women who don’t have nearly the reputation she does in the history of Hollywood. The reason that we’re writing about Mae West is because she took what was implicit in showbiz and made it explicit: her career, from beginning to end, was all about sex. Never before had anyone become so famous speaking so openly about what goes on between men and women – and she didn’t limit it to that paradigm, either. West was sexually experimental and was rumored to have had affairs with a number of women; and, despite the greater fag-hag veneration of Joan Crawford and Judy Garland, she was also one of the earliest advocates of gay rights, having written a sympathetic play about homosexual men as early as 1928. Oh, yeah: she was a writer, too. Always more than just a pretty face and a round set of hips, West was an engaging speaker, a witty and talented writer, and by all accounts, a legendarily adept improviser. (She said one of her greatest regrets is that she never got to share the screen with Groucho Marx, the only comic she considered her equal at thinking on one’s feet.) Like most people who considered sex a serious business, she couched much of her speculations about it in humor, but that didn’t save her from being repeatedly censored, censured, prosecuted (at least twice successfully) for obscenity, and banned from half the radio and television networks in the country. West never stopped working, and while her latter-day projects like Sextette are often considered more creepy than funny, considering that she kept her career going for some 70 years while pioneering gay rights, women’s liberation, and sexual freedom some thirty years before the rest of the country came around, we’d say she earned a little indulgence.

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

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Hayden Childs, Leonard Pierce

Morning Deal Report: Anne Hathaway in Wonderland

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 14:30:00 GMT

You probably already know that Tim Burton is directing Alice in Wonderland for Disney, and you most likely wouldn’t be terribly surprised to learn that Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter are attached (as the Mad Hatter and Red Queen, respectively). Now Burton has found his White Queen, and it’s Rachel Getting Married star Anne Hathaway. “The White Queen needs Alice to slay a creature known as the Bandersnatch,” The Hollywood Reporter reminds us. Ah, but who is frumious enough to play the Bandersnatch? We’re putting our money on Christopher Walken.

It turns out that October brings not only baseball’s playoffs, but really bad ideas for baseball movies. (I’m still haunted by the image of Jimmy Fallon and Drew Barrymore dancing on the field when the Red Sox won the 2004 World Series.) Now we learn that Kevin Costner and Ron Shelton are cooking up a sequel to Bull Durham. Our first thought is that Costner and Tim Robbins are a little old to pass for baseball players (even older than some of the current Yankees), but according to this UPI report (via the New York Post), a solution has been found. “Real-life couple and Durham co-stars Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon, who played a pitcher and a baseball groupie respectively in the first installment, are also expected to return for the second film. This time around, they will play the married owners of a Major League Baseball team Costner's character manages, the Post said.”

Tennis, anyone? Frank DeFord’s novel Big Bill is coming to the big screen. It’s based on the true story of tennis legend Bill Tilden, who “dominated tennis in the 1920s, winning six straight U.S. Open singles titles and becoming the first American to win Wimbledon. He was also a contract bridge champ, musicologist, novelist, playwright and actor. On the other side of the ledger, Tilden was famously self-destructive, going to jail twice for sexual misbehavior with teenage boys and dying penniless,” says Variety. Sounds like the feel-good sports story of the year.

Related:
When Good Directors Go Bad: Planet of the Apes (Tim Burton)
Hathaway Hotness, Rourke Smackdowns Head Venice Comp Lineup

Morning Deal Report: Soderbergh Does Liberace

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 14:30:00 GMT

Steven Soderbergh prides himself on being an eclectic filmmaker and you can’t get much more eclectic than following up a biopic of Che Guevara with one of Liberace. Actually, the Liberace project won’t be next on Soderbergh’s agenda – that would be The Girlfriend Experience for Mark Cuban’s HDNet – but it’s definitely on the back burner. Variety reports “Soderbergh is in discussions with Matt Damon to play Scott Thorson, who sued Liberace in 1982 for $113 million in palimony, claiming he was the entertainer’s companion for five years. Even though Liberace never wavered from career-long denials that he was gay, Thorson reportedly settled for $95,000 in 1986.” And who will play the flamboyant entertainer? Would you believe…Michael Douglas?

