The Screengrab : dudley moore

Precursors: Vice Versa (1988)

Nick Schager — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 16:30:00 GMT

Big is the most obvious predecessor of this weekend’s adult-turned-kid 17 Again, the first stand-alone starring vehicle for High School Musical’s song-and-dance Ken Doll, Zac Efron. Yet for those interested in stories featuring adults trapped in children’s bodies, one must inevitably turn to Vice Versa, the insanely corny 1988 body-swapping saga in which Judge Reinhold’s dad winds up having his brain magically transported – by a mystical Asian skull – into the noggin of Fred Savage’s son…and vice versa! Hot on the heels (by which I mean, blatantly copying the formula of) 1987’s Dudley Moore-Kirk Cameron classic Like Father, Like Son, Brian Gilbert’s film seemed at the time like merely reheated leftovers. And truth be told, given that I saw it in the theater upon its initial release and then never again, I can now barely remember any of the story’s specifics. But one glance at the below trailer makes clear that what’s waiting to be rediscovered is a lost-gem of unintentional humor. The Incredible Hulk-ish transformation sequence. Reinhold’s “cool dude” strutting with a skateboard under his arm. The hockey game crotch shot. Fred Savage having to hide his “unit” from his mom/wife. The dated Grey Poupon reference. Seriously – this film is just about pleading for critical reconsideration. Or, at least, begging to be laughed at again.

Howard Zieff, 1927 - 2009

Phil Nugent — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 15:30:00 GMT

The director Howard Zieff died this past weekend of complications of Parkinson's disease, at the age of 81. Odds are that the name doesn't mean as much to you as it might. Zieff made his best pictures in the 1970s, but his name simply wasn't one of those that people associated with the glories of that movie era. And he had a special problem, so far as his lingering reputation goes, in that his biggest hits tended to be less distinctive than some of his flops, so that to the degree that he had an image as a director, it may have been as something of a hack. But Zieff, like Michael Ritchie (Smile) and the screenwriter W. D. Richter (who wrote Zieff's first movie, the 1973 Slither), other eccentric talents who left their mark on that period without winning much acclaim for it, he was a smart, funny entertainer with his own peculiar comic sense and a feel for everyday American insanity. He first made his presence felt in the culture with his work in advertising, both as a director of TV commercials and his work in print ads. Zieff was one of the first directors to develop a name for himself as a promising talent based on his ad work: in 1967, when he was 40 years old and still half a dozen years away from his first movie job, he was the subject of a profile in Time magazine, which noted that he had made 200 commercials in six years and called him "the leading practitioner of what the trade calls the indirect sell." (Translation: his ads inspired public affection for the products they touted not because they made such a great case for the products themselves but because the ads were so entertaining.) More recently, Zieff's ad photography was the subject of a 2002 show at a West Coast gallery. Talking about his penchant for using faces, some of which were attached to people he'd spotted on the streets of New York, that were different than the usual blond hair/Colegate smile models that dominated advertising in the Mad Men era, Zieff said of his models, "They all had great faces, interesting faces, expressive faces." When he became a movie director, this lust for great faces--faces that could inspire both laughter and warmth--manifested itself as a love for character actors that sometimes gives his best work an almost Preston Sturges quality. He was devoted to the late Richard B. Schull, a character man with a strangled-sounding yet mellow whine of a voice and a friendly, baggy kisser, who helped get Slither off to a sweet start, celebrating his liberation from prison by singing "Happy Days Are Here Again."

