The Screengrab : gene hackman

Precursors: The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)

Nick Schager — Mon, 11 May 2009 20:30:00 GMT

Rian Johnson’s The Brothers Bloom arrives in select theaters this weekend before opening wide later in the month, and it so egregiously apes Wes Anderson's trademark aesthetic that one would be better off simply revisiting the film in which the director’s style fully crystallized, The Royal Tenenbaums. Anderson’s J.D. Salinger-esque saga concerns the efforts of the titular clan’s estranged patriarch, Royal (Gene Hackman), to reconcile with his wife (Anjelica Huston) and three child-prodigy-turned-adult-misfit children (Ben Stiller, Gwyneth Paltrow, Luke Wilson) by telling them he’s terminally ill. He’s not, but his ruse gets him back in the door, thus instigating a reunion that's both funny and poignant, thanks in part to a cast (which also includes Danny Glover, co-writer Owen Wilson, and Bill Murray) whose performances are uniformly droll and sorrowful, but primarily due to Anderson’s expert stewardship. Through his beautifully symmetrical compositions, use of slow-motion and pop songs, and intricately detailed set design, Anderson creates a winningly idiosyncratic, hermetically sealed world in which to situate his audience. Just as impressive, however, is his ability to make his aggressively quirky characters not only agents of humor but also pathos, the film – unlike Anderson’s more uneven subsequent efforts – offering up a near-ideal balance of silliness and sentimentality.

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

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

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

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

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

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

April Fools: The 35 Funniest Movie Characters Of All Time (Part Eight)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 23:30:00 GMT

CLORIS LEACHMAN AS FRAU BLÜCHER & GENE HACKMAN AS THE BLIND MAN IN YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN (1974)

April Fool! Uh...by which I mean I apparently miscounted, and there are actually 38 great comedic performances on this list instead of 35 -- (it's been that kind of week) -- but I couldn’t bring myself to skip two of the funniest characters in the history of cinema (especially now that we know the actors who portrayed them were bonin’). Indeed, the topical bonin’ reference is pretty much the main reason I decided to single just Leach and Hack out from Young Frankenstein's perfect storm ensemble (including Gene Wilder, Marty Feldman, Teri Garr, Madeline Kahn and Peter Boyle). But as great as all the rest of the cast may be, I have to admit, Gene Hackman’s cameo in Brooks' horror parody is one of those magical movie moments that literally makes me laugh every single goddamn time I see it...and while some may be suffering from Leachman fatigue after the performer’s stint on Dancing With The Stars, I’ll always love the lady for going on TV and shaking her badonkadonk a year after being told she was “too old” to reprise her role as Frau Blücher (insert horse whinny) in the Broadway adaptation of Brooks' film. Or, as Lisa Timmons posted at Socialite Life: “...by God, if she wants to die by acting her ass off on...Broadway, then get the heck out of her way, I say. It's like refusing to let a cowboy die with his boots on. Blasphemy.” To which I say: amen, sister. (AO)

GEORGE C. SCOTT AS GENERAL BUCK TURGIDSON IN DR. STRANGELOVE, OR, HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1964)

Not to take anything away from Peter Sellers – who played three roles in Stanley Kubrick’s pitch-black nuclear holocaust comedy and played them to perfection – but the best comic performance in the movie came from George C. Scott, an actor not normally known for his comedic roles. And, in fact, Kubrick had to trick him into the performance: Scott was encouraged to play way over the top in what he thought were piss-takes, but which Kubrick ended up using in the film. Scott was furious and reportedly vowed not to work with the director again, but it’s that supremely hysterical overacting that sells the role. Writer Terry Southern specialized in creating authority figures whose behavior was entirely inappropriate to their station, and no one fits that role better than Turgidson: allegedly patterned on gung-ho anti-communist General Curtis LeMay, Buck seems completely incapable of treating the imminent nuclear exchange seriously. He fields calls from his mistress, starts fistfights with the Soviet ambassador, and displays a childishly enthusiastic pride at the possibility that one of his damaged planes will bust through Russian radar and trigger a doomsday bomb. Scott’s wild enthusiasm actually leads him to topple ass over teakettle in one scene, a happy accident that perfectly fits his character’s role as an egomaniacal child who has been placed in charge of unthinkable power. (LP)

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce

Screengrab Salutes The Best & Worst Comic Book Movies Of All Time! (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 21:00:00 GMT

It’s Watchmen Week here at The Screengrab as the greater Geek-iverse (and the studio executives who love it) await the opening of Zack Snyder’s much-anticipated, much low-expectations-generating adaptation of Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons’ beloved, game-changing graphic novel about a bunch of asshole “super” “heroes” fighting crime, mental illness and erectile dysfunction in a scary alternate reality where Richard Nixon never went away. (And by the way, does everyone out there already know Silk Spectre II: Electric Boogaloo is portrayed by the same actress who played Valerie Cherish’s little blonde protégé on The Comeback? I just found that out, like, yesterday and was momentarily confused because I thought all the Watchmen were supposed to be kinda middle-aged -- but then I checked the Internet Movie Database and, much to my surprise, Malin Akerman’s actually 31, which is somewhat middle-aged, I suppose)...

Anyway, our own Scott Von Doviak and Paul Clark have already weighed in with their reviews of Hollywood’s latest attempt to wring a little KA-CHING! out of the POW! ZAP! BAM! of the funny book aisle, a strategy that’s been serving the Suits pretty well in recent years. I could pontificate here on the way America’s fascination with caped crusaders panders to infantile, imperialist empowerment fantasies, crowding more intelligent, adult material from the multiplex...but not only would that be annoying, it would also be hypocritical, since (A) I like a good funny book movie as much the next geek, (B) another movie about masked superheroes battling supervillains is a helluva lot better than another movie about masked sadists chopping up teenagers and (C) I keep hoping they’ll someday finally make that Wonder Woman movie I’ve been waiting for since I was 12. Mmm...magic lasso...

In the meantime, though, please enjoy the following list from Nerve.com’s very own Legion of Doom as we salute truth, justice, the American way and THE BEST AND WORST COMIC BOOK MOVIES OF ALL TIME!

The Best:

IRON MAN (2008)

True, it’s only been a few weeks since I wrote about Jon Favreau’s rock ‘em sock ‘em revival of the venerable Marvel Comics rust magnet for my Best of 2008 list...but (unlike certain awards-distributing Academies I could mention), I wanted to make sure this excellent film was recognized among the best of the best!

V FOR VENDETTA (2006)

Don't tell Alan Moore, who has never seen it but took the trouble to bad-mouth it anyway, but this adaptation of his Thatcher-era anarchists' fable, directed by Wachowski brothers proxy James McTeigue, does better than pretty good by its source material. The most important changes the filmmakers made from the original text, notably the transformation of Eve's (Natalie Portman) blokey boyfriend into a sardonic gay TV host played by Stephen Fry, actually work well: Fry's performance gives the film some heart, and film is clearly better suited than the printed page when it comes to paying gratuitous tribute to Benny Hill. The movie even inspired David Denby to apoplexy by seeming to present a terrorist as a political hero. Annoying David Denby is always a public service.

HULK (2003)

Remember how last year’s Edward Norton re-boot of The Incredible Hulk was going to prove that the relatively disappointing box office take of the 2003 Hulk was all Ang Lee’s fault? That audiences would embrace a louder, faster, dumber Hulk movie in a way they never did Lee’s artsy-fartsy one? How’s that working out for ya? The 2008 edition racked up almost exactly the same box office total as the 2003, so maybe it’s just that nobody likes poor ol’ Hulk. Or maybe the 2003 version wasn’t so bad after all, which is what I’ve been saying all along. Yes, it has its flaws; Eric Bana doesn’t exactly light up the screen, the CGI star isn’t quite up to snuff in some scenes, and things do take a little longer to get percolating than was perhaps necessary. But Lee brings a lyrical, haunting tone to the picture that may seem at odds with the whole “HULK SMASH!” ethos, but actually taps into a vein of melancholy the character has always possessed. The innovative editing scheme, with its cascade of digital wipes and split screens, is a far more clever and entertaining cinematic analog to reading a comic than anything Zack Snyder does in Watchmen, and the CGI effects do mesmerize at times. Hell, I could have watched this Hulk bouncing his way across the desert for hours.

