The Screengrab : ghostbusters

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 20:00:00 GMT

So, the other day, my lovely Polish bride was attending a work function at Boston’s historic Faneuil Hall, when she looked up and saw a tall, craggy guy dressed in camouflage, surrounded by a gaggle of teenage sons, and suddenly realized she was face-to-face with none other than Bill Ghostbustin’ Ass Murray...

...April Fool!

Oh...no, wait...that actually happened...and, indeed, America’s annual Day of Pranks is blessedly over for another year...yet considering we already kicked off the month with a salute to fools, and considering Entertainment Weekly just ran a big, page-wasting spread on the Greatest Heroes and Villains of All Time, your pals here at the Screengrab figured now would be as good a time as any to salute our real heroes...the Comic Relief.

Now, of course, the second we started compiling this list, we realized we’d undoubtedly forget at least two worthy choices for every name we picked...so feel free to remind us who we missed down below in the Comments section, and mayhaps we’ll run a Reader’s Choice list of faves at some future date. But in the meantime, please to enjoy our picks for THE 35 FUNNIEST MOVIE CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME!

DANNY KAYE AS HUBERT HAWKINS IN THE COURT JESTER (1955)

Most people know that comedy isn’t pretty, but it need not necessarily be mean. Consider the career of Danny Kaye -- in his heyday, one of the biggest draws in Hollywood, not only because he was funny but also because he was so darn likable. Nowhere is this more in evidence than in his most enduring movie, The Court Jester -- a film so benignly hilarious that it’s equally enjoyable for children and cinephiles. Taking his cue from the Technicolor swashbucklers of yore, Kaye throws himself into the role of the hapless resistance fighter-turned-jester with a childlike glee, even during the Errol Flynn-esque sword fights. But he’s at his best when engaging in his trademark wordplay. Who can forget the famous "pellet with the poison" exchange? Even better is the extended "Maladjusted Jester" number, in which Kaye, playing a hapless carnival performer-turned-freedom fighter masquerading as the "king of jesters and jester of kings" (long story), gets his chance to entertain the court. The story is put on hold while Kaye sings, dances, and jokes -- a risky move, because if the scene doesn’t work, the movie has nothing to do but stand… "and stand… and staaaaaaaaand…" Thankfully, it’s brilliant, thanks primarily to Kaye’s formidable talents and, it must be said, his innate likability. It’s this latter quality that makes the film work even today: at plenty of times during the film, Hubert has the option of resorting to violence or devious tactics, but that would be out of character for Kaye, so he must come up with more creative (and humorous) alternatives. It’s rare to find a movie that’ll make one smile throughout even between the laughs, but The Court Jester fits the bill perfectly. (PC)

PETER SELLERS AS INSPECTOR JACQUES CLOUSEAU IN A SHOT IN THE DARK (1964)

Every year, the legend of the Pink Panther films gets a little more tarnished. The endless remakes and reboots, the franchise sequels Steve Martin cranks out when he wants to restock his wine cellar, and the fact that they were never great pieces of cinema in the first place all conspire to rob the original Blake Edwards films of their magic, year after year. But lest we forget, the Pink Panther movies, as poorly as they have aged, were a showcase for the comedic talents of Peter Sellers, and in this film – the best of the series by a mile – it’s easy to see why he was once considered the funniest man in the world. What’s made the Clouseau character last is that Sellers made him a vehicle for so many types of comedy: gross physical slapstick, outrageous (for the time) sexual gags, wordplay, linguistic tomfoolery, broad ethnic comedy, improvisational brilliance, and even the odd subtle character moment. No comedian alive at the time could so deftly blend all those elements into a single character, and no one has been able to do it since, which is why the latter-day films, even starring as they do a once-gifted comic like Martin, are such a travesty. As if all that’s not enough, consider that Sellers made A Shot in the Dark in the same year that he did Dr. Strangelove! That’s a one-two punch that proves that there was literally no type of comedy he couldn’t make completely his own. (LP)

JOHN BELUSHI AS BLUTO IN ANIMAL HOUSE (1978)

Some might say "Fat drunk and stupid is no way to go through life." Happily others beg to differ. The loose cannon and gross-out pre-med under-acheiver John "Bluto" Blutarski is John Belushi at his slovenly best. He's that guy you kind of hate for being obtuse, but love for providing a breath of fresh air in pretentious situations like college, work and life. Bluto is the dispenser of such pearls of wisdom as "My advice to you is to start drinking heavily." Also, who can forget the crashing apart of the black & white reconciliation float in the homecoming parade? There would be no Animal House without Belushi's cherubic moron with a heart of gold (and stand-up ethics). (SCS)

