The Screengrab : johnny depp

Final Farewells: The Best & Worst Death Scenes In Cinema (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 21 May 2009 21:00:00 GMT

Bruce Willis in THE SIXTH SENSE (1999)

The big parlor game after The Sixth Sense hit theaters was asking your friends, “Did you guess the ending?” (As opposed to, say, The Village, where pretty much everyone guessed the dopey twist.) Some people claim they caught wise to Shyamalan’s scheme the second Donnie Wahlberg’s buff, naked psychopath shot Bruce Willis’ mumbly psychiatrist in the gut, but I’m not one of them...and as an online screenwriting teacher (at UCLA Extension...summer courses forming now!), I regularly praise the sleight-of-hand brio of the scene above. We see Willis’ character shot dead right in front of our eyes, then in the next scene it’s two years later and he’s sitting on a park bench, seemingly alive. It’s a neat trick, and for the majority of us who didn’t stop and go, “Hey, wait a minute...” it led to a clever, head-slapping reveal that Shyamalan achieved fair and square without cheating (hello, ridiculous Mission Impossible "Jon Voight" mask) or bending the willing suspension of disbelief to the breaking point (so...they set up a fake 19th century society with monsters but without antibiotics? Does anyone ever actually read Shyamalan’s scripts before they go into production?). (AO)

Johnny Depp in A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET (1984)

Johnny Depp may not have been a star yet, but his exit from Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street was instantly memorable thanks to its unholy-torrents-of-blood payoff. Reconfiguring the classic boogeyman-under-the-bed scenario into a boogeyman-inside-the-bed nightmare, Depp’s last scene finds him (and his TV) being pulled into a mattress by the gloved hand of Freddy Krueger. Out of the hole created by this supernatural incident comes a horrific eruption of blood made all the more chilling by its reverse-gravitational movement, the red geyser coating the ceiling without besmirching anything else in the room. It’s one of the finest moments in the Craven canon. (NS)

Leonard Nimoy in STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN (1982)

Yes, I’m well aware that The Wrath of Khan was followed by an entire Star Trek movie dedicated to putting Spock together again…and more than 25 years later, he’s still alive and giving advice to his younger self. So what? Leonard Nimoy knew what he was doing when he didn’t come back to give Spock a final sendoff in Star Trek: Generations; he’d already done it to perfection here. Taking the reigns of the Trek franchise, Nicholas Meyer crafted a genuine emotional epiphany from a pop artifact and set the series on a steady course for decades to come. If I can’t ride a nuclear bomb to my death (see below), at least let me be shot out of a spaceship while Scotty plays the bagpipes. (SVD)

Warren Beatty in MCCABE & MRS. MILLER (1971) & Jack Nicholson in THE SHINING (1980)

Beatty and Nicholson have been linked in the public mind for pretty much their entire careers. They’re longtime neighbors on Mulholland Drive, they’ve co-starred in The Fortune and Reds, and throughout the '70s and '80s, they shared a similar rep as Hollywood bad boys and incurable ladies’ men. They also tend to die at the end of their movies, so it’s probably not too surprising that, at some point, they would each find themselves frozen in snow as the final credits roll. As our own Hayden Childs put it last week in our countdown of Best Movies Ever, McCabe’s “final stand, his big gun battle, is as unimportant to the town of Presbyterian Church as Icarus plunging into the sea in Pieter Brueghal's Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.” In The Shining, Nicholson dies as a howling monster, a wounded minotaur loose in the maze, but whereas McCabe may be instantly forgotten, Jack Torrance has always been and will always be the caretaker. (SVD)

Slim Pickens in DR. STRANGELOVE (1964)

Can you think of a better way to go out? Slim Pickens had more than one great death scene, but whooping it up while riding the nuclear bomb that sets off the end of the world as we know it…there’s a man who knows how to make an exit. (SVD)

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Nick Schager, Scott Von Doviak

The Hype Report: The X File on Winona Ryder

Phil Nugent — Fri, 08 May 2009 17:00:00 GMT

[Being the latest in an infrequent series devoted to movie-related puff pieces so over the top that they're a show all by themselves..]

So it turns out that Winona Ryder is in the new Star Trek movie, where she plays the Vulcan ambassador Sarek's baby mama, and Vanessa Thorpe's profile of Ryder and the current state of her career has kind of science-fiction vibe to it itself. Did you know that Ryder was once "acclaimed as the most promising, most beautiful and most fashionable star of her generation - the generation, that is, that had become known as 'X'?" It's news to me, and I think I'm of the generation that had become known as 'X' myself, so long as we're all committed to writing in the style that has become known as "funny-looking'." Thorpe must have worried that we'd think it was just her, so she cites a back-up source: Ryder's father, who says that twenty or so years ago, his daughter and Johnny Depp were "the hottest couple in the United States." All together now--ewwwwww!! Is it possible that when all those folks at the red carpet premieres leaned across the police barricades and screamed, "You're the most promising, most beautiful, and most fashionable star of your generation," they were talking to Johnny? Thorpe herself undercuts her argument by describing Ryder's features as "elfin", a term I've always associated more with the likes of Michael J. Pollard or the guy on Two and a Half Men who isn't Charlie Sheen than anyone who might qualify as the most beautiful anything. It's possible that Cate Blanchett and Orlando Bloom in The Lord of the Rings have forever rewritten the rule book on this one, but not in my apartment.

The thing is, I've always thought that Ryder was beautiful, and that's why I never tortured myself a lot--a little, but not a lot--wondering why she had a career. It was easy for men, including men as smart and weird as Depp and Tim Burton, to have high hopes for her in her Beetlejuice days: she was, one more time, a very beautiful, very young girl who liked to tell interviewers that was reading Ian McEwan and do guest spots in Mojo Nixon videos. You could probably hear the puddles forming from all those geeks' hearts melting across the country. Thorpe seems to take it on faith that there's a general agreement that she was just dazzling in Scorsese's The Age of Innocence--where, to show her commitment to her craft, she allowed the makeup people to do her best to homely her up--and in the Gillian Armstrong production of Little Woman, which is indeed probably the best movie that has her close to its center. But it's also true that in both these movies, which we made when she was in her early twenties, she comes across as, emotionally, about twelve years old. When she was engaged in real life to Johnny Depp, who was eight years her senior, it was reported that no less an expert on grown-up behavior than Cher had warned her that she wasn't ready for such a leap. in the movies, seeing her married off to either Daniel Day Lewis or Gabriel Byrne was creepy, in ways the filmmakers could not have intended.

Ryder's last big-deal role was probably in 1999's Girl, Interrupted, a movie that wound up belonging her co-star, Angelina Jolie (who won an Oscar for it), and with good reason. Thorpe does her best to characterize Ryder's fallen star sound the result of some combination of a conspiracy and a perfect storm of "bad creative decisions, or perhaps just bad luck, which gradually began to edge Ryder deeper into a kind of Hollywood twilight." Yes, there was the shoplifting incident, which fed into other stories, like the one about her flaking out on the set of The Godfather III, gave her a reputation for being a troublesome fruitcake. But the fact is that Ryder's demons are small-time compared to those of Robert Downey, Jr., and there was always somebody willing to work with him while waiting for him to prove himself insurable again. Ryder was much in demand when she was barely an adult because she was beautiful and unusual and willing to work, and a number of people who got their foot in the door of the industry that way learned to act as they went along. Ryder never did. A lot of these people were discarded by the industry as their looks faded; what's most special about Ryder, who at 37 is still very easy on the eyes, is that her looks held up just fine and still Hollywood was eager to discard her, because she showed no sign of ever learning to act a lick. She and Downey were both in Richard Linklater's rotoscoped A Scanner Darkly, and the amazing thing was how much of him came through even as a cartoon, while her improved-upon screen image had the same hollow shell behind it that it always had.

Maybe Ryder will get her comeback: stranger things have happened, and if it does, good for her. But it's annoying to see writers present her career as a story of a major talent that's been neglected or gone to waste, because such talk amounts to a slight of other, genuine talents. So many really gifted actresses have to fight harder for parts as they grow older, and some of them never really win a round. Given that, how is it anything but simple justice that Ryder should have trouble getting good roles when the salient fact of her career has been her failure to seem to grow up? All she had to offer the camera was her face, and if the general feeling in Hollywood is that that's not enough to compensate for the trouble she's apt to cause, keep in mind that she's less trouble than a lot of people who manage to keep themselves in work. And then there's the wildy gifted people who don't stay in the race at all. "If Ryder's artistic rehabilitation works out over the summer," Thorpe writes breathlessly, "she will have re-emerged at the age of 37 as one of the most impressive veterans of a 1980s Hollywood bratpack scene that has seen many casualties. An emblem of troubled, talented youth, Ryder was a sort of female equivalent to River Phoenix, but unlike him she has survived." If I read this correctly, in the comparison between Phoenix, whose career included some indelible performances before it was cut short, and Ryder, whose career doesn't and wasn't, Ryder wins because, for reasons connected to a fluke of mortality and blind luck, she's the one who's still employable. Seriously, does anyone really want to go there?

Related Stories: Screengrab Review: "Star Trek"--Nick's Take

Screengrab Review: "Star Trek"--Scott's Take

Dance with a Ranger; Johnny Depp and "Donnie Brasco" Director Break Out the Silver Bullets

Phil Nugent — Wed, 06 May 2009 14:30:00 GMT

It's been reported that director Mike Newell is in talks to direct a new movie about the Lone Ranger for producer Jerry Bruckheimer. This news confuses us. We go far enough with Newell that we will always think of him as a specialist in dark-toned, downbeat British films such as Dance with a Stranger, The Good Father, and An Awfully Big Adventure. That last one has a title that sounds kind of fun until you remember that it's Peter Pan's description of what death must be; even Newell's big romantic comedy hit, Four Weddings and a Funeral, had a funeral in it. It's not the kind of resume that one associates with high-spirited Western action, but Newell was allowed to direct a Harry Potter movie that Guillermo del Toro couldn't fit into his busy schedule, so apparently that makes him Howard Hawks. The big casting news about this picture concerns not who's playing the Ranger, but Johnny Depp's eagerness to play his faithful Native American sidekick, Tonto. Leaving aside the question of whether Depp intends to go traditional with the "Me Tonto, you kemo sabe" business or attempt something more multiculturally cutting-edge, there's the fact that his previous collaboration with Newell, Donnie Brasco, was a gangster movie that nobody has ever described as frolicsome.

The thing is, we've been here before. 1981's The Legend of the Lone Ranger was a heavily touted fiasco that, in attempting to revive the character, succeeded only in dumping mountain load of dirt on the heads of his resuscitators. It was directed for maximum pomposity by William Fraker, an artist best known as a cinematographer, though he had already directed Monte Walsh, a grotesquely depressive Western that seemed to run for half the lifetime of it dazed star, Lee Marvin, and that was lit with a 30-watt bulb. Fraker's Lone Ranger movie was most notable for the tsunami of bad publicity that hit it when the Wrather Corporation, which owned the rights to the character, sicced its lawyers on Clayton Moore, the actor who had played the Ranger on television, and who the company wanted to prevent from showing up at any grocery store openings in his die mask and cowboy hat. The company won in court, but in the process reaped more bad karma than Caligula. Some of it hit the new Lone Ranger, a fellow named Klinton Spilsbury, whose performance so dazzled the suits that they had his entire performance re-dubbed by the uncredited James Keach. Lone Ranger was Spilsbury's acting debut, and since he never got work again, he has the special distinction of being the rare star of a major motion picture of the talking era who seems likely to leave no evidence of what he sounded like behind for posterity. Spilsbury subsequently won Golden Raspberry Awards for Worst Actor and Worst New Star of the year, which means that he has twice as many Golden Raspberry Awards as he has movie credits.

On the plus side, the new Lone Ranger movie is being written by Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, who wrote the ferociously whimsical Pirates of the Caribbean movies, so maybe their surfeit of jolliness will balance out Newell's natural dolor. That still leaves the question of how Depp will approach his role. In the Fraker movie, Tonto was played by Michael Horse, later of Twin Peaks, who went into the project with some trepidation and who seems to have wound up basically taking the attitude that he was just out there enjoying the scenery while some idiots shot a Lone Ranger movie around him. In an interview, Horse recalled telling the fillmakers "that in this day and age, if you portray Tonto with disrespect, there will be more Indians on your lawn than Custer saw." (Horse also recalled being bothered late one night because Spilsbury had gotten into a brawl, possibly with someone who made fun of whatever his voice sounded like: "Some guard called me at three in the morning to come and get him. I said, ‘whoa, that faithful companion stuff is only in the movies.'") As we've all been well-informed by now, Depp modeled his performance in the Pirates movies on his good buddy Keith Richards. Maybe he can model his Tonto on Jimmy Carl Black.

Great Beginnings: Screengrab's Favorite Opening Scenes Of All Time! (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 23:00:00 GMT

THE WILD BUNCH (1969)

Let's say the opening sequence in The Wild Bunch runs through the moment when they escape their first gun battle of the movie. During the credits, the Bunch rides into town in stolen uniforms, passing teetotalers and children who have tossed scorpions in among angry ants. The enormous and lethal scorpions being brought down by millions of ants? That's less a metaphor than foreshadowing. The Bunch heads into a bank, where they quickly begin to execute their plan to rob it. And the first line from The Bunch's leader, Pike, is "if they move, kill 'em."