X-MEN 2 (2003)

Ushering in the modern age of Marvel superhero films, Bryan Singer’s X-Men helped prove that the sight of men in tights – or, in this case, men and women in leather body suits – didn’t have to doom a comic adaptation to cartoonishness. It was Singer’s 2003 sequel, however, that truly elevated the genre by cannily marrying romantic drama, vigorous action and social-intolerance subtexts (here reconfigured from the source material to address sexuality more than race). Aside from Halle Berry’s still-awful wig and Alan Cumming’s grating Nightcrawler, X2 is sharper, smarter and more exhilarating than its predecessor, remaining true to the spirit of its heroes, villains and Dark Phoenix-ish storyline, buoyed by Brian Cox’s superbly villainous William Stryker, and smartly placing as high a premium on character as on spectacle. Which isn’t, however, to say that the spectacle itself isn’t reason enough to check out Singer’s sequel, since an early Stryker-led attack on Professor Xavier’s school, as well as Wolverine’s climactic throwdown with Lady Deathstrike, more than ably deliver the super-skirmish goods.

BATMAN (1989)

A genuine pop culture behemoth in the summer of '89, Tim Burton's blockbuster comic book movie probably did more than any other to make comics adaptations an accepted Hollywood genre, if only for proving that the success of the first couple of Superman movies hadn't been a fluke. This is not one of those accomplishments that nobody can see a downside to, and despite its hellacious popularity, the movie has always had enough attackers to count as controversial, including those who think it's a clumsy piece of storytelling to comics geeks (including Kevin Smith) who think it blasphemed its source material in any number of ways. But Burton's graphic sense and gothic sense of humor always made it a striking, strikingly funny piece of work, and facts are facts: no actor has ever been more compelling or convincingly haunted in a superhero role than Michael Keaton. The passage of twenty years and umpteen sequels and reboots (including Burton and Keaton's deeply flawed but often lovely Batman Returns) has thrown its defects and pluses into sharp relief: it's hard to remember that, in 1989, when Christopher Nolan was all of nineteen years old, many critics were appalled because they thought this picture was too dark.

SUPERMAN II (1980)

The 1978 Christopher Reeve Superman was an outlier, and probably the earliest example of filmmakers at least trying to make a genuinely good superhero movie. But it wasn’t entirely successful, and one sticking point for a lot of fans was the performance as Lex Luthor by Gene Hackman. The role has as many passionate defenders as detractors, but many thought that it was overly campy and unserious, and a superhero movie is generally only as good as its villain. The 1980 sequel would change all that. Introducing three Kryptonian supervillains escaped from the Phantom Zone – the hulking Non, the ice-cold Ursa, and best of all, the fantastic Terence Stamp as the megalomaniacal General Zod – Superman II gave us villains for the ages, and culminated in one of the most exciting fight scenes we’d seen to date. But it still wasn’t a great movie, and longstanding rumor placed the blame on the firing, when production was nearly complete, of Superman director Richard Donner and his replacement with Richard Lester. Lester, while a talented director, didn’t much care about the job and had little affection for the material, and the results are right there on screen. A few years ago, however, the Richard Donner cut was released commercially, and it finally became clear how good Superman II could have been if its original director had been allowed to pursue his vision all along.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Scott Von Doviak, Nick Schager, Leonard Pierce

Up The Academy: Screengrab Salutes The All-Time Best & Worst Best Picture Winners (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 22:00:00 GMT

THE BEST:

UNFORGIVEN (1992)

To my way of thinking, the best Best Pictures are both flawless examples of their genre and also communicate something about the era that produced them. Clint Eastwood’s revisionist Western scores on both counts. Not only does the film offer blue ribbon acting from a Master Class ensemble featuring Gene Hackman, Morgan Freeman, Frances Fisher, Jaimz Woolvett, Richard Harris and the Man With No Name himself, but Unforgiven also draws on the audience’s familiarity with Eastwood’s (and America’s) history of violence to reevaluate those legacies after twelve years of the Republican Party’s '80s go-round with faux-cowboy heroics. The beautifully constructed screenplay by David Webb Peoples is a sharp rebuke to the black-and-white moral simplicity of the Reagan/Bush years (not to mention a fair handful of Eastwood’s earlier films): drunken cowboys in the town of Big Whiskey maim one of the local whores, the whores seek retribution by hiring gunmen to kill the cowboys, and the town’s sadistic sheriff beats and kills the gunmen who show up. In the end, a lot of people are dead, nobody’s better off and justice has not been served. Sadly, the film’s grim portrayal of the futility of violence is just as timely now as it was at the dawn of our last “hope and change” administration.

AMADEUS (1984)

For starters, Amadeus is probably the best of the four other films nominated in 1984 (A Passage To India, The Killing Fields, Places In The Heart and A Soldier's Story), so it passes that basic test. Oddly enough, Amadeus is also one of the few movies that won Best Picture that I'd consider one of the ten best of its year — or at least close — and for a year that included Stranger Than Paradise, Once Upon A Time In America and The Terminator (just for starters), that's not bad at all. Amadeus probably won because it hit a number of reflexive buttons: it's a period costume drama where all the production and costume money is on-screen, it genuflects before Culture in the form of classical music without losing anyone with something truly alienating, it's based on a hit play, and it comes from a respectable, previously-lauded producer-director team. But the reasons Amadeus is actually pretty great have nothing to do with that and everything to do with the typical dry intelligence Milos Forman brought to the film. Forman treats this like a gigantic Brechtian exercise, paying meticulous attention to physical verisimilitude, then blowing it out with the likes of Jeffrey Jones and Tom Hulce — unmistakably American, out-of-place types. As in his later (not as good, still misunderstood) The People Vs. Larry Flynt and Man On The Moon, Forman scrupulously obeys the biopic formula, hitting all the high points of his subject's lives while refusing to shed any light on what made them tick. Point being: who/what could possibly explain that? It drives Salieri crazy that he can't figure out why God would waste his music on a drunken, disrespectful buffoon, but to Forman, that's just par for the course.

THE FRENCH CONNECTION (1971)

Arguably the first action movie to win Best Picture, The French Connection really announced (along with 1969's Midnight Cowboy triumph) a shift in what was considered acceptable award-winning fare; only a few years before, it was all treacly musicals and your occasional "serious" film. (In 1971, it was up against Nicholas And Alexandra, whose makers badly miscalculated the changing zeitgeist at some point.) But it wasn't a permanent shift: The French Connection — absolutely lean, more reliant on atmosphere and street grit than characterization or take-home morals — is as anomalous-seeming a Best Picture winner now as it was then, which speaks badly of the Academy's heavy suet-pudding tastes. (Cue outraged Dark Knight fans here.)

LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (1962)

David Lean is perhaps the only filmmaker whose natural inclinations and talents coincided perfectly with exactly the kind of material the Academy responds to: big, splashy physical filmmaking, heavy on conspicuous visual coups and visibly virtuoso acting. As it happens, Lawrence is one of my favorite films, and therefore the most important time the Academy got it right. Lawrence actually is the Best Picture of 1962, a beautiful film that (without getting too heavyhanded about it) uses exterior landscapes as a mirror for its otherwise unknowable protagonist. But surely it helped that it's long, launched Peter O'Toole in an instantly starmaking performance, and somehow managed to avoid taking a single meaningful political stance. Lawrence Of Arabia wears its ambitions plainly in every aspect — title, length, subject matter — but it lives up to them, too.

REBECCA (1940)

Hitchcock’s first American film was a contentious one, as the Master of Suspense famously quarreled with mega-producer David O. Selznick over myriad issues regarding his adaptation of Daphne Du Maurier’s novel. Such squabbles may have resulted in a film that feels somewhat more conventional than Hitch’s prior British works, but its preoccupation with emotional and psychological traumas nonetheless ultimately helped pave the way for the director’s future daring psychodramas. In Rebecca, Joan Fontaine takes up residence in the Brontë-esque home of her wealthy husband Laurence Olivier, where the specter of his deceased first wife looms large thanks in part to Judith Anderson’s unsettling manor servant, who remains devoted to her dead employer. Although devoid of significant aesthetic inventiveness, the director still generates a sumptuously creepy, unreal atmosphere that’s equally indebted to Wuthering Heights and Val Lewton’s horror classics. A technically superb thriller, it’s also an enduringly resonant depiction of societal expectations for, and demands on, women.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Vadim Rizov, Nick Schager

Dear Santa: Cinematic Comebacks We’d Most Like To See (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 17:00:00 GMT

NATASHA LYONNE

As a jailbait Jewish American Princess with the voice and delivery of a wised-up, middle-aged dame, Natasha Lyonne was the tough-tender soul of the priceless coming-of-age dramedy Slums of Beverly Hills and the best thing about the first two American Pie movies (well, aside from Alyson Hannigan, I mean). She even managed to bring a surprising amount of relatable dignity to her role as a bulimic escaped convict on the lam (and in love) with a psychopathic gal pal in what otherwise might have been the even campier and trashier Freeway 2: Confessions of a Trick Baby. Actresses frequently complain about the dearth of good roles for women in film, but in her too-brief above-the-radar career, Lyonne’s bright, bemused persona made even underwritten roles compelling, the clear mark of a comeback-worthy talent. Bland contemporaries like Jessica Alba and Kate Hudson are considered A-list, but I’d rather hear Lyonne read the back of an Oxycontin bottle out loud for two hours than watch Good Luck Chuck or Bride Wars. Unfortunately, booze, heroin and other substances have derailed Lyonne’s life and career in recent years, leading to hospitalizations and legal troubles (one involving threats of dog molestation...even Lyonne’s criminal record is fascinating)! But if Robert Downey, Jr. and Mickey Rourke can make it back from self-inflicted career immolation, here’s hoping Lyonne’s recent stint on Broadway (in the play Two Thousand Years) and busy upcoming film slate (including, according to the Internet Movie Database, projects called Goyband, Heterosexuals, Jelly, Outrage and The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle) are good signs that Lyonne has cleaned up her act, quit the dog molestation and will soon return to us in some decent roles (though, to be honest, the fact she’s co-starring with Michael Madsen in Outrage is less than comforting).

