The Screengrab : kiefer sutherland

In Other Blogs: Shoot Out the Lights

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 29 May 2009 14:30:00 GMT

I should probably use this final installment of In Other Blogs to suggest alternatives to the Screengrab for our fans about to go into withdrawal. (This is it folks, the last day, closing time, 50% off all posts, everything must go!) But let’s get real – there’s no replacing the Screengrab! Oh, if you must keep up with ongoing developments in the world of cinema, I suppose there are some alternatives (and I remind you to bookmark this page, which has a whole passel of ‘em). Instead, I’m going to take one last opportunity to pay tribute to…well, us.

At The Phil Nugent Experience, Phil Nugent takes aim at Kiefer Sutherland’s Jack Bauer. “Sutherland's performance, which has thoroughly redefined his image and career, shows just how irresistible the self-pitying enforcer act can seem when it's done to a crisp. In his first several years in movies, Sutherland was a weird-looking Brat Pack also-ran; as his youth started to slip away, his most striking roles, as a big bad wolf of a serial killer in Freeway and as the exposition merchant in the sci-fi fantasy Dark City, made it look as if he might be turning into the new Dwight Frye. His transformation into a TV action hero seemed a mighty unlikely development, but as soon as he turned into Jack Bauer, he developed a new, flinty authority that he'd never shown before. The few movies he's appeared in since 24 launched were in and out of theaters pretty quickly, and probably it helped that, as a TV star, he suddenly had smaller screens to fill, but it's possible to fail even at that: compare him to Christian Slater in My Own Worst Enemy if you want to know how thoroughly it's possible to belly flop in both media.”

At Silly Hats Only, Paul Clark announces his plans for what might qualify as the anti-Unwatchable. “For a long time, I’ve had a goal of watching every title represented by the Criterion Collection, and it occurred to me that if I didn’t set about to watch and write about every Criterion title I haven’t seen, I’ll never do it. And while it’s not the most original goal for a cinephile, I’d say it’s a worthy one all the same.”

At The AV Club, Leonard Pierce has the goods on The Goode Family. “I've always been precariously on the fence about Mike Judge. I thought Office Space was half of a brilliantly subversive satire that degenerated, in in its second half, into a predictable caper movie with a strangely reactionary message; Idiocracy, likewise, had some killer comic observations but couldn't seem to present them with much coherence in the end. So here we are with The Goode Family, Judge's new animated sitcom, and its promise to take a poke at political correctness. This all would have seemed very timely in, say, 1994, or even when King of the Hill debuted in '97.”

At From Here to Obscurity, Hayden Childs continues his alphabetical journey through his music collection. “The Cramps - Gravest Hits EP, Songs The Lord Taught Us, Psychedelic Jungle, and Bad Music For Bad People. Man! What can I possibly say about the Cramps that hasn't been said a million times already? People who enjoy the kind of music called rock & roll love the The Cramps. Some critics apparently consider Bad Music For Bad People to be a watered-down version of a better best-of that was released in England, but for me, well, that's the Cramps album that I first heard at 15 years old, and that's THE Cramps album for me. Besides all these other ones, I mean.”

At Slant, Nick Schager checks out Night in the Museum 2. “Commotion ensues, most of it functionally but unexcitingly executed, including an into-the-artwork sequence that pales in comparison to a similar bit from Loony Tunes: Back in Action.”

At The Ol’ Blog Shop, Andrew Osborne spends Memorial Day in America’s Heartland…Somerville, Mass. “But, really, for me it was all about the Shriners, or whoever those guys in the Aleppo fezzes were, and there were scores of them, possibly hundreds, taking up easily half the parade with their flags and weird Arab trumpet noodling and fake goatees and turbans and their candy-tossing...and forget about tiny little cars: the Somerville Shriners had tiny little 18-wheelers, not to mention tiny golf carts, tiny buggies, pop-wheelie clown cars, horses, horse cars, Segways and a trailer broadcasting a Shriner quartet as they sang “Yankee Doodle went to Baghdad riding in a Humvee” into dangling CB radio handsets.”

At Scott Von Doviak (someone please come up with a better blog name for me), I look at some recent movie Crime Scenes, including Gone Baby Gone. “Here are four words that inspire very little confidence when they appear on a movie screen: ‘Directed by Ben Affleck.’”

