The Screengrab : john hughes

Screengrab Self-Promotion Theater #3: Most People

Andrew Osborne — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 20:09:00 GMT

Good morning, afternoon or evening, and welcome to another edition of Screengrab Self-Promotion Theater, wherein I share my short films with you, the entertainment-starved public.

This week's offering is a five-part teen comedy entitled Most People, featuring students from the Burt Wood School of the Performing Arts, i.e., real teenagers, i.e., no pie sex or thirty-year-old "adolescents" in Porky's-style shower romps.

But if you're a fan of zero budget John Hughes-ian geek love, enjoy!

MOST PEOPLE (PART ONE):

Most People (Part One) - watch more funny videos

MOST PEOPLE (PART TWO):

Most People (Part Two) - watch more funny videos

MOST PEOPLE (PART THREE):

Most People (Part Three) - watch more funny videos

MOST PEOPLE (PART FOUR):

Most People (Part Four) - watch more funny videos

MOST PEOPLE (PART FIVE):

Most People (Part Five) - watch more funny videos

Yesterday's Hits: Home Alone (1990, Chris Columbus)

Paul Clark — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 20:00:00 GMT

The 1990 holiday movie slate boasted a number of sure-fire hits from many of Hollywood’s most bankable names. Arnold Schwarzenegger was getting pushed around by a classroom full of kids, Sylvester Stallone was revisiting his most iconic character once again, Tim Burton was debuting his first project after Batman made him Hollywood’s hottest young director, and Kevin Costner premiered his debut behind the camera, an epic Western that went on to win several Oscars. Heck, there was even a new Godfather movie. Yet none of these movies went on to become the year’s top grossing blockbuster. No, the reigning king of 1990’s box office boasted little more than a precocious child star, a kid-friendly concept, and a memorable scream.

That movie, of course, was Home Alone, directed by Chris Columbus. Sold to moviegoers with the tagline, “a family comedy… without the family,” the movie’s premise encompassed every kid’s dream- having the run of the house with no adult supervision- and many parents’ nightmare- accidentally leaving their child behind when they leave on vacation. At the center of the action was Kevin, played by Macaulay Culkin, for whom producer/screenwriter John Hughes specifically wrote the role after previously working with him on the previous year’s Uncle Buck. Expectations for Home Alone were relatively low, but good word of mouth about the film and its young star made it the runaway hit of the season, and its overwhelming success led to two sequels.

Alas, Home Alone doesn’t hold up very well, in part because of the mountain of contrivances the movie asks us to accept in order to make the storyline work. To begin with, although I’m sure that children have been accidentally left behind by their parents, it’s hard to believe that it would happen the way it does in the movie- surely one of the adults in the house was an early riser, no? Likewise, a repeated gag involving characters being fooled into thinking that a violent-sounding movie scene is really happening in the house is kind of a forehead-slapper- like any reasonably intelligent adult couldn’t tell the difference between real gunshots to those playing on a television?

But then, intelligence seems to be in short supply among the characters. One of my cinematic pet peeves is when a movie requires that its characters be idiots and Home Alone has some real doozies. Chief among the movie’s morons are Harry and Marv, a pair of bumbling burglars played by Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern. Here’s a pair so thickheaded that they get all manner of indignities vested upon them by a little kid, yet never think that, hey, maybe it’d be best to just cut their losses and run rather than risk incurring still more pain and suffering. Of course, it helps that Kevin is preternaturally at jerry-rigging booby traps all over the house with relatively little preparation, and placing them just where the crooks will strike.

This is indicative of the movie’s biggest problem, then Kevin is almost never convincing as a real kid. Oh sure, Culkin bugs his eyes out real cute and delivers the wiseassed one-liners almost like he means them. But it’s just hard to believe that Kevin would be capable of most of what he does or says, whether he’s delivering a monologue in the bathroom mirror or faking out the baddies. Part of the blame must fall on Culkin himself. Like most child actors, Culkin has self-assurance in spades but can’t sell the dialogue as his own, especially not when he’s given lines like “Bless this highly nutritious microwavable macaroni and cheese dinner and the people who sold it on sale. Amen.” Culkin was the biggest child star of his day, making $8 million a movie at the peak of his popularity, but it’s easy to see why he hasn’t been able to make the leap to grown-up roles with the same success that contemporaries like Elijah Wood have.

Time and again, I’ve bemoaned the tendency of many adults to forgive family movies their faults and manipulations on the grounds that they’re “just for kids.” While I realize that children aren’t particularly discerning movie watchers, it doesn’t seem right to use this as an excuse to foist subpar entertainment upon them. Home Alone might have been a hit in its day, but it’s also manipulative and often stupid, and making children watch movies like this is practically an insult to their budding intelligence. With all the high-quality family movies now available on DVD, there’s really no reason to show your kids Home Alone.

