The Screengrab : jon voight

DVD Digest for May 26, 2009

Paul Clark — Tue, 26 May 2009 14:00:00 GMT

In advance of the upcoming shuttering of The Screengrab- just four more days, folks!- the DVD departments of Disney, Paramount, and Fox have graciously decided not to put out any recent releases this week in protest. Thanks for the support, guys!

Unfortunately, this boycott leaves us with precious little to report in regards to recent movies. Put it another way- when your highest-profile recent release coming to DVD is the forgotten Renee Zellweger/Harry Connick Jr. rom-com New in Town (Lionsgate), the phrase “slow week” doesn’t quite cover it. If you’re looking for Asian fare, this week also brings Mamoru Oshii’s animated The Sky Crawlers (Sony, also Blu-Ray), as well as two Wayne Wang indies, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (Magnolia) and Princess of Nebraska (Magnolia). And let’s not overlook the much-anticipated How to Give Pleasure to a Woman by a Woman (Pacific Media).

Thankfully, there’s a little more of interest in the classics department, although that’s kind of a good news/bad news situation. The good news is that Warner is releasing titles from Michelangelo Antonioni, David Cronenberg, John Boorman, Hal Ashby, and Hugh Hudson. The bad news is that this week’s releases include some of these estimable auteurs’ worst films. Now, I’m aware that Zabriskie Point and M. Butterfly have their defenders. However, I’m not sure people were exactly clamoring for a DVD of Beyond Rangoon or director’s cuts of Revolution and Lookin’ to Get Out, no matter how excited Jon Voight is about the latter. At least they’re not in a box set, so you Zabriskie fans can finally watch stuff blow up real good at the end without having to buy a DVD of Al Pacino fighting the Redcoats as well. Also this week: Falling Down Deluxe Edition (Warner).

Now that Hollywood has seen fit to make Land of the Lost into an expensive summer movie, it was inevitable that Land of the Lost: The Complete Series (Universal) would be hitting stores in advance of that. Or if you’re more into the whole cop-show thing, this week also sees the release of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: The Ninth Year (Universal) and The Closer: Season 4 (Warner).

Finally, this week’s Blu-Ray only slate includes perhaps the “man”-liest triple feature around, with new Blu-Rays of Children of Men (Universal), Cinderella Man (Universal), and Inside Man (Universal) hitting stores today. Also this week: Field of Dreams (Universal), Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves Extended Cut (Warner), Seabiscuit (Universal), Spy Game (Universal), and True Romance Unrated Cut (Warner).

In the words of Annette Hanshaw, “that’s all.”

The Best & Worst Get Rich Quick Schemes In Cinema History! (Part Six)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 22:30:00 GMT

LOCK, STOCK & TWO SMOKING BARRELS (1998) & SNATCH (2000)

The Guy Ritchie formula seems deceptively easy: mix several colorfully bemonikered, slang-slinging con men, lowlifes, and petty criminals with a couple of scary sociopaths, a handful of intersecting scams and a hundred thousand bullets and beat to a pulp. And yet, as deeply uneven films like Smoking Aces (and Ritchie’s own Revolver) have demonstrated, good-natured ultra-violence can be just as tricky to pull off as the doomed get-rich-quick schemes favored by the sub-genre’s hapless anti-heroes. First, there needs to be a good Maguffin, like the antique shotguns in Lock, Stock or Snatch’s 86-carat diamond. Next comes a solid rooting interest (like the indispensable Jason Statham) and a credibly scary criminal kingpin like P.H. Moriarty’s murderous pornographer “Hatchet” Harry Lonsdale or Alan Ford’s psychopathic pig enthusiast, Brick Top. From there it’s all about delaying the inevitable showdown with as many undercard bouts as possible between interesting supporting characters like Vinnie Jones’ relatively nice bad men Big Chris and Bullet Tooth Tony and various allies, enemies and enemies-turned-allies (and vice-versa) played by the likes of Goldie, Benicio Del Toro, Dennis Farina and Brad Pitt's memorably mumbling pikey brawler, Mickey O'Neil. The real trick, though, is taking the material just seriously enough to maintain dramatic tension, while never quite taking it seriously enough to require tortured method acting from, say, Jeremy Piven. (AO)

THE STING (1973)

While The Grifters made the life of a con artist look bleak and despairing, as fit the work of a born cynic like Jim Thompson, The Sting – a smash hit when it first appeared in 1973 – made it look like quite a dreamy little profession, all natty outfits and colorful slang and snappy patter with your partner, accompanied by the rollicking ragtime strains of Scott Joplin. Of course, no one ever accused George Roy Hill of going for realism in The Sting; what he was trying to do was recapture the dynamite charisma his leads, Robert Redford and Paul Newman, had shared in their previous outing, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Amazingly, he captured lightning in a bottle twice, and even if audiences had a hard time following the big-payoff swindle that Redford and Newman had planned against the sting’s intended target, Robert Shaw, they didn’t seem to care. It all looked like such a lark, who cared about the details? (LP)

MIDNIGHT COWBOY (1969)

Explaining his reasons for lighting out from his dishwasher's job in Texas, Joe Buck (Jon Voight) says that there's "a lot of rich women back there beggin' for it -- payin' for it, too. And the men are mostly tooty fruities!" Not long after arriving in the big city, Joe beds Sylvia Miles, which settles any doubts you might have had about how hard he's willing to dedicate himself to his craft. However, he ends up paying her, a sure sign that he may lack the management skills necessary to be successfully self-employed. Luckily, Ratso (Dustin Hoffman), the slimy, crippled greaseball with the tubercular cough takes him into his apartment in a condemned building and offers to pimp him to the best of his abilities. The film doubles as a snapshot of the Times Square New York of the pre-Giuliani cleanup era; anyone who sees it and still professes feelings of nostalgia for the good old days is seriously ill. (PN)

