The Screengrab : harvey keitel

That Guy! Special "Godfather" Edition, Part Two

Phil Nugent — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 16:00:00 GMT

This week, "The Godfather--The Coppola Restoration", a DVD and Blu-ray set consisting of newly remastered editions of the three "Godfather" films directed by Francis Ford Coppola, hits the stores. To honor the release of the home video set, That Guy!, the Screengrab's sporadic celebration of B-listers, character actors, and the working famous, is devoting itself this week to the backup chorus of these remarkable films.

RICHARD CASTELLANO: Squat, fat, and fleshy, Castellano casts a broad shadow as the loyal Corleone lieutenant Clemenza. Castellano, who is said to have ad-libbed his best-remembered line--the sage advice, "Leave the gun, take the cannoli."-- makes such a strong impression in The Godfather, and is so memorable because of his work in it, that it's kind of dumbfounding to realize how little else he left behind on film. After almost a decade or so of small parts in movies, TV, and the theater, his big break came with a role in the Joseph Bologna-Renee Taylor play Lovers and Others Strangers; he was nominated for a Tony Award for it, then won an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor when he recreated his performance for the movie version in 1970. His breakout success as Clemenza led to a string of starring roles in failed TV sitcoms (The Super, Joe and Sons) and supporting roles in Godfather knockoffs, such as the TV movies Incident on a Dark Street and Honor Thy Father (based on Gay Talese's nonfiction bestseller) and the short-lived dramatic series The Gangster Chronicles. Castellano maneuvered himself out of what should have been his one sure shot at a triumphant follow-up, in The Godfather, Part II: Francis Ford Coppola wrote him out of the screenplay after being confronted with what he felt were unreasonable demands involving salary, script approval, and other perks. It's easy to understand how Castellano, after slogging away in the business for so long, would find it hard not to pass up a chance to demand a little star treatment when he felt he could get away with it; it's just as easy to understand how Coppola, who already had his plate full with the million other details to the enormous production that demanded his production, would feel inclined to tell this ego-tripping fat load to take a walk. Castellano made his last film appearance in 1982 and died six years later.

MICHAEL V. GAZZO: In The Godfather, Part II, Michael Corleone has a moment where he tells the aging gangster Frankie "Five Angels" Pentageli how glad he is that his old family house "never went to strangers. First Clemenza took it over, and then you." Thus with one speck of throwaway dialogue did Francis Ford Coppola make his one gesture to filling in whatever happened to Clemenza after Michael's ascension to the throne. After things didn't work out with Richard Castellano, Coppola was obliged to create a new character and assign to him the function in the sequel that he had planned for Clemenza: that of the leftover representative of the old ways turned alienated betrayer. It put Gazzo, the man brought in to play the part, in a tough situation: he couldn't very well do an impression of Castellano, but he had to build from scratch someone who the audience could respond to with the same kind of affection that they would someone they remembered fondly from the first movie. Gazzo, with his walrus mustache, friendly gravelly croak, and effusive but elegaic manner, actually managed to pull this off, helped by a wonderful entrance scene where he begs for a drink of water from a garden hose and then reveals that he's not too big a man to put up with Fredo's company for a few minutes. Although Gazzo, a graduate of the Actors Studio who went on to form a West Coast theater workshop in his own name, had done some acting going back to the 1950s--he's an uncredited bit player in On the Waterfront-- before he played Pentageli, he was best known for writing the "I-was-a-Method-dope fiend" play A Hatful of Rain. (He would eventually get to adapt that text for the movies, and also worked on the script for the Elvis Presley vehicle King Creole.) Godfather II effectively made him America's favorite aging goombah; it left him all but guaranteed of steady work, especially on TV, where he usually played characters whose last name ended in a vowel and who could be counted on to at some point deliver a variation on the line, "I want this Kojak/Baretta/B.J. and the Bear problem taken care of!" His second most notable movie role was in James Toback's 1978 directorial debut, Fingers, where he was funny and poignant as a whipped, washed-up loan shark who is treated protectively by his violently unhinged son, played by Harvey Keitel. He died in 1995.

BRUNO KIRBY: The son of the actor Bruce Kirby, Bruno Kirby was the epitome of the potato-faced, fast-talking, New York-honking character guy whose specialty was amusing audiences while appearing to drive everybody who has to share a screen with him right up the wall. At his most high-profile, he was the kind of actor who gets to play sidekick to the kind of actor--such as Billy Crystal in City Slickers or Albert Brooks in Modern Romance--who had to produce or direct the movie in order to star in it. Perhaps his best, most weirdly typical role was in "The Gas Man", an episode of the TV series Homicide, in which he played an embittered ex-con who was twisted and ambitious enough to plot a baroque plan for the detective (Andre Braugher) who'd put him away but not quite mad enough to carry through on it when he had the chance. In The Godfather, Part II, the most handsome item on his resume, he's thoroughly un-typical: cast as the young Clemenza, and billed as "B. Kirby, Jr.", he's not immediately recognizable in his padded suits and with his Italian accent, which inhibits him from doing his customary high-pitched jabbering. But many years later, he'd get to bring his customary type into the Corleone's world through the side door when he was cast as helpmate to Marlon Brando in his mock-Don Vito role in the 1990 comedy The Freshman. Kirby died from complications from leukemia in 2006.

Take Five: Bad Cops

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 20:15:00 GMT

Neil LaBute's new movie, Lakeview Terrace, opens this Friday. Critical opinion is still split, but critical opinion will have its say soon enough about whether the director is returning to the promising form he showed in In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors, or whether he's just cranking out a cheap thriller because he wants to buy a new boat. Lakeview Terrace finds Samuel L. Jackson, Hollywood's default angry black man, in the role of a mean-tempered, menacing L.A. cop who takes offense to an interracial couple (played by Patrick Wilson and Kerry Washington) who move in next door to him. The idea of crooked cops has always been an appealing one to people who write thrillers; the idea of the very people charged with protecting the innocent being the ones who might hurt them has powerful appeal, and plenty of filmmakers -- Alfred Hitchcock comes immediately to mind -- have put their ambivalent feelings about the police front and center in their movies. By the same token, however, due to the strict content restrictions of post-Code Hollywood, it was a taboo subject for decades; with very few exceptions, a crooked or evil cop was one of the very few things it was absolutely verboten to show on screen. When the code era passed, almost as if to make up for lost time, dozens of scriptwriters and directors began to explore the idea of the cop who betrayed the ideals he was sworn to uphold, and the bad cop genre was born. Here's five of the best.

THE ASPHALT JUNGLE (1950)

John Huston's masterful ensemble picture about a daring, carefully calculated jewel theft gone awry is one of the greatest noir films ever made, with an incredible cast (headed by Sterling Hayden as the iron-willed thug Dix Handley and Sam Jaffe as the brilliant crook Doc Riedenschneider) and a taut, fatalistic atmosphere that keeps you glued to the screen. But it's also a fine example of how movies had to creep around the concept of the bad cop at the height of the Hays Code: although it's made clear that Barry Kelley's Lt. Ditrich is on the make, and that his accepting bribes from hoods helps crime flourish, the idea of a crooked policeman being so plainly presented ran afoul of the Code. So a scene was filmed in which his incorruptible chief set him on the straight an narrow, and the end coda assures the viewer that such crooked cops are an aberration that will always be found out and punished, rather than the norm.

