The Screengrab : helen mirren

The Screengrab's Top Ten Worst...Movies...Ever!!!! (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 07 May 2009 22:00:00 GMT

Leonard Pierce's Top Ten Worst Movies Ever

1. INDEPENDENCE DAY (1996)
2. THE POSTMAN (1997)

After the half-billion-dollar disaster that was Waterworld, it’s a wonder that any studio would give Kevin Costner money for anything, let alone another massively budgeted post-apocalyptic sci-fi epic. But Warner Brothers ponied up the jack, and auteur Costner decided to show them what he could really do. Wasting another quarter-billion dollars, and bringing eternal shame to the MPAA voters who had, less than a decade before, awarded him a Best Director Oscar, Costner created one of the worst films of all time. Wasting a decent source novel by David Brin, The Postman is noisy, stupid, indulgent, witless, and interminable, and it ends with one of the biggest cop-out endings in motion picture history; but what makes it truly special (by which I mean wretched) is what a colossal vanity project it is for its director/star. Cramming the movie with his relatives, he turns his character from a relatable idealist to an impossibly perfect superman who is loved by everyone who encounters him. It’s the kind of manically overindulgent ego-stroke that used to kill entire careers in the old Hollywood system; unluckily for moviegoers worldwide, it didn’t do the same for Costner.

3. SHOWGIRLS (1995)
4. CALIGULA (1979)

Anyone can make a shitty movie with a bad cast and a crap writer. But it takes a special level of awfulness to take one of America’s leading literary lights, have him write a script to be performed by some of the world’s greatest actors, and spend tens of millions of dollars recreating the period in which your film is set, and still have it end up so horrible that it’s rightly considered one of the worst movies ever made. Conceived (and originally directed, until even he figured out what a colossal piece of shit he had on his hands) by Bob Guccione as a sort of combination of highbrow historical drama and low-grade softcore pornography, the story of the deranged Roman emperor Caligula was such a disaster that original screenwriter Gore Vidal sued to have his name removed from the final project – which, considering the stuff he left his name on, is a pretty powerful indictment of the film. Tinto Brass did most of the directing after Guccione bailed, and seriously bad directing it is, though if both the writer and the director have bailed on the project, it’s probably going to suck no matter who takes the helm. Not only did the eight-digit catastrophe waste the talents of big-leaguers like John Gielgud, Malcolm McDowell (in his worst venue until he decided to appear on Heroes), Helen Mirren, and Peter O’Toole, but – criminally unforgivable for a movie funded by the head man at Penthouse – it was so incompetent, enervating and ill-conceived that it wasn’t even remotely sexy.

5. THE BROWN BUNNY (2003)
6. URBAN MENACE (1999)

As a rule, I’ve tried to avoid sticking low-budget indie fare like Plan 9 From Outer Space, Robot Monster and Manos: The Hands of Fate on my list of the worst movies of all time. For one thing, it’s too easy – these films were often made in isolation by untrained filmmakers with zero budget, second-hand equipment and amateur actors. It’s amazing they made those films at all; expecting them to be good was expecting too much. For another, they’re from a different era; some of the acclaimed and popular films coming out of Hollywood featured dialogue just as hokey and scenarios just as idiotic, only they were assayed by skilled professionals in front of and behind the camera. But I’ll make an exception for the dreadfully bad 1999 gangsta-horror flick Urban Menace. Directed by the criminally awful Albert Pyun – whose career as an auteur of crap puts even Uwe Boll to shame – it was directed by a seasoned studio filmmaker; it had a budget that could have paid for everything Ed Wood ever made ten times over; and its target audience was the presumably more sophisticated filmgoer of today. But for all that, it plays like Plan 9 Goes Gangsta: Snoop Dogg’s stand-in is a lanky, faceless nobody who looks nothing like him. The script is through the bottom of the barrel and three feet into the ground below the barrel. The ‘actors’ include theatrically deficient rappers Big Pun and Fat Joe, who not only can’t act, but can’t even be understood. The plot can barely be said to exist, and the setting consists of a warehouse that was undoubtedly chosen for its proximity to the director’s house. It’s the kind of hacked-out garbage that’s so amazingly bad that you’ll be shocked they even make movies this bad anymore.