Soon the Bunch becomes aware that they're trapped, with gunmen hired by the railroad lining the rooftops across the street. They decide to use the passing parade of teetotalers to create confusion while they make their getaway. In the ensuing shootout, lots of innocent people die. And that's how we meet our anti-heroes, crooks lined up against the even-more-crooked railroad, bad men in bad times. The shootout is both exciting and horrific, both meant to titillate and disgust the viewer, much like the film as a whole. Sam Peckinpah knew that audiences have bloodlust, because having bloodlust is just part of being human. And he reveled in that bloodlust because he also knew that it never leads anywhere good. You want violence?, he seems to ask, well, what do you think of the leading man's horse trampling a woman? How about a man being shot full of holes in front of a couple of kids? Violence only begets violence in Peckinpah's eye. And there's no escape from it. In this movie, released at the height of the Vietnam War, Peckinpah is asking: is this the world that you want? Is your only choice whether to be a scorpion or an ant? (HC)

BLOW OUT (1981)

Throughout the 1970s, Brian DePalma positioned himself as Hollywood’s latest “Master of the Macabre”, a self-appointed heir to the mantle of Hitchcock. And in this vein, the first few minutes of Blow Out feel like a logical progression of his career -- a DePalma-esque pastiche of a fly-by-night coed slasher picture, complete with a subjective camera straight out of Halloween. What’s sort of surprising is how right DePalma gets the feel of these movies, from the clumsy camera movements (no confident Steadicam in this scene) to the oppressive cut-rate synth score and sound effects, to the nameless actresses cast entirely for their taut physiques. Gradually it dawns on the audience that this scene is a joke, and a damn good one too. But DePalma saves his best joke for last, as the killer infiltrates the shower room, draws his knife and pulls back the curtain to reveal a blonde who turns to the camera and… well, “screams” isn’t quite the word for it. “What cat did you have to strangle to get that?” asks the mixer to the sound guy, played by John Travolta. DePalma has always been fascinated with the nuts and bolts of making cinema, and he’s never been shy about sharing them with the audience, with Blow Out being perhaps the best example of this tendency. But even more important is the way DePalma uses the opening scene to set up the film’s finale, in which Travolta finally gets the right scream, albeit in the worst way imaginable. The way DePalma sets up this goal for his protagonist and then lets him back into accomplishing it would be clever and funny if it wasn’t so unbearably sad. (PC)

GOODFELLAS (1990)

Like most great directors, Martin Scorsese knows the value of starting a movie off right, in order to reel the audience into the story he’s telling. But while most of his films have pretty killer openings, nothing he’s done before or since has topped the first few minutes of GoodFellas. Instead of starting at the beginning of the story -- the early years of his protagonist Henry Hill (played by Ray Liotta) -- he begins in media res, with Henry and his crew, Jimmy (Robert DeNiro) and Tommy (Joe Pesci), driving down the highway in the middle of the night. Suddenly, there’s a knocking sound coming from behind them, and they eventually discover that it’s the bloodied body in the trunk, not quite as dead as they’d thought it was. As hooks go, this one’s a doozy -- who are these guys, and who’s the ill-fated man in the trunk? But look also at how Scorsese uses the situation to efficiently establish the three men’s personalities -- Jimmy the cool customer, Tommy the violent hothead, and Henry the follower, standing back and taking it all in. A more conventional film might have begun with the glamorous trappings of the gangster lifestyle, but Scorsese begins with the violence and doubles back to the fun stuff, so that while we watch Henry and pals living the high life, we’ve already seen them doing the dirty deeds it took to get them there. And it’s telling that when Henry’s voiceover starts up, stating that “as far back as I can remember, I’ve always wanted to be a gangster” before Tony Bennett’s “Rags to Riches” kicks in, the image we see onscreen is Henry’s weary face, numbed to the brutal spectacle taking place before his eyes. (PC)

DEAD MAN (1995)

In less than 8 minutes, Jim Jarmusch has Johnny Depp's William Blake leave the relative comfort of late-19th century civilization and travel by train backwards into savagery. The landscape outside grows more and more brutal, as do his fellow passengers. When Crispin Glover's train fireman comes to undercut his assumptions (i.e., spout weirdness at him, this being Crispin Glover), Blake gets his first glimpse of just how far outside of his world he has traveled. Glover says that he "wouldn't trust no words on no paper" and Blake should realize right there how fucked he is. He doesn't, though. He really has no choice but to follow through, even if that mean staring down Robert Mitchum and his gun. Even as he speaks to Glover, his fellow passengers, hunters and trappers by their garb, leap up and start firing out of the train at buffalo, denying their meat to the Native Americans, and dealing death without meaning to the majestic animals. Life and death don't carry the same weight out here, a lesson Blake will not learn until too late. (HC)

JACKIE BROWN (1997)

Was it Oscar Wilde who said "talent borrows, genius steals"? No one knows this better than Quentin Tarantino. In The Graduate, Dustin Hoffman stands motionless on an LAX conveyor belt while "Sound of Silence" plays in the background. In Jackie Brown, Pam Grier starts out on a conveyor belt at the more low rent Long Beach airport. Queue Bobby Womack's "110th Street." We see her in her bright blue airhostess uniform, nicely matching the mosaic background. Cut to x-ray images showing the insides of a few — is that a gun, or am I imagining things? A security guard's metal detector floats over some woman's white-pantsed crotch. Meanwhile Jackie glides through security with her bag and uniform, walks then picks up and runs, making it to her job at the gate just in time to greet passengers with a friendly airhostess smile. What more do you need to let you know you're in for sex, drugs, and desperation to get out of a dead-end job, just barely under the surface in sunny California? (SCS)

And finally...

JAWS (1975) & STAR WARS (1977)

A naked woman disappears in the water at night, devoured by a terrifying unseen monster, effectively terrifying generations of beach enthusiasts within minutes...a massive starship soars over my pubescent head, which very nearly explodes in sheer, geeky excitement...I don't really have much new to say about either film or their iconic, totally kick-ass opening sequences...but, damn, we couldn't really end our list of all-time great beginnings without them, now could we? (AO)

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three & Four

Contributors: Hayden Childs, Paul Clark, Sarah Clyne Sundberg, Andrew Osborne

Precursors: Dead Man (1995)

Nick Schager — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 14:00:00 GMT

Given its inevitable mention in countless forthcoming reviews of Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control – including mine, appearing here at The Screengrab later this morning – Dead Man is this week’s required viewing, not only as preparation for Jarmusch’s latest but also as a welcome antidote. Though the two share a formal exquisiteness, dissonant score, dreamlike atmosphere and stoic protagonist traversing a foreign locale, Dead Man exhibits little of the ponderous obliqueness and self-satisfied self-consciousness of Limits of Control, coasting on a mood of existentialist dread as it tracks Cleveland accountant William Blake (Johnny Depp) to the town of Machine where he kills a man in self-defense and, after being hit by a bullet that can’t be extracted, is forced to flee west. His flight, aided by a Native American guide named Nobody (Gary Farmer) and set to the hauntingly dissonant sounds of Neil Young’s electric guitar, is one with obvious historical overtones. Yet although Jarmusch clearly intends his tale to resonate as a nightmarishly lyrical saga of American expansion and white male hegemony, he never unduly strains such concerns by resorting to dull exposition or indulgent allegorical gestures. Instead, Dead Man’s cultural-political concerns are left to naturally spring forth from Blake’s odyssey, which – thanks to Depp’s beautifully deadpan performance – also functions as an evocative portrait of an alienated man learning to understand himself and the world around him during the course of a journey into hell.

Screengrab Predicts Summer 2009: Dishonorable Mention (Part Six)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 23:30:00 GMT

In Part Three of this list, we presented The Screengrab’s consensus picks for the Top 5 Bombs of Summer 2009.

Herewith, our individual picks and dishonorable mentions...

Andrew:

1. Wolverine
2. PUBLIC ENEMIES (July 1)

Aside from Bonnie and Clyde, The Untouchables and that Star Trek episode where they went to the gangster planet (“I don’t think you’re stupid, Mr. Krako”), I can’t think of many successful modern tommy-gun stories. Let’s see...Mobsters? The Cotton Club? Billy Bathgate? Sure, Michael Mann is a good director, but when Johnny Depp isn’t swinging for the fences with an Ed Wood, a Sweeney Todd or a Captain Jack Sparrow, he’s just dull as dishwater, and without some truly stellar reviews and/or word-of-mouth, this one's likely to disappear in the crowded summer shuffle.

3. Land of the Lost
4. Transformers...yeah, that’s right, I said it.
5. TAKING WOODSTOCK (August 14)

Ang Lee has certainly made some excellent, memorable films...but this may not be one of them. While a behind-the-scenes history of the 1969 Woodstock music festival sounds like an interesting (if someone redundant) subject, the trailer makes the whole thing look like a third-rate HBO Original Movie (or maybe a second-rate Showtime one). Chances are, Taking Woodstock will only really be remembered as the vehicle that killed off Demetri Martin’s career as a big screen leading man.

Scott:

1. GI JOE: THE RISE OF COBRA (August 7)

Perhaps not the end of civilization as we know it, but you can see it from here.

2. Land of the Lost
3. The Taking of Pelham 123
4. Imagine That
5. Year One

Nick:

1. Land of the Lost
2. X-Men Origins: Wolverine
3. Year One
4. The Taking of Pelham 123
5. BRÜNO (July 10)

Brüno may very well live up to its hype, but given its subject matter, a large swath of America won’t even consider seeing it. Consequently, its respectable but far-from-enormous box-office take will make it seem like a disappointment.

Paul:

1. Land of the Lost
2. G-FORCE (July 24)

Even if this didn’t look like total garbage -- which it does -- it would be foolish to open a family comedy about a team of guinea pig spies with sassy celebrity voices the week after the latest Harry Potter movie. With the Boy Who Lived facing off against Voldemort, will anyone but Jerry Bruckheimer care about G-Force? I sure hope not.

3. FUNNY PEOPLE (July 31)

Broad Adam Sandler comedies can still bring in the crowds. Adam Sandler dramedies? Not so much. While I applaud Sandler, Seth Rogen, and Judd Apatow for tackling more serious material than usual, I just can’t see this connecting with multiplex crowds, particularly not with a trailer that is light on laughs and heavy on sentiment. Perhaps Apatow would have been better off taking the film to Toronto and garnering some solid festival buzz before rolling it out in the fall.

4. Imagine That
5. THE HURT LOCKER (June 26)

Ever since it received rave reviews from Toronto last year, Kathryn Bigelow’s Iraq War drama has been sold more as a kickass combat action thriller than as a political statement. So why would Summit Entertainment open the film opposite Transformers, the one blockbuster of the summer that’s practically guaranteed to have loud, kinetic combat scenes and none of the audience baggage that comes with Iraq War movies? Way to piss that Twilight clout right down your legs, guys.

Click Here For The Hits (Part One & Two), The Bombs (Part Three), The Toss-Ups (Part Four) and The Honorable Mentions (Part Five)

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Nick Schager, Paul Clark

Screengrab Predicts Summer 2009: The Toss-Ups (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 22:30:00 GMT

So, now that you’ve seen our consensus picks for the Top 5 Hits & the Top 5 Bombs of Summer 2009, here are the films that we didn’t know quite what to do with...

Andrew:

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS (August 21)

This one hits theaters closer to Labor Day (and the start of the “quality” awards-bait season) than Memorial Day -- assuming QT actually finishes his grindhouse WW2 epic on time -- and the theaters it hits will probably be art houses rather than multiplexes, where nobody will be expecting the confusingly titled Basterds to rack up Pulp Fiction-esque "national sensation" numbers...but Tarantino’s latest seems like quite the odd duck nonetheless, with a promised ultra-violence sensibility that may have trouble finding its artsy splatter audience even WITH all the ass-kicking Jews and Brad Pitt’s funny southern accent.

BRÜNO (June 10)

Oh, sure...Borat was a national sensation, and the annoying guy in your office still says, “Niiice!” on a daily basis. But I’m guessing it was a lot easier for most Americans to feel “in” on the joke when Sacha Baron Cohen was making fun of them funny furriners than it will be to laugh at their own homophobic prejudices or their own knee-jerk PC responses to the heterosexual Cohen’s flouncing, mincing gay character. But then again, you know what they say about that whole “no such thing as bad publicity” thing...

Nick:

1) Public Enemies, because Michael Mann has yet to make an out-and-out summer blockbuster.

2) UP, because eagerness for Pixar’s latest has been especially muted.

3) Angels & Demons, because The Da Vinci Code craze seems to have subsided.

4) Julie & Julia, because its August release date implies that the studio thinks it has more limited appeal than Meryl Streep’s The Devil Wears Prada or Mamma Mia!

5) The Ugly Truth, because even though it’s the summer’s chief rom-com, it’s hard to imagine Katherine Heigl continuing to be a serious box-office draw.

Paul:

Drag Me to Hell- Sam Raimi fans are pumped for his return to horror, but will anyone else care? Will this be the film that finally lifts the box-office curse on summer horror movies?

Terminator Salvation- is there life for Terminator after Arnold? Will people pay to see the movie when they can just as easily watch the Terminator TV series at home? And can Christian Bale still reel in audiences now that his profanity-filled tirade has been heard by millions?

The Taking of Pelham 123- in a summer full of epic effects-driven movies, can audiences be bothered with an old-school hostage-negotiation thriller? And will MGM release a super-sweet new DVD edition of the original film just in time for the remake? Because they really should.

Year One- will a high-concept caveman comedy, even one starring Jack Black and Michael Cera, play in this age of improvisational laffers? And will there be zug-zug like in Caveman?

Public Enemies- is Johnny Depp really the box office draw Hollywood thinks he is after the Pirates trilogy? Can Michael Mann become bankable again after the subpar returns for Miami Vice? And in this era of Grand Theft Auto, will ticket buyers get excited for a fedoras-and-tommy-guns gangster shoot’em’up?

Bruno- can the least funny character from Da Ali G Show actually carry a film? Will people flock to laugh at the strange misadventures of a flamingly gay Austrian, or will they be scared off by the homosexuality factor?

Bandslam- is Vanessa Anne Hudgens still a draw even when she isn’t starring in High School Musicals? Will tween-friendly fare still do solid box office even during the summer movie season?

Taking Woodstock- is the August 14 release date occasioned by the 40th anniversary of Woodstock simply a symbolic gesture, or will nostalgia for the Summer of Love turn this into an unexpected late-summer hit?

