The Screengrab : jessica alba

Your 2008 Razzie Nominees

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 16:30:00 GMT

Getting the jump on the Oscar nominations by 24 hours, the contenders for this year’s coveted Golden Raspberry Awards have been announced. It should come as no surprise that The Love Guru leads the pack with seven nominations, including Worst Picture, and Worst Actor (Mike Myers). (The Love Guru has already suffered the disappointment of being named the Screengrab’s Worst of the Year, so this should be a cakewalk.)

Check out the major nominees after the jump.

WORST PICTURE

Disaster Movie
The Happening
The Hottie and the Nottie
The Love Guru
Meet the Spartans

WORST ACTOR

Mike Myers (The Love Guru)
Eddie Murphy (Meet Dave)
Al Pacino (88 Minutes and Righteous Kill)
Mark Wahlberg (The Happening)
Larry the Cable Guy (Witless Protection)

WORST ACTRESS

Jessica Alba (The Eye and The Love Guru)
The Cast of The Women
Cameron Diaz (What Happens in Vegas)
Paris Hilton (The Hottie and the Nottie)
Kate Hudson (Fool’s Gold and My Best Friend’s Girl)

The Worst Career Achievement award goes, of course, to Uwe Boll. The full list of nominees can be found at the official Razzies site.

21 Stars We Hate (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 21:30:00 GMT

JESSICA ALBA

I’ll let you in on a little secret: I like sexy women. Sometimes, I like to hear them discuss foreign policy in a purring Greek accent (Arianna Huffington...mrowr!), while other times I've been known to enjoy a more prurient visual display of nubile hips and boobies. Fortunately, I’m not alone in this interest. Unlike, say, my lonely passion for Whit Stillman films, which can apparently no longer be satisfied, the demand for sexy women has glutted the market to the point where it’s nearly impossible to avoid them. Everywhere you look (in pop culture, if not my local gym) there are sweaty, well-toned H-O-T girls and women gyrating their pelvic muscles and shaking their butts in thongs and Daisy Dukes and whipped cream bikinis...so WHY, out of all the sexy women in the world, from Arianna to Miss November 2008, does Jessica Frickin’ Alba get to be in so many movies? Yes, she has a nice bod, and I enjoyed watching her undulate in Sin City as much as the next straight guy...until, that is, the camera panned up to her completely vapid expression, on a face completely devoid of mystery, personality or even the lusty carnality of supporting co-star Brittany Murphy. In real life, Alba may be a sweet, darling lass who bakes pies for orphans, but onscreen she’s got less acting talent and charisma than Ryan Gosling’s sex doll in Lars and the Real Girl...and yet Alba is somehow considered an A-list player, who gets to appear not just on the cover of Maxim, but in major motion pictures, in multiple genres, from action and horror to romantic comedy, while far more interesting and far sexier actresses like Murphy, Rosario Dawson, Mila Kunis, Thora Birch, Marley Shelton (and, no doubt, a huge percentage of the rest of the female S.A.G. membership) bob along under the surface, crossing their fingers in hopes of landing some of the high profile lead roles currently going to America’s favorite bleach-blonde void.

CHRISTOPHER REEVE

Oh, boo yourself. In the years since his unfortunate death, it has become distasteful bordering on offensive to say anything even remotely critical about Christopher Reeve. And certainly, it’s not my intention to impugn him as a man – he was, by all accounts, a decent human being, a loving husband, and a fine father to his children. The tragic accident which cost him his health was an event to be lamented, and he became a hero in its wake by advocating relentlessly for the rights and dignity of the disabled; and the comeback he made from his paralysis was very nearly a miracle. But before he took that unlucky tumble from a horse, a lot of people already knew what no one is now willing to say: Christopher Reeve was a terrible actor. Wooden, clumsy, and extremely limited in range, he started out as a pretty boy who might have been a modest success if he’d stuck to what he was good at. But Reeve was an ambitious man who soon discovered that his ambition led him to places his talent wasn’t able to go. He was laughable in Somewhere in Time, embarrassing in Monsignor, and, matched up against genuine heavyweight Michael Caine in Deathtrap, he just looked like he wanted to go home. His reputation as an actor, such as it is, rests on the Superman movies he did in the 1980s, but a lot of that adulation is vested in the character he played, and a lot more in the man who was playing him; looking at Reeve’s actual performances in the movies, it’s hard to believe anyone got very excited over that.

