The Screengrab : jack nicholson

Th-Th-That's All Folks! The Best & Worst Endings Of All Time! (Part Seven)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 28 May 2009 23:00:00 GMT

SOME LIKE IT HOT (1959)

Sometimes, bringing a movie to a transcendent stop just comes down to the right sign-off line. Take it away, Joe E... (PN)

RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY (1962)

You might think we're double dipping here, since this same scene wound up on our list of great deaths scenes last week, but fuck it: Babe Ruth was a great hitter and a great pitcher. And when Joel McCrea, having taken what satisfaction he can from making the world a few louts shorter and knowing that his old pard (Randolph Scott) has had his trustworthiness restored to him, sinks to the bottom of the frame, and out of our world, it's a better than fitting end to both the character and the movie. Later Peckinpah films would end memorably and well, but never again would he get such a massive emotional effect so quietly. (PN)

YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN (1974)

The kind of unstructured crazy comedy that Mel Brooks (and, back then, Woody Allen) practiced in the '70s tended to collapse when time came to give the movies some kind of wrap-up. His collaboration with Gene Wilder is the best-sustained -- maybe the only sustained -- movie of Brooks' career, and part of what makes it satisfying is that he actually managed to provide a logical, happy ending that develops from the story instead of crashing through the rafters. You've got to be glad for these crazy kids. (PN)

CHINATOWN (1974)

Forget it, Jake. What did you do in Chinatown? As little as possible. One of cinema's best indictments of the corruption of power, Chinatown pulls no punches. No movie has better illustrated the brutal correlation between money and water rights in the arid climates of the Southwestern U.S., nor been quite so willing to show how the stewards of the public interest debase themselves acting as lackeys to the wealthy and powerful. This is exactly what American exceptionalism is trying to cover up, but the truth is that hiding something rotten only adds to the stench and decay. It takes a European eye, but not just any European eye, to see through the high gloss of rhetoric covering the post-War growth of the U.S. No, to get it right, you'd need a very particular European: one who had lived in the U.S. for a number of years, a person who lost his mother to Auschwitz and who himself spent his childhood surviving by wits alone while ducking Nazis and Nazi informers, a man who lost his wife, unborn child, and a bunch of his friends to the uniquely American Manson Family. That's the guy to look his audience in the eye and tell them that their cynical gumshoe is going to lose everything through his faith in the system, the monstrous Noah Cross is going to get away with rape, murder, and incest, and the femme fatale with the heart of gold is going to die for their sins. Forget it, he says, we're all in the dark, and no one knows if sticking their neck out makes things better or worse. I usually find nihilism appalling, but I'll be damned if Chinatown isn't a much-needed slap in the face. Where your run-of-the-mill misanthropes like Todd Solondz never got over being bullied in 7th grade, Polanski offers concrete reasons to assume the worst about people, especially when power and money are involved. It leaves you with a sour taste in the mouth and a queasy gut, but it leaves you wiser, too. (HC)

THE LONG GOODBYE (1973)

TERRY LENNOX: Nobody cares.

PHILIP MARLOWE: Nobody but me.

LENNOX: Yeah, well, that's you, Marlowe. And you're a born loser.

MARLOWE: Yeah; I even lost my cat.

[Reaches for his gun...]

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven & Twelve

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Hayden Childs

Th-Th-That's All Folks! The Best & Worst Endings Of All Time (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 28 May 2009 20:00:00 GMT

So, in case you somehow missed the news, our beloved little blog will be ending at the end of the month, meaning THIS (sniff...sniff...) will be the very LAST of Screengrab’s Thursday lists.

Yet, in the classic words of Supersonic (heavy-rotationed into my very DNA by the good people of alternative radio), “every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end,” which means that while this blog will be pushing up daisies soon, you’ll still be able to get your fix of the Screengrab All-Stars at our new blog, Screengrab-In-Exile, featuring new (if somewhat less frequent) writing and links to writing from the usual gang of idiots...we may even pop up from time to time hereabouts writing for Nerve.com. Meanwhile, all your favorite Screengrab posts will be preserved in amber for future generations at www.thescreengrab.com (and stay tuned for the end of today’s list for links to all our individual websites).

Anyway, I have to say I’ll miss the ol’ place, and I’ve really enjoyed organizing and contributing to these lists. Heck, I’ll even miss getting called a douche by anonymous internet hecklers.

But all good things must come to an end, so once more for auld lang syne, let’s fade out together with THE BEST & WORST ENDINGS OF ALL TIME!!!!!!

DR. STRANGELOVE (1964)

Last week we saluted Slim Pickens’ whooping death trip aboard a nuclear bomb, but of course, that was only the beginning of the end of Dr. Strangelove. There’s no pie fight as Stanley Kubrick had originally planned, but we do get to see the great minds of the War Room contemplating the bright side of nuclear annihilation (10 women for every man!), the continuation of Cold War tension through the end of the world and beyond, and of course, the song we hope will be playing in your head as the Screengrab fades to black: We’ll meet again…don’t know where, don’t know when... (SVD)

THE PASSENGER (1975)

Michelangelo Antonioni’s ennui-drenched cinema reached something of an apex with The Passenger, the tale of a reporter (Jack Nicholson) who, while in Africa on assignment, assumes a dead stranger’s identity to escape the soul-crushing disaffection of his own life. It’s a beguiling pseudo-noir that culminates with one of cinema’s most awe-inspiring shots, a 7-minute single take – in which the camera magically passes through a room’s iron-barred window and then rotates 180-degrees – that expresses the film’s faith-and-philosophy-tinged portrait of the folly of dreaming about escape. (NS)

CARRIE (1976)

The shock ending of Brian De Palma's horror classic provides a hint as to how De Palma got the reputation in some quarters as a rip-off artist: it's a direct steal from the ending of John Boorman's Deliverance, from just four years earlier. But it's also a clear indicator of how De Palma, in the quarters that matter, earned the reputation of a master director: his execution smokes Boorman, whose scene was a bit of a botch. By contrast, De Palma's makes audiences jump as high as anyone has ever managed without installing ejector seats in the theater. (PN)

RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK (1981)

Just a quick word to acknowledge how clever Spielberg was to have the Ark of the Covenant, the holiest of holies, the subject of all of this strife and death, crated and boxed away in an anonymous government warehouse, presumably one of thousands of forgotten treasures. That's a wry sense of humor there. (HC)

CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON (2000)

The best movie endings are the ones that come at great cost, the ones that make us feel that we’ve lived with these characters and that their eventual fate, whatever it is, has been earned. The greatest recent example of this is Ang Lee’s wuxia masterpiece, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. After a truly epic sequence of events, changes of scenery and direction, life, death, moral redirection, and any number of other twists and turns, the young lovers Jen and Lo, hiding out at the Wudan temple, fondly recall their time together in the forbidding, barbaric deserts, where their love had first blossomed. “Make a wish, Lo,” says Jen, in one of the most perfect deliveries of a movie line in modern memory; “I wish that we’ll be in the desert together again,” he replies. Jen then silently hurls herself off the edge of the temple, into the clouds below, suspended first and then flying, calling back to a legend they’d discussed during their desert idyll as Tan Dun’s majestic, gorgeous music plays us to the credits. It’s one of the most romantic endings imaginable, and guaranteed to raise a lump in the throat of all but the coldest viewer – a scene that’s truly earned. (LP)

25TH HOUR (2002)

For most of Spike Lee’s 25th Hour, Monty Brogan (played by Edward Norton) is shown coming to grips with his upcoming incarceration -- saying goodbye to his loved ones, trying to determine who sold him up the river, even asking his best friends to beat the snot out of him so he won’t look like an easy target for prison rape. But just when Monty has more or less accepted his fate, the morning he’s scheduled to make the trip up to prison, his dad James (Brian Cox) meets him for the trip with an alternative -- to escape and start a new life. Over the next ten minutes, James paints a beautiful picture of this way out -- go West, find a little town in the desert, get a new identity, and so on -- and with Terence Blanchard’s elegiac score playing behind him, the plan is as tempting as it is far-fetched. But there’s a steep price for this escape, as Monty could never return to his old life. And so, the central theme of the movie snaps sharply into focus -- the choices we all must make in life. James is prepared for the possibility of never seeing his son again as long as he knows he’ll be okay, but is Monty ready to give up everything he knows for freedom? As we see him passing all those New Yorkers he once railed against, now smiling at him and seeing him off, we wonder if he can sacrifice his past to save his future. And just when he’s come to the end of his imagined life, all of a sudden he snaps back to his real one, back in the car on the road to destiny, and Lee’s camera lingers once again on Norton’s face. The choice is yours, Monty. (PC)

Click Here For Part Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven & Twelve

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Nick Schager, Phil Nugent, Hayden Childs, Paul Clark, Leonard Pierce

Final Farewells: The Best & Worst Death Scenes In Cinema (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 21 May 2009 21:00:00 GMT

Bruce Willis in THE SIXTH SENSE (1999)

The big parlor game after The Sixth Sense hit theaters was asking your friends, “Did you guess the ending?” (As opposed to, say, The Village, where pretty much everyone guessed the dopey twist.) Some people claim they caught wise to Shyamalan’s scheme the second Donnie Wahlberg’s buff, naked psychopath shot Bruce Willis’ mumbly psychiatrist in the gut, but I’m not one of them...and as an online screenwriting teacher (at UCLA Extension...summer courses forming now!), I regularly praise the sleight-of-hand brio of the scene above. We see Willis’ character shot dead right in front of our eyes, then in the next scene it’s two years later and he’s sitting on a park bench, seemingly alive. It’s a neat trick, and for the majority of us who didn’t stop and go, “Hey, wait a minute...” it led to a clever, head-slapping reveal that Shyamalan achieved fair and square without cheating (hello, ridiculous Mission Impossible "Jon Voight" mask) or bending the willing suspension of disbelief to the breaking point (so...they set up a fake 19th century society with monsters but without antibiotics? Does anyone ever actually read Shyamalan’s scripts before they go into production?). (AO)

Johnny Depp in A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET (1984)

Johnny Depp may not have been a star yet, but his exit from Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street was instantly memorable thanks to its unholy-torrents-of-blood payoff. Reconfiguring the classic boogeyman-under-the-bed scenario into a boogeyman-inside-the-bed nightmare, Depp’s last scene finds him (and his TV) being pulled into a mattress by the gloved hand of Freddy Krueger. Out of the hole created by this supernatural incident comes a horrific eruption of blood made all the more chilling by its reverse-gravitational movement, the red geyser coating the ceiling without besmirching anything else in the room. It’s one of the finest moments in the Craven canon. (NS)

Leonard Nimoy in STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN (1982)

Yes, I’m well aware that The Wrath of Khan was followed by an entire Star Trek movie dedicated to putting Spock together again…and more than 25 years later, he’s still alive and giving advice to his younger self. So what? Leonard Nimoy knew what he was doing when he didn’t come back to give Spock a final sendoff in Star Trek: Generations; he’d already done it to perfection here. Taking the reigns of the Trek franchise, Nicholas Meyer crafted a genuine emotional epiphany from a pop artifact and set the series on a steady course for decades to come. If I can’t ride a nuclear bomb to my death (see below), at least let me be shot out of a spaceship while Scotty plays the bagpipes. (SVD)

Warren Beatty in MCCABE & MRS. MILLER (1971) & Jack Nicholson in THE SHINING (1980)

Beatty and Nicholson have been linked in the public mind for pretty much their entire careers. They’re longtime neighbors on Mulholland Drive, they’ve co-starred in The Fortune and Reds, and throughout the '70s and '80s, they shared a similar rep as Hollywood bad boys and incurable ladies’ men. They also tend to die at the end of their movies, so it’s probably not too surprising that, at some point, they would each find themselves frozen in snow as the final credits roll. As our own Hayden Childs put it last week in our countdown of Best Movies Ever, McCabe’s “final stand, his big gun battle, is as unimportant to the town of Presbyterian Church as Icarus plunging into the sea in Pieter Brueghal's Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.” In The Shining, Nicholson dies as a howling monster, a wounded minotaur loose in the maze, but whereas McCabe may be instantly forgotten, Jack Torrance has always been and will always be the caretaker. (SVD)

Slim Pickens in DR. STRANGELOVE (1964)

Can you think of a better way to go out? Slim Pickens had more than one great death scene, but whooping it up while riding the nuclear bomb that sets off the end of the world as we know it…there’s a man who knows how to make an exit. (SVD)

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Nick Schager, Scott Von Doviak

Screengrab Presents THE TOP TEN BEST MOVIES EVER!!!! (Part Six)

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

Nick Schager's Top Ten Best Movies Ever!

1) DAYS OF HEAVEN (1978)
2) THE SHINING (1980)

With all due respect to Stephen King, who famously disliked this adaptation of his novel, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is horror cinema nirvana, an unsettling vision of paternal and spousal madness crafted with the director’s trademark icy precision. Jack Nicholson’s performance is deservedly iconic, yet it’s the disquietingly unnatural atmosphere – generated by, among other things, those little twin ghouls, the nude grandma specter in the bathtub, Looney Tunes cartoons, and subtle allusions to Native American history – that truly turns this haunted hotel tale into a nerve-jangling classic.

3) MCCABE & MRS. MILLER (1971)
4) ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (1968)
5) BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA (1974)
6) LE SAMOURAI (1967)
7) STALKER (1979)
8) AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD (1972)

The production of Aguirre: The Wrath of God was so troubled that, as rumor has it, director Werner Herzog either threatened to shoot star Klaus Kinski, or plotted to have his indigenous cast members do the dirty deed once shooting was completed. Such insanity may be fantasy, but it’s in keeping with the spirit of Herzog’s mesmerizing 1972 feature about the titular Spanish conquistador, whose adventurous exploration of the wild unknown in search of greatness makes him a fitting surrogate for the mad genius director.

9) POINT BLANK (1967)
10) CRISS CROSS (1949)

Robert Siodmak is better remembered for 1946’s The Killers, a superb noir in its own right. Yet it’s this relatively unsung gem that stands as the director’s finest work in the genre, a beautifully constructed, sensual and tense thriller – about Burt Lancaster’s lovesick loner returning home to L.A. and becoming embroiled in a love triangle with his ex, Yvonne De Carlo, and her new gangster beau Dan Duryea – that expertly delivers all those things noir is famous for: love, obsession, betrayal, and a fatalism so potent that it leaves a lasting mark.

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

Contributor: Nick Schager

The Rep Report (May 1 -- 6)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 01 May 2009 15:30:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Those of you who've been meaning to catch up with your Stalin-era Russian light entertainments won't want to miss "Red Diva: Lyubov Orlova: First Lady of the Soviet Screen" at the Film Society of Lincoln Center (May 1-4). A celebrated stage performer who would eventually marry the director Grigori Aleksandrov, who, with Eisenstein, worked on the script of Strike, acted in Potemkin and assisted with the direction on October, Orlova was the sweetheart of the Soviet Union in such pictures as The Circus (1936), Jolly Fellows (1934), and Volga Volga. She died in 1975, but not before a small planet discovered by a Soviet astronomer had been named after her. Top that, Ginger Rogers!

If that's not enough to satisfy your pinko tastes, you can ride your hog over to Film Forum and stick it to the man by checking out the new restored 35-mm. print of Easy Rider. The critic David Thomson once ranked the blockbuster commercial success of Dennis Hopper's hippie dream among the greatest tragedies ever to befall the movies, and God knows that, from Peter Fonda's stoic Mr. Cool performance as Captain America to what may be the most overwrought trip sequence in the history of cinematic psychedelia (filmed in a New Orleans graveyard, where dead people were trying to sleep), it does not lack for sources of embarrassment for those who made it and anyone trying to watch it with their eyes uncrossed. Yet, as our own Sarah Clyne Sundberg noted here recently, it remains an excellent source of prime-period Jack Nicholson. And when Saint Nich's not onscreen, you can just close your eyes and listen to the best collection of counterculture-era rock that K-Tel never produced.

The Museum of Modern Art's Julien Duvivier retrospective begins today and runs though May 25. Duvivier may be best remembered here for the 1937 Pépé le Moko, starring Jean Gabin (and remade by Hollywood as Algiers, with Charles Boyer), and for good reason: it's a masterpiece of the genre that it helped to create, the poetic French melodrama. But the opening night selection, Poil de carotte (1932), is an unusual, beautiful childhood reverie that very different in some ways from most of the director's later work.

TORONTO: Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, opened last night and runs through May 10. The filma generating buzz include the boxing film Big John, Ashes of American Flags starring the band Wilco, the behind-the-scenes Asian stunt work film Action Boys, Winnebago Man, and Best Worst Movie, which nobody in Austin has been able to shut up about since last month's SXSW Festival.

PORTLAND: The Portland Documentary & eXperimental Film Festival, or "PDX Fest" for short, runs May 6 through the 10th. It kicks off with a loving memorial tribute to the late Bruce Connor.

