The Screengrab : john carpenter

The Slasher Movie Comes of Age

Phil Nugent — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 17:00:00 GMT

In The Atlantic, James Parker sings the praises of "that most misunderstood of genres," the slasher flick. Actually, Parker doesn't really make a case for the genre being misunderstood so much as boldly step up to declare that he watches them voluntarily, and he can quote Ted Hughes (“Its mishmash of scripture and physics, / With here, brains in hands, for example, / And there, legs in a treetop.” ) and Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf, which, though a fine rendering of a classic work, does not include an appearance by a naked Angelina Jolie in flesh high heels. "The classic slasher flick," he writes, "is produced at high speed, on a squeaker of a budget, and bows briefly for an anointing of critical scorn before going on to make piles of money. With a bit of luck, that critical scorn will be amplified into cultural censure—1980’s rape-revenge slasher, I Spit on Your Grave, for instance, was widely and windily reviled, to the enduring profit of its makers. 'The more the film was attacked,' writer-director Meir Zarchi confided to Variety last year, 'the more money shot into my pocket.'” He must have done pretty damn well. I'm not sure that I've ever actually seen I Spit on Your Grave, but I remember, as if it were yesterday, the 1981 "special" episode of Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel's old syndicated movie-reviews TV show Sneal Previews that was set aside for the purpose of heaping scorn and disgust on what were then just beginning to be called slasher (or "splatter") films, with I Spit on Your Grave a prime target. Watching a clip from the movie, in which a bunch of scuzzball louts swaggered around the fallen body of a violated young woman, sandwiched between the TV showmen clucking and posturing about the death of civilization, one felt much as one does at a screening of Freddy vs. Jason: it's not clear who you should root for, but you'd settle for checking off the box marked "None of the Above."

Part of the appeal of slasher movies is that they're disreputable. But the fact that a writer like Parker can admit to having taken pleasure from watching slasher movies in a magazine like The Atlantic shows how far we've come since...well, since 1976, when Harper's, a magazine pretty much on the same social outreach level as The Atlantic, ran Stephen Koch's "Fashions in Pornography", which gave the author a chance to step out onto the heath and rend his garments in appalled despair over the fact that Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre had been screened at the Museum of Modern Art. (With the title of his screed, Koch clearly anticipated the current term "torture porn", which New York magazine reviewer David Edelstein is so proud of having coined.) In movie circles, Koch is best known as the author of Stargazer, a classic, admiring survey of Andy Warhol's films, and his dismay at seeing some trashy little drive-in slaughter-fest being garlanded by a prestigious New York City culture institution may partly reflect one man's concern that his fringe cinema of choice be recognized as deserving of a place in the canon before some white trash gorehound's fringe cinema of choice. My grandmother was a good Christian Southern lady, and if a bus containing either Andy Warhol or Tobe Hooper had broken down in front of her house, she would have invited both of them in and gorged them on homemade pie, but she wouldn't have watched the movies made by either gentlemen if she'd been able to borrow someone else's eyeballs.

"Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all become respectable if they last long enough," spoke Noah Cross (John Huston) in Chinatown, a movie whose nose-slitting sequence speaks to a part of the audience that has no insurmountable problem with being titillated with a little gratuitous shock and bloodshed, so long as there's a story and big stars to go with it. Back in 1981, maybe nobody seriously expected slasher movies to last this long. But they did, and now they're at least half respectable, partly because those of us who, back then, were just old enough to watch clips from them on Sneak Previews but who couldn't see the movies themselves until they hit cable or Mom and Dad left us alone with the VCR, are now adults who, because this stuff was always there, can imagine stuff that's even worse. Some of these adults are now filmmakers whose job it is to imagine stuff that's even worse. As Parker sees it, "Saw and Hostel succeeded, above all, because they are serious slasher flicks. The extremity of their goriness reclaimed the splatter death from mainstream movies (where it’s become unremarkable to see a man fed screaming to a propeller, or run through with a drill bit). And the immersive nastiness of their aesthetic—decayed bathrooms, foul workshops, seeping industrial spaces, blades blotched with rust—distilled the slasher-flick elixir: atmosphere. No franchise thrives without it."

Parker continues: "Just as crucially, Saw and Hostel feature excellent and novel villains." Saw's Jigsaw is, or if I interpreted the art work on the last installment correctly as I whizzed past it on the subway umpteen times, was, a terminal cancer patient whose Rube Goldberg torture devices are intended to impress upon his victims the importance of appreciating life, an area in which he judges them to have been falling short. And the wealthy businessmen who, in the Hostel series, pay top dollar to torture healthy young American backpackers to death can be taken as some kind of comment on the rapaciousness of the class that brought us the new Depression. Earlier generations of genre filmmakers were a little confused when informed that they were in the social commentary business, but Hostel director Eli Roth talks about it as if he thought he might be eligible for a Pulitzer: "“Thanks to George Bush and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld," the insists, "there’s a whole new wave of horror movies.”

What's kind of off-putting is how much of the new wave has hit the beach before, with fewer Roman numerals attached. So far this year we've seen remakes of Friday the 13th, My Bloody Valentine, and Wes Craven's Last House on the Left, a movie so proudly vile that the fact that it could provide fodder for a pricey Hollywood remake--let alone the fact that its director could have gone on to work with Meryl Streep--just about single-handedly carried us all into an alternate universe. Later this year there'll be a sequel to Rob Zombie's remake of John Carpenter's original Halloween. This deluge of remakes may be part of what's now respectable about slasher movies: unless you're the Marquis de Sade, it's hard to come up with a really new take on having a madman run around turning people into kindling, and if your movie is going to look a lot like a lot of other movies, why not latch onto the name of a golden oldie and "honor" it with an official remake rather than imitate it and get tagged as a rip-off artist? If Parker, as a fan of the genre, is concerned that it may finally be killed off by losing its capacity to shock, either from endless repetition or misplaced self-seriousness, he isn't letting on: "In a tolerant spirit," he writes, "the slasher fan gets in line for the new sequel or prequel or remake or 'reboot.' If it’s crap, so what? The next one might be better."

Taxing Time: A Screengrab Salute To Beat The Clock Cinema (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 21:30:00 GMT

ALIENS (1986) & GALAXY QUEST (1999)

Life will be more stressful in the future, partly because of the ravenous extraterrestrials and tyrannical galactic tyrants we’ll encounter, but mostly because the ticking clocks in our race-against-time adventures will be replaced by soothing female voices announcing our impending doom every few seconds. That’s the case in Aliens anyway, a movie Roger Ebert called “so intense that it creates a problem for me as a reviewer: Do I praise its craftsmanship, or do I tell you it left me feeling wrung out and unhappy?” How’s this for suspense: not only does Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley find herself trapped in a space colony infested with slimy, ravenous xenomorphs (and the equally slimy Paul Reiser), but following a mishap with a nuclear reactor, the whole joint winds up on the verge of self-destruction! And then the evil Alien Queen grabs Newt (Carrie Henn), the sweet little orphan girl Ripley’s been trying to save for most of the movie!! And then, just when Ripley and Newt finally escape to the roof of the burning, exploding complex, they discover their ride is gone!!! And then it turns out the Alien Queen knows how to use elevators!!!! And she’s got David Fincher with her!!!!! And that damn soothing female voice won’t stop reminding everyone how close they are to death!!!!!! Aiiiieeeeee!!!!!!!!! Later, in the smartly high-concept Galaxy Quest, Weaver once again winds up in a desperate space race against time, trapped with co-star Tim Allen in a real-life starship designed by a much friendlier bunch of aliens to mimic the specs of their old TV starship...including the standard issue self-destruct gizmo that always counts down to zero in the most suspenseful possible way. (AO)

BLADE RUNNER (1982)

At first, time doesn’t appear to be much of a factor in the visionary sci-fi classic Blade Runner. Harrison Ford’s Deckard has to hunt down the escaped replicants, true, but they don’t seem to have a particular goal in mind, and for a while, his search for them is discursive, even leisurely. But it soon becomes clear that even if he’s not racing against time, the replicants are – their leader, Roy Batty, beautifully played by Rutger Hauer, knows that his kind is programmed with a finite lifespan, and that any moment could be his last. The brutish Leon taunts Deckard with this information in their confrontation, but in the end, Roy turns it into a tragedy. His death is the only thing that saves Deckard’s life, but by that time, it’s clear that something truly unique and precious is being lost, and the sensation is not one of relief, but of profound grief and regret. Fading from existence, Roy half-sneers, half-laments that he has seen things that Deckard cannot even begin to imagine; but because he is both more and less than human, it will all be lost at that moment the clock makes its final tick. (LP)

ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981)

Lean, mean and exhilarating, John Carpenter’s Escape From New York confirmed that the Halloween auteur was capable of delivering more than just horror. In a nightmarish future 1997, New York City has been transformed into a massive, walled-off maximum-security prison, and when Air Force One crashes on the island and the president is taken hostage one day before an all-important nuclear summit, badass criminal Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell) is recruited for a daring rescue mission. Plissken is given a 24-hour deadline that’s made more pressing by the fact that he’s been injected with micro-explosives that’ll blow if he fails his task in the allotted time-frame, a set-up that Carpenter mines for as much rousing action as possible. From a fight with an enormous bruiser, to a cab ride over a bridge covered in mines, iconic anti-hero Plissken’s efforts to save the commander-in-chief from the clutches of Isaac Hayes’ baddie – an undertaking that involves enlisting help from Ernest Borgnine, Harry Dean Stanton and Adrienne Barbeau – remains a thrilling, kick-ass sci-fi saga, and a testament to Carpenter’s still-underappreciated directorial greatness. (NS)

THE TAKING OF PELHAM ONE TWO THREE (1974)

There are endless thrillers and caper flicks that depend on split-second timing for the bad guys’ nefarious plan to succeed, but the genius of Joseph Sargent’s tight little ‘70s thriller is that it places the action on a New York subway train, a milieu in which people already get terribly bent out of shape if there’s any deviation from the strict timetable. Populated by a cast of old-school character actors (including Walter Matthau Robert Shaw, Martin Balsam, Hector Elizondo, and Jerry Stiller) who virtually define the word “craggy”, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three features a quartet of criminals – presciently given colors as code names, twenty years before Reservoir Dogs – who must ensure perfect timing and clever planning to overcome the fact that they’re committing their caper on a form of transportation that can’t possibly deviate from its course. A big-budget remake is being released later this year, but its flashy cast and jillion-dollar price tag almost guarantee it won’t have any of the grubby charm or jangling energy of the original. (LP)

Only a few precious seconds remaining to Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Five & Six!!!!