KATHLEEN TURNER

Following a scorching debut in the neo-noir Body Heat in 1981, Kathleen Turner – who was already in her late 20s when she made her big-screen debut – did as much as she could to establish herself as more than just a great body, a pretty face, and one of the screen’s sexiest voices. She soon established herself as a versatile and engaging actress, and had a strong career in the 1980s, but Hollywood is notoriously unforgiving of the reality of aging, and she began a slow decline in the 1990s. A combination of personal tragedy, ill health and the general lack of good roles offered to women over forty in Hollywood have caused her to be nearly invisible in the last decade or so, but she’s remained busy on the Broadway stage, and some reports of her savagely controlled performance as Martha in a revival of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? suggest that she may have plenty of surprises left in her. If given the chance – and if she has the inclination – Turner could still have a late-period career like that of one of her idols, Katherine Hepburn. Time will tell.

WILLIAM PETER BLATTY

Okay, this one’s probably a bit much to hope for, considering that the man is eighty years old and not in the best condition in the world. But we’ve always believed that William Peter Blatty – best known as the author of the jillion-selling religious thriller The Exorcist – was a great filmmaker trapped inside a good novelist’s body. When he couldn’t find anyone interested in making a big-screen adaptation of his novel Twinkle, Twinkle, Killer Kane, he decided to do it himself, with no formal training as a filmmaker – and the result was the astounding The Ninth Configuration, a genuine cult classic and one of the most surprising directorial debuts of all time. Likewise, when he became understandably unsatisfied with the direction the Exorcist franchise was taking after the rotten Exorcist 2: The Heretic, he took matters into his own hands again with The Exorcist III. And while that’s a deeply flawed film, it’s at least an imaginative one, with terrific glimpses of mood and tone that suggest the kind of thing its director might be capable of with more money and a better cast and crew. Blatty probably has neither the time nor the desire to make another movie, but as both a writer and a director, he’s shown more than once that he’s got greatness in him, and if he never has a Sidney Lumet moment and directs a great movie at the age of 83, we’ll at least always wonder what might have been.

GENE HACKMAN, SEAN CONNERY & WARREN BEATTY

When considering the later careers of many of cinema's most beloved actors, it's difficult to say which is worse -- taking role after role in a string of unworthy projects just to keep busy, or turning your back on acting altogether. In the case of the three actors listed above, we suppose it's understandable that after decades in the business, they would want to put acting aside and enjoy a nice retirement, and given the work they've done, we certainly don't begrudge them that choice. However, it's their most recent films that make us question their decisions. Hackman, always the busiest of the three, usually appeared in several movies a year prior to his decision to retire from acting after starring in 2004's Welcome to Mooseport -- Lord knows that playing second banana to Ray Romano might sour us on acting too. Connery, on the other hand, was still capable of carrying a movie well into his seventies, a gift which, alas, was usually squandered on subpar projects like Finding Forrester and his most recent film, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. And Beatty, never the most prolific actor to begin with, has been absent from screens since 2001's noxious Town & Country. While Hackman has busied himself writing books and doing voiceover work for Lowe's and Oppenheimer Funds, Connery and Beatty have been content to rest on their laurels and turn down project after project -- Connery declined to reprise his role in the latest Indiana Jones (yet another disappointing aspect of the film), whereas Beatty memorably bowed out of Kill Bill in favor of David Carradine. Still, hope springs eternal. As long as they're still alive and healthy, there will be the possibility that one can't-miss role will come along to lure these guys out of retirement for one final hurrah. After all, they deserve some time for themselves, but they also deserve to take one last triumphant lap before retiring for good.

Click Here For Part One, Two & Three

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Paul Clark

The Screengrab: Your One-Stop Site for All Things William Friedkin

Phil Nugent — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 16:00:00 GMT

William Friedkin is going to explain himself to us if it takes him all night. His latest telegram from his subconscious is an article in the Guardian to which he has signed his name, ostensibly on the subject of the release of The French Connection on Blu-ray. "The myth of the incorruptible lawman persisted until policing scandals started multiplying [in the late 1960s]. The age of innocence was over with the Kennedy and King assassinations and the Vietnam War, so that after Watergate in 1972, people would believe anything about corruption in all walks of life." According to Friedkin, "Those of us who made films in the 70s were not following the zeitgeist: we shaped it. We no longer believed in a man on a white horse. We knew he was flawed because we were flawed." This all has such a nice ring to it that you kind of hate to point out that everything Friedkin writes seems to be canceled out by his next sentence. Either he "shaped" the zeitgeist instead of "following it", which would seem to indicate that he was out ahead of the curve, or The French Connection, with its racist, trigger-happy supercop antihero Popeye Doyle (Gene Hackman), was a reflection of attitudes that people had already formed from reading the newspaper. When discussing what set Connection apart back in the day, one factor that Friedkin doesn't bring up is Costa-Gavras's Z, the 1969 political thriller that won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film and whose slam-bang style, with its percussive editing, was heavily influential on Friedkin's picture. Friedkin was very open about his debt to Costa-Gavras back when he must have thought that it was real artistic for a commercial Hollywood director to know enough about European movies to copy his moves from one. To judge from his deep thoughts here about how all the best cops have a lot of the dark side in them--"Actually, the best cops are the ones who can think like criminals; and there is a thin line between the policeman and the criminal that street cops cross every day. In spite of a series of laws designed to protect the accused, cops can go off the rails in a crisis, and it has to do with adrenaline and the authority the police officer has to exercise power."--Friedkin may have concluded that it would give his reputation a boost if people got the impression that David Milch filched his world view from him.

Nobody asked me, but...while my esteemed colleague Vadim Rizov recently made an intriguing case for the argument that Friedkin has no sense of social obligation, I can't shake the feeling that it's something else that really sets him apart and that helps to explain why, for two years or so, he was the hottest director in Hollywood as well as why, for the 25 years since then, he's been, well, not so much. Looking down his nose at the young hotshots whose movies make more money than his stuff, Friedkin complains that "cop films have become more visceral, less realistic. The levels of violence that were allowed in the 1970s opened the doors to young film-makers who want to push the envelope beyond all limits." Pushing the envelope beyond all limits is, of course, what Friedkin did in both The French Connection and his other blockbuster, The Exorcist. It was shocking at the time, and can still get your pulse rate rising today, but it was silly at the time when some people, trying to find a justification for how exciting the movies seemed, to claim that Friedkin was introducing a new level of "realism" by having his cop so much meaner and the violence more in-your-face than audiences were used to. The Friedkin of The French Connection wasn't the Strindberg of cop operas, he was a hungry, ambitious young hotshot trying desperately to get the attention of an audience that demanded bigger and better shocks at a time when everyday life provided plenty of them. Over the course of two big hits, Friedkin really mastered the exploding-funhouse style that, thanks in no small part to him, set the standard in big commercial thrillers. Then he got a little complacent, and new directors arrived who contrived shinier, louder explostions.

