The Screengrab : juno

Faking Farts with Olivia Thirlby

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 20:30:00 GMT

If you already have a crush on Olivia Thirlby based on her performances in Juno, The Wackness and/or Snow Angels – and of course you do – you may not want to read the new Papermag profile of the actress, which is specifically designed to instill or enhance such a crush whether you want it or not.

“With an urban sensibility that could only come from having grown up in New York City, Thirlby is the kind of girl that appeals to guys who might have a thing for Zooey Deschanel or a young Parker Posey (read: twenty-somethings who wear glasses, whether they need them or not),” writes Whitney Spaner, who obviously knows the Screengrab’s weaknesses all too well. But wait! She’s also “grounded and well-humored”! For example, Thirlby “has set her sights on playing Princess Fiona on Broadway in Shrek the Musical, if only to sing Fiona and Shrek's lovey-dovey song about, um, breaking wind, if you will. Fake fart noises are sort of Thirlby's M.O. "I saw it with my best friend, who's known me for years, and she grabbed my arm and said, 'Oh my god, it's you!' They were onstage farting for like a whole minute.”

But if a fondness for fake farting isn’t enough to sway your affections, how about the fact that she “operates on a strict monthly budget, depends on the subway and doesn't relish the idea of becoming so famous that she can't ride public transportation without being recognized. ‘I don't think it will ever get there,’ she says, genuinely hopeful. ‘Chris Noth rides the subway everyday, so if he can do it, I can do it.’” Obviously she has no idea which Screengrab personnel ride the New York subway.

Related:
Video of the Day: Ellen Page's Screen Test from "Juno"
Get Wacked!

Trailer Review: Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist

Paul Clark — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Dear Michael Cera,

I’m afraid your shtick might be starting to wear a little thin. It hurts me a little to say this, since I was a big fan of your work on Arrested Development, where you were responsible for some of the series’ most priceless moments. In addition, I thought you were exactly the sort of leading man that Superbad needed, your fumbly-kid style a perfect counterpart to the surrounding outrageousness. But midway through Juno, I began to wonder if you had anything else in your acting arsenal, and having watched a few episodes of Clark and Michael online didn’t put these thoughts to rest. Now, I’m not saying that it wasn’t a wise career move to act in Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, which wasn’t just directed by the promising Peter Sollett (Raising Victor Vargas) but also gives you a chance to play an honest-to-goodness romantic lead instead of being pulled thus way and that by Juno. But I’m not sure that starring in a movie that combines the raucous odyssey of Superbad and the outsider humor of Juno will give people a clue as to your acting versatility in the long term. I hope I’m wrong, Michael- Lord knows, if there’s anyone I want to succeed in Hollywood, it’s someone who seems like a well-adjusted, if somewhat neurotic, guy. But I fear you’re going to have to learn to spread your wings if you want your career to really take off.

All the best,
Paul

Video of the Day: Ellen Page's Screen Test from "Juno"

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 15:00:00 GMT

So, we don't know if you've heard of this Ellen Page kid. Rumor around the Screengrab water cooler is that she's gonna be big. We're talking Nancy McKeon big. Maybe even bigger! As you may recall, America's favorite wise-ass teenager starred in a little movie called Juno a few yoinks back:

As the clip indicates, Page — who already seemed preternaturally assured in front of the camera in the problematic Hard Candy — took to the role of Juno right from the jump, imbuing even script read-throughs with a great deal of maturity and poise. Will her performance in Smart People be as winning? Stay tuned, girl-geek fans...

The Jailbait Sweet 16 (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 22 May 2008 20:30:00 GMT

AMERICAN BEAUTY (1999)

This modern day take on Lolita, reviled by some, adored and Academy-Awarded by others, tells the story of Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey), a miserable hen-pecked middle-aged loser reinvigorated by a surge of life-altering lust for the sexually aggressive friend (Mena Suvari) of his mopey teenage daughter (Thora Birch). To attract Suvari’s character, Angela, Burnham starts working out, pumping up his body while channeling happy memories of his irresponsible, pot-smoking youth. Eventually, Burnham gets his wish to have sex with Angela...but, upon learning that the allegedly promiscuous girl is actually a virgin, he pulls back from the brink at the last moment, suddenly remembering that he is, in fact, an adult. And then he gets shot in the head...a nice, throwback moment to the old Hays Code days when moral transgression always led to a grisly end, cautioning the rest of us against stepping over the line. Yet transgression is part of the film’s DNA, and while I can appreciate the reasons why certain people hate this movie (the artifice, the middle-aged lust thing, the Spacey Smarm Quotient), I nevertheless enjoy the message of the smart Alan Ball script that we are not defined by our age, our possessions, or the way we’re perceived, and lying to ourselves about who we’d rather be instead of accepting who we really are leads to heartache, rage, bad relationships and, occasionally, bullets in the head. Like many dirty old men before him, Lester Burnham thinks he wants sex with a much younger woman, but what he really wants is to simply be much younger, with all of life’s possibilities ahead rather than fading away in the rearview mirror.

AMERICAN PIE (1999)

And speaking of fin de siècle movies with “American” in the title co-starring Mena Suvari...this raunchy-sweet comedy was a throwback to 1980s teen sex comedies like Fast Times At Ridgemont High, Risky Business, Porky’s, Screwballs, Losin’ It, The Last American Virgin, Zapped! and etc., etc. etc. Yet somehow, despite scenes of adolescent pie-fucking, discussions of inappropriate relations with a flute at teenage band camp, tons of high school sex and the deflowering of a pubescent boy by a predatory Mary Kay Letourneau-esque older woman, American Pie barely raised a flicker of controversy upon its release, possibly because it was simply too funny and ridiculous to get all het up about...but also perhaps because of the genuine affection writer/directors Chris and Paul Weitz had for their characters, male and female, as opposed to presenting them as figures of scorn and/or inflatable sex dolls (or just so much bloody meat, like the unfortunate young victims in any number of slasher flicks from Halloween to Hostel, where sex literally equals death). As the esteemed Mr. Pierce’s notes in an earlier post on Lolita, Nabokov’s book, for all the controversy surrounding it, was actually funny...and American Pie, a kind of classic in its own right, proves once again that sometimes the best way to deal with the scary issue of sex is simply to laugh.

FREEWAY (1996)

And then there’s the less funny side of sex: molestation, prostitution and violence against women, all of which is faced and overcome by a modern day So-Cal Red Riding Hood in this astonishing exploitation film by jailbait auteur Matthew Bright, whose fetish for pigtails and ponytails drove him to personally style the hair of his actresses...which must make him a creep, right? And yet, despite Bright's seemingly shady fascination with underage sexuality, this is one of the most empowering, ass-kicking girl power movies I’ve ever seen. Reese Witherspoon leaves this one off her resume, and yet her portrayal of the indomitable white trash warrior Vanessa Lutz is, hands-down, the single best performance of her career, promising a future of nitro-fueled intensity that (Tracy Flick aside) pretty much fizzled into perky romantic comedy fluff. Remember how cool Emilio Estevez was in Repo Man before he became...y’know, Emilio Estevez? Yeah, it’s kinda like that. The story pits Witherspoon’s illiterate, underage Lutz against a crack whore mother (Amanda Plummer), an abusive stepfather, the L.A.P.D. and, most notably, Kiefer Sutherland as the story’s Big Bad Wolf, Bob Wolverton (get it?), a leering bogeyman of a sexual predator. The escalating verbal and physical warfare between Lutz and Wolverton taps into something downright primal and possibly Freudian, as if Bright is investing all his forbidden love for the raw sexuality and electric vitality of youth into Lutz and all the self-loathing shame surrounding his secret, twisted obsessions into Wolverton, then letting the two duke it out in a steel-cage match. The result is the greatest B-movie John Waters never made, a loud, raucous, thriller with jaw-dropping stretches of pitch-black comedy and a truly startling cameo by the queen of Jailbait Cinema, the one and only Brooke Shields, who shows up (along with Mr. Bright’s even more peculiar sequel to Freeway) in part three of this list.

KIDS (1995)

In Kids, the first feature directed by the legendary photographer Larry Clark, a bunch of teenagers spend a day and a night wandering around New York City in the summer. They have sex, shoplift, beat the crap out of somebody, take drugs, and have an orgiastic party. There's no plot to speak of, but there is a suspense hook: Jennie (Chloe Sevigny) has just learned that she's contracted AIDS from the mushmouthed, seventeen-year-old lothario Telly (Leo Fitzpatrick), a serial deflowerer of girls who imagines that his sexual partners will always remember him if he's their first but who loses any interest in them after that, and she sets out to try to find him before he can rack up his next intended victim, Ruby (Rosario Dawson). (She is unsuccessful in this.) The whole movie is sunk so deep inside its obsessions with selfish teenage kicks that it gives the feeling that the screen could use a bath. When it first appeared, Kids was THE controversial indie film of its season, and it was defended by some moralists who argued that Clark and his twenty-two-year-old screenwriting partner Harmony Korine were obviously showing us these youngsters acting like animals--which is the closest thing they have to an interesting quality--as a "wake-up call" to parents. Please. Clark's subsequent films (Bully, Wassup Rockers), and for that matter the photo collections with which he'd made his name (Tulsa, Teenage Lust) have only served to confirm that Clark likes to film teenagers babbling incoherently, acting out nastily and fucking because he likes to watch teenagers babbling incoherently, acting out nastily and fucking; pointing a camera at it gives him an excuse to indulge in his hobby, which he is of course entitled to share with others who have similar interests. Those of us who used to get bored with such things after about three minutes even when we were teenagers need to look elsewhere.

HARD CANDY (2005)

At 21, Ellen Page sure is a hard-working gal. Juno may have made her a star when it opened late last year, but in recent months we've seen the arrival of three other movies in which she stars or has prominent roles (Smart People, The Tracey Fragments, and An American Crime, which played at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival but recently premiered on Showtime cable). In fact, the success of Juno was the explosion coming at the end of a long fuse set by the cult home video success of Hard Candy, a two-character drama that uses the then-teenaged actress's mixture of seductiveness and spikiness for all it's worth. She plays a 14-year-old who has struck up an Internet correspondence with an adult photographer (Patrick Wilson); when she meets him for the first time, she invites herself back to his place with the promise of hearing a Goldfrapp mp3 he boasts of having. Once they get back to his place, it turns out that she's springing a trap; taking him prisoner, she informs him that she knows that he's a pedophile who's involved in the murder of a girl, and she proceeds to torture him, threaten him with exposure and castration, and cajole him to do the right thing and commit suicide. It's to Page's considerable credit that, by turns enticing, alarming, and outright scary, she remains fascinating throughout, even though she can't make her character believable; she has a degree of infallible self-assurance that would be hard to buy in a SWAT team leader, let alone a 14-year-old girl playing cat and mouse with a psycho on his home turf. Her choicest moment of degradation for her prey may be when, having gotten him where she wants him, she casually reveals that she actually thinks Goldfrapp is pretty lame. Other movies (such as The Professional) know that the viewer's inner pedophile will be flattered by seeing a young girl insist that she wants the older man even if he has the nobility (and the box-office savvy) to not follow through; Hard Candy knows that, while castration threats are pretty bad, the best way to make the older man shrivel up is to let him know that, when he thought he was being cool and up to date, he was actually sounding like an old fart.

For more jailbait: Part One, Part Three

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

Diablo Cody Unwraps “Jennifer’s Body”

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 21 May 2008 15:30:00 GMT

If you listen closely, you can hear the sound of knives sharpening in anticipation of Diablo Cody’s screenwriting follow-up to Juno, the horror comedy Jennifer’s Body. A backlash is inevitable – really, it started almost simultaneously with the initial Juno hype, but it’s usually the sophomore effort that really takes it in the shins. If Cody is concerned, there’s not much evidence of it in the recent interviews she’s done to promote the film, which just wrapped shooting in Vancouver.