Slither--the recent horror comedy of the same title is not a remake--was a very Watergate-year kind of comedy, a paranoid road movie about a paroled robber and former high school football hero (James Caan) who is wandering around the country trying to find some loot that the Schull character has tried to direct him towards. The key the the movie's charm may be that Caan--who came to the picture after playing Sonny Corleone in The Godfather, and who gives the performance of someone who's rather enjoying the novelty of finally getting to play the sanest and least assertive person in a movie--seems to just be along for the ride, carrying out this quest because he has absolutely nothing better to do. The cast also includes Peter Boyle and Louise Lasser, who play a married couple and come across as unexpectedly, almost supernaturally right for each other, and Sally Kellerman as an oddly fetching trigger-happy speed freak. The movie's paranoid vibe is established through such devices as a massive black van--it looks like Darth Vader's weekend getaway vehicle-- that follows the heroes everywhere at the pace of a sinister gold cart, accompanied by its own theme song. Yet it has a genuine grunginess to it, a faint scent of summer days spent in cars and motels in the middle of nowhere. (It's the only movie I've ever seen where a character who is involved in violent chicanery gets stopped by a cop and threatened with a citation for driving while barefoot.) The combination of everyday frustrations and baroque dark fantasy (which, in the end, turns out to have some very ordinary roots) makes Slither a very funny excursion into screwball-surreal Americana.

Zieff's second picture, 1975's Hearts of the West, has a more raggedy script (by Rob Thompson) but a richly felt milieu--it's set in Hollywood in the early 1930s, which looks like a factory set-up on Dress Like a Cowboy Day--and a great deal of charm. It stars Jeff Bridges, all of 25 and as convincingly ingenuous as a freshly hatched chick, as Lewis Tater, who goes West in hopes of becoming a Western dime novelist and gets roped into a job acting in cowboy pictures. Besides Bridges, Hearts features especially fine work by Blythe Danner as a script girl named Trout, Alan Arkin as a touchy director, and Andy Griffith as a veteran cowboy type with a handsome, rugged exterior. (He looks exactly like the guy who Central Casting would have sent to play his part, which in a Zieff project is the surest sign that you shouldn't trust him any farther than you could throw him.) The movie also features a collection of Western stuntmen, played by such modern-cowpoke types as Matt Clark and Burton Gilliam, and when Zieff had an excuse to spend time with actors like these playing characters like these, his work had the happy hum of a man being paid for being totally in his element, as much as Michael Bay on a day when all he has to do is blow something up. Neither of these pictures is currently available on DVD, which is something that I, for one, would really like to hear President Obama address in his speech before Congress tonight.

Zieff finally had a couple of hits: the 1978 House Calls, which starred Walter Matthau and Glenda Jackson and which was later made into a TV sitcom even though the movie was sort of one already, and the 1980 Goldie Hawn vehicle Private Benjamin, a film that I like to think he made just because, as an old man, he could picture what a terrific poster it would make: Goldie, in her Gomer Pyle drag, pouting. In 1984 he helmed a remake of Preston Sturges's great Unfaithfully Yours, with Dudley Moore in the role originated by Rex Harrison. I have no evidence to support this theory, but nonetheless, I'm pretty sure that he only agreed to do it after studio goons kidnapped his grandchildren. The movie is bad, but not really that bad considering that the whole idea behind it is blasphemous, and does boast a performance by Albert Brooks that true devotees of comic genius will want to savor with one finger on the fast=forward button. Zieff's last films were the 1991 My Girl and its sequel, the 1994 My Girl 2, after which he was forced to retire in the face of the onset of Parkinson's. My own favorite of his later films is 1989's The Dream Team, which is formulaic but likable, and which reunited the director with Peter Boyle, to great effect: he plays an institutionalized dude who thinks he's Jesus, and he would get no argument from me. The movie also boasts excellent performances by Michael Keaton, Lorraine Bracco, and Christopher Lloyd, and also has a few bits, such as a scene in an army-surplus clothing store run by a hard-to-faze dude played by Jack Duffy, that showed that, when he could fit it in, Zieff's genius for faces was still firing on all cylinders.

Morning Deal Report: Remaking the Stone

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 15:30:00 GMT

I have nothing but remakes for you this morning, I’m afraid. It’s up to you, the Screengrab reader, to determine which among them is most egregiously unnecessary. We begin with Romancing the Stone, which itself was considered little more than a Raiders of the Lost Ark knockoff before cleaning up at the box office and spawning the much less beloved sequel The Jewel of the Nile. Now Fox has tapped Daniel McDermott to pen a remake of “the story of a repressed romance novelist who travels to Colombia to find her missing sister only to meet up with an American soldier of fortune,” per The Hollywood Reporter.

