The Screengrab : good will hunting

The Hype Report: "Esquire" Reporter Falls Into '90s Time Warp, Catches a Ride with Ben Affleck

Phil Nugent — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 17:00:00 GMT

Tom Chiarella's profile of Ben Affleck for the April issue of Esquire might best be explained as an attempt by the magazine to keep its discontinued "Dubious Achievements" feature by other means. Topped by a headline describing Affleck as "A Smart, Talented Man Trapped in Lindsay Lohan's Life", it begins with a scene of the reporter in a car with his subject after the subject has picked him up, always a sure sign that what the writer most wants to convey in this piece is the message, "Mom! Fill-in-the-blank [name of celebrity] hung out with ME, in a CAR, and HE drove!!" There's just one spot of mold on the six foot hoagie that is Chiarella's life: Affleck picked him up in a loaner. But Chiarella makes lemons with it, seizing this sour persimmon as an excuse for him to dazzle the reader with his deductive skills and ability to buffalo his way into the mind of his superstar quarry: "For some reason Ben Affleck doesn’t want me to see his car. So he's picking me up at my hotel in a new hybrid sedan. White. Nice car but distinctly anonymous, devoid of detail, interior unblazoned by the obvious signifiers of a personal life. A fitted Red Sox cap on the floor and his BlackBerry — that's it...We both know this is a tell that the guy doesn't want to show me anything he doesn't have to." Chiarella doesn't take it personally, because he knows that Affleck is besieged in his everyday life by "sweatpants-wearing, camera-wielding, junior-college-dropout paparazzi"--those other guys who document the lives of celebrities for a living. Chiarella finished junior college, by God! And to prove it, he paints a vivid man-crush prose poem of Affleck, that recognizes that the key to Ben's awesomeness is how much he superficially a regular guy, only better, right? "He's both jumpy and liquid in his movement. He carries himself as if held together with kite string, which means he looks at once crinkly and cool. Jeans, no belt, plain-Jane sneakers, a black long-sleeved T-shirt. And he looks a little more fragile than you'd expect, like a guy thinking about his persistent back pain. The effect: He walks light on the depthless veneer of the world, here on this lambent late afternoon at the joining edge of Beverly Hills and Culver City, where and when the house shadows always insinuate a little doom to me." "Lambent" is the present participle of lambere, i.e., "to lick." I looked it up.

"I'm fresh off four days in Las Vegas," Chiarella writes with an eagerness to share his personal information with the reader that marks him as one of those exciting "New Journalists" the kids are talking about, "just coming into the shallow end of my hangover, feeling as spiritless and empty as the very car we're riding in." (You're not bored with the car stuff yet, are you? That tree has not yet begun to be tapped.) Chiarella aches for his new friend, "Ben Affleck, the one guy in the world who should own this particular geography. But being out in the world hurts him a little. That's what Affleck shows." Like Anthony Quinn in Lawrence of Arabia, he has riches and yet he is poor, because he is a river to his people. He is the only man alive who can never pull himself back from the ledge of despair by reminding himself that if he just hangs on long enough, he may yet once again enter a movie theater and restoreth his soul by gazing on the unparalleled beauty and life force of Ben Affleck. (Well, except for blind people. And those who are technically living but in comas. And those folks you read about in the Post sometimes who are too fat to squeeze through the doors of their homes. But then, they might get to see him when the movies make it to cable.) And then Affleck turns his eyes on his interlocutor and interrupts his reverie by telling him, ""You need to eat." It is just the first insight of Affleck's that reveals that he understands his passenger, and that he cares whether or not he dies of malnutrition while in his care. Upon learning that Chiarella spent four days in Vegas, Affleck sympathizes: "Man, you stayed there too long." There's a lot of Yoda in Ben Affleck.