ALYSON HANNIGAN AS MICHELLE FLAHERTY IN AMERICAN PIE (1999)

Hannigan, had already spent two years using Buffy the Vampire Slayer as her delivery system for the message that sexy dorks rule the universe, before jumping at the chance to really put that idea across here. Popping her words like gum and making "Like you have a shot at anyone else!" sound like a siren's love lyric, she instantly created a generation of men who will die empty and unfulfilled if they never meet a friendly-seeming bookish geek who's just biding her time until the moment is right to slap them across the face and scream, "Say my name, bitch!" Her absence from movies since then, except for an American Pie sequel or three and the even sorrier Date Movie, has been a real sore spot for some of us, made no easier to take by the possibility it raises that she might just be too happy at home with that wimp bastard she married to be seeking out work. Out of respect for her personal happiness, some of us have refrained from attempting to murder her spouse, even though we suspect that she'd look adorable in black. Enjoy motherhood, sugar britches. (PN)

SACHA BARON COHEN AS BORAT IN BORAT: CULTURAL LEARNINGS OF AMERICA FOR MAKE BENEFIT GLORIOUS NATION OF KAZAKHSTAN (2006)

Overexposed? Sure. Mimicked to death? Definitely. Still one of the decade’s most iconic and consistently hilarious lunatics? Without question. Sasha Baron Cohen’s Kazakhstani journalist made his stateside debut on HBO’s Da Ali G Show in 2003 but came to national prominence with Larry Cohen’s 2006 hit, in which he traveled across America “learning” about the country while searching for his dream girl, Pamela Anderson. Posing as the inappropriate Borat amidst real people supposedly not in on the joke, Cohen pokes, prods and enrages citizens in an attempt to reveal something humorously honest about their patience, prejudices and standards of propriety. The social critique provided by Borat’s discomfiting gags, however, never takes precedence over the outrageous hilarity of his scenarios. Whether convincing an all-too-willing group of Southern bar patrons to sing along to “Throw the Jew Down the Well” on HBO, or engaging in a nude hotel wrestling match with his obese sidekick Azamat (Ken Davitian) in Borat, Cohen’s faux-reporter is a preeminent absurdist prankster whose comedy is best summed up by his own catchphrase: Is Nice!

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Paul Clark, Leonard Pierce, Sarah Clyne Sundberg, Phil Nugent, Nick Schager

SXSW Review: “New World Order”

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 18:00:00 GMT

Welcome to the New World Order, where 9/11 was an inside job and secretive elitist organizations called the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission and/or the Council on Foreign Relations are plotting our enslavement. Our only hope is a ragtag band of conspiracy theorists, anarchists and anti-globalists, led by the mad prophet of the Info Wars, Alex Jones.

Jones launched his empire more than a dozen years ago on Austin's public access television, a haven for kooks like the guy who calmly lectured about out-of-control feminism while wearing a toilet seat around his neck. At first Jones seemed right at home, but it soon became clear that cable access couldn't hold him; his charisma was too fierce, too weird, and worse yet, every once in a while he made sense. But between brain and mouth there was no interlocutor, so although he was capable of the occasional trenchant observation about the trampling of Constitutional rights or the erosion of personal freedoms, it wasn't worth trying to sift through his elaborate stream-of-consciousness black helicopter fantasias to find them.

That is, unless you buy into the whole global conspiracy, like the subjects of this compelling new documentary from Luke Myer and Andrew Neel (Darkon). Although Jones is the central figure here, we also meet a number of his counterparts and protégés, including 9/11 "Truthers" Luke Rudowski and Seth Jackson, retired police officer and militia-based separatist Jack McLamb, and Turkish-Irish filmmaker Timucin Leflef. They have little in common besides their fiercely held belief in the New World Order.

Myer and Neel aren't concerned about the reality of these beliefs, and they don't present any counter-arguments or talking head rebuttals. They don't have to. In a way, New World Order is an extension of their previous film Darkon, which was about live-action role-playing gamers. That movie's tagline was "Everybody wants to be a hero," which could just as easily apply to this one. You don't need a Ph.D. to figure out the psychology at work here; we'd all like to think our lives our important, and if you can convince yourself that you're one of the few in the know about what's really going on in the world, one of the few fighting the good fight against forces bent on destroying you...well, then you have a lot in common with Jones, Rudowski, Jackson and the rest.