But that’s not all! THR is also reporting that “Russell Brand might soon be caught between the moon and New York City.” Yes, a remake of Arthur is on the table. As you’ll recall, the original starred Dudley Moore as “a boozy playboy rascal who is set to inherit a fortune if he marries an heiress his family thinks will make something out of him. However, he falls in love with a working-class woman and turns to his valet for help when his family makes him choose between money and love.” We’re interested in the remake only if Liza Minnelli reprises her role as the working-class woman Brand romances.

You’re saying, “Please, Screengrab! No more remakes!” But we cannot oblige. John Carpenter’s They Live is coming back to life. As you know, “The movie is known for a fight scene that lasts 5 1⁄2 minutes and for the line, ‘I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass ... and I'm all out of bubblegum.’” And Hollywood is all out of ideas.

Related:
Brand X: Sexy Beast Russell Brand Storms America
Attack of the '80s Sci-Fi Remakes

Unwatchable #97: “Bolero”

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 07 May 2008 18:30:00 GMT

Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

Bo Derek became the natural successor to Farrah Fawcett as poster girl of choice in the bedrooms of adolescent boys with the 1979 release of 10, in which the cornrowed, bikinied Derek played Dudley Moore’s object of lust. (For some reason her acting debut in 1977’s Orca, in which her leg was bitten off by a killer whale, did not catapult her to stardom.) Director John Derek was ahead of the game, having met 16-year-old Bo on the casting couch years earlier. Better known for trading in a series of hot blonde wives for younger models than any filmmaking acumen, Derek abandoned wife Linda Evans (who had earlier replaced Ursula Andress) for Bo, with whom he made four movies. Bolero is one of them, and perhaps not even the worst one, though I’d hate to have to live on the difference.

Released in 1984, Bolero (the title is meant to conjure happy memories of 10, in which Bo jogged in slow motion on the beach accompanied by Ravel’s “Bolero” on the soundtrack) was billed as the Hottest Erotic Film of the Century. (Which century was not specified.) Among its IMDb keywords are “Female Nudity,” “Female Frontal Nudity,” “Female Full Frontal Nudity” and “Box Office Flop.” All of this is accurate. Derek is plenty naked as Lida MacGillivery, a wealthy schoolgirl who graduates, moons her alma mater and announces to her chauffeur Cotton (George Kennedy) her plan to travel the world and find a rich sheik to take her virginity. She finds a willing sheik, who commences licking milk and honey from her bare breasts, but he passes out before consummating the deed. Lida continues her travels, in hopes of finding another heavily accented himbo to accept her precious gift. Yes, this is a movie about a rich girl who looks like Bo Derek trying desperately to get laid.

Eventually it happens when she meets a bullfighter in Spain, but soon thereafter her future happiness is threatened when he is gored in the breadbasket by a charging bull. He grows bitter, but Lida cheers him up by learning to bullfight and riding a horse naked, and in the stirring finale, his equipment once again functions properly.

Bolero is softcore porn like they really don’t make anymore (for one thing, it features plentiful nudity by then-15-year-old Olivia d’Abo, which probably wouldn’t fly today.) It’s truly a young woman’s strange, erotic journey from Milan to Minsk, but what makes it so unbearable is the cutesy-whimsical tone of the whole thing, from goofy opium den hijinx to George Kennedy’s attempt to stop a plane from taking off with his bare hands. (Kennedy has an expression on his face throughout suggesting that his agent is already looking for a new job.) I guess it’s a vanity project of sorts for Bo Derek – everyone in the movie keeps saying she’s the most beautiful woman in the world – but she comes off as an overmedicated halfwit in every scene. The sex is more silly than sensual, but naked Bo Derek is undeniably a special effect – one that saves Bolero from the full four Maurys.