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Nick Schager

Clippy Strikes Back: The Scariest Technology In Cinema History (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 21:00:00 GMT

TRON (1982)

Older brothers usually get to be know-it-alls (and, of course, we’re usually right), but my Big Bro credibility took a huge hit in the ‘80s when I told my kid brother in no uncertain terms that he was absolutely, completely wrong in his crazy belief that Roger Ebert once gave this Disney science-fiction oddity a four-star review. But, though it pained me then (and now) to admit, my brother was absolutely right: Ebert raved about Tron, calling it a “dazzling...technological sound-and-light show that is sensational and brainy, stylish, and fun” in its anthropomorphized depiction of the inner workings of computer technology, starring Jeff Bridges as a programmer trapped in a trippy day-glo software universe Jeff “the Dude” Lebowski would surely appreciate. At the time, of course, director Steven Lisberger’s tale of a Master Control Program bent on domination was fairly unique; that and the film’s visual palette were groundbreaking enough to explain why Ebert (and my brother) could forgive the fairly colorless acting and writing...but it was the cool Disneyland theme park attraction and the super-cool video game that finally won me over to the wonders of Tron. Nowadays, of course, it’s the other way around as the Master Control Program that runs Hollywood routinely morphs video games and theme park attractions into run-of-the-mill movies, computers are ubiquitous and CGI long ago lost its new car smell...but, hey, at least good ol’ Roger Ebert still knows how to flummox me with an occasional WTF? 4-star review! (AO)

SHIVERS (1975)

For his first feature, David Cronenberg came up with an idea that so completely sums up the recurring concepts of his early work -- the horror at the body and mutations, the hang-ups about sexual repression and sexual release -- that it's kind of remarkable that he ever revved himself up again to make another. Set mostly inside a high-tech luxury apartment complex outside Montreal, it begins with a scene that suggests an old-school porno film that's gone off its trolley: a burly, bearded old man assaults a young woman in what looks like a Catholic schoolgirl outfit and, after stripping himself to the waist, sets about vivisecting her. It turns out that he's a scientist who has developed a parasite that, once introduced into the human body, frees the host from anything remotely resembling inhibitions. The girl is his test subject, who has been entirely too efficient at spreading the parasite around to various neighbors, so that by the end of the movie, the whole complex has turned into one enormous writhing, drooling, mindless orgy on the move. This concept is especially disturbing to those viewers shallow enough to notice that the casting department has not done its job with an eye towards assembling the ideal orgy of a Skinemax audience's dreams. Don't let anybody tell you that Montreal in the mid-70s was suffering from a shortage of unsightly people. (PN)

DARK STAR (1974)

Made while he and screenwriter Dan O’Bannon were completing their USC film school postgraduate work, John Carpenter’s debut feature Dark Star paid amusing homage to Kubrick’s seminal 2001 in its portrait of machinery gone awry. Aboard a spaceship whose astronauts have been tasked with eliminating unstable stars in order to pave the way for future colonization, the computer motherboard goes straight-up crazy and a rogue bomb goes even crazier, attempting to detonate in the ship’s loading bay despite the crew’s best efforts to prevent such a catastrophe. Unlike 2001 or O’Bannon’s later screenwriting hit Alien (which borrowed liberally from this film’s premise), Carpenter’s maiden directorial outing is played for tongue-in-cheek laughs rather than chills, and rather ramshackle ones at that. Yet despite an upfront lack of seriousness, this space saga’s conception of technology remains decidedly pessimistic, its story’s faulty equipment conveying an underlying fear of the potential calamity that awaits those foolish enough to count on CPUs for their safety. (NS)

COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT (1970)

This sci-fi film can be watched in its entirety on YouTube, and it doesn't lose much there. Directed by the erratic Joseph Sargent, whose other credits include Jaws: The Revenge but also The Taking of Pelham One Two Three and the 1989 TV film Day One (a good docudrama about the ultimate evil technology story, the Manhattan Project), it's not a visually distinguished movie, but its treatment of the ever-popular computers-are-our-masters theme, specifically geared to the nuclear age, is impressively spiky. Dr. Forbin, played by The Young and the Restless mainstay Eric Braeden, has perfected the ultimate missile-defense system, a supercomputer called Colossus that will have absolute control over America's nuclear arsenal and is impervious to attack. As soon as it's switched on, Colossus announces that it senses the existence of its own doppelganger -- Guardian, a Soviet supercomputer with the same function and capabilities. Furthermore, Colossus and Guardian make contact with each other and decide that they should join forces to protect the planet, shutting out the middle man -- i.e., us. Various attempts are made, under Dr. Forbin's direction, to override, penetrate, and otherwise shut down the computers, with results that only raise the question, "What part of 'impervious to attack' do you not understand?" In the end, Colossus, after detonating a couple of missiles just to remind us that it means business, assures the human population that it wants only the best for the world over which it now holds complete control, always a reassuring sentiment whether you hear it from a supercomputer with nuclear capability or Billy Mays. (PN)

Click Here For Part One, Two & Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Nick Schager

LazyVision: Week Ending Feb. 14th

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 16:30:00 GMT

We know that fans of the Screengrab want the dish on what's happening now in Hollywood (hence the Weekend Box Office Report) and what's yet to come (hence the Morning Deal Report). We know you want to be aware of what's coming to home video, hence DVD Digest. And we know that sometimes, you just want to park yourselves in front of the tube to catch a good flick, hence Set Your DVRs!.

We also know that some of you are deeply, deeply lazy individuals. And, beyond that, you're cheap, and you can't figure out anything more technologically complicated than a light switch. (We say this in the most loving way possible, for we count ourselves in your number.) You want to be able to turn on the TV -- not the computer -- and watch a good movie, anytime you want, without having to program anything -- for free. After all, wasn't that the promise of the new modern era? Wasn't that the allure of the digital age -- any movie you want, any time you want, no waiting, no fees?

Well, assuming you have digital cable, Video On Demand was made for lazy gasbags like you. Most of the stuff shown on VOD is either pay-per-view or, to put it mildly, dire, but occasionally, a gem will pop up on the "Free Movies" feature as a reward for infinitely patient cheapskates like yours truly. So, once a week, we'll bring you a handful of not-completely terrible movies you can watch whenever you want, for zero dollars and change. (Check your local provider for channel details.)

- FEARnet this week is featuring Night of the Creeps as one of its free movies on demand. This underrated 1986 camp-horror classic from cult director Fred Dekker is a real winner -- it never takes its zombies-from-out-space-plot too seriously, and plays around with the conventions of the genre years before the Scream franchise got the idea. The characters are all named after cult directors (Raimi, Carpenter, Cronenberg, etc.), and best of all, it's held together by a swell performance from beloved tough-guy character actor Tom Atkins.

- The Sundance Channel's on-demand service is offering a look at John Huston's The Dead, gratis. The final film Huston ever made, it's also one of his finest and most personal; adapted from a very fine James Joyce short story, it features some astonishing performances (including by his daughter, Anjelica) in a story involving a woman's memories of her long-dead first love, and how it stirs emotions in her husband during an Epiphany gathering. Best of all, The Dead isn't currently available in a U.S. DVD release, so this opportunity is even more special.

- Turner Classic Movies also has an on-demand service, and free this week is the classic 1948 noir flick Naked City. Somewhere between solid post-war noir, hardboiled police procedural, and ripe pre-war crime drama, Naked City is a tightly wound look at every step of a brutal murder investigation in New York. Directed by legendary noir specialist Jules Dassin, Naked City features a terrific villain in Ted DeCorsia, a gritty semi-documentary filming style, and an absolutely gripping extended chase scene through the city. It was later made into a popular TV crime show in the 1950s .

- FEARnet's on-demand service coughs up another great free offering this week in Escape from New York. Made during the period when a new John Carpenter movie was cause for excitment, this cult classic takes place in a near-future dystopia where New York City is a maximum-security prison. When President Donald Pleasance's plane crashes there with the nuclear football on board, it's up to Kurt Russell as Snake Plissken, one of the all-time great screen bad-asses, to bail him out. Russell gamely waltzes with a swell cast that includes Adrienne Barbeau, Lee Van Cleef, Ernest Borgnine, Isaac Hayes, Harry Dean Stanton -- and good ol' Tom Atkins.

- Finally, TNT's on-demand service this week offers the chance to see John Singleton's Boyz N the Hood. The 1991 film set off a wave of west coast gangsta dramas, but Boyz was the first and is still one of the best, as Singleton (whose filmmaking skills are raw and exciting here) takes a look at a group of childhood friends who struggle in different ways against the rough life of gang-ridden south central Los Angeles. Larry Fishburne's performance is a standout, and this was one of the first movies in which evidence was presented that Ice Cube was a good actor -- evidence which has been sorely lacking in recent years.

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Morning Deal Report: Bill Murray Gets Low

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 15:30:00 GMT

Bill Murray joins Robert Duvall and Sissy Spacek for Get Low, “based on the true story of Felix ‘Bush’ Breazeale, a Tennessee recluse who planned his own funeral in 1938 while he was still alive and could enjoy it,” Variety reports. Murray and Lucas Black will play partners in the funeral home.

“The Ward is the kind of script that I've been looking for: a complex, visceral story, full of suspense and scares.” Who said it? It’s John Carpenter, who will direct the psychological thriller that “follows the disturbing experience of a young woman in an institution who is terrorized by a ghost,” per The Hollywood Reporter. Amber Heard stars.

It wouldn’t be a Morning Deal Report without depressing remake news, so let it be known that Slap Shot is next on the chopping block. Galaxy Quest director Dean Parisot will do the dishonors.

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DVD Digest for February 3, 2009

Paul Clark — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 15:00:00 GMT

This week, a whole mess of “classic” movies flood the DVD market, which is good, since the recent releases coming out this week aren't all that impressive.

Heading up the classics crop is the Being There 30th Anniversary Deluxe Edition (Warner, also Blu-Ray). The good news is that the Blu-Ray disc will contain a number of intriguing special features, including an alternate ending. The bad news is that most of these features aren’t going to be on the standard DVD, so if you don’t have Blu-Ray, you’re sort of stuck. Still, definitely a movie that should be part of any good movie lover’s collection, no matter what form. And speaking of Peter Sellers movies, this week also brings the Peter Sellers 5-Film Collection (Lionsgate), which includes I’m All Right, Jack!, The Smallest Show on Earth, Carlton-Browne of the F.O., Two-Way Stretch, and Heavens Above!. Likewise, there’s a similar box set devoted to the work of Sellers’ mentor Alec Guinness- Alec Guinness 5-Film Collection (Lionsgate)- includes The Lavender Hill Mob, Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Man in the White Suit, The Captain’s Paradise, and The Ladykillers (a rather better selection than the Sellers set, I’d say).

More classics being released this week: Yentl Extended Director’s Edition (MGM), now featuring 30% more Streisand close-ups; the musical phenomenon RENT: Filmed Live on Broadway (Sony, also Blu-Ray), Friday the 13th, Parts 1-3, Uncut Deluxe Editions (Paramount, Part 1 also Blu-Ray), to tie in with the upcoming remake; the animated family film Oliver & Company 20th Anniversary Edition (Disney); John Carpenter’s wicked awesome Assault on Precinct 13 Restored Collector’s Edition (Image, also Blu-Ray); Richard Donner’s Inside Moves (Lionsgate); and the enticingly titled Silverado Single-Disc Version (Sony). Finally, Sony is releasing their second wave of their “Martini Movies” series, with this week’s releases being Getting Straight, Our Man in Havana, Five, Vibes, and Gumshoe.