“I guess I was trying to think of something that was legitimately scary to me as opposed to a marketable horror idea,” Cody told The Province, which describes Jennifer’s Body as “another story about verbal teens -- bookish Needy (Amanda Seyfried) is horrified when a satanic rite turns best pal Jennifer (Megan Fox) into a ravenous man-killer.” Hey, we’ve already had a mumblecore horror movie, so why not one full of snappy, smart-alecky banter?

“All I could think of was girls -- teenaged women are terrifying,” says Cody. “They can be really frightening, really ruthless and irrational -- and evil. So I thought maybe I could literally make a teenaged girl a bogeyman in the classic sense.” Sounds a little Carrie to us, and indeed Cody makes that comparison herself in another interview with Fearnet, also citing The Virgin Suicides, Suspiria and Just One of the Guys, among others. “This is a horror movie--not to sound like a complete pretentious douche bag--but it is a horror movie made by filmmakers and made by people who genuinely care about film. [Director] Karyn [Kusama] was a total horror geek. I’m a horror geek. The producers are into this stuff. This was not a mercenary effort to make something that seemed like it was kind of profile. We wanted to make a horror movie, and we are extremely respectful of the great films that came before us. I think that people will see that in the finished product.”

Jennifer’s Body isn’t scheduled for release until next year. That should give us plenty of time to get these knives nice and sharp.

Trailer Review: Hancock

John Constantine — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 22:41:00 GMT

Superhero movies. Now that is novel! I kid, I kid. In light of the fact that filmed superhero fiction has more cultural currency today than it ever has (in both film and television), it’s interesting to observe the diversification of the genre over the past five years across movies like Sky High, parody trash like Epic Movie, and now Will Smith’s summer vehicle Hancock. In superheroes’ native soil of comics, the down and out, irascible hero who undergoes a change of heart on the road to destiny is old hat. But it’s a treat to see it get the big budget treatment. Watching Will Smith drunkenly bumble across the California skyline is entertaining even in this small dose so Hancock is looking promising as a two hour investment. It’s also nice to see Jason Bateman getting back to making people laugh after his skeevy turn in Juno. You guys remember that movie?

Revenge of the Nerds - The 10 Sexiest Guy Geeks In Cinema (Part Deux)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 20:30:00 GMT

5. Steve Carrell as Andy Stitzer in The 40 Year Old Virgin

The poster said (and showed) it all: the painfully earnest expression, the terrible haircut, the little kid shirt and, of course, the no sex. For 40 years. Long past the point when even the nerdiest of nerds have usually managed to score at least a mercy jump from some kind soul, Andy is still living in a lonely geek paradise of pop culture, complete with an incredibly bad-ass video game chair that may, in fact, be even better than sex. But, in his isolation, Andy has also developed a tender soul and some not unimpressive pectorals (beneath a thick pelt of manly chest hair) that, combined with the stealthy square-jawed good looks beneath all the silliness, is sheer catnip to Catherine Keener’s E-Bay entrepreneur (not to mention my wife and most of her friends).

4. Michael Cera as Evan in Superbad and Paulie Bleeker in Juno

My sources inform me that Michael Cera is more cute than hot, although his junk-accentuating yellow shorts in Juno and the fact that he manages to attract Ellen Page’s titular wise-ass are mitigating factors in the case of his performance as teenage Tic-Tac enthusiast Paulie Bleeker. Of course, the geek side of the equation is more obvious...neither Paulie nor Evan seem to be especially popular in their respective high schools, but they earn their spot on this list by personifying exactly the sort of unspoiled misfits who are just on the verge of coming into their own as confident young adults (i.e., a tasty morsel and/or excellent boyfriend material for perceptive partners like Juno and Martha MacIsaac's teen temptress Becca.)

3. Daniel Radcliffe as Harry Potter in all those damn Harry Potter movies

And speaking of manly transformation...to quote blondychik1 over on YouTube regarding a certain nude scene from a certain notorious West End revival of Equus: “When did Daniel grow into a MAN?!?!” Meanwhile, over at Hogwart’s, the Harry Potter Nation has been watching the slow cinematic transformation of their favorite wizard from bespectacled young misfit to post-pubescent master of his wand in a mounting hormonal frenzy that even Muggles can feel way down deep in their Bertie Botts.

2. Christopher Reeve as Clark Kent in Superman I-IV

Respect.

1. Tobey Maguire as Peter Parker in Spider-Man 1-3

My wife and my female friends think he’s hot. My gay friends think he’s hot. Mary Jane Watson (personified by smokin’ hot, soakin’ wet Kirsten Dunst) thinks he’s hot. But he’s not JUST hot...he’s also a smart, sweet romantic superhero who’s nice to his cloying, annoying Aunt May...hell, he’s even nice to frenemies like Harry Osborn who try to kill him...AND he can deliver a stack of pizzas to your door from just about anywhere in just over ten minutes. Ladies and gents, I think we have a winner...(but please be sure to let us know who we missed)!

Click here for part 1.

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

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

With Smart People, Ellen Page reprises her wise-ass, brainy-sexy persona from Juno, reaffirming her place as the current It Girl for a brand new generation of future I.T. professionals and I.T.T. graduates.

Lord knows I enjoyed the standard-issue sex dolls of my Gen X adolescence, from Catherine Bach’s Daisy Duke to Sylvia Kristel’s steamy French maid in Private Lessons (which my parents naively allowed me to go see all by myself because it co-starred that nice Dr. Johnny Fever from WKRP In Cincinnati).

But horny fantasies aside, I knew from the get-go I was far too much of a Starlog-reading, drama club-joining, Honor-Roll attaining nerd to ever wind up with the hot blondes or the Bond babe, and so it was always the relatable, approachable freaks and geeks of cinema that gave me hope. And while most of the actresses on the following list were actually gorgeous starlets in real life, it was reassuring to believe the following characters, at least, would maybe lend you their panties if you ever needed to win a bet for a dozen floppy disks. (And don't worry, we'll get to the GUY geeks next week...but suggestions are certainly welcome!)

10. MOLLY RINGWALD AS SAMANTHA BAKER IN SIXTEEN CANDLES

Sure, she wound up with the hunky popular guy at the end, but she WAS nice enough to lend Anthony Michael Hall’s Geek her underwear, and I was always hot for Ms. Ringwald, especially when I read in later interviews that she eventually grew up, fell hard for a French guy and became quite the sex enthusiast.

9. ALLY SHEEDY AS ALLISON REYNOLDS IN THE BREAKFAST CLUB

A pivotal character in my early development, who inspired a life-long love of freaky Goth girls but also broke my heart, dropping the knowledge on my adolescent ass that even the misfit girls would usually choose the Jocks over the Brains of the world if given half a chance. Traitor!

8. MEG TILLY AS CHLOE IN THE BIG CHILL

Sexy, exotic and a little odd-looking, Chloe made me want to be the kind of cool, smart rebel her soulful misfit would dig (a.k.a. William Hurt’s drug-dealing Vietnam vet Nick) as opposed to the gabby neurotic Jeff Goldblum-y type I actually was (and am).

7. HOLLY HUNTER AS JANE CRAIG IN BROADCAST NEWS

Friends still mock me for my obsession with Holly Hunter’s t.v. producer character, but Broadcast News was the movie to beat in 1987 for nailing the friends vs. lovers dilemma faced by supportive, dorky guys in love with female “friends” who think of them as brothers. The scene where Albert Brooks’ character finally tells off Jane, then dumps her from his life is still one of my all-time favorites, finally teaching me the best way to avoid “nice guy” syndrome with girls was not to be so goddamn nice all the time.

6. DAPHNE ZUNIGA AS ALISON BRADBURY IN THE SURE THING

This Gen-X version of It Happened One Night dramatized the other side of the friends vs. lovers dilemma: once you finally figure out how to attract girls, do you go for great sex or great conversation? With Alison Bradbury, John Cusack’s Walter Gibson found the perfect balance.

Click here for part 2!

DVD Digest for April 15, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 16:00:00 GMT

For those of you looking to spend this year's tax refund check on DVDs, this won't be a particularly good week for you. But there is at least one exception...

Had you going there, didn't I? My well-documented soft spot for Dr. Uwe Boll notwithstanding, the real gem this week is The Criterion Collection's release of Blast of Silence. Criterion has long been beloved for its top-notch DVD editions of canonical favorites, but just as important in my mind is their tendency to unearth forgotten treasures. Allen Baron's Blast of Silence definitely qualifies, a grim, gritty noir about a hitman carrying out an assignment during the Christmas season. In many ways, the film feels ahead of its time, with Lionel Stander's narration- delivered in the second person- translating wonderfully to our post-Tarantino age. Blast of Silence is ripe for rediscovery by a new generation, and this Criterion release should ensure it reaches the audience it deserves.

Of course, if it's something new you're looking for, there are a couple of those this week. For people looking for indie quirk, there's two different versions of the Oscar-nominated juggernaut Juno (Fox, also Blu-Ray), the two-disc special edition of which includes featurettes called Diablo Cody Is Totally Boss, Jason Reitman for Shizz, and Honest to Blog! Creating Juno. But if you've already gotten all the Juno you can handle, or you simply craving characters who don't talk in grating sound bites, there's also MGM's Lars and the Real Girl, which isn't perfect but which I preferred to its better-hyped counterpart.

In addition, this week also sees the release of Sidney Lumet's "comeback" vehicle Before the Devil Knows You're Dead. I wasn't nearly as big a fan of the film as Scott von Doviak was, but it's good to see Lumet still making films that are worth getting excited about.

And I would be remiss if I didn't at least mention the release of Dr. Boll's In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale (Fox). After catching this in theatres, I remarked to my friends that it was "not good, but kind of awesome," exactly the kind of movie that I would have enjoyed when I was ten years old and fantasy movies weren't as popular as they are now. If nothing else, it's more entertaining than this week's other think-at-your-own-peril new release, Aliens vs. Predator- Requiem (Fox, also Blu-Ray).

As for classics, there's not much outside of our DVD of the week. Fans of late, logy Lean films can get their fix with the release of the A Passage to India Collector's Edition (Sony, also Blu-Ray). Also of note is MGM's two-pack of Mannequin and Mannequin 2: On the Move, for those who are so inclined. And for TV fans, there's The Woody Woodpecker and Friends Classic Cartoon Collection: Volume 2 (Universal), MGM's Alien Nation: Ultimate Movie Collection (which is missing the original theatrical feature), and American Dad, Volume 3.

Finally, we arrive at the moment where I turn over the column to my friend and yours, Mr. David Huddleston. Not too many condolences this week, only Warner Brothers' HD-DVD release of Bonnie and Clyde. Still, Mr. Huddleston wishes that his condolences weren't necessary, and that the DVD companies would take the hint and get on the Blu-Ray bandwagon so he could make other, more enjoyable plans for his Tuesday mornings.

Indie Box-Office Roundup: Weekend of February 29-March 2

Paul Clark — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 15:00:00 GMT

As I predicted in last week's column, arthouse audiences turned out in droves to catch The Counterfeiters (Sony Pictures Classics), Stefan Ruzowitzky's recent Oscar-winner for Best Foreign-Language Film. Currently in its second week of release, The Counterfeiters tops this week's Indie Box-Office Roundup with in an average of $10,295 per screen in 18 venues, following a strong second-place finish in its opening weekend.

The weekend's top new release was Ramin Bahrani's Chop Shop (Koch Lorber), bringing in $8,745 on a single screen, followed by last week's champ, Jacques Rivette's The Duchess of Langeais, which kept on rockin' at $7,059 per screen after expanding its release to three locations. Rounding out the top five were (stop me if you've heard this before) Sony Pictures Classics' The Band's Visit and Focus Features' In Bruges, the latter expanding to 232 screens nationwide.

Also of note was the release of Chicago 10 (Roadside Attractions), the highest-ranking documentary of the weekend at #6. And let's not overlook the Oscar bump for Best Picture winner No Country for Old Men, which found its way back into the top 10 after a nearly three-month absence following an expansion to more than 2,000 screens. Take that, Juno! ¿Quien es mas macho?