Not Readily Available on Legally Authorized Commercial DVD Release in the Continental United States: Jack Nicholson's "Drive, He Said"

Phil Nugent — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 15:00:00 GMT

[Note: When this feature premiered here some weeks back, it was under the title "Not on DVD". As several readers were thoughtful enough to point out, this was not technically accurate, because there isn't anything that you can't find in some version on DVD provided you have access to an all-region player, live at one of the far corners of the earth, and know a guy what knows a guy. Since then, researchers in the Screengrab test labs have labored to come up with a title for this feature that will be both honestly descriptive and pithy. As you can see, they failed. But you get the idea, right?]

Today marks the 72nd birthday of Mr. Jack Nicholson. In 1958, Nicholson made his movie debut in the title role of the 70-minute Roger Corman production Cry Baby Killer, which would lead to more than a decade's worth of solid employment in low-paying jobs in low-budget indie films, many of them for Corman, most of them exploitation and drive-in fare, though a few of them (such as Irving Lerner's 1960 Studs Lonigan and the pair of "existential" Westerns, The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind, that Monte Hellman directed back to back on Corman's nickel in the mid-'60s. (Nicholson also wrote the script for Whirlwind and had writing credits on a few other '60s films, including Hellman's 1964 Flight to Fury, The Trip, and the Monkees vehicle Head, with whose director, Bob Rafelson, he later made Five Easy Pieces, The King of Marvin Gardens, The Postman Always Rings Twice, and Blood and Wine.) The movie that made Nicholson a star, Easy Rider, was basically an art-house version of the biker movies that Corman had made, starting with The Wild Angels, which starred Easy Rider's Peter Fonda. Nicholson had come on board Easy Rider as an afterthought, when Rip Torn, who was set to play the good-hearted good ol' boy George Hanson, got into a bitch-slapping contest with Dennis Hopper and got his invitation to join the production rescinded. In fact, at the time, Nicholson thought that his acting career was over. He was tired of bashing his head against walls trying to break into the industry and had arranged to make his directing debut with an adaptation of Jeremy Larner's 1964 campus novel, Drive, He Said. It was only when he saw Easy Rider with an audience and picked up on the crowd's reaction to his performance that Nicholson realized that his career as a movie star had just begun.

Like Richard Farina's 1966 Been Down So Long, It Looks Like Up to Me, Larner's novel (which takes its title from a Robert Creeley poem) was published early enough in the 1960s to later seem prescient about campus unrest in the Vietnam era, and both books were turned into movies that were released in 1971, by which time the campus protest movement had peaked in the wake of Kent State. Nicholson's movie was filmed in Eugene, Oregon on and around the state university. William Tepper, who looks here like a stork-legged cross between Abbie Hoffman and the Robert De Niro of Mean Streets, made his movie debut as Hector Bloom, a star basketball player who is called out by his coach (Bruce Dern) for having an attitude problem. Hector, who could have any girl on the campus he wanted, has pulled the genius move of having an affair with Olive (Karen Black), who is married to a professor played by Robert Towne, who had also labored in the Corman factory as a screenwriter (The Last Woman on Earth, The Tomb of Ligeia) before writing a couple of movies that gave Nicholson two of his most memorable roles, The Last Detail and Chinatown. (Towne took the name of his Chinatown hero, J. J. Gittes, from Harry Gittes, a friend of Nicholson's who co-produced Drive, He Said. Though the script for this movie is credited to Larner and Nicholson, both Towne and Terrence Malick are said to have taken an uncredited crack at it.) Things turn out badly, but not necessarily in the way you might expect. It turns out that Olive's husband is an overly cerebral, phlegmatic type who knows perfectly well that Hector is balling his wife--it's not easy to miss--but wants to impress everyone with how well he's taking it; a part of him is sort of proud that the great athlete deems him worthy of cuckolding. Olive eventually pushes both of them away, telling them that they're "both big babies" who "deserve each other."

The surprising crosscurrents between the actors caught in this triangle, and also between Tepper and Dern (whose tightly focused performance as the hard-ass coach is some of the very best work he's ever done) capture what's best about Drive, He Said and suggest what Nicholson might have been able to bring to movies if he'd stuck with it as a director. Tepper himself gives an extraordinary performance as an inarticulate but deeply troubled man with the manner of a put-on artist and a romantic soul. (After Drive, He Said bombed, Tepper did some TV but disappeared from movies for a decade. In the early 1980s, he turned up in Miss Right, a comedy that reunited him with his co-star Karen Black, and he had supporting roles in the 1983 remake of Breathless and the 1984 Tom Hanks-Adrian Zmed comedy Bachelor Party, and hasn't been seen on-screen since.) Nicholson shows a free but sure hand with the cast, which also includes Michael Warren (of the TV series Hill Street Blues) and, in smaller roles, David Ogden Stiers (lean and hirsute and recognizable only by his voice, even though he's attempting a cracker accent), Cindy Williams, and June Fairchild, beloved to many for her role as the woman who snorts Ajax in the Cheech and Chong movie Up in Smoke.

For all that's brilliant (or at least brilliantly promising) about Drive, He Said, it's easy to see why it tanked in 1971. Nicholson doesn't seem to have any idea how to shape the material into a cohesive hold, so it feels like a succession of sequences rather than a movie, and the audience is left to get its bearings on its own. Probably a lot of people sat through as much of it as they could stand without ever getting them. There's also the subplot involving Michael Margotta as Gabriel, Hector's roommate, whose character must have struck some people as embarrassingly dated even in 1971. Nicholson fails to establish any basis for a relationship or even any kind of emotional bond between Hector and Gabriel, but what does come through is that, while Hector resists bending to the demands of The Establishment, Gabriel can't even consider it, and the pressure is driving him crazy, at a time when it was fashionable to view going crazy as a noble quest. Gabriel never has a quiet moment in the movie; he's always attacking the M.P.s during his draft induction physical, taking a sword to a TV set after screaming, "They staged the moon landing in Phoenix, Arizona!", throwing commodes out of second story windows, etc. At the climax, he tries to rape Olive, during an assault on her house (and body) that he (maybe with a little prodding from the director) stages as if it were a night of bad experimental theater, and after that doesn't work out, he walks naked into the campus biology lab and sets free the various critters caged there. It must be said, though, that even here Nicholson keeps a tight enough rein on Margotta's performance that only intermittently does this stuff play as foolishly as it sounds. (And in the scene in the lab, there is one glorious caught shot of one of the freed mice appearing to try to make out with one of the frogs, which spurns its advances and hops away.)

Nicholson didn't direct another movie until 1978's barnyard comedy Goin' South, in which he also starred, and that wasn't until after he'd added The Last Detail, Chinatown, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor) to his resume. After he won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Terms of Endearment, Nicholson began telling interviewers that his ultimate dream was to take home one more Academy Award, for Best Director. He pretty much stopped saying that after his third and, to date, last film as director, The Two Jakes, slithered out from under a rock in 1990. An attempted sequel to Chinatown from a fresh Robert Towne script that Towne had tried and failed to make himself five years earlier, it was the kind of movie that absolutely had to have propulsion and a clear plot line, and once again, Nicholson didn't know how to put it together so that the sum would amount to more than a pile of scenes strung together. Maybe it's not that surprising that, with so little practice sitting in the director's chair, Nicholson had gotten no better at what he had been hopeless at twenty years earlier, but he had also lost his touch at guiding his fellow actors: he couldn't even get a decent performance out of himself.

You'd have to be crazy to suggest that Nicholson took the wrong road after savoring that explosion of applause for his performance in Easy Rider. Chances are that Drive, He Said (which played at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival) wouldn't even have gotten as much attention as it did if its director hadn't been a movie star, and if Nicholson hadn't worked as hard as he did at his acting career in the early 1970s, he might not have stayed a movie star for long. (Peter Fonda, the real star of Easy Rider, sure didn't.) As it is, he became the biggest, most durable star of his generation. But he did have something special when he directed Drive, He Said, and it's a shame that, when he reached for it again, it had dissipated.

Fat Actor Watch at New York Times: Paper of Record Alleges That When Russell Crowe Sits Around the House, He Really Sits Around the House

Phil Nugent — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 15:00:00 GMT

Always looking for a fresh angle on the really important movie news of the day, Michael Cieply uses his perch at Thew New York Times to ask" what's with all the male movie stars who are porkers? Who does he have in mind, exactly? Russell Crowe and Jeff Daniels, sharing a screen in State of Play ("Two men. One notebook. Four chins."); Denzel Washington, going "cheek-to-jowl with the bulky John Travolta" in the trailer for the remake of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three; Hugh Grant; and "Even Leonardo DiCaprio, the young heartthrob from Titanic"--Photos from the set of Shutter Island, a thriller on tap from Paramount Pictures and the director Martin Scorsese in October, show a little bit more to love." Oh, snap! Are they handing out chocolate bunnies to whoever can be the biggest bitch at the Times these days?

Cieply briefly notes that there's a gender-based double standard regarding the weight and age rules in Hollywood so far as leading players are concerned, but after dropping Kathleen Turner's name, he seems to feel that he's discharged his duty, as if the subject bored even him. He seems more taken with the idea that this is an utterly new phenomenon, but despite the historical examples he digs up, that may be a non-starter. "Photos of midcentury stars — Humphrey Bogart, James Stewart, Clark Gable and others — show them to have remained rather gaunt at an age when many of the current crop are anything but." Good thing those photos are handy, since it's not as if movie actors left behind filmed records of their performances so we'd be able to remind themselves what they looked like. That said, it seems a little callous to drag Bogart, one of the best-known victims of cancer sticks ever to go down coughing, into a discussion of how movie stars used to keep themselves svelte. (One well-circulated story has it that, when illness had left Bogie too weak to handle the stairs in his own home, he used to navigate from one floor to another by stuffing himself in the dumb waiter.) It's also worth remembering that Gable, who died of a massive heart attack after completing his last film, The Misfits, had lost 35 pounds on a crash diet to get his weight below 200 before shooting began. If there's any less of that sort of thing going on nowadays because more stars feel comfortable about appearing in public looking something other than whisper-thin, surely it's for the better.

It's also true that, as Cieply would have known if he'd put down the "photographs" and spent a couple of days watching Turner Classic Movies, there have always been counter-examples one could offer to his role call of manly waifs. Wallace Beery never looked as if he'd had trouble locating the desert cart, Spencer Tracey rolled into his onscreen middle age looking as if he'd swallowed a tether ball, James Cagney was getting pretty squared-off by the time of Yankee Doodle Dandy, Robert Mitchum often had an amorphous mass surrounding his midsection that he used to abruptly suck up into his chesticological region whenever he was required to take his shirt off, Gene Hackman's weight always flunctuated, sometimes wildly, depending on just how regular his latest "regular guy" character was supposed to be, and as for Jack Nicholson, in his mid-forties when he more or less officially entered his "middle-aged" period with Terms of Endearment--please. Of course, with movies as with everything else, memory can be a great deceiver. Lawrence Turman, "a veteran film producer who is chairman of the Peter Stark producing program at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts", told Cieply that "“John Wayne always looked a bit portly." I find it disturbing that the Peter Stark producing program at the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts can do no better for its chairman than a guy who's never seen Stagecoach. It may be a tribute to the lingering effect of the image that Wayne cast from around the mid-1950s until his death in 1979 that even some professionals think he always looked like that, but I would propose that, unlikely though it may seem, that if Wayne had looked in his youth like a guy who was fated to someday look the way he did in True Grit, he never would have gotten the chance to grow into that later incarnation--at least, not on movie screens.

This still leaves the question of whether some of these stars, heavier though they may undeniably be, are as hideous to behold as Cieply seems to be implying they are. I will confess that when I saw Travolta, say, in the trailer for Pelham, I did not catch myself thinking, "Here comes Wide Load." (I did catch myself thinking, "Get a load of Weird Hairline with his Fu Manchu mustache. Each of us has his issues.) One possibility worth considering is that such stars as Travolta, Washington, and Hanks, who came up in the 1980s, when a perfect storm of society-embraced body issues and new technology in the gym led to a new species of Americans who seemed to be armor-plated in their own skin and muscle, some of whom hastened to show off their new packaging on the covers of magazines, such as that infamous shot of Travolta on the cover of Rolling Stone to promote Stayin' Alive, looking as if his abs were about to jump out of his torso and his brains had already leaked out of his ears. Maybe, having fallen for that when you had the energy and free schedule to pursue it all the way, you have to let yourself go a little later on or else you'll explode. But then, in the interests of full disclosure, I should concede that I am from The South, where we deep fry our veggie plates and the lost causes that we love to get misty-eyed about include our own arteries in their pre-clotted state. Because of my own cultural conditioning, if I had my way, every other movie made since 1984 would have starred Joe Don Baker, and the others would have been divided between Randy Quaid and the late Dub Taylor, with the result that Michael Cieply would be even more confused.

April Fools: The 35 Funniest Movie Characters Of All Time (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 22:00:00 GMT

JOHN BARRYMORE AS OSCAR JAFFE IN TWENTIETH CENTURY (1934)

No American actor ever made theatrical stylization work as well in movies as Barrymore, and when he played men of the theater, the impacted layers of self-parody in his performance just kept popping like strings of firecrackers. This movie was based on a play that in turn was based on an unproduced play called Napoleon of Broadway, a label that, if anything, sells the maniacal producer Jaffe short -- given enough men on horseback and a sufficiently isolated island, Napoleon could be stopped. Gorgeously over the topic from the word go, Barrymore plays him as a man who works behind the scenes in the theater because no stage would be big enough for the performance he calls his life. (PN)

MISCHA AUER AS CARLO IN MY MAN GODFREY (1936)

A Russian emigree born Mikhail Semyonovich Unskovsky, Auer was one of the supreme comic character actors of a great era for them, a man whose sometimes mournful-seeming countenance could never conceal the fact that there was helium in his shoes. His role here set the tone for much of his career: he plays a pianist who, having been adopted by rich society grand dame Alice Brady as her "protege", settles into her family's Art Deco mansion and easily adapts to being their pet. Auer was also memorable as a henpecked husband in a Western cow town in Destry Rides Again, and in Orson Welles' Mr. Arkadin, where, as the manager of a flea circus, he rolls up his sleeve and announces to his charges, "Soup's on!" (PN)

HARPO MARX IN JUST ABOUT ANYTHING

As a kid, I watched endless hours of Marx Brothers movies (courtesy of my dad). I felt the most kinship with the fast-talking bullshit artist Groucho. But it was quiet, sad Harpo who stole my heart. I didn't quite get why he wouldn’t talk. No matter, his kindly face with the rubber mouth and big sad eyes, together with that little horn, said more than an entire film's worth of yakking from Groucho. Who was he supposed to be, exactly? Dunno and don't care. In Monkey Business, someone suggests he's a "dumb Swede?." Perhaps he is a caricature of a FOB Irishman to to go along with the other ethnic stereotypes that the Brothers' characters seem to be based on. The mystery adds to his allure. No matter his origins, it would seem that Harpo's hobo owes something to Charlie Chaplin's little tramp, but where Chaplin verges on the annoying, the comic genius of Harpo is that he is always understated and soothing, even at his most burlesque. Like a good children's book, Harpo appeals to everyone precisely because he never speaks down to the audience. (SCS)

MARLON BRANDO AS GRINDL THE GURU IN CANDY (1968)

Candy is routinely derided as a godawful, amateurish mess, a barely watchable '60s relic and a travesty of the Terry Southern-Mason Hoffenberg novel. Furthermore, Brando's participation in it is often pointed to as the ultimate degradation that the great actor submitted to during the dark period between his '50s triumphs and his early '70s comeback. Let's define our terms here: this movie really is a piece of shit. But Brando is hysterical in it. Playing a fraudulent horndog of a guru whose Indian accent turns into a New York honk as he applies himself to the task of getting into the heroine's pants, and looking like a cross between a Roman senator and Alice Cooper, he dives right in and applies the broadest comic strokes, single-handedly bringing a MAD-comics tone to this crass, tinny show. As Brando became increasingly estranged from his own craft, more and more it was the opportunity to play comedy that lured him out of the fortress he'd built around himself with his own flesh, and in movies like The Freshman (1990), he showed that he could join in with the critics and gossip columnists in making fun of himself, and do it with more wit and grace than any of them could. (PN)

JACK NICHOLSON AS GEORGE HANSON IN EASY RIDER (1969)

Any good clown has a hint of tragedy. Jack Nicholson takes it to the limit as alcoholic ACLU lawyer George Hanson — the only latent liberal in a small hick town. Hanson is in the habit of poncing around Main Street in white linen suits and his starspangled football helmet, getting hammered daily and then sleeping it off in the local jail. Perhaps that is the kind of thing you can get away with in your own town if your father's a big shot. Better not try it outside city limits though. When the hippie bikers come through he seizes the opportunity to escape. This can't end well. (SCS)

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

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Sarah Clyne Sundberg

Precursors: Mars Attacks! (1996)

Nick Schager — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 17:00:00 GMT

The answer to combating an alien invasion is misfit monsters in this week’s aptly titled Monsters vs. Aliens, a DreamWorks animated trifle that, for all its innocuous good humor, has little on Tim Burton’s screwy homage to ‘50s E.T. sagas, Mars Attacks! With more than a dash of Dr. Strangelove mixed into its silly period-sci-fi stew, Burton’s film concerns the unexpected arrival of spacemen intent on incinerating with ray-guns all of humanity – and cackling like little schoolchildren as they do it. The president (Jack Nicholson, in one of two roles) is at the head of a lunatic cabinet, a former heavyweight champ (Jim Brown) is determined to ditch his Egyptian-themed hotel gig and reunite with his wife (Pam Grier) and kids, and a Kansas teen (Lukas Haas) tasked with caring for granny winds up at the forefront of the interspecies fight, three of the many threads Burton casts with all-stars and crams into his overstuffed plot. Mars Attacks! isn’t often riotous but its postmodern use of ‘50s aesthetics in a clearly present day (circa 1996) setting proves both strangely natural and striking, as does its stabs at surreally wacko imagery, from the opening shot of cattle on fire running down a street, to the appearance of the Martians’ UFO armada. And while Burton’s satiric skewering is scattershot at best, the uninhibited madcap energy of his tribute-cum-big-budget-blockbuster nonetheless frequently makes it more amusing and inspired than that of the cheesy ‘50s B-movies (and bloated ‘90s summertime action-sagas) on which it deliriously riffs.