It's not quite true to say that Friedkin is indifferent to how his movies are seen to reflect, or to effect, society. He did make at least one genuine message movie: Rampage, one of the biggest duds of his career, a courtroom drama about a beyond-evil serial killer which he first filmed in 1987 and which only won limited release in 1992, and which Friedkin tinkered with to turn it into a brief for the death penalty. And he did care enough about the charges that Cruising was a homophobic movie that linked homosexuality with psychotic murderousness by holding that unfortunate press conference where he said that he himself had no idea who had committed the murders in the movie or what the killer's motives or sexual orientaton might have been or what the hell the ending was supposed to mean. It's easy to believe him, because The French Connection and The Exorcist are themselves full of plot holes and loose ends and logical stretches out of the Bizarro World, but when Friedkin was truly on his game, the movies just plowed over viewers in a way that kept them good and distracted from that sort of thing. By the time he had finished The Exorcist, Friedkin was a master at the special craft of keeping viewers transfixed by how ugly and repellent everything onscreen was. He got in trouble with Cruising not because he had anything to say for or against gay lifestyles but because he was still working in the same way that had made him a hot ticket, but this time, because of the setting, the movie boiled down, not as "Ewwwwww!! Heroin dealers shot down in cold blood!" or Ewwwwww!! A little girl vomiting on a priest!" but Ewwwww!! Guys dancing together!" It could be that his subsequent films, such as Jade and To Live and Die in L.A., haven't been as successful just because his moment passed: other directors have stolen his thunder, and no matter how brutally he stages his chases and fights, they no longer pass for daringly ugly commentaries on What We've All Come To. And as his attempts to do something different, such as the "comedies" The Brinks Job and Deal of the Century show, it's not as if he knows how to do anything else.

Related Stories: "The French Connection" Influenced Everything

William Friedkins Has No Sense of Social Obligation

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 21:00:00 GMT

20. GENE HACKMAN (1930 - )

Hackman was 33 when he made his movie debut in Robert Rossen's Lilith; he got to play a scene with Warren Beatty, who, admiring his colleague's mastery of his craft and maybe also thinking that his potato-faced plainness provided a splendid contrast on-screen to his own Colgate smile and dashing looks, cast him as his brother in Bonnie and Clyde. By that time, Hackman, voted Least Likely to Succeed by the good folks at the Pasadena Playhouse (a title he shared with his roommate Dustin Hoffman), had begun to build a steady career on the basis of his hard-won dependability as an actor. The impression he made as Buck Barrow lit a fire under his career, one that fanned out four years later when he starred in The French Connection and won the Academy Award for his performance as the obsessive cop Popeye Doyle, a job that he has often cited as something less than his favorite. Hackman's admiring notices in this period are full of tributes to his "anonymity" and lack of sex appeal; it was as if everyone was glad that he was getting treated by the casting office as if he were a star but wanted to get their personal disavowals of responsibility on the record in anticipation of the day when the world realized that a terrible mistake had been made. But Hackman remained a genuine movie star, a testament to the surprising fact that every once in a while, exceptional ability and hard work just seem to pay off. Maybe because he never really had any youthful bloom to lose, his stardom only grew more secure as he got older and grew into authority figure parts, some benevolent (such as the many father figures he played in movies like Twice in a Lifetime and Hoosiers), some malignant (like the sadistic Western sheriff in Unforgiven). Let the record show that he even, by God, developed sex appeal: in that department, he had an especially trumphant year in 1988, when he stirred many hearts playing the FBI agent who seduces Frances McDormand in Mississippi Burning and the smaller but indelible role of The Good Man Who Got Away Because You Told Him to Leave, You Stupid Cow in Woody Allen's Another Woman. He has given many noteworthy performances since then, the standout perhaps being his lovingly cracked variation on the father figure role in Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums. He has not appeared onscreen since 2004's Welcome to Mooseport, perhaps because he's waiting for someone to explain to him what the hell he was doing in Welcome to Mooseport.

19. MICHAEL CAINE (1933 - )

When Caine became a big star in the mid-1960s, be brought back something that had been lost in American films -- the kind of actor's energy born of naked desperation. In the Depression years, people like James Cagney went into acting as an alternative to starvation, but by the '60s, American stars from comfortable middle-class backgrounds entered acting because, as Paul Newman put it, they were escaping a life spent working in the family sporting goods store. But the Cockney Caine was trying to break away from an early life informed by class consciousness and poverty. The fact that he'd been hungry at one point in his life may help to account for his eagerness to keep working, even in poor films, a decision that actually got him teased by that guardian of lofty cultural values, People magazine. It might also account for the fact that he owns so many restaurants. (Regarding Jaws: The Revenge, the movie that caused People so much consternation, Caine has said, "I have never seen the film, but by all accounts it was terrible. However I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific.") As Harry Palmer, the entertainingly grubby spy in eyeglasses in The Ipcress File and the serial seducer in Alfie, Caine magnetized the camera with his working man's anger and ambition, which he was skillful enough to channel into the characters' own drives and delusions. One critic analyzed the secret of Alfie's success with women and concluded that it was that he didn't know his own limitations, but it may have been that Caine himself was too frightened of failure to dare consider that any limitations might not be overcome. One might have expected Caine to lose his edge when he became rich and famous and the chip on his shoulder started to fray, but he just keeping getter better and better as an actor. The official notice that he had become something like acting royalty probably came in 1975, when John Huston asked him to co-star in the film version of The Man Who Would Be King (which Huston had longed to make for decades, in the role once intended for Humphrey Bogart); for the movie-loving Caine, that must have been a little like getting a call from John the Baptist asking if he could do a chore that Jesus just wasn't up to. Other especially notable roles from his sprawling filmography include his gangster antihero in Get Carter (1971) and, fifteen years later, his supporting role as the criminal kingpin Mortwell in Neil Jordan's Mona Lisa, a crook who would have scared the shit out of Frank Booth. He won his first Oscar that same year, for his supporting role in Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters; he won another one for his surpassingly beautiful performance in 1999's The Cider House Rules, after which he played wintry roles in Last Orders and The Quiet American. After making that last one, and campaigning like hell to get it seen when Miramax threatened to dump it, Caine announced that he was, as far as he was concerned, "retired", which for Caine means that he now shows up in only a couple of pictures a year and doesn't take leading roles unless, as was the case with last year's Sleuth, they give him the chance to remake one of his older pictures so that he can play the role that he wasn't old enough to play the first time around. Some day he will die. When that happens, it would probably be a good idea to leave any messages for me with the doorman for a few weeks.

18. TOSHIRO MIFUNE (1920-1997)

Just try to look away when Toshiro Mifune's on screen. It's almost impossible. With his odd charisma and brooding intensity, he completely dominates any scene he's in. You can tell that he's trying to be generous with the other actors, but nature made him a cinematic powerhouse. Credited on IMDB with 181 movies between 1947 and 1995, Mifune is the Western face of Japanese cinema. Movies like Midway, 1941, and the miniseries Shogun brought him to the American masses, but it was his earlier work that made his career. He was the John Wayne to Akira Kurosawa's John Ford, casting as huge a mythic shadow across the face of cinema. Consider: Kurosawa made 32 movies during his life, and Mifune starred in 15 of them. Seven of those are five-star, drop-everything, must-see-immediately movies: Stray Dog, The Seven Samurai, I Live In Fear, Throne of Blood, The Hidden Fortress, Yojimbo, and High and Low. Mifune also made four other movies that rank among the best movies ever made: Samurai 1 - 3 and The Sword of Doom. But enough about his importance to the canon! Let's talk about the man's signature moments, such as the mirthless laughter that rips out of his head like a bird from a cage, driving home just how close to the edge of sanity this character really is. Or the impassive-yet-sad dignity, when Mifune seems to be made of stone while the other actors flow around him like river water. Or, best of all, the way he could turn either of those on a dime into fear, horror, and pain, letting viewers in on an unspoken backstory that needs no further explanation. Even if you speak not a word of Japanese, you always know everything you need to know about Mifune's characters.

17. WILLIAM HOLDEN (1918-1981)

William Holden made a lot of movies, but the movies that made William Holden were few and far between. Don't get me wrong; Holden was a great actor, but his standout roles were so much brighter than his getalong roles that it's hard to believe they could coexist. That's probably true of most leading men, but it seems especially true of Holden. With Billy Wilder, he made Sunset Blvd, Stalag 17, and Sabrina. He made a bunch of war movies other than Stalag 17 (his face always seems to be hinting at the horrors he's seen and is trying to forget, thank you very much), but the best was The Bridge On The River Kwai with David Lean. He made a whole bunch of Westerns, even working with the great John Ford, but the really memorable one was Sam Peckinpah's stunning The Wild Bunch, which might be the best Western ever made. And he also made overrated Oscar bait like Love Is A Many-Splendored Thing and Network, for which the Academy duly rewarded him. I don't know whether Holden was a handsome man, but he was definitely a commanding and intriguing actor, and that's all that counts.