Click Here For The Hits (Parts One & Two), The Bombs (Part Three) and The Honorable Mentions (Parts Five & Six)

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Nick Schager, Paul Clark

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 22:30:00 GMT

SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK (2008)

Caden Cotard believes that he is dying. In a way, he is right. This is as true of him as it is of anyone who's ever drawn breath. Time slips away in a very special way for Cotard, though. He awakes one morning in September, but by the time he gets coffee, there's kids in Halloween masks running around. His wife takes his daughter to Europe for a short trip. His crush is flirting with him later, trying to get him to come home with her. He can't, he says, his wife is only gone for a week. "Caden, it's been a year!," she tells him. Some around him age at a startling rate, while others never seem to get a day older. Time is cheating Cotard. It's hard to describe how slippery time is in this movie, because it's utterly different than any other movie I can recall. I sat breathlessly waiting for the movie to start for a good hour, not realizing that this anticipation is itself the point. Life slips away while you focus on the future or the past. You are in a race against time - we all are - but how can a person get his or her head in the race when there are so many issues that need handling elsewhere? Dylan sang that he not busy being born is busy dying. Cotard is in a constant state of trying, and failing, to be born anew. With a grant from the MacArthur Foundation, he sets out to prove that he's worthy of the money and prestige, launching an enormous production that seeks to mirror life itself. But time pulls away at him here, too. Years pass with startling swiftness while we watch the production grow. Cotard keeps suggesting new names, new ways to launch his play. But the future he looks towards is always holding hands with the past, as his life is constantly popping up in his production, actors speaking his inner thoughts to each other, and Cotard no closer to understanding that his life is happening now, right there, not in front of his eyes, but in him. The play he is staging at the beginning of the movie is Death Of A Salesman, the great 20th century play about a man who cannot live his life because of his dreams. Synecdoche, New York is the 21st century answer, a retelling of Death Of A Salesman with the classic Charlie Kaufman Borgesian mindfuck. But it's also one of the most nakedly emotional movies of his - or anyone's - career. I thought he would have trouble again scaling the heights of Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, but Synecdoche, New York goes right over the top, taking Eternal Sunshine's bittersweet mix of love and frailty and adding the sure knowledge that time is the enemy, indifferent to heart and soul and fair gamesmanship. Time will win in the end, and all that will be left of us are the structures we build, real and metaphorical. Leave something worthwhile. (HC)

THE FRENCH CONNECTION (1971)

The car chase scene in The French Connection is less a race against time than a race against a hijacked train. But let's not be nit-picky. You find yourself egging Doyle, Gene Hackman's obsessed cop on as he drives like the wind under the elevated tracks in Brooklyn, subway train speeding on above him. Why doesn't he just blast right through that mom and her stroller? Just put the pedal to the metal and out-drive all those damn squares for crying out loud. Who cares about regular folk when there is a mission to accomplish? But folks: Don't try this at home. In real life the subway always beats a car in New York City. (SCS)

VANISHING POINT (1971)

1971 was a good year for crazed lonely guys indulging in car chases. Vanishing Point is sort of like a porno. It does away with any extraneous exposition or dialogue, all that remains is a race against time for the pettiest of reasons. Footing the bill for a handful of amphetamines. Long stretches of open road and a car to propel the protagonist forward. The only way to beat this arm-rest clutching experience would be to actually race your own car across the continent. (SCS)

DEAD MAN (1995)

Being a fan of Two-Lane Blacktop, I like my races against time like I like my own race towards death: molasses-slow, meandering, and hallucinatory. Dead Man excels at these criteria. Many Westerns are morality tales, stories about people addressing conflicting ethical concerns out where the law doesn't apply, but Jim Jarmusch's Western is about learning to find your own soul before death takes you. Johnny Depp plays an accountant named William Blake. His parents are dead and he has nothing but the clothes on his back as he crosses out of civilization into the wild frontier town of Machine, somewhere in the Dakotas. The job promised him has dried up, and, despondent, he takes up with a beautiful woman. But her lover shows up and shoots her, and then waits, almost dispassionately, for Blake to do the expected thing and finish him off. Blake heads out into the woods, gut-shot and dying. This is where we begin. The first person to find Blake is an outcast Native American who calls himself Nobody (which he prefers to He Who Talks Loud, Saying Nothing). Nobody has been educated in Europe and believes Blake to be his namesake, the 18th century poet and painter. The two travel towards the sea, sowing death and destruction along the way. Rarely, however, do they encounter or kill someone who doesn't deserve it in some way. Out there beyond the grasp of civilization, all men are in a race towards death. Only Blake knows how close death hovers at his shoulder, and only Blake knows the preciousness of time. (HC)

Five seconds to Click Part One, Two, Three, Four & Five, McGruber!!!!!

Contributors: Hayden Childs, Sarah Clyne Sundberg

In Other Blogs: Swing and a Drive

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 14:30:00 GMT

As I write this, we’re 72 hours from Opening Day and I can practically taste the peanuts and Cracker Jack. OK, that’s because I had a bowl of peanuts and Cracker Jack for breakfast, but you don’t want to hear about that. You want to hear about the Beyond the Multiplex interview with Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, directors of what Andrew O’Hehir calls the best baseball movie ever, Sugar. “One of the things that drew us to this story was this really staggering statistic,” says Fleck. “If you look at the '80s, the percentage of African-American players in baseball was around 22 percent. That has gone down to somewhere around 8 or 9 percent now, while the Dominican population in baseball has risen dramatically….Major League Baseball has taken money out of the inner cities, partly because baseball is an expensive sport to play. It's not like basketball, where all you need is a ball and a hoop. You need lots of equipment, and you've got fields you have to take care of. They've taken money out of the cities and flipped it into the Dominican Republic, where they can sign players much cheaper.”

At Scanners, Jim Emerson wonders whether Blu-ray has gone too far. “The announcement of a pristine, digitally enhanced Blu-ray release of Edgar G. Uhlmer's grimy 1945 noir Detour got me thinking in granular terms... It would be a mistake to 'clean up' the noise of some kinds of music, just as it would be counter to the spirit of, say, John Cassavettes (or Ed Wood) to create digitally pristine copies of their grittier work for Blu-ray release. A movie that was shot in 16 mm or on grainy stock for low-light conditions looks that way because... that's the way it was made. It's part of the work itself, integral to the experience the filmmakers created. Is it a good idea to ‘restore’ (‘remodel’ is more apt) a movie to look brighter, sharper, clearer than it ever was before?” Good questions, but as Emerson eventually points out, that “digitally pristine” edition of Detour was an April Fool’s Day joke.

Via GreenCine Daily, a look at a most unusual Craigslist posting. “Just this afternoon, I stumbled upon this hilariously pathetic, 'negotiable' pitch under the quite-clickable heading Attention Film Critics (Los Angeles): ‘Hi. We just finished a film and need to buy a one sentence quote from someone who calls himself a film critic. Thanks.’…I half-worry that an unscrupulous somebody might just take that person up on the offer. On the other hand, perhaps it's a positive sign for critics, that our opinions still hold a monetary value.” This is truly disgusting, repulsive and contrary to every ethical impulse in my body. And dammit, it looks like they’ve already found someone else to do it.

If you enjoyed Paul Clark’s entry in the White Elephant Blogathon, you can check out the rest of the entries here. I’m particularly thrilled that She Blogged by Night was forced to sit through the recent Unwatchable entry 3 Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain. “Speaking of rejuvenated manhood, at one point Medusa -- in her skin tight black leather S&M gear -- practically straddles Dave Dragon while telling him she'll make him her boytoy. Frankly, and I say this with all the maturity and dignity I can muster, I would have much rather seen the movie that would have led to.”

And if you didn’t get enough April Fool action on Wednesday, CinemaBlend has a roundup of some of the best film site pranks (although not our own, harrumph), including Seth Rogen In Talks for Galactica Film, Johnny Depp Is Freddy Krueger and Daniel Craig Quits Bond.

Trailer Review: Public Enemies

Paul Clark — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 16:00:00 GMT

After dividing audiences with his borderline experimental mood-piece update of Miami Vice, Michael Mann is back with his take on the John Dillinger story. Compared to his last film, this looks like a frankly conventional and commercial project- at least, as commercial as a tommy-guns and fedoras movie can be nowadays. But some quibbles aside (I’m not sold on the suitability of the digital gloss for this particular project), Public Enemies looks pretty promising. Depp is an interesting choice for the crime legend (fifteen years ago, who could have imagined him headlining a movie like this?), and I like Bale more when he’s freed from the burden of carrying a movie and can instead unleash his inner character actor. There has been some negative buzz surrounding early screenings of Public Enemies, but I’ve learned that it’s best to give Mann the benefit of the doubt.

Public Enemies: The Many On-Screen Faces of John Dillinger

Phil Nugent — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 15:00:00 GMT

Michael Mann's Public Enemies doesn't open until July, but the appearance last week of the movie's trailer was enough to get chat rooms buzzing and fan boys clapping and speaking in strange tongues. Based on Bryan Burroughs's book Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933–34, the movie features an all-star Depression-era rogue's gallery that includes Channing Tatum as Pretty Boy Floyd, Giovanni Ribisi as Alvin "Creepy" Karpis, Stephen Dorff as Homer Van Meter, David Wenham as Harry Pierpont, Stephen Graham as Baby Face Nelson, and John Ortiz as Frank Nitti, along with such enforcers of the law as Christian Bale as Melvin Purvis, the G-man who brought John Dillinger to heel and Billy Crudup as J. Edgar Hoover, who was able to turn the headlines about rampaging criminals into a call for a national police force, the FBI. The real attraction, of course, is Johnny Depp as Dillinger, the most charismatic and legendary of the celebrity crooks and a figure who personified the image of the 1930s bank robber as dashing desperado.

Bonnie and Clyde had their doomed-love thing; Baby Face Nelson, who played super-villain team-up with Dillinger for a while, was a genuinely scary thug; Machine Gun Kelly was a hype. But Dillinger, conscious of the good it did him to keep world opinion on his side, actively courted the public with his dimples and courtly manners, so that even his hostages came out talking to reporters about what splendid company he'd been. He tried to avoid the use of violence, pulled off dazzling escapes, and stuck to robbing banks, at a time when nobody had a good word for those financial institutions. It was partly in response to Dillinger's popularity that Hollywood created the movie image of the endearing gangster, and Dillinger himself was not immune to the charms of that image: the movie he was exiting when he was shot down by Purvis's men was Manhattan Melodrama, a juicy ear of corn in which Clark Gable played a lovable rapscallion named Blackie whose best boyhood pal (William Powell) grew up to be District Attorney. When Blackie rubs out a nogoodnik who was threatening to spread some damaging slander about his buddy, who's getting ready to run for Governor, Powell is forced to prosecute Blackie for murder, while Blackie sits through the trial grinning in pleasure at his pal's sturdy principles and courtroom flair. Blackie's last act is to warn Powell, who's now Governor, not to even think about commuting his death sentence, before heading to the electric chair with a smile on his face and a swagger in his walk. Presumably Dillinger spent his last minutes in the theater feeling suitably flattered.

There have been enough wildly different screen takes on Dillinger by now that it's anyone's guess what Depp's will look like. But it seems a safe bet that Captain Jack Sparrow will find a way to clearly differentiate himself from such notable predecessors as these:

Humphrey Bogart, THE PETRIFIED FOREST (1936)

Bogart's character here, "Duke Mantee", represents the playwright Robert Sherwood's theatrical conceit of Dillinger as social outlaw and voice of the blunt common man. (His gang includes a black member, who enjoys goading his opposite number, a subservient black chauffeur.) Duke takes over a roadside diner where the hostages include Leslie Howard as the hero and mouthpiece, a crestfallen intellectual who makes poetic speeches about fate and destiny and other assorted claptrap. Bogart, who has a terrific, untamed look here, had been part of the Broadway cast of the play, as had Howard. His success on stage helped turned around a career that had been stalled, but he was almost denied the chance to be in the movie because Jack Warner wanted his own house gangster, Edward G. Robinson, to play the part. But Robinson was getting tired of waving gats around, and Howard announced that he didn't want to do the movie without Bogart, and there was no way Warner could replace Howard--no one else in the business could have delivered most of his lines with a straight face. The film version did finally get Bogart's movie career properly launched, but his performance wasn't as fresh as it must have been early in the Broadway run, and it would be another five years before another gangster role, in High Sierra, officially made him a star.

Lawrence Tierney, DILLINGER (1945)

Made a decade after Dillinger's death, this was the first film that claimed to tell his story and call him by name, and it also marked the big-time starring debut of Lawrence Tierney. These two things do not compute. In his mid-twenties, Tierney still had a thick head of black hair and a handsome profile, but he already had the voice of a mudslide survivor and emitted mean vibes potent enough to turn sunflowers black and fill nearby rivers with dead fish. He was simply not ideally cast as man for whom violence was a last resort, and the screenwriters, Philip Yordan and the uncredited William Castle, having taken a quick check of which of the two men, Dillinger or Tierney, they had greater need to fear, astutely shaped the script to Tierney's personality. Shot under the working title "John Dillinger, Killer", it's a portrait of a hell-raising psycho with a chip on his shoulder. Directed by the no-name Max Nosseck, it's also an energetically slapped-together knuckle buster of a poverty row production, with a running time of an hour and ten minutes and an especially exciting bank robbery scene that Nosseck didn't shoot: the footage was lifted from Fritz Lang's 1937 Bonnie-and-Clyde movie, You Only Live Once.

Warren Oates, DILLINGER (1973)

This film marked the directing debut of screenwriter John Milius, whose nostalgia for old movies and the era they were made in almost matches his enthusiasm for flamboyantly choreographed displays of bloody mayhem. Warren Oates, in one of his rare flings as a leading man, is Big John, while Ben Johnson, who played Oates's brother in The Wild Bunch, is supposed to be Melvin Purvis. (Twenty years older than Purvis was at the time and radiating a confident, bearlike serenity, Johnson might have been more convincing as Hoover than as the junior agent who, a title card at the end of the movie informs us, ultimately committed suicide, but Milius must have just loved the idea of the two time-tested character actors battling it out in the field.) The movie is full of people like Harry Dean Stanton (who goes out in a blaze of shotgun fire, wearing a fur coat he's taken off a carjacked college student, soon after delivering the line that ought to be on his family crest: "Things ain't workin' out for me today."), Geoffrey Lewis, Richard Dreyfuss (as a surly, punk-ass Baby Face Nelson), Frank McRae, and Cloris Leachman as the Lady in Red, and Milius seems to be having a good time staging many of the actual highlights of Dillinger's and the other gangsters' careers--in scrambled order, so that he can close with the killing of Dillinger, which actually predated some of the other events he wants to include. Weightless, never as dangerous as it wants to be, but kind of lovable, seeing this picture is like watching a bunch of people in period dress play cops and robbers on a movie studio's dime.