HALLE BERRY

It must have taken a phenomenal amount of determination and perseverance for Berry to work her way up through decorative eye candy roles in such movies as Strictly Business, Boomerang, and The Flintstones to more challenging dramatic parts in Losing Isiah and Bulworth, and then to her landmark win as the first African-American recipient of the Academy Award for Best Actress for Monster's Ball and all the attention about her becoming the first black Bond girl in Die Another Day. But Monster's Ball is still a ridiculous movie, and Berry is hardly the least ridiculous thing in it. And her Bond girl made a great entrance, walking in from the surf, but then, as is so often the case with Berry's characters, wore out her welcome as soon as she started talking. Berry can be off-putting because, like Demi Moore, she seems to be less interested in entertaining the audience than in daring them not to respect her; at her worst, she radiates a defensive insistence on her own stature as an actress that is way out of proportion to her proven abilities, which in moments of high drama seem to consist mostly of a tremulous, anxious quality combined with a "Who farted?" expression. And that's when her mouth isn't even moving: her big line from the first X-Men movie ("Do you know what happens to a toad when it's struck by lighting? The same thing that happens to everything else.") has the special distinction of being both the lamest-written and the lamest-delivered line in the history of superhero movies. It's just too bad that her need to be taken seriously may preclude her from doing more comedy. Because if the clip above is any indication, we do have to give her props for having a sense of humor.

ORLANDO BLOOM

Did Peter Jackson have him grown in a lab? In the battle scenes in the Lord of the Rings pictures, most of the cast can be seen with hair and sweat flying while Bloom, as the elf Legolas, always looks as if his smooth plastic surface had just been wiped clean with a damp cloth. When I saw the movies, I assumed that he'd been CGI'ed to look that way, on the theory that elves never have a hair out of place even when they go on the flume ride at the water park, but Viggo Mortensen has since told interviewers that he used to stare at Bloom in disbelief while they were filming, wondering how the little bastard kept looking like a fashion spread no matter what got thrown at him or what exertions were required of him. Will Bloom ever find another role as perfectly suited to his lightweight, poreless quality as that of an arrow-shooting elf? He hasn't so far. He was cast as the romantic hero of Pirates of the Caribbean, only to have the movies use his inability to hold the screen with Johnny Depp or Keira Knightley as a running in-joke. It was fun getting to see Brendan Gleeson slap the pluperfect shit out of him in Troy, but the directors who've given him the chance to carry a picture -- in Kingdom of Heaven and Elizabethtown and the barely released Haven -- have only succeeded in putting nasty dents in their own careers. So far, he hasn't done enough damage to otherwise promising projects to qualify as a menace, but that could change: he's supposedly threatening to play the Alain Delon role in Hong Kong action master Johnny To's planned remake of Jean-Pierre Melville's 1970 French gangland classic Le Cercle Rouge. If he pulls that off, all will be forgiven. If he screws it up, film geeks of many kinds will want to lasso his balls and leave him hanging upside down from a Times Square billboard.

RENÉE ZELLWEGER

Where did Renée Zellweger come from, and what did she ever do to earn her keep in the gallery of semi-major starlets? She has the acting abilities and charisma of a lutefisk. There is little that is redeeming about her in any of her movies. Especially not her uhm, "method" act as "fat" in Bridget Jones's Diary. Whose hand she greased to win an Oscar for Cold Mountain we will never know. And speaking of Oscars, a nomination for her role in Chicago? You must be joking. Just about every other actor in that movie swept the floor with her. And that includes Mr. Cellophane. All this is quite aside from the fact that she perpetually looks as if she just bit into a lemon.

LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD: STEVEN SEAGAL

There’s a certain amount of humor in the notion of a big fat guy playing an indestructible martial arts machine. But Steven Seagal isn’t laughing. Ever. In fact, he may not even have the physical capability. And if watching close-ups of his portly mug intercut with shots of an obviously thinner stunt man kicking ass on the roof of a speeding train in Under Siege 2 didn’t get the man to laugh out loud, I guess he never will. Which is probably all for the best: based on the witty one-liners in his godawful body of work (as evidenced in the clip above), the only thing worse than Seagal’s “enlightened” action flicks would be a string of inspirational Zen comedies. Speaking of which...

LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD: MIKE MYERS

According to a recent Entertainment Weekly profile, Mike Myers (despite his loveable Wayne’s World and Austin Powers personas) is a hellacious douche, largely despised in Hollywood for both the right and some of the wrong reasons, by good and evil people alike. As if beating the Powers franchise to death and helping Jim Carrey and Theodore Geisel’s money-grubbing widow to destroy the wonder and magic of Dr. Seuss’ legacy weren’t enough, Myers actually said The Love Guru was “a delivery system for some wonderful ideas,” a statement that’s actually funnier than anything in the movie.

Click Here For Part One, Part Two & Part Three

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent, Sarah Clyne Sundberg

The American Film Institute Has $1,000 and Top Ten Lists...FOR YOU!!!!!

Andrew Osborne — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 20:30:00 GMT

As faithful readers are no doubt aware, we here at The Screengrab are cuckoo for Top Ten lists (and even Top Five and Top Sixteen lists), including The Top Five Black Presidents of the Silver Screen, The Five Kinds of Twist Endings, The Top Ten Barroom Scenes (not to be confused with The Top 15 Movie Bars), The Jailbait Sweet Sixteen, The Top Twelve Tough Jews of Cinema, The Twelve Greatest Movies Based on TV Shows, The Top 5 Hits and Misses of Summer 2008, The Ten Sexiest Guy Geeks and The Ten Sexiest Nerd Girls in Cinema, to name our Top Ten recent examples.

Now it seems the American Film Institute has contracted decaphilia as well, supplementing its list of the 100 Greatest Films of All Time with this year’s listing of the Top Ten Greatest Films in Ten Classic Genres.

The films themselves will be revealed in a CBS special hosted by cinema legends Jessica Alba and Jennifer Love Hewitt (among others) on Tuesday, June 17th – at which point YOU, yes YOU could become the lucky winner of a cool thousand dollars of Best Buy swag!

All you have to do is go to the AFI website by June 16 and enter the 10 Top 10 Sweepstakes, wherein you must correctly guess the Top Ten Films in the aforementioned classic genres: Romantic Comedy, Fantasy, Mystery, Epic, Western, Sports, Animation, Gangster, Sci-Fi, Drama (hint: we’re guessing Citizen Kane is the free space on this particular Bingo card).

DVD Digest for June 3, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 14:00:00 GMT

With Father’s Day coming in less than two weeks, the studios begin to unveil their snazzy new editions of what TNT used to call “movies for guys who like movies.” We’ve got all the manly movies you need to keep dad happy while mom and her friends are out seeing the Sex and the City movie (seriously, how did we not see that coming?).

Before Clint Eastwood became known as an Academy Award-winning filmmaker (or a guy who co-starred with an orangutan) he was first and foremost a grimacing badass. And while some- including yours truly- have a soft spot for his Man With No Name trilogy- the most enduring character from this period would also certainly be “Dirty” Harry Callahan. This week, Warner unveils new DVD and Blu-Ray editions of all five of Eastwood’s Dirty Harry films, featuring all of the features from previous DVD editions plus a number of new ones. Most notably, Warner Brothers’ box set (the films are also sold separately) includes a new feature-length documentary, Clint Eastwood: Out of the Shadows. In addition, the memorabilia included in the box set includes a 40-page hardcover book and a map of San Francisco detailing Harry’s hunt for Scorpio.

But if dad’s looking for wartime heroism (Blu-Ray only), MGM and Fox both have something that’ll fit the bill. MGM will unveil Blu-Ray editions of A Bridge Too Far and Battle of Britain this week, although these new discs will contain no special features. So if it’s tricked out Blu-Rays (and better movies) you want, go with Fox’s war DVDs. The studio will be releasing three of its classics- Patton, The Longest Day and The Sand Pebbles- exclusively on Blu-Ray, packed with special features and all the bells and whistles he could ever hope for.

But that’s not all, folks. If dad wants some laughs with his testosterone, buy him the new City Slickers: Collector’s Edition (MGM), which gives him some Western action, male bonding humor courtesy of Crystal, Kirby and Stern, and of course Jack Palance, who even in death can still crap bigger than you. Other, more recent dudely comedies releasing this week include Semi-Pro (New Line, also Blu-Ray), Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Comedy Show (Lionsgate), and for the father whose enjoyment of movies far outweighs his taste, Meet the Spartans (Fox, also Blu-Ray). And what’s a list of guy movies with James Bond? Sony will release a new three-disc edition of Casino Royale, Bond’s best big-screen adventure since the sixties (there, I said it).