While you’re processing that mental image over your morning bowl of Frankenberries, here’s some chick flick news for you. Drew Barrymore will produce How to Be Single, adapted from the best-selling novel by Liz Tuccillo. Barrymore is already producing He’s Just Not That Into You by the same author, but lest you be confused, The Hollywood Reporter explains that while “Into You was a non-fiction how-to look at relationships, Single is Tuccillo's fiction debut. It follow the dating lives of five single New York women, one of whom, the narrator, is writing a book about how bachelorettes across the world manage. The woman embarks on a trip around the world for the book and gets involved in an international affair, while her four friends duke it out on the New York dating scene.” For some reason, I’m picturing a Sarah Jessica Parker type for the lead.

If you’re excited about the upcoming Land of the Lost movie with Will Ferrell, you’ll be thrilled to learn that Sigmund and the Sea Monsters is also coming to the big screen. Sid and Marty Krofft will produce the movie scripted by Dana Gould (The Simpsons). And yes, according to Variety, live-action versions of Lidsville, The Bugaloos and Dr. Shrinker may not be far behind.

Related:
Steven Soderbergh's "Girlfriend Experience"
Will Ferrell and the Retro Boys

Morning Deal Report: Another “300”

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Wall-E walloped the competition at the box office over the weekend, taking in an estimated $62.5 million. That’s good for the second best June opening ever, right behind Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. In second place, Angelina Jolie racked up $51.1 million for Wanted, which no one at this desk was expecting. Get Smart hung in there at third place with $20 million, but The Love Guru plummeted 61%, taking in only $5.4 million. Looks like Mike Myers needs a new mantra.

Proving Hollywood will never let a little thing like all of the characters dying get in the way of cashing in on a popular movie, Legendary Pictures has announced that a sequel to 300 is in the works. According to Variety, Frank Miller is penning both the graphic novel and the screenplay, “although at this point it's not clear whether it will be a prequel or spinoff. Most of the characters, including Gerard Butler's King Leonidas, died in the original, making a follow-up tricky…Spinoffs of bloody actioners can prove challenging, especially when the main characters kick the bucket the first time out.” The sequel story seems obvious to us: Leonidas and his troops dining in Hell, as promised.

Per the Hollywood Reporter, the roller derby comedy Whip It! is ready to…er…roll. Drew Barrymore will make her directorial debut and also star alongside Ellen Page. Also appearing will be Marcia Gay Harden as “an overbearing ex-beauty queen who would rather see her daughter, Bliss (Page), in pageants than skates,” Kristen Wiig as “Bliss' rowdy mentor, Malice in Wonderland,” and Juliette Lewis as “Dinah Might, the star of Austin's top team.” Don’t they know the ultimate Austin roller derby story has already been told in the documentary Hell on Wheels? Send them to Spank Alley!

Related:
Frank Miller: CGI Lacks Spirit, So "Spirit" Will Lack CGI

Morning Deal Report: Ellen Page Whips It For Drew Barrymore

Peter Smith — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 16:45:00 GMT

Rumors confirmed: Ellen Page will star in Drew Barrymore's directorial debut, Whip It!. According to Variety, the film "follows the exploits of alterna-teen Bliss. . . [who finds] herself after joining a female roller derby team." Story by one "Maggie Mayhem." Yup, this sounds like an Ellen Page project all right. Ellen Page: the Winona Ryder of the '00s? Discuss.

Dario Argento is working on Giallo, "an English-language homage to the genre that made him a cult helmer." (That would be giallo, I take it.) Argento's daughter Asia costars with Ray Liotta and Vincent Gallo. Gallo plays "a solipsistic, penis-obsessed lout who makes movies." No, I made that up.

Forest Whitaker to play inspirational basketball coach.

The Ten Greatest Prosthetics in Movie History, Part 2

Peter Smith — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 21:00:00 GMT

Nicole Kidman's Nose in THE HOURS (2002)

Can a fake nose win an Oscar? Some might say it already did, when Nicole Kidman's turn as Virginia Woolf in The Hours was awarded the golden statue for Best Actress. We've got nothing against Kidman's performance in that film, but judging by the reams of press that her lightly reoriented schnozz got at the time, you'd think that it was the nose that was wearing Kidman, instead of the other way around. Of course, this was yet another award in a long series of Best Actress Oscars that went to Beautiful Women Doing Unglamorous Things — whether it was playing a tarted-up legal secretary (Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich), having sex with Billy Bob Thornton (Halle Berry in Monster's Ball) or looking like a burn victim (Charlize Theron in Monster). Which is, really, the only way we can explain Kidman's decision to use such a subtle prosthetic in the first place; it's not like the American moviegoing public had any idea what Virginia Woolf looked like in the first place.