7. THE HAPPENING (2008)

There’s a 1967 hippies-on-a-rampage flick called The Happening that, oddly enough, could also arguably qualify as one of the most awful movies ever, but the worst-case scenario we’re discussing here is the one that may have provided a final capper to director M. Night Shyamalan’s downward career spiral. Usually, a stupid plot alone isn’t enough to make a movie qualify for all-time-worst status, but the plot of The Happening (trees turn against mankind and use some kind of floral pheremones to trigger a wave of mass suicide and madness) is Navy vs. the Night Monsters-level bad, and utterly dashes any hopes the movie had of being good by its very existence. Luckily for us, though, Shyamalan throws in tons of extra bad-movie elements in case the asinine plot isn’t enough: a ridiculous lead performance by Mark Wahlberg, interaction between the lead actors utterly free of charisma, hooty special effects, a subpar script, and set pieces that are meant to be dramatic and terrifying but instead come across as laughable, or, worse yet, boring and pointless. Shyamalan went from shocking the world with his seemingly unique gifts to shocking the world at how bad his movies were; it seems unlikely that he has the ability to make a movie worse than The Happening (assuming any studio will give him money to make a movie ever again). But then again, that’s what people said about The Village, too.

8. BATTLEFIELD EARTH (2000)
9. MOMENT BY MOMENT (1978)
10. TOMMY BOY (1995)

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine & Ten

Contributor: Leonard Pierce

The Authenticity Police on the Set of "State of Play"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 15:00:00 GMT

Washington Post writer R. B. Brenner describes his thrilling adventures serving as a technical consultant on State of Play. The movie which stars Russell Crowe as bearish investigative reporter employed by "the Washington Globe, a down-on-its-luck 'second buy' in town, recently taken over by a media conglomerate," where he has Helen Mirren for a boss and Rachel McAdams as a blog-savvy novice to goggle with admiration over his death-defying journaistic feats and to tsk-tsk over his ethical lapses. Once upon a time, this was a 2003 British miniseries of the same title, which "portrays a Fleet Street world of newspapering that, though rollicking fun, is an ethical nightmare by American standards. Its ace reporter pays sources for information (an absolute no-no in the United States), surreptitiously videotapes a source in a hotel room (a firing offense, and a felony in several states) and generally behaves like a walking conflict of interest (and in a bedroom scene with the politician's wife, he does more than walk)." Brenner saw it as his job to guide the filmmaking team, which included Scottish director Kevin Macdonald (Touching the Void, The Last King of Scotland), in adapting the specifics to the American journalism milieu without costing the story any juice.

Towards this end, Brenner set about trying to make sure that Crowe's character was a respectable beacon of his profession, even though part of the character's scruffy charm is clearly meant to be that he's one of those rule-bending, amoral dudes whose first responsibility is to the story and who, compared to the people Brenner probably views as being at the height of the profession--i.e., the ones who get invited to appear on the Sunday morning talk shows and, well, get hired as technical consultants on major Hollywood productions--aren't completely respectable. Brenner objected to the fact that Crowe's character repeatedly pays informants for information, which Brenner says could never happen here, by which he presumably means that if a real reporter got caught doing it, there would be howls of outrage and affronted op-ed pieces for a week and then the reporter would either be suspended or get fired and go to work for Fox News. "Twice, the director agreed to work-arounds. The third time? The good news is, Crowe's reporter never pays a dime, which Macdonald sees as accommodating me. The bad news is, one brief scene could lead the audience to think otherwise."

This was not the only occasion when "my crusade for authenticity bumped into unyielding walls at times. When I repeatedly objected to the illicit-videotaping scene, Macdonald politely made clear that in the end, plot rules. He was trying to tell a dramatic story, a political whodunit, and didn't want the audience bogged down in a journalism ethics lesson. I kept arguing that if he aspired to elevate the film above mere thriller, then accurately portraying my profession's code of conduct should matter more." On the other hand, he describes a scene during filming when Mirren's editor asked Crowe if he could be "objective" about a story in which he had a personal stake and Crowe ad-libbed, "Absolutely not." "Those words," writes Brenner, "didn't make it into the film, much to my relief." Too bad; it's not only a funny line, but it reveals the reporter as an honest man.