This stuff would be pretty funny if Chiarella were hanging out with Nelson Mandela, but what makes it priceless is that he's advertising how starstruck he is by Ben Affleck, a man whose dozen or so years in the limelight have a clear, commonly shared arc in terms of public perception. When he first broke through in 1997, partly through his starring role in Kevin Smith's Chasing Amy, but mostly as Matt Damon's co-star and Academy Award-winning screenwriter on Good Will Hunting, Affleck was greeted as a major star, every girl's dream date, and a classy creative presence--he could write! Hollywood, and the entertainment media, very, very much wanted to treat him as a big deal, deserving of box office, respect, awards, and Gwynneth Paltrow. It would have taken a lot of very lazy performances in especially cheesy movies to turn that around, and Affleck was more than happy to oblige. Armageddon, Pearl Harbor, The Sum of All Fear, Paycheck, Gigli, Daredevil--those are just the high-profile cow turds, and while there are lots of stars who've struggled to keep their good name while making bad movie after bad movie, one of the great constants of Affleck's terrible movies was how frequently he was the worst thing in them. By 2003, when New York Times critic A. O. Scott wanted to indicate that Edward Burns's performance in the movie Confidence did not make him prime Golden Globe material, he wrote that Burns was "so glib and lazy as to make Ben Affleck look like the young Dustin Hoffman."

Now, Affleck pulled out of it a couple of years ago--not by improving his acting, but by stepping behind the camera and directing a very good version of a Dennis Lehane novel, Gone Baby Gone. More power to him--everybody loves a good comeback story. But what's amazing, and a little disturbing, about Chiraella's mash note is that he doesn't seem to know what is known to everyone who, at some point between Shakespeare in Love and Smokin' Aces, picked up a copy of People in a hair salon in North Carolina. To him, Affleck is and always has been "that Boston guy, the man's man, the guy who tore off three of the best monologues in movie history — at the end of Good Will Hunting, in a cameo in Boiler Room, and at the climax of Chasing Amy — man-o-logues, transformative, deconstructible speeches that speak right into the skull box of the self-aware. They are what you remember about him. Not J.Lo. Not Gigli. Not his dim pass in Jersey Girl. Affleck the writer, once a cat-around guy, still a seriously good cardplayer, and now the emergent actor-director of his generation. He's hard on the heels of Gone Baby Gone, a film so provocative in its moral questioning, so deep in the tissue of a Boston neighborhood that it made Scorsese's much celebrated The Departed look genteel and chockablock with its crank-up-the-Goodfellas intensity. There was one great movie about Boston a couple of years ago: It was Affleck's. And he wrote it, adapted it from Dennis Lehane, with a friend from high school. He is a man's man, a friend's friend." He and Damon go way back too, of course. It's hard to know too much about Affleck without starting to wonder if maybe his greatest talent--unless you can call having a face a talent--was for making the right friends in high school.

"When we dropped the car, a guy at the valet stand took out his camera phone and asked, just by poking the camera in the air, a gesture that didn't exist ten years ago, Can I have your image to carry in my pocket?" I guess we could have had the gesture ten years ago, but it seemed prudent to wait until camera phone technology was more widely disseminated. I probably only imagine that a vote was taken at some point. "Affleck squinted, dipped his head. He gives in to this outside world — Yes, take my image — but it does not interest him to see it." Of course, he has easier access to his image than the rest of us, assuming that there are reflective surfaces in his home. "He grinds things"--eyeglass lenses? spare keys? his teeth?--" as he speaks, winnows details, finds a thread and pulls it. He speaks in runs, funny, at times halting, always bearing in on a cleaner, more relevant point. This tends to lead him to the larger issues of his work, his career, his path through life. And although there's nothing obviously self-possessed about him, his answers always take the shape of a metaphor for himself." Reading this, many readers will wish that Chiarella had filmed Affleck while he was talking, and gridning and winnowing and finding and pulling, and posted it on YouTube. Chiarella may have thought that would cross a line, but instead, as a fun party game, he proposes a way for the reader to pretend for a few seconds that he is Ben Affleck: "Look at this next passage, for example. Read it aloud and you will automatically sound like Ben Affleck. I typed it carefully, direct from the tape, leaving out no stutter or fragment. Read it with speed, with considered imprecision, as if what's occurring to you might really lead you to the next point. Replace calculation with momentum. Speak a little quicker at the end of sentences; be excited as you near conclusions." Sing out, Louise! Smile, baby.