BOB LE FLAMBEUR (1956)

Jean-Pierre Melville was the high priest of French noir, and Bob le Flambeur was one of his crowning achievements, a heist film so expertly orchestrated that, along with the preceding The Asphalt Jungle, it helped set a template still employed half a century later. The set-up involves aging, dapper gambler and thief Bob (Roger Deuchesne), who’s so well-liked that he’s friends with the chief of police, and who – after finding himself down on his luck – endeavors to change his fortunes by recruiting a crew for a lucrative casino score. Bob’s day-to-day existence revolves around taking chances, meaning that his eventual decision to pull off one last robbery is simply an example of a man recognizing his inherent nature. If Bob remains true to himself until the end, so too does Melville, whose expressionistic direction magnificently set the stage for the forthcoming French New Wave. Dark, sumptuous shadows, stunning iris shots, and on-location cinematography breathe melancholic life into this portrait of the romantic allure of a big score, and of the inescapable hand of fate. (NS)

CHRISTMAS IN JULY (1940)

By the standards of Preston Sturges's later, wilder films, the dreams on display here are rather modest, but they manage to inspire an impressive amount of damage anyway. Dick Powell, at his most ingratiatingly sappy, is the luckless young striver who wants to secure a solid enough place for himself that he can marry his girl, Ellen Drew. Dick decides that his best chance is to win the $25,000 top prize for the Maxford House Coffee Slogan, a shot in the dark that becomes a major point of his masculine pride when Ellen casts doubt on his submission: "If you can't sleep, it's not the coffee, it's the bunk!" (She persists in not liking it even after he's explained it to her, which he does at some length.) In perhaps the most straightforward plotline Sturges ever conceived, pranksters trick Dick into believing that he's won, Dick somehow gets his hands on the money and plays Mr. Big Spender, his boss forces a promotion on him in recognition of his previously unsuspected genius for concocting advertising slogans, the truth is revealed, Dick is chastened, and then of course it turns out that he really did win the contest because nobody sent in anything better. (PN)

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

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

Screengrab Review: "Pride and Glory"

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 19:45:00 GMT

Gavin O'Connor's new film, Pride and Glory, has a plan: it's mapped out all the things it wants to remind you of. It clearly wants to echo the moral ambiguity of The Wire, the multigenerational sweep of The Godfather, the close-knit web of loyalty and betrayal of The Departed. But since it's O'Connor at the helm instead of the talented folks who brought you those stories, it conjures them in tone only, never in quality, and leaves you asking: haven't I seen this movie before -- like, a hundred times?.

If O'Connor started out with a script that wasn't particularly going anywhere, and if he wasn't especially going to bring anything to the table as the director, he at least gave us some actors with juice to play his family of often-shady New York police officers. Edward Norton, who isn't the world's most consistent performer but is occasionally capable of greatness, plays Ray Tierney, a conflicted hard-ass who is divided between fidelity to his insular cop clan and a desire to do the right thing no matter what. This sort of agonized moralist is a specialty of Nortons, but here he just seems sort of bored. Jon Voight, on the other hand, seems to be having a ball as the family's drunken father figure, and even though the vast majority of his dialogue are windy cliches, he livens up the flick every moment he's on screen. No such luck with Colin Farrell, toothy at the best of times and absolutely ludicrous here: as bad-boy brother-in-law Jimmy Egan, he might as well be twirling a Snidley Whiplash mustache and tying his wife (named, no kidding, Megan Egan) to a railroad track.

Pride and Glory tries for the kind of intensity conjured by movies like Serpico, Donnie Brasco, and Goodfellas, which is probably why all its highfalutin talk about honor and loyalty and devotion sound so familiar. But it's not a comfortable familiarity; it's a boring one. The movie never really picks up, even in its most action-packed scenes, because it has an unwarranted confidence in the dramatic potential of its plot, and an unjustified trust in the ability of its lead actors to deliver it. Farrell's goofy performance aside, there's not that much about it to actively dislike; but there's certainly not much to like, either. It's the cinematic equivalent of a Big Mac: overstuffed, not very good for you, and you've already tried it so many times that you don't even really taste it anymore.

Screengrab Review: W.

Special Election Year Report: Unfunny Conservatives Battle Racist Chihuahuas at the Box Office

Phil Nugent — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Jean-Luc Godard once said that Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 had surely done its part in getting George W. Bush re-elected. You may disagree, but if an investigating committee of impartial wise men were formed to rank every statement of a political nature that Godard has ever issued in descending order of just how deranged they sound, it's doubtful that the sneer at Moore would make the top hundred. (Maybe not the top five hundred.) Moore said back in 2004 that he hoped that his movie would have an effect on the election, and maybe it did. (How he though that he might inspire some effect that was hurtful to Bush by making a movie specifically designed to comfort those who already agreed with him one-hundred percent while confusing anyone on the fence and pissing off and galvanizing everyone on the other side is a question for a different investigating committee of impartial wise men.) To hear them tell it, David Zucker and the other conservative Hollywood players who worked on An American Carol would like to have an impact on this year's election but are having trouble breaking through that gosh-darn media filter. Zucker, who will probably always be best known, especially at the rate he's going, as part of the team that wrote Kentucky Fried Movie and went on to create Airplane! and the Police Squad/The Naked Gun franchise, has weighed in on political matters before. A few years ago, he produced and directed a series of political ads, including the one above, which chastises the Democrats for being too soft to dictators and terrorists, and the one below, which compares James Baker and the Iraq Study Group to Neville Chamberlain. Basically, the spots look a lot like what you might get if a smart new comedy troupe were to fantasize about what would result from one of the Airplane! guys got it into his head that he was a political satirist. Politically and historically, they're garbled all to hell--for instance, you might get the impression from the first one that Zucker thinks that the Clinton administration's negotiations with North Korea had resulted in Kim Jong Il developing his own nuclear weapons and the Bush administration's refusal to talk to that government had cowed them, instead of the other way around--but you do get to see an overweight Madeleine Albright impersonator in a bad dye job split her skirt. As the Drudge Report noted at the time in an exclusive report on a screening for political insiders, "One GOP strategist said 'jaws dropped when the ad was first viewed. "Nobody could believe Zucker thought any political organization could use this ad."