Jeff Goldblum's Jaw, Cheeks, Eyes, His Very Fucking Being, in THE FLY (1986)

Some of us were prohibited from watching more than two hours of TV a week as children. Luckily, some of us were also latch-key kids, so naturally, whenever no one was home, we gorged, often on both food and shlocky afternoon TV movies. And those of us who were unlucky enough to see The Fly at this time didn't quite grasp the extent of our mistake until it was too late. There you are, happily eating your delivery pizza, and in the middle of a big, meaty bite, you're confronted by the spectacle of one of Brundlefly's eyes falling off, like an egg yolk dripping into batter. You assume that's the most disgusting scene they're gonna throw at you. Again, big mistake. Jeff Goldblum's Brundlefly is possibly the single most hideous, repugnant creature ever seen on film — worse than the Alien mother, worse than any other close competitor. Every negative trait of Jeff Goldblum's physiognomy is brought into stark relief onto an insect face; when it decays, we dare you to keep eating. We certainly didn't.

Penelope Cruz's Ass, VOLVER (2006)

Since her Hollywood debut, Cruz has been the poster child for foreign-born performers who aren't half as compelling in English as they are in their native tongue. Which is why her reunion with Pedro Almodovar was a cause for celebration — not only would she be working in Spanish again, but she was collaborating with a filmmaker who always brought out the best in her. But strangely enough, much of the buzz around Penelope's role in 2006's Volver focused less on the performance than around the generous fake derrière she strapped on for the role. According to Almodovar, the padded rump was necessary for the character, an earthy, hard-working mother in the Anna Magnani tradition, and this makes sense, since Penelope Cruz is lovely, but talk about bun cakes — she ain't got 'em. But then a funny thing happened. Instead of drawing undue attention to Penelope's prodigious prosthetic posterior, the hype allowed moviegoers to grow accustomed to the sight of the suddenly callipygian Cruz, much in the same way Alejandro Amenabar leaked stills of a heavily made-up Javier Bardem to the Spanish press so the public would get used to his appearance in The Sea Inside. The gimmick paid off in the end, as Cruz's full-bodied (sorry) performance made the rockin' world go 'round, garnering her unprecedented critical praise and a rare (for a foreign-language performer) Best Actress Oscar nomination. In fact, after the success of Volver, the only question that remains for Penelope Cruz's career is: how can she leave this behind?

Vincent Gallo's Penis in THE BROWN BUNNY (2003)

When people actually got around to seeing Vincent Gallo's The Brown Bunny rather than just making fun of it (which isn't to say that they stopped making fun of it afterwards, or that many people actually got around to seeing it), the scene that generated the most buzz was what is delicately referred to as "the blowjob", where Gallo's lodge pole is climbed by Chloe Sevigny, for whom one has never felt more pity. The scene's verite qualities and (literally) naked emotional power are what most people talked about, although we think they were just grateful that something was actually happening in the movie after endless shots of Gallo driving aimlessly across country. Gallo, who tends to be pretty sensitive about things like this, has always claimed that the hog in question belongs to him; French director Claire Denis, on the contrary, claims that it is an artificial wang, and that, worse yet, it isn't even Vince's artificial wang — she says he stole it off the set of her 2001 film Trouble Every Day, in which he had a large part, but not that large part. In the absence of, er, concrete evidence from Gallo, we're going to go with Claire Denis' version of events; we figure that since she's not on record as hoping Roger Ebert gets cancer for giving one of her films a bad review, she's got the moral high ground.

