The Screengrab : heath ledger

Screengrab’s Five to Watch at Cannes

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 13 May 2009 17:00:00 GMT

Greetings from the Croisette on the beautiful French Riviera! The entire Screengrab gang has convened over croissants and café au lait at Le Grande Bleu, and we’re hashing over our picks to click for the fabulous festival kicking off with tonight’s screening of the opening night film, Up. Wait until the crew back at Nerve headquarters gets a look at these expense reports!

OK, so we’re not actually in France. But why should a little technicality like that prevent us from bringing you the best in Cannes coverage? Or at least linking to the best in Cannes coverage, which we’ll do when we launch our daily Cannes Roundup tomorrow. For now, here’s a look at five movies I’d be sure to check out if I actually were on the Riviera instead of sitting at my desk in my underwear.

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS

Maybe Death Proof wasn’t all you dreamed it would be, and Brad Pitt’s cracker accent may not fill you with all the confidence in the world, and it’s just possible I’m describing myself here. Still, I have enough good will stored up for Quentin Tarantino as a filmmaker (if not as a personality) that I can’t help but be excited for his World War II epic, bad spelling and all.

TAKING WOODSTOCK

“It’s 1969, and Elliot Tiber, a down-on-his-luck interior designer in Greenwich Village, New York, has to move back upstate to help his parents run their dilapidated Catskills motel, the El Monaco…When Elliot hears that a neighbouring town has pulled the permit on a hippie music festival, he calls the producers, thinking he could drum up some much needed business for the motel.” Ang Lee’s take on the ‘70s (The Ice Storm) worked out pretty well, so let’s see what he can do with the ‘60s.

THE IMAGINARIUM OF DOCTOR PARNASSUS

Granted, Terry Gilliam’s track record of late has not been stellar. He couldn’t get Don Quixote off the ground, The Brothers Grimm was underwhelming, and I already regret leaving Tideland off my top ten list of the worst movies ever. But judging from the brief clips above, Imaginarium has more of an early Gilliam feel, and the curiosity factor of Heath Ledger’s last ever (partial) performance is definitely a draw. Plus: Tom Waits as the Devil!

PANIQUE AU VILLAGE (A TOWN CALLED PANIC)

I’d never heard of this Belgian film before this morning, but the description certainly intrigues. “Animated plastic toys like Cowboy, Indian and Horse have problems, too. Cowboy and Indian's plan to surprise Horse with a homemade birthday gift backfires when they destroy his house instead. Surreal adventures take over as the trio travel to the center of the earth, trek across frozen tundra and discover a parallel underwater universe where pointy-headed (and dishonest!) creatures live. Each speedy character is voiced -- and animated -- as if their very air contains both amphetamines and laughing gas.”

ANTICHRIST

“A grieving couple retreat to ’Eden’, their isolated cabin in the woods, where they hope to repair their broken hearts and troubled marriage. But nature takes its course and things go from bad to worse...” Hey, I’m always up for a good ol’ scary cabin-in-the-woods movie, and with Lars Von Trier at the helm, this one is sure to either terrify or infuriate – or more likely, both.

Screengrab's Favorite Movies About Music: Fiction Edition (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Last week, as part of our ongoing coverage of the South-By-Southwest Film, Music & Interactive Festival, we decided to get our collective groove on with a list of our favorite movies about real-live musicians.

But who says musicians have to be real to be memorable? Sure, Mitch & Mickey may be fictional characters portrayed by Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara in Christopher Guest’s faux-folkumentary, A Mighty Wind...yet despite the fact the duo never really existed, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house when my lovely Polish bride and I danced at our wedding reception to that non-existent classic hit of sweet, sweet romance, “A Kiss At The End Of The Rainbow." And, sure, the real Sid Vicious was nice and all...but I have equally fond memories of Gary Oldman’s fictional version in Alex Cox’s Sid & Nancy.

To blur the lines of fiction and reality even further, this week’s list also includes movies about make-believe people affected by real musicians and real musicians transforming themselves into make-believe people as your pals at the Screengrab salute OUR FAVORITE MOVIES ABOUT MUSIC: FICTION EDITION!

THIS IS SPINAL TAP (1984)

Yes, we all know it's hilarious. But This Is Spinal Tap is a classic for more reasons than simple hilarity. This was one of the first major films to be classified a "mockumentary", and in order for the style to work at all, director Rob Reiner and stars Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer had to get all the details down cold. This meant concocting an elaborate backstory involving multiple group names, format changes, and a parade of dozens of drummers who met their respective ends under bizarre circumstances. But beyond the more obvious references, Spinal Tap had to walk, talk, and play like a real aging rock band, from the principles writing and performing their own songs before actual crowds to the shorthand that the band members have with each other, as when Nigel (Guest) calls out "GSM" during rehearsal to signal that he wants to practice the song "Gimme Some Money." The gambit worked -- numerous moviegoers at the time were convinced that Spinal Tap was a real touring act, and the movie quickly became a favorite of legitimate rock acts, who identified with such scenes as the group getting lost on their way to the stage. Soon enough, life imitated farce, and Guest, McKean, and Shearer began touring as Spinal Tap, even releasing a second album in 1992 entitled Break Like the Wind. Even today, Spinal Tap endures, both in its cinematic form and its real-life incarnation, with a tour coming later this spring.

24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE (2002)

Steve Coogan has a motor-mouthed smart-guy comedian's dream role as Tony Wilson, TV reporter, pop theorist, and the man behind Factory Records, which brought the sound of Manchester to a postpunk world. Directed by Michael Winterbottom, the movie, which also provides plum roles for Shirley Henderson (as Wilson's first wife), Paddy Considine (as his sidekick Rob Gretton), Andy Serkis (as the deranged genius producer Martin Hannett), and Sean Hayes (as Ian Curtis), covers the first public performance by the Sex Pistols, the rise and end of Joy Division, the band's resurrection as New Order, the slaphappy career of the Happy Mondays and the coming of rave culture, and Factory's death throes, with Coogan's Wilson walking through it explaining himself and the culture he's part of, always talking a mile a minute. Coming from the cerebral Winterbottom, the movie itself could be called a sustained work of rock criticism, except that rock crit hasn't been this funny since Lester Bangs swigged his last bottle of Romilar.

HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH (2001)

John Cameron Mitchell energetically transposed his hit off-Broadway show to celluloid with 2001’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch, the story of a transsexual punk rock goddess named Hedwig (Mitchell) who narrates her life story while travelling across the country playing second-rate venues, her shot at stardom stymied by a former lover and disciple (Michael Pitt) who became a music sensation by stealing her songs. Hedwig’s is a lunatic odyssey which begins in East Berlin where, as a young boy, she undergoes a sex change operation in order to marry her U.S. army lover and escape the Iron Curtain, and which is partially conveyed via a bevy of musical numbers and animated sequences that are striking in both their ingenuity and power. Bolstered by rollicking, blistering tunes that are as well suited for arenas as they are for the stage and screen, Mitchell’s film is rowdy, bombastic, idiosyncratic and heartfelt, a combination to which only a select few movie musicals can legitimately lay claim.

THE DOORS (1991)

A close friend once derided The Doors’ music as “bad poetry with keyboards,” and while I’m generally inclined to concur with his assessment, there’s nonetheless something transfixing about Oliver Stone’s 1991 biopic, which has the type of on-the-edge, trippy-druggy dynamism that typified the director’s creatively fertile early-‘90s period. Stone’s anything-goes aesthetic showmanship is an ideal approach for a portrait of the L.A. band and, in particular, lead singer Jim Morrison, whose larger-than-life persona – drunken fool, callous bastard, earnest poet, sex god – naturally appealed to a filmmaker fascinated with mythologizing socio-political icons. The Doors oozes reverence without alienating those who might think the film’s subjects and their classic-rock canon fall somewhat short of greatness, due in part to uniformly superb performances led by Val Kilmer’s pitch-perfect embodiment of the lizard king, but mostly thanks to Stone’s lack of inhibition, his madman stylistic excesses (and yes, I’m including the Indian in the desert), supremely well-attuned to the careening rollercoaster energy of The Doors.

VELVET GOLDMINE (1998) and I'M NOT THERE (2007)

With these two films, Todd Haynes has produced the finest examples of fictional rock movies that I can imagine. Both have taken the lives of real rock musicians -- Bowie & Iggy in the former, Dylan in the latter -- and played up the mythic qualities to create a transcendent hyper-reality. No, Bowie and Iggy and Dylan didn't really live like this. But speaking from the point of view of poetry and mythology and literature, these are more true than mere reality can manage. That's what myths and stories are about: heightening everyday reality into a more universal truth. Most people's lives aren't up to the examples set by Ulysses or Hercules or even Ishmael or Natty Bumppo. But I think few would deny that there's a universal recognition of the truth in the lives of these wandering heroes. Celebrities sometimes play the role of real-life analog to idealized heroes. That's why so many urban myths leap up about the lives of celebrities; people need to believe in the extraordinariness of others. Rock musicians in particular often play the debauched Dionysian role of the glorious artistic mess, the pleasure-seeker who indulges in sex and drugs to feed his or her creative output. With these movies, Haynes pushes past the mere facts to feed the stories, and the results are fascinating, part narrative and part critique. In Velvet Goldmine, Christian Bale plays a journalist in an Orwellian Britain of the late '80s. A series of events causes him to investigate -- and recall -- the heyday of glam rock and its figurehead Brian Slade, who is basically the Platonic ideal of David Bowie (with elements of Brian Eno thrown in for good measure) as played by Jonathan Rhys Meyer. Slade's closest associate is Curt Wild (Ewan McGregor), who is mostly Iggy with a little Lou Reed thrown in. The two are lovers, and Slade gleefully expresses his fluid sense of sexuality. So there's three layers right there: Orwellian future, permissive past, rockers as trangressors. But there's more. Haynes dares to suggest that the bisexual/creative impulse was a gift from aliens (or angels) to Oscar Wilde in the Victorian era, and has passed down through the ages to the instigators of glam. That's, well, audacious as all hell. Haynes specifically compares Slade to both Wilde and his horrendous creation Dorian Gray. So, that's at least two more layers, maybe more. So, yes: gay theory, rock theory, lit theory, treatises on repression and freedom combined with the cults of youth and beauty. There's a lot going on in this movie. And it rocks like hell.

In I'm Not There, Haynes similarly adopts all of the myths about Bob Dylan into a narrative that's both fractured and more meaningful than a straightforward film could convey. There are six Dylans in this film, which is fewer Dylans than real life has given us. But these six Dylans represent the greatest periods of his life. Marcus Carl Franklin, an 11-year-old African-American boy, represents the youngest Dylan myth, the farmboy who rides the rails calling himself Woody Guthrie, learning America's traditional folk and blues music along the way. Ben Whishaw plays the interior Dylan, the playful interviewee who calls himself Arthur Rimbaud and comments cryptically on the rest of Dylan's life. Christian Bale plays the young and sincere New York folksinger Dylan, the socially active songwriter who calls himself Jack Rollins and travels to the South to sing to Civil Rights workers in a field. Rollins will later morph into Pastor John, the born-again Christian Dylan of the late '70s and early '80s. Heath Ledger plays the actor Dylan, the one who is horrible to his beautiful wife and torn in two by their divorce. His name is Robbie Clark and his wife, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, is Claire, and their story evokes the mid-'70s Dylan of Renaldo and Clara and Blood On The Tracks. Cate Blanchett plays Jude Quinn, the rock star Dylan of the mid-'60s and Don't Look Back. Quinn is explicitly shown as dead from a motorcycle accident at the beginning of the movie, which references Dylan's 1966 motorcycle accident which effectively killed off his Don't Look Back-era persona. Richard Gere plays Billy the Kid, who is the Dylan of The Basement Tapes, John Wesley Harding, and Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid. Gere's Billy lives in Riddle County, where the carnivalesque/Old West/Old Testament world of the Basement Tapes springs to life. So, that's the shallowest overview I could provide, and it more or less ate up all my space. Layers and layers in these films. Watch 'em again. And again.

Click Here For Part Two, Three, Four & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Paul Clark, Phil Nugent, Nick Schager, Hayden Childs

Screengrab Presents The Best & Worst Comic Book Movies Of All Time (Part Six)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 23:30:00 GMT

The Best:

GHOST WORLD (2001)

Forget best comic book movies...Terry Zwigoff’s deadpan adaptation of Dan Clowes’ cool blue-black graphic novel (distilled from the bizarre alt-comic Eightball) is one of the best movies of ANY genre to emerge in the past decade. While most of the films on this list are super-powered adolescent wish fulfillment fantasies, Ghost World is a dead-on portrayal of life as it really is for many American teens (as well as the aging misfits some of them...okay, some of us...grow into). Recent high school grads Enid (Thora Birch) and Rebecca (Scarlett Johansson, peaking early in her best role ever) slouch through a dystopic Los Angeles, floating on attitude to keep from drowning in a world of suck...add cranky Steve Buscemi as a hapless, lonely object of affection and you've got a near-perfect black comedy about alienation and the slow death of individualism in America, from the blissful escapism of Enid's private "Jaan Pehechan Ho" Bollywood dance party curtain raiser to her bitter, existential fade-out on a literal road to nowhere.

THE DARK KNIGHT (2008)

By the time the second of Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies came around, no one was seriously questioning the idea that a movie based on a comic book could actually be good. But nobody suspected how good until they’d managed to live through The Dark Knight. Nolan and his brother Jonathan tried to cram a huge amount of story into the movie’s heavy running time, but while it didn’t always work out – the Two-Face plot sagged a bit at the end, and there were moments that would have been better placed in a lesser movie – it justified its length and left you wishing there was even more. A great deal of attention is heaped on Heath Ledger’s terrifying, hypnotic (and Oscar-winning) performance as the Joker, and rightly so; but there’s so much more to the movie than that. The Nolans are always willing to sidestep the traditional conflicts of superhero stories and introduce powerful shades of moral ambiguity, which comes across in spades in The Dark Knight; and while Batman himself is left alone and lost at the edge of right and wrong, Gary Oldman as Commissioner Gordon provides the movie’s true moral center. And, given the numerous ways it manages to transcend simplistic blockbuster-movie tropes, it’s also an amazing-looking movie, with brutal fights, set pieces, and that rarest of things, an exciting and interesting chase scene, all of which helped make it one of the most successful motion pictures in the history of the world.

