The Screengrab : leonard nimoy

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

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

Bruce Willis in THE SIXTH SENSE (1999)

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

Johnny Depp in A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET (1984)

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

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

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

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

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

Slim Pickens in DR. STRANGELOVE (1964)

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

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Nick Schager, Scott Von Doviak

Yesterday's Hits: Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986, Leonard Nimoy)

Paul Clark — Fri, 08 May 2009 19:00:00 GMT

With this week’s release of J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek, I thought the time was right to look back at an earlier big-screen installment of the franchise. But which one? Despite the enduring popularity of the Star Trek brand, few of the Trek movies could be classified as blockbusters. Even The Wrath of Khan, the current fan favorite among the original-cast adventures, only grossed a fairly unremarkable $78 million domestically. As of earlier this week, the biggest hit out of the Trek movies is the series’ fourth entry, 1986’s The Voyage Home, which was the only pre-Abrams Trek movie to gross upwards of $100 million.

So why, out of ten Star Trek movies to date, was this the one that struck a chord with moviegoers? Much of it had to with the idea that it was, to quote a recent essay at The House Next Door, “the Star Trek film for people who don’t actually like Star Trek all that much.” The Trek franchise won legions of fans with its futuristic stories set in far-flung worlds, but others were turned off by the more science fiction-heavy aspects of the show and movies. So, by setting the majority of its story in 1980s San Francisco, The Voyage Home gave devotees another agreeable two hours to spend with their beloved Enterprise crew, and allowed non-fans to enjoy a Star Trek movie without feeling so, for lack of a better word, geeky. When the film hit theatres over Thanksgiving weekend, it took in the largest opening weekend haul of 1986, and eventually became one of the year’s biggest hits.

Of course, there were other factors that contributed to Star Trek IV’s box office success. Even more than most Trek movies, this one was pretty family friendly, with a few mild expletives (or, as Leonard Nimoy's Spock calls them, “colorful metaphors”), but nothing stronger than a “damn,” “hell,” or “double dumbass on you!” Its timely save-the-whales message didn’t hurt either. Through some deliciously convoluted plot developments, the fate of the human race depends on the survival of two humpback whales, which allowed director Nimoy and his co-screenwriters to shoehorn a lesson into the story in the classic Trek fashion.

But most importantly, The Voyage Home was- and still is- funny. The 1980s were the heyday of the fish-out-of-water comedy, and by placing the familiar Enterprise crew four centuries into the past, the film afforded the characters plenty of opportunities to get laughs from their cluelessness about 20th century life. The film, to its credit, makes the most of the disconnect between the characters and their unfamiliar surroundings, and our knowledge of the crew’s personalities only makes it funnier. So when engineering whiz Scotty (James Doohan) comes face to face with an old-school computer, or Chekov (Walter Koenig) wanders around San Francisco inquiring about “nuclear wessels” at the height of the Cold War, the comedy is richer than it would have been had the characters not been so well established.

One of the better surprises the movie holds is William Shatner’s performance. In the more serious Trek episodes and on the series, Shatner had a tendency toward hamminess, especially when the situation called for big emotions. Here, in a more lighthearted movie, Shatner isn’t exactly natural, but that’s the point- his cartoonishly stalwart bearing allows for a nice contrast with the casualness of the eighties setting. One of the more amusing running jokes in the film is that while Kirk repeatedly admonishes Spock for looking out of place, Kirk really doesn’t fit in any better, although he’s convinced that he does. Because of this, he’s able to sell lines like the scene in which he feels the need to apologize for Spock, explaining that he’s an old hippie who “took too much LDS.” Rather than leaning on the line to milk the joke, Shatner practically throws it away, which makes it that much funnier. In recent decades, Shatner has become a parody of himself, so it’s nice to see him getting intentional laughs.

Aside from the comedy, the movie is more uneven, but it’s still one of the better Star Trek movies. Yes, the plot is ridiculous, but that’s part of the fun. Too many big-budget franchises play it safe in their narratives, setting up a formula and sticking to it from film to film. With Star Trek (especially the movies) the formula is less in the plot than in the characterizations- Kirk’s unconventional but instinctive leadership sense, Spock’s unflappability, Dr. McCoy's (DeForest Kelley) cantankerousness, and so on. Because the characters are firmly established, the filmmakers could afford to be more adventurous with the stories themselves. It’s hard to think of another movie series that could get away with a plot that hinges on an alien intelligence that communicates in humpback whale-song, but somehow The Voyage Home makes it work.