It's no small offering Chiarella offers the common man, this chance to sound like Ben Affleck, especially when he's "not throwing a bunch of monkey shit against the actor wall to see what sticks. He's taking a boilerplate, stupid, out-of-the-gate question on my part and road-mapping his psyche with the answer." But Chiarella does himself an injustice by denigrating his own question; clearly, Affleck was impressed with his new friend, and felt that he was right to let him inside his life, because after they split up and were trading e-mails, Affleck took pity and sent him a detailed description of the inside of his real car, the one that Chiarella was not privileged to ride inside. I'm sure that he knew that he'd done the right thing to entrust this information to Chiarella when he cracked open his copy of Esquire and saw that the hellzapoppin author actually used the term "man-o-logue" twice! Here's hoping he copyrights it before it spreads.

Take Five: Van Sant

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 21:30:00 GMT

Gus Van Sant is certainly one of the most curious figures in contemporary American cinema. He pioneered a very specific breed of indie filmmaking before it even had a name, but his forays into mainstream cinema have alternated between clever successes and embarrassing failures. He gives some of the oddest interviews in Hollywood (compared to him, David Lynch is a downright pedestrian chit-chatter), and he's as dedicated to constant reinvention -- or at least refinement -- as anyone in the industry. And his career would seem downright schizophrenic if it weren't so marked by intensely personal qualities; he's done everything from big, Oscar-baiting biopics (such as Milk, his take on the rise and demise of openly gay San Francisco politician Harvey Milk) to small, artsy, improvised tales with almost no commercial potential. He's equally capable of having his characters spout unadulterated Shakespeare and having them say nothing at all for endless minutes of screen time, and make both choices seem perfectly natural. He has a curiously critical eye towards his own work -- that is to say, it's not curious that he is self-critical, but rather it's curious how much he talks like a film critic; many of his longer discussions with journalists have sounded more like a well-informed film critic discussing Gus Van Sant's work than it does a director talking about himself. His stabs at mainstream credibility have yielded decidedly mixed results; his successes have been noteworthy (see below), but his failures, especially flattened-out duds like Finding Forrester and Good Will Hunting, and an utterly pointless remake of Psycho, have been spectacular. Through it all, he's remained one of the film industry's hardest men to figure out, but it seems no one ever tires of watching what his next move will be. Here's five of our favorites by the Prince of Portland.

MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO (1991)

Mala Noche was the movie that made the underground sit up and take notice of Gus Van Sant's talent; Drugstore Cowboy won over the burgeoning indie world and made him a critic's darling. But the daring, explosively risky My Own Private Idaho was the movie that convinced me that I was seeing the work of an American genius in the making. The story of two sad, sincere male hustlers (played by River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves), it blended elements of Shakespearean drama, class warfare, transgressive queen cinema, and pure street poetry in a way that so clearly shouldn't have worked that it's downright amazing how well it did. Van Sant crammed the movie with real characters from his beloved Portland and made an intensely personal film that nonetheless hit everyone who saw it right where they lived.

TO DIE FOR (1995)

Gus Van Sant's first stab at commercial credibility was Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, which, despite a plethora of good intentions, was his first major dud. In fact, its ineptness in spite of itself might be noted as a pattern that the director would follow in much of his mainstream work, if it wasn't for the existence of his follow-up film, To Die For. Working from Buck Henry's sharpest, nastiest script in decades, Van Sant directs a movie that almost invisibly echoes some of the themes of his previous work, especially in those scenes featuring lovestruck, dimwitted local teen Joaquin Phoenix and his crew. Van Sant rarely overreaches, and manages to let the black comedic tone of the script do its work; his greatest accomplishment is to get a truly memorable performance out of Nicole Kidman, who's better here than she would be again for some time.