The Worst:

GHOST RIDER (2007)

I understand why Nic Cage took the lead role in Ghost Rider. It’s because Nic Cage is a hack who will pretty much do anything for money, as evidenced by, oh, let’s say Bangkok Dangerous or any other movie he’s made in the last half-decade. He’s also a major comic book geek (his son’s name is Kal-El, for Christ’s sake), and he probably sized up the script, counted the number of zeroes after the initial digit, realized he’d be performing most of the movie under layers of CGI anyway, and went shopping for a new boat. What’s less easy to understand is why anyone bothered to make Ghost Rider in the first place. The character was always pretty absurd, even by the bong-rattled standards of the 1970s Marvel Bullpen that produced him: a motorcycle stunt rider who gets possessed by the Devil and fights crime for some reason. He was never really that popular, even by the standards of juveniles who find that description totally bad-ass, and was mostly remembered until this movie came out as the only character based on a tattoo to star in his own title. Still, in the right hands, a decent movie could have been made of Ghost Rider, but the right hands are not those of the disgraceful Mark Steven Johnson. The biggest mystery of all is why anyone in Hollywood would give this guy a job doing anything after he made the horrible Daredevil and wrote the even more horrible Elektra, and yet, here he is again, screwing up another comic book character. The sole consolation of Ghost Rider is that nobody appears to have seen it, so maybe my bad memories of it are just a nightmare.

THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN (2003)

This big-budget belly flop marked a true historic moment in the twinned histories of both movies and comics; never before had a major studio release been widely criticized for having dumbed-down a comic book. The illustrator Kevin O'Neill gave a deliciously perverse period look to Alan Moore's parodic adventure serial about a Victorian era Super Friends team comprised of Alan Quartermain, Captain Nemo, Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde, the Invisible Man, and Dracula's old flame, Mina Harker. The director, Stephen Norrington, began work on the project by casting Sean Connery as Quartermain, apparently a sadistic act designed to get fans' hopes up by giving a false impression that he knew what he was doing. Elsewhere, Norrington and his screenwriter, James Dale Robinson (a comics scribe best known for his work on DC's Starman and the miniseries The Golden Age), coarsened and blunted the comic's sly edge, altering its characters for the worse (such as in the wrong call of making Mina Harker explicitly vampiric, even though the starchy proto-feminist of the comic was much more intimidating than any mere bloodsucker) and added new personnel, including a twentyish Tom Sawyer, presumably intended as a sop to the American market, and Dorian Gray, apparently included so that Norrington could hire, and then not fire, Stuart Townsend, just to show that he was stupider than Peter Jackson. The movie provided news for gossip columnists throughout its production, thanks to the battles between Connery and the director. When it was finally over, Connery announced that the experience had inspired him to retire from acting, and it didn't do anybody else's career any favors either.

THE NINE LIVES OF FRITZ THE CAT (1974)

Ralph Bakshi's 1972 Fritz the Cat, an adults-only feature animation based on a Robert Crumb character, helped attract Crumb's work a lot of attention, and the cartoonist has been bitching about it ever since; he can be seen early in the documentary Crumb complaining about how Bakshi browbeat him into giving him the rights and then debased his work. Bakshi's film wasn't very good, but the sequel, which he had nothing to do with, makes Bakshi's work look like the second coming of Winsor McKay. Most of the film, which includes Fritz's encounters with Hitler and various stereotypical mid-'70s "street" characters, settles for being ugly-looking and obnoxious, but it goes for broke in the last section, a mess of racist and anti-Semitic cariactures in which President Henry Kissinger sends Fritz on a mission to New Jersey, which has fallen under black rule and changed its name to "New Africa." If the actual Crumb's work was twice as offensive as his most hard-assed detractors claim that it is, and not funny or aesthetically pleasing at all, it would still be better than this.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent

Oscar Prospectus

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 21:00:00 GMT

We’ve already presented our Oscar predictions, and we assure you we put as much thought into them as the next guy…assuming the next guy isn’t Nate Silver. That name may ring a bell if you’re either a baseball fan or a political junkie. His statistical work for Baseball Prospectus, including PECOTA (Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm), has long been invaluable to statheads and fantasy players, but it was his FiveThirtyEight.com project, which proved to be the most accurate predictor of the 2008 election results, that made him a household name (at least in households where MSNBC plays more than three hours a day).

Now Nate Silver has turned his statistical genius toward helping to win your office Oscar pool. “Formally speaking, this required the use of statistical software and a process called logistic regression,” according to New York magazine. “Informally, it involved building a huge database of the past 30 years of Oscar history. Categories included genre, MPAA classification, the release date, opening-weekend box office (adjusted for inflation), and whether the film won any other awards.”

Among Silver’s findings: Heath Ledger runs away with the Supporting Actor category, with an 85.8% chance of winning, Taraji P. Henson is his somewhat surprising pick for Supporting Actress, and Slumdog Millionaire is a slamdunk with a 99% chance of taking home Best Picture. “Slumdog Millionaire won all three awards associated with Oscar success: the Directors Guild Award, the Golden Globe, and the bafta. It’s also a serious film, which the Academy favors. If there’s an upset (which would be a shocker), it will be Milk; guilt over Prop 8 and the Brokeback snub of ’06 could split the vote, with Boyle getting Director and Milk getting Picture.”

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: Feb. 7-13, 2009

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 22:00:00 GMT

Listen, I’m a man of few words and I’ve got skulls to impale with a rusty machete, so I’m gonna make this short and sweet. The Screengrab ran down my entire history this week, with Precursors: Friday the 13th Parts I-III, IV-VI, and VII-X. Frankly, I don’t think they showed me the proper reverence, but I’ll make my displeasure known at the appropriate time. I’m also a little miffed that I was left out of Bloody Valentines: The Worst Relationships in Cinema History (Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six and Seven). Every one of my relationships has ended with a hunting knife sticking out of someone’s eye socket, which should be your first hint that I belong on the list. But again, I’ll make sure the right people hear about this, and they won’t be happy.

Meanwhile, here are some more Screengrab posts to read. Be sure to leave the light on. Reviews: Two Lovers, Gomorrah and The Rock-afire Explosion

Screengrab Q & A: James Gray and Two Lovers

He's Hot, He's Oscar-Nominated, and He's Dead: The Heath Ledger Stealth Award Campaign

Reviews By Request, Oscar-Nominated Edition: Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942, Michael Curtiz)

Unwatchables: Baby Geniuses and In the Mix

Believe It Or Not: Patrica Highsmith's Ripley, On Screen

Video of the Day: Lindsay Lohan's Screen Test

The Killing Joke

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 18:00:00 GMT

For some fans, it won’t be enough for Heath Ledger to win a posthumous Academy Award for his performance as the Joker in The Dark Knight. The not-at-all-crazy folks at the new site The Ultimate Joker are taking it a step further: they don’t want anyone else to ever play the role again.

“They've launched a petition calling for studios to withdraw the character for good from any future Batman movies, a somewhat strange request given all the actors who have stepped into the Joker's murderous shoes on screens large and small,” according to a report at Wired.com. “We truly believe Ledger's performance as Joker is the best an actor could ever do," the site's team leader, Fer Barbella, told Wired.

Despite this belief, the team of Ledger enthusiasts is restricting their petition to big-screen, live action portrayals. “Television and animation is off our radar,” Barbella says, before conceding that he enjoys the work of Cesar Romero and even Jack Nicholson in the role of the clown prince of crime.

If you’d like to join this very important crusade, check out the Ultimate Joker site. It’s a shame, though – why couldn’t somebody have thought of this tactic in time to prevent Steve Martin from taking on the role of Inspector Clouseau?

Related:
He's Hot, He's Oscar-Nominated and He's Dead: The Heath Ledger Stealth Award Campaign
Jokers Wild About Heath Ledger's Oscar Chances

He's Hot, He's Oscar-Nominated, and He's Dead: The Heath Ledger Stealth Award Campaign

Phil Nugent — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 19:00:00 GMT

Heath Ledger did a number of remarkable things in his life, and now, more than a year after his death, he has inadvertently had a hand in perhaps the most amazing feat of his career: he's inspired The New York Times to use the word "graciousness" in reference to a studio-mounted Oscar campaign. Almost as soon as The Dark Knight, featuring Ledger's bravura final performance as the Joker, hit theaters, people have been asking whether Ledger might win an Oscar for it. At first, this seemed like spillover from the public mourning period that Ledger's untimely death set off. Now that Ledger has been officially nominated for Best Supporting Actor, the prospect of his winning the award carries the additional weight of the support for the movie itself. The Dark Knight was that rarity, a well-reviewed commercial blockbuster and pop culture event, and a lot of people thought it had a shot at being nominated for Best Picture, but in the end, Ledger's nomination, as well as nominations in a slew of technical-award categories (editing, sounds, make-up, etc.), were all the recognition that it got from the Academy. And this in a year where the movies that were nominated in the Best Picture category seem perversely selected to make 2008 seem like a worse year for movies than it was. With the possible exception of Milk, none of this year's nominees got uniformly better reviews than The Dark Knight, and a couple of them, notably The Reader, did much, much worse.

The Oscar campaigns that people talk about for years until they enter Hollywood legend are the ones, such as Chill Wills's for The Alamo and Diana Ross's for Lady Sings the Blues, that are seen as so aggressive and tasteless that they manage to gross out even the hardened cynics of Hollywood. It's not that often that you heat about a campaign that's notable for how gingerly it's being conducted, but this is an unusual situation. It's not wholly unprecedented for an actor to be posthumously nominated for an Academy Award, and not even unprecedented for one to win, but the precedents tend to emphasize what's special about this case. Peter Finch, who won for Best Actor for 1976's Network, had died shortly before the nominations were announced, but the movie was already in theaters and Finch was on tour promoting it when his heart gave out. More recently, in 1996 the Italian actor Massimo Troisi was nominated for his starring role in Il Postino, almost two years after he died shortly after shooting on that film wrapped, but his nomination was a fondly sentimental gesture to an actor who before his death was unknown in the U.S. Ledger's nomination, which seems unlikely to make the actor any more famous or to earn the movie a single additional dollar in DVD revenue, seems to be devoid of the usual political calculations that drive these things, unless the central calculation was that to not recognize Ledger's performance would have left the Academy looking ridiculous. David Carr writes that "Warner Brothers has managed to walk the line between elegy and ghoulishness, reminding the public and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences that one of the great performances in 2008 was the last of Mr. Ledger’s career, but doing so without seeming to commodify his death," adding that "The specter of Mr. Ledger has created a large overhang this award season. His performance was recognized with victories at both the Golden Globes and the Screen Actors Guild ceremonies. And what would usually be moments for agent thanking and mom waving suddenly became something as solemn and reverent as an observance at Arlington." Carr also notes that the non-campaign campaign has met with the approval of blogger and Ledger-booster Sasha Stone. "“They had to walk a tightrope there, and no one really knew if they could,” she saus. "The studio didn’t flood the press with Dark Knight ads, and they really could have.”

Screengrab Predicts The Oscars: Winners (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 22:00:00 GMT

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

And the nominees are...

Josh Brolin – Milk
Robert Downey, Jr. – Tropic Thunder
Philip Seymour Hoffman – Doubt
Heath Ledger – The Dark Knight
Michael Shannon – Revolutionary Road

Paul Clark Predicts: Heath Ledger

Probably the most iron-clad pick of the major nominees, giving Hollywood a chance to honor one of their brightest young talents who was gone far too soon. Although if by some chance there’s a sentiment out there to give it to someone who’s still around, I’d say Brolin would be the best bet -- Hoffman just won, Shannon’s lucky just to be nominated, and they’d never give Downey an Oscar for a performance that controversial. But yeah, this is Ledger’s all the way.

Andrew Osborne Predicts: Heath Ledger

Leonard Pierce Predicts: Heath Ledger

Josh Brolin’s terrific performance in Milk may be diffused by the fact that he’s surrounded by other great supporting roles. Downey deserved his nomination, but won’t get it in a million years. But really, what are we even talking about here? If there’s ever been, forgive me, a mortal lock in the history of the Oscars, it’s Heath Ledger’s performance as the Joker.

Should Win: Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight
Will Win: Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight

Nick Schager Predicts: Heath Ledger

Iconic role in an immense blockbuster? And it’s his final performance? Ledger is this year’s sure bet.

Sarah Clyne Sundberg Predicts: Heath Ledger

Any other year, Philip Seymour Hoffman, since he's in enough high profile movies this year to warrant it. Rightfully, though the award belongs to Josh Brolin. This being not a normal year, but rather The Year Heath Ledger Died, he will get posthumously rewarded.

Scott Von Doviak Predicts: Heath Ledger

SCREENGRAB CONSENSUS: HEATH LEDGER

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

And the nominees are...

Amy Adams – Doubt
Penélope Cruz – Vicky Cristina Barcelona
Viola Davis – Doubt
Taraji P. Henson – The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Marisa Tomei – The Wrestler

Paul Clark Predicts: Viola Davis

I’d say this is between Davis and Cruz, but the role wins it for Davis. After all, the role has already brought home a Tony, and while it’s tempting to think Cruz could accept the Oscar from her boyfriend and Vicky Cristina Barcelona costar Javier Bardem, Davis’ Oscar clip will be hard to beat.

Andrew Osborne Predicts: Viola Davis

I really, really want Penélope Cruz to win this, simply because she gave (for me, anyway) the most memorable Supporting Actress performance of the year...but the Academy hates comedy and loves drama, especially snot-running down the face “Oscar” moments like Viola Davis’ cameo in Doubt. Plus...diversity! And, hey, Viola ain't no slouch and totally knocked her scene outta the park, so no hard feelings. Taraji P. Henson doesn’t deserve it: she was likeable enough, but her performance was all about make-up, so I’ll be mad if she wins. Amy Adams doesn’t deserve it, either: she was fine, but the role was fairly bland. And I wouldn’t mind seeing Marisa Tomei win, but I’m guessing the Mickey Rooney wing of the Academy watched about five minutes of The Wrestler before snapping it off in disgust and reaching for that nice Benjamin Button screener again...

Leonard Pierce Predicts: Marisa Tomei

To hear a lot of the entertainment pundits tell it, Marisa Tomei is a stone cold lock for her role in The Wrestler, but I’m not convinced. She still catches a decent amount of flak from critics who don’t think she deserved her first Oscar. Viola Davis seems the most deserving for Doubt, but may suffer from a vote-split with Amy Adams. This one may be the most difficult of the major categories to call.

Should Win: Viola Davis, Doubt
Will Win: Marisa Tomei, The Wrestler

Nick Schager Predicts: Viola Davis

Davis takes supporting actress honors, because Doubt has to win something. And because Woody Allen’s excruciating Barcelona-travelogue-cum-phony-threesome-dramedy can’t in any way be honored. Please.

Sarah Clyne Sundberg Predicts: Viola Davis

Because she was that good and because the Academy will want to throw something Doubt's way.

Scott Von Doviak Predicts: Penélope Cruz

SCREENGRAB CONSENSUS: VIOLA DAVIS

Stay tuned for no Miley Cyrus, no Bruce Springsteen, no Jon Stewart and some Indian guy called Gulzar as the Screengrab 2009 Oscar Special continues!

Contributors: Paul Clark, Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Nick Schager, Sarah Clyne Sundberg, Scott Von Doviak

The Three Catastrophes of Terry Gilliam

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 20:30:00 GMT

Terry Gilliam is set to receive the Bafta Fellowship, the most prestigious award bestowed by the British Academy of Film and Television, during the “British Oscars” ceremony this Sunday night. Presumably this is a lifetime achievement award for his unique body of work, although in an interview with The Guardian, Gilliam himself speculates otherwise. “Voters must, he assumes, have felt sorry for him because his latest film, The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus, has been hit by three catastrophes.”