Top 10, Weekend of February 29-March 2:
1. The Counterfeiters [Sony Pictures Classics] ($10,295 per screen)
2. Chop Shop [Koch Lorber Films] ($8,745)
3. The Duchess Of Langeais [IFC Films] ($7,059)
4. The Band's Visit [Sony Pictures Classics] ($4,553)
5. In Bruges [Focus Features] ($3,342)
6. Chicago 10 [Roadside Attractions] ($3,052)
7. The Unforeseen [Cinema Guild] ($2,496)
8. Caramel [Roadside Attractions] ($2,300)
9. The Year My Parents Went On Vacation [City Lights Pictures Releasing] ($2,121)
10. No Country For Old Men [Miramax] ($2,020)

Source: IndieWire.

Juno Prequel From Hell: Teenage Mother

John Constantine — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 22:49:00 GMT

Every now and again, I want to slap the internet. A good, stern, open-faced backhand right across the cheek of every last bit of code and piece of worthless, confounding information. It is a ghastly place filled with things that actually cause madness and stupidity and you can see the horrible effects it has on the minds of those who casually wander its halls on any message board or blog, including our little corner of the swamp. The internet causes you to see things like this…

But it also yields treasures so rich that you are forced into an awed, grateful silence. Case in point: Teenage Mother.

A mere ten years ago it would have been impossible for anyone to accidentally stumble upon this nugget of pop detritus. And yet here we are. There are three things made evident by this forty year-old trailer:

1) The sixties were insane.

2) Chicken wings are hot.

3) Quentin Tarantino must never find out it exists.

The Screengrab thanks Ectoplasmosis for these moments of unadulterated glory.

Juno's Diablo Cody Tries Her Hand at Acting... With Mixed Results

Peter Smith — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 21:55:00 GMT

She's been a stripper. She's been a blogger. She's been a pop-culture sensation. But Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody is... not much of an actress, judging by this clip from the web videocast series Chasing Windmills. Hit the jump to check it out.

Video here.

2008 Independent Spirits Award

Phil Nugent — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 18:30:00 GMT

The Independent Spirit Awards, designed as a counterpoint to the Academy Awards (and traditionally handed out the day before the Oscars ceremony) were distributed this past Saturday. It may say something about the current state of the movie industry that, at first glance, the list of nominees did not seem as glaringly different from the list of Oscar nominees as might have been expected, though if the two institutions tended to pick their nominees from basically the same talent pool, they tended to diverge in their selection of winners. Juno won for Best Picture, while its Oscar-garlanded screenwriter, Diablo Cody, took the prize for Best First Screenplay, and its star, Ellen Page, won for Best Actress. Philip Seymour Hoffman won the Best Actor prize for his work in The Savages, whose writer-director, Tamara Jenkins, won for Best Screenplay. Awards for Best Supporting Actor and Actress went to Chiwetel Ejiofor (for Talk to Me) and Cate Blanchett, who dedicated her award to her I'm Not There co-star, Heath Ledger. Rounding out the major categories were Julian Schnabel's award as Best Director for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (which was also honored for its cinematography, by Janusz Kaminski), John Carney's Once (winner for Best Foreign Film) and Scott Frank's The Lookout (Best First Film). The evening also marked the first appearance of a new award named in honor of the late, great Robert Altman, to honor the film that makes the most impressive use of its ensemble cast; it was given to Todd Haynes's I'm Not There. The movies got a little more independent, or at least a lot more obscure, a bit further down the list with John Eska's August Evening, winner of the John Cassavettes Award for best feature made for under $500,000. Among the hardcore independent filmmakers on hand, Eska did the best job of putting his place in the food chain, in relation to the Philip Seymour Hoffmans and the Cate Blanchetts, in pespective by taking the stage and saying that he wanted to thank his agent, the only problem being that he doesn't have one yet.

Paul Clark (Kinda) Liveblogs the Oscars

Paul Clark — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 21:30:00 GMT

Well, it's that time of year again, and unlike last year, I'll actually be posting here as the night goes on. While it's difficult to me to actually "live-blog" because my computer faces away from the television, I'll try to post something over every commercial break. Let's see how this goes. Hopefully I'll at least be more coherent than Harry Knowles usually is, but you never know.

4:30 PM- Just for the record, here's my complete list of predictions, so I won't be able to weasel my way out of them later and declare my predictive powers to be any more awesome than they actually are:

Best Picture: No Country for Old Men
Best Actor: Daniel Day-Lewis
Best Actress: Marion Cotillard
Best Supporting Actor: Javier Bardem
Best Supporting Actress: Tilda Swinton
Best Director: Joel and Ethan Coen
Best Original Screenplay: Juno
Best Adapted Screenplay: No Country for Old Men
Best Animated Feature: Ratatouille
Best Art Direction: There Will Be Blood (winner: Sweeney Todd)
Best Cinematography: There Will Be Blood
Best Costume Design: Atonement (winner: Elizabeth)
Best Documentary Feature: No End in Sight (winner: Taxi to the Dark Side)
Best Documentary Short Subject: Sari's Mother (winner: Freeheld)
Best Editing: The Bourne Ultimatum
Best Foreign Language Film: The Counterfeiters
Best Makeup: La Vie en Rose
Best Original Score: Atonement
Best Original Song: "Falling Slowly," Once
Best Animated Short: Peter and the Wolf
Best Live-Action Short: Tanghi Argentini (winner: The Mozart of Pickpockets)
Best Sound Editing: The Bourne Ultimatum
Best Sound Mixing: No Country for Old Men (winner: The Bourne Ultimatum)
Best Visual Effects: Transformers (winner: Golden Compass)

How will I fare? Stay tuned...

Preshow- Oh, great. Regis is hosting. Better than Joan and Melissa at least.

8:05- Cotillard is so hot. Just wanted to get that out there.

8:06- Host lady to Travolta: "You're not wearing a dress in honor of HAIRSPRAY." Come on, he's not Trey Parker.

8:08- Bardem: "seeking money AND revenge?" All right, did you SEE the movie?

8:10- How many times is Regis going to say "what's wrong with these people?"

8:13- Wow, Mickey Rooney's still alive, and more Yoda-like than ever.

8:13- JUNO: "the little movie that could." Way to go, Fox Searchlight marketing team.

8:23- Uh-oh, there's Hilary Swank. Nobody tell Nathaniel, OK? "People say you can play any kind of role." OK, WHAT? It's Hilary Swank, not Meryl Streep.

8:27- Remember this for next year, ABC- fewer random stars, more Bill Conti.

8:29- XAVIER Bardem? Come on, Regis, you've had time to practice your pronunciations.

8:30- FYI, I'll be boldfacing all the predictions I get right, in case you're keeping score at home.

8:33- Maybe they should hire Arnold to transport the Oscars every year. Would've saved them a big headache back in 2000.

8:34- Jack's next to Javier Bardem. Mothers, lock up your daughters...

8:36- "Oscar-nominated psychopathic killer movies." Wow, a Dorothy Hamill reference. You definitely don't get this from Whoopi.

8:38- NORBIT- "too often the Academy ignores movies that aren't good." OK, Oscar director, where's the Rick Baker cutaway shot? That's just sloppy, buds.

8:40- A stripper named Olympia Dukakis- forget Chigurh and Plainview, that's the most disturbing image we'll get tonight.

8:42- Spike Lee likes the black President joke. You're doing well, Jon.

8:44- Costume Design- I miss the models they had last year. Much better than the diagrams. Gah... ELIZABETH? Lots of costumes, but to what end? At least she kept it short.

8:51- Some of those production numbers are frightening, but none so much as accompanying the montage with Celine Dion. Classy wrap-up with Chaplin though.

8:53- Carell/Hathaway- must we really play the GET SMART theme? Hathaway's pretty smoking though. And Carell's clueless schtick still works. Yes... first correct prediction of the night. Go RATATOUILLE. Fun story too- Brad Bird is so cool.

8:57- Cutting from Heigl to Keri Russell? Is this a pregnancy-movie-themed edit? Yeesh. Also, settle down Heigl. But hey, LA VIE EN ROSE won. Go me. At least it wasn't frickin' NORBIT.

9:01- First song nominee- "Happy Working Song", quite possibly the first Oscar-nominated song with the lyric about scrubbing a toilet. Adams is a charmer, but did we really need to nominate 5 songs this year? 3 ENCHANTED songs seems like a lot of padding in my opinion. At least there's no production number behind her.

9:09- Stop trying so hard to be funny, Rock Dwayne. Yikes... THE GOLDEN COMPASS? Granted, it's the least terrible of the five movies, but the effects weren't all that stellar, except of course for the polar bear ripping the other polar bear's jaw off. That was awesome.

9:12- That's two bum predictions in a row for me. SWEENEY TODD sort of deserves it too though, so I won't complain.

9:14- Yes, Cate's awesome. But why not mention her cameo in HOT FUZZ?

9:17- Much as I love Casey Affleck's performance, this is the wrong category for him... Bardem- what other scene would they have picked? Hoffman, likewise... wow, that's a lot of applause for Holbrook. Could an upset happen? Nope, guess not. Also, I'm guessing Wilkinson will have an Oscar within the next decade. Nice quick speech, Bardem. Too bad most native English-speaking winners can't keep it that brief.

9:24- At least wasting our time with fake montages is more entertaining than wasting our time with real montages. Also, Pee Wee!

9:26- Holy crap, who's responsible for such prosaic and literal-minded lyrics? The little girl's good though, even if she does sound like she's auditioning for Teenage Idol. Still, this better not beat "Falling Slowly".

9:30- Sweet, it's Owen Wilson. He could use some more practice reading the TelePrompter though. Ick... THE MOZART OF PICKPOCKETS won. Probably the least of the nominees, at least in my estimation.

9:32- Wait, BEE MOVIE? Couldn't they afford RATATOUILLE? The bees montage was pretty amusing though. Go MADAME TUTLI-PUTLI! OK, PETER AND THE WOLF wins. I predicted this, but that doesn't mean I'm happy about it.

9:36- Alan Arkin rules. Nice little speech there- don't know if he wrote it, but he made it his own. Hope you were watching folks, you've just watched Ruby Dee's entire performance in AMERICAN GANGSTER. And wow, it must've been tough to find a non-foulmouthed scene for Amy Ryan. Yesssssssss... Tilda wins. Righteous. She's so cool. Much better speeches this year all around, I'd say.

9:45- "The always fantastic Jessica Alba." Unless she's trying to act, that is. At least she's only presenting the Sci-Tech awards, fitting since I'm not entirely convinced she's not a special effects creation herself.

9:47- Brolin, you were robbed bud. At least you got a Muriel Award this year. Pretty obviously, it goes to the Coens. We'll be seeing plenty of them tonight, methinks. "We've only adapted Homer and Cormac McCarthy." Nice.

9:50- Hey, there's Sid Ganis. Time to get myself a drink. Wait, MICHAEL BAY's in the Academy? That explains so much.

9:53- This was a pretty fun production number in the movie, but it's really not that great a song. Chenoweth actually sounds quite a bit like Amy Adams, although she's a more polished singer to be sure. All these dancers look kind of dumb outside the context of the movie, I gotta say.

10:02- Angelina Jolie baby jokes never get old. Right? RIGHT???

10:03- Seth Rogen and Jonah Hill- awesome. Way to liven up the Sound Editing category. I'm calling BOURNE for this one, but who knows? Damn, I got it. How about that? And see, these are the people who should be getting flustered, not the professional actors.

10:06- Oh sweet, "Halle" and "Dame Judi" are doing the Sound Mixing category too. I'm guessing this'll be NO COUNTRY, although maybe Kevin O'Connell might get finally get his for TRANSFORMERS. Nope, this one's BOURNE too. Cool, I guess. And nice shirt, buddy.