Other new releases this week include: Anton Corbijn’s Ian Curtis biopic Control (Weinstein Company); the Jessica Alba remake of The Eye (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray); Michael Caine and Demi Moore in Flawless (Magnolia); the long-delayed The Onion Movie (Fox); and Asia Argento just the way we like her (i.e. mostly naked and toting a gun) in Olivier Assayas’ Boarding Gate (Magnolia). The week’s most notable non-guy-movie old-school release is Jean-Jacques Beineix’s seminal Cinema du look classic Diva (Lionsgate). Finally, releasing on Blu-Ray only: Cloverfield (Paramount), Signs (Buena Vista), The Recruit (Buena Vista), There Will Be Blood (Paramount).

Jessica Alba Is Ready To Be Taken Seriously Now, Please

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Jessica Alba is tired of getting all these scripts containing gratuitous nudity. I know, I know: what’s the problem? “I don't think this is happening to Natalie Portman,” she tells The Independent’s James Mottram, who may have had to wipe the drool off his profile of the actress before he sent it in. “Jessica Alba mesmerises men,” writes Mottram. “It's what she does…Her signature roles so far have seen her in various states of undress, from a bikini-clad diver in Into the Blue to a lasso-wielding stripper in Sin City… Hamstrung by her beauty, she is typical of what Hollywood wants from its young starlets these days: a girl-next-door with just the right amount of sex appeal for the 18-25, male, movie-going demographic.” He goes on to praise Alba’s “ability to stir male loins,” which maybe sounds dirtier than he meant it.

So now that we’re all clear on the fact that Alba is an attractive woman and that this fact goes a long way towards explaining why she’s in movies, it must be about time for Alba’s Serious Actress phase to commence. The first step is to dismiss her previous work as fluff or worse. Of Good Luck, Chuck, her recent rom-com with the execrable Dane Cook, Alba says “It's porn…It wasn't supposed to be like that.” On Into the Blue and her co-star Paul Walker: “Paul was the lead. Paul helped develop it. You wouldn't believe how much that kid got paid! And I don't think he did one ounce of publicity.”

In the J-horror remake The Eye, Alba got to flex her acting muscles as a blind violinist. She learned “basic Braille and how to walk with a cane. And she spent six months learning how to play the violin – even though, in the end, this is seen in just two sequences.” Mottram is also impressed with Alba’s political consciousness – unless he’s putting us on, which seems increasingly likely as the article progresses. Alba “recently appeared in a pro-Barack Obama video directed by Black Eyed Peas' will.i.am.” Her thoughts on the candidate? “Everyone views him as the next JFK. That's where people are putting him, because he's for the people and not necessarily about making more money for corporations that are running our country.”

“Maybe there's a chance of that Oscar yet,” Mottram concludes. Yeah, I think he might be putting us on. Either that or he’s in love.

Trailer Review: Meet Bill

Paul Clark — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Isn't the world sick of midlife crisis comedies yet? You would think so, considering that the basic template is almost always the same — man gets fed up with life/job/family, his wife cheats on him (or at least he thinks she does), he rebels against his job, he gets in shape, and starts chasing a younger woman. Yet for some reason or other, filmmakers keep making these movies, perhaps because Hollywood is full of struggling middle-aged screenwriters who feel the need to fob their trite insights off on the world in the name of fiction-as-therapy. Judging by its trailer, Meet Bill doesn't seem to have many new wrinkles on the formula. I like Aaron Eckhart, but unfortunately he doesn't appear to transcend the same-old-same-old feel of the proceedings, and the generic-ass title doesn't inspire much hope either. Also, to Jessica Alba — enjoy your stardom while it lasts, because once you can't coast on your looks anymore, you're going to be in a world of trouble.