That seems about par for the course for Gilliam, who should be able to knock off three catastrophes over lunch break, but these circumstances have been particularly trying. First, of course, was the death of the movie’s star Heath Ledger. “"It just isn't possible that he's dead," he says. "There's nothing he can't do, it just flows out of him with ease and grace. He lifted everybody. He wasn't like Marlon Brando or James Dean or any of the more neurotic actors, his was all positive energy. I knew he was tired but that Saturday he had been doing all his own stunts, he was leaping off wagons, indestructible. On no level did his death make sense."

The film’s producer, Bill Vince, also died, leaving Gilliam’s daughter Amy to take the reigns. And this past fall, Gilliam was hit by a car, breaking his back. (He got better.) Gilliam came up with a unique solution to the problem of losing his lead actor, adding three additional actors (Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell) to play the same character following various trips through a “magic mirror.”

Dr. Parnassus is due this fall, assuming no further catastrophes befall it. Read the rest of The Guardian piece here.

Related:
Heath Ledger Through the Looking Glass
When Good Directors Go Bad: The Brothers Grimm

SAG Awards Announced

Andrew Osborne — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 15:00:00 GMT

Fifteen years ago, members of the Screen Actor's Guild -- tired of their work only being acknowledged by 24/7 news coverage, 7000 entertainment magazines and the paltry 938 awards shows available at the time -- established the SAG Awards, to more conveniently bestow awards directly upon one another.

And so, last night, the glitterati convened once again to honor the following actors with the coveted "Saggy":

Film

Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role
SEAN PENN - Milk

Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role
MERYL STREEP - Doubt

Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Supporting Role
HEATH LEDGER - The Dark Knight

Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in (an allegedly) Supporting Role
KATE WINSLET - The Reader

Outstanding Performance by a Cast
SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE

Outstanding Performance by a Stunt Ensemble
THE DARK KNIGHT

Television

Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Television Movie or Miniseries
PAUL GIAMATTI - John Adams

Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Television Movie or Miniseries
LAURA LINNEY - John Adams

Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Drama Series
HUGH LAURIE - House

Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Drama Series
SALLY FIELD - Brothers & Sisters

Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Comedy Series
ALEC BALDWIN - 30 Rock

Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Comedy Series
TINA FEY - 30 Rock

Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series
MAD MEN (Woo-hoo!!!)

Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Comedy Series
30 ROCK

Outstanding Performance by an Stunt Ensemble in a Television Series
HEROES

Life Achievement Award
JAMES EARL JONES

Oscar Nominations Announced

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 14:30:00 GMT

A week or two back, your friends here at the Screengrab took a stab at predicting which people and movies the Academy would nominate for Oscars this year -- and now you can see which of us was the best prognosticator, since the official list was just announced this morning in Los Angeles by Forest Whitaker and Academy president Sid Ganis:

BEST MOTION PICTURE OF THE YEAR

* "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" (Paramount and Warner Bros.), A Kennedy/Marshall Production, Kathleen Kennedy, Frank Marshall and Ceán Chaffin, Producers
* "Frost/Nixon" (Universal), A Universal Pictures, Imagine Entertainment and Working Title Production,Brian Grazer, Ron Howard and Eric Fellner, Producers
* "Milk" (Focus Features), A Groundswell and Jinks/Cohen Company Production, Dan Jinks and Bruce Cohen, Producers
* "The Reader" (The Weinstein Company), A Mirage Enterprises and Neunte Babelsberg Film GmbH Production, Nominees to be determined
* "Slumdog Millionaire" (Fox Searchlight), A Celador Films Production,Christian Colson, Producer

PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTOR IN A LEADING ROLE

* Richard Jenkins in "The Visitor" (Overture Films)
* Frank Langella in "Frost/Nixon" (Universal)
* Sean Penn in "Milk" (Focus Features)
* Brad Pitt in "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" (Paramount and Warner Bros.)
* Mickey Rourke in "The Wrestler" (Fox Searchlight)

PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE

* Josh Brolin in "Milk" (Focus Features)
* Robert Downey Jr. in "Tropic Thunder" (DreamWorks, Distributed by DreamWorks/Paramount)
* Philip Seymour Hoffman in "Doubt" (Miramax)
* Heath Ledger in "The Dark Knight" (Warner Bros.)
* Michael Shannon in "Revolutionary Road" (DreamWorks, Distributed by Paramount Vantage)

PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTRESS IN A LEADING ROLE

* Anne Hathaway in "Rachel Getting Married" (Sony Pictures Classics)
* Angelina Jolie in "Changeling" (Universal)
* Melissa Leo in "Frozen River" (Sony Pictures Classics)
* Meryl Streep in "Doubt" (Miramax)
* Kate Winslet in "The Reader" (The Weinstein Company)

PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTRESS IN A SUPPORTING ROLE

* Amy Adams in "Doubt" (Miramax)
* Penélope Cruz in "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" (The Weinstein Company)
* Viola Davis in "Doubt" (Miramax)
* Taraji P. Henson in "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" (Paramount and Warner Bros.)
* Marisa Tomei in "The Wrestler" (Fox Searchlight)

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE FILM OF THE YEAR

* "Bolt" (Walt Disney), Chris Williams and Byron Howard
* "Kung Fu Panda" (DreamWorks Animation, Distributed by Paramount), John Stevenson and Mark Osborne
* "WALL-E" (Walt Disney), Andrew Stanton

ACHIEVEMENT IN ART DIRECTION

* "Changeling" (Universal), Art Direction: James J. Murakami, Set Decoration: Gary Fettis
* "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" (Paramount and Warner Bros.), Art Direction: Donald Graham Burt, Set Decoration: Victor J. Zolfo
* "The Dark Knight" (Warner Bros.), Art Direction: Nathan Crowley, Set Decoration: Peter Lando
* "The Duchess" (Paramount Vantage, Pathé and BBC Films), Art Direction: Michael Carlin, Set Decoration: Rebecca Alleway
* "Revolutionary Road" (DreamWorks, Distributed by Paramount Vantage), Art Direction: Kristi Zea, Set Decoration: Debra Schutt

ACHIEVEMENT IN CINEMATOGRAPHY

* "Changeling" (Universal), Tom Stern
* "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" (Paramount and Warner Bros.), Claudio Miranda
* "The Dark Knight" (Warner Bros.), Wally Pfister
* "The Reader" (The Weinstein Company), Chris Menges and Roger Deakins
* "Slumdog Millionaire" (Fox Searchlight), Anthony Dod Mantle

ACHIEVEMENT IN COSTUME DESIGN

* "Australia" (20th Century Fox), Catherine Martin
* "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" (Paramount and Warner Bros.), Jacqueline West
* "The Duchess" (Paramount Vantage, Pathé and BBC Films), Michael O'Connor
* "Milk" (Focus Features), Danny Glicker
* "Revolutionary Road" (DreamWorks, Distributed by Paramount Vantage), Albert Wolsky

ACHIEVEMENT IN DIRECTING

* "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" (Paramount and Warner Bros.), David Fincher
* "Frost/Nixon" (Universal), Ron Howard
* "Milk" (Focus Features), Gus Van Sant
* "The Reader" (The Weinstein Company), Stephen Daldry
* "Slumdog Millionaire" (Fox Searchlight), Danny Boyle

BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE

* "The Betrayal (Nerakhoon)" (Cinema Guild), A Pandinlao Films Production, Ellen Kuras and Thavisouk Phrasavath
* "Encounters at the End of the World" (THINKFilm and Image Entertainment), A Creative Differences Production, Werner Herzog and Henry Kaiser
* "The Garden" A Black Valley Films Production, Scott Hamilton Kennedy
* "Man on Wire" (Magnolia Pictures), A Wall to Wall Production, James Marsh and Simon Chinn
* "Trouble the Water" (Zeitgeist Films), An Elsewhere Films Production, Tia Lessin and Carl Deal

BEST DOCUMENTARY SHORT SUBJECT

* "The Conscience of Nhem En" A Farallon Films Production, Steven Okazaki
* "The Final Inch" A Vermilion Films Production, Irene Taylor Brodsky and Tom Grant
* "Smile Pinki" A Principe Production, Megan Mylan
* "The Witness - From the Balcony of Room 306" A Rock Paper Scissors Production, Adam Pertofsky and Margaret Hyde

ACHIEVEMENT IN FILM EDITING

* "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" (Paramount and Warner Bros.), Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall
* "The Dark Knight" (Warner Bros.), Lee Smith
* "Frost/Nixon" (Universal), Mike Hill and Dan Hanley
* "Milk" (Focus Features), Elliot Graham
* "Slumdog Millionaire" (Fox Searchlight), Chris Dickens

BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM OF THE YEAR

* "The Baader Meinhof Complex" A Constantin Film Production, Germany
* "The Class" (Sony Pictures Classics), A Haut et Court Production, France
* "Departures" (Regent Releasing), A Departures Film Partners Production, Japan
* "Revanche" (Janus Films), A Prisma Film/Fernseh Production, Austria
* "Waltz with Bashir" (Sony Pictures Classics), A Bridgit Folman Film Gang Production, Israel

ACHIEVEMENT IN MAKEUP

* "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" (Paramount and Warner Bros.), Greg Cannom
* "The Dark Knight" (Warner Bros.), John Caglione, Jr. and Conor O'Sullivan
* "Hellboy II: The Golden Army" (Universal), Mike Elizalde and Thom Floutz

ACHIEVEMENT IN MUSIC WRITTEN FOR MOTION PICTURES (ORIGINAL SCORE)

* "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" (Paramount and Warner Bros.),Alexandre Desplat
* "Defiance" (Paramount Vantage), James Newton Howard
* "Milk" (Focus Features), Danny Elfman
* "Slumdog Millionaire" (Fox Searchlight), A.R. Rahman
* "WALL-E" (Walt Disney), Thomas Newman

ACHIEVEMENT IN MUSIC WRITTEN FOR MOTION PICTURES (ORIGINAL SONG)

* "Down to Earth" from "WALL-E" (Walt Disney), Music by Peter Gabriel and Thomas Newman, Lyric by Peter Gabriel
* "Jai Ho" from "Slumdog Millionaire" (Fox Searchlight), Music by A.R. Rahman, Lyric by Gulzar
* "O Saya" from "Slumdog Millionaire" (Fox Searchlight), Music and Lyric by A.R. Rahman andMaya Arulpragasam

BEST ANIMATED SHORT FILM

* "La Maison en Petits Cubes" A Robot Communications Production, Kunio Kato
* "Lavatory - Lovestory" A Melnitsa Animation Studio and CTB Film Company Production, Konstantin Bronzit
* "Oktapodi" (Talantis Films) A Gobelins, L'école de l'image Production, Emud Mokhberi and Thierry Marchand
* "Presto" (Walt Disney) A Pixar Animation Studios Production, Doug Sweetland
* "This Way Up", A Nexus Production, Alan Smith and Adam Foulkes

BEST LIVE ACTION SHORT FILM

* "Auf der Strecke (On the Line)" (Hamburg Shortfilmagency), An Academy of Media Arts Cologne Production, Reto Caffi
* "Manon on the Asphalt" (La Luna Productions), A La Luna Production, Elizabeth Marre and Olivier Pont
* "New Boy" (Network Ireland Television), A Zanzibar Films Production, Steph Green and Tamara Anghie
* "The Pig" An M & M Production, Tivi Magnusson and Dorte Høgh
* "Spielzeugland (Toyland)" A Mephisto Film Production, Jochen Alexander Freydank

ACHIEVEMENT IN SOUND EDITING

* "The Dark Knight" (Warner Bros.), Richard King
* "Iron Man" (Paramount and Marvel Entertainment), Frank Eulner and Christopher Boyes
* "Slumdog Millionaire" (Fox Searchlight), Tom Sayers
* "WALL-E" (Walt Disney), Ben Burtt and Matthew Wood
* "Wanted" (Universal),Wylie Stateman

ACHIEVEMENT IN SOUND MIXING

* "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" (Paramount and Warner Bros.), David Parker, Michael Semanick, Ren Klyce and Mark Weingarten
* "The Dark Knight" (Warner Bros.), Lora Hirschberg, Gary Rizzo and Ed Novick
* "Slumdog Millionaire" (Fox Searchlight), Ian Tapp, Richard Pryke and Resul Pookutty
* "WALL-E" (Walt Disney),Tom Myers, Michael Semanick and Ben Burtt
* "Wanted" (Universal), Chris Jenkins, Frank A. Montaño and Petr Forejt

ACHIEVEMENT IN VISUAL EFFECTS

* "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" (Paramount and Warner Bros.), Eric Barba, Steve Preeg, Burt Dalton and Craig Barron
* "The Dark Knight" (Warner Bros.), Nick Davis, Chris Corbould, Tim Webber and Paul Franklin
* "Iron Man" (Paramount and Marvel Entertainment), John Nelson, Ben Snow, Dan Sudick and Shane Mahan

ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

* "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" (Paramount and Warner Bros.), Screenplay by Eric Roth, Screen story by Eric Roth and Robin Swicord
* "Doubt" (Miramax), Written by John Patrick Shanley
* "Frost/Nixon" (Universal), Screenplay by Peter Morgan
* "The Reader" (The Weinstein Company), Screenplay by David Hare
* "Slumdog Millionaire" (Fox Searchlight), Screenplay by Simon Beaufoy

ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

* "Frozen River" (Sony Pictures Classics), Written by Courtney Hunt
* "Happy-Go-Lucky" (Miramax), Written by Mike Leigh
* "In Bruges" (Focus Features), Written by Martin McDonagh
* "Milk" (Focus Features), Written by Dustin Lance Black
* "WALL-E" (Walt Disney), Screenplay by Andrew Stanton, Jim Reardon, Original story by Andrew Stanton, Pete Docter

(And stay tuned for much more Screengrab bloggage on the 81st Academy Awards!)

Video of the Day: "Dark Knight", Schmark Knight

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 15:45:00 GMT

While everyone sits around whingeing about whether or not the late Heath Ledger is going to win an Oscar for his portrayal of the Joker in Christopher Nolan's made-more-cheddar-than-Kraft The Dark Knight, we're all about honoring the past here at the Screengrab. And what better way to honor the past than to show the audition test that got Adam West and a classy young fella named Burton Gervis their gigs as Batman and Robin?

Just imagine if the runners-up, Lyle Waggoner and Peter Deyell, would have gotten the job! Uh...never mind.

Screengrab Live Blogs The Golden Globes

Andrew Osborne — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 00:39:00 GMT

(All times TiVo approximate)

7:33 - Nice silly bow tie, Brad.

7:35 - Way to step on your annoying daughter’s dress, Billy Ray.

7:38 - Good Lord! Marisa Tomei is wearing the puffy shirt! Is her next movie The Pirates of Penzance?

7:41 - Brangelina blow off Ryan Seacrest...heh-heh-heh...