THE GODFATHER (1972)

The Hays Code had been more or less dead in the water for a dozen years by the time Francis Ford Copolla started filming his epic American gangster movie, and those dozen years had seen a lot of wearing away of the notion of the policemen as a friendly, helpful, vigilant and unimpeachable protector of the innocent. But a few taboos still remained on screen, and The Godfather did its not insubstantial bit to overcome them. In the course of the Corleone family's conflict with the slimy drug dealer Virgil Solozzo, Tom Hagen warns that "The Turk" cannot be gotten to because he enjoys the protection of New York police captain McCluskey (played by Sterling Hayden, acting the flip side of his Asphalt Jungle character) -- and that it is simply not done to kill a cop. When young Michael Corleone, who had previously been the victim of McCluskey's bullying, argues "Where does it say you can't kill a cop?", and points out that Hayden is a dirty cop on the make with his fingers in the drug racket, he's not just talking to the family -- he's talking to the audience.

MANIAC COP (1988)

William Lustig's bizarre little thriller, combining traditional police thriller elements with a sadistic slice of slasher-era horror, was the last movie you'd expect to start a franchise. But so it did, and in the the process launched the career of the hulking, iron-jawed Robert Z'dar. The sequels are generally not worth watching, but the original Maniac Cop -- in which a serial killer dressed as an NYPD patrol officer starts preying on innocent victims -- it a remarkably tight and rather exciting (if extremely lurid) piece of cinema that more than justifies its cult reputation. As a director, Lustig doesn't waste time or film, and the movie carries on at a deadly, involving clip; it's abetted by tons of fine performances from respectable character actors like Sheree North, Bruce Campbell, and original That Guy!/friend of the Screengrab Tom Atkins.

BAD LIEUTENANT (1992)

Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant was, at the time of its release, what it still is today: an atom bomb of bad-cop movies. Harvey Keitel, at the peak of his "I must appear naked in every movie I make" phase, plays a nameless New York police detective who is far and away the worst portrayal of a policeman in cinematic history: a brutal, violent drunk, a drug addict, a crook, a thief, a gambling addict, and a whoremonger. But this isn't just shock cinema: Keitel's Lieutenant is not just the worst big-screen cop imaginable, he's also, in many ways, the most complex. Ferrara throws Keitel into a deep, dark hole because he wants to show him the way out of it. Bad Lieutenant is a terrific film, which is why the as-yet-unconfirmed rumors that Werner Herzog is going to remake it with Nicolas Cage in the title role are so bewildering.

TRAINING DAY (2001)

Antoine Fuqua's nasty 2001 Los Angeles gang story hasn't held up spectacularly well in the years since it was made. Co-star Ethan Hawke seems out of place; the plot doesn't hold up particularly strongly, the tone wanders all over the place, and though it's quite well made, it's never spectacular. What does hold up, however, is Denzel Washington's electrifying performance as Alonzo, a narcotics officer so deep on the take that he barely recognizes -- or cares -- what side he's on. In the annals of crooked cop movies, it stands alongside Harvey Keitel's Bad Lieutenant, and skillfully illustrates the way that a bad man can justify his evil by thinking that he's doing good. The role earned Washington his second acting Oscar and his first Best Actor; though he'd deserved it for Malcolm X, this was no mere compensatory gesture, but a well-earned recognition of a stunning performance.

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The Rep Report: August 21--27

Phil Nugent — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 23:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: It's that time of year--the humidity-soaked dead space between the last of the real summer movies and the first of the autumn "serious" pictures--where unexpected flurries of stray weirdness count for a lot even in repertory programming. Starting August 21 and running for a week, Anthology Film Archives digs deep into the seamier recesses of the nostalgia glands for a celebration of New York vigilante movies from the 1970s and 1980s. including the official kick-start to the genre: Michael Winner's Death Wish, with Charles Bronson in his most archetypal role, and a movie that Jeff Goldblum (who made his screen debut with a five-second appearance as one of the caterwauling thugs who fuck up Chuck's wife and daughter) has been apologizing for ever since. The schedule also includes Abel Ferrara's moody, arty-looking bloodbath Ms. 45, which is notable for its wordless star performance by the beautiful and doomed Zoe Lund, who would later write Ferrera's Bad Lieutenant under the name Zoe Tamerlis. (She also appeared in that film as one of Harvey Keitel's drug connections. Zoe Tamerlis Lund died in 1999, of a heart attack brought on by cocaine use, at the age of 37.) The schedule also amounts to the closest thing you're ever likely to see to a William Lustig Festival. Lustig, the subject of a new interview in the New York Press, directed the 1988 Maniac Cop (which was written by Larry Cohen and boasts one of the all-time classic B-list casts of its era: Tom Atkins, Bruce Campbell, Sheree North, Richard Roundtree, William "Big Bill" Smith, and the cruelly-underappreciated-by=everyone-except-Larry-Cohen Laurene Landon) and its sequel Maniac Cop 2 as well as the 1983 Vigilante. (Say what you like about Lustig, nobody can accuse him of going in for opaque, misleading titles.) Vigilante, which stars Fred Williamson and my man Robert Forster, has an impressive back-up choir itself in Richard Bright, Joe Spinell, Woody Strode, Joseph Carberry, Rutanya Alda, and Steve James, a talented performer who died young after practically taking out a patent on the category "Action Hero's Sidekick, Black Male." There are people who actually watch the Times Square scenes in Taxi Driver and tear up from thinking about the "good old days." They'll be squeezing them into the theater with a crowbar.

The dog days are also a great time for rummaging in the career of actors who had such long and busy careers that they can to be part of the landscape and rediscovering what they were like when they were walking cult items. The Brooklun Academy of Music is having a three-day Richard Widmark festival from August 25 through the 27th, and the inclusion of the London-set Night and the City makes it an event. This febrile yet moving noir was directed by Jules Dassin, who as it happens died this past March, as did Widmark himself, when both men were in their nineties. Neither ever did better work than they did here.

Take Five: Gotta Get A Guru

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 19:55:00 GMT

Mike Myers' not-so-glorious return to the big screen, The Love Guru -- also known as Austin Powers IV and Verne Troyer's Pleading E-Mails Finally Pay Off -- opens everywhere today, and critics couldn't be more disappointed. Not only is it reported to be low on laughs, it's also being criticized as being high on stereotypes; despite his alleged friend and idol Deepak Chopra coming to his aid, Myers has been attacked for his stereotyping of Asian Indians and his portrayal of a cartoonish, caricatured guru. But let's face it: Hollywood has always loved its gurus, spiritual masters, and wise old mystics from the subcontinent. Hardly had the Beatles falled under the influence of the Maharishi than Hollywood followed suit; here's a look at some of the more memorable wise men of the East that the movie business has given us.