10:10- Wait, Best Actress already? Go Carice Van Houten! Oh, never mind. Whitaker's gotten much better at public speaking since last year. Look at Cate cringe- she knows how terrible the movie is. But it's not like she'd say no. Christie, always classy. And you know what would be awesome? If they could use a Cotillard clip where we hear her real voice for more than a second. Wow, Cate was pretty happy about Cotillard winning. And since I predicted her, so am I. I mean, just look at her up there- she's glowing. Only question is whether an American can take home Best Actor, since otherwise the foreign actors are sweeping.

10:19- This commercial lead-in was brought to you by Wii.

10:20- Farrell presents "Falling Slowly." Because, you see, he's Irish, and the movie's Irish, so why not? Sounds good though. Also, nice music shop motif in the background with the guitars and all. At least there aren't any slow-motion dancers. But why the orchestra?

10:24- Come on Jack, try a little harder to sell what's been written for you. You're an actor, right?

10:26- Best Picture montage- yikes, some of these HURT. I won't even say which ones, you know the ones you hate.

10:29- Best Editing. I bet BOURNE, but I'm hoping for NO COUNTRY, just to see what'll happen. Alas, Roderick Jaynes' Oscar will have to wait.

10:32- Nice jab at IMDb, Jon. And holy NECKLACE, Nicole! Cool montage for Robert Boyle- pretty impressive filmography, I gotta say, and looking darn good for 98. I hadn't even heard who had gotten the honorary award, but now that I know I must say they've made a fine choice.

10:43- Holy crap, I forgot Andrzej Wajda's new film was up for Best Foreign-Language Film. And of course the WWII movie wins. Yeesh, that was easy.

10:47- Oh Jesus, THIS song? Boooooooooo-ring. Didn't they have a "Blame Canada"-style spoof song they could've nominated? It would've livened things up, that's for sure. And they say this guy's name is John McLaughlin? I was sort of hoping it'd be the dude from The McLaughlin Group instead of yet another sensitive, blandly hunky singer. If this song beats "Falling Slowly" I'm throwing my shoes at my television. So if the liveblogging stops abruptly, you'll know why.

10:50- This is one of your favorite categories, Travolta? Funny, it's one of my least favorites, since they usually pick sentimental junk. Naturally, I will except "It's Hard Out Here For a Pimp." WHEW, thank GOD. I was afraid I'd have to use my next Screengrab paycheck to replace my TV.

10:57- A propos of absolutely nothing- I like Stewart well enough, but am I the only one who'd welcome an Oscar ceremony hosted by "Halle" and "Dame Judi"?

10:58- Wow, Stewart just invited Marketa Irglova back to finish her speech. Extremely classy of him. I sort of take back what I just said about Halle and Dame Judi.

11:00- OK Cameron, have you seen SUNRISE? Doesn't sound like it. Almost all these cinematography nominations are awesome- THERE WILL BE BLOOD takes it. Sorry Deakins. And way to recognize everybody else.

11:03- "Two time Academy Award nominee Hilary Swank"- somewhere, Annette Bening cringes.

11:07- Why can't they put the necrology in chronological order by the dates they passed away? By saving the "biggest name" for last, it's like they're making a value judgment on whose death is most notable. For example, I like Heath Ledger, but how is career more worthy of remembrance than Ousmane Sembene? Just a thought.

11:10- This category sucks without THERE WILL BE BLOOD. Predicting ATONEMENT, rooting for RATATOUILLE. And ATONEMENT it is. Wow, I'm actually doing pretty darn well tonight.

11:13- See, we can't bring the soldiers home, or they'd have to come up with a different gimmicky Oscar presentation. The winner is... FREEHELD, about homosexual soldiers. Had I known that I would've predicted that instead of going with the cutest-sounding name.

11:17- I've only seen two of these- SICKO and NO END IN SIGHT. NO END IN SIGHT is the better of the two, but LAKE OF FIRE blows them both away. So does THE KING OF KONG, for that matter. Of course, can you imagine the documentary branch honoring a movie about video games? Well, looks like I'm wrong here too- TAXI TO THE DARK SIDE takes the award.

11:25- Harrison Ford walks onstage to Indiana Jones theme- too obvious? WAKE UP, HARRISON! Wait, think he's drunk? Please MICHAEL CLAYTON... Please MICHAEL CLAYTON... nope, JUNO. Well, that's a point for me in the Oscar contest anyway. Grumble grumble... also, that tattoo is super-classy. I bet Tom Hanks has one just like it.

11:32- Helen Mirren just said "cojones"- she's awesome. Awesome pick for the Day-Lewis clip- powerful and bravura but not the "milkshake" bit everyone knows by heart. Who's that with Viggo? And of course Day-Lewis wins. What else is there to say but "DRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAINAGE"!!!!!!!!! "The handsomest bludgeon in town"- well put, man. I wonder what he'll be doing next?

11:44- What if the Coens DIDN'T win??? Guess we'll never find out. Whew... I could listen to the Coen brothers talk all day. Some part of me wants to see "Henry Kissinger: Man on the Go" included on the NO COUNTRY DVD.

11:46- Should be NO COUNTRY. Would be awesome if it was THERE WILL BE BLOOD as well, but I doubt it. As I suspected... NO COUNTRY it is. Now we get more of the Coens onstage, which is fine by me. And hey, it's not even midnight yet! Rudin: "with the opportunity for making movies comes the responsibility of making them good." Someone please relay this message to Joel Schumacher.

Well, everything turned out more or less as expected- a solid Oscar ceremony for a year when the very possibility of a ceremony was long in doubt. Good job keeping it moving along, while still finding time to bring back Marketa Irglova, a truly gracious move by Stewart and probably the highlight of the night for me.

No big surprises, but also no bad surprises, and I'll take that. Looks like I got 17 out of 24 categories right. Hope you did as well or better, unless of course you're in the same Oscar pool I'm in this year.

Hope you've enjoyed reading. Sorry I wasn't funnier. Good night.

Screengrab Review: Charlie Bartlett

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

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

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

Screengrab Bets the Oscars: Phil's Picks

Phil Nugent — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Let's make sure we're on the same page on this: if you bet money, household chores, or bragging rights on anything you're about to read in this post, you are out of your mind, and while I pity you, I will not admit in a court of law to ever having met you. I got off the Oscar train when I was eight years old and Sissy Spacek didn't win for Carrie; to have continued our relationship beyond that point would have been madness, madness! I claim no inside knowledge or deep understanding of how they decide these things, and the only thing I could tell you about the winners of recent years is that Jennifer Hudson won last year for Dreamgirls. (How do I know this? I was talking to someone on the phone when it was announced, and the woman I was talking to happened to have her TV set on. When Hudson's name was called out, the woman screamed. It turned out that it was a joyous scream, but until she calmed down enough to tell me what the hell was going on, my best guess was that she had just noticed that her couch was on fire.) Anyway, the only thing more completely charmless than the Oscars may be the ugly spectacle of a writer bragging about how little he cares about what he's paid to weigh in on, so now that we've just established that my opinion in this area counts for about as much as hair styling tips from Paul Wolfowitz, here goes:

BEST SCREENPLAY:

Diablo Cody takes Best Original for Juno because the voters have actually heard her name — it's not like, having come across it once, you can get it out of your head without laser surgery — and Paul Thomas Anderson takes it for Best Adaptation for There Will Be Blood, because that's what you get when you make a great movie but you aren't going to get Best Picture and the Best Director prize already taken.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS:

Apparently this is going to go to Cate Blanchett for I'm Not There, partly because Blanchett is also nominated for a Best Actress award that she is not getting to get and nominating her twice in one year without giving her anything would just seem silly. A good and sound bit of reasoning, and so I will of course reject it. And not only because I don't get the universally accepted logic by which this is agreed to be a "supporting" performance. Who the hell is she supposed to be supporting? The term ought to mean something other than "Big name actor in a role that is frequently off-screen." She's definitely the unquestioned star of her section of the movie, and while I didn't put a stop watch on it, I'll bet that she has as much screen time as any of the other Dylans. And if it turns out that Richard Gere, say, has a little more actual screen time, I'm not sure that the editor did him a favor by it. Until persuaded otherwise, I shall remain convinced that Blanchett's placement in this category is part of some conspiracy to screw over Amy Ryan, who wouldn't win anyway, because you only win an Oscar for playing a character as skanky as her Gone Baby Gone character if the Academy has already seen you in a bunch of glamour-puss roles and so knew for sure that you were acting. It's a moot point anyway, because I boldly predict that the winner will be Ruby Dee, because she has had a long and distinguished career, because she is 83 years old, because her late husband, Ossie Davis, is much missed, and because even though she didn't have much of a role in American Gangster, she did get to slap Denzel Washington, and he needed slapping.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR:

Hal Holbrook has had a long and distinguished career and is now the same age as Ruby Dee, so if she doesn't win in her category, his chances automatically go up by 50%. But I really don't see it happening. Philip Seymour Hoffman gives the best performance in this category — he's a stone hoot in Charlie Wilson's War, which marks a rare example of an actor giving the Academy three different performances to select for nomination and the Academy choosing the right one. I'd think he had a real chance if it weren't for the fact that he already won not too long ago for Best Actor for Capote, which makes Javier Bardem the needier candidate. Bardem's trigger-happy, unstoppable psycho in a much-discussed hairstyle gave audiences all the fun of watching a Batman villain ply his trade, but it's in an officially certified, critically approved serious film with a literary pedigree, and for this he will be the recipient of much gratitude from voters whose wives dragged them to Atonement. He's already won more than a few awards for this performance, and he'll be throwing one more on the pile.

BEST ACTRESS:

Julie Christie in a lock. Next?

BEST ACTOR:

The conventional wisdom seems to be that this one belongs to Daniel Day-Lewis for There Will Be Blood. I think that George Clooney has a shot for Michael Clayton, which is the kind of hard-hitting, tough-minded, yet still glamorous-looking movie that Hollywood wishes and expects America to take to its bosom. (Clooney looks worn-down and dissipated in it, and a gorgeous-looking man looking as much like hell as he can is the most glamorous thing in the world.) Some would argue that Clooney himself gave the award to Day-Lewis at a recent Newsweek-sponsored gathering where he serenaded his shy British colleague by saying that all actors "bow low to this motherfucker." Indeed, the whole of the media has been going wild these last couple of months about Day-Lewis's position as the great screen actor of our time. I do not disagree. But I happen to be one of those suspicious types who, when I hear conservative pundits on Fox News go on and on about how fearsome a candidate Barack Obama would be against a Republican challenger in November, and how they think that any Republican would just chew Hillary Clinton up and spit her out, I can't help thinking, Okay, would they say that out loud if they really believed it? Hasn't anyone ever heard the one about wanting to be thrown in the brier patch? So, on this baseless idiot notion, I have just decided the media have been building Day-Lewis up in preparation for the shocking upset to come when Clooney takes the prize. Remember, you read it here first! Unless I'm wrong, in which case you can just forget that I said anything.

BEST DIRECTOR:

The Coens, for No Country for Old Men, in a bigger lock than Julie Christie.

BEST PICTURE:

The big pictures here are obviously No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood, and I think they're going to cancel each other out. Both are impressive, violent movies that actually alienate as many potential voters as they attract. For the same reasons that I think George Clooney is an attractive candidate for Best Actor, his movie, Michael Clayton, has the smell of a loser to it. So the contrarian, can't-we-all-just-get-alone vote will go to putting either Juno or Atonement over the top. After it won at the Golden Globes, I thought that Atonement, with its period romance and literary prestige, was a shoo-in, but since then I have shifted over to favoring Juno, partly because I got bored with my previous position, partly because Juno is this year's Little Miss Sunshine, and Little Miss Sunshine lost last year. That means that the partisans of indie-flavored whimsy will be harder-driving this year. Also, it came out later in the year than Little Miss Sunshine, and is lucky in its timing: I calculate that the backlash against the backlash against Juno is now on a rising wave and will crest in time for the awards Sunday. It will flatten out the next morning and the papers will be full of "What were we thinking" pieces for the next two weeks.