Of course, maybe I’m biased. After all, Star Trek IV was the first Trek movie I saw as a kid, although had already seen quite a few episodes from the series. But while I remember laughing a lot back then, it plays better for me now that I’ve doubled back and caught the rest of the movies. One may not have to be a fan of Star Trek to enjoy the comedy scenes in 1986, but a working knowledge of the movies, especially the second and third films, makes the 23rd Century sequences much more worthwhile. The Voyage Home brings the storyline that began with The Wrath of Khan to a satisfying end in the movie’s final scene, in which the crew takes a long, loving look at their new ship- the all-new Enterprise A. It’s an obvious ending, but at the end of this long, strange journey, the crew has earned it, and so has the movie.

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

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 06 May 2009 18:30:00 GMT

As J.J. Abrams’ mega-hyped, blockbuster-in-waiting reboot of the Star Trek franchise begins, we might be watching any other movie in the series. The usual massive space behemoth posing a threat to the continued existence of the galaxy has materialized, and Starfleet is racing to the rescue. As the responding vessel is not named Enterprise, it’s all reduced to fireballs and cinders in a matter of minutes. But something is different: the captain of the destroyed starship is named Kirk…George Kirk, whose son James Tiberius is born on an escaping shuttlecraft even as his father heroically goes down with the ship. There’s your back story: roguish adventurer Jim Kirk can’t help what he is – he was literally born into it.

All right, so there’s a little more back story than that. There’s the half-human, half-Vulcan Spock’s tormented youth at the hands of his cold, emotionless peers, and the tween Kirk joyriding in a borrowed “vintage” convertible, and smoking hot space cadet Uhura (Zoe Saldana) fending off the advances of twentysomething townie Kirk (Chris Pine) while slumming in a bar outside the Iowa-based Starfleet Academy.

It all sounds like the makings of a feature-length fanwank, but Abrams is nothing if not a clever fellow and he has a few tricks up his sleeve. It’s not just that the mega-threat is a vengeance-seeking Romulan from the future named Nero (Eric Bana) – that’s just another day at the office in the Star Trek realm – but that he’s seeking his vengeance against the future version of Spock we all know and love, played by Leonard Nimoy. And that the youthful Spock (Zachary Quinto) is unable to prevent the cataclysmic first phase of Nero’s revenge, an epic event that may have hardcore Trekkies shaking their fists at the screen and howling in outrage, “That never happened!”

They’d be wrong, however, because Abrams and his writers Robert Orci and Alex Kurtzman have come up with an ingenious loophole that allows them to clear the decks of all the clutter comprising four decades worth of Trek mythology. Abrams doesn’t have to worry too much about being reverent, which allows him to rev it up and have some fun. And Star Trek is an undeniably fun summer ride – it’s got the big thrills, big laughs and special effects that blow away any and all earlier incarnations of Trek, and only rarely insults the intelligence. (You won’t want to give too much deep thought to the “science” involving black holes and red matter.)

The cast is game, although Abrams comes up against the same stumbling block that often bedeviled the original series and its spinoff movies: finding enough for the supporting characters to do. Uhura has a beefed-up role (and there’s a nifty piece of misdirection involving her character) and Simon Pegg makes the most of his brief screen time as Scotty, but the crotchety Bones (Karl Urban) gets short shrift, and Sulu (John Cho) and Chekov (Anton Yelchin) are still just a guy who can fence and a Russian with a funny accent (“Enemy wessels approaching!”) respectively. (And let’s not even speak of the regrettable stunt casting of Winona Ryder and Tyler Perry in minor roles.)

As it ever was, the focus is on the Kirk/Spock dynamic, which is where the turning-back-the-clock element really pays off. There’s a sharper edge to the relationship here, as the hotheaded man of action and the cool, logical half-alien size each other up as both rivals and potential allies. Quinto has inherited Nimoy’s knack for infusing his matter-of-fact pronouncements with almost subliminal dry wit, and while there’s really no replacing the Shat Man, Pine is surprisingly adept at evoking the bravado and bluster of Kirk without devolving into parody. As unlikely as it once seemed, it looks like the ol’ Enterprise has a few more light-years left in it after all.