Trailer Review: The Love Guru

Paul Clark — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Earlier this week, I wrote about the trailer for Step Brothers, the latest comedy from the inconsistent but prolific Will Ferrell. By comparison, Mike Myers only makes a new film every few years — excepting voiceover work in Shrek movies, The Love Guru is his first starring vehicle since (uh oh) 2003's The Cat in the Hat. Given how much time Myers has had to develop this movie, you'd think it would look pretty funny, but alas, you'd be wrong. In this dire Indian-flavored comedy, Myers stars as the guru Pitka, an internationally-famous holy man who comes off like a cross between the late Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and Hrundi V. Bakshi, the Peter Sellers character from The Party, though less serene than Sexy Sadie and not as funny as Mr. Birdy Num-Num. Whether he's engaging in labored physical comedy with a little person or trading quips with sworn enemy of funny Jessica Alba, it's clear that Myers has become a shade of his formerly hilarious self. Sadly, we're now stuck with the Mike Myers who never met a gag he wouldn't repeat half a dozen times, rather than the young tyro who had us (or me, anyway) gasping with his Scots rendition of "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy." It's a shame, really. I miss that guy.

The Ten Worst Medical Breakthroughs in Movie History, Part 1

Phil Nugent — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 21:30:00 GMT

This weekend marks the opening of The Eye, starring Jessica Alba as a blind young woman who regains her sight thanks to corneal transplant surgery. Unfortunately, this happy situation brings her to grief when her new peepers start feeding her frightening, apocalyptic visions. If the plot sounds familiar, if may be because The Eye is a remake of a 2002 Hong Kong film by the Pang brothers. But it might also have something to do with the fact that, from the 1960 French horror classic Eyes Without a Face to more recent films such as the 1991 Body Parts (itself based on a French novel called Choice Cuts), it's easy to think of other movies where experimental transplant surgery has had unhappy side effects for the lucky beneficiary. (Steven Spielberg's first professional directing gig was "Eyes", one of the segments of the 1969 pilot for the horror anthology series Night Gallery, in which the fates play a cruel joke on a nasty eye transplant patient, played by Joan Crawford.) Although a great many movie doctors have plied their trade wisely and humanely, saving many fake lives in the process, it's still true that there have been a great many ambitious medical breakthroughs in the movies that have yielded questionable results, and worse. To wit:

THE INCREDIBLE TWO-HEADED TRANSPLANT (1971)

Case in point. This low-budget horror movie really nails the potential dangers of reckless and unregulated transplant surgery. Or maybe it really nails the potential dangers of giving Bruce Dern a medical license. Dern plays an unprincipled, deranged — dare we say, Dernesque — mad genius who's squatting out in the desert, idly sticking extra heads on raccoons. When a drooling, murderous sex maniac stops by to ask Dern how's tricks, our hero sees his chance and grafts the head of this leering cretin onto the oversized body of the pure-hearted village half-wit. It turns out that the pervert, by virtue of his stronger will and general alpha maleness, gains control of the shared body, a development that leads to scenes where helpless innocents are killed and molested by the monster, scenes that are intercut with close-ups of the actor playing the meanie resting his head on the shoulder of the actor playing the sweet idiot; the latter moans, rolls his eyes, and generally registers his disapproval, while the former sniggers and makes Billy Idol faces. Dern and his creation are destroyed at the end of the movie, but a year later, some exploitation film scientists who somehow got ahold of his notes grafted Ray Milland's head onto the body of Rosey Grier in The Thing with Two Heads. It can easily be distinguished from this movie because the scientists who perform the operation on Grier and Milland do not have a concerned best friend played by Casey Kasem.

JUNIOR (1994)

For some of us, the disappointments related to this Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle began with the news that he was not playing the Peter Bagge comics character of the same name. Instead, the future Governor of California plays a gynaecological scientist (check) who specializes in fertilization medication (double check) who, in order to draw attention to the effectiveness of his new super-drug, doses himself with progesterone, estrogen, and his own meds, has an egg that's been fertilized with his own sperm implanted in his abdominal cavity, and conceives a child which he then decides to carry to term, because it will make him a better person (with you so far), much as cross-dressing did for Dustin Hoffman. The fellow scientist who anonymously supplies the egg is played by Emma Thompson, who comes to love Arnold and looks forward to raising the child with him — and that's where I get off the boat. It should be noted that Schwarzenegger was not the first man to give birth in a Hollywood comedy; the same thing happened to Billy Crystal in the 1977 Rabbit Test which comprises the entirety of Joan Rivers's directing career. But that movie made no attempt to explain or justify its plot scientifically: Crystal's pregnancy was best explained as a miracle, though Crystal probably thinks that the only miracle related to Rabbit Test is the fact that he was ever able to find work again.