THE LOVED ONE (1965)

One of the few countercultural satires from the 1960s to hold up in the modern era, Tony Richardson's The Loved One holds up for two reasons: first, it was based on an Evelyn Waugh novel from nearly two decades prior and isn't quite as tarred, as a result, by the hippie-dippie vibe of its time; and second, it's got an impeccable crew behind the camera, from Richardson to cinematographer Haskell Wexler to skilled, hip screenwriters Christopher Isherwood and Terry Southern. This satire of capitalism run amok in the funereal industry crams so many jokes into its two-hour running time that it's almost impossible to keep up with them all, but make sure you don't miss gravel-throated character actor Lionel Stander as the Guru Brahmin, one of the first-ever big-screen gurus -- and one of the first to be portrayed as a bumbling fraud.

CANDY (1968)

This big-screen adaptation of the Mason Hoffenberg novel (actually the infamous Terry Southern writing under a pseudonym) is generally regarded as a major failure. It's not that there weren't talented people involved -- besides Southern himself, and his co-writer Buck Henry, the cast is crammed with fine actors -- but the entire film seems to go off the rails from the very start. That doesn't mean, though, that there aren't plenty of bizarre treats for those with the energy to sit through it. This updating of Voltaire's Candide is purely Southern in the sense that authority figures are always portrayed as phony, venal, and couching some grotesque habits or appetites. In this instance, we're treated to the the sight of the monstrour Grindl -- a sex-crazed Hindu guru played by an overheated Marlon Brando -- putting the poor, put-upon Candy in yet another compromising position.

THE PARTY (1968)

All right, so technically, Peter Sellers' Hrundi V. Bakshi ("That is what my name is called") in the Blake Edwards farce The Party isn't a guru. (That title more rightly belongs to Chauncey Gardiner, the character played by Sellers in 1979's Being There.) But he is Indian, sort of, and he does speak in Hindi platitudes that those around him mistake for pearls of inscrutable eastern wisdom. For example, when asked who he thinks he is, he responds, "In India, we do not think who we are. We know who we are." Whoa, heavy. The rest of the movie is pretty much straight-up Blake Edwards comic fare, and it falls flat on the stereotypes at times, but a few scenes are still paralytically funny forty years later, especially when a stoned Bakshi comes across a parakeet cage and solemnly intones the name of the birdseed: "Birdy Num Num."

THE HOLY MOUNTAIN (1973)

In this stunning, surreal, and nearly incomprehensible masterpiece by ultimate provocatuer Alejandro Jodorowsky, the guru is Horacio Salinas, a Christlike thief who is half savior and half mountebank. Under the tutelage of the Alchemist, a mysterious figure played by Jodorowsky himself, he and his gang of mystical banditos -- each named for a different celestial body -- plan nothing less than an assault on Heaven, where they will depose the reigning gods and take their places. Visually, this is exactly the sort of film people talk about when they talk about crazy European art films: it's bewildering, deliberately offensive, totally impenetrable, and weird for the sake of being weird. It's also absolutely brilliant, and Jodorowsky -- who's the real guru here -- shows us what it might be like inside the mind of the truly enlightened -- and it alternately makes us gasp at its beauty and scares the hell out of us.

HOLY SMOKE (1999)

Jane Campion's weirdest movie -- which, if you think about it, is really saying something -- features the always-engaging Kate Winslet in the role of a young woman who decides to embark on a quest for spiritual self-discovery in the Indian subcontinent. Along the way, she encounters the guru Chiddaatman Baba (played by Dhritiman Chatterjee) and falls under his sway -- and that's just where the movie begins. From there, she is confronted by Harvey Keitel as a deprogrammer -- sorry, "cult exiter" -- hired by her family to get her back, and discovers that he's not without his own guru-like tendencies. A battle of wills, intellects and bodies ensue over the terrain of feminism, spirituality and sexuality, and the movie degenerates into a bit of a chaotic mess, but it's at least a glorious mess with two terrific actors like Keitel and Winslet at the fore.

Werner Herzog vs. Abel Ferrara: Round 2

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 13:00:00 GMT

Last time we checked in with the developing saga of Werner Herzog’s planned remake of The Bad Lieutenant, the original film’s director, Abel Ferrara, had extended his best wishes for a fruitful collaboration between Herzog and star Nicolas Cage. Either that or he wished they’d die in Hell, I forget. Herzog himself has been mum on the subject, but now he’s broken the silence to clear the air. Or something like that.

Ostensibly interviewing Herzog about his new documentary about life in Antarctica, Encounters at the End of the World, those pranksters at Defamer couldn’t resist asking a few questions about the Bad Lieutenant remake. First of all, says Herzog it’s not a remake. “It's like, for example, you wouldn't call a new James Bond movie a remake of the previous one — although the name of the bad lieutenant is a different one, and the story is completely different.”

While Harvey Keitel’s tormented cop roamed the streets of the New York, Herzog has a different setting in mind. “And it's going to be in New Orleans, which is a fascinating place. Part of it was the decision of the producers for tax incentives — which is totally legitimate. However, I thought to myself: ‘We have seen a lot of New York in movies; we have not seen New Orleans in feature films.’ Or very few feature films. After Katrina it's a particularly interesting set-up.”

As for Ferrara, Herzog is delighted with the angry auteur’s wish for his fiery demise, although he professes not to actually know who he is. “Maybe I could invite him to act in a movie! Except I don't know what he looks like.”

So let’s see if I’ve got this straight. Herzog’s remake is actually a continuation, except it’s a different cop with a different name in a different city, but aside from that, it’s actually a franchise akin to James Bond. I think I’m more interested now. But I’m not sure.

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Abel Ferrara Would Like Werner Herzog and Nicolas Cage to Please Die in a Fire

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 27 May 2008 15:30:00 GMT

When we first brought you the news of Werner Herzog’s planned remake of The Bad Lieutenant starring Nicolas Cage, we wondered whether the director of the original version, Abel Ferrara, was cool with his intensely personal vision being monkeyed with. Now we have an answer, which appears to be: not so much.

According to Spoutblog, Ferrara addressed the issue during his Cannes press conference for his latest effort, Chelsea on the Rocks. “Ferrara twice talked about Werner Herzog’s alleged Nicolas Cage-starring remake of his Bad Lieutenant,” writes Karina Longworth, “once in response to a question from a reporter, and once just because he apparently felt like he needed to vent. First, Farrara tagged a comment about the remake on to his answer to a question about working outside the Hollywood system. ‘As far as remakes go, Harvey [Weinstein? Not mentioned in this Variety story in connection to the project. Keitel, who starred in the original? Hmmmm....] begged me not to say anything mean, or stupid. [pause] But I wish these people die in Hell. I hope they’re all in the same streetcar, and it blows up.’”

So yeah, he seems pretty cool with it. Later a reporter mentioned the remake and Ferrara responded, “It hasn’t been remade yet.” When told that it would be, he said, “Don’t count on it.” Could there be litigation in the future? But they’ve already gone to the trouble of making this handsome poster!