Take Five: Road Trip

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 20:15:00 GMT

Opening this Friday, Neil Burger's The Lucky Ones is a bit of a gamble as a follow-up to The Illusionist. Following the plight of three soldiers recently returned from Iraq (played by Tim Robbins, Michael Pena and Rachel McAdams), it quickly turns into a sort of social statement-cum-sign o' the times story as they find themselves on a road trip together across the country. It's hard to predict how The Lucky Ones will be received; Iraq movies are always a crapshoot, and the movie's curious blend of comedy and drama may not fit in with the subject matter. But it's always fun to see a new road movie, especially this late in the year when the possibility taking real-world road trips becomes more and more daunting. Road pictures have a long and storied history in Hollywood, and filmmakers have managed to fold everything from bone-chilling noir to high-concept comedy to existential drama into the format. America is especially adept at making road pictures, not only because of the grand canvas that is the national geography, but because of our total immersion in car culture. Here's five of our favorites.

DETOUR (1945)

Film noir, despite its association with the urban environment, was never afraid to take its show on the road as long as there was a nice juicy crime at the center of the story, and Detour serves up a doozy. A grade-z Poverty Row picture made for the cost of Clark Gable's lunch, Detour nonetheless proved to be one of the most effective noir films of its day, thanks to its relentless, grubby energy. Tom Neal, who starts the picture looking like he's had his insides scooped out and just gets worse from there, plays a sad-sack piano player who just wants to get to the west coast so he can be united with his former flame. But along the way he gets framed for murder after running afoul of Ann Savage in one of the most terrifying femme fatale roles of all time. A terrific, unsparingly bleak little film that proves a little can go a long way.

ROAD TO UTOPIA (1946)

The term "road picture" was more or less invented to describe the handful of movies made in the 1940s to showcase the comedic talents of the Bob Hope/Bing Crosby team. The movies, which always featured the boys making an arduous comic trek to some picaresque location, were of varied quality, but were alway huge moneymakers. The last of these was the best; it featured Hope and Crosby (accompanied, as always, by Dorothy Lamour) as turn-of-the-century con artists heading to Alaska to strike gold. That was just the set-up, though, for one of the most anarchic comedies of the decade; scanning more like a Marx Brothers movie, Road to Utopia featured in-jokes, metahumor, wordplay, surreal gags, and even some inexplicable albeit hilarious voice-overs by master humorist Robert Benchley.

TWO LANE BLACKTOP (1971)

A beloved film among your loyal Screengrab scribes, Monte Hellman's throat-clutching existential race movie Two Lane Blacktop opened to great praise and almost as quickly faded out of existence. It's not hard to see why: for all its greatness, it's a remarkably strange little flick, curiously aimless despite its implacable velocity, with characters who are little more than cyphers, as much as they intrigue us. Two of its 'stars', James Taylor and Dennis Wilson, basically never acted again, and Warren Oates turns in a performance -- as the impenetrable, self-inventing G.T.O., named after his car -- that's bizarre even weighed against his filmography. Still, it's probably the pinnacle of the road movie as metaphor for existence, and once seen, it's never forgotten. A real underground classic that's finally gotten its due.

NATIONAL LAMPOON'S VACATION (1983)

Nowadays, the presence of the National Lampoon imprint is practically a guarantee that a movie is going to be a colossal pile of shit. There are those of us old enough to remember how lucky we were back in the days when only the next installment of the venerable National Lampoon's Vacation franchise was going to be a piece of shit, but even for us old cranks, it does us good to remember that the original was actually a pretty solid ensemble comedy. Directed by a still-fresh Harold Ramis, written by John Hughes (who adapted his own story, with surprisingly few changes, from the old NatLamp magazine), and starring Chevy Chase when "starring Chevy Chase" was a preferable alternative to suicide, Vacation has held up surprisingly well, both on its own merits and as, essentially, the blueprint for every road comedy since.

BROKEN FLOWERS (2005)

Even for fans of Jim Jarmusch -- a group of which I am a proud member -- there was a lot not to like about Broken Flowers. Though the music, by Ethiopian jazzman Mulatu Astaque, was fantastic, it felt like it was driving the aimless plot, and the hip-music-plays-as-America-flashes-on-the-windshield device was getting a bit tired. Bill Murray's aging sad sack character was becoming less of a revelation and more of a routine. The incomprehensible ethnic as source of boundless wisdom device was wearing thin. All in all, parts of Broken Flowers played like a pardoy of Jarmusch rather than the real thing. But the parts that worked, including some stunning acting by the movie's female leads and the whole road-trip-to-nowhere angle which Jarmusch has done so well before, remind you why you put up with the parts that don't.

Related Posts:

Take Five: Taxi!