Screengrab's Ultimate Exploitation Films!!!!!!! (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 22:30:00 GMT

FEMALE TROUBLE (1974)

Oh, sure, Pink Flamingos has the shit-eating and the egg lady and Hairspray’s the big fat crossover hit, but to my way of thinking, Female Trouble is probably the masterpiece of John Waters’ cinematic career, an epic faux biopic spanning the life of Divine’s iconic Dawn Davenport from adolescence to the electric chair by way of High School Confidential, Butterfield 8 and the weirdest episode of Batman ever. Shock value has always been Waters’ aesthetic and if, say, you were to attend an all-night marathon of his early films tripping your balls off on LSD (like, uh...this friend of mine did once), your jaw would remain in constant droppage at the cavalcade of perversion, blasphemy and scrub-your-brain imagery on relentless display, from Flamingos’ notorious “singing asshole” to Desperate Living’s hung leather goons “digging for gold” in aged Edith Massey’s queenly honeypot. But Waters’ brand of exploitation is so funny and cheerful that, in the end, his off-putting worlds take on a cozy familiarity and you feel nothing but affection for his crackpot characters and the actors who play them, especially Massey (we miss you Edie!)...and never more so than in Female Trouble, which features an endless stream of quotable lines, memorable moments and a brilliant comedic performance by Divine who, as Dawn, not only does flips on a trampoline and trashes Christmas morning like a hell-spawn tornado ("I told you cha cha heels!"), but also gets s/himself pregnant, gives birth and bites through the umbilical cord. Top that, Streep!

MANSON (1972)

This true-crime film, the movie equivalent of one of those instant paperback accounts of tabloid horrors that have been largely displaced by the Internet and reality TV, has the special, weird distinction of being perhaps the only old-Times Square favorite to be nominated for an Academy Award. (It lost out in the Best Documentary Feature category to Marjoe, religious-con-man-turned-Earthquake-cast-member Marjoe Gortner's self-expose, which was almost as sleazy but a lot more self-aware.) Co-directed by Robert Hendrickson, who never made another film, and Laurence Merrick, whose previous credits included The Black Angels and a gay-porn vampire movie alternately called Dracula and the Boys and Does Dracula Really Suck?, it employs a mix of interviews, news footage, home movies and "recreations", with plenty of emphasis on the freaky hippie-orgy scene it imagines as having gone down at the Spahn Ranch. The movie is less concerned with explaining what happened or why than in infecting the viewer with a sense of unease, based on the idea that it all might not be over; it was, after all, made at a time when plenty of Charlie's followers were still living in society and not yet arthritic. The soundtrack, which is made up of dreamy-sounding '60s trance-rock, some of it taken from the Family's own recordings and some of it composed especially for the soundtrack by a couple of Manson's former associates, adds considerably to the overall creepiness. So did the news, in 1977, that Lawrence Merrick had been murdered by an unbalanced stalker, a development that the film's publicists were not shy about hinting at having possibly been delayed "retribution" from the Family.

HELLS ANGELS ON WHEELS (1967)

This biker flick, starring Jack Nicholson and Adam Rourke, is about as good as the wheeler genre got. It's certainly better than The Wild Angels, the Roger Corman movie that kick-started the genre and, um, Easy Rider, the counterculture statement that grew out of it. As in Easy Rider, Nicholson plays the audience representative, a fed-up working stiff who impulsively throws in his lot with the biker gang, but here we get to enjoy him for the length of the whole picture. Hells Angels on Wheels was directed by Richard Rush, who would later become best known for the cult film The Stunt Man starring Peter O'Toole -- but the more important reference point here may be that he'd already worked with Nicholson on the West-Coast-hippie-scene movie Pysch-Out. (The list of future Hollywood luminaries who worked on the movie also includes the stuntman Hal Needham and the late, great Hungarian-born cinematographer László Kovács, back when he was billing himself as "Leslie Kovac".) The movie also boasts a wordless appearance by Sonny Barger, the president of the Oakland, California chapter of the Angels, who is also credited as "technical advisor". The movie was made during a brief window when the Angels were willing to work with people who professed to be interested in telling their "story", before they withdrew after becoming rankled about being exploited by sundry show-business types, such as Roger Corman, who they felt screwed them over on The Wild Angels. Add it to Corman's list of accomplishments that he left the members of a self-styled outlaw motorcycle gang with a bad taste in their mouths.

THE INTRUDER (1962)

Roger Corman directed this tabloid melodrama about racist rabble-rousing, from Charles Beaumont's adaptation of his own novel. William Shatner plays a leather-lunged agitator from "the Patrick Henry Society" who arrives in a Southern town torn apart by school desegregation and hits the ground running, making hateful speeches and stirring up trouble. Corman has been known to say that this is the one movie he made in his exploitation-movie prime that he lost money on, always with the implication that he got artistically ambitious and made something too good for his target audience. On the contrary, opines Bill Landis of Sleazoid Express: the film failed in its initial release simply because "not many distributors in [Corman's] distribution network wanted to play a film that used the word 'nigger' every few seconds." Corman wound up selling the movie to a rival exploitation master, Mike Ripps, who made a bundle on it by linking it up on a double bill with another Southern melodrama, Poor White Trash, and devising a two-headed marketing campaign, selling the movie to Northern black audiences under the title Shame and to Southern audiences under the name I Hate Your Guts. Of course, it was its star's later promotion to Starfleet Captain that helped Shame to achieve belated, self-contained lift-off. The movie and Shatner's character lack depth -- it's just a picture of a hateful blowhard, with no psychological layers -- but Shatner's youthful brio gives the picture energy, and after he turned into William! Shatner!, grindhouse audiences loved to come out to screenings of the movie so they could see James T. Kirk toss around the "N"-word.

THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS (1960)

This man-eating plant movie, which Roger Corman directed from a script by Charles B. Griffith (who also wrote A Bucket of Blood, The Wild Angels, and Death Race 2000), is kind of awe-inspiring as some kind of ultimate example of just what Corman and Griffith were prepared to throw into the pot to keep one of their stews cooking. (Accoring to Griffith, Corman instructed him to concoct a script as soon as the sets became available, and that he immediately went to work spitballing ideas at Corman, who rejected several proposals before Griffith came up with the man-eating plant idea, by which time, Griffith recalled, "We were both pretty drunk.") Largely shot in two days -- the amount of time Corman had to use the sets, which were left over from another, completed production, before they were torn down -- at a cost of about $30,000 and with a running time of just seventy minutes, Little Shop's performances range from Corman regulars such as Jonathan Haze and Dick Miller, doing their character-guy shtick, to the Borsht Belt delivery of Mel Welles as the flower shop owner Mushnik to Jack Nicholson's unrestrained bit as a masochistic dental patient. The movie's sheer freakishness kept it alive on TV and the drive-in circuit until Nicholson became a star, an unexpected development that instantly turned it into an unlikely classic. It would, of course, go on to be adapted into a 1982 Off-Broadway musical that was in turn adapted into a big movie musical in 1986. None of which did Corman any good, because he had such sad hopes for the movie's commercial prospects that he never bothered to copyright it, allowing it to slip into public domain.

Warning! No one will be admitted after Part One, Two, Three, Five & Six!

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

DVD Digest for February 24, 2009

Paul Clark — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 15:00:00 GMT

This week, the midwinter doldrums hit the DVD market, with only a handful of notable DVD and Blu-Ray releases hitting shelves today.

The big news this week is the controversial Blu-Ray release of William Friedkin’s classic police procedural, The French Connection. Much ink has been spilled over William Friedkin’s tinkering with the look of his Oscar-winner for the Blu-Ray release, and while I can’t say for sure (not having bought into the Blu-Ray scene as yet) the images I’ve seen from the new release haven’t been encouraging. With their almost oppressive graininess and a color shift that appears to put the blue in “Blu-Ray”, nothing I’ve seen speaks very well to the suitability of the new technology Friedkin ran on the film when preparing the disc. But then, I’ve always been of the mind that DVD and Blu-Ray was meant to be not only a means of watching a film in the comfort of your living room, but also of film preservation, of keeping a record of the films they contain as close as possible to the way they were originally seen. Anyway, that’s enough of my editorializing. The French Connection is one of three Blu-Ray only releases getting released today by Fox, the other two being John Frankenheimer’s The French Connection II and Richard C. Sarafian’s Vanishing Point, a prime future candidate for a Reviews By Request column.

Another ideal Reviews By Request topic would be Eagle Pennell’s early proto-indie, The Whole Shootin’ Match (Watchmaker Films). Considered by many a keystone of the independent film movement, Pennell’s film went unseen for years before turning up again in theatres last year. Other classics coming to DVD today include Hector Babenco’s Ironweed, starring Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson, and Dario Argento’s Four Flies on Grey Velvet.

This week’s selection of recent releases coming to DVD is a pretty meager lot, highlighted by a pair of arthouse offerings: the documentary Chris and Don: A Love Story (Zeitgeist), about the author Christopher Isherwood and his decades-long love affair with much-younger artist Don Bachardy, and the Irish marital drama Eden (Ryko Distribution).

Finally, this week’s TV on DVD releases include: Bender and friends in their newest feature-length adventure Futurama: Into the Wild Green Yonder (Fox, also Blu-Ray); Bryan Cranston in Breaking Bad Season 1 (Sony); nineties “Must See TV” staple Just Shoot Me Season 3 (Sony); and family-friendly Indiana Jones-lite adventure in The Librarian: Curse of the Judas Chalice (Sony).

Up The Academy: Screengrab Salutes The All-Time Best & Worst Best Picture Winners (Part Seven)

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 00:00:00 GMT

THE BEST:

SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE (1998)

When it comes to second-guessing the Oscars, few Best Pictures raise Hollywood’s hackles like Shakespeare in Love. The legend goes something like this: way back in 1998, Steven Spielberg’s brilliant war movie Saving Private Ryan was a cinch to win the top slot, but sometime between the announcement of nominations and the opening of envelopes, Bob and Harvey Weinstein (the evil geniuses behind Shakespeare’s Oscar campaign) flew the invisible Miramax blimp over Hollywood and fired their diabolical Hypno-Ray at the helpless population, thus forcing all the innocent Who’s Who down in Whoville to vote for the wrong movie. As John Foote posts at InContention.com (reflecting an apparently common consensus), “Is there anyone left out there who truly believes that Shakespeare in Love, a lovely film, was actually better than Saving Private Ryan?” Well...uh, yes, actually. In fact, I’d even go so far as to say that Shakespeare in Love was MUCH better. Ryan, for all the slam-pow-gasp shock & awe chaos of its opening battle scene devolves shortly thereafter into a standard-issue World War II potboiler, circa 1952, complete with “Brooklyn,” “Redneck” and all the rest of the colorfully standard-issue Hollywood band of brothers fussin’ and fightin’ their way across Europe under the command of a tough but secretly tender-hearted father figure (played by a wildly miscast and completely unbelievable Tom Hanks). Shakespeare In Love, meanwhile, presented an Elizabethan world more fully-imagined than fellow Best Picture competitor Elizabeth, thanks to a remarkably literate and inventive screenplay by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard. And, while it’s easy to mock the GOOP-tastic Gwyneth of today, Paltrow generated palpable chemistry with co-star Joseph Fiennes in a well told, old-school love story, surrounded by a flawless supporting cast, all of them at or near the top of their games. True, movies this smart don’t usually win Oscars...which is probably why so many Academy voters are still baffled by Shakespeare’s victory.

ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST (1975)

So many of Oscar's pronouncements amount to a string of missed calls and concessions to sentimentality that when they get one right square on the nose -- when someone is rewarded for the best work of their career at that point in time as opposed to what they did a few years ago or what they might do if they can be induced not to chuck it all and go back to night school or even, as in the case of something like Ben Kingsley's performance in Gandhi, what the person they're playing did -- it stands out. The Academy has had plenty of opportunities to give Jack Nicholson a thumb's-up these past several years, and plenty of times they've jumped at the chance, even when, as in 1997's As Good As It Gets, the performance in question called to mind Picasso's boast that "I can paint fake Picassos as well as anybody!" But they got it just right with Nicholson's first Oscar, for his Randall Patrick McMurphy, a performance that he gave a year after Chinatown set his movie star status in stone, and one that goes farther than he'd ever gone before, with fewer ingratiating winks and nods to the audience than he'd ever include in a full-length performance again. And since the movie, for all its virtues, rises and falls on the strength of its star, it deserved its Best Picture Oscar...a painful thing for this lifelong Jaws partisan to concede.

THE WORST:

THE LIFE OF EMILE ZOLA (1937)

Today Paul Muni is best remembered for his starring role in Howard Hawks' gangster classic Scarface. It turned out to be a rare occasion when Muni provided movie audiences with entertainment value for their money. After winning an Oscar nomination for his next film, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, Muni lost to Charles Laughton for his performance in The Private Life of Henry VIII and must have vowed to never be out-biopic'ed again. In short order, he established himself as the leading advocate of pompous, overbearing movies, winning a Best Actor Oscar for The Life of Louis Pasteur, in which he cured anthrax over the outraged objections of the small-minded, and then starred in Zola, in which he "J'accused" up one side of France and down the other. He also starred in Juarez, as Juarez, and The Good Earth, in which he must have disappointed his diehard fans by not actually portraying the planet. It all made him the Mister Oscar Bait of the 1930s, but by the end of the decade, audiences were sick of the self-righteous sight of him. He tried to get back to where he once belonged, but too much time spent reciting gaseous speeches while buried in historically conscientious makeup jobs had blunted his instincts, and some of his later movie roles, such as his lovable gangster in Angel on My Shoulder (1946), are actually even worse than the Oscar-bait stuff. He died in 1967, the bulk of his filmography fit only to serve as a cautionary example that Meryl Streep failed to heed.

DRIVING MISS DAISY (1989)

It’s not often that a movie dealing with racial issues is so totally (if well-meaningly) clueless that it gets an entire rap song dedicated to its utter boneheadedness, but Driving Miss Daisy is that movie, and Public Enemy’s “Burn Hollywood Burn” is that song. After years of racism, stereotyping, and opportunities denied, Chuck D and his cohorts seemed to be saying, this is what constitutes progress? A movie about a cranky old southern Jewish woman whose black chauffer learns to live and love with her irascible, patronizing demeanor? Not only was it offensive on a number of levels – intentionally and otherwise – but it simply wasn’t a great movie by any reckoning. Its adaptation from a stage play was realized hamhandedly, Bruce Beresford’s direction is perfunctory, and the acting ranges from good but uninspiring to ambitious but dull (Dan Aykroyd ineptly takes the kind of risks that would later rejuvenate Bill Murray’s career). It’s easy to say that its victory came about because of a weak competitive field – other candidates ranged from poor (Dead Poets Society) to good-but-not-great (My Left Foot) – but the thing to remember is that 1989 was also the year that Spike Lee’s wonderful Do the Right Thing, a superior movie in every respect, and one that said far more about racial relations than Driving Miss Daisy could dream, was released. And it didn’t even get a nomination.

DANCES WITH WOLVES (1990)

Hot on the heels of Driving Miss Daisy, you wouldn’t think Oscar would be so quick to embrace another well-meaning racial drama, especially one helmed by someone who’s an even worse director than he is an actor. But sure enough, the voters’ tendency to absurdly overvalue any directorial effort by an actor that rises above total incompetence won out, and Kevin Costner’s bloated, plodding quasi-Western Dances with Wolves took home the Best Picture trophy in 1990. Continuing their history of giving Martin Scorsese the finger, they passed over his tremendous gangster tale GoodFellas in deference to this ridiculously overlong, condescending story of a white man who becomes beloved of the Indians by virtue of his sublime spirituality (heaven forfend the hero of the movie be an actual Indian, because then there wouldn’t be a starring role for director Kevin Costner’s favorite star, actor Kevin Costner). Dances with Wolves isn’t quite horrible enough to be the modern-day equivalent of The Greatest Show On Earth; it does contain some thrilling scenes, some decent acting, and direction that’s proficient if never outstanding. But its grossly overweight running time and heavy-handed message are easily the equal of anything in DeMille’s hokey circus epic. Still, things could have been worse; though no one remembers this anymore, The Godfather Part III was a Best Picture nominee in ’90, too.