When Good Directors Go Bad: Rising Sun (1993, Philip Kaufman)

Paul Clark — Fri, 23 May 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Normally, I try not to get hung up on whether a movie is commercial. While it’s undeniable that films that are intended for a large audience have to satisfy a different set of expectations than those that aren’t, I generally do my best to consider the movie based on how well it succeeds in doing what it sets out to do. However, it’s undeniable that some filmmakers have sensibilities that are well-suited to commercial filmmaking, and others who don’t. Some of our best filmmakers (like Martin Scorsese) are even able to move back and forth between big-budget filmmaking and more personal work. Others have a harder time with it. One director who falls into the latter category is Philip Kaufman, and nowhere is this more apparent than his 1993 film Rising Sun.

Rising Sun was based on a novel by Michael Crichton, whose work was experiencing a surge in popularity in the early nineties. Crichton’s novel combined the ever-popular murder mystery genre with the then-current topic of Japanese encroachment on the American business market. Rising Sun wasn’t one of Crichton’s best novels, but there was potential there for an interesting film, and the choice of Kaufman to direct was inspired. Kaufman had been working for almost three decades, directing eccentric twists on popular genre films like 1972’s The Great Northfield, Minnesota Raid and the 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. But his best-known work came in the 1980s, with his rich adaptations of tricky works of literature including The Right Stuff, The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Henry & June.

It’s clear from Kaufman’s pedigree that Fox was looking for a classy, A-list adaptation of Crichton’s bestseller. However, I’m not sure classy was the way to go with Rising Sun. This is a story that incorporates such elements as boardroom intrigue, high-tech surveillance, the Japanese “shadow world” of Los Angeles, and a woman who gets off on being asphyxiated. Yet Kaufman directs the film like it’s high drama. The result is lifeless and inert. And if there’s one thing you don’t want in a movie where a character eats sushi off a woman’s bare breasts (with a nipple/sake chaser), it’s inertia.

But if Rising Sun is a washout as a guilty-pleasure entertainment, it’s just as uncompelling as an exposé of Japanese culture. When it was first published, Crichton’s novel drew fire from Japanese-American groups for its portrayal of their business culture as being ruthless and conniving. But even when I saw the film back in 1993, most of the more shocking details seemed pretty quaint. Granted, some of the more supposedly anti-Asian elements were toned down for the movie, but no matter which form it took, Rising Sun had surprisingly little insight into Japanese culture that hadn’t been expressed in a more interesting way elsewhere.

Which leaves us only with the murder mystery, which offers few surprises. Early in the film, Sean Connery’s wise Capt. John Connor tells Wesley Snipes’ Lt. Web Smith, “When something seems too good to be true, then it’s not true.” Not particularly sage advice, but apparently advice that was heeded by Kaufman, Crichton, and co-screenwriter Michael Backes. Why else would they waste almost an hour setting up an obvious decoy villain? Once it becomes clear that the film is content to cycle through every twist and turn we expect from it- the fake villain, the heroes getting thrown off the case, the ugly revelations about their pasts, the emergence of the real villain, and so on- all that’s left is counting down the minutes between “surprise” revelations. And at 129 minutes, that’s a lot of counting.

Kaufman has always had a knack for casting, and in 1993, a movie top-lined by Connery and Snipes still qualified as an A-list production. For his part, Snipes is pretty solid in the film. I’ve long believed Snipes to be undervalued as an actor, due first to his career long being mired in forgettable action fare, then more recently because of his legal problems. Web Smith isn’t a great part- certainly not as flashy as his supporting role in Mo’ Better Blues- but he does all he can with a character who’s essentially playing straight man to Connery. I especially like his slow burn moments, when he tries desperately to maintain his cool in the middle of confounding and/or ridiculous circumstances. Crichton objected to Fox’s casting of Snipes in a role that was written as white man, but I think that it works here, giving the film a complicated yet sympathetic lead in a way that grounds the story.

Connery, on the other hand, is content to coast through the film, propelled largely by his own presence. Crichton famously wrote the role of John Connor especially the Scots legend, but both the character and the performance are something of a dud. Connery’s role consists primarily of being right all the time and deigning to offer advice to those less enlightened than he. Unfortunately, this arrogance extends to the performance itself, with Connery (who also executive-produced) putting forth no more effort than necessary to earn his pay.

What’s more, Kaufman and Crichton take every opportunity they can to underline exactly how wise Connor is, most notably by pitting him against vulgar anti-Japanese Lt. Graham (Harvey Keitel), who refers to the Japanese as “nips” and decries their presence in this country. Unfortunately for the film, Keitel’s live-wire performance upstages Connery’s self-important one, with Keitel getting almost all of the best lines (my favorite being his declining of an offer of sushi: “no thanks. If I get a craving for mercury, I’ll eat a thermometer”).

When I look at Kaufman’s filmography, I can’t help but marvel at some of the novels he’s adapted for the screen. After all, here’s a guy who has successfully adapted some near-unadaptable material, including books by Tom Wolfe and Milan Kundera. Who would have thought it would be Michael Crichton who would defeat him? But just because Crichton’s books seemingly adapt themselves doesn’t mean that Kaufman was the right director for the job. As a director who specialized in literate fare, scenes like the one in which Wesley Snipes is attacked in the middle of a raid by an irate nude woman just aren’t in his wheelhouse. Unfortunately, Rising Sun was the beginning of a downturn in Kaufman’s career, leading first to the respectfully yet hardly enthusiastically-received Quills seven years later, then another misguided commercial project, Twisted, in 2004. Hopefully, one of his announced upcoming projects- perhaps his proposed Nicholas Ray film Interrupted- will get him back on track.

Werner Herzog’s Very Bad Idea

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 14 May 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Werner Herzog is remaking The Bad Lieutenant with Nicolas Cage. I can’t stop him.

According to Variety, “Nicolas Cage will star in an updated version of 1992's Bad Lieutenant with Werner Herzog directing, Edward R. Pressman producing and Avi Lerner's Nu Image/Millennium Films financing.” How many red flags can you possibly cram into one sentence? First and foremost, Lerner is the schlockmeister behind the recent Al Pacino fiasco 88 Minutes and Pacino’s upcoming re-teaming with Robert De Niro, Righteous Kill, as well as the latest Rambo reboot. His slate of upcoming productions is crammed with remakes and sequels, including yet another Rambo, re-launchings of both Conan and Red Sonja, Undisputed 3 (there was an Undisputed 2?) and the long-anticipated-by-someone Poe biopic written and directed by Sylvester Stallone.