An American Carol stars Kevin Farley--Chris's brother--as a Michael Moore-like filmmaker who, after a setback with the failure of his latest cinematic diatribe Die, You American Pigs!, tries to regain his rad-lib street cred with a campaign to ban the Fourth of July. To set him straight, he is visited by a vision of John Kennedy and then by the ghosts of George Washington (Jon Voight), General George Patton (Kelsey Grammar--and if you were forced to pick out one role best associated with George C. Scott that could also be a good fit for Sideshow Bob, wouldn't this be the one to jump out at you?), and an angel of death, played by a typecast Trace Atkins. The all-star cast also includes Leslie Nielson, who Zucker must keep stashed in a safety deposit box between films, as well as James Woods, Dennis Hopper, Robert Davi, Paris Hilton, Kevin Sorbo, Gary Coleman, and Bill O'Reilly--as "himself", thank God. (Really, does anyone want to see Bill O'Reilly stretch himself as a performer?) Considering what's known about the movie, including its trailer and the stuff you just read here, it doesn't strike me as shocking that it didn't do well in its first weekend. Especially since the movie wasn't screened for critics, meaning that the first real reviews didn't start dribbling in until the day after it opened. This is a well-known sign of a stinker, one that moviegoers have learned to pick up on. It should be noted, though, that Zuvker has explained that in this case it was a protective measure, meant to shield the film from liberal critics who would never judge it fairly. (Full discolsure: This writer's politics are probably closer to Michael Moore's than to Jon Voight's. However, I once had to kill a blog that I had worked on for a over a year because of the flood of comments from people wishing me a slow, painful death after I wrote there that I had problems with Michael Moore's work and suspected that his farts do not smell like sweet honey. Also, though basic human sensitivity keeps me from describing my actual reaction to the news that Chris Farley had died, I can say that it was not anything like, "Oh, if only he has an equally unfunny, lookalike brother who can some day continue his mission on Earth!")

The filmmakers might have been expected to react to the collapse of their box office hopes in any number of ways. They might have re-thought the no-press-screenings rule, for instance, or maybe regretted not having asked Kevin Sorbo to do full frontal. Maybe even regretted not having asked Kelsey Grammar to do full frontal. (Dennis Hopper and Gary Coleman hardly need to be asked.) But instead, they have floated the notion that a kind of voter fraud is going on: At a page at the movie's slow-moving web site (was it designed by John McCain?) they wrote: "We have had heard from numerous people across the country that there has been some ticket fraud when buying a ticket for An American Carol this past weekend. Please check your ticket. If you were in fact one of those people that were "mistakenly" sold a ticket for another movie please fill out the form below. Hold on to your ticket so we can have proof. If you have noticed other irregularities with the theatres in your area please let us know in the comment section below. For instance, Rated R film rating (when in fact we are rated PG-13), posters not being up, not being listed on the marquee, image or focus problems, sound issues, etc. Please email us a picture of your ticket stub to fraud@americancarol.com.") The page has since been taken down, indicating either that liberal hackers are making mischief or the filmmakers' lawyers gave them a pep talk explaining such arcane concepts as "baseless charges", "talking out your ass", and "sue you back to the Stone Age." (Meanwhile right wingers on-line are keeping the spirit alive. Still you'd think that the director of BASEketball and My Boss's Daughter would be better equipped to shrug off failure; it's not as if he hasn't had some practice at it. Then again, maybe even Ed Wood would have trouble processing the information that his labor of love got its ass kicked by Beverly Hills Chihuahua. It can't help that a recent article in Slate tagged Beverly Hills Chihuahua as an implicitly conservative movie that uses racist images of Mexico and Hispanic dogs to, confusingly, peddle a message of tolerance, brotherhood, and hitting on the landscaper. Take it away, Lou Dobbs!

Trailer Review: An American Carol

Paul Clark — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 16:00:00 GMT

I’ve heard some conservatives speaking of “the humorless left,” but if this trailer tells me anything, it’s that humorlessness can be found on both sides of the aisle. How else to explain this laugh-free, broad-as-a-barndoor jeremiad against America-hating liberals, embodied here in the person of a Michael Moore surrogate played by Chris Farley’s little brother Kevin? Granted, Moore kind of brings this upon himself, but I think that’s part of the problem- Moore’s tactics have become pretty embarrassing even to those who agree with his politics, so not only is it all too easy to single him out as a symbol of left-wing America, but it’s fairly inaccurate as well. But then, cheap shots are this trailer’s stock in trade- liberals hate America and deserve to be repeatedly socked in the face on for ideological reasons, while only conservatives truly love and respect what this country stands for (could the Trace Atkins song in the trailer be any more on the nose?). All of which goes to show you that there are few things more depressing than an unfunny comedy, especially one populated by has-beens (Kelsey Grammer, no doubt trying to rustle up funds for his next misbegotten Broadway show), crackpots (Jon Voight), and all-around attention whores (Bill O’Reilly). And this guy directed The Naked Gun? How the mighty have fallen…

Hollywood Conservatives Face "New McCarthyism", Goblins, Unicorns

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 18:30:00 GMT

One of the favorite activities of the modern movement conservative is to claim that, since not every single aspect of the culture panders to him, he is being discriminated against. Having never actually experienced any actual discrimination -- unlike, say, black people -- the right-winger seems to believe that it is an oppression too heavy to be borne that he is sometimes made aware of things that he does not personally enjoy. Liberal arts classes in college taught by liberals? Discrimination against conservatives! Some people don't adhere to the tenents of the Southern Baptist Convention? Discrimination against conservatives! Young people listening to the rappity-hop music? Discrimination against conservatives!