GERRY (2002)

In 2002, Van Sant was on the tail end of a bad time. Hollywood hadn't been good to him over the previous half-decade, but to be fair, he hadn't been very good to it, either, with Good Will Hunting, Psycho and Finding Forrester gunking up his resume. Returning to his strange interiors for another shot at indie filmmaking, he released the first of his "Death Trilogy", the underrated Gerry, and a lot of critics were ready to call it his fourth disaster in a row: it's static to the point of tedium, its improvised dialogue (by two actors not especially beloved by highbrow reviewers) was sometimes silly and sometimes impenetrable, and it had nothing resembling a plot. But Gerry was a quiet triumph, a movie that builds almost unnoticably and marks a return to greatness by a director who can do very much with very little.

ELEPHANT (2003)

Van Sant followed up the surprising and effective Gerry with the triumphant Elephant, the best film of 2003. The second of his death trilogy takes an almost transcendently naturalistic look at a small high school on the day of a Columbine-style murder spree; the dialogue, again largely improvised, and the endless, unintrusive tracking shots make Elephant a brilliant contradiction: a movie so banal that it's almost mystical. Through the whole event, from boring ordinariness to life-shattering violence, Van Sant's particular genius is to steadfastly refuse to lead the viewers to anything resembling an explanation for the horror. Forcing us to view everything from the eyes of those who don't understand why they have to die, Elephant reflects our own maddening desire to have random violence made explicable -- and the world's refusal to comply.

PARANOID PARK (2007)

A strangely stirring and deeply affecting film, 2007's Paranoid Park -- based largely on a successful young adult novel -- finds Gus Van Sant returning to Portland and making a key transition from the relentlessly bleak indie sensibilities of the Death Trilogy to the artsy mainstream appeal of Milk. Once again trusting an amateur cast (many of whom were recruited off of MySpace) and a good deal of improvised dialogue to carry the tone of the film, Van Sant also lays in a heavy, dark directorial touch that nails the mood of the story perfectly. He's greatly aided in this attempt by the gorgeous cinematography by Wong Kar-Wai's cameraman, Christopher Doyle, and the Zoo-York-clad Gabe Nevins as the affectless skateboarding protagonist. Paranoid Park is a perfect bridge between To Die For and Elephant.

Related Posts:

Screengrab Review: Milk

Gus Van Sant and Paranoid Park: 'It's the End of a Certain Way I Was Making Films'

21 Stars We Hate (Part One)

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

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

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

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

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

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

SHIA LABEOUF

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

ROBIN WILLIAMS

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

EWAN McGREGOR

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

CLINT EASTWOOD

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

NICOLE KIDMAN

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

Click Here For Part Two, Part Three & Part Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

In Other Blogs: List-o-Mania

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Our “In Other Blogs” survey team has been working around the clock to determine exactly how best to serve you, the “In Other Blogs” reader. The results are in, and it turns out: you like lists! This works out well for us, since our research also indicates that other blogs love to run lists. Here’s a roundup from the week in ranking pop culture ephemera.

Spout offers up both the 5 Best and the 5 Worst Directorial Sellouts of All Time. Any such “worst” list seems incomplete without Francis Ford Coppola’s Jack, and it’s hard to view Michael Moore’s Canadian Bacon as a sellout since nobody was buying. We can't argue with Finding Forrester, though. “After the huge success of Good Will Hunting, Hollywood would let Gus Van Sant make anything he wanted. Unfortunately it was a shot-for-shot remake of Psycho, which was deemed the biggest-budgeted experimental film of all time. When that deservedly tanked, Van Sant went for this, his real sellout.”

