The Screengrab : john cleese

Beatrice Arthur, 1922 - 2009

Phil Nugent — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 14:30:00 GMT

Beatrice Arthur has the peculiar distinction of having provided a reason to watch the 1974 movie musical Mame, based on the Broadway show and starring Lucille Ball (and when I say "watch", I of course mean, "keep your finger pressed hard on that fast-forward button at all but the appropriate times). The movie, which was intended as a crowning high point to Ball's career, proved to be a source of embarrassment to the star, who at 62 couldn't (or at least didn't) dance and who gargled her songs in a voice that would have done Ernest Borgnine proud, but it did give Arthur a chance to reprise her Tony-Award-winning performance as Mame's formidable sidekick, Vera Charles, for the camera. (The movie was directed by Gene Saks, who was married to Arthur from 1950 to 1978.) Arthur's work in the movie inspired New Yorker critic Pauline Kael to one of those vivid prose poems of hers that made performing in light entertainment sound like an act of battlefield heroism that might get the subject's face included in the redesign of the Congressional Medal of Honor. Kael wrote that Arthur's Vera was "monstrously marvelous--like a coquettish tank. When she sings, the low growls that come out of her cathedral chest make Ethel Merman sound like a tinkling virgin. Beatrice Arthur can deliver a single-syllable word with enough resonance to stampede cattle three thousand miles away."

By the time she took home that Tony, Arthur had been a presence in New York theater and early television for some twenty years. Born Bernice Frankel--she later said that “I changed the Bernice almost as soon as I heard it."--her first husband was the screenwriter Robert Alan Aurthur, from whom she took an improved spelling of his last name. Before her Broadway successes in Mame and in the original production of Fiddler on the Roof, in which she played Yente the matchmaker, she had built up a strong cult following with her appearances in nightclubs and off Broadway, most notably with her performance as Lucy Brown in the 1954 production of The Threepenny Opera. She appeared often on Studio One and Kraft Television Theater, was a regular on Caesar's Hour (the variety show that Sid Caesar starred in after Your Show of Shows), and made her movie debut in 1970 in Lovers and Other Strangers. But of course, she made her biggest splash as the star of the series Maude, which premiered in 1972 and ran until 1978. A liberal-loudmouth spin-off of All in the Family, the show was powered by the old pros in the cast (which also included Bill Macy and Rue McClanahan) and quickly established a reputation as a place where touchy issues such as abortion and menopause went to get aired. In 1985, Arthur and McClanahan teamed with Betty White for another long-running sitcom, The Golden Girls. (It was created by Susan Harris, who wrote "Maude's Dilemma", the famous first-season two-parter in which the 47-year-old Maude had that abortion.) She won Emmys for both Maude and Golden Girls.

In between her two TV hits, Arthur starred in the short-lived Amanda's, a misconceived 1983 Americanization of Fawlty Towers in which Arthur was badly miscast in the role created by John Cleese to showcase his own gift for comic apoplexy. (A master of the slow burn, Arthur could raise her voice, but she was too regally self-contained to do conniption fits.) She also appeared in Mel Brooks's History of the World--Part One (1981) and the 2000 Enemies of Laughter, which was directed by John Travolta, as well as contributing memorable guest spots to Malcolm in the Middle, Futurams, and Curb Your Enthusiasm. Between 2000 and 2006, she toured the country, as well as London, Australia, and Canada, in her one-woman show, which earned her a Tony nomination when she did a version of it on Broadway in 2002. (She lost to Elaine Stritch for her one-woman show.) In 2005, she turned up on basic cable at Comedy Central's roast of Pamela Anderson, where she was introduced by emcee Jimmy Kimmel as "a national treasure" who "should be treated as such," a gesture that inspired me to personally remove his name from my fatwa list. At the roast, she gave a reading from selections of Anderson's novel Star: A Novel. Some would probably judge the resulting clip below to be workplace-inappropriate, but my feeling is always that the best way to find out such things is to jack the volume up as loud as it'll go and let 'er rip.

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 20:30:00 GMT

IT'S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD (1963) & RAT RACE (2001)

I can’t say for sure whether I’ve ever watched It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World all the way from beginning to end in one uninterrupted sitting, but I’ve definitely seen every part of the movie numerous times: mostly during lazy Sundays as a kid, when Stanley Kramer’s three-hour, star-studded tale of random strangers racing for treasure played (thanks to endless commercial breaks) like an all-day Laff-Olympics, featuring generations of comedy all-stars ranging from Buster Keaton to Milton Berle, Mickey Rooney, Buddy Hackett, Phil Silvers, Sid Caesar, Ethel Merman and a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo by the 1963 edition of the Three Stooges (with Joe DeRita on drums). More than a few strands of Mad, Mad’s chaotic, uneven DNA wound up in the seminal fluids of the far less epic (and epochal) yet funnier than expected Rat Race, featuring another group of random celebrity strangers (including John Cleese, Rowan Atkinson, Seth Green, Jon Lovitz, Kathy Najimy, Whoopi Goldberg, Dave Thomas, Amy Smart, Breckin Meyer and Cuba Gooding, Jr.) involved in another episodic race against time for treasure...but this time, with original songs by the Baha Men! (AO)

BREWSTER'S MILLIONS (1985)

Walter Hill’s Brewster’s Millions was the seventh big-screen adaptation of George Barr McCutcheon’s 1902 novel and, thanks to the participation of headliner Richard Pryor and co-star John Candy, it remains the most well-known and popular. Taking its basic narrative cue from prior versions, Pryor plays a washed-up minor league pitcher who discovers that he’s the sole remaining heir of a long-lost kooky relative who, from beyond the grave, offers him a stunning deal: if he can spend $30 million in 30 days, he’ll inherit $300 million. It’s a too-good-to-be-true offer that, of course, proves more troublesome than it initially seems, as Pryor’s nobody finds it increasingly difficult to successfully relieve himself of so much money, a predicament from which Hill squeezes mild laughs as well as a predictable money’s-not-everything moral. Pryor’s dynamically profane humor is blunted by the proceedings’ safe PG conventionality, and the film is far less funny than Hill’s prior 48 Hours. Yet in Brewster’s Millions’ defense, its time-tested conceit still manages, over a century after its initial birth, to effectively ignite the imagination. (NS)

JUGGERNAUT (1974)

Richard Lester's there's-a-bomb-on-this-ship thriller brings class and wit to the disaster genre. The plot involves a demolitions wizard who secrets a collection of big-ass bombs on Skipper Omar Sharif's cruise ship, which are set to go off unless he's handed a wad of extortion money. While Lester scans the landscape for signs of the throwaway slapstick bits and eccentric, comic character moments that were his stock in trade, Richard Harris brings it on a rocket sled as the dashing, showboating cynic leading the team of bomb defusers who are flown in and dive down to join the ship in the middle of the ocean during a very photogenic storm. After his best mate is killed, Harris takes a break to get roaring drunk and deliver his Oscar-reel speech before getting back to work. You might think that getting roaring drunk when attempting to defuse a bunch of bombs is next on your to-do list would be be ill-advised, but if you do, what part of "Richard Harris" do you not understand? (PN)

DR. STRANGELOVE, OR, HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1964)

Dr. Strangelove is beginning to rival Psycho as one of the movies we can find a reason to cram on to pretty much any list, but we couldn’t very well compile the greatest races against time without including it. After all, the stakes couldn’t be higher: if President Muffley and his advisors don’t succeed, the endgame will be the utter annihilation of life on Earth. Stanley Kubrick uses the simplest possible device to remind us of how close the world is coming to Armageddon: the little electric bulbs on the “Big Board” blink ever closer to the interior of a map of Russia. And yet, while everyone in the room knows the importance of what’s going on, no one can seem to focus on the matter at hand: General Turgidson is more concerned with being hoodwinked by the commies, Ambassador DeSadesky wants fresh fish and Cuban cigars, and the President gets into arguments with the Russian premier over who’s more sorry about this turn of events. It’s brilliant because it’s so ridiculously plausible: the end of the world is nigh, and no one can be bothered to pay attention. (LP)

Click Here For Part One, Three, Four, Five & Six...before it's too late!