Gwyneth Paltrow's Body in SHALLOW HAL (2001)

Hollywood's relationship with the overweight isn't exactly a history of sensitivity and kindness. Particularly where women are concerned, the mere suggestion of being a few pounds beyond anorexic means you're virtually unemployable; and in a city where people like Christina Ricci, Drew Barrymore and Britney Spears can be attacked in the press for being fat, roles for actual human women, let alone fat women, are few and far between. When the Farrelly brothers decided to make a movie about a shallow womanizer who falls in love with a 300-pound woman to prove that he can see 'inner beauty,' they had a casting decision to make: hire two people to play Rosemary Shanahan — one a beautiful, thin Hollywood blonde, to portray Hal's perception of her, and one a genuine 300-pound actress to portray the 'real' character — or just stick Gwyneth Paltrow in a fat suit? (It didn't help the whole unpleasant aftertaste of the movie that its male lead was Jack Black, an actor who gets romantic leads despite his own flabby physique; no actress with a body like Black's would ever nail down a leading-lady part.) Perhaps it's too much to expect anything like insight from filmmakers whose reputation is built on the gross-out comedy, but the fat suit is already a ethical minefield (representing, as it does, a sort of physical proof of Hollywood's allergy to hiring anyone genuinely overweight to appear in a prominent role) without filling it with an actress who probably weighed 110 pounds soaking wet when she was filming the role.

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

Willem Dafoe's Teeth in WILD AT HEART (1990)

The whole world seems to be rotting in David Lynch's nightmare road movie, and nowhere is this clearer than in the misbegotten mouth of white-trash villain Bobby Peru, played by Willem Dafoe in full-moon mode. Unholy, irredeemable, and defiantly unflossed, Bobby Peru is meant to be the ultimate dark void awaiting the young lovers at the end of their road to nowhere, and no Satanic movie character ever displayed a less welcoming smile. Perverse to the end, the still-smiling Bobby finally slides a shotgun beneath his chin and blows his own head off, after which the part of his body above the gum line must have felt a certain amount of relief.

Goldie Hawn's Fat in DEATH BECOMES HER (1992)

In this special-effects comedy, Goldie Hawn and Meryl Streep play lifelong rivals who achieve "undead" immortality and spend the rest of the movie blowing holes in each other, twisting each other's necks into pretzels, knocking their heads into their chest cavities, and generally behaving as if Chuck Jones were their stunt coordinator. But the most effective physical mutation in the picture may come when Hawn slips into an old-fashioned fat suit and layers of latex makeup to depict her character's depressive obesity after Streep has waltzed off with her fiancee. Nothing in the movie is funnier than Hawn's expression of malicious satisfaction, with her features sunk deep in the mass of her cream puff head, as she imagines raining destruction down on her gal pal. At the time, Hawn was forty-six years old and had spent a quarter of a century doing her damndest to hang onto the body and mannerisms of a teenage girl. Maybe she felt wickedly giddy at even pretending to have let herself go.

Dennis Hopper's False Leg in RIVER'S EDGE (1987)

Dennis Hopper, fresh from his comeback in Blue Velvet, lays claim to the being the counterculture's answer to Walter Brennan in this generation-gap study of alienated youth. John Heard made a good grab for the position in Cutter's Way, where he staggered around pretending to be one-legged and wore an eye patch to boot, but that was nothing compared to what you get when you equip Hopper with an artificial leg, an inflatable sex doll, and the name "Feck", and sit back to watch him rock. When Hopper, who deals dope to the local teenagers, sits down to remove his false leg, it symbolizes the loss of his own youthful innocence and the disconnect between the older characters and the young people, which is fed by their use of his own product. Or something like that. And did we mention that his character's name is Feck!?

— Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Vadim Rizov

Today in the Nerve Film Lounge/From the Nerve Film Issue

Peter Smith — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 16:00:00 GMT

In the Film Lounge:

American Gangster: "It's not just that other movies and TV shows have been here. It's that they've done it better."

Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten: Review coming soon.

Help!: "It's the weakest Beatles movie, but that's not to deny its pleasures."

And from the Nerve Film Issue:

The Manhood Behind the Mustache: Ada Calhoun interviews Rob Perri, the director of a gonzo "documentary" about Mets legend Keith Hernandez.

To Sleep With Anger: Bilge Ebiri traces the long, strange career of Kenneth Anger.

Character Types: Nicole Ankowski figures out which Drew Barrymore or John Cusack archetype you're dating.

We're All Replicants Here: I finally get to wax rhapsodic about Blade Runner.

— Peter Smith