Take Five: Ride Hard

Screengrab’s Back-To-School Round-Up: The Top 18+ High School Films (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 21:30:00 GMT

SIXTEEN CANDLES (1984) & THE BREAKFAST CLUB (1985)

I’m no sociologist, but I’ll nevertheless hazard the following thesis: no matter how good any particular teen film may be, there’s nothing that compares with the high school movies you saw while you were actually IN high school. And so, no matter how good, say, American Graffiti or The Last Picture Show or Rushmore or American Pie may be (and yes, Commenters, we know we left all these ultra-worthy contenders off this week’s list, and apologize profusely!), they’ll never hold the same hallowed place in my heart as Sixteen Candles or The Breakfast Club, which I saw during my junior and (best of all) senior years at good ol’ M.H.S., home of the Middleboro Marching 100 and the Speech & Theater Workshop...GO SACHEMS!!!! WOO-HOO!!!! CLASS OF ’85 RULES!!!! Writer/director John Hughes also ruled way back then, before he tumbled into the bottomless vat of Cheez Whiz better known as his post-‘80s directing career. But, just like your goofy yearbook photo, his two best films are eternal: Molly Ringwald as wised-up, self-conscious everygirl Sam and Anthony Michael Hall’s noble Geek are Clearasil icons for the ages in the endlessly quotable '84 classic that established many if not most of the future clichés of the modern teen movie: the ironic, pop culture post-modernism, the clueless but caring parent/guardian and, of course, the climactic cast-of-thousands suburban blow-out. But as good as Sixteen Candles is, The Breakfast Club seemed even better at the time, if only because it gave my senior class “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” as our official swan song. Even when I was squarely in Hughes’ demographic, of course, I recognized the occasional pretentious, simplistic and overwrought moments of the '85 dramedy, and Ally Sheedy’s conversion from cool Goth to Emilio Estevez’s boring prep girlfriend still rankles...but looking back now, I can’t help feeling nostalgic for an era when teens could be still be captivated by a talky character study that played like a one-set, seven-character off-Broadway show with no gratuitous violence or nudity (except for the second big screen close-up of Molly Ringwald’s panties in as many years). Hey...hey...hey...hey!

HIGH SCHOOL (1969)

The cinema-verite documentarian Frederick Wiseman has spent the bulk of his career boiling down one American institution after another -- often in movies with generic-label titles such as Hospital, Juvenile Court, Basic Training, and Domestic Violence -- to reveal the lives being helplessly fed into the bureaucratic grinder. It stands to figure that high school would have been one of the earliest subjects on his list. This film, which was shot at Philadelphia's Northeast High School, conveys the experience of being trapped there for a typical day, and in the process pins to the wall the regimented drills, the impatience with nonconformity, imagination, or anything else that might take things off their carefully scheduled course, the seething resentment of the authority figures trying to hammer the kids into well-behaved, smiling cannon fodder. It was selected for inclusion in the National Film Registry in the third year of that list's existence, but it might be a greater tribute to it that it was banned in Philadelphia for years because it made the educational process look dehumanizing and depressing.

LORD LOVE A DUCK (1966)

Probably many will automatically nominate Molly Ringwald or Winona Ryder for the title of high school movies' definitive prom queen, but for some of us, Tuesday Weld blows them all out of the water. The Drew Barrymore of her time -- besides having the weird name to have to explain to people, she was a veteran actress-model, supporting her family while coping with a drinking problem and a nervous breakdown, all before she was thirteen -- she was also a white-hot talent, an inventive actress who was both sexy and affecting even in the cheesy, early rock and roll exploitation pictures that served as her entry point into the movie business. She was twenty-three but still looked like a teen queen when she starred in this bizarre satire, directed by George Axelrod. She plays Barbara Ann Greene, a child of divorce (back when that was still supposed to be shameful) who wants to be loved by everyone but can't even crash the important girls' club she needs to join to take her first steps towards school-wide popularity, because she can't afford the twelve angora sweaters that are a non-negotiable requirement of establishing any girl's true worth. Luckily, she attracts the admiring attentions of Alan (Roddy MacDowell), who begins greasing the wheels for her steady ascent, by whatever means necessary: he's something between a wish-fulfilling genie and a psycho on the make. Before graduating forever from high-school age roles, Weld would follow Duck up with another cult classic, 1968's Pretty Poison, in which the roles were reversed: in that one, her frustrated young miss hooks up with a lonely young man (Anthony Perkins) with a history of emotional disturbance, who realizes too late that she's ensnared him in a murder plot. Once again, Weld demonstrates her ability to do the near-impossible by making her character believable and seductive while managing to make Tony Perkins look like the sane one.

ELECTION (1999)

Alexander Payne's movie, closely adapted from Tom Perrotta's slim, sharp novel, may be the best of all attempts to use high school life as a metaphorical testing ground for everything that comes after it. Matthew Broderick explodes his Ferris Bueller persona as the upstanding, much-admired high school teacher who preaches the virtues of democracy until it becomes clear that, unless checked, democracy is going to make a terrible mistake and reward Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon), the superachiever student who is the personification of everything that he hates and thinks is wrong with the world (i.e., everything that makes other people more successful than him). Broderick hasn't had a role half as good since, and neither Witherspoon nor Chris Klein (as the sweet golden boy dope of a jock who's Tracy's natural enemy in spite of himself) has ever been better, but a special Screengrab Missing in Action shout-out goes to Jessica Campbell, the young actress (sixteen at the time) who gives a wonderful performance as Klein's lonely, frustrated lesbian sister, whose acting out turns her into the anarchist heroine of the student body elections, and who, except for a couple of low-profile TV and movie roles, hasn't been seen since.

