The Screengrab : jennifer lopez

2 Years Ago in the Screengrab: The Romantic Comedy Subsidy Program

Phil Nugent — Tue, 26 May 2009 17:30:00 GMT

FALL, 2007: Matthew McConaughey is sitting in front of the TV in his trailer when the door swings open and Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, ushers us inside. McConaughey springs for the remote, but before he can switch off the set, we can see that he's been watching himself in the 1996 John Sayles picture Lone Star. Bernanke simply smiles, but Kate Hudson doesn't bother stifling her laughter. McConaughey blushes. "Did'ja read Janet Maslin's review of that one in the New York Times?" he asks. "Compared me to Paul Newman. Said that I should have had the lead in it, that I should have had Chris Cooper's part."

Hudson sits down next to him on the couch and gives him an affectionate hug. "I should show you my notices from Almost Famous sometimes," she purrs.

"'Course," says McConaughey, "Chris Cooper's got an Academy Award now. Which he deserves! He kept at it, kept acting, and you know, I decided to do this instead." Then he remembers that Bernanke is in the room. Looking up at the Chairman, he adds, with just a race of sheepishness in his voice, "And I'm proud to do it. It's important work."

McConaughey and Hudson are working on Fool's Gold, the latest project of the Federal Rom-Com Make-Work Administration, a division of the Fed that was set up under Alan Greenspan in 2002. A dedicated Randian, Greenspan saw the Administration's work as a way to generate work in the film business while at the same time isolating the kind of mediocrity that was so offensive to him as a follower of John Galt. Every year, the F.R.C.M.W.A. would put into production a handful of films that would keep the most mediocre technicians, directors, actors, and crew members fully employed and occupied, boosting the national employment numbers while keeping those employed from polluting the talent pool from which those trying to make actual good movies were forced to draw. The F.R.C.M.W.A. projects might employ a few good supporting actors, just to make the experience bearable for those involved; on projects so fetid that no good actor wanted any part of them, they could always make do by casting Dane Cook in multiple roles.

It was decided early on that, to make it easier to identify the F.R.C.M.W.A. projects from the other films released in a given year, three people who had established acting careers for themselves would be hired to exclusively appear in the Administration's pictures. It was a hard sacrifice; it meant effectively retiring from the acting profession. Hudson and McConaughy were among those first approached. Hudson was quick to sign on. "It just sounded easy, you know? I mean, I hear these other girls talk about creating characters, testing themselves, trying new things, blah blah blah, and maybe I don't get it. I do this, and I still get paid and my picture's in People and if there's a 'rock star'"--Hudson rolls her eyes as she makes air quotes with her fingers--"that nobody else wants, I can marry him. Maybe I'm missing something, but if you can get that with hard work and I can get it just by watching my diet and showing up, why would I want to do any hard work, when knowing that it's not even supposed to be any good is such a tremendous load off." She shrugs. "I guess I'm my mother's daughter, y'know?"

McConaughey took some persuading. "I sort of miss acting," he admits. "I mean, maybe I was only any good in like, one out of fifteen times at bat...that little bit I did in Dazed and Confused, it was kind of entertaining, right?" He looks at me open-mouthed for a long time. I'm slow to catch on that he's actually waiting for me to say yes. I nod, and he looks very relieved. "Now, you take your A Time to Kill and your Contact and your Amistad--okay, I'm a little bitter about Amistad. I think that Steven Spielberg could have protected me better. I mean, maybe not guide me to a good performance. I understand that he had a lot of other things to think about on that one. But he was in charge of the editing, not me, and there's just so much he could have cut out that would have made it less embarrassing. You know, that moment where I'm supposed to be a lawyer in the 1830s, and I get a ruling that I like, and I pump my arm and say, 'Yes!' like I'm playing pick-up basketball...I asked him, years later, I asked him, 'Steven, I know I deserve the blame for being the one who did it, but why didn't you just cut it out?" And you know what he told me? He said, 'Matthew, I remember when you did it during filming, I had what my doctor later diagnosed as a mini-stroke, and when I came to, I didn't remember you'd done it. And then when we were editing, every time I saw that moment in the footage, I'll be darned if I didn't have another mini-stroke, and forget all about it again. I didn't retain my awareness that you done it, and that I'd left it in the picture, until the red-carpet premiere. I mean, when I saw you do it up there on the big screen, naturally, I had another mini-stroke and blacked out. But this time, when I came to a few minutes later, everybody in the theater was still laughing."

McConaughey continues, "So I did keep plugging away, and I wanted to keep trying, but I was up late one night mulling over the offer, and thinking about how my career was going. And the last real movie I did was this thing where I fought a dragon." McConaughey's eyes seem to mist over. "I picked up the phone and said, sure. If it's good for the economy..."

McConaughey and Hudson co-starred in the F.R.C.M.W.A's first project, How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days. Since then, McConaughey has starred in 36 films for the administration, with Hudson making 47. This is the first time they've co-starred since Ten Days, making it a bittersweet reunion for them both. They and the others who've become an essential component in the process have learned a lot as they've gone. "Sometimes," Hudson says, "in the early days, there'd be a line in a script that makes you laugh, and you're like, whoa, how did that get in there? It''ll turn out that the writers have trouble padding out the scripts to feature length by themselves. So they'll 'borrow'"--she makes the air quotes again--"lines or ideas from their friends, or family members, or something the saw on the Internet, or somebody peeing himself in front of the bus stop, and it may turn out that those people have some talent." It used to be policy that anything good that found its way into a script would be peeled off and submitted to the writing staff of The Simpsons. "But," says Hudson, "that doesn't really happen anymore since Ben came on board with his little 'brainstorm.""

Bernanke succeeded Greenspan as head of the Federal Reserve in 2006 and was immediately briefed on the workings of the F.R.C.M.W.A. "And at that time," he says, "the Iraq War had really hit the wall and the guys whose bright idea that was were not in very great demand, so there were all these neo con geniuses roaming the halls of the White House, starting crap games and weeping. So I thought to myself, these are guys who were brought in for their understanding of foreign policy and national defense, and when a bunch of lunatics from Saudi Arabia staged a terrorist attack on American soil, their big master plan was, we should find a country in the Middle East that has no connection to these nut jobs and where there's a tin horn dictator who won't even let them set a toe inside the country, and invade that place, and topple the government, and create such chaos that everybody there hates our guts, and the lunatics who attacked us can roll in for the first time ever and use it as their farm team, that'll show 'em. I got to thinking, wow, what would a bunch of minds like that do with a subject like courtship strategy? So I told Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, Condalleezza Rice, and Richard Perle that it was vital to our national interests that I had spec scripts for romantic comedies from each of them on my desk within the week, and within four hours Feith turns in the screenplay of Failure to Launch!" The scripts are produced under pseudonyms. It turned out that Rice, who prepared for the assignment by buying a box set of Love, American Style, had a sense of farce structure just rudimentary enough in its general level of competence that her scripts have a chance of being slightly better than bearable. Bernanke sells them to Jennifer Lopez's company.