Reviewing a 1974 film version of The Front Page, Pauline Kael captured the enduring appeal of the play's view of Chicago journalism circa the early twentieth century by quoting a reporter named Sherman Reilly Duffy: "Socially a journalist fits in somewhere between a whore and a bartender, but spiritually he stands beside Galileo. He knows the world is round." By his own account, Brennan is a representative of the current state of big-time journalism, which is willing to consider the possibility that the world is round if that's what the experts say, but mostly knows where its next meal is coming from. The Hollywood State of Play is itself a throwback to the 1970s, when movies like All the President's Men and The Parallax View (and TV shows like Lou Grant and The Night Stalker, in which Darren McGavin got to the bottom of this whole zombie problem plaguing Chicago) portrayed investigative reporters as the new hard-boiled detective heroes and our last defense against some all-enveloping conspiracy whose jaws where always just about to snap shut. It's a romantic idea that may still have some fantasy appeal, but it doesn't seem very timely, considering that most of the journalistic scandals of the last twenty years have been the result not of overreaching by unshaven, hard-drinking reporters fighting to get to the truth but by well-manicured establishment reporters meekly taking dictation from whatever powerful figure deigned to use them as a P.R. service. (When The New York Times's Judith Miller was criticized for shoveling anything she was told by Ahmad Chalabi into the paper, she indignantly replied that her critics clearly didn't understand what her job was, the implication being that if Chalabi had passed his press kit along to some reporter who'd bothered to check to see whether any of what he'd been told was true or even remotely plausible, that reporter would not have been doing his job right.)

The idea that what's really killing American journalism is the closeness between journalists, who aspire to becoming TV bloviators and beltway celebrities, with the celebrities they cover, is not one that Brennan was likely to push the State of Play crew towards; by his own telling, he was too star-struck from being around real celebrities that he had to summon up all his courage to tell the movie star Crowe that if his character had real reason to believe that somebody was likely to get killed, he would probably go to the cops. The movie may do a little better by the other thing that is killing the newspaper business, which is new technology and the threat of obsolescence. Crowe's old-school ink-stained wretch vents his resentment of McAdams's flavor of the month by sneering, "I've been here 15 years, I've got a 16-year-old computer. She's been here 15 minutes and she's got enough gear to launch a fucking satellite." Another good line. Turns out that it, too, was ad-libbed, on-camera, by Crowe. Maybe, instead of bothering to write scripts, they should just hand Crowe a character and have him live in full costume for a few months, following him around and recording his movements until he gets off enough zingers to add up to a movie.

Screengrab Review: "State of Play"

Nick Schager — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 15:00:00 GMT

A 2003 BBC miniseries condensed from six hours to two for its big-screen Hollywood adaptation, State of Play is so bursting with characters, plots, and hot-button subject matter that some unavoidably receive short shrift. Though its English TV heritage and multifaceted current events-laden narrative both recall Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic, Kevin Macdonald’s (The Last King of Scotland) film nonetheless largely eschews Big Statement grandstanding in favor of murder-mystery tension. It’s a tack that can occasionally be vexing, as some of the issues this tale nominally addresses would surely benefit from further investigation, whether it’s the increasingly edgy relationship between traditional and new media, the role of corporate interests on news reporting, and – in an echo of this season’s 24 storyline – the rise of profit-first private military contractors in international affairs and homeland security. Yet Macdonald’s decision to use these topics primarily as flavoring for a tale of nothing-is-what-it-seems espionage and investigative journalism is, ultimately, a shrewd (if disappointing) one that keeps the focus on suspense and prevents the taut, knotty proceedings from overreaching.