Click Here For Part One, Part Two & Part Three

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

My Troma Summer, Part Three

Andrew Osborne — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 19:30:00 GMT

Previously on My Troma Summer: Part One, Part Two

My first few days as a barely-paid production assistant in Troma’s three-story walk-up Hell’s Kitchen “studio” were uneventful (and possibly carcinogenic) as my new drill sergeant, Andy, had me organize and inventory several piles of fake severed limbs and other junk in the building’s cramped, asbestos-y basement. After that was done, I was assigned to watch and transcribe every dreadful line of dialogue from one of the company’s recent releases, Fortress of Amerikka, for use by Troma’s overseas distributors (an exercise which at the very least taught me a valuable screenwriting lesson about NOT starting every other line of dialogue in a movie with “Listen,” as in: “Listen, we gotta get outta here.” “But those men will kill us!” “Listen, if we stay here, we’re dead for sure.” “I’m scared!” “Listen, Jennifer, you’ve gotta listen to me...” “Listen! Someone’s coming!”).

And so on.

Andy didn’t have anything in particular for me to do after the Amerikkka transcript was complete, so he decided to further indoctrinate me in the house style by sitting me down with another recent release, Troma’s War, which employed the signature Lloyd Kaufman/Michael Herz formula of sex, violence, sophomoric humor and paranoid, populist outrage against “the power elite” and all the other assorted scumbags, shysters and pests who plagued the lives of decent, ordinary people.

Of course, like many a populist, Lloyd himself lived much better than the working class heroes he championed, as I discovered when I was summoned one afternoon to the Troma kingpin’s spacious brownstone maisonette to discuss his upcoming production, Kabukiman.

Shortly after signing on as a P.A., I’d handed Andy a copy of my first ever screenplay, a John Hughes rip-off distinctly lacking in gratuitous nudity or exploding skulls. Andy nevertheless forwarded it to Lloyd, who praised the work as he escorted me into his private home office, then handed me a folder of news clippings about Japanese culture, virtual reality technology, insider trading, Al Sharpton’s defense of some teenagers recently arrested for “wilding” in Central Park and a variety of other disparate elements he somehow wanted to shoehorn into the plot of his next film.

“Basically, it’s a culture clash, East meets West,” Lloyd exclaimed, the carnival huckster exuberance of his public persona dialed back a notch or two in private. “I want the main character to be a real American hero, an honest New York City cop who gains these amazing kabuki powers and has to learn to eat with chopsticks and sing Madame Butterfly or whatever to balance his Western yin with his Eastern yang, or something like that...you know Madame Butterfly? Puccini? Oh, beautiful. A classic. Anyway, so he gets these kabuki superpowers and then he’s able to, like, chop up muggers and rapists with a Samurai sword and turn ‘em into sushi. Or something like that. You get the idea. Our Japanese producing partner, Fujimura-san, drew up a sketch of the Kabukiman costume...it’s in that folder somewhere...but anyway, you get the idea, right? East meets West. Culture clash. And that scumbag Al Sharpton...gotta work him in there, too, and that other guy...what’s his name? Milken, Michael Milken...and Boesky, all those Wall Street scumbags and their friends in Washington, funneling money to the CIA to smuggle crack into the ghetto...it’s all connected, oh yes...well, anyway, you’re a Harvard guy, you’ll figure it out. See what you come up with and we’ll talk about it tomorrow with the writers. Nice guys, you’ll like ‘em. College men.”

And so, for the rest of the day, I holed up with a spiral notebook and a pile of newspaper clippings, stitching together a Frankenstein’s monster of a story that would slowly stir to life in the coming weeks and months of my humid Troma summer.

To Be Continued...

15 Films That (Almost) Could've Been Directed By Somebody Else (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 20:00:00 GMT

We’ve been taking reader suggestions for our Top Tens of late, and this week’s list, suggested via “electronic mail” by F.O.S. (Friend of Screengrab) Kaegan has the added advantage of being topical, what with the ten million recent reviews of Nanette Burstein’s documentary American Teen that cleverly elucidated how the film’s high school cliques and self-aware characters were just like something from a John Hughes movie...but for real! (And without any Wang Chung on the soundtrack).

Spurred by Kaegan, we henceforth present fifteen worthy homages and/or bad imitations, depending how you look at it (and NOT including Brian De Palma’s numerous Hitchcock rip-offs, which we’re saving for an upcoming list of, well, best and worse Hitchcock rip-offs...so stay tuned)!

FREEWAY (1996), Not Directed by John Waters

I’ve written about Freeway so recently that I’ll merely direct you to that write-up for my thoughts on Matthew Bright’s deranged cult classic...but, considering the film’s white trash milieu, indomitable characters, gleeful celebration of violence and depravity and startling against-type casting, it seemed fitting to kick off the list with the greatest Baltimore-of-the-West film the Prince of Puke never directed.