Nick's Take

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

Nick Schager — Wed, 06 May 2009 18:00:00 GMT

Hardcore Trekkers can debate whether J.J. Abrams has committed heresy with his franchise-restarter Star Trek. For those not deeply invested in Gene Roddenberry’s humanist sci-fi series, however, this summer spectacular will prove a largely thrilling surprise, its blend of humor, romance and action so kinetically orchestrated that calling out its shortcomings feels like excessive carping. By constructing a story around planet-devouring black holes that function as time-travel portals, Abrams not only affords himself a premise fit for grand intergalactic conflicts but also a handy explanation for why Kirk (Chris Pine), Spock (Zachary Quinto), McCoy (Karl Urban) and their fellow Starfleet peace-keepers only sort of resemble themselves. It’s an alternate reality Star Trek, and all the better for it, serving up the type of breakneck thrills and operatic excitement that’s been absent from this sci-fi universe since 1982’s Wrath of Khan. A distinctly modern blockbuster that comes on like gangbusters and rarely lets up, it re-confirms that Abrams – after energizing Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible saga in 2006 – is a director tailor-made for event pics, his sleek, lens-flared cinematographic style and vigorously to-the-point pacing well-suited for the demands of mega-budgeted tentpole extravaganzas.

In this reconfigured Star Trek, whose mythos occasionally recalls Star Wars, Kirk’s dad dies saving his starship’s inhabitants and, specifically, his wife and newborn baby, and Kirk himself grows up to be a devil-may-care bad boy squandering his potential in cornfielded Iowa. Convinced by paternalistic Captain Pike (Bruce Greenwood) to follow his father’s footsteps by joining the Starfleet Academy, he immediately finds himself in conflict with Spock, a rather disagreeable know-it-all struggling to reconcile his dual heritage as a logical Vulcan and (thanks to human mom Winona Ryder) an emotional Earthling. Much of Robert Orci and Alex Kurtzman’s script centers on Kirk and Spock’s combative relationship, though along the way it also deftly provides introductions to the rest of the iconic Enterprise crew, including amusingly grouchy McCoy, mini-skirted sexpot Uhura (Zoe Saldana), tough Sulu (John Cho), goofy Chekhov (Anton Yelchin), and witty Scotty (Simon Pegg). As befitting an origin story, Abrams lavishes most of the attention on establishing his characters’ various relationships, a guiding directive that he admirably pulls off, with the writer/director sneaking in trademark catchphrases and allusions to signature moments in Star Trek history while allowing his new cast to make the revered characters their own.

Pine channels William Shatner’s ladies-man egomania with a playfulness that makes light of the legendary Kirk’s machismo, Urban’s McCoy grumbles with a gusto that would make DeForest Kelly proud, and Quinto gives Spock a smarty-pants attitude that differentiates him from that of Leonard Nimoy’s original Vulcan, who [spoiler alert] eventually figures prominently in the narrative proper. That plot involves Romulan madman Nero (Eric Bana) traveling back in time to exact revenge on Spock and the Federation for his home world’s demise, a scheme to destroy Earth that inevitably feels shoehorned into a film whose primary concern is setting up interpersonal dynamics that can be further developed in sequels. Thanks to the tacked-on nature of Kirk’s battle with Nero, as well as a few too-curt editorial choices that don’t maximize the scenario for thrills, Star Trek falters slightly during its climax. Yet it’s a minor speed bump on an otherwise brisk ride, one that avoids indulging in the franchise’s characteristic social/political allegory in favor of straightforward, uncomplicated sci-fi melodrama and mayhem. Light on its feet, free from the self-seriousness of its predecessors, and shrewd enough to keep one wanting more by not overstaying its welcome, Abrams’ breathless reboot achieves the improbable, forcefully reviving a series that many, including myself, believed had deservedly been left for dead.