Previously on Unwatchable:

98. Kickboxer 4: The Aggressor
99. The Honeymooners
100. Devil Fish

Apocalypse Now and Then: Ten Great End-of-the-World Movie Scenarios, Part 2

Phil Nugent — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 21:00:00 GMT

THE QUIET EARTH (1985)

Suppose they gave an apocalypse and nobody came? That’s the question faced by the always-engaging Bruno Lawrence in Geoff Murphy’s delightful little sci-fi thriller, The Quiet Earth. Made in New Zealand before it was home to hobbits and every low-budget syndicated action show on television, the movie opens with scientist Lawrence awaking one day to find that, due to an experiment gone rather substantially awry, he is the last person left on Earth. By far the film’s greatest charms lie in the subsequent scenes, where Lawrence tries to balance his attempt to find out what happened (and if there is any way of correcting it) with his somewhat bemused attitude towards being the last living human being on the planet. This bemusement, unsurprisingly, slowly degenerates into neurosis and from there into near-madness as Lawrence transforms from the sort of quirkiness one expects from a guy who lives alone and doesn’t get out much into outright loneliness-inspired lunacy. (It is in these scenes that Lawrence has a brief but highly amusing conversation with Adolf Hitler.) When he finally discovers that there is at least one other living person on the planet — in a scene that can only be described as the post-apocalyptic genre’s biggest meet-cute — the movie shifts gears into a more conventional science fiction contrivance, but it’s kept alive by swell performances from Lawrence and the Maori actor Peter Smith, as well as some highly inventive and rapid-fire camerawork from director Murphy. The Quiet Earth is an interesting take on the whole genre, and it nicely blends its psychological approach with the typical what-would-you-do-if-you-were-the-last-man-on-earth gameplaying seen in such movies.

THE BED SITTING ROOM (1969)

The end of the world as brought to you by giggly British weirdos. Directed by Richard Lester, it depicts what's left of England after World War III, which, we're told, lasted "three minutes and forty-seven seconds... including the peace treaty." The cast includes Ralph Richardson in the title role (after he mutates), Michael Hordern, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Spike Milligan, Marty Feldman, and Rita Tushingham, who trumps Shelley Plimpton by giving birth (to Christ knows what) after she's been pregnant for thirteen months. This is one of the most truly horrifying visions of the end of the world ever caught on film, because it's supposed to be a comedy but there isn't a laugh in it. It is the anti-Dr. Strangelove, demonstrating the desperate inability of talented people to make you laugh at its subject matter, and so making the subject matter seem terrifying to a degree that sober-faced when-they-drop-the-bomb movies such as On the Beach can only dream about.

THE BIRDS (1963)

This Hitchcock film has been the subject of considerable textual analysis and speculation as to its symbolic meaning, but I like to think that Sir Alfred made it just so that he boast that they'd let him. Imagine what the pitch must have sounded like: "So, Alfred, it's called The Birds, huh? What's it about?" "Check the title, Einstein. It's about the birds." "Birds, huh. The birds, though? Is it about any particular birds?" "Nope, it's about the birds. Pigeons, parakeets, ostriches, penguins, crows, buzzards, ducks, tufted titmice... " "I see. And what do the birds do exactly?" "Turn on us. Wage war on us. Peck our eyes out." "But... why do the birds do this?" "How the hell am I supposed to know? You think I speak toucan?" "Okay, fair point. How do we stop the birds in the end?" "We don't. They kick our ass. Make Rod Taylor their bitch." "Un-huh... so... um... " "Hang on, I'm sorry, I have to take this. Mildred, did you get ahold of the gentleman with the bulldozer yet? I really need to get those bags containing the money I made off Psycho out of the driveway, they're blocking the jet... " Hitchcock himself fought with the studio to prevent them from actually tacking the words "The End" onto the final shot of our feathered friends gathering to welcome the new day, sensing that it would count as overkill.