This week has seen a big push in one of the favorite such complaints of the movement conservative: that, because of the preponderance of liberals in Hollywood, conservatives are being discriminated against in Hollywood. Jason Appuzzo, founder of the late, unlamented Libertas Film Festival, was one of the biggest purveyors of this ridiculous myth; Brent Bozell is another. But in the last ten days, we've seen an op-ed by Jon Voight in the right-wing Washington Times in which he blamed American liberals for the murder of millions by the Cambodian dictator Pol Pot, and claimed that "if, God forbid, we live to see Obama president, we will live through a socialist era that America has not seen before, and our country will be weakened in every way". The editorial was widely scoffed at, and conservative gadflies, who mistake being made fun of for being blackballed and having your entire career destroyed, immediately came crawling up from the cellar to complain about "establishment entertainment journalists expertly wielding the tools of the New McCarthyism". So says Andrew Breitbart (who, earlier this year, I heard peddle the absurd notion that Hollywood celebrities are afraid to say they support our troops in Iraq, lest they face censure at the hands of the liberal bosses). While conservatives almost universally react to liberal opinions on the part of entertainers with some variant of "shut up and sing" (witness the widespread hostility the Dixie Chicks faced a few years ago), let one of their own get laughed at for mouthing of some ill-conceived right-wing talking point, and we're witnessing the vile fascism of "a town that doesn't embrace free speech anymore". Breitbart's commenters are even worse, claiming that "the old McCarthyism was harmless compared to the new". (Those who wish to compare and contrast may note that Mr. Voight currently has three films in production, and starred in one of the most successful films of 2007, as opposed to, say, Dalton Trumbo, who spent a year in prison because of the blacklist, or Hanns Eisler, who was more or less forced to leave the country and ended up in the hands of the Soviet East Germans, or Alvah Bessie, who never worked in her chosen profession again, or Canada Lee, Bartley Crum and John Garfield, who all died because of the horrible after-effects of coming under McCarthyite scrutiny.)

Meanwhile, the Weekly Standard featured a cover story entitled "Hollywood Takes on the Left", in which David Zucker outlines his difficulties and frustrations in making An American Carol, his long-promised conservative comedy. Zucker, too, complains of a "new McCarthyism" in Hollywood, designed to keep Republicans out, and frets that "conservative films are almost illegal in Hollywood". Even if one ignores the fact that movie studios are owned and run by capitalist multimillionaires who are hardly hostile to the core principles of conservativism, this absurd sense of pseudo-oppression fails for one simple reason: audiences tend to like or dislike movies based on whether or not they're entertaining, not based on their ideological bias. (After all, as conservatives love to remind us, liberal anti-Iraq War films have been duds at the box office.) If Zucker's film fails, it won't be because of some mythical Hollywood liberal mafia; it will be because the movie is preachy instead of funny, and audiences don't like preachy.

Luckily, because of the freedom of speech people like them denied victims of the blacklist in the 1950s, Zucker, Breitbart, Voight, and their ilk are welcome to complain all they like about how terribly oppressed they are; that they actually do so is all the evidence you need of the moral bankruptcy of the modern conservative movement.

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: July 26-August 1, 2008

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 21:00:00 GMT

The weekend is here and you could probably find something to do outside, like go to the beach or the dog track, but we both know it’s way too hot out there. For your own safety, I implore you to stay home, crank up the air conditioner and relax with a fruity drink and the finest Screengrab posts of the week.

You know us, always finding diamonds in the dung, like the Top Ten Great Scenes From Not-So-Great Movies (Parts One, Two and Three)

We got up close and personal with Sean Connery and Melissa Leo, but kept a safe distance from Shigeo Tokuda, the Godzilla of geriatric porn.

We bucked the trends and chose to pay some attention to that arthouse curiosity The Dark Knight – including the top 10 reasons it isn’t as good as you think and the foolish editorials comparing Batman and Bush.

We wondered who was goofier – Jon Voight or George Lucas? Then we wondered why Tim Burton had to remake Planet of the Apes.

We looked back to Around the World in 80 Days and ahead to Body of Lies, W and the next Harry Potter.

We checked out the Venice Film Festival lineup (not to mention Anne Hathaway)

And some would say we nuked the fridge.

Jon Voight Warns America's Youth About Obama and the Coming Socialist Era

Phil Nugent — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Fresh from his battle with the East Coast media elitists, in the form of the cover of The New Yorker, Barack Obama finds himself targeted by liberal Hollywood and a onetime representative of the baby boom generation, in the form of beloved sixties relic Jon Voight. The fearless and batshit actor went after the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate in an editorial he wrote for the Moonie-funded newspaper The Washington Times. "We, as parents," writes the man now best known as Angelina Jolie's dad, "are well aware of the importance of our teachers who teach and program our children. We also know how important it is for our children to play with good-thinking children growing up. Sen. Barack Obama has grown up with the teaching of very angry, militant white and black people: the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Louis Farrakhan, William Ayers and Rev. Michael Pfleger. We cannot say we are not affected by teachers who are militant and angry. We know too well that we become like them, and Mr. Obama will run this country in their mindset." This kind of naive faith in the power of "teachers" to permanently shape the young minds to which they have gained access may be par for the course coming from the star of Conrack, but I'm not sure I really buy it. When I was a kid, there were of course adults around who did their best to "teach and program" me, and I probably show how little lasting impact they had on me every time I wake up in a city with paved roads and venture out into it while wearing shoes. But I digress. Voight, whose failure to be cast in the remake of The Manchurian Candidate is starting to look like one hell of a grievous oversight, opines that "The Democratic Party, in its quest for power, has managed a propaganda campaign with subliminal messages, creating a God-like figure in a man who falls short in every way. It seems to me that if Mr. Obama wins the presidential election, then Messrs. Farrakhan, Wright, Ayers and Pfleger will gain power for their need to demoralize this country and help create a socialist America."