MIAMI BLUES (1990), Not Directed by Jonathan Demme

In the eighties, Jonathan Demme amassed a sizable following with his films Melvin & Howard, Something Wild, and Married to the Mob. Each of these films showed a flair for offbeat comedy, as well as an affinity for marginalized characters. So when Miami Blues hit screens in 1990, the handful of people who actually paid to see it could have been forgiven for believing it was Demme’s latest directorial effort. Hell, it was produced by Demme and his usual producing team, shot by Demme’s usual cinematographer Tak Fujimoto, edited by Demme regular Craig McKay, and co-starred newly-hot leading man Alec Baldwin, who had a supporting role in Married to the Mob. But manning the director’s chair wasn’t Demme, but rather his old Roger Corman colleague George Armitage, whose most notable title up to that point had been 1971’s Private Duty Nurses. The style of Miami Blues bears definite resemblance to that of Demme’s work, but Armitage’s sense of humor is more twisted, as in the scene where Baldwin’s Fred Frenger (a Demme name if there ever was one) steals police detective Fred Ward’s gun and badge, plus his false teeth just to rub it in. But if Armitage’s brand of sick humor doesn’t exactly jive with his old pal’s more generous comedy, the two share an affection for characters who are essentially good, embodied here in the form of Jennifer Jason Leigh’s Suzie, a kind-hearted prostitute who gets stuck on Fred and comes off like the slower cousin of Something Wild’s Audrey. Once it begins to dawn on Suzie that Fred is far more dangerous than she’d anticipated, her answer is both quirky and heartbreaking: "I had to give him the benefit of the doubt. He always ate everything I ever gave him and he never hit me."

THE THIRD MAN (1949), Not Directed by Orson Welles

It's easy to understand why people got the wrong idea about The Third Man. Orson Welles not only gives an electrifying performance as Harry Lime, but improvised various bits of the character's memorable dialogue, including his famous line about Swiss cuckoo clocks. (Indeed, he became so closely associated with the character that he went on to voice him in a radio show called The Lives of Harry Lime a few years later.) The film itself is infused with the kind of morally unhinged noir sensibility that Welles would later master in Touch of Evil, making it seem entirely plausible that his was the mind behind the film. Many of The Third Man's most daring shots, from the shadowy confrontations in the sewers of Vienna to the final, heartbreaking walk taken by Alida Valli, resemble Welles' visual pyrotechnics in his own films, and the overall dark tone of the movie, as well as little touches like the overlapping dialogue, the low-angled two-shots, and the interesting lighting, are all reminiscent of movies that Orson Welles really did direct. To top it all off, Welles was already a famous (or infamous) director when The Third Man opened in the U.S., while Carol Reed, though well-known in his native England, wasn't particular renowned here. But the all-too-common assumption that Orson Welles "really" directed the film does a disservice to the talented and innovative Reed, who, while not on his star's level of genius, was nonetheless a very dedicated, professional and skilled director. Indeed, in at least one way, it was Carol Reed who did Orson Welles' job and not the other way around: Harry Lime's hands reaching through the sewer grate near the movie's end belong to Reed and not Welles, who was gallivanting around Europe when the scene was filmed and hadn't even shown up on set yet.

INTERIORS (1978), Not Directed by Ingmar Bergman

Like a lot of movie fanatics who live in Manhattan, Woody Allen is obsessed with the work of Ingmar Bergman. Unlike a lot of movie fanatics who live in Manhattan, Woody Allen is actually capable of getting movies made and widely released across the country. For years, Allen – whose obsession with Bergman is arguably both wider and deeper than his understanding of Bergman – had been trying to get people to take him seriously, and with Interiors, he pulled the trigger in a big way, inspired by Bergman's stark, chilly tales of family unhappiness in everything from the photography to the poster design. Never had Diane Keaton stared so wistfully out of a poorly lit window; never had Woody Allen failed to appear in one of his own movies; and, most importantly, never had a film by America's leading comedic director been such a relentless bummer. Interiors proved to be a massive critical success, with only a few grouches wondering if someone so adept at comedy needed to be spending his time making second-rate imitations of art films by a Swedish director who was still alive and perfectly capable of making such films himself. (Indeed, Bergman managed to one-up Allen even in the casting department: Woody had wanted to use Ingrid Bergman for the role of Eve, but she was already committed to filming a movie in Europe with, you guessed it, Ingmar.) Regardless of whether or not you think of Interiors as a failed Bergman knock-off or a successful Bergman homage, one thing's for sure: it ain't funny. The "I liked your earlier, funnier work" has become a comic cliché of its own when applied to Woody Allen's movies; Interiors is the movie that set it all off.

Click here for Part Two, Part Three & Part Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Paul Clark, Leonard Pierce

Reviews By Request: The New Kids (1985, Sean S. Cunningham)

Paul Clark — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Thanks to reader Jason Alley for requesting this week’s review. As always, for instructions on how to request the next review for this feature (to run in two weeks) see the bottom of this post.