Paranoid delusions are contagious in New World Order, and Alex Jones is patient zero. Bloated almost beyond recognition from his early cable access days, his face a puffy fright-mask of popeyed outrage, Jones leads his minions to the hotel where the annual Bilderberg Conference is taking place. He sees his enemies behind every tree and around every corner - he's continually evading cars he imagines are pursuing him and at one point announces that a nearby bare-shirted bicyclist is clearly Secret Service. When a fire alarm goes off in the hotel just as he's set to call into a talk radio show, it's simply more confirmation that They're Out to Get Him. That he's living the movie in his mind is evident from the references to The Matrix, Star Wars and even Ghostbusters that pepper his rants.

It's no wonder that youngsters like Rudowski and Jackson fall so easily under his spell; they admit that before 9/11, they gave little to no thought about the larger global picture, so why wouldn't they be susceptible to a Hollywood-ready narrative that explains it all? At least Leflef actually channels his paranoia into creative work by making his own dystopian sci-fi films. The others are activists of the worst kind, the perfect storm of self-righteous certitude and blowhard ignorance. A healthy skepticism of government, institutions and the wealthy elite is a good thing, but without ever overtly passing judgment, Myer and Neel show how easily it can curdle into narcissistic rage.

Related:
SXSW Review: Roadsworth: Crossing the Line

Morning Deal Report: Calling All Ghostbusters

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 14:30:00 GMT

Summer is definitely over as far as the weekend box office is concerned. When the top movie of the week is Nicolas Cage in Bangkok Dangerous, you know things are a little slow. Taking in only $7.8 million was still good enough for first place, as Tropic Thunder fell to second with $7.5 million. The total weekend gross is expected to be around $66 million, which is what The Dark Knight was taking in at lunch hour just a few weeks ago.

Who ya gonna call? Well, if Ghostbusters is the answer, I’m not sure I even want to know the question. But Variety reports that Columbia Pictures is serious about rounding up the old gang for another round of spook hunting. “The studio has set The Office co-exec producers Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky to write a script for a film designed to bring back together the original cast of Harold Ramis, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and Ernie Hudson…The scribes just wrote Year One, a comedy that was directed by Ramis.” I can see Bill Murray being hard up for cash given the news of his divorce but, really, do they expect to be able to lure Ernie Hudson back?

Ed Norton, Susan Sarandon and Richard Dreyfus will star in Leaves of Grass. It’s not an adaptation of the Walt Whitman poetry collection, but rather “a comedic thriller actor-turned-filmmaker Tim Blake Nelson wrote and is directing.” Per The Hollywood Reporter, “Norton is portraying twin brothers, one an Ivy League philosophy professor, the other a small-time and brilliant marijuana grower. The professor is lured back to his Oklahoma hometown for a doomed scheme against a local drug lord (Dreyfuss) that unravels his life.”

Related:
Trailer Review: Bangkok Dangerous
Ghostbusters III, Sort Of

Saying Goodbye to Bernie Brillstein

Phil Nugent — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Last week marked the passing of one of the most important behind-the-scenes figures in American comedy of the last forty years, Bernie Brillstein. Brillstein, who was 77, had a rare combination of taste, people skills, and bulldozing smarts, all of which he applied to his job as an agent and manager. (He was also, not incidentally, one of the best interview subjects on the West Coast.) Eager to embody every cliche of the classic talent-agent success story, Brillstein worked his way up from the mail room at the William Morris Agency, after anti-Semitism kept him from entering advertising in the Mad Men era. ("I loved them," he later said of the WASP agency heads who advised him that he was wasting his time trying to break in, "for being honest.") While he was still at William Morris, Brillstein met his first meal ticket in the form of a gangling, painfully shy young puppeteer from the Washington, D. C. area: Jim Henson. The two were quick to recognize what each could do for the other, and after Brillstein set himself up in private practice in 1970, Henson and the Muppets were his first steady star clients. Another was Lorne Michaels, which explains not only how the Muppets came to be regular cast members during the first season of Saturday Night Live--an arrangement probably best remembered for having inspired Michael O'Donoghue's remark, "I don't write for felt."--but how Brillstein came to guide the careers of many of SNL's stars and to score producing credits on some of their biggest movie successes, including the Ghostbusters films. In 1990, he joined forces with producer Brad Grey. As packagers of talent, their TV credits would include The Larry Sanders Show, The Dana Carvey Show, NewsRadio, Mr. Show, Politically Incorrect, The Steve Harvey Show, Primetime Glick, and the Tea Leone vehicle The Naked Truth, which would go some way to balancing out the fact that Brillstein also had a hand in Alf. (Once you've made a few bucks off puppets, it's hard to go cold turkey.) He also wrote a book called Where Did I Go Right?