On the recent releases, this week brings Kevin Smith’s Zack and Miri Make a Porno (Genius Products, also Blu-Ray); Michael Cera in Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist (Sony, also Blu-Ray); Dakota Fanning and Queen Latifah in The Secret Life of Bees (Fox, also Blu-Ray); the wine-centric comedy Bottle Shock (Fox); and Everybody Wants to Be Italian (Lionsgate), the movie that tries to prove that, uh, everybody wants to be Italian. Also, this week brings the long awaited release of Private Valentine: Blonde and Dangerous (Sony), yet another failed attempt at movie stardom by Jessica Simpson. After all, if you want to be a big-screen star, it helps if your movies actually get released in theatres.

This week’s TV on DVD releases include Bewitched Season 7 (Sony), Colombo Mystery Movie Collection: 1990 (Universal), and The Partridge Family Season 4 (Sony).

Finally, Fox is unloading four comedy favorites on Blu-Ray this week: Little Miss Sunshine, Napoleon Dynamite, Office Space, and Sideways.

Morning Deal Report: And Another “Thing”

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 15:50:00 GMT

Just as every generation apparently needs its own version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Universal has decided the time has come around again for The Thing. We last saw the outer space critter in John Carpenter’s 1982 version, and now the studio “has set Battlestar Galactica exec producer Ron Moore to write the script and commercials director Matthijs Van Heijningen to direct the re-imagining… It is set in a Norwegian camp and chronicles how the shape-shifting alien was first discovered and overcame the inhabitants of that camp.”

A new James Bond movie is on the way – sort of. “The writer who took on Daniel Pearl will tackle the creator of 007,” per The Hollywood Reporter. “John Orloff, who penned Par Vantage's A Mighty Heart, about the slain Wall Street Journal reporter, has been brought on to pen the screenplay for Fleming, a biopic about Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond.” We’re hoping Orloff doesn’t slight the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang years.

Amanda Seyfried is A Woman of No Importance. That’s not a judgment call; it’s just that the Mamma Mia! star is set to headline a new adaptation of the Oscar Wilde comedy. “Donald Zuckerman's producing and Bruce Beresford's directing from Howard Himelstein's script,” Variety reports.

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 21:45:00 GMT

CHICAGO (2002)

Hot chicks behind bars? Check. A large, in-charge corrupt female warden? Check. Mean girl sparring between the new fish and the reigning cell block queen? Check. Nude lesbian shower orgies and bloody riot scenes? Sorry...Rob Marshall’s Oscar-winning adaptation of the toe-tappingly cynical 1975 Kander/Webb/Fosse musical adaptation of crime reporter Maurine Dallas Watkins’ 1926 play about celebrity criminals ain’t that kind of Women-In-Prison film. Helping to restore America’s faith in the potential entertainment value of movie musicals a year after Baz Luhrmann did his level best to destroy the genre with the Excedrin-headache known as Moulin Rouge, Chicago served up catchy tunes and light satire grounded by (relatively) gritty scenes of the “real-world” Murderess Row underpinning the fantasized production numbers. For all the literal and figurative song-and-dance surrounding the press and public’s fascination with lethal jazz babies Velma (Catherine Zeta-Jones) and Roxie (Reneé Zellweger), there’s also the other side of the coin: the grim fate of a Hungarian inmate who, unlike her media-savvy cellmates, is probably innocent but gets the noose rather than justice because she can’t speak English and doesn’t know how to game the system for her own benefit. But that’s about as serious as things get: those who prefer more harrowing musical depictions of doomed immigrant ladies destroyed by American xenophobia are welcome to seek out Dancer In The Dark, the entertainment equivalent of a swift hard kick in the crotch you’re not entirely sure you deserved. The rest of Chicago, meanwhile, is a feel-good romp about getting away with murder featuring Zeta-Jones at the top of her game, an unusually tolerable performances by Zellweger (in a role Divine would have really knocked out of the park) and a surprisingly unembarrassing performance by Richard Gere (although as fellow Screengrabber Scott Von Doviak correctly noted at the time, Christopher Walken in the razzle-dazzle role would have been godhead).

ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981)

Look, we’re not going lie to you: a lot of what’s awesome about John Carpenter’s Escape from New York is Snake Plissken. Kurt Russell’s one-eyed bank-robber antihero is badass enough to have earned the guy a generation of goodwill despite a subsequent decade filled with Captain Rons and Tango & Cashes. A lot more of what’s awesome about it is the dynamite supporting cast, which includes Lee Van Cleef, Harry Dean Stanton, a tasty Adrienne Barbeau, Donald Pleasance as a Fightin’ President, Screengrab fave/That Guy! emeritus Tom Atkins, and Isaac Hayes in a role so tough he almost out-bad-dudes Snake Plissken. But leaving all that aside, Escape from New York twists conventions all over the place: the bad boy reprobate is trying to break into prison, not get out of it, and New York, rather than being the destination everyone’s trying to reach and the place people only leave because they’re about to hit 40 and they can’t stand living with a roommate in Crown Heights anymore, is a maximum security prison where futuristic America dumps its biggest scumbags. (Insert predictable ‘Oh, the wacky world of science fiction, where New York is filled with criminal scum! Ha ha!’ joke here). Much as he did in Escape from Precinct 13, Carpenter takes genre conventions and flips them on their ears, with highly entertaining results.

STALAG 17 (1953)

Billy Wilder’s films are so essential and influential and beloved that it’s hard to pull back and talk about how weird and unsettling and even unpleasant they are. But they are indeed weird, unsettling, and often unpleasant. For one thing, there’s so much fakery that it’s up for grabs what Wilder was trying to elicit from his audience. In Billy Wilder’s eyes, life is about deception. Many -- if not most -- of his main characters are phonies. The cynics are all romantics. The romantics are all cynics. Sometimes they’re deluding themselves, sometimes the rest of the world. His movies also lather on a thick corn hash. That’s not too unusual for a Hollywood director of his era. John Ford and Howard Hawks were both certainly guilty of overcooking the corn. In Wilder’s movies, sometimes the corn is funny and sometimes it seems pointless. It’s all part of the artifice of his movies, the occasionally clumsy sleight-of-hand that he works with to try to distract you from the horror and mess his characters are making of their lives with all their deception. This artifice is occasionally too much for Wilder’s movies, and a few stories that should work (like Ace In The Hole, for instance, or The Apartment) try to hang too much suffering on a premise too phony and characters too empty. However, Stalag 17 goes the other way. It's a good Wilder movie. It did, however, open the door for Hogan’s Heroes, a bad tv show (don’t try to justify your nostalgia to me; it may be iconic but that doesn’t mean it’s good). It also laid the groundwork for the Roberto Benigni atrocity Life Is Beautiful, and a handful of other movies leaping to your mind about the goofy fun time people had in Nazi prison camps. Not that movies about Nazi prisons have to be grim, but c’mon, those flicks have no goddamn perspective. Anyway, the comic relief is far too broad for the movie, the story is pitched somewhere between too cynical and too maudlin, the characters are a little slow on the uptake, and damn if I know how it all works, but Stalag 17 somehow makes sense.

A MAN ESCAPED (1957)

The title suggests a conclusion foregone, but Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped is unconcerned with the conclusion. What’s important is the suffocating tight focus on Lt. Fontaine, our captured protagonist, his wide eyes full of twitchy wildness like cornered game, as he goes about the nuts-and-bolts of dismantling the prison about him. The movie opens with a close-up on his hand, testing a car door lever. In a minute, he will leap from the car and be immediately recaptured. But for the first couple of minutes, Bresson’s camera watches him as he holds his breath, waiting for just the right moment. Some men may give up when caught, but this one was built for escape. You will learn soon enough that he is a member of the French Resistance who is headed for detainment in a Nazi jail. He tells his story mostly in short, clipped voiceovers, as few people speak to him or give him a reason to speak during his confinement. But speech is unimportant. His mind is constantly at work planning his escape. Bresson’s taut and economical film lays bare the mechanics of a prison break, provided, of course, that the prison is built and staffed exactly like the one in the movie.

DEATH AND THE MAIDEN (1994)

The only prison in Roman Polanski’s film of Ariel Dorfman’s play Death and the Maiden is in the past. Sigourney Weaver plays Paulina, a former political prisoner scarred by her rape and torture while imprisoned. Her husband Gerardo (Stuart Wilson) owes her everything. One night -- the only night in this movie, really -- his car breaks down and he catches a ride from Dr. Miranda (Ben Kingsley), who leaves and later returns when he realizes that he accidentally kept Gerardo’s spare tire. The two men have a drink. Meanwhile, Paulina has apparently flipped. She steals Miranda’s car and destroys it, then returns home and begins to torture the man, claiming he did terrible things to her in the past. Her husband is understandably confused. Miranda seemed okay to him. And he knows that Paulina never saw her tormenter while in prison. How can she be sure? Three characters, one night, and a lifetime of human suffering.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Hayden Childs

Morning Deal Report: Remaking the Stone

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 15:30:00 GMT

I have nothing but remakes for you this morning, I’m afraid. It’s up to you, the Screengrab reader, to determine which among them is most egregiously unnecessary. We begin with Romancing the Stone, which itself was considered little more than a Raiders of the Lost Ark knockoff before cleaning up at the box office and spawning the much less beloved sequel The Jewel of the Nile. Now Fox has tapped Daniel McDermott to pen a remake of “the story of a repressed romance novelist who travels to Colombia to find her missing sister only to meet up with an American soldier of fortune,” per The Hollywood Reporter.

But that’s not all! THR is also reporting that “Russell Brand might soon be caught between the moon and New York City.” Yes, a remake of Arthur is on the table. As you’ll recall, the original starred Dudley Moore as “a boozy playboy rascal who is set to inherit a fortune if he marries an heiress his family thinks will make something out of him. However, he falls in love with a working-class woman and turns to his valet for help when his family makes him choose between money and love.” We’re interested in the remake only if Liza Minnelli reprises her role as the working-class woman Brand romances.

You’re saying, “Please, Screengrab! No more remakes!” But we cannot oblige. John Carpenter’s They Live is coming back to life. As you know, “The movie is known for a fight scene that lasts 5 1⁄2 minutes and for the line, ‘I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass ... and I'm all out of bubblegum.’” And Hollywood is all out of ideas.

Related:
Brand X: Sexy Beast Russell Brand Storms America
Attack of the '80s Sci-Fi Remakes

Screengrab's Top Guilty Pleasures (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 22:00:00 GMT

LEONARD PIERCE'S GUILTY PLEASURES:

BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA (1986)

Given its date of release – my senior year of high school – you might think that my unrepentant love of this middling John Carpenter action flick is just geek hangover from my formative years. But really, it’s all down to Buckaroo Banzai. I have a lifelong adoration of pulp fiction, the sort of trashy mass-market literary and cinematic entertainments popular from the ‘30s to the ‘50s, which would occasionally yield surprisingly resonant characters like the Shadow or shockingly talented writers like Raymond Chandler. For the same reason, I’m a fan of modern attempts to conjure that rare era, and one of my all-time favorites is the charming, funny, and utterly inimitable 1982 flick The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension. At the very end of the movie, a sequel was promised, but it never materialized; however, its director, W.D. Richter, was hired by John Carpenter to punch up a screenplay called Big Trouble in Little China – a B movie he wanted to turn into an A picture. It wasn’t quite that; in fact, a lot of Big Trouble in Little China can’t even aspire to B quality and settles down somewhere around Z. But it occasionally shows flashes of that demented Buckaroo Banzai genius, and while I normally can’t stand Kurt Russell, his insane John-Wayniac performance as two-fisted trucker Jack Burton (who Russell correctly points out is a hero who never does anything remotely heroic) adds an enjoyably louche element to the whole affair. Big Trouble in Little China is a perfect example of a movie that’s better than it has any right to be.