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Nick Schager, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 22:45:00 GMT

BILL MURRAY AS JEFF SLATER IN TOOTSIE (1982)

Bill Murray is one of those people with such a long, varied career of starring and supporting roles in so many beloved mainstream and indie films -- from Carl Spackler in Caddyshack to “Bill Murray” in Coffee and Cigarettes -- that he could easily fill up this week’s list almost single-handedly. But of all his roles, his understated, largely improvised performance in Tootsie has always been my favorite: a toned-down version of his cocky '80s persona that hinted at the bemused, melancholy range of his later work, his Jeff Slater is the perfect roommate and wing-man: a wise, mellow pal who gently informs you when you’re "getting into a weird area" with your career or social life, yet who doesn’t scold or judge when he walks in to find you in a dress being groped by a horny old soap opera star. The yin to Dustin Hoffman’s neurotic actor yang, he’s the kind of playwright who’d prefer a half-empty theater filled with people who just came out of the rain to a packed house (and yet somehow doesn’t sound pretentious saying it). And best of all, I actually got to have a roommate very much like him once (hi, Hari!), during a year I still recall as fondly as my memories of Tootsie and the late, great Sydney Pollack. ("You were a tomato!") (AO)

MICHAEL KEATON AS BEETLEJUICE IN BEETLEJUICE (1988)

Keaton made this movie with the director Tim Burton at a time when Burton had more experience working with cartoon characters than live actors. It was a sweet gesture on Keaton's part to meet him more than halfway. At the time, Keaton was six years past his impressive movie debut in Night Shift (as a pimp who operated out of a morgue and preferred to be called a "love broker") and overdue to take his career to another level, but even those who guessed that he had untapped potential couldn't have guessed that maggoty would be such a great look for him. Few actors have turned themselves into a special effect with such happy results. (PN)

KEVIN KLINE AS OTTO WEST IN A FISH CALLED WANDA (1988)

It’s a testament to John Cleese’s generosity as a comic author that he gave the absolute best role in A Fish Called Wanda to someone else. That someone else was Kevin Kline, who, in a performance he’d never again equal, took the ball and ran with it: his grasp on the character of Otto West, a short-tempered, virile, violent, and not altogether bright criminal and Ugly American par excellence is vice-tight. The great thing about Otto is that he’s not a typical dumb goon: he’s a fairly skillful criminal, a stone cold killer, and best of all, he’s very slightly aware of how dumb he is. While most stupid characters milk comedy out of their obliviousness, the genius of Otto’s stupidity (and Kline’s astute assessment of same) is that he knows he’s not the brightest bulb on the marquee, and it drives him crazy. Hence his one great taboo – he can’t stand it when people call him stupid. What’s more, Kline milks gallons of comic frustration out of Otto’s inability to wrap his head around complex problems; he’s never angrier than when he senses someone has the advantage of him, but since he’s not smart enough to fake it, he just gets angrier (and stupider). One of the best throwaway gags in A Fish Called Wanda comes when an elaborate plan starts to go awry and Otto is called upon to help think of a solution; obviously infuriated, he pointlessly fires a couple of rounds from his silenced pistol into a steel safe and bellows “I’m THINKING!”. (LP)

STEVE ZAHN AS GLENN MICHAELS IN OUT OF SIGHT (1998)

Steve Zahn specializes in characters who have a negative genius for being in the wrong place at the wrong time; in That Thing You Do!, things got dramatic while he was off enjoying a rollercoaster ride. Here, he takes it so far that he barely seems to be in the right movie, though you're glad he stopped by. After arriving to help bust George Clooney out of prison -- a favor for which Clooney thanks him by threatening to throw his sunglasses "off the overpass while they're still on your head" -- he hooks up with Don Cheadle's mob just in time to participate in a massacre that soon has him sneaking around in search of the back exit. If all petty criminals were more like Zahn's Glenn, the world would be a much more entertaining place, and practically a crime-free one. (PN)

JEFF BRIDGES AS JEFFREY “THE DUDE” LEBOWSKI IN THE BIG LEBOWSKI (1998)