7:46 - My lovely Polish bride Amy acquaints me with the Golden Globes dinner menu:

APPETIZERS
California organic field green salad with white asparagus
Crisp apricot dill goat cheese in phylo and poached pear
Maple syrup apple cider vinaigrette

ENTREES
Grilled prime tenderloin of beef with green tea pearl and sautéed aromatic Asian spice marinated sea bass
Sherry wine yuzu pepper sauce
Grilled king oyster mushroom
Jicama, Romanesco and potato onion croquette

DESSERT
Golden chocolate Globe with organic yogurt pistachio mousse

7:49 - The E! Channel breaks out their "Star Tracker" technology, wherein video arrows point out the stars to us in wide shots of the red carpet. Note to E! - Just because you CAN do it doesn't mean you SHOULD do it.

7:50 - Jeremy Piven appears on the red carpet. Apparently his mercury levels have returned to normal. Thank you, baby Jesus!

7:53 - Amy is sick of all the sand colored couture. Her favorite gowns of the evening: Drew Barrymore and Christina Applegate. Me, I could eat me some Anne Hathaway with a spoon.

8:02 - Amy thinks J. Lo is wearing one of Cher's Bob Mackie gowns from a 1970s time machine.

8:04 - Okay, I haven't seen The Reader and I love Kate Winslet, but...really? Best Supporting Actress? She must give really good Nazi.

8:06 - Damn, that Kate Winslet is adorable. Meanwhile...um...is Sting in that production of Pirates of Penzance with Marisa Tomei?

8:10 - BROOOOOOOOOOCCCEE!!!!!

8:11 - I'm trying to figure out who or what Darren Aronofsky looks like in his funny weaselly moustache. A villain in a Preston Sturges film? The Guy Fawkes mask in V for Vendetta? Meanwhile, Amy thinks Rumer Willis (in the background as a Golden Globes girl) may have had her chin shaved, since her big square potato head is no longer quite as prominent and she actually looks kinda cute. From a distance.

8:13 - Robert Downey Jr. apparently stuck his toe in the same electrical outlet as Drew Barrymore.

8:18 - Tom Wilkinson has apparently been drinking since noon.

8:20 - Hooray for Laura Dern! Amy's happy she kept her original nose, and I'm happy David Lynch used his mysterious powers of transcendental meditation to help her win.

8:25 - What happened to Don Cheadle's hair?

8:27 - Amy does not care about Eva Mendes. Even if she is a proud Cuban-American. (But we both love whoever that guy was she introduced...I missed what he said because I was Googling Eva Mendes and found this great shot of her plumber's crack while Amy drools over Hamm, John Hamm:

8:31 - Both my mother and Amy's mother call to express outrage over Hamm getting robbed. Amy dubs it Hammgate.

8:36 - Ricky Gervais = hilarious. Tells Kate Winslet, "See? I told you...do a Holocaust movie and you'll win awards!"

8:39 - The hobbits from the Fellowship of the Ring...sorry, I mean, the Jonas Brothers, present the award for Best Foregone Conclusion...I mean, uh, Best Animated Feature. Amy says the middle Jonas Brother looks like the guy she lost her virginity to (although I saw the guy recently and he no longer has that silky Jonas hair...or any hair, really).

8:41 - Amy wants Johnny Depp, meanwhile, to simply wash his hair.

8:43 - Sally Hawkins wins Best Actress for Comedy! I couldn't be happier! Amy is also happy for Sally, but wants to feed her skinny ass some brie.

8:45 - Sally Hawkins is full of love. And, possibly, nitrous oxide.

8:54 - Cheadle: good bald. Ralph Fiennes: not so much. (Amy, meanwhile, loves loves loves Drew Barrymore's dress.)

8:58 - Ledger wins. Universal sadness.

9:03 - Meanwhile, over on CNN, they're interviewing Priscilla Presley, who apparently got some cut-rate plastic surgery that left her looking like a Dick Tracy villain.

9:07 - Colin Farrell has that weird Aronofsky moustache, too! Trend alert!

9:10 - Waltz With Bashir guy: best acceptance speech of the evening.

9:11 - Maggie Gyllenhaal wears my aunt's drapes. Shirley Maclaine is either stoned or just got hit in the face with a frying pan.

9:13 - Paul Giamatti, for some reason, decided to come dressed as Judah Friedlander.

9:18 - Mmm! Look at that sexy Seth Rogen! Amy prefers fat Seth. Either way, Mickey Rourke is probably gonna kick his ass for that coke-snorting joke.

9:21 - What did David Duchovny mouth to the camera while blowing a kiss? Amy's guess: "I love hookers."

9:23 - Alec Baldwin thanks his vile pig of a daughter. Awwww.

9:31 - Giamatti!

9:36 - I don't have any little snarky comment to make, but I must just pause here to acknowledge the comic brilliance of Tracy Morgan, edging past the Waltz With Bashir guy for best speech. (Lorny Mikes!)

9:41 - Didn't mention it at the time, but controversy breaks out here in Somerville over Glenn Close's outfit. Amy says age-appropriate. Her mother, phoning in from New Hampshire, says early '80s Boca Raton.

9:43 - "Mmm...Pierce Brosnan," quoth Amy. "Nothin' wrong with that." She also likes him because he has a fat wife.

9:46 - P. Diddy and Kate Beckinsale step down off a wedding cake to present a nice Indian man with the award for Best Soundtrack (for Slumdog Millionaire).

9:48 - Nice boobs, Tina Fey!

9:54 - Scorcese!

9:58 - Much whispering about the awe-inspiring wonder of Steven Spielberg and his gift to the art of cinema. Bathroom break!

10:06 - All right, snark aside: (A) Spielberg throws some love to Scorcese, which is nice, but (B) that montage of Spielberg movies reminds you...damn, Steven Spielberg sure made a bunch of good-ass movies. (And, y'know, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull). This speech sure is going on, though.

10:09 - Spielberg: still talking.

10:13 - Is it more that Emma Thompson's really big or that Dustin Hoffman's really small?

10:15 - Danny Boyle wins Best Director. Again, the toe-in-electric-outlet hair. Trend alert!

10:19 - Amy says Colin Farrell looks less like a pubic hair with his hair cut short. And I'm happy to see the Bruges love: rent it now! (By the way, I didn't realize when I put In Bruges on my 2008 Top Ten list that the movie's writer/director, Martin McDonagh, is also the playwright responsible for The Lieutenant of Inishmore, the bloodiest play (and one of the most entertaining) I've ever seen on stage. If you get a chance, be sure to check it out!) I have plenty of time to write about all this, incidentally, because Colin Farrell will apparently never stop talking. "You're not Steven Spielberg!" says Amy, who hates him. Me, I thought his speech was kinda sweet.

10:29 - Hayek, Johansson and Cruz all enter my consciousness at once. Amy breaks out the smelling salts.

10:31 - Borat!

10:32 - Really? The Golden Globe audience boos a Madonna joke? Hmm. While I ponder this strange development, Vicky Cristina Barcelona wins best comedy/musical, which makes me think of Salma, Scarlett and Penelope again...mmm...

10:36 - Oh, wait...add Freida Pinto to that fantasy...mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm...

10:39 - Kate Winslet momentarily forgets that Angelina Jolie was also nominated for Best Actress. Angelina Jolie: not happy. Mark Wahlberg says hi to my mother for me.

10:45 - Mad Men? Rules.

10:49 - All the people who wouldn't return Mickey Rourke's calls last year are now very happy for Mickey Rourke.

10:50 - Mickey Rourke thanks David Unger for his balls.

10:52 - Darren Aronofsky flips the bird on national television. "Nice, real nice," says Amy's mother, phoning in from New Hampshire. "John Ford would never do that."

10:54 - Mickey Rourke thanks Scott Franklin for breaking his balls. Somehow Axl Rose was also involved with The Wrestler, making it the New Jersey-est movie of all time. Finally Rourke thanks his dogs. "That's the kinda shit you wait up all night for," says Amy.

10:58 - And...Slumdog! The guy accepting the award jumps the Aronofsky train with a verbal finger flip...trend alert!

Anyway, thanks for playing along at home! And now, to recap...the complete list of winners:

Best Motion Picture - Drama

Winner: Slumdog Millionaire (2008)

Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Drama

Winner: Mickey Rourke for The Wrestler (2008)

Best Television Series - Drama

Winner: "Mad Men" (2007)

Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture - Drama

Winner: Kate Winslet for Revolutionary Road (2008)

Best Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy

Winner: Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008)

Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy

Winner: Colin Farrell for In Bruges (2008)

Best Director - Motion Picture

Winner: Danny Boyle for Slumdog Millionaire (2008)

Best Performance by an Actress in a Television Series - Musical or Comedy

Winner: Tina Fey for "30 Rock" (2006)

Best Original Score - Motion Picture

Winner: Slumdog Millionaire (2008) - A.R. Rahman

Best Television Series - Musical or Comedy

Winner: "30 Rock" (2006)

Best Performance by an Actor in a Mini-Series or a Motion Picture Made for Television

Winner: Paul Giamatti for "John Adams" (2008)

Best Performance by an Actor in a Television Series - Musical or Comedy

Winner: Alec Baldwin for "30 Rock" (2006)

Best Screenplay - Motion Picture

Winner: Slumdog Millionaire (2008) - Simon Beaufoy

Best Performance by an Actress in a Mini-Series or a Motion Picture Made for Television

Winner: Laura Linney for "John Adams" (2008)

Best Foreign Language Film

Winner: Vals Im Bashir (2008)

Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture

Winner: Heath Ledger for The Dark Knight (2008)

Best Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for Television

Winner: "John Adams" (2008)

Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy

Winner: Sally Hawkins for Happy-Go-Lucky (2008)

Best Animated Film

Winner: WALL·E (2008)

Best Performance by an Actress in a Television Series - Drama

Winner: Anna Paquin for "True Blood" (2007)

Best Performance by an Actor in a Television Series - Drama

Winner: Gabriel Byrne for "In Treatment" (2008)

Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Series, Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for Television

Winner: Laura Dern for Recount (2008) (TV)

Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Series, Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for Television

Winner: Tom Wilkinson for "John Adams" (2008)

Best Original Song - Motion Picture

Winner: The Wrestler (2008)("The Wrestler")

Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture

Winner: Kate Winslet for The Reader (2008)

Screengrab Predicts The Oscars: Nominations (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 21:30:00 GMT

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Scott Von Doviak Predicts:

NOMINEES
Josh Brolin (Milk)
Robert Downey, Jr. (Tropic Thunder)
Philip Seymour Hoffman (Doubt)
Heath Ledger (The Dark Knight)
Michael Sheen (Frost/Nixon)

Heath Ledger was penciled in here even before The Dark Knight was released. Philip Seymour Hoffman's work as the Penguin…er, the potentially pedophilic priest in Doubt should secure him a nod. Michael Sheen is probably the lead in Frost/Nixon, but his publicist will push him for this category. Josh Brolin drinks your Milk. That leaves one spot for the other comeback kid, Robert Downey, Jr. in Tropic Thunder.

WINNER
Ledger, who will not attend the ceremony.

Sarah Clyne Sundberg Predicts:

NOMINEES
Heath Ledger (The Dark Knight)
Josh Brolin (Milk)
Dev Patel (Slumdog Millionaire)
Leonardo Di Caprio, Revolutionary Road
Ralph Fiennes, The Reader

Being that Heath Ledger gave an excellent performance and then went and died, there is no way he won't be nominated for The Dark Knight. For the same reason it isn't unlikely he'll win. Otherwise Josh Brolin stands a fighting chance. Especially given that his performance as Harvey Milk's killer in Milk is the type of role this category was made for. Well, that and taking care of actors that for whatever reason didn't end up in best leading actor. Which would explain why we find Dev Patel from Slumdog Millionaire in here. Let's face it; he just isn't famous enough (yet) to get nominated for Best Actor. Ralph Fiennes seems like a perennial nominee; if he didn't get a golden man for Schindler's List there is no way he will this year, but consider the nomination a consolation prize. Leonardo DiCaprio will be in here too, but we all know he's just filler.

WINNER
Heath Ledger

Paul Clark Predicts:

NOMINEES
Josh Brolin (Milk)
Robert Downey Jr. (Tropic Thunder)
James Franco (Milk)
Philip Seymour Hoffman (Doubt)
Heath Ledger (The Dark Knight)

We all agree that this is Ledger’s to lose, right? Likewise, Brolin and Oscar perennial Hoffman are looking pretty locked at this point. With The Soloist moved to spring, Tropic Thunder is the best chance for the Academy to honor the clean-and-sober Downey, while filling the annual comic scene-stealer slot for this category. The race for the final nomination is pretty wide open. Nominating Dev Patel here would be the voters’ best shot at giving crowd-pleaser Slumdog an acting nomination, but while a Patel nomination would likely signal a Best Picture win for the film, the actor’s only major nomination to date has come from the SAG, who are generally more inclined to recognize youth performances. Besides, will the voters really go for his relatively colorless performance, which is really a lead? Other possibilities include Happy-Go-Lucky’s driving instructor from hell Eddie Marsan (who’s been cleaning up the critics’ awards), or such reliable character actors as Bill Irwin (Rachel Getting Married) and Michael Shannon (Revolutionary Road). But I’m predicting a second supporting nomination for Milk in James Franco, whose relationship with Sean Penn’s Harvey is the emotional center of the film.

WINNER
Heath Ledger

Andrew Osborne Predicts:

NOMINEES
Josh Brolin (Milk)
Robert Downey, Jr. (Tropic Thunder)
James Franco (Milk)
Philip Seymour Hoffman (Doubt)
Heath Ledger (The Dark Knight)

So, yes, of course Heath Ledger will be nominated and win, resulting in a two-hanky “on-behalf-of” acceptance speech from...hmm...Michelle Williams? Christopher Nolan? Well, that’s a guessing game for another time. And the nomination for Ledger’s whiteface performance will book-end with Robert Downey, Jr.’s blackface role in Tropic Thunder (overshadowed in the comeback kid department by Mickey Rourke’s meatface role in The Wrestler, natch). Philip Seymour Hoffman and Josh Brolin seem like safe, SAG approved bets for their solid performances in Doubt and Milk respectively, and while I liked Tom Cruise’s what-the-hell performance in Tropic Thunder a lot more than some of my Screengrab colleagues (and think it would be a hoot if the Academy followed the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s lead and nominated him), I think the fifth nod will officially go to James Franco for Milk (but really for Pineapple Express).

WINNER
Heath Ledger

Leonard Pierce Predicts:

NOMINATIONS
Josh Brolin (Milk)
Robert Downey, Jr. (The Soloist)
Ralph Fiennes (The Reader)
Heath Ledger (The Dark Knight)
Liev Schreiber (Defiance)

Schreiber, a terrific actor who’s long been ignored by most of Hollywood, will get the nomination Defiance earns. Fiennes will be a perfunctory pick, but Brolin’s nod as Dan White will be well-deserved. Downey gets the nomination for The Soloist because he’s had an amazing year, but they won’t nominate him for a comedy (Tropic Thunder) or an action blockbuster (Iron Man). In the end, though, who’s kidding who? Especially since The Dark Knight won’t be getting anything else, Ledger is – forgive me – a mortal lock for his unforgettable turn as the Joker. BIGGEST SCREWJOB: Though Brolin deserves his nomination, it’ll come at the expense of James Franco and Emile Hirsch in the same movie.