Indie Box-Office Roundup: Weekend of February 15-17, 2008

Paul Clark — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 00:17:00 GMT

Continuing its strong appeal to arthouse audiences, Eran Kolirin's The Band's Visit has moved up to #1 atop this week's Indie Box-Office Roundup. The Israeli comedy, released in the US by Sony Pictures Classics, managed an impressive per-screen average of $11,267, up from $9,642 last week. At a time when the big Hollywood releases are opening big and falling fast, it's good to see a movie that really catches on with audiences like this. A movie like The Band's Visit may never pull in Cloverfield grosses, but in its limited release it should have more staying power than most would-be blockbusters.

Also maintaining a strong showing over President's Day Weekend was last week's chart-topper, Focus Features' In Bruges, now at #2 with a $10,420 per-screen average in its second week of release. Martin McDonough's film is still expanding its release, so expect the averages to dip somewhat in the following weeks.

The weekend's top premiere was George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead, the inaugural release from Weinstein Company offshoot Third Rail Releasing. Romero's film, his fifth Dead movie to date, garnered a solid $6,549 per screen, and will expand to 10 more markets for the weekend of February 29.

Rounding out the top 5 were Cao Hamburger's The Year My Parents Went on Vacation (City Lights) and the self-distributed David and Layla. Also of note was Magnolia's program of 2007 Oscar-nominated Short Films, which finished #9 on the list. However, I find their figures more than a bit dubious, considering I had to pay separate admissions for the Animated and Live-Action programs.

Finally, Juno-watch! The movie that Roger Ebert called "his true love" finished just outside the top 10 this week, raking in $2,993 per screen, finishing ahead of last week's top wide-ish release, There Will Be Blood. Next week could see a bump in a number of current limited releases, depending on how the Oscars pan out. So hopefully we'll get a nice surge for PT Anderson, not so much for Diablo Cody and Ivan Reitman's kid.

Top 10, Weekend of February 15-17:
1. The Band's Visit [Sony Pictures Classics] ($11,267 per screen)
2. In Bruges [Focus Features] ($10,420 per screen)
3. George A. Romero's Diary Of The Dead [Third Rail Releasing] ($6,549 per screen)
4. The Year My Parents Went On Vacation [City Lights Pictures Releasing] ($5,430 per screen)
5. David & Layla [David & Layla, LLC] ($5,007 per screen)
6. 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days [IFC First Take] ($4,808 per screen)
7. How To Cook Your Life [Roadside Attractions] ($3,704 per screen)
8. The Business of Being Born [International Film Circuit] ($3,608 per screen)
9. 2007 Academy Award Nominated Short Films [Magnolia Pictures] ($3,605 per screen)
10. Caramel [Roadside Attractions] ($3,360 per screen)

Source: IndieWire.

Screengrab Bets the Oscars: Paul's Picks

Paul Clark — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 17:00:00 GMT

All right, Screengrab regulars. You've no doubt taken a gander at the Oscar predictions from Leonard Pierce and Scott Von Doviak, which if nothing else have demonstrated that Screengrab's sense of humor remains intact. Now have a gander at — well, I was going to say the REAL predictions, but since you've already seen my nomination predictions, I can't in good conscience make such a grandiose claim. But Leonard has sent out a call, and I have no choice but to answer it.

Here goes nothing. . .

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Amy Ryan has been racking up critics' awards, but I think Hollywood insiders could be turned off by her unpleasant character. Saoirse Ronan might have had a shot with a bigger Atonement groundswell, but I don't see it happening now. Ruby Dee, SAG Award or no, should be happy just to be nominated. This brings us to Cate Blanchett as not-quite-Dylan, and Tilda Swinton in Michael Clayton. This is Blanchett's to lose. . . or would be had she not won just three years ago. The performance — more than a stunt — is might impressive, but I think Swinton sneaks in for the upset here.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: Bardem's still the one to beat here, friend-o. If anyone beats him, it'll be Grand Old Actor Hal Holbrook, although his chances would've been better had Into the Wild gotten a Best Picture nomination.

BEST ACTRESS: Leonard and Scott are all about Christie, but I think this is a closer race than they're predicting. Juno lives and dies by Ellen Page's performance, but the voters might find her too young to get behind. I'm going out on a limb and predicting Marion Cotillard as Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose, though any of these three could take home the Oscar.

BEST ACTOR: You know, had Sweeney Todd made any money at the box office, this could have been Johnny Depp's year. But as it is, Daniel Day-Lewis is untouchable, and anyone who denies it is a bastard from a basket.

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY: Much as I'd love to see a Ratatouille upset, this race comes down the Hollywood veteran vs. the feisty newcomer. Good as the Michael Clayton screenplay is, this award almost always goes to the most show-offy screenplay, which this year is almost certainly Juno. Add in a Hollywood-friendly backstory and Diablo Cody's sudden ubiquity, and you've got an Oscar waiting to happen.

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY: There Will Be Blood is a masterpiece, but it's more of a directorial and acting showcase than a triumph of screenwriting. Atonement has all the ingredients of an Oscar-bait literary adaptation, but will have to make do with a few technical awards. Which means No Country for Old Men will bring the Coen brothers their second Oscar to date — or third, should the film win Best Editing.

BEST DIRECTOR: Of the nominated directors, the Coens are the Oscar veterans, and are well-liked in the industry. How else to explain an out-of-nowhere screenplay nomination for O Brother, Where Art Thou? back in the day. If anyone has a shot, it's Paul Thomas Anderson, but don't bet on it. Even if there's an upset for Best Picture, when it comes to this category, you can't stop what's coming.

BEST PICTURE: No Country is the favorite here, partly because nobody can seem to agree on what might upset it. I'm still predicting No Country to take this prize, but allow me to float my theory for a possible spoiler: Michael Clayton. Think about it — it's both a thriller and a serious drama, starring an immensely popular movie star and a supporting cast full of familiar and talented character actors. The film contains a lot of appeal for the actor-heavy voting body, especially when you consider that it earned three acting nominations this year while no other film received more than one. If the voting members of the Academy choose to forego the darkness of No Country for something more Hollywood, count on this (more so than Juno, which skews too young and feels too lightweight to be Best Picture material) to be their alternative of choice. Could be worse — at least it's not Crash.

Screengrab Bets The Oscars: Scott’s Picks

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 19:30:00 GMT

My colleague Mr. Leonard Pierce has thrown down the gauntlet, so now it’s up to me to pick it up and swat him about the face with it. Don’t get me wrong, Leonard is a good friend and well-meaning individual, but he is also a very crazy person with some very crazy Oscar picks. If you want to win your office pool, you need to stick with me.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS:

Here we go by the double nomination rule. There is no chance Cate Blanchett will win for her lead role in Elizabeth II: Electric Boogaloo, so her performance as Bob Dylan…er, excuse me, Jude Quinn should bring home the gold this year.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR:

There is no safer bet this year than Javier Bardem winning for his chilling turn in No Country for Old Men. Let’s just hope he remembers to thank his hairdresser.

BEST ACTRESS:

I’ve got to be honest, I don’t know anything about Away from Her or Julie Christie’s performance in it. I do know she’s already won a bunch of awards for it, however, and I don’t see any reason for that to change now.

BEST ACTOR:

Daniel Day-Lewis will drink George Clooney’s milkshake! He will drink it up!

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY:

Atonement is a prestige literary adaptation, but I’m not sensing any momentum (or Atonementum, if you will). There Will Be Blood is adapted from the first part of a book nobody has read. Cormac McCarthy is the big name here, and even if No Country for Old Men isn’t his most acclaimed work, there’s no denying it was adapted about as well as could be imagined; it’s my pick.

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY:

The backlash to the Juno backlash will begin once Diablo Cody takes home this award, followed shortly by the backlash to the backlash backlash.

BEST DIRECTOR:

I don’t see any candidates strong enough to take this one away from the Coens. They look like the grand old men of cinema next to P.T. Anderson, and the remaining nominees are horses ranging from dark (Gilroy) to darkest (Reitman).

BEST PICTURE:

Don’t make me use the term Atonementum again. The big enchilada is going home with No Country for Old Men.

Screengrab Bets The Oscars: Leonard's Picks

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 15:30:00 GMT

With the 80th annual Academy Awards less than two weeks away, and with the WGA strike apparently near its end (assuring that there actually will be an Oscar ceremony, and not just a handful of star-struck entertainment journalists trying to figure out who the TelePrompTer works), it's time for us here at the Screengrab to suck it up. It's time for us to do what every other film writer in the world, self-respecting or otherwise, is doing, and lay down our picks for the big to-do. Since I've always had a knack for making a jackass out of myself on the internet, I'll be the first: under the cut, you'll find my picks for who deserves to take home a statuette come Oscar night in eigh different categories, and who's going to walk away with the gold, regardless of merit. Over the next thirteen days, I'm hoping my Screengrab colleagues will join me in this endeavor, and then, come March, at least one of us can strut around talking about how smart we are.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS:

There's a fine crowd of candidates this time around, and it's hard to pick a winner — there's no obvious failings just as there's no obvious standouts. All told, Cate Blanchett should win for her turn as Dylan in I'm Not There, but I'm predicting it will actually end up in the hands of Amy Ryan for the surprising Gone Baby Gone.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR:

If, as I'm predicting, the Coen Brothers are shut out again this year, that means even more that Javier Bardem should win for his performance as Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men. However, given his spate of terrific roles towards the end of the year, I'm predicting it will go to Philip Seymour Hoffman for Charlie Wilson's War.

BEST ACTRESS:

Ellen Page surely deserves recognition for the breakout performance she delivered in Juno, and there's a slight possibility she'll get it. However, I think the Academy will go the other direction — since Hal Holbrook won't be getting an old-timer's award, Julie Christie will take home the gold for the little-seen Away from Her.

BEST ACTOR:

Although there's an off chance that George Clooney will take home the gold, I'm picking Daniel Day-Lewis' colossal performance in There Will Be Blood as both my should-win and will-win. Past performance and academy voting patterns be damned: it's a towering, masterful job of acting that carries the entire movie.

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY:

Traditionally, the screenplay categories are the thanks-for-playing awards for the year's best movies, but which for whatever reason aren't going to get one of the big awards. As such, it's a dead heat between No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood, and my money's on Paul Thomas Anderson this year.

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY:

If ever there are a sold-gold, lead-pipe lock in the history of solid-gold, lead-pipe locks, it's Diablo Cody winning Oscar gold this year for Juno. Bet the farm on it.

BEST DIRECTOR:

For filmmakers as talented and distinctive as the Coen Brothers never to have won an Oscar is a crime, but this isn't their Departed year. They'll be shut out again, though, leaving open the question of who gets it. P.T. Anderson seems obvious, but I'm gonna say this is a divisive year and Tony Gilroy takes it for Michael Clayton.

BEST PICTURE:

If Juno wins, the very balance of nature will be forever thrown askew. No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood are the most deserving, but are perceived as overly nihilistic and grim. Michael Clayton could be the winner by default, but I think it'll go to Atonement, the very definition of an Academy prestige picture.

"Juno": Is the Little Movie That Could Too Big for Its Britches?