Robert Conrad, THE LADY IN RED (1979)

Of all the actors who've been cast as Dillinger, Conrad strikes me as perhaps the most unlikely, though all votes for Mark Harmon (who played the role in a 1991 TV movie that somehow never came across my radar screen) will be counted. Dillinger is actually a supporting character in this film, which was one of the first produced screenplays by John Sayles. Sayles told the story of how a poor farm girl (Pamela Sue Martin) who traveled to Chicago and had to use whatever means came to hand to survive life in the cold, hard city during the Depression came to be on Dillinger's arm the night he was gunned down faster than you can say, "Boy, that Clark Gable's a pisser, ain't he?" Tapping into his trademark liberal concern, Sayles tried to use the Pamela Sue Martin character to show how people are driven to desperate measures by an unfeeling capitalist society, and just to make sure that audiences wouldn't miss that she was meant to be sympathetic, he revealed that she had gotten a bad rap as the woman who set Dillinger up; both she and her new boyfriend (who tells her that he works for "the Board of Trade") were the victims of her Linda Tripp-doppelganger "friend" Anna Sage (Louise Fletcher), who deduced the boyfriend's identity and sold them out to the Feds. This protective screenwriting device has the downside of making the Martin character seem more stupid than necessary, and Conrad gives his usual convincing impersonation of a self-satisfied macho dickweed so full of himself that it's easier to see why people would want to gun him down on the sidewalk than it is to understand how he got a date to the movies. The Lady in Red, which was later re-issued under the title Guns, Sin and Bathtub Gin, was directed by Lewis Teague, who would team up again with Sayles a year later for Alligator, a probing, class-conscious exploration of the worst that can happen if you flush your pets.

Screengrab Salutes The Best & Worst Comic Book Movies Of All Time (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 21:30:00 GMT

The Worst:

CATWOMAN (2004)

Attacking Catwoman is almost too easy: it’s such an obvious, defenseless target, what with stinking up the box office like week-old kitty litter, damaging the careers of all responsible and winning Razzies for Worst Picture, Worst Screenplay, Worst Director (for “Pitof,” if that IS your real name) and Worst Actress for Halle Berry (whose Golden Raspberry acceptance speech alone very nearly redeemed both her performance AND her embarrassingly overwrought Oscar speech for Monster’s Ball, including gems like, “First of all, I want to thank Warner Bros. Thank you for putting me in a piece of shit, God-awful movie . . .it was just what my career needed”). But...nope, we’ll never be done kicking Catwoman, for oh, so many reasons. Geeks hated the flick (set in “Lake City” rather than Gotham) for heedlessly violating the sacred mythology of the source material, straight guys hated the way Berry dishonored the legacy of Kitt, Newmar, Meriwether and Pfeiffer by somehow making Catwoman (CATWOMAN!!!!!) distinctly unsexy, fashionistas hated the godawful costume, feminists hated the fact that while male superheroes were out saving the world, Berry’s crusader was investigating a frickin’ cosmetics company and right-thinking people everywhere coughed up hairballs of disgust to discover the whole tacky disaster somehow managed to cost 100 million dollars. But even worse is the nagging sense of how totally awesome a good Catwoman movie might have been...and how we’ll never, ever get to see it now. Thanks a bunch, Pitof.

FROM HELL (2001)

If you think Zack Snyder had a dense, intricate Alan Moore work on his hands when he set about adapting Watchmen, consider what the Hughes Brothers stepped into when they decided to bring Moore’s graphic novel From Hell to the screen. A speculative fiction based on the legend of Jack the Ripper, From Hell is an insanely detailed look at an alternate Victorian England and the massive conspiracy at its heart. It’s endlessly fascinating stuff, and the Hughes Brothers threw away just about all of it in order to make a nonsensical Se7en-style serial killer bloodbath. Johnny Depp is the police investigator, who is given opium-induced psychic powers here that he never possessed in the comics, while that great British actress Heather Graham plays the cockney prostitute he romances. The entire plot has been re-jiggered into a lame whodunit, thus jettisoning almost every unique aspect of Moore’s take on the Ripper story. It’s not shocking that such minutiae as the extensive tour of London’s Masonic architecture wouldn't make it to the screen, but keeping the Ripper's identity a secret throughout the movie only robs the story of its most interesting character. Worst of all, Hughes and Hughes don’t even bother trying to recreate the look of the comic – the whole sooty, early-Industrial vibe. From Hell looks like it was shot on the set of a Batman movie, which is probably what the brothers would have rather been doing in the first place.

BATMAN AND ROBIN (1997)

After the departure of Tim Burton and Michael Keaton, Warner Bros. put the Batman franchise in the unsteady, garish hands of director Joel Schumacher, who told everyone within earshot that he wanted to return to the "campy" tone of the old Adam West series, as if daring everyone in earshot to scream at him, "What're ya, high!?" Schumacher's first Batman movie, Batman Forever, which featured Tommy Lee Jones giving a performance that would have embarrassed Rip Taylor and Chris O'Donnell capering in his underoos and declaiming, "Holy twisted metal, Batman!", was one of the worst big-budget horrors ever, and damned if the old boy didn't manage to top it in his follow-up. Pre-release word on the movie was terrible, but Schumacher stubbornly continued to talk it up until his megaton bomb hit theater screens, inducing pain and suffering in all who had eyes that see. Schumacher reacted defensively at first -- "I had no idea that putting nipples on the Batsuit and Robin suit were [sic] going to spark international headlines," he pouted, in stubborn denial of the likelihood that people were trying to be nice and the nipples were the least objectionable thing about his movie. By then it was clear that, in the summer comic-book movie sweepstakes, the Caped Crusader had gotten his nuts crushed by Men in Black, a movie based on a comic little read by people outside the artist's and writer's immediate families.

DAREDEVIL (2003)

With X-Men and Spider-Man having solidified its status as king of the superhero-film hill, Marvel must have thought itself invincible, because only hubris could possibly explain the comic giant’s decision to okay Mark Steven Johnson’s take on Daredevil, the blind lawyer who combats crime at night. From the cheesy tone, to Johnson’s habit of turning his camera on extreme angles, to the miscasting of Ben Affleck, to the soft-core love scene featuring Daredevil and Jennifer Garner’s sexy assassin Elektra, Daredevil is a fiasco through and through, turning its hero into a second-rate Batman whose every extraordinary leap, jump and twirl is the byproduct of lame CGI. Johnson shoots every action sequence with maximum spasticity, setting his fights in rain and strobe lights and editing them to ribbons. Stuck headlining this misbegotten adaptation, Affleck vainly attempts to act tortured by flashing a variety of grimaces, all while an overacting Colin Farrell attempts to devour any scenery in sight as the hysterically corny villain Bullseye.

THE SPIRIT (2008)

With The Dark Knight proving in 2008 that it was possible to make a truly great superhero movie, it was actually kind of a relief to have Frank Miller remind us that same year that it was still possibly to make a truly rank one. Miller himself is one of the greatest comic artists and writers the industry has ever seen; though his work has been spotty in recent years, in the 1980s, he put out a fistful of some of the greatest superhero stories in the history of the medium. As a director, though, he’s a hell of a banjo player. Utilizing the same tricks he relied on in Sin City, but with a notably weaker cast and a downright rotten script, he took the Spirit – a venerable crimefighting character created by the beloved Will Eisner – and stuck him in a movie that would have to be twice as good as it is to be an embarrassment. Sidled with an incoherent screenplay, a tone-deaf sense of mood and pacing, a lot of wasted femmes fatale, and Samuel Jackson in one of the most deranged (and not in a good way) villain roles in recent memory, The Spirit would have been a disaster regardless, but the final nail in the coffin was the casting of charisma-free nobody Gabriel Macht in the lead role. Macht brought a Twinkie-heavy sense of anti-gravity to the Spirit the likes of which we haven’t seen since a young fellow named Klinton Spilsbury donned the mask of the Lone Ranger in his first, and last, motion picture role. Miller’s lucky he built up so much credibility in his comics career, because movies as crappy as The Spirit have ruined lesser men.

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

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

Morning Deal Report: Green Hornet Goes Gondry

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 14:30:00 GMT

Here’s a startling turn of events that potentially makes the Seth Rogen vehicle The Green Hornet a bit more interesting. “Columbia has set Michel Gondry to direct The Green Hornet, and the studio has set a June 25, 2010, release date for the film,” Variety reports. “Gondry, best known for far-out fare like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Science of Sleep and Human Nature, brings an unusual sensibility to what will be the most overtly commercial film of his career.” Can Charlie Kaufman’s Elongated Man be far behind?

It’s getting harder to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to making jokes about movies based on board games. I may be imagining things here, but I seem to recall a notorious bomb from the ‘80s adapted from Clue. And yet: “Universal is moving several spaces up the board with Clue, a big-screen take on the classic game, and is in final negotiations with Pirates of the Caribbean helmer Gore Verbinski to direct and produce,” per The Hollywood Reporter. Let the Johnny Depp as Colonel Mustard rumors start now.

If board game adaptations aren’t your thing, how about a movie based on a series of paintings? “Warner Bros. has acquired screen rights to The Lonely Dog, a limited-edition book of paintings done by Queenstown artist Ivan Clarke. The studio will turn the dog tale into a CG animated film,” Variety reports. “Clarke hatched the project when he left his dog alone, caught the look on the pooch's face and painted a fully clothed character with a lonely look on its mug.”

Related:
Copy Cat Culture
Parcheesi: The Movie

Morning Deal Report: Aaron Eckhart Hits the Rum

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 14:30:00 GMT

Aaron Eckhart and Oscar nominee Richard Jenkins are the latest to join the cast of Rum Diary, adapted from the novel by Hunter S. Thompson. Johnny Depp and Amber Heard are already aboard. Diary “is the tale of a washed-up, hard-drinking journalist named Paul Kemp (Depp) in 1950s Puerto Rico. Eckhart would play Sanderson, a wealthy landowner who believes everything has a price and introduces Kemp to a different standard of living,” per The Hollywood Reporter.

Russell Crowe’s Robin Hood may have a new Maid Marian. Liz Smith reports in Variety that “Cate Blanchett (she can play anything!) will take over the Maid Marian role in Ridley Scott's Robin Hood movie titled Nottingham. They decided Sienna Miller was too young for their Robin, the somewhat rotund, weighty and contentious Russell Crowe.” So Crowe is both rotund and weighty, which means Miller is too young for him. Makes sense.

Queen of mumblecore Greta Gerwig “has landed the lead role opposite Ben Stiller in the latest Noah Baumbach relationship dramedy,” per THR. The plot of the film, entitled Greenberg, is “under wraps, but it is expected to be set in L.A. and center on relationship intimacies in the manner of past Baumbach pictures.”

Related:
Russell Crowe Will Not Wear Tights
Greta Gerwig and the SXSW Invasion

The Three Catastrophes of Terry Gilliam

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 20:30:00 GMT

Terry Gilliam is set to receive the Bafta Fellowship, the most prestigious award bestowed by the British Academy of Film and Television, during the “British Oscars” ceremony this Sunday night. Presumably this is a lifetime achievement award for his unique body of work, although in an interview with The Guardian, Gilliam himself speculates otherwise. “Voters must, he assumes, have felt sorry for him because his latest film, The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus, has been hit by three catastrophes.”

That seems about par for the course for Gilliam, who should be able to knock off three catastrophes over lunch break, but these circumstances have been particularly trying. First, of course, was the death of the movie’s star Heath Ledger. “"It just isn't possible that he's dead," he says. "There's nothing he can't do, it just flows out of him with ease and grace. He lifted everybody. He wasn't like Marlon Brando or James Dean or any of the more neurotic actors, his was all positive energy. I knew he was tired but that Saturday he had been doing all his own stunts, he was leaping off wagons, indestructible. On no level did his death make sense."

The film’s producer, Bill Vince, also died, leaving Gilliam’s daughter Amy to take the reigns. And this past fall, Gilliam was hit by a car, breaking his back. (He got better.) Gilliam came up with a unique solution to the problem of losing his lead actor, adding three additional actors (Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell) to play the same character following various trips through a “magic mirror.”

Dr. Parnassus is due this fall, assuming no further catastrophes befall it. Read the rest of The Guardian piece here.

Related:
Heath Ledger Through the Looking Glass
When Good Directors Go Bad: The Brothers Grimm

Sundance Roundup: Day Six

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 18:00:00 GMT

More wheeling and dealing, via The Hollywood Reporter: Fox Searchlight snapped up the rights to the New York romance Adam, which it “hopes to turn it into the next Once, which it acquired here in 2007.” Sony Pictures Classics won the bidding war for An Education, “for a price in the $3 million-$4 million range for North American and select Latin American rights.” Lionsgate picked up “The Winning Season, James Strouse's tale of a high-school girls' basketball team starring Sam Rockwell.”

This year’s Sundance It Girl has been coronated. Per Entertainment Weekly, it’s 23-year-old British actress Carey Mulligan. “The star of Lone Scherfig's An Education and the bright spot in Shana Feste's melodrama The Greatest, Mulligan is transfixing audiences with her angelic looks and broad acting range.” You can also catch her in Michael Mann’s upcoming Dillinger epic Public Enemies, with Johnny Depp and Christian Bale.

E! Online is on the celebrity swag watch. Any truth to the rumors that Paris Hilton walked off with 30 goodie bags? Apparently so, but not all Sundance stars are so greedy. Screengrab sweetheart Zooey Deschanel refused all handouts, saying it “it takes away from the festival.” Awwww.

Previously:
Sundance Roundup: Day Five
Sundance Roundup: Day Four

Screengrab Live Blogs The Golden Globes

Andrew Osborne — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 00:39:00 GMT

(All times TiVo approximate)

7:33 - Nice silly bow tie, Brad.