He also produced The Wicker Man remake, which presumably is where Nicolas Cage comes into this. Well, I already knew Cage was shameless. I just want to know how Herzog got roped into the project. As described by Variety, the original 1992 Bad Lieutenant “followed the depraved New York police officer of the title, who was heavily involved in drugs, gambling, sex and stealing; the pic received an NC-17 rating.” That’s sort of putting it mildly. Love it or hate it, Lieutenant was an intensely personal vision from writer/director Abel Ferrera, with a truly out-on-a-limb performance from Harvey Keitel. It would hardly seem to be remake fodder, anymore than say, Eraserhead or Herzog’s own Aguirre: The Wrath of God. Would Herzog really be okay with Abel Ferrara remaking that? For all I know this project may have Ferrara’s blessing, and it’s not that I’m such a huge fan of his anyway, but something about this just reeks of crossing a line that ought not be crossed. This doesn’t help: “The new script's penned by Billy Finkelstein, a TV writer with credits on Murder One, Law & Order and NYPD Blue.”

Hopefully Herzog will have an announcement of his own soon. I’d love to know what he’s thinking.

Clique Picks “Hick” Flick

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 18:30:00 GMT

Normally I wouldn’t consider this the most newsworthy item in the world, but for some reason I just couldn’t resist that headline. Anyway, according to the Hollywood Reporter, “Producers Steven Siebert and Christian Taylor have optioned the best-selling novel Hick by first-time author Andrea Portes.” It’s a coming-of-age story that “was recently named among the best adult books for high school students by the School Library Journal.” The most curious part of this story is the note that the producers “hope to mold the project with a lead character in the vein of Addie Loggins of Paper Moon and Iris Steensma in Taxi Driver. " Whoa, whoa, time out here. That’s a mold? Addie Loggins, as we recall, was a scrappy little Depression-era con gal. Iris Steensma was a Times Square hooker who blew Harvey Keitel. Might want to narrow down that casting call, folks.

While we’re here, let’s take a look at some other recent script sales of note:

-- Columbia has picked up Battle: Los Angeles, “a huge event movie that can be done at a modest scale,” according to producer Neal Moritz. It focuses on one Marine platoon in the midst of an alien invasion.

-- Fanboys screenwriter and personal friend of the Screengrab Ernie Cline, who has certainly suffered enough, got a bit of good news. He’s sold his script Thundercade to Lake Shore Entertainment. It’s another idea right in Cline’s pop culture wheelhouse, concerning “a video game junkie facing a midlife crisis who learns that a young punk had broken a record he set as a teen. He and two lifelong friends embark on a quest to reclaim his place in video game history and win the world's ultimate gaming championship, Thundercade.” Lest you suspect Cline of ripping of The King of Kong, be advised that Thundercade actually predates the documentary (and with any luck will torpedo the ill-advised fictional remake).

-- And finally one that really hits us where we live. MGM picked up Bobism, “in which a shy college kid learns that his blog will be the basis for a utopian society in 1,000 years. He also finds out that aliens from the future want to kill him and prevent that utopia from happening.” You laugh, but this actually happened to us.

The Ten Best Murderous Duos in Movies, Part 2

Phil Nugent — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 21:30:00 GMT

Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson) & Vincent Vega (John Travolta), PULP FICTION (1994)

For all the talk about the brilliance of Quentin Tarantino’s filmmaking, his resurrection and reanimation of ‘70s pop culture, and the way he redefined the crime drama for a postmodern generation, there’s a profound misunderstanding of why his two most famous creations – the black-suited hitmen Jules Winnfield and Vincent Vega – are so enjoyable to watch. It’s not the hip pseudo-philosophical dialogue; it’s not the bad-ass speechifying; it’s not even the rapport between Samuel L. Jackson and born-again-hard John Travolta that makes Jules & Vincent so downright charming. No, what really makes them work is that Tarantino manages to do what no one else had ever done: he transformed the story of two murderous assassins into an engaging workplace comedy. When you get right down to it, Jules & Vincent are just two working stiffs whose job happens to be a tad idiosyncratic. When they’re not filling some rip-off artist full of hot lead, they’re just like any two likeable jerks at the office or factory of your choice: they swap vacation stories, they get annoyed at each other’s long-established social tics, they blame each other for workplace fuckups, they laugh at each others’ jokes, they eat junk food together at break time, and they drive around aimlessly between jobs trying to think of something to do, whether it’s fall in love with the wrong girl or have a profound religious awakening. For all the goofy trappings, from the automatic weapons to the mysteriously glowing box to the wallet that says BAD MOTHERFUCKER, we relate so strongly to Jules & Vincent because, despite their bloody way of making a living, we recognize in them the comfortable familiarity of workplace ritual. If anyone tells me that their scenes with Harvey Keitel’s Mr. Wolfe are anything but extremely well-done sitcom detritus, we'll call them a liar to their face.

Ray (Billy Bob Thornton) & Pluto (Michael Beach), ONE FALSE MOVE (1992)

One of the scariest of the many scary moments in Carl Franklin's modern backwoods noir (which Thornton co-wrote) comes when the intelligent and more calculating member of the duo, Pluto, instructs the more volatile Ray not to flip out when they're stopped by a highway cop: "We don't want to kill him if we don't have to." Ray takes Pluto's advice on this one because he understands that Pluto is smarter than he is; it's not as if the idea that there might be reasons not to simply kill someone who poses an inconvenience to him is something he understands on any deeper emotional level. Both men are prepared to do whatever it takes to keep them free and on the move, and to pick up a little scratch on the side as they go, and both are useful to the other, though it's Pluto's genius for sizing up a situation and deciding that it's time to wipe somebody out that keeps them free and on the move for as long as they are. The fact that they're a biracial team adds sauce to the mix, even as the redneck live wire (with the black girlfriend from the South) and his cucumber-cool partner resist the urge to ever acknowledge it.

Sappensly (Robert Webber) & Quill (Gig Young), BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA (1974)

If Fante and Mingo had lived to middle age, smartened up their wardrobes, and gone freelance, they might have ended up like these guys. Alfredo Garcia, a bizarre modern Western with white men in suits, equipped with planes, cars, and machine guns, tearing around Mexico in search of a guy's rotting melon that has a million dollar bounty on it, is the director Sam Peckinpah's scurviest film, a response to Hollywood's refusal to let him make the kind of movies he wanted to make, and Sappensly and Quill are probably meant as his fuck-you note to the studio executives he regarded as no better than manicured hyenas, gutless wonders, amoral killers. Peckinpah always had conflicted feelings about his characters and everything else he put on screen, and there's an unexpected, and unexpectedly affecting moment, when Quill is killed; Sappinsly looks at his body, utters his name in a voice cracking with grief, and then turns his gun on the movie's hero (Warren Oates) in what may be a desperate need to lash out at a world in which he's suddenly found himself alone or what may be a gunman's (successful) bid for suicide, forcing Oates to put him out of his misery. It's the closest thing to a moment of warm feeling in the movie.