On Monday, clients and well-wishers got together for a memorial service honoring Brillstein, and from the sound of it, it was a suitable testimonial to a man who sounds a lot like Santa Claus if Santa would have cut your throat with a broken bottle if it were, you know, in the best interests of the talent. Describing the action, Michael Cieply reports that "Martin Short, master of ceremonies for the event at Royce Hall on the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles, set the tone when he described a man who had no enemies and always spoke well of others. 'It would be so much easier tonight,' Mr. Short said, 'if we were memorializing someone like that.'” Getting into the spirit of things, Jon Lovitz "got in his own jab at a former manager when he prayed, 'Why, why, why couldn’t it have been Marc Gurvitz?' Mr. Short, on taking back the stage, noted that the well-tanned but still portly Mr. Lovitz did not look bad 'for someone who let himself go.'”

Yesterday's Hits: Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984, Steven Spielberg)

Paul Clark — Tue, 20 May 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Written for the Indiana Jones Blogathon at Cerebral Mastication.

When it comes to enduring popularity, most of the films I’ve written about so far for Yesterday’s Hits have fallen by the wayside. They had their moments of glory, but now they’ve been cast aside in favor of films that have either aged better or simply had the good luck not to wear out their welcome too soon. By contrast, this week’s entry is a movie I’m guessing almost everyone here has seen, and which I’d venture to guess most of you own on DVD. Yet Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom often seems to be treated as the odd man out in the Indiana Jones franchise. In conjunction with this week’s release of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, I’ve tried to figure out why exactly this is the case.

What made Temple of Doom a hit?: Talk about a silly question. Raiders of the Lost Ark was the biggest hit of 1981, a hugely popular adventure that turned a whip-cracking archeologist into one of the truly iconic Hollywood characters. Raiders was a rarity, a movie with almost universal appeal, with plenty of action, a hint of romance, evil Nazi villains, far-flung locations, and a hero audiences would follow to the ends of the Earth. So it was inevitable that director Steven Spielberg, producer George Lucas, and star Harrison Ford would bring the character back to the big screen, and nearly as inevitable that the film would scare up a lot of business. And that it did, becoming the #2 hit of 1984, trailing only Ghostbusters.

What happened?: One of the cardinal rules of sequels is that it’s difficult to live up to the original, doubly so when the original film is as great and beloved as Raiders of the Lost Ark. Sure, it happens on occasion, but how often? So despite Temple’s box office, it was almost a foregone conclusion that it couldn’t match the popularity of its predecessor. Audiences still loved Dr. Jones all right, with two more sequels still to come, but most viewers today see Temple merely as a fun, well-crafted thrill ride, rather than the classic Raiders is.

Does Temple of Doom still work?: All in all, the critical rep for the film isn’t far off. Spielberg’s skill at generating excitement is as keen here as ever, but overall the film lacks the charm of Raiders. Part of the blame rests on the shoulders of Ford, who doesn’t appear to expend much effort in his performance. Especially in his early scenes, Ford seems to be acting while hung over, so bland and flat does he appear onscreen. Eventually he comes alive, around the time the action starts, but Temple was the first sign of the sluggishness that would begin to creep into his performances more and more over the next two decades.

Perhaps the most frequent criticism of the film is Kate Capshaw’s performance as Willie, and I’ve got to say I’m in full agreement with the naysayers. Granted, Capshaw isn’t entirely to blame- Willie is an extremely thin character, her distinguishing characteristics being that she’s (a) Indy’s designated love interest, and (b) not Marion. But Capshaw herself doesn’t help matters. Most of her performance consists of shrieking, whining, and bitching at Indy, but Capshaw is too prosaic onscreen to make any of it work. She’s got no style, and not much charisma. And when an actress can’t even manage to deliver the line “are you crazy?” and make it sound convincing, there’s something wrong.