Scott's Take

Video of the Day: Leonard Nimoy at the Alamo

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Yesterday we told you about Leonard Nimoy’s surprise appearance at the Alamo Drafthouse, where the new Star Trek movie unspooled in place of the previously announced screening of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. The Alamo blog has the scoop on how the evening unfolded: “The opening credits of KHAN played out on the screen, and the audience was already psyched…In the very opening scene, though, something started to look off. The print we had was really bad, with long green lines and scratches through the whole thing. Before we’d made it more than ten lines into the dialogue, the scratches consumed the film, the picture got warped, and the film itself caught fire like the engine room of the Enterprise.” At this point, the screenwriters took the stage and…well, see for yourself. We have the video after the jump:

“Star Trek” Beams Down in Austin

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 19:00:00 GMT

Proving again that there is no truth in advertising, a theater full of Star Trek fans promised a shiny print of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan were instead forced at phaser point to sit through the new J.J. Abrams reboot of the franchise due in theaters next month. To say this is an outrage would be an understatement. I stayed up all night putting the finishing touches on my Ricardo Montalban breastplate! Do you know how many times I rehearsed Khan’s big speech so I’d be prepared to emote along as he announced, “I'll chase him round the moons of Nibia and round the Antares maelstrom and round perdition's flames before I give him up!”? And all that for nothing. I was so upset, I actually left my tricorder in the men’s room.

All right, I didn’t actually attend the screening last night. I’m always up for a little Khan, but I really don’t want to be in a theater full of people who are really, really up for a little Khan. Call me a hypocrite if you must, but now I know I missed out on a big surprise. This is the event as originally advertised by the Alamo Drafthouse: “Fantastic Fest and Ain’t It Cool News present a free screening of STAR TREK 2: THE WRATH OF KHAN with an exclusive sneak preview of 10 minutes of NEVER BEFORE SEEN footage from the new STAR TREK!” According to Wired, Leonard Nimoy – yep, Ol’ Gray Ears himself – stunned the audience with a surprise appearance and announced that they would be seeing “the entire new movie just hours before it made its international bow in Sydney.”

If anyone was disappointed by the bait and switch, they weren’t tweeting about it. Slashfilm has collected reactions ranging from Harry Knowles’ predictable “holy fuck! the new Star Trek fucking rules the universe” to the more restrained “ZOMG!! Just saw the new star trek movie and it MELTED MY PANTS!!!!!\” This is all well and good, but it still raises the troubling question: Can we ever trust the Alamo Drafthouse again? For instance, tonight’s schedule would have us believe that the “Young Frankenstein Quote-Along” is on tap, but if I show up in my Igor hoodie, how do I know I won’t get some new Will Ferrell remake of Young Frankenstein I haven’t even heard about yet?

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go look for my tricorder.

Related:
Your First Look at Star Trek 90210
Harlan Ellison vs. Star Trek, Paramount, et al - Round XXVI

Screengrab Presents: The 25 Greatest Horror Films of All Time (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 21:00:00 GMT

15. THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT (1999)

Yes, I know you never actually see the witch. Yes, my wife and my father and countless other people got motion sickness from all the whip-pan video camera shots, and many others felt ripped off when the scariest thing in the much-hyped “new horror classic” was a bundle of sticks. And, true, the sequel was a jaw-dropping fiasco. And yet, I defend The Blair Witch Project on many levels. First, it did its job and creeped the bejesus outta me. Now, maybe that’s because I grew up (and later got stoned) in the dark woods of New England, where we used to actually burn witches, and so I’m the ideal audience for a flick about the paranoid possibilities of a forest at night. I also saw the movie on the big screen, after watching the brilliant small screen promotional faux-documentary Curse of the Blair Witch, so I was up-to-speed on all the Elly Kedward/Rustin Parr mythology and ready to be seduced by the film's tone of ominous forboding (rather than waiting to be impressed by gory special effects or whatever the haters didn’t find in the film). Plus, directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez turned a $22,000 budget into a $200 million dollar indie smash and then disappeared without a trace, kinda like the actors from the movie...so maybe there really is a curse.

14. CARRIE (1976)

Brian De Palma's purest and best horror movie is also the most potent of the horror genre's many essays on just how close high school is to hell on Earth. Sissy Spacek, at 26, turns in a phenomenal performance as the outcast who has to contend with mean girls at school and a mean mother of a Jesus freak (Piper Laurie) at home. Given the chance to shine for the first time in her life, she winds up onstage dripping with pig's blood in front of her jeering adolescent tormentors, who don't know that she's telekinetic and is about to stick the local tacky-jewelry manufacturer with a whole lot of unclaimed class ring. If you can watch the ensuing carnage without rooting for her, you must have been a cheerleader.