In the nation’s capital, a thief and pizza delivery man are shot dead by a skilled killer, while at the same time, the aide (Maria Thayer) to married congressman Stephen Collins (Ben Affleck), whom she was both screwing and working for as the lead investigator of a Senate committee hearing into Blackwater-esque private military contractor PointCorp, is mysteriously killed by a subway train. Washington Globe reporter Cal McAffrey (a scruffy, long-haired Russell Crowe) is assigned to cover the first deaths but – given that Collins is his former college roommate, as well as married to a woman (Robin Wright Penn) whom he once slept with – inevitably begins looking into the latter case. What he unearths is a tangled web of duplicity, corruption and murder fit for a Raymond Chandler yarn, and one he’s tasked with figuring out while contending with an editor-in-chief (Helen Mirren) under pressure from the paper’s bottom line-driven new owners and a staff blogger named Della Frye (Rachel McAdams) eager to work the story alongside her renowned peer. Double crosses, assassinations, and treachery soon engulf the plucky reporters, and as they breathlessly sift through facts, rumors and revelations, Macdonald’s film achieves suitably swift momentum, the twists and turns coming fast enough to keep one distracted from the obvious, telegraphed denouement lying in wait.

Jeff Daniels, Viola Davis and Jason Bateman round out a sturdy all-star cast that’s asked mainly to embody familiar archetypes, and if Crowe’s hero is less compromised than the script would like us to believe – his severe conflicts of interest never truly putting his noble motivations in serious doubt – the actor’s driven performance nonetheless anchors the vigorous action. That, underneath its flurry of characters and incidents, State of Play adheres to a familiar All the President's Men-style whodunit template is for its first two-thirds inconsequential, since Macdonald keeps the shadowy proceedings brisk and thorny enough to mildly intrigue. Unfortunately, all the commotion is primarily in service of a seen-from-miles-away bombshell that renders the plot – and its half-baked but unpretentious portrait of the insidious influence of private entities in what should be public services (government and media) – far more shallow than it initially appeared. Although, even if the film proves nothing more than a clever, diverting bit of smoke and mirrors, its end-credits depiction of the start-to-finish process of newspapers’ daily creation serves as a poignant coda for the vital yet dying art of old-school, courageous, truth-telling reportage.

DVD Digest for January 6, 2009

Paul Clark — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 15:00:00 GMT

This week brings a cavalcade of crap from the lean seasons of 2008. But if you’re willing to wade through it, there are treasures to be found.

DVD of the Week: The best news in a relatively slow week is the much-anticipated arrival of two very different films by the great British director Michael Powell. For years, fans of Powell and his longtime collaborator Emeric Pressburger have yearned for a DVD of one of their greatest films, 1946’s Stairway to Heaven, also known as A Matter of Life and Death. Finally, the film has arrived in a new pressing from Sony, complete with an introduction by longtime Powell fan and friend Martin Scorsese and an interview with film scholar Ian Christie. But wait, there’s more! Paired in the set with Stairway is Powell’s late-period film Age of Consent. I have yet to see the film, which by most accounts is fairly minor Powell. Yet how can one possibly resist a movie that stars James Mason and a luscious young (and often-nude) Helen Mirren, set against some lovely Australian settings? Not me, that’s for sure.

This week’s most notable recent releases on DVD are a pair of 2008’s highest-profile pot-themed movies- David Gordon Green’s Pineapple Express (Sony, also Blu-Ray) and Jonathan Levine’s The Wackness (Sony, also Blu-Ray). Also this week is the fiction debut of documentarian Jessica Yu, Ping Pong Playa (Image, also Blu-Ray), plus a quintet of shame: Nicolas Cage in Bangkok Dangerous (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray); Vin Diesel in Babylon A.D. (Fox, also Blu-Ray); Pacino and DeNiro cashing their paychecks in Righteous Kill (Anchor Bay, also Blu-Ray); Disaster Movie (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray), the latest in the seemingly deathless cycle of cut-rate parodies from the Friedberg/Seltzer team; and the right-wing spoof/jeremiad An American Carol (Universal). Whew.

This week’s big TV on DVD is Battlestar Galactica Season 4.0 (Universal). And in Blu-Ray only news, this week sees the release of Peter Jackson’s King Kong (Universal), the pigskin drama Friday Night Lights (Universal), and Season 1 of Showtime’s Dexter (Paramount).