But while many people are prone to criticizing Indy’s pal Short Round (Ke Huy Quan), I have to admit I’ve always liked the little guy. Whereas Willie’s presence seems to be dictated by the film’s need to have some kind of female lead, the real love story in the film is the mentor/sidekick relationship between Indy and Shorty. Look at the way Spielberg frames these two together- time and again we see Short Round patterning his behavior after his idol, and it’s he, not Willie, who ends up having to save Dr. Jones when all seems lost. True, he’s given a little too much cutesy dialogue (“hold on to your potatoes!”), but the love he has for Indy is genuinely moving in spots, and he actually gets some fighting of his own to do, while Willie stands on the sidelines and punches at the air.

When I was younger, I always found it odd that Indiana Jones would take time to hunt for a bunch of stones after he’d already discover the Ark of the Covenant. But while the MacGuffin of Temple of Doom lacks the built in mystique of Raiders’ object of desire, the relatively small-scaled quest ultimately suits the film’s storyline. The Ark is an archeological milestone, so naturally the man who found it would want to go down in history. By contrast, Temple finds its hero setting out for “fortune and glory” only to discover a more important cause to fight for in the end. Faced with personal gain, he instead decides to do the right thing to save others. It’s an old story, but done right it still works, and Spielberg and company make it work.

And of course, it’s still exciting as hell. For all the awkwardness present in the 80 minutes of the story, the last 40 minutes more than compensate. But what really puts these scenes over is how brutal they are at times. Temple of Doom is often remembered as the film that helped bring about the PG-13 rating, and even today it’s surprising how hard-hitting and violent the film is in spots. I don’t think this is an accident. Spielberg, coming off blockbusters like Raiders and E.T., was becoming ill at ease with being Hollywood’s resident family entertainer, and his darker impulses come through loud and clear in Temple of Doom. For every funny animal trick we see, there’s a genuinely scary or disturbing bit that makes its mark (Mola Ram scared me way more than Toht when I was little). And while this mishmash of tones doesn’t always work, it’s nonetheless fascinating to see. As a stepping stone in Spielberg’s attempts to grow from the blockbuster king into the cinematic Elder Statesman we know him as today, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is an key work, something one couldn’t have known way back in 1984.

Aronofsky Takes Up Residence In Riverview Towers

Andrew Osborne — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 19:00:00 GMT

If Lost is too straightforward and predictable for your television palette, take heart: The Hollywood Reporter reported last week that indie film darling Darren Aronofsky is currently developing a series for AMC, the network that's recently out-HBO-ed HBO with edgy, critically-acclaimed new shows like Mad Men and Breaking Bad.

The psychological thriller (originally an HBO project, as it happens) is being scripted by John J. McLaughlin (screenwriter of Aronofsky’s upcoming film, Black Swan) and unfolds within the titular Riverview Towers apartment complex, presumably located somewhere south of Colorado’s Overlook Hotel and Twin Peaks’ Great Northern, east of The Kingdom hospital and within shrieking distance of Zuul's old haunts, Room 1408 of the Dolphin Hotel and the building where Rosemary had her baby.

As a fan of Aronofsky’s Pi, a foe of the humorless, overrated Requiem For a Dream and an unashamed defender of The Fountain, I’m curious to see whether Riverview Towers plays to the director’s edgy, imaginative strengths or disappears up its own psychological abyss like David Milch’s recent disaster of self-indulgence, John From Cincinnati. Here's hoping for the former, although I suppose the latter could be equally entertaining in its own way.

George Miller: The Furious Multimedia Road

John Constantine — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 21:54:00 GMT

Saying that 2008 is an interesting time for visual media is an understatement. As an art form, filmmaking has never been more accessible. Making a movie is cheap and distribution is only a Youtube account away. It’s interesting then to watch the growing trend of successful theatrical filmmakers looking to other mediums, specifically video games, as a new avenue of not just business but expression. Peter Jackson’s working on multiple projects within Microsoft’s omnipresent Halo franchise, Steven Spielberg’s developing three separate games for Electronic Arts (the first of which, Boom Blox for the Wii, you can check out here), and Dan Ackroyd and Harold Ramis have beaten the ravages of aging by turning to games for a third Ghostbusters. Now George Miller, of Mad Max and Babe fame, is getting in on the action. In a series of exclusive interviews with N’Gai Croal (arguably the most important voice in games journalism and who also happens to be a filmmaker himself), Miller announced that he’s collaborating with game developer Cory Barlog on a number of new projects, the first of which being a Mad Max game that will be created alongside the long in development Mad Max: Fury Road. Barlog is most famous for his work on the God of War series that, while different in subject, has quite a bit in common thematically with Mad Max. Miller and Barlog will be working together on both film and game, utilizing the same cast for both.