I note that neither McConaughey nor Hudson has yet made a film with the third working headliner of the F.R.C.M.W.A., Jennifer Aniston. Is that a matter of just never finding the right script.

"Actually," says Bernanke, "that's kind of a soft spot around here, because while Jennifer is a very important member of the Administration, she doesn't know that she's in the Administration. Along Came Polly, The Break-Up, Marley & Me--she thinks they're all real movies. And we humor her because she's such a valuable member of the team. You see, the scripts that Jennifer does, they aren't generated in-house. Somebody trying to do his best actually wrote them, but they're absolutely F.R.C.M.W.A.-quality. Jennifer herself picked them out from the pile; she has the most unerring instincts for what it is we do. We like to this of her," Bernanke beams, "as our little truffle-hunting friend."

Unwatchable Recap: 71-80

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 19:00:00 GMT

It’s time for part three of the Unwatchable Halftime Report. As you must know by now, I am watching and reviewing every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Last week I hit #51, which means I’m halfway home. Next week we’ll get started on the 50 worst movies, but I’m putting that off as long as I possibly can so that we can enjoy the fruits of my labor so far. We’ve been tackling the Unwatchables to date in groups of ten, and today it’s time for # 71-80.

80. The Smokers. “They smoke. They smoke a lot. They smoke the cigarettes and they smoke the pot. Also, they have boy troubles.”

79. Anus Magillicutty. “When it was over, I found myself actively wishing harm on those who made it, any loved ones who encouraged them to make it, and their employers (should they exist) who wittingly or not subsidized its making.”

78. The Quick and the Undead. “What we have here is your basic meat-and-potatoes (but mostly meat) post-apocalyptic zombie western.”

77. BloodRayne 2: Deliverance. “Sure, in her leather cowgirl outfit she looks like she should be pouring Jager shots and dancing on the bar at Coyote Ugly, but she’s handy with swords and guns that fire silver bullets rubbed in garlic and blessed with holy water. Her showdown with Billy the Kid is one for the ages, assuming the ages were between 9 and 9:30 last night.”

76. Kickboxer 3: The Art of War. “The high point of Kickboxer 3 arrives with a montage of wise Xian’s efforts to heal Sloane in time for the fight. He collects various roots and mouse tails and the venom from a snake to prepare a healing elixir, then smears Sloane’s body with some sort of fungal poultice. Hey, it works!”

75. The Last Sign. “I’m immediately suspicious of any movie that opens with a shitload of logos for companies I’ve never heard of. This makes me think what I’m about to watch is more of a tax shelter than a motion picture.”

74. You Got Served. “Can David and Elgin squash their beef in time to bring home the big prize? And did it really, really embarrass me to type the phrase ‘squash their beef’ just now? The answer to both questions is the same.”

73. Fascination. “The first liaison between Scott and Kelly takes place on a slanted corrugated tin roof in a photogenic rainstorm that comes out of nowhere. Just when you’re thinking, ‘Gee, looks like fun, but also a good way to fall to your death,’ Scott and Kelly slip and nearly fall to their deaths.”

72. Meet the Spartans. “Really, it’s not like I’m looking for some explanation for Britney Spears being in ancient Sparta. I realize it’s all part of the free-wheeling zaniness. But you can’t just have her shaving her head and flashing her girl parts. We’ve already seen that.”

71. Gigli. “J-Lo is also stuck with a sub-Tarantino soliloquy on the subtleties of ripping someone’s eyeball out of its socket. It’s almost harder to listen to than ‘Jenny From the Block’.”

81-90
91-100

Jailhouse Rock: The Greatest Prison Films of All Time (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 21:30:00 GMT

OUT OF SIGHT

Most people remember Stephen Soderbergh’s 1998 Elmore Leonard adaptation Out of Sight as the start (and, essentially, end) of J.Lo®’s serious acting career, and also the movie where George Clooney traded in the training wheels and became an official movie star. Yet, while the hunk-in-the-trunk romance between Lopez’s cop (Federal Marshal Karen Sisco) and the Cloon’s robber, Jack Foley, may be the heart of the story, the prison (and eventual jailbreak) scenes are the muscle. Doing time in the Lompoc federal pen, Foley protects a weasely businessman (the ever-great Albert Brooks) from the unwanted attentions of scarier convicts like the part-time pugilist, full-time sociopath Maurice “Snoopy” Miller (played to the scary hilt by Don Cheadle, a full 180 degrees away from his loveable porn star performance the previous year in Boogie Nights). When the men are eventually released back into the real world, Foley visits Brooks’ character in search of legitimate employment, only to be offered a lousy security guard job and a condescending pep talk: “You’re a bank robber. This is not a marketable skill...show me that you’re really willing to change and we’ll talk about something better.” Foley is not pleased, reminding his would-be benefactor, “Back in prison, guy like you, place like that, you were ice cream for freaks...I saved your ass.” And that, in a nutshell, is what makes Out of Sight one of the great modern prison flicks: in addition to all the endlessly quotable exchanges, the Leonard story (and screenplay by Scott Frank) is memorable for its depiction of jail as a funhouse mirror, reflecting back a distorted version of society where definitions of decency, morality and manhood get all wiggly and reversed.

THE CRIMINAL CODE (1931)

Howard Hawks' famous dictum about a good movie being nothing more than three good scenes and no bad ones gets its purest expression here, because that's all this is. Idealistic warden Mark Brady (Walter Huston) gets a new prison and proceeds to shake things up. There's a real plot — the script is exceptionally clever, building in a more-than-usually-convincing happy ending with a clever plant, making both audiences and the production code happy — and also young Boris Karloff, but as usual Hawks doesn't seem terribly invested in the mechanics. The three great scenes: an opening bit where cops debate the finer points of a card game while inspecting a crime scene (beating The Wire by some 70 years; it's just as sophisticated), Walter Huston walking through and staring down an entire prison yard through sheer force of will, and Karloff intentionally getting himself sent into solitary confinement by announcing to the first guard unlucky enough to pass him, "Hey! I don't like you!" None of these scenes are available on video (or DVD, for that matter), so enjoy as best you can the above context-free clip of dubious quality with Italian subtitles, which still gives you a feel for Huston's masterful underacting. Here, as in Capra's American Madness a year later, Huston was way ahead of the naturalistic curve.