CREEPSHOW (1982)

As my esteemed colleague Scott Von Doviak can testify, Stephen King is responsible for a lot of movies. And many of them are very, very bad. (He doesn’t even seem to like the ones that are good; this is a man who’s on record as liking Maximum Overdrive more than Stanley Kubrick’s version of The Shining.) His collaboration with zombie auteur George Romero – and one of the few major adaptations of his work where he actually wrote the screenplay himself – isn’t a very, very bad movie, but it isn’t a very, very good one either. Like the EC horror comics that serve as its inspiration, it’s unapologetic camp, with all that this implies: when it’s good, it’s very good, but when it’s bad, it’s worse. With an extremely iffy cast, no particular structure or emotional stakes, and Romero directing like a man who’s looking to buy a summer home, Creepshow has a lot going against it; add to the mix the fact that it features an infamous segment involving a man whose home is overrun by cockroaches, and you’d think I’d hate it more than I hate traffic jams. But, as it happens, Creepshow is one of my all-time guilty pleasures; I can’t say that it’s a good movie, exactly, but I watch it again and again, with some of its flattest, lamest scenes – including King’s own extraterrestrially over-the-top acting debut – being numbered among my favorites. Plus, it has an unbilled cameo by my all-time favorite That Guy!, B-movie king Tom Atkins! How could I not love it?

NURSE BETTY (2000)

There’s plenty of people who don’t even like the good movies that Neil LaBute makes; his early work, like In the Company of Men and Your Friends & Neighbors, has plenty of detractors. But while it’s no Wicker Man, his third full-length feature, Nurse Betty, is widely considered a low point in his career. And, to be honest, I can see why. He didn’t write the script (a meandering thing about a small-town nurse who, stricken with a sort of traumatic amnesia, goes to Hollywood to hook up with the soap opera surgeon she has come to believe is real), which is often flat and more than a few times carries suspension of belief beyond the breaking point. The role of a damaged naïf is suitable to Rene Zellweger, but she’s still a bad actress even when she’s in her comfort zone. And Greg Kinnear and Aaron Eckhart, two actors who have never done much for me, continue to not do much for me here. And yet, and yet…I return to the movie a lot more than I ever thought I would on the first viewing. Most of it has to do with the film’s villains: Morgan Freeman, taking a break from his normal Magical Negro gig to play a veteran hit man, is terrific as a consummate professional who can’t see his own fatal weakness, and Chris Rock is downright astonishing as Freeman’s hotheaded protégé – it’s the only thing Rock has ever done that suggests to me that he might have a pretty goddamn great dramatic actor buried in him somewhere. Thematically, the movie promises a lot more than it can deliver, but for some reason Nurse Betty has always been one of those movies where I forgive the wasted potential, because there seems like so much of it to waste.

SPICE WORLD (1997)

Why all the hate for the Spice Girls? They only wanted to zigga zigga, after all. The massive outpouring of hate directed at them smacked of bad faith, and the claim that they represented the death of music clearly came from people who weren’t paying much attention to the rest of the dross on top 40 radio in 1997. And while I’ll be the first to admit that Spice World is no A Hard Day’s Night, it’s not from lack of trying: if the band, the cast, and the crew lacked the genius and charm of the Beatles, they certainly didn’t lack good intentions, and at heart, they were making the exact same kind of movie. The biggest band in the world bond with each other, drop wisecracks, engage in wacky hi-jinks, and avoid their rabid fans while having a good time doing it. If the Spice Girls weren’t a patch on the Fab Four musically, they did have a similar cultural cachet (albeit for only about five seconds), and who can begrudge them trying to have fun with the movie that was inevitably going to get made about them? And if they lacked the pure charisma of the lads from Liverpool, Mel B and Mel C looked better in skimpy outfits than Ringo Starr looked in anything. The girls came up with the idea for the movie themselves, which makes them more praiseworthy or more blameworthy depending on your perspective, and the producers, knowing that they didn’t have a John Lennon or a Paul McCartney on their hands, at least stuffed Spice World with ringers like Mark McKinney, Stephen Fry, Bob Hoskins and Richard E. Grant. Like the band, Spice World is a fun, ultimately irrelevant little pop gumdrop, and there’s nothing wrong with that, damn it.

Click Here For More Guilt From Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Hayden Childs, Vadim Rizov & Sarah Clyne Sundberg

Contributor: Leonard Pierce

Take Five: Halloween

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 19:45:00 GMT

When a franchise has legs, the people who own it whip it so hard that those legs inevitably come off. That doesn't keep them from flogging its backside, of course; there have been eleven Friday the Thirteenth movies, eight Freddy Krueger flicks, and so many James Bond movies that they're starting to use grocery lists written by Ian Fleming on the back of cocktail napkins as their source material. The Saw franchise is already on its fifth installment, despite the fact that the first movie opened roughly three weeks ago, and I'm pretty sure they were filming the sixth and seventh movies at the craft table of the set of the fifth one. Compared to this level of sequel overinflation, you might think that the venerable Halloween franchise is a virtual model of restraint. That's what I thought, anyway, when I decided to watch every single one of them in a row. Frankly, I didn't even think there was enough of it to make a Take Five; I was completely convinced that the ultra-bizarre Halloween III had killed the thing off until Rob Zombie decided to bring it back with his 2007 remake of the original. It turns out there were five more sequels before the White Zombie frontman took a swing at reviving Michael Myers. A chilling prospect, but lucky you: this Halloween, you won't have to read my mini-reviews of each one. The first five will do, but believe me: simply living in a world that has Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers in it should scare you more than anything else about the holiday.

HALLOWEEN (1978)

Often credited as the movie that kick-started the whole slasher-film genre, Halloween doesn't really deserve that title. For one thing, it's too good. Tautly directed by John Carpenter, and featuring performances by genuine movie actors like Jamie Lee Curtis and Donald Pleasance, Halloween was likewise a big-budget picture with a canny script, a plausible if terrifying villain, and actual production values. The future would belong to movies like Friday the Thirteenth, which would be released a few years later and combine all the low-budget qualities of an indie production with the bloody aesthetic of Carpenter's best work, but none of the smarts or skills. If it can't lay claim to being the progenitor of the genre, though, Halloween can at least say that it's one of the best; it still holds up years later, and makes what came after that more of a waste.

HALLOWEEN II (1981)

Literally picking up where the first movie left off, Halloween II had the advantage of being written by Carpenter and his partner Debra Hill and the immediacy of the same characters and situations, but that's about it. The filming was put in the hands of the far less competent Rick Rosenthal; the producers tinkered a lot with Carpenter and Hill's script; the movie looks dismal and kluged-together despite a much higher budget; and, in keeping with the new slasher aesthetic ushered in by the likes of Friday the Thirteenth, it forsook tension, mood and suspense for low-budget mysticism, cheap shocks, and gore, gore, gore. It cost twice as much as its predecessor but made half the money, and it would stand as one of the most disappointing sequels of the era -- until people got a look at the next installment.

HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH (1982)

Almost as if to prove to the millions of people who hated Halloween II that they didn't know how good they had it, the next sequel, made a year later by the mysterious Tommy Lee Wallace, was bad enough on its own: its plot was incomprehensible, its pace was glacial, its story made no sense, and with the exception of cult favorite character actor Tom Atkins in the lead role, its cast was a dud. Worse still, though, it had absolutely nothing to do with the previous movies. Michael Myers was nowhere to be found, and the story -- involving a tycoon who intended to turn the heads of all the children of the world into slithering insects with the aid of high-tech Halloween masks (no, really) -- had no apparent connection to the first two movies. Wallace claimed he was trying to turn the franchise into a sort of horror anthology, a la "Night Gallery"; but he didn't seem to have told anyone beforehand, nor was he able to adequately explain why.

HALLOWEEN IV: THE RETURN OF MICHAEL MYERS (1988)

So thoroughly did Season of the Witch tarnish the reputation of the Halloween franchise that it would be six years before producer/propertyholder Moustapha Akkad gave it another whirl. He apparently spent those six years looking for someone who would answer "yes" to the questions "will you put Michael Myers back in the movie?" and "will you take a check?"; that someone Dwight H. Little, and the movie he made featured an answer to the first question right in its title. The plot, such as it is, features the comatose Myers arising to kill and kill again; the movie brings back Donald Pleasance to add a touch of class, but other than that, its new cast, new creative team, and new focus bring absolutely nothing to the table. In some ways, it's even worse than Halloween III; at least that movie had some ideas, even if they were all bad ones.

HALLOWEEN V: THE REVENGE OF MICHAEL MYERS (1989)

Made roughly three seconds after Halloween IV wrapped, the fifth installment ended up competing with its predecessor, which was just then being released on home video. To be honest, I have a lot of trouble telling the two apart: the cover art is indistinguishable, the plot is identical, and both movies feature a fucked-up-looking Donald Pleasance collecting another paycheck. If you're still keeping track at home, this is the one that introduces some additional supernatural mumbo-jumbo, with Danielle Harris suddenly discovering, after two movies, that she has a psychic link with her uncle Mikey; other than that, they're pretty much the same movie. Halloween V is the movie that introduced me to the directing talents of one Dominique Othenin-Girard, and, subsequently, caused me to never again seek out said talents.

Related Posts:

Take Five: Friday the Thirteenth

Take Five: Take Four

The Screengrab 24-Hour Stephen King Marathon (Part One)

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Introduction

Midnight – 2 a.m. FIRESTARTER (1984)

Here’s an inauspicious beginning to our little festival. We can start with the resume of director Mark L. Lester, a career on the fringes highlighted by Truck Stop Women, Roller Boogie and Class of 1984. Then there’s the second-rate source material, seemingly inspired by the question, “What if Carrie got her powers before her first period and had a more supportive parent?” Put them together and you have a shoddy little supernatural thriller starring a puffy little Drew Barrymore as Charlie, the girl who sets fires with her mind. Charlie was born with this ability after her parents Andy (David Keith) and Vicky (Heather Locklear) took part in a medical experiment conducted by the shadowy government agency The Shop. This same agency, headed up by Martin Sheen with an impressively poofy head of hair, is now pursuing Andy (who has that kind of ESP that makes your nose bleed) and Charlie, who they believe will develop the capability of burning down the entire planet. To that end, Sheen brings in John Rainbird, a maniacal child-killer with an eyepatch and a ponytail. Would you cast George C. Scott in this role? Mark Lester did. Terrible performances abound – I’m gonna go ahead and guess that Barrymore started drinking on this set – but at least there’s always a chance that the actors will burst into flames. The horrendous score by Tangerine Dream carbon dates the movie to the exact second of its release. The ending is stolen outright from Three Days of the Condor, but at least in the book, King had the good sense to admit that’s what he had in mind.

