Morning Deal Report: Ashley Judd Meets the Tooth Fairy

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 14:30:00 GMT

I vaguely remember reporting a while back that Dwayne “The Rock” John had signed to star as The Tooth Fairy, but I wasn’t sure if that happened here in the real world or in a dream. (Yes, I sometimes dream of blogging for the Screengrab. In my underwear. Which really doesn’t distinguish it from reality in any way.) Variety confirms this is really happening with this morning’s news that Ashley Judd has joined the project. “Johnson plays a minor league hockey player nicknamed the Tooth Fairy. Judd plays his girlfriend, a single mother of two kids.” The screenwriters include Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel, so you can expect a big-screen sitcom here.

Regular Steven Spielberg collaborator Jeff Nathanson will adapt The Maze of Bones, the first novel in the 39 Clues series. “39 Clues is built around the extended Cahill family, the most powerful clan in the world,” says The Hollywood Reporter. “The series is designed as an interactive adventure for kids ages 8-12 that will involve books published simultaneously in several countries, online games and hundreds of collectible cards as readers compete to solve the mystery of the Cahills' power by searching around the world and through history.”

And in giant robot news, Voltron: Defender of the Universe is headed for the big screen. It will be directed by Max Makowski, someone I had never heard of before this morning but who I have now decided I hate. Per Variety, Makowski “most recently penned the big screen adaptation of TV series Hawaii Five-O for Warner Bros. He also is attached to direct Warners' feature based on series Kung Fu and an American redo of Japanese pic Shinobi at U.” See? You hate him too, don’t you?

Related:
The Rock IS "The Tooth Fairy" and Other Worst Case Scenarios
Spielberg Gets a Clue

The 10 Greatest Psychiatrists in Movie History, Part 1

Phil Nugent — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Cinema, a form that makes it possible for the artist to actually devise and stage his own dreams and record them for posterity, has always had a fascination with psychiatrists, explorers of the mind who endeavor to delve into their patients' subconscious for clues as to how to better understand and regulate their conscious behavior. The new HBO series In Treatment is remarkable for how accurately it captures the droning frustration of a session with a typical modern shrink, whose concern that he not appear judgemental or nonobjective leaves him with little to do but sit there grunting noncommittally while the person who's paying for his time sits there tearing his hair out. But it wasn't always that way. As depicted in movies, psychiatry was once a dashing profession, inhabited by risk takers who jumped into their patients' lives with both feet and made a real effort to make a difference. More often than not, the differences they made were scary, destructive, and hair-raising. Still, it must have been nice for their patients to know that they were sharing their problems with someone who cared. Such as these worthies:

1. DR. CALIGARI (WERNER KRAUSE) in THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI (1919)

Dr. Caligari (Werner Krause) runs the laughing academy in the picturesque German mountain village of Holstenwall. As the film's narrator tells it, Caligari has been using hypnotism to control his charge Cesare (Conrad Veidt), and has also been trying to help the patient to find a place for himself in society by exhibiting him at the local geek show. When Caligari invites members of the crowd to test Cesare's omniscient powers by asking him an unanswerable question, the narrator's friend, being German, asks him not when Chinese Democracy is going to be finished but when he, the friend, will die. Cesare tells him that he will die the next dawn, and because the doctor has taught him that words must be backed up by action, makes sure that the prophecy comes true by tracking the fellow down and throttling him to meet the deadline. At the end of the movie, all this is revealed to a delusional fantasy of the narrator's, who is in fact an inmate in the asylum where Caligari really is chief of staff. The film ends with Caligari's happy announcement that, now that the narrator has gone to the trouble of envisioning a landmark work in the history of silent German Expressionist cinema, Caligari now has the key to his treatment. Maybe if a few more of the people in analysis had cared a little more about breaking new ground cinematically, the success rate among those in therapy would skyrocket.