TIME OF THE WOLF (2003)

When Michael Haneke, the European director known as the master of everyday horror for his uncanny ability to wrench suspense out of the slightest disruptions to bourgeois culture, decided to make a post-apocalyptic film, it was dead certain that it wouldn’t be a typical mosh pit of explosions, zombies, and atonal stings on the soundtrack. And, indeed, Haneke succeeded in making one of the quietest, most subtle visions of the end of the world imaginable — but also one of the most disturbing, and probably the most depressing. Haneke gives us almost no clue as to what happened to bring about the end of civilization; all we know is that the authorities are gone, the power is out, the water is tainted and no help seems to be coming from anywhere. As with all of his films, we aren’t overwhelmed with gore or beaten over the head with abject terror: instead, we’re presented with the even more profound horror of constant uncertainty and abject helplessness. When Isabelle Huppert’s family arrives at their rural cabin in hopes of waiting out the nebulous catastrophe that’s taken place, they experience the one moment of hope in the entire film; Haneke, of course, strips them of it swiftly and heartlessly, and before you know it, Huppert and her children are utterly alone, with no more possessions than they can carry and no one to protect them against a world that has grown almost instantly feral. Soon enough, they are huddled in an abandoned train station where xenophobia and sexual assault are almost tangible stinks in the air and where they are completely at the mercy of the few people bothering to pass themselves off as authority figures. Through it all, very little in the way of violence or disruption actually takes place: what chills the soul is the omnipresent fear, the certain knowledge that just as it did in a fatal and inexplicable moment at their cabin, everything can go horribly wrong at any moment and there is no safe place, no safe time. A remarkably skillful, effectively understated, and powerfully upsetting drama that conjures an apocalypse that is terrifying because it is so small and petty.

WATERWORLD (1995) & THE POSTMAN (1997)

It is the mark of a true artist that he is never satisfied with his work. Take Kevin Costner, for example. Unhappy as a mere sex symbol, he transformed himself into an Oscar-winning director, but that, too, was not enough for this nobly ambitious man. He took the only logical next step: spending close to a third of a billion dollars making two ridiculous, overblown, awful post-apocalyptic epics that would almost single-handedly destroy his career. Now that’s dedication! First came the notorious Waterworld, an early global warming scare flick that became much more famous for its colossal cost overruns (and its feeble box office) than it did for its clunky story. In it, Costner plays Mariner, a gill-festooned mutant piss-drinker who comes into contact with a bunch of unmotivated pirates called the Smokers. The leader of the Smokers is portrayed by Dennis Hopper, in full-blown Hindenburg mode as always; pitted against the supremely wooden Costner, he is as overwrought and bombastic as the Mariner is stone-faced and boring. Between the two of them, you might just be able to build one decent performance, which would be one more than is featured in Waterworld. The movie, which cost $200 million and made back about thirty bucks, was such a disaster that Costner, never a man to rest on his laurels, decided that the best way to follow it up would be to basically make the same exact movie, except this time he would direct and star in it. Of course, The Postman cost a mere $80 million, not even enough for half a Waterworld, but it made up for it by being even worse. At least the former had decent sets and costumes, whereas The Postman was a jerry-rigged piece of junk that still cost a king’s ransom and yet ended up looking bad, sounding bad, and probably even smelling bad. In this post-apocalyptic world, civilization has collapsed and America has been taken over by the Promise Keepers. Costner, a bad movie actor who here portrays a bad Shakespearian actor, poses as a postal carrier from the reformed U.S. government in order to cadge free meals off of local yokels, but soon enough, he is dispensing real hope to the legions of downtrodden mopes who have to appear in this cruddy movie. The movie only once loses its putrid reek of vanity project, and that’s at the end, a jaw-dropping exercise in the inability to suspend disbelief: the Promise Keepers, despite their inhuman levels of military discipline, have a rule that anyone can be the boss if they defeat the current leader (played by a nose-holding Will Patton) in a punch-out. Naturally, the mighty Costner prevails, and then turns to the vast army of murderous brutes who have been marauding the countryside for a decade and says "There’s gonna be peace!" They all shrug noncommittally and wander off to become chartered accountants or something, and we’re treated to another replay of the scene where Kev makes a little girl cry by wrapping himself up in the American flag. In the annals of postal lore, this thing rates slightly below Patrick Henry Sherrill’s bloodthirsty Oklahoma rampage as a point of pride.

— Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

Click here for Part 1.