BRAVEHEART (1995)

Oh, Oscar, when will you learn? By 1995, a clear theme was emerging: if you’re a well-known actor, and you manage to direct a movie without crushing yourself to death with a SteadiCam or making the entire movie with the lens caps on, you’ve got a pretty strong chance at winning a Best Picture or Best Director award even if your movie is an obvious mediocrity facing competition from much better movies by actual directors. You’d think the Academy would have figured it out: Warren Beatty did nothing worthwhile after Reds. Robert Redford never made a great movie after his Ordinary People win. Kevin Costner’s post-Dances with Wolves work is an utter embarrassment. Clint Eastwood is the most reliable acting director in Hollywood, and even he’s not that great by the standards of legitimate, non-acting directors. And yet, they fell for the exact same trick with Mel Gibson’s second directorial feature, the overheated, self-important William Wallace biopic Braveheart. A few well-staged battle scenes and some fancy speechifying don’t save the sluggish pace of the movie or the overwhelming sensation that Wallace is a bit of a sociopathic bully, and the movie doesn’t bear up to even one repeat viewing. It’s not awful, and Gibson has shown he’s capable of good work as a director since then, but Braveheart didn’t even remotely deserve to win Best Picture, even in a relatively weak year for movies.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

Up The Academy: Screengrab Salutes The All-Time Best & Worst Best Picture Winners (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 23:00:00 GMT

THE BEST:

CASABLANCA (1943)

For all the iconic Hollywood films from The Wizard of Oz to Star Wars that DIDN’T win Best Picture, it’s nice to know that Casablanca, at least, was properly enshrined. Whether you measure by cultural cachet, quotable lines, dorm room posters or AFI ranking, Humphrey Bogart’s finest hour is a classic among classics...and not in that “eat your broccoli” grad student dissertation way, either. The pace is crisp, the intrigue is intriguing, the writing is sharp and funny and the romance (not to mention the bromance) is swoony, even for cynics who’d normally gag on a sentiment like, “We’ll always have Paris.” In fact, Roger Ebert claims in his commentary on a special edition DVD of the film that he’s never heard a bad review of Casablanca, which he says is “probably on more lists of the greatest films of all time than any other single title, including Citizen Kane,” a masterpiece which may be “greater,” but nowhere near as beloved. Normally, such unquestioned, universal adoration would trigger my contrarian side (I’m lookin’ at you, Hanks!) – but that friggin' “La Marseillaise” scene gets me every goddamn time. (Now if you’ll excuse me, I seem to have a little something in my eye...)

ALL ABOUT EVE (1950)

This inside-show-business comic melodrama isn't the greatest movie ever to be garlanded with Oscars. It probably isn't even as great as Sunset Boulevard, another inside-show-business movie that happened to be nominated for Best Picture the very same year. But it's the choicest possible example of a certain kind of entertainment that looks especially fetching come awards season, the glittering self-hating bitch-fest, with actors jumping at the chance to show what overgrown, treacherous babies actors -- other actors -- really are behind the scenes, and also with the writer-director, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, preserving some of the pearls of wit that he'd been test-screening at all the best Hollywood dinner parties for the preceding couple of years. Mankiewicz was lucky to get to assign his dialogue to a couple of the greatest bitches ever to stalk a soundstage: Bette Davis, in her archetypal role as the actress and force of nature Margot Channing, and George Sanders, who picked up a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his purring critic, Addison DeWitt. The movie even opens with an awards ceremony, which Sanders can be heard snarking at in voiceover. With that opening, Mankiewicz was making it clear to the Academy that he was setting up a joke that only they could satisfyingly complete by giving his movie the prize, and the voters were happy to comply.

ON THE WATERFRONT (1954)

On its surface, this movie about labor racketeering on the New York docks could easily be mistaken for the kind of torn-from-the-headlines melodrama that Warner Bros. used to whip up into flavorful, punchy stories in the '30s and which by the 1950s was often served up in bloated and sanctimonious form. (Directed by Elia Kazan from an original script by Budd Schulberg, the movie is also widely taken as its creators' attempt to rationalize their friendly witness status before the House Un-American Activities Committee by showing the informer as a beleaguered hero.) But the actual New York locations, the strong work by such actors as Eva Marie Saint and Rod Steiger, and the best-observed moments in Schulberg's script transcend the movie's built-in limitations. And Brando himself embodies transcendence. Working quietly at first and slowly building to a full boil, he makes Terry Malloy into a real human being even as he's defining the image of the alienated '50s hero, a working-class outsider whose anger and confusion -- the instinctive, untutored emotions of a trapped animal -- make him seem more alive than the society he can't fit into, a society that no one guessed at the time was rotting from deep inside. In addition to marking the end of Brando's professional collaboration with Kazan, it also turned out to mark the end of Brando's first phase as a culture hero: his next movie, representing the start of a long stint in the wilderness, was Desirée, in which he played Napoleon. But it was enough to live on for awhile.

THE GODFATHER (1972) & THE GODFATHER, PART II (1974)

The early seventies were such a wild time for American movies that a bloody, historically sophisticated use of a criminal family as a metaphor for the capitalist system and the corruption of the American dream served as the era's answer to Gone with the Wind. Francis Ford Coppola's masterpiece, as intelligent and emotionally complicated as any epic ever to come out of Hollywood, would stand as a high point both in the history of film and the Academy's fluctuating record of shows of good sense all by itself. It's to the Academy's considerable credit that it did the right thing when it was presented with Part II, which was not the automatic commercial blockbuster that the first film had been. It must have been an especially sweet moment for Coppola, considering that the other Best Picture nominees included not only his own The Conversation but Chinatown, which was the first film independently produced by Robert Evans after Evans left Paramount Pictures, where he and Coppola had a difficult time working together on the first Godfather. Plus he beat The Towering Inferno!

THE DEPARTED (2006)

Yes, we can all agree that it's a sham of a mockery of a travesty that Martin Scorsese never won an Oscar until 2007, and it makes no sense at all that The Departed is the only movie he directed to ever win Best Picture. Let's get past that, can we? Consider the competition this spectacularly entertaining Boston crime epic faced in the category: Babel, Letters from Iwo Jima, Little Miss Sunshine and The Queen. Not really a group with a lot of staying power. If I came across any of them while channel surfing tonight, I doubt I'd pause, but The Departed sucks me in every time. William Monahan's underrated script is an endlessly quotable encyclopedia of pungent tough-guy banter. Alec Baldwin and Mark Wahlberg in particular make the most of it, and although Jack Nicholson doesn't make the most convincing Boston mob boss, even he has his inspired moments. Scorsese isn't reinventing the wheel here, he's just showing all his imitators who have been trying to recreate Goodfellas for the past two decades how to really put on a show. There's an exhilarating pace and crackling energy to his relentless storytelling here, no matter that we've seen the story before (in Infernal Affairs, the Japanese thriller upon which The Departed is based) and that it may not actually make a lick of sense. I may be an apologist for late-period Scorsese (I think I love Gangs of New York even more), but even if you're not a Departed fan, who could begrudge one of our greatest living filmmakers (and one of the world's most enthusiastic movie fans) his moment in the Oscar spotlight?

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent & Scott Von Doviak

Bloody Valentines: The Worst Relationships In Cinema History (Part Six)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 23:30:00 GMT

LUKE SKYWALKER & PRINCESS LEIA, STAR WARS IV-VI (1977-1983)

Getting his first look at Princess Leia in what was once the first and is now supposed to be the fourth Star Wars movie, Luke fairly moos, "She's beautiful!", thus revealing that he's an old-fashioned boy who likes his headphones big, round, and gnarly. Later, Leia will plant a quick smooch on him while he's in the process of saving their asses. This was back in those more innocent days when George Lucas, whatever he's said to the contrary since then, didn't know that he was going to be making a second movie, let alone that he had a whole complicated mythos to spin around it. By the time of The Empire Strikes Back, when Leia plants a hot one on Luke to make Han Solo jealous, it was clear that Leia had decided that her heart was with the bad boy who liked to hang out with Bigfoot, but just as clearly, Luke still thought he might be in the running. Certainly he didn't have the traditional manly response to his sister slipping him the tongue. You revisionist historians can dance around this all you like, but the fact is that for a couple of movies there, the all-ages audience for the Star Wars saga was treated to the sight of the Annakin sibs kind of hitting on each other. No wonder George Lucas opted to abandon his plans for a trilogy of films that would follow the action of Return of the Jedi, where the big reveal was made: he didn't have the heart to stage the most awkward holiday dinner scenes in movie history.

MAX SCHUMACHER & DIANA CHRISTENSEN, NETWORK (1976)

The May-December romance is always a tricky maneuver to pull off. This one stands out partly because it's totally bewildering; I've heard theories about how the moon landing was faked that make more sense than the plot turn that throws these two together. The movie sets them up as oppositional figures from the start: Faye Dunaway's "liberated" young woman Diana who, in screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky's cranky vision, stands for commercial exploitation and debasement, and the older man, Max, (William Holden) who, as the mouthpiece of traditional broadcast journalistic standards, represents the last stand against the corruption of the medium. When Max's old friend, the anchorman Howard Beale, has a breakdown and turns into a ranting crazy, Diana runs with it, turning the news into a showcase for the crazy man's diatribes in the name of entertainment; Max responds by accusing Diana of having "learned life from Bugs Bunny." Then, somewhere in the middle of all this, Max leaves his wife for her, they boink, and then they break up. And from the start of it all Diana's busy undermining Max's career, so it's not even as if she's using him as a stepping stone. Seriously, it's as if Eliot Ness and Al Capone just threw caution to the winds and got it on three-quarters of the way through The Untouchables. The closest thing to an explanation for this comes from Max's wife, played by Beatrice Straight, who parachutes into the movie just long enough to tell him that he's experiencing "his last roar of passion" before male menopause sets in. The Academy Award voters who gave Straight a Best Actress Oscar for this speech might almost have been reacting in self-defense.

BOBBY DUPEA & RAYETTE DIPESTO, FIVE EASY PIECES (1970)

This counterculture hit has its snobbish side, particularly in its scenes involving rich-boy classical pianist turned slumming hardhat Bobby's quote-unquote "romantic" life with "Rayette Dipesto", a name that the Minnie Pearl enthusiasts at the Grand Ole Opry would regard as a bit glaring in its white trashitude. Everything about Bobby's blue collar existence is there to signal that he's meant for better things, but there are real traces of affection and respect in his friendship with his co-worker (Billy Green Bush), whereas he treats his squeeze Rayette as if she were something he won at the company raffle when he was really hoping to come home with the waffle iron. Not that the movie doesn't agree with him that she's a nightmare: in scene after scene, he gets to smolder while she gets to whimper and whine. The question of what's wrong with him that he's chosen to keep company with such a horror never seems to get addressed. The ending, with him deserting her in the middle of nowhere, may be the act of a bastard, but it's definitely the best thing for him, for her, and for the audience.

DEBBY & VINCE STONE, THE BIG HEAT (1953)

In Fritz Lang's noir potboiler, Gloria Grahame is the platonic ideal of the smart moll, and as her gangster boyfriend, Lee Marvin, at his most bestial, is the last person in the world anyone should get smart with. By most conventional standards this is a horrendous pairing, but it's a classic if your thing happens to be mutally assured destruction. The evening that ends with him scarring her face with hot coffee even begins with him manhandling a different woman, which must be her version of foreplay. No longer able to count on her looks as her meal ticket, she throws in with the rogue cop (Glenn Ford) on the mob's tail and turns herself into a sacrificial victim by paying Marvin back and goading him to put her out of her misery. They were made for each other, dahling.

AL & VERA FROM DETOUR (1945)

Film noir has given us a lot of self-deluding males who become willing accomplices to deadly females, but there’s no bigger chump than Tom Neal’s Al and no bigger a shark than Ann Savage’s Vera in Detour. A zero-budget production shot more or less over a weekend by Edward G. Ulmer and a crew of Poverty Row nobodies, Detour is one of the most nihilistic – and yet thrilling – post-war noir films in existence. Al Roberts is a never-was nightclub piano player who travels west to hook up with a woman who clearly couldn’t be more glad to be shed of him. It’s not hard to tell why: Al is a sad sack’s sad sack, a self-pitying, pouty loser who blames his every misfortune – and he’s got plenty of ‘em – on the whole rest of the world. When a kindly drunk slips him a big enough tip to go to California and see his girl, he looks at it like someone’s shat a big old turd in his morning coffee. Along the way, after an uncanny turn of events, he runs into the appropriately named Ann Savage playing Vera, who “looks like she just got thrown off of the crummiest freight train in the world”. She’s a seething cauldron of rage, and as up to no good as a hurricane, but that doesn’t bother Al, who’s looking for a new set of gams to walk all over him. Vera sizes him up as a grade-A cut of chump in about a millisecond and spends the entire rest of this wonderful, horrible little film heaping abuse over him, to his barely registered protests. The pure inappropriateness of this abusive relationship is part of what makes it such a filthily energetic noir classic.

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

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

Bloody Valentines: The Worst Relationships In Cinema History (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 22:00:00 GMT

OLIVER & BARBARA ROSE, THE WAR OF THE ROSES (1989)

Danny DeVito’s black-heart Valentine may not be a great movie, but it’s still a pretty good one, a neat little primer of stereotypes (and uncomfortable truths) of sexual politics in the late 20th century (as well as an emetic corrective to the Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan oeuvre of junk food Hollywood romance. In the midst of a contentious turf battle with his soon to be ex-wife, DeVito’s character warns his client, Oliver, that when it comes to divorce, “There is no winning! Only degrees of losing!” Naturally, Oliver doesn’t listen: not only is he arrogant and stubborn, but he’s also played by Michael Douglas, and so our sympathies at first are with his long-suffering spouse, Barbara (Kathleen Turner)...that is, until we realize Barbara is just as hateful in her cold, ruthless femininity as Oliver is in his chauvinist manhood. And so the couple’s mutual hostility escalates into an archetypal battle of the sexes where both sides are right and both sides are wrong: Barbara can’t stand her corporate asshole of a husband, yet feels entitled to the lavish house she transformed into a home with his corporate asshole money, prompting Oliver’s angry reminder, “It’s a lot easier to spend it than it is to make it, honeybun!” On the flip side of the gender equation, Oliver treats his wife like shit, yet naively expects her to keep providing love and validation (or, in Barbara’s words, “You expect me to keep reassuring you sexually even now when we disgust each other?”), leading to a grim moment of Pyrrhic victory in the movie’s final minutes that speaks volumes about the real balance of power in most American marriages.

BILL & ABBY & THE FARMER, DAYS OF HEAVEN (1978)

It’s a story as old as the Bible. Lovers on the run pretend to be siblings while in a land strange to them. She is beautiful, and the local patriarch is interested in her. She marries the guy -- what choice does she have? -- and here’s where the stories diverge. In one, her god is displeased and smites the land with a plague. In another, her god reveals the truth to her false husband in a dream, and he makes amends with extravagant gifts, even though he was the one deceived. In the last, her false husband catches her cavorting with her lover, and figures it all out. All three come to pass in Days of Heaven. Bill (Richard Gere) and Abby (Brooke Adams) are on the run after he’s killed his boss in a fight. They arrive in the extraordinarily lush and beautiful Texas fields (so lush, in fact, that they’re actually in Canada, not Texas) of The Farmer (Sam Shepard), where they pretend to be siblings so that no one will connect them with the murder back in Chicago. They put in a season’s worth of work, and the Farmer, smitten with Abby, asks her to stay. Bill encourages her to marry him because the Farmer is ill, and Bill can see salad days before them. She does indeed marry the Farmer, but not long after, the Farmer figures out the score between them. He gives Bill money to leave. While Bill’s gone, those plan falls apart: not only does the Farmer thrive, but Abby begins to love him. Abby is surprisingly passive throughout the movie. Maybe not too surprising, given that the story takes place in 1916, when Victorian morality still ran rampant through this country. But all she does is love. First Bill, then the Farmer. And from her innocent love will come only plague and death. After all, this isn't the Bible; it's Texas.