Mr. Wint (Bruce Glover) & Mr. Kidd (Putter Smith), DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER (1971)

Neither of these guys looks like much of a threat; in fact one of them looks like the love child of David Crosby and Gallagher. (Putter Smith, who made his film debut as Mr. Kidd, made only a couple of other films and is actually best known as a jazz bassist. Bruce Glover played one of Jack Nicholson's "associates" in Chinatown but may now be best known as Crispin Glover's father.) Yet they manage to achieve memorability just on the basis of their archness, and for serving as the James Bond series' concession to the value of teamwork. Oddjob or Jaws would probably beat the shit out of either of them if one tried to sit at next to him in the villains' commissary, but so long as they stick together, respect must be paid: you never know what one of them might be up to behind your back while you're throttling the other. As for the homoerotic element alluded to elsewhere in this feature, it's there for sure, but it's best to not dwell on it, and not just because nobody wants to picture these guys kissing. (And make no mistake about it, we don't just mean that nobody wants to picture them kissing each other.) For all its charms, the Bond series has seldom been out front in terms of images of social progress, and the close-up of Mr. Wint appearing to leer pleasurably as Sean Connery literally shoves a bomb up his ass is not 007's proudest moment.

Eric (Eric Deulen) & Alex (Alex Frost), ELEPHANT (2003)

Standing in marked contrast to most of the murderous duos on this list are the teenage killers in Gus Van Sant’s impenetrable, elegiac evocation of the Columbine massacre, Elephant. Though one of them shares a name with the real-life Colorado school shooters, it’s not by design; like most of the characters in the film, actor Eric Deulen lends his name to his creation. Alex (played by the revoltingly compelling Alex Frost) is the dominant member of the twosome, plotting the massacre during class and delivering its terrifying final lines, but unlike most big-screen killer combos, there’s nothing flashy, clever or even wickedly likable about Eric & Alex. Though their actions are, in the end, far more costly in human lives than other big-screen killers, they are meant to be neither nightmarish horror-film bad-asses or appealing anti-heroes. In keeping with the tone of this wonderful, frightening film, they are ciphers: we know little more about them when the movie ends than we did when it began, and it’s easy to see that Van Sant made the movie not to explicate Columbine, but to mock our pretense that Columbine was explicable. A number of viewers detected an element of homophobia in the scene where the two kiss in a shared shower, but Van Sant no more suggests that repressed homosexuality is to blame for the boys’ rampage than video games, social isolation, or any one of a dozen red herrings he throws out. We greedily devour every one, so hungry are we for some hint, any hint that such a horrid, pointless waste of human life must have an explanation, any explanation. But in the end, we are left only with a lot of bodies and a pair of enigmas. That’s murder for you.

— Paul Clark; Phil Nugent; Leonard Pierce

Click here for Part 1.

The Movie Moment: Taxi Driver (1976, Martin Scorsese)

Paul Clark — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Of all the great films I’ve written Movie Moment pieces about thusfar, Taxi Driver is almost certainly the most celebrated. In fact, it’s been a canonical classic for so long that it’s hard to imagine what it’s like to see it fresh, to say nothing of trying to describe what exactly makes it great to those who haven’t seen it. As with all the great masterpieces of cinema, there’s a temptation to shrug and say that it exists on its own terms, but that would be selling the film, and director Martin Scorsese, short. Taxi Driver is made from many of the same components as a number of films from the period, but what distinguishes it from more routine violent dramas of its time is that it’s primarily a character study. Paul Schrader's screenplay and Scorsese’s direction follows Travis Bickle (played by Robert DeNiro) almost every step of the way so that we feel like we’ve walked in his shoes.

Scorsese uses a number of techniques, both subtle and obvious, to convey this feeling. At various points in the film, we hear Travis in voiceover, reading his letters or discussing his plans with no one in particular. Scorsese also uses numerous shots taken from Travis’ point of view, as he silently stares at suspicious characters. But Scorsese finds a way to return to Travis even in the scenes that aren’t necessarily focused on him. There’s an early scene in which we meet Cybill Shepherd and Albert Brooks in a campaign headquarters. The two of them talk, joke around, and obviously enjoy each other’s company. But eventually the conversation turns, as Shepherd notices a strange man parked in a taxi outside the building. Of course, it’s Travis, who’s been watching them the entire time.

Just as interesting is the way Scorsese shoots the conversations in which Travis is actually involved. On first viewing, it appears that Scorsese uses a lot of shot-reverse shot setups to shoot these dialogue exchanges, no different than most other Hollywood movies. But look again at the way these shots are framed- while the shots of the other people talking are invariably positioned over Travis’ shoulder, the inverse is rarely true. Travis is almost never absent from the frame, and although the space he’s given by Scorsese is usually entirely his own, he also intrudes on the spaces of the other characters.

It's because of this that a late scene between the 12 ½ year-old prostitute Iris (Jodie Foster) and her pimp Sport (Harvey Keitel) comes as such a surprise. Prior to this scene, we’ve only seen Iris and Sport through Travis’ eyes, and our experience with them echoes his. We see Iris merely as a poor young girl stuck in a miserable life and yearning to be rescued, as when she runs into Travis’ cab one night and demands to be taken away. Similarly, we only see Sport as an irredeemable monster who handles her roughly and sells her underage body to the johns with a filthy salespitch.

And then the scene begins. Sport and Iris are alone in Iris’ room, shortly after Iris has had breakfast with Travis. She begins to express doubts about her life, and talks about maybe wanting to get out. Rather than flying into a rage as one might expect from a street corner pimp, Sport instead tries to comfort her. He tells her, “I don’t want you to like what you’re doing. If you like what you’re doing, you wouldn’t be my woman.” He then puts on some music and holds her close to him, softly whispering in her ear.

It’s a pretty good scene, but what really makes it work is the point where the viewer begins to wonder, “where’s Travis?” And for good reason- this is the first and last scene in the movie in which Travis is not present. So what’s going on? It’s hard to believe this is all in his imagination- Travis is the sort of person who sees himself as a white knight, and no white knight would think to imagine his target as a gentle comforter and protector of young girls.

If anything, this may be the closest the film comes to feeling objectively “real”- that is, unfiltered through Travis’ mind. In Travis’ simplistic worldview, there are women crying out for him to save them, and men who stand in his way. This exchange between Iris and Sport stands in sharp contrast to his worldview. Granted, this is probably as good as it gets between them, but their relationship isn’t nearly so simple as Travis imagines them to be. When talking to Iris over breakfast, Travis insists that Sport is a scumbag and a killer, whereas Iris seems amused when she talks about Sport, like he’s a big brother to her. But Travis refuses to believe any differently than he already does, and it’s fitting that the tender moment between the two comes to an abrupt halt when Scorsese cuts to Travis firing his gun directly toward the camera.

The climax of Taxi Driver has a sad inevitability, as Travis decides to “save” Iris by brutally killing Sport and his associates. In the middle of the carnage, all Iris can do is recoil and scream out for him to stop, but Travis can’t see the horror in her eyes, merely the mission he feels he has to carry out. How does she feel about what happens? The film never says. But I think it’s telling that once she’s been returned to her parents, it’s her father who thanks Travis for what he’s done, and not Iris herself.