RIOT IN CELL BLOCK 11 (1954)

The first of Don Siegel's two archetypal prison movies, Riot In Cell Block 11 is better as a social document than a movie. Character actors (Neville Brand! Frank Faylen!) wait the minimum amount of time before everything explodes into a frenzy. It's strong stuff, if not particularly revelatory or fun; still, Siegel got there way before Attica and made it fairly plausible. There are no clips on YouTube, so here's a completely context-free excerpt from Private Hell 36, the frankly superior noir he made the same year. Siegel would have the clout and confidence to increase the overt stylization in his movies as he made more films; here, he's still working in a fairly traditional '50s-problem-film/exploitation potboiler mode.

LE TROU (1960)

Jacques Becker's brilliantly terse prison-break movie is longer than A Man Escaped, and hence inevitably somehow even more oppressive and claustrophobic; Bresson is concerned with transcendence, while Becker shoots down that possibility entirely. (Becker has more in common with Jean-Pierre Melville's fatalistic male cameraderie.) They're both invested in physical actions speaking much louder than words, though; the highlight is a riveting one-shot of the men pounding through the floor of their jail cell in a go-for-broke one-chance-only action. Becker's film is a notch below — wince in pain at symbolic spider-webs — but it's still a classic of the genre. Here's an amazingly long trailer in unsubtitled French; after decades of bootlegs, though, this was recently made available by Criterion, in another selfless act of public service.

THE ROUND-UP (1966)

This isn't really a prison movie; it's a prison-camp movie, which might conceivably make a difference to someone. Ruthless formalist Miklos Jancso (Bela Tarr's stylistic father) is trying to make a movie about oppression by the state; what he comes up with is an open-air equivalent to Kafka, reducing concrete political problems to a grimly amusing all-purpose absurdism. Prisoners are herded from one part of the open-to-the-sky grounds to another, without any discernible point or rhyme, except to serve as compositional elements for Jancso's immaculate tracking shots. [MAJOR SPOILER] Our ostensible protagonist is killed with half-an-hour to go, which makes the point better than any overt speech could've. There's no clips available from this film on YouTube, so here's a clip from the previous year's The Red And The White, which is stylistically pretty much the exact same movie.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Four & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Vadim Rizov

Morning Deal Report: J-Lo’s Clock is Ticking

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 15:15:00 GMT

Are we still calling Jennifer Lopez “J-Lo”? It seems like that sort of nickname should be reserved for someone who’s still famous. Maybe Plan B will get Lopez back on the A-list. Per Variety, the “story centers on a single woman (Lopez) who turns to artificial insemination to answer her ticking biological clock only to meet the man of her dreams on the same day as her positive pregnancy test results.” Oh no! I’ll bet you a shiny nickel the dream man turns out to be the semen donor.

SXSW has announced its opening night film. “The South by Southwest (SXSW) Film Conference and Festival announced today that the DreamWorks Pictures film I Love You, Man will be the 2009 Opening Night film. The De Line Pictures comedy, co-written and directed by John Hamburg (Along Came Polly, co-writer of Meet The Parents, Meet The Fockers, and Zoolander) stars Paul Rudd, Jason Segel and Rashida Jones. The film centers on a man who, upon getting engaged, realizes he has no close male friends and must find someone to be the Best Man at his wedding. The South by Southwest Film Conference and Festival runs March 13 – 21, 2009 in Austin, Texas.”

Two quick sequel notes (or possibly new elements on the periodic table, I'm not sure): Rob Zombie has signed for H2, the sequel to his own remake of Halloween. Presumably this will not actually be a remake of Halloween II, although it “picks up right as the first remake ended, following the aftermath of Michael Myers' murderous rampage through the eyes of the sister he hunted.” Olivia Wilde has signed on for TR2N. If you don’t know what that is…well, it’s the sequel to Tron. “Jeff Bridges will return in the role he played in the 1982 original, about a hacker who is abducted into the world of a computer and forced to participate in a series of gladiatorial games.” The Dude abides.

Related:
Take Five: Halloween
Unwatchable #71: "Gigli"

Unwatchable #71: “Gigli”

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

Based solely on its critical reception, it would have been easy to confuse the release of Gigli in theaters with the release of a notorious child murderer from prison. The title became an instant punchline, made even funnier by the fact that no one could pronounce it. (As the title character informs us repeatedly throughout the movie, it “rhymes with really.”) Few movies could be as terrible as it was purported to be, and indeed, Gigli isn’t one of them. In fact, it seems as though America has re-evaluated the movie since its release. I expected to find it much higher on the Bottom 100 chart, but #71 sounds about right.

The wave of bad publicity that crushed the movie can largely be blamed on the off-screen shenanigans of its stars, Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez. You could argue that it was unfair of reviewers to take out their frustrations on the movie itself, and you would have a point, but let us not forget how truly obnoxious the whole Ben ‘n Jen circus became. Somebody had to pay and writer/director Martin Brest got caught in the crossfire.

Brest was originally set to direct Rain Man but resigned over creative differences. Apparently he never got over them, because Gigli revolves around a similar autistic character, this one the brother of the L.A. district attorney. In an effort to blackmail the DA, a lowlife thug enlists two contractors, Larry Gigli (Affleck) and Ricky (Lopez), to kidnap and babysit the kid. Gigli and Ricky mistrust each other, especially when Gigli learns Ricky is a lesbian and immune from his charms, but their relationship evolves in an almost interesting way as Ricky undermines Gigli’s masculinity, engineering a gender role-reversal of sorts.

Meanwhile, Brest the screenwriter undermines Brest the idea man. His notion of stylized tough guy dialogue amounts to putting words like “excoriate” and tortured syntax like “Might you know what it is I’m getting at?” in the mouths of his goombah characters. That’s a minor offense compared to Lopez’s big speech on the merits of the vagina over the penis, a monologue that must be a big hit at off-Broadway auditions these days. J-Lo is also stuck with a sub-Tarantino soliloquy on the subtleties of ripping someone’s eyeball out of its socket. It’s almost harder to listen to than “Jenny From the Block.”

As the not terribly bright protagonist, Affleck is playing to his strengths. His Gigli is like one of those blowdried dumbasses who works for Christopher on The Sopranos and ends up getting whacked for doing something really stupid. Christopher Walken makes an unusually constipated appearance, while Al Pacino shows up at the end to deliver one of his patented late-career hameos.