7:35 - Way to step on your annoying daughter’s dress, Billy Ray.

7:38 - Good Lord! Marisa Tomei is wearing the puffy shirt! Is her next movie The Pirates of Penzance?

7:41 - Brangelina blow off Ryan Seacrest...heh-heh-heh...

7:46 - My lovely Polish bride Amy acquaints me with the Golden Globes dinner menu:

APPETIZERS
California organic field green salad with white asparagus
Crisp apricot dill goat cheese in phylo and poached pear
Maple syrup apple cider vinaigrette

ENTREES
Grilled prime tenderloin of beef with green tea pearl and sautéed aromatic Asian spice marinated sea bass
Sherry wine yuzu pepper sauce
Grilled king oyster mushroom
Jicama, Romanesco and potato onion croquette

DESSERT
Golden chocolate Globe with organic yogurt pistachio mousse

7:49 - The E! Channel breaks out their "Star Tracker" technology, wherein video arrows point out the stars to us in wide shots of the red carpet. Note to E! - Just because you CAN do it doesn't mean you SHOULD do it.

7:50 - Jeremy Piven appears on the red carpet. Apparently his mercury levels have returned to normal. Thank you, baby Jesus!

7:53 - Amy is sick of all the sand colored couture. Her favorite gowns of the evening: Drew Barrymore and Christina Applegate. Me, I could eat me some Anne Hathaway with a spoon.

8:02 - Amy thinks J. Lo is wearing one of Cher's Bob Mackie gowns from a 1970s time machine.

8:04 - Okay, I haven't seen The Reader and I love Kate Winslet, but...really? Best Supporting Actress? She must give really good Nazi.

8:06 - Damn, that Kate Winslet is adorable. Meanwhile...um...is Sting in that production of Pirates of Penzance with Marisa Tomei?

8:10 - BROOOOOOOOOOCCCEE!!!!!

8:11 - I'm trying to figure out who or what Darren Aronofsky looks like in his funny weaselly moustache. A villain in a Preston Sturges film? The Guy Fawkes mask in V for Vendetta? Meanwhile, Amy thinks Rumer Willis (in the background as a Golden Globes girl) may have had her chin shaved, since her big square potato head is no longer quite as prominent and she actually looks kinda cute. From a distance.

8:13 - Robert Downey Jr. apparently stuck his toe in the same electrical outlet as Drew Barrymore.

8:18 - Tom Wilkinson has apparently been drinking since noon.

8:20 - Hooray for Laura Dern! Amy's happy she kept her original nose, and I'm happy David Lynch used his mysterious powers of transcendental meditation to help her win.

8:25 - What happened to Don Cheadle's hair?

8:27 - Amy does not care about Eva Mendes. Even if she is a proud Cuban-American. (But we both love whoever that guy was she introduced...I missed what he said because I was Googling Eva Mendes and found this great shot of her plumber's crack while Amy drools over Hamm, John Hamm:

8:31 - Both my mother and Amy's mother call to express outrage over Hamm getting robbed. Amy dubs it Hammgate.

8:36 - Ricky Gervais = hilarious. Tells Kate Winslet, "See? I told you...do a Holocaust movie and you'll win awards!"

8:39 - The hobbits from the Fellowship of the Ring...sorry, I mean, the Jonas Brothers, present the award for Best Foregone Conclusion...I mean, uh, Best Animated Feature. Amy says the middle Jonas Brother looks like the guy she lost her virginity to (although I saw the guy recently and he no longer has that silky Jonas hair...or any hair, really).

8:41 - Amy wants Johnny Depp, meanwhile, to simply wash his hair.

8:43 - Sally Hawkins wins Best Actress for Comedy! I couldn't be happier! Amy is also happy for Sally, but wants to feed her skinny ass some brie.

8:45 - Sally Hawkins is full of love. And, possibly, nitrous oxide.

8:54 - Cheadle: good bald. Ralph Fiennes: not so much. (Amy, meanwhile, loves loves loves Drew Barrymore's dress.)

8:58 - Ledger wins. Universal sadness.

9:03 - Meanwhile, over on CNN, they're interviewing Priscilla Presley, who apparently got some cut-rate plastic surgery that left her looking like a Dick Tracy villain.

9:07 - Colin Farrell has that weird Aronofsky moustache, too! Trend alert!

9:10 - Waltz With Bashir guy: best acceptance speech of the evening.

9:11 - Maggie Gyllenhaal wears my aunt's drapes. Shirley Maclaine is either stoned or just got hit in the face with a frying pan.

9:13 - Paul Giamatti, for some reason, decided to come dressed as Judah Friedlander.

9:18 - Mmm! Look at that sexy Seth Rogen! Amy prefers fat Seth. Either way, Mickey Rourke is probably gonna kick his ass for that coke-snorting joke.

9:21 - What did David Duchovny mouth to the camera while blowing a kiss? Amy's guess: "I love hookers."

9:23 - Alec Baldwin thanks his vile pig of a daughter. Awwww.

9:31 - Giamatti!

9:36 - I don't have any little snarky comment to make, but I must just pause here to acknowledge the comic brilliance of Tracy Morgan, edging past the Waltz With Bashir guy for best speech. (Lorny Mikes!)

9:41 - Didn't mention it at the time, but controversy breaks out here in Somerville over Glenn Close's outfit. Amy says age-appropriate. Her mother, phoning in from New Hampshire, says early '80s Boca Raton.

9:43 - "Mmm...Pierce Brosnan," quoth Amy. "Nothin' wrong with that." She also likes him because he has a fat wife.

9:46 - P. Diddy and Kate Beckinsale step down off a wedding cake to present a nice Indian man with the award for Best Soundtrack (for Slumdog Millionaire).

9:48 - Nice boobs, Tina Fey!

9:54 - Scorcese!

9:58 - Much whispering about the awe-inspiring wonder of Steven Spielberg and his gift to the art of cinema. Bathroom break!

10:06 - All right, snark aside: (A) Spielberg throws some love to Scorcese, which is nice, but (B) that montage of Spielberg movies reminds you...damn, Steven Spielberg sure made a bunch of good-ass movies. (And, y'know, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull). This speech sure is going on, though.

10:09 - Spielberg: still talking.

10:13 - Is it more that Emma Thompson's really big or that Dustin Hoffman's really small?

10:15 - Danny Boyle wins Best Director. Again, the toe-in-electric-outlet hair. Trend alert!

10:19 - Amy says Colin Farrell looks less like a pubic hair with his hair cut short. And I'm happy to see the Bruges love: rent it now! (By the way, I didn't realize when I put In Bruges on my 2008 Top Ten list that the movie's writer/director, Martin McDonagh, is also the playwright responsible for The Lieutenant of Inishmore, the bloodiest play (and one of the most entertaining) I've ever seen on stage. If you get a chance, be sure to check it out!) I have plenty of time to write about all this, incidentally, because Colin Farrell will apparently never stop talking. "You're not Steven Spielberg!" says Amy, who hates him. Me, I thought his speech was kinda sweet.

10:29 - Hayek, Johansson and Cruz all enter my consciousness at once. Amy breaks out the smelling salts.

10:31 - Borat!

10:32 - Really? The Golden Globe audience boos a Madonna joke? Hmm. While I ponder this strange development, Vicky Cristina Barcelona wins best comedy/musical, which makes me think of Salma, Scarlett and Penelope again...mmm...

10:36 - Oh, wait...add Freida Pinto to that fantasy...mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm...

10:39 - Kate Winslet momentarily forgets that Angelina Jolie was also nominated for Best Actress. Angelina Jolie: not happy. Mark Wahlberg says hi to my mother for me.

10:45 - Mad Men? Rules.

10:49 - All the people who wouldn't return Mickey Rourke's calls last year are now very happy for Mickey Rourke.

10:50 - Mickey Rourke thanks David Unger for his balls.

10:52 - Darren Aronofsky flips the bird on national television. "Nice, real nice," says Amy's mother, phoning in from New Hampshire. "John Ford would never do that."

10:54 - Mickey Rourke thanks Scott Franklin for breaking his balls. Somehow Axl Rose was also involved with The Wrestler, making it the New Jersey-est movie of all time. Finally Rourke thanks his dogs. "That's the kinda shit you wait up all night for," says Amy.

10:58 - And...Slumdog! The guy accepting the award jumps the Aronofsky train with a verbal finger flip...trend alert!

Anyway, thanks for playing along at home! And now, to recap...the complete list of winners:

Best Motion Picture - Drama

Winner: Slumdog Millionaire (2008)

Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Drama

Winner: Mickey Rourke for The Wrestler (2008)

Best Television Series - Drama

Winner: "Mad Men" (2007)

Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture - Drama

Winner: Kate Winslet for Revolutionary Road (2008)

Best Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy

Winner: Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008)

Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy

Winner: Colin Farrell for In Bruges (2008)

Best Director - Motion Picture

Winner: Danny Boyle for Slumdog Millionaire (2008)

Best Performance by an Actress in a Television Series - Musical or Comedy

Winner: Tina Fey for "30 Rock" (2006)

Best Original Score - Motion Picture

Winner: Slumdog Millionaire (2008) - A.R. Rahman

Best Television Series - Musical or Comedy

Winner: "30 Rock" (2006)

Best Performance by an Actor in a Mini-Series or a Motion Picture Made for Television

Winner: Paul Giamatti for "John Adams" (2008)

Best Performance by an Actor in a Television Series - Musical or Comedy

Winner: Alec Baldwin for "30 Rock" (2006)

Best Screenplay - Motion Picture

Winner: Slumdog Millionaire (2008) - Simon Beaufoy

Best Performance by an Actress in a Mini-Series or a Motion Picture Made for Television

Winner: Laura Linney for "John Adams" (2008)

Best Foreign Language Film

Winner: Vals Im Bashir (2008)

Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture

Winner: Heath Ledger for The Dark Knight (2008)

Best Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for Television

Winner: "John Adams" (2008)

Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy

Winner: Sally Hawkins for Happy-Go-Lucky (2008)

Best Animated Film

Winner: WALL·E (2008)

Best Performance by an Actress in a Television Series - Drama

Winner: Anna Paquin for "True Blood" (2007)

Best Performance by an Actor in a Television Series - Drama

Winner: Gabriel Byrne for "In Treatment" (2008)

Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Series, Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for Television

Winner: Laura Dern for Recount (2008) (TV)

Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Series, Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for Television

Winner: Tom Wilkinson for "John Adams" (2008)

Best Original Song - Motion Picture

Winner: The Wrestler (2008)("The Wrestler")

Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture

Winner: Kate Winslet for The Reader (2008)

How Philip Seymour Hoffman Would Have Played The Penguin

Andrew Osborne — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Here at the Screengrab, we've been mongering (and squashing) rumors about possible villains for the next Batman movie, including Philip Seymour Hoffman as the Penguin, Johnny Depp as the Riddler and (mmmmmm) Angelina Jolie as Catwoman...

...and though Hoffman denied the rumor of his own supervillainy back in September, please to enjoy this YouTube clip of the Synecdoche, NY star discussing the way he might have approached the part.

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Jolie to Porn Star: "Do It"

Michael Caine, Batspoiler

Screengrab Presents: The Best Stage-To-Screen Adaptations Of All Time (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 23:00:00 GMT

DEATHTRAP (1982)

One set, five characters, a couple of twists and a few good, juicy murders: that’s the formula for success in Ira Levin’s puzzle box of a murder mystery about a struggling veteran playwright desperate for a hit. Add a nervous spouse with a weak heart, a gay lover, a weird psychic, a cagey agent and a wall full of handcuffs, pistols and crossbows and you’ve got one of the few stage plays with the power to make audiences scream and jump like a creature double-feature. The movie version wisely sticks to the basics, letting the cat-and-mouse triple-double-cross plotting speak for itself while sticking mostly to the confined but never claustrophobic Long Island home of the plotting protagonist (Michael Caine at his very Michael Caine-iest, having a helluva time). And though certain naysayers here at the Screengrab may say nay, I also give kudos to Christopher Reeve’s performance in the film, which tweaks his goody-two-shoes Superman image while letting him exercise the underutilized mischievous side of his (admittedly limited) range. Meanwhile, Dyan Cannon gives good scream as the wife, and if all that doesn’t win you over, the movie has at least one immortal line, delivered by a snarky critic (Joel Siegel) after Caine’s playwright Sidney Bruhl premieres a hackneyed whodunit nowhere near as clever as Deathtrap: “I'll tell you who done it. Sidney Bruhl done it. And he done it in public."

THE RULING CLASS (1972)

Adapted for the screen by Peter Barnes from his own deeply subversive play, The Ruling Class was sort of a last gasp for the British “Angry Young Man” movement. But its demise was also its salvation: the play – and the subsequent and very successful film – kept in place the elements of class warfare, generational conflict and family drama and turned them on their heads. It replaced rage with whimsy, a tone of rebellion with a sense of absurdity, and an overall tone of Pythonesque lunacy that proved the movement wasn’t entirely devoid of humor. The story of an upper-class family of British aristocrats forced by fortune into restoring as its head a deranged son who thinks he’s the second coming of Christ (played with delightfully silky craziness by Peter O’Toole, in one of his greatest roles), The Ruling Class is, even today, as vicious as it is hilarious. It expands on the play by adding a few memorable characters and trading up in the players (most especially Nigel Green as McKyle, “the Electric Christ”, and the unforgettable Alastair Sim as the bewildered Bishop Bertie Lampton) as well as taking the sets out-of-doors, but what made the stage version so great was its devastatingly funny and fiendish dialogue. Barnes and director Peter Medak are wise enough not to change a bit of that.