13. AUDITION (1999)

Ringu, a.k.a. The Ring, kicked off an American hunger for the weird eyes and dark, stringy hair of the ghosts of Japanese horror, but even more scary than a ghoul that crawls out of your TV set (a highly frightening but fairly uncommon occurrence) is an actual living woman who wants to do terrible, terrible things to you with needles. Sure, Sadako’s victims in The Ring may have a bad week and die, but the victims of shy, pretty, bat-shit crazy Asami Yamazaki (Eihi Shiina) wind up with no feet or tongue in a burlap sack for a much longer time. And then die. What makes the film even more disturbing is that it starts out like a carefree romantic comedy, until suddenly...not so much, kinda like Sleepless In Seattle with torture.

12. THE EVIL DEAD (1981)

Shot in the woods of Tennessee over the course of almost a year and half on a budget of less than $400,000, and slowly released to the public over an even longer span of time, Sam Raimi's gore-drenched take on the lost-out-here-in-the-middle-of-nowhere-with-weird-shit-going-on genre looks like the work of some enthusiastic kids who'd stayed up late watching junk like Equinox on TV and went a little crazy making their own home-movie version of it -- except that these kids had talent, as well as the rare determination to see their little art therapy project/get rich quick scheme through to the end. Some connoisseurs see this early, primitive effort as just a stepping-stone to the slapstick wonders of the openly parodic Evil Dead II, but the raw energy of this thing, which is often funny and just as often genuinely scary, is a testament to how well primitivism can work in the horror genre.

11. INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1978)

Jack Finney’s classic novel of (literal) social alienation was first brought to the screen in 1956, and since then it’s been officially remade three times (not counting rip-offs and “homages"). And, while the original Don Siegel adaptation has its rightful defenders, I’ve always been partial to the 1978 version starring Jeff Goldblum, Brooke Adams, Veronica Cartwright, Leonard Nimoy and, of course, the incomparable Donald Sutherland. Naturally, I’m biased: I saw this version on the big screen at an impressionable age, and it was the first movie I’d ever experienced where the good guys didn’t win...making me wonder if I could really trust the other people in the theater with me (or even my parents) and giving me an early taste of the existential angst I would become a lot more familiar with in my adolescent and adult life. Best of all, the movie inspired a game in my neighborhood where one pod person would go around infecting everyone else until there was only one “human” left. Trust me, you don’t know terror until you’re the last survivor on your street, waiting for the end as a dozen weirdly screaming pre-teen aliens slowly surround your hiding place.

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

Contributors: Andrew Unborn; The Vengeful Ghost of Phil Nugent

Your First Look at Star Trek 90210

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 17:30:00 GMT

The new Entertainment Weekly cover story has the scoop on J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek reboot, and while the cover photo doesn’t exactly set my phasers to stun (Kirk looks like he should be leading panty raids at Starfleet Academy), at least fans can be reassured that Abrams never much cared for Trek anyway. “‘All my smart friends liked Star Trek,’ he says. ‘'I preferred a more visceral experience.’ Which is exactly why he accepted Paramount's offer in 2005 to develop a new Trek flick; creatively, he was engaged by the possibility of a Star Trek movie ‘that grabbed me the way Star Wars did.’” Oh boy!

What Abrams does like about Star Trek is its “unabashed idealism. ‘I think a movie that shows people of various races working together and surviving hundreds of years from now is not a bad message to put out right now,’ says Abrams, whose infectiously upbeat energy and disdain for cynicism are among his most marked attributes… In a world where a movie as incredibly produced as The Dark Knight is raking in gazillions of dollars, Star Trek stands in stark contrast…It was important to me that optimism be cool again.’”

The EW piece goes on to drop a few hints about the story. “Star Trek's time-travel plot is set in motion when a Federation starship, the USS Kelvin, is attacked by a vicious Romulan (Eric Bana) desperately seeking one of the film's heroes. From there, the film then brings Kirk and Spock center stage and tracks the origins of their friendship and how they became officers aboard the Enterprise…. The adventure stretches from Earth to Vulcan, and yes, it does find a way to have Nimoy appearing in scenes with at least one of the actors on our cover — and maybe both… The opening sequence, for example, is an emotionally wrenching passage that culminates with a mythic climax sure to leave zealots howling ‘Heresy!’” Admittedly, I was always more of a Trek guy than a Star Wars partisan, but I checked out long before the parade of spinoff series in recent years. A little heresy doesn’t sound like such a bad idea. Here’s the full article if you want more from Abrams and his cast (including Leonard Nimoy) and some photos from the bridge and beyond.