The critical outrage over Gigli might be understandable in a vacuum, but in the context of the Affleck oeuvre, it’s a little puzzling. A cursory check of Rotten Tomatoes shows Gigli with a freshness rating of 7% on the Tomatometer, while Reindeer Games garnered 23% and Paycheck pleased 25% of the critics. Even Surviving Christmas edged out Gigli, with an 8% freshness rating. Clearly the outrage is misplaced here. Then again, Armond White called it “the only Hollywood movie of the summer with ideas,” so maybe it’s worse than I thought.

(NOTE: Today's installment of Unwatchable first appeared in slightly different form in this High Hat piece. Sorry if you already read it, but it's not like I was gonna watch Gigli again and come up with a whole new set of thoughts about it.)

Previously on Unwatchable:
72. Meet the Spartans
73. Fascination
74. You Got Served
75. The Last Sign
76. Kickboxer 3: The Art of War

Girl DisemPowering: Nine Films That Didn't Do Feminism Any Favors (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 20:30:00 GMT

And now that we’re all feeling nice and empowered from our Top Ten List of films with strong female characters and themes, here’s the other side of the coin: nine movies we’re guessing you won’t find on Gloria Steinem’s Netflix queue (unless she’s researching a new book on movies that didn’t exactly do wonders for the feminist movement).

(Oh, and while we're on the subject, a special P.S. to Katherine Heigl: Really? Knocked Up is more sexist than 27 Dresses? That's a fascinating theory. Please, tell me more!)

PRETTY WOMAN (1990)

Although she later improved her girl power street credit with her Academy Award-winning turn as an indomitable single mother in Erin Brockovich, Julia Roberts’ breakthrough role was about as healthy (and irresistible) as a deep fried bacon Twinkie for the mobs of women (and men) who made it a blockbuster hit. I mean, I’m a dude and I certainly have my issues with some of the more strident tenets of feminism, but even I was offended by the film’s basic premise about the whore-with-the-heart-of-gold who charms a rich Prince Charming with her sparkling personality (and fellatio skills) to the point where he decides to keep her for himself, making her dreams come true by paying for all the overpriced jewels and fashion she could possibly want. Oh, and he goes down on her on a Steinway...the movie’s one true nod to progressive gender relations. This movie is offensive on so many levels, it’s hard to know where to begin. The blatant portrayal of women as whores who only get what they want by attracting successful men? The offensiveness of Jason Alexander’s loathsome chauvinist pig character, a personification of the film’s equal opportunity anti-male stereotyping (unattractive men are icky slobs and probably rapists, whereas good looking men are more trustworthy and morally superior)? The ridiculous depiction of prostitution as an Outward Bound-style empowerment program (complete with Laura San Giacomo’s mother hen prostitute telling a fledgling whore at the end of the movie that she expects big things from her, y'know, on par with Roberts’ home run of man-bagging)? Oh, sure...it’s just a movie, and an insidiously charming one at that, and maybe I’m reading too much into it and getting all het up for no reason...yet, at the same time, it’s also worth noting that many of the girls who grew up watching Pretty Woman (not to mention the film’s original audience) now enjoy (and sometimes embody) the film’s sex-for-crass-materialism ethos in pervasive cultural incarnations from Paris Hilton and The Real World to just about every show on the E! network.

FATAL ATTRACTION (1987)

One of the most polarizing blockbuster hits of the '80s, Fatal Attraction presents us with Glenn Close as the image of the sexy, successful unmarried career woman and turns her into what the movie confidently assumes is every man's nightmare: the one night stand who won't go away. Seen alone in her apartment at night, she's not really confident at all: she's a lonely neurotic wreck -- this is what being without a family, or at least a man, presumably does to a woman, what all career women are really like underneath. Then, after the married guy (Michael Douglas) who thought they were both just having a little fling stops putting up with her, she turns into an avenging harpy, and in the process she says all the things that women who are sick of being badly used and treated as objects have said. They don't apply to the situation, and you may think the fact that she thinks they do shows how sick she is, but given that this is the era of Reagan, AIDS, the "new chastity" and the anti-feminist backlash, a lot of people in the audience thought the fact this fruitcake was saying them proved what she was saying must be crazy in any instance. The movie isn't exactly misogynist; its real cunning is the way it uses the recently politicized concept of "family" to justify its turning Close into a she-devil while advocating the use of violence or whatever else it takes to ward off attacks by outsiders who try to damage the holy unit of family. As everyone knows, the movie originally ended with Close committing suicide and framing Douglas for her murder, an ending that was actually more plausible in keeping with the character's psychology, and one that pissed off test audiences who were denied the revenge-killing catharsis they'd been made to expect. The movie was probably always fated to end with Close getting it, but the stroke of genius was in putting the gun in the hand of Douglas's wife (Anne Archer) and making it a battle between the good wife and the hussy, a choice that made some women in the audience cheer louder than the men. The family that slays together...

LEGAL EAGLES (1986)

Everything about this slapped-together, thoughtlessly conceived comedy-thriller, starring Robert Redford and Debra Winger as dueling lawyers and Darryl Hannah as a pair of frosted lips sitting atop mile-high legs, is a testament to the hackish instincts of the director, Ivan Reitman, and the screenwriting team, Jim Cash and Jack Epps, Jr. (whose other collaborations include Top Gun, The Secret of My Success, and Anaconda). It's the kind of movie that seems to have been made by people who were in a rush to get the shoot completed because they couldn't wait to show up at the red carpet premiere, the kind of movie where less important things like telling a story or entertaining an audience never crossed anyone's mind. About the only thing of note about it is the example it provides of just how much damage simple hackishness can do, because Legal Eagles also wasted the time and bent the brain of one of the white-hot talents of the '80s, Debra Winger, at just the point in her career where she was lined up on the runway and poised for full takeoff. Her role here -- a foil to Redford and, ultimately, a damsel in distress -- is so stupidly written that it's an insult, and she's the only person in the large, talented cast who still hadn't had the idealism beaten out of her to such a degree that she knew enough to just go through the motions and collect her check. You can see her trying to bring some kind of truth to what she's doing, and you can see how unhappy she is that she isn't succeeding, and her unhappiness is contagious. The movie is said to have done Winger extended career damage, partly because it soured her on the movie business but also because the industry was appalled that she was so impolite as to complain about the director in interviews. Anywhere but in Hollywood, expressing confidence in Ivan Reitman as a director would be grounds for having a judge take away your power of attorney.