The sci-fi blog io9 presents 15 Great Movies You Didn’t Know Were Science Fiction. After reading the list, we still don’t know about most of them. For example, the 1992 undercover cop thriller Deep Cover apparently qualifies simply because it contains “a fictional designer drug created by a combinatorial chemist.” And consider us decidedly unpersuaded by this argument for Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai: “He's a black samurai who works for the Mafia, and he communicates via carrier pigeon. He clings to the Bushido, the way of the Samurai, in the midst of a world of randomly murderous thugs, and seems to have almost superhuman fighting abilities. Plus he can communicate somehow with his friend who only speaks French. (Telepathy?)”

While we’re in the science fiction realm, how about Mahalo’s list of the Best Evil Robots? Of course, the T-1000 and Mechagodzilla are given their due, but we’re more impressed by the inclusion of the grotesque Bicentennial Man. “I defy anyone to watch the trailer for Bicentennial Man without feeling your soul in peril. Not only is Bicentennial Man singlehandedly responsible for destroying Robin Williams' career, but it's just plain evil through and through. Director Chris Columbus must be a sick, depraved individual to have thought: ‘Hey, I think I'll follow up on Mrs. Doubtfire with a sequel of sorts. Except instead of a cross-dressing man invading the privacy of his ex-wife's life, I'll have a robot, played by the same actor, infiltrate a family! Over the course of 200 years, he can trick everyone into acknowledging him as a sentient being, all the while waiting and biding his time, trying to marry the youngest daughter of the family! Then when that doesn't work out, I'll have him fall in love with her daughter!’”

Finally, someone calling himself the Sports Blawger weighs in with the Top 10 Guy’s Guy Movies. Most of his choices are what you’d expect: The Great Escape, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and The Dirty Dozen are perennial favorites at the Screengrab’s Manly Man Movie Night gatherings. But Mr. Blawger’s top choice has us questioning his usage of the phrase “guy’s guy”: “300 has freaking awesomeness all around it. The Spartans were history's original guy's guys. Spartans would look at today's metrosexual ‘guys’ with contempt, and then stab them through the stomach with their spears so they would die the slow and painful death they deserve. Spartans don't get manis and pedis. Spartans exist for one reason: to be AWESOME. Is there anything that says ‘guy's guy’ than 300 guys armed with only swords and spears, protected by only helmets and shields, destroying a million man army?” He forgot to mention all the glistening hairless chests.

Gus Van Sant and "Paranoid Park": "It's the End of a Certain Way I Was Making Films"

Phil Nugent — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Sam Adams writes in The Los Angeles Times that Gus Van Sant sees his new film, Paranoid Park, as "a transitional film, moving him once again toward the mainstream." The first thing to say about this is that, compared to the so-called "Death Trilogy" of films that Van Sant has made since 2002 (Gerry, Elephant, and Last Days) while under the influence of director Bela Tarr, he may be right. The second thing is that Van Sant's notion of the mainstream and Michael Bay's may barely be on speaking terms. It's not clear that it has all that much in common with the Van Sant of Good Will Hunting or Finding Forrester, either. The new movie differs from his other recent work in that it had an honest-to-goodness script (based on Blake Nelson's young adult novel). But as Mike D'Angelo noted here recently, it has many of the trademarks of Van Sant's forays into experimental filmmaking: nonlinear storytelling, long, long takes, even oddball music choices. The teenage skateboarder hero, who is carrying a secret that's killing him inside, strolls down a high school corridor on his way to a sit-down meeting with a police detective as Billy Swan's lovably woozy "I Can Help" ("It would sure do me good/ To do you good") wobbles on the soundtrack.