Related:
Star Trek Showdown: Shatner Fires Back
Star Trek Teaser Follow-Up: The Real Deal

Meatheads at the Mike: The Scarlett Johansson-Leonard Nimoy Connection

Phil Nugent — Wed, 21 May 2008 17:00:00 GMT

On the occasion of the release of Scarlett Johansson's debut album, Matthew Oshinsky has assembled a handy wrap-ups of actors, or at least professional camera subjects, turned vocalists. It comes divided into categories: "the teenyboppers" (Annette Funicello, David Cassidy, Hillary Duff); "former child stars" (a category that, perhaps surprisingly, seems to be the likeliest to yield an actual recording career, along the lines of those enjoyed by Janet Jackson, Phil Collins, and Alanis Morissette); and my personal favorite, "former soap stars" (including Rick Springfield, who Oshinsky notes "was already a popular singer in his native Australia when he suddenly found himself on millions of afternoon TV screens in 1981 [on General Hospital] and learned that he didn’t know what popularity meant"). For those fully fledged adult mainstream celebrities who decide that this is their big chance to show that they've still got what they had at the high school talent show, Oshinsky favors the label "Meatheads." Here we find your Russell Crowes, your Eddie Murphys, your Steven Seagals (no shit, really!?), and Bruce Willis, whose 1987 Motown release The Return of Bruno (with backup work by Booker T. Jones and members of the Temptations) tried to hedge its bets by presenting itself as a "soundtrack" to an HBO special in which Willis pretended that he was pretending to be a legendary white soul singer on the comeback trail. He thus hedged his bets in a way that, in this specialized field, passed for clever, inviting people who noticed that his music sucked to treat the whole thing as a joke. His hideous, malformed cover of the Staples Singers' "Respect Yourself" made it to number five on the charts anyway. If I live to be a thousand, I will never understand how anyone could miss the 1980s.

Oshinsky names Jennifer Lopez and David Hasselhoff the queen and king of this niche of pop cross-pollination, noting that Hasselhoff's second album, the 1989 Looking for Freedom,” "shot to No.1 in Deutschland on the strength of the title track, which was embraced by thousands of Germans looking for something American and easy to understand." (This may be closest that anyone has ever come to describing David Hasselhoff's career as being easy to understand.) But he also knows that anything touched by William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy just has a special magic to it. "It is unknown if Mr. Shatner intended for his 1968 recording of poetry and pop covers, The Transformed Man, to be the galaxy’s funniest album, even 40 years later, but it’s a serious contender. Mr. Nimoy’s 1969 record, The Touch of Leonard Nimoy, was his fourth and last until 1995’s wistfully titled You Are Not Alone, which presumably referred to someone other than him being with us." I have no idea just what to make of the fact that the author seems to have gone out of his way to snub every crossover pin-up who earned my sister's devotion when we were living under the same roof: namely, David Cassidy's brother Shaun; John Schneider, of The Dukes of Hazzard; and David Soul, who before attaining stardom on Starsky and Hutch used to appear on talk shows singing in a ski mask so that his devastating good looks wouldn't distract viewers from admiring the beauty of his music, and whose big hit, the tender ballad "Don't Give Up on Us Baby", would be rediscovered by disk jockeys with sick senses of humor every time he was arrested again for beating up a woman. Unless I hallucinated all that, but I don't think I did. Drugs of that quality never made it into the Walthall County school system back in the day.

The 12 Greatest Movies Based on TV Shows, Part I

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

Everyone’s talking about all the comic book movies infesting theaters this summer, but there’s another pop culture invasion afoot – from Speed Racer to Sex and the City to Get Smart! and the second X-Files movie, small-screen fare is taking over the multiplex. This is nothing new, of course, but it is a handy excuse for your friendly neighborhood Screengrabbers to look back at the history of TV-to-movie transitions and pluck a few diamonds out of a deep, dark mine.