The Ten Best Cussing Scenes in Movies, Part 1

Phil Nugent — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 14:55:00 GMT

Back in 1970, Pauline Kael, reviewing Robert Altman's M*A*S*H, praised it for its "blessed profanity" and wrote, "I salute M*A*S*H for its contribution to the art of talking dirty." (Altman's father reportedly put it another way, warning members of the family to stay away from the theaters because "Bob made a dirty movie!") There's been a lot of cusswords under the bridge since then, so much that when a playwright-turned-moviemaker such as Martin McDonagh gives his actors some floridly profane lines to speak, it isn't even worth a concerned piece in the Arts & Lesiure section from the kind of writer who'd pitch a fit if language half as dirty turned up on one of his kid's rap CDs. So when somebody has managed to distinguish himself by cussing in a movie in a way that stays with you, a salute is in order. Andrew Dice Clay, watch and learn.

GONE WITH THE WIND (1939)

It may not seem like such a big deal now, but seen in context, at the end of a big old-style Hollywood movie, spoken by Clark Gable in response to a tearful lover's plea, it's easy to imagine what a shocker it must have been at the time. God knows that, sixty years later, my own grandmother was just starting to recover from the shock. You can just see the fabric of civilization starting to come apart.

THE BAD NEWS BEARS (1976)

Kids love to swear. I'm sorry, parents, but it's true. Your little angel is/has been/will someday soon be a potty-mouth. The first phase of cussing is the most innocent one: you know the words are taboo, but have no idea what most of them mean. You never really think through the implications of calling your best friend a "pussy-eating cocksucker" – you simply don't have all the information you need to understand how wrong it is. The thrill comes from learning and then repeating the words, and for us kids who came of age in the 70s, The Bad News Bears was an invaluable resource. Hearing obnoxious little Tanner describe his teammates as "a bunch of Jews, spicks, niggers, pansies, and a booger-eating moron" was liberating not because we were a bunch of racists, Nazis and boogerphobes, but because we knew we'd just learned some new words our parents would kill us for saying. And there's still no more triumphant sentiment in the history of sports movies than Tanner's final kiss-off: "Hey Yankees – you can take your apology and your trophy and shove 'em straight up your ass!"

FULL METAL JACKET (1997)

The training sequences at the beginning of Full Metal Jacket are so famously vulgar, intense and energetic that once they’re over, the air sort of gets let out of the movie for the entire middle passage and doesn’t pick back up until the end. For this reason, it’s often considered a lesser Stanley Kubrick film, which is somewhat unfair; there’s a lot to like about the movie even once Private Leonard Lawrence and Gunnery Sergeant Hartman exit the stage. But oh, that opening sequence! As Hartman, character actor (and actual Marine Corps sergeant) R. Lee Ermey works in obscenity the way that Picasso worked in paint; so staggeringly awful (and hilariously funny) are his vulgar degradations of his raw recruits that by the time he has his final confrontation with Private Pyle, no one in the audience has any trouble believing that someone would want to shoot him. Although Ermey has tried to claim credit for many of Hartman’s lines, what he really brings to the role is the pitch-perfect delivery; most of the lines are taken directly from Gustav Hasford’s novel The Short-Timers, on which the movie is based. There’s a telling moment early in Hartman’s tirade where he singles out Pyle for abuse, after he has committed the crime of laughing at his obscene explosions, but it cuts directly to the heart of the matter: as violent, hateful and repulsive as the sarge’s speeches are, they’re also incredibly amusing. His recruits don’t have the luxury of laughter, but we do.

NETWORK (1976)

In the first on-air flip-out scene by Peter Finch's Howard Beale, the newly fired newsman gazes serenely into the camera and promises to shoot himself on the air because he just can't take "the bullshit" anymore. The real punch line came a couple of years after the movie premiered in theaters, when it was first shown on network TV. CBS, eager to show that they were in on the joke, allowed Beale's supposedly unbroadcastable "bullshits" to go throw uncensored. Bravo! But the scene was followed by one in which the movie's executives gather to discuss what just happened, and they are a foul-mouthed crew. And the soundtrack, on TV, turns into a veritable conga line of bleep!s.

TAXI DRIVER (1976)

"You never had no pussy like that. You can do anything you want with her. You can come on her, fuck her in the mouth, fuck her in the ass, come on her face, man. She get your cock so hard she'll make it explode. But no rough stuff, all right?"

On one level, it's the world's filthiest sales pitch, a street-corner pimp's patter for the passing johns who want to buy what he's selling. But consider the line that precedes these:

"Man, she's twelve and a half years old."

With those eight simple words, Sport's routine becomes something totally different, and altogether more chilling, thanks in no small part to Harvey Keitel's performance. Screenwriter Paul Schrader originally wrote Sport as African-American, but with Keitel standing in that doorway instead of, say, one of the gentlemen Travis sees at the Belmore Cafeteria, the scene takes on a different tone altogether. What might have been written as a scary, foreboding conversation now comes off as almost genial, with Keitel joking around with Travis' squareness before launching into his prepared monologue. It's an inspired touch by Scorsese and his actors, and one that ultimately makes the scene even creepier. It's not simply that Sport is selling wayyyyyyyyy underage girls to passersby, but that it's no big deal to him. In his mind, he's just catering to demand – after all, if nobody paid for twelve-and-a-half-year old prostitutes (it's the "and a half" that makes the line extra-creepy) he wouldn't need to sell them, right?

– Paul Clark, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak

Click here for Part 2.

Long Live the New Flesh!: Top 12 Real Bodily Transformations on Film, Part 2

Peter Smith — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 22:00:00 GMT

RENEE ZELLWEGER in BRIDGET JONES'S DIARY (2001) and BRIDGET JONES: EDGE OF REASON (2004)

Was it 20 pounds she gained? Was it 30? Sure, it's one thing when a guy decides to pack on some extra weight for a role, but when Zellweger decided to beef up to play the title role as Helen Fielding's zaftig, romantically-challenged heroine — on two separate occasions, no less — you'd have though from the reaction that her sacrifice was the cinematic equivalent of Ronnie Lott cutting off the tip of a finger to play in a football game. Her rounder figure — along with a surprisingly decent British accent — helped make Zellweger more convincing in the role, but here's the depressing reality: even at somewhere between 140 and 150 pounds, she wasn't exactly outside the normal, healthy body weight for a woman of her size and frame. No wonder the character is so screwed up.

KEANU REEVES in LITTLE BUDDHA (1993)

Don't laugh. Seriously. The idea of Keanu playing Siddhartha in Bernardo Bertolucci's epic about the life of the Buddha has fueled many a one-liner (though let it be noted that since then the actor has played a rather surprising number of Chosen Ones, so obviously Bertolucci was on to something). Perhaps it was in anticipation of such skepticism that Reeves went all-out for the role, actually choosing to not eat for a lengthy period of time to better recreate the image of Siddhartha after his momentous fast. Indeed, if more people had seen the movie, they might have garnered more respect for the young actor. You thought this dude was thin before? Check him out here.