What’s fascinating about this partnership is not just Miller’s interest in games as a narrative medium offering opportunities beyond film’s natural constraints but that he’s sought out a singular auteur to work with. Modern game development, as Croal discusses with both Barlog and Miller, is not unlike Hollywood sixty years ago: directors are traditionally studio employees and not independent artists for hire. This collaboration is an exciting moment for film and game alike. Plus new Mad Max! GIBSONLESS MAD MAX!

Happiness: The Video Game

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 15:55:00 GMT

It used to be a novelty worth commenting on that someone would make a movie based on a video game. Now, of course, in the Uwe Boll era, it's commonplace to make a movie out of a video-game franchise; for that matter, we also have movies based on amusement-park rides, board games, and for all we know, the lunch special at the Warner Brothers studio cafeteria. Video games based on movies are likewise no big deal anymore; any franchise picture worth its salt has a console adaptation on the shelves often before the movie actually gets made, and in at least one instance — the upcoming Ghostbusters game — the console game actually stands in place of a movie sequel.

Unfortunately, as Karina Longworth points out at Spout.com, indie films are left almost entirely out of the equation. In a highly amusing piece, she points out the notable dearth of video game adaptations based on successful independent films — and suggests ways in which this problem might be rectified.

Her online MMORPG based on Todd Solondz's Happiness seems like a real winner, especially (given that similar games like World of Warcraft are massive time- and money-pits) since she proposes that "because true, lasting happiness can never be achieved, no one can ever win and the game goes on forever." We're likewise fond of the idea of a Gummo first-person shooter with an all-black-metal soundtrack. But the best idea by far is a racing game based on Vincent Gallo's The Brown Bunny where "you're the only one on the road, and when you finish the race, instead of a trophy you get an absurdly long blow job from your dead girlfriend." Someone get Prince Vince on the line — I have a feeling he'll pay for this himself.

The Tree Of Libertas Is Watered By The Blood Of Idiots

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 19:30:00 GMT

As longtime readers will know, I am a dirty stinking liberal. I complain about the depiction of Arab terrorists in movies about Arab terrorists. I make fun of right-wing cultural pest/William F. Buckley son-in-law Brent Bozell on a regular basis for his alleged resemblance to Ghostbusters bureaucrat/asshole Walter Peck. I infiltrate conservative polticial conferences in order to take pills and mock bogus documentaries featuring Ben Stein. I think one of the most irritating things about the modern-day Democratic Party is that they pretend to care about stuff like violence in video games and smut in movies. I would rather watch Ben-Hur ten times in a row than spend five minutes hearing Charlton Heston gas on about gun control, and I'm a gun owner who hates Ben-Hur.

But let it never be said that I don't play fair. I believe in a level playing field, and I've decided that it's about time, given all the posts I've made here linking to bastions of communism like the Guardian and the New York Times, that I give some props to my favorite right-wing movie blog: LIBERTAS!

Founded as the internet component of Jason Apuzzo's Libertas Film Festival, a tiny annual symposium of conservative cinema, the Libertas blog has grown from a mere forum for right-wingers to complain that their values aren't honored by those crooked pornographers in Hollywood to a wonderful full-service site featuring movie news, reviews and writing from the perspective of angry cranks! (As an aside, Libertas and their ideological counterparts love to point to the poor commercial performance of anti-war documentaries as evidence that America isn't interested in such subversive flapdoodle. So where does that leave their claim that no one ever makes movies from a right-wing perspective?)

If you visit Libertas this very day, you'll see an exciting array of crazy cooterness: a review of Definitely, Maybe that condemns its "distasteful display of Hollywood values"; a review of Diary of the Dead that laments George Romero's "increasingly strident politics"; an article which condemns the mainstream media for failing to report Bob Geldof's recent praise of President Bush (although a quick Google News search reveals that it was covered by such non-radical papers as the International Herald-Tribune, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and Investor's Business Daily); a review which calls the new Harold and Kumar sequel "unfunny and mean-spirited" even though the reviewer has not seen the film; and a pre-emptive condemnation of Iron Man for possibly containing anti-war sentiments. Now that's good film blogging! Enjoy, folks!