Back in the late 1980s, Mala Noche and Drugstore Cowboy made Van Sant the great hope of the indie movement before the movement itself really had a star system and an identity. After the ambitious My Own Private Idaho, his adaptation of Tom Robbins's Even Cowgirls Get the Blues turned out to be the kind of disastrous conflagration that can turn a filmmaker's reputation to ash in one puff. Even those who thought the director needed to re-invent himself were surprised at how thoroughly he dug in as a Hollywood pro, first with the commercial-indie black comedy To Die For and then with Good Will Hunting and Finding Forrester. If Van Sant sees these kinds of films as marking distinct stages in his career — he has said that with the Death Trilogy and Paranoid Park he has reached "the end of a certain way I was making films" — he's always worked hard at doing the best job he can and is fluid in his notions of what collaborators belong on which projects. Harris Savides, his cinematographer on Gerry, Elephant, and Last Days, first teamed up with him on Finding Forrester. Now they're working together on his next movie, Milk, starring Sean Penn as the martyred, openly gay San Francisco politician Harvey Milk, a large-scale period drama that will give the director the chance to recreate San Francisco in the 1970s, in the first full glow of gay liberation — what Van Sant himself describes as "the creation of a gay class of people, from nothing, or from a subclass that was below the surface." The new project, the realization of a long term dream of Van Sant's, returns him to the general subject of Elephant, et al. — death in the public sphere — with a "more conventional" storytelling approach, but for Van Sant, conventionality remains something with which he has to make his uneasy peace. "You can never really get there," he says of such concepts as "the real" Harvey Milk, "So you might as well have an analogy rather than a biographical depiction."

And the ReOscar Goes to…Peter Fonda?

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 17:00:00 GMT

While we’ve been busy with our spreadsheets and slide rules, trying to figure who the big winners will be come Sunday night, Time’s Richard Corliss is just getting around to giving his picks for the 1998 Oscars. No, Corliss hasn’t slipped through some sort of wormhole in the space-time continuum. Instead he’s presenting Time’s First Annual Re-Oscars.

The premise is that the Academy may have occasionally made a mistake or two over the years, a controversial notion we’re nonetheless prepared to embrace. "What we're offering is a second chance at the Academy Awards handed out on March 23, 1998," Corliss writes. "To a lot of people, the record eleven Oscars that James Cameron's Titanic lapped up that night were suitable acknowledgment of a much-loved movie that quickly became the top box-office attraction in film history. We're asking how Titanic, which was named the Best Picture of 1997, and the performances that won in the four actor categories have stood the test of time. And we're answering: Eh, not so well."

If your memory of the films that challenged Titanic for Best Picture that year is a little shaky, we don’t blame you. Somehow we’d forgotten those timeless classics As Good as It Gets and The Full Monty were nominated as well, although with guns to our heads we probably could have guessed Good Will Hunting made the final five. Given those choices, we’ll go along with Corliss’s selection of L.A. Confidential as the first Re-Oscar winner, although his reasoning is a little shaky: “A guilty secret of film criticism is that reviewers often lavish their fondness on modern versions of the kinds of genres they don't make any more. Thus The English Patient, a film in the David Lean epic tradition, was my choice for best film of 1996. L.A. Confidential is a time trip back to the period in which it's set, the early '50s, when film noir (as the French called Hollywood's crime dramas) argued that postwar optimism was a lie — that brutality and betrayal lurked around the every city street corner, where the cop on the beat might also be on the take.”

Corliss also reminds us of one of the laziest Academy decisions in recent memory: Jack Nicholson winning his third Oscar for his Jack Nicholson-esque performance in As Good as It Gets. "Nicholson had lost an Oscar a few times when he deserved one: in Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces and especially Chinatown, a great performance that lost to Art Carney's turn as a lonely older guy with health problems in Harry and Tonto. . . Chalk up Nicholson's third Oscar as an early Life Achievement Award." Instead, Corliss chooses to recognize Peter Fonda’s nearly forgotten turn in the all-around understated Ulee’s Gold. Hey, we’re happy for him. For the rest of the ReOscar roster, click here.