THE MONSTER & THE MONSTER’S MATE, BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935)

It’s said by some that the closest, most loving couples act like they were made for each other. James Whale’s early horror classic proves how awful that can be in practice – at least when it’s taken literally. Of course, it’s a pretty fine distinction whether or not a married couple is better off when only one partner is made out of the stitched-together and reanimated hunks of deceased criminals or just one of them is; on the one hand, it’s good for a long-term couple to share the same interests, but on the other hand, there is such a thing as spending too much time together. In the sequel to Frankenstein, the creature makes a shocking return, and doesn’t have to bend Dr. Frankenstein and the overeager Dr. Pretorius’ arms too hard to get them to head into the lab and create for him a mate, in the form of the breathtaking Elsa Lanchester. Unfortunately, the Bride doesn’t quite react as well to her post-corpse existence as does the Modern Prometheus, and she’s even less pleased at the matchmaking that’s taken place without her consent. Her eerie, spastic behavior makes it clear to the Monster that wedded bliss is a remote possibility, and since there’s no divorce court for inhuman monsters (at least ones not rich enough to hire Raoul Felder), he decides to return to the sweet embrace of death, muttering a line that anticipates Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?: “We belong dead.”

CHARLIE PARTANNA & IRENE WALKER, PRIZZI’S HONOR (1985)

“Do I ice her? Do I marry her? Which of these things?” Jack Nicholson’s mafia hitman, Charlie Partanna, asks a question most potential bridegrooms never get around to asking themselves in this underrated John Huston black comedy about the dangers of mixing business with pleasure. In Prizzi’s Honor, Nicholson plays a high-ranking mob killer who meets the lovely Irene Walker (played by Kathleen Turner, who, as one of the modern era’s great femmes fatale, has played the distaff side of many great bloody screen couples), and, upon pursuing her, discovers that they share an uncommon occupation. Naturally it’s good to have things in common, as the calculating Maerose Prizzi (played to perfection by Anjelica Huston) points out while encouraging Charlie to wed Irene, but the perils of a couple working together are well-known to relationship counselors, and it’s particularly exacerbated when the work they do involves murdering people for profit. It’s no surprise that the movie sets up an eventual, and fatal, confrontation between the two killers, but how it arrives at that inexorable conclusion is a surprise and a delight for most of its running time, especially as Nicholson’s sometimes-befuddled traditionalist and Turner’s gregarious maverick play off one another.

BART TARE & ANNIE LAURIE STARR, GUN CRAZY (1950)

It’s a cliché that a gun is a phallic stand-in for some people, but few movies make that association more explicit – especially given the cinematic restrictions of the time – than Joseph H. Lewis’ terrific overheated noir thriller Gun Crazy. Tightly-wound, desperately alone John Dall as Bart Tare has only ever loved one thing: shooting. That all changes when he runs into trick shooter Annie Laurie Starr (a gorgeously ruined Peggy Cummins) at a touring carnival; after a notoriously sexy scene that sublimates carnal desire into gun-love in ways that Wayne LaPierre could only dream of, they’re hooked into each other for life. But while Bart only wants the love of the only woman who could ever outgun him, Annie, one of noir’s slickest femmes fatale, wants the good life, and she isn’t going to let anything, not even Bart’s reluctance to commit crimes, stand in her way. She’s been beaten down bad by life, and the way she figures it, it’s about time for life to get a taste of its own medicine. All noir films are saturated with a sense of doom, but Gun Crazy’s is downright oppressive, as Bart reluctantly embarks on a life of crime knowing he’s helpless in the face of his love for Annie. But while his course is set, his eyes are wide open, and there’s a terrifically revelatory scene after their last big caper ends up bloodier than anticipated: “Two people dead,” he spits at her, “just so we can live without working!” It’s too late, though, always too late, and in the end, Bart and Laurie, who go together like guns and ammunition, end up the only way they could, like cold spent shells on the ground.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Four, Five, Six & Seven

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Hayden Childs, Leonard Pierce

Bloody Valentines: The Worst Relationships in Cinema History (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 21:00:00 GMT

To paraphrase Edwin Starr: Valentine’s Day! Huh! What is it good for?

Well...depends who you ask: it certainly didn’t work out too well for the poor Roman priest who got himself beaten, stoned, beheaded (and later canonized) for nuptializing Christian couples out of season, nor for any of the other Catholic martyrs named Valentine whose various grisly fates somehow led to the annual tradition of grown-ass men dropping seventy bucks a pop to have teddy bears in boxer shorts with hearts on them delivered to grown-ass women in the middle of winter.

Scholars blame Geoffrey Chaucer for ruining February 14th by linking a bunch of obscure Roman Catholic feast days with the aggravating concept of courtly love, thus stressing out singles and couples alike for centuries to come with unrealistic, unattainable expectations about all the perfect moments of romance we’re all supposed to be having (instead of weeping lonely tears into our popcorn at solo matinees of He’s Just Not That Into You or forgetting to buy a frickin’ card for our significant others and never hearing the goddamn frickin’ end of it).

It should, of course, be remembered that St. Valentine’s ol’ pagan buddy Cupid is the son of both a goddess of love AND a god of war, and thus not all the couples the little bastard shoots with his arrows wind up living happily ever after. Therefore, as a cheery reminder that things could always be worse in this infernal season of l’amour, your friends-with-benefits here at the Screengrab are proud to present BLOODY VALENTINES: THE WORST RELATIONSHIPS IN CINEMA HISTORY!

PROF. IMMANUEL RATH & LOLA LOLA, THE BLUE ANGEL (1930)

A sort of preemptive riposte to the 20th century's literary canon of professors effectively leveraging their intellectual heft for the purpose of seducing their students, The Blue Angel has stuffy Rath (Emil Jannings) falling for cabaret singer Lola Lola (Marlene Dietrich) when he goes down to waggle his finger in her face and tell her to stop distracting his students. Instead, she captivates and reduces him to a pathetic spectacle, as pathetic in the public's eyes as he is in hers. If Rath had at least a little touch of submissiveness in him, maybe he'd enjoy being constantly humiliated in a sub-dom 24/7 way; as it is, Lola reduces him to a man with no free will. Dietrich's star was made in this first collaboration with Josef von Sternberg; meanwhile, Jannings' performance is frequently looked down upon as an anachronistic acting style from another age. Which actually makes perfect sense for the character he's playing. As a depiction of a May-December, intellectual-emptyheaded, pompous-earthy, and every other kind of mismatch possible relationship, The Blue Angel isn't painful only because it's more conducive to distanced contemplation and sarcastic laughter than visceral empathy. Should you have extra time at work (should you still be employed, in fact), some kind soul has uploaded the whole German version to YouTube, but the embedding has been disabled, so enjoy the trailer above, then click here to watch the whole thing.

GEORGE & MARTHA, WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? (1966)

There may be bloodier couples in the history of cinema, but there are none whose hatred burned brighter. George and Martha – a small-time failure of a college professor and his crude harpy of a wife, played by real-life couple Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor – may not want to kill each other, but it’s only because dead they would be past inflicting pain, which is all that keeps them going. Considering that Martha speaks of their marriage in terms of total warfare, and George’s idea of whimsical banter is to point a rifle at his wife’s head during a cocktail party, it’s no surprise that this movie has become shorthand for violently feuding couples. This is a couple that’s beyond mere feuding, but whose initial passion has never soured: it’s been transformed into something just as fiery, a loathing built on complete knowledge of, and complete dependence upon, one another. The film shocks us right out of the box by presenting us with a couple whose fury and loathing for each other is deeper than the love in an any big-screen romance; it then shocks us even further by showing how deeply, albeit bizarrely, they care for each other, and how much more profound their relationship is than the seemingly happy couple that contrasts them.

MICHAEL & KAY CORLEONE, THE GODFATHER (1972) and THE GODFATHER, PART II (1974)

There's a lesson here that a lot of you girls would do well to heed: when your boyfriend runs off to Sicily without a word, gets married to a perfect stranger he met over there about ten minutes after he got off the boat, and then, after somebody sticks dynamite under the hood of the car and blows her sky high, he shows up where you work, again without a word, and announces that, lucky you, he's looking to fill the position of second wife and he's prepared to consider your qualifications -- honey, take a breath. If you feel swayed by his liquid brown eyes and passionate words, try and think about how you're going to feel waking up next to him in a few years, when the face is set off by a toupee like an earth-tone fireworks display and that insinuating voice keeps erupting "HOO-hah!" Then you tell Casanova that as much as you appreciate the offer, you feel that you might be overqualified on account of your ability to count above ten without taking off your shoes. Unless you've got some kind of fetish for having doors slammed in your face.

JACK & WENDY TORRANCE, THE SHINING (1980)

If you've seen The Shining as many times as I have – and there's very little chance of that – you've probably spent some time speculating about the marriage of Jack and Wendy Torrance. How did they meet? What was the attraction? When did they decide to get married, and didn't they have any friends or family to talk them out of it? Some would point to the obvious incompatibility of the brooding, hot-tempered Jack (Jack Nicholson) and the frail, skittish Wendy (Shelly Duvall) as a flaw in the movie, but to those people I would pose this query: Do you know any married people? Because if you do, surely you are aware that for every couple that seems inevitable and perfect for each other, there are at least three that make no sense whatsoever on any rational level. It's easy to blame Jack for the eventual dissolution of the relationship. He is the guy who starts talking to ghosts and running around with an axe, after all. But let's not let Wendy entirely off the hook. She did go along with a plan that entailed living in total isolation with a man who has a history of alcohol abuse and domestic violence (no matter how much she may have tried to downplay it), and she brought her young son Danny into it. At the very least, she's guilty of poor judgment, but at least it all works out in the end.

FRANK BOOTH & DOROTHY VALLENS, BLUE VELVET (1986)

Frank Booth and Dorothy Vallens, the two emblems of maniacal deviance and defiled virtue (respectively) in David Lynch’s surrealistic neo-noir Blue Velvet, may share things...but love isn’t one of them. Dorothy (Isabella Rossellini) is a nightclub singer with a daughter and an air of mystery, which – as Kyle MacLachlan’s amateur sleuth Jeffrey peeps after being shoved, post-blowjob, into a closet – is due to her association with Frank (Dennis Hopper). Frank is a sociopath holding Dorothy’s husband hostage so she might sexually gratify him, and the twisted sadomasochistic tryst (replete with helium inhalations and erotic asphyxiation) that Jeffrey witnesses while hiding in that closet may stand as some of the most disturbingly unsettling material ever shot by the peerlessly out-there Lynch. The couple’s relationship ultimately ends when Jeffrey shoots Frank dead, but this being Lynch, the ensuing happy ending is laced with perversion, due in part to the earlier suggestion that Dorothy, conditioned to Frank’s beatings, has been warped into associating pleasure with pain.

Click Here For Part Two, Three, Four, Five, Six & Seven

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Vadim Rizov, Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent, Scott Von Doviak & Nick Schager

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

In Other Blogs: Selected Shorts

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 17:00:00 GMT

If you checked out our Oscar picks yesterday and are planning to use them as a basis for your own office pool, you should know that I, for one, pulled my short film predictions out of my hat. But at Beyond the Multiplex, Andrew O’Hehir has actually watched all the nominees. “Short films, at least as the category is defined by the Academy Awards, have even less to do with one another than feature films do. I mean, think about it: With very few exceptions, the films nominated for best picture over the years have all been three-act stories with plot, characters and a script, costing multiple millions to make and running somewhere between 80 and 160 minutes. A short, on the other hand, is any motion picture less than 40 minutes in length, and as in previous years, the 2008 nominees in animated and live-action shorts run the visual, conceptual and philosophical gamut.”

Hollywood and Fine uses the brewing Faye Dunaway/Hilary Duff feud as a jumping off point to discuss aging stars and plastic surgery. “The unkind thing, of course, is that Duff speaks a certain truth. Dunaway is yet another star who has let the fear of natural aging turn her to the sci-fi world of cosmetic surgery. This has given her face a certain computer-generated look – not quite real, not quite human. Put it this way: Dunaway makes Joan Rivers look normal. Or Cher… It’s dismaying to see the give-away cat eyes of cosmetic surgery on once-beautiful women – women who would be beautiful at any age if they just let themselves – like Catherine Deneuve, Jessica Lange and Candice Bergen. But you also detect the pursuit of elusive youth - in the form of Botox needle’s weirdly smoothing qualities - on the faces of favorite male performers as well.”

At Some Came Running, Glen Kenny talks Swanberg. “In January, in the midst of some armchair commentary on the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, I noted Mr. Joe Swanberg’s pronouncements at a press breakfast at which IFC announced a partnership with the film arm of South By Southwest, in which IFC would provide VOD screenings of varied SXSW premieres simultaneous to those films’ screenings at the festival. One of the films is the latest from Swanberg, the young filmmaker whose works (frequently tagged as components of a not-quite movement dubbed ‘Mumblecore’) are noted for their improvisational ‘realism’ and the unusual candor of their depictions of sexual matters (e.g., Swanberg himself and varied other members of his casts engage in unsimulated sex acts therein). Swanberg’s musings on where the ‘interest’ in his films began and ended solicited this rejoinder from your correspondent: ‘I think I speak for myself, and for many others, that when I hear about a new Swanberg picture my first question is "Does he show his schlong in it?" and if the answer is "Yes," my "interest" shrivels up like a Pac-Man that's just gotten it from Inky, Winky, Blinky AND Sue.’”

Around the corner at our own Paul Clark’s blog Silly Hats Only, the Third Annual Muriel Awards are getting underway. Some of your other favorite Screengrabbers are participating, wink wink. “What, not excited yet? Well, you should be. After all, we’ve got plenty of new goodies to go along with all of your old favorite Muriels traditions- that is, if you can call something two years old a tradition. I’d tell you what they are, but that would ruin the surprise, now wouldn’t it?”

Our partners over at Cracked (hey, it says over there in the right-hand column that they’re our partners, so who am I to argue?) have turned up 20 Baffling Foreign Movie Posters. That is, not posters for foreign movies, but posters for American movies as they appear in foreign lands. Such as the one pictured here for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. “Little known fact: The Turkish Director's Cut featured Shelly Duvall and swashbuckling zombies. Seriously, can you fuck up the poster for a Jack Nicholson classic any worse than this?”

Jailhouse Rock: The Greatest Prison Films Of All Time (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 21:00:00 GMT

Until Jack Nicholson’s kooky Colonel Nathan Jessep made fun of Tom Cruise’s faggoty white uniform over lunch in A Few Good Men, I’d never heard of America’s Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. Oh, for those carefree days of yesteryore.

Today, of course, most of us are sick-to-death of (and mostly just sickened by) references to all the terrible, terrible shit that’s gone down at Gitmo since America went torture-happy in 2002 and turned the base into a slightly less awful Abu Ghraib, where (according to our terrible, terrible 43rd president) the Geneva Conventions, legality, common sense and human decency no longer applied.

As of this writing, our hopefully much, much better 44th president has, according to Reuters, ordered a 120-day halt to all pending Guantánamo Bay prosecutions “to give the new administration time to evaluate the cases and decide what forum best suits any future prosecution.”

In the meantime, your pals here at the Screengrab would like to commemorate President Obama’s pledge to shut down one of the worst prisons in our nation's history with a salute to THE BEST PRISON MOVIES OF ALL TIME!

THE ROAD TO GUANTÁNAMO (2006)

Time will tell if Barack Obama truly represents the hope and change upon which he campaigned, but it was a good sign when his first act upon assuming office was to begin the process of shutting down the prison camp maintained during the Bush administration at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. Meant to detain enemy combatants and terror suspects captured during the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, Guantánamo did almost nothing to fight al-Q’aeda, instead becoming a symbol of the degraded state of civil rights during the War on Terror. Michael Winterbottom’s powerfully effective documentary The Road to Guantánamo tells, through a clever mixture of documentary interviews and dramatic reenactments, the story of young British Muslims who visited Pakistan for a friend’s wedding; through foolhardiness or naivety, they ended up taking a detour into Afghanistan, and before they knew what was happening, they were captured, turned over to U.S. forces, and ended up in the world’s most infamous prison camp. Eventually released without charge two years later, their story is especially harrowing not only because a true prison tale is always scarier than an invented one, but also because it’s illustrative of how little it takes to destroy someone’s life in an atmosphere of paranoia and political fear.

COOL HAND LUKE (1967)

Given the timing of its release, Cool Hand Luke will probably always have the aura of a counterculture artifact, although in many ways it's your basic meat-and-potatoes prison flick. The conflict between our anti-hero Luke and the establishment – that is, the Bosses who keep him and his fellow prisoners in line – is certainly emblematic of the cultural divide of the Sixties, but it's also a well-worn standby of the genre. What makes Luke memorable, in addition to Newman's iconic performance, is the sweat-soaked Southern atmosphere and the rogues gallery of rugged character actors lined up on the chain gang, including George Kennedy, Harry Dean Stanton, Ralph Waite, Dennis Hopper, Joe Don Baker and Wayne Rogers. Sure, they may seem a little too comfortable playing grabass in their underwear, but prison does strange things to a man. The horrors of the work farm, from the backbreaking labor to solitary confinement in "the hole," are so far out of proportion to Luke's crime of cutting the heads off parking meters out of boredom, we'd root for him even if he wasn't a lovable rogue who settles the great question once and for all: can a man eat 50 eggs?