A few years ago, a friend jokingly referred to me as an “art movie snob.” At first, I practically recoiled at the suggestion, but then he explained his reasoning- “think of the first section you go to when you walk into a video store. Some of us, we’ll hit the cult classics or the horror movies, but every time I go with you, you always head straight for the foreign films.” And you know, he was right. As a moviegoer, I tend to be drawn to more artistically edifying cinema, and even though I’ve tried to become more versed in genre filmmaking in the intervening years, truth is I’ve still got a lot of catching up to do. All of which is, I suppose, a roundabout way of saying that The New Kids wasn’t really the kind of movie I would normally seek out. But thanks to reader Jason Alley, I caught up with the film for this week’s Reviews by Request column, and while it wasn’t exactly my cup of tea, I found it sort of fascinating.

When Jason requested the film for review, he pitched it to me by saying “it’s like Straw Dogs directed by John Hughes.” He wasn’t far off the mark. The New Kids tells the story of Loren and Abby McWilliams (Shannon Presby and Lori Loughlin), a pair of Army brats who have recently moved to Florida following the deaths of their parents. Soon after, Loren and Abby run afoul of a gang of redneck bullies at their high school, led by Eddie Dutra (a young James Spader). The gang begins by menacing the attractive Abby, and when she rebuffs them, they respond by defacing the amusement park where they live with their uncle. But as the film progresses, the threats become more dangerous, until we see how crazy Dutra and his gang really are.

Okay, so the story isn’t exactly groundbreaking. Hell, it even provides a colorfully weird backdrop for the film’s climactic showdown. Yet The New Kids is made with a kind of brutal efficiency that makes it sort of charming. The tone is set early on when we see Loren and Abby exercising with their Army officer father (played by quintessential That Guy! Tom Atkins). Then, not five minutes after he’s been introduced, Atkins is dead. Never an explanation- just gone. The whole film is like that, never explaining anything or going into unnecessary detail, which I found refreshing in our time of bloated genre films that feel the need to dot every I.

The New Kids has no agenda except to be a lean thriller. Sean S. Cunningham, best known for directing the original Friday the 13th paints his story in broad strokes, with sympathetic protagonists and irredeemable villains. Yet sometimes some small bits of character business sneak in through the cracks. For example, I found it interesting how the film treats Loren’s more chivalric side. Every time he defends his sister or his family from Dutra, he doesn’t come off as simply heroic, but a little crazy himself, and his actions usually only serve to make the situation even worse.

Somehow, in the middle of it all, James Spader gives a surprisingly fine performance- surprising not because of Spader but because of the somewhat disposable nature of the film, in which one wouldn’t normally find memorable acting. But Spader makes for a genuinely frightening villain, mostly by projecting a kind of charismatic chilliness that almost imperceptibly segues into madness. Spader’s performance is a marvel of economy, with next to no wasted gestures. Look at the scene where he rallies his gang to chase down Abby after she escapes, where he cocks a shotgun and says, “let’s go hunting.” Rather than playing up the cheesiness of the line, Spader says it calmly, like he would if he’s about to shoot a squirrel, and as a result it’s more chilling than any overacting he might otherwise have done.

Most of The New Kids is fairly standard-issue revenge movie material, but the climactic faceoff between Dutra’s gang and Loren and Abby is pretty fascinating stuff, mostly because Cunningham shoots much of it from the point of view of the villains who are trying to find the heroes, rather than the heroes who are hiding and sneaking around. To be honest, I’m not sure this was intentional on Cunningham’s part, given his background in horror movies, but whether he meant to shoot the scene this way, it’s strangely compelling. At this point, the film becomes a kind of hybrid between slasher movie and revenge drama that I don’t think I’ve seen before. And then there’s the final scene, which plays like a combination of sick joke and setup for a sequel that never got made.

As I said before, The New Kids isn’t exactly what I’d call “my kind of movie.” But one of the goals of Reviews by Request is to broaden my horizons, to shine a light into shadowy corners of cinema that I might not have peered into otherwise. In the end, The New Kids isn’t a classic by any yardstick, but it’s certainly the kind of movie I can imagine becoming a cult object given half a chance, much as I’m told it already has among Jason (our intrepid requester) and his friends.

Previously on Reviews by Request:

Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance (1972, Kenji Misumi)

Zulu (1964, Cy Endfield)

Baxter (1989, Jérôme Boivin)

So, what movie would you like me to review for the next installment of Reviews by Request? Let me know in the comments section below. To refresh your memory, here are the rules for requesting a movie to be reviewed: (1) it has to be a movie I haven’t seen, (2) it has to be available through Netflix, and (3) please only request one film. Other than that, anything is fair game. First to suggest a movie that qualifies gets their requested review. See you in two weeks!

Vanishing Act: Savage Steve Holland

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 22 May 2008 18:30:00 GMT

If you’re not of a certain age, you’ve probably never even heard of Savage Steve Holland – or if you have, you may be under the impression that he was a professional wrestler back in the '80s. Well, you got the right decade: for a little while there, Holland was second only to John Hughes as American cinema’s foremost purveyor of comedic teen angst. I honestly couldn’t tell you whether I’ve seen one of his movies in its entirely (though I’m sure I’ve channel surfed through them hundreds of times), but some people my age still swear by the guy.