WINNER
Heath Ledger

SCREENGRAB CONSENSUS: NOMINEES
JOSH BROLIN, ROBERT DOWNEY, JR., JAMES FRANCO/RALPH FIENNES (TIE), PHILIP SEYMOUR HOFFMAN, HEATH LEDGER

SCREENGRAB CONSENSUS: WINNER
HEATH LEDGER

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

Contributors: Paul Clark, Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Sarah Clyne Sundberg, Scott Von Doviak

The Best of 2008: Leonard Pierce's Picks for the Best Movies of the Year, Part One

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 19:00:00 GMT

2008 is already getting a rap as a bad year for filmmaking, which is entirely unfair -- it's merely a good year that has to contend with coming right after 2007, one of the greatest years in recent cinematic history. It's also the first year where I spent the entire year as a critic living in a city that seems allergic to art films; when it came time to compile my top tens, which no doubt reflect my current cultural circumstances, I found I had seen fewer of the most highly praised films of the year than in any recent memory. Putting this list together involved a lot of work on my part -- not the normal intellectual work of weighing the artistic merits of each movie and finding something to say about them, but the physical work of actually seeing the damn things, when a good half of them didn't play in my city. This is especially true of the 2008 end-of-year releases. But throught a combination of tactics, including but not limited to Netflix, filesharing, begging publicists for screeners, shuttling back and forth to Austin, and, in the case of my #1 pick, engaging in a quest that would, itself, make a pretty good movie, I managed to put together a list of my ten favorite films of the year. I don't know how you loyal readers will take it -- I know that I'm at odds with a few of my Screengrab colleagues on at least a couple of these -- but here I stand, in a year that ain't as bad as it seemed.

10. MILK (Gus Van Sant, dir.)

Three decades too late, but this is the year of Harvey Milk: the new album by an Athens-based band that bears the assassinated San Francisco supervisor’s name is one of the best of the year, as is Gus Van Sant’s biopic of the country’s first openly gay elected official. Noted by Van Sant as the first movie of his return to mainstream filmmaking, Milk has been criticized for taking a straightforward approach rather than showcasing the director’s more experimental side, but, like Spike Lee’s Malcolm X, it largely succeeds because it lets the flashy stylistic touches take a back seat to what is, after all, one of the most compelling political stories of the American century. Sean Penn is rightly getting props for his terrific performance as Harvey Milk; it’s a career-redeeming showing after nearly a decade of missteps. But no one should ignore the excellent supporting performance, especially those of James Franco as Milk’s partner Scott Smith and Josh Brolin as the tortured killer Dan White. Elegant, appealing, timely and persuasive without being preachy, Milk is one of the best biopics of recent vintage.

9. BALLAST (Lance Hammer, dir.)

Lance Hammer’s debut feature film Ballast is being widely proffered as proof that reports of independent film’s death have been greatly exaggerated. The indie scene was on the rocks this year, to be sure, but Ballast is a mighty convincing argument for its continued vitality. It deals quietly and hypnotically with the emotional paralysis into which a Mississippi family is thrown after one brother commits suicide, and its characters – played almost entirely by an amateur cast using improvised dialogue – are so real as to be astonishing. The performances by a batch of promising unknowns are halting, wandering, and unspectacular, because people rarely react to such an event in a spectacular way. Likewise, criticism of the film’s slow pace seem off the mark to me: the movie’s slow movement and stately grace (visually abetted by some incredible cinematography by Lol Crawley) recall Ozu, who was rarely subject to such carping. Ballast is a thing of dark, slow beauty.

8. THE DARK KNIGHT (Christopher Nolan, dir.)

The opinion of a million IMDB fanboys notwithstanding, The Dark Knight isn’t one of the greatest films ever made. Now that it’s available on DVD, its flaws are easy to catch on repeat viewings: too much of David S. Goyer’s heavy scriptwriting hand, a confused and uncentered role for Batman himself, and an ending that continues to make precious little sense. But, by the same token, its strengths are also mightily in evidence, ready for anyone to savor who thinks a big-screen action picture can’t also be a good movie: a number of near-perfect emotional moments, a riveting conjuration of a city caught in the grips of terror, and, of course, Heath Ledger’s absolutely electrifying performance as the Joker, one of the greatest screen villains in history. And, in the same way he used a pulp noir thriller as the framework for one of the most deeply philosophical mainstream movies ever in Memento, Nolan manages to take a superhero punch-‘em-up and turn it into one of the most profoundly political movies of the year.

7. IL Y A LONGTEMPS QUE JE T'AIME [I'VE LOVED YOU SO LONG] (Phillipe Claudel, dir.)

This French drama is, with Synechdoche, New York, one of two amazing films made this year by first-time directors who are better known for their writing. Phillipe Claudel, a well-respected screenwriter and novelist, has made a movie as small and controlled as Charlie Kaufman’s is ambitious and sprawling: it’s remarkably tight for a first effort, with none of the excess that often betrays a first effort. With not a single frame wasted, he brings us the story of Juliette Fontaine, a woman whose sister takes her into a distrusting – not to say dysfunctional – family after she has spent fifteen years in prison; Kristin Scott Thomas (who seems an entirely different actress, and a far superior one, in French than she is in English) plays her with an emotional and physical reticence that borders on exhaustion, and she’s perfectly complemented by Elsa Zylberstein as her loving, determined sister. It’s the best family drama in years, understated and nearly perfect at conveying its emotional complexities.

6. MAN ON WIRE (James Marsh, dir.)

The most compelling documentary of the year is based on an event so trivial it would be almost entirely forgotten if not for the existence of the movie: Phillipe Petit’s jaw-dropping, pointless, spectacular, and foolhardy tightrope walk between the two towers of the World Trade Center during its construction in 1974. Filmed by the director of Wisconsin Death Trip and using similar techniques (including some arbitrary, though skillful reenactments), Man On Wire brings us a movie about the WTC that has nothing to do with the terror attacks that brought it down – and yet which cannot escape comparison, with its images of bits of the towers in chaos (though from construction, not destruction), its central plot of a small group of schemers engaging in intricate planning to conquer them (though their motivation is art, not violence), and its unforgettable image of Petit suspended between the buildings, so eerily reminiscent of the shots of those who fell on September 11th. Petit did not fall; we know he did not, because we see and hear him from the movie’s first shots. The fact that it’s so fascinating to watch though we know he didn’t fall is a testament to its power as a film.

Click for Part Two

Andrew Osborne's Top Ten Movies of 2008 (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 22:46:00 GMT

6. THE WACKNESS

Thoughtful, well-made coming-of-age stories are usually popular, and weed has been making a cinematic comeback lately, so I’m not exactly sure why The Wackness in general and Josh Peck’s charming turn as wistful pot dealer Luke Shapiro didn’t make more of a splash in 2008. Writer/director Jonathan Levine’s evocation of Manhattan circa 1994 feels as specific and lived-in as Ben Braddock’s Pasadena or Lloyd Dobler’s Washington suburb, and it’s hard to think of a better first-love interest than Olivia Thirlby. I posted a full review of the movie back in June when it first charmed me at the Provincetown Film Festival, so rather than repeat all that praise, I’ll just paraphrase Thirlby’s character and say the film wound up on my Top Ten because, in a difficult year, it reminded me to look at the dopeness and not just the wackness.

7. FULL BATTLE RATTLE

Full Battle Rattle is a documentary by Jesse Moss and Tony Gerber about a simulated Iraqi province in California’s Mojave desert, populated by Iraqi-American citizens and U.S. Army “insurgents” in a full-immersion training scenario where soldiers practice both their combat and diplomacy skills before heading off to the real war in Iraq. At first, it’s funny to watch battles interrupted by visits from the ice cream man as the military combines role-playing and stagecraft to create what seems like a strange, gorey theme park or game show (complete with graphically wounded mannequin “casualties,” designed to prepare fledgling medics for the realities of war). But it’s those harsh realities waiting for the participants beyond all the play-acting that provide the film with its emotional core, as we come to know the various players, including an Iraqi immigrant terrified of being deported and an American combat vet who admits, tellingly, that after returning from a tour of duty, it takes him several days to start viewing his Iraqi colleagues as people again (as opposed to potential enemies). By the time the simulation ends and the soldiers we’ve come to know say goodbye to their families and ship out to an uncertain future, the lady next to me in the movie theater was openly weeping, and there seemed to be something in my eye as well.

8. IRON MAN

I’ve gone on record about my utter bafflement over the messianic fervor surrounding The Dark Knight, a good but occasionally clunky superhero movie featuring an entertaining performance by a talented actor who died far too young. But I still don’t see why Heath Ledger’s Brad Dourif-ian performance as The Joker is considered groundbreaking or revelatory: compare its evocation of evil to Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet and then get back to me. And I’m still not really sure why Batman’s deliberations over civil liberties vs. public safety are especially more profound than Iron Man’s growing awareness of the consequences of war profiteering, except that Jon Favreau’s comic book adaptation takes itself far less seriously while delivering its tightly paced (but not over-written) action payload. Robert Downey Jr.’s performance is nowhere near as flashy or iconic as Ledger’s, of course – a typical downside of playing the good guy – but it’s miles ahead of Christian Bale’s stiff-in-a-suit Caped Crusader. Downey is fun and fascinating to watch, infusing a potentially one-dimensional role with the gravity and humanity of hard-won experience, as well as the humility of a man all too aware he could very easily have shared Ledger’s fate.

9. IN BRUGES

Who is this incredibly engaging, charismatic actor named Colin Farrell, and why haven’t I seen him on the big screen before now? Oh, sure, I’m familiar with his doppelganger: that brooding, constipated Irish guy with the same name who kept threatening to be the next big thing for several years, but never quite arrived thanks to performances in a succession of mezzo-mezzo movies that never quite connected with audiences. But the Farrell who plays the guilt-ridden hit man Ray in Martin McDonagh’s funny, suspenseful crime drama In Bruges is a true movie star, well-paired with Brendan Gleeson as the soulful mentor waiting for the other shoe to drop in the titular Belgian town after a botched assignment brings down the wrath of crime boss Ralph Fiennes (who likewise has never been quite so compelling on screen). The beautiful but claustrophobic confines of the distinctive setting and the pervasive undertow of regret gives Bruges a richer flavor than, say, a fun but ultimately disposable Guy Ritchie offering like RockNRolla, even if McDonagh’s film isn’t ultimately all that much more than the sum of its high quality parts.

10. VICKY CRISTINA BARCELONA

Until three seconds ago, I was planning to include Slumdog Millionaire in the final slot of this list, if only for the energy and scope of Danny Boyle’s storytelling mojo. But as I started to think and write about it, I realized the film as a whole simply left me cold. On the other hand, there was no lack of heat in Woody Allen’s latest comeback film, which is possibly why I have warmer memories of it. Penelope Cruz's performance as the hot-blooded trois in the ménage between Scarlett Johansson’s feckless American tourist and Javier Bardem’s Spanish art stud is probably better than the movie itself, but Allen still has some interesting things to say about the chimerical nature of love, the conflicting desires of the brain, heart and libido and the way smart people consistently outsmart themselves by refusing to acknowledge what they really want, even when they somehow manage to find it. (And, of course, the fact the movie unfolds against a backdrop of gorgeous Spanish locations doesn’t hurt, either.)

Honorable Mention: Wellness, Goliath, Turn the River, American Teen, Pineapple Express, Tropic Thunder, Tell No One, Ghost Town, Burn After Reading, The Bank Job, RockNRolla, Role Models, Quantum of Solace, Slumdog Millionaire, Doubt

Worst Movies I Actually Saw:
Patti Smith: Dream of Life, Indiana Jones & The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, What Just Happened?

Worst Movie I Didn’t See:
An American Carol

Most Overrated:
The Dark Knight (see above)

Most Overcriticized:
The Happening

Respected More Than Liked:
Synechdoche

TOP TV:
The Wire
Mad Men
The Amazing Race
The Daily Show & The Colbert Report
Survivor: Micronesia & Gabon
Breaking Bad
The Soup
Everybody Hates Chris
Recount
Generation Kill
Project Runway
True Blood

2008 SOUNDTRACK
“No One” – Alicia Keyes
“Pretty Blue” – Moonflower
“Paper Planes” – M.I.A.
“Wichita Lineman” – Glen Campbell
“Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)” – Beyonce
“Sex Changes” – The Dresden Dolls
“Shoot the Runner” – Kasabian
“Still Alive” – GLaDOS
“Sax Rohmer, Pt. 1” – The Mountain Goats
“M79” – Vampire Weekend
“I Am Commando” – The NorthAtom
“I’m Good. I’m Gone” – Lykke Li
“Belleville Rendezvous” – The Triplets of Belleville (Soundtrack)
“Happy Days Are Here Again” – Barbara Streisand

Click Here For Part One

Van Johnson, 1916-2008

Phil Nugent — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Van Johnson, who died over the weekend at the age of 92, was, during his period of greatest popularity, a major movie star whose youthful screen image was freckle-faced propaganda for how MGM thought Americans should want to see themselves during the war years. A dancer-actor who had understudied Gene Kelly on Broadway, Johnson made his way to Hollywood in the '40s and had his first screen credit in the 1942 Murder in the Big House, made for Warner Brothers during the six months he was under contract to that studio. But his movie career didn't really begin in earnest until his move that same year to MGM, where Louis Mayer, with his romantic idealization of America as one big, homogeneous soda shop, must have taken one look at his clear-faced features and bright smile and swooned. MGM immediately established a pattern for his early career by sticking him in a uniform for a bit part in Somewhere I'll Find You. He would subsequently appear in such films as Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, Two Girls and a Sailor, The White Cliffs of Dover, The Human Comedy, Pilot #No. 5, and the star-making A Guy Named Joe, in which the ghost of a fallen bomber pilot (Spencer Tracy) played matchmaker between him and Irene Dunne. (Steven Spielberg later remade it as Always.) Most of these movies are borderline unwatchable now without the looming threat of the Axis menace in the back of your head to help give you a rooting interest in what was happening on the screen, but the Self-Styled Siren notes that "Johnson was third in box-office popularity in 1946, and in the top ten even in Britain. In a poll of theater owners he was ranked ahead of Bette Davis, Cary Grant and Humphrey Bogart, among others." After enough hits radiating Crest-toothpaste enthusiasm, Johnson was sometimes allowed to return to his musical roots, as in the 1954 Brigadoon with Kelly, where he clearly enjoyed getting to show a little tartness and being able to play the more cynical member of the co-starring team. That same year, he slipped into uniform again for one of his more ambiguous tours of duty as the naval officer who has mixed feelings about alerting the world that his master and commander Queeg (Humphrey Bogart) is a few briquettes short of a barbecue.