O BROTHER WHERE ART THOU? (2000)

Pigeonholing the Coen Brothers' perpetually underrated Americana romp as a prison movie would be just as ludicrous as studying The Big Lebowski for bowling tips, but the plot is indeed set into motion by a good old fashioned escape from a chain gang, and those big bold prison stripes really bring out the best in George Clooney. Although the Coens draw some of their imagery from classic prison flicks like I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang and Cool Hand Luke (their sunglasses-wearing pursuer appears to have stepped straight out of the latter picture), none of these influences have ever delved so deeply into the importance of the proper hair care product. Indeed, O Brother was the first prison movie that dared to depict the potential danger of the escaped fugitive being transformed into a toad by bewitching sirens. For speaking such hard truths, O Brother deserves a better reputation than it currently enjoys.

GRAND ILLUSION (1937)

Jean Renoir’s WWI opus about French and English pilots captured by the Germans is a film of startling depth and grace, a testament to the power of movies to reveal elusive truths about humanity, and a hell of a good time, to boot. I realize that critical opinion of this movie is such that the last statement is akin to affirming the wetness of water, but sometimes we have to acknowledge the waters in which we swim before we dive. It is hard to describe The Grand Illusion as a prison flick, even though most of the action takes place in various prisons. The movie is about class and prejudice and war and love and honor and this list could seriously go on for a while. At the height of his powers, Renoir was an artist of amazing scope, and his little prison flick manages to illuminate the contradictions at the heart of human psychology while judging no character for behaving as they have been taught to behave. The movie is a veritable who's-who of great European (and even American) cinema. It stars Jean Gabin, one of Renoir's favorite leading men, as Lieutenant Maréchal, the central figure of the movie. Renoir himself was an aviator during WWI, and the uniform Gabin wears was Renoir's during the first World War. Pierre Fresnay plays Captain de Boeldieu, the aristocratic aviator shot down alongside Maréchal. The director Erich von Stroheim plays Captain von Rauffenstein, the aristocratic German officer who shot them down and later acts as their warden. Marcel Dalio, credited at IMDB with 177 film appearances, plays Lieutenant Rosenthal, a Jewish French officer. The gorgeous Dita Parlo also appears, along with her L'Atalante co-star Jean Dasté. But the cast is only a component of the greatness; far more important is Renoir's sweeping vision of humanity, both in confinement and in freedom.

Click Here For Part Two, Three, Four & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak, Hayden Childs

A Better Travis Bickle for a Better New Year, and Other Great "Resolutions" Movies

Phil Nugent — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 18:00:00 GMT

Today is Twelfth Day, the traditional end to the Christmas season for those of us who need a few days for the hangover to die down before we can start thinking about taking down the lights and chucking the tree out the window. So it's not too late to start thinking about taping some New Year's resolutions to the door of the fridge. Not everyone agrees about how much point there is to making New Year's resolutions; the idea behind them is to make some changes that will make your life better, and the world does not lack for evidence that people don't change. But here at the Screengrab, we think about these thing the same way we think about everything else: as filtered through movies, which is why we don't work for a golfing blog. And in the movies, there is no shortage of evidence that people can change resolve to change their lives. For the better? Eh, sometimes it depends on whether you're living the life or just sitting in the dark, watching it.

THE MOVIE: Taxi Driver (1976)

THE RESOLVER: Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro)

THE RESOLUTION: In his own words: "I gotta get in shape. Too much sitting has ruined my body. Too much abuse has gone on for too long. From now on there will be fifty push-ups each morning, fifty pull-ups. There will be no more pills, no more bad food, no more destroyers of my body. From now on will be total organization. Every muscle must be tight." He also decides to try a new hairstyle.

THE RESULTS: Having turned himself into an urban guerrilla soldier in order to assassinate a presidential candidate, Travis, with a little help from the Secret Service, decides to redirect his energies towards persuading a child prostitute to return to her family in the Midwest after re-decorating the walls of a hotel room and corridor with her pimp's brains. After a period of rest and recovery in the hospital, he returns to work, where he finds that the girl who dumped him on their first date after a disagreement over his taste in movies is sufficiently impressed by the change in him to show up, hanging around his cab with a faraway look in her eyes. Clearly a success, made all the more gratifying by the fact that his hair grew out while he was in a coma and the girl never saw him in his ill-considered new look.

THE MOVIE: The Shining (1980)

THE RESOLVER: Jack Torrence (Jack Nicholson)

THE RESOLUTION: To use the time and isolation provided by his new winter job to really sit down and focus on getting some serious writing done. Also, if the masterpiece gets finished early, maybe spend some time examining his relationship with his wife and son.

THE RESULTS: Torrence's breakthrough experimental novel, consisting of 38,000 typographical variations on the same ten-word sentence, didn't make Oprah's Book Club, but both Harold Bloom and David Eggers think it was underrated at the time of its original publication. (Back then, many critics questioned whether it would have been published at all if not for the surrounding news stories about Torrence's untimely death and the events surrounding the break-up of his marriage. Certainly the fact that his agent was able to arrange a six-figure movie deal came as a big surprise.) On the face of it, weighing the good against the no so good, this would appear to be a moderate success. However, thinking long term, it should be noted that the ending of The Shining seems to hint that Jack has been this way before, which in turn may indicate that he'll be back. And when he does, with all the life experience he'll be packing, the next book is sure to be dynamite!

THE MOVIE: Torremolinos 73 (2003)

THE RESOLVER: Alfredo López (Javier Cámara)

THE RESOLUTION: To make a better life for himself and his wife, Carmen (Candela Peña), by becoming a pornographic filmmaker.

This Spanish comedy, which is, or should be, dear to the hearts of all good Nerve readers, is a weirdly charming tribute to the homier side of the sexual revolution and the porno chic era. Alfredo and Carmen aren't the hardened pros of Boogie Nights but budding entrepreneurs trying to ride their mom and pop operation into a higher level of the middle class, and they have amusingly mixed feelings about the discovery that Carmen has become an international porn star. Alfredo, who can't compete with his wife for the camera's attention, tries to compensate by letting his artistic pretensions develop, and the two manage to go out in glory with the bigger-budgeted art-porn flick of the title, which also makes it possible for Carmen to conceive a child with one of her studly co-stars, a develop that delights both Carmen and her loving but infertile husband. By going all the way with his resolution, the lucky Alfredo is able to express himself artistically, enrich himself and his family financially, and strengthen his marriage. Somewhere, Jack Torrence is seething.

THE MOVIE: Drugstore Cowboy (1989)

THE RESOLVER: Bob Hughes (Matt Dillon)

THE RESOLUTION: To end a long-standing and thoroughly enjoyed addiction to drugs, following an unfortunate incident involving a weekend in the woods spent burying a turquoise-faced Heather Graham.

THE RESULTS: Bob trades in a free-wheeling, exciting life as the unquestioned head of a "family" of doper-grifters and a marriage to one of the hottest women in the history of movies (Kelly Lynch) for a sorry, colorless nine-to-five existence and the random wild evening spent being lectured by William S. Burroughs. On the plus side, he is, at twenty-six, a healthy young man, freshly clean and sober, with his whole blooming life laid out ahead of him. On the down side, Max Perlich blows his brains out.

THE MOVIE: Leaving Las Vegas (1995)

THE RESOLVER: Ben Sanderson (Nicolas Cage)

THE RESOLUTION: To enjoy the exorbitant severance check that he has won as a result of his alcoholism by relocating to a city where the bars never close and drink himself to death

THE RESULTS: A spectacular success. Not only does Ben succeed in drinking himself to death, becoming so liquefied and benumbed that he is able to enjoy having broken glass embedded in every square inch of his naked back, but his glitteringly flamboyant self-destructiveness wins the heart of a fair hooker (Elisabeth Shue), one of those hard-edged but vulnerable blondes made all the more painfully alluring by the emotional and physical wear and tear of her unhappy experience. What's more, in his final scene, in a trope that would test H. P. Lovecraft's ability to suspend his disbelief, he was able to present her with a functioning erection, despite the fact that he was so drunk that his penis was the last remaining part of him that could still stand up. Though it will win us no awards from MADD for saying it, it must be admitted that Leaving Las Vegas makes a much stronger case for getting plowed than Drugstore Cowboy makes for cleaning up your act.

THE MOVIE: Lost in America (1985)

THE RESOLVER: David Howard (Albert Brooks)

THE RESOLUTION: To drop out of society, cash in their savings and the proceeds from the sale of their house to supply them with a $145,000 "nest egg", take to the road (with his wife, Linda, played by Julie Hagerty), and, in his own words: "Touch Indians, see the mountains and the prairies and all the rest of that song."

THE RESULTS: David starts out with a full head of steam but plows into a wall when he and the Missus stop in Vegas with plans to renew their marriage vows. Waking up to discover that Linda has hit the blackjack table and eaten into "the core of the nest egg"--and failing to persuade the casino boss (Garry Marshall) to give them back their money as a goodwill P.R. gesture--David flips out and becomes impossible to live with before settling down to try to start a new life in a trailer home, with Linda taking a job at a burger joint and David working as a crossing guard. After a day of this, he and Linda reconsider their devotion to their new identities as social dropouts and conclude that it would be better for David to return to the bosses he insulted and walked out on "and eat shit." On the most obvious level, it might seem that this resolution ended with a case of clear-cut, absolute failure. On the other hand, the simple fact of it is that most people are what they, deep down, prefer to be, and however much they might wish they were someone else, they don't change. Keeping that in mind, Lost in America can be seen as the story of someone who, in the course of about two weeks, gave it his best shot, found out that he wasn't cut out to be Walt Whitman--which means that he won't spend the rest of his life torturing himself with thoughts about the road not taken--and was able to return to his true path with a minimum of hurt and damage: no harm, no foul. Except that you have to wonder how David would feel right about now, given that he'd be about sixty, and would have spent the last several months watching his retirement fund turn to ash. If Brooks were up for a sequel, it might be scarier than whatever George Romero still has in him.

Screengrab Presents: Cinema's Greatest Comebacks (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 21:00:00 GMT

“Don’t call it a comeback, I been here for years,” implored L.L. Cool J (shortly before his mother told him to knock us unconscious), raising an interesting point in the endless Hollywood parlor game of career perception: after all, the recent Golden Globe nominations for Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem would seem to mark Vicky Cristina Barcelona as a return to form for Woody Allen...but what then to make of the fact that Match Point, Sweet & Lowdown, Manhattan Murder Mystery, Crimes & Misdemeanors, etc. etc. were all considered phoenix-like returns to form in the Woodman’s prolific (and sometimes crappy) oeuvre? How many times can a person come back if they never really go away?

Sometimes, though (as in the case of pugilist/thespian Mickey Rourke), the weepy entertainment magazine profiles and welcome home parties seem entirely appropriate. After all, the one-time heartthrob used to be a bona fide movie star (and light bondage icon) thanks to hits like Diner and 9 ½ Weeks, and though he’s done interesting work since then in films like Buffalo '66 and Spun, among others, there’s a big difference between co-starring with Eric Roberts and generating Oscar buzz.

Sure, Rourke essentially torpedoed his own career by stomping around like the Pope of Douchebag Village for years and years...but as the auto and financial industries have shown, everybody gets a second chance in America, no matter how bad you fuck up (unless, of course, you’re poor).

So, in honor of this week’s release of The Wrestler, we here at The Screengrab hereby salute...THE GREATEST COMEBACKS OF ALL TIME!

(And stay tuned next week as we ask Santa for THE COMEBACKS WE’D MOST LIKE TO SEE!)

JACK NICHOLSON in TERMS OF ENDEARMENT (1983)

Though you could be forgiven for not believing it, there was a stretch there where it looked touch and go for the continued health of Jack Nicholson's continued career and reputation. After winning the Academy Award for Best Actor for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), Nicholson jumped head first into a series of high-profile ventures -- The Missouri Breaks, Goin' South (which he also directed), The Postman Always Rings Twice, and, yes, friends, The Shining, which did disappointing box office and was badly mauled by most reviewers. However many fans it's racked up in the years since, the reaction to his performance in The Shining was typical: the conventional wisdom was quickly turning towards the direction that a man once capable of sensitive work had turned into an eyeball-rolling self-parodist, and in a Playboy interview published a year before his 1982 death, the gentle-spirited Henry Fonda criticized Nicholson for having thrown away his career and disgracing his profession. The actor's critical reputation began to recover around the time the magazine hit the stands, starting with his supporting performance in Reds and then with his starring role in the little-seen The Border, but it was Terms of Endearment that set the tone for Nicholson's successful reinvention of himself as a post-counterculture elder statesman who styled himself as a broad but soulful entertainer, someone who was still prone to go over the top but could usually make you love him for it. It could be argued that Nicholson lost something beautiful in the process -- as Anthony Lane later wrote, Nicholson rose to stardom as a man who seemed deeply pained by the state of the world, and sustained his stardom into old age by turning into someone who seemed very pleased with himself -- but it was still an audacious pull back from the career abyss. The role of the pear-shaped horndog Garrett Breedlove won him a second Academy Award, this time for Best Supporting Actor, neatly bookending his time of trouble. It also established that he was smarter than Burt Reynolds, who famously turned the role down to honor his commitment to Hal Needham to do Stroker Ace, which in career terms was like honoring his commitment to show up in front of the firing squad at dawn with a cigarette in his mouth and the blindfold in place.

AL PACINO in SEA OF LOVE (1989)

This entertaining, twisty little thriller made the leap to event status on the strength of its announcement that Pacino had returned to functionability. Pacino had entered into a nightmarishly sustained slump after The Godfather, Part II and Dog Day Afternoon, starring in a series of movies that rank among the very worst of their time (Bobby Deerfield, Revolution), films so thoroughly mediocre and tinny that it was impossible to imagine what appeal they'd ever had for him (...And Justice for All, Author! Author!), as well as Cruising and Scarface, which, for whatever cult status they would come to enjoy, earned him more in bad press at the time than they did in good reviews or box office. Compared to some of those misfires, the relative modesty of Sea of Love was part of its appeal at the time: it was a relief to see Pacino, returning to the screen, after a four-year absence, in a clever little cop opera that gave him a chance to look worn-down and middle-aged but not romantically implausible, enjoying the Richard Price-scripted byplay with such solid pros as John Goodman and Richard Jenkins, and -- an eternal Pacino specialty -- demonstrating that he wasn't afraid to pitch on-screen woo with an actress (Ellen Barkin) who looked as if she could fold him up and stick him in her purse. His spirit refreshed, Pacino was back a year later as Big Boy Caprice in Dick Tracy, happily gnawing the last traces of meat from the hambone.

CHRISTOPHER LEE in THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING (2001) & STAR WARS EPISODE II: ATTACK OF THE CLONES (2002)

Lee has scarcely stopped working since entering movies in the late 1940s, but his ghettoized stardom in horror movies failed to translate into mainstream screen prominence, and as the decades went by, he seemed most likely to appear in high-profile pictures when the director was someone like Joe Dante or Tim Burton, who'd cut his teeth on Hammer films and felt an affectionate debt of gratitude to the old gent. Which is nice, but self-paroding cameos in Gremlins 2 and Sleepy Hollow do not a comeback make. The first real sign in years that the then-78-year-old Lee still had strapping reserves of energy going to waste came when he turned up in the 2000 BBC version of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast, where he was dashingly costumed and looked and moved like a man twenty years younger. But the cherries on top of his career came with his villainous performances as Rings' malignant sorcerer Saruman and the abuser of the Force Lord Dooku -- subtle, George -- which, by drawing on memories of his screen past even as they threaded him into the texture of the two biggest multi-part fantasy series of the turn of the century, honored his career while tying it up with a handsome bow. After which, Lee being Lee, he called his agent and went back to work.

DENNIS HOPPER & DEAN STOCKWELL in BLUE VELVET (1986)

For most of his career, Hopper had led the league in blackballings, being driven out of the acting profession by the director Henry Hathaway, then remaking himself as a director and returning in glory with the 1969 Easy Rider. The box office success of that movie was so bewildering to the studios that Hopper was given a big bag with a dollar sign on it and absolute creative freedom to do whatever he wanted for his next movie as director, which resulted in 1971's The Last Movie...and cue blackballing number two. Hopper would spend most of the next fifteen years reeling from his intake of drugs and drink while working on a string of offbeat projects for European and American maverick directors, ranging from Apocalypse Now and Rumble Fish for Coppola and Wim Wenders' The American Friend to Neil Young's Human Highway, Henry Jaglom's Tracks and Orson Welles' unfinished The Other Side of the Wind. His performances in most of them were pretty unsteady; Hopper seemed to have his notion of artistry boiled down to the actor's willingness to do anything, but nobody ever hesitated to hire Dennis Hopper because they were concerned that he might not be crazy enough. He's said that Blue Velvet, one of a string of films he appeared in around 1986 which also includes River's Edge, Hoosiers, and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre Part II, was the first job he'd gotten after getting clean and sober, though he apparently almost talked himself out of it by telling David Lynch that he had to play Frank Booth because he was Frank Booth, after which Lynch considered hiding under the table. It's a measure of how impressed Hollywood was with both Hopper's performance and the sheer feat of rendering himself employable that Entertainment Tonight had a camera installed in Hopper's home when the Academy Award nominees were announced on television so that they could record his reaction, it being a forgone conclusion that his name would be among those read aloud. (It's a measure of just how freaked out Hollywood was by Blue Velvet that the E.T. cameras got to record Hopper's momentary confusion when it turned out that he'd been nominated instead for his work in Hoosiers.) Hopper's long shadow also obscured some of the triumph of his Blue Velvet co-star, one-scene wonder Dean Stockwell, who had also appeared with him in The Last Movie, Tracks, and Human Highway. A child actor back in the 1940s, Stockwell had kept his career going into adulthood, winning the Best Actor award at Cannes for 1959's Compulsion and co-starring with Katharine Hepburn, Ralph Richardson, and Jason Robards in 1962's Long Day's Journey into Night. He went counterculture and turned his back on Hollywood in the late '60s and '70s, then slowly began creeping back with parts in Paris, Texas and To Live and Die in L.A., as well as Lynch's Dune, which he later told an interviewer was the only role he wanted badly enough to screen test for. (The interviewer next asked if he'd care to explain why he'd wanted it so badly. Stockwell replied that he'd rather not.) But it was his performance in Blue Velvet that made him hot enough that he could quit his second job hustling real estate.