"The Democrats," according to Voight, "have targeted young people, knowing how easy it is to bring forth whatever is needed to program their minds. I know this process well. I was caught up in the hysteria during the Vietnam era, which was brought about through Marxist propaganda underlying the so-called peace movement." At this point, the reader may begin to suspect that this whole op-ed is Voight's way of apologizing to his new, politically like-minded friends for having starred in, and won an Oscar for, Coming Home, a movie that reduced the Vietnam War to the message that a groovy windblown blond stud of a war protester--Voight's role--fucks better than an Army captain who believes in the war, even if the war protester is paraplegic. (And especially if the Army captain is played by Bruce Dern.) Voight, who was last seen sitting in the audience at the MTV Movie Awards applauding lustily at the news that his daughter had lost the trophy for Best Villain to Johnny Depp, also has some strong words for "Gen. Wesley Clark, who himself has shame upon him, having been relieved of his command, [and who] has done their bidding and become a lying fool in his need to demean a fellow soldier and a true hero." Voight, who himself has shame upon him, having starred in and co-written Lookin' to Get Out, believes that "If, God forbid, we live to see Mr. Obama president, we will live through a socialist era that America has not seen before, and our country will be weakened in every way." Obama will no doubt be counselled to ignore this double-barrelled assault on himself and those who taught and programmed him, but he may do so at his peril. Surely a man who, in this decade alone, has played both Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Howard Cosell is no ordinary celebrity crackpot.

In Other Blogs: 2008 Halftime Reports

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Your favorite Screengrab writers have chimed in with their favorites (or least favorites, as the case may be) from the first half of 2008, but it may not completely shock you to learn that we are not the only bloggers to do so. Over at Cinematical, Jeffrey M. Anderson explains why. “Here's one of my dirty little secrets: I love lists and I keep track of my year's ten best movies all year long. Most other critics hastily assemble their lists at the last second, which is partly why so many December movies dominate; critics can't remember what they've seen earlier in the year. My list shows that 2008 has had a pretty poor first half, but I do have some contenders for listhood. Two movies are currently competing for the top spot, though I need to see them both again to be sure. Hou Hsiao-hsien's Flight of the Red Balloon (6 screens) is one; it has a lovely, laid-back, observant quality and feels less severe than some of Hou's other recent films. But I haven't yet decided if the film is a comedy or a tragedy.”

Also at Cinematical, Scott Weinberg presents a month-by-month breakdown of his year at the movies. As always, January is the cruelest month. “Not many choices, really, but I'm an enthusiastic supporter of both Cloverfield and Teeth. I also enjoyed Cassandra's Dream a bit more than most folks seem to, but it's hardly among Woody Allen's best movies. Beyond that, January was as lame as ever. (Thanks for nothing: One Missed Call, First Sunday, Mad Money, Rambo, Untraceable, and the execrable Meet the Spartans.)”

A site that’s new to us, Gone Elsewhere, weighs in with an overlooked choice. “The best new release I’ve seen thus far is Jeff Nichols’ Shotgun Stories. The film stars Michael Shannon as the oldest of three adult brothers whose father abandoned them years ago and began a new family, with four sons. The two sets of half-brothers grew up as bitter rivals, and emotions come to a head after the father dies. Shannon may be the most creepily intense actor in movies today; see William Friedkin’s Bug if you don’t believe me. Among the more interesting insights the film has to offer is that most of the characters seem to know full well that their actions are irrational and unproductive, but their hatred is self-sustaining and out of their control.”

At Scanners, Jim Emerson writes about the ever-changing crimson shades of cinematic blood. “Before the late '70s, blood was generally (and, remember, these are generalizations -- there are certainly exceptions) bright red and opaque, like nail polish or latex paint. It was often compared to ketchup, which in many cases it was. Since then, our taste for blood runs darker, anywhere from ruby red to almost black…My favorite movie-blood story belongs to Martin Scorsese. The way he tells it, the MPAA freaked when they saw the bloodbath in Taxi Driver (1976) and was ready to slap it with an X rating for violence. They suggested he tone it down -- as in, tone down the red -- in order to get an R. So, Scorsese put the scene through some kind of chem wash or something that made the blood more brownish. In his view, it made the scene more sickening and disturbing, but he got his R rating.”

And finally, our List-o-Mania selection this week comes from Spoutblog, which brings us 5 Actors Who Shouldn’t Be Famous. I’m not entirely certain Josh Hartnett even qualifies as famous, but the most controversial choice is Jon Voight. Granted, the included clip of Karate Dog is a powerful indictment.