Phil Nugent — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Dana Stevens in Slate diagrams the Juno backlash. Stevens speaks for a lot of us here: "When Juno came out, I saw it as a flawed but fun indie, a film that, despite the screenplay's overreliance on grating banter, somehow snuck up on you by the end and made you like it." Since then, the damnded thing has been nominated for four major Academy Awards including Best Picture, come unnervingly close to doubling the box office take claimed by the second-biggest hit among the Best Picture nominees (No Country for Old Men), and inspired some big name critics to hail it as the best movie of the year. Granted, this reaction is insane, but how insane? And how much of one's dismay at those who are overpraising the picture should be directed at the movie itself? We've been here before: it wasn't that long ago that Little Miss Sunshine was praised for its stellar cast and surprising mix of world-beaten warmth and black humor, only to set off panic alarms in some quarters when it made a mint and garnered Oscar nominations. Both these films have been accused of playing out of their leagues, albeit by people who you might expect not to really care that much about the Oscars as a serious measure of artistic worth. At the same time, they stand accused of not being "indie" enough--they're unusual compared to most of the mainstream product, but they're also commercial comedies with big studio promotional money pushing them uphill. Of course, if they hadn't been hits at all, some of the same people who now claim to see something unjust in their success would be wondering why smart, off-beat little movies with good commercial instincts can't get a break in this country. In fact, they'd be tearing their hair out over it.

The Juno backlash--which, as Stevens notes, has already inspired a backlash to the backlash ("Is it so wrong to have liked Juno a little?" moans Tim Long, as if anyone's liking it a little were the problem)--reminds us that movies do not exist in a vaccuum, and that makes it harder for our responses to certain movies to remain untouched by the cultural weather they generate. It's natural for people who saw Juno early in its run to see what kind of response it's since inspired and to wonder if they saw the same movie, just as it's natural for people whose introduction to it were a sheaf of notices calling it the greatest thing since sliced bread to check it out and emerge from the theater wondering what they're missing. It is "a movie you adore or revile, attack or defend, and maybe change your mind about—not just after a second viewing, but halfway through the first." (As Stevens points out, there is a rare universality of opinion on the repellent suckiness of the first couple of full dialogue scenes, in particular the one where Rainn Wilson mans the counter at the convenience store and spits out such horrors as, "This is one diddle that can't be un-did, homeskillet." I haven't seen an opening so thoroughly designed to drive viewers out of a movie that actually turned out to have its good points since Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me.) The scary thing is that, this year, Juno might actually have a chance to beat the Coens P. T. Anderson for Best Picture at the Oscars, especially if it's seen as a compromise candidate stuck in between two bigger movies that many Academy voters regard as off-puttingly nihilistic. But my money's on Atonement; it has confused young women and production values, with English accents thrown in to boot!

Screengrab Speculation: Who is Diablo Cody REALLY?

John Constantine — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 21:29:00 GMT

That’s right ‘Grabbers. It’s another Juno post. This time though, Uncle John’s got a little something different than the usual praise or backlash piece. After much consideration, I have realized that writer Diablo Cody is not a real person.

I got to see Juno back at the tail end of November and liked it well enough. It is a cute movie, it knows it’s a cute movie and since being cute seems to be its chief ambition, I find it hard to heap either serious praise or scorn on it. At the time though, something about Juno seemed very familiar. Something about the overt nostalgia evoked by its suburban pastoral setting, its color palette, its costuming, twee soundtrack, and 80s pop culture references seemed to recall something very specific. Some person…

I present to you the theory that

Is in fact

Yes, Diablo Cody is actually Kevin Smith. Shocking I know and no doubt disturbing for those readers with a folder on their desktop labeled DCStripperPicsHAWT. But it’s true. The full theory is deep and riddled with evidence provided by the internet and coffee stained back issues of Entertainment Weekly but here are three bullet points to back up the claim:

1) Nobody Talks Like That – Kevin Smith’s fall from commercial and critical grace in the past eight years signaled the death of quirky-monologue-as-conversation in movies. This was a good thing. But Juno resurrects the insipid rat-a-tat dialogue stylings found in Clerks and Mallrats and cashes in Star Wars references for Thundercats and other flotsam from 1985. Nobody says, “Honest to blog.” Nobody says, “Try not to suck any more dicks on your way through the parking lot.” These things were written by the same person.

2) Nobody Likes Kevin Smith Anymore, Needed to Become Somebody Else – By the time Jersey Girl flopped, Smith had already overstayed his welcome in the average moviegoers mind. Clerks 2 wasn’t exactly the kind of success to bring them back into the theater either. In order to regain the buzz surrounding his early success, Smith needed to somehow become an indie breakout again. Creating a sexy new persona was just the ticket and it worked swimmingly.

3) Both Former Strippers

We’re through the looking glass now, dear reader.

Teenage Pregnancy (Don't Do It!)

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 15:45:00 GMT

Hey, have you heard that this is the year of the unwed mother? It's true! 2008's official dead horse is the trend towards movies featuring women who are unmarried, pregnancy, and strangely diffident about it. If you don't believe us, read, oh, every other film blog in the last twelve months or so.

In addition to daily blog-fodder, the Year of the Knocked Up and Wisecracking has inspired lots of back-and-forth opinionating among women, mothers, pro-choicers, anti-abortionists, and everyone else who has, or thinks they have, a stake in whether or not women should be having kids out of wedlock. Juno, understandably, has been at the center of the debate, with some unusual results: no less august a personage than right-wing cultural critic/humorless Walter Peck look-alike Brent Bozell, a man with a history of despising anything that might suggest the enjoyment of life, has come out in favor of the film because of its alleged pro-life message.

Until recently, though, nobody seems to have bothered to ask actual teenagers what they think of Juno, which is what makes this article in the Guardian so intriguing. The paper took a group of genuine teenage girls and boys to watch the film, and then asked them how realistic they found it, with some surprising results:

- One sixteen-year-old focuses on the somewhat lackluster portrayal of the child's father: "The film didn't really focus on Bleeker's reaction to the pregnancy, but then boys are quite inarticulate and don't talk to their friends much."

- Another wonders at the reaction of Juno's classmates: "At Juno's school, the other students were almost scared of her. At the school I go to, people are much more used to pregnancy. Quite a few people have got pregnant. At first, it's a big drama and you're shocked that someone's pregnant, but then you get used to it."

- One boy finds the rather blase view of teenage sex in the film hard to relate to: "It's not about our lifestyle. You got the feeling the two teenagers had sex because they were bored, but in London, you don't just get bored. . . school provides a lot of sex education — a bit too much, you think sometimes — and your parents are saying it as well."

- Most tellingly of all, almost every teenager interviewed says that they'd prefer to have an abortion than take the (suspiciously simple) route chosen by Juno. "Raising a child now would just be unfathomable," says a fifteen-year-old girl. "My friends and I talk about what we would do if we got pregnant and almost everyone I know says: 'I would have an abortion,' no questions asked."

Romantic Comedies: Where's the Love?

Phil Nugent — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 18:00:00 GMT

A. O. Scott contemplates the decline of the Hollywood romantic comedy and wonders how it is that so rich and noble a genre, a form used by Preston Sturges and Howard Hawks and Ernst Lubitsch to fully explore the complexities and frustrations of love's pursuit and all its attending derangements, could have degenerated into a way to grind out fodder to fill theaters in the late-winter season and keep Kate Hudson employed. Compared to those earlier great works, "the dry martinis of the past have been sweetened and diluted. We emerge lulled and soothed, but rarely intoxicated." Sure, some of this is the nostalgia talking, but it's not as if the man doesn't have a big ol' point. For some "stars", such as Hudson (and Matthew McConaughey, her co-star in the new Fool's Gold), steady work in such movies as How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, Alex and Emma, Raising Helen and Failure to Launch — paper-thin flicks just passing through theaters on their way to steady rotation on cable — is the movie equivalent to being a cast regular on one of those TV series, such as Wings or Coach, that seem to stay on the air for fifteen years even though you've never met anyone who watches it. What's depressing is how the ambition seems to have leaked out of the genre, and not just ambitious filmmaking, but any ambitions regarding serious romance.

In the glittering surface of classic screwball comedy, this ambitiousness was most obviously expressed in torrents of language. In Sturges's The Lady Eve Henry Fonda tells Barbara Stanwyck, "Every time I've looked at you here on the boat it wasn't only here I saw you: you seemed to go way back…I know that isn't clear but I saw you here and at the same time further away and then still further away and then very small…like converging perspective lines… no, that isn't it, more like figures following each other in a forest glade. Only way back there you were a little girl in short dresses with your hair falling on your shoulders, in the middle distance your hair is up but you're still gawky like a colt…then when you get nearer you look more like you do now, except not so pretty…but I've only told you half of it, because way back there a little boy is standing with you, holding your hand, and in the middle distance I'm still with you, not holding your hand anymore because it isn't manly, but wanting to. And then still nearer we look terrible: you with your legs like a colt and mine like a calf…what I'm trying to say, only I'm not a poet I'm an ophiologist, is that I've always loved you. I mean I've never loved anyone but you. I suppose that sounds as dull as a drugstore novel, and what I see inside I'll never be able to cast into words…but that's what I mean. I wish we were married and on our honeymoon." And he's supposed to be one of the inarticulate ones! Then there's Unfaithfully Yours, the conductor hero played by Rex Harrison, upon learning that his brother-in-law has hired a private detective to keep an eye on his wife, lashes out: "No man who employs detectives should ever be disappointed. I hope every time you've engaged these vermin you've discovered you had antlers out to here, that you were the laughing stock of the city, and that you came crawling out of the agency your face aflame, your briefcase stuffed with undeniable evidence of your multiple betrayal, dishonor dripping from your ears like garlands of seaweed," and responds to the man's offer to "forgive your insults" by saying, "I forbid you to forgive me anything on any grounds whatsoever and I may still punch you in the nose at any instant! Now go away and never speak to me again unless it is in some public place where your silence might cause comment and embarrassment to our wives." Given special tutoring and help from a CGI effects team, could Matthew McConaughey say all that? Maybe in a month's time, if you let him take a break every three words to fortify himself with bong hits.

Of course, while a glib tongue may be of great use in courting ladies fair [insert joke here], it's not the only thing. Still, it's sobering how little some of the people in these current movies are willing to settle for. In Fool's Gold, McConaughey is good-looking, dim-witted, lucky, and probably a fun guy to have a beer with. Just because these are the qualities Tim Russert looks for in a president, are they really all you could ask for in a fantasy boyfriend? Hudson is actually chastised for expecting or wanting more — though it's not clear that she wouldn't find all that perfectly satisfactory if it just came yoked to a shitload of money. In the great romantic comedies, the hero and heroine test each other, challenge each other, ultimately prove that each is special enough to deserve the other. For filmmakers who prize niceness above everything else, this may smack of bad sexual politics. But even if there's some hostility in the concept of romance as a challenge, seeing the leads prove themselves worth of the challenge made for a payoff that was worth it. In most of what passes for romantic comedy nowadays, the hero and heroine are resigned to ending up together because they're the best-looking people onscreen, and have nothing to do but yell and bicker and engage in wacky shenanigans to postpone the inevitable until the picture has achieved feature length. The really unsettling thing about this is that there may be something more to it than a worry in Hollywood that making a movie about people who really seem special, and not just special-looking, might irritate the lumpen drones in the audience. Scott singles Juno out as an example of a movie that does have some of that old magic, and Ellen Page is definitely worth slaying a dragon over, but for some of us, the weirdest thing about that picture is how abnormally reluctant the heroine is to simply admit that she kinda likes the best friend who got her pregnant, even though, as Michael Cera plays the part, he's openly yearning for her to give him a sign that his feeling for her is reciprocated. The fact is that when a modern romantic comedy like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind does tap into something imaginative and deeply felt, it often ends inconclusively, if not in outright despair. It's as if the few filmmakers left who want to bring their A-game to this kind of material are also the ones who are too wised-up to believe in happy endings.

Trailer Review: Baby Mama

John Constantine — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 23:52:00 GMT

I realize that it’s been asked many times before in recent days but, seriously, what is going on with baby movies? It’s been a more obvious trend in the past twelve months with successes like Knocked Up and Juno, but this has been brewing for a few years now. I’m convinced it all started with Idiocracy in 2006. Yeah, it’s a broad satire but the movie’s base premise is that smart people aren’t breeding. Fill us in with your theories in the comments section, we’re all ears.