16. CLINT EASTWOOD (1930 - )

I’m not a hippie, a swinger or a Mormon, but I nevertheless live a polygamist lifestyle, sharing my wife on a regular basis with a septuagenarian jazz enthusiast whose talent, machismo and flinty good looks still, apparently, inspire lust in at least one small Polish woman decades after inspiring much wider lust during the tight pantsed, bare-chested, absurdly large biceped days of his youth. Despite my wife’s leftist political philosophy, she’s willing to forgive Eastwood’s right-wing libertarian political leanings and starring roles in all those reactionary Dirty Harry movies and violent spaghetti westerns, partly because those early films were so damn entertaining, but mostly because Clint has mellowed since then, producing, directing and/or starring in deeply human films like Unforgiven and Letters From Iwo Jima which explore the root cause and grisly aftermath of the human fascination with violence that helped to make him a star in the first place. Yet even though Eastwood would have qualified for this list based merely on his collaborations with Sergio Leone (let alone his cop movies, let alone his Oscar-caliber directing chops), that’s still only half the story. Unlike largely one-trick action stars of the Bronson/Stallone/Seagal variety, the erstwhile “man with no name” ain’t afraid to let his freak flag fly or get down with his sensitive feminine side, headlining everything from weepy “women’s” films (The Bridges of Madison County, Million Dollar Baby) to weird experiments (The Beguiled, White Hunter Black Heart) and inexplicable monkey comedies (Every Which Way But Loose), proving there’s a whole lot more to my wife’s beloved fake husband than just his big, big guns.

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

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Hayden Childs, Andrew Osborne

The Rep Report: September 5--10

Phil Nugent — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 20:30:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Anthology Film Archives commences its salute to Jerry Schatzberg tonight with screenings of the director's firat features, the 1970 alienation-fest Puzzle of a Downfall Child (starring Faye Dunway) and the 1971 The Panic in Needle Park, costarring Al Pacino, in his first starring role, and Kitty Winn as a young couple of heroin addicts. Schatzberg, who seems to be more or less retired, had an erratic career, and to his other problems, he'll probably have at least one chance during his personal appearance at this retrospective to patiently explain that, no, he isn't Joel Schumacher. But as a filmmaker he had a broad curiosity about different milieus and kinds of characters, and his pictures have generally had texture and weight. Needle Park retains interest as a deep quaff of '70s New York at its most confoundingly ungovernable, and Schatzberg can boast of having directed Pacino in both his last performance before The Godfather made him a star and the first picture he made afterwards, the 1973 road movie Scarecrow co-starring Gene Hackman. When Schatzberg made the New York-set Street Smart fifteen years after Needle Park, he had to shoot it in Toronto, but once again he helped launch the movie career of a major star, this time someone who'd been working for decades and would turn fifty the year the picture was released: just a couple of years earlier, Morgan Freeman had been reduced to holding down a job on Another World, but his terrifying performance as a pimp who emerges like a monster from the id to turn pampered reporter Christopher Reeve's life into a pretzel earned him his first Academy Award nomination and a long-belated measure of the industry stature he'd long deserved. Also showing: Honeysuckle Rose, a 1980 country music remake of Intermezzo starring Willie Nelson and Dyan Cannon, which introduced Willie's theme song "On the Road Again," and "Reunion," a sadly overlooked 1989 film starring Jason Robards, with a screenplay by Harold Pinter.

Raindance, the British company responsible for the Raindance Film Festival (which opens October 7, by the way), is bringing its educational program to the New York Film Academy. Aspiring filmmakers looking to drop a few bucks towards their futures might want to check out Elliot Grove's "99 MInute Film School" on Tuesday, September 9 and the "Lo to No Budget Filmmaking" seminar on the weekend of September 13 and 14, which bears a recommendation blurb from director Christopher Nolan, whose most recent film, The Dark Knight, has been well-received. This marks the first time the Raindance people's first venture into America, and it might be nice if it wasn't their last, so for God's sake, behave yourselves.

LOS ANGELES: Every Thursday in September, the Silent Movie Theater hosts "Word Is Born: Hip Hop at the Movies, 1979-1984". Included are Hollywood exploitation jobs such as Breakin' and Beat Street, the solid period documentary Style Wars, and on September 25, Beat This! Hip Hop Rarities, winner of this month's Rep Report Award for Promotional Copy That We Have No Intention of Trying to Re-Word: " We've dug even deeper for our closeout night, and we're bringing you some of the rarest cuts in a fantastic mix of rarities from the old-school hip-hop era. Watch them one after the other, obscure odds and ends from the Golden Age, ending with Beat This! A Hip-Hop History! Yup! It’s the history of hip-hop! And it was made in 1984! And it’s all in rhyme! And it’s vocoderized by Afrika Bambaataa! And it’s sci-fi! And it stars BS-ing punk-impresario-turned-double-dutch-promoter Malcolm McLaren in all his patronizing glory! And it was made for Granada TV! And they forced director Dick Fontaine to slip in McLaren against his will, but he couldn’t do anything about it!"

SAN FRANCISCO: Sean McCourt of the Bay Guardian has the dirt on this weekend's Lebowski Fest.

NORTH CAROLINA: The tenth Hi Mom! Film Festival, festuring an international, family-friendly selection of fifty-one animated and live-action shorts, runs this weekend starting tonight, at the Art Center in Carborro. Please note that the outdoor screenings planned for Chapel Hill have been moved indoors due to a "strong threat of rain."

Jerry Reed, 1937--2008

Phil Nugent — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Jerry Reed has died of complications from emphysema at the age of 71. Reed, who was born in Atlanta in 1937, spent two years in the military before moving to Nashville in the early 1960s to pursue a career in the country music industry. A guitar picker with a unique style, he quickly earned a place in the fraternity of working, sought-after studio musicians while honing his songwriting on the side. His rise to solo stardom was abetted by two legendary figures: Chet Atkins, who produced one of Reed's early singles in the mid-'60s and later teamed up with him for a pair of award-winning albums in the early 1970s, and Elvis Presley, who recorded a couple of Reed compositions, "Guitar Man" and "U.S. Male", while plotting his own late-'60s comeback. (Legend has it that Elvis, who decided to do "Guitar Man" after hearing Reed's own recorded version, decreed that Reed was to be brought in to play on the sessions after finding that nobody else could recreate the self-taught guitarist's "weird tunings.") Reed's own biggest hit, the 1971 Grammy-winning "When You're Hot, You're Hot", established him as an unexpected master of the demented redneck comedy routine set to music, a field that he also plowed in the Elvis tribute "Tupelo Mississippi Flash" and the great, rabid Cajun epic "Amos Moses." During this period, he was becoming a familiar face on TV, thanks to recurring appearances on musical-variety programs hosted by Glen Campbell and Dean Martin. (Reed had his own short-lived series--The Jerry Reed When You're Hot You're Hot Hour--in 1972.) He also slipped into animated (as in cartoon) form to appear on an episode of The New Scooby-Doo Movies, calling in Shaggy, Scooby, and the other personnel of the Mystery Machine to help him find his lost guitar.

In 1975, Reed made his movie acting debut in the redneck classic W. W. and the Dixie Dancekings, starring Burt Reynolds. His movie career, which would displace his music career for several years, became inextricably tied to that of Reynolds's, with whom he co-starred in Gator (which Reynolds directed), Smokey and the Bandit and its first sequel, and Stroker Ace, where his brief appearance was uncredited, a hint that Reynolds probably wishes he'd picked up on. Reed also turned up on Reynolds's TV series B. L. Stryker and Evening Shade; acted in the comedy Hot Stuff, which was directed by its star, fellow Reynolds sidekick Dom DeLuise; and displaced ol' Burt in the 1983 Smokey and the Bandit Part 3, which Reynolds couldn't be bothered with. He also co-starred with Peter Fonda in High-Ballin', part of the trucker-as-modern-American-hero drive-in movie cycle that the Smokey and the Bandit movies (and Reed's own contribution to its soundtrack, "East Bound and Down") helped midwife, went head to head with Robin Williams and Walter Matthau in the 1983 comedy The Survivors, and played an officer in the Gene Hackman-Danny Glover Vietnam drama Bat 21 (1988), on which he was also the executive producer. After contributing redneck authenticity to the Adam Sandler vehicle The Waterboy in 1998, Reed officially abandoned movies to spend the rest of his life concentrating on his music. At that time, he expressed something close to disdain for his acting ability ("When people ask me what my motivation is, I have a simple answer: Money."), but in fact he was an easy, natural presence on-screen, and brought energy and likability to many roles that might have defeated a better-trained but stiffer performer. If the secret to his success in movies was partly that he recognized his own limitations and never strayed to far outside his comfortable range, that at least makes him smarter than say, Kris Kristofferson. Reed is survived by his wife Priscilla, with whom he would have celebrated a fiftieth wedding anniversary next year.