And remember, your one-stop shopping destination for keeping track of the ol’ Screengrab gang is Screengrab in Exile. Don’t stop believin’!

Screengrab Review: Monsters vs. Aliens

Andrew Osborne — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 14:00:00 GMT

At the 3-D screening of Monsters vs. Aliens I attended, there was a collective gasp from the children in the audience when the first image seemingly launched off the screen at us, and a cynical, “It took five people to write that?” from an adult behind me when the end credits finally rolled. My own opinion fell somewhere between those two reactions.

While generally more broad and less well-written than a typical Pixar film, the gang at DreamWorks Animation (under the direction of Conrad Vernon and Rob Letterman) gives good visual in their latest, with everything from spaceships to red rubber paddle balls zooming towards (and, in correctly equipped theaters, beyond) the screen, as well as a series of cleverly conceived and executed action sequences: one, involving an epic battle on and around the Golden Gate Bridge, is especially breath-taking.

The story and characters, meanwhile, don’t go a lot deeper than the high-concept title: Reese Witherspoon voices a young bride-to-be named Susan, who transforms into a 50-ish foot woman called Ginormica after getting hit by a mysterious meteorite on her wedding day.

“Ginormica,” in fact, is the name assigned to Susan after she’s captured by a secret government agency tasked with containing the world’s creepiest creatures, including a brainless blob (Seth Rogen), a fish-ape (or possibly ape-fish) “missing link” (Will Arnett), a Brundlefly-esque amalgam of mad scientist and cockroach (Hugh Laurie) and Insectosaurus (Jimmy Kimmel), a giant Mothra-style insect several times larger than even Ginormica (and whose incoherent yowlings somehow required yet another celebrity voice). When evil extraterrestrial Gallaxar (a relatively restrained Rainn Wilson) invades, the U.S. President (a disappointing Stephen Colbert, badly in need of restraint) is convinced by General Monger (Kiefer Sutherland, channeling Larry the Cable Guy) to arrange a battle royale involving...say it with me now...monsters vs. aliens.

Along the way, there are plenty of (mostly) clever gags -- my favorite involving a thumb-less wedding guest -- and nice (if simplistic) messages about acceptance and girl power. Meanwhile, even those currently experiencing Rogen fatigue may get a kick out of the actor’s familiar stoner giggle issuing from a family-friendly blob...a character the husky Canadian was pretty much born to play.

And besides, griping that DreamWorks’ new offering doesn’t measure up to, say, WALL-E or The Incredibles isn’t entirely fair. Since at least the Jeffrey Katzenberg era at Disney, American mainstream animated features (from Who Framed Roger Rabbit to Coraline) have been consistently smarter, better crafted and more humane than most Hollywood product over the same period. If Monsters vs. Aliens is just an average kiddie film, then here’s hoping all the kiddies raised on such films will come to demand at least as much quality from the studios as their generation moves forward into adulthood.

Related Stories:
Trailer Review: Monsters vs. Aliens
The Top 50 Movies of 2009

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

Jason Patric: Real-Life Asshole

Peter Smith — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 18:00:00 GMT

I always appreciated Jason Patric's fall from playing leading men to playing unapologetic pricks in films like Neil LaBute's Your Friends and Neighbors. I figured the guy was probably channeling some of his anger and disappointment into his craft. After I saw him alongside Samantha Morton in Expired at last year's Sundance Film Festival, I couldn’t stop laughing at his demented antics, but did make a mental note: "This guy is a really convincing dick." Who knew that he was just being himself? Well, according to this blog post, and a similar report from Defamer, Jason Patric is still trying to keep up with Kiefer Sutherland, this time in the arena of bar assholery. There were no reports of him collapsing on Christmas trees though, so for now Kiefer still has the edge, both on- and off-screen. This isn’t to say I don’t believe in Mr. Patric's talent. Like everyone else in the universe, I love The Lost Boys, and I thought he was pretty damn good in Rush and even Sleepers. It’s tough to justify groping random women, but let’s face it, you’d get pretty sick of those "Speed 2, Keanu Reeves' replacement" jokes too. . . — Bryan Whitefield