Related:
2008: Second Quarter Wrap-Up
Half Measures: Leonard Pierce's Favorites of the First Half of '08
Half Measures: Paul Clark's Favorites of the First Half of '08

The 12 Greatest Movies Based on TV Shows, Part II

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 08 May 2008 20:30:00 GMT

THE FUGITIVE (1993)

The Fugitive might not have been the first TV series remade for the big screen, but it was almost certainly the one that proved how bankable- and even respectable- such adaptations could be. The film took as its inspiration one of the most influential series of its day, a four-season cat-and-mouse story of an escaped, convicted killer out to clear his name. While The Fugitive remains true to the spirit of the series, director Andrew Davis and his screenwriters do so in a way that reconfigures the formula for the big screen, beginning with a famous, still-impressive bus crash. The film also benefits from placing nearly equal emphasis on the pursued Dr. Richard Kimble (Harrison Ford) as it does on pursuer, U.S. Marshal Samuel Gerrard (Tommy Lee Jones, who in a rare display of Academy affection for a genre performance won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar). The Fugitive also has a sense of place that’s rare for a big-budget thriller, utilizing Chicago so perfectly that the story becomes unimaginable in any other setting. But the best scenes in the film are the ones that remain truest to their television inspirations, specifically the near-miss suspense sequences in which Kimble barely manages to evade capture through a combination of luck and formidable intelligence. Of all the TV adaptations up to that time, it was The Fugitive that showed that films of this kind, when done right, could be much more than a simple grab for nostalgia-driven box office, and in doing so became more or less the standard by which big-budget TV-to-film translations are judged.

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE (1996)

Yes, really. A huge hit on its original release, Mission: Impossible was mostly dismissed by critics as a dopey Tom Cruise action movie, while being criticized by many viewers for having too much plot, not enough stuff blowing up. But a second look at the film reveals what a gripping suspense movie it really is, translating the formula of the TV series- gadgets, undercover missions, realistic masks, and the like- into the form of a summer tentpole release. Mission: Impossible contains at least three or four wonderfully tense scenes- the opening operation gone fatally wrong, the tête-à-tête at Prague’s Akvarium, that awesome Rififi-esque break-in at Langley- more than most Hollywood thrillers can claim. In addition, the film represents the most successful attempt by director Brian DePalma to fuse the silky-smooth cinema-saturated style of his most characteristic work with a big-budget blockbuster, and in the process becomes a surprisingly lean and satisfying thriller. If nothing else, Mission: Impossible deserves respect as the only film in the series to date that’s remained true to the team-centric nature of the show, with subsequent efforts becoming increasingly focused on Tom Cruise saving the world. Supporting players like Jon Voight, Vanessa Redgrave and Henry Czerny make such a strong impression here that it’s a shame that Cruise has become so intent on hogging the spotlight in later films in the franchise.

THE BLUES BROTHERS (1980)

Netflix, video stores and pay cable movie channels are littered with the toxic waste spew of that very special category of cinematic detritus: the SNL movie. Sure, the never-as-funny-as-it-should-be/ never-as-bad-as-its-rep Saturday Night Live has produced more than its share of legitimate comedy stars and second bananas over the years, from Chevy Chase and Bill Murray to Amy Poehler and Tina Fey. But one-dimensional SNL characters, barely tolerable in five minute doses, can be downright unbearable in full-length features (i.e., It’s Pat, A Night At the Roxbury, Coneheads, etc.). Wayne’s World is one notable exception, but to my way of thinking, The Blues Brothers is far and away the best of the SNL films (and, for the purposes of this list, one of my favorite TV-to-movie adaptations), transforming a recurring, ego-driven musical duo (whose routine and appeal I never really understood) into iconic figures in a John Landis/John Belushi/Dan Akroyd phantasmagoria that bends over backwards in its efforts to entertain: car crashes! cast-of-thousands musical numbers! more car crashes! Illinois Nazis! country and western! rhythm and blues! John Candy! Aretha Franklin! Carrie Fisher with a machine gun! (And did I mention the car crashes?) I mean, fuck! The endless, mind-boggling demolition-derby pile-up of police cars in the climactic car chase alone is worth the price of admission (take that, CGI!), but the musical numbers (by Franklin, Ray Charles, James Brown, Cab Calloway, John Lee Hooker, et. al.) are even better, and introduced me and countless other white people to a whole bunch of talented black people we’d never fully appreciated before. And if all that weren’t enough, The Blues Brothers is endlessly quotable (“We’re on a mission from God,” “Three orange whips,” etc.) and spawned a pretty damn tasty jambalaya at the late-lamented Cambridge House of Blues...and how many movies can you say that about? True, The Blues Brothers also spawned the execrable Blues Brothers 2000...but the original, indispensable 1980 version will forever stand as the Cadillac Ranch of movies, a bizarre, fascinating, coke-fueled white elephant at the crossroads of cracked genius and howling oblivion.

HEAD (1968)

It was 1968 and the studio chiefs were very confused. There was something called “youth culture” or “the counterculture” or whatever – you know, dirty smelly hippies who wanted to see weird shit at the movies! Hopelessly out of touch, these suits had to turn to the scruffy people for help. The kids seemed to like that TV show The Monkees, so Columbia Pictures hired the show’s producer Bob Rafelson, and he teamed with that really weird Jack Nicholson dude from the Corman pictures, and they smoked a bunch of weed and they came up with Head. Surreal, satirical, self-referential, psychedelic and pretty much plotless, the movie bore little resemblance to the kiddie show that spawned it and failed at the box office. In retrospect, it never had a chance; the heads wouldn’t be caught dead seeing a Monkees movie and the young fans of the show wouldn’t be able to make heads or tails of it. But there’s enough inspired weirdness, bizarre cameos (Annette Funicello, Frank Zappa, Victor Mature and Sonny Liston) and good music (notably the Michael Nesmith-composed “Circle Sky”) to make it a worthy cult object, if not a great movie.