FLASHDANCE (1983)

This MTV-styled sleazefest was bad for women, sweatshirts, steelworkers, strip clubs, movies, lobster dinners, pit bulls, warehouse lofts, Top 40 radio, and Jennifer Beals' dance double. (It was also a little rough on Maureen Marder, the real-life stripper-welder who "inspired" the screenplay outline, and who was persuaded to sign away the movie rights to her life story for a flat payment of $2300. After the movie grossed in excess of $150 million, Paramount, in an industry that routinely writes checks to squelch nuisance suits, actually let Marder drag them in front of a judge after she came around begging for more money, secure in the knowledge that the agreement would hold up in court. Then, in an amazing act of chutzpah, the movie studio actually sued over a Jennifer Lopez video that was painstakingly designed as a tribute to the movie. Not that people shouldn't be penalized somehow for paying tribute to Flashdance.) It makes all the horrible sense in the world that, for this "inspirational" story of a girl who doesn't give up her dream to dance, the director Adrian Lyne cast an unknown who couldn't dance (but who had the "look") and then tried to suppress the information that her dancing was performed by a double, Marine Jahan, whom he subsequently threatened to punish for daring to publicly take credit for her own work in the movie. (He may have been successful in this: Jahan only appeared in one other movie, 1984's Streets of Fire.) Given the flashy fast-cut style that Lyne developed (with his work in TV commercials before transposing it to movies), this could just as well have been the story of a carefully lit can of peas that never gave up its dream to be a zucchini. Not trying to give you any ideas, Adrian.

MONA LISA SMILE (2003)

The thing that makes Mona Lisa Smile – the story of a bohemian art history teacher who comes to shake things up at the hyper-conservative cartoon of an East Coast university in the stodgy 1950s – so incredibly frustrating, and qualifies it for inclusion in our list of movies that are particularly disempowering to women, is that it actually thinks it’s a feminist movie. Set at a version of Wellesley University so reactionary that the board of chancellors might as well have Snidely Whiplash mustaches, the movie asks us to believe that Julia Roberts’ character has come to show young women the possibility of more than just a perfunctory education to put some polish on their cocktail party chatter before settling down into marriage, but it subverts itself at every turn, to such a degree that it actually comes across as more sexist that the milieu it rails against. Roberts shows her students the liberation possible through art – but never manages to mention any female artists. Roberts teaches her young charges that there’s more to life than being someone’s wife – but all of the characters are essentially defined by their relationship to men. Roberts encourages her students not to let themselves be limited by the expectations of others – but Maggie Gyllenhaal’s character is clearly condemned in the movie for her loose sexual morals, and in one of the movie’s ugliest scenes, Julia Stiles’ character excoriates an ashamed Roberts for expecting her to choose a career over marriage. When it comes to defining women by their power and potential, Mona Lisa Smile is a path to hell that’s paved with good intentions.

Click here for Part Two of Girl DisemPowering

Click here for Part One and Part Two of Chick Hits: The Girl Power Top Ten

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

Meatheads at the Mike: The Scarlett Johansson-Leonard Nimoy Connection

Phil Nugent — Wed, 21 May 2008 17:00:00 GMT

On the occasion of the release of Scarlett Johansson's debut album, Matthew Oshinsky has assembled a handy wrap-ups of actors, or at least professional camera subjects, turned vocalists. It comes divided into categories: "the teenyboppers" (Annette Funicello, David Cassidy, Hillary Duff); "former child stars" (a category that, perhaps surprisingly, seems to be the likeliest to yield an actual recording career, along the lines of those enjoyed by Janet Jackson, Phil Collins, and Alanis Morissette); and my personal favorite, "former soap stars" (including Rick Springfield, who Oshinsky notes "was already a popular singer in his native Australia when he suddenly found himself on millions of afternoon TV screens in 1981 [on General Hospital] and learned that he didn’t know what popularity meant"). For those fully fledged adult mainstream celebrities who decide that this is their big chance to show that they've still got what they had at the high school talent show, Oshinsky favors the label "Meatheads." Here we find your Russell Crowes, your Eddie Murphys, your Steven Seagals (no shit, really!?), and Bruce Willis, whose 1987 Motown release The Return of Bruno (with backup work by Booker T. Jones and members of the Temptations) tried to hedge its bets by presenting itself as a "soundtrack" to an HBO special in which Willis pretended that he was pretending to be a legendary white soul singer on the comeback trail. He thus hedged his bets in a way that, in this specialized field, passed for clever, inviting people who noticed that his music sucked to treat the whole thing as a joke. His hideous, malformed cover of the Staples Singers' "Respect Yourself" made it to number five on the charts anyway. If I live to be a thousand, I will never understand how anyone could miss the 1980s.

Oshinsky names Jennifer Lopez and David Hasselhoff the queen and king of this niche of pop cross-pollination, noting that Hasselhoff's second album, the 1989 Looking for Freedom,” "shot to No.1 in Deutschland on the strength of the title track, which was embraced by thousands of Germans looking for something American and easy to understand." (This may be closest that anyone has ever come to describing David Hasselhoff's career as being easy to understand.) But he also knows that anything touched by William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy just has a special magic to it. "It is unknown if Mr. Shatner intended for his 1968 recording of poetry and pop covers, The Transformed Man, to be the galaxy’s funniest album, even 40 years later, but it’s a serious contender. Mr. Nimoy’s 1969 record, The Touch of Leonard Nimoy, was his fourth and last until 1995’s wistfully titled You Are Not Alone, which presumably referred to someone other than him being with us." I have no idea just what to make of the fact that the author seems to have gone out of his way to snub every crossover pin-up who earned my sister's devotion when we were living under the same roof: namely, David Cassidy's brother Shaun; John Schneider, of The Dukes of Hazzard; and David Soul, who before attaining stardom on Starsky and Hutch used to appear on talk shows singing in a ski mask so that his devastating good looks wouldn't distract viewers from admiring the beauty of his music, and whose big hit, the tender ballad "Don't Give Up on Us Baby", would be rediscovered by disk jockeys with sick senses of humor every time he was arrested again for beating up a woman. Unless I hallucinated all that, but I don't think I did. Drugs of that quality never made it into the Walthall County school system back in the day.