Take Five: We're Playin' Basketball

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

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

HOOSIERS (1986)

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

HOOP DREAMS (1994)

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

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

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

HE GOT GAME (1998)

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

QUANTUM HOOPS (2007)

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

Taverns on the Screen: The Top Ten Barroom Scenes of Cinema (Part Deux)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 20:30:00 GMT

RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK (1981)

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is a fine example of the way lazy, excessive reliance on ridiculous CGI (and CGI monkeys) can ruin an otherwise passable movie. And there’s no finer argument for the good ol’ fashioned non-CGI pleasures of real world filmmaking than the Nepalese bar sequence in the original Raiders of the Lost Ark. To recap: winsome badass Karen Allen (oh, Hollywood, HOW did you ever let her get away?) drinks a yak-herder under the table, then her flaky ex-boyfriend shows up while she’s all full o’ rotgut and she slaps him in the face and sends him on his way. And THEN, creepy Nazi torturer Toht (a.k.a. Mr. Melty-Face) shows up with a bunch of evil minions and things really get interesting. What follows is a master class in cinematic action, pacing, camera placement, stuntwork, pyrotechnics, performance and editing...all without a bluescreen (or hangover) in sight.

ON_LINE (2002)

Okay, so maybe I’m biased, given that I co-wrote this one (with director Jed Weintrob), but I’ve always had a soft spot for the scene in this under-the-radar internet sex comedy where neurotic shut-in John (Josh Hamilton) goes to an odious, overpriced Manhattan nightclub on a disastrous double-date with Jordan (Vanessa Ferlito), the wild cybersex enthusiast he picked up on the internet, his oversexed roommate, Moe (Harold Perrineau, Jr.) and Moe’s pill-popping, manic-depressive girlfriend (Isabel Gillies). But don’t take my word for it: in a Salon review that (almost but not quite) made up for any number of really quite nasty reviews of the film, the extremely cultured and discerning Andrew O'Hehir summed up the appeal of the scene thusly: “John's nightclub internal monologue, as he watches Jordan dance and reflects on how hot she is, how shallow he is for thinking that and how little chance he has of actually getting in her pants in the off-line world, is probably the movie's high point.” Thanks, Mr. O’Hehir...I couldn’ t have said it better myself!

BLAZING SADDLES (1974)

Before that dastardly Hedley Lamar (played with nefarious gusto by the late Harvey Korman) decided to run the railroad through it, the hamlet of Rock Ridge in Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles had everything an Old West town needed: a church, a hoosegow for when Mongo came to town, and proximity to the Hollywood Hills. And, of course, it had its own saloon. But unlike most of the filthy, rowdy joints in the history of westerns, this particular saloon was always kept nice and clean, thanks to the stewardship of the unfortunately named Anal Johnson. All that came to an end, however, with the arrival of the Teutonic songbird Lili von Shtupp, played with Dietrichian élan by the Oscar-nominated Madeline Kahn. Lili’s world-weary act, sweet set of curves, and foul-mouthed stage patter (“Why don’t you get your friggin’ feet off the stage?”) brings every rough rider in the county, but it’s her love of that delicious schnitzengruben that leads Lamar to hire her to seduce and abandon Bart, the new sheriff in town. In one of the most memorable scenes ever set in an Old West saloon, Lili sighs out “I’m Tired” before being carried off, James Brown-style, by her backup dancers and deposited in the arms of Sheriff Bart – who, it turns out, has more schnitzengruben than she can handle.

THE NINTH CONFIGURATION (1980)

It’s a scene we’ve watch play out a million times in a million action movies: a nameless bar in the middle of nowhere is taken over by a generic group of bikers, who wreak havoc in the place until they push the wrong guy just a little bit too far. But William Peter Blatty’s disturbing cult hit The Ninth Configuration is no typical action movie, and the bar fight won’t play out in a typical way. The set-up to the scene is more complex than it seems: mentally disturbed former astronaut Billy Cutshaw (Scott Wilson), disillusioned that sensitive psychiatrist Col. Vincent Kane (Stacy Keach) has turned out to be a blood-soaked Marine Corps commando, escapes from an asylum and seeks refuge in liquor at the nameless biker bar. A combination of booze, despair and a smart mouth enrages the boss bikers (the unstable brute Stanley and the cunning, sadistic Richard, played by the gaunt, devil-faced Richard Lynch), who abuse Cutshaw until Kane arrives to rescue him. Kane, who has forsaken violence and taken up the mantle of the caring, well-meaning shrink in order to bury his own murderous past, attempts to come to a peaceful resolution, but finally he can take no more. The scene that follows is one of the most stunning bar fights every captured on film – although to call it a fight ignores what truly happens: Kane utterly annihilates the biker gang in a matter of seconds, killing a number of them. It’s an astonishing scene, and even more astonishing is the fact that it’s not even the climax of The Ninth Configuration.

THE FRENCH CONNECTION (1971)

In an audio commentary track recorded for the French Connection DVD, Gene Hackman described Eddie Egan, the real-life model for Hackman's obsessed narc "Popeye" Doyle, as having been "flippant" to a degree that he'd never encountered before in a human being. It's easy to imagine the conversation among the patrons of the Harlem bar that Popeye raids after he's stormed in and out like a hurricane: "That fellow was certainly flippant, wasn't he? I'm a fervent supporter of our boys in blue, but speaking as an amateur observer of the law enforcement process, I can't help feeling that some of that flippancy was unwarranted! Here, help me tie off this tourniquet?" The raid, which is actually a cover for a meeting in the men's room between Popeye and an informant, establishes Popeye's adversarial relationship to the city's civilian population, his casual racism, and the gleefully sadistic tinge to his brutality. (Obliged to rough up his informant so that no one will suspect the guy is a rat, Popeye asks him, "Where do you want it?" The man thinks about it for a second and points to his right cheek, and Popeye slugs him on his left. The blow looks hard enough to crack the guy's jaw, but this is Popeye when he's just playing.) In a recent interview in Reason, Ed Burns, the twenty-year veteran of the Baltimore Police Department turned TV writer whose HBO series The Wire dismantled the logic behind the nation's "war on drugs", called the scene "iconic" and blamed it for instilling the wrong mindset in a generation of cops by "put[ting] out the idea of this guy who cracks heads," Popeye set police work back by reinforcing the idea that cops should act like swaggering badasses instead of establishing a functional relationship with their communities. So if you're a fan of The Wire -- a not uncommon condition among Screengrab writers -- then give it up for Popeye Doyle; without him, The Wire might not have been necessary.

Related Stories:

Tavern On The Screens - The Top Ten Barroom Scenes of Cinema (Part One)

CGI Must Die: Five Reasons Why

Harvey Korman, 1927--2008

Screengrab Pub Crawl - The Top 15 Bars of Cinema (Part One)

Screengrab Pub Crawl - The Top 15 Bars of Cinema (Part Two)

Screengrab Pub Crawl - The Top 15 Bars of Cinema (Part Three)

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent

That Guy! Classic: Peter Boyle

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 20:30:00 GMT

In all of our occasional looks back at great character actors of the past, we've never written about anyone as universally beloved as Peter Boyle. The husky Irish-American with the wry smile worked, during his forty-year career, in everything from quiet, thoughtful little independent films to blockbuster sitcoms, but despite a number of controversial positions in his private life and the friendship of some of the entertainment industry's most despised liberals (he was a close friend to both John Lennon and Jane Fonda), the American public always took him to heart, and it's impossible to find anyone he worked with that doesn't remember him fondly after his death in 2006.

Originally intending to enter the priesthood, Boyle was bitten by the acting bug early on (his father hosted a children's show in his native Pennsylvania) and after a few minor roles on film and television, hit it big with his lead performance in 1970's Joe. Although he did a tremendous job as a racist factory worker and the breakthrough role opened doors for him, Boyle was deeply shaken by the role: attending his first screening of the film, he was disturbed to hear people cheering the character's reactionary lines, and was extremely selective about choosing his parts from then on. In fact, it's ironic that some of Boyle's most memorable roles have been those of violent, brutal men; the actor himself was, by all accounts, an extremely gentle man, a liberal, and a lifelong pacifist who opposed the war in Vietnam, championed civil rights, and worried constantly about the impact of his performances as brutes, thugs and killers. But his career was also peppered with some extremely adept comic performances, and his greatest success came as a cast member of the highly successful situation comedy Everybody Loves Raymond. He also did some top-flight work in other television dramas, including a swell turn as Fatso Judson in the TV movie adaptation of From Here to Eternity and a lead role in the short-lived but extremely well-made cop show Joe Bash. But it was on the big screen that he had the greatest impact; his odd features and quirky approach ensured that he'd never be a leading man, but he absolutely barnstormed every character role he was given. Although we'll list our favorites below, everyone remembers Boyle fondly from a different performance, and he's sure to go down in history as not just one of the best, but one of the best-loved, character actors in Hollywood.