JOHN TRAVOLTA in PULP FICTION (1994)

Travolta may have mixed feelings about having had his career resurrected by Quentin Tarantino, given that he's been known to insist to interviewers that he wasn't that far down the ladder when Pulp Fiction broke -- those Look Who's Talking movies made a lot of darn money, thank you very much! -- but most people who cared knew that Tarantino's dialogue and taste in hair extensions restored cachet and hipness to a star brand that had gotten badly devalued since 1981. Travolta cemented his comeback with Get Shorty, a project that he, yes, turned down before Tarantino called him up and advised him to snap to attention. His filmography since then has more than its fair share of stinkers, but it's better remembered now than it was in 1993 that he really is a terrific actor, and he retains the special dignity of a star who came back after being depicted as having been reduced to tending bar in a '70s nostalgia club on an episode of The Simpsons, an episode on which -- the ultimate indignity! -- he didn't even get to provide his own self-mocking voice. And, lest we forget, he did get to name Harry Knowles's site.

Click Here For Part Two, Three, Four & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

Roman Polanski: Wanted in Los Angeles, Desired in Turin

Phil Nugent — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 16:00:00 GMT

For almost a year now, Marina Zenovich's documentary Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, which deals with the Los Angeles criminal case that turned the director of Chinatown and Rosemary's Baby into a fugitive from American justice, has been kicking up dust in both film and legal circles. In 1977, Polanski was arrested on six felony counts arising from charges that he had drugged and raped a thirteen-year-old girl at a private photo shoot he had arranged at his friend Jack Nicholson's house. In a plea bargain, Polanski, who had been staring down a possible life sentence if convicted on all counts, pled guilty to a single count of "unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor", and expected to receive probation, a sentence that would have been in keeping with recommendations made by psychiatrists advising the court. In the end, Polanski fled the country, though only after spending 42 days locked up in a maximum-security prison where he was to receive a "psychological evaluation." What the documentary, which draws on interviews with both defense and prosecution attorneys involved in the case, makes clear is that Polanski skipped out only after deciding that he couldn't trust the judge, Lawrence J. Rittenband, a starstruck jackass whose delight at being at the center of a high-profile case had turned to distress over the bad publicity he was getting from Hollywood reporters chastising him for going easy on a rich pervert filmmaker with a "Children of the night!" foreign accent. (The subtitle of Zenovich's film is a sly reference to the different ways that Polanski was regarded in America and in Europe.) On two occasions, Rittenband demanded that the lawyers play-act scenes with him for the benefit of the reporters, and reneged on deals he'd made when he didn't like his press clippings. (Rittenband has since died, but in the movie, retired Deputy District Attorney Roger Gunson, who speaks about Polanski as if he were something he'd found sticking to his shoe, recalls warning Polanski's lawyer about Rittenband and says that if he'd found himself at the legal mercy of a freak like Rittenband, he probably would have been on the next plane himself.) Now lawyers for Polanski have filed a request the dismiss the outstanding warrant against him, citing the evidence of "a pattern of misconduct and improper communications" revealed in the film. If the charges are dropped--a move that Polanski's alleged victim calls for in the film--the 75-year-old winner of the 2002 Academy Award for Best Director (for The Pianist) will finally be able to visit the U.S. for the first time in thirty years. A spokeswoman for the District Attorney's office told reporters that she couldn't comment on the new developments because the D.A. was s till waiting to be served with the motion. She knew all about it, though. Saw it on the TV news.

While he waits for the results of the Los Angeles Superior Court hearing scheduled in January, Polanksi is maintaining his regular schedule of getting his feet kissed in Europe. He recently showed up at the Turin Film Festival, site of an enormous career retrospective thrown in his honor. Neil Harris reports that "At the nearby Museo Nazionale del Cinema, the gantry that snakes around its spectacular five-storey exhibition hall is decorated with blown-up photographs from the director's own collection. Viewed together, they offer fascinating insights into the making of such iconic masterworks as Repulsion, Chinatown and Rosemary's Baby. A snap from the latter's set sees its star Mia Farrow visibly delighted by a chart breaking down her performance into separate components. Polanski, whose directing style has not always inspired descriptions of his actors as being "visibly delighted", rolled into town to co-star in a Q & A session with director Nanni Moretti (The Son's Room), the festival's artistic director. Describing the challenges he's placed in front of himself on some projects, Polanski said that "Telling stories is not enough. I need something more difficult to achieve." He also admitted to the odd failure or two. The most spectacular of these on his resume is Pirates, the $40 million bellyflop that Polanski had actually been working on before his arrest and that was finally released in 1986, only to serve as a reminder to the world that if you're working on an expensive project that you've conceived for Jack Nicholson to star in and find yourself making it with Walter Matthau in the lead, something has gone terribly wrong. "It was a nightmare from beginning to end. Every day something new would go wrong," Polanski recalled of the shoot, adding, "I should have got a special award just for finishing it." Or maybe, as Chico Marx might put it, he should have been offered a really special award in exchange for agreeing not to finish it.

Screengrab Presents: The 25 Greatest Horror Films of All Time (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 22:00:00 GMT

5. DAWN OF THE DEAD (1978)

Fuck a Zack Snyder remake – no other zombie movie, not even by George Romero, will ever surpass the original Dawn of the Dead. How do I love this gory, nasty, and surprisingly moving masterpiece of terror? Let me count the ways. First of all, while it can’t surpass the closed-up creepiness of the original Night of the Living Dead, it opens it up to staggering effect and makes it a truly apocalyptic horror film. Second, Night had always been projected as a one-off; it was Dawn that made zombies into one of the famous monsters of filmdom, that transformed Romero’s dead-eyed flesh-eaters into beings with their own mythology and internal logic. By doing so, it didn’t just launch a franchise – it launched an entire universe, a cultural archetype with as much meaning and possibility as vampires, werewolves – or angels. Third, it’s tight as hell, incredibly suspenseful, and remarkably well-acted, with the technical difficulties of filming something so ambitious on a shoestring overcome in surprising and effective ways. Fourth, like all great horror movies, it gives us an essential human drama at its center; we care about the story because we care about Stephen, Peter, Roger and Francine. Fifth, it’s a deeply satirical exercise, the first attempt – and probably the most successful – by Romero to mock us by showing us the way a lot of people probably see us: zombies as cultural/political metaphors. And sixth…well, it’s about a bunch of flesh-eating zombies running amok in a shopping mall. And, to use the highfalutin language of film criticism, that’s awesome.

4. PSYCHO (1960)

One of the running jokes around the opulent Screengrab offices is that no matter what lists we come up with, there’s some way to fit Psycho onto them. I’ve personally written up so many aspects of it, I feel like I should get a screenplay credit. But Psycho is definitely responsible for two major accomplishments – both, to me, indisputable, and both decidedly mixed blessings to cinema – that make it especially suitable for this list. The first is that it effectively killed off noir. The highly stylized crime dramas were already on their way out, but Psycho, by cribbing so many of their visual cues but utterly annihilating (literally, at least in the case of Marion Crane) their doomed criminal anti-heroes and shifting the focus from ordinary criminals to extraordinary psychopaths, Psycho put noir in the ground as a dominant method of storytelling. The second is that it ushered in a new kind of villain: setting the tone for the slasher movies of 20 years later and the torture porn of 40 years later, Psycho replaced the notion of the murderer as a relatable character – a villain, surely, but one driven by rational urges like greed, lust, revenge, or envy – with that of the psychopath. Gone was the moral ambiguity of crime dramas past, and in its place was the appeal of the villain who was totally alien: who was intriguing because we could not recognize ourselves in him, because he did things we literally could not imagine. There’s no denying that these two transformations did more harm than good, and ushered in legions of terrible movies, but they’re also further testimonies to how great, and how transformative, Psycho really was.

3. NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968)

George A. Romero has directed a number of great films, but his legacy will surely be his contributions to the zombie horror subgenre. With five Dead films under his belt and yet another on the way, Romero has defined the modern concept of big-screen zombies. Many consider his masterpiece to be 1978’s Dawn of the Dead, with its scathing critique of our consumerist impulses, but for sheer thrills, nothing can top the original Night of the Living Dead. The plot is simple, almost crude -- a group of strangers barricade themselves in an abandoned home in order to defend themselves against an infestation of zombies roaming the countryside. But working from this rudimentary premise, Romero fashioned a scruffier, scarier counterpart to Hitchcock’s The Birds, another film that mined horror from a sudden, uncanny plague unleashed by nature. In addition, Romero’s hardscrabble shooting style -- his black and white 16mm cinematography was necessitated by the film’s $100,000 budget -- helped to change the way horror movies could be made. With the runaway success of Night, horror began to move away from the elegant, big-budget productions to more quick-and-dirty scares, paving the way for the likes of Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Halloween, and many others. But none of this would matter if Night wasn’t scary as hell, which it definitely is, in large part because Romero so skillfully orchestrates the breakdown of society that results from the zombie plague. With the line between living and dead so thoroughly obliterated, nothing else can be sacred -- government, law, morality, and perhaps most memorably, the institution of the family. When a couple’s infected daughter suddenly turns on her parents, it’s clear that anything is possible in Romero’s world, which is perhaps the scariest notion of all.

2. FREAKS (1932)

Having launched a legend the year before with the Bela Lugosi talkie of Dracula, old Hollywood hand Tod Browning decided to quit fucking around: this time, he was serious. This time, the horror felt by his audience wasn’t going to be creepy or sensual: it was going to be repulsive and visceral. And he was going to make them pay for it. The essence of some of the greatest horror stories is making the audience question who, exactly, the monsters really are, and, by peopling its cast with authentic touring circus freaks and then making them the victims of the greedy, lying “normals”, Freaks made it crystal clear: they are us. Some have accused the film of exploiting its cast, but that’s a knee-jerk reaction that not only ignores the movie’s moral complexity (and the fact that the wronged freaks exact a chilling, and utterly deserved, vengeance on their tormentors), but also the fact that for many of the performers, it was the biggest paycheck they’d ever have. They were also treated well by Browning and his cast, something that couldn’t be said for the studio (which wouldn’t allow most of them to dine in the cafeteria) or many of its stars (who refused to star alongside “sideshow exhibitions”). The knowledge of how the picture was made only serves to enhance its powerful condemnation of intolerance -- which was even stronger, just as the ending was even bleaker, before the studio forced cuts. Even today, over 75 years later, Freaks remains one of the most disturbing films ever released by a major Hollywood studio – just as Tod Browning had intended.

1. THE SHINING (1980)

One of the big mistakes many horror filmmakers make is to over-explain the mysterious forces at work in their films. Ask anyone who’s watched the misguided “explanation scene” that George Romero belatedly added to some of the DVD releases of Night of the Living Dead -- usually, not knowing exactly why the monsters are attacking is much more effective than knowing. No horror movie has captured this idea better than The Shining. Stanley Kubrick memorably stated of 2001 that he “wanted to ask more questions than we had answers,” and he used the same tactic in bringing Stephen King’s bestseller to the screen. Naturally, this annoyed many viewers, including King himself, who didn’t cotton to the liberties Kubrick took with his work. But no matter -- it’s the film’s ambiguity that makes it so disturbing. Why are there two different Gradys? What’s up with the guy in the animal suit? And what exactly happens to Jack at the end of the movie? Wisely, Kubrick withholds the answers, allowing the disorientation that results from these scenes to go unresolved. In addition, the film also tells a more human-sized horror story, of a family that’s barely holding together even before the ghosts arrive on the scene -- a man whose eerie formality keeps his demons uneasily at bay as long as he stays off the sauce, a boy overwhelmed by his supernatural gift (curse?) and still scarred by an act of drunken violence by his father, and the woman who can’t handle the idea of losing either of them. All the while, Kubrick practically hypnotizes us with his filmmaking brilliance -- those Steadicam shots! -- meaning that even when The Shining becomes difficult to watch, it’s impossible to look away.

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

Contributors: Jack-o-Leonard Pierce, Mauled Clark

Connery, Lazenby, Moore, Dalton, Brosnan, Craig, Obama...

Phil Nugent — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 19:00:00 GMT

We're used to seeing actors endorse political candidates, but not like this: in an interview with that distinguished cultural journal Parade, Daniel Craig sizes up the American candidates for president and decides which of them is best-suited to take his job. After asking Craig about which Hollywood "tough guy" he would most like to emulate (“The obvious choice for me would be Bogart. Not only because of that ease he had with his unique take on masculinity, but also—and this is much more important—because he got to sleep with Lauren Bacall.”), interviewer Kevin Sessums hits him with the big one: “Who do you think would be the better James Bond—Barack Obama or John McCain?” As Sessums reports, "Craig doesn’t hesitate. 'Obama would be the better Bond because—if he’s true to his word—he’d be willing to quite literally look the enemy in the eye and go toe-to-toe with them. McCain, because of his long service and experience, would probably be a better M,' he adds, mentioning Bond’s boss, played by Dame Judi Dench. 'There is, come to think of it, a kind of Judi Dench quality to McCain.'”

In other election season movie news, Reuters is reporting that a majority of people who responded to a Moviephone.com poll voted Harrison Ford's character in Air Force One as their favorite movie president, coming in ahead of Morgan Freeman in Deep Impact. Trying to explain this, Moviefone's Scott Robson says, "It seems everybody is looking for a commander-in-chief who can come in and take command. Our readers voted with their hearts at a time when you have the economy going down the tubes, but in an ideal world it would be great to have a president who can kick some ass." It will be remembered that presidents Ford and Freeman stood up to Gary Oldman in a Satanic goatee and a big fucking rock from space, respectively. Others who made it onto the top ten include Bill Pullman in Independence Day, Jack Nicholson in Mars Attacks!, and Jeff Bridges in The Contender, who, respectively and with varying results, stood up to alien attackers, more alien attackers, and Gary Oldman in an Antonin Scalia haircut. E. G. Marshall in Superman II finished out of the money entirely, proving that if you balance the budget but also kneel before invading Kryptonian supermen, one guess which act is the one that everyone remembers.

Screengrab Salutes: The Top 25 Leading Men of All Time (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 23:00:00 GMT

5. PAUL NEWMAN (1925-2008)

As the man who inspired this list, it's entirely fitting that Mr. Newman wound up in our Top 5...and we recently posted 10 good reasons why (in addition to the official Screengrab obituary by Phil Nugent) so, uh...moving on to number 4...

CARY GRANT (1904-1986)

In his single funniest movie, His Girl Friday, Grant responds to a threat by crowing, "The last man to say that to me was Archie Leach, just a week before he cut his throat." The line is an in-joke meant for mass consumption, since it was fairly common knowledge that Grant's real name was Archie Leach. But Grant really did cut "Archie Leach's" throat; the product of a Dickensian childhood -- as a rich, internationally famous movie star, he was unexpectedly reunited with his mother, who he had believed was long dead -- he created a romantic image of perfection and lived in it on screen and off. What makes the image so supremely, universally attractive is that it is perfect in its imperfection: unlike the countless male models and juveniles who tried their best to never put a foot wrong, Grant was a trained acrobat and natural farceur who had the solid instincts to know that the best way to win the audience's heart was to send his strapping, handsome frame falling all over itself in slapstick pratfalls, as if none of his physical assets were enough to keep him from being rendered powerless by what the sight of a female co-star was doing to his center of gravity. By the time the cycle of screwball romances that made him a star was gearing up, Grant was not juvenile, and he was never a shrinking violet: he was a brash scene-stealer who enjoyed getting a verbal rhythm going with the other people in a scene. Since he and his romantic partners couldn't actually get it on in the movies of their day, they exchanged wisecracks as a metaphor for foreplay; in this context, the moment when he gets Irene Dunne to reluctantly laugh when he's collapsing in on himself at a society recital is one of the sexiest stand-ins for an orgasm in movie history. Grant had other sides to his talent: his buddy-buddy-buddy act with Victor MacLaglen and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. helped to make Gunga Din one of the most joyous action comedies ever to come out of Hollywood, and he gave an honorable, committed performance in Clifford Odets' None but the Lonely Heart, a box-office failure and labor of love. But in more than sixty years, nobody has come close to displacing him as the most iconic romantic comedian in movies; the best anyone can do is to say, as they say of George Clooney now, that he's the closest we're likely to get these days to Cary Grant.

