The Screengrab : every which way but loose

21 Stars We Hate (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Three weeks ago, we paid tribute to Paul Newman, a fantastically decent and charitable movie star possessed of great taste, artistic integrity and that elusive hat-trick of looks, talent and charisma that elevated him to the status of beloved international icon and left the world a sadder place when he left it.

Newman’s passing (and, to some extent, his dressing) got us thinking about other Leading Men and Leading Ladies we loved, or at least admired, or who at the very least satisfied most of the basic requirements of stardom: unforgettable performances in memorable films, a uniquely fascinating persona and maybe even some crazy knee-wobbling sex appeal for good measure.

But in the midst of all our recent celebrity praising, we couldn’t help noticing the preponderance of past and present “stars” who could more accurately be described as black holes: a whole lotta nothing endowed with tremendous powers of suck...false matinee idols who never really earned their overpraised, overpaid stations in the pop culture firmament, or genuine icons who long ago squandered whatever legitimacy they once had, and now just bug the shit out of us.

Given the fleeting, fickle nature of fame and the contrarian curmudgeonliness of your friends here at the Screengrab, you may notice a few of the names we praised less than a fortnight hence are back this week as figures of scorn and ridicule...

...but hey, that’s show biz, kid, so let’s get ready to RUUUUUUMMBLE!!!!!!

SHIA LABEOUF

Like Sarah Palin (but far less scary and secessionist), “The Boof” was plucked from relative obscurity and forced down America’s collective throat despite a staggering lack of qualifications for a job that any number of people could do better. Unlike Palin, whose ascendancy was engineered for cynical political advantage, I have no idea why Hollywood in general (and Steven Spielberg in particular) picked LaBeouf as their Gen-Y A-List representative...but for now I guess we’re stuck with him (and since I already posted a longer rant on the subject back in April, I’ll leave it at that...at least until Stockholm decides he’s ready for his Nobel Peace Prize for, y’know, bein’all peaceful an’ shit).

ROBIN WILLIAMS

I'll grant you that this one is like shooting fish in a barrel – but if you're going to set a barrel of fish in front of me and hand me a gun, what am I supposed to do? Anyway, it's not as if I'm a lifelong Williams hater. I was there when he debuted as Mork from Ork on a 1978 episode of Happy Days; I even remember taping the show (on audio cassette – this was pre-VCR) and listening to it over and over. (This was perhaps the 374th dorkiest thing I did in 1978. Number 212 was dressing up as Mork for Halloween, although my mother did a fabulous job with the costume.) I had his comedy album, Reality, What a Concept, some of which I even understood. He was a fine Popeye, and although it's been many years since I've seen either The Survivors or Moscow on the Hudson, I remember liking them at the time. So when did it all go awry? Some would point to Dead Poets Society, and certainly the seeds of sentiment and sanctimony were planted there, but I would argue in favor of Awakenings, in which those seeds sprouted into the Sensitive Man Beard. Into the early '90s, Williams could still garner critical acclaim by hacking through the same eight voices he always uses in Aladdin, but after a sickly stretch including Jumanji, Jack, Father's Day, Patch Adams and Bicentennial Man, defenders were harder to come by. (Somewhere in there he won an Oscar by breaking out the SMB again for Good Will Hunting, but I'd like to think a re-vote today would send it to Burt Reynolds for Boogie Nights instead.) After a brief but failed flirtation with a "dark phase" (including One Hour Photo and Insomnia), Williams has returned to serving up his patented cocktail of shtick and schmaltz. By 2007's License to Wed, even he seemed to be tired of his own act.