Joe Queenan: The Worst Movies Ever Made Aren't What They Used to Be

Phil Nugent — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Professional cranky bastard Joe Queenan surveys the current contenders for the title of worst movie ever made and finds them lacking. He is appalled that a walking answer to a trivia-quiz lightning round like Paris Hilton can take a few weeks off from doing nothing to doing nothing in front of a camera crew, and that the results can be used to scare people away from theaters for a weekend or two in the late winter season, and this gets called the worst movie ever made, as if enough work had gone into it for it to qualify as a movie, let alone the worst anything. "That is not fair," he grrumbles. "It is not fair to Kevin Costner, it is not fair to Jennifer Lopez, and it is certainly not fair to Madonna. Though it is a natural impulse to believe that the excruciating film one is watching today is on a par with the excruciating films of yesterday, this is a slight to those who have worked long and hard to make movies so moronic that the public will still be talking about them decades later. Anyone can make a bad movie; Kate Hudson and Adam Sandler make them by the fistful." Queenan saves his lowest accolades for movies that are shown real misguided imagination and daring in their very conception. As examples, he cites Futz!, a 1969 hippie extravaganza based on an Off-Broadway play, written in verse, about a farmer whose very close relationship with his pig meets with the disapproval of his neighbors. Though made by the same people who worked on the theatrical production, the fil adaptation trumped the live version because they were able to use a real pig, causing many reviewers to remark that seeing the movie put the viewer in the unusual position of seeing a blameless pig robbed of its dignity. (I have never seen Futz! myself, and not for lack of trying. I sometimes wonder if there is a single remaining print out there somewhere, and if so, if cast member Sally Kirkland might not be hiding it under her bed.)

Queenan also cites Pier Paolo Pasolini's final film, Salo, "the lighthearted Holocaust-era comedy Life Is Beautiful", and The Way We Were, which differs from those pictures in that it doesn't have any Nazis in it, though I'm not sure I'd argue that it doesn't belong. In the end, though, he takes the practical-minded position that a real contender has to have practical consequences: he's looking for "a movie that destroys a studio, wrecks careers, bankrupts investors, and turns everyone connected with it into a laughing stock..." Yes, he's giving the title to old-school favorite Heaven's Gate, the one that took down United Artists. "This is a movie about Harvard-educated gunslingers who face off against eastern European sodbusters in an epic struggle for the soul of America. This is a movie that stars Isabelle Huppert as a shotgun-toting cowgirl. This is a movie in which Jeff Bridges pukes while mounted on roller skates. This is a movie that has five minutes of uninterrupted fiddle-playing by a fiddler who is also mounted on roller skates." I'm pretty sure that the "mounted on roller skates" theme is one that even Futz! let slip through its fingers, but again, I haven't seen it and can only guess. Queenan reports that he knew someone who worked for the public relations company that handled the picture: "He told me that when the 220-minute extravaganza debuted at the Toronto film festival, the reaction was so thermonuclear that the stars and the film-maker had to immediately be flown back to Hollywood, perhaps out of fear for their lives. No one at the studio wanted to go out and greet them upon their return; no one wanted to be seen in that particular hearse. My friend eventually agreed to man the limo that would meet the children of the damned on the airport tarmac and whisk them to safety, but only provided he was given free use of the vehicle for the next three days. After he dropped off the halt and the lame at suitable safe houses and hiding places, he went to Mexico for the weekend." Of course, that was then and this is now, and while it seems unlikely that it'll ever start smoking The Godfather in the AFI polls, Heaven's Gate now has a hardy band of deeply committed, easily riled defenders, every one of whom I know in my heart is a superior person who dresses better than I do. That, too, is part of the charm of a true worst movie--enough vision, talent, and passion should have gone into it that someone will see grounds for its defense in there. I do no forsee a day in which there will be a ravening cult sticking up for The Hottie and the Nottie, but if that does ever happen, I'd keep an eye out for the other three horsemen.

Our 11 Favorite Romantic Moments in the Movies, Part 1

Phil Nugent — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 21:30:00 GMT

First things first: before you all start sending in your complaints, take a look at the headline there. It's not "The Best Romantic Moments" or "The Most Classic Romantic Moments", and the American Film Institute was not consulted in the making of this list. These are our favorite romantic moments, chosen by us, the good people of the Screengrab. Romance is a very big part of what makes movies so central to our imaginative lives, and what strikes a person as deeply romantic is about as personal as responses get. Here are a few moments that got to us. Happy Valentine's Day.

OUT OF SIGHT (1998)

You have to figure that this movie would have a special place in the heart of any movie geek: the hero and heroine first detect a spark between them while talking about movies. The fact that they're having that conversation while holed up in the trunk of a car after one of them has taken the other hostage in the course of a prison break...well, let's call that the "meet cute", an essential part of any story that you look forward to telling the grandchildren someday. That scene lights the fuse that spreads out into a smooth hot glow in this scene, the one where George Clooney officially became a movie star and the repository of our best fantasy hopes on the big screen. As for Jennifer Lopez, well, let's just say that if she had retired from the screen to enter a nunnery or marry the Prince of Monaco immediately after shooting this movie, we'd still be driving ourselves crazy wondering what we'd all missed out on.

BLUE VELVET (1986)

Some believe that David Lynch's greatest movie is so deeply encased in something called "irony" that it is devoid of true feeling and honest emotion. These worthies must have been on an extended jujubee break in the lobby during the dance scene, with Kyle MacLachlan and Laura Dern trancing out to the unearthly sound of Julee Cruise performing the Lynch-Angelo Badalamenti song "Mysteries of Love." If anything, Lynch's Pop distancing makes it possible for the viewer to appreciate how ridiculous romantic love can seem to the observer, and also to recognize how little that matters in relation to the way it make you feel. Or as that great romantic poet Jerry Lee Lewis once put it, "I laughed at love 'cause I thought it was funny. You came along and you moved me, honey..."

TRULY, MADLY, DEEPLY (1991)

Juliet Stevenson was happy before the movie started, because she was with Alan Rickman, but then he went and died on her, and she became just miserable. It got so bad that Alan Rickman had to come back to comfort her, and she was happy again for a while, but then she got confused because she met another guy who, though perhaps not measuring up to Alan Rickman in many respects, did have the clear home-field advantage of still being alive, and so Alan Rickman, who is sensitive about these things, finally told her that he thought he'd better leave, because he was prepared to put what was best for her first, and it would probably be better for her to get back to having close relationships with living people. All in all, you should maybe just watch the clip: they explain it a lot better than we do.

MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO (1991)

Mike (River Phoenix) is a no-account hustler. He's a narcoleptic, unable even to control whether he stays conscious. He's got nobody, no home, and in all likelihood, not much future beyond the point at which the movie stops. But he is a romantic hero, because he loves unconditionally, asking only that the undeserving object of his love treat him with a little respect when he has to ask him a direct question: "What am I to you?"