3. JACK NICHOLSON (1937 - )

Yes, his talent long ago calcified into an all-too-familiar repertoire of raised eyebrows and half-hearted devilish grins, but the case could be made that Jack Nicholson was the American leading man for nearly two decades, ranging roughly from 1970's Five Easy Pieces to 1989's Batman. (And yes, technically Michael Keaton was the leading man in Batman, but it was Jack who raked in a record $50 million thanks to all those lucrative Joker products.) Easy Rider made him an "overnight success" after spending the bulk of the '60s on Roger Corman's work farm, but Five Easy Pieces established Nicholson as the anti-hero for America's counterculture hangover – quick to anger, with little use for authority, but magnetic and funny nonetheless. He got on a hot streak that encompassed some of the most revered films of the era, from The Last Detail to Chinatown to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Soon he was an Academy Awards fixture, as both attendant (always in the front row, all shades and wolfish grin) and recipient (12 nominations, including wins for Cuckoo's Nest, Terms of Endearment and As Good as It Gets), and then he was a caricature, albeit one still capable of firing up the jets on occasion (A Few Good Men, a few scenes in The Departed). Through it all, he's always been Jack – one name, four letters, and just about everyone on earth knows who you mean.

2. MARLON BRANDO (1924-2004)

There’s little that can be said about Brando that hasn’t been said before, and better besides. After all, he’s obviously a genius, with a style that revolutionized movie acting. But although much is made of how well he plays brutish characters onscreen, what helped Brando transcend the trap of playing “tough guys” was the tenderness with which he approached them. Look no further than the famous scene in On the Waterfront where he’s chatting with Eva Marie Saint and he suddenly starts to fiddle with her glove. There’s a gentle, almost feminine quality to this blue-collar palooka, one that manifests itself in his bashful-boy approach to the girl on whom he’s got a crush. Granted, in his later years, Brando became essentially a monologist, noodling in the corner while everyone else tried to make a movie around his whims. But when he was actually in a collaborative mood, no movie star engaged so completely with those around him. In his last great role in 1972’s Last Tango in Paris, Brando took what was essentially a two-character drama and shot it full of electric intensity, locking on to costar Maria Schneider so completely that we begin to see him anew through her eyes -- middle-aged and hulking, but undeniably erotic.

1. HUMPHREY BOGART (1899-1957)

So, what makes a classic leading man? If it’s staying power, then Bogie’s got it: he was a star for decades during his own lifetime, then enjoyed a posthumous resurgence of popularity during the 1960s, and remains a household name today, his timeless mug even now adorning the wall of a dorm room near you. Though some may argue his range was limited (despite two Oscar nominations and a win for The African Queen), it’s hard to imagine the history of modern cinema without his influential wised-up, world-weary, cynical/romantic tough-guy persona and his indelible performances in all-time classics like The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, Key Largo, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, etc., etc., etc. He was a box office badass, and despite a famously hangdog physiognomy that could charitably be described as “unconventional,” he somehow managed to seduce the insanely hot 19-year-old Lauren Bacall (or was it the other way around?) during production of To Have and Have Not and hold onto her for thirteen years until his death by cancer in 1957. And despite the 26 year age difference between them, Bacall was certainly no giggly schoolgirl...Bogart was just that cool, I guess. Cooler than Nicholson, cooler than Clooney...and certainly cooler than Sinatra, who many still believe was the original head of the Rat Pack, when in fact it was Bogie who was and remains the indisputable king of the ultimate fraternity of cinematic cool.

Click Here for Part One, Two, Three, Four, Six, Seven & Eight

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

How Not to Interview Faye Dunaway: Latest in a Series

Phil Nugent — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 17:00:00 GMT

At the Guardian, Xan Brooks has a diverting account of how he came to get ejected from Faye Dunaway's presence while conducting her "first British press interview in nearly 20 years ". Dunaway is across the pond for the Raindance Film Festival showing of her latest film, Flick, a horror movie directed by David Howard. Brooks opens his account by describing how Howard listed for him all "the things I am absolutely not to ask her. Firstly, there must be no mention of Mommie Dearest, the Joan Crawford biopic credited with destroying Dunaway's career. Nor must I ask her about Andrew Lloyd Webber, who bumped her from the Los Angeles production of Sunset Boulevard in 1994; or about her adult son, who may or may not be adopted; or about the cosmetic surgery that she may or may not have undergone. Is that it? 'Yes,' says Howard. 'I think that's the lot.' He turns out to be wrong." Brooks veered into a minefield when he chose to ask her about Roman Polanski's Chinatown and how much reports of tensions on its set might have damaged her career. ("Oh," Dunaway says, "The Roman thing.") When our intrepid correspondent asks the ladylike Dunaway if it's true that she once threw a cup of urine at her pint-sized director, the interview wraps itself up in short order.

Before the meltdown, Dunaway gives what sounds like an amusing performance, half elegant and half dippy, as an aging star who may only be a faded name to younger moviegoers and who seems surprisingly intent on being judged a creature of regal dignity. In Flick, she plays "a one-armed Memphis cop on the trail of a zombie Teddy boy." Brooks marches right out onto thin ice at the start, mentioning that Howard has said that in casting her, "he was taking his lead from Roger Corman, the B-movie producer who made a habit of hiring older Hollywood legends such as Ray Milland to appear in his movies" Dunaway's response: "I think he was going for - not old Hollywood, let's not say that. But maybe a little of the old-style glamour." Despite the dragon-lady demeanor that made Dunaway stand out in the '60s and '70s and that made her a neat fit for both the role of Joan Crawford and the nostalgic setting of Chinatown, Dunaway describes her breakout role as Bonnie Parker as the one "that's closest to me. I was a southern girl and so was Bonnie. We share the frustrations of living in that small, limited environment - dying to get out and move forward in the world. That was part of my makeup as a girl." Cut short though it was, the conversation does give you a feeling that you might have glimpsed something about Dunaway, and why she hasn't done better at staying afloat in the last couple of decades: women have to fight to stay alive in Hollywood, and Dunaway, who clearly has the resources to be a fighter, doesn't want to be seen that way: it conflicts with her surprising desire to be seen as a lady. She doesn't seem to grasp that Brooks is trying to help her out, not trap her, when he suggests that the nasty stories told against her for having been difficult might "come down to a case of Hollywood sexism, I ask her. After all, nobody ever complained about her former co-stars Jack Nicholson, Steve McQueen or Marlon Brando being a little bit wild or rebellious. But Dunaway doesn't bite: she can't think what I mean."

A Screengrab Salute To Movie Trailers: Addendum!

Andrew Osborne — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Oh, my goodness. After recently saluting some of the best previews for Hollywood, independent, grade-Z schlock and even fake movies, it suddenly occurred to me that we here at the Screengrab forgot a very important category: PARODY trailers.

True, there aren't that many, but at least ONE must certainly be recognized as part of any decent salute to coming attractions.

Many of you will have seen this already (and the accompanying picture should hip you to the parody trailer of which I speak)...but it's always worth seeing again, yes?

And if you DON'T know what I'm talking about, by all means, click below and enjoy!

Vanishing Act: Monte Hellman

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Hellman! His is one of the great “What if?” stories in American cinema. As in, “What if someone had given the poor guy some money to make a few movies over the past 40 years or so?” The beginning of Hellman’s career bears a close resemblance to that of many heavy-hitters from his generation, including Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese and Jonathan Demme. That is, he got his filmmaking education on the cheap from Roger Corman, churning out quickies like Beast from Haunted Cave and Flight to Fury. Once Hellman had put in enough hours in the basement, Corman teamed him with fellow stalwart Jack Nicholson for a pair of offbeat westerns, The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind. Hellman’s breakthrough and downfall arrived simultaneously with 1971’s Two-Lane Blacktop, declared “The Movie of the Year” by Esquire and then released to general indifference.

Had the movie caught on with the youth culture in the same way Easy Rider did, Hellman’s subsequent filmography might have been a treasure trove, but instead it’s more of a trivia quiz. There’s Shatter, a 1974 Hong Kong action picture Hellman departed after three weeks of shooting; China 9, Liberty 37, a Spaghetti western in which Warren Oates and Sam Peckinpah appear in support of the immortal Fabio Testi; The Greatest and Avalanche Express, both of which Hellman took over after the original directors died; Iguana, a seafaring tale of a disfigured sailor that never received a theatrical release; and Cockfighter, the only one of the bunch that lives up to the promise of the early westerns and Blacktop – and even that one had its original theatrical release sabotaged when Corman recut it to add more action.

By 1989, it was as if Hellman had come full circle to his disreputable early days with Corman, as he helmed the horror sequel Silent Night, Deadly Night III: Better Watch Out! His best shot at a comeback arrived in the form of Quentin Tarantino, who approached Hellman to direct his script Reservoir Dogs. Of course, Tarantino eventually decided to direct it himself, leaving Hellman with only an Executive Producer credit. That led to pretty much nothing.

So where is Hellman now? He’s got a teaching gig at CalArts, helping to educate future filmmakers who may someday hire him and then decide to direct themselves, leaving him only with an Executive Producer credit. He was heavily involved with Criterion’s superb 2-disc DVD release of Two-Lane Blacktop, which includes commentary tracks, a documentary field trip to some of the film’s locations as well as an uneasy conversation between Hellman and Blacktop star James Taylor, who has never seen the film. And after seventeen years, he finally returned to the director’s chair for a segment of the horror anthology Trapped Ashes.

Having recently watched Ashes, just out on DVD, I can attest that Hellman’s segment, “Stanley’s Girlfriend,” is worth a look. Although it’s never explicitly stated, the Stanley of the title is clearly Kubrick, and Hellman has fun with what we know of the legend, weaving the 2001 filmmaker’s love of photography and chess into a supernatural explanation for his permanent exile from the United States. “Stanley’s Girlfriend” isn’t much more than a doodle, but it’s easily the standout in a movie that includes a cautionary plastic surgery tale about vampiric breast implants. See for yourself:

Previously on Vanishing Act:
Christopher McQuarrie
Savage Steve Holland

Take Five: Ride Hard

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Larry Bishop's Hell Ride opens in limited release this week. Advance buzz about the retroriffic biker exploitation flick isn't great, despite the fact that the movie features one of the most mindlessly entertaining trailers of recent years. Still, it's good to see the biker movie, a cultural leftover from the 1960s that has remained with us despite the transition of Harley culture from last refuge of dangerous lowlifes to weekend amusement of the upper middle class, survive in some form or another. For over 40 years, the lone, leather-clad biker on a flipped-back hog or amped-up chopper has been one of Hollywood's most enduring archetypes, used for everything fom a means to instill mindless terror to cheap comedy relief to, all too often, both. If Hell Ride does nothing more than give Michael Madsen a chance to play an all-new variant on his standard violent lowlife character, it will at least keep this archetype alive. Though, given that plenty of aging Tinseltown stars, writers and producers are themselves motorcycle enthusiasts, it's probably not in any immediate danger anyway. While you're waiting for Hell Ride to come to your local theater -- or, more likely, given its dismal advance hype, while you're waiting for it to show up at your local video rental bargain bin -- here's five more biker movies to help you unleash your inner scuzzball.

THE WILD ONE (1953)

Laslo Benedik's teen-menace movie started it all, in more ways than one. Not only was it the first major motion picture to deal with the alleged menace of out-of-countrol outlaw biker gangs (which, a little over ten years later, would developed into a full-blown moral panic, as exquisitely detailed in Hunter S. Thompson's Hell's Angels), but it was one of the first movies to present us with the raw sexual charisma and magnetic, brooding talents of young Marlon Brando; it almost single-handedly started the 1950s craze among teen boys for leather jackets; and each gang in the film lent a name to a rock band (Brando's Black Rebel Motorcycle Club and Lee Marvin's Beatles). The events of the film -- which is still highly entertaining today, despite literally decades of imitators -- involve the takeover of a small California town by rival gangs of outlaw bikers; based on a story in Harper's (which was itself based on a real-life incident in Hollister, CA in 1947), it also starts a less pleasign tradition: that of ridiculously overstating the biker menace to appeal to your audience. Not only were the events in Hollister terribly mild compared to the dramatization in The Wild One (there was no real violence, and very little vandalism or criminal behavior), but the bikers involved were invited back a number of times over the years until it became something of a local tradition.

EASY RIDER (1969)

By 1969, the myth of the outlaw biker had transmogrified from simple post-WWII recreational activity to mysterious urban legend to full-blown moral panic, and finally, as evidenced in this notorious countercultural masterpiece, a counter-symbol of true freedom and the flight from small-mindedness and oppression in the face of stultifying all-American values. By the time Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson strapped on the helmets and hopped aboard their custom Captain America choppers, they were engaged in full-fledged reverse myth-making, transforming the rebel biker from the sort of dangerous threat to small-town America that Hopper had played a number of times in other, lesser exploitation movies to a vision of the divine fool, the holy innocent who, while he might consume barrels full of psilocybin and acres worth of grass, was in fact all that was good and decent about this country. And then, wouldn't you know it? Some greaseball redneck goes and blows his head off, just to be a dick. While there's certainly qualities to Easy Rider that make it a treat to watch (most especially Nicholson's performance, Laszlo Kovacs' cinematography, and bits of Terry Southern's screenplay), it's very much a product of its time; you may be glad it exists, but you're likely to spend a lot of time wondering exactly what happened back then.

GIMME SHELTER (1970)

Since Hunter Thompson didn't have a film crew with him when he was writing his Hell's Angels book, the Maysles Brothers' masterful documentary about the Rolling Stones' notorious concert at Altamont is likely to remain the definitive treatment of the most infamous of all outlaw biker groups on film. Unsurprisingly, it shows them at their worst but doesn't entirely play fair: while everyone knows the story of how the security at the concert was disastrously handed over to a lot of drunken, rowdy Angels who worked cheap and didn't care whose head they bashed in, and while there's no doubt that their killing of black concertgoer Meredith Hunter was an overreaction (and the racial slurs they deployed against him didn't help their cause one bit), it was only later made clear that the bikers had been right about Hunter: he was, as they'd said, been carry a gun, waving it around recklessly, and behaving in a very suspicious manner. Filmed evidence of this was why Hell's Angel Allen Passaro, who was primarily responsible for Hunter's death, was acquitted of murder. But as with most stories involving outlaw bikers, the truth got muddled and the legend got exaggerated: Altamont became widely known as the exact time and place that the Sixties died, and the Hell's Angels' reputation as lawless maniacs grew deeper and darker.

THE ROAD WARRIOR (1981)

After decades of imitators, parodies, and its own decreasing dividends in terms of sequels, it's hard to remember exactly how exciting the Mad Max movies were when they first came out. Hard, that is, until you sit down and watch one all the way through. Made at a time when Mel Gibson was still an electrifying performer and not a living self-parody, and directed by a George Miller light-years removed from feel-good movies about talking pigs, they still hold up a gold standard for smart, anarchic, terrifyingly high-velocity action movies, and Mad Max 2 -- more commonly known in the U.S. as The Road Warrior -- is the best of them. It's one of the best action movies of all time, and unlike most movies featuring car crashes, postapocalyptic wastelands, and murderous bandits who look like they were once members of Charged G.B.H., it doesn't sacrifice a shred of intelligence while bringing us its heart-stopping thrills. With oil recently clearing $300 a barrel, gas hitting over $4 a gallon, and many people -- both serious economic thinkers and paranoid tool-shed ranters -- considering what a "post-peak oil" world might look like, now is a good time to contemplate a future without gasoline, where deranged biker gangs run amok, and say: actually, that looks kinda cool.

BEYOND THE LAW (1992)

While public interest in outlaw biker gangs started to die out in the 1970s and had almost totally faded by the 1980s, the biker gangs themselves never went away, and even today, a fringe element of the culture is responsible for some fairly heinous drug dealing and the sort of violent turf wars that go with them. In 1982, an Arizona undercover cop infiltrated one such gang in order to bring them down after a particularly brutal drug killing, and Playboy magazine carried his compelling story. Over 10 years later, HBO produced this dramatic action thriller based on Dan Saxon's story, and while it didn't attract a great deal of attention at the time, it has gone on to become a bargain-bin cult classic, thanks largely to its highly realistic depiction of undercover procedures and its unusually literate storytelling. Okay, admittedly, some of the dialogue is a bit hokey, and Charlie Sheen looks absolutley ridiculous in a biker beard and leather vest, but it's a tightly constructed, nasty little thriller that's a lot better than it has any right to be. And hey, who's that playing a violent lowlife? You guessed it: Michael Madsen! How far we've come...

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