EWAN McGREGOR

McGregor first attracted attention for his work in the films of director Danny Boyle, with whom he was supposed to have some Scottish, post-MTV Scorsese-and-De Niro thing going on. In Boyle's debut feature, Shallow Grave, McGregor had the most prominent and sympathetic of the three main roles, alongside Kerry Fox, who made him her bitch, and Christopher Eccleston, who out-acted him into the next county. They followed that up with the much bigger hit Trainspotting, where Robert Carlyle swabbed the screen with him. The Boyle-McGregor partnership finally came to an acrimonious end when Boyle cast Leonardo DiCaprio as the lead in The Beach, thus sparing McGregor the chance to have his clock cleaned by Tilda Swinton. (They also worked together on A Life Less Ordinary, another movie full of actors who might have easily stolen it from Ewan, except who would have wanted it?) On his own, McGregor has provided evidence of an adventurous spirit by agreeing to star in several of the most unpleasantly misconceived big projects of the last dozen years, including Peter Greenaway's pervy art exhibit The Pillow Book, Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge, and David Mackenzie's lyrical ode to post-coital depression, Young Adam. McGregor also acted and sang in Todd Haynes' glitter rock movie Velvet Goldmine, where his famous and often-exposed physique, while certainly hunky enough as the physiques of pampered, hard-drinking young Scottish actors go, looked a little marshmallowy for someone who was meant to be Iggy Pop; however, we like the suggestion brunted by some admiring reviewers that this made it easier to accept that he was really meant to be Iggy and Lou Reed. His most high-profile role since Trainspotting was, of course, that of the young Ob-wan Kenobi in George Lucas' Star Wars prequels. Better actors than Ewan had trouble making their presence felt in those pictures, so it would be wrong to be too hard on him for that chapter of his career, though it does seem amazing that anyone could picture this guy someday turning into Alec Guinness. One hates to be too hard on McGregor for anything, really: unlike some names on this list, not to mention a whole lot of more talented people, he seems like a nice guy, and he's generally not painful to watch. It's just that, seeing him acting in a movie, you often find yourself staring at him and wondering where the rest of the donut went.

CLINT EASTWOOD

Sergio Leone, the director who made Eastwood a star with the Italian Western A Fistful of Dollars, once told an interviewer that, "When Michelangelo was asked what he had seen in the one particular block of marble which he chose among hundreds of others, he replied that he saw Moses," adding that he cast Clint after experiencing the same epiphany, except in reverse: watching Eastwood in action, "What I saw, simply, was a block of marble." The canny Leone would make some terrific pictures with that block of marble, and once the marble was established as the biggest international movie star in the world, he would go on to make a lot of other, shittier movies with a lot of lesser directors, a roll call that includes himself. During his peak years as a movie star, Eastwood established himself as the king of his thing: monolithic, inexpressive, yet implicitly self-righteous in his need to dish out retributive (and pre-emptive) violence to anyone who had it coming to him, which in most of those movies is anyone who's on-screen who he isn't fucking or who isn't played by an orangutan. Back in those days, the conventional wisdom on Eastwood was that it might be fun to watch him pistol whip people on screen, but that you wouldn't want to admit to being a fan if you were applying for a government job. But whatever you think of his earlier action hits, for the last couple of decades we've been sharing the planet with Clint the Auteur, the increasingly hard-to-listen-to, sinewy old guy with the glare of an Old Testament prophet and the voice of a rattlesnake's death rasp who keeps sliding behind the camera to direct a long string of ever more obvious movies with creaking joints that are invariably hailed as masterpieces by people who must need to get their eyeballs oiled. It's easy to think of other cases where it took the critics a while to catch up with an American original, but sometimes they do get it right the first time. John Huston -- who Clint impersonated in White Hunter, Black Heart, something he had as much business attempting as Huston himself would have had playing Shirley Temple -- said in Chinatown that politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all become respectable if they last long enough, and there's a little of all three in Eastwood.