2. DR. YEN LO (KHIGH DHIEGH) in THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962)

At first glance, Dr. Yen Lo seems to be the ideal psychiatrist. He has a wife he dotes on, an easy bedside manner, an encyclopedic knowledge of the latest medical and behavioral techniques, and a quick wit. “Always with humor!”, he tells a colleague, with a beaming smile on his Chinese face. It’s only when you realize that the joke he’s just told his nervous compatriot involves using him as the test dummy on which to unleash his newly reprogrammed assassin, and that his gregarious, friendly bedside manner only comes after he has completely rewired your brain and turned you into a remorseless killer that the bloom starts to come off the rose. And sooner or later, you’re going to realize that he may have gotten you to lose weight and play a mean game of solitaire, but he’s also gotten you hooked on yak dung cigarettes. To sum up, Dr. Yen Lo isn’t the kind of doctor who is going to get a lot of referrals through the HMO. But he is, as played by omnipresent character actor Khigh Dhiegh in the immortal 1962 political thriller The Manchurian Candidate, the man who made an unstoppable, relentless killer out of war hero Raymond Shaw, and one of the most sinister psychiatrists in cinematic history. (Dhiegh specialized in portraying menacing Chinese – he was also Wo Fat on Hawaii Five-0 – but he was actually not east Asian at all, but of North African Arab origin.) It’s his jolly, disarming manner that makes his aptitude at destroying innocent men’s minds so particularly monstrous; and worst of all, he gets off scot-free in a movie soaked with bloody murder: the last time we see him, he’s tottering off to Macy’s to tick some items off of Madame Lo’s shopping list.

3. DR. LOUIS JUDD (TOM CONWAY) in CAT PEOPLE (1942)

When you think about how many overpaid chin-scratchers are using their psychiatry degrees as a license to tap into the bank accounts of people who have abandonment issues or wished that daddy had hugged them more, you have to feel a certain admiration for Dr. Louis Judd (Tom Conway), who bravely agreed to take on the more difficult case of a deeply troubled young woman (Simone Simon) who was reluctant to consummate her marriage because she was convinced that if she did, she would turn into a sharp-clawed, fang-toothed jungle cat, with dire effects for any naked man who happened to be embracing her at the time. Dr. Judd's breakthrough method of treatment for her condition--i.e., putting the moves on her--remains controversial; some feel that he violated the boundaries of the doctor-patient relationship, while others, pointing out that it was the patient's husband who retained him, argue that anyone who puts his confused, hot young wife in the hands of a guy with a pencil line mustache and a family resemblance to George Sanders is begging for whatever happens. In the end, Dr. Judd surprised himself, if no one else, by establishing that if anyone hit on his patient hard enough she really would turn into a murderous jungle cat, and in his last moments on Earth he wrapped up the case by shooting his client, thus making himself a hero figure to therapists everywhere.

4. COL. VINCENT KANE (STACY KEACH) in THE NINTH CONFIGURATION (1980)

“I’m telling you, Billy, Kane is Gregory Peck in Spellbound,” says Lt. Frank Reno (who is adapting Shakespeare’s plays for dogs) to the depressed astronaut Captain Billy Cutshaw. “It’s just like that movie. He comes to take over the nuthouse and he’s nuts himself.” Cutshaw responds to this news by requesting that Reno drop out of a tree like an overripe mango, but the lieutenant is right: Col. Vincent Kane, the Marine Corps psychiatrist sent to take charge of an insane asylum staffed by disturbed Vietnam veterans, is in fact the craziest man in the joint. The actual extent of his insanity is slowly teased out over the course of this gripping, underrated movie written and directed by The Exorcist’s William Peter Blatty; it begins as a surreal, endlessly quotable comedy, and, as Kane’s madness is revealed, becomes a dark, deep philosophical drama. Colonel Kane is played by Stacy Keach in what can only be described as the role of a lifetime, and he meets it with gusto. At first, he’s full of quiet compassion and boundless sympathy, but with the right provocations and the slightest circumstance, he’s fully transformed into the raging, lethal “Killer” Kane. One of his most memorable scenes comes when his subordinate, Major Groper, cavils at having to play dress-up as part of the inmates’ role-playing therapy; demanding love and compassion from Groper, Kane morphs, werewolf-like, from an impossibly kindly shrink to a seething, hissing, screaming maniac of a Marine drill instructor who’d just as soon see someone dead as insubordinate. Groper, by the way, gets one of the movie’s funniest lines earlier in the movie: warning the men – who he considers to be goldbricking fakers – that the asylum will soon be taken over by the formidable Kane, he hollers: “Too bad, boys! Tough shit! Because guess who’s coming? A PSYCHIATRIST! The best! The best in uniform! The greatest fucking psychiatrist since Jung!” Naturally, he pronounces it with a hard J.