Salting the Earth: Cloverfield II

John Constantine — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 17:56:00 GMT

When you make $80 million on a $30 million investment in less than two weeks, it’s understandable that you want to go back for seconds. As the ‘Grab pointed out earlier today, Paramount is already talking about making Cloverfield II: Field of Dreams with Matt Reeves.

Here’s why this is an exceptionally bad idea. Reeves already mentioned that a sequel might could focus on different perspectives of the same attack on New York. There’s logic there. There are undoubtedly other people filming the event on cell-phones and digital cameras. The problem is that the audience already knows what the monster does in New York. They know where it goes up until the climactic bombing. New York is, literally and metaphorically, done. The movie does tease that the monster survives but a sequential sequel doesn’t seem smart either. Watching the monster head upstate and start scarfing bed and breakfasts along the Hudson doesn’t sound too thrilling (maybe a little). Paramount and Reeves should sit down, savour their success, and consider how to intelligently explore what has the potential to be a lasting franchise.

Our two cents? Cloverfield is excellent genre deconstruction so there’s only one place you go next with the genre: GIANT MONSTER FIGHT! Have it fight some enormous yeti that comes out of a melting polar glacier. Or have the Statue of Liberty come to life Ghostbusters 2 style and seek out revenge. Both good ideas.

What's A Game Without Winners?

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 20:45:00 GMT

It's no secret in the entertainment industry that video games see themselves increasingly as competition for movies — and so does everyone else. They're beginning to get big-name casts like movies; they have big budgets, heavy roll-out dates, and a rigorous seasonal competition like movies; and as storytelling becomes more immersive and graphics become more realistic, they begin to resemble the moviegoing experience more and more — only when you play a game, you're in the movie in a way you can't be with an actual movie.

Beyond that, video games are starting to make money like movies — or even better. With less overhead cost, fewer production headaches, and no filming locations, a video game costs less to make; the industry hasn't yet been crippled by high-cost front-loaded deals for big-name actors and directors; and a very successful video game rollout can produce as much revenue or more than a blockbuster film. It's no surprise that, after years of dithering about whether or not to make a third Ghostbusters movie, Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis decided that the third installment of the franchise would in fact be in video game form: it would be cheaper to make, they noted, and allow them a lot more freedom for character development and a longer, funner script while at the same time making the fancy special effects magic better and cheaper.

All that the industry is really lacking is a high-profile awards show — and that's about to change. For the first time ever, the Writer's Guild of America is announcing nominations for its first-ever award for outstanding acheivement in video game writing. The nominees include TV and film writing vets like Matt Selman & Tim Long for The Simpsons Game; Sebastian Stepin for the creepy horror game The Witching; and Ed Zuckerman and Christofer Emgard for the alternate-history combat thriller World in Conflict. It's a major step forward for the legitimacy of an entertainment medium that becomes increasingly sophisticated every year but rarely gets credit for the quality of its writing.

There's only one small hiccup: thanks to the WGA strike, the awards ceremony for the video game prize is likely to be cancelled in its first year.

Trailer Review: Highlander the Video Game

John Constantine — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 23:18:00 GMT

While the Screengrab typically restricts itself to the realm of non-interactive cinematic pursuits, we think this teaser trailer for a new Highlander property is just the sort of entertaining genre nerdery that deserves special notice. Highlander joins Ghostbusters as a film franchise that’s leaving theaters for the greener pastures of video games, where aging stars aren’t a concern and your entire budget is devoted to special effects. Feel free to insert your own “There can be only one!” joke into the convenient comments section below.

Thanks to Kotaku for the spot.

Morning Deal Report: Ghostbusters III, Sort Of

Peter Smith — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 16:00:00 GMT

Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis are writing a Ghostsbusters videogame, and Bill Murray and Ernie Hudson are on board. It's not Ghostsbusters III, but it's something.

John C. Reilly will play a vampire.

As you may have heard, the ever-entertaining Sylvester Stallone has been working on an Edgar Allen Poe biopic. Now rumor suggests Viggo Mortensen may star.

— Peter Smith