Where to see Peter Boyle at his best:

YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN (1974)

After a half a decade of playing moody dramatic roles, Boyle shocked and charmed movie audiences when he turned up as the monster in Mel Brooks' brilliant homage/parody of the classic Univeral horror franchise. Showing an aptitude for comedy that would sustain him for the rest of his career, Boyle managed to bring down the house in every scene he was in, often without saying a word; his clumsy, bellowing song-and-dance with Gene Wilder is a paralyzingly funny classic, and the scene he shares with Gene Hackman proves that while the silent era is long dead, the best comic actors can still kill an audience with nothing more than an exasperated look.

TAXI DRIVER (1976)

Amazingly, the very next film that Boyle made after wrapping Young Frankenstein was Martin Scorsese's devastating Taxi Driver, a movie as emotionally intense and dark as Brooks' film was light and breezy. Boyle took on the role of Wizard, the pontificating, droning hack guru who passes for a font of wisdom amongst the cab drivers of New York. It's an important role, especially insofar as it helps establish Travis Bickle's inability to relate to anyone, even the friendly (though completely full of shit) Wizard. Boyle handles it deftly, getting some comic mileage out of Wizard's stories but also giving him the gravitas to act as a sounding board for Robert De Niro's deep alienation.

MONSTER'S BALL (2001)

Just as Boyle's first major success as an actor came from playing a misguided racist in Joe, his last major role on the screen came from playing the unreconstructed bigot of a father to Billy Bob Thornton in Monster's Ball. The lead performances of Thornton and Halle Berry got all the attention, but Boyle was just as riveting as Buck Grotowski, the unapologetically racist father of Thornton's prison guard and the patriarch of his highly dysfunctional family. It's also yet another irony in Peter Boyle's career: though Boyle was a crusader for civil rights, two of his most memorable and powerful roles are as virulently prejudiced men.

Roy Scheider, 1932-2008

Phil Nugent — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Roy Scheider has died in Little Rock, Arkansas, at the age of 75. He had battled cancer in recent years; the cause of death has been reported as complications from a staph infection. Scheider made his film debut in a 1962 horror movie called The Curse of the Living Corpse and throughout the 1960s worked on the stage and on such TV soaps as The Edge of Night, Love of Life, and The Secret Storm. He began to get small movie roles in the late '60s, and had a breakout year in 1971, when, as a thirty-nine-year-old juvenile, he played Jane Fonda's pimp in Klute and Gene Hackman's police partner in The French Connection. (In interviews, and ultimately in a commentary track on The French Connection DVD, Scheider liked to tell a story about how he won the part after someone saw him blow a stage audition and was impressed with the brio with which off the director.) Scheider got an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for the role, which would ultimately lead to his getting his first leading role in The Seven-Ups, a 1973 cop thriller directed by the French Connection producer Philip D'Antoni. But it was of course the 1975 Jaws that was Scheider's biggest hit and the movie that made him a familiar face to the public at large, and beloved to a generation of pop-eyed movie freaks. As the land-locked seaside Sheriff Brody, Scheider was the tentpole of a central triumverate that also included Richard Dreyfuss (wisecracking, brainy, Method) and Robert Shaw (macho, demented, classically theatrical). It was Scheider's job to anchor what would become the most successful movie ever made by serving as the likable audience identification figure, he pulled it off with a smooth, pro's grace.

Scheider starred in a number of other movies (including William Friedkin's Sorcerer, Last Embrace, Still of the Night, and Blue Thunder) but never again found himself at the center of anything near as big a blockbuster. He was also forced, by contractual committment, to appear in Jaws 2, which cost him the chance to star in Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter. He did get an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor for serving as the director Bob Fosse's alter ego in the 1979 All That Jazz; he didn't want, but his work in that picture will be remembered as among the best performances of his career. However, by the mid-1980s he was only getting big parts in smaller-budgeted pictures (such as 52 Pick-Up, made for Cannon Films) and indie productions (such as 1997's The Myth of Fingerprints) and appearing in smaller parts in such films as Fred Schepisi's The Russia House, David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch, and Francis Ford Coppola's The Rainmaker. He also starred in the first season of the TV series SeaQuest DSV and played studio chief George Schaefer in RKO 281, an HBO film about the making of Citizen Kane. He kept working at a furious rate, and in one of his last appearances, as a serial killer on Death Row last year in an episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent, he showed that he was still capable of doing memorable work when the material he was given managed to meet him halfway.

Forgotten Films: "All Night Long" (1981)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Gene Hackman turned seventy-eight this past week. Though he seems to have eased into semi-retirement — his last movie appearance was in 2004's Welcome to Mooseport with Ray Romano, a teaming that I assume was a thrill for at least one of them — for decades Hackman was as sturdily dependable as any hard-working character lead turned unlikely movie star in Hollywood history. His birthday provides as good an excuse as any to dig out one of his best performances, in one of his best, and least-appreciated movies, the 1981 comedy All Night Long. It's also a terrific movie to discover at the dawn of a still-new year, because it's about a man who seems to be used up and past the point the point of no return taking the reins and making a new world for himself, by learning in the nick of time to cast off what no longer works for him and doing, and going after, whatever the hell he wants.

Hackman plays George Dupler, whose twenty years of service to the corporate behemoth have driven him to the edge of a nervous breakdown. One day, his stress becomes notable enough that he's encouraged to express what's bothering him, and a chair goes flying through the shiny glass wall of his company's building. A dead man walking, George is shuttled off to serve out his days as night manager of an enormous twenty-four-hour Los Angeles drugstore. The screenwriter, W. D. Richter, apparently took his inspiration from a magazine article about nocturnal urban living as the last great frontier. George has to cross that frontier to build himself a new life; it starts with him adjusting his internal clock to his new working hours, expands to his taking up with the mistress of his teenage son (Dennis Quaid), and winds up with him moving into a loft and embarking on a career as an inventor. His first invention is a new kind of mirror. It doesn't reverse the image of what you're seeing: it gives the user the chance to see what others actually behold when they look at him, the poor sap.

All Night Long has its own eccentric humor and a cool, liberating tone, and it actually got several admiring notices when it was released early in 1981. Unfortunately, it got caught up in internal Hollywood politics and bad marketing decisions, all of them related to the actress who plays George's new squeeze: Barbra Streisand. The movie was directed by the Belgian Jean-Claude Tramont, who was married to the semi-legendary Hollywood agent Sue Mengers, who at the time had Streisand as a star client. The movie had headed into production with the actress Lisa Eichhorn set to play the female lead, but somebody must have thought that having Streisand on board would be good for something, with the result that she was nudged into the role, the film's budget ballooned accordingly, and the finished product was released with an ad campaign that seemed designed to call up memories of previous comic horrors such as For Pete's Sake and The Main Event. Tramont's career never recovered from the movie's high-profile commercial failure; he would direct only once more — As Summers Die, a 1986 TV film with Bette Davis, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Scott Glenn — before dying in 1996. The funny thing is that Streisand neither makes nor sinks the movie; her quirky-mouse performance is amusing — you can see her consciously trying not to come across as a diva — but she and Hackman have zero chemistry. Their romance just seems like a fling he uses to cushion his fall as he transitions into a new life; you can't imagine they'll be together for long after the final credits roll. But if All Night Long is compromised as a love story, as a tribute to a loser who didn't know how to lie down, it's richly satisfying. Tramont, Richter, and Hackman started out with the quirky tools of classic screwball comedy and applied them with so much heartfelt grace and imagination that they constructed a comedy worthy of Rilke's dictum, "You must change your life!"

The Top Ten Action Heroes Who Deserve A Comeback, Part 1

Peter Smith — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 22:30:00 GMT

This week's top ten comes to us from guest writer Gabriel Mckee, friend of Nerve and author of The Gospel According to Science Fiction. Read his fantastic blog here.

Recent years may well be remembered for bringing back the over-the-top action hero. New sequels to Rocky, Die Hard, and Rambo have revived long-dead franchises, and the trend is continuing. Indiana Jones 4 has started filming, and a fourth Mad Max film would have wrapped by now had scheduling conflicts not led director George Miller to make Happy Feet instead. Though it's an easy trend to mock, it opens the door for other action heroes to be resurrected — here are some top candidates.