McCABE & MRS. MILLER (1971)

Love does a job on people. Consider the case of John McCabe (Warren Beatty), frontier enterpeneur in partnership with the whore and brothel keeper Mrs. Miller (Julie Christie), who has the misfortune to be in love with a woman who he brought to the territory in order to profit from her selling herself to any client ambitious enough to get into bed with her. Believing that "If a man is fool enough to get into business with a woman, she ain't going to think much of him" and lamenting that all his association with Mrs. Miller has "cost me so far is money and pain," McCabe retreats to his room and, alone, rages at the woman he feels doesn't see him: “I got poetry in me. I do! I got poetry in me. But I ain’t gonna put it down on paper. I ain’t no educated man. I got sense enough not to try.” Delivered by one of the sexiest male movie stars of his generation, the speech may in fact be one of the most poetic of all depictions in movies of the ability of romantic frustration to make any of us feel pathetically inarticulate.

LA JETÉE (1962)

It is often said of people in love that the world only seems to exist, that things only seem to come to life, when they are with the people they love. In experimental filmmaker Chris Marker’s brilliant, haunting narrative masterpiece La Jetée, that notion is made visually explicit, in one of the most memorable sequences in all of film history. It’s a moment of delicate beauty that manages to be not only an iconic piece of filmmaking but a moment of breathtaking tenderness and romance, as well. The film (upon which Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys was based) is in fact a series of still photographs, telling the story of a world devastated by nuclear warfare, and the attempt of a group of survivors to travel back in time searching for an answer, any answer, to their dire predicament. The man that is chosen as the time traveler, played by Davos Hanich, is haunted by a vague visual memory that will assume grave importance when he arrives in the present day, but through it all, the story is told only through a compelling voice-over narration and Marker’s exquisitely paced still photographs. Except for one moment. In the latter half of the film, Hanich gazes down at the face of the woman he loves (played by the beautiful Hélène Chatelain) and, almost imperceptibly at first, and then clearly like breaking through water, her face begins to move, and she blinks, in the movie’s only filmed sequence. It’s not only a tremendously effective piece of direction, but one of the most moving, romantic moments in cinema.

— Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

Click here for Part 2.

Wesley Snipes Fought the Law, and the Law Won Three Out of Eight Counts

Phil Nugent — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Wesley Snipes has had his day in court. As we reported here previously, Snipes was hauled into a Florida courtroom by the Internal Revenue Service and charged with six misdeamor counts based on his alleged failure to file tax returns between 1999 and 2004, and felony counts of conspiracy to defraud the government and filing false tax refund claims. In recent years, the feds have lost a few similar cases due to what experts view as a trend among disgruntled juries to side with the accused in order to tell the I.R.S. where they can shove it. If Snipes had gotten off scott-free, it would have been a singular victory for the "tax deniers'" movement and a terrible humiliation for the prosecutors. As it happened, the jury sort of split the difference, finding Snipes guilty on three of the misdemeanor counts and absolving him of responsibility for the felonies. At the same time, they found the actor's two co-defendents, Eddie Ray Kahn and Douglas Rosile — both of whom are connected to American Rights Litigators, a Florida-based tax protesters' outfit — guilty of felony counts similar to the ones lodged against Snipes.

Both Snipes and the chief prosecutor, Robert O'Neill, professed to be delighted with the verdict. Using all his thespic skills to cover up his grief over the verdicts against his tax advisers, both of whom could be looking at as much as ten years in prison, Snipes told reporters that ""it does feel good, it feels great." Meanwhile, his lawyer, Robert Bernhof, continued to maintain that his client had never meant to do anything wrong, but had simply been confused over whether he was legally obligated to pay taxes, had asked the I.R.S. about it, and would have sent them a check immediately if they'd just gotten back to him. O'Neill responded to the verdict with a statement saying that "Filing tax returns is not optional. It is a legal requirement;" now that we've all got that straight, Bernhof says that Snipes is "ready to pay and file." Now the lawyers will set about determining just how much Snipes owes the government; in a worst-case scenario, he could still be sentenced to as much as three years in jail. In the meantime, I intend to start working on an Internet-urban myth calling attention to the fact that, with Snipes's I.R.S. troubles, Woody Harrelson's pot bust, Jennifer Lopez's felony gun charge in the and Robert Blake's arrest for murder, there's some kind of curse working its way through the cast of Money Train. Chris Cooper, watch your back!

Take Five: Cryptozoology

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Hollywood loves a good monster movie. The recent success of the risky Cloverfield is proof of the fact that audiences, too, will flock to a good creature feature even if the monster's main purpose is to ruin the first-date memories of outer-borough hipsters. Strangely enough, though, movie studios and filmgoers alike are a tad more diffident when it comes to monsters that have a slight possiblilty of being real. Vampires, zombies, wolfmen, and whatever the hell Gamera was supposed to be? Sure, we'll take whatever you got. But when was the last time you saw a bunch of lithe, promiscuous teenagers menaced by a bunyip? What was the last movie that featured a small town in the middle of nowhere being attacked by a rampaging Cornish Owl-Man? Paramount is hoping, with the Friday release of Fred Wolf's shaggy Sasquatch story Strange Wilderness, that audiences will evince an interest in Bigfoot unseen since the glory days of the Six Million Dollar Man. But as we'll see, the history of movies based on so-called "cryptids" — creatures or animals widely thought to be legends, but believed by some researchers to be real — is dismal enough that the studio has as much chance of actually uncovering the Loch Ness Monster than turning a profit off of this dud-in-the-offing.

NIGHT OF THE DEMON (1980)

An almost-forgotten, and rightfully so, horror cheapie from the dawn of the slasher era, Night of the Demon does for Bigfoot what Jason Voorhees did for big-screen murderers, or at least tries to. Big-screen Bigfeet are usually portrayed as either gentle giants or, at worst, misunderstood animals, but in this null-budget exploitation number, he's more like a bloodthirsty devil on a rampage, Freddy Kreuger without the stylish hat and sweater combo. The movie's Sasquatch romps all over the Pacific Northwest, terrorizing anthropology students, yanking the junk off of an unfortunate hillbilly, and having his wicked way with local farmer's daughters. The high, or low, point of the flick comes in a flashback sequence: the innocent young lady who found herself at the receiving end of unwelcome advances from Bigfoot decides, for some reason, to bear its offspring (birthing the child of a monstrous rape apparently being less shameful than an abortion), until her overbearing dad decides to force her to kill the Bigfoot baby! A hallucinatorily bad movie sure to be the final word in, as the poster copy put it, "cross-breedin' Bigfoot".

TWILIGHT ZONE: THE MOVIE (1983)

Despite the fact that multiple reports of gremlins, wing-monsters and foo fighters by American flyers in WWII were all almost certainly the result of ordinary mechanical failure, combat fatigue, or smuggling a bottle of Old Crow into the cockpit, the Army took them seriously enough to launch a legitimate investigation, and by the 1960s, the beasties were entrenched enough in popular culture to inspire a memorable episode of The Twilight Zone. When a movie adaptation rolled around some twenty years later, a remake of this episode was arguably its high point, thanks largely to a wildly over-the-top, and yet somehow perfectly suitable, lead performance by John Lithgow. (Amusingly enough, almost twenty years after that, William Shatner — who'd played the gremlin's victim in the original TV version — was paired up with Lithgow on his own show, 3rd Rock from the Sun, and the two baked hams overacted like there was no tomorrow in a sly inside gag about their shared past.) Nowadays, the movie is remembered largely for the disastrous accident that took the lives of several crew members, and given John Landis' rather contemptible behavior at a subsequent trial for negligence, it's surprising he didn't try to blame the helicopter crash on an invisible monster only he could see.

SPLASH (1984)

Yes, folks, there are those in the cryptozoological community — and apparently there is one — who believe that mermaids are really real, and not just the product of a dugong and a very lonely, very drunk sailor coming into contact with one another. It is to them and to you that we recommend a fresh viewing of this charming '80s comedy. It's long been an almost invisible part of the cultural landscape; few people even think about it these days. But Splash is in fact a very fine comedy of its day, not boisterous or insulting like the majority of Eighties comedies that reached its level of success. And it also functions quite well as a time capsule: it brings us a pre-iconic Tom Hanks, a pre-crazy-recluse Darryl Hannah, a pre-self-important Ron Howard, and a pre-death John Candy in one of his most appealing roles — all wrapped up in a genuinely funny, if slight, Bruce Jay Friedman screenplay. There's only five dugongs in captivity, but DVDs of Splash can be found anywhere.

ANACONDA (1997)

Despite an incredibly dismal record of investigations into various Nessies, Jersey Devils and Bigfeet, the cryptozoologists have been right exactly once: the giant squid. Long considered a myth, a dead Architeuthis washed up in New Zealand in the 1870s, and in 2004, scientists finally captured living speciments on film. Many believe that if the fringe biology crowd is going to score another stopped-clock victory, it will be with the discovery of gigantic specimens of the already huge constrictor snakes known as anaconda, and when that day comes, perhaps this movie will be viewed as eerily prophetic instead of an embarrassingly hokey, campy creature feature with a mind-blowingly unrealistic rubber snake as its villain. Anaconda isn't entirely unsalvageable; Jon Voight hams it up deliciously as a great white hunter, Ice Cube is entertaining in full-on Private Hudson mode as a doomed photographer, and there are many fine shots of Jennifer Lopez' structurally pleasing hiney. However, the script is an utter dud, the special effects look like they were done by a dull fifteen-year-old, and the plot makes The Mothman Prophecies look brilliant by comparison.

THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES (2002)

When the history of Richard Gere's movie career is written, it's unlikely that this will be one of its most glorious moments. It's hard to imagine a worse title than The Mothman Prophecies, and if the movie isn't quite as terrible as the title promises, it sure as hell ain't great, either. Supposedly based on true events, the flick is about as good as you might expect from a movie prefaced by such a claim; back in the 1970s, they used to make thousands of flicks like this loopy would-be chiller about a West Virginia town haunted by mysterious visions of the future and visitations by a rubbery, bug-winged extraterrestrial something-or-other, and they were all pretty bad, albeit in a different way. The Mothman Prophecies is plenty expensive as opposed to a cheap filmed-in-a-weekend exploitation flick, and it tries for a post-modern moody ambience instead of pure shock, but it's still pretty dire. There's a big, garish steel statue of the Mothman in the actual West Virginia town where the events of the movie allegedly took place; it's a safe bet that Gere's performance — alternately bored and confused — will ever be similarly immortalized.

DVD Digest for January 29, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 15:00:00 GMT

This week finds more titles from the late-summer/early-fall dumping ground coming to DVD, but a handful of gems as well.

DVD of the Week: In a slow week for classics on DVD, the most noteworthy new title is Seth Gordon's documentary The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (New Line). I wasn't allowed to have a video game system growing up, and because of this I often had to sit patiently on my friends' couches while they would finish up the games they were in the process of playing on their Super Nintendos or Sega Genesises (Genesi?) when I showed up. As such, I wasn't exactly eager to see two hours of competitive gaming, but The King of Kong quickly won me over. At heart, it's an unlikely sports documentary, with all of the drama and unforgettable characters that genre's best films contain. As the movie morphs into a de facto showdown by the reigning champ, the showboating gaming legend Billy Mitchell, and the good-guy challenger Steve Wiebe, Kong becomes uncommonly involving. Little wonder that Hollywood wants to turn the story into a feature film, but why wait for the fictional interpretation when you can see the genuine article?

It's a big week for flms that premiered at Sundance 2007, with other notable new releases this week including: Spellbound director Jeffrey Blitz's debate-themed indie Rocket Science (HBO); John August's The Nines (Sony), starring Ryan Reynolds and Hope Davis; and the terrorism-themed horror film Right at Your Door (Lionsgate). In addition, this week sees the release of the Kevin Kline sex-trafficking thriller Trade (Lionsgate), the J.Lo-produced Feel the Noise (Sony), and the direct-to-DVD offerings Canvas (Universal) and Charm School (Sony). And if you're a glutton for punishment, check out Cuba Gooding Jr. in Daddy Day Camp (Sony, also on Blu-Ray), a sequel so dire that Eddie Murphy opted out of it.

TV shows coming to DVD this week: Glenn Close in Season 1 of Damages (Sony, also Blu-Ray), the sixth season of Curb Your Enthusiasm (HBO), and Emergency! Season 4 (Universal). The only major classic films coming to DVD are El Cid, getting released in two separate editions by the Weinsteins, and the obligatory 15th Anniversary cash-grab edition of Groundhog Day, coming out just in time for... well, you know.

Finally, there's the strange case of Warner's The Invasion. The Nicole Kidman-starring SF flop was originally scheduled to be released three weeks ago, but after Warner decided to commit solely to Blu-Ray, the film's release was delayed until this week. So if those of you who read my column of January 8 (thanks, by the way) wondered why The Invasion wasn't in stock at your local video store, now you know.