2 a.m. – 4 a.m. THE MANGLER (1995)

Before he was the world’s best-selling author, King worked in an industrial laundromat and supplemented his income by selling short stories to skin magazines. The Mangler is based on one such story, which concerns an industrial laundry machine that becomes possessed by a demon and starts killing people. And you wonder where he gets his ideas. To the best of my recollection, the short story (found in the Night Shift collection) runs only a few pages. It’s been a long time since I read it, so I’m not sure exactly what director Tobe Hooper and his screenwriters added to stretch it out to feature length. It couldn’t have been much, though. Hooper gives us an impressively Dickensian laundry, all hissing steam and dark grinding gears and sweaty, filthy, bosomy workers. Robert “Freddy Krueger” Englund seems to think he’s Dickensian in his layers of old age makeup and clanky mechanical legs, but my guess is his performance was sponsored by Honey Baked Ham. The premise: the gigantic folding machine gets a taste of virgin blood, awakening its inner demon. Said machine begins feeding on the laundresses and then, when it breaks free of its moorings and goes mobile, everyone else. Ted Levine gives an enjoyably unhinged performance as the cop investigating this peculiar turn of events, but there’s nowhere near enough story here to sustain a 106-minute running time.

4 a.m. – 6 a.m. CHRISTINE (1983)

One of King’s recurring themes is Our Machines Will Kill Us. (Perhaps you’ve heard of The Mangler?) Another one is Revenge of the Nerd (as in the abovementioned Carrie). Put them both together and you’ve got Christine, in which nerd meets car, car turns nerd into cool guy, car starts killing cool guy’s enemies. Fresh off his remake of The Thing, John Carpenter directed this solid if undistinguished adaptation of King’s killer car tale. (“Solid if undistinguished” is pretty much Carpenter’s stock in trade; he’s a meat-and-potatoes B-movie guy, and I’m guessing he’d take that as a compliment.) Give him this much: Carpenter was the first to use George Thorogood’s “Bad to the Bone” in a movie – it plays as the red 1958 Plymouth Fury rolls off the assembly line under the opening credits – and Terminator or no Terminator, it’s still the best use of the song ever. Twenty years later, loser Arnie Cunningham (Keith Gordon) spots the Fury rusting in a vacant lot and it’s love at first sight. Before long, Arnie has ditched his nerd glasses and restored the car named Christine to its former glory, and the bullies who once plagued him are meeting untimely ends beneath her wheels. Carpenter makes spooky use of ’50s rock and roll, which effectively acts as the ghost in the machine, and comes up with a few nifty images, notably Christine ablaze and pursuing one of Arnie’s tormenters like a literal Car From Hell. The pre-CGI shots of the car regenerating itself after being vandalized are a hoot, and the grand finale, in which Christine is run over with a bulldozer and crushed into a cube, is cathartic for any disgruntled car owner.

Part Two

Thursday Morning Poll for October 23, 2008

Paul Clark — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Reader Steve C. accused me of being a sadist due to last week’s poll, in which I asked readers which of George A. Romero’s Dead movies was their favorite. But (somewhat spurious) charges of sadism notwithstanding, the Romero poll saw perhaps the most decisive win of any Thursday Morning Poll to date. A full two-thirds of Screengrab readers selected 1978’s gorefest/consumerism satire Dawn of the Dead as their favorite of the franchise, followed by Night and Day. The more recent entries in the series, Land and Diary, received no love whatsoever, but while neither of them is up to the high standard set by the original trilogy, I have a soft spot for Land, which almost feels like the best John Carpenter movie that Carpenter never made. If nothing else, it’s the best Carpenter movie in the last two decades (since They Live, of course).

In conjunction with both the upcoming Presidential election and the recent release of Oliver Stone’s W., I thought a Presidential quiz was in order for this week. But while I struggled to come up with a suitable topic, it dawned on me that Josh Brolin wasn’t the first member of his family to portray an actual President. A few years ago Josh’s dear old dad, James “Paging Mr. Herman” Brolin, essayed the role of Ronald Reagan in a much-ballyhooed and controversial miniseries, The Reagans. In light of this realization, I decided this was the only logical question for this week’s quiz. So, I ask you- which Brolin do you think was more Presidential?

Which Brolin was more Presidential? | BuzzDash polls

As always, the comments section is open. So exercise your right to vote, and we’ll see you next week!

Vintage Trailer Review: Incredible Two-Headed Marathon Special

Paul Clark — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 17:00:00 GMT

It’s the middle of October, and many of you are no doubt getting ready for your Halloween festivities. But for all you movie lovers who are planning to be in Central Ohio this weekend, check out the area’s premier horror-movie event, The Incredible Two-Headed Marathon. Currently in their fifth year as co-hosts, Bruce Bartoo and Joe Neff have once again lined up a diverse and crowd-pleasing lineup, with something to delight horror lovers of practically every stripe. This year, to commemorate the Marathon, I’ve decided to post some trailers for the classics that are being shown, to go along with the Trailer Reviews I've already posted this week for the area premiere films playing at the Marathon, All the Boys Love Mandy Lane and Let the Right One In.

We begin with the trailer for Mario Bava’s Kill, Baby… Kill!, one of Bava’s early classics and a favorite of giallo fans. I’m woefully underversed in my Bava, but there’s no mistaking that style, even in trailer form. Dig those zooms!

Next, we move on to the original Wes Craven version of The Hills Have Eyes, back before he got all mixed up with Kevin Williamson and violins and the like.

Another genre master being represented this year is John Carpenter, whose 1980 film The Fog will be playing here. Not exactly one of my favorite Carpenter films, but it’s a lot of fun nonetheless.

Finally, Bruce and Joe always seem to include a movie that doesn’t necessarily fit with the “horror” theme but is a crowd-pleaser nonetheless. This year, they’ve chosen Peter Jackson’s cult favorite Meet the Feebles, which should be a blast to see with a Marathon crowd.

If you’re planning to attend a horror marathon where you live, feel free to tell us about it in the comments section. And for anyone who’s interested in finding out more about the Incredible Two-Headed Marathon, check out the official Web site.

Isaac Hayes, 1942--2008

Phil Nugent — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 22:00:00 GMT

Isaac Hayes has died, at 65, at his home in Memphis, Tennessee. Hayes first came to prominence through his work at Memphis's legendary Stax studios, where, still in his early twenties, he became a keyboard player with the house band, worked as part of the production team, and developed a fruitful songwriting partnership with David Porter. The Porter-Hayes credit appeared on some two hundred compositions, including a raft of hits by the magnificent duo Sam and Dave, including "Soul Man", "I Thank You", "You Don't Know Like I Know", "When Something Is Wrong with My Baby", and "Hold On, I'm Comin'", whose title phrase is said to have been born when the hard-working Hayes was importuning Porter to return from the men's room. No ego as endearingly supersized as Hayes's could have been completely satisfied with working behind the scenes, and in 1967 he released his first solo album, the jazz-flavored Presenting Isaac Hayes. That was followed in 1969 by the unexpected blockbuster success of Hot Buttered Soul, which established Hayes's gruff bass voice, his habit of interjecting spoken-word interludes into his songs, his flamboyantly extended performances of such numbers as "By the Time I Get to Phoenix", and, through its cover art, the iconic impact of his big bald head and taste for gold necklaces. The album made him Stax's biggest star at a precarious time in the label's history.

Hayes would first branch out into movies with his soundtrack for the black-private eye movie Shaft in 1971. The jarringly funky "Theme from Shaft" became a significant radio hit, and would earn Hayes (who had an on-screen cameo as a bartender) an Academy Award for Best Original Song, thus making him the first African-American to be given an Oscar for a non-acting contribution to a movie. (Shaft would also earn Hayes Grammy and Golden Globe Awards for Best Original Motion Picture Score.) When Stax staged a one-day concert in Los Angeles, featuring all its biggest acts, to commemorate the anniversary of the Watts riots, the resulting performance documentary, Wattstax (1973), featured Hayes in the concert-closing role of conquering hero, taking the stage in bare chest and chains. (He proceeded to perform "Theme from Shaft" and "Soulsville", but because MGM owned the rights to those songs and refused to give them up for the soundtrack, Hayes wound up recording another song, "Rollin' Down a Mountain", just so that there'd be something the movie could show after his grand entrance. The original footage was finally restored a few years ago when a buffed-up version of Wattstax was shown on the PBS series P.O.V. and released to DVD.)

By 1975, Stax was reduced ro filing for bankruptcy, but by then Hayes seemed more interested in his movie career anyway. He co-starred with Fred Williamson in the self-explanatory Tough Guys (1974) and then played the title role in Truck Turner. He had a recurring guest role as the ex-con Gandy Finch on The Rockford Files and ruled a post-apocalyptic Big Apple in John Carpenter's Escape from New York (1981). But through the 1980s and early '90s, most of the steam had escaped from his career. Salvation came in the unlikely form of the role of Chef on South Park, which didn't just give him a semi-regular paycheck and establish him as a beloved talisman of the 1970s; it gave him his most conspicuous music success in decades when the novelty song "Chocolate Salty Balls" (which he performed on the show and which was included in Chef Aid: The South Park Album) went to number one on the UK charts. After ten years, Hayes and South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker went their separate ways over a nasty dispute over Hayes's reported indignation over the show's satirical treatment of Scientology. In the meantime, Hayes also put out some fresh music while appearing onscreen in Flipper, Illtown, Six Ways to Sunday, Blues Brothers 2000, Reindeer Games, Hustle & Flow, while lending his voice to Dr. Dolittle 2 and, of course South Park: Bigger, Longer, & Uncut. In 2002, he and other soul legends were paid tribute in the documentary Only the Strong Survive, and that same year he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

A cause of death has not yet been determined.

The Top Ten Great Scenes From Not So Great Movies (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 20:00:00 GMT

A few weeks ago, we here at the Screengrab called on YOU, the good people of Blogtopia, to let us know what Top Ten Lists you’d like to see us forget to include your favorite movies on...and, lo, it came to pass that we did verily discuss the finest farewells and most ignominious exits in the annals of cinema o’er the previous fortnight at the behest of one “Other Matt.” (Sorry, I just got back from the free outdoor Boston Common production of All’s Well That Ends Well, and I'm still feeling a little iambic.)

Anyway, this week, we’ve taken the suggestion of just plain “Matt” (presumably the original Matt and possibly Other Matt’s Batman-esque nemesis): ten great scenes that really deserved to be in better movies!

"Kickapoo" from TENACIOUS D IN THE PICK OF DESTINY (2006)

It’s difficult to describe to the uninitiated what a colossal disappointment the Tenacious D movie turned out to be. If you’ve only seen the movie or heard a handful of songs, it would be easy to dismiss the portly duo (Jack Black and Kyle Gass) as a comic novelty act. But the fans knew better, getting hooked on the endlessly re-watchable HBO series and frequenting D concerts. And with Pick of Destiny, it felt like their dream had finally come true: a fitting vehicle for the self-proclaimed “World’s Greatest Band.” Then they actually saw the movie, at which point all hope came crashing down, leaving D fans no choice but to trudge home and forlornly listen to “Fuck Her Gently” over and over again. But before that could happen, the movie’s opening scene actually delivered everything the fans had always hoped for...namely, a kickass rockin’ D musical. The “Kickapoo” number (an all-sung origin story featuring Meat Loaf as the Bible-thumping father of young Jables and Ronnie James Dio as a diabolical mentor) promises so much more than even a good movie could possibly deliver. Which, of course, makes it all the more disappointing that the movie that follows barely even seems to try, even jettisoning Meat Loaf and Dio altogether and retreating to the relatively safe template of stoner comedy. But for five minutes, it’s pure Tenacious D bliss, the foul-mouthed, Jim Steinman-esque rock opera the fans deserved, rather than the sub-Cheech’n’Chong antics they ended up getting.

That long-ass alley brawl from THEY LIVE (1988)

John Carpenter's 1988 sci-fi allegory wasn't a terrible movie by any means; it was your basic, meat-and-potatoes B-movie, the ideal bottom half of a drive-in double bill back when such things existed. (There is dissent in the Screengrab bullpen about this evaluation, with at least one colleague proclaiming They Live to be "totally awesome," but in my book such praise is reserved for movies that don't star "Rowdy" Roddy Piper.) But Carpenter's movie does have its moment of greatness…well, actually it's a hell of a lot longer than a moment. Piper's Nada, a laborer who finds a special pair of sunglasses that allow him to see hidden messages in billboards and hidden aliens inside seemingly normal people, wishes to share his discovery with his co-worker Frank (Keith David). Frank declines. When a sensible discussion of the issue fails to bear fruit, fisticuffs ensue. And ensue. And ensue. For nearly six minutes, Piper and David beat the crap out of each other in an alley, and every time you think they're finished, reduced to nothing more than heaves and grunts, they start all over again. It's not that their fight is some brilliantly choreographed ballet of action – its brilliance (and hilarity) lies in its single-minded relentlessness.

Jack & Sam's hellacious squabble from HUSBANDS AND WIVES (1992)

It was a perfect storm for Woody Allen in 1992: his personal life was splattered all over the tabloids, and his new movie came packaged with provocative similarities to the headlines. Most critics were quick to slap a label reading "Woody's latest masterpiece" on Husbands and Wives, praising the shaky camera work, jump-cuts and foul language as well as the perceived highly personal subject matter. This was a breakthrough, a new raw, down-and-dirty Woody Allen – except for those of us who saw it as the same old Allen with a derivative, migraine-inducing stylistic tic wholly unsuited to his Upper East Side world. Sure enough, it didn't take long for Woody to revert to his tried-and-true long master shots and PG-13 dialogue, but there is one scene in Husbands and Wives that delivers a short, sharp shock of the rawness Allen was targeting. It doesn't involve his character or Mia Farrow at all – and you could speculate that Allen couldn't bring himself to completely abandon his audience's affections, though I've seen too many of his subsequent films (Deconstructing Harry, Anything Else) to make that mistake – but rather the late Sydney Pollack in the role that really turned the remainder of his career towards acting rather than directing. As Jack (the best friend role that had often gone to Tony Roberts or Michael Murphy in the past), Pollack is a married man romancing a younger woman, Sam (Lysette Anthony), described by Allen's character as a "fucking cocktail waitress." Pollack dismisses Allen's snobbery until Sam embarrasses him at an upscale party by voicing her New Age-y thoughts about tofu and astrology and whatnot. What follows is sort of the Woody Allen version of the They Live fight – a corrosive "let's get outta here" scene that escalates into a kind of mortifying slapstick.

Click here for Part Two & Part Three

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Paul Clark, Scott Von Doviak

Take Five: Friday the 13th

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 20:15:00 GMT

Normally, the Friday Take Five feature is built around some new release. But this is a very special day for bottom-drawer cinephiles the world over: today is Friday the 13th, the day commemorated in a series of eleven of the rootin'-est, tootin'-est, sexually-active-teenager-beheadin'-east movies of all time. While there isn't a new Friday the 13th movie coming out -- unfortunately, or thankfully depending on your perspective, we'll have to wait until 2009 for the proposed remake of the first movie -- there's no reason we can't take a look back at what is, despite the universal revulsion of critics, one of the most successful franchises in motion picture history. It's hard to believe it's been 28 years since the first Friday the 13th movie, but the mass-murderous adventures of the scrappy, plucky Jason Voorhees (and what's with all the big-screen serial killers having such WASPy names, from Voorhees to Krueger to Meyers? Aren't there any unstoppable, inhuman psychopathic butchers named Breitkowicz or Morelli?) have manage to last longer than most marriages. With little more than a machete, a hockey mask, and a can-do attitude, Jason has become a cultural icon, almost single-handedly birthing the lamentable teen-slasher genre so popular in the 1980s and managing to set a standard for improbable resurrections that not even superhero comics can rival. I'm not going to say that the movies below represent the best of the Friday the 13th movies; to be perfectly honest, "best" just isn't a word than any of these flicks can aspire to. But at the very least, these are the five that represent, in some way, a hallmark acheivement for everyone's favorite reason to avoid summer camp.

FRIDAY THE 13th (1980)

It's usually claimed that the first of the venerable hack-'n'slash franchise is the best, and we can't argue with that claim. However, while John Carpenter's Halloween was a genuinely good low-budget horror movie that spawned a ton of far inferior sequels, Sean Cunningham's Friday the 13th was pretty much a crappy exploitation movie that produced a bunch of sequels that were marginally worse. The francise didn't have far to fall, but at the very least, if you were of a certain age in the 1980s, seeing the original Friday the 13th was something like a rite of passage. Of mild canonical interest due to the fact that Jason Voorhees isn't the killer and doesn't even appear in the film in his familiar form, this would still just be a long-forgotten curio along the lines of Silent Night Deadly Night if it hadn't happened to catch an inexplicable fire and turn into one of the biggest indie movie hits of all time. The sequels that it birthed are all much, much worse, don't get us wrong -- but don't go into this expecting any kind of a diamond in the rough. It's just the least objectionable turd in a very big punchbowl.

FRIDAY THE 13th PART 3 (1982)

Although the franchise was already a runaway hit, it wasn't until the third installment that the Friday the 13th movies finally took the shape with which we're most familiar today. The third visit to woebegotten Camp Crystal Lake was marketed as a gimmick movie thanks to having been filmed in 3-D ("A new dimension in terror!", screamed the posters and newspaper ads), but what really makes Friday the 13th Part 3 so memorable in the series is that it's the first time the immortal and ill-tempered Jason Voorhees first dons his iconic hockey mask. He also picks up a few attributes that would be reiterated, if never actually explained in any way, in all subsequent Friday the 13th movies: his tremendous, almost superhuman strength, and his abilty to come back from almost any injury, however fatal. Hockey goalies are the members of the team least likely to get into a fistfight on the ice, but starting with this movie, Jason Voorhees manages to make them seem like the most bad-ass guys in professional sports.

FRIDAY THE 13th: THE FINAL CHAPTER (1984)

The fourth installment of the franchise promised it would be the last, and some people -- including special effects wizard Tom Savini, who believed this would be Jason Voorhees' last ride, and actor Ted White, who played the killer but was so upset with the script and the poor treatment of the actors that he asked for his name to be removed from the credits -- seemed to believe it. No such luck, though: The Final Chapter made $32 million, which pretty much guaranteed that there would be more to come. In most ways a typical example of the series (Jason goes bananas on a bunch of teens with a variety of sharpened implements), The Final Chapter is noteworthy largely for its cast: a young Corey Feldman plays the male lead in a sure sign that you're watching a movie that was made in the mid-1980s. Additionally, Crispin Glover's fans and detractors alike will be interested to know that in this movie, the always-controversial actor's hand gets nailed to a countertop with a corkscrew. And then Jason whacks him in the face with a meat cleaver.

JASON X (2002)

It's the tenth movie! Get it? If that doesn't strike you as particularly clever, too bad, because believe us, it doesn't get any better from there. By this point in the two decades of the Friday the 13th franchise, the character of Jason Voorhees has already become a sort of cultural punchline for improbable resurrections; in addition, he's already slipped the surly bonds of Camp Crystal Lake and visited, amongst other places, Manhattan, Hell, and the depths of Corey Feldman's soul -- each worse than the one before. So what was left for the venerable franchise to do but send him to an even more absurd location (a spaceship orbiting a post-apocalyptic future Earth) and give him an even more ridiculous method of resurrection (infiltrated by a hi-tech nanobot virus and transformed into a cybernetic superman)? The writers were also clever enough to use the movie's future setting as a way to give the finger to the innumerable continuity nerds who had started swarming around the francise.

FREDDY VS. JASON (2003)

Well, why not? Pitting the two slasher icons against one another was an idea that had been kicking around for a decade, but by the time it finally got made, anyone who expected Hong Kong veteran Ronny Yu to bring the same sly, campy sense of humor to Freddy vs. Jason that he did to Bride of Chucky was in for a pretty big disappointment. The plot to this thing is pretty incomprehensible, even by the convoluted standards of Friday the 13th movies, but it's all just prelude to the big showdown between the two bloodthirsty ne'er-do-wells that makes up the second half of the movie. After a great deal of hurled cutlery, Jason seems to emerge victorious, trudging sloppily out of Crystal Lake with the severed head of Freddy Krueger -- which then proceeds to give us a wink, a laugh, and the terrifying prospect of yet another sequel. Luckily, that's the last we've seen of Freddy or Jason for a good long while, but the remake is less than a year away...

Summer of ’78: “Damien: Omen II”

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Each Thursday this summer we’ll hop in the Screengrab time machine and jump back thirty years to see what was new and exciting at the neighborhood moviehouse this week in…The Summer of ’78!

Damien: Omen II

Release Date: June 9, 1978

Cast: William Holden, Lee Grant, Jonathan Scott-Taylor, Robert Foxworth, Sylvia Sidney, Lance Henriksen

The Buzz: The son of Satan is back to raise more hell!

Keywords: Devil Child, Satanism, Ice Hockey, Attacked By Bird, Torso Cut In Half

The Plot: I'd never seen any of the Omen movies, but I do vaguely recall reading the novelizations. You know how it is; too young to see R-rated movies in the theater, but not too young to buy the book versions of same down at Mr. Paperback. (They were probably just happy I was interested in reading at all.) So I can’t tell you much about the first Omen movie, but let’s all agree to assume that Damien Thorn was born with the mark of the beast, and that those who figured out he was the Antichrist met with an untimely demise.

One of those people was Damien’s father Robert Thorn (Gregory Peck), who apparently did not have the chance to change his will before attempting to kill his own offspring with sacred daggers, because as the sequel begins, the now teenage Damien is in the custody of Robert’s brother Richard (William Holden) and his wife Ann (Lee Grant). Now a military school cadet, Damien is still unaware of his destiny as the prince of darkness, until his sergeant (played by a young-yet-craggy Lance Henriksen) tells him to check out the Book of Revelation. “For you it is just that – a book of revelation, for you, about you.” Hey, who couldn’t use one of those?

Damien learns that being the Antichrist comes with certain advantages. For example, it turns out that he’s very good at remembering historically significant dates. And, you know, he can give heart attacks to old ladies and make people plummet down elevator shafts. It takes him long enough, but eventually Richard Thorn figures out that his brother has willed him a dud, and tries to get his hands on those fancy daggers. Sadly, even William Holden is no match for Satan’s boy.

The Test of Time: I have no idea if Omen fans were satisfied with this follow-up, but if so, they must have been easily impressed. The stakes never seem particularly high in this sequel; those who grow suspicious of Damien are pretty quickly hit by trucks or fall through thin ice on the lake. And there doesn’t seem to be any urgency to get rid of him, since his destiny involves taking over a big corporation with questionable ethical policies. Heck, if he doesn’t do it, someone else will! Damien was released a few months before John Carpenter’s Halloween would usher in the era of the slasher film, so its big scares must have looked dated almost immediately. (Perhaps not quite as dated as Robert Foxworth’s frightening Luke Spencer perm, but still.) Still, it was successful enough to spawn Omen III: The Final Conflict, and now that the first Omen has been remade, who knows? Maybe Damien will be back for another round as well.

Quotable Quote: “You’re not my brother! The Beast has no brother! You were born of a jackal!”

2008 Equivalent: It’s a sequel about the son of a demon, so I’m going with Hellboy II: The Golden Army.

Previously on Summer of '78: Capricorn One

Yesterday's Hits: Fatal Attraction (1987, Adrian Lyne)

Paul Clark — Tue, 13 May 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Whenever I describe the idea of Yesterday’s Hits to someone who’s never read the column, I’m often asked, “why write about movies that aren’t popular anymore?” There are a number of reasons, but one of the biggest has always been a kind of anthropological fascination with the movies to which earlier generations gravitated. In some cases, the reasons behind the films’ blockbuster status are simple- because they craved good special effects, or because the stars were popular at the time. But in some cases, it goes deeper than that, because the film taps into a certain zeitgeist that makes it a must see. Simply put, it’s the right film at the right time. One example of this is Fatal Attraction.

What made Fatal Attraction a hit?: The 1980s were a profitable period for R-rated movies, and one of the prime beneficiaries of this was the erotic thriller genre. But while most movies of this kind were fairly disreputable, Fatal Attraction was different- a classy project pairing bankable leading man Michael Douglas with three-time Oscar nominee Glenn Close. Because of its pedigree, Fatal Attraction was able to attract a bigger audience than most films of the kind, becoming the second-biggest hit of 1987.

However, the film’s success was bigger than box-office grosses, with its title entering the popular lexicon. This was due in no small part to the way its screenplay (penned by James Dearden) tapped into two major issues of the day. First, after the advent of feminism, there was a certain degree of anxiety among many men about these newly independent and sexually powerful women, exemplified in the film by Glenn Close’s Alex. But also important- although less explicit in the film- was the sudden fear of sex which was caused by the discovery of AIDS earlier in the decade. Suddenly, the casual sex of the sixties and seventies carried with it deadly consequences. These two factors combined to make Fatal Attraction a topic of national conversation, with the film garnering six Oscar nominations, including Best Picture. Not bad for a project that had repeatedly been dismissed as a ripoff of Play Misty for Me and passed on by almost twenty filmmakers, including Brian DePalma and John Carpenter.

What happened?: While Fatal Attraction transcended the genre to which it ostensibly belonged, its box-office performance paved the way for an explosion of erotic thrillers, few of which were remotely as good, and almost none of which were as respectable. Most of the films that were made in its wake were sleazy and shameless, with filmmakers like screenwriter Joe Eszterhas aiming to outdo each other for kinky sexuality and elaborate deaths. In addition, there was a rise in direct-to-video erotic thrillers at the end of the eighties, occasioned in part by the home-video success of Fatal Attraction. For both of these reasons, and others besides, the erotic thriller genre had largely become a parody of itself even before Carl Reiner made his dire spoof Fatal Instinct in 1993.

Does Fatal Attraction still work?: Mostly, yes. For a movie of this kind, Fatal Attraction is pretty low-key for most of its duration. Dearden and director Adrian Lyne take time to properly establish the film’s characters and story rather than simply barreling through to the sex and violence. From the beginning, the film portrays Dan Gallagher’s (Douglas) life in detail- his beautiful wife Beth (Anne Archer), his little girl, his job as a high-powered lawyer, and his close friendships. It’s not until after we see what his everyday life is like that the film throws Alex into the mix, which allows us to see what he has before he does something that could cause him to lose it.

It’s because of this that the casting of Douglas is crucial. Most big stars of the period specialized in uncomplicated heroes, but Douglas was the exception, often playing flawed yuppie types with a dark side. Fatal Attraction gave him the one of his best roles, as a decent man who is almost done in by his arrogance- he cheats on his wife because he knows he’ll have fun, and he figures he’ll never get caught anyway, so where’s the harm? But of course, he does.

Also important is Close’s performance as Alex, who’s crazy all right, but also says some things that make a good amount of sense. After Dan unceremoniously dumps her, she calls him on it, saying he treats her like “some slut you can just bang a couple of times and throw in the garbage.” After she finds out she’s pregnant, she seeks him out and demands that he “accept his responsibilities.” Alex has her share of problems- she’s suicidal, for one thing- but most of her actions in the film’s first half are actually pretty reasonable. She’s been wronged, she’s pissed, and now she will. Not. Be. Ignored.

The first hour or so of Fatal Attraction works so well as a morality play, with Dan trying to figure out how to shake off Alex while dealing with his own guilt and keeping the truth from his wife, that it’s sort of disappointing when it moves into more traditional thriller territory. Some of the film’s most famous sequences- the boiled bunny, the kidnapping- still pack a punch, but they don’t fit very well with what came before. Mostly though, it feels too easy to turn Alex into a psycho. By making her a villain, it provides an easy opportunity for Dan to emerge as a hero working in the interest of protecting his family and saving his marriage. Compared to what came before, it’s far too tidy.

Especially damaging is the film’s climactic scene, in which Alex brandishes a butcher knife and tries to murder Beth. In Dearden’s original ending, Alex committed suicide in a manner that made it appear Dan had killed her, which led to him being arrested for her murder. However, after disastrous test screenings, the studio shot the new ending, which tested much better. But while turning Alex into a knife-wielding slasher helped the film’s box office, it hurt it quality-wise. With its original ending, not only do all of the Madame Butterfly references suddenly make sense, but the film becomes far more about Dan having to deal with the consequences of his affair and less about providing clear-cut violent catharsis for the audience. Sadly, a move like this is all too typical of Hollywood- so short-sighted that they’ll gladly torpedo a future classic in the interest of making the movie more bankable today. Of course, this is what made Fatal Attraction so ideal for Yesterday’s Hits. Funny how that worked out, isn’t it?

The Rep Report (March 7-14)

Phil Nugent — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 23:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: An inspiration to late bloomers everywhere, the Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira (born in December, 1908) made his first film in 1938 and managed to make a dozen more pictures over the course of the next forty years, but he started to buckle down in 1979, when he made his breakthrough with Doomed Love. He's made more than thirty works since then, and has churned out a movie a year since 1990. "The Talking Pictures of Manoel de Oliveira" (March 7-30) at the Brooklyn Academy of Music is an ambitious retrospective salute to the remarkable career and little-seen work of this distinctive and filmmaker as he apprroaches his centennial.

BAM is also paying tribute this month to J. Hoberman, the brainy and idiosyncratic film writer, on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of his settling in at his regular perch at The Village Voice. Running from March 10 through April 3, the schedule begins with Eraserhead, the subject of Hoberman's first review for the Voice, and includes such "personal favorites" of the critic as King of Comedy, David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch, Ernie Gehr's Side/Walk/Shuffle, Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, and John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13. (Pleased as punch, the Voice has posted Hoberman's 1992 review of Naked Lunch, a stellar example of the kind of fireworks that Hoberman can set off even when writing about a movie that many sane people wouldn't watch again if blindfolded.)

Separated at Birth: "Cloverfield" and "Miracle Mile"

Phil Nugent — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 19:00:00 GMT

The apocalyptic monster movie Cloverfield, with its Camcorder-eye view of Manhattan being flattened by an aggrieved, bellowing beastie from the sea, was already well defined in the public mind as "Godzilla meets The Blair Witch Project" long before it opened. It used to be that this kind of mixed-marriage pitch was a staple of Hollywood satire, an easy laugh at the industry's blatant embrace of unoriginality. By now, after a few decades of Entertainment Tonight and Entertainment Weekly teaching lay people to think of movies in terms of grosses and big weekend openings, even ticket buyers are conditioned to think of a movie's resemblance to other movies as some kind of come-on. J. J. Abrams, whose Bad Robot company produced Cloverfield (and who is probably the creator most strongly associated with it, even though he neither wrote nor directed it), has also taken credit, in a roundabout way, for the most striking image featured in its trailer, that of the head of the Statue of Liberty being used as a bowling ball, by saying that he'd always felt gypped that there was no such image in John Carpenter's Escape from New York, even though that movie's poster showed the Statue's head lying discarded in the street. But there's another movie that in its structure bears a striking resemblance to Cloverfield: Miracle Mile, written and directed by Steve De Jarnatt and released to nothing better than mildly cultish appreciation back in 1989. The fact that a moviemaking team that takes so much pride in its influences has not — to my knowledge, anyway — done much to advertise their debt to De Jarnatt's film may indicate that the similarities are coincidental, or it may just prove that nobody wants to brag about building their hit on the bones of an underappreciated, semi-forgotten (and better) picture.

[Please Note: Spoilers to Follow. You have been warned]

CLOVERFIELD: The movie opens with the information that Beth (played by a very pretty young woman) and Rob (played by an even prettier young man) have fallen in love, but due to some miscommunication for which they both may be to blame, they quarrel and split acrimoniously on the evening of Rob's big going-away party. At that ill-timed moment, the apocalypse shows up, in the form of a giant, rampaging monster, and Rob tears through the increasingly chaotic metropolis that is Manhattan in a state of nocturnal panic, to be with the woman he loves. Thanks to his gallant heroism, which is depicted in something close to real time, they manage to reconnect, but an attempt to flee by government helicopter fails. The movie concludes with Beth and Rob dying in the rubble of Central Park, but their end is at least a small triumph of the heart: they have the chance to die together with the words "I love you" on their lips. Immortalized in the home-video footage collected and preserved by the government, they will live on in memory as a testament to the tender emotions of those lost in the monster's attack.

MIRACLE MILE: The movie opens with the information that Harry (played by Anthony Edwards in engaging, likable-geek mode) and Julie (played by Mare Winningham as a lovable geekette) have fallen in love, but Harry is reluctant to tell Julie that he loves her because he has commitment problems. He resolves to take the plunge when he and Julie are set to meet one night, but due to some miscommunication for which a power outage and malfunctioning alarm clock are to blame, he fails to show up. Wandering the nocturnal city alone, Harry learns that the apocalypse is coming in on the next train, in the form of a nuclear attack. Harry tears through the increasingly chaotic metropolis that is Los Angeles in a state of panic, to be with the woman he loves. Thanks to his gallant heroism, which is depicted in something close to real time, they manage to reconnect, but an attempt to flee by government helicopter fails. The movie concludes with Harry and Julie dying in the mire of the La Brea Tar Pits, but their end is at least a small triumph of the heart: they have the chance to die together with the words "I love you" on their lips. Like the dinosaurs, they will join the fossil record, living on in memory as a testament to man's folly.

It goes without saying that the feel and texture of the two movies could hardly be more different, though there are traces in Cloverfield of a yearning to express something close to the romantic sweetness of Miracle Mile; it's outside the movie's range, partly because it would get in the way of the spectacle, partly because the characters lack the individual spark of the people in Miracle Mile. (On the other hand, they also lack the unpolished averageness of the people in The Blair Witch Project, a quality that made it easier to believe that movie might really be a record of something that had happened. If you think that the people onscreen count for more than your taste in gimmickry, Cloverfield is actually more like Godzilla meets Make Me a Supermodel.) It might be nice if some of the attention being paid to Cloverfield could be siphoned off in Miracle Mile's direction, assuming that the clock hasn't already completely run out on Cloverfield's fifteen minutes. Miracle Mile was in some ways its writer-director's real feature debut; the script was named one of the ten best unproduced screenplays by American Film magazine in 1983, the same year that De Jarnatt got his first screen credit for his work on the screenplay of Strange Brew, starring Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas as Bob and Doug Mackenzie. De Jarnatt had sold it to a studio that had no interest in letting him direct it; he was later able to buy it back, after working as a writer and director on the mid-1980s revival of the TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents and writing and directing the straight-to-cable sci-fi romance Cherry 2000. Since then, he's done a lot of TV, and he had a hand in launching the offbeat horror series American Gothic and Kindred: The Embraced. But in the almost twenty years since Miracle Mile was completed, he hasn't made another movie.

Take Five: We Love The '80s

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 22:30:00 GMT

American moviegoers can't get enough of the 1980s, apparently. Those of us who had to live through it the first time remember it primarily as a time of bad metal, worse sitcoms, and waiting around to see what dumb-ass thing Ronald Reagan would say next, but to the generations that followed, it is a time for richly veined cultural nostalgia. From what we can recollect through the haze of drugs and alcohol that coat our memories of the decade, the hallmark of 1980s cinema was very loud explosions punctuated by the occasional car chase or wise-cracking black transvestite. It's not something we thought anyone would be eager to repeat, and yet there have been, in recent memory, new installments of the Die Hard and Rocky franchises; a new TV series based on The Terminator; an upcoming Indiana Jones picture; and, opening all across the country this Friday, a new Rambo movie. Even the Screengrab is getting into the act, with Gabriel Mckee posting his top ten action heroes who deserve a comeback, many of whom hail from the Decade That Time Refuses To Forget. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em: so says Take Five as we present a fistful of '80s action movies that we. . . well, we don't love, exactly, but we at least look back on with something less than severe brain trauma.

ROCKY III (1982)

Sure, the first movie had heart and soul. And the second movie had a ruthless determination to capitalize on the first movie's heart and soul. But do you know what they didn't have? Do you know what they lacked, which made the third installment unquestionably the best of all the Rocky movies? That's right: MR. T. They didn't have Mr. T, and as such, they suffered, as do all artistic projects not involving Mr. T. Here's a little secret they don't teach you at film school: sure, Citizen Kane might have been the greatest movie of all time — but it would have been even better if it had been able to feature Mr. T yelling at people. And Rocky III, whatever its other faults — and it had hundreds, from its hamhanded TV-movie direction (by Sly himself) to its predictable storyline — at least gave us Mr. T yelling at people in abundance. When his Clubber Lang (a savage, media-loathing brute allegedly inspired by young George Foreman) wasn't yelling at people, he was beating people up, and Rocky III brings us the double pleasure of seeing Sylvester Stallone clobbered by Clubber and Hulk Hogan as "Thunderlips". Just turn it off halfway through.

BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA (1986)

If it wasn't the most exciting or accomplished action movie of the 1980s, it was at least probably the most enjoyable: Big Trouble in Little China was brought to us by an uncharacteristically light-hearted John Carpenter, and worked both as a straight-up pseudo-mystical punch-'em-out and as a loopy parody of same. Carried largely on the back of Kurt Russell's endearing performance as antihero "ol' Jack Burton", a trucker who's chock full of bogus wisdom delivered in a ridiculously over-the-top John Wayne accent. Part of the reason it plays so well as both sincere action and goofy action send-up is because the script was written by W.D. Richter, who originally conceived it as a sequel to his own The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension from two years earlier. Legal and financial issues kept the sequel from being made, but Big Trouble features some of its characteristic touches and clever bits of dialogue. It also features swell performances from a young Kim Cattrall and James Hong, everyone's favorite inscrutable Asian. Besides, how can you not love a movie featuring a wizard named Egg Shen?

ACTION JACKSON (1988)
Where is the love for Sgt. Jericho Jackson, we ask you? Where? This compelling saga of America's forgotten black action hero was released in the same month as Bloodsport, making 1988 — which also brought us Die Hard, Above the Law, Red Heat and They Live — a banner year from cheesy guilty-pleasure action movies. This one had it all: a post-Rocky, pre-Arrested Development Carl Weathers playing a tough Detroit cop who was also an all-American track star and a Harvard-educated attorney; former Prince plaything Vanity making hay while the sun shone as a sex kitten; Sharon Stone, doing the thing that she was best known for doing before everyone all of the sudden decided to take her seriously; and villains Craig T. Nelson and Robert Davi overacting like there was no tomorrow. (Which, for Robert Davi at least, there probably wasn't.) Action Jackson had everything you could have wanted out of a 1980s action flick: a wisecracking tough guy hero, naked dead chicks, tons of explosions, people dying in extremely creative ways, egregious use of narcotics, and a protagonist whose name rhymed! Come back, Carl Weathers, all is forgiven.

BLOODSPORT (1988)

Before Jean-Claude Van Damme was a full-time crazy person, he was America's next big martial arts star. Bloodsport was the movie that put the rubber-groined Belgian on the map, portraying real-life martial arts semi-star Frank Dux. The plot of Bloodsport — well, it's giving it a lot more credit than it deserves to even call it a plot, involving (as does every other martial arts movie ever made) a bunch of well-toned Asians out to kick each other in the face. It's not much for memorable acting, either; Van Damme had already, in his first starring role, perfected the self-satisfied smirk that would carry him through the rest of his career, and while the movie does feature a young Forest Whitaker as a federal agent tasked to stand around looking exasperated, it also features Leah Ayres failing to become America's sweetheart, Donald Gibb trying to make the transition from hooligan to lummox, and Bolo Yeung (the former Bruce Lee nemesis known as Yang Tse) putting in the kind of performance only a trunk full of steroids can deliver. But it does feature some stunning martial arts battles, which is really all you can hope for in a movie like this.

ROAD HOUSE (1989)

In all the calls for a revival of action movie heroes like Rocky, Rambo, Ryan, and Indy, where are the legions of fans clamoring for a return of James Dalton? Patrick Swayze desperately needs something to do, people. Believe it or not, there was once a time when women would line up around the block to get a load of this chunk-headed 'King of the Sleepers' with his shirt off, and nowhere was he more chunk-headed or shirtless than in this deleriously zany action flick about a Zen-influenced tough guy ("Pain don't hurt") who is hired, despite his small stature and philosophy degree from NYU, to act as the bouncer at an out-of-control bar. Directed by a former electrician named Rowdy and co-starring Kelly Lynch at the height of her blondeness, Road House transcends its shortcomings by being so completely indifferent to its own craziness that it chugs along on its own energy with nary a look back. Ben Gazzara is the bad guy in this thing, clearly bombed out of his coconut, and it features the immortal line "I used to fuck guys like you in prison".

Video of the Day: John Carpenter on Lead Vocals

Peter Smith — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Do not miss this video: John Carpenter rocking out in the editing room to his theme song for Big Trouble in Little China. Speaking as someone who finds John Carpenter endearing, but always has slightly less fun watching his movies than expected, I can tell you this may be the best thing John Carpenter ever did.

Tip of the hat to the AV Club commentators who flagged down this masterpiece.

New Holiday Classics: Wind Chill (2007)

Peter Smith — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 17:00:00 GMT

Although some very good things naturally go together, as we all know from those commercials where some klutz gets his peanut butter on that other guy's chocolate, filmmakers have had a mixed and mostly unhappy time trying to merge Christmas with the horror movie. Sure, it's always kind of fun to stick a psychopathic killer in a Santa Claus suit, but it's seemed anticlimactic whenever anyone has done it since 1984's Silent Night, Deadly Night — not a good movie, but its ads got seen by the wrong bunch of tightassed ninnies and inspired a wonderful episode of Donahue where Phil and his legion of overcaffeinated housewives fretted that such films would result in a new generation of demonic hell-spawn hanging out at the Gap. Then there's Bob Clark's 1974 Black Christmas, which was recently revived and remade, just before Clark's death earlier this year. It has earned a reputation as a seminal shocker that established both the holiday-themed horror movie gimmick and the strategy of assigning the killer a trademark tracking shot and an asthma condition before John Carpenter's Halloween, as well as possibly inventing the whole "The calls are coming from inside the house!" wheeze. But some of us have always thought that its ending is kind of a cheat, and besides, so far as tapping the horrific potential of Christmas break goes, Black Christmas kind of misses the point. Because the sorority girls who are its principal victims get murdered in time for school break, they are spared the experience of going home for the holidays, which is when the scary stuff really starts.

The ghost story Wind Chill, which was briefly released to theaters earlier this year and recently came out on DVD, can be seen as a corrective to Clark's error in timing. Directed by Gregory Jacobs, Wind Chill opens in a lonely, eerily depopulated college campus. The heroine, played by the strikingly assured young Emily Blunt (of My Summer of Love and The Devil Wears Prada), appears to be among the last students to get the hell out of Dodge for the holidays. She piles into a car with a guy she doesn't know (Ashton Holmes, Viggo Mortensen and Maria Bello's son in A History of Violence) with whom she's agreed to share a ride, and right away a creepy vibe sets in. Holmes, channeling one of Michael Cera's clueless nice guys, keeps trying to charm his new friend, who plainly just wants to get the trip completed as painlessly as possible and then go back to being unaware of his existence. As he keeps trying to make contact, and she begins to respond to his overtures with ever greater displays of contempt and condescension, it may begin to dawn on viewers that they're watching an uncannily well-executed performance of a dance they may recognize from their own college days or, if they're really unlucky, even their more recent lives: the awkward non-mating ritual between the worshipful boy trying too hard to craft a perfect day for himself and the wrong person, and the girl who's only trying to decide whether her unwanted suitor is even worth regarding as a stalker.

One of the nice things about this set-up is that when things switch gears and the supernatural element (which includes Martin Donovan as a hulking, phantom state trooper) comes in, you're kind of relieved; as in a sci-fi story where the arrival of the aliens unites the Earth's superpowers together against a common threat, confusion and fear make it possible for a bitch princess and a geeky dork, trapped together in a stalled car, to actually be civil to each other for minutes at a time. Wind Chill may have just been too small a film to take much away from 300's take at the box office, and it may not be weird or bloody enough to become a cult classic now, but it's a smart little genre flick that ought to be perfect for winter cocooners looking for an excuse to jack up the thermostat, huddle together on the couch, and think about how cold it looks inside that damn car. — Phil Nugent