SWEENEY TODD: THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET (2007)

Tim Burton’s first full-blown attempt at a musical is so successful, it’s a wonder that he never tried it before. Without sacrificing the elements that have made him famous – the gloomy atmospherics, the high gothic sensibilities, the manic pace, the deft blend of dark humor and absurd violence – his big-screen adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s notorious musical gives him the perfect format. Why? Because musicals are infinitely forgiving of the qualities that, in many of Burton’s other films, can rightly be considered weaknesses: his overblown dialogue, his clumsy grasp of the dynamics of storytelling, his slight characterization, and his love of style over emotional substance. Everything really comes together for him here, and the result is one of the most enjoyable musicals in decades. Dismissals of the lead actors (Johnny Depp as the vengeance-addled Victorian hairstylist and Burton’s wife, Helena Bonham Carter, as the vendor of unhygienic meat pies) as unable to sing at the level expected from a big-screen musical somewhat miss the point: Sweeney Todd is a fiendishly difficult production, its songs and structure much more akin to an opera than a musical comedy, and it contains precious few toe-tappers, so putting the words in the mouths of those not well-suited to the old school of musicals doesn’t sink it one bit.

INHERIT THE WIND (1960)

Almost fifty years down the road, there are a lot of problems with the Stanley Kramer adaptation of the then-controversial play (by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, no relation) about the Scopes Monkey Trial. It’s excessively stagey; Kramer doesn’t bother to open up the set very much, and too many scenes are given no chance to work in the very different medium of film. The casting is problematic; Spencer Tracy and Frederic March are terrific in the lead roles (as stand-ins for Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan, respectively), and there are some good supporting jobs, especially by Elliott Reed as the county prosecutor, but Dick York and Donna Anderson as the romantic leads are flat as pancakes, and Gene Kelly playing a thinly-veiled H.L. Mencken is one of the biggest botch-jobs in casting history. It’s unfair, imbalanced, and historically inaccurate. And in a certain sense, it’s simply not as relevant as it once was; Inherit the Wind isn’t about what it’s about, but rather a Cold War narrative about the long-faded dangers of McCarthyism. But there are still some gorgeous speeches in this moldy oldie, and since America is, astonishingly, still debating the rightness of teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution in schools some eighty-odd years after the Scopes Trial, it maintains a relevance its authors couldn’t possibly have anticipated.

WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? (1966)

While many directors attempt to open up adaptations of stage plays for the big screen by taking the action up and out, Mike Nichols helps make Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? a masterpiece by doing the opposite. Although he does take us outside once or twice, what makes the film so visually arresting is his camera’s perfect pace with the legendary dialogue: instead of going out, it circles endlessly in and around, like a shark. It darts in and out of scenes, whirls around like the heads of the characters after a stinging rejoinder, and creeps in for powerful closeups that reveal faces as ugly as the words they’re speaking. Who exactly gets credit for the screenplay has been the subject of endless disputes, arguments and lawsuits, but really, it’s as simple as going to the source; almost all of the hypnotic dialogue that takes place between timid, repressed college professor Richard Burton and his domineering, disapproving wife Elizabeth Taylor is present in Edward Albee’s original stage play. Not for nothing is Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? a sort of literary shorthand for viciously feuding married couples: as Burton and Taylor go for each other’s throats, the camera matches them slash for slash, portraying a couple so sick of each other – but so used to each other – that the object of their hatred fills their eyes and becomes all that they can see.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce

Screengrab Salutes: The Top Biopics of All Time! (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 22:00:00 GMT

FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS (1998)

Biopics have always blurred the line between fact and legend, a stylistic practice that both fueled and destroyed the career of Hunter S. Thompson, who (at his best) went beyond the bounds of traditional journalism by injecting himself into the stories he covered, amplifying the reality of his subject matter through wild exaggeration. But, as a certain lame duck American president can certainly attest, “truthiness” is a slippery slope, and Thompson eventually began to confuse himself with his journalistic doppleganger, Raoul Duke, the drug-addled party monster at the heart of Terry Gilliam’s psychedelic adaptation of the college dorm room staple once considered unfilmable. While a “straight” biopic of the actual events of Thompson’s life would be fascinating (as long as Art Linson, director of the tedious Bill Murray fiasco Where the Buffalo Roam, had nothing to do with it), Gilliam instead captured the legend of Thompson/Duke and his infamous 1971 road trip to Sin City with his “attorney,” Dr. Gonzo (a funhouse mirror fictionalization of the Mexican-American political activist Oscar Zeta Acosta). Critics loathed the over-the-top depiction of Thompson’s hallucinated wonderland, yet despite an excess of shrieking in Benicio del Toro’s headache-inducing performance as Gonzo, Johnny Depp admirably captures both the real Thompson and his alter ego in an underrated performance. Plus, the movie’s a flat-out hoot: after howling through a near empty screening with fellow Screengrabber Scott Von Doviak, another audience member who’d ignored all the scathing reviews approached us to hazard the minority opinion, “Yeah! It was funny...right?”

RAGING BULL (1980)

Directors who specialized in noir – drawn as they were to doomed heroes and disorienting levels of moral ambiguity – loved to make films about boxers. Carnal, visceral creatures, they seemed particularly drawn to the sort of manipulative femme fatales the genre celebrated, and they played to the notion of destiny’s brute: they were men, after all, whose primary form of human communication was savage physical violence. Martin Scorsese, who brought the dynamic emotional energy of the ’70s and the gorgeous visual iconography and crushing sense of guilt and shame of Catholicism to the noir framework, clearly felt the same way, so it’s no coincidence that one of his greatest films is a breathtaking refinement of the old-school pug-centered crime drama. What makes Raging Bull such a shocker, then, is that it’s a true story: Jake LaMotta’s meteoric rise, brutal determination, mercurial mood swings, and destructive relationships with his wife, his family, and his God seem like the stuff of lurid, overblown pulp drama. Given the material they had to work with, it’s no wonder Scorsese and his collaborators created such a stunning, immediate film. While much is made of the admittedly astonishing physical transformation made by Robert DeNiro as his LaMotta slid from lean, hungry contender to fat, washed-up ex-champ, his emotional and psychological transformation is just as incredible, as the cocky, unstoppable self-confidence of the young man inexorably decays into the pitiful, indulgent self-loathing of age.

MISHIMA: A LIFE IN FOUR CHAPTERS (1985)

Paul Schrader wrote the screenplay to Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull, which may have served as a sort of apprenticeship for his directing, four years later, the moving screen biography of Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima. Not only did he borrow heavily from Scorsese’s visual handiwork (notice the overhead camera angles, and the visual tonality that mixes elegiac near-silences with scenes of fiery violence), but he chose as his subject a public figure who shared more in common with Jake LaMotta than either of them would have cared to admit. Like LaMotta, Mishima’s story was so bizarre as to seem like the stuff of fiction: a weak young man who transformed himself through sheer willpower into a physically perfect bodybuilder; a barely closeted homosexual with poetic inclinations who married one of his country’s most famous female beauties and preached a gospel of rabid militarism; and a famous celebrity, considered the greatest writer of his generation, who ended his life in the most base possible manner, staging a would-be fascist revolution that ended with him clumsily committing suicide as the soldiers he hoped to inspire laughed at his grand ideals. Deftly blending intense psychological moments from Mishima’s life with gorgeous evocations of some of the most famous scenes in his fiction, Schrader creates a biopic that shows how much he learned from Scorsese – and how much he brought to the table himself.

THE ELEPHANT MAN (1980)

There were a million ways The Elephant Man could have gone wrong. (It’s easy to see how, in the innumerable one-joke parodies of it that sprang up in its wake.) A film about John Merrick, the terribly deformed Victorian-era man whose intelligence and perception transformed the lives of many who met him, could have been overly mawkish if taken too far in one direction, or grotesque and exploitative if taken too far in the other. Mel Brooks, who financed the film, knew this, and his first and best decision was to keep his name out of the production, realizing that audiences and critics would expect the film to be a joke if they thought it was coming from him. He took a major risk in hiring David Lynch to helm The Elephant Man, especially given Lynch’s penchant for unnerving surrealism, but Lynch was the best possible choice, and hit the necessary tone just right: he let Merrick’s appearance speak for itself, trusting John Hurt to communicate the agony of his mere existence as well as the man’s essential dignity. Lynch made the right decision to transfer his sense of the absurd and the bizarre onto Merrick’s surroundings, presenting us with a view of Victorian London as unsettling and alien as that of the world of Eraserhead, while putting Merrick in the position not of a monster, but of a man who did his best to be human in a world that would not allow him that role. The collaboration was so successful it’s a shame that the project Brooks next intended to do with Lynch – a surreal nightmare biography of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels set entirely inside the subject’s head - never got off the ground.

SAMURAI I: MUSASHI MIYAMOTO (1954)

When the historical figure you’re portraying in your biopic is less a human being than a character straight out of legend, you’ve got a lot of leeway in how you can portray him. There have been dozens of films in which legendary swordsman and duelist Miyamoto Musashi is the central figure, but the best of them all is director Hiroshi Inagaki’s Samurai trilogy. Though they’re best viewed as a whole, the first of the three movies is probably the strongest installment, telling the story of the epic figure from his humble beginnings to his utter transformation in the crucible of an unimaginably bloody battle. What Inagaki does right, and what distinguishes Musashi Miyamoto from the innumerable other films about the characters, is to strike a powerfully clear balance between historical storytelling and epic filmmaking; he is able, through solid storytelling and some highly inventive composition, to convey the sense that he is allowing us a glimpse of a real human figure who came from a particular time and place and ended up the way he did for discernable reasons, but he never lets go of the sweep and tension that remind us we’re watching a movie about a hero who is as much demigod as man. Of course, much of the credit must go to Toshirô Mifune, who gives the first of many towering performances in the lead role, yet Inagaki – rarely thought of as one of the first-rank Japanese directors of his day – does a fine job of sustaining the mood, tone, pace and look (abetted by some terrific EastmanColor cinematography by Jun Yasumoto) that distinguishes the whole trilogy. It’s as close to a definitive biopic as one can hope for when dealing with a legend.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce

Screengrab Salutes: The Top Biopics Of All Time! (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 21:00:00 GMT

The problem with biopics, as most cineastes know, is the way they often tend to play like a greatest hits of their subjects’ lives, packed with historical moments and celebrity impersonations rather than realistic character development or any kind of specific story worth telling.

But Gus Van Sant’s Milk vaulted out of the specialty box office charts and into the mainstream top ten largely on the strength of a gripping, inspirational (and, sadly, still timely) story of persecution, triumph and tragedy, featuring a classic protagonist/antagonist duo embodied by Sean Penn’s crusading gay rights activist and Josh Brolin’s conflicted assassin.

And so, with Oscar buzz clinging to Van Sant, Penn and Brolin like...wait for it...yes, milk mustachios, we here at the Screengrab decided now would be the perfect time to Walk Hard through the positively true story of OUR FAVORITE BIOPICS OF ALL TIME!

ED WOOD (1994)

Tim Burton’s tribute to the so-called “worst director of all time” is a two-fer: while Johnny Depp’s relatively obscure title character is the focus, the Oscar-winning main attraction was Martin Landau’s portrayal of a lusty, foul-mouthed, morphine-addicted Bela Lugosi in the final years of his life, after Hollywood had kicked him to the curb and the once proud actor could only find work rolling around in a lake with a giant rubber octopus. Lugosi’s son, Béla Junior, initially criticized Burton’s film for its inaccuracies with regard to his father (who, for example, was married at the time of his death and rarely used profanity, at least according to friends like Forrest J. Ackerman, Ed Wood’s one-time “illiterary” agent). But what makes the film great is that docu-drama realism was never the point: we don’t necessarily see events as they happened, but rather the way Ed Wood, Jr. (and, to a certain extent, Wood biographer Rudolph Grey and cartoonist/old Hollywood enthusiast Drew Friedman) perceived them: in surreal, melodramatic black & white fantasias where an alcoholic transvestite wannabe could actually transcend death and live forever like his idol, Count Dracula.

I'M NOT THERE (2007)

If ever there was an artist who required no further mythologizing, it would have to be Bob Dylan. A conventional biopic of the Bard might well be unbearable, which is why it's a good thing Todd Haynes, World's Cleverest Film Student, signed on for the task. Haynes takes the well-known Dylan mythos, scrambles it all together and then bounces it off a series of funhouse mirrors, delighting in the ever more distorted reflections that result. Six different actors play six different versions of Dylan, among them Woody Guthrie (Marcus Carl Franklin), an 11-year-old African-American boy who rides the rails with hobos, spinning tall tales of a rambling youth with no direction home; Jack Rollins (Christian Bale), an alternate universe troubadour whose Dylanesque career unfolds as scenes from a mockumentary in the mode of A Mighty Wind; and Robbie (Heath Ledger), an actor who is playing Jack Rollins in a conventional biopic called Grain of Sand. (Sample dialogue: "I'm only a pawn in their game!") The standout is Cate Blanchett, who was nominated for an Oscar for her eerie take on hipster-dandy Jude Quinn, supernova post-Beatles pop star. In appropriating and manipulating various filmmaking styles, Haynes is striving for a cinematic equivalent to the way Dylan adapted and exploded traditional folk forms in his music. The resulting surreal swirl recalls Dylan's most fertile creative period, his mid-60s "thin, wild mercury music" wherein characters ranging from Paul Revere to Jack the Ripper to Cecil B. DeMille could inhabit the same soundscape. Through these methods, Haynes is attempting a biography not so much of a man, but of an artistic sensibility. If I'm Not There is occasionally impenetrable, pretentious or overly impressed with its own cleverness, that only serves to make it a more accurate, warts-and-all portrait, without delving into tabloid trash. You may love it or hate it, but you get the feeling its subject wouldn't want it any other way.

LADY SINGS THE BLUES (1972)

This soapy treatment of the life of Billie Holiday is not beloved by jazz critics or historical purists, who recoil from its sloppy handling of the facts of the singer's life and gag on Diana Ross' pop stylings when she sings Holiday classics such as "Strange Fruit." But the movie remains highly enjoyable when taken on the terms that it set for itself in 1972: a chance for African-American audiences to wallow in the kind of old-Hollywood melodrama that had been spun from the lives of white celebrities such as Lillian Roth and Ruth Etting, with a dash of blaxploitation attitude for flavor. (It turns out that Billie needed a toxically blond white man to turn her onto heroin. Who knew?) Ross' singing here takes a back seat to her acting, which should have marked the start of a major movie career. She proved she had the talent, but once she'd tasted success in Hollywood, her diva gene ate her common sense alive. Her scenes with her piano man sidekick, Richard Pryor, have a special poignance today, because it's hard to remember that there was a time when Diana Ross and Richard Pryor occupied the same planet.