10. Scott McCoy (Chuck Norris), The Delta Force

Before he was a meme, before he was Walker, Texas Ranger, even before he was a Karate Kommando, Chuck Norris was Maj. Scott McCoy of the Delta Force. This elite antiterrorist strike force, led by Lee Marvin, consists of some thirty soldiers who are highly trained in standing around in the back of a cargo plane while Chuck Norris rides around on a motorcycle killing terrorists. Delta Force came out in the pre-Die Hard world, before we expected our action heroes to have pathos, depth or family troubles. There's not much character to this character, but when it comes to straightforward ass-kicking, Norris is the undisputed master. Norris is ripe for a Stallone-style comeback, and in the and in the age of the War on Terror, a new entry in the Delta Force saga is the perfect vehicle for his revival.

9. Axel Foley (Eddie Murphy), Beverly Hills Cop

Remember when Eddie Murphy made movies that people enjoyed? Barring Dreamgirls, his film career has been on a losing streak for over a decade, putting him just below Robin Williams on the list of actors who need to be rescued from their own careers. A return to the role of Axel Foley, the detective/con man of Beverly Hills Cop, might be the best way to ensure that Norbit never happens again.

8. Jack Carter (Michael Caine), Get Carter

Michael Caine has made a major comeback in recent years, but in most of his recent roles — in Batman Begins, Children of Men,and The Prestige, for instance — he's played the Kindly Old British Guy. It's easy to forget that he made his name playing jerks — first a heartless cad in Alfie, then a brutal-but-suave thug in Get Carter. This story of a London gangster who travels to Newcastle (Britain's equivalent of South Jersey) to investigate his brother's murder isn't as flashy as more recent tales of the U.K. underworld. But Guy Ritchie and Jason Statham nevertheless owe everything to Get Carter's blueprint and Caine's cynical performance. A return to the character of Carter would give Caine a chance to recapture both the grim violence and the effortless sexiness of one of his greatest roles.

7. Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle (Gene Hackman), The French Connection

The most successful action film of the '70s didn't star Clint Eastwood, Bruce Lee or any other established veteran of the genre. The French Connection owes much of its success to Gene Hackman's performance as hot-headed bad cop Popeye Doyle (which earned him his first Academy Award). More than just a tough guy, Doyle is a contemptible bully, and instead of an invincible supercop, his temper makes him a bit of a screw-up. Hackman is still more than capable of this kind of complexity (as proven by The Royal Tenenbaums), and it would be thrilling to see what he could do with this character after thirty-five years.

6. Foxy Brown (Pam Grier)

The 1973 film Coffy established Pam Grier as the undisputed queen of '70s blaxploitation. Foxy Brown (originally intended as a sequel entitled Burn, Coffy, Burn!) justified her ascension — whether infiltrating a high-end call-girl ring, shooting her drug-dealing brother in the ear, or hijacking a drug runner's crop duster, Foxy is "a whole lotta woman." At turns smiling and sneering, she violently opposes an oppressive society symbolized by a white-operated heroin syndicate. Grier has had a slightly higher profile since Quentin Tarantino reintroduced audiences to her charms, but it's been far too long since she's kicked ass like she did in Foxy Brown.

Read PART 2.

Top Thirteen Greatest Fictional Movie Presidents, Part 2

Peter Smith — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 22:00:00 GMT

Sandy McCallum as Mr. President/David Carradine as President Frankenstein, DEATH RACE 2000 (1975)

In many ways, Sandy McCallum's "Mr. President" in the sci-fi satire Death Race 2000 was a political leader far ahead of his time. He was a charismatic evangelical in tune with the religious right (he began all his presidential addresses with the line "My children, whom I love"); he remained sequestered in his vacation home even in times of crisis (what is Mr. President's fabled Winter Palace in Beijing but a slightly more grandiose version of the big ranch in Crawford?), and most importantly, he struck home with the American people by isolating and identifying the sole cause of all our national woes, foreign and domestic: the hated French! Still, every great leader's time must eventually pass, and when Mr. President finally lost his life in a freak automotive accident, his successor (likewise ahead of the curve: a popular athlete who parlayed his celebrity status into a career in politics), the wonderfully named President Frankenstein, took over. At first, America was worried — the new president, with his outspoken First Lady and his program of progressive reform, seemed like he might be some sort of bleeding-heart liberal — but our minds were eased when his first official act in office was to run over pesky news media personality Junior Bruce with his car. America loves you, President Frankenstein!

Jeff Bridges as President Jackson Evans, THE CONTENDER (2000)

President Evans is a supporting character in this dull message movie about the trouble his female vice-presidential nominee (Joan Allen) has in getting approved, but he's also the movie's wild card, a slick charmer who isn't actively opposed to doing the right thing whenever possible but mostly seems interested in winning with a minimum of confrontational hassle. His hobby is torturing the staff of the White House kitchen by testing their ability to serve him anything he asks for at any hour of the day; at one point he's spotted wandering the halls and ignoring the person talking to him while munching his latest snack and muttering, "Shark steak. Fuckin' shark steak sandwich. . ."

Henry Fonda as The President, FAIL-SAFE (1964)

This grim melodrama, in which American bombers nuke Moscow because of a technical error, opened some ten months after Dr. Strangelove, an unusual case of the straight version of a story coming after the parody. Actually, this version is fairly funny if you watch it now in the wrong spirit. The nameless president winds up averting World War III by ordering a nuclear strike on New York City to make it up to the Russians, even though the First Lady happens to be in the Big Apple. The movie also came out the same year as The Best Man, in which Fonda played a presidential candidate too pure in heart to develop the killer instinct needed for the job. Fifteen years later he would play the U.S. president again, this time in the disaster movie Meteor. (And let's not forget that one of his early roles was as Young Abe Lincoln in the John Ford classic.) Maybe the real question posed by Fail-Safe is, if Hollywood is such a bastion of liberal bias, then how come every time Fonda, the movie star known as the embodiment of liberal humanism, got cast as the leader of the free world, half the planet wound up in danger of obliteration?

Franchot Tone as The President, ADVISE AND CONSENT (1962)

When Otto Preminger's Washington melodrama opened, New York Times reviewer Bosley Crowther glowered at it through his lorgnette and wrote that the filmmakers' "intense and deliberate projection of a cynical attitude toward the actions of politicians extends right up to the President of the United States, whom they frankly portray in this fiction as a man of peculiar principles. He is made (in a tasteless portrayal of a sick, testy man by Franchot Tone) to be tolerant of cheap conniving and the telling of lies under oath." Translated into English, this means that Tone's character is one of the few movie presidents one can imagine actually running the country, a tough, hard-bitten old son of a bitch who knows how to play the game. Unfortunately, we all have our bad days, and he comes to grief after he makes the mistake of trying to appoint — it's him again! — Henry Fonda as Secretary of State. Tone's president, worn out from political machinations and Fonda's high-minded dithering, ultimately succumbs to a heart attack, leaving the country in the hands of his vice-president, Lew Ayres, who makes Hank Fonda look like Solomon crossed with Sean Connery.

Bill Pullman as President Thomas J. Whitmore, INDEPENDENCE DAY (1996) and Gene Hackman as President Alan Richmond, ABSOLUTE POWER (1997)

Taken together, these two films, originally released a little more than six months apart, go a long way towards summing up the Clinton presidency as it was filtered through different fantasy lenses in the popular culture of its time. Pullman's president is, like President Bartlett on The West Wing, a fantasy of an improved Bill Clinton, the Clinton that some disappointed observers wanted him to be: a sensitive liberal-minded family man, but with a record of military heroism (in the first Gulf War) and the ability to keep his dick in his pants. When the movie opens, he's struggling to keep his job as the media and his political enemies paint him as spineless and ineffectual, but the extraterrestrial invasion gives him the chance to show what he's made of: he dusts off his flight suit and kicks a little alien butt, albeit only after the destruction of the White House and the death of his First Lady. (She's played by Mary McDonnell, who wound up getting her own TV presidency after robots took their turn trying to wipe out the human race on Battlestar Galactica.) President Richmond represents Clinton the defiler, the rampaging amoral deviant unfit for polite society, let alone high office; the film's director-star, Clint Eastwood, has to take matters into his own hands and bring about justice after he's seen Richmond's Secret Service bodyguards kill a woman who was trying to defend herself from a violent sexual assault at POTUS's hands. The cover-up is handled by the president's evil, female chief of staff (Judy Davis), a Hillary even he couldn't bring himself to marry. Oddly enough, Absolute Power also laid the seeds for a future TV presidency: one of Richmond's murderous goons is played by Dennis Haysbert, who later became the martyred President David Palmer on 24.

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

Check back tomorrow for Part 3!