As Johnson grew middle-aged, the movies seemed to have less and less use for him, and he spent more and more time on television, mixed in with the occasional return to the theater. But as parts dried up, Johnson himself developed a sturdy, patrician bearing that made him impressive to watch, even if the fact that you were watching him probably meant that you had nothing better to do that evening than turn on McMillan and Wife. He won an Emmy nomination for his work in the 1976 miniseries Rich Man, Poor Man, but the brightest light on his late-career resume is Woody Allen's 1985 The Purple Rose of Cairo, in which he played a character in that film's movie within the movie, doing a wonderfully precise send-up of the kind of distinguished penthouse daddy-o figure he could have played to perfection if only Hollywood hadn't stopped making those kinds of movies. Having toured in the musicals La Cage aux Folles and Show Boat when in his sixties and seventies, he retired after appearing in the 1992 Australian movie Clowning Around, a film also notable for having been Heath Ledger's screen debut.

Morning Deal Report: Golden Globe Nominees Announced, NY Critics Sound Off

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 14:30:00 GMT

Frost/Nixon and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button lead the way with five nominations each, as the Golden Globe nominees were announced this morning. Both were nominated for Best Drama, along with The Reader, Revolutionary Road and Slumdog Millionaire. Meryl Streep is nominated for both Doubt and Mamma Mia, matched by Kate Winslet for The Reader and Revolutionary Road. Other acting nominees include Sean Penn for Milk, Mickey Rourke for The Wrestler and Heath Ledger for The Dark Knight – the sole Bat-nomination. Check out the full roster here.

The New York Film Critics Circle drank up Milk, naming it the best movie of the year and honoring Penn and Josh Brolin for their performances. Happy-Go-Lucky earned kudos for director Mike Leigh and star Sally Hawkins. Penelope Cruz took Supporting Actress honors for Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Here's the full list.

“Ben Stiller is set to replace Mark Ruffalo in Greenburg, a comedy-drama Noah Baumbach is writing and directing,” per The Hollywood Reporter. Ruffalo dropped out after the shooting death of his brother last week. Greenburg “is expected to center on the intimacies of relationships in the manner of Baumbach's other films,” if that helps.

Related:
Globes Without Glitter
Auto-Baumbach-graphies

One Billion Bats

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 20:15:00 GMT

In the Los Angeles Times' Hero Complex blog, Geoff Boucher has a lengthy conversation with Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan, whose superhero epic is teetering on the verge of making a billion dollars. Considering that's just U.S. and foreign box office, and doesn't even take into account merchandising and the vast sums it's going to rake in once it comes to home video, that's the kind of cash that even Bruce Wayne would greet with a low whistle. Nolan, though, if he isn't exactly taking the news in stride, at least isn't letting it go to his head: "I can't get my arms around it, to be frank. It's mystifying. It's terrific, but at the same time, it's a little abstract, the numbers are so big...there's something liberating in knowing that my next film, whatever it is, isn't going to make as much money. I don't have to try for years."

Wait a minute..."whatever it is"? Surely it's going to be a third Batman movie. Surely Nolan isn't going to walk away from a franchise that netted widespread critical acclaim and a ten-figure box office return, right? The man himself is cagey on the subject, saying that if there's a compelling enough story to tell, he'll be on board, but noting that no such story has yet revealed itself, and asking the very sensible question: "How many good third movies in a franchise can people name?"

The rest of the interview (part two is here) is equally engaging, featuring Nolan's thoughts on the character of Batman, the loss of Heath Ledger and what it means to the franchise, the widely-argued politics of The Dark Knight, and his favorite scene in the movie. He never gets around to answering whether or not he'll helm the next installment, but our money is on yes. A billion dollars can buy you a lot of story.

Why So Serious?: The Dark Knight in the Political World

Michael Caine, Batspoiler

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 14:00:00 GMT

So you're in a high-stress profession. You work all day and all night to try to make the world a better place, but to protect some very important people, you have to keep certain things about your job secret. But the strain of such a massive secret, a thing that some people would kill to know, can't be borne forever by just one man. So you turn to the one person you think you can trust, the one man you believe will keep your secret: your faithful butler. And then he goes and blabs it to the whole world.

Ever since Christopher Nolan's latest Batman flick, The Dark Knight, made its first trillion dollars, speculation has been rampant about who's going to play the villain role in the next installment. Heath Ledger's untimely death makes it an unlikely, albeit intriguing, possibility that he'll return as the Joker; the two hottest rumors are that Angelina Jolie will be the draw, slipping into a Catwoman costume, and that Johnny Depp and Phillip Seymour Hoffman will tag team as the Riddler and the Penguin. Both have generally dismissed as fan-driven wishful thinking until yesterday, when Michael Caine -- currenty paying his club fees as Bruce Wayne's butler Alfred -- took a moment at the Toronto International Film Festival to cite an unnamed Warner Brothers exec and insist that the latter rumor is true.

Of course, just to keep us baying, Hoffman had to come out and insist he's never heard any such thing. But who are you gonna trust, the Penguin, or Batman's loyal batman? The rat!

Related Posts:

Jolie to Porn Star: 'Do It'

In Other Blogs: Batman Forever

Jolie to Porn Star: "Do It"

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Although Heath Ledger hasn't officially announced that he won't be returning to the role of the Joker, we're guessing that in this case, silence gives assent. And with the question of whether or not there will be a new Batman movie easily answered by a quick peek at its gargantuan box-office numbers, speculation is beginning to turn to who will play the villain in the next installment.

Amongst the hottest rumors, despite an official denial by franchise hack David S. Goyer, are that Johnny Depp will step into the franchise as the Riddler, or that Philip Seymour Hoffman will take on the role of the Penguin. Those are perfectly acceptable choices, classic Batman villains assayed by two of our most accomplished actors. But in terms of sheer, white-hot, skin-tight buzz generation, they can't hold a candle to our favorite rumor, which is that Angelina Jolie will be playing Catwoman.

Having secured the "blessing" of beloved TV Catwoman Julie Newmar -- who has about as much say in the matter as I do -- to take on the role, Jolie, according to the highly respectable sources at the New York Post's Page Six, has begun consulting her "gal pal", porn star (and, apparently, hardcore Catwoman fan) Tera Patrick about how she should play the role. Frankly, there's not much more to it than putting on a tight-fitting costume, flitting about seductively, and purring at Batman, but if Angelina wants to cozy up with the star of Filthy Fuckers #194: Suck My Handle, who are we to argue?

According to the Post, "Tera had such insights into the role that Jolie cracked, 'You should do it!'" The Screengrab fully supports this casting decision.

Top Ten Reasons The Dark Knight Isn't As Good As You Think It Is

Andrew Osborne — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 03:44:00 GMT

Yes, the first hour is great: a non-stop thrill ride, a tour de force. And Heath Ledger gives a mesmerizing performance, and we’re all very sad that he’s dead. I’m not even being sarcastic: his recent films indicated a phenomenal range, and he seemed like a nice enough guy, and I’m always very sorry when smart, decent, talented people die far too young (while Cheney continues relentlessly on).

And I understand how and why The Dark Knight made so much money. After all, we’re all stuck at home this summer, since God knows we can’t afford to drive or fly anywhere, and movie theaters are air-conditioned. Even my lovely Polish bride (who friggin’ HATES all the usual summer superhero blockbuster crap) ponied up the bucks to go see Christian Bale, et. al. on the big screen.

But people...get a grip. It’s not the best movie ever. It’s not even as good as Iron Man, ferchrissakes.

And I’ll give you ten reasons why...but DON’T keep reading if you haven’t seen the movie yet, ‘cuz the following post is spoiler-tastic to the max. Okay...you’ve been warned. Spoilers ahead.

1. It is, at the very least, half an hour too long. Probably more. Long movies are fine...movies where you feel every second of the too-long length? Not so much.

2. It is WAY overpraised by critics because it features the last complete (and potentially Oscar-worthy?) performance by Heath Ledger. Need proof? Okay, which of the following awesome, iconic comic book movie performances were mentioned as potential Oscar contenders?

(a) Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman in Batman Returns, (b) Jack Nicholson as The Joker in Batman, (c) Danny De Vito as The Penguin in Batman Returns, (d) Christopher Reeve as Superman in Superman, (e) Any other performance in a comic book movie ever.

(Johnny Depp as Jack Sparrow doesn’t count...that was a movie based on a theme park ride. Not the same thing at all.)

3. It’s a comic book movie that addresses topical themes like America's response to terrorism. And has nothing particularly interesting to say.

4. So...the evil genius who outwits the cops at every turn, terrorizes the city and kills a judge and the police commissioner is finally captured and then...left un-handcuffed in an interrogation room with a cop (in a department riddled with corruption)? The cop in question turns out to be dumb rather than crooked but...uh...Hannibal Lecter got strapped to a stretcher with a hockey mask just for eating a few people. I’m just saying.

5. Speaking of that scene where the Joker gets caught and then gets away (you know the one I mean?)...so they don’t have metal detectors in Gotham City police headquarters? That might, for instance, detect a bomb in someone’s abdomen?

6. And, okay, I know the Joker is an evil genius and all...but considering he tells Batman exactly where to find Rachel and Harvey Dent and the Caped Crusader and Gordon leave on their rescue missions at exactly the same time...how exactly does the Jokester arrange it for Gordon to arrive at Rachel’s location just a few seconds too late? (Pay attention...this question will be on your SAT.)

7. The whole "bombs on the ferries sequence" (with the cameo appearance by everyone’s favorite, The Magical Negro, i.e., the token appearance by the wise black character who shows whitey how to be a better whitey)? Lame. Oh, so lame. (Oh, wait a minute...I forgot Morgan Freeman also has a major role in the film as, uh...a wise black character who shows whitey how to be a better whitey.)

8. Did I miss something, or is this just sloppy screenwriting? Eric Roberts tells Gordon he’s had enough of all the Joker agita. As such, he tells Gordon exactly where to find the Joker. Cut to the Joker on a boat with all the surviving mobsters (except Eric Roberts). The Joker makes a speech, then burns a pile of money and a Chinaman. Then....leaves. Did Gordon have a senior moment, or was that just sloppy screenwriting that NOBODY INVOLVED WITH THE PRODUCTION SEEMED TO NOTICE?

9. Let me get this straight: the Joker kills a bunch of people, lays waste to the city and burns off half of Harvey Dent’s face...but the plan is that Batman will take the blame for Harvey Dent’s death in order to keep the good people of Gotham from getting bummed out. Because, of course, nobody in Gotham City would believe that the Joker killed Harvey Dent...even though the Joker tied him up in a room with a bomb and burned off half his face, then blew up the hospital he was in. No, much better plan to blame Batman. Good thinking, guys.

10. And Batman doesn’t kill the insane, indestructible, unstoppably evil Joker...why? Oh, right. Principles. Like when he didn’t kill Harvey Dent and resisted violating the civil rights of everyone in Gotham City...oh...wait...

Yeesh.

Related stories: How Batman Is The New Beatles, Fitting Farewells - The Top Ten Great Final Films, Screengrab Review - The Dark Knight

Ignominious Exits: The Top Ten Worst Final Films (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Last week, in honor of Heath Ledger’s last completed performance (as the Joker in The Dark Knight), we examined the final performances and films of actors and directors that served as fitting capstones to their careers. This week, in a Top Ten list suggested by YOU (in the general sense, and "Other Matt" specifically), we present ten ignominious exits: the cinematic equivalent of dying on the toilet, suffered by artists who really deserved better.

Charles Chaplin's A COUNTESS FROM HONG KONG (1967)

Chaplin's previous film, A King in New York, had been made ten years earlier and was the last film in which he starred; it was a stillborn disaster, and would have qualified as a notably sad ending to his career in its own right if he hadn't managed to follow it up with this thing. But Countess, which he also wrote and produced, as well as having written the music and contributed a cameo appearance, is especially embarrassing for its timeless, packed-in-mothballs quality. It was, after all, made the same year as Bonnie & Clyde and The Graduate, yet you wouldn't guess from watching it that anything had happened in either filmmaking or the world at large since about 1949. The film's leading man is Marlon Brando, and you couldn't guess from his work here that he'd ever known livelier days, either. Brando was used to directors who welcomed his attempts to fuse elements of his personality with his characters, but Chaplin was an old-fashioned sort who had no truck with that kind of Method foolishness; anything the actors tried to bring in interfered with the clickety-clack of the script that he'd been running inside his head for years. Some people regard some of Brando's later performances as being synonymous with the term "self-indulgent": he stands accused of having undercut his own movies and made his colleagues' lives difficult by abandoning coherence and logic and doing whatever he felt like doing in the name of letting his freak flag fly. But even in something like The Island of Dr. Moreau, he's at least inventive and amusing, stuck in a hopeless project but trying to entertain the audience while he entertains himself. Chaplin's movie gives you the chance to see what Brando looked like when he'd abandoned all hope: chained to a stupid script (and the character name "Ogden Mears"), he slogs through his blocking and reels off his dialogue syllable by syllable, plainly just wanting it all to be over. It's a sign of how thoroughly Chaplin had lost touch with his creative instincts that, once he'd broken the actor of his early attempts to bring some of his own collaborative instincts and energy to the role, he claimed to find Brando's work delightful. A Countess from Hong Kong went over like a fart at a funeral with critics and audiences, but damned if Petula Clark didn't have a number one hit with a reworked version of the movie's theme song. The Beatles, having displaced Charlie as England's most popular international import, must have had a rueful chuckle over that.

Stanley Kubrick's EYES WIDE SHUT (1999)

Stanley Kubrick spent more than the last two years of his life working on this, his only film after 1987's Full Metal Jacket. He didn't just work at his accustomed glacial pace; he shot the film once, then recast two important supporting roles with different actors (with Sydney Pollack and Marie Richardson stepping in for, respectively, Harvey Keitel and Jennifer Jason Leigh) and shot much of it again. One fringe benefit of the production was that it unexpectedly took its star, Tom Cruise, out of circulation for a couple of movie seasons. Kubrick died a few days after a screening of what may or may not have been his ideal final version of the film for Cruise, his co-star and then-wife Nicole Kidman, and Warner Brothers executives. By then, the media, for lack of other Cruise-related news in the two and a half years since his Oscar-nominated turn in Jerry Maguire, had been flogging the picture so hard that they had at least as much invested in its success as the studio. The news of Kubrick's death ratcheted up the odds considerably: the thought that he had died while putting the finishing touches on something that might be less than his masterpiece was generally considered too morbid a thought to bear. Eyes Wide Shut was released in the summer of 1999 amid a tsunami of hype, but since the movie itself was hard to stay awake through, the hype itself had a distinctive, abstract quality, given that it was easier to make the movie sound interesting if you sort of reviewed another, imaginary version of the actual picture. The most popular gambit was to devote great seas of ink to discussing whether the sex scenes between Tom and Nicole were the sexiest ever filmed or just the sexiest ever performed by an actual husband and wife; the topic was covered to such a degree that it inspired a backlash, which took the form not of people arguing that the sex scenes between Tom and Nicole weren't really all that sexy but instead, of people arguing that it actually made them uncomfortable to see two married actors going at it on screen, since for all the viewer knew, that might be what they really look like when they're going at it at home, thus raising all kinds of "T.M.I."-related issues. In order to understand just how desperate the hype merchants were to avoid discussing the actual movie, it helps to know that in all of Eyes Wide Shut's two hours and forty minutes, there is not a single sex scene between Tom and Nicole, unless you count a couple of minutes of pre-coital necking which takes place, appropriately enough given the personalities involved, while Tom and Nicole are staring at themselves in a mirror. Bolstered by this kind of Barnum-esque coverage, Eyes Wide Shut did respectable business until word of mouth overcame it and theater owners needed the space for extra screenings of The Blair Witch Project. The question of what Kubrick himself thought of his final film remains controversial, and when Full Metal Jacket star R. Lee Ermey dared to tell an interviewer that his old buddy Stan had told him shortly before his death that he had helmed "a piece of shit", many were quick to come down on the drill sergeant as if he had convened a meeting of all the children of the world to inform them that there is no Santa Claus.