GENTLEMAN JIM (1942)

This affably sanitized life of heavyweight boxer James J. Corbett (Errol Flynn) is probably the most entertaining example of the boxer-biopic genre that Martin Scorsese was to bury for all time with Raging Bull. It also provided its star, Errol Flynn, with a rare chance to appear onscreen in street clothes instead of leggings or cowboy gear. The premise is that Corbett was the first brainiac who conquered his opponents by means of the "scientific" method, which enables him to whup such swaggering sides of beef as John L. Sullivan (Ward Bond). This allows Flynn to win his fights and still display a glib enough tongue to pitch woo at society gal Alexis Smith. This is also the movie that was in theaters when Flynn was dragged into court on hinky charges of statutory rape, a sideshow that turned out to do the movie not the least bit of harm at the box office.

WHAT'S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT (1993)

In this updating of Love Me or Leave Me (the 1955 cult classic in which Doris Day, as singer Ruth Etting, was physically abused by James Cagney as her husband-manager), Angela Bassett and Laurence Fishburne play Ike and Tina Turner, from their days starting out together on the R & B touring circuit and the period when electrifying star performances on-stage alternated with one-sided sparring matches backstage to the day that Tina, having discovered the untapped strength at her core with the help of a chanting regimen, starting punching back. The closest thing to a flaw in Bassett's performance is that she didn't have Turner's legs, a problem that today would probably be corrected with the help of CGI; she compensates with her slugger's arms, which make the scenes of abuse easier to get through, since you can't help but anticipate the moment when this woman realizes that she can take care of herself. Fishburne may be even better, tapping into deep reserves of rage that a lesser actor would have been tempted to take out on the costume designer. This is probably the finest lead performance ever given by an actor who at one point is forced to don hot pants and a Prince Valiant haircut.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

Morning Deal Report: Johnny Depp Has Hand

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 15:30:00 GMT

“Johnny Depp's production company Infinitum Nihil has acquired screen rights to the Nick Tosches novel In the Hand of Dante,” Variety reports. “Book revolves around Dante's masterwork The Divine Comedy, and tells parallel storylines involving Dante in 14th-century Italy as he tries to complete the work, and a contemporary storyline involving Tosches, who is asked to authenticate what might be Dante's original manuscript. Depp would play Tosches.” The project will have to wait, as Depp is set to play Hunter S. Thompson for the second time in an adaptation of The Rum Diaries, beginning production in March.

Twilight star Kristen Stewart is set to play Joan Jett in the biopic The Runaways. For those of you who missed the ‘70s, The Hollywood Reporter helpfully notes, “The Runaways were hugely influential as the first successful all-girl hard rock band; its members included guitarists Jett and Lita Ford, drummer Sandy West, singer-keyboardist Cherie Currie and bassist Jackie Fox. The band was brought together in late 1975 by impresario Kim Fowley, who thought a novelty act of teenaged girls performing in leather and lace would be an easy sell, but the girls ended up proving to be serious and influential musicians with songs like Cherry Bomb.” No word yet on who will play the creepy, creepy Fowley.

Phillip Noyce (Patriot Games) is developing a remake of Captain Blood for Warner Bros. “Errol Flynn starred in the 1935 original, directed by Michael Curtiz, as a doctor wrongly sentenced to slavery in the Caribbean, where he and his comrades become avenging pirates,” Variety reminds. Aargh.

Related:
Depp vs. Murray: Dueling Gonzos
Johnny Depp, Household Pet

The Top 50 Movies of 2009

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 16:00:00 GMT

It’s getting harder and harder for us poor drones of the blogosphere to stay current. We haven’t even begun to compile our final thoughts on the films of 2008, and already the Times Online has published their list of the top 50 movies of 2009.

Granted, it’s purely speculative nonsense. “Which hot franchises will step up to fill the spaces left by Batman, Bond and Indy? We’ve taken a look through the studio schedules and picked out the most promising prospects for the coming year.” Some of their choices look pretty safe. The number one pick is Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and others finishing in the top ten include Star Trek (#3), the Da Vinci Code follow-up Angels & Demons (#6) and Monsters vs. Aliens (#8). Going out a little further on a limb, they’ve selected the Dillinger biopic Public Enemies to finish behind only Harry Potter. Sure, it’s got Johnny Depp and Christian Bale, but it’s also got a whiff of the brat pack bomb Mobsters about it, no?

Of course, the real fun is to be found further down the list. I’m glad someone is optimistic enough to believe Fanboys will finally be released in theaters; on the other hand, I’m somewhat skeptical that “curiosity value alone guarantees S. Darko a strong opening weekend.” Perhaps most intriguing is #42: “Them, a recently announced feature to be directed by Sean of the Dead and Hot Fuzz’s Edgar Wright, is not, as far as we can tell, an update of the hoary old giant ant chiller but a fictionalised adaptation of Jon Ronson’s investigative book about the shadowy conspiracies that operate behind our notional governments. Unless it turns out that the Illuminati and the Bilderberg Group actually are all enormous ants.”

Check out the full list starting here.

Related:
Sequel to "Donnie Darko" Is on the Way, Much to the Dismay of the Creator of "Donnie Darko"
Your First Look at Star Trek 90210

Honorable Mention: The Top Leading Men of All Time (Part Eight)

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 02:00:00 GMT

DUSTIN HOFFMAN (1937 - )

He isn't on this list so much for his work in the later years, though Ishtar definitely gets honorable mention. It is more for the deliciously anti-leading man stuff he did way back when. He redefined the romantic hero in The Graduate: "Mrs. Robinson, are you trying to seduce me?" So lost and confused, so attractive. No wonder he gets the girl (and her mother). Then there's more heroes against the odds: Ratso Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy, the somewhat psychotic-seeming protagonist of Marathon Man and, well, Tootsie. Here's to you Dustin Hoffman.

JEAN-PAUL BELMONDO (1933 - )

How goes the plot of Breathless again? Can't remember? Well maybe that is because you were distracted by the dreaminess of Jean-Paul Belmondo. Seriously, the man took the Humphrey Bogart cigarette thing and improved upon it. How many actors can do that? He made this film nerdess get a Jean Seberg haircut and take up a Gauloises Blondes habit when she was sixteen. Unfortunatly she never ended up with Jean Paul in a hotel room. Oh well. At least Pierrot Le Fou is coming up on my Netflix list.

JOHNNY DEPP (1963 - )

There's no sense beating around the bush: for a long, long time, we remained steadfastly resistant to Depp's charms. He was very pretty. He seemed to mean well. It was sweet that Marlon Brando seemed to see something in there that was worth encouraging. We were glad that we did not personally own any of the hotels that he stayed in and that subsequently needed extensive reconstruction. But he had a penchant for moist, self-pitying whimsey, and an unfortunate ability to seem to bring it out of others, as in his first starring role for Tim Burton, Edward Scissorhands. He often looked lost, whether in sausage movies like Nick of Time or meatier fare such as Ed Wood, where he mostly smiled a lot. And when he tried for deeper emotions, as in Donnie Brasco, he sometimes seemed to be dipping his bucket into an empty well. But by 2003, the year that he let Captain Jack Sparrow out of the bottle and appeared in Robert Rodriguez's mostly uninspired, messy Once Upon a Time in Mexico, apparently starring in some livelier, stranger film that he was making in his head, the lad had won us over. Depp may still look a bit like a teen pin-up, but his ambitions as an actor clearly have less to do with romancing or charming audiences than with bringing us images from a different dimension, and after more than twenty years of practice, he's harnessed enough mastery of his physical instrument to his boundless imagination that he does whatever it is he's doing pretty darned well, even if what it is that he thinks he's doing sometimes remains an open question. He puts on as good a show now as any actor of his generation. It's not clear that he can play a straight role and invest in with real emotional power, but the dark, deep tones of his Sweeney Todd -- in many ways his greatest breakthrough yet -- suggest that he's only begun to realize his full promise.

JOHN WAYNE (1907-1979)

Like it or not, the man born Marion Morrison is the face of the cinematic take on American history. He rarely stepped outside his comfort zone of Westerns and war movies, where Man struggled and fought with Otherness and Nature in morality plays writ as large as the myth of American exceptionalism. He had 171 movies under his belt when he died, and most of them aren't great or even good. A lot of them espouse a distinctly conservative political viewpoint. And a handful are absolutely stunning. Let's start with Stagecoach, the movie that Orson Welles used as a template for how to make movies when he was getting ready to make Citizen Kane. John Ford brilliantly used the Monument Valley location to emphasize how tiny the people in Stagecoach were in their environment, and it fell to Wayne, the outlaw-with-a-heart-of-gold, to save everyone from their fates. Now look to Rio Bravo and The Searchers. In the former, Wayne is the tough sheriff intent on standing alone against corrupt power. In the latter, Wayne plays a damaged, obsessive, creepy loner who spends the bulk of the movie on the hunt for his little niece so that he can do her the honor of mercy-killing her after her defilement (or so he imagines) at the hands of Native Americans. That's about as ugly as a plot can be, but it's a testament to Wayne's iconography that he can play both parts without changing the John Wayne-ness of the roles. It's rare to see John Wayne lose, which made The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance that much more meaningful. There's plenty of other great iconic Wayne movies: Red River, Fort Apache, Rio Grande, and She Wore A Yellow Ribbon are among the best. You may hear some ugly words spoken unironically in many of his movies but, well, it's important to remember that the westward expansion in American history isn't just about triumph, but triumph at the expense of someone else. It's possible, maybe even necessary, to appreciate both of these points at the same time.

RICHARD BURTON (1925-1984)

Richard Burton arrived in Hollywood in the late 1940s as the heir apparent to Laurence Olivier, blessed with blazing intelligence, a stern handsomeness, crazy Shakespearean chops, and one of the greatest voices in cinema history. Yet it took years for Burton to find his niche in Hollywood, his gifts mostly wasted in cookie-cutter roles in movies like The Robe and Alexander the Great. But if youth didn’t become him onscreen, middle age sure did. Whereas Burton was ill at ease with uncomplicated heroism, he excelled playing more compromised characters, often opposite his two-time wife Elizabeth Taylor. Night of the Iguana showed him as the ideal antihero for both John Huston and Tennessee Williams, while his work as the dissolute academic George in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? afforded him his best co-starring vehicle with Taylor, who according to Burton brought out the best in him as an actor. But best of all is the aging agent Alec Leamas in The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, in which Burton plays the washed-up operative with a dissolute grace that makes the character unimaginable in anyone else’s hands. In his later career, Burton took an alarming number of “paycheck roles,” primarily to cover the debt he’d incurred from both of his divorces from Liz Taylor. But even then, despite being deep into alcohol issues, he was still capable of the old Burton magic, as in the film adaptation of Equus or his final big-screen appearance in 1984. His career was mired in subpar movies, gossip, and booze -- “a spoiled genius from the Welsh gutter,” he called himself -- but Richard Burton also touched genius in a way that few actors could manage.

WARREN BEATTY (1937 - )

Usually, Warren Beatty is lumped in with the generation of movie stars who emerged during the 1970s -- Pacino, Nicholson, DeNiro, Hoffman. But unlike those men, Beatty’s stardom predates the period: he came of age during the late 1960s, as the classical period of Hollywood was drawing to an end. Perhaps that explains why Beatty was so uniquely able to fit in roles both classical and contemporary. But while Beatty’s rakish charm and lothario reputation might have helped to make him a star, it was his adventurous spirit that kept him there. By 1967, he had acquired enough clout to produce a violent crime drama that became one of the seminal films of the era, Bonnie and Clyde. From there, Beatty worked selectively, collaborating with his equally gifted friends and some of the most talented filmmakers of the day, including Robert Altman in McCabe & Mrs. Miller, in which Beatty gave perhaps his finest performance. Beatty served as producer on many of his films, and writer/director on four of them. Yet these productions were rarely vanity projects -- Shampoo found a dramatic context in which Beatty could wrestle with his public image, while the notorious flop Ishtar memorably cast him against type as the shy songwriting partner of ladies’ man Dustin Hoffman. All the while, Beatty has never shied away from his passions, particularly for liberal politics. Who else would have not only made a film about Communist John Reed at the height of the Cold War but would have taken home an Oscar for it as well? Who else would have taken a story of a Senator who finds his political voice in hip-hop culture? Beatty has laid low since 2001’s misbegotten Town and Country -- far too long an absence for a star as vital as this one. Come back, Warren. All is forgiven.

GREGORY PECK (1916-2003)

With his tall, un-fussy presence, it’s easy to think that Gregory Peck was all about heroes. Certainly, his serene masculinity was well-suited to such manly genres as Westerns and war movies. But if all Peck did in his career was to play the good guy over and over, he wouldn’t be worth mentioning here. Consider the way Hitchcock cast him against type in 1945’s Spellbound -- with a more obviously “crazy” actor in the part it would be easy to dismiss the character as a nutjob, but because it’s Peck we root for him to beat his demons. Similarly, he made a most unlikely Captain Ahab, but after seeing him tied to the side of the white whale, it’s hard to imagine another actor doing it better. Peck was one of those rare stars who could do damn near anything, be it the foreign correspondent who romances runaway princess Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday, the besieged lawyer of Cape Fear, even Dr. Joseph Mengele in The Boys From Brazil. But the film that defined him for future generations was To Kill a Mockingbird. As an embodiment of fifties-era manliness, Peck was something of an inspired choice to play the bookish, bespectacled Atticus Finch. And while many of his more conventionally heroic characters are respected by virtue of their strength, Peck imbues Atticus with a forthright goodness that is no less commanding of respect. Other movie heroes may buckle swashes or save the day on the battlefield, but Peck makes Atticus a good guy to whom we can all relate -- the father we had, or wish we had, or wish we were.

And finally, yes...