Although he’s not the most clownish figure in the Coen Brothers’ endlessly quotable cult comedy – that title belongs to gun-toting, dog-sitting Vietnam vet Walter Sobchak, played with gusto by John Goodman – you’d be hard-pressed to find a figure more hilariously suited to the archetype of the Holy Fool than Jeff Bridges’ Dude. Conceived as a stoner upturning of Raymond Chandler’s hard-nosed detective Philip Marlowe, the Dude, a perpetually out-of-it former roadie whose life revolves around bowling, weed, and White Russians, is caught up in a web of mistaken identity, kidnapping and blackmail. While Marlowe stubbornly refused to be warned off a case, doggedly pursuing the truth for its own sake, the Dude barely even seems to be aware that he’s on a case, and yet, in his own shambolic, shaggy-dog way, has the instincts and aptitude of a real detective. Based on film promoter and ex-‘60s radical Jeff Dowd, the Dude is an immortal comic creation, a stumbling bum who outwits people more or less by default and lives in the sunshiney flipside of Los Angeles noir. His mind is never far from his next frame, and his dress sense isn’t quite tailored suits and ties, but let’s see Philip Marlowe disarm a rival simply by saying “Well, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.” (LP)

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

When Good Directors Go Bad: The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990, Brian De Palma)

Paul Clark — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Of all the prestige projects of the 1990 awards season, few had more potential than The Bonfire of the Vanities. To begin with, it was based on Tom Wolfe’s first fiction book, which had been widely read in serialized form in Rolling Stone before becoming a bestseller upon its publication as a novel. The director was Brian De Palma, who made his reputation with a series of kinky, Hitchcock-inspired thrillers during the seventies before branching out into more mainstream fare such as Scarface, The Untouchables and Casualties of War. With a wildly popular novel and an A-list director, Warner Bros. had visions of Oscars dancing in their heads, and they consequently filled the cast with big names, from recent Oscar nominees Tom Hanks, Melanie Griffith, and Morgan Freeman to newly anointed action superstar Bruce Willis, and backed them with plenty of first-rate character actors.

Ideally, The Bonfire of the Vanities should have been one of the biggest movie events of 1990. But then, if it had been, I would be writing about it in my Yesterday’s Hits column instead of When Good Directors Go Bad. As it stands, the big-screen adaptation remains one of the most notorious fiascos in Hollywood history, earning back a mere $15 million of its then-extravagant $50 million budget, and receiving mostly savage reviews. As a De Palma fan of long standing- I’m the guy who liked The Black Dahlia, after all- I’d like to say that the film was merely misunderstood, but even I have to admit that it’s a failure.

Part of the problem is the casting of the principal roles, from the top on down. If you were casting the role of an ambitious commodities trader and self-anointed “Master of the Universe”, whose name would come to mind? Michael Douglas? Tom Cruise, perhaps? But after Warner Bros. deemed the character too unsympathetic on the page, they decided to cast Tom Hanks in the role, which is sort of like casting Jimmy Stewart as Gordon Gekko. Also problematic was the casting of Willis. The character of journalist Peter Fallow was written as a dissolute Brit (the role was originally offered to John Cleese), but Willis ended up being cast for marquee value, and gave one of his laziest performances, smirking his way through the role and pissing off most of the people involved with the production with his ego.

Worst of all is Griffith. During the eighties, Griffith’s dumb-blonde persona proved to be surprisingly adaptable to a number of filmmakers’ visions, from the tart-with-a-heart of Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild to the streetwise porn star of De Palma’s own Body Double. However, the role of Maria Ruskin was far beyond her limited talent. On the page, Maria may be the trickiest character in the novel, a wily manipulator whose ditzy façade hides a pitch-black heart. But Griffith can only manage the ditzy part, so when the character begins to reveal her shameless nature after Sherman’s life begins to go down the tubes we never believe it. The two halves of her personality- sexy and cunning- never mesh convincingly, so rather than lacing her manipulations with an erotic charge, her dark side makes the sexy stuff creepy, which surely wasn’t what the film was aiming for.

But while the casting issues might have been out of De Palma’s hands, he’s far from blameless. Admittedly, Wolfe’s novel is something of a tough nut to crack, simultaneously a cross-section of New York City life, a morality tale, and a savage takedown of the craven greed and ambition that fueled the eighties. However, it fails on all three counts. Much of its power as a snapshot of the Big Apple’s social strata is lost because its characters are sketchy and one-dimensional, a problem that might have been partially alleviated by spot-on casting, but not entirely. Likewise, the film places its morality tale aspects on the back burner for most of its running time, only to have judge/voice of reason Morgan Freeman bust out an extended monologue about decency in the film’s final five minutes, at which point it comes off as a tacked-on moral rather than a natural outgrowth of the story.

This leaves only the exposé aspect of the story. In nearly 700 pages, Wolfe was able to lay bare the motivations of nearly all of the major players in the story, from Sherman, Maria and Peter, to the lawyers, politicians and community leaders who opportunistically seized upon his case for their own personal gain. Without the time to do this onscreen, De Palma instead focuses on the circus (political and media-driven) that ensues. But while a more assured comic filmmaker might have been able to spin even an abbreviated Bonfire into a bitter little pill (imagine what an Ace in the Hole-era Billy Wilder might have done with this material), De Palma brings almost nothing to the material aside from the liberal use of unflattering wide-angle close-ups to underline the grotesqueness of the characters. Sure, there are a handful of cool camera tricks- especially the nearly five-minute-long opening Steadican shot- but for the most part they don’t really work in the context of the story, and mostly just call attention to themselves. I hate to use a criticism that De Palma’s detractors are wont to levy at him, but in this case, they’re right.

In the end, the biggest failing of The Bonfire of the Vanities is one of tone. The scathing satire of the original novel was replaced by a more hamfisted style that was both broad and shrill. A few of the jabs hit (I love how Andre Gregory’s poet is introduced: “he’s on the shortlist for the Nobel Prize. He has AIDS.”), but most of the time they whiff. Scenes like the one where Maria’s cuckold husband (Alan King) suddenly dies in mid-conversation or the famous “crumbs” monologue by Sherman’s wife might have worked on the page, but they flounder and die onscreen, the former because it’s not inherently funny to see a minor character kick the bucket, the latter because Kim Cattrall plays the character as such a high-strung harpy that it’s hard to focus on anything she says.

Now, it’s entirely possible that Ebert was right when he wrote that The Bonfire of the Vanities might be enjoyable to those who are unfamiliar with the book. But I wouldn’t bet on it. De Palma and the studio took a powerful and lacerating story and adapted it in the most pedestrian way possible, and replaced the prickly citizens of Wolfe’s New York City with characters who are both cartoonish and, worse, uninteresting. If anything good came out of my watching Bonfire again, it’s that I’ve been inspired to re-read the book, to immerse myself in Wolfe’s language and marvel at the world he created. By now, it’s become a cliché that people are generally better off reading the book, but in this case that’s the only way to go.

Fitting Farewells: The Top Ten Great Final Films (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 20:30:00 GMT

Desmond Llewelyn, THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH (1999)

Despite a pretty decent theme song, The World Is Not Enough hardly qualifies as a great film (or even a particularly great Bond film), but it earns a spot on this list for one perfect scene. Desmond Llewelyn first appeared as the cranky go-to guy for state-of-the-art British spy paraphernalia in 1963’s From Russia With Love and returned in every subsequent 007 installment (except for 1973’s Live and Let Die) thereafter, outlasting Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore and Timothy Dalton before finally teaming with Pierce Brosnan for three late ‘90s adventures. In his final big screen appearance, the aging Q is seen schooling his protégé (and eventual replacement) R, played by John Cleese, before disappearing from view with the classic exit line, “Never let them see you bleed, and always have an escape plan.” Sadly, Llewelyn died shortly after the production wrapped, not of old age (he was 85), but in a car crash, on his way home to his beloved wife of 61 years after dinner with a friend...not, as my dad pointed out, the worst way to go, especially after spending your life as a beloved cinema icon (who once said he’d play his signature role “as long as the producers want me and the Almighty doesn't").

Robert Mitchum in DEAD MAN (1996)

Most of Robert Mitchum's contemporaries from the Golden Age made their onscreen farewells as frail shadows of their former selves (as we'll explore in-depth next week). Not Big Bad Bob. There could be no greater contrast between the classic Hollywood tough guys and the man-children of today's cinema than Mitchum's brief scene with Johnny Depp near the beginning of Dead Man. Even pushing 80, Mitchum looks like he could snap Depp in half like a breadstick. As John Dickinson, owner of a steelworks in the Old West town of Machine, Mitchum has a mane of white hair, an ever-present shotgun, and a life-sized self-portrait lurking behind him as if he is already in the process of passing into legend. When he hires a band of bounty hunters to track down Depp's William Blake, he can hardly bring himself to acknowledge their existence, instead addressing his initial remarks to the stuffed grizzly bear mounted in the corner of his office. It's as if he can only relate to the one other larger than life creature in the room.