As for Baby Mama, it’s looking pretty funny. Fey’s playing her forlorn-lonely-aging-fastidious thing to perfection and Poehler’s as delightfully zany as ever. They are truly the Wayne and Garth of this decade and it’s nice to see them continue collaborating. It’s also nice to see two female leads in the male-dominated screwball comedy genre. Make Will Ferrell and Judd Apatow’s respective crews look like chumps, Tina. The Grab’s got your back.

Academy Awards Also-Rans

Phil Nugent — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Now that the Academy Award nominations have been announced, we can all buckle up and wait to find out who the lucky non-winners are. Don't get us wrong: an Oscar win has a lot to recommend it. It bestows upon the recipient not just bragging rights but a new, higher pay ceiling and, if he doesn't screw it up the way Kevin Spacey did, a privileged glow and a long-term shot at juicier roles. But as anyone who's spent ten minutes reading about Cary Grant or Alfred Hitchcock knows, there's nothing that sets a major Hollywood figure apart like never having won an Oscar — that is, a real Oscar, and none of that special lifetime career achievement bullshit. Then, every time someone writes a profile of you, they can set aside a moment to tear their hair out over the fact that you never got the big prize — and everyone, including the people who'd never given it a second's thought before, will automatically do you the honor of agreeing that, yes, it is a shocking thing now that you mention it. In recent years, the sudden realization that Paul Newman and Martin Scorsese, to name two examples, had never won Oscars set off palpitations in the entertainment media, and cries went out urging the Academy to do the right thing, to make sure that they did not go to their graves un-Oscared, even if it meant honoring, by association, such lesser works as The Color of Money and The Departed. It's hard not to feel that, by finally joining what sometimes seems to be the majority, these men lost a little something that had previously set them apart from the likes of Red Buttons, Cliff Robertson, Roberto Begnini. One would think that Scorsese, with his ravenous enthusiasm for obscure and neglected filmmakers whose posthumous reputations glow with the luster one associates with misunderstood genius, would get this as much as anyone, but the lure of the little gold statuette is a powerful one. Let's take a moment to honor some of the people who will have to content themselves with asking Marty how it feels to hold one.

BEST ACTOR: Except for Johnny Depp and Viggo Mortensen, all the nominees here are already lost souls, with Oscars already stashed in the broom closet. Still, George Clooney and Tommy Lee Jones have only won for Best Supporting Actor in the past, so I'm sure it would feel a little special if they were able to corral one for being top banana. (Jones's nomination is also notable for being the only direct evidence included in the list of nominations that there was something this past year called "movies about the Iraq war.") Notable among the missing: Mark Ruffalo and Robert Downey, Jr. of Zodiac, two very fine performances that could just as easily have been shoehorned into the Supporting Actor category, but which had the misfortune to have been included in a movie that really took it on the chin for having been released early in the year. (The Academy has traditionally favored movies that were released late in the year and so were fresh in the minds of voters, a tradition that the development of home video has done surprisingly little to reverse.) The Academy did reach back to movies released in the first half of 2007 in order to bestow a Best Actress nomination on Julie Christie for her work in Away from Her, but Gordon Pinsent, who had to carry that picture, and whose performance was equally fine, was slighted, which may have something to do with the fact that no Academy voters have fond memories of having used a picture of him torn from the pages of Vogue to help them get through puberty thirty years ago. Similarly, Will Smith's performance in I Am Legend, a movie that he was obliged to keep alive single-handedly for long stretches, was in its way every bit as impressive a feat of movie-star acting as Clooney's glamorously world-weary turn in Michael Clayton, but he was in a movie about fighting rabid vampires, whereas Clooney was in one about reaching deep down into the pit of one's soul and learning to say no to the forces of evil, represented by a bunch of lawyers who could easily be taken for rabid vampires if you squint.

BEST ACTRESS: It's really no surprise that one of the most remarkable performances seen this year, that of Molly Shannon in Year of the Dog, isn't here: the movie was, again, released a very long time ago, it wasn't a hit, and in the ranks of people remembered for having been on Saturday Night Live, Shannon is probably closer to Chris Farley's side of the scale than Bill Murray's in the public mind. That could change if she gives many more performances like this one, but God knows where she's going to find the roles. It's a bit more surprising that Angelina Jolie's A Mighty Heart has sunk without a trace; it's not the best performance of the year, nor is it Jolie's best performance, but in a year that, as usual, was not overflowing with instances of women being given the chance to strut their stuff in big, juicy parts, you might think that Jolie's lending whatever muscle she has a movie star to telling the story of Daniel Pearl's widow would get her a token nod. Maybe all the factors that it had going against it — released in the summer, box-office failure, heavy subject matter, plus the mixed feelings that so many people seem to have about Jolie (is she a star, or a tabloid freak?) created a kind of perfect storm. Ashley Judd's wild-eyed, insane sexy mama in the off-Broadway sort-of-horror picture Bug was something to see. I don't know if the studio even bothered to send out screener copies to Academy voters, though if they were on the fence about it, I'd have chipped in for the cost of the postage, just so I could fantasize about how many of them would end up calling in priests to exorcise their DVD players.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: Chris Cooper punted two good shots the Academy's way, first with his creepy performance as treasonous spook Robert Hanssen in Breach, then with an excellent demonstration of the character actor functioning as secret star in the big action flick The Kingdom, but the Academy passed on both. Steve Zahn was amazing and heartbreaking as a doomed P.O.W. in Werner Herzog's Rescue Dawn; he didn't get nominated either, but just last week he was amazing again, effortlessly channeling Robert Duvall as the young Gus McCrae in the Lonesome Dove prequel, so maybe the Emmys will make it up to him later. Jeff Daniels' straight-talking blind man in The Lookout deserved more attention than it got, and Clarence Williams III made a solid meal of about two (uncredited) scenes as Bumpy Johnson in American Gangster. (Ruby Dee did get nominated for Best Supporting Actress for playing Denzel Washington's mother in that movie. Her performance isn't nearly as rich as Williams', but she's certainly due for a little attention, and maybe the Academy figured, regarding her and Williams, that it was either one or the other.) The funny thing is that the category is padded out with people — Casey Affleck, Javier Bardem — who got enough screen time in their movies to qualify as lead actors. Bardem's Supporting Actor status feels like it's rigged to make it easier for him to claim the award, though I'd look for a late surge to form behind Hal Holbrook after people realize that he's not only nominated but actually still alive and capable of being cheered by a win.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: I don't get the universal consensus that Cate Blanchett was a supporting actress in I'm Not There. I guess that, again, it comes down to amount of screen time, but nobody else in that movie had any more screen time than she did; certainly nobody else put theirs to as good a use. I probably wouldn't mind so much except that, by shoving her into this category for her phenomenal performance, it feels as if the Academy is shafting Amy Ryan, nominated for a hair-raisingly skanky performance as a bad mother for the ages in Gone Baby Gone, and Tilda Swinton, whose completely reprehensible and yet completely understandable corporate villain gave Michael Clayton a surprising amount of its soul. A little tinkering might have left room for Marisa Tomei, who in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead made Philip Seymour Hoffman's faithless wife convincingly empty and slow-witted and shallow in her dissatisfaction with her existence, yet still made her seem very much worth screwing up your life over. This would have also been the place to honor little Nina Kervel-Bey, who made one of the year's most remarkable debuts in the French film Blame It on Fidel. She's actually the star of the movie, but from Tatum O'Neal to Abigail Breslin, the Academy has traditionally shoved little girls into the Best Supporting Actress category, as if "supporting" were synonymous with "short." Appearances to the contrary, Ellen Page turns twenty-one next month, so her nomination in the Best Actress category (for Juno) does not break this trend. It would have been nice, though, if Page's co-star Jennifer Garner could have been sandwiched in here. In The Kingdom, Garner is still trying to prove herself as an action heroine, with mixed results, but she gave the performance of her career so far in Juno — a carefully nuanced performance and a brave one, one that depended for its (and the movie's) full effectiveness on the actress's willingness to slowly open up to the audience and reveal what's on the inside of a woman who has the shell of a frosty yuppie robot.

BEST DIRECTOR: The fun in this category has usually been in thinking about how it feels to be the one director who wasn't nominated even though his movie was nominated as Best Picture. However he may laugh it off in public, you know that the message he thinks he's getting is, "And last but not least, nominated for Best Picture in spite of having been directed by..." This year it is the director of Atonement, the esteemed young filmmaker what's-his-name, who has to wonder if everybody thinks the actors built the sets while he was in the bathroom and came up with their blocking while he was at lunch. Suffice to say that Julian Schnabel, the director of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, fills out the category just fine, though it might be even finer if, say, Jason Reitman had somehow been overlooked in favor of Zodiac's David Fincher. Another surprisingly plausible contender might have been Ben Affleck, who sure did a hell of a lot better job behind the camera on Gone Baby Gone than he's ever done in front of it. Affleck may not have the face of a director — that's a compliment, Ben — but I'm in favor of anything that encourages him to stay back there.

Kimya Dawson: "I’m into, like, full-audience group-hug kind of stuff."

Phil Nugent — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Singer-songwriter Kimya Dawson first attracted attention as half of the core (with Adam Green) of the Moldy Peaches, a band whose music stuck many of us as charming but seemed to many others to, at best, define the term "an acquired taste." The group released only one real album of new material, which had the distinctive bad fortune of being released on September 11, 2001, before going "on hiatus." Since then, Dawson, who doesn't have professional management and promotes herself through the Internet, has released a string of low-profile solo albums with such titles as I'm Sorry That Sometimes I'm Mean and My Cute Fiend Sweet Princess. And now, she's part of a smash hit record — the Juno soundtrack, currently number three on the charts. The movie incorporates Dawson's songs — notably "Anyone Else but You", which the stars Ellen Page and Michael Cera perform together at the end of the picture, and which is also heard in the Moldy Peaches' version — and Mateo Messina, who composed the score, tried to take his cues from Dawson's work so that all the music in the movie would have a similar feel. Dawson's music, which isn't on a major label, might seem an odd choice for synergy-minded suits to try to include in a movie, but then that's not how this wasn't their choice; it turns out that Dawson was suggested by Ellen Page, after Juno's director, Jason Reitman, asked her what kind of music she thought her character would listen to.

Thanks to the movie, the quirky, thoughtful Dawson, with her childlike music and DIY aesthetic, is on the verge of breaking through to a much larger audience, and she's smart enough to have mixed feelings about it. "Because of the success of the album," she says, "people have all these expectations of what the next steps are for me." This seems not to be the kind of concern over mainstream success versus punk "authenticity" that caused Kurt Cobain so much angst but an honest concern about the nature of her relationship to the audience changing in ways that may not serve her well. Fans of the movie who are compelled to seek out more of her work may not like what they hear; longtime fans may feel that something special has been lost now that, suddenly, the rest of the world has caught on to their secret good thing. In the meantime, she's just trying to remain herself, albeit in front of more people. Performing recently in Brooklyn, she wrapped up her show by telling the audience, "People who have to leave, leave fast. People who don’t, get in a circle and hold hands."

Paul Clark Predicts the Oscar Nominees

Paul Clark — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 19:00:00 GMT

"Nobody knows anything." Screenwriter William Goldman immortalized that phrase a few decades ago, and it's as true this Oscar season as it's always been. Perhaps even more so — not only are many Oscar races still wide-open, but the status of the ceremony itself is up in the air. But for now the show is still happening, which means the nominations are set to be announced tomorrow morning. Here are my hasty, shot-in-the-dark predictions in the top six categories:

Best Picture:
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Into the Wild
Juno
Michael Clayton
No Country for Old Men

I think we can all agree that No Country is in, right? Beyond that, it's something of a crap shoot. Michael Clayton is the kind of classy star vehicle the Academy usually responds to, and audience favorite Juno has become too big a word of mouth phenomenon to ignore. At one point, Atonement was looking like a front-runner for the win, but its Oscar buzz has subsided. On the other side of the coin, There Will Be Blood may be too bleak for the voters to embrace — it would have a better chance were it the year's undisputed critical champ, but with No Country in the mix, PTA's masterpiece could be shut out here. Instead, I'm predicting The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, an acclaimed true-life story that's only gaining momentum, and Into the Wild, the year's most Oscar-baity film directed by a respected actor, which is something that tends to go over well with the actor-filled Academy membership.