THE NAKED GUN: FROM THE FILES OF POLICE SQUAD! (1988)

The Naked Gun has very little competition as the least likely TV-to-movie transition of all time. It’s derived from a series that only yours truly and four other people watched, one that lasted six episodes and went off the air six years before the movie reached theaters. But Police Squad! had a pedigree; the Airplane! team of Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker created it, star Leslie Nielsen was nominated for an Emmy for his deadpan turn as Lt. Frank Drebin, and the show became a cult favorite through reruns and home video. Even so, The Naked Gun was an unexpected smash hit, spawning two lousy sequels and an entire craptacular genre of Leslie Nielsen parodies. Don’t hold those sins against it, though. The Naked Gun is a well-oiled laugh machine – from the slapstick stylings of the always hilarious O.J. Simpson to the climactic baseball game honored in an earlier Screengrab list, it’s like a MAD magazine come to life, complete with blink-and-you’ll-miss-it marginalia crammed into every corner of the screen. It’s really the last time Nielsen was ever funny, and that goes triple for the ZAZ triumvirate, who have separately and together foisted the likes of Brain Donors, Rat Race and Scary Movie 4 on their once loyal fans.

TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME (1992)

The second and final season of Twin Peaks ended in a flurry of bizarre cliffhangers, so when rumors of a movie began to circulate, those few of us who were still watching shared a brief moment of hope that at least some resolution would be forthcoming. Then we heard that Fire Walk with Me would be a prequel covering the last seven days of Laura Palmer’s life and, well, so much for that idea. Presumably the reasoning was that a reboot of the story would draw in a larger audience than a continuation, or at least that’s how we imagine David Lynch explained it to the suits at New Line. It’s a safe bet that 99% of any potential new audience fled the theater within the movie’s first 30 minutes, set in a deliberately alienating bizarro Twin Peaks called Deer Meadow, where the cops are unfriendly, the waitresses are hags and the FBI is represented by Chris Isaak as a pale echo of Kyle MacLachlan’s Special Agent Dale Cooper. (MacLachlan makes only fleeting appearances in the movie, unaware that his career is Showgirls-bound.) But those who left early missed out on one of Lynch’s most intense and emotionally charged fever dreams. Stripped of the quirky humor that had soured into tiresome shtick long before the series ended, Fire Walk with Me unwraps Laura Palmer from her plastic for a one-of-a-kind descent into hell. Sheryl Lee burns through the screen in a shoulda-been star-making performance and Lynch cooks up some of his most indelible set pieces, most notably the subtitled “Pink Room” sequence set in what appears to be Satan’s roadhouse. Just don’t ask us about the David Bowie cameo.

- Paul Clark, Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak

READ PART I

The Rep Report (March 26 - April 2)

Phil Nugent — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 15:00:00 GMT

BERKELEY: "The Clash of '68" (March 27 - April 23) at Pacific Film Archives commemorates the fortieth anniversary of May 1968, a time of intense political unrest across the globe and, what seems even more remarkable now, a time when those tensions were reflected in a series of high-profile movies. In its efforts to convey the full range of "revolutionary" political cinema at the time, the programming mixes some especially choice examples (including Alain Tanner's 1975 comedy Jonah Who Will be 25 in the Year 2000, from a screenplay by John Berger; Bertolucci's Before the Revolution and Godard's La Chinoise; Costa-Gavras's torn-from-the-headlines thriller Z, which rewrote the rules on packaging political content in a commercial form; and Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers required viewing at the Pentagon for those trying to learn how to fight an insurgency, and its controversial follow-up, Queimada! (better known here as Burn!) starring Marlon Brando) with such obscurities and oddities as The Revolutionary (1970), an allegorical look at campus activism starring young Jon Voight as a fellow called "A." (Attention, Steve Ditko!) Especially notable: A Grin without a Cat, one of the documentarian Chris Marker's obsessive yet playful meditations on where the heck we've been and how we all ended up here. Show up twenty minutes ahead of screening time and listen to Pacifica Radio's "Revolution Rewind Moments", aural montages of high points from 1968 as captured by news radio microphones. (The program is presented in conjunction with the exhibit Protest in Paris 1968: Photographs by Serge Hambourg", at Berkeley Art Museum.)

Also at PFA: "Heinz Emigholz: Architecture as Autobiography" (April 1 - April 17) brings together five of the German filmmaker's "Photography and Beyond" documentaries, focusing on such architects as Louis Sullivan, Bruce Goff, and Rudolph Schindler. Emigholz will be in attendance at several of the screenings.

NEW YORK: Starting March 26, the Anthology Film Archives dusts off two of the early comedies of writer-director-star Albert Brooks. Like Woody Allen's earliest stuff, these movies are spotty, erratic, and not always so easy on the eyes, yet keep hitting wild streaks of comic inspiration that could have come from nobody else. Brooks's first film as a triple threat, the 1979 Real Life, in which he plays a documentarian who invades a "normal American family" household, was once a parody of the PBS series An American Family and now looks like a prescient vision of a time when it would seem as if nobody could walk to the bathroom without tripping over a camera cord. 1981's Modern Romance, about a malfunctioning love affair (between Brooks and Kathryn Harrold) that proves too dysfunctional to simply die, features a Qualuude-fueled routine by Brooks that's as funny as any five minutes of footage from the '80s.