An animator who studied at CalArts (and who, according to wikipedia, designed the Whammy on the game show Press Your Luck), Holland’s legacy rests entirely on two movies he made with John Cusack: Better Off Dead (1985) and One Crazy Summer (1986). In the former, Cusack gets dumped by his girlfriend, makes several suicide attempts, then hooks up with a foreign exchange student. In the latter, he’s a cartoonist who spends an eventful summer on Nantucket with the likes of Bobcat Goldthwait, Demi Moore and Curtis “Booger” Armstrong. Neither movie set the box office on fire, but both were cult hits with long afterlives on video and cable, thanks to 80s-style wackiness like Cusack’s creation of a claymation Van Halen hamburger:

Or Bobcat Goldthwait wreaking havoc in a Godzilla costume:

Alas, the magic could not last. Holland’s third directorial effort, 1989’s How I Got Into College (which he did not write), was a certifiable box office bomb, and that was it for Holland’s movie career. He found a niche on television, however, directing episodes of Encyclopedia Brown, Shasta McNasty, Lizzie McGuire, and my one-time late night guilty pleasure, V.I.P. But as Indiana Jones is here to remind us, all things '80s will return to haunt us, and that includes Savage Steve Holland. He has no less than three comeback vehicles in the works: a straight-to-video sequel to Legally Blonde, a National Lampoon movie called Ratko: The Dictator’s Son, and The Big One 3, described by the director as the sort-of third part of the Better Off Dead/One Crazy Summer trilogy. But that’s not all. Holland is attached to yet another project, one that can only be summed up by its three word title:

Howard Stern’s Porky’s.

Didn’t I say something about all things '80s returning to haunt us?

Geek Love: The Ten Sexiest Nerds in Cinema, Gen-XX Edition (Part Deux)

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

5. MARY STUART MASTERSON AS DANNI IN HEAVEN HELP US AND WATTS IN SOME KIND OF WONDERFUL

Danni in the 1960s-era Catholic school comedy Heaven Help Us would surely have been too cool for me in the real world, but the tomboy drummer Watts was a perfect fantasy: the groovy gal pal who’s been secretly pining for you all along -- then, when you finally catch wise, she’s dressed in a sleek, Goth-y chauffeur’s uniform. Tellingly, in John Hughes’ gender-flipped version of the same story (Pretty In Pink), Jon Cryer’s groovy guy pal, Duckie secretly pines for Molly Ringwald’s Andie, but then has to just suck it while she runs off with...yes, another popular hunk.

4. MICHELLE MEYRINK AS JORDAN COCHRAN IN REAL GENIUS

I wouldn’t have been smart enough for Jordan Cochran’s motor-mouthed, socially awkward “Pacific Tech” brainiac, but it was nice to know cute girls could be hyper, too!

3. THORA BIRCH AS JANE BURNHAM IN AMERICAN BEAUTY AND ENID IN GHOST WORLD

I’d evolved from a hopelessly geeky adolescent to a somewhat less geeky adult by the time Thora Birch became the definitive fin de siècle geek girl, but her sultry slow-burn cynicism (and surprisingly huge breasts) put the “It” in her misfits. (Scarlett Johnasson in Ghost World, meanwhile, is one of the hottest screen characters of all time, but ScarJo as a nerdy misfit is about as believable as Denise Richards as a nuclear physicist.)

2. CARRIE FISHER AS PRINCESS LEIA IN RETURN OF THE JEDI

The iconic, the unforgettable, the indisputable chain mail bikini. Even my gay nerd friends wanted a piece o’ that.

1. ALYSON HANNIGAN AS MICHELLE FLAHERTY IN AMERICAN PIE

A goofy, accessible, redhead nymphomaniac played by the actress who played the lesbian witch (and the evil vampire lesbian witch) on Buffy the Vampire Slayer? My friends, we have a winner.

And now that we've got you all lathered up in a hot geek frenzy, we'd love to know the nerds that steam up YOUR Coke-bottle glasses...and stay tuned for next week's list of Top Ten Brainy BOYS!

Click here for Part 1!

Screengrab Review: Charlie Bartlett

Peter Smith — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 19:00:00 GMT

December brought us Juno, a teen movie (over)written by a thirty-year-old ex-stripper; February brings us Charlie Bartlett, a teen movie apparently written by a twelve-year-old whipped into a frenzy of high-school anticipation by every other teen movie ever made. It's an odd creature, this Charlie Bartlett — thick with references to Rushmore, Harold and Maude and Ferris Bueller's Day Off, it feels persistently unreal, untempered by real-life experience of high school. The "drug" sequences seem to come from someone less familiar with altered states than with the pot montage in The Breakfast Club, and a key virginity loss is mysteriously set inside a scene from Sixteen Candles. You might find this annoying, or you might find yourself getting wistful for the worst years of your life.