NICOLE KIDMAN

Between Dead Calm, the 1989 Australian thriller that was her first film released in the U.S., and her Hollywood debut the next year in Days of Thunder, Kidman's onscreen image seemed to lose ten years and at least that many brain cells. Her '90s screen partnership with her then-husband Tom Cruise, which also resulted in Far and Away and Eyes Wide Shut, was like some post-modern parody of the public marriage and tie-in movie career of Liz Taylor and Richard Burton, itself no great moment in the history of human dignity. By the time it was over, any personality or expressive qualities that Kidman ever had were smothered in "glamour." If she's really a star, then she's a star of a very strange kind, with an odd, limited sort of appeal: she's had her greatest successes playing characters who the audience is meant to want to strangle (as in To Die For and Malice) or in movies where somebody already beat us to it: her best performance, by miles, was in the ghost story The Others, where she was completely convincing as a woman so tightly buttoned up and horribly repressed that she didn't even know she was dead. Since the divorce from Tom Cruise, in which she seemed to win official custody of the media and the industry's solicitous respect, she's picked her roles like a politician with a desire to cover as much ground as possible without offending anyone, and they've been a testament to the awfulness of her taste: jumping at the chance to miscast herself in Oscar-bait literary adaptations like The Hours, The Human Stain, and Cold Mountain while courting the groundlings in terribly misconceived remakes of The Stepford Wives, Invasion (as in "of the Body Snatchers"), and the TV series Bewitched. Having some arch, boring glamourpuss making movies for them seems to give studio heads a kick, at least for a while: in 2006, Kidman was the most highly paid actress in movies, even though a look at the returns on her films made it seem that she couldn't draw crows to a cornfield at sundown.

Click Here For Part Two, Part Three & Part Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

DVD Digest for September 2, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week’s DVD Digest is highlighted by a bumper crop of new TV-on-DVD releases in conjunction with the upcoming fall season. In addition, a large number of Blu-Ray only releases and a crush of new indie films on DVD helps to smooth over the lack of a first-rate “DVD of the Week”-worthy release.

This week’s high-profile new releases on DVD include Ira Sachs’ acclaimed fifties-set drama Married Life (Sony, also Blu-Ray), the Norwegian import Reprise (Buena Vista) (click here for Bryan Whitefield’s interview with the filmmaker), and the animated direct-to-DVD Marvel feature Next Avengers: Heroes of Tomorrow (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray). Also, in a strange coincidence, this week also brings the release of four films I caught at Columbus’ Out@Wex series of GLBT films this past spring: Jacques Nolot’s Before I Forget (Strand), the coming-of-age drama Water Lilies (Koch), the gender politics comedy Itty Bitty Titty Committee (Wolfe Video), and Lagerfeld Confidential (Koch), a documentary about the fashion designer.

This week’s slate of classics coming to DVD is highlighted by three new Fox Noir releases: Elia Kazan’s Boomerang, Jean Gabin in Moontide, and Road House (no, not that one), which includes a commentary track from Screengrab favorite Kim Morgan. Somewhat less notable is MGM’s 20th Anniversary Edition of the unholy union of Michael J. Fox and Jay McInerney, Bright Lights, Big City.

In the TV-on-DVD department, this week brings Desperate Housewives Season 4 (Disney), Eli Stone Season 1 (Disney), Ghost Whisperer Season 3 (Paramount), It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia Season 3 (Fox), Life Season 1 (Universal) starring the ever-underrated Damian Lewis, Supernatural Season 2 (Warner), and The Office Season 4 (Universal).

Finally, this week’s action-heavy Blu-Ray only releases include: Jet Li in Black Mask (Lionsgate), Arnold Schwarzenegger in Eraser (Warner), the Clint Eastwood double feature Every Which Way But Loose (Warner) and The Gauntlet (Warner), Marvel’s animated The Invincible Iron Man (Lionsgate), the killer-virus thriller Outbreak (Warner), Michael Bay’s Transformers (Paramount), and Steven Seagal ridin’ the rails in Under Siege 2: Dark Territory (Warner).

Yesterday's Hits: Every Which Way But Loose (1978, James Fargo)

Paul Clark — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 19:00:00 GMT

It’s hard to remember now, but there was a time when Clint Eastwood wasn’t the critics’ favorite and Oscar juggernaut he is today. Back in the seventies, his films were labeled as lowbrow and pandering by most critics. This didn’t stop him from being one of the decade’s most reliable stars, and his thrillers and Westerns were solid hits. Still, there comes a time in almost every star’s career when he decides to broaden his appeal, to step outside his usual comfort zone into the sort of movie few people expect from him. For comedians, this is often a serious role designed to show off their dramatic chops. For larger-than-life stars, it’s something more down-to-earth, a more family-friendly vehicle to bring them down to Earth. And for Eastwood, it was playing opposite an orangutan named Clyde in Every Which Way But Loose.