THAT OBSCURE OBJECT OF DESIRE (1977)

Born in 1977, the legendary great director and provocateur Luis Bunuel cashed out with this minor classic, in which the rage and audience-baiting tricks of his early work seemed to have been replaced by a serene but sly playfulness. He gives the impression here that he's just enjoying the company of one of his favorite actors (Fernando Rey) and a couple of beautiful women (Carole Bouquet and Ángela Molina) as he uses them to jauntily illustrate his story about a gentleman who is driven half mad with frustration by a young woman who alternately invites and repels his advances. (The women is played by both of the lead actresses; a great deal of ink has been spent by critics speculating on what this device means, though it could have been something as simple as Bouquet having quit or been fired from the production and Bunuel deciding that he didn't feel like reshooting her scenes.) Having enjoyed one final round of good reviews and hossanahs, Bunuel settled in for a few years of drinking, studying insects, and working on his autobiography, My Last Sigh, which appeared not long before his death in 1983.

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

Click here for Part One and Part Three

America The Critical: 15 Movies That Show What's Wrong With U.S. (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 20:30:00 GMT

THE GODFATHER (1972)

Perhaps you've heard of it? The epic (and epically popular) metaphorical study of how the American dream was corrupted begins with the words "I believe in America" and then spends six hours and fifteen minutes (counting Part II) making it clear just what that belief entails. Sweet dreams, Papa.

IDIOCRACY (2006)

After skewering the soul-deadening effect of modern cubicle culture in 1999’s Office Space, Beavis & Butthead and King of the Hill creator Mike Judge created a comedic future dystopia (mirroring that of Cyril M. Kornbluth’s classic 1951 short story, “The Marching Morons”) where idiots have inherited the Earth (because all you overeducated hipsters out there either didn’t spawn or tried to prevent unsustainable overpopulation by limiting yourselves to one or two kids while the irresponsible, short-sighted and just plain dumb were breeding like rabbits). Idiocracy featured eminently bankable heartthrob Luke Wilson (as well as plenty of good ol’ lowest-common-denominator fart jokes) and received largely positive reviews...yet, mysteriously, the film was withheld from critics and vanished without a trace, receiving virtually zero publicity from its distributor (20th Century Fox) during its shockingly miniscule 125-screen theatrical run, whereupon the film was dumped unceremoniously onto DVD. So what happened? Well, I’ve never heard an official explanation, but I suspect the Suits either didn’t get Judge’s film or its depiction of our nation’s ever-lowering standards of taste, intelligence and acceptable civilized behavior hit a little too close to home, given the media’s complicity in the closing of the American mind. In Judge’s film (set in 2505, but clearly, even shockingly evocative of the trashiest parts of our modern-day landscape), nothing matters but sex and money, nobody is responsible for their own behavior, everything (including the population’s disposable clothing) is branded with corporate logos and anyone who dares to appear smart, competent, cultured, self-aware or sensitive (y’know, elite) is branded a “fag” and viewed with hostility and suspicion, even if (like Wilson’s time-traveling 20th century everyman) they’re trying to prevent global catastrophe. Judge somehow got product placement from real companies (whose representatives apparently never read the script: one scene, for instance, features an H&R Block that offers tax returns with “happy endings”), and biting the hands of his corporate masters so viciously may be the real reason the Suits buried the film, although (like Office Space) Idiocracy has managed to attract a small cult following (which this entry will hopefully increase), bringing some overdue attention to an unfairly neglected satiric gem of smart dumb comedy.

THE MAGIC CHRISTIAN (1969)

Terry Southern was the foremost satirist of American culture of his generation, and The Magic Christian is a jab at American money-lust unrivalled by anything this side of William Gaddis' JR. And while director Joseph McGrath (abetted by two Monty Python's Flying Circus alums, Graham Chapman and John Cleese) transplanted the action to his native England when he adapted the book for the big screen, transforming billionaire prankster Guy Grand from an old line Northeasterner to (im)proper British banker along the way, there was still no mistaking what country the author had in mind when he penned the tale of a man whose sole purpose in life was to prove that everyone has their price. A few of the scenes play nicely into the new but not exactly improved British sensibility of the film, but most of the bizarre schemes Grand comes up with to test the limits of his countrymen's greed – from a ludicrously overpriced luxury car roughly the size of a city block to a championship boxing match calculated to enrage by having the fighters kiss at a vital moment – could only resonate the way they do in America. The change of scenery does give the movie a bit of a schizophrenic feel (as does the addition of a rather purposeless Ringo Starr as Grand's son), but really, if someone tells you he's made a satire of a cash-hungry nation full of venal hacks who will sell out their every principle for money, you know what country he's talking about even if everyone in the movie talks like Alastair Cooke.

THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH (1976)

Suppose an alien, a blank slate with no preconceptions about our country, found himself in America. To him it is neither the land of opportunity nor the Great Satan, so with no frame of reference or historical context, what elements of our culture make the greatest impression upon him? Rampant consumerism? Unchecked capitalism? The duplicity of governments and corporations? That's one way of looking at Nicolas Roeg's trippy sci-fi flick (adapted from a novel by Walter Tevis), but like much of Roeg's '70s output, The Man Who Fell to Earth resists easy interpretation. David Bowie, already the man who sold the world, takes on the title role, one Thomas Jerome Newton. A visitor from another planet suffering from extreme drought, Newton has come to our world on a rescue mission. Using alien technology, he secures a number of patents (including one for ultra-futuristic self-developing film) and amasses a fortune, with which he plans to finance a return trip home (presumably with plenty of water, although like everything else, this is never really explained). But Newton loses focus, corrupted by wealth, drink, television and the only people he trusts. By the time he falls into the clutches of a government agency that has discovered his true nature, he has flamed out, never to return to the stars. Roeg keeps us as disoriented as his protagonist with his slippery acid trip visuals and elastic interpretation of time and space, but there's no mistaking the intent behind such images as Bowie stirring his gin with the barrel of a six-shooter, and it ain't God Bless America.

POINT OF ORDER (1964)

Emile de Antonio, the early, smarter, non-self-promoting version of Michael Moore, didn't pretend to be an investigative journalist. In his first film, which is about the Army-McCarthy hearings, he didn't even make any pretense to topicality: Point of Order was released ten years after the hearings themselves, and seven years after Joseph McCarthy's death. De Antonio's eye was on the big picture. He had the insight that, by boiling the 187 televised hours of hearing down to a tight 97 minutes of political vaudeville -- Joseph McCarthy and Joseph Welch's greatest hits -- and doing without voice-over narration or any other kind of explanatory devices, he could skirt charges of bias by seeming to let the HUAC all-stars hang themselves by their own words and actions. At the same time, by selecting just the right material and emphasizing the ridiculous to such a degree that the movie was immediately praised as a work of nonfiction satire, he seriously affected how the Red-hunters in Congress would be seen for generations. De Antonio would use the same political scrapbook technique in such later films as the Vietnam War doc In the Year of the Pig and the Nixon biography Millhouse: A White Comedy, movies that attracted less mainstream attention in part because their targets hadn't been off the front pages for a decade at the time they were released.

Click here for Part One and Part Three

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak

No Shit, Sherlock: Guy Ritchie Reimagines Holmes

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Here at the Screengrab, we’re not philosophically opposed to a “re-imagining” of Sherlock Holmes. After all, the ace detective has been through a lot in his century-long career on the silver screen. He’s been played by Peter Cook, Peter Cushing, Peter Lawford and Peter O’Toole. He’s even been portrayed by actors not named Peter, including Christopher Lee, Christopher Plummer, John Cleese, Michael Caine and someone named Hugo Flink. But we’re pretty sure even the great Basil Rathbone would turn in his pipe and deerstalker hat at the news out of Hollywood this morning.

Guy Ritchie, the man behind such meticulously crafted mysteries as Snatch and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, will spearhead the Holmes revival. According to the Hollywood Reporter, “Ritchie has signed on to write and direct a reimagining of super sleuth Sherlock Holmes for Warner Bros. Lionel Wigram and Dan Lin are producing the movie, which takes its cues from a forthcoming comic that Wigram wrote as a selling tool for a new take on the classic Sir Arthur Conan Doyle character. The concept sees the character be more adventuresome and less stuffy than previous screen incarnations and mines on more obscure character traits.”

The phrases “selling tool” and “less stuffy” certainly have me salivating at the prospect of a hip new Sherlock for the 21st century, how about you? Can I get an “Elementary, my dear Watson”? No?

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