Bette Davis in WICKED STEPMOTHER (1989)

No Hollywood star of the classic era worked harder than Bette Davis for good roles and sustained career longevity. In the 1930s, she breached her contract with Warner Bros. to take roles in English films and then unsuccessfully sued her studio, claiming that they were killing her career by forcing her to appear in "mediocre" films. When her career cooled as she entered middle age, she prankishly took out a classified newspaper ad reminding the industry of her availability. And as she grew elderly, she embraced a new movie image as a hag horror queen and became a not-infrequent guest star on series TV. Whether you admire this side of Davis as an undying devotion to the practice of her craft or see it as the egomania of a Madonna prototype whose life only seemed to be real so long as millions of people were paying attention to her -- and it was probably a little from column A and a little from column B -- it was almost fated to ultimately bite her in the ass, and the last big bite was Wicked Stepmother, a godforsaken "supernatural comedy" written and directed by Larry Cohen. Davis, who was 80 at the time of shooting, plays a witch who marries Lionel Stander and proceeds to turn his family topsy-turvy. Or at least that was the idea: Davis rankled the set after a week of shooting, putting out a statement saying that the script that she had agreed to perform was so bad it was unplayable and that Cohen was deliberately shooting her to look grotesque. For his part, Cohen announced to the press that his star had been too sick to work but was afraid that if her condition became common knowledge, no one would ever hire her again. A look at the movie provides solid evidence for both claims. Davis, frail and with her head topped by a gruesome-looking red wig, does look pretty bad, but even the healthy members of the cast seem on the verge of pitching over from the effects of having to deliver Cohen's dialogue. Whatever really happened, it's kind of amazing that the woman who once went toe-to-toe with Jack Warner might have thought that Larry Cohen would chivalrously watch her back after she'd walked out on him. (Instead of burning the precious footage he had of his famous star, Cohen rewrote the script to explain that Davis's character was now inhabiting the body of a cat and assigned her lines and business to a new character, her "daughter", played by Barbara Carrera.) Davis died a few months after Cohen's reupholstered version of the movie briefly surfaced, like pond scum, in theaters. The finished version includes a nasty in-joke involving Davis' old nemesis, Joan Crawford (whose own final film was the 1970 British scare picture Trog, in which Mommie Dearest co-starred with a dude in a frozen-faced monkey suit). That was pretty embarrassing, but given that Crawford had enough sense and self-restraint to retire after that and spend the last seven years of her life in virtual seclusion, we'd have to judge that Crawford wins that round on points.

Click here for Part Two and Part Three

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

How Batman Is the New Beatles

Phil Nugent — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 16:28:00 GMT

Present Batman and future John Connor Christian Bale--the trailers for next year's Terminator Salvation are currently preceding screenings of The Dark Knight, confirming whatever suspicions you may have had that there's a whole lotta Bale goin' on--has begged the media to "respect my privacy" as he deals with personal matters related to his arrest by London police on Tuesday, following "allegations he assaulted his mother and sister in a London hotel." Bale, who was in London for the local premiere of The Dark Knight, isn't letting the incident interfere with his schedule to promote the movie. He turned up in Barcelona yesterday for the Spanish premiere and signed autographs for fans and took questions about the movie, while steering clear of any comments on his "private matter." (Bale's camp did put out a statement saying that, after the cops took him in, he "co-operated throughout, gave his account in full of the events in question, and left the station without any charge." The most interesting thing about Bale's travails may be that they don't seem to be registering as hardly a blip on the cultural radar. At the very least, they aren't hurting the film--or, if they are, it's scary to think about how well it might otherwise be doing. The movie has made over $200 million so far, and while, given the current condition of the dollar, that might not seem so impressive, take a look at those crowds lined up around the theaters and imagine what'll it be like as the movie goes international and audiences that big start paying in Euros.

The Dark Knight is a moody, violent fantasia on post-9/11 themes, and it has one star who can't do press because he was buried last winter and another whose press conferences now begin with a reminder that he won't be talking about charges that he roughed up his mom, yet in terms of popular appeal, this two-and-a-half-hour, apocalyptic carny ride seems to be the most bullet-proof film of the season, maybe of the year. Ty Burr, calling the movie "a pop event" on the order of the Beatles appeaing on the Ed Sullivan show, field the question, Is it the best movie of all time, and answers, that it "has to be the best movie of all time because it feels that way right now, and because it feels impossibly exhilarating to share that thrill with everyone you know and millions of people you don't. Although hype played a critical part, this is less about hype than the gentle madness of crowds. The response to Dark Knight represents a perfect storm of studio publicity, public mourning, epic seriousness of filmmaking purpose, and the unspoken need for something in this crass tinsel culture to mean something." Burr is probably right in thinking that the reaction is largely tied to Heath Ledger's death, and in complicated way. It's not just that seeing Ledger's final performance all these months after the (surprising, at least to some of us) huge outpouring of public grief represents some sort of closure, but the truly amazing nature of that performance helps to validate the claims made at the time of Ledger's death for the unknowable, but presumed to be titanic, future that still lay ahead for the actor. The Dark Knight is a terrific movie, and that makes its success satisfying, but no movie is this successful just because it's terrific. "There's relief to be found," Burr writes, "in such pop-cult unification and also the elation of not having to think for yourself -- the joy of being picked up in a boundless groundswell of excited, committed response. That this has been brought about by a movie about people in tights blowing things up (all right, a thought-provoking movie about people in tights blowing things up), rather than any of the vexing issues of our actual world, isn't accidental. Not in the least. The Dark Knight is over in two and a half hours, and would that you could say the same about climate change or the presidential election."

Take Five: Bring On the Bad Guys

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 20:00:00 GMT

As you may have heard unless you've just gotten back from an alternate dimension with no public relations industry, The Dark Knight opens this weekend, and even our resident skeptic Scott Von Doviak is hailing Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker as one of the pinnacles of big-screen malevolance. Batman is the perfect illustration of the principle that a hero is only as good as his villains; the Clown Prince of Crime is the outstanding member of an unforgettable rogue's gallery that throws the lonely heroism of Bruce Wayne into sharp relief by illustrating the other facets of his personality and demonstrating how terrible he might have been had he not taken the path of righteousness. Indeed, there are any number of genres, from true crime to film noir to serial thrillers to even Shakespearean tragedy, that prove that a story is only as strong as its most detestable character. Crime, as the man once said, is only a left-handed form of human endeavor, and for every enigmatic nihilist like the Joker who simply wants to watch the world burn, there's a figure whose vileness and evil are the result of a good man gone just a little bit bad. If your showing of The Dark Knight is sold out, here's five movies featuring some of our favorite big-screen villains to tide you over until you get to hear Ledger's deadly cackle for yourself.

THE STEPFATHER (1987)

These days, Terry O'Quinn is best known for his portrayal of John Locke, the mysteriously healed castaway from Lost who can be both hero and villain as he attempts to forge a mystical connection with the island. But 20 years ago, when the veteran stage actor first came to the attention of the moviegoing public, it was in this smart little thriller about a man so obsessed with having the perfect family that he was willing to kill to get it. His face an affable blank, O'Quinn goes about his father-knows-best routine with barely a harsh word for anything, until something goes wrong. That's when the devil inside him comes up, and he moves quickly from tearing up his tool room to butchering his whole family. O'Quinn's tightly controlled performance here is what makes the movie, and his quiet intensity is what makes it so devastatingly effective when he temporarily forgets the careful fiction he's made of his life and asks, with genuine confusion, "Who am I here?" -- before remembering, and delivering the news to his new wife in an especially brutal way.

THE MINUS MAN (1999)

Though a flawed movie, The Minus Man -- directed by Hampton Fancher, best known for penning the screenplay to Blade Runner -- is also a compelling one, thanks to the strong performance by Owen Wilson as the main character, Vann Siegert. Turning the usual serial killer narrative on its head, The Minus Man presents Siegert as a kind, handome, likable young man who wants to put down roots, to fit in, to be somebody -- but most of all, to help people. The problem is, he thinks that most people are so miserable that the best way to help them is to kill them (gently, of course, with a fast, painless poison). So decent is this mass murderer that his own conscience has to step in occasionally and remind him that what he's doing is wrong, in the person of two imaginary FBI agents who torment him. And so convincing is Wilson in making Vann a likable figure that more than once, the viewer finds himself wishing they would just go away and leave the poor boy alone.

THE ADVENTURES OF BUCKAROO BANZAI ACROSS THE 8TH DIMENSION (1984)

Great villains don't always have to be grim, sinister, humorless killing machines. Sometimes, as in this delightful neo-pulp sci-fi musical comedy, they can be goofy, pompous, overblown killing machines with the worst fake Italian accents since Chico Marx. Dr. Emilio Lizardo, the nefarious Red Lectroid living in the body of a long-dead rocket scientist, is played in the film by John Lithgow, who hams it up like there's no tomorrow. He sticks electrodes on his toungue, he tortures helpless women with honey, he gives plagiarized inspirational speeches to his handful of followers, and he deliberately mispronounces the names of his underlings -- and he has a hell of a time doing it. Dressed up in cobbled-together bits and pieces of a dozen pulp archetypes, Lithgow gets support from a colossal cast of veteran character actors, including Dan Hedeya, Christopher Lloyd and Vincent Schiavelli, but he outshines them all, investing each one of his often hilarious lines with hooty gravitas.

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (2007)

Some critics found the character of Anton Chigurh in the Coen Brothers' masterful adaptation of a Cormac McCarthy novel to be so over-the-top as to read like a cartoonish supervillain. Others, though, found the understated psychopath, played by a preternaturaly detached Javier Bardem in one of the big screen's most memorable haircuts, to carry surprising depth for someone described by another character in the film as "the ultimate bad-ass". The most compelling thing about Chigurh is that, while everyone else perceives him as totally insane, his madness has the impenetrable integrity of the lunatic. To himself, his actions make perfect sense, and the more time we spend around his insanity, the more we begin to understand it: in the chilling scene near the movie's end where he pays a visit to the tragedy-stricken Carla Jean, we know that he's playing his own deranged interpretation of fair with her, and the terror we feel as the tension mounts comes from the fact that we know and she doesn't.

ROCKY III (1982)

Made at the exact moment in time that the Rocky franchise was becoming a laughable self-parody, but Mr. T had yet to do the same, Rocky III, while more or less a disaster in its second half and filled with hokey, ridiculous moments, does manage to give us some of the most thrilling scenes in the series. Why? Because it also gives us the greatest villain in the series: the brutal, granite-hard, contemptous Clubber Lang, a street-fighting brawler who has nothing but loathing for the soft celebrity smooth-talker that Stallone's Rocky Balboa has become. Patterned partly after the young George Foreman, Clubber Lang is a monster in the ring who lives to destroy his opponents and has developed a line of trash-talk so electrifying that it sends the gregarious Rocky into a rage while providing the most quotable dialogue in the whole Rocky series. And though he never showed himself capable of doing more than he does here, Mr. T is stunning: his hostile, spitting hatred of everyone but himself is so exciting to watch that for the film's first hour, it's hard to take your eyes off him.

Fitting Farewells: The Top Ten Great Final Films (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 20:00:00 GMT

We recently asked YOU what Top Tens you’d like to see here on The Screengrab and, among the many fine suggestions, “Other Matt” proposed the Top Ten Ignominious Exits (i.e., “...films of an actor that are less than glorious and not [fitting] the last time we see them on celluloid”)... a list we’ll actually tackle NEXT week, since THIS week, in honor of Heath Ledger’s final completed performance (as the Joker in The Dark Knight), we've decided to examine the other side of the Two-Face coin: actors and directors who managed to fade to black with a fitting and/or memorable cinematic swan song.

Robert Altman's A PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION (2006)

When this project was first announced, it was a real head-scratcher for many: the sensibilities of Robert Altman and Garrison Keillor would seem to blend together about as well as bourbon and buttermilk. While no one in their right mind would ever equate A Prairie Home Companion with one of Altman's masterpieces, the result is a genial slice of faux-Americana that leaves you grinning from ear to ear. The wisp of a plot concerns the closing of the theater that has served as the long-time home of Keillor's homespun radio program, spurring the cast and crew to put on one last show for the folks at home. The specter of death hovers over the proceedings, but Companion is never morbid – how could it be when said specter is embodied by sweet-tempered Virginia Madsen? The backstage shenanigans and onstage farewells lend Companion the highly appropriate aura of a curtain call for a great American master – the icing on one of our culture's richest cakes.

John Wayne in THE SHOOTIST (1976)

After winning his Academy Award for the 1969 Western True Grit, a movie that gave him the chance to make fun of his anachronistic image and his physical decline yet still emerge heroic, John Wayne didn't seem to know what to do with himself. He spent most of the 1970s alternately starring in stale cowboy flicks (Rio Lobo, The Cowboys, Chisum) that tried to deny that he, or the movies, had changed, and embarrassing himself in imitations of the new bullying cop movies that had displaced the Western (McQ, Brannigan), like some combination of Clint Eastwood and a Tyrannosaurus Rex in a bad rug. He rallied, though, for his last film, in which he played a character specially tooled to provide a send-off for Wayne's screen image. He's J.B. Books, a legendary gunfighter who rides in from the plains to take a room in a small town and wait to die of cancer. The movie itself is sentimental and uneven, but Wayne, fitter-looking than in True Grit and dandified with a moustache, performs with more dignity and grace than he'd demonstrated onscreen in years. He must have suspected that this would be his last chance to tone up the tail end of his filmography, and he didn't let himself down. Although Wayne would live another three years, The Shootist was his last film, and 1977 would be the first year in which he didn't appear in a movie since his film debut in 1926.