Morning Deal Report: Helen Mirren and Joe Pesci Shacked Up at “Love Ranch”

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 14:30:00 GMT

Taylor Hackford (Ray) is seeking domestic distribution for Love Ranch, “the independently financed drama he directed in which Helen Mirren and Joe Pesci star as the proprietors of Nevada’s first legalized brothel,” Variety reports. “Their characters are loosely based on Joe and Sally Conforte, who ran the Mustang Ranch, where prizefighter Oscar Bonavena was gunned down after being suspected of having an affair with madam Sally.” Aside from a small part in The Good Shepherd, Pesci has been absent from movie screens since 1998’s Lethal Weapon 4.

An unusual contender has emerged as a potential director of The Trial of the Chicago 7 for Dreamworks. Although Steven Spielberg has long considered helming the project himself and Paul Greengrass was also considered, The Hollywood Reporter notes that the “latest well-known director who has met on the project is Ben Stiller; while the discussions for Stiller to helm the film are very much at the exploratory stage, the actor and DreamWorks are mulling whether such a pairing would work for both parties.”

“Javier Bardem will star in Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's Biutiful, the Mexican helmer's first project after his much-publicized bust-up with former screenwriting partner Guillermo Arriaga,” per Variety. “Pic is about a man embroiled in shady dealings who is confronted by a childhood friend, now a policeman.”

Related:
"Chicago Ten": Cartooning the Sixties
The Ten Worst Hairdos in Movie History

Morning Deal Report: Jamie Foxx is a Law Abiding Citizen

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 14:30:00 GMT

Frank Darabont is back and Stephen King is nowhere to be found. Darabont will direct Law Abiding Citizen, set to star Jamie Foxx and Gerard Butler. “Written by Kurt Wimmer and Darabont, the script follows a successful assistant D.A. (Butler) who finds himself at the center of a vigilante plot hatched by a traumatized victim of the legal system (Foxx). Foxx's character is devastated to learn that, because of a plea bargain, one of his wife and daughter's murderers will be set free. So he unleashes revenge on the killers and those who made the deal,” says The Hollywood Reporter. Hey guys, Charles Bronson just called. He wants his big-ass gun back.

Julie Taymor is collaborating with her first screenwriter, William Shakespeare, again. The Titus director will bring a gender-bending version of The Tempest to the screen. Helen Mirren will play “Prospera,” and the cast also includes Russell Brand as the jester Trinculo, Djimon Hounsou as deformed slave Caliban, and Alfred Molina as the drunken butler Stephano. I kind of wish I was watching this right now.

It seems like only yesterday I was telling you about George Romero’s plans for a new zombie movie. (Actually it was three days ago, but who’s counting?) Now one of Romero’s lesser known early works is getting the remake treatment. Breck “son of Michael” Eisner will direct The Crazies, which “revolves around people in a small Kansas town who are beset by a virus that causes insanity and death after a mysterious toxin contaminates the local water supply,” per Variety. A quick check of Eisner’s IMDb page reveals he also has reboots of The Creature from the Black Lagoon and Flash Gordon in the works. I can’t stop him.

Related:
Raiders of the Leaked Frank Darabont Screenplay
Take Five: Romero Alive!

CGI Must Die: 5 Reasons Why

Andrew Osborne — Mon, 12 May 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Plastic surgery is a good metaphor for CGI (a.k.a. "computer-generated imagery"): it works best when you’re least aware of it, adding value without calling attention to its glaring, unnatural fakery. A little and you’re marveling at the natural, age-appropriate sexiness of Susan Sarandon, Helen Mirren or Meryl Streep, wondering “did she or didn’t she?” with regard to nips, tucks and nose jobs. Too much, and you’re recoiling in horror at that freakish Cat Lady lady, gasping in shock over missing noses and airbag lips, or wondering why Nicole Kidman keeps wearing that creepy Nicole Kidman mask.