SYLVESTER STALLONE in COP LAND (1996)

When an actor feels pressured to live up to his own image (forty-eight vials of human growth hormone, anyone?), is it surprising that the public was so resistant to seeing him at less the perfect physical condition? With his legacy as Rocky and Rambo firmly (get it, firmly) established, movie goers expected "Sylvester Stallone" + "cop" to equal "muscles" + "action." Stallone gained forty pounds (mmm, IHOP…) and accepted SAG minimum to play the role of the shy, gentle, hearing-impaired cop Freddy, but the public just wouldn't embrace him that way. Even a cast rounded out by De Niro, Keitel, and Liotta — and pumped up by a Miramax hype machine which had just recently become fully operational — couldn't force the film into viewer's hearts. It was a risk Stallone needed to take as an actor, but with five kids, a wife, and a magazine launch to support, he ultimately returned to his free weights and the franchises that made his fame and fortune.

PETER O'TOOLE in LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (1962)

In Nicolas Wapshott's snippy biography of the legendary Peter O'Toole, the author claims that producer Sam Spiegel and director David Lean pressured the actor into getting a rhinoplasty to narrow his nose, in order to more closely resemble his character in Lawrence of Arabia. While it's indisputable from photographic evidence that O'Toole did indeed get some work done on his booze-reddened honker around this time, it was likely his own decision — even leaving aside the fact that it's an awful lot to ask of someone to get elective surgery to play a single role, how dedicated to verisimilitude could Lean and Spiegel have possibly been? After all, O'Toole, at nearly 6'3", was a full ten inches taller than the diminutive T.E Lawrence, but it's not very likely that David Lean asked his leading man to get his shins lopped off for the role. Still, as physical transformations go, it might not have been the most dramatic, but its occurrence in such a big movie with such a big star is noteworthy, coming only a few years after Charlton Heston was being sponged down with bodypaint to play a Mexican in Touch of Evil. Goodness knows what they would have asked of Marlon Brando if he'd gotten the part; Anthony Perkins, who was also considered, probably would have required a full Adam's apple transplant.

GEORGE CLOONEY in SYRIANA (2004)

New York Times reviewer Manohla Dargis once wrote that, by roping Brad Pitt into the Danny Ocean movies, George Clooney relieved himself of "of the burden of being the most beautiful man in the room." It is a burden that Clooney has happily relieved himself of whenever possible. In the ensemble-cast political drama Syriana, which he co-produced, Clooney plays one of those intelligence experts who knows more than anybody else about what's going on in the Middle East but cannot get any of the higher-ups to listen to him because his gruff manner and realistic views harsh their buzz. To play the part, he let his beard grow out and gained just enough weight to take himself out of the "Hell-lo, gorgeous!" league. The change gives him an air of authentic-seeming physical discomfort, which pays off brilliantly in the scene where he fluffs a job interview and the in the image of him, shirtless and barefoot, regaining consciousness on a bathroom floor after torture: he looks painfully vulnerable but too pathetic to bother killing off. The experience seems to have served him well; in the current Michael Clayton, in which he plays a big law firm's unloved, overmortgaged fixer, he shows that he can now play the overqualified loser role without the physical baggage.

MARLON BRANDO in THE TEAHOUSE OF THE AUGUST MOON (1956) and APOCALYPSE NOW (1979)

In his blazing youth, Marlon Brando sometimes made very odd decisions in his choice of roles, but even when all the odds were stacked against him, he always brought total commitment to the train-wreck site. When John Patrick's once-loved, painfully whimsical play was brought to the screen, Brando insisted on playing the Japanese interpreter Sakini, a narrator figure who keeps talking to the audience and dispensing cutesy aphorisms in a mincing fake-Asian dialect. Brando's seriousness of purpose is evident in his starved appearance: he went on a crash diet and whittled himself down alarmingly for the part so that Glenn Ford and the others playing American military men could loom over him appropriately. He doesn't give a terrible performance—he does a number of clever things, and he keeps his energy level amazingly high, considering that he must have felt like passing out every time he walked past the catering area — but after the viewer recovers from the initial shock, he may wonder why Brando thought this material was worth the sacrifice. Twenty years later, Brando had reason to feel that he had nothing left to prove, and to prove that, he used the set of Apocalypse Now to unveil the mountainous physical condition that we know think of as Late Brando. The actor would later go on to do some remarkable things in that condition, but he was still self-conscious about his weight gain and hadn't yet mastered his new body as an actor. Having single-handedly scuttled Francis Ford Coppola's original conception of Colonel Kurtz as a man so divorced from physical pleasure that he was a gaunt, haggard, living ghost, he balked at the director's attempt to reconceive the role as a bloated, belching voluptuary. In the end, all Coppola could do with him was let him babble whatever came into his head while shooting him concealed in shadows and hope for the best. We will long argue about the lessons of Marlon Brando's career, but this much seems clear enough: whether he was giving it his all or just watching the clock while waiting for his paycheck to clear, he didn't get to be Marlon Brando by doing anything half-way.

CHRISTIAN BALE in THE MACHINIST (2004)

Brad Anderson's psychological thriller aims for a surreal, nightmarish feel in its story about an insomniac repressing a terrible secret, but nothing in Anderson's bag of visual tricks is as disturbing as the appearance of its star: to convey the effects of stress and sleeplessness on his character, Bale lost more than sixty pounds over the course of four months, taking his weight down to 120 pounds. Reportedly he wanted to go down to a neat one-hundred pounds, but Anderson talked him out of it. Thank God he did; with his facial features sunken and gnarled, the skin tightly fitted around his skeletal structure, Bale looks like something you could cut your hand on. If the way he looks were the product of some special make-up technique, it might be awe-inspiring, but knowing that it's really his body both makes and undermines the movie. He's the creepiest thing in it, yet you're too worried that he could keel over at any minute to concentrate on the story.

HONORABLE MENTION:

MELANIE GRIFFITH in THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES (1990)

Some physical transformations have proven worth it; some, not so much. Some have been valuable investments of time on the parts of the actors, who have used a change in their bodies as part of their creative process; some have verged on neurotic acts of self-mutilation. But Melanie Griffith's attempt to go above and beyond the call of duty on The Bonfire of the Vanities is in a category all its own: it's mainly notable for the way the actress, who at the time was a fifteen-year veteran of Hollywood moviemaking at age thirty-three, seems to have gotten her personal and professional calendars mixed up. Playing a gazillionaire's tarty mistress, a role that required her to appear in a succession of low-cut gowns, Griffith decided that it would be a good idea to get breast enhancement surgery during a break from shooting, when half her scenes were in the can and she still had more to shoot. According to Julie Salomon's indispensable book The Devil's Candy, the movie's director, Brian De Palma, was notified of the big change in his leading lady when she returned to the set and sat in his lap; she beamed at him and waited for a compliment on her new chassis while the crew goggled and he tried to smile while wondering how he was going to match shots. Oddly, Griffith continues to show a disatisfaction with what God and Tippi Hedren gave her that some might say borders on rank ingratitude; she recently did her part to get the TV series Viva Laughlin pulled off the air by scaring the viewers with her new lips, which look as if they were drawn by Max Fleischer.

– Pazit Cahlon, Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Scott Renshaw