Edward G. Robinson in SOYLENT GREEN (1973)

Soylent Green is a cheesy camp landmark of a dystopian sci-fi picture, but it has greatness in it, in the form of Edward G. Robinson. Robinson played the ancient researcher who is partner and roommate to Charlton Heston' tough-cop hero. As someone old enough to remember the planet before overpopulation, global warming, and the depletion of its natural resources turned it into a sweltering hellscape, Robinson's character is an emissary from another world, and so was Robinson, who began his career in movies before talkies and became a star in 1931 when he landed the title role in Little Caesar. He and Heston have an old-married-couple rapport that gives the movie its bit of heart; theirs is the only human relationship we see, maybe the last one left in a world that turns people into scavengers and victims. (Heston and Robinson had almost played together in the first of Heston's future shock films, Planet of the Apes, but after playing Dr. Zaius in a test scene, Robinson concluded that he wasn't hale enough to endure wearing the ape makeup for long stretches of time.) To its credit, Soylent Green gives him a beauty of a send-off, gazing wistfully at old nature footage while waiting for his lethal shot to kick in at a euthanasia clinic; it renders the famous "Soylent Green is made from people!" finale an anticlimax. Robinson died in January, 1973, four months before his last picture was released.

Andrei Tarkovsky’s THE SACRIFICE (1986)

Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice is a masterpiece by any yardstick, a beautiful, uncompromising meditation on the encroaching apocalypse and one man’s attempts to stop it in order to protect his family. Yet if one considers that Tarkovsky was suffering from lung cancer -- the disease that eventually claimed his life -- while making the film, it takes on a poignant new layer of significance. Once, in an interview, Tarkovsky stated “the only condition of fighting for the right to create is faith in your own vocation, readiness to serve, and refusal to compromise.” Having built up one of the most acclaimed bodies of work of any filmmaker of his generation, Tarkovsky might have been forgiven for retiring from filmmaking and living out the rest of his days in peace. But Tarkovsky, scarcely 53 years old at the time, wasn’t about to pass away without making one more offering to the gods of cinema. So when the film’s hero (played by Erland Josephson) lays down his life to spare those he loves, it’s impossible not to think of the filmmaker himself, making one final effort to better the art form he loved so passionately and uncompromisingly. Fittingly, The Sacrifice was one of Tarkovsky’s most celebrated films, not only as a tribute to a major work by a master filmmaker, but also as the final film from an artist who had, as always, raged against the dying of the light.

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent, Paul Clark

Click here for Part Two and Part Three

Screengrab Review: “The Dark Knight”

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 12:00:00 GMT

Christopher Nolan’s 2005 franchise re-launch Batman Begins ended with a tantalizing tease (lifted from Frank Miller’s comic book reboot Year One) that all but guaranteed a sequel: Lt. James Gordon (Gary Oldman) revealing the calling card of the new freak in town – a Joker, of course – and implying that by his presence, Batman has raised the stakes for theatricality and large-scale actions among the criminal element in Gotham City. To mostly satisfying results, the highly anticipated and insanely hyped follow-up, The Dark Knight, takes that idea and runs with it. The only problem is, it runs a marathon when a 10K would have sufficed.

As The Dark Knight opens, a new day has dawned on Gotham, with fresh-faced District Attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) leading the charge. Along with his assistant and girlfriend Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal replacing Katie Holmes, an upgrade in every conceivable way), he has put mob boss Sal Maroni (Eric Roberts) on trial and is closing in on the underworld’s money laundering operation. But he requires a little clandestine help from the city’s resident masked vigilante, who he doesn’t realize is, of course, Rachel’s “psycho ex-boyfriend” Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale).

Crashing the party is a much more dangerous psycho, his scarred face smeared with greasy clown makeup. He cuts a deal with the mob to rid them of the Batman in exchange for half their assets, and the wiseguys are forced to take this Joker seriously once he starts eliminating high-profile targets, including the current police commissioner. It soon becomes clear that the Joker isn’t in it for the money; he’s an unpredictable agent of pure anarchy, looking to reshape Gotham City in his own twisted image.

The Joker, you may have read, is played by the late Heath Ledger in his final full performance. Last week I wrote this cranky post about the somewhat unseemly hype surrounding Ledger’s Oscar chances. I’m still not crazy about all that, but there’s no denying that Ledger delivers the goods. He’s a mesmeric force burning through The Dark Knight like a shooting star – you literally can’t take your eyes off him, and when he’s not onscreen the movie misses him terribly. His Joker isn’t Nicholson’s baggy-pants comedian or Cesar Romero’s hooting harlequin; he has no name, no past, no future, no rules and no reductive “mommy never loved me” back story (or rather, he has a bunch of them, and they all contradict each other). He’s pure, unfettered chaos, and in Ledger’s portrayal, the comic book icon finally becomes one of the great screen villains.

Through its first ninety minutes or so, The Dark Knight is a worthy showcase for him. Nolan manages to keep a lot of plates spinning at once, using the insistent, earworming score by Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard to make action in disparate locations seem like it’s all part of the same epic sweep. But he has the same problem here as he did in Batman Begins; he’s really good at getting all the parts of the engine tuned up and revving at full force, but he has a much harder time shutting it all down. In its protracted final act, The Dark Knight blunders down some blind alleys and runs through a series of false climaxes en route to the finish line. There’s the matter of introducing another supervillain late in the game, a temptation the Batman series has rarely been able to resist. Here it’s the coin-flipping Two-Face, who has been given short shrift twice now, although admittedly he fares better here than when Joel Schumacher turned him into Jim Carrey’s cackling sidekick in Batman Forever. He does have an arc, but honestly, we don’t care about it as much as we should – which leads to the other big flaw Knight shares with its predecessor.

Nolan and his co-screenwriter (and brother) Jonathan Nolan want to make sure we’re aware that what we’re watching is a cut above the usual summer superhero fare – that it has layers of psychological depth that set it apart from your Hulks and Iron Men. To that end, they have a bad habit of explicating their themes in the dialogue, so that every character becomes an armchair psychologist or amateur sociologist at one time or another. This results in some ponderous musings on morality, madness, fate and the nature of heroism, all of which weigh down the movie in the home stretch. The filmmakers would like to think The Dark Knight is about the battle for Harvey Dent’s soul, and by extension, that of Gotham City, but we know better. It’s all about the Joker, and every minute he’s not on the screen is a minute we’ve been robbed. Heath Ledger left us wanting more, but the same can’t quite be said of The Dark Knight.

Related:
Batman: The Lost Years
The Joker's Viral Marketing: Threat or Menace?

Jokers Wild About Heath Ledger's Oscar Chances

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 20:15:00 GMT

From somewhere near the intersection of Hype and Necrophilia comes this AP report assessing a dead guy’s Oscar chances for a performance none of us regular folk have seen yet. I realize it’s rare to find anything crass or tasteless about the Academy Awards, but even by the usual standards this piece sticks in my craw. (And I really like to keep my craw free of offending blockages.)

In case you’ve been doing missionary work with that recently discovered tribe in the Amazon, it seems that Heath Ledger, who died in January, plays the Joker in the upcoming Batman movie The Dark Knight. Within minutes of his death there were murmurs about a possible posthumous Oscar nomination, but that was before anyone had seen his performance. Now that a few insiders have seen it, the murmurs have become a dull roar that promises to become much, much duller but totally inescapable over the next six months or so.

“Jack Nicholson's Joker was a blast,” writes David Germain. “Heath Ledger's Joker is as dark and anarchic a figure as Randle McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, the role that brought Nicholson his first Academy Award. Ledger's performance in the Batman tale The Dark Knight is so remarkable that next Jan. 22, the one-year anniversary of his death, he could become just the seventh actor in Oscar history to earn a posthumous nomination.”

Germain goes on to quote an assortment of luminaries, all of whom agree that Ledger is Brando, Olivier, Nicholson and Cesar Romero all rolled into one. I hope it’s true, and I am looking forward to the movie and the performance, although the hype is beginning to make my left eye twitch uncontrollably. Is there not something a little unseemly about the need to turn Ledger into another James Dean? Germain writes, “The aura surrounding Ledger since his death is a sign that, like Dean, he could endure as a mythic figure of talent silenced before his time…That will not necessarily improve his Oscar chances. Dean had two shots after his death and lost both.” Gee, he must have been all broken up about that.

Related:
The Joker's Viral Marketing: Threat or Menace?
Batman: The Lost Years

The Gay Pride Top Twenty (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 20:45:00 GMT

THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (1975)

By the time I first encountered the film version of Richard O’Brien’s bizarre musical paean to ‘50s horror movies and polymorphous perversity, it was already a well-established cult classic, regularly attended by freaks and frat boys, geeks and fad-of-the-week trendies. But underneath the audience-participation spectacle was a gleefully subversive last gasp celebration of gender-blind free love (before pop culture sexuality became more repressive yet somehow simultaneously more commodified, fetishized and pervasive in the neo-con '80s and '90s). The invocation of Tim Curry’s infamous sweet transvestite Dr. Frank-n-Furter to “Give yourself over to absolute pleasure” became highly questionable advice in the AIDS era; even in the no-holes-barred world of the film's Transsexual Transylvanians, Frank’s lifestyle’s too extreme (and the character, like many overreaching sensualists before him, meets a tragic demise). Yet, the Rocky cult continues to flourish, years after its early ‘80s heyday, with screenings often serving as safe havens for GLBT (and straight!) misfits seeking community, acceptance and glamour in the midst of a “Science Fiction Double Feature” lost in time, lost in space and meaning. (Mee-eeaaaaa-nnniiinnnggg!!!!)

BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN (2005)

According to the official Oscar narrative, 2005 was the Year of Gay Cinema, and Brokeback Mountain, which won three Academy Awards that year, was its purest expression. And that’s true, to a point; in a year that seemed to feature more mainstream movies than usual with gay themes, Brokeback Mountain, with its gorgeous scenic cinematography, its elegiac tone, and its powerhouse lead performances by the late Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal as doomed, love-struck cowboys, stood out. But more than a simple movie, Brokeback Mountain was that rare thing, a cultural phenomenon: a work of art that transcends its nature as merely a good or bad, popular or unpopular, example of its type and becomes something that permeates the culture and becomes a sort of intellectual shorthand for something greater than itself. Not only did the movie provide us with a genuine catchphrase in “I wish I knew how to quit you”, but it became such a phenomenon that pundits on the left and the right used its box office numbers to defend or denigrate the mainstreaming of homosexuality. One’s very reaction to it seemed to become a referendum on gay rights. And while there’s no denying that a lot of the attention it got was of the negative sort, tinged with a base and hysterical juvenile homophobia, from the first internet wag who dubbed it Bareback Mountin’ to the last sports radio talk-show guest who used its title as a cheap butt-fuck joke, it saturated the very cultural discourse of its time. And in that way, it advanced the cause of gay cinema – and maybe of gay rights in general – more than its makers could have ever dreamed.

BOUND (1996)

Because its action unfolds mostly in a couple of apartments on what appears to be the planet Earth, it's tempting to think that Bound is the only Wachowski Brothers movie to take place in the real world, when actually it's as much a fantasy as The Matrix or Speed Racer. Gina Gershon's Corky may hang out in the sort of bars where the women are built like Brian Dennehy…but she's still built like Gina Gershon. When she hooks up with breathy femme fatale Violet (Jennifer Tilly), it's the sort of lesbian romance that two dudes from Chicago would dream up. (That is, they were two dudes at the time, Larry Wachowski's later gender bending adventures notwithstanding.) Still, their love affair isn't just Skin-emax-style titillation; it's actually handled rather matter-of-factly in what might otherwise be a pretty standard neo-noir flick. Joe Pantoliano's greasy hood Caesar may disapprove, but who cares what he thinks? Violet and Corky aren't just partners in crime, plotting to swipe two million dollars out from under the noses of Caesar and his gangster pals. They have genuine love and respect for each other, a rarity in a genre where everyone is usually out to screw everybody else.

THE COCKETTES (2002)

This tremendously entertaining documentary, directed by Billy Weber and David Weissman, records through vintage footage and new interviews the rise and fall of San Francisco's pre-eminent drug-addled co-ed transvestite hippie song and dance trip. Led by the charismatic Hibiscus, footage of whom provides grounds for a convincing argument that the Second Coming occurred sometime in the late sixties and that Jesus had to leave again but wants everyone to know that he really enjoyed the acid, the Cockettes went from improvisational dancing to the accompaniment of old records before the midnight movie at the Palace Theater to elaborate, high-camp stage musicals. Their story doubles as a parable of the bust-up of the counterculture; the troupe eventually split up over the question of whether they were in it to make money or for love of performance with quasi-religious ambitions. Hibiscus and his devotees broke apart to form the Angels of Light, while the other Cockettes stormed New York for a disastrous run on Broadway before sneering crowds of jaded, black-hearted sophisticates. They crawled back home and had a few more local triumphs (including the sci-fi extravagaza Journey to the Center of Uranus, starring special guest Divine), but time and medical bills began to tear them apart. Some of the survivors interviewed in the movie look as if they're still trying to catch their breath since having stormed the Bastille, but between their stories and the clips of the troupe in action, few movies have made a misspent youth look like such a noble and enviable calling.

LAW OF DESIRE (1987)

In 1987, American audiences shell-shocked from AIDS and the sexual revolution made a blockbuster out of Fatal Attraction, the movie that created the modern stereotype of the spurned one-night-stand turned stalker as the ultimate embodiment of the fear of the loss of control that can come with romantic obsession and sexual freedom. That same year, Pedro Almodovar, a Spaniard liberated by the death twelve years earlier of the dictator Franco, served up Antonio Banderas as a young, straight stud who experiences one night of bliss with the celebrity director Pablo (Eusebio Poncela) and is so determined to make just one more trip to the well that lays siege to his reluctant love object's life, killing the boy-man of Pablo's dreams (who's such a dullard that the audience couldn't care less) and holding his sister (Carmen Maura), who used to be his brother, hostage until his steamy demands are met. With Banderas in the role and with Almodovar nudging him on, it is very hard to watch this without thinking, "Sure wish somebody loved me enough to put a gun on my family and pitch my significant other off the nearest cliff." Some sniff at early Almodovar as a frivolous artist, but for all his camp humor and extravangance, he was deadly serious in his insistence that respect be paid to those willing to go all the way for love.

Click here for Part One, Part Two and Part Four

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

Trailer Review: The Dark Knight Trailer #3

Paul Clark — Wed, 07 May 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Continuing this week’s spotlight of brand new trailers for the summer blockbusters, here’s the brand spankin’ new trailer for the Screengrab team’s predicted #1 hit of the summer. I must say, it looks awfully tasty. As with the last trailer, this one is very Joker-heavy, but for good reason, as Ledger’s final performance looks positively scorching. But at the same time, there’s plenty of room for the other characters, especially Aaron Eckhart as Harvey Dent, who finally get some screen time as well as a tantalizing final line. The only thing that seems strange to me is how little we actually see of Christian Bale’s performance- most of the shots of him are reaction shots of stuff with him in the suit, which makes me wonder what Christopher Nolan intends to do with the character. But I’m guessing that’s the point- Batman at his best is something of an enigma, and while he’s the hero of the movie the villains (especially the Joker) are much easier to sell. But who am I’m kidding? I’m there opening day, if not before.