Best Actor:
George Clooney, Michael Clayton
Daniel Day-Lewis, There Will Be Blood
Johnny Depp, Sweeney Todd
Emile Hirsch, Into the Wild
Viggo Mortensen, Eastern Promises

Even if the Academy decides to overlook There Will Be Blood, they won't be able to deny the awesomeness of Day-Lewis' blazing performance as Plainview. Likewise, Clooney and Depp have recently become Academy favorites, and I dare say that had Sweeney Todd done more business Depp would've been the one to beat here. Hirsch is a bit iffier here given his age, but he carries Into the Wild on his capable shoulders, and if the film gets nominated I'm guessing he will be too. With the recent groundswell for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, I think Matthieu Amalric should be seen as a contender here, although not nearly as much as if he was an American star. Instead, I'm going with Mortensen — Eastern Promises didn't exactly set the world on fire, but his performance was the highlight, and I think voters will take the opportunity to honor him not only for this role but also for his overlooked turns in A History of Violence and the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Best Actress:
Amy Adams, Enchanted
Julie Christie, Away From Her
Marion Cotillard, La Vie en Rose
Angelina Jolie, A Mighty Heart
Ellen Page, Juno

Throughout this awards season, three names kept popping up in this rare — Christie, Cotillard, and Page. So it's pretty safe to assume they'll make it in. That leaves us two spots in a relatively weak year for buzzed-about performances (sadly, Black Book's Carice Van Houten has no traction whatsoever). With very little competition, Jolie should make the cut — the film didn't make much of a dent, but her stardom has kept her in the race. The final spot is anyone's guess. High-profile star turns (Jodie Foster in The Brave One, Cate Blanchett in Elizabeth: The Golden Age) have flopped at the box office, while respected performers in independent films (notably Laura Linney in The Savages) have been lost in the year-end shuffle. That leaves Amy Adams in Enchanted, a star-making performance by a previous nominee in a hit movie that's still fresh in people's minds.

Best Director:
Paul Thomas Anderson, There Will Be Blood
Joel and Ethan Coen, No Country for Old Men
Tony Gilroy, Michael Clayton
Sean Penn, Into the Wild
Julian Schnabel, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

At this point, Best Director is the Coens' to lose. Even if someone else takes home Best Picture, I think it's still their year in this category. I also think the Directors Branch will be impressed by Sean Penn's metamorphosis into serious filmmaker, as well as Schnabel's unconventional, inspired filmmaking choices in Diving Bell. For this year's semi-obligatory non-Best Picture-nominated director, I'm predicting Anderson, a respected maverick whose filmmaking chops in There Will Be Blood are undeniable even if the film itself is too much for some audiences. Of the two remaining Best Picture nominees, I think Gilroy has the edge over Juno's Jason Reitman for two reasons: (1) crowd-pleasing comedies tend to get shut out of this category, and (2) Gilroy is a veteran screenwriter makes an impressive directorial debut. But don't be surprised if another "lone director" — say, Sidney Lumet for Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, or Tim Burton for Sweeney Todd — gets the nod instead.

Best Supporting Actor:
Javier Bardem, No Country for Old Men
Philip Seymour Hoffman, Charlie Wilson's War
Hal Holbrook, Into the Wild
Tommy Lee Jones, No Country for Old Men
Tom Wilkinson, Michael Clayton

In a year without Bardem, this race might have come down to Grand Old Actor Holbrook vs. veteran character actor Wilkinson. But Bardem casts a long shadow over this category, with Chigurh the creepiest villain in an Oscar-feted film since Hannibal Lecter. Charlie Wilson's War wasn't the Oscar juggernaut that it was predicted to be, but I still think Hoffman's scene-stealing turn will make it in. I think this year's biggest surprise will be the absence of Casey Affleck's performance in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Affleck's the only serious competition Bardem has had among the precursor awards, but Jesse James was a box-office flop and Affleck's performance could give voters the willies. Max Von Sydow's affecting turn in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly might have had a chance here — as a means of honoring one of the world's most esteemed actors and, by extension, his recently-departed longtime collaborator Ingmar Bergman — except that he might not have enough screentime to be a contender. Instead, I'm giving the edge to Jones, an Academy favorite who came roaring back this year to give two acclaimed performances after a decade's worth of commercial crap.

Best Supporting Actress:
Cate Blanchett, I'm Not There
Catherine Keener, Into the Wild
Kelly MacDonald, No Country for Old Men
Amy Ryan, Gone Baby Gone
Tilda Swinton, Michael Clayton

Once again, three names keep popping up in this category: Blanchett, Ryan, and Swinton. I think they'll all get nominated, though who will win remains to be seen (early shot-in-the-dark prediction: a Swinton upset). The other two spots are less certain. But consider that, more than any other category, the Best Supporting Actress nominees are largely composed of performers who starred opposite other Oscar nominees. In this respect, I think contenders such as Ruby Dee in American Gangster, Marisa Tomei in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, and especially Saoirse Ronan in Atonement, are at a disadvantage here. Instead, I'm predicting the fourth spot to go to Catherine Keener, getting her third nomination in this category for her moving turn in Into the Wild. The final slot comes down to Jennifer Garner in Juno and Kelly MacDonald in No Country for Old Men. Despite Garner's greater name recognition, I'm giving the edge to MacDonald, both for No Country's frontrunner status and for playing one of Oscar's favorite characters, the supportive, long-suffering wife. But honestly, it could go either way.

Watch for the Oscar nominations tomorrow, January 22. And remember, nobody knows anything.

When Good Directors Go Bad: Ishtar (1987, Elaine May)

Paul Clark — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 20:00:00 GMT

I don’t have a set method for choosing the subjects of my When Good Directors Go Bad columns. Occasionally, I’ll try to spotlight a director who recently released a new film, and once I even used an acclaimed filmmaker’s death as an excuse to re-examine his most notorious work (sorry, Michelangelo). But most of the time I’ll just write up whatever I can get my hands on in time. However, when I wrote a piece on Mike Nichols a few weeks ago, I knew there was only one logical follow-up: his former onstage partner Elaine May. And Elaine May meant one thing: Ishtar.

Elaine May was one of the great unheralded filmmaking talents of the 1970s. While guys like Scorsese, Coppola and Spielberg were turning Hollywood upside down, May carved out a fascinating niche for herself. All three of her 1970s films — A New Leaf, The Heartbreak Kid, and Mikey and Nicky — were characterized by May’s probing curiosity about the male psyche and her ramshackle directing style. But if May appeared slapdash behind the camera, she was a perfectionist in the editing room, and both A New Leaf and Mikey and Nicky were taken out of her hands at various points in post-production.

Ishtar was May’s first effort behind the camera in a decade, and it seemed a strange project for her, considering her previous work. Gone was the misanthropic view of relationships found in A New Leaf and The Heartbreak Kid, and the caustic portrait of friendship in Mikey and Nicky. Instead, the film’s protagonists are a pair of chummy, not-too-bright aspiring singer-songwriters, Rogers (Warren Beatty) and Clarke (Dustin Hoffman). They’re lousy, but they’re endlessly enthusiastic about their work ("Shit, man," says Clarke to Rogers when they’re hammering out a new song, "when you’re on you’re on!"), and this attitude extends to their friendship.

Ishtar has amassed a cult following over the years, and watching the film’s opening half hour it’s easy to see why. When Rogers and Clarke sing songs like "(I’m Leaving Some) Love in My Will" before dumbfounded audiences, the movie is pretty priceless. The wonderfully awful songs were penned by Paul Williams (assisted by May and Hoffman), and Hoffman and Beatty are wonderful playing against type, with Hoffman as the would-be lothario and Beatty as a romantic sadsack. Had May simply made a film about these two guys trying to make a name for themselves as musicians, composing songs and performing, it might have been a comedy classic.

Alas, the movie isn’t called Rogers and Clarke. It’s called Ishtar, and before long the film drops its heroes off in the titular (fake) North African country, and drops most of the laughs with it. As the film progresses, Rogers and Clarke become pawns in a civil war involving a CIA agent (Charles Grodin), a band of revolutionaries led by sexy Isabelle Adjani, and an ancient map. Oh, and a blind camel.

Much of the film’s then-notorious $55-million price tag went to the scenes in North Africa, but almost nothing about these scenes works. I can’t decide if May simply miscalculated her strengths as a filmmaker, or if she decided sometime during production that her heart really wasn’t in the civil-war material but figured she might as well grit her teeth and finish anyway. Either way, it’s a little heartbreaking how far astray Ishtar has gone by the time Beatty, Hoffman, and Adjani are firing machine guns at a pair of CIA helicopters in the desert. If there’s any truth to the belief that a big budget is the enemy of comedy, then Ishtar is Exhibit A.

Most of the filmmakers I’ve spotlighted in this series have rebounded from their films to recapture their reputations, or at least to continue having productive careers. But Ishtar effectively torpedoed May’s career as a director — due both to its budget overruns and to May’s unwillingness to make nice with Hollywood — and she’s worked exclusively as a screenwriter and occasional actress since. It’s a shame, since I for one would love to see May direct another film. At a time when even "edgy" comedies like Juno are essentially warm and fuzzy, we need her prickly comedic sensibility more than ever.

Screengrab Presents: The Hollywood Guide to Pregnancy

Gwynne Watkins — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 15:00:00 GMT

A pregnancy test is not an etch-a-sketch. This is one doodle that can't be un-did, homeskillet. See: Juno

Pregnancy instantly propels the father-to-be into a mid-life crisis. Luckily, women never panic about being pregnant. Women love babies! See: She’s Having a Baby, Nine Months

During your pregnancy, dreams are unusually vivid and strange. Especially when the father is a giant mutated insect. See: David Cronenberg’s The Fly

If you’re not sure who the father is, tell everyone you’ve ever slept with it’s theirs. Babysitters for life! See: Three Men and a Baby

Be sure to get adequate prenatal care, on the off-chance you’re carrying the spawn of Satan. See: Rosemary’s Baby, Village of the Damned, It’s Alive

Virgin pregnancies are only possible in three places: the Bible, Tatooine and Kevin Smith movies. See: Nativity Story, Dogma, Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace

The appropriate thing to yell when your water breaks is "Thundercats are go!" See: Juno

If you live in a totalitarian regime, and you get knocked up, don’t worry; your kid is probably the savior of humankind. See: Children of Men, Terminator, Willow, The Seventh Sign

Need a bomb to drop during an argument? You can’t go wrong with "I secretly aborted your child!" See: The Godfather Part II, The Anniversary Party, Cabaret

Abortion? What’s that? See: Knocked Up, Boys on the Side, Saved!, The Station Agent, Match Point, Circle of Friends, Dreamgirls, For Keeps?

If you’re pregnant and married to a police detective, you should probably leave town for a while. If you’re pregnant and you are a police detective, just keep doing what you’re doing. See: Se7en, Fargo

Pregnancy in the Deep South never ends well. See: Gone with the Wind, Steel Magnolias, A Place in the Sun, A Streetcar Named Desire

Make sure that the hospital you’ve chosen has all the latest technology, specifically the machine that goes ping. See: Monty Python’s Meaning of Life

The delivery room is a good place for: last-minute apologies, marriage proposals, David Hyde Pierce. It is a bad place for: fist fights, Bette Midler. See: Knocked Up, Lover Come Back, Addams Family Values, Nine Months, Beaches

Wouldn’t it be funny if men could get pregnant? Oh wait. See: Junior, Rabbit Test

— Gwynne Watkins

Previous Hollywood Guides:
The Hollywood Guide to Drinking
The Hollywood Guide to Office Romance
The Hollywood Guide to Infidelity