THEY SAVED HITLER’S BRAIN (1963)

If saving the brain of a man widely considered to be history’s greatest monster doesn’t count as the very definition of a bad application of medical technology. Worse still, they don’t just save Hitler’s brain — they save his whole head, so we don’t even get any respite from that annoying push-broom ‘stache of his. No, he just sits there, looking as evil as a stand-in who doesn’t actually look all that much like Hitler can possibly look, burbling around in his jar, waiting for someone to invent Futurama and hatching many a nefarious scheme. By the time this movie came out, Hitler was well on his way to becoming less a sinister historical figure and more of a Dr. Octopus type, a comic-opera supervillain trotted out every time someone wrote a cheap take-over-the-world screenplay. And screenplays don’t come any cheaper than the one in this doozy, which is actually two almost completely unrelated movies (check out the different hairstyles, car models, even film stock from scene to scene) crammed together and broadcast more or less as a TV timefiller in the mid-‘60s. Not since the Golden Age of Ed Wood have there been so many bad special effects, so much terrible acting, so many egregious continuity errors. We here at the Screengrab don’t pretend to be experts on the psychology of Adolf Hitler, and we certainly don’t say this to excuse the man or his lifetime of evil deeds, but we feel quite certain that if someone did bring his head back to life in the confines of an electrified jar, that disembodied, unholy head in a jar could make a better movie than this.

FLATLINERS (1990)

Flatliners was meant to be an intelligent, provocative, moody thriller that blurred the line between good and evil. Unfortunately, they gave it to Joel Schumacher to direct, and so it instead turned out to be yet another object lesson in the ongoing saga of Schumacher’s incredible ability to destroy anything with which he is even remotely involved. In the film, a bunch of medical students decide to take a break from getting drunk and complaining to subject themselves to clinical death in order to determine if stories of what lie beyond the veil of mortality are really true. Each time, they experience more and more of the other side before being resuscitated; and each time, they become whinier and poutier until Kevin Bacon, In his most Judd Nelsonish performance to date, starts bitching and moaning to a stained glass window like it was his mom and it had just told him he was grounded on prom night. Indeed, while the characters in the film channel the eerie experiences of a world beyond death, the actors who play them – including Bacon, Julia Roberts, and a delightfully pissy Kiefer Sutherland – do an amazing job of channeling the relentless unpleasantness of the Brat Pack. We won’t give anything away for those who have yet to see this misbegotten pile of Schumakings, but rest assured, it won’t be long that you’ll be praying for the entire cast to die for real.

UNIVERSAL SOLDIER (1992)

It is a little-known but nonetheless completely true fact that sometime after the Vietnam War, the United States military developed secret technology that would allow them to bring dead people back to life and turn them into ultra-efficient, superhuman robotic killing machines. Unfortunately, the technology only seemed to work on heavily muscled men of northern European origin, which is how we ended up sending both Dolph Lundgren and Jean-Claude Van Damme to the Persian Gulf to blow up terrorists. There were practical reasons not to use these two (they are both terribly bad actors, and at times, the screen threatens to fold in on itself like a quantum singularity at the sheer blankness of their personalities) as well as psychological ones (if you’re going to send two ultra-efficient, superhuman robotic killing machines on a top secret mission together, why would you pick two guys who hated each other so much that they essentially murdered each other the last time they were paired up), but none of that makes any difference when there’s towelhead ass to be kicked, so off they go on one of the most overblown, ridiculous 1980s action movies to not actually be made in the 1980s. Apparently, the medical technology that allows people to be brought back from the dead and turned into murderous cyborgs can do nothing to prevent their tendency to smirk, pose shirtless, and make terrible puns at the drop of a hat, which is probably why the program was ultimately abandoned. This rank cheeseball of a picture was directed by Roland Emmerich, who would later inflict such god-awful stinkbombs as Independence Day and the 1999 Godzilla remake on the world. How anyone could sit through Universal Soldier and come out of it thinking “You know what that guy needs is a MUCH BIGGER BUDGET” is itself a medical miracle.