Take Five: Cryptozoology

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Hollywood loves a good monster movie. The recent success of the risky Cloverfield is proof of the fact that audiences, too, will flock to a good creature feature even if the monster's main purpose is to ruin the first-date memories of outer-borough hipsters. Strangely enough, though, movie studios and filmgoers alike are a tad more diffident when it comes to monsters that have a slight possiblilty of being real. Vampires, zombies, wolfmen, and whatever the hell Gamera was supposed to be? Sure, we'll take whatever you got. But when was the last time you saw a bunch of lithe, promiscuous teenagers menaced by a bunyip? What was the last movie that featured a small town in the middle of nowhere being attacked by a rampaging Cornish Owl-Man? Paramount is hoping, with the Friday release of Fred Wolf's shaggy Sasquatch story Strange Wilderness, that audiences will evince an interest in Bigfoot unseen since the glory days of the Six Million Dollar Man. But as we'll see, the history of movies based on so-called "cryptids" — creatures or animals widely thought to be legends, but believed by some researchers to be real — is dismal enough that the studio has as much chance of actually uncovering the Loch Ness Monster than turning a profit off of this dud-in-the-offing.

NIGHT OF THE DEMON (1980)

An almost-forgotten, and rightfully so, horror cheapie from the dawn of the slasher era, Night of the Demon does for Bigfoot what Jason Voorhees did for big-screen murderers, or at least tries to. Big-screen Bigfeet are usually portrayed as either gentle giants or, at worst, misunderstood animals, but in this null-budget exploitation number, he's more like a bloodthirsty devil on a rampage, Freddy Kreuger without the stylish hat and sweater combo. The movie's Sasquatch romps all over the Pacific Northwest, terrorizing anthropology students, yanking the junk off of an unfortunate hillbilly, and having his wicked way with local farmer's daughters. The high, or low, point of the flick comes in a flashback sequence: the innocent young lady who found herself at the receiving end of unwelcome advances from Bigfoot decides, for some reason, to bear its offspring (birthing the child of a monstrous rape apparently being less shameful than an abortion), until her overbearing dad decides to force her to kill the Bigfoot baby! A hallucinatorily bad movie sure to be the final word in, as the poster copy put it, "cross-breedin' Bigfoot".

TWILIGHT ZONE: THE MOVIE (1983)

Despite the fact that multiple reports of gremlins, wing-monsters and foo fighters by American flyers in WWII were all almost certainly the result of ordinary mechanical failure, combat fatigue, or smuggling a bottle of Old Crow into the cockpit, the Army took them seriously enough to launch a legitimate investigation, and by the 1960s, the beasties were entrenched enough in popular culture to inspire a memorable episode of The Twilight Zone. When a movie adaptation rolled around some twenty years later, a remake of this episode was arguably its high point, thanks largely to a wildly over-the-top, and yet somehow perfectly suitable, lead performance by John Lithgow. (Amusingly enough, almost twenty years after that, William Shatner — who'd played the gremlin's victim in the original TV version — was paired up with Lithgow on his own show, 3rd Rock from the Sun, and the two baked hams overacted like there was no tomorrow in a sly inside gag about their shared past.) Nowadays, the movie is remembered largely for the disastrous accident that took the lives of several crew members, and given John Landis' rather contemptible behavior at a subsequent trial for negligence, it's surprising he didn't try to blame the helicopter crash on an invisible monster only he could see.

SPLASH (1984)

Yes, folks, there are those in the cryptozoological community — and apparently there is one — who believe that mermaids are really real, and not just the product of a dugong and a very lonely, very drunk sailor coming into contact with one another. It is to them and to you that we recommend a fresh viewing of this charming '80s comedy. It's long been an almost invisible part of the cultural landscape; few people even think about it these days. But Splash is in fact a very fine comedy of its day, not boisterous or insulting like the majority of Eighties comedies that reached its level of success. And it also functions quite well as a time capsule: it brings us a pre-iconic Tom Hanks, a pre-crazy-recluse Darryl Hannah, a pre-self-important Ron Howard, and a pre-death John Candy in one of his most appealing roles — all wrapped up in a genuinely funny, if slight, Bruce Jay Friedman screenplay. There's only five dugongs in captivity, but DVDs of Splash can be found anywhere.

ANACONDA (1997)

Despite an incredibly dismal record of investigations into various Nessies, Jersey Devils and Bigfeet, the cryptozoologists have been right exactly once: the giant squid. Long considered a myth, a dead Architeuthis washed up in New Zealand in the 1870s, and in 2004, scientists finally captured living speciments on film. Many believe that if the fringe biology crowd is going to score another stopped-clock victory, it will be with the discovery of gigantic specimens of the already huge constrictor snakes known as anaconda, and when that day comes, perhaps this movie will be viewed as eerily prophetic instead of an embarrassingly hokey, campy creature feature with a mind-blowingly unrealistic rubber snake as its villain. Anaconda isn't entirely unsalvageable; Jon Voight hams it up deliciously as a great white hunter, Ice Cube is entertaining in full-on Private Hudson mode as a doomed photographer, and there are many fine shots of Jennifer Lopez' structurally pleasing hiney. However, the script is an utter dud, the special effects look like they were done by a dull fifteen-year-old, and the plot makes The Mothman Prophecies look brilliant by comparison.

THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES (2002)

When the history of Richard Gere's movie career is written, it's unlikely that this will be one of its most glorious moments. It's hard to imagine a worse title than The Mothman Prophecies, and if the movie isn't quite as terrible as the title promises, it sure as hell ain't great, either. Supposedly based on true events, the flick is about as good as you might expect from a movie prefaced by such a claim; back in the 1970s, they used to make thousands of flicks like this loopy would-be chiller about a West Virginia town haunted by mysterious visions of the future and visitations by a rubbery, bug-winged extraterrestrial something-or-other, and they were all pretty bad, albeit in a different way. The Mothman Prophecies is plenty expensive as opposed to a cheap filmed-in-a-weekend exploitation flick, and it tries for a post-modern moody ambience instead of pure shock, but it's still pretty dire. There's a big, garish steel statue of the Mothman in the actual West Virginia town where the events of the movie allegedly took place; it's a safe bet that Gere's performance — alternately bored and confused — will ever be similarly immortalized.