Charlie (Anton Yelchin) has been booted out of every private school in the state — not for bad grades, of course, but for persistent attention-seeking prankery. He's desperate for popularity, and at his new public school, he finds it by psychoanalyzing his classmates and prescribing them medication via the bevy of shrinks thrown at him by his doting, overbearing mother (Hope Davis, who chastizes him for not eating his dinner with the line, "I've cooked you a perfectly Oedipal meal" — or at least that's how I heard it). Simultaneously, he befriends a bully (one Tyler Hilton, who looks far too much like a young Morrissey to be threatening) and romances the principal's daughter (Kat Dennings, of The 40-Year-Old Virgin). But the principal himself (Robert Downey, Jr., entertaining as ever) turns out to be a problem, though not too much of a problem to resolve in a ludicrous climax. Basically, this is not the next Rushmore, Donnie Darko or even Ferris Bueller, despite Charlie's preference for a Bueller-esque shades-and-beret combo. It's not without fun, though. You can scoff at it if you like, but if you're twelve, you'll probably find it highly plausible. — Peter Smith

Gregory's Girl, Interrupted

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Over in the Times of London, Kevin Maher catches up with the cast of Bill Forsyth's charming little adolescent romantic comedy Gregory's Girl, 27 years later on. For those who haven't seen the film, much of its delight came from its extremely appealing — and, at the time, almost completely unknown — cast of young actors. Like very few films of the time, it captures the sweetness, agony, and even ugliness of young love in a way that anticipates (and improves upon) John Hughes' films of a few years later.

The feature is the usual blend of melancholy and nostalgia that comes with such where-are-they-now features, with the added tint of speculation borne of the fact that none of the cast went on to any great fame as screen actors. It's also a glimpse into the lives of the "jobbing actor", those who plug away with small roles here and there over a lifetime to keep in the game, and those who simply decide it isn't worth it and become pharmaceutical sales reps in East Kilbride. (In a strange bit of coincidence, Clare Grogan, who played Susan — the "Gregory's Girl" of the title — became the lead singer of Altered Images, whose minor hit "Happy Birthday" played in a key scene of John Hughes' thematically similar Sixteen Candles.)

But the most amazing part of the article is the news that a DVD of Gregory's Girl is being given away free with the Sunday Times. What do we have to do to get in on that action? We'd love to get free American indie films with our Sunday New York Times...

Vanishing Act: John Hughes

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 19:00:00 GMT

You learn some funny things when researching a column dedicated to filmmakers who have mysteriously vacated the multiplex. As surprised as I was last week to find out that Michael Cimino was originally slated to direct Footloose, I am doubly stunned this week to discover that there are no less than five Beethoven movies. I’m not talking about the deaf composer idolized by Alex in A Clockwork Orange; I’m talking about the freakin’ St. Bernard of that name. And do you know what that fifth Beethoven movie is titled? That’s right, it’s Beethoven’s 5th! And why am I telling you this?

It’s because the first Beethoven movie was co-written by John Hughes, under the nom de garbage Edmond Dantès. Dantès, you may recall, was the Count of Monte Cristo, but it’s also the name Hughes has used on several occasions to disguise his involvement in films such as Maid in Manhattan. Looking over his body of work, you have to wonder if he wishes he’d started using the name earlier.

Hughes had a pretty good thing going for a while there, as almost anyone who was a teenager in the 1980s will tell you. Together, Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Weird Science, Pretty in Pink and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off pretty much comprise the definitive portrait of teen angst in the Reagan era. But after a brief foray into the grown-up realm with She’s Having a Baby, Hughes regressed like Charlie in Flowers for Algernon, churning out increasingly lame kiddie fare, from the Home Alone series to Curly Sue to (shudder) Baby’s Day Out. At some point, perhaps he realized his name was becoming shorthand for “prolific purveyor of puerile pap,” and made an abrupt course correction. Now he’s almost reclusive enough to consider changing his name to Howard.

The most recent project Hughes graced with his own name was the barely-released Reach the Rock, an uncharacteristically downbeat small-town dramedy he scripted in 1998. Around that time he gave one of last known interviews, conducted by High Hat co-founder and Screengrab confidant William Ham. In it, he does sound like a man who’s ready for an extended sabbatical. “The only sequels I was involved in were under duress,” he says. “I didn't even know about Vegas Vacation until I read about it in the trades!... I tried to talk them out of doing Ferris Bueller as a series…That's why I've stayed in Chicago, 'cause I never quite fit into L.A. It's easier to maintain a degree of innocence here, you're not playing the herd so much.”

It’s a little hard to buy the notion of John Hughes as anti-Hollywood renegade, especially since his alter ego Edmond Dantès is back at work. Did you catch the Drillbit Taylor trailer earlier today on the Screengrab? Well, Dantès is credited with the story on this latest export from the Judd Apatow conglomerate. Indeed, the increasingly overexposed and overextended Apatow could do worse that to regard his latest collaborator as a cautionary tale…before he ends up making his own Curly Sue.