DEEP BLUE SEA (1999)

Many of the medical breakthroughs on this list are included because they're just plain inexplicable. After all, who in his right mind would think grafting a second head onto a human body constitutes scientific progress? But there is a different strain of movies of this sort, in which the researchers' goals are admirable but the experiments themselves are misguided at best. Perhaps the best example of this kind of movie is Renny Harlin's Deep Blue Sea. Now, anyone who has ever lost a loved one to Alzheimer's Disease will be sympathetic to the aims of the project headed by Saffron Burrows' Dr. Susan McCallister. But when she discovers that sharks maintain a constant level of brain activity even in advanced age, she hits upon the brilliant crazy-ass idea of creating giant mutant sharks with giant mutated brains that she can harvest in the hope of finding a cure. Trouble is, she neglects to give the sharks a healthy, socially productive outlet for their increased mental capacities, no doubt because with all the time her research demands, she has no time left to teach her subjects underwater chess or to translate Proust into shark language. So the giant mutant geniussharks do what giant mutant genius sharks are prone to doing- they escape and chow down on all nearby humans, most memorably the project's chief investor, played by Samuel L. Jackson. Happily, the sharks go down in the end, a setback for Alzheimer's research but a victory for human mental superiority. How else to explain the genius-fish being vanquished by the likes of LL Cool J and the future star of Homeless Dad?

— Paul Clark, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

Click here for Part 2!

Attack of the Half-Assed Hollywood Remakes of Asian Horror Movies

Phil Nugent — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 21:00:00 GMT

With the new Hollywood remake of the Pang brothers' The Eye arriving in theaters this coming Friday — and with the new Hollywood remake of Takashi Miike's One Missed Call hustling out to make room for it — Terrence Rafferty ponders this thing called the glut of American remakes of recent Asian horror pictures. (Not everything gets a pithy term around here.) The success of Gore Verbinski's The Ring (based on the Japanese film Ringu, and Takashi Shimizu’s The Grudge, the director's English-language remake of his own Ju-On, guaranteed that there will many more films of this kind, even though, whether taken individually or as a singular continental phenomenon, adapting Asian horror movies for the Hollywood assembly line is a precarious business. Not that there aren't worse ways to go about it: as Rafferty notes, back in "the Stone Age of exploitation-movie history, shrewd Hollywood producers would simply have done what they did with the Japanese monster movies of that era: chop them up, hastily dub them into English and — if the repackagers were feeling particularly frisky — shoot a few minutes of new footage with a minor, familiar and presumably desperate American actor. Say what you will about remakes, they seem, all in all, a better option than Raymond Burr in Godzilla."

What neither remaking or recutting can easily finesse is the special mood — a haunting, eerie gloominess that seems to link a familiarity with ghosts to a lack of faith in any long-term future on this earth — that permeates so many of the original films. When Takashi Shimizu agreed to go through the chore of making Ju-On again — a task that he must have found to be a congenial one, since he's also made sequels to both the Japanese and American versions and is about to bring forth The Grudge 3 — he was canny enough to have Sarah Michelle Gellar, Bill Pullman, Clea DuVall and William Mapother come to Japan, rather than risk trying to make the story's underpinnings take root in, say, Boston. (Rafferty singles out Dark Water starring Jennifer Connelly and directed by Walter Salles, as a rare example of an uprooted Asian ghost story that works rather well in its new setting — a damp, crumbling fortress of an apartment complex on Roosevelt Island.) Then there are the special idiosyncrasies of some of the filmmakers who have been drawn to this material. There has to be an easier way to make a living than trying to render a Takashi Miike screenplay clear and understandable to a mass audience — didn't it ever occur to Eric Valete, the director of the American version of One Missed Call, that he might be happier walking through open fields in Eastern Europe, to see if there were still active land mines in the area? Nor is there any need to translate the remarkable work of the Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa, who is less a formulaic genre filmmaker than a nightmare poet (and a disciple of Val Lewton) working out his own fantasies of isolation and apocalyptic loneliness, into incoherent junk like the recent Pulse, with Kristen Bell.

As for The Eye, Rafferty detects "a half-detectable increase in optimism" in the new version, which means that the haunted quality that makes the original so hard to shake off may have been lost in translation: "That stranger-in-a-strange-land feeling might be induced by, say, the production values of the American version of The Eye, which, in their relative luxuriousness, suggest a happier, more hopeful view of the world than the starker sets of the Pang brothers do; or by the casting of sunny-looking Jessica Alba as the heroine, played in the original by the beautiful but grim-faced Lee Sin-je. The role is essentially the same: A young blind woman has her vision restored by cornea transplants and begins to see, along with the ordinary sights of everyday life, disturbing, unaccountable visions of shadowy afterlives. Ms. Alba looks unpleasantly surprised; Ms. Lee looks shaken to her core (though somehow less surprised)."