5. DR. HANNIBAL LECTER (BRIAN COX) in MANHUNTER (1986) and ANTHONY HOPKINS in THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (1991), HANNIBAL (2001), and RED DRAGON (2002)

In many ways, this is an atypical entry for this list, as in the four films set during Dr. Hannibal Lecter's adult life, we almost never actually see him working with patients. Yet I doubt anyone would contest his inclusion here. Formidably intelligent, impossibly cultured, and certifiably wacko, Lecter's appetites take him all over the world and into many realms of human experience. Yet even more than his taste for human flesh, what makes him truly scary is the way he uses that great big brain of his to toy with those he perceives as being beneath him. As a character explains in Hannibal, Lecter preys on what he calls "the rude," and his most severe mind games are reserved for those who offend his cultivated sensibilities. Think of the way he talks Multiple Miggs into swallowing his own tongue after Miggs insults Clarice. Or the way he drugs Mason Verger and convinces him to carve up his own face. But even when he's dealing with people he respects more, he can't help himself — consider his conversations with Clarice, in which he drops hints about the case she's working on, but in the form of riddles rather than as straightforward clues. One almost feels sorry for him after a while — after all, what else does he have left to enjoy in life but his mind?

— Paul Clark, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

Click here for Part 2.

DVD Digest for January 22, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 15:00:00 GMT

This week: a triple dose of Criterion, four films by a Hollywood favorite, and some old TV pals do their best to compensate for another slow week for recent releases.

DVD of the Week: Long one of the film history's most undervalued directors, Lindsay Anderson is finally starting to get his due on DVD. Last year saw the DVD releases of his classics If... and O Lucky Man!, and this week sees the deluxe two-disc Criterion treatment of his 1963 breakthrough film This Sporting Life. The film stars the Oscar-nominated Richard Harris in a star-making role as a young man trying to make it as professional rugby player, and is one of the key examples of the British "kitchen-sink" dramas of the 1960s. The DVD also includes commentary by Anderson associate Paul Ryan and screenwriter David Storey, a documentary about Anderson's career, and most notably, several of Anderson's short films, including his autobiographical final work, 1992's Is That All There Is?

This week's Criterion releases are Alf Sjöberg's 1951 adaptation of Strindberg's Miss Julie (featuring a young Max Von Sydow in a small role), and the box set 4 by Agnes Varda, which features her new-to-DVD films Le Bonheur (1965) and Le Pointe Courte (1956), as well as new editions of the previously-released Cléo From 5 to 7 (1962) and Vagabond (1985). Also of note this week is MGM's John Frankenheimer Collection, a rather bare-bones affair that includes the new-to-DVD Burt Lancaster film The Young Savages (1961), plus existing editions of The Manchurian Candidate, The Train, and Ronin.

New TV on DVD includes: Barney Miller: The Complete Second Season (Sony); Hawaii Five-O: The Complete Third Season (Paramount); The Odd Couple: The Complete Third Season (Paramount); Torchwood: The Complete First Series (Warner); and ER: The Complete Eighth Season (Warner).

Finally, we've got the new stuff, which aside from the DVD release of one of my favorite films of 2007, Richard Shepherd's The Hunting Party, is looking pretty dire. How about Jessica Simpson in the straight-to-DVD Working Girl "remake" Blonde Ambition (Sony)? Or the Amanda Bynes "Snow White goes to college" romp Sydney White (Universal)? Of course, there's also Sony's classy period farce Molière. I mean, Molay really pumps my nads, but that hardly makes up for the gruesome twosome of Disney's The Game Plan and (three separate versions of) Lionsgate's Saw IV, both of which are also coming out on Blu-Ray. Seriously folks, if you want us to take this new format seriously, you're going to have to start releasing some good movies instead of the latest pandering crap.

The Screengrab : hawaii five-o

Morning Deal Report: Ashley Judd Meets the Tooth Fairy

The 10 Greatest Psychiatrists in Movie History, Part 1

DVD Digest for January 22, 2008