Hollywood has developed an unhealthy addiction to both plastic surgery and CGI, preferring the obviously fake to the convincingly real, whether in the form of grotesquely disproportionate rock-hard breasticles or pixilated atrocities like Speed Racer, the cinematic equivalent of watching other people's birthday brats play video games at Chuck E. Cheese for an endless 135 minutes.

Did Jar-Jar Binks teach us nothing? Call me old-fashioned, but I still prefer a little special in my special effects: cinematic images that make me go, “Oh my God, how’d they do that?” rather than, “Dude, that reminds me of this awesome World of Warcraft battle I just posted on YouTube!”

If you’re one of the CGI addicted who think all non-pixelated movie effects are inherently “cheesy,” consider the following clips an intervention as we here at the Screengrab present five examples of amazing movie moments that had (almost) nothing to do with computer-generated imagery.

Just about any Buster Keaton movie

See that car falling apart while Buster Keaton is driving it? See the front of that house falling and nearly crushing him? See that bridge collapsing with the train on it? All that shit actually happened in real life, not in post-production!

The Road Warrior

Why are high speed car chases with actual cars (and trucks and motorcycles and gyrocopters) better than computerized car action? Gee, I don’t know...maybe the same reason sex with an actual human being is better than internet porn?

The Thing (1982)

Sure, the shape-shifting alien action in John Carpenter’s The Thing may look as fake and unbelievable as CGI...but the viscous, tactile ooze has an icky, organic quality that's very hard to duplicate in the shiny world of greenscreen ones and zeroes.

Altered States

CGI scenes all tend to have a similar look, not unlike the legions of aging Hollywood starlets sporting “trout pout” and Spitting Image puppet faces after one too many visits to the neighborhood Botox dispensary. Directors and special effects coordinators forced to get a little more creative, however, may come up with distinctive, fucked-up and memorable images like those found in this one-of-a-kind Ken Russell phantasmagoria.

Star Wars

And speaking of tactile...one word: models. The star destroyer in the opening scene of Star Wars (along with all the nooks and crannies of all the ships in 2001, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Alien) were and remain more iconic and dramatic than all the CGI pod-racers, Naboo royal cruisers or Trade Federation frigates the computers at Skywalker Ranch have ever rendered.

Don’t get me wrong. CGI has achieved some amazing things: the bullet-time sequences in The Matrix, Gollum and that buck naked Angelina Jolie in Beowulf. But enough is enough, people. It’s time for Hollywood to go cold turkey.

For the betterment of all humanity...CGI Must Die.

Success is a Cage

Peter Smith — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 19:00:00 GMT

Hey, remember when Nicolas Cage used to make good movies? Neither do we. He's taken so many subpar roles lately that we forgot that we used to look forward to seeing his name in the Morning Deal Report, and with more bombs under construction (like Ghost Rider 2 and National Treasure 2), he's starting to stretch pretty hard to explain why he bothers to do them in the first place. National Treasure 2 is the result of a lifelong crush on Helen Mirren, says Cage, and while we can't disagree that "she looked sensational in chainmail" in Excalibur, that's no excuse to inflict a sequel to one of the dumbest blockbusters in recent history on the public. Falling back on the old we're-just-waiting-for-the-right-script line for Ghost Rider 2, Cage says he wants to take the character "really dark — way dark", which apparently didn't occur to anyone involved in the making of the first movie about an alcoholic stuntman possessed by a demon from Hell. We're getting pretty tired of all these flimsy justifications, Nic — why not just admit that you need the money so you can buy a new castle? — Leonard Pierce

Morning Deal Report: Mirren Nirren Stirren Bo-Berrin

Peter Smith — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 15:00:00 GMT

From the "Variety Headlines You Wish Were Literally True, Not Just Clever Puns on the Titles of Upcoming Films" dept.: "Mirren, Pesci open 'Love Ranch'".

Filmax's upcoming Diary of a Nymphomaniac seeks "attractive, bold 18-32 year old girls who want to triumph in movies." Know any?

Eli Roth's next project, as rumored, is Trailer Trash: eighty minutes of fake trailers, a la Roth's contribution to Grindhouse, though perhaps not as uniformly icky.

— Peter Smith