Citizen Cruise

Phil Nugent — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 21:00:00 GMT

In her final, book-length interview with Francis Davis, the late film critic Pauline Kael lamented that entertainment reporters were always wrting about John Travolta as if he were stupid. When Davis suggested that this might have something to do with Travolta's devotion to Scientology, Kael said that nobody seemed to have the same problem with Tom Cruise. That was then and this is now, and the furor over Andrew Morton's forthcoming unauthorized biography of the brainmaster behind Days of Thunder is shaping up to be all about the Scientology association that has done some much in recent years to type Cruise as a towering weirdo in the public eye and may be on the verge of derailing his career. Once upon a time, gossipy speculation about Cruise (and threats from his lawyers regarding same) tended to be all about his sexuality. Now they tend to be about whether it's true that he is the "defacto second-in-charge" of the "religion" and whether his choice of Katie Holmes to be his zombie bride (over such proposed candidates as Scarlett Johansson, Jessica Alba, and Kate Bosworth) was the result of internal negotiations with his Scientologist brethren.

Morton, who made his name serving as confidante and tell-all author to then-Princess Diana (producing a book that became a bargaining chip in the public relations war surrounding the royal divorce) and Monica Lewinsky; he's also written "unauthorized" bios about Madonna and the Beckhams, and reportedly claims that Cruise's current to-do list includes a high-pressure campaign to bring David Beckham to Scientology. He also claims that Nicole Kidman has kept mum about the church since her divorce from Cruise for fear that she would be prevented from seeing the two children she and Cruise adopted together. For his own part, there have been reports that Morton himself has been keeping a low profile for fear of violent reprisals from the Scientology Mafia. Cruise's attorneys have poo-poohed such talk and concentrated on making with the legal threats against the book's publisher, St. Martin's Press. As for Cruise himself, his lawyer Bertram Fields will say only that "He has no intention of reading it." It would seem to be implicit in this statement that for Cruise to pass up a chance to read about himself is no small gesture.

Trailer Roundup: The Eye, One Missed Call, The Orphanage

Peter Smith — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 16:00:00 GMT

The Eye

One Missed Call

The original Pang Brothers’ version of The Eye was a cheesy mix of the forgettable Madeleine Stowe thriller Blink and the early, funny films of M. Night Shyamalan. But the film nonetheless got solid reviews, so it was only a matter of time before a studio decided to mount an English-language remake. It’s hard to imagine someone out-hacking the Pangs, but David Moreau and Xavier Palud, making their English-language debut following the middling French home-invasion chiller Ils, look to be giving it the old college try. And as shoddy as most of the Asian horror remakes have been thusfar, at least some have been cast with interesting actors. That this one stars Jessica Alba doesn’t inspire confidence. But why should Lionsgate do any different? The formula of hot chick + semi-proven commodity + February release worked for When a Stranger Calls, right?

No less dire-looking is the remake of One Missed Call. The original film was one of roughly forty-seven movies Takashi Miike made in 2003, and was a decent movie that fit comfortably in an era of J-horror gimmickry. By comparison, the Hollywood version looks like another long-overdue nail in the coffin of J-horror remakes, bearing a closer resemblance to the spate of Ring knockoffs than the original version and starring the hottest cast of fall 2001 (Shannyn Sossamon, Ed Burns, etc.) You’d think audiences would start objecting to lousy horror movies, but then, we’re already on the fourth Saw.

The Orphanage

I saw this movie in Toronto, and I recommend it. But genre movies are a tough sell, so instead of accurately portraying The Orphanage as an atmospheric thriller in the vein of Guillermo Del Toro (who produced the film and gets his name prominently featured in the trailer), this trailer makes it look like a schlocky Asian-horror wannabe, complete with lots of flash cuts and horrified reaction shots and absolutely no dialogue. It’s a shame, since the audience that embraced Pan’s Labyrinth might avoid this on the basis of the lousy trailer, while the rest will probably be pissed at having to read subtitles. Still, it’s nice to see a horror movie with a heroine over forty who isn’t a spiteful old biddy.

— Paul Clark