What made Every Which Way But Loose a hit?: Every Which Way But Loose was originally written for Burt Reynolds, but while with Burt in the lead it might have just been another of his good-natured goofs, for Eastwood it was genuine change of pace. One of the tests of a beloved star is whether he can make his usual audiences follow him when he tries something new. And follow Eastwood they did with Every Which Way But Loose, which became one of the biggest hits of his career. The fight scenes were rough-and-tumble enough to satisfy Eastwood’s fan base, but Clyde’s presence in the film helped to soften his character in other ways. Trucker Philo Beddoe is more sensitive than the enigmatic loners he usually played- friendly, uncertain, tentative around women. As Philo says, “I'm not afraid of any man, but when it comes to sharing my feelings with a woman, my stomach turns to jelly.” This no doubt had some appeal for audience members- especially women- who couldn’t relate to his more stoic characters like Harry Callahan.

But let’s not underestimate Clyde’s appeal. Even for those of us who like to think we’re above lowbrow animal humor, there’s something about primates that strikes a universal note in audiences. Perhaps it’s the way they can ape (sorry) traditional human behavior, but in an outsized, cartoonish way. Regardless, Every Which Way But Loose gets a lot of mileage from Clyde acting like a person- drinking beer, giving people the finger, driving, doing his little victory dance when Philo wins a fight. The Clint’n’Clyde combination provided so irresistible to audiences that the film spawned sequel, Any Which Way You Can (also a hit), and a rash of imitations, most obviously the televised trucker-and-primate series BJ and the Bear.

What happened?: Unpretentious entertainments like Every Which Way But Loose aren’t really designed for the long haul. Its ambitions are modest- to make people laugh, to showcase some popular country songs, to have a fist fight every ten minutes or so, and to let people forget their troubles for two hours. Worthy goals all, but not the sort of traits that help a movie to stand the test of time, or which cry out for critical re-evaluation. Today, Every Which Way But Loose feels like it was practically made to be watched late at night on basic cable. It’s the kind of movie that people remember fondly but don’t feel the need to seek out again.

Does Every Which Way But Loose still work?: Better than expected, but still not quite. Most people only remember the fight scenes and the byplay between Eastwood and Clyde, but the film contains quite a bit of filler to bring it up to a 114 minute running time, and not all of it’s good. Naturally, Philo’s frequent fist fights cause him to run afoul of a number of people, and when he, his friend Orville (Geoffrey Lewis), and Clyde take to the road, they’ve got both a biker gang and a pair of bumbling cops on their tail. It’s hard to say which of the two bands of pursuers are less funny. The cops are pretty superfluous to the plot, and the film could have cut them out entirely without incurring any structural damage. By contrast, we spend more time with the bikers, but it’s not time well-spent. Aside from the moment when Ruth Gordon (playing Orville’s salty-mouthed Ma) hauls out a shotgun and starts blowing up their bikes, the bikers’ scenes mostly feel pointless. In both cases, the scenes distract from the stuff we came for.

Yet other elements of Every Which Way But Loose hold up surprisingly well. Most films would portray Philo’s courting, and subsequent pursuing, of country singer Lynn Halsey-Taylor (played by Eastwood’s then-girlfriend Sondra Locke) as a traditional romance. Yet from the beginning there’s something off about her character. Lynn- who surprisingly isn’t the heiress to the drinking fountain empire- stares too intently and tries too hard to make Philo fall in love with her, and Philo, true to form, falls for it. Watching the film, I thought this might be a fault of the performance, but considering the truth we find out about the character, it ends up making a lot of sense. I was genuinely surprised by the direction the film went with this storyline- not so much because it comes out of nowhere, but because I thought it was too good-natured to go there.

I also liked the ambiguous note the film takes in its climactic fight scene, in which Philo ends up taking a dive against aging legend Tank Murdock (Walter Barnes). It’s rare for a character in this kind of film to not get what he sets out for, but that’s part of the movie’s charm. At the end of the day, Every Which Way But Loose isn’t an especially good movie- it’s too unfocused for that, with too much lame filler that could have easily gotten cut without being missed. But it’s likable enough that I can almost forgive it its missteps. And I think it goes without saying that Clyde is still awesome.