THE UNTOUCHABLES (1987)

Technically, Brian De Palma’s stylish, iconic film version of The Untouchables isn’t based on the hit TV show from the early 1960s; it’s based on incorruptible federal agent Elliot Ness’ book of the same name. But the TV show and the movie both sprang from the same source material, and that’s good enough for us. Besides, DePalma adapted many of the same narrative tropes as the television show: the morally inflexible Ness, his wise old streetwise mentor, and his diverse band of wisecracking cops aping the stock players in WWII movies. What DePalma did with them, however, is what made the movie great: elevating the entire conflict beyond the simple good guy/bad guy cops and robbers drama of the TV show, he turned it into grand opera, nothing less than an epic, tragic conflict between Al Capone as a smiling Satan and Ness himself as a tortured Jesus. And because it’s sly postmodernist Brian De Palma behind the camera, he couldn’t help winking at the audience from time to time, whether he was blatantly ripping off – er, paying homage to – the Odessa Steps sequence of Battleship Potemkin in the thrilling train station shootout or tipping the hand of his entire approach with Capone ordering a brutal execution as he tearfully watches Pagliacci at the theater. Gone are the cramped sets and gritty feel of the series, replaced by grand, chasm-like buildings and swooping outside shots; gone is the cocky, confident Ness of Robert Stack, set aside by a tortured Kevin Costner in what would be one of the last coherent performances of his career. Capone is a jolly Lucifer, and Frank Nitti (played by the sallow, vampire-faced Billy Drago) is his lizardlike assassin. Adding, on top of the whole thing, a classic, catchy, percussive score by none other than Ennio Morricone, and De Palma – the director so many people love to hate – had finally scored the first major blockbuster hit of his career.

MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL (1975)

For a movie that’s made so many people laugh for over 30 years, the people who made Monty Python and the Holy Grail didn’t have a very good time. The first big-screen effort from arguably the greatest sketch comedy group of all time was plagued with problems: they were frequently denied access to filming locations they thought they’d secured; Graham Chapman, playing the part of King Arthur, was plagued with psychological and physical problems as a result of his recovery from alcoholism; the entire production was plagued with budgetary problems and probably wouldn’t even have been made if members of Pink Floyd (huge fans of the Monty Python’s Flying Circus TV show) hadn’t have stepped in and pumped money into the film; the troupe was working on an incredibly strict filming deadline and nerves were frayed to the breaking point trying to get the production in on time; and much of the filming was done in locations that left the cast and crew cold, wet, and miserable much of the time, when they weren’t almost dying from falling off of a cliff. And in the end, what did they have to show for it? Nothing more than the purest distillation possible of their absurdist, kitchen-sink comic sensibilities. Decades of abuse at the hands of geeks who didn’t know when to leave well enough alone still haven’t managed to sink Monty Python and the Holy Grail or its hard-earned reputation as one of the funniest movies ever made. And if filming it was fraught with peril, that just means that it had even more in common with the original TV show: Monty Python’s Flying Circus faced censorship battles, ratings problems, drug and alcohol abuse from a cast who were often at each other’s throats, a network that completely failed to understand the show and scheduled it in the most ham-handed way possible, and, of course, a miniscule budget and a ruthless production timeline. So it’s no surprise that Holy Grail so effectively captures the postmodern comic brilliance of Flying Circus; they’d all been there before.

THE SIMPSONS MOVIE (2007)

For all the hype that went into the release of the big-screen version of Our Favorite Family, you’d think something exceptionally earth-shaking was going to happen. But really, what was the big deal? It wasn’t the revival of a beloved but long-lost franchise; The Simpsons is still on the air and is likely to remain so until the apocalypse. It didn’t promise any major changes in continuity, since The Simpsons doesn’t have any. (They did kill off at least one supporting character, but it’s not like the entire future of the series hinged on the actions of Dr. Nick Riviera.) And with the exception of a hilarious “goddamn” from Marge and a brief glimpse at Bart’s hand-drawn doodle, it didn’t even take much advantage of the creative free space of a theatrical release. All it did was deliver, essentially, a triple-length episode of The Simpsons. But that’s pretty much what the show’s fans wanted, and the producers, writers and directors gave them an extremely high-quality triple-length episode for their money. The animation is terrific, and one of the few ways in which the filmmakers do take advantage of the big screen is in a gorgeous color palate and some cinematic storytelling that uses up every inch of the space allotted. The writing is top-notch, with tons of funny lines and despite a bit of a sag near the end, it’s one of the tightest comedies in recent memory; while the show’s latter seasons aren’t as dismal as some embittered fans would have you believe, measured against the product on TV, The Simpsons Movie is a lot funnier, more controlled, and better at what people value in the show. The gimmicky guest stars are (literally) disposed of early on, leaving Albert Brooks – a veteran of the series who’s provided some of its most memorable moments – to nearly steal the show from then on. Sure, it’s just a long episode of the show, but that’s good enough for me.

STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN (1982)

The 1979 Star Trek--The Motion Picture was many years' worth of stops and starts in coming, and remains a very expensive project that no one involved with looks back on proudly. But despite its being regarded as a disappointment, it did make enough money that Paramount decided to burn off whatever good will remained among fans of the TV series by making a much less pricey sequel for the summer trade. It was actually the sequel that rejuvenated interest in the property and launched the long-running movie franchise. The writer-director Nicholas Meyer, who had previously demonstrated a flair for playing with other people's characters in his Sherlock Holmes novel and screenplay The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, was brought in late and given a short window in which to prepare a shooting script, and managed to do it by cobbling together the best elements of the many already-discarded attempts by other writers—including the idea of a sequel to the old TV episode "Space Seed" with Ricardo Montalban reprising his role as the regal, megalomaniac villain Khan. He also had the masterstroke of supplying Leonard Nimoy with a gorgeous death scene as Mr. Spock, which was reportedly a key factor in persuading Nimoy to go back on his vow to never put his ears back on after the first movie. The results were greeted with rapturous gratitude by long-time fans and non-Trekkers alike despite attempts to sabotage the release by Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, whose displeasure with something that someone wanted to do with his baby was almost infallible proof that it must be a step in the right direction.

SOUTH PARK: BIGGER, LONGER & UNCUT (1999)

Most "movies" spun off from still-current, ongoing TV series are just stretched-out TV episodes, sometimes with pricier special effects or guest stars. (The last straw may have been the over-hyped 1998 X-Files movie, which tarted up a subpar script from the series' "conspiracy" with a fireball explosion, a Martin Landau cameo, and the threat of the two leads kissing, then ended with a series-impacting plot twist designed to make those smart enough to have stayed at home feel left out when the fall TV season began.) The South Park movie, a genuine act of pop outrage with its mock-Disney-cartoon-musical score (written by series creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker and composer Marc Shaiman, who later brought Hairspray to Broadway) and its Colorforms-meets-Photoshop images of Saddam Hussein and a weirdly sympathetic Satan getting it on, is the rare example of someone bringing their hot, pre-sold property to the big screen and seeing it as a reason to step up their game. At a time when movies are getting smaller and smaller and moving more and more to TV and computer screens and even cell phones, Parker and Stone felt an old-fashioned obligation to enlarge their vision for the theater version. What's more, their discovery of just how much they could do with their little freak hit informed and improved the subsequent seasons of the TV version, now on its twelfth season and going strong. In fact, it was with the movie that South Park made its real transition from giggly fad to one of the cornerstones of our civilization.

MIAMI VICE (2006)

The '80s TV show co-created by Michael Mann and Anthony Yerkovich was very much a product of its time, so much so that Manhunter, the 1986 movie that Mann made while the show was still on the air, looks a lot more like the movie called Miami Vice that he made twenty years later. The movie doesn't have the high-contrast visual scheme or the pastel threads or the distracting celebrity cameos of the series; it does have the tropical setting and some character names in common with the series, but what it mainly has is the hopeless-romantic atmosphere and the coiled-spring bursts of action that the show reached for in its proudest moments, executed by a gifted director who had had a couple of decades to work on his moves. The movie, which required significant rewriting to satisfy the whims of one of its stars, Jamie Foxx, has been released in a "director's cut" DVD version, and neither it nor the theatrical release can be said to be free of lulls or to consistently make a world of sense. But when it's at its most intoxicating--especially when Gong Li points her sad headlights at the camera as the cinematographer Dion Beebe is adjusting the light on the horizon just so while God, looking over his shoulder, takes notes--it can get you higher than all the coke in Colombia.

- Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent

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