MEL GIBSON (1956 - )

It may be hard to remember now, but there was a time not too long ago when Mel Gibson -- better known of late for his drunken, anti-Semitic rants and strange directorial inclinations -- was one of Hollywood’s most effortlessly likable leading men. He demonstrated his intensity early in his career, as the enigmatic postapocalyptic hero of the Mad Max trilogy. But it was the Lethal Weapon franchise that propelled Gibson to international superstardom, providing him a mainstream context for his slightly off-kilter presence while affording the breathless women in the audience a good long look at his ass. In the decade to come, Gibson demonstrated his appeal across numerous genres including a solid effort in Franco Zeffirelli’s production of Hamlet. And even when the film itself was unworthy, he rose to the occasion all the same. Look at his work in 1997’s Conspiracy Theory, in which he distinguished an otherwise ordinary thriller with his unhinged performance. Better yet, check out 2000’s What Women Want, which after more than twenty years in the business marked his first lead role in a romantic comedy. The movie’s premise (a male chauvinist pig starts to hear women’s thoughts) is too gimmicky by half, but Gibson singlehandedly salvaged it by making his character more or less the last guy you’d expect to be the center of a romantic comedy -- which, of course, makes it all the more satisfying when he reveal his more sensitive side. Lately, Gibson has taken a break from acting, directing two epics that were shot in dead languages. But we’re happy to see that Gibson is once against stepping in front of the camera, since it’s pretty clear there are many more facets of his talent that he hasn’t shown us yet.

Click Here for Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six & Seven

Contributors: Sarah Sundberg, Phil Nugent, Hayden Childs, Paul Clark

Morning Deal Report: Anne Hathaway in Wonderland

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 14:30:00 GMT

You probably already know that Tim Burton is directing Alice in Wonderland for Disney, and you most likely wouldn’t be terribly surprised to learn that Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter are attached (as the Mad Hatter and Red Queen, respectively). Now Burton has found his White Queen, and it’s Rachel Getting Married star Anne Hathaway. “The White Queen needs Alice to slay a creature known as the Bandersnatch,” The Hollywood Reporter reminds us. Ah, but who is frumious enough to play the Bandersnatch? We’re putting our money on Christopher Walken.

It turns out that October brings not only baseball’s playoffs, but really bad ideas for baseball movies. (I’m still haunted by the image of Jimmy Fallon and Drew Barrymore dancing on the field when the Red Sox won the 2004 World Series.) Now we learn that Kevin Costner and Ron Shelton are cooking up a sequel to Bull Durham. Our first thought is that Costner and Tim Robbins are a little old to pass for baseball players (even older than some of the current Yankees), but according to this UPI report (via the New York Post), a solution has been found. “Real-life couple and Durham co-stars Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon, who played a pitcher and a baseball groupie respectively in the first installment, are also expected to return for the second film. This time around, they will play the married owners of a Major League Baseball team Costner's character manages, the Post said.”

Tennis, anyone? Frank DeFord’s novel Big Bill is coming to the big screen. It’s based on the true story of tennis legend Bill Tilden, who “dominated tennis in the 1920s, winning six straight U.S. Open singles titles and becoming the first American to win Wimbledon. He was also a contract bridge champ, musicologist, novelist, playwright and actor. On the other side of the ledger, Tilden was famously self-destructive, going to jail twice for sexual misbehavior with teenage boys and dying penniless,” says Variety. Sounds like the feel-good sports story of the year.

Related:
When Good Directors Go Bad: Planet of the Apes (Tim Burton)
Hathaway Hotness, Rourke Smackdowns Head Venice Comp Lineup

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: Sept. 6-12, 2008

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 21:00:00 GMT

In a world where Aronofsky’s Wrestler Bodyslams Venice Competition…where Paris Hilton Pulls the Bullshit Train to Toronto…where Good Directors Go Bad and Charlie Kaufman Gets Wired...a world we will call, for lack of a better term, a Lebowski World…

In a time when Harry Potter Fans Revolt….when Johnny Depp is a household pet and Michael Caine is a Batspoiler…when Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains is rediscovered and a Classless Man gets in a Voiceless Brawl…

One blog dares to bring you the Arab Movie Hall of Shame. One blog looks back at City Slickers and Kazaam and lives to tell the tale. One blog celebrates the Local Hero soundtrack and the dinosaurs of the Wheel Inn . And one blog stands alone to bring you Coming Attractions: A Screengrab Salute to Movie Trailers, Parts One and Two!

The Screengrab! Now playing on a computer near you.

Morning Deal Report: Johnny Depp, Household Pet

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 14:30:00 GMT

Don’t tell the newly pious Joe Eszterhas, but his old partner in crime Paul Verhoeven is in talks to direct another erotic thriller. Variety says the untitled script by Wendy Miller “centers on a college intern who finds himself trapped in a dangerous affair with the boss’s wife. Project is described as Risky Business meets Fatal Attraction.” So…Fatal Business? Risky Attraction?

What is the terrifying secret of The Steam Experiment? I certainly can’t wait to find out, as Val Kilmer, Armand Assante and Eric Roberts team up for the indie suspense thriller. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the plot concerns “six people trapped and terrorized in an urban Turkish bathhouse.” Just imagine being trapped in a bathhouse with Val Kilmer, Armand Assante and Eric Roberts and you can already smell the suspense.

Johnny Depp reunites with Gore Verbinski (Pirates of the Caribbean) for the animated feature Rango. Per Variety, “Depp will voice the lead character, a household pet that goes on an adventure to discover its true self.” Really, that’s what it says – a household pet. As if revealing whether he’s a dog or cat or gerbil would be giving too much away.

Related:
Saint Joe: "Showgirls" Writer Finds Jesus
Depp vs. Murray: Dueling Gonzos

Michael Caine, Batspoiler

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 14:00:00 GMT

So you're in a high-stress profession. You work all day and all night to try to make the world a better place, but to protect some very important people, you have to keep certain things about your job secret. But the strain of such a massive secret, a thing that some people would kill to know, can't be borne forever by just one man. So you turn to the one person you think you can trust, the one man you believe will keep your secret: your faithful butler. And then he goes and blabs it to the whole world.

Ever since Christopher Nolan's latest Batman flick, The Dark Knight, made its first trillion dollars, speculation has been rampant about who's going to play the villain role in the next installment. Heath Ledger's untimely death makes it an unlikely, albeit intriguing, possibility that he'll return as the Joker; the two hottest rumors are that Angelina Jolie will be the draw, slipping into a Catwoman costume, and that Johnny Depp and Phillip Seymour Hoffman will tag team as the Riddler and the Penguin. Both have generally dismissed as fan-driven wishful thinking until yesterday, when Michael Caine -- currenty paying his club fees as Bruce Wayne's butler Alfred -- took a moment at the Toronto International Film Festival to cite an unnamed Warner Brothers exec and insist that the latter rumor is true.

Of course, just to keep us baying, Hoffman had to come out and insist he's never heard any such thing. But who are you gonna trust, the Penguin, or Batman's loyal batman? The rat!

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In Other Blogs: Batman Forever

Unwatchable #70: “Epic Movie”

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 18:00:00 GMT

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

How could you do this to me, IMDb Bottom 100 list? After all we’ve been through together, how could you make me sit through two Friedberg-Seltzer spoof movies in a single week? It was only last Friday that I took on #72 Meet the Spartans, and now you present me with the diarrhea duo’s previous exercise in pop culture regurgitation, Epic Movie. Look, I was patient and understanding when you made me watch two Kickboxer sequels. At least you gave me a few weeks to recover between them. But now you’ve crossed a line, IMDb Bottom 100 list. We’ll continue to do business together, but we’re no longer speaking.

The only good news is that, much like Spartans, Epic Movie barely crosses the 60 minute mark before the extended credits, complete with dance sequences and hee-larious outtakes, begin. Also, the word apparently had yet to reach the top Hollywood agencies that they would serve their clients best by destroying all query letters from Friedberg-Seltzer Industries; there are actual recognizable faces on display here in addition to the usual sort-of-look-and-sound-alikes. Kal Penn, Jennifer Coolidge, David Carradine, Crispin Glover (!) and perhaps most dishearteningly, Fred Willard, all show up and do their best to survive with their dignity intact.

The best I can say about Epic Movie is that it’s not quite as slapdash as Meet the Spartans. (I’ll dismiss the fact that it’s actually ranked higher on the list as a statistical quirk.) There’s a sort of plot, at least for a while, involving four orphans, each of whom secures a golden ticket entitling them to a tour of Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. (Wonka is played by Glover, doing a twitchy but uninspired take on Johnny Depp’s version.) Wonka takes the orphans prisoner in order to use their organs as the secret ingredient in his candy, but they escape through the wardrobe into Gnarnia. (The ‘G’ is what makes it a parody, right up there with those Cracked issues of the mid-70s featuring “The Fonze.”) There they battle The White Bitch (Coolidge), enlist the aid of Captain Jack Swallows, and get Punk’d by an Ashton Kutcher-alike in a trucker hat.

There are fleeting indications in Epic Movie that Friedberg and Seltzer have some dim awareness that making a pop culture joke involves putting some sort of twist on that which is familiar. For instance, turning the Mutant Academy into a high school where the X-Men are the cool kids is an amusing notion. Turning the Da Vinci Code phrase “So dark the con of man” into “So lame the hair of Tom” as a poke at the follicular follies of Tom Hanks in that particular movie – that’s moderately chuckle-worthy. Having the characters break into hip-hop musical numbers every ten minutes, however, is not funny. It’s not funny the first time, it’s not funny the fourth time, and it only calls attention to the fact that you’re desperate to pump up the running time.

There are indications that the game is up for our friends Iceberg and Salsa. (See what I did there? I spoofed ‘em! I spoofed ‘em good!) Their latest atrocity Disaster Movie did not approach the box office success of its predecessors, and it became the first movie ever to score a perfect 0% on Rotten Tomatoes. Now that’s funny.

Previously on Unwatchable:
71. Gigli
72. Meet the Spartans
73. Fascination
74. You Got Serve d
75. The Last Sign

The Top 20 Movies About Movies (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 22:00:00 GMT

ED WOOD (1994)

Some idiots still go into the motion picture business to get rich...but the ones who stick around long after the dreams of fame and fortune have curdled into a nasty hangover of disappointment and massive credit card debt are the genuine addicts, driven by an overpowering, irrational desire to project their inner landscapes onto the real world in search of validation, a little fun and a taste of immortality. I’m guessing Tim Burton’s the type of guy who would’ve found a way to keep making movies even if his star had never risen over Hollywood and he’d wound up shooting cable access fantasias on his days off from Applebee’s. And without a budget, an art department or professional actors, his flaws as a director would have been more obvious, his obsessions would have seemed more silly, his distinctive aesthetic would have been reduced to cheesy, ticky-tack attempts at grandeur, easily mocked by a society incapable of distinguishing between talent and success. Ed Wood, Jr. was a similar addict, and it’s definitely arguable whether he would have eventually developed into a better director if he’d ever gotten the breaks and budgets he so desperately craved, but regardless of his ultimate worth as a filmmaker, Burton clearly recognized a kindred spirit in the cross-dressing auteur’s bizarrely inimitable proto-Goth sensibility, which (combined with a perfect storm of pitch-perfect career highpoints from Johnny Depp, Martin Landau and screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, working from the fascinating Wood biography Nightmare of Ecstasy by Rudolph Grey) resulted in one of the greatest films ever made about the potential for transcendence in even the shittiest art.

GODS AND MONSTERS (1998)

For the most part, this beautifully imagined story about the last days of the great cult director James Whale (Ian McKellan) is set long after Whale had retired from that Hollywood silliness and stopped setting foot on soundstages. But it remains a fine tribute to the surprising lasting power of movie images, and it does have one terrific moviemaking scene, when Whale flashes back to the experience of directing Ernest Thesiger and company in The Bride of Frankenstein. No one in a movie has better captured the appeal of making movies than McKellan when he rhapsodizes about how much fun it was, "working with your friends." And Brendan Fraser, as Mr. Jimmy's hunky new friend, contributes one of his best screen performances ever when, having watched the movie with his razzing pals, he gently feels relief wash over him as Whale reassures him that, yes, parts of it are supposed to be funny.

BOMBSHELL (1933)

Jean Harlow was an usual critter in her day, a woman who, once she had a few hits to her name and a few scandals notched in her belt, was unimaginable as anything but a movie star. Compare her to Madonna or Angelina Jolie and now it's clear that she was decades ahead of her time, but in her own decade she must have seemed quite the freak. Luckily, she knew how to laugh at herself, and this early talkie, in which she plays a glamourpuss celebrity so seedy yet so artificial that she has the Wizard of Oz for a father, remains the classic template for Hollywood's satiric take on itself in the studio-contract era. Co-starring Lee Tracy, who in the talkie era was to reporters and press agents what Seth Rogen is today to scoring out of his league.

LOS ANGELES PLAYS ITSELF (2003)

Thom Anderson's dense, meaningful masterpiece works on so many levels that, even at over three hours long, the more one sees it, the more one notices what is omitted as much as what is included. Incredibly ambitious, relentlessly formalist, and bearing both the eye of an artist and the soul of a documentarian committed to social justice, Los Angeles Plays Itself is almost totally unique among modern films. Piecing together a century of Hollywood's portrayals of its own surroundings, from the gorgeous Art Deco-tinted luxury of early films to the deliberately hazy nostalgia of Chinatown to the socialist-realist depictions of filmmakers like Charles Burnette, it's a movie that not only presents an almost complete vision of a modern city – and presents that city with love, respect, disappointment and rage, as appropriate – but also manages to do something quite profound at the same time, which is to use film as a medium for portraying how film changes the way we think, perceive and remember a place. Legal issues will likely prevent Los Angeles Plays Itself from ever getting the wide theatrical release it so richly deserves – it features footage from hundreds of films and television shows, and the clearance rights would be ruinously expensive for any production company – but it turns up occasionally at festivals and academic screenings, and the entirely of the movie was, until recently, available on YouTube. (Keep checking -- the copyright cops work slow.) Not only one of the finest movies about filmmaking imaginable, but one of the most unique films ever made, period.

Click Here for Part One, Part Two, Part Three & Part Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce